CHAPTER V.

SUMMARY OF THE EIGHTH EPOCH.

We have now brought our narrative to the second crisis in the history of speculation. The Skepticism which made the Sophists powerful, and which closed the first period of this history, we now behold once more usurping the intellects of men, and this time with far greater power. A Socrates appeared to refute the Sophists. Who is there to refute and to discredit the Skeptics?

The Skeptics, and all thinkers during the epoch we have just treated were such, whether they called themselves Epicureans, Stoics, Pyrrhonists, or New Academicians the Skeptics, we say, were in possession of the most formidable arms. From Socrates, from Plato, and from Aristotle, they had borrowed their best weapons, and with these had attacked Philosophy, and attacked it with success.

All the wisdom of the antique world was powerless against the Skeptics. Speculative belief was reduced to the most uncertain "probability." Faith in philosophic Truth was extinct. Faith in human endeavor that way was gone. Philosophy was impossible.

But there was one peculiarity of the Socratic doctrine which was preserved even in the midst of skepticism. Socrates had made Ethics the great object of his inquiries: and all subsequent thinkers had given it a degree of attention which before was unknown. Philosophy contented itself with the Common-Sense doctrine of the Stoics, and the Probabilities of the Skeptics, which, however futile as philosophic principles, were efficacious enough as moral principles. Common-Sense may be a bad basis

for metaphysical or scientific reasoning; but it is not so bad a basis for a system of morals.

The protest, therefore, which Skepticism made against all Philosophy was not so anarchical in its tendency as the protest made by the Sophists; but it was more energetic, more terrible. In the wisdom of that age there lay no cure for it. The last cry of despair seemed to have been wrung from the baffled thinkers, as they declared their predecessors to have been hopelessly wrong, and declared also that their error was without a remedy.

It was, indeed, a saddening contemplation. The hopes and aspirations of so many incomparable minds thus irrevocably doomed; the struggles of so many men, from Thales, who first asked himself, Whence do all things proceed? to the elaborate systematization of the forms of thought which occupied an Aristotle the struggles of all these men had ended in Skepticism. Little was to be gleaned from the harvest of their endeavors but arguments against the possibility of that Philosophy they were so anxious to form. Centuries of thought had not advanced the mind one step nearer to a solution of the problems with which, child-like, it began. It began with a child-like question; it ended with an aged doubt. Not only did it doubt the solutions of the great problem which others had attempted; it even doubted the possibility of any solution. It was not the doubt which begins, but the doubt which ends inquiry: it had no illusions.

This was the second crisis of Greek Philosophy. Reason thus assailed could only find a refuge in Faith; and the next period opens with the attempt to construct a Religious Philosophy.

NINTH EPOCH.

PHILOSOPHY ALLIES ITSELF WITH FAITH: THE ALEXANDRIAN SCHOOLS.

CHAPTER I.

RISE OF NEO-PLATONISM.

§ I. ALEXANDRIA.

PHILOSOPHY no longer found a home in Greece; it had no longer any worshippers in its native country, and was forced to seek them elsewhere. A period had arrived when all problems seemed to have been stated, and none seemed likely to be solved. Every system which human ingenuity could devise had been devised by the early thinkers; and not one had been able to withstand examination. In the early annals of speculation, a new and decisive advance is made whenever a new question is asked; to suggest a doubt, is to exercise ingenuity; to ask a question, is to awaken men to a new view of the subject. But now all questions had been asked; old questions had been revived under new forms; nothing remained to stimulate inquiry, nothing to give speculators a hope of success.

Unable to ask new questions, or to offer new answers to those already asked, the Philosophers readily seized on the only means which enabled them to gain renown: they travelled. They carried their doctrines into Egypt and to Rome; and in those places they were listened to with wonder and delight. Their old doctrines were novelties to a people who had no doctrines of

its own; and, from the excessive cost of books in those days, almost all instruction being oral, the strangers were welcomed warmly, and the doctrines imported were as novel as if they had been just invented.

Philosophy, exiled from Greece, was a favored guest in Alexandria and Rome: but in both cases it was a stranger, and could not be naturalized. In Alexandria, however, it made a brilliant display; and the men it produced gave it an originality and an influence which it never possessed in Rome.

Roman Philosophy was but a weak paraphrase of the Grecian; and we, therefore, give it no place in this history. To speak Greek, to write Greek, became the fashionable ambition of Rome. The child was instructed by a Greek slave. Greek Professors taught Philosophy and Rhetoric to aspiring youths. Athens had become the necessary "tour" which was to complete a man's education. It was there that Cicero learned those ideas which he delighted in setting forth in charming dialogues. It was there Horace learned that light and careless philosophy, which shines through the sparkling crystal of his verse. Wandering from the Academy to the Porch, and from the Porch to the Garden, he became imbued with that skepticism which checks his poetical enthusiasm; he learned to make a system of that pensive epicureanism which gives so peculiar a character to his poems; a character which, with a sort of after-dinner freedom and bonhomie, recommends him to men of the world.

In Rome, Philosophy might tinge the poetry, give weight to oratory, method to jurisprudence, and supply some topics of conversation; but it was no Belief filling the minds of serious men: it took no root in the national existence; it produced no great Thinkers.

In Alexandria the case was different. There several schools were formed, and some new elements introduced into the doctrines then existent. Great thinkers-Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry-made it illustrious; and it had a rival, whose antagonism alone would confer immortal renown upon it: that rival was Christianity.

In no species of grandeur was the Alexandrian school deficient, as M. Saisset justly observes:* genius, power, and duration, have consecrated it. Reanimating, during an epoch of decline, the fecundity of an aged civilization, it created a whole family of illustrious names. Plotinus, its real founder, resuscitated Plato; Proclus gave the world another Aristotle; and, in the person of Julian the Apostate, it became master of the world. For three centuries it was a formidable rival to the greatest power that ever appeared on earth-the power of Christianity; and, if it succumbed in the struggle, it only fell with the civilization of which it had been the last rampart.

Alexandria, the centre of gigantic commerce, soon became a new metropolis of science, rivalling Athens. The Alexandrian Library is too celebrated to need more than a passing allusion: to it, and to the men assembled there, we owe the vast labors of erudition in philosophy and literature which were of such service to the world. We cannot here enumerate all the men of science who made it illustrious; enough if we mention Euclid, for Mathematics; Conon and Hipparchus, for Astronomy; Eratosthenes, for Geography; and Aristarchus, for literary Criticism. Besides these, there were the Philosophers; and Lucian, the witty Skeptic; and the Poets, Apollonius Rhodius, Callimachus, Lycophron, Tryphiodorus, and, above all, the sweet idyllic Theocritus.

It is a curious spectacle. Beside the Museum of Alexandria there rises into formidable importance the Didascalia of the Christians. In the same city, Philo the Jew, and Enesidemus the Pyrrhonist, founded their respective schools. Ammonius Saccas appears there. Lucian passes through at the same time that Clemens Alexandrinus is teaching. After Plotinus has taught, Arius and Athanasius will also teach. Greek Skepticism, Judaism, Platonism, Christianity—all have their interpreters within so small a distance from the temple of Serapis !

* Revue des Deux Mondes, 1844, tome iii. p. 783; an admirable article on the Alexandrian Schools.