The essential mark of the decay of Greek thought was the intense subjectivism which is a feature of all the post-Aristotelian schools. Not one of them is interested in the solution of the world-problem for its own sake. The pure scientific spirit, the desire for knowledge for its own sake, is gone. That curiosity, that wonder, of which Aristotle speaks as the inspiring spirit of philosophy, is dead. The motive power of philosophy is no longer the disinterested pursuit of truth, but only the desire of the individual to escape from the ills of life. Philosophy only interests men in so far as it affects their lives. It becomes anthropocentric and egocentric. Everything pivots on the individual subject, his destiny, his fate, the welfare of his soul. Religion has long since become corrupted and worthless, and philosophy is now expected to do the work of religion, and to be a haven of refuge from the storms of life. Hence it becomes essentially practical. Before everything else it is ethical. All other departments of thought are now subordinated to ethics. It is not as in the days of the strength and youth of the Greek spirit, when Xenophanes or {341} Anaxagoras looked out into the heavens, and naively wondered what the sun and the stars were, and how the world arose. Men's thought no longer turns outward toward the stars, but only inward upon themselves. It is not the riddle of the universe, but the riddle of human life, which makes them ponder. This subjectivism has as its necessary consequences, one-sidedness, absence of originality, and finally complete scepticism. Since men are no longer interested in the wider problems of the universe, but only in the comparatively petty problems of human life, their outlook becomes exclusively ethical, narrow, and one-sided. He who cannot forget his own self, cannot merge and lose himself in the universe, but looks at all things only as they affect himself, does not give birth to great and universal thoughts. He becomes self-centred, and makes the universe revolve round him. Hence we no longer have now great, universal, all-embracing systems, like those of Plato and Aristotle. Metaphysics, physics, logic, are not studied for their own sakes, but only as preparations for ethics. Narrowness, however, is always compensated by intensity, which in the end becomes fanaticism. Hence the intense earnestness and almost miraculous heights of fanatical asceticism, to which the Stoics attained. And an unbalanced and one-sided philosophy leads to extremes. Such a philosophy, obsessed by a single idea, unrestrained by any consideration for other and equally important factors of truth, regardless of all other claims, pushes its idea pig-headedly to its logical extreme. Such a procedure results in paradoxes and extravagances. Hence the Stoics, if they made duty their watchword, must needs conceive it in {342} the most extreme opposition to all natural impulses, with a sternness