unheard of in any previous ethical doctrine save that of the Cynics. Hence the Sceptics, if they lighted on the thought that knowledge is difficult of attainment, must needs rush to the extreme conclusion that any knowledge is utterly impossible. Hence the Neo-Platonists must needs cap all these tendencies by making out a drunken frenzy of the soul to be the true organ of philosophy, and by introducing into speculation all the fantastic paraphernalia of sorcery, demons, and demi-gods. Absence of sanity and balance, then, are characteristics of the last period of Greek philosophy. The serenity and calm of Plato and Aristotle are gone, and in their place we have turgidity and extravagance. Lack of originality is a second consequence of the subjectivism of the age. Since metaphysics, physics, and logic are not cultivated, except in a purely practical interest, they do not flourish. Instead of advancing in these arenas of thought, the philosophies of the age go backwards. Older systems, long discredited, are revived, and their dead bones triumphantly paraded abroad. The Stoics return to Heracleitus for their physics, Epicurus resurrects the atomism of Democritus. Even in ethics, on which they concentrate all their thought, these post-Aristotelian systems have nothing essentially new to say. Stoicism borrows its principal ideas from the Cynics, Epicureanism from the Cyrenaics. The post-Aristotelians rearrange old thoughts in a new order. They take up the ideas of the past and exaggerate this or that aspect of them. They twist and turn them in all directions, and squeeze them dry for a drop of new life. {343} But in the end nothing new eventuates. Greek thought is finished, and there is nothing new to be got out of it, torture it how they will. From the first Stoic to the last Neo-Platonist, there is no essentially new principle added to philosophy, unless we count as such the sad and jaded ideas which the Neo-Platonists introduced from the East. Lastly, subjectivism ends naturally in scepticism, the denial of all knowledge, the rejection of all philosophy. We have already seen, in the Sophists, the phenomenon of subjectivism leading to scepticism. The Sophists made the individual subject the measure of truth and morals, and in the end this meant the denial of truth and morality altogether. So it is now. The subjectivism of the Stoics and Epicureans is followed by the scepticism of Pyrrho and his successors. With them, as with the Sophists, nothing is true or good in itself, but only opinion makes it so. {344} CHAPTER XV THE STOICS