Giddy with victory and joy, the Greeks discarded ethics; truth was made the handmaid of sophistry, superstition, and scepticism; and beauty, in losing her ideal glory, sank into the depths of sensualism and realism. The harmony of the triad, which artists, philosophers, and moral teachers had succeeded in establishing, was destroyed, and a discordant strain of melancholy woe resounded through history, echoing here and there some remnants of the old and charming melodies. The conquests of Philip of Makedon and Alexander the Great brought the East into contact with the Greek spirit. The East furnished mystic incomprehensibilities, and an egotistic hatred of all art that could not be turned into money, or used for serving some deity to buy up its good graces. Buddhistic tenets joined hands with Brahmanic conceits; Egyptian symbols were intermingled with Hebrew practical enactments, without any ideal aspirations. Greek philosophical diatribes were used to prove the impossible possible, and the ‘supernatural’ most natural. Some Greeks attempted to revive the antique mode of thinking, but they were silenced by the Neo-Platonists, and thus the Greeks themselves became the most successful apostles of unnaturally-shaped superstitions, deadening the vivifying spirit of Christ’s teachings. The Romans had only one aim in history--to regulate their conquests. The State was everything with them; they taught us how to systematise the actions of men, to make them useful citizens in this world, and, when they left their legacy of infallible authority to the Romish Church, how to prepare fit inhabitants for another world. The outward realistic form, proclaiming some inward mystic grace or meaning, became everything. Base hollowness in art and morals, vapid verbiage in philosophy, unnatural profligacy and licentiousness, mean covetousness and heartless egotism, brought humanity intellectually, morally, and spiritually, to the brink of destruction. Everyone thirsted for a change--reality was unbearable.