Plotinus is too much of a Greek to accept, or even see, all the consequences of his own theory, which makes moral life consist in an attempt to escape from the world and to quench consciousness and personality. Accordingly, though he has a poor opinion of civic life (a thing excusable enough in those days), he believes that the civic virtues ought to be cultivated, as a means toward the higher, and has apparently nothing to say against the ordinary grammatical, rhetorical, and musical education of his time. He has a good deal to say in favor of Mathematics, as a preparation for what to him is the supreme branch of education, Dialectics. But the tendency of his teaching is only too obvious, and the conclusions which he did not draw, time and succeeding generations drew for him. The effect of Neoplatonism was, in the long run, to make the super-civic part of man the whole man, to discredit political life and political effort, and to pave the way for the mystic, the ascetic, and the hermit. Nor were the tendencies of the other philosophical schools in any marked degree different. Thus philosophy, instead of contributing to harmonize man and society, and to restore moral life, came to be one of the strongest agencies in bringing about confusion and dissolution, by ignoring moral life altogether, embracing superstition, and turning man into a mere plaything of blind necessity and magical forces. And thus ancient civilization fell to pieces, because man himself had fallen to pieces, and each piece tried to set itself up for the whole. The civic fragment finds its highest expression in Quintilian, the super-civic in Plotinus. Ere the fragments can be united into a truly moral being, a member of a truly moral society, a new combining force, unknown to either rhetorician or philosopher, must arise. CHAPTER IV CONCLUSION Truly it was an old world, and even Cæsar's patriotic genius was not enough to make it young again. The dawn does not return till the night has fully set in.--Mommsen. My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.--Isaiah. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.--Jesus. Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things that are God's.--_Id._ Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings? and not one of them is forgotten in the sight of God. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.--_Id._ We love because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.--John. By one intelligible form, which is the divine Essence, and one conscious intention, which is the divine Word, things may be known in their multiplicity by God.--Thomas Aquinas.