As the new cosmopolitanism deepened the gulf between the citizen and the individual, and immeasurably widened the sphere of the latter, in the same proportion did the teaching of Plato fail to bridge over that gulf, and provide activity for that sphere. To tell the super-civic man now that his function was to contemplate divine things and oracularly deliver laws for the guidance of the world, would have argued an absence of humor not common in those days. Besides, those persons who claimed to have contemplated divine things showed no such fitness for legislation as to induce practical men to accept their guidance. The sober fact was, that the contemplation of divine things, which more and more absorbed the energy of Greek thought, was, except for Aristotle, a mere vague asperation without moral value, and became ever more a sort of mystic ecstasy, in which the individual, instead of acquiring insight and power to live worthily and beneficently in the world, was thrown back upon himself, with his will paralyzed. Nor could this be otherwise, seeing the nature of the divine things, the contemplation of which was reckoned so important. Instead of being personal attributes, or a person imposing a moral law seen to be binding, they were mere abstractions, increasing in emptiness the higher they were in the series, the highest being absolute vacancy. In vain had Aristotle protested that all reality is individual: the Platonic theory, that all knowledge is of ideas or universals, prevailed, with the result that the highest knowledge was held to be knowledge of that which is absolutely universal, viz. indeterminate being or, as Plotinus held, something lacking even the determination of being--the Supreme Good. That the super-civic man should find satisfaction in gazing into vacancy, or be any more valuable in the world after he had done so, no matter how spotless his life and ecstatic his look, is inconceivable.