The horizons of the philosophy of the ancient world had remained narrow too long. No ethical thinkers had appeared who at the right time might have led that world to an ethical optimism about reality. It was a calamity, too, that the natural sciences, which had started in such a promising way, came to a standstill, partly through the fault of fate, partly because philosophy turned away from them, before mankind discovered the law of the uniformity of nature, and obtained thereby control over it. Hence the men of antiquity never acquired that self-consciousness which in their descendants of modern times has kept alive, even through the darkest periods of history, the belief in progress—even though it be sometimes progress of the most superficial kind. This psychological factor is of great importance. It is true that artistic ability, which in the Greek spirit meets us in such abundant measure, is also control over the material, but this creative power was unable to draw the man of antiquity up to a higher life-affirmation and to belief in progress. It served only to let him express himself, in words and in form, in the antagonism between primitive [pg 060] world- and life-affirmation, and thinking world- and life-denial. It is the puzzling intermixture of serenity and melancholy which produces the tragic charm of Greek art. From every point of view, then, a strong ethical world- and life-affirmation is made difficult for the ancient world. It therefore falls more and more a prey to pessimistic world-views, which draw its thoughts away from reality, and celebrate the liberation of the spiritual from its bondage to the material in a succession of cosmic dramas. Gnosticism, Oriental and Christian, Neo-Pythagoreanism, which arose as early as the first century B.C., the Neo-Platonism which originated with Plotinus (A.D. 204-269), and the great Mystery-religions, all come to meet the religious, world-shunning disposition of the masses during the breaking-up of antiquity, and offer it that deliverance from the world of which it is in search. In this chaos of ideas Christianity emerges victorious because it is the most robust religion of redemption, because as a community it possesses the strongest organization, and because beneath its pessimistic world-view it has at its disposal living ethical ideas. The optimistic-ethical monism of the later Stoics is like a sunbeam breaking through in the evening of the long, gloomy day of antiquity while the darkness of the middle ages is already drawing on, but it has no power to waken any civilization to life. The time for that is past. The spirit of antiquity, having failed to reach an ethical nature-philosophy, has become the prey of a pessimistic dualism in which no ethic of action is any longer possible; there can only be an ethic of purification. The thoughts of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are the winter seed of a coming civilization. [pg 061] CHAPTER VI