=The Skeptical Philosophy.=—PYRRHO, who flourished about 300 B.C., was the father of the Skeptics. They held that there was no standard of truth appreciable by the human mind; nothing can therefore be asserted as true. Pyrrho doubted everything; his disciples used to follow him, lest, in practically applying his theory, he should be run over in the streets or walk off a precipice. =The Socratic School.=—When Socrates (470-399 B.C.) came upon the stage in the golden period of Athens, it was to denounce the atheistical philosophy of his predecessors, and take the field against the Sophists, who made endless disputation, fallacious but specious, the head and front of their system. “These word-snapping quibblers,” says Felton, “were prodigious favorites with the Athenians,—men who proved that right was wrong, and wrong right, and that there was neither wrong nor right; that knowing one thing is knowing everything, and that there is no such thing as knowing anything at all; that as the beautiful exists by the presence of beauty, so a man becomes an ass by the presence of an ass; and so on, ringing myriads of changes, like the fools in Shakespeare, upon these quirks of jugglery.” Socrates had an effective way of dealing with these gentry. By cunningly contrived questions, which at first seemed to have no bearing on the point at issue, he led them on from admission to admission, until he involved them in absurdities and convicted them out of their own mouths. For one like Socrates, the mythology of Greece was too gross, the speculations of the philosophy then current were too unreal and hollow. He aspired to something better. At length the unity of God, the soul’s immortality, and the moral responsibility of man, dawned upon his mind—sublime truths which he might well have drawn from revelation itself. The practice of virtue he inculcated as indispensable to happiness and true religion. A _demon_, or secret influence, he said, constantly attended him, and was his director in the work of social reform no less than in the every-day affairs of life. Whether he deceived himself in this belief or strove to deceive others into it that he might gain credence for his doctrines, certain it is that his teachings exercised a most wholesome influence. All subsequent Greek philosophy is stamped with their impress. (_See Blackie’s “Horæ Hellenicæ.”_)