His very confused political philosophy (the volume containing it, according to all appearance, having been composed, after his death, of passages and fragments and different portions of his lectures) is specially a review of the divergent political constitutions which existed throughout the Greek world. The tendencies, for there are no conclusions, are still very aristocratic, but less radically aristocratic than those of Plato. THE AUTHORITY OF ARISTOTLE.--Aristotle, by reason of his universality, also because he is clearer than his master, and again because he dogmatises--not always, but very frequently--instead of discussing and collating, had throughout both antiquity and the Middle Ages an authority greater than that of Plato, an authority which became (except on matters of faith) despotic and well-nigh sacrosanct. Since the sixteenth century he has been relegated to his due rank--one which is still very distinguished, and he has been regarded as among the geniuses of the widest range, if not of the greatest power, that have appeared among men; even now he is very far from having lost his importance. For some he is a transition between the Greek genius--extremely subtle, but always poetic and always somewhat oriental--and the Roman genius: more positive, more bald, more practical, more attached to reality and to pure science. CHAPTER VI VARIOUS SCHOOLS The Development in Various Schools of the General Ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. THE SCHOOL OF PLATO; THEOPHRASTUS.--The school of Plato (not regarding Aristotle as belonging entirely to that school) was continued by Speusippus, Polemo, Xenocrates, Crates, and Crantor. Owing to a retrograde movement, widely different from that of Aristotle, it dabbled in the Pythagorean ideas, with which Plato was acquainted and which he often appreciated, but not blindly, and to which he never confined himself. The most brilliant pupil of Aristotle was Theophrastus, naturalist, botanist, and moralist. His great claim to fame among posterity, which knows nothing of him but this, is the small volume of _Characters_, which served as a model for La Bruyere, and before him to the comic poets of antiquity, and which is full of wit and flavour, and--to make use of a modern word exactly applicable to this ancient work--"humour." SCHOOLS OF MEGARA AND OF ELIS.--We may just mention the very celebrated schools which, owing to lack of texts, are unknown to us--that of Megara, which was called the Eristic or "wrangling" school, so marked was its predilection for polemics; and that of Elis, which appears to have been well versed in the sophistic methods of Zeno of Elea and of Gorgias.