THE NEW ACADEMY.--Scepticism, albeit attenuated, softened, and less aggressive, reappeared in a school calling itself the New Academy. It claimed to adhere to Socrates--not without some show of reason, since Socrates had declared that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing--and the essential tenet of this school was to affirm nothing. Only the Academicians believed that certain things were probable, more probable than others, and they are the founders of probabilism, which is nothing more than conviction accompanied with modesty. They were more or less moderate, according to personal temperament. Arcesilaus was emphatically moderate, and limited himself to the development of the critical faculties of his pupil. Carneades was more negative, and arrived at or reverted to scepticism and sophistry pure and simple. Cicero, with a certain foundation of Stoicism, was a pupil, and one of the most moderate, of the New Academy. AENESIDEMUS; AGRIPPA; EMPIRICUS.--Others built on experience itself, on the incertitude of our sensations and observations, on everything that can cheat us and cause us illusion in order to display how _relative_ and how miserably partial is human knowledge. Such was Aenesidemus, whom it might be thought Pascal had read, so much does the latter give the reasons of the former when he is not absorbed in faith, and when he assumes the position of a sceptic precisely in order to prove the necessity of taking refuge in faith. Such was Agrippa; such, too, was Sextus Empiricus, so often critical of science, who demonstrates (as to a slight extent M. Henri Poincare does in our own day) that all sciences, even those which, like mathematics and geometry, are proudest of their certainty, rest upon conventions and intellectual "conveniences." CHAPTER X NEOPLATONISM Reversion to Metaphysics. Imaginative Metaphysicians after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess. ALEXANDRINISM.--Amid all this, metaphysics--namely, the effort to comprehend the universe--appears somewhat at a discount. It enjoyed a renaissance in the third century of our era among some teachers from Alexandria (hence the name of the Alexandrine school) who came to lecture at Rome with great success. Alexandrinism is a "Neoplatonism"--that is, a renewed Platonism and, as considered by its authors, an augmented one.