The contests of these schools bring us down to the middle of the second century before Christ, when Greece fell under the dominion of Rome. From this time forth not only were Greek philosophers of eminence drawn to live themselves at Rome, and so to meet her statesmen and nobles in habits of intercourse, but the higher classes of the great capital commonly completed their education by visiting and studying at Athens, Rhodes, and other centres of Grecian thought. Thus by the fusion of Greece with the empire, while her political importance dwindled away, her influence upon the mind of her subjugators was immensely increased. But the Roman on his side obtained a sort of victory. As a rule he was anything but an original thinker. He was an essentially practical man: he had a steady instinct which led him to distrust first causes and general principles. The Greek schools were to him of value only as they might fit into his daily life, not as coherent systems of thought. The spirit therefore in which he regarded their differences was to select from them what best suited his tastes and feelings. If he had no power to originate, he could choose. But such likewise had been the result among the Greeks themselves of two centuries of conflict, in which the rival systems of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism had stood over against each other. They sprung from the same soil; they might even be termed three branches of one stem,(442) inasmuch as their common root was the desire to find for the individual man something which would give him tranquillity of mind, happiness in fact, independent of his civil circumstances. In this they all took up a practical rather than a theoretical ground, the ground indeed which is now assigned to religion. Utterly opposed, then, as they were in their means, they sought the same end, and it was not in nature that the collision of their various arguments should not at length kindle the spirit of eclecticism. Thus the temper of the Roman statesman and noble, and the course of Greek philosophy itself, combined to produce this spirit, which from the beginning of the first century before Christ pervaded the thinkers of the Greco-Roman world.(443) But eclecticism betokens a weakening of the philosophic mind, that weariness which is unable to take a firm grasp of truth, an absence of the keen aim and high desire which such a grasp betokens. It is a confession that no one system possesses the truth: in which state of things nothing remains for the individual but to choose for himself out of different systems those morsels of truth which approve themselves most to his taste or tact, or, as he would term it, his truth-seeking sincerity.