Now in this selection from rival and antagonistic schools—this oscillation between the positive and sceptical tone of thought, this sitting as a judge rather than obeying as a disciple—Cicero very exactly represented the tone and attitude of the cultivated classes in his own time and in the century following his death. Originality of mind in philosophic studies was gone; nor was any system as a whole believed in. The sceptic and eclectic turn of mind are but the reverse sides of the same mental coinage: he who selects from all is convinced by none. Neither his doubts nor his choices satisfied Cicero, or any one of those who followed him in that most important century, the eighth of the Roman city, fifty years of which preceded and fifty followed the coming of Christ. In its philosophical productions no preceding century had been so poor as this. It had only to show the school of the Sextii, which arose at Rome about the beginning of our era, and took a sort of middle standing between Pythagorean, Cynic, and Stoic principles.(446) This school was of small importance, and soon became extinct. With this exception from Cicero to Seneca no names of distinction appear. There is a gap in philosophical thought. A period so influential on the destinies of man in its events, so celebrated for its polite literature, on which the world has since been feeding, is barren in the highest realm of inquiry. For this reason there is a particular justice in taking Cicero as an exponent of heathen thought and spirit, the living specimen of the kind, inasmuch as he is the last philosophic writer before Christian thought appears in the world, and chose for himself the function of summing up what he thought of value in the ages before him.