We omit therefore nothing in our review if we place ourselves at the end of this century, in the reign of Claudius, and cast a glance backward over that prodigious labour of human reason through which we have hastily travelled, and which had then lasted six hundred years. The problem was, given the universe, what will man’s reason in the most gifted, cultivated, inquiring, dialectic race of the ancient world do with it? And more particularly, to what results will reason come as to the power which has formed, or which rules it: as to its chief inhabitant, his nature, and the purpose for which he exists, and the end to which he is ever advancing: as to the duties by which he is bound to this creating, or at least maintaining and ruling power: as to those offices which he owes to his fellow, the individual to the individual, the civil community to the community. It was to these points especially that the greatest character in the whole movement—the single heathen who knew how to die for his convictions—turned the thoughts of those who followed him. Again, at the very starting-point of Greek philosophy a man of most virtuous conduct, gifted likewise with great powers of attraction, had sought to realise in a society the philosophic life. And we have seen this conception of the mode of propagating truth to lie at the bottom of Greek teaching, and to have been pursued by Plato, by Aristotle, by Zeno, by Epicurus, to have been the original and even the only form of teaching which they recognised. What was the result in this respect also? In the four hundred and forty years following the death of Socrates had reason produced a consistent doctrine, and a society of which that doctrine should be the law and bond, a fitting body for its soul to tenant, the immortal race of that living word which Plato contemplated? Time there had been enough, and even a superfluity of genius: but there were also two great outward events which might be expected to favour and advance such a result.