average Christians. The practice soon received a further development. Just as ordinary philosophers had sometimes found life in society to be intolerable and had gone into “retreat,” so the Christian philosophers began to withdraw altogether from the world, and to live their lives of self-discipline and contemplation in solitude. The retention of the old names shows the continuity of the practice. They were still practising discipline, ἄσκησις, or philosophy, φιλοσοφία. So far as they retired from society, they were still said “to go into retreat,” ἀναχωρεῖν, whence the current appellation of ἀναχωρηταί, “anchorets.” The place of their retreat was a “school of discipline,” ἀσκητήριον, or a “place for reflection,” φροντιστήριον.[306] To these were soon added the new names which were relative to the fact that moral discipline was usually practised in solitude. Those who retired from the world were “solitaries,” μοναχοί, and the place of their retirement was a “place for solitude,” μοναστήριον. When the practice was once firmly rooted in Christian soil, it was largely developed in independent ways for which Greece was not primarily responsible, and which therefore cannot properly be described here; but the independence and enormous overgrowth of these later forms cannot wipe away the memory of the fact that to Greece, more than to any other factor, was due the place and earliest conception of that sublime individualism which centred all a man’s efforts on the development of his spiritual life, and withdrew him from his fellow-men in order to bring him near to God.