At this stage of Grecian philosophy, we witness, for the first time, a remarkable phenomenon. The true and good science which directs itself to the Godlike and divine, is unable to attain to any lasting or pervading influence on the lives of men: on the other hand, we see a false and evil sophistic gradually gaining a complete ascendency amid the general demoralization of society, and the growing anarchy of the political community, which, thoroughly corrupt and degenerate, only rose out of one revolution to fall immediately into another. Or, rather, this false sophistic, and this moral and political anarchy, were perfectly one together, so far at least as two destructive principles can ever be or be brought in unison. The complete alienation which now existed between the better science and life, and especially public life, is most distinctly manifested in the case of the greatest among the Grecian philosophers of later times--in Aristotle, and the position he occupied in his own age and nation. This acute thinker, with the utmost care and diligence, collected together all the most eminent results of the science, and the most remarkable thoughts of earlier times. Examining and analyzing them with great critical acumen, and with a comprehensive survey, he formed them into a new whole, and arranged them into a system of his own, completer and fuller than had ever before been attempted or accomplished. We can not, perhaps, estimate too highly or admire too much this great master of human subtilty, whether for his intellectual powers and extent of learning, or even as a writer. Still we must not forget that in his system were contained the germ and evident tendency to the two chief forms of philosophical error--naturalism on the one side, and rationalism on the other. And so we find that in the later times of the following centuries, each of these false systems, according as the occasion favored the one or the other, were drawn out from the Aristotelian doctrine, to receive a further and a distincter development. In his doctrine on the Godhead, he can least of all stand a severe and rigorous criticism. And in many points, as, for instance, in his notion of the absolute self-sufficiency of the reason, he approximates but too closely to the idealistic view which we have already designated as the transition to scientific atheism. It was only in a very remote and distant age that Aristotle attained to a very great importance and authority. In his own day he did but form a very inconsiderable school, which exercised far less influence on public life than two other sects, in whose history the development of Grecian philosophy finds its close.