[214] _Met._ I, 9, 990 b ff.; VI, 8; XII, 10; XIII, 3. [215] _Phys._ II, 3, 194 b, 16 ff.; cf. _Met._ I, 3, 983 a, 24 ff.; VI, 7, 1032 a, 13 ff.; VII, 4, 1044 a, 32 ff.; _et passim_. [216] E. g. _Phys._ II, 7, 198 a, 22 ff. [217] _Phys._ VIII, 6, 258 b, 10 ff.; _Met._ XI, 7 (entire). [218] _De caelo_, I, 4, 271 a, 33. [219] E. g. _Met._ VII, 6, 1045 b, 18 f. [220] Cf. the whole discussion of God in _Met._ XI. [221] On the foregoing see the _De anima_ in general and especially II, 1; III, 4 and 5. [222] Cf. on the foregoing the two ethical works, the Nicomachean and the Eudemian Ethics, entire. [223] _Laws_, VI, 759 and X entire. [224] _Politics_, VI, 8, 1322 b, 18 ff.; VII, 8, 1328 b, 12 ff.; 1329 a, 27 ff.; 1330 a, 8 f.; 1331 b, 4-6, 17 f. VI LATER RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHIES Plato and Aristotle mark the culmination of a great period in Greek thought. After them metaphysical speculation made little if any advance in antiquity. Indeed we are all aware of the fact that the greater part of the thinking world has been divided between Platonists and Aristotelians ever since, although in our own time we are seeing a return by some to the philosophic position of the Sophists and Heraclitus. Now in our discussion of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle you must have felt that their systems were for the intellectual élite. The large demands which they make upon the reason and the habit of reasoning unfit them for the great majority of mankind, since the average man desires a practical guide in life which he can readily follow, rather than a philosophical system which he can grasp only by the careful use of his intellect. Furthermore, in the period after Alexander, when national life and interests were weakened or destroyed by the Macedonian’s conquests and the struggles of his successors, the individual was forced to withdraw from public life; he lost the satisfactions which the politics of his community had once furnished, felt himself without the social supports which the compact life of his city-state had formerly given, and so, turned in on himself, he naturally sought for a sure rule of life and a guarantee of individual happiness. We shall now consider first a school of practical philosophy which followed Aristotle—that of the Stoics, and then some mystic philosophies of the early centuries of our era.