On the platform of the ancient life of Greece such a change could not possibly have come about. It may be that under more favourable circumstances Greek philosophy might have further developed along the same course of purely intellectual enquiry which it had previously so successfully followed in the hands of its earlier representatives, more particularly of Aristotle. What results might in this way have been attained, we cannot exactly determine. Speculation is, however, useless. In point of fact, the historical circumstances under which philosophy had to grow cannot be ignored. Philosophy had become what it was under the influence of those circumstances. The Socratic theory of conceptions, and Plato’s theory of ideas, presuppose on the one hand the high culture of the age of Pericles, and the brilliant career of Athens and Greece following on the Persian war. They also presuppose the political degradation and the moral exhaustion of Greece during and after the Peloponnesian war. Aristotle, with his high intellectual culture, despairing of everything direct and practical, with his wide view of things, his knowledge of every kind, his system matured and elaborate, and embracing all the results of previous enquiry—appears as the child of an age which was bearing to the grave a great historical epoch, in which intellectual labour had begun to take the place of vigorous political action. The bloom of Greek philosophy was short-lived, but not more short-lived than the bloom of national life. The one was dependent on the other, and both were due to the action of the same causes. The Greeks, with a high appreciation of freedom, a ready aptitude for politics, and a genius for artistic creations, produced within the sphere of politics one result of its kind unrivalled and unique. They neglected, however, to lay the foundations wide and deep. Their political endurance was not equal to their versatility and restlessness. Communities limited in extent and simple in arrangement sufficed for them. But how could such communities include all branches of the Greek family, and satisfy at once all legitimate aspirations? It is the same within the department of science. Prematurely concluding and rashly advancing from isolated experiences without mediating links to the most general conceptions, they constructed theories upon a foundation of limited and imperfect experience, which it was wholly inadequate to bear. Whether, and in how far, the intellect of Greece, if left to itself, might have remedied these defects in a longer protracted calm of development, is a question which it is impossible to answer. As a fact, that intellect was far too intimately bound up with the political, the moral, and the religious life—in short, with the whole mental tone and culture of the people—not to be seriously affected by a change in any one of them. It lay, too, in the character and historical progress of that people to have only a