In like manner Neoplatonism united all the elements of previous philosophical Schools into one comprehensive and well-arranged system, in which each class of existences had its definite place assigned to it. The initial point in this system, the all-embracing unity, was a being lying beyond the world, high above every notion that experience and conception can supply, unmixed with the process of life going on in the world, and from his unattainable height causing all things, but himself subject to no conditions of causality. Neoplatonism is the intellectual reproduction of Byzantine Imperialism. As Byzantine Imperialism combines Oriental despotism with the Roman idea of the state, so Neoplatonism supplements the scientific forms of Greek philosophy with Oriental mysticism. In Neoplatonism the post-Aristotelian philosophy had manifestly veered round into its opposite. Self-dependence and the self-sufficingness of thought made way for implicit resignation to higher powers, for a craving for revelation, for an ecstatic departure from the sphere of conscious mental activity. Man has abandoned the idea of truth within for truth to be found only in God. God stands there as abstract spirituality removed into another world in contrast to man and the world of appearances. Speculation has but one aim—to explain the procession of the finite from the infinite, and the conditions of its return into the absolute; but neither of these problems can meet with a satisfactory intellectual solution. Even this form of thought betrays undeniably the personal character of the post-Aristotelian philosophy, and is the natural outcome of previous teaching, as will be more fully seen in the sequel. With it the creative powers of the Greek mind were exhausted. After being driven step by step during centuries from the platform of their own national philosophy, the Greeks were eventually entirely dislodged therefrom by the victory of Christianity. Neoplatonism made one more futile attempt to rescue the forms of Greek culture from its mighty rival, but when that attempt failed Greek religion and Greek philosophy went down together. PART II. THE STOICS. CHAPTER III. HISTORY OF THE STOICS UNTIL THE END OF THE SECOND CENTURY B.C.