To what extent do dialectics and the faith in reason rest upon _moral_ prejudices? With Plato we are as the temporary inhabitants of an intelligible world of goodness, still in possession of a bequest from former times: divine dialectics taking its root in goodness leads to everything good (it follows, therefore, that it must lead "backwards"). Even Descartes had a notion of the fact that, according to a thoroughly Christian and moral attitude of mind, which includes a belief in a _good_ God as the Creator of all things, the truthfulness of God _guarantees_ the judgments of our senses for us. But for this religious sanction and warrant of our senses and our reason, whence should we obtain our right to trust in existence? That thinking must be a measure of reality,--that what cannot be the subject of thought, cannot _exist,_--is a coarse _non plus ultra_ of a moral blind confidence (in the essential principle of truth at the root of all things); this in itself is a mad assumption which our experience contradicts every minute. We cannot think of anything precisely as it is.... 437. The real _philosophers of Greece_ are those which came before Socrates (with Socrates something changes). They are all distinguished men, they take their stand away from the people and from usage; they have travelled; they are earnest to the point of sombreness, their eyes are calm, and they are not unacquainted with the business of state and diplomacy. They anticipated all the great concepts which coming sages were to have concerning things in general: they themselves represented these concepts, they made systems out of themselves. Nothing run give a higher idea of Greek intellect than this sudden fruitfulness in types, than this involuntary completeness in the drawing up of all the great possibilities of the philosophical ideal. I can see only one original figure in those that came afterwards: a late arrival but necessarily the last--_Pyrrho_ the nihilist. His instincts were opposed to the influences which had become ascendant in the mean-time the Socratic school, Plato, and the artistic optimism of Heraclitus. (Pyrrho goes back to Democritus _via_ Protagoras....) ***