They were very far indeed from seeing all the implications of this conclusion: these showed themselves only in the sequel; but the fact is, that the principle of the separation between the man and the citizen, and the assignment of the place of honor to the former, proved at once the destroying angel of Hellenism and the animating spirit of the civilization which took its place. If we look closely at the schemes of Plato and Aristotle, we shall see that they try to render innocuous the spirit of individualism by exhausting its activities in intellectual relations to the divine, offering it heaven, if it will only consent to relinquish to the political spirit its earthly claims. They practically said: Man, in all his relations to his fellow-men here below, is a citizen; only in relation to God is he an individual. The history of the last two thousand years is but a commentary on this text. From the day when the master-mind of the Greek world credited man's nature with a divine element having a supreme activity of its own, European thought and life have been agitated by three questions, and largely shaped by the answers given to them: (1) What is the nature of the divine element in man? (2) In what form or institution shall that element find expression and realization? (3) How shall that institution relate itself to the State? And they have not yet been definitely answered. Principles that are to move the world are never the result of mere abstract thought, but always of a crisis or epoch in human affairs. And so it was in the present case. The separation between the man and the citizen was accomplished in fact, before it was formulated in theory. On the other hand, the theory received emphasis from the events which accompanied and followed its promulgation. The battle of Chæronea, which took place sixteen years before Aristotle's death, by putting an end forever to the free civic life of Greece, removed the very conditions under which the old ideal could realize itself, and forced men to seek a sphere of activity, and to form associations, outside of the State. The State, indeed, still maintained a semblance of life, and the old education, with its literature, gymnastics, and music still continued; but the spirit of both was gone. The State was gradually replaced by the philosophic schools, while intellectual training tended more and more to concentrate itself upon rhetoric, that art which enables the individual to shine before his fellows, and to gain wealth or public preferment. From this time on, the spiritual life of Greece found expression in the pretentious, empty individualism of the rhetorician, the lineal descendant of the sophists, and in the philosophical sects, which embodied the spirit of Socrates, their opponent.