Then, on the other hand, the lust of practical utility caused a grave misconception of what logic can do. For Aristotle, logic is a scientific analysis of the modes of inference; its uses are those which follow intrinsically from all noble activity freely and zealously prosecuted. But with the death of Aristotle the great days of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and divine wisdom were over. The Stoics into whose hands the chief sceptre of philosophy, directly or indirectly, passed never rose above the conception of life as a task and a duty, and of all other things, literature, science, and art, as subservient to the performance of that task. The conception is an ennobling one: but only with a relative or comparative nobility. It ennobles, if it is set beside and against the view that life is a frivolous play, a sport of caprice and selfishness. But it darkens and narrows the outlook of humanity, when it loses sight of life as a joy, a self-enlarging and self-realising freedom, of life as in its supreme phase _θεωρία_--or the enjoyment of God. To the Stoic, therefore,--and to the dominant Christian theory which entered to some extent on the Stoic inheritance--logic, like the rest of philosophy, was something only valuable because ultimately it helped to save the soul. It thus sunk into the position of an Organon or instrument. To the Stoic,--for instance to Epictetus--its value was its use to establish the doctrines of the Stoic faith, by confuting the ill-arranged and futile inferences on which were founded the aims and approvals of ordinary worldly life. To the Christian, again, it served as a method for putting into systematic shape (under the guidance of certain supreme categories or principles also borrowed from Greek thought) the variety of fundamental and derivative aspects which successive minds, pondering on the power and mystery of the Christian faith, had set forward as its essential dogmas. It thus helped to build up (out of the leading ideas of Greek metaphysics, and the principles emerging in the earliest attempts to formulate the law of Christ) that amalgam of the power of a divine life with the reflective thought of the teachers of successive generations, which constitutes the dogmatic creed of Christendom. Such a reconstruction in thought of the reality which underlies experience--(in this case the experience of the Christian life), is inevitable if man is to be man, a free intelligence, and not a mere animal-like feeling. But its success is largely, if not entirely, dependent on the value of the logic and metaphysics which it employs: and it would be a bold thing to say that the subtle, abstract, and unreal system of Neo-Platonist and Neo-Aristotelian thought was an organon adequate to cope with the breadth and depth, latent if not very explicit, in the fulness and reality of the religious life.