of Protagoras, Socrates, and Plato, as well as in the Stoics and Epicureans. But at first it was only
doctrinal, not temperamental; for a long time it failed to kill scientific curiosity. We saw how
Posidonius, about 100 B.C., travelled to Spain and the Atlantic coast of Africa to study the tides.
Gradually, however, subjectivism invaded men's feelings as well as their doctrines. Science was
no longer cultivated, and only virtue was thought important. Virtue, as conceived by Plato,
involved all that was then possible in the way of mental achievement; but in later centuries it came
to be thought of, increasingly, as involving only the virtuous will, and not a desire to understand
the physical world or improve the world of human institutions. Christianity, in its ethical
doctrines, was not free from this defect, although in practice belief in the importance of spreading
the Christian faith gave a practicable object for moral activity, which was no longer confined to
the perfecting of self.
Plotinus is both an end and a beginning--an end as regards the Greeks, a beginning as regards
Christendom. To the ancient world, weary with centuries of disappointment, exhausted by despair,
his doctrine might be acceptable, but could not be stimulating. To the cruder barbarian world,
where superabundant energy needed to be restrained and regulated rather than stimulated, what
could penetrate in his teaching was beneficial, since the evil to be combated was not languor but
brutality. The work of transmitting what could survive of his philosophy was performed by the
Christian philosophers of the last age of Rome.
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