making out a drunken frenzy of the soul to be the true organ
of philosophy, and by introducing into speculation all the
fantastic paraphernalia of sorcery, demons, and demi-gods.
Absence of sanity and balance, then, are characteristics of
the last period of Greek philosophy. The serenity and calm
of Plato and Aristotle are gone, and in their place we have
turgidity and extravagance.
Lack of originality is a second consequence of the subjec-
tivism of the age. Since metaphysics, physics, and logic are
not cultivated, except in a purely practical interest, they
do not flourish. Instead of advancing in these arenas of
thought, the philosophies of the age go backwards. Older
systems, long discredited, are revived, and their dead bones
triumphantly paraded abroad. The Stoics return to Hera-
cleitus for their physics, Epicurus resurrects the atomism of
Democritus. Even in ethics, on which they concentrate all
their thought, these post-Aristotelian systems have nothing
essentially new to say. Stoicism borrows its principal ideas
from the Cynics, Epicureanism from the Cyrenaics. The
post-Aristotelians rearrange old thoughts in a new order.
They take up the ideas of the past and exaggerate this or
that aspect of them. They twist and turn them in all direc-
tions, and squeeze them dry for a drop of new life. {343}
But in the end nothing new eventuates. Greek thought
is finished, and there is nothing new to be got out of it,
torture it how they will. From the first Stoic to the last
Neo-Platonist, there is no essentially new principle added
to philosophy, unless we count as such the sad and jaded
ideas which the Neo-Platonists introduced from the East.
Lastly, subjectivism ends naturally in scepticism, the de-
nial of all knowledge, the rejection of all philosophy. We
have already seen, in the Sophists, the phenomenon of sub-
jectivism leading to scepticism. The Sophists made the
individual subject the measure of truth and morals, and in
the end this meant the denial of truth and morality alto-
gether. So it is now. The subjectivism of the Stoics and
Epicureans is followed by the scepticism of Pyrrho and his
successors. With them, as with the Sophists, nothing is
true or good in itself, but only opinion makes it so.
{344}