in India, and again between weakening and expanding Buddhist lineages in
China. But it is not necessary that there should always be a strong organiza-
tional position; this depends on external conditions, such as the political forces
which determine the ups and downs of religions. There is also an internal
dynamic which will produce splits, and if this goes on long enough, counter-
moves toward synthesis to reduce the diminishing attention enforced by the
law of small numbers. The fractionalizing mode prevailed alone in Greek
philosophy for the first six or eight generations, and the synthesizing moves of
Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics occurred in response to the self-engendered
weakness of this proliferation of schools. For the earliest period, there was no
way at all to prevent splits; given the opening up of an empty field, it was
structurally impossible that Greek philosophy could have reached consensus
around a position like that of Thales or Pythagoras.
The pure forms of creativity, fractionalizing and synthesizing, are ideal
types. They have real exemplars when appropriate conditions prevail, but
much of intellectual history consists of mixed cases. There are both strong and
weak forms of synthesis; the latter is better called syncretism. The lowest level
of syncretism represents an effort to overcome factional differences by the
intellectual equivalent of brute force, declaring that Buddha’s doctrines were
stolen from Lao Tzu, or that Plato and all the other schools had their ideas
from Pythagoras or ancient Egypt. We see a more moderate but weak form of
syncretism in the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, when there was a
relatively stable array of philosophical positions, none of them enjoying very
strong organizational bases. Here Platonists, Aristoteleans, Stoics, and rheto-
ricians wavered back and forth, asserting mixtures of one version with another.
The period is characterized by no great analytical advances. The same is true
later, when Iamblichus and his followers arbitrarily chop new rungs into the
Neoplatonist hierarchies of ontological emanation to fit a panoply of deities
and magical forces from their grand alliance of cults. A weak organizational
base and correspondingly permeable boundaries between intellectuals and lay
concerns produce the admixture of particularistic elements which is one of the
conditions promoting syncretism rather than synthesis.
The grand systems of synthesis are those which take differences seriously
rather than overriding them. Logically inconsistent elements are worked upon,
and this results in a new framework or new analytic conceptions. Plotinus,
much more than his Middle Platonist predecessors, is aware of the differences
between Plato and Aristotle, and is willing to criticize the Stoics on the soul as
a material substance at the same time that he adapts from them moral teachings
to use against the Peripatetics (CHLG, 1967: 197–199, 226). It is this effort
to shape existing elements selectively into a comprehensive picture that distin-
guishes strong synthesis from weak syncretism. The key condition is the mo-
132 •^ The Skeleton of Theory