Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY.437The point most interesting to our present subjectis this, that all these schools take up a commonground, one which we consider to belong properlyto religion, that is, the question wherein the happinessof man consists, and how to attain it.13 Thusthe political circumstances of the land gave thetone to its philosophy. What the time requiredwas something which would compensate men forthe lost position of a free citizen and a self-governedfatherland. The cultivated classes lookedto philosophy for consolation and support. Theanswers to this question which the various systemsgave were very different from each other, but anwer they all attempted. What they hcommon is, the drawing-back of man upon -L hself, his inner mind, his consciousness, as a beingwho thinks and wills :u while on the other handthe mental view was widened from the boundariesof a narrow state to that which touches man ingeneral. The field of morality opened out beyondthe range of this or that city, territory, or monarchy.Thus two hundred full years were occupiedwith the struggles of the Stoic and Epicureanschools, and the sceptical opposition to them ofthe middle and later Academy. At the very beginningof this time the man who sat first inAristotle's chair after him, and therefore the headof the most speculative school, Theophrastus, hadshocked the students of philosophy by declaringZeller, vol. iii. part 1. p. 14. 14 Ibid. p. 18.