Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY.453In its philosophical productions no preceding centuryhad been so poor as this. It had only toshow the school of the Sextii, which arose athe beginning of our era, and toea sort of middle standing between Pythagorean,Cynic, and Stoic principles.39 This school was ofsmall importance, and soon became extinct. Withthis exception from Cicero to Seneca no names ofdistinction appear. There is a gap in philosophicalthought. A period so influential on the destiniesof man in its events, so celebrated for its politeliterature, on which the world has since been feed-ing, is barren in the highest realm of inquiry.For this reason there is a particular justice intaking Cicero as an exponent of heathen thoughtand spirit, the living specimen of the kind, inasmuchas he is the last philosophic writer beforeChristian thought appears in the world, and chosefor himself the function of summing up what hethought of value in the ages before him.We omit therefore nothing in our review ifwe place ourselves at the end of this centunin the reign of Claudius, and cast a srlance backward over that prodigious labour of human reasonthrough which we have hastily twhich had then lasted six hundred years. Thproblem was, given the universe, what will man'!reason in the most gifted, cultivated, inquiringdialectic race of the ancient world do with it ?39 Uebenveg, i. 219, 223.