Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY.467with the doctrine of the human personality; andon all these the philosophic mind was dark andconfused.ut if the Greek's physical theory stood in theway of his conceiving clearly the human personalityin this life, much more did it impede his conceptionof that personality as continuing after death.For as the union of a portion of the divine reasonwith matter constituted man, and as death put anend to that union, the compound being ceased toexist, the portion of the divine reason reverted toits source, but the sensitive soul, as well as thebody, was dissolved and came to nothing. Therewas in his mind no " individual substance of arational nature" to form the basis of identity, andmaintain the conception of personality. In theabsence of this, he who had felt, thought, andacted, was no more. He could not therefore receiveretribution for his deeds, since there was nopersonal agent on whom the retribution was to fall.3. A god who'was not personal and did notmake man,-man in whom freewill, the mark ofpersonality, was not recognised, so long as helived, and in whom after death no personal agentcontinued to exist, - these correspond to eachother, and these were the last result of Gneco-Boinan philosophic thought up to the time ofClaudius. But what sort of duty did man, beingsuch, owe to such a god? Cicero's book on Officeshad been written upwards of eighty years, but no-