made, it was recognized that creation, in its
various parts, displays intention and design, the adaptation of means to
secure proposed ends. This suggested a reasoning and voluntary agency,
like that of man, in the government of the world; and from a continual
reference to human habits and acts, Greek philosophy passed through its
stage of anthropoid conceptions.

A little farther progress awakened suspicions that the mind of man can
obtain no certain knowledge; and the opinion at last prevailed that we
have no trustworthy criterion of truth. In the scepticism thus setting
in, the approach to Oriental ideas is each successive instant more and
more distinct.

[Sidenote: Approach to Oriental ideas.]

This period of doubt was the immediate forerunner of more correct
cosmical opinions. The heliocentric mechanism of the planetary system
was introduced, the earth deposed to a subordinate position. The
doctrines, both physical and intellectual, founded on geocentric ideas,
were necessarily endangered, and, since these had connected themselves
with the prevailing religious views, and were represented by important
material interests, the public began to practise persecution and the
philosophers hypocrisy. Pantheistic notions of the nature of the world
became more distinct, and, as their necessary consequence, the doctrines
of Emanation, Transmigration, and Absorption were entertained. From this
it is but a step to the suspicion that matter, motion, and time are
phantasms of the imagination--opinions embodied in the atomic theory,
which asserts that atoms and space alone exist; and which became more
refined when it recognized that atoms are only mathematical points; and
still more so when it considered them as mere centres of force. The
brink of Buddhism was here approached.

As must necessarily ever be the case where men are coexisting in
different psychical stages of advance, some having made a less, some a
greater intellectual progress, all these views which we have described
successively, were at last contemporaneously entertained. At this point
commenced the action of the Sophists, who, by setting the doctrines of
one school in opposition to those of another, and representing them all
as of equal value, occasioned the destruction of them all, and the
philosophy founded on physical speculation came to an end.

[Sidenote: Uniformity in the manner of intellectual progress.]

Of this phase of Greek intellectual life, if w