ind men engaged in the processes of
positive, constructive thought, but we have presented to our view an age
of retrospection, of literary criticism, and, to a great extent, of
intellectual exhaustion. Men live amid the ruins of the systems
constructed by their ancestors, and each one attempts to form for
himself, out of the scattered fragments, a combination which may serve
him as a sufficiently coherent rule of thought, and, especially, of
life. Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism, the "Orientalizing Hellenes,"
and the "Hellenizing Orientals," all by their restless, nervous,
frequently erratic and aimless activity, bear witness to the fact that
the mind of man has had revealed to it its own limitations, and is well
on the way towards despair of ever arriving at truth. The Greek mind no
longer exhibits that elasticity and spontaneity and enthusiasm in the
search for truth, or that confidence in its results, which characterized
the representatives of the best period of the thought of the race. The
political fortunes of Greece do but typify the process which was going
on in the Greek mind itself, and the period which we are considering is
an age of intellectual as well as political decadence. This is
manifested by the further fact that the thought of the age was largely
turned backward and dwelt in the past. The day of original thought had
passed by, and men were now content to deal with ideas at second
hand--to be commentators rather than creators. This literary character
which Greek philosophy now first began to exhibit was often seen and
protested against. Thus Epictetus says: "If I study philosophy with a
view only to its literature, I am not a philosopher, but a litterateur;
the only difference is that I interpret Chrysippus instead of
Homer."[28] But protest as they might, the inexorable signs of old age
crept over the nation as irresistibly as they do over the individual,
and, like the venerable man, preserved beyond his generation, Hellas
lived largely in the memories of the past.

The influence of this condition of things is seen in the education of
the times. The Greek world of this period, as we know it, was
pre-eminently educated, but in a special, literary sense of the term.
The foundation of their education was Grammar--the "Belles Lettres" of
modern times. Sextus Empiricus says, "We are all given over to Grammar
from childhood, and almost from our baby-clothes."[29] After Grammar
came Rhetoric, "the study o