f literature by the study of literary
expression and quasi-forensic argument,"[30] and Rhetoric was followed
by Philosophy, which, however, like the other branches of study, so
partook of the characteristics of the age that we find Marcus Aurelius
congratulating himself in this manner: "I owe it to Rusticus that I
found the idea of the need of moral reformation, and that I was not
diverted to literary ambition, or to write treatises on philosophical
subjects, or to make rhetorical exhortations."[31]

This saying of the imperial Stoic suggests another characteristic of the
thought of the age--its ethical cast. From the time of Aristotle men had
been content to have, to a large extent, the abstract problems of
Ontology, Epistemology, and the others, and to lay emphasis on questions
of life and manners. Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism, and all the
minor schools of the age, are pre-eminently ethical in their character.
To be sure it was ethical theory rather than practice with which they
were busied, but this fact makes the characteristic none the less
important for the student of the history of philosophy.

This disorganized condition of thought which we have been attempting to
depict has been well described by Dr. Stirling: "The fall of the old
world, which was at once political, religious and philosophical, was
characterized by a universal atomism. Politically, the individual, as an
atom, found himself alone, without a country, hardly with a home.
Religiously, the individual, as an atom, has lost his God; he looks up
into an empty heaven; his heart is broken, and he is hopeless, helpless,
hapless, in despair. Philosophically, all is contradiction; there is no
longer any knowledge he can trust. What the world is he knows not at
all. He knows not at all what he himself is. Of what he is here for, of
what it is all about, he is in the profoundest doubt, despondency and
darkness. Politically, religiously and philosophically thus empty and
alone, it is only of himself that the individual can think; it is only
for himself that the individual must care. There is not a single need
left him now--he has not a single thought in his heart--but {eu prattein},
his own welfare."[32]

It was in the midst of this lump of Eclecticism, Syncretism and
Scepticism that the leaven of Christianity was deposited, and the result
of the fusion which took place after the first antagonism had passed
away, makes this period a turning-point in th