y petty problems of human life, their outlook
becomes exclusively ethical, narrow, and one-sided. He who cannot
forget his own self, cannot merge and lose himself in the universe,
but looks at all things only as they affect himself, does not give
birth to great and universal thoughts. He becomes self-centred, and
makes the universe revolve round him. Hence we no longer have now
great, universal, all-embracing systems, like those of Plato and
Aristotle. Metaphysics, physics, logic, are not studied for their own
sakes, but only as preparations for ethics. Narrowness, however, is
always compensated by intensity, which in the end becomes fanaticism.
Hence the intense earnestness and almost miraculous heights of
fanatical asceticism, to which the Stoics attained. And an unbalanced
and one-sided philosophy leads to extremes. Such a philosophy,
obsessed by a single idea, unrestrained by any consideration for other
and equally important factors of truth, regardless of all other
claims, pushes its idea pig-headedly to its logical extreme. Such a
procedure results in paradoxes and extravagances. Hence the Stoics, if
they made duty their watchword, must needs conceive it in {342} the
most extreme opposition to all natural impulses, with a sternness
unheard of in any previous ethical doctrine save that of the Cynics.
Hence the Sceptics, if they lighted on the thought that knowledge is
difficult of attainment, must needs rush to the extreme conclusion
that any knowledge is utterly impossible. Hence the Neo-Platonists
must needs cap all these tendencies by making out a drunken frenzy of
the soul to be the true organ of philosophy, and by introducing into
speculation all the fantastic paraphernalia of sorcery, demons, and
demi-gods. Absence of sanity and balance, then, are characteristics of
the last period of Greek philosophy. The serenity and calm of Plato
and Aristotle are gone, and in their place we have turgidity and
extravagance.

Lack of originality is a second consequence of the subjectivism of the
age. Since metaphysics, physics, and logic are not cultivated, except
in a purely practical interest, they do not flourish. Instead of
advancing in these arenas of thought, the philosophies of the age go
backwards. Older systems, long discredited, are revived, and their
dead bones triumphantly paraded abroad. The Stoics return to
Heracleitus for their physics, Epicurus resurrects the atomism of
Democritus. Even in ethics, on which