nn, in his "History of Philosophy,"
places it in the medieval division. For, firstly, an interval of no
less than five centuries separates the foundation of Neo-Platonism
from the foundation of the preceding Greek schools, the Stoic, the
Epicurean, and the Sceptic. How long a period this is will be seen if
we remember that the entire development of Greek thought from Thales
to the Sceptics occupied only about three centuries. Plotinus, the
real founder of Neo-Platonism, was born in 205 A.D., so that it is, as
far as historical time is concerned, a product of the Christian era.
Secondly, its character is largely un-Greek and un-European. The Greek
elements are largely swamped by oriental mysticism. Its seat was not
in Greece, but at Alexandria, which was not a Greek, but a
cosmopolitan, city. Men of all races met here, and, in particular, it
was here that East and West joined hands, and the fusion of thought
which resulted was Neo-Platonism. But, on the other hand, it seems
wrong to include the thought of Plotinus and his successors in
medieval philosophy. The whole character of what is usually called
medieval philosophy was determined by its growth upon a distinctively
Christian soil. It was {369} Christian philosophy. It was the product
of the new era which Christianity had substituted for paganism.
Neo-Platonism, on the other hand, is not only unchristian, but even
anti-christian. The only Christian influence to be detected in it is
that of opposition. It is a survival of the pagan spirit in Christian
times. In it the old pagan spirit struggles desperately against its
younger antagonist, and finally succumbs. In it we see the last gasp
and final expiry of the ancient culture of the Greeks. So far as it is
not Asiatic in its elements, it draws its inspiration wholly from the
philosophies of the past, from the thought and culture of Greece. On
the whole, therefore, it is properly classified as the last school of
Greek philosophy.

The long interval of time which elapsed between the rise of the
preceding Greek schools, whose history we have traced, and the
foundation of Neo-Platonism, was filled up by the continued existence,
in more or less fossilized form, of the main Greek schools, the
Academic, the Peripatetic, the Stoic, and the Epicurean, scattered and
harried at times by the inroads of scepticism. It would be wearisome
to follow in detail the development in these schools, and the more or
less trifling disputes of