The Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics - College of Stoic Philosophers

78 STATE OF CULTURE IN GREECE.
Ckap.
II "
of Stoicism, the
two Schools are,
Cyrenaic of EiDicureanisra. These
./
however, only of minor importance
in the general progress of philosophy in the fourth
'yL.
century, and sophistry by the close of the same cen-
tuiy was already a thing of the past, Socrates,
it is
true, would have nothing to do with plwsical en-
quiries ; yet he felt the desire for knowledge
far too
keenly to bear comparison with the post-Aristotelian
philosophers. Proposing to concern himself only with
subjects which were of practical use in life, he yet
put forth a theory of knowledge which involved a
reform quite as much of speculative as of practical
philosophy, and that reform was accomplished on a
grand scale by Plato and Aristotle.
However little Greek philosophy as a whole deve-
loped during the fourth century along the lines of
its subsequent expansion, still the speculations of
Plato and Ai'istotle necessarily helped to prepare for
the coming charg.?. The antagonism between the
ideal and phenomeral worlds which Plato set up, and
Aristotle vainly attempted to bridge over, leads ulti-
mately to a contrast between the outer and the inner
life, between thought and the object of thought.
The generic conceptions or forms, which Plato and
Aristotle regard as most truly real, are, after all,
fabrications of the human mind. The conception of
reason, even in its expanded
form as the divine
Reason, or reason of the world, is an idea formed by
abstraction from the inner life. And what is really
meant by identifying form in itself with what is, an&
matter with what is jMSsible, or even (as Plato does)