another school might assert towards his teachers a
certain impartiality of critical examination. If Plato
and Socrates were dear to the Platonist, truth was
dearer still. But to the Epicurean the belief in
his characteristic doctrines was blended with, and
humanized by, attachment to the memory of the
founder of his creed.

Of the four schools, two were more ancient than
the others. The Academics and the Peripatetics
preceded the Stoics and Epicureans by more than
half a century; they continued to exist and flourish
long after the younger sects had died away into
silence. But during the four centuries which wit-
nessed the rise and spread of Epicurean and Stoical
doctrines, from B.C. 250 to A.D. 150, the two other
schools were forced into the background, and aban-
doned by all but a few professed students. In the
Roman world, the Stoic and Epicurean systems
divided between themselves the suffrages of almost
all who cared to think at all. Plato and Aristotle
were almost unknown, for the two schools which
professed to draw their original inspiration from
these masters had rapidly drifted away from the de-
finite doctrine of their leaders. The doctrine both
of Plato and of Aristotle had been of a kind which,
in modern times, we should term Idealism. It had
been sustained by an enthusiasm for knowledge, and
carried on by a great wave of intellectual energy.
Plato and Aristotle gathered the ripe fruit from that
Athenian garden where Pericles, Phidias, and So-
phocles had visibly signified the spring-time of

-2-