We know very little of those
Sceptics, Cynics, Epicureans, Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, of whom
there has been so much talk, except at second-hand, through the Romans,
from whom Stoicism in after ages received a new and not ignoble life.
But this we do know of the later sets, that they gradually gave up the
search for truth, and propounded to themselves as the great type for a
philosopher, How shall a man save his own soul from this evil world?
They may have been right; it may have been the best thing to think about
in those exhausted and decaying times: but it was a question of ethics,
not of philosophy, in the sense which the old Greek sages put on that
latter word. Their object was, not to get at the laws of all things,
but to fortify themselves against all things, each according to his
scheme, and so to be self-sufficient and alone. Even in the Stoics, who
boldly and righteously asserted an immutable morality, this was the
leading conception. As has been well said of them:
"If we reflect how deeply the feeling of an intercourse between men and
a divine race superior to themselves had worked itself into the Greek
character--what a number of fables, some beautiful, some impure, it had
impregnated and procured credence for--how it sustained every form of
polity and every system of laws, we may imagine what the effects must
have been of its disappearance.
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