life of which Mohammed's fabled coffin is the fittest
symbol.

The *New Academy*, whose philosophy was a hybrid of Platonism and
Pyrrhonism, while it denied the possibility of ascertaining objective
truth, yet taught that on all subjects of speculative philosophy
probability is attainable, and that, if the subject in hand be one which
admits of being acted upon, it is the duty of the moral agent to act in
accordance with probability,--to pursue the course in behalf of which the
more and the better reasons can be given. There are moral acts and habits
which seem to be in accordance with reason and the nature of things. We
may be mistaken in thinking them so; yet the probability that they are so
creates a moral obligation in their favor. The New Academy professed a
hypothetical acquiescence in the ethics of the Peripatetic school,
maintaining, therefore, that the mean between two extremes is probably in
accordance with right and duty, and that virtue is probably man's highest
good, yet probably not sufficient in itself without the addition of
exterior advantages.

*Cicero* considered himself as belonging to the New Academy. His instincts
as an advocate, often induced by professional exigencies to deny what he
had previously affirmed, made the scepticism of this school congenial to
him; while his love of elegant ease and luxury and his lack of moral
courage were in closer harmony with the practical ethics of the
Peripatetics than with the more rigid system of the Stoics. At the same
time, his pure moral taste and his sincere reverence for the right brought
him into sympathy with the Stoic school. His "De Officiis" is an
exposition of the Stoic system of ethics, though by the professed disciple
of another philosophy. It is as if a Mohammedan, without disclaiming his
own religion, should undertake an exposition of the ethics of
Christianity, on the ground that, though Mohammed was a genuine prophet,
there was, nevertheless, a higher and purer morality in the New Testament
than in the Koran.

Chapter XV.

MODERN HISTORY OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

*For several centuries after the destruction of the Western Empire*,
philosophy had hardly an existence except in its records, and these were
preserved chiefly for their parchment, half-effaced, covered by what took
the place of literature in the (so called) Dark Ages, and at length
deciphered by such minute and wearisome toil as only mediae