enduring
memorial of his name.[466]

[Footnote 465: "Phaedo," Sec. 105.]

[Footnote 466: Aristotle's "Metaphysics," bk. i. ch. iii.]

We have devoted a much larger space than we originally designed to the
ante-Socratic schools--quite out of proportion, indeed, with that we
shall be able to appropriate to their successors. But inasmuch as all
the great primary problems of thought, which are subsequently discussed
by Plato and Aristotle, were started, and received, at least, typical
answers in those schools, we can not hope to understand Plato, or
Aristotle, or even Epicurus, or Zeno of Cittium, unless we have first
mastered the doctrines of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, and
Anaxagoras.[467] The attention we have bestowed on these early thinkers
will, therefore, have been a valuable preparatory discipline for the
study of

II. THE SOCRATIC SCHOOL.

The first cycle of philosophy was now complete. That form of Grecian
speculative thought which, during the first period of its development,
was a philosophy of nature, had reached its maturity; it had sought "the
first principles of all things" in the study of external nature, and had
signally failed. In this pursuit of first principles as the basis of a
true and certain knowledge of the system of the universe, the two
leading schools had been carried to opposite poles of thought. One had
asserted that _experience_ alone, the other, that _reason_ alone was the
sole criterion of truth. As the last consequence of this imperfect
method, Leucippus had denied the existence of "the one," and Zeno had
denied the existence of "the many." The Ionian school, in Democritus,
had landed in Materialism; the Italian, in Parmenides, had ended in
Pantheism; and, as the necessary result of this partial and defective
method of inquiry, which ended in doubt and contradiction, a spirit of
general skepticism was generated in the Athenian mind. If doubt be cast
upon the veracity of the primary cognitive faculties of the mind, the
flood-gates of universal skepticism are opened. If the senses are
pronounced to be mendacious and illusory in their reports regarding
external phenomena, and if the intuitions of the reason, in regard to
the ground and cause of phenomena, are delusive, then we have no ground
of certitude. If one faculty is unveracious and unreliable, how can we
determine that the other is not equally so? There is, then, no such
thing as universal and necessary truth. Truth is va