its course in almost every Greek state during the
same period. The Ionic philosophy may be regarded as corresponding
with the _kingly_ era in Greek politics. Philosophy sits upon the
heights and utters its authoritative dicta for the resolution of the
seeming contradictions of things. One principle is master, but the
testimony of the senses is not denied; a harmony of thought and
sensation is sought in the interpretation of appearances by the light
of a ruling idea. In Pythagoras and his order we have an
_aristocratic_ organisation of philosophy. Its truths are for the few,
the best men are the teachers, equal as initiated partakers in the
mysteries, supreme over all outside their society. A reasoned and
reasonable order and method are {83} symbolised by their theory of
Number; their philosophy is political, their politics oligarchic. In
the Eleatic school we have a succession of personal attempts to
construct a _domination_ in the theory of Nature; some ideal conception
is attempted to be so elevated above the data of sensation as to
override them altogether, and the general result we are now to see
throughout the philosophic world, as it was seen also throughout the
world of politics, in a total collapse of the principle of forced
authority, and a development, of successively nearer approaches to
anarchic individualism and doubt. The notion of an ultimately true and
real, whatever form it might assume in various theorists' hands, being
in its essence apart from and even antagonistic to the perceptions of
sense, was at last definitely cast aside as a delusion; what remained
were the individual perceptions, admittedly separate, unreasoned,
unrelated; Reason was dethroned, Chaos was king. In other words, what
_seemed_ to any individual sentient being at any moment to be, that for
him was, and nothing else was. The distinction between the real and
the apparent was definitely attempted to be abolished, not as hitherto
by rejecting the sensually apparent in favour of the rationally
conceived real, but by the denial of any such real altogether.

The individualistic revolution in philosophy not {84} only, however,
had analogies with the similar revolution contemporaneously going on in
Greek politics, it was greatly facilitated by it. Each, in short,
acted and reacted on the other. Just as the sceptical philosophy of
the Encyclopaedists in France promoted the Revolution, and the
Revolution in its turn developed and