st thinker
the Sceptical School had known since the age of Pyrrho, its
founder. In claiming a union between Pyrrhonism and the
philosophy of Heraclitus, he recognised also the pre-Socratic
tendency of the Sceptical School. The name of Socrates was all
powerful in the Academy, but Aenesidemus comprehended the fact
that the true spirit of Pyrrhonism was of earlier origin than
the Academic Scepsis.

CHAPTER V.

_Critical Examination of Pyrrhonism_.

The distinct philosophical movement of which Pyrrho was the
author bore his name for five centuries after his death. It had
an acknowledged existence as a philosophical tendency, if indeed
not a sect, for a great part of that time. Yet, when we
carefully analyse the relation of Pyrrhonism, as presented to us
by Sextus, to the teachings of Pyrrho himself, in so far as they
can be known, we find many things in Pyrrhonism for which Pyrrho
was not responsible.

The foundation elements of the movement, the spirit of Empirical
doubt that lay underneath and caused its development in certain
directions rather than others, are due to Pyrrho. The methods of
the school, however, were very foreign to anything found in the
life or teachings of Pyrrho. Pyrrho was eminently a moralist. He
was also to a great degree an ascetic, and he lived his
philosophy, giving it thus a positive side wanting in the
Pyrrhonism presented to us by Sextus. Timon represents him as
desiring to escape from the tedious philosophical discussions of
his time--

[Greek:
o geron o Purrhon, pos e pothen ekdusin heures
latreies doxon te kenophrosunes te sophiston;]

and again he speaks of his modest and tranquil life--

[Greek:
touto moi, o Purrhon, himeiretai etor akousai
pos pot' aner et' ageis panta meth' hesuchies
mounos d'anthropoisi theou tropon hegemoneueis
..... pheista meth' hesuchies
aiei aphrontistos kai akinetos kata tauta
me prosech' indalmois hedulogou sophies.][1]

Pyrrho wished more than anything else to live in peace, and his
dislike of the Sophists[2] may well have made him try to avoid
dialectic; while, on the contrary, in the Pyrrhonean School of
later times discussion was one of the principal methods of
contest, at least after the time of Agrippa. Pyrrhonism seems to
have been originally a theory of life, like the philosophy of
Socrates, to whom Pyrrho is often compared,[3] and Pyrrho, like
Socrates, lived his phi