d ethics, and set
it more and more in the foreground. After Possidonius, Seneca,
Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius of the Stoical school, and men like
Plutarch of the Platonic, attained to an ethical view, which, though not
very clear in principle (knowledge, resignation, trust in God), is
hardly capable of improvement in details. Common to them all, as
distinguished from the early Stoics, is the value put upon the soul,
(not the entire human nature), while in some of them there comes clearly
to the front a religious mood, a longing for divine help, for redemption
and a blessed life beyond the grave, the effort to obtain and
communicate a religious philosophical therapeutic of the soul. From
the beginning of the second century, however, already announced itself
that eclectic philosophy based on Platonism which after two or three
generations appeared in the form of a school, and after three
generations more was to triumph over all other schools. The several
elements of the Neoplatonic philosophy, as they were already
foreshadowed in Philo, are clearly seen in the second century, viz., the
dualistic opposition of the divine and the earthly, the abstract
conception of God, the assertion of the unknowableness of God,
scepticism with regard to sensuous experience, and distrust with regard
to the powers of the understanding, with a greater readiness to examine
things and turn to account the result of former scientific labour;
further, the demand of emancipation from sensuality by means of
asceticism, the need of authority, belief in a higher revelation, and
the fusion of science and religion. The legitimising of religious fancy
in the province of philosophy was already begun. The myth was no longer
merely tolerated and re-interpreted as formerly, but precisely the
mythic form with the meaning imported into it was the precious
element.[128] There were, however, in the second century numerous
representatives of every possible philosophic view. To pass over the
frivolous writers of the day, the Cynics criticised the traditional
mythology in the interests of morality and religion.[129] But there were
also men who opposed the "ne quid nimis" to every form of practical
scepticism, and to religion at the same time, and were above all intent
on preserving the state and society, and on fostering the existing
arrangements which appeared to be threatened far more by an intrusive
religious than by a nihilistic philosophy.[130] Yet men whose