ver, does not escape the eye of one who looks
below the surface, that the inner history of the ancient world must
necessarily have degenerated into barbarism of its own accord, because
it ended with the renunciation of this world. There is no desire either
to enjoy it, to master it, or to know it as it really is. A new world is
disclosed for which everything is given up, and men are ready to
sacrifice insight and understanding, in order to possess this world with
certainty; and, in the light which radiates from the world to come, that
which in this world appears absurd becomes wisdom, and wisdom becomes
folly.

Such is Neoplatonism. The pre-Socratic philosophers, declared by the
followers of Socrates to be childish, had freed themselves from
theology, that is, the mythology of the poets, and constructed a
philosophy from the observation of nature, without troubling themselves
about ethics and religion. In the systems of Plato and Aristotle physics
and ethics were to attain to their rights, though the latter no doubt
already occupied the first place; theology, that is popular religion,
continues to be thrust aside. The post-Aristotelian philosophers of all
parties were already beginning to withdraw from the objective world.
Stoicism indeed seems to fall back into the materialism that I prevailed
before Plato and Aristotle; but the ethical dualism which dominated the
mood of the Stoic philosophers, did not in the long run tolerate the
materialistic physics; it sought and found help in the metaphysical
dualism of the Platonists, and at the same time reconciled itself to the
popular religion by means of allegorism, that is, it formed a new
theology. But it did not result in permanent philosophic creations. A
one-sided development of Platonism produced the various forms of
scepticism which sought to abolish confidence in empirical knowledge.
Neoplatonism, which came last, learned from all schools. In the first
place, it belongs to the series of post-Aristotelian systems and, as the
philosophy of the subjective, it is the logical completion of them. In
the second place, it rests on scepticism; for it also, though not at the
very beginning, gave up both confidence and pure interest in empirical
knowledge. Thirdly, it can boast of the name and authority of Plato; for
in metaphysics it consciously went back to him and expressly opposed the
metaphysics of the Stoics. Yet on this very point it also learned
something from the Stoic