before younger and sturdier races.
It was not so many years now before Greece, passing from one alien
yoke to another, was to become no more than a Roman province.

{340}

Philosophy is not something that subsists independently of the growth
and decay of the spirit of man. It goes hand in hand with political,
social, religious, and artistic development. Political organization,
art, religion, science, and philosophy, are but different forms in
which the life of a people expresses itself. The innermost substance
of the national life is found in the national philosophy, and the
history of philosophy is the kernel of the history of nations. It was
but natural, then, that from the time of Alexander onwards Greek
philosophy should exhibit symptoms of decay.

The essential mark of the decay of Greek thought was the intense
subjectivism which is a feature of all the post-Aristotelian schools.
Not one of them is interested in the solution of the world-problem for
its own sake. The pure scientific spirit, the desire for knowledge for
its own sake, is gone. That curiosity, that wonder, of which Aristotle
speaks as the inspiring spirit of philosophy, is dead. The motive
power of philosophy is no longer the disinterested pursuit of truth,
but only the desire of the individual to escape from the ills of life.
Philosophy only interests men in so far as it affects their lives. It
becomes anthropocentric and egocentric. Everything pivots on the
individual subject, his destiny, his fate, the welfare of his soul.
Religion has long since become corrupted and worthless, and philosophy
is now expected to do the work of religion, and to be a haven of
refuge from the storms of life. Hence it becomes essentially
practical. Before everything else it is ethical. All other departments
of thought are now subordinated to ethics. It is not as in the days of
the strength and youth of the Greek spirit, when Xenophanes or {341}
Anaxagoras looked out into the heavens, and naively wondered what the
sun and the stars were, and how the world arose. Men's thought no
longer turns outward toward the stars, but only inward upon
themselves. It is not the riddle of the universe, but the riddle of
human life, which makes them ponder.

This subjectivism has as its necessary consequences, one-sidedness,
absence of originality, and finally complete scepticism. Since men are
no longer interested in the wider problems of the universe, but only
in the comparativel