tionalistic conception of religion, which
resolved the myths into biographies of various benefactors of the
human race living in the grey dawn of early times whom superstition
had transformed into gods, or Euhemerism as it was called,(8) there
were chiefly three philosophical schools that came to be of
importance for Italy; viz. the two dogmatic schools of Epicurus
(484) and Zeno (491) and the sceptical school of Arcesilaus (513)
and Carneades (541-625), or, to use the school-names, Epicureanism,
the Stoa, and the newer Academy. The last of these schools, which
started from the impossibility of assured knowledge and in its
stead conceded as possible only a provisional opinion sufficient
for practical needs, presented mainly a polemical aspect, seeing
that it caught every proposition of positive faith or of
philosophic dogmatism in the meshes of its dilemmas. So far it
stands nearly on a parallel with the older method of the sophists;
except that, as may be conceived, the sophists made war more
against the popular faith, Carneades and his disciples more against
their philosophical colleagues. On the other hand Epicurus and
Zeno agreed both in their aim of rationally explaining the nature
of things, and in their physiological method, which set out from
the conception of matter. They diverged, in so far as Epicurus,
following the atomic theory of Democritus, conceived the first
principle as rigid matter, and evolved the manifoldness of things
out of this matter merely by mechanical variations; whereas Zeno,
forming his views after the Ephesian Heraclitus, introduces even
into his primordial matter a dynamic antagonism and a movement
of fluctuation up and down. From this are derived the further
distinctions--that in the Epicurean system the gods as it were did
not exist or were at the most a dream of dreams, while the Stoical
gods formed the ever-active soul of the world, and were as spirit,
as sun, as God powerful over the body, the earth, and nature; that
Epicurus did not, while Zeno did, recognize a government of the
world and a personal immortality of the soul; that the proper
object of human aspiration was according to Epicurus an absolute
equilibrium disturbed neither by bodily desire nor by mental
conflict, while it was according to Zeno a manly activity always
increased by the constant antagonistic efforts of the mind and
body, and striving after a harmony with nature perpetually in
conflict and perpetually at