CHAPTER XIX.

THE NEW ACADEMY-CONCLUSION.

THE last record of Greek philosophy before the birth of Christ is the record of the progress of the school originated by Plato,-the " Academy."

For some time after Plato's death the tenets of the school remained unaltered. During the reigns of Speusippus, Xenocrates, Crantor, Polemo, and Crates, no mind had governed with sufficient originality to strike out afresh upon a new road.

But Crantor, himself a faithful disciple of his master, was unwittingly the occasion of unfaithfulness to the Platonic doctrines.

Crantor was a native of Soli, in Cilicia. He studied under Xenocrates in Athens, and was intimate with Polemo and the staunch supporters of Platonic doctrine. Had he been told that he would be the unconscious instigator of the movement against the only "Academy" then known, and the equally unconscious indicator of another, he would have been horrified. But such was the fact.

Diogenes

Crantor thought and wrote voluminously. Laertius states that he left thirty thousand lines of commentaries upon moral subjects. That these must have existed close upon the Christian era is proved by the remark of the poet Horace (whose philosophy was Epicurean, and who died in the year 8 B.C.), that "Crantor was equal to Chrysippus in ability, and that his works were

being greatly read in Rome." Crantor wrote a treatise, which Plato would have approved, "On Grief," which was imitated by Cicero in his third book of "Tusculan Disputations," as well as sincerely admired by him,—and which was declared by Panatius to be a "golden work, which deserved to be learnt by heart, word for word." He wrote commentaries on Plato's works; poems, faithful to the Platonic ideas, which were sealed up and placed in the Temple of Athens in Soli,-poems which earned him the title from Theatetus of "Friend of the Muses;" and, after all this, he may be called the Founder of Scepticism in the School of Plato.

For he had a pupil whom he loved, in whose talents he believed, and to whom he bequeathed his fortune of ten talents, and this pupil was Arcesilaus.

Arcesilaus was born in Eolia, in Asia Minor. The city which claims him as a citizen is Pitane or Pitana,—which was known for its patent for making bricks so elastic and buoyant that they would float in water. He was born B.C. 316; and his father, Leathes (or Scythes), intrusted his early education to Autolycus, a well-known mathematician. During his boyhood his sharp wit and reasoning power attracted the attention of his tutors and friends; and at the expressed wish of his brother, Moireas, he went to Athens and became the pupil of Theophrastus, and of the master who afterwards so dearly loved him,— Crantor.

During Crantor's life,—although Arcesilaus seemed to show an unsatisfied restlessness which led him to hear the lecturers heading the various philosophical schools then co-existing in Athens, he seems to have been sufficiently under the influence of the faithful Platonist to outwardly adhere to Platonism, pure and simple.

But no sooner was Crantor dead than he declared his separation from the Academy, and his general antagonism to the Platonic doctrines as then interpreted, as well as to the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Peripatetics, and the

general dissenters who were classed under the head of Sceptics.

Yet he called himself a Platonist.

He accepted the Platonic doctrines in their widest sense, but he emphatically declared against the wonderful hidden meanings-those "esoteric " doctrines which disciples after the death of Plato had found in the writings of their master.

He continued an Academician, but altered the system so far as to separate his followers from the followers of Polemo and Crates, and to establish his claim as founder of what was called by historians "the Middle Academy."

It would seem that the general atmosphere of hopelessness, of Doubt, was infecting even the brilliant and genial mind of this fascinating philosopher, whose amiability and sympathetic temperament were so irresistible that to see him was to love him. So winning was his manner, so irreproachable his behaviour, alike to enemies and friends, that it was impossible to be angry with him. Thus, although he separated himself mentally from his colleagues, there are no records of the furious quarrels between the original Academy and the new branch that might reasonably be expected. Polemo and Crates, the last two original Academical philosophers of the era, may have grieved over their old friend's desertion, and may have striven to win him back, but they seem neither to have reviled nor to have hated him.

Arcesilaus, whose opinions are chiefly to be gathered from the records of Cicero, Sextus, and others (the fourth book of Cicero's "Academic Questions" containing a remarkable exposition of the doctrines of Arcesilaus and the corresponding objections of some of his antagonists), appears to have seized upon the negative side of both Plato and Aristotle.

He adhered to Plato's notion that Sense was untrustworthy, and that, therefore, the mind of man, influenced through the senses, was no test of Truth or of Falsehood;

and, with Aristotle, he entirely rejected the theory of preexisting ideas in the human mind. Denying both these opposite suggestions, he reduced the mental power of mankind to a very low—indeed, to a hopeless standard; for to deny all certainty whatever to the mind of man is to bring him to a level below that of the animals, who at least possess powerful instincts. Such opinions would naturally lead to a course of despairing and rebellious. conduct. Yet the wise Stoic, Cleanthes, said of Arcesilaus, that "if he loosened the ties of morality by his words, he knit them again by his example; "—high praise from such a quarter.

The geniality and open-handedness of the founder of the Middle Academy led to his gaining the reputation of a free-liver. In our own time, men less distinguished than he who are prompt and lavish in their aid to the suffering and the sick, are generally supposed to owe their generosity to their recklessness of life. But in recording these reports of Arcesilaus, biographers discredit them.

Arcesilaus was succeeded by Lacydes or Lacidas, B.C. 241. Lacidas is chiefly interesting as being a favourite of Attalus the First, king of the young empire of Pergamus, which was eventually left to the Romans by a childless monarch. Pergamus is philosophically interesting because of the literary taste of its various monarchs, who founded a library in the capital (Pergamus, now called Pergamo), which contained no less than 200,000 volumes; and because it was in Pergamus that parchment was first invented and made use of, Ptolemy of Egypt having forbidden the exportation of papyrus from his kingdom.

Attalus gave Lacidas a garden for his philosophical pursuits; and in this garden Lacidas seems to have followed his master's depreciation of the human mind to its bitter end. For we hear of his extolling animal nature to such a height that he practically illustrated his tenets by giving a favourite goose a magnificent funeral; and in

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utter hopelessness he drank himself to death,—an end which should be a wholesome lesson to the adopters of the negative as a living entity.

Arcesilaus and Lacidas seem to stand in the same relation to the "Middle or second Academy," the first adulterated School of Plato,-as do Carneades and Clitomachus to the "New Academy," or second variation on the Platonic themes.

Carneades, who is called the Founder of the School of Thought named the "New Academy," was born in Cyrene about 213 or 214 B.C.

His philosophical teachers were the sceptical Middle Academicians and the discouraging Stoics,-Hegesinus (third leader of the Academy after Arcesilaus) and Diogenes (the Stoic) being those who may be said to have influenced him most.

The mind of Carneades was both acute and deep. Swift to detect weak points, he soon rejected the Stoical assertions and clung to the Academical doubts. At least these were capable of logical defence.

He read the works of the Stoic Chrysippus, and at once exerted all his mental power to refute them. Besides being a natural logician, his style was brilliantly eloquent; therefore, his withering attacks upon the Stoical theory of knowledge injured the school to no small extent.

Carneades may well be advanced as an instance of pure Atheism, against those who declare that no pure Atheist ever existed. Many philosophers-notably Democritus― showed the tendency to assume that the universe is most probably spontaneous, and that no need for a First Cause exists. This spontaneous universal self-existence is boldly declared for by Carneades, who attacked the idea of a God, and, in his depreciation of Nature and "things as they are," showed himself to be that which in our own time is called a Pessimist-one who is the exact opposite of the Optimist, who declares that "whatever is, is Good"