ABSTRACT
It has already been pointed out that the natural science of antiquity reached its zenith in Aristotle, and a number of reasons have been given for the fact that only in points of detail, but never in regard to the summarizing of the results achieved, did it advance beyond his standpoint. While Rome, first as a republic and then as an empire, was conquering and administering the whole of the civilized world, there began an era which, more than any other, should have been devoted to promoting the work of intellectual culture. The universal peace that prevailed during the first two centuries of the Christian era has never had its counterpart either before or since, for the border feuds and insurrections which disturbed it were entirely local and transient. And as there was peace, there was also prosperity; even up to the present day the ruins of buildings bear witness to the common and private wealth of those days throughout the length and breadth of the Roman Empire. And yet it was this very epoch which witnessed the decline of ancient science — indeed the whole of the culture of antiquity. It was not long before the best minds in the intellectual world of the time realized this fact. Pliny, for instance, is never tired of repeating that humanity is corrupt and that his age was worse than the era that had passed. The reason he gives is the increasing corruption of morals — an assertion with which innumerable other ancient authors are in agreement and which has therefore been repeated in more recent times. The cause cannot lie there, however; moral corruption is always a symptom and not a cause of cultural decadence. The cause is far more likely to be found in the change in the common conception of life which was a consequence of subjection under the Empire. The ancient provincial patriotism had lost its power to survive and there was no possibility of any fresh form of social community developing; instead the individual personality appears as struggling for freedom from external oppression and grievances. This self-assertion against an oppressive existence both Epicureans and Stoics sought to put into practice, each in their own way; but, as we have seen, their teachings formed no good soil in which to cultivate empirical research. In the long run, however, the purely negative insensibility to suffering which constituted the philosophy of life of these schools of thought could not suffice; in their place appeared lines of thought start59ing out from the idea of leading the personality into an existence different from the earthly, of creating with the aid of some kind of higher, secret knowledge a happier world for the soul to live in. There thus arose a half-mystical, half-experimental psychology, which was nurtured by philosophical schools possessing sectarian organizations, like that of the Pythagoreans in the old days. One of these schools, and the most fantastic of all, actually called themselves neo-Pythagoreans; another, more scientifically serious, was the neo-Platonic, which sought to bring the human spirit, along the mystical path of introspection, into contact with the world of ideas, which Plato declared to be the only true world. Through this development the very idea of philosophy became radically altered; the philosopher was no longer a lover of wisdom, as the name implies, but a lover of piety. But as such he retained no interest in natural phenomena; his spirit in fact lived in supernatural regions of space, and if he devoted any time to the objects of nature, it was merely in order to discover the secret divine powers which, hidden from the eyes of the ignorant, dwelt in plants and animals.
