FORE:The most important result of the old Pythagorean teaching was, that it contributed a large elementsomewhat too large, indeed,to Platos philosophy. Neo-Pythagoreanism bears precisely the same relation to that revived Platonism which was the last outcome of ancient thought. It will be remembered that the great controversy between Stoicism and Scepticism, which for centuries divided the schools of Athens, and was passed on by them to Cicero and his contemporaries, seemed tending towards a reconciliation based on a return to the founder of the Academy, when, from whatever cause, Greek speculation came to a halt, which continued until the last third of the first century after Christ. At that epoch, we find a great revival of philosophical interest, and this revival seems to have been maintained for at least a hundred years, that is to say, through the whole of what is called the age of the Antonines. In the struggle for existence among the rival sects which ensued, Platonism started with all the advantages that a great inheritance and a great name could bestow. At the commencement of this period, we find the Academy once more professing to hold the doctrines of its founder in their original purity and completeness. Evidently the sober common-sense view of Antiochus had been discarded, and Platos own writings were taken as an authoritative standard of truth. A series of industrious commentators undertook the task of elucidating their contents. Nor was it only in the schools that their influence was felt. The beauty of their style must have strongly recommended the Dialogues to the attention of literary men. Plutarch, the most considerable Greek writer of his time, was a declared Platonist. So251 also was the brilliant African novelist, Apuleius, who flourished under Marcus Aurelius. Celsus, the celebrated anti-Christian controversialist, and Maximus, the Tyrian rhetorician, professed the same allegiance; and the illustrious physiologist Galen shows traces of Platonic influence. Platonism, as first constituted, had been an eminently religious philosophy, and its natural tendencies were still further strengthened at the period of its revival by the great religious reaction which we have been studying in the present chapter; while, conversely, in the struggle for supremacy among rival systems, its affinities with the spirit of the age gave it an immense advantage over the sceptical and materialistic philosophies, which brought it into still closer sympathy with the currents of popular opinion. And its partisans were drawn even further in the same direction by the influence of Neo-Pythagoreanism, representing, as this did, one among the three or four leading principles which Plato had attempted to combine.Finally, in man himself, thought is not distinguished from feeling; it is, in fact, the essence of mind, just as extension is the essence of body; and all spiritual phenomena are modes of thought in the same sense that all physical phenomena are modes of space. It was, then, rather a happy chance than genuine physiological insight which led Descartes to make brain the organ of feeling no less than of intellection; a view, as Prof. Huxley has observed, much in advance of that held by Bichat a hundred and fifty years later. For whoever deduced all the mental manifestations from a common essence was bound in consistency to locate them in the same bodily organ; what the metaphysician had joined the physiologist could not possibly put asunder.
