might be assented to by those who listened to him, that is, might become affirmations of other persons. In the one case as in the other, the same word dogma was employed.1 It thus came to express (1) a decree, (2) a doctrine. The latter use tended to predominate. The word came ordinarily to express an affirmation made by a philosopher which was accepted as true by those who, from the fact of so accepting it, became his followers and formed his school. The acquiescence of a large number of men in the same affirmation gave to such an affirmation a high degree of probability; but it did not cause it to lose its original character of a personal conviction, nor did it afford any guarantee that the coincidence of expression was also a coincidence of ideas either between the original thinker and his disciples, or between the disciples themselves.2

18 de vópos Bariλéws dóypa, Dio Chrys. vol. i. p. 46, ed. Dind.

2 The use of the word in Epictetus is especially instructive: Sóyμara fill a large place in his philosophy. They are the inner judgments of the mind (κpíuata ¥vxîs, Diss. 4. 11. 7) in regard to both intellectual and moral phenomena. They are especially relative to the latter. They are the convictions upon which men act, the moral maxims which form the ultimate motives of action and the resolution to act or not act in a particular case. They are the most personal and inalienable part of us. See especially, Diss. 1. 11. 33, 35, 38; 17. 26; 29. 11, 12; 2. 1. 21, 32; 3. 2. 12; 9. 2; Ench. 45. Hence άò Soyμátwv dadeîv, “to speak from conviction," is opposed tʊ ảïò tŵv xeidŵv dadeîv, “to speak with the lip only," Diss. 3. 16. 7. If a man adopts the Soyua of another person, e.g. of a philosopher, so as to make it his own, he is said, dóyμarı ovμñalñσaι, “to feel in unison with the conviction," Diss. 1. 3. 1. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrh. Hypot. 1. 13, distinguishes two philosophical senses of Soyua, (1) assent to facts of sensation, tò Evdокεîv Tivi πрάуμатi, (2) assent to the inferences of the several sciences: in either sense it is (a) a strictly personal feeling, and (b) a

Within these limits of its original and proper use, and as expressing a fact of mind, the word has an indisputable value. But the fact of the personal character of a dogma soon became lost to sight. Two tendencies which grew with a parallel growth dominated the world in place of the recognition of it. It came to be assumed that certain convictions of certain philosophers were not simply true in relation to the philosophers themselves, and to the state of knowledge in their time, but had a universal validity: subjective and temporary convictions were thus elevated to the rank of objective and eternal truths. It came also to be assumed that the processes of reason so closely followed the order of nature, that a system of ideas constructed in strict accordance with the laws of reasoning corresponded exactly with the realities of things. The unity of such a system reflected, it was thought, the unity of the world of objective fact. It followed that the truth or untruth of a given proposition was thought to be determined by its logical consistency or inconsistency with the sum of previous inferences.

These tendencies were strongly accentuated by the decay of original thinking. Philosophy in later Greece was less thought than literature. It was the exegesis of received doctrines. Philosophers had become professors. The question of what was in itself true had become entangled with the question of what the Master firm conviction, not a mere vague impression: it was in the latter of the two senses that the philosophers of research laid it down as their maxim, μὴ δογματίζειν : they did away, not with τὰ φαινόμενα, but with assertions about them, ibid. 1. 19, 22: their attitude in reference to τὰ ἄδηλα was simply οὐχ ὁρίζω, “I abstain from giving a definition of them," ibid. 1. 197, 198.

had said. The moral duty of adherence to the traditions of a school was stronger than the moral duty of finding the truth at all hazards. The literary expression of a doctrine came to be more important than the doctrine itself. The differences of expression between one thinker and another were exaggerated. Words became fetishes. Outside the schools were those who were littérateurs rather than philosophers, and who fused different elements together into systems which had a greater unity of literary form than of logical coherence. But these very facts of the literary character of philosophy, and of the contradictions in the expositions of it, served to spread it over a wider area. They tended on the one hand to bring a literary acquaintance with philosophy into the sphere of general education, and on the other hand to produce a propaganda. Sect rivalled sect in trying to win scholars for its school. The result was that the ordinary life of later Greece was saturated with philosophical ideas, and that the discordant theories of rival schools were blended together in the average mind into a syncretistic dogmatism.

Against this whole group of tendencies there was more than one reaction. The tendency to dogmatize was met by the tendency to doubt; and the tendency to doubt flowed in many streams, which can with difficulty be traced in minute detail, but whose general course is sufficiently described for the ordinary student in the Academics of Cicero. In the second and third centuries of our era there had come to be three main groups of schools. "Some men," writes Sextus Empiricus,1 "say

1 Sext. Empir. Pyrrh. Hypot. 1. 3.

that they have found the truth; some say that it is impossible for truth to be apprehended; some still search for it. The first class consists of those who are specially designated Dogmatics, the followers of Aristotle and Epicurus, the Stoics, and some others: the second class consists of the followers of Clitomachus and Carneades, and other Academics: the third class consists of the Sceptics." They may be distinguished as the philosophy of assertion, the philosophy of denial, and the philosophy of research.1 But the first of these was in an overwhelming majority. The Dogmatics, especially in the form either of pure Stoicism or of Stoicism largely infused with Platonism, were in possession of the field of educated thought. It is a convincing proof of the completeness with which that thought was saturated with their methods and their fundamental conceptions, that those methods and conceptions are found even among the philosophers of research who claimed to have wholly disentangled themselves from them.2

The philosophy of assertion, the philosophy of denial, and the philosophy of research, were all alike outside the earliest forms of Christianity. In those forms the moral and spiritual elements were not only supreme but exclusive. They reflected the philosophy, not of Greece, but

1 Ibid. 4, δογματική, ἀκαδημαϊκή, σκεπτική.

2 For example, Sextus Empiricus, in spite of his constant formula, o opiw, maintains the necessity of having definable conceptions, τῶν ἐννοουμένων ἡμῖν πραγμάτων τὰς οὐσίας ἐπινοεῖν ὀφείλομεν, and he argues that it is impossible for a man to have an evvota of God because He has no admitted ovoía, Pyrrh. Hypot. 3. 2, 3.

of Palestine. That philosophy was almost entirely ethical. It dealt with the problems, not of being in the abstract, `but of human life. It was stated for the most part in short antithetical sentences, with a symbol or parable to enforce them. It was a philosophy of proverbs. It had no eye for the minute anatomy of thought. It had no system, for the sense of system was not yet awakened. It had no taste for verbal distinctions. It was content with the symmetry of balanced sentences, without attempting to construct a perfect whole. It reflected as in a mirror, and not unconsciously, the difficulties, the contradictions, the unsolved enigmas of the world of fact.

When this Palestinian philosophy became more selfconscious than it had been, it remained still within its own sphere, the enigmas of the moral world were still its subject-matter, and it became in the Fathers of the Talmud on the one hand fatalism, and on the other casuistry.

The earliest forms of Christianity were not only outside the sphere of Greek philosophy, but they also appealed, on the one hand, mainly to the classes which philosophy did not reach, and, on the other hand, to a standard which philosophy did not recognize. "Not many wise men after the flesh" were called in St. Paul's time: and more than a century afterwards, Celsus sarcastically declared the law of admission to the Christian communities to be "Let no educated man enter, no wise man, no prudent man, for such things we deem evil; but whoever is ignorant, whoever is unintelligent, whoever is uneducated, whoever is simple, let him come