472 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. 



ward of uncommon abilities and attainments. In this system of pub- 

 lic instruction and discussion then consists one of the principal reasons 

 why the Greeks were not condemned to the same sudden close in the 

 progress of philosophical science to which their precursors on the 

 same road were subjected. 



Another fatal impediment to the advancement of knowledge was 

 the absolute power which prevailed in the east. That unlimited des- 

 potism which disinherited nature of her rig-nts, and reducing men to 

 a blind and unlimited obedience, deprived them of the free and inde- 

 pendent use of their reason. Lastly, the Indians and Persians were a 

 sedentary people ; the Chaldees and Egyptians avoided all commerce 

 with strangers, and these last feared to trust themselves to the terrors 

 of the sea. Thus, shut up among themselves they could not borrow 

 from elsewhere the light they did not themselves possess. They 

 were forced to confine themselves to their hereditary traditions, and 

 the exclusiveness of the source from which they derived their know- 

 ledge reduced their science to mere and sterile imitation. 



Following the traces of the Phenicians, the first navigators, the 

 Greeks undertook voyages and entertained relations with foreign 

 countries. The Greek colonies were peculiarly adapted for the ad- 

 vancement of learning by the advantages they derived from an inti- 

 mate connexion with the habits and manners of the people to whose 

 vicinity they migrated, and by the unbroken relations with the mo- 

 ther country. Accordingly, among the lonians we find the first in- 

 struction given in philosophy. To the spirit of mercantile enterprise 

 and the political views which caused voyages and emigrations the 

 Greeks added the desire of observing the manners of the orientals 

 and penetrating the mysterious depositories of secret doctrines and 

 traditionary lore which were to be found in the possession of their 

 privileged castes. Mythologies and allegories, every species of tra- 

 dition when borrowed from one people by another become more ob- 

 scure among the borrowers than they were among the lenders, for 

 they are further removed from the source of truth. But this is not 

 the case with true knowledge when imparted to a fresh understanding 

 unfettered by acquired prejudices and unaccustomed to the discre- 

 pancies and errors to be met with in the subject matter transmitted. 

 It undergoes a new ordeal in which it is purged from the dross and 

 refined till it shines with a purity it possessed not among- its inventors. 

 Sober reason often supplies that which energetic imagination has not 

 in its power, and thus advances a theory or system to perfection of 

 which it would never have made in original discovery. 



When the Greek philosophers arrived in Egypt and the east, the 

 sages of those countries were fallen into a state of mental sloth ; their 

 curiosity was extinct, and the propagation among their own sects of 

 the doctrines they received from their forefathers formed the whole 

 circle of their wisdom, but their foreign visitants arrived with the keen 

 edge of curiosity unblunted by satiety and were surprised by the con- 

 trasts between their doctrines and their own. To them they had all 

 the racy interest of novelty, and they felt themselves at liberty to re- 

 ceive or reject, to divide or to accumulate those of their new acquire- 

 ments which they thought reasonable or unreasonable, adapted for 



