oh. ii.] THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY. 23 



become the object of thought. The earliest philosophic 

 speculations of the Greeks dealt almost exclusively with 

 the origin of the Universe, and the nature of its irpwrr] dp^q 

 or First Cause, or with just such theories of the ultimate 

 constitution of matter as we saw in the previous chapter 

 leading us to alternative impossibilities of thought. In the 

 Parmenidcs and Sophistes of Plato we may find, presented with 

 unrivalled acuteness, though rendered dreary by endless 

 verbal quibbling, many of the same inquiries concerning the 

 nature of the Absolute which we have been led to condemn as 

 impracticable. Is the Absolute One or Many ? Is the One 

 Finite or is it Infinite ? And these inquiries, in the first- 

 named dialogue, lead up to the same sort of startling 

 paradoxes which we have already signalized as the inevitable 

 outcome of speculation upon such subjects. In his first 

 argument, Parrnenides demonstrates that the One is neither 

 in itself nor in anything else, neither at rest nor in motion, 

 neither the same with itself nor different from itself. In his 

 second argument, he demonstrates that the One is both in 

 itself and in other things, both at rest and in motion, both the 

 same with itself and different from itself. That is, while his 

 first demonstration denies both of two opposite and mutually 

 destructive propositions, his second affirms them both. 



There is no doubt that after Plato's time the Greeks felt, 

 though they did not distinctly comprehend, the futility of 

 such inquiries. By the successors of Plato, philosophy was 

 brought into a state of more or less complete scepticism as to 

 the possibility of any trustworthy knowledge whatever. " We 

 assert nothing, — not even that we assert nothing," was the 

 extravagant dictum of one of the later schools of Greek 

 philosophy. And finally philosophy ceased from its indepen- 

 dent inquiries, being merged in theology by Proklos, who, 

 hopeless of attaining absolute knowledge by any exertion of 

 the intellectual powers, was driven to assert the existence 

 of a divine supernatural light, by which the soul being 



