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philosophic coins which had been so long passing current with 
so little claim to be regarded as true metal. Among the 
crowd who followed in the train of Alexander the Great into 
the unknown regions of the Fire Rivers, beyond the Indus, 
there was a dreamy, thoughtful man, with quiet simple tastes, 
who, while others gave way to excitement or terror, calmly 
pondered on the new phases of Life and Being which opened 
upon him. He conversed with Persian Magi and with Indian 
Gymnosophistee ; he heard them chant the precepts of Zer- 
dusht, the ancient hymns of the Veda; he heard them tell of 
Ormuzd the all-loving, of Indra the all-encompassing ; and 
as he compared their teaching with what he had heard from 
his instructors Bryson and Metrodorus, and read in the fasci- 
nating books of Democritus, the sad thought flashed across his 
mind, “ Can we ever know ? How can we dare, while we gaze 
on the ever-varying phenomena that pass before our view, to 
assume that there is any reality, any tixed substratum under- 
lying them all ; or, even granting that there is, how can we 
venture to suppose that we are able to bring to bear upon it 
a power of comprehension sufficient to enable us to judge of 
it ? Is our mind competent to deal with the Unseen ? 33 This 
was Pyrrho the Sceptic. His Scepsis was not the doubting 
and careful sifting of truths up to his time regarded as 
axiomatic, but the turning of the intellectual gaze inward upon 
the instrument of understanding itself, and pronouncing sen- 
tence against it; or, more strictly speaking, declining to pro- 
nounce sentence in its favour. “ How do you judge of the 
Unseen ? 33 he asked. “ You say you have a Criterion within 
you, an instrument for determining the Beautiful and the True, 
for discriminating between the Good and the Bad, the Ethereal 
and the Worldly; how do you know that this Criterion is 
correct? How can you be sure that it may not mistake the 
False for the True, or fail to detect the reality of Being under 
the unreality of mere appearance ? Still more, if in things 
finite your Criterion be so untrustworthy, how can you possibly 
venture to apply it to the Infinite ? 33 
The question remained unanswered. It was not yet time for 
Immanuel Kant to appear. 
TheWord Sceptic, however, is applied, at the present time, 
not to philosophy, but to religion. It is not used to signify 
one who examines the truth of what is presented to him for 
acceptance, nor yet one who argues that he has no faculty 
which can be relied on for the apprehension of higher Truth : 
it signifies one who rejects the probability, if not the possi- 
bility, of communication between God and man ; and especially 
one who repudiates the divine origin and authority of a certain 
