It was only in a very remote and distant age that Aristotle attained to a very great importance and authority. In his own day he did but form a very inconsiderable school, which exercised far less influence on public life than two other sects, in whose history the development of Grecian philosophy finds its close.
The system of the Stoics, with its stern and, consequently, impracticable theory of morals, its doctrine of absolute necessity and blind fatalism, announces itself at once as identical with an austere rationalism. At the same time, under the teaching of the Epicureans, a soft and effeminate naturalism became almost universally prevalent. And while, in another and newer form, it gradually assumed the place of the old mythical heathenism, which daily fell more and more into neglect and disrepute, it still retained the old heathen sentiment, and a careless and undisturbed indifference in inactive bliss and self-enjoyment, as it was even ascribed and imputed to the gods, was introduced into life, and extolled as the true wisdom. Thus, then, while on the one hand the foundation was laid for that insensibility with which the wide-spreading and growing corruption and the approach of the general ruin were contemplated, so, on the other hand, the apathy of the Stoics was not exactly the right kind of sentiment to furnish a check or counteractive to this sybaritic indifference.
As concerns the relations of public life, the social community, and the state, the Stoical doctrine appears, no doubt, in a worthier and a better light. On this account it numbered among its adherents almost all the great statesmen that lived from the last times of the Republic down to the later centuries of the Empire. Considered, however, in themselves, and scientifically regarded, both systems must be looked upon simply as the last chemical decomposing process, or the initiatory putrifying state of all higher science and philosophical reflection among the Greeks. On the whole, then, we conclude that Grecian science and philosophy have exercised no influence at all on life, or at least, either a very inadequate, or such as has proved radically baneful and pernicious.
But now, in the very center of man's history--in the transition-point between the ancient and the modern world--science and life were again at unison, as at the beginning. And this was effected by the appearance of a new science in another form. For most assuredly we shall not err in giving this name to a new living and spiritual power, which, totally changing and giving an entirely new direction to the arbitrary views, sentiments, and principles of public and private life, and also to the modes of thinking prevalent in the age and in the world, was strong enough to triumph, not only over heathenism itself, but also over the science and philosophy of its most enlightened nations. Now this new mode of thinking, which came forward in the full certainty of the most undoubting faith and the highest internal illumination, had, so far as it is right and allowable to call it a science, a very different form and scope from all that has previously and usually been so called. For it issued out of the very depths of life, and received from love--a divine love, that is--its first diffusion and establishment. Consequently, it was a thoroughly living science, or, as being perfectly clear and certain in itself, a new scientific life, which, moreover, proceeded from this its first starting-point, was able to penetrate into all the other forms of public life and of the anterior systems of science, and by adopting or remodeling them, give to itself therein a further and more universal development.