Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/397

 FOURTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY 373 mined to make Humanity go its way without cringing to capricious gods and without sacrificing Free-Will. He condensed his gospel into four maxims: "God is not to be feared ; death cannot be felt ; the Good can be won ; all that we dread can be borne and conquered." Two great systems remained, more intellectual and less emotional : the Academy, which, after the death of its founder and Speusippus, turned from paradoxical meta- physics in the direction of a critical and sceptical eclec- ticism ; and the Lyceum or Peripatos, whose organisa- tion of knowledge formed the greatest intellectual feat of the age. Its founder, Aristoteles of Stagiros, in Chal- cidice (384-322 B.C.), stands in character, as well as in date, midway between the Athenian philosopher and the Alexandrian savant. He came to Athens at the age of seventeen, and stayed for twenty years. But he had grown up under the shadow of Macedon, his father having been physician to Amyntas II.; he had no democratic sympathies, and the turmoil of Athenian politics was unmeaning to him. In his first published work, a letter in the style of Isocrates, he declared for the * contemplative life ' as opposed to the practical, and remained true to his principles all his days.^ Plato was his chief philosophical teacher ; but he was an omnivorous lover of knowledge, and spent his energies not only on the history of previous philosophy, on the mathematical researches of Eudoxus and the mysticism of the Pythagoreans, but on such detailed studies as the compilation of the Didascali?e (see p. 249) and the mor- phological structure of gourds. His relations with his master are illustrated by the celebrated sentence in the Ethics about Plato and Truth : ^^BotJi being dear, I a/pn ' irpoTpeirTiKos els (piXoTotpiav,