Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/18

 to adjust themselves with the course of human experience.

From Plato onwards philosophy had been very largely concerned with theories which more or less directly concerned the structure of society: it was perceived that a very large part of man's life, duties, and general welfare, was intimately concerned with his relations to the community in which he lived. But soon after the time of Aristotle the general conditions of the social order were seen to be undergoing a profound modification: great empires with highly organised administrations replaced the self-governing city states of the older period, and social life had to adjust itself to the new conditions. A man who was a citizen of the Roman Empire was a citizen in quite a different sense from that in which one was a citizen of the Athenian Republic. The Stoic philosophy, which is of this later age, already presupposes these new conditions and in course of time the other schools orientated themselves similarly. One of the first results is a tendency to eclecticism and to combination of the tenets of several schools. The new outlook, broader in its horizon, perhaps shallower in other respects, impelled men to take what was an imperialist attitude instead of a local or national one. Precisely similar changes were forced upon the Jewish religion. Hellenistic Judaism, at the beginning of the Christian era, is concerned with the human species and the race of Israel is considered chiefly as a means of bringing illumination to mankind at