Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/22

 was never of more than secondary importance.

In the course of what we may term the Alexandrian period the Platonic school had steadily taken the first place. It was indeed considerably changed from the ancient Academic standards, chiefly by the introduction of semi-mystical elements which were attributed to Pythagoras, and later by fusion with the neo-Aristotelian school. The Pythagorean elements probably can be traced ultimately to an Indian source, at least in such instances as the doctrine of the unreality of matter and phenomena which appears in Indian philosophy as māyā, and the re-incarnation of souls which is avatar. The tendency of native Greek thought, as seen in Democritus and other genuinely Greek thinkers, was distinctly materialistic, but Plato apparently incorporates some alien matter, probably Indian, perhaps some Egyptian ideas as well. We know there was a transmission of oriental thought influencing Hellenism, but very little is known of the details. Certainly Plotinus and the neo-Platonists were eclectic thinkers and drew freely from oriental sources, some disguised as Pythagorean, by a long sojourn in Greek lands.

In the 3rd century A.D. we find the beginnings of what is known as neo-Platonism. A very typical passage in Gibbon's Decline and Fall (ch. xiii) refers to the neo-Platonists as "men of profound thought and intense application; but, by mistaking the true object of philosophy, their labours contributed much less to improve than to corrupt the human