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have seen above (p. 38) that in the time of Cicero—that is to say, shortly before the Christian era—the works of Aristotle were very little known even to philosophers. The edition of those works by Andronicus was made and published in the last half-century before the birth of Christ. And then—three hundred years after the death of Aristotle—there began silently and imperceptibly the first dawn of that wider reputation of him, which was destined to shine through the whole of Europe for a thousand years with ever-growing and increasing splendour.

During the period of the Roman Empire, the day for original philosophies was gone by. The works of Aristotle, in the form in which they were now presented to the world—being a culmination of ancient thought, and containing a dogmatic exposition of the outlines of every science; being rich in ideas and facts, precise in terms, and yet condensed, and often obscure—offered to the minds of intellectual men, and especially the subtle Greeks of those times, exactly the kind of food and employment which suited them. To study one of these treatises, and comment upon it,