Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/387

Rh the school of philosophy as developed by his successors took its name. Of all the philosophers Plato is the greatest man of letters and master of style. His philosophy, though it inspired and still inspires many men of genius or special aptitude, was too purely ideal and critical to have much influence on ordinary people, and his successors—while professing to found themselves on him—reached in time a position of almost complete scepticism, which is never popular with the masses who desire, above all things, from their teachers something clear and definite. Nor did he, like the Sophists, give what was needed for practical life; for he neither professed nor taught the art of rhetoric.

His pupil Aristotle—the next founder of a school—was born at Stageiros, but passed much of his time at Athens, first in his early youth, and later on (after having been for four years tutor to Alexander the Great) during another thirteen years (B.C. 335–322). His followers and successors were called "peripatetics," from the peripatos or covered walk in the Lyceium, where, for a time at any rate, he met his pupils. The prominent feature in the Peripatetic philosophy is the abandonment of the "ideal" theories of Plato as to the origin of knowledge, and the adoption of the "inductive" method—the collection of facts from which knowledge is derived by reason. Aristotle himself was encyclopaedic in his range of knowledge and interest. He wrote treatises on nearly every subject—on ethics, rhetoric, poetry, politics, metaphysics, and many branches of physics. These treatises have formed the basis of modern