History of ancient philosophy / by Dr. W. Windelband ; authorized translation by Herbert Ernest Cushman.

  • Wilhelm Windelband
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: History of ancient philosophy / by Dr. W. Windelband ; authorized translation by Herbert Ernest Cushman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Hellenism. This is partly due to the dialectic architectonic, and partly to the need of giving to every form of i)oly- theism its place in the hierarchy of mythological formulte into which Froclus had translated the Greek conceptual world. The physics and ethics of Froclus show little individuality. He stood far off from the first, and adduced only this new thought that the material is not derived from the ps3’chical, but directly from the dveLpov of the first intelligible triad, and that it is fancifully formed by the lower world-soul, the <f>va-ii;. His attempt in ethics is to lower the metaphysical dignity of the human soul and to make it appear thereby the more needy of the help of positive religious exercise and of divine and dajmonic grace. Froclus thinks, therefore, that the characteristic of the soul is its freedom, and therefore its guilt. The steps of its redemption are here also “political” virtue, scientific knowl- edge, divine illumination, faith, and finally ecstasy (jxavLa) for which a peculiar power of the soul is presupposed. The two great streams of theosophy which hurst forth from Alexandria, on the one hand, into Christian theology, on the other into neo-Platonism, were not long separate from each other. Although neo-Platonism was destroyed by scholasticism, it sent its thought through a thousand channels into the orthodox as well as the heterodox de- velopment of Christian thought after Origen. Both systems of thought found their perfect reconciliation in an original thinker, who was the philosopher of Christianity, — Augus- tine. The doctrine of Augustine, however, was much more than a receptacle for the confluent streams of Hellenic- Boman philosophy. It was rather the living fountain of the thought of the future. His was an initiating rather than a consummating work, and therefore he does not belong to the history of ancient philosophy.