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The Stoic ideal of the World as 'one great City of Gods and Men' has not been surpassed by any ideal based on the Nation. What we have to consider is the general trend of religious thought from, say, the Peripatetics to the Gnostics. It is a fairly clear history.
Then bending down to her again, he added, by way of explanation: "The winged daughter of Night would prove herself negligent if she allowed me to enjoy wholly without drawback the overwhelming happiness of being with you once more." "Nemesis!" remarked Thoas, an aristocratic young hipparch of the guards of the Diadochi, who had studied in Athens and belonged to the Peripatetics there.
The Stoics did not owe much to the Peripatetics. There was too much balance about the master mind of Aristotle for their narrow intensity.
XIX. Why should I say more? Why should I add that the Peripatetics say that these perturbations, which we insist upon it should be extirpated, are not only natural, but were given to men by nature for a good purpose? They usually talk in this manner.
They insisted on effecting here and now that separation between the sheep and the goats, which Christ postponed to the Day of Judgment. Unfortunately, when it came to practice, all were found to be goats, so that the division was a merely formal one. The good man of the Stoics was variously known as 'the sage', or, 'the serious man', the latter name being inherited from the Peripatetics.
You see the London above and the London below: round us the sleepy city, and the stars in the water looking like souls of suicides. I caught a girl with a bad fit on her once. I had to lecture her! It's when we become parsons we find out our cousinship with these poor peripatetics, whose "last philosophy" is a jump across the parapet. The bridge at night is a bath for a public man.
Now, as the Peripatetics say, the first mover in nature moves only and is not moved, and the last moved is moved only but does not move, and between these there is that which moves and is moved by others; so there is the same analogy between those three sorts of persons that make up a company, there is the simple inviter, the simple invited and the invited that invites another.
Until that was done they were to wear the fool's cap. The Peripatetics, on the other hand, recognized an intermediate state between virtue and vice, to which they gave the name of progress and proficience. Yet so entirely had the Stoics, for practical purposes, to accept this lower level, that the word "proficience" has come to be spoken of as though it were of Stoic origin.
After the fall of that religion, the Peripatetics, emerging from their obscurity, prevailed in the controversies of the Oriental sects, and their founder was long afterwards restored by the Mahometans of Spain to the Latin schools. The physics, both of the Academy and the Lycæum, as they are built, not on observation, but on argument, have retarded the progress of real knowledge.
"I might," says Origen, "have recourse to the authority of Aristotle, and the Peripatetics, to make the Pythoness much suspected. I might extract from the writings of Epicurus and his sectators an abundance of things to discredit oracles; and I might shew that the Greeks themselves made no great account of them."
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