The progress of philosophy from Thales to Plato is the most stupendous
triumph of the human intellect. The reason of man soared to the loftiest
flights that it has ever attained. It cast its searching eye into the
most abstruse inquiries which ever tasked the famous minds of the
world. It exhausted all the subjects which dialectical subtlety ever
raised. It originated and carried out the boldest speculations
respecting the nature of the soul and its future existence. It
established important psychological truths and created a method for the
solution of abstruse questions. It went on from point to point, until
all the faculties of the mind were severely analyzed, and all its
operations were subjected to a rigid method. The Romans never added a
single principle to the philosophy which the Greeks elaborated; the
ingenious scholastics of the Middle Ages merely reproduced Greek ideas;
and even the profound and patient Germans have gone round in the same
circles that Plato and Aristotle marked out more than two thousand years
ago. Only the Brahmans of India have equalled them in intellectual
subtilty and acumen. It was Greek philosophy in which noble Roman youths
were educated; and hence, as it was expounded by a Cicero, a Marcus
Aurelius, and an Epictetus, it was as much the inheritance of the Romans
as it was of the Greeks themselves, after Grecian liberties were swept
away and Greek cities became a part of the Roman empire. The Romans
learned what the Greeks created and taught; and philosophy, as well as
art, became identified with the civilization which extended from the
Rhine and the Po to the Nile and the Tigris.

Greek philosophy was one of the distinctive features of ancient
civilization long after the Greeks had ceased to speculate on the laws
of mind or the nature of the soul, on the existence of God or future
rewards and punishments. Although it was purely Grecian in its origin