philosophical search, are those which are equally true for every man,
which will equally avail every man, which he must proclaim, as far as he
can, to every man, from the proudest sage to the meanest outcast, he
enters, I believe, into a lie, and helps forward the dissolution of that
society of which he is a member. I care little whether what he holds be
true or not. If it be true, he has made it a lie by appropriating it
proudly and selfishly to himself, and by excluding others from it. He
has darkened his own power of vision by that act of self-appropriation,
so that even if he sees a truth, he can only see it refractedly,
discoloured by the medium of his own private likes and dislikes, and
fulfils that great and truly philosophic law, that he who loveth not his
brother is in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth. And so it
befell those old Greek schools. It is out of our path to follow them to
Italy, where sturdy old Roman patriots cursed them, and with good
reason, as corrupting the morals of the young. Our business is with
Alexandria; and there, certainly, they did nothing for the elevation of
humanity. What culture they may have given, probably helped to make the
Alexandrians, what Caesar calls them, the most ingenious of all nations:
but righteous or valiant men it did not make them. When, after the
three great reigns of Soter, Philadelphus, and Euergetes, the race of
the Ptolemies began to wear itself out, Alexandria fell morally, as its
sovereigns fell; and during a miserable and shameful decline of a
hundred and eighty years, sophists wrangled, pedants fought over accents
and readings with the true odium gammaticum, and kings plunged deeper
and deeper into the abysses of luxury and incest, laziness and cruelty,
till the flood came, and swept them all away. Cleopatra, the Helen of
Egypt, betrayed her country to the Roman; and thenceforth the
Alexandrians became slaves in all but name.

And now that Alexandria has become a tributary province, is it to share