more attached to reality and to pure science.



CHAPTER VI

VARIOUS SCHOOLS


The Development in Various Schools of the General Ideas
of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.


THE SCHOOL OF PLATO; THEOPHRASTUS.--The school of Plato (not
regarding Aristotle as belonging entirely to that school) was continued by
Speusippus, Polemo, Xenocrates, Crates, and Crantor. Owing to a retrograde
movement, widely different from that of Aristotle, it dabbled in the
Pythagorean ideas, with which Plato was acquainted and which he often
appreciated, but not blindly, and to which he never confined himself.

The most brilliant pupil of Aristotle was Theophrastus, naturalist,
botanist, and moralist. His great claim to fame among posterity, which
knows nothing of him but this, is the small volume of _Characters_,
which served as a model for La Bruyere, and before him to the comic poets
of antiquity, and which is full of wit and flavour, and--to make use of a
modern word exactly applicable to this ancient work--"humour."

SCHOOLS OF MEGARA AND OF ELIS.--We may just mention the very
celebrated schools which, owing to lack of texts, are unknown to us--that
of Megara, which was called the Eristic or "wrangling" school, so marked