AENESIDEMUS; AGRIPPA; EMPIRICUS.--Others built on experience itself,
on the incertitude of our sensations and observations, on everything that
can cheat us and cause us illusion in order to display how _relative_
and how miserably partial is human knowledge. Such was Aenesidemus, whom
it might be thought Pascal had read, so much does the latter give the
reasons of the former when he is not absorbed in faith, and when he assumes
the position of a sceptic precisely in order to prove the necessity of
taking refuge in faith. Such was Agrippa; such, too, was Sextus Empiricus,
so often critical of science, who demonstrates (as to a slight extent M.
Henri Poincare does in our own day) that all sciences, even those which,
like mathematics and geometry, are proudest of their certainty, rest upon
conventions and intellectual "conveniences."



CHAPTER X

NEOPLATONISM


Reversion to Metaphysics.
Imaginative Metaphysicians after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess.


ALEXANDRINISM.--Amid all this, metaphysics--namely, the effort to
comprehend the universe--appears somewhat at a discount. It enjoyed a
renaissance in the third century of our era among some teachers from
Alexandria (hence the name of the Alexandrine school) who came to lecture
at Rome with great success. Alexandrinism is a "Neoplatonism"--that is, a
renewed Platonism and, as considered by its authors, an augmented one.