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Excerpt from Stoicism Of discovery, and could make therefore little progress in their course. There was a sublime audacity in the way in which they grappled with great questions, constructed systems of the universe, and explained as they thought the laws of nature, before they had determined the Simplest rules of logic, or had any more appliances than the experience of the untrained senses. They were like the early painters who aspired often to portray the imagery of heaven, or to deal with lurid scenes of future judgment, before they had learnt even the rudiments of perspective or anatomy. They gave birth therefore to little more than guess work, lighted up here and there with flashes of strange insight, that may remind us of the discoveries of later ages; but nothing came of all their subtle thought, for they had no tests by which to disentangle truth from error. There was a want of balance and pro portion in their hasty systems which seemed to oscillate from pole to pole. At one time they had only eyes to see the moods and qualities of outward nature, and language seemed to them to bear no higher meaning, and mind and its processes to be but subtler forms of matter. At another time they were so much impressed by the eeting character of all the knowledge gained through sense, that thought alone seemed sure and solid, while all experience else was treacherous and unreal. There was no practical value in their speculations while they rested on this level. The love of wisdom, which the name philosophy implied, was strong and earnest; it was a natural yearning to explain the mysteries of the world in. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy