Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECTION B GREEK AND GRECO-ROMAN PHILOSOPHY Origin. Greek philosophy first appeared in the Ionic colonies of Asia Minor, and never throughout the course of its development did it wholly lose the marks of its Oriental origin. Whether this influence was as preponderant as Roth and Gladisch contend,1 or as unimportant as Zeller and others maintain,2 it is certain that the philosophy of Greece was characterized from the beginning by a spirit which is peculiarly Hellenic. The Greek looked out upon the world through an atmosphere singularly free from the mist of allegory and myth: the contrast between the philosophy of the East and the first attempts of the Ionian physicists is as striking as the difference between an Indian jungle and the sunny, breeze- swept shores of the Mediterranean. ‘ Greek Religion exercised hardly more than an indirect influence on Greek philosophy. Popular beliefs were so crude as to their speculative content that they could not long retain their hold on the mind of the philosopher. Consequently, such influence as they directly exercised was antagonistic to philosophy. Yet it was the popular beliefs which, by keeping alive among the Greeks an exquisite appreciation of form and an abiding sense of symmetry, did not permit the philosopher to take a partial or an isolated view of things. In this way Greek religion indirectly fostered that imperative desire for a totality of view which, in the best days of Greek speculation, enabledGreek philosophy to attain its most 1mportant results. In one particular instance Greek religion contributed directly to Greek philosophy by handing over to philosophy the doctrine of immortality, ? a doctrine which in every stage of its philosophical development has retained the mark of its theological origin. Plato, for exampl…
