of societies with religious laws[1] would not in itself alone, in view of the religious character of all Greek judicial institutions, prove a religious origin of these schools, but the circumstance that Greek science worked out its contents directly from religious ideas, and that certain connections with religious cults present themselves unmistakably in a number of directions,[2] makes it not improbable that the scientific societies sprang originally from religious unions (the Mysteries) and continued in a certain connection with them. But when the scientific life had developed to complete independence, these connections fell away and purely scientific schools were founded as free unions of men who, under the guidance of persons of importance, shared with each other the work of research, exposition, defence, and polemic,[3] and at the same time had an ethical bond in a common ideal of the conduct of life.
With the advent of the larger relations of life in the Hellenistic and Roman period, these unions naturally became loosened, and we frequently meet writers, especially among the Romans, who are active in the field of philosophy in a purely individual way, neither members of a school nor professional teachers. Such were Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Not until the latest period of antiquity were the ties of the schools drawn more closely again, as in Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism.
Among the Romanic and Germanic peoples the course of events has been not unlike that in the ancient world. The science of the Middle Ages also appears in the tram of the Church civilisation, it has its seats in the cloister-schools, and is stimulated toward independent development primarily by questions of religious interest. In it, too, the oppositions of various religious orders, such as the Dominicans and Franciscans, assert themselves for a time, and even the freer scientific associations out of which the universities gradually developed, had originally a religious background and an ecclesiastical stamp.[4] Hence there was always but a slight degree of independence with reference to Church doctrine in this corporate philosophy of the universities, and this held true on into the eighteenth century for the Protestant universities also, in the foundation and development of which ecclesiastical and religious interests had a foremost place.
On the other hand, it is characteristic of the "world-wisdom" or secular philosophy which was gaining its independence at the beginning of the modern period, that those who bring and support it are not at all men of the schools, but men of the world and of life. An escaped monk, a state-chancellor, a cobbler, a nobleman, a proscribed Jew, a learned diplomat, independent men of letters and journalists,—these are the founders of modern philosophy, and in accord with this, their work takes for its outer form not the test-book or the deposit of academical disputations, but the free literary production, the essay.
Not until the second half of the eighteenth century did philosophy again become corporate, and domesticated in the universities. This took place first in Germany, where the most favourable conditions were afforded by the rising independence of the universities, and where a fruitful interchange between teachers and students of the university was beneficial to philosophy also.[5]
- ↑ v. Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, Antigonos von Karystos (Philol. Stud. IV. Berlin, 1881, pp. 263 ff.)
- ↑ The Pythagoreans, as is well known, offer a pre-eminent example of this, but sympathies with the Apollo cultus are plain enough in the Platonic Academy also. Pfleiderer has lately sought to bring the apparently isolated Heraclitus into connection with the Mysteries (E. Pfleiderer, Heraklit von Ephesus Berlin, 1886)
- ↑ Cf. II. Usener, Ueber die Organisation der wissenschafflichen Arbeit im Alterthum (Preuss. Jahrb, Jahrg. LIII, 1884, pp 1 ff), and E. Heitz, Die Philosophenschulen Athens (Deutsche Revue, 1884, pp. 326 ff).
- ↑ Cf . G. Kaufmann, Geschichte der deutschen Universitaten I. pp. 98 ff, (Stuttg. 1888).
- ↑ Schelling has erected the finest monument to the ideal conception of science in the activity of German universities, in his Vorlesungen uber die Methode des akademischen Studiums (2. and 3, Vorlesung. Ges. Werke, I. Abth,, Vol. 5, pp. 223 ff.).
