THREE:An interesting example of the process on which I have just touched is offered by the reappearance and further elaboration of some most important Greek ideas in modern philosophy. In the concluding chapter of this work I have attempted to indicate the chief lines along which such a transmission may be traced. The subject is one which has hitherto been unduly neglected. No critic would be justified in describing the speculative movement of the nineteenth century without constant reference to the metaphysicians andxviii moralists of the two preceding centuries. Yet the dependence of those thinkers on the schools of antiquity is hardly less intimate than our dependence on Spinoza and Hume. Nevertheless, in no work that I am acquainted with has this circumstance been used to elucidate the course pursued by modern thought; indeed, I may say that the persistence of Hellenic ideas down to the most recent times has not been fully recognised by any scholar except Prof. Teichmüller, who has particularly devoted his attention to the history of conceptions as distinguished from the history of systems.We have already repeatedly alluded to the only man of genius whom Epicureanism ever counted among its disciples. It is time that we should determine with more precision the actual relation in which he stood to the master whom, with a touching survival of religious sentiment, he revered as a saviour and a god.
