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CHAP.  I  THE  PHILOSOPHIC  DIRECTOR  291

the  TheaeMu^^  had  lost  its  keenness.  The  imperious  craving
was  for  some  guide  of  life,  some  medicine  for  the  deeply-felt
maladies  of  the  soul.
The  extinction  of  the  free  civic  life  of  Greece,  the  conquests
of  Macedon,  the  foundation  of  the  world-wide  empire  of  Bome;
had  wrought  a  momentous  moral  change.  In  the  old  city-
state,  rel^on,  morals,  and  political  duty  were  linked  in  a
gracious  unity  and  harmony.  The  citizen  drew  moral  support
and  inspiration  from  ancestral  laws  and  institutions  clothed
with  almost  divine  authority.  Even  Plato  does  not  break
away  from  the  old  trammels,  but  requires  the  elders  of  his
Utopia  as  a  duty,  after  they  have  seen  the  vision  of  Grod,
to  descend  again  to  the  ordinary  tasks  of  government'  But
when  the  corporate  life  which  supplied  such  vivid  interests
and  moral  support  was  wrecked,  the  individual  was  thrown
back  upon  himself.  Morals  were  finally  separated  from
politics.  Henceforth  the  great  problem  of  philosophy  was
how  to  make  character  self-sufficing  and  independent ;  how  to
find  the  beatitude  of  man  in  the  autonomous  will,  fenced
against  all  assaults  of  chance  and  change.^  At  the  same
time,  the  foundation  of  great  monarchies,  Macedonian  or  Soman,
embracing  many  tribes  and  races  and  submerging  old  civic  or
national  barriers,  brought  into  clearer  light  the  idea  of  a  uni-
versal conmionwealth,  and  placed  morals  on  the  broad  founda-
tion of  a  common  human  nature  and  universal  brotherhood.
