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man, who was made not for the school but wholly for the world : but then let him be transferred from the history of philosophy to that of the general progress of society at Athens, if he can claim any place there. The latter of these expedients is not very far removed from that which has been adopted by Krug^[1]! For as in his syste^n Socrates stands at the end of the one period, and not at the beginning of the next, he appears not as the germ of a new age, but as a product and aftergrowth of an earlier one ; he sinks, as an insulated phenomenon, into the same rank with the sophists, and other late fruits of the period, and loses a great part of his philosophical importance. Only it is but a half measure that this author adopts, when he begins his new period with the immediate disciples of Socrates as such ; for at its head he places the genuine Socratics, as they are commonly called, and above all Xenophon, men of whom he himself says, that their only merit was that of having propa- gated and diffused Socratic doctrines, while the doctrines them- selves do not appear to him worth making the beginning of a new period. — Ast had previously arrived at the same result by a road in some respects opposite.^[2] With him Plato is the full bloom of that which he terms the Athenian form of phi- losophy, and as no plant begins with its bloom, he feels himself constrained to place Socrates at the head of this philosophy, but yet not strictly as a philosopher. He says, that the opera- tion of philosophy in Socrates was confined to the exercise of qualities that may belong to any virtuous man, that is to say, it was properly no philosophy at all ; and makes the essence of his character to consist in enthusiasm and irony. Now he feels that he cannot place a man endowed with no other qualities than these at the head of a new period, and therefore he ranges the sophists by his side, not indeed without some inconsistency^ for he himself sees in them the perverse tendency which was to be counteracted by the spirit of the new age ; but yet he prefers this to recognizing the germ of a new gradation in Socrates alone, whose highest philosophical worth he makes to consist in his martyrdom, which however cannot by any means be deemed of equal moment in the sphere of science, as in that of religion or politics. Though in form this course of Ast's is opposite to Krug's, in substance it is the same: its result is likewise to

1. Gesch. der Philos. alter Zeit.
2. Grundriss ciner Gesch. der Philos.