I should not have presumed to choose for any lectures of mine such a subject as that which I have tried to treat in this book.  The subject was chosen by the Institution where the lectures were delivered.  Still less should I have presumed to print them of my own accord, knowing how fragmentary and crude they are.  They were printed at the special request of my audience.  Least of all, perhaps, ought I to have presumed to publish them, as I have done, at Cambridge, where any inaccuracy or scioli

Before I begin to lecture upon the Physical and Metaphysical schools of Alexandria, it may be better, perhaps, to define the meaning of these two epithets.  Physical, we shall all agree, means that which belongs to φύσις; natura ; nature, that which φύεται, nascitur , grows, by an organic life, and therefore decays again; which has a beginning, and therefore, I presume, an end.  And Metaphysical means that which we learn to think of after we think of nature; that which is supernatural, in fact,

I said in my first Lecture, that even if royal influence be profitable for the prosecution of physical science, it cannot be profitable for art.  It can only produce a literary age, as it did in the Ptolemaic era; a generation of innumerable court-poets, artificial epigrammatists, artificial idyllists, artificial dramatists and epicists; above all, a generation of critics.  Or rather shall we say, that the dynasty was not the cause of a literary age, but only its correlative?  That when the old

We now approach the period in which Alexandria began to have a philosophy of its own—to be, indeed, the leader of human thought for several centuries. I shall enter on this branch of my subject with some fear and trembling; not only on account of my own ignorance, but on account of the great difficulty of handling it without trenching on certain controversial subjects which are rightly and wisely forbidden here.  For there was not one school of Metaphysic at Alexandria: there were two; which, du

I tried to point out, in my last Lecture, the causes which led to the decay of the Pagan metaphysic of Alexandria.  We have now to consider the fate of the Christian school. You may have remarked that I have said little or nothing about the positive dogmas of Clement, Origen, and their disciples; but have only brought out the especial points of departure between them and the Heathens.  My reason for so doing was twofold: first, I could not have examined them without entering on controversial gro