Let us consider the first of these causes. Aenesidemus, although
not the first of the later Sceptics, was apparently the first to
separate himself from the Academy. He was the founder of a new
movement, the attempt to revive the older Scepticism as taught
by Pyrrho and Timon, and separate it from the dogmatic teachings
of the Stoics which were so greatly affecting the Scepticism of
the New Academy. It was the spirit of his time to seek to
sustain all philosophical teaching by the authority of as many
as possible of the older philosophers, and he could hardly
escape the tendency which his training in the Academy had
unconsciously given him. Therefore we find him trying to prove
that the philosophy of Heraclitus follows from Scepticism. It is
not necessary either to explain the matter, as both Hirzel and
Natorp so ingeniously attempt to do, by claiming that the truth
of contradictory predicates which Aenesidemus accepted from
Heraclitus referred only to phenomena. The history of philosophy
gives us abundant proof of the impossibility of absolute
Scepticism, and Aenesidemus furnishes us with one example of
many of this impossibility, and of the dogmatism that must exist
in connection with all thought. In the case of Aenesidemus, who
evidently gave the best efforts of his life to establish the
Sceptical School, the dogmatism was probably unconscious. That
he remained to the end a Sceptic is shown by the fact that he
was known as such to posterity.
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