But as to the greatness of his work, the profundity of his philosophy and the brilliance of his religious idealism, there can be no question.
Even the disciples of Jesus could not grasp the simplicity and profundity of his message; still less could his opponents.
As a whole, the Avesta, for profundity of thought and beauty, stands on a lower level than the Old Testament.
From the lonely life he led, and still more from the extreme profundity of his philosophy and his contempt for mankind in general, he was called the "Dark Philosopher" (6 o-Komewos), or the "Weeping Philosopher," in contrast to Democritus, the "Laughing Philosopher."
His fondness for the allegorical and his manifest carelessness of preparation disappoint as often as his profundity, his devout mysticisms, his practical application attract and satisfy.
This single instance need not, it is true, show a Hellenism of any profundity; still it does show that certain parts of Hellenism had become so essential to the lustre of a court that even an Arsacid could not be without them.
His incommensurable and indescribable masterpiece of mingled humour, wisdom, satire, erudition, indecency, profundity, levity, imagination, realism, reflects the whole age in its mirror of hyperAristophanic farce.
A fifth group, displaying the profundity of their strategic perceptions, discussed the direction the troops would now have to take.
The almost mystical profundity of Hillel's conciousness of God is shown in the words spoken by him on the occasion of a feast in the Temple - words alluding to the throng of people gathered there which he puts into the mouth of God Himself: "If I am here every one is here; if I am not here no one is here" (Sukkah 53a).
The value of these works is impaired somewhat by Baur's habit of making the history of dogma conform to the formulae of Hegel's philosophy, a procedure "which only served to obscure the truth and profundity of his conception of history as a true development of the human mind" (Pfleiderer).
The extraordinary advances made by him in this branch of knowledge were owing to his happy method of applying mathematical analysis to physical problems. As a pure mathematician he was, it is true, surpassed in profundity by more than one among his pupils and contemporaries; and in the wider imaginative grasp of abstract geometrical principles he cannot be compared with Fermat, Descartes or Pascal, to say nothing of Newton or Leibnitz.
