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CHAPTER XV
THE STOICS
Zeno of Cyprus, the founder of the Stoic School, a Greek of Phoenician descent, was born about 342 B.C., and died in 270. He is said to have followed philosophy; because he lost all his property in a ship-wreck--a motive characteristic of the age. He came to Athens, and learned philosophy under Crates the Cynic, Stilpo the Megaric, and Polemo the Academic. About 300 B.C. he founded his school at the Stoa Poecile (many-coloured portico) whence the name Stoic. He died by his own hand. He was followed by Cleanthes, and then by Chrysippus, as leaders of the school. Chrysippus was a man of immense productivity and laborious scholarship. He composed over seven hundred books, but all are lost. Though not the founder, he was the chief pillar of Stoicism. The school attracted many adherents, and flourished for many centuries, not only in Greece, but later in Rome, where the most thoughtful writers, such as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus, counted themselves among its followers.
We know little for certain as to what share particular Stoics, Zeno, Cleanthes, or Chrysippus, had in the formation of the doctrines of the school. But after Chrysippus the main lines of the doctrine were complete.{345}We shall deal, therefore, with Stoicism as a whole, and not with the special teaching of particular Stoics. The system is divided into three parts, Logic, Physics, and Ethics, of which the first two are entirely subservient to the last. Stoicism is essentially a system of ethics which, however, is guided by a logic as theory of method, and rests upon physics as foundation.
Logic.
We may pass over the formal logic of the Stoics, which is, in all essentials, the logic of Aristotle. To this, however, they added a theory, peculiar to themselves, of the origin of knowledge and the criterion of truth. All knowledge, they said, enters the mind through the senses. The mind is atabula rasa, upon which sense-impressions are inscribed. It may have a certain activity of its own, but this activity is confined exclusively to materials supplied by the physical organs of sense. This theory stands, of course, in sheer opposition to the idealism of Plato, for whom the mind alone was the source of knowledge, the senses being the sources of all illusion and error. The Stoics denied the metaphysical reality of concepts. Concepts are merely ideas in the mind, abstracted from particulars, and have no reality outside consciousness.
Since all knowledge is a knowledge of sense-objects, truth is simply the correspondence of our impressions to things. How are we to know whether our ideas are correct copies of things? How distinguish between reality and imagination, dreams, or illusions? What is the criterion of truth? It cannot lie in concepts, since these are of our own making. Nothing is true save{346}sense-impressions, and therefore the criterion of truth must lie in sensation itself. It cannot be in thought, but must be in feeling. Real objects, said the Stoics, produce in us an intense feeling, or conviction, of their reality. The strength and vividness of the image distinguish these real perceptions from a dream or fancy. Hence the sole criterion of truth is this striking conviction, whereby the real forces itself upon our consciousness, and will not be denied. The relapse into complete subjectivity will here be noted. There is no universally grounded criterion of truth. It is based, not on reason, but on feeling. All depends on the subjective convictions of the individual.
Physics.
The fundamental proposition of the Stoic physics is that "nothing incorporeal exists." This materialism coheres with the sensationalism of their doctrine of knowledge. Plato placed knowledge in thought, and reality, therefore, in the Idea. The Stoics, however, place knowledge in physical sensation, and reality, therefore, in what is known by the senses, matter. All things, they said, even the soul, even God himself, are material and nothing more than material. This belief they based upon two main considerations. Firstly, the unity of the world demands it. The world is one, and must issue from one principle. We must have a monism. The idealism of Plato and Aristotle had resolved itself into a futile struggle against the dualism of matter and thought. Since the gulf cannot be bridged from the side of the Idea, we must take our stand on matter, and reduce mind to it. Secondly, body and soul, God and{347}the world, are pairs which act and react upon one another. The body, for example, produces thoughts (sense-impressions) in the soul, the soul produces movements in the body. This would be impossible if both were not of the same substance. The corporeal cannot act on the incorporeal, nor the incorporeal on the corporeal. There is no point of contact. Hence all must be equally corporeal.
All things being material, what is the original kind of matter, or stuff, out of which the world is made? The Stoics turned to Heracleitus for an answer. Fire is the primordial kind of being, and all things are composed of fire. With this materialism the Stoics combined pantheism. The primal fire is God. God is related to the world exactly as the soul to the body. The human soul is likewise fire, and comes from the divine fire. It permeates and penetrates the entire body, and, in order that its interpenetration might be regarded as complete, the Stoics denied the impenetrability of matter. Just as the soul-fire permeates the whole body, so God, the primal fire, pervades the entire world. He is the soul of the world. The world is His body.
But in spite of this materialism, the Stoics averred that God is absolute reason. This is not a return to idealism. It does not imply the incorporeality of God. For reason, like all else, is material. It means simply that the divine fire is a rational element. Since God is reason, it follows that the world is governed by reason, and this means two things. It means, firstly, that there is purpose in the world, and therefore, order, harmony, beauty, and design. Secondly, since reason is law as opposed to the lawless, it means that the universe is{348}subject to the absolute sway of law, is governed by the rigorous necessity of cause and effect.
Hence the individual is not free. There can be no true freedom of the will in a world governed by necessity. We may, without harm, say that we choose to do this or that, that our acts are voluntary. But such phrases merely mean that we assent to what we do. What we do is none the less governed by causes, and therefore by necessity.
The world-process is circular. God changes the fiery substance of himself first into air, then water, then earth. So the world arises. But it will be ended by a conflagration in which all things will return into the primal fire. Thereafter, at a pre-ordained time, God will again transmute himself into a world. It follows from the law of necessity that the course taken by this second, and every subsequent, world, will be identical in every way with the course taken by the first world. The process goes on for ever, and nothing new ever happens. The history of each successive world is the same as that of all the others down to the minutest details.
The human soul is part of the divine fire, and proceeds into man from God. Hence it is a rational soul, and this is a point of cardinal importance in connexion with the Stoic ethics. But the soul of each individual does not come direct from God. The divine fire was breathed into the first man, and thereafter passes from parent to child in the act of procreation. After death, all souls, according to some, but only the souls of the good, according to others, continue in individual existence until the general conflagration in which they, and all else, return to God.
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Ethics.
The Stoic ethical teaching is based upon two principles already developed in their physics; first, that the universe is governed by absolute law, which admits of no exceptions; and second, that the essential nature of man is reason. Both are summed up in the famous Stoic maxim, "Live according to nature." For this maxim has two aspects. It means, in the first place, that men should conform themselves to nature in the wider sense, that is, to the laws of the universe, and secondly, that they should conform their actions to nature in the narrower sense, to their own essential nature, reason. These two expressions mean, for the Stoics, the same thing. For the universe is governed not only by law, but by the law of reason, and man in following his own rational nature isipso factoconforming himself to the laws of the larger world. In a sense, of course, there is no possibility of man's disobeying the laws of nature, for he, like all else in the world, acts of necessity. And it might be asked, what is the use of exhorting a man to obey the laws of the universe, when, as part of the great mechanism of the world, he cannot by any possibility do anything else? It is not to be supposed that a genuine solution of this difficulty is to be found in Stoic philosophy. They urged, however, that, though man will in any case do as the necessity of the world compels him, it is given to him alone, not merely to obey the law, but to assent to his own obedience, to follow the law consciously and deliberately, as only a rational being can.
Virtue, then, is the life according to reason. Morality is simply rational action. It is the universal reason which is to govern our lives, not the caprice and self-will{350}of the individual. The wise man consciously subordinates his life to the life of the whole universe, and recognises himself as merely a cog in the great machine. Now the definition of morality as the life according to reason is not a principle peculiar to the Stoics. Both Plato and Aristotle taught the same. In fact, as we have already seen, to found morality upon reason, and not upon the particular foibles, feelings, or intuitions, of the individual self, is the basis of every genuine ethic. But what was peculiar to the Stoics was the narrow and one-sided interpretation which they gave to this principle. Aristotle had taught that the essential nature of man is reason, and that morality consists in following this, his essential nature. But he recognized that the passions and appetites have their place in the human organism. He did not demand their suppression, but merely their control by reason. But the Stoics looked upon the passions as essentially irrational, and demanded their complete extirpation. They envisaged life as a battle against the passions, in which the latter had to be completely annihilated. Hence their ethical views end in a rigorous and unbalanced asceticism.
Aristotle, in his broad and moderate way, though he believed virtue alone to possess intrinsic value, yet allowed to external goods and circumstances a place in the scheme of life. The Stoics asserted that virtue alone is good, vice alone evil, and that all else is absolutely indifferent. Poverty, sickness, pain, and death, are not evils. Riches, health, pleasure, and life, are not goods. A man may commit suicide, for in destroying his life he destroys nothing of value. Above all, pleasure is not a good. One ought not to seek pleasure. Virtue is{351}the only happiness. And man must be virtuous, not for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of duty. And since virtue alone is good, vice alone evil, there followed the further paradox that all virtues are equally good, and all vices equally evil. There are no degrees.
Virtue is founded upon reason, and so upon knowledge. Hence the importance of science, physics, logic, which are valued not for themselves, but because they are the foundations of morality. The prime virtue, and the root of all other virtues, is therefore wisdom. The wise man is synonymous with the good man. From the root-virtue, wisdom, spring the four cardinal virtues, insight, bravery, self-control, justice. But since all virtues have one root, he who possesses wisdom possesses all virtue, he who lacks it lacks all. A man is either wholly virtuous, or wholly vicious. The world is divided into wise men and fools, the former perfectly good, the latter absolutely evil. There is nothing between the two. There is no such thing as a gradual transition from one to the other. Conversion must be instantaneous. The wise man is perfect, has all happiness, freedom, riches, beauty. He alone is the perfect king, statesman, poet, prophet, orator, critic, physician. The fool has all vice, all misery, all ugliness, all poverty. And every man is one or the other. Asked where such a wise man was to be found, the Stoics pointed doubtfully at Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic. The number of the wise, they thought, is small, and is continually growing smaller. The world, which they painted in the blackest colours as a sea of vice and misery, grows steadily worse.
In all this we easily recognize the features of a resuscitated Cynicism. But the Stoics modified and softened{352}the harsh outlines of Cynicism, and rounded off its angles. To do this meant inconsistency. It meant that they first laid down harsh principles, and then proceeded to tone them down, to explain them away, to admit exceptions. Such inconsistency the Stoics accepted with their habitual cheerfulness. This process of toning down their first harsh utterances took place mainly in three ways. In the first place, they modified their principle of the complete extirpation of the passions. Since this is impossible, and, if possible, could only lead to immovable inactivity, they admitted that the wise man might exhibit certain mild and rational emotions, and that the roots of the passions might be found in him, though he never allowed them to grow. In the second place, they modified their principle that all else, save virtue and vice, is indifferent. Such a view is unreal, and out of accord with life. Hence the Stoics, with a masterly disregard of consistency, stuck to the principle, and yet declared that among things indifferent some are preferable to others. If the wise man has the choice between health and sickness, he will choose the former. Indifferent things were divided into three classes, those to be preferred, those to be avoided, and those which are absolutely indifferent. In the third place, the Stoics toned down the principle that men are either wholly good, or wholly evil. The famous heroes and statesmen of history, though fools, are yet polluted with the common vices of mankind less than others. Moreover, what were the Stoics to say about themselves? Were they wise men or fools? They hesitated to claim perfection, to put themselves on a level with Socrates and Diogenes. Yet they could not bring themselves to admit that there was{353}no difference between themselves and the common herd. They were "proficients," and, if not absolutely wise, approximated to wisdom.
If the Stoics were thus merely less consistent Cynics, and originated nothing in the doctrines of physics and ethics so far considered, yet of one idea at least they can claim to be the inventors. This was the idea of cosmopolitanism. This they deduced from two grounds. Firstly, the universe is one, proceeds from one God, is ordered by one law, and forms one system. Secondly, however much men may differ in unessentials, they share their essential nature, their reason, in common. Hence all men are of one stock, as rational beings, and should form one State. The division of mankind into warring States is irrational and absurd. The wise man is not a citizen of this or that State. He is a citizen of the world.
This is, however, only an application of principles already asserted. The Stoics produced no essentially new thought, in physics, or in ethics. Their entire stock of ideas is but a new combination of ideas already developed by their predecessors. They were narrow, extreme, over-rigorous, and one-sided. Their truths are all half-truths. And they regarded philosophy too subjectively. What alone interested them was the question, how am I to live? Yet in spite of these defects, there is undoubtedly something grand and noble about their zeal for duty, their exaltation above all that is petty and paltry, their uncompromising contempt for all lower ends. Their merit, says Schwegler, was that "in an age of ruin they held fast by the moral idea."
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CHAPTER XVI
THE EPICUREANS
Epicurus was born at Samos in 342 B.C. He founded his school a year or two before Zeno founded the Stoa, so that the two schools from the first ran parallel in time. The school of Epicurus lasted over six centuries. Epicurus early became acquainted with the atomism of Democritus, but his learning in earlier systems of philosophy does not appear to have been extensive. He was a man of estimable life and character. He founded his school in 306 B.C. The Epicurean philosophy was both founded and completed by him. No subsequent Epicurean to any appreciable extent added to or altered the doctrines laid down by the founder.
The Epicurean system is even more purely practical in tendency than the Stoic. In spite of the fact that Stoicism subordinates logic and physics to ethics, yet the diligence and care which the Stoics bestowed upon such doctrines as those of the criterion of truth, the nature of the world, the soul, and so on, afford evidence of a genuine, if subordinate, interest in these subjects. Epicurus likewise divided his system into logic (which he called canonic), physics, and ethics, yet the two former branches of thought are pursued with an obvious carelessness and absence of interest. It is evident that learned{355}discussions bored Epicurus. His system is amiable and shallow. Knowledge for its own sake is not desired. Mathematics, he said, are useless, because they have no connexion with life. The logic, or canonic, we may pass over completely, as possessing no elements of interest, and come at once to the physics.
Physics.
Physics interests Epicurus only from one point of view--its power to banish superstitious fear from the minds of men. All supernatural religion, he thought, operates for the most part upon mankind by means of fear. Men are afraid of the gods, afraid of retribution, afraid of death because of the stories of what comes after death. This incessant fear and anxiety is one of the chief causes of the unhappiness of men. Destroy it, and we have at least got rid of the prime hindrance to human happiness. We can only do this by means of a suitable doctrine of physics. What is necessary is to be able to regard the world as a piece of mechanism, governed solely by natural causes, without any interference by supernatural beings, in which man is free to find his happiness how and when he will, without being frightened by the bogeys of popular religion. For though the world is ruled mechanically, man, thought Epicurus in opposition to the Stoics, possesses free will, and the problem of philosophy is to ascertain how he can best use this gift in a world otherwise mechanically governed. What he required, therefore, was a purely mechanical philosophy. To invent such a philosophy for himself was a task not suited to his indolence, and for which he could not pretend to possess the necessary{356}qualifications. Therefore he searched the past, and soon found what he wanted in the atomism of Democritus. This, as an entirely mechanical philosophy, perfectly suited his ends, and the pragmatic spirit in which he chose his beliefs, not on any abstract grounds of their objective truth, but on the basis of his subjective needs and personal wishes, will be noted. It is a sign of the times. When truth comes to be regarded as something that men may construct in accordance with their real or imagined needs, and not in accordance with any objective standard, we are well advanced upon the downward path of decay. Epicurus, therefore, adopted the atomism of Democritusen bloc, or with trifling modifications. All things are composed of atoms and the void. Atoms differ only in shape and weight, not in quality. They fall eternally through the void. By virtue of free will, they deviate infinitesimally from the perpendicular in their fall, and so clash against one another. This, of course, is an invention of Epicurus, and formed no part of the doctrine of Democritus. It might be expected of Epicurus that his modifications would not be improvements. In the present case, the attribution of free will to the atoms adversely affects the logical consistency of the mechanical theory. From the collision of atoms arises a whirling movement out of which the world emerges. Not only the world, but all individual phenomena, are to be explained mechanically. Teleology is rigorously excluded. In any particular case, however, Epicurus is not interested to know what particular causes determine a phenomenon. It is enough for him to be sure that it is wholly determined by mechanical causes, and that supernatural agencies are excluded.
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The soul being composed of atoms which are scattered at death, a future life is not to be thought of. But this is to be regarded as the greatest blessing. It frees us from the fear of death, and the fear of a hereafter. Death is not an evil. For if death is, we are not; if we are, death is not. When death comes we shall not feel it, for is it not the end of all feeling and consciousness? And there is no reason to fear now what we know that we shall not feel when it comes.
Having thus disposed of the fear of retribution in a future life, Epicurus proceeds to dispose of the fear of the interference of the gods in this life. One might have expected that Epicurus would for this purpose have embraced atheism. But he does not deny the existence of the gods. On the contrary, he believed that there are innumerable gods. They have the form of men, because that is the most beautiful of all forms. They have distinctions in sex. They eat, drink, and talk Greek. Their bodies are composed of a substance like light. But though Epicurus allows them to exist, he is careful to disarm them, and to rob them of their fears. They live in the interstellar spaces, an immortal, calm, and blessed existence. They do not intervene in the affairs of the world, because they are perfectly happy. Why should they burden themselves with the control of that which nowise concerns them? Theirs is the beatitude of a wholly untroubled joy.
"Immortal are they, clothed with powers,Not to be comforted at all,Lords over all the fruitless hours,Too great to appease, too high to appal,Too far to call."[Footnote 17]
[Footnote 17: A. C. Swinburne'sFelise.]
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Man, therefore, freed from the fear of death and the fear of the gods, has no duty save to live as happily as he can during his brief space upon earth. We can quit the realm of physics with a light heart, and turn to what alone truly matters, ethics, the consideration of how man ought to conduct his life.
Ethics.
If the Stoics were the intellectual successors of the Cynics, the Epicureans bear the same relation to the Cyrenaics. Like Aristippus, they founded morality upon pleasure, but they differ because they developed a purer and nobler conception of pleasure than the Cyrenaics had known. Pleasure alone is an end in itself. It is the only good. Pain is the only evil. Morality, therefore, is an activity which yields pleasure. Virtue has no value on its own account, but derives its value from the pleasure which accompanies it.
This is the only foundation which Epicurus could find, or desired to find, for moral activity. This is his only ethical principle. The rest of the Epicurean ethics consists in the interpretation of the idea of pleasure. And, firstly, by pleasure Epicurus did not mean, as the Cyrenaics did, merely the pleasure of the moment, whether physical or mental. He meant the pleasure that endures throughout a lifetime, a happy life. Hence we are not to allow ourselves to be enslaved by any particular pleasure or desire. We must master our appetites. We must often forego a pleasure if it leads in the end to greater pain. We must be ready to undergo pain for the sake of a greater pleasure to come.
And it was just for this reason, secondly, that the{359}Epicureans regarded spiritual and mental pleasures as far more important than those of the body. For the body feels pleasure and pain only while they last. The body has in itself neither memory nor fore-knowledge. It is the mind which remembers and foresees. And by far the most potent pleasures and pains are those of remembrance and anticipation. A physical pleasure is a pleasure to the body only now. But the anticipation of a future pain is mental anxiety, the remembrance of a past joy is a present delight. Hence what is to be aimed at above all is a calm untroubled mind, for the pleasures of the body are ephemeral, those of the spirit enduring. The Epicureans, like the Stoics, preached the necessity of superiority to bodily pains and external circumstances. So a man must not depend for his happiness upon externals; he must have his blessedness in his own self. The wise man can be happy even in bodily torment, for in the inner tranquillity of his soul he possesses a happiness which far outweighs any bodily pain. Yet innocent pleasures of sense are neither forbidden, nor to be despised. The wise man will enjoy whatever he can without harm. Of all mental pleasures the Epicureans laid, perhaps, most stress upon friendship. The school was not merely a collection of fellow-philosophers, but above all a society of friends.
Thirdly, the Epicurean ideal of pleasure tended rather towards a negative than a positive conception of it. It was not the state of enjoyment that they aimed at, much less the excitement of the feelings. Not the feverish pleasures of the world constituted their ideal. They aimed rather at a negative absence of pain, at tranquillity, quiet calm, repose of spirit, undisturbed by fears and{360}anxieties. As so often with men whose ideal is pleasure, their view of the world was tinged with a gentle and even luxurious pessimism. Positive happiness is beyond the reach of mortals. All that man can hope for is to avoid pain, and to live in quiet contentment.
Fourthly, pleasure does not consist in the multiplication of needs and their subsequent satisfaction. The multiplication of wants only renders it more difficult to satisfy them. It complicates life without adding to happiness. We should have as few needs as possible. Epicurus himself lived a simple life, and advised his followers to do the same. The wise man, he said, living on bread and water, could vie with Zeus himself in happiness. Simplicity, cheerfulness, moderation, temperance, are the best means to happiness. The majority of human wants, and the example of the thirst for fame is quoted, are entirely unnecessary and useless.
Lastly, the Epicurean ideal, though containing no possibility of an exalted nobility, was yet by no means entirely selfish. A kindly, benevolent temper appeared in these men. It is pleasanter, they said, to do a kindness than to receive one. There is little of the stern stuff of heroes, but there is much that is gentle and lovable, in the amiable moralizings of these butterfly-philosophers.
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CHAPTER XVII
THE SCEPTICS
Scepticism is a semi-technical term in philosophy, and means the doctrine which doubts or denies the possibility of knowledge. It is thus destructive of philosophy, since philosophy purports to be a form of knowledge. Scepticism appears and reappears at intervals in the history of thought. We have already met with it among the Sophists. When Gorgias said that, if anything exists, it cannot be known, this was a direct expression of the sceptical spirit. And the Protagorean "Man is the measure of all things" amounts to the same thing, for it implies that man can only know things as they appear to him, and not as they are in themselves. In modern times the most noted sceptic was David Hume, who attempted to show that the most fundamental categories of thought, such as substance and causality, are illusory, and thereby to undermine the fabric of knowledge. Subjectivism usually ends in scepticism. For knowledge is the relation of subject and object, and to lay exclusive emphasis upon one of its terms, the subject, ignoring the object, leads to the denial of the reality of everything except that which appears to the subject. This was so with the Sophists. And now we have the reappearance of a similar{362}phenomenon. The Sceptics, of whom we are about to treat, made their appearance at about the same time as the Stoics and Epicureans. The subjective tendencies of these latter schools find their logical conclusion in the Sceptics. Scepticism makes its appearance usually, but not always, when the spiritual forces of a race are in decay. When its spiritual and intellectual impulses are spent, the spirit flags, grows weary, loses confidence, begins to doubt its power of finding truth; and the despair of truth is scepticism.
Pyrrho.
The first to introduce a thorough-going scepticism among the Greeks was Pyrrho. He was born about 360 B.C., and was originally a painter. He took part in the Indian expedition of Alexander the Great. He left no writings, and we owe our knowledge of his thoughts chiefly to his disciple Timon of Phlius. His philosophy, in common with all post-Aristotelian systems, is purely practical in its outlook. Scepticism, the denial of knowledge, is not posited on account of its speculative interest, but only because Pyrrho sees in it the road to happiness, and the escape from the calamities of life.
The proper course of the sage, said Pyrrho, is to ask himself three questions. Firstly, he must ask what things are and how they are constituted; secondly, how we are related to these things; thirdly, what ought to be our attitude towards them. As to what things are, we can only answer that we know nothing. We only know how things appear to us, but of their inner substance we are ignorant. The same thing appears differently to different people, and therefore it is{363}impossible to know which opinion is right. The diversity of opinion among the wise, as well as among the vulgar, proves this. To every assertion the contradictory assertion can be opposed with equally good grounds, and whatever my opinion, the contrary opinion is believed by somebody else who is quite as clever and competent to judge as I am. Opinion we may have, but certainty and knowledge are impossible. Hence our attitude to things (the third question), ought to be complete suspense of judgment. We can be certain of nothing, not even of the most trivial assertions. Therefore we ought never to make any positive statements on any subject. And the Pyrrhonists were careful to import an element of doubt even into the most trifling assertions which they might make in the course of their daily life. They did not say, "it is so," but "it seems so," or "it appears so to me." Every observation would be prefixed with a "perhaps," or "it may be."
This absence of certainty applies as much to practical as to theoretical matters. Nothing is in itself true or false. It only appears so. In the same way, nothing is in itself good or evil. It is only opinion, custom, law, which makes it so. When the sage realizes this, he will cease to prefer one course of action to another, and the result will be apathy,"ataraxia."All action is the result of preference, and preference is the belief that one thing is better than another. If I go to the north, it is because, for one reason or another, I believe that it is better than going to the south. Suppress this belief, learn that the one is not in reality better than the other, but only appears so, and one would go in no direction at all. Complete suppression of opinion would mean complete{364}suppression of action, and it was at this that Pyrrho aimed. To have no opinions was the sceptical maxim, because in practice it meant apathy, total quietism. All action is founded on belief, and all belief is delusion, hence the absence of all activity is the ideal of the sage. In this apathy he will renounce all desires, for desire is the opinion that one thing is better than another. He will live in complete repose, in undisturbed tranquillity of soul, free from all delusions. Unhappiness is the result of not attaining what one desires, or of losing it when attained. The wise man, being free from desires, is free from unhappiness. He knows that, though men struggle and fight for what they desire, vainly supposing some things better than others, such activity is but a futile struggle about nothing, for all things are equally indifferent, and nothing matters. Between health and sickness, life and death, difference there is none. Yet in so far as the sage is compelled to act, he will follow probability, opinion, custom, and law, but without any belief in the essential validity or truth of these criteria.
The New Academy.
The scepticism founded by Pyrrho soon became extinct, but an essentially similar doctrine began to be taught in the school of Plato. After the death of Plato, the Academy continued, under various leaders, to follow in the path marked out by the founder. But, under the leadership of Arcesilaus, scepticism was introduced into the school, and from that time, therefore, it is usually known as the New Academy, for though its historical continuity as a school was not broken, its essential character underwent change. What especially{365}characterized the New Academy was its fierce opposition to the Stoics, whom its members attacked as the chief dogmatists of the time. Dogmatism, for us, usually means making assertions without proper grounds. But since scepticism regards all assertions as equally ill-grounded, the holding of any positive opinion whatever is by it regarded as dogmatism. The Stoics were the most powerful, influential, and forceful of all those who at that time held any positive philosophical opinions. Hence they were singled out for attack by the New Academy as the greatest of dogmatists. Arcesilaus attacked especially their doctrine of the criterion of truth. The striking conviction which, according to the Stoics, accompanies truth, equally accompanies error. There is no criterion of truth, either in sense or in reason. "I am certain of nothing," said Arcesilaus; "I am not even certain that I am certain of nothing."
But the Academics did not draw from their scepticism, as Pyrrho had done, the full logical conclusion as regards action. Men, they thought, must act. And, although certainty and knowledge are impossible, probability is a sufficient guide for action.
Carneades is usually considered the greatest of the Academic Sceptics. Yet he added nothing essentially new to their conclusions. He appears, however, to have been a man of singularly acute and powerful mind, whose destructive criticism acted like a battering-ram not only upon Stoicism, but upon all established philosophies. As examples of his thoughts may be mentioned the two following. Firstly, nothing can ever be proved. For the conclusion must be proved by premises, which in turn require proof, and soad infinitum. Secondly,{366}it is impossible to know whether our ideas of an object are true, i.e., whether they resemble the object, because we cannot compare our idea with the object itself. To do so would involve getting outside our own minds. We know nothing of the object except our idea of it, and therefore we cannot compare the original and the copy, since we can see only the copy.
Later Scepticism.
After a period of obliteration, Scepticism again revived in the Academy. Of this last phase of Greek scepticism, Aenesidemus, a contemporary of Cicero, is the earliest example, and later we have the well-known names of Simplicius and Sextus Empiricus. The distinctive character of later scepticism is its return to the position of Pyrrho. The New Academy, in its eagerness to overthrow the Stoic dogmatism, had fallen into a dogmatism of its own. If the Stoics dogmatically asserted, the Academics equally dogmatically denied. But wisdom lies neither in assertion nor denial, but in doubt. Hence the later Sceptics returned to the attitude of complete suspense of judgment. Moreover, the Academics had allowed the possibility of probable knowledge. And even this is now regarded as dogmatism. Aenesidemus was the author of the ten well-known arguments to show the impossibility of knowledge. They contain in reality, not ten, but only two or three distinct ideas, several being merely different expressions of the same line of reasoning. They are as follows. (1) The feelings and perceptions of all living beings differ. (2) Men have physical and mental differences, which make things appear different to them. (3) The different senses give different{367}impressions of things. (4) Our perceptions depend on our physical and intellectual conditions at the time of perception. (5) Things appear different in different positions, and at different distances. (6) Perception is never direct, but always through a medium. For example, we see things through the air. (7) Things appear different according to variations in their quantity, colour, motion, and temperature. (8) A thing impresses us differently when it is familiar and when it is unfamiliar. (9) All supposed knowledge is predication. All predicates give us only the relation of things to other things or to ourselves; they never tell us what the thing in itself is. (10) The opinions and customs of men are different in different countries.
{368}
CHAPTER XVIII
TRANSITION TO NEO-PLATONISM
It has been doubted whether Neo-Platonism ought to be included in Greek philosophy at all, and Erdmann, in his "History of Philosophy," places it in the medieval division. For, firstly, an interval of no less than five centuries separates the foundation of Neo-Platonism from the foundation of the preceding Greek schools, the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Sceptic. How long a period this is will be seen if we remember that the entire development of Greek thought from Thales to the Sceptics occupied only about three centuries. Plotinus, the real founder of Neo-Platonism, was born in 205 A.D., so that it is, as far as historical time is concerned, a product of the Christian era. Secondly, its character is largely un-Greek and un-European. The Greek elements are largely swamped by oriental mysticism. Its seat was not in Greece, but at Alexandria, which was not a Greek, but a cosmopolitan, city. Men of all races met here, and, in particular, it was here that East and West joined hands, and the fusion of thought which resulted was Neo-Platonism. But, on the other hand, it seems wrong to include the thought of Plotinus and his successors in medieval philosophy. The whole character of what is usually called medieval philosophy was determined by its growth upon a distinctively Christian soil. It was{369}Christian philosophy. It was the product of the new era which Christianity had substituted for paganism. Neo-Platonism, on the other hand, is not only unchristian, but even anti-christian. The only Christian influence to be detected in it is that of opposition. It is a survival of the pagan spirit in Christian times. In it the old pagan spirit struggles desperately against its younger antagonist, and finally succumbs. In it we see the last gasp and final expiry of the ancient culture of the Greeks. So far as it is not Asiatic in its elements, it draws its inspiration wholly from the philosophies of the past, from the thought and culture of Greece. On the whole, therefore, it is properly classified as the last school of Greek philosophy.
The long interval of time which elapsed between the rise of the preceding Greek schools, whose history we have traced, and the foundation of Neo-Platonism, was filled up by the continued existence, in more or less fossilized form, of the main Greek schools, the Academic, the Peripatetic, the Stoic, and the Epicurean, scattered and harried at times by the inroads of scepticism. It would be wearisome to follow in detail the development in these schools, and the more or less trifling disputes of which it consists. No new thought, no original principle, supervened. It is sufficient to say that, as time went on, the differences between the schools became softened, and their agreements became more prominent. As intellectual vigour wanes, there is always the tendency to forget differences, to rest, as the orientals do, in the good-natured and comfortable delusion that all religions and all philosophies really mean much the same thing. Hence eclecticism became characteristic of the schools.{370}They did not keep themselves distinct. We find Stoic doctrines taught by Academics, Academic doctrines by Stoics. Only the Epicureans kept their race pure, and stood aloof from the general eclecticism of the time. Certain other tendencies also made their appearance. There was a recrudescence of Pythagoreanism, with its attendant symbolism and mysticism. There grew up a tendency to exalt the conception of God so high above the world, to widen so greatly the gulf which divides them, that it was felt that there could be no community between the two, that God could not act upon matter, nor matter upon God. Such interaction would contaminate the purity of the Absolute. Hence all kinds of beings were invented, demons, spirits, and angels, intended to fill up the gap, and to act as intermediaries between God and the world.
As an example of these latter tendencies, and as precursor of Neo-Platonism proper, Philo the Jew deserves a brief mention. He lived at Alexandria between 30 B.C. and 50 A.D. A staunch upholder of the religion and scriptures of the Hebrew race, he believed in the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament. But he was learned in Greek studies, and thought that Greek philosophy was a dimmer revelation of those truths which were more perfectly manifested in the sacred books of his own race. And just as Egyptian priests, out of national vanity, made out that Greek philosophy came from Egypt, just as orientals now pretend that it came from India, so Philo declared that the origin of all that was great in Greek philosophy was to be found in Judea. Plato and Aristotle, he was certain, were followers of Moses, used the Old Testament, and gained their wisdom therefrom!{371}Philo's own ideas were governed by the attempt to fuse Jewish theology and Greek philosophy into a homogeneous system. It was Philo, therefore, who was largely responsible for contaminating the pure clear air of Greek thought with the enervating fogs of oriental mysticism.
Philo taught that God, as the absolutely infinite, must be elevated completely above all that is finite. No name, no thought, can correspond to the infinity of God. He is the unthinkable and the ineffable, and His nature is beyond the reach of reason. The human soul reaches up to God, not through thought, but by means of a mystical inner illumination and revelation that transcends thought. God cannot act directly upon the world, for this would involve His defilement by matter and the limitation of His infinity. There are therefore intermediate spiritual beings, who, as the ministers of God, created and control the world. All these intermediaries are included in the Logos, which is the rational thought which governs the world. The relation of God to the Logos, and of the Logos to the world, is one of progressive emanation. Clearly the idea of emanation is a mere metaphor which explains nothing, and this becomes more evident when Philo compares the emanations to rays of light issuing from an effulgent centre and growing less and less bright as they radiate outwards. When we hear this, we know in what direction we are moving. This has the characteristic ring of Asiatic pseudo-philosophy. It reminds us forcibly of the Upanishads. We are passing out of the realm of thought, reason, and philosophy, into the dream-and-shadow-land of oriental mysticism, where the heavy scents of beautiful poison flowers drug the intellect and obliterate thought in a blissful and languorous repose.
{372}
CHAPTER XIX
THE NEO-PLATONISTS
The word Neo-Platonism is a misnomer. It does not stand for a genuine revival of Platonism. The Neo-Platonists were no doubt the offspring of Plato, but they were the illegitimate offspring. The true greatness of Plato lay in his rationalistic idealism; his defects were mostly connected with his tendency to myth and mysticism. The Neo-Platonists hailed his defects as the true and inner secret of his doctrine, developed them out of all recognition, and combined them with the hazy dream-philosophies of the East. The reputed founder was Ammonius Saccas, but we may pass him over and come at once to his disciple Plotinus, who was the first to develop Neo-Platonism into a system, was the greatest of all its exponents, and may be regarded as its real founder. He was born in 205 A.D. at Lycopolis in Egypt, went to Rome in 245, founded his School there, and remained at the head of it till his death in 270. He left extensive writings which have been preserved.
Plato had shown that the idea of the One, exclusive of all multiplicity, was an impossible abstraction. Even to say "the One is," involves the duality of the One. The Absolute Being can be no abstract unity, but only a unity in multiplicity. Plotinus begins by ignoring this{373}supremely important philosophical principle. He falls back upon the lower level of oriental monism. God, he thinks, is absolutely One. He is the unity which lies beyond all multiplicity. There is in him no plurality, no movement, no distinction. Thought involves the distinction between object and subject; therefore the One is above and beyond thought. Nor is the One describable in terms of volition or activity. For volition involves the distinction between the willer and the willed, activity between the actor and that upon which he acts. God, therefore, is neither thought, nor volition, nor activity. He is beyond all thought and all being. As absolutely infinite, He is also absolutely indeterminate. All predicates limit their subject, and hence nothing can be predicated of the One. He is unthinkable, for all thought limits and confines that which is thought. He is the ineffable and inconceivable. The sole predicates which Plotinus applies to Him are the One and the Good. He sees, however, that these predicates, as much as any others, limit the infinite. He regards them, therefore, not as literally expressing the nature of the infinite, but as figuratively shadowing it forth. They are applied by analogy only. We can, in truth, know nothing of the One, except that itis.
Now it is impossible to derive the world from a first principle of this kind. As being utterly exalted above the world, God cannot enter into the world. As absolutely infinite, He can never limit Himself to become finite, and so give rise to the world of objects. As absolutely One, the many can never issue out of Him. The One cannot create the world, for creation is an activity, and the One is immutable and excludes all{374}activity. As the infinite first principle of all things, the One must be regarded as in some sense the source of all being. And yet how it can give rise to being is inconceivable, since any such act destroys its unity and infinity. We saw once for all, in the case of the Eleatics, that it is fatal to define the Absolute as unity exclusive of all multiplicity, as immutable essence exclusive of all process, and that if we do so we cut off all hope of showing how the world has issued from the Absolute. It is just the same with Plotinus. There is in his system the absolute contradiction that the One is regarded, on the one hand, as source of the world, and on the other as so exalted above the world that all relationship to the world is impossible. We come, therefore, to a complete deadlock at this point. We can get no further. We can find no way to pass from God to the world. We are involved in a hopeless, logical contradiction. But Plotinus was a mystic, and logical absurdities do not trouble mystics. Being unable to explain how the world can possibly arise out of the vacuum of the One, he has recourse, in the oriental style, to poetry and metaphors. God, by reason of His super-perfection, "overflows" Himself, and this overflow becomes the world. He "sends forth a beam" from Himself. As flame emits light, as snow cold, so do all lower beings issue from the One. Thus, without solving the difficulty, Plotinus deftly smothers it in flowery phrases, and quietly passes on his way.
The first emanation from the One is called the Nous. This Nous is thought, mind, reason. We have seen that Plato regarded the Absolute itself as thought. For Plotinus, however, thought is derivative. The One is beyond thought, and thought issues forth from the One{375}as first emanation. The Nous is not discursive thought, however. It is not in time. It is immediate apprehension, or intuition. Its object is twofold. Firstly, it thinks the One, though its thought thereof is necessarily inadequate. Secondly, it thinks itself. It is the thought of thought, like Aristotle's God. It corresponds to Plato's world of Ideas. The Ideas of all things exist in the Nous, and not only the Ideas of classes, but of every individual thing.
From the Nous, as second emanation, proceeds the world-soul. This is, in Erdmann's phrase, a sort of faded-out copy of the Nous, and it is outside time, incorporeal, and indivisible. It works rationally, but yet is not conscious. It has a two-fold aspect, inclining upwards to the Nous on the one hand, and downwards to the world of nature on the other. It produces out of itself the individual souls which inhabit the world.
The idea of emanation is essentially a poetical metaphor, and not a rational concept. It is conceived poetically by Plotinus as resembling light which radiates from a bright centre, and grows dimmer as it passes outwards, till it shades off at last into total darkness. This total darkness is matter. Matter, as negation of light, as the limit of being, is in itself not-being. Thus the crucial difficulty of all Greek philosophy, the problem of the whence of matter, the dualism of matter and thought, which we have seen Plato and Aristotle struggling in vain to subjugate, is loosely and lightly slurred over by Plotinus with poetic metaphors and roseate phrases.
Matter Plotinus considers to be the ground of plurality and the cause of all evil. Hence the object of life can{376}only be, as with Plato, to escape from the material world of the senses. The first step in this process of liberation is"katharsis,"purification, the freeing of oneself from the dominion of the body and the senses. This includes all the ordinary ethical virtues. The second step is thought, reason, and philosophy. In the third stage the soul rises above thought to an intuition of the Nous. But all these are merely preparatory for the supreme and final stage of exaltation into the Absolute One, by means of trance, rapture, ecstasy. Here all thought is transcended, and the soul passes into a state of unconscious swoon, during which it is mystically united with God. It is not a thought of God, it is not even that the soul sees God, for all such conscious activities involve the separation of the subject from its object. In the ecstasy all such disunion and separation are annihilated. The soul does not look upon God from the outside. It becomes one with God. It is God. Such mystical raptures can, in the nature of the case, only be momentary, and the soul sinks back exhausted to the levels of ordinary consciousness. Plotinus claimed to have been exalted in this divine ecstasy several times during his life.
After Plotinus Neo-Platonism continues with modifications in his successors, Porphyry, Iamblicus, Syrianus, Proclus, and others.
The essential character of Neo-Platonism comes out in its theory of the mystical exaltation of the subject to God. It is the extremity of subjectivism, the forcing of the individual subject to the centre of the universe, to the position of the Absolute Being. And it follows naturally upon the heels of Scepticism. In the Sceptics all faith in the power of thought and reason had finally died out. They{377}took as their watchword the utter impotence of reason to reach the truth. From this it was but a step to the position that, if we cannot attain truth by the natural means of thought, we will do so by a miracle. If ordinary consciousness will not suffice, we will pass beyond ordinary consciousness altogether. Neo-Platonism is founded upon despair, the despair of reason. It is the last frantic struggle of the Greek spirit to reach, by desperate means, by force, the point which it felt it had failed to reach by reason. It seeks to take the Absolute by storm. It feels that where sobriety has failed, the violence of spiritual intoxication may succeed.
It was natural that philosophy should end here. For philosophy is founded upon reason. It is the effort to comprehend, to understand, to grasp the reality of things intellectually. Therefore it cannot admit anything higher than reason. To exalt intuition, ecstasy, or rapture, above thought--this is death to philosophy. Philosophy in making such an admission, lets out its own life-blood, which is thought. In Neo-Platonism, therefore, ancient philosophy commits suicide. This is the end. The place of philosophy is taken henceforth by religion. Christianity triumphs, and sweeps away all independent thought from its path. There is no more philosophy now till a new spirit of enquiry and wonder is breathed into man at the Renaissance and the Reformation. Then the new era begins, and gives birth to a new philosophic impulse, under the influence of which we are still living. But to reach that new era of philosophy, the human spirit had first to pass through the arid wastes of Scholasticism.
{378}
SUBJECT INDEX
as many in one,
as reason,
as knowable,
as form,
Parmenides on,
Heracleitus on,
Empedocles on,
Plato on,
Aristotle on,
Parmenides on,
Plato on,
as explanation,
Aristotle's doctrine of,
defined,
identified with definitions,
Socrates's doctrine of,
objectivity of,
Stoics on,
defined,
of Eleatics,
of Anaxagoras,
of Plato,
of Aristotle,
identified with final cause,
Anaximander and,
Aristotle's doctrine of,
Spencer's doctrine of,
identified with formal cause,
identified with final cause,
Xenophanes on,
Socrates on,
Plato on,
Aristotle on,
as first mover,
as thought of thought,
relation of, to the world,
Plotinus on,
Democritus on,
Protagoras on,
Socrates on,
Epicurus on,
The Idea of,
as God,
Antisthenes on,
Plato on,
Aristotle on,
Stoics on,
Epicurus on,
distinguished from pleasure,
Anaximander on,
Pythagoreans on,
Xenophanes on,
Anaxagoras on,
Plato on,
Aristotle on,
of Parmenides,
essentials of,
Plato as founder of,
Theory of,
Aristotle on,
Atomists on,
Plato on,
Aristotle on,
Epicurus on,
Zeno on,
Anaxagoras on,
Aristotle on,
Hume on,
Kant on,
Hegel on,
Pythagoreans on,
Plato on,
Aristotle on,
of the Infinite,
of the Absolute,
through concepts,
Plato on,
as recollection,
necessary knowledge,
origin of,
of Ionics,
defect of,
indestructibility of,
Platonic,
Aristotle's doctrine of,
Plotinus on,
founded on reason,
Zeno on,
Aristotle on,
Zeno on,
necessary concepts,
of Anaxagoras,
of Plotinus,
defined,
of concepts,
distinguished from happiness,
distinguished from appearance,
distinguished from existence,
distinguished from sense,
distinguished from cause,
as universal,
as concepts,
supremacy of,
as basis of love,
as Absolute,
passive and active,
as basis of morals,
knowledge as,
Aristotle on,
relation to philosophy,
Xenophanes on,
Heracleitus on,
Democritus on,
decay of Greek,
particularism of,
distinguished from reason,
Heracleitus on,
Atomists on,
Plato on,
Aristotle on,
Stoics on,
Epicureans on,
Sophists on,
Plato's,
Aristotle on,
defined,
Ideas as,
Aristotle's doctrine of
defined,
of Anaxagoras,
of Plato,
of Aristotle,
as knowledge,
teachable,
unity of,
as sole good,
relation to pleasure,
customary and philosophic,
dianoetic,
as the mean,
of the Cynics,
of the Cyrenaics,
of the Stoics,