CHAPTER II.Importance of the ethical tendency in pre-Socratic Philosophy generally under-estimated—Development of this tendency from Thales to the Sophists, and from the Sophists to the Stoics and Epicureans—Special influence of these two Schools, aided by the failure of political interest, in establishing a practicable ideal ofpersonalvirtue—This ideal, conspicuous in Plutarch’s “Ethics,” and inculcated by the philosophers of the early Græco-Roman Empire generally.
Importance of the ethical tendency in pre-Socratic Philosophy generally under-estimated—Development of this tendency from Thales to the Sophists, and from the Sophists to the Stoics and Epicureans—Special influence of these two Schools, aided by the failure of political interest, in establishing a practicable ideal ofpersonalvirtue—This ideal, conspicuous in Plutarch’s “Ethics,” and inculcated by the philosophers of the early Græco-Roman Empire generally.
It will be interesting and useful briefly to trace the growth of the ethical tendency in Greek Philosophy, not only as a preparation for the study of Plutarch’s position as an ethical and religious teacher, but also because the prominence of this tendency in the pre-Socratic systems appears to have been greatly underestimated.[54]It has been found so easy, for purposes of historical narrative, to describe a certain philosophicaltendency as “physical,” and a certain other as “metaphysical,” that the purely general character of these descriptions has been overlooked. Thales was a natural philosopher, an astronomer, and, if we may trust the “general belief of the Greeks” to which Herodotus alludes in his account of the crossing of the river Halys by Crœsus, a great mechanical engineer as well.[55]But he was something more than this. He was distinguished for great political insight, and was acknowledged to be the greatest of the group of practical philosophers who were known as the Seven Sages.[56]To this group are assigned those famous dicta which, whether inscribed by priests on the walls of temples, or embodied by philosophers in their ethical systems, conveyed a profound moral significance to every member of a Hellenic community. Although no special one of these sayings is ascribed to Thales by name, it would surely be absurd to suppose him deficient in those very qualities which brought fame to the men at whose head he was universally placed. A man who was confessedly a trusted counsellor in Politics would assuredly, in those days, have had something to say on that branch of Politics which was destined eventually to be separated from its parentstem, and to become a distinct branch of philosophical investigation. Anaximander cannot, at this distance of time, be directly associated with the practical problems of human life, but must ever remain wrapped up in his “infinity,” which is neither Air nor Water, nor any other element, but “something that is different from all of them.”[57]It is not, however, without significance in this connexion, that the most striking fragment of his Philosophy that has reached our times is couched in ethical phraseology: “That out of which existing things have their birth must also,of right, be their grave when they are destroyed. For they must, by the dispensation of time,give a just compensation for their injustice.”[58]We are in equal ignorance of any special ethical teaching of Anaximenes. Heraclitus, however, has a distinctly ethical aspect, in spite of the physical nature of most of his philosophical speculations. Self-knowledge, which is alien to the multitude, who are under the sway of the poets,[59]is already, in Heraclitus, the basis of self-control, as it is in Socrates the basis of all moral excellence.[60]An ordered self-control is the highest of all virtues; even the Sun must not transgress the limits of his sphere, or the Erinnyes, the Ministers ofJustice, will find him out.[61]Anaxagoras, whom Sextus Empiricus will one day describe as “themostphysical” of all the philosophers, began his book on Nature with the words “All things were in confusion together; then came Intelligence, and gave them order and arrangement;” thus laying the foundation of his Natural Philosophy in a principle which could not fail of early application to the sphere of Conduct.[62]The denial of blind Chance, or of immutable Fate, in the realm of physical phenomena easily leads to its repudiation in the sphere of Ethics, and to a recognition of the personal responsibility of the individual mind for the consequences of its own decisions.[63]It was probably a conviction of the ethical fruitfulness of the principle thus laid down by Anaxagoras in the sphere of Physics which induced Aristotle, the greatest of all ethical philosophers, to assert that its author, as compared with his predecessors, was a sober thinker by the side of random babblers.[64]The physical investigations of Democritus were utilized by the Epicureans to free man from superstitious fears of another world, in order that he might direct all his powers to making the best of this world, in a moral, infinitely more than in a physical, sense. He specifically discussed Virtue, and concluded that happiness consisted in Temperance and Self-Control.[65]In a book which he wrote under the significant title of “Tritogeneia,” or “Minerva,” heappears to have applied the principle of Intelligence to the domain of Ethics, as Anaxagoras had applied it to the realm of Physics, pointing out that there wanted three things to the perfection of human society—“to reason well, to speak well, and to do one’s duty;” and that these three powers all spring from the directing influence of Intelligence. The author of the “Magna Moralia” says that Pythagoras was the first to discuss Virtue, and indicates in what manner the Pythagoreans attempted to apply their theory of Number to the sphere of Ethics. Their method was wrong, according to the “Magna Moralia,” since there is a special and appropriate method for the analysis and discussion of the virtues, and “Justice is not a number evenly even.”[66]Such a definition, thus crushed by way of a point-blank negative, has, of course, nothing but a metaphorical significance as applied to Ethics; but the metaphorical conception of Justice as a perfect number will not be totally devoid of inspiration to justice of conduct in the mind of one who loves perfection even when represented by an arithmetical abstraction; and if by this definition “it was designed to express the correspondence between action and suffering,”[67]a fruitful, though incomplete, ethical principle is embodied intheir mathematical phrasing.[68]In a more general sense, Epicharmus has sung how the Pythagorean Doctrine of Number may be applied to the domain of practice:—
“Man’s life needs greatly Number’s ordered sway:His path is safe who follows Number’s way.”[69]
“Man’s life needs greatly Number’s ordered sway:His path is safe who follows Number’s way.”[69]
“Man’s life needs greatly Number’s ordered sway:His path is safe who follows Number’s way.”[69]
“Man’s life needs greatly Number’s ordered sway:
His path is safe who follows Number’s way.”[69]
But the Pythagorean doctrine of Transmigration probably had a greater ethical value than the metaphysical conceptions of Number which constituted the Pythagorean οὐσία; although it is not impossible that the dogma, when carelessly held or unphilosophically interpreted, might have a vicious rather than a virtuous effect.[70]The “Golden Verses of Pythagoras,” whether composed by any individual member of the school, or officially embodying the teaching of the sect, or representing the actual work of some philosopher not formally a Pythagorean, have been universally recognised to express a Pythagorean ideal;[71]and thusexhibit in the doctrine of the Italian School a far more vigorous and fruitful ethical tendency than any study of its official doctrines—so far as they are available for study—would lead us to suppose. And, indeed, the followers of this Philosophy were conspicuous, even in Plato’s time, for a special manner of life, the preparation for which involved a strenuous devotion to a strict and lofty ethical ideal, an ideal which subsequently formed no small part of the strength of that last school of Greek Philosophy which nominally sheltered under the ægis of Plato.[72]
Among the philosophers of the Eleatic School we find an equally marked tendency in the direction ofEthics. The very basis of the anti-theistic propaganda of Xenophanes is that the gods in their traditional character do not display those virtues which are incumbent on even ordinarily decent men. To his strenuous sincerity the removal of the gods from the sphere of human conduct meant the introduction of a stricter and better reasoned sanction for morality. Even Parmenides and Melissus and Zeno were not so absorbed in the creation of abstract metaphysical conceptions but that Plutarch is able to mention them together, not only as distinguished for their contributions to the practical wisdom of their time, but as evincing by the manner of their death their constancy to a lofty ethical conception of the duties of life.[73]Empedocles is included in the same category as having conferred great material and political benefits upon his fellow-citizens, to whom he also addressed a poem inculcating a pure and noble manner of life based on the doctrine of Transmigration.
This brief review of the pre-Socratic and pre-Sophistic Philosophers appears to indicate that, if their ethical doctrines were not formulated with the scientific detail and precision of later schools, their speculations had a strongly ethical cast, and tended to work out into practical morality in the sphere of daily conduct. In spite of the numerous systems of Ethics which have been propounded in ancient and modern days, a scientific basis of Morality has not yet been truly laid,and it was, perhaps, a recognition of the difficulties menacing attempts in this direction, aided by a feeling that “moral progress has not to wait till an unimpeachable system of Ethics has been elaborated,”[74]which led the early Greek Schools to confine their utterances on Morals to “rugged maxims hewn from life,” which compensated for their lack of scientific precision by the inspiration they applied to the work of actual life.
It must, however, be admitted that with the Sophists the concerns of practical life began to assume that predominant place in philosophical speculations which they afterwards wholly usurped; and the claim of the Sophists (whether or not Socrates is to be reckoned among them) to be regarded as the founders of Ethical Philosophy is not weakened by the fact that, when Philosophy and Ethics were identified,[75]the term Sophist was assigned to men whose lives were in diametrical opposition to everything connoted by the designation philosopher.[76]The Sophists of the Socraticage, whose varied teachings were lacking in any philosophical principle to give them unity and dignity, brought the business of common life into so marked a prominence, and recognized Conduct as so much larger a fraction of life than it had hitherto been consciously recognized, that the necessity of finding a scientific basis for Conduct became apparent, and a sphere was thus opened to the genius of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
It is not necessary to linger in demonstrating the important part played by Ethics from this point onward in the development of Greek Philosophy. “I hold that Socrates, as all are agreed, was the first whose voice charmed away philosophy from the mysterious phenomena over which Nature herself has cast a veil, and with which all philosophers before his time busied themselves, and brought it face to face with social life, so as to investigate virtue and vice, and the general distinction between Good and Evil, and led it to pronounce its sentence that the heavenly bodies were either far removed from the sphere of our knowledge, or contributed nothing to right living, however much the knowledge of them might be attained.”[77]Althoughthis well-known passage from Cicero’s “Academics” has been criticized for the too great emphasis which it lays on the alienation of Socrates from Natural Philosophy, and, moreover, as an attempt has been made to show above, it lays in like manner too much stress on the alienation of previous thinkers from Moral Philosophy, or, at any rate, from empirical Ethics, it expresses with great clearness the surpassing importance which the common life of humanity, as illumined by the light of virtuous ideals, was henceforward to assume as the end and aim of philosophical investigations and discussions. The overwhelming importance of Ethics in the philosophical system of Plato is directly or indirectly apparent in all his teaching; and where he, too, indulges in physical speculations, it is with the warning that probability is all that can be expected from such investigations, and that they constitute a wise and moderate recreation in the course of severer and more legitimate studies.[78]But it must be conceded that, while no writer has composed more beautiful panegyrics in praise of Virtue; while no teacher has depicted its surpassing importance to humanity with greater devotion of spirit or subtler charm of language; yet the severity of the intellectual processes which alone lead to a comprehension of what, in the Platonic system, Virtue is, has had the effect ofmaking Virtue herself appear almost “too bright and good for human nature’s daily food;” too lofty and afar for the common man to attain; a mere abstraction to be preserved as a field appropriate to the gymnastics of metaphysicians, and to be shielded from the harsh contact of the common world and common men by thechevaux de friseof dialectical subtlety. Excess of Reason in Plato has produced a similar result to that produced by excess of Emotion in modern Religion, and it is not without Justice that a great writer of the nineteenth century has described Plato as “putting men off with stars instead of sense,” and as teaching them to be anything but “practical men, honest men, continent men, unambitious men, fearful to solicit a trust, slow to accept, and resolute never to betray one.”[79]The accessibility of Virtue to the common heart is conditioned in Plato’s system by its intelligibility to the common reason. The dialectic processes by which the Ideas of the Good, the True, the Beautiful are pursued are merely repellent to the average man, who does not care for Metaphysics, but wishes to be good and pure and just in his dealings with his fellow-men.[80]“Plato acknowledges that the morality of themultitude must be utilitarian, since none other is attainable save by the highly trained metaphysician.”[81]Even when the multitude accept the teachings of the philosopher, it is not because they are capable of the knowledge of ideal truth, but because the philosopher has compelled them to recognize, from utilitarian reasons, that it is better to be virtuous than to be vicious. But this acknowledgment of the inability of the multitude to be virtuous in the highest sense, and the assertion that they must submit themselves as clay to be moulded by the philosopher, who alone has a knowledge of ideal goodness, do not help in a world where the philosophers are not autocrats, but where every teacher must submit his claims to the intelligence of the multitude. It may accordingly be questioned whether Plato’s Ethics have furnished inspiration for goodness except to those who have already had a predilection for virtue as an appanage of the highest intellect, or to those more general lovers of the Beautiful whose taste is gratified by fascinating descriptions of a quality which, in itself, has no special charm for them, but which, when depicted by this “master of the starry spheres” in its atmosphere of cold but radiant splendour, has transfigured their moral life with beams that do not “fade into the common light of day.” Plato’s teaching, indeed, has something monastic, exclusive, aristocratic in its import, and the“esoteric” doctrines which were taught in the grove of Academus to students already prepared by a special course of instruction to receive them stand at the very opposite pole of Philosophy to those homely conversations which Socrates would hold with the first chance passer-by in the streets of a busy city. “Let no one enter here who has not studied Mathematics” was a phrase which summed up in a dogmatic canon of the school the views of the master touching the exclusion of the multitude from direct participation in Virtue and Philosophy.[82]
Aristotle brings us into a world where there is less of poetry and beautiful imagery, but in which the common man can see more clearly. If the landscapes are not so lovely, the roadways are better laid and the milestones are more legible. The contrast has been often enough already elaborated. Its essence seems to lie in the recognition by Aristotle that men are men, and not ideal philosophers. It hardly needed those famous passages in the “Ethics,” in which Aristotle subjects the Theory of Ideas to a most searchingcriticism, to emphasize that predilection for the practical concerns of daily life, as not only the proper sphere of Ethics, but their foundation and material, which is conspicuous in the general character of his work. Over and over again he insists that happiness depends upon action, not contemplation;[83]and so convinced is he that Ethics, like every other science, must start from knowledge of actual facts, that he denies the claim of those to be students of Moral Philosophy who are inexperienced in the actions of life.[84]And it is, surely, in allusion to the demand of the Platonic Philosophy that the multitude shall permit themselves to be moulded by the Platonist potter even into that inferior form of virtue of which alone they are capable, that Aristotle reverts to the famous saying of Hesiod that he is second best only who “obeys one who speaks well,” while assigning the moral supremacy to the man who makes his own practical experience of life the basis of his ethical theories and the mainspring of his moral progress.
Thus it seems that Aristotle is the true successor of Socrates, inasmuch as Philosophy, which under the spells of Platonism had withdrawn again to the empyrean, is charmed down once more by the Stageirite to the business and bosoms of mankind. To use the expressive metaphor of Aristotle himself, though not, of course, in this connexion, if the creator of the “Republic” shines as one of “the most beautiful and thestrongest” present at the Olympian Games, the author of the “Ethics” is one of the “Combatants” who have been crowned, because they have descended into the arena, and by right action have secured what is noble and good in life.[85]After Aristotle, it was improbable that Philosophy would ever again render itself obnoxious to the reproach levelled against Plato by some of his contemporaries that “they went to him expecting to hear about the chief good, but he put them off with a quantity of remarks about numbers and things they could not understand.”[86]
Contemporary with the work of Aristotle and his insistence upon the necessity that each individual man should seek for the chief good in the sphere of his own actual experience, occurred the relaxation of the dominant claims of the State to the best part of the energies and activities of the citizen. The change in the political condition of Greece consequent upon the Macedonian conquest had turned the Greek citizen back upon his own soul for inspiration to guide his steps aright. The philosophical tendency was thus aided by external conditions, and the joint operation of both these influences established in Stoicism and Epicureanism the satisfaction of the moral requirements of the individual man as the aim and end of Philosophy.
Whatever importance the leaders of the Stoics attached to Logic and Physics—and different philosophers formed different estimates of their value[87]—allwere agreed that these parts of Philosophy were only useful in so far as they enabled mankind to lead a virtuous life; a life in harmony with nature and its laws; a life which placed them above the domination of “Fear and hope and phantasy and awe, And wistful yearning and unsated loves, That strain beyond the limits of this life.”[88]The Epicureans repudiated Dialectic,[89]and, as already stated, studied Physics with a view only to freeing the mind of man from those supernatural fears which hampered him in his attainment of terrestrial virtue and happiness:—
“Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia cæcisIn tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemusInterdum nilo quæ sunt metuenda magis quamQuæ pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necesse estNon radii solis neque lucida tela dieiDiscutiant, sed naturæ species ratioque.”
“Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia cæcisIn tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemusInterdum nilo quæ sunt metuenda magis quamQuæ pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necesse estNon radii solis neque lucida tela dieiDiscutiant, sed naturæ species ratioque.”
“Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia cæcisIn tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemusInterdum nilo quæ sunt metuenda magis quamQuæ pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necesse estNon radii solis neque lucida tela dieiDiscutiant, sed naturæ species ratioque.”
“Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia cæcis
In tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
Interdum nilo quæ sunt metuenda magis quam
Quæ pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.
Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necesse est
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturæ species ratioque.”
Lucretius, whose great poem is devoted to an exposition of the physical side of Epicureanism,i.e.of the Atomic Philosophy of Democritus,[90]is only on the same ground with Epicurus himself when he makes it clear, not merely by the general complexion of his argument, but by a large number of particular passages, and those, too, the most strikingly beautiful in the poem, that theinvestigation of natural phenomena is to serve only as a means of freeing the life of humanity from those cares and vices which are hostile to its peace:—
“Denique avarities et honorum cæca cupidoQuæ miseros homines cogunt transcendere finesJuris et interdum socios scelerum atque ministrosNoctes atque dies niti præstante laboreAd summas emergere opes, hæc vulnera vitæNon minimam partemmortis formidinealuntur.”
“Denique avarities et honorum cæca cupidoQuæ miseros homines cogunt transcendere finesJuris et interdum socios scelerum atque ministrosNoctes atque dies niti præstante laboreAd summas emergere opes, hæc vulnera vitæNon minimam partemmortis formidinealuntur.”
“Denique avarities et honorum cæca cupidoQuæ miseros homines cogunt transcendere finesJuris et interdum socios scelerum atque ministrosNoctes atque dies niti præstante laboreAd summas emergere opes, hæc vulnera vitæNon minimam partemmortis formidinealuntur.”
“Denique avarities et honorum cæca cupido
Quæ miseros homines cogunt transcendere fines
Juris et interdum socios scelerum atque ministros
Noctes atque dies niti præstante labore
Ad summas emergere opes, hæc vulnera vitæ
Non minimam partemmortis formidinealuntur.”
The investigation of nature with a view to eliminating the fear of death as a factor in human conduct, clearly enounced as it is in the poem of the Roman Epicurean, is still more emphatically expressed in a “fundamental maxim” of Epicurus himself: “If we did not allow ourselves to be disturbed by suspicious fears of celestial phenomena; if the terrors of death were never in our minds; and if we would but courageously discuss the limits of our nature as regards pain and desire: we should then have no need to study Natural Philosophy.”[91]
The exclusion of Dialectics,[92]and the subordination of Physics to Ethics, restricted—if, indeed, it were a restriction—the scope of character and intelligence to the sphere of conduct, and it is in the light of this limitation that the full significance of the Epicurean definition of Philosophy lies—“Philosophy is an active principle which aims at securing Happiness by Reasonand Discussion.” Here we have in practical completion that identification of Philosophy with Ethics towards which the whole tendency of Greek speculation had been consciously or unconsciously working, and which was fully consummated in the later development of the Stoic and Epicurean systems. The combined effect of this principle of Epicureanism, and of the contemporaneous failure of political interest, was to direct attention to those less ostentatious, but, for happiness, more effective virtues, which flourish in private society and in the daily intercourse of mankind. Because it excluded Dialectics, and because it was excluded from Politics, the gospel of the Garden established an ideal of homely virtue which lay within the reach of the average man, who, like Epicurus himself, was repelled by Plato’s distance from life, and did not feel called upon to cherish impracticable schemes of ameliorating society under the dominion of a Demetrius the Liberator, but was willing to content himself with a humbler range of duty, with being temperate and chaste in his habits, simple and healthy in his tastes, cheerful and serene in his personal bearing, amiable and sympathetic with his friends, and cultivating courteous relations in those slightly more extended social circles where comity and tact take the place of the more intimate and familiar virtues of household life.[93]
By the method of placing in continuous order certain common and well-known indications, we have endeavoured to illustrate the view that the natural development of Greek Philosophy led in the direction of Ethics, and that the natural development of Ethics led in the direction of a popular scheme of conduct, which, fragmentary and incomplete as it might be in a scientific sense, had yet the advantage that it was founded upon the common daily life of the ordinary man, and placed before the ordinary man in his common daily life an ideal of virtue which, by efforts not beyond his strength, he might realize and maintain. This type of character, partly the growth of the circumstances of the time, but strengthened and expanded by the manner in which Epicureanism adapted itself to those circumstances, reacted upon the sterner conception of the Stoic ideal of private virtue, and when we reach the revival of Religion and Philosophy in the Græco-Roman world of the Empire, it is this ideal which is the aim and end of every philosopher from Seneca to Marcus Aurelius, from Plutarch to Apuleius, no matter what the particular label they may attach to their doctrines to indicate their formal adhesion to one of the great classical schools.[94]To take an extreme exampleof a truth which will subsequently be illustrated from Plutarch, Seneca, who is a Stoic of the Stoics, is full of praise for the noble and humane simplicity of the Epicurean ideal of life, and in those inspiring letters through which he directs the conscience of his friend Lucilius into the pure and pleasant ways of truth and virtue, it is an exceptional occurrence for him to conclude one of his moral lessons without quoting in its support the authority of the Master of the Garden. The absorbing interest of Plutarch as a moral philosopher lies mainly in the fact that though, as a polemical writer, he is an opponent, and not always a fair or judicious opponent, both of the Porch and the Garden,[95]he collects from any quarter any kind ofteaching which he hopes to find useful in inculcating that ideal of conduct which he believes most likely to work out into virtue and happiness; and though his most revered teacher is Plato, the ideal of conduct which he inculcates is one which Epicurus would have wished his friend Metrodorus to appropriate and exemplify.[96]This ideal Plutarch thought worth preservation; it is the last intelligible and practicable ideal presented to us by Paganism; and the attempts which Plutarch made to preserve it are interesting as those of a man who stood at a crisis in the world’s history, and endeavoured to find, in the wisdom and strength and splendour of the Past, a sanction for purity and goodness, when a sanction for purity and goodness was being mysteriously formed, in comparison with which the wisdom and strength and splendour of the Past were to be regarded but as weakness and darkness and folly. The experiment was not without success for a considerable time; and had Paganism been defendedby Julian in the pliant form which Plutarch gave it, and in the spirit of tolerance which he infused into his defence of it, it is probable that the harmonious co-operation, and perhaps the complete union, of the classical tradition and the Christian faith would have been the early and beneficial result.[97]With a view to observing some of the factors which contributed to the success of Plutarch’s work, we propose to give a brief glance at the ethical condition of the epoch in which it was carried on.