F. D. Maurice

Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy

First published
1850 (as a book; first written as the article on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana)
This text
Fourth edition. London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1861.
Length
124,000 words, about 9 hours' reading

Begin reading Modern English

Maurice wrote this survey as the article on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, and rewrote much of it when it was published as a book in 1850. He means it, as one of its margin notes says, to be “not a history of opinions and systems, but of investigations”: an account of how men in different countries and ages have searched for Wisdom, and what moved them to search.

It begins with the Hebrews, whose Scriptures he reads as the ground of all such inquiry, and passes through Egypt, Phœnicia and Assyria, India, China and Persia to Greece, which fills most of the book: the legendary age, the first schools, Pythagoras and the Eleatics, the Sophists and Socrates, Plato, a long study of Aristotle, and the Epicureans, Stoics and Academics after him. It closes with Rome and Alexandria. The printed book glosses nearly every paragraph with a note in its margin, and this edition keeps them.

Contents

The one-line summaries are guides drafted with the help of AI, not Maurice’s words.

  1. Title Page
  2. Dedication

    Dedicating the volume to the Chevalier Bunsen, Maurice explains that it grew from an Encyclopædia Metropolitana article for Hugh James Rose, meant as hints rather than a history, now largely rewritten to correct its faults.

  3. Preface
  4. Contents
  5. Introduction

    Defining philosophy as the love of Wisdom, a hidden treasure to be sought, Maurice distinguishes physical, metaphysical, and moral inquiry, and proposes to trace men’s searches, not the premature conclusions of Schools, before and after Christ.

  6. Chapter I. The Hebrews

    Hebrew philosophy—Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job—grows from God’s self-revelation to Abraham and Moses, and finds its essence in personal Wisdom, present with God before creation, whom the prophets know as the Word teaching all men.

    1. Section I. Grounds of Hebrew Philosophy
    2. Section II. Hebrew Philosophy
    3. Section III. The Prophets
  7. Chapter II. Egyptians, Phœnicians, Assyrians

    Egypt, Phœnicia, and Chaldæa bred no philosophers: Egyptian physical lore, unbalanced by knowledge of man, turned sages into diviners and people into idolaters, restless Phœnician commerce left no room for contemplation, and Chaldæan astrology served tyrants.

  8. Chapter III. Hindoo Philosophy

    Brahm emerges from the Vedas’ cries for purification as the thinking priest’s god; in the Bhagavad Gita Kreeshna bids Arjoon fight without seeking reward, yet the Hindoo’s search, like the Buddhist revolt, ends in the self.

    1. Section I. The Philosophy Latent in the Religion
    2. Section II. The Philosophy Developed—the Bhagavad Gita
    3. Section III. The Philosopher Separating Himself from the Priest
  9. Chapter IV. Chinese Philosophy

    Khoung-fou-tseu, admired by eighteenth-century philosophers, found reason and duty embodied in ancient rites and the mean, and Meng-tseu boldly rebuked oppressive kings, but neither could show what righteous power sustains rulers in their duties.

  10. Chapter V. Persian Philosophy

    Zerduscht, a real reformer behind the legends, fought the Magians’ homage to Ahriman with prayer to Ormuzd as Light, tillage, and kings exalted above priests, leaving Persia deeply moral but hostile to speculation.

  11. Chapter VI. Grecian Philosophy

    Revering in Zeus counsel rather than goodness, the Greeks turned from using wisdom to seeking it—Thales and the Ionians in nature, Pythagoras in a brotherhood, Xenophanes and Parmenides in the One—until Zeno invented logic.

    1. Division I.—Period Before Socrates
      1. Section I. Greek Wisdom in the Legendary Ages
      2. Section II. The Beginning of Philosophy
      3. Section III. The First School
      4. Section IV. Pythagoras
      5. Section V. Xenophanes—Parmenides—Zeno
    2. Division II.—Greek Philosophy from Socrates to Aristotle

      Though Mr. Grote rightly calls the Sophists respectable professors of wisdom, their common prize, political power won by rhetoric, was the real cancer of Periclean Athens, which Aristophanes mocked in vain and Socrates alone could reform.

      1. Section I. Athens in the Time of Socrates.—The Sophists
      2. Section II. Socrates

        Turning from Anaxagoras’s physics to the question “What am I?”, Socrates, guided by his Demon, sifted words to break Athens’ worship of power, died for asserting truth rather than opinion, and fathered Cyrenaic, Cynic, and Megarian schools.

      3. Section III. The Socratics
      4. Section IV. Plato

        Plato proved the truest Socratic by writing dialogues rather than a system, reaching through them the doctrine of Ideas and dialectics, and finding in the Republic that justice is one law for soul and commonwealth.

    3. Division III.—Aristotle

      Tutor of Alexander and philosopher of the Macedonian age, Aristotle turned Plato’s dialectics from a search for realities into a masterly logic—Categories, Analytics, Topics—that maps how the mind discourses, not what is.

      1. Section I. Aristotle the Beginner of a New Epoch
      2. Section II. Relation of Aristotle to Plato
      3. Section III. The Logical Treatises of Aristotle
      4. Section IV. The Physics of Aristotle

        Quoting Dr. Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences, Maurice shows how Aristotle’s logic ruled his physics, deriving from words alone the impossibility of a void, an eternal circular motion, the four elements, and absolute levity.

      5. Section V. The Metaphysics of Aristotle

        Against the Platonists, Aristotle’s Metaphysics makes form an energy inherent in each thing and matter mere potency, ascending to an immaterial, self-contemplating First Cause of things, not, like Plato’s God, a Being who satisfies man’s wants.

      6. Section VI. Aristotelian Psychology

        Aristotle’s ethics rest not on theology but on the soul’s faculties, placing virtue in a mean, society in Friendship and Justice, the highest happiness in contemplation, and the polity in household relationships, not Platonic unity.

      7. Section VII. The Aristotelian Ethics
      8. Section VIII. Politics of Aristotle
    4. Division IV.—The Later Sects

      After Alexander, Pyrrho’s weary scepticism lay beneath Greece’s later sects: Epicurus escaped nature’s order through atoms and sensation, Zeno’s Stoics made Fate their god, and the Academics sank into Sophists and Rhetoricians.

      1. Section I. Greece After the Time of Alexander
      2. Section II. Epicurus
      3. Section III. Stoicism
      4. Section IV. The Academic
  12. Chapter VII. Roman Philosophy

    Rome’s love of order, not of wisdom, shaped its philosophy: Lucretius found order in Epicurean atoms, Cato and Brutus lived out Stoicism, and Cicero, nominally an Academic, brought out the idea of Duty.

    1. Section I. Roman History and Mythology
    2. Section II. Origin of Latin Philosophy
    3. Section III. The Roman Epicurean
    4. Section IV. The Roman Stoic
    5. Section V. The Proper Roman Philosophy
  13. Chapter VIII. The Alexandrian Philosophy

    Amid Alexandria’s confluence of thought, Philo saw the Divine Word guiding every seeker of wisdom, yet missed the divine polity that the apostles proclaimed fulfilled in a divine and human Person.

    1. Section I. Alexandria
    2. Section II. The Jewish Philosophy

About this digital edition

How the text was made, and the printer's errors corrected

The original book

Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy by Frederick Denison Maurice.

This edition

First produced 2026-11-04 by the book pipeline from a page scan of the printed book; this version produced 2026-11-05. It is part of a project to make F. D. Maurice’s works freely available in every useful digital form. The guiding principle throughout was fidelity to the printed text: Maurice’s own spelling, capitalization, punctuation, ligatures, and typography rule, except where a printing error was identified and deliberately emended (each such change is listed below).

How this text was made

The transcription pipeline combines automated tools, AI models, and page-by-page human review:

  • OCR and conversion. The scan was OCRed (ocrmypdf/Tesseract) and converted to structured text (marker), then cleaned by a language model (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) working chunk by chunk.
  • Human review of every machine change. Every word the cleanup model altered was reviewed against an image of the printed line. Footnotes were verified against the printed page and renumbered uniformly.
  • Quotation marks were normalized to the printer’s own conventions and validated by a nesting checker; every remaining irregularity was inspected against the page image. The final text has fully paired quotation marks.
  • Italics were restored (the OCR text layer records none) by a vision model (claude-sonnet-5-5) cross-checked against a deterministic measurement of letterform slant on the page images, with per-word statistical calibration derived from the book itself. Every page was then reviewed by a human editor against the print. This edition carries 376 italic spans.
  • Small capitals and ligatures (æ, œ) are reproduced as printed.
  • Greek was checked word by word against the print. Its accents and breathings follow standard usage: where the printer’s are missing or differ, they were corrected silently and are not listed among the emendations below. Greek is set upright, as the book prints it.
  • A whole-book audit (claude-sonnet-5-5) checked structure, headings, footnotes, and Greek; its findings were reviewed by a human editor against the print before any were applied.

The text contains 30 footnotes and 34 small-caps renderings of the print.

Emendations

Places where this edition deliberately differs from the printed book, each a correction of an apparent printing error, verified against the page image:

  • p. 7: ‘Anaxamines’ → ‘Anaximenes’
  • p. 7: ‘Zenophanes’ → ‘Xenophanes’
  • p. 30: ‘dictinction’ → ‘distinction’
  • p. 31: ‘there no fountains’ → ‘there were no fountains’
  • p. 42: ‘Pharoahs’ → ‘Pharaohs’
  • p. 42: ‘Pharoah’ → ‘Pharaoh’
  • p. 46: ‘ascribes’ → ‘prescribes’
  • p. 67: ‘Study of Looks.’ → ‘Study of Books.’
  • p. 73: ‘even if was’ → ‘even if it was’
  • p. 79: ‘to’ → ‘too’
  • p. 81: ‘Khoung-feu-tseu’ → ‘Khoung-fou-tseu’
  • p. 81: ‘fine’ → ‘finer’
  • p. 86: ‘congnizable’ → ‘cognizable’
  • p. 87: ‘so’ → ‘no’
  • p. 90: ‘trangressed’ → ‘transgressed’
  • p. 91: ‘bo’ → ‘be’
  • p. 94: ‘proceeded by which’ → ‘proceeded, by which’
  • p. 97: ‘σονετόι’ → ‘συνετοί’
  • p. 97: ‘σονετοὺς τινας καὶ νομοθετικούς’ → ‘συνετούς τινας καὶ νομοθετικούς’
  • p. 106: ‘py’ → ‘occupy’
  • p. 144: ‘ono’ → ‘one’
  • p. 150: ‘when’ → ‘whom’
  • p. 168: ‘ordon’ → ‘order’
  • p. 187: ‘seventeeth’ → ‘seventeenth’
  • p. 198: ‘Ἀναλύτικα ὕστερα’ → ‘Ἀναλυτικὰ Ὕστερα’
  • p. 198: ‘now’ → ‘how’
  • p. 204: ‘befere’ → ‘before’
  • p. 205: ‘begun’ → ‘began’
  • p. 209: ‘is Morals;” This is Physics;“’ → ‘is Morals;” “This is Physics;”’
  • p. 212: ‘Consistly’ → ‘Consistently’
  • p. 223: ‘hi’ → ‘his’
  • p. 228: ‘(deo Syrexy) ;’ → ‘(αἰσθητική);’
  • p. 228: ‘(Opexrun);’ → ‘(θρεπτική);’
  • p. 232: ‘he’ → ‘be’
  • p. 234: ‘kiud’ → ‘kind’
  • p. 235: ‘differerg’ → ‘differing’
  • p. 239: ‘the Platonic Republic bears’ → ‘the Platonic Republic bears’
  • p. 249: ‘Ἦν δὲ πονικὸς μὲν καὶδἀφύσικος δὲ καὶ βραδὺς ὑπερβαλλόντως. Ὄνος ἀκούων προσεδέχετο· λέγων αὐτὸς μόνος δύνασθαι βαστάζειν τὸ Ζήνωνος φορτίον’ → ‘Ἦν δὲ πονικὸς μὲν ἀφυσικὸς δὲ καὶ βραδὺς ὑπερβαλλόντως. Ὄνος ἀκούων προσεδέχετο· λέγων αὐτὸς μόνος δύνασθαι βαστάζειν τὸ Ζήνωνος φορτίον’
  • p. 249: ‘satisfactory’ → ‘satisfactorily’
  • p. 250: ‘3.’ → ‘4.’
  • p. 253: ‘incomprehensibe’ → ‘incomprehensible’
  • p. 259: ‘repective’ → ‘respective’

Printer’s oddities that are not errors were left exactly as printed (including inconsistent proper-name spellings and the original’s own numbering gaps).