Section I. Greece After the Time of Alexander
1. The small remains of the later schools; It may surprise our readers that so large a portion of this sketch should have been devoted to Greek philosophy, and that nothing should yet have been said about those schools which we are wont to regard as the great representatives of it. The Epicureans, the Stoics, the Academics, are continually spoken of as the Greek schools. Not a few young Englishmen grow up with the impression that in them are to be found those thoughts in their highest and most concentrated form, which have made Greece wonderful. Such an impression is strangely at variance with facts. What have the teachers of these great schools left, by which we may judge of them and of their doings? Of Epicurus, we have three letters preserved by Diogenes Laertius; of Zeno, nothing; of Cleanthes, a single hymn to Jupiter; of the Academics, merely traditions. We have not spoken of the three books of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, because, amidst the multitude of his books, it was necessary to choose those which refer most directly to our subject. In each of these books—we might add, in the short notes on poetry—there is five times as much matter bearing directly upon moral and metaphysical philosophy as in all the Greek remains of the later schools (of course we limit the remark to the time before Christ). If their words and those of Aristotle were weighed instead of measured, we believe the disproportion would be found far greater.
2. yet they wrote largely. It cannot be replied to this statement that Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, wrote nothing, and yet that few men have done more to awaken the energies by which books are produced. Epicurus, Zeno, and their respective followers, belong to an age of books, and were in the strictest sense makers of books. Each of them may have written as much as Aristotle. The dialogue, as an interchange of feelings with disciples, can never have been characteristic of them; they were teachers, lecturers, men who laid down maxims and laws which their disciples repeated, modified, and argued for.
3. And this is in part the explanation and the justification of the place which has been assigned them among their countrymen. We have heard of seekers of wisdom, of men who were steadily working out problems. The men we are speaking of had finished their search, had solved their problems. They had ascertained what was to be known and not to be known; they could set down the results of their inquiries in definite, manageable propositions; they had a well-ascertained, transmissible doctrine. They therefore deserve the name which has been given them—they are the Greek sects. To call them the Greek philosophers is absurd, at least if philosophy is to bear the sense which Socrates or even which Aristotle gave to it. But they did distinctly appropriate to themselves one set of conclusions or results; they had fixed theses and formulas which could be learned by heart; they could supply the Greeks of the ages to which they belonged with all that the Greeks of those ages wanted—topics of disputation; they could supply another, and a nobler race, with suggestions which they could mould into something like a satisfaction for the cravings of their energetic minds.
4. The age of Alexander. The great Alexandrian period had succeeded to the republican period—the age when Greeks proved that they could subdue barbarians to the age when they maintained their own freedom against barbarians, or indulged the excesses of that freedom in conflicts with each other. Of this time we have considered Aristotle as the representative. This was the time when he surveyed all the different provinces of human thought, and mapped them out; when he reproduced the inquiries of his predecessors, and cast them into moulds of his own; above all, when he assigned to the wise man and to the practical man, two perfectly distinct spheres of activity, though spheres in which each might beneficially or injuriously affect the other. Aristotle then, to a great extent, proclaimed the search for wisdom to be at an end. He left the impression on the minds of his disciples that the whole scheme of the universe could be brought under the forms of the human understanding. No doubt there was much in his teaching to counteract this impression. There was a vast range for the activity of the practical man in regulating his own mind, in preserving or improving society. The divine “Theorist” might surely hope that he, too, had a field to explore which was almost or quite inexhaustible. So long as the age of Alexander lasted, the practical man and the theorist would alike gain strength and hope from the change which was taking place in the state of the world, from the new treasures that were discovered in it, from the prospect of seeing Greek wisdom at the head of it.
5. The age which succeeded. That dream passed away: there were some, perhaps, who felt while it lasted how brief it was to be. An age of intrigue succeeded, in which all great principles were lost sight of; in which it was proved that the elements of which Greek society consisted were absolutely unsociable; in which, however, the restoration of the older freedom was as hopeless as the preservation of a united empire. What a sense of weariness and exhaustion must alterations so sudden have produced in the mind of the most active and feverish nation that ever existed! How certainly would the speculations of its wise men reflect that weariness and hopelessness!
6. The new Scepticism. Scepticism we have spoken of as a Greek characteristic. So far from attributing it to philosophy, we have supposed that philosophy was a great protest against it. If a Greek could learn that there was something which he could not create, he had advanced a certain way towards reverence and belief. But another kind of scepticism was possible, which may, in some sense, be called the fruit of philosophy. A man might say, “We have been seeking a long time; what have we found? Have we got hold of any certain determinations? Aristotle says that we have. Socrates and Plato seem to say the reverse. They perhaps are as good authorities as he is. And when we consider what a multitude of different notions have been circulating among us for these two or three hundred years, who can be confident that any one is entitled to more respect than any other? Some function there is, undoubtedly, for the wise man. We Greeks are assuredly to be still, as we have always been, the wise people of the earth. But the function of the wise man is not perhaps to determine anything. May it not be rather that he is to tell us how it is best for those to behave themselves, who, as Socrates said, know that they know nothing?”
7. Pyrrho; his history. Of this state of mind, Pyrrho has always been considered the representative. He is said to have been in the army of Alexander, to have conversed with the Indian Gymnosophists, to have arrived at the conclusion that there is nothing noble or base, or just or unjust; that nothing truly is; that men do all things by custom and law; that each individual thing is not more this than that. Being naturally nervous, he is said to have cultivated, with great success, ἀταραξία, or freedom from disturbance; so that he would not leave the road to escape from being thrown down by a carriage, or bitten by a dog; that he lived 90 years; that he was made a high priest by his own citizens, who, for his sake, excused philosophers from payment of taxes; that the Athenians honoured him with their citizenship.
8. Its internal probability. Excepting the reports about his practical conduct, which are merely jokes, not very clever ones, upon his efforts after quietness, the outlines of this story are very credible. A Greek coming into contact with an absorbed Brahmin would be very likely to admire his seeming freedom from external disquiet, and, at the same time, to increase his own growing doubts about the importance or reality of the questions in which his people had been interested. The language about the good and the base is the ordinary language of sceptical despair. Such despair being compatible with the belief that anything is possible because nothing is true, could not the least disqualify a man for a priest. It was not natural that the city which in less degenerate days gave Socrates the hemlock, should give Pyrrho its highest rewards for stating in words that which a great majority of Athenians will at once have recognised as their own inward persuasion. Whether the history of the individual man Pyrrho is authentic or fictitious, it is no doubt in substance the history of thousands in that time.
9. But what is there in this universal scepticism which at all corresponds to the character we have given of the different sects? Pyrrhonism at the root of the sects, which were, however, a reaction against it. In one sense, Pyrrhonism lay at the root of all these sects; in another they were the reaction against it. A despair of discovery—of philosophy in its old sense—was implied in them all. A belief that the main object of the wise man is to seek for freedom from the disturbances and distresses of the ordinary man, is implied in them all. But men who have fallen into doubt through exhaustion soon find doubt itself very exhausting. They crave for some distinct, positive decisions; decisions, if possible, which shall be novel, which shall be better than any given before; which shall make them conscious of their superiority to those in past times who toiled and travailed, and after all affirmed little; decisions which shall embody the results of much thinking without calling for the effort of it; but, at all events, decisions, which can be easily set forth and argued for, and used to controvert any old or new opinion that may be opposed to them.
Section II. Epicurus
born b.c. 342, died b.c. 270.
1. Epicurus a dogmatist. Epicurus, we are told, liked to hear anecdotes respecting the indifference and apathy of Pyrrho. In these qualities he aspired to imitate him. But Epicurus was no doubter; he was the most imperious of dogmatists. No one had ever such entire faith in his own conclusions; no one more thoroughly and heartily rejected all conclusions but his own, as absurd, even as impossible. Unless he had attained to this perfect satisfaction in his own judgment, he would have missed the main object which he proposed to himself. But, on the other hand, any one who proposes that object to himself may be tolerably secure of attaining such self-confidence. A man must be brought into a peculiar condition of mind before he can believe that the universe and all that it contains exist only that they may tell him how he is to be comfortable; but when he has once believed this, it will be wonderful indeed if his ears ever catch any sound which is not an echo to his demand, or some fragment of an answer to it. Do you deny that all men like pleasure and dislike pain? This is his kind of inquiry, which, as it means simply, Do you deny that all men like what they like, and dislike what they dislike? certainly reduces an opponent to very considerable perplexity.
2. His boast of originality. Epicurus was fond of boasting that he had made his own philosophy. He was a “self-taught” man. A really original thinker seldom puts forth such a profession. He knows that what he has learnt is his own; he is glad to confess from whom he has learnt. Epicurus might be perfectly honest in saying that he had read very little, and had worked out his conclusions in his own mind; but he was a copyist nevertheless; few men more entirely so. Aristotle had shown clearly that if an absolute good is not the end of practical life, happiness must be its end. Epicurus could say no more; he could only find out some new criterion of happiness, seeing that Aristotle’s definition of it as an energy of the soul, put forth in conformity with certain existing relations, implying a body politic, must needs be unsatisfactory. In seeking for this criterion, Epicurus had no resource but to adopt the old sophistical dogma; he could only say that we must refer everything to the standard of our sensations. No doubt he may have refined considerably upon this thought, for, in the first place, he had a body of formulas provided him by Plato and Aristotle on the subject of sensations; and, secondly, he lived in an age in which thought was less active, but in which all that contributes to mere gratification, whether bodily or mental, was far better understood. Sensation. It is a question which has been much, and we think very unnecessarily, debated, whether, by making sensation his standard of happiness, Epicurus did, or did not, mean to encourage what is formally called sensuality. The testimonies of antiquity respecting his personal character are various, and the most modern criticism seems rather inclined to revert to the vulgar opinion respecting it, rejecting, certainly with good reason, the fanatical panegyrics of some French and English writers in the last century. Upon the whole, we are inclined to believe that Epicurus was an apathetic, decorous, formal man, who was able, without any great difficulty, to cultivate a measured and even habit of mind, who may have occasionally indulged in sensual gratifications to prove that he thought them lawful, but who generally preferred, as a matter of taste, the exercises of the intellect to the more violent forms of self-indulgence. And this life would, it seems to us, be most consistent with his opinions. To avoid commotion, to make the stream of life flow on as easily and uninterruptedly as possible, was clearly the aim of his philosophy.
3. Dialectics and Physics—why touched by Epicurus. For this end it was advisable to avoid the pursuit of wealth and honours; it was better to abstain from extremely vehement enjoyments, but it was absolutely necessary to get rid of all superstitious fears. How these were produced was, therefore, an important question for the founder of such a system. The answer to it led him much further than he at first intended to go. Naturally, Epicurus cared only for moral questions, that is to say, for such questions as related to the management of human life. With dialectics, either in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense of the word, he had no proper concern; for what had he to do with a science which distinguishes the false from the true either in things or words? In physics he took even less interest; the fixed order of nature is a painful weight upon the mind of a man who aims at adjusting a scheme for himself, and who disbelieves in any actual order and government. Theology, so intimately blended with both of these in the earlier systems, would have been still more resolutely banished from his. But then all these subjects must pass under his review, because from all of them conclusions had been derived which affect man’s serenity and cause him dreams. A study answering to logic may be used to explain the origin of opinions, and why some of them must, for want of better epithets, be called false and some true. A man has certain sensations, and certain images are presented to him from without. The sensations are to be trusted, the representations are to be trusted: only in the exercise of some power by which a judgment is formed from these sensations or representations does error arise. These are corrected by referring again to the sensations, the only ultimate standards. Here again the originality of Epicurus consists, it will be seen, wholly in his omissions.
4. How to escape from the sense of an order. The relation between the senses and the visible representations which are set before them had been treated by Plato and Aristotle, each in his own method, with the profoundest skill and discrimination. Epicurus had only to avail himself of such fragments from the intuitive observations of the one, or the rigid analysis of the other, as were consistent with the rejection of their principle that there is another and a surer standard than that which the senses supply. In physics Epicurus was still a copyist; and any one who studies the rest of his philosophy may perceive that, as he adopted the theory of Democritus simply because it was the one which it was most comfortable to hold, so he was guided, in many changes which he introduced into it, simply by the wish to get rid of some distressing fact which interfered with his moral speculations, and made his scheme of life less practicable. The idea of mysterious powers in nature had been one which had at all times haunted the Greek mind, and to which the speculations of the philosophers bore as much witness as the fables of the mythologists. With this thought was connected another, still more oppressive to the mind of Epicurus, still more interfering with the calmness and apathy of the true sage. It seemed that these powers were organised, that there were the vestiges of a scheme in nature, that there was something in them which answered to man’s own powers of art and contrivance, while it controlled them. From these painful impressions there was one joyful refuge. The notion of the world being composed of atoms which had met in empty space, had united and disposed themselves into the light forms or heavy masses of which our senses take cognizance, at once relieved Physics of its connection with Theology.
5. The Soul of man. And since one product of these invisible atoms was that which had been called the soul of man, a new light dawned upon the moral system from this natural philosophy, a new confirmation of the great principle that man is a machine which may, like any other, be regulated and adjusted to produce certain desirable results.
6. Declination of Atoms. One fault, however, there is in the doctrine of Democritus. His descent of atoms in a direct line savoured too much of a determinate purpose, a fixed law. Suppose them to decline a little from the line—a very little—and this charm is broken, and, what is better still, you have a method of accounting for the existence of choice and freedom in man. If Epicurus anticipated an actual physical discovery in this speculation, it is a new evidence that the divinity which he supposed took no interest in human thoughts or designs, does sometimes shape them into a strange resemblance of what is true, when they are shaping themselves into the most grotesque forms of falsehood. On the whole, it seems unnecessary to attribute to the founder of this philosophy any deep and malignant design of undermining the foundations of human belief or human conduct. The worst that can be said of him is, that he exactly caught the impression of a wretched emasculated age; the best that can be said of him is, that he showed some skill in combining the notions of former philosophers into the only scheme of doctrine which could seem to the men of such an age plausible or possible. One thing should be noticed, that if Epicurism is ultimately destructive of moral habits, it is not to these, but to science, that it sets itself in direct opposition. The Epicurean the enemy of science. The Epicurean is essentially the unscientific man—it would be more correct to say, the hater of science; a fact the more striking, because in modern days, when physical science has established itself in the world by another agency than theirs, the disciples of this school have sometimes affected to take it under their patronage, and even to boast of themselves as the exclusive promoters of it. Perhaps we shall find, when we come to speak of them, that they have departed more in appearance than in reality from the fundamental principle of their sect.
Section III. Stoicism
1. Stoicism a struggle against unbelief. The second great effort against the Pyrrhonism of this age is the Stoic philosophy. In speaking of this system, as well as of the last, we must endeavour to detach ourselves as much as possible from Roman associations and representations. To do this entirely is out of the question, for till these philosophies were adopted by the living minds of Rome, they can scarcely be said to have found their meaning. Still it is important to consider the form of the statue as it came from Greek artists, now no longer able of themselves to impart animation to their works, before it was embraced by the Italian Pygmalion. If we reflect how deeply the feeling of an intercourse between men and a divine race superior to themselves had worked itself into the Greek character, what a number of fables, some beautiful, some impure, it had impregnated and procured credence for, how it sustained every form of polity and every system of laws, we may imagine what the effects must have been of its disappearance. If it is possible for a man, it certainly was not possible for a Greek, to feel himself connected by any real bonds with his fellow-creatures around him, when he felt himself utterly separated from every being but them. But the sense of this isolation would affect different minds very differently. Zeno: birth uncertain; died 263 B.C. It drove the Epicurean to consider how he might make a world in which he should live comfortably, without distracting visions of the past and future, and the dread of those powers who no longer awakened in him any feelings of sympathy. It drove Zeno to consider whether a man may not find enough in himself to satisfy him, though what is beyond him be ever so unfriendly. This again was no new problem, either for a practical man or a theorist to deal with. Again and again it had presented itself to the Greek sages; again and again experiments had been made to solve it, and the conditions under which it could and could not be solved had been profoundly investigated. Here then, as in the former case, we can expect no originality in conception; the sole interest lies in the thorough desolation of heart which led the philosophers of the Porch to venture once more upon this inquiry. We may trace in the productions which are attributed to Zeno a very clear indication of the feeling which was at work in his mind. He undertook, for instance, among other tasks, to answer Plato’s Republic. The truth that man is a political being, which informs and pervades that book, was one which must have been particularly harassing to his mind, and which he felt must be got rid of before he could hope to assert his doctrine of a man’s solitary dignity. He appears to have carried out, with some consistency and steadiness in his life, the principle for which he was contending, really showing an indifference to outward circumstances, and maintaining, with less dogmatical affectation than many others, a creditable independence and uprightness of character. Zeno taught at Athens. The Athenian respect for him. He was not accused of corrupting the youth or bringing in new demons; he received a golden crown, and was buried publicly in the Ceramicus. Athens may not have sympathised with his severity as much as with the indifference of Pyrrho; but it could do justice to the good qualities of any man whom it could understand. Socrates was neither sceptic nor dogmatist; they knew not where to have him; it was safer to get rid of him.
2. Cleanthes, born about B.C. 300. It is pleasant to meet with a hardy, energetic, and free man in this dreary and formal time. Cleanthes, the disciple and successor of Zeno, seems to deserve this character.
One who began life as a boxer,1 who came to Athens with five drachmas; who drew water by night that he might have leisure to attend Zeno’s lectures by day; who was brought before the Dicastery to account for his healthy appearance when he had no obvious means of supporting existence, and who was acquitted upon the testimony of the gardeners for whom he worked; who refused the ten minæ which the Areopagus offered him as a reward of this discovery; who was accounted a very slow toilsome man,2 and patiently endured to be called “The ass,” taking it as a compliment that he could bear the burden which Zeno put upon him—such a man would be a striking figure in any time, specially striking amidst a race of clever talkers, impatient of rough toil, ambitious above all things of the reputation for quickness and wit.
Cleanthes wrote a great many beautiful books, says the biographer. The list of their titles makes us glad that they are lost, as they might probably have spoiled our impressions of him as a living being; degraded him into a mere discourser upon Sensation, Time, Art. He survives truly and satisfactorily in his Hymn to Jupiter, which is the only production remaining to us that connects the early Stoicism with the higher and nobler form it acquired, after it had received the Roman impregnation, in the Life and Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
3. Chrysippus, born B.C. 280. The “slow” Cleanthes had far less favour in the Porch than his pupil, the rapid Chrysippus.3 “Give me your doctrines and I will find the demonstrations,” he said to the humble bearer of burdens. “If the gods have a science of dialectics among them it must be that of Chrysippus,” was the reverent language of his disciples. He did not dissent from their judgment respecting him. “To what instructor shall I commit my son?” asked an anxious parent. “To me,” said the Stoic; “if there were a better philosopher to be found, should not I go to him?”
Such a person was not likely to write a hymn to Jupiter; but he was the man of all others to perfect the Stoical system. There had been many differences among the professed followers of Zeno. Ariston scorned dialectics; and seems, in some of his conclusions, to have approached Epicurus. Chrysippus put an end to these heresies, and gave the school a definite form and culture. It may be worth while to point out very briefly how the first naked conception of a man striving to live apart from the time and things around him, shaped itself into a compact and tolerably consistent theory of the universe.
4. Stoical division. The Stoics could hardly invent any division of studies different from that which use had so long sanctioned; they could not be so negligent as not to extend their theory into the different departments of Morals, Logic, and Physics. They introduced, however, a novelty of expression. They spoke of Virtue as being ethical, logical, and physical. It was not that there were three different kinds of virtue, but three different parts which composed it: logic, they said, was the shell of the egg, ethics the white, physics the yelk. Much may be learnt from this language. First we learn that virtue, a certain state of mind or character in the individual man, is all that the Stoic is capable of conceiving. This is the ultimate idea upon which all ideas of truth, as well as of outward tangible forms, are dependent. It will be seen at once how easily such an opinion as this grew out of the Aristotelian doctrine, and yet how it may have appeared, in certain points of view, more unlike to that than to the Platonic. In the doctrine of Socrates, developed by his great disciple, virtue in man is always a conformity to a standard out of himself, a participation in that which is absolutely good, and inseparable from the possession of that which is absolutely true. This doctrine Aristotle rejected, striving to fix practical morality in one department, and the study of Being in another. Upon his system, virtue and happiness acquired the substantive and independent character which neither Socrates nor Plato could ever have assigned them. But the very separation which he had effected between the provinces of Ethics and Ontology enabled him the more easily to follow the natural bent of his character, and to represent the contemplative life as the highest life—that which peculiarly appertains to the philosopher. The difference between the Stoic and Socrates. The Stoic, in carrying out his conception respecting virtue, disconnecting it entirely from every dream of an absolute good, rejected with indignation his praise of Contemplation, and seemed to return to the older Socratic language by representing virtue as consisting in a conflict with appearances and deceptions. But the fact is that the Stoic took only the negative side of the Socratic doctrine; his virtue had nothing to converse with, nothing to behold but itself; the impediments which it was to clear out of its way, the temptations which it was to resist, were not those which dimmed the human vision, and prevented it from beholding its proper object, but only those which made it less conscious of its own independence and glory. The Stoical ethics, therefore—borrowing all which was genuine and vital in them from the language of Socrates respecting the slavery of the undisciplined and sensual spirit, borrowing also and misapplying many of his phrases respecting the connection of virtue with science—so far as they were of native manufacture, consisted merely of pithy maxims of conduct, wire-drawn and minute, entering into the lowest details and frivolities, tending to emasculate the character under pretence of elevating it, and worthy of the censure that they were fitter for nurses than for philosophers. This was the white of the egg.
5. The Dialectical shell. That Dialectics should have been nothing more than the shell, is a proof how very little of the real feeling of the Socratic philosophy had survived in this feeble imitation of it. In fact, the language to which we have just alluded, in which science was represented as connected, nay, almost identical with virtue, meant, in the mouths of the Stoics, nothing more than this—that a virtuous man is a man of good taste, has a shrewd discernment of what should be accepted and of what should be rejected. Truth as reality, falsehood as a positive opposite to truth, they in nowise recognised. Dialectics, therefore, in the Platonic sense, which is the science of distinguishing between truth and falsehood, they had no use for. All they understood was that in some way or other that which is desirable is preferred by some and not preferred by others, and that it was necessary, therefore, to inquire what it is in us which determines the fitness or unfitness of things; how we know when we get a right result from things, and when we get a wrong one. In all essential respects their conclusions upon the subject were the same as the Epicurean; that is to say, the one has just as little belief as the other in any standard besides sense, in any difference between the real and the apparent. The difference of their moral scheme, however, made the Stoics unwilling to acknowledge this similarity; they wished to persuade themselves—to a certain extent they could persuade themselves honestly—that those who aimed at the attainment of virtue as their end, would not have the same fluctuating rule and measure of what was good, as those who aimed only at the production of certain pleasurable results. The Stoics sought therefore for a science, though they could not reach it; and in their attempt to reach it they invented a number of acute verbal distinctions, which, with some mixture of grammar and rhetoric, constituted their dialectical virtue, as those rules of behaviour of which we spoke just now constituted their moral. Certainly this was very fitly compared to a shell containing no nourishment in itself, and so conveniently fragile as to afford an easy passage to the yelk within.
6. The physical yelk. It may surprise our readers that the essential part of the Stoical egg, the whole of which is the type of Virtue, should be the physical part. But there is nothing really inconsistent in this notion, either with the origin of Stoicism or its after-development. If the Epicurean undervalued physics because they spoke of something fixed and pre-ordained, something therefore inconsistent with that adjustment and adaptation to circumstances and accidents which he considered his chief good, the Stoic, who wished to rise above circumstances, to attain a firm and independent position, as naturally delighted to contemplate an undeviating system. The perception of any real law and standard for man had forsaken both alike. But there are some who can never lose their deep feeling of the necessity for such a law; these therefore, in their despair of discovering it, will take refuge in the most exact type and counterpart of that which they are seeking, in the sequence of the operations of nature. The invariable attendant upon this feeling is, reverence for fate or necessity, with a proud and voluntary submission of ourselves to its dominion. Such a Fate became the god of the Stoic—strictly speaking his only god; but as he saw it imaged in the movements of the universe, and as he felt at times the need of something more real, more connected with himself than this abstraction, the World became the living form in which he contemplated the object of his worship. And since he found it expedient for the strengthening of some of his moral habits, and accordant with some of the maxims of his philosophy, not to reject established opinions, he easily persuaded himself to adopt the opinion of Aristotle, that the old legends did in fact represent processes in the material world. They might, therefore, without any violation of his philosophical dignity, be recognised and defended. Theology being thus identified with physics, it surely becomes no matter of surprise that the latter should be treated as the most inward and sacred part of morality.
Section IV. The Academic
1. Plato most perplexing to his school One sect yet remains to be mentioned to complete our picture of Grecian philosophy in its decrepitude and decline. This is the Academic. We have seen how entirely the very power of conceiving that which we have described as the central principle of Plato’s philosophy had departed from his countrymen. All his language about Being was to them the merest dream; they could not even understand the elaborate arguments of Aristotle against his doctrine. Nay, his views respecting the Form and the Matter in each substance had become practically as unintelligible as the deeper speculations of his master. Under such circumstances we may easily conceive what a change must have taken place in the schools bearing their names. The Peripatetic, who worshipped the name of Aristotle, might still satisfactorily expound his Physics, his Logic, part of his Metaphysics, and whatever of his Ethics could be detached from the Politics; but the Academics found the incomprehensible part of their master’s creed impregnating all his works; it could no more be detached from the Phædrus and the Phædon than from the Republic.
2. The resource There was, however, one circumstance in their favour. For reasons which we have considered at quite sufficient length, the great principle of Plato is developed in dialogues, in which two propositions seem to be set up for the purpose of knocking each other down. Could anything be more natural than the notion that Plato intended hereby to keep men’s judgments in a perpetual equilibrium; to maintain, in short, a habit of entire interminable scepticism? The conclusion was most plausible; yet so much did there appear in the writings and in the whole purpose of Plato to refute it, so much did it seem the very object of his life to overthrow scepticism, that a long time elapsed before this plausible notion was able to establish itself. The Academy appears to have undergone many changes; what they were has been the subject of much controversy, but the language of Cicero leaves little doubt that it did at one time assert certain dogmatical propositions as the doctrine of Plato, and that it passed by slow degrees into that purely sceptical society from which he derived, or fancied he derived, his own opinions.
3. Platonists, Sophists, and Rhetoricians. The result is curious, but by no means inexplicable. Scepticism was, as we have said, the foundation of both the other sects, though they attempted to break loose from it. The Academic yielded submissively to the spirit of the times, and embodied it most consistently in his own no views. He discoursed eloquently upon all topics, carefully abstained from coming to a conclusion upon any; he could not say what was right, but he was satisfied that both Epicurean and Stoic were wrong, and this was quite sufficient for his purpose. Arguing was his vocation; a kind of arguing, however, which did not exclude an indulgence in flights and flourishes of rhetoric, when the occasion might serve for their introduction. In fact, the disciples of that philosopher who wrote the Gorgias and the Phædrus became nothing else than the teachers of men how to become Sophists and Rhetoricians. Such were the lees of Greek philosophy, from which one may conjecture how rich must have been its flavour, how full its body, when it was in its prime.