# Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy: A Modern Paraphrase

*Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy, by Frederick Denison Maurice, restated paragraph by paragraph in modern English. This paraphrase follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation. Drafted with claude-sonnet-5-5; reviewed by a human editor.*

## PREFACE

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TO THE SECOND EDITION.
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The article on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy in the *Encyclopædia Metropolitana* was written at the request of the late Rev. Hugh James Rose, who became Editor of that work after Mr. Smedley died. Mr. Rose wanted the treatise to be historical rather than didactic. I thought there were already many histories of Philosophy, that a single Encyclopædia article had hardly room for one, and that I was not competent to write it. Yet the reasons Mr. Rose gave for objecting to a dogmatic treatise seemed to me very weighty.

On reflection I concluded that I would be doing what the Editor wanted if I did not offer a formal, regular account of the systems. He himself heartily disliked mere historical abridgments. Students can find such accounts in the many French and German works that claim to supply them. Instead I would give a few hints to help them examine the purpose of the most conspicuous teachers, read their books where any survive, and connect them with the country and age in which they lived. By keeping to this aim, I hoped the article, though short and imperfect, need not be superficial. Its remarks could not replace the reader's own reflection or a study of the original sources, but I hoped they might lead to both.

Nearly twelve years after the death of the kind and excellent man under whom I began this essay, I have been asked to prepare it for separate publication. Looking it over after so long, I find that it fell short even of the modest aim I had set. As it now seems to me, I failed to grasp clearly what the word Philosophy means. I failed to see what part different nations had taken in the inquiries it names, to trace the workings of the Wisdom that guided those inquiries, and to notice how one grew out of another. I also found that I had indulged too much in disquisition and too little in biography. I have tried to correct some of these errors in this volume, much of which is entirely new. Some errors, I have no doubt, remain, and will offend the reader as much as they offend me. I want him at least to understand what I have attempted, so that he may be more aware of my deficiencies, suffer less from them, and not judge me by the standard of learned and elaborate books, which I never pretended to imitate. I would gladly have removed the disagreeable affectation of the plural pronoun. But I did not want to sever the connection between this volume and the Encyclopædia, since I have many personal reasons to be thankful that I had the honour of contributing to its pages.

This volume treats only of Ancient Philosophy. The second part of the original article will need to be entirely rewritten.

London: *July* 1850.

## INTRODUCTION.

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I\.
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I. Philosophy literally means the love of Wisdom. That is the love of a hidden treasure, so it comes to mean a *search* after Wisdom.

II\. All have admitted that this hidden treasure cannot be seen, handled, weighed or measured. Yet it may be sought among things that can be: among things that are produced and grow, that is, among *Physical* things.

III\. The philosopher asks whether Wisdom is in these things and of the same kind as they are, or of a different kind: fixed, constant, unproduced. One who seeks an object not of the same kind as the things around him is called a *Metaphysical* philosopher.

IV\. But how has he learned to dream of an object different in kind from these things? Is *he* different from them? How does he come to desire this Wisdom, this hidden treasure? Must it not have more to do with him than with them? If he knew himself, and the ways, habits and manners of his race, might he not be nearer to what he seeks? These ways, habits and manners are the concern of the *Moral* philosopher.

V. This sketch aims to show how men have been led into these inquiries, how they have been pursued in different countries and ages, and what has come of them.

VI\. Moral inquiries are suggested by our daily acts, our ordinary speech and our necessary relations. Metaphysical inquiries are suggested by our discovery of powers in ourselves that we do not find in other creatures. The moral therefore concern us most, and in a history will come first. But we shall find that they cannot be separated from the metaphysical. Physical inquiries pursued merely to learn the order and constitution of the world around us I shall not report. But insofar as they were prompted by the desire to find Wisdom, they are too bound up with moral inquiries, and too plainly assumed in the word *metaphysical*, to be passed over. The philosopher seeks for Wisdom everywhere so that he may know where it is not.

VII\. All nations have engaged in this search, and those that have left the most records in the History of the World have done so most actively. Buildings, poems, pictures, mechanical arts, and above all polities, show the direction that different periods, countries and individuals have taken in it. But the name "Philosopher" has generally, and rightly, been kept for one who has searched deliberately and traced out a method. Such a man interprets the less conscious striving of his contemporaries.

VIII\. It would be a fatal mistake to make even the most rapid sketch of philosophical inquiry merely a record of the conclusions different Schools reached. These are generally premature attempts to end the search for Wisdom and to confine its results to a few meagre propositions. It is far more interesting, and far more the historian's proper work, to trace the thoughts at work in the minds of the founders of Schools. He should discover how they were affected by their characters, teachers, disciples, opponents, and personal and political conflicts, and watch how those thoughts were expanded, completed or narrowed. Those who busy themselves with the speculations and contradictions of Schools are likely to begin with extravagant expectations and end in despondency. Earnest, sympathetic meditation on men's actual efforts to discover the secret of their life and the ends they live for offers equal encouragement to humility and to hope.

IX\. The sketch will have two parts: Philosophy before and after the coming of Christ. The first part will treat of: 1st, the Hebrew Philosophy; 2nd, the Hindoo; 3rd, the Chinese; 4th, the Persian; 5th, the Greek; 6th, the Roman; 7th, the Græco-Hebraic or Alexandrian. The second part will treat of: 1, the Philosophy of the first six centuries; 2, the Philosophy of the Middle Ages; 3, the Philosophy of the centuries from the thirteenth to our own time.

## CHAPTER I. THE HEBREWS.

### SECTION I. GROUNDS OF HEBREW PHILOSOPHY.

1\. [The]{.smallcaps} historian of philosophy usually passes over the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet the book of Job describes philosophy in exact language. "Where is wisdom found, and where is the place of understanding?" is said to be *the* inquiry that matters more to man than finding veins of silver or bringing gold out of the earth. The book of Proverbs makes the search for wisdom its subject and purpose, and says man must dig for it as for hidden treasure. This language hardly fits an opinion that people of the most opposite views have eagerly held: that these books assume all knowledge to be handed down from above, so that man has nothing to search out. The opinion could not be so general unless there were facts or reasons behind it. The writers of Job and Proverbs do presume a revelation, and they ground both the possibility and the duty of searching for wisdom upon it. So revelation must mean something different to them than it does to many moderns. To learn what it means, we must go to the books that profess to record how God made himself known to man. There we will find not Hebrew philosophy itself, but its grounds and elements.

2\. Genesis opens with the creation of the World, or Order, in which we live. Modern geological discoveries and speculations have done much to lift a veil from this record, and to bring out the all-important principle that the sacred historian speaks of the world in its relation to Man. If we forget this, the whole later history becomes incoherent and unintelligible. We must take the words "God made Man in his own likeness" as the key to it, and see the course of the visible world as secondary to the relation between God and our race.

3\. Once these data are assumed, it is no strange exception that the unseen Being should unveil himself to man; it is the law and condition of man's being. The contradiction would be that He after whose image man is made should not give him the capacity to behold his own archetype, and should refuse him the power to be what he was made to be. These Scriptures treat it throughout as a contradiction. God is everywhere speaking to man, and man is meant to hear. God places the first man in a garden, calls forth in him the power to name the creatures, gives him a helpmate, and creates the marriage bond. Man submits to a lower creature, denies the authority of the invisible Lord, and tries to hide from His presence. He is awakened to own that presence and to feel he has transgressed. He is driven from the garden and must eat his bread by the sweat of his brow; but this labour is to teach him that he depends not on the earth he tills but on an invisible Ruler. The first murder is committed, and God asks Cain for his brother. Cain's great punishment is to go out from God's presence. His descendants build cities and invent mechanical arts. Another race, headed by Seth, is said to be called by the name of the Lord. The first is irregular and disorderly; the second confesses itself under Divine government. Though nothing is recorded of it but the succession of its families, it is treated as being in the state intended for man at that stage of his growth. Violence and confusion later overspread the earth, and a flood punishes the wickedness of its inhabitants; the race is preserved in one of the Seth family. A covenant of God with man is the foundation of the restored world. Noah's sons are meant to people the earth according to their tongues, nations and families. Some of them seek to defy this purpose by building a tower on the plain of Shinar so as not to be scattered. God confounds the scheme, and they leave off building. But a mighty hunter establishes the kingdoms of Babel and Nineveh, and Scripture throughout treats the Babel kingdom as the form of godless society.

4\. A Divine education, then, is assumed as the regular basis of human life and fellowship. God teaches man what he is, and man knows what he is and fulfils his task just so far as he receives this instruction. It comes from an invisible Being and is addressed to something in man other than what connects him with the visible world. Man is always ready to forget God and bow down to visible things. To that extent he becomes a slave and an animal, and the society he lives in becomes corrupt and untenable.

5\. Abram is called by God out of his father's house to go into a strange land, and this calling is the foundation of his life. The Lord of all speaks to him; he heeds and obeys. God makes him know that He is one he may trust, and he believes in Him as righteous. His faith is counted to him for righteousness; he acknowledges the Being in whose likeness he is made, and becomes like Him. His outward life is very commonplace: a shepherd with many flocks and herds, dwelling in tents among city-dwellers with whom he does not mix but has frequent dealings. Once he leads his servants to rescue a kinsman living in Sodom. Returning, he meets a priest of the most high God in Salem and gives him a tenth of the spoil. He goes into Egypt, already an organized nation with a Pharaoh; there he loses his faith in God and tells a lie to save himself, which nearly costs him his wife. All his discipline is of this practical kind. He finds that God overthrows cities that have become hateful and given over to beastly crimes, and he is taught to intercede for the righteous in them. He is sure the Judge of all the earth will not slay them with the wicked: God must do right. Abraham lives under the promise that in him and his seed all families of the earth will be blessed, yet he has no seed. A child is born to him by a bondwoman in his house, and he hopes the promise is fulfilled; but he is told that his own wife's child must be heir. She is barren, yet he believes, and waits long. When the child is born and growing up, Abraham is called to sacrifice him. He gives himself to God, ready to do what is commanded. Another offering is provided, and Abraham is blessed for his trust. So the whole history, as far as he himself is concerned, is that of a man taught to know himself by knowing in whom he must believe. Nothing distinguishes him from his kind: he learns what he has in common with all human beings, the relations in which they stand to the world around them and to their Creator.

6\. But such a history cannot be merely individual. To know what he is, Abraham is taught what it is to be a master, a husband, a father. The discipline that most concerns himself concerns him in these roles; God speaks to him as head of a family and founder of a race. So he is educated to feel his connection with past and future. Hebrew history rests on the belief that God made a covenant with the patriarchs and their seed. They are circumcised and taught that they are separated and set apart by the Lord of all. The sign shows that what they are separated from is something in themselves: their own flesh is cut off. The Hebrew has the same tendency to forget God as other men. Other men, in turn, are treated as subjects of Divine teaching as much as the chosen race: God speaks to Abimelech and to Pharaoh, and the sign of the covenant is shared by Ishmael's descendants. The patriarchs are shown to have all their neighbours' evils, and some peculiar to themselves from their sense of special privilege. Jacob is more deceitful and treacherous than Esau, and the man who prizes his birthright more than the one who despises it. The one tries to get an heir's rights by trick; the other thinks nothing of the inheritance but much of the loss of corn and wine he believes goes with it. Both are disappointed. The deceiver becomes a wanderer, yet in his wandering learns that God is with him, though he knew it not, and that there is a ladder between earth and heaven. He has put himself under a Divine education, and it does not leave him till it has punished his falsehood. The frank, open-hearted hunter has his reward: he does not lose what he feared to lose; he misses only what he never cared for.

7\. The rest of Genesis is in harmony with this. The heads of the Jewish nation, the circumcised sons of Jacob, commit the crimes one might expect of wild shepherds and settlers, and their sins are especially family sins. The one who feels what it is to be in covenant with a righteous being is taught to understand his privilege by being an exile and a prisoner. He learns that God is with him, keeping him from evil and giving him wisdom. He believes that God cares for Pharaoh and Egypt, and is their Ruler and Teacher as well as his. He becomes an instructor to a king. Yet the historian is still chiefly occupied with family relations; he cares more to tell how Joseph behaved to his brothers and was made known to them than how he bought up the lands of Egypt. The consciences and hearts of human beings have testified that he is right: such records concern us more and are really more wonderful. They belong to humanity and morality, and set forth family relations as the first stage of spiritual history, the stage out of which all others must gradually develop.

8\. Exodus shows the Jewish people still as a collection of families. They have multiplied in Egypt, are regarded as a dangerous body of aliens, and are reduced to slavery. The book gives the history of their deliverance. God sees their affliction and hears their cry; He remembers his covenant and calls a man out of one of their tribes to deliver them. Egypt is presented as a nation abounding in wise men, who practise magic and soothsaying and advise the king. Moses is brought up in the king's court and learned in this wisdom. While still young he feels for his countrymen, tries to deliver them, and smites an Egyptian. He becomes an exile in Midian. There, keeping his father-in-law's flock at the back of the desert, he hears the Lord God tell him that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But God also makes known to Moses another name: "Say to the Israelites that the I Am hath sent thee to them." In this name Moses speaks to his countrymen and commands Pharaoh to let the people go. "The Lord God of the Hebrews" had sent him. Pharaoh asks "Who is the Lord God?" and increases the people's burdens. The river is smitten; flies, lice and locusts attack the Egyptians; the magicians mimic the plagues. At last they and the people confess that a real hand is stretched out upon them. The first-born are destroyed and the slaves go out with a high hand. A memorial feast is appointed, to be kept from generation to generation, as a witness that the Lord protected their households and brought them out of the house of bondage.

9\. At this stage the principles are plainly the same as in the first. The invisible Lord is still the great speaker and actor, men are in their right state when they hear His voice and confess His acting, and it is still the rule, not the exception, that He reveals himself. But this new revelation is of a deeper kind. The Egyptian priests and magicians had all sorts of thoughts and speculations about God, and plans for representing and propitiating Him. Hence came superstitions, tricks, the exaltation of men for their skill in the tricks, and worship of visible things in which they had found tokens of power, tools of usefulness, or causes of fear. The Lord of all comes forth declaring himself the true Being, himself the teacher of wisdom to man and the ruler of the things man is worshipping. He makes felt the power He is continually exercising. The plagues were startling specimens of judgments He had shown before and would show again in that land. They are remarkable chiefly because their reason is explained: natural agents are shown to obey a moral law. A righteous Being sends them, to punish the oppressor and deliver the oppressed.

10\. On this foundation the polity of the Israelites stands. The name of God is its ground. He is the people's deliverer; He calls out the leader who guides them through the wilderness; He gives them bread each morning and makes water flow from the rock. He goes before them by night and day and casts horse and rider into the deep. He is judge between man and man and teacher of their judges. He gives the law, appoints the priest and the sacrifice, orders the host and goes with it to battle. He is head of the tribes and fixes the bounds of their habitation. The commonest arrangements have their sanction from His name. He inspires the artificer with skill for cunning works, and himself dwells in the tabernacle and meets the worshipper at the mercy-seat.

11\. God's covenant is at the root of the national society as it was of the family society. For the most part the Jewish institutions were not new. Egypt already had a law, a priesthood, sacrifices and temples. The Jew did not bring these forms with him; he found them established in the land he entered as a band of shepherds. They might have been cast aside as parts of an idolatrous system. In that case the Israelites, having grown into a people, would have kept only family or pastoral institutions; they would have become an Arab horde. This would have been their fate if Moses had stolen the tenet of God's unity from the Egyptian sages and published it to his countrymen, as a witness that they were no longer a degraded caste and could worship the one God of nature instead of their oppressors' many gods. And if he had then, to suit their prejudices, pretended to a mission from an actual, living Being who authorized a system essentially Egyptian with a hard, lazy tenet of Divine unity tacked on, he would have framed the most incongruous scheme of falsehood ever palmed on the world, and his name should be held accursed as the wickedest of liars and blasphemers. Before we pronounce that sentence we should hear his own account. He does not boast of proclaiming any tenet about God's unity. He says the I Am, the living God, sent him to guide and deliver his countrymen. The Egyptians believed in a hidden god; he said that hidden God had come forth to declare himself. The Egyptians thought he had delegated to priests the power to interpret His mind; Moses said God was ever living and acting, and the priest was the witness of His presence and of His relation to men. The Egyptian held that sacrifices were the means of bending the Divine will to man's; Moses said they were confessions of man's revolt from God's will, and could never be bribes to the Divine Being, who had himself appointed their kind and amount. The Egyptian spoke of laws either irreversible or changeable at the monarch's will. Moses spoke of laws as the utterance of an unseen, eternal King, which no man could set aside, which ever proceeded from God's own mouth, enforced by thunders and lightnings, telling each Israelite he stood in God's presence and warning him of tendencies hateful to God that would destroy him. The Egyptian had statutes for the particular emergencies of the land, to be enforced by some religious machinery. The law of Moses assumes that the Lord of all, who does not think it beneath Him to care for the growth of trees and the fall of sparrows, directed the arrangements suited to an agricultural people on the Mediterranean shore. The Egyptians had temples where they worshipped beings conceived from the natural phenomena of each place. Moses affirmed that God does not float in the air or dwell in the hills or clouds; where it pleased Him to dwell, there His glory might be felt and the worshipper converse with Him.

Whether or not this description of the polity is true, it is at least consistent. It does not set aside Egyptian institutions or faith; it justifies them by inverting them. The Egyptian rested on man's conceptions of God; the Israelite on God's declaration of Himself to man. The one assumes the nation to be a society that must be upheld, and can only be upheld, by Divine sanction, and so must forge those sanctions. The other assumes the nation to be established by the living and true God himself, to witness His truth and permanence, and to be bound to a perpetual protest and war against every attempt to confound Him with visible objects.

12\. According to the Hebrew economy, this is the nation's one great characteristic function. The nation grows out of the family and is grounded on the family covenant. It must preserve family distinctions; its lands are apportioned to the tribes; its memorial feasts are tied to household life; in battle each man encamps by the standard of his father's house. But the nation is not a mere collection of families. It witnesses to a perpetual battle between order and disorder, right and wrong, the invisible God who is Lord of man and the visible things claiming lordship over him. The Israelite, God's covenant servant, is to take part in this fight and go forth as God's instrument in putting down corruption and oppression. When commissioned to destroy, he must destroy. He is to hold individual life cheap for the sake of asserting the right and truth men have violated. He sees idolatry as the cause of all strife and degradation, and is to hate it with a perfect hatred.

13\. This new stage in Israel's life is the beginning of Song and of Written Law. The first expresses thanksgiving for deliverance from the visible oppressor. It proclaims the Lord as deliverer and man of war. It is poured out by an individual who feels he is a member of a nation and becomes its spokesman. Though he speaks God's praises, he feels he is inspired by God. The flame of the song, like that of the sacrifice, was first kindled by Him to whom it ascends.

The Code is precisely the opposite of the Song. It comes from the Lord's lips and is simply His utterance; it carries no inspiration with it. It takes each man apart and makes him feel that he alone is spoken to, though a crowd surrounds him. Yet it too comes from a Deliverer, and is the sign of a new and greatly advanced stage of education. The discipline of experience has not passed away, but distinct formal precepts have been added. Written letter has replaced memorial stones and pillars; the finger of God has permanently set down the decrees His people must keep.

They are *decrees*. The whole force of the code, as a code, lies in its coming from Him who has the right to command, who has given the sea its bounds and determined what man is to be. The Lawgiver's right to say "So it shall be" is the foundation of every precept. But we must remember that He who claims this right first revealed Himself to the Israelite as his Deliverer and Friend, the enemy of oppression and wrong, one who does not act from self-will. The Hebrew Scriptures teach us to call a law lacking either condition a contradiction. If law is the creature of self-will, its meaning and sanction perish in the very attempt to enforce it. For law to proceed from those it addresses is equally at odds with these books. They assume that there is a righteous Will in the universe, and that this Will can utter itself, and has done so.

But the code is addressed to the covenant people; it is strictly national. How then have the Ten Commandments been felt to be the moral institute of modern European tribes, which differ from the Jewish in all outward respects? Anticipating a later part of this sketch, I say that this has happened only so far as the peoples of modern Europe have felt themselves to belong to distinct nations, and have recognised the essential grounds of the Jewish polity (the covenant, the calling, the actual government of an unseen Lord) as applying to themselves in their national character. They have felt the obligation and virtue of this code not as members of a larger society but precisely as united in particular local societies. Whatever has weakened or absorbed their national feeling has weakened the authority of the Ten Commandments. Hence the conscience of these nations has strongly commended the distinction between these Commandments and the mere statutes of the Jewish people. They have not denied a Divine origin to the statutes; they have felt that the same Wisdom which adapted one class of commands to one place and age must intend something different for another. The Ten Commandments they have recognised as having no such limitation.

The distinction some have tried to introduce here, between positive and essentially moral commands, does not seem to concern us. We may notice it later, but it cannot enter into the question of a code. Every part of a Law must, *by the force of the term*, be positive; that is, it must be laid down. But what is laid down may concern the inhabitants of a district as such, or as human beings. The subjects of the Jewish economy were especially awakened to this distinction. No more commandments were added to those spoken on Sinai; all later legislation, though referred to the same Authority, is kept separate from them. All later history witnessed to the Jew that the sources of political disunion and crime, and of the loss of all personal dignity and manliness, lay in setting up any god besides the Unseen Deliverer; in imagining any likeness of Him in heaven, earth or waters; in losing awe for His Name; in losing the distinction between Work and Rest, which grounds man's life, has its archetype in God, and is worked by Him into the fabric of His own people's existence; in losing reverence for parents, life, marriage, property and character; and in the covetous feeling at the root of these evils.

Property, it will be seen, was carefully guarded by this code, though only *one* provision refers to it. It cannot be pretended that the law *exists* to protect individual possession, though reverence for property was a sign of this second stage of Jewish education. It had comparatively little to do with the patriarchs' tent life. We see its beginning in the quarrels of Lot's and Abraham's herdsmen, in arrangements about wells, and in the purchase of burying-grounds. It appears clearly in the assignment of portions to the sons of Jacob. But within the chosen people there were as yet no distinct rules to protect it. It is connected with the nation's protesting character and with the sense of individuality awakened in its members.

But mixed with the family and national institutions was a hint of something larger than either. The Levite tribe was exempt from the ordinary regulations of property. It represented the whole people and each family, and bore witness that Israel's relation to the I Am could not be satisfactorily expressed without breaking through the forms and limits of a local commonwealth. In fact, all these institutions taught Israelites to prize boundaries and landmarks and strengthened their attachment to place; yet they kept reminding every devout person who submitted to them and meditated on them that he had in him something that did not belong to space or time, that only a Being above such restraints could speak to, and that only knowledge of such a Being could satisfy.

14\. Whatever else this history has or lacks, no one will deny that it is a moral and metaphysical history, by the definition already given of those terms. It is moral because from first to last it refers directly to man, to the habits, ways and constitution of the human race as distinct from every other. It is metaphysical because it asserts that man is distinct from physical things: though he has in him what is under the law of growth and decay, he also has what connects him with what is fixed, constant and permanent, with a living personal Being who is above the laws of nature and himself imposed them.

15\. Though a moral and metaphysical history, it is, as already admitted, no history of a philosophy, of thoughts about wisdom or a search after it. I must add that it is also no history of a Religion in the common sense of the word. It is not a history of men's thoughts about God, or desires after Him, or affections towards Him. It professes to be a history of God's unveiling of Himself to man. If it is not that, it is nothing; it is false from beginning to end.

To make it a history of one tribe's speculations about God, we must deny the very root of any speculations that tribe ever had, which is the belief that they could not think of God unless He had first thought of them, nor speak of Him unless He were speaking to them. A class of modern teachers assume that God is made in man's image and formed after his conceptions, and then insist that a nation which lived and acted on the opposite conviction must have shared this one. Let every people speak its own word and tell us what it means. We who think the Hebrews spoke a true word and meant the true thing claim for them only what we would claim for all: the right to interpret themselves.

16\. I have denied that Hebrew history is the history of a religion or a philosophy. But I fully admit that there are Hebrew books which in the ordinary sense are to be called religious, just as I contend that some are to be called philosophical. When the Jewish Rabbinical schools gave the name "holy writings" to one part of these books and "histories" to another, they expressed their feeling that some especially embody the human spirit's aspirations after a Divine person, just as others set forth that person's acts towards men. The book of Psalms is chief of the holy writings. In later times there has been a tendency to give it this character too strictly and exclusively. People overlook the historical and political features that are so plain to ordinary readers, and regard the Psalms simply as utterances of individual sorrow, trust, thankfulness or rapture. This destroys the writer's meaning, for it does not separate his religious feelings from their surroundings but gives them a new character altogether. The Psalmist is not a recluse brooding over his own feelings. He is a man learning under the pressure of life (on the battlefield, on the judgment-seat, through persecutors' cruelty, the fellowship of outlaws, sons' rebellion, his own transgressions) his own feebleness, his need of Divine help, and the mysterious relations in which he stands to the Lord and to his fellow-men. The Lord of all had revealed himself to Israel as a king reigning from generation to generation, in whose government alone lay his subjects' freedom, safety and hope. Great changes had since come in Israel's outward condition: they were no longer *merely* under the invisible Lord who spoke His laws on Sinai. A king went forth in sight of the Host as its leader and was confessed to be the chief of the people's strength. The difficulty was to connect these two truths: to keep the visible king from interfering with the homage due to the Invisible, and to make him God's witness instead of a rival and rebel. Saul had been made king because the people disbelieved that God was an actual king. The whole of David's strange history (shepherd-boy, hero, exile, king ruling, king deposed, reigning righteously and falling into rebellion and injustice) testified that the temporal sovereign was only the representative, an imperfect type, of One whose throne is for ever and ever. A twofold conviction is implied in all the utterances of the Psalms: that the unseen kingdom is the ground of every other and the true substantial kingdom, and that man is meant to be the image of God in his royalty. It gives the Psalms their strength, unity and variety, and makes them as human as they are national.

Trust in God is the life-spring of every prayer and song: trust in Him as the Lord God of Israel, who will do what He has promised, will show the Jewish calling not to be vain, will fully manifest Himself to men as their Ruler, and will prove false every attempt to make Him in men's likeness and true His assertion that He made men in His. It is a long fight between the true God and false gods, the true image and the false; the struggle is desperate in that land, in every land, in each man's heart. At times all hope of success seems gone; "the faithful fail from among the children of men," and false gods and false men have their way. God seems to have left the world to lies, misery and atheism. But out of the depth of despair comes hope. The Lord shall arise, and man shall not always have the upper hand; He will defend the poor and fatherless and see that those in need have right. Let the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing, He will set His king on His holy hill of Zion, a king who shall reign as long as sun and moon endure and set peace and righteousness on the earth. Throughout the Psalms, all the elements of Hebrew life and revelation I have mentioned (the feast, the law, the tribe, the tabernacle, the priests, the sacrifices, above all the battlefield against idolatry) appear in connection with the writers' inmost thoughts and longings. But the ingenuity of modern criticism has decided that some Psalms must be by men more cultivated than was compatible with reverence for the Mosaic institutions or the surrounding religious system. Someone who could have the Lord say, "Thinkest thou that I will eat bull's flesh, or drink the blood of goats," or, lamenting his crime, say, "Thou desirest no sacrifice, else would I give it Thee, but thou delightest not in burnt offering," must, we are told, have held convictions the old orthodox Hebrew would have regarded with horror. The end of the 51st Psalm, "Build Thou the walls of Jerusalem, then shalt Thou be pleased with burnt offering, and whole burnt offering, then shall they offer young bullocks upon Thy altar," is accordingly written off as a priestly interpolation wholly at odds with the prayer. If my earlier remarks are true, these passages are the greatest proof of how earnestly the Psalmist had meditated on the Mosaic institution of sacrifice and on the difference between his country and all others. The very lesson that one who devoutly obeyed the Mosaic directions would have learnt from them was this: sacrifices were expressions of the heart's surrender to Him from whom it had strayed, not gifts by which it might hope to make the Divine Lord tolerate its wrongdoing. Every humble and contrite man would have learnt that sacrifices are precious in God's eyes as witnesses of a reconciled spirit and a restored nation. But I readily admit that there is a truth indicated in these rude attempts to break up the unity of compositions in which the consciences and hearts of all ages have recognized a match with their own deepest feelings. If the Mosaic economy were really part of a Divine education, it should be able to show how it has done its work. It should be able to say: "the men who have been under this training are not what they would have been without it; those with the longest experience of it see the furthest; the children who keep this Law are wiser than their forefathers." I admit that the Psalms contain something that does not belong to the patriarchal or legal period of Jewish history. By claiming the privileges of Abraham's children, meditating on the Law night and day, and undergoing the Divine discipline of toil, strife and sorrow that their fathers' records explained to them, an insight and apprehension were cultivated in them that the earlier time could not have had. They saw more into the meaning and heart of institutions; they saw how the principle implied in them rose above accident and rule. They learnt to protest against those who sacrificed the spirit to preserve the letter and so lost both. They saw how what is essentially and eternally human was drawn out by what is formally and exclusively national. They found an absolute, unchangeable morality beneath the relative morality of the patriarchal family and the positive morality of decrees and statutes.

### SECTION II. HEBREW PHILOSOPHY.

1\. No one will deny that the book of Proverbs is quite different in character from the book of Psalms. Everyone feels the difference, and the books' own opening statements recognize it. When we call Proverbs a philosophical book, we are following the writer's own definition: "To know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding, to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity, to give subtlety to the simple, to give the young man knowledge and discretion."

This does not prepare us for a book of passionate devotion, of groans from a man in deep trouble, or of his confident flight to a refuge. It prepares us for what we find: observation, reflection, experiment. Yet it has much in common with the Psalms. Unlike the histories, both set forth the seeking and striving of man's spirit. Both assume that this striving has been awakened in the man and that its direction has been given him. He seeks righteousness because the righteous Being first sought him, and he seeks wisdom because the wise Being first sought him. He is to know wisdom and equity, as he is to be righteous, because God made him in His image.

2\. The first statement of the Divine revelation already implies that it was meant to awaken this craving for wisdom as much as the other. The Jewish history is not merely a display of a gracious and kindly character, though it is that in the highest sense. When the Lord God reveals Himself as merciful, gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy, He leads men to feel that their own lack of mercy, quickness to anger and unwillingness to forgive are wrong, a departure from the standard they are meant to match. As these qualities are shown in action, their nature becomes clearer and the sense of rebellion against them more vivid. But such a display presumes a method of government, a fitting of means to ends, which we call *judgment*. The unseen King must govern the world on a plan; there must be in Him something that arranges, devises and orders. What is in Him is in His creature too, who can perceive and trace it because he has something corresponding to it: an eye that meets the light, takes it in, and sees objects by it.

3\. Solomon felt that the king has a calling which demands this wisdom. He asked for it and it was granted, and his life became the type of wisdom to the Hebrews and the key to his words, as it has been felt to be in every age. In him were the strongest tendencies to sensuality, the fullest sympathy with outward things and their attraction, and the assurance that the world is meant to be ruled and examined by man. All the motives to the visible worship or idolatry that the law condemned were in him at their liveliest. But he also had a sense of relation to the invisible Being of whom the law and covenant testified, the absolute and perfect King to whom every king, by his own authority and the permanence of his dynasty, bore witness. Only such a Being could protect him against the powers conspiring to rob him of his strength and enslave him. Only He could teach him how to judge and govern, how to know the boundaries of order and disorder, justice and iniquity, and how to make the things about him his instruments and distinguish their uses and properties. The Temple he built expressed his belief that the buildings and treasures of the world, the objects and instruments of idolatry, were to be consecrated to the unseen Being and to witness to Him. The book of Proverbs expresses his feeling of the relation in which man stands to the world and to his Maker.

4\. Solomon is said to have known all plants, from the hyssop on the wall to the cedar of Lebanon; he studied natural things. But Proverbs contains none of this lore. It assumes that Wisdom is not to be found there, however earnestly the wise man contemplates nature and however much he delights in it. Wisdom has to do first with man. He is to seek it so that he can rule others and himself, so that it may deliver him from the strange woman, the harlot Sense who is always dragging him down into death, and so that he may know the path of life.

5\. If he seeks, he must find. As surely as the tempting voice is always beckoning him to follow its ways, another voice is crying aloud in the places of concourse and speaking to the heart within, promising him riches and honour, durable riches and righteousness. Wisdom seeks to enter the heart and draw the soul after it. Once fully welcomed, it becomes sweet and pleasant, but first it applies sharp corrections and bitter medicines. The man who follows this guide must not grow weary of discipline.

6\. The Divine covenant and law evidently implied this distinction between two powers drawing men in opposite directions. Without it we could not interpret the calling of Abraham and his family, still less the national faith and the national protest against idolatry. Even the most external-seeming Mosaic arrangements, such as the permission of some meats, the denunciation of others, and the apparently arbitrary division of clean and unclean beasts, had been cultivating in the Israelite the feeling that there was an upward and a downward path: he was naturally inclined to one, and a Divine hand was leading him into the other. The author of Proverbs only draws out the sense and purpose of these ordinances and recognizes an essential, eternal law beneath them. He represents the whole of man's life as an expression of this conflict. Every act is done in obedience to one or the other of the influences acting on him at every moment, and every act confirms him in obedience to one or the other.

7\. But are the words "influences," "principles," "powers" adequate? We have spoken of the "harlot Sense," but Solomon, with far more practical truth and poetic power, calls her "the strange woman." He can tolerate no abstraction. It is an actual enchantress who speaks to each unhappy youth. The best individual language is also the best general language; the only way to describe the temptations of the race is to describe those of the particular heart. He does not arrive at a notion of what is human by heaping up experiences; in each one he finds what belongs to all.

8\. If what seduces a man from his proper state must be described personally, how is it with Wisdom? Is *that* merely an abstraction, when it is something to be embraced, possessed and loved? Is it not a reality, a person? If not, how could its attractions be measured against those of the other? Can we follow a dream or shadow as we follow what we know to be substantial? If Sense comes before us as a woman, Solomon takes for granted that Wisdom can be nothing *less* fair or attractive. To use the feminine in one case and not the other would make the meaning false in both. Wisdom must have an intense loveliness and captivating power for those who have come within its circle. It would contradict the whole doctrine of the book to fancy that this loveliness is the creature of the one who beholds and loves it. Wisdom offers itself to him, overcomes his reluctance and draws him after it. Far from making his understanding a creator, he is told above all not to lean on it or trust it; if he does, Wisdom disowns him and he is a fool.

9\. But what is this Wisdom? At each step the question becomes more awful. Solomon had declared at the outset that whoever does not begin with the fear of the Lord has no hope of attaining it. That fear must have been strong in the writer, mixed with a strange boldness, when he gradually comes to see Wisdom, the counsellor of man, as the counsellor of God, "by whom," here on earth, "kings reign and princes decree justice," but who "was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was." Wisdom speaks: "When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no fountains abounding with water, before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth; when as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When He prepared the heavens I was there, when He set a compass upon the face of the deep, when He established the clouds above, when He strengthened the fountains of the deep, when He gave to the sea his decree that the waters should not pass His commandment, when He appointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by Him as one brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in the habitable parts of His earth, and my delights were with the sons of men."

This is the very essence of Hebrew philosophy. It had been unfolding gradually out of the earlier revelations, and here it finds full expression. Here is one who shares God's mind and was before the universe, in whom the whole order of creation originated, yet who regards man as above all creation and has been his guide and teacher from the first. In Wisdom man attains the satisfaction of his highest desires and is delivered from subjection to the world around him. In this assertion lies the foundation of all the minute practical teaching about the duties of the king and of the shopkeeper. The Divine order of the world is also the true human order. The king is set on his throne to exhibit it in acts of protection and punishment; the just balances exhibit it too. All confusion comes from men forgetting their places in this order, ceasing to acknowledge the power that guides and keeps them in it, and yielding to the power that seeks to put out the inward eye that alone can discern it.

10\. The antithetical form of Proverbs evidently belongs to its essence; its main idea, running through every part, could not have been brought out otherwise. It also matters that the book is addressed by a father to his child. It is didactic and affectionate, and gives the results of experience, not the processes. In both respects it differs from the other great book of Hebrew Philosophy, *Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher*.

11\. Ecclesiastes records personal experiences, struggles, disappointments and partial conclusions. It is the story of a man in a labyrinth, trying one passage after another, always baffled and forced into a new path that ends as hopelessly. But the labyrinth is not chiefly one of speculation. It is the actual maze of human life, and the actual contradictions that a man meets if he does not shut his eyes. And though each conclusion seems to conclude nothing, something is ascertained by each experiment. Riches, all earthly enjoyments, all works, toils and vocations are found to have a positive good in them. The wise man whose eyes are in his head is found better than all others. Though there is an excuse for thinking the old days better than our own, it proves unwise to inquire about this. There is comfort under the oppressions of cities and provinces. And yet vanity and vexation of spirit is written on everything, and this is a fact that must not be disguised. Wisdom itself seems under the same curse, and the experiences of the wise seeker are sadder and more oppressive than other men's. But his sadness, disappointments and falls are chief parts of his schooling. He is learning to accept the fact, painful at first to discover, that what is crooked cannot be made straight and what is wanting cannot be numbered. He had been trying to *make* an order, and has gradually learnt to perceive one. He had looked on himself as the centre of the universe, and despite all his skill, wisdom and piety, that false conception brought him weariness everywhere. When he confesses God as the centre, then "though the silver cord be loosed, and the golden bowl be broken, though the pitcher be broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern," the spirit can find rest. After all its speculations and trials it returns to Him who made it, and learns to see itself in Him and Him in all things.

12\. It is a hard question whether the book of Job should be counted among these philosophical books, and if so, to what time it belongs. On the date, critics have always fluctuated and seem no nearer agreement now. The weight of modern opinion perhaps favours a comparatively late period, but to many the arguments for extreme antiquity still seem decisive. It would be absurd to go into the reasons here, though the result matters to the student of philosophy. If the book belongs to the age of Abraham or Moses, it would prove that the deepest and most conscious agonies of the human spirit were experienced and expressed at a time when, judging from Genesis especially, we expect faith to show itself chiefly in practical life and the divinest utterances to take the form of simple history. It is certainly not impossible that such thoughts were working in men's minds in the first ages. To be assured of it would be like discovering a wonderful new country where we least expected one, a discovery reasonable people would gladly make at the cost of any theory. If instead it must be assigned to Solomon's age or even the Chaldaic period, it still cannot lose its profound reality as the history of an actual human struggle, or be twisted by criticism into a mere book of speculation. Whenever, wherever and by whomever written, it must remain for all human beings what the peasants of every land feel it to be: the divine record of what one felt who shared their flesh and blood, who was plunged in the deepest sorrows they can suffer, and had to work his way into health and peace, not unhelped or unguided, though all human friends and counsellors strove against him.

In attributing this kind of interest to the book, we may seem to have settled whether it belongs to the strictly religious or the strictly philosophical writings of the Hebrews. That would be rash. We have tried to show that Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are in the truest sense human books, essentially practical and concerning everyone's life. Job's intense suffering makes it his first concern to find out whether a gracious and loving Being rules the world, whether his misery comes from such a source or from somewhere else. In his agony he pours out words like the east wind; at times he seems to deny his Maker's goodness, and he continually contradicts himself. His pious, well-instructed friends confute him with authorized, beautiful, eloquent phrases. They appeal to the judgment of their elders, to whom they are mere children, they are shocked at his irreverence, and they wonder he is not afraid of affronting the Being who has laid him low and might raise him again. Job tells them he has heard a thousand such things and knows them all by heart. But God is actually smiting him, and fine speeches are no use then. He must know what his anguish means. Belief in a righteous God is everything to him, and without that hope he has nothing; so he cannot be content until he sees how God is righteous, and how He can be so while afflicting him, a man who knows inwardly that he has tried to be and do right and still clings to Him whose rod lies so heavily upon him.

So far this wonderful history seems fitter to be classed with the Psalms than with Proverbs. But when God answers Job out of the whirlwind, it is especially with a view of His *wisdom* that He lays him prostrate. Job had asserted in his inmost heart, and generally with his lips, the *righteousness* of God, and had justified Him as his three friends had not, however they seemed to. But he had taken no measure of the wisdom of Him who made Orion and the Pleiades, the horse that paws the valley, the ostrich that lays her eggs and forgets her young, and the leviathan that takes his pastime in the great waters. He had thought he could judge the means by which the All-wise would accomplish His righteous ends: why He appointed suffering for man, how He maintains the conflict with evil, how He will bring it to an issue. A revelation not of God's power or sovereignty but of His infinite wisdom was Job's humiliation, and it was his cure. In dust and ashes he sees, actually exercising His gracious and mysterious dominion, the Being of whom he had heard by the hearing of the ear. He abhors himself, and then is raised to a new and nobler life. At this point the book of Job surely asserts its right to a place with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, among the books that set forth the search after wisdom, the methods by which God guides a man in that search, and its reward.

### SECTION III. THE PROPHETS.

1\. The book of Job has sometimes been read as the history of the Jewish nation rather than of one individual. I am not surprised that intelligent readers proposed this, or that it met vehement resistance. A nation's prosperity, misery, and restoration can surely be read in that book. Yet anyone who has suffered will never be persuaded that he is not reading of his own struggles, struggles that went on in the heart of a real person.

The Jewish prophets teach us to reconcile the two opinions. They feel in their own hearts the miseries of their nation, and of every nation. They show us that the experiences of the single man and of the body politic are not different but essentially the same. The Jew has to fight his country's battles in his own soul. His study of its present condition, its past, and its coming fortunes is not separate from his own life. He understands what he sees outside him by what is passing within, and he does not know himself except as an Israelite.

2\. The writings of the prophets cannot strictly be counted among the philosophical writings of the Hebrews. The prophet is not primarily a seeker but a preacher. He comes as one who has received light and can impart it, to denounce existing evils and foretell approaching ones. Still, any view of Hebrew philosophy is imperfect without him. Mixed with his announcements and denunciations are continual displays of his own difficulties and confusions. If he has been brought into the sunshine, he had a long preparation of darkness and twilight. His public teaching can never be separated from the school that raised him, or from the Temple where he saw his most glorious visions.

3\. Every Hebrew teacher was a prophet. Moses, the guide and lawgiver, claims the title, and a Jew could hardly have refused it to Abraham. The prophet did not need to leave written records; he might, like the father of the nation, bear his witness by acts rather than words. Still, there was a time when the prophet became a more distinct part of Hebrew society, and the name became that of a class or Order. The Sacred Record places this at the transition from the age of the Judges to the age of the Kings, and connects it with a general shaking of the most sacred Mosaic institutions. Scripture never hints that the priest, with "holiness to the Lord" on his forehead, was less prone to evil than other men. The very first High-priest, the brother of Moses, was the leader and tool of the people in setting up an Egyptian idol. Now certain members of the priestly family became utter reprobates, and the High-priest did not restrain them. The people abhorred the offerings of the Lord. Then a boy dedicated to the Temple's service, sleeping in a chamber near it, heard a voice calling him. He thought it was the priest's; it was the Lord's. He was appointed to tell the priest of his sins and of the coming fall of his house. The Word of God had spoken to Samuel, and let none of his words fall. It was known that there was a prophet in Israel.

The elders believed there was a charm in the tabernacle to save them from their enemies; they took it into battle, and it fell into the hands of the Philistines. Samuel became a judge and a deliverer. He restored law and order, defined boundaries, and executed justice between man and man. His sons did not walk in his ways. The people craved a leader of their armies, and Samuel told them of the Invisible King in their midst. He anointed the visible king, warned him of his self-will, and foretold his ruin. He anointed the man after God's own heart.

4\. Here the essential qualities of the prophetic office are clearly shown, and we can understand what a school of the prophets was. The ground of its members' mission was the same as Samuel's: they were taught that the Word of God was speaking to them, and that they were to heed this voice and follow it wherever it led. In the school they were trained to study and meditate on God's law, and to consider their people's past: how God had dealt with their fathers, and what their calling as Israelites meant. But this was only so that they might know how He was dealing with them *then*. They were no less under His government and guidance than their fathers. They were reading not of the acts of One who had been, but of One who was then and would be evermore. The Living God was the only name by which they could speak or think of Him. Their countrymen forgot Him and thought He lived only in the past. Priesthood, sacrifices, and tabernacle had become dead machinery, instead of the assurance of His permanent presence. The prophet was to be trained in the belief of that presence, to act and live upon it, and to tell priests, kings, and people that their acts and their whole lives were lies unless they recognised this as their ground.

5\. This was the true Jewish education. We have no reason to suppose that only prophets were trained in these schools; they might train their countrymen there, and could train them only in the same lore. They could only tell them, as they do in all their written discourses, that even without a special call to be teachers or prophets, the Word of God was speaking to them, warning them against their evil tendencies and guiding them to be right and true, and that they could lead safe and honest lives only by following that guidance.

6\. Often those who claimed the special office of prophet heeded this teaching least, and for this very reason: they did not see it as the teaching of a righteous, wise Being to the *whole* nation. They prized their special gifts and thought it wonderful to speak words in God's name. They would not submit to be schooled before pouring out their utterances. They never learned to distinguish the whispers of the harlot Sense, the vain, self-exalting spirit, from the lesson of Him who came to humble, sift, and purify. So they became traders in prophecy. They spoke a lie out of their own hearts and said "The Lord hath said," now saddening the righteous, now speaking peace where there was no peace. They were base flatterers of kings, inventors of tricks, patrons of idolatry, and cunning or impudent deceivers of a people that loved to be deceived. They turned prophecy into divination, guessing at coming events from what they saw, or catching up the utterances of departed seers at second hand. Speaking of God's judgments was nothing terrible to them, because they did not believe in the judgments or in Him. These were words to toy with, to frighten enemies or please disciples. They came from hollow, hypocritical, atheistical hearts, and did more than any others to make the people hollow, hypocritical, and atheistical.

7\. Against these false brethren of their own order, even more than against the heartless priest and the godless king, the true prophet testified by words and acts. It was no part of his vocation to pass himself off as something else, or to hide from himself or others his conflicts with the evil in him, his difficulty in separating the precious from the vile, or the reluctance with which he often obeyed the Divine voice. He did not claim inspiration out of pride. His temptation was to deny it, to boast that he had something of his own, and to pretend he could be or do anything except as he submitted to One higher than himself. He does not seek credit by declaring what is to come; he is mainly busy with the present. He brings God as a present God, by signs, discourses, and songs, before the consciences of the presumptuous or cowardly king or prophet. He witnesses to the same present God to the heart of the crushed and oppressed Israelite. The future is all contained in the past and present. God is, and therefore He will manifest Himself. He reigns, and unrighteous rulers, Jews or heathens, shall know it. Their want of faith shall not hinder His purposes, and tyranny and disorder shall not always keep men from knowing what His gracious dominion is. Kings set up to testify of His rule may misunderstand their vocation, priests may forget Him and turn idolaters, prophets may utter lies in His name, and the whole people may misunderstand why it was called out; but a perfect King shall reign in righteousness, and the true Priest and Prophet of the World shall appear. There shall be mysterious sufferings mixed with mysterious exaltation. At last God will confound all the false images of Him and manifest His true image to man. Israel may go into captivity and become the lowest of nations, and heathens may be God's ministers to punish it; but the promise will still prove true: in Abraham and his seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

8\. An historian of Hebrew philosophy ought to notice these records, if only to show how entirely the popular teaching of the Hebrews corresponds with that of the specially philosophical books. It is entirely *esoterical* in the best sense, if by that we mean what concerns the inner man and his highest, most mysterious relations. It is entirely *exoterical*, if by that we mean what is proclaimed to all men and concerns states, governments, and the most outward circumstances of life. But it is especially necessary to point out how this popular teaching, tied as it was to the deepest personal meditation and experience, fills a gap in the merely philosophical teaching and removes a difficulty that might otherwise confuse us. We have seen that Wisdom in Proverbs is spoken of as a person, but a female. Everyone must feel that the passages quoted from that book would have been artistically less beautiful without this form of language. But artistic beauty always rests on some substantial ground of truth. We could not feel the propriety of such expressions if they did not answer to something in our hearts that required them and would suffer if others replaced them. Wisdom, regarded *primarily* as the object of our search and love, even though we are told that we were first sought and loved, does come before us in this feminine shape. But the prophet who speaks in God's name says at once, "The Word of God came to me, saying." We feel sure he is under the same teaching as Solomon. He means the same antagonist to the harlot Sense, the same Divine Counsellor, the same person who was with the Lord as one brought up with Him before the earth was formed or the heavens brought forth, and whose delights were with the sons of men. Yet we are sure this is no female voice. It is He who speaks, who commands and judges men, the Ruler and King of their inmost hearts and spirits. The prophets testify of such an One in every speech. They could not believe in a human king, priest, or prophet, or that man was made in God's image, if they did not acknowledge Him. Because they believe in Him, they are confident that God will be completely declared to men and His image seen in a man. That prospect carries us beyond Hebrew philosophy as we find it in Proverbs, but it supplies the complement to it. By reflecting on it we may perhaps better understand what that philosophy is, and what all philosophy is: where its deep, essential truth lies, and its necessary limitation.

9\. From the last remark our readers may gather that I have noticed these prophets, and especially this leading characteristic of them, for more than the sake of Hebrew philosophy. No one can read them simply without feeling that they saw the Being who spoke in their hearts as the real Lord of all men. In their comments on the state of the world in their day, they go far beyond Palestine. The more they find all heathen evils in their own countrymen, the more they discover, and rejoice to discover, a bond of spiritual connection between themselves and all peoples. They could not believe that any government, order, or desire of light or wisdom in any human creatures could come from anywhere but the Source of order, government, light, and wisdom. They saw resistance to the Divine teaching as the sin of their own land and of all lands. Their hopes of future blessing for their own people and for all people rested on the assurance that He who was then speaking secretly would be proclaimed openly.

10\. In entering on the philosophy of the other nations of the earth, we have a choice of four methods. It is more honest to say at the outset which I shall adopt, so that readers may be on guard against any effort of mine to strain facts to fit it.

i\. First, we may assume that the Hebrews, like all other peoples, were merely following their own instincts and impulses in the search for wisdom, and were not guided, as they pretended, by a Divine Teacher.

ii\. Second, we may resolve to make out a connection between the Scriptures, or their writers, and the philosophers of Hindostan, Persia, or Greece, believing it impossible that those philosophers could have obtained light any other way.

iii\. Third, we may resolve that these philosophers never had any light, and merely followed delusions and spread them.

iv\. Fourth, we may assume the doctrine which seems to me to be asserted throughout the Scriptures, and especially elucidated and enforced by the prophets: that all men really have had a Divine Teacher, whether or not they have followed His guiding.

I believe this doctrine to be true. It adds unspeakably to the interest and wonder of the records we have been considering, and it makes me deeply anxious not to misrepresent those I am about to describe.

## CHAPTER II. EGYPTIANS, PHŒNICIANS, ASSYRIANS.

1\. [Three]{.smallcaps} countries are especially connected with Jewish history: Egypt, Phœnicia and Chaldæa. Each has left memorials of itself. Those of Egypt are becoming more interesting to our time than to any earlier one, and Chaldæa is only now beginning to yield its treasures to European enterprise. Strictly speaking, none of the three produced any philosophers. But they indirectly influenced the philosophy of other nations in ways too important to overlook, and a few words on them seem a necessary sequel to the chapter on the Hebrews.

2\. The wise men, magicians and soothsayers we read of in Exodus were no doubt students of nature. They had observed something of its powers and mysteries, of its influences over man, and of the means he has to turn those influences to good or harm. They surely believed this knowledge came from some Divine power, and I do not question their belief. If they traced their observations on the course of the year or the cultivation of the earth to a heavenly Teacher, they spoke more humbly, more truly, and more in the spirit of the Hebrew books than Josephus did. That Romanised Jew, out of foolish patriotism or a wish to make his countrymen respectable to their masters, pretends that Abraham, Joseph or Moses taught the Egyptians astronomy. The Hebrew legislator gives no hint that his ancestors imparted or possessed any such wisdom. What he himself had, if we believe the New Testament commentator on his words, he must first have received from the Egyptians. But his Divine Teacher purged his mind of the idolatries and confusions that surrounded their physical doctrines, and enabled him to give *man* his true place in creation. The Hebrew history does say that Joseph, instructed by the Invisible King, gave Pharaoh skill and foresight. But it never claims for the Jews acquaintance with the mechanical arts, or with the powers of nature needed to invent them. It implicitly concedes these to their tyrants.

3\. Here we find the main difference in development between the two peoples. Modern science may credit Egypt with a long series of dynasties, clear signs of an organised priesthood and civil order, and very great and probably very early achievements in stone and masonry. But the moral philosopher must ask why all these great powers bore so little fruit for the world. How was their growth stunted and deformed? Why must unbounded skill and research be spent, after all these generations, merely to prove that the oldest nation in the world actually existed?

4\. This is the answer I propose; if it is wrong, our inquiries into other nations will contradict it. The Egyptians' knowledge of the universe and its powers was not balanced by any knowledge of the powers and destinies of man. Those who came to know the things around them could not help feeling that they, the observers, were somehow superior to what they observed. They clearly had that conviction and were even oppressed by it. But the objects they saw and the facts revealed to them soon became everything. They nearly lost themselves in the things, and their higher culture only made the people more helpless servants of them. What the sage told of his discoveries made his countrymen idolaters; what he held back made him feel his difference from them, and led him to affect airs of superiority and devise new arts to keep up that difference. So the sagacious man, from being a true observer, became a diviner, and enslaved those he should have freed, each new invention being as it were the creation of a new god. Such magicians are the great corrupters of kings. They teach them to rule by craft instead of righteousness, and give them animals for subjects instead of human beings. The healthy, patriarchal faith of the Hebrew boy put new life into a Pharaoh. It taught him the difference between true judgment of the future and cunning conjecture about it, and it made the elements already in Egyptian society sound and coherent. But the government and the people's faith slid back into the old rut. The soothsayers and magicians again put their physical knowledge to the service of falsehood and tyranny, and the Pharaohs built their treasure-cities to their own glory with the help of Jews. Then came the vindication of moral order, and the assertion that man is cared for by God, from the lips and the rod of Moses.

5\. These indications of the Egyptian mind, from whatever period they come, are a clue to its later as well as its earlier stages. Consider the effect of men being crushed and overwhelmed by natural images and impressions before they had any inner life to sustain them. Then it may not be hard to understand why Egyptian idolatry took such various forms, depending on local position. It may explain why the priests seem to have had such stores of secret information while the people were so degraded; why the Greeks listened to the teachers at Memphis with wonder yet felt so little sympathy with them; and why Egyptian sculpture is so gross and animal, yet implies so much reflection and suggests so many thoughts. We may also understand what form the Egyptian's moral and metaphysical philosophy must have taken when he was stirred to ask questions about himself as well as about the things around him. He must have groped for a meaning in them, seeking the relation between animal forms and man and what in their acts typifies his own. This was the slow, painful, upward process by which he tried to free himself from the degrading objects he had submitted to. If we had a clear record of such efforts we should take the greatest interest in them and recognise the guidance of a Divine hand. Notorious facts give us full right to believe that the Egyptian intellect was especially exercised in discovering the symbols of Nature and detecting the higher, human meanings beneath them. In this way the Egyptian atmosphere influenced both Jews and Greeks, as we shall consider later, and still more strikingly some teachers of the Christian church. But these moral inquiries had no power to leaven the polity of Egypt or reach the heart of its people. They can only have been the struggles of a set of sages to escape webs which sages had first spun for themselves and their land. The history of Hindoo philosophy will give us more clearly ascertained evidence of this kind of conflict. However certain we may be that it took place in Egypt, we would have to resort to idle conjecture if we tried to trace its course there.

6\. We so habitually connect commerce with human progress that it may seem strange how little there is to report of the nation whose capital was Tyre. The Phœnicians must have gathered many observations on their long voyages, but these were for others to reflect upon rather than themselves. Their own genius seems to have been exclusively active. The love of variety and the eagerness for new objects are an important element in human life. But some silence and repose must mingle with them before men can steadily ask "What is wisdom?" or care for an answer. A Phœnician colony in Africa could produce a Hannibal, but a contemplative sage could hardly be looked for in either the mother or the daughter city. Yet the Phœnician temper, joined with other more stable qualities, helped form the mind of the Greek. *He* was to prove that the sea, which is the symbol and witness of man's freedom, does not merely tempt him to seek the outward and visible treasures that so commonly enslave it. But before Phœnicia had added anything to the traditions or studies of the West, it had met the Hebrew kingdom. To Hiram and his successors, Jewish life was not represented by a Joseph, a fugitive shepherd-boy. Solomon showed them that the divine polity he administered could expand to meet the conditions and temptations of a mercantile people. It had begun in the tent life of the patriarchs and seemed, in its legal stage, devised for tillers of the ground. But a deeper wisdom than earth or ocean supplies had laid its foundation and was still upholding it.

7\. In Chaldæa, as the Hebrew Scriptures present it, we meet again wise men like those of Egypt, but here they are especially called astrologers. The study of the heavenly bodies no doubt prevailed among the priests of Thebes and Memphis, and the first systematic observations of the course of the year may rightly be ascribed to them. Their claim to superior insight into human events will partly have rested on this knowledge: because they knew more of nature than others, they could divine what would probably happen to fields and crops. It is another step, and one that indicates a different order of thought and feeling, to connect the stars *directly* with human life, and to believe that the course of the one is influenced or regulated by the other.

8\. Wide plains and still, beautiful nights favour the growth of such a faith; perhaps only in such circumstances has it ever taken deep root. There we find a hunting rather than an agricultural people, whose speculations turn more on whether their efforts to get food will succeed than on whether the earth will produce it. Physical knowledge is not to be expected in this condition of society. Tyranny, the rule of a man who claims dominion over the beasts of the field and over his own kind by the same right, will begin earlier here. The Babel polity of Scripture is of this character; its founder is said to have been a mighty hunter before the Lord. In such a polity the human form is more reverenced and the forms and symbols of nature far less, as anyone will feel who compares the sculptures recently brought from Nineveh with the Egyptian remains. In these very early and remarkable works of art we see reverence for animals in proportion not to their usefulness to man but to the strength of their talons or the quickness of their flight. The forms of such creatures combine with the human countenance to express the notion of the Divine. They will not have sufficed for this alone; the earlier Sabæan worship will have continued alongside these images of man's power and dominion. But that worship was itself moulded by the character of the people who adopted it. Among a race of conquerors the stars will have become dynasts ruling over man's life. Subjects who felt a hopeless gulf between themselves and their sovereigns, and regarded them as beings of another kind, would have no difficulty seeing these cold, distant, brilliant orbs as the Kings of kings and Lords of lords. Wise men who hoped for something better from the world than they saw will have asked these witnesses of calm and order when a brighter day would come, when the world would be ruled with less fantasy and caprice. The passion for knowing the future will have become inseparably tied to contemplating the stars, and a scheme of relations between them and the dwellers on earth will have been worked out. Guilty monarchs, perplexed by signs in the heavens, will eagerly have fled to the astrologers' science for relief. In general they will have made the astrologers ministers of their purposes and props of their authority.

9\. These hints will be useful for the history that follows, and they are closely connected with what has gone before. For the Hebrew books show the prophets in Babylon bearing witness especially against astrological divination. They declared that the unseen King and Lord of their land does reveal the future through the present and the past; that all events are connected by a moral law; that the hope of a more righteous government of the earth was not vain and deceitful; and that the crises and revolutions of empires are pre-ordained and all tending to answer the questions, What is wisdom? Where is it to be found?

## CHAPTER III. HINDOO PHILOSOPHY.

### SECTION I. THE PHILOSOPHY LATENT IN THE RELIGION.

1\. Everything we know from internal evidence about Egyptian and Chaldaic wisdom comes from pyramids, tombs, and inscribed statues, whether already deciphered or still waiting to be. In Hindostan we are back in a world of books, among a people who are literary by profession. Their literature does not explain a history; it takes the place of one. We know almost nothing of what the Hindoo has done, and a great deal of what he has thought.

2\. The English scholar must still wait for an accurate knowledge of the Hindoo Vedas. Until recent years even the most accomplished Sanscrit scholars shrank from translating them. We must take their great beauty of style and language on the word of those competent to judge, whose judgment cannot be wholly warped by love of their subject. But the specimens we have show their general design and character. They are invocations. Powers of air, earth, or fire are implored for help in different emergencies. It is assumed that these powers are related to man and can hear his cries. It is even hoped that they may have fellowship with him and come to share his food and wine. The worshipper does not doubt that they will be pleased with his offerings and may be swayed by his sacrifices.

3\. So we find ourselves at once in a priestly world. The priest prescribes the method of invocation and the kind of sacrifice, and presents them, so he is the leading man of the community. The orders and ranks of priests will naturally be defined first, and all other callings will be measured by the offices they perform. At this stage of Hindoo life the objects of worship must also have been many, determined by the different influences that powers in nature exert over man, with the priest defining and arranging those influences.

4\. Yet the worshipper feels a communion with the beings he addresses, and this distinguishes Hindoo adoration from the merely physical idolatry of the Egyptians. From the first the Hindoo seems to seek friendship with his divinities, not just help. Soon we find that the help he seeks is not only for feeding his cattle or defeating his enemies, and that the friendship of the wine-cup does not satisfy his idea of intercourse with the Divine. He invokes a Purifier and desires purification for himself. His ceremonies and sacrifices, whatever other lesser ends they have, seem gradually to point more and more to this one.

5\. As they do, *one* Being gradually seems to dawn on him through the different objects that had divided his attention. The name Agni stands out more and more among the forms the Vedas seek to propitiate. You feel that he is becoming the special object of Brahminical service, that he may soon displace all the others and be acknowledged as the Being whom all the rest were bringing to light. We believe *such* a unity is latent in these early books, strictly polytheistic as they are. It seems to be the result of the worshipper's own experiments and discoveries, or at any rate it reveals itself in the course of his thought and devotion. It stands in strange contrast to the variety which he must still acknowledge as real, and which he had taught others, as well as himself, to regard as divine.

6\. Here begins the distinction between the priestly and the popular faith of the Hindoos. It has often been put down to wilful imposture, and imposture has no doubt upheld it, but its origin may have been less culpable. The wish for purification implies a sense of something in ourselves that does not belong to this earth and may be separated from it. When the man asks himself what this is, he finds with wonder that the very effort of asking suggests the answer. He thinks; he thinks of all the things around him. Surely his thought makes him superior to them. If he can become a purely thinking being, he is no longer one of them, and he has gained what he wanted. But who can make him such a being? The God he calls on must himself be of this kind. He must be *the* thinker, close to the thinking man as his patron, friend, and fellow-worker. Where can the union with him stop? Not until they become identical, until the man sinks into the God and is lost.

7\. So in the next stage of Hindooism Agni has become Brahm. A priest-god now stands clearly before us, and no other name fits him. He is emphatically the God of the priest as distinct from other men: the priest himself, raised and transfigured. The priest's great effort and privilege is to be absorbed in him.

8\. But has the priest himself not changed in the process? Is he still the director of invocations and orderer of sacrifices? Has he not become the thinker, the intellectual man, whose business is to use powers the common man lacks or has never cultivated? The priest is now the philosopher, the seeker after wisdom hidden from others. More than ever he must keep aloof from those who follow the ordinary crafts and occupations of the world. The man who merely acts, even the greatest hero or warrior, must rank far beneath the thinker. The thinker must guard the privileges he has been given and pass them on to an order of successors.

9\. In such a scheme, what place is left for his old work? What is the purpose of sacrifices and offerings if thinking is all in all? There are several possible answers besides the vulgarest and wickedest, to which the Brahmin was always inclined: that such a religion is needed for the fool but not for the wise man. First, by concentrating divinity in Brahm, the universe did not lose its sacredness. Every part of nature was a thought of Brahm's. The cow, the elephant, the flower were all portions of him, so there was no wrong in paying them homage; it could be counted part of the service of Brahm. Second, a devout mind finds something inexpressibly awful in its nearness to Brahm, in the confusion between worshipper and object of worship. Solemn invocations, the habitual pronouncing of the name Om or Light, and rites of purification might well serve to remind the priest-student that he was calling on some being, and not merely adoring himself or an image thrown off from himself. Third, if storms and convulsions in nature showed dark thoughts in Brahm, sacrifice or propitiation might be needed to remove them, even though the direct worship of dark beings had not yet become part of the mythology, or was denounced by those who held the purer conception. Still, contradictions lay hidden in the attempt to reconcile the Brahmin's philosophical and priestly positions. They were certain to show themselves in his later history, and were as likely to cause conflicts of opinion within his own schools as any resistance from the people.

### SECTION II. THE PHILOSOPHY DEVELOPED—THE BHAGAVAD GITA.

1\. Another great problem, or set of problems, also of the highest interest, occupied the Brahmin. Contemplation was his tribe's business, yet something had to be done. He himself had to act, and the other castes existed for the sake of action. How were action and contemplation related? How was the bond between the Brahmin and the other tribes to be kept up if their worship differed from his and they aimed at a wholly different object? We cannot learn what forced this question on the Hindoo mind. But we know that at some time it became a very practical part of his reflections and gave shape and colour to all his philosophy, because of that remarkable poem, the Bhagavad Gita. Its unity and completeness entitle it to be called a poem, though it is only an episode of a much longer one. Scholars still debate its date. A. W. Schlegel, its late Latin translator, never finished his promised essay on the subject. But he made his opinion clear, formed after reflecting on its poetic structure, spirit and language: that it deserves precedence over all the efforts of Greek speculation. Hindoos claim a still earlier origin. Some authorities have imagined a much later one, after the Christian era, not far from the many commentaries written on it in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. My general inclination favours Schlegel, but it must yield to strong external evidence. Even if the poem is ultimately excluded from the records of the old world, it is admitted to contain the very essence of Brahminical philosophy and to set out vividly questions that must have stirred the Hindoo mind in every age. So it is a fit subject for this sketch. I shall give an abstract of it, believing it will lead readers into the heart of the subject and save them many pages of wearisome discourse.

2\. The scene opens on a battlefield. The Kooroos and the Pandoos, kindred tribes, are about to fight a deadly war. Arjoon, one of the Pandoo heroes, stands in a chariot drawn by white horses. Beside him is the divine Kreeshna, who for now is only the prince's mysterious counsellor; he will tell us his own nature and offices later.

Arjoon looks on with horror at a battle in which uncles, tutors, cousins, sons, brothers and close friends stand on both sides. He thinks he can have no happiness hereafter if he murders his own people. Such a crime is likely to destroy the virtue of a whole family or tribe, and the Sankar threatens hell to those who fall and those who survive. He sits down in the chariot between the two armies and throws away his bow and arrows.

3\. His divine adviser rebukes his weakness: it is his duty to fight. "Tell me what I shall do," the young man cries. "I am confounded between *two* duties. I am overcome with dread of sin, and nothing could appease my grief, though I ruled the earth or the hosts of heaven." Kreeshna then teaches him the nature of the soul, and says he may go to the fight because the soul neither kills nor is killed. You cannot say of it that it has been, is about to be, or will be hereafter. It is without birth, ancient, constant, eternal. As a man throws away old garments and puts on new, so the soul leaves its old mortal frames and enters new ones. Weapon, fire, water and wind cannot divide, burn, corrupt or dry it. It is indivisible, inconsumable, incorruptible, universal, permanent, immoveable. Our former state of being is unknown, the middle state is plain, the future cannot be discovered. The duty of Arjoon's tribe is to fight; a soldier of the Kshatree tribe has no higher.

4\. So belief in the soul's immortality is tied to the practice of life. But is Arjoon's dread of the future consequences of his action not reasonable? Kreeshna suggests it is not. People who hold out reward and punishment in that way look for passing enjoyment in heaven, not for eternal absorption. The Veds, which seem to encourage such notions, are suited to men in a threefold condition. Turn to spiritual things and hold firm to the higher path, and you will be free from care about the future as well as the present. Consider the deed, not the outcome, and let hope of reward not be the motive for action. Yet do not spend your life in inaction. Do your duty, give up all thought of consequence, and take refuge in wisdom alone. Men with true wisdom are unmindful of good and evil in this world. Those who have abandoned thought of the fruit of their actions are freed from the chains of birth and go to the regions of eternal happiness.

5\. Arjoon asks to know more about the Moonee, the thoroughly wise man. Kreeshna answers: "The wisdom of that man is established who, like the tortoise, can draw in all his members and restrain them from their usual purposes. The tumultuous senses carry off by force even the heart of one who strives to restrain them. The inspired man, trusting in me, may quell them and be happy. Such a man walks in the night when all things go to rest and sleeps in the day when all things wake. A man who trusts in the Supreme does not go astray; at the hour of death he shall mix with the incorporeal nature of Brahm."

6\. The relation of action to thought still troubles Arjoon and prompts another lecture from Kreeshna. In it Arjoon asks how man is led to commit offences, since he seems compelled against his wishes by some secret force. "It is the enemy, lust or passion," the teacher replies, "insatiable and full of sin, by which this world is covered as flame by smoke, a sword by rust, or the unborn child by its membrane. This old foe, in the shape of desire, raging like fire and hard to appease, darkens the understanding even of the wise. This destroyer of wisdom and knowledge must be subdued, and it can be; for though the organs are great, the mind is greater; the Resolution is greater than the mind, and there is One greater than that. When thou hast resolved what is superior to the resolution, and fixed thyself by thyself, then determine to abandon inclination or desire, thy great enemy."

7\. There is a deep mystery in that last sentence. Who is this that is superior to the resolution in man? All the discipline seems to depend on the question. Kreeshna says he taught this to one and another in former days, that it was handed down to the Rajarshees, and lost. Arjoon asks how this can be, since Kreeshna came later into life than some of those he taught. "Both I and thou," says Kreeshna, "have passed many births; mine are known to me, thou knowest not thine. Though I am not by nature subject to birth or decay, yet I have command over my own nature and am made evident by my power. When virtue declines in the world, I make myself manifest; I appear from age to age to preserve the just, destroy the wicked, and re-establish virtue." Two kinds of worship are pointed out. Those who acknowledge Kreeshna do not, on leaving their mortal frames, enter another, but enter into him. On the other hand, those who seek success for their works in this life worship the Devatas (demons or angels). The true Kreeshna worshipper sees rest in action and action in rest; he performs all duties yet, as it were, does nothing; he seeks no reward and is pleased with whatever chance brings; he is freed from the bonds of action and is the same in prosperity and adversity. God is attained by the man who makes God alone the object of his works. There are various modes of worship, all purifying, but worship of spiritual wisdom is far better than worship with offerings of things. In wisdom every work is found. Seek it with prostrations, questions and attention, and you will not fall again into folly; you will see all nature in me. Though you were the greatest of offenders, you can cross the gulf of sin in the bark of wisdom. Nothing in this world compares with wisdom and purity. He who is perfected by practice finds it in due time in his own soul. He who has faith finds wisdom; the ignorant man, and the man full of doubt, is lost. Those whose understandings, souls and refuge are in the Deity are purified from their offences by wisdom and go where they shall never return. The learned see him alike in the reverent Brahmin perfected in knowledge, in the ox, the elephant, the dog, and the man who eats dogs' flesh. Those whose minds are fixed on this equality gain eternity even in this world.

8\. The next lecture, on the exercises of the soul, works out the same idea in many forms. To the Yogi, or devout man, gold, iron and stones are the same; he is the same to those who love and those who hate, in the company of saints or sinners. He delights in his own soul; he is in God and free from sin; he believes in unity, worships me present in all things, and dwells in me altogether, even on this earth. In this conversation Arjoon asks, "Whither, O Kreeshna, doth the man go after death, who, although he be endued with faith, hath not obtained perfection in his devotion: because his unsubdued mind wandered from the discipline, does he come to nothing?" Kreeshna answers, "No man who hath done good goeth unto an evil place. A man whose devotions have been broken off by death, having enjoyed for many years the reward of his virtues in the region above, is at length born again in some holy family. He is endued with the same degree of application that he held in his former body, and he begins again to labour for perfection."

9\. But after all, who is Kreeshna? The question has already arisen in Arjoon's mind, and he has reached the stage of discipline at which it can be answered. The teacher says: I am the creation and dissolution of the whole universe. Nothing is greater than I; all things hang on me like precious gems on a string. I am moisture in water, light in the sun and moon, invocation in the Veds, sound in the firmament, sweet savour in the earth, glory in the source of light. I am life in all things and zeal in the zealous. I am the eternal seed of nature, the understanding of the wise, the glory of the proud, the strength of the strong, free from lust and anger. A supernatural influence bewilders the wicked, the foolish and the low-minded and keeps them from coming to me. I am not in these, though they proceed from me. Many seek me, but the wise man is constantly engaged in my service; I esteem him as myself, for his spirit depends on me alone. Those who worship the Devatas go to them; those who worship me alone go to me. The ignorant, who do not know my supreme nature, which is above all things, believe that I, who am invisible, exist in the visible forms in which they see me. I know all beings that have been, are, and shall be, but not one of them knows me. Those who trust in me know Brahm, the supreme and incorruptible; they know the emanations from which natural things are generated; they know the destroying nature. In this body I am the teacher of worship. He who thinks constantly of me will find me, and he who finds me does not return to mortal birth. The universe exists, dissolves, is reproduced; there is an incorruptible abode which is my mansion. The supreme Being is obtained by him who worships no other gods; in him all nature is included, and by him all things are spread abroad. I, continues Kreeshna, am the sacrifice, the worship, the spices, the fire, the victim, the father and mother of this world; I am the road of the good, the comforter, the creator, the witness, the asylum and the friend. Those who serve other gods with firm belief involuntarily worship me. I am the same to all mankind. Those who serve me in adoration are in me. If one of ever such evil ways serves me alone, he becomes virtuous in spirit and obtains eternal happiness. Even women, and the tribes of Visya and Soodra, shall go the supreme journey if they take sanctuary with me; how much more my holy servants the Brahmins and the Rajarshees! Consider this world finite and joyless, and serve me.

10\. Arjoon begins to regard his teacher with wonder and adoration. He is taught that reason, knowledge, clear judgment, patience, truth, humility, meekness, birth, death, fear, courage, zeal, renown and infamy all come from him. He is the soul standing in the bodies of all beings; he is the chief of warriors, floods and animals; the Himmalaya among mountains, the Ganges among rivers; the science in science, the spring among seasons, gaming among frauds, the rod and policy among rulers. "Amongst the secret I am silence, amongst the wise I am wisdom."

11\. All these are forms of Kreeshna. Arjoon longs to see his never-failing spirit, and a mysterious revelation is granted. The pupil is overwhelmed with rapture and terror. He sees all creation proceeding from Kreeshna and swallowed up in him. With this vision is mingled one of the army around him. As troops of insects rush faster and faster into flaming fire, and as rapid rivers roll on to the ocean's bed, so these heroes are rushing toward the flaming mouth of the Divine Being. The whole world is filled with his grandeur. Kreeshna is the destroyer as well as the creator! Of all these warriors, none but Arjoon is to live; they are already destroyed by the Divine power. Let him put forth his hand and be the immediate agent of their death. On to the battle!

12\. But Arjoon's terror grows. He bows down before him whom he had called Kreeshna and friend. I was ignorant of thy greatness, he says; I was blinded by affection and presumption; I have trifled with thee; I ask thy forgiveness. Thou art the Father of all things, animate and inanimate, the sage instructor of the whole, worthy to be adored. Bear with me as a father with his son, a friend with a friend, a lover with his beloved. I am pleased to see things never seen before, but my mind is in awful fear. He is told not to be disturbed or let his faculties be confounded. The god takes again his kindly human shape, and Arjoon is at peace.

13\. After this wonderful self-disclosure, and some discourse on how he is to be served in his visible and invisible nature, Kreeshna answers some of his pupil's harder questions. First, what is Kshetra, or body? It consists of the five elements (earth, water, fire, air and æther), consciousness, understanding, spirit, the eleven organs, the powers of the five senses, love and hatred, pleasure and pain, sensibility and firmness. Secondly, what is Wisdom? It is freedom from self-esteem, hypocrisy and injustice; patience, rectitude, respect for masters and teachers; freedom from attachment and affection to children, wife and home; evenness of temper whatever happens, longed for or not; freedom from pride, worship paid to Kreeshna alone, love of solitude, constant study of the superior spirit. Thirdly, what is Gnea, the object of Wisdom? It is that which has no beginning and is supreme, which can be called neither being nor not being. It is all hands and feet, all faces, heads and eyes, all ear; it sits in the midst of the world. Without organs, it is the reflected light of every faculty of the organs; connected with nothing, it contains all things; without quality, it partakes of every quality. It is the inside and outside, the moveable and immoveable, of all nature. It stands at a distance yet is present; it is undivided, yet stands divided in all things. It is the ruler of all things, the light in light, declared to be free from darkness.

14\. Kreeshna declares two other principles to be without beginning: Prakreetee and Pooroosh. The former seems to be the mere instrument or agent in man, the latter the directing power in him. All things, animate and inanimate, are said to be produced from the union of *Kshetra* and *Kshetra-gna*. I, says Kreeshna, am the Kshetra-gna in every mortal frame, the living power which directs it.

15\. From Prakreetee, or nature, proceed three Goon, or qualities: the truth quality, the passionate quality, the dark quality. The Satwa-goon, or truth quality, leads to wisdom; the Raja-goon, or passionate quality, to ambition and covetousness; the Tama-goon, or dark quality, to madness, distraction and ignorance. Those ruled by the first mount on high, those ruled by the second stay in the middle, and those ruled by the last sink below. But the soul must rise above all these qualities into a Being superior to them before it can drink the water of immortality. How this ascent is made, how a man is to rise above the particular Pooroosh, or soul, into the Poorooshottama, or supreme soul, is Kreeshna's next subject. I need not speak of it, as earlier lectures have anticipated it.

16\. An important subject remains. Belief in three different qualities presumes a different destiny for the creatures endued with them, and this is now plainly affirmed. The Divine destiny is absorption into the Divine nature; the evil destiny confines the soul to mortal birth. Those born under the evil destiny do not know what it is to advance in virtue or fall back in vice. They say the world is without beginning and end, without an Eeswar, or Divine light, and that all things are conceived by the union of the sexes. They say the gratification of sensual appetite is the supreme good, and "This to-day hath been acquired by me, and this I shall have also; I am powerful, I am happy, I am rich; I am endued with precedence among men. Where is there another like me? I will make presents at the feast, and be merry." Such men are self-conceited, stubborn, ever in pursuit of wealth and pride. They worship in name only, and hypocritically. They trust in pride and power; they hate me in themselves and others, so I cast them down into the wombs of evil spirits and unclean beasts. They go from birth to birth, and at length, not finding me, go into the most infernal regions. There are three ways to these: lust, anger and avarice. Avoid these gates of sin and thou wilt go the journey of the Most High.

17\. Distinction of qualities leads to distinction in kinds of faith or worship. All worship, but the nature and object of the worship are set by their different qualities. Worship directed by Divine precept, without desire of reward and with an attentive mind, is of the Satwa-goon. Worship performed irregularly, without regard to the precepts of the law, without distribution of bread, without the usual invocations, without gifts to the Brahmins at the end, and without faith, is of the Raja-goon. Worship performed with a view to the fruit, and with hypocrisy, is of the Tama-goon. Whatever is done without faith, whether sacrifices, deeds of charity or mortification of the flesh, is called Asat and is not for this world nor the one above. The same qualities show themselves in works. He who has the Satwa-goon forsakes the fruit of action but not action itself; he who has the Raja-goon forsakes the work because it is painful; he who has the Tama-goon neglects action through folly and distraction of mind. So with Wisdom: that of the Satwa-goon sees one infinite principle in nature; that of the Raja-goon sees manifold principles; that of the Tama-goon sees only self-interest in all things. So with Pleasure. The pleasure a man enjoys from his labour, in which he finds the end of his pains, which is poison at the beginning and the water of life at the end, is of the Satwa-goon; it arises from the consent of the understanding. The pleasure arising from the mere meeting of the organs with their objects, sweet as the water of life at first and poison at last, is of the Raja-goon. The pleasure that tends from beginning to end to stupefy the soul is of the Tama-goon. Nothing, Kreeshna declares, in heaven or earth is free from the influence of these three qualities.

18\. On these qualities depend the duties of the four tribes: Brahmin, Kshatree, Visya and Soodra. The natural duties of the Brahmin are peace, self-restraint, zeal, purity, patience, rectitude, learning, theology. Those of the Kshatree are bravery, glory, rectitude, not fleeing from the field, generosity, princely conduct. The natural duty of the Visya is to cultivate land, tend cattle, and buy and sell; that of the Soodra is servitude. A man content with his own lot and duty obtains perfection, for he offers his works to that Being from whom the principles of all beings proceed. The duty of a man's own calling is far better than another's, however well the other is done. A man's own calling, with all its faults, ought not to be forsaken. With thy heart place all thy works in me, and thou shalt surmount every difficulty. But if through pride thou wilt not hear my words, thou wilt surely be lost. From self-confidence thou mayest think thou wilt not fight; that is a false resolve, for the principles of thy nature will drive thee, and thou wilt do from necessity what thou seekest through ignorance to avoid.

19\. This conclusion fits the opening of the story and gives it unity, but it may seem inconsistent with what has been said of the special glory of the Brahmin. Kreeshna adds, "Eeswar resideth in the bosom of every mortal being, revolving with his supernatural power the universal wheel of time. Take sanctuary with him upon all occasions, oh! offspring of Bahrat; by his divine pleasure thou shalt obtain supreme happiness, and an eternal abode."

20\. It would have been easy to pick sentences from this poem and other Hindoo books and build a scheme of Hindoo philosophy out of them. But such a scheme would not represent the actual thoughts and conflicts in the minds of those to whom it was attributed. We might form a high or low notion of this remarkable people or their teachers, but we should know nothing of either. The occasion of the poem, its scenery, and the way its thoughts work themselves out are at least as important as the results Arjoon, Kreeshna or the narrator reach. The final moral, which shows the Kshatree tribe to have its own work and dignity, not incompatible with the Brahmin's superior glory, evidently runs through the poem. All its dramatic interest and speculation are linked to it. Arjoon's darkness comes from fancying that the work which belongs to the priest also belongs to the warrior, or that the only escape from this is to suppose a different standard for each, a different object to pursue, a different God to adore. Such an opinion had doubtless been taught in the Brahminical schools and seemed a natural inference from the idea of Brahminism. The author of the poem evidently felt how opposed it was to what he regarded as pure Brahminism: it must force the Brahmin himself to acknowledge many objects when his business was to search for unity, and it must lead to a hopeless division of castes that should be bound together in obedience to what was most refined and spiritual. So the book is evidently the work of a reformer who wished to make the Brahminical tribe conscious of its vocation as the guide, not the tyrant, of the rest. In pursuing this aim he brings out the highest form of Hindooism, a form that never was and never could be realised, but by which we may understand its lower and more vulgar manifestations far better than by looking at them alone.

21\. This form differs from what we find in the Veds, and many have concluded that the poem is throughout a hidden protest against the belief embodied in them. But I see no sufficient reason to doubt that the author is sincere in the respect he professes for them, and that he believed he was drawing out the sense latent in them. Nor was he perhaps wholly wrong. The writers of the Veds would have been quite unable to follow him in a single step of his philosophical speculation, and there is no reason to doubt that they really meant to ask Indra and the other gods they invoked to come and drink with them. Yet their cries for communion and friendship with the gods, and for purification, grounded as they are on religious aspirations of the creature and not on a revelation of the Creator, do contain implicitly the ideas developed in the Bhagavad Gita. In one respect the poet returns from the more exclusive Brahminism to the earlier teaching of the Vedas: his hero is Kreeshna, not Brahm. It is true that Kreeshna *is* Brahm and claims the name; but he presents himself first in human shape, as the warrior and not merely the thinker. This difference belongs to the whole conception of the poem. The sudden manifestation of his spiritual and divine glory, which overwhelms Arjoon, does not swallow up his human form or prevent his appearing in it again. However great the difficulty, the Hindoo philosopher sees that this union must somehow be realised, and that no teacher of man's spirit is sufficient in whom both conditions do not meet.

22\. But for all the depth and sincerity of this acknowledgment of such a teacher, the soul of man is still the ultimate object of this poem, as much as of the narrower, merely meditative religion. In both it is equally true that the soul, or spiritual part of man, is always unawares becoming the God, even while there is the strongest effort to escape this identification: a really earnest struggle of the man to sink in awe, to confess One mightier than himself, to become nothing in his presence. What is his presence? Where is it? Here the Hindoo is lost; he sees images of himself everywhere, and he is sure there is something that is not the image of himself. To discover what it is is worth the toil and sorrow of a life, and to know it must be the great reward hereafter. But while he is working out that difficult problem and devising the best means of complete fruition, Earth goes on with her processes of growth, decay and destruction; the man himself is born, has to live, fight and die. Nothing connects himself or Nature with God, unless he worships himself or Nature and makes the God include both. This is the downward result to which everything in Hindoo life and society has always tended.

23\. The Hebrew was forbidden to connect God with anything in heaven above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth. He was taught to look up to the Lord as his God, the God of his fathers, the King of his land, the Creator of things, the Lawgiver of himself. He was taught to wage war on the tendencies to worship natural gods that he found in himself and saw in others. He was taught to acknowledge the Lord as the ever-present guide, ruler and teacher of his whole nation: every Jew in the covenant, and priests, lawgivers and prophets God's ministers to them. This is what is called their narrow, exclusive faith. But out of it, as we have seen, grew a philosophy: the recognition of a Divine teacher of man, and of a wisdom to be the object of his search and love. The Hindoo starts from the discovery to which the Hebrew was led by long and painful discipline. He is conscious of a mysterious Teacher near him, one who works on his spirit and is at the same time ruler over nature. But his search begins from himself, and, despite his conviction that it ought not to be so, it ends in himself. The purification of his own soul becomes in practice the highest end he can pursue or conceive; he must make it his aim, and must separate from the society to which he nevertheless feels bound, in order to pursue it. The more he learns about himself, the more he finds he must get rid of himself, yet that demon always pursues him. To sink and be lost is his only hope, to sink in Brahm. But is Brahm anything except a projection from himself? Does sinking in him mean the same as being nothing?

24\. Reflections like these, on which the whole condition of Hindoo society for thousands of years is the commentary, might raise doubts in those who think that acknowledging a wisdom received hinders the search for it, and that the soul of man is most likely to be free when it works out its freedom for itself, or under a set of wise men. But we who acknowledge the Hebrew principle, and have that vantage-ground for viewing the history of the universe, need not rest in this merely negative conclusion. We are bound to look on the whole course of human thought as directed by a wisdom above man's, by One who, as the Apostle says, "orders the times before appointed and the bounds of men's habitations, that they may seek Him, if haply they may feel after Him and find Him." To one holding this faith, the seekings of the Bhagavad Gita and of the whole Hindoo world must be of the profoundest interest. He must see that they were continually baffled, but he sees it with sympathy, not exultation, certain that they were struggling with questions which belong to him and to the whole universe, to which he too must seek an answer and cannot rest till he finds one. Far from seeing only contradictions in the method or result of the search, he will be repeatedly humbled to see how much was made known to these inquirers: what glimpses of light they caught, what visions of good cheered their dreary path, what strength was given them for thought, for suffering, even at times for manly action. If he feels even a wish to deny or explain away this fact, he will suspect himself of a secret atheism, and of having studied the Hebrew books to no profit.

25\. These remarks belong especially, but not only, to the subject now before us. Modern inquiries have made it clear that Sanscrit is the source of most European languages. So we have a right to expect that the habit of thought and feeling in the Sanscrit books may be traced, under different modifications, in the nations we shall speak of later. These Hindoo books may prove the beginning of a course of inquiry we shall follow through many windings in Greek and modern philosophy. The spirit of man, which in the Hebrew books we saw under a Divine discipline and education, will now be seen asking a multitude of questions about itself, its destiny, and its relations to the visible and invisible world. It will be feeling after some object near it that might guide or help it in the search, losing that object again and again, and questioning earth and heaven where it has gone and how it may be recovered. Whether this Indo-Germanic course of inquiry ever meets the Semitic teaching we have been hearing; whether the unity revealed to the Hebrew will explain or contradict the unity the Brahmin seeks: our future history may show. Meanwhile I note that the problems we shall meet among Ionian, Eleatic and Platonic philosophers will perplex us far less if we have listened attentively to the dialogue between Arjoon and Kreeshna.

### SECTION III. THE PHILOSOPHER SEPARATING HIMSELF FROM THE PRIEST.

1\. I will leave any discussion of the formal schools of Hindoo philosophy to the second part of this sketch. But there is one great Eastern revolution, placed by most authorities in the fifth or sixth century B.C., that is closely bound up with the history of philosophy. The few glimpses we have of the outward facts of this conflict, which led to such surprising results, would be unintelligible to us without some prior knowledge of Hindoo speculations.

2\. Hindoo books constantly speak of the Buddhist as a member of a philosophical sect. We know him as the follower of a religion held by nearly a third of the world's people. To reconcile these two descriptions, we must recall what was said about the seemingly unsociable characters joined in the Brahmin, and about the nature of Brahm himself. The priest is the man who uses his soul or intellect, unlike the mass of men, who use only their senses. Brahm is *the* Intellect, or Buddha. It could easily have been guessed that a sect of Brahmins would dwell on the idea of intelligence in man until they suspected that their claim to a monopoly of it denied Brahm's presence. It is likely, too, given what we found in the Bhagavad Gita, that they would put the meditative side of religion above the sacrificial. But there came a memorable and critical period in the history of mankind generally, connected with the rise of reformers and legislators in various countries, and perhaps marking the beginning of European society and civilization. Then Brahminism was shaken to its centre in Hindostan, and the worship of the One Intelligence was proclaimed aloud as incompatible with the claims of an hereditary caste.

3\. It was not the original Hindoo *doctrine* that became the inspiring idea of whole countries, as some have said, in plain contradiction to both the letter and spirit of the Veds. It was the idea hidden in that doctrine, which had again and again threatened to break loose from it. The philosophy, freeing itself from the old faith, became a faith itself. Buddhism is the most surprising effort of the human intellect to assert its own supremacy that has ever been recorded, or perhaps ever will be. European sages in the last century and this one have asked when philosophy will break free of the fetters priests put on it. Philosophy in Asia did that two thousand years ago. It threw off an intolerable yoke, affirmed that man's soul can expand without limit, and claimed for that soul the homage due to a divinity. This was no idle boast: it actually won the allegiance of multitudes.

4\. Is the result one that a lover of wisdom, or of his kind, can delight to dwell on? Every form in which the intellect can express belief in itself and its powers has been found and tried. The Buddhist sometimes worships the pure, absolute unity; sometimes he sees a soul above his own, *himself* transfigured; sometimes he adores men who did great works on earth, the one Buddha spread among many Buddhas. Now he denies all symbols; now everything is symbolical. He is the purest of theists and the most complete of atheists. He thinks nothing too vast for human wisdom, yet sees it all gathered up in an infant. He is always fleeing from himself, yet finds nothing but images of himself. The philosophy that began by freeing itself from religion has made itself a religion, one especially narrow, artificial, and material. Those who would not be priests or have priests practise every priestly imposture and are slavishly priestridden. The adored intellect makes no progress; the seeker after wisdom has no resource but to identify the search with the object and to confess that he finds nothing. Can this be the process destined to free mankind?

## CHAPTER IV. CHINESE PHILOSOPHY.

1\. [I have]{.smallcaps} said that the Buddhist revolution was an effort of philosophers to free themselves from an inherited faith. The teachers of the last century would still not have looked to such an experiment for encouragement or example. Mysticism belonged to the rebels against the Brahminical system as much as to the system itself, and it inspired them with nothing but contempt. But the Eastern world gave them another object for unbounded admiration. In Khoung-fou-tseu they found everything they missed in the sages of India, without what offended them there. Six centuries before Christ, they heard, here was a man who thought the outward economy of an empire a worthier study than all hidden and abstract lore. He valued maxims of life and conduct above doctrines about the Divinity, and had anticipated some of the most modern propositions about governor and governed. He was no mere name for a set of opinions. He had a distinct personality, and his words and acts were not confined to a small circle or a century or two. He left his impression on the most populous empire in the world. After two thousand years his authority is still sacred to the people, the mandarins and the emperors, and his influence is felt throughout that vast society.

2\. Such a fact deserves attention. India and China are very different: in India all history is a philosophy, and in China all philosophy is a history. Yet for each people the search after wisdom is the only satisfactory key to what has befallen it. The long line of dynasties before Khoung-fou-tseu is hard to understand, though his words and acts compel us to believe in it, and that difficulty proves the point. We acknowledge the empire's antiquity because it is needed to explain the reform he worked in it.

3\. So I need not dwell on the old faith of China as I did on that of India. We must examine it largely through his eyes, since he collected and remodelled the books that contain it. He may have left out much that seemed immaterial for educating his country but that a modern critic would value. Still, I do not doubt the general accuracy of his conception of the old institutions and creed. There is abundant proof of the fidelity with which he studied them and his earnest desire to preserve them. No one aspired less to be an innovator; his chief aim was to remove innovations. Yet this was balanced by deep reverence for what was established. Nothing was to be brought back merely for the sake of bringing it back, and order was not to be sacrificed even in the hope of redressing an evil.

4\. Khoung-fou-tseu could not have had his effect on China, or been recognised as he has been for so many ages, unless his mind were the highest type of the Chinese mind, in which we can read what it aimed at both before and after he enlightened it. So I accept the view that Chinese religion was from the first less lofty and mysterious than almost any other people's. The belief in the eternal as distinct from and opposed to the temporal, so characteristic of the Hindoo, existed only dimly and was supplied by reverence for the past. The sense of communion with invisible powers, though not absent, was weak. The emperor must always have been regarded as the highest utterer of the divine mind, and the priest valued chiefly as a minister of court ceremonial. Rites must have had a value of their own, independent of all significance, such as they have scarcely had elsewhere. With this went what may seem incompatible with it: an attachment to whatever is useful and practical. The Chinese must have respected family relationships profoundly, but the relation of father and son will have overshadowed the rest, so that the others were treated as forms of it or sacrificed to it. Implicit obedience to authority will have been *the* virtue that every institution existed to enforce and that alone would preserve them. Add to the reverence for ancestors, the emperor and the father some Sabean worship, some astrology and speculation about the future, and we probably reach a fair picture of China under the old emperors whom the sage continually cites with admiration and regret.

5\. These habits of mind may have been represented more or less perfectly in particular sovereigns, and they had embodied themselves in the forms of Chinese society. A tyrant could upset the whole economy of such a world, and a state resting on custom and observance could quickly fall into confusion. "The dynasty of Yu," says the Book of Verses, "might be compared to the Most High while it retained the affection of the people: we learn by its decline how hard it is to preserve the command of heaven." These words must be explained later; I quote them now only to show the starting-point of Confucian philosophy. The wisdom it aims at is whatever can remove a decayed condition of society and restore the principles implied in it. The Chinese books speak of the studious, meditative man almost as much as the Brahminical ones do. As earnestly as the Brahmins, and perhaps more honestly, Khoung-fou-tseu rates thought and study above animal pleasures, wealth and office. Yet no one is less of a Moonee. He began as a man of affairs, a Chinese official, studied the affairs of the empire all his life, and trained his disciples to take part in them. Education was for him the one necessary means to good government, and all education was for the sake of government. To find the ends of government and the means of reaching them was the sage's one function.

6\. Before turning to his doctrines, and to how morals and metaphysics were combined in his political science, I must give some idea of the man himself. The third of the Chinese classical books, the Lun-yu or Philosophical Dialogues, is the most helpful. It records his sayings, which show far more internal evidence of genuineness than those usually attributed to the founders of the Greek schools. It also has the testimonies of affectionate disciples. These are not wholly to be trusted, but they give different impressions of his character, from which we can form our own.

7\. M. Pauthier, the recent French translator of the Chinese classics, has put us under great obligation by bringing these treasures within our reach. His enthusiasm, besides his European reputation, shows that he has really mastered the difficulties. He has somewhat rashly compared the Lun-yu dialogues with those in which Socrates is the hero. He candidly adds that the resemblance is chiefly to the sayings Xenophon attributes to his master, and that the artistic beauty and form of the Platonic dialogues are hard to find in the Chinese. He even admits a certain monotony in Khoung-fou-tseu's utterances, but adds that "even this monotony has something of the serenity and the majesty of a moral instruction, which is bringing successively under our eyes the different sides of human nature contemplated from a higher ground." I would gladly trade some of this serenity and majesty for the Greek's hearty, humorous sympathy with all that goes on around him. But I accept it as the mark of another order of genius, eastern rather than western, entitled to its own respect. It is also hardly just to speak of Khoung-fou-tseu as simply looking down on his fellow-men: his deeds and words show fellow-feeling and real humbleness of mind. The dogma that great influence over mankind always goes with such qualities may or may not be true, but it is certainly not contradicted here.

8\. So that readers may know the form of this Chinese book, and not only the choice sentences I might pick, I give the substance of some passages that best show his character and way of thinking. He said: I comment on the old books but do not compose new ones; I have faith in the Ancients and love them, and I honour our Lao-pang above all (a sage of the Chang dynasty). To meditate in silence and recall what I have meditated, to study without discouragement, to teach without being cast down: how shall I attain these virtues? My sorrow is that virtue is not cultivated, study not pursued manfully, justice and equity professed but not followed, and the wicked and perverse not corrected. If a man makes no effort to develop his own mind, I will not develop it for him; if he will not use speech to make himself intelligible, I will not guess his meaning; if, once shown one angle of a square, he does not find the other three, I will not do the demonstration for him. He told Yeu-youan that when we are in public office we do our duty and when dismissed we have the repose of private life, and that only the two of them lived so. T'seu-leu asked whom he would take as lieutenant if he led three armies of 12,500 men each. He answered that he would certainly not take the man who would lead them by hand into combat with a tiger, ford a river for no reason, or throw his life away without reason or remorse; he wanted a man who kept steady vigilance over affairs and could form plans and carry them out. To get riches fairly I would take a low occupation if necessary; if the means were unfair, I would rather follow what I delight in. In the kingdom of Tshi he heard the music called Tchao and was so affected that for three months he did not know the taste of his food; he said he did not think such perfection had been reached since. Yeo-yeou wondered whether the master would help the Prince of Wei, and Tseu-koung went to ask, but only indirectly. He asked what the master thought of Pe-i and Chou-tsi. The master called them true sages of the old world, said they had no regrets because they sought humanity and obtained it, and Tseu-koung went back saying the master would not assist the Prince. To eat a little rice, drink water, and have only one's bent arm to lean on has its own satisfaction; riches and honour got unfairly are like a cloud driven by the wind. If I could add years to my life I would ask fifty to study the Y-king, so as to be free from great faults. When Ye-hong asked Tseu-leu about him and got no answer, he said: tell him that Khoung is a man who in his eagerness for knowledge forgets to eat, in the joy of having it forgets the cost, and does not notice old age. I was not born with knowledge; I loved the ancients and made every effort to acquire what they knew. He never spoke in conversation of extraordinary things, civil troubles or spirits. If three of us travel together I will find two instructors: I imitate the good man and correct myself by the bad. Heaven has planted virtue in me; what can Hoan-teu do to me? Do you think I conceal doctrines from you, my disciples? I have none; I have done nothing that I have not shared with you. I cannot hope to see a holy man, only a wise one (the exact difference will be explained later); I cannot hope to see a truly virtuous man, only one constant and settled in his views. To have nothing and act as if one had plenty, to be empty and show oneself full, to be little and show oneself great, is very hard to keep up. How is it that some act without knowing what they do? I would not behave so. We must hear the advice of many, choose what is good in it and follow it, see much and reflect carefully on what we have seen: that is the second step in knowledge. When a young man from Heou-hing, a people hard to teach, came to his disciples and they doubted whether to receive him, he said that he had admitted him to come, not to go away: the man had purified and renewed himself to enter the school, so praise him for coming so far; I am not responsible for his past or future. Is humanity far from us? I wish to have it, and it comes. A judge of Tchin asked whether Tchou-king understood the rites, and Khoung-fou-tseu said he did. The judge said a great man should never assent to others' faults, yet he had done so, for the prince had married a woman of his own family name, On, and called her On-mengtsew; a prince should know the rites. When this was reported, the philosopher cried: what a happy man Khoung-fou-tseu is, for if he commits a fault men are sure to know it. In literature I am not equal to others; if I think of one who unites holiness and humanity, how could I compare myself to him? All I know is that I force myself to practise these virtues and teach them without being disheartened. When he was very sick and Tseu-leu begged leave for the disciples to pray for him to the spirits and genii, he asked whether that was proper. Tseu-leu said it was, since the book Leni says to address prayers to the spirits and genii above and below. He said: the prayer of Khoung-fou-tseu is constant. The luxurious are not submissive, the parsimonious are vile and abject, yet baseness is better than disobedience. Tai-pe might be called sovereignly virtuous: he refused the empire three times, and the people saw nothing admirable in it. Deference and respect not regulated by rules or education are mere indulgence of our fancy; circumspection not so regulated is extravagant cowardice; manly courage not so regulated is insubordination; rectitude not so regulated brings the greatest confusion. We may force the people to *follow* the precepts of justice and reason, but not to *comprehend* them. He who has unshaken faith in truth and loves study passionately keeps the principles of virtue that follow from them until death. If a state is governed by reason, poverty and misery are shameful; if not, riches and honour are. I see no defect in Yu: he was sober in food and drink and devoutly pious to the spirits and genii; his ordinary clothing was poor, but how beautiful were his robes at ceremonies; his dwelling was humble, but he gave all his energy to digging trenches and canals for the waters.

9\. Some of these sentences need illustration from other passages. In the last, Yu is commended for devotion to the spirits and genii, yet on his sick-bed Khoung-fou-tseu seems scarcely to have acknowledged their existence, or at least to have had no faith in their power to help him. The contradiction is only apparent, as the third chapter of the book shows. Asked the meaning of the grand royal sacrifice, he said, "I do not know. He who did know this sense would find everything under Heaven clear and manifest for him. He would find no more difficulty in knowing everything than in putting his finger in the palm of his hand." When he entered the great temple he inquired minutely about everything, and an onlooker asked who could now say he knew the rites; he answered that he did so in conformity with the rites. When Tseu-kang wished to abolish the sheep sacrificed on the first day of the twelfth moon, he said, "Tse, you are only engaged about the sacrifice of the sheep, I am only concerned about the ceremony."

From these passages we may judge his religious feeling generally. He saw a mystery in the sacrifice that he could not penetrate. He was far from denying it and would not for the world abolish its expression, but what it meant he did not know and probably did not seek to know. He valued the sacrifice not for itself or for any benefit from it, but as part of an august and awful ceremonial. He worshipped the spirits and genii because it was the ancient law and established custom, which was what made them sacred to him; but he had nothing to tell about them. It does not follow that he feigned a faith for the vulgar which he secretly disowned, or that he thought worship a mere invention to maintain government. His own sincere conduct rules out the first supposition, and his demand for sincerity in ministers and emperors rules out the second. One passage might even seem to overturn all I have said of his ritualism and to show that he *did* recognise a hidden ground for the customs he preserved. Tseu-hia asked the meaning of the lines in the Book of Verses: "*What an agreeable smile there is upon his fine and delicate mouth! how sweet and ravishing his look! The ground of the picture must be prepared if you would paint*." He answered, "You cannot lay on the colours till you have made preparation for them." Tseu-hia said, "You hint that mere ritual laws are secondary things." He replied, "You have caught my meaning; you are beginning to understand my discourses on poetry." He also speaks of a hidden sense in the rites of the dynasty of Hai which laws and the opinions of wise men did not suffice to make known. This leads to his main principle. Ceremonies, formalities, etiquette, in a word social customs, embody the principle of reason, the very secret of order among men. This principle is the divinest thing he knows, and traditional habits and forms are its most accurate expression. They are the great restraints on self-will, and keeping them is the sign of a ruler who wants to be in sympathy with his people. To perceive what they signify is the wise man's privilege, and he is to communicate it, as far as he can without intentional reserve, to his disciples. It is the great business of education to impress it on rulers and subjects alike. But this wisdom can hardly be better expressed than in the forms themselves. It must be gained by observation, practice and habitual discipline, and must show itself in conduct, gestures and looks as much as in words. It must be uttered, so far as it can be, in short maxims and somewhat enigmatical poetry, which interpret themselves slowly to one who combines honest purpose, diligence and political experience.

In the same way we must understand a phrase very frequent in his discourses, though one disciple strangely says he did not often care to use it. Our French guide renders it, no doubt accurately, as *humanity*. A few passages show that the word had a profound, almost cabalistical significance for him, which may account for his speaking of it rarely, though his disciples could not help often attributing it to him. Ming-wow-pe asked whether T'seu-lou was humane, and the philosopher said, "I do not know." Asked again, he said that for commanding the armies of a great kingdom T'seu-lou would be capable, "but I do not know what is his humanity." Of Kieou he said he might govern a city of a thousand houses or a family of a hundred chariots, but he did not know his humanity. Of Tchi he said that in an official sash at court, with his good elocution, he might receive and hand out guests, but again he did not know his humanity. I have quoted passages showing his great love of music, and the importance he attached to it in education and government is perhaps the one point of resemblance with Plato. He clearly connected new music closely with the sublime virtue, or complex of virtues, he calls humanity. I conceive humanity to mean that order and harmony of relations in the body politic, with the corresponding order and harmony of feelings and faculties in the individual, of which music is the natural expression. One disciple declares that his master's doctrine consists simply in having rectitude of heart and loving our neighbour as ourselves. M. Pauthier apologises for giving this form to his translation but says he could find none more accurate, and until a greater scholar contradicts him we must accept it. If he supposes that those who believe these words came from higher lips will be scandalised, he mistakes the matter altogether. Those who attach the most awful significance to those lips and to the Person from whom the words fell will be the least inclined to see him as a propounder of great maxims rather than the giver of a new life. They will be the least likely to grudge a Chinese teacher any glimpses he was given of what the true regenerator of humanity should do for it.

Connected with this is another key phrase of the Confucian system, which he too seems always to have uttered with hesitation: it is said he spoke rarely of destiny or of the *command of heaven*. Perhaps he did not know precisely what he meant by heaven, but he knew it was something real and not imaginary. It fits the character of the original Chinese worship, and of his own mind, that he should be deeply impressed by the order of the heavenly bodies, and by the evenness, calm and steadfastness shown in the succession of day and night. He wanted that order in human society and believed the imperial dignity was meant to represent and uphold it. The emperor executed the mandate of heaven when he presented the image of this order, and disobeyed it when he forgot the principle and promoted or permitted confusion. So Khoung-fou-tseu presumes a direct responsibility in the emperor, but to whom? Many expressions recognise the misery that follows when the sovereign forgets his duties to the governed, and so his modern interpreters keep hoping he dreamed of responsibility to the popular voice. However plausibly some sentences support this, I believe it outrages the whole principle and history of the Confucian doctrine. In the philosopher's mind the emperor could not transgress the commandment of heaven more than by forgetting he was an emperor and confessing he was a subject. Responsibility to an actual living Being who could call the emperor to account is equally out of the question. What remains is homage to a principle, a law, the idea of duty, and this is what he laboured by all his education and discipline to realise in his own heart and others'. He was wisely conscious of its vagueness and felt the need to connect it with some superior order, even if only a natural one. He did not like to say what the emperor obeyed, yet he felt, and even declared, that the emperor, like all men, indeed because he was the first of men, lived by obedience. Here the teacher's personal convictions become identical with his political philosophy, of which I must now give a more exact account.

10\. Ngrâi-Koung asked Khoung-fou-tseu for the constitutive principles of good government. He said that the laws of the kings Wen and Wou were written on bamboo tablets: if their ministers lived now, their laws would be in force; the ministers are gone and the principles are no longer followed. The combined virtues of a prince's ministers make the administration good, as the earth, uniting the moist and the dry, makes plants grow; good administration springs up naturally in suitable soil, like reeds on a riverbank. A prince who wants to imitate the old kings must choose ministers by his own sentiments, which must always be inspired by the public good. To keep them so he must conform to the great law of duty, and that law must be sought in humanity, the principle of love for all men. This humanity *is man himself*, and regard for relations is its first duty. The prince can never cease correcting and perfecting himself. To do so he must render his relations what is due them; to do that he must know and honour wise men, who will instruct him in his duties; and to know them he must have knowledge of heaven and of the law which directs the practice of prescribed duties. The most universal human duties are five, and man has three natural faculties for practising them. The duties are the relations between prince and ministers, father and children, husband and wife, elder and younger brother, and friends. The faculties are conscience, the light of intelligence that distinguishes good from evil; humanity, the equity of the heart; and moral courage, the force of the soul. Whether nature suffices for knowing these duties or study is needed, whether the knowledge comes with difficulty or not, the result is the same once it is had. Whether we practise them naturally and without effort or for profit and advantage, the result is the same once useful works are accomplished. He who loves study, or applying his intelligence to the law of duty, is very near moral science; he who devotes all his efforts to moral duties is near the devotion to man's happiness called humanity; he who knows how to blush for weakness in duty is very near the force of mind needed to fulfil it. As soon as the prince has regulated and improved himself, the universal duties will be accomplished towards him. When he reveres wise men he will have no doubt of truth and falsehood, good and evil. When his parents have the affection due them, there will be no quarrels among his uncles and brothers. When he treats secondary officials properly, the learned will zealously do their duty in the seminaries. When he loves the people as his son, they will imitate their superior. When he draws savans and artists about him, his wealth will be well spent. When he entertains strangers agreeably, men from the four ends of the empire will flock to his state. When he treats his great vassals kindly, he will be respected throughout the empire. These political axioms must not be separated from the following, which are more purely moral. All virtuous actions and duties resolved beforehand are accomplished, and if not so resolved they are in a state of infraction. If we have determined beforehand the words we must speak, we shall not hesitate; if we have determined our affairs and occupations, they will be easily accomplished. The perfect, the true, disengaged from all mixture, is the law of heaven. The process of perfection, using all one's efforts to discover the celestial law, the true principle of the mandate of heaven, is the law of man. The perfect man attains this law without outside help and without meditation or long reflection, and arrives at it with calm and tranquillity: this is the holy man. He who keeps tending towards perfection, clings strongly to the good and fears to lose it, is the sage.

11\. These extracts come from the second of the classical books, called "The Invariable in the Mean." The Chinese think it contains the very essence of all philosophy, that of the great school, for which the first school, the school of custom or etiquette, is only the vestibule. Since we shall often meet the doctrine of the mean in the schools of the West, let us see what anticipation of it these passages from the Tchoung-Young contain.

You will have noticed the *form* in which the Confucian maxims unfold. M. Pauthier says the sorites is clearly a Chinese invention: to be a good emperor you must be a good friend, to be a good friend a good son, to be a good son you must know the law of right, and so on. This is how the sage naturally and habitually speaks. Each duty involves another. What is the first duty, from which all draw their sanction and which makes the others possible? It is hard to find, and often we seem to move in a circle. But clearly all duties involve a rule. To be right is to be regular, and irregularity is the common expression for the violation of all relations. Irregularity is clearly the effect of some bias to one side or another, so the law of rectitude must be the law of the *mean*, and all study and discipline must serve to preserve it. The book says: "Before joy, satisfaction, anger, sorrow, have been produced in the soul, the state in which we are found is called the mean. When once they have been produced in the soul, and they have not transgressed certain limits, the state in which we are is called harmonic. This Mean is the grand foundation of the world. Harmony is the universal and permanent law of it. When the Mean and the harmony have been carried to the point of perfection, heaven and earth are in a state of perfect tranquillity, and all beings receive their full development." Khoung-fou-tseu said the man of superior virtue keeps invariably to the mean, and the unprincipled man constantly opposes it. Few know how to keep long in the right way, and he knew the reason: cultivated men pass beyond it, ignorant men do not reach it; men of strong virtue go too far, men of feeble virtue stop short.

Here is the marrow of Chinese life, morals and politics. It explains the passion for minute ceremony that seems so ridiculous to Western people. It explains why the affectionate disciples of so honest and simple a man spend whole pages telling us how his robe, saluting people on either side, fell straight before and behind; how he quickened his step to introduce guests with his arms spread like a bird's wings; how he bent his body under the palace gate as if it were too low; how before the throne his countenance changed, his step was grave and measured as if fettered, and his words as embarrassed as his feet; how he climbed into the hall holding his robe with both hands, bent, hardly daring to breathe; how his nightdress was half as long again as his body; how he never ate meat not cut in straight lines nor meat lacking its proper sauce. There are a thousand such particulars, and I omit them lest I lessen your respect for a remarkable man, since I mean only to shed light on the national character and show how his philosophy grew out of it and was determined by it. That philosophy is not a collection of dry formalities. It rests on large experience, and it brings out the idea of duty as the West never did until Greek philosophy was remoulded by the Latin mind. It suggests very deep thoughts about the connection of social and individual life, and may help us as much by what it fails to recognise as by what it proclaims. But in China the blanks that are so significant to us have been filled as they could only be filled: by new maxims, a more rigid ceremonial, and intense self-conceit and self-satisfaction. Other experiments have tried to supply Khoung-fou-tseu's deficiencies, and a mystical rationalism and the Buddhist divinity have both been called in to help out the cold atheism of the authorised creed. But the true Confucian rightly feels these plants are not native to Chinese soil. He clings to his classical books, learns them by heart, and dwells on the equity, contempt of money and reverence for antiquity they enforce. By the contradictions of his acts and life he shows what truth these maxims have and what powerlessness: how faithfully they foretell the decline of a country that does not obey them, and how unable they are to produce obedience. The philosophers of the last century were entitled to point to China's existence through so many centuries, with its mechanical appliances, early maturity and political experience, and say, "See what can be effected by mere intelligence, content to dwell upon the earth, aspiring to no acquaintance with things divine." I accept their words and their example. Such intelligence could do this, so God has willed. Alas for human beings, if there is nothing which can do more!

12\. I should wrong China if I said nothing of the fourth classical book, which bears another name than the great teacher's. It is the name of a man who was himself a teacher and reformer, who thought Khoung-fou-tseu the great legislator of the world, and who laboured in a society that had degenerated again to restore his precepts and practice. Meng-tseu belongs to the fourth century B.C. He is immeasurably more interesting to us than his predecessor, and so, I suppose, must seem far inferior to him in Chinese eyes. He probably was inferior in quietness, self-control and adaptation to the habits of the people he spoke with. I can imagine he would never have been a great legislator or left a great impression on his country if Khoung-fou-tseu had not led the way. But in place of his master's solemnity and general dryness, Meng-tseu seems to have had real humour, a very earnest dislike of oppression, courage in telling disagreeable truths to the highest personages, and a power of seeing how sound maxims apply to the details of government. We cannot contemplate these without admiration and profit after 2,000 years. If I have led readers to think scornfully of eastern wisdom, or to suppose it has no lessons for England in the nineteenth century, I have tempted them to imitate the worst Chinese habits. Let me repair the error by asking them to listen to a conversation between Meng-tseu and Siouan-Wang, king of Tshi.

The king asked whether it was true that King Wen-Wang's park was seven leagues round. Meng-tseu said history tells us so. "Was not that excessive?" said the king. Meng-tseu said the people thought it too small. The king said his own park was only four leagues round and the people thought it too large; why the difference? Meng-tseu answered that Wen-Wang's park was shared with the people: all who wanted grass or wood went there, all who wanted pheasants or hares. Since the king had his park in common with the people, they thought it small though it was seven leagues round. "Was that wonderful? When I was about to cross your frontier I inquired what was especially forbidden in your kingdom. I learnt there is a park four leagues round within your line of customs, where the man who kills a stag is punished with death as if he had killed a man. So there is an actual pit of death four leagues round in the heart of your kingdom. The people think that park too great. Is it wonderful?"

From a very long conversation with the same prince, all worth extracting, I take a passage that shows his talent less than many others do, but it will prove his philosophy is not obsolete. To lack the necessaries of life and yet keep an equal and virtuous mind is possible only for men whose intelligence raises them above the multitude. The mass of the people, lacking necessaries, lack also an equal and virtuous mind; then come violation of law, licence and debauchery, and there is nothing they will not do. Then you bring them before judgment-seats and punish them, so you catch the people in a net. If a man truly endowed with humanity occupied the throne, could he commit this criminal action of snaring the people? As things are, the people's private property is so constituted that children have not wherewith to support their parents, nor fathers their wives and children. In years of abundance they suffer pain and misery to the end of life, and in years of calamity they are not saved from famine and death. In such extremity they think only of escaping death, and have no time for the moral doctrines that would teach them justice and equity. Meng-tseu goes on to suggest remedies: better cultivation, planting trees, rearing animals, making silk, and above all education. One of his great maxims is that the monarch should always share his pleasures with the people. If a prince rejoices in the people's joy, they rejoice in his; if he sorrows in their sorrows, they sorrow in his. Let him rejoice and sorrow with everybody, and he can find no difficulty in reigning.

The same king, in another conversation, admired two lines in the Book of Verses: "We may be rich and powerful, but we should have compassion on the widows and orphans." Meng-tseu answered rather abruptly, "Oh, king! if you find them so good, why do you not practise them?" The king said his defect was that he loved riches. Meng-tseu answered that Kong-lieon also loved riches, so he shared them with his people to gratify his love, and the king might try the same. The king said he had another weakness, that he loved pleasure. Meng-tseu answered that Tai-wang loved pleasure and loved his wife dearly, so he contrived that in all his kingdom there should be no celibates. More pointed still is another conversation with this patient prince. Meng-tseu asked what a servant of the king must do if he left his wife and children with a friend while on a journey and on his return found them cold and hungry. The king said he must break with his friend. If the chief judge cannot govern the magistrates under him? He must be deposed. If the provinces at the extreme limits of the kingdom are not well governed? The king looked to right and left and changed the subject. Meng-tseu said the great man has three satisfactions: to have his parents living and no dissension between elder and younger brother; to have nothing to blush for before heaven or man; and to meet wise and virtuous men of his generation. To rule an empire is not among them.

When the prince of Lou wanted Lo-tching-tseu, a disciple of Meng-tseu, to undertake the whole administration of the kingdom, Meng-tseu said he could not sleep for joy. Asked whether Lo-tching-tseu had great energy, prudence and a mind for great designs, or extensive learning, he answered "Not at all" to each. Why then the joy? "Because he is a man who loves what is good." Is that enough? "To love what is good is more than enough to govern the empire: how much more to govern the kingdom of Lou!" If one proposed for administration loves the good, good men from within the four seas will travel a hundred leagues to counsel him. If he does not, they will say he is a self-satisfied man who always answers "I knew that a long while ago," and that tone drives good counsellors a hundred leagues away. Then slanderers, flatterers and men whose faces say "Yes" to every word arrive in crowds, and in such company how can he govern well?

A yet higher strain is this. Chun came to the empire from the fields; Fou-youé rose from a mason to be minister; Kiao-he from a seller of fish and salt; Kouan-i-ou from a gaoler. When heaven wishes to give a great office to its chosen men, it first tries their souls and minds with days of sorrow. Their nerves and bones are worn out with toil and their flesh tormented with hunger, and the results of their actions run contrary to their hopes. Thus their souls are stimulated, their natures hardened, and their force increased by an energy without which they could not have fulfilled their high destiny. Men commit faults before they can correct themselves; they know anguish of heart and thwarted plans until at last they come forth. It is universally true that life comes through pains and trials, death through pleasures and repose.

I cannot help thinking that Khoung-fou-tseu himself comes forth in a braver and finer spirit in Meng-tseu's reports and commentaries. Meng-tseu quotes him as saying that the most honest men of a neighbourhood are the pests of virtue. Wen-tchang asked who they are. Meng-tseu said they are those who take pains never to speak or act differently from all around them. If you try to find them in a fault you never know where to take them, and whatever side you attack you never get at them. What dwells in their heart resembles rectitude and sincerity, and what they practise looks like temperance and integrity. As the whole neighbourhood boasts of them, they think themselves perfect. So Khoung-fou-tseu calls them the pests of virtue. He said: "I detest that which has appearance without reality; I detest clever men, for fear they confound justice; I detest an eloquent mouth, lest it confuse truth; I detest the sounds of the music Tching, because they corrupt music; I detest the colour violet because it mimics purple; I detest the most respectable people of a neighbourhood because they mimic virtue."

13\. In spite of this last extract, Meng-tseu has a much more democratic tendency than his master. He is even reported to have said, "The people is the most noble thing in the world. The spirits of the earth and the fruits of the earth are second to them. The prince is of the least importance of all." Such a sentiment appears in a book that all educated Chinese learn by heart, side by side with precepts that seem to make the emperor the source of all light and wisdom to his people. It must cause great perplexity among thoughtful members of the Celestial Empire, especially those brought into contact with the notions and history of barbarians. The effects of such teaching may be much greater than we can foresee, though one cannot expect them to favour the real freedom and moral culture of this singular people. The deepest wisdom of both Khoung-fou-tseu and Meng-tseu seems to have lain in awakening monarchs to a consciousness of their position and duties. Their greatest failures seem to have come from being unable to show what higher and more righteous power sustains monarchs in that position and can give them energy for those duties. Whatever teaching can supply that lack may be the instrument of making China what God intends it to be. A subversion of its political order must also subvert its ancient wisdom, without giving it any capacity to acquire fresh light.

## CHAPTER V. PERSIAN PHILOSOPHY.

1\. The life of Khoung-fou-tseu (Confucius) is as clear, accurate, and formal as that of a man who lived a century ago. The life of Zerduscht, his counterpart in Persian philosophy, is confused and mythical. Out of the wild legends of his birth, adventures, and reformation, hardly any orderly history can be made. The most intelligent modern critics have given up the attempt. They doubt that he existed. They think he stands for an epoch or a great struggle of opposing principles, that several people from that epoch or struggle may have been merged under one name, and that the traditional story may belong as much to one of them as to another.

2\. Suppose we had to accept this conclusion. To what period would the imaginary hero belong? It is hard not to connect him with the general movement of the Asiatic mind that I have already mentioned. The Buddhist upheaval in Hindostan, the great Chinese reformation, and the movement in Iran or Persia, of which I now speak, may not have been more than a century apart, even if they were not strictly contemporary. They plainly had something in common. The Indian, Chinese, and Persian reformers all believed they were restoring an old order or principle that had been forgotten or violated and replaced by modern practices and notions. Neither the Buddhist nor the disciple of Zerduscht, any more than Khoung-fou-tseu, would admit to introducing innovations into his country's worship or government; all professed to sweep innovations away. Yet this coincidence makes their differences more remarkable, as does the power each of them exerted. They left their mark on vast regions of the earth. They showed that there were great ideas of which these nations were, and perhaps had always been, the appointed keepers. In the practical records of Chinese thought and law we tried to find what is characteristic of the Chinese. Can we likewise get through the vagueness of the Zendavesta and find what lay hidden in the minds of those who wrote it or believed it?

3\. It seems impossible to give any account of this strange collection of litanies. How it came together is still unsolved. Recent inquiries are shedding so much light on the debates about its language that it would be unwise to enter on them, even if my subject required it. If I gave specimens of its style as it reaches us through its French compiler, M. Anquetil, I might confuse readers about its purpose rather than help them to it. I will therefore offer only some general hints about the meaning and purpose of the change that has been connected for so many centuries with the name of Zoroaster. They are not at all new, and mostly agree with what all students of the subject have concluded. But they may show what place Persia holds in the history of philosophical inquiry, and how it is connected, by likeness or opposition, with Egypt, India, China, and Greece.

4\. The difficulty of ascribing a personal existence to Zoroaster is much the same as with Lycurgus, Odin, and many others. It belongs chiefly to our own time. It comes partly from a true sense of how institutions, beliefs, and habits spread through particular races and mark them from the very first. It comes also from a vague and false feeling that acts can accomplish themselves without living agents, and that great conflicts can go on in the clouds and the air without human combatants or personal leaders. In each of these cases we shall probably return in the end to our forefathers' belief in an actual legislator or champion. We may still admit that we cannot reach the very definite picture of his position and deeds that they reached, whether by filling the gaps in fact from their imagination, or by the opposite course of stripping legends of their poetry, which gives them their worth and meaning, and so reducing them to facts. Of Zerduscht I must speak as an actual person. He may have had another name, he may have done things we know nothing of, and he may not have done any of the things his biographers record. But I may assume that someone fought the conflict that produced such striking and lasting results, and I will speak on that assumption.

5\. Zerduscht's conflict was with the Magians. I take this to be the fact of his history, whatever fictions surround it. He found men who, as he believed, did homage to a power or powers of evil. They probably made no secret of it. They taught that such a power was to be worshipped, and they could teach the method. They knew the evil being's secrets and could explain how to avert his wrath. Their influence rested on the belief that they had this knowledge.

6\. This was true in practice whatever worship they also paid to a beneficent Divinity. There is no reason to suppose that reverence for Ormuzd had ceased among them. Probably they rendered him services regularly and punctually and called on the people to do the same. But what is the worship of a good Being when Evil openly dwells beside him? Evil inevitably becomes *the* God. His character leavens and moulds the whole service. Whatever the theories about how the two beings relate, Ormuzd really becomes the servant of Ahriman. The Magians were in truth Ahriman's priests, even when they nominally bowed to his rival.

7\. The effects of such a religion show themselves everywhere. Zerduscht felt them especially in one place. The earth in Iran was overgrown with weeds, and nothing was done to till it or make it fruitful. How much is contained in those words! What a record of the effects of a priesthood that regards its chief Divinity as the author of curses rather than blessings! There was slavish dependence on the seasons with no study of the laws governing them, and a fear of touching thorns and thistles as if they grew by divine ordinance and had a sacred right. The arms grew weaker from lack of manly work, and the heart grew weaker as hope decayed. A Magian could point to this triumphantly and say: "See the proof of our doctrine! Does evil not prevail, and grow mightier? What can we do but bribe it to be less severe and demanding? Where shall we direct our prayers and sacrifices if not to this terrible conqueror?" It was an opinion that kept confirming itself with new evidence, always producing the facts that proved it.

8\. What line must a reformer take against them? He could admit no compromise. He must say outright: "Your whole scheme of worship is a lie, and the ground it stands on is a lie. The earth is meant to bring forth and bud; the thistles are meant to be destroyed. Man is meant to put seed into it and draw strength out of it. These evil spirits are not his masters, and he owes them no service. They create nothing, produce nothing, keep nothing alive. The powers of creation, production, and nourishment are all good. Whatever begets, brings forth, and makes life more plentiful is to be sought as a counter to the powers of death. However strong those powers are, there must be something stronger."

9\. So Zerduscht raises his prayer to these Powers of life and production. It is idle to pretend he invokes only one Power; the Zendavesta's litanies are addressed to many. Yet the opinion is not as wrong as it seems. Zerduscht would have said himself that he worshipped only Ormuzd. He felt that as everything destructive and evil tends to division, so everything good tends to unity. In his mind this was not a theory, as it would have been for a Hindoo, but a strong practical conviction that he showed more in his acts than in words. He worshipped goodness. Whatever seemed to do good and act beneficially for man, in nature or beyond it, seemed to him to have come from Ormuzd and to tend to return to him.

10\. The Magians were of course astrologers. They tended to see the stars as evil agencies and prophets of mischief to man. Zerduscht does not leave the line of thought he finds in his country. Light is the object of his reverence. Light is plainly the great source of the earth's fruitfulness and man's benefactor. In his mind it becomes identical with Ormuzd. It is Good, or such a witness and symbol of Good that he cannot tell them apart. Hymns and invocations to Light are surely ways of resisting the dark being and his agents, and of bringing good to the land and those who farm it.

11\. Zerduscht was therefore as practical a man as Khoung-fou-tseu, aiming just as much at increasing his country's wealth in the simplest sense. But he was directly opposed to the Chinese in that devotion was his great instrument. Even "instrument" hardly expresses the difference. He did not see prayer as a mere means to a result; for him it was an actual looking up to a Power able to help men against their enemies. The petitioner is driven to it by the might and number of the evil powers striving against him. His litanies may seek material blessings and deliverance from material evils, but they are certainly addressed to an invisible Power of Light, against a tyrant partly visible and partly invisible who would make all his acts and thoughts confused and dark. It is not easy to say how much visible idolatry he would have tolerated, but Herodotus's testimony on the character of Persian worship carries great weight, and I think no clear evidence on the other side overturns it. He felt the absence of visible symbols to be the characteristic difference between Persian worship and his own. He did not see the empire in its strength, when his reform was presumably most strongly felt, but its influence had surely not passed away. We may fairly conclude the reform protested not only against the worship of Ahriman but against homage to visible things, which Ahriman's servants the Magi would doubtless have encouraged. All the petitions of the Zendavesta point, at least primarily, to powers and influences that dwelt in natural things but could not be perceived by the senses. This distinction would come out more and more in the two opposing worships, until some eclectic philosophy, trying to reconcile them and divide their provinces fairly, assigned the whole outward framework of things to Ahriman as his original territory, and the invisible to Ormuzd as his creation, through which he made repeated assaults and incursions on his rival's possessions.

12\. But Zerduscht himself and his true followers had no such eclecticism. His faith was in a perpetual, uncompromising war between the powers of good and evil. The earth was no permitted or tolerated dwelling for Ahriman and his subjects; on the contrary, all prayers and sacrifices to Ormuzd were for the sake of the earth and its restoration. Here lies the interest of Zerduscht's doctrine and reformation for the moral philosopher. It was a search after light, an inquiry after the Being who gives light and order to the universe. Only this source of light and order presented itself to the Persian mainly not as an intelligence but as one who is right and true. Good and evil, right and wrong, became far more primitive and fundamental distinctions in his mind than in any heathen people of east or west. The Persians were much more distinctly a moral people than the Hindoos or any Greek tribe. Xenophon's romance is a Greek's open acknowledgment of this. He must have had plenty of experience of the gross dishonesty the Persians fell into in dealing with his countrymen, yet he still recognised and admired this moral character as typical. He had seen it in some degree in the younger Cyrus, and he fancied, or tried to fancy, that the founder of the nation had shown it almost perfectly.

13\. In one respect it has been supposed that Zerduscht did recognise a reconciliation between the divinity he abjured and the one he worshipped. It has been thought that a boundless Time lay in the Reformer's mind beneath all his conceptions of a good or evil being, and that both must have proceeded from it. It cannot be denied that the Zendavesta has litanies suggesting such a notion, which may be as early as Zerduscht. We shall see, in the second part of this sketch, how the doctrine drawn from them greatly influenced later Persian philosophy, and how it affected, and was affected by, the faith of the Christian church. But I conceive there is not the slightest proof that this abstraction interfered in any practical way with Zerduscht's exclusive homage to Ormuzd and the benign powers he supposed to proceed from him. His prayers to a boundless Time seem to me to express his sense that there must be a deeper Unity, a more absolute Being, than he had grasped. How could he be satisfied with a Being he had to think of as one and almighty, yet identical with every gracious influence and productive power? For Ormuzd's own sake and honour he needed some other, more distinct way of declaring and invoking him. This was the way. It was awkward and incoherent, led to the very result he wished to avoid, and was full of future abstractions and confusions. But a man as thoroughly practical as Zerduscht could use it with no care for its speculative difficulties, as a release for his spirit from a real and oppressive contradiction, and as a way of bringing his worship closer to his human and political faith.

14\. The Cyropædia and Herodotus's testimony about the Persians' feelings toward their king, and his inseparable connection with their worship, fully confirm another important inference from the legends of Zerduscht. The Magian was officially his antagonist; some *monarch* was always the ally in his reforms. To exalt the royal function above the priestly, and to keep kings from being servants of priests, was surely a great part of his work. In this he was probably acting out a faith far older in Persia than himself. It is hard not to trace, as most modern historians have, an opposition between the Persian and Median tribes. It did not prevent an attempt at union between them but made it necessary, and it points to more than a strife of personal feelings and interests. Median predominance seems always to mean the triumph of a priestly order and priestly habits. Persian prevalence shows a king who knows he is a king and is determined to keep his authority against all opposers, whatever visible or invisible instruments they use. The nobler kings, such as Cyrus and Darius Hystaspes, do not merely proclaim their own tyranny. They assert that Ormuzd is King. They are as entirely religious as those leagued against them, and their faith is the ground of all their acts. In its strength they decree justice, organize satrapies, improve the farming of the land, and build one of those mighty monarchies in which we recognised the characteristic strength and spirit of Asia. In those monarchies everything depends on the central power, or rather on the earnestness with which it confesses its subjection to a gracious Power in whose name it rules and fights. The inscriptions Major Rawlinson has recently interpreted show how true this was of Darius Hystaspes. They embody the very spirit of the Zerduscht reformation, and might almost tempt us to the notion, favoured by some German critics, that he was the Prophet himself. That notion, I think, does not fit any popular tradition. Darius surely realised the conception of the teacher far more than any mere teacher could. His order was an attempt to imitate the order of the heavenly bodies and the calm regularity of Nature, which would have been especially admired by one who saw light as the centre of the outward universe and the king as the centre of human society.

15\. But in the heart of this wonderful order lay seeds of weakness and decay. The king confessed a King mightier than himself, in whom dwelt supreme right and justice. But he was the one utterer of this higher Sovereign's will, and his own absolute dominion represented the divine absoluteness. The light that comes from the heavenly bodies *may* symbolize a goodness and wisdom reaching the remotest corners, quickening the least thing as well as the greatest and calling forth its own distinct nature and properties. But this light *may* also be seen as gathered into one luminous orb, an object of distant reverence, altogether unlike what it shines on. The Persian mind tended more and more this way. The Zerduscht reform resisted it only briefly, and in one sense promoted it. He probably had more tribe feeling, more patriotism in the western sense, than we usually find among Asiatics. But the strength his faith gave the monarchy soon made it, like the great monarchies before it, impatient of boundaries, eager to swallow all tribes, and careless of their distinctions. His zeal in breaking the chains of priestly domination, which had hampered the sovereign's free activity, might give wide scope to beneficent government and help put down many abuses and abominations fostered by the Ahrimanic devotion. On the other hand, he weakened the witness latent in the priestly character, which could not be wholly lost even after the priest became a servant of evil powers. That witness was that the oppressed subject has a refuge when the visible ruler becomes a self-willed despot, with no feeling of kinship to his subjects, paying habitual homage to Ahriman. Persia's later history interprets the meaning and shows the power of Zerduscht's principle, but also shows how little protection it gave against this danger. It shows what an opening, even a necessity, there was for Magian conspiracies and counter-revolutions to check royal tyranny, even to restore it when it had fallen through its own crimes and weakness. It shows a still greater need for some witness, which Asia could not supply, that life and movement are necessary for man as well as a fixed eternal law.

16\. Those who delight in proving eminent teachers of past generations to be impostors, charlatans, or knaves dwell on some legends of Zerduscht's life that, they think, convict him of many violent and ambitious acts. Once it is settled how much of these legends deserves credence, we may accept them as evidence against the Reformer. But it is a monstrous violation of critical fairness to reject as fiction all the records showing the high estimate his countrymen formed of him, while treating as true, though no less miraculous, those that offend our consciences. The overall impression they leave is certainly that Zerduscht was possessed with a sense of his vocation to put down the Ahrimanic worship by all possible means and to assert the worship of Ormuzd. Whether this should be done was a question of life and death, since the material as much as the spiritual well-being of Persia depended on it. I have no doubt that in pursuing this purpose he stirred up wars, persecuted, and pressed his own claims to inspiration until he may sometimes have forgotten the work in its champion. But I am equally convinced, from the results of his labours, that in the main he sacrificed himself to the cause, and not the cause to himself.

17\. By this, I think, he has earned no unimportant place in a history of Philosophy. Yet the name does not belong to Persia, or to the Persian character as Zerduscht formed it. The light the Persian worshipped told him what to follow and what to shun. Their rule of right was given once for all, and whoever transgressed it was doomed. There was no room for speculation. They abhorred it as leading to confusion and darkness; refined symbolism implied to them falsehood and traffic with evil spirits. In their strength they crushed every kind of intellectual subtlety with law and the sword, as leading to dishonesty and trickery. In their weakness they shrank from it as an unknown, mysterious power they could not cope with. The fanaticism of Cambyses in Egypt, and the struggles attributed to Zerduscht with the intellectualism and priestcraft of the Brahmin, show some aspects of this character toward foreigners. Now we must look at another aspect. We must see in what sense the Persians were philosophers by viewing them in contrast with the nation to which that title strictly and originally belongs, the nation that at every stage of its existence deserves the apostle's description: "They seek after wisdom."

## CHAPTER VI. GRECIAN PHILOSOPHY.

### DIVISION I.—PERIOD BEFORE SOCRATES.

#### SECTION I. GREEK WISDOM IN THE LEGENDARY AGES.

1\. [The]{.smallcaps} opposition between Greece and Asia shows itself to the schoolboy reading the Homeric poems. It meets him again in the first pages of Herodotus, and he follows it through that whole varied narrative. It links the episodes to the main story and gives unity to books that at first seem confused and miscellaneous. In them Persia gradually becomes the representative of Asia, and the glorious conflict of the historian's own age interprets all the ages before it. Wherever the young reader turns, the contrast and the connection between the two peoples is before him. He finds it in the retreat of the Ten Thousand, and in the efforts of its leader to bring Persian manners and virtues before his countrymen. He cannot read of the republics' conflicts among themselves without some event recalling the monarchy that tried to crush them and was defied. Demosthenes is inspired by the thought of that triumph when he determines that a pretended Greek shall not win the dominion which the ruler of the whole barbarian world could not. It inspires no less the son of the hated Macedonian, when he goes out to prove that the signal-fires announcing Troy's fall were faithful prophecies that the farthest East would bow to the descendants of Odysseus and Neoptolemus.

2\. A few notorious facts will show that this opposition, visible on the surface of the history, existed in the heart of these nations. The student sees at once that Ormuzd was not the god of the Greeks, and that goodness is not the primary characteristic of any of their divinities. Their essential common quality is not hard to discover, I think. The constantly recurring epithet for Zeus, *metieta* ("counsellor"), suggests it. A title like Cloudcompeller may describe his acts, but this one is plainly meant to describe his very nature. It is not a solitary expression: the more we consider what Homer attributes to the father of gods and men, the more "counsel" appears as the main quality shown. The god's mind may be swayed by various impulses and passions, but he always acts with a purpose and devises a series of means to achieve it.

3\. The other gods are like Zeus. Apollo is a deviser and suggester of counsels, and Athene still more clearly. Where this character is lacking, as in Ares and Aphrodite, they become objects of ridicule to mortals, however mighty the sword of the one and the girdle of the other.

4\. This quality seems to involve both secrecy and society. The counsels are formed deep within the divinity's heart, but they must be shared. Zeus must tell the Olympian assembly his intentions, or part of them; they must be discussed, deliberated, opposed; there must be ministers to carry them out and often opposing agents to thwart them. The Persian has various beneficent powers, all proceeding from Ormuzd, all invoked by his name, all united against the realm of darkness. The Greek instead honours a number of beings who bring about a result through their conspiracies and contradictions. They are in themselves neither good nor evil and have the same inclinations to both as human beings. They often seem no more powerful physically, but they have a depth and subtlety of wisdom that men cannot reach.

5\. In Persia the king is an image of god but is not personally related to him. Ormuzd is always contemplated as the unapproachable light, and his goodness, though shown in mercy to man, is not to be confused with human goodness. But the counsellors of Olympus are always related to sages below: they meet mortal nymphs, father earthly heroes, and give them their sceptres and wisdom. The kings reign as sons of Jove, and in early times the feeling of belonging to the divine race is the warrant of sharing the divine attributes. There is never any doubt what the essential constituent of royalty is. It is not physical strength, mercy, kindness, justice, or courage; it is being a man of many devices. Courage, justice and mercy may or may not be added to this gift or be involved in it, but it is the fundamental one and the rest are accessory. Strength is thrown into the shade in just those heroes where we would expect it: lightness and grace are preferred, and Achilles is "swift-of-foot." Ambush and stratagem, as often observed, test the hero as much as open fight. Diomed shows his heroic talent no more in wounding Ares than in persuading Glaucus, as they meet as friends on the battlefield telling the story of their kinship, to exchange golden armour for iron, the worth of a hundred oxen's hides for that of nine. These indications of a deep and pervading spirit appear in a stage of society we rightly call, in one sense, very simple, and in fights where strength and prowess might seem everything. Clearly they are not everything: the council-chamber is as much a part of the Homeric picture as the field of battle. On that field, besides distinct heroes in a death-struggle, we see troops moving together, in ranks, in silence, an excellence which off the battlefield would not have been specially Greek.

6\. No one who considers the story of Odysseus, and feels as all have felt that he represented, in fact and in prophecy, his country's whole mind and tendencies, will doubt that *polymetis* ("of many counsels") is the epithet of the Greek hero as much as of the god. But no one who feels the beauty, delicacy and pathos of that story will admit that "cunning" or "crafty" is anywhere near an adequate translation. All the possibilities of craft and cunning lie in it, and such qualities can hardly have offended the morals of a man or nation that claimed it as the most honourable of badges. Yet it also held the possibility of a wisdom that might rise above tricks and falsehood and find them foolish. The "man of many counsels" had large sympathy and a wonderful power of communicating with men, receiving impressions from them and making impressions on them. He had the clearest, sharpest power of observation; all natural forms showed themselves to him in distinct outline, with all their shifting shadows. Animals did homage to the higher instinct in him. He felt that material things were given him to shape, mould and quicken. Though fond of seeing the ways and cities of men, he had a sense of home; the rocks of Ithaca were dearer to him than all the world, for the sake of those who lived there. He might cast off many ties he was born into, and leave his father's house to wander and seek new lands. But the bonds he entered voluntarily were unspeakably precious: the marriage-tie, and the oath to kinsman, fellow-citizen or even stranger, confirmed by sacrifice. No peril or war was too long or distant to punish their breach. Of all men he best understands the meaning and worth of association, yet he is the most tempted to choose his own way. He is most disposed to see law and government as belonging especially to man and distinguishing him from the lower creatures, and most inclined to break loose from them in his eagerness to assert men's skill to create them for themselves.

7\. In time some of these great contrasts, especially the last, appeared in the rivalry of the Dorian and Ionian tribes. We are often tempted to take the Ionians as the true specimens of the Greek character, and there is great excuse for that. Yet only by seeing both as equally Greek can we fully appreciate what distinguished this people from every other on earth. If the Lacedæmonian and Persian characters had points of sympathy, there was also the strongest repulsion between them. The Spartan Pausanias, affecting the airs of an Asiatic satrap, is far more ludicrous than Themistocles would have been in his place. Compared with *the* king, the Spartan kings show the difference between East and West even more strikingly than the Athenian democracy does. Lycurgus's legislation is as unlike that of the Medes and Persians as Solon's. If we ask the reason, we find that counsel or wisdom, not goodness, is the object of faith and reverence as much for one tribe as the other. It was just this common ground, the sense of shared feeling and language, that made their differing conceptions of the conditions of wisdom and the ways of attaining it so remarkable, and their actual contests so terrible. Indeed, the existence of such opposing tribes, and the vast influence both could exert, points to the greatest contrast between European and Asiatic life. On one side is the vastness of oriental despotism, with all its different races blended and submitting to one central lord. On the other are the struggles of two small cities, each possessed by the idea that one government or principle is better than another, ready to destroy or be sacrificed for its own maxim, and passing on the conviction and the enthusiasm to twenty other cities in different parts of the world, and in a measure to every man in them. And it must never be forgotten that amid all these conflicts there was still the common Hellenic name; all Greeks still felt that it, and the gifts it indicated, separated them from barbarians; and there was still the god of Delphi, who gave counsel to Ionians and Dorians alike, and from whom the rulers of Asia also believed oracles came to guide them.

8\. The acknowledgment of this teacher of civil wisdom, who could not easily be separated from the source of light to the world, is one of those facts in Greek history that every thoughtful student has seen to be full of significance. Apollo and Artemis, as our own great poet says, "held the sun and moon in fee." They were beautiful beings with human forms and sympathies who possessed and governed these natural orbs, and the material light that came from them was only an emblem of the light given to the mind of the one who sought help from the divine priestess. This inspiration was not merely produced by the exhalations of the cave, nor confined to her; the votary shared it in a much more practical sense. In later times the belief in an inspiring god, who prompts the highest song as well as the wildest revelry, was embodied in the legends and festivals of Dionysus. The Greek felt near him an impulse that could degrade him into a beast and a slave, and one that could raise him into a man and a freeman. His actual history proved both convictions true.

9\. If the Zeus of the Greeks is very different from Ormuzd, he is almost as unlike Brahm. The object of Hindoo worship, we have seen, is *Intelligence*, but intelligence as contrasted with action. Every Greek legend shows gods or heroes as teachers of some art, deliverers from some plague or nuisance, makers of a region habitable, openers of communication between regions, establishers of law and order, builders or defenders of cities. The main tendency of the Greek mind is certainly to contemplate intelligence only as bearing on action, leading to direct practical results and governing material things and bodies of men.

10\. Hence the skill, counsel or wisdom of the Greek was especially valued for its creative or productive power. The more this power was exercised, and the more varied its directions, the more the people began to suspect that they were themselves the authors of what they looked up to, and that king, priest and god were their own handiwork. So there lay in the heart of the Greek's faith a seed of unbelief, continually bearing fruit. This unbelief was likely to be most active in those whose faculties were liveliest and most energetic. Something akin to it was also in the popular feeling, even when it clung most fondly to its old legends and ceremonies. These were loved with a parent's fondness more than a child's: the Greek clung to them as his own, to be held against others, not as something he depended upon and revered.

11\. If Zeus and Apollo hold the highest place in Greek devotion, Hermes had his own special honour. The teacher of words and author of eloquence had given mortals a gift the Greeks felt to be greater and more wonderful than corn and wine. Their latest historian points out carefully how the power of words was recognised in the very infancy of the nation. He notes the significance of the picture on Achilles's shield, of the trial in the Agora with pleaders supporting each side, and how public speaking was felt to be "the standing engine of government and the proximate cause of obedience," long before the heroic period gave way to the historical. The most careless reader of the Iliad must be struck by the poet's sense of the wonder in "winged words," by his emphasis on them as the special characteristic of human beings, and by his feeling that through them men communicate with the gods as well as with each other. The power of wisdom and the power of words became indissolubly connected in the Greek mind. By these men exerted the highest influence they were capable of; words flew from the speaker's lips as messengers of health or destruction, and were in a most remarkable sense *his*. Yet there was something in them he did not make, an order to which he had to conform.

12\. The mysteries expressed something words could not. So far as they were connected with Demeter and her worship, they referred of course to the secret productive powers of plants and animals; they might be given a more material meaning, and be associated with gross and sensual images. But the importance statesmen attached to them showed that they were acknowledgments of a wisdom dwelling somewhere, which could not be measured or reduced to human forms, and by which the operations of nature, of the mind, and even of political society were ultimately regulated.

#### SECTION II. THE BEGINNING OF PHILOSOPHY.

1\. The seven wise men stand in the same relation to the later history of Greece as the seven champions of Christendom do to the Middle Ages. Bias, Pittacus, Periander and Solon belong to fact, while St. George and St. Denys belong chiefly to fable. But the mystical number shows that both groups were felt to represent different sides of one character. Among the seven are tyrants, legislators and students of nature, and the reports about them varied widely. One said that they all occupied themselves with poetry. Another said they were merely clever men concerned with lawmaking. They were reported to be favourites of Croesus, except Thales. Others spoke of their meeting at the Panionium or at Delphi. All these reports may be correct. They were mainly men of understanding, held to have the divine, heroic, Odyssean gift in greater measure than their neighbours. It was natural that they put their thoughts into verse. Verse was a language unlike that of the market. It expressed more than met the ear, ordinary men felt its power, and a notion of prophecy still clung to it. It is probable that they cultivated the friendship of a great Asiatic ruler. Some did so for a personal aim, some for their city's sake, and some for the pleasure of showing the Greek against what seemed so much greater and was so inferior. We might also have concluded that they remained thoroughly Greek, taking an interest in every Greek matter of council and government. For this reason they will have had much to do with Delphi.

2\. Granting these common traits, there was room for the widest divergence in their pursuits. One man might pride himself on knowing all his fellows' weaknesses and apply to himself the Greek maxim that the wise man should rule over fools. By fair means or foul, by courtesy or violence, by good acts or destructive ones, he might make himself a tyrant. His claim to the title, and his power to keep it, would rest not on his family, a theory, or military command, but on being a wise man. Another might think it nobler to lay down rules for the preservation and well-being of his city, rules that would outlast him, and he might give up ease, wealth and temporary power to do it. He would be a legislator in the higher sense, yet his legislation would still be a form of his "wisdom." He would be heard and obeyed only as long as he held the reputation of a wise man. Lastly, the Greek mind would be puzzled by a man who had acquired true oriental lore, studied astrology, and could calculate eclipses. If he used his studies in nature for his own profit or his country's good, he would be counted a politician. If he withdrew from society to contemplate, he would be scorned as a stargazer. Either way the phrase "wise man" would fit him. It would name the shrewdness he showed in everyday affairs, and it would suggest that he knew, or claimed to know, what most people did not.

3\. In this last description the reader will recognise *Thales*, who usually holds first place among the wise. Herodotus says he was a citizen of Miletus and a Phœnician by descent. Diogenes Laertius says some believed he came from Phœnicia and was made a citizen of Miletus, but that most people believed him a native of an illustrious family. The authority of Herodotus must outweigh the judgment of those "most people," who naturally did not want to share such a name with Asiatics. Even so, the Greeks have by far the largest share in him. If he brought his astrology from Phœnicia, he was thoroughly Milesian in how he used it. Herodotus says he predicted to the Ionians the eclipse that occurred while the Lydians and Medes were fighting, and which led to peace between them. The Greeks generally believed (Herodotus thought otherwise) that it was Thales who enabled Croesus to cross the Halys by turning the river's course, when Croesus made his fatal attack on Persia. Others said he was no friend of Croesus, and that he kept Miletus from allying itself with him and so saved it from the conqueror's wrath. Bias of Priene gave good advice to the Ionian cities after Harpagus overthrew them. But Herodotus says Thales had urged them before their fall to set up a common assembly at Teos.

4\. Opposite reports circulated about Thales. Some said he bought up the oil-presses just before the olive season to show how easily a wise man could get rich. Others told how he fell into a pit while watching the stars and was mocked by an old woman for knowing what was over his head better than what lay at his feet. Both stories are probably Greek invention, but they show his countrymen's uncertainty whether to class him with men of business or with theorists, and their sense that he somehow combined the two. Neither story explains his special distinction of being set apart from the other wise men and called a philosopher. He gets that title from no less an authority than Aristotle, who certainly would not have given it merely because he calculated eclipses, studied astrology, made himself rich, turned the Halys, or proposed a common Ionian assembly. Nor was the judge a favourable one. Aristotle seems to have known little of the Ionian sage. His words suggest that he had seen no writings of Thales, or that there were none. He puts Thales in a class he compares to untrained boxers, who land many good blows but without skill.

5\. "He maintained water to be the ground of all things, and the world to have a soul, and to be full of demons." That is what the gossiping Greek biographer gives as the "philosophy" of Thales. But this was surely not his philosophy, only the index to it. How did Thales come to think about water, or a ground of all things, or a world with or without a soul, full or empty of demons? What put him on seeking when he was reputed to have found out so much more than other men? And what was he seeking? The word *Philosophy* is the plainest answer. He was thought to have got *Wisdom*, which could be used for ruling men, building bridges, making money or making laws. He had tried it in some of these ways, not without success, and had won his full share of admiration. Had he wished to head a party in Miletus, or to embroil it with another city, his wisdom would probably have been enough. But he had a more extravagant ambition: to bind his countrymen and their cities together into a peaceful community. Then he found that he had to deal with elements that did not obey fixed laws as the stars did. There were bodies subject to alternations of light and darkness that could not be reliably predicted, and strong currents that could not be turned from their courses as easily as the Halys. Was it among these that he could hope to find the principle of order and unity? Must it not rather lie in the world offered to his senses, which is subject to fierce convulsions but confesses a control even in them? And as for the wisdom we boast of, can its first principle and root be in us? Must it not be somewhere else, where men's caprices are not at work or are overruled by an order mightier than they? *Philosophy* was the search not for something else but for Wisdom itself, the very thing which other people thought he fully possessed and commanded.

6\. Whether Thales dealt straight blows or random ones, he was the Greek who found that he must ask the question the man of Uz had asked long before: "*Where* is wisdom found, and where is the place of understanding?" He saw that neither he nor his countrymen yet had an answer, and that they might expect one from some source. If it is said that his answer was poor and unsatisfactory, and more so on this showing than any other, I admit at once that it was not *the* answer needed for his sake, Ionia's, or mankind's. But I cannot admit that it was worthless. Is it nothing that moisture is necessary to the life of all living things and the growth of all growing things? Does that not deserve notice? Everyone has no doubt noticed it, as everyone has seen an apple fall. Is not the whole difference between a man whose eyes are in his head and one whose eyes are at the ends of the earth just this, that the one observes commonplaces and thinks about them, while the other passes them by and despises them? Thales cannot be said to have exaggerated the importance of the fact that so amazed him. He probably underrated it. And if it seemed to him the one all-absorbing fact to which every other must bow, let us remember that it was *his* fact, the one he had travelled for, and the one that had struck his mind with mighty force and conviction. The world would not be better without some who treasure such facts with a mother's love. I suspect it would be very barren of precious observations and discoveries.

7\. It may be urged, however, that this course led, and could only lead, to scepticism. The early Greeks, though their faith was insecure, still had some faith. They referred wisdom to divine persons, whether called Zeus, Apollo or Athene, and what is personal must be better than what is impersonal. To find the beginning of things in an element like water is virtually to deny any distinct divinity. And the doctrines attributed to Thales, that the world has a soul and is full of demons, contain the germ of all later Greek pantheism.

8\. These objections are important and need serious treatment. What I say of them now is only to remove perplexities from the student's mind and help him see the answer that the later history gives. I have observed already that the seed of the most widespread scepticism lay in the Greek mind. The wise Greek had learnt to believe that he was not sprung from the gods but they from him, and that their wisdom was derived from his. Every new exercise of his faculties, especially those that produced beautiful forms of the divinity, strengthened this conviction. It had already taken unconscious possession of a multitude of minds and was rapidly becoming conscious. Now the feeling "I do not possess wisdom, I must look for it" was surely a powerful counteraction of this tendency, not an aggravation of it. Even if Thales had discarded all faith in Apollo and Athene and put belief in water as the first germ of things in its place, he would at least have laid hold of a fact in nature of which he was not the author, while his countrymen tended to believe nothing but what they had created. But so far as we can see, the effect of physical inquiry on his mind was not this at all. Acknowledging something beyond and outside himself seems rather to have given his mind a religious awe. "Can our ill doings escape the eye of the gods?" he was asked, and he is said to have answered, "Nay, not our thoughts." Those words are less like what a later Greek would have said than most of what is attributed to him. If they are genuine, they may interpret the other saying, that all things are full of gods or demons.

9\. Whether that phrase of Thales pointed most directly to the connection of demons with himself or with the world he saw through his senses, we may not be able to learn. Probably he could not have told us if we had asked. The question that occupied him was whether what he knew was working in him might have its original home and highest throne in Nature, and whether the order he perceived there might be the order to which he belonged. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that, because he was engaged in this inquiry, past traditions of beings like and related to man meant nothing to him. Poseidon and Oceanus may have become more venerable to him, not less, because of the significance he attached to water. And when he is said to have believed in "a world with a soul," we must not be perplexed by the definitions of the more recent schools from which that language comes. Aristotle felt that Thales was rather seeking to know what the soul is than settling whether it should be attributed to the universe. Thales seems, he says, to have considered it "a moving power or principle." He found a living, moving power in himself, without which his solid body would be a mere heap of atoms ready to fall apart. He found a living power in nature, water or moisture, without which the solid framework of things would be a dead heap of atoms. The two facts illustrated and explained each other, and it was natural to give a common name to both. What is this that I call soul, or wisdom, in myself, which distinguishes Greeks from barbarians and slaves from freemen? Is it not here also, or a particle of it, or perhaps the very root and ground of it?

#### SECTION III. THE FIRST SCHOOL.

1\. We should separate the first philosopher from those who follow him, so that the word *school* does not mislead us into defining it by later times, when it meant mainly the receivers, transmitters and expounders of a set of theories about gods, men, and nature. The men of the Ionic school were not disciples of Thales in that sense. They did not adopt his maxim about water, combine it with maxims of their own, and found a sect named after him. A real bond joined them, but of another kind: they were all seekers after wisdom, and all sought in the same direction, though they reached markedly different and opposite conclusions. Some have made the opposition greater than it was. Old digests of philosophy liked to say that Thales traced all things to *water*, Anaximander to *earth*, Anaximenes to *air*, Heraclitus to *fire*, so that the four elements were shared out among four Ionic teachers. More learned modern treatises divide the Greek natural philosophers into dynamical and mechanical, placing Thales in the first class and his successor Anaximander in the second, and conclude that they cannot have been master and disciple.

2\. Thales, as we have seen, did name water as a first principle. *Anaximander* was a geographer and inventor of geographical instruments, so the earth, as the complex of sea and land, occupied much of his thought. But his watchword was the Infinite (τὸ ἄπειρον), not the earth. That phrase shows he found an aggregate of phenomena a worthier subject of contemplation than a vital power, and in that sense he may be called antidynamical. But the historian has no right to adopt a classification that is formally correct if it does not represent the contrast between the minds and purposes of two inquirers. The opposition of "mechanical" and "dynamical" suggests that Thales and Anaximander studied nature as a modern German or Englishman does, conscious that the physical world is one field of investigation and the political or human world another. That was not the case at all. They were by vocation wisdom-hunters, who started their game in other ground and were led by accidents and impulses to follow it here. The track of the first pursuer was the one the next ran in, until some fresh scent turned him out of it. Anaximander can hardly have been old enough to hear Thales, yet he belonged to the same city and was greatly influenced by reports and traditions of him. But Thales discoursed, while Anaximander wrote, a difference of great practical importance. Thales, seeking in things the order he could not find among men, lighted upon a fact. Anaximander, setting down in writing the object of the student's inquiry, *called* it the beginning or element (ἀρχή or στοιχεῖον). The *name*, convenient as it seems for pointing the direction of philosophy, to some extent changes it: the pursuit of an ἀρχή threatens to replace the pursuit of wisdom. Still more dangerous was his other phrase, "the Infinite." A formula so comprehensive seemed to exhaust all possibility; philosophy, just beginning, had already reached its goal, for what could lie beyond the unbounded? Let us do Anaximander the justice to believe that "the Infinite" was not merely a formula to him; that it expressed thoughts too deep for utterance; that he really bowed before what he could not measure or comprehend, even while he seemed ambitious to sum it up in a few syllables.

3\. In *Anaximenes* we see the effect of Anaximander's step, and also signs of a return to the line he abandoned. The word ἀρχή is equivocal: it suggests "rule" as well as "beginning." Anaximenes seems to have seen that the philosopher should seek a power that rules, not merely an element or starting-point. Plutarch, who can never be a fair judge of the old philosophers, since he viewed their subjects from a quite different standpoint, may still be taken as evidence when he attributes to them language he is unlikely to have invented and which bears the marks of an earlier stage of thought. Anaximenes, he says, held that "the air rules over all things, as the soul, being air, rules in man." This explains Aristotle's statement that Anaximenes made air his ἀρχή, and connects him with the seekers for wisdom. This ruling power in man, invisible and intangible yet accomplishing wonders and compelling huge bodies to obey—what is it, and where? We look in the natural universe to see if it is there. Is not air, invisible, impalpable, all-penetrating, all-commanding, the very thing? Jove was said of old to rule in the air, the cloud-compeller; may he not *be* this air? It was a perilous question. When later teachers answered yes with untrembling lips, the result was fatal to all sense of a personal moral ruler. But Anaximenes may have raised it in a different spirit. The air may rather have been humanised and glorified by its association with Jove than Jove materialised by identification with the air. The coarseness of the old mythology may have lessened in the student's mind without being stripped of all its real associations.

4\. Another danger lurked in such language, though it did not cause it. In practice the Greek was more liable to confound the "great Counsellor" with the soul, the ruling element in himself, than with the air. *Heraclitus* the Ephesian seems to have been especially aware of this tendency in his countrymen, and his dread of it seems connected with all his political theories, physical speculations, and personal sorrows. In his mind these were evidently never separated.

5\. He believed that we should fight to the death for the law. But he would not be a magistrate of Ephesus; he would rather play at dice with the children before the temple of Artemis. What good could come of making laws for evil men? He would live on herbs in the mountains rather than among people who banished their best citizens and would not willingly keep one good man among them. So he was thought a stern aristocrat who despised the people. Yet he is said to have received the civilities of the great king with even more indifference than those of his countrymen. His feeling toward the Ephesians was, I judge, more that of a disappointed lover than of a scorner. "Pride or insolence," he said, "should be stifled more diligently than a fire." The Greeks' vaunting and sense of superiority to the rest of the world seem to have inspired him with pity and mourning. "Your knowledge of many things," he said, "does not give you reason or wisdom." An obvious saying, yet much of his philosophy lies hidden in it. Is the individual soul, as Anaximenes thought, the ruling power in man? Is it not in itself a poor, weak, insignificant thing, most contemptible when most presuming? Separate a man from his fellows and what is he worth? Abolish laws and government and what becomes of the atoms that make up your society? You Greeks are always making the experiment; see what comes of it in this city of mine, what infinite disorder and cause for sorrow. Would not nature have told you the secret if you had studied her? There we find no set of individual energies at work. All things are efficient only in their harmony, only in subjection to some central principle of life. Take that away and the things we see are phantoms, and the universe shows only endless flux. The coal without the fire is a man trying to exist in himself; the coal ignited, receiving communication from another nature, is a man's soul enkindled by communication with a higher, diviner reason.

6\. This may explain why Heraclitus is supposed to have attached such sacredness to fire. Old fables, carefully considered and joined to experience, might teach him that fire was the vital, quickening power of the universe: sometimes the symbol, sometimes the thing symbolised, of the universal life by participation in which all particular things have being, and apart from which they are unsubstantial and unreal. But this physical fire was never divorced from the law that holds societies together, or from the higher universal mind with which the individual mind is meant to be in communion. So when we are told that Heraclitus said the object of man's life is to know the name of Jupiter, we may be sure Jupiter meant to him neither air nor fire, but a reality he could not comprehend and desired should comprehend him.

7\. Such was Heraclitus: a man of marked individual character, full of deep and pregnant intuitions. The popular notion of him as the crying philosopher should not be discarded as meaningless or unconnected with his speculations. His thoughts are like fragments torn from his own being, and not without effort and violence that must have drawn many a sigh from him. The other notion of him, as "the obscure" or "dark" man, is also not unfounded. The fire in his heart and brain, of which the whole world gave him the image, no doubt gave off much smoke that confused and stifled the careless gazers and passers-by, perhaps not to his displeasure. But something in him is not adequately represented by either his tears or his smoke. The sense of a harmony beneath a perpetual conflict of powers, making that very conflict the means of their preservation, pervaded his being, gave the tone to all his thoughts, and realised itself to him in all the inner forms and outward images of nature.

8\. These four, Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Heraclitus, are usually regarded as the Ionic school. The classification has a reason and an advantage: they belonged to one region, were exposed to similar influences, succeeded each other at short intervals, and, I think, passed on some apprehensions and discoveries from first to last. Still, before studying those who were technically and practically the moral and metaphysical philosophers of Greece, we need to speak briefly of two or three others who, in different circumstances, came to occupy themselves chiefly with the phenomena and powers of Nature.

9\. I depart a little from chronological order in order to set *Democritus* of Abdera next to Heraclitus of Ephesus. The old story that contrasts the smiles of one with the tears of the other has significance for both the men and their philosophies. A man who recognises a central power adequate to keep all things at one, who believes in an order, must at times be overwhelmed by the distractions of the actual world, and the more intense his belief, the more the contradictions of experience oppress him. Heraclitus worshipped law and saw a multitude of incoherent elements resolved to disregard it. He found a refuge, but how imperfect a one, in nature, where he could detect a uniting, organising energy. But with his mind harassed by human confusions, how could he fail to see their counterpart there: a whirl of atoms which, if the invisible compulsion binding them were forgotten for a moment, must make the brain sick and the heart sadder than before?

10\. But suppose a man arose whose position did not lead him to brood on the perplexities of human society or seek to remove them: provided with external comforts, blessed with good digestion, indifferent to fame, with the Greek habit of observation, and with opportunities of seeing many cities and men, none of which he passionately preferred. We need not wonder at the results he would reach in practice and theory. He would be a benignant, agreeable, sociable companion, who would regard the disorders of humanity as mere eccentricities, treated all the more kindly if he suspected that some results might be serious or painful to those who showed them. He would come to think even "eccentricities" too strong a word for variations that might not be deviations from any standard. For is there a standard, a centre? Can we find one in human beings, or in the physical world? Our senses tell us of none. Perhaps we cannot depend on our senses; but have we anything better? Can we see more than those atoms whose sight so disturbed Heraclitus? Is it not worth while to get at them, to examine and dissect the world, to see what it is actually made of, and to leave our own guesses, dreams, beliefs and hopes out of the question as far as we can? Is that not the course for the sound physical inquirer, and for the man who wants a quiet, easy, healthy mind, undisturbed by expectations, dark or cheerful, that may never be realised?

11\. Here, it seems, we have Democritus the Thracian, whom Aristotle and Bacon both honoured above most Greek speculators because, they thought, he mixed less speculation with observation of facts, and looked hardily at the materials of the world without fearing to meet something that must not be looked at. We do not undervalue qualities that two such judges thought important. Democritus has filled his place among physical inquirers and brought to light a kind of investigation that is indispensable. But I venture to remark that if there had been no men more sombre and less pleasant than he, no inquirers haunted by a sense of powers and mysteries whose existence he ignored, physical philosophy would have been as impossible as moral, and the examination of atoms as lazily pursued and unproductive as the study of laws and of spirit.

12\. *Empedocles* of Agrigentum shows yet another phase of Greek life and feeling. He was utterly unlike Democritus in indifference and equanimity, and no less unlike Heraclitus in his scorn of the mob and hatred of equality. This enthusiastic Sicilian showed in his acts, poetry and philosophy all the strange elements at work through so many ages in the political and physical microcosm where he lived.

13\. Nowhere had a man such opportunity as in Sicily to witness every change and condition of society, or more temptation to join its revolutions. Nowhere would he be more reminded of the similar convulsions in the earth's womb, of Nature's influence on man, and of the powers man can put forth against Nature. This last observation seems to have impressed Empedocles most, and to have joined with all he had heard and read of divine helpers of men, who taught them mysterious arts and delivered them from oppressive plagues. His inmost conviction seems to have been that such helpers still existed, and that whoever diligently studied the powers of nature might still be guided and inspired by them. It won him the name of an enchanter, and mixed in his own mind with a confused notion that he was himself a kind of celestial person who could wield natural powers at will. But in general he seems to have used his wisdom honestly and benevolently, more for others' good than his own glory; and certainly he was not content with that wisdom but sought the springs and fountain of it. For him the varied powers of the universe could not be reduced to any one element. The marvel that filled his heart was the endless warfare of opposing forces, none of which could destroy the other and none, perhaps, of which could exist without the other.

14\. For Empedocles this was no imaginary battlefield; the very powers Homer showed fighting for Greeks and Trojans were engaged in it. The human passions, love, hatred, friendship, dissension, were seen mixing in the war of earth, air, fire and water. Aristotle, the great classifier of the world, is naturally shocked at this confusion of physics and ethics. While admiring Empedocles as an artist, he seems to have disliked him unusually as a speculator. We may be excused from sharing his feeling, since what offended him is, for the historian of human inquiries, one of the most interesting facts: these early, zealous students of the outward world did not and could not detach it from the deeper perplexities they found in themselves and in human intercourse. To insist that they should is to insist that they not follow the great question that agitated their whole being. For ourselves, we have no wish to separate Empedocles who won at the chariot race, as his father had done, and fought for the liberty of Agrigentum, from Empedocles the author of the Καθαρμοί (the *Purifications*), who as a poet forms a curious link between Homer, Pindar, and his Roman admirer Lucretius.

15\. *Anaxagoras* of Clazomenæ belongs by birth and early education to the Ionic school. But he taught at Athens, and I think the direction of his mind and the peculiarity of his doctrines can clearly be traced to the influences around him there. Anaxagoras would have been most reluctant to confess this debt; he seems to have been even more utterly without patriotism, in the ordinary sense, than Democritus. When someone said, "You care nothing for your country," he answered, "Very much indeed; my country is there," pointing to the stars. There seems to have been no affectation in this. He was absorbed in mere physical contemplation as no Greek before him had been; natural philosophy in his mind was separated from political wisdom, even opposed to it.

16\. But this violent reaction against his countrymen's habits must have been produced by seeing them in full activity: the bustle of Athens drove him to the stars. Yet one finds him unawares bringing into his chosen country the maxims of the one he despised. As he listened wearily, with forced interest, to accounts of party affinities, club fellowships, and alliances among leaders formed and broken, brought him by some favourite, admiring disciple, one can imagine him reflecting on how a whole is made up of portions that seem perfectly distinct yet have a mysterious attraction for each other; how the loss of that attraction is what we mean by dissolution or destruction; and how by it all things are preserved in life. From such reflections, quickly transferred from the region he disliked to the one he loved, the theory of *Homœomeriæ* may easily have developed, in which modern students have seen the germs of important discoveries about the laws of cohesion. Pericles would surely at once see the human analogy that his master had lost the sense of. He might enjoy being transported for a while into a world so unlike his daily work, and find his thoughts lifted by its clearer, rarer atmosphere, but we cannot doubt how *he* applied the doctrine, or where he looked for the similar particles he was to combine. For Anaxagoras also taught that there must be a combiner; the mere cohesion of particles was not enough. As Aristotle observes, the particles could not be the cause of the change in their position and relation to each other.

17\. Nous (Intelligence) was called in to produce and maintain their fellowship; called in, the critic remarks, merely as a resource when the other expedient for solving the difficulty had been tried and failed. Be that as it may, the philosopher clearly told the Athenians that "all things at first were in a heap; that Nous came in and set them in order" (turned a chaos into a universe). This doctrine had always been latent in the Greek mind; Homer's Zeus of counsel was its indication, and the Ionic search for wisdom amidst natural elements implied it.

18\. But if Anaxagoras brought to light the principle his countrymen half-unconsciously recognised, he stripped it not only of certain confused sensual additions they had made, but of everything that made it practically and vitally precious to them. What was this Nous, which had set the stars in order, to them? It was not Zeus, not the acting, living ruler taking part in human affairs whom Homer had set before them. Yet it seemed to assume all his functions and do all the work they had ascribed to him. Was this what they had meant? Was there nothing else in their traditions and hearts? The conscience of the Athenians answered that there was something else, but the answer was a confused muttering, mixed with a painful suspicion that they did not habitually believe more than Anaxagoras told them, and generally not quite as much. Out of that mixed impression, with the true indignation and malignant, hypocritical bitterness that its different parts bred, an accusation of impiety against him naturally came. Mixed with it was another that Anaxagoras must have heard with profound astonishment: he was accused of Medism, a disposition to betray Athens to Persia. Probably the very existence of the Persian empire had escaped him, or remained with him only in connection with some geographical observation. But his devotion to the stars may have given those who wished to wound Pericles through his teacher a plausible plea for representing him as having Magian tastes. The charge of malignancy during the English Civil Wars, of the Popish Plot, and of *incivisme* during the French Revolution was established by evidence that leaves us and our neighbours little excuse for condemning the Athenian democracy if it yielded to such proofs. Anaxagoras, whether condemned for political or religious offences, retired to Lampsacus, we are told, with a smile of regret that his countrymen had exiled themselves from him. He suffered less than almost any man would from the loss of home ties and affections; the stars could be seen at Lampsacus as at Athens. It is difficult to feel all the sympathy we wish for the victim of injustice from men in whose welfare he took no interest and whose evils he never sought to reform.

#### SECTION IV. PYTHAGORAS.

::: {.center}
[born b.c. 608 or 605 (bentley); b.c. 570 (dodwell and clinton).]{.smallcaps}
:::

1\. We pass from the least political of the Greek philosophers to the most political. The records we have of Pythagoras, imperfect as they are, matter for two reasons. They introduce the next part of our subject, the life of Socrates and the doctrines of Plato. They also throw light on the Ionic school from which he came, whose members, Empedocles especially, confessed great debts to him.

2\. The traditions that call Thales the first philosopher of Greece say that Pythagoras first used the name. He did not dare claim wisdom for himself, we are told; wisdom was a divine possession, which men could only love and seek. Some judge this modesty inconsistent with his character and say that, if he showed it, it was feigned, since he habitually claimed divine inspiration and unusual gifts. Could he have renounced a title that had been freely given to quite ordinary mortals?

3\. The answer lies in his history. For now I note only that the difficulty remains if, as other authorities say, Socrates invented the word "Philosopher" in this sense and stubbornly held to it. Socrates also claimed divine teaching, and, more remarkably, made that claim his very reason for refusing the title "wise man." What inspiration Pythagoras believed he had been given we may consider shortly; I only ask readers not to judge it, or him, by the reports of fanatical admirers after Christ's time, or by the satires of Lucian of Samosata.

4\. Pythagoras was born at Samos, in a year that is uncertain. Under what master he studied is hotly disputed; if I may choose one guess out of many, any of which may be true or false, I take the one that assigns his early training to Anaximander. Anaximander, as we have seen, carried mathematics further than his predecessors, and his geometry largely shaped his theory. A young pupil of earnest character and high imagination meeting such a thinker would feel a great conflict. The science, new to him and in some measure to everyone around him, would seem strange, wonderful and sublime; the doctrine attached to it would seem cold, vague and unsatisfying. He would begin, we may fancy, to ponder his teacher's favourite phrase, "the Infinite" (τὸ ἄπειρον), said to be the sum of all things. How unlike what geometry suggests! Geometry leads to limitation and distinctness in each thing and in all; and is not that limitation what constitutes their perfection? Surely the wise man must seek the πέρας, the ultimate limit, not the limitless. Again, Anaximander spoke of an ἀρχή, a beginning. Here he did profit by his science, though mathematics did not teach him the necessity of it: he found every line starting from a point and every series beginning from a fixed number. "But why go abroad to look for your beginning when you have it in the instrument you carry with you? You Ionian philosophers grope after unity in the world around you. Where did you get that idea? Was it not from these numbers, this geometry? There we find not the mere shadow of unity, but unity itself."

5\. Such thoughts, we may fancy, began to work in Pythagoras while he was still among Ionians, making him discontented with earlier methods of inquiry and hopeful of finding a better. We may suppose him setting out on his travels, driven, it is said, by the tyranny of Polycrates. He took away another, perhaps greater, benefit from his Asiatic education. The rhapsodists who sang the old legends to the Greeks of the region where Troy stood, and where Homer or many Homers lived, were perhaps silent by then. But their words were preserved, by this time written down, and the melodies in which they had been sung still lived in the people's hearts. The Dorian and Lydian measures must have impressed a young Greek deeply; in some the passion for abstract speculation might later efface this, but in others it would give speculation a richer, more poetical character. All Pythagoras's thoughts on the mystery of number seem to have joined with musical feelings from the first. Was not music the highest illustration of that mystery? Whence come the disposition of thoughts and words into verse, and the fascination of melody, if number is not the secret law, the moving soul of the universe?

6\. All these ideas might have lived in his mind and borne little fruit, or no better fruit than a crude philosophical system. But Pythagoras became a traveller. The reports of where he went are all uncertain. We may conjecture with fair confidence that he met people in many different positions and circumstances, and began to think more deeply about their nature and destiny. Then the mystery of number appeared to him in a new light. This was the very problem every legislator had tried to solve: how a number of apparently separate units could feel themselves a real unity. All society and government was the working out of this problem. So away with Ionian experiments after a physical unity; here was the true field for discovery. But what in man has the capacity for association and organization? Not likeness of feature, and not nearness in space. It is that wonderful thing inhabiting this animal frame, which can carry itself beyond all limits of space and time. "I, Pythagoras, can carry myself back to the age of Achilles and Agamemnon; doubtless in some condition I actually lived then. I can project myself forward into ages to come; doubtless in some condition I shall live then. But in what condition? This soul, which can look before and after, can also shrink into an incapacity to contemplate anything but the present moment. Of what degeneracy it is capable! What a beast it may become! And if something lower than itself, why not something higher? And if higher or lower, why may there not be a law exactly determining its rises and falls? Each soul has its own evil tastes, which bring it to the likeness of different creatures beneath it; why may it not be bound to remain in the condition of the thing to which it has adapted and reduced itself?"

7\. Pythagoras may or may not have borrowed such thoughts from Egyptian priests. To a man in his frame of mind every old tradition and relic of national faith would be precious; still, nothing in the doctrine of transmigration could not easily have grown from his reflections on what makes men human and able to associate. He was surely led to another, deeper discovery by studying the governments of different countries, especially those with the Dorian stamp. Everywhere he found that the bond of the community was the recognition of a power above man, a righteous lawgiving power. No human legislature ever dared dispense with this, and no society could hold together without it. A deep and awful idea! The union of men presumes a still deeper ground. Is not this ground the πέρας, the ultimate unity we are seeking?

8\. So, we suppose, the idea of limitation, got from geometry and set against the notion of an all-comprehending Infinite or Indefinite, and the idea of beginning and succession, got from arithmetic and set against the notion of a merely external ground of things, were fused and softened by a sense of music dwelling deep in the heart of the world. They may thus have become joined to practical thoughts about the nature of the human soul and the bonds that relate souls to each other.

9\. The more this sense of the sacredness and mystery of human fellowship grew in Pythagoras, the more peril and evil he will have seen in men's pretensions to wisdom. Order is destroyed by such individual pretensions. Wisdom must be seen as altogether above the soul, something it cannot appropriate but must honour; to be sought in silence yet not in solitude; which each man must reverence for himself yet feel is no more his than his fellows'; and which can be truly pursued only by those willing to give up outward enjoyments for it. So the philosophy of Pythagoras *could* not be carried out except in a community of living men.

10\. His inmost meaning was to be expressed in the bonds that held them together in their dealings with each other and with outsiders, and in the silence and fear with which they acknowledged an invisible ruler. Thus the proportions and relations of the universe would be shown on their highest ground; the mystical harmony felt; the dignity of the human soul, and its capacity for growth and perfecting, proved; distributive justice, the geometry and arithmetic of politics, realised in practice; and the idea of God felt as the foundation of social life. This, I think, was the feeling that led to the Pythagorean society, which grew up in southern Italy. Even after deducting the extravagance of later reporters, it must have had great influence on various cities of Magna Graecia. It brought about legislative and moral reforms, engaged in political intrigue, and was finally put down as a dangerous religious confederacy incompatible with regular government.

11\. By calling this society "an order," Bishop Thirlwall and Mr. Grote have done much to explain the secret of its strength and influence, and of its errors and decay. The earnest seeker of wisdom found hearts yearning for it like his own. It was an inheritance meant for them and him, and the more they made it the common object of their lives, the more they might hope to share it. The lessons from their master could be communicated only to the circle around him; to others they would have been different lessons. Apart from the practical discipline that went with them they were not true, and served no purpose of purification or seeking of wisdom. The allegiance of men so joined to the one who gave their minds their first impulse and directs their energies is affectionate, devout, dangerous. They are united by sympathy and reverence, and a man is the object of both. If he has felt deeply that their union rests on no power or wisdom of his, he will tell them so continually and try, through every form of their polity, to keep them mindful of it. But if he believes that what he teaches is not his own, he must believe, and make them believe, that it was imparted to him; he must regard his work as a vocation. The more he uses language expressing this, the more passionate, idolatrous followers will pervert it, and make his earnest disclaiming of wisdom an excuse for saying he possesses it on altogether new and peculiar terms. How can such idolatry fail to react on its object? It must awaken in him vanity, self-consciousness and self-glorification, which struggle fearfully with the truth-seeking, truth-loving temper that led him to say, "I did not choose this course for myself; I did not make this discovery. A mightier wisdom has guided me and shown me what I could never have found." The histories of such struggles are not written, or written very imperfectly, even in the autobiographies and secret confessions of great teachers. Another day may reveal them, with all the strange contradictions that provoked our harsh judgments and should have drawn our pity and sorrow. The outward results are better known and often tragic. Of the Pythagoreans we have only indistinct glimpses, but enough, with the experience we have since gained, to show how zealous the society must have been to bring others into its light, yet how proud in boasting of an exclusive hold on it; how resolved not to separate their moral practices from their outward doctrines, yet how apt, in the heat of propagandism, to drop all inconvenient austerity and to tolerate and use the corruptions they undertook to remove; how their first aim will have been to use their society to make all society deeper in its foundations and truer in its acts, yet how at last they may have come to think it had no deeper foundation than the Pythagorean rule, and that false and dishonest means might be legitimate to establish that rule. Some traditions represent the founder as advancing the ambitions of his order and sharing in its downfall. We cannot test their accuracy. If true, they need not make us doubt the sincerity of his purpose or the real worth of the principle he testified to. The failure of a noble scheme may vindicate its planner's inner conviction better than success would. If Pythagoras believed that human society had a mysterious, divine ground, and that every true philosopher and reformer lives to convince society of it, it was fitting that he and his order should perish when they began to fancy they could build society by their devices, on their wisdom. His name remained sacred and venerable for Greece, though none could say in words what it had done for them. Those who spoke of Pythagorean doctrines in earlier times meant the doctrine of Philolaus, Lysis, Eurytus and Archytas, men who knew nothing of the Italian master, never shared his discipline, and were raised amid ordinary Greek influences. Those who spoke of Pythagoras himself in neo-Platonic times meant a wonder-worker they had created by mixing Christian and pagan records, to convince the world that the Christian church was a plagiarism. But Plato and Aristotle kept a reverence for the original master's name that they never gave to the school where his opinions were dried for use and export. Iamblichus and Porphyry were unconsciously testifying that the best and wisest teachers of ancient Greece had been led, by all their studies of nature and man, and, as they rightly judged, by some guide higher than either, to seek a brotherhood that did not rest on human wisdom; that they tried to create one, and failed.

#### SECTION V. XENOPHANES—PARMENIDES—ZENO.

1\. I have observed before that most of the Greek sages were poets. Verse seemed the natural language for thoughts meant as oracles, for the experienced ear and puzzling to the crowd. Once the wise man became the philosopher, he used verse less often. Empedocles had a rich, poetic mind, but Anaxagoras, Anaximander and Anaximenes probably never left ordinary speech. Yet whichever medium they used, a suspicion began to rise in them: the poet, insofar as he was a Maker, was the philosopher's antagonist. Homer held the sympathies of the Greeks as the most profound student never did. Why? Was his influence healthy? Were his creations not obstacles to the investigator, since he had assumed the very result the inquirers were still pursuing?

2\. This sense of opposition reached its height in *Xenophanes*. Like Pythagoras he was an Ionian by birth and became an Italian colonist. He felt bitterly the luxury of his own city, Colophon, and was disgusted by the manners and love of amusement among the Greeks of Asia and the islands. He must have gone to Italy a discontented man, discontented probably with the Ionian investigations as well as with their political life. Pythagoras's example, or his own reflection, will have taught him that what he wanted was not an element or ἀρχή. But he seems to have had little interest in geometry or arithmetic, and music did not impress him as it did Pythagoras. Pythagoras's thoughts on the soul and its migrations took no hold of him. In one fragment he ridicules a sage who would not let a dog be beaten, because he recognised in its growl the voice of an old friend.

3\. Nor does he seem to have wanted to found or join any political association. He may have heard of the scattering of the Pythagorean society and turned away from such experiments. But his genius did not lead that way anyway. Social unity was not his problem. His problem concerned unity in quite a different sense. What are the gods of the Homeric poems? Does any reality correspond to them? Are they not formed in the poet's brain and clothed by him in sensible forms and images? Is it to sensible forms and images that our minds do homage? Pythagoras had approached this last question from a different side and in a different spirit. He had recognised a Being near to man, to be adored in silence and awe. That Being had little in common with the gods of his countrymen, yet he never denied that they were owed homage. His secret teaching to his disciples cannot have been that the homage was merely a concession to the vulgar; it must have been an effort to make it more sincere and significant. Pythagoras felt he had no substitute for the personal objects he had been taught to revere. He felt that some living being, not an abstraction and not a creation of his own mind, must sustain his polity and every human one.

4\. In Xenophanes all these checks on free inquiry into his country's faith were missing. The naked question came before him: "What does my soul affirm about God; what conceptions can it or can it not form of Him?" His verses, written in various styles and measures, were his answers. As a poet-philosopher he criticises the poets, to show that they have been making the beings they bow down to. The Homeric gods all have human shapes because men made them in their own likeness; if an ox made a god, would he not give him horns and hoofs? How can any conception of God be formed? What do your finite and infinite mean, if both are terms of your own mind? How can you make Him out of them?

5\. This may sound like scepticism, but in Xenophanes it was not. He did not argue that because the senses cannot tell us of God, and we cannot measure Him by our conceptions, He therefore is not. He said the reverse: "My senses do not tell me what is; they tell me only of appearances. My conceptions do not measure what is; it lies deeper." So he did not deny the being of that which the Homeric pictures failed to resemble. His disapproval of them came from his wish to assert a real ground of things, independent of man's conclusions or conceptions, which he affirms to be but does not make.

This was a wonderful process of thought, and our later history must unfold its results. Xenophanes was no atheist but an earnest theist. He asserted *a* Being. Asked "*what* Being?", he would have owned he could not say; he could only say what that Being was not. He approached the border of negation manfully and reverently, and so did not cross it. He pointed out a void he could not fill, and for that alone we should be grateful. But he also saw the way to a deep and radical truth.

6\. A healthier thinker than Xenophanes, though one in whom it is harder to take the same interest, took up his inquiry: *Parmenides*. The question about God that had so occupied Xenophanes does not seem to have agitated him nearly as much. His mind rested on Xenophanes's principle that what the senses present are appearances, and that only what the mind affirms without the senses actually *is*. What, then, does the mind affirm? Xenophanes had said "God." Parmenides said "Unity," or "The One." My senses tell me thousands of things, yet has not every thinking and feeling man groped after some one root and ground of them all? This is what man wants, and it is affirmed to be by that within him which fights against apparitions and phantoms. Plurality is one such apparition, deceitful and transitory; only unity is permanent and eternal. Such a belief could not dawn on a Greek philosopher without deep wonder. He had seen Ionians in succession question all nature for this unity. He had seen Pythagoras evoke it from the relations of number and actually build a human society to illustrate it. Now unity declared itself a condition of the human mind itself; it had been sought in all other things, when it really dwelt only with the mind. A child's confused look at a new world is a faint emblem of the surprise of an earnest seeker on whom this thought has just burst. Yet he cannot doubt it is true. It makes intelligible so much that had perplexed him, and accounts so well for what other men have thought. But what follows? Faith in the things about us becomes impossible; we live in a shadow world and behold nothing. The distinctions of things, the apparent multitude of objects, do not exist and speak only to our fancy. Only the unity the mind beholds and demands has substance.

7\. Anyone can see how this doctrine exposed Parmenides to the jests of witty men, who grow on the surface of every land, and Greece and her colonies produced their share. These wits no doubt thought they were setting self-evident facts against mere dreams. But Parmenides had a friend and disciple unwilling to leave them undisturbed in this opinion. *Zeno* of Elea was convinced that the doctrine experience seemed so irresistibly to establish was not only false but absurd, and he boldly undertook to make the absurdity palpable to the popular mind. In a series of arguments, some still preserved, he tried to show that space cannot exist; that we cannot suppose a plurality of objects without giving them self-destructive qualities; that if real existences are many, their number must be both finite and infinite; and lastly that the notion of movement involves a contradiction. Readers may not care for these early specimens of Greek subtlety and may denounce them as a word-conjurer's tricks. Zeno deserves no such name. He was brave in both action and speculation, and we owe him a great practical discovery. He holds an especially important position as a thinker, and it will help our later studies of Greek philosophy to understand it.

8\. Every philosophy needs an instrument or organ to make itself intelligible. For the Ionic philosopher it was some external object; for the Pythagorean, lines and numbers. What was the Eleatic's instrument? He seems to have risen into a region of such pure metaphysic, rejecting every common and sensible analogy, that at first one cannot see how he could impart his doctrine or suggest any method for pursuing it. Xenophanes seems to have felt this difficulty, and Parmenides somewhat. Precious as their hints are, it seems likely they would have had to stop where they were and leave no successors. But Zeno solved the puzzle. He found that *words* stand to this philosophy as sensible objects and numbers stand to the other two. Our language must embody the law and principle of our own mental workings, and that was exactly what the Eleatics were dealing with.

9\. Zeno was only imperfectly conscious of this truth, but he acted on it, with useful fruit for him and for us. There was no falseness in his use of words. He felt that they affirm and embody truths, and he used them to elucidate truths. In this he was as honest as the wits who tried to confute Parmenides and his kind by appeal to experience. For they too profit from our belief in words. They awaken our consciousness that the words we speak carry the impress and image of the external world, and they rest on this against philosophers who set the evidence of the external world at nought. Zeno awakens our consciousness that the words we utter express something with no counterpart in the external world, and he rests on this against those who set at nought the witness of their own minds. Both appeals are fair and carry conviction. But one merely convinces us of a fact we already took for granted; the other forces us to perceive truths lying very near our inmost being, yet almost entirely hidden from us.

10\. But the practical discovery that came directly from this search for an instrument for the Parmenidean philosophy is what most obliges us to admire and thank Zeno. According to the best historical evidence, we owe mathematical science to the East, and it fits the calm, contemplative yet sensual character of the Orientals that this was their contribution. But *Logic*, the science that declares not the conditions of external things but the conditions under which we ourselves speak and judge, was purely a Greek invention. No other people had the subtlety to conceive such a science, still less to find its province and work. Logic in its formal, narrow sense is thought the antagonist of poetry, yet only a most imaginative and poetical nation could have discovered its meaning and necessity and given it its statue-like perfection in Greek hands. Zeno is believed, on the best grounds, to be the inventor of logic. He first saw clearly that the mind has a distinct law governing its own affirmations, and so was first stirred to ask what that law is. How much we owe him we shall understand better as we advance. My main object here has been to point out the connection between this achievement and the Eleatic philosophy, which Zeno ably defended; to indicate the influence of that philosophy on the Greek mind; to show its important place in the history of human inquiry; and to excite interest in the later development of a doctrine we have seen in its first germ. In so rapid a sketch we can only notice what seems the living and central peculiarity of each thinker. But the real germinant principle is hard to find amid the mass of notions and opinions around it. An historian will distrust his own sagacity in detecting it, and will rejoice to find it anywhere in its rude, primitive shape. However little value it has in that state, he thinks it unwise to wait until the animalcule has become a perfect insect, or the insect has died, before examining it. This is my apology for treating the ante-Socratic schools briefly, yet at a length that may seem out of proportion to the time we can give their successors. We wish not to furnish readers with a history but to put them in a right method of procuring one for themselves, and I am convinced that their understanding of the palmy period between Socrates and Aristotle, and of the age of senility that followed, will be clear or confused exactly in proportion as they study or pass over its infancy. Let them not hope to understand Plato, Aristotle, or even Epicurus, Zeno of Cittium and Carneades, if they begin by despising Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Parmenides. We might go further and say we would greatly doubt the claim of anyone to know Hobbes, Locke, Leibnitz or Kant who could find nothing but confusion and barrenness in these early inquiries.

### DIVISION II.—GREEK PHILOSOPHY FROM SOCRATES TO ARISTOTLE.

#### SECTION I. ATHENS IN THE TIME OF SOCRATES.—THE SOPHISTS.

1\. No one doubts that Greece was the country of wisdom and wise men, or that Athens was its capital. There Wisdom was worshipped with all her rites, and wise men had an honour given them nowhere else. The name of the city shaped what its citizens did. Even the meanest of them felt that the Goddess of Wisdom protected him and had given him some endowment.

2\. Nobody disputes either that the age of Pericles was when Athens reached the glory she had always aimed at, and her sons' powers came to manhood. Pericles thoroughly understood the people he ruled. The funeral oration Thucydides gives him may not have been delivered in just this form, but it expresses the exact perception of the Athenian mind which the historian knew Pericles had. If the speech is not a report, it still rightly shows Pericles's settled purpose: not to restrain the tendencies of this character but to give them full play. He would let no Spartan moroseness interfere with Athenian freedom. Whatever corrections it needed, he believed, must come from itself. To bring in the maxims and habits of another tribe would destroy Athenian energy without giving it the Dorian self-restraint.

3\. Right or wrong, this calculation had memorable effects. We think first of the work of sculptors and poets. The sense of beauty and symmetry in the human form that awoke then, and the images of the gods it produced, have been admired and have shaped later generations. But they belong with the processions and temples they were made for. The great tragedies, too, should be pictured as performed at festivals, competing for a popular prize, before delighted or critical crowds. Those that have lasted more than 2,000 years show how deeply some Athenians thought about the destiny of man. But they stood among many other works probably not felt to be inferior. They were judged by their power to amuse at the moment, by their fit with the demands of very clever but probably very impatient spectators. An author's popularity was measured by how quickly and versatilely he could stir sorrow or mirth, although the man who had thought and felt most would stir the deepest echoes and in the end win the greatest reverence. Aeschylus and Sophocles probably towered over their contemporaries even in the judgment of the many. Still, the qualities we admire in them must largely have been forgotten in the immediate effects they produced. It was for later times to find how much in them no show could exhaust, and that it belonged not to one age or nation but to mankind.

4\. Why, it may be asked, do such reflections suit the age of Pericles more than that of James I.? Were not Ben Jonson and Fletcher thought of mainly as makers of masques for the court, and Shakspeare as an actor at the Globe? That is true. But a student of philosophy, above all of the life of Socrates, has special need to remember how all the great men of Athens whose instruments were words appeared to their fellow-citizens. All were practising some kind of *wisdom*, and addressed it, in the theatre or the agora, to judges who were themselves wise and conscious of wisdom, able to appreciate it and to reward it. The tragedians, with their minds fixed on the heroic ages, kept their wisdom from becoming a creature of the mob's. A comic writer, whose business was with the present, needed very high genius to resist that influence; he would do so partly by choosing the broadest and most conspicuous conceits and affectations of his age to ridicule. But those who used wisdom for entertainment faced the lesser temptation. Those who used it directly to persuade, who spoke in order to lead citizens to deeds, stood in a far more dangerous position for their honesty and could do greater and more widespread mischief. By degrees their kind of power became the measure of all others. The rhetorician was regarded as the man who had found out the effective use of words. Poets, statesmen, thinkers of every class, even the commonest handicraftsmen, would gradually become rhetoricians, and rhetoric would be looked on as the craft of the wise city.

5\. It has commonly been supposed that a class of men, formed in various Greek cities but always counting Athens their headquarters, kept this tendency alive in young Athenians and gave it a dangerous prominence. They are called Sophists; from them the name has taken on its evil sense; and Socrates's main work has been supposed to be to counteract and undermine their influence. Learned men share this impression with the vulgar, the most modern and critical writers with mere narrators. Recently these notions have been attacked with great skill and apparently with great weight of evidence. The existence of a sophistical system has been flatly denied. Those given the common name, it is said, differed from each other in all their doctrines, pursuits and habits of life. No corrupt purpose or immoral character can be charged against them; proof of their respectability can be had from the books of their greatest opponents. They did not make Athenian society fall from the standard of earlier ages, since the history shows no such decline. The word Sophist was not a term of abuse to the Greeks; it was a synonym for the wise man, and impartial writers gave it to poets, to philosophers, and to the supposed antagonist of sophistry himself. Plato and Aristotle chose to use it badly; they had a right to their own definition, but they cannot give us a right to pass an *ex post facto* sentence on their contemporaries. Finally, we may hold that the object of Socrates's life was good without blaming the Sophists whom he or his disciple blames: he aimed at a universal standard of wisdom and truth, while they professed only to teach Athenians how to think, speak and act. These conclusions, if true, must affect our whole later history. So we should consider how far they are borne out by the able arguments and undoubted facts that Mr. Grote has produced.

6\. We accept at once Mr. Grote's definition of the Sophist as Plato's and the true one: "the professor of wisdom; he taught young men to speak, think, and act." We want no other and no worse account of him. If modern artists have put darker shades into their picture, they have done him a service rather than an injury, because their clumsy exaggeration hides the essential ugliness that Mr. Grote's flattering sketch brings out in full relief.

7\. They have, I think, been especially wrong in trying to blacken the age of Pericles, as though it were inherently worse than any earlier age. In many respects it was much better. Not only were the people's intellectual energies more developed, but their great writers showed a moral insight and purpose not found in older times or in their immediate predecessors. Who can deny that Thucydides has a much higher tone than Herodotus? That the *Oedipus Tyrannus* recognises principle much more deeply than the *Odyssey*? That even Aristophanes (though I agree with Mr. Grote in refusing him the dignity of a moral teacher) tacitly admits, in his satires on bad citizens, a standard that poets and audiences in the times of Solon and Pisistratus would not so readily have perceived? The better men had certainly progressed in moral perception, and that progress could not have been found in them unless their contemporaries were *capable* of the same. The Athenians' political training and discipline must have contributed greatly; their experience of society and government led them to practical distinctions that would otherwise have been hidden from them.

8\. Whatever we think of the Athenian democracy, it clearly did this great service to the eminent men who lived under it, and through them to the world. Its corrupt maxims and practices are known to us through the emphatic protests against them preserved in historical reflections and prophecies, in lessons from the past and ridicule of the present. But the protests also show what the Athenians' peculiar temptation was, why they were more prone to it now than before, and what influences most surely fostered it. We have seen that most of the Greek wise men were tyrants (or despots, as Mr. Grote prefers). The natural use of their wisdom was to gain power, to fit them for governing fools. Every Greek was inclined to this opinion, and it grew with his faculties. Democracy gave him an obvious chance to exercise them in this direction. The Peloponnesian war suggested thoughts, latent in the Persian war, of rivalry between Greeks, of Athenian ascendancy, of the difference between forms of government. The passionate impulses of patriotism, with their own dangers, gave way to deliberate schemes and calculations about winning rule and wielding it. There may not have been more evil-doing in one time than the other, but there must have been more consciousness of it, more inward wickedness, and a greater readiness to bring crimes under a theory and defend them by it. This is what the Melian controversy inevitably suggests. Allow what you please for the writer's aristocratic leanings: an experienced and wise man credits his fellow-citizens with a distinct understanding of an evil purpose and its principles such as we meet nowhere else. Yet we would have attributed such an understanding to a people of Athenian wit and subtlety even without his authority.

9\. To give this wit and subtlety full play, all that was needed was for a set of men to appear who started from the same maxim as the wise men in general, but had instruments those men lacked, and who were ready to *teach* the skill that others had *used* in a narrower sphere for their own advantage. The professors I am speaking of fit this description exactly. They had all the respectability Mr. Grote claims for them; many were aged and grave; they were men of uncommon sagacity and penetration. They had studied in different schools, some under Empedocles, some under Zeno. Some gave themselves to physical studies, some to moral, some directly to political. Each had some sort of wisdom and undertook to teach it. Each held out the winning of political power as the prize. That was their common point of agreement, and possibly their only one. Young Athenians wanted to learn how to think, act and speak on all subjects so that they might guide the people as they pleased, and for this they sought a Sophist or Professor.

10\. The Athenians certainly needed to learn to *think*. What was the teaching for that? They had to be told about natural, moral and political subjects by men who had taken pains to learn what Thales, Pythagoras and Parmenides said of them. They had to be told the views of ancient cosmogonists about the world and the gods, and of modern thinkers and allegorists on the same subject. They had to hear of the Heraclitan flux and the Parmenidean One; of how cities were said in former days to be built by the lyre of Apollo, and how they were held together by the skill or legislation of recent despots. They were taught to compare all these views, to see the strength of one and the weakness of another, or to combine and reconcile them. Thus the Sophist taught his pupils to think. But all thinking is for the sake of *action*. These professors are thoroughly practical men; they do not come to draw us away from the world's business, and what would we care for them in Athens if they did? We want to know about men, not stars. We want to defeat Brasidas, or support our party at home against Nicias, or rival Cleon, much more than to know anything of Heraclitus, Parmenides or Zeno. Yet the one learning is the road to the other. Remember what lies between thinking and acting; remember Homer's "winged words," which have always been with Greeks "the great engines of government, the proximate cause of obedience." If we teach you to *speak*, we teach you in the most efficient way to act. These physical, metaphysical and moral theories will furnish you with topics, they will be the tools of your trade, and they will give you a wonderful power to embarrass, confute and overawe an uninstructed opponent. Any of them may serve. Theories of the order and formation of the world, in the skilful hands of Hippias, may make as good a rhetorician as direct moral teaching from Prodicus, or speculations on government, human or divine, from Protagoras. All supply topics; all are instruments of persuasion. And see what power Zeno has put into our hands! Words may mean the most opposite, contradictory things. Would it not be invaluable lore to be taught the secret of this contradiction and how to turn it to account?

11\. In the last paragraph I hinted at the modern meaning of the word Sophist, which Mr. Grote so indignantly rejects. It is certainly not *the* meaning; the one he has put in its place is far more comprehensive and satisfactory. But by the necessity of his calling, the man who taught thinking, acting and speaking would come to see the last as including the other two. He would become a rhetorician and a teacher of rhetoric. For that he must deal with the subtle meanings of words, honestly as Zeno did or treacherously, depending on his aim. If his aim was to sway the mind of a mob, he was at least in considerable danger of leading his pupils to give sophistry the force with which we are most familiar.

*Note.* Since I have admitted the Sophists' general respectability, I need not examine Mr. Grote's arguments for it in each case. But one statement he relies on needs a short notice. He thinks Prodicus can be shown by more than negative evidence to have been a highly moral teacher, because the story of the Choice of Hercules, as we usually read it, names him as its author. What better proof, he asks, that Prodicus urged on Athenian youth a severe, even ascetic, self-restraint? I have no wish to dispute the beauty or worth of that fable; it was surely full of instruction for that age, since all ages have found it so. But I submit that its lesson does good or harm according to the reader's aim. If he wants the power to drain marshes and kill noisome beasts, all must bless him for not yielding to the Goddess of Pleasure. If he merely wants to be the strongest of men by resisting the enchantress, it might have been better for the world and for himself if he had yielded. Mr. Grote surely remembers Gibbon's paradox about the clergy: "Their virtues are more dangerous to society than their vices." On Gibbon's presumed hypothesis, that the order divides into those who deny themselves to gain dominion over their fellows and those who give way to animal indulgence, the saying is easily granted. The monk who restrains his appetites to be followed and idolised as a confessor does more harm to others, and is probably more evil in himself, than the sleek abbot given up to hawks and hounds. The principle applies universally. Before we can call Prodicus a useful teacher for telling his pupils how to get the bone and nerve of Hercules, we must know whether he departed from the general rule of his class by not holding out political power as his prize.

12\. I cannot think, then, that accomplished scholars and honest men like Ritter and Brandis are fairly accused of imposing on less-instructed readers when they use a phrase like "Die Sophistik" to express their sense that all the different professors of wisdom in the age of Pericles practised one art. That view does not conflict at all with the fact that the word Sophist may have been applied to a poet, or to anyone who exercised influence through words rather than swords—to Thales, to Pythagoras, to Socrates. Astrology has an undoubted meaning, which most people think a bad one; yet is an astrologer any more than one who studies the stars? Why should the man who studied them with the full aim of finding the laws governing their courses not have been called an astrologer, as much as any of the countless doctors who foretold political events from the stars? These traders in natural knowledge were no more one school or guild than the Athenian professors; they had different maxims, were rivals, were enemies; yet it has been usual to think they had a common work that a common name can denote. And every man who claimed to be an astronomer, not an astrologer, had to make good his claim by the labours of a life and show how he differed from the caster of nativities. In doing so he must put a stigma on a name not necessarily evil before, and gain for himself a name in some sense new. His eventual compensation will be to vindicate the fame of many worthy predecessors who were not distinctly conscious of their own end but honestly sought for light while others boasted that they possessed it and could turn it to account. Till he has finished his task he must bear the same reproach as those he most opposes, and from whom he is trying to deliver his fellows.

13\. Many at this time scorned and ridiculed the young men of Athens for attending one Sophist or another, and for showing the effects of the teaching in their self-conceited words and acts. Aristophanes above all could teach these young men to laugh at themselves, at their own thoughts, speculations and imaginations as well as their teachers'. In doing so he perhaps expected to restore the habits of an older and, as it seemed to him, simpler method.

Neither reason nor evidence allows us to believe that his success matched his zeal or genius. He may have abated some of the nuisances infesting Athens; he may have thinned the race of sycophants, made the vulgar kinds of mob-persuasion less effective, even done something to curb his fellow-citizens' litigious spirit. But he can have done very little to root out the real cancer of the nation's being, which fed on the hearts not of the worst but of the best, noblest and most promising of the Athenian youth. No one could apply a sound remedy to this evil who despised the age he was born into, who saw only the effects of the sophistical poison without understanding its nature and the constitutions it worked on. Only he could hope to reform the young men of Athens who sympathised with them heartily and affectionately; who did not show contempt or indignation for their favourite teachers but was ready to follow them through all their windings and subtleties; who, without for a moment forgetting his purpose of finding his way back to realities, could fearlessly grapple with the most shadowy and impalpable abstractions. Such a man would have sore difficulties, through which only a clear perception of his object could lead him unhurt. His inward conflicts, before he was fit for his task, must be severe. The greatest of his outward ones would perhaps be this: those who were aiming, with very different instruments, to resist the same evils would infallibly misconstrue his purpose. He would inevitably pass with them for a Sophist, perhaps the subtlest and most mischievous of them. Because he sought to make men feel there was no resting-place in any of their theories or opinions, he would be suspected of universal scepticism. Because he led them to feel that they were not without ground to stand on if they would seek it, he would be accused of undermining the ground their forefathers stood on. Because he tried to look through the clouds drawn up from the earth into the serene heaven behind them, it would be fancied that he invoked the clouds' protection and did them homage.

Such a man was Socrates, and this was his fate. Sophists hated him, and he was ridiculed as the worst of them. He treated his country's diseases by a method exactly opposite to Aristophanes's, and so Aristophanes denounced him as their chief promoter. We have now to consider what his method was, how it affected his own age, and what traces it has left of itself for later generations.

#### SECTION II. SOCRATES.

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[born ol. 77, 4; b.c. 468.]{.smallcaps}
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1\. [There]{.smallcaps} is little doubt that Socrates was the son of a statuary and a midwife, and that he was born in a small township of Attica. We do not know exactly when he came to Athens. It was probably about the start of the Peloponnesian war, when Pericles was still alive and Anaxagoras was teaching. Socrates attended Anaxagoras's school. He very likely took up his master's studies with real ardour and carried away many valuable hints.

2\. Anaxagoras, as we have seen, stood at the furthest remove from the trading Sophists. For them political life was everything; for him it was nothing. He sought a home in the world of nature, apart from human beings. It was a noble experiment. Young Pericles felt it to be so, though his life's desire was political ascendancy. One might have thought young Socrates, who never showed that desire, would be carried away by it even more. But he could not find a country where Anaxagoras sought one. As he listened to his master's sublime physical speculations, he seems to have asked himself: "What are all these to me? Let atoms be linked by whatever law of affinity, let them whirl at random or be guided by an intelligence; the question still remains, What am I? These speculations do not answer it, yet it must be answered somehow. Any carpenter or shoemaker who could help me solve it would be my benefactor. The profoundest teacher whose thoughts run another way is not the man I want." So he left the school of Anaxagoras. Its quietness was inviting, but if that quietness cost the sacrifice of human feelings and interests, the gossip of the Agora and the bustle of the Piraeus were better.

3\. Like the Sophists, then, Socrates was a man of business and action. His wisdom, if he had any, must be directed to what was passing around him, not to some other sphere. But did he have wisdom he could use for this? Could he teach about things on earth or in the skies? The more he considered, the more he found that he did not possess wisdom; it was exactly what he needed. He could not hand it to disciples to use and traffic with. He had to go in search of it. The distinction between the Sophist, or wise man, and the philosopher had dawned on Pythagoras, perhaps on Thales; for Socrates it became the cardinal distinction. For him to possess or profess wisdom would be utter falsehood. He found he could not lay down theories or maxims even about the commonest things. What he needed was to understand them, and to understand them so that he might understand himself and find out whether he had any ground to stand on or was only floating in the air.

4\. Who could help him in this inquiry? It concerned his very self, which no eye could see and which lay beneath all utterance and thought. Socrates believed there was one near him who took notice of the most secret movements of his mind and will, who reproved, restrained, and warned him. A divine teacher was with him at all times. Though he did not possess wisdom, this teacher could set him on the road to seek it, preserve him from delusions that might turn him off it, and keep his mind fixed on the end for which he was to live and act. Xenophon asks, with plain soldierly honesty, whether the accusers could believe Socrates lied about this. He hints that it would shake his faith in all reality to suppose that so clear-sighted a man, so free from superstition, could be the victim of a wholly false impression, or that such an impression could produce the wholesome effects Xenophon himself had witnessed. We believe that Socrates told no lie about his Demon, and that it was precisely this faith that kept him from lying and made him clear-sighted and free from superstition.

5\. Socrates connected this guide with the mythology of his countrymen, and seems to have interpreted each by the other. He was sure he had such a teacher, so he could acknowledge a teacher of wisdom to Greeks and to men generally. Much that was said about the god of Delphi seemed profane to him, and he turned from it with disgust. But on the whole he believed more, not less, than his countrymen, and shrank from the scepticism and irreverence in which they and their poets indulged. He had no notion of replacing Jupiter or Apollo with a Nous or Intelligence. That would have been strange, since he was not accounting for the existence of the universe but craving a light to show him his own path through it. So he was not a Monotheist in the sense some have claimed; he did not deny that there were various objects of worship, and in many acts of his life he acknowledged them. But he felt there was one teacher, one source of light and wisdom, leading him out of the confusions of sense. He was therefore practically more of a Monotheist than he could have been had he tried to reduce Greek traditions to physical speculations or treated them as mere follies.

6\. Socrates spoke of his Demon as reproving and restraining himself. But because he connected the Demon with his country's gods, he felt that other men also had a director to obey, who could lead them to what he sought. So instead of being a solitary thinker, he had the most intense sense of a vocation to help and instruct others. He could not give them wisdom, but he might put them on the same way of seeking it that he was walking himself.

7\. What charms he used to draw a circle around him may at first seem inexplicable. Most of the Sophists were advanced in age and reputation when he first appeared in Athens. They promised to fit men to be politicians, orators, and generals, and offered plausible proof that they could do it. He promised nothing. He had come, he said, to practise his mother's profession on behalf of those who had thoughts they wished to be delivered of. You could not tell what line he took, whether he was a philologer like Prodicus or a professor of statesmanship like Protagoras; he seemed to be all things by turns and nothing for good. Personal beauty was a great recommendation among the Athenians, yet he had large projecting eyes like a bull's, a flat upturned nose, a protruding stomach, a tattered cloak, and was seldom seen with sandals. Nevertheless the youth of Athens began to flock to him, thinking he had something to teach them, perhaps that he could somehow impart the art of governing better than the regular doctors. Some of the causes we have mentioned as likely to alienate his countrymen may even have contributed to this result. The Athenians liked a humorist, and Socrates showed himself one by his outward carelessness and the whole tone of his talk. He also had a hearty, genial way of interesting himself in whatever interested those he was with, and as little solemn quackery as was ever found in any man. Add that he was thoroughly Greek: in his habits of mind, his taste for society, his wit and argument, his brave unflinching love of his land, and in making freedom (far more than is usually acknowledged) the passion and end of his life. But all this together could not have outweighed his many disadvantages had he not had the real magnet that draws young men's hearts, however reluctant: knowledge of the very thing they want and have been toiling in vain to find.

8\. Political power, as we have seen, was the one prize the Sophists set before themselves and held out to pupils as the reward for their labour on abstract speculations. The roads to it differed, and each teacher believed, and persuaded his disciples, that his was the shortest. But all shared one method: they sought power by means of *words*. Mastery of words was the great art the Athenian youth must cultivate; his own feelings and what he saw daily in his city told him there was a fascination in words that the physical force of an Oriental tyrant could not match. Socrates, when he began earnestly to meditate on his countrymen's condition, seems first to have observed that here, as usually, the tyrants were slaves: those who wished to rule the world by words were in ignominious bondage to words. The wish to break this spell took strong hold of him. But it would have been ineffectual, and would have interfered with the main feeling of his life, had he not been able to connect the study of words with that deep question about his own being. As he reflected, he saw more and more clearly that words are not only the instruments by which we govern others but the means by which we may become acquainted with ourselves. In trying really to understand a word, to find the *bona fide* meaning he himself gave it, he gained more insight into his own ignorance and more real knowledge than by all other studies together. In this work he knew he was honest; he was feeling for a ground and breaking through a thousand tricks and self-deceptions. If he was to deliver his countrymen from the miserable shallowness into which the ambition of wisdom and depth had betrayed them, to lead them out of the multitude of systems above morality into a firm sense that there was a morality, and above all to rescue them from the worship of *power*, this must be his means. He must not stop to weigh the wisdom of this proposition or that. He must not denounce with moral indignation those that struck him as mischievous or outrageous, nor generously concede those that seemed plausible. In every case he must lead his disciples to ask what they actually meant by the words of the propositions they used. He must count no time wasted that they honestly spent on this, and no perplexities or contradictions dangerous that arose from their own minds in the course of it.

9\. This was certainly an irritating, vexatious way to proceed. An opponent who had adopted a proposition and had plenty of arguments for it would be tortured to find himself not fairly met on those arguments, but led back to a question he had taken for granted. He would be forced to account for a word he supposed everyone agreed on, and not allowed to bring any of his own resources into play. It was equally perplexing for a disciple who had come expecting a doctrine to be established or refuted, and the ingenious arguments on both sides to be useful in a popular assembly. He got no decision either way, and learned that he had been talking all his life in a language he did not understand, using words like algebraic characters. Yet somehow the Sophist was taught that he was in the presence of one stronger than himself. He might chafe, fret, and complain of unfair treatment. He could not say his opponent had not beaten him at his own word-fighting, or that all the scepticism he had turned against the common thoughts and feelings of mankind had not come back tenfold on himself. He could not help owning that the man in conflict with him had some other end than the exercise or display of power, and yet had a power before which his own quailed. The disciple, for his part, amid all his bewilderment, went away feeling that he had, perhaps for the first time, actually learned something. He was convinced that if there is nothing better than dominion over other men's minds, there is at least an important and indispensable preliminary to it, unless our own minds are to be the sport of every deceiver.

10\. The infinite humour and vivacity of Socrates must have served him greatly in such dialogues. But his opponents often fancied he was merely indulging his humour when he was in fact following out his principle. His habit of confessing uncertainty or ignorance on any subject, which in their eyes was the chief element of his "irony," was not usually put on. We make no doubt that he often began a discussion without knowing where it would lead, actually hoping, as he said, to learn from the result. He was certain not of a particular conclusion but that his method was sound and would lead each person who followed it to clearness and truth. His discoveries about himself and his fellow-creatures were probably the practical fruits of this method. For instance, by repeated experiments he convinced himself of the immense importance of recollection: the mind without it is at the mercy of accidents, and the mind with it is continually realising its own possessions, receiving them as if bestowed for the first time. Most of his moral discipline rested on this principle. Its purpose and ground was to remove the impediments to recollection and lead the mind from mere sensible images and impressions to an examination of its own treasures. But the principle was saved from any Brahminical tendency by his habitual use of words and sensible images as the means by which a man feels his way into the principles and grounds of his being. A man learns to understand himself by trying to understand common things, what the carpenter does with his wood, the shoemaker with his leather, the mason with his stones, and by really finding out what we mean when we talk of them. So Socrates's withdrawment or recollection did not point to an escape from common life or daily business. It formed the habit a man is to cultivate of seeking out what each thing really is, not merely its shapes, appearances, and accidents, and this is ultimately to fit him to perceive what is deepest and truest. The soul of the doctrine is a faith won by repeated proofs and trials. Man has in him a desire to find out the truth of things, and also an inclination to keep company with mere images of things. As far as the first keeps uppermost and rules the other, he is in his honest, sound position; as far as the lower is uppermost, he becomes a mere shadow-pursuer and shadow-fighter. Socrates did not adopt this as a scheme to supplant another scheme. He stumbled on it as a fact he could no more deny than what his senses showed him, a fact which *was*, however explained, and must be recognised in all our dealings with ourselves or others.

11\. There was one young man in Athens whom Socrates loved intensely. In him the Greek qualities were seen at their highest: creative power, skill with words, personal beauty, fascination of manner. The love Socrates bore him shows how thoroughly he sympathised with the very feelings he feared most and in which he saw all possibilities of evil. If Alcibiades could have learned that there was a right and a wrong, and that man's business is to walk in a line, not devise one, to perceive, not to create, the whole history of Athens might have been different. There must have been critical moments when he confessed to himself that something was more worth seeking than dominion. There must have been moments when the feeling that he too had a guide and monitor within him was stronger than the sense of power and the inclination to wrong that went with it. But Ahriman prevailed over Ormuzd. Alcibiades yielded to the darker power within, which kept tempting him to glorify his own intellect and use his mighty gifts to destroy his country and himself. Then all the skill in word-fighting he had seen in his master became his curse, an instrument of mighty mischief. Once he had parted with the moral purpose Socrates was aiming at, what he received from him became sophistry of the worst kind. It taught him to act more effectively on the maxim that all order and society had been invented by the strongest or cunningest, who could pull down what they had invented.

12\. This, says our recent historian of Greece, was not the sophistical teaching. The Sophists merely meant to fit Athenian young men for civil life; their aim was not so high as that of Socrates, but far from bad. We believe Socrates would have answered: "Either it is *this* aim that I set before myself, or it is a bad aim. All my teaching and influence, if it lacks this aim, is bad teaching and bad influence. My elenchus is in itself nothing better than the logic or rhetoric of any other professor. If it is taken up merely as a more skilful or ingenious art, it will be worse, for its purpose is to lead men to apprehend that which is, by sifting it from its shapes and counterfeits, from that which is not. The Sophists are destroying the heart and soul of my countrymen, because they keep leading them to think that what they want is an *art* to do or to make. What they actually want is a *science*, a means of seeing what they did not make, what lies beneath all our doings and is at the root of ourselves."

13\. From this it will be seen in what sense knowledge seemed to Socrates the basis of morality. Those who suppose he meant to exalt the human faculties and make them the grounds of virtue and truth do not merely mistake but invert his meaning. To destroy the worship of power, especially intellectual power, was the purpose of his life, and he showed this above all in his doctrine of the relation of knowledge to morality. As the outward eye sees certain objects and is good for nothing except as it sees them, so the inward eye perceives certain objects and is good for nothing except as it sees them. The objects are there, and the whole blessing of the man is to behold them. As he beholds them he becomes like them, but they *are*; they are not the variable functions of his mind but the eternal, unchangeable principles and grounds of it. A notice of Socrates is only an occasion for indicating this faith; in speaking of his great disciple we must try to expound it.

14\. Socrates, then, was, as he said himself, a philosopher and nothing else, a philosopher in the strictest sense, who helps us better than anyone to know what philosophy is. He never imagines that his philosophy contains or provides its own object. He is the wisest of men, as the oracle said, because he knows nothing; that is, because he brings nothing with him but acknowledges what presents itself to him. When he speaks of the dignity of the philosopher, he means the dignity of a man who does not exalt himself or put himself in the way of the thing he examines, and who has the simplest, most open eye for receiving light from wherever it comes. That there is a source from which the light comes, and that this light is connected with man, is a principle assumed, however imperfectly developed, in all his words and acts.

15\. How could such a man, it has often been asked, be compelled to drink hemlock? Must not the restored democracy of Athens have been worse and more intolerant than any power ever on earth? Mr. Grote answers, most reasonably I think, that the wonder is how such a man was allowed to go on teaching so long, since no state ever showed so much tolerance for differences of opinion as Athens. I would add this. Had it been possible to regard Socrates merely as an utterer of peculiar opinions, one of the Greek Sophists or professors, he might still have taught with impunity. Anytus and Meletus might have had their own reasons for disliking him, his connexion with Critias or Alcibiades might have roused suspicion, and the comedians' ridicule might have kept up a habitual prejudice, but the tolerance of the Athenian people would have triumphed. He would have been acquitted on the charge of corrupting the youth and on that of introducing new demons. But there has always been, and always will be, a limit to the indulgence of those who regard all opinions as equally possible. A man who positively denies that he is proclaiming an opinion, who speaks of the possibility of *knowing*, the duty of *distinguishing*, and a truth that men do not create and that does not change with our intellect, belongs to a different category from the promulger of opinions, and is not entitled to the same mercy. Tolerant people, on the very ground of their tolerance, feel bound to silence or crush him. What business has he to insult other men's opinions, to tell them there is something it is dangerous not to see, that falsehoods cling to their lives which they ought to cast off? It takes a long time before a thoroughly good-natured man can persuade himself that anyone has reached this height of criminality. All pity will be shown to the man's fanaticism while possible, and he will be treated, in spite of himself, as a sectarian teacher propounding a particular opinion. But if he persists, as Socrates did, in asserting that he is not a Sophist and not the putter-forth of a theory, tolerant men must, and experience shows they will, reluctantly resort to the same racks, dungeons, and poison-cups that bigots use. For it comes to this: if the teacher is right, he must be regarded as a public benefactor, and the city must honour him above all its citizens. When the judges condemned Socrates to death, they asked him, by Athenian custom, what milder sentence he would propose for himself. He answered, "A public support in the Prytaneum." They might be offended at his audacity, but their consciences told them this was the real alternative. Not being prepared to take it, they let the sentence be carried out, and so chose a course far more honourable to Socrates and more instructive to later ages.

16\. We must be careful not to separate the discourse of Socrates after his condemnation from the course of his earlier life. His faith in a future state is often put forward as distinguishing him from his countrymen and the pagan world. But no one refers more often than Socrates himself to the old stories that express this faith: to Aeacus and Rhadamanthus, the functions attributed to them, and the souls they judged. He evidently believed the essence of these stories was true, that they set forth a correspondence between men's condition hereafter and their condition here. As in other cases, he received what earlier men taught but asked himself what it meant and how it concerned him. His countrymen believed that somehow they would be judged hereafter by what they had done here, and that some particle of themselves would suffer a vague punishment or enjoy a vague happiness. He was fixed in the conviction that a man's blessedness consists in knowing that which is, with his soul engaged in the pursuit of that knowledge, and that his misery consists in lacking it and being given up to dreams and unrealities. He hoped he would know hereafter what he had desired to know here. He sought arguments to convince himself that, however the accidents around him changed, he himself would continue, and, freed and purified from the corruptions and restraints he had felt here, would converse with perfect Wisdom and Goodness. Socrates did not tell his disciples that his future life would be separate from his life here; he looked for the continuation and unfolding of that life. He felt that his eyes had been partly opened and would be opened more perfectly, that he would still and always be a seeker after wisdom, but that wisdom would meet and embrace him and ever reveal new treasures, which would awaken ever fresh longings and continually satisfy them. The seeker of wisdom, who passed here for a pursuer of shadows, would grasp substance; the seeker of wealth and power, who passed here for a pursuer of substance, would grasp a shadow.

17\. The hints I have thrown out may, I think, enable readers to reconcile the three documents we have on the life of Socrates. Take first the Aristophanic portrait. It is a broad, extravagant caricature, but drawn by a consummate artist who, even in distorting his original's expression, shows that he studied it. I could not say this if, as some commentators pretend, he had represented Socrates as a natural philosopher. The name of the play is almost the only excuse for that notion. Who that knows the genius of Aristophanes, or the delicacy of Athenian taste, will suspect him of the wretched conceit that a man worships the clouds because he likes gazing at the stars, or his audience of tolerating it? Far more likely the airy nymphs the philosopher is said to have put in place of his country's gods are the patronesses of attempts to catch the thin, evanescent meanings, and shadows of meanings, of words. Those attempts might plausibly be imputed to one who prized philology for its own sake and found it indispensable in his warfare with the Sophists. The basket in which the philosopher hangs between heaven and earth, to mingle his thoughts with the congenial air, does not show that the poet feared Socrates saw himself as a mere particle of the world's general life, longing to be reunited with his native element. It points instead to the doctrine of the withdrawment of the spirit from the world's phantasms, which I have called so capital an article of his moral creed, and of which his idea of the soul after death is only the expansion and fulfilment. The maps and geometrical instruments the old Athenian found in the phrontisterium partly prove that Socrates often used illustrations from subjects familiar to Athenian youth, and partly seem a joke at the attempt to reduce morality to a science. The dialogue about the cause of thunder is clearly meant far more as a caricature of his method of discourse than as an exposition of his opinions. Its chief object is to leave the impression that Socrates put some special demon of his own in place of Jupiter, which the poet, to keep his metaphors consistent and to strike an oblique blow at the really physical speculators, calls Dinos. These remarks are necessary in justification of Aristophanes, for if in these parts he meant to show Socrates as a naturalist, the whole plot is absurd. Why should Strepsiades go to a natural philosopher to learn to cheat his creditors? How could such a teacher give Pheidippides lessons in beating his father? The most remarkable feature of the play, the contest between the just and the unjust principle, is decisive as to his meaning. The satirist, with the quick intuition one would expect of such an Athenian, saw that the conflict between an uplooking and a downlooking mind was the most characteristic and important feature of the system he ridiculed.

18\. The one point in the life of Socrates of which Aristophanes was utterly ignorant is its object, and this is just the point on which Xenophon is anxious to inform us. This worthy disciple is too anxious to show Socrates in his dignity, so we miss the hearty humorist who can be seen, though disguised, in the comedian's picture. It was natural that a soldier should be more struck by the positive conclusions Socrates reached on practical matters than by his method of reaching them. It was equally natural that a professed apologist should want to show his master in the way most intelligible to plain persons, who had been puzzled by reports of his strange argumentation and fancied some great mischief lurked in it. But if we bear this in mind and treat Xenophon as the expounder of the Socratic discipline rather than of the man or his principles, we shall be more struck by the agreements than by the differences between him and the other biographers. Homage to an invisible guide and teacher, the distinction between the principle in man that looks upward and the one that gravitates to the earth, and the recognition of restraints on the animal nature as means of freeing the true man, we shall find on every page of the *Memorabilia*. Standing alone, Xenophon would be unsatisfactory, even misleading; his Socrates would be almost as much a mere bundle of fine qualities or true opinions as his Cyrus. But he is most useful in giving clearness and steadiness to the apprehensions we draw from other, and on the whole better, sources. In him we see clearly that Socrates kept a moral end before him from first to last, and was to all intents a practical man. This discovery, instead of making the other accounts harder to interpret, which some think inconsistent with it, makes them more intelligible and more consistent with themselves than we would otherwise have thought.

19\. In the Socrates of Plato we find the Aristophanic and the Xenophontic Socrates, the mere humorist and debater and the mere moralist, uniting to form the real man. It has often been said that Plato's brilliant imagination created a hero with very few points of resemblance to the actual Socrates. It would certainly be hopeless to clear Plato of the charge of a brilliant, and more than brilliant, imagination. But the word has two meanings. If it means contempt of reason and probability, the gift must belong in a much lower degree to Plato than to those who think it possible that a man living in the very city where Socrates had walked and talked for years could palm off on his countrymen a false or fantastic image of him. If instead we mean the power of giving substance and life to what would otherwise be a mere shadow, it must be a most serviceable ally to one who would collect and harmonise the remembrances of an actual character, no less than to one who would create a character that never existed. Strong affection may make such a faculty unnecessary in a mere biographer, or perhaps awaken it. But one who has to describe a friend's thoughts, words, and acts, and also to show how they bore on the state of his country and will bear on men's speculations and lives for ages, needs no ordinary measure of this faculty. This is Plato's work. He proposed to exhibit Socrates as the guide into a particular line and course of thought. To do it, he had to bring him livingly before us, so that we should see not his opinions but himself, trace the workings of his mind, and see how he acted on others and they on him. By no other means could Plato have given us the true Socrates, and without presenting the true Socrates he could never have brought out clearly the different sides of his own philosophy.

#### SECTION III. THE SOCRATICS.

1\. Three schools grew directly out of the philosophy and discipline of Socrates, usually called the Cyrenaic, the Cynic, and the Megaric. They may be called the parents of the most conspicuous theories that occupied later Greece. The Cyrenaic doctrine, mixed with a tributary stream from the physics of Democritus, ended in Epicurism. The Cynic joined with the Megarian to form Stoicism. The Megarian also contributed one element to the speculations that flourished much later at Alexandria. It is worth tracing the leading thoughts of each and showing how they began with Socrates.

2\. Aristippus of Cyrene seems to have had a singularly easy, happy temperament. Pleasures did not excite him, and pains passed lightly over him. One would have thought few men could have had less sympathy with Socrates, who fought hard all his life with himself and the world. Yet this earnest thinker had charms even for Aristippus. Socrates said we are not to yield to circumstances but to master them, and Aristippus, whom no circumstance oppressed, found in his own experience an interpretation of that maxim. Socrates often pitied and warned the thoughtless man for his restlessness and perturbation. What more natural inference than that freedom from annoyance, a dismissal of all anxious and turbulent cares, is the great end of philosophy? Besides these well-known commonplaces of his master's talk, Aristippus could no doubt cite authentic fragments of conversation in which Socrates seemed to assume pleasure as the end of life and to fit his other maxims to it. He could tell, we may be sure, of times when Socrates rebuked his own lazy, voluptuous habits of mind and yet seemed to aim at proving, not that they led to a wrong end, but that they were ill-chosen means to it. So Aristippus easily persuaded himself that he was a Socratic, indeed the best and most complete interpreter of Socrates, when he announced the great discovery that pleasure and pain are the ultimate principles of human life, and that pursuing the one and avoiding the other is, and must be, every man's business. Whatever honour belongs to the first formal proclaimer of a doctrine that has held so prominent a place in the philosophy of every age must be given to Aristippus. What distinguishes him from later and less practical reasoners of this class is his plain and honest assertion that the momentary, concrete gratification, not the complex notion of happiness, is and must be the object of men's desires and labours. It was easy for him to fit other parts of the Socratic creed to this. If choosing the agreeable and rejecting the disagreeable is the great virtue of the soul, how conveniently could Socrates' language on the connection of virtue with reason and knowledge serve the new sect! It is the intellect that prefers and discards, and why should these acts of judgment not be the same as that perception of what is and what is not to which the master so constantly referred? As for the apparent self-restraint and bodily privations of Socrates, they were no real contradiction to the Cyrenaic theory, which allows all varieties of taste and may let one man seek mental pleasure at the cost of bodily, and another bodily at the cost of mental. The school went through several changes. With Theodorus, pleasure and pain ceased to be real outward objects, and self-seeking and self-glorification became the acknowledged ends of the wise man. In Hegesias the hope of attaining pleasure gave way to a mere devising of ways to avoid pain. Anniceris seems to have smoothed the rough edges of the doctrine and prepared the way for its merging in the more general notions of happiness matured by Epicurus.

3\. The Cynic school, as it appears in its founder Antisthenes and in Diogenes, its only very notorious disciple, is the formal opposite of the Cyrenaic. Yet it adds one more illustration to the old maxim that Mr. Coleridge observed to be the most pregnant of all for the philosopher and the historian of philosophy: "Extremes meet." Both started from the same Socratic maxim, and probably both cited the same discourses in defence of their systems. The wise man should not submit to circumstances but rule them, said Aristippus, and so his whole business is to arrange them for the most pleasure and least pain. A man should be superior to his circumstances, said Antisthenes, and therefore must overcome his sensitivity to pleasure and pain and try to live wholly within himself, cultivating the nobler part of him that outward impulses and impressions do not touch. If Aristippus could cite passages from the discourses of Socrates, Antisthenes could appeal more confidently to the whole course of his life, his habitual struggle for victory over mere sensations. The Cynics were really disciplinarians more than doctrinists. They had a hard dogmatism of their own, but they were far more eager to show their own indifference to passing accidents than to find principles and reasons for it. Of the two, Antisthenes seems to have been the more honest and Diogenes the more original. The first was hard and narrow but apparently sincere; the second was an ostentatious coxcomb, whose proud, insolent spirit now and then threw off sparks of what might have been genius had it come with simplicity of character and a true purpose.

4\. Euclides of Megara was unquestionably more sagacious and subtle than any of those named. He was drawn to Socrates not by hope of a theory of life or a scheme of self-culture, but by Socrates' unrivalled skill in disputation. Had he lived thirty years earlier, he would have been an Eleatic or a Sophist. But nothing shows the effect of Socratic teaching on the Greek mind more remarkably than the moral tone it gave to men who would otherwise have been mere debaters. To argue was the taste and vocation of the Megarian school, but their arguments were all drawn irresistibly to the question, "What is the Good?" Pursuing it, they were led naturally to the pregnant positions of Socrates about evil as a departure from, and rebellion against, what *is*, which, as we have seen, was the ultimate and in one way the most characteristic part of his philosophy. This principle, cut off from the living processes by which Socrates reached it and sought to make others conscious of it, and set in naked opposition to every other idea of virtue or goodness, made up the Megarian doctrine. All their labour went to disproving the obvious and apparently irresistible opinion that what the senses report is the most real and certain. We have heard how Zeno defended the doctrine of his friend and master Parmenides by showing the utter instability of sensible presumptions and conclusions. The Megarian school used the same method. The difference lay in the character of the periods: Zeno's purpose was to support the metaphysical idea of Oneness, the Megarians' to support the moral idea of absolute, unchangeable Being.

5\. The history of this school is melancholy and instructive. Euclides, though his mind leaned to disputation, felt the grandeur of the moral lessons he had learned from Socrates. In Eubulides positive faith was displaced by delight in his own subtlety and in refuting opposing arguments. Diodorus Cronos admired and revered the mere forms of the understanding, apart from all vital principles or results. Finally Stilpo seems to have lost the characteristic idea of the Megarian school altogether while carrying its characteristic weakness to the highest point. His problem was not to establish the existence of objective truth but to show how an intellect might be formed that would be most impassive to influences from without and least disturbed by feelings from within. One of his pupils was Zeno of Cittium, the author of Stoicism.

#### SECTION IV. PLATO.

1\. The biographer of the Greek philosophers reports that Socrates once dreamed he had an unfledged cygnet on his knee. In a few moments it grew wings and flew away, singing very sweetly. The next day a young man came to him who was said to count Solon among his nearer ancestors, and through Solon to look back to Codrus and the god Poseidon. His name was Plato.

2\. Before coming to Socrates, this youth had written dithyrambs, songs and tragedies. He had studied under Ariston of Argos, a celebrated wrestler. Some say he got his name from the breadth of his chest, and that he won a wrestling prize at the Isthmian games. Whatever his earlier studies, the day he settled at the knees of Socrates decided the course of his life. Nothing he had learnt before was wasted, but the discourses of Socrates gave it meaning and direction. From Socrates he learnt to understand himself, and so to understand his predecessors and contemporaries. He learnt what a Greek, and what a man, ought to seek, and what perils and temptations beset either who starts the search.

3\. Plato has so identified himself with his master that it is hard to establish the events of his own life. Less is recorded of him than of many insignificant Greek sophists, and what is recorded rests on poor evidence. The epistles that bear his name have long been rejected as spurious, though some scraps of information may be drawn from them. The most interesting concern his journeys to Sicily: his connection with the elder tyrant Dionysius, his attempts to reform the younger, his hope of realising an ideal polity through a dissolute and worthless tyrant, and his influence on Dion, the stern aristocrat, conspirator and despot. We cannot arrange this history, but we may grant that Plato had an intense longing to prove he was no mere dreamer, and that what he believed could be realised. We have too few facts to draw a moral about a noble mind yielding to hopes of great results from such instruments. He may never have had flattering expectations, but only, perhaps reluctantly, carried out a task laid on him. How far it was *necessary* that his polity be tried in Syracuse or anywhere to test its principles, we can judge better once we have considered what it was. The question that concerns us now is whether Plato, once fledged, flew off into the air and left his master on the earth, as some have fancied and the old tradition seems to hint; or whether he was the truest expounder of his master — the true Socratic precisely because he was not the founder of a Socratic system but a living and original investigator.

4\. Plato conversed with both Aristippus and Antisthenes. With Euclides he was closer, for after the death of Socrates, when Athens seemed unsafe, he and other disciples fled to Megara. It would be rash to say that his own thought was shaped by watching these three, since internal evidence apparently supports the view that his *Phædrus* and *Laches* were written in his master's lifetime. Yet he must have noticed very early how his fellow-disciples seized on particular sayings of their teacher and built systems and schools out of them, and he must have thought deeply about how to escape the same temptation. If Socrates had made up his creed from the systems then current in Greece, it would be no surprise that the elements, artificially put together, reasserted their independence and were claimed by the minds they suited. Everything Plato had seen of his master made that supposition impossible. Whether or not Socrates had studied other schools, every thought he uttered came fresh and living from himself — or rather was the joint fruit of his own reflection and that of the people he talked with. He could minister to other minds because he knew so well what passed in his own, and sought out each principle as the answer to a real difficulty. But every philosopher is in some sort an inquirer into the workings of his own mind, and his philosophy, if sincere, shows that mind. How then was Socrates, so remarkably *himself*, kept from the narrowness and exclusiveness into which Aristippus and Antisthenes, both sincere in their way, had plainly fallen?

5\. Plato could answer only that it was the healthy habit of always tying his thoughts to outward circumstances and to the puzzles of his own age that kept the Socratic doctrines, in their owner's hands, from stagnating into mere theory. The obvious way to make a philosophy complete and fit for all times is to strip off the accidental features that suited it to one crisis. Plato was convinced by reflection and experience that the opposite course was the safe one. Homer could be read and enjoyed in the age of Pericles not because he stood aloof from the local and temporary, but because he was wrapped in it; men were presented as they were in a quite different state of manners, and that was exactly what let readers see them as brothers and countrymen. The reader will think of many reasons why the analogy of poetry does not hold for philosophy; it is enough that they did not weigh with Plato. No one knew or felt more strongly the essential difference between poetry and philosophy — he was even betrayed into exaggerations in asserting it. But he was convinced it did not lie in this, that the poet wins immortality by adapting himself to the feelings of his age and the philosopher by divesting himself of them all. He thought he saw that giving up living and practical sympathies, divorcing oneself from human interests, produces the very narrowness the philosopher hopes to escape. So if Greek wisdom was not to fall back from where Socrates had brought it, or ever to serve other countries and periods, Plato concluded it must not dissolve into speculations or declamations about this scheme of life or that principle of action. It must show itself in the conversations of actual men — not of some imaginary day, but of that day — talking about what they really talked of when they met in the streets or at their feasts. He took no pains to forget the people he lived among or what occupied them, or to adopt any more universal way of thinking and speaking than theirs.

6\. The *Dialogue* of Plato is therefore not, as some have said, an artistic invention in which the philosopher sacrificed severe judgment to imagination, to a reputation for dramatic skill, or to the wish to present truths agreeably. He plainly regarded it as a necessary means of making clear the truths he believed he possessed, and he is anxious above all to impress this, that in the Dialogue rightly used we have the induction to all principles. It is strange that he should be accused of sacrificing his disciples to a selfish desire for fame by a method that leads them step by step in self-inquiry, or of using it to win their favour, when it caused more vexation to every superficial talker of the day than anything else his genius could have devised. A mere artist tries to carry us at once into noble contemplations that make us conscious of our own greatness. Plato wants us to feel our own way into them, climbing rugged and thorny paths and finding how many frivolous difficulties must be cleared away before we see anything as it is. His Dialogues are literally an *education*: they teach how to deal with our own minds, how far to humour them and how far to resist, how to receive the glimpses of light that sometimes fall on them, and how to find a way through the darkness in which they so often feel lost. Only in the sacred oracles do we find an author so aware of his own perplexities, so unwilling to hide them, and so anxious to awaken us to them so that we may be delivered. Here lies Plato's art. It is most consummate — deeper in insight and influence than almost any human composition — yet it is not art in the common sense, for it has no independent purpose of pleasing. It does not work underground, leaving the ordinary man to feel its effects and the thoughtful man to judge it by them. It draws your attention anxiously to its own methods, and the writer is as ambitious that you understand all the springs and valves at work as that you accept any one result. Indeed he does not acknowledge the results as yours until you have gone, in your own inner being, through the processes that lead to them.

7\. Plato above all men must be studied in Plato. Hearty, sympathetic acquaintance with one Dialogue will do more to introduce a student to what is blunderingly called his system than the reports of all critics and historians. There are no digests of doctrine, no ready-made notions to carry away; everything is alive and at work. Nor are the speakers, as in our best Dialogues — Berkeley's, for instance — personages with significant names; they are real Phædruses, Gorgiases and Protagorases, talking in a place we are given an accurate, vivid description of, about some passing question that proves to contain the deepest and highest principles of our being. These are drawn out not by force, as if the facts were predetermined to yield a moral, but by the ordinary accidents of conversation: explanations and contradictions, the confusion of disciples, the anger of doctors, the clumsy reconciliations of good-natured bystanders. The dialogue is often a *Siris*. Like Berkeley's admirable treatise, it may be moored on earth to no worthier a stake than the virtues of tar-water; often the starting-point is less worthy still, the lying speech of some rhetorician defending a mischievous, vulgar paradox. Yet the chain is unwound with a skill of which our modest countryman would cheerfully have confessed his own was a feeble copy, until its highest link is felt to be about the throne of Him whose name Berkeley had the privilege to utter, and Plato the honesty to declare unutterable.

8\. So far I have described Plato as reasserting the whole principle of Socrates against those who had dismembered it. But a notion has gone out, supported by an able and eloquent French commentator of our day, that Plato was an Eclectic. In its most plausible form this says that on every occasion he set two imperfect principles against each other, and either by showing their inadequacy hinted at, or by clear exposition developed, a third idea including both. Another common version is that Plato conceived a philosophy which, starting from Socrates, would absorb all the other Greek philosophies, metaphysical and moral, so that we find in him an attempt to harmonise not only the schools that took their name from Socrates but those before him. There seems to me much truth in both statements, but truth in a form likely to mislead and to pervert the reader's notion of the Greek teacher's real object. I suspect that by considering these theories we may understand Plato's meaning better and gain light for all our future inquiries.

9\. One main object of Plato in using the dialogue was to discover the latent meaning of words, and to lead the inquirer to recognise it as what had been implied in them from their origin, though floating in the minds of those who gave them quite another meaning. This carried out the method Socrates had been maturing all his life, to which we traced the success of his moral experiments. It rested on a faith ripening daily into certainty: that there is in every man that which apprehends and recognises truth; that truth is always near him; and that his view of it is always interrupted and distorted by the phantoms presented to his senses. Plato believed the great duty of the Socratic teacher was to draw this truth out of the student's mind and teach him to realise it as his own; to this all labour was to be bent, and in doing it faithfully the teacher might hope for greater illumination. But we must never forget that the discipline was moral as well as intellectual — primarily and essentially moral: he must resist the attractions and bribery of sense to escape her impositions. Now this process leads to a result that often looks like *Eclecticism*. One opinion is rejected as false, the opposite opinion is shown to be unsatisfactory too, and then a truth is seen, or suspected to lie hidden, which both were aiming ineffectually to reach. The reader of the Dialogues will meet such instances again and again. But let him not hurry to conclude that the teacher's aim was to reconcile these opinions or to build a more comprehensive one. If he quietly accompanies Plato he will find that in such conversations *distinction* is much more the object than accommodation. The intention is to distinguish between the images the mind shapes from objects of sense when it is sense-ridden, and the sound meaning and reality it can perceive when it has sought to purge itself of its habitual delusions; to teach it the art of rejecting as well as choosing, and to put it in the posture for either. He may well have done more than any philosopher who ever lived to bring harmony and unity into moral speculation — I fully believe he has. But he begins by cultivating in us the habit of moral distinction, and by making us feel that truth and falsehood are radical, ultimate contradictions that cannot be explained or resolved into anything else. To see what is, as it truly is, is the highest privilege of the best and wisest man; to see things as they are not, confused, sensualised, corrupted, is the misery and curse of the thoughtless, slavish victim of inclination. To open in other men the inward eye that discerns the reality of things is the vocation of him who has served his own apprenticeship to truth and feels himself her servant.

10\. Such, I conceive, is the object of one large class of the Platonic Dialogues, the induction or vestibule to the rest. In these Plato is distinctly and emphatically Socratic. They must differ from the actual conversations of Socrates in one respect: the end must always have been more present to the writer than to the speaker. In Socrates the strongest feeling seems to have been: "I am certain there is something that is not appearance or phantasy, that man did not shape for himself, that will remain when all phantasies have vanished, that is, and that I must recognise if I would be anything but a phantom or shadow myself." This was the conclusion of a practical, working mind. By earnest meditation on it, Plato came to feel that if every thing has an unseen reality, a truth and substance of which the eye sees only shape and colour, there must be a truth and substance without any of these sensible adjuncts, which is in *itself*, and the beholding of which is the function and highest attainment of the purified spirit. The outward shell of this opinion so resembles the doctrine of Euclides that we cannot wonder some critics, wanting to break Plato's philosophy into fragments, pronounced several early Dialogues to be productions of the Megarian school. Wherever they found this substance, this τὸ ὄν, set forward as the end of human inquiry, they connected it with a system whose prominent mark was that Good and Being are identical. Those who agree with my view will see both the plausibility of the notion and its utter untenableness. Nowhere is the distinction between Plato and the Megarians clearer than here, where he asserts their own principle. By keeping to the method of Socrates, and making his Dialogues not the declaration of a truth but a mental exercise to arrive at it, he has removed all the dryness and prickliness of the doctrine and shown how it connects with the more obvious notions the Megarian roughly opposed to it. Pleasure is not the good, they said; self-denial is not the good; Being is the good. Yes, said Plato, but there is a Being in pleasure, a reality as well as a falsehood. Whatever man has found words for, whatever he has pursued in life, contains a truth, a substance, that can be distinguished from the lying phantom that surrounds and counterfeits it. So far as a man does this, he puts himself in the right state of mind to perceive in the end *that* Truth, *that* Being, which has no accidents about it. But to reach and cultivate this state of mind there must be a discipline, a curbing and contradiction of the lower nature, and so this too is a good.

11\. Without any purpose of combining opinions — indeed while resolutely maintaining boundaries and using a most subtle test for telling the true from the apparent — Plato had brought the three doctrines that called themselves Socratic into a certain relation and harmony. Next he had to consider how far the same doctrine and method might apply to the earlier philosophers of Greece: how far his master had been anticipated by Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides or Pythagoras, and how far he had thrown back a light that made their speculations more intelligible and consistent with each other. Here, in my judgment, begins the second class of Dialogues, in which the link is illustrated and developed between Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy — between the doctrine of Being that Socrates asserted and the question of Unity that had so long occupied the Greek mind.

12\. Readers will remember that the Eleatic leader Xenophanes differed in one respect from his successors: his language at first seems to agree remarkably with that of Socrates. What he took to be the true object of contemplation was God, or "The Being." Yet while doing justice to his course of thought, we had to admit he was essentially a destructive thinker, who reduced his Being to a bare negation of human qualities, and that Parmenides expressed the result better in simply affirming Oneness. How then did Socrates' doctrine differ from Xenophanes'? By a whole heaven. The Being of Xenophanes was altogether exclusive; the Being of Socrates altogether inclusive. If language has words like "just," "merciful," "good," and applies them to certain acts, then whether or not the words were understood or rightly applied, there is a reality corresponding to them — a "justice," a "mercy," a "goodness" — and all centre and unite in the Being. No Sophist could embarrass him by asking: "Man also uses 'unjust,' 'unmerciful,' 'bad'; why should these not have archetypes too, and dwell in that permanent, all-containing substance?" For it was assumed in the very hypothesis that these are departures from what is, and so intrinsically falsehoods. By reflecting on this delicate yet vital difference — which marks the man fighting all popular opinion and faith from the man finding substance and life in everything — Plato seems to have gained his first insight into the doctrine of Ideas, the most native part of his philosophy, which may fairly be called purely Platonic. I readily admit what the other disciples of Socrates vehemently asserted, and Aristotle took from them: that Socrates never enunciated this principle in any discourse. Yet I believe just as firmly that Plato reached it by steadily adopting the Socratic method, and that they missed it only because they neglected that method. In making this clear I may also give such insight into the subject itself as a treatise like this can.

13\. The Greek word for *appearance* and for *opinion* is the same: an opinion is what *seems* to each man. The whole education Socrates gave was to lead his disciples from appearances to realities, and in so doing he felt he was leading them from Opinions to Knowledge. His experiments on others convinced him, and his own heart told him, that we thirst for knowledge and cannot be satisfied with less. These at least are Socratic assertions; no one pretends Plato palmed them on him. But how could this be? The essence, the being of a thing or person seems shut up inside it. I may acknowledge it is there, but how can it come within my perceptions? Must it not be some shape, image or phantom of the thing I take account of, and not the thing itself? Grant this, and the Socratic philosophy falls. And what falls with it? Not a scheme or system, but the faith that truth is anyhow knowable by man, that he is not the necessary dupe of shadows and impostures — the fact that he is a moral being. There was no doubt that these results would follow; they had followed, and the practice and education of Socrates had been nothing but a deliverance from them. The Sophists had turned the world into a shadow world in which they could safely practise their juggleries. It was the great assertion that something is, and that only what is can be known, that had discomfited them and mocked their subtleties. Yet unless this great practical puzzle could somehow be resolved, the conclusions of Socrates, however sound by the reason and moral feeling of everyone who worked them out, would remain open to continual assault from the understanding. Here too Plato was not left to conjecture. The Sophists had stolen their armour from the real, honest philosophers of Greece. *Those* philosophers had not dared to grapple with the difficulty, and the proofs they left of its presence in their speculations had been eagerly seized by men who knew so well how to suck poison from every flower.

14\. I have suggested that a faithful, affectionate study of the strange, earnest thoughts of Heraclitus might profit any man. But his sayings on the endless vicissitude of things and the falsehood of all human conjectures impressed the Greek mind far more than his deeper thoughts on the universal light in man and his power of conversing with the universal. These latter connected themselves only with the vague pantheistic notions then gaining ground — notions probably very far from Heraclitus himself, who thought it ultimate wisdom to know the name of Jupiter. The former, in the hands of Protagoras, became a system excluding all constancy, permanence or order. One man has one notion of what he beholds or meditates on, another man another; any may be as right as any other; and that we cannot have more than such notions, nor come nearer the truth of things, is to be taken for granted rather than proved. Meanwhile the Eleatic "fixedness," the formal opposite of the Heraclitean "flux," served the deceiver equally well. Denying plurality, and so embarrassing men's minds about the objects of their worship, was as convenient a policy as upsetting their faith in their own convictions. Such observations might have led another man to despair of all inquiry; they only gave Plato a stronger moral interest in pursuing the inquiries he had begun.

15\. All the notions, you say, that the mind forms about what the bodily eye sees, or its own inward eye sees, are confused, fluctuating, contradictory. My notion of the flower is not the very flower; my notion of what is just is not the very just. Most true, Heraclitus; most true, Protagoras. But these notions are indexes, guideposts to what is not false, confused or contradictory. The notion of the flower and of justice proves there is a very flower — a very justice. Again, the mind can behold the Being, the One; but all the notions, imaginations and premonitions of the sensual understanding offer only miserable, counterfeit resemblances of it. True, Xenophanes and Parmenides; yet there is that in this Being, this One, which does and must answer to these notions, which they are trying, however vainly or awkwardly, to express. Now connect the results of inquiries that start from such opposite points. What follows? There are permanent, unchangeable forms in which what is manifests itself as it is, and in which we behold it as it is. Are these forms in the beholder or in what he beholds? We answer that the region of pure Being, where the inner mind dwells, may be (one might expect it to be) under some law corresponding to that of sensible phenomena. At least there could be no *à priori* presumption against this doctrine: a sound cannot, by the nature of language and things, be referred only to what it comes from, but supposes an ear that receives it; so there may be such a presentation of what actually is — of the substance or essence of each thing — as cannot be understood merely in reference to the thing, nor merely in reference to the one it is made to, but belongs at one and the same moment to both. This presentation cannot by its nature be fluctuating; it must be permanent and substantial, or it could not make known what is permanent and substantial. It must be the very opposite of its parallel in the world of sense. Are we to say such ideas or forms are eternal as well as substantial? To say "Yes" would startle no one if they concerned only Justice, Goodness, or even Beauty. But when we speak of the actual flower and tree as having a primary form or idea, is there not something dangerous in a doctrine that makes such forms eternal? The reply is that this would do very partial justice to Plato. For if he believes there is a reality, and so in some sense an archetypal form or idea, in the minutest thing, he believes just as firmly that every idea has its ground and termination in one higher than itself, and that there is a supreme idea, foundation and consummation of all the rest — the idea of the absolute and perfect Being, in whose mind they all dwelt, and in whose eternity alone they can be thought of as eternal.

16\. This remark also relieves the doctrine of another objection. These ideas, being substantial by nature, must be substantially in him who perceives them. To suppose there are indeed forms or ideas of things but that we have only notions of those ideas is merely to push the difficulty a step further off, and to fall into contradiction and absurdity in the attempt. The idea itself must be considered as with us and in us. The notion we form of the thing, when we begin to use our senses, compare and reflect, must not be identified with the idea; it is a witness and proof that the idea is present and that we are feeling after it. To realise or possess the idea is to have the science, the knowledge, of the thing. But this assertion that the ideas are substantially with us must be taken together with what was said before, and then it is plain that it does not affirm the ground and root of knowledge to be in ourselves — the very falsehood Plato sought to overturn. The ideas are the witnesses in our inmost being that there is something beyond and above us; when we enter into the idea of anything we give up our pretensions to be authors or creators and become mere acknowledgers of what is. To enter into that deepest, ultimate idea which is the ground of our being must be, in the deepest sense, a surrender of our own notions and imaginations — an act of submission to, and reception of, the Truth.

17\. Here, then, Plato most consistently carries out the principle his master asserted from first to last. We see how perfectly the Socratic doctrine that knowledge is the end of life agrees with the humility and confession of ignorance at the root of all the Socratic discipline. We see the harmony between knowledge and being, and how every act of knowledge presupposes a certain state of character and affections. And we see how truly Plato reconciled two forms of philosophy, one dealing with the objects of our knowledge and one with our acts of perception — how truly he found a truth of which each had dimly seen one side, yet how little this came from any project of harmonising opposite theories, and how much from resolutely pursuing a principle that supersedes theories altogether and, so far as it is faithfully acted on, frees us from bondage to them. The work and glory of Plato is not to frame a comprehensive system including nature and society, man and God, as its elements or compartments — which necessarily leads the builder to think himself above them all — but to show the utter impossibility of such a system and cut up the very dream of it by the roots. Whoever attempts to build such a Babel must understand that he will not find its model in Plato, and that before he advances a step he must undo everything Plato has done, disprove all his conclusions, and prove false the process by which he reached them. Those commentators who find in Plato nothing but exquisite ridicule of all system-makers, his own day's and earlier, have understood him imperfectly. That ridicule would not be so delightful, so genial and consoling to every earnest student, if he did not feel it to be the handmaid of the most severe demonstration, and only another aspect of the most generous sympathy with everything honest, humble, practical and true. The kind, experienced teacher smiles at our useless waste of time in building, but only to urge us to the more profitable work of seeking the foundation of what is built. The first is the employment of those who desire to be gods; the second, of those who believe the highest blessing man is capable of is to know God.

18\. But if Plato is almost free from the propensity to theories that has beset most philosophers — if his principle, consistently followed, is positively incompatible with them — how is he so commonly supposed to have mapped human knowledge into three provinces: Dialectics, Ethics and Physics? In considering this we may perhaps discover the purpose of a third class of his Dialogues, and see his so-called Eclecticism under yet another aspect.

19\. The critics who find this classification in Plato cannot mean that one part of the Dialogues treats of dialectics and another does not. They must know that every dialogue shows his dialectic method and makes some new trial or application of it. Nor, I think, can they pretend, without doing violence to the author's purpose and language, that the dialectical dialogues are not also ethical. A moral purpose is conspicuous throughout, and, as I have said, developing the method by which truth is perceived is inseparably interwoven with moral culture. Freeing the mind from sensible impressions and fascinations is the joint effect of restraining inclination and of the art that distinguishes the apparent from the real. Without a sense of this intertwining of ethical and intellectual discipline, the most beautiful Dialogues are unintelligible. Indeed the desire to separate what Plato believed inseparable is perhaps the main cause of the narrow and partial views held of his works.

20\. Look at the *Phædrus*. Lysias had proposed a thesis about Love and defended it ingeniously in studiously balanced sentences, the aptest dress for a rhetorical purpose. Socrates first shows how easy it is to meet his arguments with a counter-series as ingenious and artificial. Then he finds the radical defect of both: they were dealing with a word whose meaning had not been ascertained. In trying to find what it signifies, and to separate its true from its apparent meanings, he unveils the principles of his dialectics. Combined with this is the most distinct declaration and warning — in a form unfit for us, but suited to the evil state of Greek society, and proving the purity of the writer who could keep so high a standard in the midst of it — that only by restraining the grosser appetites can we be in a state to apprehend the true nature of Love. At the close the two principles are harmonised in a splendid myth in which the disciple learns that only he who governs himself, with his lower nature in subjection, is fit for the highest exercise of his faculties, the contemplation of that which truly is. We cannot reduce this Dialogue to any of the partial descriptions given of it. It is not a mere attack on rhetoricians, nor a mere development of the Socratic method for testing words; nor does it seem a treatise on pure love or on the idea of beauty. All these may be hinted at and even valuably illustrated, but the reader must be content to feel how they sustain each other and let them form a whole in his mind, without eagerly giving supremacy to any one. He will then find, I believe, that this is the type dialogue of the class that teaches us to make substance or being the end of our inquiries; but he will certainly not be able to discover whether it is more ethical or dialectical.

21\. The *Gorgias* is another nearly as striking instance. Formal critics have decided that it must be merely an attack on rhetoric, or else have the merely moral object of explaining the nature and purpose of punishment. A person who only hears of this discussion would suppose that a work open to such opposite interpretations must be incoherent and rhapsodical. The more he reads it, the more he will be struck by the sequence of its thoughts and the easy way one grows out of another. On reflection he will find that, as the Sophist's intellectual purpose was inseparably joined to the moral, and the pursuit of political power as an end to the cultivation of a treacherous art as the means, so it was impossible to bring a sounder intellectual discipline to the youth of Athens without leading them to see that the true purpose of life was not gaining dominion or escaping suffering and punishment, but gaining — even through suffering, punishment and disgrace — deliverance from the moral evil that obstructed their search after truth and made power a curse to them. Here again he distinguishes the true from the apparent, not by ethics without dialectics, or dialectics without ethics, but by both together.

22\. How the case stands with physics I shall explain shortly. But I can say now that whenever his opponents engaged in physical speculation, Plato is willing, in those Dialogues with the most distinctly moral purpose, to take them on, and that he never divides the two provinces so as to suggest that the principles governing one may not usefully or injuriously affect the other. I could easily convince readers of this if I had space to analyse the *Theætetus*; but I can only commend that exquisite specimen of Platonic wisdom to their careful study, and go on to show how the notion that Plato formally divided the subjects of human thought may have arisen, and may be reconciled with my belief in his hatred of theories and consistency of purpose.

23\. I have often observed that the founders of the Greek schools were led, by their circumstances or the tendencies of their own minds, to choose a distinct sphere of observation. No forethought or wish to be a natural philosopher drew Thales into his course; the outward facts presented to his senses simply struck him as most likely to solve the problem he found within. Likewise Pythagoras was led, by scarcely known or acknowledged influences, gradually to desert the maxims of his native soil and make Society, or the State, the subject of his inquiries; to this he added a scheme of nature he tried to bring under the same law as the facts of the order and government of men. Parmenides and Zeno entered their purely metaphysical region not by resolving to choose one province over another, but by reflecting on the two preceding systems and finding them inadequate. They too sought to make their system universal, and to make the political world and nature in some sense dependent on the laws of pure mind. Plato then found it already established that there are these three lines along which men's thoughts naturally run when strongly exercised. He had no artificial distinctions to create; his predecessors' experience had discovered the natural ones. What remained for him? To follow them into each region, to ask how far any had found the unity he sought, and to consider whether what they looked for *in* nature, *in* society, *in* the mind of man may be implied in each yet have its foundations beneath them all. This, I believe, was the final, consummate effort of the Platonic philosophy. As one set of Dialogues seems designed merely to unfold the Socratic doctrine of Being, and another expressly to develop the principle of Ideas as necessary to support the former and to solve a problem the Heracliteans and Eleatics had shown to exist, so I believe there is a third in which Plato reflects on his master's discoveries and his own, and applies them directly to the three subjects of nature, society and knowledge. Everyone will recognise in the *Timæus* an attempt to find a unity for the external universe, and in the *Republic* an attempt to find the meaning of political unity. So, without contradicting my assertion that in all the Dialogues he is evolving a dialectical method, we may admit that some propose the direct, formal aim of showing how this method guides us to the true unity in *knowledge*. We must also remember that Plato, as reviewer of past systems and as expounder of Socrates, was *obliged* to reverse the order in which we traced the schools historically. He might begin with the principles the Eleatics expounded and descend to the natural speculations of the Ionians, and he could take no other course if the Socratic doctrine of Being, and the Socratic method of distinguishing the real from the fantastic, were to be his guiding stars all the way. Here, then, I must begin my notice of his search for unity. I am eager to introduce readers to what I consider the crowning labour of his life, the end he aimed at obscurely throughout — his polity; but first I must refer to his discussions of the conditions and meaning of SCIENCE. A few words will then suffice for the less important, though interesting, question of how far his views on the [physical world]{.smallcaps} agreed or disagreed with his other principles.

24\. There was one great and obvious difference between the position of the Parmenideans and that of the Pythagoreans or Ionians. No one could doubt that the latter had a real subject for inquiry, however idle the inquiries. But the Eleatic had to produce both the dream and the interpretation: to maintain that there was a region of pure mind, and to show what went on there. So Plato had two tasks: to show their assumption was sound before inquiring how far it could carry them. For this he adopted a method that has greatly puzzled many readers. In the *Parmenides* he introduces Socrates, full of youthful vivacity, broaching the doctrine of ideas against the antiplurality doctrine of Parmenides and Zeno. The aged philosopher treats him with graceful courtesy, lets him offer one explanation after another, shows that all are untenable, encourages him to hope that after more severe training he will understand himself better, and finally establishes his own doctrine of the One in a series of annihilating propositions showing that it must exist and that it cannot exist under any conditions or limitations the understanding knows. Probably no one but Plato ever tried such an experiment — showing that his own principle is untenable except as connected with and grounded on the principle of another philosopher who did not recognise it. But the Dialogue does more than establish that the mind witnesses of something not under sensible laws. It prepares us to feel the want the Eleatic doctrine could not satisfy. As we read, a conviction of the purely negative character of the method grows, and while we assent to its conclusions we feel an increasing moral interest in finding a higher point of view from which to contemplate both it and the imperfect substitute the young Socrates proposed. In the *Sophist* this wish is largely realised. An Eleatic stranger discusses with the young Theætetus the meaning of the word Sophist and the qualities of the animal it denotes, how far it belongs to the same genus as the Philosopher and how they differ. We conclude that the Sophist's great object is to set up a universal science — meaning merely a capacity of talking on all subjects, of framing images of what is and passing them off as substances and realities. But a difficulty arises: Parmenides, whose opinions the Eleatic stranger might be expected to favour, has told us not to inquire about what is not, since the conception is impossible. How then will our definition of the Sophist avail us? How shall we ever pursue him onto the ground where we have clear evidence he has gone? The stranger finds himself obliged, much as he fears the guilt of parricide, to examine the soundness of this doctrine of his honoured countryman and teacher. By degrees the fallacy unveils itself: in refusing to recognise not-being, Parmenides was shutting his eyes to something which is. The contradiction may seem startling, but we do not escape it by refusing to look at it. We have stumbled on an instance where what is adverse to reality must be treated to all intents as real. And looking further into the use of language, we see more and more the impossibility of giving the word Being the rigid exclusiveness it must have in Parmenides' system. We cannot identify our notion of sameness or difference with our notion of Being, yet Being enters into both; there *is* a sameness and a difference between things. Where does this lead? To the conclusion — carried home more directly than it is put in words, as constantly in Plato — that Parmenides is after all dwelling in a region of words. Though he seems to have sounded the inmost depth of thought, and has actually found that there are depths words do not reach, he is at last only setting one notion against another. It is not Being but the notion of Being he has been investigating, and necessarily most imperfectly. Now the vision opens of a new kind of science, wholly unlike the Sophist's, yet in one sense as universal; wholly different from the exclusive, dogmatic, national philosophy of Parmenides, yet like his having unity for its condition and ultimate ground. This is the science of dialectics, the science proper to the philosopher. It rejects no form of thought or language as unfit for investigation, but searches out the idea of each, and finds which notions and phantasms are inconsistent with it, which cling to it, and which have tried to become part of it. It looks on Being as the object of its search, but Being connected with life and power, not a dry abstract notion, the mere negation of other notions. This must be the science of sciences: not because it reduces all forms of thought to one or includes all existing sciences, but because it discovers beneath all forms of thought an ultimate ground of unity, and assigns to each science its specific object and its relation to every other.

25\. Every science is looking for a foundation. It rests on the faith that there is a law for the facts it investigates, and what that law is, is what it inquires into. *The* science should explain how the mind goes about searching for such laws, whatever the facts. But its own specific object is the deep ground of all laws, the Being from whom they get their life and power. So dialectics is the search after premises. Parmenides and Zeno went no higher than a Logic that takes the mind's premises for granted and says what conclusions follow from them. That was their universal science, as Rhetoric was the Sophist's. The first overthrew all facts by setting up a law in the mind against them. The second confounded law and fact, using certain laws of the mind to overturn admitted facts, or the contradictions of facts to disprove law. The principle of seeking laws in and through facts is the one by which Socrates defended men's faith and morality against Rhetoric, and Plato defended the possibility of science against Logic. This is the inductive science which, two thousand years later, had to fight the same battle against the same enemies when it first asserted itself clearly as the only guide to knowledge of the physical world. The Socratic doctrine of Being makes us feel that this science is necessary. The Platonic doctrine of Ideas makes us understand that it is possible. The mind's demand for a Unity that is positive and not negative, not an amalgam of parts but what precedes all division into parts and is unaffected by it, makes us confident that it is real.

26\. Several passages in the Dialogues indicate the connection between Plato's dialectics and his politics. In the *Sophist*, for example, the Eleatic stranger proposes to examine three words: *Sophist, Philosopher, Politician*. The last is reserved for its own dialogue, but Plato plainly wants us to feel how close the three persons are, and that the last cannot be investigated without knowing the other two. Under the Sophist's teaching, the young Athenian came more and more to feel that rhetorician and statesman were interchangeable, and that the effective ruler of men was the effective master of words. On the other hand, the logic of Parmenides and Zeno must have made politics a set of abstract propositions. An earnest man might give them practical life, but they would lose, in proportion, everything that endeared them to him as a logician. Zeno himself was probably an example, but we have no reason to think he left successors; his disciples must either have confined themselves to inquiries about entity and unity or become rhetorical politicians. Plato's dialectics, by their nature, could not claim to be Politics. They assumed facts, not as premises to start from but as raw material in which premises lie hidden. The laws and conditions of society were to be investigated by this dialectic and could not be investigated without it, but they were presumed to exist and were quite distinct from the faculty and science that discovers them. So Plato was in a position to do justice to Pythagoras as he had to Parmenides. He could believe there was much in the one's discoveries about the order of society, as there had been in the other's about the needs of the pure mind. He prepared to use the philosophy he had found true in one region to examine the observations and doctrines of the other.

27\. But there is more. The reader of the *Republic* will find, perhaps with surprise, that questions about the nature and objects of dialectics take up a good deal of this political treatise. Some have inferred that the title misleads: Plato's purpose is not to teach the conditions and relations of a State but to build a platform for carrying forward the philosophical inquiries of his other Dialogues with more interest and success. On this view the *Republic* is a laboratory built for experiments on the nature of the individual man. This hypothesis is likely to find acceptance today, even apart from the first-rate talent and learning behind it. I am not anxious to refute it, but I want readers to study the *Republic* with a free spirit, not hindered by a theory from seeing how it illustrates a subject that has occupied us already and must at every step ahead: the relation between the mind of man and the constitution of society. I believe Plato was charged with expressing the deepest wants of our being and with discovering or prophesying the kind of satisfaction that must be provided for them. I make no apology for dwelling on his name in this rapid sketch, because if readers are set on the right course for studying Plato, Aristotle and the Jewish Scriptures, they can trace for themselves, with little help from me, the progress of these inquiries in modern Europe, whether in the age of the fathers, the schoolmen, or since the Reformation. Without that preparation, the ablest discourses on later ethics and metaphysics will avail them little. So it matters greatly to ascertain whether Plato is silent on the wants of our social being; whether he thought them purely secondary and accidental; or whether he found them so embedded in man's constitution that he could not investigate the law of each man's inner life without also investigating the law that relates him to his fellows. The supporters of the former opinion (as readers of Schleiermacher's Introduction to the *Republic* will see) have shown admirable ingenuity in working out their conclusion. Those who hold the latter may be content to beg attention to Plato's express words and briefly recap the heads of his dialogue.

28\. At the beginning of the *Republic* we are in a circle of Athenians gathered to witness a religious ceremony lately brought in from Thrace. The most prominent and interesting person is old Cephalus, a cheerful, benign octogenarian, with whom Socrates begins to discuss the comforts of old age and the advantages or disadvantages of riches. A remark of Cephalus leads to the question whether Simonides' definition of justice, that it consists in speaking the truth and giving each man his due, is satisfactory. Cephalus is called away to perform a sacrifice, and Polemarchus takes his part. The discussion has got no further than a general agreement that the mere outward acts in Simonides' words cannot satisfy the idea of justice, and that its obligations are not affected by whether we stand as friends or enemies. Then the sophist Thrasymachus breaks in, vehemently asserting that the whole notion of justice is a fraud practised by the strong on the weak. He does not shrink from the consequence that the life of an unjust man would be desirable in itself, and most of the first book is devoted to examining this doctrine.

29\. At the start of the second book, young Glaucon and Adeimantus say they are dissatisfied with how Thrasymachus defended his cause and with his haste in giving it up. They do not share his views, and feel convinced that Justice is intrinsically good, but the arguments proving it seem to them inconclusive. Is it not true that society has put honour on a certain course of conduct because it serves its own security and advantage? Has it not helped out the weakness of its sanctions with religious feelings and terrors? Are we not born under this twofold set of impressions for what is called justice and against injustice? Can we suppose a man keeping the idea and practice of Justice against the laws and his fellow-men, without imagining some divine sanction or patronage? Socrates admits the question is difficult and perhaps cannot be answered at once. But might we reach some solution by examining it on a larger scale? The question presumes an existing society and supposes this notion of justice, fiction or reality, to be necessary to a State's support. Shall we then inquire how it becomes necessary to a State, and what justice in a State is? Then perhaps we may know better what justice in an individual is, and whether it can be maintained under the disadvantages Glaucon imagines.

30\. I remark in passing that those who regard the political part of the *Republic* as merely accidental and subordinate treat this Preface as the main support of their theory. They say it is so much easier and more consistent to believe that the subject started at the outset is the main and central one, and that everything else is merely illustration, that no student who understands Plato's method will tolerate any other supposition. I admit at once that this is Plato's object, that the *Republic* is an inquiry into the nature and meaning of Justice, and that if this is lost sight of, the connection of its parts cannot be understood. But I say the most natural reading of Plato's words is that political justice was inseparable in his mind from individual justice. This was the very quality he saw as the meeting point of ethics and politics; or rather, as proof that they are two concentric spheres. Establishing this relation is, I think, the great purpose of the first two books. They teach all later reasoners with sophistical men that the moral ground can be held safely only by following opponents onto their own political ground. Instead of contending that there is an order the individual must follow even if society did not exist, they should take pains to prove that eternal principles are involved in the very constitution of society. Its individual members conform to these principles, not because they are willing to sacrifice their distinct personality, but because they have no other way of asserting it. Whether modern writers on ethics would have fared better by heeding this admonition from the most experienced and subtle opponent of sophistry, I may inquire later. At all events, those who think the main purpose of the Dialogues is to discover and develop a method of thought must be strangely hampered by a theory that makes them suppose that here the result is the only thing that matters, and the processes for reaching it are artificial and yet clumsy and cumbrous.

31\. To return: hoping that seeking justice in a State will solve our difficulties, Plato proceeds at once to form a society. Anyone looking here for an imaginary perfect commonwealth will be disappointed. Nothing in his primary conception is mystical or Utopian; everything is as earthly and commonplace as the merest materialist could wish. Men meet and find that each cannot provide for his own animal wants. Different needs arise, and different capacities among the group suit them, hence division of labour and distinct occupations. Then comes the desire for an excess of earth's good things, hence tumults and external wars. Now we need guardians, or watch-dogs, of the state. What sort of persons must they be? They are clearly in danger of becoming wolves instead of watch-dogs. How is that prevented? How do we produce in them the inner qualities so obviously necessary to the community's welfare? These arrangements are very unlike what we would expect from the builder of an imaginary commonwealth: no assumption of an advantageous position, no prior theory about the wants and feelings of the members, and above all no hope of averting crime by outward contrivances. Does this apparent carelessness about external contrivances favour the notion that the society is only a scaffolding? If it were, I could not account for the scaffolding not being built more elaborately. If Plato were free to choose his plan and materials, and indifferent whether they fit the nature of things so long as they helped him to a discovery that would stand on its own ground whatever steps led to it, then any effort to conform to dry ordinary facts would be idle and, as an offence against art, censurable. But suppose his object was not to frame a society after an ideal in his own mind but, as I have supposed throughout, to investigate the conditions of political unity: the idea involved in society's very existence, from which it has departed and become confused and incoherent. If that is the view of the treatise most consistent with the rest of Plato's philosophy and with its relation to the other Dialogues, then it is no wonder he carefully avoids imagination while setting out the bare elements of which society is composed. He takes pains to convince us he is a searcher, not a creator. He is not one of the poets he can find no place for in his commonwealth, but one of the investigators of truth as it actually is, whom he would put at its head.

32\. The *Republic* then assumes that selfish desires exist and that their evil results have occurred. It examines this question: under what conditions can we suppose society to hold together permanently, despite the tendencies to decomposition plainly appearing within it? In preserving any body from decay we may consider either what positive precautions resist its corruption, or how to call forth and strengthen the principles of life it must have within it in order to be at all, though their presence may show itself only through the power that opposes them. Plato repeatedly gives us to understand that in this dialogue he is concerned with developing those principles of life and not with outward regulations for repressing evil. That is why the *Republic* has seemed to many simply a treatise on education, or little more than a censure of existing Greek education. These critics remind us that he has hardly sketched his society before he says the guardians' minds must not be corrupted by the false ideas of the gods in Homer's poems; that much of the third book concerns gymnastics and music, with a minute inquiry into which kinds of music serve or frustrate the ends of education; and that the subject returns in the sixth and seventh books, where the use of all the sciences in forming a statesman's mind is investigated. All this is true. But I am persuaded this portion will be better appreciated by those who treat it as subordinate to the great object of discovering the principle at the foundation of society, which connects it with the processes of the individual mind and gives consistency and harmony to both, than by those who make it the dialogue's sole and independent purpose. Nothing fits my view of Plato's purpose better than his putting a right view of the gods' character at the threshold of education, for the idea of the Good, connected with Order, underlies his whole scheme. His great endeavour is to make men feel that this *is*, that it exists, and to teach them to distinguish between society's anomalies and its principles. Above all, therefore, we must see that our models are not defaced with our own corruptions.

33\. For the same reason music becomes so important. Developing the sense of order and harmony in the commonwealth's members is the secret of making it really what it claims to be. It is part of this order that the feeling of it should first be given to the guiding, guarding minds of the society and spread from them through the whole. This brings to light a new and important element. Among the guardians some will be of a higher order. These are the ones on whom education has had its complete mellowing effect. The others have mainly gained a braced, masculine tone from combining gymnastics with the higher forms of music; these have absorbed the very essence of the music, acquiring a perfectly harmonised temper and a sense of wholeness that makes them the true ideals and representatives of the whole community. These are obviously our *magistrates*. But how shall we persuade our people that these different qualities exist and fit people for different offices? We must tell them a story, says Plato. We must tell them they were all originally made out of the earth, which they are therefore to love as their common mother, counting themselves brothers through her. Yet the gods put different materials into them, making some of gold, some of silver, some of baser metals. These must not be confounded but kept distinct and put to distinct uses, so that society benefits from each. In this parable Plato shows that he regards himself not as the contriver of an imaginary scheme but only as following out Providence's intentions in instituting society.

34\. All this time we seem to have forgotten our original question about Justice. But in the fourth book we find that the State's arrangements, and even the long discussion of music, have been preparing a clearer development of the idea. We have found three classes in society, and each embodies a characteristic quality that through it becomes the quality of the whole fellowship. The magistrates express the very idea of Wisdom: superintending, distinguishing, arranging. The guardians express Fortitude: sustaining, amalgamating, preserving. The inferior classes, while they keep their place, express Temperance: self-restraining and submitting. Without any of these a society could not exist, and its permanence depends on how far each class's qualities interpenetrate the rest. But do these not imply still another quality, a principle or power that fuses all the classes and qualities, belonging not to one class in particular but by its nature to the whole? This is evidently the musical principle we have been trying to instil through education. What shall we name it? Is it not the Justice we have been trying to understand? Do we not turn Simonides' crude outward notion into a practical, satisfactory idea when, instead of making justice consist in giving every man his due and speaking the truth, we describe it as what determines the true relation of all things and persons to each other, the very law and harmony of the world? Yet may we not go a little deeper? Our first object was to find justice's nature and effect not in society but in the individual. At every step we seem to find proof that the two are inseparable, that the law of society must be the law of the individual. Perhaps now we can explain this more particularly. Our inquiry has shown three necessary classes in the State: magistrates, guardians, and a class supplying the body's animal wants. Why this distribution? Is it not that there is a similar distribution of parts in the man himself: Reason, Energy or Will, and Cupidity or animal nature? If these are not to live in perpetual discord and the man in perpetual misery, must there not be something in him that keeps each in its proper relation to the others, giving supremacy to Reason, preserving the strength and purity of Will, and subjecting Cupidity? Is Justice then not necessary to each of us?

35\. With this point settled, Socrates is willing to end the dialogue. But Glaucon and Adeimantus remind him that if justice is, as he says, the principle of harmony or unity in the commonwealth, he is bound to explain the other conditions of that unity. If inevitable circumstances make the union impracticable, then justice itself is impracticable. If so for the commonwealth, then by the whole tenor of the argument also for the individual, and we would end by acquiescing in a conclusion not unlike the sophistical one we have laboured to refute. So the four books from the beginning of the fifth to the end of the ninth take up three questions. First, in what sense are family relationships compatible with the unity of a commonwealth? Second, how far can that unity consist with individual selfishness and ambition? Third, how can it consist with the law of decay and degeneracy to which all societies seem subject?

36\. I need not tell any reader what Plato says on the first. Even those who know almost nothing else of him have heard that he spoke of the two sexes as meant to perform exactly the same duties and exercises, and joined to this another doctrine (which in a logical mind is generally inseparable from it) of a community of wives and children. They have heard that these notions enter into his perfect commonwealth, and that he wishes to supersede the existing relations of father and child, wife and husband, which we suppose lie at the foundation of all moral apprehension and political order. The question naturally arises, not whether I can justify this part of his speculations, but how, with such a huge and hideous blot in them, I can venture to call them important, and above all spend so much time examining them. Many readers and admirers of Plato take satisfaction in the fact that in the *Laws*, undoubtedly a later work, he seems to have changed his views and to recognise the sanctity of human relationships as they exist. I do not regard the passages referred to as a recantation. Even if Plato thought them one himself (there is no proof of it), I am convinced he would have relapsed into his former opinion had he again devoted himself to studying the idea of a commonwealth. The *Laws*, it seems to me, explain the conditions under which any particular nation exists, where the coercive power restraining its members' evils comes from, and how it is preserved as a distinct community. For this Plato saw the importance of distinct relationships; he could not help seeing they lie at the foundation of national life and that with their loss it would perish. The *Republic*, on the other hand, is not an inquiry into the conditions of a particular state. Phrases in it again and again seem to define this as its object, but others, far more pregnant and often uttered unconsciously, show a different and grander aim present in the writer's mind, haunting him when he could not realise it. He felt there should be some body expressing not the law of a confined, definite national life but the law of society itself, the principle of its unity. He felt that such a body is implied in the existence of every national community, yet transcends it and is not subject to its limitations. I could produce proofs of this from every book of the *Republic*, but none more striking than the fifth. The idea of a universal *Greek* society is formally put forward there, yet it is evident this does not satisfy Plato; he has the dream of something more comprehensive. A feeble sophist would have tried to express the dream in big words; *he* is content to suggest the nearest practical approximation his circumstances allowed. But with this universal society Plato does not see how distinct relationships are compatible. Perfect community seems the very law of its being, and anything that interferes with it seems to frustrate its intention.

37\. Here we see at once Plato's ignorance and his knowledge. How such a universal society could grow out of a national community and a family, and keep both those holy institutions, which had been its cradle, unharmed and in harmony with itself, he did not know. That wisdom was reserved for the shepherds of Palestine. It was given to them only by degrees, and their chief duty was to keep what had been divinely given in sure confidence that more would be added. But this *was* permitted to the sage of Greece: to feel that a universal community is necessary to man's life, and that it is a great living truth implied in the existence of society, though still undeveloped. To such insight and honesty of purpose, rejecting no light vouchsafed, it is granted that even the crudities and ignorances he fell into in seeking truth shall benefit future generations. They even serve to correct and expose those same crudities when men of a different spirit reproduce them. The fifth book of the *Republic* curiously anticipates every scheme of universal society put forward by religious fanatics or political theorists from the spread of Christianity to the present day. It stands as practical testimony from the wisest man of the ancient world that this is the only consistent law, and must be the ultimate law, of every such society whenever it tries to exist alone as a merely spiritual or cosmic family. So I reject with indignation the Roman academician's "I would rather be wrong, by Hercules," and love Plato only as far as he loved truth. Yet I may find worth even in this unfortunate passage.

38\. The part of the *Republic* in the sixth and seventh books is second to none in interest. The difficulty it must solve is whether such a State as we have described is compatible with men's selfish notions. Plato does not dodge the question. He declares at once his conviction that such a State could only be administered by philosophers. He then explains what he means by a philosopher, why the people generally called by that name are unfit to be practical politicians, and what their real relation is to their countrymen. Here we have the full development of the doctrine we found at the root of Socrates' teaching: the selfish, self-seeking principle that leads men to animal gratifications is the source of disorder and confusion in human life, not its real moving spring. There is in man something higher, not satisfied with itself, that seeks converse with the Good. The philosopher is the man holding this converse, whose mind is fixed on the true end and meaning of things, their substance and reality. The rest follow images and shadows, yet in pursuing them they confess their want of a Good and feel blindly after it. If the philosopher descends to the pursuit of their shadows, he becomes worthy of their contempt, since there is a perpetual contradiction between the higher aims he is conscious of and the grovelling course he has taken. If instead he steadily keeps his own idea in view, he is necessarily unintelligible to them and they despise him for that. But suppose he has worked his way out of the mine where they dwell, no longer getting light through little crannies that transmit it broken and confused and mislead men about its source, and has come out into open sunlight and seen all things as they are. He neither glorifies himself by living apart nor confuses his light with their darkness, but goes down among them to lead them by the track he has trodden into clear day. Would he not then be fulfilling his function as a philosopher and yet be most truly a politician? If you ask what this upward road is, Plato is ready to consider it with you. Men recognise a certain education: they teach arithmetic and geometry, as well as the gymnastics and music we spoke of, and plainly value these studies highly. Are they wrong? Surely not. They are wrong only in seeking shadows instead of substances throughout their lives and in making all these sciences serve their low ambition. Arithmetic and geometry have been used merely for secular commercial ends; they might purify the mind to perceive the truth of things. Plato carefully inquires what is the proper function of each science for this end, and the inquiry shows the need of the grander, deeper science of Dialectics, which leads directly to contemplating truth as truth and good as good, in its pure essence. A nation guided and educated this way comes into the condition of the republic we have described. Its wisest, deepest-minded men will be its magistrates; the community will have one end; and the principle of justice, which assigns each his place and gives all a sense of proportion and harmony, will pervade and actuate it. So the existence of ambition and selfishness does not upset the idea of our Republic, does not prove it is not implied in the nature of society, and does not show that it may not be realised at some time or somewhere.

39\. Next comes the law of decay in societies, which most speculators have recognised and which the Pythagorean philosophers fancied they could express in numerical ratios. Plato gives the inquiry a valuable turn by connecting it with the cardinal doctrine of the *Republic*, that the life of men and the life of States explain each other. Accordingly he maintains that there is a democratic, an oligarchic and a tyrannical form of character answering to those forms of government. Each form of character is obviously a departure from some true original model, as the governments are too. In each case the process of degeneration can be traced, and one can show how what happens in society and what happens in the individual react on each other. In this part Plato proves that his faculty of close, lively, practical observation was strengthened, not impaired, by his converse with transcendent realities. It would be hard to find an ancient passage on which a modern statesman could meditate more profitably, or one more sure to explain the facts of his daily experience, than the eighth and ninth books. The result is the same as before. This law of degeneracy exists in earthly commonwealths just because they have not understood and steadfastly contemplated that original model, the perfect idea of a commonwealth, which is also the original model and perfect idea of a human character. It is a contradiction and absurdity to allege this degeneracy as proof that no such model exists. But after all this, does the thought still linger: *where* is it to be found? Plato answers at the end of book nine: "But perhaps in heaven there is a pattern laid up for the one who wishes to see it, and seeing it, to found a city within himself." Is it wonderful that such words suggested to some of the Christian fathers the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews about the hope of the head of the covenanted people: "he looked for the city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God"; or those describing the hope as fulfilled: "our citizenship is in heaven"?

40\. One more subject needs a few words, especially since Plato devotes his last book to it: his opinion of the imitative arts generally, and of poetry as one of them. He plainly attached great importance to these opinions and yet was never wholly satisfied with them. He touches on the question almost as soon as he has sketched his society's first outline, and returns to it when his task seems complete, partly as if there were no security for his idea's reception while doubt hung over this point, partly as if something in it remained unpenetrated. In the introduction to the *Timæus* he offers a kind of apology to the poets for his severity and seems to think they may have an important vocation, though he does not clearly understand it. The grounds of his arguments in the third and tenth books are not quite the same. In both he stresses that the poet must adapt himself to men's opinions about actions and character, or they will not acknowledge the likeness of his picture; so he must pervert the truth of things and can never exalt the minds he accommodates himself to. But in the last he sees a particular mischief in poetry: it tends to destroy harmony of character and weaken self-control, and so undermines the commonwealth's justice and order by honouring every excited and passionate feeling. The latter argument might lead one to suspect that Plato was partly determined by the circumstances of his own age. The exaltation of passion, the want of balance and harmony in characters, the preference for weak, earthly creatures over calm and stately ideals were the marks of the Euripidean as against the Sophoclean drama. Add the influence of a poetical age (felt most after it had passed) in fostering the worship of mere creative power and the notion that man's mind is the origin of all that is. That notion, as we have seen, lay at the root of Greek sophistry and was what Socrates fought all his life. Still, Plato's attack on Homer, and his eagerness to disprove the common opinion that the Greeks owed Homer much of their organisation and cultivation, show he was not merely affected by passing considerations. So I leave it as a hint for the reader's reflection whether this reluctant condemnation of poetry, by one who had been a poet in the formal sense and in the best sense remained one always, may be explained as we explained his theory about relationship. Poetry seems to belong primarily and almost exclusively to national life. The sense of national union gives it its first impulse; when that sense weakens, poetry withers, and with its revival it starts to life again. Without it men would never become conscious of their own powers, affections and wants, and in that consciousness consists the joy and freedom of their life as citizens of a state. By calling this forth in the Greeks, Homer may be said to have made them a nation, full of life and full of turbulence. But is there nothing better than mere consciousness of power? Is there no higher condition of society than being citizens of a state? The *Republic* answers. It teaches that far beyond this consciousness of power lies the contemplation of truth and goodness and the soul's assimilation to them. Far beyond the mere feeling of energy to dare, act and revenge lies the perception of order and harmony, an intimate fellowship with a Being above us and the beings around us. It teaches that there is a universal society, of which this contemplation and assimilation are the ground, this perception of order and harmony the life, and this fellowship the result and realisation. With this community, says Plato, poetry has little to do: praise of the gods and eulogies of great men are its only fields. Strictly speaking, I think he is right. That is, if we could separate, as he had to, the national life from the universal life (I hope I have explained how important it is to distinguish them), poetry, the soul of the first, would be excluded from the other except in the cases he names. If we would connect all the vital energies poetry expresses with the deeper insights and perfect moral life of the higher region, we must understand, and by understanding realise, for ourselves at least and as far as is permitted for mankind, the law by which the universal and national societies sustain each other.

41\. The *Republic* ends nobly with a discussion of immortality. It has been less popular than that in the *Phædo*, because its scenery is less solemn and affecting, but on its merits it deserves even more attention. I am far from thinking as lightly as some do of the arguments from reminiscence and from the interchange of light and darkness, death and life, in Socrates' dying conversation; they seem to me pregnant with the deepest meaning. But I cannot help thinking that once Plato had realised the connection between the individual's life and society's life, he felt he had a stronger ground for his hope of immortality. He had found the point where the witness in the heart meets the demands of reason. The sense of belonging to a community stretching behind and before, outlasting the deaths of generations, is for each man evidence of his own immortality. You may be quite unable to put it into syllogisms, but happily it makes them unnecessary. Plato only went to the roots of this feeling when he showed that the individual and society alike rest on the idea of justice, alike are sustained by contemplating what is true and permanent, and alike die a moral death when they contradict the principles of their being. He then affirmed that the accident of physical death can no more change the condition of one than of the other, and that as they have lived here must be their life hereafter.

[Note.] The *Republic*, like many Dialogues, closes with a myth, and the passage on Lying in the third book puts before us what use Plato thought it lawful to make of fables and legends, so one remark is in order. Dearly as he loved truth for its own sake, and firmly as he believed it could be contemplated in pure essence, he felt that no criterion of truth was so sure as that it governed practice and was the law of life. He never meant to replace his country's faith with a pure idealism. He hated such attempts, not more for their hardness and cruelty than for their inconsistency with his whole doctrine. He left them to men who did not believe ideas were substantial, who thought them mere creations of the mind with nothing to do with living acts. While he was jealous of stories that hindered men from acknowledging goodness and truth as life's ultimate ends, he was equally certain that all great principles must somehow have an investiture of *facts* and cannot be fully presented to man except in facts. If no series of facts embodying and revealing truths was within his reach, then rather than let his truths be taken for bare conceptions of his mind, he would invent a clothing for them, as the lesser evil. But it was an evil: it exposed him to fearful contradictions and often put his love of truth in great jeopardy. What claim then to the name of Platonists have those who *wish* to believe there is no series of facts containing a revelation of supersensual, transcendent truths? They think it an *à priori* probability that the deep want of such facts which Plato felt has not been satisfied, and are determined, even by the most violent treatment of historical evidence, to prove that whenever a supposed fact manifests a principle it must be a fable.

42\. For reasons already explained I have dwelt long on this great summary of Greek ethical, metaphysical and political philosophy, so I have time for only one remark, showing how Plato's doctrine connects with that of the great predecessor whose labours I suppose he meant to review. The book on music, the passages on geometry and arithmetic, and certain mystical sentences about the law of decay in a State, which have defied commentators, amply prove a Pythagorean character in the *Republic*. But looking closely, the whole work may in one sense be called Pythagorean. Its object is to discover the musical law that gives a State internal wholeness, as distinct from the external law that keeps its parts from falling apart. Where then does he differ from Pythagoras? In this: while he gives music and arithmetic their due honour as instruments for cultivating in man the feeling of his position and relations, he does not deduce that position and those relations from combinations of notes or series of numbers. He makes Justice, a moral principle, the music of his commonwealth. This is the more remarkable and honourable because he evidently felt the temptation to be a cabbalist, and never shed the belief (perhaps no deep thinker ever quite did) that something profound and mysterious is interwoven with human life in the relations of lines, numbers and sounds. It was a great merit to keep so steadily to the practical ground and never forget that it is really the highest. By doing so he did in one sphere what he had already done in another: he discovered the political principle Pythagoras had sought among the laws that connect us with nature, as he had found the scientific principle Parmenides had groped after among the forms of our own minds.

43\. I am glad that my duty as historian of moral and metaphysical inquiries does not call upon me, or even permit me, to say much on Plato's *Physics*. Still, the *Timæus* is so curiously connected with the *Republic* by its exquisite introduction, in which Critias tells the story of the submerged State, so like the one Socrates described the day before, that I cannot pass it over. (Here the doctrine of reminiscence is plainly brought into play, and it is new evidence that Plato considered the *Republic* no work of imagination but the discovery of a truth implied and forgotten in the constitution of all societies.) Moreover, so much importance has been attached to this dialogue, early and late, as if it held the very heart of Platonism. About the link between Plato's *Politics* and *Physics* I would not speak confidently. He may have seen a closer relation between the moral κόσμος he investigated in the *Republic* and the material universe Timæus creates than I can trace. But this seems evident: he entered his new task conscious that he must fill a gap in his speculations and complete his review of ancient philosophy, and at the same time secretly apprehensive that the light that had guided him might forsake him here. It is strange at any rate that, undertaking a subject so important in Greek eyes as the creation and organisation of nature, he makes Socrates merely a listener. To a faithful student of Plato it must seem stranger still that he wholly abandons his usual method: the dialogue form is used merely as a graceful dramatic veil over the introduction, and in the expository part it gives way to the harangue, a style Plato generally disliked.

44\. Yet it is to this above all that the *Timæus* owes its reputation among those who produce summaries and synopses of Platonic doctrine. Elsewhere they found him balancing opinions, often refusing to give a verdict on their merits, tedious (they think) in tracing the road to a conclusion, and ill-naturedly forgetful of the duty to clothe it in precise, available, transferable formulas. Here, though his language may be more obscure, there may be more allusions to ill-understood parts of Greek speculation than in all the rest, and his teaching concerns a question on which we all believe he could have only partial illumination, still the convenience of catching so Protean a philosopher for one moment in a rigid, definite state has outweighed all this. The Platonic cosmogony has become the storehouse from which diligent compilers gather their notions of Plato's mind and works. It has even been a plausible and popular theory, ingeniously accounting for the uncertainty of the other Dialogues, that they were only a vestibule to the inner oracle of the *Timæus*. Having explained my views on these so-called uncertainties, and tried to show how much Plato's method is part and parcel of Plato himself, I must regard this work with very different feelings. I do not pretend to look with indifference on the splendid theory it develops. I know how closely it is tied to theories that strongly influenced men's minds, especially in the first ages of the Church, and I am willing to accept for Plato the compliments natural philosophers have paid him for intuiting truths to be established later. Yet the *Timæus* seems to me chiefly valuable because it shows the worth of the principle from which it is so signal a departure. In every other dialogue Plato teaches us to discover a universal law in any particular fact that comes to our notice; here we have huge hypotheses to begin with, and all facts fitted and arranged according to them.

45\. Whatever truth these hypotheses hold he owes to his earlier studies in another direction. Having reached the doctrine of ideas by his own sure upward investigation, he could see that the world must be created according to an idea. But at that point his light forsook him; he could not apply his dialectic to drawing this idea out from the names or facts in which it lay embedded. He had to trust his imagination to construct a theory. In other cases he is a philosopher seeking light, and when he could not see its track, showing where it ought to be and from what unrisen sun it must flow. Here he is a presumptuous theologian, assuming he can declare what must be revealed, and so losing the right way to what may be discovered. Bacon does him no injustice in respect to his *Physics* when he says Plato confused and corrupted them with theology, and when he implicitly counts him among the giants who piled hill on hill hoping to reach heaven. I wish our countryman, for his own honour and for the ages that followed, had been as willing to recognise Plato's truth as he was acute in detecting his falsehood, as honest in acknowledging him a guide as he was right in pointing him out as a beacon. He would then have seen that the *Timæus* contradicts the principle of induction because it is inconsistent with Plato's own principle. He would have seen that in one solitary instance the Greek sage was betrayed, by that ambition of completeness and circularity (which far more than desire of fame deserves to be called the last infirmity of noble minds), into a subject on which he could only dogmatise, and could dogmatise only by forsaking his own method. He would have confessed that the *Novum Organum* was only the extension of that method to a new class of subjects. He would have taught his disciples that the course of investigation promising such new discoveries in the world of sense, founded on the principle that man is only a seeker and prospers in proportion as he tries simply to behold what is and not darken it with the mists of his own conceptions, had been marked out ages before as the only way to become acquainted safely with the truths of their own being. He would have solemnly urged them to remember that a heathen, untaught by the revelation that deals directly with these transcendent truths and lays them open to every peasant, had yet perceived that they must be the most precious a man can know, and that only in knowing them is he truly a man. He would have told them that if ever the study in which the heathen sage forgot his usual wisdom should become the only one in which Christians care to excel, and if ever, "from the opening of the ways of the senses and the kindling of a greater light of nature, some unbelief and night should arise in our minds toward the divine mysteries," then a feeling would grow up toward those mysteries worse than unbelief, if it is not another form of it: a stupid acquiescence in them, without acknowledging that they answer any craving of the heart, any necessity of reason, any prediction of the imagination. In that case, for the sake of the age and country so diseased, of all who should follow, and of physical knowledge itself, which can never long flourish apart from moral light, it would be most desirable that men resume the study of the Athenian philosopher. They should realise the wants of their own minds by observing those he felt in his, and consider how an adequate provision for both can be found.

### DIVISION III.—ARISTOTLE.

#### SECTION I. ARISTOTLE THE BEGINNER OF A NEW EPOCH.

1\. When we call Plato the ideal philosopher, we forget that the Greek people, his fellow-citizens especially, were pursuing ideals the whole time he and his master lived. Socrates was born in 468 B.C. and Plato died in 347 B.C. Pericles entered public life a year before Socrates was born, and Philip of Macedon took Olynthus the year Plato died. If one expression must stand for these 120 years, it is this: sculptors, painters, poets, politicians, cities and mobs were all occupied with some ideal of beauty, wisdom, freedom or self-government. They were striving to realise it, dreaming of it, or playing with it to bewilder others. The philosopher belonged to mankind, but he belonged just as remarkably to his own time. He interpreted, ordered and justified its cravings, and showed that they had a true foundation and must have an ultimate satisfaction.

2\. A different stage of history clearly begins when Philip appears. His name signals that the age of individual energy had passed. In that age, weighty events took place in insignificant localities, and the pettiest party contests developed the most lasting and universal principles. His name marks the arrival of an age of concentrated organising power, of successful assaults on freedom, of grand conceptions and wide conquests, of what has well been called material sublimity. This age needed its own philosophical expounder and representative. One was provided, who was destined to influence later times more than his own.

3\. In 367 a young man arrived in Athens who had been born at Stagira in Chalcidice. His father was a physician at the court of Amyntas II., king of Macedonia. The youth had been brought to that court and had met Philip, the king's son, who was a few years younger. But at seventeen no court attraction could keep him from the city where Plato lived and where all wisdom was to be found. Perhaps he was almost ashamed of a country that Athenians still affected to think semi-barbarous.

4\. No scrupulous Athenian could have found anything barbarous in the young Aristotle. A defect in his pronunciation was only a lisp. He differed from the ordinary student in taking more care of his person: he set off his short, slender figure with somewhat fastidious dress, and, it is reported, with rings and a fashionable haircut. Small quick eyes and a sarcastic curl of the lips were noted as his characteristics, perhaps the only important ones, until Plato returned from his Sicilian journey, during which he seems to have been absent. Plato found the most promising pupil his school had ever had, and surnamed him "the reader." He found it necessary to check this pupil's philosophical devotion rather than excite it.

5\. Even so, Speusippus, not Aristotle, succeeded Plato in the Academy. Aristotle left Athens just when Philip's triumphs were becoming terrible to the liberties of Greece. Five years later he was at Philip's court, educating his son Alexander. His influence on Alexander's mind must have been prodigious, and Alexander's whole later history depended on the years between his fourteenth and seventeenth. He came to his master a raw, untamed youth, with impulses no one could understand or govern. He left as a Greek prince who united the vigour and accomplishments of the republican period with his father's schemes and capacities, a desire to conquer the world, and an intellect able to achieve it. We need not ask whether Aristotle inspired or favoured Alexander's particular projects. Even if he discouraged them, the direction of mind that made them conceivable and achievable came from the teacher. Without this culture, Alexander might have aspired to no more than victory in one of those Olympic contests from which a not very remote ancestor had been excluded.

6\. Alexander gave his master the one reward he really prized. He enabled him to make his history of animals a book of instruction and wonder for all later generations, Cuvier and Owen among them. Every nation Alexander conquered enriched Aristotle with new and more valuable facts. Aristotle stored up and meditated on these treasures in Athens, where all his great works were written. There he gathered a circle of devoted pupils who heard both his more popular and his more systematic teaching. There he commented on his predecessors, corresponded with Alexander, and endured the misunderstandings of Alexander and his court. He suffered domestic sorrows, which he felt as a man and which give us a personal interest in him. Finally he underwent the popular charge of impiety, which had banished Anaxagoras and killed Socrates. Summoned before the Areopagus on this charge, he declined to appear and was condemned to death. He retired to Chalcis and died there in 322 B.C.

#### SECTION II. RELATION OF ARISTOTLE TO PLATO.

1\. A student who passes from Plato to Aristotle is struck first by the complete absence of the dramatic form and feeling he has grown used to. The living people he conversed with are gone. Protagoras, Prodicus, and Hippias no longer lounge on their couches among admiring pupils. There are no walks along the city wall, no readings beside the Ilissus, no lively symposia leading to high talk about love, no Critias recalling the tales of ancient and glorious republics that he heard in his youth before he became a tyrant. Above all there is no Socrates at the centre of these groups, standing out in his own character and showing that the subtlest of dialecticians may be the most humorous and humane of men. Everyone will feel some sorrow at losing so many beautiful pictures. But most readers will think the precision and philosophical dignity of the treatise ample compensation for the richness of the dialogue. They like to hear solemn questions treated solemnly and opinions discussed calmly, without personalities. Above all they like a profound and considerate judge who is willing to pronounce a positive decision on the evidence. They count this a great advantage, and they find it, and more, in Aristotle.

2\. Still, I think the person who can do justice to the master's method will be the best judge of the disciple. We will understand neither well if we settle for a vague notion that one was a consummate artist and the other a profound practical philosopher. I have already argued that Plato used the dialogue not for artistic purposes but because his idea of science required it. In the same way, to claim for Aristotle his true and noble position, we must not suppose that his claim to be practical or profound rests on lacking Plato's qualities or abandoning Plato's method. We call those studies most practical that are tied to real, living, passing questions. Yet it was the actual opposition of the Sophists that drove Socrates and Plato to seek principles not yet recognised, lest they lose those they had. Aristotle could examine sophistical arguments calmly, because it was the hour in the school for that subject. In Plato's day it was a matter of life and death whether we have anything permanent to rest on, for men in every Greek town were abusing Heraclitus's name to support a doctrine of perpetual flux. Aristotle could label the question physical or metaphysical and balance it patiently against an opposing theory. The Parmenideans forced Plato to investigate the nature and conditions of science, because they threatened it with hopeless stillness. Aristotle feels no such alarm; he has only to compose a system of analytics. Socrates, whose body was about to pass through death, was led to consider the nature and lasting properties of the soul. Aristotle opens his treatise on the soul by asking whether it is to be considered in relation to any particular person or in the abstract, and whether we should speak of it physically or dialectically. Without deciding which course is best, I think it would violate ordinary usage to call the latter the more practical.

3\. Nor is depth quite the quality to attribute to Aristotle when we contrast him with his predecessor. Plato's situation and task made him always seek principles. The simplest everyday facts puzzled him, and nothing that interested human beings was beneath his notice, but what he kept asking about was the meaning of these things, the truth implied in them. The commonest word and the commonest act were unintelligible to him except by a light from another region than the one we habitually live in. There is no trace of this feeling in Aristotle. His ambition, and perhaps his appointed function, was to collect every possible fact and arrange and classify it. No one is less tempted to suspect a deep meaning in facts, or to grope after one. Likewise his highest aim with words is to press and settle them into a definition. The thought that words have a life, connected with the life in us, and might help interpret its marvels, never entered his mind, or at least never stayed there. This disposition may bring comfort and advantage, but people careful with language would not call it "profound."

4\. Another prejudice must be removed if we are to understand their relative positions. It is often fancied, and Aristotle seems not anxious to correct the impression, that Plato's disciple forsook him as Plato had forsaken his master, and that the later philosophy is in some respects a return to the simple faith of Socrates. If what I have said is right, this notion is not merely wide of the truth but the opposite of it. Plato's personality was exactly the quality of mind and writing that he inherited from Socrates. He seldom drifted into abstractions, and he kept the strong feeling that "we are actual men, wrestling against evil tendencies within and evil powers without, capable of being educated, and of educating each other into a longing after, and perception of, the perfect Goodness and Truth." He owed this to Socrates. His own work was to connect this personal struggle with the orderly development of principles. It was just with the Socrates in Plato that Aristotle could not sympathise. I can easily imagine that he had a general respect for Socrates's good sense, that he recognised him as the useful and victorious opponent of what was mischievous and unphilosophical, and that he sincerely believed Socrates did not hold certain offensive opinions of his disciple. But I cannot believe that he in the least admired the Socratic method, or that all his wisdom could teach him where that method must lead anyone who habitually followed it.

5\. These remarks may seem for a moment to disparage this wonderful man, but on reflection they relieve his character of some unjust charges, set his real merits in a clearer light, and explain the kind of influence he has had and always will have. Some over-watchful, sensitive critics find in his works passages showing personal jealousy and dislike of Plato. They say he does not comment on Plato in a manly, philosophical spirit, but usually with affected phrases of reluctance, which betray hidden ill-will more than strong abuse would. Perhaps these passages would have seemed far less meaningful if the gossiping anecdote-mongers of later Greece had not illustrated them with stories of quarrels between master and pupil. These stories plainly come from vulgar invention or a trivial, treacherous memory, yet once heard they influence us unawares and keep us from looking fairly at the evidence that gives them their only plausibility. Apart from the stories, the quotations prove only that Aristotle felt irritation and displeasure on perceiving something in Plato's words that his large intellect and immense information could not grasp. Imagine being haunted by this thought: "In all definable qualities I am equal, nay superior to my predecessor; I have reduced subjects into far greater order, I analyse far more perfectly, I have a far greater store of facts at my command; and yet there is in him something quite *undefinable*, which seems to make an incredible difference between us." That could well vex even an honest and great mind. It would be not only a personal humiliation but a jar against his strongest conviction, that nothing ought to be incapable of definition and that whatever defies it can scarcely be of great worth. So admirers and flatterers, equally unable to understand either man, may have stirred up petty quarrels between them. But we do not need that supposition to account for the sneers and taunts, if such they are, that now and then displease us in Aristotle.

6\. Given all this, it is not hard to show what was peculiar to the Stagirite's philosophy: how it grew out of Plato's, how far they contradict each other, and how far one fills a space the other left empty. We have seen how Plato came to his high estimate of dialectics. He watched his master hold a safe moral position against the Sophists' attacks. To assert realities against appearances and counterfeits was *his* single aim, and keeping it steadily in view he almost unconsciously worked out a method entirely different from earlier philosophers'. Reflecting on Socrates's end, he saw the full practical meaning of what Xenophanes and others had asserted in terms, that Being is the object of all our inquiries. He saw also that the end must be joined to the method, since until the method was practised, Being had been a word, a notion, a negation, not an object really to be beheld and striven after. Hence it was vital to bring the method forward and present it to his pupils substantively, not merely as leading to certain results but as the safe and universal means of reaching any results. I have mentioned a class of dialogues with this purpose. These, or something answering to them (perhaps nearer ordinary exposition, though I can scarcely believe Plato ever abandoned the dialogue as his vehicle), must have been the peculiar study of the Academy, especially of the more advanced disciples.[^fn025] So a feeling about dialectics will have grown up among these pupils that Plato would have wished to discourage, yet which his own works kept fostering. They saw it used as a key to the secrets of social, moral, and physical life, and saw their master take pains that they should examine the wards of the key. It was natural that they should think a fuller and more systematic development of this all-important science desirable, even necessary. They would see confusion and irregularity in their teacher's proceedings. Had he not strangely mixed inquiries into the grounds of morality with statements about the nature of science? Surely it would be more orderly to keep these questions distinct, each under its own head. And were there not signs of narrowness in Plato that a more accurate habit of distinction would have cured? His dislike of some usual abuses of rhetoric had led him to undervalue the whole art, though it could, like any other, be reduced to strict laws and be contemplated apart from its accidental results. The same might be said of his doctrine of poetry, and still more of his ill-concealed indifference to physical speculation. If all these subjects were looked at directly as distinct branches of human culture, how much knowledge might be gained in each, and how much clearer we might become about the capacities and limits of the human intellect!

[^fn025]: Mr. Blakesley's Life of Aristotle (in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana) shows, I think most satisfactorily, that Aristotle's *acroamatic* treatises differed from the *exoteric* not in the abstruseness or mysteriousness of their subject matter, but in that the former formed part of a course or system, while the latter were casual discussions or lectures on a particular thesis. The remark in the text extends and adapts this doctrine to Plato.

7\. Such thoughts may have been at work in many who frequented Plato's school. In few did they bear fruit, and in most of those few it was the unripe or blighted fruit of feeble theories that professed to universalise Plato's system and really showed their authors knew nothing of Plato or of themselves. But one was able to make the others' thoughts intelligible. To him Platonism will have seemed a necessary preparation for a complete, circular philosophy. Its unsystematic character, imaginative flights, and neglect of certain provinces of thought will have looked like signs of rudeness and infancy. He will have conceived the thought of assigning each study its true place, with the one Plato had proved so important in the first place, shown in full proportion and determining the character and treatment of the rest. So dialectics was in a sense the centre of both philosophies. Nor did Aristotle consciously change what the word meant in his predecessor's discourses. He only wanted to give the study more distinctness and prominence, and to exhibit its processes and operations apart from any particular applications and results. But in doing this the character of the pursuit inevitably changed. Plato's feeling was: certain objects are presented to my mind, whether sensible objects like trees or objects for the understanding like names, but objects still, things *thrown in my way*; I must know what they mean and find out their truth, and for this I must have dialectics. For Aristotle the object has vanished from before his eyes and mind, and he devotes his whole energy to contemplating dialectics in itself. What follows? The sense of needing dialectics as an escape from the impositions that block our view of things as they are grows weaker and at last disappears. Plato spent his life asserting against Protagoras and his school that the mind is not its own standard, that the aspects under which objects appear to us are not our knowledge of them, and that we can know them as they are in themselves. This principle gave his dialectics all its meaning, and his disciple no longer feels it with any force. On the contrary, Aristotle proposes to investigate precisely the aspects under which we see and judge things. He wants to know the rules and conditions under which the mind, by its own constitution, considers and discourses. He makes the mind a centre, referring everything to itself, as Plato's opponents did. But he differed from them in that their intention was knavish and his entirely honest. They set up the doctrine that things are only as they seem to us in order to unsettle all faith and make each individual's judgment a lawful standard. He sought to convince men that all is not unstable and fluctuating, by showing a fixed rule to which human judgments must conform. That rule limits individual taste and caprice, and tests and orders the appearances that the Sophist pretended were infinite.

8\. So the definition of dialectics in Plato and Aristotle may be almost the same, while the whole scope and object of the science is different. Either could say that dialectics is the science that discovers the difference between false and true. But in Plato the false is the semblance an object presents to the sensualised mind, and the true is the object's very substance and meaning. In Aristotle the false is a wrong *affirmation* about whatever the mind takes cognizance of, and the true is a right *affirmation* about the same. So Plato's dialectic treats of how we gain a clear and vital perception of things, and Aristotle's of how we discourse about them. To Plato, words are the means by which we ascend to realities that have no sensible exponents. To Aristotle they are formulas in which we set out our notions and judgments. One wants to find what hidden meaning a word indexes; the other wants to keep the word from crossing boundaries he has fixed for it. Hence the sense and leading maxim of Plato's philosophy became not only more distasteful but positively more unintelligible to his wisest disciple than to many who had never studied in the Academy or had set themselves against it. When Aristotle had matured his dialectics, it seemed so perfect and satisfactory that he could not dream of anything outside its circle that could not be brought under its rules. He felt he had found all the forms in which any proposition can be set down in words. What more there could be, what opening for another region wholly outside the government of these forms, he had no conception. If there were such a region it must be a vague, uninhabited world, and to suppose it peopled with other, most real and distinct forms was the extravagance of philosophical delirium. So when he speaks of the doctrine of substantial ideas, ideas that are the grounds of all our forms of thought and so cannot be subject to them, he is driven to a strange and, for so consummate a logician, most disagreeable necessity: he begs the whole question. He argues that since these ideas ought to come under some ascertained condition of logic, and by hypothesis come under none, they must be fictitious.

9\. As we go on I shall note how this primary difference affected the two philosophers' views on every question they took up. For now I mention it to show that methods with entirely different objects need not interfere with each other. The Platonic doctrine is not absurd because Aristotle could find no place for it in his system. And Aristotle's labours are not useless or ill-directed because they do not supply, as he fancied they did, any satisfaction for the inquiries Plato had awakened.

#### SECTION III. THE LOGICAL TREATISES OF ARISTOTLE.

1\. Any orderly examination of Aristotle must, I think, begin with his treatises on logic. They are not the most interesting of his works, but without some grasp of their nature and purpose we can hardly understand the character, value and necessary limits of his opinions on ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry. I shall shortly quote an eminent writer on physical science to show that a fair estimate of Aristotle's work in that field depends on knowing how much weight he gave to the forms of logic. The long-debated question closer to this sketch is what exactly he meant by Metaphysics, or which of his thoughts his disciples referred to by that name. I think it can be settled only by first examining his dialectics.

2\. In the Berlin edition of Aristotle the *Categories* come first. Doubts about its genuineness seem to have been removed by modern inquiry. A work that exactly fills a gap in an author's acknowledged writings, so that together they form a complete system, would often be suspect. Against that, roundness is Aristotle's great characteristic. It is easier to imagine a perfect series of his logical writings reaching us than a pupil able to fill a gap he left. It is also less hard to credit one man with such mastery of the subject when we remember that the original conception of the study was Zeno's, not his. I have already explained how naturally that conception arose in a mind that had taken in the principle of Xenophanes and Parmenides: that the mind has laws of its own and is independent of what the senses report. What more we owe to Zeno beyond this discovery and its use in refuting sensible conclusions, we do not know. Some Sophists, though they turned the art to the worst ends, may have refined and improved it. In the school of Euclides the principles of logic, not only its practice, must have been studied and clarified. Given these materials, it is not incredible that a man trained in Plato's school to great subtlety and precision, and possessing unparalleled breadth and diligence, produced a design and edifice that later ages have scarcely been able to alter or improve. He did not raise the science from its foundations. "He found it brick and left it marble" may be said of him as truly as of almost any architect.

3\. The work on the *Categories* seems a fitting vestibule to this building. On entering it we feel that its purpose is altogether different from what Plato taught us to think all-important, and yet that it is a true purpose. There is a way of penetrating the nature and essence of things, whether they present an outward image to my senses or, just as really, speak only to my mind. Aristotle does not concern himself with that way. But our minds certainly form notions about both kinds of things, and these notions may themselves be subject to rules. They may be defined and classified, and there may be a general set of conceptions to which all particular ones refer. Aristotle affirms this. He says all our notions can be reduced to ten: Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Time, Place, Position, Possession, Action, Passion. A Platonist will ask what these words themselves signify. How do I know what Substance is better than I know what a man or a horse is? Or Quantity better than I know what three cubits long is? These questions had to be asked, as we shall see, and were asked to good effect when the Aristotelian province of thought tried to bring all other provinces within it. But for any purpose other than destroying that pretension they are beside the point. When I study an actual man or horse, the substance is doubtless the unknown *x* I am looking for, and to assume I know it is to stop investigation. But I understand the *name* substance as well as the *name* man or horse. And who says that, because there is a science of *things*, there is no science of *names*, no laws of dependence and affinity among them? Conformity or nonconformity to such laws is exactly what we mean by coherent or incoherent discourse. We must either call our deep desire for arrangement and classification a mere disease, or believe it arises from the limits and conditions to which our minds are subject, and is another name for the wish to understand them.

4\. The rules of grammar, the terminology of every art and science, the very attempt to be intelligible, all presuppose these limits. Men keep inventing divisions and schemes of thought, and keep narrowing and stifling great principles and laws by them. There is no safety from this except a clear and steady perception of certain necessary boundaries, imposed not by our fellow-men but by the nature of our own understandings. Let the reader consider the *Categories* carefully. Does it not clear his mind, and in no ordinary degree, about his own modes of speech? Does it not make him feel more than before that his words, winged as they are, cannot take a chance flight but must follow an appointed, preordained path? Is there not, then, a witness in himself that Aristotle has a distinct and reasonable end which it is greatly in our interest to know?

5\. From these general forms under which all our notions fall, Aristotle goes on, in his treatise *On Interpretation*, to inquire into the mode of our affirmations and denials. There he develops the nature and limits of propositions, the meaning of contraries and contradictories, and the force of affirmation and denial in impossible, contingent and necessary matter. I have no excuse for dwelling on works of merely formal character. I mention them to press on the reader Archbishop Whately's important remark that the two books of the *Prior Analytics* develop the syllogistic principle and process. Aristotle is not the mere inventor of an art but the masterly expounder of the facts on which the art rests, and without which it would have no meaning. He does not teach us how to make propositions, but what propositions are and necessarily must be, given the conditions of the human intellect. He does not tell us how to make syllogisms, but how we do syllogise when we do not violate the laws of our mind, as we would violate the laws of our body by trying to walk on our heads instead of our feet.

6\. But Aristotle saw that this analysis of our mental operations was not enough. He had told us how we *discourse*, not how we *know*. Are these forms of logic themselves knowledge? Is syllogistic demonstration the same as science? Or is only one kind of it science? Or are its results science? Or are there premises assumed in it which also do, or may, belong to science? What are they, and how do we get at them? These are the questions that occupy him in the *Posterior Analytics*. I shall try to seize a few points in the inquiry that will best let the reader judge Aristotle's mind and see how he stands related both to his great master and to the expounder of the inductive philosophy.

7\. The treatise opens: "All teaching and all intellectual learning come from previously existing knowledge. This is plain from looking at every case. The mathematical sciences are acquired this way, and so is each of the other arts. So it is also with arguments, both by syllogism and by induction: both teach through what is already known, the one taking its premises as from those who understand, the other showing the universal through the clearness of the particular. Rhetoricians persuade in the same way, either through examples, which is induction, or through enthymemes, which is syllogism." Two important words in the first clause, *teaching* and *learning*, were, I imagine, carefully distinguished in the school Aristotle came from. I am confident that *learning*, being the method of acquisition, would there have taken precedence of *teaching*, which points to the communication of knowledge. That here the order is changed, and teaching put first as if it contained learning, is very significant and explains much that follows. Plato had a profound reverence for mathematics: "Let no man undisciplined in geometry enter the halls of philosophy." I cannot account for this unless he saw in the mathematical process something akin to his own method. That resemblance does not lie in what we call mathematical demonstration, the machinery of axioms, definitions, hypotheses and propositions, which, valuable as it is, has scarcely a Socratic element in it. What remains? Plato, I think, would answer: exactly the essence of mathematics, the *learning*. Demonstration is only the *teaching*, a necessary and inseparable accident of the science, which implies something else and means nothing without it. Learning is the process by which, in a particular triangle, I arrive at one of the laws belonging to it as a triangle, that its three angles equal two right angles. Teaching is the formal verbal statement of that law and its confirmation by deductions from admitted premises. In this sense mathematics would be to Plato not *the* science but the best preparation for it, because it recognises permanent forms and principles in visible objects that we are able to enter into and discover. Aristotle, as I have often hinted, perceives only the forms and laws of our mind. So what was the subordinate part of mathematics for his master became the whole for him. He looks at mathematics only in reference to demonstrations; its mark is that it deals with necessary matter. Ask why necessary, and the only answer is that it starts ultimately from self-evident propositions. So the proposition, a mode of our own mind, becomes the ultimate ground of all things; or if you want a Hercules' pillar beyond it, you have the *Categories*. Penned within these limits, it is hard to grasp what science means. Aristotle feels the difficulty and, with his usual honesty, does not evade it. He admits it may puzzle us to say whether science is only what we get after a series of satisfactory syllogisms, or whether the premises assumed in them must have the same character. All he can say is that we must deal fairly with facts, and that what we are bound to assume as known we do in some sort actually know. Ultimate knowledge, then, the most perfect truth the philosopher can reach, as well as his starting point, is still a proposition. All knowledge seems to fall under two forms: knowing *that* it is so, and knowing *why* it is so. Neither can include the knowledge Plato aims at, knowledge correlative with Being, which is not *about* things or persons but *of* them.

8\. If these forms of our mind are the ground of our knowledge, we cannot reach them at once. What are the steps? Here comes in Aristotle's doctrine about sensible objects. Our perception of them is not strictly knowledge, for that word, whether used of premises or conclusions, always refers to the universal. Our sense apprehensions refer only to particulars, to individuals. From these, which are most evident to us, we reach the more general by induction. How entirely this differs from what Bacon called induction, the reader will see the more he studies Aristotle. He will find first that the sensible *phenomenon* is taken for granted as a safe starting point. Aristotle believed as strongly as we do that phenomena are not principles. But to suspect phenomena, to suppose they need sifting and probing to learn what fact they denote, is no part of his system. The sensible impression satisfied him, not to rest in, but as a true beginning; the whole difference between those who acquiesce in it and the most consummate philosopher lay in the use the latter made of his power of generalising and syllogising. In this way Aristotle became the parent of all the modern schools of sensible philosophy. Yet those schools have drawn their best and most convincing arguments from the errors into which Aristotle and the Aristotelians were led by their own hypothesis. The first book of Locke is an elaborate and satisfactory exposure of the notions into which the Stagirite school is driven by its determination to recognise no foundation of truth but sense and experience. They were too learned and thoughtful not to see that the mind demands universal forms somehow. Because they would not acknowledge them as the grounds of our mind, they were forced to seek them in the mind, and so to conceive them as propositions. Hence the fancy of an innate notion that whatever is, is, or that the whole is greater than its part. Mr. Locke confuted that fancy amid shouts of triumph from his admirers, while in fact he was conspiring with Aristotle to disparage the principle that delivers us from such fallacies. But I am anticipating a later page.

9\. These later analytics deal entirely with demonstrative reasoning. The *Topics*, a much longer work, deal wholly with probable reasoning. Here Aristotle seems to me far more at home. I have suggested that he never possessed, and could not possess, the idea of Science; it lay outside his province, and when he tried to grapple with it he brought it within forms that robbed it of its essence. But no one did so much to give scientific form to subjects that are by nature not scientific, or to give our thoughts precision about the wavering matters of opinion and ordinary conduct. Looking at the *Topics*, we confess, with some reluctance, that no method of persuasion or discourse is so loose that it cannot be analysed and shown to involve inevitable limits. We have some justification for discontent with these resolute reductions of all thought and argument to a system. We feel the vital power is not there. What really brings men to agree with a falsehood or a truth, the energy and conviction of the speaker, is left out of account. And the habit of contemplating arguments without regard to the truth they are meant to establish, or their moral influence, is somewhat hardening and deadening. But I think the work of a thorough master like Aristotle will on the whole do good. He so well understands himself and what he can do that we are not misled, as by inferior writers, into fancying nothing is wanted but what he tells us. His exquisite dissections teach what more blundering dissectors might not: that there is something which cannot be dissected. To understand Aristotle rightly, the *Topics* should be read with the three books on Rhetoric. I cannot speak of that work now, because so much of Aristotle's moral and political wisdom is presumed in it, but it is closely connected with the work on probable arguments. The *Topics* are to it what the six books of Euclid are to a treatise on practical mechanics. It may seem strange to speak of a geometry for a rhetorician, and I have shown how alien geometry was to Aristotle's habits of mind. Yet we cannot help seeing that, as far as a person with the faculty of persuasion can be taught that his is not a mere craft but has maxims and laws governing it, he will become at least less mischievous, and may become a sincere, true-minded man. From another point of view the *Topics* give the roundness and completeness to Aristotle's logical system which, as I said, he evidently desired and so remarkably achieved.

#### SECTION IV. THE PHYSICS OF ARISTOTLE.

1\. A short treatise on *Sophistical Proofs* closes the series of Aristotle's works on logic. His many writings on physics follow. We have no direct interest in these. But to show how his logical ideas shaped his views in this field, I will take the liberty of quoting a passage from Dr. Whewell's *History of the Inductive Sciences*, vol. i. sec. 2, "The Aristotelian Physical Philosophy."

2\. "The principal treatises of Aristotle are the eight books of *Physical Lectures*, the four books *Of the Heavens*, and the two books *Of Production and Destruction*. The book *Of the World* is now universally acknowledged to be spurious. The *Meteorologics* is full of physical explanations of natural phenomena, but it does not set out the doctrines and reasonings of the schools in so general a form, and the same is true of the *Mechanical Problems*. The natural-history treatises (*On Animals, On the Parts of Animals, On Plants, On Physiognomies, On Colours, On Sounds*) gather an extraordinary mass of facts and show a wonderful power of systematising. But they do not expound principles, so they need not be considered here.

3\. "The *Physical Lectures* are the works about which Simplicius, a Greek commentator of the sixth century, and Plutarch both tell a well-known anecdote. Alexander the Great is said to have written to his former tutor: 'You have not done well to publish these *Lectures*. How shall we, your pupils, excel other men if you make public what we learned from you?' Aristotle is said to have answered: 'My *Lectures* are published and not published; they will be intelligible only to those who heard them.' The story may easily have been made up and circulated by people who found the works beyond them. It cannot be denied that working out the meaning and reasoning of every part would be very laborious, if not impossible. But we can follow a large part of the work clearly enough to grasp the character and principles of its reasoning, and that is what I shall try to do.

4\. "The author's introductory account of philosophy fits closely with what has already been said: he takes his facts and generalisations as they are implied in the structure of language. 'We must in all cases proceed,' he says, 'from what is known to what is unknown.' No one will deny that, but we can hardly follow his inference. He adds, 'We must proceed, therefore, from universal to particular.' And he continues that something of this can be seen in language, for names signify things in a general and indefinite manner, as *circle* does, and by defining we unfold them into particulars. He illustrates this by saying that children at first call all men *father* and all women *mother*, and only afterwards distinguish.

5\. "Following this view, he tries to settle several great questions about the universe, raised among subtle and speculative men, by unfolding the meaning of the words and phrases applied to the most general notions of things and relations. We have noticed this method already; a few examples will illustrate it further. Rival sects had debated whether there is a void, a place without matter. The arguments were briefly these. There must be a void, because a body cannot move into a space unless it is empty, so without a void there could be no motion. On the other side, there is no void, because the intervals between bodies are filled with air, and air is something. Both opinions had even been supported by experiment. Anaxagoras and his school showed that confined air resists compression, by squeezing a blown bladder and pressing an inverted vessel down into water. On the other side, it was said that a vessel full of fine ashes holds as much water as if the ashes were not there, which could only be explained by void spaces between the ashes. Aristotle decides that there is no void, on an argument like this: in a void there could be no up and down, since in nothing there are no differences, and none in a privation or negation; but a void is merely a privation or negation of matter; therefore bodies in a void could not move up and down, which it is their nature to do. It is easy to see that such reasoning raises the familiar forms of language, and the intellectual connections of terms, above facts. It makes truth depend on whether terms are primitive, and on whether we say that bodies fall naturally. In such a philosophy every new result of observation would have to conform to the usual combinations of phrases, as they had been linked by the modes of apprehension already familiar.

6\. "I do not mean to suggest that the common modes of apprehension underlying common language are limited and casual. On the contrary, they imply universal and necessary conditions of our perceptions and conceptions: all things are necessarily apprehended as existing in time and space and as connected by cause and effect. So far as the Aristotelian philosophy reasons from these assumptions it has a real foundation, though even then its conclusions are often insecure. We have an example in the eighth book, where he says there never was a time without change and motion: 'for if all things were at rest, the first motion must have been produced by some change in some of these things; that is, there must have been a change before the first change.' Again: 'How can *before* and *after* apply where time is not? or how can time be when motion is not?' And: 'If time is a mensuration of motion, and if time be eternal, motion must be eternal.' But sometimes principles of a more arbitrary kind are brought in, and beyond the general relations of thought, the inventions of earlier speculators are taken for granted, such as the commonly received opinions about the frame of the world. From the eternity of motion, proved as above, Aristotle goes by a curious train of reasoning to identify this eternal motion with the daily motion of the heavens. 'There must,' he says, 'be something which is the first moved,' which follows from the relation of cause and effect. Then: 'Motion must go on constantly, and therefore must be either continuous or successive. Now what is continuous is more properly said to take place *constantly*, than what is successive. Also the continuous is better; but we always suppose that which is better to take place in nature, if it be possible.' Here the vague judgment of *better* and *worse* is introduced, as *natural* and *unnatural* had been before into physical reasoning.

7\. "I proceed with Aristotle's argument: 'We have now, therefore, to show that there may be an infinite, single, continuous motion, and that this is circular.' This is proved, as one might guess, from the consideration that a body may go on revolving regularly in a circle. So we have a demonstration, on the principles of this philosophy, that there is and must be a first mover, revolving eternally with uniform circular motion. This kind of philosophy may seem too trifling to dwell on, but it is important for our purpose to exemplify it so far, that we may go on knowing we have done it no injustice.

8\. "I now pass from the doctrines on the motions of the heavens to those on the material elements of the universe. Here I remark that the tendency we are tracing, to draw speculative opinions from the relations of words, must be very natural to man. The widely accepted doctrine of the four elements seems to rest on the opposition of the adjectives *hot* and *cold*, *wet* and *dry*. It is much older than Aristotle and was probably one of the earliest philosophical dogmas. But the great master of this philosophy states it more systematically than his predecessors.

9\. "'We seek,' he says, 'the principles of sensible things, that is, of tangible bodies. We must take, therefore, not all the contrarieties of quality, but those only which have reference to the touch. Thus black and white, sweet and bitter, do not differ as tangible qualities, and therefore must be rejected from our consideration.'

"'Now the contrarieties of quality which refer to the touch are these: hot, cold; dry, wet; heavy, light; hard, soft; unctuous, meagre; rough, smooth; dense, rare.' He then rejects all but the first four, for various reasons. Heavy and light go because they are not active and passive qualities; the others go because they are combinations of the first four, which he therefore infers to be the four elementary qualities.

"'Now in four things there are six combinations of two; but the combinations of two opposites, as hot and cold, must be rejected. We have, therefore, four elementary combinations, which agree with the four apparently elementary bodies: air is hot and wet (for steam is air), water is cold and wet, and earth is cold and dry.'

10\. "This disposition to assume that a common elementary quality must exist wherever we habitually apply a common adjective began before the Aristotelian philosophy and survived its reign. Among other examples, it would be hard to clear Bacon's *Inquisitio in Naturam Calidi*, 'Examination of the Nature of Heat,' of the charge of confounding very different classes of phenomena under the word *hot*. The correction of these opinions about the elementary composition of bodies belongs to an advanced period in the history of physical knowledge, even after its revival.

11\. "The Aristotelian doctrines on motion are still founded on reasoning from adjectives, but here the result follows not only from the opposition of words but from the distinction between being *absolutely* and *relatively* true. 'Former writers,' says Aristotle, 'have considered heavy and light *relatively* only, taking cases where both things have weight, but one is lighter than the other; and they imagine that in this way they defined what was *absolutely* heavy and light.' We now know that things which rise by their lightness do so only because heavier surrounding bodies press them upwards. The assumption of absolute levity is evidently gratuitous, or rather merely nominal, and it vitiated all the reasoning that followed. The inference was that fire must be absolutely light, since it tends to take its place above the other three elements, and earth absolutely heavy, since it tends to take its place below fire, air and water. The philosopher also argued with great acuteness that air, which tends to take its place below fire and above water, does so *by its nature*, and not by any combination of heavy and light elements. For if air were composed of parts that give fire its levity joined to parts that produce gravity, we could take so large a quantity of air that it would be lighter than a similar quantity of fire, having more of the light parts. It follows that each of the four elements tends to its own place: fire highest, then air, then water, and earth lowest. The whole train of errors comes from verbal fallacies: from taking light as the opposite of heavy, and levity as a quality of a body instead of an effect of surrounding bodies."

#### SECTION V. THE METAPHYSICS OF ARISTOTLE.

1\. Dr. Whewell's remarks show how Aristotle's method necessarily got in the way of true observation and interpretation of nature. They matter to us mainly because people have always felt a connection between the physical treatises and those that Aristotle, or a disciple, classed as Metaphysical. These latter writings have been much disputed. Some suppose they got their name from an accident of placement beside the books on Physics, since they could not conveniently be filed among them. Others suppose it came from Aristotle's own feeling that he was rising into a region above and beyond the one he had been living in.

2\. One of his early commentators seems to adopt both explanations. He says the object of this treatise is theological: here Aristotle "theologises." Our order of learning begins with what is last by nature, because that is better known to us. So Aristotle spoke first of physical matters, which are last by nature but first to us. The present subject is first by nature but last to us, since imperishable things are older than perishable, and the ungenerated older than the generated. Therefore he spoke first of things moved without order (in his book on *Meteors*), then of things moved according to an order or system (in the work on the *Heavens*, concerning stars and spheres), and finally, in this treatise, of things that are wholly immovable. That is theology, a study that befits the gods. So the work is entitled *After-the-Physics*: it is to be read after the physical treatises, and the title shows this. Another scholiast is more decisive: the title refers not to the character of the book but to the order of reading, since the book treats of physical *principles*. Taken together with the books themselves, these hints will, I think, explain how the two theories arose and largely reconcile them. As we proceed we shall see in what sense Aristotle "theologises," in what sense he treats of "unmoved" and therefore non-physical things, and in what sense he treats of physical "principles."

3\. The first Book of the Metaphysics (the one we reasonably suppose to be first, from its style and method) starts from an investigation of the words Art and Experience, which we shall meet again in the Ethics, and rises to an examination of the word Wisdom, or σοφία. Wisdom is knowledge of certain causes and principles. The obvious next question is what kinds of causes and principles, but Aristotle thinks he has already answered it implicitly. Sense and experience take note of individual cases. Wisdom rises to the first causes and principles, the most universal, those furthest from casual observation. I must give his own striking words. Through Wonder men have always begun to philosophise. At first they wondered at the difficult things close at hand, then little by little asked about greater things: the changes of the moon, the sun and stars, the origin of the universe. But whoever is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant. So the philosopher is in a way a lover of fables, for fables are made of wonders. Since men philosophised to escape ignorance, they evidently pursued knowledge for its own sake and not for any advantage. The facts support this: this wisdom began to be sought only when the necessities of life and leisure were already supplied. Just as a man is free who exists for his own sake and not another's, so this is the one wholly free knowledge, because it alone exists purely for itself. So its possession may fairly be thought not to belong to man, since human nature is often servile. According to Simonides, "God alone would have this prize," and it is unworthy of us not to seek the knowledge that is proper to him. "If the poets speak truly that the Divine Nature is envious, Simonides must be right, and all over-learned people must be unhappy. But the Divine Nature *cannot* be envious; rather, as the proverb says, 'the poets lie.' No study is more honourable than this, for what is most godlike is most honourable. Now a science may be godlike in two ways: because it is what God has above all others, or because it is itself the knowledge of the Divine. This one is both, for God seems to be a kind of beginning of causes, and God alone or chiefly will possess this knowledge. All other kinds of knowledge are more needful for common purposes, but none is better."

4\. The wise man presented here is not the old Greek sage who could outwit his fellows and found a tyranny. He is not the anxious questioner asking in every direction, "Where is wisdom found?" He is not the Sophist who brings every kind of knowledge to market and sells it to the highest bidder, pledging that it will bring power and its fruits. He is not the Socratic philosopher asking everything he sees for the meaning or truth hidden in it, nor the Platonic philosopher seeking what holds knowledge, society, and nature together. He must be carefully distinguished from, and set against, the man of business or practice (a man highly to be prized in his way). He has a function entirely his own, one that raises him almost to a Divine level and makes him the one fit beholder of what is Divine. And what is the Divine? The answer is that it is *the Cause*: what lies beneath all other causes, is not subject to accident, movement, or the law of growth, and is the original root of all things. Here we have the Aristotelian theology.

5\. But by this definition the theology is *Metaphysics*. It comes after physics in the order of discovery: after because it is implied in physics, and after because it is beyond them. For that very reason it cannot be separated from them, since you cannot know what it is except by its relation to them. I have been careful until now to use the name as little as possible, at least in sketching the Greek inquirers; it is dangerous to anticipate a name. The time will surely come when it is imposed if it is wanted, and a definer of boundaries will appear and say, "This is Morals," "This is Physics," "This is Metaphysics." If he shows he has a right to be heard, we must listen. But we shall understand his exact limits far less well if we have not first let earlier students take their own course and explain themselves. However grateful we may be to a teacher for telling us what to call each thing, we must be careful not to take him as the interpreter of his predecessors. He has a service of his own to render, but it is in the nature of that service that he be an over-strict disciplinarian. He insists that guerilla troops, whose worth lies in their sudden and irregular appearance, follow the rules of regular warfare. He compels men whose order is as strict as his own but wholly different to adopt his signs and divisions, on pain of being treated as disobedient and lawless.

6\. This applies especially to the able review of earlier Greek philosophers in the first book of the Metaphysics. Causes, Aristotle says, are fourfold: (1) the substance of a thing, what constitutes it; (2) its matter, the needful condition of it; (3) the source from which its motion comes; (4) the reason, purpose, or good of its existence. No one can deny the value of this classification for Aristotle's purposes, or that, used with moderation, it can help a student clear his mind about his own aims. But Aristotle believes each school of Greek thinkers followed one of these courses of inquiry and took it as the only and sufficient method. So the Ionic philosophers studied the matter of things, hoping to find a primary element to which all else could be referred. Those who chose fire were led by its effects to speculate on the mystery of Motion. That started a new kind of inquiry, pursued much in the spirit of the inquiries about elements, until Anaxagoras discovered the need for an Intelligence to set physical agents moving. But he turned to this ultimate principle only when other instruments failed him, so the Atomic theory, which explained nature's facts more plausibly than his Homœomeriæ, easily replaced them. Between this theory and the one that made Numbers the first principles of things, Aristotle seems to detect a connection, not well supported by chronology. The doctrine of numbers he takes as the first form of the inquiry into the essence or substance of things, and the archetypal ideas of the Platonists, who regarded numbers as intervening powers between sensible things and pure essences, as the second and higher form. The inquiry about the purpose of things, he imagines, was not pursued distinctly by any class of predecessors but entered confusedly into the speculations of them all.

7\. Now if Socrates was, as I have maintained, the keystone of Greek speculation (an opinion supported by many passages in Aristotle himself), this historical sketch, however ingenious, cannot be correct. In it Socrates is an interloper, rightly mentioned only in a parenthesis as devoting himself chiefly to ethical inquiries, and Plato's intellectual descent is traced, not through him, but to the Ionian and Heraclitan schools. Throughout this treatise Aristotle shows a lack of sympathy with his predecessors. It must have made it impossible for him to understand their complicated thoughts and anxieties, even had he not been set on arranging them, and so he was needlessly irritated with those whose vagrant habits defied arrangement. Yet his hints about other men help us greatly to know him. The Metaphysics are troublesome reading, partly from frequent repetitions and partly from the difficulty of finding a sequence in the books. Still, any student who wants to investigate the questions that have occupied later men should read them. To illustrate my earlier remarks I shall trace a very rough outline of the subjects discussed and record some of the solutions Aristotle gives to the difficulties he raises.

8\. A kind of appendix after the first book proves that causes are not infinite, so that the inquiry earlier philosophers engaged in can be carried on. This same short book contains important remarks on how the search is to be conducted; on the contributions each school may have made; on the advantage a philosopher may draw from attending even to popular notions; on some men's dislike of exact mathematical reasoning and others' insistence on nothing else; and on limiting mathematical accuracy to things without matter. It also clearly announces a principle the student of Aristotle must always keep in mind: the end of theoretical science is truth, of practical science, work. He adds an explanation that further shows how he differs from his master: the practical man has nothing to do with the eternal or the absolute, only with the relative. This book ends with a promise to inquire into the meaning of the word Nature, which the book commonly placed next does not fulfil.

9\. This second book is a collection of doubts or questions to be resolved later. The first is whether it is the business of one science or of several to inquire into all kinds of causes or principles. That question involves the subject of the whole treatise. The province called σοφία seems to include so many different things (matters purely of sense, causes of motion, the nature of Being, the reason and purpose of things) that it is hard to suppose one science dealing with principles that apparently admit neither analogy nor contrast. Second: are the Principles of things the most comprehensive Genera to which individual things can be referred, or the atoms of which they consist? Third, connected with it: is there anything besides individual things? If not, how can they be known, since individual things are infinite and knowledge is of what is one and universal? Fourth: are the principles of perishable and imperishable things the same? Fifth, the great question of all: are Being and Unity the essences of things that are, not distinguishable from them, or must we seek τὸ ὄν and τὸ ἕν as if each had a distinct nature? Sixth: are numbers, bodies, planes, and points substances or not? These are the general controversies we hope to see settled in the following books.

10\. The third book may be taken as an answer to the first question. There is a science that contemplates Existence *as* Existence, and whatever belongs to it in that respect, unlike other sciences, which treat only attributes of particular existences. There are things peculiar to Being as Being, and the philosopher's function is to investigate the truth about them. The dialectician and the sophist resemble the philosopher; Being is the common subject-matter of all three. But they only *discourse* about the subjects that are in a peculiar sense his property. Dialectical power differs from the philosophical in its nature, the sophistical in the intention of the user: dialectic is tentative about what philosophy knows, and sophistry is apparent knowledge that is not real. This passage shows the difference between Platonic and Aristotelian dialectics. For Plato dialectics was *the* human science, the philosopher's science as such, and σοφία in its essence belongs to God. Aristotle finds a difference between dialectics and the highest philosophy, and inevitably: since his dialectic treats only the forms of human thought and deals with knowledge as the powers and means of knowing that we possess, there must be another science about the objects of knowledge as such. But in this science too the objects cease to be objects and become *subjects* for man's contemplation; they become Metaphysics or Ontology. The hint about the *Sophist* here should also be compared with the elaborate portrait of his character and functions in the dialogue between the Eleatic stranger and Theætetus. It connects with the question whether mathematical axioms are matters for the Ontologist or highest philosopher. The answer is yes. The mathematician assumes these axioms; the student of physics sometimes meddles with them, rashly and presumptuously; as first principles they can be known only by the person whose office we are defining. Since the Sophist especially delighted in denying axioms, saying the same thing can be and not be, this is the natural place to settle his pretensions. True to their difference, Aristotle shows him not, as Plato does, as an inventor of counterfeit images of what is, but as one who attributes accidents to accidents instead of to substances. We can hardly imagine two portraits of the same person so correct and so felicitous, yet so thoroughly expressing the manner and principle of their respective artists.

11\. The fourth book is a book of definitions. I can convey its importance only by listing the words defined: Principle (ἀρχή), Cause, Element, Nature, Necessity, Unity, Being, Substance, Sameness, Opposition, First and Last, Power, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Perfection, Limitation, "in respect of which" (*secundum quid*), whose meaning is easily seen in Touchstone's words in *As You Like It*: "In respect that it is of the country it is a good life, but in respect that it is not of the court it is a vile life"; Disposition, Habit, Passion, Privation, Inclusion, Derivation, Part, Whole, the mutilated, Kind, Falsehood, Accident. Some of these explanations are evidently repeated from the *Categories* and the *Analytics*. Some are better understood from the arguments in later books than from any formal definition. Still they are worth reading and reflecting on. The one on "Nature" is perhaps the most important, but the only satisfactory clue to his notions of it is the whole treatise.

12\. The fifth book explains Aristotle's view of the difference between physical and ontological science. They agree in being theoretic, not practical or productive. They differ in that the physical deals with what is capable of change or movement and is embedded in matter, while the primary philosophy deals with the unchangeable and what is separate from matter. Mathematical science lies between: like ontology in the first respect, like physics in the second. If there is such a science as Theology, it must be a part, and the highest part, of the primary Philosophy. The Divine Nature must pre-eminently be outside the circle of composite and movable things. The things physical science treats are subject to accidents. There cannot be a science of accidents, since as such they exclude science altogether. But there may be, and are, principles and causes of things that admit accidents. In seeking these, physical science keeps its formal distinction from the higher science that deals with beings and essences as such. There is another sense of "Being," used especially by the Platonists, that must be distinguished from ours: Being had been confounded with truth, and Not-being with falsehood. Now truth, according to Aristotle, is in the mind, not in things. Affirmation combines, negation separates; falsehood separates what should be combined and combines what should be separate. But the existences we are dealing with are simple or uncompounded. Here again is a capital and vital point of difference between the two philosophies.

13\. The sixth book contains some of the most important distinctions in the whole treatise. Ontology is concerned with Substance. What is to be counted a substance? Are walking, sitting, being in health substances? No: all these imply a subject to which they refer. In this way we get rid of the notion of a substantial good, and of a substantial warmth or whiteness. All these are qualities of some subject, and what that subject is must be sought in each individual that presents itself to our observation.

14\. But does not substance, so considered, necessarily connect itself with body? Here is one of our great puzzles. Some would make the *boundaries* of body substances; some would have substances not cognizable by the senses at all; some would make the One the primary substance and suppose other sets of substances, such as numbers, magnitudes, souls, generated from it. Aristotle's opinion is this. Every subject has, first, ὕλη, which we must translate matter, and second, μορφή, form. The matter of a thing is its necessary condition. But matter is not its essence; something else is implied in it, something it presents or makes manifest. Applying this to the questions that occupied the third class of philosophers in the introductory book, the Platonists and Pythagoreans, this form is the true εἶδος they dreamed of. It is the essential thing in each thing, that by which substance is possible and without which it is inconceivable. But it does not exist apart from each particular subject. It enters into the definition of every subject, and without it the definition would be none; so it must be viewed in that subject and cannot be contemplated as a distinct, peculiar essence. By this rule, all notions of an ideal form of hollowness or of pugnosedness (Aristotle's favourite illustration) are out of the question. These cannot primarily be subjects of a definition; they presuppose something whose properties they are, and only in that can you look for an εἶδος. Every notion of Being as distinct from the particular person or thing that is, falls to the ground. Socrates and the being of Socrates are identical, and the αὐτοέκαστον ("each thing itself") of which Plato talked is nothing but this εἶδος, or form, inherent in the thing.

15\. The way this same principle applies to another class of inquiries, those about the origin of things, needs closer examination.

In any production we find, first, something from which it has been generated; second, something by which it has been generated; third, the result, the thing itself. There are three modes of production: natural, artificial, automatic. In natural productions we see a matter at once; indeed Nature itself, in the largest sense, may be defined as that out of which things are produced. Everything that becomes has a nature, which is another way of saying it has a ὕλη, and that in each thing which might not have been is this ὕλη. The result formed from this matter is some substance: a vegetable, a beast, a man. But what is the producing cause in each case? Clearly something of like kind with the result: a man generates a man. So the resulting thing implies a productive force distinct from the matter it works on, and this is our εἶδος. The combination of εἶδος with ὕλη both produces a substance and constitutes it. Now look at artificial productions. Here too the εἶδος is the producing power, and it is in the soul. The physician's art, the architect's plan, is the εἶδος that produces actual health or an actual house. But here a distinction arises: these productions involve a νόησις and a ποίησις. The νόησις is the perception and inner holding of the form; the ποίησις is the making out of the given matter. The third mode, neither strictly natural nor artificial, works by the action of the thing itself. For instance, a cure may come by applying warmth; a body may become warm by rubbing; this warmth in the body is either itself a portion of health or leads to something like itself that is. Evidently this implies the earlier presence of either nature or an artificer. And this kind of generative influence must combine with another: there must be a productive power and something out of which it is produced. In every case, then, there is an ὕλη and an εἶδος. What is generated is the whole substance, of matter and form. But the form, properly speaking, is not generated. It is reproduced in each particular subject in combination with a certain matter, and becomes a new and peculiar form by that combination. Every production therefore needs a certain form and a certain matter. All the qualities of the produced substance *must* inhere (potentially, not actually) in the substance producing, and *may* belong to the form when they are produced.

16\. It remains to consider how this doctrine bears on the philosophers who busied themselves with a primary element. The inquiries of those who sought the τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα (that for the sake of which) are reserved for another discussion. But first several doubts of the second book must be resolved. First, the meaning of Part and Whole. The most obvious sense of part concerns quantity, but that has nothing to do with our subject. We want the connection of the idea of *Part* with substance. Granting the division of substance into ὕλη and εἶδος, we should say that in a brass statue the brass is *part* of the statue as the complex of form and matter, but not of the statue considered as a Form. Now since Form is the proper subject of a definition (it can be described in itself, while the material cannot), in some cases we necessarily speak of parts as constituting the whole and in others not. We define a circle without reference to its parts, and a syllable by the letters that compose it. The parts of the circle are material parts; the parts of the syllable are formal, logical parts. If you regard a syllable as composed of letters in wax, or of sounds in the air, its divisions become material and fall outside a logical definition. Again, in a material division the whole precedes the part. Logically and formally, the part precedes the whole. If you define the life of an animal, you will describe it by some of its functions; none of its other functions can be performed without sensation, so sensation will be assumed in the existence of the whole animal. This holds equally for matter of the senses (æsthetic) and for matter of the mind (noetic: the figures of mathematics). Generally, then, the question of priority between "part" and "whole" depends on the distinction between matter and form, and cannot be settled if that distinction is disregarded. Aristotle admits, however, the difficulty of defining by form alone, and not by the complex substance of form and matter together. He acknowledges that the attempt to divide matter from substance and treat sensible things as not sensible led to all the Pythagorean and Platonic inventions he so dislikes.

17\. Another question, involving the same philosophers, follows at once. How are substances connected with *kinds*? If there are types after which all sensible things are formed, these types would seem to be universals, and what the senses deal with, particulars. On this view all differences and properties found in the most marked individual of a kind would have to be included in those primitive universal forms; but by logic the opposite is the case. The genus is stripped of the difference that goes to make up the species, and of the properties that go to make up the individual. Your genera can never be types of the individual; by their nature they lack all that characterises him. So the εἶδος, which is the essential in each thing and makes it what it is, must be seen as individualised by the ὕλη it is joined to. Apart from that modification it is only a logical existence, the highest genus to which it is finally referred being pre-eminently what can be contemplated only by and in the mind. This I take to be Aristotle's meaning, and from it follows closely the doctrine with which he winds up this book, applying it to those who dealt mainly with ὕλη. Given any fact or thing, I have no further need to trouble myself about the fact, the ὅτι; the sense, or something like sense, supplies that. When I see a musical man I am not to ask what the musical man is; he is what I behold and nothing else. My business is with the διότι, the cause: why is he this or that? The answer is in the εἶδος, the form or constitution, the ultimate reason of what each thing is. So I get no nearer the cause of things by reducing them to natural elements. The analysis may be physically proper or useful, but it does not lead to what I seek. Whatever is, and whatever I can behold with senses or mind, is not the A or the B of which it is composed but something else. The synthesis of A and B involves the presence of a form or existence that cannot be found in either separately. So find as many primary elements as you will, you have not found an ἀρχή.

18\. Our main business, then, is to find the meaning of this εἶδος and its relation to the ὕλη. The seventh book takes up the subject and carries forward a hint from the last, perhaps the most pregnant in Aristotle's writings and the one with most effect on his whole philosophy. The εἶδος or μορφή is an energy; the ὕλη is a δύναμις, a capacity that needs the action of the energy to produce a result. Οὐσία, as I said, is the synthesis of these. If you leave out the ἐνέργεια you come only to material elements and combinations that do not give you the actual things you are examining. The difficulty is about things that seem to have no ἐνέργεια in themselves, such as a house. Must their substances be something distinct from and external to them? The answer: do you ask whether the material house, the stones and cement, is a substance? Certainly not; you have excluded the notion of substance by the way you put the question. But do you ask whether that house is actually something? Your question assumes it. You cannot define anything without treating it as a substance, however you satisfy yourself about why it is so. So there is something, not distinct from the house but implied in it, which is a form or εἶδος. The test that it exists is your own attempt to define it.

19\. On this principle of an energy and a δύναμις in each substance, he shows how necessary it is in any inquiry after causes to keep three questions in view. By cause do you mean capacity, δύναμις? Moving power? The form? (The last two *may* always be the same, but the inquiry into the constitution of each thing is distinct from the inquiry into its productive force.) Or lastly, do you mean the οὗ ἕνεκα? (This too may be the same question as the last, differently stated: the constitution of each thing may determine its purpose.)

20\. But this use of "capacity" (δύναμις) raises another doubt. Has not every subject a capacity for contraries? Must we not say that every healthy body is potentially sick, and water potentially both wine and vinegar? The answer is that this absence or deprivation of qualities is an accident of those qualities and not itself a quality. For a dead body to become alive it must pass into a certain ὕλη that has the potentiality of life; for vinegar to become wine it must pass into water; nothing similar happens in the opposite case. Finally he applies this principle to the difficulty about unity, which he had often hinted at and on which he had already spoken plainly. If a man is defined as a biped animal, why does each of these, "animal" and "biped," not constitute a separate entity? What, in short, grounds our conception of each thing and person as one? Aristotle suggests that the question is hopeless if put in this form, since each variation of your definition creates a new puzzle. He would rather assume the unity of each thing as a fact or datum of the understanding and account for its being reduced to different constituent elements. This *is* accounted for by the necessary co-presence of matter and form in each thing, matter being merely a potentiality and form an energy. In this way the dream of a *unity* distinct from the individual thing is got rid of, as the dream of a *substance* distinct from each particular thing was before.

21\. The eighth book is still occupied with capacities and energies. Aristotle inquires into the different senses of δύναμις: what we mean when we say a thing can or cannot be. There is a use of this language in geometry that is metaphorical and not to our purpose. We say a thing can or cannot be, meaning that it is or is not. But all δυνάμεις in the proper sense refer to some primary δύναμις, *which is the cause or beginning of a change in some other thing as another thing*. Warmth, for instance, is a δύναμις, equally in what warms and in what is warmed. The δύναμις in the thing warmed refers to the corresponding primary δύναμις in the thing warming, and this necessary implication of what answers to itself in something else is its characteristic nature. To every capacity there corresponds an incapacity, which may mean the absence of a faculty of communication, the absence of a faculty of reception, or merely a negative want, or a positive state involving that want.

22\. Δυνάμεις are divided into rational and irrational: the rational subsist in the reasonable soul, the irrational are merely physical. All art and knowledge are of the first class. A radical distinction between them can be found thus. Warmth, an irrational δύναμις, can only produce warmth; the physician's art can produce either health or sickness. In general, one kind of power can produce contrary changes, the other only one change; and the contrary changes are wrought by the rational powers with and upon the irrational.

23\. This description of δυνάμεις might seem in some points to trench on the notion of energies given in the last book, so Aristotle goes on to distinguish them. The Megarian sect, following their general rule of reducing every idea to that of Being and excluding any distinct notion of production and *becoming*, had identified Power or Capacity with energy. Where there is no building, they said, there is no builder. Apply this to arts, says Aristotle, and the man who has studied longest ceases to have the art as soon as he stops exercising it. Apply it to things without reason or life, and nothing is sweet, warm, or cold except at the moment it is tasted or felt. In our minds this is perhaps not very destructive of their proposition, but it was very effective against the Megarians, who had a great horror of the Protagorean doctrine. So a thing may have the capacity of being and not be, and the capacity of not being and be; what it is the capacity of takes place when something is added, which is Energy. Energy is analogous to motion. You cannot predicate motion or energy of things that are not; the moment energy or motion is added, they are. But many things that are not have a possible or potential existence. (As a note: this passage determines as clearly as any the meaning of ἐντελέχεια, the opposite of *potentiality* yet ill translated by "actuality." Εἶδος expresses the substance of each thing at rest, its form or constitution; ἐνέργεια its substance as active and generative; ἐντελέχεια seems the synthesis of the two. Cicero's *effectio* gives its most important side but not the whole.) Yet Energy is not to be confounded with Motion. The difference is not where we might suspect, that motion belongs to the irrational and energy to the rational, for Learning falls under Motion and sight under Energy. The difference is that every motion is incomplete, tending toward an end without including it, while energy has its end in itself and involves no pause or termination. Learning, building, walking all imply a termination. Seeing, thinking, being happy imply none; these are Energies.

24\. On this showing, energy precedes δύναμις in the order of reason and of substance, though not always in the order of time. It precedes in reason because the first of all capacities is the capacity of energising: a man who has the faculty of building has in him the capacity of using his energy in the art of building. In time it is otherwise. The primary energising power precedes, even in time, what receives its impression, Form being older than Matter. But in any particular person or thing, we say its capacity of being that person or thing precedes its being so actually. Yet even then there is always a prior energy presumed in some other thing to which it owes its existence. So we get a principle we shall find put to practical use in the Ethics: the exercise of any particular energy precedes the habitual use of the faculty, and it is by playing the harp that we become harp players. Several important ethical doctrines are developed in this inquiry, but I shall notice them later. One more pregnant notion bears directly on our present subject. Δύναμις was defined as the cause of change in another thing as another thing. But this notion needs a resting-place, unless there is some primary δύναμις presupposed in all others, which is the beginning of motion. This is φύσις, and so we have reached the most complete notion of it we can expect. Energy still precedes and surpasses this first and primary cause of all change.

Aristotle goes on to show how Energy is better and more glorious than δύναμις, for instance because δύναμις is the same for contraries. The capacity of health and sickness is the same; so for stillness and movement, rising and falling. But one of each pair must be good, so the energy that determines which contrary takes effect must be better than the Faculty or Capacity. Two consequences follow. First, Energy is what makes things be evil that have only the possibility of evil in them. Second, in things primary and eternal there is no evil, no fault, no decay; the capacity for evil lies in Nature. Every moral and theological student will feel the importance of these two axioms. Another proposition, widely applied in another direction, is added about *discovery*: it means bringing into Energy things that exist potentially, because Knowing is an Energy.

25\. This book ends with another reference to the relation between truth and being, falsehood and not-being. Truth and falsehood are the accordance or discordance of our judgment with the actual state of things, and three cases fall under notice. First, things always united and inseparable, or always separable and never united. Here the judgment must be uniform: the same will be true in all cases, false in all cases. Second, things that may be separated or united. Here comes the possibility that something is true today and false tomorrow, or true in one aspect and false in another. Third, things perfectly simple, admitting neither division nor combination. To these the words true and false do not apply, only knowledge and ignorance: you either know such things or you do not. About them no mistake or deception is possible, only the presence or absence of knowledge. All sensible objects whose existence you ascertain by touch or sight are of this kind; the lack of touch or sight, not a false opinion, shuts them out from you.

26\. In the ninth book we meet the question of unity again. The name One, he says, is used in four ways: for what is *continuous by nature*, for a *whole*, for an *individual thing*, and for what is *predicated of a whole*. The general sense of the Indivisible is common to all. Unity in any of these senses may be attributed to a substance that is inseparable in place, form, and thought, as well as to an actually indivisible whole. The fundamental notion of unity he takes to be that of a measure of quantities; without such a measure quantity is inconceivable. There may be something actually indivisible, or something indivisible to our senses; an actual unity in form and a supposed unity in matter. Each bears the name because each is used as a measure. He asserts the need for such a measure against the Protagorean notion that man is the measure of all things, which he treats as a silly truism that puts on the form of a paradox and has the effects of a falsehood.

27\. A distinct absolute unity is denied on precisely the same ground as a distinct absolute substance. The One is always *some* one thing or nature. In colours, if you suppose them all to come from white, white is the one; in voices, the elementary vowel; and so in all cases. So the Ionic attempt to find some matter, such as air or fire, to be unity is as unreasonable as the Parmenidean, Pythagorean, and Platonic attempts to give unity itself a formal and separate character.

28\. "The One" is the undivided or indivisible; this is its primary notion, to which all others reduce. "The many" will then mean the divided or divisible, from which, as more cognizable by the senses, the One will be inferred. Next: how are the one and the many opposed? Are not the "many" and the "few" equally opposed, and if so, is unity not merely an element of plurality? This brings in a discussion of the different modes of opposition: contradiction, relation, privation, strict contrariety. Possibly there is some confusion here of different lectures or reports, for in the lengthy explanation we seem to lose sight of the original subject. My readers will have noticed how much the idea of a "law of opposition" in things entered all Greek speculation, so as to seem to many its foundation. Aristotle approaches it from the logical side: the forms of opposition he finds in our minds determine his view of the actual opposition in nature. So his remarks, though apparently irrelevant, throw considerable light on his doctrine of unity. What our understanding needs in order to explain to itself the existence of multitude, he called "the One." In his mind, unity was therefore identical with Singleness.

29\. The next book is mostly a recapitulation of puzzles and solutions already given. It is not to be passed over on that account, for Aristotle's repetitions of himself, or the reports of his different pupils, generally clear away difficulties. Here especially the remarks on the nature and limits of the primary philosophy, and his refutation of Protagoras's two cardinal sophisms, are in many respects fuller than in the third book. I shall notice only his analysis of Motion and his remarks on the Infinite. Motion is neither an energy nor merely a potency; it must be contemplated alternately as each. A lump of brass is potentially a statue; the energy that will make it one is in the sculptor's mind. The motion, the transition from brass to statue, is found neither in the brass nor in the mind; it is what gives the brass's potentiality its meaning and connects it with the energy. In a formula: "Motion is the entelechy (the perfecting power or principle) of the potential as potential." He admits the difficulty of finding an expression for this idea, but shows by examining earlier attempts that his own, however awkward, is the only satisfactory one.

30\. On the Infinite, which had so exercised earlier Greek speculators and had been resorted to as the ultimate solution of so many difficulties, he aims at no precision of language, because by its nature it excludes precision. To fit it into a scheme, or treat it as a helpful definition of nature or the universe, is in his judgment absurd. It can only mark the *ne plus ultra* to which human thought and inquiry can reach, or already have reached. By its very name it excludes the limitations by which alone you can deal with subjects within human cognizance. His opinion here is characteristic of his mind and bears importantly on the history of metaphysics. Scarcely any question interested the Greek mind more than the one at issue between the schools of Pythagoras and Xenophanes: whether it is truer and more reverent to speak of God as the Limit or as the Infinite. Aristotle's concluding remark on the Infinite should be quoted for the incidental light its latter clause throws on his idea of Time, an idea modern students of philosophy need to reflect on. The infinite is not the same in magnitude, motion, and time, as if it were one nature; rather the later is spoken of in terms of the earlier, as motion in terms of the magnitude over which it moves or changes or grows, and time by means of the motion.

31\. Book eleven opens with an attempt to fix the number of causes or first principles. Every sensible substance has a capacity of change, and the changes are four: in substance, quality, quantity, and place. Generation and corruption name the first, growth and decay the second, alteration (ἀλλοίωσις) the third, transference (φορά) the fourth. These are changes into contraries. But contraries themselves do not change; something must undergo the change from one to the other, and this something must be *Matter*. Being does not arise from not-being; being in potency is changed into being in energy, and being in potency is matter. Granting this, there are three ἀρχαί or first principles: the two contraries Form and Privation (στέρησις), and the Matter that passes from one to the other.

32\. But Aristotle says this statement strictly applies only to material things, where the element (στοιχεῖον) and the principle (ἀρχή) are the same. You have heat, the εἶδος; cold, the στέρησις; what has the potency of being either, the ὕλη; and the resulting substance, the flesh, bone, or whatever it may be. But in things apprehended by the mind another idea intrudes. Besides the two opposites, health and sickness, and the matter susceptible of both, you have the health-making art of the physician. The principle, so used, acquires a double meaning that the element does not have: it must be contemplated both as the stationary Form and the moving Power. There must in a sense be four ἀρχαί, though only three elements. The reader will see that these conclusions were partly anticipated, but they need repeating here, for here is the link between Aristotle's Metaphysics and his Theology; this is the road, or one step of the road, by which he reaches the conception of a First Moving Cause. Most of this remarkable book is devoted to unfolding that conception. I can only give the results of an argument that Aristotle clearly felt to be the summing-up of his metaphysical series. There must be an eternal, immovable Substance that is at the same time the source of all movement. Its primary notion is that it is an Energy. Potentiality is excluded from it, for the highest form of Being is incompatible with mere capacity of Being. And since Matter and Potentiality are convertible terms, it must be immaterial. There is no refuge from the notion that all things proceeded from darkness and nothingness except in this belief. Energy being prior to mere potency, eternity must be affirmed of the chaos or night out of which things are supposed to be formed in a different sense from that in which it is affirmed of the Primeval Being.

33\. We must attribute a continual *negative* existence to this potency, but a continual *operative* existence only to the First Cause. We need the one to account for Corruption and Decay, the other to account for actual Existence and Life. Matter is in no sense a cause, either to itself or to anything else, while to a First Cause we necessarily attribute self-causation. Other things impart motion after first receiving it; this must be its own Mover. The next step toward apprehending this Being comes from considering our own intellect and will. There is an object of cognition, something to be known, and an object of volition, something to be desired, and these set intellect and will in us in motion. What appears good to each Understanding or Will actuates it; what *primarily* actuates must be what *is* good. In this we find the union of the faculty of knowledge with what is to be known, and of the faculty of will with what is to be desired. So self-contemplation and self-delight must be the essentials of Deity. By other processes of reasoning he concludes that the Being must be without parts (ἀμερής), without passions (ἀπαθές: the reader will notice the change of gender and will easily believe that τὸ θεῖον is a more common antecedent than ὁ θεός), and subject to no vicissitude (ἀναλλοίωτον).

34\. We then approach the grand question: is there one such cause or many? Nowhere is the difference between Aristotle and his master more remarkable. We have seen how tenderly Plato treated his countrymen's mythology, not from cowardice but because he felt it held a latent truth for which no philosophical abstractions or generalities could substitute. Aristotle, having satisfied himself that the *argument* favours one cause, sweeps away every notion that interferes with it. He considers the gods his country worshipped as derived from certain astrological notions, and merely as setting forth the secondary sensible substances that proceed from the first immaterial Cause.

35\. With equal decision, on this new ground, he denounces the philosophical schemes that had been substituted for the old cosmogonies. He charges them with two common vices: they acknowledged an antithesis and contradiction in things but did not take account of the third element, matter, which is the only explanation of the evil and disorder in the universe; and they substituted many original principles for the one.

36\. In the last two books the doctrines of the Platonists and Pythagoreans (on ideas and numbers) are discussed again at great length and with Aristotle's usual ingenuity. I cannot be expected to go over arguments I have so often mentioned, and I am less anxious to present them fully than to prepare my readers to study them where they occur. But I may remark that the continual renewal of these discussions is important for determining the nature and connection of these treatises, and the character of Aristotle's whole mind and system. Evidently he felt the refutation of these opinions, and the substitution of something else, to be in a manner the business of his life. At all events it was the needed preliminary to his more positive work: while his mind was haunted with these notions, the system he proposed to build, whether physical, metaphysical, or moral, seemed to him to rest on a dubious and infirm foundation. So I regard the metaphysical treatises (whether or not they can be reduced to formal sequence and unity) as having this subject at their centre. His aims are these: to show what ideas are not and what they are; to establish that the εἶδος is not distinct from the particular individual substance, existing apart and connecting it with some higher substance, but is merely its inherent form; to connect the εἶδος, the constituent principle of each thing, with the ἐνέργεια that calls it into existence, and so to give the same satisfactory answer to the two Greek inquiries about the nature of being and the origin of matter; to explain the nature and conditions of the ὕλη, and by depriving it of all intrinsic substantial properties and reducing it to a mere potency, practically to get rid of the old Ionic investigations; and finally to hint at a principle his moral writings fully expound, that the final Cause, the οὗ ἕνεκα, is also connected with the εἶδος and ἐνέργεια, so that the good or purpose of each class of substances is known when we know its nature and proper energy. This is the object he pursues most consistently through all his windings and recapitulations in the books of Metaphysics.

37\. But this object connects on one side with *Logic* and on the other (as the scholiast is so anxious to tell us) with *Theology*. I have not seen my way to adopt Ritter's method of identifying the logical treatises with the metaphysical, a plan inconsistent with the very words of the third book. By such a course, it seems to me, we would lose much insight into the philosopher's habits of mind and the growth of his opinions, which we gain by studying the treatises distinctly while acknowledging their closest connection. I believe Aristotle to be primarily and at heart a logician, who became thoroughly enamoured of the forms of logic and convinced they gave a satisfactory account of the facts of the world, and then gradually worked out in his mind an Ontological system that gave the rationale of those forms and interpreted their relation to different phenomena. Now if it is true, as I have maintained, that the *mathematician* has another set of laws, discovered in the course of his inquiries, from those the *logician* knows, we need not be surprised that Aristotle's arguments against Ideas are so constantly mixed with allusions to the Pythagorean study of Lines or Numbers, or that this study was actually the *base* of the principle he is trying to overthrow.

38\. It is on all accounts a more important inquiry how *Theology* became interwoven with either set of speculations. I think it cannot be denied that the recognition of an absolute Being, an absolute Good, gave life to the whole doctrine of Plato and without it the doctrine is meaningless, while for Aristotle it is merely the crowning result, or at least the necessary postulate, of his philosophy. Consistent with this difference, it was a Being to satisfy the wants of Man that Plato sighed for, and a first Cause of Things that Aristotle did homage to. The first would part with no indication or symbol of the truth that God has held intercourse with men and made himself known to them; the second was content to seek in nature and logic for demonstrations of his attributes and his unity. When we use personal language to describe the God Plato speaks of, we feel it suits best with his feelings and principles, even when, through reverence or ignorance, he refrains from it himself. When we use personal language to describe the Deity of Aristotle, we feel it improper and unsuitable, even if, through deference to ordinary notions or the difficulty of inventing any other, he uses it himself. Theology, then, can have no connection with the ethics of Aristotle.

#### SECTION VI. ARISTOTELIAN PSYCHOLOGY.

1\. The metaphysical treatises shed light on the point we last discussed, and that makes them an important introduction to Aristotle's ethical system. From his Dialectics we might have concluded that he rejected Plato's doctrine of Ideas as a scientific account. It would not follow that he gave up the belief in some ideal of excellence, which runs through all mythologies and has never left the hearts of men. But his conception of God simply as the ground of nature shows at once that, in his mind, acknowledging God's perfection has no connection with a scheme of practical life and conduct. He does not lack sympathy with Plato, or with any philosopher who tried to explain men's dreams on this subject. He simply has not found in himself, and does not recognise in others, the want which every age has tried to express in so many forms. So it becomes an interesting question: what foundation in Aristotle's ethics takes the place of the Theology that is so plainly the foundation of Plato's?

2\. The answer leads us to a very important treatise, the three books on the Soul. It contains more of what has in our day, especially here and in Scotland, been called metaphysics than the works that bear that title. The first book, as usual, examines earlier theories. Aristotle thoroughly disposes of the notions of Democritus, Empedocles and the Pythagoreans, and shows why we can never be satisfied with calling the soul motion, or the principle of motion, or the primary element, or number. In the second book he develops his own doctrine. The soul belongs to the category of entities, so it has a matter and a form. Here, as elsewhere, the matter coincides with its δύναμις (potentiality), and the form is ἐντελέχεια (actuality). The soul is neither separately but the result of both. Sight, for example, requires the energy of vision, the faculty of vision, and in addition an organ, an actual eye. What is true of this sense is true of the whole substance of which it is a part. The soul has its energy and its faculty distinct from the organ through which both appear, yet it requires such an organ. The soul is not a body, but neither is it without a body. In general, what distinguishes a living creature (ζῷον) is that it has a ψυχή (soul).

3\. But not all living creatures have a soul exercising the same δυνάμεις (faculties). All the faculties that can exist in any living creature are these five: receiving nourishment (θρεπτική), sensation (αἰσθητική), motion in place (κινητική), impulse or desire (ὀρεκτική), and intelligence (διανοητική). The nutritive faculty is the lowest and is present in every case, so the soul with this faculty alone may be attributed to vegetables. Wherever any higher faculty is present, all the lower exist too. Under each head there is an interesting discussion of the faculty's character and limits. Under the first, the question is whether the life in each plant must be considered the active or only the passive instrument of its self-sustenance. Under sensation, more complicated points arise, and Aristotle enters into the whole theory, examining each sense in detail. This is the discussion carried on with so much liveliness and depth in one part of the *Theætetus*. The opinion there attributed to Protagoras, which Plato does not deny so far as the doctrine of sensation goes, apart from its moral consequences, is nearly the same as Aristotle's: sensation is neither in the organ nor in the object, but is generated between them, as the effect of the medium through which they communicate. The question of the motive faculty at once involves us in something higher than itself, since movement must depend on impulse, and this is true in all creatures. Sense-appearances do generate impulses or desires, but we must not therefore attribute a governing power to sensation. Rather, the nature of the faculty of impulse determines how these appearances influence it, than that it is determined by them. So each creature seems to have a nature, seen expressly in this faculty of impulse. How, then, does man differ from other creatures? Not, it seems, by lacking this impulsive faculty, nor by its being less truly his nature than it is theirs, but by having the dianoetic faculty to direct it and act with it. The true nature of man consists in the coincidence and joint working of these two. So the soul may be considered as having three portions, distinct logically and not materially: one wholly without reason, one rational, and one that participates in reason.

In this psychological system we find the root of the Aristotelian ethics we were looking for: they begin in Psychology and end in Politics.

#### SECTION VII. THE ARISTOTELIAN ETHICS.

1\. At the opening of the Nicomachean Ethics, long regarded as the fullest statement of his views, Aristotle says that Ethics is an introduction to Politics. So he does not identify the two as Plato does; it is possible, indeed necessary, to treat them separately. In his usual way he looks for the grounds of society in the nature of man. He cannot accept Plato's simple willingness to treat outward necessities and accidents as the *occasions* of society. To him that carries a further step, full of Plato's idealism: the supposition that Society itself involves some higher Unity than any particular society expresses. What seems to him to pervade all things, almost as a law of the universe, and above all to be the secret of human order and government, is a principle of equality and adjustment. The same principle, in another form, drives his ethics. Virtue lies in a mean, and in a sense *is* a mean. Government, which is also a mean, is therefore naturally occupied with sustaining the virtue of individuals, and that virtue is in turn government's chief safeguard. This must be noticed, or the connection between the two spheres, which Aristotle acknowledges as much as his master did, will not be apparent. Many difficulties will also seem insurmountable to a reader who takes the Ethics as a complete system and forgets that, for practical purposes, an educating, directing power is presumed to reside in a governing body whose nature and functions are not yet defined.

2\. But Virtue, the attainment of this mean, is not in Aristotle's view the formal aim of a man's life or of society. Once the notion of an absolute good, introduced by those "dear" and troublesome men the Platonists, is out of the way, there remains one obvious and generally admitted end of all human desires: happiness is emphatically the human end. But if it is human, its definition must be sought in what is peculiarly characteristic of human beings. It cannot lie in powers we share with other creatures, so not chiefly in the nutritive or sensory powers. It must consist in some exercises or energies, since in these the soul or life of every creature shows itself. So it must lie in the energies of our best and highest nature, exercised not at intervals but through a whole life, a life with enough outward prosperity to give them free scope.

3\. But all energies need a direction, and the right direction of its energies is the *virtue* of each class. What, then, is specifically human virtue? It must be in the man. On our psychology, the impulsive faculty is the constitutive faculty of the human soul, though its excellence consists in being subject to the reasoning faculty. Virtue will therefore imply the presence and harmony of both, though it will be found most characteristically in the first. So it must be a habit. But of what kind, and what is its aim, given that an absolute good or ideal is out of the question, and that happiness cannot be the aim, since happiness is exactly what we are now analysing? Aristotle says we are not to worry about scientific accuracy in definitions. Our purpose is practical: we want to form an actual man of a certain character, not a theoretical one.

4\. Practically, then, what we blame as mischief and derangement is in every case excess. There is an excess called timidity and one called foolhardiness; one called prodigality and one called narrowness or avarice. But extremes presuppose a mean, and this is what our habit aims at; virtue generally lies in it. Yet we aim at action, and actions are specific, not general. How, then, do we arrive at specific virtues? Their species are determined by their distinct objects: some habits concern external pleasures, others the passions of the mind. In each case the practical purpose defines the virtue. A general description of the excesses and their corresponding means can be given that really applies in all cases. Still, the excess may differ for each man, according to his actual circumstances and his proneness to one side or the other. Liberality, for instance, is practically a different quality in the rich man and the poor, and one must resist the temptation to profusion, the other to meanness. Virtue is therefore in a mean that is a mean relative to *us*, not one that can be fixed absolutely and invariably by rule.

5\. It follows that this habit presupposes a faculty of choice, or predetermination. Is that the same as willing? Clearly not: willing concerns ends, choice concerns the means to ends. It implies a right end and a right determination of the will toward it. It may be called deliberative desire (and the reader will note how steadily the psychological axiom we mentioned is kept in view). But to what cases does this will or counsel apply, and how far does it depend on us? We do not deliberate about things absolute or eternal, nor about things in the sphere of accident. What remains is whatever is done by us or with our concurrence. Some of these may be taken from our control by actual violence, and this gives rise to questions of casuistry, such as whether a virtuous man will submit to do wrong or to die; each case must be decided on its merits. In ordinary cases the doubt is whether inclination is itself a force upon will and reason. Aristotle disposes of this first by remarking that no reasonable man can confuse an influence on the impulse with a force that prevents its operations; and second by admitting that such influences may produce an incapacity for a particular action, but that this incapacity results from a previous habit which need not have been formed. Habits, then, are in our power; actions not always.

6\. With these foundations settled, he turns to the particular ethical virtues, where his acute and often delicate powers of observation have room to work. The temper of mind Shakspeare has wrought into us does not like to see any character as the mere development of one quality. We dislike hearing of a man as the Magnificent, the Magnanimous, the Modest, the Temperate, or the Just. But this doubtless suited Greek habits. Aristides, Themistocles and Cimon, even if they had no set purpose of realising a particular type of character, fall more readily into certain moulds than the traditional figures of ancient Rome or modern Europe. How a similar tendency was revived at one period in Christian society, and how that revival was tied to a scholastic reverence for Aristotle, we may have to notice later.

7\. Two of these virtues deserve special notice, because they throw light on the whole system and on ethical inquiry generally. The first is Justice. Is it not itself an abstract of all the virtues? We have seen Plato's answer in the *Republic*. Aristotle treats it differently, yet shows how much he felt his master's influence even when rejecting his ideas. In one sense, he says, justice is a complex of virtues: it is the habit that chiefly disposes us to obey the laws, and since laws forbid excesses of every kind and encourage every kind of virtue, justice has respect to them all. But there is such an offence as overreaching, and there must be a specific virtue answering to it, related to the general one. The evil is inequality in matters of property; the virtue is evenness or equality. This implies on each side an excess, a more and a *less*, in reference to given persons. The virtue aims at preserving the right proportion between things and persons and restoring the balance when it is broken. Remove the restriction to property, and justice would seem the very virtue of virtues, so emphatically does it preserve the mean. But that restriction makes it harder to say how far the virtue belongs to the individual and how far to the State. So justice, though more narrowly meant, becomes for Aristotle as for Plato a debatable ground between the two regions. At all events it must be regarded as *the* ethical virtue of a statesman.

8\. The other virtue is temperance. It is opposed to intemperance and involves the general notion of an even mind undisturbed by sensual desires, so it might seem to include self-restraint. But in Aristotle's psychology the soul has a rational, an irrational and a quasi-rational part. The quality that controls the irrational or merely animal nature need not be the same as the one concerning the quasi-rational part, the passions and affections. The name temperance goes to the first, self-restraint to the second. A curious consequence follows: this self-government seems distinct not only from the virtue concerned with sensual desires but even from virtue itself, since virtue has its chief seat in the impulsive nature over which self-restraint is supposed to rule. So after the catalogue of virtues we are puzzled to find a book opening with three moral states to be avoided (vice, lack of self-control, brutishness) and three good states corresponding to them (virtue, self-restraint, and a divine excellence as far above ordinary humanity as brutishness is below it). The result seems inevitable to anyone who reflects on the system: what preserves virtue must somehow be distinct from virtue. But it must also be admitted that it considerably impairs the symmetry of a design otherwise singularly complete.

9\. Before Aristotle touched on this preserving power, which belongs to the purely ethical side of man, he had to explain more distinctly than in his psychology the intellectual faculties to which such important functions are given. He begins by reaffirming that the impulsive and intellectual faculties must co-operate for any good moral act; or, as he puts it more neatly and more in line with his own view of the intellect, what the one affirms or denies the other must pursue or avoid. The soul, he says, may affirm or deny truly in five ways: by art, by science, by practical wisdom, by wisdom, by intuition. Art is what we would call the creative or poetic faculty, in its highest and lowest sense. Science is its converse: it deals with what cannot be otherwise, does not fashion but perceives, and concerns universals, not particulars. Aristotelian science, as we have seen, deals with conclusions, not premises. But some faculty must deal with premises, a tact, intuition or spiritual sense, and this is intuition. Its sphere seems very limited, being bounded on one side by science and on the other by wisdom. Wisdom, we were told in the *Metaphysics*, deals with principles, so it might seem to cover all that is assigned to intuition. But that which affirms things to be so without reasoning is surely distinct from the faculty that searches for causes through long and winding labyrinths. When intuition is said to deal with premises, the first operation is meant; when wisdom is, the second. Practical wisdom, the last of the five, is different yet has something of the others. Like art, it deals with what changes and can be changed, but it is perceptive and discriminating, not productive. So far it resembles science, though its subject-matter is wholly different. It has the quickness of tact that intuition has, but only as the result of practice and experience. It is therefore, like wisdom, a laborious investigating faculty, yet its end is practice, not speculation. The practical, experienced man is thus contrasted with the meditative, speculative one, though wisdom may usefully assist practical wisdom. From this analysis it is evident that practical wisdom is the quality which, combined with right character, meaning a proper condition of the impulsive faculty, produces virtue. The doctrine of Socrates that virtue is practical wisdom (stated somewhat carelessly, since the real Socratic doctrine treats virtue as science, the knowledge of what is absolutely good, prudence being only a guardian faculty that protects the soul, in seeking that knowledge, from the seductions and confusions of sense) is said to be only one side of the truth. Practical wisdom is not virtue, though virtue cannot exist without it.

10\. We have seen that justice occupies, to a certain extent, the same position in Aristotle's system as in Plato's, as a link between morals and politics. But Aristotle could not help seeing that justice, under the conditions he had imposed, explained very imperfectly the connection of human society with the life of the individual. This dry, hard principle of distribution, exchange and rectification could never replace the music of Plato's *Commonwealth*. Reflecting on this, he seems to have concluded that Friendship fills the void, and that Friendship and Justice together make up the social law. So seen, Friendship holds the most important place in an ethics always looking onward to Politics, and it is no wonder he gave it two elaborate books. Anyone acquainted with Greek tradition and mythology knows how much the Greek mind was occupied with the subject. There, as elsewhere, physical and moral thoughts were intertwined, and the same language described the law of sympathy between sky and earth and between man and man. Aristotle takes care to free himself from these ambiguous phrases, which he perhaps lacked the imagination to see as more than metaphors, and fixes on Friendship as one of the essential conditions of our nature to which the very existence of communion must be referred.

11\. On this footing he has no hesitation in setting aside many popular notions of friendship as giving an inadequate view of it. He rejects the doctrine that friendship rests ultimately on utility or pleasure, not with sentimental indignation but as contrary to facts and reason. Such friendships are transitory and depend on accidents, which shows the practical man as much as the philosopher that the essence of friendship is not found in them. The friendship of good men for each other must be the source from which we deduce its nature. Here alone we learn its conditions, or even its possibility, for properly speaking it is possible only if one man can really delight in another and love him as himself. A politician seriously reflecting on the existence of society must feel that a principle is at work among men which can be defined only in these terms; that its imperfect appearances in the world, so far as they are imperfect, make its meaning less intelligible; that if selfishness were absolute it could not exist at all; and that the highest form in which it shows itself is the test of its character. Aristotle states these conclusions again and again with great precision. On their strength he says that the idea of equality or proportion is as discoverable in friendship as in justice; only that in justice the worth of each object comes first and its fitness to us second, while in friendship fitness comes first and worth is subordinate. On the same ground he holds that friendship is seen in its true working not in clubs, societies or partnerships, where men associate for some specific object (though justice is needed there too, as assessor and complement, every kind of society implying a law to regulate it as well as a motive to form it, a principle of government as well as of concord), but in a *polity* of which all these are portions. An inquiry into the different kinds of government thus becomes connected with an inquiry into the law of friendship.

12\. In this passage we see how far Aristotle surpassed Plato in understanding relationships, while falling short of him in everything concerning the absolute. In the relations of father to son, husband to wife, and brother to sister he finds three primary forms of friendship, and the grounds of the three kinds of government to which all others reduce: Monarchy, Aristocracy and Timocracy, whose corruptions are Tyranny, Oligarchy and Democracy. Under each true form friendship and justice exist and sustain each other, but friendship takes its peculiar form from the society. In a monarchy it is the friendship of patronage and reverence. In an aristocracy it has the conjugal model, one party being respected as superior in worth and keeping that respect only while he asserts dominion on that ground. The fraternal type of equality is preserved in all friendship under a timocracy. In the depraved forms friendship is depraved and weak, and in tyranny, which he counts the worst because it corrupts the best, both friendship and justice vanish, subjects being regarded as animals and so incapable of human qualities. With this law of sympathy established as one of the two necessary conditions of human fellowship, and virtue shown to be the necessary condition of friendship, Aristotle goes on to settle many questions of deep practical interest. The most important concern the relation between friendship and self-love. In what sense is friendship a part of self-love, and in what sense opposed to it? Since pleasure and utility have already been separated from friendship, the vulgar notion of self-love must be separated from it too. Still, ordinary language suggests some analogy between the two, and it is hard to get beyond saying that the friend is loved as another self. May the difficulty then be solved thus: self-love may itself be distinguished from all thoughts of profit and loss, and the wise and good man is the true self-lover, the only one who is at one with himself and can enjoy his own company? If so, it would be wrong to seek the ground of friendship in self-love; it would be truer to say they illustrate each other. Only the man capable of friendship will have himself for a friend, and only he who can enjoy and love himself can enjoy and love another. These two books on Friendship are certainly not the least profound of Aristotle's writings, and to the general reader they will be by far the most delightful.

13\. From this subject we pass, in the tenth book, to Pleasure: what it is, how far, as some philosophers teach, it is to be denounced as an evil, and how far it is *a good* or connected with *the good*. Aristotle argues against many prevalent definitions. He shows why it is neither a movement, nor a process of coming into a state, nor the filling up of a want. He thinks the universal longing of mankind sufficient witness that pleasure is something real and worthy in itself, not merely a means to another end, and an examination of the facts leads to the same conclusion. But it also refutes the opinion that pleasure can be made a distinct formal purpose of life. It is the flower or consummation of something else. The exercise of sight and the exercise of hearing each bring their own pleasure after them, but the pleasure is tied to the energy and cannot be severed from it. So to understand what pleasure is, and what the highest pleasures are, you must understand what energies are and what the highest energies are. You cannot refer the last to the first; you must refer the first to the last. The energy most appropriate to each creature brings the pleasure appropriate to it; "the energy of the soul, according to virtue," brings man the highest pleasure. The pleasure an act gives the one who performs it is the test that the act has become habitual to him and that he has acquired the corresponding character. The man who delights in musical energies has become a musician; the man who delights in just acts is a just man.

14\. From this analysis of pleasure the step is easy to reconsidering happiness, and so to a brief review of the whole treatise. Happiness he has found to be the end of man, and to *consist in* the use of his highest energies, not, like pleasure, merely to result from it. What, then, is the highest happiness? It is that of the contemplative man. If we can imagine the life of the gods, it is absurd to attribute to them justice, which concerns contracts and conventions, or temperance, which implies temptations they cannot suffer, and so with most of the acts that preserve the mean for man. We must believe their life to consist in contemplation. But those who can attain this celestial life need early discipline and education. They must be trained to avoid the extremes in which evil lies and to practise the virtues which are the conditions of, and preparation for, contemplative happiness, though it transcends them. For the rest there must be a discipline to cultivate whatever capacities they have, or, if they resist, to coerce and punish them. Here is the field for the science of Politics. Aristotle says the Sophists had reduced that science to a mere teaching of how to talk and argue, but its foundations lie in ethical knowledge and ethical practice, and without them it is worthless and rotten. This is the introduction to the book on Politics.

#### SECTION VIII. POLITICS OF ARISTOTLE.

1\. We can give our readers only a few hints for studying this treatise. Valuable and interesting as it is, it can never stand to Aristotle's other writings as the Platonic *Republic* stands to Plato's dialogues. It is certainly closely connected with his Ethics and his Ontology, as our earlier remarks show, but it is connected with them as a set of results and deductions, not as a principal and fundamental part of his design. The doctrine set out so carefully in the Metaphysics, that every substance presupposes a ruling, active power and a submissive, receptive faculty or matter, reappears here in the most obvious outward facts. The relation of male and female is taken as the first hint of society and as containing its principle. The fellowship implied in that relation involves another idea, rule and subjection, which finds its complete expression in the relation of master and slave. Compare these two relations with the relation within each man, explained in the Psychology and illustrated in the Ethics, between the reasoning power, the faculty that shares in reason, and the mere animal nature. You feel at once that they explain each other and show the condition under which society is meant to exist. Where reason is developed and its authority acknowledged, where the faculty that shares in reason is in fellowship with it and subordinate to it, and where the animal nature is controlled, there you have the true condition of the individual man and the true condition of society. There the relations of husband and wife, and of master and servant, will be kept; they will not be arbitrary but lawful and orderly.

2\. In such a state of things only a polity is possible. Since this is the only true condition of each man, a political state is evidently his only proper and natural condition, and every other is anomalous. The constituents of a polity are found in a household, but a house is not therefore a miniature city, and a city is not merely a collection of households. Each has its own nature and laws. Yet each alike consists in human relations, finds in them the end of its existence, and must regard all means and instruments in reference to them. Economy is not primarily the management of the household's goods or property; that is secondary and accidental. It is mainly the right ordering of the household itself. The slave is the link between the two branches of economy: he must be considered an instrument, and yet treated as a man. A polity can be composed only of freemen, as much because only a freeman understands how to obey as because only he understands how to govern.

3\. Almost necessarily it follows from this view, first, that Aristotle should heed the Platonic idea of unity as little in his Politics as in his Metaphysics. He should utterly abhor any attempt to embody that idea by abolishing distinct relationships, since in his opinion these are the very foundation of society. He should count as good all forms of government that rest on some actual relation, and as evil all that have become in any sense arbitrary. He should therefore acknowledge, much as Plato did, three true forms and three departures from them. He should look on the democratic departure, the attempt to set up a society in which all govern, with no more complacency than the others. And at the same time he should take as his ideal the form from which democracy is a deviation, the one that makes all freemen eligible to govern, though not necessarily sharing in government. These seem to us the main principles of the book. Once they are understood, its occasional difficulties and contradictions will be less puzzling, its place in relation to the rest of the philosophy will be felt, and its value as a key to the political science of modern as well as ancient times will be appreciated.

### DIVISION IV.—THE LATER SECTS.

#### SECTION I. GREECE AFTER THE TIME OF ALEXANDER.

1\. Readers may be surprised that so much of this sketch has gone to Greek philosophy while nothing has yet been said of the schools we usually take to be its great representatives. The Epicureans, the Stoics and the Academics are constantly called *the* Greek schools, and many young Englishmen grow up thinking that the thoughts that made Greece wonderful are found in them in their highest form. That impression sits strangely with the facts. What did the teachers of these schools leave by which we can judge them? Of Epicurus we have three letters, preserved by Diogenes Laertius; of Zeno, nothing; of Cleanthes, one hymn to Jupiter; of the Academics, only traditions. I have not discussed the three books of Aristotle's Rhetoric, because among his many books I had to choose those bearing most directly on my subject. But each of those books, and even his short notes on poetry, contains five times as much on moral and metaphysical philosophy as all the Greek remains of the later schools put together (I limit this to the time before Christ). Weigh the words instead of measuring them, and I believe the disproportion would be far greater.

2\. It cannot be answered that Thales, Pythagoras and Socrates wrote nothing and yet did more than most men to awaken the energies that produce books. Epicurus, Zeno and their followers belonged to an age of books and were strictly makers of books; each of them may have written as much as Aristotle. The dialogue, as an exchange of feelings with disciples, can never have been characteristic of them. They were teachers and lecturers who laid down maxims and laws, which their disciples repeated, modified and argued for.

3\. This partly explains and justifies the place they have been given among their countrymen. We have heard of seekers of wisdom, men steadily working at problems. These men had finished their search and solved their problems. They had settled what could and could not be known; they could set down their results in definite, manageable propositions; they had a settled doctrine that could be handed on. So they deserve the name they have been given: they are *the* Greek *sects*. To call them the Greek *philosophers* is absurd, at least if philosophy means what Socrates, or even Aristotle, meant by it. But they did claim one set of conclusions as their own, with fixed theses and formulas that could be learned by heart. They could give the Greeks of their ages what those Greeks wanted, namely topics for disputation; and they could give another and nobler race suggestions that *it* could mould into something like a satisfaction for the cravings of its energetic minds.

4\. The great Alexandrian period followed the republican period: the age when Greeks showed they could subdue barbarians gave way to the age when they defended their freedom against barbarians, or abused it in quarrels among themselves. Aristotle I have taken as the representative of the earlier time. He surveyed and mapped all the provinces of human thought, reproduced his predecessors' inquiries and recast them in his own moulds, and above all gave the wise man and the practical man two quite distinct spheres of activity, though spheres in which each might help or harm the other. To a great extent, then, Aristotle declared the search for wisdom at an end. He left his disciples with the impression that the whole scheme of the universe could be brought under the forms of the human understanding. Much in his teaching counteracted this. The practical man had a vast range for governing his own mind and keeping or improving society, and the divine "Theorist" might hope for a field that was almost or quite inexhaustible. As long as Alexander's age lasted, both would draw strength and hope from the changing state of the world, its newly discovered treasures, and the prospect of Greek wisdom standing at its head.

5\. That dream passed, and some perhaps felt, while it lasted, how brief it would be. An age of intrigue followed, in which all great principles were lost sight of. It proved that the elements of Greek society were absolutely unsociable, and that restoring the older freedom was as hopeless as keeping an empire united. Changes so sudden must have left a sense of weariness and exhaustion in the most active and feverish nation that ever existed, and the speculations of its wise men were sure to reflect that weariness and hopelessness.

6\. I have spoken of scepticism as a Greek characteristic. Far from blaming philosophy for it, I have supposed that philosophy was a great protest against it: a Greek who learned that there was something he could not create had advanced some way toward reverence and belief. But another kind of scepticism was possible, which in some sense may be called the fruit of philosophy. A man might say: "We have been seeking a long time; what have we found? Have we any certain determinations? Aristotle says we have. Socrates and Plato seem to say the opposite, and they are perhaps as good authorities as he. With so many different notions circulating among us for two or three hundred years, who can be confident that any one deserves more respect than another? The wise man has some function, undoubtedly, and we Greeks are still to be the wise people of the earth. But perhaps his function is not to determine anything. May it not be rather to tell us how those should behave who, as Socrates said, know that they know nothing?"

7\. Pyrrho has always been taken as the representative of this state of mind. He is said to have served in Alexander's army and talked with the Indian Gymnosophists, and to have concluded that nothing is noble or base, just or unjust; that nothing truly is; that men do everything by custom and law; and that each thing is no more this than that. Being naturally nervous, he is said to have cultivated, with great success, ἀταραξία (freedom from disturbance), so that he would not step off the road to avoid being run down by a carriage or bitten by a dog. He is said to have lived ninety years, to have been made high priest by his own citizens, who for his sake excused philosophers from taxes, and to have been given citizenship by the Athenians.

8\. Apart from the reports of his conduct, which are only jokes, and not very clever ones, about his efforts after quietness, the outline of this story is quite credible. A Greek meeting an absorbed Brahmin would likely admire his apparent freedom from outward disquiet, and at the same time grow more doubtful about the importance or reality of the questions that had interested his own people. The talk about good and base is the ordinary language of sceptical despair. Since such despair is compatible with believing anything possible because nothing is true, it could not disqualify a man from being a priest. It was not unnatural that the city which in less degenerate days gave Socrates the hemlock should give Pyrrho its highest rewards for stating in words what most Athenians would at once have recognised as their own inward persuasion. Whether Pyrrho's personal history is authentic or fictitious, in substance it is the history of thousands in that time.

9\. But what in this universal scepticism corresponds to the character I have given the *sects*? In one sense Pyrrhonism lay at the root of all of them; in another they were the reaction against it. All of them implied a despair of discovery, of *philosophy* in its old sense, and a belief that the wise man's main object is freedom from the disturbances and distresses of ordinary men. But men who have fallen into doubt through exhaustion soon find doubt itself very *exhausting*. They crave distinct, positive decisions: if possible novel ones, better than any given before, which make them feel superior to those earlier toilers who affirmed little after all their travail; decisions that embody the results of much thinking without requiring the effort of it; but at all events *decisions*, easily set forth and argued for, and usable against any old or new opinion opposed to them.

#### SECTION II. EPICURUS.

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[born b.c. 342, died b.c. 270.]{.smallcaps}
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1\. [Epicurus]{.smallcaps}, we are told, liked hearing anecdotes about the indifference and apathy of Pyrrho, and wanted to imitate him in those qualities. But Epicurus was no doubter; he was the most imperious of dogmatists. No one ever had such complete faith in his own conclusions, or so heartily rejected every other conclusion as absurd, even impossible. Without this perfect satisfaction in his own judgment he would have missed his main object. But anyone who sets that object before him is fairly sure to gain such self-confidence. A man must be in a peculiar state of mind to believe that the universe and everything in it exists only to tell him how to be comfortable. Once he believes it, it will be wonderful if he ever hears any sound that is not an echo of his demand or a piece of an answer to it. "Do you deny that all men like pleasure and dislike pain?" is his kind of inquiry. It means simply, "Do you deny that all men like what they like and dislike what they dislike?" — and it leaves an opponent considerably perplexed.

2\. Epicurus liked to boast that he had made his own philosophy, that he was "self-taught." A really original thinker seldom says this; he knows that what he has learnt is his own, and is glad to name his teachers. Epicurus may honestly have read very little and worked out his conclusions in his own mind, but he was a copyist nonetheless, as much as almost any man. Aristotle had shown that if an absolute good is not the end of practical life, happiness must be. Epicurus could say no more than that; he could only look for a new criterion of happiness, since Aristotle's definition — an energy of the soul, exercised in conformity with certain existing relations and implying a body politic — was bound to be unsatisfactory to him. In that search he had no resource but the old sophistical dogma that everything must be referred to the standard of our sensations. He may have refined on it, because he had formulas about sensations from Plato and Aristotle, and because he lived in an age less active in thought but far better versed in everything that serves mere gratification, bodily or mental. It has been much debated, and, I think, needlessly, whether by making sensation his standard he meant to encourage what is formally called sensuality. The ancient testimonies about his character vary. The most recent criticism seems inclined to return to the popular opinion, rightly rejecting the fanatical praises of some French and English writers of the last century. On the whole I am inclined to think Epicurus was an apathetic, decorous, formal man who could cultivate a measured, even habit of mind without great difficulty. He may now and then have indulged in sensual pleasures to prove he thought them lawful, but he generally preferred, as a matter of taste, the exercises of the intellect to the more violent forms of self-indulgence. That life seems to me most consistent with his opinions, since the aim of his philosophy was plainly to avoid commotion and make life's stream flow as easily and uninterruptedly as possible.

3\. To that end it was advisable to avoid the pursuit of wealth and honours, and better to abstain from very vehement enjoyments; but it was absolutely necessary to be rid of all superstitious fears. How these fears arise was therefore an important question for the founder, and the answer led him further than he first meant to go. Naturally he cared only for moral questions, those about the management of human life. He had no real concern with dialectics, Platonic or Aristotelian: what had he to do with a science that distinguishes false from true in things or words? He took even less interest in physics, since the fixed order of nature is a painful weight on a man who wants to arrange a scheme for himself and disbelieves in any actual order and government. Theology, so closely mixed with both in the earlier systems, he would have banished still more resolutely. Yet all these subjects had to pass under his review, because conclusions drawn from them disturb man's serenity and give him bad dreams. A study answering to logic can explain how opinions originate and why some must be called false and some true. A man has sensations, and images are presented to him from outside. The sensations are to be trusted, and so are the representations; error arises only when some power forms a judgment from them. Such judgments are corrected by returning to the sensations, the only ultimate standards. Here again the originality of Epicurus lies wholly in what he omits.

4\. Plato and Aristotle, each in his own way, had treated the relation between the senses and the visible representations set before them with the profoundest skill and discrimination. Epicurus only had to use such fragments from Plato's intuitive observations or Aristotle's rigid analysis as were consistent with rejecting their principle that there is another and surer standard than the senses. In physics he was still a copyist. As he adopted Democritus's theory simply because it was the most comfortable to hold, so, as anyone who studies the rest of his philosophy can see, the many changes he made in it were guided simply by a wish to be rid of some distressing fact that interfered with his moral speculations and made his scheme of life less practicable. The idea of mysterious powers in nature had always haunted the Greek mind, as the speculations of the philosophers bore witness no less than the fables of the mythologists. Connected with it was another thought, still more oppressive to Epicurus and still more damaging to the calm and apathy of the true sage: that these powers were organised, that nature showed vestiges of a scheme, something answering to man's own powers of art and contrivance while also controlling them. From these painful impressions there was one joyful refuge. The notion that the world is composed of atoms which met in empty space and united into the light forms or heavy masses our senses know at once freed physics from its connection with theology.

5\. And since one product of these invisible atoms was what had been called the soul of man, a new light dawned on the moral system from this natural philosophy: a new confirmation of the great principle that man is a machine which, like any other, can be regulated and adjusted to produce desirable results.

6\. There was one fault in Democritus's doctrine. His atoms descended in a straight line, which savoured too much of determinate purpose and fixed law. Suppose them to swerve a little from the line — a very little — and the charm is broken; better still, you have a way of accounting for choice and freedom in man. If Epicurus anticipated an actual physical discovery in this speculation, it is fresh evidence that the divinity he supposed, one taking no interest in human thoughts or designs, does sometimes shape them into a strange resemblance of truth when they are shaping themselves into the most grotesque falsehoods. On the whole it seems unnecessary to attribute to the founder any deep and malignant design of undermining human belief or conduct. The worst that can be said is that he exactly caught the impression of a wretched, emasculated age; the best is that he showed some skill in combining the notions of earlier philosophers into the only scheme that could seem plausible or possible to the men of such an age. One thing should be noticed: if Epicurism is ultimately destructive of moral habits, it is not to these but to science that it directly sets itself in opposition. The Epicurean is essentially the unscientific man — more correctly, the hater of science. That is the more striking because in modern days, when physical science has established itself by another agency than theirs, disciples of this school have sometimes affected to patronise it and even boasted of being its exclusive promoters. 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\. The second great effort against the Pyrrhonism of this age is the Stoic philosophy. As with the last system, we must try to detach ourselves from Roman associations and portrayals. Doing so entirely is impossible, since these philosophies hardly found their meaning until living Roman minds adopted them. Still, it matters to consider the statue as it came from Greek artists, who could no longer give life to their works, before the Italian Pygmalion embraced it. The sense of intercourse between men and a divine race above them had worked deeply into the Greek character. It had given credence to many fables, some beautiful and some impure, and it sustained every polity and system of laws. We can imagine, then, what its disappearance did. A Greek could not feel bound to his fellow-creatures when he felt cut off from every other kind of being. But this isolation affected minds differently. It drove the Epicurean to ask how he might make a world in which to live comfortably, free of visions of past and future and of dread of powers who no longer stirred any sympathy in him. It drove Zeno to ask whether a man may find enough in himself to satisfy him, however unfriendly everything beyond him may be. This was no new problem for the practical man or the theorist. The Greek sages had met it again and again, tried to solve it, and thoroughly examined the conditions under which it could and could not be solved. So here, as before, we can expect no originality of conception. The interest lies in the complete desolation of heart that led the philosophers of the Porch to try the inquiry once more. The works attributed to Zeno show clearly what was working in his mind. Among other tasks he undertook to answer Plato's *Republic*. The truth that man is a political being pervades that book, and it must have troubled him, and he felt it had to be got rid of before he could assert a man's solitary dignity. He seems to have lived by his principle with consistency and steadiness, showing a real indifference to outward circumstances and, with less dogmatic affectation than many, a creditable independence and uprightness. Zeno taught at Athens. 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 have sympathised less with his severity than with Pyrrho's indifference, but it could do justice to the good qualities of any man it could understand. Socrates was neither sceptic nor dogmatist; they did not know where to have him, and it was safer to get rid of him.

2\. It is pleasant to meet a hardy, energetic, free man in this dreary, formal time, and *Cleanthes*, Zeno's disciple and successor, seems to deserve that description.

He began life as a boxer and came to Athens with five drachmas. He drew water by night so that he could attend Zeno's lectures by day. He was brought before the Dicastery to explain his healthy appearance when he had no obvious means of living, and was acquitted on the testimony of the gardeners he worked for. He refused the ten minæ the Areopagus offered him as a reward for this discovery. He was reckoned a very slow, toilsome man, and patiently endured being called "The ass," taking it as a compliment that he alone could bear the burden Zeno put on him. Such a man would stand out in any age, and especially among a race of clever talkers, impatient of rough toil and ambitious above all for a name for quickness and wit.

His biographer says Cleanthes wrote many beautiful books. The list of titles makes us glad they are lost, since they might have spoiled our impression of him as a living being and reduced him to a mere discourser on Sensation, Time, Art. He survives truly in his Hymn to Jupiter. It is the only surviving work connecting early Stoicism with the higher, nobler form it took, after its Roman impregnation, in the Life and Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

3\. The "slow" Cleanthes had far less favour in the Porch than his rapid pupil Chrysippus. "Give me your doctrines and I will find the demonstrations," Chrysippus told the humble burden-bearer. His disciples said reverently, "If the gods have a science of dialectics among them it must be that of Chrysippus." He did not disagree with them. An anxious parent asked, "To what instructor shall I commit my son?" and he answered, "To me; if there were a better philosopher to be found, should not I go to him?"

Such a man was not likely to write a hymn to Jupiter, but he was the man to perfect the Stoical system. Zeno's professed followers had differed widely. Ariston scorned dialectics and in some conclusions seems to have approached Epicurus. Chrysippus ended these heresies and gave the school a definite form and culture. It may be worth showing briefly how the first bare conception of a man striving to live apart from his time and surroundings grew into a compact and tolerably consistent theory of the universe.

4\. The Stoics could hardly invent a division of studies different from the long-sanctioned one, and they extended their theory into Morals, Logic, and Physics. But they introduced a novelty of expression, speaking of *Virtue* as ethical, logical, and physical. These were not three kinds of virtue but three parts composing it: logic was the shell of the egg, ethics the white, physics the yolk. Much can be learnt from this. First, virtue, a state of mind or character in the individual, is all the Stoic can conceive. On it every idea of truth, and of outward tangible forms, depends. This opinion grew easily out of Aristotle's doctrine, yet in some respects it looks less like that doctrine than like Plato's. In the doctrine of Socrates, developed by Plato, virtue is always conformity to a standard outside the man, a participation in the absolutely good, and inseparable from possessing the absolutely true. Aristotle rejected this, trying to place practical morality in one department and the study of Being in another. In his system virtue and happiness gained a substantive, independent character that Socrates and Plato could never have given them. But this separation of Ethics from Ontology also let him follow his natural bent and call the contemplative life the highest, the life peculiar to the philosopher. The Stoic carried his conception of virtue further, cutting it off from any dream of an absolute good. He rejected Aristotle's praise of Contemplation with indignation, and seemed to return to the older Socratic language by describing virtue as a conflict with appearances and deceptions. But he took only the negative side of the Socratic doctrine. His virtue had nothing to converse with or behold but itself. The obstacles and temptations it had to overcome were not those that dim human vision and keep it from its proper object, but only those that make it less conscious of its own independence and glory. The Stoical ethics, then, drew all that was genuine and vital from Socrates' language about the slavery of the undisciplined, sensual spirit. They also borrowed and misapplied many of his phrases about virtue and science. In so far as they were of native manufacture, they were only pithy maxims of conduct, wire-drawn and minute, descending into the lowest details and frivolities. They tended to emasculate character under pretence of elevating it, and deserved the censure that they were fitter for nurses than for philosophers. This was the white of the egg.

5\. That Dialectics should be only the shell shows how little of the real spirit of Socrates survived in this feeble imitation. The language that made science almost identical with virtue meant, in the Stoics' mouths, only that a virtuous man has good taste and a shrewd sense of what to accept and what to reject. They did not recognise truth as reality, or falsehood as a positive opposite to truth. So they had no use for Dialectics in the Platonic sense, the science of distinguishing truth from falsehood. All they understood was that what is desirable is preferred by some and not by others. They therefore asked what in us determines the fitness or unfitness of things, and how we know when things give us a right result and when a wrong one. In all essentials their conclusions were the same as the Epicureans': neither believed in any standard besides sense, or in any difference between the real and the apparent. But their moral schemes differed, so the Stoics were unwilling to admit the likeness. They wanted to persuade themselves, and to some extent honestly could, that those who aimed at virtue would not have so fluctuating a measure of good as those who aimed only at pleasurable results. So the Stoics sought a science, though they could not reach it. In the attempt they invented many acute verbal distinctions which, mixed with some grammar and rhetoric, made up their dialectical virtue, as the rules of behaviour just mentioned made up their moral virtue. It was a fitting comparison to a shell that holds no nourishment and is so fragile that it gives easy passage to the yolk within.

6\. Readers may be surprised that the essential part of the Stoical egg, which as a whole is the type of Virtue, should be the physical part. But this fits both the origin and the later development of Stoicism. The Epicurean undervalued physics because it spoke of something fixed and pre-ordained, inconsistent with the adjustment to circumstances and accidents that he counted his chief good. The Stoic wished to rise above circumstances and take a firm, independent position, and so naturally delighted in contemplating an undeviating system. The perception of any real law and standard for man had left both alike. But some people can never lose their deep sense that such a law is necessary. In despair of finding it, they take refuge in its closest type and counterpart, the sequence of nature's operations. This feeling always brings with it reverence for fate or necessity, and a proud, voluntary submission to its rule. Such a Fate became the Stoic's god, strictly his only god. But he saw it imaged in the movements of the universe, and at times he felt the need of something more real and more connected with himself than an abstraction. So the World became the living form in which he contemplated the object of his worship. He also found it expedient, for strengthening some of his moral habits and in keeping with some of his maxims, not to reject established opinions. So he easily persuaded himself to adopt Aristotle's view that the old legends did represent processes in the material world. They could then be recognised and defended without violating his philosophical dignity. Once theology was identified with physics, it is no surprise that physics should be treated as the most inward and sacred part of morality.

#### SECTION IV. THE ACADEMIC.

1\. One sect remains to complete our picture of Greek philosophy in its decline: the Academic. We have seen that Plato's countrymen had lost the very power of conceiving what I have called the central principle of his philosophy. His language about Being was a dream to them. They could not even follow Aristotle's elaborate arguments against it, and Aristotle's own views about Form and Matter in each substance had become almost as unintelligible as his master's deeper thoughts. We can imagine what this did to the schools that bore their names. The Peripatetic, who worshipped Aristotle's name, could still expound his Physics, his Logic, part of his Metaphysics, and whatever of his Ethics could be separated from the Politics. But the Academics found the incomprehensible part of their master's creed running through all his works. It could be no more detached from the *Phædrus* and the *Phædon* than from the *Republic*.

2\. They had one circumstance in their favour. For reasons I have already considered at sufficient length, Plato develops his great principle in dialogues where two propositions seem set up to knock each other down. What could be more natural than to think he meant to hold men's judgments in perpetual balance, and to cultivate a habit of endless scepticism? The conclusion was plausible. Yet Plato's writings and his whole purpose so plainly refuted it, and overthrowing scepticism seemed so clearly the object of his life, that it was a long time before the notion took hold. The Academy seems to have gone through many changes, and what they were is much disputed. But Cicero's language leaves little doubt that it once asserted certain dogmatic propositions as Plato's doctrine, and that it passed by slow degrees into the purely sceptical society from which he derived, or fancied he derived, his own opinions.

3\. The result is curious but not inexplicable. Scepticism, as I have said, was the foundation of both the other sects, though they tried to break loose from it. The Academic submitted to the spirit of the times and embodied it most consistently in his "no views." He talked eloquently on every subject and carefully avoided concluding anything. He could not say what was right, but he was satisfied that both Epicurean and Stoic were wrong, and that was enough for him. Arguing was his vocation, though it left room for flights and flourishes of rhetoric when the occasion served. In fact the disciples of the philosopher who wrote the *Gorgias* and the *Phædrus* became nothing but teachers of how to be Sophists and Rhetoricians. Such were the dregs of Greek philosophy, from which one may guess how rich its flavour and how full its body must have been in its prime.

## CHAPTER VII. ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.

### SECTION I. ROMAN HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY.

1\. The ballads or songs thought to underlie one part of Roman history will surely have mentioned many divine persons. But they will surely not have placed at the center a divine counsellor, a God of wisdom. That is not the leading trait of the Roman Jove, nor of any of the lesser demigods. They are lawgivers, rulers, preservers of boundaries, champions of right, avengers of wrong. It could never have occurred to a Latin mind to revere them chiefly, or perhaps at all, for their wit and subtlety.

2\. The heroes of early Roman history and tradition differ in the same way from the Greek hero. There is no Odysseus among them. His countrymen might easily have given his qualities to Romulus, Numa, or Publicola, saying: "Intelligence is what organises infant communities and prescribes rites and laws; if you suppose an order was created, you presume device or counsel in the one who established it." A Greek needed this, because he could not separate the two thoughts. A Roman separated them without effort. Even if he felt that wisdom was needed to preserve order, order came first in his mind and wisdom second. He might admit that the legislator was a wise man; he would never have allowed that the wise man, as such, was a legislator.

3\. We may reject much of the stories in Livy (he himself scarcely asks us to believe them), yet no one can doubt that he had a deep perception of what the history meant. A simple reader who takes his facts for granted gets the impression of a wonderful order growing up over many centuries, by mysterious influences, through conflicts of opposing forces, under divine direction. The critical investigator arrives at the same conclusion. Each event, truly or falsely recorded, whether kept by the vanity of patrician families or expressing popular sympathy or indignation, still explains the development of some new principle in the commonwealth. It shows how what was latent became manifest, and how institutions came forth when needed out of seeds sown in the soil ages before. We may now understand better which elements, Latin or Etruscan, went into the body politic. But that it was a body politic, and that influences higher than mortal gave it coherence and kept it from dissolving, remains the common result of old credulity and modern investigation.

4\. These considerations help us see why the old Roman life seems so much less a preparation for philosophy than the old Oriental or old Greek life. The seeds of all later Brahminism were in the original Hindoo faith. The step from the Homeric chief or king to the sage tyrant of Samos or Corinth is natural, and so is the step from him to the student of physics or of man. But what germs of such a student were there in the countrymen of Fabricius and Camillus? By what steps could they be led to become professors of wisdom, or hunters for it—sophists or philosophers?

### SECTION II. ORIGIN OF LATIN PHILOSOPHY.

1\. If we remember how many of our inquiries so far have been searches for an *order* in nature or in human society, we may find an answer to this question. The bare problem, "Where is wisdom found?", was not likely to occur to the Roman of any age, and he would never really understand those who had gone searching here and there for its solution. The mere wisdom-trader or hawker might at certain periods of the commonwealth enjoy some reputation, since the prizes he offered the Athenian, rhetorical skill and political power, were just as precious to the Roman. But the course of Roman history, the forms of the constitution, and the kind of arguments by which a Roman candidate won over his electors meant that skill in disputation, in general maxims, and in word-subtleties was not generally useful to him. Sophists and Rhetoricians might both exist, but they would have distinct functions. The Sophist's trade, we may be sure, would not be carried on by native hands, which would be clumsy both at making the wares and at selling them. When Rome wanted Sophists, they would be brought in among the conqueror's spoils, to march in his triumph like any other slaves and supply him with a new luxury. But the love of order was deeply seated in the Roman heart, connected with all his hardest fights and identified with his glory. If the society around him failed to satisfy it, it might produce questionings as deep and earnest as any that had ever occupied a Greek in earlier times.

2\. Such inquiries, in any form recognisable as philosophy, would of course appear late. They would be preceded by a long internal growth of the national powers, by a sudden and wonderful display of them in victories over the surrounding world, by a bewildering sense of their vastness, and by an accompanying and contradictory sense of weakness and decay. Clever Greeks coming to Rome at such a time, with a whole apparatus of notions and phrases strange to the Latin ear, would make very different impressions on different minds. A new fashion is most welcome to men who seek excitement and have exhausted their old resources. Men tired of the monotony and stateliness of Roman traditions would eagerly seize on the promise of something that would lift them above the past and let them despise it. The old conservative was himself widening the gap between present and past by his corrupt practices and by indulging the worst habits of ambition and aggrandisement to which his countrymen were inclined. He would be startled and shocked by the invasion of fantastic follies and would resist them in the coarsest and rudest ways. He would not realise that there were men far more patriotic than himself who listened to the Greek teachers in the hope of recovering a state of things they fancied had once been theirs and had departed. They listened with astonishment and admiration, even with blind and devout acquiescence, and yet they brought to the Greeks far more than they received: feelings, recollections, and hopes that could turn the driest chips of doctrine into practical realities.

3\. It may be said that the young Roman had to take what he could get. If Carneades or Cratippus was the teacher of the day, he had to learn from him and not from Plato or Aristotle, since the living voice is always mightier than the book and can transform it. This is partly true. Yet it is evident from what we have said that the Roman had a natural affinity for the later schools and could not appreciate the earlier. Epicureans, Stoics, and Academics concerned themselves with how men were to live, and had distinct, definite propositions about the condition and conduct of the human or physical universe they inhabited. The Roman was discontented with the political schemes and intrigues around him, unable to recover his ancestors' maxims, and aware of the tricks of the augurs and diviners of his land and of the state-craft worked into all his country's religion. He cared little for questions about Being or Unity, but eagerly craved anything that gave him hope of greater coherency and consistency in his own relations.

### SECTION III. THE ROMAN EPICUREAN.

1\. The poem of Lucretius is the first and most astonishing outburst of the spirit that the wisdom of the Censor and the older Romans could not hold in check. Much heightens the wonder. The philosophical poems of the nation that supplied philosophy's language and produced the most splendid poetry have perished. Only fragments remain of the verses in which Xenophanes and Parmenides gave their opinions, and Empedocles of Agrigentum is hardly more than the shadow of a name. Nor have we reason to think these men, gifted and original as they were, are to be regretted as works of art. How strange, then, that the greatest effort of Roman genius should treat a subject utterly alien to the Latin mind, written by a young man struggling with a language barren and uncouth for his purposes — a language one would have thought could become poetical only in speaking of great men's deeds and of peoples subdued to law! Some may find it more astonishing still that the theory he set out to defend was, of all that Greece had produced since Thales, the hardest and most mechanical, one would have said the flattest and most prosaic. Genius is called forth by difficulties, but we can generally recognize a fitness in the choice of subject, without which a work can hardly become a great national possession. No thoughtful reader can believe Lucretius took up the doctrine because he thought it suited to poetry, or because he wanted fame for overcoming its unsuitableness. He writes with entire conviction, his whole mind impregnated with his doctrine. That was a necessary condition of so great a poem: he felt what he said. An earnestness absent from every Greek mind for at least two centuries had taken hold of his. He may have chosen a miserable idol, but he gave it complete and devoted worship.

2\. He owed this earnestness to his Roman education. He perhaps had no strong impulse toward active life, nor much of the legal and rhetorical ability it required. The rage and contention of parties, and the atrocities and meannesses of the days of Marius, Cinna, and Sylla, which he must have heard of daily, will have distracted him. *We* can see how much better Roman society of that age, despite its abominable crimes, was than the dreary condition of Greece, even when its sleep was disturbed by the dreamy patriotic efforts that the coming of Flaminius and the Romans stirred up. *We* can see that great social principles were struggling in those party conflicts, which could not have left such a mark on history if there had not been much good mixed with the apparent evil. But to Lucretius the misery and confusion will have seemed almost without relief. Little knowing how much he owed to his country's polity, and to the truths beneath its false worship, for the disgust these sights roused in him, he will have been led to question the worth of the faith and reverence that seemed to uphold a system of falsehood and cruelty. He will probably have found most thoughtful youths about him asking the same questions, with much the same result, except that they could rest quietly in contempt of popular opinion, while he needed a positive substitute. Arriving at Athens in this state, what was more natural than that an Epicurean lecturer's words should grip his soul as they never gripped the lecturer himself? He would welcome them as deliverance from an intolerable burden, as the discovery of a region he had dreamed of but never believed in, and as satisfying the love of order that his Roman discipline had given him and that Rome's circumstances constantly affronted.

3\. A poem on the Nature of Things, written in such circumstances by a man with the vision and faculty divine, might well embody some of the deepest and truest feelings. The strongest patriotism and the greatest command of his native tongue might appear in a man who seemed to adopt all the habits and notions of a Greek. Under the guise of Epicurism he might express a religious longing for deliverance from the tyranny of powers he could not love. The Democritean concourse of atoms might give him his first notion of any scheme or order in the universe. Such a poem might well become national, for it would express the very state of mind of its age as reflected in its most gifted person. It would show the union of Greek speculation and Roman life in that age, and how Roman life asserted its dominion over the beggarly materials it had to work with.

4\. We have no excuse for dwelling long on this noble poem, both because it is so well known and because its chief light on the history of philosophy is the illustration it gives of Roman feeling at this crisis. On that point I suggest two reflections. The first concerns a marked difference between the poet and his master. Epicurus, as we have seen, valued himself mainly on the moral or human part of his system, and took the physical part from Democritus only as a resource. Lucretius, on the contrary, fixed at once on the atomic theory as the central part of his philosophy. Nothing shows more strikingly the difference between them. The Greek's problem was how to find an excuse for a voluptuous and indolent temper, sensual or not, and how to arrange the world to fit it. The Roman's delight was to recognize some principle and connection in things. Given these impulses, Lucretius was in spirit further from Epicurus than either Zeno or Chrysippus. The second peculiarity illustrates a remark already made. Lucretius craves order in the physical world, but he feels no necessary connection between it and the Nous of which Anaxagoras spoke. He can more readily regard it as the result of a concurrence of atoms. Lucretius wanted a Moral Ruler; not finding one, he became an Atheist. Has the Atheism of any Latin ever been removed by the mere acknowledgment of a skilful Designer or Demiurgus?

### SECTION IV. THE ROMAN STOIC.

1\. Some men of more adventurous genius fled "from the dregs of Romulus" to the study of the laws of the material universe. But many more found their relief in contemplating the severe figures of the elder Romans. They either found such men in their country's records or built them out of the materials those records supplied: stately characters who were indifferent to wealth, loved their country above all things, and were ready to sacrifice themselves, or whatever was dearest to them, for its sake. A whole heaven would seem to lie between such simple men and the stiff, solemn, self-conscious Stoic. Yet the two characters resembled each other outwardly enough to deceive those who felt they lacked some knowledge their fathers had not had. These people were half ashamed of their old ignorance and half afraid that a new philosophy would weaken their admiration and their patriotism. It was soothing and satisfying to be taught how they might, by rule and principle, be what their ancestors had been by some unattainable instinct, and how this Greek infusion might make them only better and more consistent Romans.

2\. We have plenty of evidence that such feelings existed, but they did not, like the thoughts of the great Epicurean, find their chief expression in words. The true utterances of Roman Stoicism are the lives of Cato and Brutus. Cato was the more formal and severe, like someone who felt he was trying to keep up a character; Brutus was the more genial and free, like someone who had really caught the spirit of the olden time. Both were Roman aristocrats at heart, whatever the language of the schools they spoke. Their lives gave the doctrine a splendour it could never have gained from its first teachers, or from Seneca and the rhetoricians who afterwards talked of it in Latin.

### SECTION V. THE PROPER ROMAN PHILOSOPHY.

1\. So far we have seen the Romans only turning the dead formulas of the Greek schools into living words and acts. But Rome was also to have a formal philosophy of its own. It would make no new discoveries and follow no course of thought not already marked out, but it would give dignity to one department of thought that even the greatest Greeks had treated as secondary. I have spoken of Cicero as an Academic, and much in his character, his political career, and his rhetorical habits might have led us to predict that this was the sect he would be drawn to. He seems to have had an equitable, balancing, compromising nature. The circumstances of his age confirmed it: no one could keep steadily to a party when parties kept shifting their ground, and he was conscientiously unwilling to stay out of political life or to set an unattainable, immovable standard for those engaged in it. His profession as an advocate riveted and perfected these tendencies. He is certainly not the person to point to as the highest form of the Roman character, but he had the Roman temperament to a remarkable degree. He seems formed to show us what his nation's intellect was at its natural best, not lifted above itself by some extraordinary impulse of genius or devotion. That is why his letters, speeches, and dialogues give so perfect an image of his age, and why some have thought a history of Rome could be written from them if every other monument were lost.

2\. But merely practical wisdom cannot put itself into words until it is mixed with an apparently incongruous element. Had Cicero not studied Greek philosophy and been something of a pedant, as far as an accomplished scholar and statesman can be one, he would not have let us understand himself and his countrymen as he has. His philosophy mattered to him and to us. Still, it is amusing to hear him speak as if philosophy had greatly moulded his habits of mind, when plainly those habits were wrought into him by old forms and institutions, by his country's circumstances, and by the tone of the men around him. These determined which philosophy he took under his patronage. He found the Academics treating philosophical questions as fairly as prosecutor and defendant were treated in the Roman courts. They reached no settlement, as he could reach none in the disputes of factions. They leaned toward established notions against the dogmatic denials of the Epicurean, and toward moderate behaviour suited to circumstances against the Stoic's fixed rule. So he was irresistibly prepossessed in their favour.

3\. What made those views attractive to the Greek was their fitness for talk, which could go on forever without any reference to life. What endeared them to the Roman was their apparent suitability for practice, their seeming to show the very point where philosophy and practice intersect. That was the point Cicero aimed at, and in his own speculations, however derived from the Academics they may seem, he keeps bringing it before us. The Greek Academician was utterly deficient in the feeling of Duty, the feeling that there is a work a man is sent into the world to do. All the sects lacked it: each framed a scheme of life or aimed at an ideal of excellence, and none acknowledged a vocation. It would be unjust to say Plato and Aristotle had no sense of duty; they must have had it, or they would not have been what they were. But it was not the prominent characteristic in either of them, or in any Greek. In Cicero, on the other hand, this feeling gives all the meaning and interest to his works. You can see he is impatient of any subject that has no direct bearing on human life; when he writes on such subjects he uses only his left hand, they never really affect him, and he has no opinions on them and does not care to have any. So he retails the opinions of all the philosophers as far as he knows them, or lets a capable representative of each sect state its views, and seems to dislike nothing but the dogmatism each shows. Yet in the end you find he has a set of firm convictions that all these controversies and his own nominal scepticism left undisturbed. He sees only a difference of words between the Peripatetics and the Academics, and clearly means this to hold of the original masters of the two schools as well. The whole subject of Being and Ideas, which Greek philosophy in its best days dealt with, is an unknown world to him. Plato he regards chiefly as the most eloquent of men; from Aristotle he got good help for the study of rhetoric. He seems to have cared nothing for physics; he prized logic chiefly as a mental exercise; and in all disputes about the nature of the gods, so far as they touch these subjects, he seems neutral, and by modern rules we might fancy him atheistic. But he is not so at all. He believes in a Divine power and a Divine government much more strongly than many who have infinitely greater opportunities of knowledge. He reached this belief without help from the Greeks, and kept it, not strengthened but not materially weakened by what he learned from them. Without a Divine Being there can be no sanctity, no duties, no laws; this was the conclusion of both his heart and his reason, and he felt it to be deeper and securer than any argument could make it. He vindicated this ground to himself and brought out the idea of Moral Obligation with a distinctness it had not had before. It would not be easy to point to passages where he discusses the subject amply and satisfactorily; the student will often complain of loose language, and will sometimes be puzzled how so much indifference to absolute truth can coexist with so strong a sense of moral duty. Yet this seems to be the total effect of his books, the result left by both their merits and their omissions: though he has established nothing, he leaves us convinced that something is established, that it is not independent of us, and that it concerns us and we are bound to act in conformity with it. His philosophical works have therefore been unjustly exalted and unjustly disparaged. If we use him as an interpreter of the older Greeks and try to understand Plato through him, we give him a station never intended for him, and he will lead us astray. If we regard him merely as the translator into eloquent Latin of what he heard from his teachers in Athens, we degrade him just as unfairly. His philosophy has substantive value; language like his can never be a mere clothing for other men's conceptions, though it may not suit the very deepest ideas. And in the works where he adopted Plato's titles and might seem to follow him most closely, the *Laws* and the *Republic*, he in fact drew most on his own native resources, and proved true his own saying that he had learned more from the Twelve Tables than from all the philosophers.

4\. The sentence upon Cicero, sealed and sanctioned by the young Octavius, was the sign that the republic had really passed away and a new age was beginning. What that age would be like, how it would affect Rome and the universe, what questions it would settle and what questions it would raise, we may have to consider later. Possibly the answer is not to be gained wholly or chiefly from Roman history. The youth whom Virgil hoped would come to the aid of a ruined age did not fulfil that task; the return of the Saturnian reign was not brought about by the son of Pollio. When Dante spoke of Virgil, his noble predecessor, as a teacher and guide in the search for wisdom, it was mainly because Virgil had led his hero into the invisible world, and had suggested to his Florentine disciple that from there he must obtain his knowledge of the destinies of Italy and of mankind.

## CHAPTER VIII. THE ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY.

### SECTION I. ALEXANDRIA.

1\. [The]{.smallcaps} kingdom of the Ptolemies in Egypt was the most remarkable result of Alexander's conquests. Its capital was worthy of his name. Much of the Greek wisdom he wanted to make supreme in the world was gathered there, and much of the wisdom of other peoples came there to pay it homage. Indian sages saw the connection between their faith and the old Egyptian mysteries. The Persian, whose people had once made war on those mysteries, could declare his belief in the conflict of good and evil powers. The Jews, whose connection with Egypt was much older, came too. A powerful Jewish colony settled there and even had a temple, and at an Egyptian king's command the Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek.

2\. So the country where we find the first beginnings of civilization, and perhaps of speculation, was appointed to receive streams of thought that had been running in different directions from the birth of Moses to the birth of our Lord. Could these streams really mingle? Could we tell which had come down from the highest ground, and to which river the rest were tributary?

3\. The Gymnosophist, or Brahmin, was a curious subject for Greek observers and geographers. But apart from Pyrrho, no Greek thought was ever affected by him. The dualism of the Persians had entered deeply and practically into the thoughts of Socrates and his great disciple. But neither in its native form nor in any other was it likely to affect men who no longer felt a conflict within themselves, and who only discoursed and criticised. Egyptian animal worship had become too gross for any symbolism, and if symbolism took no other form, it would only disgust the Greeks. So none of these doctrines could subdue the Greek mind or even change its direction. Nor could the teachers of Alexandria interpret the faith of any people of East or West. They knew nothing really of Plato or Aristotle. They could comment on them ably, but had never thought or felt with them.

4\. In time another element was added to those the Ptolemies had gathered. The Roman appeared on Egyptian soil, and Egypt became a Roman province. This seemed proof that something in the world was stronger than Greek subtlety.

5\. Yet here, as elsewhere, the Roman conqueror did homage to the Greek slave. No countryman of Cicero would have dared to voice his own thoughts in an Alexandrian school that his country's legions protected or overawed. He might be conscious of a talent for government unknown to any Greek, yet he felt that even the Greeks of the lowest age had a right to be his masters in philosophy. Nowhere were his maxims of duty and obedience less likely to be heeded than in Egypt. Among all the motley classes of Alexandria's population, scarcely any but the Roman soldiers would be at all impressed by them.

6\. Of all who visited the city of the Ptolemies, the Jew is perhaps the last in whom people would expect to find an expounder or reconciler of other peoples' thoughts. Did not his calling and position forbid him to meddle with the words and acts of the uncircumcised? Was he not bound to regard their search after wisdom as profane and dangerous? Did not the divine lore he had received exclude and condemn all other? We have partly considered the principle behind these questions already. Now we have to see what answer the facts give.

### SECTION II. THE JEWISH PHILOSOPHY.

1\. The apocryphal books, except the two books of Maccabees, hold little of interest or value as history. Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon are philosophical in the strict, formal sense. Much in them seems trivial and inflated to most Western readers. But the passages that speak of Wisdom as a teacher, as an object of passionate love, and as that for which everything else is to be sacrificed have a beauty everyone admits. Their fervour was caught from studying writings that truly belong to Solomon's age. The books are commentaries on his work, but more than commentaries. The writer was not chiefly a book student; he had himself pursued wisdom and lived under her discipline. The books devoutly recognize the sacredness of Jewish history. The Divine Ruler of the nation is seen as the Ruler of each individual's spirit, and every fact of the revelation is treasured as needed for the education and meditation of the seeker of wisdom. Yet it is not only language that separates these books from the Scriptures and connects them with Greek thought. They have a Platonic character that we do not find in Cicero or even in Cicero's great pupil. Intellectually the son of Sirach, whoever he was, was far inferior to Aristotle or Cicero. Still, we cannot help believing that Plato would have sympathised with him more than with them. Plato would have found him able to grasp positions that all their familiarity with the technical language of the schools could not have enabled them to master.

2\. When these books were written, the Jew had probably not yet *claimed* his connection with the philosophers of Greece and of the world. About the beginning of the Christian era a Jew was teaching in Alexandria who kept the profoundest reverence for his country's divine oracles. Yet he acknowledged that the Indian Gymnosophist, the Greek philosopher, and the Egyptian symbolizer had received wisdom from the Source of wisdom. So far as they were led out of the pursuit of visible and sensible things, he held, they were led by One who seeks to bring man's spirit into communion with Himself.

3\. Few particulars are known of the early life of this Alexandrian Jew, Philo. His own account of his embassy to Caligula, made to represent the state of his countrymen in Egypt, is a curious document for Roman and Jewish history. It tells us little about his life, except that as a very old man he kept his patriotic sympathies, had not destroyed his practical powers by speculation, and had the confidence of his fellow Jews. Anything else must be gathered from his books. Those books had great influence on the early Christian church and won him the name of the *Theosopher*.

4\. Examining this word will best explain the writings that earned it. The word *philosopher* constantly recurs in Philo. He speaks of the lover and pursuer of wisdom as the spiritual or divine man, who has left the downward path and is seeking his proper object. But the seeker of wisdom is also the seeker of God. Wisdom is not an aggregate of conclusions, not the human soul, not something diffused through all things. It is the I Am who spoke to Moses in the bush, the Instructor and Inspirer of all the prophets, He who gave the law on Sinai.

5\. Philo confessed, as any Jew must, an absolute Being, dwelling in light which no man has seen or can see. How such a Being could converse with man, and how there could be sympathy between Him and a creature, was the wonder of the Hebrew psalmist and prophet. But he believed while he wondered. Philo saw that such intercourse was as much implied in all the Hebrew records, and in the nature of God Himself, as His self-existence and self-concentration. The two truths could not be reconciled in a theory. A Divine Word, a Logos, speaking to the mind and spirit opened to hear the voice, was in Philo's view the reconciliation. He traced such a speaker in every expression of the divine book, the obvious and the minute, and in every step of Hebrew history.

6\. This principle, worked out through all the Scripture narratives, is the peculiarity of Philo's writings, and is his philosophy or theosophy. On this ground he can look with interest at the Brahminical aspiration after absorption in the divine essence. He can look as well at men's struggles to know the divine, the beautiful, the good; their eagerness to escape sensual defilement and the prison-house of the body; their sense of moral obligation; and their mythological or natural allegories. Most men tread the path of sensuality and darkness. A few, in all countries and generations, have been led along the upward path as wisdom-seekers or seekers of God. They have been so because the Divine Word or Wisdom looked upon them and chose them for the knowledge and service of Himself.

7\. From the hints we threw out when we left the Jewish Prophets for the wide field of Gentile speculation, it may be fancied that we shall gladly rest in Alexandrian theosophy as the end of our inquiries. We spoke of the Divine Word who taught the prophets as the one source from which, as they and we believe, all illumination proceeded. Philo, holding that faith, has found a standing point from which he can regard with affectionate sympathy many earnest thoughts that have occupied men's hearts in different ages. He has escaped the temptation to suppose that any general theory or system can unite these thoughts, that is, the temptation to kill them in order to harmonise them. He has told us what the philosopher is pursuing and who guides him. But serious questions must be asked before we give ourselves up to the hopes this teacher seems to hold out. What has he done to explain the great puzzle of the Bhagavad Gita, how practical life can be reconciled with the life of the Brahminical sage? What link is there between his mysticism and the dry, businesslike reflections of Khoung-fou-tseu? What step has he taken toward solving the problem of Plato's republic? His books abundantly honour the Aristotelian "theory." But what hint do they give to explain Aristotle's assertion that politics is the architectonic science, or to bring his reverence for human relationships into agreement with his master's communism? The Alexandrian shows some respect for the Roman sense of duty. But how can he help any Roman understand his feeling that a divine power had been building up his city for generations? How can he foretell whether the battle of Actium and the death of the Egyptian queen would restore or destroy its order? How can he guess whether Augustus, or a ruler of quite a different kind, would found a universal kingdom in which freemen could dwell?

8\. On all these points Philo is silent. The meditations of the philosopher or theosopher are everything to him, and the condition of the universe, except as it consists of philosophers or theosophers, is nothing. So he cannot satisfy the demands of philosophy. In its highest as in its humblest form, philosophy is occupied with questions not about itself or the class that professes it, but about nature, man, and God. Did this incapacity come from clinging too closely to his own records? *They* speak from first to last of a polity, and describe its gradual growth out of a single family under Divine superintendence. Philo sees nothing of this growth. The shepherd life of Abraham and the acts of Moses and Joshua are nothing to him, except as they suggest divine allegories from which the theosopher may draw nourishment. Is it not possible, then, that he failed to explain Plato and the teachers of the old world precisely because he did not take simply enough the books he studied so profoundly and admired so earnestly, and in which he thought he could find the essence of all philosophy?

1\. In the days of Philo a society arose which said it was the expansion and fulfilment of the polity whose beginnings are recorded in the Hebrew histories. A teacher who had lately become one of its officers was accused by a synagogue of the Alexandrians before the High Priest and Sanhedrim at Jerusalem. The charge was speaking blasphemous words against the temple and the law, and saying that One was come who would change the customs Moses had delivered. He defended himself not by interpreting the story allegorically, but by a plain narrative. He showed how in each period there had been a fresh unfolding of a divine kingdom through human agents, and how each period assumed and required the manifestation of One who should prove its foundation to be actually divine and actually human. That witness was stoned, as those who spoke like him in former days had been.

2\. Another Jew, who was present at his death and took part in it, soon incurred his countrymen's hatred. He invited heathen citizens of Corinth, Ephesus, and Thessalonica to join the society that began in Palestine and at first included only circumcised men. His disciples at Corinth, full of the Greek passion for wisdom, fancied that he and an Alexandrian teacher were rival sophists, each wanting to palm off his own doctrine and bind them into a sect called by his name. He told them that that teacher and he had come to proclaim a hidden, divine wisdom. But it was a wisdom that had shone forth in weakness, and its only perfect manifestation was in a Man who had been crucified. He told them their fellowship included the weakest, the most ignorant, the most evil. Its members formed one body in one Head, and whoever sought to divide them, or boasted of some wisdom of his own, was their enemy and destroyer. He told the people of the city where Heraclitus had dwelt that all spiritual blessings were theirs, all the mysteries of divine knowledge. Yet they were made up of all the kindreds and tribes of the earth, the invisible and visible worlds being reconciled in Him who united divine glory with human nothingness. At Jerusalem he said that this divine society was the flower and consummation of what their fathers had possessed, what began in Abraham's tent. Finally, to the Jews and Gentiles of Rome he asserted the worth of outward law. It made men conscious of internal evil. It made them realize the opposition between the flesh, which flies from what is right and true, and the spirit, which desires but cannot attain. And it drives man to seek a righteousness above his own, one that condemns his evil nature and justifies and satisfies the cravings of his inner man.

3\. Finally, an aged Galilean fisherman, living in the country where Greek philosophy began, proclaimed the reconciliation of the Revelation that had been from the beginning with the Light that had shined afresh upon the world. He declared that the Word was with God and was God, that in Him was Life, and that the Life was the Light of men. He uttered a divine Name that expressed The Being and The Unity. He saw a city descending out of heaven, with this Unity as its centre and ground.

4\. Some readers fancy that ancient and modern history are divided by the so-called fall of the Western Empire. The historian of philosophy cannot adopt their arrangement. The point we have reached is where the curtain falls on the speculations of the old world. When it rises again we shall find new actors, occupied with questions closely connected with all we have considered but in many important respects different. A new element has been infused into the minds of Pagans and Jews as well as of Christians. If we agree with Philo that the speculations of men before Christ were guided by a Teacher who knew what was in man, we need not fear to enter the more complicated and embarrassing inquiries of the later time.