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
born b.c. 342, died b.c. 270.
1. Epicurus, 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.