Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy

Contents

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

1. Dedication — Preface

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

2. Introduction

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

3. Chapter I. The Hebrews

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

4. Chapter II. Egyptians, Phœnicians, Assyrians

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

5. Chapter III. Hindoo Philosophy

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

6. Chapter IV. Chinese Philosophy

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

7. Chapter V. Persian Philosophy

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

8. Chapter VI. Grecian Philosophy

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

9. Division II.—Greek Philosophy from Socrates to Aristotle

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

10. Section II. Socrates — Section III. The Socratics

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

11. Section IV. Plato

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

12. Division III.—Aristotle

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

13. Section IV. The Physics of Aristotle

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

14. Section V. The Metaphysics of Aristotle

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

15. Section VI. Aristotelian Psychology — Section VIII. Politics of Aristotle

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

16. Division IV.—The Later Sects

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

17. Chapter VII. Roman Philosophy

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

18. Chapter VIII. The Alexandrian Philosophy

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