prophetic clearness of sight which may well astonish modern critics. He
regarded motion in these atoms as a primal fact, probably deriving it
from the theory of Heracleitus. He held that as these atoms collided in
the void, not always directly, but obliquely, the striking and the
struck assumed a rotatory motion, and so established vortices which
either attracted suitable atoms or rejected others by the centrifugal
force of this rotation. Thus were constructed not only the great spheres
that we observe in the sky, but all the ordinary objects around us. Into
his explanations of the causes of the irregular forms of these objects
I cannot enter, by reason of their intricacy. But to what consequences
his theory led him may be told you in a sentence. He maintained, with
the imagination of a great scientific mind, that there were an endless
number of world-systems through space, differing merely in magnitude,
some furnished with several moons, some in process of becoming, others,
owing to collisions, in process of destruction, some of them wholly
deficient in moisture, and hence devoid of animal and plant life. These
are all consequences which we have drawn from the use of the telescope
and even the spectroscope, but which this wonderful man reached by way
of philosophical thinking.
Aristotle makes it his chief objection to the Atomic theory that it is
purely descriptive of phenomena without assigning any cause for the
primeval motion of the atoms; that it recognises no Architect, no
Demiurge who set the myriad crowd of particles into motion, and then
into regulated action. But Aristotle was misled by an assumption which
has infected philosophy down to the present day--the assumption that a
state of rest is prior to, and more natural to matter than a state of
motion. This prejudice did not mislead Democritus, though it is an idol
not only of the cave, as Bacon would say, but also of the forum. We
have been misled and deceived by relative want of motion, to consider
that until disturbed by an active impulse matter occupies a fixed place.
But now, I would almost say since the twentieth century dawned, this old
fallacy is giving way to the newer conception that there is no such
thing as rest in nature, nay not even within the particles of any solid
body. So then the primal assumption of the Greek thinker that motion is
the natural state of matter was a wonderful anticipation of science, and
shows once more what giant strides the human race may make by thinking
as compared with the mere recording of experiments. Even now, when
students of experimental physics are degenerating into mere mechanics,
who seek to interrogate nature by the use of delicate machinery, and
carefully recorded occurrences, I am assured by those in our great
University who have been compelled in earlier life to acquire a sound
knowledge of Greek philosophy, that the study of the old
_Hylozoists_--the Ionic schools we have reviewed--is the very best
introduction to the higher task of framing theories from experiments,
and when I have heard read in the schools essays written in ignorance of
these theories, I have often wondered at the absence of scientific
logic of consistent thinking, of clear imagining which characterises the
modern scientist. And when we are faced in our universities by the
gigantic demands of modern scientists for laboratories, machinery,
upkeep, and what not, by way of promoting what they call very
ridiculously _original research_, they should be told openly and
constantly that no mere mechanic, no mere tradesman, however splendidly
equipped, will ever be worth one straw in original research. Such a high
calling, if it is not to be mere name, a mere imposture, requires as its
first implement a trained intellect, taught to speculate, and to devise
theories which may or may not be verified or illustrated by mechanical
tools. The greatest discoverers in modern science were men with bad
tools, and small equipment. The old Greeks had none at all, and yet how
many of the world’s mysteries did they approach and solve, merely by the
force of pure and sound speculation! When we hear little modern men of
science wondering how the Greeks could have got so far without modern
instruments, we feel rather inclined to tell them we wonder the moderns
have done so much with the help of these, for in abstract thinking lies
the real basis of every great discovery.
So far, the course of Greek philosophy has led us to the side of
science, to the constitution of the world, to the immensity of space, to
the physical construction of animal and vegetable life, to the problem
of the duration of the universe, to the dreams about its origin.
Regarding all this as _natural philosophy_ (to use an obsolete but
convenient expression), there remains another orb of Greek speculation
which took rise with Socrates, passed on through Plato and Aristotle to
the Stoic and Epicurean schools, and even illumined with its setting
rays the old world passing into the night of the Dark Ages. Two things,
says the philosopher Kant, impress me always with their peerless
majesty--the starry heaven above, and the Moral Law within. It is this
latter aspect of human philosophy, bound up as it is on the one side
with profound metaphysic, on the other with ordinary practical life,
that I must now speak. But here, where the material is large, and our
evidence very complete, it is not expedient that I should detain you at
any length. It may be new to some of you that Parmenides or Leucippus
have been the fathers of modern systems; but none of you will doubt for
a moment the colossal influence of Plato and Aristotle upon modern
thought.
You must beware of exaggerating the revolution in philosophy produced by
Socrates and the Sophists. It may indeed be true in their case that they
despised scientific speculation, and did not care to make researches
into the constitution of the universe. Gorgias even erected into a
theory his scepticism regarding the reality of our knowledge, and wrote
a famous tract on the impossibility of knowing anything; and he was by
no means the only nihilist in the course of Greek philosophy. But when
we come to Plato, we find high physical speculation, we find high
theories of the universe, we find all the learning of his predecessors
woven into his system, or utilised by way of illustration. The ideas of
the Pythagoreans in particular, influenced him constantly, and his
advocacy of a training in geometry, which may, more than people think,
have shaped the curriculum of modern public schools in Europe, is
Pythagorean in spirit.
But in spite of this strong recommendation, it does not appear that
Plato himself made any advances in that science. His aim was for the
moral reform of the individual, and with him of society, by metaphysical
and ethical training. He had a higher opinion of the value of education
than even the modern democrat, or English Radical, who imagines that by
infusing knowledge into the masses, you can make them equal to the
classes in refinement and in the amenities of life. But Plato’s
education was intended strictly for the ruling minority; he did not
think the artisan or the labourer fit for this high privilege, and in
all his ideal schemes, he set up either the exceptional man as a monarch
(in the _Politicus_), a small oligarchy of guardians (in the
_Republic_), or a fixed code of strict _Laws_, with severe penalties for
any violation or even questioning of them--all clearly aristocratic
forces,--as the safeguards of society. And in spite of all these ethical
safeguards, he did not believe that any state, even if ideally
constructed, would last for ever, but that it must live through a youth
and a maturity and ultimately reach the decrepitude of age.
I will not revert to the political speculations of Plato, which belong
to another part of my subject. My present concern is with his theology
and his metaphysic. Is it any wonder that the early Christian thinkers,
such as Saint Augustine, delighted in him and called him the Attic
Moses? In his _Republic_ he goes so far as to propose for his ideal
state the expulsion of Homer and the other Epic poets, and the
establishment of a loftier creed, as necessary for pure and sound
morals. The true deity must be one, and the author of all good. He must
be free from all disturbance of passion or caprice, without love or
jealousy, without pride or interest. Any defects there may be in the
world are due, not to his want of benevolence, but to his want of
omnipotence in controlling the necessities of things, or perhaps rather
because no being, omnipotent or not, can possibly be conceived as
reconciling absolute contradictories.
It may, for example, be better and nobler for the creation that beings
should exist which have a free will of their own and which are not like
machines controlled by invincible necessity. But if they have indeed
free will, how is it possible they should not go wrong, and cause evil
in the world as the outcome of their liberty? Yet if this be the cause
of evil in the world, it implies a higher and better state than one of
perfect order, with the ideas of virtue and merit expunged from
existence.
Plato goes further than any but the highest Christian theologians when
he declares the Moral Law to be eternal and immutable, and to be binding
even on the Author of the universe. In other words, the great mediæval
controversy,--whether God does a thing because it is right, or whether a
thing must be right because God does it,--this controversy is solved in
the sense of what the Cambridge Platonists have called Immutable
Morality. If such be the obligation under which even the Deity acts, it
is an obvious corollary that nothing in the conduct of men is comparable
to justice, nothing in dignity equal to the obeying of the Moral Law,
without any regard of consequences. Nay more, to be punished for
wrong-doing is far happier and better than to escape the consequences,
and so to miss the great lesson that crime brings with it misery as a
just consequence. Accordingly, a clear knowledge of moral principles is
of the first moment to all men, and in Plato’s day it was often a more
difficult problem to choose the right course, than to follow it when
discovered. This is the meaning of those many researches into the proper
connotation of terms expressing moral ideas. What is _justice_, what is
_temperance_, what is _chastity_, what is _holiness_? On all these,
there was little difficulty in showing by discussion that the popular
notions were vague, and often self-contradictory. The first step to a
purer life was to understand its conditions, to bring the intellect, as
well as the will, to bear upon the conduct of men. Hence a man who felt
no difficulty in doing his duty, when he once saw it plainly before him,
might well say with Socrates and with Plato, that virtue was knowledge,
that right living was a science, and that therefore a high education was
the necessary condition of a noble character.
This attitude is foreign to the morals of Christianity, which accepts
the child and the ignorant as better fitted for salvation than the wise
and prudent. But such a theory, like that of a primitive Church where
the members had all things in common, may be very practical at the
opening of a revolution, yet may afterwards be found impracticable. It
was not merely owing to its supposed corruption and decadence that the
Mediæval Church came to ignore that poverty and equality of all
Christians which we find at Jerusalem in the Acts of the Apostles. There
is an aristocracy among men which no system of religion, of morals, of
politics can ignore without disastrous consequences, and that is the
aristocracy of intellect. This was the lesson which Plato taught in
every page, and this it was which made him speculate upon the nature of
the soul, and its relation to the Author of the universe, and to the
knowledge of things higher and deeper than mere ordinary experience.
It was only gradually that he arrived at his conviction of the
immortality, or rather of the eternity of the soul; probably it was
suggested to him by the mystics and theologians among the Greeks. But in
his dialogue known as the _Phædo_, he has discussed this now accepted
belief with all its difficulties. In the person of Socrates, he has
courted all the objections, and has endeavoured to show on metaphysical
principles that the soul, being a perfectly simple active principle,
distinct from, and superior to, the body, will not pass away with the
death of its tabernacle but will exist hereafter, as it has existed,
from eternity to eternity. The late Erwin Rohde, a critic not at all
favourable to revealed religion, says, I think with great truth, that
“no human teacher has ever done so much as Plato to extend this belief,”
which has produced not only the noblest spiritual life, but also the
noblest poetry. You know it in your English poets, best of all perhaps
in the sober Wordsworth--
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
And again:
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And hear the children sporting on the shore,
And hear the mighty waves, rolling for evermore.
Need I pass on to Aristotle, and show in detail how his philosophy so
dominated mediæval learning that it was adopted and protected by the
Church, and that it became one of the efforts of the spirit of reform in
logic and in psychology to break the shackles which this great thinker
had, as the modern spirits often complained, forged to keep the human
intellect from its advance? Need I tell you that this was owing to a
travesty of the great man, learned not from his own pregnant words but
through translations and commentaries?
I will conclude with a reference to the two great systems that dominated
the Roman world after Plato and Aristotle had turned philosophy into an
ethical channel--I mean those of the Stoics and of the Epicureans, who
mapped out human character with a clearness that makes them our teachers
to the present day. Not that they avoided speculating on the nature of
the universe. The physics of Epicurus, borrowed from Democritus, are
among the most difficult of studies, and the Stoics embraced in their
view as the motive of action of their wise man all the harmony of the
universe. These speculations may now be antiquated, but as the teachers
of ethical types, as the expounders of what the highest human wisdom
finds in its search for happiness, these two schools have fixed the
types of civilised men for all time. Every man in this audience is born
either a Stoic or an Epicurean, or what is perhaps far more common,
alternates from one to the other according to circumstances. In its
simplest form the great question is: Are we to live for duty, or live
for pleasure--not of course mere vulgar pleasure of the senses, but that
refined balance of intellectual and moral pleasure which you will find
best explained in my old friend Walter Pater’s _Marius the Epicurean_;
or else are we to seek for our standard outside ourselves, in the laws
which the Moral Governor of the world has established for its welfare,
and co-operate with Him in the promotion of His great ends? Such is the
ideal wise man of the Stoics, who despised all earthly delights, all
physical pleasures, for the sake of the great law of duty, and the
great mission of living for some nobler purpose than mere animal or
social comforts. We have its best expression in the peroration of
Cicero’s account of the system[47]; or if you will have it in a more
familiar shape, in the loud clarion of Saint Paul: “As deceivers, and
yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live;
as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as
having nothing, yet possessing all things.”[48] For he too was bred a
Stoic, and was not afraid in his addresses to cultivated men of his day
to preach Stoic theology, akin to Pantheism.
If the time should ever come when men will no longer be led by
revelation, when they will reject miracle and prophecy, and determine to
be led by the mere light of reason (men have often anticipated such a
future, regardless of the fact that hitherto religious scepticism has
always ended in a recoil from this liberty, and a revival of positive
and even superstitious creeds)--if, I say, such an age should ever lay
aside the Christian faith, there will still remain the ethical types
which Zeno and Epicurus have crystallised in their systems--there will
always remain the man of duty and the man of pleasure, the man who
lives for others and he who lives for himself, in terms of modern
philosophic jargon, the Altruist and the Egoist, the Spiritualist and
the Materialist.
* * * * *
And here I break off my unfinished task, unfinished indeed as it must
be, for beyond the many things that I have omitted though I knew them,
there are many more omitted because I knew them not, because I have not
fathomed the unfathomable depth and the myriad variety of that genius
which is living, and suggesting, and working all through the ideal
aspects of our modern life. There are probably few men who have lived
longer and more intimately with the old Greeks, in more phases of their
life, ever probing and seeking for deeper and better knowledge of their
vast legacy to mankind, of which the rodent tooth of time, the
sacrilegious hands of men, have lost or destroyed so much. The farther I
seek, the wider the vistas I see opening before me. So now, when my part
in the race is nearly run, there remains to me no higher earthly
satisfaction than this, that I have carried the torch of Greek fire
alight through a long life--no higher earthly hope than this, that I
may pass that torch to others, who in their turn may keep it aflame with
greater brilliancy perhaps, but not with more earnest devotion, “in the
Parliament of men, the Federation of the world.”
INDEX
A
Achæan League, organisation and dissolution, 203, 204
_Acontius and Cydippe_, love story of a modern type, 94
Actium, battle, 71
_Æneid_ of Virgil, _see_ Virgil
Æolic school, characteristic, 53
Æschylus, source of his tragedy, 36, 37;
one of the “three tragic poets,” 47;
Milton’s view of, 47;
characters of his plays, 48;
judge of tragedy, 73;
music of, 136
_Agamemnon_: great play, 27;
opening of, 48;
“vulgar and trivial persons,” 48;
contributes to Byron, 55;
Browning’s version, 57;
often translated into English, 58
_Prometheus Vinctus_: model for _Paradise Lost_, 47
Æsculapius, shrine of, 176
_Agamemnon_, _see_ Æschylus
Agatharchus, discovers principles of perspective, 130
Alcæus, poet, 37
_Alexander_, _Life of_, 97
Alexandria, library, collecting of, gives impetus to literary criticism, 91
Alexandrian school, development of mechanics, 162;
invention of the _sakia_, 165
_Alkestis_, _see_ Euripides
Alma-Tadema, Sir Edward, influenced by Greek art, 131, 132
Amyot, imitated Greek novel, 96
Anatomy, how studied by Greeks, 148
Anaxagoras, principal feature of his system, 229;
on original particles, 229;
Aristotle on, 229;
his famous _Nous_, 230, 231
Anaximander, makes advances in astronomy, 216, 217;
geological observations of, 218
Anaximenes, idea of the fundamental element of the world, 216, 217;
theory of eclipses, 217
Antiphon, treatises of, 82
_Antony and Cleopatra_, _see_ Shakespeare
_Aphrodite_ of Melos, mentioned, 118
Apollonius of Perga, treatment of conic sections, 161, 167
Apollonius Rhodius, delights in nature, 59
_Argonautics_: great epic, 41;
model for Milton, 43;
and Goethe’s _Faust_, 44
Arabic numerals, 157
Archilochus, poet, 37
Archimedes, triumphs of, in mechanics, 162, 167
Architecture, earliest form of house, 99;
houses of the dead, 100-102, 110, 111;
square house, 102;
evolution of classical, 103;
building materials, 103;
Doric, 104;
temples, 105, 110;
distinction between house and temple, 106, 107;
perfection of religious, 106, 107;
arch not used by Greeks, 107, 108;
Greek and Roman, compared, 108;
purpose in parts of a building, 109;
origin of arch, 109;
Roman use of arch, 110;
ornamentation of, by sculpture, 120
Archytas, 167
_Areopagitica_, _see_ Milton
_Argonautics_, _see_ Apollonius Rhodius
Argos, slaves in, 188
Aristides, studied oratory, 70
Aristocracies, in classical and mediæval times, 184
Aristophanes, as critic, 92;
ridicules Asklepiads, 176
Aristophanes, diction and metre, 37;
greatest master of Greek comedy, 60, 61;
Frere’s translation, 61, 64;
Rogers’s translation, 61;
influence and legacy, 61
_Birds and Frogs_: 27
Aristotle, almost canonised, 19;
criticism of _Iphigenia in Aulis_, 62, 72;
criticism of Medea, 62;
distinction between prose and poetry, 62, 63;
on Herodotus, 62, 63, 73;
on dramatic poetry and history, 72, 74;
and Herodotus, on style and subject of history, 74;
treatise on Language, 149;
treatise on Reasoning, 150;
arithmetical proof of theorem in geometry, 156;
on geometry, 159;
“master of those that knew,” 167;
brought up in Socratic method, 167;
style of writing, 167, 168;
system of collaboration, 168, 171;
collaborators, 169;
does no original work in mathematics, 169;
competence in mathematics, 170;
sciences promoted by, 171;
views on slavery, 189;
views on craftsmen, 189;
essential in his ideal of a state, 206;
objection to atomic theory, 233;
influence on modern thought, 237;
his philosophy and the Church, 242
_Constitution of Athens_: 169
_Poetic_: on tragic poetry, 61;
on dramatic poetry and history, 72
Aristoxenus, collaborator with Aristotle, 169
Arithmetic, starting-point of mathematics, 153;
importance of, to Pythagoras, 153;
numbers the essence of the universe, 153, 154;
Greek meaning of, 154;
Pythagorean speculations on natural series of units, 155;
specimens of treatment by Pythagoras, 156;
importance of numbers ten and twelve, 156;
Greek notation, 157;
Euclid’s works on, 161;
books on history of, 170
Arnold, Matthew, compares Milton’s style with Virgil’s, 46;
writes plays after Greek models, 58
_Merope_: 58
Art, earliest Greek, 12;
proper province of, 33, 34;
use of the term, 98
Artificiality of Greek poetry, defined, 33, 34
Asklepiads, method of, 176
Assemblies, in Greek democracies, 183
Astronomy, books on history of, 170
_Atalanta_, _see_ Swinburne
Athens, debts in, 186;
leadership, 201;
degeneration of spiritual life in, 210
Atomic theory, developed by Leucippus and Democritus, 231, 232;
results of, 233;
Aristotle’s objections to, 233
Atomists, doctrine of, 218, 219
Atreus, tomb of, 102, 111
Attic citizens, character, 208
Attic Code of laws, 190, 261
Attic life, portrayed by Menander, 208, 209
B
Bacchylides, comparison of Gray with, 54
Beehive huts, earliest form of house, 99;
extant examples, 99, 100;
not easily defended, 99;
once a general type, 100;
houses of the dead, 100-102;
Treasury of Athens, 101;
development of, 102
Biography, Plutarch, model, 80
_Birds and Frogs_, of Aristophanes, 27
Blow’s anthem, “I beheld and lo! a great multitude,” 126
Boccaccio, and Greek novels, 95
Botany, promoted by Aristotle, 171
Botticelli, Greek influence on, 131
Brougham, Lord, on Demosthenes, 84
Browning, Robert, his version of _Agamemnon_, 57;
version of Euripides, 57, 58, 64
Brydges, Sir Egerton, on choruses in _Samson Agonistes_, 50
Buckle’s _Civilisation_, famous opening, 5
Burke, Edmund, style influenced by Isocrates, 90;
translation of the _Tract on the Sublime_, 92
Burlington Art Club of London, collection of Greek fragments, 21
Byron, Lord, leader of Romantic school, 55;
knowledge of Greek poetry, 55;
borrows from Æschylus, 55;
interested in Greek life and Greece, 56;
interests Romanticists in Greece, 56
Byzantine architecture, 18
C
Calverley’s _Theocritus_, 64
Cambridge Platonists, 240
Carrey, Jacques, drawings of Parthenon, 52
Cathedral of Henry the Lion at Brunswick, 119
Chalmers, Thomas, Scotch orator, style, 90
Chapman, translation of the Iliad, 45, 51
_Charioteer_ of Delphi, 117
Choral hymns, Doric, 41
Cicero on Pindar, 50;
on history, 80;
style modelled on that of Isocrates, 88, 90
_De Finibus_: 245
City states, in Greece, 183;
combinations and alliances, 200
Colours, use, 118
Comedy, Greek, influence, 60, 61
Composition in sculpture, 120, 122
_Comus_, _see_ Milton
Constantinople, adheres to Hellenic traditions, 182
_Constitution of Athens_, 169
Contracts, civil, 194
Conversation, perfection of Greek style, 90, 91;
Plato’s _Dialogues_, 91
Corcyrean massacre, Thucydides on, 77
Cornford, Mr., _Thucydides Mythistoricus_, referred to, 77