Thus in Plato we have a man of great original mind attempting with this

instrument of induction and definition to form a scheme of the universe,

which divides under his hand into a triple aspect of ethics, physics, and

dialectics.(365) No doubt his main intention was to offer to the cultured

and reflective few,—that inner circle to which his teaching and his

writings were directed,—a philosophy which should serve them as a

religion,(366) which should fill up the gaps and remove the anomalies of

the existing worship, purifying and restoring it, while it preserved amity

with it notwithstanding. Such being his intention, the manner in which he

treats the doctrine of the Divine Being is the more remarkable. Instead of

basing his philosophy upon it, and showing its relation as a part of his

system of physics, ethics, and dialectics, he speaks of it frequently

indeed, but always incidentally.(367) It is not so with other doctrines

which he has at heart. Three of his finest dialogues are dedicated to

setting forth as many aspects of his doctrine as to the soul’s

immortality; the Phædrus treats of its preëxistence; the Banquet of the

influence of immortality on the relations of the present life; the Phædo

of death as the means of a happy futurity.(368) But no one collects

together and lucidly exhibits his view of the divine nature. This has to

be picked out of his writings, a bit here, and another there, and put

together by the student. No doubt he felt, as he has said,(369) “with

regard to the Maker and the Father of this universe it is hard to find him

out, and when you have found him impossible to describe him to all men.”

He was intimately convinced that the great mass of mankind was quite

unsuited to receive the conception of the Divine Being which he had

formed. But I believe there to have been another reason of greater force

with him for his not having presented as a whole his conclusions on this

central doctrine of all. It was not merely that the fate of his master

Socrates was ever before him,(370) but the singular position which he held

with regard to the established worship. He wished to correct, not to

destroy it; he wished to reduce it to monotheism, and yet to preserve

polytheism. The two are bound together in his mind. If then his writings

be carefully analysed, and every reference to the Supreme Being put

together into a sort of mosaic,(371) we should find the following picture.

The everlasting essence of things, with which Philosophy deals, is the

highest object. Ideas are those everlasting gods after the pattern of

which the world and all things which are in it are formed, and the

Godhead, taken absolutely, is not distinct from the highest Idea. Plato

sets forth the causality of Ideas and the sway of reason in the world

together with the impossibility to explain what is generated save by an

Ingenerate, motion save by a soul, and the ordered disposition of the

world, working out a purpose, save by reason; and in all which he declares

respecting the Godhead, the Idea of Good, of the highest metaphysical and

ethical perfection, is his guiding-point. As this highest Idea stands at

the head of all Ideas as the cause of all being and knowledge, so the one

everlasting invisible God, the Former and Father of all things, stands at

the head of all the gods, alike difficult to find and to describe. Just as

the above Idea is distinguished by the conception of the Good, so Plato

selects goodness as God’s most essential attribute. It is on this ground

that he maintains the Godhead to be absolutely good and upright, and its

operation to be merely good and upright; against the old notion which

imputed envy to it, and derived evil from it. Again, in opposition to the

fabulous appearances of the gods, it is from the goodness of the Godhead

that he deduces its unchangeableness, inasmuch as what is perfect can

neither be changed by anything else, nor change itself, and so become

worse. He adds, the Godhead will never show itself to men other than it

is, since all falsehood is foreign to it; inasmuch as to falsehood in the

properest sense, that is, ignorance and self-deception, it is not exposed,

and has no need to deceive others. He extols the divine perfection, to

which no beauty and no excellence is wanting; the divine power, which

embraces everything and can do everything which is possible, that is,

which does not involve a moral or a metaphysical contradiction: for

instance, it is impossible for God to wish to change Himself, for evil to

cease, and from the doctrine respecting the forming of the world and

matter it is clear that the divine activity in producing is limited by the

nature of the finite.(372) He extols the divine wisdom which disposes all

things to its purpose; its omniscience, which nothing escapes; its

justice, which leaves no transgression unpunished and no virtue

unrewarded; its goodness, which makes the best provision for all. He

rejects, as notions taken from man, not merely the Godhead’s having a

body, but likewise all those tales which impute passions, quarrels, crimes

of every kind to the gods. He declares them to be exalted above pleasure

and displeasure, to be untouched by any evil; and is full of moral

indignation at the thought that they allow themselves to be won over, or

rather corrupted, by prayers and offerings. Moreover he shows that

everything is ordered and ruled by Divine Providence, which extends over

the least as well as the greatest, and as regards men is especially

convinced that they are a carefully-tended possession of the Godhead, and

that all things must issue in good to those who through virtue gain its

goodwill. If the unequal and unjust distribution of men’s lot is objected,

his reply is, that virtue carries its reward and wickedness its punishment

immediately in itself; further, that both are sure of a complete

retribution in the after-world, while already in this life as a rule in

the end the upright goes not without recognition and thanks, nor the

transgressor without universal hate and detestation. As to the general

fact that there is evil in the world, it seemed to him so inevitable that

it was not requisite expressly to defend the Godhead on that score. All

these statements carry us back at last to one and the same point. It is

the Idea of the Good by applying which Plato produces so exalted a

doctrine of God. In the like spirit he will consider only the moral

intention in acts of worship. He alone can please the Godhead who is like

it, and he alone is like it who is pious, wise, and just. The gods cannot

receive the gifts of the wicked; the virtuous alone have a right to invoke

them. God is goodness; and he who bears not the image of that goodness in

himself stands in no communion with him.

The doctrine here set forth is the highest ever reached by purely heathen

Greek speculation; but we must remember that it is not thus collected into

a head by Plato himself, still less is it put into such a relation to his

physical, his logical, and his moral system as such a doctrine ought to

bear. A man who had reached so lofty a conviction of the divine unity and

moral perfection as this must, if he would make it effectual, give to it

in his system the place which it really holds in the world. If there be

indeed a Maker and Father of the universe by whom all things consist, all

that Plato taught should have been subordinated to this its first

principle, and the sum of his teaching to men should have been to set him

forth. So far is this from the position which Plato really took, that in

his ideal Republic no other religion but the traditional Greek religion

was to subsist; he changes nothing in the very forms of the polytheistic

worship; he refers the decision on many points to the Delphic Apollo.(373)

And when in his last book on the Laws(374) he sets forth the notion of a

second best state, one which can be realised under actual circumstances,

wherein he gives a mass of practical directions for the needs of the lower

classes, religion in its purely polytheistic dress is the soul of his

teaching, the groundwork of his structure. Men are to worship first of all

the Olympian gods, and the gods who are the patrons of the city; then the

gods of the earth; then demons and heroes; and all these in the

traditional way by offerings, prayers, and vows. All good in public life

is their gift; everything is to be consecrated to them; to violate their

shrines is the greatest of crimes. In fact, after all, but few of mankind

are capable of understanding or receiving the philosophic God. However

imperfect(375) the popular belief in the gods may be, and however

unsatisfactory to him the allegorical interpretations of it then so much

in vogue, yet is it in Plato’s conviction indispensable to all those who

have not had a scientific education. Men must first be taught with lies,

and then with the truth: the popular fables and the worship grounded on

them is therefore for all the _first_, and for most the _only_ form of

religion.(376) The philosopher, it is true, sees deeper and despises them

in his heart. Thus the monotheist in speculation is a polytheist in

practice: as Socrates, the model and exemplar of Greek philosophy, with

his dying breath, so Plato, its most inspired teacher with all the voice

of his authority, sacrificed the cock to Æsculapius.

But moreover, this supreme God, who has to be disinterred from the

recesses of the Platonic teaching, and conciliated with the worship

practically paid to a host of subordinate gods, is in Plato’s conception

neither absolutely personal nor free, and he is not the Creator but only

the Former of the world. In Plato’s theory there is coeternal with him a

first matter, without form or quality, which exists independently of him;

which moreover is inhabited and swayed to and fro in disorderly heavings

by a sort of soul, the token of that dark Necessity(377) which rises

behind the figures of gods and men in Greek poetry. It is indeed the work

of the divine reason to come down upon this shapeless mass and its inborn

mover, and out of them to construct the world-soul, with which and with

his own reason he forms and maintains and vivifies the ordered universe.

As he is by this operation the Father of the universe, so this First

Matter is “the Mother of all generation,” the condition of the existence

of corporeal things. But in this original matter lies the origin of evil,

which, perpetuated in the corporeal structure of man, can indeed be tamed

and schooled, and in a certain degree subdued, but never can be

exterminated by the divine reason. The power, the wisdom, and the

providence of Plato’s God are encountered by this check, which stands

eternally over against the Demiurgos in his world-forming activity, which

limits his freedom, and impairs his personality, while it excludes the

whole idea of creation. Students of this philosophy(378) attempt to

associate together his highest Idea, that of the Good, with the supreme

God, of whom he speaks with personal attributes, as the just, the wise,

the true, the good, but admit that Plato has not attempted to solve the

problem how the Idea, which by his hypothesis as it is the highest is also

the most general, is at the same time the most individual, the one

personal God. In fact, it is admitted that he fails—together with all the

ancient Greek writers—in the strict conception of personality.(379) As

according to him individual beings are what they are only by participation

of something higher, it is no wonder that in describing that one Reason,

the Idea of the Good, the highest and most general of all, which forms and

governs the world, his language oscillates between the personal and the

impersonal. But if his philosophical reasons tend one way, it must be

allowed that the heart and affections of the man, and the whole moral

sense of the teacher, decide another.

The ethical system of Plato appears to be a strict deduction from his

physical. As man in his view is a compound of matter, vivified by a

portion of the world-soul, which the divine reason takes and unites with a

portion of itself, so his virtues correspond to this threefold

composition.(380) For man has an immortal portion in his soul, the reason,

the godlike, in him, but the divine reason, in joining a portion of the

world-soul with matter, invests it with two mortal parts, one the

courageous, or manly, the other, sensuous desire, or the female element,

having their seat in the body’s activity. To these answer respectively the

virtues of prudence, of courage, and of temperance, while justice comes in

afterwards as a right ordering of the three, or as prudence applied to

practice. The seat of all irregular desires, of all evil, in fact, is to

Plato in this union of the soul with matter. As this matter is primordial,

evil in its origin does not indeed spring from God, but it is beyond his

power: it springs from that state of things which existed before the

action of God on chaos:(381) it must stand over against the good: and of

necessity encompasses this mortal nature and the place of its habitation:

and to man it lies not in the perverted use of free-will, but in his

original composition, wherein his body is its seat. But in this triple

composition of man Plato does not seem to have clearly apprehended a human

personality at all: he has not even attempted to explain(382) in what the

unity of the soul consists besides these its three portions, two of which,

being tied to the body, drop off at death.

It is in the practice of Plato as a teacher that we can most fitly

consider the conception which the Greek philosophers in general had

concerning the method of studying and imparting philosophy altogether. It

was about the fortieth year of his life, and twelve years after the death

of his master Socrates, that Plato, having already travelled widely,

settled at Athens.(383) Here he purchased a fixed residence at the

Academia, which became from that time a philosophical school for study,

conversation, oral lectures, and friendly meetings. Here he drew around

him an inner circle of scholars to whom he addressed his unwritten

doctrines,(384) especially his doctrine of Ideas, the key to his whole

system, according as they were able, after preparation, to receive them:

and here besides he gave lectures which might be attended not only by that

inner circle of choice disciples but by studious persons in general. This

residence of Plato served for three hundred years, from 387 before Christ

until the siege of Athens by Sylla in 87, as the centre of Plato’s

philosophy viewed as a teaching power. Now in this Plato had before him

the great example of Pythagoras, in the first age of Greek philosophy.

Concerning the doctrines of that philosopher we know little with

certainty,(385) but all are agreed as to his manner of teaching them. His

attempt was to establish a community which should carry in its bosom,

propagate, and perpetuate a doctrine in morals, politics, religion, and

philosophy. His whole procedure was by oral teaching, for he left not a

word written. It was in fact a religious order of life which he first

practised in his own person, and then endeavoured to communicate to

others. Into this order trial for everyone preceded reception.(386) His

scholars were for a long period required to practise silent obedience and

unconditional submission to the authority of the doctrine delivered to

them. Severe daily examination was imposed upon all. The publishing of his

doctrine, especially his speculation as to the nature of God, was strictly

forbidden. The upright life, the learning which then could only be

attained by personal inquiry, the persuasiveness of Pythagoras, were

together so effective that he succeeded in establishing such a community

both in Crotona and in other cities of Southern Italy. It was persecuted

and suffered continual disasters, but still this Pythagorean community,

bearing on its founder’s doctrines and manner of life, existed for several

generations after his death, during which many of the most distinguished

Greeks belonged to it. Such was the poet Æschylus, whose mind was formed

on Pythagorean principles. In Plato’s time the Pythagorean Archytas was at

the head of the state of Tarentum: and Plato himself was largely imbued

with Pythagorean tenets.(387)

Now Plato, it is true, did not imitate the political part of the

Pythagorean scheme. It was only upon paper that he set forth his ideal

republic. But the same conception as to the manner of communicating a

doctrine lay in his mind as in that of Pythagoras. He did not look to

writing as a primary instrument of communicating thought. He places it

himself in a relation of dependence upon oral dialectic instruction. It is

only to serve as a reminder of what had been otherwise taught: and,

moreover, it is quite subordinate to his first postulate, the earnestness

of a life devoted to inquiry and education.(388) These principles are set

forth with great lucidity in his dialogue Phædrus, where he introduces by

the mouth of Socrates the Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of arithmetic,

geometry, astronomy, drafts and dice, and also of letters. With these

inventions in his hand the god approached the then king of Egypt Thamous,

recommending him to make them known to his subjects. But Thamous was by no

means inclined to receive these inventions unconditionally: he praises or

blames them, as he judges of them, and at last he comes to the

letters.(389) “This discovery,” says Thoth, “O king, will make the

Egyptians wiser, and improve their memory. It is of sovereign effect in

both things.” “Most ingenious Thoth,” replies the king, “one man is made

to give birth to art, and another to judge what good or what harm it will

do to those who use it. And now you, being the father of letters, out of

natural affection assert of them that which is just the contrary to their

real office. For they will breed forgetfulness in the minds of those who

learn them, who will slight the faculty of memory, inasmuch as relying on

what is written externally in the types of others they do not exercise

remembrance by an inward act of their own. The spell you have found is

good not for fixing in the mind, but for reminding. And as to wisdom, you

offer to those who learn them not its reality but its appearance. For they

will indeed hear much, but as this will be without teaching, they will

seem to have many minds but generally no judgment, and be hard to

comprehend, having become wiseacres instead of wise men. O Socrates, says

Phædrus, you are one who can easily tell stories from Egypt or any other

country. My dear Phædrus, it was in the temple of Dodonean Jupiter that

they made the first oracular words to proceed from an oak. The men of that

day, not being wise as you young men, were satisfied in their simplicity

to listen to an oak or a rock, if they only spoke the truth. Perhaps it

makes a difference to you who the speaker is, and from what country; for

you do not look merely whether it is true or not. Your rebuke, says

Phædrus, is just, and what the Theban says about letters seems to me to be

right. Well then, says Socrates, the man who thinks to leave an art in

writing, and he also who receives it as being, when written, something

clear and certain, must be very simple, and be really ignorant of Ammon’s

oracle, when he thinks that written words are something more than a

reminder to one who knows the subject of the matters about which they are

written. Exactly so, Socrates. For surely, Phædrus, writing shares this

troublesome characteristic with painting. The productions of painting

stand there as if they were alive, but if you ask them a question,

preserve a solemn silence. Just so it is with writing. You may think that

they speak with some meaning, but if you ask what that meaning is, there

they stand with just the same word in their mouth. When once a thing is

written, it is tossed over and over by all who take it in, whether it

concerns them or not, and is unable to speak, or to be silent with the

proper persons. And if it is maltreated or slandered, it wants its father

always to help it, for it can neither defend nor help itself. What you say

now is also very true indeed. But, says Socrates, can we not find another

word, this one’s lawful brother, and see the process by which it arises,

and how much better and abler than the former it is? What word is this,

and how does it arise? The word which is written on the disciple’s soul

together with true knowledge, which is able to defend itself, and knows

how to speak and to be silent with the proper persons. You mean the living

and animated word of one who has knowledge, whereof the written word may

justly be called the shadow.(390) I mean that indeed. Tell me now; an

intelligent gardener, who had seeds that he cared for, and wished to bear

fruit, would he hurry with them in summer to the gardens of Adonis, plant

them, and rejoice to see them springing up with a fair show in a week? or

would he do this for amusement, and in festival-time, if he did it at all,

but when he took pains would use his gardener’s art, sow them at the

fitting time, and be too glad if, seven months afterwards, he saw them

coming to perfection? Certainly, Socrates, that would be the difference

between his sport and his earnest. Shall we, then, say that he who

possesses the science of justice, honour, and goodness, has less

intelligence than the gardener for his own seeds? Surely not. He will not,

then, hurry to write them with a pen in ink with words, which cannot on

the one hand help themselves with speech, and on the other hand are

incapable to teach the truth sufficiently. I should think he would not. He

will not; but as for these written flower-borders, he will sow and write

them, when he does write them, for amusement, storing up reminders for

himself, should he come to a forgetful old age, and for every one who

pursues the same footsteps, and he will take pleasure in seeing them

springing up tenderly: so when other men fall to other amusements,

lubricating themselves at the banquet, or other such things, he will take

his amusement here. In this, Socrates, you would substitute a very seemly

amusement for a bad one, when the man who can play with words sports upon

the subject of justice and suchlike. So it is, my dear Phædrus, but it is,

I take it, earnest in a far higher sense, when one, using the art of

dialectics, takes hold of a fitting soul, and plants and sows with true

knowledge words able to help both themselves and their planter, not

fruitless, but having seed, whence growing up in a succession of minds

they will from age to age produce an immortal line,(391) and will make

their possessor happy as far as man can be.”

In these words, put in his master’s mouth, Plato, if I mistake not, has

given us the whole purpose of his life, and the manner in which he hoped

to accomplish it. It was in the Academia that he sought to establish that

immortal line of living words, who should speak as the possessors of real

knowledge upon justice, truth, and goodness. He is describing a living

culture by living teachers, of whom he aspired to be himself the first;

and the written dialogues which he has left are in his intention, and so

far as they enter at all upon the higher points of his doctrine,(392)

reminders of that which he had set forth to chosen auditors by word of

mouth, the word which was able, as he says, to explain and defend itself,

and to answer a question put to it.

This, then, was the relation existing in the mind of the prince of Greek

philosophers between the written and the spoken word as instruments in

imparting true knowledge, or science. The written word he regarded as

subsidiary, as presupposing instruction by question and answer, and still

more the moral discipline of a life earnestly given up to the study of the

subjects in question. Without this a writing by itself was like a figure

in a picture, which makes an impression on the beholder, but when asked if

it is the true impression keeps, as he says, a solemn face, and makes no

reply; which is the same to all, the earnest and the indifferent, and

cannot treat them according to their merits. He laughs at the notion of

such a writing being by itself any more than sport. And let us remember

that he who said this has enshrined his own philosophy in the most

finished specimens of dramatic dialogues which the Greek mind produced.

These are the statements of the man who wrote Greek in his countrymen’s

opinion as Jupiter would have spoken it. There are, then, in Plato’s mind

three constituents of teaching: first, the choice of fitting subjects for

it, and what is therein implied, the imposition of a moral discipline upon

them regulating their life to the end in view; secondly, the master’s oral

instruction conveying gradually and with authority to minds so prepared

the doctrine to be received; and thirdly, the committing such doctrine to

writing, which shall serve to _remind_ the disciple of what he has been

taught. And this was what he carried into effect.(393) He fixed himself at

the Academia, over which he presided for forty years: he was succeeded

therein by his nephew Speusippus, who held his chair for eight years;

Xenocrates followed in the same post during twenty-five years; and the

line was continued afterwards by Polemon, Crantor, Crates, Arcesilaus, and

others in uninterrupted series. Plato thus established the method of Greek

philosophy, and his example herein was followed by Aristotle, Zeno, and

Epicurus.

His great disciple Aristotle came to him at the age of seventeen, and

studied under him during twenty years. At a later age, when, after

completing the education of Alexander, he fixed himself in middle life at

Athens, he set up there a second philosophical school at the Lyceum on its

eastern side, and on the model of that of Plato. Attached to this museum

were a portico, a hall with seats, one seat especially for the lecturing

professor, a garden, and a walk, together with a residence, all

permanently appropriated to the teacher and the process of

instruction.(394) When Aristotle died in the year 322 B.C., his friend

Theophrastus presided over his school during five and thirty years, and

the line continued on. We learn that there were periodical meetings,

convivial and conversational, among the members both of the Academic and

Peripatetic schools, and laws for their regulation established by

Xenocrates and Aristotle. It was in the shady walks of his garden that

this great philosopher taught by word of mouth the choicer circle of his

disciples: for the more general hearers he gave lectures sitting.(395) His

instructions were divided into two classes, those which he gave on

rhetoric, the art of discussion, knowledge of civil matters, and suchlike,

which were exoteric, and those which touched the finer and more subtle

points of philosophy, which were termed acroatic, as addressed to the

ears.(396) Again, his dialogues he called “public” or “issued” discourses,

things made over to the general public, in distinction from what was not

so disclosed, but reserved for the philosopher’s own meditation, to be

subsequently communicated either by oral lecture or by writing to the

private circle of scholars who gave themselves up entirely to his

philosophy. These Aristotle called “philosophical” or “teaching”

discourses, proceeding, that is, from the principles proper to each branch

of learning, and not from the opinions of the lecturer. These latter were

termed “tentative,” as belonging to the exoteric. Simplicius, one of the

latest writers on Greek philosophy, defines exoteric as “the common, and

what concludes by arguments which are matter of opinion;” and Philoponus,

as discourses “not of strict proof, and not directed to lawfully-begotten

hearers,” that is, trained and prepared, “but to the public, and springing

from probabilities.”(397) Thus in Aristotle, the largest in grasp of mind,

the most observant of facts, the most accurate in definition among Greek

writers, the philosopher in fact and “master of those who know,”(398) for

all future ages, we find the same three constituents of teaching as in

Plato, and in the same order of importance: first, hearers selected for

their natural aptitude, and then submitted to a moral discipline and a

common life; secondly, the instruction of such hearers by word of mouth,

question and answer, discussion and cross-examination; and lastly, the

committing of doctrines to writing. With him too his written philosophical

discourses were _reminders_ of his oral teaching, which they presupposed

and required as a key to their full meaning, and especially for the

comprehension of their harmony as a system.

The order of teaching which I have thus sketched as being followed in

practice by the two most eminent Greek philosophers belonged to them all.

They had no other conception respecting the method of communicating a

doctrine efficiently to men. None of them considered philosophy merely or

chiefly as a literature: none of them attributed to a book the power of

teaching it. Their conception was, a master and his scholars, and the

living together, the moral subordination and discipline which this

involved. This school of education or training in knowledge(399) was their

primary thought: the committing of their doctrine to writing was both

subsequent and secondary. Their writings were intended, as Plato says, to

be recollections(400) of their teaching, and failed to convey the real

knowledge to those who had not the stamp of this teaching impressed on

their minds.

As Plato made a local habitation for himself and his doctrine in the

Academia, and Aristotle in the Lyceum, so Zeno, the founder of the third

great philosophic school, took up his abode in the Portico at Athens, a

court surrounded with pillars, and adorned with the paintings of

Polygnotus. Here he began to teach about 308 B.C., and here he continued

teaching as some say for fifty-eight years. It is said that the character

of Socrates, as drawn by Xenophon and by Plato in his _Apology_, filled

him with astonishment and admiration:(401) and the Stoics afterwards drew

their doctrine of the wise man, which they endeavoured to image out and

realise, from that living example of it,(402) an instance of the

connection of doctrine with person which is full of interest and

suggestion. Zeno was succeeded in his office of teaching by Cleanthes, and

Cleanthes by Chrysippus and a long line of teachers, who for several

hundred years continued, with variations, the same general doctrine of

ethics.

Just in the same way and at the same time Zeno’s great rival Epicurus

fixed the seat of his school in the Garden at Athens, which thenceforth

became for thirty-six years the central point of the teacher’s activity.

About him gathered a circle of friends whom similarity of principles and

the enjoyment of cultivated intercourse bound together with unusual

intimacy. It speaks for the special character of his philosophy that from

the beginning women and even hetæræ formed a part of this society. But he

succeeded during this long period of teaching in impressing upon his

school so strong a character that it is recognised without essential

change during hundreds of years.(403)

We should do injustice to the character and the work of Plato, Aristotle,

Zeno, and Epicurus, the founders of the four great schools of Greek

philosophy, if we did not take into account what was in their day no doubt

of greater influence than their writings, that is, their function as

teachers, their oral teaching itself, and those fundamental principles of

philosophic education which lay at the bottom of it. Plato has left us

very little of doctrine put out in his own name. He is not a speaker in

his dialogues. He puts what he would say in the mouth of others,

especially of Socrates. He tells us that he has purposely done this in

order that men might not say, here is Plato’s philosophy:(404) and the

reason of this was that he utterly distrusted his own or any man’s power

to disclose to others such a system in a set form of words. It is, then,

the more remarkable that he has said in his own person what were his most

settled convictions as to intercourse by word of mouth, and continuous

written discourse, viewed as instruments for attaining and communicating

truth. He expresses his absolute disbelief that men can reach true

conceptions by their being set forth in the immutable form of writing. It

is a far other and more difficult work which has to be accomplished. In a

word, not even aptness for learning and memory will give the power to see

the truth as to virtue and vice to one who is not kin to the subject; nor,

again, this kinship without such aptitude and memory: but when both are

joined, then out of living together, after much time,(405) by the

continual friction of name, definition, acts of sight and perception, by

thought and meditation, the hearing and answering the objections of

others, the process of mutual cross-examination discharged without envy or

jealousy, and with sincere love of the truth, a sudden flash of fire

kindles in the mind, and nourishes itself, disclosing the knowledge

required. Thus it is that prudence and intelligence on each subject,

shining out in this beam of light, go forward as far as man may reach. The

view here propounded, if reflected upon, will convey to us what the living

work first of Pythagoras, and then of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus,

and their successors, was. Both the conception indeed and the realisation

seem to have been most complete in Pythagoras. The philosophic living

together was its basis. Instruction was oral. Learning was effected by the

collision of mind with mind, by objection and answer. It was the Socratic

principle inherited from these schools that nothing passed muster for

knowledge which did not stand the test of cross-examination:(406) but an

unchangeable text was utterly unsuited, according to Plato, to debate the

question under treatment in such fashion, while on the other hand the mind

of the reader was passive in receiving the impression which it conveyed.

On neither side therefore did the conditions of knowledge exist, but this

was reached under the circumstances of personal intercourse above

mentioned, and might be recalled in the written form to the minds of those

who had thus first attained it.

Down to the end of Greek philosophy the same conception as to the method

of teaching prevailed. Ammonius Sakkas, the founder of Neoplatonism,

delivered his doctrine only by word of mouth, which his chief disciples,

Erennius, Origines, and Plotinus, engaged not to make public.(407) It was

when one of them, Erennius, had broken this promise, that another,

Plotinus, after delivering lectures at Rome, wrote down his philosophy;

but his scheme was to carry it out by collecting his disciples together in

one city, and thus realising Plato’s republic.

CHAPTER XIV. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY. PART II.

The mind of the next great teacher who arose in Greece after Plato

presented an almost complete contrast to that of the master under whom he

had so long studied. Aristotle’s power consisted in a parallel development

of two forces which do not often coexist.(408) He joined together a rare

degree of consistent philosophic thinking with an equally rare degree of

accurate observation. This double faculty is shown in what he effected. He

made the sciences of logic, ethics, and psychology: he built up those of

natural history and politics with the wealth of knowledge which his

experience had accumulated.(409) Thus his analytic and synthetic genius

embraced the whole range of human knowledge then existing. As Plato threw

his vivid fancy and imagination and his religious temper into everything

which concerned the human spirit, so Aristotle fixed his gaze upon nature,

which with him in all its manifestations was the ultimate fact. As Plato

rose from the single being to his conception of the true, the good, the

beautiful, of which the Idea to him was everything, so Aristotle,

steadfastly discarding his master’s doctrine of Ideas, took his stand on

the single being, examining it with the closest observation and the

subtlest thought, and the knowledge thus conveyed to him is everything.

Plato’s conception of God is that of the great world-former, orderer, and

ruler: Aristotle’s conception of God is that of a pure intelligence,

without power, an eternal, ever-active, endless, incorporeal substance,

who never steps out of that everlasting rest into action: who is the

world’s first cause, but is unconscious of it, his action upon the world

being likened to the influence of the beloved object upon the lover.

Plato’s dualism is summed up in the expression, God and Matter;

Aristotle’s dualism, in God and the World. Plato represents the action of

the Deity as the working-up of the original matter into the millions of

forms which the world exhibits: but these millions of forms are taken by

Aristotle as if they had existed for ever; the World, as it is, and the

Deity, are coeternal.

Aristotle’s doctrine of the human soul is that it exists only as that

which animates the body, without which its being cannot be known.(410) It

is the principle which forms, moves, and developes the body; the substance

which only appears in the body formed and penetrated by it, and which

works continuously in it, as the life which determines and prevails over

its matter. Thus the body is of itself nothing; what it is, it is only

through the soul, whose being and nature it expresses, to which it is

related as the medium in which the purpose, which is the soul, realises

itself. Thus the soul cannot be thought of without the body, nor the body

without the soul: both come into their actual state together. In the soul

Aristotle distinguishes three parts, the vegetative, the sensitive, and

the thinking. This last, the peculiar property of man, is further

divisible into the passive and the active, of which the former is linked

to the soul as the soul is to the body, as form is to matter, multiplies

itself with individuals, and is extinguished with them. But the reason, or

pure intelligence, has nothing in common with matter, comes from without

into man, and exists in him as a self-consisting indestructible being,

without multiplying or dividing itself. Accordingly this intellect or

reason suffers the soul to sink back with the body into the nothing from

which both have been together produced. It alone continues to subsist as

what is ever the same and unchangeable, since it is nothing but the divine

intelligence in an individual existence, enlightening the darkness of the

human subject in the passive part of the understanding, and so must be

considered as the first mover in man of his discursive thinking and

knowing, as well as of his willing.(411) As that which is properly human

in the soul, that which has had a beginning, must also pass away, even the

understanding, and only the divine reason is immortal, and as memory

belongs to the sensitive soul, and individual thinking only takes place by

means of the passive intellect, all consciousness must cease with death.

And again, clearly as Aristotle maintains that man is the mover and master

of his own actions, and has it in his power to be good or evil, and thence

repudiates the assumption of Socrates and Plato that no one is willingly

evil, yet he cannot find a place for real freedom of the will between the

motion which arises from sensitive desire, and that which proceeds from

the divine intelligence dwelling in the soul. Necessity arises on both

sides, from the things which determine the passive understanding, and from

the divine intelligence.(412) Thus his physical theory, as in the case of

Plato noted above,(413) prevents a clear conception of the human

personality. His notion of man in this point corresponds to his notion of

God: he does not concern himself with questions respecting the goodness,

justice, and freedom of God, inasmuch as his God is not really

personal:(414) so with regard to man we find in him no elucidation as to

the question of moral freedom, nor of the origin and nature of wickedness

in man. Wickedness is with Aristotle the impotence to hold the mean

between too much and too little: it presents itself therefore only in this

world of contingency and change, and has no relation to God, since the

first or absolute good has nothing opposed to it. He has not the sense of

moral perversion with regard to evil. In accordance with which the end of

all moral activity with him is happiness, which consists in the well-being

arising from an energy according to nature; as virtue is the observing a

proper mean between two extremes. And the highest happiness is

contemplative thought, the function of the divine in man, the turning away

from everything external to the inner world of the conceptions.

The religious character, which belongs conspicuously to Plato’s

philosophy, fails, it will be seen, in that of Aristotle. Whereas Plato

strove to purify the popular belief, and urged as the highest point of

virtue to become like to God by the conjunction of justice and sanctity

with prudence,(415) Aristotle divides morality from religion as his God is

separated off from the world.(416) His scientific inquiries have not that

immediate relation to the personal life and the destiny of man in which

the religiousness of Platonism most consists. His whole view of the world

goes to explain things as far as possible from their natural causes.(417)

Thus he admits in the whole direction of the world the ruling of a divine

power, of a reason which reaches its purpose; he believes in particular

that the gods care for men, take an interest in him who lives in

accordance with reason; that happiness is their gift; he contradicts the

notion that the godhead is envious, and so could withhold from man

knowledge, the best of its gifts; but this divine providence coincides for

him entirely with the working of natural causes. In his view the godhead

stands in solitary self-contemplation outside the world, the object of

admiration and reverence to man. The knowledge of it is the highest task

for his intellect. It is the good to which in common with everything that

is finite he is struggling; whose perfection calls forth his love: but

little as he can expect a return of love from it, so little does he find

in it any coöperation distinct from the natural connection of things, and

his reason is the only point of immediate contact with it.

Religion(418) itself Aristotle treats as an unconditional moral necessity.

The man who doubts whether the gods should be honoured is a subject fit

not for instruction but for punishment, just as the man who asks whether

he should love his parents. As the natural system of the world cannot be

imagined without God, so neither can man in it be imagined without

religion. But he can give us no other ground save political expediency for

resting religion upon fables so apparent as the stories of the popular

belief. He sometimes himself uses these fables, like other popular

opinions, to illustrate some general proposition, as, for instance,

Homer’s verses on the golden chain show the immobility of the first mover:

just as in other cases he likes to pursue his scientific assumptions to

their least apparent beginnings, and to take account of sayings and

proverbs. But if we except the few general principles of religious belief,

he ascribes to these fables no deeper meaning, and as little does he seem

to care about purifying their character. For his state he presupposes the

existing religion, as in his personal conduct he did not withdraw from its

usages, and expressed his attachment to friends and relations in the forms

consecrated by it. But no trace is found in him of Plato’s desire to

reform religion by means of philosophy: and in his politics he allows in

the existing worship even what in itself he disapproves, as the case of

unseemly words, inscriptions, and statues. Thus the relation of the

Aristotelic philosophy to the actual religion is generally a very loose

one. It does not disdain indeed to use the points of connection which the

other presents, but has no need of it whatever for itself: nor does it

seek on its own side to purify and transform religion, the imperfection of

which it rather seems to take as something unavoidable. The two are

indifferent to each other; philosophy pursues its way without troubling

itself about religion, without fearing any interruption from it.

In the seventy-seven years which elapsed from the death of Socrates, B.C.

399, to that of Aristotle, B.C. 322, Greek life had suffered a great

change. That dear-loved independence which every state had cultivated, and

which concentrated every energy of the mind in civil life, had vanished.

During the forty years of Plato’s work as a teacher it was becoming less

and less: Chæronea gave it the death-blow; while Aristotle is the son of a

time at which scientific study had already begun to take the place of

active political life.(419) But the conquest effected by his great pupil

Alexander completed this change. He opened the East to the Greek mind,

bringing it into close contact with Asiatic thought, beliefs, and customs.

Under his successors Alexandria, Antioch, and Seleucia, Tarsus, Pergamus,

and Rhodes became great centres of Greek culture: but Greek

self-government was gone. Athens with the rest of the Greek cities had

lost its political independence, but it remained the metropolis of Greek

philosophy. From the last decade of the fourth century before Christ four

great schools, the Platonic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean, all seated

here, as embodied in the dwelling-place and oral teaching of their

masters, stand over against each other. The point most interesting to our

present subject is this, that all these schools take up a common ground,

one which we consider to belong properly to religion, that is, the

question wherein the happiness of man consists, and how to attain it.(420)

Thus the political circumstances of the land gave the tone to its

philosophy. What the time required was something which would compensate

men for the lost position of a free citizen and a self-governed

fatherland. The cultivated classes looked to philosophy for consolation

and support. The answers to this question which the various systems gave

were very different from each other, but an answer they all attempted.

What they have in common is, the drawing-back of man upon himself, his

inner mind, his consciousness, as a being who thinks and wills:(421) while

on the other hand the mental view was widened from the boundaries of a

narrow state to that which touches man in general. The field of morality

opened out beyond the range of this or that city, territory, or monarchy.

Thus two hundred full years were occupied with the struggles of the Stoic

and Epicurean schools, and the sceptical opposition to them of the middle

and later Academy. At the very beginning of this time the man who sat

first in Aristotle’s chair after him, and therefore the head of the most

speculative school, Theophrastus, had shocked the students of philosophy

by declaring that fortune, not wisdom, was the ruler of the world. But it

was precisely against the despondence which such a conviction would work

in the mind that the Stoics struggled with their doctrine of apathy,

Epicurus with his self-contentment, the Sceptics with their tranquillity

of indifference.(422) These all sought to cure those whom the fables of

the popular religion were insufficient to satisfy, those who felt the

evils and trials of life and knew not whither to turn in their need. But

the Stoic and the Epicurean cures stood in the strongest contrast to each

other.

Zeno(423) of Cittium in Cyprus, after listening for twenty years to the

teaching of various Socratic masters in Athens, founded a school himself,

and wished it to be a school of virtuous men rather than of speculative

philosophers. It was a system of complete materialism rigorously carried

out. He admitted only corporeal causes, and two principles, matter, and a

force eternally indwelling in it and shaping it. These two principles,

matter and force, were in fact to the stoic mind only one eternal being

viewed in a twofold aspect. Matter for its subsistence needs a principle

of unity to form and hold it together: and this, the active element, is

inconceivable without matter as the subject in which it dwells, works, and

moves. Thus the positive element is matter viewed as being as yet without

qualities, while the active element which runs through and quickens

everything is God in matter. In real truth God and matter are one thing,

or, in other words, the stoic doctrine is a pantheism which views matter

as instinct with life.(424) God is the unity of that force which embraces

and interpenetrates the universe, assuming all forms, and as such is a

subtle fluid, fire, ether, or breath, in which are contained all forms of

existence belonging to the world-body which it animates, and from which

they develop themselves in order: it lives and moves in all, and is the

common source of all effect and all desire. God, then, is the world-soul,

and the world itself no aggregate of independent elements, but a being,

organised, living, filled and animated by a single soul, that is to say,

by one original fire manifesting itself in various degrees of tension and

heat. If in Aristotle’s theory the world is a total of single beings,

which are only bound together unto a higher aim by a community of effort,

in the stoic system on the contrary these beings all viewed together are

members of a surpassingly perfect organisation, and as such, so bound in

one, that nothing can happen to the individual being, which does not by

sympathy extend its operation to all others. Thus on his physical side,

God is the world-fire, the vital all-interpenetrating heat, the sole cause

of all life and motion, and the necessity which rules the world: while on

his moral side, inasmuch as the first general cause can only be a soul

full of reason and wisdom, he is the world-reason, a blessed being, the

originator of the moral law, ever occupied with the government of the

world, being in fact himself the world. Thus everything is subject to the

law of absolute necessity; everything eternally determined through an

endless series of preceding causes, since nothing happens without a cause,

and that again is the working of a cause before it. What, then, is called,

or seems to be, chance, is merely the working of a cause unknown to us.

The will of man is accordingly mere spontaneity. He wills, but what he

wills is inevitable: he determines himself, but always in consequence of

preceding causes. And since here every cause is something subject to the

conditions of matter, something purely inside the world, it becomes

unalterable destiny. But inasmuch as the series of causes leads back to

the first, and this first cause has not only a physical side, but includes

intelligence with it, and so everything in it is foreseen and

predetermined, therefore that which considered under the aspect of

inevitable necessity is called fate or destiny, viewed as thought may be

termed Providence, a divine arrangement.

With such a doctrine it is evident that all morality was reduced to a

matter of physics: and yet no sect of Greek philosophers struggled so hard

to solve the great problem of moral freedom as the Stoics.(425) But the

iron grasp of their leading tenet was ever too much for them. Man’s soul

is of the same substance as the world-soul, that is, breath or fire, of

which it is a portion: in man it manifests itself as the force from which

knowledge and action proceed, as at once intelligence, will, and

consciousness. It is, then, closely allied with the Divine Being, but at

the same time corporeal, a being which stands in perpetual action and

reaction with the human body. It is that heat-matter bound to the blood,

which communicates life and motion: it is perishable, though it lasts

beyond the body, perhaps to the general conflagration. It has therefore,

in the most favourable view, the duration of a world-period, with the

outrun of which it must return to the universal ether or godhead: its

individual existence and consciousness end.

As to the popular religion,(426) the Stoics admitted that it was filled

with pretended deities, false doctrines, and rank superstition; that its

wilderness of fables about the gods was simply contemptible: but that it

was well to retain the names of gods consecrated in public opinion, who

were merely descriptions of particular incorporations of the one

world-god.

The Stoics did not represent the component elements of human nature as

struggling with each other, like Plato.(427) With them nature and reason

is one thing. Their virtue,(428) or highest good, is life in accordance

with nature, that is, the concurrence of human conduct with the all-ruling

law of nature, or of man’s will with God’s will. Thus it was that the

Stoic sought to reach his doctrine of philosophical impassibility: and to

this system the majority of earnest and thinking minds in the two

centuries before Christ inclined.(429)

At the very same time as Zeno, Epicurus set up at Athens a school destined

through all its existence to wage a battle with stoicism, yet aiming by

different means at the same end, the freedom of the individual man from

anxiety and disturbance.(430) If Zeno’s world was an intelligent animal,

that of Epicurus was a machine formed and kept in action by chance. He

assumed the atomic theory of Democritus, that all bodies—and there are

nothing else but corporeal things—have arisen originally from atoms moving

themselves in empty space. They are eternal and indestructible, without

quality, but not without quantity, and endlessly various in figure. As

these from mere weight and impulse would fall like an everlasting rain in

empty space without meeting each other, Epicurus devised a third motion, a

slight declension from the perpendicular, in virtue of which their

agglomeration is produced: and thus it is a work of pure chance that out

of these, the countless worlds which frame the universe began to be. Any

order or higher guidance of the universe, as directed to a purpose, is not

to be thought of, any more than necessary laws, according to which the

appearances of nature reproduce themselves. For a law would ultimately

lead to a lawgiver, and this might reawaken fear, and disturb the wise

man’s repose. He utterly denied the intervention either of one god or of

many gods in the forming or the maintenance of the world: the main purpose

indeed of his philosophy was to overthrow that religious view which saw in

the argument from design a sure proof of a divine Providence.(431)

Nothing, he thought, was more perverted than that the opinion that nature

was directed for the good of man, or generally for any object at all; that

we have tongues in order to speak, or ears in order to hear, for in fact

just the reverse is true. We speak because we have tongues, and hear

because we have ears. The powers of nature have worked purely under the

law of necessity. Among their manifold productions some were necessarily

composed in accordance with an end: hence resulted for man in particular

many means and powers; but such result must not be viewed as intentional,

rather as a purely casual consequence of naturally necessary operations.

Gods, such as the people believed, he utterly repudiated. Not he who

denied such gods, but he who assumed their existence, was godless. He

allowed, indeed, that there existed an immense multitude of gods, beings

of human form, but endued with subtle, ethereal, transparent,

indestructible bodies, who occupied the intermundial spaces, free from

care, regardless of human things, enjoying their own blissful repose.(432)

His gods are in fact a company of Epicurean philosophers, possessing

everything which they can desire, eternal life, no care, and perpetual

opportunity of agreeable entertainment.

The soul of man is a body made out of the finest round and fiery atoms; a

body which, like heated air, most rapidly penetrates the whole material

frame. The finest portion of the soul, the feeling and thinking spirit,

which as a fourth element is added to the fiery, aerial, and vaporous

portions, dwells in the breast. In these elements all the soul’s passions

and impulses are rooted. When death destroys the body, the sheltering and

protecting home of the soul’s atoms, these evaporate at once. It was clear

that in such a system the soul could not outlive the body, but Epicurus

laid a special stress on this, since thereby only could men be delivered

from the greatest impediment to repose and undisturbed enjoyment of life,

the torturing fear of the world below, and of punishments after death. It

was the crown of his system, to which ethics, physics, and such logic as

he admitted were entirely subordinate, to emancipate men from four fears,

the fear of death, the fear of natural things, the fear of the gods, the

fear of a divine Providence, which was the same thing as fate.(433)

Nevertheless, the followers of Epicurus had no scruple, after the manner

of their master, who had spoken of the worship of the gods like a priest,

to visit temples and take part in religious ceremonies. These, it is true,

were useless, since they had nothing to fear and nothing to hope from the

gods, but it was an act of reason, and could do no harm, to honour beings

naturally so high and excellent.(434)

Of this school we learn that it gradually became the most numerous of all.

Its social force really lay in setting forth as a model the undisturbed

security of individual life. It agreed at the bottom with stoicism that

man’s wisdom and highest end was to live in accordance with nature. Zeno,

it is true, called this living in accordance with nature, virtue, man’s

highest and only good; Epicurus called it pleasure; but Zeno’s virtue

consisted essentially in the absence of passions, the pleasure of Epicurus

in the mind’s undisturbedness.(435) The Epicureans were more attached to

their master’s memory than any other school. They were renowned for their

friendship with each other. Epicurus’s Garden at Athens meant the highest

refinement of Athenian life, the enjoyment of everything that was pleasant

in the society of likeminded men.(436) It was this side of his philosophy

which made it popular.

While the schools of Zeno and Epicurus seated at Athens were powerfully

influencing Grecian thought, the former especially drawing to it the

stronger and more thinking minds, resistance arose to them both in the

chair of Plato. First Arcesilaus and then Carneades, who had succeeded to

this office, set up in the middle Academy the school of Scepticism. While

Stoics and Epicureans alike sought peace of mind through knowledge of the

world and its laws, they on the contrary maintained that this same peace

of mind could only be attained by renouncing all such knowledge.(437) They

held that no truth and no certainty were given to man by the

representations of his senses, by his feelings, and by his consciousness

of these, which do not enable him to know the real being of anything.(438)

Those who held this view would not say downright that what they

contradicted was untrue: they were of opinion that it might be true, only

there was no certitude of this, and therefore it must be left

undetermined. The uncertainty was as great on the one side as on the

other. Sextus Empiricus defined the state of skepsis to be “skilfulness in

so setting forth appearances and reflections against each other, as to be

brought through the equilibrium of opposing facts and grounds in their

favour first to a suspension of judgment, and then to imperturbable

tranquillity.”

Carneades, whose life occupied the greater part of the second century

before Christ, and who is extolled by Cicero as the keenest and most

copious of disputants, was the man in whom this school of thought reached

its highest point. He had appeared at Rome among a deputation of

philosophers in the year 155, when his eloquence and earnestness made a

great impression on his Roman hearers. This scepticism of the younger

Academy however ran in accordance with the direction which the collective

philosophy of the Greeks naturally took, and was carried out with an

acuteness and a scientific ability which makes us recognise in it an

important member of philosophical development.(439) Carneades subjected

the stoic doctrine as to God in particular to a criticism the range of

which went far beyond the dogmas of this school, and in fact tended to

represent every conviction as to the existence of the godhead, and every

religious belief, as something impossible and untenable.(440) This,

however, as Cicero repeatedly assures us, was not done for the purpose of

destroying belief in the gods, but only to point out the weakness and

groundlessness of stoic doctrines. It is chiefly in his assaults on the

assertions and assumptions of his adversaries that Carneades is

victorious: when he attempts anything positive on his own side, it amounts

to this, that a rational man will take probability for his guide, when he

cannot be assured of truth: and his chief merit appears to have been in

more accurately determining the degrees of probability.(441)

The contests of these schools bring us down to the middle of the second

century before Christ, when Greece fell under the dominion of Rome. From

this time forth not only were Greek philosophers of eminence drawn to live

themselves at Rome, and so to meet her statesmen and nobles in habits of

intercourse, but the higher classes of the great capital commonly

completed their education by visiting and studying at Athens, Rhodes, and

other centres of Grecian thought. Thus by the fusion of Greece with the

empire, while her political importance dwindled away, her influence upon

the mind of her subjugators was immensely increased. But the Roman on his

side obtained a sort of victory. As a rule he was anything but an original

thinker. He was an essentially practical man: he had a steady instinct

which led him to distrust first causes and general principles. The Greek

schools were to him of value only as they might fit into his daily life,

not as coherent systems of thought. The spirit therefore in which he

regarded their differences was to select from them what best suited his

tastes and feelings. If he had no power to originate, he could choose. But

such likewise had been the result among the Greeks themselves of two

centuries of conflict, in which the rival systems of Stoicism,

Epicureanism, and Scepticism had stood over against each other. They

sprung from the same soil; they might even be termed three branches of one

stem,(442) inasmuch as their common root was the desire to find for the

individual man something which would give him tranquillity of mind,

happiness in fact, independent of his civil circumstances. In this they

all took up a practical rather than a theoretical ground, the ground

indeed which is now assigned to religion. Utterly opposed, then, as they

were in their means, they sought the same end, and it was not in nature

that the collision of their various arguments should not at length kindle

the spirit of eclecticism. Thus the temper of the Roman statesman and

noble, and the course of Greek philosophy itself, combined to produce this

spirit, which from the beginning of the first century before Christ

pervaded the thinkers of the Greco-Roman world.(443) But eclecticism

betokens a weakening of the philosophic mind, that weariness which is

unable to take a firm grasp of truth, an absence of the keen aim and high

desire which such a grasp betokens. It is a confession that no one system

possesses the truth: in which state of things nothing remains for the

individual but to choose for himself out of different systems those

morsels of truth which approve themselves most to his taste or tact, or,

as he would term it, his truth-seeking sincerity.

But it is not too much to say that the whole spirit of later antiquity, so

far as it interested itself in the discovery of truth, from the time that

Greek philosophy was diffused over the Roman world, leant more or less to

eclecticism. Its most able, most distinguished, and most interesting

representative is Cicero.(444) He lived at a time when rival criticism had

searched out and exposed every weak point in the different systems of

thought. To found new systems there was no further creative force; his

eclectic position was the necessary result. His genius supplied him with

no means to overcome it. His philosophical writings are scarcely more than

transcripts from various Grecian sources, wherein he uses his skill as a

rhetorician and his unfailing wealth of words to set forth with lawyerlike

balancing the arguments of different schools. We can yet detect the

originals, from which in the short intervals of enforced absence from

political life before and after the death of Cæsar he transfused with such

rapidity into a Latin shape the products of Greek discussion.(445) Thus

his treatise on the Republic and on Laws are in form imitations of Plato’s

writings with the same title, while for their contents Cicero applies

Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrines to his own political

experiences, making also much use of Polybius. His _Paradoxa_ explain

Stoic propositions. The groundwork of his _Consolatio_ is Crantor’s

writing upon Grief. The _Lost Hortensius_ is drawn from an exhortation of

Aristotle to Themison, a prince of a city of Cyprus, or from a similar

work of the academician Philo of Larissa; his books _De Finibus_ from

works of Phædrus, Chrysippus, Carneades, Antiochus, as well as the studies

which Cicero himself in his youth made while attending lectures; his

_Academica_ from the writings and partly also from the lectures of the

best-known Academicians: his _Tusculan Disputations_ from Plato and

Crantor, from Stoics and Peripatetics. The first book on the _Nature of

the Gods_ from the writing of an Epicurean, which has been discovered in

the rolls of Herculaneum, and was first supposed to be a treatise of

Phædrus, but is now known to be a work of Philodemus: his critique on the

Epicurean standing-point is drawn from the stoic Posidonius; the second

book from Cleanthes and Chrysippus; the third from Carneades and

Clitomachus. Of his books on _Divination_, the first is taken from

Chrysippus, Posidonius, Diogenes, and Antipater; the second from

Carneades, and the stoic Panætius. His treatise on _Fate_ from the

writings of Chrysippus, Posidonius, Cleanthes, and Carneades: his _Elder

Cato_ from Plato, Xenophon, Hippocrates, and Aristo of Chius: his _Lælius_

mainly from a writing of Theophrastus on Friendship. His main authority

for the first two books on _Offices_ is Panætius; and for the third

Posidonius; while besides Plato and Aristotle he has made use of Diogenes

of Babylon, Antipater of Tyre, and Hecato.

Now in this selection from rival and antagonistic schools—this oscillation

between the positive and sceptical tone of thought, this sitting as a

judge rather than obeying as a disciple—Cicero very exactly represented

the tone and attitude of the cultivated classes in his own time and in the

century following his death. Originality of mind in philosophic studies

was gone; nor was any system as a whole believed in. The sceptic and

eclectic turn of mind are but the reverse sides of the same mental

coinage: he who selects from all is convinced by none. Neither his doubts

nor his choices satisfied Cicero, or any one of those who followed him in

that most important century, the eighth of the Roman city, fifty years of

which preceded and fifty followed the coming of Christ. In its

philosophical productions no preceding century had been so poor as this.

It had only to show the school of the Sextii, which arose at Rome about

the beginning of our era, and took a sort of middle standing between

Pythagorean, Cynic, and Stoic principles.(446) This school was of small

importance, and soon became extinct. With this exception from Cicero to

Seneca no names of distinction appear. There is a gap in philosophical

thought. A period so influential on the destinies of man in its events, so

celebrated for its polite literature, on which the world has since been

feeding, is barren in the highest realm of inquiry. For this reason there

is a particular justice in taking Cicero as an exponent of heathen thought

and spirit, the living specimen of the kind, inasmuch as he is the last

philosophic writer before Christian thought appears in the world, and

chose for himself the function of summing up what he thought of value in

the ages before him.

We omit therefore nothing in our review if we place ourselves at the end

of this century, in the reign of Claudius, and cast a glance backward over

that prodigious labour of human reason through which we have hastily

travelled, and which had then lasted six hundred years. The problem was,

given the universe, what will man’s reason in the most gifted, cultivated,

inquiring, dialectic race of the ancient world do with it? And more

particularly, to what results will reason come as to the power which has

formed, or which rules it: as to its chief inhabitant, his nature, and the

purpose for which he exists, and the end to which he is ever advancing: as

to the duties by which he is bound to this creating, or at least

maintaining and ruling power: as to those offices which he owes to his

fellow, the individual to the individual, the civil community to the

community. It was to these points especially that the greatest character

in the whole movement—the single heathen who knew how to die for his

convictions—turned the thoughts of those who followed him. Again, at the

very starting-point of Greek philosophy a man of most virtuous conduct,

gifted likewise with great powers of attraction, had sought to realise in

a society the philosophic life. And we have seen this conception of the

mode of propagating truth to lie at the bottom of Greek teaching, and to

have been pursued by Plato, by Aristotle, by Zeno, by Epicurus, to have

been the original and even the only form of teaching which they

recognised. What was the result in this respect also? In the four hundred

and forty years following the death of Socrates had reason produced a

consistent doctrine, and a society of which that doctrine should be the

law and bond, a fitting body for its soul to tenant, the immortal race of

that living word which Plato contemplated? Time there had been enough, and

even a superfluity of genius: but there were also two great outward events

which might be expected to favour and advance such a result.

The first of these was the subjection of the whole East to the influence

of the Greek mind by the conquest of Alexander, the effect of which

continued in the kingdoms carried on by his successors. Originally the

civil position of the Greek, as the free citizen of a free state, had been

all in all to him. His country was his single measure. But during the

lifetime of Plato and Aristotle this position had been more and more

altering. The philosophy of Zeno and Epicurus was set up by men who had

lost it altogether, who were thrown back on themselves, on the intrinsic

nature of man, for support. Their inmost thought was how to produce

tranquillity of mind, and so far as might be, happiness, for man, in

something independent of his civil position. The loss of self-government

had opened to them perforce a field far wider than the narrow confines of

a provincial citizenship. Henceforth the schools of Plato, Aristotle,

Zeno, and Epicurus issued their mental legislation not for the inhabitant

of Attica, but for all that fusion of races which occupied the eastern

coasts of the Mediterranean, was ruled by Greek potentates, and spoke the

Hellenic tongue. Thus the ground taken up by philosophy was at once

religious and cosmopolitan; the former because it attempted to deal with

the nature of man as man, and to give him inward contentment, the latter

because the mind, which used as its organ the Greek language, swayed large

and independent empires, embracing various races of men. Then, if ever, it

might have been expected that heathenism would make a great spring,(447)

would cast aside what was local and accidental in the various customs,

races, and beliefs brought under the fusing influence of one spirit, and

idealise out of them a religion bearing the stamp and showing the force of

that human reason of which Greece was the great representative. But the

three centuries which witnessed the birth, the vigorous growth, and the

incessant contests of the schools of Zeno and Epicurus, together with the

scepticism which from Plato’s chair passed judgment on them both, produced

no such result, but rather terminated in that balancing of opposite

systems, and the selection of fragments from each, which we have seen in

Cicero.

The second great event which we have to note is that when the Greek mind

had thus been for three hundred years in possession of society throughout

the East, the Roman empire came to bind in unity of government not only

all those races which the successors of Alexander had ruled, but the wide

regions of the West as well, and their yet uncivilised inhabitants. Here,

again, the Greek mind was not dethroned, but married, as it were, to Roman

power. Philosophy made a sort of triumphal entry into Rome in spite of

Cato and all the conservative force of the old Roman spirit. And if fusion

had been the thought, the desire, and the attempt of the Ptolemies and the

Seleucidæ, even more certainly was it the only spirit by which Augustus

and Tiberius could hope to rule in peace the world made subject to them.

And not less than the extinction of Greek autonomy did the loss of

self-government accompanying the institution of the empire force the Roman

also back upon himself. When Cicero could no longer sway the senate, he

studied philosophic systems at Tusculum: and certainly his book of Offices

has been more valued by all posterity than his speeches against Catiline

or his defence of Milo. A long train of writers from the Fathers downwards

have seen in the civil unity of the Roman empire a providential

preparation for a great religion. But the field on which that empire arose

had already, so far as concerns the thinking classes, long been occupied

by the Greek philosophy. The two forces come into operation now together:

and seventy years after the battle of Actium, when Augustus and Tiberius

had completely established one ruling authority, and when this second

outward revolution had had full time to give its impulse to thought, and

had set before the eyes of men for two whole generations the vision of an

empire which seemed conterminous with civilisation itself, we may fairly

ask what philosophy had done towards producing a corresponding unity of

doctrine, and a society sustaining and propagating it.

If, then, we take our stand at the moment when Claudius began to reign,

and count a century backwards, it is impossible to mention a time when

philosophy was more impotent for good, and when the higher classes of the

Roman empire were more thoroughly irreligious and unbelieving. To

understand the reason of this we must take into account first the negative

and then the positive action of philosophy up to that time. As to the

former, there can be no doubt that the effect of philosophy in all its

schools and through all its shades of thought had been hostile to a simple

belief in polytheism and its mythology. Human reason had been turned with

pitiless severity on its mass of fables, its discreditable stories, its

manifold contradictions. As early as the sixth century before Christ it

had used the key of allegory in order to infuse into these some better

meaning, and this was carried out into full detail by Metrodorus, a

follower of Anaxagoras. Thus if Homer, the mirror in which the Greek saw

his religion reflected, described Jupiter as suspending Juno between

heaven and earth, Heracleitus was indignant with the atheists who did not

see that it meant how the world and the elements were formed.(448) By this

process indecent personal agencies melted away into physical effects, or

were even sublimated into moral lessons. Men were told that only soft

Phæacians could see in the loves of Mars and Venus a consecration of

adultery: to the man of sense it meant that valour and beauty were worthy

of each other. Through all the following centuries this tone of mind

continued. As to the stoical philosophers in particular, this physical

allegorising was the perpetual instrument by which they reconciled their

stern system of material Pantheism with all the stage scenery of the

poet’s Olympus. Epicurus, on the contrary, recognised the existence of

gods in countless numbers, but they were beings who lived in the enjoyment

of his philosophy, far removed from the cares of providence and the

thought of human things. On the other hand, Plato’s attempt to purify,

while he recognised, polytheism, and to sweep away all its fables as

purveyors of evil thoughts and desires, found little success, though his

conception of the godhead as the Idea of goodness, remained the highest

ever reached in that long process of thought; and through all this period

the best and purest minds found in him a support against that bewilderment

of the reason which the vulgar religion inflicted on them. But few and far

between were those who followed Plato in this his highest conception,

while the literature of that last century, in the midst of which Christ

appeared, remains an abiding proof that the critical, scoffing, negative

spirit of philosophy had spread itself over all the cultured classes. We

seek in vain in Julius Cæsar and Cicero, in Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil,

Manilius, Horace, Ovid, in Polybius, Dionysius, Diodorus, or Strabo, for

any real belief in the immortal gods whose names appear in their writings.

The poets use them for stage-effect, the statesmen as part of the

machinery of government, the historians as names interwoven with the

events which they recount: yet the life of all these men was filled with

the frequentation of rites and ceremonies, as a matter of law and custom,

having reference to a multitude of gods, concerning whom they had a

contemptuous disbelief, though none of them were without many a dark

superstition.

Such was the negative influence of philosophy; but what inward support had

it given to minds whose ancestral belief, still entertained by the mass of

men all around, was thus eaten out? What substitute had it provided for

this discredited polytheism with its ridiculed mythology?

1. First, did the Greek philosophy teach the unity of the Godhead? If by

this question be meant, did philosophy ever go forth into the midst of the

temples and smoking sacrifices with which every city teemed, and proclaim,

These gods which you worship are no gods: there is one Maker and Ruler of

the universe, and the homage due to him alone is usurped by a multitude of

pretended deities;—then there is no doubt about the answer, that this is

what neither Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Zeno, nor any other

philosopher thought of doing. The philosophic god was never set in the

forefront of the battle after this fashion. He dwelt in the most secret

shrine of Plato’s mind, hard to be discovered, and to be confessed, if at

all, in secret. If with Aristotle he was a pure spirit, yet he abode apart

from the world, working on it indeed, as the magnet on the iron, but

unconscious of it, not ruling it with free will.(449) And, save so far as

this is an exception, the Greek mind from beginning to end never succeeded

in absolutely separating God from matter. And as time went on, this

original defect showed itself more and more, until in the stoic system,

which, as to the conception of the power ruling the world, prevailed over

all the rest, that which was called God was simply a force pervading all

matter.(450) The Stoics could, indeed, as in the hymn of Cleanthes, invest

this god of theirs with many beautiful, grand, and attractive attributes.

His was almighty power;(451) he was the author of nature; he ruled all

things with law; and the world willingly obeyed his will. And this common

law passed through all things, so that evil mixed with good resulted in a

general order. Thus they could address him as Father and as King, guiding

all things with justice; and this being they termed Jupiter. But this is

only a poetic(452) exhibition of their genuine thought and meaning, which

was, that “all which was real was corporeal; matter and force are the two

chief principles; matter in itself is motionless and formless, but capable

of assuming every motion and every form. Force is the active, moving, and

forming principle; it is indivisibly joined with matter: the operating

force in the whole of the world is the Godhead.”(453) “By the names

World-soul, World-reason, Nature, Universal Law, Providence, Fate, the

same thing is indicated, the one Primal Force determining everything with

absolute regularity, interpenetrating the whole world.” And even the

opposition between the material and the spiritual description of the

Godhead disappears upon closer examination, for on Stoic principles the

Godhead can only then be considered as real when considered as body.(454)

It was to such a unity that Greek philosophy advanced, receding more and

more from that imperfect conception of personality with which it had

started. Further, the idea of creation is wanting to Greek philosophy from

its beginning to its end. The power which it contemplates is evermore

confronted with matter, which it can permeate, fashion, move through a

natural alchemy of endless changes, but in face of which it is not free to

create or not to create, not even free to prevent the evil which lies

therein as a sort of blind necessity. As there was always Force, so was

there always Matter. To the conception of a free Creator of spirit and of

matter the Greek mind never rose: nor accordingly to that of a free Ruler

of the universe: and this is only to say in other words, that the

conception of personality—that is, of self-consciousness and moral

freedom, as applied to a Being of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness—was

imperfect and confused. Plato in his highest flight had seemed to

recognise one God, whom to enjoy is the happiness of man; but Plato and

all who followed him had endured, had countenanced, had taken part in the

polytheistic worship. And again, neither he, nor Aristotle, nor Zeno

showed any inclination to suffer for their doctrines. This philosophic

god, gradually evolved by the reasoning mind, produced the very smallest

effect upon the unphilosophic world. The stoic argument from final causes,

which Cicero has preserved for us, and the force of which he has

acknowledged in very remarkable words,(455) generated no martyrs. Was it

merely from want of earnestness that the philosophers tolerated and

practised the polytheism which surrounded them, and avoided all suffering

for their opinions by compliance with a worship which they disbelieved? or

was it that their standing-ground, in all more or less pantheistic, was

identical with that which they impugned?(456) that the gods of Olympus

were powers of nature personified, while their god was simply one power

inhabiting nature? that they never reached the one personal creating God,

and were consequently unable to maintain his absolute distinction from the

world together with his relation to it as Creator and Ruler? That which

they cherished as a private philosophical good, which they cared so little

to exhibit to the world, was in fact incapable of conquering the world,

for the human heart cannot live upon an impersonal god, and will not

suffer for a conception of the reason. But it was in this conception that

philosophic thought had terminated. And here we find the chief cause of

its powerlessness to improve and purify the mythology which it attacked,

and much more to affect the lives and conduct of those who professed its

tenets. For the old mythology had at least a strong consciousness of

personality in its gods. In Homer himself the original tradition, of which

his religion was a corruption, still spoke of the father of gods and men

as the ruler and judge of the world. In the heathen mind generally such a

conception still existed; nor is it too much to say that the common people

among the Greeks and Romans were nearer to the truth of one personal God

than the philosopher; and the philosopher himself when he listened at any

moment of danger and anxiety to the promptings “of the soul naturally

Christian” within him, than when he indulged in his esoteric problems.

2. But the conception of personality in God rules the conception of

personality in man. As throughout the Greek philosophy the former was weak

and imperfect, until in the Stoic system it vanished, so the latter. The

physical theory of the Greek overmastered and excluded the conception of

freewill in his mind, first as to God and then as to man. As evil existed

throughout the world, for which he had no better solution than to place

its seat in that matter which was coexistent with the divine reason, and

which that reason was powerless wholly to subdue, so in the smaller world

of man. In him a portion of the divine reason was united with matter. If

Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics arranged somewhat differently the mode of

this composition, yet to all of them alike from the one side and the other

the notion of physical necessity came in. The material constituent tended

to evil, the reasoning constituent to good: in the man who was made up of

the two there was a perpetual jar. There was no room left in their theory

for the conception of the soul as a self-originating cause of action. No

sect struggled so hard and so persistently to maintain a doctrine of

freewill as the Stoic: but it went down before that central tenet of their

system, physical necessity, the inexorable sequence of cause and effect,

which made up their “common law,” by which the world was ruled. The

conception of an all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful personal Creator, in

whose nature the eternal law is based, not being clear to their minds, so

neither was the conception of sin, as the infringement of that law. The

law of physical necessity took the place of the eternal moral law: that

which man did he did by virtue of the physical constituents out of which

he was composed. The evil which he did was physical rather than moral: and

he was not responsible for what he could not prevent. The questions of

freewill, of evil viewed as sin, and of responsibility, are inextricably

bound up with the doctrine of the human personality; and on all these the

philosophic mind was dark and confused.

But if the Greek’s physical theory stood in the way of his conceiving

clearly the human personality in this life, much more did it impede his

conception of that personality as continuing after death. For as the union

of a portion of the divine reason with matter constituted man, and as

death put an end to that union, the compound being ceased to exist, the

portion of the divine reason reverted to its source, but the sensitive

soul, as well as the body, was dissolved and came to nothing. There was in

his mind no “individual substance of a rational nature” to form the basis

of identity, and maintain the conception of personality. In the absence of

this, he who had felt, thought, and acted, was no more. He could not

therefore receive retribution for his deeds, since there was no personal

agent on whom the retribution was to fall.

3. A god who was not personal and did not make man,—man in whom freewill,

the mark of personality, was not recognised, so long as he lived, and in

whom after death no personal agent continued to exist,—these correspond to

each other, and these were the last result of Græco-Roman philosophic

thought up to the time of Claudius. But what sort of duty did man, being

such, owe to such a god? Cicero’s book on Offices had been written upwards

of eighty years, but nothing that followed it during that time equalled it

in reputation or ability. It was the best product that his Roman thought

could draw from all the preceding Grecian schools: and it was accepted for

centuries as the standard of heathen morality. Let us, then, first note

that in this book(457) there is nothing like a recognition of God as the

Creator and Common Father; no call upon the human soul to love him as

such, and for his own perfections; no thought that the duty of man

consists in becoming like to him, nor his reward in attaining that

likeness. The absence of such a thought gives its character to the whole

book, and measures its level. The second point to be noted is, that the

happiness of man consists not in being like God, and consequently, in

union with him, but in virtue, which is living according to nature. In his

reasonable nature everyone possesses a sufficient standard of moral action

under every circumstance which may arise. Thirdly, throughout the whole of

his treatise Cicero makes no use of the doctrine of man’s immortality. His

happiness, then, is left to consist in virtue—life according to reason,

which again is life according to nature—without respect to any future

state of existence. Now, if Cicero stood alone in these three points, his

book would only represent his own authority, but he is in fact the

mouthpiece herein of that whole preceding heathen philosophy which he

criticised, and from which he selected. Even Plato himself, by far the

highest and best of Greek philosophers in this respect, though he had in

single expressions indicated that the happiness of man was to be made like

to God, constructed no system of ethics in dependence on that conception,

which, if it be true, is of all-constraining influence, and is to the

whole moral system what the law of gravity is to the material universe.

Plato’s ethical system was a strict deduction from his physical theory of

the three parts in man, to each of which he assigned its virtue. Far less

did Aristotle connect morality with God. The Stoics, indeed, who occupy by

far the largest space in Greek philosophy, seem to be an exception. It is

said that “their whole view of the world springs from the thought of the

Divine Being who generates all finite beings from himself, and includes

them all in himself, who penetrates them with his power, rules them with

his unchangeable law, and thus merely manifests himself in them all;” so

that their system “is fundamentally religious, and scarcely an important

statement in it which is not in connection with their doctrine of God;”

and so with them “all moral duties rest on a religious ground, all

virtuous actions are a fulfilment of the divine will and law;”(458) but

then this God is but a name for the sternest and most absolute system of

material necessity: a God without a moral nature; without freedom; without

personality; under that name, in fact, force and matter making up one

thing are substituted for a living God, who, in virtue of the laws of

nature, is swept out of his own universe. So, again, Cicero’s statement

that man’s happiness consists in virtue, which virtue is life according to

nature, is the general doctrine of philosophy, which the Stoics in

particular had elaborated. If there be any one expression which would

sum-up in a point the whole heathen conception of what man should do, it

would be “Life according to nature.” So, again, the exclusion of any

thought of immortality, and a consequent retribution, in its bearing on

morality, was common to all the schools of Grecian thought, if we except

the faltering accents and yearning heart of Plato, and most of all was

truly stoic. The imperfection and unclearness of their view as to the

divine personality, and as to the human, in the reasonable being, the

image and reflection of the divine, accords but too truly, while it

accounts for, this detachment of man from God in the field of moral duty.

4. What, then, remained to man after such deductions? There remained the

earthly city, the human commonwealth. And when, passing beyond the bounds

of any particular nation, and man’s civil position therein, philosophy

grasped the moral life as the relation between man as man,(459) and

conceived human society itself as one universal kingdom of gods and men,

it made a real progress and reached its highest point. But this was the

proper merit of the Stoics.(460) Plutarch attributes to Zeno, their

founder, this precise idea, that we ought not to live in cities and towns,

each divided by peculiar notions of justice, but esteem all men as

tribesmen and citizens, who should make up one flock feeding in a common

pasture under a common law. The grandest passages of Cicero are those in

which he clothes in his Roman diction this stoic idea, as for

instance:(461) “They judge the world to be ruled by the power and will of

the gods, and to be a sort of city and polity common to gods and men, and

that everyone of us is part of this world.” The bond of this community is

the common possession of reason,(462) “in which consists the primal

society of man with God. But they who have reason in common, have also

right reason in common. And as this is law, we are as men to be considered

as associated with the gods by law also. Now they who have community of

law, have likewise community of rights. This latter makes them also to

belong to the same polity. But if such pay obedience to the same commands

and authorities, then are they even much more obedient to this supernal

allotment, this divine mind and all-powerful God. So that this universal

world is to be considered one commonwealth of gods and men.” “Law is the

supreme reason, implanted in nature, which commands all things that are to

be done, and prohibits their contraries.” “The radical idea of right I

derive from nature, under whose guidance we have to draw out the whole of

this subject-matter.” Thus the great Roman lawyer and statesman, robing

philosophy in his toga, propounded to his countrymen, full of the greed of

universal conquest, with no less lucidity than truth and beauty, the

result of stoic thought, that human society in general rested on the

similarity of reason in the individual, that we have no ground for

restricting this common possession to one people, or to consider ourselves

more nearly related to one than another. All men, apart from what they

have done for themselves, stand equally near to each other, since all

equally partake of reason. All are members of one body, since the same

nature has formed them out of one stuff, for the same destination.(463)

Greek philosophy has undoubtedly the merit of bringing out into clear

conception this purely human and natural society. It thus expressed in

language the work of Alexander, and still more the work of the Roman

empire, as it was to be; and more than this, it herein supplied a point of

future contact with Christian morality. The advance from the narrowness of

the Greek mind in its proud rejection of all non-hellenic nations, and no

less from the revolting selfishness of Roman conquest, is remarkable. And

it is an advance of philosophic thought. As the older thinkers considered

the political life of the city to be an immediate demand of human nature,

so the Stoics considered the unitedness of man as a whole together, the

dilatation of the particular political community to the whole race, in the

same light. Its ground was the common possession of reason. The common law

which ruled this human commonwealth was to live according to the dictation

of reason, that is, according to nature, in which therefore virtue

consists,(464) being one and the same in God and in man, and in them

alone.(465) Such virtue branches into four parts, the prudence which

discerns and practises the truth; the justice which assigns his own to

each; the courage which prevails over all difficulties; the self-restraint

and order which preserves temperance in all things. These being bound up

together cover the whole moral domain, and embrace all those relations

within which human society moves, and, as having their root in the moral

nature of man, are a duty to everyone.

This human commonwealth enfolds in idea the whole earth. It is the society

of man with man. But it closes with this life. It has no respect to

anything beyond. It was the Stoics who most completely worked out this

system of moral philosophy; who urged the duty of man’s obedience to

nature, of his voluntary subjection to that one universal law and power

which held all things from the highest to the lowest in its grasp; and who

likewise most absolutely cut him off from any personal existence in a

future state. The virtue in which they placed his happiness was to be

complete in itself; it was the work of man without any assistance on the

part of God.(466) It made man equal to God. It found its reward in itself.

If it was objected that the highest virtue in this life sometimes met with

the greatest disasters, sorrows, pains, and bereavements, the system had

no reply to this mystery. It did not attempt to assert a recompense beyond

the grave.

As little did it attempt to account for or to correct the conflict between

man’s reason and his animal nature. That perpetual approval of the better

and choice of the worse part stood before the Stoic as before us all. He

admitted that the vast majority of men were bad, and his wise man was an

ideal never reached. But he had no answer whatever to the question, why,

if vice is so evil in the eye of our reason, it so clings to our nature;

why, if so contrary to the good of the mass, it dwells within every

individual.(467)

The human city or community of men is the highest point which this moral

philosophy contemplates. Each particular commonwealth should be herein the

image of the one universal commonwealth which their thought had

constructed. But what, then, is the relation of the individual man to the

whole of which he is a part? This nature, which is the standard to the

whole ideal commonwealth, is, as we have seen so often, in fact a law of

the strictest necessity. If virtuous, man follows it willingly; if

vicious, he must follow it against his will. There was no real freedom for

the individual in the system as philosophy. What was disguised under the

name of law, reason, and God, was a relentless necessity before which

everyone was to bow. But transfer this philosophy to any political

community, and consider in what position it placed the individual with

regard to the civil government. Human society is considered as supreme:

but his own state represents to him that society, and as all things end

with this life, no part of man remains withdrawn from that despotism which

requires the sacrifice of the part for the good of the whole. Man’s

conscience had no refuge in the thought of a future life; no reserve which

the abuse of human power could not touch. And so we find that in matter of

fact there was no issue out of such a difficulty but in the doctrine of

self-destruction. They termed it in truth _The Issue_,(468) when disease,

or disaster, or pain, or the abuse of human power, rendered it impossible

any longer to lead a life in accordance with nature. In this case all the

Stoic authorities justified it, praised it, and termed it the Door which

divine Providence had benignantly left ever open.

While therefore it must be acknowledged that the stoical conception of the

whole earth as one city(469) was a true result of Greek thought, and at

the same time the highest point it reached, and a positive result of great

value, yet it must also be said that it was one rather big with rich

promises for the future than of any great present advantage: for it

required to be impregnated and filled with another conception of which its

framers had lost their hold, the doctrine, that is, of a future

retribution, redressing the inequality, the injustice, the undeserved

suffering so often falling upon virtue in the present life. When that

conception came to complete and exalt the Stoic idea, the need of

self-destruction as an issue of the wise man, as soon as he could not live

according to nature, ceased, for man himself ceased to be a part of a

physical whole governed by necessity. The human city relaxed its right

over the individual in presence of a divine city, which embraced indeed

man in his present life, but taught him to look for its complete

realisation in another.

The human commonwealth, however, extended in idea to the race itself, as

possessing reason in common, and individual man therein, as well as the

whole aggregate, viewed as being ruled by the cardinal virtues of

prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, but both the commonwealth

and the individual terminating with this life, was the last word of

heathen philosophy up to the time of Claudius.

We have seen that from the time the Greek race was absorbed in the Roman

empire the systems of philosophy were broken up by the eclectic spirit,

which, engendered within already by the ferment of opinions, was

strengthened and developed by the accession of the practical Roman mind.

Variety of belief is indeed marked as “the essential feature of Greek

philosophy” from its outset, and “the antagonist force of suspensive

scepticism” as including some of its most powerful intellects from

Xenophanes five hundred years before to Sextus Empiricus two hundred years

after the Christian era. One of its historians stamps it as “a collection

of dissenters, small sects each with its own following, each springing

from a special individual as authority, each knowing itself to be only one

among many.”(470) It is therefore no wonder that if Plato’s grand

conception of an immortal line of the living word thus came to nought,

philosophy proved itself much more incapable of founding a society

impregnated with its principles than it had even been of constructing a

coherent doctrine which should obtain general reception. And to judge of

the actual impotence of philosophy in the century ending with the

principate of Claudius, we must rest a moment on this second fact.

Philosophers calling themselves Platonic, Peripatetic, Sceptic, Stoic,

Epicurean, or these in various mixtures, were to be found at the various

seats of learning, Athens, Rhodes, Alexandria, for instance, or at Rome as

the seat of empire, or travelling like wandering stars over her vast

territory, but these scattered, nebular, and disjointed luminaries shone

with a varying as well as a feeble light, which rather confused than

satisfied human reason. They were utterly powerless to transfer their

doctrine into any number of human hearts living in accordance therein. The

only exception to this statement seems to prove its real truth. By far the

most united of the sects was that of the Epicureans, who held with great

tenacity to their founder’s views and mode of life, which may be summed up

in denial of God and Providence, and enjoyment to the utmost of this

world’s goods; the fair side of it being a general benevolence, courtesy,

friendship, in short, a genial appreciation of what we understand by the

word civilisation. These antagonists of Stoic principles and of the

highest morality which heathen thought had constructed were the most

numerous of existing sects, and we are told that hundreds of years after

their founder’s death they presented the appearance of a well-ordered

republic, ruled without uproar or dissension by one spirit, in which they

formed a favourable contrast to the Stoics. With the exception of a single

fugitive, Metrodorus, never had an Epicurean detached himself from his

school.(471) We must give philosophy the credit of this single instance of

a capacity to create a social life in accordance with its tenets in a sect

whose doctrines were a reproach among the heathens themselves. The failure

of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Aristotle, of Zeno, was the success of

Epicurus, and at the same time the announcement that the age of Augustus

and Tiberius was ready to expire in sensuality and unbelief, and even in

exhaustion of the philosophic mind, for no period is so barren of

scientific names, which carry any weight, as the fifty years preceding

Claudius.(472) We have seen above that all these philosophers aimed at

forming a society which should carry out their principles; that this was

their original and their only idea of teaching; that with a view to make

it permanent they created a chair of teaching, a living authority who was

to continue on their doctrine. But the chair of Plato alone presented(473)

five Academies with dissentient doctrines; and a Platonic or Stoic city no

one had seen. Thus viewing their united action upon the polytheistic

idolatry we may say that while they could discredit its fables in

reflecting minds, while they could even raise an altar in their thoughts

“to the unknown God,” they left society in possession of the temples and

observant of a worship which they pronounced to be immoral, monstrous, and

ridiculous. They had destroyed in many the ancestral belief; they had

awakened perhaps in some a sense of one great Power ruling the universe;

but having taken up the religious ground and professed to satisfy man’s

desire for happiness, they had been utterly powerless to construct a

religion. They failed entirely in the union of three things,(474) a dogma

and a morality founded on that dogma, both of which should be exhibited,

brought before the eyes and worked into the hearts of men by a

corresponding worship. To unite these three things was needed an authority

of which above all they were destitute. Their dogma was without the

principle of faith; their morality without binding power; but the worship

which should blend the two they had not at all. And so they presented no

semblance of the society which should carry these three things in its

bosom, and they could not in the least satisfy the doubts or the yearnings

which they had raised.

But the period beginning with the rise of Greek philosophy and ending with

the principate of Claudius will ever remain of the highest interest and

importance as showing what human reason, putting forth its highest powers

in the race in which it culminated, but at the same time more thoroughly

separated from belief, tradition, and authority than anywhere else, did

actually achieve. It is in this respect that the heathen philosophers,

together with the poets and historians who precede the publication of the

Christian religion in the Roman world, possess a value far beyond any

intrinsic merit of their own. It is a study of pathology the results of

which are far as yet from being gathered in. It is only by carefully

examining what the philosophers taught in theology and morals—for they

aspired to be and were both the theologians and the moralists of those

ages—that we can at all form an adequate judgment of the real work which

the Christian Church has wrought in the world. It is only by using the

historians and poets as a mirror of that general society to whose cultured

classes the philosophers spoke, that we can estimate what the great mass

of mankind then was, and what effect the philosophers produced on them.

The difference between their world and their society and ours is the

measure of Christian work. The hundred years preceding Claudius, which

include in them almost all the greatest names of Roman literature, are the

most important of all in this point of view, both as containing the result

of scientific thought in the five preceding centuries, and as giving the

depth of the moral and intellectual descent. We learn from this whole long

period the fulness of the truth conveyed in those words of the angelic

doctor at the commencement of his great work: “Even for those things which

can be investigated concerning God by the force of human reason, it was

necessary for man to be instructed by a divine revelation, because few

only, and they after long inquiries, and with the admixture of many

errors, would convey to man the truth concerning God as searched out by

reason.”(475)

What the philosophers from the time of Thales had taken as their special

work was to measure and estimate the visible world. And for the last four

centuries of this period especially they made the nature and the needs,

the supreme good and the happiness of man their chief concern, in

subordination to which they continued their physical inquiries. And surely

the judgment which an inspired writer formed of their travail must recur

to the mind with great force at the end of the preceding review: “If they

knew so much as to be able to estimate the visible world, why did they not

more easily discover its Lord?”(476) Why from the goods which they beheld

had they not power to know the sole possessor of being, nor when they gave

attention to his works, recognised their artificer? Why did they esteem

fire or breath, rapid air or circling stars, or the force of water, or the

lights of heaven rulers of the universe? For if the visible beauty of

these delighted them so that they conceived them to be gods, how did they

not draw the conclusion that the Lord of these was so much better than

they? for it was the Author of beauty who created them. If they were

struck dumb with the sense of their power and operation, why did they not

conceive how much more powerful He who made them was? For from the

greatness and the beauty of creatures the parent of them is by the force

of reason discerned.(477)

From their capital error in this—which the same writer declares to be

inexcusable(478)—proceeded their other errors concerning man, his nature,

his supreme good, and his final end. It is here sufficient to note that

down to the age of Claudius there is no appearance that either of these

great errors would be corrected: and still less any appearance of the rise

of a great religion which would cause the multitudinous altars of

heathenism to disappear before the altar of the unknown God, and would

construct a City of God in the midst of that population in the thinking

minds of which divergent systems of philosophy had eaten out belief in the

babel of false gods without implanting belief in a personal Creator, the

author and the end of man.

INDEX.

_Academies_, the five, of Plato’s school, 480.

_Adam_, his headship, 60, 62, 65;

its result seen in his fall, 67.

_Alexander_ the Great, effects of his conquests on Greek life, 436, 455.

_Alexander Severus_, his treatment of Christians, 244.

_Antoninus Pius_, extension of the Church in his reign, 197;

treatment of it under him, 227-233;

what aspect the Church bore to him, 233-7.

_Apollonius_, a senator, martyred under Commodus, 302, 209, note 37.

_Apostolic age_, result of, 186-7.

_Aristotle_, his character as a philosopher, 429;

his view of the soul, 430;

relation of his philosophy to religion, 433;

conception of the method of teaching, 420;

what he says of Socrates, 390;

his account of the generation of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, 400.

_Athanasius, S._, 26, 32, 34, 37, 98.

_Athenagoras_, 182.

_Athens_, worship at, 5.

_Augustine, S._, his contrast of Heathenism with Christianity, 172-5;

on the moral influence of Polytheism, 21-4, 27, 30, 33;

how the Second Divine Person is the Truth, 51;

Adam and Christ, 76, 77, 84, 110;

the Church Christ’s Body, 99;

and at once his Temple, House, and City, 88;

also the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men, 97;

dowered with Christ’s Blood, 144;

Christ and the Church one Man, 57, 144;

believing Christ, without believing the Church, is decapitating Christ,

105;

crime of denying that the Catholic Church will for ever continue in its

unity, 106;

the Word made flesh that He might become the Head of the Church, 107;

the Holy Spirit Vicarius Redemptoris, 115, 119, 124, 125, 139;

asserts the perpetual Principatus of the Roman See from the beginning,

290;

describes the uses of heresy, 281-2;

admits of no charity but in the unity of the Body, 130, 139;

coherence of the natural and mystical Body of Christ in the Eucharist,

103;

what the Church will be hereafter, 112.

_Augustus_, his idea of the Roman empire, 2;

prospects of Polytheism at the end of his reign, 46.

_Aulus Gellius_, 421.

_Beugnot_, Destruction du Paganisme, 43, 44.

_Captivity_ of man to the devil, 27-30, 33-8, 69;

its full reversal as seen in the Body of Christ, 112.

_Carneades_, 447.

_Catholic_, term used of the Church by S. Ignatius about A.D. 115, and by

the Church of Polycarp fifty years later, 206.

_Celsus_, 179, 197, 230, 231, 234.

_Champagny_, 16, 182, 241, 243, 305, 475, 480.

_Christ_, declares Himself to be a king, 49;

His kingdom that of Truth, 50-4;

the counterpart of Adam as an individual, 76;

as Head of a race, 77;

as making one Body with His people, 79;

parallel in His natural and mystical Body, 96;

analogies between them, 97;

coherence of both in the Eucharist, 103;

His action permanent in His kingdom, 81;

in His House, 86;

in His Body, 88;

in His Bride, 91;

in the Mother of His race, 92;

His five distinct loves, 93;

His Body imperishable, 104;

crime of imputing falsehood to it, 105;

force of its corporate unity, 110;

gifts which He bestows on it, 125;

connection of Truth with His Person the principle of persecution, 182;

His Passion repeated in His people, 185;

His work summed up by S. Augustine, 172-5.

_Chrysostom, S._, 87, 101, 109, 220, 224.

_Church_, the, the Kingdom of Truth, 81;

the House of Christ, 86;

the Body of Christ, 88;

the Bride of Christ, 91;

the Mother of His race, 92;

the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men, 97;

as such, the treasure-house of Truth and Grace, 100, 120-2;

conveys the fruits of the Incarnation, 101, 143;

is imperishable and incorruptible, 105;

possesses Unity, Truth, Charity, and Sanctity as coinherent gifts of the

Spirit, 125-8;

bestows forgiveness of sins, faith, adoption, and sanctification on the

individual, 128-31;

unity of its jurisdiction, 146;

analogy between it and the relation of soul and body, 133;

between it and the human commonwealth, 134;

between it and the natural unity of man’s race, 135;

transmission of truth in it, 148, 166;

by a triple succession, 156-161;

development of the Truth its proper work, 168;

its divine life as opposed to heathenism, 171;

its witness of Christ’s confession in the first ten generations, 184;

its first persecution by Nero, 191;

growth in the time of Antoninus Pius, 195;

picture of it by S. Ignatius, 199;

its treatment of heresies, 204, 206, 258, 265, 274, 276;

bearing of Trajan to it, 209, 215;

of Hadrian, 221;

of Antoninus Pius, 226;

of Marcus Aurelius, 292;

of Commodus, 302;

of Septimius Severus, 302;

its position in the third century, 308;

its organic unity as set forth by S. Cyprian, 325-334;

power of its idea on Christians, 340;

expresses Christ in its moral character, its worship, and its

government, 341-5;

persecuted by Decius, 356;

by Valerian and Aurelian, 361;

by Diocletian, 362;

obtains freedom from Constantine, 371;

how affected by Roman law between A.D. 64 and 313, 371-3.

_Church_, a mother or cathedral church only so called, 253.

_Churches_, public, when first known to exist at Rome, 308.

_Cicero_, states the work of Socrates, 391;

representative of Eclecticism, 450;

sources of his philosophical works, 451;

what he says of the atomic theory, 464;

his book _de Officiis_ the standard of heathen morality for centuries

after him, 468;

his statement of the Stoic idea of the world as one republic of gods and

men, 471;

his conception of virtue in general, 471, 473;

his partition of the cardinal virtues, 473;

virtue not a gift of God, but the work of man, 474.

_Cleanthes_, his hymn quoted, 461.

_Clement_, Pope S., 191, 194.

_Clement_, of Alexandria, 278, 287, 303.

_Commodus_, 243, 302.

_Cyprian, S._, his statement of the Church’s organic unity founded on the

Primacy given to Peter, 326-331;

puts the force of the Episcopate in its unity, 147, 332-4;

repudiates a parallel between the twelve tribes of Israel and the

Church, on the question of unity, 334;

agreement of his witness with that of S. Paul, S. Ignatius, and S.

Irenæus, 349;

his conversion, described by himself, a type of heathen conversion in

general, 336-8;

describes the relaxation produced by the long peace of the Church before

the Decian persecution, 350-2;

his martyrdom, 358;

says the Emperor Decius would much rather endure the appointment of a

rival emperor than of a Bishop of Rome, 356.

_Cyril, S._, of Alexandria, 54, 55;

on the Fall and the Restoration, 136;

to become a Christian is to enter into unity with Christ both physical

and spiritual, 137.

_Dante_, 422.

_Decius_, 356.

_De Rossi_, 252.

_Diocletian_, 362.

_Diognetus_, author of letter to, marks the Christians as one body and

people, but diffused everywhere, circ. A.D. 100, 318.

_Dionysius, S._, archbishop of Alexandria, prizes martyrdom for the unity

of the Church more highly than for resistance to idolatry,

345.

_Döllinger_, Heidenthum und Judenthum, quoted or referred to, 5-13, 25,

196, 386, 401, 402, 407, 409, 410, 429-31, 438, 441, 442,

445-47, 456, 458, 461, 479, 480;

Hippolytus und Kallistus, 248, 256, 257.

_Domitian_, his persecution, 94.

_Eclecticism_, how it arose in Greek Philosophy, 448;

becomes universal, 450.

_Epicurus_, his conception of the method of teaching, 424;

his doctrine, 442.

_Episcopate_, the, triply defended by scripture, by institutions, and by

continuous personal descent, 163;

one and undivided, 327;

like the unity of the Godhead, 333;

which is effected by the Primacy, 334.

_Eucharist_, coherence of natural and mystical Body of Christ in, 102-3;

called by S. Ignatius that flesh of our Saviour Christ which suffered

for our sins, 202, note.

_Eusebius_, 150, 209, 251, 253, 302, 304, 361, 363, 364, 366, 367, 369.

_Forgiveness of sins_, doctrine of, guarded by triple succession of

teaching, of men, and of sacraments, 162.

_Freewill_, no room for it in the physical theory of Greek philosophy,

_e.g._ in Plato, 410, 411;

in Aristotle, 432;

in Stoicism, 440-1;

in all the schools, as to God, 461-5;

as to man, 465-7;

bearing of this on civil government, 475.

_Future life_ of man as a personal being, why not held by Greek

philosophy, 467, 470;

absence of it from Cicero’s _de Officiis_, 468.

_Grace_, Adam created in, 62, 64;

loss of this gift in the Fall, 66;

grace as restored in Christ, 136;

grace in the God-man, 77;

as in Adam and as in the God-man compared, 53;

as bestowed through the headship of the God-man, 78;

as seen in the Body of Christ, the counterpart of the body of Adam, 79;

grace, with truth, makes “the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men,”

97, 117;

the human fountain of this double power in the created nature of Christ,

121;

whence it is transfused into the Church, His Body, 122, 123-6;

grace, as given to the Church complete and indefeasible, 127;

as given to the individual may be withdrawn, 131;

actual bestowal of this grace on the Church, 138-142;

grace necessary for the acceptance and maintenance of truth, 155-6, 167,

170-2, 269;

grace, truth, and unity, viewed by S. Cyprian as inseparable, 332-3.

_Greek mind_, its standing-point, 380;

represents human reason more than any other ancient race, 382;

aided by a matchless language, 379;

ripens in the most beautiful of climates, 378;

pervades the whole East from the time of Alexander, 455;

is married to Roman power in the empire, 456;

is the great intellectual opponent of the Christian mind and Church,

375;

criticises polytheism for six hundred years, 376;

its outcome up to the time of S. Peter’s founding the Roman Church,

475-484;

why its philosophy disbelieved a future life, 467, 470.

_Grote_, Plato, 377, 402, 412, 413, 420, 421, 427, 478.

_Hadrian_, grandeur of Rome in his days, 240;

treatment of the Church, 221-3;

puts to death S. Symphorosa and her sons, 224-6.

_Hagemann_, die römische Kirche in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 209,

257, 273, 289, 352, 354.

_Hasler_, Verhältniss der heidnischen und christlichen Ethik, 468.

_Heathenism_, what it is, 59, 70, 72;

contrasted with Christianity, 79, 170-2;

by S. Augustine, 172-5;

its disregard of the value of moral truths, 177-9.

_Heresy_, subserves the enucleation of doctrine, 281;

the determining the Canon of the New Testament, 284;

brings out full statements of the principle of tradition, 286;

promotes extension and corroboration of the hierarchy, 288;

temper of, described by Irenæus, 270;

by Tertullian, 276;

by Clement of Alexandria, 278, 279;

by S. Augustine, 282.

_Herodotus_, the travelled Greek gentleman, 377.

_Idolatry_, Asiatic, its turpitude, 25;

division of gods, how far it could go, 27.

_Ignatius, S._, Bishop of Antioch, his picture of the Church in his day,

199-203;

his martyrdom, 215;

his recognition of the Roman Primacy, 218;

power of his intercession attested by S. Chrysostom, 219;

the Eucharist, that flesh of our Saviour Christ which suffered for our

sins, 202;

“Wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church”, 206;

completeness of a diocesan church called τὸ ἴδιον σωματεῖον, of the

whole church τὸ ἒν σῶμα τῆς ἐκκλησίας, 220.

_Innocent I._ Pope S., 255, 347.

_Irenæus, S._, 113, 264;

guilt of those who divide the great and glorious Body of Christ, 138;

on the Church’s unity of belief, 264-6;

gives the descent of the Roman See to his time, 267;

affirms its superior principality, 267;

sets forth the Church as the treasure-house of truth and grace, 268-9;

distinguishes the perpetual teaching office in her, 269, 287;

contrasts her truth with the variation of heresies, 270;

summary of his doctrine on the Church, heresy, the Primacy, tradition,

271-4;

one of a chain between S. Paul, S. Ignatius, and S. Cyprian, 349;

speaks of the number of martyrs, 339;

himself martyred with many of his people, 303;

speaks of “the tradition of the Apostles” as the whole body of truth

which they communicated, 198;

speaks of the “founding and building” of Sees, 255.

_Junius Rusticus_, 293.

_Jurisdiction_, spiritual, its unity, 146;

emanates from Christ’s Person, 342;

is the expression of His sovereignty, 345.

_Justin, S._, his martyrdom, 294-8;

his _Apologia_ quoted, 227-30;

marks Christians as one people and body, 319;

censures Jewish conduct in defaming Christians, 189;

describes the extension of Christianity in his time, 197.

_Kellner_, Hellenismus und Christenthum, 182, 197, 306.

_Kleutgen_, die Theologie der Vorzeit, 62, 63, 287.

_Kuhn_, Einleitung in die katholische Dogmatik, 291.

_Lactantius_, 363, 364, 365, 366.

_Lasaulæ_, Fall des Hellenismus, 192.

_Laurence, S._, his martyrdom, compared with a contemporaneous incident,

358.

_Liguori, S. Alphonso_, 141.

_Man_, various states of: state of pure nature, 60;

state of integrity, 61;

state of original justice, 62;

state of, after the fall, 67;

how summed up in Adam, 64, 71;

effect of his being a race, 59;

force of his social nature, when fallen, 72;

when restored, 108-110;

his corruption viewed as a fact of modern science, 58.

_Marcus Aurelius_, treatment of the Church, 292, 299-301.