When Socrates declared before his judges that "there is no evil to a
good man either in life or after death, nor are his affairs neglected
by the gods", he sounded the keynote of Stoicism, with its two main
doctrines of virtue as the only good, and the government of the world
by Providence. Let us weigh his words, lest we interpret them by the
light of a comfortable modern piety. A great many things that are
commonly called evil may and do happen to a good man in this life,
and therefore presumably misfortunes may also overtake him in any
other life that there may be. The only evil that can never befall him
is vice, because that would be a contradiction in terms. Unless
therefore Socrates was uttering idle words on the most solemn
occasion of his life, he must be taken to have meant that there is no
evil but vice, which implies that there is no good but virtue. Thus
we are landed at once in the heart of the Stoic morality. To the
question why, if there be a providence, so many evils happen to good
men, Seneca unflinchingly replies: "No evil can happen to a good man,
contraries do not mix." God has removed from the good all evil:
because he has taken from them crimes and sins, bad thoughts and
selfish designs and blind lust and grasping avarice. He has attended
well to themselves, but he cannot be expected to look after their
luggage: they relieve him of that care by being indifferent about it.
This is the only form in which the doctrine of divine providence can
be held consistently with the facts of life Again, when Socrates on
the same occasion expressed his belief that it was not "permitted by
the divine law for a better man to be harmed by a worse", he was
asserting by implication the Stoic position. Neither Meletus nor
Anytus could harm him, though they might have him killed or banished,
or disfranchised. This passage of the Apology, in a condensed form,
is adopted by Epictetus as one of the watchwords of Stoicism.
There is nothing more distinctive of Socrates than the doctrine that
virtue is knowledge. Here too the Stoics followed him, ignoring all
that Aristotle had done in showing the part played by the emotions
and the will in virtue. Reason was with them a principle of action;
with Aristotle it was a principle that guided action, but the motive
power had to come from elsewhere. Socrates must even be held
responsible for the Stoic paradox of the madness of all ordinary
folk.
The Stoics did not owe much to the Peripatetics. There was too much
balance about the master mind of Aristotle for their narrow
intensity. His recognition of the value of the passions was to them
an advocacy of disease in moderation: his admission of other elements
besides virtue into the conception of happiness seemed to them to be
a betrayal of the citadel, to say as he did that the exercise of
virtue was the highest good was no merit in their eyes, unless it
were added to the confession that there was none beside it. The
Stoics tried to treat man as a being of pure reason. The Peripatetics
would not shut their eyes to his mixed nature, and contended that the
good of such a being must also be mixed, containing in it elements
which had reference to the body and its environment. The goods of the
soul indeed, they said, far outweighed those of body and estate, but
still the latter had a right to be considered.
Though the Stoics were religious to the point of superstition, yet
they did not invoke the terrors of theology to enforce the lesson of
virtue. Plato does this even in the very work, the professed object
of which is to prove the _intrinsic_ superiority of justice to
injustice. But Chrysippus protested against Plato's procedure on this
point, declaring that the talk about punishment by the gods was mere
'bugaboo'. By the Stoics indeed, no less than by the Epicureans, fear
of the gods was discarded from philosophy. The Epicurean gods took no
part in the affairs of men; the Stoic God was incapable of anger.
The absence of any appeal to rewards and punishments was a natural
consequence of the central tenet of the Stoic morality: that virtue
is in itself the most desirable of all things. Another corollary that
flows with equal directness from the same principle is that is better
to be than to seem virtuous. Those who are sincerely convinced that
happiness is to be found in wealth or pleasure or power prefer the
reality to the appearance of these goods; it must be the same with
him who is sincerely convinced that happiness lies in virtue.
Despite the want of feeling in which the Stoics gloried, it is yet
true to say that the humanity of their system constitutes one of its
most just claims on our admiration. They were the first fully to
recognise the worth of man as man; they heralded the reign of peace
for which we are yet waiting; they proclaimed to the world the
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man; they were convinced of
the solidarity of mankind, and laid down that the interest of one
must be subordinated to that of all. The word "philanthrop," though
not unheard before their time, was brought into prominence by them as
a name for a virtue among the virtues.
Aristotle's ideal state, like the Republic of Plato, is still an
Hellenic city; Zeno was the first to dream of a republic which should
embrace all mankind. In Plato's Republic all the material goods are
contemptuously thrown to the lower classes, all the mental and
spiritual reserved for the higher. In Aristotle's ideal the bulk of
the population are mere conditions, not integral parts of the state.
Aristotle's callous acceptance of the existing fact of slavery
blinded his eyes to the wider outlook, which already in his time was
beginning to be taken. His theories of the natural slave and of the
natural nobility of the Greeks are mere attempts to justify practice.
In the Ethics there is indeed a recognition of the rights of man, but
it is faint and grudging. Aristotle there tells us that a slave, as a
man, admits of justice, and therefore of friendship, but
unfortunately it is not this concession which is dominant in his
system, but rather the reduction of a slave to a living tool by which
it is immediately preceded. In another passage Aristotle points out
that men, like other animals, have a natural affection for the
members of their own species, a fact, he adds, which is best seen in
travelling. This incipient humanitarianism seems to have been
developed in a much more marked way by Aristotle's followers, but it
is the Stoics who have won the glory of having initiated humanitarian
sentiment.
Virtue, with the earlier Greek philosophers, was aristocratic and
exclusive. Stoicism, like Christianity, threw it open to the meanest
of mankind. In the kingdom of wisdom, as in the kingdom of Christ,
there was neither barbarian, Scythian, bond, nor free. The only true
freedom was to serve philosophy, or, which was the same thing, to
serve God; and that could be done in any station in life. The sole
condition of communion with gods and good men was the possession of a
certain frame of mind, which might belong equally to a gentleman, to
a freedman, or to a slave. In place of the arrogant assertion of the
natural nobility of the Greeks, we now hear that a good mind is the
true nobility. Birth is of no importance; all are sprung from the
gods. "The door of virtue is shut to no man; it is open to all,
admits all, invites all--free men, freedmen, slaves, kings and
exiles. Its election is not of family or fortune; it is content with
the bare man." Wherever there was a human being, there Stoicism saw a
field for well doing. Its followers were always to have in their
mouths and hearts the well-known line--