they point as their ultimate end to the happiness of the agent. The
first seeks that happiness in external circumstances; the second and
third in psychological conditions. There is, however, a fourth kind of
motive which may be urged, and which is the peculiar characteristic of
the intuitive school of moralists and the stumbling-block of its
opponents. It is asserted that we are so constituted that the notion of
duty furnishes in itself a natural motive of action of the highest
order, and wholly distinct from all the refinements and modifications of
self-interest. The coactive force of this motive is altogether
independent of surrounding circumstances, and of all forms of belief. It
is equally true for the man who believes and for the man who rejects the
Christian faith, for the believer in a future world and for the believer
in the mortality of the soul. It is not a question of happiness or
unhappiness, of reward or punishment, but of a generically different
nature. Men feel that a certain course of life is the natural end of
their being, and they feel bound, even at the expense of happiness, to
pursue it. They feel that certain acts are essentially good and noble,
and others essentially base and vile, and this perception leads them to
pursue the one and to avoid the other, irrespective of all
considerations of enjoyment.
The school of philosophy we are reviewing furnishes the most perfect of
all historical examples of the power which the higher of these motives
can exercise over the mind. The coarser forms of self-interest were in
stoicism absolutely condemned. It was one of the first principles of
these philosophers that all things that are not in our power should be
esteemed indifferent; that the object of all mental discipline should be
to withdraw the mind from all the gifts of fortune, and that prudence
must in consequence be altogether excluded from the motives of virtue.
To enforce these principles they continually dilated upon the vanity of
human things, and upon the majesty of the independent mind, and they
indulged, though scarcely more than other sects, in many exaggerations
about the impassive tranquillity of the sage. In the Roman empire
stoicism flourished at a period which, beyond almost any other, seemed
most unfavourable to such teaching. There were reigns when, in the
emphatic words of Tacitus, "virtue was a sentence of death." In no
period had brute force more completely triumphed, in none was the
thirst for material advantages more intense, in very few was vice more
ostentatiously glorified. Yet in the midst of all these circumstances
the Stoics taught a philosophy which was not a compromise, not an
attempt to moderate the popular excesses, but which in its austere
sanctity was the extreme antithesis of all that the prevailing examples
and their own interests could dictate. And these men were no impassioned
fanatics, fired with the prospect of coming glory. They were men from
whose motives of action the belief in the immortality of the soul was
resolutely excluded. In the scepticism that accompanied the first
introduction of philosophy into Rome, in the dissolution of the old
fables about Tartarus and the Styx, and the dissemination of
Epicureanism among the people, this doctrine, notwithstanding the
beautiful reasonings of Cicero and the religious faith of a few who
clung like Plutarch to the mysteries in which it was perpetuated, had
sunk very low. An interlocutor in Cicero expressed what was probably a
common feeling, when he acknowledged that, with the writings of Plato
before him, he could believe and realise it; but when he closed the
book, the reasonings seemed to lose their power, and the world of
spirits grew pale and unreal. If Ennius could elicit the plaudits of a
theatre when he proclaimed that the gods took no part in human affairs,
Caesar could assert in the senate, without scandal and almost without
dissent, that death was the end of all things. Pliny, perhaps the
greatest of all the Roman scholars, adopting the sentiment of all the
school of Epicurus, describes the belief in a future life as a form of
madness, a puerile and a pernicious illusion. The opinions of the Stoics
were wavering and uncertain. Their first doctrine was that the soul of
man has a future and independent, but not an eternal existence, that it
survives until the conflagration that was to destroy the world when all
finite things would be absorbed in the all-pervading soul of nature.
Chrysippus, however, restricted to the best and noblest souls this
future existence, which Cleanthes had awarded to all, and among the
Roman Stoics even this was greatly doubted. The belief that the human
soul is a detached fragment of the Deity, naturally led to the belief
that after death it would be reabsorbed in the parent Spirit. The
doctrine that there is no real good but virtue deprived the Stoics of
the argument for a future world derived from unrequited merit and
unpunished crimes, and the earnestness with which they contended that a
good man should act irrespectively of reward, inclined them, as it is
said to have inclined some Jewish thinkers, to the denial of the
existence of the reward. Panaetius, the founder of Roman stoicism,
maintained that the soul perished with the body, and his opinion was
followed by Epictetus and Cornutus. Seneca contradicted himself on the
subject. Marcus Aurelius never rose beyond a vague and mournful
aspiration. Those who believed in a future world believed it faintly and
uncertainly, and even when they accepted it as a fact, they shrank from
proposing it as a motive. The whole system of stoical ethics, which
carried self-sacrifice to a point that has scarcely been equalled, and
exercised an influence which has rarely been surpassed, was evolved
without any assistance from the doctrine of a future life. Pagan
antiquity has bequeathed us few nobler treatises of morals than the "De
Officiis" of Cicero, which was avowedly an expansion of a work of
Panaetius. It has left us no grander example than that of Epictetus, the
sickly, deformed slave of a master who was notorious for his barbarity,
enfrancished late in life, but soon driven into exile by Domitian, who,
while sounding the very abyss of human misery, and looking forward to
death as to simple decomposition, was yet so filled with the sense of
the Divine presence, that his life was one continued hymn to Providence,
and his writings and his example, which appeared to his contemporaries
almost the ideal of human goodness, have not lost their consoling power
through all the ages and the vicissitudes they have survived.
There was, however, another form of immortality which exercised a much
greater influence among the Roman moralists. The desire for reputation,
and especially for posthumous reputation--that "last infirmity of noble
minds"--assumed an extraordinary prominence among the springs of Roman
heroism, and was also the origin of that theatrical and overstrained
phraseology which the greatest of ancient moralists rarely escaped. But
we should be altogether in error if we inferred, as some have done, that
paganism never rose to the conception of virtue concealing itself from
the world, and consenting voluntarily to degradation. No characters were
more highly appreciated in antiquity than those of men who, through a
sense of duty, opposed the strong current of popular favour; of men like
Fabius, who consented for the sake of their country to incur the
reputation that is most fatal to a soldier; of men like Cato, who
remained unmoved among the scoffs, the insults, and the ridicule of an
angry crowd. Cicero, expounding the principles of stoicism, declared
that no one has attained to true philosophy who has not learnt that all
vice should be avoided, "though it were concealed from the eyes of gods
and men," and that no deeds are more laudable than those which are done
without ostentation, and far from the sight of men. The writings of the
Stoics are crowded with sentences to the same effect. "Nothing for
opinion, all for conscience." "He who wishes his virtue to be blazed
abroad is not labouring for virtue but for fame." "No one is more
virtuous than the man who sacrifices the reputation of a good man rather
than sacrifice his conscience." "I do not shrink from praise, but I
refuse to make it the end and term of right." "If you do anything to
please men, you have fallen from your estate." "Even a bad reputation
nobly earned is pleasing." "A great man is not the less great when he
lies vanquished and prostrate in the dust." "Never forget that it is
possible to be at once a divine man, yet a man unknown to all the
world." "That which is beautiful is beautiful in itself; the praise of
man adds nothing to its quality." Marcus Aurelius, following an example
that is ascribed to Pythagoras, made it a special object of mental
discipline, by continually meditating on death, and evoking, by an
effort of the imagination, whole societies that had passed away, to
acquire a realised sense of the vanity of posthumous fame. The younger
Pliny painted faithfully the ideal of stoicism when he described one of
his friends as a man "who did nothing for ostentation but all for
conscience; who sought the reward of virtue in itself, and not in the
praise of man." Nor were the Stoics less emphatic in distinguishing the
obligation from the attraction of virtue. It was on this point that they
separated from the more refined Epicureans, who were often willing to
sublimate to the highest degree the kind of pleasure they proposed as an
object, provided only it were admitted that pleasure is necessarily the
ultimate end of our actions. But this the Stoics firmly denied.
"Pleasure," they argued, "is the companion, not the guide, of our
course." "We do not love virtue because it gives us pleasure, but it
gives us pleasure because we love it." "The wise man will not sin,
though both gods and men should overlook the deed, for it is not through
the fear of punishment or of shame that he abstains from sin. It is from
the desire and obligation of what is just and good." "To ask to be paid
for virtue is as if the eye demanded a recompense for seeing, or the
feet for walking." In doing good, man "should be like the vine which has
produced grapes, and asks for nothing more after it has produced its
proper fruit." His end, according to these teachers, is not to find
peace either in life or in death. It is to do his duty, and to tell the
truth.
The second distinguishing feature of stoicism I have noticed was the
complete suppression of the affections to make way for the absolute
ascendency of reason. There are two great divisions of character
corresponding very nearly to the stoical and epicurean temperaments I
have described--that in which the will predominates, and that in which
the desires are supreme. A good man of the first class is one whose
will, directed by a sense of duty, pursues the course he believes to be
right, in spite of strong temptations to pursue an opposite course,
arising either from his own passions and tendencies, or from the
circumstances that surround him. A good man of the second class is one
who is so happily constituted that his sympathies and desires
instinctively tend to virtuous ends. The first character is the only one
to which we can, strictly speaking, attach the idea of merit, and is
also the only one which is capable of rising to high efforts of
continuous and heroic self-sacrifice; but on the other hand, there is a
charm in the spontaneous action of the unforced desires which
disciplined virtue can perhaps never attain. The man who is consistently
generous through a sense of duty, when his natural temperament impels
him to avarice, and when every exercise of benevolence causes him a
pang, deserves in the very highest degree our admiration; but he whose
generosity costs him no effort, but is the natural gratification of his
affections, attracts a far larger measure of our love. Corresponding to
these two casts of character, we find two distinct theories of
education, the aim of the one being chiefly to strengthen the will, and
that of the other to guide the desires. The principal examples of the
first are the Spartan and stoical systems of antiquity, and, with some
modifications, the asceticism of the Middle Ages. The object of these
systems was to enable men to endure pain, to repress manifest and
acknowledged desires, to relinquish enjoyments, to establish an absolute
empire over their emotions. On the other hand, there is a method of
education which was never more prevalent than in the present day, which
exhausts its efforts in making virtue attractive, in associating it with
all the charms of imagination and of prosperity, and in thus insensibly
drawing the desires in the wished for direction. As the first system is
especially suited to a disturbed and military society, which requires
and elicits strong efforts of the will, and is therefore the special
sphere of heroic virtues, so the latter belongs naturally to a tranquil
and highly organised civilisation, which is therefore very favourable
to the amiable qualities, and it is probable that as civilisation
advances, the heroic type will, in consequence, become more and more
rare, and a kind of self-indulgent goodness more common. The
circumstances of the ancient societies led them to the former type, of
which the Stoics furnished the extreme expression in their doctrine that
the affections are of the nature of a disease--a doctrine which they
justified by the same kind of arguments as those which are now often
employed by metaphysicians to prove that love, anger and the like, can
only be ascribed by a figure of speech to the Deity. Perturbation, they
contended, is necessarily imperfection, and none of its forms can in
consequence be ascribed to a perfect being. We have a clear intuitive
perception that reason is the highest, and should be the directing power
of an intelligent being; but every act which is performed at the
instigation of the emotions is withdrawn from the empire of reason.
Hence it was inferred that while the will should be educated to act
habitually in the direction of virtue, even the emotions that seem most
fitted to second it should be absolutely proscribed. Thus Seneca has
elaborated at length the distinction between clemency and pity, the
first being one of the highest virtues, and the latter a positive vice.
Clemency, he says, is an habitual disposition to gentleness in the
application of punishments. It is that moderation which remits something
of an incurred penalty; it is the opposite of cruelty, which is an
habitual disposition to rigour. Pity, on the other hand, bears to
clemency the same kind of relation as superstition to religion. It is
the weakness of a feeble mind that flinches at the sight of suffering.
Clemency is an act of judgment, but pity disturbs the judgment. Clemency
adjudicates upon the proportion between suffering and guilt. Pity
contemplates only suffering, and gives no thoughts to its cause.
Clemency, in the midst of its noblest efforts, is perfectly passionless;
pity is unreasoning emotion. Clemency is an essential characteristic of
the sage; pity is only suited for weak women and for diseased minds.
"The sage will console those who weep, but without weeping with them;
he will succour the shipwrecked, give hospitality to the proscribed, and
alms to the poor, ... restore the son to the mother's tears, save the
captive from the arena, and even bury the criminal; but in all, his mind
and his countenance will be alike untroubled. He will feel no pity. He
will succour, he will do good, for he is born to assist his fellows, to
labour for the welfare of mankind, and to offer each one his part. His
countenance and his soul will betray no emotion as he looks upon the
withered legs, the tattered rags, the bent and emaciated frame of the
beggar. But he will help those who are worthy, and, like the gods, his
leaning will be towards the wretched.... It is only diseased eyes that
grow moist in beholding tears in other eyes, as it is no true sympathy,
but only weakness of nerves, that leads some to laugh always when others
laugh, or to yawn when others yawn."
Cicero, in a sentence which might be adopted as the motto of stoicism,
said that Homer "attributed human qualities to the gods; it would have
been better to have imparted divine qualities to men." The remarkable
passage I have just cited serves to show the extremes to which the
Stoics pushed this imitation. And indeed, if we compare the different
virtues that have flourished among Pagans and Christians, we invariably
find that the prevailing type of excellence among the former is that in
which the will and judgment, and among the latter, that in which the
emotions are most prominent. Friendship rather than love, hospitality
rather than charity, magnanimity rather than tenderness, clemency rather
than sympathy, are the characteristics of ancient goodness. The Stoics,
who carried the suppression of the emotions farther than any other
school, laboured with great zeal to compensate the injury thus done to
the benevolent side of our nature, by greatly enlarging the sphere of
reasoned and passionless philanthropy. They taught, in the most emphatic
language, the fraternity of all men, and the consequent duty of each man
consecrating his life to the welfare of others. They developed this
general doctrine in a series of detailed precepts, which, for the range,
depth, and beauty of their charity, have never been surpassed. They even
extended their compassion to crime, and adopting the paradox of Plato,
that all guilt is ignorance, treated it as an involuntary disease, and
declared that the only legitimate ground of punishment is prevention.
But however fully they might recognise in theory their principles with
the widest and most active benevolence, they could not wholly counteract
the practical evil of a system which declared war against the whole
emotional side of our being, and reduced human virtue to a kind of
majestic egotism; proposing as examples such men as Anaxagoras, who when
told that his son had died, simply observed, "I never supposed that I
had begotten an immortal," or as Stilpo, who when his country had been
ruined, his native city captured, and his daughters carried away as
slaves or as concubines, boasted that he had lost nothing, for the sage
is independent of circumstances. The framework or theory of benevolence
might be there, but the animating spirit was absent. Men who taught that
the husband or the father should look with perfect indifference on the
death of his wife or his child, and that the philosopher, though he may
shed tears of pretended sympathy in order to console his suffering
friend, must suffer no real emotion to penetrate his breast, could never
found a true or lasting religion of benevolence. Men who refused to
recognise pain and sickness as evils were scarcely likely to be very
eager to relieve them in others.
In truth, the Stoics, who taught that all virtue was conformity to
nature, were, in this respect, eminently false to their own principle.
Human nature, as revealed to us by reason, is a composite thing, a
constitution of many parts differing in kind and dignity, a hierarchy in
which many powers are intended to co-exist, but in different positions
of ascendency or subordination. To make the higher part of our nature
our whole nature is not to restore but to mutilate humanity, and this
mutilation has never been attempted without producing grave evils. As
philanthropists, the Stoics, through their passion for unity, were led
to the extirpation of those emotions which nature intended as the chief
springs of benevolence. As speculative philosophers, they were entangled
by the same desire in a long train of pitiable paradoxes. Their famous
doctrines that all virtues are equal, or, more correctly, are the same,
that all vices are equal, that nothing is an evil which does not affect
our will, and that pain and bereavement are, in consequence, no ills,
though partially explained away and frequently disregarded by the Roman
Stoics, were yet sufficiently prominent to give their teaching something
of an unnatural and affected appearance. Prizing only a single object,
and developing only a single side of their nature, their minds became
narrow and their views contracted. Thus, while the Epicureans, urging
men to study nature in order to banish superstition, endeavoured to
correct the ignorance of physical science which was one of the chief
impediments to the progress of the ancient mind, the Stoics for the most
part disdained a study which was other than the pursuit of virtue. While
the Epicurean poet painted in magnificent language the perpetual
progress of mankind, the Stoic was essentially retrospective, and
exhausted his strength in vain efforts to restore the simplicity of a
by-gone age. While, too, the school of Zeno produced many of the best
and greatest men who have ever lived, it must be acknowledged that its
records exhibit a rather unusual number of examples of high professions
falsified in action, and of men who, displaying in some forms the most
undoubted and transcendent virtue, fell in others far below the average
of mankind. The elder Cato, who, though not a philosopher, was a model
of philosophers, was conspicuous for his inhumanity to his slaves.
Brutus was one of the most extortionate usurers of his time, and several
citizens of Salamis died of starvation, imprisoned because they could
not pay the sum he demanded. No one eulogised more eloquently the
austere simplicity of life which stoicism advocated than Sallust, who in
a corrupt age was notorious for his rapacity. Seneca himself was
constitutionally a nervous and timid man, endeavouring, not always with
success, to support himself by a sublime philosophy. He guided, under
circumstances of extreme difficulty, the cause of virtue, and his death
is one of the noblest antiquity records; but his life was deeply marked
by the taint of flattery, and not free from the taint of avarice, and it
is unhappily certain that, after its accomplishment, he lent his pen to
conceal or varnish one of the worst crimes of Nero. The courage of Lucan
failed signally under torture, and the flattery which he bestowed upon
Nero, in his "Pharsalia," ranks with the Epigrams of Martial as probably
the extreme limit of sycophancy to which Roman literature descended.
While, too, the main object of the Stoics was to popularise philosophy,
the high standard of self-control they exacted rendered their system
exceedingly unfit for the great majority of mankind, and for the
ordinary condition of affairs. Life is history, not poetry. It consists
mainly of little things, rarely illumined by flashes of great heroism,
rarely broken by great dangers, or demanding great exertions. A moral
system, to govern society, must accommodate itself to common characters
and mingled motives. It must be capable of influencing natures that can
never rise to an heroic level. It must tincture, modify, and mitigate
where it cannot eradicate or transform. In Christianity there are always
a few persons seeking by continual and painful efforts to reverse or
extinguish the ordinary feelings of humanity, but in the great majority
of cases the influence of the religious principle upon the mind, though
very real, is not of a nature to cause any serious strain or struggle.
It is displayed in a certain acquired spontaneity of impulse. It softens
the character, purifies and directs the imagination, blends insensibly
with the habitual modes of thought, and, without revolutionising, gives
a tone and bias to all the forms of action. But stoicism was simply a
school of heroes. It recognised no gradations of virtue or vice. It
condemned all emotions, all spontaneity, all mingled motives, all the
principles, feelings, and impulses upon which the virtue of common men
mainly depends. It was capable of acting only on moral natures that were
strung to the highest tension, and it was therefore naturally rejected
by the multitude.