effort, though I think that is involved in his view. But Aristotle does.
Following Plato in essentials, he makes bold to say outright that every
natural thing in its own way longs for the divine and desires to share
in the divine life, so far as it can.[11] Every such thing in this world
of space and time has to cope with difficulties and is imperfect, but
everything struggles towards the good. That good is in the life of God,
a thinking life, an activity of thought, existing in some sense beyond
this imperfect world; and this life is so supremely desirable that it
makes everything else struggle to reach it. It moves the whole world,
Aristotle says, in a famous passage, because it is loved. It is the
world's desire.[12]
Now this idea of effort--or of something analogous to
effort--constituting the inner nature of every natural thing reappears,
with pregnant consequences, in modern thought, though seldom with these
vast theological consequences. The idea of an upward effort through
nature lies at the base of our most hopeful theories of evolution, and
forms the true support of our modern faith in progress. Broadly
speaking, our evolutionists are now divided into two schools: the
adherents of the one believe that variations are purely accidental, and
may occur in any direction whatsoever, the useful ones being preserved
only because they happen to be useful for the life of the species, while
the adherents of the other--the school that I would call the school of
hope--believe that accident, even with natural selection to aid it, is
utterly inadequate to account for the ordered beauty and harmony that we
do see in natural things. They admit, as Plato and Aristotle admit,
imperfection and difficulty in the world, but they insist on a movement
towards value: in short, they conceive an order emerging that is brought
about, to quote a modern writer, both in nature and in society, by 'a
principle of movement and progress conflicting with a principle of
inertia.'[13]
Aristotle, in words that are strikingly modern, raises the very question
at issue here.[14] He asks whether we can suppose that nature does not
aim at the good at all, but that variations arise by chance and are
preserved just because they are useful, and he scouts the idea that
chance could do more, as Zeller says, than 'bring about isolated and
abnormal results'. He chooses instead the conception of purpose and
effort, and this in spite of the difficulties in conceiving a purpose
and an effort that are not definitely conscious. The sort of thing that
is in Aristotle's mind when he speaks of nature aiming at the good,
comes out in a passage by Edward Carpenter in his little book _The Art
of Creation_. Carpenter plunges boldly and compares the principle that
makes a tree grow and propagate its kind with the impulse that makes a
man express himself. Man, he says,
has a Will and Purpose, a Character, which, do what you
will, tends to push outwards towards expression. You put
George Fox in prison, you flog and persecute him, but the
moment he has a chance he goes and preaches just the same as
before.... But take a Tree and you notice exactly the same
thing. A dominant Idea informs the life of the Tree;
persisting, it forms the tree. You may snip the leaves as
much as you like to a certain pattern, but they will only
grow in their own shape. Finally, you may cut the tree down
root and branch and burn it, but, if there is left a single
seed, within that seed ... lurks the formative ideal, which
under proper conditions will again spring into life and
expression.[15]
Aristotle would have endorsed almost every word of this. In his pithy
way, speaking of the distinction between natural and artificial objects,
he says himself that if you planted a wooden bed and the wood could
still grow, it would grow up, not a bed, but a tree.[16]
He would not have gone so far as to talk about the _Will_ of a tree, but
he would have admitted that what made the tree grow was the same sort of
thing as Will. And in one respect he goes farther than Edward Carpenter
does. For he considers that not only growth but even the movement of
natural things through space is somehow an expression of a tendency
towards the good and the divine, a tendency which, when consciousness
supervenes, we can call effort, an activity, even though, at its best,
only an imperfect activity. He looks up at the splendour of the circling
stars and asks if it is possible that so glorious an order can be
anything but a manifestation of something akin to the divine. Here
indeed he is speaking of movements made by existences he reckoned among
the highest in the world, for he thought the stars were living beings
higher than man. But he recognized a rudimentary form of such activity
even in what we now call inanimate matter. Here we come to a leading
conception of Aristotle's, and one most important for our purpose: the
conception of a hierarchy of natural existences, all of them with some
value, less or more. When Aristotle is truest to himself, he will tell
us not to be afraid of studying the meanest forms of natural existence,
because in everything there is something marvellous and divine. He
quotes with much satisfaction the story of Heracleitus, who welcomed
his friends into the bakehouse with the saying that 'there were gods in
the bakehouse too'.[17]
Thus, at the lowest end of the scale, we have what we call inanimate
matter, which Aristotle thinks of much as we do, namely, as something
occupying space, the different parts of it being endowed with different
powers of movement, and with different properties, such as warmth or
coldness, wetness or dryness. A natural thing, he says, is a thing that
has a principle of activity in itself, something that makes it act in a
definite way, whenever it is not interfered with by anything else.[18]
Aristotle speaks, for example, of fire having a natural tendency to
mount up, much as we might speak of solids having a natural tendency to
gravitate towards one another. Go back as far as we like, and, Aristotle
thinks, we still find certain primitive differences which constitute
what we call the primitive elements. This, I imagine, is much the point
of view of modern science.
And these primitive elements in Aristotle's view influence each other,
unite with each other, or change into each other. As a rule, however,
they exhibit no new powers. But given a happy concurrence of qualities,
say a certain union of heat and cold, and a new power does become
manifest: the power of life. Thus, in a sense, Aristotle does envisage
the spontaneous generation of life; and he knows, roughly, what he means
by life. The living thing can go through far more changes than the
non-living, while yet remaining recognizably the same thing. For
example, it shows in itself a greater advance to richness and also a
decline, it uses other things to foster this advance, and it sends out
fresh things, like itself, but independent of itself: in short, it
grows, decays, feeds itself, and propagates its kind.[19]
As I understand Aristotle, for him there is not an entire and absolute
difference between ordinary matter and living things, and yet there is a
real difference, and one not to be explained away, for there is a new
manifestation of active energy. And if we consider life of more value
than mere motion, then we are right in saying there is a higher energy.
The quality of growth is a quality which could not be deduced from the
quality of warmth or from the quality of mere movement in space, and yet
all three qualities are alike in this, that they are all manifestations
of an energy which is somehow inherent in things, and not merely imposed
on them from without. The manifestations of life are started, in a
sense, by the different movements, 'mechanical', if you like to call
them so, in the rudimentary forms of matter, the elements meeting each
other in space. The process of life could not have begun without such
movements. But neither could it have begun if the elements, just as they
appear, had been all there was. There had to be latent, that is, the
possibility of a different and higher mode of action. This higher mode
of action Aristotle calls a higher Form, a higher Idea. And I think it
is true to him to say that he believes the lower Forms, the lower Ideas,
do their most perfect work when they bring about the conditions under
which the higher ones can operate. For when he speaks of that
concurrence of elements that conditions life he speaks of the 'warmth
and cold' as 'having mastered the matter'.[20]
In any case he conceives a whole series of higher and lower Forms, the
higher coming nearer and nearer to that full and glorious activity which
he conceives to be the life of God. Above the power of the thing to grow
as a plant grows appears the power of sensation as it is present in
animals, and above that again the power, first seen in man, of living
the life of thought, perceiving what is beautiful and true in the
'forms', the characters, of all the things around him, and with this
that further power of setting consciously before himself what he really
wants to be and to do, the power of moral action strictly so-called.
Throughout this series, in every higher stage the lower is present as a
kind of basis. In the man who thinks there is active not only the power
of thought, but also the power of sensation, the faculty of growth, and
the physical properties of the body. It would seem that Aristotle has
only to take one step, and he would be a thoroughgoing evolutionist. He
has only to say that the different stages are successive in time, the
lower regularly preceding the higher. But this step he hesitates to
take.
He often comes very near it. He speaks of nature passing gradually from
inanimate things through living things to living animals. He speaks of
what is first in itself, first inherently, 'prior' in the logical sense
because it is the goal and the completion of the thing, as appearing
later in time. For instance, he believes that man can only find his real
happiness and develop his real nature in the State, but the State
appears later in time than the primitive associations of the household
and the family.[21] What came earlier in history were barbarous
communities such as those of the Cyclopes, where 'each man laid down the
law for his wife and children and obeyed no other law'.
But Aristotle does not go on from this belief to the belief in a
universal upward process throughout all history. The developed State, it
is true, may always have been preceded by a lower form, but that lower
form may itself have been preceded by a higher.
Aristotle, in short, is haunted, like Plato, by the idea of cycles,
alternations, decline and progress, progress and decline. He feels this
both in the life of States and in the whole life of the world. He speaks
of the same discoveries being made over and over again, an infinite
number of times, in the history of civilization. And his words recall
the sad passage in Plato's _Laws_ (676) referring to the numberless
nations and states, ten thousand times ten thousand, that had risen and
fallen all over the world, passing from worse to better and from better
to worse. Similarly Aristotle will speak of degraded animal forms, and
sometimes write as though the animal world could sink back into the
vegetable altogether.
Admitting, however, something like progress within the different cycles,
we must ask a little more about the kind of progress which Aristotle
would have desired. (I take Aristotle again as a typical Greek.) Man at
his best, he clearly holds, in trying to realize his true nature should
aim at a happiness which involves a harmony of all his faculties, a
harmony inspired and led by the highest faculty of all, the Reason which
rejoices in the contemplation of what is at once true and good and
beautiful.
Now in this aim, we must ask, does a man need other men and other
creatures, and in what sense does he need them? Here, I think, we come
on two inconsistent tendencies in Aristotle's thought, connected with
two different ways of regarding the hierarchy of existences. We say that
one existence is higher than another. Does this mean that what we call
the lower are only so many blundering attempts to reach the higher? That
every creature, for example, which is not a thinking man is, on the
whole, a mistake? Aristotle often does speak like that. Woman, he says
in one passage, is only a mutilated male.[22] The principle which ought
to develop into the active power of thought could not, he explains, in
women master the recalcitrant element which is always thwarting
perfection, and thus woman is man _manque_. On these lines of thought it
is easy to slip into looking on all other forms of existence as merely
valuable in so far as they serve the direct purposes of men, and indeed
only of a few men, those namely who are able to think as philosophers.
This is the kind of view according to which, as the satirist suggests,
cork-trees only grow in order to make corks for champagne-bottles, and
the inferior races of mankind only exist to furnish slaves for the
higher. And Aristotle does, on occasion, lend himself to such a view: he
justifies a slavery in which, as he says, some men are to be treated
merely as living tools. And yet on his own principles every man ought to
aim at realizing his own end, and not merely the ends of others.
But there is a widely different view, also present in Aristotle, and
truer to the essence of his thought. It is a view instinct with that
reverence for all existence of which I spoke at first, and it holds that
all the different natural types, high or low, could all be united in one
harmony, like an ordered army, as Aristotle himself would say, in which
the divine spirit was present even as the spirit of a general is present
in his men. The greatest thing in man, Aristotle thinks, is the godlike
power of apprehending the different characters of all the things around
him, and this of itself suggests the belief that all these characters
have a value of their own, unique and indispensable, each aiming at a
distinct aspect of the Divine, each, if it fulfilled its inner nature,
finding, as Plato might have said, the place where it was best for it to
be. Again, it is clear from Aristotle's whole treatment of the State,
that when he wrote his famous phrase, 'Man is by nature a political
animal', he meant that man, as we should say, is essentially social. It
is part of man's goal to live with others; it is not merely a means to
the goal. His highest happiness lies in the contemplation of the good,
and the good, Aristotle says, can be contemplated far better in others
than in ourselves. This is a profound saying, and from this thought
springs the deep significance of friendship in Aristotle's system. The
crown of the civic life he takes to be the community of friends who
recognize the good in each other, and enjoy each other through this. The
wider this community, then, we must surely say, the better.
For Aristotle then, man's perfection ought to mean the perfection of
every individual, and progress, so far as he conceives it, involve
progress towards this end. This should lead on to belief in the supreme
importance of the individual soul, and to Kant's great principle that we
should always treat each man as an end in himself.
Thus, if we concentrate on the hopeful elements in Plato and Aristotle,
we may fairly say, I think, that we can see outlined in their
philosophies something like the following belief: every natural thing in
this world, and every natural creature, so far as it is good,--and all
are more or less good,--tends to express some distinct aspect of a
perfect harmony: we human beings are the first on earth to be definitely
conscious of such a tendency, the first to be able definitely to direct
it to its true goal, and our business in life is therefore threefold: to
make actual our own function in this harmony, to help other creatures to
actualize theirs, and to contemplate every such manifestation, in men or
in things, with reverence and rejoicing.
The harmony, if complete, would be a manifestation of a divine reality,
and thus the love of God, the love of our neighbour, the love of nature,
self-development, political life, scientific study, poetic
contemplation, and philosophic speculation, would all unite in one
comprehensive and glorious task.
This, surely, is hopeful enough. But the Greek hope faltered and sank.
Could this harmony ever be realized? Would not the thwarting element in
the world always drag it down again and again, and drag some men down
always, so that after all progress was impossible, and for some men
should not even be attempted? As a matter of fact, Plato and Aristotle
do limit their exhortations to a narrow circle of cultured Greeks, and
even with them they doubt of success.
Now this despondency came partly, I think, through the very
sensitiveness of the Hellenic nature. The spectacle of the ever-baffled
struggle in Nature and Man they felt at times almost intolerable.
Aristotle saw that this perpetual failure in the heart of glorious good
made the very essence of tragedy. The tragic hero is the man of innate
nobleness who yet has some one defect that lays him open to ruin. Man is
set in a world full of difficulties, a world much of which is dark and
strange to him: his action and those of others have results which he did
not, and in his ignorance could not, foresee; he is not strong enough
for his great task.
All the Greek poets have this deep sadness. Homer has it, in and through
his intense feeling for the beauty and energy of life. There has never
been such war-poetry as Homer's, and yet there has never been any which
felt more poignantly the senselessness in war. 'And I must come here',
Achilles says to his noble enemy at the close, 'to torture you and your
children.'
In the next place, the sadness of the world could not be lightened for
the Greeks by the vision that the modern theory of evolution has opened
up to us of the long advance in the history of life on the planet. Even
their knowledge of history in the strict sense was scanty, and it is
only a long view of history that is likely to be comforting. What
history they did know could bring them little comfort. In the first
place it showed them a series of great civilizations, rising and
falling, and those that had fallen seemed at least as good as those that
followed them. A Greek like Plato knew of the Homeric civilization,
simpler indeed, but fresher and purer than his own. And he believed,
what we now know to be the fact, that even before the Homeric there had
been a wonderful island-culture, what we call the Minoan, flourishing
before the Homeric. 'There had been kings before Agamemnon.'
And behind Minos and Agamemnon lay the great, and by that time the
ossifying, kingdom of Egypt, compared to which the Greeks were, and felt
themselves to be, but children. Plato had seen, finally, the
degeneration of the Persian Empire--once so magnificent and mighty.
This fact of recurrent decay is one of the heaviest that the human
spirit can shoulder. Any theory of progress must come to terms with it,
for Progress through history is certainly not an uninterrupted ascent; a
spiral is the better image. And the weight must lie most heavily on a
generation which feels its own self to be in peril of decay. Now Plato
and Aristotle lived at such a period. Greece had gone through the bitter
experiences of the Peloponnesian War, and the shadow of it lay on them,
as on its historian Thucydides. In that fratricidal conflict Greece tore
herself to pieces. It was a struggle between the two leaders of the then
civilized world, and it has a terrible likeness to the struggle that is
going on now. From its devastating influence Greece never recovered.
Historians still dispute, and always will, as to the exact proportion of
praise and blame between the two. But Thucydides himself, a true-hearted
Athenian, brings out the tyrannical side in the Athenian temper. Not
indeed towards her own people, but towards all who were not of her own
immediate stock. Because Athens thought herself the fairest city in the
world, as indeed she was, because she thought herself menaced by Sparta,
and menaced she was, she allowed herself to tyrannize and lightly took
up the burden of war between brethren. There are few passages in history
more stately than the Funeral Oration of Pericles in which he calls
Athens the School of Hellas, but even in it there is a certain deadly
coldness of heart. And few things are more terrible than the coarsening
of temper which Thucydides depicts as the war goes on and Pericles is
succeeded by his caricature Cleon, the man who means to prosecute the
war vigorously, and by vigour means ruthlessness. Nor was there ever a
sterner indictment of aggression than that given in the dialogue between
the spokesmen of Melos, the little island that desired to stand out of
the conflict, and the Athenian representatives who were determined to
force her into their policy. And after that dialogue comes, in
Thucydides' great drama, the fall of Athens.
The city recovered in some measure from her fall, but only to face
another disaster. If she sinned in the Peloponnesian War through the
spirit of aggression, she sinned in the struggle with Macedon through
slackness and cowardice. In the one struggle she lost comradeship; in
the other she lost liberty. And with the loss of the two she lost
buoyancy. In a deeper sense than Pericles used the phrase, 'the
springtime went out of her year'. Ultimately, perhaps, we cannot explain
why this should be so. Other nations have had as disheartening
experiences and yet risen above them. Some of the most inspired
prophecies in the Hebrew writings came after the tiny state of Judaea
had been torn in pieces by the insensate conflict between North and
South, and after the whole people had been swept into captivity. But
whatever the ultimate reason, Athens did not recover. We must not end,
however, on a note of despair. Far from it. The work of Aristotle and
Plato and of the Greeks generally, was cramped for lack of sympathy and
lack of hope, and, strangely enough, it was after they had passed and
their glory with them that sympathy grew in the world, and after
sympathy grew, hope returned.
For it is exactly in those failing years, when the Hellenic gave way to
the Hellenistic, that men first grasped, and grasped so firmly that it
could hardly be lost again, one of the fundamental principles on which
the whole fabric of our later civilization has rested, or ought to rest,
the great principle of personal equality, the claim of every individual
to transcendent value, irrespective of race and creed and endowment. The
conquering rule of Alexander, whatever else it did, broke down the
barriers of the little city-states and made men of different races feel
themselves members of mankind. There rose among the Stoics the
conviction that all men do belong together and are all made for each
other. And with the advent of Christianity came the belief that every
man, however mean and unworthy, can receive a power that will make him
all he ought to be. The highest is within his reach. There is no reason
now why the glorious life that Hellenism conceived for a few should not
lie open to all men.
Finally, we might say, and truly, that the vast political organization
built up by Rome gave us Europeans, once and for all, the vision of a
united Europe.
That dream has never left it. Even to-day, here and now, in spite of our
disasters, our blunders, and our crimes, let us not forget it, that
dream which is 'not all a dream', the dream of once again constructing a
system in which we might, all of us, all nations and all men and women,
make progress together in the common task.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
G. L. Dickinson, _The Greek View of Life_.
Zeller, _Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics_.
Edited by Evelyn Abbott, _Hellenica_.
Bury, _History of Greece_.
Davies and Vaughan, _Plato's Republic_.
Welldon, _Aristotle's Politics_.
Peters, _Aristotle's Ethics_.
Bridges, _The Spirit of Man_.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] G. H. Perris, _History of War and Peace_, p. 54.
[7] 'The Unity of Western Civilization,' c. III.
[8] _The Spirit of Man_, 40; _Phaedo_, 96.
[9] _The Spirit of Man_, 16; _Phaedo_, 66.
[10] _Natural Religion_, part ii, c. 5.
[11] _De An._ ii. 4, 415, p. 35.