ANCIENT HISTORY OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY.
The numerous *ethical systems* that have had currency in earlier or later
times, may be divided into two classes,—the one embracing those which make
virtue a means; the other, those which make it an end. According to the
former, virtue is to be practised for the good that will come of it;
according to the latter, for its own sake, for its intrinsic excellence.
These classes have obvious subdivisions. The former includes both the
selfish and the utilitarian theory; while the latter embraces a wide
diversity of views as to the nature, the standard, and the criterion of
virtue, according as it is believed to consist in conformity to the
fitness of things, in harmony with an unsophisticated taste, in accordance
with the interior moral sense, or in obedience to the will of God. There
are, also, border theories, which blend, or rather force into
juxtaposition, the ideas that underlie the two classes respectively.
It is proposed, in the present chapter, to give an outline of *the history
of ethical philosophy in Greece and Rome*, or rather, in Greece; for Rome
had no philosophy that was not born in Greece.
*Socrates* was less a moral philosopher than a preacher of virtue.
Self-ordained as a censor and reformer, he directed his invective and
irony principally against the Sophists, whose chief characteristic as to
philosophy seems to have been the denial of objective truth, and thus, of
absolute and determinate right. Socrates, in contrast with them, seeks to
elicit duty from the occasions for its exercise, making his collocutors
define right and obligation from the nature of things as presented to
their own consciousness and reflection. Plato represents him, whenever a
moral question is under discussion, as probing the very heart of the case,
and drawing thence the response as from a divine oracle.
*Plato* held essentially the same ground, as may be seen in his
identifying the True, the Beautiful, and the Good; but it is impossible to
trace in his writings the outlines of a definite ethical system, whether
his own, or one derived from his great master.
The three *principal schools of ethical philosophy in Greece* were the
Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic.
The *Peripatetics* derived their philosophy from Aristotle, and their name
from his habit of walking up and down under the plane-trees of the Lyceum.
According to him, virtue is conduct so conformed to human nature as to
preserve all its appetites, proclivities, desires, and passions, in mutual
check and limitation. It consists in shunning extremes. Thus courage
stands midway between cowardice and rashness; temperance, between excess
and self-denial; generosity, between prodigality and parsimony; meekness,
between irascibility and pusillanimity. Happiness is regarded as the
supreme good; but while this is not to be attained without virtue, virtue
alone will not secure it. Happiness requires, in addition, certain outward
advantages, such as health, riches, friends, which therefore a good man
will seek by all lawful means. Aristotle laid an intense stress on the
cultivation of the domestic virtues, justly representing the household as
the type, no less than the nursery, of the state, and the political
well-being of the state as contingent on the style of character cherished
and manifested in the home-life of its members.
There is reason to believe that *Aristotle’s personal character* was
conformed to his theory of virtue,—that he pursued the middle path, rather
than the more arduous route of moral perfection. Though much of his time
was spent in Athens, he was a native of Macedonia, and was for several
years resident at the court of Philip as tutor to Alexander, with whom he
retained friendly relations for the greater part of his royal pupil’s
life. Of his connection with the Macedonian court and public affairs,
there are several stories that implicate him dishonorably with political
intrigues, and though there is not one of these that is not denied, and
not one which rests on competent historical authority, such traditions are
not apt so to cluster as to blur the fair fame of a sturdily incorruptible
man, but are much more likely to cling to the memory of a trimmer and a
time-server.
*Epicurus,* from whom the Epicurean philosophy derives its name, was for
many years a teacher of philosophy in Athens. He was a man of simple,
pure, chaste, and temperate habits, in his old age bore severe and
protracted sufferings, from complicated and incurable disease, with
singular equanimity, and had his memory posthumously blackened only by
those who—like theological bigots of more recent times—inferred, in
despite of all contemporary evidence, that he was depraved in character,
because they thought that his philosophy ought to have made him so.
He represented *pleasure as the supreme good*, and its pleasure-yielding
capacity as the sole criterion by which any act or habit is to be judged.
On this ground, the quest of pleasure becomes the prime, or rather the
only duty. “Do that you may enjoy,” is the fundamental maxim of morality.
There is no intrinsic or permanent distinction between right and wrong.
Individual experience alone can determine the right, which varies
according to the differences of taste, temperament, or culture. There are,
however, some pleasures which are more than counterbalanced by the pains
incurred in procuring them, or by those occasioned by them; and there are,
also, pains which are the means of pleasures greater than themselves. The
wise man, therefore, will measure and govern his conduct, not by the
pleasure of the moment, but with reference to the future and ultimate
effects of acts, habits, and courses of conduct, upon his happiness. What
are called the virtues, as justice, temperance, chastity, are in
themselves no better than their opposites; but experience has shown that
they increase the aggregate of pleasure, and diminish the aggregate of
pain. Therefore, and therefore alone, they are duties. The great worth of
philosophy consists in its enabling men to estimate the relative duration,
and the permanent consequences, as well as the immediate intensity, of
every form of pleasure.
Epicurus specifies *two kinds of pleasure*, that of rest and that of
motion. He prefers the former. Action has its reaction; excitement is
followed by depression; effort, by weariness; thought for others involves
the disturbance of one’s own peace. The gods, according to Epicurus, lead
an easy, untroubled life, leave the outward universe to take care of
itself, are wholly indifferent to human affairs, and are made ineffably
happy by the entire absence of labor, want, and care; and man becomes most
godlike and most happy, therefore most virtuous, when he floats through
life, unharming and unharmed, idle and useless, self-contained and
self-sufficing, simple in his tastes, moderate in his requirements, frugal
in his habits.
It may be doubted *whether Epicurus denoted by pleasure,*(*18*)* mere
physical pleasure alone*. It is certain that his later followers regarded
the pleasures of the body as the only good; and Cicero says that Epicurus
himself referred all the pleasures of the intellect to the memory of past
and the hope of future sensual gratification. Yet there is preserved an
extract of a letter from Epicurus, in which he says that his own bodily
pains in his years of decrepitude are outweighed by the pleasure derived
from the memory of his philosophical labors and discoveries.
*Epicureanism numbered among its disciples*, not only *men of approved
virtue*, but not a few, like Pliny the Younger, of a more active type of
virtue than Epicurus would have deemed consistent with pleasure. But in
lapse of time it became the pretext and cover for the grossest sensuality;
and the associations which the unlearned reader has with the name are only
strengthened by conversance with the literature to which it gave birth.
Horace is its poet-laureate; and he was evidently as sincere in his
philosophy as he was licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in
good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is
his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality
which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and disgusting, that makes
Horace even perilously fascinating, so that the guardians of the public
morals may well be thankful that for the young the approach to him is
warded off by the formidable barriers of grammar and dictionary.
While Epicureanism thus generated, on the one hand, in men of the world
laxity of moral principle and habit, on the other hand, in minds of a more
contemplative cast, it *lapsed into atheism*. From otiose gods, careless
of human affairs, the transition was natural to a belief in no gods. The
universe which could preserve and govern itself, could certainly have
sprung into uncaused existence; for the tendencies which, without a
supervising power, maintain order in nature, continuity in change,
ever-new life evolved from incessant death, must be inherent tendencies to
combination, harmony, and organization, and thus may account for the
origin of the system which they sustain and renew. This type of atheism
has its most authentic exposition in the “De Rerum Natura” of Lucretius.
He does not, in so many words, deny the being of the gods,—he, indeed,
speaks of them as leading restful lives, withdrawn from all care of mortal
affairs; but he so scoffs at all practical recognition of them, and so
jeers at the reverence and awe professed for them by the multitude, that
we are constrained to regard them as rather the imagery of his verse than
the objects of his faith. He maintains the past eternity of matter, which
consists of atoms or monads of various forms. These, drifting about in
space, and impinging upon one another, by a series of happy chances, fell
into orderly relations and close-fitting symmetries, whence, in
succession, and by a necessity inherent in the primitive atoms, came
organization, life, instinct, love, reason, wisdom. This poem has a
peculiar value at the present day, as closely coincident in its cosmogony
with one of the most recent phases of physical philosophy, and showing
that what calls itself progress may be motion in a circle.
The *Stoics*, so called from a portico(19) adorned with magnificent
paintings by Polygnotus, in which their doctrines were first taught, owe
their origin to Zeno, who lived to a very great age, illustrious for
self-control, temperance, and the severest type of virtue, and at length,
in accordance with a favorite dogma and practice of his school, when he
found that he had before him only growing infirmity with no hope of
restoration, terminated his life by his own hand.
According to the Stoic philosophy, *virtue is the sole end of life*, and
virtue is the conformity of the will and conduct to universal nature.
Virtue alone is good; vice alone is evil; and whatever is neither virtue
nor vice is neither good nor evil in itself, but is to be sought or
shunned, according as it is auxiliary to virtue or conducive to vice,—if
neither, to be regarded with utter indifference. Virtue is indivisible. It
does not admit of degrees. He who only approximates to virtue, however
closely, is yet to be regarded as outside of its pale. Only the wise man
can be virtuous. He needs no precepts of duty. His intuitions are always
to be trusted. His sense of right cannot be blinded or misled. As for
those who do not occupy this high philosophic ground, though they cannot
be really virtuous, they yet may present some show and semblance of
virtue, and they may be aided in this by precepts and ethical
instruction.(20) It was for the benefit of those who, on account of their
lack of true wisdom, needed such direction, and were at the same time so
well disposed as to receive and follow it, that treatises on practical
morality were written by many of the later Stoics, and that in Rome there
were teachers of this school who exercised functions closely analogous to
those of the Christian preacher and pastor.
Stoicism found *its most congenial soil* in the stern, hardy integrity and
patriotism of those Romans, whose incorruptible virtue is the one
redeeming feature of the declining days of the Republic and the effeminacy
and coarse depravity of the Empire. Seneca’s ethical writings(21) are
almost Christian, not only in their faithful rebuke of every form of
wrong, but in their tender humanity for the poor, the slaves, the victims
of oppression, in their universal philanthropy, and in their precepts of
patience under suffering, forbearance, forgiveness, and returning good for
evil. Epictetus, the deformed slave of a capricious and cruel master,
beaten and crippled in mere wantonness, enfranchised in his latter years,
only to be driven into exile and to sound the lowest depths of poverty,
exhibited a type of heroic virtue which has hardly been equalled, perhaps
never transcended by a mere mortal; and though looking, as has been
already said, to annihilation as the goal of life, he maintained a spirit
so joyous, and has left in his writings so attractive a picture of a soul
serenely and supremely happy, that he has given support and consolation to
multitudes of the bravest and best disciples of the heaven-born religion,
which he can have known—if at all—only through its slanderers and
persecutors. Marcus Aurelius, in a kindred spirit, and under the even
heavier burdens of a tottering empire, domestic dissensions, and defeat
and disaster abroad, maintained the severest simplicity and purity of
life, appropriated portions of his busiest days to devout contemplation,
meditated constantly on death, and disciplined himself to regard with
contempt alike the praise of flatterers and the contingency of posthumous
fame. We have, especially in Nero’s reign, the record of not a few men and
women of like spirit and character, whose lofty and impregnable virtue
lacked only loving faith and undoubting trust in a fatherly Providence to
assimilate them to the foremost among the Apostles and martyrs of the
Christian Church.
*The Sceptical school of philosophy* claims in this connection a brief
notice. Though so identified in common speech with the name of a single
philosopher, that Pyrrhonism is a synonyme for Scepticism, it was much
older than Pyrrho, and greatly outnumbered his avowed followers. It was
held by the teachers of this school that objective truth is unattainable.
Not only do the perceptions and conceptions of different persons vary as
to every object of knowledge; but the perceptions and conceptions of the
same persons as to the same object vary at different times. Nay, more, at
the same time one sense conveys impressions which another sense may
negative, and not infrequently the reflective faculty negatives all the
impressions derived from the senses, and forms a conception entirely
unlike that which would have taken shape through the organs of sense. The
soul that seeks to know, is thus in constant agitation. But happiness
consists in imperturbableness of spirit, that is, in suspense of judgment;
and as it is our duty to promote our own happiness, it is our duty to live
without desire or fear, preference or abhorrence, love or hatred, in
entire apathy,—a life of which Mohammed’s fabled coffin is the fittest
symbol.
The *New Academy*, whose philosophy was a hybrid of Platonism and
Pyrrhonism, while it denied the possibility of ascertaining objective
truth, yet taught that on all subjects of speculative philosophy
probability is attainable, and that, if the subject in hand be one which
admits of being acted upon, it is the duty of the moral agent to act in
accordance with probability,—to pursue the course in behalf of which the
more and the better reasons can be given. There are moral acts and habits
which seem to be in accordance with reason and the nature of things. We
may be mistaken in thinking them so; yet the probability that they are so
creates a moral obligation in their favor. The New Academy professed a
hypothetical acquiescence in the ethics of the Peripatetic school,
maintaining, therefore, that the mean between two extremes is probably in
accordance with right and duty, and that virtue is probably man’s highest
good, yet probably not sufficient in itself without the addition of
exterior advantages.
*Cicero* considered himself as belonging to the New Academy. His instincts
as an advocate, often induced by professional exigencies to deny what he
had previously affirmed, made the scepticism of this school congenial to
him; while his love of elegant ease and luxury and his lack of moral
courage were in closer harmony with the practical ethics of the
Peripatetics than with the more rigid system of the Stoics. At the same
time, his pure moral taste and his sincere reverence for the right brought
him into sympathy with the Stoic school. His “De Officiis” is an
exposition of the Stoic system of ethics, though by the professed disciple
of another philosophy. It is as if a Mohammedan, without disclaiming his
own religion, should undertake an exposition of the ethics of
Christianity, on the ground that, though Mohammed was a genuine prophet,
there was, nevertheless, a higher and purer morality in the New Testament
than in the Koran.