corrections we owe, I suppose, the texts of the Greek poets as they now
stand. They seem to have set to work at their task methodically enough,
under the direction of their most literary monarch, Ptolemy Philadelphus.
Alexander the Ætolian collected and revised the tragedies, Lycophron the
comedies, Zenodotus the poems of Homer, and the other poets of the Epic
cycle, now lost to us. Whether Homer prospered under all his expungings,
alterations, and transpositions—whether, in fact, he did not treat Homer
very much as Bentley wanted to treat Milton, is a suspicion which one has
a right to entertain, though it is long past the possibility of proof.
Let that be as it may, the critical business grew and prospered.
Aristophanes of Byzantium wrote glossaries and grammars, collected
editions of Plato and Aristotle, æsthetic disquisitions on Homer—one
wishes they were preserved, for the sake of the jest, that one might have
seen an Alexandrian cockney’s views of Achilles and Ulysses! Moreover,
in a hapless moment, at least for us moderns, he invented Greek accents;
thereby, I fear, so complicating and confusing our notions of Greek
rhythm, that we shall never, to the end of time, be able to guess what
any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric Hexameter, sounded like. After a
while, too, the pedants, according to their wont, began quarrelling about
their accents and their recessions. Moreover, there was a rival school
at Pergamus where the fame of Crates all but equalled the Egyptian fame
of Aristarchus. Insolent! What right had an Asiatic to know anything?
So Aristarchus flew furiously on Crates, being a man of plain common
sense, who felt a correct reading a far more important thing than any of
Crates’s illustrations, æsthetic, historical, or mythological; a
preference not yet quite extinct, in one, at least, of our Universities.
“Sir,” said a clever Cambridge Tutor to a philosophically inclined
freshman, “remember, that our business is to translate Plato correctly,
not to discover his meaning.” And, paradoxical as it may seem, he was
right. Let us first have accuracy, the merest mechanical accuracy, in
every branch of knowledge. Let us know what the thing is which we are
looking at. Let us know the exact words an author uses. Let us get at
the exact value of each word by that severe induction of which Buttmann
and the great Germans have set such noble examples; and then, and not
till then, we may begin to talk about philosophy, and æsthetics, and the
rest. Very Probably Aristarchus was right in his dislike of Crates’s
preference of what he called criticism, to grammar. Very probably he
connected it with the other object of his especial hatred, that fashion
of interpreting Homer allegorically, which was springing up in his time,
and which afterwards under the Neoplatonists rose to a frantic height,
and helped to destroy in them, not only their power of sound judgment,
and of asking each thing patiently what it was, but also any real
reverence for, or understanding of, the very authors over whom they
declaimed and sentimentalised.
Yes—the Cambridge Tutor was right. Before you can tell what a man means,
you must have patience to find out what he says. So far from wishing our
grammatical and philological education to be less severe than it is, I
think it is not severe enough. In an age like this—an age of lectures,
and of popular literature, and of self-culture, too often random and
capricious, however earnest, we cannot be too careful in asking
ourselves, in compelling others to ask themselves, the meaning of every
word which they use, of every word which they read; in assuring them,
whether they will believe us or not, that the moral, as well as the
intellectual culture, acquired by translating accurately one dialogue of
Plato, by making out thoroughly the sense of one chapter of a standard
author, is greater than they will get from skimming whole folios of
Schlegelian æsthetics, resumes, histories of philosophy, and the like
second-hand information, or attending seven lectures a-week till their
lives’ end. _It is better to know one thing_, _than to know about ten
thousand things_. I cannot help feeling painfully, after reading those
most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that the especial
danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness, sentimental
eclecticism—and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed, that
intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand, and
eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness and
shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks, without
an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to escape from
its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists did, by plunging
desperately into any fetish-worshipping superstition which holds out to
its wearied and yet impatient intellect, the bait of decisions already
made for it, of objects of admiration already formed and systematised.
Therefore let us honour the grammarian in his place; and, among others,
these old grammarians of Alexandria; only being sure that as soon as any
man begins, as they did, displaying himself peacock-fashion, boasting of
his science as the great pursuit of humanity, and insulting his
fellow-craftsmen, he becomes, ipso facto, unable to discover any more
truth for us, having put on a habit of mind to which induction is
impossible; and is thenceforth to be passed by with a kindly but a
pitying smile. And so, indeed, it happened with these quarrelsome
Alexandrian grammarians, as it did with the Casaubons and Scaligers and
Daciers of the last two centuries. As soon as they began quarrelling
they lost the power of discovering. The want of the inductive faculty in
their attempts at philology is utterly ludicrous. Most of their
derivations of words are about on a par with Jacob Böhmen’s etymology of
sulphur, wherein he makes _sul_, if I recollect right, signify some
active principle of combustion, and _phur_ the passive one. It was left
for more patient and less noisy men, like Grimm, Bopp, and Buttmann, to
found a science of philology, to discover for us those great laws which
connect modern philology with history, ethnology, physiology, and with
the very deepest questions of theology itself. And in the meanwhile,
these Alexandrians’ worthless criticism has been utterly swept away;
while their real work, their accurate editions of the classics, remain to
us as a precious heritage. So it is throughout history: nothing dies
which is worthy to live. The wheat is surely gathered into the garner,
the chaff is burnt up by that eternal fire which, happily for this
universe, cannot be quenched by any art of man, but goes on forever,
devouring without indulgence all the folly and the falsehood of the
world.
As yet you have heard nothing of the metaphysical schools of Alexandria;
for as yet none have existed, in the modern acceptation of that word.
Indeed, I am not sure that I must not tell you frankly, that none ever
existed at all in Alexandria, in that same modern acceptation. Ritter, I
think, it is who complains naïvely enough, that the Alexandrian
Neoplatonists had a bad habit, which grew on them more and more as the
years rolled on, of mixing up philosophy with theology, and so defiling,
or at all events colouring, its pure transparency. There is no denying
the imputation, as I shall show at greater length in my next Lecture.
But one would have thought, looking back through history, that the
Alexandrians were not the only philosophers guilty of this shameful act
of syncretism. Plato, one would have thought, was as great a sinner as
they. So were the Hindoos. In spite of all their logical and
metaphysical acuteness, they were, you will find, unable to get rid of
the notion that theological inquiries concerning Brahma, Atma, Creeshna,
were indissolubly mixed up with that same logic and metaphysic. The
Parsees could not separate questions about Ahriman and Ormuzd from Kant’s
three great philosophic problems: What is Man?—What may be known?—What
should be done? Neither, indeed, could the earlier Greek sages. Not one
of them, of any school whatsoever—from the semi-mythic Seven Sages to
Plato and Aristotle—but finds it necessary to consider not in passing,
but as the great object of research, questions concerning the
gods:—whether they are real or not; one or many; personal or impersonal;
cosmic, and parts of the universe, or organisers and rulers of it; in
relation to man, or without relation to him. Even in those who flatly
deny the existence of the gods, even in Lucretius himself, these
questions have to be considered, before the question, What is man? can
get any solution at all. On the answer given to them is found to depend
intimately the answer to the question, What is the immaterial part of
man? Is it a part of nature, or of something above nature? Has he an
immaterial part at all?—in one word, Is a human metaphysic possible at
all? So it was with the Greek philosophers of old, even, as Asclepius
and Ammonius say, with Aristotle himself. “The object of Aristotle’s
metaphysic,” one of them says, “is theological. Herein Aristotle
theologises.” And there is no denying the assertion. We must not then
be hard on the Neoplatonists, as if they were the first to mix things
separate from the foundation of the world. I do not say that theology
and metaphysic are separate studies. That is to be ascertained only by
seeing some one separate them. And when I see them separated, I shall
believe them separable. Only the separation must not be produced by the
simple expedient of denying the existence of either one of them, or at
least of ignoring the existence of one steadily during the study of the
other. If they can be parted without injury to each other, let them be
parted; and till then let us suspend hard judgments on the Alexandrian
school of metaphysic, and also on the schools of that curious people the
Jews, who had at this period a steadily increasing influence on the
thought, as well as on the commercial prosperity, of Alexandria.
You must not suppose, in the meanwhile, that the philosophers whom the
Ptolemies collected (as they would have any other marketable article) by
liberal offers of pay and patronage, were such men as the old Seven Sages
of Greece, or as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In these three last
indeed, Greek thought reached not merely its greatest height, but the
edge of a precipice, down which it rolled headlong after their decease.
The intellectual defects of the Greek mind, of which I have already
spoken, were doubtless one great cause of this decay: but, to my mind,
moral causes had still more to do with it. The more cultivated Greek
states, to judge from the writings of Plato, had not been an
over-righteous people during the generation in which he lived. And in
the generations which followed, they became an altogether wicked people;
immoral, unbelieving, hating good, and delighting in all which was evil.
And it was in consequence of these very sins of theirs, as I think, that
the old Hellenic race began to die out physically, and population
throughout Greece to decrease with frightful rapidity, after the time of
the Achæan league. The facts are well known; and foul enough they are.
When the Romans destroyed Greece, God was just and merciful. The eagles
were gathered together only because the carrion needed to be removed from
the face of God’s earth. And at the time of which I now speak, the signs
of approaching death were fearfully apparent. Hapless and hopeless
enough were the clique of men out of whom the first two Ptolemies hoped
to form a school of philosophy; men certainly clever enough, and amusing
withal, who might give the kings of Egypt many a shrewd lesson in
king-craft, and the ways of this world, and the art of profiting by the
folly of fools, and the selfishness of the selfish; or who might amuse
them, in default of fighting-cocks, by puns and repartees, and battles of
logic; “how one thing cannot be predicated of another,” or “how the wise
man is not only to overcome every misfortune, but not even to feel it,”
and other such mighty questions, which in those days hid that deep
unbelief in any truth whatsoever which was spreading fast over the minds
of men. Such word-splitters were Stilpo and Diodorus, the slayer and the
slain. They were of the Megaran school, and were named Dialectics; and
also, with more truth, Eristics, or quarrellers. Their clique had
professed to follow Zeno and Socrates in declaring the instability of
sensible presumptions and conclusions, in preaching an absolute and
eternal Being. But there was this deep gulf between them and Socrates;
that while Socrates professed to be seeking for the Absolute and Eternal,
for that which is, they were content with affirming that it exists. With
him, as with the older sages, philosophy was a search for truth. With
them it was a scheme of doctrines to be defended. And the dialectic on
which they prided themselves so much, differed from his accordingly. He
used it inductively, to seek out, under the notions and conceptions of
the mind, certain absolute truths and laws of which they were only the
embodiment. Words and thought were to him a field for careful and
reverent induction, as the phenomena of nature are to us the disciples of
Bacon. But with these hapless Megarans, who thought that they had found
that for which Socrates professed only to seek dimly and afar off, and
had got it safe in a dogma, preserved as it were in spirits, and put by
in a museum, the great use of dialectic was to confute opponents.
Delight in their own subtlety grew on them, the worship not of objective
truth, but of the forms of the intellect whereby it may be demonstrated;
till they became the veriest word-splitters, rivals of the old sophists
whom their master had attacked, and justified too often Aristophanes’
calumny, which confounded Socrates with his opponents, as a man whose aim
was to make the worse appear the better reason.
We have here, in both parties, all the marks of an age of exhaustion, of
scepticism, of despair about finding any real truth. No wonder that they
were superseded by the Pyrrhonists, who doubted all things, and by the
Academy, which prided itself on setting up each thing to knock it down
again; and so by prudent and well-bred and tolerant qualifying of every
assertion, neither affirming too much, nor denying too much, keep their
minds in a wholesome—or unwholesome—state of equilibrium, as stagnant
pools are kept, that everything may have free toleration to rot
undisturbed.
These hapless caricaturists of the dialectic of Plato, and the logic of
Aristotle, careless of any vital principles or real results, ready enough
to use fallacies each for their own party, and openly proud of their
success in doing so, were assisted by worthy compeers of an outwardly
opposite tone of thought, the Cyrenaics, Theodorus and Hegesias. With
their clique, as with their master Aristippus, the senses were the only
avenues to knowledge; man was the measure of all things; and “happiness
our being’s end and aim.” Theodorus was surnamed the Atheist; and, it
seems, not without good reason; for he taught that there was no absolute
or eternal difference between good and evil; nothing really disgraceful
in crimes; no divine ground for laws, which according to him had been
invented by men to prevent fools from making themselves disagreeable; on
which theory, laws must be confessed to have been in all ages somewhat of
a failure. He seems to have been, like his master, an impudent
light-hearted fellow, who took life easily enough, laughed at patriotism,
and all other high-flown notions, boasted that the world was his country,
and was no doubt excellent after-dinner company for the great king.
Hegesias, his fellow Cyrenaic, was a man of a darker and more melancholic
temperament; and while Theodorus contented himself with preaching a
comfortable selfishness, and obtaining pleasure, made it rather his study
to avoid pain. Doubtless both their theories were popular enough at
Alexandria, as they were in France during the analogous period, the
Siècle Louis Quinze. The “Contrat Social,” and the rest of their
doctrines, moral and metaphysical, will always have their admirers on
earth, as long as that variety of the human species exists for whose
especial behoof Theodorus held that laws were made; and the whole form of
thought met with great approbation in after years at Rome, where Epicurus
carried it to its highest perfection. After that, under the pressure of
a train of rather severe lessons, which Gibbon has detailed in his
“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” little or nothing was heard of
it, save _sotto voce_, perhaps, at the Papal courts of the sixteenth
century. To revive it publicly, or at least as much of it as could be
borne by a world now for seventeen centuries Christian, was the glory of
the eighteenth century. The moral scheme of Theodorus has now nearly
vanished among us, at least as a confessed creed; and, in spite of the
authority of Mr. Locke’s great and good name, his metaphysical scheme is
showing signs of a like approaching disappearance. Let us hope that it
may be a speedy one; for if the senses be the only avenues to knowledge;
if man be the measure of all things; and if law have not, as Hooker says,
her fount and home in the very bosom of God himself, then was Homer’s
Zeus right in declaring man to be “the most wretched of all the beasts of
the field.”
And yet one cannot help looking with a sort of awe (I dare not call it
respect) at that melancholic faithless Hegesias. Doubtless he, like his
compeers, and indeed all Alexandria for three hundred years, cultivated
philosophy with no more real purpose than it was cultivated by the
graceless _beaux-esprits_ of Louis XV.’s court, and with as little
practical effect on morality; but of this Hegesias alone it stands
written, that his teaching actually made men do something; and moreover,
do the most solemn and important thing which any man can do, excepting
always doing right. I must confess, however, that the result of his
teaching took so unexpected a form, that the reigning Ptolemy, apparently
Philadelphus, had to interfere with the sacred right of every man to talk
as much nonsense as he likes, and forbade Hegesias to teach at
Alexandria. For Hegesias, a Cyrenaic like Theodorus, but a rather more
morose pedant than that saucy and happy scoffer, having discovered that
the great end of man was to avoid pain, also discovered (his digestion
being probably in a disordered state) that there was so much more pain
than pleasure in the world, as to make it a thoroughly disagreeable
place, of which man was well rid at any price. Whereon he wrote a book
called, Ἀποκαρτερῶν, in which a man who had determined to starve himself,
preached the miseries of human life, and the blessings of death, with
such overpowering force, that the book actually drove many persons to
commit suicide, and escape from a world which was not fit to dwell in. A
fearful proof of how rotten the state of society was becoming, how
desperate the minds of men, during those frightful centuries which
immediately preceded the Christian era, and how fast was approaching that
dark chaos of unbelief and unrighteousness, which Paul of Tarsus so
analyses and describes in the first chapter of his Epistle to the
Romans—when the old light was lost, the old faiths extinct, the old
reverence for the laws of family and national life, destroyed, yea even
the natural instincts themselves perverted; that chaos whose darkness
Juvenal, and Petronius, and Tacitus have proved, in their fearful pages,
not to have been exaggerated by the more compassionate though more
righteous Jew.
And now observe, that this selfishness—this wholesome state of
equilibrium—this philosophic calm, which is really only a lazy pride,
was, as far as we can tell, the main object of all the schools from the
time of Alexander to the Christian era. We know very little of those
Sceptics, Cynics, Epicureans, Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, of whom
there has been so much talk, except at second-hand, through the Romans,
from whom Stoicism in after ages received a new and not ignoble life.
But this we do know of the later sets, that they gradually gave up the
search for truth, and propounded to themselves as the great type for a
philosopher, How shall a man save his own soul from this evil world? They
may have been right; it may have been the best thing to think about in
those exhausted and decaying times: but it was a question of ethics, not
of philosophy, in the sense which the old Greek sages put on that latter
word. Their object was, not to get at the laws of all things, but to
fortify themselves against all things, each according to his scheme, and
so to be self-sufficient and alone. Even in the Stoics, who boldly and
righteously asserted an immutable morality, this was the leading
conception. As has been well said of them:
“If we reflect how deeply the feeling of an intercourse between men and a
divine race superior to themselves had worked itself into the Greek
character—what a number of fables, some beautiful, some impure, it had
impregnated and procured credence for—how it sustained every form of
polity and every system of laws, we may imagine what the effects must
have been of its disappearance. If it is possible for any man, it was
not, certainly, possible for a Greek, to feel himself connected by any
real bonds with his fellow-creatures around him, while he felt himself
utterly separated from any being above his fellow-creatures. But the
sense of that isolation would affect different minds very differently.
It drove the Epicurean to consider how he might make a world in which he
should live comfortably, without distracting visions of the past and
future, and the dread of those upper powers who no longer awakened in him
any feelings of sympathy. It drove Zeno the Stoic to consider whether a
man may not find enough in himself to satisfy him, though what is beyond
him be ever so unfriendly. . . . We may trace in the productions which
are attributed to Zone a very clear indication of the feeling which was
at work in his mind. He undertook, for instance, among other tasks, to
answer Plato’s ‘Republic.’ The truth that a man is a political being,
which informs and pervades that book, was one which must have been
particularly harassing to his mind, and which he felt must be got rid of,
before he could hope to assert his doctrine of a man’s solitary dignity.”