_Importance of the ethical tendency in pre-Socratic Philosophy
generally under-estimated—Development of this tendency from
Thales to the Sophists, and from the Sophists to the Stoics and
Epicureans—Special influence of these two Schools, aided by the
failure of political interest, in establishing a practicable
ideal of PERSONAL virtue—This ideal, conspicuous in Plutarch’s
“Ethics,” and inculcated by the philosophers of the early
Græco-Roman Empire generally._
It will be interesting and useful briefly to trace the growth of the
ethical tendency in Greek Philosophy, not only as a preparation for
the study of Plutarch’s position as an ethical and religious teacher,
but also because the prominence of this tendency in the pre-Socratic
systems appears to have been greatly underestimated.[54] It has been
found so easy, for purposes of historical narrative, to describe a
certain philosophical tendency as “physical,” and a certain other as
“metaphysical,” that the purely general character of these descriptions
has been overlooked. Thales was a natural philosopher, an astronomer,
and, if we may trust the “general belief of the Greeks” to which
Herodotus alludes in his account of the crossing of the river Halys by
Crœsus, a great mechanical engineer as well.[55] But he was something
more than this. He was distinguished for great political insight, and was
acknowledged to be the greatest of the group of practical philosophers
who were known as the Seven Sages.[56] To this group are assigned
those famous dicta which, whether inscribed by priests on the walls of
temples, or embodied by philosophers in their ethical systems, conveyed
a profound moral significance to every member of a Hellenic community.
Although no special one of these sayings is ascribed to Thales by
name, it would surely be absurd to suppose him deficient in those very
qualities which brought fame to the men at whose head he was universally
placed. A man who was confessedly a trusted counsellor in Politics would
assuredly, in those days, have had something to say on that branch of
Politics which was destined eventually to be separated from its parent
stem, and to become a distinct branch of philosophical investigation.
Anaximander cannot, at this distance of time, be directly associated
with the practical problems of human life, but must ever remain wrapped
up in his “infinity,” which is neither Air nor Water, nor any other
element, but “something that is different from all of them.”[57] It is
not, however, without significance in this connexion, that the most
striking fragment of his Philosophy that has reached our times is couched
in ethical phraseology: “That out of which existing things have their
birth must also, _of right_, be their grave when they are destroyed. For
they must, by the dispensation of time, _give a just compensation for
their injustice_.”[58] We are in equal ignorance of any special ethical
teaching of Anaximenes. Heraclitus, however, has a distinctly ethical
aspect, in spite of the physical nature of most of his philosophical
speculations. Self-knowledge, which is alien to the multitude, who are
under the sway of the poets,[59] is already, in Heraclitus, the basis of
self-control, as it is in Socrates the basis of all moral excellence.[60]
An ordered self-control is the highest of all virtues; even the Sun must
not transgress the limits of his sphere, or the Erinnyes, the Ministers
of _Justice_, will find him out.[61] Anaxagoras, whom Sextus Empiricus
will one day describe as “the most _physical_” of all the philosophers,
began his book on Nature with the words “All things were in confusion
together; then came Intelligence, and gave them order and arrangement;”
thus laying the foundation of his Natural Philosophy in a principle which
could not fail of early application to the sphere of Conduct.[62] The
denial of blind Chance, or of immutable Fate, in the realm of physical
phenomena easily leads to its repudiation in the sphere of Ethics, and to
a recognition of the personal responsibility of the individual mind for
the consequences of its own decisions.[63] It was probably a conviction
of the ethical fruitfulness of the principle thus laid down by Anaxagoras
in the sphere of Physics which induced Aristotle, the greatest of all
ethical philosophers, to assert that its author, as compared with his
predecessors, was a sober thinker by the side of random babblers.[64] The
physical investigations of Democritus were utilized by the Epicureans
to free man from superstitious fears of another world, in order that he
might direct all his powers to making the best of this world, in a moral,
infinitely more than in a physical, sense. He specifically discussed
Virtue, and concluded that happiness consisted in Temperance and
Self-Control.[65] In a book which he wrote under the significant title of
“Tritogeneia,” or “Minerva,” he appears to have applied the principle
of Intelligence to the domain of Ethics, as Anaxagoras had applied it to
the realm of Physics, pointing out that there wanted three things to the
perfection of human society—“to reason well, to speak well, and to do
one’s duty;” and that these three powers all spring from the directing
influence of Intelligence. The author of the “Magna Moralia” says that
Pythagoras was the first to discuss Virtue, and indicates in what manner
the Pythagoreans attempted to apply their theory of Number to the sphere
of Ethics. Their method was wrong, according to the “Magna Moralia,”
since there is a special and appropriate method for the analysis and
discussion of the virtues, and “Justice is not a number evenly even.”[66]
Such a definition, thus crushed by way of a point-blank negative, has,
of course, nothing but a metaphorical significance as applied to Ethics;
but the metaphorical conception of Justice as a perfect number will
not be totally devoid of inspiration to justice of conduct in the mind
of one who loves perfection even when represented by an arithmetical
abstraction; and if by this definition “it was designed to express the
correspondence between action and suffering,”[67] a fruitful, though
incomplete, ethical principle is embodied in their mathematical
phrasing.[68] In a more general sense, Epicharmus has sung how the
Pythagorean Doctrine of Number may be applied to the domain of practice:—
“Man’s life needs greatly Number’s ordered sway:
His path is safe who follows Number’s way.”[69]
But the Pythagorean doctrine of Transmigration probably had a greater
ethical value than the metaphysical conceptions of Number which
constituted the Pythagorean οὐσία; although it is not impossible that
the dogma, when carelessly held or unphilosophically interpreted, might
have a vicious rather than a virtuous effect.[70] The “Golden Verses of
Pythagoras,” whether composed by any individual member of the school,
or officially embodying the teaching of the sect, or representing the
actual work of some philosopher not formally a Pythagorean, have been
universally recognised to express a Pythagorean ideal;[71] and thus
exhibit in the doctrine of the Italian School a far more vigorous and
fruitful ethical tendency than any study of its official doctrines—so far
as they are available for study—would lead us to suppose. And, indeed,
the followers of this Philosophy were conspicuous, even in Plato’s time,
for a special manner of life, the preparation for which involved a
strenuous devotion to a strict and lofty ethical ideal, an ideal which
subsequently formed no small part of the strength of that last school of
Greek Philosophy which nominally sheltered under the ægis of Plato.[72]
Among the philosophers of the Eleatic School we find an equally marked
tendency in the direction of Ethics. The very basis of the anti-theistic
propaganda of Xenophanes is that the gods in their traditional character
do not display those virtues which are incumbent on even ordinarily
decent men. To his strenuous sincerity the removal of the gods from
the sphere of human conduct meant the introduction of a stricter and
better reasoned sanction for morality. Even Parmenides and Melissus
and Zeno were not so absorbed in the creation of abstract metaphysical
conceptions but that Plutarch is able to mention them together, not only
as distinguished for their contributions to the practical wisdom of
their time, but as evincing by the manner of their death their constancy
to a lofty ethical conception of the duties of life.[73] Empedocles is
included in the same category as having conferred great material and
political benefits upon his fellow-citizens, to whom he also addressed a
poem inculcating a pure and noble manner of life based on the doctrine of
Transmigration.
This brief review of the pre-Socratic and pre-Sophistic Philosophers
appears to indicate that, if their ethical doctrines were not formulated
with the scientific detail and precision of later schools, their
speculations had a strongly ethical cast, and tended to work out into
practical morality in the sphere of daily conduct. In spite of the
numerous systems of Ethics which have been propounded in ancient and
modern days, a scientific basis of Morality has not yet been truly laid,
and it was, perhaps, a recognition of the difficulties menacing attempts
in this direction, aided by a feeling that “moral progress has not to
wait till an unimpeachable system of Ethics has been elaborated,”[74]
which led the early Greek Schools to confine their utterances on Morals
to “rugged maxims hewn from life,” which compensated for their lack of
scientific precision by the inspiration they applied to the work of
actual life.
It must, however, be admitted that with the Sophists the concerns of
practical life began to assume that predominant place in philosophical
speculations which they afterwards wholly usurped; and the claim of
the Sophists (whether or not Socrates is to be reckoned among them)
to be regarded as the founders of Ethical Philosophy is not weakened
by the fact that, when Philosophy and Ethics were identified,[75]
the term Sophist was assigned to men whose lives were in diametrical
opposition to everything connoted by the designation philosopher.[76]
The Sophists of the Socratic age, whose varied teachings were lacking
in any philosophical principle to give them unity and dignity, brought
the business of common life into so marked a prominence, and recognized
Conduct as so much larger a fraction of life than it had hitherto been
consciously recognized, that the necessity of finding a scientific basis
for Conduct became apparent, and a sphere was thus opened to the genius
of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
It is not necessary to linger in demonstrating the important part played
by Ethics from this point onward in the development of Greek Philosophy.
“I hold that Socrates, as all are agreed, was the first whose voice
charmed away philosophy from the mysterious phenomena over which Nature
herself has cast a veil, and with which all philosophers before his time
busied themselves, and brought it face to face with social life, so as
to investigate virtue and vice, and the general distinction between
Good and Evil, and led it to pronounce its sentence that the heavenly
bodies were either far removed from the sphere of our knowledge, or
contributed nothing to right living, however much the knowledge of them
might be attained.”[77] Although this well-known passage from Cicero’s
“Academics” has been criticized for the too great emphasis which it lays
on the alienation of Socrates from Natural Philosophy, and, moreover, as
an attempt has been made to show above, it lays in like manner too much
stress on the alienation of previous thinkers from Moral Philosophy, or,
at any rate, from empirical Ethics, it expresses with great clearness the
surpassing importance which the common life of humanity, as illumined by
the light of virtuous ideals, was henceforward to assume as the end and
aim of philosophical investigations and discussions. The overwhelming
importance of Ethics in the philosophical system of Plato is directly or
indirectly apparent in all his teaching; and where he, too, indulges in
physical speculations, it is with the warning that probability is all
that can be expected from such investigations, and that they constitute a
wise and moderate recreation in the course of severer and more legitimate
studies.[78] But it must be conceded that, while no writer has composed
more beautiful panegyrics in praise of Virtue; while no teacher has
depicted its surpassing importance to humanity with greater devotion of
spirit or subtler charm of language; yet the severity of the intellectual
processes which alone lead to a comprehension of what, in the Platonic
system, Virtue is, has had the effect of making Virtue herself appear
almost “too bright and good for human nature’s daily food;” too lofty and
afar for the common man to attain; a mere abstraction to be preserved
as a field appropriate to the gymnastics of metaphysicians, and to be
shielded from the harsh contact of the common world and common men by the
_chevaux de frise_ of dialectical subtlety. Excess of Reason in Plato
has produced a similar result to that produced by excess of Emotion in
modern Religion, and it is not without Justice that a great writer of the
nineteenth century has described Plato as “putting men off with stars
instead of sense,” and as teaching them to be anything but “practical
men, honest men, continent men, unambitious men, fearful to solicit
a trust, slow to accept, and resolute never to betray one.”[79] The
accessibility of Virtue to the common heart is conditioned in Plato’s
system by its intelligibility to the common reason. The dialectic
processes by which the Ideas of the Good, the True, the Beautiful are
pursued are merely repellent to the average man, who does not care for
Metaphysics, but wishes to be good and pure and just in his dealings
with his fellow-men.[80] “Plato acknowledges that the morality of the
multitude must be utilitarian, since none other is attainable save by
the highly trained metaphysician.”[81] Even when the multitude accept
the teachings of the philosopher, it is not because they are capable of
the knowledge of ideal truth, but because the philosopher has compelled
them to recognize, from utilitarian reasons, that it is better to be
virtuous than to be vicious. But this acknowledgment of the inability of
the multitude to be virtuous in the highest sense, and the assertion that
they must submit themselves as clay to be moulded by the philosopher, who
alone has a knowledge of ideal goodness, do not help in a world where
the philosophers are not autocrats, but where every teacher must submit
his claims to the intelligence of the multitude. It may accordingly be
questioned whether Plato’s Ethics have furnished inspiration for goodness
except to those who have already had a predilection for virtue as an
appanage of the highest intellect, or to those more general lovers of
the Beautiful whose taste is gratified by fascinating descriptions of a
quality which, in itself, has no special charm for them, but which, when
depicted by this “master of the starry spheres” in its atmosphere of cold
but radiant splendour, has transfigured their moral life with beams that
do not “fade into the common light of day.” Plato’s teaching, indeed,
has something monastic, exclusive, aristocratic in its import, and the
“esoteric” doctrines which were taught in the grove of Academus to
students already prepared by a special course of instruction to receive
them stand at the very opposite pole of Philosophy to those homely
conversations which Socrates would hold with the first chance passer-by
in the streets of a busy city. “Let no one enter here who has not studied
Mathematics” was a phrase which summed up in a dogmatic canon of the
school the views of the master touching the exclusion of the multitude
from direct participation in Virtue and Philosophy.[82]
Aristotle brings us into a world where there is less of poetry and
beautiful imagery, but in which the common man can see more clearly. If
the landscapes are not so lovely, the roadways are better laid and the
milestones are more legible. The contrast has been often enough already
elaborated. Its essence seems to lie in the recognition by Aristotle
that men are men, and not ideal philosophers. It hardly needed those
famous passages in the “Ethics,” in which Aristotle subjects the Theory
of Ideas to a most searching criticism, to emphasize that predilection
for the practical concerns of daily life, as not only the proper sphere
of Ethics, but their foundation and material, which is conspicuous in
the general character of his work. Over and over again he insists that
happiness depends upon action, not contemplation;[83] and so convinced is
he that Ethics, like every other science, must start from knowledge of
actual facts, that he denies the claim of those to be students of Moral
Philosophy who are inexperienced in the actions of life.[84] And it is,
surely, in allusion to the demand of the Platonic Philosophy that the
multitude shall permit themselves to be moulded by the Platonist potter
even into that inferior form of virtue of which alone they are capable,
that Aristotle reverts to the famous saying of Hesiod that he is second
best only who “obeys one who speaks well,” while assigning the moral
supremacy to the man who makes his own practical experience of life the
basis of his ethical theories and the mainspring of his moral progress.
Thus it seems that Aristotle is the true successor of Socrates, inasmuch
as Philosophy, which under the spells of Platonism had withdrawn again to
the empyrean, is charmed down once more by the Stageirite to the business
and bosoms of mankind. To use the expressive metaphor of Aristotle
himself, though not, of course, in this connexion, if the creator of
the “Republic” shines as one of “the most beautiful and the strongest”
present at the Olympian Games, the author of the “Ethics” is one of the
“Combatants” who have been crowned, because they have descended into
the arena, and by right action have secured what is noble and good in
life.[85] After Aristotle, it was improbable that Philosophy would ever
again render itself obnoxious to the reproach levelled against Plato by
some of his contemporaries that “they went to him expecting to hear about
the chief good, but he put them off with a quantity of remarks about
numbers and things they could not understand.”[86]
Contemporary with the work of Aristotle and his insistence upon the
necessity that each individual man should seek for the chief good in
the sphere of his own actual experience, occurred the relaxation of
the dominant claims of the State to the best part of the energies and
activities of the citizen. The change in the political condition of
Greece consequent upon the Macedonian conquest had turned the Greek
citizen back upon his own soul for inspiration to guide his steps aright.
The philosophical tendency was thus aided by external conditions, and
the joint operation of both these influences established in Stoicism and
Epicureanism the satisfaction of the moral requirements of the individual
man as the aim and end of Philosophy.
Whatever importance the leaders of the Stoics attached to Logic and
Physics—and different philosophers formed different estimates of their
value[87]—all were agreed that these parts of Philosophy were only
useful in so far as they enabled mankind to lead a virtuous life; a life
in harmony with nature and its laws; a life which placed them above the
domination of “_Fear and hope and phantasy and awe, And wistful yearning
and unsated loves, That strain beyond the limits of this life_.”[88]
The Epicureans repudiated Dialectic,[89] and, as already stated,
studied Physics with a view only to freeing the mind of man from those
supernatural fears which hampered him in his attainment of terrestrial
virtue and happiness:—
“Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia cæcis
In tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
Interdum nilo quæ sunt metuenda magis quam
Quæ pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.
Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necesse est
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturæ species ratioque.”
Lucretius, whose great poem is devoted to an exposition of the physical
side of Epicureanism, _i.e._ of the Atomic Philosophy of Democritus,[90]
is only on the same ground with Epicurus himself when he makes it clear,
not merely by the general complexion of his argument, but by a large
number of particular passages, and those, too, the most strikingly
beautiful in the poem, that the investigation of natural phenomena is to
serve only as a means of freeing the life of humanity from those cares
and vices which are hostile to its peace:—
“Denique avarities et honorum cæca cupido
Quæ miseros homines cogunt transcendere fines
Juris et interdum socios scelerum atque ministros
Noctes atque dies niti præstante labore
Ad summas emergere opes, hæc vulnera vitæ
Non minimam partem _mortis formidine_ aluntur.”
The investigation of nature with a view to eliminating the fear of
death as a factor in human conduct, clearly enounced as it is in the
poem of the Roman Epicurean, is still more emphatically expressed
in a “fundamental maxim” of Epicurus himself: “If we did not allow
ourselves to be disturbed by suspicious fears of celestial phenomena;
if the terrors of death were never in our minds; and if we would but
courageously discuss the limits of our nature as regards pain and desire:
we should then have no need to study Natural Philosophy.”[91]
The exclusion of Dialectics,[92] and the subordination of Physics to
Ethics, restricted—if, indeed, it were a restriction—the scope of
character and intelligence to the sphere of conduct, and it is in the
light of this limitation that the full significance of the Epicurean
definition of Philosophy lies—“Philosophy is an active principle
which aims at securing Happiness by Reason and Discussion.” Here we
have in practical completion that identification of Philosophy with
Ethics towards which the whole tendency of Greek speculation had been
consciously or unconsciously working, and which was fully consummated in
the later development of the Stoic and Epicurean systems. The combined
effect of this principle of Epicureanism, and of the contemporaneous
failure of political interest, was to direct attention to those less
ostentatious, but, for happiness, more effective virtues, which flourish
in private society and in the daily intercourse of mankind. Because it
excluded Dialectics, and because it was excluded from Politics, the
gospel of the Garden established an ideal of homely virtue which lay
within the reach of the average man, who, like Epicurus himself, was
repelled by Plato’s distance from life, and did not feel called upon to
cherish impracticable schemes of ameliorating society under the dominion
of a Demetrius the Liberator, but was willing to content himself with a
humbler range of duty, with being temperate and chaste in his habits,
simple and healthy in his tastes, cheerful and serene in his personal
bearing, amiable and sympathetic with his friends, and cultivating
courteous relations in those slightly more extended social circles where
comity and tact take the place of the more intimate and familiar virtues
of household life.[93]
By the method of placing in continuous order certain common and
well-known indications, we have endeavoured to illustrate the view that
the natural development of Greek Philosophy led in the direction of
Ethics, and that the natural development of Ethics led in the direction
of a popular scheme of conduct, which, fragmentary and incomplete as
it might be in a scientific sense, had yet the advantage that it was
founded upon the common daily life of the ordinary man, and placed before
the ordinary man in his common daily life an ideal of virtue which, by
efforts not beyond his strength, he might realize and maintain. This type
of character, partly the growth of the circumstances of the time, but
strengthened and expanded by the manner in which Epicureanism adapted
itself to those circumstances, reacted upon the sterner conception of the
Stoic ideal of private virtue, and when we reach the revival of Religion
and Philosophy in the Græco-Roman world of the Empire, it is this ideal
which is the aim and end of every philosopher from Seneca to Marcus
Aurelius, from Plutarch to Apuleius, no matter what the particular label
they may attach to their doctrines to indicate their formal adhesion to
one of the great classical schools.[94] To take an extreme example of
a truth which will subsequently be illustrated from Plutarch, Seneca,
who is a Stoic of the Stoics, is full of praise for the noble and humane
simplicity of the Epicurean ideal of life, and in those inspiring letters
through which he directs the conscience of his friend Lucilius into
the pure and pleasant ways of truth and virtue, it is an exceptional
occurrence for him to conclude one of his moral lessons without quoting
in its support the authority of the Master of the Garden. The absorbing
interest of Plutarch as a moral philosopher lies mainly in the fact
that though, as a polemical writer, he is an opponent, and not always
a fair or judicious opponent, both of the Porch and the Garden,[95]
he collects from any quarter any kind of teaching which he hopes to
find useful in inculcating that ideal of conduct which he believes most
likely to work out into virtue and happiness; and though his most revered
teacher is Plato, the ideal of conduct which he inculcates is one which
Epicurus would have wished his friend Metrodorus to appropriate and
exemplify.[96] This ideal Plutarch thought worth preservation; it is the
last intelligible and practicable ideal presented to us by Paganism;
and the attempts which Plutarch made to preserve it are interesting
as those of a man who stood at a crisis in the world’s history, and
endeavoured to find, in the wisdom and strength and splendour of the
Past, a sanction for purity and goodness, when a sanction for purity
and goodness was being mysteriously formed, in comparison with which
the wisdom and strength and splendour of the Past were to be regarded
but as weakness and darkness and folly. The experiment was not without
success for a considerable time; and had Paganism been defended by
Julian in the pliant form which Plutarch gave it, and in the spirit of
tolerance which he infused into his defence of it, it is probable that
the harmonious co-operation, and perhaps the complete union, of the
classical tradition and the Christian faith would have been the early and
beneficial result.[97] With a view to observing some of the factors which
contributed to the success of Plutarch’s work, we propose to give a brief
glance at the ethical condition of the epoch in which it was carried on.