sense-impressions, ingeniously developed. We can, he argued, know the
outer world, because our sense impressions are literally 'impressions'
or stamps made by external objects upon our organs. To see, for
instance, is to be struck by an infinitely tenuous stream of images,
flowing from the object and directly impinging upon the retina. Such
streams are flowing from all objects in every direction--an idea which
seemed incredible until the modern discoveries about light, sound, and
radiation. Thus there is direct contact with reality, and consequently
knowledge. Besides direct vision, however, we have 'anticipations', or
προλήψεις, sometimes called 'common conceptions', e. g. the general
conception which we have of a horse when we are not seeing one. These
are merely the result of repeated acts of vision. A curious result of
this doctrine was that all our 'anticipations' or 'common ideas' are
true; mistakes occur through some interpretation of our own which we add
to the simple sensation.
We can know the world. How then are we to understand it? Here again
Epicurus found refuge in the old Ionian theory of Atoms and the Void,
which is supposed to have originated with Democritus and Leucippus, a
century before. But Epicurus seems to have worked out the Atomic Theory
more in detail, as we have it expounded in Lucretius' magnificent poem.
In particular it was possibly he who first combined the Atomic Theory
with hylozoism; i. e. he conceived of the Atoms as possessing some
rudimentary power of movement and therefore able to swerve slightly in
their regular downward course. That explains how they have become
infinitely tangled and mingled, how plants and animals are alive, and
how men have Free Will. It also enables Epicurus to build up a world
without the assistance of a god. He set man free, as Lucretius says,
from the 'burden of Religion', though his doctrine of the 'blessed
Being' which neither has pain nor gives pain, enables him to elude the
dangerous accusation of atheism. He can leave people believing in all
their traditional gods, including even, if so they wish, 'the bearded
Zeus and the helmed Athena' which they see in dreams and in their
'common ideas', while at the same time having no fear of them.
There remains the foolish fancy of the Cynics and Stoics that 'Aretê'
is the only good. Of course, he answers, Aretê is good; but that is
because it produces happy life, or blessedness or pleasure or whatever
you call it. He used normally the word ἡδονή 'sweetness', and counted
the Good as that which makes life sweet. He seems never to have entered
into small disputes as to the difference between 'sweetness', or
'pleasure', and 'happiness' and 'well-being' (ἡδονή, εὐδαιμονία,
εὐεστώ, κτλ.), though sometimes, instead of 'sweetness' he spoke of
'blessedness' (μακαριότης). Ultimately the dispute between him and the
Stoics seems to resolve itself into a question whether the Good lies in
πάσχειν or ποιεῖν, in Experience or in Action; and average human beings
seem generally to think that the Good for a conscious being must be
something of which he is conscious.
Thus the great system is built, simple, intelligible, dogmatic, and--as
such systems go--remarkably water-tight. It enables man to be unafraid,
and it helps him to be happy. The strange thing is that, although on
more than one point it seems to anticipate most surprisingly the
discoveries of modern science, it was accepted in a spirit more
religious than scientific. As we can see from Lucretius it was taken
almost as a revelation, from one who had saved mankind; whose intellect
had pierced beyond the 'flaming walls of Heaven' and brought back to man
the gospel of an intelligible universe.[106:1]
In 310 B. C., when Epicurus was thirty-two, things had so far improved
that he left Colophon and set up a school of philosophy in Mytilene, but
soon moved to Lampsacus, on the Sea of Marmora, where he had friends.
Disciples gathered about him. Among them were some of the leading men of
the city, like Leonteus and Idomeneus. The doctrine thrilled them and
seemed to bring freedom with it. They felt that such a teacher must be
set up in Athens, the home of the great philosophers. They bought by
subscription a house and garden in Athens for 80 minae (about
£320)[107:1] and presented it to the Master. He crossed to Athens in 306
and, though he four times revisited Lampsacus and has left letters
addressed _To Friends in Lampsacus_, he lived in the famous Garden for
the rest of his life.
Friends from Lampsacus and elsewhere came and lived with him or near
him. The Garden was not only a philosophical school; it was also a sort
of retreat or religious community. There lived there not only
philosophers like Mêtrodôrus, Colôtes, Hermarchus, and others; there
were slaves, like Mys, and free women, like Themista, the wife of
Leonteus, to both of whom the Master, as the extant fragments testify,
wrote letters of intimate friendship. And not only free women, but women
with names that show that they were slaves, Leontion, Nikidion,
Mammarion. They were _hetairae_; perhaps victims of war, like many of
the unfortunate heroines in the New Comedy; free women from conquered
cities, who had been sold in the slave market or reduced to misery as
refugees, and to whom now the Garden afforded a true and spiritual
refuge. For, almost as much as Diogenes, Epicurus had obliterated the
stamp on the conventional currency. The values of the world no longer
held good after you had passed the wicket gate of the Garden, and spoken
with the Deliverer.
The Epicureans lived simply. They took neither flesh nor wine, and there
is a letter extant, asking some one to send them a present of 'potted
cheese'[108:1] as a special luxury. Their enemies, who were numerous and
lively, make the obvious accusations about the hetairae, and cite an
alleged letter of the Master to Leontion. 'Lord Paean, my dear little
Leontion, your note fills me with such a bubble of excitement!'[108:2]
The problem of this letter well illustrates the difficulty of forming
clear judgements about the details of ancient life. Probably the letter
is a forgery: we are definitely informed that there was a collection of
such forgeries, made in order to damage Epicurus. But, if genuine, would
it have seemed to a fair-minded contemporary a permissible or an
impermissible letter for a philosopher to write? By modern standards it
would be about the border-line. And again, suppose it is a definite
love-letter, what means have we of deciding whether Epicurus--or for
that matter Zeno or Plato or any unconventional philosopher of this
period--would have thought it blameworthy, or would merely have called
our attention to the legal difficulties of contracting marriage with one
who had been a Hetaira, and asked us how we expect men and women to
live. Curiously enough, we happen to have the recorded sayings of
Epicurus himself: 'The wise man will not fall in love', and 'Physical
union of the sexes never did good; it is much if it does not do harm.'
This philosophy is often unjustly criticized. It is called selfish; but
that it is certainly not. It is always aiming at the deliverance of
mankind[109:1] and it bases its happiness on φιλία, Friendship or
Affection, just as the early Christians based it on ἀγάπη, a word no
whit stronger than φιλία, though it is conventionally translated
'Love'. By this conception it becomes at once more human than the Stoa,
to which, as to a Christian monk, human affection was merely a weakness
of the flesh which might often conflict with the soul's duty towards
God. Epicurus passionately protested against this unnatural 'apathy'. It
was also human in that it recognized degrees of good or bad, of virtue
or error. To the Stoic that which was not right was wrong. A calculator
who says that seven sevens make forty-eight is just as wrong as one who
says they make a thousand, and a sailor one inch below the surface of
the water drowns just as surely as one who is a furlong deep. Just so in
human life, wrong is wrong, falsehood is falsehood, and to talk of
degrees is childish. Epicureanism had an easy and natural answer to
these arguments, since pleasure and pain obviously admit of
degrees.[110:1]
The school is blamed also for pursuing pleasure, on the ground that the
direct pursuit of pleasure is self-defeating. But Epicurus never makes
that mistake. He says that pleasure, or 'sweetness of life', is the
good; but he never counsels the direct pursuit of it. Quite the reverse.
He says that if you conquer your desires and fears, and live simply and
love those about you, the natural sweetness of life will reveal itself.
A truer criticism is one which appears dimly in Plutarch and
Cicero.[110:2] There is a strange shadow of sadness hanging over this
wise and kindly faith, which proceeds from the essential distrust of
life that lies at its heart. The best that Epicurus has really to say of
the world is that if you are very wise and do not attract its
notice--Λάθε βιώσας--it will not hurt you. It is a philosophy not of
conquest but of escape. This was a weakness from which few of the
fourth-century thinkers completely escaped. To aim at what we should
call positive happiness was, to the Epicureans, only to court
disappointment; better make it your aim to live without strong
passion or desire, without high hopes or ambitions. Their professed
ideals--παντὸς τοῦ ἀλγοῦντος ὑπεξαίρεσις, ἀταραξία, εὕροια, 'the removal of all
active suffering', 'undisturbedness', 'a smooth flow'--seem to result in
rather a low tension, in a life that is only half alive. We know that,
as a matter of fact, this was not so. The Epicureans felt their doctrine
to bring not mere comfort but inspiration and blessedness. The young
Colotes, on first hearing the master speak, fell on his knees with tears
and hailed him as a god.[111:1] We may compare the rapturous phrases of
Lucretius. What can be the explanation of this?
Perhaps it is that a deep distrust of the world produces its own inward
reaction, as starving men dream of rich banquets, and persecuted sects
have apocalyptic visions of paradise. The hopes and desires that are
starved of their natural sustenance project themselves on to some plane
of the imagination. The martyr, even the most heretical martyr, sees the
vision of his crown in the skies, the lover sees in obvious defects only
rare and esoteric beauties. Epicurus avoided sedulously the
transcendental optimism of the Stoics. He avoided mysticism, avoided
allegory, avoided faith; he tried to set the feet of his philosophy on
solid ground. He can make a strong case for the probable happiness of a
man of kindly affections and few desires, who asks little from the
outside world. But after all it is only probable; misfortunes and
miseries may come to any man. 'Most of the evils you fear are false,' he
answers, still reasonably. 'Death does not hurt. Poverty need never
make a man less happy.' And actual pain? 'Yes, pain may come. But you
can endure it. Intense pains are brief; long-drawn pains are not
excruciating; or seldom so.' Is that common-sense comfort not enough?
The doctrine becomes more intense both in its promises and its demands.
If intense suffering comes, he enjoins, turn away your mind and conquer
the pain by the 'sweetness' of memory. There are in every wise man's
life moments of intense beauty and delight; if he has strength of mind
he will call them back to him at will and live in the blessedness of the
past, not in the mere dull agony of the moment. Nay, can he not actually
enjoy the intellectual interest of this or that pang? Has he not that
within him which can make the quality of its own life? On hearing of the
death of a friend he will call back the sweetness of that friend's
converse; in the burning Bull of Phalaris he will think his thoughts and
be glad. Illusion, the old Siren with whom man cannot live in peace, nor
yet without her, has crept back unseen to the centre of the citadel. It
was Epicurus, and not a Stoic or Cynic, who asserts that a Wise Man will
be happy on the rack.[112:1]
Strangely obliging, ironic Fortune gave to him also a chance of testing
of his own doctrine. There is extant a letter written on his death-bed.
'I write to you on this blissful day which is the last of my life. The
obstruction of my bladder and internal pains have reached the extreme
point, but there is marshalled against them the delight of my mind in
thinking over our talks together. Take care of the children of
Metrodorus in a way worthy of your life-long devotion to me and to
philosophy.'[113:1] At least his courage, and his kindness, did not
fail.
Epicureanism had certainly its sublime side; and from this very
sublimity perhaps arose the greatest flaw in the system, regarded as a
rational philosophy. It was accepted too much as a Revelation, too
little as a mere step in the search for truth. It was based no doubt on
careful and even profound scientific studies, and was expounded by the
master in a vast array of volumes. But the result so attained was
considered sufficient. Further research was not encouraged. Heterodoxy
was condemned as something almost approaching 'parricide'.[113:2] The
pursuit of 'needless knowledge' was deliberately frowned upon.[113:3]
When other philosophers were working out calculations about the size of
the Sun and the commensurability of the sun-cycle and the moon-cycle,
Epicurus contemptuously remarked that the Sun was probably about as big
as it looked, or perhaps smaller: since fires at a distance generally
look bigger than they are. The various theories of learned men were all
possible but none certain. And as for the cycles, how did any one know
that there was not a new sun shot off and extinguished every day?[113:4]
It is not surprising to find that none of the great discoveries of the
Hellenistic Age were due to the Epicurean school. Lucretius, writing 250
years later, appears to vary hardly in any detail from the doctrines of
the Master, and Diogenes of Oenoanda, 500 years later, actually repeats
his letters and sayings word for word.
It is sad, this. It is un-Hellenic; it is a clear symptom of decadence
from the free intellectual movement and the high hopes which had made
the fifth century glorious. Only in one great school does the true
Hellenic _Sôphrosynê_ continue flourishing, a school whose modesty of
pretension and quietness of language form a curious contrast with the
rapt ecstasies of Stoic and Cynic and even, as we have seen, of
Epicurean, just as its immense richness of scientific achievement
contrasts with their comparative sterility. The Porch and the Garden
offered new religions to raise from the dust men and women whose spirits
were broken; Aristotle in his Open Walk, or _Peripatos_, brought
philosophy and science and literature to guide the feet and interest the
minds of those who still saw life steadily and tried their best to see
it whole.
Aristotle was not lacking in religious insight and imagination, as he
certainly was not without profound influence on the future history of
religion. His complete rejection of mythology and of anthropomorphism;
his resolute attempt to combine religion and science, not by sacrificing
one to the other but by building the highest spiritual aspirations on
ascertained truth and the probable conclusions to which it pointed; his
splendid imaginative conception of the Divine Being or First Cause as
unmoved itself while moving all the universe 'as the beloved moves the
lover'; all these are high services to religious speculation, and
justify the position he held, even when known only through a distorting
Arabic translation, in medieval Christianity. If he had not written his
other books he might well be famous now as a great religious teacher.
But his theology is dwarfed by the magnificence and mass of his other
work. And as a philosopher and man of science he does not belong to our
present subject.
He is only mentioned here as a standard of that characteristic quality
in Hellenism from which the rest of this book records a downfall. One
variant of a well-known story tells how a certain philosopher, after
frequenting the Peripatetic School, went to hear Chrysippus, the Stoic,
and was transfixed. 'It was like turning from men to Gods.' It was
really turning from Greeks to Semites, from philosophy to religion, from
a school of very sober professions and high performance to one whose
professions dazzled the reason. 'Come unto me,' cried the Stoic, 'all ye
who are in storm or delusion; I will show you the truth and the world
will never grieve you more.'
Aristotle made no such profession. He merely thought and worked and
taught better than other men. Aristotle is always surprising us not
merely by the immense volume of clear thinking and co-ordinated
knowledge of which he was master, but by the steady _Sôphrosynê_ of his
temper. Son of the court physician of Philip, tutor for some years to
Alexander the Great, he never throughout his extant writings utters one
syllable of flattery to his royal and world-conquering employers; nor
yet one syllable which suggests a grievance. He saw, at close quarters
and from the winning side, the conquest of the Greek city states by the
Macedonian _ethnos_ or nation; but he judges dispassionately that the
city is the higher social form.
It seems characteristic that in his will, which is extant, after
providing a dowry for his widow, Herpyllis, to facilitate her getting a
second husband, and thanking her for her goodness to him, he directs
that his bones are to be laid in the same grave with those of his first
wife, Pythias, whom he had rescued from robbers more than twenty years
before.[116:1]
Other philosophers disliked him because he wore no long beard, dressed
neatly and had good normal manners, and they despised his philosophy for
very similar reasons. It was a school which took the existing world and
tried to understand it instead of inventing some intense ecstatic
doctrine which should transform it or reduce it to nothingness.
It possessed no Open Sesame to unlock the prison of mankind; yet it is
not haunted by that _Oimôgê_ of Kynoskephalai. While armies sweep Greece
this way and that, while the old gods are vanquished and the cities lose
their freedom and their meaning, the Peripatetics instead of
passionately saving souls diligently pursued knowledge, and in
generation after generation produced scientific results which put all
their rivals into the shade.[116:2] In mathematics, astronomy, physics,
botany, zoology, and biology, as well as the human sciences of
literature and history, the Hellenistic Age was one of the most creative
known to our record. And it is not only that among the savants
responsible for these advances the proportion of Peripatetics is
overwhelming; one may also notice that in this school alone it is
assumed as natural that further research will take place and will
probably correct as well as increase our knowledge, and that, when such
corrections or differences of opinion do take place, there is no cry
raised of Heresy.
It is the old difference between Philosophy and Religion, between the
search of the intellect for truth and the cry of the heart for
salvation. As the interest in truth for its own sake gradually abated in
the ancient world, the works of Aristotle might still find commentators,
but his example was forgotten and his influence confined to a small
circle. The Porch and the Garden, for the most part, divided between
them the allegiance of thoughtful men. Both systems had begun in days of
discomfiture, and aimed originally more at providing a refuge for the
soul than at ordering the course of society. But after the turmoil of
the fourth century had subsided, when governments began again to
approach more nearly to peace and consequently to justice, and public
life once more to be attractive to decent men, both philosophies showed
themselves adaptable to the needs of prosperity as well as adversity.
Many kings and great Roman governors professed Stoicism. It held before
them the ideal of universal Brotherhood, and of duty to the 'Great
Society of Gods and Men'; it enabled them to work, indifferent to mere
pain and pleasure, as servants of the divine purpose and 'fellow-workers
with God' in building up a human Cosmos within the eternal Cosmos. It
is perhaps at first sight strange that many kings and governors also
followed Epicurus. Yet after all the work of a public man is not
hindered by a slight irony as to the value of worldly greatness and a
conviction that a dinner of bread and water with love to season it 'is
better than all the crowns of the Greeks'. To hate cruelty and
superstition, to avoid passion and luxury, to regard human 'pleasure' or
'sweetness of life' as the goal to be aimed at, and 'friendship' or
'kindliness' as the principal element in that pleasure, are by no means
doctrines incompatible with wise and effective administration. Both
systems were good and both in a way complementary one to another. They
still divide between them the practical philosophy of western mankind.
At times to most of us it seems as though nothing in life had value
except to do right and to fear not; at others that the only true aim is
to make mankind happy. At times man's best hope seems to lie in that
part of him which is prepared to defy or condemn the world of fact if it
diverges from the ideal; in that intensity of reverence which will
accept many impossibilities rather than ever reject a holy thing; above
all in that uncompromising moral sensitiveness to which not merely the
corruptions of society but the fundamental and necessary facts of animal
existence seem both nauseous and wicked, links and chains in a system
which can never be the true home of the human spirit. At other times men
feel the need to adapt their beliefs and actions to the world as it is;
to brush themselves free from cobwebs; to face plain facts with common
sense and as much kindliness as life permits, meeting the ordinary needs
of a perishable and imperfect species without illusion and without
make-believe. At one time we are Stoics, at another Epicureans.
But amid their differences there is one faith which was held by both
schools in common. It is the great characteristic faith of the ancient
world, revealing itself in many divergent guises and seldom fully
intelligible to modern men; faith in the absolute supremacy of the
inward life over things external. These men really believed that wisdom
is more precious than jewels, that poverty and ill health are things of
no import, that the good man is happy whatever befall him, and all the
rest. And in generation after generation many of the ablest men, and
women also, acted upon the belief. They lived by free choice lives whose
simplicity and privation would horrify a modern labourer, and the world
about them seems to have respected rather than despised their poverty.
To the Middle Age, with its monks and mendicants expectant of reward in
heaven, such an attitude, except for its disinterestedness, would be
easily understood. To some eastern nations, with their cults of
asceticism and contemplation, the same doctrines have appealed almost
like a physical passion or a dangerous drug running riot in their veins.
But modern western man cannot believe them, nor believe seriously that
others believe them. On us the power of the material world has, through
our very mastery of it and the dependence which results from that
mastery, both inwardly and outwardly increased its hold. _Capta ferum
victorem cepit._ We have taken possession of it, and now we cannot move
without it.