A Short History of Greek Philosophy

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Moreover there are distinctions among desires; some are both natural
and compulsory, such as thirst; some are natural but not compulsory, as
the desire for dainties; some are neither natural nor compulsory, such
as the desire for crowns or statues. The last of these the wise man
will contemn, the second he will admit, but so as to retain his
freedom. For independence of such things is desirable, not necessarily
that we may reduce our wants to a minimum, but in order that if we
cannot enjoy many things, we may be content with few. "For I am
convinced," Epicurus continues, "that they have the greatest enjoyment
of wealth, who are least dependent upon it for enjoyment."

Thus if Epicurus did not absolutely teach simplicity of living, he
taught his disciples the necessity of being capable of such simplicity,
which they could {225} hardly be without practice. So that in reality
the doctrine of Epicurus came very near that of his opponents. As
Seneca the Stoic observed, "Pleasure with him comes to be something
very thin and pale. In fact that law which we declare for virtue, the
same law he lays down for pleasure."

One of the chief and highest pleasures of life Epicurus found in the
possession of friends, who provided for each other not only help and
protection, but a lifelong joy. For the 'larger friendship' of the
civic community, Epicurus seems to have had only a very neutral regard.
Justice, he says, is a convention of interests, with a view of neither
hurting or being hurt. The wise man will have nothing to do with
politics, if he can help it.

In spite of much that may offend in the doctrines of Epicurus, there is
much at least in the man which is sympathetic and attractive. What one
observes, however, when we compare such a philosophy with that of Plato
or Aristotle, is first, a total loss of constructive imagination. The
parts of the 'philosophy,' if we are so to call it, of Epicurus hang
badly together, and neither the Canonics nor the Physics show any real
faculty of serious thinking at all. The Ethics has a wider scope and a
more real relation to experience if not to reason. But it can never
satisfy the deeper apprehension of mankind.

The truest and most permanently valid revelations {226} of life come
not to the many but to the one or the few, who communicate the truth to
the many, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, always at the cost
of antagonism and ridicule. A philosophy therefore which only
represents in theoretical form the average practice of the average man,
comes into the world still-born. It has nothing to say; its hearers
know it all, and the exact value of it all, already. And in their
heart of hearts, many even of those who have stooped to a lower ideal,
and sold their birthright of hopes beyond the passing hour, for a mess
of pottage in the form of material success and easy enjoyment, have a
lurking contempt for the preachers of what they practise; as many a
slaveholder in America probably had for the clerical defenders of the
'divine institution.'

There is a wasting sense of inadequacy in this 'hand-to-mouth' theory
of living, which compels most of those who follow it to tread softly
and speak moderately. They are generally a little weary if not
cynical; they don't think much of themselves or of their success; but
they prefer to hold on as they have begun, rather than launch out into
new courses, which they feel they have not the moral force to continue.
"May I die," said the Cynic, "rather than lead a life of pleasure."
"May I die," says the Epicurean, "rather than make a fool of myself."
The Idealist is to them, if not {227} a hypocrite, at least a
visionary,--if not a Tartuffe, at least a Don Quixote tilting at
windmills. Yet even for poor Don Quixote, with all his blindness and
his follies, the world retains a sneaking admiration. It can spare a
few or a good many of its worldly-wisdoms, rather than lose altogether
its enthusiasms and its dreams. And the one thing which saves
Epicureanism from utter extinction as a theory, is invariably the
idealism which like a 'purple patch' adorns it here and there. No man
and no theory is wholly self-centred. Pleasure is supplanted by
Utility, and Utility becomes the greatest Happiness of the greatest
Number, and so, as Horace says (_Ep._ I. x. 24)--

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret,

Nature (like Love) thrust out of the door, will come back by the
window; and the Idealism which is not allowed to make pain a pleasure,
is required at last to translate pleasure into pains.

{228}

CHAPTER XXII

THE STOICS

_Semitic admixture--Closed fist and open hand--'Tabula rasa'--Necessity
of evil--Hymn of Cleanthes--Things indifferent--Ideal and
real--Philosophy and humanity_

Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy (born _circa_ 340
B.C.), was a native of Citium in Cyprus. The city was Greek, but with
a large Phoenician admixture. And it is curious that in this last and
sternest phase of Greek thought, not the founder only, but a large
proportion of the successive leaders of the school, came from this and
other places having Semitic elements in them. Among these places
notable as nurseries of Stoicism was Tarsus in Cilicia, the birthplace
of St. Paul. The times of preparation were drawing to a close; and
through these men, with their Eastern intensity and capacities of
self-searching and self-abasement, the philosophy of Greece was linking
itself on to the wisdom of the Hebrews.

Zeno came to Athens to study philosophy, and for twenty years he was a
pupil first of Crates the Cynic, and then of other teachers. At length
he set up a school of his own in the celebrated _Stoa {229} Poecile_
(Painted Colonnade), so named because it was adorned with frescoes by
Polygnotus. There he taught for nearly sixty years, and voluntarily
ended his life when close on a century old. His life, as Antigonus,
King of Macedon, recorded on his tomb, was consistent with his
doctrine--abstemious, [386] frugal, laborious, dutiful. He was
succeeded by Cleanthes, a native of Assos in Asia [387] Minor. But the
great constructor of the Stoic doctrine, without whom, as his
contemporaries said, there had been no Stoic school at all, was
Chrysippus, a native of Soli or of Tarsus in Cilicia. He wrote at
enormous length, supporting his teachings by an immense erudition, and
culling liberally from the poets to illustrate and enforce his views.
Learned and pedantic, his works had no inherent attraction, and nothing
of them but fragments has been preserved. We know the Stoic doctrine
mainly from the testimony and criticisms of later times.

[389]

Like the Epicureans, Zeno and his successors made philosophy primarily
a search for the chief good, a doctrine of practice and morals. But
like them they were impelled to admit a logic and a physics, at least
by way of preliminary basis to their [390] ethics. The relations of
the three they illustrated by various images. Philosophy was like an
animal; logic was its bones and sinews, ethics its flesh, physics its
life or soul. Or again, philosophy was {230} an egg; logic was the
shell, ethics the white, physics, the yolk. Or again, it was a
fruitful field; logic was the hedge, ethics the crop, physics the soil.
Or it was a city, well ordered and strongly fortified, and so on. The
images seem somewhat confused, but the general idea is clear enough.
Morality was the essential, the living body, of philosophy; physics
supplied its raw material, or the conditions under which a moral life
could be lived; logic secured that we should use that material rightly
and wisely for the end desired.

[391]

Logic the Stoics divided into two parts--Rhetoric, the 'science of the
open hand,' and Dialectic, the 'science of the closed fist,' as Zeno
called them. They indulged in elaborate divisions and subdivisions of
each, with which we need not meddle. The only points of interest to us
are contained in their analysis [392] of the processes of perception
and thought. A sensation, Zeno taught, was the result of an external
_impulse_, which when combined with an internal _assent_, produced a
mental state that revealed at the same time itself and the external
object producing it. The perception thus produced he compared to the
grip which the hand took of a solid object; and real perceptions,
those, that is, which were caused by a real external object, and not by
some illusion, always testified to the reality of their cause by this
sensation of 'grip.'

{231}

The internal assent of the mind was voluntary, and at the same time
necessary; for the mind could not do otherwise than will the acceptance
of that which it was fitted to receive. The peculiarity of their
physics, which we shall have to refer to later on, namely, the denial
of the existence of anything not material, implied that in some way
there was a material action of the external object on the structure of
the perceiving mind (itself also material). What exactly the nature of
this action was the Stoics themselves were not quite agreed. The idea
of an 'impression' such as a seal makes upon wax was a tempting one,
but they had difficulty in comprehending how there could be a multitude
of different impressions on the same spot without effacing each other.
Some therefore preferred the vaguer and safer expression,
'modification'; had they possessed our modern science, they might have
illustrated their meaning by reference to the phenomena of magnetism or
electricity.

An interesting passage may be quoted from [393] Plutarch on the Stoic
doctrine of knowledge: "The Stoics maintain," he says, "that when a
human being is born, he has the governing part of his soul like a sheet
of paper ready prepared for the reception of writing, and on this the
soul inscribes in succession its various ideas. The first form of the
writing is produced through the senses. When we perceive, for example,
{232} a white object, the recollection remains when the object is gone.
And when many similar recollections have accumulated, we have what is
called _experience_. Besides the ideas which we get in this natural
and quite undesigned way, there are other ideas which we get through
teaching and information. In the strict sense only these latter ought
to be called ideas; the former should rather be called perceptions.
Now the rational faculty, in virtue of which we are called reasoning
beings, is developed out of, or over and beyond, the mass of
perceptions, in the second seven years' period of life. In fact a
thought may be defined as a kind of mental image, such as a rational
animal alone is capable of having."

Thus there are various gradations of mental apprehensions; first, those
of sensible qualities obtained through the action of the objects and
the assent of the perceiving subject, as already described; then by
experience, by comparison, by analogy, by the combinations of the
reasoning faculty, further and more general notions are arrived at, and
conclusions formed, as, for example, that the gods exist and exercise a
providential care over the world. By this faculty also the wise man
ascends to the apprehension of the good and true.

The physics of the Stoics started from the fundamental [398]
proposition that in the universe of things there were two elements--the
active and the passive. {233} The latter was Matter or unqualified
existence; the former was the reason or qualifying element in Matter,
that is, God, who being eternal, is the fashioner of every individual
thing throughout the universe of matter. God is One; He is Reason, and
Fate, and Zeus. In fact all the gods are only various representations
of His faculties and powers. He being from the beginning of things by
Himself, turneth all existence through air to water. And even as the
genital seed is enclosed in the semen, so also was the seed of the
world concealed in the water, making its matter apt for the further
birth of things; then first it brought into being the four
elements--fire, water, air, earth. For there was a finer fire or air
which was the moving spirit of things; later and lower than this were
the material elements of fire and air. It follows that the universe of
things is threefold; there is first God Himself, the source of all
character and individuality, who is indestructible and eternal, the
fashioner of all things, who in certain cycles of ages gathers up all
things into Himself, and then out of Himself brings them again to
birth; there is the matter of the universe whereon God works; and
thirdly, there is the union of the two. Thus the world is governed by
reason and forethought, and this reason extends through every part,
even as the soul or life extends to every part of us. The universe
therefore is a living thing, having a {234} soul or reason in it. This
soul or reason one teacher likened to the air, another to the sky,
another to the sun. For the soul of nature is, as it were, a finer air
or fire, having a power of creation in it, and moving in an ordered way
to the production of things.

[399]

The universe is one and of limited extension, being spherical in form,
for this is the form which best adapts itself to movement. Outside
this universe is infinite bodiless space; but within the universe there
is no empty part; all is continuous and united, as is proved by the
harmony of relation which exists between the heavenly bodies and those
upon the earth. The world as such is destructible, for its parts are
subject to change and to decay; yet is this change or destruction only
in respect of the qualities imposed upon it from time to time by the
Reason inherent in it; the mere unqualified Matter remains
indestructible.

[408]

In the universe evil of necessity exists; for evil being the opposite
of good, where no evil is there no good can be. For just as in a
comedy there are absurdities, which are in themselves bad, but yet add
a certain attraction to the poem as a whole, so also one may blame evil
regarded in itself, yet for the whole it is not without its use. So
also God is the cause of death equally with birth; for even as cities
when the inhabitants have multiplied overmuch, {235} remove their
superfluous members by colonisation or by war, so also is God a cause
of destruction. In man in like manner good cannot exist save with
evil; for wisdom being a knowledge of good and evil, remove the evil
and wisdom itself goes. Disease and other natural evils, when looked
at in the light of their effects, are means not of evil but of good;
there is throughout the universe a balance and interrelation of good
and evil. Not that God hath in Himself any evil; the law is not the
cause of lawlessness, nor God Himself responsible for any violation of
right.

[404]

The Stoics indulged in a strange fancy that the world reverted after a
mighty cycle of years in all its parts to the same form and structure
which it possessed at the beginning, so that there would be once more a
Socrates, a Plato, and all the men that had lived, each with the same
friends and fellow-citizens, the same experiences, and the same
endeavours. At the termination of each cycle there was a burning up of
all things, and thereafter a renewal of the great round of life.

[408]

Nothing incorporeal, they maintained, can be affected by or affect that
which is corporeal; body alone can affect body. The soul therefore
must be corporeal. Death is the separation of soul from body, but it
is impossible to separate what is incorporeal from body; therefore,
again, the soul must {236} be corporeal. In the belief of Cleanthes,
the souls of all creatures remained to the next period of cyclic
conflagration; Chrysippus believed that only the souls of the wise and
good remained.

[413]

Coming finally to the Ethics of the Stoic philosophy, we find for the
chief end of life this definition, 'A life consistent with itself,' or,
as it was otherwise expressed, 'A life consistent with Nature.' The
two definitions are really identical; for the law of nature is the law
of our nature, and the reason in our being the reason which also is in
God, the supreme Ruler of the universe. This is substantially in
accordance with the celebrated law of right action laid down by Kant,
"Act so that the maxim of thine action be capable of being made a law
of universal action." Whether a man act thus or no, by evil if not by
good the eternal law will satisfy itself; the question is of import
only for the man's own happiness. Let his will accord with the
universal will, then the law will be fulfilled, and the man will be
happy. Let his will resist the universal will, then the law will be
fulfilled, but the man will bear the penalty. This was expressed by
Cleanthes in a hymn which ran somewhat thus--

Lead me, O Zeus most great,
And thou, Eternal Fate:
What way soe'er thy will doth bid me travel
That way I'll follow without fret or cavil.
{237}
Or if I evil be
And spurn thy high decree,
Even so I still shall follow, soon or late.

Thus in the will alone consists the difference of good or ill for us;
in either case Nature's great law fulfils itself infallibly. To their
view on this point we may apply the words of Hamlet: "If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not
now, yet it will come; the _readiness_ is all."

This universal law expresses itself in us in various successive
manifestations. From the moment of birth it implants in us a supreme
self-affection, whereby of infallible instinct we seek our own
self-preservation, rejoice in that which is suitable to our existence,
shrink from that which is unsuitable. As we grow older, further and
higher principles manifest themselves--reason and reflection, a more
and more careful and complete apprehension of that which is honourable
and advantageous, a capacity of choice among goods. Till finally the
surpassing glory of that which is just and honourable shines out so
clear upon us, that any pain or loss is esteemed of no account, if only
we may attain to that. Thus at last, by the very law of our being, we
come to know that nothing is truly and absolutely good but goodness,
nothing absolutely bad but sin. Other things, inasmuch as they have no
character of moral good {238} or moral evil, cannot be deemed really
good or bad; in comparison with the absolutely good, they are things
indifferent, though in comparison with each other they may be
relatively preferable or relatively undesirable. Even pleasure and
pain, so far as concerns the absolute end or happiness of our being,
are things indifferent; we cannot call them either good or evil. Yet
have they a relation to the higher law, for the consciousness of them
was so implanted in us at the first that our souls by natural impulse
are drawn to pleasure, while they shrink from pain as from a deadly
enemy. Wherefore reason neither can nor ought to seek wholly to
eradicate these primitive and deep-seated affections of our nature; but
so to exercise a resisting and ordering influence upon them, as to
render them obedient and subservient to herself.

[415]

That which is absolutely good--wisdom, righteousness, courage,
temperance--does good only and never ill to us. All other
things,--life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, reputation,
birth,--and their opposites,--death, disease, pain, deformity,
weakness, poverty, contempt, humility of station,--these are in
themselves neither a benefit nor a curse. They may do us good, they
may do us harm. We may use them for good, we may use them for evil.

[417]

Thus the Stoics worked out on ideal and absolute lines the thought of
righteousness as the chief and {239} only good. Across this ideal
picture were continually being drawn by opponents without or inquirers
within, clouds of difficulty drawn from real experience. 'What,' it
was asked, 'of _progress_ in goodness? Is this a middle state between
good and evil; or if a middle state between good and evil be a
contradiction, in terms, how may we characterise it?' Here the wiser
teachers had to be content to answer that it _tended_ towards good, was
good in possibility, would be absolutely good when the full attainment
came, and the straining after right had been swallowed up in the
perfect calm of settled virtue.

'How also of the wise man tormented by pain, or in hunger and poverty
and rags, is his perfectness of wisdom and goodness really sufficient
to make him happy?' Here, again, the answer had to be hesitating and
provisional, through no fault of the Stoics. In this world, while we
are still under the strange dominion of time and circumstance, the
ideal can never wholly fit the real. There must still be difficulty
and incompleteness here, only to be solved and perfected 'when iniquity
shall have an end.' Our eyes may fail with looking upward, yet the
upward look is well; and the jibes upon the Stoic 'king in rags' that
Horace and others were so fond of, do not affect the question. It may
have been, and probably often was, the case that Stoic teachers {240}
were apt to transfer to themselves personally the ideal attributes,
which they justly assigned to the ideal man in whom wisdom was
perfected. The doctrine gave much scope for cant and mental pride and
hypocrisy, as every ideal doctrine does, including the Christian. But
the existence of these vices in individuals no more affected the
doctrine of an ideal goodness in its Stoic form, than it does now in
its Christian one. That only the good man is truly wise or free or
happy; that vice, however lavishly it surround itself with luxury and
ease and power, is inherently wretched and foolish and slavish;--these
are things which are worth saying and worth believing, things, indeed,
which the world dare not and cannot permanently disbelieve, however
difficult or even impossible it may be to mark men off into two
classes, the good and the bad, however strange the irony of
circumstance which so often shows the wicked who 'are not troubled as
other men, neither are they plagued like other men; they have more than
their heart could wish,' while good men battle with adversity, often in
vain. Still will the permanent, fruitful, progressive faith of man
'look to the end'; still will the ideal be powerful to plead for the
painful right, and spoil, even in the tasting, the pleasant wrong.

The doctrine, of course, like every doctrine worth anything, was pushed
to extravagant lengths, and {241} thrust into inappropriate quarters,
by foolish doctrinaires. As that the wise man is the only orator,
critic, poet, physician, nay, cobbler if you please; that the wise man
knows all that is to be known, and can do everything that is worth
doing, and so on. The school was often too academic, too abstract, too
fond of hearing itself talk. This, alas! is what most schools are, and
most schoolmasters.

Yet the Stoics were not altogether alien to the ordinary interests and
duties of life. They admitted a duty of co-operating in politics, at
least in such states as showed some desire for, or approach to, virtue.
They approved of the wise man taking part in education, of his marrying
and bringing up children, both for his own sake and his country's. He
will be ready even to 'withdraw himself from life on behalf of his
country or his friends. This 'withdrawal,' which was their word for
suicide, came unhappily to be much in the mouths of later, and
especially of the Roman, Stoics, who, in the sadness and restraint of
prevailing despotism, came to thank God that no one was compelled to
remain in life; he might 'withdraw' when the burden of life, the
hopelessness of useful activity, became too great.

With this sad, stern, yet not undignified note, the philosophy of
Greece speaks its last word. The later scepticism of the New Academy,
directed mainly to a negative criticism of the crude enough logic of
the {242} Stoics, or of the extravagances of their ethical doctrine,
contributed no substantial element to thought or morals. As an
eclectic system it had much vogue, side by side with Stoicism and
Epicureanism, among the Romans, having as its chief exponent Cicero, as
Epicureanism had Lucretius, and Stoicism, Seneca.

The common characteristic of all these systems in their later
developments, is their _cosmopolitanism_. _Homo sum, nil humani a me
alienum puto_, 'I am a man; nothing appertaining to humanity do I deem
alien from myself,' this was the true keynote of whatever was vital in
any of them. And the reason of this is not far to seek. We have seen
already (p. 82) how the chaos of sophistic doctrine was largely
conditioned, if not produced, by the breakdown of the old civic life of
Greece. The process hardly suffered delay from all the efforts of
Socrates and Plato. Cosmopolitanism was already a point of union
between the Cynics and Cyrenaics (see p. 128). And the march of
politics was always tending in the same direction. First through great
leagues, such as the Spartan or Athenian or Theban, each with a
predominant or tyrannical city at the head; then later through the
conquest of Greece by Alexander, and the leaguing of all Greek-speaking
peoples in the great invasion of Asia; then through the spread of Greek
letters all over the Eastern {243} world, and the influx upon Greek
centres such as Athens and Alexandria, of all manner of foreign
intelligences; and finally, through the conquest of all this teeming
world of culture by the discipline and practical ability of Rome, and
its incorporation in a universal empire of law, all the barriers which
had divided city from city and tribe from tribe and race from race
disappeared, and only a common humanity remained.

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