We turn now to Greece, and in Greece especially to Athens, which became its intellectual centre.

The influence of Greece on the civilization of the world it is impossible to ignore and difficult to exaggerate, and in no department of civilization, except perhaps in that of art, has its influence been greater than in ethics, or the science of the conduct of life. The cities of Greece had of course their own traditional ethical standards, which varied considerably, and were all seriously weakened by demoralizing mythologies. At Athens the enumeration of what came much later to be called “the cardinal virtues”—justice, self-control, courage and wisdom—was, it seems,1 traditional in Socrates’ time. These were civic virtues, which could be justified on merely utilitarian principles, but, in spite of the bad example set by the gods of the mythology, there was probably a general recognition that morality had ultimately a divine sanction. The great dramatists seem to take this for granted. Thus Æschylus, in the Prometheus Bound, recognizes the glory of the hero’s rebellion in the interests of humanity against the tyranny of Zeus, and implies the assurance that there was something, even beyond the irresistible power of Zeus, which would vindicate him at last2; while in the Agamemnon he gives to Zeus (“whoever he be”) something of the moral dignity which belongs to the Hebrew Jehovah.3 Sophocles, in the Antigone, presents to us his heroine as appealing beyond the ruler of the city to the eternal moral laws which are there identified with the sovereignty of Zeus. Euripides, like Æschylus, makes Hecuba appeal to a Something, called by many names, which lay beyond the unjust or careless gods of Heaven and Hades—Something “which, moving in its silent path, guides mortal destinies according to justice.” “Unrighteousness is not to be found with the gods.”4 These great poets probably represent the common conscience of their people in elevating Right to the dignity of a divine law, beyond the authority of states and mythologies. But at Athens especially, in the fifth century, the principle of morality was seriously threatened.5

Democracy, of which Athens was the stronghold, was the political system which gave equal opportunity—not to all the inhabitants of the city, for the citizen body was sustained by slave labour, and there was no movement to enfranchize the slaves—but to the whole body of the citizens. For them all, under democracy, there was an open career. The writing or reading of books was not yet in fashion. The opportunity and the power lay with the public speaker. Unlimited success was to be won by the power of persuasion in law courts and assemblies. Under these circumstances a host of professional teachers (sophists) had appeared who offered to show men how to succeed. Though some of them were great and good men, their method was “Machiavellian”—they owned no principle but success; so at least Socrates and Plato thought. But it would have been in vain for those who dreaded their influence to appeal merely as conservatives to tradition. For mere tradition had been discredited, and to appeal to religious tradition in particular would have been useless. It was under such circumstances that Socrates, and Plato after him, laboured to re-establish morality, social and individual, on a firm foundation of eternal principles.6

§ 1

Socrates (c. 470-399 b.c.) is said by Cicero7 to have “called philosophy down from the heavens to earth (or ‘away from the secrets and obscurities of nature’ with which it had previously been occupied8), and introduced it into the cities and houses of men, compelling men to enquire concerning life and morals and things good and evil”; and the truth of this description of his activity is acknowledged by everyone. It appears that he himself took for granted the obligation of morality and the divine authority of conscience and the moral law. “For,” he said to his judges,9 “whereas I know but little of the world below [Hades], I do not suppose that I know; but I do know that injustice and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonourable, and I will never fear a possible good [death] rather than a certain evil [to do wrong]. Men of Athens, I honour and love you, but I shall obey God rather than you.” This is the rock on which Socrates stood. He was a martyr for righteousness and truth, and Phædo, in the last words of the dialogue called by his name, calls him “the best man of whom I have ever had experience and the wisest and justest.”

How was it, then, he came to be condemned to death?10 The plea was “that he did not worship the gods whom the city worships, and corrupted the young men.” The latter part of the charge no doubt expressed the resentment of the newly restored democracy of Athens at Socrates’ friendship with the hated traitor Alcibiades and the fallen oligarch Critias. But, at the bottom, the cause of his condemnation was their alarmed aversion from his whole principle and method, and their sense of his formidable power. For he hated rhetoric, and the worship of success, and the clamour of the popular voice, and he believed himself to have a divine vocation to “examine men” and to plant the morality of the city life on a foundation deeper than political expediency.

His “ironical” method was to address some grown citizen or distinguished sophist, or brilliant young man, whom he heard speaking about piety or justice or temperance or courage, as if he were himself quite ignorant and were seeking enlightenment—“What is this virtue you speak of?” Then with his incomparable power of dialectic he would show the inadequacy or absurdity of their attempts to define, one after another—contenting himself often with nothing more than the negative result of having exploded the false assumption of knowledge in others. That was, no doubt, an “unsettling” method of instruction, calculated to inspire nothing more than a distrust of popular rhetoric. But Socrates’ aim went beyond that. He described himself as practising the art of his mother the midwife. He was the midwife of the intellect to bring to the birth something latent but innate in the intelligence of ordinary men. His aim, as Aristotle describes it, was through induction, that is, the examination of particular instances, to arrive at an adequate general definition of each ethical notion. That definition would represent reality—something true and abiding which could be relied upon. He did this in the region of ethics exclusively. He held that the virtues were rational—that rationality and virtue were inseparable, and that vice was mere ignorance.11

Thus by means of the definition of particular virtues he sought to aim at such a trustworthy science of good living as that henceforth virtue might be taught, and good parents and teachers would be able to hand on the science to their children and pupils, as securely as any other kind of solid knowledge. And he did all this in the assurance of a divine commission, confirmed by the Delphic oracle, with the safeguard of a divine restraint—a mysterious inward voice which warned him when he was going wrong—and in the conviction that the good life was the will of God for men.

Undoubtedly the most lifelike, as well as brilliant and fascinating, picture of Socrates that we possess is that given us by Plato in the dialogues in which Socrates is the dominant speaker. The question is at the present moment much in dispute—“How far down in the course of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, as they advance from criticism of the loose popular definitions of the virtues to the positive doctrine of the eternal “forms”12 (or principles), centring in the form or principle of the Good, is it really the historical Socrates which is represented?13 But we can leave that question aside. For however much or little of “Platonism” is to be ascribed to Socrates as its real originator, at any rate it is as Platonism in its full development, and not as Socratism, that this philosophy influenced Greece and the world. Socrates remained in the memory of man not as the author of a philosophical system, but rather as the very type and model of philosopher, saint and martyr, who had taught men to care for their souls,14 and had believed in the capacity of the average man to think accurately and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

It is indeed much to be remembered that ethical idealism in Greece depended not on any sense of gradual progress in the ethical standard of society, but on the reverence in which outstanding historical individuals were held. The standard of the good in Aristotle is “as the Wise Man would determine”: Socrates remained in memory as this ideal Wise Man—just as later Plotinus did among the Neo-Platonists.

§ 2

We may well imagine that Plato (427-347 b.c.) would have said that he owed his soul to Socrates. But he had other teachers. From Cratylus, Aristotle tells us, he derived the tradition of Heracleitus—the idea of the everlasting flux and instability of all sensible things—of the whole phenomenal world: and from the Pythagoreans he derived his veneration for the mathematical elements, numbers and figures, which, though they are suggested to us by our senses, are yet something which sensible experience never realizes in perfection, while at the same time they are supremely real and the very basis of exact science. These were the main influences which met in Plato. Socrates convinced him that “the moral values” (as we call them), goodness and the separate virtues, and truth and beauty, are realities eternal and divine behind all the varieties and fluctuations of opinion, and that it is the salvation of the soul to live according to these eternal principles, and real knowledge to apprehend them. From Heracleitus he learned to appreciate the changing character of sensation and opinion, and contrasted it with the other realm of stable reality—the realm of forms or principles—the realm of science. Finally, and more and more as his thought developed, he found in mathematics, side by side with ethics, the type and the standard of science.

Throughout, then, Plato presents to us the conviction that it is only on the background of the world of eternal principles that this world of changing experience can be given any intelligible meaning, or that any real satisfaction can be found in living our present life. But we do well to observe at once that Plato is never a mystic in the sense that in the vision of the eternal and unchangeable world he is prepared to turn his back on this world.15 No; as it is from the passing experiences of the senses and the needs of the earth-bound soul that we get the suggestion of the world of stable being, so one who by strenuous thought has won his citizenship in that higher region must return to earth to practise what he has learnt there. Here it is, in the actual city life of his day, that he has to save his soul, and do his duty, and win his spurs. Moreover, though the knowledge of the forms is contrasted, as being real knowledge, with the mere opinion of those who are content with sense-experience, yet Plato does not exaggerate the knowledge which can be gained of the Beyond. When he has need to speak of the Hereafter—of heaven or hell or purgatory—he passes at once into glorious “myths” which he declares to be only profitable lies.

Thus though the “heavenly things” are more real than the earthly, our only profitable knowledge of heavenly things is what we derive from earthly experience by analysing its implications and suggestions. For the earthly things, however transitory, “partake of” or “imitate” the eternal, and only from them can we get the starting-point of real knowledge. Moreover, Plato has no idea of solitary virtue or of a solitary conscience or of solitary salvation. A man realizes himself only in the close human relationships of the city. In all this Platonism is to be distinguished from the Neo-Platonism which has often usurped its name.

Plato’s conception of the Forms, as we find it in the Dialogues, varies very noticeably. If they are to be equivalent to Socrates’ definitions or general notions, then there must be forms of material objects, such as beds and tables, as much as of virtues, such as courage and self-control. Along this line of thought we reach the idea of an eternal world of forms, in which the prototypes of all the things of this world exist in perfection, so that earthly things are “the copies” of, or “partake in,” the heavenly. And this eternal, or real, world is presented to us as an ordered world, where supreme among the forms is the Form of Good, in which is found also the ultimate motive of the universe. Things are what they are because it is good that they should so be. Thus the Form of Good tends to appear as a force, bringing things into being, and not only as a static intellectual principle. But in a later dialogue (the Parmenides, 130 C) Socrates confesses to a sense of absurdity, at any rate in suggesting a “form” of mud or of anything disgusting, and the difficulty of discrimination is not faced. Then there are dialogues where we hear nothing of the forms, or where, as in the Sophist,16 “the friends of the forms” are shrewdly criticized by the Eleatic Stranger in the presence of “Socrates,” who is silent. In one (the Theætetus, 191 C) we are led by “Socrates” himself on the way to the doctrine that our knowledge of real objects is not derived from sensations passively received, but is due to the intelligence which holds together the data of sensation. We seem to be moving towards a doctrine of mental categories like that of Kant. But the suggestion is found to involve difficulties, and is not pursued.

In the Timæus—which we must remember was the only dialogue of Plato known (in great part) to the Middle Ages—and in the Laws, Plato’s latest work, we are presented with a definite cosmogony or philosophical theism. We must not of course assume that Timæus, who gives the cosmological lecture in the dialogue named after him, and who represents a type of Pythagoreanism, expresses exactly Plato’s own conclusions, or that the unnamed Athenian of the Laws is to be identified with Plato, but undoubtedly both these dialogues give us our best insight into the final tendency of Plato’s mind and the principles upon which his Academy was founded to work. In these dialogues, then, we are presented with a definite doctrine of the Creator God, the supreme soul or person, whose existence we are bound to postulate to explain our world, which shows such unmistakable marks of order and design. He, out of the formless chaos which lies beyond time,17 creates the orderly world out of his pure goodness: “He was good, and no goodness can ever entertain jealousy of anything. Being free from jealousy, then, he desires that all things should be as like himself as possible. This is the true beginning of creation and the world, which we should do well in receiving on the testimony of wise men: God designed that all things should be good and nothing bad, as far as this could be accomplished.”18 And the idea of the eternal forms reappears here in the sense that God is represented as creating the world, like any other creative artist, on the model of an eternal self-existent and complete ideal world, present to His mind. (Of the relation of this eternal “living being” to the Creator God nothing is said, nor of the relation of God to formless matter.) The content of this Divine Ideal is found to consist of the mathematical and moral principles on which science and life are based.19

In view of this changing conception of the Forms which the dialogues present to us, we must remember that Plato had no love of written systems of philosophy. He would not write out, or sanction the writing out of, his own system. What he set most store by was the Academy which he founded, where students living long years in close association in the “great business” of thought should catch the light of truth, which once kindled in the soul “feeds upon itself.” His dialogues, intended for general reading, he would have us regard as “belonging to Socrates, turned young and handsome”—that is (we may perhaps paraphrase), as embodying the spirit of his master, without regard to any explicit system.20 Platonism has gone through many phases—during Plato’s own life and the life of his Academy and in Neo-Platonism and in the later world of philosophy. But the principle has been constant through all those phases that the temporary can only be understood on the background of the eternal; that experience itself suggests, even forces upon our notice, eternal realities; that if any real knowledge is possible it must be knowledge of those things; and if any worthy life is to be lived, it must be in the conviction of divine laws of right and wrong.

We must certainly attribute to Plato a final theism, but not any complete or consistent doctrine about God. In his highest flights and moments of vision he uses language which only the conception of personality can satisfy. Thus in the Sophist,21 he puts into the mouth of the Eleatic visitor this question about God (Zeus): “Can we ever be made to believe that motion and life and soul and thought are not present with perfect being, or that it exists as holy, awful, mindless, motionless fixture?” In more than one place he tells us that the good life is the imitation of God, and that no being on earth is so like God as the just man. In the Timæus,22 as we have just seen, he tells us that God made the world because He was free of all jealousy, and would have creatures to share in His perfection; but he holds it for certain in the Laws that there must be one or more evil souls at the root of things to account for the evil in the world, and he leaves the position of the “formless matter,” into which God in creation introduced form and order, quite undetermined. He has no hesitation, moreover, in speaking of “Gods” as well as of “God.”23

But what most concerns us is to gain as exact an idea as we can of Plato’s conception of the good life, individual and social. It is quite untrue to describe Plato as lacking in the sense of the value of individual personality. The whole purpose of the state is to educate good souls. No work is to be compared to that of “saving the soul,” or, as we say, making the best of the latent capacities of the individual. And he is deeply conscious of the dominion of sin in the world—of what a precarious adventure life is in such a world as ours. He gives us vivid pictures of temptation. He compares the real self to a charioteer who has to control two winged horses, the nobler fiery steed, which we may call ambition or pride or the spirit of adventure, and the baser, which is lust or appetite. Out of the warring elements within it, the soul has to fashion a co-operative unity, and that he can only hope to do with the help of God—that is, by having some real vision of eternal principles. This constitutes the supreme importance of education.

Developed virtue must be rational. It must be able to receive and give rational account of itself. But it is not barely or only intellectual; thus the most important period in the education of the soul is the pre-rational, the education of children to love and hate the right things. The rational habit can only grow out of the right predisposition, which is the right direction of the emotions. The training of children—the stories they are taught, the songs they sing, the dances they practise—is to train the soul to love order and beauty and to feel aright, so that later, when the period of conscious reason comes, they can, by a sound prejudice, distinguish truth from error and right from wrong. Among the most justly famous passages in Plato are the passages in the Republic and the Laws about the emotional training of children which is the only adequate preparation for the later life of rational principle. Also beyond the period of childhood Plato shows an admirable appreciation of the adaptation of various human occupations to the stages of individual life.

In most of his dialogues Plato is markedly not ascetic or puritan. The evil is not that men love pleasure and pursue it—he is even prepared to argue for the virtuous life on the ground that in the long run it is the most pleasant—but that they mistake the nature of the soul and its true satisfaction, and pursuing pleasure, as it is depicted by unregulated fancy, they altogether miss the real happiness. All the common aims and activities of life are good, as the body and its natural impulses are not in themselves evil but good. Money and power are goods if rightly used.24 The one thing needed is the control of the whole of life by the consecration of it to the true aim—which is the good life lived in accordance with eternal principles or the following of God.

Nor is the emotional nature to be regarded as only valuable in childhood. Among the most memorable of Plato’s dialogues are those—the Phædrus and Symposium—which treat of love—not the Agape of the New Testament, which is a settled disposition of the will, but the Eros of Greek poetry, the irresistible passion. Here, in expressing his sympathy with the passionate affection of young men for one another, Socrates (or Plato) is, we feel, on very dangerous ground.25 But he sees in such passionate love something capable of sublimation. Behind the beautiful body is the beautiful soul, and behind the beautiful soul is the pattern of all loveliness, the ideal beauty. For the supreme good is beauty as well as truth, and it is the object of passion as well as of intellectual research. Thus, beside the philosophers as guides to truth stand the inspired men who have seen the vision of the Eternal Beauty, or in a divine madness have received the afflatus, the inspiration of God. Or perhaps it may be more truly said that the philosopher, to be worthy of the name, must be the lover also. We should judge that Plato, as truly as Pascal, felt that “the heart has its reasons” as well as the speculative and logical intellect, and that what claims to be the truth must satisfy the whole soul of man, which loves and wills as well as thinks.26

Plato, I say, was not an ascetic or a puritan—unless indeed by asceticism we mean merely self-control. (Socrates, his ideal, is, we notice, in spite of his sympathetic attitude towards very dangerous fashions of the day, represented to us as himself in absolute control of sensual passion.) He recognizes how all that belongs to normal humanity—all that makes human life happy and wholesome—can be consecrated and used in loyal subjection to the Right. This at least is true throughout the greater part of the dialogues, and when he is speaking of the ordering of his own life by the individual. On the other hand, he would never allow us to imagine that anything but the life of the city can educate and develop the individual. It is the city—which is both State and Church, as we should say—which is to impress upon each of the citizens the true principles of the good life, and every citizen is bound to remember that no man lives to himself but to the community. But he is convinced that the actual city-states of Greece have very poorly fulfilled the function of developing character on the eternal pattern.

Moreover, though he has a deep and true conception of progress in the life of the individual, he is almost wholly without the conception of human society as advancing by gradual improvements, or as moving towards any final consummation.27 If he does not believe in a golden age in the past, he certainly does not believe that humanity or the city-state, as he knows it, is advancing towards any state of perfection in the future. His sense of all-pervading sin and of progressive deterioration, is so strong that his hope for mankind seems to lie in nothing else than in securing a completely fresh start. He builds his Utopias therefore. The construction of the ideal city, whether in the Republic or in the Laws, assumes the necessity for starting completely afresh and in isolation in the Building of the City.

It is true that he did not think that the constructions which he imagined could be realized in their entirety, but he probably did really think that the only way in which a city-life, such as the wise man could approve, could become an actual fact on earth would be through the emergence of the philosopher king, or group of philosophic men, who would be able to command the allegiance of a whole body of citizens, and would be entrusted with power absolute enough to make a really fresh start in organizing a common life dedicated to the true ideals. But it is when we consider his ideal cities (perhaps especially in the more prosaic presentation of the Laws) that we become perplexed and astonished at the amount of drastic regimentation to which he seems seriously to suppose that the citizen body must be subjected if the real city-church is to exist. We have grown so used to Plato’s wonderful sympathy with various types of man and his astonishing versatility and abounding sense of humour, that his ideal of government amazes and irritates us. It seems to involve such a complete ignorance of human nature, not less of Greek human nature than of the human nature we ourselves know.

That he should think it worth while to suggest that human governors, however philosophic, would be able to distribute human beings into classes, not according to their birth in this or that caste, nor by giving free opportunity to everyone to make his own position, but by a quasi-infallible insight into the latent capacity of each, leading to an autocratic distribution of functions, seems incredible; that in one picture of the ideal city he should establish a communism in wives and children utterly abolishing the family, and in the second picture, when family life is recognized and maintained, that he could demand a eugenic despotism which would leave no “private life” to the individuals and no real control over the education of their children; that he should demand the expulsion of the poets in general, and a censorship of literature of the most exacting kind—excites the same feeling of amazement. It is perhaps deepened when we find Plato to be the first clear formulator of the principle of religious persecution as necessary for his city-church.

That God (or gods) really exist; that God is good and only good; that God is incorruptible, and that bribes and sacrifices cannot deflect him from the path of perfect justice, are indeed noble dogmas. But for their maintenance Plato established a Nocturnal Court of Inquisition bound to visit recalcitrant heretics with lifelong confinement or death. Plato, who, following Socrates, had seemed the very apostle of peaceful persuasion and free-thinking, reappears as an autocrat indeed, and that so rigid and doctrinaire that his hope for the maintenance of his city is based on the fact that it has been found possible in Egypt—the very type of immobility, the very antithesis of Greece—to preserve for countless ages the rules of art and practices of religion.28 “If the fable about Cadmus has been found credible, who can set limits to what a beneficial lie may not establish as an immutable law?” “But Plato is only playing with us,” you may say. That is true in a measure in the Republic. But in the Laws it is hardly to be imagined. And at any rate, if he is only “idealizing,” at least we shiver at the severity of the regimentation to which he dreams humanity must be subjected if the good life is to be realized at all on earth. The regimentation is so complete that it even excludes from the life of the city the very possibility of real self-sacrifice. It is indeed a splendid idea that the adepts in philosophy should be called to come down from their lofty seats of intellectual contemplation to become rulers and politicians. But it is not allowed to be a matter of free choice. It is all to be done under compulsion.29

Perhaps the strangest feature in the whole of Plato’s thought is that it does not appear that he—he whose conception of the power of love is so entrancing—ever realized at all what the love of man and woman can be, or the glory of the home, or the power of the mother’s love as the very root and inspiration of the good life. Any worthy conception of distinctive womanhood, such as we find in the Greek dramatists, is quite lacking.

The name of Plato is perhaps the grandest name in the history of philosophy and in particular of moral philosophy, and Platonism has been so permanent and ennobling an influence on the life and thought of mankind that criticism of him seems almost irreverent. In fact, however, his immediate influence on the ethical life of Greece does not seem to have been considerable. His ethical ideal still centred wholly upon the city-life. According to the latest tendencies of his thought, his Academy, the foundation of which he regarded as his permanent work, gave itself not only to mathematical studies which had become the basis of his philosophy, but to constitution-making for cities.30

But the days of the city-state were passing. Plato’s death was shortly followed by the establishment of the Macedonian supremacy in Greece, and the Macedonian Empire was the prelude to that of the Romans. Until that was firmly established, which was still centuries ahead, the Greek world was in a state of disintegration, confusion and uncertainty. What was in question was no longer how the city-state could be best ordered in the ethical interest of the citizens—which was the question for Plato and Aristotle—but how the individual in a world of disorder and fear could save his own soul. Thus it was through Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, and the later fusion of Platonism with Stoicism, that the power of Plato’s idealism made itself widely felt as a master influence in fashioning the individual life, and indeed, through the profound influence of Hellenistic thought on Roman law, in fashioning the society which was to be; but it was thus as a generalized influence that it prevailed—the influence of the general idea that human life, if it is to be noble and worthy, must be lived on the basis of eternal principles frankly recognized, and that such principles the reason of man has the power to apprehend and embody.

§ 3

Zeno31 (c. 350-260 b.c.) appears to have been a Phoenician by race, whose home was in Cyprus, but who, under the influence of the story of Socrates, was converted from trade to philosophy and, after trying in vain to find satisfaction in the various philosophic schools at Athens, established himself about 310 b.c. in the Painted Colonnade (Stoa, whence the name of his philosophy) as a prophet and teacher of the good life, the life which is victorious over fear and desire and doubt. His physics and psychology were quite different from Plato’s. He may be described as a materialistic pantheist—the God of whom he spoke as immanent in the universe, and as the principle of order, being Heracleitus’ element of Fire, conceived of as a refined material force or “spirit”; but this fire or spirit was also Heracleitus’ “reason,”32 and the reason in each man was a fragment of this divine reason, whereby the man can, if he will, live in accordance with “nature,” that is the all-pervading and all-prevailing divine purpose or providence; and where this is deliberately and consistently done, a man can attain to perfect tranquillity of mind, accepting indifferently all accidents, as being the will of God, and rising superior to all doubt or fear or preference of pleasure to pain. As for the wicked who follow their lusts and appetites, in neglect of the will of God, they would suffer as all must who set themselves against omnipotent Nature.

Zeno, however, in spite of the “self-sufficiency” which he proclaimed for the individual man, was not wholly individualist. He asserted the essential equality and independence of all men of all races and all classes in virtue of the share of each in God. But he would have all men regarded as forming one city—one “city” of God, which indeed included the whole universe; and he insisted on the duty of mutual service to the whole by each of its members33—distinguishing, however, active service from any inward emotion of compassion for human suffering. The feeling of compassion he regarded as an emotion destructive of tranquillity, and therefore is a vice rather than a virtue. The good man’s humanitarianism was to be simply an attitude of will—not a feeling but simply a motive to action. (It is obvious how closely Zeno’s conception of the highest state for man—absolute detachment—resembles that of Indian sages and of Lao-tse in China.34 But it was not in this sense that Stoicism coalesced with Platonism and later with Christianity.)

It should be added that the Stoics believed that the soul survived death, but that there could be no immortality for the individual. The destiny of all individual souls, “fragments” of the one divine fire, would be reabsorption into their source. And much as Zeno insisted on the reality of providence and upon a divine purpose in events, he had no conception of any final consummation or ultimate purpose for the universe—any kingdom of God to come. He conceived of a cycle of universes.35 The divine fire brought the universe into being, and it gradually “ran down” through stages of deterioration till it reached its end in a universal conflagration, after which another identical universe would succeed in its place, and again run down to another conflagration and so ad infinitum. There was nothing final, and nothing individual could survive these cosmic conflagrations. The satisfaction of the individual must be looked for here and now.

It ought to be said that the evidence does not admit of distinguishing precisely between the teaching of Zeno himself and that of his school. For instance, it was the teaching of the Stoic School that it lay in the legitimate judgment of the individual to terminate his life by suicide when it should seem good to him. It is not certain, however, whether this was the teaching of Zeno himself.

Zeno, we have seen, embraced certain psychological and physical theories, derived from the Heracleitean tradition, perhaps somewhat misunderstood; but his method was not that of the traditional Greek philosopher, but rather that of the Semitic prophet. Psychologically he derived all knowledge from “impressions” made upon the soul, and he distinguished impressions according to their intensity. Some impressions, he said, have such intensity as to be irresistible—they, as it were, “take hold of one by the hairs of one’s head and drag one to assent” They become convictions which can be proclaimed without argument. Zeno’s teaching appears to have consisted mainly of such affirmations. He trusted not to intellectual arguments, which breed scepticism, but to dogmatic statements which, because of their self-evidence, produce faith in the souls of those who have ears to hear. Accordingly he preached, and his successors preached, effectively to select souls, the way of emancipation from fear and doubt and the tyranny of desire. And the emphasis of Stoicism on its being man’s vocation to reduce his whole nature into subordination to his will, and his will into harmony with the will of God or the eternal law of nature, admitted of easy accommodation to the ethical principle of Platonism. So in fact, in the two last centuries before Christ, a fusion of Stoicism and Platonism was effected by teachers such as Panætius and Posidonius. How complete such a practical fusion could be will appear if we have under our eyes two celebrated Stoic utterances—the hymn of the Stoic Cleanthes36 and a grand Stoical presentment of the Law of Nature from Cicero’s De Republica.

O God most glorious, called by many a name,

Nature’s great King, through endless years the same;

Omnipotence who by thy just decree

Controllest all, hail Zeus! for unto thee

Behoves thy creatures in all lands to call.

We are thy children, we alone, of all

On earth’s broad ways that wander to and fro,

Bearing thine image wheresoe’er we go.

Wherefore with songs of praise thy power I will forth show.

Lo! yonder heaven that round the earth is wheeled,

Follows thy guidance, still to thee doth yield

Glad homage; thine unconquerable hand

Such flaming minister, the levin-brand

Wieldeth, a sword two-edged, whose deathless might

Pulsates through all that nature brings to light;

Vehicle of the universal Word,37 that flows

Through all, and in the light celestial glows

Of stars both great and small. O King of Kings

Through ceaseless ages, God! whose purpose brings

To birth, whate’er on land or in the sea

Is wrought, or in high heaven’s immensity;

Save what the sinner works infatuate.

Nay, but thou knowest to make crooked straight;

Chaos to thee is order; in thine eyes

The unloved is lovely, who didst harmonize

Things evil with things good, that there should be

One Word through all things everlastingly.

One Word—whose voice, alas! the wicked spurn.

Insatiate for the good their spirits yearn,

Yet seeing see not, neither hearing hear

God’s universal law, which those revere

By reason guided, happiness who win.

The rest, unreasoning, diverse shapes of sin

Self-prompted follow; for an idle name

Vainly they wrestle in the lists of fame;

Others inordinately riches woo,

Or dissolute, the joys of flesh pursue;

Now here, now there, they wander, fruitless still

For ever seeking good and finding ill.

Zeus the all-bountiful, whom darkness shrouds,

Whose lightning lightens in the thunder-clouds,

Thy children save from error’s deadly sway;

Turn thou the darkness from their souls alway;

Vouchsafe them unto knowledge to attain;

For thou by knowledge art made strong to reign

O’er all, and all things rulest righteously;

So, by thee honoured, we will honour thee,

Praising thy works continually with songs,

As mortals should; nor higher meed belongs

E’en to the gods, than justly to adore

The universal law for evermore.

The Law of Nature

“There is a true law which is right reason, agreeable to nature, diffused among all men, constant, eternal, which calls us to duty by its injunctions, and by its prohibitions deters us from wrong: which upon the good lays neither injunction nor prohibition in vain; while for the bad, neither its injunctions nor its prohibitions avail at all. This law admits neither of alteration nor subtraction nor abrogation. The vote of neither senate nor people can discharge us from our obligation to it. We are not to look for some other person to expound or interpret it; nor will there be one law for Rome and another for Athens, nor one at this date and another later on; but one law shall embrace all races over all time, eternal and immortal; and there shall be hereby one common master and commander of all—God, who originated this law, and proposed it and arbitrates concerning it; and if anyone obeys it not, he shall play false to himself, and shall do despite to the nature of man, and by this very fact shall pay the greatest penalties, even if he should escape all else that is reckoned punishment.”

There will be something more to be said about the ethical conceptions which the Christianity of the early centuries found current in the Græco-Roman world, and which it in part readily assimilated and in part criticized and repudiated. But there can be no question of the enormous influence which this Platonic and Stoic conception of the eternal law of right and wrong, for the individual and for the society, was to have in the evolution of modern Europe.38

APPENDED NOTES

A. ON AEISTOTLE AND EPICURUS

I have passed over Aristotle’s treatment of ethics and politics not from any lack of respect, but because it is substantially a critical republication of Platonism, only robbed of some of its brilliant and appealing qualities—“a little coarsened and with a certain diminution of moral fervour,” Taylor’s Platonism, p. 56. “For the most part,” says W. D. Ross (Aristotle, p. 190), “he accepts the opinions of the Academy as his own.” See for details Taylor’s Plato, pp. 61, 64, 176, 235, 269, 324 n., 406, 410, 413 n., 415.

I have also passed over the famous Epicurus, Zeno’s contemporary. He was a man, it seems, of great attractiveness and even severity in his own habits of life. He saw mankind degraded by fear—fear of death and fear of the gods, and from both these kinds of fear he sought to deliver men by pure Naturalism. It was a highly sublimated sensuality that he taught. His ethical doctrine was that happiness was identical with pleasure, which accordingly was the only aim that a man could set before himself; but that wisdom consisted in the weighing of pleasures, in respect of intensity and permanence, as a result of which it would appear that a virtuous life was the pleasantest. There were, no doubt, many noble Epicureans, like Lucretius or such men as Pater has described with wonderful subtlety in Marius the Epicurean. There have in later times been Hedonists who put a fresh aspect on Hedonism by taking account of the will of a righteous God and life beyond the grave, but any such considerations Epicurus rigidly excluded. Death was final, and the gods were not concerned with human life. The outlook being thus limited, it did not seem to Greek thinkers in general that those who cared for the good life could find support in his principles, and they fell into disrepute. It would seem that just as Stoicism was gradually refined into such an appealing form as appears in Marcus Aurelius’s meditations, so Epicurus doctrine became coarsened and vulgarized.

B. ON THE THEORY OF CYCLES (see above, p. 135).

The theory that the history of the universe would be found to consist of an infinite succession of cycles, each exhibiting progressive deterioration and reaching final dissolution, is to be found in the thought of the Vedanta in India. It was apparently (whether borrowed from India or no, directly or indirectly) an Orphic idea. The law of deterioration is clearly in Plato’s mind as regards human societies, though the idea of cycles does not appear: but the doctrine of cycles, each identical with the last preceding even in detail, was a recognized doctrine of the Stoics (see Bevan, Stoicism and Scepticism, pp. 50 f.). The idea of a progressive development in the universe or of any ideal climax to universal history does not seem to occur in classical literature. De Burgh (op. cit.) instances Lucretius as an exception (B. v, 11. 771 onward, esp. 1454-7). But Lucretius is also responsible for the saying “Eadem sunt omnia semper” (iii, 945), and the melancholy conclusion of B. ii. He perhaps conceived of development through each cycle to end in destruction and a fresh beginning, without any final purpose or culmination.

C. THE PLATONIC AND ARISTOTELIAN CONCEPTIONS OF GOD

Plato finally certainly conceived of God as personal—self-moved and the author of all orderly movement in the universe—as purely good, and as creating the world that His creatures might share His goodness. This comes very near to the Christian conception that God is love, though the limits to such an identification have been noticed (above,p. 123). Aristotle’s conception of God, as expressed in a famous passage of the Metaphysics, as the Supreme Thought—thought thinking upon itself in supreme satisfaction—is also a personal conception; but the idea of God conveyed in this passage is very different from Plato’s. God is not self-moving but unmoved. He is neither creator nor sustainer of the universe, of which he is unconscious, and to which he is wholly indifferent. He is the author of all movement in the universe, only because in his supreme perfection he kindles love in all that is, so that all things move towards him as an object of desire. But this strangely mystical notion of a universal movement in the world towards a self-conscious but otherwise unconscious and indifferent God (see Ross’s Aristotle, pp. 183 f.) is not the only one to be found in the Metaphysics. There is another passage, much less often quoted (1075a), which discusses the relation of the world to God under the figure of an army. “The question must now be raised in which of two ways the nature of the universe possesses the Good and the Highest Good—whether as something existing separately and of itself, or as the order of the whole? Perhaps we should say in both ways, as in the case of an army. For the Good in the case of an army is both its order and its general, but the latter especially, for the general does not depend on the order, but the order does depend on him.” If the Supreme Good is identified by Aristotle (as it surely is) with God, here he suggests that it is not enough to conceive of the Good, i.e. God, as an immanent and unconscious principle of organization in the universe. It or He must be also independent of the world and its director, like the general of an army (see Baillie, Interpretation of Religion, pp. 292-293). It certainly looks as if in this passage Aristotle was suggesting a conception of God very different from what he suggests elsewhere. We must recognize that neither in Aristotle nor in Plato nor in the Stoics is there a consistent theology.

• 1.

  See A. E. Taylor’s Plato, The Man and his Work, p. 222.

• 2.

  We cannot, however, answer the question of what was contained in the lost drama of the Prometheus Freed. “There is perhaps no piece of lost literature that has been more ardently longed for” (Gilbert Murray).

• 3.

  Ag., pp. 155, 353 ff.

• 4.

  Fragment, p. 609. For the above see Gilbert Murray’s Literature of Ancient Greece, pp. 225, 265 f.

• 5.

  Thuc., iii, 82, gives an account of a universal degeneracy throughout the Greek cities as a result of wars without and party spirit within.

• 6.

  For what follows I am depending upon Ueberweg’s Hist. of Phil., vol. i, pp. 83 ff.; John Burnet’s Greek Philosophy, pt. i, also his Platonism and Essays and Addresses; A. E. Taylor’s Plato (Methuen) and Platonism (Harrap); R. C. Lodge’s Plato’s Theory of Ethics (Kegan Paul); William Temple’s Plato and Christianity (Macmillan), and W. D. De Burgh’s Legacy of the Ancient World (Macdonald and Evans), cap. v.

• 7.

  Acad. Post., i, 4, 15; Tusc., v, 4, 10.

• 8.

  In the Phædo (96) Socrates himself is represented as having taken a deep interest in these matters, but abandoned it in despair of obtaining satisfaction.

• 9.

  See above, p. 9; cf. Phædo, 118.

• 10.

  The answer to this question in part is that Socrates would have nothing short of acquittal. Probably if he had acquiesced in banishment it would have contented his judges.

• 11.

  Cf. Aristotle, Eth. Nic., 1145 (vi. 13).

• 12.

  The word commonly used by Plato is εἶδος or ἰδέα So we talk of the Platonic “doctrine of ideas.” But the English word means only a conception in the mind, and that is precisely not the meaning of the Greek word. One may translate it “form,” using inverted commas to indicate that it is not what we mean by form. But principle or sometimes “value” (in the modern philosophical sense) better conveys to us the real meaning of the word.

• 13.

  Dr. A. E. Taylor, following Burnet, is the advocate of the position that so long as Socrates is the dominant speaker in the dialogues, the teaching is that of the real Socrates in substance; but he admits that in the Parmenides Plato “frees himself from the responsibility for the strict accuracy of his narrative” (Plato, p. 352). It is very difficult not to feel, as one reads, for example, the Republic or Phædrus or Symposium, or Theætetus, that a much wider admission is needed, in spite of the dramatic devices by which the connection of the dialogue with the real Socrates is maintained.

• 14.

  “‘To care for their souls’ was what Socrates urged on his fellow-citizens” (Burnet, Essays, etc., pp. 138 ff.). He discovered “the soul” in the sense of the spiritual personality.

• 15.

  Burnet insists that Socrates was much more of a mystic than Plato. “There can be no doubt that Plato means us to believe that Socrates had actually attained to this beatific vision [of] the eternal forms. It is not for nothing that he is represented as having one of his trances just before the conversation recorded in the Symposium” (see Greek Philosophy, p. 140; cf. pp. 131, 168, 244).

• 16.

  248 A.

• 17.

  Plato asserts that Time and Creation are correlative and begin together.

• 18.

  Timæus, 29-30.

• 19.

  On the Timæus, A. E. Taylor is our leading authority. See his Plato, cap. xvii, and his edition of the Timæus.

• 20.

  These last sentences depend upon the Letters of Plato (vii, 341 C, and ii, 314 C), now recognized again as authentic (see A. E. Taylor’s Plato, p. 23). The translation of the last phrase I have borrowed from Burnet.

• 21.

  Soph., 248-249.

• 22.

  Tim., 29 E.

• 23.

  There are other matters, beside the nature of God, as to which we cannot speak certainly of any definite doctrine as “Platonic.” Thus, (1) while the doctrine on which he always insists is that the good life—the life in correspondence with the Form of Good or with God—is, wherever lived, essentially eternal and godlike, and while he certainly believed in the persistence of the soul beyond death, and in something real adumbrated in the myths of hell and purgatory and heaven, we cannot feel sure that he does more than play with the doctrine of the pre-existence and reincarnations of souls or with the idea of anamnesis—that the way in which the embodied soul awakes to recognize eternal principles is by “being reminded” of what it had known in a previous state of existence. The Meno (86 B) suggests as much as this (see also Taylor’s Plato, cap. viii, and Lodge, cap. xvi). (2) We cannot speak definitely as to Plato’s doctrine of matter or of evil. Certainly he does not hold that matter is evil or the source of evil as such. But he sometimes talks of the body as the degrading prison-house of the soul, only by emancipation from which it can attain its true liberty and life, in the Orphic or Pythagorean manner. Certainly he propounds the idea of the absolute creation by God of all things in nature through the lips of the Eleatic Stranger (Soph., 265 C). But (as mentioned above) in the Timæus, in speaking of creation, he seems to presuppose chaotic matter, and, in the Laws approves a belief in evil souls and their influence in creation, without explaining whether these evil souls are so originally or by a fall from goodness.

• 24.

  But there is a recurrent note of contempt for business as commonly understood (see Rep., iii, 416; iv, 425; and Theætetus, 173-175.

• 25.

  Finally, in the Laws, Plato does pronounce a severe judgment on all “unnatural vices” as being really unnatural, and banishes the practice of them from his state (see Laws, 836-842).

• 26.

  A great part of the unparalleled fascination of Plato’s dialogues depends on his wide humanism; but it cannot be denied that in his latest dialogues, just as his literary style has lost so much of its glory and charm, so his spirit has become doctrinaire and dogmatic.

• 27.

  Prof. Lodge, in his Plato’s Theory of Ethics—a very valuable book—is fond of speaking of “the process of social evolution” or “the long upward struggle of humanity” as if these ideas were to be ascribed to Plato. He does indeed show in the Laws a real sense of the initial stages through which civilized life evolved; but when he is considering the phases of civilized life he shows no sense of a progressive purpose to be gradually realized. Prof. Lodge himself acknowledges this, p. 162.

• 28.

  Laws, 798-800. Incidentally we should notice that it is misleading to speak of Plato’s political theory as Socialism or Communism. It is socialistic in the sense that the individual can only realize himself in the state and that the state is supreme over the individual. It is communistic (in the Republic) as applied to the governing classes. But the economic life, the life of productive industry, on which the whole fabric depends, is left outside any communistic legislation. It is assumed that the wealth-producing or money-making classes will be permanently content to submit to the governing classes.

• 29.

  A German commentator, quoted by Lodge, speaks of Plato’s ideal state as a “Zwang-Anstalt.”

• 30.

  Taylor, Plato, pp. 5 ff. and 464.

• 31.

  The most illuminating account of Zeno is to be found in Edwyn Bevan’s Stoics and Sceptics.

• 32.

  In fact Fire, Spirit (Breath), Ether, Nature, Reason, Providence, Destiny and Zeus seem to be identified in Stoicism.

• 33.

  “You are part of a social system,” wrote the Stoic Emperor, Marcus Aurelius; “a factor necessary to complete the sum; therefore your every action should help to complete the social life. An action of yours which does not tend, directly or remotely, to this social end, dislocates life and infringes its unity. It is an act of sedition” (Meditations, ix, 23 (Rendall’s trans.)).

• 34.

  See especially Bevan, op. cit., pp. 77 ff.

• 35.

  See App. Note 2, at end of chapter.

• 36.

  I have borrowed James Adam’s translation from The Vitality of Platonism, pp. 104 ff. If it is not very good poetry, neither is the original.

• 37.

  The Greek should rather be translated “Reason.”

• 38.

  The definition of S. Thomas Aquinas runs thus: “Participate legis æternae in rationali creatura lex naturalis dicitur.” “That is, that the immanent and all-present reason, which penetrates the universe, rises in man to a height or climax in which it becomes the conscious law of liberty and truth. Here Platonist, Stoical and Christian ideas meet in a splendid unity.” “On the first view crudely expressed the Law of Nature is a code which is discovered and rules are based upon it. On the second it is the inner law of an unfolding organism which is observed, the reason and value of which are to be found, not in its obscure beginnings, but in the richness of the end to which it moves” (C. E. Osborne, Christian Ideas in Political History (John Murray), pp. 62-64; cf. p. 14).