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HELENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
THE GREEK TRADITION
From the death of Socrates
to the Council of Chakedon
399 B.C. TO A.D. 451
INTRODUCTION: PLATONISM
VOLUME I. THE KELIGION OF PLATO
VOLUME II. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
HELLEJSTSTTC
PHILOSOPHIES
BY
PAUL ELMER MORE
Author of "Shelburne Essays"
ccc
PRINCETON
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
London: Humphrey Milf or d. Oxford University Press
1923
Copyrighted 19* By The University IVvss
PRINTED AT THE 1'ftINOKTON 1 WlVBItSITV
CONTENTS
>3
ARISTIPPUS 1
EPICURUS 18
CYNICS AND STOICS 65
EPICTETUS 94
PLOTINUS 17S
DIOGENES 60
SCEPTICISM 304
APPENDIX A 371
APPENDIX B 374
APPENDIX C 376
APPENDIX D 378
APPENDIX E 384
CHAPTER I
ARISTIPPUS
Or the life of Aristippus, who founded the phi-
losophy of pleasure which was to be developed
and altered by Epicurus, not much is known. He
was born in Gyrene, whence the name of his sect,
but apparently abandoned his home at an early
age. For a while, at least, he belonged to the cir-
cle that gathered about Socrates in Athens. In
these yearshe seems to have been bothlearner and
teacher, for, according to a story derived from
Phanius, the Peripatetic, he was not only the
first of Socrates' pupils who exacted money for
his lessons, but on one occasion aroused the in-
dignation of the master by sending him twenty
drachmas from his earnings.
For some time he was in Syracuse at the court
of the younger, perhaps also of the elder, Diony-
sius, where he exercised his wit at the expense of
Plato. Once at a banquet, as the gossip runs, the
2 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
tyrant bade his guests dance in purple robes;
whereupon Plato refused, declaring,
"I could not \vell a woman's garment wear."
But Aristippus complied, excusing himself with
the apt quotation,
"Even in Bacchus' wild alarm
The modest -woman suffers still no harm."
On another occasion, when Dion ysius presented
Plato with a book and Aristippus with gold, the
wily Cyreiiaic defended himself against the jeers
of a friend with the observation : ** I want money,
Plato books/' These anecdotes are fi'om the in-
exhaustible storehouse of Diogenes Laertius ; but
Plutarch also tells us that the tyrant off ered Plato
money often and in large sums, and that Aris-
tippus commented on Plato's refusal of the gifts
with the remark that Dionysius was canny in his
munificence, since he proffered little to those
who needed much, and much to Plato who would
take nothing. 1
19. A good jest never dies. Dr. Johnson onee undertook
to browbeat a Cantabrigian by repeating the famous epigram?
"Our royal master saw, with heedful eyes,
The wants of his two universities:
Troops he to Oxford sent, as knowing why
That learned body wanted loyalty :
But books to Cambridge gave, as well discerning
That that right loyal body wanted learning/*
To which the Cantabrigian made retort:
"The king to Oxford sent his troop of horse,
For Tories own no argument but force ;
With equal care to Cambridge books he sent,
For Whigs allow no forecbut argument."
ARISTIPPUS 3
If the life of Aristippus is summed up in a few
anecdotes, it is not much better with his philos-
ophy. The books he wrote have been lost, and
for the knowledge of his principles we have lit-
tle more than a few sentences of Diogenes Laer-
tius and of Sextus Empiricus, and even so it is
impossible to distinguish clearly between what
was taught by Aristippus himself and what was
added by his successors. In general, the princi-
ples of the sect are thus summarized by Diog-
enes:
"Those who abdde by the Aristippean rule of
life and were called Cyrenaics held the follow-
ing opinions : There are two affections which we
feel (pathe) 9 pain and pleasure, the former be-
ing a rough state of motion, the latter a smooth
state of motion. Pleasure does not differ from
pleasure [in quality, they mean], nor is one more
a pleasure than another. Pleasure is approved
by all living creatures, whereas pain is avoided.
And the pleasure of the body, which they make
their chief good, or end, is not that continuous
and unperturbed state of repose arising from
cessation of pain which Epicurus accepted as
the end. They believe that the end is a different
thing from happiness (eudaimonia) ; for the
good we aim at is pleasure (hSdong) in particu-
lar, but happiness is the sum of particular pleas-
ures, in which are included those of the past and
those of the future. The particular pleasure is
4 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
desirable for itself, whereas happiness is not de-
sirable for itself but for the particular pleasures
that compose it. As a proof that pleasure is the
end, we have the fact that from childhood we are
attracted to it involuntarily, and that obtaining
it we seek nothing further, whereas there is noth-
ing we so avoid as its opposite, pain. And pleas-
ure, they assert, is a good even when it arises
from most unseemly causes ; for even if the act
is disreputable, still the pleasure in itself is desir-
able and good. The removal of pain they do not
account pleasure, as does Epicurus ; neither is
the absence of pleasure pain. For both pleasure
and pain consist in motion, or sensation, and
neither the absence of pain nor the absence of
pleasure is a motion, or sensation; in fact the
absence of pain is a state like that of one asleep.
. . . The absence of pleasure and the absence of
pain they called middle states. Moreover they
held pleasures of the body to be better than those
of the mind or soul, and distresses of the body to
be worse. . . . But however pleasure in itself
may be desirable, the causes of some pleasures
often result in the contrary state of distress, so
that the assemblage of pleasures which produces
happiness seems to them a matter of extreme
difficulty. The life of the wise man, they admit,
is not one of continuous pleasure, nor the life of
the fool one of continuous pain; it is a question
of predominance. . . . Nothing, they say, is
just or beautiful or ugly intrinsically and by na-
ture, but by law and convention. Nevertheless a
ARISTIPPUS 5
sensible man will not do anything shocking, by
reason of the penalties imposed and for the sake
of popular opinion."
Sextus in his treatment of the school dwells
naturally more on the rational basis of their the-
ory. The onty criterion of knowledge we have is
in the sensations, or immediate affections (pa-
the) ; these alone are comprehensible and intrin-
sically true, whereas of the causes of these sen-
sations we have no sure knowledge. We know
when we have the sensation of white or sweet,
and can affirm that we have at this moment such
or such a sensation, veraciously and with no fear
of contradiction; but of what lies behind or be-
yond this sensation we can say nothing certain*
We cannot even say that a particular object is
white or sweet, for in another person, or in our-
selves at another moment, this same object may
produce quite a different sensation. Nor have
we any right to suppose that the particular sen-
sation which we call white or sweet is the same
as that which another person calls by the same
name. We know only our own sensations, and
all that is common in such abstractions as white-
ness or sweetness is merely the word. 2
Fitted together the expositions of Diogenes
and Sextus maybe summedup in the three max-
v. Math. VII, 191.
6 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
ims : Sensations alone are comprehensible, sen-
sations and not their causes ; The end of life is to
live pleasurably ; The particular pleasure is de-
sirable for itself , whereas happiness is not desir-
able for itself but for the particular pleasures
which compose it.
Of all philosophies this, I take it, is the easiest
to understand; and, granted its hypothesis that
the only certain facts in our experience are the
immediate sensations of pleasure and pain as
these come and go and come again, granted so
much as that Plato's Ideal world, or its equiva-
lent, is a vapour raised by hope and nothing
more, the "dream of a shadow," it is of all dog-
matic philosophies the most rigidly logical and
the most thoroughly consistent and the most im-
mediately persuasive. It is the wisdom of the
world, preached in effect and practised long be-
fore Aristippus reduced it to a formulary. You
shall find it in the poets of the old times, Mim-
nermus and Theognis and their kind, who sang
in various notes to the refrain of carpe diem.
Whether Aristippus really quoted much from
them, we do not know; but it can be asserted of
his hedonism that it was rooted in their voluptu-
ary principles, and his admonitions, as 'Sextus
said of other philosophers, might have been
ARISTIPPUS 7
sealed by the authority of many a gnomic verse
and stanza. 3 And it was equally a possession of
the future to be followed by innumerable Cy-
renaics who had never heard the name. As a man-
ner of life it is of all time ; as a reasoned theory
it is affiliated manifestly with the principles of
the more sceptical Sophists, particularly with
the famous doctrine of Protagoras that man is
the measure of all things, as this was taken in
conjunction with the widely accepted aphorism
of Heraclitus: All tilings pass and nothing
abides. 4 How these two principles flowed to-
gether in a purely sensational and atomistic the-
ory of knowledge, Plato has shown at length in
the Theaetetus.
The puzzling question is rather to understand
how two such divergent schools as the Academic
and the Cyrenaic could have been created by men
who professed allegiance to one and the same
person. Plato's relation to his master is clear
enough ; but what business had this denier of the
gods, this repudiator of the living reality of jus-
tice and all moral law, this hardened materialist,
with the honest disciples of Socrates? Yet it is a
*The historical affiliation cannot be doubted. The logical relation
of the various schools of sensationalism and scepticism to Hera-
clitus, Democritus, and Protagoras will be discussed in our last
chapter.
8 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
fact, as we learn from the Phaedo, that he was
close to the master, so close that his absence was
noted from the little band who stayed with Soc-
rates through the last day in gaol.
The explanation, one may say, is that in Soc-
rates' mind the various elements of the Platonic
philosophy lay side by side without having been
merged together into a homogeneous system;
hence it was possible for men of such utterly
divergent tempers as Aristippus and Euclides
and, as we shall see, Antisthenes to find in his
words substance for their reflexion and confir-
mation of their aims. For his part, Aristippus
simply laid hold of the hedonism which, if we ac-
cept the Protagoras of Plato as historical in this
respect, formed an integral part of the Socratic
doctrine, and developed this independently in a
manner which Socrates certainly would have re-
pudiated. Socrates apparently took happiness
as the criterion of right conduct, and understood
happiness rather naively as a balance of pleas-
ures, without attempting to reconcile such a cri-
terion with his affirmation of the everlasting re-
alities of good and evil. He left it to his-great
disciple to effect such a reconciliation, or per-
haps we should say modification, by drawing
a distinction between pleasure in the ordinary
ARISTIPPUS 9
sense and another feeling, which he called hap-
piness (eudaimonia) , akin to pleasure superfi-
cially but associated with an essentially differ-
ent sphere of the soul's activity. Such was not
the way of Aristippus. The apparent paradox
of Socrates he escaped by accepting only the
hedonism and rejecting everything that might
conflict with it. And then, having attained this
point of consistency, he further altered the So-
cratic point of view by defining pleasure in terms
of the Protagorean sensationalism and the Her a-
clitean flux. So it was that the Socratic hedon-
ism became the Cyrenaic pursuit of the passing
pleasures of the body. It is true that Aristippus
saw, as anyone must see who thinks at all, that
some pleasures bring very disagreeable conse-
quences, and must be forgone; yet it was still
the momentary sensation he made his end, as the
one thing sure and desirable.
So far one can see how Aristippus may be
called a perverted, or at least an imperfect, So-
cratic, but on another side he was truer to the
spirit, if not the spirituality, of the master. Prob-
ably, after all, what drew and held the inquisitive
young men who congregated about this strange
teacher and preacher of the streets was not so
much any particular doctrine as it was the power
10 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
of his life, his imperturbable courage and cheer
in a world where these were terribly needed, a
sense of mastery that emanated from his glance
and his very gesture, the central calm in his heart
beyond the reach and understanding of idle cu-
riosity yet strangely visible and fascinating to
those who approached him nearly, the embodi-
ment, as it were, of everything 'Summed up in
the Greek tradition by those hauntingly beauti-
ful words eleuihena and asphaleia, liberty and
security. Here was liberty, the free man, the
man secure in himself against all the chances of
life, the man sufficient unto himself, autarkSs.
Now it is evident that Aristippus was impressed
by the need of attaining something like this same
liberty and security of mind in his pursuit of
what the fleeting moment might yield; other-
wise, he saw, there could be no joy in the pursuit
but only a tortured dependence on the fluctua-
tions of success and failure. It is, indeed, this
conception of liberty and security meeting to-
gether in self-sufficiency as a necessary factor of
the life of pleasure, that makes him a philoso-
pher and something more, if not better, than the
idle voluptuary. To this end he would be always
master of himself, and, so far as possible, mas-
ter of events by adapting himself voluntarily
ARISTIPPUS 11
and adroitly to the changing conditions of for-
tune and society "every colour and condition
became Aristippus." And so it was that Horace
could say:
Nunc in Aristippi furtim praecepta relabor,
Et miki res non me rebus subiungere conor.
The formal precepts by which Aristippus in-
culcated this theory are gone with his books, but
we have a sufficient number of anecdotes which
indicate how he put his philosophy into practice.
One day Diogenes the Cynic, 5 who was washing
some potherbs, ridiculed him as he passed by, and
said, "If you had learnt to satisfy yourself with
these you would not have been serving in the
courts of tyrants," To which Aristippus replied,
"And you, if you knew how to behave among
men, would not be washing potherbs." Being
asked once what advantage he had derived from
philosophy, he said, "That I am able to associate
confidently with any man." To the question of
Dionysius why philosophers haunted the doors
of the rich but the rich did not frequent those of
philosophers, he retorted, "Because philosophers
know what they need and the rich do not." An-
other time, at dinner, when the tyrant was try-
sit is important to distinguish between this Diogenes of Sinope,
the Cynic, and Diogenes of Laerte, the historian of philosophy,
who lived much later.
12 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
ing to drag him into philosophical talk against
his will, he defended himself by saying, "It is
absurd if you are learning from me to discourse,
yet are teaching me when I ought to discourse."
Dionysius was vexed at this, and showed his dis-
pleasure by sending the philosopher to the bot-
tom of the table. Whereupon Aristippus : "You
wished to make this place more respectable." At
another time, when Dionysius asked him why
he had come to Sicily, his reply was: "When I
wanted wisdom I went to Socrates, but now,
wanting money, I have come to you" ; or, as the
story is otherwise related, "I went to Socrates
for instruction (paideia) , to Dionysius for di- ;
version (paidia)" Again, he was begging a
favour for a friend, and, being refused, fell at
the tyrant's feet ; and when someone reproached
him for his conduct, his retort was : "I am not to
blame, but Dionysius who has his ears in his
feet." Whether this biting retort was made in
the presence of the tyrant himself, does not ap-
pear from the record; but certainly in the ruler's
absence he could take down the arrogance of a
misguided courtier in a manner worthy of the
cynic Diogenes, whose savage disregard of the
proprieties he seems indeed sometimes to have
forestalled. And he was equally quick to defend
ARISTIPPUS 13
his own indulgences. A certain sophist, visiting
him and seeing the women he had about him and
the lavishness of his table, was unwary enough
to express censure. Aristippus waited a mo-
ment, and invited the sophist to pass the day
With him, and then, when the invitation was ac-
cepted, observed : "You seem to have a quarrel
with the expense and not the luxury of my din-
ners." Another time his servant murmured at
the weight of a sack of money he was carrying
for him on the road, and Aristippus merely said,
"Pour out what is too much for you and carry
what you can/*
Perhaps some apology is needed for stringing
together these tales out of the only history of
Greek philosophy that has come down to us. But
in fact they are not so irrelevant as they may
seem; they show probably as well as any of the
author's works would have done the kind of ver-
satility which the wily philosopher of Gyrene,
like another Odysseus, acquired in his search for
pleasure through many cities and many species
of men. They might perhaps all be summed up
fin his one famous saying when reproached for
living with Lais the courtesan: "I possess her, I
am not possessed by her, since the best thing is
'not to forbear pleasures, but to grasp them with-
14 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
out sufferingtheir mastery." Hdbeo^non hdbeor:
that is the key by which the Cyrenaic would open
the door to the liberty and security of philoso-
phy, while acknowledging no good beyond the
indulgence in whatever the swift-flowing cur-
rent of time might lay at his feet. Hedonism was
no new thing in Greece, or in the world ; but the
poets who were its professing votaries had been
so weakly uncertain of their tenure, rather had
been so positively certain that happiness was the
flower of one brief moment of life, and, going,
left behind only the winter of discontent.
"Gather my youth, O heart, before it fly !
Soon other men shall be, no donbt ; but I
An earthen clod in the dark earth shall lie"
was the admonition of Theognis ; and Mimner-
mus had sung the same truth in more despondent
language :
"What then is life, what pleasure, when afar
Sinks golden Aphrodite's star ?
Ah, death for me, when love in secret lifts
No more the heart, and honeyed gifts
Charm not, and slumber fails, and all the flowers
That fill the garden of young hours.
So as the leaves put forth upon the boughs,
In springtide, when the sun allows,
Like these a little time the bloom of youth
Delights us, and we know no truth
ARISTIPPUS i $
Of good and evil from the gods. Yet still
The Fates are near to work their will,
One with the term of age and palsied breath,
One with the blacker term of death."
Call no man happy until the end! Xot only
are such pleasures ephemeral at the best, but
there is always the danger that they may escape
us entirely. A little change, a grain of dust blow-
ing into the eye, a slip of the foot, pestilence walk-
ing in the street, the betrayal or the misfortune
of friends, the tyranny of enemies, and the
power of enjoyment is gone, while the capacity
of suffering remains. Man is terribly subject to
chance in these matters, his will has the feeblest
grasp upon them, and in the end chance throws
off its mask and shows itself as a remorseless fa-
tality. It was against this treachery of accident
and despotism of fate that Aristippus sought a
brave defence by the shifts of an infinitely clever
versatility and by calling himself the master and
not the slave of pleasure. Habeo, non Tiabeor.
In his practice there was no doubt a latent dual-
ism, an unacknowledged trust in some resource
of the soul apart from and superior to the suc-
cession of sensations evoked by contact with the
world ; but at the last we are as we believe we are,
and our destiny is in the creed we profess. If
16 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
physical sensation is pronounced to be all, if we
have no secure place save in the feeling of the
moment, what is left but a dull vacuity when
pleasure is absent, unless pain rushes in to fill
the void? The boasted liberation of our philoso-
phy turns out under the stress of life to be some-
thing very like mockery: Habeor., non habeo.
The inevitable end of the Cyrenaic creed if
held sincerely and unflinchingly as however in
the complexity of nature few men actually do
hold it is the kind of grim jesting that runs
through so much of the Greek Anthology :
"All is laughter, and all is dust, and all is noth-
ing; for out of unreason spring all things that
are."
"You speak much, O man, but after a little
you are laid in the ground. Be silent, and while
still alive turn your thoughts upon death." 6
It is an oft-repeated truism that extremes
meet ; and so we see the Cyrenaic, who has staked
his hopes on the accidental favours of this world,
subscribing the same lesson as the Platonist, who
was ready to risk all on his belief in another
eGlycon:
IL&rra 7^Xs Kal ir&VTa. K6vis Kal irdvra r
irdvra 7&
PaUadas:
IIoXXA XaXew,
crtya, Kal /xeX^ra G>v %n rbv ddvarov.
ARISTIPPUS 17
world, life is a study of death. It is the same
precept, but with what a change! Cicero tells of
a certain Cyrenaic named Hegesias, who argued
so eloquently for death as a release from evils
that he was forbidden by KingPtolemaeus from
teaching in the schools a philosophy which per-
suaded many of his pupils to commit suicide. 7
Disp. I, 34.
CHAPTER II
EPICURUS
I
OF Epicurus, whose name has become a syno-
nym for the philosophy of pleasure, we know
not a great deal, but rather more than of his pre-
decessor from Gyrene. He was born of an Athe-
nian father, a school teacher, in Samos in 341 B.C.
His mother, according to the chronique scanda-
leuse which passed in ancient times for the his-
tory of philosophy, was engaged in the disrepu-
table business of selling charms and practising
magical rites for the propitiation of the gods ;
and the boy helped both his parents in their
trades. One can surmise that from his mother's
occupation Epicurus acquired an early hatred
of superstition. At the age of eighteen he went
to Athens, where he stayed but a short time, and
then led a more or less wandering life until he
returned to the city in 306 as a teacher of phi-
losophy with several adherents. Here he bought
18
EPICURUS 19
a garden beyond the walls for 80 minae (about
$1600) , where he set up his school, or where, one
might saj^more precisely, he lived with his friends
and pupils, men and women, in what might be
called a state of plain living and moderately high
thinking. At the time of his settling Plato had
been dead forty-one years and Aristippus some-
what longer ; Polemo was the head of the Acad-
emy and Theophrastus of the Lyceum ; Zeno, a
slightly younger man, was living in Athens, and
probably had already opened his school in the
Painted Porch. Death came to him in 270, at
the age of seventy or seventy-one.
Epicurus was a voluminous writer, leaving be-
hind him some three hundred separate treatises.
It is curious that the great advocate of ease and
pleasure should have cared little for the comfort
of his readers. Ancient critics complained of his
disorderly composition, and the modern student
finds his language one of the most difficult, not
to say repellent, styles of all the Greek philoso-
phers. His primary works are lost, as is the so-
called larger epitome of them made by his own
hand. There was also a smaller epitome, parts of
which, apparently, are preserved by Diogenes
Laertius. We have besides this a remarkable sum-
mary of his doctrine in forty aphorisms or Mas-
20 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
ter Sayings. The poem of Lucretius is based
probably on the larger epitome, and there are a
great number of allusions to and quotations from
his works in other Greek and Latin authors. Al-
together we have a pretty full report of the main
tenets of his philosophy ; how far we under stand
them is another matter.
The difficulty that confronts us when we try
to understand Epicurus is the extraordinary
paradox of his logic. What, in a word, is to be
said of a philosophy that begins with regarding
pleasure as the only positive good and ends by
emptying pleasure of all positive content ? There
is no possibility, I think, of really reconciling this
blunt contradiction, which was sufficiently ob-
vious to the enemies of Epicurus in antiquity,
but it ispossible, with the aid of Plutarch's shrewd
analysis, 1 to follow him step by step from his
premises to his conclusions, and so to discover
the source of his entanglement.
Epicurus began with the materialistic and
monistic theses which had allured Aristippus,
and which, mingled in varying proportions from
the teaching of Heraclitus and Protagoras and
Democritus, had come to be the prevailing be-
lief of the Greek people ; they were, indeed, no
1.ZV071 Posse Suaviter Vivi Secundum Epicurum. I draw freely on
the racy language of the old English translation.
EPICURUS 21
more than the essence refined out of the voluble
lecturing and debating of the so-called sophists
against whom Socrates and Plato had waged a
relentless but unsuccessful warfare. This visible
palpable world of bodies is the only reality, and
the only thing which to man, in such a world, has
any certain value is his own immediate physical
sensations. Pleasure we feel and pain we feel, in
their various degrees and complications ; and we
know that all men welcome pleasure and shrink
from pain by a necessity of nature. Pleasure, in
fact, is simply a name for the sensation which
we do welcome, and pain for the sensation from
which we do shrink. The example of infants and
animals is before us to nullify any attempt to
argue away this primary distinction.
These are the premises of Epicurus, as they
had been of Aristippus, and to these he will cling
through thick and thin, whatever their conse-
quences may be and however they may entangle
him in self -contradictions.He seems even to have
gone out of his way at times to find the grossest
terms to express the doctrine, whether his mo-
tive was to shock the Philistines of morality or
to fortify himself and his friends in their posi-
tive belief. The avowed programme of the school
was "not to save the Greeks, but to indulge the
22 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
belly to the limit of safety with meat and drink";
and in a letter to a friend Epicurus says : "I in-
vite you to continuous pleasures, not to virtues
that unsettle the mind with vain and empty hopes
of fruition." The programme is simple enough
in all conscience, and might satisfy the most cyn-
ical votary of the flesh, but, desiring like his pre-
decessor to be a voluptuary, Epicurus was driven
despite himself to be a philosopher, even more a
philosopher than the Cyrenaic, whether his wis-
dom came from deeper reflection or greater ti-
midity. His experience might be described as the
opposite of that of Johnson's humble acquaint-
ance who had been trying all his life to attain phi-
losophy but failed because cheerfulness would
break in. Aristippus could make a boast of his
Habeo, non Tidbeor^ but, however he might twist
about, his dependence on the fleeting sensation
of the moment left him at last a prey to the haz-
ards of circumstance. Clearly the hedonist who
was enough of a philosopher to aim at liberty
and security must embrace a wider view of life
than the Cyrenaic; and so the first step of Epi-
curus was to take happiness, conceived as a con-
tinuous state of pleasure, rather than particular
pleasures, for the goal. This is the initial, and
perhaps the most fundamental, difference be-
EPICURUS 23
tween the strictly Epicurean and the Cyrenaic
brand of hedonism.
But how, taking individual pleasures still in
the grossly physical sense, was a man to assure
himself of their consummation in happiness? It
was well to make a god of the belly and, in the
Epicurean language, of any other passage of the
body that admitted pleasure and not pain, but,
as soon as he began to reflect, the philosopher
was confronted by the ugly fact that the en-
trances of pain are more numerous than those
of pleasure, and that the paroxysms of pain may
surpass in intensity any conceivable pleasure.
He saw that there was something ephemeral and
insecure in the very nature of pleasure, whereas
pain had terrible rights over the flesh, and could
dispute her domain with a vigour far beyond the
power of her antagonist. Evidently, in a world
so constituted, the aim of the philosopher will be
lowered from a bold search for sensations to the
humbler task of attaining some measure of se-
curity against forces he cannot control; and so,
I think, we shall interpret the curious phenome-
non that the greatest of all hedonists was driven
to a purely defensive attitude towards life. On
the one hand he knew, as Plato had shown, that
the recovery from disease and the relief from an-
24 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
guish do bring a sense of active well-being, and
hence it was possible for him to define pleasure
in negative terms without seeming to contradict
flagrantly his grosser views about the belly and
other bodily organs. Again, since positive pleas-
ure and pain by some law of nature are so inti-
mately bound together that the cessation of one
is associated with access of the other, 2 then, clear-
ly, the only pleasure free of this unpleasant ter-
mination is that which is itself not positively in-
duced but comes as the result of receding pain.
For the content of happiness, therefore, the Epi-
curean will look to sensation of a negative sort :
"The limit of pleasure is reached by the removal
of all that gives pain," and "Pleasure in the flesh
admits no increase, when once the pain of want
is removed; it can only be variegated." 3
But the philosopher cannot stop here. 'Such a
state of release, though in itself it may not be
subject to the laws of alternative pleasure and
pain, is yet open to interruption from the haz-
ards of life. And so Epicurus, in his pursuit of
happiness, is carried a step further. Not on the
present possession of pleasure, whether positive
association of pleasure and pain was familiar to Plato. He
refers to it in Phaedo 60B, and deals with it at greater length in
the Philebus.
and 18. In my quotations I sometimes adopt the lan-
guage of the excellent versions in R. D. Hicks's Stoic and Epi*
curean,
EPICURUS 25
or negative, will he depend for security of hap-
piness, but on the power of memory. Here, at
least, we appear to be free and safe, for memory
is our own. Xothing can deprive us of that recol-
lected joy, "which is the bliss of solitude" ; even
what was distressful at the time may often, by
some alchemy of the mind, be transmuted into a
happy reminiscence :
"Things which offend when present, and affright,
In memory, well painted, move delight/**
The true hedonism, then, will be a creation in the
mind from material furnished it by the body.
Plutarch describes the procedure of Epicurus
thus, and exposes also its inadequacy:
Seeing that the field of joy in our poor bodies
cannot be smooth and equal, but harsh and bro-
ken and mingled with much that is contrary, he
transfers the exercise of philosophy from the
flesh, as from a lean and barren soil, to the mind,
in the hopes of enjoying there, as it were, large
pastures and fair meadows of delight. Not in the
body but in the soul is the true garden of the Epi-
curean to be cultivated. It might seem as if by
the waving of a magic wand we had been trans-
lated from a materialistic hedonism to a region
like that in which Socrates and Plato looked for
*Cowley, Upon His Majesty's Restoration.
26 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
unearthly happiness. But in fact there is no such
magic for the Epicurean. The source of the pleas-
ures which compose our happiness is still phys-
ical, and only physical; the office of the soul, so-
called, is merely to retain by an act of selective
memory the scattered impressions of sensuous
pleasure and to forestall these by an act of selec-
tive expectation. If you hear the Epicurean cry-
ing out and testifying that the soul has no power
of j oy and tranquillity save in what it draws from
the flesh, and that this is its only good, what can
you say but that he uses the soul as a kind of ves-
sel to receive the strainings from the body, as
men rack wine from an old and leaky jar into a
new one to take age, and so think they have done
some wonderful thing. And no doubt wine may
be kept and mellowed with time, but the soul
preserves no more than a feeble scent of what it
takes into memory; for pleasure, as soon as it
has given out one hiss in the body, forthwith ex-
pires, and that little of it which lags behind in
memory is but flat and like a queasy fume, as if
a man should undertake to feed himself today
on the stale recollection of what he ate and drank
yesterday. What the Epicureans have is but the
empty shadow and dream of a pleasure that has
taken wing and fled away, and that serves but
EPICURUS 27
for fuel to foment their untamed debires, as in
sleep the unreal satisfaction of thirst and love
only stings to a sharper lust of waking intem-
perance.
Memory, though it promise a release from the
vicissitudes of f ortune, is still too dependent on
the facts of life, too deeply implicated in the re-
currence of passionate desires. There is no final-
ity of happiness here, and so the Epicurean is
driven on to further refinement. If pushed hard,
he will take refuge in imagining a possible pain-
lessness of the body and a possible stability of
untroubled ease. Life itself, in some rare in-
stances, may afford the substance of this com-
fort, and memory then will be sufficient; but if
the substance eludes us, we have still that within
us which by the exercise of free will can lull the
mind into fancying it remembers what it never
possessed. Step by step the reflective hedonist
has been driven by the lessons of experience from
the pursuit of positive pleasure to acquiescence in
pleasure conceived as the removal of pain; from
present ease in the flesh to the subtilizing power
of memory in the mind, and, when memory is
starved, to the voluntary imagination that life
has gone well with him. The fabled ataraxy, or
imperturbable calm, of the Epicurean turns out
EPICURUS 27
for fuel to foment their untamed desires, as in
sleep the unreal satisfaction of thirst and love
only stings to a sharper lust of waking intem-
perance.
Memory, though it promise a release from the
vicissitudes of fortune, is still too dependent on
the facts of life, too deeply implicated in the re-
currence of passionate desires. There is no final-
ity of ha/ppiness here, and so the Epicurean is
driven on to further refinement. If pushed hard,
he will take refuge in imagining a possible pain-
lessness of the body and a possible stability of
untroubled ease. Life itself, in some rare in-
stances, may afford the substance of this com-
fort, and memory then will be sufficient; but if
the substance eludes us, we have still that within
us which by the exercise of free will can lull the
mind into fancying it remembers what it never
possessed. Step by step the reflective hedonist
has been driven by the lessons of experience from
the pursuit of positive pleasure to acquiescence in
pleasure conceived as the removal of pain; from
present ease in the flesh to the subtilizing power
of memory in the mind, and, when memory is
starved, to the voluntary imagination that life
has gone well with him. The fabled ataraxy, or
imperturbable calm, of the Epicurean turns out
28 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
to be something very like a pale beatitude of
illusory abstraction from the tyranny of facts,
the wilful mirage of a soul which imagines itself,
but is not really, set apart from the material uni-
verse of chance and change. JIaheo, non habeor,
was the challenge of Aristippus to the world;
the master of the Garden will be content with
the more modest half : Non habeor.
There is something to startle the mind in
this defensive conclusion of a philosophy which
opened its attack on life under such brave and
flaunting colours. There is much to cause reflec-
tion when one considers how in the end hedon-
ism is forced into an unnatural conjunction with
the other monistic philosophy with which its
principles are in such violent conflict. For this
ataraxyof the avowed lover of ease and pleasure
can scarcely ^be .distinguished from the apathy
which the Stoic devotees of pain and labour .
glorified as the goal of lif e*.This is strange. It is
stranger still, remembering this negative con-
clusion of Epicurean and Stoic, by which good
becomes^a mere deprivation of evil, to cast the
mind forward to the metaphysics of another and
later school of monism which led the Neopla-
tonist to reckon evil as amere deprivation of good.
Into such paradoxical combinations and antag-
EPICURUS 29
onisms we are driven as soon as we try to shun
the simple truth that good is good and evil is
evil, each in its own right and judged by its im-
mediate effect in the soul.
It may appear from the foregoing that the
hedonist, in his pursuit of the summum bonum,
argues from point to point in a straight line;
in practice he seems rather to follow no single
guide, but to fluctuate between two disparate
jet inseparable motives. At one time, in a world
wherej^^^c^^nsation is J;he only criterion of
truth^and : fhe Jbasis jof 'all reality, the liberty of
enjoyment is the lure that draws him on; at an-
ra world of chance and change or
of mechanical law which takes no great heed of
our wants, it seems as if security from misad-
venture must be the limit of man's desire. Other
pMosbphers, the Platonist in his vision of the
world of Ideas, the Christian in his submission
to the will of God, may see their way running
straight before them to the one sure goal of spir-
itual happiness, in which liberty and security
j oin hands. The path of the hedonist wavers from
side to side, aiming now at positive pleasure and
now at mere escape from pain; and this, I take
it, is one of the curious reprisals of truth, that
the dualist should have in view a single end,
3 o HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
whereas the monist should be distracted by a
double purpose. Whether one or the other of the
revolving objects shall stand out clearer before
the hedonist's gaze, will depend perhaps chiefly
upon his temperament. With an Aristippus the
pleasure of the moment is supreme, though he
too will have his eye open for the need of safety ;
with an Epicurus, more timid by nature and
more reflective, the thought of security at the
last will almost, if never quite, obliterate the en-
ticement of pleasure. It was still as a good Epi-
curean that Horace could write :
Sperne voluptates, nocet empta dolore voluptas.
II
Certainly, when we pass from consideration
of the chief good to the philosophical theories
which Epicurus developed to explain and jus-
tify his choice of that good, the idea of security
becomes altogether predominant ; it is the key-
note equally of his ethics, his science, and his at-
titude towards religion.
The ethical ideal of the Garden is summed up
in the famous maxim, "Live concealed" (lathe
Udsas), or, as Horace exquisitely phrases it, the
EPICURUS 31
fallentis semita vitae. In this way alone would
the perfect ataraxy be attained.
Now the hidden way is not that which we
admire today, much as in other respects our
thoughts have kept the colour of hedonism and
utilitarianism. On the one hand, the pleasures
pursued by the modern voluptuary are likely to
be that of the busy and aggressive sort which
cannot easily be dissociated from the noise of
crowds and the distraction of ceaseless motion,
and in comparison with which the Garden of
Epicurus jvould-seeni to offer but a wan image
of lif e. On the other hand, the only useful career
we commonly understand today is one equally
involved in the restless business of doing, and
our commendation is reserved for those who are
engaged in promoting the welfare or regulating
the morals of other men. To shrink from the
hazard of public adventure or to prize the re-
finement of secrecy is branded as cowardly, while
concern for the salvation of one's own soul is
likely to be reprehended as selfish and immoral.
Hence it happens that both the vices and the
virtues of the present age have brought into dis-
repute the ancient ideal of withdrawal from the
distractions of life. That is as it may be. But at
least we ought to keep the mind clear in these
32 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
matters, and not to lose the sense of distinctions.
The hidden way of the Epicurean has at first
sight a startling resemblance to the Platonic and
the Christian flight from the world, and to a cer-
tain point the two ideals are rooted in the same
soil; but to ignore their difference while seeing
their similarity, or to unite them in the same
praise or condemnation, would be the error of a
very blind psychology. When Gregory of Naz-
ianzus, in accordance with the direct methods
of the day, had been captured bodily and or-
dained a priest against his will, he first fled from
this act of "spiritual despotism" to the monastic
retreat of his friend Basil in Pontus, and then,
admitting the obligation thrust upon him, re-
turned to his charge. And this was in part his
apology to the people for his precipitate flight :
"Into my heart had come a certain longing for
the beauty of the quietness of solitude. Of this,
indeed, I had been a lover from the beginning,
as I know not whether any other votary of let-
ters had ever loved it; and this, amid great diffi-
culties and trials, I had made my vow to God.
Some taste of it I had already known, having
stood, as it were, in its vestibule, so that my de-
sire was the more enkindled by experience ; and
I could not tolerate the tyranny that was thrust-
ing me back into the midst of noise and tumult,
and dragging me by violence from the better life
EPICURUS 33
as from a sacred asylum. For nothing appeared
to me so desirable for a man as this, that, closing
the eyes of the senses, and withdrawing from the
flesh and the world into his inner self, and hav-
ing no contact with all that concerns humanity,
save as need compelled, conversing with himself
and with God, that so he should live above the
plane of visible things, and bear within him the
signs of divinity, pure always and unmixed with
earthly vagrant impressions, presenting his soul
as a clean mirror to God and the heavenly
lights/ 55
Gregory's apology, delivered in the remote
church of Cappadocia, might seem almost to be
a sermon on the Epicurean text, "Live con-
cealed," which no doubt he had heard discussed
from every point of view during his student
days at the university of Athens. Yet if the se-
ductive phrase of Epicurus, as we may suppose,
had sunk into his mind so as never to be absent
from his thoughts, it is no less true that the hid-
den life for which he pined was divided, as pole
is separated from pole, from that, in some ways
not ignoble, withdrawal of the Athenian hedon-
ist into his garden.
For Epicurus the purpose of retirement waiy
primarily the desire to escape so far as possible
the incursions of society, with no thought of fit-
sOratio II, 6, 7.
34 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
ting himself for citizenship in another world. To
this end political life was to be utterly eschewed;
for how, indeed, could the philosopher maintain
his precious calm of soul, while suffering the
anxieties of ambition or the envies of office? To
the same end marriage and the cares of a family
were to be avoided, though not so rigorously as
political entanglements. In one respect Epi-
curus was better than his creed. It is notorious v
that his school made much of friendship, theo-
retically and practically; and their kindly com-
radeship, even their readiness to sacrifice ease
and possessions for a friend, threw something
like a glow of romance over their otherwise un-
lovely profession of egotism. No doubt Epi-
curus could find logical excuses for this hu-
man weakness in the mutual protection offered
by such unions ; but in fact some inextinguish-
able nobility of mind carried him here quite be-
yond the bounds of his boasted principles. His
hedonism might leave a place open for friend-
ship as the greatest felicity which wisdom pro-l
cures for the whole of life, 6 but he was surely
forgetting the claims of the flesh when he added
that it was of more account to know with whom
we were to eat and drink than what we were to
Dk>g* Laert., Epicurus 148.
EPICURUS 35
eat and drink. 7 And his rejection of the Pytha-
gorean community of goods (which had been so
alluring to Plato), because it shows some lack
of confidence in the generosity of friendship, is ,
one of the finest and, in the French sense of the
word, most spirituel of ancient maxims. 8
Such was the social ideal of Epicurus, and his
rules for private conduct were of a piece with
it they were directed as completely, consider-
ing the place of friendship in his social scheme
even more completely, towards the attainment
of that outer and inner security on which the
continuous state of pleasure must depend. To
this end morality of a sort is necessary: "It is
not possible to live pleasantly without living
wisely and fairly and justly, nor to live wisely '
and fairly and justly without living pleasantly."
The exordium is well, and might lead one to ex-
pect a code of morals not altogether unlike the
Platonic eudaemonism; but such an expectation
is soon dispelled. In the Epicurean scheme there
is no conception of wisdom as a good to be sought
for itself, or of justice as a possession which of
itself brings peace and happiness to the owner;
how, indeed, could such a conception find place
in a purely materialistic philosophy? Not virtue
^Seneca, Ep. xix, 10.
sDiog. Laert., Epic. 11.
36 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
for its own sake is desirable, nor is justice con-
ceivable for its own immediate reward in the
soul; the law of safety is the supreme law of
conduct, and "any means is a natural good by,
which a man may acquire a sense of security f rorn^
other men," The state of nature would be like
that which a Thrasymachus and a Callicles up-
held at Athens, and a Hobbeswastoexpoundin
England. So far as justice exists as an obliga-
tion, it is merely a kind of compulsory engage-
ment by which we agree not to deprive others of
their possessions and comfort in order that we
may enjoy from them the same immunity. And
if men live up to such a compact it is only because
of the penalties imposed upon disobedience. "In-
justice is not an evil in itself," and he would be a
fool who did not covertly grasp for himself what
he could, while preaching abstention to his neigh-
bours, were it possible to do this with impunity.
"No one who in secret violates any article of the
social compact of mutual forbearance can be con-
fident that he will escape detection, even though'
hitherto he has escaped a thousand times ; for to
the end of life he cannot be sure that he is safe." 9
Mr. Hicks undertakes to condone this code of morality as being
"just the position taken up by modern international law and just
the attitude adopted by Christian nations" (Stoic and Epicurean
177). He has a word of protest against the Stoics who presented
the code *in an unfavourable light, as does Epictetus when he
EPICURUS 37
And as it is with justice between man and
man, so it is with the more personal virtues of
prudence and temperance and courage. "The^
virtues are not taken for themselves but for the
pleasure they bring," prudence because it sees
the folly of striving for the unattainable, tem-
perance because it protects us against perilous
indulgences, courage because it enables us to
overcome pain and to escape from empty fears.
At the best, virtue becomes such a barter of
pleasure against pain and of pleasure against
pleasure as seemed to Socrates, in gaol and
awaiting death, to miss all the nobler chances of
life. At its ordinary level virtue is the caution of
a soul that sees no real distinction between good
and evil, but shrinks back from the bold adven-
ture of licence:
"If the acts that give pleasure to the profligate
absolved him from fears, ... if they showed
him the limit of desires, we should have nothing
to censure in such a man; for his life would be
says: 'Not even does Epicurus himself declare stealing to be bad,
but he admits that detection is; and because it is impossible to
have security against detection, for this reason he says, Do not
steal.' " I cannot see that the Stoics (to whom might be added
the Platonists and Christians and all the other moralists save the
followers of Epicurus) presented the code in a more unfavour-
able light than did he who first promulgated it. Discredit the be-r /
lief that injustice by its own nature, and apart from any conven-
tional penalties, works mischief in the soul that harbours it, and
the position of Epicurus as interpreted by his enemies is the only
logical one to take though Epicureans might on occasion be
illogical.
3 8 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
filled with pleasures flowing in from every side,
and would have no pain of body or mind pain
which is the evil thing."
Ill
But there was another disturbance of human
life more serious than that which came from the
entanglement of the individual in society viz.
the disturbance from the tyranny and terror be-
gotten by false notions of the universe. JSecujrity
from the encroachments of society Epicurus
sought, as we have seen, in his ethics; to attain
like security from the world at large he looked
to some formula for the universal nature of
things which should enable the mind to pursue
its even course without anxiety. "For," as lie
says, "there would be no profit in establishing
security from men so long as we suffered from
forebodings of what goes on overhead and under
the earth and anywhere in the infinity of space."
Now the great enemy of ataraxy, as Epicurus
saw it, was religion. It is superstition that has
filled our human life with hideous fears of the
world to come and with criminal passions in this
world, and to free mankind from these he will
lay his axe at the root of the evil.
EPICURUS 39
As for the sense of terrors to come it is hard
for us, with our impatience to admit the force of
any mythology but our own, to comprehend how
large a part it played in the life of the ancients,
how it hung like a lowering cloud in the air of
Greece, which we are wont to picture to our-
selves as perfectly serene and untroubled by
those spectral portents that haunted the Middle
Ages and our own age until a very recent date.
Yet a little reading and a slight acquaintance
with the human heart ought to warn us against
such an error. 10 Plato saw clearly the havoc made
in the imaginations of his countrymen by the
gruesome tales of Hades, and undertook to lib-
erate men by moralizing the future life and by
placing the fate of the soul within the power of
each man, as he chose the upward path of virtue
or the downward path of vice and misery. But
such a deliverance required the belief in moral
laws which were not recognized in the hedonistic
monism of Epicurus; the only way of escape
open to him was to find what comfort he might
in the conclusions of his naturalistic creed. There
is no future life, no immaterial soul which will
live and continue to suffer when the visible body
is dissolved; therefore the dread of what may
ioFor the sort of terrors current in antiquity see, e.g., Lucian's
Lover of Lies 22, 25.
40 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
happen after that final event is as idle as the
shuddering that inflicts our dreams. But what
of the horror that still is left of empty darkness,
of annihilation, the thought of sinking into an
abyss of nothingness? why, that too is causeless:
"Death is nought to us ; for that which is dis-
solved [as the body and soul are dissolved into
their elements at death] feels not, and that which
feels not is nothing to us/' This was an argu-
ment to which Epicurus recurred again and
again, 11 as if by repetition of a charm he might
benumb the heart into a dull acquiescence. And
one recalls the retort of Plutarch, that such a
thought does not remove the terror of death, but
rather adds to its sting by demonstrating its
cause ; for it is just this anticipation of complete
insensibility in the future that fills men with a
present distress. 12
The tyranny of the future is but an extension,
"So Cicero, De Fin. ii, 31.
122V0W Posse HOfe. It might seem that Epicurus could have
made out a better case for himself by regarding death as the
great surcease of pain and so as the fitting consummation of
pleasure as he conceived pleasure. He might have quoted the
beautiful line of Electra in Sophocles:
w \virovfivovs
"Therefore receive me in thy narrow home,
As nought to nothing, in that world below
To dwell with thee forever . . .
For this I see, the dead have rest from pain."
But the spirit of religious resignation, even in its negative as-
pect, cannot be wedded to Epicureanism,
EPICURUS 41
so to speak, of the monstrous oppression under
which man's present life labours from his belief
in the gods and in Providence. And here at least
Epicurus was dealing with an undeniable evil.
Cruel persecutions, the smouldering fires of re-
ligious bigotry, malignity dressed in the garb of
spiritual love, the passion of egotism stalking
about as a divine inspiration, the grovellingdread
of supernatural portents, the paralysis of the
human will, who can think of these and what
they have done through the long course of his-
tory, without shuddering? All this Lucretius,
translating Epicurus into the language of poet-
ry, summed up in one fiery picture of the sacri-
fice of Iphigenia on the altar of Artemis, with
its last stroke of indignation, terrible and unfor-
gettable:
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
Here again Epicurus had been anticipated.
Plato too was keenly alive to the sum of evils for
which religion must be held responsible, but for
release from this oppression he could find a way
quite barred to the materialist. It was his privi-
lege to liberate religion from the dark over-
growth of superstition by purifying our notion
of the gods and by moralizing the work of Provi-
dence; whereas for the pure hedonist the only
42 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
escape was simply to deny the fact of any inter-
vention from above in the life of mankind, and
this.Epicurus.did absolutely and unflirichingly.
It might have been expected that he would follow
the logical consequences of suchacreedinto pure
atheism; but here, for one reason or another, he
drew back. Though the thought of Providence
was utterly repugnant to him, and though he
swept away, with one grand gesture of disdain,
the whole fabric of signs and portents and proph-
ecy, he&till in a fashion clung to the existence of
the gods. It is easy to accuse him, and antiquity
did not fail to accuse him, of insincerity, as if he
were an atheist but, for fear of popular resent-
ment, concealed his genuine views. Possibly he
may have been influenced to some extent by this
motive, but his theology is capable of another
and more generous explanation; he really had a
need oJLthe gods-in hi^ philosophy, and of pre z
cisely the kind of gods whom he admits, as may
be seen from his arguments.
In the first place, granted the existence of
gods, granted that their state is one of untroubled
_dirity,grantedthat felicity is dependent on that
withdrawal from cares and obligations which was
the ideal of Epicurean hedonism, then it follows
that the gods will pass their time in unconcern
EPICURUS 43
for the business of this vastly laborious world of
ours. "The motion of the heavenly bodies, their
solstices, eclipses, risings and settings, and what
goes with these, all such things we must believe
happen without the present or future interven-
tion of any being who at the same time enjoys
perfect felicity with immortality/' 18 Nor will the
gods suffer themselves to be affected and swayed
by the distracted affairs of mankind :" That which
is blessed and immortal neither has any trouble-
some business itself nor brings such trouble upon
another; it is exempt from movements of anger
and favour, for all this implies weakness." There
is no room in such a theology for a divine Provi-
dence of creation or preservation. The gods, if
they exist, will not be "good" in the sense which
Plato attached to this word, but simply happy
in the enjoyment of complete indifference and
security ; their home will be set apart in a Para-
dise beyond the shock and conflict of opposing
forces, where, as in a celestial counterpart of
Epicurus' own garden, they will spend the long
aeons in pleasant intercourse one with another. .
Such the gods must be, if we grant their exist-
ence,
. Prima 76.
44 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
"The gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud^ or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm ! and such,
Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm,
Not such, nor all unlike it, man may gain
Letting his own life go."
And in these lines from Tennyson's Lucre-
tius we see not only how Epicurus 14 adapted
Homer's picture of Olympus for his home of the
gods, but why he admitted the gods into a phi-
losophy which might have been expected to abut
on pure atheism. After all, the divine state was
no more than a carrying out by the imagination
of that which Epicurus aimed at in this troubled
world, but never could quite achieve. The maka-
rios bios, "the blessed life," "the lif e of felicity, ">
is a phrase often on his lips, and he was not un-
willing to accept from his pupils terms of hom-
age which fell little short of deification ; yetwithal
how imperfect was the security he could actually
attain against the encroachments of society and
"Tennyson's lines are taken from the third book of the De Rt-
rttm Jffltfttra-, where Lucretius borrows from the sixth book of
the Ody99ey; but Epicurus, though he was not fond of Homer or
the other fabricators of myth, would not have repudiated this
picture.
EPICURUS 45-
the pangs of disease, and that last agony of dis-
solution, however bravely he might argue that
agony away. He needed this ideal of the divine
tranquillity to strengthen his own heart and to
put courage into his band of worshippers. He,
also, must have his religion, his dream of imitat-
ing God, at whatever price he bought it.
IV
Having freed man from, the terrors of super-
stition by removing the gods far off from the
actual world, it remained for Epicuni&^to- sub-
stitute some theory:. oLiiature's course .which
should a,t once fill the place of Providence and
offer a secure foundation for his ethics. To this
end, being no inventor, he was content for his
physics to take over bodily, with, however, one
important addition, the atomic system,
mocritus* And from his Letter to Herodotus one
can see the process by which his mind settled upon
this particular hypothesis as suitable to his gen-
eral philosophy. All that we know is given to us
by the momentary sensations of the body. Hence
the world is corporeal, and the dividing reason
will cut this corporeal substance into ever smaller
and smaller particles until it reaches the concep-
46 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
tion of ultimate atoms which correspond to the
atomism of our sensations. If you ask why he
stays the dividing reason at this point and does
not permit it to proceed ad infinitum, he will re-
turn the simple and sufficient answer that, if we
do not pause somewhere, all things will be ana-
lysed into nothingness. But empty space also is
necessary for his system, since without it the
atoms would be crowded together; there would
be no division, but a solid mass, and there would
be no possibility of that motion of matter which
is a fact of observation. Hence the universe for
Epicurus is composed of *an infinite void where-
in are moving an infinite number of solid atoms.
And here it is in place to observe that this con-
clusion reached by the unrestrained action of the
analytic reason is as thoroughly monistic as is
the conclusion reached by the unrestrained ac-
tion of the synthetic reason. Plutarch was keen
enough to note this, and to lay it against the
school : "For when Epicurus says that 'the whole
is infinite and uncreated and incorruptible with-
out increase or diminution/ he certainly speaks
of the universe as a unity. And when in the be-
ginning of his treatise he declares that 'the nature
of things consists of bodies and the void/ he has
made an apparent division where there is really
EPICURUS 47
only one nature; for of his two terms one really
does not exist at all, but is called by you the im-
palpable and the void and the bodiless. So that
for you the universe is a unity." 15 The point of
Plutarch's argument is that naturalism, in so far
as it excludes from its view anything positive
and radically different from matter, is equally
monistic, equally arbitrary, whether it divides
its material substratum into innumerable atoms,
after the fashion of Democritus and Epicurus,
or conceives a continuous substance in a state of
everlasting flux, after the mode of Heraclitus
and Zeno.
Upon this hypothesis of atoms moving in the
void Epicurus built up a purely mechanistic ex-
planation of all the phenomena of the world and
of life. Omitting the details of his exposition, we
may say, briefly, that by the mutual shock and
repulsion of the atoms, which vary indefinitely
in shape and size, more or less durable aggrega-
tions of matter are formed and vortical motions
are started, out of which are produced the solar
andsidereal systems. Living organisms owe their
origin to the same cause, the soul, or principle of
life, being simply a compound of finer atoms, a
sort of fiery vapour, enmeshed in the corporeal
48 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
structure of grosser atoms and dissipatingwhen
its vessel is dissolved. Even the gods are mater-
ial and subject to decay.
So far Epicurus seems to have followed pretty
closely in the steps of the naturalists who pre-
cededhim. But in one momentous point he struck
out for himself. In the Democritean theory the
atoms were supposed to be moving primarily all
in one downward direction, and the collisions out
of which the aggregations arose were supposed to
occur by reason of the fact that the heavier atoms
would overtake the lighter. N"ow Epicurus was
sagacious enough to see that no universe like this
of ours could arise on such a basis. A regular
and uniform flux of atoms might create a con-
glomeration of absolute law and order, but it
would be a world without variety or variation of
form, or indeed without any forms whatsoever,
properly speaking. To escape this conclusion
he added a significant modification: the atoms
should all be falling downwards by their own
weight as in the Democritean system (though
he failed to give any intelligible meaning to the
word "downwards" in space of infinite exten-
sion), but besides this primary motion each in-
dividual atom swerves a little to one side or the
other by some principle of arbitrary declination
EPICURUS 49
within itself. Lucretius states the matter thus:
"This point of the subject we desire you to
apprehend, that when atoms are borne straight
downwards through the void by theirown weights,
at quite uncertain times and uncertain places they
push themselves a little from their course, only
just so much that you can call it a change of in-
clination. If they were not wont to swerve thus,
they would fall down all, like drops of rain,
through the deep void, and no clashing could
have been begotten, nor any collision produced,
among the first-beginnings ; thus Nature never
would have produced anything/' 16
By this clever device Epicurus shuns the im-
passe of absolute determinism, and introduces
the possibility at once of order and variety
order from the systematic motion of the atoms,
variety from the spontaneousmotionof each indi-
vidual atom. The masses, organic and inorganic,
of which the world is composed are thrown out
by nature without design and in infinite variety.
Those which happen to be constructed suitably
and are fitted to their environment endure and,
in the case of living creatures, propagate their
kind; while the rest are broken up and perish
Rer. Nat. ii, 16-324 The translation is from John Mas-
son's Lucretius, Epicurean and Poet. How far Epicurus was
justified in assuming that Democritus held the atoms to he fall-
ing eternally downwards is a question we need not consider. See
Burnet's Greek Philosophy 1, 96.
50 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
amidst the unceasing clash and conflict. In the
sphere of organic life, at least, Epicuruslftm-
nected the law of survival with the conception of
development in time, and the fifth book of Lu-
cretius presents a magnificent and really as-
tounding picture of man's progress from the
primitive state of savagery to that of a complex
civilization. 17 But for one omission, Epicurus
would have anticipated in principle the theory
of Darwinian evolution; if we may judge from
Lucretius, he had no hint of the gradual trans-
formation of one species into another, but each
species, as it was thrown out by chance, so en-
dured if it was fit, or perished if it was unfit. The
omission is large, no doubt ; yet in view of the
apparent inability of modern biologists to come
to any agreement upon the law of variation, per-
haps it will not be held so damaging to the intel-
ligence of our ancient philosopher as at first it
might appear. And apart from this, the Epicu-
rean doctrine agrees surprisingly with the mod-
ern attempt to explain the nature of things on a
purely materialistic and mathematical basis. In
both the ultimate source of phenomenal evolu-
tion is reduced to the mechanical law of chance
iTM. Joyau (Epicure 118) thinks that the picture of progress in
Lucretius should not be carried back to Epicurus; it is certainly,
I think, implicit in the Epicurean physics.
EPICURUS S i
and probability, and endurance is made to de-
pend on the law of fitness. Both fail to explain
how there can be a law of probability in the se-
quences of chance, and both equally shirk the
difficulty of giving any meaning to the word
"fit" in a world not governed by an intelligence
which is superior to mechanical forces, and which
acts selectively in accordance with a self -justi-
fying principle of Tightness, or order.
It is a question how far Epicurus* anticipa-
tion of the atomic theory in its present form and
of evolution should be set down to mere philo-
sophical guessing, and how far in general he can
be regarded as a precursor of the modern scien-
tific spirit. According to Froude Epicureanism
was "the creed of the men of science" in the time
of Caesar; Sir Frederick Pollock held it to be
"a genuine attempt at a scientific explanation
of the world" ; for Professor Trezza it "summed
up in itself the most scientific elements of Greek
antiquity" ; Renan praised Epicureanism as "the
great scientific school of antiquity/' and to Dr.
Woltjer "the Epicureans, with respect to the
laws and principles of science, came nearest of
all the ancients to the science of our own time."
On the other side Mr. Benn, from whom I bor-
row these quotations, regards such comments as
52 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
"absolutely amazing"; 18 he can find in Epicu-
rus no spark of the true scientific spirit. Perhaps
it would be fairer to put it this way, that Epi-
curus was a great anticipator of science, but, like
the hero of Moliere's play, mcdgrt lui. In fact
not the least paradox of his logic rich in surprises
was his adoption of a scientific, or semi-scientific,
mode of explaining the world for the avowed
purpose of undermining the very foundation of
what we understand by science. It was the last
thing he had at heart that, having adopted a the-
ory of creation which eliminated Providence
from the world, he should suffer his physics to
set up a law of mechanical determinism in its
place. Between the personal tyranny of theology
and the impersonal despotism of science, if he
had to choose, he would prefer the former as the
less absolute and
"Destiny, which some introduce as sovereign
over all things, he [the wise man] laughs to scorn,
affirming that certain things happen of neces-
sity, others by chance, others through our own
agency. For he sees that necessity destroys re-
sponsibility and that chance or fortune is incon-
stant; whereas our own actions are free, and it
is to them that praise and blame naturally attach,
It were better, indeed, to accept the legends of
i*TKe Greek PWosoyhers* 367.
EPICURUS 53
the gods than to bow beneath that yoke of des-
tinywhichthenaturalphilosophershaveimposed.
The one holds out some faint hope that we may
escape by honouring the gods, while the neces-
sity of the philosophers [of science] is deaf to
all supplications/' 19
It was strictly in harmony with this hostile
attitude towards the postulates of science that
Epicurus denied the possibility of formulating
a single and final explanation of any phenome-
non of nature. Only in the general law of atoms
and the void, upon which his whole philosophy
rested, did he admit any exception to this rule;
in all other cases, dealing with particular phe-
nomena, we are simply to accept whatever the-
ory may suit the conditions of our life and con-
firm our tranquillity, remembering always that
the theory accepted does not exclude an infinity
of others equally possible. So far his interest in
investigation would go, and no further; for the
pure inquisitiveness of reason, here as every-
where, he expressed unmitigated contempt, 20
From any point of view it appears that Epi-
curus shaped his system of physics, not in the
interest of science, but as an aid to his ethical
**Epist. Tertia 133 (Hicks's translation). For a similar atti-
tude of a modern Epicurean, Samuel Butler of Erewhon, towards
science and religion, see Shelburne Essays XI, 198.
wEpist. Secwnda 87, 93, 97, 104.
54 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
purpose; he was seeking here, as in his theology
(which indeed to the Hellenist is a branch of
physics) , for such a liberation from the inroads
of the outer world as would enable him to attain
the equanimity, the ataraxy, which seemed to
him the only secure ground of pleasure. Hence
his famous declination, or arbitrary swerving,
of the atoms performed a double function : on
the one hand it broke the rigidity of what other-
wise would have congealed into a system of ab-
solute determinism, and on the other hand it
opened the door to a freedom of will which places
the life of pleasure within a man's own choice.
The nexus between atomic declination and hu-
man freedom is not clear. 21 They both, no doubt,
imply spontaneity; but in the one case a spon-
taneity of pure chance, and in the other case a
spontaneity of conscious purpose, and these two
are more than different in kind, they are intrin-
sically incompatible from the Epicurean point
of view. A dualist may solve this difficulty by
2iSee Masson, Journal of Philology XII, 1883, pp. 137-135. In
the second of his Boyle Lectures the great Bentley commented
thus on the Epicurean attempt to deduce free will from a me-
chanical deviation of the atoms: " Tis as if one should say that
a bowl equally poised, and thrown upon a plain and smooth
bowling-green, will run necessarily and fatally in a direct -mo-
tion; but if it be made with a bias, that may decline it a little
from a straight line, it may acquire by that motion a liberty of
will, and so run spontaneously to the jack." (Quoted in Jebb's
Life of Bentley, p. 31.)
EPICURUS 55
attributing mechanical chance to the material
world and conscious purpose to the realm of
spirit ; but no such division was legitimately open
to a consistent monist. Apparently Epicurus
undertook to bully the logic of the situation by
a transparent device. His primary atoms are
described, as a true materialist should describe
them, in purely quantitative terms; they have
size and form, but no qualities, no sensation,
nothing inducive of sensation. Then, suddenly,
by themere fact of aggregation, they have become
endowed with qualities and with sensation, and
in the finer atoms which constitute the soul me-
chanical chance has become converted into con-
scious free will. The transition is arbitrary, in-
comprehensible, subversive of the principles of
the Epicurean physics, as Plutarch was not slow
to point out; 22 but, then, logic is the last strong-
hold of tyranny, and Epicurus was ready to pur-
chase liberty at the price of any self-contradic-
tion.
V
This, indeed, is the staggering fact, that a phil-
osophical theory, which in the name of rea-
son begins with a repudiation of the dualistic
v. Coloten Illls, 1118E.
56 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
paradox in the nature of things, should end in a
set of self-imposed and utterly unreasonable
paradoxes. Here is a philosopher who puts his
faith solely_^d_unconditionally in the senses,
yet f oi^ the basis of Ms system goes beyond the
.jsense&~fca~aiLhypothesii5 of invisible atoms and
the void; who accepts all sensations as true, yet
holdsjpart of the qualities given to us by sensa-
tion to be purely relative ; who despises the forms
and rules of logic, yet argues on from syllogism
to syllogism ; who recognizes only physical causes
and laws, and rejects all arbitrary and fanciful
effects, yet in his own doctrine of atomic deflec-
tion and human free will makes a law of unac-
countable spontaneity; who reduces all pleasure
and pain to corporeal feelings, yet looks to the
soul as the seat of the higher satisfaction ; who
sees no motive but seK-jseeking_ egotism, yet" in
practice followed the. precepts of humanity, jus-^
tice, disinterested friendship, even of self-sacri-
fice. 23
All this is undeniable ; but it is equally true
that the conclusions of Epicurus are no more
QOD^BjSSfSx^'&s^d'^xe those of Stoicism and
NeoplatoiusDpu or,iudeedof any monistic meth-
od. And, after all, it may be said that the physics
23eller, Oeschichte^ IV, 422.
EPICURUS 57
and metaphysics of Epicurus are only the outer
fortifications thrown up, with whatever success,
to protect the inner citadel of his philosophy. In
taking pleasure as his starting point and end,
he chose what all men do naturally aim at and
desire pleasure, or something corresponding
to it in the spirit. That is the simple fact to which
we must hold fast through all the shifts of rea-
son ; and those subtle logicians who have tried to
escape this law of nature by discriminating be-
tween pleasure itself as the end of action and the
object or act which results in pleasure have mere-
ly quibbled over a word. By grasping so firmly
this fundamental truth though it be but half
the truth of humanlif e, Epicurus gave hisname
to one of the broad and enduring philosophies of
life ; and men of old and men of today call them-
selves Epicureans who have never read a line of
the master's writings. That, in fact, is character-
istic of his influence. No founder of a sect was
ever more revered by his followers, and of all
the schools of Greece his was the only one which,
theoretically, underwent no change; although
in practice no men who call themselves by the
same name have so differed in their lives, as the
pleasure of their desires shifts from colour to
colour.
58 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
The great multitude, indeed, of those who have
called themselves, or whom we call, Epicureans
have been anything but scholars or sages or, in
any proper sense of the word, philosophers. This
is so true that it was common among the early
Christians, while making many concessions to
the other pagan sects, to deny utterly to Epi-
cureanism the name of philosophy; among the
Jews the Greek name of the master of the Gar-
den was used to denote a heretic or unbeliever
of any sort. "Be diligent," said Rabbi Lazar,
"to learn Thorah, wherewith thou mayest make
answer to Epicurus." 2 * What the creed of pleas-
ure too often means to the world Cicero has told
in his oration against Piso, the despoiler of Mace-
donia. In his disorderly youth this Piso met with
a Greek philosopher who undertook to expound
to him the doctrines of the Garden. But the teach-
er did not get far. "No doubt you have heard it
said that the Epicureans measure all things de-
sirable to men by pleasure" it was enough; like
a stallion neighing in excitement the youth leapt
at the words, delighted to find an authority for
lust where he had expected a sermon on virtue.
The Greek began to distinguish and divide and
explain; but "No," cried the young man, "stop
of the Jewish Fathers 40, edited by Charles Taylor.
EPICURUS 59
there, I subscribe, your Epicurus is a wonderful
fellow!" And the Professor, with his charming
Greek manners, was too polite to insist against
the will of a Roman senator, 25
Pleasure is a power that needs no encomium
to inflame the desires and to fascinate the under-
standing, and a philosophy which throws such a
word about broadcast, however it may modify
and protest, cannot be absolved from a terrible
responsibility. It will be said that such a charge
may be fair enough against the Cyrenaics, who
were rather voluptuaries than philosophers, but
is a grave injustice when applied to the true
Epicurean brand of hedonism. And, no doubt,
there is some force in this excuse. As for Epi-
curus himself we have seen that the craving for
security prevailed so strongly with him over the
grasping at positive indulgence in the com-
pound which he called by the name of ataraxy,
that the body in the end is almost refined out of
his philosophy. By whatever devices of logic and
ambiguities of definition, however he came by
the possession, one cannot but feel that in his
heart he did hold a treasure of wisdom. He was
tried by bereavement and in his later years by
25 In Pisonem 28. Lucian (The Parasite 11) shows that the pro-
fessional toady has laid hold of the Ulos of Epicureanism better
than Epicurus himself.
60 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
painful disease, yet through it all he seems to
have remained lord of himself and of that tran-
quillity of soul which he preached as the genuine
fountain of pleasure. To one of his friends, just
before his death, he sent a letter of which this
fragment is preserved :
"And now as I am passing this last and blessed
day of my life I write to you. Strangury has laid
hold of me, and wracking torments beyond which
suffering cannot go ; but over against all this I
set my joy of soul in the memory of our thoughts
and words together in the past. Do you care for
the children of Metrodorus, in a manner worthy
of your devotion to me and to philosophy."
Strange termination, you will say, to a creed
which began by denying reality to everything
except the immediate sensations of the body ; yet
there it is, Were it not for the flaunting paradox
of the phrase, one would declare that of all Epi-
cureans he who gave them their name was the
least an Epicurean.
And the world has seen many other noble
souls who have found a measure of comfort and
strength and grace and something very like spir-
itual elevation in the more refined philosophy of
hedonism. Transplanted to Boroa^such. a creed
could inspire Lucretius with a passionate long-
ing to liberate mankind from the slavery of im-
EPICURUS 61
aginary fears, and with an agony of adoration,
one might say, for that Xature by whose will the
atoms were maintained in their everlasting ma-
jestic dance, and who offered to the souls of men
one fleeting glimpse of her tremendous face and
then dropped upon them the thick curtain of
annihilation, kindly in what she granted, kind-
lier in what she withheld. The same creed could
carry a sensitive lover of the earth's bounties like
Atticus unscathed through the brutalities of the
Civil Wars, a man of infinite resourcefulness in
the service of his friends by virtue of his com-
plete abstention from the hazard of public af-
fairs.
In England of the nineteenth century the tra-
dition could still rouse a JPater to break the calm
of Victorian propriety for the valorous adven-
ture of an artistic hedonism distilled out of the
more positive doctrines of Aristippus and the
stricter discipline of Epicurus. "Every moment
some form grows perfect in hand or face ; some
tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the
rest; some mood of passion or insight or intel-
lectual excitement is irresistibly real and attrac-
tive to us for that moment only* Not the fruit
of experience, but experience itself, is the end/*
And so the pursuit of philosophy shall be no
62 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
cold consultation of books or dull hoarding of
wisdom; for, with a "sense of the splendour of
our experience and of its awful brevity, gath-
ering all we are into one desperate effort to see
and touch, we shall hardly have time to make
theories about the things we see and touch." 28
Under a new name the old philosophy of the
Garden could teach Mill, as a utilitarian, to look
for private happiness in devotion to the well-
being of others, and, as a hedonist, to grade the
28 Ancient Epicureanism covers every form of hedonism except
the artistic. I can find nothing in antiquity quite corresponding
to the philosophy developed by Pater on the principles of Aris-
tippus, or to the aesthetic of Croce, nothing corresponding to the
theory of art for art's sake of modern times. As for Epicurus
himself, he was so far from conceiving an artistic hedonism
that he virtually rejected aesthetics altogether from his doctrine.
He will admit a kind of pleasure in music, but will not take it
seriously and forbids any discussion of it as an art. He excludes
the study of rhetoric and commands his pupils to have nothing
"to do with rty \ev6fyiov Ka\QVfdvijv ircudetav. For Homer he has
only abuse, Sextus Empiricus was referring mainly to the Epi-
curean views when he said (Adv. Math. I, 298) that, so far as it
lies with the poets, their art is not only useless to life but actually
injurious; for poetry is a stronghold, or confirmation, of men's
passions. (Aristippus was probably more liberal; see preceding
chapter, p. 6). The breakdown of ancient hedonism is owing.
to the fact that it fails to give the desired security from the
chances of life on which its happiness depends. Just this security
the modern theory of aesthetic hedonism proposes to offer by
seeking the source of pleasure in an art entirely dissevered from
the business of life. But the result is an art denuded of solid con-
tent and a life without meaning. Epicurus was nearer to the
truth than is Pater or Croce. For a profound criticism of the
source of the modern theories in Hegel's aesthetic I may refer
to the work of my friend Prosser Hall Frye, Romance and
Tragedy.
EPICURUS 63
kinds of pleasure by a scale of spiritual values
which theoretically he denied,
Epicurus can number among his followers a
sufficient line of artists and scientists, great sol-
diers and statesmen, sages and prophets; and if
a philosophy is to be rated by its finest fruit, he-
donism may hold up its head among the schools.
But even so, taken at its highest, as a true phi-
losophy and not as a mere incentive to the in-
stinctive lusts of the flesh, Epicureanism still
suffers a grim defeat by any genuine pragmatic
test. At the best it was founded on a half-truth.
Its error is deep-rooted in the initial assumption
of a materialistic monism, and that fault it could
never entirely correct, though in practice it elud-
ed by an inconsistency the grosser consequences
of its origin. Certainly, the heart of man craves
happiness as its inalienable right ; but the hedong
which Epicurus could offer as the reward of wis-
dom, the pleasure whose limit is determined by
the elimination, or even by the mental conquest,
of all physical pain, is a poor possession in com-
parison with the eudaimonia which Socrates and
Plato found in the soul that has raised its eyes
to the everlasting beauty of the Ideal world ; or
beside that "joy in the Holy Ghost'* which leaps
out of the language of St. Paul. No doubt the
64 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
human heart needs to be liberated from the vicis-
situdes of fortune and the visions of a disordered
imagination and the terror of death ; but the se-
curity of the Epicurean is a pale substitute for
the fair and great hope of the Platonist, or for
the assurance of the Christian: "Ye shall know
the truth, and the truth shall make you free." 27
It was the final charge of Plutarch against the
philosophy of hedonism that a life of pleasure
was impossible under the rule of Epicurus ; and
Professor Martha closes his penetrating and
generous study of Lucretius with the judicial
sentence, that "the true refutation of the doctrine
which preaches pleasure is the sadness of its
greatest interpreter." So much must be weighed
against any theory of the world which ignorant-
ly or wantonly shuts its eyes to the reality of
"Things more sublime than mortal happiness." 28
ristian was not afraid of the Epicurean watchword. So
etter ccxlv) : M-jjS*^ irpon^6repov rfjs aX^detas KO.I TTJS otKetas
dff<j>a\eias TtBtytvot. See The Religion of Plato 301.
Chamberlayne, Pharonnlda III, ii, 52.
CHAPTER III
CYXICS AND STOICS
THE long line of Cynics and Stoics, in some
respects the most important and significant of
the Hellenistic sects, begins with Antisthenes,
an Athenian, bom about the year 440 B.C. At
one time he was a pupil of Gorgias, and to the
end his doctrine retained a strong sophistic bias;
but later in his career he succumbed, like his an-
tagonist Aristippus, to the Socratic spell. It is
said that, living in Piraeus, he used to walk daily
the forty furlongs up to the City to hear Soc-
rates, and we know from Plato that he became
intimate enough with the master to form one of
the faithful group who stayed with him through
the last day in gaol. At some date, probably after
the death of Socrates, he set up his own school
in the gymnasium Cynosarges. Hence, presum-
ably, the name Cynic which attached to his fol-
lowers, although popular etymology delight-
65
66 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
ed to connect it with the word for dog (kyori) .
In one respect the father of the Cynics agreed
with his fellow-pupil from Gyrene: they both,
as imperfect Socratics, rejected all the spiritual
side of Socrates' teaching. Both were material-
ists and sensationalists, in whom the master's
deep concern with the human soul and with its
eternal rights and responsibilities struck no
answering chord. Antisthenes, apparently, was
what Plato would call a semi-atheist: some kind
of God he accepted as a power more or less iden-
tical with Nature ; but it was a God remote from
mankind, while the popular worship, to which
Socrates conformed, with a shade, it may be, of
ironical reservation, was to the Cynic a matter
of jest and contempt. So also he repudiated
vehemently the Ideal philosophy which Plato
developed from the spiritual affirmations of
Socrates. "O Plato," he is said to have exclaimed,
"a horse I see, horseness I do not see." He was
the first of the avowed nominalists, or concep-
tualists, for whom Ideas have no objective real-
ity, but are only names or conceptions in the
mind. And he was honest enough to carry this
nominalism out to its logical conclusion. If our
Ideas are pure conceptions of the mind, evoca-
tions only of our own thinking power, with no
CYNICS AND STOICS 67
corresponding reality outside of the mind to
which they should conform, and by which they
should be controlled, then all Ideas are equally
real and equally justifiable, and there is no dis-
tinction between true and false, no place for con-
tradiction. "Whatever we say is true: for if we
say, we say something; and if we say something,
we say that which is ; and if we say that which is,
we say the truth." Here was room for a pretty
feud, the memory of which remained as a source
of amusement to the scandal-mongers of a late
generation. 1 Antisthenes satirized Plato in a
scurrilous book; and though Plato mentions his
antagonist only once, and then merely to include
him among those who were present at the death
of Socrates, yet the later dialogues are much
concerned with refuting this fundamental here-
sy, which makes a mockery of the philosophic
quest of truth.
And if Antisthenes was at one with Aristip-
pus in rejecting the whole spiritual half of the
Socratic doctrine, we can see, I think, how he
was still drawn to Socrates by the same traits
which fascinated the young visitor fromCyrene.
He too was looking for freedom and security,
freedom from inner perturbations, and secur-
*See e.g., Athenaeus v, 63; xi, 115.
68 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
ity from a world that seemed indifferent, if not
hostile, to man's happiness ; and in the autarkeia
of Socrates he saw these qualities embodied in a
manner that piqued his curiosity and dominated
his will.
So far Antisthenes and Aristippus, as natu-
ralistic monists, were in harmony, but at this
point their paths diverged. To the Cyrenaic it
appeared that liberty and security might be ob-
tained, at little cost, by a prudent calculation in
the pursuit of pleasure, through the hedonism,
that is to say, which formed a part undoubtedly,
but not the whole, of the Socratic teaching. To
the Cynic, with his different temper and mind,
such a creed appeared not exactly subordinate
to a higher truth, as it did to Plato, but intrinsi-
cally dangerous and subversive of life. He saw
that the boasted Hnbeo, non Tiabeor of Aristip-
pus was no more than the gilding on the chains
of servitude. He felt too clearly the seductions
and enervation of pleasure, the pitfalls it dug
for unwary feet, and turned from it as from an
implacable foe. To such an extreme he went in
the expression of this antipathy that he used to
say, "Rather let me be mad than feel pleasure"; 2
by which he meant, apparently, not that he was
2Diog. Laert. VI, 3: Mawfy? /wtXXov
CYNICS AND STOICS 69
opposed to the mere gratification of the senses,
for in some respects he was ready enough to in-
dulge the flesh, 3 but that he refused to distin-
guish between pleasure and pleasure in such a
way as to suffer his conduct to be governed by
the need of choice. Virtue (arete) , not the free
dalliance with pleasure, was the parent of self-
sufficiency ; that should be the goal of his striv-
ing, and all things between virtue and vice should
be disregarded as indifferent, except as they
contributed to this or that end. If any one aspect
of the Socratic doctrine is to be isolated from
the rest, this at least is a more orthodox code
than the Cyrenaic or the Epicurean hedonism.
But for Antisthenes, who discarded the pur-
suit of pleasure as a snare, and to whom the Ideal
happiness of Plato could have no meaning, vir-
tue was necessarily left without a positive mo-
tive or outcome, and took the form of a mere
hardening of one's resolve against any accom-
modation with the world. It could go no further
than that quality of steady endurance (karteria)
on which alone the indomitable valour of Socra-
tes might seem to depend. Or if virtue assumed
a positive character at all, it would be by inten-
sifying passive endurance into a deliberate wel-
.g. ibid.:
70 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
come of the bracing hardships of life. That, I
think, is the significance of the Cynic identifica-
tion of virtue with ponoSj a word not easy to de-
fine* It means either "labour" or "pain," as the
case may be, or both together with shifting em-
phasis on one or the other element of the com-
pound; as "labour" it signified for the Cynic
that philosophy was a matter of life and action,
not of words or syllogisms or learning ; as "pain"
it would inculcate an indifference to pleasure
extending even to a preference for discomfort
and privation. The accepted morality of the
world would be nothing more than an imposi-
tion of words, an unauthorized convention (ne-
mos) , in opposition to which he would set up
the law of nature (physis] , or the consideration
of things as they are on the lowest possible basis
of estimation; all that creates the comfort and
ease and grace of life, and at the same time
softens the possessor so as to leave him a prey
to the hazards of fortune, he would strip off as
superfluous. The philosopher should be abso-
lutely self-sufficient in his apathy, or as near-
ly self-sufficient as the necessities of physical
existence permit liberated from desires and
fears, superior to want, inured to hardship, con-
temptuous of opinion, licensed to do and to say
CYNICS AND STOICS 71
whatever occurred to him, a model for other men.
Only in one point did Antisthenes yield to
the softer emotions. Somehow he found it pos-
sible to combine some sort of sympathy with his
apathy, and to preach some sort of universal
citizenship along with his exaggerated individ-
ualism ; he was the first, unless Socrates preced-
ed him, to call himself a cosmopolite. But of this
strange paradox we shall have more to say when
it appears in the Stoicism of Epictetus.
Such was the life and lesson of Antisthenes.
As our gossiping historian puts it : "From Soc-
rates he took the quality of endurance and apa-
thy, and so founded the school of Cynicism; and
that ponos is the chief good he proved by the in-
stance of the great Heracles and of Cyrus, draw-
ing one example from the Greeks and the other
from the barbarians." Antisthenes is a shadowy
and somewhat ambiguous figure; for the later
generations his fame was quite swallowed up by
that of Diogenes, or of the legendary saint of
philosophy into whom the real Diogenes was
soon converted.
II
Thelineof Cynics runs from Antisthenes through
Diogenes of Sinope, Crates,Bionof Borysthenes,
72 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
Teles, and spreads out into a body of genuine
ascetics and cunning impostors, who wore the
folded cloak and imitated the surly manners of
their leaders for the edification of society or the
gratification of their own vanity and greed.
Cynicism remained to the end a mode of life
rather than a system of thought. Meanwhile the
current was diverted in part to an allied, though
in some respects very different school.
Zeno, probably a Phoenician by race, was born
in the Cyprian town of Citium about the year
336 B.C. When still a young man he came to
Athens, and there, stirred by the reading of
Xenophon's Memorabilia and Plato's Apology >
was drawn to the Socratic philosophy and placed
himself under the tutelage of the cynic Crates,
though he studied also with the masters of the
Megarian and Academic sects. In time he found-
ed his own school, delivering his lectures in the
StoaPoikile, a colonnade near the Agora adorned
with paintings, from which his followers came to
be called Stoics, or men of the Porch. He died
in 264, having taught publicly for some forty
years, and having won the esteem of the Athe-
nians for his integrity of character and frugal-
ity of life.
The affiliation of Zeno's doctrine may be gath-
CYNICS AND STOICS 73
ered by reading together two passages from an-
tiquity; one from the historian of Laerte, who
says that Antisthenes laid the foundation of the
city by anticipating the apathy of Diogenes, the
continence of Crates, and the endurance of Zeno ;
the other from a late Stoic who declares that by
the counsel of God Socrates took for his province
the examination of souls, and Diogenes the art
of rebuking in royal fashion, whereas Zeno made
philosophy didactic and dogmatic.* As Epicu-
rus, following Aristippus, laid hold of the So-
cratic hedonism and developed this into a sys-
tematic philosophy, so Zeno took, the Socratic
virtue of endurance and self-sufficiency from
the Cynics and out of these constructed an elab-
orate scheme of optimism. And, again, like Epi-
curus, he accepted the Xenocratic division of phi-
losophy into physics, logic, and ethics, and un-
dertook to lay a solid basis for his ethical struc-
ture in a harmonized theory of the nature of the
universe and in what seemed to him a sound cri-
terion of knowledge.
In forming his physical system to this end it
is clear, I think, that Zeno had in view the Pla-
tonic cosmos and especially the mythological
scheme of the Timaeus. Like Plato, he felt the
. Laert. VI, 15; Epictetus, Discourses III, xxi, 19.
74 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
working of two forces in the composition of the
world, which he also identified with a creating
God and brute matter. This. dualism, manifest-
ly Platonic in conception, runs through the Sto-
ics' creed and colours what may be called their
philosophic emotions at every step ; but it does
so, one might say, despite themselves and in a
manner quite inconsistent with their fury for
rationalizing. For this would seem to be a dis-
tinctive note of the Stoic mind, that it was not
content to abide by the paradoxical data of con-
sciousness and to emplpy_reason in the service of
these data, but was convinced that reason can
transcend the facts of experience and explain
the nature of things by an hypothesis of its own.
Any hope of a self-sufficient life, they thought,
must be based on a theory of the world in which
we live as itself self-sufficient, with no disturb-
ing defect and no inherent inconsistencies, a rea-
soned and perfect unit. The process by which
they satisfied these demands of rational opti-
mism is fairly clear, and the results beautifully
simple if only they had any basisjxf: trutti.,_;^ -
In the first place reason looks for a continu-
ous and comprehensible system of cause and ef-
fect, and in this demand it finds itself baffled at
the outset by the relation between spirit, or the
CYNICS AND STOICS 75
immaterial, and matter. The problem is not pe-
culiar to the Stoics, and the solution has been re-
peated whenever rationalism has usurped the
field of thought. Thus it goes. We are aware, as
it seems to us, of two factors in ourselves mak-
ing a composite creature, mind and body, spirit
and matter. We know also that in some way
these two elements of our constitution act and
suffer together: we are sick, and the mind is af-
fected; we think or feel, and the body is affect-
ed. There appears to be some kind of interaction
between the two elements, yet no investigation
of psychology or physiology has ever succeeded
in laying a finger on the nexus of cause and ef-
fect, and indeed any such bond is incomprehen-
sible, even repellent, to reason, so long as we
conceive body and soul, the material and the im-
material, as belonging to two distinct orders of
being. Hence rationalism, in its search for a
closed system of cause and effect, has invariably
tended to escape this dualism by defining mind
and soul in terms of matter and body, or by de-
fining matter and body in terms of mind and
soul. The former of these adaptations is the eas-
ier, for the very simple reason that body forces
itself peremptorily upon our senses, whereas
soul is elusive and can more readily, so to speak,
76 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
be argued out of sight; and this, consequently,
has been the path commonly pursued. Certain-
ly it was the course taken by Zeno, as may be
shown by putting together several of the Stoic
arguments :
"Nothing incorporeal feels with ( sympaschei,
'has the same affection with/ 'is connected caus-
ally with') body, nor does body feel with the in-
corporeal, but body with body. Now the soul
feels with the body in sickness or under the knife,
and the body feels with the soul, turning red
when the soul is ashamed and pale when the soul
is afraid. Therefore the soul is body."
"There are those who think that nothing can
cause motion which is itself motionless, but that
everything that causes motion is itself in motion.
And evidently this was the view of those ancient
philosophers who held that the first principle,
whether one or multiple, was corporeal; and
among the moderns it is the view of the Stoics."
(In the following sentences the writer is criti-
cising from the Peripatetic point of view) : "We
ought not to begin from the ultimate principles
of causation, that is to say, from concussion and
thrust; nor should we surrender our contention
with the Stoics who hold that an agent produces
its effect by propinquity and contact. It is bet-
ter to say that all causes are not by propinquity
and contact."
CYNICS AND STOICS 77
"Death is a separation of soul from body. But
nothing incorporeal is separated from body, as
on the other hand there is no contact between
the incorporeal and body. But the soul is in con-
tact with body and is separated from body;
therefore the soul is body."
By reasoning such as this Zeno reduced soul,
or spirit, or the divine, or whatever one may
choose to call the immaterial element, to a purely
mechanical operation. His definitions, to be sure,
left room for a troublesome distinction between
energy and matter to be explained away before
a thoroughly materialistic system could be es-
tablished; but the Stoic was not a man to be
frightened by any such bogey of the intellect,
and he will evade this dualism of mechanics by
defining energy and matter as nothing more
than the active and passive aspects of one and
the same thing.To be sure it is rather a puzzler
for the monist to explain how a uniform sub-
stance can act on itself as agent and be acted
upon by itself as patient, and perform both
operations at the same time; but his vocabulary
is not exhausted, however his reason may be dis-
concerted, and the tonos of Chrysippus and the
later writers was devised, apparently, for just
this purpose of finally identifying energy and
matter. However, as no critic of antiquity seems
78 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
to have comprehended the precise function of
this famous and furiously debated term, we may
avow our own ignorance unabashed, and pass
on. Whether logically or illogically, Zeno had
reached a completely mechanistic conception of
the universe, in which energy is only another
name for matter. 5
His next problem was to reduce the apparent
diversities of matter itself to one uniform sub-
stratum. Here he proceeded, so far as I can see,
by a sheer plunge of the reason rather than by
logical steps. Falling back upon the ancient hy-
lozoistic philosophies, which found the source of
nature in some one primordial stuff possessing
the characteristics of life, and more particularly
upon Heraclitus, he declared that the universal
substratum of things was fire, or an element like
fire in its fineness and fluidity. So stated, the
theory sounds crude enough to ears accustomed
to the modern conception of combustion ; but if
for the moment we suppress our knowledge of
chemical processes and accept the terminology
of the 'Stoics, the physical substratum assumed
by Zeno is near enough to the nebular hypothe-
sis of Kant to command our respect though it
may not warrant our assent. At any rate reason
sSee Appendix A.
CYNICS AND STOICS 79
had done its work ; the great leap had been taken
from the dualism of experience to a nietaphysic
of absolute monism.
To account for the actual condition of the
world in its manifold diversity, Zeno had re-
course to the process of evolution. In the begin-
ning is fire. This primary substance is potential-
ly active and passive, and by some law of its
being the passive principle in it thickens and
coarsens, becomes separate from the active prin-
ciple, and develops stage by stage into the four
elements of the phenomenal world: fire, air,
water, earth. Meanwhile the active principle re-
mains unchanged, and penetrates the coarser
elements as the forming, creating, governing
energy of the cosmos. In the gleaming stars of
the firmament it appears with uncontaminated
splendour, and through the descending scale of
creatures it manifests itself as reason in man,
soul in animals, nature in plants, and hexis in
inorganic objects. At the conclusion of time's
period the process of evolution is inverted, and
by gradual steps the world is absorbed back into
the primordial element from which it sprang;
fire again becomes all in all, until once more the
law of diversification begins its work. The alter-
nating expansion and contraction, evolution
So HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
and involution, are, as it were, the diastole and
systole of the world's great heart, the everlast-
ing recurrence by which the same series of events
endlessly repeat themselves: what is happen-
ing now, has happened before, and will happen
again, as regularly and as f atefully and as me-
chanically as the swing of a pendulum. 6
Such, briefly summarized, is the physical the-
ojrjr of JZenp, which was carried on by his follow-
ers .with little change. Speaking as scientists and
in the cooler moments of reason, they reduce the
universe to a mere machine conceived in the most
grossly materialistic terms. All things that real-
ly exist are bodies, and those phenomena which
other men define in terms of immaterial energy
are explained by the interpenetration of body
in body or by the mixture of body with body.
Nor, denying the existence of empty space with-
in the confines of the world, are they repelled by
the conclusion that such a theory of interpene-
tration implies the existence of two bodies in the
same place at the same time. 7 So they account
for the operation of fate and Providence and
for that sympathy of part with part which binds
the universe together into a perfect unity. All
same process of evolution and involution will be met with
again in the spiritual monism of Plotinus.
TJ. von Arnim, Stoicorum Vet. Frag. II, 475.
CYNICS AND STOICS 81
these things are the mechanical effects of a dif-
fusion of the primordial element throughout the
visible body of the world, as it were matter dis-
solved in matter, not by j uxt aposition of particle
to particle, but by coocupation of the same space.
_And it is characteristic of the Stoic mind that,
just as their desire to define all activity in a pure-
ly mechanical formula forces them in the end to
play fast and loose with the first law of mechan-
ics, so their boldly formulated panhylism, if I
may invent the word for the theory of material
solutions, can suddenly and without warning,
slip over into an equally bold pantheism. Almost,
one might say, at the whim of the writer the im-
manent cause of the world may be described in
grossly materialistic terms, or it may be digni-
fied as God, Providence, logos, the universal
soul, with all the spiritual connotation of such
words as they are commonly used. 8 That is the
sort of logical legerdemain to which the monist
is inevitably brought at last by the stern neces-
sity of facts; and so it happens that the same
philosophy after many centuries has fathered
the science of a Huxley and the romanticism of
sThis is a residue of the Timaean mythology which clung to the
Stoics as it were despite themselves. But it also goes back to the
original discrepancy of the Heraclitean fire and logos as two ill-
consorted principles of evolution. See Aall, GesckichU der Log-
oaidee I, 18, 129.
82 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
a Wordsworth. For the pantheistic turn of Stoic-
ism, which will colour all the thoughts of such
later writers as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
and Seneca, we can go back to the second master
of the school, Cleanthes, whose Hymn to Zeus
fortunately has been preserved. It contains, as
Mr. Adam has observed, "what is perhaps the
most famous expression in Greek literature of
the profoundly religious as well as philosophic-
al doctrine of man's celestial origin and nature"
the most famous, undoubtedly, in religion
owing to St. Paul, but, with certain phrases of
Plato echoing in my mind, I should be slow to
say the most profound in philosophy. The trans-
lation which follows is from Mr. Adam's Vital-
ity of Platonism:
"O Gad 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, 9 we alone, of all
9 'E* ffov 7&p yv6/j<r0a. The reader needs no reminder of Paul's
words at Athens (Acts xvii, 28):'l$ycLfa"$y&.pt'wfj[VKalKivotifte6aKal
AT/HEX* ws xat rives rQv KO.&* fytas TTOMJTW y elfdjKOffi, Tov ykp xal y&os tffptv.
The last clause is taken from Aratus (Phaenomena 5), but Paul's
use of the plural "poets" may indicate that he had also in mind
the equivalent words of Cleanthes, as indeed by his time the sen-
timent was a commonplace of philosophy. Mr. Adam, comment-
ing on the clause, "in him we live and move and have our being,**
observes that a Stoic would rather have said, <4 God lives in us."
CYNICS AND STOICS 83
On earth's broad ways that wander to and f ro,
Bearing thine image wheresoever we go.
Wherefore with songs of praise thy power I will forth
shew.
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, 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, whatever 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.
84 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
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 away :
Vouchsafe that unto knowledge they 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."
For the basis of his logic Zeno took the or-
ganon of Aristotle, but consistently with the
materialism of his physics, made sensation the
ultimate source of all thought and knowledge.
This department of the Stoic philosophy was for
many decades the subject of fierce attack from
the sceptics on the one side and from the idealists
on the other side. It is not within my province
to trace the long and tangled course of this his-
tory; only a word must be said in regard to the
phantasia katattptikg as the Stoic criterion of
knowledge, since with it is involved the ethical
system which is our real concern.
Now the use of the phrase phantasia katalSp-
CYNICS AND STOICS 85
tike was more or less modified to meet the hos-
tile criticism it evoked, but in the main and ulti-
mately its meaning is clear enough. A phantasia
is the impression made in the mind by some ex-
ternal object through the senses, and this im-
pression was of ten understood in a gross manner
as resembling the figure made upon wax by a
seal. Katdptik$ ordinarily would signify grasp-
ing, or comprehending; but it may also, in ac-
cordance with the common ambiguity of active
and passive in Greek, signify grasped, or com-
prehended; and there has been a good deal of
dispute among modern critics as to whether a
phantasia so defined implies an impression made
when the sense clearly grasps and comprehends
the object perceived, or when it is grasped by
the ob j ect, or indeed as to which of the two grasps
or is grasped. 10 In either case it was an impres-
sion so distinct and vivid and consistent and per-
manent as to carry its own conviction of certain-
ty and to be its own criterion of truth. Through
such impressions the objects of sense are, so to
speak, exactly reproduced in the mind, and we
loSextus Emp., Adv. Math, vii, 257, describes the kataleptic pro-
cess vividly: M6po? otJ^i rQv rpi"x&V) Qourl, XajujSdvercu, jcaTao-irafl'a ^ju-as
els <rvyK<tTd6<riv.
86 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
attain to a perfect comprehension, kataUpsis,of
the nature of the world as it is. 11
It is no wonder that the malicious critics of the
Porch jumped at such a thesis and worried it as
a cat plays with its victim. By such a criterion,
they wbuld ask, how do you distinguish between
a wise man and a fool, when each swears with
equal conviction to the vigour of his impression
and the clarity of his opinion? It was apparently
Arcesilas, founder of the Middle Academy, who
started the mischief, and for a century and more
there was a running battle between the Stoic
supporters of kataL^psis and the sceptical main-
tainers of akataUpsia ("non-comprehensibil-
ity") , which seems to have afforded vast enter-
tainment to all concerned. One of the stories of
this warfare is commonly passed over by the his-
torians of philosophy as too frivolous for their
graver Muse; but as it was quoted by the godly
Eusebius in his Preparation for the Gospel, and
as it really has some significance at least for
nThe part played by judgment as distinct from sensation in the
final act of comprehension, the existence or not of phantasies de-
rived from an immaterial source, are questions much agitated. I
do not pretend to have any firm foothold on this quaking ground
where Stoic psychology and epistemology meet. At bottom it
should seem that the Stoics were trying to find some equivalent
for Plato's definition of knowledge (Theaetetus 308s) as<5p0^ 56<x
juerd X6you, but by their monism, which leaves no place for a dis-
tinction between 86& (i.e. afo6y<rn) and \6yos, were driven about
in a vicious circle. Fortunately my 'theme absolves me from en-
tering upon this argument; Bonhoffer (Epictet wnd die 8toa
. et al.) discusses it at sufficient length.
CYNICS AND STOICS 87
any one who is inclined to take lightly all the-
ories of knowledge, ancient or modern, it may
find a place in these pages. It is related of a cer-
tain Lacydes, the successor of Arcesilas as head
of the Academy, and so, nominally, a follower
of Plato.
Now this Lacydes, we are told, was a stingy
fellow who used to dole out the stores to his
household with a tight fist. But though he acted
as his own steward, he did not like to carry the
keys about with him; and so he adopted this
habit. Having locked the pantry, he would put
the key in a desk, seal the desk with his signet,
and then throw the signet through the keyhole
into the pantry. When next he wished to enter
the room, he would break the seal of the desk,
get the key, and so on. Naturally the slaves
soon got wind of this procedure, and took ad-
vantage of it. In his absence they would raid
the pantry, and then lock the room just as their
master had done. Lacydes to his surprise would
find empty vessels where he had left them full,
and could not understand how this happened
unless his eyes deceived him. However he had
heard that Arcesilas, of the Academy, was ex-
pounding the doctrine of incomprehensibility
(akataUpsia) against the Stoics, that is to say,
88 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
was teaching that we can derive no certain know-
ledge from what we see and hear. So to school to
Arcesilas our Lacydes went, and was convinced
that the new doctrine of incomprehensibility ex-
plained the deception of his eyes. One day he in-
vited a friend to his house, and began to lay bare
the mysteries of scepticism, giving his experi-
ence with the pantry as a proof of the fact that
our senses are no criterionof knowledge. "What/'
he argued, "could Zeno himself answer to my
demonstration of incomprehensibility? With
my own hands I lock up everything, seal the
desk, and throw the signet into the room; and
then when I come back, there are the signet and
the key just where they should be, but the stores
have all the appearance of not being as I left
them. What's to be made of it? No thief could
have got in, because the key is sealed up. It's
just that we can't put any dependence on our
senses." At this tale the friend, who was a merry
wag, broke out into uproarious laughter, and
explained to the victim what had happened.
Lacydes thought it prudent to carry the signet
about with him after that, and no longer used his
storeroom as a demonstration of incomprehen-
sibility; nevertheless, he continued his sceptical
studies just the same. But the slaves were not to
CYNICS AND STOICS 89
be outdone. Whether from some wicked Stoic
or otherwise, they got their instruction, and made
their plans accordingly. They simply broke the
seal on the desk, took the key, pilfered the pan-
try, locked it up, put the key back in the desk,
which they then left unsealed or sealed with any
signet they could find. When Lacydes saw the
state of the desk and accused them of tampering
with the seal, they calmly assured him that his
senses deceived him and that everything was
exactly as he had left it. 'Tor you know," they
would say, "one can't form any sound opinion
from what one sees ; and as memory is a kind of
opinion, that too is quite untrustworthy. You
yourself were saying as much to a friend in our
hearing." Then Lacydes would argue, and the
slaves would counter-argue, until it sounded as
if all the denizens of the Academy and the Porch
were at one another's throats, and no one could
tell who was Academician and who was Stoic.
Lacydes kept this up until he got into a state of
utter distraction, and could only cry out in rage
to gods and neighbours. At last he settled the
difficulties by staying at home andkeepingwatch
on the door. To the slaves who tried to ply him
with the old doubting questions, he would say:
"My boys, that's the way we talk about these
go HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
things in the schools, but we live differently/* 12
Lacydes, at least as he comes to us in the tra-
dition, is not much more than a buffoon, playing
a farcical interlude on the stage of the Academy
between the solemn parts of Arcesilas and Car-
neades. But out of the mouths of fools wisdom
sometimes proceeds, and perhaps the soundest
conclusion to all epistemological debates is the
genial ejaculation that we talk one way in the
schools and live another way. What else is to be
made of any argument on the process of know-
ing when every step of the argument must be
based on an assumption of this same process of
knowing.
The ethical creed, for the sake of which Zeno
built up his physics and logic, can best be studied
in the teaching-of - Epictetus, who in the jjiain
returned to the original, principles of the sect,
though no doubt something of the Platonic tone
introduced by certain schismatics still clung to
his mind. It will be sufficient to note here two
points. In the first place, the Cynical contempt
for the conventions of decency remained as a
kind of amari oliqidd in the Stoic school, con-
trasting painfully with its finer vein of moraliz-
ing. There are sayings quoted from the early
12! have paraphrased the story as quoted by Eusebius (Praep*
Ev. XIV, vii) from Numenius.
CYNICS AND STOICS 91
-masters of the Porch expressing their, theoret-
ical at least, indifference to the most abhorrent
of unnatural vices. And this, too, is a logical se-
quence of a monism which denies all ultimate
distinctions, as Plato showed in the Gorgias. In
the second place, it is clear that the whole ration-
al system of Zeno was worked out for the pur-
pose of achieving that inner and moral security
which was the desire also of Cyrenaic and Epi-
curean but was plainly incompatible with a phi-
losophy of pleasure and atomistic chance. Only
in a world absolutely rational and continuous,
absolutely at one with itself, and only by a cri-
terion of knowledge which enabled us to repro-
duce such a world exactly in our own reason,
could man, as the Stoic believed, be secure in the
rational government qf his own life. This is the
significance of the famous maxim "to live con-
sistently with nature," or "in accordance with
nature/' which from the time of Cleanthes was
repeated as the catchword of Stoic ethics. But
and this is the dire Nemesis that tortured their
logic by the means adopted for attaining such
security they deprived themselves of the liberty
^chjsva<$> aadis,. equally the aim of philosophy.
When reason has reduced the world to a fatalis-
tic machine, any talk of freedom (and tjae Stoics
92 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
talked much of it) becomes a pitiful mockery^
'If Cyrenaic and Epicurean saw in the world a
place of liberty without security, it may be"said
that the 'Stoic universe is, for the soul of man a
place of security without liberty. Yet both Epi-
curean and Stoic knew and felt deeply that our
security and liberty cannot be severed, but are
craved as one thing.
Meanwhile, to return to the historical devel-
opment of Stoicism, it is sufficient for our pur-
pose to mention the fact that after Cleanthes
the leadership, of the school passed into the hands
of Chrysippus (ca. 280-205), who remains, when
all criticism has been made, one of the supreme
masters of dialectic. The task of Chrysippus was
to develop and organize the doctrines laid down
by Zeno into a vast metaphysical system. It was
said of him: "Had there been no Chrysippus,
there had been no Porch." Then came the panic
and the defection of the so-called Middle Porch.
From the virulent attacks to which the contra-
dictions inherent in their principles laid the
Stoics bare, Panaetius (fill B.C.) and Posido-
nius (|91) sought relief by trying to merge a
Platonic psychology with the rigid monism of
Zeno. No doubt the results of this "conflation,"
or "contamination," were interesting, and since
CYNICS AND STOICS 93
the publication of 'Schmekel's study of Die Mitt-
lere Stoa (1892) Posidonius in particular has
become for the historians of philosophy a figure
of almost superstitious reverence, to whom they
are prone to trace in one way or another the spir-
itualistic currents that prevailed in later Greek
thought. But there is a good deal of pure con-
jecture in all this; and at bottom the changes
introduced by Panaetius and Posidonius, so far
from relieving the Stoic system of its inherent
difficulties, only added a new source of mental
confusion. The radical dualism of Plato and the
absolute rationalism of Zeno can never be made
to lie down comfortably together.
CHAPTER IV
EPICTETUS
EPICTETUS was a Phrygian-born slave of Nero's
f reedmanEpaphroditus. He was lame, f rombirth
or by disease, as the cause is variously reported.
But Celsus, the anti-Christian, has a different
story : "When his master was twisting his leg,
Epictetus only smiled, and said calmly, 'You will
break it.' And when it was broken, *I told you
so/ Did your God [Jesus] say anything like
that under torture ?" a Whatever may be the
truth of this, Epictetus, at some time, gained his
freedom, and set up a school of philosophy in
Rome, continuing the Stoic lessons he had
learned under Musonius Rufus. His language
was Greek, which he spoke with vigour and pre-
cision, if not with elegance. In the year 94 (?)
Domitian banished the philosophers, and Epic-
tetus transferred his classes to ISTicopolis in
lOrigen, Contra Celswm vii, 53.
94
EPICTETUS 95
Epirus. He died in old age, having won respect
for himself as a man, and wide renown as a
teacher.
Epictetus wrote nothing. But one of his hear-
ers, the historian Arrian, took notes of his lec-
tures, probably in shorthand, and published the
gist of these in several books of Discourses, out
of whichhe alsocompiledabrief compendium, or
Manual. Fortunately Arrian, as he declares in
his preface and as the text confirms, has repro-
duced pretty faithfully the direct, unadorned
speech of the lecturer, with the result that, though
we know so little of Epictetus' life, he is extra-
ordinarily vivid to us as a teacher; it is as if we
were actually in the class-room, and heard the
lame old man, as he calls himself, delivering his
rather disjointed, but direct and powerful ap-
peals. We can almost see the pupils as they sit
taking notes, asking a question now and then or
putting in an objection. For the most part they
would seem to have belonged to the upper and
official classes, young men who came over to this
provincial town to find some guide which should
take the place of the older religious sanctions,
or to learn the way to strength and a quiet heart
in a world filled with fears and alarms, or mere-
ly to acquire such readiness of tongue and such
96 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
adroitness in argument as would enable them to
shine in a polished and disputatious society.
These last were apparently the more numerous;
at least their presence vexed the soul of the stem
disciplinarian, and over and over again he turns
aside to ridicule their vanity and to warn them
that they are wasting their time. He is not there
to impart cleverness in the exchange of paltry
phrases, but to train the will and prepare for the
rude contest of life. "The ship is sinking/' he
cries out to those who wish to jump immediately
into the subtleties of logic, "the sea is breaking
over you, yet you would hoist the topsails!" 2
Occasionally some traveller strolls into the
hall where this strange professor of philosophy
is holding forth, whose fame has reached him
through the noise of the Empire's business ; and
sometimes the sightseer is greeted with such
words about himself as must have sent him out
with tingling ears. A notable scholar, who had
been detected in adultery, ventures in, and hears
a terrible diatribe on the baseness of such a sin.
What, one wonders, were the pupils doing while
the master was pouring denunciation on the
poor victim? How did the victim take it? Did he
2 This is the tone and almost the words of Buddha in regard to
metaphysical dispute.
EPICTETUS 97
sit patiently, with a Stoic smile, through the
storm?
Constantly also the master talks about him-
self, humbly, proudly, with wistful earnestness.
Once he has been telling about a pardoned exile
who had been in charge of the corn-supply in
Rome, and who had protested to Epictetus, on
his way back, that the rest of his life should be
devoted to retirement and tranquillity only to
plunge, as Epictetus predicted, more deeply
than ever into ambitious schemes on reaching
Rome. And then Epictetus suddenly thinks of
himself:
"Do I say that the creature man is not to be
active? Heaven forbid! But what is it that fet-
ters our faculty of action? Take myself first:
when day comes, I remind myself a little as to
what lesson I ought to read to my pupils. Then
in a moment I find myself saying, 'But what do
I really care what sort of lesson I give to this
man or that? The first thing is for me to sleep.'
And yet, how can the business of those world-
lings be compared in importance with ours? If
you attend to what they are doing you will see
the difference. They do nothing all day long ex-
cept vote, dispute, deliberate about a handful of
corn or an acre of land, and petty profits of this
sort. Is there any resemblance between receiv-
ing and reading a petition such as this : e l beg
9 8 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
you to let me export a little corn/ and a petition
such as, C I beg you to inquire from Chrysippus
how the universe is governed, and what position
the rational creature holds in it; inquire too who
you are and what is good for you, and what is
evil' ? What have these petitions in common? Do
both demand the same attention? Is it equally
shameful to neglect one and to neglect the other?
"What is my conclusion? Are we elders alone
indolent and sleepy? Nay, the fault is much
rather with you young men. For, indeed, we old
folk, when we see young men playing, are only
too eager and ready to join their play. Much
more, if I saw them thoroughly awakened and
eager to share my studies, should I also be eager
myself to take my studies seriously." 3
II
As for the system of philosophy expounded by
Epictetus, there was not much of originality
here, and, indeed, originality in the matter of his
teaching was the last thing he aimed at. In the
main his lectures, apparently, took the form of
reading and interpreting the Stoic doctrine of
Chrysippus, though this formal side of his in-
sMost of the quotations from Epictetus in this chapter are from
the excellent translation by P. E. Matheson (Clarendon Press,
1916). But in some cases I have altered the language freely, so
that Mr. Matheson should not be held responsible for any word
or phrase without reference to his work.
EPICTETUS 99
struction is for the most part passed over by
Arrian. Philosophy for Epictetus, as for the
other teachers of his day, was divided into three
heads: physics, ethics, and logic; and if he had
little to say about the first of these branches, its
subject matter, nevertheless, lay in his mind as
the background of all his reasoning. The mater-
ialism of the earlier school had been softened in
the course of time; there is scarcely a hint in
Epictetus of the primitive stuff of the world,
and he would willingly let us forget that the
soul is only a finer substance than those of which
our bodies are composed. The identification of
that fiery element with reason (logos) had be-
come more complete, and his thoughts turned
rather to God and to God's providential gov-
ernment of the world than to any mechanical
law of nature. Yet if the materialism of the
school has been shoved into the background,
their monism, theoretically at least, has suffer-
ed no relaxation. The Providence of God is an
absolute fatality, and whatever is, by virtue of
its necessity, of its very being, is right.
Confronted by the great problem of evil as a
disturbing factor in the nature of things, Epic-
tetus, in what may be called his objective theory
of ethics, contented himself with the familiar
ioo HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
paradox which the Stoics had learnt from Plato,
while passing over Plato's alleviation of its irri-
tating inadequacy. 4 For the composition of the
universe as a whole it is necessary that there
should be an infinite number of parts each in-
complete in itself. What seems evil to any indi-
vidual member of the corporate body is this
inevitable incompleteness. The perfection and
well-being of the whole are conditioned by the
imperfection and limitation of the parts. To this
explanation Epictetus followed his predecessors
in adding another, which is nothing more than
the same physical paradox expressed in the
terms of ethics : our character and the happi-
ness springing from character depends on the
strength derived from resistance to opposition;
the suffering which we call evil is merely the
gymnastic exercise by which we acquire self-
mastery, and as such is our good in disguise. So
Heracles would never have been himself or real-
ized his divinity but for his victory of endurance
through the twelve labours. It is patent that
such an explanation leaves the heart of the mat-
ter untouched, and affords no answer to the
troublesome query why the perfection of the
world as a whole should require the conscious
*See The Religion of Plato 145 ff., 235.
EPICTETUS 101
imperfection of the parts, or why our good must
be wrung out of suffering. But we need not be
too severe with Epictetus for juggling with a
sophism which, time-worn and frayed as it is,
still goes on doing duty after these thousands
of years.
Indeed, Epictetus himself was aware of the
insufficiency of such an answer, taken alone, to
the insistent problem of philosophy. He was
always and above all a moralist, and the voice of
conscience was still an ugly fact which he had to
meet. Thinking of the world wherein men live,
he might say that whatever is is right, but think-
ing of man himself, speaking from the depths of
his own consciousness, he was bound to consider
the proUpseis, as the 'Stoics called them, the
primary presuppositions, or preconceptions, of
good and evil, the conviction common to all men
that some things are well with them and other
things are not well with them. The task of the
Stoic philosopher, then, was to find some term
of reconciliation for the optimism of his monis-
tic physics and the ethical dualism which as a
true moralist he could not escape.
So much will be clear from the Stoic point of
view: since the world itself is absolutely deter-
mined and absolutely right, the distinction of
102 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
good and evil lies not in the nature of things, but
is purely subjective; it is in ourselves, involved
somehow in our act of imagining such a distinc-
tion. It is we who have eaten of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, and for ourselves
corrupted what is incorruptible. "All things are
opinion," 5 said Marcus Aurelius which is not
equivalent to the Shakespearian maxim : "There
is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes
it so," but means rather: All things are good
although thinking may make them to appear ill.
That is the beginning, and that is the end, of
Stoicism, summed up in the one word dogma
("judgment," "opinion," "the way things seem
to us") , which runs through all the chapters of
Epictetus like the binding refrain of a chant.
What, then, more precisely are these dog-
mata? The reply to this question breaks into a
group of propositions which occur either alone
or in various combinations with almost dam-
nable iteration ; they form what I may call the
Stoic Wheel, though the phrase itself was not
in use.
THE STOIC w H K/EVT.
1. What are dogmata?
Certain things are ours, belonging to us,
in a sense we.
EPICTETUS 103
Other things are not ours, another's, for-
eign, alien, not we.
2. What are ours? what not ours?
Ours are things in our power, under our
control.
Not ours are things not in our power ^not
under our control.
3. What are in our power? whatnotinourpower?
In our power are things voluntary, mat-
ters of our will, choice.
Not in our power are things involuntary.
4. What are voluntary? what involuntary ?
We can exercise our will in the use of
impressions, or phantasies.
We cannot exercise our will in the im-
pressions themselves. 6
But what is meant by this "use" of impres-
sions which we have reached in our attempt to
define the nature of dogmata? Now an impres-
sion, phantasy, phantasia, in the simplest terms
is the change produced in the mind by an exter-
nal object, the image that corresponds with what
we perceive and that remains after the imme-
diate act of perception. The difference between
an impression and the use of an impression may
be illustrated thus. A man is on a vessel at sea,
and looking out receives an image, or picture, of
eOurs, tStat not ours, dXX&rpia; in our power, ril0" TJIUV; voluntary,
fl-poaipertioi; will, 7r/>oct(pe<m; impressions, 0ajra<rcu; use of impres-
sions,
104 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
a boundless expanse of water; that is a phan-
tasy. Then, perhaps, there comes upon him a
feeling of awe or terror at the thought of his
own littleness and helplessness amidst this vast,
weltering, inhuman power; that is not a phan-
tasy, but his own use of a phantasy. Again, a
storm arises, and the picture is formed in his
mind of rushing winds and beating waves ; that
is a phantasy. The story of men drowned at sea
recurs to memory, and this too produces a phan-
tasy. But suppose he allows these images to un-
man him with fear: that is not a phantasy, but
the use of a phantasy ; it is not the bare image of
death that causes his distress, but the thought,
or dogma, that death is a fearful event. 7
Thus the use of impressions is our thought
about them, our judgment of their character and
consequences, in a word our dogmata; and so the
circle is completed, the Wheel has come full
around to its starting point. Then, again, from
dogmata we may proceed as before. What is a
dogma, we ask again; and the answer is the
fPhantasia means not only an immediate image created by
some impression from without, but is used also for the chain of
images that may follow in the mind. When a distinction is made
between phantasiai and the use of phantasiai, the phantasia is an
immediate image not under our control, while the "use" includes
the successive images and judgments raised by the imagination
and so under our control. In this sense the word for imagination
is anaplasis. (see III, xxiv, 108 if.)
EPICTETUS 105
same, the judgment that certain things are ours
and certain other things foreign to us, not ours.
But the last link of the chain is now in our defi-
nition as well as the first, and these things that
are ours we know to be the use of impressions as
distinguished from the impressions themselves
which are not ours (since their cause is outside
of us) ; and the use of impressions we know to
be just the dogmata we form about them. So of
the second step. The things that are ours are
those in our power, and the things that are for-
eign to us are those not in our power. But again
the definition has this new content: we know also
that the things in our power are the use of im-
pressions, whereas the things not in our power
are the impressions themselves, and the use of
impressions we know to be just our dogmata. It
may seem that our so-caRed Wheel is merely a
vicious circle, since the reasoning, if reasoning
it be, amounts to no more than this: we have
dogmata that certain things are ours, and these
things which are ours are nothing but our dog-
mata; or, things themselves are not in our pow-
er, but it is in our power to form judgments con-
cerning them, and the judgments we form are
that things are not in our power. Certainly that,
taken alone, if it is not what logicians term a
io6 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
vicious circle, is at least a wheel revolving upon
itself and carrying us nowhere. Somehow the
fact of good and evil, as a matter of dogma,
seems to have slipped in between impressions
and the use of impressions, but as yet we have
been brought no closer to knowing just what
good is and just what evil is.
Now it is from difficulties of this kind, Epic-
tetus says, that education and philosophy take
their origin. Men are so constituted by nature
that some things seem to them for their profit,
other things for their harm. In this sense all men
are born with preconceptions, or innate ideas,
of good and evil. So far we are all alike ; but the
moment we apply these preconceptions to par-
ticular cases, the moment we say this man is
good, or this act is right, or this condition is
well, or the contrary, that moment there is dis-
agreement and discord. 8 What else was the
cause of the Trojan war but such a disagree-
ment between Menelaus and Paris? And what
brought about the long calamities of the Greek
host but a similar conflict of opinion between
Agamemnon and Achilles? Philosophy, then,
will be the endeavour to find some rule by which
we can give practical content to the abstract no-
sTo this extent the whole Stoic philosophy is anticipated in the
Euthyphro of Plato.
EPICTETUS 107
tions of good and evil, or, to use the technical
term of the Porch, it will be the Application
(epharmog) of our general preconceptions of
right and wrong, advantage and disadvantage,
to particular cases. And education in philosophy
will be to the end that men may arrive at con-
cord through such a rule. To this point all the
schools would be in agreement; but for the Stoic,
with his assumption that the world itself is right
and that evil is only in our dogmata, the appli-
cation would be, if the metaphor is not too harsh,
by giving some forward motion to that Wheel
which seemed to be revolving about a fixed
centre.
In the working out of this application into a
complete code we meet with the one important
contribution made by Epictetus to the Stoic
philosophy. In general he was content to adhere
closely to the system developed by Zeno and
Cleanthes, and particularly by Chrysippus, of
whom he speaks in language of reverence like
that employed by Lucretius of Epicurus. But
in his division of ethics into three topoi, "de-
partments," or "fields," at least in the detailed
use of that division, he appears to have struck
out for himself ; and it is a notable achievement.
"There are three fields," he says, "in which a
io8 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
man who is good and noble {i.e., who is to apply
his preconceptions rightly to conduct] must be
trained. The first concerns desires and aver-
sions; he must be trained not to fail of that
which he desires, nor to fall into that for which
he has an aversion. The second field is concerned
with impulses to act and not to act, and, in a
word, with what is fitting: that we should act in
order, with due consideration, and with proper
care. The object of the third field is that we may
not be deceived, and may not act at random;
and, generally, it is concerned with assent." In
a loose way these three fields correspond with
the normal tripartite division of philosophy, the
first with physics, the second with ethics in the
narrower sense of practical conduct, the third
with logic ; but the correspondence, except per-
haps in the case of the third pair, was never
drawn out explicitly by Epictetus, and should
not be pressed. All philosophy was virtually
ethics for him.
Ill
The First Field, or Department, of ethics is
concerned with our desires and aversions; and
if happiness is the end which all men seek, then
it should seem to follow simply enough that the
EPICTETUS 109
purpose of philosophy will be to instruct us how
to obtain what we desire and to avert what we
desire not. But we need no long experience of
the world to learn that it moves on at its own
sweet will, with scant regard to our desires. The
Cyrenaic and Epicurean had discovered this
truth to their great cost :
"The worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes or it prospers ; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two was gone/'
Not in that direction lies the path of philoso-
phy, and he who would snatch at the fleeting
gifts of pleasure has staked his happiness on the
most fickle of all chances. The Stoic will turn
another way, and will alter himself to fit a world
which itself he finds he can so little alter. He
will make his desire sure, unhampered, unforced,
unhindered, and his aversion equally secure of
liability. And there is one way alone to accom-
plish this : by limiting his desires to those things
which are within his power and subject to his
will, to those things, in a word, which are his
own. Not his are the circumstances of existence ;
not his are health and riches and prosperity, not
friends or wife or children or fatherland, not life
itself. These he can control but a little, if at all ;
they are outside of him, coming and going by
no HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
their own right. They are indeed within him by
the phantasies they produce in his mind, but
over these phantasies also he has no arbitration;
they are what they are. His domain extends no
further than the voluntary use of these impres-
sions, by forming of them what judgments he
chooses. And in one way only can he judge of
them so as always to have his desire: he must
hold fast to the belief that whatever is is right
and therefore for the interest of himself as a
part of the whole, and that whatever is not can-
not be desirable.
Such then is the first step in the application
of general ideas to the particular needs of life.
All men are born alike with preconceptions of
good and evil ; they disagree one with another be-
cause they apply these preconceptions to exter-
nal objects and conditions. The Stoic will tell
us that none of these things for which we con-
tend is either good or evil, but in themselves all,
without exception, are ultimately indifferent
(adiaphora) . The distinction of good and evil is
not there, but lies within the scope of the human
will; it is my good to conform my desires to
things as they are, it is my evil to desire things
to be other than God has ordered them or to set
my will in opposition to the decrees of Provi-
EPICTETUS 111
dence. All the circumstances of life are indiffer-
ent, in the sense that in themselves they are nei-
ther good nor evil, but that we may create either
good or evil for ourselves by our attitude towards
them. 9
It may appear that such a conclusion leaves
us still revolving in the same vicious circle of
dogmata: we have dogmata of good and evil,
and good and evil are our dogmata; but in fact
we have taken a long step forward. "What
then," Epictetus asks, "is the fruit of these dog-
mata?" And he answers: "The fairest and most
becoming fruit for those who are truly educat-
ing themselves tranquillity, fearlessness, liber-
ty" ; to which may be joined the peculiar virtue
of Stoicism, apathy. Now the passions (patM]
are those emotions that trouble the soul when it
fails to get what it desires or falls into that for
which it has aversion, and the apathetic man is
he who, by right dogmata, has raised himself
sit is not my fault if we have fallen already into a startling in-
consistency. All things are right, and our dogmata cannot alter
this fact; yet in the same breath we are told that the circum-
stances of life are indifferent and become the source of good or
evil in accordance with our dogmata. This is the antinomy run-
ning all through Stoicism, as the world is regarded objectively
or subjectively: objectively regarded it is good, subjectively it
may be good or evil; but, and this is the crux, how in a monistic
system can there be any radical distinction between objective and
subjective?
112 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
above the possibility of just these emotions. He,
too, is the tranquil man, since nothing can per-
turb him, and fearless, since nothing that he re-
gards as misfortune can befall him, and free,
because his dogmata are his own and are sub-
ject to no outer control. Stoic apathy, so under-
stood, though it may be far from the Christian
virtue implied in the same term, 10 must not be
condemned as a state of sullen insensibility, a
kind of death in life, unless tranquillity and fear-
lessness and liberty are held to be despicable
possessions. Rather, Epictetus says, when per-
turbation and fear and servility, envy and jeal-
ousy and hatred, are gone, then, and then only,
is the heart open to the true philosophic joy;
then the soul has acquired that happiness for
which all men are striving, while ignorantly im-
peding their own progress by dalliance with
the false lures of pleasure. This is the ethical im-
plication in the study of physics, that, knowing
the constitution of the world, we should per-
ceive the fatality which controls all things, and
should obey the law with alacrity, as otherwise
we must obey it sullenly.
The whole matter was summed up by Epic-
tetus in the four so-called procheira, or maxims
The Religion of Plato 333 ff.
EPICTETUS 113
which the philosopher should have at hand un-
der all the circumstances of life :
1. "Lead me, O Zeus, and them, O Destiny,
Where'er my lot is cast by your decree.
I follow unafraid ; nay, if my will
Basely rebelleth, I shall follow still."
2. "Who rightly with necessity complies,
In things divine we count him skilled and wise."
3. "Well, Crito, if this be the god's will, so be it."
4. "Anytus and Meletus have power to put me to death,
but not to harm me/" 11
IV
So far our attention has been concentrated on
what is our own, in our power, matters of the
will, the use of phantasies ; all the rest is neither
good nor evil in respect to our inner life, but be-
nThe first of these four procheira, from Cleanthes, is merely an
expansion of the Stoic watchword "to live in accordance with
nature." It was thus paraphrased by Seneca (Ep. cvii, 10) :
Due, o parens celsique dominator poli,
quocumque placuit; nulla parendi mora est.
adsum impiger. fac nolle } comitabor g emeus 3
malusque patiar, quod pati licuit bono.
ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trdkunt.
The second is from a lost play by Euripides. The third and
fourth are condensed into epigrammatic form from passages in
Plato, Crito 43 D and Apology 30 c. The fourth, which is more al-
tered from the original than the third, seems to have been widely
1 current. It is thus quoted by Plutarch (apud Stobaeus, Et h. vii,
32) and by Maximus Tyr., xii, 8 A. Justin Martyr (Apol I, ii, 4)
uses it with noble effect in his appeal against the martyrdom of
Christians.
114 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
longs to the sphere of indifference, and only by
preserving this distinction in our dogmata is
philosophic calm attainable. Nevertheless, it will
be said, these indifferent things are about us,
and in some way we must preserve the dogma
that they are foreign to us yet must play a man's
part in this life amongst them. How? The an-
swer to this question is given in the Second Field
of ethics.
In a passage already quoted, having distin-
guished the First Field, as concerned with de-
sires and aversions, from the Second, which has
to dp with the impulses to act and not to act,
Epictetus adds that this Second Department is
"the sphere of what is fitting, of duties; for I
must not be without feeling (apathetic) like a
statue, but must maintain my natural and ac-
quired relations, as a religious man, as son,
brother, father, citizen." Elsewhere Epictetus
states more clearly how and when in our philo-
sophic training the transition should be made
from the First Field to the Second. "Let us con-
fine ourselves," he says to a pupil who was eager
to advance too rapidly, "to the First Depart-
ment, where we have almost sensible demon-
stration that we do not apply our preconcep-
tions properly. Do you at this moment desire
EPICTETUS 115
things possible, and possible for you? Why,
then, do you feel yourself hindered and per-
turbed? Are you not now trying to avoid what
is inevitable? Otherwise, why do you fall into
trouble and misfortune? Why does a thing not
happen when you desire it, and happen when
you do not desire it, which is the strongest proof
of inner perturbation and misery?" Then, a lit-
tle further on, speaking of the same pupil in the
third person, he continues: "Now, when he has
worked at this Department and made himself
master of it, let him come again and say to me,
I wish to be free from passion and disquiet, but
also I wish, as one who has attained to piety and
philosophy and wise heedf ulness, to know what
my specific duties are to the gods, to my broth-
ers, my fatherland, to strangers. 5 Enter then on
the Second Department, I say; this, too, is
yours."
Now, if we examine these passages, we shall
see that the whole matter really hinges on the
definition of a few words as indeed the Stoics
of all philosophers were the most given to defin-
ing and to drawing nice distinctions in the use
of terms. In the First Field the application of
our preconceptions is (1) to things that are our
own, (2) to desires and aversions in connection
n6 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
with these, and (3) to absolute good and evil
therein. In the Second Field the application
is extended (1) to our relations (scheseis) with
things foreign, (2) to our impulses to act and
not to act (hormai and aphormai) in these rela-
tions, and (3) to the perception of our duty and
of what is fitting (kathekon) in such actions. 12
In the meaning of these three terms relations,
impulses to act, duties is contained the law of
conduct.
As for material conditions, such as health and
riches, these may rightly be the objects of our
activity in so far as they are preferred (proeg-
mena) above their contraries ; to this extent the
Stoic will compromise with the common instinct
of mankind. But, while preferred, these things
are still indifferent in the sense that, though we
may work for them, we must not suffer our peace
and happiness in any degree to depend ulti-
mately on our success or failure. Nor should the
pursuit of such things be permitted to interfere
r. Matheson and other recent scholars avoid "duty" as a trans-
lation of kathdkon, since it "suggests a conflict which is not im-
plied in the word." No doubt the connotation of "duty" has been
changed by the Christian sense of a conflict between the will of
God and the will of man ; but on the other hand such words as
"fitting" and "proper" miss the sense of obligation to a divine
law, which is certainly strong in Epictetus' use of katMkon. On
the whole I regard "duty" as our nearest English equivalent.
EPICTETUS 117
with the religious and social obligations imposed
on us by our nature.
All men, Epictetus says, and repeats with
noble insistence, are the sons of one God and are
thus related among themselves as children in one
family; they are fellow-citizens of the one great
City of God, which is the world; and so it is fit-
ting, it is their duty we may say, to act towards
God as towards a father and towards one an-
other as towards brothers and fellow-citizens,
and to check any impulse to act otherwise. Man
is by nature a religious being, whose first duty
is to worship the universal Father and Creator
and Ruler ; and he is a social being, whose sec-
ond duty is so to play his part in the common-
wealth that peace and concord and good will
may be preserved. On these two commandments,
the Stoic might have said, hang all the law and
the prophets. They are summed up in the fa-
mous phrase "to live in accordance with nature."
But in this city of the world there are various
things to do, many places to fill, many different
associations to maintain. One man is set to rule,
another to serve ; one to trade, another to teach ;
one to marry, another to live without home or
hearth. To each man there are the narrower re-
lations to his particular city, to father, brother,
ii8 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
wife, children, friends, strangers; and in each
case he must act accordingly. The directions
given are not very definite, you say; for the
question is still left open how specifically we are
to meet these obligations. And, in fact, Epicte-
tus has few definite rules to offer. In the tenth
chapter of the second book, after stating in gen-
eral terms that the duty of a man is to act as a
being distinguished from the lower animals by
the possession of a rational will, and that the
duty of a citizen is never to think of himself as
solitary but always as a member of organized
society, of a son to show obedience, of a brother
to display a spirit of kindly concession still not
very specific rules, you will say he adds : "Next,
if you belong to a city council, remember that you
are a councillor; if young, that you are young;
if old, that you are old ; if a father, that you are
a father. For each of these names,, if properly
considered, suggests the acts appropriate to it."
The inference would be that there is no need to
search over-curiously into the particular duties
of life, for these have been discovered and suffi-
ciently elaborated for us by the common experi-
ence of the race ; they are embodied in the very
words we use ; and as in worship it is well to con-
form to tradition and the custom of the State, so
EPICTETUS 119
in the various relations of man to man the voice
of wisdom bids us to put away conceit (oie#i$)
and humble one's self to the acceptance of what
has been tried and found salutary. 13
If there is originality in this branch of the
Stoic ethics it is in the change from the Aristo-
telian method of defining virtues by some rule
of measure in the activities themselves to this
consideration of right conduct as determined by
man's relations with other men. Here, as in other
respects, Stoicism holds a curious halfway posi-
tion between paganism and Christianity. One
step was yet to be taken: the change from the
abstract sense of relationship to the concrete
emotion love to God and to man as prescribed
in the Golden Rule which underlies and vivi-
fies all these relations. Yet in another direction,
as we shall see, the Stoic movement, so far as it
remained true to its naturalistic origins, was un-
isThis statement may seem to be contradicted by the fact that, in
their passion for distinguishing and defining, some of the Stoics
discussed particular problems of ethics in a manner which pointed
the way to the scholastic science of casuistry. No doubt Stoicism
is inconsistent here as elsewhere, but this is to be observed: the
casuistical method was introduced by Panaetius and Posidonius
and so passed on to Cicero as a defence against the attacks
of Carneades, and is not inherent in Stoicism (cf. Schmekel,
p. 368). An examination of the passages- given by Bonhoffer (II,
201 ff.) will show that Epictetus, at least, uses (rxf<reis as if their
meaning and obligations were conveyed immediately in the 6?<3-
/wtra. For the appeal to <rvjr#0eia, custom, convention, against Pyr-
rhonist and Academic, see Discourses I, xxvii, 15.
120 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
dermining the very basis of morality in the great
tradition of Platonism and Christianity.
In a way, the Stoic division of ethics into these
two Fields, or Departments, is no more than a
clear recognition of the double character of mo-
rality that runs all through the Greek Tradi-
tion. Plato first developed the idea, particularly
in his analysis of the virtues in The Republic,
where he assigns specific spheres of activity to
wisdom, bravery, and temperance, and identifies
j ustice with the compelling force behind all these
various activities. And this distinction, in one
form or another, was carried on by the later
schools. 14 But in the Stoic scheme the discrimi-
nation at first sight may seem harsh, even re-
pulsive, and at the same time obscure harsh,
owing to the sharp assignment of good and evil
i*I have discussed this distinction in Platonism 97-113. It seems
to have been first sharply denned by Aristo (see Arnim I, p.
85). A few further references to the continuation in the later
schools may be given; Aristotle, Eth. Nic. II, vi, 15, 17; VI, ix,
7; X, viii, 3 (with Stewart's notes) ; Philo Judaeus, Leg. All. I,
63 ff.; Clemens Alex., Strom. I, xx, 97; Chrysostom, In Mat. 96s,
189s; Socrates, EC. Hist. IV, xxiii. Even the Epicureans draw a
like distinction between the ataraxy of a soul which possesses
itself, and the popular "justice" which implies conformity for
the sake of safety. Only the sceptics of the Pyrrhonic school re-
ject the distinction absolutely.
EPICTETUS 121
exclusively to the First Field, whereas all the
objects of activity in the Second Field are de-
nominated indifferent ; obscure, because the law
of absolute morality does somehow extend down
into this region of indifference and because the
command to live in accord with nature is equally
operative in both Fields, "nature" being in one
sense the rational will that distinguishes man as
man and in another sense the sum total of man's
relations to the world. Yet, however paradoxical
the Stoics may be otherwise, they are really not
inconsistent here, as may be proved by the kind
of illustrations constantly recurring in Epic-
tetus. Take the supreme test of character, death.
Now death, in the Stoic system, must be held a
matter of complete indifference, in itself neither
good nor bad, for the reason that it is something
over which we have no control, and which as a
consequence cannot be reckoned as ours. Never-
theless, the threat of death stirs in the mind an
impulse to act or not to act, and the action suit-
able to the conditions is our duty, our kathekon.
There is responsibility here. Yet at the same
time our acts themselves are still in a manner in-
different in so far as they can be predetermined
by no fixed canon but must vary with circum-
stances ; it may be fitting to face death unflinch-
122 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
ingly, or, under other circumstances, it may be
our duty to follow the impulse to avoid death.
So far we are in the Second Field, which has to
do with the experimental rules of practical eth-
ics. We enter into the realm of absolute moral-
ity, passing to the First Field, when we consider,
not our specific conduct in regard to this death,
not the impulse to act or to refrain from action,
but the telos, or end, which lies behind and be-
yond all activity, and which concerns what the
Stoics call the desires and aversions of the soul.
However we act, whatever the event, our desire
and our aversion must be separated from the act
and the event, and this absolutely, for the rea-
son that the thing itself, death or life, is indif-
ferent.
Or take one of the common relations of life. I
am father, brother, son, husband, friend to such
a one, and he or she is related to me correspond-
ingly. In the very name of that bond I see the
obligations under which I am laid if I am to live
in harmony with my nature as a human being.
But at the same time that person, whether son
or brother, in himself is something foreign, not-
mine, in so far as I have no control over him and
am not responsible for his actions to me. Being
foreign, he is a thing indifferent, in so far as his
EPICTETUS 123
actions may make no difference in my conduct,
or at least in my recognition of duty towards
him. What if he is unkind, grasping, unfilial,
must I therefore lose my humanity and fail in
my obligations? Moreover, he is a thing for-
eign, not-mine, by the fact that I have no power
to retain him ; he is mortal and may die ; he may
go on a journey and so be lost to me. And in that
sense also he is a thing indifferent, because the
good and ill of my being must not depend on his
presence, and my desires and aversions, in the
citadel of the will, must be free of any relation.
If he leaves me, as things mortal have a way of
leaving, my desire shall not be attached to him,
nor my peace broken, nor my liberty infringed,
nor my submission to the divine will imperiled.
We touch here a mystery, and the frank, some-
times petulant, expression of an obscure truth
has brought ill repute to the Stoics not always
undeserved. So strong was their conviction of
the ultimate independence of our will, our de-
sire and aversion, upon any of these external
relations, that they were wont to clothe their be-
lief in words unnecessarily vehement. Suppose
your friend dies, says Epictetus ; shall you there-
fore sit and bewail? Shall you forget that he was
born a mortal and subject to death? If the pot is
124 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
broken in which you boil your meat, do you not
send to the market and buy another? So be it in
your friendship. Or, shall you stake your soul's
peace on the little son you love so dearly? What
harm if, when you kiss him, you murmur, "To-
morrow you will die"? But I must go away,
you say, and my mother will grieve when she
does not see me. That is her affair, not yours.
Are you responsible because she will not learn
the lesson of philosophy? Your own sorrow you
may check absolutely, for it belongs to you; an-
other's sorrow you shall endeavour to assuage
so far as may be lawful, not absolutely. Other-
wise you will be fighting against God, and array-
ing yourself against His conduct of the universe.
These are not pretty sayings, let us admit;
but they should not be misunderstood. Epicte-
tus did not mean to root out the natural affec-
tions which are so beautifully expressed by the
word philostorgia. One of his finest chapters is
that in which he rebukes a father who has run
away from a sick daughter because he could not
endure the sight of her suffering. "Suppose her
mother and her attendant also showed their love
like you by running away," Epictetus rejoins
indignantly; "was it right that the child should
be left desolate and helpless because of the great
EPICTETUS 125
affection of you its parents and of those about
it?" No, this Phrygian slave, who was much
alone in the world, and who did not shirk the
harder doctrines of his school, was not in his
heart callous to the softer ties of humanity, and
there is a fund of tenderness under the rough
language of his teaching. The critic who says
that "Stoics made solitude in the heart and
called it peace" 15 has turned a neat epigram, but
he has not told the whole truth.
Yet, though it is a sad misreading of the text,
to think of a typical Stoic like Epictetus as de-
void of tenderness and natural affection, it is
true that the deeper feeling of his mind is that
of the Hindu epigrammatist :
"These dear companionships are not for ever ;
The wheel of being without end
Still whirls : if on the way some meet and sever,
'Tis brother, mother, father, friend."
It is true that the relations of life are things
ephemeral, foreign, and at the last uncontrol-
lable, whereas inner peace, steadfastness of con-
tent, compliance to the will of God, are our own ;
not any power, not God Himself, can deprive
us of the liberty of choosing what we will. And
i5T. R. Glover, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman
Empire 67.
126 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
when conflict arises, as sometimes it is forced
upon us, between what is ours to choose and our
attachment to what is not ours, when the bonds
of love are broken by accident or separation or
death, when the perversity of another renders
the mutual ties of life impossible, then the Stoic
will say that these things are indifferent and that
a man must withdraw into the citadel of his own
soul where his real treasure of good is to be de-
fended. Where good and evil are, there finally is
our responsibility, and there happiness. And so,
putting this truth in compact language, the Sto-
ic will declare : "It is better that thy son should
be evil than that thou shouldst be unhappy." 16
Does that sound harsh, inhuman, paradoxical?
It may sound so, yet Christ could pronounce a
similar law in even sterner words. When one
said to him that his mother and brothers were
without, desiring to speak to him, thinking that
he was beside himself, what was his answer?
"Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?"
At another time, when the multitude was fol-
lowing him, he turned upon them, and cried : "If
any man come unto me, and hate not his father,
and mother, and wife, and children, and breth-
ren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he
12 : Kpetrrov 5 rbv Traida Kaicby elvat ^ crt
EPICTETUS 127
cannot be my disciple." Those are bitter sayings
that have caused many to wince and many to be
offended ; but they cannot be evaded, nor is there
any contradiction, for one who knows the law
of religion, between them and the truly Chris-
tian sentences in the Epistle of St. John, "Who-
sover hateth his brother is a murderer," and "If
a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother,
he is a liar." I would not have it implied that I
see no difference between the Christian goal of
salvation and the Stoic pursuit of safety, or be-
tween the Christian love for one's neighbour and
the Stoic sense of duty in the relations of life;
there is in fact a profound difference. But, so
far as it goes, the Stoic distinction between the
First Field of ethics which teaches that absolute
good and evil lie in the right disposition of the
will and bids a man seek first his own happiness,
and the Second Field which embraces the obli-
gations to other men, so far as it goes this dis-
tinction is in the direction that was to be taken
by Christianity. As I said, we touch here a mys-
tery.
Looking to the Orient, one is struck by a cur-
ious, almost a haunting, similarity of this Stoic
mystery with the practical wisdom of India as
summed up in the Bhagavad Gitd. ISTo doubt the
128 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
difference here is as great as the resemblance,
perhaps at the last analysis even greater. To the
Hindu the world was not the purposed handi-
work of God in any such way as it appeared to
the Occidental philosopher ; it was rather a mi-
rage of illusion which offered no place for Provi-
dence or for submission to the divine will or for
adjustment of the human will to the ordered
progress of physical events. And on the other
hand the eternal reality of the Atman is quite
lacking to the Stoic distinction between what is
mine and what is not mine. Nevertheless, in the
application of these two orders of ideas East
and West come together in a manner which
must strike the imagination. In the East this
application is expressed in the law of works and
detachment :
"Whosoever abandoneth all desires, and goeth his way
without craving,
Who saith not This is mine! This is I! he eometh unto
peace.
"Therefore without attachment ever lay hand to thy pe-
culiar work,
For he that doeth his work without attachment, he at-
taineth the Supreme.
"If all the doings of a man are devoid of the persuasion of
desire,
EPICTETUS 129
If all his works are passed through the fires of know-
ledge, then will they who understand call him wise." 17
Now it will be seen at a glance, I think, that
these couplets give as it were a summary of the
Stoic division of ethics into the First and Sec-
ond Fields. The duties of a man to the world,
the obligations of his natural and acquired re-
lations, are the Hindu works. And as these works
in the Hindu scheme are to be carried out with-
out attachment to the subjects of obligation and
without ultimate concern for results, so pre-
cisely is it with the Stoic. Here, too, the duties
of our position must be fulfilled somehow with-
out encroaching on our freedom from attach-
ment (prospatheia) , and the kindly affections
must be maintained without marring the soul's
private possession of apathy. Somehow the de-
sire and aversion of the will must be removed
from our activities and their consequences to
the sphere of absolute good and evil. Only so,
Hindu and Stoic alike declare, is the path open
to peace and liberty and happiness, only so can
the law of the world be maintained. "It is diffi-
cult/' Epictetus says, "to unite and combine
i7For a fuller discussion of the Hindu creed I may refer to
Shelburne Essays VI, 43 ff. Mr. Edwyn Sevan has drawn atten-
tion to the parallel between Epictetus and the Bhagavad Git& in
his Stoics and Sceptics 77 ff.
130 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
these two things the care of one who devotes
himself to the particular circumstances of life
and the settled peace of. one who disregards
them yet not impossible. Otherwise happiness
would be impossible." Here, as elsewhere, what
is dark and seemingly paradoxical in theory
may be illuminated and simplified by its per-
sonification, so to speak, in a human character.
Those who are familiar with the life of Marcus
Aurelius have seen the union of Stoic aloofness
with a tenderness towards all natural relations
carried out in almost perfect harmony. Whether
the Emperor's apathy did actually contain the
elements of a positive happiness, is another ques-
tion.
In the West, apart from the immediate teach-
ings of Christ, the affiliation of this part of Sto-
icism is social rather than religious, and shows
itself in the problem of the individual and the
community, which troubled the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and has not ceased to vex
the drowsy ear of the present age. The antinomy
goes back to Antisthenes, the first Cynic, who
in some way not clear to us combined a harsh
egotism with the doctrine of sympathy. From
Antisthenes the antinomy passed to the Stoics,
with whom it took the form of conflict between
EPICTETUS 131
self-interest, culminating in apathy, and a sense
of fellowship (koinonia) which, if not exactly
sympathy, resulted in practice very much like
it. On the one hand the Stoics insisted unwaver-
ingly that the highest good for a man must be
identical with his own advantage, while on the
other hand they were equally insistent on the fact
that men are bound together in one community
as the children of the same God and must con-
cern themselves with their brothers' welfare.
' Fellowship is the strong law of nature, and if,
like Epicurus, we deny the law, yet nature draws
us to her will, reluctant and groaning. The recon-
ciliation between these contradictories was made
by Epictetus in a passage whose influence is still
felt, though its meaning may have been strange-
ly perverted:
"This is not mere selfishness: for it is natural
to man, as to other creatures, to do everything
for his own sake ; for even the sun does everything
for its own sake, and in a word so does Zeus him-
self. But when he (Zeus) would be called 'The
Rain-giver 5 and 'Fruit-giver' and 'Father of
men and Gods,' you see that he cannot win these
names or do these works unless he does some
good to the world at large : and in general Zeus
has so created the nature of the rational animal,
that he can attain nothing good for himself, un-
132 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
less he contributes some service to the commun-
ity. So it turns out that to do everything for
one's own sake is not unsocial. For what do you
expect? Do you expect a man to hold aloof
from himself and his own interest? No : we can-
not ignore the one principle of action which
governs all things to be at unity with them-
selves."
Fellowship thus according to the Stoic creed
is a part, an essential yet subordinate part, of
self-interest. Ultimately a man's good, what he
desires and must pursue, is that which he re-
gards as advantageous to himself. But this good
is placed in the realm of the will and the reason:
man by nature is endowed with these faculties
as his distinctive element, and his happiness as
well as his duty is to live in accordance with his
nature as a being so endowed. By nature also
he is born one of a community of beings having
the same endowment, and it is in accordance
with his nature as a being so endowed to treat
all men as fellows in the spirit, with generosity,
helpful consideration, justice. But, it is impor-
tant to add, as pleasure and the utility concerned
with pleasure are not factors of his own real
good, so they form no part, at least no essential
part, of the bond of fellowship ; and, secondly,
though our obligation cannot be annulled by
EPICTETUS 133
the acts of another, our sympathy with another
ceases as soon as, and so far as, he in his turn
ceases to act as a reasonable and social being*
Now, whatever may be thought of this creed,
and however we may hold that it solves, or fails
to solve, the antithesis of the individual and the
community, certainly the modern attitude to-
wards the question, though its origin goes back
to Stoicism, is radically different from that of
Epictetus.
The modern movement begins, or at least first
becomes important, with Shaftesbury, 18 whose
life and manner of thought, as he believed, were
regulated by a minute study of Epictetus, while
in fact he was introducing into philosophy a
spirit quite foreign to his teacher. To begin
with, from the Stoic principle of reason and will
Shaftesbury has removed the range of ethics
entirely to the emotions. In place of the ancient
command to acquire right dogmata, his precept
is : "Be persuaded that wisdom is more from the
heart than from the head; feel goodness, and
asFor the earlier revival of Stoicism at the Renaissance see
F. Strowski, Pascal et son temps, chap. ii. But the peculiarly
modern tone, with its blend of Epicureanism, must be attributed
in the main to Shaftesbury, whose influence through the eight-
eenth century was immense. For his devotion to Epictetus, see
the Philosophical Regimen edited by Benjamin Rand.
134 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
you will see all things fair and good." 19 The key-
word for Shaftesbury is not dogmata but the
"affections." These he divides into natural (or
public) and selfish (or private), and then sets
them side by side as essentially hostile one to
the other. "Whatsoever, therefore," he says, "is
done which happens to be advantageous to the
species, through an affection merely towards
self -good, does not imply any more goodness in
the creature than as the affection itself is good.
Let him, in any particular, act ever so well; if,
at the bottom, it be that selfish affection alone
which moves him, he is in himself still vicious.
Nor can any creature be considered otherwise,
when the passion towards self -good, though ever
so moderate, is his real motive in the doing that
to which a natural affection for his kind ought
by right to have inclined him." Now certainly,
whatever we may think of this doctrine, it is a
radical departure from the Stoic attempt, as
seen in the quotation just given from Epictetus,
to derive the natural duties (kaih^kontd) from
and most of the following quotations are taken from
Thomas Fowler's Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Dr. Fowler gives
an excellent summary of Shaftesbury's views; but it is hard to
understand how, after showing the true weakness of Shaftes-
bury's ethical mixture (p. 92), he should add (p. 98) : "It would
not be too much to say that there is no modern writer whose
views on morals approximate so closely to the classical way of
thinking on these subjects as his."
EPICTETUS 135
one ultimate principle of self -interest. And the
practical consequences of this departure carry
us very far. Instead of a rigid law of subordina-
tion extending from right dogmata to a right
understanding of what is ours and thence to a
right disposition towards what is not ours, we
are to discover a rule of conduct in the balance
of public and private affections, or between the
feelings of sympathy and egotism* 20 If there is
any governing principle behind this mechanical
balance, it is not the Stoic reason or will but a
kind of instinctive taste or aesthetic sense, which
is affected by harmony or disharmony of char-
acter just as it is by proportion or disproportion
in a work of art. "And this, after aU, the most
natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral
truth; for all beauty is truth," Shaftesburysays,
in a vein of dubious Platonism that was to be
echoed by Keats. Thus the Benevolent Theory
of Ethics merges insensibly into a pleasant and
easy kind of aesthetic hedonism as far removed
from the Porch as it is from the Academy. In
this facile blend of Stoicism and Epicureanism
there is no place for that strenuous discipline on
which Epictetus insisted, as one might say, in
soShaftesbury may have got this notion of a balance between
egotism and sympathy from Panaetius through Cicero (see
Schmekel, Die mittUre Stoa 220, 369) ; he did not get it from
Epictetus.
136 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
season and out of season ; instead we have the
beginning of the new theory of natural good-
ness and moral laissez-fcdre which has been the
dominant note in modern ethics and sociology
from that day to this. To Epictetus wisdom and
goodness were to be attained, if at all, by the la-
bour of a lifetime ; to Shaf tesbury goodness ap-
pears so natural that it almost requires labour to
be vicious: "Nor can anything besides art and
strong endeavour, with long practice and medi-
tation, overcome such a natural prevention or
presupposition of the mind in favour of this mor-
al distinction [between the amiability of virtue
and the deformity of vice]." 21 As in Platonism,
so it was in Stoicism, and so it will be in Chris-
tianity, the first step towards an understand-
ing of the doctrine must be in tearing away the
masques which conceal their true features. To
some it may appear also that the path of wisdom
points in the same direction.
VI
The First Field of ethics, as we have seen, was
concerned with the adjustment of the will to the
great law of physics. The world is a vast flux,
wherein all things are moving and changing by
I, iii, 1.
EPICTETUS 137
force of necessity and all things, taken together,
are right, even as they are necessary. It is the
business of the philosopher to recognize that he
too is a part of this system, but not the whole of
it, and that his good and evil, his happiness or
misery, depend on the recognition of this fact;
the world is not his to alter or control, but it is in
his power to accept, or refuse to accept, things
as they are.
The Second Field had to do with practical
conduct, or with the division of philosophy called
ethics in the narrower usage of the word. Hav-
ing accepted the world as not ours, and so indif-
ferent to us, we have still to know how to behave
in relation to outer things.
The Third Field applies to life the division
of philosophy called logic. The earlier 'Stoics,
Chrysippus especially, had developed the or-
ganon of Aristotle in many directions, and had
much to say about hypothetical arguments, vari-
able premises, epichir ernes, enthymemes, and the
rest of the syllogistic machinery; all of which
Epictetus took over as a part of the philosophic
discipline, though evidently with some reluc-
tance, and with outspoken irritation against
those who came to him merely to acquire dexter-
ity in debate. Yet Epictetus was well aware of
138 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
the importance of this study at the proper time;
and he saw that it had a double function. Nega-
tively we need to have our wits sharpened by
logical exercise in order that we may be ready to
defend ourselves against the attacks of scepti-
cism and may refute false and misleading argu-
ments. But there is a positive use of logic also.
Our conduct in the Second Field in the end must
be determined by logical distinctions and by the
application of syllogistic arguments to our re-
lations; "for really, in every circumstance of
life, our aim is to question how the good man
may fitly deal with it and fitly behave." And the
use of reason extends still higher into the First
Field, for, after all, our attitude towards the
sum of things that constitute the world will fol-
low as a kind of syllogistic conclusion upon the
premises we accept in regard to them. Reason
in the end is that which makes all things articu-
late and complete, and life itself, unless it be
that kind of unexamined and untested exist-
ence which to Socrates was no life at all, resem-
bles nothing so much as a syllogism in practice.
"In fact," Epictetus says, "we must behave in
life as we do with hypothetical arguments" ; and
then he illustrates his meaning by this curious
example:
EPICTETUS 139
" 'Let us assume it is night.'
" 'Granted/
^ |What foUows? Is it day?'
" 'No, for I have already assented to the as-
sumption that it is night/
" 'Let us assume then that you believe that it
is night/
" 'Granted/
" ']\ T ow believe that it really is night/
" 'This does not follow from the hypothesis/
So too it is in life. 'Let us assume that you
are unfortunate/
" 'Granted/
" 'Are you then unfortunate?'
" 'Yes/
" 'What then, are you unhappy?'
" 'Yes/
" 'Now believe that you are in the midst of
real evils/
" 'This does not follow from the hypothesis:
and Another (God) forbids me/ " 22
^Discourses I, xxv. Plato also (see The Religion of Plato 42)
bases his philosophy on an hypothetical argument at once cur-
iously like and unlike this of Epictetus. Plato's syllogism may
be paraphrased as follows:
Let us assume that the just man, appearing to be unjust,
is misunderstood by men and neglected by the gods.
Granted.
Then will he not suffer all the external consequences of in-
justice in this world with no hope of recompense in the next?
Yes.
What then, is he in the midst of real evils?
Yes.
Now, believe that he is unhappy.
This does not follow from the hypothesis; the nature of
justice forbids me.
Plato will admit that a man may be in the midst of real evils, but
140 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
In such a way life presents itself to the Stoic
as offering a series of hypothetical propositions,
to each of which he must assent or refuse to as-
sent. And so this Third Field, starting with the
dry bones of formal logic, brings us at last to
that mysterious word Assent (synkatatTiesis] ,
in which it is not too much to say that the whole
psychology of the Porch culminates. Here is the
problem: What is this act of assent? or, more
specifically, What is it that assents? What is
that to which it assents? Evidently the answer
to these questions will involve our conception of
the Self and the world, of personality and the
meaning of good and evil.
Now, at the first blush, the Stoic answer to
the question, What is it that assents? would
seem to present no difficulty. Over and over
again it is said that good and evil are in the pro-
cdresis, that this alone is free, that this alone is
ours, and so in a way we. That sounds simple
and final. But is it? A difficulty arises when we
undertake to transfer the term proairesis to
English. We commonly translate it "will," and
this, with proper reservations, is perhaps the
will not admit that he is therefore necessarily unhappy; Epicte-
tus will admit that a man may be unhappy, but will not admit
that he is therefore in the midst of real evils. That is the gulf
between Platonism and Stoicism.
EPICTETUS 141
nearest equivalent we have. But, taken abso-
lutely, our "will" is a synonym for the Latin
voluntas, rather than for proairesis; by etymol-
ogy and usage the Greek word signifies rather
a mental process than a dynamic faculty, rather
the act of choosing, the act of giving and with-
holding assent, than that which chooses and as-
sents. What determines the act? What lies be-
hind the proaire&is?
And here, again, the step would seem to be
easy. We are brought at once to the familiar
catchword of Stoicism, the hegemonikon, or
Governing Principle as it is commonly trans-
lated, whose very meaning indicates the deter-
mining power of the will and the agent in the
act of choosing. But, again, there are difficul-
ties. Repeatedly the command is given to pre-
serve the Governing Principle in accordance
with nature, since therein lies our good. What
is it then that preserves and determines this fac-
ulty? "As in walking," Epictetus says charac-
teristically, "you take care not to tread on a
nail or twist your foot, so take care not to harm
your Governing Principle." What is this "you"
that governs the governor, that guides the will,
that assents or dissents? It is reason, the Stoic
might reply. God Himself, or that subtle spirit
143 HELLENISTIC * PHILOSOPHIES
out of which all the world evolves, is intelligence,
knowledge, pure reason, and man has within him
a portion of God ; his soul is, as it were, a frag-
ment of the divine reason. That is the essence of
the Governing Principle, right reason. The an-
swer is clear enough, one thinks; but again dif-
ficulties surge up. Reason is given us, it is said,
for the purpose of using and controlling our im-
pressions; but in the same breath we are in-
formed that it is itself a system framed out of
impressions of one kind or another (I, xx, 5) . It
is untrammeled contemplation; yet when erro-
neous dogmata affect it concerning things good
and evil, there is a necessity upon us to act un-
reasonably. What is this that determines the
reason, that governs the governor, that guides
the will, that assents or dissents? It is rather
like the house that Jack built, or, in the more
dignified language of the schools, a recessus ad
infinitum.
Some light is thrown on this vexatious prob-
lem in a chapter of the Discourses with the un-
promising title, "That we ought not to be angry
with men: and concerning what things are small
and what are great among men." Here Epicte-
tus asks the .question categorically, "What is the
EPICTETUS 143
cause of our assenting to anything?" and pro-
ceeds to give this answer:
" The appearance that it is. To that which
appears not to be it is impossible to assent. Why ?
Because such is the nature of the mind to agree
to what is true, to disagree with what is false,
to suspend judgment on things unknowable
" 'What is the proof of this?'
" Feel (paihe,, be persuaded, assent to the
proposition) now, if you can, that it is night.
" 'It is impossible/
" Put away the feeling (apopaihe, be dis-
suaded, dissent to the proposition) that it is day.
" 'It is impossible/
" Either feel or put away the feeling that the
stars are even in number.
" c lt is impossible.'
" When a man assents, then, to what is false,
know that he had no wish to assent to the false :
'for no soul is robbed of the truth with its own
consent,' as Plato says, but the false seemed to
him true."
Now this necessity of our nature to assent to
what appears a fact, a truth, extends, as the ar-
gument goes on to show, from the sphere of per-
ception to the sphere of action. Whatever ob-
ject appears to a man good, that perforce he
desires ; whatever action appears to him for his
144 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
interest, that perforce he has an impulse to carry
out: "for the measure to man of all doing is
appearance (phainomenon) " To this at last
come even the great events of history which have
thrown the world into commotion. It was ap-
pearance that caused Paris to run away with the
wife of Menelaus, appearance that drew Helen
to follow him; and if it had appeared to Mene-
laus a gain instead of a loss to he relieved of such
a woman, there would have been no Iliad or
Odyssey on so little a thing depended effects
so vast. Hence whatever happens, whatever we
see a man doing, we can only say : "So it seemed
to him, such was his dogma." 23
In our search for the source of assent and re-
sponsibility we have come a circle back to the
dogmata with which the whole discussion of
ethics began. But these dogmata, as we now see
them, are purely passive, with no element of
freedom in them, no place for that apathy which
was the aim of philosophy, no promise of secur-
ity from the fatal pressure of the world. The
will as a free faculty of choosing and the Gov-
48: "Earufrefyyov y&p ty' ^edcrry tin %$o%ev afrry. The
closing phrase here is equivalent to Sbyfjta atfrou. Dogma, in fact,
means etymologically not so much an active judgment as a pas-
sive appearance, a phainomenon. The Stoic ethics end in the
same -confusion between active and passive as that from which
their physics began.
EPICTETUS 145
erning Principle have simply vanished away.
Is there then no responsibility in the choice of
good and evil, no morality, no distinction be-
tween mine and not-mine, myself and not-my-
self , nothing but a dull mechanic exercise of im-
pressions?
Now, whatever else we may think or demon-
strate, we cannot get away from the immediate
belief in a distinction between mine and not-
mine, myself and that which is not myself. No
possible argument can relax our hold on this
primary dogma of consciousness; everything
may proceed from that dogma, nothing can ob-
literate it, and therefore the Stoics were justi-
fied in applying this distinction to the theory of
moral responsibility.
It is a fact that, considering the lives of other
men, looking at that which is not we, we seem
to discover only passive determination, and no
choice or responsibility at all. Good men and
evil alike are the playthings of circumstance,
their character is the product of heredity and
environment, their emotions and actions are con-
trolled by laws they did not make, and so their
consequent happiness or misery is only their al-
lotment in the vast network of fate, or chance.
That is what the Stoic had in mind when he de-
146 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
clared that "the measure to man of all doing is
appearance," and then, as putting a curb upon
the attempt to pry into the moral responsibility
of others, added, "It is not possible for a man to
follow what appears to you, but only what ap-
pears to him. . . . Therefore, whatever hap-
pens, say to yourself, 'So it seemed to him.' "
No precept is more frequent in Epictetus than
this, that the motives and deeds of other men are
not ours to judge, that we should not permit
these things to influence our own sense of obli-
gation to the world, that we should never find
fault, never give way to anger or hatred or re-
proach. Only in this way can our peace of mind
and the even current of our life be maintained,
and only so can we preserve our conscience free
of blame. "This is education, to learn what is
ours, and what is not ours."
Turning now to our own immediate experi-
ence, we see something like that which we ob-
served in the conduct of other men, yet with
something added. Here too we are carried on
through a consideration of the will and the Gov-
erning Principle to dogmata. "To every one the
cause of his doing anything is his dogmata," it
is said categorically ; and our dogmata are sim-
ply that which appears to us, "for the measure
EPICTETUS 147
to man of all doing is appearance." And again:
"When we are impeded, or disturbed, or dis-
tressed, let us never lay the blame on others, but
on ourselves, that is, on our dogmata. To accuse
others for one's own misfortunes shows a want
of education; to accuse one's self is the begin-
ning of education; to accuse neither others nor
one's self shows that one's education is com-
plete." That would seem to obliterate the dis-
tinction between impressions and the use of im-
pressions so far as any responsibility for them is
concerned, and to leave man a helpless victim of
the world. Nevertheless the Stoic was above all,
and despite, if necessary, his reason, conscious
of his own moral responsibility. One step yet
remained for him. He might, in accordance
with his fatalism, admit that impressions and, if
pushed to the wall, his use of impressions, Ms
dogmata, and his positive will, were imposed up-
on him without his choice, but one thing was still
his own : though he could not create impressions
or dogmata, and though, in the end, he must act
as the prevalent dogma bids, he could still for a
time hold his dogmata in check. This is the fac-
ulty which he called epocM, "suspension of as-
sent." How this suspension operated may be
gathered from a few statements of Epictetus:
148 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
"Where does your work lie? In desire and
aversion, that you may not suffer failure in de-
sire nor force in aversion; in impulse to act and
not to act, that you may not err therein; in as-
sent and suspension of assent."
"First of all, do not be hurried away by the
suddenness of the shock, but say: 'Wait for me
a little, impression ; let me see what you are, and
what is at stake ; let me test you.' And, further,
do not permit it to go on picturing the next
scene. If you do, it straightway carries you off
whither it will."
"Third comes the field of assents, concerned
with things plausible and attractive. For, as'Soc-
rates bade men 'not live a life without exami-
nation/ so you ought not to admit an impres-
sion without examination, but say, 'Wait, let me
see who you are and whence you come,' just as
the nightwatch say, 'Show me your token.' "
"When you imagine some pleasure, beware,
as in the case of other impressions, that it does
not carry you away. Wait awhile and give your-
self pause. Then remember two things : the time
you will enjoy the pleasure, and the after time
of repentance and self-reproach. . . . And if
it seems to you opportune to realize the pleasure,
take heed that you be not mastered by its win-
ning sweetness."
"Wherefore make it your first endeavour not
to be carried away by an impression; for if once
EPICTETUS 149
you gain time and delay you will be more master
of yourself." 24
The process is fairly clear. Upon the mind,
already crowded with memories of the past, a
new impression is made by some object or event.
Our response in desire or aversion, in positive
or negative impulse, will depend upon our use
of this new impression; our use of it is coinci-
dent with our judgment of it; our judgment is
an act of assent or dissent, and our assent, when
given, is determined by the way the object or
event appears to us. All the consequences flow
from the impression itself and from the memory
of former impressions ; the mind creates nothing,
and knowledge comes to us by passive adapta-
tions. We are carried about in a circle of fatal-
ity, and there is no freedom except in that one
clause, when given. The consequences to our-
selves maybe of one sort if assent and judgment
follow immediately upon the impression; they
may be of an entirely different sort if we sus-
pend assent for a time, and so allow our judg-
ment to be modified by the stored-up body of
experience. 25
^Discourses I, iv s 11; II, xviii, 24; III, xii, 14; Manual 3$, 20.
Cf. Plutarch, Adv. Coloten 1122 c.
ssThe term "suspense" (epocM) is common to both Sceptics and
Stoics, but it has a different meaning in the two schools. The
Sceptic applies his suspense of judgment to all final conclusions
150 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
In the last analysis that which is mine, the
me, as distinguished from all that is not mine,
the not-me, is driven back by negation after ne-
gation to a power of suspension, which is some-
times called the Inner Check. We have a phi-
losophy superficially resembling Platonism,but
with a fundamental difference. For Epictetus
the soul, considered positively, is not a dual com-
pound of reason and the passions as Plato con-
ceived it, but is one and indivisible, a portion of
the pure reason of God. If passions break in to
perturb the quiet current of our life, it is because
the soul as a unit turns in a wrong direction and
ceases to function in accordance with its nature.
If you ask why and how such a perversion oc-
curs, the answer apparently will be that the nat-
ural operation of a reasonable soul is to act as a
stay upon the flux of impressions that continu-
ally invade it from the world, and that, in its
evil case, it fails so to operate. Evil in the soul
would thus be not so much a positive change in
the nature of that which is essentially good, as a
kind of relaxation of energy, an atony or tem-
porary sluggishness, to which it succumbs. Its
concerning the nature of things; appearances he simply accepts
at their face value as appearances. The Stoic exercises a sus-
pension of assent to appearances in order to maintain the final
judgment that all is really good.
EPICTETUS 151
passions are then a true passivity rather than an
active principle of evil. 26 But to the further ques-
tion why the soul suffers this relaxation, and
assents when it should not, there is no answer.
Neither was any answer given by Plato; but in
the case of the Stoics the very possibility of the
question is an arraignment of the ultimate mon-
ism of their physics.
And an equally troublesome question springs
up from the other side : Why is there any need
of that staying power of the will or reason ? What
is it in the nature of things that lies in wait for
us, so to speak, and takes advantage of the soul's
indolence? To explain this the Stoics have a
beautiful and, to me at least, haunting phrase,
first apparently introduced by Cleanthes, cer-
tainly used by Chrysippus, and not forgotten by
Epictetus "the seductiveness in things," "the
plausibility of circumstances," "the persuasion
of appearances," as the words are variously
translated. 27 We are, as it were, ravished by the
is the rhathymia of which I have written at length in The
Religion of Plato 253 ff. In Stoicism the actual word used is
atonia. The notion is connected with their principle of tonos,
energy, the active principle as contrasted with the passive, which
diminishes in force as the evolutionary process extends further
and further from the primeval source. Taking into account the
mechanical terms in which tonos is defined, one might say that
the Stoic conception of passion and will is a materialistic counter-
part of the Neoplatonic conception.
27 'H TriQavbrris r&v irpa.yfjuiTUj'.
152 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
persuasive beauty of the world and by its lure of
pleasures, and so the refraining will succumbs
to precipitate judgments, assenting indolently
where it should exercise suspension, admitting
that as good and desirable which a slower judg-
ment would recognize as really foreign to the
soul. The error of judgment, or false dogma,
would resolve itself at last into a darkening con-
fusion of the soul and the world, or, in the more
technical language of the school, into forgetful-
ness of the difference between what is mine and
not mine. I am inclined to accept this account of
error and evil as perhaps the finest in the history
of philosophy. It is at bottom a paraphrase of
the theory implicit in the Platonic ethics, and a
foreshadowing of the theory which will be held
by some of the wisest of the Christian theolo-
gians. It raises no logical difficulty there where
it belongs, though it may still leave the ultimate
problem of metaphysics unsolved and insolu-
ble. But no Stoic will tell you why or how, in a
world identical with God and perfectly organ-
ized, the plausibility of things should have this
power to seduce the will, turning reason into
passion and producing evil out of goodness. Nor
will he tell you why the morality of our specific
acts may depend on a suspension of assent, while
EPICTETUS 153
the root of all morality depends on our unhesi-
tating assent to the universe as it is and to life
as a whole. On the other hand, no genuine Stoic,
however hemay feel towards othermenas though
they were passive instruments of their dogmata,
will admit that he is not himself finally respon-
sible for his assent to error and for his own mis-
takes and unhappiness.
VII
The fact is that Stoicism, by a fault inherent in
its method, was perhaps of all philosophies the
most paradoxical. Seduced by the fascinations
of the combining reason, it started with an ab-
solutely monistic and deterministic theory of
the world, and then, in abhorrence at the im-
moral consequences of such a theory, accepted
the non-rational and dualistic intuitions of good
and evil. The inevitable result is a succession of
flaunting paradoxes which radiate from these
two contradictions : the world is totally good, yet
human experience is 'full of evil; and, all things
are fatally determined, yet man's will is free.
Evil, the Stoics assert in one breath is not real
but only apparent, the necessary imperfection
of the parts contributing to the perfection of the
154 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
whole ; yet almost in the same breath they are
painting man's life on earth in colours of the
blackest pessimism. The inconsistency is most
striking in Marcus Aurelius, who does not shrink
from the strongest, even the most revolting, terms
to describe the miseries of the body and of so-
ciety ; but Epictetus is not free of the same pes-
simism. Instruction in his school was directed to
nerving the pupils against a world bristling with
hostile forces: "Life is a soldier's service; one
man must keep guard, another go out as a scout,
another take the field." Yet these same pupils
are rebuked if, sent out as spies to reconnoitre
the land, they do not report, as did the Cynic
Diogenes, that "no enemy is near, all things are
full of peace." One is reminded of Jeremiah's
scornful words, "Peace, peace, when there is no
peace." And then, if a man suffers defeat in this
battle, is it that he has been borne down inno-
cently by superior force, or shall he be held re-
sponsible? No one is deprived of the truth will-
ingly, no one errs willingly, Epictetus will insist
in various language, and insist all the while with
equal fervour that every man is free and need
only exercise his will to be good. It is no solution
of these entanglements tomaintain that all things
are good and only thinking makes them evil.
EPICTETUS 155
Whence the evil thought? Whence the terrible
earnestness in a conflict with unreal shadows?
"To question to and fro
And to debate the evil of the world,
As though we bore no portion of that ill,
As though with subtle phrases we could spin
A woof to screen us from life's undelight.
. . . How vain are words,
When that which is opposed to them is more."
These embarrassments were not overlooked
by the ancient critics of the Porch as indeed
how should they be? At the very beginning the
Stoic had to meet the arguments of the Epi-
curean who could at least see the difficult posi-
tion of a philosophy which commanded men to
live according to nature, yet took no account of
pleasure and pain or even went so far as almost
to glory in pain. Surely pleasure is a natural
good, a thing desired by all men, and pain a
natural evil. The Platonist, who also made little
of pleasure and pain, could answer that he did
so because pleasure was in fact insignificant in
comparison with the happiness to be found in a
realm of the spirit quite apart from nature ; but
the Stoic left no such retreat open against his
adversaries. Then came the leaders of the so-
called Middle Academy, Axcesilas and Car-
156 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
neades, who for a hundred and fifty years plied
the Stoic stronghold with every weapon of scep-
ticism. It was easy for these trained logicians,
especially Carneades, to show the untenability
of a monistic optimism by simply pointing to the
innumerable instances of actual evil ; it was easy
to set forth the inconsistency of clinging to the
belief in Providence and conscious design in a
universe of absolute determinism ; and more vir-
ulently, as we have seen, they drove the Stoic
from point to point in his criterion of knowledge.
This warfare between the Academy and the
Porch was not forgotten, and long afterwards
Plutarch summed up the results in a crushing
essay De Stoicorum Repugnantiis. But for the
heart of the matter we may turn to the Christian
critics, to Justin Martyr, for instance, who struck
home in this notable passage :
"Everywhere right-minded lawgivers and
thinkers show this [the inherent sense of respon-
sibility in man for good and evil] by their com-
mands that such things we shall do and from
such things we shall refrain. And the Stoic
.philosophers also in their ethical theory show a
strong respect for these same truths, so that it is
clear there must be some fault in their natural-
istic doctrine of first principles. For let them say
that human actions are due to fate, or let them
EPICTETUS 157
say that God is nothing but transitory matter
always taking new forms and dissolving back
into itself again, the Stoics are caught on this
dilemma: either they will be found to acknow-
ledge only corruptible things and to teach that
God Himself as extended through the whole
and parts of the universe is involved in the sum
of evil, or else they must declare that there is no
such thing as good and evil." 28
It is curious and illuminating to hear William
James in our day applying the same dilemma,
in still more vigorous terms, to a modern equiva-
lent of the 'Stoic paradox:
"My trouble, you see, lies withmonism. Deter-
minism=monism; and a monism like this world
can't be an object of pure optimistic contempla-
tion. By pessimism I simply mean ultimate non-
optimism. The Ideal is only a part of this world.
Make the world a Pluralism, and you forthwith
have an object to worship. Make it a Unit, on
the other hand, and worship and abhorrence are
equally one-sided and equally legitimate reac-
tions. Indifferentism is the true condition of such
a world, and turn the matter how you will, I
don't see how any philosophy of the Absolute
can ever escape from that capricious alterna-
tion of mysticism and satanism in the treat-
ment of its great Idol, which history has always
shown. . . . Either close your eyes and adopt
28 Apology II, vi, 7.
158 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
an optimism or a pessimism equally daft ; or ex-
clude moral categories altogether from a place
in the world's definition, which leaves the world
unheimlich, reptilian, and foreign to man; or
else, sticking to it that the moral judgment is
applicable, give up the hope of applying it to
the whole:' 29
The logic of the Porch in fact was terribly
vulnerable, and as a result of the attacks deliv-
ered from the sceptics of the Academy the lead-
ers of the school tried to fortify their position
by various outworks, so to speak, built of thefts
from Aristotle and even more flagrantly from
Plato. The result was the so-called Middle Porch
of Panaetius and Posidonius, answering to the
Middle Academy.
But however Stoicism by these modifications
may have averted an immediate danger, it did
not render itself really immune ; it enlarged the
sentimental scope of its doctrine and humanized
its ethics, but it did so only by utterly confound-
ing a logic already sufficiently confused. Both
Panaetius and Posidonius clung to the physical
monism and determinism of Zeno, and then, in-
I, 238, 25T. See also p. 245. Unfortunately James,
doughty foe as* he was of every form of absolutism of the One,
by Ms theory of pluralism came very close to the opposite abso-
lutism of the many. Hence, with all his brilliancy and insight,
his failure to bring true spiritual relief from the prison house of
metaphysics.
EPICTETUS 159
stead of holding that human nature also was one
and purely rational, and facing full front the
embarrassments of such a psychology, they un-
dertook to slip Plato's dualistic conception of
the soul into an utterly incompatible metaphysic.
I am not writing a history of Greek philosophy
and have no need to go into the details of this
impossible mixture; it is sufficient to say that
Epictetus was evidently shocked by the mess
the word is not too strong into which Stoicism
had been thrown, and, in the main, reverted to
the earlier and authentic doctrine as it was de-
veloped by Chrysippus.
One admires the honesty of the reformer's
purpose, one is deeply impressed by the solidity
and rigour with which he carries out the ancient
tenets and applies them to life ; but the old in-
consistency still lurks like a serpent at the heart
of the system, scotched but not killed. It is one
of the irreparable misfortunes of philosophy
that some great thinker did not arise who, with
clearer vision and more radical hand, should
have thrown over the Stoic rationalism for the
Platonic dualism, and then, on that sounder
foundation, should have adopted and adapted
the large achievements of the Stoic teachers in
the field of ethics. 'Such a conversion was per-
160 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
fectly practicable, and the result might have
been a body of thought unshakable at the base
and majestic in its superstructure. 30 The Stoic
creed of dogmata would not be denied, but en-
riched with new significance. It would still be
true that all our philosophy and all conduct de-
pend on right or wrong judgments yet with a
difference. We should not say that no actual
wrong exists in this absolutely determined world,
and that things only seem wrong by a false judg-
ment, and so in a way are evil to us, with the
stubborn question still unanswered why we so
judge when we are parts of such a world. Rath-
er, we should say that both good and evil are real-
ly here in the sum of things, but that for us the
world may become a place of good or evil in ac-
cordance with our judgments. For when we
judge truly, and our opinion of right and wrong
coincides with the eternal laws, then the world
does indeed become good to us in so far as the
evil in it cannot invade the citadel of our being,
and we understand what Socrates meant when
he declared that no harm can befall a good man
either in this life or the next. The true office of
philosophy is to overcome evil, not to deny it.
soThis In a measure was actually done by Plutarch (e.g., the last
sections of De Tranqv&litate Animi) and other syncretists, but
never, as it seems to me, with full comprehension of the problem.
EPICTETUS 161
Then the 'Stoic Wheel, as I have called it,
with its distinction between mine and riot-mine
and the other pairs that follow, would not be
left to revolve in vacua, so to speak, but would
correspond to a final distinction in the nature of
things. And a like transformation would take
place in applying the Wheel to the three Fields.
Good and evil would depend on the character of
our desires and aversions, but a new and positive
content would be given to this direction of the
soul. 31 The idia, things that are ours, to which
desire should be directed, would now be identi-
fied with the Platonic Ideas where the interest
of the true self lies, and our aversion would be
turned towards the positive forces of evil in the
flux of phenomena. The bleak negation of the
Stoic would acquire a positive aspect in the true
life of the spirit. And so with the impulse to act
or not to act: how much of the inconsequence
observed in the obligations of life would be re-
moved, if we kept the sense of responsibility for
our part in a great drama of creation with its
eternal and ever-present issues; how the un-
reality felt in the duties prescribed by human
relations would be overcome, if the institutions
of society were regarded as necessary, though
siCf. Plato The Republic 518B.
162 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
faulty, copies of a divine order; how the cold-
ness that chills the theoretical brotherhood of
mankind would be warmed up, if the Stoic con-
ception of the sage as a being completely super-
ior to mortal frailty and emotion, impervious to
pain or sorrow, not even subject to temptation,
with no intermediary between his bleak, unat-
tainable perfection and the total folly of ordi-
nary men, were softened to the Socratic ideal of
the philosopher as one still striving for wisdom,
still contending with his passions, differing only
in degree of attainment from his unwiser com-
rade. For here again we are struck by the ano-
maly that a philosophy which begins with the
assumption of an impossible monism ends prac-
tically in a harsh and unreal dualism. 32 On the
other side, how much the profound intuition of
Plato might have gained in precise usefulness
through the subtle analysis of the Stoic ethics.
And then, in the Third Field, where the ethical
law is summed up in the word "assent," all that
the Stoics had added to philosophy might have
been retained, while the maddening query "as-
sent to what?" would have lost its sting. Right-
32The wearisome question of the Stoic sage, or perfect man, and
the possibility or impossibility of such a creature, is not dis-
cussed dialectically by Epictetus. What he made of the sage as a
personality of history we shall see in our study of Diogenes.
EPICTETUS 163
ness of assent would still be defined as a conse-
quence of that vigour of the soul which imposes
a stay upon the impressions surging through it
from the world, but the "seductiveness in things"
which makes such a suspension of judgment
necessary, and the passions of the soul itself,
would now have a substantial meaning.
And, lastly, the Stoic faith in the fatherhood
of God and the Stoic piety, how they would have
gained in fervour and security, if the foundation
on which such emotions ought to rest had not
been undermined. Even as it is, at whatever cost
of inconsistency, the religion of the Porch in
some respects marks a genuine advance upon
that of the Academy in the direction of Chris-
tianity. God, whatever He should have been log-
ically, was in fact to Epictetus no such cold ab-
straction as He was becoming in the metaphys-
ical school of the day, nor was He hard to know
and impossible to express quite as He had seemed
to Plato, nor was He a fancy to be grasped by
the imagination only. One cannot read Epicte-
tus without feeling that in his realization of the
divine nearness he was almost a Christian; and
this is so true of a contemporary Stoic, Seneca,
that Tertullian and Jerome actually regarded
him as a disciple of St. Paul and the Council of
164 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
Trent cited him as it did the Fathers of the
Church. "In thyself thou bearest Him/' says
Epictetus, "and art unaware that thou art defil-
ing Him with unclean thoughts and foul actions.
If an image of God were present, thou wouldst
not dare to behave so; but now God Himself
is present within thee, seeing all things, hear-
ing all things, yet thou art not ashamed of thy
thoughts and deeds, O slow to understand thy
own nature and estranged from God!" Thus the
central act of religion for Epictetus, as for all
those from Plato to Chrysostom who did not ut-
terly depart from the Tradition, was the en-
deavour to make one's self so far as possible like
to God:
"The philosophers say that the first thing one
must learn is this : 'that God exists and provides
for the universe, and that no man can act or even
conceive a thought or reflection without God
knowing. Next is to learn the true nature of the
gods. For whatever their nature is found to be,
he who will please and obey them must needs
try, so far as he can, to make himself like them.'
If the divine nature is faithful, he must be faith-
ful too ; if free, he must be free too ; if beneficent,
he too must be beneficent; if high-minded, he
must be high-minded: he must, in fact, as one
who makes God his ideal, follow this out in every
act and word."
EPICTETUS 165
There is nothing original in this conception
of "becoming like," but in the spirit of devotion
that went with it one catches a note that had
never before been sounded so clearly in pagan
worship. One day the lonely exile in Nicopolis,
after pointing out the manifold bountiful works
of Providence, seems to have forgotten the school-
room and the pupils who so many of them came
to him for ignoble purposes, and breaks into a
chant of benediction to the great and good Fa-
ther, greatest and best because He has given to
man the faculty to comprehend His beneficence.
Surely, all men ought at every moment to re-
member the divine goodness with thanksgiving:
"More than that: since most of you are walk-
ing in darkness, should there not be some one to
discharge this duty and to sing praises to God
for all? And what else can a lame old man like
me do but chant the praise of God? If indeed I
were a nightingale, I should sing as a nightin-
gale ; if a swan, as a swan : but as I am a rational
creature I must praise God. This is my task; I
do it, and I will not abandon this duty so long
as it is given me: and I invite you all to join in
this same song."
I know of nothing quite like that in the phi-
losophers not in Plato, not in Plotinus. It is
a note that will be caught up by the priests of a
166 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
new religion, and will find one of its sweetest
echoes in George Herbert:
"Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,
And put the penne alone into his hand,
And made him Secretarie of thy praise.
"Beasts fain would sing; birds dittie to their notes ;
Trees would be tuning on their native lute
To thy renown ; but all their hands and throats
Are brought to Man, while they are lame and mute.
"Man is the world's high Priest. He doth present
The sacrifice for all; while they below
Unto the service mutter an assent,
Such as springs use that fall and windes that blow.
"He that to praise and laud thee doth refrain
Doth not refrain unto himself alone,
But robs a thousand who would praise thee fain,
And doth commit a world of sinne in one.
"Wherefore, most sacred Spirit, I here present
For me and all my fellows praise to thee.
And just it is that I should pay the rent,
Because the benefit accrues to me."
We repeat the devotional passages of Epic-
tetus and Seneca and the other Stoics which echo
the magnificent hymn of Cleanthes, and we are
stirred deeply and rightly, indeed, for of in-
EPICTETUS 167
sincerity or hypocrisy there is no suspicion in
these men and then into our sympathetic emo-
tion creeps the benumbing recollection that this
Being of their worship is only a subtle form of
matter pervading the grosser visible elements;
that this Providence which we are asked to cele-
brate in chants of praise is only another name
for a mechanical law of expansion and contrac-
tion, absolutely predetermined in its everlasting
recurrences; and that this worshipping soul, this
boasted spark of reason which distinguishes man,
is nothing more than a glimmering flame of the
universal fire caught for a moment in an ephem-
eral cage of flesh, with no assurance of separate
duration, no independence of personality, is
nothing more at best than a bundle of dogmata
with no spiritual entity behind them. How dif-
ferent, one reflects, might have been the whole
course of the world's inner life, how much of the
estrangement between philosophy and religion
might have been avoided, if Panaetius and more
particularly Posidonius, in their reform of Ze-
no's psychology, had shaken off the tyranny of
metaphysics, and, going a step further, had ac-
cepted the fundamental dualism of Plato instead
of merely borrowing shreds and tatters of its
spiritual implications. Certainly the leaders of
168 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
the Porch, if ever any religious guides, made the
great refusal.
And the result of that refusal is the note of
sadness on which this philosophy ends a sad-
ness nobler in character, yet infinitely more pa-
thetic, I sometimes think, than the final joyless-
ness of therival schoolof the Garden. All through
the Discourses of Epictetus at intervals occurs
the ominous phrase, "The door is open," "Open
is the door." The practice of philosophy, he used
to say, is summed up in the two words c *bear"
and "forbear" (anecho / w j apechou) ; and then,
if the hand of the world became too heavy and
temptation pressed too close, there was left to
every man the one way of escape from failure
and disgrace. I would not infer that this remov-
al of the "canon 'gainst self -slaughter" implies
anything weak or contemptible in the creed or
lives of these men ; there is no trace in Epictetus
or in any other genuine Stoic of the "sickly incli-
nation" 33 which led Donne to argue the legiti-
macy of suicide for a Christian. Voluntary exit
from the battle field was permitted only when
victory was impossible and defeat certain, and
the signs were such that the sage could know
surely the summons of the Captain to retire. The
17.
EPICTETUS 169
mere shirking of pain and danger was scorned
by the Stoic as loyally as by the Christian, and
the record of the deaths of Thraseas and Arria
and the other political martyrs in Tacitus is the
most stirring memory from the dark days of the
Empire ; yet there, after all, meeting us at every
turn, is the bitter phrase, "The door is open/'
a strange admission to be wrung from the heart
of men who taught that all things are for the
best and that there is no real evil in this world.
But the sadness is not so much in the conces-
sion of the open door as in the thought of the
emptiness that lies beyond : "When God fails to
provide for you, then He is giving the signal of
retreat, He has opened the door, and says to
you, 'Come/ Where? To nothing fearful,
but thither whence you were born, to things
friendly and akin to you, to the elements" and
that is all. These are honest words, no doubt,
instinct with that stubborn courage and that
forced, almost sullen, tranquillity which to the
popular mind whether justly or not sum up
the meaning of the boasted Stoic apathy. Inevi-
tably one compares this utmost comfort offered
by Epictetus with the Christian triumph in mar-
tyrdom: "To the baser of mankind witness to
the Lord by blood seems to be mere death and
i 7 o HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
that the most violent, for they know not thjit this
gate of death is the beginning of true lif e.T 4 Like
the Epicurean, so the Stoic, notwithstandfengTiis
much brave talk about a fatherland beyond the
grave and about his kinship to God, was deliber-
ately shutting his eyes on "things more sublime
than mortal happiness." Perhaps the most beau-
tiful term in the 'Stoic vocabulary is the eurhoia,
by which they expressed the even current of the
sage's life, moving on like a majestic river. It is
a noble ideal and no doubt often in large meas-
ure attained; yet for the Stoic the river of life
was hidden from the sun, and deep in his heart
he who sailed thereon must have felt himself as
a waif borne on a stream of endless and mean-
ingless mutations. The words with which Mat-
thew Arnold closes his essay on Marcus Aure-
lius apply more exactly to the wistful Emperor
in his palace than to the exiled f reedman of our
study, but they ought not to be forgotten in any
estimation of what Stoicism gave and failed to
give: "We see him wise, just, self -governed,
tender, thankful, blameless; yet, with all this,
agitated, stretching out his arms for something
beyond, tendentemque marms ripae ulterioris
amore"
3*Clemens Alex., Strom. IV, vii, 44.
EPICTETUS 171
As for Epictetus, the old lame schoolmaster
of jXTicopolis, he Is one of the supreme doctors
of ethical experience, there is no doubt of it ; yet
he who would read him wisely, I sometimes think,
must come to the Discourses as a Platonist and
not as a Stoic, and must write between the lines
and insert into the definitions a truth of which
Epictetus himself had been robbed by the false
usurpations of the intellectus sibi per missus.
CHAPTER V
PLOTINTJS
THE sects of Epicurus and Zeno go back through
their predecessors to immediate association with
Socrates, and are rivals of the Academy, if not
openly anti-Platonic. The philosophy we are now
to study was held by its founder, and is some-
times held today, to be rather a genuine restora-
tion after many years of the teaching of Plato :
it is called in the schools Neoplatonism. Yet to
me, if anything is clear, it is that the dominating
note of Plotinus belongs to a current of thought
which is more a perversion than a development
of what was learnt in the Academy. 1 And in view
of the extraordinary revival of interest in the
mystics shown today, and in Plotinus as the fa-
ther of them all, it should seem to be a matter of
some importance to get a clear notion of what
Neoplatonism really was, and to consider how
iDean Inge's otherwise illuminating and profound study of The
Philosophy of Plotinus is in my judgment vitiated by the failure
to observe the radical differences between Platonism and Neo-
platonism,
172
PLOTINUS 173
far it is a source of true religion and of the purer
life of the spirit.
Fortunately we have for Plotinus, what we have
for no other of the ancient philosophers, a good
contemporary biography, composed by his pu-
pil and literary executor, Porphyry. He was
born in Egypt about A.B. 205. In his twenty-
eighth year 2 he became interested in philosophy,
and frequented the most highly reputed profes-
sors in Alexandria ; but with little satisfaction to
himself until he was directed to Ammonius Sac-
cas, with whom he studied for eleven years. The
question was raised in antiquity, and recently
has been reopened, how closely Plotinus fol-
lowed the teaching of Ammonius, and how far
he felt the direct influence of a certain TsTume-
nius of Apamea. It is probable that Ammonius
himself owed a good deal to Numenius, and that
in this way ideas of the Apamean philosopher
reached Plotinus. But there is reason to believe
that for the most part Plotinus was a faithful,
though by no means servile, disciple of Ammo-
nius, who should therefore be recognized as the
2This is the year given by Porphyry, but, as will be seen, it al-
lows little or no time for Plotinus 5 study with the preliminary
professors.
174 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
true founder of Neoplatonism. Porphyry tells
us that Herennius, Origen (the pagan), and
Plotinus agreed to keep the doctrine of their
master secret, and that Plotinus held to this com-
pact until his fellow students broke it. And there
is another argument. Origen (the Christian) was
also in his youth a pupil of Ammonius, and Ori-
gen's theology so strikingly resembles the meta-
physics of Plotinus in many details that their
common source is a natural inference. As for
the education of Plotinus in other respects, it is
singular in that it entirely missed the rhetorical
training then regnant in the schools. His hand-
writing was slovenly, his spelling and grammar
faulty, his pronunciation illiterate, his style so
crabbed that the best scholar of his day found it
unintelligible and the modern Grecian reads it
with agony.
At the age of thirty-nine Plotinus joined the
Emperor Gordian in his eastern expedition, be-
ing eager to acquaint himself at first hand with
the practice of philosophy among the Persians
and Indians. When Gordian lost his life in Me-
sopotamia, the inquisitive student escaped with
some difficulty to Antioch, and from thence to
Rome, where, at the age of forty, he opened a
class in philosophy. After some eighteen years
PLOTINUS 175
Porphyry joined him, and continued in the
school for six years. Then came changes. Por-
phyry went away to Sicily, and other pupils left
him; friends had died; the Emperor who had
protected him was murdered; he was afflicted
with a distressing disease, and so, in solitude and
suffering, he retired to Campania, where he died
in the second year of the Emperor Claudius, at
the age of sixty-six. He had summoned a friend
and pupil, the physician Eustochius, to his bed-
side ; but the friend was slow in coming, and the
last words of Plotinus were these: "You see I
am still waiting for you" ; and then : "I strive to
render up the Divine in myself to the Divine in
the AIL"
So far as we can judge of the man, he had
lived in harmony with his dying words; his life,
in the full sense of the phrase used by Plato and
so many other philosophers of Greece, was a
continual study and practice of death. 'Such, we
are told, was his shame of existence in the flesh
that he would not speak of his family or the place
of his birth. "When urged by a favourite pupil to
allow his portrait to be taken, he declined, with
this excuse : "Is it not enough to carry for a time
this image which nature has put about us? And
must I consent also to leave behind me an image
176 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
of an image as a precious spectacle for poster-
ity?" Four separate times, according to Por-
phyry, he was caught up beyond all thinking
and all thought into ecstatic union with God;
and indeed always for him the goal and the vi-
sion lay near at hand. Through the metaphysic-
al jargon that abounds in his works we can see
that his power over men was owing to a direct
experience of the Divine; and when he spoke
there came a light upon his countenance and a
new beauty upon his features as a testimony of
the truth.
Like other masterful mystics Plotinus ap-
peared as a prophet of things forgotten, a dis-
coverer of things unknown, a guide in the spir-
itual way, preacher of a new Evangel. The em-
pire in those troubled days of Gallienus was al-
most at its lowest ebb ; faction and treason were
rife in the Capital; the barbarians were pressing
in from all sides ; pestilence and poverty swept
through the lands ; some terrible and final catas-
trophe seemed to be immanent over society. In
such a world and such an age, it is not strange
that the call of peace, the annunciation of a se-
curity that no present calamities could shake,
the promise of liberty for the soul, should have
appealed to many as a true voice from heaven.
PLOTINUS 177
Men of power and learning flocked to the school
of this teacher out of Egypt. One of these, the
Senator Rogatianus, went so far as to surrender
his property, emancipate his slaves, renounce
his political honours, and practise a life of reli-
gious abstinence. The house of Plotinus was
filled with boys and girls who had been entrust-
ed to his care by their dying parents. The em-
peror and his wife so venerated him that they
planned to restore an old ruined city, once ac-
cording to tradition the home of (Pythagorean)
philosophers, and in this seat, rechristened Pla-
tonopolis, to establish Plotinus and his friends
under a constitution modeled upon Plato's
Laws. The scheme fell through, from jealousies
and intrigues at court as Porphyry believed.
Plotinus was readier with tongue than with
pen, and it was only under pressure from his
pupils that he consented to put his philosophy
into writing. During the period at Rome before
he was joined by Porphyry he composed twenty-
one treatises ; then in the six years of Porphyry's
time he wrote twenty-four more, and, finally, in
the two closing years of isolation he added nine.
These fifty-four books Porphyry edited, and ar-
ranged in groups of nine, making the six so-
called Enneads.
178 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
The Enneads, composed and edited in such a
manner, offer anything but easy reading. Be-
sides the difficulty of Plotinus' language, there
is a baffling obscurity in the connexion of some
of his ideas, not to say in the ideas themselves.
Of recent years it has become the fashion to ex-
plain certain fundamental inconsistencies by the
fact that his books belong to three periods, gov-
erned by different influences. 3 There is some-
thing in this, no doubt ; but it does not go far
enough, and I fail to grasp any radical change
from the Platonic books of the first period to the
super-Platonic books, as one may call them, of
the second period written under the influence
of Porphyry. Something more than chronology
is involved. There are, as I see it, two modes of
thought running through the Enneads from be-
ginning to end, essentially incompatible one with
the other yet intimately merged together. One
of these is a simple but profound philosophy,
expressing a genuine psychological experience
and closely related to Platonism ; the other is a
metaphysic, of Aristotelian and Stoic stamp,
which not only suffers the kind of self-destruc-
tion that always attends the logic of unchecked
rationalism, but works confusion in the philos-
sSuch is the thesis of Fritz Heinemann's remarkable work,
Plotin.
PLOTINUS 179
ophy of which it is a parasite. In our study of
Plotinus, therefore, we shall deal separately, so
far as this can be done, with his philosophy and
with his metaphysics, remembering however that
such a discrimination is our own and was not
made by him.
II
One cannot read much in Plotinus, at least I
cannot, without feeling that his philosophy be-
gins, and in a manner ends, in a strong, almost
a morbid, sense of the inadequacies of our mor-
tal state. His mood is one of dismay at the sub-
servience of the soul to its own mean and impure
desires, and at the unceasing change and insta-
bility of its mundane interests, with death hover-
ing over all. Life, under these terms, seems to
him no more than "an expense of spirit in a waste
of shame." Such a feeling, indeed, lies close to
the origin of all philosophy, as of most poetry;
but with Plotinus this very discomfort forced
upon his mind an overwhelming conviction that
there is that within us which stands apart from
a world of confusion and disgrace. Whence the
desire to escape, unless there is something that
feels the desire and is aware of its own immuta-
ble purity?
i8o HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
"Plato, thou reasonest well.
It must be so ; else whence this pleasing hope,
This longing after immortality?"
In these troubled nether regions the soul is
like the sea-god Glaucus, whom Plato describes
in The Republic, disfigured by clinging shells
and all kinds of overgrowth. If we would be free,
we must strip the soul clean of these excres-
cences, and, looking to its philosophy, discern
its true nature, its higher contacts, and its kin-
ship with the divine. Of necessity evils parade
about the earth, Plotinus says, quoting now from
the Theaetetus; and our only way of escape is in
the acquisition of those celestial qualities where-
by we are made like unto God. And so the phi-
losophic life, that experience which springs from
obedience to deep-lying instincts of our nature,
will be a constant striving of the soul to know
itself and its God. Growth in wisdom will be
symbolized as an ascent from this world to an-
other, a turning away from what is "here" to
what is "there." For the fatherland, where the
Father dwells, is not here, but yonder. This as-
cent of the soul will be by three paths, the aes-
thetic, the ethical, and the intellectual, by one or
all, according as the start, to use a distinction
known to Plato, is from the perception of the
PLOTINUS 181
beautiful or the good or the true. And in each of
these paths there are three stages.
It is a little puzzling at first to find so ascetic
a writer as Plotinus, one so scornful of the graces
of language, touched by a passion for beauty
such as few other seers have felt. But so it is ; and
the great sixth book of the fir siEnnead, together
with the eighth and ninth of the fifth Ennead,
fairly quivers with the aesthetic emotion of the
Phaedrus and the Symposium, while in some re-
spects they enlarge and correct Plato's theory
where it is narrowed by ethics. Beauty, as we
first learn to feel it, is addressed to the eye and
the ear. But even here what attracts the philo-
sophic observer is not merely the external sym-
metry of parts, since simple things can be lovely
as well as compound things ; the appeal is rather
by that within the object which is akin to the ob-
serving soul. Beauty shines forth there where
the Idea has entered and made itself master of
what otherwise is ugly with disorder and inco-
herence and lawless multiplicity; that is how the
material object is transfigured by communi-
cating in the Logos that flows from the Divine.*
*To this day there is' no satisfactory English translation of the
Enneads. Thomas Taylor's version embraces only selections and,
though praiseworthy in some respects, rather blunts the sharp
outlines of the original K. S. Guthrie has published a complete
translation, for which one must applaud his courage; but, one
182 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
But there are purer and loftier beauties than
those of the eye and the ear, ravishing powers
which are hidden from the many. For as it is not
for those who have been born blind to speak of
the graceful forms of the material world wrapt
for them in darkness, so there is a beauty of con-
duct and learning and all that order of which it
behoves those to hold silence who have never
cared for such things ; nor may they tell of the
splendours of virtue who have never known the
face of justice and temperance, beautiful be-
yond the lights of evening and of dawn. Such
vision is reserved for those who see with the eye
of the soul; and seeing they will rejoice, and a
desire will fall upon them, which is not pain,
deeper than all that colour and moulded shape
can ever stir.
And still above rides Beauty the solitary-
dwellingExistence, the Good, the unique source,
the secret hope of every heart. And he that shall
know this vision with what passion of love shall
he not be seized, with what wondering delight,
what longing to be molten into one with it!
regrets to add, it so teems with inaccuracies as to be utterly
untrustworthy. Stephen Mackenna has completed a careful and
scholarly version of the three first Enneads. He is free and
sometimes unduly quaint, but his work, when finished, will be a
notable addition to our philosophical literature. In my para-
phrases and quotations of Plotinus I have drawn largely on this
version, so far as it extends.
PLOTINUS 183
Surely, if he that has not yet seen this Being
-must hunger for it as for all his welfare, he that
knows will be stricken by a salutary terror, flood-
ed with unspeakable gladness.
But what must one do? How shall one pre-
pare one's self for the arduous path? As there
are purifications and the laying aside of gar-
ments for those who approach the holy myster-
ies, so it is with those who would ascend to the
^sanctuary of Beauty. He that has strength, let
him arise, and withdraw into himself, leaving
without all that the eyes know, turning away
from the delight of fair bodies that once en-
thralled him. These he will no longer pursue,
for he knows them to be copies, vestiges, shad-
ows, and his desire is now towards the reality.
And so, as if lightened of a heavy burden, he
shall mount with swift and easy steps. But it is
otherwise with those who cling to the pleasures
of the flesh. For if any one follows what is like
a beautiful shape playing over water is there
not a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how
he sank into the depths of the current and was
swept away into nothingness? It is thus with him
who pursues the charm of material forms, for-
getful that they are images fleeting over the
abyss ; he sinks down, not in body but in soul, to
184 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
depths of infinite darkness and sadness, sight-
less himself to have commerce only with blind
shadows.
The aesthetic ascent proceeds from the per-
ception of visible objects of beauty to the invisi-
ble but gracious acts of the soul, and from these
to the uttermost fountain of all that is fair and
lovely. ItJs^liaQst^ur^Xlatonism, with how-
ever two jm^rtajitje.TOe^tions. Plato nowhere
gives a hint of that mystical vision wherein at
last the seer and the seen merge together in one
indistinguishable act of objectless contempla-
tion. Of this dubious development we shall have
more to say elsewhereiin another direction Plo-
tinus made a valuable correction to the doctrine
of Ideas, and may be said, without quibbling, to
have been more Platonic than Plato. Art, it is
well known, except under the most stringent
discipline was always a matter more or less sus-
pect to Plato, and his banishment of the poets
from his ideal commonwealth was a theme that
racked the invention of his apologetic admirers.
This is not the place to discuss at length what
has generally seemed an aberration in the most
Homeric of all philosophers, as he was called.
The point here to be observed is that in the tenth
book of The Republic he excused his suspicion
PLOTINUS 185
of art by describing the artist as merely an imi-
tator of imitations, and therefore as twice re-
moved from Ideas and the realm of immediate
truth with which the philosopher is concerned.
Why, one asks, did not Plato, taught by his own
technique, understand that the great artist has
his eye fastened not on nature or manufactured
objects as on an opaque veil, but is really look-
ing through these to the Ideas behind the cur-
tain? Why did he not see that the artist is no
slave of nature, but at once her lover and, as it
were, her corrector and finisher, and more truly
a maker than he who fashions works of utility
with his hands? This is the question asked and
answered by Plotinus; and by so doing he jus-
tified Platonism as the artist's philosophy par
excellence*
$Enneads V, viii, 1; ix, 2, 11. Dean Inge, II, 215, observes:
"Here he [Plotinus] agrees with Philostratus, who in an epoch-
making passage [Vit. Apott. vi, 19] says that great works of art
are produced not by imitation (the Aristotelian plfjwris) but by
imagination (Qavraffta) , 'a wiser creator than imagination [sic,
imitation], for imitation copies what it has seen, imagination
what it has not seen.' The true artist fixes his eyes on the arche-
typal Logoi, and tries to draw inspiration from the spiritual
power which created the forms of bodily beauty. . . . This is a
real advance upon Plato and Aristotle." It may be said that
this theory of art was* not entirely ignored by Plato, as e.g.,
Sophist 067 c; but such a passage cannot weigh against the com-
mon trend of his criticism. James Adam, in his note on Republic
598 A, enters the defence that "Plato's own conception of a tran-
scendent self-existing Beauty has proved an inexhaustible foun-
tain of inspiration to some of the greatest artists, notably, for
instance, in connexion with the Platonic Academy at Florence
i86 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
It will have been observed that in the middle
stage of the aesthetic ascent comeliness and vir-
tue clasp hands, and that in the last stage they
are quite merged together in the Beautiful and
the Good, which are one. And so the transition
is easy to the second of the three ways, the ethic-
i,ii,i al. We attain likeness to God, Plotinus says,
quoting Plato, by becoming just and holy and
wise. But, he adds, such a precept seems to im-
ply that our human virtues are also qualities of
the divine Being; and how can that be? Is God
wise by reasoning as we reason, or brave because
in the days of Michel Angelo." And this is abundantly true. But
on the whole E. J. Urwick, in the eleventh chapter of his Mes-
sage of Plato, has said the truer thing: "Not so, Plato would
reply ; this is art's great illusion. The ecstasy of the art-inspired
soul is not the ecstasy of God-knowledge. It is only an emotional
shadow of the true ecstasy fleeting, impermanent, unreal. Dan-
gerous, too, as are all extreme emotional states. For if you think
these are real, you will never reach the true vision of God. . , .
And the penalty of all emotional states will overtake you. As cer-
tainly as emotion is unstable, so certainly will reaction follow on
realization. You will rise to the heights only to fall again to
deeper depths. . . . Make it [art], if you will, the basis of all
your early religious education: make it, as you must, the ground-
work of the good environment in which the learning soul should
live. Treat it in this way, as the servant of the spiritual life, and
its dangers are gone. But if it is- protested, as it is today, and as
it was beginning to be among the Greeks in Plato's time, that
art cannot reach its highest development in any subordination
whatever, but must be free a cult in itself, an end in itself
then, like everything else which makes such a claim, it must be
*bowed out 1 of the good life." Mr. Urwick's book has been sharp-
ly criticised, and justly. I too would repudiate certain aspects
of his Oriental mysticism as applied to Plato; but I think, never-
theless, that he has done a work of vital importance as a correc-
tive of the Platonism prevalent in Germany an<J England today.
PLOTINUS 187
he has aught to fear, or temperate because He
has passions to restrain, or just because He has
aught to withhold? No, if virtue abides in the
divine world, it is not such as we practise in these
trammels of the flesh and amid these counter-
claims of individual souls; or rather, let us say,
virtue is here, while its source and law are there,
and by participation we become like to that
which is not like to us. The moral assimilation
to God, therefore, means not a mere growth in
kind, a change in degree, so to speak, but de-
mands an alteration in nature and a conversion
of the soul.
As the soul is evil bjr interfusing with the body,
and sharing the body's moods and thinking the
body's thoughts, so its first step in goodness will
be by usurping the command in this partnership,
and by imposing measure and order upon in-
stincts which of themselves are disorderly and
measureless. Hence the civic virtues, as Plato
calls them, the limit and bound set upon our de-
sires, the removal of false judgments, the re-
spect for equality. And this is the beginning of
the flight from the world and of the great pur-
gation. The soul will rise to the second stage of
goodness by thinking its own thoughts, which is
wisdom, and by feeling nought for the body's
188 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
sake, which is temperance, and by fearing not
its separation from the body, which is fortitude,
and by holding its lower members in subjection
to reason, which is righteousness or justice. By
i,ii,5 this purgation of virtue the passions are dis-
pelled anger, fear, and the like, with grief and
all its kin. The soul is disengaged and set free;
it lives then not virtuously, but in contact with
the principle of virtue ; it is not measured, but is
itself the law of measure ; it is not subject to rea-
son, but is itself reason.
That is the second stage of the ethical ascent,
attaining which the soul has become like to God,
dwelling in undivided contemplation, which is
possession, of all beauty of the Ideal virtues. But
still beyond, in the philosophy of Plotinus, lies
that highest reach wherein likeness to God is
i, vn, i transformed into identity with the Good. To that
utter point are directed all aspi&tions, all loves,
every act; and therefore, when the soul has
mounted to this apex of its course, it no longer
aspires, no longer loves, no longer acts, having
no longer an end outside of itself; nor is there
any division within itself of desire and desired,
of seer and seen. It abides in its own peace ; it is
not good, but Goodness.
There are several methods of explaining the
PLOTINUS 189
intellectual ascent, but the easiest of these per-
haps, and that which shows most clearly the re-
lation of this experience to the moral and aes-
thetic, will begin with the activity of the soul as
it contemplates the external world of sight and
sound. Out of a confused mass of impressions
and sensations that follow one another in time,
the soul, as a thinking mind, discovers a seeming
order in disorder. Gradually the plan and pur-
pose of things stand out more sharply, the mind
is stirred to admiration at the beauty and right-
ness and wisdom of the whole, and begins to re-
flect more deeply on the significance of what it
sees, and on its own place amid the kaleidoscop-
ic phenomena of nature. It becomes more and
more aware of some power within nature that
moves and governs in conformity with its, the
soul's, own modes of thinking. The centre of in-
terest shifts from contemplation of the world to
the act of contemplation itself. And so by de-
grees the reality of life will seem to be not a soul
reflecting on phenomena outside of itself in an
impenetrable sphere of time and space, but the
inner activity of a pure < intelligence, or Nous*
*Nous is the Hellenistic term for reason in this* higher order of
mental activity. Noumena are the Ideas of the Nous, the objects
of its inner reflection as? distinguished from phenomena as ob-
jects of contemplation outside of itself. Nota are the same as
noumena, but rather more objectively considered, more distinct^
that is, from the act of reflection. It is very hard to avoid the
use of these technical terms.
igo HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
communing with its own Ideas, or noumena* of
wfyeh the signs of intelligence displayed in the
world are an accidental outflow. But these nou-
mena are in the Nous, of the Nous itself; "up-
ward" and "inward" are synonymous terms to
the Neoplatonist; and the intellectual ascent
may thus be described as a passage from the soul
engaged in discursive reasoning to the soul en-
gaged in intuition of its own multiple powers.
But there is a step beyond this, when the mind
begins to consider that these noumena are not
impressions forced upon it by some external
necessity, as the phenomena were, or seemed to
be, but are its own free activity, and that, by
withdrawing this activity, it can plunge, as it
were, into itself, passing thus from the one-many
to the One. Here all disquiet ceases. Here all
division; all multiplicity, come to an end; the
soul is no longer an intelligence communing with
its Ideas, it is not even an intelligence reflecting
upon itself (for such reflection still implies par-
tition and duality) , but simply Itself, the Ab-
solute One which is not thinking or thought, but
the goal of all thinking and thought.
The end of knowledge is not unlike a self-
denying ordinance, where truth and goodness
and beauty have dissolved together by losing
PLOTINUS 191
their distinctions/ and by this loss have tran-
scended whatever we can name or think of as
existence. The three ways by which the goal is
reached might be likened to three mountain
paths that start from different points at the
base, and as they ascend draw ever nearer and
nearer together. As the paths approach, the
climbers thereon catch glimpses of one another
in the open places, and hail one another with
cries of greeting and encouragement; until, at
the last, they meet on the summit in the wide
light and the free air, with nothing about them,
nothing above them, savea vast emptiness. There
is nothing more to say but the Neti, neti, "It is
not so, not so," of the Hindus. Plotinus himself,
we are told, had suffered the ecstasy four sepa-
rate times ; and after the passages on beauty, in
which his language glows with a fire caught from
Plato, he is most impressive when, forgetting the
difference of the ways, he strives to convey some
intimation of the final vision wherein, seeing all,
one sees nothing. In his arrangement of the En-
neads Porphyry has appropriately placed last
the book which may be called the Apocalypse of
our western Bible of mysticism. This is the con-
clusion:
7At times, however, Plotinus repudiates such an identification,
and insists that the Good is above the Beautiful
192 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
"What, then, is the One and what Its nature?
We cannot be surprised to find It difficult to teH
of, since even Existence and the Ideas resist our
penetration though all our knowing is based up-
on the Ideas. The further the human Soul, or
Mind, ventures towards the Formless (to what
is either above or below Form and Idea) , the
more is it troubled ; it becomes itself, as it were,
undefined, unshaped, in face of the shifting va-
riety before it, and so it is utterly unable to take
hold; it slips away; it feels that it can grasp
nothing. It is at pain in these alien places, and
often is glad to give up all its purpose and to fall
back upon the solid ground of the sense-grasped
world and there take rest. . , .
"Our greatest difficulty is that consciousness
of the One comes not by knowledge, not even by
such an intuitive Intellection as possesses us of
the lower members of the Intellectual Order,
but by an actual Presence superior to any know-
ing. The Soul, when it deals with matters of
knowledge, suffers a certain decline from its
Unity, for knowing is still an act of reasoning,
and reasoning is a multiple act, an act which leads
the Soul down to the sphere of number and mul-
tiplicity. The Soul, therefore, must rise above
knowledge, above all its wandering from its
Unity; it must hold itself aloof from all know-
ing and from all the knowable and from the
very contemplation of Beauty and Good, for all
Beauty and Good are later than this, springing
PLOTINUS 193
from This as the daily light springs from the
sun. . . .
"The Supreme is not absent from any one
and yet is absent from all ; present everywhere
It is absent except only to those that are pre-
pared to receive It, those that have wrought
themselves to harmony with It, that have seized
It and hold It by virtue of their own Likeness
to It and by the power in themselves akin to the
power which rays from It. These and these only,
whose Soul is again as it was when it came from
out of the Divine, are free of what Vision of the
Supreme Its mighty nature allows. . . .
"It indeed does not aspire after us, in order
that It may be conversant with us ; but we aspire
after It, in order that we may revolve about It,
We indeed perpetually revolve about It, but we
do not always behold It. As a band of singers,
however, though it moves about the coryphaeus,
may be diverted to the survey of something for-
eign to the choir [and thus become disobedient],
but when it converts itself to him, sings weU,
and truly subsists about him ; thus also we per-
petually revolve about the Principle of all things,
even when we are perfectly loosened from It,
and have no longer a knowledge of It. Nor do
we always look to It ; but when we behold It,
then we obtain the end of our wishes, and rest
[from our search after felicity]. Then also we
are no longer discordant but form a truly divine
dance about It. ...
194 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
"The Soul restored to Likeness goes to its
Like and holds of the Supreme all that Soul can
hold, . . . that which is before all things that
are, over and apart from all the universe of Ex-
istence. This is not to say that in this plunging
into the Divine the Soul reaches nothingness: it
is when it is evil that it sinks towards nothing-
ness : by this way, this that leads to the Good, it
finds itself; when it is the Divine it is truly it-
self, no longer a thing among things. It aban-
dons Being to become a Beyond-Being when its
converse is in the Supreme. He who knows him-
self to have become such, knows himself now an
image of the Supreme ; and when the phantasm
has returned to the Original, the journey is
achieved. Suppose him to fall again from the
Vision, he will call up the virtue within him and,
seeing himself all glorious again, he will take his
upward flight once more, through virtue to the
Divine Mind, through the Wisdom There to the
Supreme. And this is the life of the Gods, and
of Godlike men, a life without love of the world,
a flight of the Alone to the Alone." 8
Ill
Such is the ascent, and such the consummation
of blessedness. It will have been observed that
The fourth paragraph of this passage is taken from the trans-
lation of Thomas Taylor, the rest from the appendix to Mr. Mac-
kenna's first volume.
PLOTINUS 195
this report of the upward way contains two re-
lated but not identical elements. In the first
place, and essentially, it gives the actual psycho-
logical experience of the man Plotinus, who
dwelt in Rome at a certain time, and who, amid
the distractions and fears of a dissolving world,
sought for himself and for others a plan of se-
curity and liberty. That, in a manner, is not
Neoplatonism alone, but the burden of all phi-
losophy; for the world is always distracted, al-
ways filled with alarms and threatenings, and
always the cry is to find a refuge from its per-
turbations ; the goal of wisdom is always an ata-
raxy in one form or another. With Plotinus the
search led inwards, into himself; and through
all his writings, mixed with much that is ex-
traneous and with some things that perplex the
mind, there runs the note of wonder and joy of
one who has discovered the majesty and ever-
lasting value of his own soul. The ascent to the
height, the journey to the centre, is no more
than a figurative expression of this discovery,
which indeed is philosophy. Let a man, he says
to those who doubt, look to his soul stripped of
all that clings to her, rather, let him consider
himself and that which veritably concerns him,
and surely he shall see within himself a cosmos
196 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
all of mind and all of light, illuminated, as it
were, from a central flame of Goodness which
is the unexhausted fountain of outpouringtruth
and joy. His desire will be set no longer upon
the visible and dying things of earth, but upon
eternal, unbodied realities. Then shall he under-
stand the words of Empedocles : "Hail and fare-
well, henceforth I am for you a deathless god."
The way of purification is to the knowledge of
our better selves, and our true science is within.
For the soul does not run abroad when she would
have vision of temperance and righteousness,
but sits at home, and so, in self -contemplation
and in recollection of what she has been, beholds
those virtues as fair statues of gold, standing
there, wiped clean of every stain.
That is the personal experience at the heart of
the Plotinian philosophy. And with it goes the
belief that a man's soul is not isolated in a world
with which it has no bonds of sympathy, that
philosophy is not private only but cosmic. The
ascent is not made in a vast emptiness of unreal-
ity, but our inner change means at each step the
consciousness of a new environment and of a
new law, or, if you choose, a different aspect of
the one all-embracing law. The first awakening
brings with it the hint of a world-soul, of which
PLOTINUS i 97
our individual soul is a member, and which is re-
lated to the visible universe as our soul is asso-
ciated with the body, though without the disa-
bilities of fragmentary existence. By that know-
ledge we feel our withdrawal into ourselves to
be no selfish or sullen isolation, but a richer com-
munion with the innumerable souls of others
who, like us, are members of one sentient life.
We rise higher into a larger sphere of the senses,
wherein we see without distraction and hear
without perturbation, being at once in the world
but not broken by its multiplicity. 9 And then, as
we withdraw from the senses, we are rapt into a
noetic sphere, where the intuitive faculty of the
soul, identified now with the cosmic Nous, en-
joys the contemplation of those eternal Ideas
of which the visible world is, as it were, an image
hovering like a mirage over the abyss of chaos.
Last of all, the ecstatic trance, in which the dis-
tinction between the mind and its Ideas, the self
and self-knowledge, passes away, is not, so Plo-
tinus would have us believe, a mere swooning
and eclipse of the soul while the world goes
booming on, but a flight of the Alone to the
Alone. Sense and spiritual contemplation and
This conception of a soul in the universe runs through Platonic,
Stoic, and Neoplatonic philosophy. See Philebus 30 A; Arnim,
Fragm. II, 1015; Plotinus' IV, iii, 7; The Religion of Plato 116.
ig8 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
mystic union are psychological states corre-
sponding to cosmic climes, and growth in self-
knowledge may be described also as a journey
of the soul through the universe to its far-off
home. Only this should be noted, that the actual
attainment of the noetic state, when once the soul
has been released from the bondage of rebirth,
brings a cessation of what we regard as personal
existence. The heaven of the Nous has no place
for memory of the soul's past lives, and Being
there is not an immortality that denotes con-
scious continuity; it is rather a blissful forget-
f ulness. And the last stage of identification with
the One is a complete loss of identity.
But why does the soul attain to its native goal
so seldom, if indeed it attain at all, and why does
it sink away? Why, if that ecstatic union, as it
feels, signifies its true being, has it ever de-
scended to these earthly cares and distractions?
These were questions that Plotinus drew from
his own experience, and answered as best he
could.
iv, Tin, i Often, he says, when I awake out of the slum-
ber of this life, and from an alien world enter
into myself, I am amazed at the beauty of what
I behold. Then I begin to live, and am conscious
of a divine energy, and know that in that higher
PLOTINUS 199
sphere I am truly myself as I am at one with
God. But after a little the peace is broken, the
vision fades, and once more I am bound to the
senses and a slave to circumstance. Why this de-
scent, this submission to the will of the flesh?
Thinking of these things I recall what Hera-
clitus taught long ago: the inevitableness of
change, the way up and the way down, the re-
laxation that comes with change, the labour and
weariness of abiding in one state. I remember
the belief of Empedocles and Pythagoras and
many others, that our fall hitherward was a pen-
alty for sin, and our life in the body an incarcer-
ation of the soul. And then I think of the writ-
ings of Plato, which contain many beautiful say-
ings about the soul, but in this matter seem to
express two diverse views. For at one time he
too speaks of our existence here as of an im-
prisonment, and describes this world as a dark
cavern where the soul lies in chains, awaiting its
release and the journey upwards to the free air
and the blessed light of the sun. Yet elsewhere,
in the Timaeus, this same Plato has fair speech
of the world, and declares that God in His be-
nevolence sent the souls hither in order that the
cosmos might be perfected as a divine creature
200 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
and a happy duplication of the Ideal pattern
whereon His own eyes are set.
How is this discrepancy to be reconciled?
Plotinus thinks we see a contradiction because
we forget that there are two modes of govern-
ing and of exercising care. One is the royal way,
when the ruler issues commands and calls forth
order and beauty by the very power of his word,
but himself needs not to stretch out his hand to
the task. Another way is that of the servant,
who is merged in his work and soiled by base as-
sociations. Now the world-soul takes the royal
way, and, while shaping and moderating the
chaos of matter, holds itself apart with clean
hands and unperturbed gaze, and never leaves
the company of the high gods. But these indi-
vidual souls of ours, though they also by right
share in the blessed life of Ideas, succumb weak-
ly to the task imposed upon them, and, falling
from communion with the world-soul, become
immersed in a multitude of material cares and
chained to these bodies as squalid and complain-
ing captives.
For the reason of this falling away Plotinus
has two theories, which may at first seem incom-
patible, but are really not so. While the indi-
vidual souls are joined with the world-soul they
PLOTINUS 201
exercise lordship over the kingdom of matter
without passion or taint. But, according to one
theory, they become weary of this communion,
and their eyes grow tired with the steady vision
of Ideas which this passionless lordship demands.
They long for that ease in alteration of which
Heraclitus spoke, and so break loose from their
source, and in the weakness of their individual
existence sink down to the solid staying-ground
of these bodies. Elsewhere the cause of the sep-
aration and the fall is laid, not to weariness, but
to a spirit of pride and a lust of the souls to be
themselves and their own masters. In either case
it is clear that Plotinus is merely translating into
a mythological event what he knew to be the
last discoverable source of evil in the soul, that
slackness which succumbs to the fatigue of hold-
ing fast to higher things and turns to the ease and
comfort of change, the vanity that flatters us in-
to believing we have no other end than to be our-
selves and to follow our inclinations. Slackness
and vanity, these together are the dark remote
origin of our guilt ; they are the cause of the fall,
and then of the misbehaviour of the soul amid the
trials which it has brought upon itself, whereby
it is plunged ever deeper into the abyss of evil.
Happy the soul that takes the penalties of life
202 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
for discipline, and, learning wisdom and grace
by suffering, turns again to the long ascent* 10
IV
So far, by a process of separation, which, as I
have said, does some violence to the literary
method of Plotinus, we have been considering
his pure philosophy and mythology, that is to
say, his analysis of an actual and, up to a certain
point, normal experience, followed by the in-
evitable and, if properly understood, legitimate
hypostatizing of the stages of this experience as
cosmic realities. The conversion of the soul from
interest in the dead realm of phenomena to the
living world of Ideas is a simple daily occurrence
of which all men have a more or less vivid sense.
So, too, the feeling that the evil for which we are
responsible arises from an indolent and egotistic
yielding to the pressure of circumstance and the
drifting tides of temperament. To this extent
Neoplatonism is a fair development of the Pla-
tonic philosophy; nor, to say the least, can I
see any harm in permitting the imagination to
the Platonic conception of slackness and vanity see The
Religion of Plato 353. The icdfMTos which Plotinus borrows from
Heraclitus corresponds with the fo8vfua, of Athanasins and other
Christian theologians; the rfafui and the povkqOyytu tavTQv clwtt
with the Christian danfowa.
PLOTINUS 203
transform these psychological facts into a cos-
mic mythology. Whether Plotinus was justified
in his peculiar interpretation of the doctrine of
Ideas, and how far the mystical trance, which he
superimposed upon Platonism, can be embodied
in a sound philosophy, are questions of another
colour, to which our answer may be deferred un-
til our estimation of the value of the Plotinian
system as a whole.
Our business at this point is with the meta-
physical scheme in the Enneads, which intro-
duces a mental procedure quite different in kind
from what we have been considering. Reason
now, instead of limiting its function to analysing
and clarifying the psychological data at its ser-
vice, will undertake to build up a theory of the
cause and genesis of the total sum of things, the
rerum natura, in harmony with its own demands
fora logical absolute; and if the facts of our
consciousness prove rebellious to these demands,
so much the worse for the facts. Stoic and Epi-
curean had done this by means of a monistic
naturalism, why should not the Idealist do the
same in his own manner for his own edification?
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causa*,
Atque metus omnis et mexordbile fatum
Subiecit pedibus strepitum'que Acherontis avari.
204 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
Whether warranted or not, the transition
from philosophy to metaphysics is comprehen-
sible enough. Reason, as Plotinus says, is the
faculty that goes on dividing until it reaches the
perfectly simple which is no longer susceptible
of analysis; its unchecked course leads straight
on to the dark and baffling abyss where all dis-
tinctions cease. Now just such a resting place is
offered by the presumption of mysticism. The
ecstatic trance will be accepted as a positive ex-
perience, and then will be wrenched from its
psychological setting and conceived as an ab-
stract Unity. This Unity will be hypostatized as
the ultimate reality and hence as the cause of all
things, while the multiple world of phenomena
will be conceived as an effect flowing out by some
mechanical process from the universal source of
being.
To Plotinus it is evident that this transcen-
dental monism, this metaphysic of the spirit,
seemed to come straight out of Plato's Dia-
logues ; and many, perhaps most, critics of the
present day write as if Neoplatonism were an
inevitable and proper development of the Pla-
tonic philosophy. That, emphatically, is not the
thesis I would maintain. Neoplatonism, as I see
it, derives its central dogma not from Plato at
PLOTINUS 205
all, but from a method of reasoning which was
introduced by Aristotle, and which, combining
with certain Oriental currents of theology and
merging into Xeo-Pythagoreanism, carried phi-
losophy in a direction quite contrary to the true
implications of Platonism. The question, as it
involves matters of the first importance, may
warrant a digression of some length before we
take up the Plotinian scheme analytically.
Plato's treatment of the problem of creation,
as the reader of the Timaeus need scarcely be
reminded, was not rationalistic or metaphysical,
but mythological. In the simplest terms, his the-
ory means that we are conscious of two forces
at work in ourselves and in the world, a divine
cause and a lower cause. The realm of phenom-
ena, in which our mortal life passes, is a com-
posite of these two forces ; or, in the language of
the religious imagination, God, with His eye set
on the everlasting and immutable Ideas, im-
poses form and order on an aboriginal chaos,
so far as the necessity therein permits. He him-
self creates the universe as a whole, a living
creature, the god to be; while to the lesser gods
206 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
He assigns the task of fashioning and govern-
ing the individual creatures in the world of gene-
sis, or becoming.
Now the relation of Plato's mythological
scheme to the Aristotelian metaphysics and to
the subsequent course of religious philosophy
may be seen by a glance at the diagram on the
opposite page.
In the first place it is to be noted that for the
dualism of Plato, corresponding to our innate
and insurmountable sense of the divine and the
"necessary" in our realm of experience, Aris-
totle has substituted a dualism justified, if it can
be justified at all, on the demands of pure rea-
son. Because no rational account could be given,
as Plato himself admitted, of the relation between
Ideas as divine entities and the forms of the phe-
nomenal world, Aristotle denies the existence of
any such Ideas, and ascribes the final reality of
being to the intimate and inseparable union of
form (or idea) and matter in individual objects.
To existence in this sense God has no relation as
cause or governor; the world in its substance is
eternal and totally independent of divine inter-
ference, God, so far as He is cause, is regarded
as the source "of motion, not of being, and even
as such He stands utterly remote from conscious
PLOTINUS
207
II
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a
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208 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
and voluntary contact with the world. Here en-
ters the wedge that was to split the dualistic
view of the world in such a manner as to drive
thought finally into an absolute monism. The
process of reasoning by which Aristotle reaches
this conception of the first cause displays strik-
ingly and once for all the fallacy inherent in the
metaphysical method.
The argument 11 starts from a supposed law
of mechanics: eveiy object in motion, accord-
ing to Aristotle, presupposes a motor, which, as
it is itself in motion, presupposes another motor.
(That is a theory which seems to follow from
our daily observation of the material world, and
which conforms to Newton's three laws of mo-
tion to this extent that every change of motion
requires an external motor.) But, Aristotle con-
tinues, we must pause somewhere; reason can-
not abide the thought of a series of mobiles and
motors regressing to infinity, it must have a be-
ginning. ( There is nothing in our knowledge of
physical facts to justify this demand of reason.
So far as our experience goes, the series is with-
out beginning or end, or, rather, our physical
following statement of Aristotle's metaphysical argument
& taken from Clodius Plat's masterly exposition in his volume of
Les grands philosopher p. 110 if. The comments and criticisms
are of course my own.
PLOTIXUS 209
experience has nothing to do with beginnings or
ends. Aristotle's argument is of a purely meta-
physical character having no connexion with
mechanics.) There must, then, be a final motor,
which, as such, is not moved by anything anter-
ior to itself. It cannot be moved from without,
because it is the first motor, or from within, be-
cause all motion requires an external motor ; it
is essentially and absolutely unmoved, and there-
fore motionless, being the complete actualiza-
tion of all potential motion (whatever that may
mean). It is the Unmoved Mover. How then
does it move the world? Certainly not by means
of a mechanical impulse, for this, by the law of
mechanics, would imply a movement in itself
by reaction. It will act upon the world as a final
cause, as the end towards which all moving
things aspire, as they are set in motion by an
innate love of the Absolute which itself recipro-
cates nothing. And this final cause of all motion,
itself unmoved, is God.
Here several observations are in order. In the
first place, this consummation of Aristotle's rea-
soning offers no likeness to anything in human
experience, whether spiritual or natural. Plato
had defined soul as the self -moved mover, and
so as the cause of all moving, logically antece-
210 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
dent to mechanical motion which demands an ex-
ternal motor. His language is not precise, as
Aristotle pointed out, 12 since mechanical motion
is spatial, whereas psychic activity is non-spa-
tial. His theory thus leaves unexplained the real-
ly unexplainable connection, or modus operan-
di, between mind and matter; but it answers to
this simple fact of our experience, that the soul,
as free agent, possesses a spontaneous activity,
whereas in the mechanical world, so far as we
know it, there is no freedom or spontaneity, but
only the action and reaction between inert bod-
ies in motion. And thus the definition of God as
the original self -moved mover, a spirit tran-
scendent yet somehow operating by his divine
will within the sphere of mechanical forces, may
leave His nature a mystery, but a mystery akin
to the relation of mind and body which meets us
in every act of our diurnal life. By going a step
further and defining God as the Unmoved
Mover, Aristotle has passed from philosophy
to metaphysics; that is to say, driven on by the
insatiate impulse of reason to express itself in
absolutes, he has defined the ultimate spiritual
reality in terms which have no relation to any-
thing we know from our own spiritual life, and,
Anima I, 3.
PLOTINUS 211
baldly stated, have no meaning at ail. But at the
same time and this explains the pertinacious
attraction of the error he pretends to reach his
conclusion by a straight argument from the uni-
versally acknowledged facts of our physical ex-
perience, not observing that his conclusion in an
Unmoved Mover is not a derivation from, but a
flat contradiction of, his premise that every ob-
ject in motion presupposes a motor which is it-
self in motion. This pretension to lend the au-
thority of physical fact, or scientific observation,
to a theorem which is essentially contradictory
to all our physical experience lies perdu in the
very method of rationalism, and indeed in all
so-called science which glides surreptitiously in-
to metaphysical generalizations. The sceptics,
as we shall see, laid hold of this inconsistency
with deadly effect.
In a sense Aristotle's absolute might be de-
scribed as a blending of Plato's God with the
Idea of the True and the Good, while it heart-
lessly eliminates what is valuable in both. As the
cause of all life and motion, it is God, but not
the Creator, since it has no connexion with the
being of individual objects or persons; nor is it
the author of Providence, since it has no con-
scious concern with the unrolling of mundane
212 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
events. As the goal of all thinking, it is the Idea
of the True ; but it is a truth evacuated of any
content, being the pure energy of self -contem-
plation, without difference or sequence or pur-
pose or specific thought. As the end of all desir-
ing, it is the Idea of the Good; but it is a good
devoid of meaning or value, since a gulf yawns
between it and the principle of form and order
which enters into the composition of individual
beings. Plato might seem to have had Aristotle's
absolute in mind when he exclaimed: "In the
name of God, what is this! Are we going to be-
lieve out of hand that the highest Being has in
fact no motion or life or soul or intelligence, a
thing that neither lives nor thinks, but remains
forever fixed in solemn, holy, unconscious va-
cuity?" 13
These may be reckoned harsh words to apply
to "the master of them that know" ; and indeed,
if our design embraced a history of Greek phi-
losophy in its various ramifications, we should
have a very different account to render of Aris-
totle's scope and significance. But even in the
secular branch of philosophy, I do not see how
the conclusion can be avoided that his introduc-
tion of metaphysics has been the source of end-
PLOTINUS 213
less logomachies which bear no relation to the
facts of human experience. Certainly, in the re-
ligious sphere which is our special province, his
conception of God must be rejected finally as
an unwarranted assumption of the unchecked
reason, logically self -destructive, intellectually
confusing, ethically mischievous.
How far the later theologians, pagan and
Christian, were directly and consciously influ-
enced by Aristotle, is a question not easy to an-
swer. On the one hand the references to his works
are surprisingly rare throughout this whole per-
iod; Plotinus, for instance, seldom alludes to
him, whereas the reminiscences of Plato in the
Enneads are innumerable. Yet Neoplatonism is
undoubtedly more Aristotelian than Platonic
at the core, and Loof s can maintain that all the
positive theological dogmas of Dionysius the
Areopagite (whose mysticism is essentially Neo-
platonic) go back ultimately to the Aristotelian
conception of God. 1 * Among the Christian wri-
ters a distinction must be made. For the ortho-
dox theologians of the first centuries Aristotle
scarcely existed; and this general neglect is ex-
uDogmengeschicTite* 320. It Is at least questionable, however,
whether Loofs is correct in saying that Aristotle's God is 1 the
erste Ursache und Utztes Ziel aUe* Seienden. For a different
view, which I have adopted supra, see Boehm, Die Oottesidee 6t
Aristoteles.
^ AJCJ.JLJ2JN1ST1C PHILOSOPHIES
plained simply enough by Gregory Nazianzen's
contemptuous reference to his "petty view of
Providence, his technical method, and his mor-
tal theories of the soul/' 15 On the contrary it is
characteristic of the major heresies that they
all, openly or implicitly, turned for their philo-
sophical basis from Plato to Aristotle, and we
may surmise that the heretical treatises, if pre-
served, would display abundant allusions to the
Peripatetic logic andmetaphysics. ThoughNeo-
platonism had already begun its work in the
theology of St. Augustine, the direct entrance
of Aristotle into the accepted theology of the
Church occurred at a definite moment after the
Council of Chalcedon, at the close of our period,
when Leontius of Byzantium undertook to ex-
plain and support rationalistically the bare dog-
matic statement of the creed as to the single per-
sonality and dual nature of Christ. By suffer-
ing itself to be seduced in this direction, scho-
lasticism adopted the metaphysical method of
the heretics as opposed to the Platonic method
of the great orthodox Grecians, and it is a ven-
turesome, but warrantable, thesis that the the-
ology of the Church Councils, since the year 451,
Or. I, 10: 'ApwrorAovs rty iuicpo\fyop vphvoua.*, xal rb <lrrex-
j Kcd robs BmiTobs vepl $vyris X^yow, Ka.1 rb dv&p(airud)V r
'PLOTINUS 215
has been vitiated to a certain extent by the un-
orthodox, and at bottom anti-religious, logic of
Aristotelianism. If the Greek theology of the
third and fourth centuries is orthodox, then
heresy can be plucked with both hands out of
Thomas Aquinas. 16
On the whole, then, in the absence of docu-
ments which would enable us to trace fully the
history of the subject, it may be said that, apart
from its double role in Christian theology, the
influence of Aristotelian transcendentalism
merged at an early date with various streams of
thought, Neo-Pythagorean, Oriental, and what
not, which however commonly regarded them-
selves as Platonic rather than Peripatetic, and
which reached their flower in the metaphysical
system of Plotinus, 17 Generally speaking, the
effect of this transcendentalism has been two-
i*This is not the place to enter into the details of Christian the-
ology. Those who are curious to see the relations between Aris-
totle and heresy may be referred to Whittaker, Apolk>ni*ts of
Tyana 71 ; Tixeront, Sift, des Dogm3 II, 22, 28, 40, 100; Robert-
son, Regnum Dei 153. For Leontius of Byzantium see H. M.
Relton, A Study in Christology. An illustration of the devastat-
ing effect of the Aristotelian metaphysic on medieval theology is
the doctrine of Transubstantiation.
"The Neoplatonists and their syncretic predecessors made a
conscious effort to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, and to this end
appealed to the supposed esoteric doctrine of Plato, hints of
which are found in the spurious Epistles. Numenius, for in-
stance, wrote a treatise on ihe&yp&fadfrYfuLTaof Plato which he
entitled Hepi r&v a-apA HXdraw faroppfrrw. On this' subject see the
excellent pages (88 ff.) of Chaignet's Platan.
216 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
fold : in irreligious minds it has tended to rele-
gate God to a polite limbo of the Unknowable,
resulting in agnosticism or more outspoken ma-
terialism; with the religiously inclined it has
fostered a mysticism which holds itself from the
sheer abyss of inanity by creating a variety of
intermediaries between its remotest divinity and
the world.
Aristotle himself, sought to bridge over the
gap between his Unmoved Mover and the var-
iously moving world by the insertion of a celes-
tial sphere forever revolving about itself in an
unvaried motion. But the tendency towards a
mysticism mitigated by intermediaries comes
clearly to the front in Philo the Jew, whose
deity is a strange mixture an unholy mesal-
tiance I should like to say of the Hebrew Je-
hovah and the Aristotelian Absolute. Between
this God and the world, from which He is com-
pletely severed by His transcendental nature,
Philo then inserts the Logos, a compound of the
Platonic Ideas and the Stoic logoi, conceived as
the animated, but not fully personified, mind of
deity. And all this in Philo's eyes appeared to
be pure Plato and pure Moses; Aristotle he
scarcely recognizes.
More extraordinary was the course taken by
PLOTINUS 217
the Gnostics. They might differ in everything
else, but in one thing they all agreed : in making
a distinction between the true God, who dwells
aloof from any contact with change and appear-
ance and mortal life in a dark abyss of silence,
and a lower deity, who is the Demiurge, or Cre-
ator, of the world and the more or less respon-
sible author of suffering and evil.
In line with the Gnostics stands the rather
enigmatical figure of Numenius of Apamea
(see the diagram on p. 207), who flourished in
the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and of whose
works some fragments are preserved. He was
professedly an eclectic, or syncretist, whose phil-
osophical brew should contain the wisdom of the
Brahmins, Hebrews, Magi, and Egyptians, dis-
solved in a medium itself compounded of Pla-
tonism and Pythagoreanism. Out of this con-
coction certain images emerge. The divine cause,
which by Plato had been left as Demiurge and
Ideas in parallel state, is split up into a trinity
of subordinated causes. The first God, the One
identified with Being and Nous and the Idea of
the Good, is too remote to have any contact with
the sphere of change and appearance. Below
him stands a second God, who is not Goodness
but good, the Demiurge of Plato's Timaeus,the
218 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
divine conceived as working in the sphere of
genesis. And there is still a third, who seems to
be a misunderstanding of the Timaean descrip-
tion of the universe as a living creature, "the
god to be." All this to Numenius was pure Pla-
tonism, or pure Mosaism, as you choose; for
"what," he says, thinking no doubt of Philo's
blend, "is Plato but Moses in Attic speech?"
As a Platonist he still maintains a strict dual-
ism between the divine cause and the Tiyle (mat-
ter) underlying the phenomenal world, regards
evil as a spirit of ignorance and disorder in the
material substratum, and writes a history of the
Academy to show how the later leaders of the
school betrayed its founder.
VI
We can now see where the mystical monism
which closed the psychological experience of
Plotinus joined this metaphysical current from
Aristotle to Numenius. The highest member of
the divine cause for Numenius was the One, but
it could be described also as Being and Nous,
and thus was not utterly devoid of shadowy
qualities and activities. For Plotinus the One,
as the abyss into which contemplation plunges
PLOTINUS 219
in a kind of suicidal vertigo, must be lifted into
the dark vacuity above both mind and being,
which are relegated to a second place in a new
triad. His First Principle will be, in the com-
plete sense of the words, absolute and abstract
unqualified, undefinable, non-existent as super-
essential. It may possibly be called the Good;
but it is not good as Plato applied that term to
the Demiurge, since it has no feeling for any-
thing within itself or outside of itself, but is the
unrelated source of all relations. It is the spir-
itual affirmation of Socrates transformed into a
relentless negation. 18 The dualism of Plato,
which still in Numenius contrived to hold a pre-
carious place, has been eliminated to the utmost.
There is no longer, properly speaking, a Crea-
tor in the scheme, nor a distinct act of creation,
but the sphere of genesis overflows from the
lowest member of the divine triad and expands
infinitely into the emptiness of hyle.
The Neoplatonic problem, then, a very pretty
problem, will be to explain wliy and how this
concrete world of experience has been evolved
from a metaphysical abstraction. For the why
isEven the One and the Good are, so to speak, courtesy titles and
imply a positive addition to what is purely negative. The name
"One," it is said (V, v, 6), perhaps means no more than the
denial of multiplicity; and (V, v, 10) the "Good" is what the
Nous remembers of It after the vision has passed.
220 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
Plotinus is rathervague; as indeed the mere pos-
sibility of such a question implies a flaw in his
monism. Perhaps the nearest approach to a clear
answer can be found in the principle of vision,
contemplation, thedria. In one of the chapters
of his great book On Nature and Contempla-
tion and the One the question is put to Nature
herself why she brings forth works, and she re-
in, via, 4 plies : "It would have been better not to ask but
to learn in silence, even as I am silent and make
no habit of speech. And learn what? That all
becoming is my vision, seen in my silence ; for I,
myself sprung from vision, am vision-loving,
and by this faculty bring forth vision." The visi-
ble world is thus the realization of a desire of
vision in the heart of Nature. But this creative
longing to see and behold does not begin, nor
does it end, with the evocation of material phe-
nomena; it extends up and down, throughout,
everywhere, having no bound. All doing is for
the sake of contemplation, and being itself is
merely a by-work of visioning. But in perfect
unity there can be no vision, no place for a see-
ing and a seen; if the One will contemplate it
must lose its oneness. Hence, the Supreme, be-
ginning as One, becomes pregnant from the
love of vision; and there is multiplicity. Yet it
PLOTINUS 221
were well if this had never happened, for the
whence is better than the whither; and if the
question why is still urged, the only response
will be that command of Xature to keep silence,
or that dark word Necessity, Anarike, which for
Plato had signified the limiting obstacle to the v, IT. i
divine purpose, and is transformed by Plotinus
into a kind of fatalism impending upon the
whole system of the universe, a law of compul-
sion within the heart of the divine itself. 19
In regard to the how of this expansion Plo-
tinus is more explicit, and perhaps also more un-
intelligible, according to the rule that the more
explicitly one solves an insoluble problem the
less intelligibly. All sorts of verbal ambiguities
are involved: the double sense of hen as "one v, T .4
ifllt is in his poet's sense of vision that Plotinus remains most
faithful to the spirit of Platonism. And it is easy to see how
vision and necessity are transferred by him to his 'metaphysical
system. Thus (V, v, 12) he says that each thing is to be grasped
by the organ suited to it, one thing by the eyes, another by the
ears, while to the Nous there is vision of another kind. Those
who demand reality through the bodily senses alone have for-
gotten that which they have desired and striven after from the
beginning. "For all things reach after It and strive for It by a
necessity of their nature (0tf<res dwtyicu), having as it were a pro-
phetic sense that without the vision they cannot be." Thus, if the
being of all things depends upon the necessity of vision, and if all
things are an emanation from a First Principle, then the neces-
sity of vision will readily be made the cause of emanation. This
whole chapter (V, v, 12) is a marvellous, and marvellously im-
possible, blend of the Platonic thedria in the Phaedra and Sym-
posium and Republic with the Aristotelian thedria of the Ethics
and Metaphysicf.
222 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
which is composed of parts" and "one which is
v.ir.i without parts"; the double sense of arche as
"what is first" and "what rules, exercises pow-
er," and I know not how many other amphibolo-
gies. In the main, however, Plotinus depends on
v, i f 6, 7 the Aristotelian distinction between power in a
state of potentiality and power energizing, or
in a state of actuality. 20 The First Principle, he
says, is perfect, and, as the Sovereign Power,
must surpass in efficacy all things that are.
Now we observe that all creatures, as they at-
tain perfection, do not rest sterilely in them-
selves, but produce; even soulless things do this
to the extent of their ability, as fire produces
warmth and snow produces cold. How, then,
shall the Sovereign Good abide in itself as if
held by envy or impotence? There is a necessity
that something should proceed from it by virtue
of its sovereignty, and again something from this
second, and something from this, infinitely, since
the source is infinite.
The abstraction of reason is thus transformed
into a potential energy. This is entirely self-
sufficient, yet from its very infinity there will be
an overflow, or procession, into actual energy.
this point through the three succeeding paragraphs I
follow the account of the metaphysical descent in Henri Guyofs
diving where full references are given.
PLOTINUS 223
The question still confronts the monist: how
does an absolutely unqualified One emit from
itself a qualified and multiform world of being
without itself undergoing any change or quali-
fication? Of course the simple honest reply is, It
doesn't, at least so far as we have any experi-
ence of physical or psychical events there is no
such thing as an effect or emanation which leaves
its cause or source unaffected. But it is the func-
tion of metaphysics to transcend physical or
psychical experience, while pretending to argue
from such an experience, and so we have the
N eoplatonists offering a meaningless answer to
an impossible question raised by a gratuitous
hypothesis. There are, says Plotinus, two kinds
of energy. One is of the essence of a thing and
is actually the thing itself; the other is from the
essence of a thing and is the cause of another
tiling, which in turn will possess its own poten-
tiality. Thus, in the case of fire, we distinguish
between the heat which is the fire itself and the
heat which flows from the fire without diminish-
ing the fire. (Bad physics, for which however
Plotinus should not be held responsible.) And
so, in like manner, the First Principle remains
unaffected, while from the energy which abides
with it as its essential potentiality, and is It,
224 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
there flows an actualized energy which takes a
second place as Being and Nous.
Now this Nous, as proceeding immediately
from the One, is itself in a fashion one ; but, as
mind, it instinctively tries to comprehend that
from which it sprang. Or, we might say, in its
primitive state it was not mind but vision which
does not see; and so, in its striving to realize it-
self as vision, it becomes a seeing mind, no longer
a true One, but as it were a one divided into the
seer and the seen. What it beholds in itself > or
tries to behold, is its sublime source, but by its
inability to grasp absolute unity it breaks the
seen up into multiplicity, and thereby as a di-
vided One becomes the One-Many. It is the Lo-
gos and energy of the First Principle, a great
God, but a second god, below the highest.
As the energy of the First Principle, Nous is
a potentiality which cannot remain sterile, but
in its turn, without diminishing itself, overflows
to produce a lower energy, like itself though still
further from the primal One. This hypostasis
of mind is Soul. And as mind looks up to the
One and becomes the One-Many, so 'Soul looks
back to mind, and, being unable to grasp the
noetic Many in a single comprehensive view,
suffers a dispersion of energy in such manner as
PLOTINUS 225
to become the Oneand-the-Many. It sees part
by pail, in succession, and thus becomes the ori-
gin of time, in distinction from eternity which is
the property of noetic vision. In its weakened
power also it is unable to see the Many within
itself as Xous had done, and thus by going
out of itself for its vision becomes the origin of
space. 21 And, further, whereas the First Princi-
ple had produced mind and mind had produced
soul in a state of quiescence and without internal
change, the Soul, no longer an overflowing po-
tentiality, can create only by an inner altera-
tion and motion, producingthusaworldof sense
as a moving image of itself in time and outside
of itself in space. Soul is the third God, complet-
ing the celestial trinity; divine itself, as the hy-
postasis of Nous, what proceeds from it is no
longer divine, but the beginning of mortality.
The golden chain is snapped, and metaphysics
has entered upon its agony.
VII
Plotinus is in fact well aware of the break in
2tlngenious but futile reasoning. Seeing in succession Soul pro-
duces time, and seeing outside of itself it produces space. But to
say that it sees in succession and outside of itself is to assume
time and space as already existent, not to explain their cause.
The whole metaphysical procedure in fact is a senseless attempt
to explain genetically what is already present.
226 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
his argument. His ethical and emotional phi-
losophy had started from a strong sense of the
dualism of consciousness, from a clear percep-
tion of two elements in the soul, the divine and
the mortal. His metaphysics, down to the point
here reached, by confining attention to one of
the two threads of experience, the divine, had
retained a certain consistency and even a kind
of specious clarity. But now a different sort of
problem lies before him: he has reached again
the starting point of dualism, and how shall he
maintain his deterministic monism.
Time, space, motion, and it may be added
form, are results of the activity of Soul, which
is the third and last member of the divine triad;
they are, so to speak, the psychical elements of
the phenomenal world. By the same necessity of
evolution matter also should be an outflow from
the Soul, or from these psychical activities; and
this indeed is true of matter regarded as an ob-
ject of the senses, regarded, that is to say, using
the Greek terminology, as earth, air, fire, water,
and as the formed and coloured bodies (sdmata)
of our handling. But behind, or beneath, these
manifestations lies the obscure substratum of
matter itself, the hyle, which eludes our senses,
and whose existence, as Plato said, we conjee-
PLOTINUS 227
ture by "a certain sort of bastard reasoning with-
out true perception." As inexplicable, Plato in
the Timaeus was content to leave it there unex-
plained, calling it the "errant cause," "mother
and receptacle of this visible and otherwise per-
ceptible world of creation," a "separate kind,
invisible and formless, all-receiving, and in some
most extraordinary manner partaking of the
Ideal and intelligible, itself utterly incompre-
hensible." Such is the philosophical humility and
privilege of one who recognizes the limitations
of reason. But an avowed rationalist, like Plo-
tinus, has no such ease. Having set out to derive
all things from the absolute One by an unbroken
process of emanation, or evolution, he must in
some way fit this hyle into his chain, while at the
same time he must explain why the chain should
terminate at this point, and how this termina-
tion brings into the open a dualism which, de-
spite his protests, must have been latent in his
system from the beginning.
This feat of mental legerdemain Plotinus ac-
complishes by his definition of reality. The pro-
gress from the First Principle is not by addition n, r. 12
to it from some source of reality for nothing
can be added to that which is already perfect
but from not-being. Mind and being, though an
228 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
overflow from the First Principle, have in a way
less of reality, or of absolute being, than their
source which is beyond being; Soul has less of
reality than mind and being; and so the whole
process implies at once a constant dispersion and
a gradual deprivation (ster&sis) of reality. At
the last for reason demands a last as well as a
first will come that which has no positive quali-
ties to be dispersed, from which nothing more
can be subtracted, which, in a word, is there, but
is there as not-being, a nothingness which rises
like a blank wall where reality ends. This is the
hyle of Neoplatonism. It is not properly speak-
ing a part or product of the universal evolution,
but the indescribable principle of multiplicity
and deprivation that lies below being as the in-
effable One was above being. The sum of actual
existence looks suspiciously as if it resulted from
the conjunction of a descending and an ascend-
ing cause, though there has been a desperate
effort to express the act in terms of a single di-
rection.
Plotinus in fact has exhausted the vocabu-
lary of rhetoric and the devices of logic to ex-
plain the origin of the phenomenal world out of
the chaotic negation of the hyle. In general the
cause of creation would appear to be an instinc-
PLOTINUS 229
tive repugnance of Soul for the indefinite and n, IT, 10
unreal Soul has a dread of sinking down into
the void ; and so, when in its outgoing activities
it strikes upon the dark uttermost clouds of not-
being, it endeavours to impose on the formless
and unqualified those forms and qualities which
it possesses in itself as an inheritance from Xous.
Such is the origin of the material bodies in this
manifold world of genesis. But, though these
seem to be material, they are not really so in the
sense that hyle enters into their composition as
an actual substance. For this hyle, as the reverse
of the immutable and unqualified One, is in-
capable of transformation or modification; it
should, rather, be likened to a smooth, unpene-
trable surface which reflects the forms cast upon in, n, 10
it without retaining any vestige of that which
comes and goes:
"Its every utterance, therefore, is a lie; it pre-
tends to be great and it is little, to be more and it
is less; and the Existence with which it masks
itself is no Existence, but a passing trick mak-
ing trickery of all that seems to be present in
it, phantasms within a phantasm. It is like a
mirror showing things as in itself when they
are really elsewhere, filled in appearance but
actually empty, containing nothing, pretending
everything. Into it and out of it move mimicries
230 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
of the Authentic Existents, images playing up-
on an image devoid of Form, visible against it
by its very formlessness. They seem to modify
it but in reality effect nothing, for they are ghost-
ly and feeble, have no thrust and meet none in
Matter (hyle) either ; they pass through it leav-
ing no cleavage, as through water; or they might
be compared to shapes projected so as to make
some appearance upon what we can know only
as the Void." 22
Viewed thus from its lower source the phe-
nomenal world fades into an insubstantial pag-
ing e eant, an uneasy dream of the Soul, since all of
the Soul that is in body sleeps ; yet in another
aspect, seen as an evocation of the noetic forms in
the Soul, though it be but as shadows of images,
these same phenomena are altogether wonderful
and beautiful and radiant with reflected light,
a glorious garment of the Deity, a field wherein
the 'Soul may exercise her loving care with no
derogation of her pure majesty.
VIII
If we find ourselves bafHed by the ambiguous
character of the phenomenal world, the difficul-
ties grow mountain high when we undertake to
22IH, vi, 7, Mackenna's translation.
PLOTINUS 231
grasp the Xeoplatonie theory of evil. There are
in fact two methods of approaching the problem
involved in this theory, between which Plotinus
wavers with no warning and apparently no sense
of their disparity. One of these is genuinely psy-
chological, and, as was set forth in our discus-
sion of the Plotinian philosophy, merely traces
the source of evil to the known principle of in-
dolence and vanity in the human heart. It were
well if Plotinus had been content to pause here.
But the question unde malum as a thing in na-
ture was still urgent upon his reason, and so we
find him entangling his psychology in metaphys-
ical conceptions of the ultimate why and how.
Inevitably his arguments fall into devious and
dark ways.
In general, the great cause is an affection of
unlucky matter and of that which has been made
like to matter; in that view Plotinus is pretty
constant whenever he touches on the subject of
evil as a cosmic fact. But as he chances to be
swayed by imagination or by reason, the calami-
tous effects of matter are regarded differently,
just as matter itself was explained differently.
At one time it is almost Plato speaking. That,
he says, which underlies all patterns and forms i,tin,
and measures and limits, and has no trace of
232 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
good by any title of its own, but, at best, takes
order and grace from some principle outside of
itself, amere image in respect of things that truly
are, this substratum reason by search discov-
ers to be the primal evil, evil absolute. For mat-
ter becomes mistress of whatever is manifested
through it, corrupting and destroying the in-
comer, and substituting its own opposite char-
acter and kind. Body is evil so far as it partakes
of this substratum. Soul is evil in so far as it be-
comes individual by entering into body and by
that act is made subject to excess and disorder
and false judgments. And thus, as going up-
ward from virtue we come to the Beautiful and
the Good, so, by going downward from vice, we
reach essential evil. And the individual soul,
when it abandons itself unreservedly to the ex-
treme of viciousness, is no longer a vicious soul
merely for mere vice is still human, still car-
ries some trace of good but has taken to itself
another nature, the Evil, and so far as soul can be,
it is dead. And the death of the soul is twofold:
while sunk in the body to lie down in matter and
drench itself therewith; and when it has left the
body to lie for a season in that nether world
which is our "going down to Hades and slum-
bering there."
PLOTINUS 233
All this is positive enough to satisfy the im-
agination of the most thoroughgoing dualist;
but then comes the metaphysical qualm and rea-
son has her revanche. If all things are evolved
out of the One-Good, there can be no positive
wrong in the world, but only in some unimagin-
able way an illusion of wrong. As matter lacks
every positive quality and must be described in
terms of pure negation, so the evil which seems
to rise up from this abyss of not-being is noth-
ing real, but a kind of not-good which becomes
good when viewed positively, an insubstantial
phantom that appears, and then vanishes away
at the touch of reason, like a mist melting be-
neath the rays of the sun. 23
The nearest approach in Plotinus to a recon-
ciliation of these positive and negative views,
his most characteristic attitude, is that which
explains evil as remoteness from the source in a
scheme of infinite expansion. Evil thus becomes
a failure of good owing to the fact that one thing m, u. 5
will be less good than another in accordance with
their increasing distance from the focus of be-
ing, while their existence as individuals depends
23Augustine's theory of evil as not-being, or deprivation, was
taken from Plotinus, and from him has become a part of our the-
ology. But the Christian theory is modified hy the non-Plotinian
conception of free will, which introduces into Christianity a pro-
found and gratuitous inconsistency.
234 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
on this separation. And so, granted that the
i, tfii, 7 Good shall not be left in sterile loneliness, there
is a necessity in the outgoing from it, or the con-
tinuous down-going or away-going, that there
should be a Last beyond whichnothingmorecau
be produced. This Last will have no residue of
good in it, will be the necessity of evil. Call it the
final failure, or deprivation; call it the fallen
ii, iii, H sediment of the Higher Order, bitter and em-
bittering; say that evils are necessary here be-
cause of the diminishing energy in expansion,-
the metaphysical sting is in this recurring word
Necessity, Anankg, which for Plato was the
characteristic term of dualism, as designating
something contrary to the Good, but by Plo-
tinus is translated into a term of monism, as
designating something inherent in the Good.
Oh, it is not the case of Tweedledum and Twee-
dledee far from that. These speculative differ-
ences, though they seem to be spun out of thin
air, have a way of reacting on our attitude to-
wards the very solid facts of life ; and so we find
inPlotinus a whole group of theories of evil that
lie midway between Ms metaphysics and his phi-
losophy, and are fraught with consequences
practical enough.
One of his courses leads him to the ancient
PLOTINUS 235
paradox of the whole and the part, which vir-
tually denies the existence of any evil at all. This
world of sense, he says, is no longer a unity like *n, u, n
the world of mind, but a multiplicity, the mem-
bers of which are moved by a desire for unifica-
tion; but desire by its very nature is opposed to
desire, so that life is filled with contention and
contradiction. Thence flows evil, thence the spec-
tacle of a world abounding in wrong. Neverthe-
less, it is the function of philosophy to see that,
however vicious some of the parts may be, yet
taken together the evils nullify one another so
as to combine into a perfect and flawless whole.
If evil is a factor in the design, then it is not cen-
surable, not really evil. Or, life may be likened
to a play, in which the poet gives to each actor
a part as protagonist, or second, or third. Vil-
lains and virtuous clash together to make up the
plot; and for every man there is a place, a place
that fits the good man, a place that fits the bad,
and each man assumes naturally and reasonably
the role for which he is suited. The vicious role
is just as necessary as the virtuous for the com-
pletion of the drama. In like manner we should
see that the evil in the single soul serves a good
purpose in the universal system, and that what
in the individual offends nature, profits nature
236 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
in the total event. Even the executioner's ugly
office does not mar the well-governed State, since
such an officer fills a civic necessity ; and the cor-
responding moral type may be equally service-
able. As things are, all is well.
That last metaphor ought to have been a warn-
ing to an honest thinker; for it should be cleai
enough that, however necessary the executioner
may be for governing an actual State, there is
something essentially wrong in a community
which needs such an officer. Even Plotinus,
hardened optimist though he be when he gets
the metaphysical bit between his teeth, suffers
a qualm of conscience, and asks himself whether
a scheme that comes to such conclusions does not
exonerate the basest wrong-doers of their guilt.
iv, in, ie But no, he replies, the injustice of man to man
is an evil in the doer for which he will be held
responsible; although in the order of the whole
his act is not injustice, since it was necessity, and
to his victim it may be a good.
With this statement Plotinus passes to an-
other aspect of his argument, which professes
to take the sting out of evil by treating it as the
m, ii, 5 proper gymnasium for virtue. Not only would
ii, in, is this All be incomplete without evil, but vice in
itself has many useful sides : it brings about much
PLOTINUS 237
that is beautiful, in the artist's work for exam-
ple, and it stirs men to thoughtful living and to
the exercise of temperance, not allowing them
to drowse in security. In this vein, Plotinus will
not shrink from the harshest Calvinistic logic:
all things, he declares, are the work of the rul- nr.ii, u
ing Logos, even so-called evils.
Now I confess I never meet with this specious
fallacy, whether in Xeoplatonist or Stoic or in
the corrupt application of the Christian ad ma-
iorem Dei gloriam, without a feeling of revolt
and indignation. Doubtless good may be wrung
from resistance to temptation, and purity in a
measure may be wrested from contamination,
but to turn this fact into an argument for the
necessity of temptation in the world or into a
palliation of evil as not in its essence and conse-
quences evil, is nothing less than the last degra-
dation of rational unreason. Plotinus also, it is
gratifying to know, felt something of this in his
clearer moments. It is true, he admits in a no-
table passage, that the courage of man is de- 71,111,5
pendent on the existence of war, as all our prac-
tical virtues are called out by this or that acci-
dent of life ; but if Virtue herself had a choice in
the matter, whether there should be wars in or-
der that she might exercise courage, and injus-
238 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
tice in order that she might restore the right, and
poverty as a call to generosity, or whether the
earth should have peace from all these things,
certainly, if the choice were hers, she would pre-
fer that all things should go well, though it left
her with nothing more to do. Would not a true
physician, like Hippocrates, desire that no one
should have need of his art?
IX
I have dwelt at what may seem disproportion-
ate length on the problem of evil, because it is
really the point from which Plotinus takes his
start and that to which he comes back at the last.
The curious fact is that in the course of this cir-
cular process the very solid reality from which
his philosophy sought a way of escape, at the
touch of rationalism melts into an aerial noth-
ing. His metaphysics makes a jest of his phi-
losophy, or his philosophy makes nonsense of
his metaphysics as you choose. And it is be-
cause of the union of these two disparate and
finally irreconcilable elements in Neoplatonism
that any just summing up of its value is so diffi-
cult.
Undoubtedly the Enneads contain the record
of genuine and profound experience which has
PLOTINUS 239
entered into the religious inheritance of the race.
Now religion of a vital sort is not a common pos-
session; it is a flower whose root is always alive
in our barren human nature, but which blossoms
only here and there ; it shouldbe regarded, I some-
times think, as the last fine luxury of the soul,
so costly that, if it were got only by buying, few
would pay the price. What little grace of faith
we enjoy comes to most of us, when it comes, by
the gift of those pure minds endowed with spir-
itual genius, as our poetical sense is fed by the
genius of the great poets ; and the religious im-
agination is the supreme faculty, rarer far among
men than the poetical imagination. 2 * Multitudes
24Religious imagination I call this faculty of spiritual genius,
and the phrase is correct, for it is the power of visualizing what
in its nature is incorporeal and invisible. St. Paul meant this
when he spoke (II Cor. iv, 18) of **the things which are not seen."
But Plato, of course, was the first and not the least great of
those who possessed the gift. It was he who made current the no-
tion of the inner eye of the soul, and his allegories in the Phat-
dnts and Symposium are the finest examples in literature of the
spiritual imagination. But we must not disguise from ourselves
the fact that there is a certain danger in the use of this gift. For
after all we do not really see the unbodied world, and sometimes,
when the poetic fervour has cooled, the reaction leads us to ques-
tion the very existence of a world whose reality seems to depend
on an imaginative illusion. The danger becomes acute in the
Neoplatonic exaggeration of the function of vision. Heinemann
well says (Plotfa 210): "In der Zusammenhang der Grundbe-
griffe im Begriff der Schau, die auch als yvQffn Sezeichnet wird,
kann man eine Nachwirkung der Auseinandersetzune mit den
Gnostikern erkennen. Dennoch bleibt die Erhebung der Sch&u
zum Wesen aller Dinge die originelle These Plotins ; andere smgen :
das Wesen der Welt ist Wille, andere: Unbewusstes, andere;
Willen zur Macht, andere: Wasser, andere: Luft, Plotin aber:
Schau." To make knowledge identical with the imaginative fac-
ulty of vision is to bring religion perilously dose to poetry.
240 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
can speak glibly of that other world hidden be-
hind the veil of sensuous phenomena, but to how
small a number does it seem to be a vivid reality.
As it was said in the ancient mysteries: many
carry the wand, the visionaries are few. And cer-
tainly Plotinus had that realization of things
spiritual which we call seeing. There are pas-
sages scattered through his work, in the fifth
Ennead particularly, that leave no doubt of the
fact, passages which evoke the splendour of
this visible world with its variegated charm, and
then suffer it to fade away (as one picture of a
magic lantern is dimmed and overlaid and with-
drawn by the imposition of another picture up-
on the screen) , while in its place rises the glory
of the archetypal world, where we contemplate
things eternal in the kingdom of the god Kro-
nos, whose name is compounded of Jcoros (full-
ness) and nous (everlasting mind). No writing
about these passages or scanty quotation can
convey their force ; to be felt they must be read
in their completeness and by one capable of
sympathy. Such a reader will know that the in-
spiration of Plato was not lost, but passed from
generation to generation, as the lighted torch
was handed from rider to rider in the myster-
ious night race described in The Republic. If
PLOTINUS 241
Plotinus has not the perfect art of words and
the creative genius of the author of the Phae-
drus and the Symposium, the substance of the
allegory is nevertheless there, and at times a pre-
cision and directness of expression which prove
that he was no bare copyist but a master of things
spiritual in his own right. So much must be grant-
ed and it is very much to the teacher of Xeo-
platonism, and so far his philosophy is genuinely
Platonic. Had he only stopped here, or been con-
tent in his voyage over the wide seas of the spirit
to enrich the contents of Platonism with the
spoils of true discovery, instead of succumbing
to the Siren voice of the metaphysical reason
and its promise of the "ampler mind"!
"For the shrill Sirens, couched among the flowers,
Sing melodies that lure from the great deep
The heedless mariner to their fatal bowers^
Where round about them, piled in many a heap,
Lie the bleached bones of mouldering men that sleep
For ever, and the dead skins waste away.
Thou through the waves thy course right onward
keep,
And stop with wax thy comrades* ears^ that they
Hear not the sweet death-songs which through the wide
air stray." 25
xii, 39 ff., Worseley's translation. Cicero (Z>* Fin. v,
18) read in the verses the same allegory of the lust of knowledge.
242 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
What harm, it will be asked, can come from
dallying with the enchantress? Granted, as one
grants of Plotinus, that the genuine spiritual
experience is there, why should reason be checked
in the full expansion of its powers, and prevent-
ed from erecting its hypothetical scheme of the
sum of things? Why not accept metaphysics as
a good gymnasium for the brain, if nothing
more? What harm? Well, te> 'begin with, I think
that the faculty of reason itself suff ers from this
licence. Our main reliance in the decisions of life
must always be on the distinctions and assimi-
lations of reason, nor should it be supposed for a
moment that the dualist who r e j ects a metaphys-
ical rationalism is therefore blind to the super-
lative need of reasonableness. But in order to
keep our guide in the jungle of appearances
trustworthy, it is of prime importance that we
should retain our sensitiveness to the difference
between the act of reason dealing with the data
presented to it whether in the sphere of the
senses or the spirit, and the act of reason usurp-
ing the right to subvert the truths of experience
to its own insatiable craving for finalities. And
just this sensitiveness to truth is imperiled by
'the JSTeoplatonic rationalism. I think there is a
real danger in reading incautiously the eighth
PLOTINUS 243
book of the sixth Ennead, in which Plotinus ar-
gues back and forth the question of free will and
determinism in the Absolute One, He who is car-
ried away by this sort of logic, and allows him-
self to forget that the whole thing is a huge
logomachy corresponding to nothing in the heav-
ens or under the heavens or in the heart of man,
is likely to suffer a de^p vitiation of the mind, or,
awaking from his illusion, may be converted, as
Plato says, into a misologue, a hater of reason
altogether. 26 For Socrates the beginning of phi-
losophy as the wisdom of life was to know what
we know and what we do not know, and just this
distinction is lost by the metaphysician who deals
with words and logical formulae which have no
positive content.
But beyond this corruption of the reasoning
faculty itself corruptio optimi pessima the
indulgence in metaphysics may have a retro-
active effect on the philosophy of which it is sup-
posed to be a legitimate outgrowth. This result
can be seen clearly enough in the two great de-
partures of the Plotinian philosophy from the
Platonic the new conception of Ideas and the
mysticism, which are so closely connected that
it is difficult to say which of the two, if either, is*
cause and which effect.
244 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
When Porphyry j oined the school of Plotinus
at Rome, he brought with him from Athens the
Longinian doctrine that Ideas exist outside of
mind as separate entities of some sort, and that
our knowledge of them is by a process of mental
intuition corresponding to the physical percep-
tion of material phenomena. And this, with the
kindred theory that the Ideas on which the De-
miurge patterned the world have an objective
and eternal reality, is certainly, in my opinion,
the genuine Platonic tradition. One of the early
acts of Porphyry in Rome was to read a paper
supporting the Longinian view; but he was ar-
gued down by a fellow student, and at last re-
canted in favour of the contrary view inculcated
by Plotinus.
Now for his theory that Ideas are in the mind,
and only there, being no more than the noetic
activity of the soul itself, Plotinus had abun-
dant authority. In the first place he could go
back to the pre-'Socratic philosophy and quote
the saying of Parmenides that "thinking and
being are one and the same," and " C I sought out
myself as one of the things that are/' 27 For Pla-
to himself he couldrefer to Aristotle's statement
(certainly misleading if taken alone) that the
27See V, Iv, 5, and compare Plato's rejection of the Parmenidean
sentence in the Sophist.
PLOTINUS 245
place of Ideas according to the Platonic psy-
chology was in the soul; 28 and Aristotle's doc-
trine of contemplation would support the same
view. The logoi spennatikoi of the Stoics were
essentially the Ideas of Plato reduced by the
compulsion of monism to the forces of genera-
tive reason acting within the material world of
phenomena. For a later age Plotinus had the
name of Philo, who taught explicitly that the
Platonic Ideas on which the Creator modelled
the world were simply the design in His own
mind, like the plan in an architect's brain when
he starts to erect a building.
But what chiefly led Plotinus to adopt this
theory of Ideas was, I think, a desire to escape
the arguments of the agnostic, with their ten-
dency to materialism and moral indifference.
Sextus Empiricus, the historian of scepticism,
had insisted on the fact that our only knowledge
is of our immediate affections, while of the ac-
tual objective world behind our sensations we
can know nothing. Plotinus sees that the same
argument is valid for Ideas, and that here too,
so long as a distinction is maintained between
the soul and what affects it, there can be no ab-
solute knowledge ; we may know how we are af-
ssJDs An. Ill, iv, 5.
246 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
f ected, but there we stop. Reason is balked in its
desire to define those spiritual forces which oper-
ate upon us out of the Ideal world and impose
upon us the law of our moral being. This bar-
rierofignorancePlotinuswouldoverleapbysim-
v, iii, 5, e ply breaking down the distinction, and identif y-
v, T, i, 2 ing the mind with Ideas. And at the same time
he hoped to give a new and more precise mean-
ing to the Delphic command of which Socrates
and Plato had made so much: Know thyself,
v, viii, 11 For, he says, if Ideas are not outside of the mind
but in the mind, are in sooth nothing but mind
in the act of reflecting upon itself, then to know
one's self is to know Ideas and to know Ideas is
to know one's self.
All this is highly ingenious, and to many will
appear a legitimate interpretation, or it may be
development, of Platonism, as the only method
by which the doctrine of Ideas can maintain it-
self against a critical analysis. But is it? On the
contrary is it not the sort of subtle perversion
that undermines while it professes to confirm?
In the first place the defence is not necessary.
It does not follow that Ideas must become non-
existent for us if we leave them as objects which
in their inmost being we can never, as our fac-
ulties are now constituted, know. It does not
PLOTINUS 247
follow any more than that the material world
ceases to exist in itself if our knowledge of it is
confined to our sensations. Our immediate af-
fections in the spiritual order may give us just
as positive a conviction that we are in contact
with an Ideal world as is our conviction of the
material world ; it may be even far more real, as
touching the deeper strata of our being and as
governing our psychical life*
And, pragmatically., the change from the Pla-
tonic to the Neoplatonic conception of Ideas
points straight to that perversion of Ideas into
ideals which is the note everywhere of a pseudo-
Platonism. Now this distinction between Ideas
and ideals, though often ignored (partly per-
haps because we have only one abstract deriva-
tive, "idealism/ 7 for bothof them) , has far-reach-
ing consequences. The sham Platonism amounts
simply to this, that there is no difference be-
tween truth and falsehood determined by the
correspondence of our ideals with immutable
spiritual facts. Genuine Platonism holds, on the
contrary, that there is a truth dependent on our
right apprehension of the power and operation
of the eternal and impersonal Ideas; it holds
that our happiness depends on the discovery of,
and obedience to, such truth. One must add, in
248 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
fairness, that the change from the idealism of
Ideas to that of ideals is softened in Plotinus by
his strong persuasion of a moral law pervading
all stages of evolution, and by his rather illog-
ical tenet that in the order of evolution the nota,
as the thoughts of Nous, precede nodsis, as the
thinking activity of Nous. But then, theoretic-
ally, the dominion of law can be maintained in
the monistic scheme of a Plotinus only by ex-
tending the sway of necessity to the deadly tyr-
anny of a spiritual determinism. And, practical-
ly, a sham Platonism runs with headlong speed
into a kind of spiritual licence which teaches
that, if ideals are a part of the mind, then they
are ours ; if we create them by our own good will
and pleasure, and are answerable to no person
or law for their objective truth, then in a word
we are free to believe and desire and hope as we
please. Man becomes the measure in the full
Protagorean sense of the phrase.
Mysticism is a word of various import, and
should not be allowed to pass unchallenged. It
may be used to signify any form of the super-
natural, including a genuine Platonic Idealism;
it may denote an emotional pantheism such as
Wordsworth expresses in his Tintern Abbey,,
or any vague anti-rationalism. But, more strict-
PLOTINUS 249
ly, it is a metaphysical and religious system cen-
tring upon that ecstatic union, that absorption
in God or the Absolute, in which all sense of
distinctions, all positive sensation or thought
or emotion of any kind, even consciousness, is
swallowed up in a vast nothingness. It is, to
borrow the rolling language of Sir Thomas
Browne, "Christian annihilation, extasis, exolu-
tion, liquefaction, transformation, the kisse of
the Spouse, gustation of God, and ingression
into the divine shadow." 29 The pseudo-Diony-
sius, who introduced the ecstatic philosophy of
Plotinus into Christianity and was thus the be-
getter of a long line of my sties through the Mid-
dle Ages and down to the present day, was as
precise in his description as words can be :
"Unto this Darkness which is beyond Light
we pray that we may come, and may attain unto
vision through the loss of sight and knowledge,
and that in ceasing thus to see or to know we
may learn to know that which is beyond all per-
ception and understanding (for this emptying
of our faculties is true sight and knowledge),
and that we may offer Him that transcends all
things the praises of a transcendent hymnody,
which we shall do by denying or removing all
things that are. . , .
ia, conclusion.
250 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
"It is not soul, or mind, or endowed with the
faculty of imagination, conjecture, reason, or
understanding; ... It is not number, or or-
der, or greatness, or littleness, or equality, or
inequality; . . . It is not immovable nor in mo-
tion, or at rest, and has no power, and is not
power or light, and does not live, and is not life ;
nor is It personal essence, or eternity, or time;
. . . nor is It one, nor is It unity, nor is It God-
head or Goodness ; nor is It a Spirit, as we un-
derstand the term, since It is not Sonship or
Fatherhood; nor is It any other thing such as
we or any other being can have knowledge of;
nor does It belong to the category of non-exist-
ence or to that of existence ; . . . It transcends
all affirmation by being the perfect and unique
Cause of all things, and transcends all negation
by the pre-eminence of Its simple and absolute
nature free from every limitation and bevond
them all." 30
This, with the exception of a Christian term
or two which are inessential, is a fair statement
of the Plotinian mysticism carried to its ulti-
mate expression. Evidently we have here a pro-
duct of the same spirit of introversion and unifi-
cation as that which deprived the Platonic Ideas
of their substantive reality and merged them
with the ISTous. And just as evidently it bears the
marks of the Aristotelian Absolute, grafted on
**The Mystical Theology ii and iv, translated by C, E. Holt.
PLOTINUS 251
the religious sentiment of the age and trans-
formed into a complete cause of being as well as
of motion. It immediately raises three questions :
(1) the fact of the experience, (2) the interpre-
tation of the fa^t, and (3) the consequences of
the interpretation.
As for the fact, I do not see how it can be de-
nied. The literature of the world, Oriental and
Occidental, is too replete with accounts of the
mystical experience to leave any room for intel-
ligent doubt. And these accounts are singularly
uniform in their method of describing a state
which they all declare to be, positively speaking,
indescribable, unrecordable, unrememberable.
Something has happened to these mystics, some-
thing which is unf elt, or dimly felt, by the nor-
mal man, but which cannot for that be laughed
or argued away. There is a real experience here
to be explained.
Doubt, or difference of opinion, becomes legi-
timate, however, when we listen to the interpre-
tations given by those who have had the experi-
ence. It is true that by turning inwards the mind
can brood upon physical sensations in such a
way as to forget the body and the world of ma-
terial forces; but it does not follow hence that
the body and the material world are really elim-
252 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
inated as causes contributing to our physical
sensations. It is true that by the same brooding
introspection the mind can think of itself as the
source and only place of the world of Ideas ; but
it does not follow that Ideas have really lost
their independent existence as powers which af-
fect our inner life. And so also it is true that by
a kind of self-hypnotization the soul can with-
draw itself from all distinctions of thinker and
thought, engulfing itself in the vacuity of utter
abdication ; but again it does not follow that our
words have any authority when we interpret this
spiritual catalepsy as evidence of a final and ab-
solute Unity at the heart of the world. One may
suspect that a terrible confusion of emotional
values has played into a like intellectual con-
fusion to create a strange and fascinating phi-
losophy.
As for the emotional values, one cannot read
the lives of the great and the little mystics with-
out being impressed by the constantly recurring
association of the ecstatic experience with ill
health, mental derangement, sodden stupidity,
morbid excitability, moral degeneracy, down-
right criminality, erotic mania. "The one thing
known about the religious \i.e. y mystical] exper-
ience is that its occurrence is invariably due to a
PLOTINUS 253
combination of lowered vitality plus emotional
excitement." Too often the results point to a
"dissociation of ethical standards from religious
standards" as the "fundamental characteristic
of mysticism/' I quote these words, with some
hesitation, from a writer who, in her fanatical
hatred of everything approaching the superna-
tural and in her no less fanatical devotion to
what she calls science, would throw overboard
much that in my judgment characterizes the
higher reach of true religion. 31 1 know the power
and moral stimulation that have gone out to
mankind from the lives of some of the greater
mystics ; and, indeed, my distrust of this whole
side of religion has come to me only after long
and intimate intercourse with mystical litera-
ture and somewhat against my instinctive sym-
pathies. But the record is too clear and too dis-
astrous ; mysticism of the Plotinian type is al-
most certain evidence of a physical or mental or
moral taint somewhere in the devotee. No doubt
the psychology is complicated; the phenomenon
may go with magnificent powers, with refined
si Anna Robeson Burr, Religious Confessions and Confessant*.
Miss Burr takes for the motto of her book these lines from The
Duchess of Malfi, which her record justifies only too well:
**O this gloomy world !
In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live !"
254 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
devotion, and the noblest traits of character;
but in itself it is from the weakness, not the
strength, of religious experience. To regard the
momentary coma of the intellect as the crown-
ing act of submission to the will of God and as
the consummation of faith is a radical, often a
dangerous, confusion of emotional values. One
can see how, in the finer souls, the error takes
place. The ecstatic absorption, so called, may be
a blank, without meaning or content, induced
by physical causes of a doubtful character ; but
afterwards, when the mind has awakened to the
distractions and dismay of actual life, that mo-
ment of quiescence will be glorified by the magic
of memory into a realization of the perfect peace
of God which the pious soul always craves and
never consciously knows. 'So much we can un-
derstand; but we need not suffer our judgment
to be warped by such an illusion, or forget the
dangers that beset it. As a matter of fact the
Christian Church has shown a wholesome reluc-
tance to sanction extravagances that, in weaker
men, too easily run into spiritual debauchery;
"for every mystic she has canonized, she has
silenced ten."
The emotional claims of mysticism, I suspect,
would be less tolerated, were they not doubled
PLOTINUS 255
by an intellectual confusion which, in the dark-
ness of extinguished consciousness, one might
say, suddenly juggles our supreme ignorance
into absolute knowledge. The Platonic philoso-
phy admitted that the Father and Creator was
hard to know and impossible to express. And so
Christian theology, of a thoroughly orthodox
type, has had much to say about our incompe-
tence to grasp the fullness of God's being, and
has been wont to insist on the fact that our finite
reason in striving to reach His ineffable glory
can only grope awkwardly in terms of nega-
tion. 82 "Only this I can say, what He is not," St.
Augustine declares. "And now, if you cannot
comprehend what God is, at least comprehend
what He is not ; it is much for you if you do not
think of God otherwise than He is." 83 That is
the wise humility of reverence, the recognition
of the truth that before the inmost reality of
things the intellect of man must shrink to a pro-
Platomsm 146.
Trinitate viii, Q. In his Theological Oration* II, 4, Gregory
Nazianzen rebukes' Plato for saying (Timaeus 3$ c) that God is
hard to know and impossible to express to all men. According to
the Christian theologian Plato's words were meant to convey a
subtle intimation that he really knew the divine nature which in
fact is beyond all human comprehension. Passages of this sort
might be multiplied indefinitely. It will not be out of place here
to add that my chosen phrase the "inner check" is used in this
philosophical and religious sense, not as denying the positive
reality of what is for us ultimately the divine faculty but as dis-
claiming immediate knowledge of its nature and modus operand*.
256 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
f ession of its incapacity. And it does not follow
at all that such ignorance cuts man off from the
consolations of worship or even from a certain
fellowship with the divine personality. St. Basil
in one of his letters touches the matter with his
usual acumen :
" 'Do you worship what you know, or that of
which you are ignorant?' If we reply that we
worship what we know, then we are met at once
with the question: 'What is the essence of this
which you worship ?' And if we admit our ignor-
ance of His essence, we are overwhelmed with
the retort: 'Therefore you worship what you
know not/ But we say that 'to know' has more
than one meaning. For the majesty of God we
say that we know, and His power, and wisdom,
and goodness, and His providential care for us,
and the righteousness of His judgments; not
His essence. So that the question is unfair. Since
he who confesses ignorance of God's essence does
not thereby admit that we have no acquaintance
with God through those operations which we
have mentioned." 34
The argument of the Fathers is clear and hon-
est. Of God's works in the frame of nature and
in the human heart any man may have sufficient
understanding to guide him in the path of reli-
gion and to the peace of communion prepared
&*Epist. ccxxxiv Migne.For a like idea in Irenaeus and Tertul-
lian see Kidd, A History of the Church I, 333.
PLOTINUS 257
for all trusting souls; of God's love and com-
passion we have sufficient revelation in the in-
carnate Son; but of God Himself and the ulti-
mate mystery of the Divine only a fool will say
that he has understanding, as only a fool will say
that there is no God.
Philosophy and religion agree then in this,
that they hoth leave man in a combined state of
ignorance and knowledge, scepticism and faith;
they agree in telling us that we are morally re-
sponsible and intellectually impotent. But it is
against just such a limitation of its authority
that the intellectus sibi permissus rebels, and it
is just here that a metaphysical monism sets up
its claim. How, the doubter will ask, can we
comprehend the hypothetic One to which all at-
tributes are denied? How can we think of that
which is beyond thinking and thought? It might
seem as if metaphysics had deprived us even of
the practical half -knowledge vouchsafed by re-
ligious philosophy. But no: reason is resolute
and cunning; it is ready at hand to hypostatize
the very incomprehensibility of God's being into
a comprehensible Not-Being, saying to itself:
"Because I know Him not, therefore I know
His essence as pure negation." Taken alone such
a vaunt rather savours of verbal quibbling; there
258 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
is not much satisfaction for the hungry heart or
the ambitious brain in abstractions of this sort.
But joined to mysticism it acquires, and lends,
a factitious reality. By a coalescence of the il-
lusion of the emotions with the legerdemain of
logic the fabulous Not-Being will impose itself
on the believer as an equivalent for the fullness
of infinite being, and the absolute One will seem
to be the negation of multiplicity only because
it embraces all things. Ignorance has swooned
into perfect knowledge.
The consequences of this metaphysical abuse
of an experience questionable in itself are writ-
ten at large through the Enneads and the lit-
erature derived from them. As a protest against
the material monism of Epicurus and Zeno the
spirituality of Plotinus has a lasting religious
value ; but as a spiritual monism it cannot avoid
the charge of running out into a mockery of
tantalizing paradoxes. Evil in this actual life
has been virtually juggled out of existence. In
the noetic heaven, conceived as universal Nous
lost in contemplation of its own thoughts, there
is no place for memory of our lessons in the phe-
nomenal world, no continuity of moral respon-
sibility, no spiritual adventure in a new world
of veritable Ideas, no place for the soul as an
PLOTINUS 259
enduring and individual entity, no immortality
that corresponds to the craving of human na-
ture. In the final stage of absorption there is
nothing, no approach to a divine Huler con-
sciously engaged in the tasks of providence, no
communion with a personality who can feel as
man feels, there is only the oblivion of a per-
fection that annihilates what is perfected. In a
universe so constituted worship becomes a vapid
form, faith loses its substance, hope is emptied
of comf ort. 35
The rationalism of Plotinus, like that of Epi-
curus and Zeno, was a self-willed effort to tran-
scend the limitations which the dualist accepts
humbly as a necessity of our mortal state ; the
inevitable result of grasping at the forbidden
Tree of Knowledge is to dissolve philosophy and
religion into the limbo of metaphysics. And the
end of metaphysics is a Pyrrhonic agnosticism
or a lapse into gross superstition.
ssplutarch, De Defects Orac. 37: EZ 5* dXXax^t vov icarraCfla
r^ lav-rods rb
CHAPTER VI
DIOGENES OF SINOPE
BEPOBE taking up the final breakdown of the
Hellenistic heresies in scepticism it will be in
place to tell the story of the Cynic who, from a
licensed beggar and buffoon, was transformed
by the alchemy of tradition into the legendary
saint of philosophy. In him the beginning and
the end are curiously brought together.
Of the events of Diogenes' lif e, as generally
of the early philosophers, little is related, and
even what information we have is confused and
more or less questionable. He was born in Sinope
of Pontus, but left home as an exile. The cause
of his banishment is said to have been a charge
of counterfeiting brought against himself or his
father; but this may well be a false inference
from his famous maxim, "Remint the coinage," 1
by which, playing on the double sense of nomi-
ma and nomi$ma> he meant to enforce the cynic
i ILapax<tpaov rb v6ju<rfjM. The phrase is variously translated: "re-
mint the coinage," "falsify the currency," "restamp the mint-
age," etc.
260
DIOGENES OF SINOFE 261
transvaluation of all moral values. When re-
proached with the fact that the people of his
town had condemned him to exile, his reply was,
"And I condemned them to remain in Sinope."
At any rate to Athens he came, and there for a
while attached himself to Antisthenes, forced
himself on the unwilling teacher, it is said, by
vowing that no stick was hard enough to drive
him away. In time he became the typical Cynic,
accepting the epithet blandly with the remark
that if he was a "dog" it was not because he bit
his enemies, but because he snarled at his friends
f or theirsalvation. Apparently he travelled about
a good deal, and more especially haunted the
Panhellenic games and other celebrations, where
among the crowds of idlers he could exercise his
gift of scoffing wit. He had his following, and
even seemsat times to have givenregular courses
of instruction, though how and where and in
what it is hard to say. 2 At some date in his ca-
reer he was captured by pirates, and when put
up f o* sale in the slave-market greeted prospec-
tive purchasers with his customary insolence:
"Come, buy a master!" For a number of years
he served as pedagogue to the children of Xeni-
ades in Corinth, seeming to enjoy great liberty,
2For Diogenes as a serious teacher of philosophy see H. von Ar-
nica, Dio von Prusa 37 ff.
262 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
whether as slave or freedman. He died in 323
B.C. in extreme old age, on the same day, tradi-
tion said, with Alexander.
That is a scant biography, and in fact it serves,
as in the case of Aristippus, merely as frame-
work for a collection of the pithy sayings actu-
ally uttered by Diogenes or attributed to him.
From the mass of these memorabilia recorded
by his namesake of Laerte I select a few of the
more characteristic:
"Once when Plato had invited him and certain
friends to dinner, Diogenes trampled on his rugs
with the remark, *I am trampling on Plato's
vanity/ To which Plato, 'With what vanity of
your own, Diogenes!' "
"He went about with a lighted lamp one day,
saying, 'I am looking for a man.' "
"Once he was begging of a statue, and, being
asked why he did so, replied, 'I am learning to
meet with refusal/ "
"To the query when was the time to marry he
answered, Tor young men not yet, for old men
no longer.' " 8
"He was entering a theatre when the crowd
was leaving, and being asked why, he said, 'This
has been my practice all my life. 3 "
To these anecdotes may be added a few from
. Laert. has rods dt irpctrpvTfyovs M$eir&iroTe. Surely the word
should be /tafic4rt.
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 263
the numerous references scattered through Plu-
tarch's Essays;
"He said that the safest course for a man was
to possess good friends and hot-tempered ene-
mies ; for the former will instruct him and the
latter will lay bare his faults."
"To the question how one should get the bet-
ter of an enemy he answered, *By making one's
self a true gentleman/ "
"When some one was praising Platohe asked :
'Why should that fellow be proud, who has been
playing the philosopher all these years and never
caused a pang to any one?* "
"Catching a boy making a pig of himself, he
gave a slap to the boy's guardian, rightly putting
the blame not on him who had learned no better
but on him who had taught no better."*
" 'These men are laughing at you, Diogenes.'
'But I am not laughed at.' " 5
(On the possible blessings of exile): "Lei-
sure, walks, reading, undisturbed slumber;* the
boast of Diogenes, 'Aristotle breakfasts when it
pleases Philip, Diogenes when it pleases Diog-
enes.' "
These braggart and for the most part petu-
*Cf. Sophocles, PMtoetoto 387 fi
01 5' fawrtMvrres Ppffrun>
t ytyvorrat xajcot.
5The Cynic version of the Aristippean Habeo,
Moralia 604 D: X o
the scholar's life be described more beautifully?
264 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
lant sentences may look poorly for the baggage
of one who was to be the canonized saint of phi-
losophy, yet if we examine them we can see how
they bear directly on the goal towards which all
the Socratic sects were striving. Security, in one
form or another, had been the aim of Aristippus
and of Antisthenes, as indeed it was of all their
followers ; and above any one of them Diogenes
could boast this advantage from his philosophy,
"that he had prepared himself for every hazard
of fate." For what adversity could happen to a
man who was, in the words of the tragedian,
"Cityless, hearthless, reft of fatherland,
A wanderer begging food from hand to hand" ?
Socrates had attained security by character and
by the power of endurance ; Diogenes would do
more, he would not wait upon the assaults of
Fortune but would go out voluntarily to meet
her. So, at the sight of a mouse running about
at night with no need of a sleeping place or fear
of the dark, he sets himself to harden life by
giving up everything save a few necessary uten-
sils. Later, when he sees a boy drinking out of
his hands, he even throws away the cup he had
retained. And when the little house he has or-
dered is not ready for him, he makes his abode
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 265
in one of the great water-jars lying by a temple.
So he would flout the hedonist, and prove that
"the contempt of pleasure is the truest pleasure
after all"
Liberty was the other lesson that the Socrat-
ics had learned from their master unless it
should be called only a phase of security and
liberty also was carried by Diogenes to the last
point of licence (parrhesia) . The tongues of or-
dinary men might be hushed by reverence or
fear, but not the genuine Cynic's. Wlien Alex-
ander stands beside him while he is sunning him-
self in one of the gymnasium courts of Corinth,
and asks if he would have any favour, his reply
is, "Yes, remove your shadow from me." Ordi-
nary men might submit to the conventional de-
cencies of life out of respect for public opinion
if for no other reason, but not Diogenes: with
incredible effrontery he chose the open highways
to exhibit the most disgusting acts. Security and
liberty, he thought, were the fruit of obeying
nature and spurning law and custom; and in
this way he did, to the amazement of Philistine
and philosopher, effect the transvaluation of all
values of which the Sophists had talked, and
over which in these latter days certain so-called
naturalists still rave.
266 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
And the world was amazed, and did not for-
get. In the fragmentary state of our informa-
tion we cannot trace all the steps by which Diog-
enes grew into a legendary figure, but the main
course of the progress is pretty clear. At an early
date collections of memorabilia were made, into
which no doubt genuine and spurious anecdotes
were thrown together with little discrimination.
Any current witticism or bold story with the true
cynical ring would naturally gravitate to the
great exemplar of Cynicism. It was on these
memorabilia chiefly that Diogenes Laertius drew
for his so-called biography. Meanwhile the pop-
ular professors of philosophy were busy expand-
ing and embroidering and altering. To Bion of
Borysthenes, pupil of Crates who himself was a
pupil of Diogenes, is ascribed the invention of
the brief exhortatory address, the influence of
which is still seen in the Discourses of Epicte-
tus andinthe earlier appeals of Christian preach-
ers to the populace. So far as we fean judge from
the tradition there was little teaching of a posi-
tive sort in Bion, but mainly criticism of conven-
tional life and morals in a cynical vein. To lend
vivacity to his diatribes he employed freely the
Socratic dialogue, in the form of terse question
and answer, examples of which may be found
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 267
in the works of Plato. But in Bion it is clear
that Diogenes begins to displace Socrates as the
spokesman of wisdom.
More is known of Teles, a wandering preach-
er and pedagogue of the third century B.C., who
imitated and quoted Bion, and of whose dia-
tribes considerable fragments have been pre-
served in abridgement. They are dry enough
reading, at least as they have come down to us,
but they have some value as indications of the
way in which the legend of Diogenes was tak-
ing shape. And in the second discourse (Hense)
the position of the Cynic philosophy between
the optimistic endurance of Socrates and the
dogmatic optimism of the Porch is shown in a
manner not without historical interest. Teles is
quoting Bion:
"As the biting of wild beasts depends on the
way you take them for instance, grasp a snake
by the middle and you will be bitten, grasp him
by the neck and you are safe so our suffering
from circumstances depends on the opinion we
take of them. If your opinion of them is like
that of Socrates, you will not suffer; otherwise
you will be made to suffer, not by the circum-
stances themselves, but by your own character
and by your false judgment. Hence we should
not endeavour to alter circumstances, but to
adapt ourselves to things as they are. . . . And
268 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
so, as I say, I do not see how there is anything
hard or painful in things themselves, such as old
age or poverty or exile."
Socrates would overcome the evils of exist-
ence by strength of character and by trust in the
ultimate justice of the gods; the Cynic makes
the power of endurance an active principle of
life, and attains security from fear of suffering
by his contempt of hardship as a force inferior
to his own energy, and so in a way regards evil
as a matter of opinion or self -estimation; the
Stoic will go a step further and will assert that
there actually is no evil in the world except as
our opinion, or judgment, imagines it to be. The
commonplace illustrations of endurance drawn
by Teles from the life of Diogenes I have omitted
in the quotation, but even without them the pas-
sage must commend itself as a curious and in-
structive blend of these three stages of philoso-
phy-
The next step apparently was taken when
some unknown rhetorician published a number
of letters supposed to have been written by
Crates to his wife Hipparchia and to various
friends. The compositions are very brief for the
most part, consisting each of a few sentences on
some saying of Diogenes or on some common-
DIOGENES OF SINOFE 269
place of the Cynic school. In one Crates instructs
his disciples to beg the necessaries of life only
from those who are themselves initiated in phi-
losophy, for by so doing they will be accepting
what is their own. Another note admonishes a
friend that the country does not always breed
innocence nor the city vice, and that if he desires
his children to be good he should not send them
into the country but place them under the care
of a philosopher; "for," Crates adds, "virtue
comes by training, and does not insinuate itself
into the soul automatically as vice does." Com-
menting to another friend on the security and
freedom and salubrity of the simple life, he con-
cludes: "The philosophy that effects these things
is the best of all; and if you do not find it else-
where, you will certainly find it with Diogenes,
who discovered the short path to happiness."
And again the writer says : "Long is the path to
happiness by words and argument, but the study
by daily practice is short," which is good doc-
trine, whether preaehedby Diogenes or by whom-
soever. The most elaborate of the letters tells the
story of Diogenes' adventure with the pirates
as reported to Crates by one of the fellow vic-
tims who was sold into slavery and redeemed.
It is really an amusing little picture, ending
270 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
with the naive statement that the pirates were
so impressed by Diogenes 5 words when offered
for sale that they took him down from the block
and carried him off to their haunts, promising
him liberty if he would impart to them his wis-
dom. "Wherefore," the reporter ends, "on my
return home I did not send a ransom for him,
nor did I ask you to send it; but do you rejoice
with me that he is living a captive among the pi-
rates, and that such a thing has happened as few
men will credit." 7
The spurious correspondence of Crates would
appear to be an early creation, and may go back
to the age of Teles. A similar collection of let-
ters, attributed to Diogenes himself, and ad-
dressed to various friends ranging from Alex-
ander to the supposed writer's mother, must, I
think, be of later date. There are fifty-one of
these epistles, neatly turned and cleverly phrased,
which form on the whole one of the most enter-
taining products from the rhetorical workshop.
And, again, the method of composition is simple
enough; in most cases the author merely takes
one of the sayings or doings ascribed to Diog-
7The story of the capture and sale of Diogenes probably has a
kernel of historic truth. It seems to have taken literary form
under the hands of the satirist Menippus. For the part played by
Menippus generally in creating the legend, see Rudolf Helm,
Lucian, wnd M&nipp 231 ff.
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 271
enes, and then about this builds up an imaginary
scene from his life, with details added to taste
and with more or less of moralizing. Thus, in
one letter, we have the story of the slave (not a
child, as in the source-book of Diogenes Laer-
tius) drinking from his hands. Another repeats
the anecdote of the water jar, with the addition
that Diogenes got his hint from the sight of a
snail in its shell. Alexander turns up, of course;
he duly casts a shadow on the Cynic (who now
represents himself as pasting the leaves of a
book and needing light for the task) , and he ob-
serves, as a true monarch should, that if he were
not Alexander he would be Diogenes, In one
note Crates is advised to beg of statues, and in
another he is admonished not to beg of men un-
less he can give a quid pro quo in moral help. An
anecdote in the Life tells how Diogenes read
over the door of a newly married man this in-
scription: "Heracles Callinicus, son of Zeus,
dwells here; let no evil enter," and how he mis-
chievously added the words: "An alliance after
the battle/' This anecdote the letter-writer ex-
pands into the pretty tale of a visit to Cyrene,
where Diogenes sees the inscription over door
after door, and bids the citizens put "Poverty"
in the place of "Heracles" as a better safeguard
272 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
against calamity and temptation, or, if poverty
is too austere for their taste, then the word "Jus-
tice." So visibly before our eyes, the sturdy beg-
gar and licensed scoffer is changing to a model
of righteousness; even his shocking indecency
is translated into a plea for the sanctity of na-
ture which would satisfy the most emancipated
naturalist of the twentieth century. One of the
longer communications, to an anonymous friend
whom Diogenes has met at the Olympian Games,
closes in this highly edifying tone :
"But I weighed the gifts of those who offered
me bread, and from those who had profited I ac-
cepted, while the others I refused, thinking it
not a fair thing to accept from those who had re-
ceived nothing. And I did not dine with every
body, but only with those who needed my serv-
ice as a healer. . . . On one occasion I went to
the house of a very rich young man, and was re-
ceived on a couch in a room hung all over with
pictures and decked out with gold so fine indeed
that there was nowhere for a man to spit. Ac-
cordingly, when I choked with phlegm and,
glancing about, could discover no more suitable
place, I just spat on the youth himself. He be-
gan to scold at this ; but I stopped him with the
words: 'You' and I named him 'why do you
blame me for what has happened, instead of
yourself? Here you have adorned the walls and
floor of your room, and have left yourself un-
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 273
adorned as the only fit place to be so used/ * Your
language,' he replied, 'seems to intimate that I
am an uneducated boor; but you shall not have a
chance to say this to me again, for I am going to
stick close to your side henceforth.' And in fact,
on the very next day, he disposed of all his prop-
erty to his family, put on the Cynic's knapsack,
folded his cloak, and followed me. These things
were done by me in Olympia after your depart-
ure."
These are the things, indeed, done by the
Diogenes of the epistles, but one may doubt
whether the words and deeds of the actual man
were quite so pious in their intention. If the
closing incident at Olympia reads like a carica-
ture of a scene in the Gospels, where, however,
the rich young man did not follow, but went
away, leaving the Master sad, there is another
letter which describes the conversion of Diog-
enes himself in a manner suitable almost, bar-
ring the whimsical conclusion, for the investi-
ture of a Galahad in the insignia of Christian
knighthood. The newly appointed Cynic is sup-
posed to be writing back to the home he has re-
cently left:
"I am at Athens, dear father, and, having
heard that the companion of 'Socrates was teach-
inghappiness,Ibetookmyselftohim.Hechanced
274 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
at the time to be lecturing about the paths leading
thither. They are two, he was saying, and not
many, the one short, the other long; and it lies
with each man to choose for himself by which of
them he will go. I listened and said nothing; but
on the following day I returned to his house, and
besought him to expound to us the nature of these
two paths. He was quite ready, and, leaving his
seat, took us into the city, and through the city
straight to the Acropolis . And, when we had coine
to its foot, he showed us that there were two paths
up to the height, one short and steep and diffi-
cult, the other long and gentle and easy. And,
'these/ he said, c are the ways leadingto the Acrop-
olis, and the ways to happiness are like them. Each
of you may choose which lie will, and I will be
your guide.' At this the others shrank back in
alarm from the difficulty and steepness of the
shorter path, and begged him to conduct them
by the longer and gentler ; only I, feeling nay
superiority to hardship, preferred the steep and
difficultroad,forthe desire of happiness was ur-
gent upon me though it should carry me through
fire and swords. And then, when I had chosen
this path, he divested me of my robe and tunic,
and threw about me a folded cloak, and hung a
knapsack upon my shoulder, first putting in it
bread and a bit of coarse cake and a cup and
plate, and attaching to it outside an oil-flask and
a strigil. He gave me also a staff; and so he
fitted me out.
"And I askedihim why the cloakhe had thrown
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 275
over me was doubled, 'In order that I may train
you for both states,' he replied, 'for the heat of
summer and the cold of winter.* 'But why/ I
asked, * would not a single cloak suffice for that ?'
'No,' answered he; "that would be a comfort in
summer, but in winter too great an infliction for
human endurance/ 8 'And the knapsack, why
have you hung that upon me?' 'That you may
carry your home about with you/ said he, * wher-
ever you go/ 'And the cup and plate, why did
you put them in it T 'Because/ said he, 'you must
drink, and you must have something to go with
your bread, nasturtium seed or the like/ * And the
oil-flask and strigil, why did you attach these?'
'One/ said he, 'is for your labours, the other
for cleanliness/ 'And why the staff?' I asked.
'For security/ said he. * Against what?" Against
that for which the gods used it, against the
poets/ "
The date of these letters cannot be determined
exactly, but from their character it is pretty clear
that they are earlier than Dio Chrysostom and
Epictetus, by whose time the buffoon of Athens
and Corinth has been completely transformed
into a personification of sacred wisdom.
Dio was an eminent rhetorician of a distin-
guished family of Prusa in Bithynia, who, for
court reasons, was banished from Italy and his
sOates in one of his letters says that Diogenes never wore the
Cynic's cloak.
276 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
native province in the year A.D. 82. During his
period of wandering exile he underwent a con-
version from rhetoric to philosophy. Later he
came into court favour again, and was particu-
larly intimate with Trajan. Apparently one of
the first fruits of his conversion was a group of
essays wherein the ardent acolyte in philosophy
preached Diogenes to a surfeited world as a
model of the simple life. And it is curious to see
how he constructs these essays. The method is
precisely the same as in the case of the letters,
except that, in place of little scenes from Diog-
enes' life drawn for moral edification, we now
have full-blown sermons, some of which might
have graced a Christian pulpit. So the fourth
Oration (Von Arnim) grows and expands out
of the reputed meeting with Alexander. The cir-
cumstances are described more minutely than
in the letter and have all the air of an historical
novel. The King is in Corinth on political busi-
ness, and, telling his retinue that he desires to be
alone, goes off to visit the famous Cynic not
to his door, for door or house the sage has none,
but accounts the whole city his home, and at
that particular time is residing at ease in the
court of a gymnasium. There Alexander finds
him squat upon the ground; and we are told
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 277
how, on being greeted, the Cynic looked up at
the intruder with the savage glare of a lion, and
bade him stand aside a little. Alexander, like the
good prince in a fairy tale, admires the man's
audacity; for that is the character of the brave
everywhere, to love freedom and truth and to
hate falsehood and flattery. Whereupon king
and philosopher enter into a conversation,which
trails out in a long lecture from the one on the
virtues and duties of a ruler, with a few humble
questions interposed by the other. And, as if that
were not sufficient, another essay gives an ex-
tended comparison between the life of a phi-
losopher and that of the Great King, all placed
in the mouth of Diogenes, and all, needless to
say, going to prove that in virtue and security
and true happiness the beggar in his tub is in-
finitely superior to the Persian monarch in his
palace. 9 It is a pity rather to find the burly ruf-
fian thus smoothed out into a prig; but these
common-places seem to have been listened to
seriously at the time, and they have gone on
echoing through literature down to a compara-
tively recent date. Bolingbroke's treatise on the
Idea of aPatriot King is one of their latest man-
9 A beautiful illustration of the way in which a true and practical
thesis of Plato's (cf. Gorgias 4TO z) is transformed by rhetoric
into a flaunting paradox.
278 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
if estations, and that idea, working in the mind
of George the Third, helped to make agooddeal
of sad history.
Again Dio takes up the hrief statement of
Diogenes' presence at the Games and develops
it into an edifying discourse in which the Cynic
appears at once as text and expounder. Now we
see him in the throng streaming from Corinth
to the Isthmian Games. Some one asks him if
he too is going to be a spectator, and he replies,
"No, but a contestant.'' And then, when his in-
terlocutor laughs and begs to know who his an-
tagonists may be, he launches into a terrific dia-
tribe on his own mighty combats with pain and
pleasure as compared with the poor sport of
wrestlers and boxers. The moral of the sermon
is that the true athlete will go out to meet labour
and pain and grapple with them and throw them,
but the strongest man is he who flees the furthest
from pleasure, for pleasure is an antagonistnever
to be conquered at close quarters. That is the
kernel of the matter; but Diogenes' exposition
must have held his travelling companion all the
way out to the sacred grove of Poseidon, where
no doubt the patient hearer made an escape.
Elsewhere we learn that Diogenes was the
original primitivist. Zeus punished Prometheus,
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 279
he thought, not in envy or hatred of mankind,
but because the gift of fire was the source of lux-
ury and all the woes of civilization. And when
some one remarked that men are tender and
naked and need artificial warmth as other beasts
do not, Diogenes pointed scornfully to the frogs,
who have less hair on them than men, yet can live
comfortably in the coldest water. 10 As for the
exhibitionism (if I may use the hideous word)
by which Diogenes sought to shock men out
of their complacent acceptance of conventions,
there is no shirking the worst of it by Dio, on the
ground that deeds speak louder than words, as
no doubt they do ; but the stories would corrode
the paper of a modern book.
Dio is not altogether at his best in these re-
suscitations of the old Cynic. The invention is
too palpable ; and one is tempted to discredit his
praises of poverty and hardship as meaning no
more than the common trick of the rhetoricians
who sought applause by their contorted encom-
iums of flies or smoke or baldness or gout or
fever or vomiting or anything else calculated to
astound an audience satiated with eloquence.
Yet one cannot study the life of Dio or go
loCompare the Socratic retort to Protagoras (Thmetetvs 161 c),
that he might as well make a tadpole, instead of man, the meas-
ure of all things.
280 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
through all his Orations without feeling that
there was more in the man than this and that he
really had a message to deliver. The contrast be-
tween philosopher and tyrant may ring hollow
when Diogenes is represented as haranguing
Alexander in the gymnasium of Corinth, but the
common-places on the duties and toils of king-
ship take a different colour when actually pro-
nounced by the same Dio before Trajan and his
court. "Do not fear that I shall flatter you," said
the preacher, facing the ruler of the world; "it
is long since I gave proofs of my independence.
Formerly [under Domitian], when everybody
felt obliged toprevaricate, I alonewas not afraid
to utter the truth at the risk of my life. And now,
when there is permission to speak freely, I am
not likely to be so inconsistent as to surren-
der the granted liberty. And why should I lie?
To gain money, applause, glory? But money I
have never been willing to take, though often it
has been offered to me ; and what fortune I pos-
sessed of my own, I gave away and dissipated
for others, as I should do today had I anything
to give." The saintly robes of the old Cynic may
have been the work of legendary weavers, but
his example was strong enough four centuries
after his death to inspire a few men who were
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 281
striving for simplicity and sincerity and abstin-
ence in a society at once brutal in its excesses
and terrified by its doubts. And at times a higher
note breaks through the moralizing of a some-
what sentimental primitivism. The tenth Ora-
tion represents Diogenes as holding forth on the
true nature of man's intercourse with God, re-
buking the common practice of praying for
worldly gifts and prosperity, and ridiculing the
folly of wresting the oracular commands into
permission to follow our own desires*
With Dio, notwithstanding the sincerity of
his conversion, one feels that he never quite put
off the old rhetorical man, and that always he
was as much interested in displaying literary
talent as in enforcing a moral truth. But with
Epictetus we enter into a purer region, where
no suspicion of vanity mars the effect. And this
change is felt immediately in his use of Diog-
enes, The old themes recur which the rhetoric-
ians had worn threadbare, the same lessons are
drawn, but with a vigour and earnestness of
tone, with a breath of new inspiration, one might
say, that lift them into the plane of true philoso-
phy. One of the traditional stories told how,
after the battle of Chaeronea, Diogenes was
taken prisoner and carried to Philip, and how,
282 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
being asked who he was, he replied : "A spy up-
on your insatiability." The witticism is remem-
bered by Epictetus ; but now the world itself be-
comes the battle-field, and life a warfare, where-
in the Cynic's mission is to release himself from
all other obligations in order that he may be de-
voted solely to the service of God. So it is he goes
to and fro among men, without being involved
in personal relations, which if he violates he will
lose his character as a good man, and which if he
maintains he will destroy the Spy and Messen-
ger and Herald of the gods that is in him. Hence
Diogenes lived without city or hearth or prop-
erty or slave, sleeping on the ground, with only
earth and sky and one poor cloak for his furni-
ture, yet lacking nothing, blaming no man, fear-
ing no man, the master of himself and of For-
tune. 11 We, exclaims Epictetus, looking at the
Cynics of his day, "dogs of the table, guardians
of the gate," who copy those of old in nothing
except perhaps in dirty habits, do not compre-
nCompare the epigram of the Hindu Bhartrihari:
One boasted: "Ix>, the earth my bed,
This arm a pillow for my head,
The moon my lantern, and the sky
Stretched o'er me like a purple canopy.
"No slave-girls have I, but all night
The four winds fan my slumbers light."
And I astonished: Like a lord
This beggar sleeps; what more could wealth afford?
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 283
hend the measure of the greatness of Diogenes.
Otherwise we should not be astonished at his ab-
stention from marriage and the getting of chil-
dren. The time Cynic is parent of all men, has
all men for his sons, all women for his daughters.
Nor does he rebuke the erring in a spirit of con-
ceit; he corrects them as a father, a brother, as
a servant of Zeus who is Father of all. Do you
think that Diogenes loved no one, he who was so
gentle and philanthropic that he cheerfully took
uponhimself those great labours and burdens for
the common good of mankind ? As befits a servant
of Zeus, he had always the care of the world at
heart, yet in submission to the will of Providence.
As Heracles accepted the commands of Eurys-
thenes, so did he not count himself wretched un-
der the hand of discipline, or shrink from pain,
or ciy aloud in indignation. When the pangs of
fever took hold of him, he called to the passers-
by : "Base creatures, will you not stay? You are
going the long way to Olympia to watch the ath-
letes matched in battle, yet you have no curios-
ity to see this contest between fever and a man."
And he won the victory, as Heracles won it, pre-
senting himself to mankind "with the glow of
health on his face, as an illustration of the plain
and simple life in the open air, a model of ready
284 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
wit and native grace, whose very squalor was
cleanly and attractive. He was the true physi-
cian. "Men/' he says, "you are looking for hap-
piness and peace not where it is but where it is
not. Behold I have been sent to you by God as
an example. Try me, and if you see that I am
at peace in mind, hear my remedies and learn of
me how I found healing." Such was the philoso-
pher thought by Zeus worthy of the crown and
sceptre ; such is the Kingdom of the Cynic, in
comparison wherewith the power and riches and
glory of the kingdoms of the earth are vanity. 12
Evidently the Stoic sage, or wise man, so much
debated in the schools, has taken on flesh and
blood and proved himself a possibility in the per-
son of Diogenes, while the philosophic ideal has
been modified by assimilation to the historic hero
of the tub. But the reader, I think, cannot fail
also to be struck by a certain similarity between
the Diogenes of Epictetus and the Christ of the
Gospels, as one whose life was a lesson for all
mankind; even the "kingdom of the Cynic" has
a curious suggestion of the kingdom of heaven.
But the parallel is incomplete, and in the mind
of Epictetus it was entirely unconscious. The
last step remained to be taken by Julian the
"Put together from Discourses III, xxii; III, xxiv; IV, viii. The
language is largely that of P. E. Matheson.
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 285
Apostate, who gathered together whatever plau-
sible hints he could find in Greek philosophy and
my thology, hlended them with Persian and other
Oriental beliefs that had heen overrunning the
Empire, and out of the compound brewed a
strange new religion which, as he hoped, would
give to men all that was luring them to Christi-
anity, while at the same time it would save the
world from the threatened break with the nobler
traditions of antiquity.
For centuries the need of a mediating divinity
had been growing upon mankind. The old naive
faith, which had held the gods so close to human
society, was shattered by philosophic specula-
tion and general scepticism. Immorality had
spread over the world like a sickly taint ; it may
be that men were no more subject to the flesh
than they had been in earlier ages, but they were
more aware of uncleanness and less able to keep
apart their lustf ulness and the normal activities
of life. Local conventions had been swept away
with local autonomy, and the Empire, which
had swallowed up city and State in its all-level-
ing unification, had failed to check the moral
disintegration, was in fact itself showing signs
of inner decay and dissolution. From this dis-
tracted world the gods seemed remote, and faith
286 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
was growing cold, or manifested itself in waves
of cringing or hysterical superstition. One need
only read the prose hymns of Aristides, of the
second century of our era, to Zeus and Posei-
don, and then, after these, his addresses to Sera-
pis and Asclepius, to feel the difference between
the chilly conventional reminiscences of a dead
worship and the palpitating warmth of the new
daemonic naturalism. Hence the growing de-
mand, if the fair Pantheon of Hellas was to be
preserved at all, for a mediating divinity be-
tween a troubled world and the far-off peace of
the greater gods. Little help could be expected
from pure reason. Indeed, the Neoplatonism
which offered itself to Julian, with its effort to
lift the object of worship into the rarified air of
metaphysics where no human soul could breathe,
had suffered the inevitable reverse by falling in-
to mystery-mongering of the crudest sort. Mean-
while the Logos of the Christians, at once the
ineffable glory of God and His wisdom present
in the world, was supplying what paganism failed
to give. Under the strain of such a need and with
conscious reference to the success of this hated
rival, the Emperor turned for succour to the Sun-
God Helios, who belonged both to the lower
realmof phenomena, whither his light came down
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 287
with healing purity upon the living creatures of
the earth, and to the upper realm of the divine,
where he shone with spiritual radiance upon the
gods, thus uniting the two worlds in one vast or-
ganism. Plato, in the sixth book of The Bepub-
lic,, had long ago shown how the sun, as a visible
symbol of the Good, offered a meeting place for
the Idealism of philosophy and the stately cult
of Apollo, the sender of light and the patron of
art; and with this faith of ancient Hellas could
now be united the more emotional and mystical
worship of Mithra, the young conquering deity
out of the East. Hence Julian's Hymn to He-
lios, surely of all attempts to evoke religious fer-
vour by a brave and deliberate effort of the
imagination the most extraordinary, of all at-
tempts to stay the deep tides of change the most
pathetic.
Having thus, as he thought, found a substi-
tute for the Christian Logos, the Emperor
and this at least is to the credit of his mind and
heart saw that little was accomplished until
he had inspired the guardians of the renovated
cult with the zeal and virtues of the Christian
ministry. Hence his Letter to a Priest, which
has the unction of a bishop's charge to his cler-
288 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
gy 13 and the moral fervour of a Puritan exhor-
tation. The impious Christians, he declares, have
gained the ascendency and drawn men into athe-
ism by their philanthropic care for the poor and
neglected; and this virtue of benevolence must
be adopted by the priests of the gods. Charity to
all men, good and evil alike, they must practise,
and in their conduct they must show such a spir-
it of purity and piety and holiness as befits those
who have been set apart to be ministers to the
gods, and clothed in the high honour of office in
order to inspire reverence in the people. They
are to be constant in prayer and service, not
given to profane jests, avoiding the contamina-
tion of the theatres, reading only such literature
as will strengthen them in wisdom and devotion.
History does not always present the Christian
priests of that age, and especially the ruling
bishops, in a very favourable light ; they appear
often as proud and grasping and contentious
and uncharitable, models of anything save the
evangelical virtues of humility and brotherly
islt may be fanciful, but the style of Julian reminds me of the
non-juring Hickes's Treatises on th0 Christian Priesthood. At
least Hickes himself was not afraid of the parallel. "Julian," he
says (Works I, 85), "was a serious pagan, . . . and I have cited
these things out of his works concerning the common notion of
priests and priesthood," etc. Julian, it should be added, was not
always so flattering to the Christian priests, as, for instance, in
his 52nd Letter.
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 289
love. And history no doubt has good warrant for
its harsh judgment. Yet this letter of Julian
cannot be left out of the account, and its testi-
mony, wrung from a hostile witness, affords the
strongest and most unexpected evidence that
the great body of the clergy, the simple men
whom historians forget, were walking in the
quiet ways of duty and grace.
But something more was needed for the Em-
peror's revival than a mediating god in the
heavens and a disciplined priesthood. Christian-
ity proclaimed a Saviour who was God yet lived
as man among men, and who, by his victory over
the world, was an example and present help for
all who were struggling to liberate themselves
from the bondage of the flesh. The old pagan
mythology offered fragmentary hints of such a
mediator upon earth; there was Dionysus, the
son of Zeus, who "came from Indiaandrevealed
himself as a very god made man"; there was
Heracles, who endured more than human la-
bours to break the slavery of mankind and in the
end was translated to Olympus in the flames of
sacrificial fire, and there was Asclepius, the di-
vine physician, "whom Helios, in providential
care for the health and safety of men, begot as
the saviour of the world." These myths Julian
290 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
adapted to his creed; but most of all his imagi-
nation was kindled by the story of Diogenes, as
a helper more comprehensible than the half-
gods and heroes of the poets and as not less di-
vine though fully human. Like Socrates, the
Cynic in his rough exterior resembled the Sileni
that sat in the shops of the statuaries, while with-
in they contained the beautiful images of the
gods. But the wisdom of Diogenes was deeper
than that of Socrates and more immediately in-
spired. "The founder of this philosophy/' Ju-
lian writes in his address To the Uneducated
Cymes, "is he who, I believe, is the cause of all
the blessings that the Greeks enjoy, the univer-
sal leader, law-giver, and King of Hellas, I
mean the God of Delphi. And since it was not
permitted that he should be in ignorance of
aught, the peculiar fitness of Diogenes did not
escape his notice. And he made him incline to
that philosophy, not by urging his commands
in words alone, as he does for other men, but in
very deed he instructed him symbolically as to
what he willed, in two words, when he said, 'Fal-
sify the common currency.' For 'Know thyself/
he addressed not only to Diogenes, but to other
men also and still does : for it stands there en-
graved in front of his shrine/' Ajad then in a
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 291
succession of striking paragraphs Julian ex-
pounds this philosophy of which Diogenes is the
spokesman and personification, and by which he
was raised up to be the saviour of mankind.
Now the goal of the Cynic doctrine, as of all
genuine philosophy, is happiness, and happi-
ness consists in living in accordance with one's
nature. So to live is to recognize the godlike
part of one's being, the soul, or reason, as the
true man; and this is to know one's self. Such is
the first command of Apollo, which all visitors
may hear and read. And the second command,
which only Diogenes comprehended in its full
scope, was like unto it, "Remint the coinage."
The coinage is simply the mass of current cus-
toms and conventions ; and these the Cynic must
disregard, stamping a private currency for him-
self , so to speak, with the image of his own inner
nature. What has he to do with the opinions of
the deluded mob? Men are trading for honours
and riches and the comforts of life, which they
regard as precious and worthy of labour and
sacrifice. Not so Diogenes, who owned nothing,
toiled for nothing, desired nothing, envied no
man, caring only "to loaf and invite his soul" :
"Cityless, hearthless, reft of fatherland,
A wanderer begging food from hand to hand."
292 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
But to exhibit the complete mastery of the
soul and to express in visible deeds the false
standards of society the Diogenes of the Roman
Emperor went beyond mere renunciation to a
contemptuous "abuse of the flesh." The body
was a slave, and should be treated as such :
"Then let him who wishes to be a Cynic, earn-
est and sincere, first take himself in hand like
Diogenes and Crates, and expel from his own
soul and from every part of it all passions and
desires, and entrust all his affairs to reason and
intelligence and steer his course by them. For
this in my opinion was the sum and substance
of the philosophy of Diogenes. And if Diog-
enes did sometimes visit a courtesan though
even this happened only once perhaps or not
even once let him who would be a Cynic first
satisfy us that he is, like Diogenes, a man of solid
worth, and then if he see fit to do that sort of
thing openly and in the sight of all men, we shall
not reproach him with it or accuse him. . . . He
must showthe same independence, self-sufficien-
cy* justice, moderation, piety, gratitude, and the
same extreme carefulness not to act at random
or without a purpose or irrationally. For these
too are characteristic of the philosophy of Diog-
enes. Then let him trample on vaingloriousness,
let him ridicule those who though they conceal
in darkness the necessary functions of our na-
ture for instance the secretion of what is super-
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 293
fluous yet in the centre of the market-place
and of our cities carry on practices that are most
brutal and by no means akin to our nature, for
instance robbery of money, false accusations, un-
just indictments, and the pursuit of other ras-
cally business of the same sort. On the other hand
when Diogenes made unseemly noises or obeyed
the call of nature or did anything else of that
sort in the market-place, as they say he did, he
did so because he was trying to trample on the
conceit of the men I have just mentioned, and
to teach them that their practices were far more
sordid and insupportable than his own. For what
he did was in accordance with the nature of all
of us, but theirs accorded with no man's real na-
ture, one may say, but were all due to moral de-
pravity." 14
In this way the Cynic interpreted the public
command of Apollo to "know thyself," andmod-
elled his life on the private command to "falsify
the currency." So he rendered himself the hap-
piest of all men, happier than Alexander or the
Great King ; and so, as Julian believed, he might
be upheld as the supreme exemplar of a philoso-
phy capable of liberating the soul from the do-
minion of hypocrisy and of withdrawing man-
kind from the delusions of a false Saviour.
Our first reflection may be that a philosophy
i^Frorn Mrs. Wilmer Cave Wright's translation in the Loeb
Library.
294 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
which could find no cleaner exemplar than Di-
ogenes was bankrupt andready to be swept away.
And then the question may arise : Why was this
coarse ruffian rather than Socrates chosen by
men like Epictetus and Julian for canonization?
Philo Judeaus, in his QuodOmnisProbiLS, makes
much of the story of Diogenes* capture and sale,
and ranks the hero of that adventure among his
specimens of Stoic, Jewish, and Hindu sages.
Even so thorough-going a Platonist as Plutarch
succumbed almost to the tradition, and clear-
headed divines like Basil and Gregory Nazian-
zen were not exempt from the spell. 15 The cli-
max came when, under Theodosius, a professed
Cynic of the Diogenic stamp was almost made
bishop of Constantinople. Diogenes was canon-
ized I think, because in him more ostentatiously
than in any other philosopher, even more com-
pletely than in Plato's master, was seen the ex-
emplification of that longing for security and lib-
erty which had attached so many diverse minds
to the teaching of Socrates. There is a passage
in the oration of the good Platonist, Maximus
of Tyre, on the Superiority of the Cynic Life
that brings this out quite clearly. Which, Maxi-
mus asks, of the men commonly praised by the
isBasil, Quomodo Possint ex Genttiibus Libris 583 B Migne;
Gregory, Ep. xcviii.
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 295
unthinking multitude is really free: the dema-
gogue, the orator, the tyrant, the general, the
sea-captain? Each of these is in fact the slave of
other men or of his own passions or of fortune.
But the philosopher? Yes, but what kind of phi-
losopher, he asks ; and then replies to his own
query:
"I am ready indeed to praise Socrates; hut
then his words occur to me: *I obey the law and
go voluntarily to gaol, and take the poison vol-
untarily.' O Socrates, do you not see what you
are saying? Do you then yield voluntarily, or
are you an involuntary victim of fortune?
'Obeying the law/ What law? For if you mean
the law of Zeus, I commend the law; but if you
mean Solon's law, in what was Solon better than
Socrates? Let Plato answer to me for philoso-
phy, whether it saved him from perturbation
when Dio fled, when Dionysius threatened, when
he was compelled to sail back and forth over the
Sicilian and Ionian seas. . . . Wherefore I say
that from this tyranny of circumstance the only
liberation is in that life which raised Diogenes
above Lycurgus and Solon and Artaxerxes and
Alexander, and made him freer than Socrates
himself."
So it was that by his renunciation of all things,
even of philosophy, Diogenes attained to per-
fect liberty and safety. Socrates still clung to the
296 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
conventional law of the city; he was not bold
enough to falsify the currency. Plato might es-
tablish a dominion over the minds and hearts of
men by the power of his intellect and the majes-
ty of his imagination, but for what he achieved
there was the need of culture and long quiet
years and many gifts of chance. What would the
name of Plato be now had he not escaped from
the court of Dionysius? What would have been
his peace of soul had he remained a slave in the
island of Aegina? In the days of Julian a Plato
might have held the place in philosophy which
the great bishops and enemies of the Emperor,
such as Athanasius and Gregory, occupied in the
Church. True servants of God they might know
themselves to be, and without them Christianity
might have suffered corruption and perished;
but something still, in their own conscience, was
wanting, something still required, as men then
thought, for their complete liberty in the service
of God and for their emancipation from the
world. And so Gregory, the eloquent theologian
who saved the doctrine of the Trinity, was never
weary of extolling the retired and silent and
untroubled lives of the eremites; and Athana-
sius, the master statesman of the Church, who
stood unflinchingly contra mundum,, wrote his
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 297
biography of that fanatical anchorite, St. An-
thony, as of one who had reached a perfection
of Christian character denied to him by his du-
ties in the world. Anthony and Diogenes were
poles apart in their faith and in certain aspects
of ascetic practice. Instead of the utter shame-
lessness of the Cynic, the Christian was so far
subject to shame that he would never bathe or in
any other way expose his naked body to his own
eyes. Yet the two were one in their absolute con-
temptiis mundi and in their consequent fearless-
ness and indifference to the conventions of so-
ciety. I think the motive that impelled Athana-
sius to idealize Anthony was not unlike that
which led Julian, the philosopher in the world,
to turn from Socrates to Diogenes for his model
of philosophy out of the world. 16
And Diogenes alone, or let us say the legend-
ary Diogenes, could stand with the martyrs of
the Church, as he stood with the terrible ascet-
ics; and in the readiness to meet martyrdom joy-
ously men had come to see the final test of faith,
whether in religion or philosophy. It might seem
as if Socrates would have served such a purpose
better than Diogenes, for he had in fact faced
icOne seems to see a direct continuation of the Cynic tradition
in such antics, often disgusting, of the "fools of Christ" as Miss
Underbill records in her Jacopone da Todi 14, 62 9 63, 64 ti pat-
sim.
298 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
death for his convictions and conquered its fears.
But if Socrates had suffered the momentary or-
deal, it was yet, as Maximus asserted, in a spirit
of submission to the law; whereas the whole ex-
istence of Diogenes might he regarded as a vol-
untary and triumphant martyrdom in protest
against any compromise with social conventions.
And there was another cause for the choice.
The death of Socrates, as had been his life, was
too calm and reasoned to satisfy the religious
craving of that age. Julian might make a brave
pretence of appealing to the verdict of intelli-
gence, but at heart he was a child of his own gen-
eration, and for centuries the world had been
growing further and further from the old hope
of finding salvation in the clear conception of
truth and of what we know and do not know.
The change shows itself in the eclectic merging
of the various, even contradictory, sects of phi-
losophy, with a vein of Neopythagorean obscur-
antism predominating over all. It is notable in
the waves of emotional superstition that were
supplantingthehumanizedmythology of Olym-
pus. Most conspicuously it is seen in the victory
of the Christian faith, foretold by St. Paul in the
declaration that God hath "made foolish the
wisdom of this world," and verified in the exult-
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 299
ant cry of Tertullian, Quia ineptum est! quia
impossibile est! Over and over again we find
the Fathers, even those most favourably dis-
posed to Plato and most ready to admit that
God had not left Himself without a witness
among the gentiles again and again we find
them reproaching philosophy with its inability
to convert the stubborn hearts of men and to save
the masses. And the Fathers were right. In
whatever terms we may choose to state the fact,
it is true, as Ambrose said, that "it hath not
pleased God to give His people salvation in dia-
lectic." 18 It is simply true that, in setting the em-
phasis so strongly upon knowledge and intelli-
gence and in leaving so little room for the will and
the instinctive emotions, classical philosophy,
even the philosophy of Plato, had left the great
heart of mankind untouched. Christianity, by
transferring the sourceof good and evil to the will
and by appealing more directly to the emotions
and imagination, had in a measure succeeded
where philosophy had failed yet, even so, how
small has been that measure of success!
Looking back over all that Christianity has
done and has not done, we may ask ourselves
nDe Came Christi 5. The exclamation of Tertullian has been
popularized, but scarcely travestied, in the maxim, Cred& qmet
abswrdwm.
18D0 Fide i, 5: Non in dialectica complacv.it Deo *ato*m facer*
populum suwm.
300 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
whether God meant to save His people by the
emotions alone any more than by the under-
standing alone; we may broach the question
whether the tragedy of Christianity was not just
there, in its failure to achieve, or at least to im-
pose on the world, a sound combination of dia-
lectic and emotionalism. The effort was made,
no doubt, and made nobly, but it was never car-
ried to a conclusion. Clement of Alexandria per-
ceived the need fairly enough, and sought to
blend Platonism and Christianity, reason and
faith, knowledge and feeling; and in some re-
spects his endeavour marks the most dramatic
moment in the whole period we are studying.
But Clement's in the end was a confused brain,
that left him fumbling in shadows. And though
after a fashion his work was carried on and clari-
fied by Athanasiusand the great Cappadocians,
the stream of theological thought was largely
deflected by his successor Origen from the direct
course of Platonism into the blind channels of a
Neoplatonic mysticism. 19 In the West also the-
ology received a strong Neoplatonic bent from
St. Augustine ; and then, soon after the close of
iIt is not quite precise, of course, to call Origen a Neoplatonist
if we confine that term to the school of Plotinus. But Origen
was a fellow pupil of Anunonius Saccas and carried a good deal
of that philosophy into his Christian theology.
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 301
our period, there flowed over East and West alike
the desiccating winds of Aristotelian scholastic-
ism. As a consequence our Latin Christianity
has been largely a mixture of unbridled emotion,
running up into pure mysticism, with scholastic
metaphysics a mechanical, unstable mixture
and no true marriage of the intellect and the
will. The consummation of the movement in the
Occident is found in the theology of Thomas
Aquinas, from which the veiled rationalism of
Calvin and Luther was a revolt, inevitable no
doubt, but in the end more destructive of reli-
gion than the disease it sought to cure, I cannot
see any other escape : if the world is to be saved
by religion, if salvation is anything more than
an idle word, which, like Brutus, we have pur-
sued in the vain belief that it was a reality, our
hope would seem to lie in a return to the path
indicated by Clement. There we must push on
where the Greek theologians groped for a while,
grew faint, and fell away.
But this is a digression. The main stream of
philosophy by the time of Julian was stagnating
in the bogs of emotionalism ; even the mysticism
of Plotinus had lost its metaphysical backbone
and had loaded itself with the jumbled supersti-
tions of an lamblichus and other baser necro-
302 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
mancers who possessed the ear of the court. In
that atmosphere one can understand how a Di-
ogenes should have been selected for the ideal-
ized personification of otherworldliness.
To be sure there were recalcitrant voices. At
an earlier date, yet in the full tide of the legend,
Lucian had satirized the philosopher of the tub
as an audacious swaggerer, preaching his Cynic-
ism thus to gods and men :
"The traits that you should possess in particu-
lar are these : you should be impudent and bold,
and should abuse all and each, both kings and
commoners, for thus they will admire you and
think you manly. Let your language be barbar-
ous, your voice discordant and just like the
barking of a dog : let your expression be set, and
your gait consistent with your expression. In a
word, let everything about you be bestial and
savage. Put off modesty, decency, and modera-
tion, and wipe away blushes from your face
completely. Frequent the most crowded places,
and in those very places desire to be solitary and
uncommunicative, greeting nor friend nor stran-
ger ; for to do so is abdication of the empire. Do
boldly in full view of all what another would
not do in secret ; choose the most ridiculous ways
of satisfying your lust; and at the last, if you
like, eat a raw devilfish or squid, and die. That
is the bliss we vouchsafe you." 20
^Philosophies for Sale, translated by A. M. Harmon.
DIOGENES OF SINOPE 303
The satire is bitter enough, and closer to the
original, one may well believe, than the tradition
that was concealing the cloak of the sturdy old
beggar under the drapery of a "fair soul." But
Lucian was a mocker by profession who spared
nobody, and it remained for a Christian preach-
er to say the last word on the subject. St. John
Chrysostom certainly had Diogenes in mind,
and so far was just, when he pronounced his
criticism of the long search of our Hellenistic
philosophers for the security and liberty of re-
ligion within the closed circle of naturalism:
"Such was the philosophic life of the Greeks,
but it was idle. They could make a show of aus-
terity, but to no purpose, for they had no salu-
tary end to which they looked; their eyes were
set on vanity (kenodosda) and on honour from
21 In Eph. 91 A. Theodoret, I>0 Virtute Activa, CoL 1139 Mignc,
has the same idea : O# yap * Avrurdtvei real Auoryivei Kal K/XTIJT
Tr\7}(rt<as xevijs 56&}s t dXX a&rav ye etvcKO. rov
CHAPTER VII
SCEPTICISM
AFTER his haphazard manner Diogenes Laer-
tius, in his life of Pyrrho, mentions various doubt-
ers who anticipated the founder of the school of
Scepticism, such as Homer, and Euripides, and
Zeno the Eleatic, and Democritus, and Plato,
but does not name Socrates. Yet if the Apology
reproduces, as it surely does, the genuine opin-
ions of the master, one can scarcely avoid includ-
ing the* sceptics in the great and quarrelsome
family of Socratics. Indeed, all that Pyrrho was
to teach, with something more, is really implicit
in the famous utterance on death: "'Strange it
would be if now, when the god, as I firmly be-
lieve and am convinced, bids me stand forth as
one devoted to wisdom, a questioner of myself
and all the world, I were to desert my post
through fear of death or any other thing. . . .
For the fear of death, my friends, is only an-
304
SCEPTICISM 305
other form of appearing wise when we are fool-
ish and of seeming to know what we know not.
No mortal knoweth of death whether it be not
the greatest of all good things to man, yet do
men fear it as knowing it to be the greatest of
evils. And is not this that most culpable ignor-
ance which pretends to know what it knows
not?" The Epicurean sought for the admired
security and liberty of Socrates in the path of
pleasure ; the Stoic looked for peace rather in the
contempt of pleasure and in the strength of en-
durance; Pyrrho, whether consciously or not,
laid hold of the Socratic doubt for the same end.
For leave out the spiritual affirmation of Soc-
rates, his belief in the gods and in the eternal
reality of justice, as the Epicurean and, less
frankly, the 'Stoic also left it out; translate his
avowed ignorance in the face of alternative views
into suspension of judgment (epochs) ; for
"questioning" (exetazein) substitute "search-
ing" (skeptesihw) ; for the resulting fearless-
ness use the term "tranquillity" (ataraxia) , and
the broad foundation of Pyrrhonism is laid, while
only the superstructure remains to be raised. 1
Ipiat would seem to be clear enough, and, con-
sidering the influence of .Socrates and the affini-
iSee Appendix B.
3 o6 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
ties between the school of Pyrrho and the later
Academy, I have no dqubt the affiliation is his-
torical as well as logical.^tMore immediately, how-
ever, Pyrrho would seem to have come under the
influence of the I^g^o^dfcaan school, perhaps
through association with Anaxarchus, of that
sect, in whose company\he followed Alexander
on the march into India. On his return from this
expedition Pyrrho settled at Elis, his native
town, where, with his sister, he lived in dignified
simplicity, dying in extreme old age about the
year 27o!y
How far Pyrrho assumed the role of teacher
it is not easy to say/ Apparently he wrote noth-
ing except perhaps a poem addressed to Alex-
ander, and what wisdom he had to impart was
conveyed chiefly in pithy phrases and catch-
words, such as "No more" (sell, this than that) ,
"I decide nothing/' "Balance" \sdl. of evidence
and views), "Incomprehensibility," "Suspen-
sion" (of judgment), "Silence" (aphasia,, "re-
fusal to speak"), "Tranquillity." According to
his successor, Timon of Phlius, his philosophy
was a search for happiness,jsummed up in three
sAccording to Cicero the sceptics regarded themselves as fol-
lowers of Socrates: Fuerimt etiam alia genera philosophorum
qm se omnes fere Socraticos esse dicebant f . . . Pyrrhoneorwrn
(De Orat. iii, 17).
SCEPTICISM 307
questions: (1) What is the nature of things?
(2) What should be our attitude to them? (3)
What will be the result to us of such an atti-
tude? To the first of these questions the Pyr-
rhonist will reply that we have no means of de-
termining whether or not our sensations and
opinions correspond with the objects them-
selves, so that in their ultimate nature things are
for us indistinguishable and incommensurable,
and there is no court of appeal for settling our
differences about them. As Democritus said, it
is customary to call one sensation hot and an-
other cold, but beyond that we know nothing,
and truth lies buried. Hence the answer to the
second question: we can put no faith in our opin-
ions, and should hold our judgment in suspense,
saying simply in regard to each matter that it is
or is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is
not. 8 LAjid, thirdly, the result of this refusal to
decide will be that unsolicitous state of mind
which may be called tranquillity, ataraxy, and
which, as Timon added, follows upon suspense
of judgment as its shadow^
sThese are precisely the replies Buddha used to make to those
who inquired about the entity underlying our sensations and to
metaphysical questions generally.
4The questions are quoted from Aristocles, a late Peripatetic,
by Euiebius (Praep. Ev. XIV, xviii, 9), The answers, as I give
them, are from Aristocles with some additions from Diogenes
308 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
How Pyrrho carried his conclusions into the
test of life we may illustrate by his use of a pig,
a philosopher, and a dog. For the first, being
once at sea and caught in a storm, he rebuked
the terror of the passengers by pointing to a
little pig that kept on feeding through all the
commotion, and declared that such ought to be
the tranquillity of the wise man. 5 For the phi-
losopher, we are told that once when he saw
Anaxarchus fallen into a pond, he passed by
without offering assistance a display of phi-
losophic calm of which the victim is said to have
approved. But it was not always thus. When
reproached for showing fear at the attack of a
dog, he excused himself even more philosophic-
ally by observing that it is hard to put off the
whole man.
Pyrrho at best, though he imposed his name
on one of the greatest of all schools of thought,
remains a shadowy figure, and it is impossible
to separate with precision his own views from
Laertius. Brochard (Les sceptiques grecs 71 ff.) makes d5ia0o-
pla, resignation or complete renunciation, rather than&rox^, in-
tellectual doubt, the keynote of Pyrrho's teaching, and believes
that he was strongly influenced in this by observation of the
Hindu gymnosophists.
sYonge has a delicious version of this story in the Bohn transla-
tion of Diogenes Laertius: "He kept a calm countenance, and
comforted their minds, exhibiting himself on deck eating a pig."
I have fallen upon a good many strange blunders in the course
of my reading, but never on a more diverting one than this.
SCEPTICISM 309
those of his f ollowers. But the tradition is prob-
ably in the main true, and if the three questions
and their answers, as formulated by Timon,give
the substance of his philosophy of life, I think
we must admit that he laid down all that is es-
sential to scepticism, and that later scholars,
whether ancient or modern, have done no more
than develop his axioms) The great philoso-
phies, however rich their contents may be, rest
finally on the simplest common-places of exper-
ience; and it is the honour of Pyrrho that he
grasped the conscious sense of ignorance inher-
ent in the minds of all men, penetrated to its
source, and applied it relentlessly where other
men faltered or drew back. Our criticism of the
value and significance of scepticism we shall de-
fer until we take up the systematic and historic
work of Sextus Empiricusfbut we shall not for-
get that the title of originator and master of the
sect belongs to the obscure doubter of Blis^
From Pyrrho the defence of scepticism passed
to the hands of Timon, not the misanthrope of
that name, but one who might be called the mi-
sophilosophe. He was a wine-bibber; and he also
wrote poetry, tragedies and comedies which
business, the historiannaively observes, is scarce-
ly fit for a philosopher, as if wine-bibbing were
3 io HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
quite in the line of his profession. The dramas,
fortunately for us perhaps, are all lost; but we
have a few fragments from his three hooks of
Silli, or Lampoons, which evidently were bitter
and impudent enough to make a sensation. He
seems to have possessed a full command of
the terminology of abuse, compounded of far-
fetched and often archaic words, such as had de-
lighted the audience of Aristophanes, and these
he poured out on the dogmatic philosophers, liv-
ing and dead, with magnificent impartiality. In
mock-Homeric language he describes the con-
tentious Muse of philosophy as a pestilence walk-
ing among men:
"Waster <of spirit and an empty sound !
Wherever discords of the brain abound,
There the dark sister of debate is found.
"Who sent this strife of tongues that twist and lie ?
Silence is mobbed by mouthing ribaldry ;
The talking-sickness comes, and many die/'
A few chosen prophets of doubt are spared
the lash, and notably, of course, Pyrrho, the
eponymous hero of the school, who alone had
learned the secret of a quiet and easy life, devoid
of controversy and pretension, and heedless of
the wiles of a deceitful wisdom. Only he, Timon
SCEPTICISM 311
says, as Lucretius afterwards was to say of Epi-
curus, had discovered how to enjoy upon earth
the blissful calm of the gods.
II
But if Timon could sing the praises of peace,
he certainly did not walk in the way thereof. It
was in his days that Arcesilas changed the school
of Plato into the so-called Middle Academy,
which pretended to be more logically sceptical
than those who had usurped the name of sceptics ; f
and it was particularly against Arcesilas, as his
nearest rival in the field, that Timon's rage was
directed, in accordance with the verse of Hesiod,
often quoted by the sectarians from Plato down,
to the effect that "potter is the natural enemy
of potter, and poet of poet, and beggar of beg-
gar." "What are you doing here where we free-
men are?" was Timon's genial remark to Arces-
ilas, when they met one day in a public place;
and at another time, to the query why he had
come from Thebes, his answer was, "To be
where I can laugh at you face to face." It was a
eThough Arcesilas and Carneades called themselves Academics,
their purpose would seem to have been to reject what they re-
garded as the dogmatism of Plato for the more completely scep-
tical attitude of Socrates. That at least is the view of Cicero,
A cad. Post, i, 16.
3 i2 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
merry battle, no doubt, replete with joy for the
witty flaneurs of Athens, and so long as Timon
lived Zeus held the scales equal; but very soon
the bastard sons of Plato triumphed over the
children of Pyrrho, as later they brought con-
fusion among the children of Zeno, and for a
hundred years and more the Academy was the
acknowledged home of scepticismjUntil the rise
of Aenesidemus, if there were any avowed Pyr-
rhonists, they are the shadows of a name and
nothing more.
Of the actual teaching of Arcesilas we know
very little, and still less of his successor Lacy-
des, save the foolish but not insignificant story
which I have related in the chapter on the early
Stoics, ffhe Middle Academy attained its full
growth under Carneades, who presided over the
school until his death in 129 B.C., and of whom,
thanks mainly to Cicero, we have more definite
information.lCarneades was a subtle dialecti-
cian and pugnacious fighter; philosophy for him
consisted not so much in what could be deduced
from the doctrines of his nominal and remote
master, as in what could be said against his very
near enemies^of the Porch. Now the Stoics,
craving some final stay for the mind and con-
science, had developed a pure rationalism based
SCEPTICISM 313
on the assumption that certain knowledge of the
truth can be obtained from the senses. Starting
then from the sensations which convey know-
ledge in the form of a mechanical impression on
the mind, they created a theory of the world as
a vast fatalistic machine. But at the same time,
with a fine inconsistency, their rationalism, for-
getting its origin in the mechanical laws of gross
matter, produced its own theory of the world as
a process of evolution absolutely determined by
a divine indwelling reason. In either case the
logical end, whether mechanistic or pantheistic,
was to shut up the human spirit in a prison
house of Destiny, without door of exit or win-
dow of outlook. The only escape from this out-
rageous restraint was to attack the principles of
sensationalism and rationalism as adequate in-
struments of the truth, or as capable of giving
us any knowledge of things as they are in them-
selves; and this attack made the joy of Carne-
ades'JifieL With the sensational hypothesis of the
Stoics, based on a self-evident distinction be-
taten true and false impressions, he made short
shrift ; it was, indeed, as we have seen in an ear-
lier chapter, vulnerable from every side. Mani-
festly the criterion by which we distinguish be-
tween truth and falsehood, if it exist at all, must
3 i4 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
be sought outside of the sensations themselves.
But no such criterion can be found in reason.
iThis fact Carneades demonstrated by bringing
out certain fallacies inherent in the syllogism,
and, more generally, by showing that every ra-
tional proof depends on premises which them-
selves need to be proved, and so ouadinfinitum
(The result was a complete scepticism; nei-
ther sensation nor reason can carry us beyond
the circle of appearances. And this destructive
analysis of the instruments of knowledge Car-
neades confirmed by exhibiting the contradic-
tions involvedin th$ conclusions actually reached
by the dogmatists.JG-od an infinite abstraction
and also a reasonable, personal being; right and
justice a remorseless law of fatality and also a
matter of human responsibility; a sequence of
events eternally predestined and also a liberty
of the individual will, all the terrible and in-
soluble antinomies that later were to enter in-
to the Stoic theology of St. Augustine, were
dragged out by Carneades and used as batter-
ing rams to beat down the stronghold of the
Porch.
Meanwhile, brought to bay in turn with the
assertion that his scepticism left no motive for
action and made life impossible, Carneades de-
SCEPTICISM 315
fended himself with the theory of probability.
It is demonstrable, he says, that reason affords
no criterion of absolute truth, but we can attain
to varying degrees of j>robaiil^ our own
conviction of truth, and this conviction, if exam-
ined and tested, may provide a security suffi-
cient at least for practical ends, if not for the
complete satisfaction of the inquisitive intellect.
| The persuasive, the probable, as a pragmatic
sanction for action, whether introduced by Ar-
cesilas and only developed by Carneades, or ac-
tually invented by Carneades, is the great addi-
tion to philosophy of the Middle AeademjyBut
just how far the canon was carried by Carne-
ades as a nominal follower of Plato is a delicate
question to which no positive answer can be
given. For it will be seen that there is a legiti-
mate extension of the principle legitimate,
that is, for the Academician and an illegiti-
mate extension. Legitimately, it might be ap-
plied to an extension of our convictions in the
Ideal realm, to justify there a practical com-
pliance with the great dogmas of theology and
mythology ; but that was a door which, appar-
ently, Carneades did not open, or opened so nar-
rowly, as to obtain only a glimpse of the path
leading to religious liberty. Illegitimately, the
canon might be employed not as a fortification
316 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
within, but as an escape from, scepticism. Ac-
cording to a rather doubtful statement of Sex-
tus the scepticism of Arcesilas was only a blind
by which he tested the suitability of his pupils to
receive the esoteric doctrine of Ideas; so that
the Stoic Aristo could satirize him as having
"Plato before, Pyrrho behind, and Diodorus for
middle." 7 If this means that Arcesilas used the
canon of probability to establish the doctrine of
Ideas, it can only be said that the procedure, so
far as it prevailed, removed the Middle Acad-
emy from the sceptical fold, without bringing
it any whit closer to a genuine Platonism. It was
not, as we shall see later, by way of the probable
that the Platonist reaches his fundamental phi-
losophy of Ideas. And, whatever may be said
of Arcesilas, there is no evidence that Carne-
ades took this line. On the whole, then, the safest
conclusion will be thattCarneades himself was
in essential matters a firm sceptic of the Pyr-
rhonic type, and limited the scope of probabil-
ity to justifying his participation in the prac-
tical business of life, without using it as a cri-
terion of objective truth. 8 ]
"tHypotyposes I, 234. Diodorus was a follower of the Megarian
school.
8 Augustine Con. A cad. iii, 18: Quamquam et Metrodorus [a pu-
pil of Carneades] id antea [i.e., before Antiochus] facere tentar
verat, qui primus dicitwr esse confessus, non decreto placuisse
Acad&micis, nihil posse comprehendi, sed necessario contra 8to-
icos huiusmodi eos arma sumsisse.
SCEPTICISM 317
III
After the death of Carneades something hap-
pened like the peace of exhaustion that falls up-
on two armies which fight all day in doubtful
battle and at night slink away, each claiming
the victory. The Academics surrendered the
field, but consoled themselves by declaring that
they had never really cared to occupy it; scep-
ticism fell into abeyance, until, some time about
the beginning of our era, a certain Aenesidemus
undertook to revive and strengthen the old ar-
guments of doubt-as they were originally pro-
posed by Pyrrho./The works of Aenesidemus,
the first systemati^jvriter of the school of Scep-
ticism properly so called, are lost, but so far as
we can infer from the records his great achieve-
ment was the formulation of the arguments ot
doubt in ten tropes (tropos^ "method" or "pro-
cedure") leading to suspension of judgment,
and in another set of eight tropes against the
principle of causality! For the tropes of suspen-
sion it will be sufficient to say that they were
subsumed by Sextus under three heads. The first
four have to do with the differences in the active
agent in any judgment; as that, for instance,
no two men are alike in their constitution and
3 i8 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
faculties, and consequently there is no standard
by which we can bring their judgments into
agreement. The seventh and tenth have to do
with the object judged; as that, for instance,
the same object under different conditions pre-
sents different qualities (colours, etc.) , and con-
sequently we have no means of telling which of
these qualities is indicative of ultimate jreality.
The fifth, sixth, eighth, and ninth combine the
difficulties presented by the judge and the ob-
ject judged. Further, Sextus shows that these
three groups may all be subsumed under the
eighth trope, which reduces all our judgments
to relativity ( to pros ti) . 9 Another division would
group the first nine tropes together as showing
the impossibility of a "comprehensive impres-
sion," while the tenth exhibits the contradiction
of opinions that necessarily results from this
impossibility. The argument in the eight tropes
destructive of the principle of causality we may
pass over for the moment.
The next sceptic to be noted is A^igjgta^f
whom we know virtually nothing save that he
reduced the ten tropes of suspension to five,
while at the same time extending their scope to
include the processes of reason. The first of
tropes are given in a different order by other authori-
ties.
SCEPTICISM 319
Agrippa's five is based upon contradiction, and
embraces all the ten of Aenesidemus except his
eighth. The second is the famous regressus ad
infinitum, based on the fact that every proof re-
quires its hypothesis to be proved, and so on
without end. The third corresponds with the
eighth of Aenesidemus, and argues the relativ-
ity of all judgments. The fourth is virtually a
repetition, or confirmation, of the second, and
denies the right to assume any unproved hy-
pothesis as the ground of argument. The fifth,
as complementary to the second and fourth, ex-
pounds the "vicious circle" which arises when the
hypothesis used to prove a thesis requires itself
to be proved by the assumption of that thesis.
Later some unknown systematizer com-
pressed the five tropes of Agrippa into two by
combining the first and third together in one and
the second, fourth, and fifth together in a sec-
ond and complementary trope .[The final form
of the tropes, then, maybe stated thus: anything
known must be either (1) self-evident, or (2)
proved from something else ; but ( 1 ) nothing is
self-evident, as is shown by the disagreement of
' philosophers over all questions of sensation and
conception, and (2) nothingcan be proved from
something else, since any such attempt involves
320 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
either, the regressus ad infinitum or the vicious
circle j|n the end the analysis of the sceptical ar-
gumnts started by Aenesidemus thus resolves
itself into a simplified and clarified statement of
the position taken by Pyrrho at the beginning:
we cannot be sure of our comprehension of things
(katalepsis) , since men differ in their opinions
about them and there is no tribunal to which we
can appeal for decision (isostheneia) ; hence we
have no source of knowledge. J
IV
With the anonymous formulator of the two
tropes the development of scepticism reaches
its climax. For our information in regard to the
whole school, apart from Cicero, who writes as
an Academic and confusedly at that, we are
mainly dependent on^Sextus Empiricus, the
most important of whose works* fortunately are
preserved. Of the man himself we know virtu-
ally nothing. The time of his life is doubtful,
falling somewhere within the limits of A.D. 150
and 230. TThe place where he taught, whether
Athens or Rome or Alexandria, is disputable ;
and, curiously enough, though his cognomen
would indicate that he was one of the Empirics
SCEPTICISM 32,
of medicine, his own words imply rather that he
belonged to the hostile camp of the Methodies. 10
His extant works are the Hypotyposes.orOut-
lines of Scepticism, in three books, and the Ad~
versus Maihematicos, in eleven books, in which
the condensed arguments of the Hypotypotes
are extended and applied to the various schools
of philosophy and science. In neither of these
treatises does the author make any pretension
to add anything of his own to the method de-
veloped by his predecessors; but he has gather-
ed together and arranged in masterly fashion
the whole sceptical thought of the centuries. De-
spite an occasional lapse into quibbling and an
occasional confusion of ideas, he has presented
once for all and in its final form the matter of
what is certainly one of the most persistent and
most important attitudes of the human mind
towards the world in which we live. On the whole
I am almost inclined to reckon the works of Sex-
tus, after the Dialogues of Plato and the New
Testament, the most significant document in our
possession for the Greek Tradition as we are
dealing with it in these volumes.
Before discussing the value and limitations of
scepticism as the subject is presented by Sex-
wHypotyposes
322 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
tus, it may be well to summarize the difference
between the Pyrrhonic school to which he pro-
fessed allegiance and the schools to which he
was more or less antagonistic. The conflict, as
we have seen, verges upon two terms, Jcatattpsis
and isostheneidj which express the gist of the
sceptical contention as finally summed up in the
two tropes.
Kcutalepsis means seizing, comprehension, ap-
prehension, hence knowledge which we know to
be knowledge. So far the meaningis clear enough.
But there is an ambiguity in the word, which
seems not to have been firmly grasped by the
disputants, and which has introduced a good
deal of confusion into their discussion of its val-
idity. On the one hand kataUpsis is concerned
merely with the perception of objects as they
present themselves to our senses. For instance,
a stick, half in the water and half out, appears
to be bent. Or, again, a coil of rope seen in the
dark appears to be a snake. 11 The first question
would be whether we have any means of rectif y-
nThese two illustrations, the bent stick and the coiled rope,
were among the favourite tests by which the Hindus demon-
strated the illusory nature, or mdyd, of the phenomenal world.
The first of them was in common use among the Greeks at an
early period (cf. Plato, Republic 603 c) ; but the second illus-
tration, the coiled rope, is so peculiarly indigenous to India as
to lend support to Brochard's theory of Hindu influence upon
Pyrrho.
SCEPTICISM 323
ing such impressions of sight by the test of other
faculties so as to reach an assured judgment of
this stick or this rope as an object of the phe-
nomenal world. On the other hand, the question
of A:ato^ m goes much deeper,andis concerned
not with rectifying our judgment of appear-
ances, but with our apprehension of what lies
behind appearances. We may come to a conclu-
sion as to the proper epithet to be applied to the
stick or the coil of rope as phenomena, but have
we any means of comprehending what this stick
or this rope is in itself apart from what it ap-
pears to be ? Can we in any way apprehend what,
if anything, is the cause of our sensation of a
certain form and colour and hardness? Can we,
so to speak, go behind the returns ?
Isostheneia means equal weight of evidence,
or balance of divergent views, and is involved iii
the same ambiguity as katatepsis. In its lower
sense it denotes a disagreement over phenomena
as phenomena, when, for instance, one man be-
lieves on the evidence that a stick in the water is
really bent, andanother asserts on other evidence
that it is straight. In most cases of this order,
agreement of a practical sort at least may soon
be reached ; though there are obscure phenomena
less easy to decide. But in its higher range the
324 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
word signifies the discord of views in regard to
ethical opinions, such as justice, piety, decency,
and, beyond these, in regard to the ultimate na-
ture of things, where the battle between dogma-
tists and sceptics has been, and still is, hotly
waged.
Now, if we take the attitude towards these
two terms as a key to classify the various scep-
tical and non-sceptical schools, it will be seen
that there are four combinations possible :
(1) Acceptance of katalepsis and denial of
( 2 ) Acceptance of katalepsis and acceptance
of
(8) Denial of k&talejpsi* and acceptance of
isostheneia,
(4) Denial of katalfpm and denial of isos-
theneia.
Of these four combinations the first manifestly
is dogmatic; the other three, whether by the ac-
ceptance of isQBthen&a or by the denial of katar
Upm, are in different ways and degrees scep-
ticaL
(1) In the actual war of the schools at the
time we are considering the Stoics were the fight-
ing champions of dogmatism, although Epicu-
rean and Neoplatonist are in other directions
equally divergent from scepticism. The chil-
SCEPTICISM 325
dren of Zeno held that an impression might or
might not correspond to objective reality, and
hence might be true or false, but that in the
phantasia kataleptike we have an impression
which carries its own guarantee of veracious
correspondence. Furthermore, they held that in
the "sign" (stmelon) of cause and effect we have
evidence by which reason can attain to a com-
prehension of the universal laws of nature. They
would admit, of course, that men do actually dis-
agree in their views ( witness the mad dogs of the
Academy) , but they argued that only the views
of the wise need be considered, and that among
the wise there is complete agreement as to the
truth of Stoicism. Thus the Stoics accept kata-
Upsis and, in the strict sense of the word, reject
isosfheneia.
(2) The Sophists of the Protagorean stripe,
going back to Heraclitus for their principles,
took as their motto the famous dictum, Man is
the measure of all things, meaning by man his
immediate sensations. Now on this basis there is
manifestly no agreement among men, or in the
same man with himself from day to day. Thus,
honey is sweet to one man, but to another man
with the jaundice or to the same man if he falls
into that state honey is bitter, and each is right
3 26 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
in the statement of his sensation. So far, in mak-
ing the shifting sensations of men the source of
isostJieneia, the Protagoreans are in accord with
the Pyrrhonists. But the Protagoreans go a step
further, and add that man is the measure of all
things whether they are or are not; that is to say,
if honey gives to one man the sensation of sweet-
ness, then the honey is in itself sweet so far as it
is anything, and if it gives to another man the
sensation of bitterness, then it is in itself bitter,
and by the same token it is at once both sweet
and bitter. In this way the Protagoreans com-
bine the acceptance of isosiheneia with the ac-
ceptance (inferentially at least) of katattpsis.
Whatever a man feels, or thinks he feels, that is
true, not only in respect of his sensation and be-
lief, but in so far as there is nothing in the na-
ture of the external object to falsify that belief.
There is no distinction between true and false
determined by correspondence, but all opinions
are equally true. 12 The title of such a philosophy
may be set down as a kind of negative dogmat-
ism or affirmative scepticism, as you choose ; the
objective world becomes a mere chaos of contra-
dictory qualities, and the subjective world cor-
, Adv. Math. VII, 60: According to Protagoras 7n<ras rcbs
SCEPTICISM 327
respondingly a mental chaos. The outcome, If
carried logically into the moral realm, is that
rule of brute force which we find actually advo-
cated by Thrasymachus and other unflinching
sophists in the Dialogues of Plato. Since there
is no inherent distinction between true and false,
right and wrong, but that is true and right which
each man takes to be so, the struggle of life will
be to make my true and right prevail over other
men's true and right.
(3) However it may have been with Aenesi-
demus and his relation to Heraclitus, 13 the com-
plete Pyrrhonist inclined rather to the side of
Democritus, in so far as, like Democritus, he
denied katalepsis and accepted isostheneia. Man
is the measure, but he is the measure of his im-
mediate sensations only. Of things themselves
the Pyrrhonist does not say, for instance, that
they are sweet or bitter, or both sweet and bit-
ter, nor of acts that they are right or wrong, or
both right and wrong, but uses the words sweet
and bitter, right and wrong, as purely conven-
tional terms. Our judgments may or may not
correspond with the nature of things ; they may
be true, but, as is shown by the complete absence
of agreement among men, we have no criterion
Appendix C.
328 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
to determine whether or when they are true.
Hence there is no truth for us in the sense of
certain knowledge. There is even no way of
knowing whether we are approaching to, or di-
verging from, the objective truth, or whether
there is any stable law to which we can approach.
In all these matters the Pyrrhonist insisted on
suspension of judgment.
(4) Finally, there are the sceptics of the Mid-
dle Academy, who deny both katalepsis and, in
a manner, isosiheneia. In demonstrating the
inability of physical sensation and reason to dis-
cover the ultimate nature of things, they reject-
ed katalepsis just as the Pyrrhonist did. In
regard ioisostheneia their relation to the follow-
ers of Pyrrho is more complicated. Having
shown the irreconcilable diversity of human
opinions, the Pyrrhonist saw that, as a simple
matter of fact, a certain mode of thinking and
acting did prevail in the society which imme-
diately surrounded him, and this convention of
the time and place he simply accepted as a rule
of life with no question asked as to ultimate truth
or agreement. The Academic argued that the
agreement in certain matters took a wider circle
than the Pyrrhonist acknowledged and that this
larger accord might be used as guide to a sort
SCEPTICISM 329
of pragmatic truth. Even here was indeed no
ground for absolute certitude that we were
choosing the wiser course so long as any dis-
agreement could be pointed to or could be sup-
posed to exist, but some ground for probability
there might be, varying in cogency as the agree-
ment among men prevailed more or less widely.
Practically, the substitution of conviction based
on probability for mere conformity based on
suspension of judgment gave a larger basis to
the sceptical manner of life, strengthening the
right of an individual citizen's judgment against
the opinion of the narrow circle about him, yet
limiting the presumptuous claims of individ-
ualism by the broader, if never unanimous, con-
sensus of mankind. Theoretically, the canon of
probability is in line with the scepticism of the
Platonic, or Socratic, stamp, which differed es-
sentially from that of Pyrrho. The position of
the Middle Academy, in fact, wavers between
the fixed poles of Pyrrhonism and Platonism,
and is less stable than either.
We can now consider a little more fully the
philosophy of Pyrrho in its final development
330 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
as presented by Sextus. Then the last stage of
our discussion will be to show how the Pyrrhon-
ist and the Platonist, though votaries of the
same method, reached very different conclu-
sions; and by following their paths we shall, I
trust, obtain a clearer insight into the scope and
value of scepticism generally. As a preliminary
I will ask the reader to examine with some care
the subjoined diagram, and to have it ready for
reference at the successive steps of the argument.
QC
W
ft
5!
PHILOSOPHY METAPHYSICS
Physical ( Science Monism of chance
* 1*V fUVOiI, 1 * -- *
affections ) or determinism
Ataraxy Absolute hedonism
or optimism,
SPIRITUAL ( IDEALISM Transcendental
AFFECTIONS j -, monism
( EUDAE MONISM Antinomiani&m
or asceticism**
If we get behind the scenes, so to speak, if we
reach the forces that animated the various sects
and set them at one another's throats, we shall
find that the aim of the sceptics in a special man-
"Words in l.c. Roman (e.g., Science) indicate what both Pyr-
rhonist and Platonist accept
Words in Italics (e.g., Monism, Transcendental} indicate what
both reject.
Words in sm. caps, (e.g., SPIRITUAL) indicate what the Pry-
rhomst rejects but the Platonist accepts.
SCEPTICISM 33 *
ner an honourable aim in the best of them
was to live in a world of facts, Pyrrhonism de-
veloped in an age when the thinking men of
Greece were divided into hostile camps, each of
which claimed the sole possession of the truth,
and was ready to contend for the field against
all comers Eleatic against Heraelitean, Peri-
patetic against Academic, Cynic against Cyre-
naic, 'Stoic against Epicurean; not to mention
Megarian and Democritean and Sophist and I
know not what other roving guerilla bands.
Where lay the truth for which they were fight-
ing? Who should decide among these implaca-
ble combatants? And might it be that there was
no such truth at all, and could this fair valley
land of their desire be only a mirage of the brain,
which would vanish away at approach, and leave
the victor, if victor there should be, still pursu-
ing phantoms in a waste of sand? Such a state
was not peculiar to that era of Greek philoso-
phy ; it has occurred many times, and will occur
again whenever men are swayed by the libido
sciendi. It was only yesterday that one of our
poets wrote:
"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash hy night/*
HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
Now all this embittered confusion the sceptic
bkished away with the single magic word isos-
theneia. Where there is no agreement and no urn-
pire, there can be no certitude of truth, no know-
ledge ; where theory only provokes counter the-
ory, and discussion proceeds to endless division
of beliefs, he simply withdrew from the field and
took refuge in suspension of judgment: Away
with the vain chase altogether, let me plant my
feet here at home on indisputable ground. The
facts beyond dispute hoexpressed by the phrase
"immediate a.&eciions"J(oikeia patM] . Certain
perceptions, he said, I nave about which no man
can argue, from the knowledge of which no logic
can evict me. This chair I see, this table I do
here and now perceive : I say nothing about the
chair itself, or the table itself; apart from my
sensation I make no assertion about anything
whatsoever, leaving you to wrangle over your
theories of ultimate reality like dogs over a bone ;
but the image in my mind, which I call a chair or
a table, that I have and know. And so with my
present sensations of pleasure and pain; my
hopes and fears ; my memory of past sensations,
whatever memory may be; my passing reflec-
tions, however they may come to me, all these
SCEPTICISM 333
are immediate, they are my own, they are not
inference but fact.
So far the attitude of the sceptic is perfectly
simple and comprehensible. But the sceptic, like
every other man, must live; and the question
arises on what basis he shall conduct his life, and
how he shall escape f ailing" into the same sort of
theorizing as that which he has condemned in the
dogmatists. Here enters the distinction I have
indicated in the diagram by the rather arbitrary
use of the words philosophy and metaphysics.
The terminology, I confess frankly, is not that
of the ancient Pyrrhonist, who denied categoric-
ally that he had any philosophia and admitted
only an agoge, or manner of life ; philosophy and
metaphysics in his language were all one, and
equally objectionable. IBut our tongue has no
equivalent for the Greet agogd, and in accord-
ance with the usage in the previous volumes of
this series I shall here confine the term philoso-
phy to the narrower scope of reason permitted
in the sceptical and in all the other schools, and
apply the term metaphysics to that further use
of the reason, different indeed from philosophy
in kind as well as in degree, where sceptic and
dogmatic drew apart.
This distinction granted, it remains to show
334 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
what philosophy the Pyrrhonist followed, and
how he justifiedhis adherence to any philosophy.
In the first place Sextus emphatically asserted
his right as a sceptic to work in the field of sci-
ence, properly defined and limited. "The phe-
nomena of nature," according to the well-known
division of Mill, "exist in two distinct relations
to one another ; that of simultaneity, and that of
succession." 15 Hence the two categories of the
"uniformities of coexistence" and the "uniform-
ities of causation," by which scientific procedure
falls into the two types of (1) classificatory or
descriptive, and (2) genetic or mechanical. And
in both of these types, with due restrictions, the
sceptic might feel himself perfectly at home,
since both simultaneity and succession he ac-
cepts as immediate affections. He perceives as
simple facts of sensation that certain phenomena
appear together and certain others apart from
one another, and hence can be classified by de-
scription; he perceives also that certain phenom-
ena appear regularly in succession, and hence
can be classified in the manner of the genetic or
mechanical sciences. So in the science of which
Sextus himself was a student, he found no in-
compatibility in joining the profession of com-
of Logic HI, v, 1.
SCEPTICISM 335
plete scepticism with the practice of the Me-
thodic branch of medicine. So, too, in the books
written by him against the encyclical studies
(grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, as-
tronomy, music) , the arguments in each case are
directed not against, e.g., grammar as an empi-
rical study of the observable facts of speech, but
against theories of language based on rational
analogies and the supposed nature of things.
Why is it then, one asks, that the sceptics have
been accused of "denying the possibility of all
science"? 16 The error, apparently, must be at-
tributed to the differences of terminology which
are the source of endless other misunderstand-
ings in modern commentators ; and to this source
of error should be added, as particularly viru-
Jent in our treatment of the sceptics, the deeply
ingrained conceit of ourselves as wiser than our
progenitors. Now it is a remarkable fact that
the Greeks, though they gave the impulse to
scientific procedure in the western world and
were indeed eminently scientific in their method
of thought, yet had no specific term for science
as a field lying between the utilitarian arts
ieM. M. Patrick, Bextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism 96.
The German critics are sounder. See Goedeckemeyer 261, 283;
Richter Tff. It is fair to add that Antiochus was brought to
reject scepticism on the ground that it made science as well as
everv other human activity impossible.
336 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
(technai) at the one extreme, and at the other
extreme physics ( ta physika) , which in the Hel-
lenistic use of the word includes also metaphys-
ics and theology. The case, let us admit, presents
its difficulties; for while Sextus is really inveigh-
ing against those who deal with art and meta-
physics as if they were science, the historical crit-
ic, owing to the lack of a specific word for sci-
ence, is in danger of overlooking the fact that
true science is not embraced in the destructive
arguments. There is, however, this compensa-
tion in the linguistic ambiguity, that it points to a
like and almost universal ambiguity in thinking.
For it happens today, as it happened in the far
past, that the scientist, so soon as he lays down
his scalpel and his scales, and begins to general-
ize and define, is tempted to break through the
hampering circle of permitted classification and
to indulge in abstractions as unreal as those
of the professed metaphysician or theologian,
whom he so often despises; And it was against
this metaphysical extensio^ of science that the
sceptic directed his batteries)
Now the ultimate data of/science (or physics
in our use of the word, not the ancient ) are mass
(sdma the Greeks called it) and motion and
energy; and the first fatal step in rationalism is
SCEPTICISM 337
taken when the scientist, not content to employ
these immediate and inexplicable facts of sensa-
tion, tries, as it were, to go behind the returns,
and seeks by some legerdemain of definition to
comprehend what these phenomena are in them-
selves. The Stoics started the merry game when,
for the sake of a supposedly clarifying simplifi-
cation, they undertook to define energy (tones)
in terms of mass and motion, and then, pushed
by their foes of the Academy, were compelled
to define mass and motion in terms of energy,
and so, in their eagerness to embrace a cloud,
found themselves like Ixion nailed to an ever-
revolving wheel. 17
If the deluded scientist attempts to escape
from this vicious circle by defining his physical
data in terms of mathematics (number, addition
and subtraction, whole and part) , the sceptic is
at his heels with arguments to show that we have
no clearer comprehension of what number itself
is than of what mass itself is, nor of the process
of addition and subtraction, nor of the relation
of whole and part. These elements of mathe-
matics are the immediate data of the mind, be-
hind which we cannot go, as mass and motion
and energy are the immediate data of the senses,
Appendix A.
338 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
and the endeavour to explain the latter by the
former is merely a vain effort to define obscu-
rum per obscurius. And the metaphysical scien-
tist is no better off if he undertakes to get behind
the data of the senses and the mind by defining
them in the terms of space and time. This indeed
is to fall into a depth of confusion which might
be described as obscurius per obscurissimum. To
begin with the sceptic had no difficulty in dem-
onstrating that any attempt to make either space
itself or time itself comprehensible to the under-
standing is of all metaphysical follies the most
foolhardy. And there is this last inextricable
entanglement, that any psychological definition
of either space or time, of the sort desired by
the deluded scientist, involves the use of both
space and time together, and this coordinate
use of space and time means that space will be
expressed in terms of time and time in terms of
space, although each of these is so contrary in
its nature to the other that any such reciprocity
of terms results in the virtual abolition of both
as immediately given to us in experience. 18
This is a thorny brake through which I have
dragged the reader, and unprofitable as well, I
fear, unless he has had the good will to follow up
v. Math. II, 6 ff., 169 ff., Ill, 19 ff., 85 ff., I, 161 ff., 311 ff.;
Hyp. Ill, 131, 142.
SCEPTICISM 339
the references. But, however thorny and, repel-
lent the discussion may be, it is a fact that no sci-
entist of antiquity, who sought to go behind ap-
pearances, could escape the dilemmas into which
his sceptical antagonist threw him; and the 4
makers of hypotheses today in regard to mass
and energy would fare no better, had not the
critical sense been pretty well frightened out of
the field by the superstition that whatever is said
by a man of science must be science^
The next step towards the bog of metaphys-
ics is taken when we proceed to deal with the re-
lation of succession and the genetic branch of
science in the terms of sensation. Now in one
sense the sceptic no more denies causality than
does the dogmatist. "The law of causation," says
Mill, "the recognition of which is the main pil-
lar of inductive science, is but the familiar truth,
that invariability of succession is found by ob-
servation to obtain between every fact in nature
and some other fact which has preceded it; in-
dependently of all considerations respecting
the ultimate mode of production of phenomena,
and of every other question regarding the na-
ture of 'things themselves.' " To this statement
the sceptic would in the main assent, though
he would refuse the word "law" quite the full
340 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
meaning it has in Mill, and would regard causa-
tion rather as a subordinate division of the gen-
eral principle of classification than as a princi-
ple antecedent to classification. But, however
that may be, the sceptic does not deny the se-
quence of cause and effect as a matter of obser-
vation. That is to say, he admits freely as one of
his immediate affections the memory of a cer-
tain invariability of succession. He knows that
as a fact of memory, whatever memory may be,
he has seen colts always born from horses and
children from men, and he knows by the same
token that he has acted on the supposition that
this invariability in the past would continue in
the future and has not been deceived in so act-
ing. So far he is ready to admit that the exist-
ence of causation as a term for observed se-
quences is convincing by its own evidence.
The sceptic withholds his assent only when
the rationalizing scientist proceeds to analyse
the operation of causality, or to define its na-
ture, or to draw inferences from it as from a ra-
tionally comprehensible and ultimate law. Here
Sextus brings forward the contradictions into
which the rationalist falls the moment he begins
to define a cause in terms suitable to what is cor-
poreal or what is incorporeal, or as operating in
SCEPTICISM 341
space or in time, or as dissociated from or asso-
ciated with its effect, or as simple or as mul-
tiple. 19 In the end his destructive argument
amounts to this: the phenomenon of physical
causation, like the previously discussed phenom-
ena of mass and motion and energy, is condi-
tioned on the two simultaneous factors of time
and space; hut each of these factors presents
conditions peculiar to itself and exclusive of,
even contradictory to, the conditions presented
by the other factor, so that when we attempt to
define a cause in the terms of these inevitably
concomitant factors we become entangled in a
network of incoherences. Again, we are blocked
by a wall of ignorance. If, to escape these entan-
glements, the dogmatist will limit his efforts at
definition to the simple statement that cause is
a matter of relativity, Sextus will assent; but he
will add that relativity is purely a conception
of the mind, as he elsewhere sufficiently demon-
strated, and that it gives us no knowledge of an
objective operation. 20 To say that causality is a
causal relation leaves the term causal still to be
defined.
The conclusion then of the whole argument,
i* Adv. Math. IX, 203, 210, 227, 232, 237, 252, 246.
20.4 dv. Math. IX, 207; VIII, 453 ff.
342 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
developed from the eight tropes of Aeneside-
mus, will be that Causality, as a phenomenon of
experience, seem&to exist, but that, if the exist-
ence of an operation is made to depend on our
ability to give a coherent definition or rational
explanation of its nature, then causality seems
not to exist ; and between these two positions the
sceptic will hold his judgment in suspense. J
It might seem as if this debate with the^s6ien-
tific dogmatists were little better than quarrel-
ing over words; for, after all, if you grant the
facts, or apparent facts, of mass, motion, and
energy, number, time, and space, causality, as
elements of our immediate experience, what dif-
ference does it make whether you deny our abil-
ity to go behind the returns and to define the na-
ture of these elements ? Well, it does make a ser-
ious difference. For the assumption that we can
arrive at any rationally definable knowledge of
these things is, as it were, the half-way house be-
tween legitimate science and pure metaphysics,
and having gone so far, the mind is urged on
almost irresistibly to the last plunge into, the
abyss, of which plunge the results are palpable
enough. So long as physical causation is accept-
ed as nothing more than the memory of certain
sensations which have appeared in succession,
SCEPTICISM 343
the mind Is checked in its impulse to draw rigid
and absolute conclusions from thesephenomena ;
but once grant that physical causation is an im-
mutable and universal law of mass and energy,
a law of whose nature and operation we have
sure knowledge, grant this and what can save us
from leaping to the metaphysical conception of
the world as a vast all-embracing mechanism of
matter, wheels within wheels for ever grinding
on in ruthless indifference to whatever may be
caught in their cogs? The Epicurean may de-
fine his world as composed of atoms dancing
frantically through the void, the Stoic may de-
fine the same world as a continuous substance
for ever palpitating with a kind of internal con-
traction and expansion ; the Epicurean may de-
ny the presence of any design in his rain of
atoms, the Stoic may deny the presence of any-
thing but design in the everlasting recurrence
of change all is one/In either case the liberty
and security of the spirit, which these philoso-
phies started out to discover on the pathway of
physical law, end in the mockery of an inhu-
man fatality. It was against such a result that
the sceptic was fighting. For this purpose he
harped with exasperating tenacity on the con-
tradictions within each of the metaphysical sys-
344 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
terns, and on the contradictions of system with
system ; and so, by virtue of the universal isos-
theneia of reason and opinion, confirmed the
position of Socrates, that in regard to the ul-
timate nature of things our only knowledge
is that we know nothing. 2 ]/' There was in Sais,"
says Plutarch in his essay on Isis and Osiris, "a
statue of Athena, whom they call Isis, with this
inscription: 'I am all that has been, and is, and
21 A neat illustration of the false extension of thought from scep-
ticism and legitimate science to metaphysical pseudo-science may
be found in the works of Huxley. His scepticism, or agnosticism,
has as its positive side this "clear result of the investigation start-
ed by Descartes, that there is one thing of which no doubt can
be entertained, . . . and that is the momentary consciousness we
call a present thought or feeling" (Works, Eversley edition, VI,
65). This is precisely the Pyrrhonic oikeion pathos, "immediate
affection." Huxley's practical work as an observer of nature and
experimenter, and his theory of science as concerned with the
classification of our observations, are still purely Pyrrhonic. So
too is his acceptance of Hume's analysis of causality: "The re-
lation of cause and effect is a particular case of the process of
[mental] association; that is to say, is a result of the process of
which it is supposed to be the cause" (VI, 88). This, I take it,
is the Pyrrhonic canon of to pros ti. So too Huxley remains a
Pyrrhonist in Ms acceptance of Hume's distinction between sci-
ence and metaphysics (VI, 69). But when he goes on to make
cause and effect an absolute and universal law of nature, to
doubt which would be self-destruction on the part of science (V,
70), when he declares that Darwinian evolution is "no specula-
tion but a generalization of certain facts" (V, 42) ; and, further,
that "the materials of consciousness are products of cerebral ac-
tivity" (VI, 94), that we are pure "automata," that all causa-
tion is of a material, mechanical sort, and that * e man, physical,
intellectual, and moral, is as much a part of nature, as pure-
ly a product of the cosmic process, as the humblest weed" (IX,
11), then he slips from scepticism and genuine science, to ra-
tionalizing science and pure metaphysics. I have dealt with this
subject at length in 8helbv>rne Essays VIII.
SCEPTICISM 345
shall be, and no mortal ever yet has withdrawn
my garment/ "
VI
Such was the philosophy of the Pyrrhonist in
the intellectual sphere, and such his rejection of
any theory of truth approaching metaphysics.
What will be the limits of his philosophy in the
practical and emotional sphere? How shall a
man bear himself in a life surrounded and shut
in by walls of ignorance? Should the sceptic,
having surrendered the hope of positive know-
ledge, carry his denial on to what may seem at
first its logical conclusion in nihilism and black
despair? Such, certainly^ has been the outcome
of doubt in many minds. It was the undernote
of the epigrammatists of the Greek Anthology.
In modern times it has been voiced by James
Thomson with dismaying clarity:
"For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
The while all change and many vanish quite,
In their recurrence with recurrent changes
A certain seeming order ; where this ranges
We count things real ; such is memory's might.*'
That was precisely the stand taken by the an-
346 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
cient sceptic so far as science was admitted into
his philosophy ; and, one may add, it was the at-
titude of Plato towards the moving shadows
cast on the wall before the prisoners of the cave.
But what of the moral effect of this illusion, as
Thomson depicts it on the face of the "Image"
that sits enthroned above his City of Dreadful
Night, the woman of Albrecht's Diirer's "Mel-
encoUaf'?
"But as if blacker night could dawn on night.
With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,
A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,
More desperate than strife with hope debarred,
More fatal than the adamantine Never
Encompassing her passionate endeavour,
Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:
"The sense that every struggle brings defeat
Because Fate holds no prize to crown success ;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
Because they have no secret to express ;
That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
That all is vanity and nothingness."
Such may be one of the fruits of disillusion,
but not of the kind indulged by Pyrrho and Sex-
tus. They would say that this tragic bitterness
of defeat meant the rebellion of a mind con-
SCEPTICISM 347
vincedthat it had laid bare the foundation of the
world and saw all things rooted in ignominy:
"For out of unreason spring all things that are."
That, they would say, is not doubt at all, but a
kind of inverted and sullen dogmatism. The true
sceptic, they maintained, was of all men most
justified in claiming a certain ease and tranquil-
lity of mind, owing to the very fact that he re-
fused to pass any judgment at all on the ulti-
mate nature of the world.
If we analyse this boasted ataraxy of Pyr-
rho it will appear to be made up of about equal
parts of the Socratic hedonism and apathy.
What pleasures life affords the sceptic will grasp
and enjoy, asking no question as to their hidden
source or end. If troubles and pain befall him,
as they come in varying guise to all men,
"For not of ancient oak nor yet of stone
He springs, but doth a human kinship own/'
these too he will accept, and render as light as
may be by endurance, not denying their reality
nor rebelling against them as an outrage put
upon him by some malevolent Power( Such is
the proper mood of one who limits his know-
ledge to the immediate affections. 2 ^ 1
. Math. XI, 141 ff.
348 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
As for the attitude towards society and the
kind of conduct best suited to secure this state
of tranquillity for like the partisans of the
other sects the sceptics also aimed at a measure
of security Sextus states his position fairly:
"We follow a certain sort of reasoning based
upon appearances, which instructs us to live in
accordance with the manners and laws and char-
acter of our people, and with our own imme-
diate affections." If our fellow citizens worship
the gods, we too will worship, not in scornful su-
periority, but with humble acquiescence in what
men believe ; if they cherish the family and make
a virtue of the other amenities of the heart, we
too will be domestic and kind. All this the sceptic
will do on no fixed principle of morality, but
rather in despair of discovering any better guide
than the custom and beliefs in which he has been
brought up./
In practice the code of the Pyrrhonist comes
pretty close to that of the Cyrenaic; but it dif-
fers in so far as the Cyrenaic makes particular
pleasures the set purpose of his life and the test
of wisdom, whereas the Pyrrhonist simply wel-
comes what pleasures may come to him with, so
far as possible, a genial indifference to fate. 28
I, 215.
SCEPTICISM 349
Further, the two schools differ in their attitude
towards society, as conformity differs from adap-
tability. The Pyrrhonist conforms to the preva-
lent customs and sentiments in a spirit of gen-
uine scepticism ; the Cyrenaic finds his profit in
adapting himself to current opinions with a
more or less cynical contempt for what he be-
lieves to be false, fluctuating between the mod-
esty of a Pyrrho and the insolence of a Thrasy-
niachus.
Should the dogmatists turn upon the sceptic
and charge him with choosing and avoiding, in
general with not practising his boasted suspense
of judgment, the sceptic will reply that they do
not understand the distinction between a meta-
physically determined goal, for which if he
waited he would never act at all, and a philo-
sophical observation of phenomena, whereby he
has a perfect right to choose this and avoid that
among the actual experiences of life. As the
sceptic did not see himself debarred from the
practice of legitimate science, but refused to go
with the scientists into their abstract definitions,
and so on to their absolute theories of the world ;
so, in the exigencies of daily business, he is not
shut out from adopting a rule of conduct sug-
gested by appearances, while rejecting every
350 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
absolute definition of Good, whether it lead to
the Epicurean's frantic flight from pain or to
the Stoic's pitiless affirmation of optimism. He
thinks he has found the pleasant home where
Tranquillity resides; but his mistress is not the
ataraxy of Epicurus or the apathy of Zeno (the
words he uses, hut divests them of their meta-
physical associations) . On the contrary, he sees
that these fixed principles not only lead to log-
ical absurdities but defeat themselves practic-
ally ; since the moment a man sets up an absolute
ataraxy or an absolute apathy as the goal of a
rational hedonism or optimism, he adds an un-
necessary anxiety to life by aiming at what he
can never attain. Rather, the Pyrrhonist takes
to heart the story told of Apelles, who, painting
a horse and finding it difficult to reproduce the
foam, finally in a temper threw his sponge at the
picture, and lo! tiiere was the effect he had been
striving for. So J Sextus said, the sceptic, look-
ing about for a philosophy in which his mind
could repose, found himself balked at every step
by the disagreement of the sects; thus he was
forced to hold his judgment in suspense, when,
lo! by good chance the tranquillityjie was seek-
ing followed as the shadow a body.
SCEPTICISM 351
VII
I cannot see that the logic of Sextus has left
anything essential to be added by the sceptics of
a later age. Doubtless Kant, to take the great-
est of the moderns, has thrown the arguments
of the ancient school into a new and imposing
scheme, and has given them a different psycho-
logical slant; but so far as Kant's philosophy
remains truly "critical/* it seems to me to move
within the circle prescribed by his predecessors
in the Greek Tradition. Both Sextus and Kant
show, and for reasons of the same character,
that our perceptions are confined to appear-
ances and tell us nothing of things as they are
ultimately in themselves. Both show that we
are obliged to use time and space in our percep-
tion of phenomena, but can neither define the
nature of time and space nor employ them to de-
fine the nature of that which we perceive by
their means. If anything Sextus is here more
thorough than Kant, in his insistence on the dif-
ficulties which beset the mind, owing to the fact
that any attempt to analyse our sensations in
the terms of time and space obliges us to express
the relations of time in the incompatible rela-
tions of space, and vice versa.
352 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
Again, Sextus deals critically with what Kant
calls the Ideas of Reason the soul, the Cos-
mos, God and with the same destructive re-
sults. Of any guide or superior principle of the
soul distinguishing man from the beasts we have,
according to Sextus, no certain knowledge; in-
deed of the soul itself we can make no affirma-
tion, since to some reason proves its existence
and to others its non-existence, and, having no
higher court of appeal, a wise man will hold his
judgment in suspense. And so it is of the Cos-
mos as an orderly, rational whole; between those
who reason that all is chance and those who rea-
son that all is design, in our ignorance of the na-
ture or existence of causality, what resting-
place is there for the critical mind ? And so, also,
it is with the being or not-being of God. I can-
not see how in any of these cases the famous an-
tinomies of Kant have added anything of sig-
nificance to the isosiheneia of Sextus ; indeed,
for scope and thoroughness, though not in sche-
matic clarity, I submit that the palm belongs
rather to the ancient champion against the dog-
matists.
The break between the ancient and the mod-
ern comes when we pass from Pure Reason,
where Kant, remaining true to his "critical"
SCEPTICISM 353
creed, is at one with Sextus, to the Practical
Reason, where he ceases to be critical. It is true
that Sextus also, after a f ashion, used the Ideas
of Reason pragmatically as necessary assump-
tions. Thus he introduces his discussion of thebe-
ingofthegods in theHypotyposes with the state-
ment that, so far as the practice of life goes, the
sceptic will accept the common belief and will
act as if the gods existed and exercised a provi-
dence over the world ; but he will do this adoocas-
tos, that is to say, without permitting his prac-
tical conformity to prejudice his judgment of
the fact. Least of all will he, in a panic of fear,
suddenly throw overboard his whole critical
method, and rationalize this practical conform-
ity into a "categorical imperative" which com-
mands him to give an unselecting assent to the
universe as a whole. He will remain a consist-
ent sceptic, and will not, like the Kantian of to-
day or like the last beaten leaders of the Acad-
emy, try to speak as a sceptic and a Stoic in one
and the same breath.
Nor can I see that the logic of Sextus has left
open any loophole of attack for the enraged
dogmatists. One objection, however, to his con-
clusions has been raised so often and stated so
complacently, that it cannot be passed over with-
354 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
out mention. It was thrown against the Pyrrho-
nists and Academics of antiquity time after
time; St. Augustine reechoed it in his Contra
Academicos as if it were unanswered and un-
answerable; it is repeated by some of the his-
torians today with the same assurance of final-
ity. In a word the argument asserts that sceptic-
ism is self -destructive: that is to say, the very
use of reason to prove the invalidity of reason
assumes that the process of reasoning is valid,
and the conclusion that we know nothing is it-
self an assertion of knowledge. Or, as Mr. Mac-
coll expresses the criticism: "The sceptics do
not appear to have seen that their supposed dis-
proof of reasonings, if valid, disproved their own
reasonings, if, indeed, we can allow those who did
not allow of proof to talk of disproof." 24 Now to
say that the sceptics were unaware of this sort
of objection is, as a matter of fact, an extra-
ordinary misstatement. It was flung in their
teeth, so to speak, by every passer-by, and Sex-
tus, not to mention his predecessors, has it con-
stantly in mind. There would be more truth
in the statement that the sceptic's replies to it
*4NoTmaaM.&ccott,The Greek Sceptics 1QQ.-- In the issue of Mind
for July, 1894, there is an excellent criticism by Alfred Sidgwick
of Professor Bradley's Appearance and Reality, dealing clearly
and vigorously with the attempt of modern idealism to resusci-
tate this ancient charge against the futility of scepticism.
SCEPTICISM 355
were too frequent and were not always wise.
More than once, after a destructive train of rea-
soning, Sextus pulls himself up at the end with
a kind of apologetic defence, to the effect that
he is neither proving nor disproving, but holds
his judgment in suspense. Such an apology is
not quite candid, and is certainly a strategical
mistake. Indeed, both the attack and the defence
are no better than a quibbling evasion. On the
one hand, to prove by good logic that we have
no criterion of knowledge, and then to add that
this is not to assert the non-existence of a cri-
terion but only to use, ad captandum, such
methods as will convince the dogmatist that,
I say, is a feeble trick of evasion, unworthy of a
child of Pyrrho. 25 The sceptic's positionis strong-
er than that. To employ reason in such a way as
to show that it is self -destructive as an instru-
ment for defining the ultimate nature of things,
is not to assume the validity of reason in any
sense of the word under discussion; to conclude
thereby that we know nothing beyond our im-
mediate affections is utterly different from con-
cluding that we do know something beyond
these affections, and leaves the sceptic and the
dogmatist at opposite poles of philosophy. To
2$Hypotypos4s II, 79.
356 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
retort that the affirmation of ignorance still im-
plies the holding of dogma, is a quibble which, if
it brings satisfaction to any hungry dogmatist,
let him, o' God's name, make the best of it. 26
VIII
At this point I would ask the reader to refer
back to the diagram on page 330. It has been
made clear, I trust, how a genuine scepticism is
consistent in admitting a philosophy (as I limit
the word) of science and conduct, while reject-
ing the metaphysical extension of this philoso-
phy in any direction. But it will be seen by the
diagram that I also classify among the sceptics
those who accept a whole range of philosophy
which the Pyrrhonist excludes, and which I des-
ignate as spiritual. Something has been said
about the connexion of Pyrrhonism and the
Middle Academy; the last topic, and the most
important for our purpose, will be concerned
with the true children of Plato.
In the introductory chapter of my Platonism
the three main theses of the Socratic teaching
were stated as scepticism, a spiritual affirma-
tion, and the identity of virtue and knowledge,
Appendix D.
SCEPTICISM 357
the third of these propositions being capable of
a double interpretation, one of which easily
glides into rationalism. Now the affiliation of
the Hellenistic philosophies may be indicated
by saying that the Epicurean and the Stoic fol-
lowed the rationalizing tendency pf the third
thesis taken alone (not forgetting, however, the
ambiguity of the Stoic position) , that the Neo-
platonist rationalized the spiritual affirmation,
and that the Pyrrhonist clung to the scepticism
and rejected the other two theses. In such a
sense these schools may be grouped as imper-
fectly Socratic and as the heresies of philoso-
phy, whereas Plato alone developed the full
doctrine of the master by uniting the three
theses into one harmonious system of thought. 27
How Plato accomplished his great task I have
tried to set forth in the two previous volumes of
this series ; but of the part played by scepticism
in his philosophy not much was there said, and
indeed could not very well be said until after
the works of Sextus had been considered.
That Socrates did actually in his own mind
effect a union of scepticism and spiritual affir-
mation is shown by the quotation from the
Apology given at the opening of this chapter.
27See Appendix B.
3 j8 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
That there was also a strong vein of interroga-
tion and doubt running beside the Platonic
Idealism must be clear enough to any one who
has read the Dialogues. It was thus no accident
that the leaders of the Academy at an early date
beat the Pyrrhonists at their own game, and be-
came for many years the representative spokes-
men of scepticism. The customary "it is likely"
(eikos) of Plato's speculations needed only a
shift of emphasis, an extension of scope, to pass
into the "it is probable" (piihanon) of the Mid-
dle Academy, and the thing was done. Wlien
Pyrrhonism revived, the Dialogues were still a
reservoir of anti-dogmatic arguments on which
the sceptic could draw, as may be seen by the
large use of them in Sextus. 28 It is true, of
course, that the sceptical thesis of the Dialogues,
written before Pyrrho was born, is implicit rath-
er than fully developed, so that our discussion
may seem more pertinent to a certain kind of
Platonist than to Plato himself; but, with this
granted, what is the relation of the Platonic
scepticism to the Pyrrhonic? how can it be main-
tained along with a spiritual affirmation? is it a
true scepticism at all? Three questions which are
&E.g., the use made of Meno 80u and Theaetetus 147s, 165B
in Adv. Math. I, 33; Theaetetus 204 in I, 135; Ion passim zn I,
300; Sophist 233* IB I, 300; Timaeus 35 A in I, 301.
SCEPTICISM 359
really one: they touch the Christian faith as well
as the Platonic philosophy; and they must be
met and answered by any believer who, having
freed himself from the fetters of rationalism,
desires a larger world for his liberty than can
be seen by the eyes of the flesh.
Now the very essence of scepticism is the ad-
mission that our knowledge is limited to those
immediate affections about which there is no
dispute and can be no doubt. So far the Pyrrho-
nist and the Platonist and the follower of any
other philosophy must agree, if they lay claim
to the sceptic's liberty of reasonableness. The
issue will arise between the Pyrrhonist and the
Platonist over the scope of these immediate af-
fections. Both, as may be seen by looking back at
our diagram, will admit the reality of what is
there designated as the physical affections
pleasure and pain, and all those sensations and
perceptions which are connected with the body
and the world of material phenomena. But the
Platonist asserts that he lives also in a whole
range of affections, equally immediate and cer-
tain, which are not material in their origin, and
which belongto a subjectiveand objective world
of another order.
The character of these spiritual affections, as
3 6o HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
they may be termed for lack of a better word, I
need not here dwell upon. They are comprised
under what, in the previous volume of this ser-
ies, 29 I have denominated the philosophy of Pla-
to as distinguished from the two other elements,
theology and mythology, which enter into his
religion ; and I have there, to the best of iny abil-
ity, analysed and described them. Briefly stated,
they come down to a recognition of something
called the soul as an independent entity apart
from the body, and of those immediate facts of
consciousness which belong to the soul as a mor-
al, self -determining agent. Against these claims
the Pyrrhonist opposes a virtual negative; he
does not indeed directly and positively deny the
existence of the soul and its moral experience,
but, theoretically, he holds his judgment in sus-
pense regarding them, and, practically, he ig-
nores them by basing his rule of life on the phys-
ical affections alone. Beyond these there is for
him nothing to consider save the shifting cus-
toms of society which have no obligation other
than what men choose for the time to attribute
to them. In this sense the Pyrrhonist is an ag-
nostic, and the agnostic, whether ancient or mod-
ern, has always been a more or less disguised ma-
terialist.
^Particularly The Religion of Plato, chap, ill
SCEPTICISM 361
Who is right, the PyrrhomstorthePlatoiiIst?
Judged by the canon of isostheneia, the Pyrrho-
nist would appear to be your only genuine scep-
tic, since it is an open fact, so at least he avers
with plausible assurance, that, whereas all men
agree upon the existence of physical affections,
there is no such agreement upon the existence
of the spiritual affections, and it is presumptu-
ous to affirm knowledge where contradictory
opinions prevail. This was the question that
Plato faced in the Gorgias^ when to 'Socrates'
unflinching announcement of the spiritual af-
fections Polus replied that his language was
highly paradoxical and would be generally ridi-
culed by his countrymen. And Socrates admits
the paradox. It is a fact, he says, that you can
bring a host of witnesses who will swear that
they have no belief in these things which I af-
firm; but I, he adds, though I be alone in my
conviction, will not assent to their views, nor
can you force me to assent, for all the evidence
you bring to dislodge me from the truth* And
what is this clamour of the mob to us? Here we
are, you alone and I alone, debating together on
this great concern of the soul; and I think only
this will satisfy you, to convince me, as I am sure
that all I desire is the honest confession of what
362 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
you, and no other, have felt and do know. For
the rest of the world, what is it to you and to me
how they believe?
Such an argument from individual conscious-
ness might seem to be a sufficient answer to the
cavilling of the Pyrrhonist; for, after all, logic-
al demonstration ceases, and personal appeal
begins, when we come down to the rock bottom
of first premises. Have I, or have I not, this
particular affection? But even here an honest
man may well be shaken in his conviction if he
finds himself solitary or with a loud majority
against him. He will ask himself whether he does
really feel what his words imply, whether he may
not have been deluded in holding this affection,
however vivid, as in very truth of a spiritual or-
der. And so Socrates does not rest with the per-
sonal argument, but proceeds to show that all
men, by the intuitive meanings they put into
language and by the involuntary voice of con-
science, do in their hearts know these spiritual
experiences which in their lighter moments they
deny. 80
If Socrates and Plato are right, the case
would stand something like this. The spiritual
affections are immediate and universal, just as
is the truth, I think, veiled in the famous saying of Hera-
clitus 113 Diels), gwfo <m vcurtrb <f>pov&iv.
SCEPTICISM 363
are the physical affections ; all men alike live in
these two distinct orders of experience. But, in
comparison with the coarser sensations of the
body and the train of emotions they awaken, the
sense of things spiritual in the natural man is
evanescent and elusive, coming and going with
a kind of shy reticence. 81 And so it is that rea-
son, which is always in a state of rebellion against
any irreconcilable dualism, begins to argue with-
in us that these finer sensations are not so much
elusive as illusory, being in fact not of a separate
order from things physical, as they claim to be,
but material in their origin like all our other af-
fections. And in this monistic argument reason
is abetted by the strength of our natural desires,
which are uneasy under any abridgement of
their validity. Against this tendency of ration-
alism the Platonist will contend that he, and not
the follower of Pyrrho, is the complete sceptic,
since he accepts the whole range of our imme-
diate affections, whereas the Pyrrhonist is but
an imperfect sceptic, in so far as he suffers rea-
son to tyrannize dogmatically over one-half his
consciousness.
However that may be, and whether the Pla-
siCardinal Newman has dwelt on this fact with the conviction of
a priest and the eloquence of a poet. See, for example, the pas-
sage quoted in The Religion of Plato, Appendix C.
364 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
tonist is right or not in assuming a dualism of
affections, it is a fact that he is able to carry the
sceptical attitude into the spiritual realm, grant-
ed the existence of that realm, in a manner that
runs quite parallel with his and the Pyrrhonist's
attitude in the physical realm. Thus, if the read-
er will cast his eye down the column headed phi-
losophy in the diagram, he will see that the doc-
trine of Ideas corresponds to science in the phys-
ical order. In the lower order of experience the
sceptic accepts the existence of a physical real-
ity as a fact given him in his immediate affec-
tions; that is to say, the sense of something ob-
jective and impersonal, something outside of
himself which has the power of affecting him, is
just as real and immediate to him as the sense of
colour or the feeling of pleasure. The very word
"affection" implies that something not himself
affects him, and in his view the position of the
Berkeleyan idealist and, a fortiori, of the solip-
sist is not sceptical at all but dogmatic and meta-
physical to the last degree. 82 And so in the high-
*2Thus phenomena, the sense of something appearing to us, are
identical with immediate affections as r& jcard <f>avTatrtav iratiiiTi-
*%v inroTrhtrovrtL (Hyp. II, 10),d^owXoJrws(u4dv. Math. Till, 316),
ri Jwi farrow-fay KarTjyayKa^va TrbQi\ (Hyp. I, 13), rot QtavT&vels
yiHwriv ijfuv tyx&ni>a, (Hyp. II, 97), etc. The Pyrrhonist would ac-
count it a metaphysical absurdity to argue that pain is not an
affection produced by something outside of ourselves, or that
our sense of the body is not of something objective and im-
personal
SCEPTICISM 365
er order the Platonist holds that it is not the
function of scepticism, but of a perverted ration-
alism, to deny the existence of a world of objec-
tive reality underlying and shaping his spiritual
affections. The forces of this immaterial world,
with which in some way he is in contact, are sim-
ply in his vocabulary the Ideas. The Platonist
perceives further in the realm of spiritual phe-
nomena a relation of simultaneity and succes-
sion which gives him the two categories of the
"uniformities of coexistence" and the "uniform-
ities of causation," precisely as he finds them in
the realm of physical phenomena. So far as his
experience goes he sees that certain laws pre-
vail here as they do in mechanics, that certain
consequences invariably attend certain moral
acts or states ; so that a fair and adequate defini-
tion of the doctrine of Ideas would be "the sci-
ence of the spirit." He thinks that his experi-
ence here is even more exact and cogent than his
experience of physical law, for the reason that it
comes down to the centre of his being ; andhence,
in comparison with the science of the spirit, he
is inclined to regard the so-called science of
physical phenomena as a mere body of relative-
ly unstable opinions. To permit the insistence
of physical phenomena to obscure the reality of
366 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
the soul and the Ideal world is to the Platonist
the last illusion of wilful ignorance, and he who
lives in such a state is as a man walking in his
sleep. 83
Again following down the column under phi-
losophy in the diagram we see that correspond-
ing with the ataraxy of the Pyrrhonist stands
the Platonic eudaemonism. Here, in obedience
to the radical dualism of his experience, the Pla-
tonist divides his feelings into two distinct or-
ders : pleasure and pain on the one hand, which
are the result respectively of this or that conduct
in the realm of physical phenomena, and which
he accepts with the Pyrrhonist ; and on the other
handhappiness (eudaimonia) andmisery, which
accompany our spiritual volitions, and which
the Pyrrhonist rejects, or at least refuses to
separate in kind from pleasure and pain. In
the higher order the Platonist finds his goal in
that immediate sense of happiness which comes
with a life governed in conformity with the phi-
losophy of Ideas, as at once the effect and con-
firmation of spiritual knowledge. Eudaemon-
ism to him is not necessarily antagonistic to
ataraxy, hut supplements ataraxy as the final
sslamblichus, Protrepticu? pp. 68, 69, 79 Pistelli, has some ex-
cellent observations on this illusion (ehnlri?), drawn from the
Pkaedo and the Platonic Dialogues generally.
SCEPTICISM 3 6 7
rule of conduct owing to its vastly greater sig-
nificance and cogency in the fulness of life. By
virtue of Ms complete scepticism he has attained
to a peace in the soul incomparably more pre-
cious than the bare imperturbability of mind
boasted, but in fact rarely, if ever, possessed,
by the Pyrrhonic half -sceptic.
To this point the philosophy of scepticism
goes, and here it stops. The sceptic of any sort
must rest in the impossibility of defining in ra-
tional terms the nature of that objective reality
which lies behind material phenomena and which
he accepts as a given fact. So it is with Ideas.
Of their nature in themselves, how they exist,
where they dwell, if indeed the word "where"
may be applied to them at all, and in what man-
ner they operate, of this, if he is wise, the Pla-
tonist will profess ignorance. Plato himself in-
sisted on describing Ideas as separate (chdrista)
from material phenomena, yet as in some way
capable of affecting these phenomena by "par-
ticipation" or "imitation"; and it may be that
at times he was led on, by a very human impulse,
to play with rational definitions of their nature
which should explain this paradox of separa-
tion and participation; but such attempts were
abortive to say the least, and in the main, and
368 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
when true to himself, he left to the spiritual im-
agination a field wherein reason finds herself
hopelessly baffled. But for the existence of Ideas,
that was a matter the truth of which was not de-
pendent on logical deduction or poetical imagi-
nation, but was given in the immediate con-
sciousness of all men, however denied by some.
Certainly in the end, if my interpretation of the
Parmewdes and the Sophist is correct, 84 he de-
nied emphatically the right to translate the doc-
trine of Ideas into a transcendental monism cor-
responding in the spiritual realm to the meta-
physics of Epicurus and Zeno in the physical
realm. How far such a transcendental monism
strays from the true philosophy of Plato I have
tried to show in the chapter on Plotinus.
And the same limitation will be respected in
the volitional and emotional sphere of philoso-
phy. As the Pyrrhonist refrains from extend-
ing his ataraxy to the absolutes of hedonism or
optimism, so the Platonist will refuse to carry
his eudaemonism on into an absolute antinomi-
anism or an absolute asceticism. Happiness, as
he knows it, may be different in kind from pleas-
ure, and may pertain to the soul alone as dis-
tinct from the body; he will not therefore allow
PlatonAsm chap. viiL
SCEPTICISM 369
his pursuit of happiness to merge into the anti-
nomian's indifference to life in the flesh as a
matter of no concern to the soul, nor into the
ascetic's condemnation of the flesh as something
utterly hostile to the soul and so to be ruthlessly
crushed down and silenced. Both antinomian-
ism and asceticism he will regard as illegitimate
extensions of a dualistic philosophy into meta-
physics; there are no rational absolutes for the
sceptic. 35
So far I have endeavoured to show how the
philosophy of Plato embraces both scepticism
and the spiritual affirmation, and how by virtue
of this inclusiveness it proves itself more thor-
oughly positive than the materialistic exclusive-
ness of Pyrrho. For the relation of theology and
mythology to philosophy in such a scheme I must
refer the reader to the appropriate chapters in
my Religion of Plato. The problem of philoso-
phy is to ascertain what spiritual knowledge is
consistentwithalegitimateenlargementof Pyr-
rhonic scepticism; with theology and mythol-
ogy, so far as we remain true to our Platonism,
we pass from the assurance of knowledge to that
land of varying probability which was discov-
ered, but never occupied, by the great explorers
"See Appendix E.
370 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
of the Middle Academy. If there is any escape
from the restrictions of probability in the relig-
ious sphere of theology and mythology, it can-
not be achieved by the guidance of unassisted
reason, but must Trait on a revelation which
comes with its own authority of immediate con-
viction. Such a revelation the Christian theo-
logian found in the life and words of the historic
Jesus, and this belief will be the theme of our
next two volumes in the Greek Tradition.
APPENDIX A
LACTANTITTS (Arnim, Stoic. Vet. Frag. II, 1041) has
a clear statement of the confusion of monism and dual-
ism in the Stoic system, resting finally on their as-
sumption of active and passive as merely two aspects
of an ultimate unity, which thus hecomes God or mat-
ter, energy or mass, as the argument demands. It is
fair to add that in this slippery use of active and pas-
sive, perhaps the fundamental fallacy of their whole
metaphysics, the Stoics were victims of an inherent
trait of the Greek language. At another time I have in
mind to follow this peculiarity from the morphological
ambiguities of the Greek verb and adjective, through
its philosophical implications in the active and pas-
sive use of such words as KOKOV and ayaOov, to its final
results in the theological dogmas of faith and grace
and justification. There is, as I see it, a profound
truth in these philosophical extensions of a linguistic
ambiguity, as well as obvious dangers. The whole mat-
ter is a striking illustration of the close connexion be-
tween the Greek tongue and the Greek Tradition.
As for fonos, so far as I can guess at its meaning, it
is a further attempt to reduce mass and energy to the
same terms. It is the vibratory tension in the mass of
any object, energizing from the centre to the periphery
and from the periphery to the centre. By its inward
372 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
thrust it gives unity and essence, cohesion we should
say, to an individual body; by its outward thrust it
gives magnitude and form and the secondary qualities.
So far the definition leaves a radical distinction be-
tween matter and energy; to- escape this mechanical
dualism tonos is then regarded as itself simply a sub-
tle kind of matter (ether, or warm air), which pene-
trates a solid body and acts upon its mass by contact
and thrust. But this leaves the mechanical operation
of contact and thrust still definable only in terms of
energy. And so the argument proceeds in an endless
circle from mass to energy and from energy to mass. It
is not strange that the ancient critics of the Stoic
physics were bewildered.
The use of tonos was extended by the Stoics from
heads, which is the constitution (including essence and
quality) of inorganic bodies, to physis, which is the
constitution of plants, to psyche, which is the consti-
tution of animals, and finally to nous (reason), which
is the constitution of man. More generally expressed,
tonos, the sustaining and constitutive element regarded
from hems upwards to nous, becomes the logos of the
universe when regarded from nous downwards to
hexis; or, put the other way, the logos becomes the
tonos of the universe when regarded from the starting
point of our corporeal experience. Logos and tonos
are, so to speak, the same principle taken now in a
downward, now in an upward, direction.
Our knowledge of the Stoic conception of tonos is
derived from a few fragments (Arnim II, 439-468),
largely the work of hostile critics, and the whole sub-
ject is avowedly obscure. But one cannot read the ar-
APPENDIX A 373
guments without surmising that the fundamental hy-
potheses of physics were grasped by Chrysippus with
a clearer sense of the metaphysical problems involved
than is commonly shown by modern scientists, al-
though, of course, without our apparatus of experi-
mental facts. The relation between logos and tonos is,
I suspect, much the same thing as the modern relation
between mathematical equations and physical opera-
tions, expressed by us in terms more useful practic-
ally, less suggestive metaphysically.
If any reader is curious to follow the Stoics further
in their divagations regarding the materialism, or sub-
materialism, or whatever it may be called, of qualities
and forces and relations, let him study the fragments
dealing with the four categories of Chrysippus. He is
likely to come out with a headache and nothing more.
As Plutarch says (Arnim II, 380), rawa iroXXyv !x
ro^pa^v. Again one might draw a curious and illuminat-
ing parallel between the Stoic definitions of -rroca and
<rvfi/3c^rjKOTa, as material yet differing from ordinary
matter by not being subject to the known laws of
mechanics, and some of the modern hypotheses of
physics and chemistry. The Stoic hypotheses are on
the whole more logical, but they lack the audacious
fancifulness of our scientific creations.
APPENDIX B
I HAVE referred several times to the relation of Pla-
tonism and the various Hellenistic philosophies to the
doctrines of Socrates. For the sake of obtaining a
summary view of the matter we may set down these
affiliations in a diagram, remembering, however, that
such a schematization is of the roughest sort and does
not pretend to completeness or exactness.
The intellectual method of Socrates may be de-
scribed as combining scepticism and the equation vir-
tue = knowledge. Owing to the ambiguous sense of the
word knowledge, the equation, taken in one way, leads
to a rationalism, or metaphysic, quite incompatible
with scepticism, while taken in another way, it leads
to reasonableness and a kind of intuition which consort
easily with scepticism. This distinction I have treated
-t length in myPlationism. Passing on to the d'ata of life,
we may say that Socrates applied his method in such
a manner as to obtain a calculating hedonism, an op-
cimistic endurance of things as they are (Jcarteria),
and a spiritual affirmation. The practical outcome of
chis application is the two traits of character, liberty
and security, which together form self-sufficiency (<zw-
tarkeia) .
Now the various schools dealt with in this volume
are all imperfectly Socratic in the sense that they each
374
APPENDIX B 375
laid hold of certain of the Socratic theses to the exclu-
sion of others, while they all aimed at the one common
end ofautarkeia. Manifestly the Epicureans built their
philosophy on the rationalism and hedonism of Socra-
tes, the Stoics on his rationalism and optimistic en-
durance, while both excluded the scepticism and, in
varying degrees, the spiritual affirmation. Plotinus
takes the rationalism and the spiritual affirmation,
while rejecting the hedonism and at least the optimism
properly belonging to the attitude of endurance. The
Pyrrhonists accepted only the scepticism combined
with hedonism and endurance. The affiliation of the
sects may then be schematized as follows :
Epicureanism nationalism with hedonism
Stoicism: rationalism with optimistic
endurance
Neoplatonism: rationalism with spiritual
affirmation
Pyrrhonism : scepticism with hedonism and
endurance
**
Platonic dualism is the true Socratic philosophy
(beside which the various sects run much as the heresies
run parallel with Christian orthodoxy) by virtue of
uniting the Socratic theses in one harmonious system,
developing the ethical equation in the direction of
reasonableness and the higher intuition, while repu-
diating a metaphysical rationalism. Together with
these Socratic traits Plato contains also hints of a re-
ligious element which later will be developed and made
dominant by Christianity. The radical change to
Christianity will come with the substitution of revela-
ton for autarkda.
APPENDIX C
PYBJRHO connected his doubt with one aspect of the
Democritean philosophy, whereas the Sophists were
rather followers of Heraclitus, the difference being
pointed out succinctly by Sextus, thus : "From the fact
that honey appears bitter to some and sweet to others
Democritus argued that honey itself was neither sweet
nor bitter, but Heraclitus said that it was both"
(Hyp. II, 63). That is to say, from the isostheneia of
our sensations the Pyrrhonist, taking a hint from De-
mocritus, concluded that we have no knowledge of the
nature of things, whereas the Sophist from this same
isostheneia argued the knowledge of a like isostheneia
in things themselves. Yet, in the very chapter in which
Sextus draws out his distinction between the Sceptics
and the Heracliteans, he inserts the curious statement
in regard to Aenesidemus, the reviver of true Pyr-
rhonism, that "he said the sceptical school was the way
to the philosophy of Heraclitus." Here is a crux to
which no satisfactory solution has ever been given,
which indeed, with the data at our command, can only
be answered conjecturally. One may guess that Aene-
sidemus, being impressed by the discord of our sensa-
tions and opinions, felt that in some way it must cor-
respond with, or be a part of, some sort of instability
in the world at large. Now, if we consider the fact that
376
APPENDIX C 377
his ten tropes are all summed up under the one head
of relativity, and the further fact that he seems to
have referred the variation of our sensations and opin-
ions to the flowing character of time as the corporeal
essence, so to speak, of all things (Hyp. Ill, 188), we
can understand how he was led, tentatively at least,
into the camp of Heraclitus ; for the universal flux of
Heraclitus is just the union of relativity and time. But
we may con j ecture also that his theory remained with-
in the bounds of a vague correspondence, and did not
venture upon hardening this correspondence into such
a criterion of katalepsis as underlies the position of the
Sophists. At any rate we may be sure that he would
have rejected the sophistic dogmatism of a Thrasy-
machus, who believed that by sheer exercise of will-
power a man could impose his own desire as a tempor-
ary canon of right and truth.
APPENDIX D
IT is to me a surprising thing that Pyrrhonism in
general and Sextus in particular have received such
.scant consideration in our .day from English commen-
tators. The only translation we have of Sextus is
Miss Patrick's version of the first book of the Hypo-
typos es in her Sextus Empiricus and Greek Sceptic-
ism, and unfortunately her work shows a very imper-
fect acquaintance with technical Greek. As an illustra-
tion of the grudging spirit of the critics I may cite
the comment on Sextus with which Mr. Alfred Benn
closes an otherwise acute study of scepticism in his
Greek Philosophers (2nd edition, p. 470) :
"It will be enough to notice the singular circum-
stance that so copious and careful an enumeration of
the grounds which it was possible to urge against
dogmatism included, as we have seen, many still em-
ployed for the same or other purposes, should have
omitted the two most powerful solvents of all. These
were left for the exquisite critical acumen of Hume to
discover. They relate to the conception of causation,
and to the conception of our own personality as an
indivisible, continuously existing substance, being at-
tempts to show that both involve assumptions of an
illegitimate character. Sextus comes up to the very
verge of Hume's objection to the former when he ob-
378
APPENDIX D 379
serves that causation implies relation, which can only
exist in thought ; but he does not ask how we come to
think such a relation, still less does he connect it with
the perception of phenomenal antecedence (1) ; and
his attacks on the various mental faculties assumed by
psychologists pass over the fundamental postulate of
personal identity, thus leaving Descartes what seemed
a safe foundation whereon to rebuild the edifice of
metaphysical philosophy (&)."
Now (1) Sextus does clearly enough imply, if he
does not actually state, that our conception of causal-
ity is connected -with the regularly perceived sequences
of phenomena (Hyp. HI, 17, 18; Adv. Math. IX,
200-203).
() Descartes is fully forestalled. If his dictum
Cogito ergo sum has any value as the starting point
of a metaphysical philosophy, it must mean this : "I
think, therefore I have knowledge of myself as a think-
er, and from that knowledge can deduce other know-
ledge." But Sextus (Adv. Math. VH, 310 et al.) dem-
onstrates to the hilt that the dianoia, or thinking fac-
ulty, has no means of knowing itself; and, if this is so,
the Cartesian Cogito is left as a mere immediate affec-
tion from which no such deductions as he desired can
be made. Moreover, Sextus argues more than once
(e.g. 9 Hyp. II, 32 ; Adv. Math. VII, 55) that the soul
itself is unknowable, and that therefore its existence
is a matter of doubt. And soul, in his modest vocabu-
lary, is nothing less than the fundamental postulate
of personal identity.
Mr. R. D. Hicks, in his Stoic cmd Epicurean (p.
812), is something more than grudging:
380 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
"The scepticism of antiquity," he says, "busied it-
self with the problem of knowledge. But when com-
pared with cognate inquiries in modern philosophy, it
appears in its scope and range almost ludicrously ten-
tative, jejune, and superficial. That the object of cog-
nition was external reality, nay more, that it was ma-
terial reality, was not in that age seriously questioned.
No one ever challenged the existence of a real world of
things lying behind the phenomena of which we are
conscious."
Now that the arguments brought together by Sex-
tus were neither jejune nor superficial, I trust has been
made evident. At least one may say that to character-
ize the philosophy of Carneades and Aenesidemus as
ludicrous is merely bad taste or ignorance. As for Mr.
Hicks' specific objections, they are simply amazing.
Does he mean to imply, in the face of page after page
and book after book of Sextus on the cognition of in-
ternal reality, that the only object of cognition at-
tacked by the sceptics was external and material real-
ity? And then, in view of the Neoplatonic theories of
liyle and the me on, how can he say that "no one ever
challenged the existence of a real world, etc. 95 ? As for
the sceptics, it was distinctly not their business to de-
termine what the object of cognition is, but to demon-
strate that we have no knowledge of any object (be-
yond our immediate affections) whether external or
internal. To argue against the existence of an exter-
nal reality, as Mr. Hicks implies that the sceptic
should have done, leads not to scepticism at all, but to
a dogmatism of the most metaphysical sort, such as we
see in Plotinus and Berkeley. To arguments of the
APPENDIX D 381
Berkeleyan sort Dr. Johnson's retort by kicking a
stone was good reason and good scepticism. Johnson
simply meant that we have an immediate and irrefut-
able affection of an objective material world, different
in character from personality. Pyrrho and Sextus
would have applauded his beau geste. But to state that
we have such an affection of an impersonal objective
world does not imply that we know what that world is
positively.
Mr. Maccoll, in his study of The Greek Sceptics, is
more generous than Mr. Hicks, but still has his reser-
vation. "It [Pyrrhonism] disputed the possibility of
subjective, as much as of objective, truth," he says,
p. 19, "and so wide was its range, that, had it not been
regarded only as a speculative means to a practical
end, a philosophy that taught the great secret of how
to be happy, Pyrrhonism would have been very closely
akin to the doubt of modern times." That is scarcely a
fair criticism and does not correspond to the historic
fact. Doubt was forced on the Pyrrhonist by the isos-
theneia of the wrangling schools ; he did not doubt in
order to obtain happiness, but learned by experience
that a certain tranquillity of mind followed a with-
drawal from the contest, and he then justified his po-
sition by proving to his own satisfaction that all the
wrangling claims of rationalism were equally inadmis-
sible. Mr. Maccoll is nearer the fact, but still, I think,
in error, when he says, p. 100 : "They only stopped
short when the absurdity of their position was shown
by their application of it to practical life : but their
arbitrary attempt to cut the knot by admitting a cri-
terion in practice and excluding it in theory cannot be
382 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHIES
accepted. 5 * Mr. Maccoll is here virtually repeating the
well-known criticism of Hume in his Essays (II, 131,
Green and Grose) :
"A Stoic or Epicurean displays principles, which
may not only be durable, but which have an effect on
conduct and behaviour. But a Pyrrhonian cannot ex-
pect, that his philosophy will have any constant influ-
ence on the mind : or if it had, that its influence would
be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must ac-
knowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all
human life must perish, were his principles universally
and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action, would
immediately cease ; and men remain in a total lethar-
gy, till the necessities of nature unsatisfied, put an end
to their miserable existence. It is true, so fatal an event
is very little to be dreaded. Nature is always too strong
for principle. And though a Pyrrhonian may throw
himself or others into a momentary amazement and
confusion by his profound reasonings; the first and
most trivial event in life will put to flight all his doubts
and scruples, and leave him the same, in every point
of action and speculation, with the philosophers of
every other sect, or with those who never concern
themselves in any philosophical researches. When he
awakes from his dream, he will be the first to j oin in the
laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his ob-
jections are mere amusement, and can have no other
tendency than to show the whimsical condition of
mankind, who must act, and reason, and believe;
though they are not able, by their most diligent in-
quiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the founda-
APPENDIX D 383
tion of these operations, or to remove the objections,
which may be raised against them."
Hume's antinomy between theory and practice seems
to me to hold good against scepticism of the Prota-
gorean and Heraclitean variety (see ante p. 325),
which would reduce nature to a positive chaos, and
against which Plato's philosophy is directed ; it seems
to me to hold good also against the militant and dog-
matic agnosticism of the nineteenth century. But I
cannot see that the true Pyrrhonism is under any such
liability. As a matter of fact the logical and perfectly
tenable position of the Pyrrhonian is very much like
that of the man in the street, as we should say today,
who accepts things as they are without concerning
himself in philosophical researches, unless he is wor-
ried by the missionary zeal of a reformer. That is pre-
cisely the Pyrrhonian agoge.
A good account of Greek scepticism, though it forces
the evidence for a regular development, is Goedecke-
meyer's Gescliichte des griecMschen STceptizismws. The
most searching analysis and criticism of the subject
is in Richter's Skeptizismus in der PhU&sophie. But
learned and acute as are Bichter's efforts to break
through the sceptical net, it would be possible, page
after page, to show how, misled by the methods of
modern metaphysics, he fails to meet the point at issue.
On the whole the best treatise on ancient scepticism is
Brochard's Les sceptiques grecs.
APPENDIX E
THE scepticism of Plato, as I have said, was not for-
mulated by him systematically, but its character may be
learnt from passages in the Theaetetus, Republic, Ti-
maeus, Sophist, Parmenides, and Phaedrus. The out-
come of the TTieaetetus is to show that we have no ab-
solute or direct knowledge, or at least that we do not
know what knowledge is. We must be content with opin-
ion. Right opinion is distinguished from wrong opin-
ion only by the pragmatic test of experience. Right
opinion is thus a kind of ex post -facto knowledge of
events ; it is not knowledge of causes or of what nature
in itself is. In his treatment of astronomy in The Re-
public and of the phenomenal world generally in the
Timaeus, Plato shows that science is only an approxi-
mate, never an exact or final, statement of physical
law, and furnishes no basis for metaphysical theory.
In the Sophist it is proved that Ideas do exist, at
least as dynameis (forces whose effects we perceive),
and that the realm of Ideas is a living world of power
and law. But again of the ultimate nature of Ideas, as
of matter, we have no knowledge, owing to the fact
that any attempt to define them or to explain their
relation to the phenomenal world involves the use of
spatial terms, whereas Ideas are not in space. This
difficulty is brought out in the discussion of the Par-
384
APPENDIX E 385
menides. Nevertheless, as is demonstrated in the Theae-
tetus, we have this test of the conformity of our'moral
judgments with the operation of Ideas, that if a city,
for example, decrees certain laws as just, the future
consequences to the life of the city will expose the
fact if the conception of justice was false. Our condi-
tion might be summed up in the sentence that we are
morally responsible and intellectually impotent. And
this state of moral responsibility and intellectual im-
potence, it may be observed, is the essence of tragedy
as worked out on the Greek stage. (On this point I may
refer to the profound study of Aeschylus and Sopho-
cles in P. H. Frye's Romance and Tragedy.) The vi-
sion of Ideas and the theory of reminiscence, as de-
scribed in The Republic, Phaedrus, and other dia-
logues, are a mythological expression of a philosophy
which combines a spiritual affirmation with scepticism.
