m ! i BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Henrg M^ Sage 1 891 Cornell University Library B517 .B98 School of Plato: its origin, development olln 3 1924 029 000 433 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029000433 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO THE SCHOOL OF PLATO ITS ORIGIN, DEVELOPMENT, AND REVIVAL UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE A,<)vS BY f: w: bussell,' b.d., b.mus. FELLOW AND TUTOR OF B.N.C., OXFORD METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET, W.C. LONDON 1896 3^ TO EEX HOFFMEISTEE TO THE READER / AM afraid that my title will appear somewhat of a mis- nomer, and that a certain inconsistency will ie observed in my treatment of the subject. After all, it is the BoTnan Imperial Age, and no other, which aroused the initial interest; faintly (/ fear) reflected in this hook. And yet the whole course of Greek peculation is examined, from start to finish, from a peculiar and restricted stand- point: I hope that this enibrace of an almost infinite topic will he pardoned: it did not, to me, seem possible to account for the. phenomena of Boman Elatonism or Stoicism (in reality, much the same thdng), unless in such a survey we had attempted to understand the intrinsic spring of bewilderment and philosophy, — / mean the selfish desire for personal happiness, attained only by a satisfactory inter- pretation of our own nature, and the wider Nature that enfolds, restrains, and perhaps completes it. The antagon- ism is seen to be no longer the antithesis of matter and spirit, ideal and real, the dualism of evil and right, — hut, far more truly, that sense of estrangement and hostility entertained by the spirit of reflecting man towards a Universe which appears to him alien, or at least incon- viii TO THE READER siderate ; and which, at all events (whether adapted to our convenience or not), is, and must remain, very imperfectly apprehended and understood, either in its purpose, essence, or constitution. The ultimate motive is, of course (I need not waste words over a fictitious altruism !), a selfish one ; and the impvise to speculate is either curiosity or the satisfaction of a moral need. Yet the eooamination of systems is not {so far as I know) usv/illy guided by this sense of the underlying aim. I have given exclusive and unreserved attention to this point alone : the relations of God and Nature to Man. For this reason, too, I must ask forgiveness for two faults which, I know, are not easily excused : the seeming si^erficiality of the treatment, — no details being admitted, and a stern ianishmient pronounced on all minor episodes in the narrative ; and, too, a certain iteration — to mMuy, I fear, wearisome — of the main problem, and a reminder or a recapitulation in almost every essay of the results of the previous search. May I claim credence when I say that the accumulation of evidence (patiently gathered in a dozen years) does really lie behind the specious paradoxes or {worse stUl) the obvious truisms, which may perhaps seem the more sterile at each repetition? But I could not encumber or conceal the main doctrine by abundant and yet misleading commentary ; and, for brevity, I take for granted a general acquaintance with the history and development of Thought. I reserve dates, analyses, contrasts, and personal details for a later volume. TO THE READER IX One word more : the few notes admitted have, in each ease, been added as explanatory or evidential, after the completion of the -Essays; and I did not read Lotze's Microcosm until the greater part of the volume was in the The Manor House, exbottbne, Devon, Miwch 1896. CONTENTS FAOE Introddction ...... 1 Peologdb . . . . 24 Booft ®ne THE HELLENIC AGE: PLATONISM AND ITS ANTECEDENTS OHAPTEE I General Principles of the Ionic and Sophistic Age : the Search for ^vais, or the Ultimate Reality . . 27 Pa/rt I. — The Awakemng of the Individual . 29 CHAPTER II Gradual Qualification of a Spiritual Principle : the One rises out of, and becomes contrasted with, the Manifold ; and is pronounced successively Divine, Intelligent, and Good ..... 45 Hie Search for a Prima/ry Substcmce hecomes an Inqmry into an Efficient Cause, and later, imio a Final Cwuse ...... 47 xii CONTENTS CHAPTER III PAGE The Spirit of Sophistic Subjectivity ; its Causes, Errors, Justification . . . . . .59 Perversion of the Anomotgorean Principle : The Sophists combine Atomism with the Doctrine of Sovereign Nowff (in a Subjective Sense) . . .61 CHAPTER IV Correction of a Hasty Estimate of the Subject ; Growing Importance of the Doctrine of a Divine Providence . 77 Socrates y adopts and corrects the Sophistic Griterium, modifying the Isolation of the Unit with a fi/rm Trust in Providence . . . .79 CHAPTER V Plato ; the Supremacy of the Final in place of the Efficient Cause ....... 97 CHAPTER VI Aristotle : Separation of the Efficient and Final Cause ; Nature the Source and Principle of Life and Motion. 121 33ooft ICwo THE HELLENISTIC AGE CHAPTER I The Fortunes of the Academy and of the Peripatetic School . 141 The Idea of the Transcendence of the Divine gives place to Pure Natv/ralism or Poetic Pantheism . . 143 CONTENTS xiii CHAPTER II PAGE Scepticism in Greek Thouglit ; Affinity with Eastern Pessimism ....... 155 Origin of Doubt, whether Complacent or Pessimistic, as a Leading Principle in Thought; and, the Three Schools of Resulting Ata/raxy . . . 157 CHAPTER III Summary and Prospect ; the Subjective Schools, or the Sage in Isolation . . . . . .173 The Subjective Schools, or the Individual in Antagonism to the Universal Process : the Isolation of the Sage ; Gradual Rejection of the Standa/rd of Nature; Negativity of all Terms used to denote the Chief Good ...... 175 Booft Ubree JUDAISM CHAPTER I Oriental and Hellenic Ideas contrasted with Judaism (or the Belief iu the Historical Providence of God, and the Denial of Nature's Independent Life) . . . 191 Practical a/nd Speculative Influence of Hebrew Philo- sophy and Revelation; Reappearance of the Doctrine of the Divine Interest in Man . . . 193 xiv CONTENTS 3Booft jfour TRE BOMAN IMPERIAL AGE CHAPTER I PAGE The Awakening of Subjectivity ; the Enlargement of the Mental Horizon . ., . . . .209 The Emancipation of the Citizen, amd the Three Inter- pretations of Nature, and Mam's Relation to her . 211 CHAPTER II Conceptions of the Perfect or Blessed Life ; as shown in Current Notions of " Heaven " ; the Kingdom of God, in or above the Wotld ..... 233 Idsal Conceptions under the Roman Empire ; the Notion o/ Heaven ..... 235 CHAPTER III Search for the Realm of Freedom ; ending in Renunciation of the Actual : the Antithesis of the Two Worlds of Being and Becoming in Greek Philosophy . . 257 CHAPTER IV The Inherent Dualism of Scientific Knowledge (Stoicism) contrasted with the Monism of Pious Emotion . 271 The Sphere of Nature transcended, and at the same time reconciled to the Subject in the Revived Platonism 273 CONTENTS XV 3Booft jfivc THE NEW PZATONISM, AND ITS VARIOUS PHASES CHAPTER I PAGE Eclecticism : the Coalition of Positivism and Mysticism, or the Permeation of Stoic Doctrine with Platonic Sentiment : the Attempt to solve the Antithesis of Dualism by the Theory of Emanation . _ . . 285 Practical Stoicism becomes Dualistic, and accepts the Pantheism of Spirit in place of the Pantheism of Matter ; Qod retires from the alien Outer World into the Soul of Man .... 287 , CHAPTER II Dualism, lurking beneath the Nominal Unity of Stoicism, becomes Overt and Explicit in Plutarch ; while Platonism, starting- from a Notion of Duplicity, ends in a Reconciliation : — the System of Emanation, or a Graduated Hierarchy of Existence . . . 303 CHAPTER III The Universe becomes One again, with Stages of Diversity and Excellence, but no Antagonism of Conflicting Principles ....... 319 Emanation and Continuity; the Finally Accepted Soluiion of Antiquity for the Problems of Natural, and the Needs of the Self-Conscious Life . 321 xvi CONTENTS CHAPTER IV. ■ PAGE Search for the Absolute and Unqualified One, divested of all Moral Effort CWill) or Conscious Thought (Design) in Creation: Failure of Negative Theology, based upon a Postulated and Incomprehensible Omnipotence 333 Final Form of Antique Cosmology in the Doctrine of Emanation; Pre-existence and Transcendence vindicated for the Sv/preme Sov/rce of lAfe, but a Deliberate Pwrpose in Creation denied . . 335 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO INTEODUCTION (A.) The History of Thought has few more interesting periods than the first three centuries of the Christian era. It makes no difference from what point of view we regard it. Putting aside our natural prejudice, our interest in the success of the Church, and attempting to survey impartially the progress of Speculation, we cannot fail to be struck by the wealth and variety of ideas which mark the Imperial age of Eome, and the clearness of expression with which they are presented to us. In that age, all the systems that preceded in a long series reappear, but now simultaneously and with full con- sciousness of points of difference or of contact. Each one then receives a final and dogmatic restatement in the form almost of a creed, and presents itself for criticism in its clearest outKne. All previous guesses at truth, whether made by Oriental or Jewish or Hellenic mind, now meet in the crucible, and contribute, in dis- solving, their share to the formation of the New Element, the Philosopher's stone, the religious wisdom of the Christian Church. As if by some solemn compact, the State undertakes to relieve mankind of the oppressive incubus of political duties. Peace, plenty, and for the lower ranks amusement as well, are provided by the 2 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO self-sacrificing labours of the Eoman emperors, ia order that (as it would seem) the wisest in all nations might have leizure to discuss the problems of existence, to dis- semiaate their own peculiar views without hindrance, and in their conclave decide upon the final or most probable answer, on which the future development of the human race would depend. The long armistice of aggressive wars, the patient and unambitious defence of the frontier, the successful maiutenance of internal peace, the stereotyped and unalterable constitution, concealing imder an appearance of caprice the most enduring stability, the careful and judicious government, — the en- tire removal of civic interests, save a dull sense of pride in the Eoman name, which yet brought no responsibilities, — all combined to give to philosophers a unique oppor- tunity, unbounded leizure for thorough inquiry into \he hopes of Man and the significance of the World. In that period when no school of thought lacked capable repre- sentatives, when all possible suggestions of adjustment received an impartial hearing, — when the State, like the civil government of Eome during a papal election, had no favourites, and supported no candidate, but rather rigidly confined itself to the then discredited offices of keeping order and providing sustenance, — there was a strong likelihood that some final and adequate solution would be attained. And after a rapid glance at Universal History, as known to us, we must assert that at first sight such seems to have been the result. § 2. The problem which required solution was nothing less than the relation of Subject and Object ; the recon- cilement of the Individual (consciousness hitherto uncon- scious) with Society, Nature, Divine Decrees, or Fatal Order. Once convinced that he is an end in himself, and to this conviction the entire course of Greek wisdom leads as to a final result, — once, I say, convinced of his INTRODUCTION 3 own inherent dignity and value, individual man will only return to amicable relations with the Universal, which attempts in embracing to absorb him, if he be assured that in some corporate life, in such submission to a comprehensive law, lies the secret of his own per- sonal welfare and happiness. For nearly two thousand years (a long period when six forms the extreme limit of our survey), the Christian ideal, compounded of the various contributions of which I spoke, has been main- tained among the so-called progressive races of Europe. In it now survive, under a divine sanction, most of the valuable discoveries made by reflecting man in the ages of philosophy. It has points of contact with all previous systems ; indeed, the Church has so clearly appropriated the spoils of the older kingdom, that it is not difficult to prove, in a fashion, and with great show of probability, its purely human origin. § 3. It is- a matter of some concern to the present age, whether the solution given in the Christian doctrine and ethics (the former immeasurably the more important) is to maintain itself, or to give way to some new sub- stitute : whether the victory of the Church after the long conclave was final, or a mere halt in the march of progress, a truce for a season owing to the fatigue, of the combatants. An inquiry, then, into the speculation of the Eoman age should be of interest, as helping us to determine how far we are to-day confronted with really novel problems, perplexed by entirely fresh solutions. For it is clear that no one can to-day afford to play the reformer or the prophet, without a thorough knowledge of the past ; or to come forward as a propounder of new truths, without asking whether he may not have been anticipated. To one who proposes to occupy these high functions, the study of the Imperial age is above all others indispensable. It is a miniature, a summary of 4 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO all previous and perhaps all subsequent times, and the various Protean forms of its reflectiveness deserve study no less than its unrivalled political constitution, — a con- stitution imitated with more or less clumsiness hy the two Saxon nations in India and Germany, — '' Unity in and above, but not destroying, Diversity." (B.) Now it is clear that in thus speaking of problems, and their answers and solutions, I do not mean theoretical problems of ordinary knowledge. And when I employ the term philosophy, I do not intend to convey the modem and restricted use of the word. Above all things, Eoman Imperial speculation is concerned with practice, and must be approached from that side, however much the practical aim seems to pass over later into the theoretical, and to become involved in it. It was not, as it is to-day, the main and fundamental duty of Philo- sophy to inquire " under what formula can we express these perfectly familiar functions ? " The sage aimed at the only practical end worth considering by mature and f uUy self-conscious man, — the Attainment of Happiness. We shall explain (or rather express) the unavoidable experiences of life in a variety of ways, which wUl differ from age to age, and may vary indefinitely ; — whether we ask about the puzzle of spiritual and bodUy union, the action of the braia, the process of thought, the influence of environment, the mechanism of the Universe, the ulti- mate composition of its elements, and the laws or cycles of material and social change. When we discover a convenient phrase to embrace certain phenomena in the outer world, we do not explain; nor do we control or guide our action because we can define the transactions of our own complex nature, or invent a formula to embrace them. But in the realm of practical wisdom, there is the stable and unalterable fact, however inex- pHcable, of the needs of the personal spirit. And in INTRODUCTION 5 history at least, — the study of mankind, — we are on firm ground, actual fact, obAdously true experience (though it be but the history of illusion and deceit), and not on the shifting quicksands of so-called Sciences, expressed in terms of animistic relation to us, concerned with things in their very nature unknowable, and (if the truth be told) immaterial and indifferent to the main practical business of life : — the attainment of satisfaction by means of self -development. (C.) Thus from this side, Philosophy is not a narrative of discoveries and demonstrations. "We do not read of cer- tain proofs, so much as tentative guesses. It is the process, not the result that is of value ; because, however Uttle knowledge we acquire of things without, the search throws light upon our own inner nature, and teaches us to depend on ourselves and find our supreme contentment, our only motive for social action, within. All the highest truths (as we may call them), on which our moral nature, and, in consequence (as we may suppose), our happiness depend, are incapable of proof. They are corollaries ; or (in another light) postulates of the practical life. In- sight, then, into the Imperial speculation gives truth, — not about things, it may be urged, but about human nature ; and it is clear that such knowledge is far more valuable than the apprehension of absolute Truth, even if this were possible. We may be perfectly certain that such consideration of basal problems will recur, so long as this soul which reflects remains the same — restless, inquisitive, and, above all, discontented and unsatisfied with the present, whether that present be adverse or prosperous. But there is absolutely no sign that human nature is changing, or that interest in final problems is abating. (D.) It would be idle to try and divorce this practical philosophy from religion. It becomes religion when it is 6 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO sensible of failure. It is impossible in the Eoman age to keep the two apart. A study of ethics or of the law of duty, a search for positive or negative happiness, at once brings a man to the question of man's place in Creation, (or rather, to avoid prejudging the matter,) in the Universe (whether of actuality, or of his own sensa- tions merely). I need not be at pains to prove that this is a religious question (one upon which science must be silent, for this is no question of fcuits, but of an Idea) ; and entails all such inquiries as centre round the problem of Freedom, Duty, Immortahty, the Divine Nature, and the Purpose of the Cosmic Process. The significance of the Eoman age is the exhaustive examina- tion and arduous labour given to these topics. As to the result, it is of course, as before, an open question ; but in going over the long-forgotten controversies, — in patiently sifting these tentative arguments or dogmatic assertions in favour of and against such eternal hypotheses, in understanding these futile harmonies proposed to unite matter and spirit, God and man. State and individual, Necessity and Freedom, — what a flood of light is shed upon that ultimate reality to us, our own soul : seen large in history, in the infinite pertinacity of its grasp upon the illusory worlds of the Unseen and Eternal ! (E.) This period has, till quite lately, suffered under two imputations, which has prevented a candid and unprejudiced estimate of its value and significance. The Imperial system was misrepresented as a truculent despotism, reposing on mihtary power and oppressing a multitude of nations once free and autonomous, now sighing in vain over the past glories of their turbulent independence. Most of our childish histories of Kome ended with a dirge over the buried EepubUc, and a sort of warning that now indeed the student who dared to press on into the unknown, was entering the gloomy INTRODUCTION 7 labyrinth of the dark ages. Sometimes the curtain was lifted for a moment to disclose the Titanic crimes of the earlier Caesars, as revealed to us by these most trust- worthy and impartial narrators, as they seemed; and was again hurriedly lowered upon the infernal scene, leaving us to suppose that the history, which we were mercifully spared, was of the same invariable hue. Again, the social Hfe, the educated movements of the Empire, were dismissed with certain set phrases: the civilization was decadent and moribund, the philosophy a strange medley or amalgam of crude Eastern fables. Christian morality, and Hellenic ingenuity, an entire and deliberate desertion of reflecting Eeason in exchange for opiatic visions. Some students regarded Christianity as to blame for what they called the degeneracy of the times, in overthrowing the patriotic sentiment of simple pagans, and in substituting for it a selfish morality ; in awakening men from a peaceful harmony with Nature, in setting them at enmity and defiance with their true Mother. Others believed that the Church was the only safeguard against the wild and indecent Nature-worship of Oriental races, which disguised itself as religious Mysticism, and reached a wished-for oblivion and impersonality through orgiastic excess. To some it was a despicable age of superstition and creduHty ; while a single redeeming feature might be found in the noble and unworldly isolation, the self-denying devotion to duty, of the Stoic sage. Such summary incongruous and incom- patible conclusions have been rejected as inadequate by the impartial students of to-day. We are now far more likely than at any previous time to arrive at a correct estimate of those wonderful centuries, when the founda- tions of Modern Europe were being laid, in a combination of Eoman, Jewish, and Grecian elements. (F.) Another most important cause for this misconcep- 8 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO tion of the Empire (and a reason now very likely to disappear) was the long abeyance of political interest, which was supposed to show a contemptible supineness, a ready slavery, a total ignorance or neglect of that which is of highest value m human life. But such an offence we are more likely to condone at the close than at the beginning of the nineteenth century. There are times in the history of men when the absorbing pursuits of the statesman, the governor, the mandarin (whether occupied with local or national interests), recede iato the back- ground, are practised in negligence or sullen indifference, or are given over without a murmur to a class of people, or to individuals peculiarly fitted for these ungrateful and prosaic toils. We can readily understand to-day a feeling of disgust at petty politics, which sixty or eighty years ago would have been stigmatized as treason against the loftiest conception of man, — an " independent being exercising those sublime functions of civU government, from which the tyranny and self-iaterest of kings, nobles, and priests have so long debarred him." § 2. But militant Eepublicanism is now almost obsolete ; and the objects of Anarchist hatred to-day are no longer feudal privilege, royal and hereditary prero- gative, sacerdotal pretensions and such like imaginary limitations on Equality, original and universal, — these supposed hindrances, agaiust which sentimental Liberal- ism, here and on the Continent, struggled and declaimed so long, are found to be but shadows : that gallant fight was a mere beatiag of the air, so far as material benefits are concerned ; and no man can live in the mere enjoy- ment of a boasted independence which means only complete isolation. Liberty must lead to something, and that something must be the very prosaic result, sufficiency of daily food, guaranteed under an earlier r6gime, which has now passed away. Political emancipation and the ex- INTRODUCTION 9 tension of , the franchise certainly do not bring about social equality, or a uniform distribution of the good things of life. Freedom is posed as the final goal of all human striving, only so long as it is unattained ; when we arrive at it, we see it to be a means and not an end. In a sense, indeed, the tendency to altruistic reform may be said to have been rooted in selfishness, in a desire to be rid of the old responsibilities towards the weaker and inferior, which a feudal and aristocratic regime certainly acknow- ledges, however imperfectly it fulfils, but which com- mercial or middle-class reformers believe they have satisfied or escaped, by conferring a nominal independence. Among the advanced "friends of man" there is little gratitude felt toward the early pioneers of democracy, or the champions of political equality; and their half- regretful retrospect on mediaeval society is significant of a widespread change of feeling. The real difficulty is so much simpler and more fundamental than was suspected by these poetic enthusiasts ; the question of to-day is not one of constitutional change, but of social reform, — how to insure daily bread for our increasing population. § 3. At last we have arrived at the real grievance of the working people : they do not care to exercise mean- ingless rights, unless by such exercise they secure material advantages. We cannot blame them; we should rather congratulate ourselves on being out of the misty region of false sentiment, face to face with overt selfishness. We are out of the dreamland of mere ideaUsm : we confront facts, and thus, individuals ; we have to deal with concrete realities, and are not bewildered and misled by shadowy theories. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the good offices of those who (from instinct or religious motive) sympathize with the poor, are seriously hindered by the fictitious autonomy of those who are in truth dependent. In political matters we are at 10 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO their mercy, that is, in the unfruitful region of Ideas, — but in the real business of life, when we meet them singly, and not in the aggregate, the upper classes are still superior. We cannot wonder at the difficulty of progress or reform to-day, which is advanced partly by violence, and the legislation, which attempts to rearrange incomes to suit the wishes of the majority ; partly by the intense and sympathetic charity of private benevo- lence, a survival of a religious sentiment, that is in this connexion somewhat out of place ; partly by appeals to the unalterable laws which are supposed to govern demand and supply ; partly by somewhat reckless asser- tions that right and wrong, justice and equity, are not amenable to these laws at all. § 4. However intricate the solution proposed for social difficulties to-day, the immediate need is simple enough : satisfaction of the cravings of hunger, supply of work and sustenance for a population needy, and for the most part ignorant, as yet unthrifty, unrelying on its own efforts, and increasing with alarming rapidity — the old primal difficulty of food. The much-vaunted progress of the human race has brought us round, as in a circle, to the point from which our first parents started, on their expulsion from terrestrial paradise (where their limited requirements were at once satisfied by the bounty of Nature, not yet hostile). At present our reformers are trying to combine the two opposite conditions of freedom, and dependence. It is impossible to say to-day whether the upper classes exist by the tolerance of the people, or the people by the long-suffering and charity of their superiors: who it is that creates the wealth of our country, the toiler (who is little more than an automaton), or the inventor and the capitalist ; the hand or the brain. The working classes are playing a double r61e of master and servant ; in the midst of all their appeals for relief INTRODUCTION 11 and compassion, we see their leaders have occasional recourse to the enactments of forcible appropriation ; — conduct which must surely end in the destruction of the great, nay, the only fruitful principle and motive of well-doing, noUesse oblige. To which shall appeal be made ? — to pity or to fear ? Pity for others who are weaker; or fear for self, before the menaces of the stronger, because the more numerous ? We have not yet clearly made up our minds. § 5. Such an epoch must of necessity be a time of disquiet and unrest. No one can forecast the future with certainty : are we tending to a complete democracy (whatever that may mean), or to the rule of the strong man, in just that part of our daily life, civil and social, of the importance of which, for practical comfort, we are beginning to modify our too exalted estimate ?. (G.) Now the Eoman Empire at least solved the supreme difficulty: the question of starvation in the midst of plenty- — the standing paradox to-day, which may well remind us how fundamental is the problem with which civilized Europe is confronted. After the French Eevolution, the main question seemed to be, "How are we to bring the people into a share of the government, from which they have been so long wrong- fully kept ? " It may seem to-day that this inquiry was a varepov nrpoTepov, and that its hasty solution has brought us to an inextricable confusion : the free and enfranchized citizen to-day is worse off than a slave under the Eoman Empire. Liberty is a costly thing, and requires more to maintain than the lower orders can afford. Eome decided to feed its inhabitants, regarding that as the main duty of an enlightened government — to pauperize its people. But it did not allow these dependents to interfere in the administration. We permit our servants to meddle in the government. 12 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO but we do not guarantee them subsistence ; and we are only coming back, tentatively and half-terrified at our boldness, to the iirst axioms of the Eoman political system. (H.) With another of our modem difficulties, lying at the root of all others, the Imperial world was not dis- quieted; — I speak of indefinite iacrease of population, where it is (from the State's point of view) least valuable. It is clear that a Society which has enjoyed vigorous and enterprising youth, guided by instinct of domestic ties ' and a certain irrational patriotism, will, in its old age (I do not mean necessarily its decline), break up into its simplest constituent elements — into Individuals, highly self-conscious, and, to speak the truth, concerned each of them only with their own thoughts and sensations. A Family, refined by long and careful breeding and per- sistent education, will at last reach a point where the passions are blunted, the need of sensuous satisfaction is no longer felt, — where physical reproductiveness abates, and, to the outward eye, the house becomes extinct.^ On the other hand, the decadence of the old civic standards of morality among a corrupted aristocracy no doubt allowed a host of various and bizarre excitements to arise ' "In contrast to the stronger muscular action and vital power called forth by the employment of the working classes, the intense mental strain and sensual life of the higher ranks consume more nervous force ; and consequently the life of the race is much sooner spent. . . . We could almost believe that in the upper classes a just compensation is to be found in the longer mean extension of the Individual life, for the shorter average life of the Family ; and that, considered from the standpoint of the whole, it is comforting to think that the families of the superior orders —even if they keep their ground among their own rank — make room for the advancement of the lower classes by a gradual process of extinction. Yet in the interests of the whole, this satisfaction is very shortsighted," etc. {The Vital Question of the Family, in Kenner's Collection of Hart- mann's Essays, under the title "The Sexes Compared" ; an astonishing volume, the moral of which is that Judaism and Pessimism is an impos- sible alliance. ) INTRODUCTION 13 • in place of sedate matrimonial joys, — passions which in their very nature (or unnaturalness) testify to a violent outburst of self-will and subjective caprice agaiost a long thraldom to State interests.^ Nor can we omit the influence of the Christian Church, whose teaching (how- ever much it has been, siuce the Eeformation, forced into a doubtful harmony with middle-class respectability, having for its norm a comfortable and self - centred married life) in its early days held up a somewhat different ideal to those who were capable of receiving it : an ideal which the universal testimony of all ages and all religions has pronounced higher. All these causes, in alliance with certain terrible pestilences and earthquakes, combined to check a too prolific increase in the citizens of the Empire. I do not wish to underrate the influence of physical disasters, but I would desire that the above important factors be not forgotten. (I.) So perfect was the arrangement of social life, of easy communication, of equitable justice, of internal comfort, of civil administration, that the eyes of men were insensibly directed from the present upwards to a new domain ; for this present condition was incapable of improvement, was consummate, and therefore superseded itself. I cannot maintain that the governors of Eome entered fully into this vigorous life of thought, which their paternal despotism made possible. It is, on the 1 Hartmann, oddly enough, tries to assume the r61e of a new Moses or Augustus : "The social community sufiFers by this solution " (distaste for maternity, and a decrease in the number of marriages), "and therefore (!) such intensely egotistic ideas cannot be too arduously and opportunely contested. Maidens cannot learn too early that they have higher functions to perform than the mere satisfaction of pleasures. It is their task to add to the State as many sound and well-trained citizens as they are capable of producing, so that it may engage triumphantly in the struggle for national existence." This half-religious reactionary con- servatism is as much out of place to-day as it was in the early times of the Empire. 14 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO contrary, clear that the Empire never completely appre- hended or understood the continual motion of Philosophy and the Church, away from the present, — embellished with such ornaments of order, security, plenty, and amusement, — into the misty shadows of an imaginary or non-existent world. As in the familiar instance of the solicitous step- mother of the farmyard, the Empire watched with dis- appointment, chagrin, unease, and finally with indignant protest, the imgrateful efforts of the cultivated to escape from firm earth, where safety and abundance reigned, to hazard these dangerous and unnatural voyages on the sea of Speculation. Not that the Eoman tempera- ment was in itself incapable of these higher flights ; but the Imperial officials, immersed ia present business, and quite satisfied with its routine, stifled their latent aspira- tions after the Universal, the Idea ; and remained content with a visible incarnation of the principle of government, asking for nothing beyond the concrete, the actual. But the Empire, like the naive Secularism of to-day, soimded the recall in vain from these delights of secret meditation, of audacious thaumaturgy, of ecstatic devotion ; and at last, with surprising and commendable reluctance, resorted to harsh measures against the most ungrateful children, who lived wholly in the future of a terrestrial millennium or a heavenly State. The gates of the Ideal city once opened to the gaze of the aspirant, there was no power on earth that could hold him back, be the enticement to stay among his fellows never so alluring. The model philosophers of the Empire, whose services, as we may well imagine, were subsidized by the State, were Lucian and Sextus Empiricus ; and they spoke to deaf ears. By a strange law of the human mind, unvarying throughout history, and by no means as yet abrogated, the more charming and easy the present, the less it appealed to those who enjoyed it ; the more the material wants of INTRODUCTION 15 men were satisfied in a perfect State, the less could they reconcile themselves to the belief that it was final. So true is Leopardi in regarding disease and want and dis- comfort as palliatives rather than causes, of ennui and tedium ; which is engendered and not removed by the resources of civilization, the perfection of orderly and democratic government. For it is not enjoyment of material welfare, but the process of its attainment, that gives us satisfaction ; the gradual removal of obstacles to our wishes, and not the final sense that no further hin- drance exists. Man is only content with the present so long as he has some hope as yet imfulfiUed, some griev- ance, some barrier to his progress ; the moment he has attained everything that mortal can wish for, he either turns his attention to the spiritual world, or expires in despair amid the surfeit of the present. (K.) Carlyle, with all that admiration for the supposed blythe and happy unconsciousness of the Classical Age which he had in common with the early speculators of this century, yet acknowledges that from this unceasing quest it is impossible to escape. " The mere existence and necessity of a Philosophy is an evil. . . . Man is sent hither not to question, but to work ; ' the end of man,' it was long ago written, ' is an Action, not a Thought.' In the Perfect State, all Thought were but the picture and inspiring symbol of Action. Philosophy, except as Poetry and EeHgion, would have no being." And yet he inquires, "how, in this imperfect State, can it be avoided, can it be dispensed with ? Man stands as in the Centre of Nature ; his fraction of Time encircled by Eternity ; his handbreadth of Space engirdled by Infinitude ; how shall he forbear asking himself what am I ? and whence ; and whither ? How, too, except in slight partial hints, in kind asseverations and assurances, such as those with which a mother quiets her fretfully 16 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO inquisitive child, shall he get an answer to such inquiries ? " " The philosopher," says Dr. Stirling (in his Secret of Hegel, ii. 576), "is indeed the central light and heat of humanity ; and this — by his answers to those very ques- tions which Macaulay, the too precipitate pupil of Hume, consigns to children and half -civilized men." ..." These interests constitute what is essential to humanity as human- ity." ..." Man deprived of any interest in the questions concerned, woxild at once sink into no higher place than that of a human beaver, who knew only and valued only what contributed to his merely animal commodity. . . . What is peculiarly human, is not to live in towns, with soldiers and poKce, etc., safely to masticate our victuals ; what is peculiarly human is to perceive the Apparition of the Universe ; what is pecuHarly human is to interro- gate this apparition — is to ask in its regard, what ? — whence ? — why ? — whither ? " (L.) I have of set purpose laid stress on the possibility of a universal and contented Agnosticism rather than on the right and iurong of the question. The words good and evil, just and unjust, noble and debased, are far too frequently employed to-day by both parties, friends and opponents of rehgious metaphysics, in senses and contexts where they are hopelessly ambiguous, or positively mis- leading. They are employed as if they were above inquiry, scepticism, and doubt ; as if they would preserve their meaning and exert their sovereign influence, if the life of man was reduced from infinite possibility, to the circum- scription of the animal's span. It is supposed that the love of Duty, and a self-sacrificing affection for humanity, are obvious axioms, which an all-devouring scepticism cannot reach. It is therefore useful to ascertain (by a study of writers whom a pious sentiment could not blind to the logical consequence of dogma), that these instinct- INTRODUCTION 17 ive prejudices, spontaneous and unreasoned, and apt to disappear if too closely scrutinized, have never yet existed apart from TeHgious presupposition, that is, from a sense of the dignity, the value, the permanence of the single life. (M.) With this spirit of restless unease and discontent, it is evident that we must come to terms. It is a domestic foe in our midst whom we cannot expel ; each of us carries about with him in his own bosom the enemy of his own peace. Once upon a time the Stoic and the Indian pantheist attempted to extirpate, to annihilate passion (in its widest sense), and remain insensible to out- ward threats or allurements ; while the Peripatetic pro- posed to moderate and guide without expulsion ; and the Platonist to rationalize. To-day, and for some time previously, we are implored by the " friends of humanity " to abandon this ineffectual search after unseen verities, and resign ourselves contentedly, after our magnificent aspiration towards the Eternal, to the narrow Hmite of our life of seventy years (and that uncertain), and the solace which may be derived from a perfectly adjusted civil society. Now, the only question that need detain us, before we conform ourselves, with a sigh over our past dreams, to the creed of Positivism, is, whether this feat is possible for the human mind to achieve ? — to take a draught of Lethe so deep that the old harassing thoughts and doubts and inquiries on what is behind the veil, what is the meaning of it all, shall never recur to a single soul again ! Can we abandon this " fatal gift," this last half-ironical consolation given by the Immortals to suffering humanity, — Hope, — after the opening of Pan- dora's woe-laden box ? If these metaphysical (and yet so practical) thoughts cannot be silenced, we must come to some compromise ; we must, in the interests of our own peace (at the last resort, our only aim), accept with 2 18 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO more or less moral effort the best explanation which we can find of the Origin and Purpose of the "World, of the Duty and the Destiuy of Man, — not the race, but the unit. And the value of this explanation can only be ascertained by our individual experience, tested and corroborated by the voice of history iu the development of mankind. (K) But in making a sort of mental picture of the society of the Eoman Empire, we must not unduly colour one side of it. We have, in our present inquiry, to think only of the Malcontents, as we may call them. But how small and insignificant a part of the whole ! Behind these literary remains of Christian or pagan sage, rare and scanty indeed, yet so conspicuous, — what vast expansive background of unrecorded Content ! What opulent and robust mercantile enterprise, what splendour of Asiatic social Ufe, what vigorous youth- fulness in the extreme West, what keen appreciation of games and shows, what childlike delight in the savage menageries of the arena ! Yet, putting this aside, and allowing that the Imperial system exactly corresponded to the desires of a wearied world, — solemnly, and almost with a sense of duty (unparalleled in antiquity), burden- ing its shoulders with the responsibility of the whole, — yet must we, and rightly, concentrate upon the educated and refined unease, which lifted the Christian or the philosopher above the cares or delights of the com- mon herd. (The vulgar, the tStwTT;?, the rabble, the airai,SevTo<;, — how common at that epoch was this dis- tinction, coming with all the more force in an Empire which had levelled all distinctions of rank in a uniform servitude to a single ruler ! It is obvious, too, that the success of the Church was largely due to its soKcitude for the welfare (not material but spiritual) of those classes which Philosophy neglected.) INTRODUCTION 19 § 2. We do not judge an age wholly by its literature.^ If a people be happy when it lacks a history, — carent quia vate sacro, — so is it true that a reflecting or intro- spective society, refusing to be engrossed in present comforts, does not betoken the most satisfactory con- dition of a people, from a statesman's point of view. His citizens are passing beyond his control. In Europe, at the time of our inquiry, very few share in this feeling ; but their influence is so far-reaching in later time, their lesson so interesting, that they may be fairly taken as representing the sum of ancient culture : as showing the certain goal to which the whole course of Speculation was tending. Yet must we remember of how small a fragment are they the spokesmen. Continual caution, then, is needed in studying these rare monuments of the Imperial philosophers ; to whom the current events of history are strange, into whose tranquil pages there penetrates no echo of the stirring yet innocent ambition of rival candidates for ofi&ce, the din of border warfare, and but scanty vestige of gratitude for the assured security, the peace and plenty of the Imperial system. (0.) Nothing, however, can well be more instructive at the present day (amid our rudimentary attempts to answer the great question of the maintenance of the poor), than to examine the effects of a perfect govern- ment upon the educated or reflective classes. What is likely to be the result of a consistent accommodation of demand and supply, the introduction of a singularly just yet monotonous distribution of external comforts ? Clearly (unless we believe that the European mind has become Chinese) the moment the stage of insecure and hazardous sustenance has been transcended, speculative society (and I by no means exclude certain of the poorer ' The Eoman Empire has, up to the present time, been judged mainly on the evidence of two peculiar authors, — Juvenal and Tacitus. 20 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO classes, who may, like Epictetus or ^sop, attain this "fatal gift of reflection") wiU forget entirely how it toiled and laboured for this possession, passing unnoticed and unthanked in the routine of daily life, — and will strain (by a necessary law, as it would seem, of our human nature) towards a spiritual kingdom, of which we become conscious citizens as soon as ever our immediate and material wants are suppUed.^ One by one, the race passes through the various habitations provided for it, but takes final rest in none. They are but halting- places for entire humanity, as for each single Soul in an infinite progress towards a goal, which is mercifully kept in obscurity. To the meditative mind, relieved of the pressing urgency of daily cares, open long vistas of possibUity, new empires to conquer, new continents to discover in the Unknown. That this unrestful temper (eternal characteristic of the Indian mind, last step in a process for us) does not conduce to contentment must be clear : a " city of hogs " would - be more com- fortable, and perhaps more happy. (P.) It is then our aim, in this volume, or rather series of volumes, to inquire what may be learnt as to certain essential components of human nature ; I mean the 1 "The trae note of God's service" (says Mr. Bidder, University Sermon, Advent 1891) "is not permanence, Ijut pilgrimage; on earth, at any rate, the highest end of man is the pursuit, and not the enjoyment of Rest, for here we have no abiding city, but we seek one to come." This is true, also, if we substitute, with Lessing, Knowledge for Best ; we have, even in our philosophy, our love of wisdom, a horror of an unprogressive and final condition (hence the fascination exercised by the thought of an ever-fugitive Ideal, magnetizing things just because it can never be realized in them). Nor, on the third side of our natm-e, is bodily comfort a last resting-place of the wearied spirit ; for indolence is not repose, and rest is only found in perpetual movement towards the unattainable. The real satisfaction which we to-day experience in bind- ing Nature to our will, and wresting her secrets from her, must obviously be denied to our posterity, who have no glory of achievement and peril, but only the worthless pleasure of possession and inheritance. INTRODUCTION 21 • religious instiact, and the sense of unrest, which carries us beyond all our present conditions, however wretched or however perfect, to seek for a "land which is very far off," and which forbids the Individual (as it forbids his shadow, Society) to remain contented with uninquiring and complacent fruition of the Garden of Eden. (Q.) To those who believe that the highest exercise of human faculties is political, and the noblest engine of social progress is the ballot-box, this study may not be unprofitable. I shall be glad if it help to convince any single reflecting person that a condition of social comfort, of equal distribution of good things, is in its very nature unfinal ; a mere preface, an indispensable preliminary, if you will, to that business of life which is especially human. Such a state has within it, or rather itself engenders, two causes of its own dissolution : the study of Self, and the revolt of the Individual. It is not true to say that we worship abstractions; as a rule, mankind bends before persons ; and nothing can be clearer than that in the present age, when everyone is talking about the elimination of the personal, the end of the reign of Selfishness, — the influence and the indescribable glamour of a personality (that is, a rebellious and self-centred unit) is as strong a force as ever. Socialism can only be the nursery of ambition and self-will, a natural reaction of spontaneous egoism against a system which keeps it under severe control for some unscrutable or quite imintelligible end. We are not children to-day, to be kept in fetters, in the service of an idol called human progress ; we claim to be ourselves, and lead our own life. What is called the School of the Decadence in literature, with its grotesque and exaggerated emphasis on the personal and the eccentric, is but the extreme Left of a legitimate movement. The threatened retirement 22 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO of the educated classes from all share in government and statecraft, is a sign that for the free development of the Personal some other realm is needed beyond a visible kingdom, whether of Nature or of the Body Politic. And the age of Imperial Eome may help us to answer some at least of the pressing questions of modem times. Wise men then sought for a region of Freedom, in which their spirits (that is, all they felt their own) could expand and develop. We can read there what will be the probable interests and relaxations of a society, disgusted with the cares and meannesses of civil government, and yet convinced by some irrefragable instinct that man's duty (oiKeiov epyov) does not lie in hoggish satiety. We are passing through a period of transition (the usual excuse !), and have not quite, per- haps, discarded the old beliefs of the " EnKghtenment," that Happiness can be secured by Act of Parliament, and that the highest exercise of the human Keason lies either in the election of annual ofi&cials, or in the discovery of some fresh material convenience. But out of this Valley of Shadow we are rapidly ascending to a clearer light on the mountain-top ; the disillusion which f oUows our vain efforts in the path of political or social reform, the failure of our theatrical and impotent attempts to deal with man, theoretical and in masses, — all this drives us back to a renewed and profounder study of human nature, of the Soul of man, the roots of whose being lie deep in an unseen world. We shall witness a revival of interest in the Personal, and of surprise at our recent love of the aggregate: we shall put aside preconceived notions of the rights, the liberty, the inherent goodness of man (in the abstract), and suchlike formulas; we shall correct that false sentiment which is the bane of modern reform; and reverting to history for a more accurate view, — and especially to such epochs as the INTRODUCTION 23 Eoman Empire, — we shall seek to gain a fuller insight into the needs and aspirations, the hopes and the happi- ness of the Personal Spirit — after all, and even if this assurance be an illusion, the only abiding reahty to us in a world of change. PROLOGUE Before entering on the real enterprise, — an inquiry into the Platonic and other cognate systems of Thought under the Empire of Eome, — I shall be obliged to weary my readers with yet another survey of the previous History and Development of Philosophy. I am almost ashamed of venturing to put forward a fresh outline of that fanuliar course of Speculation, the Ionian hylozoists, the Sophistic Age, the significance of Socrates, the method or the doctrine of Plato, the dogmatism of Aristotle, the subjective schools of Stoic, Epicurean, Pyrrhonist, the revived religious mysticism of the New Pythagorean and Platonist, — but for my peculiar purpose there is no alternative. I must trace the main thesis of this work, the Bebellion of the Individual ; his assurance (or illusion) of Freedom; and the attempts he makes to explain, to justify, to reconcile the Universe to himself, to express it in terms of himself (beyond this relative truth no Philosophy can claim to penetrate); and finally, for the guidance of his own practical Hfe, to establish a modus Vivendi with this inscrutable Power beyond him, whether the Divine Being as deUberate and beneficent Creator, or an unconscious Destiny. The main object of his search is a realm of unfettered action ; and all apparently curious inquiry into Nature has in the end a practical motive (for example, the pursuit of Science may be con- 24 PROLOGUE 25 sidered as the highest and freest exercise of Human Eeason). This quest takes its rise from a sense of restraiat and insecurity, and a peculiar feeHng of antagonism to things without, to environment ; from a consciousness (more or less acute) of a necessary and abiding Dualism of Subject and Object. How shall we reconcile this alienation ? How, in a word (to borrow the technical and dialectic, yet highly religious and ethical language of later Platonists), how did the One become the Many ? How shall the Many again become the One ? From this standpoint I attempt to estimate the hypotheses put forward to elucidate, or to reconcile ; by general essays, in the first instance, of moderate length, unencumbered by many quotations. Afterwards these are to be supplemented, and (as I hope) confirmed by various minute inquiries, contributory to the main Thesis — the Search for the Individual's Freedom and Happiness, in a world not obviously calculated to ensure it. Book ®ne THE HELLENIC AGE : PLATONISM AND ITS ANTECEDENTS CHAPTER I GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF THE IONIC AND SOPHISTIC AGE: THE SEARCH FOR icii, OR THE ULTIMATE REALITY 27 CHAPTER I PART I. THE AWAKENING OF THE INDIVIDUAL § 1. We have first to chronicle the signs of maturity in the Greek intellect, which took the form of a reaction against received doctrines, and in which each thinker claimed for himself the exclusive right to explain the Universe. The Sophistic movement in Greece, out of which arose Socrates and Plato, continued the revolt which the Physical School had inaugurated. The one tried to set free the audacious and enterprising spirit from the bondage of social duty, as the other from an impossible hypothesis of the word and its origin. But the significance of these earliest pioneers of speculation may very likely escape us. It scarcely appears obvious that the Ionian or Eleatie is engaged on the work of emancipating the personal. The selfishness of the Sophist and his avowed disregard of political morality, is clearly due to reaction against the narrow civism of petty Hellenic States. (Only later was it seen that the restrictions of outer Law were but an echo of conscience within, and not the will of the few stronger, or, as we may say to-day, the many weaker ; at first all restraint was supposed to be pernicious to the bolder and more aspiring minds.) But we have to show that the investi- gation of Nature arose from the same craving for (or striving after) personal freedom, the same desire to create for oneself a formula to cover phenomena, and, as among 29 30 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO tl;e Sophists, a law for one's own guidance in Society, — the masterful oppressiveness of a strong will. It is indeed Will, moving dully andj at present unconsciously among the disorderly heaps which form the material universe ; scarcely yet awake, certainly not yet mature and self -sentient ; but straining towards light and freedom, in that necessary quest of all rational beings, the Search for Happiness through Liberty, through unfettered action, through mastery of things arrived at by generalization and universal formula. § 2. Hitherto these now disintegrating atoms — each for itself, in a new-formed independence of outward control — had been held together by a certain impersonal Authority, an abstraction indeed, but one which wielded a very material sceptre, the koivo<; Xoyoi, embodied, it may be, in a civic religion, State institutions, law and enactment, or the paternal rule of a single sovereign. The individual did not inquire whence this principle of authority had proceeded, what were its sanctions, whether he himself had contributed to the formation of the Social order, which bounded and controlled, while it protected him. As soon as he becomes, as we say, mature, self- conscious, he understands that this control is a reflection of his own wish: that the State is but the concrete realization of his own temper, and is imposed upon him with no higher sanction than this, that at one time he so desired it. Scientific inquiry is thus an independent and candid scrutiny of Nature, untrammelled by current and popular opinion. Sophistia is the attempt to subordinate the State to private ambition, and the Tvpavvl^ is the actual manifestation of this spirit; which, as in most other movements, does not follow, but precedes its technical justification. In each case the single life, comprehending for the first time its dormant powers, demands that it shall be free and unrestrained in its THE AWAKENING OF THE INDIVIDUAL 31 search for self -development ; whether it claims to sub- jugate Nature, or a civic community, to its theories or caprices. § 3. Behind, then, these various movements of Intellect, curiously investigating all existence outside itself, is the hidden force, the real mo|;ive-power, of Will, uneasily conscious of a stubborn opposition, and seeking to subdue this by inventing a formula to explain it. A wider horizon is suddenly displayed to those hitherto immersed in animal life or in the routine of a petty State. The " Ego " is born, or rather becomes self- conscious, and begins to strain outwards to a larger communion, to more comprehensive relations with the world. The Ionian finds the object of Search in the Universe of physical reality, viewed as a concrete whole in all the varied modes of which the original substance was capable. The Sophist discovers his world to be himself, and his own immediate sensations ; the dimen- sions of the great universe which the natural philosophers penetrate, shrivel up for him into nothingness, or the Unknowable : he is left alone with himself, and all other inquiry is valueless which does not bear upon personal ends and gratify personal ambition. In each case this has happened: a man becomes aware of his own isola- tions ; conscious of an independent life apart from the State, and of faculties which are of interest in their exercise to himself alone. He separates his own life from the social body ; and in the first thrUl of liberty, regained or won for the first time, he wonders what this new spirit will bring forth, what delights it can create unknown to Convention ; into what mysterious domains it will conduct him. Now the well-known feud between Philosophy and the State, decked out as it is with innumerable legends, arises entirely from this claim of the sage to live for himself. The Communal instinct or 32 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO Collectivism (ia its harshest form a sign of infancy or dotage) was indignant at this iagratitude, and accuses such a dissociating tendency of treason ; nay, with in- different success, attempted to recall the citizen of a wider Kingdom within the narrow boundaries of its own sphere ; or else in States where a despotic regimen prevailed, the tyrant became exasperated at the calm demeanour of a sage, who acknowledged none of his laws, and professed indifference to his favour or his menaces. Philosophy is, in its true essence and first origin, then, unsocial. It lives apart in a world of its own ; it is contemptuous of vulgar opinion, the tradition of priests, the code of aristocratic honour, and the truisms or the prejudices of orators and poets : — it claims to examine and choose for itself. It expresses itself, when once challenged by the ridicule of the mob, or the defiance of the powerful, in a tone of ever -increasing paradox. It takes no pains to conciliate the ignorant, it will not trouble to reform the world; it prefers to remain consciously superior; it is secure in the assurance of its own liberty and enlighten- ment. Quite in harmony with such an attitude is the transient attempt of the Sophists to use this to acquire political influence ; and most significant of the bankruptcy of certain knowledge wUl be the later (and unnatural) alliance between Wisdom and Common Sense. § 4. Just at present, however, the sage shows none of these misgivings, is quite confident in his own unaided powers of deciphering and controlling. He approaches the physical Universe, and attempts to explain this larger empire of which he is by birthright a citizen, the immensity and grandeur of which has suddenly impressed him. And we are now face to face with a great problem, one which must be solved before we can appreciate the ancient mind, its difficulties or its development — what was the physical Universe, later styled the KoaiM'i, on THE AWAKENING OF THE INDIVIDUAL 33 • which the variegated tribes of men, and animals played their part, rapidly vanishing, only to reappear agaia on the endless tapestry ? An answer to this question will explain the singular fact that early sages — curious about the outer world, yet only just emancipated from a mythic and credulous prejudice — concern themselves wholly with Creation (as it is), and for so long a period appear unaware of the formidable difficulty of the Creator ; in a word, how completely unconnected with theology was this nascent thought of Asia Minor. To be candid, the words Creation and Creator are inadmissible. The Greeks, and indeed the Orientals too, knew nothing of Creation : of a world fabricated by a divine and design- ful artist. Their entire system of divinity, mythic legends and genealogies, always presupposes the visible world, the scene and the parent of the divine loves, jealousies, hatreds, wars, no less than of human passion in a lower sphere. So familiar to us is the notion of a Personal Deity calling order out of chaos, to be man's habitation and place of trial, that we find it difficult to beHeve that Plato, in the tentative myth of the Timseus, is the earliest to set forth this hypothesis. We may divide thinkers to-day into the two classes of Creationists and Evolutionists (nor, indeed, is a third class of com- bination wholly inconceivable), — those who believe ia the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and maintain a more or less literal interpretation of their account of the world's origin ; and those who dismiss the idea of person and design as we conceive them, and claim simply to trace the development of a universe from Nebula, or from some varying lowest terms or simplest elements, — without presupposing any deliberate plan or object, — denying, indeed, the possibility of discovering the Arti- ficer of a scheme so wonderful, though not pledging themselves to the dogmatic assertion that such an Artificer 3 34 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO does not exist. Now and again, as with the late Professor Huxley, this simple and limited inquiry into the stages of development (which, ^t must be clear, cannot possibly cut across or impugn a religious explana- tion of the order in Nature) is coloured with a melan- choly pessimism ; and boldly invading another realm from which the man of Science should consistently exclude himself, the philosopher re-echoes the language of Solomon, and definitely pronounces that the play of Evolution is aimless, unmoral, and full of pain and trouble to those whose very perfection (oUeiov epyov, the exercise of Eeason) brings only a consciousness of a miserable futUity. § 5. The gods of whom we read, and t^hose mythology still forms part of our early education to-day, did not eayplain the world ; the world preceded, and to a certain extent explained them. Superior to man, immortal (as the intelligence of those days imderstood eternal Mfe), and powerful (but by no means omnipotent), the divine generations sprang from the womb of inscrutable Nature, that dark and mysterious source of life which every system, in presupposing, refused to investigate. The gods are regarded either as subordinate ministers, executing (sometimes in spite of themselves) the decrees of Fate or Necessity, or as semi-independent rivals, struggling in vain against them. Ordinary man, by no means able to escape the same thraldom, can yet secure by prayer or sacrifice the protection of local or national deities, a more or less efficacious shield against the darts of Necessity, or at least a possible defence worth the trying. For, as in the Oriental system of Br3,hm, no effort was made to propitiate this ultimate Power ; it was out of all relation to man, and could not be approached by him, unless he laid aside his humanity. (Here we see the germs of the later mystical and Impersonal development, of which at present there is but little trace.) In worship and THE AWAKENING OF THE INDIVIDUAL 35 supplication, then, the attempt to conciliate the unseen and partial governors of the world (whether spirits of ancestors, or souls lurking within natural objects), the ancient sages recognised the strict and impassable limits of its efi&cacy. The favour of the sovereign of Olympus himself availed nothing against the decree of Destiny. Blind terror, panic, loss and oblivion of sex and self, marked the rare and secret occasions when, by impersonal rapture of orgiastic rite or inebriety, precarious offering or atonement was made to the hidden Source of Life. The wholesome devotion to the persons of the gods, in spite of their restricted powers, kept the Greeks, for the most part, from a worship which demanded loss of self and sacrifice of will ; and retained them within the sober service of these weaker divinities ; — nay (if we may recognise the deep truth, which J. S. Mill was perhaps the first to clearly enunciate), remained all the more faithful to their precarious protectors, just because they saw in them traces of their own infirmity and limited freedom, in defiance of the blind and meaningless doom of the ultimate power of Nature. Now it was to this fundamental eosistence and not to the conception of the Divine, that the bold or impious curiosity of Ionia first directed its attention. Only later were the two identified. § 6. One object of this free speculation on the Source or Ground of Life was to dissipate this unreasoning terror, which seizes men on the threshold of the Infinite, the Unknown, the Universal. The sage vindicates his inde- pendence, not only against the State, with its laws, customs, religion, prejudices, which he serenely disregards, but also against the essence of the Universe. Half conscious that, as thinkiTig, reflecting, judging, he is superior to blind and arbitrary " Law " (though by no means yet formulating clearly that fruitful doctrine of 36 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO superiority), he begms without fear to examine that which popular Eeligion had refused to take account of, or had recoiled from in iadefinable panic. Now, at the present day, it both astounds and shocks the pious Creationist to hear men deny that behind phenomena there lives a just and merciful Being, who buUt the world-system for the use of man and other spiritual natures. If this Supreme Creator be negated, the whole religious fabric, with all its consolation and encourage- ment, all its attendant train of Virtues and Morahties, tumbles to, the ground, — overthrown by the siagle doctrine that the Pinal Power is neither bad nor good, but rather indifferent; that is, impersonal. In the Greek world, at the dawn of physical speculation, it was not thus ; — the gods of Olympus, the minor tutelars of the wood and the stream, the ancestors whose care protected the State — with these, at first, no one proposed to interfere. The inquiry into the ultimate constitution of things seemed audacious indeed, but not a sign of extreme impiety. It is further noteworthy that the popular suspicions were not aroused until attention was called to a certain definite heavenly body, as a mere glowing mass ; the tendency was pronounced clearly atheistical only when the people could appreciate a particular apphcation : the general speculation excited but little animosity, although it implies an impugnment of Providence altogether, and made it impossible for the thoughtful man to reconcile himself to a Power which could not be expressed in terms of humane design, of a conscious "Will. § 7. Of such a conception as this there is absolutely no trace until the time of Anaxagoras, when the notion of Design enters into cosmogonic speculation ; intellectual design, significantly enough, occurring earher to the Greek than the theory of a beneficent purpose. (It will be seen that the main importance of Socrates and Plato consists THE AWAKENING OF THE INDIVIDUAL 37 in their teleology ; and we shall note how the ambiguity of the latter as to goodness and purpose, leads immedi- ately to the subjective isolation and despair of the schools of later Paganism.) The main problem of all modem philosophy, — the possibihty of knowledge, the union or harmony of subject-object iu cognition, — had not presented itself, as such, to these early men of science. To this sceptical or critical attitude their successors will be driven by the contiuual divergence of opinion on the Substrate or Material which forms the Universe ; dogmas so various and irreconcilable, that the next age, or the Sophistic, will distrust all objective know- ledge, and will rest quite contented with a subjective acquaintance with our own passing emotions and sensa- tions, however mysteriously caused by the unknown agency without ; and, insecure of all positive information about the world of Nature, will turn again to the surer and more comprehensible life in Society. It will, without committing itself to any principles of government, en- deavour to make the best of social life, by gaining dperr), by winning the esteem or the admiration of one's kind. Pakt II. § 8. But I must take a fresh point of de- parture before I can fully set forth my opinion as to the ground-motive of the Ionian speculators. It must be granted that in all speculation, the secret impulse is invariably the Search for Happiness, or Self-EeaHzation — the desire of the individual to explain and satisfy his own nature, seeing that of this nature and its moods or phases he has alone immediate and unavoidable experi- ence. We have not clearly defined the inner motive of any philosophy, unless we see it in relation to the personal impulse. And allowing, as we must, that the theoretical problem of the Ground of Being stirred up the ingenious and restless Hellenic mind to analysis and inquiry, yet even this is a form of a practical difficulty 38 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO (or presupposes its solution). "Wonder and bewilder- ment turned the eyes of the early Naturalists in the direction of familiar physical events;, but the life of speculation and study of First Principles is subsequently only accepted, because it is decided (as a cardinal doctrine in the new religion) that Blessedness is attainable only through Knowledge. The stimulus, then, is a practical need, and the sage, whom we have seen determined to express the world for himself, and in his own terms, seeks a secure ground for his own personal well-being, and is first occupied in a search for the permanent, the immutable, the persistent, the eternal. Man at last becoming self-conscious, craves for a safer anchorage for his hopes than this visible world can supply. He ceases to " tell stories " about the time when there was nothing ; he asks about the present state of this universe, and claims to discover the Abiding Substrate, which remains eternal at either end, uncreated and imperishable, amid the fleeting changes and apparent decay of its transient modes.^ A certain melancholy sentiment broods over the Ionian speculations ; at present almost untinged with personal repiniag. "Non fleo privatum sed generale chaos." ^ These philosophers identify themselves with the larger world, as yet unaware of their superiority to it, or of their birthright to a more permanent existence ; their regrets are disinterested, unselfish complaints of the transience and instability of the modes of the Substrate, the vanity of this perpetual yet aimless transformation scene. § 9. In the full maturity of the conscious spirit, that is (I am afraid for Altruistic sentiment), when man becomes self-centred, he will cease to be sorry for changes in Nature, the ruin of a nation or a universe, ^ I am indebted for this suggestive statement of the true significance of the Ionian movement to Mr. Burnett. ^ Maximianua, Meg., v. 110. THE AWAKENING OF THE INDIVIDUAL 39 • so but his own soul is firmly rooted in the unchangeable and eternal ; d fractits illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruincB. But as yet the craving for prolonged personal existence, in defiance of the seemingly natural law which brooks no exception, is weak among the lonians, and only slowly emerges. Here, again, some caution is necessary. Though it would be futile to ignore the ultimate motive of all reflexion, — a desire for self-satisfac- tion, — yet the acute sense of personality (with which, for example, the Imperial age was oppressed, no less than Society to-day) is not found expressly acknowledged in earlier systems. Above aU, the survival of a personal spirit formed, we may say, no part of the creed of the Hylozoist, who, indeed, as opposed to popular belief, de- monstrated its impossibility. (Must we not candidly acknowledge that this abandonment of a personal hope is a striking feature in their speculations ?) The early mythology had been Atomic; Animism had peopled nature with an infinite multitude of independent and spontaneous wills, capricious centres of Volition. Philo- sophy (to whose cold and impartial survey Will is the Beus ex machind of discredited superstition) refuses as a rule to have anything to do with Will as a possible explanation of the Universe ; or admits it only in the last resort, and with ill-concealed irritation. Animism gives place to Hylozoism, in which the life, "hitherto supposed to reside in each particular thing, is transferred to a single substance," of which all the rest are but fleeting phases. Birth and decay (really meaningless in relation to this single substance), are but the exercise of the untiring activity of the one Ultimate Eeal, unborn and unceasing. The sentimental regret, brood- ing on the instability of things, receives a kind of pietistic consolation in the unvarying conviction, Nothing is born, nothing dies ; the Universe suffers no loss. This 40 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO final and permanent thing is called <^v- cravTO, ol 8e to dXoyov, owep eh ra? aia-9ricrei<; TepLveTai. 01 fiev o?>v Tov Nov TrpoaTo/rat rrjv rjyefwviav k. ^aa-iKeiav Toiv avd pcoireitov TrpayfiuTcov avdyovaiv avTw, — praisinf it as able to preserve the past in memory, to take hold boldly of the present, and, by reasonable conjecture, to anticipate the future. This is the power which sowed the earth, and planted it, and discovered agricidture : OvTo<; 6 TOV ovpavov KaTaa-K6vdfjiia Nov av/jL^oprjaavTei; re «, dyel,pavTeir>Ta SpripeTv, els S(r' (pxerai KaxA,, rbv S' ad davbvra k. irhvtav Trewavfiivov Xalpovras ed^THiovvras iKiri/iireiv Sd/uav. From Clem. Alex. Strom, iii. 3 : TA /IT) yeviirBai Kpstaaov tj ijjvvai ^porois. 'E/ioiyc vvv re n, xdXat SoKei- iraiSas tpvreieiv oUtqt' &.v8ptjnrovs ixpTJv Ttivovs op&vras els Serous tpvreioiuv. PLATONIC IDEALISM :, 115 emotional nature of the master himself, this postulate brought no justification of the Cosmic Process to the reflecting or suffering mind ; and this consolatory and encouraging result, and nothing else, is the common end of all Eehgion and all Philosophy. § 1 8. For in this system there is no original principle, no impulse, of Movement. Distrusting the prevalent Animism of popular belief, wise men discarded the notion of irpoatpea-K altogether, in which alone consists true explanation, — a reference of things witliout to the only ultimate fact of experience within, — the Will striving after what it believes to be best for itself. The deliberate Creative personality of the Srjfiiovpyb^ certainly recedes into the background among Plato's imimediate successors ; vanishing (as an unphilosophical superstition) into the region of legend and myth ; and yet without this efficient cause the co-operation, or rather the Uending'^ of the two domains, "idly con- fronting," is beyond our conception. The order in the universe, which we acknowledge as the very condition of Knowledge and the only foundation of morals, is neither empirically established nor rationally proved. An Ethical category is hastily imposed on phenomena by a religious and inward assurance, — an act of the highest spiritual faith, — but which (like the Doctrine of God) is quite incommunicable to sober and prosaic inquirers. § 19. In a word, although it is quite possible to study Plato as a cabn and sceptical critic, the sum of Platonic philosophy is not a philosophical conclusion at all, but the intrusion of a religious conviction. This is his permanent contribution to the development of ^ T6 Sk Xolwov i/ieU, iBavdrifi Bvrfrbv irpoav^alvotrres, iirepyii^effSe fua k. yevvare rpotpiiv re StSbvres ai^dvere k. tpBlvovra. TrdXiK SixeaBe, says the Creator to his obedient Daemons in Timasus, He. 116 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO Thought. Far he it from me to deny the legitimacy of this proceeding as an unwarrantable confusion of proviQces. N"o such delimitation of the confines of Eeason and Faith then existed; and the temperament of Plato — an intellectual scepticism combined with an emotional pietism — could arrive at no other conclusion, if he designed to cover the whole ground of man's practical experience. Like so many others, he silenced his doubts with the ardent professions of his mysticism : he forcibly overrode his suspicions. He professes to iind (after, it must be allowed, a very insufficient scrutiny) that Goodness (in some unintelligible sense) was the secret Essence and the motive Principle of this visible world. But is the idea of impersonal Goodness at aU con- ceivable — Goodhess, that is, unrelated to individual consciousness save by a salto mortale into a mystic region ? Does the question of the Origin, efficient, and Destiny, /waZ, cause of the Universe receive the smallest glimmer of illumination from this postulate ? Without the hypothesis of a single will as the ultimate motor (no longer, indeed, of myriad wills, severally lurking behind each phenomenon), this assumption becomes valueless. Goodness, unaware of its eternal correlate, the struggling visible world, out of relation to the finite and singular minds of suffering or aspiring men, and (in spite of an arbitrary postulate) working towards no conceivable goal, — here is a useless, unphilosophic beUef, an intrusion from the sphere of pure Faith, which hovers like a vapour for a moment over Greek thought, but is, and must be, whenever it reappears, speedily dissipated by the cutting wind of Empiricism, which does not exactly banish this ideal terminology, but insists that the ideas shall be purely intellectual. § 20. The problem is still, — the Principle of Motion. FINAL IN PLACE OF EFFICIENT CAUSE 117 • Whence and whither ? And it is this that Aristotle takes up, dispensing with the religious fervour which for a moment Plato had introduced. But with all this depreciation of the uncertainty, the ambiguous language, the impersonality of certain Platonic utterances, — ^judged by his immediate effect on his own school and by the reaction of Aristotle, — let us do full justice to the thoroughly ^ersonaZ allegory of the Timceus (by which, as I believe, he satisfies himself and his own instincts most completely), and let us be assured, too, that only on this path of Faith (the Practical Eeason guided by Moral Will), however distasteful this behaviour may appear to Pure Eeason, lies the direct road to the solution of the highest Mysteries. Plato is religious; and here, in the eyes of cold speculators, lies the imperfection of his philosophy ; but his real error lay in this, that he was only haK- religious. " By the term ' Eehgion ' ^ I shall mean any theory of Personal Agency in the Universe, belief in which is strong enough, in any degree, to influence conduct. No term has been used more loosely of late years, or in a greater variety of meanings." Plato would give but an ambiguous answer to the query. Do you use the term in this personal and practical significance ? Eeverence for the Ideal possibihty (say, of mankind in its infinite development), abstract admiratidn for the inexhaustible reservoir of Nature's life, a dim beUef that things are working for the " best " (a word used, like dpiffTov in Speusippus, in an entirely novel and arbitrary sense), cannot le called Religion. Such feeUng is rather a form of cosmic or pantheistic emotion, marking a peculiar temperament given to secluded studies and meditation, from whose fawning piety and inadmissible (nay, despicable) resignation to the un- ^ Romanes, Thoughts on Heligion, p. 107. 118 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO known, the reaction is inevitable, and thoroughly welcome as a wholesome corrective. Even the rebellion of Atheists against a spurious yet widely prevalent Calvinism has, as we have already mentioned, served a useful purpose. § 21. It is the Impersonality of Plato's religious philosophy that warrants,- renders necessary, and com- pletely justifies the change of standpoint, in this matter as in others, which we welcome in Aristotle. The subjective consciousness, dissatisfied with a postulate which the facts of life contradict, reaches out towards an explanation in which it, the conscious spirit, can repose ; or else will settle, not without a latent defiance of the divine counsels, in entire dependence on self. The despondency, the subjectivity, of post-Aristotelian thought (for the epoch of contented optimism in scientiftc curiosity is only a moment of transition to a more ethical standpoint) is due to the denial of an interfering, an overruhng Providence, to the substitution of self-sufficiency for mystic resignation, to the altered maxim, " Follow Nature," instead of " Become like God," — for all of which Aristotle is responsible. Had not, indeed, this tendency appeared in Plato himself ? We can trace the gradual retirement of the Ideas, as it were, from actual Hfe, from contact with matter ; they are restricted in number and influence, and are at last confined to qualities ; and there is a final stage, where they are heard of no more — they have gone back to their own transcendental region. And significantly enough, and parallel to this recession of the active causes in created things, has not a new power arisen to dispute the sovereignty, the evil World-Soul, of which we have dark hints at in the latest writings of Plato and in the earliest of his successors ? Matter, PLATONIC IDEALISM 119 once mere space, a condition of receptivity, is treated as a positive " principle of disorder confusing all things, by the side of the Order which sways the world." Nay, the strange and un-Socratic subordination of the part to the whole, — the depreciation of the single life, — is due to a growing distrust in the main doctrine of his exuberant youth. It is true he demands that this self-resignation in the Ideal State to public duty should proceed from loving and deliberate sacrifice of egoism ; and be reflecting and virtuous, and not due to compulsion from without. But in the end, the community employs force to ensure its own interests, and these can be appreciated by but a small number, and conceded to, of voluntary choice, by still fewer. In short, the world- process, hastily qualified as good, has not been justified before the suffering individual (as the Sophists seem perhaps unconsciously to demand), nor has sufficient apology been made for the paramount pretensions and claims of the State upon the unquestioning loyalty of its citizens. Subject and object are still left in un- reconciled opposition. Book ®ne THE HELLENIC AGE : PLATONISM AND ITS ANTECEDENTS CHAPTEE VI AEISTOTLE: SEPARATION OE THE EFFICIENT AND FINAL CAUSE ; NATURE THE SOURCE AND PRIN- CIPLE OF LIFE AND MOTION 121 CHAPTEE VI ARISTOTLE § 1. Plato, who expands the intelligence of Anaxagoras into intelligent goodness, nevertheless, as we have seen, does not succeed in reconciling these to the subjective consciousness. He does not say if he means the Final Principle of the world to be a person ; philosophically, he shrinks from the natural conclusion of his ethical bias, by which man is the centre of the universe. To all but a very few thinkers, the notion of an impersonal intelli- gence and goodness is unsatisfactory ; intelligence with- out consciousness, goodness without a definite design of mercy. These inconceivable efficients will be forgotten, and a genuine motor found elsewhere, the true source of life and motion. Now it is impossible to extract a dogmatic utterance on this all-important matter ; in the Platonic myths and allegories, coloured with all the varied hues of the sensible world, wherein appears his predilection for the personal, the poetic, the concrete, the beautiful, — in these he is definite enough ; but in the cold region of Pythagorean numbers, of logical forms, his system appears to exclude the idea of personality, of deliberate Will. But unless this idea be accepted, the whole idea of intelligence and of goodness becomes an arbitrary postulation. It is, after all, only by a pious act of faith, leading to the repose of resigned Quietism, that the subject can accept this explanation, become 123 124 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO reconciled to the world as it is. Plato desires him to look on the world as it va-ei ^rjv a-vfi(f)copoo<}, to develop one's own nature in rational thought and moral resistance to exterior influences. The tiger, wolf, lion, were distinctly and consciously set over against man, as types of an opposite nature, very well in their way, and having a use in the world, yet no fit pattern for our imitation. It was their part to lacerate, torment, consume ; just in the same way, it was man's peculiar duty to be faithful, modest, indulgent, self-denying. The maxim, '' Follow Nature " (in spite of the doubt which enveloped it), was never taken to mean that, after a detailed inspection of processes and speci- mens outside, we were to reproduce in our own behaviour the lesson we learn in such studies. The purely Natural maxim,^ for example, " Increase and multiply," was sedul- ously disregarded by the celibate sage. No, it was his own nature he was bound to develop ; and it was on this 1 The Mystic and the Positive, Neoplatonio and Socialist. ^ Of which the once acute thinker, Hartmann, has become an apostle glowing with righteous indignation. 190 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO point that the vagueness of its content condemned him to inaction, — expectant, perhaps, of a heavenly illumina- tion. But the axiom had, in truth, another possible sense. Besides being a command to follow the inward promptings of an (assumed) higher nature, it was a recognition of the " duty " (that is, the utility) of Passive Eesignation to the course of things taken as a whole, and identified either with blind Necessity or with the Divine Will. Here was the widest generalization ; and it interfered not at all with the former hypothesis : that man's true nature (and destiny) lay in a resolute refusal to be moved by the pleasures or pains which attacked him from outside. Against both these definitions, — this double significance of the notorious maxim, "Follow Nature" — the New Philosophy of the Sceptical Socialist, the Christian reformer, the Antinomian Gnostic, and the devout Neoplatonist, will array itself. Nature, the starting-point of our investigation in the Hellenic age, has been pronounced unknowable, and rejected as a standard for human behaviour at the close of the Hellenistic. 3Booft XTbree JUDAISM CHAPTEE I ORIENTAL AND HELLENIC IDEAS CONTRASTED WITH JUDAISM (OR THE BELIEF IN THE HISTORICAL PROVIDENCE OF GOD, AND THE DENIAL OF NATURE'S INDEPENDENT LIFE) CHAPTEK I PRACTICAL AND SPECULATIVE INFLUENCE OF HEBREW PHILO- SOPHY AND REVELATION ; REAPPEARANCE OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE DIVINE INTEREST IN MAN § 1. We have now to turn our eyes to the East, and examine the two new sources of influence, often concur- rent, yet usually distinct, which at this time began to transfuse and transform Hellenic thought. It is well to emphasize the contrast at the outset; for Judaism is not Orientalism, and the discontent and indifference of Gnostical speculations have nothiug in common with the terrestrial ideals and strict legality of the pious Hebrew. At present the two tendencies may seem to have many identical features ; but after the lapse of some centuries we shall see the original incompatibility of their doctrine, in the difference of their results. It is not accurate to include Philo among the Orientahsts, without a severe definition of his agreement and dis- agreement with what is popularly known as Oriental philosophy. And, in speaking of Judaism, we must surely mark off its practical, worldly interest in outward things — in an actual commonwealth, in a temporal de- velopment — from the vague, abstracted reveries of the Fakeer, whose only object is the anticipation in Time of an Eternal calm. We have seen the ideal of renuncia- tion introducing itself, at least theoretically, into the " mirthful enjoyment " of the Hellenic race, in the first 13 194 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO moment of their reflecting thoughtfulness ; and have noticed how early in their conscious meditation, voices might be heard summoning the lover of wisdom away from the illusion of sense into the One, the kingdom of reality. Now the tolerant Eclecticism of Philo is engaged in finding a compromise, a middle term, for the doctrines of Plato and of Moses. It is his duty to reconcile minor differences, and to show clearly the broad features of agreement. It may be that he abandons too much of the active interest in a nation's welfare (the sum and substance of Judaism) to an introspective analysis of the faculties of the Soul ; and alters the entire standpoint of criticism by which the Old Testament was estimated ; a volume containing the record of the DiAone dealings with Man, both national and individual. But even granting that Philo sacrificed the glowing life of a moral and vigorous people to a worship of ideal forms, of con- templative study, of inaccessible abstractions, it by no means follows that in Philo the value of Judaistic influ- ence was exhausted. The full and most direct influence of the Hebrew rehgion, uncontaminated by compromise with lethargic pagan thought, is to be seen in the Christian Church, the inheritor of all its treasures. For, against the doctrine of the world's eternity and per- manent value, against a superstitious submission to the subHme and impersonal Source of Life, against the depreciation of man, the single life, and his practical endeavours in the sphere of moral activity, — this Church has always raised her voice in protest. The superficial admirer of the " Classical " epochs will regret that the graceful harmony with Nature was dispelled among Christians by an " Indo-G-nostic " sense of alienation and estrangement ; that Hebrew influences entered to pervert, by grievous dogmas of man's sia and God's wrath, the pure sense of Divine Sonship ; that Jewish asceticism and HEBREW PHILOSOPHY AND REVELATION: 195 « distrust of matter violently interrupted our communion with our Mother, and bade us fly from hence, forsaking the society of our kind and the duty and enterprise of practical life. This is, however, a mistaken notion ; it is Hellenic philosophy that is always unsocial and ascetic ; and it is the influence of the Hebrew Faith that has kept aUve the ideal of development and of progress, the standard of domestic and national life ; for the deities of the Greeks are Natural Divinities, hut the Jehovah of the Hebrews is the God of History. § 2. In this assurance of the moral government of the World lay the whole secret of this transforming and invigorating power, which Jewish and Christian teaching has without doubt exercised over rude or civilized society in the West. I do not, indeed, attribute to this exclusive authority our active and eagerly busy life, which contrasts so strikingly with the animal torpor and supine- ness of the slumbering nations of the East. Yet among all the obvious contributories to this modern zest, — the influence of climate, of racial peculiarity, of striking per- sonalities, — this inspiriting doctrine is at the root of our development, and is, even from the poiut of view of social life, indispensable. It may be that we pride ourselves too much on what is termed progress, advance, and are unduly contemptuous of the stagnation which we discover in all other societies but our own. We should, indeed, find great dif&culty in replying to the pertinent, questions : " Advance of what ? Progress whither ? Improvement, by what standard ? Education, of whom ? Happiness and prosperity, where appreciated?" Yet in spite of our veneration for idle forms and purposeless turmoil (which we call the welfare of the State, the triumph of Liberty), it cannot be denied that to the impartial philosopher ^ ' Who sees in all this merely the instruments and apparatus for the de- velopment of iindividual powers, the guarantee of individual blessedness. 196 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO there are strong constraining reasons for a preference for Occidental ideals. This activity, — this eager and unrestful striving after the yet unattained, not the unattainable, — which so clearly marks our progressive European life, proceeds in no sense from our content- ment with Nature, our supine or trustful acquiescence in he^ gifts or her faithfulness. We are engaged in a wholesome and truceless struggle. We seek to domineer over her, and not follow her suggestions ; to wrest her secrets, not with a view of adoring the processes of life, the variety and yet uniform peace of phenomena, but solely with a view to adapt things external to our use and convenience. We are by no means content with a mere sufficiency. The Epicurean sage, with a cake of bread and a draught of water, may rival the bhss of Zeus himself ; but the modern pioneer of this restless guerilla warfare is satisfied with nothing short of complete dominion. How permeated ancient thought was with this ill-founded pietistic awe, this superstitious dread of Nature ! Always, to their eyes, a dark and inscrutable Being, — having a real immanent Soul, and animated, besides, in all her parts by hosts of incalculable and capricious spirits, — this notion oppressed with vague terror not only the Eastern anchorite, but the sceptic of the early Eoman Empire ! Investigation of natural phenomena was indeed a kind of worship, not to be undertaken with any impious hope of material gain, but solely in order that, understanding, we might reverence the more ! But to us Nature is the mere indifferent sphere of our development and discipline ; a quarry from which we may hew out our life, and triumph in obstacles overcome. We are no mystic votaries of cosmic emotion ; we allow no sentimental thrill to per- vade our souls at the sight of vast extension, of unerring sequence, of immutable and seemingly eternal stability. HISTORICAL PROVIDENCE OF GOD 197 Our conception of this unknown yet adaptable environ- ment is sober and utilitarian. We are intent on Nature, indeed, but only because knowledge of her sequences can minister to our comfort, or satisfy our curiosity. Our true interest is transferred to a different sphere: the historic development of mankind, the fortunes of nations and individuals ; the nobility of heroic deeds ; our own single life and its significance in the eyes of God, whose Providence is shown, not indeed in Nature, but in Revelation. For Eevelation assures us of His supreme sympathy with us, and overthrows all notions of the Divine function as consisting in an unceasing delight of self-contemplation, or the perpetual spectacle of a con- summate World. § 3. From a human point of view, this practical and utilitarian conception of Nature, neither despising nor overrating her meaning, which neither sighs over her adamantine impenetrability, nor succumbs in sentimental ecstasy to her fascinations, — the temper, in a word, of wholesome European Society, — is begotten of the union of Eoman and Jewish ideals. In them the instinctive unquestioning homage and respect paid to national life is never abandoned by a sudden and violent reaction against Civic sanctions ; but the growth of the individual (as he gradually becomes the centre round which the once self - sufficing institutions dutifuUy group them- selves), so far from producing a disintegration of the bonds of community, rather lends them reflected lustre, or provides them with a guarantee far more secure than before. For that only which justifies itself to the self- conscious man, and refers its continuance to his com- mendation, is safe against the attacks of rebellious Egoism. Not, indeed, that the Hebrew or the early Eoman citizen was entirely penetrated by a sense of his own value, and saw in the State, rather than a constraining external 198 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO authority, a reflexion or an embodiment of his particular will ; deriving its value for him, not from its power to compel, but from his own voluntary and spontaneous loyalty, his deliberate acceptance. But among the nations of antiquity, these certainly maintained a loftier view of private right, and recognised more readily individual claims. And this is perhaps the reason why these nations abound in (so-called) unselfish actions of enthusiastic devotion for the common good; whereas Greece was usually contented with unbounded profession of wilUhgness to sacrifice present advantage if the call came, without any serious intentions of fulfilling the promise. The rudiments of the much-needed reconcilia- tion of the claim of the individual with the universal (or common) Life, whether in a scheme of Theodicy or in the relation of citizen and State, thus appear in the polities of the Jew and the Eoman. Yet it cannot be allowed that all problems were answered by these nations, or received their final solution. Many passages in the Old Testament strike us not so much with admiration of splendid self-denial, as with a cold surprise that the value of the personal was not more keenly appreciated. The language is so often rather of one who has not yet risen to self-consciousness, — who can exist and sympathize only in a turbulent, objective, catholic life, — than of the pure soul who dehberately, in a loving surrender, gives up what is to it almost most precious ■^ for the good of ^ Almost, I say advisedly ; for evert the Christian never sacrifices himself; only his own; the notion of se^- sacrifice (as commonly accepted) being a pure fallacy. The believer, secure of Providence, personal immortality, and the approving eye of a merciful Judge, can cheerfully throw away all else. Unless lie were thus assured of his own value in the sight of God, and of the usefulness of his momentary devotion for a Divine purpose, in which he himself will one day fully share, his self-surrender to the unknown would be both foolish and culpable. HEBREW PHILOSOPHY AND REVELATION: 199 • others. This perfect blossom of humanity is the product of Christian influences alone. § 4. Among the Greeks, to whom the idea of Divinity is connected rather with Nature than with History, submission to the outward order was a mere enforced homage to the unknown; and a tentative dogma of the Stoics, that the World was created for the service of man, was contradicted by their practical refusal to make use of it, except by avoiding it. Among the Jews, the immediate certainty was by no means eternal and unchanging Law, far above the comprehension of the wisest, but the history of a favoured race, the gradual steps of a Divine Kevelation so vouchsafed to man, — guarantee of the permanent worth, if not of man as Tnan, at least of man as Israelite. In their Scriptural narrative we read of the successive moments of election, of separation, of careful choice of these repositaries of the Divine will and promises. From the multitude of the early man-like animals; described in the first chapter of Genesis, — ^living, like their fellows, by guidance of instinctive and unconscious impulse, — Adam is selected to receive the indwelling Spirit of God, is intrusted with a special mission. He is presented with a single help-meet, and the gift of freedom. God's attitude is not the impassive calm of a distant First Cause, delegating the work of creation to His ministers, but is the active interest of one who loves, beholds, and rejoices at the good, sorrows at the fall of man from innocence ; repents that He has called into being these ungrateful children ; is indignant and wrathful ; and punishes with severity. Noah is the next inheritor of His favour, to the exclusion of the rest of the earlier tribes, who are now swept away. From him the earth is replenished, and his descendant Abraham is again called out of the midst of his people, into a special 200 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO communion with the Divine Being, — a privilege which yet entailed the irksome condition of perpetual vagrancy and exile,^ in tantalizing view of a rich country, which was yet in a sense his own, destined to be the possessiou of his posterity. Henceforward, on the national hie of this ever-multiplying race centres all the interest of the sacred narrative, and its pages recount instances of the loyal self-devotion of those who vicariously lived in it, rather than in themselves. Through all the vicissi- tudes and disappointments of this chequered history, one guiding principle is clearly seen : the Divine mercy, favour, judgment, penalty — all is absolutely compre- hensible, and follows directly upon the merit or the crime of the universal Nation. When, as a whole, the Jewish people turn to God, He gives them deliverance from their enemies, and peace and plenty at home. Or again, when a wave of infideUty spreads over the land, and a desire for a less spiritual and moral, more naturalistic, worship takes hold of their minds, the punishment for this disloyalty to their Father is experienced by the Whole nation. All alike, without any closer discrimination of individual merit or guilt, have a share in the recompense of national virtue, the retribution of national apostasy. It is clear that no conception of the Divine Nature could be further from the ideal of the Greeks. That God should take trouble, should labour, in the work of creation or for the safety of a race, — should plead with man, rising up early and sending His prophets, — was inconceivable to those who viewed this earth either as one among infinite worlds, a single transient, rapidly passing manifestation of Life, which issues aimlessly in ' A renunciation of the present world for some certain, yet undefined, recompense beyond ; and this is the very essence of Eeligious Faith, nay, of Beligion itself. HISTORICAL PROVIDENCE OF GOD 201 eternal process (the Ionian doctrine) ; or as a sublimer spectacle, viewed with distant approbation by the Supreme, in its total perfection, not in its partial defects. But the trouble of God in the guidance of an ungrateful people is the perpetual theme of the Old Testament. An extraordinary change in the view of human life must ensue : it will have an altogether novel value and significance; and the ideal of man will no longer be an attempt to gain a typical excellence, to imitate God as an impassive spectator of the variety of existence or the harmony of the universe. The devout Israelite will rather recognise God's purpose in his nation, and will labour actively, heart and soul, to further the triumph of his country, and co-operate in the design of God. Though sacrificing his own comfort, indeed, to a law of Duty, — which spoke to him with authority from without, and could not yet be said to be " written in his heart," — he bowed down to no abstraction, lost himself in no idle contemplation of the universe, but gave himself up, in obedience to a Living God, to promote the positive welfare of his own particular tribe. § 5. In this consists the distinction: in the con- secration of the practical life, in the value attached to concrete realities, in the narrowing of a too-extended vista down to the simple needs of a small kingdom, the overwhelming responsibilities of the cosmopolitan to the duties of domestic life or " parochialism." The Jews were the reverse of cosmopoHtan, in which comforting fallacy the Greek sages could defend, and even promulgate, their civic indifference. The Jew is untouched by the calculating egoism of the Sophists, which ironically overturns the sanctions of public and individual morality. He never becomes so keenly self-conscious as to set his own life, unnoticed and neglected by the course 202 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO of Nature, over against it in determined antithesis. If he does pass, in disenchantment and disappointment, beyond this anxious immersion in the present fortune of his race, into an uncivic frame of mind, it is to return to the patriarchal ideal of direct and bhssful intercourse with God as a personal Comforter, never wholly lost even in the most earth-bound periods of the national life. This ideal calls the devout to no melancholy meditation on the unity and fatefulness of all things, but summons him, as a favoured guest, to enjoy that conviction that is at the root of all true heroism : the behef that man is the free and indispensalle agent of God's 'merciful and loving decrees. Still, it would be too much to say that this (almost Christian) behef was universally accepted among the Jews. If it had been, we should find a far greater emphasis laid on personal immortahty, the reward and fitting recompense for this faithful and laborious stewardship. Yet whether we consider the eager interest in the common welfare, — the appropriation by the single hfe of the fortunes of the whole, — or the devout prophetic communion with Jehovah, in which rare natures took refuge, nothing can be further from the Greek standards of philosophic behaviour. There is here no indifference, no apathy, no isolation, no mystic discontent with the burden of pecuHar and separate life. If the prophet leaves the society of his fellow in the wilderness, it is to no impersonal musing, no meditation on abstract forms that he retires, but to talk with a Divine Comforter, Who, in spite of His inaccessible HoHness, is yet near and condescending to sinful men ; Whose angels are always about our path. To the Jew, God's presence is everywhere ; and His care descends to minute details of the life of Israel. Nature, the wonderful fabric of outward things. He has summoned from nothingness, and upholds every instance in complete HEBREW PHILOSOPHY AND REVELATION: 203 dependence, to provide a theatre for the destiny of man, in which the gradual perfection of the Chosen Eaee was the course of development ; the Kingdom of God, the Coming of Messiah, the final consummation. The interests of such believers were no doubt narrow and intolerant ; but they were vigorous and wholesome. It needed but a shght alteration of the doctrine to transfer all this interest from an abstraction, the Jewish State, to true reality, the Soul of man ; to show that his happiness was the purpose and final aim of God in creation, and that His tender providence, far from being immersed in complacent spectacle of Nature and her obedient uniformity, or in the fortunes of a single earthly State, had in view rather an eternal and heavenly kingdom, existing for, and composed of, redeemed human souls : the Jewels of God, whose lustre gained by burnishing and affiiction here, was not for time, but for eternity. § 6. Such was the contribution of the Hebrew people to the Hfe of mankind in Western Europe ; a revival of practical interest in a renewed energy, the conception of a visible Kingdom of God, existing indeed here, and battling against mundane powers, but perfected and realized only after the Judgment; the disappearance of that admiration for Nature, which prevented the due emphasis on Man's intrinsic worth and historic development. All will be found to depend, in the last resort, upon a firm behef in Providence, not merely universal, but particular ; and just at this epoch doiibly confirmed by a starthng display of Divine Love, which need not here be more closely examined. I have now to speak of the opposite tendency : the alliance between Moses and Plato, effected by the Alexandrine Jews, by the writers of the Apocrypha, by Aristobulus and Philo. While the material and practical vigour of Judaism issued in the Christian Church, formed for the regeneration and 204 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO salvation of mankind, — leavening society through its influence on individual members, and teaching, in the onain, that only in the moral intercourse of man with man in a definitely ordered State, could the highest development of the particular soul be consummated, — a spiritual modification of Secularism now takes place, under the power of the Sceptical Epoch, which we have just discussed : a tendency ending, as might be expected, not in strengthening civil society or reconciling the estranged individual to the common life, but in trans- lating the Old Testament narrative into allegories of the phases of psychic existence, and confirming that cardinal doctrine of the sage's isolation by a certain perversion of Scripture ; yet filliTig wp the vacamiy of this meditative solitude by assurances of the Divine presence. There can be no question that Philo is the link between earlier Platonic philosophy and the dogmatic and rehgious Platonism, which revives under the Eoman Empire. With Greek wisdom he is perfectly acquainted ; he employs all the technical phraseology of the Stoics, with whom he has much in common, and is bent upon discovering a connexion or an agreement between the Mosaic Law and the theories of Plato. He tempers the abstract Idealism which takes the place in the Greek mind of a direct and personal worship ; he accepts the reahty of Eevelation, the final worth of the Law, the direct interest of God in Israel. He is indeed, to a certain degree, strengthened and encouraged by this historic sense of God's providence, of which I have spoken before. Yet he is chiefly known to us (such is the effect of compromise) as the inventor of the Aoyo^ doctrine, or rather the reconciler of its religious and ethical sense with the prevalent naturalistic hypothesis of Stoicism. Thus, while, from the Hellenic point of view, he fills the blank meditation and self-complacent solitude of the HISTORICAL PROVIDENCE OF GOD 205 • Greek " wise man " with the Vision of God, — with a moral, not a physical, explanation of our affinity to Him, — from the Hebrew side, he banishes the real interested activity of Jehovah from the world's course, allows the true conception of the Divine Nature to evaporate in impersonal abstractions, as if he accepted the old benumbing behef that God could not Himself condescend to earthly existence ; and, while preaching the deUghts of communion with Deity, he teaches that He could not be approached on the path of the practical life, but only by the road of Knowledge ; or finally despairs even of this faculty of appreciation, and plunges into Mystic trance, the last refuge for the -despair of the personal spirit before an unknowable Power. § 7. The whole aim of the Syncretistic Jews of Alexandria is to emphasize the Transcendence of the Divine Spirit. The immanence in Nature of all impulse and fertihty required for the process of life was accepted by them, with certain reservations. But they did not agree with the Stoics, that this exhibition exhausted the Divine Nature, or fully expressed it : that there was no other world but this. There is a revival of the old Platonic and Aristotelian dogma so much neglected by the Individualist Schools,^ that God had a life of His own, independent of the changefulness of this world. That mundane life, indeed, was His too, in a sense, as proceeding from Him, but He was much more. A stronger emphasis was laid on the moral relation between man and God ; it seemed impiety to Hmit His power and essence to a mere physical process. But to the Stoic, the A6 life can never be made the aim of practical wisdom, — even the most individualistic, — there is a certain revival of interest in actuality (though the motive is new) ; and while the soul waits with impatience its recall to rest, its release from the burden of the flesh, — or (in some sects) of personahty, — there is meantime an inquiry into the Domain of Human Freedom, and the practical rules which should guide the emanation from the Divine, still embodied, and retained in custody here. Thus, to finally sum up the general principles of the foregoing discussion, there is the discovery of self : the sense that the satisfaction of this self cannot be found in the actual or the present ; and lastly, for the immediate guidance of life, an inquiry for the wisest attitude to these present surroundings, which cannot be easily escaped, — an inquiry which, in many cases, will settle into the practical negation of Quietism. § 2. There arises, thus, a keen sense of personal dignity, even in the tiny sphere of the narrowly restricted PRACTICAL STOICISM BECOMES ©UALISTIC 289 autonomy, and a passionate desire for a realm which can recognise this value, and satisfy these instincts. In every system, however (except that of Christianity), the individual, while he may escape from the prison of civic routine to breathe a freer air, finds himself confronted by a stern and inexorable necessity, a law of the Universal Life, which is no respecter of persons, but figures either as Fatum or Fortuna, the relentless march of Eeason or the unaccountable caprice of unconscious Chance. What is to be man's attitude to this new Unity which, being omnipotent, and acting on irreversible decrees, is indiffer- ent to his own welfare ? He will be driven to have recourse either to antique superstition, which attempts to appease these incalculable forces ; or to devout admira- tion ; or to ill-Qoncealed defiance. But the sense of the paradox — the incompatibility of the single and the universal will — presses hard upon the thoughtful. What right, in face of this supreme Necessity, has the unit to independence ? He is a limb of a gigantic animal, and condemned by some strange law to a disturbing illusion of spontaneous action. This disheartening feeling of servitude to an unknown and unknowable Power is apt in certain natures, as we have before remarked, to clothe its despair in the language of devotion, — language, be it noted, which is entirely unmeaning apart from a personal, and thus comprehensible, authority, whose ways agree with our human notions of justice and benevolence, and on whom we can rely as, after all, knowing what is best for us, for our perfection and our discipline. Peace can only arise when there is some such " concordat " between the particular and the universal life. Self-consciousness is a sign of the perfect blossoming of the world-process, a mark of the final maturity of that individuality of the spirit which, apparently, is the goal of Nature's action (whether we view the outer world from the idealist side, 19 290 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO as a result of our thought, or reverse this, and conceive material evolution as striving to produce, and perhaps to set free, the human personality). A sense of personal worth, as being an end in oneseK, is inseparable from a high state of civilization, as from all schools of genuine Philosophy. It is ineradicable, when once this feeling is awakened, except by a dehberate return to the woods and acorns of unreflecting animahsm. Those who oppose this logical doctrine of Eousseau and the Cynics, and refuse to regret the development of man's reflecting and rational faculties, must solve this question, How is it to be satisfied ? If this demand for independence be not satisfied, it must be violently repressed, either by con- scious endeavour of pious and devout resignation, or by the stern arm of social restraint. All education teaches the hollowness of abstractions,-;— the State, Duty, the Eeason of the World, Humanity, love of mankind ; on the contrary, it removes our thoughts from the majesty and sanctity of exterior law to the Lawgiver, who is within us ; and arouses a conviction of personal worth and finality, — which absolutely defies all threats of expulsion. § 3. There is one way alone to regain contentment : it is the subjective transformation of the unknown Power, from an unconscious Fate into a Spirit of love and mercy. This change of thought wiU operate without fail in certain emotional natures, in any age of enhghtenment like the one which we are now considering ; with the cold sternness, the physical barrenness, of Stoicism will mingle the devotional hope and trust of Platonic aspira- tion. " Man cannot change the world ; hit he can change his views coruxming it" — this is the whole teaching of the Particularist Schools. In truth, they agreed that man's only influence was exerted within, upon himself : here Epicurus (with his sensible maxim, " Not things, but our thoughts on things") meets and coalesces with PRACTICAL STOICISM BECOMES DUALISTIC 291 Stoicism ; here too, from a more prosaic point of view, the Sceptics are in harmony with the rest, in this doctrine of the wise man's deliberate adaptation, accom- modation, of his own views to suit his ever-varying environment — ^in poHtics, religious beUefs, and social customs. Eebelhous defiance of natural laws is extreme folly ; yet so is an attempt to reform any given condition of society, itself a manifestation of the Divine, of the Supreme Wisdom. If happiness, meaning now nothing positive, but a torpid state, a mere absence of disturbance and disqideting passion, — if happiness be entirely a matter of the inward feeling, the same thought will recur that before induced the Individuahst Schools to retire from action, as dangerous and disappointing, and to distrust Nature, as callous and uncertain. The final Power is robbed of all personal interest, all concern, in the affairs of the world ; and the wise man who sought a higher communion and affinity than that of earth, finds himself in an empty universe, which is at best the reflexion of an absent reason. Shall he despair ? Not without one last effort of Faith : by a violent act of wUl, and in defiance of all fact and experience, he invests this Power with moral quahties which are, strictly speaking, inadmissible in the -pnrely physical theology of the Stoics. There is, in the prevalent Eclecticism, a distinct sign of alliance between this stiff positivism and the devotional mysticism which will claim Plato as its leader. Both, to a very large extent, are practical and not theoretic schools of life ; an age which had outlived any exaggerated reverence for this master or that, naturally seized on fundamental notions rather than particular doctrines, and combined what was similar and consonant, or, again, complementary, instead of laying stress on minute points of difference in matters of speculation. This Eclecticism is by no means a sign of trivial or indolent thought, 292 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO wandering idly from flower to flower, and gathering there- from only what from moment to moment seems fair and attractive : it is rather a mark of seriousness, of an earnest resolve to pass beyond prejudice, and to accept whatever truth can penetrate the mists of man's ignorance, from whatsoever quarter it comes ; these centuries, in particular, are full of such examples of broad toleration. Cicero unites the Stoic materialism, the Academic distrust, with strange Platonic yearnings ; Seneca, himself a mystic, avails himself of the axioms of Epicurus ; Cynicism itself is leagued with missionary zeal — respects and observes the decencies of Society ; Christian believers examine heathen efforts to attain truth with interest and approbation ; Plutarch combines Plato with Persian and Egyptian dualism ; and the Gnostics, in their marvellous systems of thought, leave no rehgion, no philosophy, no superstition untouched and untransformed by their mistaken zeal. § 4. Stoicism, like the religion of Buddha, lacks an object of worship. After the expulsion of the capricious and anthropomorphic deities of popular belief, Philosophy is oppressed by a sense of universal Law, either physical, aesthetic, or moral; (for I venture to apply the term aesthetic to that notion which represents beauty, order, and harmonious interaction as the purpose of the world- process.) It is clear that if the Law be called Moral, this word is applied in a new and unusual sense, and is, in the last resort, unmeaning : it is out of relation to what we term Ttwral in everyday life. In what signi- ficance, that has any affinity to the common use, can Nature and the Power which guides it be called Moral ? ^ ^ "For it is clear how fruitless must be any attempt to borrow from Soulless reality rules which have an unconstrained and natural relation to our action, with its totally different motives and aims." — Lotze, Microcosmw, bk. vi. oh. i. PRACTICAL STOICISM BECOM^ DUALISTIC 293 Physical regularity and uniform operation may indeed excite our wonder ; but the intrusion of ethical notions into this reverence for Nature was especially inexcusable in the Stoics. In their Quietism, they either refused to trust the beneficence which they so loudly proclaimed, or they believed that God, like their own will, was unable to direct the course of events.^ While the ethical content of philosophy was immensely enriched; while new duties were promulgated of sublime heroism, pious resignation, unselfishness, considerate treatment of slaves and women; while fresh responsibilities were heaped upon the honest citizen and the wise man — the strictly ethical conception of the Divine Nature evaporated altogether; nor can we wonder at the constant tendency to exalt the perfect sage above Zeus; the laborious exercise of arduous virtue above a sort of necessitarian and unconscious perfection. The Epicurean was content to equalize the bliss of the gods (as they sat apart in the intermundial spaces) with the serene enjoyment of the sage, who tried to imitate them. But the Stoic was content with nothing less than superiority; and the explanation is easy. Their deity — the complex of physical forces, culminating in the vivid yet impotent will of man — can have no ethical significance. Demanding implicit obedience to his edicts, he supplies no example, gives no encouragement, provides no protection. The normal state of the wise man is persecution, misunderstanding, hatred, isolation ; unsolaced by a sense of present sympathy or a hope of coming justice. The Stoics, indeed, urged that the sage was content with his own sense of merit and superior excellence ; but this very ' I shall have reason to show, later, that this is actually the case ; the omnipotence of the Universal Law was tacitly denied, and God takes up His abode in the Human Soul as a last asylum, where alone His authority is recognised. 294 THE SCHOOL OP PLATO insistence attempts to disguise their disappointment and despair. He felt his loneliness very acutely, and, to remedy this, resorts to the introduction of a new idea, wholly extraneous, and in the end inconsistent with his original principles. The soul of man is a part of God, in a very special and unique sense : not in the coarse materialistic doctrine, that it is a refinement of the fiery element that creates, transforms, and sustains the World ; but in a truly personal and ethical sense, — the hope and consciousness which has supported the Mystics of all times, — the sense of an indwelling, abiding presence, of the loving spirit of the Father. § 5. Before the period of earnest and practical resolve in the Stoic School, and before the infiltration of Platonic ideas, the affinity of God with the soul of man was a mere physical postulate. But this theory now becomes the foundation for devotional ethics. Invented merely to account for the excellence and powers of man, as the last product of the technical, "artistic Pire, marching forwards to the development of the world," this hypo- thesis (and in its nature it can be nothing else) becomes the consolation, the support, the encouragement of the wise man, otherwise hopeless in a foreign exile. God is within the soul of man — ^is the voice of conscience ; is, moreover, this peculiar and encouraging sense of a " present help in time of trouble," which complete resigna- tion will undeniably awaken in trustful natures. But if God is in truth the sojourner in the human soul, the honoured guest of mortal man, and loves to dwell there in a special manner rather than in the outer world of material change, succession, decay — What of this con- crete world, and the blind force which rules it ? Here recurs an inevitable Duahsm, utterly foreign to the protestations of the Stoic creed, and yet latent there, awaiting the evoking power, the purifying, and to some PRACTICAL STOICISM BECOMES DUALISTIC 295 extent reconciling, influence of the Platonic and ascetic text, ipvyf/ evTevdev k. 6(ioiS>9. Knomedge conducts, it may be, to absolute truth, but cannot show its relation to the acute and sensitive personahty, yhich lives alongside of the pure Nov<}, not touching it at all points. The man is the whole concrete being, and not a part, supposed to be the highest, and wrested f^om its environment ; as if even this were possible. Any system which proposes as the highest Good the Satis- faction of pure Eeason (man's impersonal part, after all) in the region of pure ideas, is clearly foredoomed to failure. The sense of opposition, whether in the intel- lectual or the practical sphere, becomes too aevte to allow of any true monistic explanation. Eeflectpn is absolutely and finally dualistic, and can by itself see no reconcilement. The problem of knowledge, of subject and object, becomes more urgent, and assumes a knd of PRACTICAL STOICISM BECOMES DUALISTIC 297 ethical significance; an absolute barrier arises between sense-impression and the outward reality, and challenges or overthrows the certainty of Science. In the world of action, the relation of the particular to the Absolute existence is an unsolved problem. The very nature of this universal life is pronounced unknowable : Providence becomes an empty dream ; and the meaning of the World- Process, with its conscious pain and arduous effort, must be confessed to be indecipherable and beyond human cognizance. This is a state of transition; a prolonged sojourn in this reverence for an inexplicable and un- Moral Law is impossible, and certainly not desirable. A firm behef in the advantage and holiness of the just life, in the binding duty of moral precept, leads to a certain reconstruction. Some few will proceed past the brood- ing pessimism of the Stoics into its logical result, a world-hating and unsocial Gnosticism. But the minds of equable balance recognise the hypocrisy of these latter professions. By a free and deliberate act of moral choice they solve the Dualism : Love raises in them a new sense of the Divine presence, so long lost to philo- sophical introspection; Providence is boldly reinstated as the governor of the World, not because of its perfectly rational, just, and merciful course, but in virtue of the inner experiences, the blessed contentment and peace of the resigned and acquiescent soul. § 8. In Spinoza or other pantheistic writer, one is often disgusted by a parade of unmeaning devotion. Language only possible between a personal God and a creature or child of His making and adoption, is pecu- liarly out of place when the Universal Process demands the perpetual and motiveless sacrifice of the single life, — when, in a word, the theory of Immanence resolves the Deity into a complex of physical forces, and denies the rights and the dignity of the individual, which it 298 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO accidentally produces in this interaction. But with all this, it must be acknowledged that such an abuse of ideas, a survival of obsolete notions in bare words, has been a comfort to many, who would fain overleap the Dualism by a " Salto mortale " of Love, and who gradually come to beUeve in a Divine Spirit, manifested more perfectly in man's intelligent soul than in the opera- tions of Nature. Unconsciously and by slow degrees they drag the Deity over to their side, from the hostile camp of Nature, where He has so long appeared to govern, directing with His wisdom all the insidious or overt attacks on holy sages. They enthrone Him on a long- empty pedestal in their own heart ; and, thus equipped and strengthened with a new ally, again face the world, which is now no more the complete, the final, display of Grod. Man has Grod, and the wise man is God ; the world is now the unknown factor against which we have to strive, " and God is now on our side ; the outer order is no longer His." The irrefutable argument for His being, is no more the unchanging regularity and harmony of an outward process, but our own unalterable sense of blessedness and peace.^ He ceases to be a physical power, and, ranged with our battahons, aids us against the World, — the intractable lower realm of matter, which, as fellow-workers with Him,^ we do our best to occupy, transform, and fill with refractions from His glory, with Divine ideas ; or, abandoning this entirely, choose the " good part," leaping boldly into an ardent communion with God in the depths of the Soul. § 9. How near we have come now to the final plunge of Greek philosophy ! The meditations of Aurelius or Seneca form a necessary link, as it were, between the ' Which alone, perhaps, is truly tSiov /cal Svaaijmlperov. ^ Qeif trvnepyol ; the secret of Christian zeal and enterprise, the supreme encouragement of J. S. Mill. PRACTICAL STOICISM BECOMES DyALISTIC 299 earlier Stoicism and the later Platonic School. What is significant in these representatives of the middle and transition period of Eoman Thought, is just this intro- duction of the Mystical element : this Quietism which, from an internal instinct, interprets the Unity, the ultimate Divine Essence, iv w ^Mfiev k. Kivovfie9a, accord- ing to its own hopes and longings ; and dehberately chooses to find in a loving and trustful devotion, founded on a happy inward experience of rest and comfort, the true solution to the antagonism of the single and the universal life. This alliance of practical philosophy with a religious emotion is absolutely indispensable; for if philosophy leave the path of mere scientific investigation, and be driven to a searching scrutiny of the secrets of itself and the depths of human nature, it cannot help ^eelmg, Jirsf, isolated and helpless in the midst of cruel or indifferent surroundtags, and Tiext, by a supreme effort of will, resigned and blessed in self-abandonment to a destiny which it cannot avert, — a law of duty from which it cannot escape, but which it can willingly accept; it will follow of voluntary choice lest it be dragged along, and so find its true peace of mind. That they did thereby attain a tranquillity of mind denied to a defiant Ajax cannot be doubted ; and, after all, what more precious treasure can man discover ? Is not this inner serenity the " pearl of great price " ? At all events, from the first appearance of Individualism, it is just this serene composure that was the sole object of search. Devotional Stoicism and the rapture of Platonism is a development of philosophy which is perfectly legitimate, if it be granted that Philosophy may include a practical rule of life. § 1 0. It may also be now the fitting moment for some remarks on another word of ambiguous import — I mean Pantheism ; for in the period which we are discussing, 300 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO Pantheism is passing slowly from a maiericdistw to an idealistic standpoint. It will not, I hope, be difficult to explain this. There are two ways in which the Unity of Being may be brought home to man's mind — by con- templation of the world of matter, or meditation on the world of thought. The one is objective, and is founded on admiration and awe felt at the spectacle of order and regularity in the harmony of the manifold. When man, full of such a sight of power and beauty, returns to a consideration of himself, he is struck with the sense of insignificance, the transience, of his own life, the futility of his wishes and his hopes. He appears to himself lost in the Infinite, a product of mighty and inexpKcable forces, the toy of destiny, a dependent hmb of some vast organism. But further reflection brings a certain consolation, as we have just noted. As he dwells upon the problem of his own consciousness, his sense of independence and of responsibility; as he listens with reverence to the voice of duty speaking within ; as he .awakens to a sense of his own value (however in- consistent with his previous hypothesis) — the world of Nature gradually loses for him its supreme dignity, its final excellence, as the revelation of the One; and he sees a higher than physical law written in his own heart. The outer world ceases to have a veritable existence ; it is deprived of all significant reality. The life of the individual soul is no chance result of physical forces in their endless and aimless interaction, but is the life of God, the One and only-existent. Now, it is no longer the complex of phenomena that is divinized ; in place of this we have the deification of the human soul. God, the original Life and Being, is severed and dif- fracted into a variety of finite Hves, none of which lose contact with the parent, but which rise out of Him, and sink back again, as a wave on a restless ocean, under PRACTICAL STOICISM BECOMES DUALISTIC 301 whose rippling surface dwells peace in its profound abyss. It is no longer the Pantheism of matter ; it is the Pantheism of consciousness, of spirit. In the former stage, soul is a late result of material laws ; in the latter, it only truly is, and the world without is its creature, having a semblance only of autonomous hfe. In the former, the one true reality is matter ; in the latter, spirit alone has independent life. Stoicism stands firmly on the behef that nothing exists but material substances ; Platonism recognises no true existence but in a spiritual region. The union of the two phases is inevitable. A truly self-conscious, earnest, practical disciple of the former school could not rest satisfied with a mere Nature-worship, which cannot be dignified with the name of Eeligion, but is only an effort to conciliate that which is unaccountable and capricious, and becomes in the end nugatory and abortive. A morbid and subjective melancholy vein of thought will assuredly conduct him to a practical result, foreign to Stoic principles, — the denial of the world, the assurance that God lives within him, the hatred as well as distrust of the allurements of sense ; and thus, in the monistic system of scientific Stoic Pantheism, there springs up the latent Dualism, with its ascetic resignation, its flight past matter into the bosom of God. ffiooft Ifive THE NEW PLATONISM, AND ITS VARIOUS PHASES CHAPTER II DUALISM, LURKING BENEATH THE NOMINAL UNITY OP STOICISM, BECOMES OVERT AND EXPLICIT IN PLUTARCH ; WHILE PLATONISM, STARTING FROM A NOTION OF DUPLICITY, ENDS IN A RECONCILIA- TION :— THE SYSTEM OF EMANATION, OR A GRADUATED HIERARCHY OF EXISTENCE CHAPTEK 11 DUALISM, LURKING BENEATH THE NOMINAL UNITY 0? STOICISM, BECOMES OVERT AND EXPLICIT IN PLUTARCH ; WHILE PLATONISM, STARTING FROM A NOTION OF DUPLICITY, ENDS IN A RECONCILIATION: THE SYSTEM OF EMANATION, OR A GRADUATED HIEKAKCHY OP EXISTENCE § 1. A TWOFOLD principle of Being and a hostility of primitive Powers ! A mysterious conception, in which the rudiments of superficial thought begin, and to which, in the end, revert some of the wisest of mankind! However cleverly masked under an arbitrary hypothesis of unity, Dualism is latent in all philosophical systems, and especially in those which make the loudest pro- fessions of success in this process of unification. Where, on the contrary, at the outset there is a frank admission, an honest avowal, of a " duplicity " in things, there is, at the completion of the speculative task, a certain recon- ciliation effected, " that God may be All in all." But so surely as a system starts from postulation of Monad, — of point, of germ-cell, of single substance, — whether in realm of matter or spirit, of absolute omnipotence, within lurk the seeds of rebelHon, soon to burst out into open warfare. And it is a singular Nemesis of thought that condemns the Stoic creed to end in a hopeless antithesis of what is a;hd what ought to he, while Plato's doctrine of the two worlds — heaven and earth, ideal and 20 306 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO real, vorjTct and aladrjTa, between which (as Schwegler acutely remarks) he never establishes the slightest connexion — should consummate in a final Unity, as complete as could be desired : in the conception of a universe of graduated existence, an unbroken hierarchy of Being. Here, it is true, there is higher and lower ; but " aU things, by all ways, attain unto the Supreme Unity." Stoicism adopts from Plato the querulous com- plaining language about the body as the dungeon of the Soul ; while later Platonism, employing this, indeed, as a respectable traditional formula, attaches but little import- ance to it, and becomes genially receptive of the pleasant influences of the visible world. Stoicism appropriates and uses, with a solemn and sorrowful earnestness, a notion which in Plato remains somewhat otiose ; for the master of the Academy can never lay aside his keen delight and rare appreciation of aesthetic beauty. And this is, in fact, the reason why the Stoic School now is reconciled, after a long feud, with the Cynics, whose contempt and abnegation of the joys as weU as the decency of life is notorious. The revival of respect for a Cynic ideal is a certain counterpart, in the Greek world, to the violent pessimism of the Eastern Gnostics. Matter is detestable ; asceticism the only life worthy of a philosopher ; personal and separate existence a burden and a curse to be relinquished gladly, if not violently thrown aside, or, again, to be tempered in its misery by sweet draughts of obHvion, and by a stupor which is mainly physical. § 2. But this latent Dualism, imperfectly concealed under a proclamation of an assumed unity, is not allowed to become explicit among the Stoics, or to take rank as a principle. An empty and ineffectual postulate of Monism dominates their entire system in the theoretic point of view, although in the practical life we detect all the DUALISM BECOMES OVERT IN PLUTARCH 307 passive seclusion and Quietism which is presumed to characterize only those who beheve in God's absolute transcendence. But this practical Dualism receives a mythical and speculative consideration with Plutarch of Chseronea, who, like current Christian preaching, displayed without reserve or prejudice the Dualistic conception : that the Supreme Creator (or energy in or above the world) is subject to limitation and restraint, whether of intractable material or of the actual and personal hostility of some malevolent rival. Plutarch^, stands, in a sense, midway between the Stoics, whose monistic theory has been shattered by contact with experience, and the later and reconstructive School of , ' Platonists. He is frankly duaUstic; the Stoics are ceasing to be pure monists ; and the genial creed of Alexandria has not yet been formulated, which, out of a formal and initial antithesis, will evolve the only complete and satisfactory system of Unity that antiquity affords. In Plutarch reappears the old purely scientific or curious interest ; it is no longer the difficulties of the practical life which claim undivided attention. Therefore there is something of the calm indifference of early Greek thought : a pursuit of truth for its own sake, and not with a view to solve the pressing needs of a despairing spirit, sensible only of its isolation. § 3, Plutarch views the world with serene and un- troubled gaze. He is not steadily consistent in this hypothesis, which is the explicit display of a doctrine long ago propounded by Plato, and deliberately denied by Stoicism, but returning into prominence and a real actual influence when the Eoman Eclectics combine the two systems. But his most striking tract, on " Isis and Osiris," is a studied exposition of it, and we may consider it as representing at least an important phase not only of his particular thought, but also of current speculation. 308 THE SCHOOL OF PLATO Let us consider the significance of this half-Persian, half-Egyptian hypothesis. It is a direct denial and tacit confutation of the Stoic belief : that matter is God's body, the formal principle His Spirit ; and that thus these two existed from all eternity, involved and insepar- able, as body and soul in man. The idea of Creation is, to such' a view, inadmissible ; the whole process of involving spiritual efficacy with inert substrate — of animating or overcoming matter by form — is rejected: there is no process, no progress, no development ; the Universe in its present condition is not explained, but assumed ; pro- nounced eternal, divine, consummate, and self-sufficing. Now — ^in spite of recent attempts to draw Plato over to the side of a timeless Pantheism, a positivism which refuses to concern itself with the question How or Why ? and is content with a formula which covers certain existing phenomena — it cannot be doubted that in Plato's mind ^ the idea of creation was a distinct behef , and his title for God, the Ar)/iiovpyo