Cornell University Library 
 
 3 1924 031 272 275 
 olin,anx 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031272275 
 
A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
A SIMPLE HISTORY 
 
 ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 W. R. SCOTT, M.A., 
 
 Trinity College, Dublin, 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 *AN INTRODUCTION TO CUDWORTh's "TREATISE CONCERNING ETERNAL 
 
 AND IMMUTABLE MORALITY."' 
 
 r 
 
 The Philosophical ^i&.'teW 
 
 LONDON : 
 ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G. 
 
 1894. 
 
 h 
 
PREFACE 
 
 It is somewhat anomalous that when the study of Philosophy 
 is generally supposed to begin with its history, there is no book 
 in the latter department that does not demand a previous 
 knowledge of the subject. Hence a person who may desire 
 to possess some acquaintance with the science of mind finds 
 himself, at the outset, gravitating between the horns of an 
 unpleasant dilemma — he can understand little of modern 
 philosophical works without some insight into the previous 
 course of speculation, and the histories from which he should 
 learn it are enveloped in a mist of technical terminology, 
 which presupposes knowledge only to be gained from the 
 treatises of original thinkers — thus, philosophical text-books 
 are unintelligible without a history, and the history is inac- 
 cessible without the terminology of the text-books ! 
 
 The following pages constitute a humble endeavour to aid 
 anyone who finds himself in such an unpleasant position, and 
 iti the future I hope to provide a companion volume upon 
 Modern Philosophy ; in fact, the portion yet unprinted seems 
 to me to be most needed, and I have already covered some 
 of the ground, but difiSculties of treatment have delayed the 
 completion of the work, and in the meantime I venture to 
 publish the present instalment. 
 
 As most of the works that deal with this subject have for 
 many years been translations of German text-books, I may be 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 pardoned a few words of introduction to one of less importance 
 that has been reared at home. German thought is academic, 
 while ours is more human, and, therefore, I have endeavoured 
 to show Philosophers not as mere thinking machines, but 
 as men struggling with the problems of the world, and as 
 human beings who played their part in some of the stirring 
 scenes of the earlier spiritual movements of civilization. 
 
 Secondly, being at liberty to determine my own mode of 
 treatment, I have, in most cases, clearly indicated any word 
 that has acquired a philosophical signification, either by a 
 capital letter, inverted commas, or italics. 
 
 With regard to Greek terms I have had some difficulty. 
 Many are of such importance that an explanation seems 
 necessary, but to have done so in every case would have 
 involved an appearance of pedantry extremely disheartening 
 to the general reader. Hence I have availed myself of the 
 original terms only when I felt my own translation may have 
 needed some explanation, but others of importance have been 
 noted in the ' Index of Terms ' at the end of the book. 
 
 Lastly, I have endeavoured to supply the deficiencies of my 
 exposition by a series of diagrams which group together sym- 
 bolically many of the abstract principles. This method has 
 been used with advantage in most other sciences dealing with 
 concepts of a like nature, and it has been long established in 
 Logic, but its introduction to Philosophy proper seems to have 
 been hitherto unattempted. 
 
 W. R. SCOTT. 
 
 19, Trinity College, 
 November, 1893. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE V 
 
 INTRODUCTION I 
 
 PERIOD I. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. THE THREE EARLIEST SCHOOLS 3 
 
 Sec. I. — The lonians - 3 
 
 Sec. //.—The Pythagoreans - 5 
 
 Sec. in.— The Eleatics . 6 
 
 II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE - - II 
 
 Sec. I. — Heraclitus - - 11 
 
 Sec. II. — Empedocles and the Atomists 13 
 
 Sec. ///.— Anaxagoras 16 
 
 III. THE CLAIMS OF MAN - - l8 
 
 Sec. I. — The General Characteristics of the Sophists - 18 
 
 Sec. II. — Individual Sophists and their Method . - 21 
 
 Sec. III. — The Philosophical Basis of the Proceedings of the 
 
 Sophists - 22 
 
 Sec. IV. — Close of the Period - 23 
 
 PERIOD II. 
 
 I. SOCRATES ... 25 
 
 Sec. I. — His Relation to the Preceding Philosophy - 25 
 
 Sec. II. — The Life and Death of Socrates 26 
 
 Sec. III.— His Method - - 29 
 
 Sec. IV. — His Theory of Virtue - - 30 
 
 Sec. V. — The Lesser Disciples of Socrates - 31 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 11. PLATO ■ 33 
 
 Sec. /.—The Life of Plato 33 
 
 Sec. II. — His Inner Development 35 
 
 Sec. III. — The Dialectic or Theory of Ideas 37 
 
 Sec. /K— The Universe and Man - 38 
 
 Sec. F.— Ethics and the State - - 41 
 
 Sec. VI. — Plato's Successors in the Old Academy 45 
 
 in. ARISTOTLE 45 
 
 Sec. I. — His Life - 45 
 
 Sec. II. — His Historical Position 47 
 
 Sec. III. — Aristotle's Philosophy — {A) Metaphysics 49 
 
 Sec. IV.— {B) Physics - 53 
 
 Sec. V.— {C) Ethics - - 55 
 
 Sec. r/.— The 'Peripatetic School' 58 
 
 PERIOD III. 
 
 THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LAST PERIOD OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY 60 
 
 I. A. — THE STOICS 63 
 
 Sec. I. — The Philosophers of the Stoa 63 
 
 Sec. II. — Logic and Physics 64 
 
 Sec. III.— The Theory of Virtue 65 
 
 B.— EPICURUS AND HIS FOLLOWERS 
 
 Sec. I, — The Epicurean Society - 68 
 
 Sec. II. — Logic, or Canonic, and Physics 69 
 
 Sec. III. — Ethics 71 
 
 C. — SCEPTICISM IN THE NEW ACADEMY 72 
 
 Sec. I. — Scepticism as a School of Philosophy 72 
 
 Sec. II. — The Scepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades 74 
 
 75 
 75 
 
 II. ECLECTICISM 
 
 Sec. I. — General Characteristics 
 
 Sec. II. — The Fourth and Fifth Academies 76 
 
 Sec. III. — The Stoics - 77 
 
 Sec. IV. — The Cynics, Peripatetics, and Epicureans 80 
 
 Sec. V. — Later Scepticism 80 
 
CONTENTS ix 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 III. NEO-rLATONISM ^2 
 
 Sec. /.—The Transition from Eclecticism to the Philosophy of 
 
 Faith ... 82 
 
 Sec. //.— Plotinus - - 84 
 
 Sec. III. — lamblichus - 86 
 
 Sec. /K— The Last School of Neo-Platonism - 87 
 
 INDEX OF TERMS AND GLOSSARY • - 89 
 
 INDEX OF NAMES - - 9° 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE DIAGRAMS 9^ 
 
<^ 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 As Humanity presses rapidly onward, passing stage after stage 
 in quick succession, towards the goal of ■ its development, the 
 marks of distances traversed are forgotten in the haste that 
 urges us forward to gain the purposes ordained to be the re- 
 ward of our exertions and the stimulus to our hopes. In the 
 history of mankind there came a time when the satisfaction of 
 the gnawing cares of material wants left room for a wider view 
 of things, and gradually the rudimentary forms of the sciences 
 stood forth rough-hewn by man's exertions. As he laboured 
 on, piling knowledge to knowledge, facts began to group them- 
 selves in classes, and the toiler who was fortunate enough to 
 mount highest, found other groups around his own, standing 
 like isolated mountain-tops, without connection or unity. The 
 thirst for one path that would lead to heaven was quickened, 
 not appeased, by this discovery, and when men sought a 
 higher unity, Philosophy began. In other words, some method 
 was needed which would complete and, as it were, rule all 
 else that had been acquired by man. 
 
 Doubtless such a need arose long before any mariner was 
 found daring enough to launch his bark upon an utterly 
 unknown ocean. To civilized people, like the Chinese and 
 Hindoos, the yearning for one firm chain to bind all know- 
 ledge and endeavour must have made itself felt; but it was 
 allayed by the dogmas of their faith. They connected 
 
2 INTRODUCTION 
 
 together the myriad events and experiences of life, and then 
 believed the chain might be fixed to the religious centre of 
 their other beliefs. But Philosophy must know, while theology 
 believes. Theology begins with heaven and ends with earth ; 
 philosophy begins with earth and hopes to reach to heaven. 
 
 It was not until the Greeks emerged as a people and a 
 power that knowledge was able to make its last bold stride to 
 realize its owii inner meaning. No other people had been so 
 well situated to bring forth and nurture the infant science. 
 Their country stood as a bridge, connecting the sinking 
 civilization of Asia with the sturdy barbarism of Europe. 
 Their schemes for the colonisation of their neighbours led 
 to a healthy friction, which generated new ideas, at the same 
 time removing the glaring excrescences of their religious faith. 
 The agricultural character of their country was also an impor- 
 tant element in the maturing of the early Greeks ; a soil that 
 readily yielded its gifts but to those who could earn them, 
 taught early lessons of effort, while leaving leisure for mental 
 development and spiritual inquiries. From these two facts it 
 follows that the Greek religion, though apparently mere poly- 
 theism, contained the germs of a handmaiden science. It 
 was without either dogmatic system or an organized priest- 
 hood, and, therefore, it opposed no obstacle to the free growth 
 of independent inquiry. 
 
 The politics of the Greeks, moreover, were even more 
 fruitful in the foundation of Philosophy. With a remarkable 
 genius for the orderly combination of individuals, coupled 
 with a keen perception of their claims, they learned how 
 bodies of men could be best combined in a harmonious whole. 
 To translate the same principle from politics to the grouping 
 of the highest results of all existent knowledge was the be- 
 ginning of Philosophy. 
 
PERIOD I. 
 CHAPTER I, 
 
 THE THREE EARLIEST SCHOOLS. 
 
 Sec. I. — The lonians. 
 
 (a) Thales, one of the seven ' sages of Greece,' is the father 
 of philosophy. He is said to have been born in Miletus about 
 640 B.C., and his death is placed between the years 548 and 545 
 B.C. His contemporaries honoured him for diplomatic tact and 
 practical wisdom, while many records attest his knowledge of 
 mathematics and astronomy. It was but natural that a mind 
 whose horizon was so wide-reaching should divine the necessity 
 of a coping-stone to the sciences. Therefore he sought some- 
 thing into which every portion of nature might be resolved, and 
 from which they all originated. Some beginning of the world 
 was imperative, and a beginning he defined as that 'from 
 which anything originates.' This beginning, the primal matter, 
 he declared to be Water, from which all things arise and upon 
 which our earth floats, a supposition not unnatural to a native 
 of Ionia. The reasons justifying this generalization have partly 
 perished; indeed, it is doubtful if Thales committed his thoughts 
 to writing, and the loss is the less in that his importance lies 
 not so much in the discovery of a principle as in the founda- 
 tion of a new science. 
 
4 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 (6) Anaximander, like Thales, was distinguished by remark- 
 able knowledge, and, as a fellow-citizen and contemporary, he 
 followed the path already marked out. But at first sight his 
 conclusion seems to wander wide of the simple speculations of 
 Thales. Nevertheless, he too started with the same desire to 
 unify the manifold variety of nature. But the ' beginning ' is no 
 simple element, but the Unlimited or Boundless. For, he 
 reasoned, such must be the germ of the world, otherwise it would 
 be exhausted in the creation of infinite forms. What exactly 
 the Boundless was, Anaximander seems to have left undeter- 
 mined ; its negative character was its chief attribute, separating 
 it from the bounded and limited existence of matter in its con- 
 crete form. Primeval, indestructible, imperishable, without 
 limit or end, the Boundless was at once the parent and the 
 tomb of the diversified life of the world. 
 
 The Boundless, moreover, was in movement from eternity. 
 In its motion first the warm was parted from the cold, and 
 from these arose dampness. Dampness gave use to the earth 
 and the air. In its earlier stage the earth was fluid, and as it 
 dried human life began to appear. But the created world is 
 without permanence, it must resolve itself into the primal 
 matter, which will again give birth to successive creations, each 
 again doomed to perish and again be created in ceaseless suc- 
 cession. 
 
 (c) Anaximenes lived in the middle of the sixth century 
 before Christ, and like his predecessors was also a Milesian. 
 His philosophy starts from the central thought of Anaxi- 
 mander, that the beginning of all things must be boundless. 
 But he believed that it must be something definite and 
 tangible, a boundless something, not the Boundless as a mere 
 abstraction. He found air to be concrete and also unlimited 
 and in eternal motion. Thus Anaximenes united in his primal 
 matter the cdncrete characteristics of Thales and the infinite 
 range of the thought of Anaximander. 
 
 Air becomes rare or dense; so the primal matter, Air, by 
 
THE THREE EARLIEST SCHOOLS J 
 
 rarefaction became fire; by condensation first wind, then 
 clouds, water, and, last of all, earth. But the earth, as with 
 Anaximander, resolved itself again back to the primal matter, 
 and so in endless process. 
 
 {d) Later Adherents of the Ionic School. — The simpler 
 theories of Thales and Anaximenes found supporters even in 
 the end of the fifth century. Hippo modified the theory that 
 Water was the primal matter by changing it to Moisture. 
 Diogenes of Apollonia and Idseus followed Anaximenes. The 
 former especially supported the older doctrine against later 
 theories and criticism. 
 
 Sec. II. — The Pythagoreans. 
 
 (a) The Pythagorean Society. — During the life of Anaxi- 
 menes there arose a new system of thought. Pythagoras, well 
 known as a scholar, removed from Samos to Crotona in Italy, 
 where he gathered round him a body of followers bound together 
 by a semi-religious tie. The new society was pledged under an 
 oath of secrecy to reform their lives and practise moderation 
 and self-control. The members cultivated all the sciences and 
 arts of the time, devoting themselves chiefly to mathematics. 
 
 Proselytism is the usual manifestation of a vigorous spiritual 
 life, and accordingly the early Pythagoreans soon endeavoured 
 to induce others to follow in public the same principles that 
 dominated the secret life of the society. Gradually many of 
 the cities of Magna Grsecia adopted the new scheme of life, 
 until a strong political reaction forced Pythagoras himself to 
 fly from Crotona to Metapontum. The flight of the leader 
 was a signal for the burning of the central meeting-place of the 
 order, after which many of his disciples lost their lives. Early 
 in the fourth century Archytas of Tarentum called together, for 
 a time, the scattered members of the community, which rose 
 to great influence as a religious body, while its spiritual ten- 
 dencies steadily declined. 
 
6 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 {b) The Principles of Pythagorean Philosophy. — 
 Thales and his followers sought some beginning for the world 
 by endeavouring to reduce the manifold varieties of matter to 
 one from which they might be supposed to originate. Thus 
 they aimed at the discovery of a beginning. 
 
 The general tendency of the Pythagorean society was to 
 seek some characteristic which was common to all things. 
 Perhaps they were animated by an unconscious hope that this 
 characteristic might lead to the discovery of the beginning, the 
 search for which was the animating principle of early philo- 
 sophic effort. 
 
 The one feature in which all things agreed was the fact that 
 they possessed Number. Thus Number is the continuous 
 chain that binds together infinite diversity, and number can be 
 applied to all things. 
 
 From this they unhesitatingly concluded that 'AH is Number,' 
 thereby leaving the relationship between numbers and things 
 completely undetermined. 
 
 Number, moreover, is odd or even, and the even can be 
 equally divided, while the odd cannot. As the even can be 
 divided to an unlimited extent, number contains within it the 
 opposite principles of the Boundless and the Bounded, and 
 since Number is the principle of all things, everything must be 
 either bounded or unbounded. 
 
 But Number gives us this harsh antithesis only in analysis ; 
 it has also the characteristic of Harmony, which is eminently 
 the reconciliation of opposites. Therefore the diversity of 
 things as originating from Numbers is subjected to an unalter- 
 able law pf unity, and the world is delicately fitted together in 
 the symmetrical proportioning of its parts, each to aid in the 
 beauty of the whole. 
 
 (c) The Application of these Principles. — As there is 
 no special exponent of the Pythagorean teaching, it is natural to 
 expect much diversity in the practical application of their 
 principles. Moreover, when it became necessary to assign 
 
THE THREE EARLIEST SCHOOLS 7 
 
 number to each thing, the result exhibits so many renderings 
 that in most cases none can be specially accepted. 
 
 1. In the Pythagorean account of the actual world the 
 creative energy must have been One, and this was Hestia, the 
 central fire, ' the citadel of Zeus.' As One, the central fire 
 belongs to the Bounded, and it gradually attracted towards it 
 the unbounded. Around it move the earth and other heavenly 
 bodies. Of the numbers assigned to individual things, few 
 have any significance beyond the obvious statement that the 
 point is one, the line two, a surface (or superficies) three, and 
 the solid four.* 
 
 2 . As applied to moral action, the number theory necessarily 
 gives vague results. Probably, because virtue is the unity of 
 aim of life, it was defined as a Harmony. Justice is equality 
 multiplied by equality, because it returns equal for equal. The 
 remaining ethical maxims of the Pythagoreans refer to the inner 
 life of their society, and have no reference to their philo- 
 sophical system. 
 
 (d) Influence of the Pythagoreans. — The consolidated 
 influence of opinions, perpetuated by the numbers and lasting 
 life of a society, extended farther than the previous discoveries 
 of isolated individuals. Thus, thinkers who had kept apart 
 from the charmed circle of the mystic dogma of the Pytha- 
 goreans often exhibited traces of their doctrines. Hicetas of 
 Syracuse adopted the principle of the revolution of the earth, 
 but he made it revolve Jipon its own axis instead of round the 
 central fire. The comic poet Epicharmus also seems to have 
 * I. is the point ; II. tfee line ;. III. the superficies ; IV. the solid. 
 T. igh.. It! X» J. 
 
 ^1 
 
 / 
 
 
 jf / jr i~ »Mji* *in 
 
8 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 been influenced by Pythagorean teaching ; and in many philo- 
 sophers, such as Hippasus of Metapontum and Ecphantus, it 
 has been combined with other theories. 
 
 Sec. III.^The Eleatics. 
 
 The number - theory of the Pythagoreans contained the 
 opposed principles of one and more than one, or the One and 
 the Many, which were united by the further principle of 
 Harmony. The next important step was made by a body of 
 philosophers, called Eleatics from their place of residence. 
 To mount higher towards the explanation of the world, it was 
 necessary to resolve the antithesis between what was one and 
 more than one. This was accomplished by placing truth in 
 the former and denying it in the latter. Philosophy seeks 
 unity, and unity can be found, they argued, only by denying 
 the truth, and consequently the existence of that which seems 
 not to be one. Therefore, the whole universe is one grand 
 unity, and what appears to be plurality is but the semblance 
 unity adopts to the dim eyes of humanity. 
 
 The completion of a doctrine, so far in advance of their 
 predecessors, was the work of three generations. Xenophanes 
 denied the plurality of Gods, fixing the chief characteristic of 
 divinity in its essential unity. Parmenides directly extended 
 the same doctrine to the whole field of inquiry, and Zeno 
 approached the same result negatively by proving that every- 
 thing that was plural was but a standing contradiction, and, 
 therefore (by implication), what was One is alone self-consistent 
 and true. 
 
 (a) Xenophanes. — The anger of Xenophanes was roused 
 by the popular representation of the Gods. Surely it was a 
 mockery of Divinity to deify the frailties of humanity. Nay, 
 more, to say there are Gods is a weakness of undeveloped 
 intellect, for God must be the highest of all, and, therefore, 
 One, eternal and unalterable. 
 
THE THREE EARLIEST SCHOOLS 9 
 
 When he looked at the boundless changeless dome of the 
 heavens, he felt that he saw the One that drew the yearnings of 
 humanity towards itself. The world was One and God — the 
 great unity that contains within it all things. 
 
 (5) Parmenides saw that the divinity of the God of 
 Xenocrates was but the divinity of truth. Because the One, 
 or tEe world, or God was unity, it was consistent and true. 
 Therefore, the One was the only true existence. What was 
 false or many by its plurality forfeited all claim to true being. 
 True ' Being,' on the contrary, is one, indivisible, self-complete, 
 self-contained, equally distributed, changeless and imperish- 
 able. Separated from the divisions of time and space, and 
 shut out from the many and contradictory reports of the senses, 
 reason faced the one immutable existence alone in the void of 
 thought ! 
 
 But if ' Being ' be one, and one only, how is it that men 
 seem to see plurality in all things ? This Parmenides believed 
 to be a semblance of the one true existence travestied by the 
 cunning comedians our senses. Still, how can plurality, what 
 in strictness is not Being, even seem to be ? The explanation 
 forms the second part of the epic of the philosophy of 
 Parmenides. Being is Fire, the active vivifying principle 
 opposed to dull night and the gloom of nothingness. From 
 the combination of these arose the earth and men. In our 
 minds is found the same antithesis, and each elemental part 
 recognises that which is like it, and thus we lose true Being, 
 the true, and the One in the semblance of plurality. 
 
 (c) Melissus and Zeno of Elba. — Melissus hoped to fuse 
 the principle of Parmenides with portions of other philosophies. 
 In many points, however, he remained true to his predecessor, 
 especially in his steady advocacy of the unity and indivisible- 
 ness of true Being. He added to the doctrine by denying the 
 plurality involved in the division of space and time. 
 
 If Melissus partially endeavoured to be the bearer of a flag 
 of truce to other doctrines, Zeno of Elea was the uncom- 
 
10 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 promising herald of war. In his life and philosophy he was 
 alike at odds with the world. At Athens he was met by the 
 facile sneers of those who had adopted the easy doctrine of the 
 Ionics, and he turned against them the formal weapon of 
 insidious attack. He did not directly maintain the truth of 
 his own theory ; but the issue lay between his and another, 
 and that other, he maintained, was self-contradictory. There 
 is little mention in Zeno's work of the One, but he proved it to 
 be the sole existence by disproving the existence of the Many. 
 This method was known as dialectic. 
 
 Parmenides proved that only the One Is. Zeno began with 
 the last word of Parmenides, and maintained that what is not 
 one cannot be really said to be ; and, therefore, by implication 
 ' Being ' is One. 
 
 Plurality is the illusion of our weakness, and mocks us when 
 really investigated. If we trust for knowledge to what is Many, 
 we build our faith upon a fallacy, and our reason is the sport of 
 hidden contradictions. For space and time are the special 
 demesne of the Many, and they are jointless spectres ever one 
 in appearance, never one in reality. The numbers of things 
 in space, and of occurrences in time, each of them partake of 
 this elusive character. What seems to be one in space is but 
 bound together by a carefully-balanced contradiction, for it is 
 beyond protest both immensely great and miserably little. 
 Analyze it, and it must be composed of parts, and these parts 
 of lesser parts till they can no longer be divided. But to be 
 no longer capable of division, the last parts must be without 
 magnitude, and therefore their total is infinite littleness. On 
 the other hand, take another point of view, and the parts com- 
 posing the body must be separated froin their nei^jouring 
 parts, and these from those adjoining them, and so onitintil the 
 mind is fain to admit that that which seemed one. whole, and was 
 proved infinite in smallness, has now become infinitely great. 
 
 The same illusion mocks us in the occurrences of time. It 
 seems that Achilles, fleetest of mortals, will overtake the sluggard 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE n 
 
 tortoise. But spectre Time is the judge, and, let the tortoise 
 gain the slightest start, notwithstanding the hero's speed, he 
 can never regain the ground he has lost. For when Achilles 
 has gained the stage that marks the start of the tortoise, it 
 must be still ahead ; while he reaches that point the tortoise 
 still plods on, and so the race can never be ended, and 
 those we seem to see are but the illusion of the traitor 
 multitude self-betrayed by incongruity and internal dissension. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE. 
 
 Sec. I. — HeracUtus. 
 
 (a) His Position. — In the hands of the Eleatics Philosophy 
 had become bankrupt by their hasty desire to reach the goal 
 before it had been legitimately won. Reason impetuously 
 sought its destiny in the Unity of ' Being,' and found but a 
 void where it sank nerveless and exhausted. To this pro- 
 cedure a counter-tendency was opposed by Heraclitus, who, 
 fleeing the void that first allured and then engulfed the 
 reason of the Eleatics, found truth only in changes of the 
 world as they appeared to sense. The last words of the 
 Eleatics were ' Being ' alone is One ; the first maxim of 
 Heraclitus was all things change ; Being and non-Being are 
 alike one, for both are but fleeting manifestations of the cease- 
 less law of alteration. Thus change was banished by the 
 Eleatics only to be recalled by Heraclitus and enthroned as 
 the frial and universal law. 
 
 {b) "His Life. — With Diogenes of Sinope, Heraclitus divides 
 the title of the ' Misanthrope of Ancient Philost)phy.' Living 
 between the years 535 B.C. and 475 B.C., his birth touches the 
 closing years of the last generation of the Ionics, coinciding 
 with the migration of Pythagoras to Italy, and his maturity 
 
12 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 runs parallel with that of Parmenides. Of a haughty tempera- 
 ment and strong aristocratic opinions, he associated but little 
 with his contemporaries, and he sought truth by his own 
 method. Therefore, he cared little for making disciples, and 
 the disjointed sentences in which his utterances are clothed 
 seem rather to mystify than enlighten the reader. Hence, by 
 the time of Aristotle he was named the ' Dark ' or ' Obscure.' 
 
 (c) The Principles of his Philosophy. — The thought of 
 Heraclitus might be said to begin where the poem of Par- 
 menides ends. When the one sole existence 'Being' had 
 been defined, it was necessary to explain the manifold sem- 
 blance of the world, that which in its real nature is not ' Being ' 
 but illusion. Such a distinction, according to Heraclitus, was 
 unreal ; ' Being ' and ' non-Being ' cannot be severed, for all 
 things change from one to the other. ' All things change, and 
 naught abides.' 
 
 To distinguish, moreover, ' Being ' as one is equally false ; 
 for everything under a mask of unity conceals infinite diversity, 
 and whether things appear one or many is philosophically 
 unimportant. As before, the magician Change is at work, 
 dividing one in many, and binding the fragments into one. 
 
 The law of Change was too abstract to remain the expression 
 of the continual alteration of the world. Sometimes Hera- 
 clitus reached the idea, and again the influence of the Ionics 
 draws him back to something concrete, at once the cause and 
 the expression of the change. Thus, in demi-symbolism, flame 
 or vapour is the cause of ceaseless alteration. In endless 
 process under its guidance everything passes from one state to 
 its opposite, and all existence is an oscillation between contra- 
 dictions. We can see nothing but contrariety, and so strife 
 might be named ' the parent and king of all.' But, as with 
 the Pythagoreans, the range of opposition is fixed, and thus 
 even in it there is harmony. 
 
 (d) The Theory of the World. — The fire that sym- 
 bolizes Change passes into water, and water into earth. But 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE 13 
 
 there is no stability in any of these ; when the series is com- 
 pleted earth changes to water, and water to vapour, flame, or 
 fire. As the world is the theatre of all such changes, it mani- 
 fests them all, varying between nebulous vapour and the 
 apparently stationary existences opposed to it. 
 
 The life of man, like all else, is a portion of the great world 
 vapour, and subject to the same perpetual change. Fleeting 
 impressions form its spiritual nutriment, and hence it might be 
 anticipated that Heraclitus would place truth in them. But 
 unconsciously he was influenced by the Eleatic contempt for 
 the fleeting shadows that fell upon our minds whence we know 
 not. Though Change rules all with iron tyranny, man has a 
 meagre state where reason gives the law. Reason must be the 
 judge of truth, and the 'senses are but bad witnesses.' In our 
 conduct we should submit ourselves to the unalterable law of 
 ' Change ' with contentmetit, recognising this law itself is change- 
 less, and therefore of the same order as what man calls 
 Divine. 
 
 Sec. II. — Empedodes and the Atomisis. 
 
 {a) The Tendency of Both. — Heraclitus headed a new 
 generation of thinkers by his enunciation of Change as ex- 
 planation of the world. Inside Change there was much to be 
 learned, and a careful analysis of it was the work of his suc- 
 cessors. If Change be not a delusion, as Zeno of Elea main- 
 tained, there must be some reason for its existence. From 
 another point of view it may be said that the Eleatics be- 
 queathed Being, the One and unchangeable as truth and the 
 world we see as a falsehood ; with Heraclitus, on the contrary, the 
 world because it is plural, in its, complete subjection to Change, 
 is the sole truth. Empedodes and the Atomists had to face 
 this alternative, and they endeavoured to solve the riddle by 
 manacling the Proteus that had mocked the Eleatics and 
 bewitched Heraclitus. Both asked, 'Why should all things 
 be subject to Change?' and the answers are closely related, 
 
14 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 though based upon diflferent principles. Empedocles had a 
 dawning presentiment of the universal diffusion of force, and 
 his answer hovers between a scientific and a merely poetic use 
 of the idea. The Atomists saw Change exhibiting the con- 
 tinual characteristic of change of place, and (Aeir answer was a 
 microscopic analysis of matter, which gave parts so minute 
 that their ceaseless combinations seemed to explain the pro- 
 blem of all alteration. Thus it may roughly be said that 
 Empedocles endeavoured to explain Change dynamically, the 
 Atomists mechanically. 
 
 (b) Empedocles. — Like many of the earlier Greek philo- 
 sophers, Empedocles was an ardent politician, and like Pytha- 
 goras he gained the character of a prophet, and even a worker 
 of miracles. It is probably to this side of his life, rather than 
 his philosophy, that we should attribute many of the ethical 
 doctrines commonly connected with his name. 
 
 Empedocles differed from Heraclitus in attributing less 
 finality to Change, while he was more profoundly impressed by 
 the need of some permanent reality that would remain un- 
 altered, however disguised. Thus where he began to recede 
 from the position of Heraclitus he approached the pure Being 
 of the Eleatics. But in touching their main principle he again 
 diverged in a line peculiar to himself. The permanent Being 
 that changes is not one, but divided into four fundamental 
 forms, incapable of further analysis. These he named ' roots 
 of all.' They were the four elements — fire, air, water, earth 
 — which cannot be altered save in their mutual composi- 
 tion. 
 
 To compound the elements to form the objects met with in 
 the world a force was needed. Affinity and Repulsion (or, as 
 Empedocles named them, Love and Hate) bring together and 
 separate the elements in endless mutation. 
 
 At first the four elements were held together by Love in the 
 primal world until Repulsion separated them. But before the 
 extreme of disunion was reached, the action of Affinity created 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE 15 
 
 a whirling motion of the divided substances. From this arose 
 the universe, self-centred in endless rapidity of revolution. 
 
 On the earth lower forms of life were the first to appear. 
 Gradually as AflSnity mastered Repulsion, living organisms per- 
 fected themselves until mankind was reached. As we are 
 composed of the elements, so each element recognises that 
 which is akin to it, and we desire what attracts our whole 
 nature, and avoid what repels it. 
 
 (c) The Atomists. — The completion of the Atomistic 
 theory was the work of Leucippus and Democritus. The 
 principles of the theory are due to the former, and their appli- 
 cation to the younger and better-known philosopher. Like 
 Empedocles, they took up the problem bequeathed by Hera- 
 clitus, and the relation of the two solutions may be illustrated 
 by the connection between the lonians and Pythagoreans. 
 The qualities of matter intrude themselves upon our senses, 
 while its quantity has been a matter of subsequent discovery. 
 Thus, the first school of philosophy found the former, the 
 second inferred the latter, to be the chief characteristic. Simi- 
 larly, Empedocles based the permanent element in Change 
 upon a qualitative distinction, the Atomists upon quantity. 
 
 Being was everywhere the same in kind, but it was divided 
 into an infinity of indivisible parts, which were called Atoms. 
 The Atoms differed only in shape and size. 
 
 As Being they fill space, and they are separated by the Void, 
 hence the chasm between Eleatic Being and non-Being is 
 bridged by the permanent existence of a plurality of Atoms, 
 which demand emptiness to maintain their self-completeness in 
 isolation. 
 
 From eternity the Atoms stream.ed through space, the larger, 
 and therefore heavier, falling more rapidly than the smaller 
 and lighter. Impelled by this law, the larger Atoms travel more 
 rapidly, and bound against the lighter. In this ceaseless 
 bound and rebound the whole infinity begins to whirl in a 
 complex mass. As they crash together. Atoms of different 
 
i6 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 shapes glide away, while those of similar form remain together 
 in a close or loose embrace, according to the pressure to 
 which they are subjected. 
 
 In the universal Atom-stream, our world is but one of many 
 where the Atoms have been compressed into varied combina- 
 tions. The grouping of like-shaped Atoms gives the purer 
 substances, and those more compound are composed by a 
 temporary union of the varied forms. The globular Atom- 
 forms are the highest, and these form the most ethereal of 
 things, vapour or fire. Of the globular Atoms the smoothest 
 make the human soul, the highest element in man. The in- 
 tangible irradiations of Atoms from those already compressed 
 into bodies stamp themselves upon our souls through the eye. 
 and thus we learn the existence of the world around us, per- 
 ceiving each group of Atoms by the counterparts in ourselves. 
 
 Man, though high in the Atom-world, is not its highest pro- 
 duct. Greater and still more complex than he are beings who 
 haunt the upper air, and the Atoms flowing from these to us in 
 our dreams give us the idea of Gods. 
 
 Thus the change of the world is no longer unexplained. 
 Fate is an unappeasable taskmaster to the Atoms ; there is no 
 rest, and they fulfil their destiny in ceaseless movement. 
 Growth, decay, beginning and ending, are but the grouping 
 and ungrouping of myriads of indivisible unities, which thus 
 fulfil their destiny. The world shares the instability of indi- 
 vidual things, and 
 
 ' The flaring atom-streams, 
 Ruining along the illimitable inane, 
 Fly on to clash together again, and make 
 Another and another frame of things 
 For ever.' 
 
 Sec. III. — Anaxagoras. 
 
 {a) His Connection with his Predecessors. — As the 
 birth of Anaxagoras is not far distant from those of Empedocles 
 and Leucippus, so his philosophy is likewise an attempt to meet 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE 17 
 
 the same problems. He, too, found a permanent basis for 
 change, uniting the leading characteristics of the two preceding 
 systems. With the Atomists he held an infinity of minute 
 particles, but differing from Atoms in being divisible and each 
 of a specific quality, therein agreeing with Empedocles, from 
 whom, again, he differed in that the qualities of the ' germs of 
 things ' was complex, not elements. Thus he diverged from 
 both in making the quantity and quality of the primitive con- 
 stituents of things divisible and analyzable. Therefore, of the 
 three attempts to find a basis of Being as the subject of Change, 
 the first is mainly founded upon quality, the second upon 
 quantity, and the third is a union of the two cancelling incon- 
 sistent attributes. For the ' germs ' of things, while infinite in 
 number and indestructible, are miniatures of existing things ; 
 bones contain myriad parts of bone-stuff from which the whole 
 is composed, and so with all other things. 
 
 As with the Atomists, the ' germs ' are subject to a whirling 
 motion, but — and this is the importance of Anaxagoras — 
 whence comes the impetus ? To assign it to Fate was building 
 the universe upon an empty name, and Chance was but a cloak 
 to hide the want of knowledge of the true cause. Moreover, 
 the original state of the germs of the world was a chaos of 
 bafHing confusion, and how could it become the well-ordered 
 world we see around us, unless the cause be able to arrange it ? 
 Therefore, the mover of the germs or beginnings of things must 
 be Mind. 
 
 (6) The Application of his Principles. — There are thus 
 two opposed principles for the formation of the world. On the 
 one side, the germs of things (enpz/^aTo), or, as they were after- 
 wards named, ' like parts ' (o//,oio/iipn), necessarily compound, 
 containing all the parts of the world mingled together in an 
 abyss of chaos. On the other is Mind, simple in its nature, 
 ruled by itself alone and pre-eminently gifted by its purity. 
 As Intelligence, its function is that of ordering and arrange- 
 ment — the transformation of Chaos to Kosmos. It does this 
 
i8 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 by a whirling movement of the formless mass. Gradually by 
 their rotation germs are grouped according to their most 
 universal points of agreement ; and first, the damp and heavy, 
 uniting, sink towards the centre, while round them revolve the 
 light warm germs. As the movement continues, things as we 
 know them begin to emerge, yet never with finality, for similar 
 parts are never wholly grouped together to the exclusion of 
 those that differ from them ; and so the movement ceaselessly 
 continues, ever producing change and novel combinations. 
 
 By this mind-theory of Anaxagoras, Philosophy began to 
 awake dimly to a consciousness of its own power and the 
 higher elements in man. To realize the thought was the work 
 of others, for the supreme intelligence of Anaxagoras is only a 
 matter-mover ; and thus his name fitly closes the earlier specu- 
 lations concerning nature, while at the same time mistily 
 indicating a new and hitherto untrodden road. As closing the 
 earlier sequence, he seems to bind together the salient charac- 
 teristics of preceding philosophers. The chaos of the germs of 
 things reminds us of the Unbounded of Anaximander, while 
 opposed to it is the Unity of Mind, thus carrying out the 
 Pythagorean division of the numerical character of things. The 
 pure Being of the Eleatics is centred in Intelligence, whose 
 formative power in its existence is the dynamical principle of 
 Empedocles, and by its application it produces the process and 
 change of Heraclitus. Finally, the germs obviously resemble 
 the Atoms. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE CLAIMS OF MAN. 
 
 Sec. I. — The General Characteristics of the Sophists. 
 
 With the investigation of the problem of Change the direct 
 philosophy of the first period ends. At first flying high above 
 the earth, or buried in its inmost recesses, philosophical investi- 
 
THE CLAIMS OF MAN 19 
 
 gation was ignored by all but the curious. The time had now 
 come when the search for truth must collide with the beliefs of 
 practical life. From each side tendencies of different natures 
 had been gradually coming together. 
 
 In Greece of the fifth century culture and new ideas had 
 undermined the whole edifice of religious worship, and with its 
 fall the morality of the State had suffered. For the poetic 
 attributes of the popular religion had been banished by the 
 infant prattle of early science, and the skeleton that remained 
 grinned horribly at men's blind efforts after right. Public life 
 had likewise changed. A slow revolution had silently been 
 at work, and little was needed save utterance to show that the 
 old political maxim had been changed from the unselfishness 
 of ' One for all ' to the utter egoism of 'AH for one.' Under 
 the mask of a united democracy each individual sought his own 
 will under cover of that of the sovereign people. Thus, instead 
 of the old political unity, there arose a continual divergence of 
 interests, and consequently a wide-reaching scepticism in the ■ 
 basis of law and the State. 
 
 To those who watched the tide of events the same tendency 
 appeared in the early growth of philosophy. They saw the 
 search for a beginning merged in the rock of Being, which 
 was swept away by the ceaseless waves of Change. The 
 times did not give practical men the strength of mind or 
 will to wrest a new solution from the difficulties before them. 
 Doubt was in the air, and those who aspired to lead saw it 
 the more, and it only remained to enunciate the universal 
 scepticism. 
 
 This was unhesitatingly pronounced by the Sophists, or 'wise 
 men,' who endeavoured to control the seething elements of the 
 rising intellectualism of their day. They saw tradition stripped 
 of its sanctity ; and philosophy, too, must forego its claim to 
 the leadership of the sciences. As the will of the individual 
 had emancipated itself from the tutelage of the state, so his 
 opinion must decide what is true, and philosophy was but aa 
 
20 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 intellectual tyranny to be replaced by the milder rule of ' the 
 Wise,' or who persuaded when others convinced. 
 
 Persuasion was all that the individual in his new power 
 would take from the wreckage of the preceding system of 
 religious, philosophical, political and social life ; and the mission 
 of the Wise was to cultivate the art for themselves and teach it 
 to others. Philosophy they touched but to shatter, as pre- 
 scribing a law to the sovereign individual. Permissible as an 
 educational discipline for the refutation of the views or wishes 
 of others, it was childish in middle life and a crime in 
 the old. 
 
 But the state is composed of many individualities, and he 
 who rules must be able to control them. He must be able to 
 make ' the worse appear the better reason ' at will, and thus 
 some of the later Sophists were prepared at a moment's notice 
 to maintain either side of any question. In the new state of 
 things the same wish dominated the conduct of all who 
 were ambitious, and thus the Sophists were attended by 
 numerous followers who endeavoured to cultivate the same 
 arts. . By a strange transition, philosophy was supplanted by 
 Rhetoric, and as speakers the Sophists wielded great influence. 
 Travelling from city to city, they neglected no art to proclaim 
 their own sufficiency. Everywhere they dazzled the young, 
 and received large sums of money for their teaching. Popu- 
 larity was their main object, and it was readily gained, for the 
 substitution of expression for thought is always popular and 
 eagerly welcomed. Eminently men of the world, they represent 
 in the history of civilization the first attempt of the quick- 
 witted, and clever to appropriate the labours of the scholar 
 while scouting his toil ; in the history of philosophy, without 
 being themselves philosophers, they are the brilliant champions 
 of individual thought and the claims of the mind to primary 
 and paramount consideration. 
 
THE CLAIMS OF MAN 21 
 
 Sec. II. — Individual Sophists and their Method. 
 
 Protagoras of Abdera was the first to lay claim to the lofty 
 title of a wise man. His birth is assigned to about 480 B.C., 
 and he is said to have studied philosophy in early life. As a 
 ' wise ' man he gave out that his mission was to heal the souls 
 of men by curing them of the vain desire to catch a phantom 
 truth, and teaching them instead to nourish such thoughts as 
 were profitable. In return he received large sums of money 
 as he wandered from city to city in Greece, until the Athenians 
 burned his book and expelled him from the city. The charge 
 of Atheism was founded upon the opening sentence of his 
 treatise upon the Gods. ' As for the Gods,' he said, ' I have 
 no means of knowing whether they exist or not, for there are 
 many hindrances besides the obscurity of the subject and the 
 shortness of the life of man.' 
 
 Gorgias, a contemporary of Protagoras and a man of over- 
 bearing ostentation of manner, was a native of Sicily. He was 
 selected to represent his townsmen of Leontium in a negotia- 
 tion at Athens, where he remained for some time as a Sophist, 
 teaching rhetoric and practising politics. After leading the 
 usual wandering life of the Sophist, he settled at Larissa, in 
 Thessaly, where he died at over a hundred years of age. 
 
 The wisdom of Prodicus gave rise to the proverb, ' Wiser 
 than Prodicus.' He was famed for his grammatical discoveries 
 and moral precepts, and Socrates is said to have attended his 
 lectures. 
 
 When the profession of the Sophists had become famous, 
 their ranks were largely augmented by men who exaggerated 
 their faults and went to still greater lengths to secure popularity. 
 Amongst these may be mentioned Hippias of Elis, who boasted 
 of great knowledge in Mathematics, Astronomy, History, and 
 Physical Science. Thrasymachus was a rhetorician. Euthy- 
 demus and Dionysodorus, the central characters of one of Plato's 
 dialogues, gave instruction in military tactics. Minor Sophists, 
 
22 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 while professing all sciences and arts, gave special attention to 
 one study to dazzle the more effectually those whose gifts they 
 wished to attract. As a body they were the intriguers, public 
 speakers, popular teachers, critics and leaders of the cultured 
 scepticism that called their arts into being, while growing under 
 their brilliant personalities and striking powers of expression. 
 
 Sec. III. — The Philosophical Basis of the Proceedings of the 
 Sophists. 
 
 To make ' the worse appear the better reason ' was the aim 
 of the Sophists. Underlying their practical procedure there 
 was the theoretical principle of disbelief in any fixity of know- 
 ledge. As Heraclitus taught, all things were carried along the 
 great river of change, and man himself with the rest ; hence we 
 must affirm that each thing is as it appears at the moment. But 
 the appearance can only be observed by man, and therefore, 
 though himself but a drift upon the stream of change, he is, 
 in virtue of his faculty of feeling, a register of change. ' Thus 
 man is the measure of all things.' 
 
 Man, as the standard to measure all that is, must again be 
 dissolved into his elements. He can but measure through 
 his senses, and these give a chaos of individual impressions 
 all different, many of them contradictory. Moreover, the 
 impressions of no two men agree, and thus the same sensation 
 may be real to one, unreal to another. Hence nothing can be 
 affirmed to be true, nothing false. Contradictory assertions are 
 each of them but blank documents, to either of which we may 
 affix our signature, as led by caprice or the fickle feeling of the 
 moment. 
 
 If there be no universal truth there is no universal law. As 
 sense is the blind recipient of the little light we can gain, so in 
 action we must follow the same guide, and our sole concern is 
 its gratification. 
 
 Hitherto man had been restrained from using his power of 
 ' measuring ' his surroundings and adapting his action to the 
 
THE CLAIMS OF MAN 23 
 
 results. In morals he was restrained by a myth of the power 
 of the Gods, invented by politicians to save themselves and 
 cramp his freedom. In the State he had been taught that law 
 was founded upon an unalterable basis fixed by nature. But is 
 not man, the measure of the universe, his own lawgiver, and 
 can he be denied the right of holding for law what satisfies 
 himself and can be won as the reward of his adroitness or 
 energy ? 
 
 These conclusions were not drawn by some of the earlier 
 Sophists; on the other hand, they represent a moderation 
 ridiculed by their successors. Gorgias, for instance, though 
 a contemporary of Protagoras, advanced beyond him in his 
 sarcastic refutation of the current beliefs. He used the trenchant 
 dialectic of Zeno to demolish the whole frame of the world, 
 which he named the ' Non-existent.' He shaped his argument 
 with forensic acuteness to prove Nothing could exist, and even 
 if it could exist it could not be known, and if known it could 
 not be communicated. 
 
 Sec. IV. — Close of the Period. 
 
 The first period in the history of philosophy has been named 
 its youth or the time of struggle. With boyish confidence, the 
 earliest philosophers demanded a beginning for the infinite 
 diversity of the world around them. The general solution of 
 the Ionics was to dignify one of the forms of concrete existence 
 by naming it the primal matter. The Pythagoreans abstracted 
 all material characteristics, and founded their system upon the 
 form alone, which they found to be number. Mounting still 
 higher, the Eleatics stripped number of its plurality, and gave 
 philosophy the firm foothold of pure Being in its unity. 
 
 Change, however, flitted on through the number theory and 
 carried away ideal Being. With chastened ardour the next 
 group endeavoured to explain the problem with unabated hope. 
 Side by side with the mechanical theories, Anaxagoras found 
 the primal motive force for the germs of the world in Intelli- 
 
24 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 gence, leaving the discovery he scarce understood to be com- 
 pleted by a new generation. 
 
 To carry on the growth of discovery, the ground must be 
 prepared, the stubble of the earlier theories cut away, and the 
 seed preserved for those who followed and who could under- 
 stand. This was the work of the Sophists. They represent 
 the youth of philosophy vanquished in its first confident 
 struggle with the problems of existence. Returning from 
 dearly-won victories, the spoils are found to be but barren 
 trophies when compared with the field of real life. In truth, 
 the comparison was the sole victory. The meeting of philosophy 
 and life, of thought and the world, was especially momentous, 
 A light seemed to break forth over the shattered remnants of 
 both, at first leading to doubt, and by doubt to the necessary 
 condition for new discovery. Thus the Sophists prepared the 
 ground for their successors. 
 
 After them there was no exemption from the search-warrant 
 held by the mind. All that was, all that was thought or done, 
 was open to doubt, and therefore to inquiry. The mind was 
 awakened to claim precedence instead of dreamily waiting for 
 the impressions thrust upon it from without. None but the 
 ignorant or indolent could rest in what was taken for granted as 
 exciting the imagination or pleasing the ear. The coming 
 philosophy must part with assertion and journey forward with 
 proof. When all that men hold dear was subject to reproach, 
 the time had come for a commanding genius to recall the 
 banished ideals and reinstate the fallen dignity of truth and 
 manhood. 
 
PERIOD II. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 SOCRATES. 
 
 Sec. I. — His Relation to the Preceding Philosophy. 
 
 The man who fully appreciated the tendencies of time, raised 
 himself above them, and pointed a new way to philosophy, was 
 Socrates. Looking back, we see his remarkable personality as 
 the result and directing power of the labours and speculations 
 of those who had gone before him, while he seems in many 
 respects opposed to them all. His mission was to reconcile 
 the contradictions opposed by time in the presuppositions of 
 previous theories. The simple generalizations of the earlier 
 philosophers had been sneered away by the Sophists, as the 
 vassalage of the mind had been remitted to give place to the 
 democratic tyranny of individual opinion, and Socrates was to 
 decide the new position of self-consciousness as it slowly 
 emerged as a power in philosophy. 
 
 To make the mind a dumb handmaiden of physical investi- 
 gation, he held, was to wander in a wrong direction at the very 
 outset. Summoned by the progress of knowledge, the express 
 command of the oracle he most revered, ' Know thyself,' was 
 continually ringing in his ears, and its reverberation in his 
 soul directed his thoughts and method. Self-knowledge filled 
 his mind as a region unexplored, and fraught with boundless 
 possibilities of discovery. 
 
26 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 On the other hand, while indirectly influenced by the 
 Sophists, he was the unflinching foe of the intellectual petu- 
 lance that denied truth, because the search was long, and the 
 sanction of law, because it galled them. Human egotism was 
 flattered by being elevated ' to measure ' the universe, but the 
 countless and diverse feelings of men have no stability, and 
 ' the measure of all things ' is as fleeting as the evanescent 
 shapes that bear him away. Instead of the motley and un- 
 certain ' man ' of Protagoras, Socrates was to find what in 
 humanity could be the canon of all he might believe and all 
 he ought to do. Now that scepticism had done its work, 
 Socrates must seek a new method to lay again the foundations 
 for a fresh search after truth. 
 
 To accomplish this he gave the world a ii/e instead of a 
 theory — a life opposed to the Sophists at every point. They 
 were rich ; Socrates was poor. The Sophists taught for money ; 
 Socrates in his poverty asked not even thanks. They called 
 themselves wise, and professed to teach ; he professed ignor- 
 a:nce, and entreated to be taught. They were ostentatious, 
 and he was humble. They were men of the world, living at 
 courts and flattering the rich ; he sought the poor, and spoke 
 his mind before a reckless mob, or even to his friends. Such 
 a life was his sole legacy to posterity, and it was an incontro- 
 vertible example of the existence of a nobility of soul that had 
 been apparently banished by the specious arguments of the 
 Sophists. 
 
 Sec. II. — The Life and Death of Socrates. 
 Socrates was born in 470 b.c, or early in the next year, thus 
 following closely upon the earlier Sophists, Gorgias and Prota- 
 goras. His father was a sculptor, and his mother a midwife. 
 The art of the former he is reported to have practised early in 
 life, and he often uses his mother's calling as symbolic of the 
 help he endeavoured to give those whom he found labouring 
 with ideas they were unable to bring forth. Of his youth 
 
SOCRATES 27 
 
 there are few accounts. His marriage with .Xantippe has 
 linked his name with that of a shrew, and the virtue of more 
 than ordinary conjugal patience. As a citizen he took part in 
 the government and wars of Athens. During the campaigns 
 he was distinguished by his bonhomie and endurance. None 
 bore better the scarcity of provisions and hardships of a winter 
 bivouac ; when others remained in their tents or crept out 
 shivering in furs, Socrates wandered over the ice barefooted, 
 with only his ordinary clothes, shaming the effeminacy of his 
 companions. In the heat of battle he saved the life and arms 
 of his friend, Alcibiades. In the rout at Delium he retreated 
 calmly, with a majesty of mien that warned his pursuers to 
 respect the greatness of a soul that knew no defeat. In public 
 life he braved both the tyranny of the ' Thirty ' and the rage of 
 the Democracy. When ordered by the former to execute an 
 unjust sentence, he added to the nobility of his conduct by the 
 simplicity with which he tells it: 'The other four went to 
 Salamis and fetched Leon, but I went quietly home ; for which 
 I might have lost my life, had not the power of the " Thirty " 
 shortly afterwards come to an end.'* Later, when in the 
 peculiar administration of justice at Athens, Socrates was 
 presiding, the mob became furious at the denial of the uncon- 
 stitutional sentence they demanded. They clamoured for an 
 impeachment of those who withstood their pleasure, and all 
 but Socrates yielded. He alone stood firm without flinching, 
 and though one against the people, his uncompromising atti- 
 tude secured an adjournment for the day of his office. 
 
 In social life Socrates was a strange figure ; barefooted, 
 shabby, with snub, upturned nose, protruding eyes, and un- 
 wieldy frame, he sauntered from place to place like Silenus in 
 the flesh. When he spoke, the listener was sometimes charmed 
 in spite of hirnself, sometimes goaded by a succession of urbane 
 and trivial questions to anger which, strange to say, left him the 
 
 * 'The Dialogues of Plato,' translated by B. Jowett, M.A., vol. i., 
 p. 365- 
 
28 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 germ of an idea. To teach people in spite of themselves by 
 the commonplace dialogue of everyday life was the aim of 
 Socrates. He was everywhere ready to combat the growing 
 egoism of the people. Who could refuse to enlighten the 
 humble, ugly old man ? No one could deny an answer to his 
 polite questions. Gradually, with exquisite tact and skill, he 
 placed before the astonished teacher the whole disordered 
 bundle of thoughts that had before seemed so consistent and 
 valuable. Those who were pretentious deemed such teaching 
 unwarranted impertinence, but young men of open minds 
 gathered round the great-souled critic of the life and manners 
 of the nation. They admired his keen wit and wondrous subtlety, 
 while the unostentatious simplicity and remarkable magnetism of 
 his character irresistibly recalled them from luxurious indolence 
 to the noble ideal of a life permeated with unselfish thought. 
 It was thus that Socrates endeavoured to regenerate Athens by 
 educating her sons. 
 
 The complete self-renunciation of such an aim awakened no 
 response in the cultured selfishness of the time. When Socrates 
 had become old in work, he was accused of perverting the 
 youth, of slighting the Gods of the people, of introducing new 
 Deities. He was summoned before the tribunal of justice, and 
 answered his accusers with the dignity of the innocent and the 
 playfulness of a large mind pleading before the exponents of 
 errors he had judged and forgiven. Without any plea for 
 sympathy or excuse, he told the simple tale of a life of poverty 
 and teaching — how he had everywhere found ignorance in 
 those who boasted knowledge, how he alone of all the 
 Athenians knew that he knew nothing, how simply he had 
 sought to lighten the darkness around him. Truth was not the 
 legal language of Athens, and, to her eternal shame, Socrates 
 was condemned to die. When the sentence was pronounced, 
 he bade farewell to those amongst whom he had laboured so 
 long in words weighted with prophecy, through which his great 
 love shone pure and steadfast to the end. Though unjustly 
 
SOCRATES 29 
 
 condemned, he would accept no opportunity of flight, lest 
 he should seem to prefer dishonour to death. On the last 
 day, after talking long of the immortality of the soul, he 
 bade a kind farewell to the women of his household, with 
 Xantippe among them, and rebuked the tears of his friends. 
 Even the messenger of death, who brought the poison, wept 
 with the rest, and Socrates alone was unmoved, save for the 
 sorrow of others. Taking the cup, he sprinkled a few drops in 
 honour of the Gods, calmly drank, and then lay down to die. 
 When Crito closed the eyes of Socrates, the Spirit of Humanity 
 was at last freed from the bondage of tradition, and at the same 
 time taught the true use of liberty. 
 
 Sec. III.— His Method. 
 
 The easy conversation of Socrates was the struggling speech 
 of a new method both of inquiry and teaching. 
 
 Upon its negative side it has been called irony. Professing 
 to know nothing, Socrates insidiously led his arrogant teacher 
 to probe his own thoughts and discover their inconsistencies. 
 'Y\\& positive outcome is a disentangling of the confused skeins 
 of ideas, whence knowledge was unexpectedly born. Under 
 repeated questions is concealed a cautious development of the 
 embryo thought. Beginning with the ordinary experience of 
 everyday life, he compared and contrasted different instances, 
 eliminating non-essentials, until a notion containing all the 
 essentials of the many individual experiences was unexpectedly 
 brought forth. To determine any question, Socrates asked 
 those whom he met to quote instances ; when a sufficient 
 number had been obtained, he fixed a salient characteristic in 
 one, and if by comparison it were found to be common to 
 all, the last stage of the inquiry was to determine in what 
 respects it needed to be augmented by others. By this method 
 he found in the unity of a definition the invisible thread upon 
 which the mind strings its possessions from moment to moment; 
 by the same means he gave a touchstone for discriminating 
 
30 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 between the valuable and the worthless. When the definition 
 had been established, it presented a single definite thought to 
 the inner eye of the mind, where it lay in small bulk, easy of 
 access and ready at any moment to afford a test to the claims 
 of any new experience to be ranked under it or transferred to 
 another. 
 
 Sec. IV. — His Theory of Virtue. 
 When by this method the possibility of grouping many 
 diverse things under a single mental unity was recognised, it 
 was but natural that Socrates should attach great importance 
 to the knowing powers of the mind. But under the influence 
 of the Sophists the starting-point was practical life, and from 
 his own character he invariably looked at its ethical side, hence 
 he was predisposed to connect the two together — to merge 
 virtue in knowledge. Moreover, his conversations about life 
 always led to the conclusion that knowledge was the line that 
 sundered good and evil — when men have insight they are good, 
 when they want it they are bad. 
 
 When a possible act is understood, when its relation to what 
 is noble, lovely and true, its antecedent principles, future 
 effects, with the full complement of means, are harmonized 
 with the broad view of a wise man, it is known, and therefore 
 it should be done. From this follows the apparent paradox 
 that the man who acts wrongly, knowing the right, is better 
 than he who is ignorant j for with the latter knowledge, and 
 therefore virtue, is missing ; with the former action in its blind- 
 ness has been but temporarily incited to rebel against the 
 leadership of knowledge. 
 
 The proposition that virtue is knowledge has two conse- 
 quences. In theory, from the unity of knowledge, it follows 
 that Virtue is One ; in practice, since knowledge can be taught, 
 Virtue (as knowledge) is itself teachable. 
 
 The question next arises, ' Why should we be virtuous ?' or 
 in the theory of Socrates, ' Why should we act from knowledge 
 rather than without it?' This question he never answered 
 fully, or, rather, it was answered only popularly. We should 
 
SOCRATES 31 
 
 act with knowledge because action waits on knowledge, because 
 happiness rewards the good and misery haunts the wicked, 
 because the State commands us and the unwritten laws of 
 custom and society all but compel us. 
 
 Thus, in the only sphere to which Socrates himself applied 
 his method, he was able to begin a theory of conduct and 
 morality; at the same time, like many other discoverers, he 
 failed to realize the importance of his work, or advance it 
 beyond a solid foundation. The building remained for others 
 to complete, and, when the work is ended, for enlightened 
 humanity to inhabit. ' 
 
 Sec. V. — The Lesser Disciples of Socrates. 
 
 {a) The Tendency of his Followers. — Socrates left but 
 a life behind him. He wrote nothing, and his philosophy is 
 mainly culled from the accounts of Xenophon and what 
 criticism has separated from Plato's own opinions in his 
 dialogues. By Plato alone his life was glorified and his method 
 understood and completed. From his many-sided personality 
 others took what their nature was able to receive. Antisthenes 
 exaggerated and caricatured the freedom from desires that 
 ennobled the life of his master. Aristippus, finding that the 
 impetus towards virtue, according to Socrates, was Happiness, 
 explained virtue as pleasure. Euclides missed the true but 
 hidden basis of the fragmentary Socratic philosophy, and 
 supplied it from another system. Followers gathered round 
 each of the three, and soon there grew up three schools, each 
 professing to teach the philosophy of Socrates. 
 
 Q?) Aristippus and the Cynics. — The moderation of the 
 master became the excess of the pupil. Self-control was advo- 
 cated by Socrates, and Aristippus saw no other side to his 
 character. The fine humanity of Socrates was lost, and instead 
 of it was substituted an ideal of the renunciation of every gratifi- 
 cation and every desire. Even the longing for knowledge was 
 to be stifled, ^nd therefore virtue was not knowledge, but 
 asceticism. 
 
32 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Those who had lost or forfeited every claim to enjoyment 
 joined Aristippus, who now numbered the remarkable Diogenes 
 of Sinope amongst his followers. They were called Cynics, either 
 from their meeting-place in the Cynosarges, or their miserable 
 life ' like dogs ' (xuwxos). Virtue is the sole object to be desired, 
 Vice alone to be avoided. All else is indifferent. Labour may 
 lead towards virtue, pleasure most hkely to vice. Hence 
 Aristippus called for ' madness before pleasure.' 
 
 Careless of all externals, surly, isolated, wandering like beggars, 
 arrogantly renouncing all things save strength of will, we may 
 be inclined to censure men who, seeing with Socrates the need 
 of reform without his power to aid, gave up every enjoyment 
 rather than gratify it against the dictates of their better nature. 
 
 (c) Antisthenes and the Cyrenaics. — Antisthenes, true 
 to the quest for virtue originated by Socrates, concentrated his 
 attention upon the moral problem. But his solution ignored 
 the side of Socrates' conduct exaggerated by Aristippus, and 
 became based upon the stimulus given to right action by happi- 
 ness. Happiness, moreover, consisted in pleasure, and the 
 main efforts of his followers were confined to the exact specifi- 
 cation of the gratification that should be sought. 
 
 Antisthenes himself, as a capable, dexterous man of the 
 world, gave his vote for as much positive pleasure as could be 
 by any means procured. Round him at Cyrene were grouped 
 those whose strong passions gave them leisure to calculate what 
 gratification should be especially chosen. Theodorus placed 
 pleasure, and therefore virtue, in the calmness of spirit that 
 avoids all excess. Hegesias went further, and recommended 
 the virtuous man to avoid both pleasure and pain, and secure 
 a stable equilibrium of the soul in indifference to external 
 things beyond his control. Anniceris took a wider view, and 
 brought the pleasure-principle nearer to practical life, by 
 teaching that pain is often the condition of pleasure, and 
 when, in the equating of the two, sacrifices were justified by a 
 greater gain, they should be cheerfully made. 
 
SOCRATES 33 
 
 (d) EucLiDES OF Megara. — The union of virtue and know- 
 ledge needed a definite support. Struck by the coincidence 
 between the Socratic unity of virtue and the Eleatic unity of 
 ' Being,' Euclides proclaimed the two to be identical. Thus the 
 practical teaching of Socrates was grafted upon the theoretical 
 philosophy of Parmenides, the Being of the one being changed 
 to the ' Good ' of the former. As with the Eleatics, the in-- 
 divisible unity is Perfection, its changeful manifestations imper- 
 fection. The sole object of desire should be the knowledge of 
 perfection or the Good by the clear eye of reason. The maKy 
 pursuits of men are therefore to be avoided. 
 
 Euclides was followed by dialecticians, as Parmenides was 
 succeeded by Zeno. Their destructive arguments could add 
 nothing to their barren doctrine, and the Megarians were in 
 part the originators of Scepticism, as the Cynics laid the 
 foundation of Stoicism and the Cyrenaics of Epicureanism. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 PLATO. 
 
 Sec. L—The Life of Plato. 
 
 Or the followers of Socrates, only one was able to understand 
 and perfect his philosophy, and it is a strange coincidence that 
 the beginning of the master's teaching may be assigned to nearly 
 the same date as the birth of his true successor. In the year 
 427 B.C., amid the disasters of Athens, a son was born of an 
 illustrious house and named Aristocles. Later he was known 
 as Plato, the ' broad-shouldered ' or ' broad-browed,' and we 
 can well imagine that the reverence of his followers adopted 
 the latter title, by which his personality was severed from his 
 family to become the property of the world. In his young 
 manhood the influence of the Sophists suggested doubts that 
 turned him from public life to study, and wlien he was twenty 
 
 3 
 
34 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 he joined Socrates, whom he followed through the last eight 
 years of teaching that closed in the tragic trial scene and 
 judicial murder. 
 
 After the death of his master, Plato travelled for many yearsi 
 visiting the disciples of Socrates at Megara and Cyrene. After- 
 wards he wandered to Egypt and Lower Italy, where he found 
 Pythagoreanism revived after the persecutions of the fifth 
 century. From the Megarians he learnt the need of supple- 
 menting the doctrine of Socrates, and his contact with the 
 Pythagoreans urged him to bring Philosophy nearer to practical 
 life. The occasion for fitting theory to practice presented 
 itself upon his visit to the court of Dionysius the Elder in 
 Sicily, but philosophical theories of Government met with scant 
 favour from the despot, and Plato was sold as a slave and 
 ransomed by Anniceris, the Cyrenaic. Hoping still, he re- 
 turned at the invitation of his kinsman Dion, when the younger 
 Dionysius had succeeded to the throne, only to meet fresh 
 rebuffs and new dangers. 
 
 After the first of his three visits to Sicily, Plato formally 
 opened a ' School,' known as the Academy, where, in cloistered 
 silence, under the shade of lofty trees, and in the presence of 
 the sculptured effigies of gods and god-like mortals, he unfolded 
 the sublime theory that, struggling with the problems of every 
 department of life, endeavoured to subdue them all by a single 
 philosophical principle. Those who remembered Socrates and 
 new seekers after truth flocked around him — even women, it 
 has been asserted, in the attire of men — all of whom revered 
 the man who, by travel and study, had gathered together and 
 reconciled the best thoughts upon the secrets of the soul and 
 mysteries of the world. Thus, teaching, writing, or walking 
 apart in silent meditation, he spent the afternoon and evening 
 of Hfe, till death came to him like a gentle sleep in his eightieth 
 year (347 b.c). 
 
PLATO 35 
 
 Sec. II. — His Inner Development. 
 
 The life of Plato is marked by three main stages — he was 
 first a learner, then in meeting other philosophies a critic who 
 himself gained by the contact, last of all a teacher. 
 
 From Socrates he learnt the necessity of certainty instead of 
 doubt, the importance of morality, and the new method of 
 philosophic inquiry. But, to carry on the campaign against 
 scepticism, more was needed than the mere generalizations of 
 his predecessor. For if man be but a mere shape of the 
 universal vicissitude, the definition or thought so hardly won 
 from his experiences must share the uncertainty upon which 
 they are founded. While still under the immediate influence 
 of Socrates, Plato began to fix the definition as something 
 permanent and above the changeful states from which it is 
 apparently collected. Gradually the conception of virtue 
 advanced from summation in a single thought to the existence of 
 it. This inner progress gave birth to a corresponding change 
 in the outward expression of philosophical teaching. The 
 individual conversations of Socrates with living persons were 
 replaced by the dramatized dialogues of Plato, whose opinions 
 are enforced, by 'the leading personages who held them and 
 submitted to the ruling of the idealized Socrates. As the 
 dialogues were written during the greater portion of the think- 
 ing activity of Plato, so they exhibit the same progress that 
 marks his inner life. 
 
 During his travels the growth of other principles irradiated ; 
 the possibilities and limitations of his younger work. The yet 
 unsolved antithesis of Being and Becoming or Change, came 
 into rude contact with his growing theory. If virtue is know- 
 ledge garnered from the field 6f changing life, how can the 
 harvest be fully secured ? The faculty by which man raises 
 himself above the stream of change by binding many states 
 under a single thought is powerless to grant a permanence that 
 is not his to give. Heraclitus had proved, all too clearly, that 
 
36 :A simple history OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 life and the world are both hurried on without ceasing by the 
 unalterable law of Change. Behind his changeful universe the 
 Being of the Eleatics stands firmly fixed in a moveless calm. 
 Each was set in mutual exclusion at the opposite poles of 
 philosophical speculation, and there appeared no possibility of 
 bridging the gulf. Yet Plato felt the attempt must be made, 
 for the world in its change was an undeniable fact ; but if there 
 were no Being, if nothing were permanent. Philosophy, Science 
 and Knowledge were alike but empty dreams. The influence 
 of Socrates moved his pupil to endeavour to cross the gulf, 
 while his own independent study proved a sure pilot. Plato 
 saw clearly, what Socrates dimly guessed, that in the generaliza- 
 tion of changing individual instances under a single thought, 
 the mind by its activity had passed from the fleeting field of 
 sense to the still world of reason. Hence ' Becoming ' and 
 ' Being ' can be reconciled, for the former was the world of 
 Heraclitus, the latter that of the Eleatics. Before opposed, as 
 each claiming sole right to the same world, Plato limited and 
 defined the sphere of each. Sense was fitted but to deal with 
 what was plural and fleeting — to it belonged the world of 
 Change : Reason rested in the peace of changeless unity ; by 
 it we rise to abstract Being. The definition of Socrates thus 
 became invested with the higher order of Being, and in its new 
 character it became the Idea, the eternal prototype of every 
 class of concrete existence. Each Idea possessed the lofty 
 attributes of Eleatic Being, while in their plurality they ofiered 
 an opportunity of reconciling the previous antithesis of the One 
 and the Many, for each was one with many beside it ; but if 
 the line of demarcation be drawn elsewhere, the Idea, which 
 was one before, has become a component part of the many. 
 Beyond and above the fever of life there is the divine world of 
 Ideas that gives light to our darkness and fixity to vicissitude. 
 Its symmetry and beauty console us for the broken dreams of 
 loveliness we may sometimes enjoy, and inspire the soul to 
 pant onwards to the higher destiny that awaits it when released 
 from bondage here. 
 
PLATO 37 
 
 When Plato began to teach, the sublime ideal of a mortal 
 winning the secrets of immortality* caused him to trace 
 out and establish the Ideas in every department of thought and 
 life. In the Supreme Good, the highest goal of the individual 
 man, in the question of his immortality, in the State, and in th6 
 growth of the universe, the Ideas will be found establishing 
 fixity and order. 
 
 Sec. III. — The Dialectic or Theory of Ideas. 
 
 Underlying all application of the Ideas is the ground of 
 their existence and their various characteristics. The science 
 establishing these features Plato named ' Dialectic,' marking 
 the meeting-ground of the imaginary dialogues of philosophers 
 instead of the Socratic conversations of everyday life. 
 
 Protagoras maintained that ' Man is the measure of all 
 things,' and the standard-man could but measure through his 
 sensations. ' If this be so,' Plato replies, ' if Sense be the sole 
 avenue to Knowledge, it inevitably leads to destruction.' For 
 any animal, no matter how low in the scale of creation, that 
 has feeling, is equally the criterion of ' all things ' ! Moreover, 
 Protagoras has left his theory without defence, for if anyone 
 dislikes it, such dislike, as a feeling, is therefore correct ; and, 
 thus, he is condemned by the very tribunal he had himself set 
 up, and to which he has appealed. Not only is it impossible 
 for Sense to give Knowledge, but Sense itself would disappear 
 were the theory of Protagoras true. For in the dictum there 
 is a reciprocity between Man and the Universe, but as it 
 maintains all things are in a continuous eddy of change, hence 
 they elude our senses, and sense-perception would be an im- 
 possibility. From these and other considerations it follows 
 that Sense alone cannot lead us to Knowledge. 
 
 Neither can the way to truth be sought through the rude 
 conviction or general consent of mankind.t For it may be 
 
 ** The "Epwf of the ' Pheedrus ' and ' Banquet.' t W?a. 
 
38 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 true or false, and even when true it may be produced by the 
 artifice of a cunning rhetorician, thus being a blind impulse 
 midway between knowledge and ignorance. 
 
 But besides Sense and instinctive conviction* there only 
 remains the highest exercise of the mind in Thought, and here 
 the source of knowledge must be found ; for it is only by the 
 exercise of Reason that we can raise ourselves above the 
 struggle for life, between what was and wkaf will be to that 
 which eternally is. It is the function and privilege of Reason 
 to grasp pure Being, above the sphere of change, where broken 
 shapes are ever mocking the dim eyes and ears of Sense. 
 
 By Reason we are translated to the world of the Ideas, each 
 eternally one, unalterable ; each the prototype and cause of the 
 many changeful individuals (in the world of sense) that we 
 rank under a common class, which owes its few traces of 
 stability to the eternal archetype that overshadows it from a 
 higher world. Though each self-complete, the Ideas form a 
 hierarchy in themselves, ranked in steady files, leading by 
 gentle transitions to those above and those below. At the 
 apex is the Idea of Perfection, or the Good that like the sun 
 originates and transmits light to all beneath its influence. The 
 Good is God, the supreme Idea, and the very crown of ' Being.' 
 
 Sec. IV. — The Universe and Man. 
 
 (a) The Formation of the Universe. — The world of 
 Ideas, established in stable equilibrium and crowned by Per- 
 fection, gives the clue for unravelling the riddle of the fleeting 
 life of Change around us. The order and fixity of the Idea 
 is broken up by another world, as much below, as the Ideas 
 are above the region of sense. Opposed to the flawless Being 
 of the Ideas is the lawless nothingness of Chaos, and the life 
 of Change we lead is the result of both, deriving its broken 
 order from the Idea and a half-resisted indefiniteness from 
 
PLATO 39 
 
 Chaos. Thus the whole universe in its endless state of 
 Becoming is a middle state between the opposite states of pure 
 Being in the Ideas and the utter absence of Being in Chaos. 
 
 How have these two contradictory states of Being and non- 
 Being been coupled together to form the universe, for each is 
 thoroughly isolated from the other? The medium to har- 
 monize the antithesis Plato found in a principle which he 
 named the ' world-soul,' from its analogy to the soul of man 
 that in its own life can soar to the world of Ideas, though 
 usually fettered by change. So the world-soul is a limit both 
 to the formlessness of Chaos and the lonely ' Being ' of the 
 Ideas. It is the medium to connect the individua,lity of this 
 formlessness with the universality of the Idea, and the unity 
 to the Idea with Plurality. Thus it is the principle for 
 ordering and combining the primitive constituents of all 
 things. 
 
 The forming process is clothed by Plato as an allegory. 
 The former of the world (Demiurgus) united Ideas with Chaos, 
 and from both arose the ' soul of the world.' He then 
 arranged it, as an ideal framework, throughout the whole space 
 to be occupied by the universe. This sphere, ordered by 
 world-soul, was divided into spaces, first for the fixed stars, 
 then for the orbits of the planets, and last of all at the 
 centre for the world itself. Round this centre the four 
 elements are evolved from Chaos, and from them our world is 
 formed, and completed by the creation of organized life. 
 
 Thus Chaos was transformed to Beauty and order, for, as 
 the whole creation was directed by the Idea of Perfection, the 
 huge living universe is the highest product of Divine art. By 
 the soul that inspires it the world of Ideas gives it a part of 
 the perfection that belongs pre-eminently to itself. Therefore, 
 it is one, orbed in a perfect sphere, rotating silently in a circle 
 like the progress of Reason itself, unchanged in its outward 
 form while bearing within it the many changes of the life of 
 man. 
 
40 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 {b) Man. — Like its prototype, the great world-soul, the soul 
 of man is the meeting-ground of the ideal and material. 
 Upon its higher side it is a citizen of the Divine state of the 
 Ideas, its true home, and the goal of its loftiest aspirations. 
 But the soul has also its lower side. It is fettered to the 
 body, and hence becomes the unwilling vassal of change, sub- 
 jected to the fluctuations and troubles of sense, thus uniting 
 the opposite attributes of Heaven and earth, of the Divine 
 and bestial. Therefore, the soul looks with double face to the 
 worlds of Being in the Ideas through Reason, and of Be- 
 coming through Sense. In its former capacity it is rational 
 (XoyiSTixov), in the latter sensitive {emSv/j^riTixiv). The connec- 
 tion of these opposite parts is effected by the Heart (Bu/ioi), 
 which, like the instinctive conviction* of the Dialectics, is the 
 medium, partaking in part of the nobility of Reason, but from 
 its blindness and want of insight also linked with the sensitive 
 life of the body. 
 
 How the soul forfeited its divinity in the contemplation of 
 the perfection of the ideal world is symbolically explained by a 
 philosophic myth. The soul is like a chariot, horsed by the 
 impulses of its parts. When the winged steeds move in the 
 same direction and under due control they bear the soul to the 
 Ideal world, beautiful beyond the dreams of art or the imagina- 
 tion of poetry. Such is the existence of the gods. Other 
 chariots less skilfully driven touch the higher world but to 
 sigh for a fuller enjoyment of it, and then are dragged by the 
 greedy horse of the desires to earth. Here they are imprisoned 
 in bodies, and enslaved by the lusts that first drew them from 
 heaven. Yet the Divine element is never wholly subdued. 
 In calmer moments reason whispers faintly of the earlier joyous 
 career in the morning of existence, when the soul-chariot 
 passed Idea after Idea, each containing some hidden secret of 
 the world. The voice of Reason tells of the lost home from 
 which it has been exiled, recalling its perfect beauty and 
 
 * S6^a. 
 
PLATO 41 
 
 harmony* from the stray broken shapes it sometimes recog- 
 nises here. 
 
 Reason, too, has a promise for the aspiring soul. When 
 the narcotic of sense that dulls her inner eyes is overcome, 
 her nobility is understood, and from it arises the longing for a 
 higher future state, where her prophetic voice will be vindi- 
 cated, and the secrets, that mock her now, will be- revealed. 
 For such as deserve it, death will be the bursting of the prison 
 of sense — to those who fail, a doom condemning them to pass 
 through new bodies till they become purified from sense, and 
 complete their expiation. 
 
 Sec. V. — Ethics and the State. 
 
 (a) The Supreme Object for Action. — ^When the ideal 
 promised to the soul is so lofty, it becomes its duty to en- 
 deavour to realize it. The end of all action must be to escape 
 the tyranny of sense, and rise to the higher world from which 
 the soul has come, and to which it must win its return. The 
 will must emancipate itself from the unhallowed cravings of 
 sense, that ever bind it faster to earth, and strive to follow the 
 indications of the Idea that struggle though the few short lulls 
 in the storm of change. As sense degrades, it must be 
 crushed to make way for the elevating powers of reason, that 
 point to Philosophy as the sole ladder to mount from the 
 lower to a higher life. By thus turning inwards the soul 
 regains something of its pristine freedom, and power to raise 
 itself above the alien desires that would still bind it to earth, 
 while as it gains in strength it reads more clearly the promises 
 of the future. 
 
 In placing the supreme object for the will in the cultivation 
 of Philosophy, Plato was opposed to the Cynics on one side, 
 and the Sophists followed by the Cyrenaics on the other. 
 
 The Sophists and Cyrenaics especially reversed the order 
 upon which Plato insists. Philosophy with them was useless, 
 
 * dva/ivriaii:. 
 
42 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 and Pleasure the sole object of desire. By the Dialectic 
 Philosophy was reinstated, and besides the many imperfections 
 shared by pleasure with the whole of sense, it can give neither 
 harmony to life nor worth to the soul ; and, moreover, like the 
 kindred theory that builds knowledge upon the same founda- 
 tion, the undue elevation of feeling destroys its consistency, 
 for if it be the guide of life, its contrary pain verges so close 
 upon it that a distinction is practically impossible. 
 
 The faint-hearted desertion of Philosophy by the Cynics is 
 sternly reproved by Plato. While exposing the seductions of 
 Pleasure, he held that the eradication of the higher delights 
 of knowledge was equally a false reading of the moral voice of 
 nature. The Beauty seen by reason is essential to the harmony 
 of life, and from it flow the innocent joys of spiritual pleasure 
 that aid the mind that struggles upwards towards virtue. The 
 exact place to be assigned to lower pleasure is but vaguely 
 indicated. Knowledge and Philosophy are the presiding and 
 guiding elements in the ideal joy; beside them pleasure is 
 sometimes ranked as aiding in the rounded completeness of 
 life, sometimes as the ignis fatuus that leads reason astray, 
 and breaks the unity. Such pleasures as knowledge approves, 
 and that aid in its development, may advantageously be sought, 
 and, when directed by Philosophy, aid in the growth of a life 
 symmetrically arranged, and balanced for its flight from earth. 
 The Beauty given by art must be chastened before it can 
 receive the sanction of Reason. Like our instinctive convic- 
 tions, it wants the insight of the true beauty seen by the philo- 
 sopher in the ideal world. The ' fine frenzy ' of the poet or 
 artist must be replaced by the conscious appreciation of the 
 sublime order and harmony that is immovably fixed above us, 
 which transcends our dreams of loveliness as much as the Idea 
 the shattered image that we gather from reflection upon the 
 shifting field of change, or from the faint recollection of our 
 lost higher life.* To rise from its degradation Beauty must be 
 
 * avafivt]ais. 
 
PLATO 43 
 
 separated from every trait that panders to our lower nature, 
 and enrolled in the service of the Idea of Perfection, from 
 which it had its birth, and by which alone it can realize its 
 mission. 
 
 {l>) The Doctrine of Individual Virtue. — The follow- 
 ing of the ' Supreme Good ' is virtue. 
 
 From one point of view it is, as Socrates taught, ' Know- 
 ledge One, and Teachable ' ; but as it becomes based upon the 
 theory of Ideas, Plato in his later works sometimes speaks of 
 many virtues, thus apparently contradicting Socrates by assert- 
 ing that Virtue is many. By right of the Idea, Virtue is one in 
 its characteristics, but plural in its manifestation. 
 
 As the soul has several parts, so an appropriate phase of 
 virtue belongs to each. The right exercise of Reason is 
 Wisdom. When the heart supports the decision of Reason, 
 arming itself rightly against the wiles of pleasure and the 
 menaces of pain, it is brave, and hence its virtue is Bravery or 
 Fortitude. When the senses are maintained in due control 
 they give rise to Temperance. To obtain complete harmony of 
 the three parts, and the fusion of their strength in the pursuit 
 of what is best, is the duty of Justice. 
 
 {c) Collective Virtue in the State. — When the horses 
 of the individual Soul have been duly broken and harnessed, it 
 only remains to yoke the larger chariot of the State for a 
 similar journey from sense to the Ideal world. The Idea of 
 the State is summarized in the larger Justice that unites its 
 members, and as Justice guides the individual virtues of a 
 single man, so the giant Justice of the State binds up the 
 virtues of collected groups of citizens. As there are three 
 parts in a single man, each with its appropriate virtue, there 
 are three separate groupings of the members of the common- 
 wealth, each of which must nurture the virtue it is best fitted 
 to produce. 
 
 The ideal State finds its reason in the Rulers, who legis- 
 late, and manifest Wisdom. The Heart of the State, midway 
 
44 ^ SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 between reason and sense, is the class of Warriors to ward off 
 all hurt. The senses are paralleled by the Workers, who pro- 
 vide for the wants of all, and from them Temperance is 
 demanded. When all classes work well, each in its sphere, 
 the law of the State is satisfied, and, as a whole, it exhibits 
 Justice. 
 
 Where the life of the State consists in its rigorous submission 
 to the Idea, all that is individual or personal is annihilated. 
 The goal of the Ideal is the production of a body of men 
 fused into a single unity. By the alchemy of the Idea all that 
 any man would claim as his exclusive property is transmuted 
 into the possession of the State, in which all rights are centred. 
 Money, self-culture, amusements, even domestic life, exist not 
 for one but for the whole. Everything must be shared alike — 
 common weal, common woe, and common wealth. 
 
 There is no scope for individual effort or individual choice. 
 Marriage was abolished, and children were born and educated 
 as the Wisdom of the Rulers ordained. In the two higher 
 classes the healthy infants were consigned to the State nurses 
 and teachers, from whose hands they passed at a stated age to 
 be instructed in mathematical sciences. From thirty to thirty- 
 five their education was completed by the study of dialectics, 
 and then they were tried in discharge of the duties of the 
 Warriors. Those who proved themselves fittest at fifty were 
 permitted to devote themselves to Philosophy, alternated with 
 periodic control of the State. 
 
 Throughout the whole scheme in the education and life 
 work of its members the State is the engine for establishing 
 the law and fixity of the Idea in the minutest details of public 
 life, and it thus fitly closes the philosophy of Plato, marking 
 by its comprehensive swoop from the most abstract theory to 
 practice the strong influence of the teaching and self-devotion 
 of Socrates. 
 
PLATO 45 
 
 Sec. VI. — Plato's Successors in the Old Academy. 
 
 The settled college of the Academy continued a recognised 
 society for philosophic research after the death of Plato. But 
 with the exception of Aristotle the pupils of Plato did little to 
 extend the deeper principles of his theory. As a body they 
 aimed rather at exposition than discovery, and any additions 
 made to the theory tended to impair its unity and con- 
 sistency. 
 
 In his later teaching Plato had largely adopted the sym- 
 bolism of the number- theory of the Pythagoreans, and 
 Speusippus, his nephew, who succeeded him, endeavoured to 
 reconcile the characteristics of the Ideas with the ' Numbers ' 
 of the older theory. In this he was followed by Xenocrates, 
 who was the first to divide Plato's philosophy into Dialectics, 
 Physics, and Ethics. As the learning of the school grew its 
 research declined ; even in the adoption of Pythagoreanism 
 the fresh features added belong more to the life of the body 
 than its philosophy. Polemo is chiefly remembered as a 
 moral philosopher. His pupil Grantor was the first commen- 
 tator of Plato. After Polemo, Crates became the head of the 
 school, and with his successor, Arcesilaus, the school entered 
 upon a new period of its history. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ARISTOTLE. 
 
 Sec. I. — His Life. 
 
 Plato alone of the disciples of Socrates was able to carry on 
 the growth of the new theory, and his own philosophical 
 insight was understood by a single follower, Aristotle. 
 
 Fifteen years after the death of Socrates, while Plato was 
 travelling in Italy and Sicily, a son was born to Nicomachus, 
 
46 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the physician of Amyntas, King of Macedonia, at Stagira in 
 Thrace (b.c. 384). This child was named Aristotle. His 
 parents died while he was still young, and his education was 
 undertaken by Proxenus, who caused him to be instructed in 
 all the physical knowledge of the time. When Aristotle was 
 seventeen his guardian died, and, eager for knowledge, he set 
 out for Athens, where he arrived as Plato was starting for his 
 last journey to Sicily. Disappointed in his desire to join the 
 crowd of searchers after wisdom, Aristotle devoted his young 
 enthusiasm to the pursuit of those who remembered the 
 wisdom of Socrates, and the acquisition of the writings of the 
 earlier thinkers, from which he gathered the information that 
 enabled him in later life to found the history of Philosophy. 
 
 When Plato returned, Aristotle became one of the most 
 diligent pupils of the Academy. With restless impetuosity he 
 entered new fields of knowledge beneath the soaring genius of 
 Plato. During the twenty years of his spiritual apprenticeship 
 he gradually mastered, and then began to rearrange, the Theory 
 of Ideas, and from this fact, it is probable, arise the accounts 
 of the dissensions between master and scholar. 
 
 After Plato's death Aristotle migrated to Atarneus in Mysia, 
 where he married a relation of Hermias, the prince of the 
 state. Subsequently, from his second marriage with Herpyllis, 
 he had a son who was named Nicomachus, after his grand- 
 father. From Asia Minor Aristotle returned to Athens, where 
 he opened a school of Rhetoric. 
 
 But his teaching at Athens was closed by the summons of 
 Philip to undertake the training of the spirited youth of 
 Alexander, that chafed at the blind obedience demanded by 
 ordinary teaching. The ideal instruction of statesmen by 
 philosophers that Plato asked was fraught with gain to 
 Alexander, and right royally recompensed by his father, who, 
 it is reported, rebuilt Stagira in honour of Aristotle. 
 
 When. Alexander's philosophical pupilage expanded to the 
 more trying discipline of conquest, Aristotle returned to 
 
ARISTOTLE 47 
 
 Athens, and opened a new school in the Lyceum. The 
 Cynosarges was already occupied by the snarling Cynics, the 
 shaded Academy sheltered the lofty Ideals of the Platonists, 
 and Aristotle's impetuous energy gave his followers the title 
 ' Peripatetics,' or Walking Philosophers, from his habit of rest- 
 lessly pacing up and down while lecturing. In the morning 
 he taught more advanced pupils, while the evenings were 
 devoted to popular discourses to larger audiences. His quiet 
 academic life was rudely broken by political charges brought 
 against him after the death of Alexander, and being accused 
 of blasphemy by the Athenians, he went to Chalcis, lest, as he 
 expressed it, his fellow-citizens should twice outrage philo- 
 sophy. In retirement he died in the year 322 b.c. 
 
 Sec. II. — His Historical Position. 
 
 Aristotle is the last of the three great names associated with 
 the Socratic period. The philosophic importance of the 
 universal element in man had been humbly advocated by 
 Socrates and sealed by his life. In Plato the common and 
 consciously generalized thought had received the same per- 
 manence in metaphysics that the memory of the discoverer 
 won from the reverent souls of his disciples, and the Ideas 
 enthroned as Being lent brief gleams of fixity to the changing 
 world we see around us. 
 
 The problem confronting Aristotle was the necessity of 
 pruning away some of the superfluous scaffolding ' and inner 
 contradictions that disfigured the Platonic system of the 
 Universe. From the conflict of Being in the Ideas and the 
 negation of Being in Chaos arose the world of Becoming. 
 But what principle had Plato proved for the thorough union of 
 contraries that were opposed in every characteristic? The 
 immutable phalanx of Ideas possessed no force to subjugate 
 an alien camp that was sundered from them by the gulf of con- 
 tradiction that baffles the power of the mind. As Plato granted 
 
48 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 causation to the Ideas, their permanence slipped away, and 
 hence he looks more to their abstract Being than the power he 
 sometimes grudgingly offers them of coalescing with the form- 
 lessness they are to order and direct. Thus, in the Platonic 
 account of the birth of the Universe, the collocation of Ideas 
 and Chaos is effected by the mythical Demiurgus that is ex- 
 trinsic to both. 
 
 To rid the world of this mythical power, which is the despair 
 of Philosophy, Aristotle was forced to revise the fundamental 
 presuppositions of Plato. If the older philosopher centred his 
 system in an ideal world above, with its correlate in the nothing- 
 ness below our own, his pupil, on the contrary, established 
 himself in the everyday life of Change that Plato abandoned 
 as the product of an antithesis. Thus, as the Being of 
 Parmenides is exalted in the Platonic Idea, the Change of 
 Heraclitus returns from purificadon in the hands of Aristotle. 
 
 Change, Aristotle discovered, is something more than the 
 play of opposed states that alternate between what is and what 
 is not. In all mutation there is progress and development — an 
 upward progress, not the pendulum-swing from limit to limit. 
 Thus the world around us is marked by ceaseless growth, 
 rising by graduated scales — not, as Plato taught, graduated 
 Ideas, but graduated growth. When any point is reached, it 
 has become the condition for that immediately above it, and, 
 though not yet promoted, in the general process of develop- 
 ment its possibilities must finally become actualities. In the 
 scale of progressive change there must be a first step and a 
 final result. At the lowest end there is an absolute possibility, 
 I ready to grow to any or every actuality ; upon the other side 
 there is the absolute actuality, the final outcome of the last 
 elimination of possibility by progress. Thus, it will be seen, 
 the primary antithesis of Plato is evolved as the last result of 
 the principles of Aristotle. 
 
ARISTOTLE 49 
 
 Sec. III. — Aristotle's Philosophy — {A) Metaphysics. 
 
 (a) Logic. — Like many other branches of knowledge, Logic 
 owes its foundation to Aristotle. Though he never consciously 
 divided it from the portion of his work that afterwards became 
 known as Metaphysics, it was the general summary of his 
 method of search and inquiry. 
 
 The main features of modern formal logic were fully estab- 
 lished by Aristotle, so that Kant, writing after an interval of 
 two thousand years, has said that the science has neither 
 advanced nor receded by a single step. Thought mounts 
 upward by the spiral stair of the syllogism, which contains its 
 own clear laws of legitimate progression. In a complete 
 science the lowest step rests upon actual experience, rising 
 through connected and intermediary grades to the highest, 
 which is without presupposition.. The former is grasped by 
 the experience of everyday life, the latter by the intuition of 
 Reason (voDs). To rise from the first step given us by the 
 senses to the next, which must be a general proposition, is 
 achieved by a process of generalization, similar to the Socratic 
 inquiry, which Aristotle named Induction. By comparison of 
 individual instances, the leading attributes are abstracted from 
 them and united in a single thought or concept. A higher 
 concept is next formed, and it becomes a higher step, and the 
 mind passes from one to the other upwards to gain the final 
 principle that crowns the tower, whence it can overlook the 
 whole field of the science under investigation. But the collec- 
 tion of individual instances is a toilsome task beyond the 
 energy of the unaided student, and he is forced to accept the 
 experiences of others upon their authority, and from these he 
 must generalize the definition or distinguishing concept of each 
 class as he passes it in his review. But as the method was new, 
 and the accuracy of observation necessary had never been culti- 
 vated by those whose records Aristotle was forced to accept, we 
 are compelled to admit the justice of the pathetic sentence with 
 
so A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 which he closes his work, pointing out his isolation as a dis- 
 coverer without predecessors or helpers. 
 
 The general method of discovery is therefore twofold. The 
 tower for the circuitous upward movement of the mind is buili 
 of the generalization of facts collected by Induction, and the 
 stair is fitted in by the Syllogism. Though the sciences to be 
 completed differ in every part,, the method is invariably the 
 same, and as the mind mounts stages will be found that exhibit 
 constant marks. Led by this clue, Aristotle divided all concepts 
 used in the syllogism into ten ' main classes,' which were named 
 Categories. They are substance, quantity, quality, relation, 
 where, when, position, possession, activity, passivity.* 
 
 (b) Metaphysics. — The name ' Metaphysics ' was not given 
 to any part of his vyork by Aristotle himself, but was used by 
 commentators to indicate the classification of the works dealing 
 with the most abstract sciences as occurring ' after the Physics ' 
 (i(i6TQ;[T(i]pu(r(xa). In his disjointed treatment of his intellec- 
 tual work, Aristotle was in the habit of devoting a separate 
 monograph to the study upon which he was engaged at the 
 moment, and in so doing he found a series of related sciences, 
 each dealing with a special, phase of concrete existence. To 
 supply their foundation, it was necessary to investigate the pure 
 basis of Being that was common to all, and that provided the 
 proof of the elementary suppositions upon which the other 
 sciences rested. 
 
 I. Aristotle's Critique of the Platonic Ideas, — 
 Aristotle agreed with Plato that there can be no knowledge to 
 be gathered from the mere fleeting phantasms of Change and 
 sense. The quest must be pushed to the higher region of 
 permanent Being that is reached but by thought. 
 
 Here Aristotle parts company with Plato, for he cannot 
 accept the motionless world of Ideas. For the Idea must 
 either be the same or not the same as the sensuous things from 
 which it originates. If it be the same, it is obviously a useless 
 
 oiia'ia, TToaov, ttowv, Trpog Ti, irbv, irors, KBia9m, ix^tv noieiv, Tr&axiiv. 
 
ARISTOTLE 51 
 
 duplication of the original problem. If, on the other hand, it 
 be not the same, its lonely isolation sunders it from all possi- 
 bility of explaining the changing things from which it was 
 gathered, and for whose existence it was created to account. 
 Thus, when confronted with the world, the Idea cannot justify 
 itself, and, besides, it is powerless either to produce or control 
 mutation. In the Idea things of experience merge their 
 qualities, and these are petrified into everlasting Being. The 
 Idea, therefore, contains universal attributes under its own 
 indivisible unity. But can the characteristics of an object be 
 severed from it ? Moreover, when torn from their roots, can 
 they with impunity be transplanted to an alien region ? From 
 the world of Being the Idea cannot look back upon the world 
 of sense, for in its migration it has been stripped of all that 
 might promise safety of return. The participation of the Ideal 
 type and the copy in the lower world is therefore but an 
 illusion. Hence, upon the whole, the qualities abstracted 
 from the things of experience have no claim to arrogate an 
 existence in a higher world than that to which they were born. 
 2. Form and Matter.— Though the generalized qualities 
 of a class had been raised by Plato beyond their proper rank, 
 they yet take a higher place than the perishing individuals 
 from which they have been collected. But the important con- 
 sideration is not the elevation of the one nor the depression of 
 the other, but the relation between the two. The Idea, shorn of 
 its pretence, becomes what is fixed in every class. The indefinite- 
 ness of a large number of individuals is clearly expressed in 
 the defining thought that embodies their main features. This 
 thought or concept is thus the permanent element in a throng 
 of single things we rank together — the iron band that ties the 
 class together. Neither can be separated. Without the bind- 
 ing thought or definition, the members of the class would elude 
 observation, and without the individuals the iron band would 
 sink out of sight in the void. The invariable binding element 
 is Form (I'ldog), the variable bound members are Matter (l)X)j). 
 
52 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Matter is the rude material to be worked up and realized in 
 the more complete result ; as the marble block must receive the 
 binding impress of the artist's thought, so Matter everywhere is 
 the obedient recipient of Form. The finished marble statue 
 contains Form and Matter in equipoise ; the chiselled realiza- 
 tion of the sculptor's idea is the Form that moulds the marble 
 Matter. 
 
 But the statue cannot stand alone. As a part of the decoTa- 
 tion of temple or home, it is Matter to be again worked into a 
 larger whole. Thus the principle is universal in its application. 
 Nothing can be isolated ; everything must take its place in a 
 graduated scale, in which each member is Form to those below 
 and Matter to those above. 
 
 Change is therefore no longer a riddle, but the necessary 
 condition of the endless progress from Matter to Form. The 
 whole world is endless movement, and every phase of causation 
 looks on the one side to Matter, on the other to Form. 
 
 Matter is thus the possibility of the appropriate realization, 
 and in the process of change Matter is therefore always poten- 
 tial until its end is realized, when it blossoms into actuality. 
 
 Moreover, the endless growth of potentiality into actuality 
 must start from an absolutely formless Matter and press on to 
 an absolutely matterless Form. The formless Matter is adapted 
 to receive any Form ; it is complete potentiality, utterly unde- 
 termined, and, in severance from Form, the great negation. 
 Under the determination of Form, potentiality gradually ap- 
 proaches nearer and nearer to actuality, each successive product 
 lessening the factor of Matter and increasing the factor of Form, 
 till the Divine matterless Form completes the series in the full 
 purity of the Deity. 
 
 God, as free from Matter, is One, for Matter is the realm of 
 plurality : He is the unmoved cause of motion, for Matter is 
 the field of derivative movement : He is the Supreme Intelli- 
 gence, for Matter is the negation knowledge. As the sura of 
 actuality. His activity consists in thought—a. thought, moreover. 
 
ARISTOTLE 53 
 
 that must be self-contemplative, otherwise He would degrade 
 Himself by commerce with the lower range of potentiality. 
 Hence the sphere of Divine knowledge is self-contained ; in 
 the sublime exercise of omniscience the process of knowing is 
 identical with the known, the infinity of Godhead merges 
 thought and thinking, and therefore God is the very ' thought 
 of thought ' {vorisig vo^ffsajs). 
 
 Sec. IV.— {B) Physics. 
 
 (a) The Universe. — The opposition of Plato and Aristotle 
 is most clearly marked in their treatment of Physics. From 
 the Ideal point of view, the clamorous world of Becoming and 
 Change could claim but little place in a stable state of Being 
 whose order was the admiration of the Philosopher. Aristotle, 
 on the contrary, saw beneath the vagaries of change the fixity 
 of a settled purpose of development, and, finding the per- 
 manence that Philosophy demands before him in nature, he 
 had no incentive to wander abroad from it. Change, he 
 believed, advanced through successive potentialities with falter- 
 ing steps, but unshaken purpose, to its physical actuality in 
 man. Potentiality was invariably directed to form a perfect 
 universe for the support of life, and life advanced through all 
 its grades to culminate in man. 
 
 Movement is the prime requisite for the development of the 
 potential, and hence motion is the guide that leads inanimate 
 existence through its stages. Motion is measured by time and 
 given room for its progression by Space. 
 
 The summit of existence is occupied by God, the unmoved 
 Cause of all other motion. In the , globe of the universe the 
 region of the fixed stars borrows its motion from Deity moving 
 in the perfection of the circle round the outer orb and nearest 
 God. Below the stellar cycle the planets revolve in their 
 orbits, guided by immortal beings less perfect than the wider 
 range of those beyond. Round the centre is the earth, less 
 
54 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 perfect than the rest, but still with the impulse towards perfection 
 derived from the growth and decay engendered by the light of 
 the sun, that by its change promises movement and progress. 
 
 (d) The Earth. — In the ebb and flow of existence on the 
 Earth, the lowest place is taken by inanimate things produced 
 by the combination of the elements. Without life their actuality 
 is attained when they reach a position adapted to them. 
 
 The line between inanimate and animate existences is 
 sharply drawn by ' soul,' or life, which is the form and energy 
 of an organized body. 
 
 In plants, life manifests itself in the lowly guise of a faculty 
 of nourishment and reproduction. The life oi animals possesses 
 the additional element of feeling, and, in its higher forms, 
 movement. In Man reason is united to plant-life and animal- 
 life. 
 
 (c) Man. — The efforts of nature are crowned by the pro- 
 duction of man. Even in his shape, upright position, pure 
 blood, large brain, and power of speech, he overtops the lower 
 kinds of life. As the realization of nature's energy he possesses 
 the lower phases of life. He can nourish himself, move and 
 feel. Dowered with many senses, each contributes its special 
 accurate quota towards the knowing of the object to which 
 they are related. 
 
 The sensations monopolized by each sense are brought to 
 a common mart of exchange named the Common Sense,* 
 where they become converted into memories and images. To 
 link images with thoughts is the function of a higher life that 
 belongs to man alone. 
 
 Reason (voDs) distinguishes humanity from the sense-life of 
 the brute, and communicates to Man his germ of Divinity. 
 Since the life shared with other animals is the Form of the 
 body, it perishes with it ; but Reason in its indivisible simple 
 unity lodges with us but for a time, and lives beyond the death 
 of the body. 
 
 * ahBririipiov kolvov. 
 
ARISTOTLE SS 
 
 The Reason itself has two sides. To meet the images of 
 the Common Sense, it is passive, and gradually leads to know- 
 ledge. But behind the passivity there is a sublime activity, 
 the true voZg, that grasps the highest principles, and sees with 
 intuitive certainty the mysteries that are beyond and above 
 proof. 
 
 When the desires clamour for gratification, it is the function 
 of Reason, in its freedom, to turn from theory to practice, and 
 decide the best means and end for action. Thus the practical 
 Reason (voDs ff/>axr/xo's) in the ripe enjoyment of its activity 
 becomes the guide of action and hand-maiden of virtue. 
 
 Sec. V.—{C) Ethics. 
 
 {a) The Summum Bonum. — Man in the exercise of his 
 activity invariably acts with an end in view. When it is 
 attained another looms before him, and in the endless ascent 
 from hope to hope he longs for a final end that will contain 
 all others, and whose gain will satisfy his cravings. The 
 testimony alike of experience, tradition, and the whole 
 individual actions of mankind proves that the world's desire 
 is Happiness. 
 
 The question of supreme moment is. What is Happiness ? 
 As the perfection of life and the gratification of every desire, 
 it must be the realization of man's possibilities to the full. It 
 is the giant stride of progress that perfects every part of his 
 nature, and garners his every field of possibility into one full 
 actuality. 
 
 As sensitive beings, the wants we share with other animals 
 must be allayed. Health, the satisfaction of bodily wants, 
 children, friends, competent wealth, and social influence, form 
 negative but indispensable conditions of Happiness. Though 
 the want of any or all of these fails to bend the wise man's 
 soul to misery, it can rob him of the actualization of his nature,, 
 and therefore of Happiness. 
 
56 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 After providing for lower wants and lesser cares, there is 
 still man's special possession in Reason to be considered. As 
 it is by Reason that man overtops those below him in the 
 scale of existence, it is only by the perfect satisfaction of 
 Reason's claims that he can gain Happiness. But Reason is 
 the guide of action, and its rigorous demands are only granted 
 when Action foUpws Reason, when in their union Virtue is 
 the mainspring of life's undivided energy. Therefore Happi- 
 ness consists in the perfect activity of right action, whose 
 sphere is a life devoid of lower cares. Hence Happiness is a 
 ' perfect activity in a perfect life.' 
 
 (d) Virtue. — When virtue is the main element in the 
 Happiness that all desire, the attributes of virtue .also must be 
 definitely ascertained. Virtue is the application of Reason to 
 life, and as Reason holds the scales, the virtue in any com- 
 bination of circumstances will be a mean between the opposite 
 states of too little and too mu ch . For action may end in stopping 
 short of the goal or over-passing it, and it is only when duly 
 meted by Reason that it gains the true result. The golden 
 mean, moreover, differs for different persons, and it can only 
 be ascertained for a definite individual by the full consideration 
 of his capacities and surroundings. 
 
 Moreover, it is not enough that the mean should be some- 
 times attained, and sometimes overstepped. Man cannot 
 become virtuous at a bound, but by the steady development of 
 his capacities.* Virtue concerns the will and passions, and 
 the will must be trained, Therefore Virtue is not knowledge 
 (as Socrates held), nor can it be taught, for man grows in virtue 
 by exercise, and it is only when such exercise has become 
 habitualt that a man can be called good. 
 
 Nor will Aristotle follow Socrates in the unity of virtue. 
 
 Whenever the passions can be dwarfed or when they can hurry 
 
 man to excess, the mean must be applied, and therefore the 
 
 virtues are numbered by the main relations of life. In the 
 
 * Apsral ipvffiKat + When a E?if is formed. 
 
ARISTOTLE 57 
 
 inner hidden life of the soul, in society, in the friendly relation 
 of man to man, in the wider connection of bodies of men in 
 business or the State, a mean must be decided and established. 
 
 But as the mean fluctuates with the emotions of the in- 
 dividual and the nature of the case, how is a standard mean to 
 be established ? Here Reason must apply its touchstone of care- 
 ful tact {<j>p6vriifii), elevating man above himself, by giving him 
 a law to the will to curb his desires. 
 
 Reason, moreover, within itself contains specific virtues apart 
 from its exercise in the control of the emotions. In these, 
 the acme of felicity is reached in the cultivation of philosophy, 
 the perfection both of Reason and of life. 
 
 (c) The State. — Many virtues involve the interaction of 
 society, therefore the individual can only be fully developed 
 by the State, and thus Ethics culminate in Politics. More- 
 over, man is by nature a ' political animal,' seeking the society 
 and intercourse of his fellows. 
 
 As man finds his completed aim in Happiness, which 
 provides his moral growth and physical well-being, so the 
 bodies of men, united in a State, find in it a larger develop- 
 ment and recognised legal security. Hence the aim of 
 Aristotle's polity is not the abstract state of Plato that absorbs 
 individual claims to secure the perfection of the whole, but 
 the most complete development of every single man, who 
 ranks as a citizen without prejudice to property, rights or 
 personal ties. 
 
 In its educational function the true State must be virtuously 
 guided. Therefore it may take three forms according to the 
 division of virtue amongst the rulers. If one man distances 
 all others in excellence, his government is monarchy ; if the 
 good qualities are divided amongst a few it becomes aristocracy 
 (i.e., government of the best) ; if all the citizens are equal in 
 capacity, their self-ruling is timocracy. When the basis of 
 government is planted upon any other attribute than virtue, 
 the State is false to its ideal. When the poor or the people 
 
S8 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 clamour for power in a democracy, when nobles usurp position 
 by wealth (oligarchy), or when a despot violently mounts above 
 the rest (tyranny). Virtue has been lost sighlf of, and the State 
 is a failure. 
 
 As virtue takes many forms, there can be no certain rule 
 applied for the invariable exercise of the supreme power. As 
 long as the growth and moral development of the citizens is 
 the object of the State the impulse is in the right direction, 
 however much its manifestation may be varied by circum- 
 stances. 
 
 Sec. VI.— The 'Peripatetic School.' 
 
 After the death of Aristotle his place was filled by Theo- 
 phrastus, who increased the importance of the school by 
 bequeathing it an estate. I^ike all others who have remained 
 in philosophic schools, he contributed little to the development 
 of the theory, confining himself to supplementing the positions 
 already determined. In logic he added the propositions of 
 Modality to those previously enumerated, and the treatment of 
 hypothetical and disjunctive arguments to the theory of the 
 Syllogism. His chief contribution to metaphysics was a more 
 accurate discussion of the passive and active sides of the 
 Reason, which, however, only made clearer the difficulties 
 involved in the distinction. Of his other works his investiga- 
 tions upon the nature of plants made him the great authority 
 upon Botany till the close of the Middle Ages. 
 
 Endemus was a contemporary of Theophrastus, and one of 
 the personal pupils of Aristotle. His chief contribution to 
 the philosophy of the school lay in his Ethics, where he 
 endeavoured to supply a common principle for the derivation 
 of Aristotle's disjointed virtues. Aristoxenus of Tarentum 
 had come to Aristotle from the Pythagoreans, and he intro- 
 duced the treatment of music, and from it endeavoured to 
 identify the Aristotelian Form with the older Harmony. 
 
 Strata, the ' physicist,' succeeded Theophrastus as leader of 
 
ARISTOTLE 59 
 
 the school, and instead of the Deity as the first Form, he sub- 
 stituted an unconscious internal energy of nature. 
 
 Strato was succeeded in the leadership by Lyco, Aristo, 
 Critolaus, Diodorus of Tyre, and Erymneus, who all united in 
 handing down the main theory in brilliant lectures without 
 any addition of importance. 
 
PERIOD III. 
 
 THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LAST PERIOD OF GREEK 
 PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 As Anaxagoras closed the first and tentative period of early 
 philosophy by the supposition of an ordering principle opposed 
 to Chaos, so the movement originated by Socrates is rounded 
 off by the same theory of development enunciated by Aris- 
 totle from a higher plane, with wider range and fuller applica- 
 tion. From the continuous transition of Matter to Form, 
 there results a final evolution of the component members that 
 formed the basis of the last expression of the Socratic 
 teaching. 
 
 After the death of Aristotle the germs of a larger growth 
 lay ready, but Greece had already begun to decline, and with 
 its fall Philosophy lost her home. As before, in the time of the 
 Sophists, men began to turn inwards, and, in the disintegration 
 of the State, they were compelled to find a speculative justi- 
 fication for the divergencies of individual aims and actions. 
 The East had been opened to Europe by the victories of 
 Alexander, and its luxurious repose was partly deadening to 
 effort, partly a stimulus towards the reconciliation of the 
 ephemeral Hellenic religion with the changeless theology of 
 the East. Philosophy was again interrogated for a law of life 
 and canon of belief, and now her answer was half-hearted. 
 
 When the Sophists had challenged early inquiries, the reply 
 was given back without hesitation or delay, for Greece was 
 animated by a vigorous political activity that, in the en- 
 
THE DECLINE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY 6i 
 
 thusiasm of its energy, was at one with the world by practical 
 faith and manly self-confidence. In the century separating 
 the beginning of the teaching of Socrates from the death of 
 Aristotle, the national life had grown old, and its faith had 
 sunk. With the loss of freedom the old harmony of man and 
 the world was succeeded by the discordant relation of Greece 
 at odds with herself, a disunited people, without confidence in 
 the present, without hope for the future. 
 
 Even in her decrepitude Hellas maintained the nobility that 
 marked her youthful promise. In the changed life of the 
 nation the need of reason as a guide to conduct was manfully 
 vindicated with the varied characteristics of age. Scepticism* 
 was opposed by the practical philosophy of the Stoics and 
 Epicureans, as the Sophists had been met by Socrates. But 
 the force of reason inevitably shared in the failing powers of 
 the nation, and Stoicism and Epicureanism alike represent 
 the moral effort of Socrates, deprived of power to regenerate 
 mankind, and driven back from legislating for universal virtue 
 to vindicating the power of the will over externals that cramped 
 its exercise. Eclecticism is the duplication of the fusion of 
 previous systems by Plato without the stimulus of national 
 vigour that gave him the strength to bind them all under a 
 single comprehensive system. Neo-Platonism returns to the 
 graduated progress of Aristotle, but with a similar limitation 
 
 * Pyrrho of Elis was the first to give philosophic impression to scep- 
 ticism. He was a. contemporary of Aristotle and died within a few years 
 of Theophrastus. As a student of the Megarians and a follower of Alex- 
 ander's campaigns, he was one of the first to feel the collision of the East 
 and West. 
 
 Man's great aim is Happiness. But to be happy we must know things : 
 (i.) What things are, (ii.) how we are related to things, (iii.) and what is the 
 result of the relation. 
 
 First, we can never know the nature of things, for we can only learn from 
 our senses appearances, not realities. Therefore, secondly, we must always 
 reserve our judgment ; we can never say, A is B ; only, A seems to me to be B. 
 In the last place, since we are shut out from knowledge, it is clearly incon- 
 sistent to exert any preference for one object rather than another. There- 
 fore Happiness consists in an entire suspension of choice, an utter impertur- 
 bability {arapaXJia). 
 
62 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 imposed by the times. By Form and Matter reason won a 
 path from lowest to highest existence ; while the later school, 
 with restless impatience, endeavours to reach the same result 
 by a confession of impotence in a mystic system established 
 not by knowledge, but by the stifling of reason, and the eleva- 
 tion of a biased but baseless faith. 
 
 There is a large majesty in the death of a nation that 
 demands the awe of the beholder. Its sanctity may not 
 lightly be profaned, nor the silence that veils it broken save 
 with reverence. In dying, Greek philosophy gained a deep 
 prophetic earnestness that atones for its loss of scientific 
 fulness. The mind has been recalled from the fascinating 
 pursuit of knowledge to an intense concentration upon the 
 inmost springs of moral action. Without hope from religion 
 or the world the mind must resolutely face the dread enigma 
 of the limitations that cramp its will, and decide where and 
 how it can gain a victory over circumstance. 
 
 The Stoics and Epicureans, repeating the work of Socrates, 
 were animated by an intense earnestness which left behind it a 
 union of Thought and Fact, completed and finally consolidated 
 before the end. The warfare of the remaining theories was 
 from the first foredoomed. The patchwork of Eclecticism, and 
 Neo-Platonism, with its deposition of reason, are the work of 
 men whose activity was circumscribed bya sinking civilization 
 almost setting in the darkness of the Middle Ages. 
 
 ' Go honoured hence, go home, 
 Night's childless children ; here your hour is done. 
 Pass with the stars, and leave us with the sun. '* 
 
 * Bare So/iov, iteyciKoi 0iXort/iOi 
 
 From Swinburne's ' Two Leaders. ' 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 A. — THE STOICS. 
 
 Sec. I. — The Philosophers of the Stoa. 
 
 In the forefront of the teachers of the decline of Greece is 
 Zeno of Citium. He was born a few years before the death of 
 Plato (340 or 342 B.C.), and upon the loss of his property he 
 became a" student of Philosophy. From the Cynic he passed 
 through the Megarian school, and at last joined the members 
 of the Academy. After twenty years of study he opened a 
 new school at the Stoa Pcecile, whence his disciples were 
 named Stoics. After a lengthy presidency of the new sect, he 
 put an end to his life, thereby inaugurating the principle of 
 suicide which became fashionable amongst his followers. 
 
 Zeno was succeeded by Cleanthes, a man of great force of 
 will, who, from want of originality, faithfully perpetuated the 
 teaching of Zeno, whose practice he followed by voluntary 
 death. Contemporary with Cleanthes, and also personal 
 pupils of Zeno, are Persaeus, Aristo of Chios, and Herillus of 
 Carthage. 
 
 Cleanthes was followed by Chrysippus, the great pillar of 
 Stoicism, who popularized the system by his numerous works, 
 and completed its development. 
 
 The writings of the Stoics remain but in fragments, and it 
 is difficult to distinguish the work of individual members from 
 the more complete accounts of later authorities. The main 
 characteristics of the Philosophers of the Stoa are an exaltation 
 
64 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 of virtue in brave opposition to the laxity of the life they saw 
 around them, and a sturdy resistance to the seductions of plea- 
 sure that in the general luxury usurped the throne of right. 
 While the whole edifice of Greek faith was crumbling in ruin, 
 the Stoics summoned men from the selfish desire of mere 
 safety to trust in the strength of will that was still unbroken, 
 and that rose above the general wreck with a full consciousness 
 of its inborn majesty. The individual disappointment that 
 drove men formerly to don the threadbare robe of virtue, with 
 the Cynics had now become a national grief, and the older 
 self-sacrifice was sternly exacted by the decline of Greece. 
 Knowledge sought for its own sake was no longer possible 
 when the life of the people was doomed. In a freedom hurry- 
 ing to bondage, the small domain of action yet unenslaved must 
 be rigorously guarded, and knowledge of man or the world has 
 no scope but to act as sentinel to its avenues. Hence the 
 system of the universe that in Plato and Aristotle preceded every 
 ethical inquiry is replaced by a mere outlined sketch that leaves 
 free scope for moral work. 
 
 Sec. II. — Logic and Physics. 
 
 The contraction of the sphere that bounds man's mental 
 range shuts him out from the determination of the meaning of 
 Knowledge. The mind in its darkness waits for impressions 
 to be made upon it, and the impressions are generalized by the 
 understanding. But to guarantee the stability of action there 
 must be no doubt that our thoughts are true and certain ; the 
 growing scepticism must be routed at the very outset. This 
 the Stoics accomplished, not by rigorous proof, but by the indi- 
 cation of an infallible criterion that decided definitely when 
 certainty can be predicated of any thought. When any phase 
 of consciousness has been produced by an actual object, when 
 it is no mere masquerading figment of the imagination, it 
 bears an irresistible evidence with it that actually grips the 
 
THE STOICS 6S 
 
 mind and fills it with an overpowering conviction of certainty 
 
 When knowledge is altogether derived from external and 
 material objects, and since like can only be known by like, the 
 mind and the external world must be of similar nature ; both 
 must be material. 
 
 Moreover, as God is the Cause of the world, and the effect 
 resembles the cause, the world cannot be separated from God. 
 God and world are one, and the two names merely indicate 
 different points of view. The same great living thing is called 
 God when contemplated in its wondrous activity ; it is called 
 the world when we see but passivity. The world is God's body, 
 God is the world's soul. 
 
 Following Heraclitus, the Stoics in their Pantheism saw the 
 corporeal energy of the universe, which they named God, under 
 the form of a continually working Fire or ^ther that moves in 
 perpetual cycles, with change in every part and permanence 
 only in the whole. 
 
 Since every part of the huge living universe is equally instinct 
 with Divinity, perfection belongs alike to the whole and to its 
 parts as conditions of the universal order and harmony. As 
 subjected to unalterable unity in every change, a fated Reason 
 rules with an absolute impersonality and inexorable justice. 
 Nothing in the whole system is amiss, nothing is in vain, for 
 everything is gathered up in the strong hand of law that in 
 eternal rationality regulates the whole universe in endless per- 
 fection. 
 
 Sec. III. — The Theory of Virtue. 
 {a) General Principles. — Since the universe is perfect, 
 man's relation to it consists in causing his individual action to 
 accord with the general symmetry and reason. His sole duty 
 consists in living as near the universal perfection as he may, 
 and therefore the demand of virtue is 'life according to 
 nature ' (o/ioy^oyovnevug Tff ^wii ^nv). 
 
 5 
 
66 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 {b) The Criticism of Pleasure. — The universal perfec- 
 tion and rationality being man's guide in action, it follows that 
 the irrational impulses of pleasure can have no part in virtue. 
 For virtue is the aim of effort, while pleasure is only a result of 
 effort. Moreover, the great nature of the universe consists of 
 parts duly ranked in subordination to the whole, and he 
 who ' follows nature ' must adopt the same symmetrical prin- 
 ciple ; but plaesure isolates the individual within his own little 
 range of feeling, and therefore shuts him out from participation 
 in the larger order of nature. Pleasure and passion therefore 
 are the ills and diseases of the soul, its ' mad motors,' against 
 which he who would be virtuous must wage unceasing war. 
 
 (c) The Position of ' External Goods.' — When pleasure 
 and passion are to be eliminated from the equating of the 
 virtuous man and Nature, it follows that the pursuit of wealth, 
 the crystallized means towards enjoyment, must be an object of 
 indifference. All that is outside the control of the will is 
 utterly unimportant to the man whose life is firmly set upon an 
 approximation to the standard of ideal virtue. All that 
 gives pleasure partakes of its irrationality, and hence is beneath 
 the choice of an aspirant to the ordered rationality of nature. 
 Therefore, all 'external goods,' health, wealth, even life itself, are 
 morally indifferent, and when circumstance has carried its war 
 against the will to the uttermost, instead of capitulation, the 
 mind that follows right can throw down the gauntlet to fate by 
 taking leave of a sphere that cramps its freedom without 
 humbling its lofty spirit. Life is thus outside the will, and it 
 can at any moment be forsaken, like a chance companion, as 
 was practically proved by many a Stoic teacher. 
 
 Though everything that is beyond the will's control is, from 
 the moral point of view, alike indifferent, it does not follow, as 
 the Cynics taught, that they must be sunk to a dead level without 
 a single distinguishing feature. Though unable to supplant 
 virtue in the good man's will, external things are not to be 
 deprived of the slight infinitesimal value they sometimes pos- 
 
THE STOICS 67 
 
 sess. To deny it would be to turn away from the plain teach- 
 ing of nature. Therefore, while all outside the will is alike 
 indifferent when contrasted with virtue, as aids or hindrances 
 to virtue, external things have a kind of worth too little to be 
 compared with the majesty of virtue, but enough to aid in the 
 realization of its full power. The good man will therefore 
 prefer certain indifferent things, such as wealth, not for its 
 own sake, but for the facilities it gives him for moral action, 
 and use them without being beholden to them. He will also 
 avoid others, lest they should cramp his effort ; while a third 
 class of occurrences, that cannot impinge upon the exercise 
 of the will, are not only indifferent, but beneath either prefer- 
 ence or avoidance. 
 
 {d) Virtue. — When everything outside the will has been 
 separated from Virtue, the moulding of the will to the larger 
 rationality of the universe is the sole object of Ethics. There- 
 fore virtue must be an active knowledge or practical wisdom 
 that struggles forward towards the greater reason. Vice 
 is the absence of virtue, and hence it is folly, depravity, 
 imbecility. 
 
 Since virtue is obedience to the commands of wisdom, no 
 act is virtuous unless it originates directly from a right dis- 
 position of the reason. Though to the eye of another an act 
 may satisfy every law, it is without moral worth unless it has 
 originated pure from the supreme fount of virtue in the mind 
 of the doer. 
 
 However the manifestation of virtue may vary, the disposi- 
 tion of the mind must ever be the same, and, therefore, all 
 virtues are 'of equal merit and all vices of equal depravity. 
 He who is good is good throughout, and the vicious man is 
 altogether vice. 
 
 (e) The Ideal of the 'Wise Man.' — Since Virtue is the 
 unfaltering exercise of Reason and Wisdom, the crown]|[of 
 virtue belongs only to the ideally wise or completely good. 
 The * Wise Man ' has gained full control of the passions, and 
 
68 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 he is lord of his desires ; therefore, he alone is a true king, 
 revelling in absolute liberty. He is altogether lovely, for 
 virtue alone is beautiful. As possessor of the goods of the 
 soul he has an inexhaustible treasure-house, containing the 
 whole world's wealth. With rich wisdom the Wise Man looks 
 to earth, and in his perfection excels in every relation of life ; 
 he alone is the best ruler, the truest subject, the best general 
 and deepest poet. He alone understands the ways of the Gods, 
 therefore his piety is complete, and he is the only real priest 
 and friend of Heaven. Free from want, absolutely perfect 
 and sublimely happy, he is the compeer of Zeus in greatness 
 and majesty. 
 
 B.- — EPICURUS AND HIS FOLLOWERS. 
 
 Sec. I. — Tke Epicurean Society. 
 
 It is one of the remarkable coincidences of history that the 
 date of the birth of Zeno of Citium is also that of his rival 
 Epicurus. As the condition of Greece at the close of the 
 fourth century before Christ evoked philosophical speculation, 
 invariably onesided in its conclusions, the Stoic exaltation of 
 man's moral destiny to ideal grandeur is fronted by the re- 
 iterated claims of individual happiness expounded and prac- 
 tised by Epicurus. Thus in the hands of the Stoics, man, as 
 a moral agent, strives to fulfil his destiny by the narrow road of 
 virtue ; under the guidance of Epicurus, man, in the concrete 
 life of sense, finds the goal of his being in the pursuit of 
 happiness. 
 
 The life of Epicurus, as befits the Apostle of tranquil satis- 
 faction, was singularly devoid of incident. He was born at 
 Samos, and appears to have had a scanty education. Wan- 
 dering to Colophon, Mitylene, and Lampsacus, he reached 
 Athens at the end of the fourth century. As a teacher he 
 opened a school in his garden, whither all who felt the pressure 
 of the times flocked as to a haven of refuge. The genius of 
 
EPICURUS AND HIS FOLLOWERS 69 
 
 Epicurus impressed itself upon his companions, and they per- 
 petuated his teaching without addition or alteration. The 
 bond that united the society was less the desire of knowledge 
 than the longing for an oasis of calm and rest shut out from 
 the turmoil of ordinary life. Every guest in the garden of 
 Epicurus was the friend of his fellows — a friendship more 
 celebrated than the Pythagorean ; for the common bank, to 
 which the Pythagoreans contributed, was superseded by the 
 implicit trust of well-tried friends. Thus with mutual pro- 
 vision for material wants, the Epicureans lived in an artificial 
 paradise, devoted to the culture of happiness and the pursuit 
 of a life of even tenor, diversified by no keen delights, and 
 broken by no sharp sorrows. 
 
 The friends and successors of Epicurus cared little for the 
 theoretic development of their philosophy, and hence none of 
 them can claim a place beside their master. Of the earlier 
 Epicureans, Metodorus died before Epicurus, and for nearly 
 two hundred years leader was followed by leader without 
 especial result. In the first century (b.c.) a few names emerge 
 that have become important from intrinsic considerations. 
 Phaedrus, in his exposition of the theory at Rome, gained the 
 attention of Cicero. Siro, or Sciro, was the teacher of Virgil, 
 and about the same time Lucretiu', the poet, popularized the 
 physical portion of the theory in his verses. 
 
 Sec. II. — Logic, or Canonic, and Physics. 
 
 Like the Stoics, Epicurus understands by Philosophy not the 
 Science of Truth, but an Art of Life ; or, as he defined it, the 
 realization of a happy life by maxims and reasoning. The 
 preliminary steps of Logic and Physics were even more hastily 
 passed by Epicurus than by the Stoics, and his disciples 
 shunned them as the restless foes of the settled tranquillity of 
 mind that formed the first condition of happiness. Thus the 
 Epicurean treatment of such problems is negative rather than 
 
70 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 positive, and they are satisfied with the erection of a fixed 
 boundary that, like the great wall of China, curbs every inroad 
 upon their peace. 
 
 {a) Logic, or Canonic— The great object of Canonic is 
 to bridle the impetuous questions into the reality of truth and 
 knowledge. As the beginning of knowledge lies with the senses, 
 so their impressions are always true. When an impression has 
 been frequently repeated it produces memory, which partakes 
 of the inviolability of the feelings from which it arises. Hence 
 truth belongs to all actual impressions of the senses, and 
 generalizations actually derived from them. When we pass 
 beyond the immediately-present feeling, and form opinions or 
 draw conclusions from it, there is a wide field of the possi- 
 bility of error, and it is here that all false judgment must be 
 sought. 
 
 (3) Physics. — With this simple equipment the philosopher 
 can approach the inmost secrets of nature. The haunting 
 spectres of an unknown and immeasurable universe are dis- 
 pelled by the system of Atomism that pieces together all 
 things in an evenly-balanced mechanism, with security for man 
 under the calm of unbroken law. Thus Epicurus held the 
 Atoms and Void to be the origin of the universe, and he 
 modified the theory only in two main particulars. The 
 number of the forms of the Atoms must be limited, not un- 
 limited. Moreover, partly in deference to criticism, partly to 
 avoid the idea of compulsion, the Atoms fall not in straight 
 lines, but with slight deviations, from which arises the rebound 
 that was insusceptible of proof in the earlier theory. From 
 the concussion Atoms are grouped together until an infinite 
 number of worlds is formed, that stud the gulf of immensity, 
 each isled in self-completeness, and separated from its neigh- 
 bour by an interspace of emptiness. 
 
 Upon our world life at first appeared in varied forms, but 
 only the best have survived. Amongst living animals, besides 
 the Atoms of flame or fire, there is a still more ethereal sub- 
 
EPICURUS AND HIS FOLLOWERS 71 
 
 Stance, transmitted from parent to offspring, which is the germ 
 of life and feeling. In man, moreover, there is an additional 
 part to which he owes his rationality. Death rudely cuts the 
 bond that unites the Atoms, and they are dispersed to form 
 new combinations in the infinite movement to which they are 
 subjected. 
 
 The universal reign of law in the varying binding and un- 
 binding of Atomic combinations is absolutely unbroken. It 
 is only man's timidity that sees the foresight and providence 
 of the Gods in the changes of the world. On the contrary, it is 
 the sublime privilege of Godhead to realize the ideal of happi- 
 ness in complete freedom from care. The Gods are immortal 
 beings, with etherealized bodies, human in form, but composed 
 of the purest light. Removed from the distracting cares of 
 humanity, they 
 
 ' Haunt 
 The lucid interspace of world and world, 
 Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, 
 Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, 
 Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans. 
 Nor ever sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 
 Their sacred everlasting calm.' 
 
 Sec. III. — Ethics. 
 
 When the stability of knowledge has been established by the 
 Canonic ; the universe regulated by law, the dread ' unknown 
 of death ' and the fear of Gods resolved in the Physics, it only 
 remains to establish the goal of action by Ethics. 
 
 Since the senses are the source and test of knowledge, their 
 gratification is the sole object of effort. But momentary 
 pleasure is evanescent, and the wise man will seek rather the 
 tranquil enjoyment that endures and irradiates the whole life. 
 It is the office of the judgment to decide the relative worth of 
 various enjoyments, and to determine whether the consequences 
 of a present gratification are alien to future tranquillity. 
 
 Hence Happiness consists less in the active endeavour to 
 secure bliss than the steady maintenance of a settled peace, for 
 
72 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 pleasure, at the best, is but the satisfaction of a want, and he 
 ■who is free from want is already happy. To secure this im- 
 perturbability of spirit, the claims of -the pleasures of the mind 
 must be fully recognised, for they are most lasting, and chief 
 amongst mental joys are the pleasures of virtue, freedom from 
 prejudice, from the fear of pain and suffering, and the modera- 
 tion that teaches self-control. 
 
 When man steps beyond his own individual inner life, the 
 distinction between material and mental joys determines his 
 relationship to his fellows. The necessity for tranquillity 
 amidst his surroundings justifies the existence of the State. 
 None save the philosopher recognises the fear and disturbance 
 following inroads upon the peace or security of his neigh- 
 bours, and the majority of mankind can only be deterred 
 by the threat of punishment, executed, if need be, by the 
 State. Thus material welfare binds men into communities 
 governed by common laws. On the other hand, the higher 
 joys of life are only realized to the full by the society of con- 
 genial natures that adds a rounded completeness to the bliss 
 of the completely happy man. 
 
 The portrait of the sublimely /lap/y man is a companion 
 picture to the idealized mise man of the Stoics. He is rich in 
 the fewness of his wants, content with little, an unfailing judge 
 of the claims of different pleasures, and absolute lord of his 
 desires. Destiny and fortune are powerless to prevail against 
 him, for he is armed with contentment and calm tranquillity, 
 against which what is external to himself is all but powerless. 
 Thus, complete in the most enduring bliss, he dwells as a God 
 amongst mortals. 
 
 C. — SCEPTICISM IN THE NEW ACADEMY. 
 
 Sec. I. — Scepticism as a School of Philosophy. 
 
 It is a singular instance of the decrepitude of the closing 
 period of Greek Philosophy that its limited effort after an 
 
SCEPTICISM IN THE NEW ACADEMY 73 
 
 original solution of the problem of life is both opened and 
 closed by Scepticism. Pyrrho* and his isolated followers were 
 silenced by the 'criteria' that were boldly proclaimed as in- 
 fallible touchstones of truth, and two rival dictatorships were 
 thus established that suppressed every expression of adverse 
 opinion and coerced the suffrages of the reason. These 
 haughty claims were soon fronted by renewed revolt, and 
 instead of annihilating doubt they were forced to admit it as 
 an equal in the ranks of philosophy. 
 
 This fact forms the distinction between the Scepticism of 
 Pyrrho and the new Academicians. The conflict of manners 
 and interests in the decline of Greece gave birth to the earlier 
 Scepticism, the conflict of the philosophic remedies for the 
 national evil was the origin of the later. The earlier Scepticism 
 taught individual suspense of judgment, the later urged the 
 same policy as the goal of philosophy. The earlier scepticism 
 arose from the blank silence left by the death of Aristotle and 
 unbroken by the inaction of his followers, while the later was 
 opposed to the effort demanded by the anchorites of Virtue or 
 the votaries of Content and, standing aloof from the contest 
 between them, maintained that man's destiny and happiness 
 lay not in the solution, but in the avoidance of the dilemma. 
 Lastly, Pyrrho was without a school and without accredited 
 disciples, while the later Scepticism was received into the 
 Academy and nourished by those who claimed to be the 
 spiritual heirs of Plato. 
 
 The earlier members of the Academy gradually deserted 
 metaphysics, and after the time of Xenocrates they limited their 
 inquiries to Ethics, t At first marked by erudition, the school 
 in the beginning of the third century (b.c.) was disposed to 
 despise all learning, and hence, when the Stoics and Epicureans 
 became violently opposed, their differences were construed by 
 the weaknesses of the time into existent and unavoidable con- 
 
 * Page 61. ■ t Page 45. 
 
74 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 tradictions, not of the schools, but of nature. It was thus 
 that the Academy became the rallying point of Scepticism. 
 
 This step was taken by Arcesilaus, who succeeded Crates.* 
 The followers of Arcesilaus are of little account, and they are 
 generally grouped together as the Second Academy. The 
 New, or Third, Academy was founded by Carneades, a man 
 of great eloquence and dialectic ability, who followed the 
 direction marked out by Arcesilaus. After his teaching had 
 been perpetuated for some time another new direction was given 
 to the school under the title of the Fourth Academy.t 
 
 Se^. II. — The Scepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades. 
 
 The Stoics were the chief champions of certainty, and they 
 believed that their doctrine of the Criterion riveted truth in an 
 impregnable panoply of proof. Arcesilaus replied that their 
 whole work was vain and illusory, for there is no Criterion, and 
 no such thing as truth. The criterion was alike false and 
 impossible in application — false because the conviction that 
 accompanies groundless judgments often equals that which 
 belongs to those that are supposed better founded, and im- 
 possible because no judgment has a mark of truth distinguish- 
 ing it from others. But if there be no criterion there can be no 
 truth, and therefore the mind of the wise man is ever open to 
 any alternative, while he can never stake his assent upon the 
 truth of either. The ideal condition of the philosopher is 
 therefore an impassive imperturbability that denies all know- 
 ledge without affirming its impossibility. In action this belief 
 guarantees him from the toil and care of decision ; when every 
 path of effort is open he will make no definite pronouncement, 
 but, following the course ol probability, decides by the strongest 
 incentives of the moment. 
 
 Carneades followed the same path, but his criticism was of 
 wider range, and he expressly denied the existence of any 
 
 * See p. 45. t See p. 76. 
 
SCEPTICISM IN THE NEW ACADEMY 75 
 
 certainty. Truth and error are in reality inextricably blended, 
 and each is so like the other that every true judgment can be 
 balanced by a false one, similar in every characteristic. More- 
 over, the idea of certainty is founded upon proof, and every pro- 
 cess of proof must either assume the conclusion or lead to an 
 endless series of syllogisms. An end may indeed be sought 
 in the stable existence of God, but if the existence of God be 
 established, as an inference from the symmetrical arrangement of 
 the world, the conclusion is illegitimate, for the world is full 
 of evils. The same thought was enforced in the field of Ethics 
 and action, where man must follow the advice of Arcesilaus, 
 and act as probability determines. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ECLECTICISM. 
 
 Sec. I. — General Characteristics. 
 
 The establishment of Scepticism as a philosophic creed was the 
 last act of independent energy in Greek philosophy. Many 
 doctrines were enshrined in the different schools, but there was 
 no creative energy to gather together their several elements of 
 truth, and bind them into a comprehensive system. Instead 
 of progress there now comes amalgamation, and the tendency 
 of the leaders of thought was to incorporate the most popular 
 tenets of their rivals into their own system with the least 
 possible displacement of the original materials. 
 
 This change in the attitude of Greece towards philosophy 
 was a natural consequence of its decay, but it was accelerated 
 by the growth of Rome. Gradually Greece lost her freedom, 
 and her philosophy followed other treasures of her intellect and 
 energy to the homes of her conquerors. The Romans were not 
 slow to appreciate the homage of so many arts and sciences to 
 their arms, and the youth of Rome was educated by the sages 
 
76 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 of Greece. With other teachers, the philosophers flocked to 
 Rome and introduced their various systems. 
 
 This course was fraught with momentous issues in the 
 highest degree detrimental to the progress of the deepest 
 speculation, for philosophy is the etherealization of the finest 
 powers of a nation, and it cannot survive the decay of people 
 whose labours gave it birth. The teaching of the Romans by 
 the Greeks was, at the time of the fall of Greece, especially 
 anomalous. The pupils were all-powerful, and the relative 
 claims of philosophical systems were judged by those who were 
 but half educated in them. The teachers, dependent upon 
 popularity, were thus forced to follow the lead of those whom 
 they taught, and philosophy abandoned the insight of reason 
 for the general consent of mankind, thus signing away by a 
 single melancholy deed of cession everything that had been 
 won by over four centuries of the toil of the noblest intellects 
 of Greece. 
 
 When the Romans began to philosophize, the prevailing 
 tendency of collocation of different views, or, as it has been 
 called. Eclecticism, was further augmented. Wanting the 
 subtlety and speculative earnestness of the Greeks, they failed 
 to recognise the intimate connection of Metaphysics and 
 Ethics, and, always nobly maintaining the dictates of morality, 
 they fitted them with a metaphysical superstructure, or often 
 adopted one altogether alien from them. 
 
 Sec. II. — Tlie Fourth and Fifth Academies. 
 
 The doubt that animated the New Academy was toned 
 down by time, and instead of an antagonism to knowledge, it 
 took the form of the admission of an attitude of mind midway 
 between bare probability and certainty. Philo of Larissa first 
 led the Academy in this modification of the Scepticism of 
 Carneades, and the school under his leadership is known as 
 the Fourth Academy. He agreed with Carneades in denying 
 
ECLECTICISM 77 
 
 the possibility of absolute certainty, and from this point he 
 neared the Stoic doctrine of a criterion v/hile expressly arguing 
 against it. For, he reasoned, if we are to act we must have 
 some guarantee beyond mere probability ; there must be a 
 conviction in the mind sufficient to influence the will. Such a 
 conviction, while falling short of certainty, possesses an 
 obviousness that influences without coercing our actions. 
 
 This view still left the determination of the criterion of the 
 ground of action precarious and undetermined. A fresh move- 
 ment towards a philosophic test of the determinants of action 
 was advocated by Antiochus of Ascalon, the teacher of Cicero, 
 who is named the head of the Fifth Academy. Influenced by 
 the desire of the Romans to amalgamate the prevailing doctrines 
 of the schools into a sufficiently sure foundation for action, he 
 held that Truth was not a matter of insight, but the poll of 
 opinions; it was that upon which the chief philosophers, were 
 agreed. By uniting random portions of the theories of Plato, 
 Aristotle, and the Stoa, he formed a motley body of proposi- 
 tions, which he maintained were held in common by the 
 three schools. In Ethics he urged the Platonic and Stoic 
 sufficiency of virtue, modified by Aristotle's plea for external 
 goods. 
 
 After Antiochus, Potamo, a contemporary of Augustus, 
 expressly named the school Eclectic. 
 
 In the first centuries of the Christian era the Platonists 
 devoted themselves to the study and defence of the writings of 
 Plato ; but the majority of their work shows a striking grafting 
 of Aristotelian and Stoic teaching upon the original theory. 
 Amongst many men of remarkable genius and learning, this 
 period is especially marked by the name of Plutarch of 
 Chseronea, the celebrated biographer. 
 
 Sec. III.—T/ie Stoics. 
 
 The gradual growth of the Stoic school by the labours of 
 successive thinkers, as well as its reverses under the searching 
 
78 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 criticism of the Sceptics, led the later members to repair its 
 sinking prestige by stealthy borrowings from other systems. 
 Boethus bowed to the attacks of the Sceptics by ranking the 
 other phases of consciousness with intuition* as criteria. 
 He also gave up the perpetual dissolution and re-creation of 
 the world, which he replaced by Aristotle's theory of its 
 eternity. 
 
 The introduction of Stoicism to Rome by Panaetius (the 
 author of a work upon Duty which formed the model of 
 Cicero's treatise upon the same subject) was inevitably followed 
 by a further spread of Eclecticism. The Stoic idealization of 
 duty found a ready echo in the sturdy patriotism of Rome, 
 while its speculative foundation fell upon the dull ears of men 
 imbued with the spirit of action. Hence Panaetius and his 
 pupil Posidonius were inclined to follow the same tendency, 
 abandoning the speculative foundations of Ethics, and thus 
 nearing the more popular portions of the theories of Plato and 
 Aristotle, while they steadily ignored the Cynic elements in 
 original Stoicism. 
 
 Among the noblest of the Romans the Stoics gained many 
 adherents. Cato of Utica was one of their earliest converts. 
 Cicero, the Roman historian of Philosophy, is Stoic in his 
 hostility to the Epicureans, without accepting the austerity of 
 the doctrines of Zeno. In his scanty Metaphysics he follows 
 Carneades and the New Academy, declining to throw in his lot 
 with any of the contending parties. A few years before the 
 death of Cicero a school was founded in Rome by Q. Sextus, 
 who accepted the practical precepts of the Stoics without their 
 theoretic principles. 
 
 The most illustrious pupil of the Sextian society is Seneca, 
 the ill-fated teacher and adviser of the Emperor Nero. Like 
 the other Roman Eclectics, he has little interest in the Stoic 
 Metaphysics. The woe of the world fills the whole horizon of 
 philosophy, and there is no place for mere speculation. The 
 * See p. 64. 
 
ECLECTICISM 79 
 
 conflict of reason and passion leads to Plato's longing for the 
 unbroken calm of death. To reanimate the failing forces of 
 right, he follows Plato, diverging from the Stoics in granting 
 additional powers to the Reason, which is the latent spark of 
 Divinity in man, and its dictates the human utterance of the 
 will of God. By the homage of the reason, in the sanctuary of 
 the breast, must the Deity be worshipped, not in temples nor 
 by sacrifice. 
 
 Contemporaneous with Seneca lived Musonius. In his aver- 
 sion to speculative inquiries he gives up much of the Stoic theory 
 nearing Cynicism, while in his wide philanthropy he again 
 approximates the popular teaching of the later school. Philo- 
 sophy, he argued, is the cure for the diseases of the soul — a 
 cure that cannot be wrought by mere learning, but by practice. 
 The seeds of virtue are implanted in us, but their nurture must 
 be our own work. We must therefore know our powers, and 
 this is all that philosophy can teach. But our so^e concern and 
 our sole power is the execution of our thoughts, and all beyond, 
 as out of our control, is beneath our care. Only in developing 
 the germ of virtue can happiness be found, and all else is an 
 alien power to which we must unconditionally surrender. 
 
 If in the system of Musonius the philosopher is the physician 
 of the soul, his function with Epictetus is the priest and servant 
 of God. Agreeing with the Stoic, Cynic, and Aristotelian 
 elements of his predecessor's teaching, Epictetus urges his 
 followers to the exercise of a comprehensive benevolence that 
 unites men together and brings them into community with God. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, the celebrated emperor and patron of 
 Philosophy, agrees with Epictetus save in the Cynic portions 
 of his teaching. By position and religious fervour Aurelius is 
 inclined to replace it by the more noble theories of Plato, from 
 whom he borrows the supremacy of Reason, which leads him, 
 in homage to its nobility, to depreciate all that is external to the 
 lofty dictates of the will, which are divine in their origin, and 
 lead man to bow before the throne of Deity. 
 
8o A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Sec. IV. — The Cynics, Peripatetics, and Epicureans. 
 
 The continuous adoption of Cynic and Aristotelian principles 
 by the other schools shows a successive teaching of both forms 
 of doctrine. In Imperial Rome the laxity of life called from 
 stern moralists repeated attacks, which, unheeded and fruitless, 
 drove the reformers to the hermitage of Cynicism. This later 
 outbreak is far removed from the rigour that embraced but one 
 of the many sides of the character of Socrates. In later 
 Cynicism there is an utter despair both of the world and Philo- 
 sophy. Hence their analogy to their predecessors consists 
 rather in the superficial resemblance of their mode of life 
 without a real spiritual kinship. 
 
 The followers of Aristotle diifered from their rivals of the 
 Academy in remaining true to the theory of their master. 
 They commentated and expounded his works, and fiercely 
 defended them against attacks from every quarter. Neverthe- 
 less, the spirit of Eclecticism appears even in their commentaries, 
 and starts out from the treatises they have handed down as the 
 work of Aristotle. 
 
 Amongst the frequent shifting of opinions there was only 
 one school that remained true to the principles of their founder. 
 No desire to fortify or enlarge the theory is reported to have 
 penetrated into the secluded garden of Epicurus ; probably the 
 original genius of their master dominated successive genera- 
 tions of his disciples, possibly their desire for calm and repose 
 forbade discussion, or the need of defence may not have been 
 felt, owing to the charges of sensuality which were liberally 
 heaped upon them, and which may have exempted them from 
 the ordeal of criticism as beneath the dignity of philosophers. 
 
 Sec. V. — Later Scepticism. 
 
 The negative criticism of the Scepticism of the New Academy 
 had forced the existing schools to repair the deficiencies in 
 their theories by piecemeal borrowings from other systems 
 
ECLECTICISM 8i 
 
 which had been subjected to similar attacks. It necessarily 
 followed that philosophies that owed their very existence to 
 original differences of opinion could not be consistently pieced 
 together to afford a secure defence against the common adver- 
 sary. By the substitution of Fxlecticism for Scepticism in the 
 Academy, the philosophy of doubt was deprived of a place in 
 the world of thought, and the Eclectics won a brief triumph. 
 As the progress of amalgamation multiplied trivial differences, 
 or surmounted them by perverting their meaning, a feeling of 
 dissatisfaction gradually arose which gave birth to a new body 
 of Sceptics during the close of the last century before Christ. 
 
 The new champions of doubt claimed to be the lineal 
 descendants of Pyrrho, though their arguments were mainly 
 borrowed from the followers of Arcesilaus and Carneades. 
 From both sections of their predecessors they were distinguished 
 by an alliance with a body of medical men, known as Empirics, 
 who were in opposition to the tenets of their brethren. Thus 
 the age of ancient philosophy was disturbed by the simul- 
 taneous attacks from within and from without. The Empirics 
 in medicine maintained that remedies could only be applied 
 from personal knowledge, and that it was impossible to connect 
 diseases with antecedent causes. The same theory had only to 
 be extended to disconnect all events with causes, and finally 
 destroy the tender filaments that form the woof of knowledge. 
 These conclusions were drawn by ^nesidemus, who found the 
 goal of philosophy in the denial of knowledge, which freed 
 man from care, and thus gave him the only happiness that can 
 be found. The historian of the school is Sextus Empiricus (or 
 Sextus the Empiric), who embodied in a series of voluminous 
 treatises all that had been advanced against the validity of 
 knowledge from the earliest times down to ^nesidemus. 
 
82 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 NEO-P LATON I S M. 
 
 Sec. I. — The Transition from Eclecticism to the Philosophy of 
 
 Faith. 
 
 After the death of Aristotle the thinkers of the succeeding 
 generation endeavoured, each within the limits of his school, 
 to perpetuate the several doctrines that had been handed down 
 to them. While fondly hoping to protect the territories they 
 deemed already won, they were startled by Pyrrho's proclama- 
 tion that their toil was wasted and their possessions worthless. 
 Amid a sinking national life, which robbed them of the power 
 to vindicate their claims, it is little wonder that the Academy 
 made terms with their adversary and opened their gates to 
 Scepticism. But there could be no union between philosophy 
 and doubt, and the various schools endeavoured by a combina- 
 tion of their resources to repel the common adversary. Such 
 a course, by concentrating the attacks of the sceptic upon their 
 united weaknesses, would have inevitably hastened, instead of 
 delaying, the final capitulation of philosophy. 
 
 When affairs were in this condition, at the opening of the 
 first century before Christ, the intense yearning for finality that 
 characterizes the deepest aspirations of the soul made itself 
 decisively felt. When no one system founded upon reason, 
 nor no combination of systems, was able to endure the onset 
 of the Sceptics, the insatiable hunger of the mind craved 
 another outlet, not by the beaten track of proof, but by the 
 wings of faith. Reason had hitherto claimed the whole field 
 of Philosophy, and it had failed after five hundred years of toil 
 to justify its pretensions. To reanimate its exhausted energy, 
 it must be aided by faith. Faith and reason in a close alliance 
 was the sole possible answer to the sneer of the Sceptic and the 
 despair of the ancient world. The union of philosophy and 
 religion was a change so important that it gathered in the 
 
NEO-PLATONISM 83 
 
 supreme effort of the greatest civilized nations of antiquity 
 during a period of nearly three hundred years. 
 
 The first step in the new direction may be assigned to the 
 followers of Pythagoras. For three hundred years the society 
 had pursued its way as a religious cult,* with a body of mystic 
 observances and a fixed ritual of spiritual dogmas. The 
 members were closely united in a holy brotherhood that 
 struggled towards a higher existence by a mortification of every 
 sensuous desire. At the beginning of the first century before 
 Christ they endeavoured to revive the speculative theories of 
 Pythagoras to justify their religious observances to the reason. 
 In the prevailing eclectic tendency they mingled the number 
 theory with portions of the doctrine of Plato, especially in the 
 later form, which united the characteristics of the Ideas and 
 Numbers, t From this point they diverged in the direction that 
 stamps the revived theory as Neo-Pythagorean by assigning the 
 Ideal-Numbers a place in the mind of God. The Numbers or 
 Ideas were the Divine plan of creation, the eternal model from 
 which the world was fashioned. 
 
 While the Neo-Pythagoreans borrowed Metaphysics from the 
 Platonists, the Platonists adopted many traits of the Pytha- 
 gorean religious creed. Thus there was a strong impetus given 
 to the tendency from the most popular philosophical school 
 and from one of the leading religious societies of Greece. 
 
 But it rested with another civilization to finally prepare the 
 way for the coming religious philosophy. At Alexandria 
 Greek wisdom and Oriental civilization met and crossed. 
 There the leaders of every science and every ar,t found a home 
 and eager followers. Almost all the schools of philosophy 
 were well represented, and ^nesidemus was carrying on the 
 siege of Eclecticism by a new force of doubt. ' Greek Scepti- 
 cism, Judaism, Platonism, Christianity — all have their inter- 
 preters within so small a distance from the temple of Serapis.' 
 
 Here Philo of Alexandria, a Greek by education, by birth a 
 * Page 5. t Page 45. 
 
84 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Jew, lived and taught from 30 b.c. to 50 a.d. An ardent 
 admirer of Greek philosophy and a devout worshipper of the 
 Jewish Jehovah, he endeavoured to combine the two in a 
 religious system that would satisfy the reason, while supple- 
 menting its deficiencies by the supreme fiat of Revelation ; 
 and it is only by the Idea of God that both can be firmly 
 united. 
 
 God, he taught, is the infinite expression of every infinity. 
 Every human thought that would endeavour to mount to the 
 ineffable majesty of the Godhead shrinks back dwarfed by its 
 finitude. For us it is enough to Mt'eve in His existence, seeing 
 in it the sum and source of all perfection, the infinite Power that 
 is the cause of all. 
 
 Between the infinity of God and the imperfection of the 
 world Philo's predecessors placed various intermediate steps. 
 The mass of mankind have a fixed belief in demons, and the 
 Platonists a World-soul. Such attempts to bridge the gulf are 
 summed up in Philo's Logos. The Logos is the Divine Reason 
 flowing from God, His ambassador, servant and minister. By 
 the agency of the Logos, God formed the chaotic mass of 
 primeval matter into the world, where man possesses a part of 
 each side of cosmic antithesis, his body from matter, and his 
 Reason pointing him to the universal Logos. Being thus 
 formed, it is plainly his duty and happiness to nourish the 
 spiritual germ and separate it from the clogging desires of the 
 body. To him who has courage to rise ever upward towards 
 perfection a great reward is promised. By rigid castigation of 
 the body he mounts higher and higher, gaining fresh powers, 
 until, passing every lower range of being, even the Logos, in a 
 sublime ecstasy losing the last limitations of finitude, he is 
 absorbed in the infinity of Deity. 
 
 Sec. II. — Plotinus. 
 
 For nearly two hundred years the majestic thought rudely 
 shaped by the genius of Philo of Alexandria remained un- 
 
NEO-PLATONISM 85 
 
 developed. Before the middle of the third century (a.d.) 
 Ammonius Saccas left his work as a labourer, and became the 
 k-ader of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonists. Amongst his pupils 
 were Longinus, possibly Origen, and Plotinus, his successor, 
 who wove the many elements of Jewish Theism and Greek 
 Philosophy into a comprehensive religious philosophy. Soon 
 after the deaih of Ammonius Saccas he moved to Rome, 
 where he died in the year 270 a.d. 
 
 (a) The Supreme Principle of Plotinus. — The teaching 
 of Philo connected God and the world by the supposition of 
 the Logos. To complete his thought it was necessary to show 
 the descending grades by which the Infinity of Godhead passed 
 downwards until it gave birth to the material world, without 
 forfeiting the smallest degree of perfection. To make the 
 chain of existences complete, the supreme First Principle must 
 be raised above the conception of Philo. It must be sphered 
 in an absolute infinity, and therefore denied all attributes. 
 The 'First' must be without thought, for thought implies dis- 
 tinction, and distinction finitude. It must be without will, 
 for will is directed to what is beyond the doer, and therefore 
 involving limitation. It can' at best be imperfectly described 
 as One and Good, yet always with the restriction that both sup- 
 pose an opposition ; for plurality is opposed to unity and ill 
 to good, and the sum of all must contain all things. Nay, in 
 the First there can be no division, not even the sundering of an 
 individuality that is presupposed in the unity of consciousness, 
 and therefore it is the sublime negation of thought, will, and 
 personality, the great gulf of infinity that can only be dis- 
 tinguished by the denialof every attribute that is tainted by 
 the finitude of humanity. 
 
 ib) The Principle of Reason (or rou;). — Such is the tran- 
 scendent perfection of the ' First ' that the majesty of its infinity 
 sheds forth a lesser radiance without loss or division. This 
 emanation stands next to its great prototype, and is called 
 Reason. Its lofty privilege is to see into the inmost nature of 
 
86 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 all things, and to discern their unalterable relations. For it 
 there is neither past nor future, and its existence is sphered in 
 a measureless eternity that time but vainly copies. 
 
 (e) The Soul. — From Reason proceed Life and Activity, 
 which form the lower grade of the living Soul, the great 
 rational Life. As issuing from the radiancy of Reason, it 
 shares in the timeless Ideal order ; as endowed with the privi- 
 lege and penalty of life, it inclines toward the material over 
 which it watches, and to which it communicates the higher 
 order of Reason. 
 
 (^) The Woeld-Soul and Matter. — Life must be realized 
 in the change of matter, and the Reasoning Soul completes 
 itself by the emission of the Soul of the World that is the life 
 and principle of Chaos. Lastly, the World-Soul completes 
 itself by shedding forth the inert matter that serves it as a 
 body. Thus as light at last ends in darkness, so the emana- 
 tions of the great First, the primal Infinity, are at last com" 
 pleted by the remote product of matter. 
 
 (e) The Reverse Path — from Man to the 'First.' — 
 Man is a miniature of the Soul of the World. As with Philo, 
 by his body he touches the remote verge of creation, while by 
 virtue of a higher principle he is akin to loftier existences. 
 By rigorous purification of all that fetters him to matter he 
 may win back a toilsome path to the Infinite. This is his 
 whole duty, and the sum of every virtue. As he annihilates 
 the yearnings of sense he soars above the desires of Life, 
 gradually mounting to the lofty state of the great Reason 
 (voDs). To quit the limitations of thought he must bury him- 
 self within his own spirit, and, losing every distinction, float in 
 a swoon of ecstatic bliss into the broad bosom of the shoreless 
 Infinite. 
 
 Sec. III. — lamblichus. 
 
 After the death of Plotinus, the leader of the new phase of 
 thought was Malchus of Tyre, better known as Porphyry. 
 
NEO-PLATONISM 87 
 
 After his death the chief seat of the school was transferred 
 from Rome to Syria, where lamblichus developed the religious 
 side of Neo-Platonism. Under his powerful personality and 
 dexterous management the learning and civilization of the old 
 world disputed the early claims of Christianity to the leader- 
 ship of the religions of the earth. In theory he marshalled 
 the emanations of Plotinus into a hierarchy of divisible essences 
 midway between spiritual beings and metaphysical substances ; 
 in practice he urged the severest asceticism as the sole path 
 to virtue and bliss. During a period of fifty years the new 
 doctrine advanced with giant strides. In Palestine, Rome, 
 and Alexandria it girdled the intellect of the fourth century, 
 and its climax was reached when tlie Emperor Julian ascended 
 the throne with the avowed intention of establishing religious 
 philosophy as the creed of the civilized world. After an almost 
 unparalleled career of conquest he died before his desire was 
 attained. Little more than half a century later the ill-fated 
 Hypatia was murdered by the Christian rabble at .Alexandria, 
 the stronghold of Neo-Platonism (a.d. 415). 
 
 Sec. IV. — Tke Last School of Neo-Platonism. 
 
 After the death of Julian, Neo-Platonism suffered the fate 
 of a conquered faith. Its philosophers felt the keen blast of 
 adversity, and instead of spiritual leaders they became a perse- 
 cuted sect. Suffering had proved a hardy discipline to the 
 growing energy of Christianity, but it hastened the end of 
 an enfeebled philosophy. Yet under trial the philosophical 
 schools showed the dignity of a patriarch, conscious of noble 
 purposes not unfulfilled, who would leave no jarring memories 
 behind. The surviving schools, chief amongst them the 
 Academic and Aristotelian, after leading the thought of Greece 
 for over seven hundred years, reconciled their differences, and 
 accepted the religious faith of the Neo-Platonists. 
 
 For a century and a half, marked by the name Proclus, tlie 
 
88 A SIMPLE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 
 
 main body of philosophers were united at Athens, and though 
 little was added of historical importance, they gathered in the 
 wisdom of antiquity for the admiration of posterity. 
 
 The end of philosophy in the Western portion of the Roman 
 Empire may be dated from the death of Boethius (a.d. 525), 
 and in the Eastern four years later, when the Emperor 
 Justinian confiscated ihe properly of the Academy, forbade 
 the teaching of philosophy, and banished the last of those 
 who venerated the results won during a "thousand years by 
 independent speculation and fearless inquiry. 
 
INDEX OF TERMS AND GLOSSARY 
 
 Actuality (etipyeia), 52 
 
 aTTaQeia, 66, 68 
 
 Atoms (aTOfia, also called vaara, or 
 
 thick bodies), 15, 16, 70 
 arapaKia, 61, 69, 72 
 
 Beginning (apxri\ 3 
 Boundless, The (airupov), 4 
 
 Categories (Karijyopiai), 50 
 Common sense (aiaOrjTripiov koivov), 
 
 Condensation (TruKJ/aio-ie), 5 
 Contentment {hapkarriffig), 13 
 
 ^cija, opinion as opposed to know- 
 ledge ; a rude but undeveloped 
 conviction, 37, 38 
 
 fpws, 37 
 
 External goods-! avo 
 
 TTpOTjyflBVa 
 
 ddid^opa 
 
 ,66 
 
 Fire (jriip), Pyth., 'Eirria, etc., 7 
 
 Parmen., atOepiov tt., 9 
 
 Herac, dvadvfiiaaif;, 12 
 
 Stoics, TT. nxviKOv, 65 
 
 Form (6Hpc)j S° 
 
 Full, filled space; plenum as op- 
 posed to void (ri irX^peg), 15, 16 
 
 Germs of things ((TirkpiiaTa), also 
 called o/ioiofieprj, that \s parts like 
 to the wholes, 17 
 
 Habit (£?tc), 56 
 Hate (veiKOc), 14 
 
 Idea (etJos), 36 
 
 Imperturbability (arapa^ia), 72 
 Induction, Soc. (X0701 i-KaKTiKoC), 29 
 Aris. (JTraywyq), 49 
 
 Love (^i\or?;e), 14 
 
 Matter (iiXi)), 51, 52 
 Moisture (rA vypov), 5 
 
 Obviousness (evapyeia), 77 
 
 Pleasure and virtue, 32, 71, 72 
 
 Summum bonum, 55 
 
 criticised by Plato, 42 
 
 Stoics, 66 
 
 P otentiaUty (Sivafug), 52 
 
 Rarefaction {dpaiwaig), 5 
 Recollection (dvafivijatg), 41 
 
 " I KaropSiDnaraj ' ''' 
 Roots ofall {irdvTwv pii^oiftard), 14 
 
 Suicide (i^aywyri), 66 
 
 Suspense of judgment (£;rox>j), 73 
 
 Tact {ippovriaig), 57 
 Tranquillity {drapaKia), 69, 72 
 
 Unlimited, The (ds-Eipov), 4 
 
 Void (rd ictvd)/), 15 
 
 ipavTaaia /caraXjjjrriKij, 65 
 
INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 Academy, 34, 45, 74, 76, 77, 82, 87 
 j^inesidemus, 81 
 Alcibiades, 27 
 Alexander, 46 
 Ammonius Saccas, 85 
 Anaxagoras, 16 
 Anaximander, 4 
 Anaximenes, 4, 5 
 Arniceris, 32, 34 
 Antiochus, 77 
 Antisthenes, 31, 32 
 Arcesilaus, 45, 74, 81 
 • Archytas, 5 
 Aristippus, 31, 32 
 Aristo of Ceos, 59 
 
 Chios, 63 
 
 Aristotle, 45-59 
 Aristoxenus, 58 
 Aurelius, Marcus, 79 
 
 Boelhius, 88 
 Boethus, 78 
 
 Carneades, 74, 81 
 Cato, 78 
 Chrysippus, 63 
 Cicero, 78 
 Cleanthes, 63 
 Grantor, 45 
 Crates, 45 
 Critolaus, 59 
 
 Diodorus, 59 
 
 Diogenes of ApoUonia, 5 
 
 Sinope, 32 
 
 Dionysodorus, 21 
 
 Ecphantus, 8 
 Epicurus, 68-71 
 Epictetus, 79 
 Erymneus, 59 
 Euclides, 31, 33 
 Eudemus, 58 
 Euthydemus, 21 
 
 Gorgias, 21, 23 
 
 Hegesias, 32 
 Heraclitus, 11-13 
 Herillus, 63 
 Hippasus, 8 
 Hippias, 21 
 Hippo, 5 
 Hypatia, 87 
 
 lamblichus, 86, 87 
 Idaeus, 5 
 
 Julian, 87 
 
 Longinus, 8j 
 Lucretius, 69 
 Lyco, 59 
 
 Malchus of Tyre, 86 
 
 Melissus, 9 
 
 Metaphysics, Derivation of, 50 
 
 Metodorus, 69 
 
 Musonius, 79 
 
 Pansetius, 78 
 Parmenides, 9 
 
 Peripatetic, Derivation of, 47 
 Persaeus, 63 
 
INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 91 
 
 Phsedrus, 69 
 Philo, 83, 84 
 Plato, 31, 33-45 
 Plotinus, 85 
 Plutarch, 77 
 Polemo, 45 
 Porphyry, 86 
 Potamo, 77 
 Proclus, 87 
 Prodicus, 21 , 
 
 Protagoras, 21, 23, 37 
 Pyrrho, 61, 73, 81 
 Pythagoras, 5-8 
 
 Seneca, 78 
 Sextians, 78 " 
 Sextus Empiricus, 81 
 
 Siro, 69 
 Socrates, 25-31 
 Sophists, 18-24 
 Speusippus, 45 
 Strato, 58, 59 
 
 Thales, 3 
 Theodoras, 32 
 Theophrastus, 58 
 Thrasymachus, 21 
 
 Xantippe, 27, 29 
 Xenocrates, 45, 73 
 Xenophon, 31 
 
 Zeno of Elea, 9 
 Citium, 63 
 
DIAGRAMS 
 
 The following diagrams are an attempt to present a visible 
 picture of some of the thoughts expressed in the preceding 
 pjges. The first series deals with the mutual relations of the 
 three periods of Ancient Philosophy; the second shows the 
 relations of the main principles of the different groups of 
 thinkers ; and the third the application of these principles. 
 
 (i.) It is worthy of note that Ancient Philosophy has three 
 periods, each of which has three divisions. These divisions 
 may be named Origination, Combination (or Development) 
 and Completion. They may be represented, perhaps, most 
 clearly upon a cone, round which an ascending course is traced 
 with vertical lines representing the tripartite divisions of each 
 period. In the two first diagrams this is shown vertically in 
 the first and horizontally in the second. The former has the 
 advantage of shoeing clearly the retrogressive and destiuctive 
 tendency of the movements of the Sophists and Sceptics, while 
 the second seems to give a better \iew of the circular but ever 
 upward flight of Philosophy. 
 
 (ii.) While the first series shows the relation of the periods 
 and tendencies, the next group gives the relation of the 
 principles of philosophies as they group themselves together. 
 
 (iii.) It may be noted that the third series is not complete 
 owing to the diagrams omitted being too complicated to appear 
 clearly in a single pige. The method adopted is to use the 
 principle of the second series as a basis, and then add to it 
 such details as give the most adequate view of the constitution 
 of the universe as deducible from the main principle of a given 
 philosophy. 
 
 N.B. — It may perhaps be advisable to warn ihe reader who 
 is beginning his acquaintance with philosophy, that it is im- 
 possible to give an eye-picture of abstract speculations; all that 
 diagrams can profess to show is the relation of groups of 
 thoughts without, in any case, presenting a full view of the 
 thoughts themselves. This is especially the case in the first 
 two diagrams, where the dotted lines only enclose thinkers who 
 play a similar part in their own periods, but as these periods 
 are governed by different principles, it follows that the proto- 
 type of a later thinker may be found more often in a different 
 column from his own — where the connection between those in 
 the same column is exceptionally close it is indicated in the 
 first diagram by arrow-heads. 
 
gJ'^B deveUf„,,„t 0/ P\,lp, 
 
 
 PfT-l.J 
 
 /CicA^vS- 
 
 c^^;ii«_!!a!r! 
 
 flfu< / 
 
 " AS^ 
 
 rates* 
 
 / X 
 
 i 
 
 '^*: 
 
 — Rii£lS 
 
 >^4; 
 
 '^^ 
 
 ""'V^.^. 
 
 tOfz 
 
 uoi|HuiquiQ3 
 
3C THE CDNNECTtON UF THE MAlNlQEAS 
 
 nr Twe 
 
 VARIDUH SYSTEMS 
 A. The BeqimiiTig (ttid CTiiEf CliiTacleTlslics of the World, 
 
 (a). The TanianB. (P/. TKe PyHiaqaTems. {^liTke ElealicB. 
 
 T\e SaglTiTiin^ as A\attir. NumBTical Fottti. ■ Pxits Untti^ (Beln-b'). 
 
 of CluTije. 
 
 Chmje as IHb TiTial Law. 
 
 not A i( ChkTije. 
 
 (» EMPEDDCLES 
 
 ^^^^^^-Exfilanatlon of CKfi-nge bij — -^-^^ 
 Clemenla a-nd Force ^ A tome aTttL Vniij. 
 
 A 
 
 nol A 
 
 -^TlDt- 
 
 'Umcnls 
 
 A 
 
 "XT3 
 
 B 
 
 ^^A 
 
 A nolA 
 
 8)ANAXADDRAS , 
 
 Chjinqe. 
 
QoubT- 
 
 SDPHI5T5 
 
 D W. Knowledqe 
 
 SDCRATEIS 
 
 {"hi Knowledge in QEfinitioix. 
 
 Irvdwidual InsUnces with Al^rtThiVee ^-^^ <"^^' 
 
 I Idea.8' 
 
 
 FaTTTl, 
 
 E. P J-A T D /-^ 
 
 TKeldea * ' \_y 
 
 Malterl(CUaos) 
 
 Th.e World. 
 
 F ariexd-tle: 
 
 Oe^'elati'rneTLt Try AAatlEr uTiii Fbrfn 
 
 vfltHoulfimW 
 
T"Ke Sii-br erne end a-f Man 
 
 STOICS EPICUREANS 
 
 SCEPTIC^ 
 
 HappmiQa 
 
 Virtue ^ f^fairs., 
 
 H- Men united to IKe InftTU-te bu Fkilli 
 
 NED-PLATDNISTS 
 The InfinilB. 
 
 -□ 
 
 f 
 
 Ma-r 
 
 \ 
 
 utthe: principles ap-plicq to thefdraaation 
 
 DF THE VVD RL C 
 
 A. ThB PnmaL m/ittpr d/" tfie lamans. 
 
 i Afxaxnnander "TliEQatimiless°.*T-» [t!B]=»— » Oitm/inisa >•— » ^JJiiJ 
 
 li Anaximmes. 
 
 Rre 
 
 RarelttCtlDn, I 
 
 A I R, PTimnl Milter. 
 I 
 
 Wind 
 
 I 
 Cloud 
 
 Wi 
 
 r 
 
 Earth 
 
0. MumteT-TlieDTu o^^ PTjlhagQirEana 
 
 NumbeT UufaoUTided 
 
 r^ JJJIJl I \\\ 
 
 C ' Be-LTLQ D-f th.E Eleattcs 
 
 D. 
 
 U-nitli P-UTE Be\Tig 
 
 WDTL-BoT-TLg 
 
 = Rre 
 
 Darlfneas 
 
 The Ea 
 
 / 
 
 rill- 
 
 H ERAC LITUS 
 
 ClUTTje - Kte 
 
 
 \ 
 
 I. 
 
 ■■T«-^ i 
 
E PLATD 
 
 IdeaB undET l^ie JorTnali-ve power of Dem.iTiTgus 
 
 r ARISTDTLE 
 
 I 
 
 rnTTuless Mailer 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 Now ready, cloth, p-ice y. 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO CDDWORTH'S TREATISE CONCERNING 
 ETERNAL AND IMMUTABLE MORALITY, 
 
 WITH 
 
 gx^c of (gtxbtooxt^ anb a few friiical ^ofcs. 
 
 PRESS NOTICES. 
 
 ' Students of philosophy, and all readers who appreciate the meaning of 
 the poet that called philosophy Divine, will take pleasure and instruction 
 from Mr. W. R. Scott's ' ' Introduction to Cudworth's ' Treatise concern- 
 ing Eternal and Immutable Morality.' " The book is very short, but is 
 packed with information as to Cudworth's life and with critical summaries 
 of his main work. , . . Mr. Scott's summary, intelligent, and not too 
 appreciative as it is, will serve the purpose of all but the most rigorous 
 
 ■ students.' — Scotsman. 
 
 ' These few pages give indication of familiarity with some, at least, of 
 the philosophic thinkers upon whom Cudworth draws, or with whom he 
 has to be set in relation.' — Mind. 
 
 'This short "Introduction" is enough to show that Mr. Scott would 
 
 ■ make a competent editor. . . . Mr. Scott's short " Introduction " and 
 " Summary of the Argument " and " Critical Notes " show that the task 
 of re-editing might safely be left in his hands.' — Manchester Guardian. 
 
 ' We can commend Mr. Scott's deeds and intentions, and wish him all 
 the success he deserves.'^ — Theological Monthly. 
 
 ' The Treatise brought before us deals with " The True Nature of Sense," 
 " The True Nature of Knowledge," " The True Nature of Morality," and 
 of these Mr. Scott gives us a concise and intelligent summsLiy.' ^Literary 
 Churchman. 
 
 ' Mr. W. R. Scott, of Trinity College, Dublin, has given a good sketch 
 of the life of Ralph Cudworth, and a very useful analysis of his " Treatise 
 on Eternal and Immutable Morality." ' — Ecclesiastical Gazette. 
 
 ' Those who desire to gain an insight into Cudworth's Treatise cannot 
 do better than get hold of Mr. W. R. Scott's " Introduction." '—Irish 
 Ecclesiastical Gazette. 
 
 ' This " Introduction " is in every way suitable and serviceable. Mr. 
 Scott has done his work with ability as well as modesty. To the " Intro- 
 duction " useful "Critical Notes " are appended on " Cudworth and Butler " 
 and "Cudworth and Kant," and a good Vaiex.'— The London Quarterly 
 Review. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN & CO., LONDON AND NEW YORK.