Part 10 (1/2)
The numerous *ethical systems* that have had currency in earlier or later times, may be divided into two cla.s.ses,-the one embracing those which make virtue a means; the other, those which make it an end. According to the former, virtue is to be practised for the good that will come of it; according to the latter, for its own sake, for its intrinsic excellence.
These cla.s.ses have obvious subdivisions. The former includes both the selfish and the utilitarian theory; while the latter embraces a wide diversity of views as to the nature, the standard, and the criterion of virtue, according as it is believed to consist in conformity to the fitness of things, in harmony with an unsophisticated taste, in accordance with the interior moral sense, or in obedience to the will of G.o.d. There are, also, border theories, which blend, or rather force into juxtaposition, the ideas that underlie the two cla.s.ses respectively.
It is proposed, in the present chapter, to give an outline of *the history of ethical philosophy in Greece and Rome*, or rather, in Greece; for Rome had no philosophy that was not born in Greece.
*Socrates* was less a moral philosopher than a preacher of virtue.
Self-ordained as a censor and reformer, he directed his invective and irony princ.i.p.ally against the Sophists, whose chief characteristic as to philosophy seems to have been the denial of objective truth, and thus, of absolute and determinate right. Socrates, in contrast with them, seeks to elicit duty from the occasions for its exercise, making his collocutors define right and obligation from the nature of things as presented to their own consciousness and reflection. Plato represents him, whenever a moral question is under discussion, as probing the very heart of the case, and drawing thence the response as from a divine oracle.
*Plato* held essentially the same ground, as may be seen in his identifying the True, the Beautiful, and the Good; but it is impossible to trace in his writings the outlines of a definite ethical system, whether his own, or one derived from his great master.
The three *princ.i.p.al schools of ethical philosophy in Greece* were the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic.
The *Peripatetics* derived their philosophy from Aristotle, and their name from his habit of walking up and down under the plane-trees of the Lyceum.
According to him, virtue is conduct so conformed to human nature as to preserve all its appet.i.tes, proclivities, desires, and pa.s.sions, in mutual check and limitation. It consists in shunning extremes. Thus courage stands midway between cowardice and rashness; temperance, between excess and self-denial; generosity, between prodigality and parsimony; meekness, between irascibility and pusillanimity. Happiness is regarded as the supreme good; but while this is not to be attained without virtue, virtue alone will not secure it. Happiness requires, in addition, certain outward advantages, such as health, riches, friends, which therefore a good man will seek by all lawful means. Aristotle laid an intense stress on the cultivation of the domestic virtues, justly representing the household as the type, no less than the nursery, of the state, and the political well-being of the state as contingent on the style of character cherished and manifested in the home-life of its members.
There is reason to believe that *Aristotle's personal character* was conformed to his theory of virtue,-that he pursued the middle path, rather than the more arduous route of moral perfection. Though much of his time was spent in Athens, he was a native of Macedonia, and was for several years resident at the court of Philip as tutor to Alexander, with whom he retained friendly relations for the greater part of his royal pupil's life. Of his connection with the Macedonian court and public affairs, there are several stories that implicate him dishonorably with political intrigues, and though there is not one of these that is not denied, and not one which rests on competent historical authority, such traditions are not apt so to cl.u.s.ter as to blur the fair fame of a st.u.r.dily incorruptible man, but are much more likely to cling to the memory of a trimmer and a time-server.
*Epicurus,* from whom the Epicurean philosophy derives its name, was for many years a teacher of philosophy in Athens. He was a man of simple, pure, chaste, and temperate habits, in his old age bore severe and protracted sufferings, from complicated and incurable disease, with singular equanimity, and had his memory posthumously blackened only by those who-like theological bigots of more recent times-inferred, in despite of all contemporary evidence, that he was depraved in character, because they thought that his philosophy ought to have made him so.
He represented *pleasure as the supreme good*, and its pleasure-yielding capacity as the sole criterion by which any act or habit is to be judged.
On this ground, the quest of pleasure becomes the prime, or rather the only duty. ”Do that you may enjoy,” is the fundamental maxim of morality.
There is no intrinsic or permanent distinction between right and wrong.
Individual experience alone can determine the right, which varies according to the differences of taste, temperament, or culture. There are, however, some pleasures which are more than counterbalanced by the pains incurred in procuring them, or by those occasioned by them; and there are, also, pains which are the means of pleasures greater than themselves. The wise man, therefore, will measure and govern his conduct, not by the pleasure of the moment, but with reference to the future and ultimate effects of acts, habits, and courses of conduct, upon his happiness. What are called the virtues, as justice, temperance, chast.i.ty, are in themselves no better than their opposites; but experience has shown that they increase the aggregate of pleasure, and diminish the aggregate of pain. Therefore, and therefore alone, they are duties. The great worth of philosophy consists in its enabling men to estimate the relative duration, and the permanent consequences, as well as the immediate intensity, of every form of pleasure.
Epicurus specifies *two kinds of pleasure*, that of rest and that of motion. He prefers the former. Action has its reaction; excitement is followed by depression; effort, by weariness; thought for others involves the disturbance of one's own peace. The G.o.ds, according to Epicurus, lead an easy, untroubled life, leave the outward universe to take care of itself, are wholly indifferent to human affairs, and are made ineffably happy by the entire absence of labor, want, and care; and man becomes most G.o.dlike and most happy, therefore most virtuous, when he floats through life, unharming and unharmed, idle and useless, self-contained and self-sufficing, simple in his tastes, moderate in his requirements, frugal in his habits.
It may be doubted *whether Epicurus denoted by pleasure,*(*18*)* mere physical pleasure alone*. It is certain that his later followers regarded the pleasures of the body as the only good; and Cicero says that Epicurus himself referred all the pleasures of the intellect to the memory of past and the hope of future sensual gratification. Yet there is preserved an extract of a letter from Epicurus, in which he says that his own bodily pains in his years of decrepitude are outweighed by the pleasure derived from the memory of his philosophical labors and discoveries.
*Epicureanism numbered among its disciples*, not only *men of approved virtue*, but not a few, like Pliny the Younger, of a more active type of virtue than Epicurus would have deemed consistent with pleasure. But in lapse of time it became the pretext and cover for the grossest sensuality; and the a.s.sociations which the unlearned reader has with the name are only strengthened by conversance with the literature to which it gave birth.
Horace is its poet-laureate; and he was evidently as sincere in his philosophy as he was licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and disgusting, that makes Horace even perilously fascinating, so that the guardians of the public morals may well be thankful that for the young the approach to him is warded off by the formidable barriers of grammar and dictionary.
While Epicureanism thus generated, on the one hand, in men of the world laxity of moral principle and habit, on the other hand, in minds of a more contemplative cast, it *lapsed into atheism*. From otiose G.o.ds, careless of human affairs, the transition was natural to a belief in no G.o.ds. The universe which could preserve and govern itself, could certainly have sprung into uncaused existence; for the tendencies which, without a supervising power, maintain order in nature, continuity in change, ever-new life evolved from incessant death, must be inherent tendencies to combination, harmony, and organization, and thus may account for the origin of the system which they sustain and renew. This type of atheism has its most authentic exposition in the ”De Rerum Natura” of Lucretius.
He does not, in so many words, deny the being of the G.o.ds,-he, indeed, speaks of them as leading restful lives, withdrawn from all care of mortal affairs; but he so scoffs at all practical recognition of them, and so jeers at the reverence and awe professed for them by the mult.i.tude, that we are constrained to regard them as rather the imagery of his verse than the objects of his faith. He maintains the past eternity of matter, which consists of atoms or monads of various forms. These, drifting about in s.p.a.ce, and impinging upon one another, by a series of happy chances, fell into orderly relations and close-fitting symmetries, whence, in succession, and by a necessity inherent in the primitive atoms, came organization, life, instinct, love, reason, wisdom. This poem has a peculiar value at the present day, as closely coincident in its cosmogony with one of the most recent phases of physical philosophy, and showing that what calls itself progress may be motion in a circle.
The *Stoics*, so called from a portico(19) adorned with magnificent paintings by Polygnotus, in which their doctrines were first taught, owe their origin to Zeno, who lived to a very great age, ill.u.s.trious for self-control, temperance, and the severest type of virtue, and at length, in accordance with a favorite dogma and practice of his school, when he found that he had before him only growing infirmity with no hope of restoration, terminated his life by his own hand.
According to the Stoic philosophy, *virtue is the sole end of life*, and virtue is the conformity of the will and conduct to universal nature.
Virtue alone is good; vice alone is evil; and whatever is neither virtue nor vice is neither good nor evil in itself, but is to be sought or shunned, according as it is auxiliary to virtue or conducive to vice,-if neither, to be regarded with utter indifference. Virtue is indivisible. It does not admit of degrees. He who only approximates to virtue, however closely, is yet to be regarded as outside of its pale. Only the wise man can be virtuous. He needs no precepts of duty. His intuitions are always to be trusted. His sense of right cannot be blinded or misled. As for those who do not occupy this high philosophic ground, though they cannot be really virtuous, they yet may present some show and semblance of virtue, and they may be aided in this by precepts and ethical instruction.(20) It was for the benefit of those who, on account of their lack of true wisdom, needed such direction, and were at the same time so well disposed as to receive and follow it, that treatises on practical morality were written by many of the later Stoics, and that in Rome there were teachers of this school who exercised functions closely a.n.a.logous to those of the Christian preacher and pastor.
Stoicism found *its most congenial soil* in the stern, hardy integrity and patriotism of those Romans, whose incorruptible virtue is the one redeeming feature of the declining days of the Republic and the effeminacy and coa.r.s.e depravity of the Empire. Seneca's ethical writings(21) are almost Christian, not only in their faithful rebuke of every form of wrong, but in their tender humanity for the poor, the slaves, the victims of oppression, in their universal philanthropy, and in their precepts of patience under suffering, forbearance, forgiveness, and returning good for evil. Epictetus, the deformed slave of a capricious and cruel master, beaten and crippled in mere wantonness, enfranchised in his latter years, only to be driven into exile and to sound the lowest depths of poverty, exhibited a type of heroic virtue which has hardly been equalled, perhaps never transcended by a mere mortal; and though looking, as has been already said, to annihilation as the goal of life, he maintained a spirit so joyous, and has left in his writings so attractive a picture of a soul serenely and supremely happy, that he has given support and consolation to mult.i.tudes of the bravest and best disciples of the heaven-born religion, which he can have known-if at all-only through its slanderers and persecutors. Marcus Aurelius, in a kindred spirit, and under the even heavier burdens of a tottering empire, domestic dissensions, and defeat and disaster abroad, maintained the severest simplicity and purity of life, appropriated portions of his busiest days to devout contemplation, meditated constantly on death, and disciplined himself to regard with contempt alike the praise of flatterers and the contingency of posthumous fame. We have, especially in Nero's reign, the record of not a few men and women of like spirit and character, whose lofty and impregnable virtue lacked only loving faith and undoubting trust in a fatherly Providence to a.s.similate them to the foremost among the Apostles and martyrs of the Christian Church.
*The Sceptical school of philosophy* claims in this connection a brief notice. Though so identified in common speech with the name of a single philosopher, that Pyrrhonism is a synonyme for Scepticism, it was much older than Pyrrho, and greatly outnumbered his avowed followers. It was held by the teachers of this school that objective truth is unattainable.
Not only do the perceptions and conceptions of different persons vary as to every object of knowledge; but the perceptions and conceptions of the same persons as to the same object vary at different times. Nay, more, at the same time one sense conveys impressions which another sense may negative, and not infrequently the reflective faculty negatives all the impressions derived from the senses, and forms a conception entirely unlike that which would have taken shape through the organs of sense. The soul that seeks to know, is thus in constant agitation. But happiness consists in imperturbableness of spirit, that is, in suspense of judgment; and as it is our duty to promote our own happiness, it is our duty to live without desire or fear, preference or abhorrence, love or hatred, in entire apathy,-a life of which Mohammed's fabled coffin is the fittest symbol.
The *New Academy*, whose philosophy was a hybrid of Platonism and Pyrrhonism, while it denied the possibility of ascertaining objective truth, yet taught that on all subjects of speculative philosophy probability is attainable, and that, if the subject in hand be one which admits of being acted upon, it is the duty of the moral agent to act in accordance with probability,-to pursue the course in behalf of which the more and the better reasons can be given. There are moral acts and habits which seem to be in accordance with reason and the nature of things. We may be mistaken in thinking them so; yet the probability that they are so creates a moral obligation in their favor. The New Academy professed a hypothetical acquiescence in the ethics of the Peripatetic school, maintaining, therefore, that the mean between two extremes is probably in accordance with right and duty, and that virtue is probably man's highest good, yet probably not sufficient in itself without the addition of exterior advantages.