Part 19 (1/2)
The second distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of stoicism I have noticed was the complete suppression of the affections to make way for the absolute ascendency of reason. There are two great divisions of character corresponding very nearly to the stoical and epicurean temperaments I have described--that in which the will predominates, and that in which the desires are supreme. A good man of the first cla.s.s is one whose will, directed by a sense of duty, pursues the course he believes to be right, in spite of strong temptations to pursue an opposite course, arising either from his own pa.s.sions and tendencies, or from the circ.u.mstances that surround him. A good man of the second cla.s.s is one who is so happily const.i.tuted that his sympathies and desires instinctively tend to virtuous ends. The first character is the only one to which we can, strictly speaking, attach the idea of merit, and is also the only one which is capable of rising to high efforts of continuous and heroic self-sacrifice; but on the other hand, there is a charm in the spontaneous action of the unforced desires which disciplined virtue can perhaps never attain. The man who is consistently generous through a sense of duty, when his natural temperament impels him to avarice, and when every exercise of benevolence causes him a pang, deserves in the very highest degree our admiration; but he whose generosity costs him no effort, but is the natural gratification of his affections, attracts a far larger measure of our love. Corresponding to these two casts of character, we find two distinct theories of education, the aim of the one being chiefly to strengthen the will, and that of the other to guide the desires. The princ.i.p.al examples of the first are the Spartan and stoical systems of antiquity, and, with some modifications, the asceticism of the Middle Ages. The object of these systems was to enable men to endure pain, to repress manifest and acknowledged desires, to relinquish enjoyments, to establish an absolute empire over their emotions. On the other hand, there is a method of education which was never more prevalent than in the present day, which exhausts its efforts in making virtue attractive, in a.s.sociating it with all the charms of imagination and of prosperity, and in thus insensibly drawing the desires in the wished for direction. As the first system is especially suited to a disturbed and military society, which requires and elicits strong efforts of the will, and is therefore the special sphere of heroic virtues, so the latter belongs naturally to a tranquil and highly organised civilisation, which is therefore very favourable to the amiable qualities, and it is probable that as civilisation advances, the heroic type will, in consequence, become more and more rare, and a kind of self-indulgent goodness more common. The circ.u.mstances of the ancient societies led them to the former type, of which the Stoics furnished the extreme expression in their doctrine that the affections are of the nature of a disease--a doctrine which they justified by the same kind of arguments as those which are now often employed by metaphysicians to prove that love, anger and the like, can only be ascribed by a figure of speech to the Deity. Perturbation, they contended, is necessarily imperfection, and none of its forms can in consequence be ascribed to a perfect being. We have a clear intuitive perception that reason is the highest, and should be the directing power of an intelligent being; but every act which is performed at the instigation of the emotions is withdrawn from the empire of reason.
Hence it was inferred that while the will should be educated to act habitually in the direction of virtue, even the emotions that seem most fitted to second it should be absolutely proscribed. Thus Seneca has elaborated at length the distinction between clemency and pity, the first being one of the highest virtues, and the latter a positive vice.
Clemency, he says, is an habitual disposition to gentleness in the application of punishments. It is that moderation which remits something of an incurred penalty; it is the opposite of cruelty, which is an habitual disposition to rigour. Pity, on the other hand, bears to clemency the same kind of relation as superst.i.tion to religion. It is the weakness of a feeble mind that flinches at the sight of suffering.
Clemency is an act of judgment, but pity disturbs the judgment. Clemency adjudicates upon the proportion between suffering and guilt. Pity contemplates only suffering, and gives no thoughts to its cause.
Clemency, in the midst of its n.o.blest efforts, is perfectly pa.s.sionless; pity is unreasoning emotion. Clemency is an essential characteristic of the sage; pity is only suited for weak women and for diseased minds.
”The sage will console those who weep, but without weeping with them; he will succour the s.h.i.+pwrecked, give hospitality to the proscribed, and alms to the poor, ... restore the son to the mother's tears, save the captive from the arena, and even bury the criminal; but in all, his mind and his countenance will be alike untroubled. He will feel no pity. He will succour, he will do good, for he is born to a.s.sist his fellows, to labour for the welfare of mankind, and to offer each one his part. His countenance and his soul will betray no emotion as he looks upon the withered legs, the tattered rags, the bent and emaciated frame of the beggar. But he will help those who are worthy, and, like the G.o.ds, his leaning will be towards the wretched.... It is only diseased eyes that grow moist in beholding tears in other eyes, as it is no true sympathy, but only weakness of nerves, that leads some to laugh always when others laugh, or to yawn when others yawn.”
Cicero, in a sentence which might be adopted as the motto of stoicism, said that Homer ”attributed human qualities to the G.o.ds; it would have been better to have imparted divine qualities to men.” The remarkable pa.s.sage I have just cited serves to show the extremes to which the Stoics pushed this imitation. And indeed, if we compare the different virtues that have flourished among Pagans and Christians, we invariably find that the prevailing type of excellence among the former is that in which the will and judgment, and among the latter, that in which the emotions are most prominent. Friends.h.i.+p rather than love, hospitality rather than charity, magnanimity rather than tenderness, clemency rather than sympathy, are the characteristics of ancient goodness. The Stoics, who carried the suppression of the emotions farther than any other school, laboured with great zeal to compensate the injury thus done to the benevolent side of our nature, by greatly enlarging the sphere of reasoned and pa.s.sionless philanthropy. They taught, in the most emphatic language, the fraternity of all men, and the consequent duty of each man consecrating his life to the welfare of others. They developed this general doctrine in a series of detailed precepts, which, for the range, depth, and beauty of their charity, have never been surpa.s.sed. They even extended their compa.s.sion to crime, and adopting the paradox of Plato, that all guilt is ignorance, treated it as an involuntary disease, and declared that the only legitimate ground of punishment is prevention.
But however fully they might recognise in theory their principles with the widest and most active benevolence, they could not wholly counteract the practical evil of a system which declared war against the whole emotional side of our being, and reduced human virtue to a kind of majestic egotism; proposing as examples such men as Anaxagoras, who when told that his son had died, simply observed, ”I never supposed that I had begotten an immortal,” or as Stilpo, who when his country had been ruined, his native city captured, and his daughters carried away as slaves or as concubines, boasted that he had lost nothing, for the sage is independent of circ.u.mstances. The framework or theory of benevolence might be there, but the animating spirit was absent. Men who taught that the husband or the father should look with perfect indifference on the death of his wife or his child, and that the philosopher, though he may shed tears of pretended sympathy in order to console his suffering friend, must suffer no real emotion to penetrate his breast, could never found a true or lasting religion of benevolence. Men who refused to recognise pain and sickness as evils were scarcely likely to be very eager to relieve them in others.
In truth, the Stoics, who taught that all virtue was conformity to nature, were, in this respect, eminently false to their own principle.
Human nature, as revealed to us by reason, is a composite thing, a const.i.tution of many parts differing in kind and dignity, a hierarchy in which many powers are intended to co-exist, but in different positions of ascendency or subordination. To make the higher part of our nature our whole nature is not to restore but to mutilate humanity, and this mutilation has never been attempted without producing grave evils. As philanthropists, the Stoics, through their pa.s.sion for unity, were led to the extirpation of those emotions which nature intended as the chief springs of benevolence. As speculative philosophers, they were entangled by the same desire in a long train of pitiable paradoxes. Their famous doctrines that all virtues are equal, or, more correctly, are the same, that all vices are equal, that nothing is an evil which does not affect our will, and that pain and bereavement are, in consequence, no ills, though partially explained away and frequently disregarded by the Roman Stoics, were yet sufficiently prominent to give their teaching something of an unnatural and affected appearance. Prizing only a single object, and developing only a single side of their nature, their minds became narrow and their views contracted. Thus, while the Epicureans, urging men to study nature in order to banish superst.i.tion, endeavoured to correct the ignorance of physical science which was one of the chief impediments to the progress of the ancient mind, the Stoics for the most part disdained a study which was other than the pursuit of virtue. While the Epicurean poet painted in magnificent language the perpetual progress of mankind, the Stoic was essentially retrospective, and exhausted his strength in vain efforts to restore the simplicity of a by-gone age. While, too, the school of Zeno produced many of the best and greatest men who have ever lived, it must be acknowledged that its records exhibit a rather unusual number of examples of high professions falsified in action, and of men who, displaying in some forms the most undoubted and transcendent virtue, fell in others far below the average of mankind. The elder Cato, who, though not a philosopher, was a model of philosophers, was conspicuous for his inhumanity to his slaves.
Brutus was one of the most extortionate usurers of his time, and several citizens of Salamis died of starvation, imprisoned because they could not pay the sum he demanded. No one eulogised more eloquently the austere simplicity of life which stoicism advocated than Sall.u.s.t, who in a corrupt age was notorious for his rapacity. Seneca himself was const.i.tutionally a nervous and timid man, endeavouring, not always with success, to support himself by a sublime philosophy. He guided, under circ.u.mstances of extreme difficulty, the cause of virtue, and his death is one of the n.o.blest antiquity records; but his life was deeply marked by the taint of flattery, and not free from the taint of avarice, and it is unhappily certain that, after its accomplishment, he lent his pen to conceal or varnish one of the worst crimes of Nero. The courage of Lucan failed signally under torture, and the flattery which he bestowed upon Nero, in his ”Pharsalia,” ranks with the Epigrams of Martial as probably the extreme limit of sycophancy to which Roman literature descended.
While, too, the main object of the Stoics was to popularise philosophy, the high standard of self-control they exacted rendered their system exceedingly unfit for the great majority of mankind, and for the ordinary condition of affairs. Life is history, not poetry. It consists mainly of little things, rarely illumined by flashes of great heroism, rarely broken by great dangers, or demanding great exertions. A moral system, to govern society, must accommodate itself to common characters and mingled motives. It must be capable of influencing natures that can never rise to an heroic level. It must tincture, modify, and mitigate where it cannot eradicate or transform. In Christianity there are always a few persons seeking by continual and painful efforts to reverse or extinguish the ordinary feelings of humanity, but in the great majority of cases the influence of the religious principle upon the mind, though very real, is not of a nature to cause any serious strain or struggle.
It is displayed in a certain acquired spontaneity of impulse. It softens the character, purifies and directs the imagination, blends insensibly with the habitual modes of thought, and, without revolutionising, gives a tone and bias to all the forms of action. But stoicism was simply a school of heroes. It recognised no gradations of virtue or vice. It condemned all emotions, all spontaneity, all mingled motives, all the principles, feelings, and impulses upon which the virtue of common men mainly depends. It was capable of acting only on moral natures that were strung to the highest tension, and it was therefore naturally rejected by the mult.i.tude.
The central conception of this philosophy of self-control was the dignity of man. Pride, which looks within, making man seek his own approbation, as distinguished from vanity, which looks without, and shapes its conduct according to the opinions of others, was not only permitted in stoicism, it was its leading moral agent. The sense of virtue, as I have elsewhere observed, occupies in this system much the same place as the sense of sin in Christianity. Sin, in the conception of the ancients, was simply disease, and they deemed it the part of a wise man to correct it, but not to dwell upon its circ.u.mstances. In the many disquisitions which Epictetus and others have left us concerning the proper frame of mind in which man should approach death, repentance for past sin has absolutely no place, nor do the ancients appear to have ever realised the purifying and spiritualising influence it exercises upon the character. And while the reality of moral disease was fully recognised, while an ideal of lofty and indeed unattainable excellence was continually proposed, no one doubted the essential excellence of human nature, and very few doubted the possibility of man acquiring by his own will a high degree of virtue.
The doctrine of suicide was the culminating point of Roman stoicism. The proud, self-reliant, unbending character of the philosopher, could only be sustained when he felt that he had a sure refuge against the extreme forms of suffering or of despair. Although virtue is not a mere creature of interest, no great system has ever yet flourished which did not present an ideal of happiness as well as an ideal of duty. Stoicism taught men to hope little, but to fear nothing. It did not array death in brilliant colours, as the path to positive felicity, but it endeavoured to divest it, as the end of suffering, of every terror. Life lost much of its bitterness when men had found a refuge from the storms of fate, a speedy deliverance from dotage and pain. Death ceased to be terrible when it was regarded rather as a remedy than as a sentence.
Life and death in the stoical system were attuned to the same key. The deification of human virtue, the total absence of all sense of sin, the proud stubborn will that deemed humiliation the worst of stains, appeared alike in each. The type of its own kind was perfect. All the virtues and all the majesty that accompany human pride, when developed to the highest point, and directed to the n.o.blest ends, were here displayed. All those which accompany humility and self-abas.e.m.e.nt were absent.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 74: From Chapter II, Vol. I, of ”History of European Morals,”
1869. The author's foot-notes have been omitted.]
THE ENTHUSIASM OF HUMANITY[75]
JOHN ROBERT SEELEY
The first method of training this pa.s.sion which Christ employed was the direct one of making it a point of duty to feel it. To love one's neighbour as oneself was, he said, the first and greatest _law_. And in the Sermon on the Mount he requires the pa.s.sion to be felt in such strength as to include those whom we have most reason to hate--our enemies and those who maliciously injure us--and delivers an imperative precept, ”Love your enemies.”
It has been shown that to do this is not, as might at first appear, in the nature of things impossible, but the further question suggests itself, Can it be done to order? Has the verb to love really an imperative mood? Certainly, to say that we can love at pleasure, and by a mere effort of will summon up a pa.s.sion which does not arise of itself, is to take up a paradoxical and novel position. Yet if this position be really untenable, how is it possible to obey Christ's commands?
The difficulty seems to admit of only one solution. We are not commanded to create by an effort of will a feeling of love in ourselves which otherwise would have had no existence; the feeling must arise naturally or it cannot arise at all. But a number of causes which are removable may interfere to prevent the feeling from arising or to stifle it as it arises, and we are commanded to remove these hindrances. It is natural to man to love his kind, and Christ commands us only to give nature play. He does not expect us to procure for ourselves hearts of some new supernatural texture, but merely the heart of flesh for the heart of stone.
What, then, are the causes of this paralysis of the heart? The experience of human life furnishes us readily with the answer. It constantly happens that one whose affections were originally not less lively than those of most men is thrown into the society of persons dest.i.tute of sympathy or tenderness. In this society each person is either totally indifferent to his neighbour or secretly endeavouring to injure or overreach him. The new-comer is at first open-hearted and cordial; he presumes every one he meets to be a friend, and is disposed to serve and expects to be served by all alike. But his advances are met by some with cautious reserve, by others with icy coldness, by others with hypocritical warmth followed by treacherous injury, by others with open hostility. The heart which naturally grew warm at the mere sight of a human being, under the operation of this new experience slowly becomes paralysed. There seats itself gradually in the man's mind a presumption concerning every new face that it is the face of an enemy, and a habit of gathering himself into an att.i.tude of self-defence whenever he deals with a fellow-creature. If when this new disposition has grown confirmed and habitual, he be introduced into a society of an opposite kind and meet with people as friendly and kind as he himself was originally, he will not at first be able to believe in their sincerity, and the old kindly affections from long disuse will be slow to rouse themselves within him. Now to such a person the imperative mood of the verb to love may fairly be used. He may properly be told to make an effort, to shake off the distrust that oppresses him,--not to suffer unproved suspicions, causeless jealousies, to stifle by the mere force of prejudice and mistaken opinion the warmth of feeling natural to him.
But we shall have a closer ill.u.s.tration if we suppose the cold-hearted society itself to be addressed by a preacher who wishes to bring them to a better mind. He too may fairly use the imperative mood of the verb to love. For he may say, ”Your mutual coldness does not spring from an original want of the power of sympathy. If it did, admonitions would indeed be useless. But it springs from a habit of thought which you have formed, a maxim which has been received among you, that all men are devoted to self-interest, that kindness is but feebleness and invites injury. If you will at once and by a common act throw off this false opinion of human nature, and adopt a new plan of life for yourselves and new expectations of each other, you will find the old affections natural to all of you, weakened indeed and chilled, but existing and capable of being revived by an effort.”
Such a preacher might go further and say, ”If but a small minority are convinced by my words, yet let that minority for itself abandon the selfish theory, let it renounce the safety which that theory affords in dealing with selfish men, let it treat the enemy as if he were indeed the friend he ought to be, let it dare to forego retaliation and even self-defence. By this means it will shame many into kindness; by despising self-interest for itself it will sometimes make it seem despicable to others; by sincerity and persistency it will gradually convert the majority to a higher law of intercourse.”
The world has been always more or less like this cold-hearted society; the natural kindness and fellow-feeling of men have always been more or less repressed by low-minded maxims and cynicism. But in the time of Christ, and in the last decrepitude of ethnic morality, the selfishness of human intercourse was much greater than the present age can easily understand. That system of morality, even in the times when it was powerful and in many respects beneficial, had made it almost as much a duty to hate foreigners as to love fellow-citizens. Plato congratulates the, Athenians on having shown in their relations to Persia, beyond all the other Greeks, ”a pure and heartfelt hatred of the foreign nature.”[76] Instead of opposing, it had sanctioned and consecrated the savage instinct which leads us to hate whatever is strange or unintelligible, to distrust those who live on the further side of a river, to suppose that those whom we hear talking together in a foreign tongue must be plotting some mischief against ourselves. The lapse of time and the fusion of races doubtless diminished this antipathy considerably, but at the utmost it could but be transformed into an icy indifference, for no cause was in operation to convert it into kindness.