"form," the immaterial principle which makes a thing what it is. Individuals come into being and dissolve and pass out of existence, but the type persists-"forms" are eternal.

A problem of a different kind was presented by the heavenly bodies and their movements. Aristotle approaches this from the point of view of contemporary astronomy. A number of concentric spheres rotate around the earth. The cause of their motion is a primum movens, itself unmoved, beyond the outermost sphere. This prime mover is immaterial, and it moves, not by an outgoing physical force, but by a spiritual attraction—κινεῖ ὡς ἐρώμενον. It is Mind (Noûs); its activity is pure thought, consciously thinking itself. This infinite active mind is God. God is perfect; he has life, continuity of existence, eternity of existence.

Man is a kind of being intermediate between other corporeal existences and God, partaking of the nature of both. He has in common with the plants and animals a nutritive soul, the principle of life; in common with the animals he has also a sensitive, appetitive, motive soul; man alone has an intellective soul. Aristotle distinguishes the passive intellect, which receives from the senses their impressions, and an active intellect in which originate the forms of thought for the interpretation of the sensible impressions. The latter alone can exist apart from the soul and the body; when it so exists, independent of external objects, having no inessential attributes, essentially operant, it is eternal, for it then possesses the attributes of the eternal Mind, God.

Thus Aristotle's system is in the end more completely dualistic than Plato's; his God is more absolutely transcendent. He has no difficulty in admitting the existence of other gods -the heavenly bodies, for example—and there is nothing in his system to exclude such beings. In a lost work, of his earlier years, he explained the origin of the universal belief in gods by two principal causes: First, psychical phenomena, such as dreams, enthusiasm, prophecy; and, second, the impression made by the heavenly bodies and their regular and harmonious movements. But he did not think that in ex

plaining the belief he had explained away religion. Like his predecessors, he rejects the anthropomorphic mythology; he goes beyond them when he attributes to natural causes the beneficent activities which the multitude ascribe to the gods, "When Zeus rains, it is not in order to make the grain grow, but of necessity," that is, by natural law. Positively, he has little to say about the gods whom the people worshipped; "divine natures are beyond our observation," he says somewhere. Yet he left directions in his will for the erection of a statue to Zeus Sōtēr and one of Athena Sōteira in his native city. The accusation of impiety which drove him from Athens shortly before his death was politically inspired; he was denounced on the charge of deifying his quondam patron, the tyrant Hermias of Assos.

On the lot of man after death which so much interested Plato, Aristotle has nothing to say. The Orphic-Pythagorean eschatology, with its great assize, its bodily torments of the disembodied, and its transmigration of souls, probably seemed to him an objectionable kind of infernal mythology. Personal immortality has no room in his system; the rational soul is eternal, but not as individual soul.

Of Aristotle's ethics it must suffice here to say that he endeavoured to put ethics also on a scientific basis. Abandoning Plato's transcendental goal, he finds the chief end in man's well-being. This well-being lies in the proper functioning of the distinctively human faculties, the attainment of the specifically human excellences. Virtue is not a knowledge which may be imparted, but a habit which must be cultivated. Moral excellence, or virtue, is the steady guidance and control of the appetitive part of the soul by the practical reason; the intellectual excellences are the practical wisdom exercising this control, and speculative wisdom, the proper virtue of the pure intellect. In this activity is the highest human happiness.

CHAPTER XX

THE GREEKS

LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY

Epicureanism-Stoicism-The Immanence of God-Determinism— Providence-Freedom-Ethics-Attitude toward the Popular Religion Stoicism as a Religion-Propaganda-Academic Scepticism -Eclecticism-Plutarch-The Neopythagoreans-Dualistic Character of Popular Philosophies-Revelation-Influence of Oriental Religions-Judaism-Neoplatonism-Plotinus-Porphyry-The

Closing of the Schools.

THE next turn in Greek philosophy was the attempt to overcome dualism and transcendentalism. Such an attempt was made in the Peripatetic school itself by Straton of Lampsacus, but the scanty notices of his teachings hardly make it possible to say more than this. The atomic materialists, in succession to Democritus, had no inconsiderable following; their doctrine obtained a wider vogue through Epicurus. His religious influence was, however, merely negative. In his mechanical universe the gods were assigned a comfortable lodging in the intrastellar spaces on condition that they should not interfere with things; interest in sublunary affairs could only trouble that undisturbed calm in which they are a pattern of perfect bliss. The worship of the gods is therefore a disinterested æsthetic emotion, induced by the contemplation of their perfect repose, the realised ideal of unconcern. The soul, being material, is perishable. When men understand this, they are emancipated from the fear of death: death itself is no evil, for so long as we are here, death is not, and when death arrives, we are not; and there is no hereafter. Epicurus combated the belief in im

mortality because it keeps man from making the right use of this life, and because the fear of death-which is at bottom the fear of something after death-is the cause of the gravest moral aberrations. To extirpate the fear of the gods and the fear of the hereafter is the condition not only of a happy life, but of a right one. It is a fine religious zeal that animates Lucretius in his polemic against religion; he would vindicate for man the freedom of his soul. The ethics of Epicureanism are necessarily egoistic and eudemonistic; but the vulgar notion that it made the pleasures of the senses the highest good is false.

The religious importance of Stoicism, on the contrary, is very great, and fuller consideration must therefore be given it. Aristotle, as we have seen, brought the Platonic ideas down to earth: form and matter are not at the poles of the universe apart, but are united in individual objects; formless matter is a mere abstraction, and, conversely, there are in the universe no immaterial forms. This was a long step toward bringing together again the two worlds which Plato had sundered. But above the universe was God, pure form, pure actuality, pure thought, the unmoved prime mover, the final cause of all motion and becoming. The Stoics made the further step that was necessary to arrive at monism: they brought God back from his banishment, they removed the condemnation to inactivity and the disabilities of immateriality, and made him a living God, immanent in every part and particle of the universe. In so doing, they revived the theories of the Ionian naturalists, especially of Heraclitus, to whom they are related in the same way as the Epicureans to Democritus. Like the Epicureans, also, their predominant interest in ethical problems distinguishes them from the older naturalists and reveals their inheritance from Socrates. On this side, the Stoics stand in the tradition of the Cynics, as the Epicureans in that of the Cyrenaic school. Finally, both, as dogmatic philosophies, had to defend themselves at the front door against the scepticism of the contemporary Academy.

Stoicism is an outspoken materialism; not a mechanical materialism, however, like its rival, but a dynamic materialism, akin to the so-called "hylozoism" of the Ionians. The origin of the existing world it explained with Heraclitus by the downward process of the ever-living fire; but-and here the Stoic anthropocentric teleology asserts itself—this worldprocess is not the law, or necessity, of nature, but the evolution of the one primal substance, which is purposeful intelligence; the multiplicity of the actual universe is the production of intelligent beings; the world was created, or rather evolved, for the sake of men. At the end of its period will come the world-conflagration, the re-involution of the universe into the primal fire the upward path of Heraclitus.

The cosmos is one, spherical, finite, surrounded by infinite. void space. space. It is a living and intelligent being. Its life and intelligence are God, who pervades it to the smallest particle, like the soul in the human body, and comprehends in one consciousness all that is and comes to pass. This immanent God is not immaterial, like the transcendent godhead of Plato and Aristotle; the Stoic system admits no immaterial reality. God is spirit (πveûμa), that is, a form of matter consisting of the two finer elements, fire and vapour. This spirit, everywhere present, but in different degrees of purity and fineness, imparts to all things their distinctive qualities, holds them together, sets them in motion-in short, is, in diverse operations, the one force in the universe.

As there is one force, so there is one universal causal nexus running through the entire cosmos and bringing all things to pass: this is the Stoic Determination (Eiuapuévn, Fatum). But the determinism is not mechanical: it is directed by intelligence to the best and wisest ends, and when regarded from this point of view it is Providence. The doctrine of an all-embracing particular Providence raises the problem of

1 The immanent God, whom some Christian theologians imagine to be a modern discovery, is, when the term is correctly employed, nothing but the Stoic God, as the transcendent God of Christian theology is its inheritance from Neoplatonism.