GREECE AFTER THE TIME OF ALEXANDER. 231 Economy is not primarily, but secondarily and accidentally, the management of the goods or property of the household; it is mainly the right ordering of the household itself. The slave is the connecting link between one branch of economy and the other; he must be considered as an instrument, and yet he must be treated as a man. A polity can be considered only as composed of freemen, quite as much because a freeman only understands how to obey as because he only understands how to govern. rejected. 3. It follows almost necessarily from this view of the case- The Platonic first, that the Platonic idea of unity should be as little heeded Unity by Aristotle in his Polity as in his Metaphysics; that he should utterly abhor the attempt to embody that idea by abolishing distinct relationships, these being in his opinion the very foundation of society; that he should recognise all forms of government as good which have their ground in any actual relation, and all as evil which have become in any sense arbitrary; that he should therefore acknowledge, much as Plato did, three true forms, and three departures from these; and that he should look on the democratical departure, the attempt to establish a society in which all should govern, with at least as little complacency as the rest; that, at the same time, he should conceive the form from which this is a deviation,-the form which makes all freemen eligible to government, though not necessarily participant of it, as his ideal. These seem to us the main principles of the book, which being understood, the occasional difficulties and contradictions it presents will be less puzzling; its position in reference to the other parts of the philosophy will be felt; its value as a key to the political science of modern as well as ancient times will be appreciated. DIVISION IV.-THE LATER SECTS. SECTION I. GREECE AFTER THE TIME OF ALEXANDER. remains of 1. It may surprise our readers that so large a portion of this The small sketch should have been devoted to Greek philosophy, and that the later nothing should yet have been said about those schools which schools. we are wont to regard as the great representatives of it. The Epicureans, the Stoics, the Academics, are continually spoken of as the Greek schools. Not a few young Englishmen grow up with the impression that in them are to be found those thoughts in their highest and most concentrated form, which have made Greece wonderful. Such an impression is strangely yet they wrote largely. The age of at variance with facts. What have the teachers of these great schools left, by which we may judge of them and of their doings? Of Epicurus, we have three letters preserved by Diogenes Laertius; of Zeno, nothing; of Cleanthes, a single hymn to Jupiter; of the Academics, merely traditions. We have not spoken of the three books of Aristotle's Rhetoric, because, amidst the multitude of his books, it was necessary to choose those which refer most directly to our subject. In each of these books-we might add, in the short notes on poetry-there is five times as much matter bearing directly upon moral and metaphysical philosophy as in all the Greek remains of the later schools (of course we limit the remark to the time before Christ). If their words and those of Aristotle were weighed instead of measured, we believe the disproportion would be found far greater. 2. It cannot be replied to this statement that Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, wrote nothing, and yet that few men have done more to awaken the energies by which books are produced. Epicurus, Zeno, and their respective followers, belong to an age of books, and were in the strictest sense makers of books. Each of them may have written as much as Aristotle. The dialogue, as an interchange of feelings with disciples, can never have been characteristic of them; they were teachers, lecturers, men who laid down maxims and laws which their disciples repeated, modified, and argued for. 3. And this is in part the explanation and the justification of the place which has been assigned them among their countrymen. We have heard of seekers of wisdom, of men who were steadily working out problems. The men we are speaking of had finished their search, had solved their problems. They had ascertained what was to be known and not to be known; they could set down the results of their inquiries in definite, manageable propositions; they had a well-ascertained, transmissible doctrine. They therefore deserve the name which has been given them— they are the Greek sects. To call them the Greek philosophers is absurd, at least if philosophy is to bear the sense which Socrates or even which Aristotle gave to it. But they did distinctly appropriate to themselves one set of conclusions or results; they had fixed theses and formulas which could be learned by heart; they could supply the Greeks of the ages to which they belonged with all that the Greeks of those ages wanted-topics of disputation; they could supply another, and a nobler race, with suggestions which they could mould into something like a satisfaction for the cravings of their energetic minds. 4. The great Alexandrian period had succeeded to the republican period-the age when Greeks proved that they could GREECE AFTER THE TIME OF ALEXANDER. 233 subdue barbarians to the age when they maintained their own freedom against barbarians, or indulged the excesses of that freedom in conflicts with each other. Of this time we have considered Aristotle as the representative. This was the time when he surveyed all the different provinces of human thought, and mapped them out; when he reproduced the inquiries of his predecessors, and cast them into moulds of his own; above all, when he assigned to the wise man and to the practical man, two perfectly distinct spheres of activity, though spheres in which each might beneficially or injuriously affect the other. Aristotle then, to a great extent, proclaimed the search for wisdom to be at an end. He left the impression on the minds of his disciples that the whole scheme of the universe could be brought under the forms of the human understanding. No doubt there was much in his teaching to counteract this impression. There was a vast range for the activity of the practical man in regulating his own mind, in preserving or improving society. The divine "Theorist" might surely hope that he, too, had a field to explore which was almost or quite inexhaustible. So long as the age of Alexander lasted, the practical man and the theorist would alike gain strength and hope from the change which was taking place in the state of the world, from the new treasures that were discovered in it, from the prospect of seeing Greek wisdom at the head of it. The age succeeded 5. That dream passed away: there were some, perhaps, who felt while it lasted how brief it was to be. An age of intrigue which succeeded, in which all great principles were lost sight of; in which it was proved that the elements of which Greek society consisted were absolutely unsociable; in which, however, the restoration of the older freedom was as hopeless as the preservation of a united empire. What a sense of weariness and exhaustion must alterations so sudden have produced in the mind of the most active and feverish nation that ever existed! How certainly would the speculations of its wise men reflect that weariness and hopelessness! But 6. Scepticism we have spoken of as a Greek characteristic. So The new far from attributing it to philosophy, we have supposed that Scepticism. philosophy was a great protest against it. If a Greek could learn that there was something which he could not create, he had advanced a certain way towards reverence and belief. another kind of scepticism was possible, which may, in some sense, be called the fruit of philosophy. A man might say, "We have been seeking a long time; what have we found? Have we got hold of any certain determinations? Aristotle says that we have. Socrates and Plato seem to say the reverse. They perhaps are as good authorities as he is. And when we Pyrrho; Its internal probability. Pyrrhonism at the root consider what a multitude of different notions have been circulating among us for these two or three hundred years, who can be confident that any one is entitled to more respect than any other? Some function there is, undoubtedly, for the wise man. We Greeks are assuredly to be still, as we have always been, the wise people of the earth. But the function of the wise man is not perhaps to determine anything. May it not be rather that he is to tell us how it is best for those to behave themselves, who, as Socrates said, know that they know nothing." 7. Of this state of mind, Pyrrho has always been considered the representative. He is said to have been in the army of Alexander, to have conversed with the Indian Gymnosophists, to have arrived at the conclusion that there is nothing noble or base, or just or unjust; that nothing truly is; that men do all things by custom and law; that each individual thing is not more this than that. Being naturally nervous, he is said to have cultivated, with great success, àrapagía, or freedom from disturbance; so that he would not leave the road to escape from being thrown down by a carriage, or bitten by a dog; that he lived 90 years; that he was made a high priest by his own citizens, who, for his sake, excused philosophers from payment of taxes; that the Athenians honoured him with their citizenship. 8. Excepting the reports about his practical conduct, which are merely jokes, not very clever ones, upon his efforts after quietness, the outlines of this story are very credible. A Greek coming into contact with an absorbed Brahmin would be very likely to admire his seeming freedom from external disquiet, and, at the same time, to increase his own growing doubts about the importance or reality of the questions in which his people had been interested. The language about the good and the base is the ordinary language of sceptical despair. Such despair being compatible with the belief that anything is possible because nothing is true, could not the least disqualify a man for a priest. It was not natural that the city which in less degenerate days gave Socrates the hemlock, should give Pyrrho its highest rewards for stating in words that which a great majority of Athenians will at once have recognised as their own inward persuasion. Whether the history of the individual man Pyrrho is authentic or fictitious, it is no doubt in substance the history of thousands in that time. 9. But what is there in this universal scepticism which at all of the sects, corresponds to the character we have given of the different which were, sects? In one sense, Pyrrhonism lay at the root of all these sects; in another they were the reaction against it. A despair of discovery of philosophy in its old sense-was implied in them however, a reaction against it. all. A belief that the main object of the wise man is to seek for freedom from the disturbances and distresses of the ordinary man, is implied in them all. But men who have fallen into doubt through exhaustion soon find doubt itself very exhausting. They crave for some distinct, positive decisions; decisions, if possible, which shall be novel, which shall be better than any given before; which shall make them conscious of their superiority to those in past times who toiled and travailed, and after all affirmed little; decisions which shall embody the results of much thinking without calling for the effort of it; but, at all events, decisions, which can be easily set forth and argued for, and used to controvert any old or new opinion that may be opposed to them. SECTION II. EPICURUS. BORN B.C. 342, DIED B.C. 270. 1. EPICURUS, we are told, liked to hear anecdotes respecting Epicurus a the indifference and apathy of Pyrrho. In these qualities he dogmatist. aspired to imitate him. But Epicurus was no doubter; he was the most imperious of dogmatists. No one had ever such entire faith in his own conclusions; no one more thoroughly and heartily rejected all conclusions but his own, as absurd, even as impossible. Unless he had attained to this perfect satisfaction in his own judgment, he would have missed the main object which he proposed to himself. But, on the other hand, any one who proposes that object to himself may be tolerably secure of attaining such self-confidence. A man must be brought into a peculiar condition of mind before he can believe that the universe and all that it contains exist only that they may tell him how he is to be comfortable; but when he has once believed this, it will be wonderful indeed if his ears ever catch any sound which is not an echo to his demand, or some fragment of an answer to it. Do you deny that all men like pleasure and dislike pain? This is his kind of inquiry, which, as it means simply, Do you deny that all men like what they like, and dislike what they dislike? certainly reduces an opponent to very considerable perplexity. 2. Epicurus was fond of boasting that he had made his own His boast of philosophy. He was a self-taught" man. A really original originality. thinker seldom puts forth such a profession. He knows that what he has learnt is his own; he is glad to confess from whom he has learnt. Epicurus might be perfectly honest in saying that he had read very little, and had worked out his conclusions in his own mind; but he was a copyist nevertheless; few men |