could not afford, to prove that life and movement are necessary for man, as well as a fixed eternal law.

ambition

16. Those who find an especial delight in proving eminent Zerduscht's teachers of former generations to be impostors, charlatans, or and fanatiknaves, dwell much upon some of the legends of Zerduscht's cism. life, which convict him, they think, of many violent and ambitious acts. When it is settled how much of these legends are entitled to credence, we may accept them as evidence against the Reformer. But to reject all the records which show the high estimate that his countrymen formed of him, as mere fictionsto assume those as veracious, though not less miraculous, which offend our consciences-is a monstrous violation of critical fairness. The total inference which they leave upon our mind is certainly this, that Zerduscht was possessed with a sense of his vocation to put down, by all possible means, the Ahrimanic worship, to assert the worship of Ormuzd. Whether this should be done or not was a question of life and death; the material, as much as the spiritual, well-being of Persia depended upon it. We have no doubt that, in the accomplishment of this purpose, he stirred up wars, persecuted, urged his own claims to inspiration, till he may sometimes have forgotten the work in its champion. But we are equally convinced, from the results of his labours, that he did, in the main, sacrifice himself to the cause, and not the cause to himself.

sense a

17. By doing so he has, we think, earned for himself a right Zerduscht, to no unimportant place in a history of Philosophy. The name in what does not belong to Persia, or to the Persian character as it was philosopher. formed by Zerduscht. The light which the Persian worshipped told him what it behoved him to follow, what to shun. Their rule of right was given once and for ever; whoso trangressed it was doomed. There was no room for speculation. They abhorred it as leading to confusion and darkness-refined symbolism implied in their minds falsehood, and traffic with evil spirits. Intellectual subtlety of all kinds in the days of their strength they crushed with law and the sword, as leading to dishonesty and trickery; in the days of their weakness, they shrunk from it as an unknown mysterious power which they could not cope with. The fanaticism of Cambyses in Egypt, the struggles which are attributed to Zerduscht with the intellectualism and priestcraft of the Brahmin, exhibit some aspects of this character towards foreigners. We have now to contemplate another; we have to see in what sense the Persians were philosophers, by viewing them in contrast with the nation to which that title strictly and originally belongs; the nation which, in every stage of its existence, merits the apostle's description, "They seek after wisdom."

Greece and

Asia: the contrast

between the

histories.

Zeus.

CHAPTER VI.

GRECIAN PHILOSOPHY.

DIVISION I.—PERIOD BEFORE SOCRATES.

SECTION I.

GREEK WISDOM IN THE LEGENDARY AGES.

1. THE opposition between Greece and Asia presents itself to the schoolboy who is reading the Homeric poems. It meets him again in the first pages of Herodotus; he traces it through the whole of his varied narrative; it connects the episodes with the main story; it gives a unity to books which strike him at first as confused and miscellaneous. In them, Persia gradually becomes the representative of Asia; the glorious conflict of the historian's own age interprets all the ages that had preceded it. Wherever the young reader turns he is reminded of this contrast, and the connection between the two people. He finds it in the retreat of the Ten Thousand; it is forced upon him by the efforts of the leader of that retreat to bring Persian manners and Persian virtues before the minds of his countrymen. He cannot dwell upon the conflicts of the republics among themselves without some event to recall to him the monarchy which had sought to crush them, and which they had defied. The mind of Demosthenes is inspired by the thought of that republican triumph, when he determines that a pretended Greek shall not obtain the dominion which the ruler of the whole barbarian world could not win. It inspires no less the heart of the son of the hated Macedonian, when he goes forth to prove that the signal-fires which proclaimed that Troy had fallen were faithful prophecies that the furthest regions of the East should bow before the descendants of Odysseus and Neoptolemus.

Ground of 2. A few very notorious facts will show that the opposition this contrast which thus presents itself on the surface of the history existed in the heart of these nations. The student perceives at once Ormuzd and that Ormuzd was not the god of the Greeks. Goodness is not the primary characteristic of any one of their divinities. What their essential and common quality is, it is not, we think, hard to discover. The continually recurring epithet μnriera, as μητίετα, applied to Zeus, immediately suggests it. The title Cloudcompeller may express his acts: this is clearly meant to be sig nificant of his very nature. For it is not a solitary expression; the more we consider the different transactions which Homer attributes to the father of gods and men, the more do we find "counsel" to be the main quality which is indicated by them.

The mind of the god may be swayed by various impulses and passions, but he always acts with a purpose and devises a train of means for the accomplishment of it.

attribute of

3. The other gods are like Zeus. Apollo is the deviser and Counsel the suggester of counsels; Athene still more conspicuously. If the Greek this character is wanting in Ares and Aphrodite, they become, god. for that reason, objects of ridicule to mortals, let the sword of the first and the girdle of the other be ever so mighty.

4. This quality seems to involve at once the idea of secresy and of society. The counsels are carried on deep within the heart of the divinity, but they must be shared. Zeus must communicate his intentions, or part of his intentions, to the Olympian assembly; they must be submitted to discussion, deliberation, opposition: there must be ministers to execute them; often opposing agents to thwart them. Instead of various beneficent powers, all proceeding from Ormuzd, all invoked by his name, all united against the realm of darkness, the Greek does homage to a number of beings who are bringing about a result by their conspiracies and contradictions, who are in themselves neither good nor evil, who have the same inclinations to good and evil with human beings, who often seem physically not more powerful, but who have a depth and subtlety of wisdom to which men cannot attain.

The divine assembly.

heroes and

Wisdom or

counsel the

racteristic.

5. In Persia the king presents an image of god, but he is not The Greek personally related to him. Ormuzd is continually contemplated kings spring as the unapproachable light; his goodness, though it is shown from Zeus. in acts of mercy to man, is not to be confounded with human goodness. But the counsellors in Olympus are always related to sages below; they meet with mortal nymphs, become the fathers of earthly heroes, impart to them their sceptres and their wisdom. The kings reign as sons of Jove. In early times the feeling of belonging to the divine race is the warrant of their sharing the divine attributes. There is never the least doubt what is the special and necessary constituent of royalty; it is royal chanot physical strength-it is not mercy, kindness, justice—it is not courage; it is the being a man of many devices. Courage, justice, mercy, may or may not be added to this gift or be involved in it; but it is the fundamental one, all others are accessory. Strength is thrown into the shade in those heroes in whom we would expect it most; lightness and grace are preferred to it: Achilles is the "swift-of-foot." The ambush and stratagem, as has been so often observed, are quite as much the test of the hero as the open fight. Diomed shows his heroic talent not more in wounding Ares than in persuading Glaucon to change the golden armour for the iron, that worth a hundred oxen's hides for that worth nine, when they are meeting

as friends on the field of battle and telling the story of their kinsmanship. These are indications of a deep and pervading spirit, exhibiting itself, be it remembered, in a stage of society which we are wont to speak of, and in one sense rightly, as one of great simplicity, and in those fights where strength and personal The Homeric prowess might seem to be all in all. Clearly they are not all in battle-field all; the council-chamber is as much a part of the Homeric picture as the field of battle: on that field, if we see distinct heroes in a death-struggle, we see also the troops moving collected, in ranks, in silence (an excellence which, except on a field of battle, would not have been specially characteristic of Greeks).

and councilchamber.

Odysseus

the type of the Greek nation.

Trick not essential to the character.

Its noble qualities.

ties: marriage.

6. No one who considers the story of Odysseus, and feels, as all have felt, that he represented actually and prophetically all of his country's mind and tendencies, will doubt that woλúμntic is the epithet for the Greek hero as much as for the god. But no one who feels the exceeding beauty, delicacy, pathos of that story, will admit for a moment that "cunning" or "crafty" is an adequate even the most distant approximation to an adequate version of that title. All possibilities of craft and cunning lie in it; such qualities can scarcely have been morally offensive to the man or the nation that claimed it as the most honourable of all badges. Within it also lay the possibilities of a wisdom which might rise superior to tricks and falsehood, which might discover them to be essentially foolish. The man of many counsels" had a large sympathy, a wonderful power of communicating with men, of receiving impressions from them, of making an impression on them. He had the clearest, sharpest faculty of observation; all the forms of nature presented themselves to him in their distinctest outline, with all their varying shadows. Animal nature did homage to the higher instinct which dwelt in him. He felt that material things were given him to shape and mould, and quicken. Though fond of seeing the ways and the cities of men, he had still the sense of a home; the rocks of Ithaca were dearer to him than all the world besides-dear to him for the sake of those

who dwelt there. He might cast away many ties which he found established at his birth; he might leave his father's house to Sacredness become a wanderer and seeker of new lands: but the voluntary of voluntary bonds into which he had entered, the marriage-tie, the oath to the kinsman, or fellow-citizen, or even the stranger, confirmed by the divine sacrifice, were unspeakably precious; no perils or wars were too long or distant to punish the breach of them. Of all men he most understands the meaning and worth of association, yet he is of all men the most tempted to choose a way of his own of all men he is most disposed to recognise law

and government as especially belonging to man, and distinguishing them from the inferior creatures; the most inclined to break loose from law and government, in his eagerness to assert the skill of men to create them for themselves.

Ionian.

character of

The to the

Persian.

Greek.

7. In process of time some of these great contrasts, especially Contrast of the last, were exhibited in the rivalship of the Dorian and Ionian Dorian and tribes. Though we may be continually tempted to fix upon the last as the proper specimens of the Greek character, though there is great excuse for such a notion, yet it is only in contemplating them as both equally Greeks that we can attain to a full appreciation of that which distinguished this people from every other on the face of the earth. If there were points of sym- The pathy between the Lacedæmonian and the Persian character, both opposed there was also the strongest repulsion between them. Spartan Pausanias, affecting the airs of an Asiatic satrap, is a far more ludicrous object than Themistocles would have been in the same position. The Spartan kings when compared with the king exhibit the difference between the East and West even more strikingly than the Athenian democracy. The legislation of Lycurgus is as little like that of the Medes and Persians as Solon's. If we inquire the reason of the difference, we shall Both find that counsel or wisdom, not goodness, is the object of faith essentially and reverence as much with one tribe as the other. It was the very fact of their having this common ground to start fromthe sense of a community of feeling and of language-which made the differences of their conceptions respecting the conditions of wisdom and the modes of attaining it so remarkable, and their actual contests so terrible. Indeed, the existence of such opposing tribes, and the vast influence which they were both able to exert, suggest the greatest and most memorable contrast between European and Asiatic life. The vastness of the oriental despotism, with all the different races blended together, submitting to one central lord-what a picture is this to contemplate side by side with the struggles of two small cities, each possessed with the idea of one government or principle being better than another, ready to destroy or be sacrificed for the sake of its own maxim-imparting the conviction of it, and the enthusiasm for it, to twenty other cities in different parts of the world, and in a measure to every man who dwelt in every one of them! And it must never be forgotten that, amidst all these conflicts, there was still the common Hellenic name-there was still the feeling in all Greeks that they were separated from barbarians by that name, and by the gifts which it indicated-there was still the god of Delphi who gave counsel to the Ionians and Dorians alike, and from whom the rulers of Asia believed that oracles proceeded by which they also might be guided.