Chapter VIII: Higher Thinking, Philosophy, Speculative and Practical Theology 213 (6)

The moral conditions of refined Attic life in these dying days are best known from the remains, or from the Latin translations of the society plays of the famous Menander. The life which Menander portrayed has been discussed and estimated in a chapter of my _Greek Life and Thought_, and you will there see at length how trivial, how selfish, how immoral, how ignoble that life was. If such was indeed the true character of Attic society in Menander’s days, we may well congratulate the world that the Macedonian conquerer arose to show the world that there were greater ideals than to while away one’s time in the rotten refinements of decadent Athens.

When I wrote that chapter, we were still dependent for our estimate of Menander and his society in the Latin translations, or adaptations, by Plautus and Terence, and there were those that thought the Roman adapters had chosen the trivial side of a society which might be not only refined but serious and thoughtful. The recent discovery of large fragments of four plays on a papyrus roll in Egypt has dissipated any such hopes. The same triviality, the same stupid repetition of vulgar and immoral plots and topics meet us throughout these scenes. If there be any moral lesson conveyed by the picture we here have of Attic society, it is this: that the slave and the prostitute were not only more intelligent, but less immoral than their masters. In all these so-called pictures of life, not a single person of the least distinction appears--not a single philosopher, or politician, or poet, or man of letters, or benefactor--though we know that the walls of temples and cities were being covered with panegyrics of leading citizens and their civic and private virtues. Not a single problem of religious or political importance is ever discussed. There is not even, in the new fragments, any wealth of that vulgar proverbial wisdom, or sententiousness posing as wisdom, which was gathered from the plays of Menander by diligent collectors, and which, surviving in thousands of lines, has given him a false importance in the histories of Greek literature. But here, as elsewhere, the lapse of ages had separated the wheat from the chaff; the later scholiasts and commentators gathered from Menander the stray gems, as one might pick from the array of a gay but stupid lady the real diamonds with which she had adorned her worthless person.

In relation to Greek politics, which is our subject to-day, this is no idle digression. For it shows us clearly that the higher society of Athens had abandoned this great human interest and so had narrowed and impoverished their spiritual life. It is usual to repeat in our histories that the growth of the Macedonian power, of the Hellenistic kings, of the Roman Republic, killed all possibility of any serious Greek politics, and that in consequence serious men were driven into anti-social philosophy at home, active men into mercenary service abroad. In Menander’s day and long after it, there was still plenty of work for honest and capable men in saving the liberties and the dignities of their native cities. A century later, Polybius shows how the total ruin of Greece and the disastrous conquest by Mummius were mainly produced by the follies and violences of stupid and corrupt demagogues. But these demagogues were invested with official power by the votes of those that still practised politics, when the better classes had retired in disgust. If this disgust dated from Menander’s time, then we can only reflect that those who have abdicated their influence in the day of their country’s prosperity, are not likely to regain it when a crisis comes, and when the masses have found for themselves other leaders.

I have seen a very similar catastrophe in the Ireland of my own time. I have seen the old landed gentry, who had long lived a gay, idle, hospitable life, when their privileges and their properties were attacked by a dangerous agitation, show such want of public spirit, such miserable mistrust in one another, such reckless folly in not spending time, money, and energy in resisting their plunderers, that they lost the sympathy of all their friends, and while they called on English influence to protect them, and railed against all concession and compromise, they have seen their land filched from them by successive legislative inroads upon their rights, and their fortunes ruined even by those on whom they relied to defend them. Many a time did I warn those about me of these inevitable consequences, but there I have seen another instance, and one which came home to me with poignant regret, of the miseries induced by mere incompetence. _Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat._

VIII

HIGHER THINKING, PHILOSOPHY, SPECULATIVE AND PRACTICAL THEOLOGY

In my last lecture I spoke of the small effect, or want of effect, which a mere intellectual training in the liberal arts might have upon the average morals of a large society. To-day I propose to take you into a higher atmosphere, and consider what occupied the élite of Greek society in their advanced education, and in their speculations on the nature of things. You must not underrate the enormous advantages the well-born youth then possessed in training his mind, as compared with the youth of to-day. In the first place, a very moderate income would keep a household in comfort, and remove all the grinding care which, in this our modern life with its myriad exigencies, torments so many respectable families. In the next place, the demon of competition had not invaded these states, nor was it possible to do as I and many others have done, to be a slave for some years in order to obtain a competence by passing first in a single examination. In the third place, there was no object in travelling long distances. What was worth seeing, lay within easy reach. In modern life there is only Holland, and perhaps Northern Italy, which offers the same delights within short distances. The huge amount of time spent by Americans in travelling is perhaps one of the most serious obstacles to their intellectual advancement. If North America were compressed into one tenth its size, its inhabitants might gain some leisure for better education.

The obvious thing that will strike any intelligent American, who has only heard of Plato, and wants to make his acquaintance through Jowett’s noble translation, is the amount of time these Dialogues waste in arriving at a conclusion. Nay often they represent a very long conversation which comes to no conclusion at all. Yet that feature is essential to all higher training of the human mind. You may appear to the vulgar to be wasting time, and yet it is not wasting time, but doing the best you can for a great object. The earth moving in its orbit need not delay its regular course because it revolves upon its axis, and causes its whole surface to enjoy the blessed light of the sun. And the next thing you will find in Plato’s Dialogues (the best exponent of higher education I know) is that the objects in view are not those of sense, or of the material needs of life, or of obtaining success in the world. They all, like Saint Paul’s reasonings with Felix, have to do with righteousness and temperance, and judgment to come. But even this field, that of ethical inquiry, is not the highest to which Greek education attained. For their early teachers taught them to think about the universe and its constitution, the nature of mind, the nature of matter, and other high questions of abstract metaphysic.

A notable point about this Greek philosophy is that the priest or the enchanter has nothing to say to it. The sage was a layman, who need fear no pope, no ban of the Church, in using his reason freely upon the problems even of theology. There were indeed isolated cases, where a man who denied the existence of the traditional gods, or was supposed so to do, was pursued by popular indignation. Diagoras of Melos, called the atheist, was driven from the societies which thought such teaching dangerous; Socrates was prosecuted in like manner, because he was suspected of spreading scepticism among the youth, but he was executed only because he behaved in a manner highly contumacious to the established order of the State. Had he defended himself in the ordinary routine, he would at most have been subjected to a fine. These isolated cases are only mentioned lest you should imagine that they were typical. Greek philosophy being secular, was therefore free.

The earliest thinkers, those of the Ionic school, set themselves to solve by speculation the very question which now engrosses our deepest researches in physics. They thought out, or they inferred from their observations, that “things are not as they seem”; they found out, what we have attained by long experiment, that the many qualities our senses perceive are not fundamental or primary, that as Descartes and Locke and Spinoza taught, mechanical composition and varying degrees of motion in minute particles of the same kind may produce wholly diverse impressions. The most obvious and striking of these to the ordinary man is the case of colour. Descartes had anticipated that the pace of the rotation of particles made the differences; we know now that it is not rotation, but vibration of ether, and so with variation in tones. But the differences both of colours and sounds are due to the more or less rapid motion of the vibration. This was what Thales and Anaximenes and Anaximander felt when they said that the world consisted of one element, that moisture, caloric, ether, were the primitive stuff of which the world was composed. And these famous men were not mere metaphysicians, they showed their intellectual greatness in various ways. Thales actually predicted an eclipse, to the astonishment of his contemporaries.[45] He showed them that the lesser bear, ending in the pole star, was a better indication for the sailor to use than the greater. He solved the problem of measuring the height of an inaccessible object by comparing its shadow with that of a small one within reach. He gave valuable advices in politics. So that his metaphysic was both the source and the climax of a wide mental activity. So with Anaximander. He attempted the first map of the known world and made signal advances in astronomy. Anaximenes declared that eclipses were the concealing of one heavenly body by the interposition of another. These were great feats; but they were nothing in comparison to the bold attempts at solving the problem of the origin and nature of the world, wherein their speculations, often erroneous, nevertheless left a residuum of thoughts that were the seeds of all our higher philosophy.

If Thales laid it down that in all the varieties of plant and animal life there was a common element which was their real or original substance, Anaximander thought that caloric (or the igneous principle) was necessary to develop the original material. His book is lost, and his views not clear to us, but we know that his geological observations told him that our world had once been covered with water, from which land had emerged. He was moreover the first to maintain that nothing was eternal except the primeval substance of things.

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

In the largest sense, even applying it to the gods of the Greek Pantheon, did he assert this colossal doctrine. Anaximenes went further, and, assuming that the particles of ether are the most subtle in the universe, he set up the principle of rarification and condensation of matter, asserting that this was the one great cause of the differences in the bodies we perceive. This then was the first expression of the doctrine of the Atomists, which has lasted to the present day.

It is a common piece of arrogance among experimentalists to say that these wonderful anticipations of modern science were mere gropings in the dark, supported not by experiment, but by what we should call superficial observations. The wonder is all the greater that these men should in their theories have gone to the root of the matter, and thought out the metaphysical possibilities of the composition of the world. Abstract thinking--theory--is after all the true basis of every great discovery. In complete disregard of the theological cosmogony derived from the old poets, they openly inaugurated the birth of a natural science engendered by pure and high thinking.

This is even more signally the case with Heracleitus of Ephesus. But I can only give you some of his marvellous anticipations in a few words; to go into any one of these systems would require a whole lecture, not a passage in this discourse. In the first place he agreed with both his predecessors, that one subtle element was the foundation of all nature and this he sought in what the vulgar call fire, but with him a far more subtle essence, never still for an instant. From this all the universe had been evolved by a process of cooling, and had developed into earth, water, and the rest, but in the end these would return into their original condition, “so that the earth would be rolled up as a scroll, and the elements dissolved with fervent heat.” This far-off glimpse of Laplace’s theory, which postulates our whole planetary system starting from a revolving mass at white heat, is less striking than another that lays down the principle that there are endless motions in things which the senses cannot perceive, and that absolute rest is impossible in nature.

The world was never made;
It will change, but it will not fade.
So let the wind range
For even and morn, ever will be, thro’ eternity.
Nothing was born, nothing will die,
All things will change.[46]

It is but yesterday that the newest physical philosophers have declared themselves for this doctrine, and tell us that every particle of matter is made up of lesser particles in perpetual motion. Heracleitus was no less clear on the relativity of the qualities of matter, which are good or bad according to the percipient, and from that he drew the conclusion that apparent contradictions may coexist and that all nature consists in a perpetual conflict between opposites. Nature is a state of war said he, using the term in a far deeper sense than did later men.

These amazing conjectures were set down in a quaint, picturesque, but abstruse treatise, which even Aristotle found difficult to grasp, but if ever a great imagination sowed seeds in the minds of men, which after long generations germinated into modern science, it was that of Heracleitus. His dark enigmas, seasoned with pessimistic utterances, with supreme contempt of the ordinary public, were always attractive and stimulating to keen minds.

The next great name in this magnificent series is Pythagoras, whose influence revolutionised not only the science but the politics and ethics of Greece, and created new ideals among men, higher and purer than those of traditional morality. But as I have already said something of him in a former discourse, I will hurry on to his contemporaries and his successors.

The founder of the great school of Elea, an old Greek colony of Ionians in the Italian bay south of Pæstum, was Xenophanes, whose main feature was a bold criticism of the popular theology, as represented by the poetry of Homer. He could easily show the moral defects of the denizens of the Homeric Olympus, and hence inferring their unreality, he pressed home the great doctrine of the unity of the universe, whether ideal or real, and the identification of the Maker (if there ever was a Maker) with his work--a theory which has existed from that day to this under the name of Pantheism, and as such has fascinated the higher spirits even among the cold and practical Anglo-Saxons. This feeling of unity in all the world with the Eternal Cause of the world has indeed appeared in the far East in other and strange systems of philosophy; but never was the doctrine discussed with such variety as among the Greeks. Lofty poetry, hard logic, bitter controversy were all called in to support it, and among a clear-sighted, sceptical race, like the Greeks, so vague and transcendent a theory is far more striking and therefore more fruitful in its spiritual consequences, than when professed by mere ascetics or anchorites who have no contact with common life, and who will not condescend to argument. The Greek Pantheists of the early period were men of high character in public life, respected for their practical wisdom and their literary eminence, and it was they that forced upon the world the astounding theory that not only are all the data of our senses illusory and vain, but that even the assumption of any number of original elements or substances is idle, and must terminate in the great _One_, which embraces them all, and merges gods and men, matter and mind, into that all-embracing Single Being, of whom a forgotten mystic in a later age (but still a Greek) has used this tremendous metaphor: the “gods are his laughter, the race of mortal men his tears.”

The positive side of the doctrine was mainly due to Parmenides, of whom Plato speaks with greater respect than of any other thinker except Socrates, and it was clearly a further development, or urging to their extreme consequences, of the older theories which reduced all the various qualities of the world of sense to the manifestations of a single substance. But they had each made some one reservation and upheld one of the data of the senses, but each a different one. Was not therefore the inference clear that this was but a half-way house, and that what we call mind and matter are after all not radically distinct but only separate aspects of the primeval one?

If you think this old-world and idle speculation, I need only refer you to Descartes, the father of modern scientific metaphysic, who held that his two universal factors, extension and thought, were after all but qualities of the one all-embracing substance which he called God; or I may refer to Spinoza, the spiritual pupil of Descartes, and the most important Pantheist of the seventeenth, or perhaps of any, century.

The positive arguments in favour of this subtle speculation, which to the vulgar public of any age must always remain absurd, were in the first place the untrustworthy character of our senses, which could be shown not only to be misleading but to give contradictory reports concerning the same thing; next the general consent of all thinkers that there must be something permanent and indestructible in the midst of all the changes of phenomena; then the inability of any perceived substance, such as water, or air, however subtle, to satisfy this condition of permanence, and to take a position superior to the attacks of rival theories. You must therefore abstract more and more from all qualities till you reach that pure Being, which is all and none, spirit and body, unity and infinity, eternal, indestructible, invariable, the source and substance of all that ever did or ever will exist.

You can well imagine how these splendid dreams were regarded by the clever and practical Greek public, as indeed they have been by average men from that day to this, whenever the great theory has been stated afresh by metaphysicians or by mystics. It was the special merit of the Eleatic Zeno (not the great Stoic who lived far later) to show the carping critic that the difficulties which had led the philosopher to discard the senses as guides to truth, can be raised in the case of the common facts of our everyday life, and that the scoffer cannot solve them. I lay stress on these intellectual puzzles, because they have occupied philosophers perpetually down to the present day, and in no particular case can we affirm more decidedly that the Greeks were the fathers of modern thinking. And do not for a moment imagine that because these subtleties lead to no immediate result, they are therefore barren. You might as well say that physical games and exercises are of no use, because they merely result in strengthening and improving the human frame and the human temper, apart from any further result. Now what were Zeno’s puzzles? I will mention but the most obvious. Is it conceivable that sound should be made up of non-sounding things? And yet this absurdity is demonstrable. Drop a single millet seed from your hand upon the grass. It will not make the smallest noise. Go on with a second, a third, and so on, till you reach thousands; it is so with them all. Yet if you turn out a cartful of such seeds, it will make a considerable noise. How is it possible, if each individual grain is silent? Again, you imagine that if two bodies are moving in the same direction, one slower, the other faster, the latter will soon overtake the former. It is not so, and can be proved impossible. Conceive the swift-footed Achilles trying to overtake a tortoise, and that he runs one hundred yards, while the other is crawling but ten. When he has completed his one hundred, the tortoise is still one ahead, when he has added this one, the tortoise is still 1/10 ahead, then 1/100, then 1/1000, and so on _ad infinitum_, for it is mathematically certain that neither series can ever reach the limit, in the one case of III, in the other of II yards. Therefore it is demonstrated that Achilles can never in all time overtake the tortoise.

But we may go even farther and say that the very idea of motion is inconceivable. Every moving body must move in time, and time is divided into moments of time. At each moment the moving body must either be in the place where it is, or the place where it is not. The latter being manifestly absurd, the body must be in the place where it is. But then of course it is not moving, for motion can only be defined as a change of place. Continuous motion is therefore inconceivable.

I need not do more than mention to you, that these very problems, handed down by Zeno to the schools, formed the subject of interminable disputes for centuries, and if you even now, with all your boasted progress, take them in hand, you will not easily find a logical solution. Happily we are no longer in the condition of those mediæval pedants, of whom we hear that not a few went mad, or died of brain fever, because they could not reconcile the foreknowledge and foreordaining of things by God with the absolute free will of men. Nor are any of you, I sincerely trust, encumbered with the extraordinary fairness of mind of the mediæval ass of Buridanus which being set between two bundles of hay exactly and precisely alike, died of starvation because it could see no possible reason for preferring to eat the one before the other. Nevertheless, I trust you will appreciate that the mental subtlety we inherit from the Greeks is no small part of our education.

But it is not merely in the hard logic of controversy that the Greek Pantheists have left a great legacy to mankind. If I mistake not, the higher poetry of these latter days is deeply indebted to that grandiose theory, that all nature is but one, that all things whether mute or speaking, whether still or moving, whether fair or hideous, are all the manifestations of the one great All, the ineffable substance which some call a world-soul, some the universe, some God, the supreme _One_, without variableness or shadow of turning, though only apprehended by man in myriad variations. You can find that view of things in Shelley, in Wordsworth, in Tennyson, and it is not too much to say that at their highest moments, and in their noblest verse, they are all inspired with this Divine intoxication. It is common to call it Platonism, and my old friend Mr. Shorthouse even wrote an essay to show that the respectable and orderly Wordsworth could hardly be called a Christian, so saturated was he with this Pantheistic feeling. His visions of the pre-existence of the human soul--these were indeed Platonic; his Pantheistic passages come from the influence which Plato acknowledges, but which he does not allow to subjugate him. Wordsworth is the most uneven and often prosaic of poets, but in his greatest moments he too feels that intercommunion of all nature which is unmistakably Greek and not English--

A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,--
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things.

Time fails me to go into the fascinating subject of the Pantheism of Tennyson, and of other of our poets. It is indeed only spasmodic, but it is there, and is a strange note in the singing of an otherwise tame and prosaic race.

Let us now return to the great procession of the sages of Hellas. It does not seem necessary to delay long upon Anaxagoras and Empedocles, though both were very great figures in their day. The principle feature in both their systems was that they felt the want of some ideal, or semi-ideal principle to work as a cause in producing the changes in nature. Anaxagoras postulated the original particles to be very diverse in quality and to enter into the composition of ordinary things so as to make up what we call their various qualities. The food we eat, for example, affects all the various parts of human bodies, however different, such as the tissue of the flesh, the hair, the nails, the viscera, because there is in this food, which is made up from corn or other vegetable and animal substances, an assortment of particles each of which contributes to nourish the member or part akin to it. If we ask how external bodies are brought together, and made up into unities, Anaxagoras felt so keenly the necessity of a moving cause that he set up his famous _Nous_, which we cannot translate by the word _mind_, for it was still a material cause, though far more subtle and active than the rest, such as we now imagine ether to be. But even so, Aristotle speaks of Anaxagoras as a great and fruitful innovator, inasmuch as he saw that brute matter cannot begin to act or even to move without some non-material or spiritual, or ideal cause. From what we know of Anaxagoras, he advanced but a little step in this direction himself; he was only groping his way, but to have been pioneer to Plato and to Aristotle is itself no mean praise. In a similar direction, the famous Empedocles postulated the principles of Love and Hate, much as we now postulate Attraction and Repulsion, to explain the varieties, and the movements, in external nature.

Observe that not one of these Ionic philosophers had yet asserted the great contrast of mind and matter, the still greater contrast of a Divine architect and his work. The phenomena of mind seemed to them but to be the result of a subtle and more impalpable combination of elements not differing in kind from the nature of material substances. So when a wholly different school came to review what the ancients had accomplished, the _Nous_ of Anaxagoras, and the Love and Hate of Empedocles, were hardly felt to be steps in advance. In fact for a while the development seemed to be the other way, for the last great theory we have to notice, before we come to the ideal philosophy of Plato and his followers, is more decidedly materialistic than all its predecessors. That is the famous Atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus, which maintained that the universe contains no elements but atoms and the void, the atoms being hard physical particles of only one quality but capable of myriad mechanical combinations in and by means of the void, or empty space which existed more or less in every body. As a hypothesis, this is the simplest that has ever been offered to explain the constitution of matter; it has consequently lasted all through the Renascence of learning into the newer age and has formed the very basis of the modern science of chemistry. The original atoms were not conceived as mathematical points, or as having any spiritual quality like the monads of Leibnitz; they were merely very small, impenetrable, and differing in figure. It was the density of their combination and hence the small fraction of void spaces in any body which made the difference of specific gravity, and the difference of their shape produced other qualities.

But how did these atoms come together? Here Democritus showed a prophetic clearness of sight which may well astonish modern critics. He regarded motion in these atoms as a primal fact, probably deriving it from the theory of Heracleitus. He held that as these atoms collided in the void, not always directly, but obliquely, the striking and the struck assumed a rotatory motion, and so established vortices which either attracted suitable atoms or rejected others by the centrifugal force of this rotation. Thus were constructed not only the great spheres that we observe in the sky, but all the ordinary objects around us. Into his explanations of the causes of the irregular forms of these objects I cannot enter, by reason of their intricacy. But to what consequences his theory led him may be told you in a sentence. He maintained, with the imagination of a great scientific mind, that there were an endless number of world-systems through space, differing merely in magnitude, some furnished with several moons, some in process of becoming, others, owing to collisions, in process of destruction, some of them wholly deficient in moisture, and hence devoid of animal and plant life. These are all consequences which we have drawn from the use of the telescope and even the spectroscope, but which this wonderful man reached by way of philosophical thinking.

Aristotle makes it his chief objection to the Atomic theory that it is purely descriptive of phenomena without assigning any cause for the primeval motion of the atoms; that it recognises no Architect, no Demiurge who set the myriad crowd of particles into motion, and then into regulated action. But Aristotle was misled by an assumption which has infected philosophy down to the present day--the assumption that a state of rest is prior to, and more natural to matter than a state of motion. This prejudice did not mislead Democritus, though it is an idol not only of the cave, as Bacon would say, but also of the forum. We have been misled and deceived by relative want of motion, to consider that until disturbed by an active impulse matter occupies a fixed place. But now, I would almost say since the twentieth century dawned, this old fallacy is giving way to the newer conception that there is no such thing as rest in nature, nay not even within the particles of any solid body. So then the primal assumption of the Greek thinker that motion is the natural state of matter was a wonderful anticipation of science, and shows once more what giant strides the human race may make by thinking as compared with the mere recording of experiments. Even now, when students of experimental physics are degenerating into mere mechanics, who seek to interrogate nature by the use of delicate machinery, and carefully recorded occurrences, I am assured by those in our great University who have been compelled in earlier life to acquire a sound knowledge of Greek philosophy, that the study of the old _Hylozoists_--the Ionic schools we have reviewed--is the very best introduction to the higher task of framing theories from experiments, and when I have heard read in the schools essays written in ignorance of these theories, I have often wondered at the absence of scientific logic of consistent thinking, of clear imagining which characterises the modern scientist. And when we are faced in our universities by the gigantic demands of modern scientists for laboratories, machinery, upkeep, and what not, by way of promoting what they call very ridiculously _original research_, they should be told openly and constantly that no mere mechanic, no mere tradesman, however splendidly equipped, will ever be worth one straw in original research. Such a high calling, if it is not to be mere name, a mere imposture, requires as its first implement a trained intellect, taught to speculate, and to devise theories which may or may not be verified or illustrated by mechanical tools. The greatest discoverers in modern science were men with bad tools, and small equipment. The old Greeks had none at all, and yet how many of the world’s mysteries did they approach and solve, merely by the force of pure and sound speculation! When we hear little modern men of science wondering how the Greeks could have got so far without modern instruments, we feel rather inclined to tell them we wonder the moderns have done so much with the help of these, for in abstract thinking lies the real basis of every great discovery.

So far, the course of Greek philosophy has led us to the side of science, to the constitution of the world, to the immensity of space, to the physical construction of animal and vegetable life, to the problem of the duration of the universe, to the dreams about its origin. Regarding all this as _natural philosophy_ (to use an obsolete but convenient expression), there remains another orb of Greek speculation which took rise with Socrates, passed on through Plato and Aristotle to the Stoic and Epicurean schools, and even illumined with its setting rays the old world passing into the night of the Dark Ages. Two things, says the philosopher Kant, impress me always with their peerless majesty--the starry heaven above, and the Moral Law within. It is this latter aspect of human philosophy, bound up as it is on the one side with profound metaphysic, on the other with ordinary practical life, that I must now speak. But here, where the material is large, and our evidence very complete, it is not expedient that I should detain you at any length. It may be new to some of you that Parmenides or Leucippus have been the fathers of modern systems; but none of you will doubt for a moment the colossal influence of Plato and Aristotle upon modern thought.

You must beware of exaggerating the revolution in philosophy produced by Socrates and the Sophists. It may indeed be true in their case that they despised scientific speculation, and did not care to make researches into the constitution of the universe. Gorgias even erected into a theory his scepticism regarding the reality of our knowledge, and wrote a famous tract on the impossibility of knowing anything; and he was by no means the only nihilist in the course of Greek philosophy. But when we come to Plato, we find high physical speculation, we find high theories of the universe, we find all the learning of his predecessors woven into his system, or utilised by way of illustration. The ideas of the Pythagoreans in particular, influenced him constantly, and his advocacy of a training in geometry, which may, more than people think, have shaped the curriculum of modern public schools in Europe, is Pythagorean in spirit.

But in spite of this strong recommendation, it does not appear that Plato himself made any advances in that science. His aim was for the moral reform of the individual, and with him of society, by metaphysical and ethical training. He had a higher opinion of the value of education than even the modern democrat, or English Radical, who imagines that by infusing knowledge into the masses, you can make them equal to the classes in refinement and in the amenities of life. But Plato’s education was intended strictly for the ruling minority; he did not think the artisan or the labourer fit for this high privilege, and in all his ideal schemes, he set up either the exceptional man as a monarch (in the _Politicus_), a small oligarchy of guardians (in the _Republic_), or a fixed code of strict _Laws_, with severe penalties for any violation or even questioning of them--all clearly aristocratic forces,--as the safeguards of society. And in spite of all these ethical safeguards, he did not believe that any state, even if ideally constructed, would last for ever, but that it must live through a youth and a maturity and ultimately reach the decrepitude of age.

I will not revert to the political speculations of Plato, which belong to another part of my subject. My present concern is with his theology and his metaphysic. Is it any wonder that the early Christian thinkers, such as Saint Augustine, delighted in him and called him the Attic Moses? In his _Republic_ he goes so far as to propose for his ideal state the expulsion of Homer and the other Epic poets, and the establishment of a loftier creed, as necessary for pure and sound morals. The true deity must be one, and the author of all good. He must be free from all disturbance of passion or caprice, without love or jealousy, without pride or interest. Any defects there may be in the world are due, not to his want of benevolence, but to his want of omnipotence in controlling the necessities of things, or perhaps rather because no being, omnipotent or not, can possibly be conceived as reconciling absolute contradictories.

It may, for example, be better and nobler for the creation that beings should exist which have a free will of their own and which are not like machines controlled by invincible necessity. But if they have indeed free will, how is it possible they should not go wrong, and cause evil in the world as the outcome of their liberty? Yet if this be the cause of evil in the world, it implies a higher and better state than one of perfect order, with the ideas of virtue and merit expunged from existence.

Plato goes further than any but the highest Christian theologians when he declares the Moral Law to be eternal and immutable, and to be binding even on the Author of the universe. In other words, the great mediæval controversy,--whether God does a thing because it is right, or whether a thing must be right because God does it,--this controversy is solved in the sense of what the Cambridge Platonists have called Immutable Morality. If such be the obligation under which even the Deity acts, it is an obvious corollary that nothing in the conduct of men is comparable to justice, nothing in dignity equal to the obeying of the Moral Law, without any regard of consequences. Nay more, to be punished for wrong-doing is far happier and better than to escape the consequences, and so to miss the great lesson that crime brings with it misery as a just consequence. Accordingly, a clear knowledge of moral principles is of the first moment to all men, and in Plato’s day it was often a more difficult problem to choose the right course, than to follow it when discovered. This is the meaning of those many researches into the proper connotation of terms expressing moral ideas. What is _justice_, what is _temperance_, what is _chastity_, what is _holiness_? On all these, there was little difficulty in showing by discussion that the popular notions were vague, and often self-contradictory. The first step to a purer life was to understand its conditions, to bring the intellect, as well as the will, to bear upon the conduct of men. Hence a man who felt no difficulty in doing his duty, when he once saw it plainly before him, might well say with Socrates and with Plato, that virtue was knowledge, that right living was a science, and that therefore a high education was the necessary condition of a noble character.

This attitude is foreign to the morals of Christianity, which accepts the child and the ignorant as better fitted for salvation than the wise and prudent. But such a theory, like that of a primitive Church where the members had all things in common, may be very practical at the opening of a revolution, yet may afterwards be found impracticable. It was not merely owing to its supposed corruption and decadence that the Mediæval Church came to ignore that poverty and equality of all Christians which we find at Jerusalem in the Acts of the Apostles. There is an aristocracy among men which no system of religion, of morals, of politics can ignore without disastrous consequences, and that is the aristocracy of intellect. This was the lesson which Plato taught in every page, and this it was which made him speculate upon the nature of the soul, and its relation to the Author of the universe, and to the knowledge of things higher and deeper than mere ordinary experience.

It was only gradually that he arrived at his conviction of the immortality, or rather of the eternity of the soul; probably it was suggested to him by the mystics and theologians among the Greeks. But in his dialogue known as the _Phædo_, he has discussed this now accepted belief with all its difficulties. In the person of Socrates, he has courted all the objections, and has endeavoured to show on metaphysical principles that the soul, being a perfectly simple active principle, distinct from, and superior to, the body, will not pass away with the death of its tabernacle but will exist hereafter, as it has existed, from eternity to eternity. The late Erwin Rohde, a critic not at all favourable to revealed religion, says, I think with great truth, that “no human teacher has ever done so much as Plato to extend this belief,” which has produced not only the noblest spiritual life, but also the noblest poetry. You know it in your English poets, best of all perhaps in the sober Wordsworth--

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.

And again:

Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And hear the children sporting on the shore,
And hear the mighty waves, rolling for evermore.

Need I pass on to Aristotle, and show in detail how his philosophy so dominated mediæval learning that it was adopted and protected by the Church, and that it became one of the efforts of the spirit of reform in logic and in psychology to break the shackles which this great thinker had, as the modern spirits often complained, forged to keep the human intellect from its advance? Need I tell you that this was owing to a travesty of the great man, learned not from his own pregnant words but through translations and commentaries?

I will conclude with a reference to the two great systems that dominated the Roman world after Plato and Aristotle had turned philosophy into an ethical channel--I mean those of the Stoics and of the Epicureans, who mapped out human character with a clearness that makes them our teachers to the present day. Not that they avoided speculating on the nature of the universe. The physics of Epicurus, borrowed from Democritus, are among the most difficult of studies, and the Stoics embraced in their view as the motive of action of their wise man all the harmony of the universe. These speculations may now be antiquated, but as the teachers of ethical types, as the expounders of what the highest human wisdom finds in its search for happiness, these two schools have fixed the types of civilised men for all time. Every man in this audience is born either a Stoic or an Epicurean, or what is perhaps far more common, alternates from one to the other according to circumstances. In its simplest form the great question is: Are we to live for duty, or live for pleasure--not of course mere vulgar pleasure of the senses, but that refined balance of intellectual and moral pleasure which you will find best explained in my old friend Walter Pater’s _Marius the Epicurean_; or else are we to seek for our standard outside ourselves, in the laws which the Moral Governor of the world has established for its welfare, and co-operate with Him in the promotion of His great ends? Such is the ideal wise man of the Stoics, who despised all earthly delights, all physical pleasures, for the sake of the great law of duty, and the great mission of living for some nobler purpose than mere animal or social comforts. We have its best expression in the peroration of Cicero’s account of the system[47]; or if you will have it in a more familiar shape, in the loud clarion of Saint Paul: “As deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing all things.”[48] For he too was bred a Stoic, and was not afraid in his addresses to cultivated men of his day to preach Stoic theology, akin to Pantheism.

If the time should ever come when men will no longer be led by revelation, when they will reject miracle and prophecy, and determine to be led by the mere light of reason (men have often anticipated such a future, regardless of the fact that hitherto religious scepticism has always ended in a recoil from this liberty, and a revival of positive and even superstitious creeds)--if, I say, such an age should ever lay aside the Christian faith, there will still remain the ethical types which Zeno and Epicurus have crystallised in their systems--there will always remain the man of duty and the man of pleasure, the man who lives for others and he who lives for himself, in terms of modern philosophic jargon, the Altruist and the Egoist, the Spiritualist and the Materialist.

* * * * *

And here I break off my unfinished task, unfinished indeed as it must be, for beyond the many things that I have omitted though I knew them, there are many more omitted because I knew them not, because I have not fathomed the unfathomable depth and the myriad variety of that genius which is living, and suggesting, and working all through the ideal aspects of our modern life. There are probably few men who have lived longer and more intimately with the old Greeks, in more phases of their life, ever probing and seeking for deeper and better knowledge of their vast legacy to mankind, of which the rodent tooth of time, the sacrilegious hands of men, have lost or destroyed so much. The farther I seek, the wider the vistas I see opening before me. So now, when my part in the race is nearly run, there remains to me no higher earthly satisfaction than this, that I have carried the torch of Greek fire alight through a long life--no higher earthly hope than this, that I may pass that torch to others, who in their turn may keep it aflame with greater brilliancy perhaps, but not with more earnest devotion, “in the Parliament of men, the Federation of the world.”

INDEX

A

Achæan League, organisation and dissolution, 203, 204

_Acontius and Cydippe_, love story of a modern type, 94

Actium, battle, 71

_Æneid_ of Virgil, _see_ Virgil

Æolic school, characteristic, 53

Æschylus, source of his tragedy, 36, 37;
one of the “three tragic poets,” 47;
Milton’s view of, 47;
characters of his plays, 48;
judge of tragedy, 73;
music of, 136
_Agamemnon_: great play, 27;
opening of, 48;
“vulgar and trivial persons,” 48;
contributes to Byron, 55;
Browning’s version, 57;
often translated into English, 58
_Prometheus Vinctus_: model for _Paradise Lost_, 47

Æsculapius, shrine of, 176

_Agamemnon_, _see_ Æschylus

Agatharchus, discovers principles of perspective, 130

Alcæus, poet, 37

_Alexander_, _Life of_, 97

Alexandria, library, collecting of, gives impetus to literary criticism, 91

Alexandrian school, development of mechanics, 162;
invention of the _sakia_, 165

_Alkestis_, _see_ Euripides

Alma-Tadema, Sir Edward, influenced by Greek art, 131, 132

Amyot, imitated Greek novel, 96

Anatomy, how studied by Greeks, 148

Anaxagoras, principal feature of his system, 229;
on original particles, 229;
Aristotle on, 229;
his famous _Nous_, 230, 231

Anaximander, makes advances in astronomy, 216, 217;
geological observations of, 218

Anaximenes, idea of the fundamental element of the world, 216, 217;
theory of eclipses, 217

Antiphon, treatises of, 82

_Antony and Cleopatra_, _see_ Shakespeare

_Aphrodite_ of Melos, mentioned, 118

Apollonius of Perga, treatment of conic sections, 161, 167

Apollonius Rhodius, delights in nature, 59
_Argonautics_: great epic, 41;
model for Milton, 43;
and Goethe’s _Faust_, 44

Arabic numerals, 157

Archilochus, poet, 37

Archimedes, triumphs of, in mechanics, 162, 167

Architecture, earliest form of house, 99;
houses of the dead, 100-102, 110, 111;
square house, 102;
evolution of classical, 103;
building materials, 103;
Doric, 104;
temples, 105, 110;
distinction between house and temple, 106, 107;
perfection of religious, 106, 107;
arch not used by Greeks, 107, 108;
Greek and Roman, compared, 108;
purpose in parts of a building, 109;
origin of arch, 109;
Roman use of arch, 110;
ornamentation of, by sculpture, 120

Archytas, 167

_Areopagitica_, _see_ Milton

_Argonautics_, _see_ Apollonius Rhodius

Argos, slaves in, 188

Aristides, studied oratory, 70

Aristocracies, in classical and mediæval times, 184

Aristophanes, as critic, 92;
ridicules Asklepiads, 176

Aristophanes, diction and metre, 37;
greatest master of Greek comedy, 60, 61;
Frere’s translation, 61, 64;
Rogers’s translation, 61;
influence and legacy, 61
_Birds and Frogs_: 27

Aristotle, almost canonised, 19;
criticism of _Iphigenia in Aulis_, 62, 72;
criticism of Medea, 62;
distinction between prose and poetry, 62, 63;
on Herodotus, 62, 63, 73;
on dramatic poetry and history, 72, 74;
and Herodotus, on style and subject of history, 74;
treatise on Language, 149;
treatise on Reasoning, 150;
arithmetical proof of theorem in geometry, 156;
on geometry, 159;
“master of those that knew,” 167;
brought up in Socratic method, 167;
style of writing, 167, 168;
system of collaboration, 168, 171;
collaborators, 169;
does no original work in mathematics, 169;
competence in mathematics, 170;
sciences promoted by, 171;
views on slavery, 189;
views on craftsmen, 189;
essential in his ideal of a state, 206;
objection to atomic theory, 233;
influence on modern thought, 237;
his philosophy and the Church, 242
_Constitution of Athens_: 169
_Poetic_: on tragic poetry, 61;
on dramatic poetry and history, 72

Aristoxenus, collaborator with Aristotle, 169

Arithmetic, starting-point of mathematics, 153;
importance of, to Pythagoras, 153;
numbers the essence of the universe, 153, 154;
Greek meaning of, 154;
Pythagorean speculations on natural series of units, 155;
specimens of treatment by Pythagoras, 156;
importance of numbers ten and twelve, 156;
Greek notation, 157;
Euclid’s works on, 161;
books on history of, 170

Arnold, Matthew, compares Milton’s style with Virgil’s, 46;
writes plays after Greek models, 58
_Merope_: 58

Art, earliest Greek, 12;
proper province of, 33, 34;
use of the term, 98

Artificiality of Greek poetry, defined, 33, 34

Asklepiads, method of, 176

Assemblies, in Greek democracies, 183

Astronomy, books on history of, 170

_Atalanta_, _see_ Swinburne

Athens, debts in, 186;
leadership, 201;
degeneration of spiritual life in, 210

Atomic theory, developed by Leucippus and Democritus, 231, 232;
results of, 233;
Aristotle’s objections to, 233

Atomists, doctrine of, 218, 219

Atreus, tomb of, 102, 111

Attic citizens, character, 208

Attic Code of laws, 190, 261

Attic life, portrayed by Menander, 208, 209

B

Bacchylides, comparison of Gray with, 54

Beehive huts, earliest form of house, 99;
extant examples, 99, 100;
not easily defended, 99;
once a general type, 100;
houses of the dead, 100-102;
Treasury of Athens, 101;
development of, 102

Biography, Plutarch, model, 80

_Birds and Frogs_, of Aristophanes, 27

Blow’s anthem, “I beheld and lo! a great multitude,” 126

Boccaccio, and Greek novels, 95

Botany, promoted by Aristotle, 171

Botticelli, Greek influence on, 131

Brougham, Lord, on Demosthenes, 84

Browning, Robert, his version of _Agamemnon_, 57;
version of Euripides, 57, 58, 64

Brydges, Sir Egerton, on choruses in _Samson Agonistes_, 50

Buckle’s _Civilisation_, famous opening, 5

Burke, Edmund, style influenced by Isocrates, 90;
translation of the _Tract on the Sublime_, 92

Burlington Art Club of London, collection of Greek fragments, 21

Byron, Lord, leader of Romantic school, 55;
knowledge of Greek poetry, 55;
borrows from Æschylus, 55;
interested in Greek life and Greece, 56;
interests Romanticists in Greece, 56

Byzantine architecture, 18

C

Calverley’s _Theocritus_, 64

Cambridge Platonists, 240

Carrey, Jacques, drawings of Parthenon, 52

Cathedral of Henry the Lion at Brunswick, 119

Chalmers, Thomas, Scotch orator, style, 90

Chapman, translation of the Iliad, 45, 51

_Charioteer_ of Delphi, 117

Choral hymns, Doric, 41