A Critical History of Greek Philosophy Part 16

Justice hardly comes into the scheme; it is rather a virtue of the State than of the individual, and it has been thought by some that the book devoted to it in the "Ethics" has been misplaced. Justice is of two kinds, distributive and corrective. Its fundamental idea {320} is the a.s.signment of advantages and disadvantages according to merit.

Distributive justice a.s.signs honours and rewards according to the worth of the individuals involved. Corrective justice has to do with punishment. If a man improperly obtains an advantage, things must be equalized by the imposition on him of a corresponding disadvantage.

Justice, however, is a general principle, and no general principle is equal to the complexity of life. Special cases cannot be foreseen, The necessary adjustment of human relations arising from this cause is equity.

Aristotle is a p.r.o.nounced supporter of the freedom of the will. He censures Socrates because the latter's theory of virtue practically amounts to a denial of freedom. According to Socrates, whoever thinks right must necessarily do right. But this is equivalent to denying a man's power to choose evil. And if he cannot choose evil, he cannot choose good. For the right-thinking man does not do right voluntarily, but necessarily. Aristotle believed, on the contrary, that man has the choice of good and evil. The doctrine of Socrates makes all actions involuntary. But in Aristotle's opinion only actions performed under forcible compulsion are involuntary. Aristotle did not, however, consider the special difficulties in the theory of free will which in modern times have made it one of the most th.o.r.n.y of all philosophical problems. Hence his treatment of the subject is not of great value to us.

_(b) The State_.

Politics is not a separate subject from Ethics. It is merely another division of the same subject. And {321} this, not merely because politics is the ethics of the State as against the individual, but because the morality of the individual really finds its end in the State, and is impossible without it. Aristotle agrees with Plato that the object of the State is the virtue and happiness of the citizens, which are impossible except in the State. For man is a political animal by nature, as is proved by his possession of speech, which would be useless to any save a social being. And the phrase "by nature" means the same here as elsewhere in Aristotle. It means that the State is the end of the individual, and that activity in the State is part of man's essential function. The State, in fact, is the form, the individual, the matter. The State provides both an education in virtue and the necessary opportunities for its exercise. Without it man would not be man at all. He would be a savage animal.

The historical origin of the State Aristotle finds in the family. At first there is the individual. The individual gets himself a mate, and the family arises. The family, in Aristotle's opinion, includes the slaves: for, like Plato, he sees no wrong in the inst.i.tution of slavery. A number of families, joining together, develop into a village community, and a number of village communities into a _polis_ (city), or State. Beyond the city, of course, the Greek idea of the State did not extend.

Such then is the historical origin of the State. But it is of capital importance to understand that, in Aristotle's opinion, this question of historical origin has nothing on earth to do with the far more important question what the State essentially is. It is no mere mechanical aggregate of families and village communities, {322} The _nature_ of the State is not explained in this way. For though the family is prior to the State in order of time, the State is prior to the family and to the individual in order of thought, and in reality.

For the State is the end, and the end is always prior to that of which it is the end. The state as form is prior to the family as matter, and in the same way the family is prior to the individual. And as the explanation of things is only possible by teleology, it is the end which explains the beginning, it is the State which explains the family, and not vice versa.

The true nature of the State, therefore, is not that it is a mechanical sum of individuals, as a heap of sand is the sum of its grains. The State is a real organism, and the connexion of part to part is not mechanical, but organic. The State has a life of its own.

And its members also have their own lives, which are included in the higher life of the State. All the parts of an organism are themselves organisms. And as the distinction between organic and inorganic is that the former has its end in itself, while the latter has its end external to it, this means that the State is an end in itself, that the individual is an end in himself, and that the former end includes the latter. Or we may express the same thought otherwise by saying that, in the State, both the whole and the parts are to be regarded as real, both having their own lives and, in their character as ends, their own rights. Consequently, there are two kinds of views of the nature of the State, which are, according to Aristotle, fundamentally erroneous. The first is the kind of view which depends upon a.s.serting the reality of the parts, but denying the reality of the whole, or, what is the same {323} thing, allowing that the individual is an end in himself, but denying that the State as a whole is such an end or has a separate life of its own. The second kind of false view is of the opposite kind, and consists in allowing reality only to the whole State, and denying the reality of its parts, the individuals. The opinions that the State is merely a mechanical aggregate of individuals, that it is formed by the combination of individuals or families for the sake of mutual protection and benefit, and that it exists only for these purposes, are examples of the first kind. Such views subordinate the State to the individual. The State is treated as an external contrivance for securing the life, the property, or the convenience of the individual. The State exists solely for the sake of the individual, and is not in itself an end. The individual alone is real, the State unreal, because it is only a collection of individuals. These views forget that the State is an organism, and they forget all that this implies. Aristotle would have condemned, on these grounds, the social contract theory so popular in the eighteenth century, and likewise the view of modern individualism that the State exists solely to ensure that the liberty of the individual is curtailed only by the right of other individuals to the same liberty.

The opposite kind of false view is ill.u.s.trated by the ideal State of Plato. As the views we have just discussed deny the reality of the whole, Plato's view, on the contrary, denies the reality of the parts.

For him the individual is nothing, the State everything. The individual is absolutely sacrificed to the State. He exists only _for_ the State, and thus Plato makes the mistake of setting up the State as sole end and denying that the {324} individual is an end in himself.

Plato imagined that the State is a h.o.m.ogeneous unity, in which its parts totally disappear. But the true view is that the State, as an organism, is a unity which contains heterogeneity. It is coherent, yet heterogeneous. And Plato makes the same mistake in his view of the family as in his view of the individual. The family, Aristotle thinks, is, like the individual, a real part of the social whole. It is an organism within an organism. As such, it is an end in itself, has absolute rights, and cannot be obliterated. But Plato expressly proposed to abolish the family in favour of the State, and by suggesting community of wives and the education of children in State nurseries from the year of their birth, struck a deadly blow at an essential part of the State organization. Aristotle thus supports the inst.i.tution of family, not on sentimental, but upon philosophic grounds.

Aristotle gives no exhaustive cla.s.sification of different kinds of State, because forms of government may be as various as the circ.u.mstances which give rise to them. His cla.s.sification is intended to include only outstanding types. He finds that there are six such types, of which three are good. The other three are bad, because they are corruptions of the good types. These are (1) Monarchy, the rule of one man by virtue of his being so superior in wisdom to all his fellows that he naturally rules them. The corruption of Monarchy is (2) Tyranny, the rule of one man founded not on wisdom and capacity, but upon force. The second good form is (3) Aristocracy, the rule of the wiser and better few, of which the corrupt form is (4) Oligarchy, the rule of the rich and powerful few. (5) Const.i.tutional Republic or Timocracy arises {325} where all the citizens are of fairly equal capacity, i.e., where no stand-out individual or cla.s.s exists, so that all or most take a share in the government. The corresponding corrupt form is (6) Democracy, which, though it is the rule of the many, is more especially characterized as being the rule of the poor.

Unlike Plato, Aristotle depicts no ideal State. No single State, he thinks, is in itself the best. Everything must depend upon the circ.u.mstances. What is the best State in one age and county will not be the best in another. Moreover, it is useless to discuss Utopian const.i.tutions. What alone interests the sane and balanced mind of Aristotle is the kind of const.i.tution which we may hope actually to realize. Of the three good forms of government he considers that monarchy is theoretically the best. The rule of a single perfectly wise and just man would be better than any other. But it has to be given up as impracticable, because such perfect individuals do not exist. And it is only among primitive peoples that we find the hero, the man whose moral stature so completely exalts him above his fellows that he rules as a matter of course. The next best State is aristocracy. And last, in Aristotle's opinion, comes const.i.tutional republic, which is, however, perhaps the State best suited to the special needs and level of development of the Greek city-states.

6. Aesthetics, or the Theory of Art.

Plato had no systematic philosophy of Art, and his views had to be collected from scattered references. Aristotle likewise has scarcely a system, though his opinions are more connected, and though he devoted a special tretise, the "Poetics", to the subject. And this {326} book, which has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, deals exclusively with poetry, and even in poetry only the drama is considered in detail.

What we have from Aristotle on the subject of aesthetics may be divided roughly into two cla.s.ses, firstly, reflections on the nature and significance of art in general, and, secondly, a more detailed application of these principles to the art of poetry. We shall deal with these two cla.s.ses of opinions in that order.

In order to know what art is, we must first know what it is not. It must be distinguished from kindred activities. And firstly, it is distinguished from morality in that morality is concerned with action, art with production. Morality consists in the activity itself, art in that which the activity produces. Hence the state of mind of the actor, his motives, feelings, etc., are important in morality, for they are part of the act itself. But they are not important in art, the only essential being that the work of art should turn out well, however it has been produced. Secondly, art is distinguished from the activity of nature, which it in many respects resembles. Organic beings reproduce their own kind, and, in the fact that it is concerned with production, generation resembles art. But in generation, the living being produces only itself. The plant produces a plant, man begets man. But the artist produces something quite other than himself, a poem, a picture, a statue.

Art is of two kinds, according as it aims at completing the work of nature, or at creating something new, an imaginary world of its own which is a copy of the real world. In the former case, we get such arts as that of {327} medicine. Where nature has failed to produce a healthy body, the physician helps nature out, and completes the work that she has begun. In the latter case, we get what are, in modern times, called the fine arts. These Aristotle calls the imitative arts.

We saw that Plato regarded all art as imitative, and that such a view is essentially unsatisfactory. Now Aristotle uses the same word, which he perhaps borrowed from Plato, but his meaning is not the same as Plato's, nor does he fall into the same mistakes. That in calling art imitative he has not in mind the thought that it has for its aim merely the faithful copying of natural objects is proved by the fact that he mentions music as the most imitative of the arts, whereas music is, in fact, in this sense, the least imitative of all. The painter may conceivably be regarded as imitating trees, rivers, or men, but the musician for the most part produces what is unlike anything in nature. What Aristotle means is that the artist copies, not the sensuous object, but what Plato would call the Idea. Art is thus not, in Plato's contemptuous phrase, a copy of a copy. It is a copy of the original. Its object is not this or that particular thing, but the universal which manifests itself in the particular. Art idealizes nature, that is, sees the Idea in it. It regards the individual thing, not as an individual, but in its universal aspects, as the fleeting embodiment of an eternal thought. Hence it is that the sculptor depicts not the individual man, but rather the type-man, the perfection of his kind. Hence too, in modern times, the portrait painter is not concerned to paint a faithful image of his model, but takes the model merely as a suggestion, and seizes upon that essential and eternal {328} essence, that ideal thought, or universal, which he sees shining through the sensuous materials in which it is imprisoned.

His task is to free it from this imprisonment. The common man sees only the particular object. The artist sees the universal in the particular. Every individual thing is a compound of matter and form, of particular and universal. The function of art is to exhibit the universal in it.

Hence poetry is truer, more philosophical, than history. For history deals only with the particular as the particular. It tells us only of the _fact_, of what has happened. Its truth is mere correctness, accuracy. It has not in it, as art has, the living and eternal truth.

It does not deal with the Idea. It yields us only the knowledge of something that, having happened, having gone by, is finished. Its object is transient and perishable. It concerns only the endless iteration of meaningless events. But the object of art is that inner essence of objects and events, which perishes not, and of which the objects and events are the mere external drapery. If therefore we would arrange philosophy, art, and history, in order of their essential n.o.bility and truth, we should place philosophy first, because its object is the universal as it is in itself, the pure universal. We should place art second, because its object is the universal in the particular, and history last, because it deals only with the particular as such. Yet because each thing in the world has its own proper function, and errs if it seeks to perform the functions of something else, hence, in Aristotle's opinion, art must not attempt to emulate philosophy. It must not deal with the abstract universal.

The poet must not use his verses as a vehicle of abstract thought. His proper {329} sphere is the universal as it manifests itself in the particular, not the universal as it is in itself. Aristotle, for this reason, censures didactic poetry. Such a poem as that of Empedocles, who unfolded his philosophical system in metre, is not, in fact, poetry at all. It is versified philosophy. Art is thus lower than philosophy. The absolute reality, the inner essence of the world, is thought, reason, the universal. To contemplate this reality is the object alike of philosophy and of art. But art sees the Absolute not in its final truth, but wrapped up in a sensuous drapery. Philosophy sees the Absolute as it is in itself, in its own nature, in its full truth; it sees it as what it essentially is, thought. Philosophy, therefore, is the perfect truth. But this does not mean that art is to be superseded and done away with. Because philosophy is higher than art, it does not follow that a man should suppress the artist in himself in order to rise to philosophy. For an essential thought of the Aristotelian philosophy is that, in the scale of beings, even the lower form is an end in itself, and has absolute rights. The higher activities presuppose the lower, and rest upon them. The higher includes the lower, and the lower, as an organic part of its being, cannot be eradicated without injury to the whole. To suppress art in favour of philosophy would be a mistake precisely parallel to the moral error of asceticism. In treating of Aristotle's ethics we saw that, although the activity of reason is held in highest esteem, the attempt to uproot the pa.s.sions was censured as erroneous. So here, though philosophy is the crown of man's spiritual activity, art has its rights, and is an absolute end in itself, a point which Plato failed to see. In the human organism, the head is the {330} chief of the members. But one does not cut off the hand because it is not the head.

Coming now to Aristotle's special treatment of the art of poetry, we may note that he concentrates his attention almost exclusively upon the drama. It does not matter whether the plot of a drama is historical or fict.i.tious. For the object of art, the exhibition of the universal, is just as well attained in an imaginary as in a real series of events. Its aim is not correctness, but truth, not facts, but the Idea. Drama is of two kinds, tragedy and comedy. Tragedy exhibits the n.o.bler specimens of humanity, comedy the worse. This remark should be carefully understood. It does not mean that the hero of a tragedy is necessarily a good man in the ordinary sense. He may even be a wicked man. But the point is that, in some sense, he must be a great personality. He cannot be an insignificant person. He cannot be a nonent.i.ty. Be he good or bad, he must be conceived in the grand manner. Milton's Satan is not good, but he is great, and would be a fit subject for a tragedy. The soundness of Aristotle's thought here is very noteworthy. What is mean and sordid can never form the basis of tragedy. Modern newspapers have done their best to debauch this word tragedy. Some wretched noteless human being is crushed to death by a train, and the newspapers head their paragraph "Fearful Tragedy at Peckham Rye." Now such an incident may be sad, it may be dreadful, it may be horrible, but it is not tragic. Tragedy no doubt deals with suffering. But there is nothing great and enn.o.bling about this suffering, and tragedy is concerned with the sufferings of greatness.

In the same way, Aristotle does not mean that the comic {331} hero is necessarily a wicked man, but that he is, on the whole, a poor creature, an insignificant being. He may be very worthy, but there is something low and ign.o.ble about him which makes us laugh.

Tragedy brings about a purification of the soul through pity and terror. Mean, sordid, or dreadful things do not enn.o.ble us. But the representation of truly great and tragic sufferings arouses in the beholder pity and terror which purge his spirit, and render it serene and pure. This is the thought of a great and penetrating critic. The theory of certain scholars, based upon etymological grounds, that it means that the soul is purged, not _through_, but _of_ pity and terror, that by means of a diarrhoea of these unpleasant emotions we get rid of them and are left happy, is the thought of men whose scholarship may be great, but whose understanding of art is limited.

Such a theory would reduce Aristotle's great and illuminating criticism to the meaningless babble of a philistine.

7. Critical Estimate of Aristotle's Philosophy.

It is not necessary to spend so much time upon criticising Aristotle as we spent upon doing the same for Plato, and that for two reasons.

In the first place, Plato with his obvious greatness abounded in defects which had to be pointed out, whereas we have but little adverse criticism for Aristotle. Secondly, Aristotle's main defect is a dualism almost identical with that of Plato, and what has been said of the one need only be shortly applied to the other.

At bottom Aristotle's philosophy is the same as Plato's, with some of the main defects and crudities removed. Plato was the founder of the philosophy of the Idea. {332} But in his hands, idealism was clogged with unessentials, and overgrown with excrescences. His crude theory of the soul as a thing mechanically forced in and out of the body, his doctrines of reincarnation and recollection, the belief that this _thing_ the soul can travel to some place far away where it will see those _things_ the Ideas, and above all, what is the root of all these, the confusion between reality and existence, with its consequent degradation of the universal to a mere particular--these were the unessentials with which Plato connected his essential idealism. To take the pure theory of Ideas--albeit not under that name--to purge it of these enc.u.mbrances and to cast them upon the rubbish heap, to cleanse Plato's gold of its dross, this was the task of Aristotle. Thought, the universal, the Idea, form--call it what you will--this is the ultimate reality, the foundation of the world, the absolute prius of all things. So thought both Plato and Aristotle.

But whereas Plato began to draw mental pictures of the universal, to imagine that it existed apart in a world of its own, and so might be experienced by the vision of the wandering soul, Aristotle saw that this was to treat thought as if it were a thing, to turn it into a mere particular again. He saw that the universal, though it is the real, has no existence in a world of its own, but only in this world, only as a formative principle of particular things. This is the key-note of his philosophy. Aristotle registers, therefore, an enormous advance upon Plato. His system is the perfected and completed Greek idealism. It is the highest point reached in the philosophy of Greece. The flower of all previous thought, the essence and pure distillation of the Greek philosophic spirit, the gathering {333} up of all that is good in his predecessors and the rejection of all that is faulty and worthless--such is the philosophy of Aristotle. It was not possible for the Greek spirit to advance further. Further development could be only decay. And so, in fact, it turned out to be.

Aristotle deserves, too, the credit of having produced the only philosophy of evolution which the world has ever seen, with the exception of that of Hegel; and Hegel was enabled to found a newer theory of evolution only by following largely in the footsteps of Aristotle. This was perhaps Aristotle's most original contribution to thought. Yet the factors of the problem, though not its solution, he took from his predecessors. The problem of becoming had tortured Greek thought from the earliest ages. The philosophy of Heracleitus, in which it was most prominent, had failed to solve it. Heracleitus and his successors racked their brains to discover how becoming could be possible. But even if they had solved this minor problem, the greater question still remained in the background, what does this becoming mean? Becoming for them was only meaningless change. It was not development. The world-process was an endless stream of futile and purposeless events, "a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Aristotle not merely asked himself how becoming is possible. He showed that becoming has a meaning, that it signifies something, that the world-process is a rationally ordered development towards a rational end.

But, though Aristotle's philosophy is the highest presentation of the truth in ancient times, it cannot be accepted as anything final and faultless. Doubtless no philosophy can ever attain to finality. Let us apply our {334} two-fold test. Does his principle explain the world, and does it explain itself? First, does it explain the world? The cause of Plato's failure here was the dualism in his system between sense and thought, between matter and the Ideas. It was impossible to derive the world from the Ideas, because they were absolutely separated from the world. The gulf was so great that it could never be bridged. Matter and Idea lay apart, and could never be brought together. Now Aristotle saw this dualism in Plato, and attempted to surmount it. The universal and the particular, he said, do not thus lie apart, in different worlds. The Idea is not a thing here, and matter a thing there, so that these two incommensurables have to be somehow mechanically and violently forced together to form a world.

Universal and particular, matter and form, are inseparable. The connexion between them is not mechanical, but organic. The dualism of Plato is thus admitted and refuted. But is it really surmounted? The answer must be in the negative. It is not enough by a _tour de force_ to bring matter and form together, to a.s.sert that they are inseparable, while they remain all the time, in principle, separate ent.i.ties. If the Absolute is form, matter ought to be deduced from form, shown to be merely a projection and manifestation of it. It must be shown that form not only moulds matter but produces it. If we a.s.sert that the one primal reality is form, then clearly we must prove that all else in the world, including matter, arises out of that prime being. Either matter arises out of form or it does not. If it does, this arising must be exhibited. If it does not, then form is not the sole ultimate reality, for matter is equally an ultimate, underivative, {335} primordial substance. In that case, we thus have two equally real ultimate beings, each underived from the other, existing side by side from all eternity. This is dualism, and this is the defect of Aristotle. Not only does he not derive matter from form, but he obviously sees no necessity for doing so. He would probably have protested against any attempt to do so, for, when he identifies the formal, final, and efficient causes with each other, leaving out the material cause, this is equivalent to an a.s.sertion that matter cannot be reduced to form. Thus his dualism is deliberate and persistent. The world, says Aristotle, is composed of matter and form. Where does this matter come from? As it does not, in his system, arise out of form, we can only conclude that its being is wholly in itself, i.e., that it is a substance, an absolute reality. And this is utterly inconsistent with Aristotle's a.s.sertion that it is in itself nothing but a mere potentiality. Thus, in the last resort, this dualism of sense and thought, of matter and Idea, of unlimited and limiting, which runs, "the little rift within the lute," through all Greek philosophy, is not resolved. The world is not explained, because it is not derived from a single principle. If form be the Absolute, the whole world must flow out of it. In Aristotle's system, it does not.

Secondly, is the principle of form self-explanatory? Here, again, we must answer negatively. Most of what was said of Plato under this head applies equally to Aristotle. Plato a.s.serted that the Absolute is reason, and it was therefore inc.u.mbent on him to show that his account of reason was truly rational. He failed to do so. Aristotle a.s.serts the same thing, for form is only {336} another word for reason. Hence he must show us that this form is a rational principle, and this means that he must show us that it is necessary. But he fails to do so. How is form a necessary and self-determining principle? Why should there be such a principle as form? We cannot see any necessity. It is a mere fact. It is nothing but an ultimate mystery. It is so, and that is an end of it. But why it should be so, we cannot see. Nor can we see why there should be any of the particular kinds of form that there are. To explain this, Aristotle ought to have shown that the forms const.i.tute a systematic unity, that they can be deduced one from another, just as we saw that Plato ought to have deduced all the Ideas from one another. Thus Aristotle a.s.serts that the form of plants is nutrition, of animals sensation, and that the one pa.s.ses into the other. But even if this a.s.sertion be true, it is a mere fact. He ought not merely to have a.s.serted this, but to have deduced sensation from nutrition.

Instead of being content to allege that, as a fact, nutrition pa.s.ses into sensation, he ought to have shown that it must pa.s.s into sensation, that the pa.s.sage from one to the other is a logical necessity. Otherwise, we cannot see the reason why this change occurs.

That is to say, the change is not _explained_.

Consider the effects of this omission upon the theory of evolution. We are told that the world-process moves towards an end, and that this end is the self-realization of reason, and that it is proximately attained in man, because man is a reasoning being. So far this is quite intelligible. But this implies that each step in evolution is higher than the last because it approaches nearer to {337} the end of the world-process. And as that end is the realization of reason, this is equivalent to saying that each step is higher than the last because it is more rational. But how is sensation more rational than nutrition? Why should it not be the other way about? Nutrition pa.s.ses through sensation into human reason. But why should not sensation pa.s.s through nutrition into human reason? Why should not the order be reversed? We cannot explain. And such an admission is absolutely fatal to any philosophy of evolution. The whole object of such a philosophy is to make it clear to us why the higher form is higher, and why the lower is lower: why, for example, nutrition must, as lower, come first, and sensation second, and not _vice versa_. If we can see no reason why the order should not be reversed, this simply means that our philosophy of evolution has failed in its main point. It means that we cannot see any real difference between lower and higher, and that therefore we have merely change without development, since it is indifferent whether A pa.s.ses into B, or B into A. The only way in which Aristotle could have surmounted these difficulties would have been to prove that sensation is a development of reason which goes beyond nutrition. And he could only do this by showing that sensation logically arises out of nutrition. For a logical development is the same as a rational development. He ought to have logically deduced sensation from nutrition, and so with all the other forms. As it is, all that can be said is that Aristotle was the founder of a philosophy of evolution because he saw that evolution implies movement towards an end, and because he attempted to point out the different stages in the attainment of that end, {338} but that he failed rationally to develop the doctrine stage by stage.

As neither the principle of form in general was shown to be necessary, nor were the particular forms deduced from each other, we have to conclude that Aristotle like Plato, _named_ a self-explanatory principle, reason or form, as ultimate principle of things, but failed to show in detail that it is self-explanatory. Yet, in spite these defects, the philosophy of Aristotle is one of the greatest philosophies that the world has ever seen, or is ever likely to see.

If it does not solve all problems, it does render the world more intelligible to us than it was before.

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CHAPTER XIV

THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF POST-ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY

The rest of the story of Greek philosophy is soon told, for it is the story of decay. The post-Aristotelian is the least instructive of the three periods of Greek thought, and I shall delineate only its main outlines.

The general characteristics of the decay of thought which set in after Aristotle are intimately connected with the political, social, and moral events of the time. Although the huge empire of Alexander had broken up at the conqueror's death, this fact had in no way helped the Greek States to throw off the yoke of their oppressors. With the single exception of Sparta, which stubbornly held out, they had become, for all intents and purposes, subject to the dominion of Macedonia. And the death of Alexander did not alter this fact. It was not merely that rude might had overwhelmed a beautiful and delicate civilization. That civilization itself was decaying. The Greeks had ceased to be a great and free people. Their vitality was ebbing. Had it not been one conqueror it would have been another. They were growing old. They had to give way before younger and st.u.r.dier races.

It was not so many years now before Greece, pa.s.sing from one alien yoke to another, was to become no more than a Roman province.

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Philosophy is not something that subsists independently of the growth and decay of the spirit of man. It goes hand in hand with political, social, religious, and artistic development. Political organization, art, religion, science, and philosophy, are but different forms in which the life of a people expresses itself. The innermost substance of the national life is found in the national philosophy, and the history of philosophy is the kernel of the history of nations. It was but natural, then, that from the time of Alexander onwards Greek philosophy should exhibit symptoms of decay.

The essential mark of the decay of Greek thought was the intense subjectivism which is a feature of all the post-Aristotelian schools.

Not one of them is interested in the solution of the world-problem for its own sake. The pure scientific spirit, the desire for knowledge for its own sake, is gone. That curiosity, that wonder, of which Aristotle speaks as the inspiring spirit of philosophy, is dead. The motive power of philosophy is no longer the disinterested pursuit of truth, but only the desire of the individual to escape from the ills of life.

Philosophy only interests men in so far as it affects their lives. It becomes anthropocentric and egocentric. Everything pivots on the individual subject, his destiny, his fate, the welfare of his soul.

Religion has long since become corrupted and worthless, and philosophy is now expected to do the work of religion, and to be a haven of refuge from the storms of life. Hence it becomes essentially practical. Before everything else it is ethical. All other departments of thought are now subordinated to ethics. It is not as in the days of the strength and youth of the Greek spirit, when Xenophanes or {341} Anaxagoras looked out into the heavens, and naively wondered what the sun and the stars were, and how the world arose. Men's thought no longer turns outward toward the stars, but only inward upon themselves. It is not the riddle of the universe, but the riddle of human life, which makes them ponder.

This subjectivism has as its necessary consequences, one-sidedness, absence of originality, and finally complete scepticism. Since men are no longer interested in the wider problems of the universe, but only in the comparatively petty problems of human life, their outlook becomes exclusively ethical, narrow, and one-sided. He who cannot forget his own self, cannot merge and lose himself in the universe, but looks at all things only as they affect himself, does not give birth to great and universal thoughts. He becomes self-centred, and makes the universe revolve round him. Hence we no longer have now great, universal, all-embracing systems, like those of Plato and Aristotle. Metaphysics, physics, logic, are not studied for their own sakes, but only as preparations for ethics. Narrowness, however, is always compensated by intensity, which in the end becomes fanaticism.

Hence the intense earnestness and almost miraculous heights of fanatical asceticism, to which the Stoics attained. And an unbalanced and one-sided philosophy leads to extremes. Such a philosophy, obsessed by a single idea, unrestrained by any consideration for other and equally important factors of truth, regardless of all other claims, pushes its idea pig-headedly to its logical extreme. Such a procedure results in paradoxes and extravagances. Hence the Stoics, if they made duty their watchword, must needs conceive it in {342} the most extreme opposition to all natural impulses, with a sternness unheard of in any previous ethical doctrine save that of the Cynics.

Hence the Sceptics, if they lighted on the thought that knowledge is difficult of attainment, must needs rush to the extreme conclusion that any knowledge is utterly impossible. Hence the Neo-Platonists must needs cap all these tendencies by making out a drunken frenzy of the soul to be the true organ of philosophy, and by introducing into speculation all the fantastic paraphernalia of sorcery, demons, and demi-G.o.ds. Absence of sanity and balance, then, are characteristics of the last period of Greek philosophy. The serenity and calm of Plato and Aristotle are gone, and in their place we have turgidity and extravagance.