Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/596

 572 STOICS health, strength, and such like ' ' excellencies. " Further, Pansetms had maintained that pleasure is not altogether a thing indifferent : there is a natural as well as an unnatural pleasure. But, if so, it would follow that, since pleasure is an emotion, apathy or eradica- tion of all emotions cannot be unconditionally required. The gloss he put upon the definition of the end was "a life in accordance with the promptings given us by nature " ; the terms arc all used by older Stoics, but the individual nature (wlv) seems to be Posi- emphasized. From Posidonius, the last representative of a com- donius. prehensive study of nature and a subtle erudition, it is not stirpris- in" that we get the following definition : the end is to live in con- templation of the reality and order of the universe, promoting it to the best of our power, and never led astray by the irrational part of the soul. The heterodox phrase with which this definition ends points to innovations in psychology which were undoubtedly real and important, suggested by the difficulty of maintaining the essential unity of the soul. Pansetius had referred two faculties (those of speech and of reproduction) to animal impulse and to the vegetative "nature" ((pvcns) respectively. Yet the older Stoics held that this v<ris was changed to a true soul (^/vx^l) at birth. Posidonius, unable to explain the emotions as "judgments " or the effects of judgments, postulated, like Plato, an irrational principle (including a concupiscent and a spirited element) to account for them, although he subordinated all these as faculties to the one substance of the soul lodged in the heart. This was a serious departure from the principles of the system, facilitating a return of later Stoicism to the dualism of God and the world, reason and the irrational part in man, which Chrysippus had striven to surmount. 1 Yet in the general approximation and fusion of opposing views which had set in, the Stoics fared far better than rival schools. Their system became best known and most widely used by indi- vidual eclectics. All the assaults of the sceptical Academy had failed, and within fifty years of the death of Carneades his degener- ate successors, unable to hold their ground on the question of the criterion, had capitulated to the enemy. Antiochus of Ascalon, the professed restorer of the Old Academy, taught a medley of Stoic and Peripatetic dogmas, which he boldly asserted Zeno had first borrowed from his school. The wide diffusion of Stoic phraseology and Stoic modes of thought may be seen on all hands, in the language of the New Testament writers, in the compendious "histories of philosophy" industriously circulated by a host of writers about this time (cf. H. Diels, Doxographi Greed). The later ' The writings of the later Stoics have come down to us, Stoics, if not entire, in great part, so that Seneca, Cornutus, Persius, Lucan, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius are known at first hand. They do not profess to give a scientific exposi- tion of doctrine, and may therefore be dismissed somewhat briefly (see EPICTETUS and AURELIUS). We learn much more about the Stoic system from the scanty fragments of the first founders, 2 or even from the epitomes of Diogenes Laertius and Stobseus, than from these writers. They tes- tify to the restriction of philosophy to the practical side, and to the increasing tendency, ever since Panaetius, towards a relaxation of the rigorous ethical doctrine and its approxi- mation to the form of religious conviction. This finds most marked expression in the doctrines of submission to Providence and universal philanthropy. Only in this way could they hold their ground, however insecurely, in face of the religious reaction of the first century. In passing to Rome, Stoicism quitted the school for actual life. The fall of the republic was a gain, for it released so much intellec- tual activity from civic duties. The life and death of Cato fired the imagination of a degenerate age in which he stood out both as a Roman and a Stoic. To a long line of illus- trious successors, men like Psetus Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus, Cato bequeathed his resolute opposition to the dominant power of the times ; unsympathetic, impractic- able, but fearless in demeanour, they were a standing re- proach to the corruption and tyranny of their age. But 1 Works of Posidonius and Hecato have served as the basis of extant Latin treatises. Cicero, De Divinatione, perhaps De Natura Deorum, i., ii. , comes in part from Posidonius ; Cicero, De Finibus, iii., and Seneca, De Beneficiis, i.-iv., from Hecato, who is also the source of Stobanis, Ed. Eth., ii. 110. Cf. H. H. Fowler, Pansetii et Hecatonis Fragmenta, Bonn, 1885. 2 Cf. C. Wachsmuth, Commentationes II. de Zenone Citiensi et Cleanthe Assio, Gbttingen, 1874. Baguet's Chrysippus, Louvain, 1822, is unfortunately very incomplete. when at first, under Augustus, the empire restored 1 order, philosophy became bolder and addressed every class in society, public lectures and spiritual direction being the two forms in which it mainly showed activity. Books of direction were written by Sextius in Greek (as afterwards by Seneca in Latin), almost the only Roman who had the ambition to found a sect, though in ethics he mainly followed Stoicism. His contemporary Papirius Fabianus was the popular lecturer of that day, producing a powerful effect by his denunciations of the manners of the time. Under Tiberius, Sotion and Attains were attended by crowds of hearers. In Seneca's time there was a professor, badly attended it is true, even in a provincial town like Naples. At the same time the antiquarian study of Stoic writings went on apace, especially those of the earliest teachers, Zeno and Aristo and Cleanthes. Seneca is the most prominent leader in the direction Seneca. which Roman Stoicism now took. His penetrating intellect had mastered the subtleties of the system of Chrysippus, but they seldom appear in his works, at least without apology. Incidentally we meet there with the doctrines of Pneuma and of tension, of the corporeal nature of the virtues and the affections, and much more to the same effect. But his attention is claimed for physics chiefly as a means of elevating the mind, and as making known the wisdom of Providence and the moral govern- ment of the world. To reconcile the ways of God to man had been the ambition of Chrysippus, as we know from Plutarch's criticisms. He argued plausibly that natural evil was a thing indifferent, that even moral evil was required in the divine economy as a foil to set off good. The really difficult problem why the prosperity of the wicked and the calamity of the just were permitted under the divine government he met in various ways : some- times he alleged the forgetfulness of higher powers ; some- times he fell back upon the necessity of these contrasts and grotesque passages in the comedy of human life. Seneca gives the true Stoic answer in his treatise On Pro- vidence : the wise man cannot really meet with misfortune ; all outward calamity is a divine instrument of training, designed to exercise his powers and teach the world the indifference of external conditions. In the soul Seneca recognizes an effluence of the divine spirit, a god in the human frame ; in virtue of this he maintains the essential dignity and internal freedom of man in every human being. Yet, in striking contrast to this orthodox tenet is his vivid conception of the weakness and misery of men, the hopelessness of the struggle with evil, whether in society or in the individual. Thus he describes the body (which, after Epicurus, he calls the flesh) as a mere husk or fetter or prison of the soul ; with its departure begins the soul's true life. Sometimes, too, he writes as if he accepted an irrational as well as a rational part of the soul. In ethics, if there is no novelty of doctrine, there is a surprising change in the mode of its application. The ideal sage has receded ; philosophy comes as a physician, not to the whole but to the sick. We learn that there are various classes of patients in " progress " (TT/DOKOTT^), i.e., on their way to virtue, making painful efforts towards it. The first stage is the eradication of vicious habits : evil tendencies are to be corrected, and a guard kept on the corrupt propensities of the reason. Suppose this achieved, we have yet to struggle with single attacks of the passions : irascibility may be cured, but we may succumb to a fit of rage. To achieve this second stage the impulses must be trained in such a way that the fitness of things indifferent may be the guide of conduct. Even then it remains to give the will that property of rigid infallibility without which we are always liable to err, and this must be effected by the training of the judgment. Other