Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/598

Rh 576 ETHICS straightness, light, &c., and of evil with the opposite qualities. Still, on the whole, the moral precepts of Pythagoras appear to have been announced much more in a dogmatic, or even prophetic, than in a philosophic manner ; and, whether sound or arbitrary, to have been accepted by his disciples with a decidedly unphilosophic reverence for the &quot; ipse dixit &quot; J of the master. Hence, whatever influence the Pythagorean blending of ethical and mathe matical notions may have had on Plato, and, through him, on later thought, we cannot regard the school as having really forestalled the Socratic inquiry after a completely reasoned theory of conduct. The ethical element in the &quot; dark &quot; philosophizing of Heraclitus (circ. 530-470 B.C.) shows more profundity of view but still less approximation to a system; in spite of the partial anticipation of Stoicism which we find in his conceptions of a law of the universe, to which the wise man will carefully conform, and a divine harmony, in the recognition of which he will find his truest satisfaction. It is only when we come to Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates, the last of the series of original thinkers whom we distinguish as pre-Socratic, that we find anything which we can call an ethical system. The frag ments that remain of the moral treatises of Democritus are sufficient, perhaps, to convince us that the turn of Greek philosophy in the direction of conduct, which was actually due to Socrates, would have taken place without him, though in a less decided manner ; but when we compare the Democritean ethics with the post-Socratic system to which it has most affinity, Epicureanism, we find that it exhibits a very rudimentary apprehension of the formal conditions which moral teaching must fulfil before it can lay claim to be treated as scientific. The fact is that a moral system could not satisfactorily be constructed until attention had been strongly directed to the vagueness and inconsistency of the common moral opinions of mankind ; until this was done, the moral counsels of the philosopher, however supreme his contempt for the common herd, inevitably shared these defects. For this purpose, was needed the concentration of a philosophic intellect of the first order on the problems of practice. In Socrates, for the first time, we find the required combination of a genuine ardour for knowledge, and a paramount inte rest in conduct. The pre-Socratic thinkers, from Thales downwards, were all primarily devoted to ontological re search; but by the middle of the 5th century B.C. the clash and conflict of their dogmatic systems had led some of the keenest minds to doubt the possibility of penetrating the secret of the universe. This doubt found expression in the reasoned scepticism of Gorgias, and produced the famous doctrine of Protagoras, that the human apprehension is the only standard of what is and what is not. A similar view of the natural limits of the human intellect repelled the philosophic ardour of Socrates from physico-metapbysi- cal inquiries. In his case, moreover, such a view found support in a naive piety that indisposed him to search into things of which the gods seemed to have reserved the know ledge to themselves. The regulation of human action, on the other hand (except on occasions of special difficulty, for which omens and oracles might be vouchsafed), they had left to human reason; on this accordingly Socrates concen trated his efforts. The age ^The demand for an art of conduct was not, however, of the original in Socrates, though his conception of the requisite Sophists, knowledge was so in the highest degree. The thought of the most independent thinker is conditioned by that of his age ; and we cannot disconnect the work of Socrates from the professional instruction in conduct which is so striking 1 This well-known phrase was originally attributed to the Pytha goreans. a phenomenon of this period of Greek civilization. The origination of this kind of teaching seems to have been due to the genius of Protagoras; whom we may suppose to have been turned, like Socrates, to the study of human affairs in consequence of his negative attitude towards current onto logical speculation. This instruction, conveyed in well- thronged lectures, does not seem to have been based on any philosophical system, and was in fact of too popular a quality to be of much philosophical importance. It seems to have combined somewhat loosely the art of getting on in the world with the art of managing public affairs, and to have mingled encomiastic expositions of different virtues with prudential justifications of virtue, as a means of obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain. But however commonplace the teaching of the &quot;sophistti&quot; may have been, the general fact of the appearance of this new profession to meet a new social need is sufficiently remarkable. How came it that after so many centuries, in which Greeks had used their moral notions with the confidence of perfect knowledge, and attributed to any cause rather than ignorance the extensive failure of men to realize virtue, they should suddenly be come persuaded that good conduct was something that could be learnt from lectures 1 It must be borne in mind that in the Greek conception of virtue the moral view of life was not separated from the prudential; the apirr) which the sophists professed to communicate was not strictly virtue, as distinguished from other skills and gifts that sustain and enrich life. Thus while in this age, as in more modern times, most men would suppose that they had sufficient knowledge of justice and temperance, they would not be equally confident that they possessed the art of making the best of life generally. We must remember, too, the importance of the civic or public side of life, to a free-born leisured Greek in the small town communities of this age. The art of conduct as professed and taught to him would mean to a great extent the art of public life; indeed, Plato s Protayoras defines his function to be that of teaching &quot; civic excellence &quot; in distinction from other skills (as that of flute-playing), which might also be included under the notion of open/. It is more natural that a plain man should think scientific training necessary in dealing with affairs of state than in his own private concerns. Still this emergence of an art of conduct with profes sional teachers cannot thoroughly be understood, unless it is viewed as a crowning result of a general tendency at this stage of Greek civilization to substitute technical skill for traditional procedure and empirically developed faculty. In the age of the sophists we find, wherever we turn, the same eager pursuit of knowledge, and the same eager effort to apply it directly to practice, The method of earth- measurement was rapidly becoming a science ; the astro nomy of Meton was introducing precision into the compu tation of time ; Hippodamus was revolutionizing architec ture by building towns with straight broad streets ; old- fashioned soldiers were grumbling at the new pedantries of &quot; tactics &quot; and &quot; hoplitics ; &quot; the art of music had recently received a great technical development ; and a still greater change had bsen effected in that training of the body which constituted the other half of ordinary Greek education. If bodily vigour was no longer to be left to nature and spon taneous exercise, but was to be attained by the systematic observance of rules laid down by professional trainers, it was natural to think that the same might be the case with mental excellences. The art of rhetoric, again, which was developed in Sicily in the second half of the fifth century, is a specially striking example of the general tendency we are here considering ; and it is important to observe that the profession of rhetorician was commonly blended with that of sophist. Indeed throughout the age of Socrates