Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/606

Rh 584 T H I S good or bad. That this impassive sage was a being not to be found among living men the later Stoics at least were fully aware. They faintly suggested that one or two moral heroes of old time might have realized the ideal, bat they admitted that all other philosophers (even) were merely in a state of pro gress towards it. This admission did not in the least dimi nish the rigour of their demand for absolute loyalty to the exclusive claims of wisdom. The assurance of its own unique value that such wisdom involved they held to be an abid ing possession for those who had attained it ; and without this assurance no act could be truly wise or virtuous. Whatever was not of knowledge was of sin ; and the dis tinction between right arid wrong being absolute and not admitting of degrees, all sins were equally sinful, whoever broke the least commandment was guilty of the whole law. Similarly, in any one of the manifestations of wisdom, commonly distinguished as particular virtues, all wisdom was somehow involved ; though whether these virtues were specifically distinct, or only the same knowledge in different relations, was a subtle question on which the Stoics do not seem to have been agreed. Was, then, this rare and priceless knowledge something which it was possible for man to attain, or were human shortcomings really involuntary 1 There is an obvious danger to moral responsibility involved in the doctrine that vice is involuntary; which yet seems a natural inference from the Socratic identification of knowledge with virtue. Hence Aristotle had already been led to attempt a refutation of this doctrine; but his attempt had only shown the pro found difficulty of attacking the paradox, so long as it was admitted that no one could of deliberate purpose act con trary to what seemed to him best. Now, Aristotle s diver gence from Socrates had not led him so far as to deny this ; while for the Stoics who had receded to the original Socratic position, the difficulty was still more patent. In fact, a philosopher who maintains that virtue is essentially knowledge has to choose between alternative paradoxes : he must either allow vice to be involuntary, or affirm ignorance to be voluntary. The latter horn of the dilemma is at any rate the less dangerous to morality, and as such the Stoics chose it. But they were not yet at the end of their perplexities ; for while they were thus driven on one line of thought to an extreme extension of the range of human volition, their view of the physical universe involved an equally thorough going determinism. How could the vicious mm be responsible if his vice were strictly pre determined? The Stoics answered that the error which was the essence of vice -was so far voluntary that it could be avoided if men chose to exercise their reason ; no doubt it depended on the innate force and firmness 2 of a man s soul whether his reason was thus effectually exercised ; but moral responsibility was saved if the vicious act proceeded from the man himself and not from any external cause. With all this we have got little way towards ascertaining the positive practical content of this wisdom. How are we to emerge from the barren circle of affirming (1) that wisdom is the sole good and unwisdom the sole evil, and (2) that wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil; and attain some method for determining the particulars of good conduct 1 Both Cynicism and Stoicism stood in need of such a method to complete their doctrine, since neither school was prepared to maintain that what the sage docs is indifferent (no less than what befalls him), provided only he does it with a full conviction of its indifference. The Cynics, however, seem to have made no philosophical 1 The Stoics were not quite agreed as to the inalienability of virtue, but they were agreed that, when once possessed, it could only be lost through the loss of reason itself. a Hence some members of the school, without rejecting the definition of virtue = knowledge, also defined it as &quot;strength and force. provision for this need ; they were content to mean by virtue what any plain man meant by it, except in so far as their sense of independence led them to reject certain received precepts and prejudices. The Stoics, on the other hand, not only worked out a detailed system of duties or, as they termed them, &quot; things meet and fit &quot; (KaOrjKovra.) for all occasions of life ; they were further especially concerned to comprehend them under a general formuk. They found this by bringing out the positive significance of the notion of Nature, which the Cynic had used chiefly in a negative way, as an antithesis to the &quot; consentions &quot; (i/6/xos), from which his knowledge had made him free. Even in this negative use of the notion, it is necessarily implied that whatever in man is &quot; natural &quot; that is, prior to and uncorrupted by social customs and conventions, must furnish valid guidance for conduct. But whence can this authority belong to the natural, unless nature, the ordered creation of which man is a part, be itself somehow reasonable, an expression or embodiment of divine law and wisdom ? The conception of the world, as organized and filled by divine thought, was common, in some form, to all the philosophies that looked back to Socrates as then- founder, the Megarians, as we saw-, even maintaining that this thought was the sole reality. This latter doctrine harmonized thoroughly with the Stoic view of human good ; but being unable to conceive substance idealistically, they (with considerable aid from the earlier system of Heraclitus) supplied a materialistic side to their pantheism, conceiving divine thought as an attribute of the purest and most primary of material substances, a subtle fiery aether. They held the physical world to have been developed out of Zeus, so conceived ; to be, in fact, a modification of his eternal substance into which it would ultimately be con sumed and re-absorbed ; meanwhile it was throughout permeated with the fashioning force of his divine spirit, and perfectly ordered by his prescient law. This theological view of the physical universe had a double effect on the ethics of the Stoic. In the first place it gave to his cardinal conviction of the all-sufficiency of wisdom for human wellbeing a root of cosmical fact, and an atmo sphere of religious and social emotion. The exercise of wisdom was now viewed as the pure life of that particle of divine substance which was in very truth the &quot;god within him ;&quot; the reason whose supremacy he maintained was the reason of Zeus, and of all gods and reasonable men, no less than his own ; its realization in any one individual was thus the common good of all rational beings as such ; &quot; the sage could not stretch out a finger rightly without thereby benefiting all other sages,&quot; nay, it might even be said that he was &quot;as useful to Zeus as Zeus to him.&quot; 3 But again, the same conception served to harmonize the higher and the lower elements of human life. For even in the physical or non-rational man, as originally constituted, we may see clear indications of the divine design, which it belongs to his rational will to carry into conscious execu tion ; indeed, in the first stage of human life, before reason is fully developed, uncorrupted natural impulse effects what is afterwards the work of reason. Thus the formula of &quot;living according to nature,&quot; in its application to man as the &quot;rational animal,&quot; may be understood both as directing that reason is to govern, and as indicating how that govern ment is to be practically exercised. In rnan, as in every other animal, from the moment of birth natural impulse prompts to self-preservation, and to the maintenance of his physical frame in its original integrity, then, when reason has been developed and has recognized itself as its own sole good, these &quot; primary ends of nature&quot; and whatever 3 It is apparently in view of this union in reason of rational beings that friends are allowed to be &quot; external goods &quot; to the sage, and that the possession of good children is also counted a good.