Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/608

Rh 586 ETHICS wellbeing of their sage was independent, not only of exter nal things and bodily conditions, bat of time itself ; it was fully realized in a single exercise of wisdom and could not be increased by duration. This paradox is violent, but it is quite in harmony with the spirit of Stoicism; and we are more startled to find that the Epicurean sage, no less than the Stoic, is to be happy even on the rack ; that his happiness, too, is unimpaired by being restricted in duration, when his mind has apprehended the natural limits of life ; that, in short, Epicurus makes no less strenuous efforts than Zeno to eliminate imperfection from the conditions of human existence. This characteristic, however, is the key to the chief differences between Epicureanism and the more naive hedonism of Aristippus. The latter system gave the simplest and mast obvious answer to the inquiry after ulti mate good for man ; but besides being liable, when developed consistently and unreservedly, to offenl the com mon moral consciousness, it conspicuously failed to provide the &quot; completeness &quot; and &quot; security &quot; which, as Aristotle says, &quot; one divines to belong to man s true Good.&quot; Philo sophy, in the Greek view, should be the art as well as the science of good life; and hedonistic philosophy would seem a bungling and uncertain art of pleasure, as pleasure is ordinarily conceived. Nay, it would even be found that the habit of philosophical reflection often operated adversely to the attainment of this end, by developing the thinker s self-consciousness, so as to disturb that normal relation to external objects on which the zest of ordinary enjoyment depends. Hence we find that later thinkers of the Cyrenaic schojl felt themselves compelled to change their fundamen tal notion ; thus Theodorus defined the good as &quot; gladness&quot; (x a P&amp;lt;*) depending on wisdom, as distinct from mere pleasure, while Hegesias proclaimed that happiness was un attainable, and that the chief function of wisdom was to render life painless by producing indifference to all things that give pleasure. But by such changes their system lost the support that it had had in the pleasure-seeking tendencies of ordinary men; indeed, with Hogesias the pur suit of pleasure has turned into its opposite, and one is not surprised to learn that this hedonist s lectures were forbidden as stimulating to suicide. It was clear that if philosophic hedonism was to be established on a broad and firm basis, it must somehow combine in its notion of good what the plain man naturally sought with what philosophy could plausibly offer. Such a combination was effected, with some little violence, by Epicurus; whose system with all its defects shewed a remarkable power of standing the test of time, as it attracted the unqualified adhesion of generation after generation of disciples for a period of more than six centuries. Epicurus maintains, on the one hand, as emphatically as Aristippus, that pleasure is the sole ultimate good, and pain the sole evil : that no pleasure is to be rejected except for its painful consequences, and no pain to be chosen except as a means to greater pleasure ; that the stringency of all laws and customs depends solely on the legal and social penalties attached to their violation; that, in short, all vir tuous conduct and all speculative activity are empty and useless, except as contributing to the pleasantness of the agent s life. And he assures us that he means by pleasure what plain men mean by it ; and that if the gratifications of appetite and sense are discarded, the notion is emptied of its significance. So far the system would seem to suit the inclinations of the most thorough-going voluptuary. But its aspect changes when we learn that the highest point of pleasure, whether in body or mind, is to be attained by the mere removal of pain or disturbance, after which pleasure admits of variation only and not of augmentation ; that therefore the utmost gratification of which the body is capable may be provided by the simplest means, and that &quot; natural wealth. is no more than any man can earn. When further we are told that the attainment of happiness depends almost entirely upon insight and right calculation, fortune having very little to do with it ; that the pleasures and pains of the mi ad are far more important than those of the body, owing to the accumulation of feeling caused by memory and anticipation; and that an indispensable con dition of mental happiness lies in relieving the mind of all superstitions, which can only be effected by a thorough knowledge of the physical universe, we see that an ample place is secured in this system for the exercise of the philo sophic intellect. So again, in the stress that Epicurus lays on the misery which the most secret wrong-doing must necessarily cause the doer, from the perpetual fear of dis covery, and in his exuberant exaltation of the value of dis interested friendship, we recognize a sincere, though not completely successful, effort to avoid the offence that con sistent egoistic hedonism is apt to give to ordinary human feeling. As regards friendship, indeed, the example of Epicurus, who was a man of eager and affectionate tempera ment, and peculiarly unexclusive sympathies, 1 was probably more effective than his teaching. Tho genial fellowship of the philosophic community that he collected in his garden remained a striking feature in the traditions of his school ; and certainly the ideal which Stoics and Epicureans equally cherished, of a brotherhood of sages united in harmonious smooth-flowing existence, was most easily realized on the Epicurean plan of withdrawing from political and dialectical conflict to simple living and serene leisure, in imitation of the eternal leisure of the gods apart from the fortuitous concourse of atoms that we call a world. The two systems that have just been described were those Lab that most prominently attracted the attention of the Grw ancient world, so far as it was directed to ethics, from P 1 &quot; 1 their almost simultaneous origin to the end of the 2d ^ p. century A.D., when Stoicism almost vanishes from our j,, u view. But side by side with them the schools of Plato and Aristotle still maintained a continuity of tradition, and a more or less vigorous life ; and philosophy, as a recognized element of Grosco-Roman culture, was understood to be divided among these four branches. The internal history, however, of the four schools was very different. We find no development worthy of notice in Aristotelian ethics ; in fact the philosophic energy of this school seems to have been somewhat weighed down by the inheritance of the master s vast work, and distracted by the example of his many-sided activity. The Epicureans, again, from their unquestioning acceptance of the &quot; dogmas &quot; 2 of their founder, almost deserve to be called a sect rather than a school. On the other hand, the changes in Stoicism are very noteworthy ; and we are peculiarly well able to trace them, as the only original writings of this school which we possess are those of the later Human Stoics. These changes may be partly attributed to the natural inner development of the system, partly to the reaction of the Roman mind on the essentially Greek doctrine which it received, a reaction all the more inevitable from the very affinity between the Stoic sage and the ancient Roman ideal of manliness. It was natural that the earlier Stoics should be chiefly occupied with delineating the inner and outer characteristics of ideal wisdom and vir^iie, and that the gap between the ideal sage and the actual philo sopher, though never ignored, should yet be somewhat overlooked. But when the question &quot; What is man s good 1 &quot; had been answered by an elaborate exposition of perfect wisdom, the other question &quot; How may a man 1 It is noted of him that he did not disdain the co-operation either of women or of slaves in his philosophical labours. 2 The last charge of Epicurus to his disciples is said to have been, Twv SoyuaTuiv fj.e/j.i&amp;gt;ri&amp;lt;r&cu.