Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/609

Rh ETHICS 587 emerge from the misery and folly of the world, and get on the way towards wisdom ] &quot; would naturally attract atten tion ; and the preponderance of moral over scientific interest, which was characteristic of the Roman mind, would tend to give this question especial prominence. Thus philosophy, in the view of Seneca and Epictetus, comes to present itself as the healer to whum men come from a sense of their weakness and disease, whose business is &quot; with the sick not with the whole;&quot; the wisdom by which she heals is not something that needs long disserta tions or dialectical subtleties, but rather continual practice, self-discipline, self-examination. The same sense of the gap between theory and fact gives to the religious element of Stoicism a new force and a new aspect; the soul, con scious of its weakness, leans on the thought of God, and in the philosopher s attitude towards external events, pious resignation preponderates over self-poised indifference ; the old self-reliance of the reason, looking down on man s natural life as a mere field for its exercise, shrinks and dwindles, making room for a positive aversion to the flesh as an alien element imprisoning and hampering the spirit ; the body has come to be a &quot; corpse which the soul sustains,&quot; 1 and life a &quot;sojourn in a strange land,&quot; 2 in short, the ethical idealism of Zeno has begun to borrow from the metaphysical idealism of Plato. y ( In no one of these schools was the outward coherence of 08 tradition so much strained by inner changes as it was in Plato s. The alterations, however, in the metaphysical position of the Academics seem to have had less effect on their ethical teaching than might be expected, as, even during the period of Scepticism, they appear to have presented as probable the same general view of human good which Antiochus afterwards dogmatically announced as a revival of the common doctrine of the &quot; ancients &quot; Plato and Aristotle. And during the eventful period of a century and a half that intervenes between Antiochus and Plutarch, we may suppose the school to have maintained the old controversy with Stoicism on much the same ground; accepting the formula of &quot;life according to nature,&quot; but demanding that the &quot; good &quot; of man should refer to his nature as a whole, the good of his rational part being the chief element, and always preferable in case of conflict, but yet not absolutely his sole good. When, how ever, we have come to Plutarch, the same tendencies of change show themselves that we have noticed in later Stoicism. The conception of a normal harmony between the higher and lower elements of human life has begun to be disturbed, and the side of Plato s teaching that deals with the inevitable imperfections of the world of concrete experience becomes again prominent. I or example, we find Plutarch adopting and amplifying the suggestion in Plato s latest treatise (the Lau a) that this imperfection is due to a bad world-soul that strives against the good, a suggestion which is alien to the general tenor of Plato s doctrine, and had consequently lain unnoticed during the intervening centuries. We observe, again, the value that Plutarch attaches, not merely to the sustainment and consolation of rational religion, but to the supernatural communications vouchsafed by the divinity to certain human beings in certain states, as in dreams, through oracles, or by special warnings, like those of the genius of Socrates. For these flashes of intuition, he holds, the soul should be prepared by tranquil repose, and the subjugation of sensuality through abstinence. The same estrangement between mind and matter, the same ascetic effort to attain by aloofness from the body a pure receptivity for divine or semi-divine influences, is exhibited in the revived Pytha- goreanism of the first and second centuries A.L&amp;gt;. But the Epictetub. 8 Marcus Aureliui. general tendency that we are noting did not find its full expression in a reasoned philosophical system until we come to the latest-born of the great thinkers of antiquity the Egyptian Plotinus. The system of Plotinus (205-270 A.D.) is a striking Neo-PIa- development of that element of Platonism which has had toni!in) - most fascination for the mediaival and even for the modern mind, but which had almost vanished out of sight for six centuries. At the same time the differences between this Neo-Platonisin and the original Platonism are all the more noteworthy from the reverent adhesion to the latter which the former always maintains. Plato, we saw, identified good with the real essence of things; and this, again, with that in them which is definitely conceivable and knowable. It belongs to this view to regard the imperfection or bad ness of things as somewhat devoid of real being, and so in capable of being definitely thought or known ; accordingly, we find that Plato has no technical term for that in the concrete sensible world which hinders it from perfectly ex pressing the abstract ideal world, and which in Aristotle s system is distinguished as absolutely formless matter (vr)). And so, when we pass from the ontology to the ethics of Platonism, we find that, though the highest life is only to be realized by turning away from concrete human afluirs and their material environment, still the sensible world is not yet an object of positive moral aversion ; it is rather something which the philosopher is seriously concerned to make as harmonious, good, and beautiful as possible. But in Neo-Platonifcm the inferiority of the condition in which the embodied human soul finds itself is more intensely and painfully felt ; hence an express recognition of formless matter ( vA??) as the &quot; first evil,&quot; from which is derived the &quot; second evil,&quot; body (o-o^ua), to whose influence all the evil in the soul s existence is due. Accordingly the ethics of Plotinus represent, we may say, the moral idealism of the Stoics cut loose from nature. The only good of man is the pure existence of the soul, which in itself, apart from the contagion of the body, is perfectly free from error or defect ; all higher or philosophic virtues (as distinguished from the merely &quot; civic&quot; forms of prudence, temperance, justice, and courage) are essentially purifications from this contagion; until the highest mode of goodness is reached, in which the soul has no community with the body, and is entirely turned towards reason. It should be observed that Plothms himself is still too Platonic to hold that the absolute mortification of natural bodily appetites is required for purifying the soul; but this ascetic inference was drawn to .the fullest extent by his disciple Poipliyry. There is, however, a yet higher point to be reached in the upward ascent of the Neo-Platonist from matter ; and here the divergence of Plotinus from Platonic idealism is none the less striking, because it can to some extent sup port itself on Platonic authority. 3 The cardinal assumption of Plato s uietaphj sic is, that the real is definitely thinkable further the mind advances in abstraction from sensible par ticulars and apprehension of real being, the more definite and clear its thought becomes. Plotinus, however, urges that, as all thought involves difference or duality of some kind, it cannot be the primary fact in the universe, what we call God. He must be an essential unity prior to this duality, a Being, wholly without difference or determina tion ; and, accordingly, the highest mode of human exist ence, in which the soul apprehends this absolute, must be s The ultimate notion in Plato s, ontology is, as we saw, tlie &quot; good ; &quot; and hence he is led to describe this good as &quot; beyond thought and being (t W/ctica vov Kal ovvias}. The phrase might certainly suggest the metaphysical doctrine of I lotir.us, though we cannot suppose that, his theosoj liic inference presented itself even dimly to the mind of Plato.
 * nd knowable in proportion as it is real ; so that the