Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/242

232 that we can deal justly towards our fellow-men. But we cannot act against these promptings without being conscious of them, neither can we be conscious of them without acting against them to a greater or a less extent; and thus consciousness, or an act of antagonism put forth against our natural selfishness, lies at the root of the great principle upon which all justice depends, the principle suum cuique tribuendi. Therefore, in every nation of antiquity in which wise and righteous laws prevailed, they prevailed not in consequence of any natural sense or principle of justice among men, but solely in consequence of the act of consciousness, which exposed to them the injustice and selfish passions of their own hearts, and, in the very exposure, got the better of them.

If we look, too, to the highest sects of ancient philosophy, what do we behold but the development of consciousness in its antagonism against evil, and an earnest striving after something better than anything that is born within us? What was the whole theoretical and practical Stoicism of antiquity? Was it apathy, in the modern sense of that word, that this high philosophy inculcated? Great philosophers have told us that it was so. But oh! doctrine lamentably inverted, traduced, and misunderstood! The "apathy" of ancient Stoicism was no apathy in our sense of the word; it was no inertness, no sluggish insensibility, no avoidance of passion, and no folding of the hands to sleep. But it was the direct reverse of all this. It was, and it inculcated, an eternal war