Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XI.djvu/827

 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 809 wi .? >y his senses and passions; but by his pure in- telligence, his love, by dim reminiscences and regrets, he communes with heaven, which is " is true home. He thus by opposite faculties d impulses tends to opposite goals. By elding to the one he degrades himself, and to me extent perishes. By cherishing the other e resumes and retains his divine excellences, e four cardinal virtues are temperance, cour- (6vfj.6g wisdom, and love. The first two are relative, the product of earthly imperfec- tion ; the second two are real, the remnants of our original perfection. They all have their foundation in wisdom, the fruit of reason, which sees through" the material world the J)rld of ideas of which it is a dim copy, and ntemplates the supreme beauty of the essen- tial universe. The Platonic morality is there- fore speculative; virtue is referred finally to intellect. A magnificent ideal is presented, sentiment of love is commanded, and it is med that to know the right will be sufficient practise it. There is no place in his philos- hy for that perversity by which the soul sees e better and follows the worse, avoids what loves and embraces what it hates ; a phenom- enon, however, which Plato himself has de- scribed. The virtue which won his admiration implies a pure intelligence, obedience to which by the heart and will is presupposed. Nor did he precisely define the nature of moral good and evil ; his analysis did not reach to the absolute; and he left truth, beauty, and good- ness to blend together and lose themselves in their supreme source. God is the principle of moral order, and virtue consists in knowing and imitating him. " Alone among the ancient philosophers," says St. Augustine, "Plato made happiness consist not in the enjoyment of the body or of the mind, but in the enjoyment of God, as the eye enjoys the light." The princi- ple of the ideal contained in his philosophy has proved itself imperishable, and has more than once in modern times prompted both ethical and metaphysical speculations to higher standpoints. The ethics of Aristotle place the sovereign good in happiness, which is insepara- ble from virtue, and consists in life and action. The gods themselves are happy only because they act. This theory of activity, which makes virtue to be the best possible disposition of all human functions, was one of the remarkable amendments made by him in the system of his master. An action is right or wrong only when it proceeds from free will and personal responsibility, and its moral desert must be judged by the end which it proposes, that is, by the intention. The Socratic and Platonic mistake of regarding vice as the involuntary product of ignorance is thus corrected. Virtue is a habit, a sort of moral dexterity; single acts cannot constitute it ; but the virtuous dis- position must be constant, acquired by oft re- peated acts, and underlying the whole art of life. But the characteristic ethical statement of Aristotle is that virtue is a mean between two extremes. At one point all the passions are good ; below or above that, they violate the order of nature, and are bad. Equally removed from extreme excess and extreme deficiency there lies in all spiritual and physi- cal conditions an intervening state, which is that of virtue. To act when we ought, in the right circumstances, in the proper manner, and for legitimate persons and purposes that is the juste milieu which characterizes morality. Hence there is always only one way of acting well, while there are thousands in which we may do wrong. He however gives no absolute definition of virtue, as an abstract mean be- tween two abstract extremes, does not deter- mine it as a fixed mathematical point, but makes it relative to the circumstances and disposition of the individual, a centre varying according to the pains and pleasures, desires and hatreds which encircle it. This ingenious theory is derived a posteriori instead of suggested a pri- ori, is an inference and not an instinct, and has perhaps never been applied as a practical cri- terion of duty. As in metaphysics Aristotle completely sundered God from the world, so in ethics he separated the speculative from the practical reason, and gave to morality no foun- dation in absolute science. His moral scheme was a branch of politics, virtue was a civil quality to be developed only in the state, and his views of man and life were not universal but essentially Greek and republican. To prove that man was something more than a member of society was a task for the future. This task was fulfilled by the cynicism of Diogenes and the stoicism of Zeno, while the conquests of Alexander may be said to have denationalized the Greek ethics. Diogenes proclaimed him- self a citizen of the world, and the government of the universe the only polity worthy of our admiration. Opposed to patriotism, family, and property, the cynic placed virtue in the strength to endure privations and in indepen- dence of social relations. Under the banner of inward freedom and power, he verged to- ward asceticism, misanthropy, and impudence. The same tendency more strikingly appears in stoicism, the leading feature of which is tyr- anny over self, a revolt against the senses and passions, contempt of pain, pleasure, death, and of all the accidents of humanity. It was the philosophy of Roman citizenship, lying underneath the inflexibility of discipline and duty. Cleanthes and Epictetus both declared force to be the only virtue. A rigorous ad- herence to the essential elements, the lowest terms of human nature, a contempt for plea- sure as something not designed in the scheme of natural law and inconsistent with its ideal of the freedom and independence of the soul, a striving to shape the individual life accord- ing to the rational nature, which is itself in conformity with the' rational order of univer- sal nature, an abstract apprehension of virtue as the subjection of personal to universal ends, and a consequent moral indifference to exter-