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 810 MORAL PHILOSOPHY nal good, were the prominent characteristics of the ethical system of the stoics, which was rivalled only by Epicureanism in the amount of its influence on Greek and Roman thought and life. Its moral standpoint was one of abstract subjectivity, its scheme of particular duties was conceived with reference to an ideal of rational freedom, and its motives were all heroic. Stern, haughty, and inflexible, it disregarded the lighter graces both of inward and outward nature in its contemplation of the laws and the energy of the primitive forces of the soul. Stoicism was one of the modes of reaction against the degeneracy of Greek society; Epicureanism, another. Like Aris- totle, Epicurus placed the highest good in hap- piness. The prize of life is the possession of supreme pleasure. All other virtues are but the auxiliaries of prudence or wisdom, which is the architect of our happiness, teaching us, in whatsoever situation we may happen to be placed, to derive from it the utmost advan- tages. Thus by prudence the wise man will abstain from the burden of public affairs and from marriage, will observe the laws of his country, acquire means to live with dignity and ease, practise sobriety and moderation, cul- tivate friendships, an4 aim after a life without a trouble (arapat-ia). This serene pleasure he does not allow to be disturbed by fears of death or of the gods; for the gods live in changeless and blessed repose in empty space, undisturbed by any management of human affairs ; and death is the end of all feeling, and not an evil to be dreaded, since when death is, we are not. His ethical system does not recognize any positive end of life,' and proposes nothing higher than a state of pas- sionless repose ; and from the multitude of his disciples during several centuries there pro- ceeded no original thought and no preeminent man. The system itself degenerated, until it became strange that a philosopher who was proverbially blameless and temperate, who nurtured himself on barley bread and water, with which he boasted that he could rival Jupiter in happiness, should have been the founder of Epicureanism. The Horatian nil admirari expresses the melancholy but not the sensuality of its later character. The in- fluence of the Platonic and Aristotelian ethical theories declined; stoicism and Epicureanism remained as rival sects. During the first Chris- tian centuries stoicism predominated in intel- lectual theories, and philosophers of all schools, poets, historians, and rhetoricians, spoke like Seneca and Epictetus of the sacred love of the world, of the equality of man, of universal law, and a universal republic. Unlike the ear- lier philosophers, who had founded ethics on the system of the human faculties and passions with reference to their combined operation in the state, the Neo-Platonists gave a theologi- cal and mystical character to duty in connec- tion with their doctrines of emanation. The object of life was to rise by processes of as- ceticism and ecstatic vision from the world of the senses into which we have fallen to our original home in the world of ideas, and the virtues which mark the successive steps in this return are distinguished as physical, po- litical, ethical, purificative, contemplative, and theurgic. While all antiquity had made the sovereign good consist in escape from pain, either by virtue or by pleasure, Christianity by the mystery of the passion announced the divinity of sorrow. From this time until the rise of modern philosophy ethics cannot be separated from dogmatics. During a thousand years of theological speculations on the prob- lems of life, no system of philosophical ethics was attempted. The characteristic element in Christian virtue is love. If the Christian ideal of perfect charity were realized, ethics and politics would alike be absorbed in a higher science. Prominent as were the ideas of faith, hope, charity, and self-sacrifice in the age of the apostolic and the church fathers, their basis remained from the first rather religious than speculative, notwithstanding the persuasion that in the reason enlightened by the Word there was given a ground of union between objective revelation and subjective knowledge. Justin Martyr, " the evangelist in the robe of a philosopher," began to apply the forms of ancient ethical philosophy to Christian con- ceptions of duty, and maintained human free- dom by identifying the will and the conscience. Augustine, though aiming to emancipate Chris- tian thought from antique influences, asserted the rationality of Christian morality, since it sprang from the absolute reason of Christ, who was both the central idea in philosophy and the ideal of life. While Augustine and Pela- gius were debating free will and sovereign grace, the same question was discussed in a different form by the last of the pagan phi- losophers, Plotinus and Proclus. The former, in a scheme of universal and absolute deter- mination, suppressed liberty ; the latter urged that the essence of personality was liberty, that man was his own controlling demon, and used the terms autokinesy and heterokinesy, corresponding nearly to the autonomy and heteronomy of Kant. The most elaborate at- tempt to combine the moral ideas of Chris- tianity and those of Alexandrian paganism was made by the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, which exerted great influence on later mystical theories. In the middle ages, mysticism, scholasticism, and casuistry succes- sively presided over the doctrines of Christian morality. St. Bernard and St. Victor were the leading representatives of mysticism. The former has been surpassed by no author in his delineations of the worth and power of lore. From him proceeded that passionate inspira- tion, which the monastery of St. Victor per- petuated through the middle ages, and which remains embodied in the " Imitation of Christ." The two preeminent Christian sentiments, ac- cording to him, are humility and love, both