CHAPTER XIV

THE LATER AGE OF THE GREEK WORLD

## PART I

PHILOSOPHY

Plato and the Platonic account of the nature, origin, and destiny of the soul closes a period. It marks the end of that theological and spiritualist movement to the force and significance of which nothing bears clearer witness than the fact that it could have such a conclusion. After this point its development ceases--at least it disappears from the surface of Greek life: like one of those Asiatic torrents with which the ancients were familiar it buries itself underground for a long stretch of its course, only to reappear eventually, with all the greater effect, far away from the place of its origin. Even Plato's own school almost immediately after the death of its master and directing spirit turned its attention in a direction quite other than that which he had given it.[1\14] To have retained the Platonic outlook would have made his pupils even more isolated in their very different age than Plato himself had been in his own.

Greece entered upon a new and final phase of her development. The ominous breakdown of the older political fabric at the end of the fourth century might have seemed likely to put an end to the natural vitality of the Greek peoples. With the conquest of the East by Macedonians and Greeks, however, new tasks were set before that people and with the new task they acquired new faculties. The _polis_, indeed, the purest expression of Greek constructive ability, could not be restored to life. Such of the old and narrow city-republics as had not perished completely in that stormy period only languished in a stagnant peace. Rare, indeed, are the exceptions in which (as particularly in Rhodos) a more vigorous and independent life asserted itself. The new and swollen cities of the Macedonian Empire, with their motley populations drawn from many nationalities, could not make good the loss. The Leagues in which Greece seemed to be making an effort to find a political organization of a wider compass soon broke down under the effects of inward {491} corruption and external violence. Even in its deepest and most essential character the old national spirit of Greece, which had drawn its strength from its clear-cut individuality, seemed to be suffering damage through the unlimited extension eastwards and westwards of Greek life. It did not cease to be an immeasurable advantage to be a Greek, but a Greek now meant anyone who had a share in the one thing that still distinguished and characterized the Greeks, namely, Greek culture--and Greek culture was no longer confined to a single nation. It was no fault of this Greek humanism that not a single one of the vast populations of the East (and in the West at last Rome stood alone) was able to make their own this culture so generously offered to the whole world, so that there, too, all should become _Greek_ who were capable of becoming free human beings. Nevertheless, from all countries and nationalities uncounted multitudes of _individuals_ entered into the circle of this extended Hellenism. The way was open for all who could live without the need of a way of life and thinking modelled strictly upon national lines: for the culture which now united all Greeks and Greek communities was based upon science--and science knows nothing of national frontiers.

The science which could thus present itself as the guiding principle of such a large and heterogeneous mass of cultured people, must at any rate have reached a condition of stability if not of completely rounded finality. After all the stir and controversy of the previous centuries it had at last arrived at a period of contented enjoyment of its own resources: the long drawn-out struggle, the restless years of search were now held to have borne fruit. In philosophy at least there was a distinct slackening of the insatiable zeal and boldness of individual thinkers in posing new questions and wresting answers or in seeking for fresh solutions to old problems. A few great systems, formulated in accordance with the fixed tenets of the various schools of thought, still offered a refuge to those who demanded fixity and definition in their opinions; for centuries they kept up their special traditions without serious alteration until they, too, fell in pieces at last. A greater measure of independence and variety was displayed by the special sciences which since they had now been completely released for the first time from the leading-strings of philosophy proceeded to develop freely in accordance with their own principles. Art, too, was by no means devoid as yet of originality and attractiveness, and in spite of the overwhelming achievements of the past refused to be driven {492} into a position of subservience and imitation. But it was no longer, in conjunction with the peculiar customs and manners of a people, the mistress and dispenser of wisdom and knowledge of the world. Art becomes a plaything and an incidental diversion: it is science that determines the general character and content of culture. But this scientifically minded culture shares in the natural temper of all science. Science has its feet firmly planted in life itself: it keeps men's minds actively employed in this world; it has small temptation to leave the firm ground of what is knowable and can never be too well known, to voyage out into the region of the intangible which can never be a subject of scientific inquiry. A cool rationalism, a calm adherence to the intelligible and thinkable, without any leanings to the gloomy terrors of a mysterious world of the unknown--such is the temper that marks the science and culture of the Hellenistic age and marks it more distinctively than any other period of Greek culture. Such mysticism as was still vigorous and effective kept itself timidly in the background at this time; in the everyday world it is rather the direct contrary of mysticism that we are made aware of; the unlovely results of the prevailing rationalism, a bleak reasonableness, a knowing and prosaic common sense such as stares dully at us from the pages of Polybios' History as the point of view of the narrator himself and of those of whom he writes. It was no age of heroes or of the heroic. A weaker and more delicate generation holds the field. The breakdown of political life and the disappearance of its obligations made it more possible than it had ever been before for the individual to lead his own life in his own way.[2\14] And he makes the most of his freedom, his culture, the treasures of an inward, private life enriched with all the brilliance and charm of an old and perfected civilization. All the past had thought and laboured on his behalf; he is not idle, but he is busy without ever being in a hurry, enjoying his heritage and taking his ease in the cooling sunlight of the long drawn-out autumn of Greek life. And he is little concerned to inquire what may follow when this brilliant, many-coloured world that surrounds him shall have vanished from his gaze. This world is all in all to him. The hope or fear of immortality has little effect upon the educated people of the age.[3\14] Philosophy to which in one form or another they are all more or less closely attached teaches them according to its

## particular mood to cherish that hope or calmly to set it to one

side: in none of the popular sects {493} had the doctrine of the eternity or imperishable nature of the soul any serious significance as the central doctrine of a system. Natural science ruled the day, while theology remained in the background and could only obtain a doubtful hearing (if it was even listened to at all) for its proclamation of the divine origin and everlasting life of the souls.

§ 2

At the outset of this period, and illuminating a long stretch of it with the light of his genius, stands the figure of Aristotle. In what this master _di color' che sanno_ had to say of the soul's nature and destiny two voices are distinctly audible. The soul, he instructs us, is that which in a living and organic physical body brings the potentially existing to actual existence. It is the _form_ to the body's matter, the culmination of the capacities of independent life residing in the particular body. Bodiless and immaterial itself, it is not the outcome of the mixture of the various parts of the body; it is the cause, not the resultant, of the vital functions of its body which exists for the soul's benefit as its "instrument".[4\14] It dwells within a natural organism and though it is itself unmoved it moves that organism as the source of its growth and nourishment, of its desires and locomotion, of its feeling and perceiving; while in the higher organisms it acts as the combination of all these faces. It is as little to be thought of as separate from the body--its own body--as the power of vision is in separation from the eye or as its shape from the moulded waxen image.[5\14] Theoretically, indeed, it is possible to distinguish between body and soul, but actually and in the animated organism they cannot be distinguished. When the living creature dies the matter of which it was composed loses it special adaptation to a purposeful organism, and this adaptation was its life; without it there can be no independent "Substance" (~ousi/a~).[6\14] The Form, the functional power of the once living organism, its "soul", has no longer any independent existence.

This is the voice of Aristotle the physicist when he is speaking from the standpoint of a physical doctrine which includes the study of the soul "in so far as it occurs not without matter".[7\14] Aristotle the metaphysician takes us further. In the soul of man, besides the vital powers of the organized individual, there lives a spiritual being of more than natural character and origin, the "Mind"--"that in us which thinks and conceives".[8\14] This thinking mind is not bound to the body and its life.[9\14] It does not come into being with the creation of the human organism which is completed by the addition of Mind. It has no beginning and was uncreated from eternity:[10\14] it enters into man at his creation "from without".[11\14] Even while it lives within the body it remains unmingled with the body and its powers and uninfluenced by them.[12\14] Enclosed within itself it lives its separate life as something quite other than the "soul" (of which it is nevertheless called a "part"[13\14]) and separated from it by a gulf. Comparable with the God of Aristotle's world it transcends what might be called its "little world",[14\14] the living human organism. It influences that organism without being influenced in turn. It is akin to God; it is called the "divine" in man.[15\14] Its activity is the same as that of God.[16\14] God--pure substance, unlimited, highest, everlasting actuality--is absolute and perpetually operant thinking.[17\14] All practical activity, doing and creating, is far removed from God.[18\14] So, too, the "Mind" is entirely occupied in thinking (though here there is some alternation perhaps between the potential and the actual).[19\14] It grasps, in an intuition of the intellect that is beyond failure and error,[20\14] the "unmediated" first principles, the first and highest concepts, immediately certain and not deducible from still higher concepts, from which all knowledge and philosophy is derived.[21\14]

In its association with the body and its "soul" this thinking Reason lives as "the ruling"[22\14] element over both--not, however, as the "realization" of this particular individual creature. The Mind is indeed said to be that which the individual man "is",[23\14] and without the addition of Mind the man could not exist, but the special and personal character belonging to the individual is not to be found in this reasoning Mind.[24\14] Mind is totally devoid of distinguishable qualities and is identical in every case where it appears; it is invariably foreign to the separate and individual character of the man to whom it is added, and hardly seems to be _his_ peculiar property.

When death occurs the thinking "Mind" is not involved in the destruction which overtakes the human organism with which it was associated. Death does not affect it. Like everything that is without beginning it is indestructible.[25\14] It returns again to its separate existence. Like the great World-Mind, God, and in company with it--for it has not sprung from God and does not merge again into God--the individual Mind of man continues in unending life.[26\14] It {495} disappears now into impenetrable darkness. The separate existence of the Mind is beyond not merely our perception but our conceiving as well--persisting for itself alone, Mind has no mental activity, no memory and no consciousness; indeed, it is impossible to say what special qualities or activity can be attributed to it beyond the simple predicate of existence, of being.[27\14]

In the doctrine of this thinking Mind which is associated with the human soul "from without" and never merges into it, of its pre-existence from eternity, its kinship with God and its imperishable life after its separation from the human organism--in all this Aristotle preserves a mythological element taken from the dogmatic teaching of Plato.

There was a time when he had been a complete Platonist precisely in his doctrine of the soul. In his youth, like other members of the Academy, he had yielded[28\14] to the fascination of clothing in artistic and perfected language brilliant fantasies about the origin, nature, and destiny of the soul--the divine daimon[29\14] inhabiting the mortal frame of man. Later, however, it seemed inconceivable to him that "any soul may inhabit any body".[30\14] He could only conceive of the "soul" of the individual man as a realization of the life of this entirely distinct and physical organism, to which it is indissolubly bound as the purpose and form of the particular instrument. All the vital powers as well as appetite, perception, memory, and reflective thought, appeared to him merely as the modes of activity manifested by the animated body which is itself unthinkable apart from its "soul". And yet he still preserved a relic of the old dualistic opposition between the body and the independent substantial soul--the same conception of the soul, in fact, as that which Plato had himself, in the later period of his philosophical development, alone retained. This was as the contemplative Mind which is occupied in apprehending the highest truths in intellectual intuition; and this mind is, according to Aristotle, not to be included in the "soul", but to be separated from it as a special being that has descended from the heights of divinity and has been coupled with the soul from without and for its limited period of life. The origin of this conception of a reduplicated soul is plain: it is derived from memories of Plato and beyond that from theological doctrine which was itself in the last resort but a spiritualized restatement of primeval popular fancies of the psyche that dwells in the living body. But though he took over the doctrine he did not take over the special sense that {496} the theologians had given to it: he omitted both the conclusions they drew and the exhortations they based upon it. We hear no more of the "purification" of the divine Mind within mankind. It has nothing impure or evil in it nor can any breath of pollution affect it from without. The effort towards the "other world" of purity, the denial and rejection of its earthly partner the living body, are foreign to the "Mind" of Aristotle.[31\14] It has no impulse to "deliverance" or self-emancipation; it knows of no peculiar task that points beyond this world. The presence of this "separable" Mind in the living man is an assured fact, and nothing more: no purpose in life is deducible from it. The fact itself seemed to be evident from the power that man possesses of grasping immediately a highest form of knowledge that is beyond demonstration, not as the result of the mental activity of his soul, for the apprehension is prior to the soul, but by means of a higher spiritual faculty, a special intellectual being that seemed to proclaim its presence and existence within man in this way. It is thus by way of a theory of knowledge not of a theological doctrine that we arrive at the distinction between "Mind" and "Soul". But the doctrine thus reasserted was in reality nothing but the old doctrine of the theologians. This "Mind", too, seems to the thinker to be a being akin to God. The pure contemplative existence, a life consisting in the contemplation of the final objects of intuition is counted as a privilege of the divine and of all divine beings, as the true purpose of vital energy and of its manifestation; and in the description of this state the sober reserve of his lecture style seems to be uplifted and almost illuminated with the warmth and brilliance imparted by a genuine glow of personal experience.[32\14] This pure activity of contemplation, finding its deepest satisfaction in itself, belongs to the divine in man--to the Mind; its whole life lies in this. This activity, however, the Mind performs and finishes in this life, while it is united with the body and the body's "soul". There is nothing left that can be thought of as forming the content of the life and activity of the Mind in its separate existence after the completion of its period of life on earth. Mind and the man with whom it is associated can hardly have a very urgent desire for that emancipation in "another world" which is thus left blank and without content for our thought. The thought of immortality cast in this form could no longer possess any real value or ethical significance for man.[33\14] It arises from a logical deduction, from metaphysical considerations, not {497} from a demand of the spirit. It lacks not only the distinctness that might have appealed to the senses and given direction to the imagination, but the power (or the intention) of playing a leading part in the conduct or direction of life on this earth. There is no inspiration in this doctrine--not even for the philosopher, though it was to him and his activity and his efforts that the picture and panegyric of "Mind", the philosopher in man, had really referred.

It was quite possible to abide by the teaching and philosophy of Aristotle, directed as it was to the observation and interpretation of the things of this world, while abandoning the advanced post of the doctrine of Mind--that Being which has sunk to the level of this world from the other world of divinity, which separates itself, with the death of man, once more to everlasting divine life though hardly to a continuation of individual existence. On this point in

## particular free discussion of the master's teaching maintained

itself in his school: some, and by no means the weakest, of Aristotle's successors denied altogether and in every form the doctrine of immortality.[34\14]

§ 3

The dogmatic teaching of the Stoics on the subject of the human soul is closely bound up with the materialistic pantheism by means of which they explained all the phenomena of life, of being and becoming upon earth. God is All, and divinity is nothing outside this "all", which forms the world: the Universe is God. God is thus not only the matter but the form, the life and the power of the world. Divinity is the original matter, the etherial Fire, the fiery "breath" which maintains itself or changes and in innumerable metamorphoses creates the world. God is also what supplies a purpose to this world and is the purposeful force--the reason and law of the world. The universal deity which is thus at once matter, mind, and formative principle sends out from itself at varying periods the multiplicity of Appearance and then again at another time takes back the multifarious and the divided into the fiery unity of its own breath of life. Thus, in everything that has shape, in everything that lives and moves, the content and the unifying form is God: he is and works as their "state" in inorganic things, as "nature" in plants, as "irrational soul" in the other living things, as rational and thinking soul in man.[35\14] {498}

The soul of man, thus endowed with reason, is a fragment of the divine,[36\14] and is itself divine like everything else in the world but in a purer sense than all other things. It has remained closer to the first and original essence of the divine, conceived as "creative fire" (~pu=r technikô/n~), than the earthly fire which has lost much of its original purity and refinement. It is closer[37\14] than the lower matter that in all its changeful forms degenerates progressively as it gets farther and farther away from the divine fire by gradual loss of the tension (~to/nos~) that had once been living and active in the primeval fire; closer even than the material of its own body in which it dwells and rules. As something essentially distinct from the body, then, the individual soul comes into being among the elements of its body when that body is conceived, and it develops its full nature after the birth of the individual.[38\14] But even in its individual, separate existence it remains incompletely detached from the universal life that is present in it; it remains subject to the "universal Law" of the world, which is God, and fast bound by "fate", the "destiny" (~peprôme/nê, heimarme/ne~) which decrees the course of their existence for the totality of all Life and the individual lives.[39\14] Nevertheless, the soul has its special gifts and special task--it is capable of self-determination and is responsible for its own decisions and acts. Though it is a pure emanation from the universal Reason and bound down to no irrational elements, it has the power of irrational choice and can resolve upon what is evil. Though they have all sprung from one and the same original source the individual souls are of very different character, intellect, and propensity of will. Unreason in thought, will, and conduct is common in the world; those who have real insight are few; in fact, the Wise Man, the man who keeps his own will in complete harmony with the universal and divine direction of the world, is but a picture of imaginary perfection, _naturæ humanæ exemplar_, never fully and perfectly realized in actual life.

Ethical interests demanded the freedom and independence of the moral personality and its will, which can only fulfil the requirements of duty by self-mastery and the overthrow of base impulses; but this independence was in conflict with the essential principles of Stoic metaphysics. The Stoics taught that the world (and the soul included in it) is only the necessary self-development of a single and absolute Being that excludes all independent and separate multiplicity. Nor could they recognize any principle of Evil, an anti-rational principle answering to the purity of divine power, working {499} evil and suggesting it, and making the individual capable of wilful disobedience to the laws of all-embracing divinity. Pure pantheism, uniting God and the world in indissoluble unity, cannot imagine a real conflict between humanity and divinity; it cannot postulate a principle of Evil through the overthrow of which a lost unity with God is to be restored. Pantheism makes no claims of an ethical or religious kind. The ingenuity of the Stoic doctors was exercised in vain in the attempt to find a way out of this dilemma.[40\14]

From the very origin of the school two tendencies were discernible in the teaching of the Stoa, derived as that teaching was from such different sources. On the one hand, the ethical doctrine of the Cynics, to whom the Stoics owed the greater part of their practical teaching, threw the individual back upon his own resources and made everything depend upon the determination of his own will. It thus pointed in the direction of the most self-sufficient individualism--to an ethical atomism. The physical doctrine derived from Herakleitos, on the other hand, merged the individual completely into the omnipotence and omnipresence of the All-One; and therefore, as its ethical counterpart, demanded that this relation of the individual to the universal Logos of the world should find expression in a life lived completely _ex ductu rationis_, in unconditional abandonment of the individual will to the Universal Mind that is the World and God.[41\14] In actual fact it was Cynicism that had the profounder influence in ethical matters. The universal Law and order of the world, embracing both universe and individual in its absolute decrees, threw its net too widely to be able to answer closely enough to the needs of narrow and individual existence. No practical ethics could possibly unite this distant and final aim with the individual man in a single nexus of ordered self-determination. The intermediate link between the universe and its laws, on the one hand, and the individual with his private will, on the other, had formerly been the Greek _polis_ with its law and custom. But it was a cosmopolitan age, and for the Stoics as well as for the Cynics before them the city-state had lost most of its educative force. The individual saw himself more and more left to his own devices and forced to depend upon his own strength--his life had to be ordered on self-erected standards and guided by self-found rules. Individualism, which gave its tone to the age more decisively than in any past period of Greek life, began to win a footing even in this pantheistic system. The "Wise Man" who is a law to himself in perfect {500} self-determination,[42\14] and feels himself bound only to those like himself,[43\14] is individualism's fairest flower.

But the soul, thus elevated to a height where it was capable of much that was impossible for or only incompletely within the reach of its weaker sisters, began more and more to seem like something rather different from a mere dependent offshoot of the One divine power that is the same everywhere. It is, in fact, regarded as an independent, divine, and self-enclosed creature in those passages where in Stoic literature, as in the older literature of the theologians, the soul is called a "daimon"--the daimon dwelling within the individual man, and given to him as his associate.[44\14] Death, too, is regarded by this professedly monist system as a separation of soul from body[45\14] in accordance with what was really a naive or a conscious spiritualism. In death, then, this soul-essence whose independence had been so marked even in life, does not perish with the body--it does not even lose itself again in the One from which it had taken its origin. An infinitely extended individual life is indeed not attributed to the individual souls: only God, the one Soul of the World, is eternally indestructible.[46\14] But the souls which have arisen by separation from the one and all-embracing divinity, survive the destruction of their bodies: until the final dissolution, in the Conflagration that will make an end of the present period of world-history, they persist in their independent life; either all of them (as was the older teaching of the school) or, as Chrysippos, the master of Stoic orthodoxy, taught the souls of the "Wise" only, while the others have been lost in the general life of the Whole some time previously.[47\14] The stronger ethical personality is held together in itself for a longer time.[48\14]

From the point of view of physical science and materialist doctrine[49\14] it was also hard to see why the soul, composed of pure fire-breath, which even in life had held the body together and had not been held together by the body,[50\14] should disappear at once when that body was disintegrated. As it had once held the body together, so it might well and all the more easily hold itself together now. Its lightness carries it upwards into the pure air under the moon, where it is fed by the breath that rises upwards and where there is nothing that can put an end to it.[51\14] An "underworld" region like that of popular imagination and theological teaching, was expressly denied by the Stoics.[52\14] Their imagination preferred to exercise itself in an imaginary extension of life in the Aether, which was their region of {501} the souls;[53\14] but as a rule it appears that such flights of fancy were avoided. The life of the souls after death--that of the wise as well as of the unwise--remained indistinct and without content[54\14] in the imagination of those whose life was still upon earth.

Thus, the doctrine of the soul-personality and its continued existence (never simply expanded into personal immortality), which was in reality not required by the metaphysical principles of Stoicism, and could indeed hardly be reconciled with them, had in fact no serious significance for the general intention and substance of Stoicism--least of all for Stoic ethics and conduct of life. The philosophy of Stoicism is directed to the study of life, not of death. In this life on earth and only here can the purpose of human endeavour--the reproduction of divine wisdom and virtue in the human spirit--be fulfilled in manful contest with contrary impulses, fulfilled, that is, in so far as such a thing is possible for lonely and isolated fragments of divinity.[55\14]

But virtue is sufficient in itself for the attainment of happiness--a happiness which loses nothing through the brevity of its duration and to which nothing would be added by the prolongation of its span.[56\14] Nothing in the doctrine of Stoicism points man, or the Wise Man, to another world beyond the life of the body and outside this earthly theatre of conflict and duty, for the fulfilment of his being and his task.

§ 4

The limited doctrine of immortality which, as we have seen, was not an essential part of the teaching of Stoicism, began to be called in question as soon as the rigid dogmatism of the school was subjected to the too-searching criticism of other schools of thought. In the clash of opinions Stoicism began to be doubtful of the absolute validity of its own teaching. The boundaries of orthodox doctrine once so firmly drawn now became more fluid; exchange and even compromise became common. Panaitios, the first writer among the pedantic professors of Stoicism to achieve a wider popularity for his writings, became the teacher and friend of those aristocratic Romans who found in Greek philosophy the impulse to a humanism that the barren soil of Rome could never have produced unaided. And Panaitios differed in more than one point from the strict orthodoxy of the older Stoicism. For him the soul is formed of two distinct elements[57\14]--it is no longer simple and undivided, but {502} compounded of "Nature" and "Soul" (in the narrower sense).[58\14] In death these two elements separate and change into other forms. The soul having had its origin at a particular point in past time now perishes in time. Being capable of grief and subject to the destructive influence of the emotions it falls a victim at last to its own pains. Panaitios, while remaining a Stoic, taught the dissolution of the soul, its death and simultaneous destruction with the death of the body.[59\14]

His pupil Poseidonios, who as a writer possessed an even greater influence than Panaitios with the great majority of cultivated readers who belonged to no special school of thought, returned to the older Stoic doctrine of the simple and undivided nature of the soul as fiery breath. He distinguished three faculties but not three separate and independent elements in the human soul, and as a consequence of this view had no further need to believe in the dissolution of the soul into its component parts at death. He also denied the origin of the individual soul in time, from which the doctrine of its destruction in time had seemed to follow by a logical necessity. He returned to the old theological idea of the pre-existence of the soul, its life since the beginning of the created world; and could therefore go on to assert its continued existence after death--at least till the time of the next destruction of the World at the hands of omnipotent Fire.[60\14]

It was not an inward and private necessity that led to this transformation of the old teaching of the School. Doubts and criticisms levelled at it from outside--from the Sceptics in

## particular--had necessitated the change. While some gave up the

struggle, others sought refuge in a re-arrangement of the figures of the dialectical game and by the introduction of fresh characters.[61\14] Immortality might be abandoned to criticism or reaffirmed in either case with equal indifference. The Platonic and poetic version of Stoicism provided by Poseidonios may have found a wider response among the readers of a highly cultivated society who felt the need of a doctrine of immortality more as a satisfaction to the artistic fancy than from any deeper or more temperamental causes. Cicero, the most eloquent representative of the Hellenized Roman culture of the time, may perhaps give us a picture of the refined and æsthetic partiality with which these ideas were taken up. In the _Dream of Scipio_ and the first book of the _Tusculans_, he gives an account, mainly based on Poseidonios, of the belief then held of a continued life of the soul in the divine element of the Aether.[62\14] {503}

§ 5

Stoicism had a long and vigorous life. More than ever during the first and second centuries of our era did it fulfil its real task of

## acting as a practical guide to conduct, not as a mere museum of dead

erudition. It made good its claim to provide its adherents with the autonomous freedom and independence of a mind at peace with itself, whose virtue was proof against the tribulation and failure of life, and not corrupted by its plenty. It was not always blind imitation of a literary fashion or the love of displaying virtuous paradoxes that attracted the noblest of the higher Roman aristocracy to the doctrines of Stoicism. Not a few of them guided their lives in accordance with its principles and even died for their convictions. Not entirely "without tragic emotion", as the Stoic Emperor would prefer it, but at any rate with conscious and deliberate purpose--not in mere unreasoning **stubbornness[63\14]--did these Stoic martyrs go to their death. Nor was it the unquestioned certainty of a continued life in a higher existence that made them so ready to give up life upon this earth.[64\14] Each in the special manner dictated to him by his own temperament and the circumstances of his life, they still speak to us, these leaders of Roman Stoicism--Seneca the philosophic director of the world's conscience, Marcus Aurelius the Emperor, and those instructors and patterns of the aspiring youth of Rome, Musonius and Epictetus. The eager and unswerving effort of these wise men to educate themselves to the attainment of freedom and peace, of purity and goodness of heart, wins our admiration--not least in the case of Seneca in whom the struggle for self-mastery and philosophic calm must have been a continual war with his own too-receptive and imaginative nature. But just as they looked for no supernatural helper and redeemer but trusted to the power of their own spirit for the assurance of success, so they required no promise of a future crowning of their labours in an after-life of the soul. The whole scope of their endeavour lies within the limits of this world. The old Stoic belief in the continued life of the individual soul until the annihilation of all separate creation in the World Conflagration[65\14] is regarded at the best as one possibility among many[66\14]--it is perhaps but a "beautiful dream".[67\14] But whether death is a transition to another form of being or a complete termination of individual life--to the wise man it is equally welcome, for he measures the value of life not by the number {504} of its years but by the richness of its content. At bottom Seneca is inclined to the view that death is the end of all things for man, after which "everlasting peace" awaits the restless spirit.[68\14]

The Stoic Emperor is uncertain whether death is a dissipation of the elements of the soul (as the atomists teach) or whether the mind survives in a conscious or an unconscious existence that must yet disappear eventually in the life of the Whole. All things are in perpetual flux--so the Law of the universe has willed it--nor shall the human personality maintain itself untouched and unchanged. But even supposing that death is a "putting out" of his small individual candle, the wise man is not afraid: to the melancholy that is the prevailing mood of his gentle, pure, and high-strung character Death, the annihilator, seems to beckon like a friend.[69\14]

The tougher spirit of the Phrygian slave and freedman needed no conviction of personal survival to enable him to face the battle of earthly life with courage and intrepidity. What has been made must be unmade: without hesitation and without regret the wise man gives himself up to the laws of the rationally-ordered universe in which the present must make way for the future--not indeed to be lost entirely, but to be changed and to merge its individuality, its unimportant self in new manifestations of the creative stuff of Life. The Whole does not perish, but its parts change and alter their relations among themselves.[70\14] The pantheistic principles of the school which had been taken over from Herakleitos and which made it permanently inconceivable that the diminutive individual spark of life could achieve a lasting separation from the central fiery mass, had become a settled conviction. The passionate abandonment of the personal, short-lived self to the everlasting Whole and One had become a fixed habit of mind. No longer did it seem intolerable that the individual existence should pass away after a brief span of life; it was possible to remain a Stoic and yet assert expressly, like Cornutus the teacher of Persius, that with the death of its body there is an end, too, of the individual soul.[71\14]

§ 6

The atomist doctrine renewed by Epicurus demanded in the most emphatic manner of its adherents that they should abandon the belief in personal survival.

For the atomist the soul is corporeal, a compound made {505} up of the most mobile of the atoms which form the plastic elements of air and fire. It occupies all parts of the body, and is held together by the body, while at the same time, and in spite of this, holding itself in essential distinctness from the body.[72\14] Epicurus also speaks of the "Soul" as a special and enduring substance within the body, a "part" of the corporeal, not a mere "harmony" resulting from the association of the parts of the body.[73\14] He even speaks of two parts or modes of manifestation in the "soul"; the irrational, which holds the whole body in its sway as its vital force, and the rational, situated in the breast, which exercises will and intelligence and is the last and most essential source of life in living things, without the undivided presence of which death occurs.[74\14] _Anima_ and _animus_ (as Lucretius calls them), distinct but not separable from one another,[75\14] come into being in the embryo of man and grow to maturity, old age and decay, together with the body.[76\14] If death occurs it means that the atoms belonging to the body are separated and the soul-atoms withdrawn--even before the final dissolution of the body, the separable "soul" disappears. No longer held together by the body, it is blown away in the wind, it disappears "like smoke" in the air.[77\14] The soul, this soul that had animated the individual man, is no more.[78\14] The material elements of which it was composed are indestructible; it is quite possible that they may at some future time combine together with the life-stuff to produce new life and consciousness of exactly the same kind as had once been joined together in the living man. But, if so, it will be a new creature that thus comes into being: the original man has been annihilated by death; there is no bond of continuous consciousness uniting him with the fresh creation.[79\14] The vital forces of the world are continuous, undiminished, indestructible, but in the formation of the individual living creature they are only lent temporarily, for this occasion and for a brief period, after which they are withdrawn for ever from the particular creature. _Vitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu._

After his death the individual is unaffected by the fate of his inanimate body;[80\14] nor should he be troubled by the thought of what may happen to the atoms of his soul. Death does not concern him at all; for he only is when death is not; where death is, he is no longer there.[81\14] Sensation and consciousness have left him at the dissolution of body and soul; what he cannot possibly feel affects him no longer. Epicurean maxims are never tired of driving home {506} this proposition: death is nothing to us.[82\14] From every possible direction, from abstract principle and practical experience in actual life, Lucretius labours to demonstrate the truth of this view[83\14] as ardently as other philosophers seek to prove its opposite. Physical science has no more valuable service to render than that of convincing us of its truth.[84\14] Just as the wisdom of Epicurus has no other purpose than to protect man, of all creatures the one most sensitive to pain, from distress and anguish--and even pleasure is but the removal of pain--so more

## particularly, in putting an end to the fear of death and the craving

after unceasing life, it serves this finite life itself,[85\14] that is committed to us once and for all and never repeated.[86\14] If a man has once succeeded in realizing that he will cease to be in the moment of death's coming, he will neither be oppressed with terror at the threatened loss of self-consciousness nor will the terrors of eternity[87\14] or the fabulous monsters of the spirit-world below the earth[88\14] darken his existence by casting their dark shadow over all his life.[89\14] He will devote himself to life without repining, neither fearing death nor seeking it.[90\14]

He alone--the ideal Wise Man of the Epicurean faith--will know how to live as the true artist of his own life;[91\14] he will not waste the precious time in vain preparations for the future,[92\14] but will cram every moment to the full so that his brief span of existence will have all that a long life could give. Long life, in fact, even life without an end, would not make him any happier or any richer. What life has to offer it has already offered--anything further must only be a repetition of what has gone before: _eadem sunt omnia semper._[93\14] The Wise Man has no reason even to look for an eternity of life.[94\14] In his own personality, in this present "now", he possesses all the conditions necessary to happiness. The very transience of this supreme happiness to which mortality can attain makes it seem the more valuable to him. To the development and the enjoyment of this, the only life that belongs to him he will devote himself exclusively. In ethical matters, too, the atomist doctrine holds good. There is no such thing in nature as an essential community of human beings--still less of humanity--there are only individuals.[95\14] In associations entered into by free and unforced choice the individual may attach himself to the individual as one friend to another; but the political societies that men have invented and set up among themselves have no obligations for the Wise Man. He is himself the centre and indeed the whole circumference of the world surrounding {507} him. State and society are valuable, and indeed only exist for the protection of the individual and to make it possible for him under their enfolding care to develop his own personality in freedom.[96\14] The individual, on the other hand, does not exist for the state, but for himself. "It is no longer necessary to save the Hellenes or to win crowns of victory from them in contests of wisdom."[97\14] Such is the decision reached with a sigh of relief by a civilization that has attained the highest point of its development and is now overcome by a lassitude in which it no longer sets itself new tasks, but takes its ease as age may be permitted to do. In its lassitude it no longer hopes, and in all honesty no longer cares, to extend the period of its existence beyond the limits of this earthly life. Calm and untroubled it sees this life, dear though it may once have been, fade away, taking its leave and sinking into nothingness without a struggle.

NOTES TO