FORE:The Stoic arguments are, indeed, when we come to analyse them, appeal to authority rather than to the logical understanding. We are told again and again that the common objects of desire and dread cannot really be good or evil, because they are not altogether under our control.55 And if we ask why this necessarily excludes them from the class of things to be pursued or avoided, the answer is that man, having been created for perfect happiness, must also have been created with the power to secure it by his own unaided exertions. But, even granting the very doubtful thesis that there is any ascertainable purpose in creation at all, it is hard to see how the Stoics could have answered any one who chose to maintain that man is created for enjoyment; since, judging by experience, he has secured a larger share of it than of virtue, and is just as capable of gaining it by a mere exercise of volition. For the professors of the Porch fully admitted that their ideal sage had never been realised; which, with their opinions about the indivisibility of virtue, was equivalent to saying that there never had been such a thing as a good25 man at all. Or, putting the same paradox into other words, since the two classes of wise and foolish divide humanity between them, and since the former class has only an ideal existence, they were obliged to admit that mankind are not merely most of them fools, but all fools. And this, as Plutarch has pointed out in his very clever attack on Stoicism, is equivalent to saying that the scheme of creation is a complete failure.56What remains of the visible world after deducting its ideal elements is pure space. This, which to some seems the clearest of all conceptions, was to Plato one of the obscurest. He can only describe it as the formless substance out of which the four elements, fire, air, water, and earth, are differentiated. It closes the scale of existence and even lies half outside it, just as the Idea of Good in the Republic transcends the same scale at the other end. We may conjecture that the two principles are opposed as absolute self-identity and absolute self-separation; the whole intermediate series of forms serving to bridge over the interval between them. It will then be easy to understand how, as Aristotle tells us, Plato finally came to adopt the Pythagorean nomenclature and designated his two generating principles as the monad and the indefinite dyad. Number was formed by their combination, and all other things were made out of number. Aristotle267 complains that the Platonists had turned philosophy into mathematics; and perhaps in the interests of science it was fortunate that the transformation occurred. To suppose that matter could be built up out of geometrical triangles, as Plato teaches in the Timaeus, was, no doubt, a highly reprehensible confusion; but that the systematic study of science should be based on mathematics was an equally new and important aper?u. The impulse given to knowledge followed unforeseen directions; and at a later period Platos true spirit was better represented by Archimedes and Hipparchus than by Arcesilaus and Carneades.
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