THREE:Netherland soldiers and inhabitants of the village bustled about along the opposite river-bank. I shouted as loudly as possible; and when at last I succeeded in drawing their attention, I made them understand that I wanted to be pulled across in the little boat, which in ordinary times served as a ferry. A short consultation took place now on the opposite side, after which a soldier, who clearly possessed a strong voice, came as near as possible to the waterside and, making a trumpet of his two hands, roared:
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THREE:"Nor must you tell them that we detained you here. That was really not our intention at all, but just now we had no time to examine your papers."Aristotle even goes so far as to eliminate the notion of sequence from causation altogether. He tells us that the causes of events are contemporary with the events themselves; those of past events being past; of present events, present; and of future events, future. This thing will not be because that other thing has happened, for the middle term must be homogeneous with the extremes.282 It is obvious that such a limitation abolishes the power of scientific prediction, which, if not the only test of knowledge, is at any rate its most valuable verification. The Stagirite has been charged with trusting too much to deductive reasoning; it now appears that, on the contrary, he had no conception of its most important function. Here, as everywhere, he follows not the synthetic method of the mathematician, but the analytic method of the naturalist. Finally, instead of combining the notions of cause and kind, he systematically confuses them. It will be remembered how his excellent division of causes into material, formal, efficient, and final, was rendered nugatory by the continued influence of Platos ideas. The formal cause always tended to absorb the other three; and it is by their complete assimilation that he attempts to harmonise the order of demonstration with the order of existence. For the formal cause of a phenomenon simply meant those properties which it shared with others of the same kind, and it was by virtue of those properties that it became a subject for general reasoning, which was interpreted as a methodical arrangement of concepts one within another, answering to the concentric disposition of the cosmic spheres.
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THREE:If now, abandoning all technicalities, we endeavour to estimate the significance and value of the most general ideas contributed by Stoicism to ethical speculation, we shall find that they may be most conveniently considered under the following heads. First of all, the Stoics made morality completely inward. They declared that the intention was equivalent to the deed, and that the wish was equivalent to the32 intentiona view which has been made familiar to all by the teaching of the Gospel, but the origin of which in Greek philosophy has been strangely ignored even by rationalistic writers.74 From the inaccessibility of motives and feelings to direct external observation, it follows that each man must be, in the last resort, his own judge. Hence the notion of conscience is equally a Stoic creation. That we have a mystical intuition informing us, prior to experience, of the difference between right and wrong is, indeed, a theory quite alien to their empirical derivation of knowledge. But that the educated wrong-doer carries in his bosom a perpetual witness and avenger of his guilt, they most distinctly asserted.75 The difference between ancient and modern tragedy is alone sufficient to prove the novelty and power of this idea; for that the Eumenides do not represent even the germ of a conscience is as certain as anything in mythology can be.7633 On the other hand, the fallibility of conscience and the extent to which it may be sophisticated were topics not embraced within the limits of Stoicism, and perhaps never adequately illustrated by any writer, even in modern times, except the great English novelist whose loss we still deplore.We have already observed that Scepticism among the ancients was often cultivated in connexion with some positive doctrine which it indirectly served to recommend. In the case of its last supporters, this was the study of medicine on an empirical as opposed to a deductive method. The Sceptical contention is that we cannot go beyond appearances; the empirical contention is, that all knowledge comes to us from experience, and that this only shows us how phenomena are related to one another, not how they are related to their underlying causes, whether efficient or final. These allied points of view have been brought into still more intimate association by modern thought, which, as will be shown in the concluding chapter, has sprung from a modified form of the ancient Scepticism, powerfully aided by a simultaneous development of physical science. At the same time, the new school have succeeded in shaking off the narrowness and timidity of their predecessors, who were still so far under the influence of the old dogmatists as to believe that there was an inherent opposition between observation and reasoning in the methods of discovery, between facts and explanations in the truths of science, and between antecedence and causation in the realities of Nature. In this respect, astronomy has done more for the right adjustment of our conceptions than any190 other branch of knowledge; and it is remarkable that Sextus Empiricus, the last eminent representative of ancient Scepticism, and the only one (unless Cicero is to be called a Sceptic) whose writings are still extant, should expressly except astronomy from the destructive criticism to which he subjects the whole range of studies included in what we should call the university curriculum of his time.301 We need not enter into an analysis of the ponderous compilation referred to; for nearly every point of interest which it comprises has already been touched on in the course of our investigation; and Sextus differs only from his predecessors by adding the arguments of the New Academy to those of Protagoras and Pyrrho, thus completing the Sceptical cycle. It will be enough to notice the singular circumstance that so copious and careful an enumeration of the grounds which it was possible to urge against dogmatismincluding, as we have seen, many still employed for the same or other purposes,should have omitted the two most powerful solvents of any. These were left for the exquisite critical acumen of Hume to discover. They relate to the conception of causation, and to the conception of our own personality as an indivisible, continuously existing substance, being attempts to show that both involve assumptions of an illegitimate character. Sextus comes up to the very verge of Humes objection to the former when he observes that causation implies relation, which can only exist in thought;302 but he does not ask how we come to think such a relation, still less does he connect it with the perception of phenomenal antecedence; and his attacks on the various mental faculties assumed by psychologists pass over the fundamental postulate of personal identity, thus leaving Descartes what seemed a safe foundation whereon to rebuild the edifice of metaphysical philosophy.
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