We have illustrated the position of Cicero by reference to the master who, more than any other Greek philosopher, seems to have satisfied his ideal of perfect wisdom. We must now observe that nothing is better calculated to show how inadequate was the view once universally taken of Socrates, and still, perhaps, taken by all who are not scholars, than that it should be applicable in so many points to Cicero as well. For, while the influence of the one on human thought was the greatest ever exercised by a single individual, the influence of the other was limited to the acceleration of a movement already in full activity, and moreover tending on the whole in a retrograde direction. The immeasurable superiority of the Athenian lies in his dialectical method. It was not by a mere elimination of differences that he hoped to establish a general agreement, but by reasoning down from admitted principles, which were themselves to be the result of scientific induction brought to bear on a comprehensive and ever-widening area of experience. Hence his scepticism, which was directed against authority, tended as much to stimulate enquiry as that of the Roman declaimer, which was directed against reason, tended to deaden or to depress it. Hence, also, the political philosophy of Socrates was as revolutionary as that of his imitator was conservative. Both were, in a certain sense, aristocrats; but while the aristocracy176 of the elegant rhetorician meant a clique of indolent and incapable nobles, that of the sturdy craftsman meant a band of highly-trained specialists maintained in power by the choice, the confidence, and the willing obedience of an intelligent people. And while the religion of Cicero was a blind reliance on providence supplemented by priestcraft in this world, with the hope, if things came to the worst, of a safe retreat from trouble in the next; the religion of Socrates was an active co-operation with the universal mind, an attempt to make reason and the will of God prevail on earth, with the hope, if there was any future state, of carrying on in it the intellectual warfare which alone had made life worth living here. No less a contrast could be expected between the orator who turned to philosophy only for the occupation of a leisure hour, or for relief from the pangs of disappointed ambition, and the thinker who gave her his whole existence as the elect apostle and martyr of her creed.Lost like ourselves his liberty!"
A new design should be based upon one of two suppositionseither that existing mechanism is imperfect in its construction, or that it lacks functions which a new design may supply; and if those who spend their time in making plans for novel machinery would stop to consider this from the beginning, it would save no little of the time wasted in what may be called scheming without a purpose."Nobody but a servant, and a pretty one," the other said.The same fundamental difference comes out strongly in their respective theologies. Plato starts with the conception that God is good, and being good wishes everything to resemble himself; an assumption from which the divine origin and providential government of the world are deduced. Aristotle thinks of God as exclusively occupied in self-contemplation, and only acting on Nature through the love which his perfection inspires. If, further, we consider in what relation the two philosophies stand to ethics, we shall find that, to Plato, its problems were the most pressing of any, that they haunted him through his whole life, and that he made contributions of extraordinary value towards their solution; while to Aristotle, it was merely a branch of natural history, a study of the different types of character to be met with in Greek society, without the faintest perception that conduct required to be set on a wider and firmer basis than the conventional standards of his age. Hence it is that, in reading Plato, we are perpetually reminded of the controversies still raging among ourselves. He gives us an exposition, to which nothing has ever been added, of the theory now known as Egoistic Hedonism; he afterwards abandons that theory, and passes on to the social side of conduct, the necessity of justice, the relation of private to public interest, the bearing of religion, education, and social institutions on morality, along with other kindred topics, which need not be further specified, as295 they have been discussed with sufficient fulness in the preceding chapter. Aristotle, on the contrary, takes us back into old Greek life as it was before the days of Socrates, noticing the theories of that great reformer only that he may reject them in favour of a narrow, common-sense standard. Virtuous conduct, he tells us, consists in choosing a mean between two extremes. If we ask how the proper mean is to be discovered, he refers us to a faculty called φρ?νησι?, or practical reason; but on further enquiry it turns out that this faculty is possessed by none who are not already virtuous. To the question, How are men made moral? he answers, By acquiring moral habits; which amounts to little more than a restatement of the problem, or, at any rate, suggests another more difficult questionHow are good habits acquired?Again, on the practical side, by combining Plato with Aristotle and both with Stoicism, Plotinus contrives to eliminate what is most valuable in each. If, in the Republic, the Good was placed above all existence, this was only that we might transform existence into its image. If Aristotle placed the theoretical above the ethical virtues, he assigned no limits but those of observation and reasoning to the energising of theoretic power. If the Stoics rested morality on the absolute isolation of the human will, they deduced from this principle not only the inwardness of virtue, but also the individualisation of duty, the obligation of beneficence, and the forgiveness of sin. But with Plotinus, Reason has no true object of contemplation outside its own abstract ideas, and the self-realisation of Stoicism means a barren consciousness of personal identity, from which every variety of interest and sympathy is excluded: it is not an expansion of our own338 soul into coincidence with the absolute All, but a concentration of both into a single point, a flight of the alone to the alone;503 and only in this utter solitude does he suppose that the Platonic Good is finally and wholly possessed.
