VI.

THE STOICS — A FRAGMENT.

The Stoics were one of the four sects of philosophy recognized and conspicuous at Athens during the three centuries preceding the Christian era and during the century or more following. Among these four sects, the most marked antithesis of ethical dogma was between the Stoics and the Epikureans.

The Stoics agreed with the Peripatetics (anterior to Epikurus, not specially against him) that the first principle of nature is (not pleasure or relief from pain, but) Self-preservation or Self-love; in other words, the natural appetite or tendency of all creatures is, to preserve their existing condition with its inherent capacities, and to keep clear of destruction or disablement. This appetite (they said) manifests itself in little children before any pleasure or pain is felt, and is moreover a fundamental postulate, pre-supposed in all desires of particular pleasures, as well as in all aversions to particular pains. We begin by loving our own vitality; and we come, by association, to love what promotes or strengthens our vitality; we hate destruction or disablement, and come (by secondary association) to hate whatever produces that effect.

This doctrine associated, and brought under one view, what was common to man not merely with the animal, but also with the vegetable world; a plant was declared to have an impulse or tendency to maintain itself, without feeling pain or pleasure. Aristotle (in the tenth Book of the Ethica) says that he will not determine whether we love life for the sake of pleasure, or pleasure for the sake of life; for he affirms the two to be essentially yoked together and inseparable: pleasure is the consummation of our vital manifestations. The Peripatetics, after him, put pleasure down to a lower level, as derivative and accidental. The Stoics went farther in the same direction — possibly from antithesis against the growing school of Epikurus.

The primary officium (in a larger sense than our word duty) of man is (they said) to keep himself in the State of Nature; the second or derivative officium is to keep to such things as are according to nature, and to avert those that are contrary to nature; our gradually increasing experience enables as to discriminate the two. The youth learns, as he grows up, to value bodily accomplishments, mental cognitions and judgments, good conduct towards those around him, — as powerful aids towards keeping up that state of nature. When his experience is so far enlarged as to make him aware of the order and harmony of nature and human society, and to impress upon him the comprehension of this great idéal, his emotions as well as his reason becomes absorbed by it. He recognizes this as the only true Bonum or Honestum, to which all other desirable things are referable; as the only thing desirable for itself and in its own nature. He drops or dismisses all these prima naturæ that he had begun by desiring. He no longer considers any of them as worthy of being desired in itself, or for its own sake.

While, therefore, (according to Peripatetics as well as Stoics) the love of self and of preserving one's own vitality and activity is the primary element, intuitive and connate, to which all rational preference (officium) was at first referred, they thought it not the less true that in process of time, by experience, association, and reflection, there grows up in the mind a grand acquired sentiment or notion, a new and later light, which extinguishes and puts out of sight the early beginning. It was important to distinguish the feeble and obscure elements from the powerful and brilliant after-growth; which indeed was fully realized only in chosen minds, and in them hardly before old age. This idea, when once formed in the mind, was The Good — the only thing worthy of desire for its own sake. The Stoics called it the only good, being sufficient in itself for happiness; other things being not good, nor necessary to happiness, but simply preferable or advantageous when they could be had: the Peripatetics recognized it as the first and greatest good, but said also that it was not sufficient in itself; there were two other inferior varieties of good, of which something must be had as complementary 661(what the Stoics called præposita or sumenda).1 Thus the Stoics said about the origin of the Idea of Bonum or Honestum, much the same as what Aristotle says about ethical Virtue. It is not implanted in us by nature; but we have at birth certain initial tendencies and capacities, which, if aided by association and training, enable us (and that not in all cases) to acquire it.

A distinction was made by Epictetus and other Stoics between things in our power and things not in our power. In our power are our opinions and notions about objects, and all our affections, desires, and aversions: not in our power are our bodies, wealth, honour, rank, authority, &c., and their opposites; though, in regard to these last, it is in our power to think of them as unimportant. With this distinction we may connect the arguments between the Stoics and their opponents as to what is now called the Freedom of the Will. But we must first begin by distinguishing the two questions. By things in our power, the Stoics meant things that we could do or acquire if we willed: by things not in our power, they meant things that we could not do or acquire if we willed. In both cases, the volition was assumed as a fact: the question what determined it, or whether it was non-determined, i. e., self-determining, was not raised in the antithesis. But it was raised in other discussions between the Stoic theorist Chrysippus, and various opponents. These opponents denied that volition was determined by motives, and cited the cases of equal conflicting motives (what is known as the Ass of Buridan) as proving that the soul includes in itself, and exerts, a special supervenient power of deciding action in one way or the other — a power not determined by any causal antecedent, but self-originating, and belonging to the class of agency that Aristotle recognizes under the denomination of automatic, spontaneous (or essentially irregular and unpredictable). Chrysippus replied by denying not only the reality of this supervenient force said to be inherent in the soul, but also the reality of all that Aristotle called automatic or spontaneous agency generally. Chrysippus said that every movement was determined by antecedent motives; that in cases of equal conflict the exact equality did not long continue, because some new but slight motive slipped in unperceived and turned the scale on one side or the other.2 Here, we see, the question now known as the Freedom of the Will is discussed, and Chrysippus declares against freedom, affirming that volition is always determined by motives.

But we also see that, while declaring this opinion, Chrysippus does not employ the terms Necessity or Freedom of the Will; neither did his opponents, so far as we can see: they had a different and less misleading phrase. By freedom, Chrysippus and the Stoics meant the freedom of doing what a man willed, if he willed it. A man is free as to the thing that is in his power, when he wills it: he is not free as to what is not in his power, under the same supposition. The Stoics laid great stress on this distinction. They pointed out how much it is really in a man’s power to transform or discipline his own mind — in the way of controlling or suppressing some emotions, generating or encouraging others, forming new intellectual associations, &c.; how much a man could do in these ways, if he willed it, and if he went through the lessons, habits of conduct, and meditations, suitable to produce such an effect. The Stoics strove to create in a man’s mind the volitions appropriate for such mental discipline, by depicting the beneficial consequences resulting from it, and the misfortune and shame inevitable, if the mind were not so disciplined. Their purpose was to strengthen the governing reason of his mind, and to enthrone it as a fixed habit and character, which would control by counter suggestions the impulse arising at each special moment — particularly all disturbing terrors or allurements. This, in their view, is a free mind; not one wherein volition is independent of all motive, but one wherein the susceptibility to different motives is tempered by an ascendant reason, so as to give predominance to the better motive against the worse. One of the strongest motives that they endeavoured to enforce, was the prudence and dignity of bringing our volitions into harmony with the schemes of Providence; which (they said) were always arranged with a view to the happiness of 662the Kosmos on the whole. The bad man, whose volitions conflict with these schemes, is always baulked of his expectations, and brought at last against his will to see things carried by an over-ruling force, with aggravated pain and humiliation to himself: while the good man, who resigns himself to them from the first, always escapes with less pain, and often without any at all. As a portion of their view concerning Providence it may here be mentioned that the earlier Stoics, Zeno and Chrysippus, entertained high reverence for the divination, prophecy, and omens that were generally current in the ancient world. They considered that these were the methods whereby the gods were graciously pleased to make known beforehand revelations of their foreordained purposes. Herein lay one among the marked points of contrast between Stoics and Epikureans.

We have thus seen that in regard to the doctrine called in modern times the Freedom of the Will (i.e., that volitions are self-originating and unpredictable), the Stoic theorists not only denied it, but framed all their Ethics upon the assumption of the contrary. This same assumption of the contrary, indeed, was made also by Sokrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epikurus; in short, by all the ethical teachers of antiquity. All of them believed that volitions depended on causes; that, under the ordinary conditions of men’s minds, the causes that volitions generally depended upon are often misleading and sometimes ruinous; but that, by proper stimulation from without and meditation within, the rational causes of volition might be made to overrule the impulsive. Plato, Aristotle, Epikurus, not less than the Stoics, wished to create new fixed habits and a new type of character. They differed, indeed, on the question what the proper type of character was; but each of them aimed at the same general end — a new type of character, regulating the grades of susceptibility to different motives. And the purpose of all and each of these moralists precludes the theory of free-will, i.e., the theory that our volitions are self-originating and unpredictable.

While the Epikureans declined, as much as possible, interference in public affairs, the Stoic philosophers urged men to the duties of active citizenship.3 Chrysippus even said that the life of philosophical contemplation (such as Aristotle preferred and accounted godlike) was to be placed on the same level with the life of pleasure; though Plutarch observes that neither Chrysippus nor Zeno ever meddled personally with any public duty: both of them passed their lives in lecturing and writing. The truth is that both of them were foreigners residing at Athens, and at a time when Athens was dependent on foreign princes. Accordingly, neither Zeno nor Chrysippus had any sphere of political action open to them: they were, in this respect, like Epictetus afterwards, but in a position quite different from Seneca, the preceptor of Nero, who might hope to influence the great imperial power of Rome, and from Marcus Antoninus, who held that imperial power in his own hands.

Marcus Antoninus — not only a powerful emperor, but also the most gentle and amiable man of his day — talks of active beneficence both as a duty and a satisfaction. But in the creed of the Stoics generally, active beneficence did not occupy a prominent place. They adopted the four Cardinal Virtues — Wisdom, or the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance — as part of their plan of the virtuous life, the life according to Nature. Justice, as the social virtue, was placed above all the rest. But the Stoics were not strenuous in requiring more than Justice, for the benefit of others beside the agent. They even reckoned compassion for the sufferings of others as a weakness, analogous to envy for the good fortune of others.

The Stoic recognised the gods (or Universal Nature, equivalent expressions in his creed) as managing the affairs of the world, with a view to producing as much happiness as was attainable on the whole. Towards this end the gods did not want any positive assistance from him; but it was his duty and his strongest interest, to resign himself to their plans, and to abstain from all conduct tending to frustrate them. Such refractory tendencies were perpetually suggested to him by the unreasonable appetites, emotions, fears, antipathies, &c., of daily life; all claiming satisfaction at the expense of future mischief to himself and others. To countervail these misleading forces by means of a fixed rational character built up through meditation and philosophical teaching, was the grand purpose of the Stoic ethical creed. The emotional or appetitive self was to be starved or curbed, and retained only as an appendage to the rational self; an idea proclaimed before in general terms by Plato, but carried out into a system by the Stoics, though to a great extent also by the Epikureans.

The Stoic was taught to reflect how 663much that appears to be desirable, terror-striking, provocative, &c., is not really so, but is made to appear so by false and curable associations. And, while he thus discouraged those self-regarding emotions that placed him in hostility with others, he learnt to respect the self of another man as well as his own. Epictetus advises to deal mildly with a man that hurts us either by word or deed; and advises it upon the following very remarkable ground:— “Recollect that in what he says or does, he follows his own sense of propriety, not yours. He must do what appears to him right, not what appears to you: if he judges wrongly, it is he that is hurt, for he is the person deceived. Always repeat to yourself, in such a case: The man has acted on his own opinion.”

The reason here given by Epictetus is an instance, memorable in ethical theory, of respect for individual dissenting conviction, even in an extreme case; and it must be taken in conjunction with his other doctrine, that damage thus done to us unjustly is really little or no damage, except so far as we ourselves give pungency to it by our irrational susceptibilities and associations. We see that the Stoic submerges, as much as he can, the pre-eminence of his own individual self, and contemplates himself from the point of view of another, as only one among many. But he does not erect the happiness of others into a direct object of his own positive pursuit, beyond the reciprocities of family, citizenship, and common humanity. The Stoic theorists agreed with Epikurus in inculcating the reciprocities of Justice between all fellow-citizens; and they even went farther than he did, by extending the sphere of such duties beyond the limits of city, so as to comprehend all mankind. But as to the reciprocities of individual Friendship, Epikurus went beyond the Stoics in the amount of self-sacrifice and devotion that he enjoined for the benefit of a friend.

[END OF APPENDIX VI]

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