moral difficulties incident to private life. Teachers of wisdom" contrived to give lessons in rhetoric because pupils required some really "useful" return for fees paid. Stoicism thus became influential in proportion as, like the Romans themselves, it ceased to trouble itself about the origin of the world, or the destiny of man, and devoted attention to the discussion of the immediate needs inseparable from ordinary life. By adapting itself in this way to surrounding requirements, it formed another among the many evidences that Roman civilisation developed new affinities the more it came into contact with Greek thought and culture.

At this stage, then, Stoicism found its individual man ready to hand. Freedom was no longer the problem, but rather the more casuistical one of drawing a dividing line between specifically right and specifically wrong deeds. The old theory embodied in the maxim “live according to nature," which was supposed to be a guide sufficient for eternity, found itself jostled in the streets of Rome by a questioning mob, all of whom spoke at once, asking each a different question. A philosophy put to such test could not but exercise a very definite sway. It practically stood in place of religion,1 and like religion, it tended to treat all men as equals.2 Stoicism thus became more cosmopolitan during its sojourn at Rome. Humanitarianism, if implicit from the first, was its latest doctrine. In this shape it entered Roman law, moulding man's conceptions of his natural relations to his fellow-man for centuries after the Roman system had been dead or crystallised. Ceasing somewhat to

1 Cf. Roman Stoicism as a Religion, in Essays and Addresses, Rev. J. M. Wilson.

2 This point is brought out by Mr Lecky in European Morals, vol. i. p. 252 sq.

minister to an ideal, it grasped real life, and breathing into the narrowness of local or national institutions a larger spirit, it evolved a positive code of duties, which the individual ought to fulfil in social life. And so it achieved its own immortality. For a principle was thus formulated which Christianity afterwards adopted and spread over the whole civilised world.

While, then, Stoicism gained in one respect by its contact with Roman civilisation, it lost in another. And, so far as the development of the religious consciousness in humanity is concerned, the loss, even if necessary to progress, was, relatively speaking, greater than the gain. As a theory of the universal, Stoicism waned more and more. The constant demands of the individual that his particular difficulties should be met, while they pointed to an increase of respect for man as such, kept limiting the philosophic outlook. The relation between the universal and the individual no longer absorbed thinkers. The isolated individual himself, nay, even his momentary mood, had become the important object of inquiry. Selfexamination, directed no doubt to the disclosure of imperfection, took a leading place among Stoic doctrines. This apparently unavoidable tendency to attach undue consideration to the man of the moment, was fatal in its effects upon Stoicism regarded as a witness for highest truth. Assuredly there were some few brilliant exceptions. But, as a general rule, the philosophy was reduced to the level of an officially authorised cult. Grounded now on the exaltation of man as an individual, it readily lent itself to the degrading deification of the Emperor. In the absence of any other effective universal faith, and amid the conflict of individuals, all

equally valuable in the eyes of the cosmopolitan philosopher, Cæsar, who ex officio had many advantages, became the individual,-the only god possible for the Roman world as a whole. With Nero for "their Lord and their God," the later Stoics might well question the efficacy of the salvation which their wise man could achieve for himself. Of old it had been the strength of their system to perceive one ever-present power reproducing itself in the endless variations of the pagan pantheon. Now, this very god was found shut up in human form. Theoretically he might be in every man, practically he reserved his self-revelation for the person of the Cæsar. The contradiction was unavoidable. Reason-the deity-is everywhere, but he is limited by the circumstances now and here operative. friction of the world, as it were, is too strong for the moulding force even of divinity. And if God be thus constrained, what must be said of the individual man in whom he is alleged to find habitation?

The

In Rome, the philosophy of Zeno and Chrysippus chanced upon elements which were essentially incompatible with its continued existence as an explanation of man and the world. At the last, indeed, it proves itself "the most incongruous, the most self-contradictory, of all philosophical systems. With a gross and material pantheism it unites the most vivid expressions of the fatherly love and providence of God: with the sheerest fatalism it combines the most exaggerated statements of the independence and self-sufficiency of the human soul: with the hardest and most uncompromising isolation of the individual, it proclaims the most expansive view of his relations to all around." 1

1 St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, Lightfoot, p. 296.

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CHAPTER VI.

SCEPTICISM, COMPLACENCY, AND SUPERSTITION.

In addition to Epicureanism and Stoicism, a third post-Aristotelian school appeared in Greece, bent on similar aims, but prepared to solve difficulties by another method. Pyrrho and the Sceptics, like their contemporaries, desired that the individual should be enabled to make the most of his own life. But they promised subjective freedom only on condition that the problems presented by the phenomenal world, and by the strange contradictions incident to human life, should be severely left unheeded. The harmony with self of Epicurus and Zeno was obtained by Pyrrho in a veritable suspense of judgment with regard to everything except self. Here too, as with the other schools, individual salvation was only achieved by a tour de force. If the Epicureans had sought pleasure principally by avoiding pleasures, if the Stoics had tried to bring about the fuller development of life chiefly by destroying its only possible content, the Sceptics arrived at self-possession by narrowing the bounds of certainty down to self. They did not observe that, if self be certain, the harmony is no longer with self, but with all that makes self in any respect real.

At first, under Pyrrho and his immediate followers, Scepticism was the creed of a comparatively feeble folk.1 But afterwards, in contact with the other individualistic schools, and more especially at Rome, it gained many adherents. Carneades is its chief historical representative. The disturbing force, which his negative criticism brought to bear upon the progress of thought at Rome, was much more important in its results than is sometimes supposed.

Dogmatic theories, such as Epicureanism, and more conspicuously Stoicism, are always open to easy attack. Whenever dogmatists begin to formulate positive doctrines, they are liable to criticism on the part of those who are not burdened with any inflexible conscientiousness. And Stoicism, being the more constructive of contemporary systems, attracted the larger share of hostile comment. At Rome, despite an ingrained horror of irresponsibility in matters of conduct, there was a special reason for the widespread scepticism of the Academy. Scepticism, as a suspense of judgment, did not bind men down to any "cut and dried" abstract creed. As a theory of such suspense, it left the individual to himself, and so was well able to accommodate adherents whose ethical practice was of the most varied description. At the same time, as an integral portion of the philosophical organism, its importance was relative rather than absolute. Carneades and his friends kept up a constant irritation by criticising the other competing systems. When Stoicism first began to gain ground at Rome, nothing hindered its growth more than the continuous, and, it may be added, well-founded and well-informed opposition of the Academicians. This 1 Cf. Zeller's Stoics, &c., p. 517.