Transcriber’s note:
The letters A and B with the plus sign at the top are shown as A⁺ and B⁺.

A
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
IN EPITOME,

BY
DR. ALBERT SCHWEGLER.

TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL GERMAN,
BY
JULIUS H. SEELYE.

THIRD EDITION.

NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
443 & 445 BROADWAY.
LONDON: 16 LITTLE BRITAIN.
1864.

Entered, according to act of Congress, in the year 1856,
By Julius H. Seelye,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Northern District of New York.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE
BY HENRY B. SMITH, D. D.

The History of Philosophy, by Dr. Albert Schwegler, is considered in Germany as the best concise manual upon the subject from the school of Hegel. Its account of the Greek and of the German systems, is of especial value and importance. It presents the whole history of speculation in its consecutive order. Though following the method of Hegel’s more extended lectures upon the progress of philosophy, and though it makes the system of Hegel to be the ripest product of philosophy, yet it also rests upon independent investigations. It will well reward diligent study, and is one of the best works for a text-book in our colleges, upon this neglected branch of scientific investigation. The translation is made by a competent person, and gives, I doubt not, a faithful rendering of the original.

Henry B. Smith.

Union Theological Seminary, New York, Nov. 6, 1855.

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.

Schwegler’s History of Philosophy originally appeared in the “Neue Encyklopädie für Wissenschaften und Künste.” Its great value soon awakened a call for its separate issue, in which form it has attained a very wide circulation in Germany. It is found in the hands of almost every student in the philosophical department of a German university, and is highly esteemed for its clearness, conciseness, and comprehensiveness.

The present translation was commenced in Germany three years ago, and has been carefully finished. It was undertaken with the conviction that the work would not lose its interest or its value in an English dress, and with the hope that it might be of wider service in such a form to students of philosophy here. It was thought especially, that a proper translation of this manual would supply a want for a suitable text-book on this branch of study, long felt by both teachers and students in our American colleges.

The effort has been made to translate, and not to paraphrase the author’s meaning. Many of his statements might have been amplified without diffuseness, and made more perceptible to the superficial reader without losing their interest to the more profound student, but he has so happily seized upon the germs of the different systems, that they neither need, nor would be improved by any farther development, and has, moreover, presented them so clearly, that no student need have any difficulty in apprehending them as they are. The translator has therefore endeavored to represent faithfully and clearly the original history. As such, he offers his work to the American public, indulging no hope, and making no efforts for its success beyond that which its own merits shall ensure.

J. H. S.

Schenectady, N. Y., January, 1856.

CONTENTS.

A
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.

SECTION I.
WHAT IS MEANT BY THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.

To philosophize is to reflect; to examine things, in thought.

Yet in this is the conception of philosophy not sufficiently defined. Man, as thinking, also employs those practical activities concerned in the adaptation of means to an end; the whole body of sciences also, even those which do not in strict sense belong to philosophy, still lie in the realm of thought. In what, then, is philosophy distinguished from these sciences, e. g. from the science of astronomy, of medicine, or of rights? Certainly not in that it has a different material to work upon. Its material is precisely the same as that of the different empirical sciences. The construction and disposition of the universe, the arrangement and functions of the human body, the doctrines of property, of rights and of the state—all these materials belong as truly to philosophy as to their appropriate sciences. That which is given in the world of experience, that which is real, is the content likewise of philosophy. It is not, therefore, in its material but in its form, in its method, in its mode of knowledge, that philosophy is to be distinguished from the empirical sciences. These latter derive their material directly from experience; they find it at hand and take it up just as they find it. Philosophy, on the other hand, is never satisfied with receiving that which is given simply as it is given, but rather follows it out to its ultimate grounds; it examines every individual thing in reference to a final principle, and considers it as one link in the whole chain of knowledge. In this way philosophy removes from the individual thing given in experience, its immediate, individual, and accidental character; from the sea of empirical individualities, it brings out that which is common to all; from the infinite and orderless mass of contingencies it finds that which is necessary, and throws over all a universal law. In short, philosophy examines the totality of experience in the form of an organic system in harmony with the laws of thought. From the above it is seen, that philosophy (in the sense we have given it) and the empirical sciences have a reciprocal influence; the latter conditioning the former, while they at the same time are conditioned by it. We shall, therefore, in the history of the world, no more find an absolute and complete philosophy, than a complete empirical science (Empirik). Rather is philosophy found only in the form of the different philosophical systems, which have successively appeared in the course of history, advancing hand in hand with the progress of the empirical sciences and the universal, social, and civil culture, and showing in their advance the different steps in the development and improvement of human science. The history of philosophy has, for its object, to represent the content, the succession, and the inner connection of these philosophical systems.

The relation of these different systems to each other is thus already intimated. The historical and collective life of the race is bound together by the idea of a spiritual and intellectual progress, and manifests a regular order of advancing, though not always continuous, stages of development. In this, the fact harmonizes with what we should expect from antecedent probabilities. Since, therefore, every philosophical system is only the philosophical expression of the collective life of its time, it follows that these different systems which have appeared in history will disclose one organic movement and form together one rational and internally connected (gegliedertes) system. In all their developments, we shall find one constant order, grounded in the striving of the spirit ever to raise itself to a higher point of consciousness and knowledge, and to recognize the whole spiritual and natural universe, more and more, as its outward being, as its reality, as the mirror of itself.

Hegel was the first to utter these thoughts and to consider the history of philosophy as a united process, but this view, which is, in its principle, true, he has applied in a way which would destroy the freedom of human actions, and remove the very conception of contingency, i. e. that any thing should be contrary to reason. Hegel’s view is, that the succession of the systems of philosophy which have appeared in history, corresponds to the succession of logical categories in a system of logic. According to him, if, from the fundamental conceptions of these different philosophical systems, we remove that which pertains to their outward form or particular application, &c., so do we find the different steps of the logical conceptions (e. g. being, becoming, existence, being per se (fürsichseyn) quantity, &c.). And on the other hand, if we take up the logical process by itself, we find also in it the actual historical process.

This opinion, however, can be sustained neither in its principle nor in its historical application. It is defective in its principle, because in history freedom and necessity interpenetrate, and, therefore, while we find, if we consider it in its general aspects, a rational connection running through the whole, we also see, if we look solely at its individual parts, only a play of numberless contingencies, just as the kingdom of nature, taken as a whole, reveals a rational plan in its successions, but viewed only in its parts, mocks at every attempt to reduce them to a preconceived plan. In history we have to do with free subjectivities, with individuals capable of originating actions, and have, therefore, a factor which does not admit of a previous calculation. For however accurately we may estimate the controlling conditions which may attach to an individual, from the general circumstances in which he may be placed, his age, his associations, his nationality, &c., a free will can never be calculated like a mathematical problem. History is no example for a strict arithmetical calculation. The history of philosophy, therefore, cannot admit of an apriori construction; the actual occurrences should not be joined together as illustrative of a preconceived plan; but the facts, so far as they can be admitted, after a critical sifting, should be received as such, and their rational connection be analytically determined. The speculative idea can only supply the law for the arrangement and scientific connection of that which may be historically furnished.

A more comprehensive view, which contradicts the above-given Hegelian notion, is the following. The actual historical development is, very generally, different from the theoretical. Historically e. g. the State arose as a means of protection against robbers, while theoretically it is derived from the idea of rights. So also, even in the actual history of philosophy, while the logical (theoretical) process is an ascent from the abstract to the concrete, yet does the historical development of philosophy, quite generally, descend from the concrete to the abstract, from intuition to thought, and separates the abstract from the concrete in those general forms of culture and those religious and social circumstances, in which the philosophizing subject is placed. A system of philosophy proceeds synthetically, while the history of philosophy, i. e. the history of the thinking process proceeds analytically. We might, therefore, with great propriety, adopt directly the reverse of the Hegelian position, and say that what in reality is the first, is for us, in fact, the last. This is illustrated in the Ionic philosophy. It began not with being as an abstract conception, but with the most concrete, and most apparent, e. g. with the material conception of water, air, &c. Even if we leave the Ionics and advance to the being of the Eleatics or the becoming of the Heraclitics, we find, that these, instead of being pure thought determinations, are only unpurified conceptions, and materially colored intuitions. Still farther, is the attempt impracticable to refer every philosophy that has appeared in history to some logical category as its central principle, because the most of these philosophies have taken, for their object, the idea, not as an abstract conception, but in its realization as nature and mind, and, therefore, for the most part, have to do, not with logical questions, but with those relating to natural philosophy, psychology and ethics. Hegel should not, therefore, limit his comparison of the historical and systematic process of development simply to logic, but should extend it to the whole system of philosophical science. Granted that the Eleatics, the Heraclitics and the Atomists may have made such a category as the centre of their systems, and we may find thus far the Hegelian logic in harmony with the Hegelian history of philosophy. But if we go farther, how is it? How with Anaxagoras, the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle? We cannot, certainly, without violence, press one central principle into the systems of these men, but if we should be able to do it, and could reduce e. g. the philosophy of Anaxagoras to the conception of “the end,” that of the Sophists to the conception of “the appearance,” and the Socratic Philosophy to the conception of “the good,”—yet even then we have the new difficulty that the historical does not correspond to the logical succession of these categories. In fact, Hegel himself has not attempted a complete application of his principle, and indeed gave it up at the very threshold of the Grecian philosophy. To the Eleatics, the Heraclitics and the Atomists, the logical categories of “being,” “becoming,” and being per se may be successively ascribed, and so far, as already remarked, the parallelism extends, but no farther. Not only does Anaxagoras follow with the conception of reason working according to an end, but if we go back before the Eleatics, we find in the very beginning of philosophy a total diversity between the logical and historical order. If Hegel had carried out his principle consistently, he should have thrown away entirely the Ionic philosophy, for matter is no logical category; he should have placed the Pythagoreans after the Eleatics and the Atomists, for in logical order the categories of quantity follow those of quality; in short, he would have been obliged to set aside all chronology. Unless this be done, we must be satisfied with a theoretical reproduction of the course which the thinking spirit has taken in its history, only so far as we can see in the grand stages of history a rational progress of thought; only so far as the philosophical historian, surveying a period of development, actually finds in it a philosophical acquisition,—the acquisition of a new idea: but we must guard ourselves against applying to the transition and intermediate steps, as well as to the whole detail of history, the postulate of an immanent conformity to law, or an organism in harmony with our own thoughts. History often winds its way like a serpent in lines which appear retrogressive, and philosophy, especially, has not seldom withdrawn herself from a wide and already fruitful field, in order to settle down upon a narrow strip of land, the limits even of which she has sought still more closely to abridge. At one time we find thousands of years expended in fruitless attempts with only a negative result;—at another, a fulness of philosophical ideas are crowded together in the experience of a lifetime. There is here no sway of an immutable and regularly returning law, but history, as the realm of freedom, will first completely manifest itself at the end of time as the work of reason.

SECTION II.
CLASSIFICATION.

A few words will suffice to define our problem and classify its elements. Where and when does philosophy begin? Manifestly, according to the analysis made in § I., where a final philosophical principle, a final ground of being is first sought in a philosophical way,—and hence with the Grecian philosophy. The Oriental—Chinese and Hindoo—so named philosophies,—but which are rather theologies or mythologies,—and the mythic cosmogonies of Greece, in its earliest periods, are, therefore, excluded from our more definite problem. Like Aristotle, we shall begin the history of philosophy with Thales. For similar reasons we exclude also the philosophy of the Christian middle ages, or Scholasticism. This is not so much a philosophy, as a philosophizing or reflecting within the already prescribed limits of positive religion. It is, therefore, essentially theology, and belongs to the science of the history of Christian doctrines.

The material which remains after this exclusion, may be naturally divided into two periods; viz:—ancient—Grecian and Græco-Romanic—and modern philosophy. Since a preliminary comparison of the characteristics of these two epochs could not here be given without a subsequent repetition, we shall first speak of their inner relations, when we come to treat of the transition from the one to the other.

The first epoch can be still farther divided into three periods; (1.) The pre-Socratic philosophy, i. e. from Thales to the Sophists inclusive; (2.) Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; (3.) The post-Aristotelian philosophy, including New Platonism.

SECTION III.
GENERAL VIEW OF THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY.

1. The universal tendency of the pre-Socratic philosophy is to find some principle for the explanation of nature. Nature, the most immediate, that which first met the eye and was the most palpable, was that which first aroused the inquiring mind. At the basis of its changing forms,—beneath its manifold appearances, thought they, lies a first principle which abides the same through all change. What then, they asked, is this principle? What is the original ground of things? Or, more accurately, what element of nature is the fundamental element? To solve this inquiry was the problem of the Ionic natural philosophers. One proposes as a solution, water, another, air, and a third, an original chaotic matter.

2. The Pythagoreans attempted a higher solution of this problem. The proportions and dimensions of matter rather than its sensible concretions, seemed to them to furnish the true explanation of being. They, accordingly, adopted as the principle of their philosophy, that which would express a determination of proportions, i. e. numbers. “Number is the essence of all things,” was their position. Number is the mean between the immediate sensuous intuition and the pure thought. Number and measure have, to be sure, nothing to do with matter only in so far as it possesses extension, and is capable of division in space and time, but yet we should have no numbers or measures if there were no matter, or nothing which could meet the intuitions of our sense. This elevation above matter, which is at the same time a cleaving to matter, constitutes the essence and the character of Pythagoreanism.

3. Next come the Eleatics, who step absolutely beyond that which is given in experience, and make a complete abstraction of every thing material. This abstraction, this negation of all division in space and time, they take as their principle, and call it pure being. Instead of the sensuous principle of the Ionics, or the symbolic principle of the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, therefore, adopt an intelligible principle.

4. Herewith closes the analytic, the first course in the development of Grecian philosophy, to make way for the second, or synthetic course. The Eleatics had sacrificed to their principle of pure being, the existence of the world and every finite existence. But the denial of nature and the world could not be maintained. The reality of both forced itself upon the attention, and even the Eleatics had affirmed it, though in guarded and hypothetical terms. But from their abstract being there was no passage back to the sensuous and concrete; their principle ought to have explained the being of events, but it did not. To find a principle for the explanation of these, a principle which would account for the becoming, the event was still the problem. Heraclitus solved it, by asserting that, inasmuch as being has no more reality than not being, therefore the unity of the two, or in other words the becoming, is the absolute principle. He held that it belonged to the very essence of finite being that it be conceived in a continual flow, in an endless stream. “Every thing flows.” We have here the conception of original energy, instead of the Ionic original matter; the first attempt to explain being and its motion from a principle analytically attained. From the time of Heraclitus, this inquiry after the cause of the becoming, remained the chief interest and the moving spring of philosophical development.

5. Becoming is the unity of being and not-being, and into these two elements is the Heraclitic principle consciously analyzed by the Atomists. Heraclitus had uttered the principle of the becoming, but only as a fact of experience. He had simply expressed it as a law, but had not explained it. The necessity for this universal law yet remained to be proved. WHY is every thing in a perpetual flow—in an eternal movement? From the dynamical combination of matter and the moving force, the next step was to a consciously determined distinction, to a mechanical division of the two. Thus Empedocles combining the doctrines of Heraclitus and Parmenides, considered matter as the abiding being, while force was the ground of the movement. But the Atomists still considered the moving mythic energies as forces; Empedocles regarded them as love and hate; and Democritus as unconscious necessity. The result was, therefore, that the becoming was rather limited as a means for the mechanical explanation of nature, than itself explained.

6. Despairing of any merely materialistic explanation of the becoming, Anaxagoras next appears, and places a world-forming Intelligence by the side of matter. He recognized mind as the primal causality, to which the existence of the world, together with its determined arrangement and design (zweckmässigkeit) must be referred. In this, philosophy gained a great principle, viz.— an ideal one. But Anaxagoras did not know how to fully carry out his principles. Instead of a theoretical comprehension of the universe—instead of deriving being from the idea, he grasped again after some mechanical explanation. His “world-forming reason” serves him only as a first impulse, only as a moving power. It is to him a Deus ex machina. Notwithstanding, therefore, his glimpse of something higher than matter, yet was Anaxagoras only a physical philosopher, like his predecessors. Mind had not yet appeared to him as a true force above nature, as an organizing soul of the universe.

7. It is, therefore, a farther progress in thought, to comprehend accurately the distinction between mind and nature, and to recognize mind as something higher and contra-distinguished from all natural being. This problem fell to the Sophists. They entangled in contradictions, the thinking which had been confined to the object, to that which was given, and gave to the objective world which had before been exalted above the subject, a subordinate position in the dawning and yet infantile consciousness of the superiority of subjective thinking. The Sophists carried their principle of subjectivity, though at first this was only negative, into the form of the universal religious and political changing condition (Aufklärung).[1] They stood forth as the destroyers of the whole edifice of thought that had been thus far built, until Socrates appeared, and set up against this principle of empirical subjectivity, that of the absolute subjectivity,—that of the spirit in the form of a free moral will, and the thought is positively considered as something higher than existence, as the truth of all reality. With the Sophist closes our first period, for with these the oldest philosophy finds its self-destruction (Selbstauflösung).

SECTION IV.
THE IONIC PHILOSOPHERS.

1. Thales.—At the head of the Ionic natural philosophers, and therefore at the head of philosophy, the ancients are generally agreed in placing Thales of Miletus, a cotemporary of Crœsus and Solon; although this beginning lies more in the region of tradition than of history. The philosophical principle to which he owes his place in the history of philosophy is, that, “the principle (the primal, the original ground) of all things is water; from water every thing arises and into water every thing returns.” But simply to assume water as the original ground of things was not to advance beyond his myth-making predecessors and their cosmologies. Aristotle, himself, when speaking of Thales, refers to the old “theologians,”—meaning, doubtless, Homer and Hesiod,—who had ascribed to Oceanus and Thetis, the origin of all things. Thales, however, merits his place as the beginner of philosophy, because he made the first attempt to establish his physical principle, without resorting to a mythical representation, and, therefore, brought into philosophy a scientific procedure. He is the first who has placed his foot upon the ground of a logical (verständig) explanation of nature. We cannot now say with certainty, how he came to adopt his principle, though he might have been led to it, by perceiving that dampness belonged to the seed and nourishment of things; that warmth is developed from moisture; and that, generally, moisture might be the plastic, living and life-giving principle. From the condensation and expansion of this first principle, he derives, as it seems, the changes of things, though the way in which this is done, he has not accurately determined.

The philosophical significance of Thales does not appear to extend any farther. He was not a speculative philosopher after a later mode. Philosophical book-making was not at all the order of his day, and he does not seem to have given any of his opinions a written form. On account of his ethico-political wisdom, he is numbered among the so-named “seven wise men,” and the characteristics which the ancients furnish concerning him only testify to his practical understanding. He is said e. g. to have first calculated an eclipse of the sun, to have superintended the turning of the course of the Halys under Crœsus, &c. When subsequent narrators relate that he had asserted the unity of the world, had set up the idea of a world-soul, and had taught the immortality of the soul and the personality of God, it is doubtless an unhistorical reference of later ideas to a standpoint, which was, as yet, far from being developed.

2. Anaximander.—Anaximander, sometimes represented by the ancients as a scholar and sometimes as a companion of Thales, but who was, at all events, younger than the latter, sought to carry out still farther his principles. The original essence which he assumed, and which he is said to have been the first to have named principle (ἀρχὴ), he defined as the “unlimited, eternal and unconditioned,” as that which embraced all things and ruled all things, and which, since it lay at the basis of all determinateness of the finite and the changeable, is itself infinite and undeterminate. How we are to regard this original essence of Anaximander is a matter of dispute. Evidently it was not one of the four common elements, though we must not, therefore, think it was something incorporeal and immaterial. Anaximander probably conceived it as the original matter before it had separated into determined elements,—as that which was first in the order of time, or what is in our day called the chemical indifference in the opposition of elements. In this respect his original essence is indeed “unlimited” and “undetermined,” i. e. has no determination of quality nor limit of quantity, yet it is not, therefore, in any way, a pure dynamical principle, as perhaps the “friendship” and “enmity” of Empedocles might have been, but it was only a more philosophical expression for the same thought, which the old cosmogonies have attempted to utter in their representation of chaos. Accordingly, Anaximander suffers the original opposition of cold and warm, of dry and moist (i. e. the basis of the four elements) to be secreted from his original essence, a clear proof that it was only the undeveloped, unanalyzed, potential being of these elemental opposites.

3. Anaximenes.—Anaximenes, who is called by some the scholar, and by others the companion of Anaximander, turned back more closely to the view of Thales, in that he made air as the principle of all things. The perception that air surrounds the whole world, and that breath conditions the activity of life, seems to have led him to his position.

4. Retrospect.—The whole philosophy of the three Ionic sages may be reduced to these three points, viz:—(1.) They sought for the universal essence of concrete being; (2.) They found this essence in a material substance or substratum; (3.) They gave some intimation respecting the derivation of the elements from this original matter.

SECTION V.
PYTHAGOREANISM.

1. Its Relative Position.—The development of the Ionic philosophy discloses the tendency to abstract matter from all else; though they directed this process solely to the determined quality of matter. It is this abstraction carried to a higher step, when we look away from the sensible concretions of matter, and no more regard its qualitative determinateness as water, air, &c., but only direct our attention to its quantitative determinateness,—to its space-filling property. But the determinateness of quantity is number, and this is the principle and standpoint of Pythagoreanism.

2. Historical and Chronological.—The Pythagorean doctrine of numbers is referred to Pythagoras of Samos, who is said to have flourished between 540 and 500 B. C. He dwelt in the latter part of his life at Crotonia, in Magna Grecia, where he founded a society, or, more properly, an order, for the moral and political regeneration of the lower Italian cities. Through this society, this new direction of philosophy seems to have been introduced,—though more as a mode of life than in the form of a scientific theory. What is related concerning the life of Pythagoras, his journeys, the new order which he founded, his political influence upon the lower Italian cities, &c., is so thoroughly interwoven with traditions, legends, and palpable fabrications, that we can be certain at no point that we stand upon a historical basis. Not only the old Pythagoreans, who have spoken of him, delighted in the mysterious and esoteric, but even his new-Platonistic biographers, Porphyry and Jamblichus, have treated his life as a historico-philosophical romance. We have the same uncertainty in reference to his doctrines, i. e. in reference to his share in the number-theory. Aristotle, e. g. does not ascribe this to Pythagoras himself, but only to the Pythagoreans generally, i. e. to their school. The accounts which are given respecting his school have no certainty till the time of Socrates, a hundred years after Pythagoras. Among the few sources of light which we have upon this subject, are the mention made in Plato’s Phædon of the Pythagorean Philolaus and his doctrines, and the writings of Archytas, a cotemporary of Plato. We possess in fact the Pythagorean doctrine only in the manner in which it was taken up by Philolaus, Eurytas and Archytas, since its earlier adherents left nothing in a written form.

3. The Pythagorean Principle.—The ancients are united in affirming that the principle of the Pythagorean philosophy was number. But in what sense was this their principle—in a material or a formal sense? Did they hold number as the material of things, i. e. did they believe that things had their origin in numbers, or did they regard it as the archetype of things, i. e. did they believe that things were made as the copy or the representation of numbers? From this very point the accounts given by the ancients diverge, and even the expressions of Aristotle seem to contradict each other. At one time he speaks of Pythagoreanism in the former, and at another in the latter sense. From this circumstance modern scholars have concluded that the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers had different forms of development; that some of the Pythagoreans regarded numbers as the substances and others as the archetypes of things. Aristotle, however, gives an intimation how the two statements may be reconciled with each other. Originally, without doubt, the Pythagoreans regarded number as the material, as the inherent essence of things, and therefore Aristotle places them together with the Hylics (the Ionic natural philosophers), and says of them that “they held things for numbers” (Metaph. I., 5, 6). But as the Hylics did not identify their matter, e. g. water, immediately with the sensuous thing, but only gave it out as the fundamental element, as the original form of the individual thing, so, on the other side, numbers also might be regarded as similar fundamental types, and therefore Aristotle might say of the Pythagoreans, that “they held numbers to be the corresponding original forms of being, as water, air, &c.” But if there still remains a degree of uncertainty in the expressions of Aristotle respecting the sense of the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers, it can only have its ground in the fact that the Pythagoreans did not make any distinction between a formal and material principle, but contented themselves with the undeveloped view, that, “number is the essence of things, every thing is number.”

4. The carrying-out of this Principle.—From the very nature of the “number-principle,” it follows that its complete application to the province of the real, can only lead to a fruitless and empty symbolism. If we take numbers as even and odd, and still farther as finite and infinite, and apply them as such to astronomy, music, psychology, ethics, &c., there arise combinations like the following, viz.: one is the point, two are the line, three are the superficies, four are the extension of a body, five are the condition (beschaffenheit), &c.—still farther, the soul is a musical harmony, as is also virtue, the soul of the world, &c. Not only the philosophical, but even the historical interest here ceases, since the ancients themselves—as was unavoidable from the arbitrary nature of such combinations—have given the most contradictory account, some affirming that the Pythagoreans reduced righteousness to the number three, others, that they reduced it to the number four, others again to five, and still others to nine. Naturally, from such a vague and arbitrary philosophizing, there would early arise, in this, more than in other schools, a great diversity of views, one ascribing this signification to a certain mathematical form, and another that. In this mysticism of numbers, that which alone has truth and value, is the thought, which lies at the ground of it all, that there prevails in the phenomena of nature a rational order, harmony and conformity to law, and that these laws of nature can be represented in measure and number. But this truth has the Pythagorean school hid under extravagant fancies, as vapid as they are unbridled.

The physics of the Pythagoreans possesses little scientific value, with the exception of the doctrine taught by Philolaus respecting the circular motion of the earth. Their ethics is also defective. What we have remaining of it relates more to the Pythagorean life, i. e. to the practice and discipline of their order than to their philosophy. The whole tendency of Pythagoreanism was in a practical respect ascetic, and directed to a strict culture of the character. As showing this, we need only to cite their doctrines concerning the transmigration of the soul, or, as it has been called, their “immortality doctrine,” their notion in respect of the lower world, their opposition to suicide, and their view of the body as the prison of the soul—all of which ideas are referred to in Plato’s Phædon, and the last two of which are indicated as belonging to Philolaus.

SECTION VI.
THE ELEATICS.

1. Relation of the Eleatic Principle to the Pythagorean.—While the Pythagoreans had made matter, in so far as it is quantity and the manifold, the basis of their philosophizing, and while in this they only abstracted from the determined elemental condition of matter, the Eleatics carry the process to its ultimate limit, and make, as the principle of their philosophy, a total abstraction from every finite determinateness, from every change and vicissitude which belongs to concrete being. While the Pythagoreans had held fast to the form of being as having existence in space and time, the Eleatics reject this, and make as their fundamental thought the negation of all exterior and posterior. Only being is, and there is no not-being, nor becoming. This being is the purely undetermined, changeless ground of all things. It is not being in becoming, but it is being as exclusive of all becoming; in other words, it is pure being.

Eleaticism is, therefore, Monism, in so far as it strove to carry back the manifoldness of all being to a single ultimate principle; but on the other hand it becomes Dualism, in so far as it could neither carry out its denial of concrete existence, i. e., the phenomenal world, nor yet derive the latter from its presupposed original ground. The phenomenal world, though it might be explained as only an empty appearance, did yet exist; and, since the sensuous perception would not ignore this, there must be allowed it, hypothetically at least, the right of existence. Its origin must be explained, even though with reservations. This contradiction of an unreconciled Dualism between being and existence, is the point where the Eleatic philosophy is at war with itself—though, in the beginning of the school—with Xenophanes, it does not yet appear. The principle itself, with its results, is only fully apparent in the lapse of time. It has three periods of formation, which successively appear in three successive generations. Its foundation belongs to Xenophanes; its systematic formation to Parmenides; its completion and partial dissolution to Zeno and Melissus—the latter of whom we can pass by.

2. Xenophanes.—Xenophanes is considered as the originator of the Eleatic tendency. He was born at Colophon; emigrated to Elea, a Phocian colony in Lucania, and was a younger cotemporary of Pythagoras. He appears to have first uttered the proposition—“every thing is one,” without, however, giving any more explicit determination respecting this unity, whether it be one simply in conception or in actuality. Turning his attention, says Aristotle, upon the world as a whole, he names the unity which he finds, God. God is the One. The Eleatic “One and All” (ἒν καὶ πᾶν) had, therefore, with Xenophanes, a theological and religious character. The idea of the unity of God, and an opposition to the anthropomorphism of the ordinary views of religion, is his starting point. He declaimed against the delusion that the gods were born, that they had a human voice or form, and railed at the robbery, adultery, and deceit of the gods as sung by Homer and Hesiod. According to him the Godhead is wholly seeing, wholly understanding, wholly hearing, unmoved, undivided, calmly ruling all things by his thought, like men neither in form nor in understanding. In this way, with his thought turned only towards removing from the Godhead all finite determinations and predicates, and holding fast to its unity and unchangeableness, he declared this doctrine of its being to be the highest philosophical principle, without however directing this principle polemically against the doctrine of finite being, or carrying it out in its negative application.

3. Parmenides.—The proper head of the Eleatic school is Parmenides of Elea, a scholar, or at least an adherent of Xenophanes. Though we possess but little reliable information respecting the circumstances of his life, yet we have, in inverse proportion, the harmonious voice of all antiquity in an expression of reverence for the Eleatic sage, and of admiration for the depth of his mind, as well as for the earnestness and elevation of his character. The saying—“a life like Parmenides,” became afterwards a proverb among the Greeks.

Parmenides embodied his philosophy in an epic poem, of which we have still important fragments. It is divided into two parts. In the first he discusses the conception of being. Rising far above the yet unmediated view of Xenophanes, he attains a conception of pure single being, which he sets up as absolutely opposed to every thing manifold and changeable, i. e., to that which has no being, and which consequently cannot be thought. From this conception of being he not only excludes all becoming and departing, but also all relation to space and time, all divisibility and movement. This being he explains as something which has not become and which does not depart, as complete and of its own kind, as unalterable and without limit, as indivisible and present though not in time, and since all these are only negative, he ascribes to it, also, as a positive determination—thought. Being and thought are therefore identical with Parmenides. This pure thought, directed to the pure being, he declares is the only true and undeceptive knowledge, in opposition to the deceptive notions concerning the manifoldness and mutability of the phenomenal. He has no hesitancy in holding that to be only a name which mortals regard as truth, viz., becoming and departing, being and not-being, change of place and vicissitude of circumstance. We must therefore be careful not to hold “the One” of Parmenides, as the collective unity of all concrete being.

So much for the first part of Parmenides’ poem. After the principle that there is only being has been developed according to its negative and positive determinations, we might believe that the system was at an end. But there follows a second part, which is occupied solely with the hypothetical attempt to explain the phenomenal world and give it a physical derivation. Though firmly convinced that, according to reason and conception, there is only “the One,” yet is Parmenides unable to withdraw himself from the recognition of an appearing manifoldness and change. Forced, therefore, by his sensuous perception to enter upon a discussion of the phenomenal world, he prefaces this second part of his poem with the remark, that he had now closed what he had to say respecting the truth, and was hereafter to deal only with the opinion of a mortal. Unfortunately, this second part has been very imperfectly transmitted to us. Enough however remains to show, that he explained the phenomena of nature from the mingling of two unchangeable elements, which Aristotle, though apparently only by way of example, indicates as warm and cold, fire and earth. Concerning these two elements, Aristotle remarks still farther that Parmenides united the warmth with being, and the other element with not-being.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that between the two parts of the Parmenidean philosophy—between the doctrine concerning being and the doctrine concerning appearance—there can exist no inner scientific connection. What Parmenides absolutely denies in the first part, and indeed declares to be unutterable, viz., the not-being, the many and the changeable, he yet in the second part admits to have an existence at least in the representation of men. But it is clear that the not-being cannot once exist in the representation, if it does not exist generally and every where, and that the attempt to explain a not-being of the representation, is in complete contradiction with his exclusive recognition of being. This contradiction, this unmediated juxtaposition of being and not-being, of the one and the many, Zeno, a scholar of Parmenides, sought to remove, by affirming that from the very conception of being, the sensuous representation, and thus the world of the not-being, are dialectically annihilated.

4. Zeno.—The Eleatic Zeno was born about 500 B. C.; was a scholar of Parmenides, and the earliest prose writer among the Grecian philosophers. He is said to have written in the form of dialogues. He perfected, dialectically, the doctrine of his master, and carried out to the completest extent the abstraction of the Eleatic One, in opposition to the manifoldness and determinateness of the finite. He justified the doctrine of a single, simple, and unchangeable being, in a polemical way, by showing up the contradictions into which the ordinary representations of the phenomenal world become involved. While Parmenides affirms that there is only the One, Zeno shows in his well-known proofs (which unfortunately we cannot here more widely unfold), that the many, the changing, that which has relation to space, or that which has relation to time, is not. While Parmenides affirmed the being, Zeno denied the appearance. On account of these proofs, in which Zeno takes up the conceptions of extension, manifoldness and movement, and shows their inner contradictory nature, Aristotle names him the founder of dialectics.

While the philosophizing of Zeno is the completion of the Eleatic principle, so is it at the same time the beginning of its dissolution. Zeno had embraced the opposition of being and existence, of the one and the many, so abstractly, and had carried it so far, that with him the inner contradiction of the Eleatic principle comes forth still more boldly than with Parmenides; for the more logical he is in the denial of the phenomenal world, so much the more striking must be the contradiction, of turning, on the one side, his whole philosophical activity to the refutation of the sensuous representation, while, on the other side, he sets over against it a doctrine which destroys the very possibility of a false representation.

SECTION VII.
HERACLITUS.

1. Relation of the Heraclitic Principle to the Eleatic.—Being and existence, the one and the many, could not be united by the principle of the Eleatics; the Monism which they had striven for had resulted in an ill-concealed Dualism. Heraclitus reconciled this contradiction by affirming that being and not-being, the one and the many, existed at the same time as the becoming. While the Eleatics could not extricate themselves from the dilemma that the world is either being or not-being, Heraclitus removes the difficulty by answering—it is neither being nor not-being, because it is both.

2. Historical and Chronological.—Heraclitus, surnamed by later writers the mystic, was born at Ephesus, and flourished about 500 B. C. His period was subsequent to that of Xenophanes, though partially cotemporary with that of Parmenides. He laid down his philosophical thoughts in a writing “Concerning Nature,” of which we possess only fragments. Its rapid transitions, its expressions so concise, and full of meaning, the general philosophical peculiarity of Heraclitus, and the antique character of the earliest prose writings, all combine to make this work so difficult to be understood that it has long been a proverb. Socrates said concerning it, that “what he understood of it was excellent, and he had no doubt that what he did not understand was equally good; but the book requires an expert swimmer.” Later Stoics and Academicians have written commentaries upon it.

3. The Principle of the Becoming.—The ancients unite in ascribing to Heraclitus the principle that the totality of things should be conceived in an eternal flow, in an uninterrupted movement and transformation, and that all continuance of things is only appearance. “Into the same stream,” so runs a saying of Heraclitus, “we descend, and at the same time we do not descend; we are, and also we are not. For into the same stream we cannot possibly descend twice, since it is always scattering and collecting itself again, or rather it at the same time flows to us and from us.” There is, therefore, ground for the assertion that Heraclitus had banished all rest and continuance from the totality of things; and it is doubtless in this very respect that he accuses the eye and the ear of deception, because they reveal to men a continuance where there is only an uninterrupted change.

Heraclitus has analyzed the principle of the becoming still more closely, in the propositions which he utters, to account for the origin of things, where he shows that all becoming must be conceived as the product of warring opposites, as the harmonious union of opposite determinations. Hence his two well-known propositions: “Strife is the father of things,” and “The One setting itself at variance with itself, harmonizes with itself, like the harmony of the bow and the viol.” “Unite,” so runs another of his sayings, “the whole and the not-whole, the coalescing and the not-coalescing, the harmonious and the discordant, and thus we have the one becoming from the all, and the all from the one.”

4. The Principle of Fire.—In what relation does the principle of fire, which is also ascribed to Heraclitus, stand to the principle of the becoming? Aristotle says that he took fire as his principle, in the same way that Thales took water, and Anaximenes took air. But it is clear we must not interpret this to mean that Heraclitus regarded fire as the original material or fundamental element of things, after the manner of the Ionics. If he ascribed reality only to the becoming, it is impossible that he should have set by the side of this becoming, yet another elemental matter as a fundamental substance. When, therefore, Heraclitus calls the world an ever-living fire, which in certain stages and certain degrees extinguishes and again enkindles itself, when he says that every thing can be exchanged for fire, and fire for every thing, just as we barter things for gold and gold for things, he can only mean thereby that fire represents the abiding power of this eternal transformation and transposition, in other words, the conception of life, in the most obvious and effective way. We might name fire, in the Heraclitic sense, the symbol or the manifestation of the becoming, but that it is also with him the substratum of movement, i. e. the means with which the power of movement, which is antecedent to all matter, serves it self in order to bring out the living process of things. In the same way Heraclitus goes on to explain the manifoldness of things, by affirming that they arise from certain hindrances and a partial extinction of this fire. The product of its extremest hindrance is the earth, and the other things lie intermediately between.

5. Transition To the Atomists.—We have above regarded the Heraclitic principle as the consequent of the Eleatic, but we might as properly consider the two as antitheses. While Heraclitus destroys all abiding being in an absolutely flowing becoming, so, on the other hand, Parmenides destroys all becoming in an absolutely abiding being; and while the former charges the eye and the ear with deception, in that they transform the flowing becoming into a quiescent being, the latter also accuses these same senses of an untrue representation, in that they draw the abiding being into the movement of the becoming. We can therefore say that the being and the becoming are equally valid antitheses, which demand again a synthesis and reconciliation. But now can we say that Heraclitus actually and satisfactorily solved the problem of Zeno? Zeno had shown every thing actual to be a contradiction, and from this had inferred their not-being, and it is only in this inference that Heraclitus deviates from the Eleatics. He also regarded the phenomenal world as an existing contradiction, but he clung to this contradiction as to an ultimate fact. That which had been the negative result of the Eleatics, he uttered as his positive principle. The dialectics which Zeno had subjectively used against the phenomenal, he directed objectively as a proof for the becoming. But this becoming which the Eleatics had thought themselves obliged to deny entirely, Heraclitus did not explain by simply asserting that it was the only true principle. The question continually returned—why is all being a becoming? Why does the one go out over into the many? To give an answer to this question, i. e. to explain the becoming from the presupposed principle of being, forms the standpoint and problem of the Empedoclean and Atomistic philosophy.

SECTION VIII.
EMPEDOCLES.

1. General View.—Empedocles was born at Agrigentum, and is extolled by the ancients as a natural philosopher, physician and poet, and also as a seer and worker of miracles. He flourished about 440 B. C., and was consequently younger than Parmenides and Heraclitus. He wrote a doctrinal poem concerning nature, which has been preserved to us in tolerably complete fragments. His philosophical system may be characterized in brief, as an attempt to combine the Eleatic being and the Heraclitic becoming. Starting with the Eleatic thought, that neither any thing which had previously been could become, nor any thing which now is could depart, he sets up as unchangeable being, four eternal original materials, which, though divisible, were independent, and underived from each other. In this we have what in our day are called the four elements. With this Eleatic thought he united also the Heraclitic view of nature, and suffered his four elements to become mingled together, and to receive a form by the working of two moving powers, which he names unifying friendship and dividing strife. Originally, these four elements were absolutely alike and unmovable, dwelling together in a divine sphere where friendship united them, until gradually strife pressing from the circumference to the centre of the sphere (i. e. attaining a separating activity), broke this union, and the formation of the world immediately began as the result.

2. The Four Elements.—With his doctrine of the four elements, Empedocles, on the one side, may be joined to the series of the Ionic philosophers, but, on the other, he is excluded from this by his assuming the original elements to be four. He is distinctly said by the ancients to have originated the theory of the four elements. He is more definitely distinguished from the old Ionics, from the fact that he ascribed to his four “root-elements” a changeless being, by virtue of which they neither arose from each other nor departed into each other, and were capable of no change of essence but only of a change of state. Every thing which is called arising and departing, every change rests therefore only upon the mingling and withdrawing of these eternal and fundamental materials; the inexhaustible manifoldness of being rests upon the different proportions in which these elements are mingled. Every becoming is conceived as such only as a change of place. In this we have a mechanical in opposition to a dynamic explanation of nature.

3. The Two Powers.—Whence now can arise any becoming, if in matter itself there is found no principle to account for the change? Since Empedocles did not, like the Eleatics, deny that there was change, nor yet, like Heraclitus, introduce it in his matter, as an indwelling principle, so there was no other course left him but to place, by the side of his matter, a moving power. The opposition of the one and the many which had been set up by his predecessors, and which demanded an explanation, led him to ascribe to this moving power, two originally diverse directions, viz.: repulsion and attraction. The separation of the one into the many, and the union again of the many into the one, had indicated an opposition of powers which Heraclitus had already recognized. While now Parmenides starting from the one had made love as his principle, and Heraclitus starting from the many had made strife as his, Empedocles combines the two as the principle of his philosophy. The difficulty is, he has not sufficiently limited in respect to one another, the sphere of operation of these two directions of his power. Although, to friendship belonged peculiarly the attractive, and to strife the repelling function, yet does Empedocles, on the other hand, suffer his strife to have in the formation of the world a unifying, and his friendship a dividing effect. In fact, the complete separation of a dividing and unifying power in the movement of the becoming, is an unmaintainable abstraction.

4. Relation of the Empedoclean to the Eleatic and Heraclitic Philosophy.—Empedocles, by placing, as the principle of the becoming, a moving power by the side of his matter, makes his philosophy a mediation of the Eleatic and Heraclitic principles, or more properly a placing of them side by side. He has interwoven these two principles in equal proportions in his system. With the Eleatics he denied all arising and departing, i. e. the transition of being into not-being and of not-being into being, and with Heraclitus he shared the interest to find an explanation for change. From the former he derived the abiding, unchangeable being of his fundamental matter, and from the latter the principle of the moving power. With the Eleatics, in fine, he considered the true being in an original and indistinguishable unity as a sphere, and with Heraclitus, he regarded the present world as a constant product of striving powers and oppositions. He has, therefore, been properly called an Eclectic, who has united the fundamental thoughts of his two predecessors, though not always in a logical way.

SECTION IX.
THE ATOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY.

1. Its Propounders.—Empedocles had sought to effect a combination of the Eleatic and Heraclitic principle—the same was attempted, though in a different way, by the Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus. Democritus, the better known of the two, was the son of rich parents, and was born about 460 B. C. in Abdera, an Ionian colony. He travelled extensively, and no Greek before the time of Aristotle possessed such varied attainments. He embodied the wealth of his collected knowledge in a series of writings, of which, however, only a few fragments have come down to us. For rhythm and elegance of language, Cicero compared him with Plato. He died in a good old age.

2. The Atoms.—Empedocles derived all determinateness of the phenomenal from a certain number of qualitatively determined and undistinguishable original materials, while the Atomists derived the same from an originally unlimited number of constituent elements, or atoms, which were homogeneous in respect of quality, but diverse in respect of form. These atoms are unchangeable, material particles, possessing indeed extension, but yet indivisible, and can only be determined in respect of magnitude. As being, and without quality, they are entirely incapable of any transformation or qualitative change, and, therefore, all becoming is, as with Empedocles, only a change of place. The manifoldness of the phenomenal world is only to be explained from the different form, disposition, and arrangement of the atoms as they become, in various ways, united.

3. The Fulness and the Void.—The atoms, in order to be atoms, i. e. undivided and impenetrable unities,—must be mutually limited and separated. There must be something set over against them which preserves them as atoms, and which is the original cause of their separateness and impenetrability. This is the void space, or more strictly the intervals which are found between the atoms, and which hinder their mutual contact. The atoms, as being and absolute fulness, and the interval between them, as the void and the not-being, are two determinations which only represent in a real and objective way, what are in thought, as logical conceptions, the two elements in the Heraclitic becoming, viz. being and the not-being. But since the void space is one determination of being, it must possess objective reality no less than the atoms, and Democritus even went so far as to expressly affirm in opposition to the Eleatics, that being is no more than nothing.

4. The Atomistic Necessity.—Democritus, like Empedocles, though far more extensively than he, attempted to answer the question—whence arise these changes and movements which we behold? Wherein lies the ground that the atoms should enter into these manifold combinations, and bring forth such a wealth of inorganic and organic forms? Democritus attempted to solve the problem by affirming that the ground of movement lay in the gravity or original condition of the material particles, and, therefore, in the matter itself, but in this way he only talked about the question without answering it. The idea of an infinite series of causalities was thus attained, but not a final ground of all the manifestations of the becoming, and of change. Such a final ground was still to be sought, and as Democritus expressly declared that it could not lie in an ultimate reason νοῦς, where Anaxagoras placed it, there only remained for him to find it in an absolute necessity, or a necessary pre-determinateness ἀνάγκη. This he adopted as his “final ground,” and is said to have named it chance τύχη, in opposition to the inquiry after final causes, or the Anaxagorean teleology. Consequent upon this, we find as the prominent characteristic of the later Atomistic school (Diagoras the Melier), polemics against the gods of the people, and a constantly more publicly affirmed Atheism and Materialism.

5. Relative Position of the Atomistic Philosophy.—Hegel characterizes the relative position of the Atomistic Philosophy as follows, viz.:—“In the Eleatic Philosophy being and not-being stand as antitheses,—being alone is, and not-being is not; in the Heraclitic idea, being and not-being are the same,—both together, i. e. the becoming, are the predicate of concrete being; but being and not-being, as objectively determined, or in other words, as appearing to the sensuous intuition, are precisely the same as the antithesis of the fulness and the void. Parmenides, Heraclitus and the Atomists all sought for the abstract universal; Parmenides found it in being, Heraclitus in the process of being per se, and the Atomists in the determination of being per se.” So much of this as ascribes to the Atomists the characteristic predicate of being per se is doubtless correct,—but the real thought of the Atomistic system is rather analogous with the Empedoclean, to explain the possibility of the becoming, by presupposing these substances as possessing being per se, but without quality. To this end the not-being or the void, i. e. the side which is opposed to the Eleatic principle, is elaborated with no less care than the side which harmonizes with it, i. e. that the atoms are without quality and never change in their original elements. The Atomistic Philosophy is therefore a mediation between the Eleatic and the Heraclitic principles. It is Eleatic in affirming the undivided being per se of the atoms;—Heraclitic, in declaring their multeity and manifoldness. It is Eleatic in the declaration of an absolute fulness in the atoms, and Heraclitic in the claim of a real not-being, i. e. the void space. It is Eleatic in its denial of the becoming, i. e. of the arising and departing,—and Heraclitic in its affirmation that to the atoms belong movement and a capacity for unlimited combinations. The Atomists carried out their leading thought more logically than Empedocles, and we might even say that their system is the perfection of a purely mechanical explanation of nature, since all subsequent Atomists, even to our own day, have only repeated their fundamental conceptions. But the great defect which cleaves to every Atomistic system, Aristotle has justly recognized, when he shows that it is a contradiction, on the one hand, to set up something corporeal or space-filling as indivisible, and on the other, to derive the extended from that which has no extension, and that the consciousless and inconceivable necessity of Democritus is especially defective, in that it totally banishes from nature all conception of design. This is the point to which Anaxagoras turns his attention, and introduces his principle of an intelligence working with design.

SECTION X.
ANAXAGORAS.

1. His Personal History.—Anaxagoras is said to have been born at Clazamena, about the year 500 B. C.; to have gone to Athens immediately, or soon after the Persian war, to have lived and taught there for a long time, and, finally, accused of irreverence to the gods, to have fled, and died at Lampsacus, at the age of 72. He it was who first planted philosophy at Athens, which from this time on became the centre of intellectual life in Greece. Through his personal relations to Pericles, Euripides, and other important men,—among whom Themistocles and Thucydides should be named—he exerted a decisive influence upon the culture of the age. It was on account of this that the charge of defaming the gods was brought against him, doubtless by the political opponents of Pericles. Anaxagoras wrote a work “Concerning Nature” which in the time of Socrates was widely circulated.

2. His Relation to his Predecessors.—The system of Anaxagoras starts from the same point with his predecessors, and is simply another attempt at the solution of the same problem. Like Empedocles and the Atomists so did Anaxagoras most vehemently deny the becoming. “The becoming and departing,”—so runs one of his sayings—“the Greeks hold without foundation, for nothing can ever be said to become or depart; but, since existing things may be compounded together and again divided, we should name the becoming more correctly a combination, and the departing a separation.” From this view, that every thing arose by the mingling of different elements, and departed by the withdrawing of these elements, Anaxagoras, like his predecessors, was obliged to separate matter from the moving power. But though his point of starting was the same, yet was his direction essentially different from that of any previous philosopher. It was clear that neither Empedocles nor Democritus had satisfactorily apprehended the moving power. The mythical energies of love and hate of the one, or the unconscious necessity of the other, explained nothing, and least of all, the design of the becoming in nature. The conception of an activity which could thus work designedly, must, therefore, be brought into the conception of the moving power, and this Anaxagoras accomplished by setting up the idea of a world-forming intelligence (νοῦς), absolutely separated from all matter and working with design.

3. The Principle of the νοῦς.—Anaxagoras described this intelligence as free to dispose, unmingled with any thing, the ground of movement, but itself unmoved, every where active, and the most refined and pure of all things. Although these predicates rest partly upon a physical analogy, and do not exhibit purely the conception of immateriality, yet on the other hand does the attribute of thought and of a conscious acting with design admit no doubt to remain of the decided idealistic character of the Anaxagorean principle. Nevertheless, Anaxagoras went no farther than to enunciate his fundamental thought without attempting its complete application. The explanation of this is obvious from the reasons which first led him to adopt his principle. It was only the need of an original cause of motion, to which also might be attributed the capacity to work designedly, which had led him to the idea of an immaterial principle. His νοῦς, therefore, is almost nothing but a mover of matter, and in this function nearly all its activity is expended. Hence the universal complaint of the ancients, especially of Plato and Aristotle, respecting the mechanical character of his doctrine. In Plato’s Phædon Socrates relates that, in the hope of being directed beyond a simple occasioning, or mediate cause, he had turned to the book of Anaxagoras, but had found there only a mechanical instead of a truly teleological explanation of being. And as Plato so also does Aristotle find fault with Anaxagoras in that, while he admits mind as the ultimate ground of things, he yet resorts to it only as to a Deus ex machina for the explanation of phenomena, whose necessity he could not derive from the causality in nature. Anaxagoras, therefore, has rather postulated than proved mind as an energy above nature, and as the truth and actuality of natural being.

The further extension of his system, his doctrine concerning the homoiomeria (constituent elements of things), which according to him existed together originally in a chaotic condition until with their separation and parting the formation of the world began—can here only be mentioned.

4. Anaxagoras as the Close of the pre-Socratic Realism.—With the Anaxagorean principle of the νοῦς, i. e. with the acquisition of an absolutely immaterial principle, closes the realistic period of the old Grecian Philosophy. Anaxagoras combined together the principles of all his predecessors. The infinite matter of the Hylics is represented in his chaotic original mingling of things; the Eleatic pure being appears in the idea of the νοῦς; the Heraclitic power of becoming and the Empedoclean moving energies are both seen in the creating and arranging power of the eternal mind, while the Democritic atoms come to view in the homoiomeria. Anaxagoras is the closing point of an old and the beginning point of a new course of development,—the latter through the setting up of his ideal principle, and the former through the defective and completely physical manner in which this principle was yet again applied.

SECTION XI.
THE SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY.

1. Relation of the Sophistic Philosophy to the Anaxagorean Principle.—Anaxagoras had formed the conception of mind, and in this had recognized thought as a power above the objective world. Upon this newly conquered field the Sophistic philosophy now began its gambols, and with childish wantonness delighted itself in setting at work this power, and in destroying, by means of a subjective dialectic, all objective determinations. The Sophistic philosophy—though of far more significance from its relation to the culture of the age than from its philosophy—had for its starting principle the breach which Anaxagoras had commenced between the subjective and the objective,—the Ego and the external world. The subject, after recognizing himself as something higher than the objective world, and especially as something above the laws of the state, above custom and religious tradition and the popular faith, in the next place attempted to prescribe laws for this objective world, and instead of beholding in it the historical manifestation of reason, he looked upon it only as an exanimated matter, upon which he might exercise his will.

The Sophistic philosophy should be characterized as the clearing up reflection. It is, therefore, no philosophical system, for its doctrines and affirmations exhibit often so popular and even trivial a character that for their own sake they would merit no place at all in the history of philosophy. It is also no philosophical school in the ordinary sense of the term,—for Plato cites a vast number of persons under the common name of “Sophists,”—but it is an intellectual and widely spread direction of the age, which had struck its roots into the whole moral, political, and religious character of the Athenian life of that time, and which may be called the Athenian clearing up period.

2. Relation of the Sophistic Philosophy to the Universal Life of that Age.—The Sophistic philosophy is, theoretically, what the whole Athenian life during the Peloponnesian war was practically. Plato justly remarks in his Republic that the doctrines of the Sophists only expressed the very principles which guided the course of the great mass of men of that time in their civil and social relations, and the hatred with which they were pursued by the practical statesmen, clearly indicates the jealousy with which the latter saw in them their rivals and the destroyers of their polity. If the absoluteness of the empirical subject—i. e. the view that the individual Ego can arbitrarily determine what is true, right and good,—is in fact the theoretical principle of the Sophistic philosophy, so does this in a practical direction, as an unlimited Egoism meet us in all the spheres of the public and private life of that age. The public life had become an arena of passion and selfishness; those party struggles which racked Athens during the Peloponnesian war had blunted and stifled the moral feeling; every individual accustomed himself to set up his own private interest above that of the state and the common weal, and to seek in his own arbitrariness and advantage the measuring rod for all his actions. The Protagorean sentence that “the man is the measure of all things” became practically carried out only too faithfully, and the influence of the orator in the assemblies of the people and the courts, the corruptibility of the great masses and their leaders, and the weak points which showed to the adroit student of human nature the covetousness, vanity, and factiousness of others around him, offered only too many opportunities to bring this rule into practice. Custom had lost its weight; the laws were regarded as only an agreement of the majority, the civil ordinance as an arbitrary restriction, the moral feeling as the effect of the policy of the state in education, the faith in the gods as a human invention to intimidate the free power of action, while piety was looked upon as a statute which some men have enacted and which every one else is justified in using all his eloquence to change. This degradation of a necessity, which is conformable to nature and reason, and which is of universal validity,—to an accidental human ordinance, is chiefly the point in which the Sophistic philosophy came in contact with the universal consciousness of the educated class of that period, and we cannot with certainty determine what share science and what share the life may have had in this connection,—whether the Sophistic philosophy found only the theoretical formula for the practical life and tendencies of the age, or whether the moral corruption was rather a consequence of that destructive influence which the principles of the Sophists exerted upon the whole course of contemporaneous thought.

It would be, however, to mistake the spirit of history if we were only to bewail the epoch of the Sophists instead of admitting for it a relative justification. These phenomena were in part the necessary product of the collective development of the age. The faith in the popular religion fell so suddenly to the ground simply because it possessed in itself no inner, moral support. The grossest vices and acts of baseness could all be justified and excused from the examples of mythology. Even Plato himself, though otherwise an advocate of a devout faith in the traditional religion, accuses the poets of his nation with leading the very moral feeling astray, through the unworthy representations which they had spread abroad concerning the gods and the hero world. It was moreover unavoidable that the advancing science should clash with tradition. The physical philosophers had already long lived in open hostility to the popular religion, and the more convincingly they demonstrated by analogies and laws that many things which had hitherto been regarded as the immediate effect of Divine omnipotence, were only the results of natural causes, so much the more easily would it happen that the educated classes would become perplexed in reference to all their previous convictions. It was no wonder then that the transformed consciousness of the time should penetrate all the provinces of art and poesy; that in sculpture, wholly analogous to the rhetoric art of the Sophistic philosophy, the emotive should occupy the place of the elevated style; that Euripides, the sophist among tragedians, should bring the whole philosophy of the time and its manner of moral reflection upon the stage; and that, instead of like the earlier poets, bringing forward his actors to represent an idea, he should use them only as means to excite a momentary emotion or some other stage effect.

3. Tendencies of the Sophistic Philosophy.—To give a definite classification of the Sophistic philosophy, which should be derived from the conception of the general phenomena of the age, is exceedingly difficult, since, like the French “clearing up” of the last century, it entered into every department of knowledge. The Sophists directed the universal culture of the time. Protagoras was known as a teacher of virtue, Gorgias as a rhetorician and politician, Prodicus as a grammarian and teacher of synonyms, Hippias as a man of various attainments, who besides astronomical and mathematical studies busied himself with a theory of mnemonics; others took for their problem the art of education, and others still the explanation of the old poets; the brothers Euthydemus and Dionysidorus gave instruction in the bearing of arms and military tactics; many among them, as Gorgias, Prodicus, and Hippias, were intrusted with embassies: in short the Sophists, each one according to his individual tendency, took upon themselves every variety of calling and entered into every sphere of science; their method is the only thing common to all. Moreover the relation of the Sophists to the educated public, their striving after popularity, fame and money, disclose the fact that their studies and occupations were for the most part controlled, not by a subjective scientific interest, but by some external motive. With that roving spirit which was an essential peculiarity of the later Sophists, travelling from city to city, and announcing themselves as thinkers by profession—and giving their instructions with prominent reference to a good recompense and the favor of the rich private classes, it was very natural that they should discourse upon the prominent questions of universal interest and of public culture, with occasional reference also to the favorite occupation of this or that rich man with whom they might be brought in contact. Hence their peculiar strength lay far more in a formal dexterity, in an acuteness of thought and a capacity of bringing it readily into exercise, in the art of discourse than in any positive knowledge; their instruction in virtue was given either in positive dogmatism or in empty bombast, and even where the Sophistic philosophy became really polymathic, the art of speech still remained as the great thing. So we find in Xenophon, Hippias boasting that he can speak repeatedly upon every subject and say something new each time, while we hear it expressly affirmed of others, that they had no need of positive knowledge in order to discourse satisfactorily upon every thing, and to answer every question extemporaneously; and when many Sophists make it a great point to hold a well-arranged discourse about something of the least possible significance (e. g. salt), so do we see that with them the thing was only a means while the word was the end, and we ought not to be surprised that in this respect the Sophistic philosophy sunk to that empty technicality which Plato in his Phædrus, on account of its want of character, subjects to so rigid a criticism.

4. The Significance of the Sophistic Philosophy from its Relation to the Culture of the Age.—The scientific and moral defect of the Sophistic philosophy is at first view obvious; and, since certain modern writers of history with over-officious zeal have painted its dark sides in black, and raised an earnest accusation against its frivolity, immorality, and greediness for pleasure, its conceitedness and selfishness, and bare appearance of wisdom and art of dispute—it needs here no farther elucidation. But the point in it most apt to be overlooked is the merit of the Sophists in their effect upon the culture of the age. To say, as is done, that they had only the negative merit of calling out the opposition of Socrates and Plato, is to leave the immense influence and the high fame of so many among them, as well as the revolution which they brought about in the thinking of a whole nation, an inexplicable phenomenon. It were inexplicable that e. g. Socrates should attend the lectures of Prodicus, and direct to him other students, if he did not acknowledge the worth of his grammatical performances or recognize his merit for the soundness of his logic. Moreover, it cannot be denied that Protagoras has hit upon many correct principles of rhetoric, and has satisfactorily established certain grammatical categories. Generally may it be said of the Sophists, that they threw among the people a fulness in every department of knowledge; that they strewed about them a vast number of fruitful germs of development; that they called out investigations in the theory of knowledge, in logic and in language; that they laid the basis for the methodical treatment of many branches of human knowledge, and that they partly founded and partly called forth that wonderful intellectual activity which characterized Athens at that time. Their greatest merit is their service in the department of language. They may even be said to have created and formed the Attic prose. They are the first who made style as such a separate object of attention and study, and who set about rigid investigations respecting number and the art of rhetorical representation. With them Athenian eloquence, which they first incited, begins. Antiphon as well as Isocrates—the latter the founder of the most flourishing school of Greek rhetoric—are offshoots of the Sophistic philosophy. In all this there is ground enough to regard this whole phenomenon as not barely a symptom of decay.

5. Individual Sophists.—The first, who is said to have been called, in the received sense, Sophist, is Protagoras of Abdera, who flourished about 440 B. C. He taught, and for wages, in Sicily and in Athens, but was driven out of the latter place as a reviler of the gods, and his book concerning the gods was burnt by the herald in the public market-place. It began with these words: “I can know nothing concerning the gods, whether they exist or not; for we are prevented from gaining such knowledge not only by the obscurity of the thing itself, but by the shortness of the human life,” In another writing he develops his doctrine concerning knowing or not-knowing. Starting from the Heraclitic position that every thing is in a constant flow, and applying this preëminently to the thinking subject, he taught that the man is the measure of all things, who determines in respect of being that it may be, and of not-being that it may not be, i. e. that is true for the perceiving subject which he, in the constant movement of things and of himself, at every moment perceives and is sensible of—and hence he has theoretically no other relation to the external world than the sensuous apprehension, and practically no other than the sensuous desire. But now, since perception and sensation are as diverse as the subjects themselves, and are in the highest degree variable in the very same subject, there follows the farther result that nothing has an objective validity and determination, that contradictory affirmations in reference to the same object must be received as alike true, and that error and contradiction cannot be. Protagoras does not seem to have made any efforts to give these frivolous propositions a practical and logical application. According to the testimony of the ancients, a personal character worthy of esteem, cannot be denied him; and even Plato, in the dialogue which bears his name, goes no farther than to object to his complete obscurity respecting the nature of morality, while, in his Gorgias and Philebus, he charges the later Sophists with affirming the principles of immorality and moral baseness.

Next to Protagoras, the most famous Sophist was Gorgias. During the Peloponnesian war (426 B. C.), he came from Leontium to Athens in order to gain assistance for his native city against the encroachments of Syracuse, After the successful accomplishment of his errand he still abode for some time in Athens, but resided the latter part of his life in Thessaly, where he died about the same time with Socrates. The pompous ostentation of his external appearance is often ridiculed by Plato, and the discourses through which he was wont to exhibit himself display the same character, attempting, through poetical ornament, and florid metaphors, and uncommon words, and a mass of hitherto unheard of figures of speech, to dazzle and delude the mind. As a philosopher he adhered to the Eleatics, especially to Zeno, and attempts to prove upon the basis of their dialectic schematism, that universally nothing is, or if there could be a being, it would not be cognizable, or if cognizable it would not be communicable. Hence his writing bore characteristically enough the title—“Concerning Not-being or Nature.” The proof of the first proposition that universally nothing is, since it can be established neither as being nor as not-being, nor yet as at the same time both being and not-being, rests entirely upon the position that all existence is a space-filling existence (has place and body), and is in fact the final consequence which overturns itself, in other words the self-destruction of the hitherto physical method of philosophizing.

The later Sophists with reckless daring carried their conclusions far beyond Gorgias and Protagoras. They were for the most part free thinkers, who pulled to the ground the religion, laws, and customs of their birth. Among these should be named, prominently, the tyrant Critias, Polus, Callicles, and Thrasymachus. The two latter openly taught the right of the stronger as the law of nature, the unbridled satisfaction of desire as the natural right of the stronger, and the setting up of restraining laws as a crafty invention of the weaker; and Critias, the most talented but the most abandoned of the thirty tyrants, wrote a poem, in which he represented the faith in the gods as an invention of crafty statesmen. Hippias of Elis, a man of great knowledge, bore an honorable character, although he did not fall behind the rest in bombast and boasting; but before all, was Prodicus, in reference to whom it became a proverb to say—“as wise as Prodicus,” and concerning whom Plato himself and even Aristophanes never spoke without veneration. Especially famous among the ancients were his parenetical (persuasive) lectures concerning the choice of a mode of life (Xenophon’s Memorabilia, II. 1), concerning external good and its use, concerning life and death, &c., discourses in which he manifests a refined moral feeling, and his observation of life; although, through the want of a higher ethical and scientific principle, he must be placed behind Socrates, whose forerunner he has been called. The later generations of Sophists, as they are shown in the Euthydemus of Plato, sink to a common level of buffoonery and disgraceful strife for gain, and comprise their whole dialectic art in certain formulæ for entangling fallacies.

6. Transition to Socrates and Characteristic of the Following Period.—That which is true in the Sophistic philosophy is the truth of the subjectivity, of the self-consciousness, i. e. the demand that every thing which I am to admit must be shown as rational before my own consciousness—that which is false in it is its apprehension of this subjectivity as nothing farther than finite, empirical egoistic subjectivity, i. e. the demand that my accidental will and opinion should determine what is rational; its truth is that it set up the principle of freedom, of self-certainty; its untruth is that it established the accidental will and notion of the individual upon the throne. To carry out now the principle of freedom and self-consciousness to its truth, to gain a true world of objective thought with a real and distinct content, by the same means of reflection which the Sophists had only used to destroy it, to establish the objective will, the rational thinking, the absolute or ideal in the place of the empirical subjectivity was the problem of the next advent in philosophy, the problem which Socrates took up and solved. To make the absolute or ideal subjectivity instead of the empirical for a principle, is to affirm that the true measure of all things is not my (i. e. the individual person’s) opinion, fancy and will; that what is true, right and good, does not depend upon my caprice and arbitrary determination, or upon that of any other empirical subject; but while it is my thinking, it is my thinking, the rational within me, which has to decide upon all those points. But my thinking, my reason, is not something specially belonging to me, but something common to every rational being; something universal, and in so far as I am a rational and thinking being, is my subjectivity a universal one. But every thinking individual has the consciousness that what he holds as right, as duty, as good or evil, does not appear as such to him alone but to every rational being, and that consequently his thinking has the character of universality, of universal validity, in a word—of objectivity. This then in opposition to the Sophistic philosophy is the standpoint of Socrates, and therefore with him the philosophy of objective thought begins. What Socrates could do in opposition to the Sophists was to show that reflection led to the same results as faith or obedience, hitherto without reflection, had done, and that the thinking man guided by his free consciousness and his own conviction, would learn to form the same judgments and take the same course to which life and custom had already and unconsciously induced the ordinary man. The position, that while the man is the measure of all things, it is the man as universal, as thinking, as rational, is the fundamental thought of the Socratic philosophy, which is, by virtue of this thought, the positive complement of the Sophistic principle.

With Socrates begins the second period of the Grecian philosophy. This period contains three philosophical systems, whose authors, standing to each other in the personal relation of teacher and pupil, represent three successive generations,—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

SECTION XII.
SOCRATES.[2]

1. His Personal Character.—The new philosophical principle appears in the personal character of Socrates. His philosophy is his mode of acting as an individual; his life and doctrine cannot be separated. His biography, therefore, forms the only complete representation of his philosophy, and what the narrative of Xenophon presents us as the definite doctrine of Socrates, is consequently nothing but an abstract of his inward character, as it found expression from time to time in his conversation. Plato yet more regarded his master as such an archetypal personality, and a luminous exhibition of the historical Socrates is the special object of his later and maturer dialogues, and of these again, the Symposium is the most brilliant apotheosis of the Eros incarnated in the person of Socrates, of the philosophical impulse transformed into character.

Socrates was born in the year 469 B. C, the son of Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and Phænarete, a midwife. In his youth he was trained by his father to follow his own profession, and in this he is said not to have been without skill. Three draped figures of the Graces, called the work of Socrates, were seen by Pausanias, upon the Akropolis. Little farther is known of his education. He may have profited by the instruction of Prodicus and the musician, Damon, but he stood in no personal connection with the proper philosophers, who flourished before, or cotemporaneously with him. He became what he was by himself alone, and just for this reason does he form an era in the old philosophy. If the ancients call him a scholar of Anaxagoras, or of the natural philosopher, Archelaus, the first is demonstrably false, and the second, to say the least, is altogether improbable. He never sought other means of culture than those afforded in his native city. With the exception of one journey to a public festival, the military campaigns which led him as far as Potidæa, Delion, and Amphipolis, he never left Athens.

The period when Socrates first began to devote himself to the education of youth, can be determined only approximately from the time of the first representation of the Clouds of Aristophanes, which was in the year 423. The date of the Delphic oracle, which pronounced him the wisest of men, is not known. But in the traditions of his followers, he is almost uniformly represented as an old, or as a gray-headed man. His mode of instruction, wholly different from the pedantry and boastful ostentation of the Sophists, was altogether unconstrained, conversational, popular, starting from objects lying nearest at hand and the most insignificant, and deriving the necessary illustrations and proofs from the most common matters of every day life; in fact, he was reproached by his cotemporaries for speaking ever only of drudges, smiths, cobblers and tanners. So we find him at the market, in the gymnasia, in the workshops, busy early and late, talking with youth, with young men, and with old men, on the proper aim and business of life, convincing them of their ignorance, and wakening up in them the slumbering desires after knowledge. In every human effort, whether directed to the interests of the commonwealth, or to the private individual and the gains of trade, to science or to art, this master of helps to spiritual births could find fit points of contact for the awakening of a true self-knowledge, and a moral and religions consciousness. However often his attempts failed, or were rejected with bitter scorn, or requited with hatred and unthankfulness, yet, led on by the clear conviction that a real improvement in the condition of the state could come only from a proper education of its youth, he remained to the last true to his chosen vocation. Purely Greek in these relations to the rising generation, he designated himself, by preference, as the most ardent lover; Greek too in this, that with him, notwithstanding these free relations of friendship, his own domestic life fell quite into the background. He nowhere shows much regard for his wife and children; the notorious, though altogether too much exaggerated ill-nature of Xantippe, leads us to suspect, however, that his domestic relations were not the most happy.

As a man, as a practical sage, Socrates is pictured in the brightest colors by all narrators. “He was,” says Xenophon, “so pious, that he did nothing without the advice of the gods; so just, that he never injured any one even in the least; so completely master of himself, that he never chose the agreeable instead of the good; so discerning, that he never failed in distinguishing the better from the worse;” in short, he was “just the best and happiest man possible.” (Xen. Mem. I. 1, 11. IV. 8, 11.) Still that which lends to his person such a peculiar charm, is the happy blending and harmonious connection of all its characteristic traits, the perfection of a beautiful, plastic nature. In all this universality of his genius, in this force of character, by which he combined the most contradictory and incongruous elements into a harmonious whole, in this lofty elevation above every human weakness,—in a word, as a perfect model, he is most strikingly depicted in the brilliant eulogy of Alcibiades, in the Symposium of Plato. In the scantier representation of Xenophon, also, we find everywhere a classic form, a man possessed of the finest social culture, full of Athenian politeness, infinitely removed from every thing like gloomy asceticism, a man as valiant upon the field of battle as in the festive hall, conducting himself with the most unconstrained freedom, and yet with entire sobriety and self-control, a perfect picture of the happiest Athenian time, without the acerbity, the one-sidedness, and contracted reserve of the later moralists, an ideal representation of the genuinely human virtues.

2. Socrates and Aristophanes.—Socrates seems early to have attained universal celebrity through the peculiarities attaching to his person and character. Nature had furnished him with a remarkable external physiognomy. His crooked, turned-up nose, his projecting eye, his bald pate, his corpulent body, gave his form a striking similarity to the Silenic, a comparison which is carried out in Xenophon’s “Feast,” in sprightly jest, and in Plato’s Symposium, with as much ingenuity as profoundness. To this was added his miserable dress, his going barefoot, his posture, his often standing still, and rolling his eyes. After all this, one will hardly be surprised that the Athenian comedy took advantage of such a remarkable character. But there was another and peculiar motive, which influenced Aristophanes. He was a most ardent admirer of the good old times, an enthusiastic eulogist of the manners and the constitution, under which the fathers had been reared. As it was his great object to waken up anew in his people, and to stimulate a longing after those good old times, his passionate hatred broke out against all modern efforts in politics, art and philosophy, of that increasing mock-wisdom, which went hand in hand with a degenerating democracy. Hence comes his bitter railing at Cleon, the Demagogue (in the Knights), at Euripides, the sentimental play-writer (in the Frogs) and at Socrates, the Sophist (in the Clouds). The latter, as the representative of a subtle, destructive philosophy, must have appeared to him just as corrupt and pernicious, as the party of progress in politics, who trampled without conscience upon every thing which had come down from the past. It is, therefore, the fundamental thought of the Clouds to expose Socrates to public contempt, as the representative of the Sophistic philosophy, a mere semblance of wisdom, at once vain, profitless, corrupting in its influence upon the youth, and undermining all true discipline and morality. Seen in this light, and from a moral standpoint, the motives of Aristophanes may find some excuse, but they cannot be justified; and his representation of Socrates, into whose character all the characteristic features of the Sophistic philosophy are interwoven, even the most contemptible and hateful, yet so that the most unmistakable likeness is still apparent, cannot be admitted on the ground that Socrates did really have the greatest formal resemblance to the Sophists. The Clouds can only be designated as a culpable misunderstanding, and as an act of gross injustice brought about by blinded passion; and Hegel, when he attempts to defend the conduct of Aristophanes, forgets, that, while the comic writer may caricature, he must do it without having recourse to public calumniation. In fact all the political and social tendencies of Aristophanes rest on a gross misunderstanding of historical development. The good old times, as he fancies them, are a fiction. It lies just as little in the realm of possibility, that a morality without reflection, and a homely ingenuousness, such as mark a nation’s childhood, should be forced upon a time in which reflection has utterly eaten out all immediateness, and unconscious moral simplicity, as that a grown up man should became a child again in the natural way. Aristophanes himself attests the impossibility of such a return, when in a fit of humor, with cynic raillery, he gives up all divine and human authority to ridicule, and thereby, however commendable may have been the patriotic motive prompting him to this comic extravagance, demonstrates, that he himself no longer stands upon the basis of the old morality, that he too is the son of his time.

3. The Condemnation Of Socrates.—To this same confounding of his efforts with those of the Sophists, and the same tendency to restore by violent means the old discipline and morality, Socrates, twenty-four years later, fell a victim. After he had lived and labored at Athens for many years in his usual manner, after the storm of the Peloponnesian war had passed by, and this city had experienced the most varied political fortunes, in his seventieth year he was brought to trial and accused of neglecting the gods of the state, of introducing new deities, and also of corrupting the youth. His accusers were Melitus, a young poet, Anytus, a demagogue, and Lycon, an orator, men in every respect insignificant, and acting, as it seems, without motives of personal enmity. The trial resulted in his condemnation. After a fortunate accident had enabled him to spend thirty days more with his scholars in his confinement, spurning a flight from prison, he drank the poisoned cup in the year 399 B. C.

The first motive to his accusation, as already remarked, was his identification with the Sophists, the actual belief that his doctrines and activity were marked with the same character of hostility to the interests of the state, as those of the Sophists, which had already occasioned so much mischief. The three points in the accusation, though evidently resting on a misunderstanding, alike indicate this; they are precisely those by which Aristophanes had sought to characterize the Sophist in the person of Socrates. This “corruption of the youth,” this bringing in of new customs, and a new mode of culture and education generally, was precisely the charge which was brought against the Sophists; moreover, in Plato’s Menon, Anytus, one of the three accusers, is introduced as the bitter enemy of the Sophists and of their manner of instruction. So too in respect to the denial of the national gods: before this, Protagoras, accused of denying the gods, had been obliged to flee, and Prodicus, to drink hemlock, a victim to the same distrust. Even five years after the death of Socrates, Xenophon, who was not present at the trial, felt himself called upon to write his Memorabilia in defence of his teacher, so wide-spread and deep-rooted was the prejudice against him.

Beside this there was also a second, probably a more decisive reason. As the Sophistic philosophy was, in its very nature, eminently aristocratic, and Socrates, as a supposed Sophist, consequently passed for an aristocrat, his entire mode of life could not fail to make him appear like a bad citizen in the eyes of the restored democracy. He had never concerned himself in the affairs of the state, had never but once sustained an official character, and then, as chief of the Prytanes, had disagreed with the will of the people and the rulers. (Plat. Apol. § 32. Xen. Mem. I. 1, 18.) In his seventieth year, he mounted the orator’s stand for the first time in his life, on the occasion of his own accusation. His whole manner was somewhat cosmopolitan; he is even said to have remarked, that he was not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world. We must also take into account, that he found fault with the Athenian democracy upon every occasion, especially with the democratic institution of choice by lot, that he decidedly preferred the Spartan state to the Athenian, and that he excited the distrust of the democrats by his confidential relations with the former leaders of the oligarchic party. (Xen. Mem. I. 2, 9, sq.) Among others who were of the oligarchic interest, and friendly to the Spartans, Critias in particular, one of the thirty tyrants, had been his scholar; so too Alcibiades—two men, who had been the cause of much evil to the Athenian people. If now we accept the uniform tradition, that two of his accusers were men of fair standing in the democratic party, and farther, that his judges were men who had fled before the thirty tyrants, and later had overthrown the power of the oligarchy, we find it much more easy to understand how they, in the case before them, should have supposed they were acting wholly in the interest of the democratic party, when they pronounced condemnation upon the accused, especially as enough to all appearance could be brought against him. The hurried trial presents nothing very remarkable, in a generation which had grown up during the Peloponnesian war, and in a people that adopted and repented of their passionate resolves with the like haste. Yea, more, if we consider that Socrates spurned to have recourse to the usual means and forms adopted by those accused of capital crime, and to gain the sympathy of the people by lamentations, or their favor by flattery, that he in proud consciousness of his innocence defied his judges, it becomes rather a matter of wonder, that his condemnation was carried by a majority of only three to six votes. And even now he might have escaped the sentence to death, had he been willing to bow to the will of the sovereign people for the sake of a commutation of his punishment. But as he spurned to set a value upon himself, by proposing another punishment, a fine, for example, instead of the one moved by his accuser, because this would be the same as to acknowledge himself guilty, his disdain could not fail to exasperate the easily excited Athenians, and no farther explanation is needed to show why eighty of his judges who had before voted for his innocence, now voted for his death. Such was the most lamentable result—a result, afterwards most deeply regretted by the Athenians themselves—of an accusation, which at the outset was probably only intended to humble the aristocratic philosopher, and to force him to an acknowledgment of the power and the majesty of the people.

Hegel’s view of the fate of Socrates, that it was the result of the collision of equally just powers—the Tragedy of Athens as he calls it—and that guilt and innocence were shared alike on both sides, cannot be maintained on historical grounds, since Socrates can neither be regarded exclusively as the representative of the modern spirit, the principle of freedom, subjectivity, the concrete personality; nor his judges, as the representatives of the old Athenian unreflecting morality. The first cannot be, since Socrates, if his principle was at variance with the old Greek morality, rested nevertheless so far on the basis of tradition, that the accusations brought against him in this respect were false and groundless; and the last cannot be, since at that time, after the close of the Peloponnesian war, the old morality and piety had long been wanting to the mass of the people, and given place to the modern culture, and the whole process against Socrates must be regarded rather as an attempt to restore by violence, in connection with the old constitution, the old defunct morality. The fault is not therefore the same on both sides, and it must be held, that Socrates fell a victim to a misunderstanding, and to an unjustifiable reaction of public sentiment.

4. The “Genius” δαιμόνιον of Socrates.—Those traces of the old religious sentiment, which have been handed down to us from so many different sources, and are certainly not to be explained from a bare accommodation to the popular belief, on the part of the philosopher, and which distinguish him so decidedly from the Sophists, show how little Socrates is really to be regarded as an innovator in discipline and morals. He commends the art of divination, believes in dreams, sacrifices with all proper care, speaks of the gods, of their omniscience, omnipresence, goodness, and complete sufficiency in themselves, even with the greatest reverence, and, at the close of his defence, makes the most solemn asseveration of his belief in their existence. In keeping with his attaching himself in this way to the popular religion, his new principle, though in its results hostile to all external authority, nevertheless assumed the form of the popular belief in “Demonic” signs and symbols. These suggestions of the “Demon” are a knowledge, which is at the same time connected with unconsciousness. They occupy the middle ground between the bare external of the Greek oracle, and the purely internal of the spirit. That Socrates had the conception of a particular subject, a personal “Demon,” or “Genius,” is altogether improbable. Just as little can these “Demonic” signs, this inward oracle, whose voice Socrates professed to hear, be regarded after the modern acceptation, simply as the personification of the conscience, or of the practical instinct, or of the individual tact. The first article in the form of accusation, which evidently refers to this very point, shows that Socrates did not speak barely metaphorically of this voice, to which he professed to owe his prophecies. And it was not solely in reference to those higher questions of decided importance, that Socrates had these suggestions, but rather and preeminently with respect to matters of mere accident and arbitrary choice, as for example, whether, and when, his friends should set out on a journey. It is no longer possible to explain the “Demon” or “Genius” of Socrates on psychological grounds; there may have been something of a magnetic character about it. It is possible that there may be some connection between this and the many other ecstatic or cataleptic states, which are related of Socrates in the Symposium of Plato.

5. The Sources of the Philosophy of Socrates.—Well known is the old controversy, whether the picture of Socrates, drawn by Xenophon or by Plato, is the most complete and true to history, and which of the two men is to be considered as the more reliable source for obtaining a knowledge of his philosophy. This question is being decided more and more in favor of Xenophon. Great pains has been taken in former as in later times, to bring Xenophon’s Memorabilia into disrepute, as a shallow and insufficient source, because their plain, and any thing other than speculative contents, seemed to furnish no satisfactory ground for such a revolution in the world of mind as is attributed to Socrates, or for the splendor which invests his name in history, or for the character which Plato assigns him; because again the Memorabilia of Xenophon have especially an apologetic aim, and their defence does not relate so much to the philosopher as to the man; and finally, because they have been supposed to have the appearance of carrying the philosophical over into the unphilosophical style of the common understanding. A distinction has therefore been made between an exoteric and an esoteric Socrates, obtaining the first from Xenophon, the latter from Plato. But the preference of Plato to Xenophon has in the first place no historical right in its favor, since Xenophon appears as a proper historian and claims historical credibility, while Plato on the other hand never professes to be an historical narrator, save in a few passages, and will by no means have all the rest which he puts in the mouth of Socrates understood as his authentic expressions and discourse. There is, therefore, no historical reason for preferring the representation of Socrates which is given by Plato. In the second place, the under-valuation of Xenophon rests, for the most part, on the false notion, that Socrates had a proper philosophy, i. e. a speculative system, and on an unhistorical mistaking of the limits by which the philosophical character of Socrates was conditioned and restricted. There was no proper Socratic doctrine, but a Socratic life; and, just on this ground, are the different philosophical tendencies of his scholars to be explained.

6. The Universal Character of the Philosophizing Of Socrates.—The philosophizing of Socrates was limited and restricted by his opposition, partly to the preceding, and partly to the Sophistic philosophy.

Philosophy before the time of Socrates had been in its essential character investigation of nature. But in Socrates, the human mind, for the first time, turned itself in upon itself, upon its own being, and that too in the most immediate manner, by conceiving itself as active, moral spirit. The positive philosophizing of Socrates, is exclusively of an ethical character, exclusively an inquiry into the nature of virtue, so exclusively, and so onesidedly, that, as is wont to be the case upon the appearance of a new principle, it even expressed a contempt for the striving of the entire previous period, with its natural philosophy, and its mathematics. Setting every thing under the standpoint of immediate moral law, Socrates was so far from finding any object in “irrational” nature worthy of study, that he rather, in a kind of general teleological manner, conceived it simply in the light of external means for the attainment of external ends; yea, he would not even go out to walk, as he says in the Phædrus of Plato, since one can learn nothing from trees and districts of country. Self-knowledge, the Delphic γνῶθι σαυτόν appeared to him the only object worthy of a man, as the starting-point of all philosophy. Knowledge of every other kind, he pronounced so insignificant and worthless, that he was wont to boast of his ignorance, and to declare that he excelled other men in wisdom only in this, that he was conscious of his own ignorance. (Plat. Ap. S. 21, 23.)

The other side of the Socratic philosophizing, is its opposition to the philosophy of the time. His object, as is well understood, could have been only this, to place himself upon the same position as that occupied by the philosophy of the Sophists, and overcome it on its own ground, and by its own principles. That Socrates shared in the general position of the Sophists, and even had many features of external resemblance to them—the Socratic irony, for instance—has been remarked above. Many of his assertions, particularly these propositions, that no man knowingly does wrong, and if a man were knowingly to lie, or to do some other wrong act, still he would be better than he who should do the same unconsciously, at first sight bear a purely Sophistic stamp. The great fundamental thought of the Sophistic philosophy, that all moral acting must be a conscious act, was also his. But whilst the Sophists made it their object, through subjective reflection to confuse and to break up all stable convictions, to make all rules relating to outward conduct impossible, Socrates had recognized thinking as the activity of the universal principle, free, objective thought as the measure of all things, and, therefore, instead of referring moral duties, and all moral action to the fancy and caprice of the individual, had rather referred all to true knowledge, to the essence of spirit. It was this idea of knowledge that led him to seek, by the process of thought, to gain a conceivable objective ground, something real, abiding, absolute, independent of the arbitrary volitions of the subject, and to hold fast to unconditioned moral laws. Hegel expresses the same opinion, when he says that Socrates put morality from ethical grounds, in the place of the morality of custom and habit. Hegel distinguishes morality, as conscious right conduct, resting on reflection and moral principles, from the morality of unsophisticated, half-unconscious virtue, which rests on the compliance with prevailing custom. The logical condition of this ethical striving of Socrates, was the determining of conceptions, the method of their formation. To search out the “what” of every thing says Xenophon (Mem. IV. 6, 1.) was the uninterrupted care of Socrates, and Aristotle says expressly that a twofold merit must be ascribed to him, viz.: the forming of the method of induction and the giving of strictly logical definitions,—the two elements which constitute the basis of science. How these two elements stand connected with the principle of Socrates we shall at once see.

7. The Socratic Method.—We must not regard the Socratic method as we are accustomed to speak of method in our day, i. e. as something which, as such, was distinctly in his consciousness, and which he abstracted from every concrete content, but it rather had its growth in the very mode of his philosophizing, which was not directed to the imparting of a system but to the education of the subject in philosophical thinking and life. It is only a subjective technicality for his mode of instruction, the peculiar manner of his philosophical, familiar life.

The Socratic method has a twofold side, a negative and a positive one. The negative side is the well known Socratic irony. The philosopher takes the attitude of ignorance, and would apparently let himself be instructed by those with whom he converses, but through the questions which he puts, the unexpected consequences which he deduces, and the contradictions in which he involves the opposite party, he soon leads them to see that their supposed knowledge would only entangle and confuse them. In the embarrassment in which they now find themselves placed, and seeing that they do not know what they supposed, this supposed knowledge completes its own destruction, and the subject who had pretended to wisdom learns to distrust his previous opinions and firmly held notions. “What we knew, has contradicted itself,” is the refrain of the most of these conversations.

This result of the Socratic method was only to lead the subject to know that he knew nothing, and a great part of the dialogues of Xenophon and Plato go no farther than to represent ostensibly this negative result. But there is yet another element in his method in which the irony loses its negative appearance.

The positive side of the Socratic method is the so-called obstetrics or art of intellectual midwifery. Socrates compares himself with his mother Phænarete, a midwife, because his position was rather to help others bring forth thoughts than to produce them himself, and because he took upon himself to distinguish the birth of an empty thought from one rich in its content. (Plato Theætetus, p. 149.) Through this art of midwifery the philosopher, by his assiduous questioning, by his interrogatory dissection of the notions of him with whom he might be conversing, knew how to elicit from him a thought of which he had previously been unconscious, and how to help him to the birth of a new thought. A chief means in this operation was the method of induction, or the leading of the representation to a conception. The philosopher, thus, starting from some individual, concrete case, and seizing hold of the most common notions concerning it, and finding illustrations in the most ordinary and trivial occurrences, knew how to remove by his comparisons that which was individual, and by thus separating the accidental and contingent from the essential, could bring up to consciousness a universal truth and a universal determination,—in other words, could form conceptions. In order e. g. to find the conception of justice or valor, he would start from individual examples of them, and from these deduce the universal character or conception of these virtues. From this we see that the direction of the Socratic induction was to gain logical definitions. I define a conception when I develope what it is, its essence, its content. I define the conception of justice when I set up the common property and logical unity of all its different modes of manifestation. Socrates sought to go no farther than this. “To seek for the essence of virtue,” says an Aristotelian writing (Eth. I. 5), “Socrates regarded as the problem of philosophy, and hence, since he regarded all virtue as a knowing, he sought to determine in respect of justice or valor what they might really be, i. e. he investigated their essence or conception.” From this it is very easy to see the connection which his method of definitions or of forming conceptions had with his practical strivings. He went back to the conception of every individual virtue, e. g. justice, only because he was convinced that the knowledge of this conception, the knowledge of it for every individual case, was the surest guide for every moral relation. Every moral action, he believed, should start as a conscious action from the conception.

From this we might characterize the Socratic method as the skill by which a certain sum of given, homogeneous and individual phenomena was taken, and their logical unity, the universal principle which lay at their base, inductively found. This method presupposes the recognition that the essence of the objects must be comprehended in the thought, that the conception is the true being of the thing. Hence we see that the Platonic doctrine of ideas is only the objectifying of this method which in Socrates appears no farther than a subjective dexterity. The Platonic ideas are the universal conceptions of Socrates posited as real individual beings. Hence Aristotle (Metaph. XIII. 4) most fittingly characterizes the relation between the Socratic method and the Platonic doctrine of ideas with the words, “Socrates posits the universal conceptions not as separate, individual substances, while Plato does this, and names them ideas.”

8. The Socratic Doctrine concerning Virtue.—The single, positive doctrinal sentence which has been transmitted us from Socrates is, that virtue is a knowing,—that, consequently, nothing is good which happens without discernment, and nothing bad which is done with discernment, or, what is the same thing, that no man is voluntarily vicious, that the base are such against their will, aye, even he who knowingly does wrong is better than he who does it ignorantly, because in the latter case, morality and true knowledge are both wanting, while in the former—if such a case could happen—morality alone is violated. Socrates could not conceive how a man should know the good and yet not do it; it was to him a logical contradiction that the man who sought his own well being should at the same time knowingly despise it. Therefore, with him the good action followed as necessarily from the knowledge of the good as a logical conclusion from its premise.

The sentence that virtue is a knowing, has for its logical consequence the unity of virtue and for its practical consequence the teachableness of it. With these three propositions, in which every thing is embraced which we can properly term the Socratic philosophy, Socrates has laid the first foundation stone for a scientific treatment of ethics, a treatment which must be dated first from him. But he laid only the foundation stone, for on the one side he attempted no carrying out of his principle into details, nor any setting up of a concrete doctrine of ethics, but only, after the ancient manner, referred to the laws of states and the unwritten laws of the universal human order, and on the other side, he has not seldom served himself with utilitarian motives to establish his ethical propositions, in other words he has referred to the external advantages and useful consequences of virtue, by which the purity of his ethical point of view became tarnished.

SECTION XIII.
THE PARTIAL DISCIPLES OF SOCRATES.

1. Their Relation to the Socratic Philosophy.—The death of Socrates gave to his life an ideal perfection, and this became an animating principle which had its working in many directions. The apprehension of him as an ideal type forms the common character of the immediate Socratic schools. The fundamental thought, that men should have one universal and essentially true aim, they all received from Socrates; but since their master left no complete and systematic doctrine, but only his many-sided life to determine the nature of this aim, every thing would depend upon the subjective apprehension of the personal character of Socrates, and of this we should at the outset naturally expect to find among his different disciples a different estimate. Socrates had numerous scholars, but no school. Among these, three views of his character have found a place in history. That of Antisthenes, or the Cynical, that of Aristippus, or the Cyrenian, and that of Euclid, or the Megarian—three modes of apprehending him, each of which contains a true element of the Socratic character, but all of which separate that which in the master was a harmonious unity, and affirm of the isolated elements that which could be truly predicated only of the whole. They are therefore, one-sided, and give of Socrates a false picture. This, however, was not wholly their fault; but in that Aristippus was forced to go back to the theory of knowledge of Protagoras, and Euclid to the metaphysics of the Eleatics, they rather testify to the subjective character and to the want of method and system of the Socratic philosophy, and exhibit in their defects and one-sidedness, in part, only the original weakness which belongs to the doctrine of their master.

2. Antisthenes and the Cynics.—As a strictly literal adherent of the doctrine of Socrates, and zealously though grossly, and often with caricature imitating his method, Antisthenes stands nearest his master. In early life a disciple of Gorgias, and himself a teacher of the Sophistic philosophy, he subsequently became an inseparable attendant of Socrates, after whose death he founded a school in the Cynosarges, whence his scholars and adherents took the name of Cynics, though according to others this name was derived from their mode of life. The doctrine of Antisthenes is only an abstract expression for the Socratic ideal of virtue. Like Socrates he considered virtue the final cause of men, regarding it also as knowledge or science, and thus as an object of instruction; but the ideal of virtue as he had beheld it in the person of Socrates was realized in his estimation only in the absence of every need (in his appearance he imitated a beggar with staff and scrip) and hence in the disregarding of all former intellectual interests; virtue with him aims only to avoid evil, and therefore has no need of dialectical demonstrations, but only of Socratic vigor; the wise man, according to him, is self-sufficient, independent of every thing, indifferent in respect of marriage, family, and the public life of society, as also in respect of wealth, honor, and enjoyment. In this ideal of Antisthenes, which is more negative than positive, we miss entirely the genial humanity and the universal susceptibility of his master, and still more a cultivation of those fruitful dialectic elements which the Socratic philosophizing contained. With a more decided contempt for all knowledge, and a still greater scorn of all the customs of society, the later Cynicism became frequently a repulsive and shameful caricature of the Socratic spirit. This was especially the case with Diogenes of Sinope, the only one of his disciples whom Antisthenes suffered to remain with him. In their high estimation of virtue and philosophy these Cynics, who have been suitably styled the Capuchins of the Grecian world, preserved a trace of the original Socratic philosophy, but they sought virtue “in the shortest way,” in a life according to nature as they themselves expressed it, that is, in shutting out the outer world, in attaining a complete independence, and absence of every need, and in renouncing art and science as well as every determinate aim. To the wise man said they nothing should go amiss; he should be mighty over every need and desire, free from the restraints of civil law and of custom, and of equal privileges with the gods. An easy life, said Diogenes, is assigned by the gods to that man who limits himself to his necessities, and this true philosophy may be attained by every one, through perseverance and the power of self-denial. Philosophy and philosophical interest is there none in this school of beggars. All that is related of Diogenes are anecdotes and sarcasms.

We see here how the ethics of the Cynic school lost itself in entirely negative statements, a consequence naturally resulting from the fact that the original Socratic conception of virtue lacked a concrete positive content, and was not systematically carried out. Cynicism is the negative side of the Socratic doctrine.

3. Aristippus and the Cyrenians.—Aristippus of Cyrene, numbered till the death of Socrates among his adherents, is represented by Aristotle as a Sophist, and this with propriety, since he received money for his instructions. He appears in Xenophon as a man devoted to pleasure. The adroitness with which he adapted himself to every circumstance, and the knowledge of human nature by which in every condition he knew how to provide means to satisfy his desire for good living and luxury, were well known among the ancients. Brought in contact with the government, he kept himself aloof from its cares lest he should become dependent; he spent most of his time abroad in order to free himself from every restraint; he made it his rule that circumstances should be dependent upon him, while he should be independent of them. Though such a man seems little worthy of the name of a Socraticist, yet has he two points of contact with his master which should not be overlooked. Socrates had called virtue and happiness coordinately the highest end of man, i. e. he had indeed asserted most decidedly the idea of a moral action, but because he brought this forward only in an undeveloped and abstract form, he was only able in concrete cases to establish the obligation of the moral law in a utilitarian way, by appealing to the benefit resulting from the practice of virtue. This side of the Socratic principle Aristippus adopted for his own, affirming that pleasure is the ultimate end of life, and the highest good. Moreover, this pleasure, as Aristippus regards it, is not happiness as a condition embracing the whole life, nor pleasure reduced to a system, but is only the individual sensation of pleasure which the body receives, and in this all determinations of moral worth entirely disappear; but in that Aristippus recommends knowledge, self-government, temperance, and intellectual culture as means for acquiring and preserving enjoyment, and, therefore, makes a cultivated mind necessary to judge respecting a true satisfaction, he shows that the Socratic spirit was not yet wholly extinguished within him, and that the name of pseudo-Socraticist which Schleiermacher gives him, hardly belongs to him.

The other leaders of the Cyrenian school, Hegesias, Theodorus, Anniceris, we can here only name. The farther development of this school is wholly occupied in more closely defining the nature of pleasure, i. e. in determining whether it is to be apprehended as a momentary sensation, or as an enduring condition embracing the whole life; whether it belonged to the mind or the body, whether an isolated individual could possess it, or whether it is found alone in the social relations of life; whether we should regard it as positive or negative, (i. e. simply the absence of pain).

4. Euclid and the Megarians.—The union of the dialectical and the ethical is a common character in all the partial Socratic schools; the difference consists only in this, that in the one the ethical is made to do service to the dialectical, and that in the other, the dialectical stands in subjection to the ethical. The former is especially true of the Megarian school, whose essential peculiarity was pointed out by the ancients themselves as a combination of the Socratic and Eleatic principles. The idea of the good is on the ethical side the same as the idea of being on the physical; it was, therefore, only an application to ethics of the Eleatic view and method when Euclid called the good pure being, and the not-good, not-being. What is farther related of Euclid is obscure, and may here be omitted. The Megarian school was kept up under different leaders after his death, but without living force, and without the independent activity of an organic development. As hedonism (the philosophical doctrine of the Cyreneans that pleasure is the chief good) led the way to the doctrine of Epicurus, and cynicism was the bridge toward the Stoic, so the later Megaric development formed the transition point to scepticism. Directing its attention ever more exclusively towards the culture of the formal and logical method of argument, it left entirely out of view the moral thoughts of Socrates. Its sophistries and quiddities which were, for the most part, only plays of word and wit, were widely known and noted among the ancients.

5. Plato, as the complete Socraticist.—The attempts thus far to build upon the foundation pillars of the Socratic doctrine, started without a vigorous germinating principle, and ended fruitlessly. Plato was the only one of his scholars who has approached and represented the whole Socrates. Starting from the Socratic idea of knowledge he brought into one focus the scattered elements and rays of truth which could be collected from his master or from the philosophers preceding him, and gave to philosophy a systematic completeness. Socrates had affirmed the principle that conception is the true being and the only actual, and had urged to a knowledge according to the conception; but these positions were no farther developed. His philosophy is not yet a system, but is only the first impulse toward a philosophical development and method. Plato is the first who has approached a systematic representation and development of the ideal world of conceptions true in themselves.

The Platonic system is Socrates objectified, the blending and reconciling of preceding philosophy.

SECTION XIV.
PLATO.

I. Plato’s Life. 1. His Youth.—Plato, the son of Aristo, of a noble Athenian family, was born in the year 429 B. C. It was the year of the death of Pericles, the second year of the Peloponnesian war, so fatal to Athens. Born in the centre of Grecian culture and industry, and descended from an old and noble family, he received a corresponding education, although no farther tidings of this have been transmitted to us, than the insignificant names of his teachers. That the youth growing up under such circumstances should choose the seclusion of a philosophic life rather than a political career may seem strange, since many and favorable opportunities for the latter course lay open before him. Critias, one of the thirty tyrants, was the cousin of his mother, and Charmides, who subsequently, under the oligarchic rule at Athens, found his death at Thrasybulus on the same day with Critias, was his uncle. Notwithstanding this, he is never known to have appeared a single time as a public speaker in the assembly of the people. In view of the rising degeneracy and increasing political corruption of his native land, he was too proud to court for himself the favor of the many-headed Demos; and more attached to Doricism than to the democracy and practice of the Attic public life, he chose to make science his chief pursuit, rather than as a patriot to struggle in vain against unavoidable disaster, and become a martyr to his political opinions. He regarded the Athenian state as lost, and to hinder its inevitable ruin he would not bring a useless offering.

2. His Years of Discipline.—A youth of twenty, Plato came to Socrates, in whose intercourse he spent eight years. Besides a few doubtful anecdotes, nothing is known more particularly of this portion of his history. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia (III. 6) Plato is only once cursorily mentioned, but this in a way that indicates an intimate relation between the scholar and his master. Plato himself in his dialogues has transmitted nothing concerning his personal relations to Socrates; only once (Phæd. p. 59) he names himself among the intimate friends of Socrates. But the influence which Socrates exerted upon him, how he recognized in him the complete representation of a wise man, how he found not only in his doctrine but also in his life and action the most fruitful philosophic germs, the significance which the personal character of his master as an ideal type had for him—all this we learn with sufficient accuracy from his writings, where he places his own incomparably more developed philosophical system in the mouth of his master, whom he makes the centre of his dialogues and the leader of his discourses.

3. His Years of Travel.—After the death of Socrates 399 B. C, in the thirtieth year of his age, Plato, fearing lest he also should be met by the incoming reaction against philosophy, left, in company with other Socraticists, his native city, and betook himself to Euclid, his former fellow-scholar, the founder of the Megaric school (cf. § XIII. 4) at Megara. Up to this time a pure Socraticist, he became greatly animated and energized by his intercourse with the Megarians, among whom a peculiar philosophical direction, a modification of Socraticism, was already asserted. We shall see farther on the influence of this residence at Megara upon the foundation of his philosophy, and especially upon the elaboration and confirmation of his doctrine of Ideas. One whole period of his literary activity and an entire group of his dialogues, can only be satisfactorily explained by the intellectual stimulus gained at this place. From Megara, Plato visited Cyrene, Egypt, Magna-Grecia and Sicily. In Magna-Grecia he became acquainted with the Pythagorean philosophy, which was then in its highest bloom. His abode among the Pythagoreans had a marked effect upon him; as a man it made him more practical, and increased his zest for life and his interest in public life and social intercourse; as a philosopher it furnished him with a new incitement to science, and new motives to literary labor. The traces of the Pythagorean philosophy may be seen through all the last period of his literary life; especially his aversion to public and political life was greatly softened by his intercourse with the Pythagoreans. While in the Theatætus, he affirmed most positively the incompatibility of philosophy with public life, we find in his later dialogues, especially in the Republic and also in the Statesman—upon which Pythagoreanism seems already to have had an influence—a returning favor for the actual world, and the well-known sentence that the ruler must be a philosopher is an expression very characteristic of this change. His visit to Sicily gave him the acquaintance of the elder Dionysius and Dion his brother-in-law, but the philosopher and the tyrant had little in common. Plato is said to have incurred his displeasure to so high a degree, that his life was in danger. After about ten years spent in travel, he returned to Athens in the fortieth year of his age, (389 or 388 B. C.)

4. Plato as Head of the Academy; His Years of Instruction.—On his return, Plato surrounded himself with a circle of pupils. The place where he taught was known as the academy, a gymnasium outside of Athens where Plato had inherited a garden from his father. Of his school and of his later life, we have only the most meagre accounts. His life passed evenly along, interrupted only by a second and third visit to Sicily, where meanwhile the younger Dionysius had come to the throne. This second and third residence of Plato at the court of Syracuse abounds in vicissitudes, and shows us the philosopher in a great variety of conditions (cf. Plutarch’s Life of Dion); but to us, in estimating his philosophical character, it is of interest only for the attempt, which, as seems probable from all accounts, he there made to realize his ideal of a moral state, and by the philosophical education of the new ruler to unite philosophy and the reins of government in one and the same hand, or at least in some way by means of philosophy to achieve a healthy change in the Sicilian state constitution. His efforts were however fruitless; the circumstances were not propitious, and the character of the young Dionysius, who was one of those mediocre natures who strive after renown and distinction, but are capable of nothing profound and earnest, deceived the expectations concerning him which Plato, according to Dion’s account, thought he had reason to entertain.

When we look at Plato’s philosophical labors in the academy, we are struck with the different relations to public life which philosophy already assumes. Instead of carrying philosophy, like Socrates, into the streets and public places and making it there a subject of social conversation with any one who desired it, he lived and labored entirely withdrawn from the movements of the public, satisfied to influence the pupils who surrounded him. In precisely the measure in which philosophy becomes a system and the systematic form is seen to be essential, does it lose its popular character and begin to demand a scientific training, and to become a topic for the school, an esoteric affair. Yet such was the respect for the name of a philosopher, and especially for the name of Plato, that requests were made to him by different states to compose for them a book of laws, a work which in some instances it was said was actually performed. Attended by a retinue of devoted disciples, among whom were even women disguised as men, and receiving reiterated demonstrations of respect, he reached the age of eighty-one years, with his powers of mind unweakened to the latest moment.

The close of his life seems to have been clouded by disturbances and divisions which arose in his school under the lead of Aristotle. Engaged in writing, or as others state it at a marriage feast, death came upon him as a gentle sleep, 348 B. C. His remains were buried in the Ceramicus, not far from the academy.

II. The Inner Development of the Platonic Philosophy and Writings.—That the Platonic philosophy has a real development, that it should not be apprehended as a perfectly finished system to which the different writings stand related as constituent elements, but that these are rather steps of this inner development, as it were stages passed over in the philosophical journeyings of the philosopher—is a view of the highest importance for the true estimate of Plato’s literary labors.

Plato’s philosophical and literary labors may be divided into three periods, which we can characterize in different ways. Looking at them in a chronological or biographical respect, we might call them respectively the periods of his years of discipline, of travel, of instruction, or if we view them in reference to the prevailing external influence under which they were formed, they might be termed the Socratic, Heraclitic-Eleatic, and the Pythagorean; or if we looked at the content alone, we might term them the Anti-Sophistic-Ethic, the Dialectic or mediating, and the systematic or constructive periods.

The First Period—the Socratic—is marked externally by the predominance of the dramatic element, and in reference to its philosophical standpoint, by an adherence to the method and the fundamental principles of the Socratic doctrine. Not yet accurately informed of the results of former inquiries, and rather repelled from the study of the history of philosophy than attracted to it by the character of the Socratic philosophizing, Plato confined himself to an analytical treatment of conceptions, particularly of the conception of virtue, and to a reproducing of his master, which, though something more than a mere recital of verbal recollections, had yet no philosophical independence. His Socrates exhibits the same view of life and the same scientific standpoint which the historical Socrates of Xenophon had had. His efforts were thus, like those of his contemporary fellow disciples, directed prominently toward practical wisdom. His conflicts however, like those of Socrates, had far more weight against the prevailing want of science and the shallow sophisms of the day than for the opposite scientific directions. The whole period bears an eclectic and hortatory character. The highest point in which the dialogues of this group culminate is the attempt which at the same time is found in the Socratic doctrine to determine the certainty of an absolute content (of an objective reality) to the good.

The history of the development of the Platonic philosophy would assume a very different form if the view of some modern scholars respecting the date of the Phædrus were correct. If, as they claim, the Phædrus were Plato’s earliest work, this circumstance would betray from the outset an entirely different course of culture for him than we could suppose in a mere scholar of Socrates. The doctrine in this dialogue of the pre-existence of souls, and their periodical transmigrations, of the relation of earthly beauty with heavenly truth, of divine inspiration in contrast to human wisdom, the conception of love,—these and other Pythagorean ingredients are all so distinct from the original Socratic doctrine that we must transfer the most of that which Plato has creatively produced during his whole philosophical career, to the beginning of his philosophical development. The improbability of this, and numerous other grounds of objection, claim a far later composition for this dialogue. Setting aside for the present the Phædrus, the Platonic development assumes the following form:

Among the earliest works (if they are genuine) are the small dialogues which treat of Socratic questions and themes in a Socratic way. Of these e. g. the Charmides discusses temperance, the Lysis friendship, the Laches valor, the lesser Hippias knowing and wilful wrong-doing, the first Alcibiades, the moral and intellectual qualifications of a statesman, &c. The immaturity and the crudeness of these dialogues, the use of scenic means which have only an external relation to the content, the scantiness and want of independence in the content, the indirect manner of investigation which lacks a satisfactory and positive result, the formal and analytical treatment of the conceptions discussed—all these features indicate the early character of these minor dialogues.

The Protagoras may be taken as a proper type of the Socratic period. Since this dialogue, though directing its whole polemic against the Sophistic philosophy, confined itself almost exclusively to the outward manifestation of this system, to its influence on its age and its method of instruction in opposition to that of Socrates, without entering into the ground and philosophical character of the doctrine itself, and, still farther, since, when it comes in a strict sense to philosophize, it confines itself, in an indirect investigation, to the Socratic conception of virtue according to its different sides (virtue as knowing, its unity and its teachableness, cf. § XII. 8,)—it represents in the clearest manner the tendency, character and want of the first period of Plato’s literary life.

The Gorgias, written soon after the death of Socrates, represents the third and highest stage of this period. Directed against the Sophistical identification of pleasure and virtue, of the good and of the agreeable, i. e. against the affirmation of an absolute moral relativity, this dialogue maintains the proof that the good, far from owing its origin only to the right of the stronger, and thus to the arbitrariness of the subject, has in itself an independent reality and objective validity, and, consequently, alone is truly useful, and thus, therefore, the measure of pleasure must follow the higher measure of the good. In this direct and positive polemic against the Sophistic doctrine of pleasure, in its tendency to a view of the good as something firm and abiding, and secure against all subjective arbitrariness, consists prominently the advance which the Gorgias makes over the Protagoras.

In the first Socratic period the Platonic philosophizing became ripe and ready for the reception of Eleatic and Pythagorean categories. To grapple by means of these categories with the higher questions of philosophy, and so to free the Socratic philosophy from its so close connection with practical life, was the task of the second period.

The Second Period—the dialectic or the Megaric—is marked externally, by a less prominence of form and poetic contemplation, and not unfrequently indeed, by obscurity and difficulties of style, and internally, by the attempt to give a satisfactory mediation for the Eleatic doctrine and a dialectic foundation for the doctrine of ideas.

By his exile at Megara, and his journeys to Italy, Plato became acquainted with other and opposing philosophical directions, from which he must now separate himself in order to elevate the Socratic doctrine to its true significance. It was now that he first learned to know the philosophic theories of the earlier sages, for whose study the necessary means could not at that period, so wanting in literary publicity, be found at Athens. By his separation from these varying standpoints, as his older fellow pupils had already striven to do, he attempted striding over the narrow limits of ethical philosophizing, to reach the final ground of knowing, and to carry out the art of forming conceptions as brought forward by Socrates, to a science of conceptions, i. e. to the doctrine of ideas. That all human acting depends upon knowing, and that all thinking depends upon the conception, were results to which Plato might already have attained through the scientific generalization of the Socratic doctrine itself, but now to bring this Socratic wisdom within the circle of speculative thinking, to establish dialectically that the conception in its simple unity is that which abides in the change of phenomena, to disclose the fundamental principles of knowledge which had been evaded by Socrates, to grasp the scientific theories of the opposers direct in their scientific grounds, and follow them out in all their ramifications,—this is the problem which the Megaric family of dialogues attempts to solve.

The Theatætus stands at the head of this group. This is chiefly directed against the Protagorean theory of knowledge, against the identification of the thinking and the sensible perception, or against the claim of an objective relativity of all knowledge. As the Gorgias before it had sought to establish the independent being of the ethical, so does the Theatætus ascending from the ethical to the theoretical, endeavor to prove an independent being and objective reality for the logical conceptions which lie at the ground of all representation and thinking, in a word, to prove the objectivity of truth, the fact that there lies a province of thought immanent in the thinking and independent of the perceptions of the senses. These conceptions, whose objective reality is thus affirmed, are those of a species, likeness and unlikeness, sameness and difference, &c.

The Theatætus is followed by the trilogy of the Sophist, the Statesman, and the Philosopher, which completes the Megaric group of dialogues. The first of these dialogues examines the conception of appearance, that is of the not-being, the last (for which the Parmenides may be taken) the conception of being. Both dialogues are especially directed to the Eleatic doctrine. After Plato had recognized the conception in its simple unity as that which abides in the change of phenomena, his attention was naturally turned towards the Eleatics, who in an opposite way had attained the similar result that in unity consists all true substantiality, and to multiplicity as such no true being belongs. In order more easily on the one side to carry out this fundamental thought of the Eleatic to its legitimate result, in which the Megarians had already preceded him, he was obliged to give a metaphysical substance to his abstract conceptions of species, i. e. ideas. But on the other side, he could not agree with the inflexibility and exclusiveness of the Eleatic unity, unless he would wholly sacrifice the multiplicity of things; he was rather obliged to attempt to show by a dialectic development of the Eleatic principle that the one must be at the same time a totality, organically connected, and embracing multiplicity in itself. This double relation to the Eleatic principle is carried out by the Sophist and the Parmenides; by the former polemically against the Eleatic doctrine, in that it proves the being of the appearance or the not-being, and by the latter pacifically, in that it analyzes the Eleatic one by its own logical consequences into many. The inner progress of the doctrine of Ideas in the Megaric group of dialogues is therefore this, viz., that the Theatætus, in opposition to the Heraclitico-Protagorean theory of the absolute becoming, affirms the objective and independent reality of ideas, and the Sophist shows their reciprocal relation and combining qualities, while the Parmenides in fine exhibits their whole dialectic completeness with their relation to the phenomenal world.

The Third Period begins with the return of the philosopher to his native city. It unites the completeness of form belonging to the first with the profounder characteristical content belonging to the second. The memories of his youthful years seem at this time to have risen anew before the soul of Plato, and to have imparted again to his literary activity the long lost freshness and fulness of that period, while at the same time his abode in foreign lands, and especially his acquaintance with the Pythagorean philosophy, had greatly enriched his mind with a store of images and ideals. This reviving of old memories is seen in the fact that the writings of this group return with fondness to the personality of Socrates, and represent in a certain degree the whole philosophy of Plato as the exaltation of the doctrine and the ideal embodiment of the historical character of his early master. In opposition to both of the first two periods, the third is marked externally by an excess of the mythical form connected with the growing influence of Pythagoreanism in this period, and internally by the application of the doctrine of ideas to the concrete spheres of psychology, ethics and natural science. That ideas possess objective reality, and are the foundation of all essentiality and truth, while the phenomena of the sensible world are only copies of these, was a theory whose vindication was no longer attempted, but which was presupposed as already proved, and as forming a dialectical basis for the pursuit of the different branches of science. With this was connected a tendency to unite the hitherto separate branches of science into a systematic whole, as well as to mould together the previous philosophical directions, and show the inner application of the Socratic philosophy for ethics, of the Eleatic for dialectics, and the Pythagorean for physics.

Upon this standpoint, the Phædrus, Plato’s inaugural to his labors in the Academy, together with the Symposium, which is closely connected with it, attempts to subject the rhetorical theory and practice of their time to a thorough criticism, in order to show in opposition to this theory and practice, that the fixedness and stability of a true scientific principle could only be attained by grounding every thing on the idea. On the same standpoint the Phædon attempts to prove the immortality of the soul from the doctrine of ideas; the Philebus to bring out the conception of pleasure and of the highest good; the Republic to develop the essence of the state, and the Timæus that of nature.

Having thus sketched the inner development of the Platonic philosophy, we now turn to a systematic statement of its principles.

III.—Classification of the Platonic System.—The philosophy of Plato, as left by himself, is without a systematic statement, and has no comprehensive principle of classification. He has given us only the history of his thinking, the statement of his philosophical development; we are therefore limited in reference to his classification of philosophy to simple intimations. Accordingly, some have divided the Platonic system into theoretical and practical science, and others into a philosophy of the good, the beautiful and the true. Another classification, which has some support in old records, is more correct. Some of the ancients say that Plato was the first to unite in one whole the scattered philosophical elements of the earlier sages, and so to obtain for philosophy the three parts, logic, physics, and ethics. The more accurate statement is given by Sextus Empiricus, that Plato has laid the foundation for this threefold division of philosophy, but that it was first expressly recognized and affirmed by his scholars, Xenocrates and Aristotle. The Platonic system may, however, without difficulty, be divided into these three parts. True, there are many dialogues which mingle together in different proportions the logical, the ethical, and the physical element, and though even where Plato treats of some special discipline, the three are suffered constantly to interpenetrate each other, still there are some dialogues in which this fundamental scheme can be clearly recognized. It cannot be mistaken that the Timæus has predominantly a physical, and the Republic as decidedly an ethical element, and if the dialectic is expressly represented in no separate dialogue, yet does the whole Megaric group pursue the common end of bringing out the conception of science and its true object, being, and is, therefore, in its content decidedly dialectical. Plato must have been led to this threefold division by even the earlier development of philosophy, and though Xenocrates does not clearly see it, yet since Aristotle presupposes it as universally admitted, we need not scruple to make it the basis on which to represent the Platonic system.

The order which these different parts should take, Plato himself has not declared. Manifestly, however, dialectics should have the first place as the ground of all philosophy, since Plato uniformly directs that every philosophical investigation should begin with accurately determining the idea (Phæd. p. 99. Phædr. p. 237), while he subsequently examines all the concrete spheres of science on the standpoint of the doctrine of ideas. The relative position of the other two parts is not so clear. Since, however, the physics culminates in the ethics, and the ethics, on the other hand, has for its basis physical investigations into the ensouling power in nature, we may assign to physics the former place of the two.

The mathematical sciences Plato has expressly excluded from philosophy. He considers them as helps to philosophical thinking (Rep. VII. 526), as necessary steps of knowledge, without which no one can come to philosophy (Ib. VI. 510); but mathematics with him is not philosophy, for it assumes its principles or axioms, without at all accounting for them, as though they were manifest to all, a procedure which is not permitted to pure science; it also serves itself for its demonstrations, with illustrative figures, although it does not treat of these, but of that which they represent to the understanding (Ib.). Plato thus places mathematics midway between a correct opinion and science, clearer than the one, but more obscure than the other. (Ib. VII. 533.)

IV. The Platonic Dialectics. 1. Conception of Dialectics.—The conception of dialectics or of logic, is used by the ancients for the most part in a very wide sense, while Plato employs it in repeated instances interchangeably with philosophy, though on the other hand he treats it also as a separate branch of philosophy. He divides it from physics as the science of the eternal and unchangeable from the science of the changeable, which never is, but is only ever becoming; he distinguishes also between it and ethics, so far as the latter treats of the good not absolutely, but in its concrete exhibition in morals and in the state; so that dialectics may be termed philosophy in a higher sense, while physics and ethics follow it as two less exact sciences, or as a not yet perfected philosophy. Plato himself defines dialectics, according to the ordinary signification of the word, as the art of developing knowledge by way of dialogue in questions and answers. (Rep. VII. 534). But since the art of communicating correctly in dialogue is according to Plato, at the same time the art of thinking correctly, and as thus thinking and speaking could not be separated by the ancients, but every process of thought was a living dialogue, so Plato would more accurately define dialectics as the science which brings speech to a correct issue, and which combines or separates the species, i. e. the conceptions of things correctly with one another. (Soph. p. 253. Phædr. p. 266). Dialectics with him has two divisions, to know what can and what cannot be connected, and to know how division or combination can be. But as with Plato these conceptions of species or ideas are the only actual and true existence, so have we, in entire conformity with this, a third definition of dialectics (Philebus p. 57), as the science of being, the science of that which is true and unchangeable, the science of all other sciences. We may therefore briefly characterize it as the science of absolute being or of ideas.

2. What Is Science? (1.) As opposed to sensation and the sensuous representation.—The Theatætus is devoted to the discussion of this question in opposition to the Protagorean sensualism. That all knowledge consists in perception, and that the two are one and the same thing, was the Protagorean proposition. From this it followed, as Protagoras himself had inferred, that things are, as they appear to me, that the perception or sensation is infallible. But since perception and sensation are infinitely diversified with different individuals, and even greatly vary in the same individual, it follows farther, that there are no objective determinations and predicates, that we can never affirm what a thing is in itself, that all conceptions, great, small, light, heavy, to increase, to diminish, &c., have only a relative significance, and consequently, also, the conceptions of species, as combinations of the changeful many, are wholly wanting in constancy and stability. In opposition to this Protagorean thesis, Plato urges the following objections and contradictions. First. The Protagorean doctrine leads to the most startling consequences. If being and appearance, knowledge and perception are one and the same thing, then is the irrational brute, which is capable of perception, as fully entitled to be called the measure of all things, as man, and if the representation is infallible, as the expression of my subjective character at a given time, then need there be no more instruction, no more scientific conclusion, no more strife, and no more refutation. Second. The Protagorean doctrine is a logical contradiction; for according to it Protagoras must yield the question to every one who disputes with him, since, as he himself affirms, no one is incorrect, but every one judges only according to truth; the pretended truth of Protagoras is therefore true for no man, not even for himself. Third. Protagoras destroys the knowledge of future events. That which I may regard as profitable may not therefore certainly prove itself as such in the result. To determine that which is really profitable implies a calculation of the future, but since the ability of men to form such a calculation is very diverse, it follows from this that not man as such, but only the wise man can be the measure of things. Fourth. The theory of Protagoras destroys perception. Perception, according to him, rests upon a distinction of the perceived object and the perceiving subject, and is the common product of the two. But in his view the objects are in such an uninterrupted flow, that they can neither become fixed in seeing nor in hearing. This condition of constant change renders all knowledge from sense, and hence (the identity of the two being assumed), all knowledge impossible. Fifth. Protagoras overlooks the apriori element in knowledge. It is seen in an analysis of the sense-perception itself, that all knowledge cannot be traced to the activity of the senses, but that there must also be presupposed besides these, intellectual functions, and hence an independent province of supersensible knowledge. We see with the eyes, and hear with the ears, but to group together the perceptions attained through these different organs, and to hold them fast in the unity of self-consciousness, is beyond the power of the activity of the senses. Again, we compare the different sense-perceptions with one another, a function which cannot belong to the senses, since each sense can only furnish its own distinctive perception. Still farther, we bring forward determinations respecting the perceptions which we manifestly cannot owe to the senses, in that we predicate of these perceptions, being and not-being, likeness and unlikeness, &c. These determinations, to which also belong the beautiful and the odious, good and evil, constitute a peculiar province of knowledge, which the soul, independently of every sense-perception, brings forward through its own independent activity. The ethical element of this Plato exhibits in his attack upon sensualism, and also in other dialogues. He maintains (in the Sophist), that men holding such opinions must be improved before they can be instructed, and that when made morally better, they will readily recognize the truth of the soul and its moral and rational capacities, and affirm that these are real things, though objects of neither sight nor of feeling.

(2.) The Relation of Knowing to Opinion.—Opinion is just as little identical with knowing as is the sense-perception. An incorrect opinion is certainly different from knowing, and a correct one is not the same, for it can be engendered by the art of speech without therefore attaining the validity of true knowledge. The correct opinion, so far as it is true in matter though imperfect in form, stands rather midway between knowing and not-knowing, and participates in both.

(3.) The Relation of Science to Thinking.—In opposition to the Protagorean sensualism, we have already referred to an energy of the soul independent of the sensuous perception and sensation, competent in itself to examine the universal, and grasp true being in thought. There is, therefore, a double source of knowledge, sensation and rational thinking. Sensation refers to that which is conceived in the constant becoming and perpetual change, to the pure momentary, which is in an incessant transition from the was, through the now, into the shall be (Parm. p. 152); it is, therefore, the source of dim, impure, and uncertain knowledge; thinking on the other hand refers to the abiding, which neither becomes nor departs, but remains ever the same. (Tim. p. 51.) Existence, says the Timæus (p. 27) is of two kinds, “that which ever is but has no becoming, and that which ever becomes but never is. The one kind, which is always in the same state, is comprehended through reflection by the reason, the other, which becomes and departs, but never properly is, may be apprehended by the sensuous perception without the reason.” True science, therefore, flows alone from that pure and thoroughly internal activity of the soul which is free from all corporeal qualities and every sensuous disturbance. (Phæd. p. 65.) In this state the soul looks upon things purely as they are (Phæd. p. 66) in their eternal being and their unchangeable condition. Hence the true state of the philosopher is announced in the Phædon (p. 64) to be a willingness to die, a longing to fly from the body, as from a hinderance to true knowledge, and become pure spirit. According to all this, science is the thinking of true being or of ideas; the means to discover and to know these ideas, or the organ for their apprehension is the dialectic, as the art of separating and combining conceptions; the true objects of dialectics are ideas.

3. The Doctrine of Ideas in its Genesis.—The Platonic doctrine of ideas is the common product of the Socratic method of forming conceptions, the Heraclitic doctrine of absolute becoming, and the Eleatic doctrine of absolute being. To the first of these Plato owes the idea of a knowing through conceptions, to the second the recognition of the becoming in the field of the sensuous, to the third the position of a field of absolute reality. Elsewhere (in the Philebus) Plato connects the doctrine of ideas with the Pythagorean thought that every thing may be formed from unity and multiplicity, from the limit and the unlimited. The aim of the Theatætus, the Sophist, and the Parmenides is to refute the principles of the Eleatics and Heraclitics: this refutation is effected in the Theatætus by combating directly the principle of an absolute becoming, in the Sophist by combating directly the principle of abstract being, and in the Parmenides by taking up the Eleatic one and showing its true relations. We have already spoken of the Theatætus; we will now look for the development of the doctrine of ideas in the Sophist and Parmenides.

The ostensible end of the former of these dialogues is to show that the Sophist is really but a caricature of the philosopher, but its true end is to fix the reality of the appearance, i. e. of the not-being, and to discuss speculatively the relation of being and not-being. The doctrine of the Eleatics ended with the rejection of all sensuous knowledge, declaring that what we receive as the perception of a multiplicity of things or of a becoming is only an appearance. In this the contradiction was clear, the not-being was absolutely denied, and yet its existence was admitted in the notion of men. Plato at once draws attention to this contradiction, showing that a delusive opinion, which gives rise to a false image or representation, is not possible, since the whole theory rests upon the assumption that the false, the not-true, i. e. not-being cannot even be thought. This, Plato continues, is the great difficulty in thinking of not-being, that both he who denies and he who affirms its reality is driven to contradict himself. For though it is inexpressible and inconceivable either as one or as many, still, when speaking of it, we must attribute to it both being and multiplicity. If we admit that there is such a thing as a false opinion, we assume in this very fact the notion of not-being, for only that opinion can be said to be false which supposes either the not-being to be, or makes that, which is not, to be. In short, if there actually exists a false notion, so does there actually and truly exist a not-being. After Plato had thus fixed the reality of not-being, he discusses the relation of being and not-being, i. e. the relation of conceptions generally in their combinations and differences. If not-being has no less reality than being, and being no more than not-being, if, therefore, e. g. the not-great is as truly real as the great, then every conception may be apprehended according to its opposite sides as being and not-being at the same time: it is a being in reference to itself, as something identical with itself, but it is not-being in reference to every one of the numberless other conceptions which can be referred to it, and with which, on account of its difference from them, it can have nothing in common. The conception of the same ταὐτὸν and the different θάτερον represent the general form of an antithesis. These are the universal formulæ of combination for all conceptions. This reciprocal relation of conceptions as at the same time being and not-being, by virtue of which they can be arranged among themselves, forms now the basis for the art of dialectics, which has to judge what conceptions can and what cannot be joined together. Plato illustrates here by taking the conceptions of being, motion (becoming), and rest (existence), and showing what are the results of the combinations of these ideas. The conceptions of motion and rest cannot well be joined together, though both of them may be joined with that of being, since both are; the conception of rest is therefore in reference to itself a being, but in reference to the conception of motion a not-being or different. Thus the Platonic doctrine of ideas, after having in the Theatætus attained its general foundation in fixing the objective reality of conceptions, becomes now still farther developed in the Sophist to a doctrine of the agreement and disagreement of conceptions. The category which conditions these reciprocal relations is that of not-being or difference. This fundamental thought of the Sophist, that being is not without not-being and not-being is not without being, may be expressed in modern phraseology thus: negation is not not-being but determinateness, and on the other hand all determinateness and concreteness of conceptions, or every thing affirmative can be only through negation; in other words the conception of contradiction is the soul of a philosophical method.

The doctrine of ideas appears in the Parmenides as the positive consequence and progressive development of the Eleatic principle. Indeed in this dialogue, in that Plato makes Parmenides the chief speaker, he seems willing to allow that his doctrine is in substance that of the Eleatic sage. True, the fundamental thought of the dialogue—that the one is not conceivable in its complete singleness without the many, nor the many without the one, that each necessarily presupposes and reciprocally conditions the other—stands in the most direct contradiction to Eleaticism. Yet Parmenides himself, by dividing his poem into two parts, and treating in the first of the one and in the second of the many, postulates an inner mediation between these two externally so disjointed parts of his philosophy, and in this respect the Platonic theory of ideas might give itself out as the farther elimination, and the true sense of the Parmenidean philosophizing. This dialectical mediation between the one and the not-one or the many Plato now attempts in four antinomies, which have ostensibly only a negative result in so far as they show that contradictions arise both whether the one be adopted or rejected. The positive sense of these antinomies, though it can be gained only through inferences which Plato himself does not expressly utter, but leaves to be drawn by the reader—is as follows. The first antinomy shows that the one is inconceivable as such since it is only apprehended in its abstract opposition to the many; the second, that in this case also the reality of the many is inconceivable; the third, that the one or the idea cannot be conceived as not-being, since there can be neither conception nor predicate of the absolute not-being, and since, if not-being is excluded from all fellowship with being, all becoming and departing, all similarity and difference, every representation and explanation concerning it must also be denied; and lastly, the fourth affirms that the not-one or the many cannot be conceived without the one or the idea. What now is Plato’s aim in this discussion of the dialectic relations between the conceptions of the one and the many? Would he use the conception of the one only as an example to explain his dialectic method with conceptions, or is the discussion of this conception itself the very object before him? Manifestly the latter, or the dialogue ends without result and without any inner connection of its two parts. But how came Plato to make such a special investigation of this conception of the one? If we bear in mind that the Eleatics had already perceived the antithesis of the actual and the phenomenal world in the antithesis of the one and the many, and that Plato himself had also regarded his ideas as the unity of the manifold, as the one and the same in the many—since he repeatedly uses “idea” and “the one” in the same sense, and places (Rep. VII. 537) dialectics in the same rank with the faculty of bringing many to unity—then is it clear that the one which is made an object of investigation in the Parmenides is the idea in its general sense, i. e. in its logical form, and that Plato consequently in the dialectic of the one and the many would represent the dialectic of the idea and the phenomenal world, or in other words would dialectically determine and establish the correct view of the idea as the unity in the manifoldness of the phenomenal. In that it is shown in the Parmenides, on the one side, that the many cannot be conceived without the one, and on the other side, that the one must be something which embraces in itself manifoldness, so have we the ready inference on the one side, that the phenomenal world, or the many, has a true being only in so far as it has the one or the conception within it, and on the other side, that since the conception is not an abstract one but manifoldness in unity, it must actually have manifoldness in unity in order to be able to be in the phenomenal world. The indirect result of the Parmenides is that matter as the infinitely divisible and undetermined mass has no actuality, but is in relation to the ideal world a not-being, and though the ideas as the true being gain their appearance in it, yet the idea itself is all that is actual in the appearance or phenomenon; the phenomenal world derives its whole existence from the ideal world which appears in it, and has a being only so far as it has a conception or idea for its content.

4. Positive Exposition of the Doctrine of Ideas.—Ideas may be defined according to the different sides of their historical connection, as the common in the manifold, the universal in the particular, the one in the many, or the constant and abiding in the changing. Subjectively they are principles of knowing which cannot be derived from experience they are the intuitively certain and innate regulators of our knowledge. Objectively they are the immutable principles of being and of the phenomenal world, incorporeal and simple unities which have no relation to space, and which may be predicated of every independent thing. The doctrine of ideas grew originally out of the desire to give a definite conception to the inner essence of things, and make the real world conceivable as a harmoniously connected intellectual world. This desire of scientific knowledge Aristotle cites expressly as the motive to the Platonic doctrine of ideas. “Plato,” he says (Metaph. XIII. 4), “came to the doctrine of ideas because he was convinced of the truth of the Heraclitic view which regarded the sensible world as a ceaseless flowing and changing. His conclusion from this was, that if there be a science of any thing there must be, besides the sensible, other substances which have a permanence, for there can be no science of the fleeting.” It is, therefore, the idea of science which demands the reality of ideas, a demand which cannot be granted unless an idea or conception is also the ground of all being. This is the case with Plato. According to him there can be neither a true knowing nor a true being without ideas and conceptions which have an independent reality.

What now does Plato mean by idea? From what has already been said it is clear that he means something more than ideal conceptions of the beautiful and the good. An idea is found, as the name itself (εἰδος) indicates, wherever a universal conception of a species or kind is found. Hence Plato speaks of the idea of a bed, table, strength, health, voice, color, ideas of simple relations and properties, ideas of mathematical figures, and even ideas of not-being, and of that, which in its essence only contradicts the idea, baseness and vice. In a word, we may put an idea wherever many things may be characterized by a common name (Rep. X. 596): or as Aristotle expresses it (Met. XII. 3). Plato places an idea to every class of being. In this sense Plato himself speaks in the beginning of the Parmenides. Parmenides asks the young Socrates what he calls ideas. Socrates answers by naming unconditionally the moral ideas, the ideas of the true, the beautiful, the good, and then after a little delay he mentions some physical ones, as the ideas of man, of fire, of water; he will not allow ideas to be predicated of that which is only a formless mass, or which is a part of something else, as hair, mud and clay, but in this he is answered by Parmenides, that if he would be fully imbued with philosophy, he must not consider such things as these to be wholly despicable, but should look upon them as truly though remotely participating in the idea. Here at least the claim is asserted that no province of being is excluded from the idea, that even that which appears most accidental and irrational is yet a part of rational knowledge, in fact that every thing existing may be brought within a rational conception.

5. The Relation of Ideas to the Phenomenal World. Analogous to the different definitions of idea are the different names which Plato gives to the sensible and phenomenal world. He calls it the many, the divisible, the unbounded, the undetermined and measureless, the becoming, the relative, great and small, not-being. The relation now in which these two worlds of sense and of ideas stand to each other is a question which Plato has answered neither fully nor consistently with himself. His most common way is to characterize the relation of things to conceptions as a participant, or to call things the copies and adumbrations, while ideas are the archetypes. Yet this is so indefinite that Aristotle properly says that to talk in this way is only to use poetical metaphors. The great difficulty of the doctrine of ideas is not solved but only increased by these figurative representations. The difficulty lies in the contradiction which grows out of the fact that while Plato admits the reality of the becoming and of the province of the becoming, he still affirms that ideas which are substances ever at rest and ever the same are the only actual. Now in this Plato is formally consistent with himself, while he characterizes the matériel of matter not as a positive substratum but as not-being, and guards himself with the express affirmation that he does not consider the sensible as being, but only as something similar to being. (Rep. X. 597.) The position laid down in the Parmenides is also consistent with this, that a perfect philosophy should look upon the idea as the cognizable in the phenomenal world, and should follow it out in the smallest particulars until every part of being should be known and all dualism removed. In fine, Plato in many of his expressions seems to regard the world of sensation only as a subjective appearance, as a product of the subjective notion, as the result of a confused way of representing ideas. In this sense the phenomena are entirely dependent on ideas; they are nothing but the ideas themselves in the form of not being; the phenomenal world derives its whole existence from the ideal world which appears in it. But yet when Plato calls the sensible a mingling of the same with the different or the not-being (Tim. p. 35), when he characterizes the ideas as vowels which go through every thing like a chain (Soph. p. 253), when he himself conceives the possibility that matter might offer opposition to the formative energy of ideas (Tim. p. 56), when he speaks of an evil soul of the world (de Leg. X. 896), and gives intimations of the presence in the world of a principle in nature hostile to God (Polit. p. 268), when he in the Phædon treats of the relation between body and soul as one wholly discordant and malignant,—in all this there is evidence enough, even after allowing for the mythical form of the Timæus, and the rhetorical composition which prevails in the Phædon, to substantiate the contradiction mentioned above. This is most clear in the Timæus. Plato in this dialogue makes the sensible world to be formed by a Creator after the pattern of an idea, but in this he lays down as a condition that this Demi-urge or Creator should find at hand a something which should be apt to receive and exhibit this ideal image. This something Plato compares to the matter which is fashioned by the artisan (whence the later name hyle). He characterizes it as wholly undetermined and formless, but possessing in itself an aptitude for every variety of forms, an invisible and shapeless thing, a something which it is difficult to characterize, and which Plato even does not seem inclined very closely to describe. In this the actuality of matter is denied; while Plato makes it equivalent to space it is only the place, the negative condition of the sensible while it possesses a being only as it receives in itself the ideal form. Still matter remains the objective and phenomenal form of the idea: the visible world arises only through the mingling of ideas with this substratum, and if matter be metaphysically expressed as “the different,” then does it follow with logical necessity in a dialectical discussion that it is just as truly being as not-being. Plato does not conceal from himself this difficulty, and therefore attempts to represent with comparisons and images this presupposition of a hyle which he finds it as impossible to do without as to express in a conceivable form. If he would do without it he must rise to the conception of an absolute creation, or consider matter as an ultimate emanation from the absolute spirit, or else explain it as appearance only. Thus the Platonic system is only a fruitless struggle against dualism.

6. The Idea of the Good and the Deity. If the true and the real is exhibited in general conceptions which are so related to each other that every higher conception embraces and combines under it several lower, so that any one starting from a single idea may eventually discover all (Meno. p. 81), then must the sum of ideas form a connected organism and succession in which the lower idea appears as a stepping-stone and presupposition to a higher. This succession must have its end in an idea which needs no higher idea or presupposition to sustain it. This highest idea, the ultimate limit of all knowledge, and itself the independent ground of all other ideas, Plato calls the idea of the good, i. e. not of the moral but of the metaphysical good. (Rep. VII. 517.)

What this good is in itself, Plato undertakes to show only in images. “In the same manner as the sun,” he says in the Republic (VI. 506), “is the cause of sight, and the cause not merely that objects are visible but also that they grow and are produced, so the good is of such power and beauty, that it is not merely the cause of science to the soul, but is also the cause of being and reality to whatever is the object of science, and as the sun is not itself sight or the object of sight but presides over both, so the good is not science and truth but is superior to both, they being not the good itself but of a goodly nature.” The good has unconditioned worth, and gives to every other thing all the value it possesses. The idea of the good excludes all presupposition. It is the ultimate ground at the same time of knowing and of being, of the perceiver and the perceived, of the subjective and the objective, of the ideal and the real, though exalted itself above such a division. (Rep. VI. 508-517.) Plato, however, has not attempted a derivation of the remaining ideas from the idea of the good; his course here is wholly an empirical one; a certain class of objects are taken, and having referred these to their common essence this is given out as their idea. He has treated the individual conceptions so independently, and has made each one so complete in itself, that it is impossible to find a proper division or establish an immanent continuation of one into another.

It is difficult to say precisely what relation this idea of the good bore to the Deity in the Platonic view. Taking every thing together it seems clear that Plato regarded the two as identical, but whether he conceived this highest cause to be a personal being or not is a question which hardly admits of a definite answer. The logical result of his system would exclude the personality of God. If only the universal (the idea) is the true being, then can the only absolute idea, the Deity, be only the absolute universal; but that Plato was himself conscious of this logical conclusion we can hardly affirm, any more than we can say on the other hand that he was clearly a theist. For whenever in a mythical or popular statement he speaks of innumerable gods, this only indicates that he is speaking in the language of the popular religion, and when he speaks in an accurate philosophical sense, he only makes the relation of the personal deity with the idea a very uncertain one. Most probable, therefore, is it that this whole question concerning the personality of God was not yet definitely before him, that he took up the religious idea of God and defended it in ethical interest against the anthropomorphism of the mythic poets, that he sought to establish it by arguments drawn from the evidences of design in nature, and the universal prevalence of a belief in a God, while as a philosopher he made no use of it.

V. The Platonic Physics. 1. Nature.—The connection between the Physics and the Dialectics of Plato lies principally in two points—the conception of becoming, which forms the chief property of nature, and that of real being, which is at once the all sufficient and good, and the true end of all becoming. Because nature belongs to the province of irrational sensation we cannot look for the same accuracy in the treatment of it, as is furnished in dialectics. Plato therefore applied himself with much less zest to physical investigations than to those of an ethical or dialectical character, and indeed only attended to them in his later years. Only in one dialogue, the Timæus, do we find any extended evolution of physical doctrines, and even here Plato seems to have gone to his work with much less independence than his wont, this dialogue being more strongly tinctured with Pythagoreanism than any other of his writings. The difficulty of the Timæus is increased by the mythical form on which the old commentators themselves have stumbled. If we take the first impression that it gives us, we have, before the creation of the world, a Creator as a moving and a reflecting principle, with on the one side the ideal world existing immovable as the eternal archetype, and on the other side, a chaotic, formless, irregular, fluctuating mass, which holds in itself the germ of the material world, but has no determined character nor substance. With these two elements the Creator now blends the world-soul which he distributes according to the relation of numbers, and sets it in definite and harmonious motion. In this way the material world, which has become actual through the arrangement of the chaotic mass into the four elements, finds its external frame, and the process thus begun is completed in its external structure by the formation of the organic world.

It is difficult to separate the mythical and the philosophical elements in this cosmogony of the Timæus, especially difficult to determine how far the historical construction, which gives a succession in time to the acts of creation, is only a formal one, and also how far the affirmation that matter is absolutely a not-being can be harmonized with the general tenor of Plato’s statements. The significance of the world-soul is clearer. Since the soul in the Platonic system is the mean between spirit and body, and as in the same way mathematical relations, in their most universal expression as numbers, are the mean between mere sensuous existence and the pure idea (between the one and the many as Plato expresses it), it would seem clear that the world-soul, construed according to the relation of numbers, must express the relation of the world of ideas to that of sense, in other words, that it denotes the sensible world as a thought represented in the form of material existence. The Platonic view of nature, in opposition to the mechanical attempts to explain it of the earlier philosophers, is entirely teleological, and based upon the conception of the good, or, on the moral idea. Plato conceives the world as the image of the good, as the work of the divine munificence. As it is the image of the perfect it is therefore only one, corresponding to the idea of the single all-embracing substance, for an infinite number of worlds is not to be conceived as actual. For the same reason the world is spherical, after the most perfect and uniform structure, which embraces in itself all other forms; its movement is in a circle, because this, by returning into itself, is most like the movement of reason. The particular points of the Timæus, the derivation of the four elements, the separation of the seven planets according to the musical scale, the opinion that the stars were immortal and heavenly substances, the affirmation that the earth holds an abiding position in the middle of the world, a view which subsequently became elaborated to the Ptolemaic system, the reference of all material figures to the triangle as the simplest plane figure, the division of inanimate nature, according to the four elements, into creatures of earth, water, and air, his discussions respecting organic nature, and especially respecting the construction of the human body—all these we need here only mention. Their philosophical worth consists not so much in their material content, but rather in their fundamental idea, that the world should be conceived as the image and the work of reason, as an organism of order, harmony, and beauty, as the good actualizing itself.

2. The Soul.—The doctrine of the soul, considering it simply as the basis of a moral action, and leaving out of view all questions of concrete ethics, forms a constituent element in the Platonic physics. Since the soul is united to the body, it participates in the motions and changes of the body, and is, in this respect, related to the perishable. But in so far as it participates in the knowledge of the eternal, i. e. in so far as it knows ideas, does there live within it a divine principle—reason. Accordingly, Plato distinguishes two components of the soul—the divine and the mortal, the rational and the irrational. These two are united by an intermediate link, which Plato calls θυμὸς or spirit, and which, though allied to reason is not reason itself, since it is often exhibited in children and also in brutes, and since even men are often carried away by it without reflection. This threefoldness, here exhibited psychologically, is found, in different applications, through all the last general period of Plato’s literary life. Based upon the anthropological triplicate of reason, soul and body, it corresponds also to the division of theoretical knowledge into science (or thinking), correct opinions (or sense-perception), and ignorance, to the triple ladder of eroticism in the Symposium and the mythological representation connected with this of Poros, Eros, and Penia; to the metaphysical triplicate of the ideal world, mathematical relations and the sensible world; and furnishes ground for deriving the ethical division of virtue and the political division of ranks.

So far as the soul is a mean between the spiritual and corporeal, may we connect the Phædon’s proofs of its immortality with the psychological view now before us. The common thought of these arguments is that the soul, in its capacity for thinking, participates in the reason, and being thus of an opposite nature to, and uncontrolled by the corporeal, it may have an independent existence. The arguments are wholly analytical, and possess no valid and universal proof; they proceed entirely upon a petitio principii, they are derived partly from mythical philosophemes, and manifest not only an obscure conception of the soul, but of its relations to the body and the reason, and, so far as the relation of the soul to the ideal world is in view, they furnish in the best case only some proof for the immortality of him who has raised his soul to a pure spirit, i. e. the immortality of the philosopher. Plato was not himself deceived as to the theoretical insufficiency of his arguments. Their number would show this, and, besides, he expressly calls them proofs which amount to only human probability, and furnish practical postulates alone. With this view he introduces at the close of his arguments the myth of the lower world, and the state of departed souls, in order, by complying with the religious notions, and traditions of his countrymen, to gain a positive support for belief in the soul’s immortality. Elsewhere Plato also speaks of the lower world, and of the future rewards and punishments of the good and the evil, in accordance with the popular notions, as though he saw the elements of a divine revelation therein; he tells of purifying punishment in Hades, analogous to a purgatory; he avails himself of the common notion to affirm that shades still subject to the corporeal principle will hover after death over their graves, seeking to recover their lifeless bodies, and at times he dilates upon the migration of the soul to various human and brute forms. On the whole, we find in Plato’s proofs of immortality, as in his psychology generally, that dualism, which here expresses itself as hatred to the corporeal, and is connected with the tendency to seek the ultimate ground of evil in the nature of the “different” and the sensible world.

VI. The Platonic Ethics.—The ground idea of the good, which in physics served only as an inventive conception, finds now, in the ethics, its true exhibition. Plato has developed it prominently according to three sides, as good, as individual virtue, and as ethical world in the state. The conception of duty remains in the background with him as with the older philosophers.

1. Good and Pleasure.—That the highest good can be nothing other than the idea of the good itself, has already been shown in the dialectics, where this idea was suffered to appear as the ultimate end of all our striving. But since the dialectics represent the supreme good as unattainable by human reason, and only cognizable in its different modes of manifestation, we can, therefore, only follow these different manifestations of the highest good, which represent not the good itself, but the good in becoming, where it appears as science, truth, beauty, virtue, &c. We are thus not required to be equal to God, but only like him (Theæt.) It is this point of view which lies at the basis of the graduated table of good, given in the Philebus.

In seeking the highest good, the conception of pleasure must be investigated. The Platonic standpoint here is the attempt to strike a balance between Hedonism, (the Cyrenian theory that pleasure is the highest good, cf. § XIII. 3), and Cynicism. While he will not admit with Aristippus that pleasure is the true good, neither will he find it as the Cynics maintain, simply in the negation of its contrary, pain, and thus deny that it belongs to the good things of human life. He finds his refutation of Hedonism in the indeterminateness and relativity of all pleasure, since that which at one time may seem as pleasure, under other circumstances may appear as pain; and since he who chooses pleasure without distinction, will find impure pleasures always combined in his life with more or less of pain; his refutation of Cynicism he establishes by showing the necessary connection between virtue and true pleasure, showing that there is a true and enduring pleasure, the pleasure of reason, found in the possession of truth and of goodness, while a rational condition separate from all pleasure, cannot be the highest good of a finite being. It is most prominently by this distinction of a true and false, of a pure and impure pleasure, that Plato adjusts the controversy of the two Socratic schools.—A detailed exhibition of the Philebus we must here omit.—On the whole, in the Platonic apprehension of pleasure, we cannot but notice that same vacillation with which Plato every where treats of the relation between the corporeal and the spiritual, at one time considering the former as a hindrance to the latter, and at another as its serving instrument; now, regarding it as a concurring cause to the good, and then, as the ground of all evil; here, as something purely negative, and there, as a positive substratum which supports all the higher intellectual developments; and in conformity with this, pleasure is also considered at one time as something equivalent to a moral act, and to knowledge, and at another as the means and accidental consequence of the good.

2. Virtue.—In his theory of virtue, Plato is wholly Socratic. He holds fast to the opinion that it is science (Protagoras), and therefore, teachable (Meno), and as to its unity, it follows from the dialectical principle that the one can be manifold, or the manifold one, that, therefore, virtue must both be regarded as one, and also in a different respect, as many. Plato thus brings out prominently the union and connection of all virtues, and is fond of painting, especially in the introductory dialogues, some single virtue as comprising in itself the sum of all the rest. Plato follows for the most part the fourfold division of virtues, as popularly made; and first, in the Republic (IV. 441), he attempts a scientific derivation of them, by referring to each of the three parts of the soul its appropriate virtue. The virtue of the reason he calls prudence or wisdom, the directing or measuring virtue, without whose activity valor would sink to brute impulse, and calm endurance to stupid indifference; the virtue of spirit is valor, the help-meet of reason, or spirit ( θυμὸς) penetrated by science, which in the struggle against pleasure and pain, desire and fear, preserves the rational intelligence against the alarms with which sensuous desires, would seek to sway the soul; the virtue of the sensuous desires, and which has to reduce these within true and proper grounds, is temperance, and that virtue in fine to which belong the due regulation and mutual adjustment of the several powers of the soul, and which, therefore, constitutes the bond and the unity of the three other virtues, is justice.

In this last conception, that of justice, all the elements of moral culture meet together and centre, exhibiting the moral life of the individual as a perfect whole, and then, by requiring an application of the same principle to communities, the moral consideration is advanced beyond the narrow circle of individual life. Thus is established the whole of the moral world—Justice “in great letters,” the moral life in its complete totality, is the state. In this is first actualized the demand for the complete harmony of the human life. In and through the state comes the complete formation of matter for the reason.

3. The State.—The Platonic state is generally regarded as an ideal or chimera, which it is impracticable to realize among men. This view of the case has even been ascribed to Plato, and it has been said that in his Republic he attempted to sketch only a fine ideal of a state constitution, while in the Laws he traced out a practicable philosophy of the state from the standpoint of the common consciousness. But in the first place, this was not Plato’s true meaning. Although he acknowledges that the state he describes cannot be found on earth, and has its archetype only in heaven, by which the philosopher ought to form himself (IX. 592), still he demands that efforts should be made to realize it here, and he even attempts to show the conditions and means under which such a state could be made actual, not overlooking in all this the defects arising from the different characters and temperaments of men. A composition, dissociated from the idea, could only appear untrue to a philosopher like Plato, who saw the actual and the true only in the idea; and the common view which supposes that he wrote his Republic in the full consciousness of its impracticability, mistakes entirely the standpoint of the Platonic philosophy. Still farther the question whether such a state as the Platonic is attainable and the best, is generally perverted. The Platonic state is the Grecian state-idea given in a narrative form. It is no vain and powerless ideal to picture the idea as a rational principle in every moment of the world’s history, since the idea itself is that which is absolutely actual, that which is essential and necessary in existing things. The truly ideal ought not to be actual, but is actual, and the only actual; if an idea were too good for existence, or the empirical actuality too bad for it, then were this a fault of the ideal itself. Plato has not given himself up merely to abstract theories, the philosopher cannot leap beyond his age, but can only see and grasp it in its true content. This Plato has done. His standpoint is his own age. He looks upon the political life of the Greeks as then existing, and it is this life, exalted to its idea, which forms the real content of the Platonic Republic. Plato has here represented the Grecian morality in its substantial condition, If the Platonic Republic seems prominently an ideal which can never be realized, this is owing much less to its ideality than to the defects of the old political life. The most prominent characteristic of the Hellenic conception of the state, before the Greeks began to fall into unbridled licentiousness, was the constraint thrown upon personal subjective freedom, in the sacrifice of every individual interest to the absolute sovereignty of the state. With Plato also, the state is every thing. His political institutions, so loudly ridiculed by the ancients, are only the undeniable consequences following from the very idea of the Grecian state, which allowed neither to the individual citizen nor to a corporation, any lawful sphere of action independent of itself.

The grand feature of the Platonic state is, as has been said, the exclusive sacrifice of the individual to the state, the reference of moral to political virtue. Since man cannot reach his complete development in isolation, but only as a member of an organic society (the state), Plato therefore concludes that the individual purpose should wholly conform to the general aim, and that the state must represent a perfect and harmonious unity, and be a counterpart of the moral life of the individual. In a perfect state all things, joy and sorrow, and even eyes, ears and hands, must be common to all, so that the social life would be as it were the life of one man. This perfect universality and unity, can only be actualized when every thing individual and particular falls away, and hence the difficulty of the Platonic Republic. Private property and domestic life (in place of which comes a community of goods and of wives), the duty of education, the choice of rank and profession, the arts and sciences, all these must be subjected and placed under the exclusive and absolute control of the state. The individual may lay claim only to that happiness which belongs to him as a constituent element of the state. From this point Plato goes down into the minutest particulars, and gives the closest directions respecting gymnastics and music, which form the two means of culture of the higher ranks; respecting the study of mathematics, and philosophy, the choice of stringed instruments, and the proper measure of verse; respecting bodily exercise and the service of women in war; respecting marriage settlements, and the age at which any one should study dialectics, marry, and beget children. The state with him is only a great educational establishment, a family in the mass.—Lyric poetry he would allow only under the inspection of competent judges. Epic and dramatic poetry, even Homer and Hesiod, should be banished from the state, since they rouse and lead astray the passions, and give unworthy representations of the gods. Exhibitions of physical degeneracy or weakness should not be tolerated in the Platonic state; deformed and sickly infants should be abandoned, and food and attention should be denied to the sick.—In all this we find the chief antithesis of the ancient to the modern state. Plato did not recognize the will and choice of the individual, and yet the individual has a right to demand this. The problem of the modern state has been to unite these two sides, to bring the universal end and the particular end of the individual into harmony, to reconcile the highest possible freedom of the conscious individual will, with the highest possible supremacy of the state.

The political institutions of the Platonic state are decidedly aristocratic. Grown up in opposition to the extravagances of the Athenian democracy, Plato prefers an absolute monarchy to every other constitution, though this should have as its absolute ruler only the perfect philosopher. It is a well-known expression of his, that the state can only attain its end when philosophers become its rulers, or when its present rulers have carried their studies so far and so accurately, that they can unite philosophy with a superintendence of public affairs (V. 473). His reason for claiming that the sovereign power should be vested only in one, is the fact that very few are endowed with political wisdom. This ideal of an absolute ruler who should be able to lead the state perfectly, Plato abandons in the Laws, in which work he shows his preference for a mixed constitution, embracing both a monarchical and an aristocratic element. From the aristocratic tendency of the Platonic ideal of a state, follows farther the sharp division of ranks, and the total exclusion of the third rank from a proper political life. In reality Plato makes but two classes in his state, the subjects and the sovereign, analogous to his twofold psychological division of sensible and intellectual, mortal and immortal, but as in psychology he had introduced a middle step, spirit, to stand between his two divisions there, so in the state he brings in the military class between the ruler and those intended to supply the bodily wants of the community. We have thus three ranks, that of the ruler, corresponding to the reason, that of the watcher or warrior, answering to spirit, and that of the craftsman, which is made parallel to the appetites or sensuous desires. To these three ranks belong three separate functions: to the first, that of making the law and caring for the general good; to the second, that of defending the public welfare from attacks of external foes; and to the third, the care of separate interests and wants, as agriculture, mechanics, &c. From each of these three ranks and its functions the state derives a peculiar virtue—wisdom from the ruler, bravery from the warrior, and temperance from the craftsman, so far as he lives in obedience to his rulers. In the proper union of these three virtues is found the justice of the state, a virtue which is thus the sum of all other virtues. Plato pays little attention to the lowest rank, that of the craftsman, who exists in the state only as means. He held that it was not necessary to give laws and care for the rights of this portion of the community. The separation between the ruler and the warrior is not so broad. Plato suffers these two ranks to interpenetrate each other, and analogous to his original psychological division, as though the reason were but spirit in the highest step of its development, he makes the oldest and the best of the warriors rise to the dignity and power of the rulers. The education of its warriors should therefore be a chief care of the state, in order that their spirit, though losing none of its peculiar energy, may yet be penetrated by reason. The best endowed by nature and culture among the warriors, may be selected at the age of thirty, and put upon a course of careful training. When he has reached the age of fifty and looked upon the idea of the good, he may be bound to actualize this archetype in the state, provided always that every one wait his turn, and spend his remaining time in philosophy. Only thus can the state be raised to the unconditioned rule of reason under the supremacy of the good.

SECTION XV.
THE OLD ACADEMY.

In the old Academy, we lose the presence of inventive genius; with few exceptions we find here no movements of progress, but rather a gradual retrogression of the Platonic philosophizing. After the death of Plato, Speusippus, his nephew and disciple, held the chair of his master in the Academy during eight years. He was succeeded by Xenocrates, after whom we meet with Polemo, Crates, and Crantor. It was a time in which schools for high culture were established, and the older teacher yielded to his younger successor the post of instruction. The general characteristics of the old Academy, so far as can be gathered from the scanty accounts, were great attention to learning, the prevalence of Pythagorean elements, especially the doctrine of numbers, and lastly, the reception of fantastic and demonological notions, among which the worship of the stars played a part. The prevalence of the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers in the later instructions of the Academy, gave to mathematical sciences, particularly arithmetic and astronomy, a high place, and at the same time assigned to the doctrine of ideas a much lower position than Plato had given it. Subsequently, the attempt was made to get back to the unadulterated doctrine of Plato. Crantor is said to be the first editor of the Platonic writings.

As Plato was the only true Socraticist, so was Aristotle the only genuine disciple of Plato, though often abused by his fellow-disciples as unfaithful to his master’s principles.

We pass on at once to him, without stopping now to inquire into his relation to Plato, or the advance which he made beyond his predecessor, since these points will come up before us in the exhibition of the Aristotelian philosophy. (See § XVI: III. 1.)

SECTION XVI.
ARISTOTLE.

I. Life and Writings of Aristotle.—Aristotle was born 384 B. C. at Stagira, a Greek colony in Thrace. His father, Nicomachus, was a physician, and the friend of Amyntas, king of Macedonia. The former fact may have had its influence in determining the scientific direction of the son, and the latter may have procured his subsequent summons to the Macedonian court. Aristotle at a very early age lost both his parents. In his seventeenth year he came to Plato at Athens, and continued with him twenty years. On account of his indomitable zeal for study, Plato named him “the Teacher,” and said, upon comparing him with Xenocrates, that the latter required the spur, the former the bit. Among the many charges made against his character, most prominent are those of jealousy and ingratitude towards his master, but most of the anecdotes in which these charges are embodied merit little credence. It is certain that Aristotle, after the death of Plato, stood in friendly relations with Xenocrates; still, as a writer, he can hardly be absolved from a certain want of friendship and regard towards Plato and his philosophy, though all this can be explained on psychological grounds. After Plato’s death, Aristotle went with Xenocrates to Hermeas, tyrant of Atarneus, whose sister Pythias he married after Hermeas had fallen a prey to Persian violence. After the death of Pythias he is said to have married his concubine, Herpyllis, who was the mother of his son Nicomachus. In the year 343 he was called by Philip of Macedon, to take the charge of the education of his son Alexander, then thirteen years old. Both father and son honored him highly, and the latter, with royal munificence, subsequently supported him in his studies. When Alexander went to Persia, Aristotle betook himself to Athens, and taught in the Lyceum, the only gymnasium then vacant, since Xenocrates had possession of the Academy, and the Cynics of the Cynosaerges. From the shady walks περίπατοι of the Lyceum, in which Aristotle was accustomed to walk and expound his philosophy, his school received the name of the Peripatetic. Aristotle is said to have spent his mornings with his more mature disciples, exercising them in the profoundest questions of philosophy, while his evenings were occupied with a greater number of pupils in a more general and preparatory instruction. The former investigations were called acroamatic, the latter exoteric. He abode at Athens, and taught thirteen years, and then, after the death of Alexander, whose displeasure he had incurred, he is said to have been accused by the Athenians of impiety towards the gods, and to have fled to Chalcis, in order to escape a fate similar to that of Socrates. He died in the year 322 at Chalcis, in Eubæa.

Aristotle left a vast number of writings, of which the smaller (perhaps a fourth), but unquestionably the more important portion have come down to us, though in a form which cannot be received without some scruples. The story of Strabo about the fate of the Aristotelian writings, and the injury which they suffered in a cellar at Scepsis, is confessedly a fable, or at least limited to the original manuscripts; but the fragmentary and descriptive form which many among them, and even the most important (e. g. the metaphysics) possess, the fact that scattered portions of one and the same work (e. g. the ethics) are repeatedly found in different treatises, the irregularities and striking contradictions in one and the same writing, the disagreement found in other particulars among different works, and the distinction made by Aristotle himself between acroamatic and exoterical writings, all this gives reason to believe that we have, for the most part, before us only his oral lectures written down, and subsequently edited by his scholars.

II. Universal Character and Division of the Aristotelian Philosophy.—With Plato, philosophy had been national in both its form and content, but with Aristotle, it loses its Hellenic peculiarity, and becomes universal in scope and meaning; the Platonic dialogue changes into barren prose; a rigid, artistic language takes the place of the mythical and poetical dress; the thinking which had been with Plato intuitive, is with Aristotle discursive; the immediate beholding of reason in the former, becomes reflection and conception in the latter. Turning away from the Platonic unity of all being, Aristotle prefers to direct his attention to the manifoldness of the phenomenal; he seeks the idea only in its concrete actualization, and consequently grasps the particular far more prominently in its peculiar determinateness and reciprocal differences, than in its connection with the idea. He embraces with equal interest the facts given in nature, in history, and in the inner life of man. But he ever tends toward the individual, he must ever have a fact given in order to develope his thought upon it; it is always the empirical, the actual, which solicits and guides his speculation; his whole course is a description of the facts given, and only merits the name of a philosophy because it comprehends the empirical in its totality and synthesis; because it has carried out its induction to the farthest extent. Only because he is the absolute empiricist may Aristotle be called the truly philosopher.

This character of the Aristotelian philosophy explains at the outset its encyclopedian tendency, inasmuch as every thing given in experience is equally worthy of regard and investigation. Aristotle is thus the founder of many courses of study unknown before him; he is not only the father of logic, but also of natural history, empirical psychology, and the science of natural rights.

This devotion of Aristotle to that which is given will also explain his predominant inclination towards physics, for nature is the most immediate and actual. Connected also with this is the fact that Aristotle is the first among philosophers who has given to history and its tendencies an accurate attention. The first book of the Metaphysics is also the first attempt at a history of philosophy, as his politics is the first critical history of the different states and constitutions. In both these cases he brings out his own theory only as the consequence of that which has been historically given, basing it in the former case upon the works of his predecessors, and in the latter case upon the constitutions which lie before him.

It is clear that according to this, the method of Aristotle must be a different one from that of Plato. Instead of proceeding like the latter, synthetically and dialectically, he pursues for the most part an analytic and regressive course, that is, going backward from the concrete to its ultimate ground and determination. While Plato would take his standpoint in the idea, in order to explain from this position and set in a clearer light that which is given and empirical, Aristotle on the other hand, starts with that which is given, in order to find and exhibit the idea in it. His method is, hence, induction; that is, the derivation of certain principles and maxims from a sum of given facts and phenomena; his mode of procedure is, usually, argument, a barren balancing of facts, phenomena, circumstances and possibilities. He stands out for the most part only as the thoughtful observer. Renouncing all claim to universality and necessity in his results, he is content to have brought out that which has an approximative truth, and the highest degree of probability. He often affirms that science does not simply relate to the changeless and necessary, but also to that which ordinarily takes place, that being alone excluded from its province, which is strictly accidental. Philosophy, consequently, has with him the character and worth of a reckoning of probabilities, and his mode of exhibition assumes not unfrequently only the form of a doubtful deliberation. Hence there is no trace of the Platonic ideals, hence, also, his repugnance to a glowing and poetic style in philosophy, a repugnance which, while indeed it induces in him a fixed, philosophical terminology, also frequently leads him to mistake and misrepresent the opinions of his predecessors. Hence, also, in whatever he treated, his thorough adherence to that which is actually given.

Connected in fine with the empirical character of the Aristotelian philosophizing, is the fragmentary form of his writings, and their want of a systematic division and arrangement. Proceeding always in the line of that which is given, from individual to individual, he considers every province of the actual by itself, and makes it the subject of a separate treatise; but he, for the most part, fails to indicate the lines by which the different parts hang together, and are comprehended in a systematic whole. Thus he holds up a number of co-ordinate sciences, each one of which has an independent basis, but he fails to give us the highest science which embraces them all. The principle is sometimes affirmed that all the writings follow the idea of a whole; but in their procedure there is such a want of all systematic connection, and every one of his writings is a monograph so thoroughly independent and complete in itself, that we are sometimes puzzled to know what Aristotle himself received as a part of philosophy, and what he excluded. We are never furnished with an independent scheme or outline, we rarely find definite results or summary explanations, and even the different divisions of philosophy which he gives, vary essentially from one another. At one time he divides science into theoretical and practical, at another, he adds to these two a poetical creative science, while still again he speaks of the three parts of science, ethics, physics, and logic. At one time he divides the theoretical philosophy into logic and physics, and at another into theology, mathematics, and physics. But no one of these divisions has he expressly given as the basis on which to represent his system; he himself places no value upon this method of division, and, indeed, openly declares himself opposed to it. It is, therefore, only for the sake of uniformity that we can give the preference here to the threefold division of philosophy as already adopted by Plato.

III. Logic and Metaphysics. 1. Conception and Relation of the Two.—The word metaphysics was first furnished by the Aristotelian commentators. Plato had used the term dialectics, and Aristotle had characterized the same thing as “first philosophy,” while he calls physics the “second philosophy.” The relation of this first philosophy to the other sciences Aristotle determines in the following way. Every science, he says, must have for investigation a determined province and separate form of being, but none of these sciences reaches the conception of being itself. Hence there is needed a science which should investigate that which the other sciences take up hypothetically, or through experience. This is done by the first philosophy which has to do with being as such, while the other sciences relate only to determined and concrete being. The metaphysics, which is this science of being and its primitive grounds, is the first philosophy, since it is presupposed by every other discipline. Thus, says Aristotle, if there were only a physical substance, then would physics be the first and the only philosophy, but if there be an immaterial and unmoved essence which is the ground of all being, then must there also be an antecedent, and because it is antecedent, a universal philosophy. The first ground of all being is God, whence Aristotle occasionally gives to the first philosophy the name of theology.

It is difficult to determine the relation between this first philosophy as the science of the ultimate ground of things, and that science which is ordinarily termed the logic of Aristotle, and which is exhibited in the writings bearing the name of the Organon. Aristotle himself has not accurately examined the relations of these two sciences, the reason of which is doubtless to be found in the incomplete form of the metaphysics. But since he has embraced them both under the same name of logic, since the investigation of the essence of things (VII. 17), and the doctrine of ideas (XIII. 5), are expressly called logical, since he repeatedly attempts in the Metaphysics (Book IV.), to establish the logical principle of contradiction as an absolute presupposition for all thinking and speaking and philosophizing, and employs the method of argument belonging to that science which has to do with the essence of things (III. 2. IV. 3), and since, in fine, the categories to which he had already dedicated a separate book in the Organon are also discussed again in the Metaphysics (Book V.), it follows that this much at least may be affirmed with certainty, that he would not absolutely separate the investigations of the Organon from those of the Metaphysics, and that he would not counsel the ordinary division of formal logic and metaphysics, although he has omitted to show more clearly their inner connection.

2. Logic.—The great problem both of the logical faculty and also of logic both as science and art, consists in this, viz., to form and judge of conclusions, and through conclusions to be able to establish a proof. The conclusions, however, arise from propositions, and the propositions from conceptions. According to this natural point of view, which lies in the very nature of the case, Aristotle has divided the content of the logical and dialectical doctrine contained in the different treatises of the Organon. The first treatise in the Organon is that containing the categories, a work which treats of the universal determinations of being, and gives the first attempt at an ontology. Of these categories Aristotle enumerates ten; essence, magnitude, quality, relation, the where, the when, position, habit, action, and passion. The second treatise (de interpretatione) investigates speech as the expression of thought, and discusses the doctrine of the parts of speech, propositions and judgments. The third are the analytic books, which show how conclusions may be referred back to their principles and arranged in order of their antecedence. The first Analytic contains in two books the universal doctrine of the Syllogism. Conclusions are according to their content and end either apodictic, which possess a certain and incontrovertible truth, or dialectic, which are directed toward that which may be disputed and is probable, or, finally, sophistic, which are announced deceptively as correct conclusions while they are not. The doctrine of apodictic conclusions and thus of proofs is given in the two books of the second Analytic, that of dialectic, is furnished in the eight books of the Topic, and that of sophistic in the treatise concerning “Sophistical Convictions.”

A closer statement of the Aristotelian logic would be familiar to every one, since the formal representations of this science ordinarily given, employ for the most part only the material furnished by Aristotle. Kant has remarked, that since the time of the Grecian sage, logic has made neither progress nor retrogression. Only in two points has the formal logic of our time advanced beyond that of Aristotle; first, in adding to the categorical conclusion which was the only one Aristotle had in mind, the hypothetical and disjunctive, and second, in adding the fourth to the first three figures of conclusion. But the incompleteness of the Aristotelian logic, which might be pardoned in the founder of this science, yet abides, and its thoroughly empirical method not only still continues, but has even been exalted to a principle by making the antithesis, which Aristotle did not, between the form of a thought and the content. Aristotle, in reality, only attempted to collect the logical facts in reference to the formation of propositions, and the method of conclusions; he has given in his logic only the natural history of finite thinking. However highly now we may rate the correctness of his abstraction, and the clearness with which he brings into consciousness the logical operation of the understanding, we must make equally conspicuous with this the want of all scientific derivation and foundation. The ten categories which he, as already remarked, has discussed in a separate treatise, he simply mentions, without furnishing any ground or principle for this enumeration; that there are this number of categories is only a matter of fact to him, and he even cites them differently in different writings. In the same way also he takes up the figures of the conclusion empirically; he considers them only as forms and determinations of relation of the formal thinking, and continues thus, although he allows the conclusion to stand for the only form of science within the province of the logic of the understanding. Neither in his Metaphysics nor in his Physics does he cite the rules of the formal methods of conclusion which he develops in the Organon, clearly proving that he has nowhere in his system properly elaborated either his categories or his analytic; his logical investigations do not influence generally the development of his philosophical thought, but have for the most part only the value of a preliminary scrutiny.

3. Metaphysics.—Among all the Aristotelian writings, the Metaphysics is least entitled to be called a connected whole; it is only a connection of sketches, which, though they follow a certain fundamental idea, utterly fail of an inner mediation and a perfect development. We may distinguish in it seven distinct groups. (1) Criticism of the previous philosophic systems viewed in the light of the four Aristotelian principles, Book I. (2) Positing of the apories or the philosophical preliminary questions, III. (3) The principle of contradiction, IV. (4) Definitions, V. (5) Examination of the conception of essence (οὐσία) and conceivable being (the τί ἦν εἴναι) or the conception of matter (ὕλη), form (εἶδος), and that which arises from the connection of these two (σύνολον), VII. VIII. (6) Potentiality and actuality, IX. (7) The Divine Spirit moving all, but itself unmoved, XII. (8) To these we may add the polemic against the Platonic doctrine of ideas and numbers, which runs through the whole Metaphysics, but is especially carried out in Books XIII. and XIV.

(1) The Aristotelian Criticism of the Platonic Doctrine of Ideas.—In Aristotle’s antagonism to the Platonic doctrine of ideas, we must seek for the specific difference between the two systems, a difference of which Aristotle avails himself of every opportunity (especially Metaph. I. and XIII.) to express. Plato had beheld every thing actual in the idea, but the idea was to him a rigid truth, which had not yet become interwoven with the life and the movement of existence. Such a view, however, had this difficulty, the idea, however little Plato would have it so, found standing over against it in independent being the phenomenal world, while it furnished no principle on which the being of the phenomenal world could be affirmed. This Aristotle recognizes and charges upon Plato, that his ideas were only “immortalized things of sense,” out of which the being and becoming of the sensible could not be explained. In order to avoid this consequence, he himself makes out an original reference of mind to phenomenon, affirming that the relation of the two is, that of the actual to the possible, or that of form to matter, and considering also mind as the absolute actuality of matter, and matter, as the potentially mind. His argument against the Platonic doctrine of ideas, Aristotle makes out in the following way.

Passing by now the fact that Plato has furnished no satisfactory proof for the objective and independent reality of ideas, and that his theory is without vindication, we may affirm in the first place that it is wholly unfruitful, since it possesses no ground of explanation for being. The ideas have no proper and independent content. To see this we need only refer to the manner in which Plato introduced them. In order to make science possible he had posited certain substances independent of the sensible, and uninfluenced by its changes. But to serve such a purpose, there was offered to him nothing other than this individual thing of sense. Hence he gave to this individual a universal form, which was with him the idea. From this it resulted, that his ideas can hardly be separated from the sensible and individual objects which participate in them. The ideal duality and the empirical duality is one and the same content. The truth of this we can readily see, whenever we gain from the adherents to the doctrine of ideas a definite statement respecting the peculiar character of their unchangeable substances, in comparison with the sensible and individual things which participate in them. The only difference between the two consists in appending per se to the names expressing the respective ideas; thus, while the individual things are e. g. man, horse, etc., the ideas are man per se, horse per se, etc. There is only this formal change for the doctrine of ideas to rest upon; the finite content is not removed, but is only characterized as perpetual. This objection, that in the doctrine of ideas we have in reality only the sensible posited as a not-sensible, and endowed with the predicate of immutability, Aristotle urges as above remarked when he calls the ideas “immortalized things of sense,” not as though they were actually something sensible and spacial, but because in them the sensible individual loses at once its individuality, and becomes a universal. He compares them in this respect with the gods of the popular and anthropomorphical religion; as these are nothing but deified men, so the ideas are only things of nature endowed with a supernatural potency, a sensible exalted to a not-sensible. This identity between the ideas and their respective individual things amounts moreover to this, that the introduction of ideas doubles the objects to be known in a burdensome manner, and without any good results. Why set up the same thing over again? Why besides the sensible twofoldness and threefoldness, affirm a twofoldness and threefoldness in the idea? The adherents of the doctrine of ideas, when they posit an idea for every class of natural things, and through this theory set up two equivalent theories of sensible and not-sensible substances, seem therefore to Aristotle like men who think they can reckon better with many numbers than with few, and who therefore go to multiplying their numbers before they begin their reckoning. Therefore again the doctrine of ideas is a tautology, and wholly unfruitful of the explanation of being, “The ideas give no aid to the knowledge of the individual things participating in them, since the ideas are not immanent in these things, but separate from them.” Equally unfruitful are the ideas when considered in reference to the arising and departing of the things of sense. They contain no principle of becoming, of movement. There is in them no causality which might bring out the event, or explain the event when it had actually happened. Themselves without motion and process, if they had any effect, it could only be that of perfect repose. True, Plato affirms in his Phædon that the ideas are causes both of being and becoming, but in spite of the ideas, nothing ever becomes without a moving; the ideas, by their separation from the becoming, have no such capacity to move. This indifferent relation of ideas to the actual becoming, Aristotle brings under the categories, potentiality and actuality, and farther says that the ideas are only potential, they are only bare possibility and essentiality because they are wanting in actuality.—The inner contradiction of the doctrine of ideas is in brief this, viz., that it posits an individual immediately as a universal, and at the same time pronounces the universal, the species, as numerically an individual, and also that the ideas are set up on the one side as separate individual substances, and on the other side as participant, and therefore as universal. Although the ideas as the original conceptions of species are a universal, which arise when being is fixed in existence, and the one brought out in the many, and the abiding is given a place in the changeable, yet can they not be defined as they should be according to the Platonic notion, that they are individual substances, for there can be neither definition nor derivation of an absolute individual, since even the word (and only in words is a definition possible) is in its nature a universal, and belongs also to other objects, consequently, every predicate in which I attempt to determine an individual thing cannot belong exclusively to that thing. The adherents of the doctrine of ideas, are therefore not at all in a condition to give an idea a conceivable termination; their ideas are indefinable.—In general, Plato has left the relation of the individual objects to ideas very obscure. He calls the ideas archetypes, and allows that the objects may participate in them; yet are these only poetical metaphors. How shall we represent to ourselves this “participation,” this copying of the original archetype? We seek in vain for more accurate explanations of this in Plato. It is impossible to conceive how and why matter participates in the ideas. In order to explain this, we must add to the ideas a still higher and wider principle, which contains the cause for this “participation” of objects, for without a moving principle we find no ground for “participation.” Alike above the idea (e. g. the idea of man), and the phenomenon (e. g. the individual man), there must stand a third common to both, and in which the two were united, i. e. as Aristotle was in the habit of expressing this objection, the doctrine of ideas leads to the adoption of a “third man.” The result of this Aristotelian criticism is the immanence of the universal in the individual. The method of Socrates in trying to find the universal as the essence of the individual, and to give definitions according to conception, was as correct (for no science is possible without the universal) as the theory of Plato in exalting these universal conceptions to an independent subsistence as real individual substances, was erroneous. Nothing universal, nothing which is a kind or a species, exists besides and separate from the individual; a thing and its conception cannot be separated from each other. With these principles Aristotle hardly deviated from Plato’s fundamental idea that the universal is the only true being, and the essence of individual things; it may rather be said that he has freed this idea from its original abstraction, and given it a more profound mediation with the phenomenal world. Notwithstanding his apparent contradiction to Plato, the fundamental position of Aristotle is the same as that of his master, viz., that the essence of a thing (τὸ τί ἐστιν, τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) is known and represented in the conception; Aristotle however recognizes the universal, the conception to be as little separated from the determined phenomenon as form from matter, and essence or substance (οὐσία) in its most proper sense is, according to him, only that which cannot be predicated of another, though of this other every remaining thing may be predicated; it is that which is a this (τόδε τι), the individual thing and not a universal.

(2.) The four Aristotelian principles or causes, and the relation of form and matter.—From the criticism of the Platonic doctrine of ideas arose directly the groundwork of the Aristotelian system, the determinations of matter (ὕλη), and form (εἶδος). Aristotle enumerates four metaphysical principles or causes: matter, form, moving cause, and end. In a house, for instance, the matter is the wood, the form is the conception of the house, the moving cause is the builder, and the end is the actual house. These four determinations of all being resolve themselves upon a closer scrutiny into the fundamental antithesis of matter and form. The conception of the moving cause is involved with the two other ideal principles of form and of end. The moving cause is that which has secured the transition of the incomplete actuality or potentiality to the complete actuality, or induces the becoming of matter to form. But in every movement of the incomplete to the complete, the latter antedates in conception this movement, and is its motive. The moving cause of matter is therefore form. So is man the moving and producing cause of man; the form of the statue in the understanding of the artist is the cause of the movement by which the statue is produced; health must be in the thought of the physician before it can become the moving cause of convalescence; so in a certain degree is medicine, health, and the art of building the form of the house. But in the same way, the moving or first cause is also identical with the final cause or end, for the end is the motive for all becoming and movement. The moving cause of the house is the builder, but the moving cause of the builder is the end to be attained, i. e. the house. From such examples as these it is seen that the determinations of form and end may be considered under one, in so far as both are united in the conception of actuality (ἐνέργεια), for the end of every thing is its completed being, its conception or its form, the bringing out into complete actuality that which was potentially contained in it. The end of the hand is its conception, the end of the seed is the tree, which is at the same time the essence of the seed. The only fundamental determinations, therefore, which cannot be wholly resolved into each other, are matter and form.

Matter when abstracted from form in thought, Aristotle regarded as that which was entirely without predicate, determination and distinction. It is that abiding thing which lies at the basis of all becoming; but which in its own being is different from every thing which has become. It is capable of the widest diversity of forms, but is itself without determinate form; it is every thing in possibility, but nothing in actuality. There is a first matter which lies at the basis of every determinate thing, precisely as the wood is related to the bench and the marble to the statue. With this conception of matter Aristotle prides himself upon having conquered the difficulty so frequently urged of explaining the possibility that any thing can become, since being can neither come out of being nor out of not-being. For it is not out of not-being absolutely, but only out of that which as to actuality is not-being, but which potentially is being, that any thing becomes. Possible or potential being is no more not-being than actuality. Every existing object of nature is hence but a potential thing which has become actualized. Matter is thus a far more positive substratum with Aristotle than with Plato, who had treated it as absolutely not-being. From this is clearly seen how Aristotle could apprehend matter in opposition to form as something positively negative and antithetic to the form, and as its positive denial (στέρησις).

As matter coalesces with potentiality, so does form coincide with actuality. It is that which makes a distinguishable and actual object, a this (τόδε τι) out of the undistinguished and in determinate matter; it is the peculiar virtue, the completed activity, the soul of every thing. That which Aristotle calls form, therefore, is not to be confounded with what we perhaps may call shape; a hand severed from the arm, for instance, has still the outward shape of a hand, but according to the Aristotelian apprehension, it is only a hand now as to matter and not as to form: an actual hand, a hand as to form, is only that which can do the proper work of a hand. Pure form is that which, in truth, is without matter (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι); or, in other words, the conception of being, the pure conception. But such pure form does not exist in the realm of determined being; every determined being, every individual substance (οὐσία), every thing which is a this, is rather a totality of matter and form, a (σύνολον). It is, therefore, owing to matter, that being is not pure form and pure conception; matter is the ground of the becoming, the manifold, and the accidental; and it is this, also, which gives to science its limits. For in precisely the measure in which the individual thing bears in itself a material element is it uncognizable. From what has been said, it follows that the opposition between matter and form is a variable one, that being matter in one respect which in another is form; building-wood, e. g. is matter in relation to the completed house, but in relation to the unhewn tree it is form; the soul in respect to the body is form, but in respect to the reason, which is the form of form (εἶδος εἴδους) is it matter. On this standpoint the totality of all existence may be represented as a ladder, whose lowest step is a prime matter (πρώτη ὕλη), which is not at all form, and whose highest step is an ultimate form which is not at all matter, but is pure form (the absolute, divine spirit). That which stands between these two points is in one respect matter, and in another respect form, i. e. the former is ever translating itself into the latter. This position, which lies at the basis of the Aristotelian view of nature, is attained analytically through the observation that all nature exhibits the perpetual and progressive transition of matter into form, and shows the exhaustless and original ground of things as it comes to view in ever ascending ideal formations. That all matter should become form, and all that is potential should be actual, and all that is should be known, is doubtless the demand of the reason and the end of all becoming; yet is this actually impracticable, since Aristotle expressly affirms that matter as the antithesis, or denial of form, can never become wholly actualized, and therefore can never be perfectly known. The Aristotelian system ends thus like its predecessors, in the unsubdued dualism of matter and form.

(3.) Potentiality and Actuality (δύναμις and ἐνέργεια).—The relation of matter to form, logically apprehended, is but the relation of potentiality to actuality. These terms, which Aristotle first employed according to their philosophical significance, are very characteristic for his system. We have in the movement of potential being to actual being the explicit conception of becoming, and in the four principles we have a distribution of this conception in its parts. The Aristotelian system is consequently a system of the becoming, in which the Heraclitic principle appears again in a richer and profounder apprehension, as that of the Eleatics had done with Plato. Aristotle in this has made no insignificant step towards the subjection of the Platonic dualism. If matter is the possibility of form, or reason becoming, then is the opposition between the idea and the phenomenal world potentially overcome, at least in principle, since there is one being which appears both in matter and form only in different stages of development. The relation of the potential to the actual Aristotle exhibits by the relation of the unfinished to the finished work, of the unemployed carpenter to the one at work upon his building, of the individual asleep to him awake. Potentially the seed-corn is the tree, but the grown up tree is it actually; the potential philosopher is he who is not at this moment in a philosophizing condition; even before the battle the better general is the potential conqueror; potentially is space infinitely divisible; in fact every thing is potentially which possesses a principle of motion, of development, or of change, and which, if unhindered by any thing external, will be of itself. Actuality or entelechy on the other hand indicates the perfect act, the end as gained, the completely actual (the grown-up tree e.g. is the entelechy of the seed-corn), that activity in which the act and the completeness of the act fall together, e. g. to see, to think where he sees and he has seen, he thinks and he has thought (the acting and the completeness of the act) are one and the same, while in those activities which involve a becoming, e. g. to learn, to go, to become well, the two are separated. In this apprehension of form (or idea) as actuality or entelechy, i. e. in joining it with the movement of the becoming, is found the chief antagonism of the Aristotelian and Platonic systems. Plato considers the idea as being at rest, and consisting for itself, in opposition to the becoming and to motion; but with Aristotle the idea is the eternal product of the becoming, it is an eternal energy, i. e. an activity in complete actuality, it is not perfect being, but is being produced in every moment and eternally, through the movement of the potential to its actual end.

(4.) The Absolute, Divine Spirit.—Aristotle has sought to establish from a number of sides, the conception of the absolute spirit, or as he calls it, the first mover, and especially by joining it to the relation of potentiality and actuality.

(a.) The Cosmological Form.—The actual is ever antecedent to the potential not only in conception (for I can speak of potentiality only in reference to some activity) but also in time, for the acting becomes actual only through an acting; the uneducated becomes educated through the educated, and this leads to the claim of a first mover which shall be pure activity. Or, again, it is only possible that there should be motion, becoming, or a chain of causes, except as a principle of motion, a mover exists. But this principle of motion must be one whose essence is actuality, since that which only exists in possibility cannot alone become actual, and therefore cannot be a principle of motion. All becoming postulates with itself that which is eternal and which has not become, that which itself unmoved is a principle of motion, a first mover.

(b.) The Ontological Form.—In the same way it follows from the conception of potentiality, that the eternal and necessary being cannot be potential. For that which potentially is, may just as well either be or not be; but that which possibly is not, is temporal and not eternal. Nothing therefore which is absolutely permanent, is potential, but only actual. Or, again, if potentiality be the first, then can there be no possible existence, but this contradicts the conception of the absolute or that which it is impossible should not be.

(c.) The Moral Form.—Potentiality always involves a possibility to the most opposite. He who has the capacity to be well, has also the capacity to be sick, but actually no man is at the same time both sick and well. Therefore actuality is better than potentiality, and only it can belong to the eternal.

(d.) So far as the relation of potentiality and actuality is identical with the relation of matter and form, we may apprehend in the following way these arguments for the existence of a being which is pure actuality. The supposition of an absolute matter without form (the πρώτη ὕλη) involves also the supposition of an absolute form without matter (a πρῶτον εἶδος). And since the conception of form resolves itself into the three determinations, of the moving, the conceivable, and the final cause, so is the eternal one the absolute principle of motion (the first mover πρῶτον χινοῦν), the absolute conception or pure intelligible (the pure τί ἧν εἶναι) , and the absolute end.

All the other predicates of the first mover or the highest principle of the world, follow from these premises with logical necessity. Unity belongs to him, since the ground of the manifoldness of being lies in the matter and he has no participation in matter; he is immovable and abiding ever the same, since otherwise he could not be the absolute mover and the cause of all becoming; he is life as active self-end and actuality; he is at the same time intelligible and intelligence, because he is absolutely immaterial and free from nature; he is active, i. e. thinking intelligence, because his essence is pure actuality; he is self-contemplating intelligence, because the divine thought cannot attain its actuality in any thing extrinsic, and because if it were the thought of any thing other than itself, this would make it depend upon some potential existence for its actualization. Hence the famed Aristotelian definition of the absolute that it is the thought of thought (νόησις νοήαεως), the personal unity of the thinking and the thought, of the knowing and the known, the absolute subject-object. In the Metaphysics (XII. 1.) we have a statement in order of these attributes of the Divine Spirit, and an almost devout sketch of the eternally blessed Deity, knowing himself in his eternal tranquillity as the absolute truth, satisfied with himself, and wanting neither in activity nor in any virtue.

As would appear from this statement, Aristotle has never fully developed the idea of his absolute spirit, and still less has he harmonized it with the fundamental principles and demands of his philosophy, although many consequences of his system would seem to drive him to this, and numerous principles which he has laid down would seem to prepare the way for it. This idea is unexpectedly introduced in the twelfth book of the Metaphysics simply as an assertion, without being farther and inductively substantiated. It is at once attended with important difficulties. We do not see why the ultimate ground of motion or the absolute spirit must be conceived as a personal being; we do not see how any thing can he a moving cause and yet itself unmoved; how it can be the origin of all becoming, that is of the departing and arising, and itself remain a changeless energy, a principle of motion with no potentiality to be moved, for the moving thing must stand in a relation of passive and active with the thing moved. Moreover, Aristotle, as would follow from these contradictory determinations, has never thoroughly and consistently determined the relation between God and the world. He has considered the absolute spirit only as contemplative and theoretical reason, from whom all action must be excluded because he is perfect end in himself, but every action presupposes an end not yet perfected; we have thus no true motive for his activity in reference to the world. He cannot be truly called the first mover in his theoretical relation alone, and since he is in his essence extra-mundane and unmoved, he cannot once permeate the life of the world with his activity; and since also matter on one side never rises wholly to form, we have, therefore, here again the unreconciled dualism between the Divine spirit and the unmistakable reality of matter. Many of the arguments which Aristotle brings against the gods of Anaxagoras may be urged against his own theory.

IV. The Aristotelian Physics.—The Aristotelian Physics, which embraces the greater portion of his writings, follows the becoming and the building up of matter into form, the course through which nature as a living being progresses in order to become individual soul. All becoming has an end; but end is form, and the absolute form is spirit. With perfect consistency, therefore, Aristotle regards the human individual of the male sex as the end and the centre of earthly nature in its realized form. All else beneath the moon is, as it were, an unsuccessful attempt of nature to produce the male human, a superfluity which arises from the impotence of nature to subdue the whole of matter and bring it into form. Every thing which does not gain the universal end of nature must be regarded as incomplete, and is properly an exception or abortion. For instance, he calls it an abortion when a child does not resemble its father; and the female child he looks upon as an abortion in a less degree, which he accounts for by the insufficient energy of the male as the forming principle. In general, Aristotle regards the female as imperfect in comparison with the male, an imperfection which belongs in a higher degree to all animals except man. If nature did her work with perfect consciousness, then were all these mistakes, these incomplete and improper formations inexplicable, but she is an artist working only after an unconscious impulse, and does not complete her work with a clear and rational insight.

1. The universal conditions of all natural existence, motion, matter, space and time, Aristotle investigates in the books of Physics. These physical conceptions may, moreover, be reduced to the metaphysical notions of potentiality and actuality; motion is accordingly defined as the activity of being potentially, and is therefore a mean between the merely potential entity and the perfectly realized activity;—space is the possibility of motion and possesses, therefore, potentially, though not actively, the property of infinite divisibility; time is in the same way the infinitely divisible, expressing the measure of motion in number, and is the number of motion according to before and after. All three are infinite, but the infinite which is represented in them is only potentially but not actually a whole: it comprehends nothing, but is itself comprehended,—a fact mistaken by those who are accustomed to extol the infinite as though it comprehended and held every thing in itself, because it had some similarity with the whole.

2. From his conception of motion Aristotle derives his view of the collective universe, as brought out in his books De Cælo. The most perfect motion is the circular, because this is constant, uniform, and ever returning into itself. The world as a whole is therefore conditioned by the circular motion, and being a whole complete in itself, it has a spherical form. But because the motion which returns into itself is better than every other, it follows, from the same ground, that in this spherical universe the better sphere will be in the circumference where the circular motion is most perfect, and the inferior one will arrange itself around the centre of the universal sphere. The former is heaven, the latter is earth, and between the two stand the planetary spheres. Heaven, as the place of circular motion, and the scene of unchangeable order, stands nearest the first moving cause, and is under its immediate influence; it is the place where the ancients, guided by the correct tradition of a lost wisdom, have, placed the Divine abode. Its parts, the fixed stars, are passionless and eternal essences, which have attained the best end, which must be eternally conceived in a tireless activity, and which, though not clearly cognizable, are yet much more divine than man, A lower sphere, next to that of the fixed stars, is the sphere of the planets, among which, besides the five known to the ancients, he reckons the sun and the moon. This sphere stands a little removed from the greatest perfection: instead of moving directly from right to left, as do the fixed stars, the planets move in contrary directions and in oblique orbits; they serve the fixed stars, and are ruled by their motion. Lastly, the earth is in the centre of the universe, farthest removed from the first mover, and hence partaking in the smallest degree of the Divine. There are thus three kinds of being, exhibiting three stages of perfection, and necessary for the explanation of nature; first, the absolute spirit or God, an immaterial being, who, himself unmoved, produces motion; second, the super-terrestrial region of the heavens, a being which is moved and which moves, and which, though not without matter, is eternal and unchangeable, and possesses ever a circular motion; and, lastly, in the lowest course this earth, a changeful being, which has only to play the passive part of being moved.

3. Nature in a strict sense, the scene of elemental working, represents to us a constant and progressive transition of the elementary to the vegetative, and of the vegetative to the animal world. The lowest step is occupied by the inanimate bodies of nature, which are simple products of the elements mingling themselves together, and have their entelechy only in the determinate combinations of these elements, but whose energy consists only in striving after a fitting place in the universe, and in resting there so far as they reach it unhindered. But now such a mere external entelechy is not possessed by the living bodies; within them dwells a motion as organizing principle by which they attain to actuality, and which as a preserving activity develops in them towards a perfected organization,—in a word they have a soul, for a soul is the entelechy of an organic body. In plants we find the soul working only as persevering and nourishing energy: the plant has no other function than to nourish itself and to propagate its kind; among animals—where we find a progress according to the mode of their reproduction—the soul appears as sensitive; animals have sense, and are capable of locomotion; lastly, the human soul is at the same time nutritive, sensitive, and cognitive.

4. Man, as the end of all nature, embraces in himself the different steps of development in which the life of nature is exhibited. The division of the faculties of the soul must therefore be necessarily regulated, according to the division of living creatures. As the nutritive faculty is alone the property of vegetables, and sensation, of animals, while to the more perfect animals locomotion also belongs, so are these three activities also development steps of the human soul, the antecedent being the necessary condition of, and presupposed in time by, the subsequent, while the soul itself is nothing other than the union of these different activities of an organic body in one common end, as the entelechy of the organic body. The fourth step, thought or reason, which, added to the three others, constitutes the peculiarity of the human soul, forms alone an exception from the general law. It is not a simple product of the lower facilities of the soul, it does not stand related to them simply as a higher stage of development, nor simply as the soul to the body, as the end to the instrument, as actuality to possibility, as form to matter. But as pure intellectual activity, it completes itself without any mediation of a bodily organ; as the reason comes into the body from without, so is it separable from the body, and therefore has it no inner connection with the bodily functions, but is something wholly foreign in nature. True, there exists a connection between thought and sensation, for while the sensations are outwardly divided, according to the different objects of sense, yet internally they meet in one centre, as a common sense. Here they become changed into images and representations, which again become transmuted into thoughts, and so it might seem as if thought were only the result of the sensation, as if intelligence were passively determined; (here we might notice the proposition falsely ascribed to Aristotle: nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, and also the well-known though often misunderstood comparison of the soul with an unwritten tablet, which only implies this much, viz., that as the unwritten tablet is potentially but not actually a book, so does knowledge belong potentially though not actually to the human reason; fundamentally and radically the thought may have in itself universal conceptions, so far as it has the capacity to form them, but not actually, nor in a determined or developed form). But this passivity presupposes rather an activity; for if the thought in its actuality, in that it appears as knowledge, becomes all forms and therefore all things, then must the thought constitute itself that which it becomes, and therefore all passively determined human intelligence rests on an originally active intelligence, which exists as self-actualizing possibility and pure actuality, and which, as such, is wholly independent of the human body, and has not its entelechy in it but in itself, and is not therefore participant in the death of the body, but lives on as universal reason, eternal and immortal. The Aristotelian dualism here again appears. Manifestly this active intelligence stands related to the soul as God to nature. The two sides possess no essential relation to each other. As the Divine spirit could not enter the life of the world, so is the human spirit unable to permeate the life of sense; although it is determined as something passionless and immaterial, still must it as soul be connected with matter, and although it is pure and self-contemplative form, still it should be distinguished from the Divine spirit which is its counterpart; the want of a satisfactory mediation on the side of the human and on that of the Divine, is in these respects unmistakable.

V. The Aristotelian Ethics. 1. Relation of Ethics to Physics.—Aristotle, guided by his tendency towards the natural, has more closely connected ethics and physics than either of his predecessors, Socrates or Plato, had done. While Plato found it impossible to speak of the good in man’s moral condition, disconnected from the idea of the good in itself, Aristotle’s principal object is to determine what is good for man solely; and he supposes that the good in itself, the idea of the good, in no way facilitates the knowledge of that good, which alone is attainable in practical life. It is only the latter, the moral element in the life of men, and not the good in the great affairs of the universe, with which ethics has to do. Aristotle therefore considers the good especially in its relation to the natural condition of men, and affirms that it is the end towards which nature herself tends. Instead of viewing the moral element as something purely intellectual, he rather apprehends it as only the bloom of the physical, which here becomes spiritualized and ethical; instead of making virtue to be knowledge, he treats it as the normal perfection of the natural instinct. That man is by nature a political animal, is his fundamental proposition for the doctrine of the state.

From this connection of the ethical and the physical, arose the objections which Aristotle urged against the Socratic conception of virtue. Socrates had looked to the dialectical exclusively for the ground of all morality, and had accordingly made virtue and knowledge one. But in this, said Aristotle, the pathological element which is associated by nature with every moral act, is destroyed. It is not reason, but the circumstances and natural bias of the soul which are the first ground of virtue. There is an instinct in the soul which at first strives unconsciously after the good, which is only subsequently sought with the full moral insight. Moral virtue arises first from that which is natural. It is on this ground, also, that Aristotle combats the notion that virtue may be learned. It is not through the perfection of knowledge, but by exercise that we become acquainted with the good. It is by a practice of moral acts that we become virtuous, just as by a practice of building and of music we become architects and musicians; for the habit which is the ground of moral constancy, is only a fruit of the abundant repetition of a moral action. Hence it is that originally we have our virtuous or our vicious dispositions in our power, but as soon as they are formed either to virtue or to vice, we are no longer able to control them. It is by three things, therefore, nature, habit, and reason, that man becomes good. The standpoint of Aristotle is in these respects directly opposed to that of Socrates. While Socrates regarded the moral and the natural as two opposites, and made the moral conduct to be the consequent of a rational enlightenment, Aristotle treated both as different steps of development, and reversing the order of Socrates, made the rational enlightenment in moral things consequent upon the moral conduct.

2. The Highest Good.—Every action has an end; but since every end is only itself a means to some other, we need therefore something after which we can strive for its own sake, and which is a good absolutely, or a best. What now is this highest good and supreme object of human pursuit? In name, at least, all men are agreed upon it, and call it happiness, but what happiness is, is a much disputed point. If asked in what human happiness consists, the first characteristic given would be that it belongs alone to the peculiar being of man. But sensation is not peculiar to man, for he shares this with the brute. A sensation of pleasure, therefore, which arises when some desire is gratified, may be the happiness of the brute, but certainly does not constitute the essential of human happiness. Human happiness must express the completeness of intelligent existence, and because intelligence is essentially activity, therefore the happiness of man cannot consist in any merely passive condition, but must express a completeness of human action. Happiness therefore is a well-being, which is at the same time a well-doing, and it is a well-doing which satisfies all the conditions of nature, and which finds the highest contentment or well-being in an unrestrained energy. Activity and pleasure are thus inseparably bound together by a natural bond, and happiness is the result of their union when they are sustained through a perfect life. Hence the Aristotelian definition of happiness. It is a perfect practical activity in a perfect life.

Although it might seem from this as though Aristotle placed the happiness of man in the natural activity of the soul, and regarded this as self-sufficient, still he is not blind to the fact that perfect happiness is dependent on other kinds of good whose possession is not absolutely within our power. It is true he expresses an opinion, that outward things in moderation are sufficient, and that only great success or signal reverses materially influence the happens of life; still he holds that wealth, the possession of friends and children, noble birth, beauty of body, etc., are more or less necessary conditions of happiness, though these are partly dependent on accidental circumstances. These wavering and inconsistent views of Aristotle respecting the nature of happiness, naturally rise from his empirical method of investigation. Careful in noting every thing which our limited experience seems to utter, he expressly avoids making either virtue or pleasure his principle, because actual experience shows the separation of the two. Although therefore he gives directions in general to strive after that pleasure in which the good man delights, or which is connected with a virtuous activity, yet is pleasure with him an end for its own sake, and not merely an accident of virtue, an empiricist, Aristotle is here also a dualist, while the Stoics and Epicureans have respectively taken and held fast to each of the two sides.

3. Conception of Virtue.—As has already been seen in the Aristotelian Polemic against Socrates, virtue is the product of an oft-repeated moral action, a condition acquired through practice, a moral dexterity of the soul. The nature of this dexterity is seen in the following way: every action completes something as its work; but now if a work is imperfect when it has either a want or a superfluity, so also is every action imperfect in so far as there is in it either too little or too much; its perfection, therefore, is only found as it contains the right degree, the true mean between the too much and too little. Accordingly, virtue in general may be explained as the observation of the right mean in action, by which is meant not the arithmetical or absolute mean, but the one relative to ourselves. For what is enough for one individual is insufficient for another. The virtue of a man, of a woman, of a child, and of a slave is respectively different. Thus, virtue depends upon time, circumstance, and relation. The determination of this correct mean will always waver. In the impossibility of an active and exhaustive formula, we can only say respecting it that it is the correct mean as determined by a correct practical insight which is seen to be such by the intelligent man.

It follows from this general conception of virtue, that there will be as many separate virtues as there are circumstances of life, and as men are ever entering into new relations, in which it becomes difficult practically to determine the correct method of action, Aristotle, in opposition to Plato, would limit the field of separate virtues by no definite number. Only certain fundamental virtues can be named according as there are certain fixed and fundamental relations among men. For instance, man has a fixed relation to pleasure and pain. In relation to pain, the true moral mean is found in neither fearing nor courting it, and this is valor. In relation to pleasure, the true mean standing between greediness and indifference is temperance. In social life, the moral mean is between doing and suffering wrong, which is justice. In a similar way many other virtues might be characterized, each one of them standing as a mean between two vices, the one of which expresses a want and the other a superfluity. A closer exhibition of the Aristotelian doctrine of virtue would have much psychological and linguistic interest, though but little philosophical worth. Aristotle takes the conception of his virtues more from the use of language than from a thoroughly applied principle of classification. His classification of virtues is, therefore, without any stable ground, and is differently given in different places. The conception of the correct mean which Aristotle makes the measure of a moral act is obviously unworthy of a systematic representation, for as it cannot be determined how the intelligent man would act in every case, there could never be given any specific directions how others should act. In fine, the criterion of virtue as the correct mean between two vices cannot be always applied for in the virtue of wisdom, e. g. which Aristotle describes as the mean between simplicity and cunning, there is no such thing as too much.

4. The State.—Aristotle, like Plato, makes the highest condition of moral virtue attainable only through political life. The state exists before the individual, as the whole is prior to its parts. The rationality and morality of the state is thus antecedent to that of the individual. Hence in the best state, moral and political virtue, the virtue of the man and the virtue of the citizen are one and the same thing, although in states as they are, the good citizen is not necessarily also the good man. But though this principle harmonized with Plato, yet Aristotle, at whose time the old aboriginal states had already begun their process of dissolution, cherished a very different view concerning the relation of the individual and the family to the state. He allows to both these an incomparably greater consideration, and yields to them a far wider field of independent action. Hence he combats Plato’s community of wives and goods, not simply on the ground of its practicability, but also on the ground of its principle, since the state cannot be conceived as a strict unit, or as possessing any such centralization as would weaken or destroy individual activity. With Plato the state is but the product of the philosophical reflection, while with Aristotle it results from given circumstances, from history and experience, and he therefore wholly omits to sketch a model state or a normal constitution, but carefully confines his attention to those which actually exist. Although the ideal of a state constitution in the form of a limited monarchy is unmistakably in his mind, still he contents himself with portraying the different kinds of polities in their peculiarities, their origin, and their reciprocal transitions. He does not undertake to declare which is the best state absolutely, since this depends upon circumstances, and one constitution is not adapted for every state. He simply attempts to show what form of the state is relatively the best and the most advisable under certain historical circumstances, and under given natural, climatic, geographic, economic, and intellectual conditions. In this he is faithful to the character of his whole philosophy. Standing on the basis of the empirical, he advances here as elsewhere, critically and reflectively, and in despair of attaining the absolutely true and good, he seeks for these relatively, with his eye fixed only on the probable and the practicable.

VI.—The Peripatetic School.—The school of Aristotle, called the Peripatetic, can here only be mentioned; the want of independence in its philosophizing, and the absence of any great and universal influence, rendering it unworthy an extended notice. Theophrastus, Eudemus, and Strato are its most famous leaders. Like most philosophical schools, it confines itself chiefly to a more thorough elaboration and explanation of the system of its master. In some empirical provinces, especially the physical, the attempt was made to carry out still further the system, while at the same time its speculative basis was set aside and neglected.

VII.—Transition to the Post-aristotelian Philosophy.—The productive energy of Grecian philosophy expends itself with Aristotle, contemporaneously and in connection with the universal decay of Grecian life and spirit. Instead of the great and universal systems of a Plato and an Aristotle, we have now systems of a partial and one-sided character, corresponding to that universal breach between the subject and the objective world which characterized the civil, religious, and social life of this last epoch of Greece, the time succeeding Alexander the Great. That subjectivity, which had been first propounded by the Sophists, was at length, after numerous struggles, victorious, though its triumph was gained upon the ruins of the Grecian civil and artistic life; the individual has become emancipated, the subject is no longer to be given up to the objective world, the liberated subjectivity must now be perfected and satisfied. This process of development is seen in the post-Aristotelian philosophy, though it finds its conditioning cause in the character of the preceding philosophical strivings. The dualism which formed the chief want of the systems both of Plato and Aristotle, has forced itself upon our attention at every step. The attempt which had been made, with the greatest expenditure of which the Grecian mind was capable, to refer back to one ultimate ground both subject and object, mind and matter, had produced no satisfactory result; and these two oppositions, around which all previous philosophy had struggled in vain, still remained disconnected. Wearied with the fruitless attempts at mediation, the subject now breaks with the objective world. Its attention is directed towards itself in its own self-consciousness. The result of this gives us either STOICISM, where the moral subject appears in the self-sufficiency of the sage to whom every external good and every objective work is indifferent, and who finds a good only in a moral activity; or EPICUREANISM, where the subject delights itself in the inner feeling of pleasure and the calm repose of a satisfied heart, enjoying the present and the past, and never fearing the future while it sees in the objective world only a means by which it can utter itself; or, again, Scepticism, where the subject, doubting and rejecting all objective truth and science, appears in the apathy of the Sceptic, who has broken both theoretically and practically with the objective world. In fine, New-Platonism, the last of the ancient philosophical systems, bears this same character of subjectivity, for this whole system turns upon the exaltation of the subject to the absolute, and wherever it speculates respecting God and his relation to man, it is alone in order to establish the progressive transition from the absolute object to the human personality. The ruling principle in it all is the interest of the subjectivity, and the fact that in this system there are numerous objective determinations, is only because the subject has become absolute.

SECTION XVII.
STOICISM.

Zeno, of Cittium, a city of Cyprus, an elder contemporary of Antigonus Gonatas, king of Macedon, is generally given as the founder of the Stoical school. Deprived of his property by shipwreck, he took refuge in philosophy, incited also by an inner bias to such pursuits. He at first became a disciple of the Cynic Crateas, then of Stilpo, one of the Megarians, and lastly he betook himself to the Academy, where he heard the lessons of Xenocrates and Polemo. Hence the eclectic character of his teaching. It has in fact been charged against him, that differing but little if at all from the earlier schools, he attempted to form a school of his own, with a system wherein he had changed nothing but names. He opened a school at Athens, in the “variegated porch,” so called from the paintings of Polygnotus, with which it was adorned, whence his adherents received the name of “philosophers of the porch” (Stoics). Zeno is said to have presided over his school for fifty-eight years, and at a very advanced age to have put an end to his existence. He is praised for the temperance and the austerity of his habits, while his abstemiousness is proverbial. The monument in his honor, erected after his death by the Athenians, at the instance of Antigonus, bore the high but simple eulogium that his life had been in unison with his philosophy. Cleanthes was the successor of Zeno in the Stoic school, and faithfully carried out the method of his master. Cleanthes was succeeded by Chrysippus, who died about 208 B. C. He has been regarded as the chief prop of this school, in which respect it was said of him, that without a Chrysippus there would never have been a Porch. At all events, as Chrysippus was an object of the greatest veneration, and of almost undisputed authority with the later Stoics, he ought to be considered as the principal founder of the school. He was a writer so voluminous, that his works have been said to amount to seven hundred and five, among which, however, were repeated treatises upon the same propositions, and citations without measure from poets and historians, given to prove and illustrate his opinions. Not one of all his writings has come down to us. Chrysippus closes the series of the philosophers who founded the Porch. The later heads of the school, as Panætius, the friend of the younger Scipio (his famous work De Officiis, Cicero has elaborated in his treatise of the same name), and Posidonius, may be classed with Cicero, Pompeius, and others, and were eclectic in their teachings. The Stoics have connected philosophy most intimately with the duties of practical life. Philosophy is with them the practice of wisdom, the exercise of virtue. Virtue and science are with them one, in so far at least that they divide virtue in reference to philosophy into physical, ethical, and logical. But though they go on according to this threefold division, and treat of logic and physics, and though they even rank physics higher than either of the other sciences, regarding it as the mother of the ethical and the science of the Divine, yet do we find their characteristic standpoint most prominently in their theory of morals.

1. Logic.—We have already said that it is the breach between subject and object, which forms the basis of all post-Aristotelian philosophy. The beginning of this philosophy of subjectivity is found with the Stoics. The feature most worthy of notice in their logic, is the striving after a subjective criterion of the truth, by which they might distinguish the true representation from the false. Since they limited all scientific knowledge to the knowledge of the senses, they found this criterion in that which was evident in the sensuous impression. They conceived that they had answered the whole problem, in affirming that the true or conceivable representation reveals not only itself, but also its object: it, they said, is nothing else than a representation which is produced by a present object in a manner like itself.

2. Physics.—In their physics, where they follow for the most part Heraclitus, the Stoics are distinguished from their predecessors, especially from Plato and Aristotle, by their thoroughly carried out proposition that nothing uncorporeal exists, that every thing essential is corporeal (just as in their logic they had sought to derive all knowledge from the sensuous perception). This sensualism or materialism of the Stoics which, as we have seen in their logic, lies at the basis of their theory of knowledge, might seem foreign to all their moral and idealistic tendencies, but is clearly explained from their subjective standpoint, for, when the thought has become so intensely engrossed in the subject, the objective world can only be regarded as a corporeal and material existence. The most immediate consequence of such a view is their pantheism. Aristotle before them had separated the Divine Being from the world, as the pure and eternal form from the eternal matter; but so far as this separation implied a distinction which was not simply logical, but actual and real, the Stoics would not admit it. It seemed to them impossible to dissever God from matter, and they therefore considered God and the world as power and its manifestation, and thus as one. Matter is the passive ground of things, the original substratum for the divine activity: God is the active and formative energy of matter dwelling within it, and essentially united to it: the world is the body of God, and God is the soul of the world. The Stoics, therefore, considered God and matter as one identical substance, which, on the side of its passive and changeable capacity they call matter, and on the side of its active and changeless energy, God. But since they, as already remarked, considered the world as ensouled by God in the light of a living and rational being, they were obliged to treat the conception of God not only in a physical but also in its ethical aspect. God is not only in the world as the ruling and living energy of this great ζῷον (animal), but he is also the universal reason which rules the whole world and penetrates all matter; he is the gracious Providence which cares for the individual and the whole; he is wise, and is the ground of that natural law which commands the good and forbids the evil; he punishes and rewards; he possesses a perfect and blessed life. But accustomed to regard every thing spiritual only in a sensuous way, the Stoics were obliged to clothe this ideal conception of God in a material form, apprehending it as the vital warmth or an original fire, analogous to the view of the earlier natural philosophers, who held that the soul, and even reason itself, consisted in the vital warmth. The Stoics express this thought in different ways. At one time they call God the rational breath which passes through all nature; at another, the artistic fire which fashions or begets the universe; and still again the ether; which, however, they hardly distinguish from the artistic fire. From these varying views, we see that it did not belong to the Stoics to represent the conception of God in any determinate kind of existence. They availed themselves of these expressions only to indicate that God, as the universal animating energy in the world, could not be disconnected from a corporeal agency. This identification of God and the world, according to which the Stoics regarded the whole formation of the universe as but a period in the development of God, renders their remaining doctrine concerning the world very simple. Every thing in the world seemed to them to be permeated by the divine life, and was regarded as but the flowing out of this most perfect life through certain channels, until it returned in a necessary circle back again to itself. It is not necessary here to speak more closely of the physics of this school.

3. The Ethics.—The ethics of the Stoics is most closely connected with their physics. In the physics we saw the rational order of the universe as it existed through the divine thought. In the ethics, the highest law of human action, and thus the whole moral legality of life is dependent upon this rational order and conformity to law in universal nature, and the highest good or the highest end of our strivings is to shape our life according to this universal law, to live in conformity with the harmony of the world or with nature. “Follow nature,” or “live in harmony with nature,” is the moral maxim of the Stoics. More accurately: live in harmony with thy rational nature so far as this has not been distorted nor refined by art, but is held in its natural simplicity.

From this moral principle, in which we have also the Stoic conception of virtue, the peculiarities of their theory of morals follow with logical necessity.

(1.) Respecting the Relation of Virtue to Pleasure.—When the demand is made that the life should be in conformity with nature, the individual becomes wholly subjected to the universal, and every personal end is excluded. Hence pleasure, which of all ends is the most individual, must be disregarded. In pleasure that activity in which blessedness consists is abated, and this could only appear to the Stoics as a restraint of life, and thus as an evil. Pleasure is not in conformity with nature, and is no end of nature, says Cleanthes; and though other Stoics relax a little from the strictness of this opinion, and admit that pleasure may be according to nature, and is to be considered in a certain degree as a good, yet they all held fast to the doctrine, that it has no moral worth and is no end of nature, but is only something which is accidentally connected with the free and fitting activity of nature, while itself is not an activity, but a passive condition of the soul. In this lies the whole severity of the Stoic doctrine of morals; every thing personal is cast aside, every external end of action is foreign to the moral man, the action in wisdom is the only good. From this follows directly:

(2.) The View of the Stoics Concerning External Good.—If virtue, as the activity in conformity to nature, is exclusively a good, and if it alone can lead to happiness, then external good of every kind is something morally indifferent, and can neither be the object of our striving nor the end of any moral action. The action itself and not that towards which it tends is good. Hence such special ends as health, wealth, &c., are in themselves worthless and indifferent. They may result either in good or evil, and when deprived of them the happiness of the virtuous man is not destroyed. The Stoics yield from the rigor of their fundamental principle only in a single instance. They admit that there may be a distinction among indifferent things; that while none of these can be called a moral good, yet some may be preferable to others, and that the preferable, so far as it contributes to a life in conformity to nature, should enter into the account of a moral life. So the sage will prefer health and wealth when these are balanced in the choice with sickness and poverty, but though these objects have been rationally chosen, he does not esteem them as really good, for they are not the highest, they are inferior to the virtuous acting, in comparison with which every thing else sinks to insignificance. In making this distinction between the good and the preferable, we see how the Stoics exclude from the good every thing relative, and hold fast to it alone in its highest significance.

(3.) This abstract apprehension of the conception of virtue is still farther verified in the rigid antagonism which the Stoics affirmed between virtue and not-virtue, reason and sense. Either, they conclude, reason is awakened in the life of man and holds the mastery over him, or it is not awakened, and he serves his irrational instincts. In the former case we have a good and in the latter a bad man, while between these two cases as between virtue and vice, there is no mean. And since virtue cannot be partially possessed, but the man must be wholly virtuous or not at all, it follows that virtue as such is without degree, just as truth is, and hence also all good acts are equally good, because they spring from the full freedom of the reason, and all vicious ones equally bad, because they are impelled by the irrational instinct.

(4.) But this abstractedness of the moral standpoint, this rigid opposition of reason and irrationality, of the highest good and the individual good, of virtue and pleasure, has no power to furnish a system of concrete moral duties. The universal moral principle of the Stoics fails in its applicability to the individual instance. The Stoic morals has no concrete principle of moral self-determination. How must we act in every individual instance, in every moral relation, so as to act according to nature? To this inquiry Stoicism can give no answer. Its system of particular duties is thus wholly without a scientific form, and is only held together by some universal conceptions which it contains. For the most part they satisfy themselves with describing in general terms the action according to nature, and with portraying their ideal of the wise man. The characteristics which they give this ideal are partly paradoxical. The wise man is free even in chains, for he acts from himself unmoved by fear or desire; the wise man alone is king, for he alone is not bound by laws and owes fealty to no one; he is the true rich man, the true priest, prophet, and poet. He is exalted above all law and every custom; even that which is most despicable and base—deception, suicide, murder—he may commit at a proper time and in a virtuous character. In a word the Stoics describe their wise man as a god, and yield it to him to be proud and to boast of his life like Zeus. But where shall we find such a sage? Certainly not among the living. In the time long ago there may have been a perfect sage of such a pattern; but now, and for a long time back, are men at best only fools who strive after wisdom and virtue. The conception of the wise man represented, therefore, to the Stoics only an ideal, the actualization of which we should strive after, though without ever hoping to reach it; and yet their system of particular duties is almost wholly occupied in portraying this unreal and abstract ideal—a contradiction in which it is seen most clearly that their whole standpoint is one of abstract subjectivity.

SECTION XVIII.
EPICUREANISM.

The Epicurean school arose at Athens, almost contemporaneously with the Porch, though perhaps a little earlier than this. Epicurus, its founder, was born 342 B.C., six years after the death of Plato. Of his youth and education little is known. In his thirty-sixth year he opened a philosophical school at Athens, over which he presided till his death, 271 B.C. His disciples and adherents formed a social league, in which they were united by the closest band of friendship, illustrating the general condition of things in Greece after the time of Alexander, when the social took the place of the decaying poetical life. Epicurus himself compared his society to the Pythagorean fraternity, although the community of goods, which forms an element in the latter, Epicurus excludes, affirming that true friends can confide in one another. The moral conduct of Epicurus has been repeatedly assailed but, according to the testimony of the most reliable witnesses, his life was blameless in every respect, and his personal character was estimable and amiable. Moreover, it cannot be doubted that much of that, which is told by some, of the offensive voluptuousness of the Epicurean band, should be regarded as calumny. Epicurus was a voluminous writer, surpassing, in this respect, even Aristotle, and exceeded by Chrysippus alone. To the loss of his greater works he has himself contributed, by his practice of composing summaries of his system, which he recommended his disciples to commit to memory. These summaries have been for the most part preserved.

The end which Epicurus proposed to himself in science is distinctly revealed in his definition of philosophy. He calls it an activity which, by means of conceptions and arguments, procures the happiness of life. Its end is, therefore, with him essentially a practical one, and on this account the object of his whole system is to produce a scheme of morals which should teach us how we might inevitably attain a happy life. It is true that the Epicureans adopted the usual division of philosophy into logic, which they called canonics, physics, and ethics; but they confined logic to the doctrine of the criterion of truth, and considered it only as an instrument and introduction to physics, while they only treated of physics as existing wholly for ethics, and being necessary in order to free men from superstitious fear, and deliver them from the power of fables and mythical fancies concerning nature, which might hinder the attainment of happiness. We have therefore in Epicureanism the three old parts of philosophy, but in a reversed order, since logic and physics here stand as the handmaids of ethics. We shall confine ourselves in our exposition to the latter, since the Epicurean canonics and physics offer little scientific interest, and since the physics especially is not only very incomplete and without any internal connection, but rests entirely upon the atomic theory of Democritus.

Epicurus, like Aristotle and the other philosophers of his day, placed the highest good in happiness, or a happy life. More closely he makes pleasure to be the principal constituent of happiness, and even calls it the highest good. But Epicurus goes on to give a more accurate determination of pleasure, and in this he differs essentially from his predecessors, the Cyrenians. (cf. § XIII. 3.)

1. While with Aristippus the pleasure of the moment is made the end of human efforts, Epicurus directs men to strive after a system of pleasures which should insure an abiding course of happiness for the whole life. True pleasure is thus the object to be considered and weighed. Many a pleasure should be despised because it will result in pain, and many a pain should be rejoiced in because it would lead to a greater pleasure.

2. Since the sage will seek after the highest good, not simply for the present but for his whole life, he will hold the pleasures and pains of the soul, which like memory and hope stretch over the past and the future, in greater esteem than those of the body, which relate only to the present moment. The pleasure of the soul consists in the untroubled tranquillity of the sage, who rests secure in the feeling of his inner worth and his exaltation above the strokes of destiny. Thus Epicurus, would say that it is better to be miserable but rational than to be happy and irrational, and that the wise man might be happy though in torture. He would even affirm, like a true follower of Aristotle, that pleasure and happiness were most closely connected with virtue, that virtue is in fact inseparable from true pleasure, and that there can be no agreeable life without virtue, and no virtue without an agreeable life.

3. While other Hedonists would regard the most positive and intense feeling of pleasure as the highest good, Epicurus, on the other hand, fixed his eye on a happiness which should be abiding and for the whole life. He would not seek the most exquisite enjoyments in order to attain to a happy life, but he rather recommends one to be satisfied with little, and to practise sobriety and temperance of life. He guards himself against such a false application of his doctrine as would imply that the pleasure of the debauchee were the highest good, and boasts that with a little barley-bread and water he would rival Zeus in happiness. He even expresses an aversion for all costly pleasures, not, however, in themselves, but because of the evil consequences which they entail. True, the Epicurean sage need not therefore live as a Cynic. He will enjoy himself where he can without harm, and will even seek to acquire means to live with dignity and ease. But though all these enjoyments of life may properly belong to the sage, yet he can deprive himself of them without misery—though he ought not to do so—since he enjoys the truest and most essential pleasure in the calmness of his soul and the tranquillity of his heart. In opposition to the positive pleasure of some Hedonists, the theory of Epicurus expends itself in negative conceptions, representing that freedom from pain is pleasure, and that hence the activity of the sage should be prominently directed to avoid that which is disagreeable. All that man does, says Epicurus, is that he may neither suffer nor apprehend pain, and in another place he remarks, that not to live is far from being an evil. Hence death, for which men have the greatest terror, the wise man does not fear. For while we live, death is not, and when death is, we are not; when it is present we feel it not, for it is the end of all feeling, and that, which by its presence cannot affect our happiness, ought not, when thought of as a future, to trouble us. Here Epicurus must bear the censure urged against him by the ancients, that he does not recognize any positive end of life, and that the object after which his sage should strive is a mere passionless state.

The crown of Epicurus’s view of the universe is his doctrine of the gods, where he has carried over his ideal of happiness. To the gods belong a human form, though without any fixed body or human wants. In the void space they lead an undisturbed and changeless life, whose happiness is incapable of increase. From the blessedness of the gods he inferred that they had nothing to do with the management of our affairs, for blessedness is repose, and on this account the gods neither take trouble to themselves nor cause it to others. It may indeed be said that these inactive gods of Epicurus, these indestructible and yet not fixed forms, these bodies which are not bodies, have but an ill connection with his general system, in which there is in fact no point to which his doctrine of the gods can be fitly joined—but a strict scientific connection is hardly the merit of this whole philosophy.

SECTION XIX.
SCEPTICISM AND THE NEW ACADEMY.

This subjective direction already noticed was carried out to its farthest extent by the Sceptics, who broke down completely the bridge between subject and object, denying all objective truth, knowledge and science, and wholly withdrawing the philosopher from every thing but himself and his own subjective estimates. In this direction we may distinguish between the old Scepticism, the new Academy, and the later Scepticism.

1. The Old Scepticism.—Pyrrho of Elis, who was perhaps a cotemporary of Aristotle, was the head of the old Sceptics. He left no writings behind him, and we are dependent for a knowledge of his opinions upon his scholar and follower, Timon of Phlius. The tendency of these sceptical philosophers, like that of the Stoics and Epicureans, was a practical one, for philosophy, said they, ought to lead us to happiness. But in order to live happily we must know how things are, and, therefore, in what kind of a relation we stand to them. The first of these questions the Sceptics answered by attempting to show that all things, without exception, are indifferent as to truth and falsehood, uncertain, and in nowise subject to man’s judgment. Neither our senses nor our opinions concerning any thing teach us any truth; to every precept and to every position a contrary may be advanced, and hence the contradictory views of men, and especially of the philosophies of the schools respecting one and the same thing. All objective knowledge and science being thus impossible, the true relation of the philosopher to things consists in the entire suspension of judgment, and the withholding of every positive assertion. In order to avoid every thing like a positive assertion, the Sceptics had recourse to a variety of artifices, and availed themselves of doubtful modes of expression, such as it is possible; it may be so; perhaps; I assert nothing,—cautiously subjoining to this last—not even that I assert nothing. By this suspension of judgment the Sceptics thought they could attain their practical end, happiness; for the abstinence from all positive opinion is followed by a freedom from all mental disturbance, as a substance is by a shadow. He who has embraced Scepticism lives thenceforward tranquilly, without inquietude, without agitation, with an equable state of mind, and, in fact, divested of his humanity. Pyrrho is said to have originated the doctrine which lies at the basis of sceptical apathy, that no difference exists between sickness and health, or between life and death. The Sceptics, for the most part, derived the material for their views from the previous investigations in the dogmatic schools. But the grounds on which they rested were far from being profound, and were for the most part either dialectic errors which could easily be refuted, or mere subtleties. The use of the following ten tropes is ascribed to the old Sceptics, though these were perhaps not definitely brought out by either Pyrrho or Timon, but were probably first collected by Ænesidemus, soon after the time of Cicero. The withholding of all decisive judgment may rest; (1) upon the distinction generally existing between individual living objects; (2) upon the difference among men; (3) the different functions of the organs of sense; (4) the circumstances under which objects appear; (5) the relative positions, intervals, and places; (6) intermixtures; (7) the quantities and modifications of the objects we perceive; (8) relations; (9) the frequent or rare occurrence; (10) the different ways of life, the varieties of customs and laws, the mythical representations and dogmatic opinions of men.

2. The New Academy.—Scepticism, in its conflict with the Stoics, as it appeared in the Platonic school established by Arcesilaus (316-241), has a far greater significance than belongs to the performances of the Pyrrhonists. In this school Scepticism sought its support by its great respect for the writings and its transmission of the oral teachings of Plato. Arcesilaus could neither have assumed nor maintained the chair of instruction in the Academy, had he not carefully cherished and imparted to his disciples the impression that his own view, respecting the withholding of a decisive judgment, coincided essentially with that of Socrates and of Plato, and if he had not also taught that he only restored the genuine and original significance of Platonism, when he set aside the dogmatic method of teaching. An immediate incitement to the efforts of Arcesilaus is found in his opposition to the rigid dogmatic system which had lately arisen in the Porch, and which claimed to be in every respect an improvement upon Platonism. Hence, as Cicero remarks, Arcesilaus directed all his sceptical and polemic attacks against Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. He granted with his opponent that no representation should form a part of undoubted knowledge, if it could possibly have arisen through any other object than that from which it actually sprung, but he would not admit that there might be a notion which expressed so truly and accurately its own object, that it could not have arisen from any other. Accordingly, Arcesilaus denied the existence of a criterion which could certify to us the truth of our knowledge. If there be any truth in our affirmations, said he, we cannot be certain of it. In this sense he taught that one can know nothing, not even that he does know nothing. But in moral matters, in choosing the good and rejecting the evil, he taught that we should follow that which is probable.

Of the subsequent leaders in the new Academy, Carneades (214-129) alone need here be mentioned, whose whole philosophy, however, consists almost exclusively in a polemic against Stoicism and in the attempt to set up a criterion of truth. His positive performance is the attempt to bring out a philosophical theory of probabilities. The later Academicians fell back to an eclectic dogmaticism.

3. The later Scepticism.—Once more we meet with a peculiar Scepticism at the time when Grecian philosophy had wholly fallen to decay. To this time belong Ænesidemus, who probably—though this cannot be affirmed with certainty—lived but a little after Cicero; Agrippa, whose date is also uncertain, though subsequent to Ænesidemus, and Sextus Empiricus—i. e. a Grecian physician of the empiric sect, who probably flourished in the first half of the third century of the Christian era. These are the most significant names. Of these the last has the greatest interest for us, from two writings which he left behind him (the hypotyposes of Pyrrho in three books, and a treatise against the mathematicians in nine books), which are sources of much historical information. In these he has profusely collected every thing which the Scepticism of the ancients knew how to advance against the certainty of knowledge.

SECTION XX.
THE ROMANS.

The Romans have taken no independent part in the progress of philosophy. After Grecian philosophy and literature had begun to gain a foothold among them, and especially after three distinguished representatives of Attic culture and eloquence—Carneades the Academician, Critolaus the Peripatetic, and Diogenes the Stoic—had appeared in Rome as envoys from Athens; and after Greece, a few years later, had become a Roman province, and thus outwardly in a close connection with Rome, almost all the more significant systems of Grecian philosophy, especially the Epicurean (Lucretius), and the Stoic (Seneca), flourished and found adherents in Rome, though without gaining any real philosophical progress. The Romish philosophizing is wholly eclectic, as is seen in Cicero, the most important and influential philosophic writer among the Romans. But the popular philosophy of this man and of the minds akin to him cannot be strongly assailed, for, notwithstanding its want of originality and logical sequence, it gave philosophy a broad dissemination, and made it a means of universal culture.

SECTION XXI.
NEW PLATONISM.

In New Platonism, the ancient mind made its last and almost despairing attempt at a philosophy which should resolve the dualism between the subjective and the objective. The attempt was made by taking on the one side a subjective standpoint, like the other philosophies of the post-Aristotelian time (cf. § XVI 7); and on the other with the design to bring out objective determinations concerning the highest conceptions of metaphysics, and concerning the absolute; in other words, to sketch a system of absolute philosophy. In this respect the effort was made to copy the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, and the claim was set up by the new system to be a revival of the original Platonism. On both sides the new attempt formed the closing period of an ancient philosophy. It represents the last struggle, but at the same time the exhaustion of the ancient thinking and the dissolution of the old philosophy.

The first, and also the most important, representative of New Platonism, is Plotinus. He was a pupil of Ammonius Saccas, who taught the Platonic philosophy at Alexandria in the beginning of the third century, though he left no writings behind him. Plotinus (A. D. 205-270) from his fortieth year taught philosophy at Rome. His opinions are contained in a course of hastily written and not closely connected treatises, which, after his death, were collected and published in six enneads by Porphyry (who was born A. D. 233, and taught both philosophy and eloquence at Rome), his most noted disciple. From Rome and Alexandria, the New Platonism of Plotinus passed over in the fourth century to Athens, where it established itself in the Academy. In the fourth century, Jamblichus, a scholar of Porphyry, and in the fifth, Proclus, (412-485), were prominently distinguished among the New Platonists. With the triumph of Christianity and the consequent fall of heathenism, in the course of the sixth century, even this last bloom of Grecian philosophy faded away.

The common characteristic of all the New Platonists is a tendency to mysticism, theosophy, and theurgy. The majority of them gave themselves up to magic and sorcery, and the most distinguished boasted that they were the subjects of divine inspiration and illumination, able to look into the future, and to work miracles. They professed to be hierophants as much as philosophers, and exhibited the unmistakable tendency to represent a Pagan copy of Christianity, which should be at the same time a philosophy and a universal religion. In the following sketch of New Platonism we follow mainly the track of Plotinus.

1. Ecstasy as a Subjective state.—The result of the philosophical strivings antecedent to New Platonism had been Scepticism; which, seeing the impracticability of both the Stoic and Epicurean wisdom, had assumed a totally negative relation to every positive and theoretical content. But the end which Scepticism had actually gained was the opposite of that for which it had striven. It had striven for the perfect apathy of the sage, but it had gained only the necessity of incessantly opposing every positive affirmation. Instead of the rest which they had sought, they found rather an absolute unrest. This absolute unrest of the consciousness striving after an absolute rest, begat immediately a longing to be freed from this unrest, a longing after some content which should be absolutely satisfying, and stripped of every sceptical objection. This longing after an absolutely true, found its historical expression in New Platonism. The subject sought to master and comprehend the absolute; and this, neither by objective knowledge nor dialectic mediation, but immediately, by an inner and mystical mounting up of the subject in the form of an immediate beholding, or ecstasy. The knowledge of the true, says Plotinus, is not gained by proof nor by any mediation; it cannot be found when the objects known remain separate from the subject knowing, but only when the distinction between knower and known disappears; it is a beholding of the reason in itself, not in the sense that we see the reason, but the reason beholds itself; in no other way can knowledge come. If any one has attained to such a beholding, to such a true unison with the divine, he will despise the pure thinking which he otherwise loved, for this thinking was only a movement which presupposed a difference between the perceiver and the perceived. This mystical absorption into the Deity, or, the One, this resolving the self into the absolute, is that which gives to New Platonism a character so peculiarly distinct from the genuine Grecian systems of philosophy.

2. The Cosmical Principles.—The doctrine of the three cosmical principles is most closely connected with the theory just named. To the two cosmical principles already received, viz., the world-soul and the world-reason, a third and higher one was added by the New Platonists. For if the reason apprehends the true by means of thinking, and not within itself alone; if, in order to grasp the absolute and behold the divine, it must lose its own self-consciousness, and go out beyond itself, then reason cannot be the highest principle, but there stands above it that primal essence, with which it must be united if it will behold the true. To this primal essence Plotinus gives different names, as “the first,” “the one,” “the good,” and “that which stands above being” (being is with him but a conception, which, like the reason, may be resolved into a higher ground, and which, united with the reason, forms but the second step in the series of highest conceptions). In all these names, Plotinus does not profess to have satisfactorily expressed the essence of this primal one, but only to have given a representation of it. In characterizing it still farther, he denies it all thinking and willing, because it needs nothing and can desire nothing; it is not energy, but above energy; life does not belong to it; neither being nor essence nor any of the most general categories of being can be ascribed to it; in short, it is that which can neither be expressed nor thought. Plotinus has thoroughly striven to think of this first principle not as first principle, i. e. not in its relation to that of which it is the ground, but only in itself, as being wholly without reference either to us or to any thing else. This pure abstraction, however, he could not carry out. He sets himself to show how every thing else, and especially the two other cosmical principles, could emanate from this first; but in order to have a principle for his emanation theory, he was obliged to consider the first in its relation to the second and as its producer.

3. The Emanation Theory of the New Platonists.—Every emanation theory, and hence also that of the New Platonists, considers the world as the effluence of God, and gives to the emanation a greater or less degree of perfection, according as it is nearer or more remote from its source. They all have for their principle the totality of being, and represent a progressively ascending relation in its several parts. Fire, says Plotinus, emits heat, snow cold, fragrant bodies odors, and every organic thing so far as it is perfect begets something like itself. In the same way the all-perfect and the eternal, in the overflowing of his perfection sends out from himself that which is also eternal, and after him, the best, viz., the reason or world-intelligence, which is the immediate reflection and image of the primal one. Plotinus abounds in figures to show how the primal one need lose nothing nor become weakened by this emanation of reason. Next to the original one, reason is the most perfect. It contains in itself the ideal world, and the whole of true and changeless being. Some notion may be formed of its exaltation and glory by carefully beholding the sensible world in its greatness, its beauty, and the order of its ceaseless motion, and then by rising to contemplate its archetype in the pure and changeless being of the intelligible world, and then by recognizing in intelligence the author and finisher of all. In it there is neither past nor future, but only an ever abiding present. It is, moreover, as incapable of division in space as of change in time. It is the true eternity, which is only copied by time. As reason flows from the primal one, so does the world-soul eternally emanate from reason, though the latter incurs no change thereby. The world-soul is the copy of reason, permeated by it, and actualizing it in an outer world. It gives ideas externally to sensible matter, which is the last and lowest step in the series of emanations and in itself is undetermined, and has neither quality nor being. In this way the visible universe is but the transcript of the world-soul, which forms it out of matter, permeates and animates it, and carries it forward in a circle. Here closes the series of emanations, and, as was the aim of the theory, we have been carried in a constant current from the highest to the lowest, from God to the mere image of true being, or the sensible world.

Individual souls, like the world-soul, are linked both to the higher and the lower, to reason and the sensible; now bound with the latter and sharing its destiny, and anon rising to their source in reason. Their original and proper home was in the rational world, from whence they have come down, each one in its proper time, into the corporeal; not, however, wholly forsaking their ideal abode, but as a sunbeam touches at the same time the sun and the earth, so are they found alike in the world of reason and the world of sense. Our calling, therefore—and here we come back to the point from which we started in our exhibition of New Platonism—can only be to direct our senses and aspirations towards our proper home, in the ideal world, and by asceticism and crucifying of the flesh, to free our better self from its participation with the body. But when our soul has once mounted up to the ideal world, that image of the originally good and beautiful, it then attains the final goal of all its longings and efforts, the immediate union with God, through the enraptured beholding of the primal one in which it loses its consciousness and becomes buried and absorbed.

According to all this, the New Platonic philosophy would seem to be a monism, and thus the most perfect development of ancient philosophy, in so far as this had striven to carry back the sum of all being to one ultimate ground. But as it attained its highest principle from which all the rest was derived, by means of ecstasy, by a mystical self-destruction of the individual person (Ichheit), by asceticism and theurgy, and not by means of self-conscious thinking, nor by any natural or rational way, it is seen that ancient philosophy, instead of becoming perfected in New Platonism, only makes a despairing leap beyond itself to its own self-destruction.