Ethics

ETHICS, the name generally given to the science of moral philosophy. The word " ethics " is derived from the Gr. r)OtKOS, that which pertains to rlOos, character.

For convenience in reference, the arrangement followed in this article may be explained at the outset: - Page Definition And Scope. 809 Historical Sketch 810 A. Greek and Graeco-Roman Ethics 810 The Age of the Sophists. 811 Socrates and his Disciples 811 Plato. 812 Plato and Aristotle. 814 Aristotle. 815 Stoicism. 816 Hedonism (Epicurus) 818 Later Greek and Roman Ethics 818 Neoplatonism . 819 B. Christianity and Medieval Ethics. 820 Christian and Jewish " Law of God " 820 Christian and Pagan Inwardness. 820 (Knowledge, Faith, Love, Purity).

Distinctive Particulars of Christian Morality 821 Development of Opinion in Early Christi C. Modern Ethics - continued Page Association and Evolution 837 Free-will. 837 French Influence on English Ethics 838 (Helvetius, Comte) German Influence on English Ethics 839 (Kant, Hegel) D. Ethics since 1879.. 840 III. Bibliography.. 845 Section I. contains a general survey of the subject; it shows in what sense ethics is to be regarded as a special field of philosophical investigation - its relations to other departments of thought, especially to psychology, religion and modern physical science. The article makes no attempt to give a detailed, casuistical examination of the matter of ethical theory. For this, reference must be made to special articles on philosophic schools, writers and terms.

Section II. is a historical sketch in four parts tracing the main lines of development in ethical speculation from its birth to the present day. Here again it has been possible to notice only the salient points or landmarks, leaving all detail to special articles as above. All important writers whose names occur in this sketch are treated in special biographical articles, and references are given as often as possible to supplementary articles which illustrate and explain points which cannot be fully treated here. This is especially the case in connexion with technical terms (whose history and meaning are inevitably taken for granted) and biographical information about minor ethical writers.

I. Definition And Subject-Matter Of Ethics In its widest sense, the term " ethics " would imply an examination into the general character or habits of mankind, and would even involve a description or history of the habits of men in particular societies living at different periods of time. Such a field of study would obviously be too wide for any particular science or philosophy to investigate, and moreover portions of the field are already occupied by history, by anthropology and by the particular sciences (e.g. physiology, anatomy, biology), in so far as the habits and character of men depend upon the material processes which these sciences examine.

Even philosophies such as logic and aesthetic would be necessary for such an investigation, if thought and artistic production are normal. human habits and elements in character. Ethics then is usually confined to the particular field of human character and conduct so far as they depend upon or exhibit certain general principles commonly known as moral principles. Men in general characterize their own conduct and character and that of other men by such general adjectives as good, bad, right and wrong, and it is the meaning and scope of these adjectives, primarily in relation to human conduct, and ultimately in their final and absolute sense, that ethics investigates.

A not uncommon definition of ethics as the " science of conduct " is inexact for various reasons. (i) The sciences are descriptive or experimental. But a description of what acts or what ends of action men in the present or the past call, or have called, " good " or " bad " is clearly beyond human powers. And experiments in morality (apart from the inconvenient practical consequences likely to ensue) are useless for purposes of ethics, because the moral consciousness would itself at one and the same time be required to make the experiment and to provide the subject upon which the experiment is performed.

(2) Ethics is a philosophy and not a science. Philosophy is a process of reflection upon the presuppositions involved in unreflective thought. In logic and metaphysics it investigates either the process of apprehension itself, or conceptions such as cause, substance, space, time, which the ordinary scientific consciousness never criticizes. In moral philosophy the place of the body of sciences, which philosophy as the theory of knowledge investigates, is taken by the developed moral consciousness, which already pronounces moral judgment without hesitation, and claims authority to subject to continual criticism the institutions and forms of social life which it has itself helped to create.

When ethical speculation first begins, conceptions such as those of duty, responsibility, the will as the ultimate subject of moral approbation and disapprobation, are already in existence and already operative. Moral philosophy in a certain sense adds nothing to these conceptions, though it sets them in a clearer light. The problems of the moral consciousness at the time at which it first becomes reflective are not strictly speaking philosophical problems at all.

It is occupied with just such questions as each individual man who wishes to act rightly is constantly called upon to answer, e.g. questions such as " What particular action will meet the claims of justice under such and such circumstances? " or " What degree of ignorance will excuse this particular person in this particular case from his responsibility ? " It tries to attain a knowledge as complete as possible of the circumstances under which the act contemplated must be performed, the personalities of the persons whom it may affect, and the consequences (so far as they can be foreseen) which it will produce, and then by virtue of its own power of moral discrimination pronounces judgment. And the ever-recurring problem of the moral consciousness, " What ought to be done ?" is one which receives a clearer and more definite answer as men become more able in the course of moral experience to apply those principles of the moral consciousness which are yet employed in that experience from the outset.

Nevertheless there is a sense in which moral philosophy may be said to originate out of difficulties inherent in the nature of morality itself, although it remains true that the questions which ethics attempts to answer are never questions with which the moral consciousness as such is confronted.

The fact that men give different answers to moral problems which seem similar in character, or even the mere fact that men disregard, when they act immorally, the dictates and implicit principles of the moral consciousness is certain sooner or later to produce the desire either, on the one hand, to justify immoral action by casting doubt upon the authority of the moral consciousness and the validity of its principles, or, on the other hand, to justify particular moral judgments either by (the only valid method) an analysis of the moral principle involved in the judgment and a demonstration of its universal acceptation, or by some attempted proof that the particular moral judgment is arrived at by a process of inference from some universal conception of the Supreme Good or the Final End from which all particular duties or virtues may be deduced.

It may be that criticism of morality first originates with a criticism of existing moral institutions or codes of ethics; such a criticism may be due to the spontaneous activity of the moral consciousness itself. But when such criticism passes into the attempt to find a universal criterion of morality - such an attempt being in effect an effort to make morality scientific - and especially when the attempt is seen, as it must in the end be seen, to fail (the moral consciousness being superior to all standards of morality and realizing itself wholly in particular judgments), then ethics as a process of reflection upon the nature of the moral consciousness may be said to begin. If this be true it follows that one of the chief function of ethics must be criticism of mistaken attempts to find a criterion of morality superior to the pronouncements of the moral consciousness itself.

The ultimate superiority of the moral consciousness over all other standards is recognized, even by those who impugn its authority, whenever they claim that all men ought to recognize the superior value of the standards which they themselves wish to substitute. Similarly, their opponents refute their arguments by showing that they are based ultimately upon a recognition of certain distinctions which are moral distinctions (i.e. imply a moral consciousness capable of discriminating between right and wrong in particular cases), and that these moral distinctions conflict with the conclusions which they reach.

This may briefly be illustrated by reference to some of the great fundamental controversies of ethics. None of these originates out of conflicting statements of the moral consciousness, i.e. there is no fundamental contradiction in morality itself. No one (if unsophisticated) ever confused the conception of pleasure with the conception of the Good, or thought that the claims of selfish interest were identical with those of duty. But the controversy between hedonists and antihedonists originates as soon as men reflect that a good which is not in some sense " my " good is not good at all, or that no act can be said to be moral which does not satisfy " me."

Or, again, the Ix. 26a reflection that the mark or sign of the perfect performance of a particular virtuous act or function is the presence of a characteristic pleasure which always accompanies it, is opposed to the reflection that it is a mark of the highest morality never to rest satisfied, and out of these seemingly contradictory statements of the reflective consciousness might arise a multitude of controversies either concerning pleasure and duty, or the even more difficult and complex conceptions of merit, progress, and the nature of the Supreme Good or Final End.

When and how fresh controversies in ethics will begin it would be impossible for any one to foretell. Sometimes the dominance of a particular science or branch of study is the occasion of an attempt to apply to ethics ideas borrowed from Sciences or analogous to the conceptions of that science. False analogies drawn between ethics and mathematics or between morality and the perception of beauty have wrought much mischief in modern and to some degree even in ancient ethics. The influence of ideas borrowed from biology is everywhere manifest in the ethical speculations of modern times.

Sometimes, again, whole theories of ethics have been formulated which can be seen in the end to be efforts to subordinate moral conceptions to conceptions belonging properly to institutions or departments of human thought and activity which the moral consciousness has itself originated. Law, for instance, depends, or at least ought to depend, upon men's need for and consciousness of justice. And such institutions as the family and the state are created by the social consciousness, which is the moral consciousness from another aspect. Yet morality has been subordinated to legal and social sanctions, and moral advance has been held to be conditioned by political and social necessities which are not moral needs.

Similarly no one since civilization emerged from barbarism has ever really been willing to yield allegiance to a deity who is not moral in the fullest and highest sense of the word. God is not superior to moral law. Yet there have been. whole systems of theological ethics which have attempted to base human morality upon the arbitrary will of God or upon the supreme authority of a divinely inspired book or code of laws. One of the greatest of all ethical controversies, that concerning the freedom of the will, arose directly out of what was in reality a theological problem - the necessity, namely, of reconciling God's foreknowledge with human freedom.

The unreflective moral consciousness never finds it difficult to distinguish between a man's power of willing and all the forces of circumstance, heredity and the like, which combine to form the temptations to which he may yield or bid defiance; and such facts as " remorse " and " penitence " are a continual testimony to man's sense of freedom. But so soon as men perceive upon reflection an apparent discrepancy between the utterances of their moral consciousness and certain conclusions to which theological speculation (or at a later period metaphysical and scientific inquiries) seems inevitably to lead them, they will not rest satisfied until the belief in the will's freedom (hitherto unquestioned) is upon further reflection justified or condemned.

It is clear then that the complexity of the subject-matter of ethics is such that no sharply defined boundary lines can be drawn between it and other branches of inquiry. Just in so far as it presupposes the apprehension of moral facts, it must presuppose a knowledge of the system of social relationships upon which some at least of those facts depend. No one, for instance, could inquire into the nature of justice without being further compelled to undertake an examination of the nature of the state.

It would be difficult to decide how much of the dispute between the advocates of pleasure theories and their opponents turns upon vexed questions of psychology, and how much is p ho strictly relevant to ethics. If, as has already been said, one of the chief tasks of ethics is to prevent the intrusion into its own sphere of inquiry of ideas borrowed from other and alien sources, then obviously these sources must be investigated. One example of this necessity may be given. It is sometimes maintained that the proper method of ethics is the psychological method; ethics, we are told, should examine as its subject-matter moral sentiments wherever found, without raising ultimate questions as to the nature of obligation or moral authority in general.

Now if in opposition to such arguments the ultimate character of moral obligation be defended, it will be necessary to point out that no one feels moral sentiments except in connexion with particular objects of moral approbation or disapprobation (e.g. gratitude is inexplicable apart from a particular relationship existing between two or more persons), and that these objects are objects of the moral consciousness alone. But such a line of argument is certain to make necessary an inquiry into the nature of the objects of psychological study which may produce quite unforeseen results for psychology.

Nothing therefore is to be gained by confining ethics within limits which must from the nature of the case be arbitrary. The defender at all events of the supremacy of moral intuitions must be prepared to follow whither the argument leads, into whatever strange quarters it may direct him. But this much may be said by way of delimitation of the scope of ethics: however complicated and involved its arguments and processes of inference may become, the facts from which they start and the conclusions to which they point are such as the moral consciousness alone can understand or warrant. (H. H. W.) II. Historical Sketch A. Greek and Graeco-Roman Ethics. - The ethical speculation of Greece, and therefore of Europe, had no abrupt and absolute beginning.

The naive and fragmentary precepts of conduct, which are everywhere the earliest manifestation of nascent moral reflection, are a noteworthy element in the gnomic poetry of the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. Their importance is shown by the traditional enumeration of the Seven Sages of the 6th century, and their influence on ethical thought is attested by the references of Plato and Aristotle. But from these unscientific utterances to a philosophy of morals was a long process. In the practical wisdom of Thales, one of the seven, we cannot discern any systematic theory of morality.

In the case of Pythagoras, conspicuous among pre-Socratic philosophers as the founder not merely of a school, but of a sect or order bound by a common rule of life, there is a closer connexion between moral and metaphysical speculation. The doctrine of the Pythagoreans that the essence of justice (conceived as equal retribution) was a square number, indicates a serious attempt to extend to the region of conduct their mathematical view of the universe; and the same may be said of their classification of good with unity, straightness and the like, and of evil with the opposite qualities.

Still, the enunciation of the moral precepts of Pythagoras appears to have been dogmatic, or even prophetic, rather than philosophic, and to have been accepted by his disciples with an unphilosophic reverence as the ipse dixit 1 of the master. Hence, whatever influence the Pythagorean blending of ethical and mathematical notions may have had on Plato, and, through him, on later thought, we cannot regard the school as having really forestalled the Socratic inquiry after a completely reasoned theory of conduct. The ethical element in the " dark " philosophizing of Heraclitus (c. 530-470 B.C.), though it anticipates Stoicism in its conceptions of a law of the universe, to which the wise man will carefully conform, and a divine harmony, in the recognition of which he will find his truest satisfaction, is more profound, but even less systematic.

It is only when we come to Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates, the last of the original thinkers whom we distinguish as pre-Socratic, that we find anything which we can call an ethical system. The fragments that remain of the moral treatises of Democritus are sufficient, perhaps, to convince us that the turn of Greek philosophy in the direction of conduct, which was actually due to Socrates, would have taken place without him, though in a less decided manner; but when we compare the Democritean ethics with the post-Socratic system to which it has most affinity, Epicureanism, we find that it exhibits a very rudimentary apprehension of the formal conditions which moral teaching must fulfil before it can lay claim to be treated as scientific.

1 This well-known phrase was originally attributed to the Pythagoreans.

The truth is that no system of ethics could be constructed until attention had been directed to the vagueness and inconsistency of the common moral opinions of mankind. For this purpose was needed the concentration of a philosophic intellect of the first order on the problems of practice. In Socrates first we find the required combination of a paramount interest in conduct and an ardent desire for knowledge. The pre-Socratic thinkers were all primarily devoted to ontological research; but by the middle of the 5th century B.C. the conflict of their dogmatic systems had led some of the keenest minds to doubt the possibility of penetrating the secret of the physical universe.

This doubt found expression in the reasoned scepticism of Gorgias, and produced the famous proposition of Protagoras, that human apprehension is the only standard of existence. The same feeling led Socrates to abandon the old physico-metaphysical inquiries. In his case, moreover, it was strengthened by a naive piety that forbade him to search into things of which the gods seemed to have reserved the knowledge to themselves. The regulation of human action, on the other hand (except on occasions of special difficulty, for which omens and oracles might be vouchsafed), they had left to human reason. On this accordingly Socrates concentrated his efforts.

Though, however, Socrates was the first to arrive at a proper conception of the problems of conduct, the general idea did not originate with him. The natural reaction against the metaphysical and ethical dogmatism of the earlyg Y thinkers had reached its climax in the Sophists. Gorgias and Protagoras are only representatives of what was really a universal tendency to abandon dogmatic theory and take refuge in practical matters, and especially, as was natural in the Greek city-state, in the civic relations of the citizen.

The education given by the Sophists aimed at no general theory of life, but professed to expound the art of getting on in the world and of managing public affairs. In their eulogy of the virtues of the citizen, they pointed out the prudential character of justice and the like as a means of obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain. The Greek conception of society was such that the life of the free-born citizen consisted mainly of his public function, and, therefore, the pseudo-ethical disquisitions of the Sophists satisfied the requirements of the age.

None thought of apenn (virtue or excellence) as a unique quality possessed of an intrinsic value, but as the virtue of the citizen, just as good flute-playing was the virtue of the flute-player. We see here, as in other activities of the age, a determination to acquire technical knowledge, and to apply it directly to the practical issue; just as music was being enriched by new technical knowledge, architecture by modern theories of plans and T-squares (sc. Hippodamus), the handling of soldiers by the new technique of " tactics " and " hoplitics," so citizenship must be analysed afresh, systematized and adapted in relation to modern requirements.

The Sophists had studied these matters superficially indeed but with thoroughness as far as they went, and it is not remarkable that they should have taken the methods which were successful in rhetoric, and applied them to the " science and art " of civic virtues. Plato's Protagoras claims, not unjustly, that in teaching virtue they simply did systematically what every one else was doing at haphazard. But in the true sense of the word, they had no ethical system at all, nor did they contribute save by contrast to ethical speculation. They merely analysed conventional formulae, much in the manner of certain modern so-called " scientific " moralists.

Into this arena of hazy popular common. sense Socrates brought a new critical spirit, showing that these popular lecturers, in spite of their fertile eloquence, could not defend their fundamental assumptions, nor even give rational definitions of what they professed to explain. Not only were they thus " ignorant," but they were also perpetually inconsistent with themselves in dealing with particular instances. Thus, by the aid of his famous " dialectic," Socrates arrived first at the negative result that the professed teachers of the people were as ignorant as he himself claimed to be, and in a measure justified the eulogy of Aristotle that he rendered to philosophy the service of " introducing induction and definitions."

This description of his work is, however, both too technical and too positive, if we may judge from those earlier dialogues of Plato in which the real Socrates is found least modified. The pre-eminent wisdom which the Delphic oracle attributed to him was held by himself to consist in a unique consciousness of ignorance. Yet it is equally clear from Plato that there was a most important positive element in the; teaching of Socrates in virtue of which it is just to say with Alexander Bain, " the first important name in ancient ethical philosophy is Socrates."

The union of the negative and the positive elements in his work has caused historians no little perplexity, and we cannot quite save the philosopher's consistency unless we regard some of the doctrines attributed to him by Xenophon as merely tentative and provisional. Still the positions of Socrates that are most important in the history of ethical thought not only are easy to harmonize with his conviction of ignorance, but even render it easier to understand his unwearied cross-examination of common opinion.

While he showed clearly the difficulty of acquiring knowledge, he was convinced that knowledge alone could be the source of a coherent system of virtue, as error of evil. Socrates, therefore, first in the history of thought, propounds a positive scientific law of conduct. Virtue is knowledge. This principle involved the paradox that no man, knowing good, would do evil. But it was a paradox derived from his unanswerable truisms, " Every one wishes for his own good, and would get it if he could," and " No one would deny that justice and virtue generally are goods, and of all goods the best."

All virtues are, therefore, summed up in knowledge of the good. But this good is not, for Socrates, duty as distinct from interest. The force of the paradox depends upon a blending of duty and interest in the single notion of good, a blending which was dominant in the common thought of the age. This it is which forms the kernel of the positive thought of Socrates according to Xenophon. He could give no satisfactory account of Good in the abstract, and evaded all questions on this point by saying that he knew " no good that was not good for something in particular," but that good is consistent with itself.

For himself he prized above all things the wisdom that is virtue, and in the task of producing it he endured the hardest penury, maintaining that such life was richer in enjoyment than a life of luxury. This many-sidedness of view is illustrated by the curious blending of noble and merely utilitarian sentiment in his account of friendship: a friend who can be of no service is valueless; yet the highest service that a friend can render is moral improvement.

The historically important characteristics of his moral philosophy, if we take (as we must) his teaching and character together, may be summarized as follows: - (i) an ardent inquiry for knowledge nowhere to be found, but which, if found, would perfect human conduct; (2) a demand meanwhile that men should act as far as possible on some consistent theory; (3) a provisional adhesion to the commonly received view of good, in all its incoherent complexity, and a perpetual readiness to maintain the harmony of its different elements, and demonstrate the superiority of virtue by an appeal to the standard of selfinterest; (4) personal firmness, as apparently easy as it was actually invincible, in carrying out consistently such practical convictions as he had attained.

It is only when we keep all these points in view that we can understand how from the spring of Socratic conversation flowed the divergent streams of Greek ethical thought.

Four distinct philosophical schools trace their immediate origin to the circle that gathered round Socrates - the Megarian, the Platonic, the Cynic and the Cyrenaic. The impress of the master is manifest on all, in spite of the wide differences that divide them; they all agree in holding the most important possession of man to be wisdom or knowledge, and the most important knowledge to be knowledge of Good. Here, however, the agreement ends. The more philosophic part of the circle, forming a group in which Euclid of Megara (see Megarian School) seems at first to have taken the lead, regarded this Good as the object of a still unfulfilled guest, and were led to identify it with the hidden secret of the universe, and thus to pass from ethics to metaphysics.

Others again, whose demand for knowledge was more easily satisfied, and who were more impressed with the positive and practical side of the master's teaching, made the quest a much simpler affair. They took the Good as already known, and held philosophy to consist in the steady application of this knowledge to conduct. Among these were Antisthenes the Cynic and Aristippus of Cyrene.

It is by their recognition of the duty of living consistently by theory instead of mere impulse or custom, their sense of the new value given to life through this rationalization, and their effort to maintain the easy, calm, unwavering firmness of the Socratic temper, that we recognize both Antisthenes and Aristippus as " Socratic men," in spite of the completeness with which they divided their master's positive doctrine into systems diametrically opposed. Of their contrasted principles we may perhaps say that, while Aristippus took the most obvious logical step for reducing the teaching of Socrates to clear dogmatic unity, Antisthenes certainly drew the most natural inference from the Socratic life.

Aristippus (see Cyrenaics) argued that, if all that is beautiful or admirable in conduct has this quality as being useful, i.e. productive of some further good; if virtuous action Aris= is essentially action done with insight, or rational ttppr,s. apprehension of the act as a means to this good, this good must be pleasure. Bodily pleasures and pains Aristippus held to be the keenest, though he does not seem to have maintained this on any materialistic theory, as he admitted the existence of purely mental pleasures, such as joy in the prosperity of one's native land. He fully recognized that his good was capable of being realized only in successive parts, and gave even exaggerated emphasis to the rule of seeking the pleasure of the moment, and not troubling oneself about a dubious future.

It was in the calm, resolute, skilful culling of such pleasures as circumstances afforded from moment to moment, undisturbed by passion, prejudices or superstition, that he conceived the quality of wisdom to be exhibited; and tradition represents him as realizing this ideal to an impressive degree. Among the prejudices from which the wise man was free he included all regard to customary morality beyond what was due to the actual penalties attached to its violation; though he held, with Socrates, that these penalties actually render conformity reasonable. Thus early in the history of ethical theory appeared the most thoroughgoing exposition of hedonism.

Far otherwise was the Socraticspirit understood by Antisthenes and the Cynics. They equally held that no speculative research was needed for the discovery of good and The . virtue, and maintained that the Socratic wisdom was Cynics. exhibited, not in the skilful pursuit, but in the rational disregard of pleasure, - in the clear apprehension of the intrinsic worthlessness of this and most other objects of men's ordinary desires and aims. Pleasure, indeed, Antisthenes declared roundly to be an evil; " Better madness than a surrender to pleasure."

He did not overlook the need of supplementing merely intellectual insight by " Socratic force of soul "; but it seemed to him that, by insight and self-mastery combined, an absolute spiritual independence might be attained which left nothing wanting for perfect well-being (see also Diogenes). For as for poverty, painful toil, disrepute, and such evils as men dread most, these, he argued, were positively useful as means of progress in spiritual freedom and virtue. There is, however, in the Cynic notion of wisdom, no positive criterion beyond the mere negation of irrational desires and prejudices.

We saw that Socrates, while not claiming to have found the abstract theory of good or wise conduct, practically understood by it the faithful performance of customary duties, maintaining always that his own happiness was therewith bound up. The Cynics more boldly discarded both pleasure and mere custom as alike irrational; but in so doing they left the freed reason with no definite aim but its own freedom. It is absurd, as Plato urged, to say that knowledge is the good, and then when asked "knowledge of what ?" to have no positive reply but "of the good"; but the Cynics do not seem to have made any serious effort to escape from this absurdity.

The ultimate views of these two Socratic schools we shall have to notice presently when we come to the post-Aristotelian schools. We must now proceed to trace the fuller development of the Socratic theory in the hands of Plato and Aristotle.

The ethics of Plato cannot properly be treated as a finished result, but rather as a continual movement from the position of Socrates towards the more complete, articulate system of Aristotle; except that there are ascetic and Plato. mystical suggestions in some parts of Plato's teaching which find no counterpart in Aristotle, and in fact disappear from Greek philosophy soon after Plato's death until they are revived and fantastically developed in Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism. The first stage at which we can distinguish Plato's ethical view from that of Socrates is presented in the Protagoras, where he makes a serious, though clearly tentative effort to define the object of that knowledge which he with his master regards as the essence of all virtue. Such knowledge, he here maintains, is really mensuration of pleasures and pains, whereby the wise man avoids those mistaken under-estimates of future feelings in comparison with present which we commonly call " yielding to fear or desire."

This hedonism has perplexed Plato's readers needlessly (as we have said in speaking of the Cyrenaics), inasmuch as hedonism is the most obvious corollary of the Socratic doctrine that the different common notions of good - the beautiful, the pleasant and the useful - were to be somehow interpreted by each other. By Plato, however, this conclusion could have been held only before he had accomplished the movement of thought by which he carried the Socratic method beyond the range of human conduct and developed it into a metaphysical system.

This movement may be expressed thus. " If we know," said Socrates, " what justice is, we can give an account or definition of it "; true knowledge must be knowledge of the general fact, common to all the individual cases to which we apply our general notion. But this must be no less true of other objects of thought and discourse; the same relation of general notions to particular examples extends through the whole physical universe; we can think and talk of it only by means of such notions. True or scientific knowledge then must be general knowledge, relating, not to individuals primarily, but to the general facts or qualities which individuals exemplify; in fact, our notion of an individual, when examined, is found to be an aggregate of such general qualities. But, again, the object of true knowledge must be what really exists; hence the reality of the universe must lie in general facts or relations, and not in the individuals that exemplify them.

So far the steps are plain enough; but we do not yet see how this logical Realism (as it was afterwards called) comes to have the essentially ethical character that especially interests us in Platonism. Plato's philosophy is now concerned with the whole universe of being; yet the ultimate object of his philosophic contemplation is still " the good," now conceived as the ultimate ground of all being and knowledge. That is, the essence of the universe is identified with its end, - the " formal " with the " final " cause of things, to use the later Aristotelian phraseology. How comes this about ?

Perhaps we may best explain this by recurring to the original application of the Socratic method to human affairs. Since all rational activity is for some end, the different arts or functions of human industry are naturally defined by a statement of their ends or uses; and similarly, in giving an account of the different artists and functionaries, we necessarily state their end, " what they are good for." In a society well ordered on Socratic principles, every human being would be put to some use; the essence of his life would consist in doing what he was good for (his proper 'p-yov).

But again, it is easy to extend this view throughout the whole region of organized life; an eye that does not attain its end by seeing is without the essence of an eye. In short, we may say of all organs and instruments that they are what we think them in proportion as they fulfil their function and attain their end. If, then, we conceive the whole universe organically, as a complex arrangement of means to ends, we shall understand how Plato might hold that all things really were, or (as we say) " realized their idea," in proportion as they accomplished the special end or good for which they were adapted.

Even Socrates, in spite of his aversion to physics, was led by pious reflection to expound a teleological view of the physical world, as ordered in all its parts by divine wisdom for the realization of some divine end; and, in the metaphysical turn which Plato gave to this view, he was probably anticipated by Euclid of Megara, who held that the one real being is " that which we call by many names, Good, Wisdom, Reason or God," to which Plato, raising to a loftier significance the Socratic identification of the beautiful with the useful, added the further name of Absolute Beauty, explaining how man's love of the beautiful finally reveals itself as the yearning for the end and essence of being.

Plato, therefore, took this vast stride of thought, and identified the ultimate notions of ethics and ontology. We have now to see what attitude he will adopt towards the practical inquiries from which he started. What will now be his view of wisdom, virtue, pleasure and their relation to human well-being?

The answer to this question is inevitably somewhat complicated. In the first place we have to observe that philosophy has now passed definitely from the market-place into the lectureroom. The quest of Socrates was for the true art of conduct for a man living a practical life among his fellows. But if the objects of abstract thought constitute the real world, of which this world of individual things is but a shadow, it is plain that the highest, most real life must lie in the former region and not in the latter.

It is in contemplating the abstract reality which concrete things obscurely exhibit, the type or ideal which they imperfectly imitate, that the true life of the mind in man must consist; and as man is most truly man in proportion as he is mind, the desire of one's own good, which Plato, following Socrates, held to be permanent and essential in every living thing, becomes in its highest form the philosophic yearning for knowledge. This yearning, he held, springs - like more sensual impulses - from a sense of want of something formerly possessed, of which there remains a latent memory in the soul, strong in proportion to its philosophic capacity; hence it is that in learning any abstract truth by scientific demonstration we merely make explicit what we already implicitly know; we bring into clear consciousness hidden memories of a state in which the soul looked upon Reality and Good face to face, before the lapse that imprisoned her in an alien body and mingled her true nature with fleshly feelings and impulses.

We thus reach the paradox that the true art of living is really an " art of dying " as far as possible to mere sense, in order more fully to exist in intimate union with absolute goodness and beauty. On the other hand, since the philosopher must still live and act in the concrete sensible world, the Socratic identification of wisdom and virtue is fully maintained by Plato. Only he who apprehends good in the abstract can imitate it in such transient and imperfect good as may be realized in human life, and it is impossible that, having this knowledge, he should not act on it, whether in private or public affairs. Thus, in the true philosopher, we shall necessarily find the practically good man, who being " likest of men to the gods is best loved by them "; and also the perfect statesman, if only the conditions of his society allow him a sphere for exercising his statesmanship.

The characteristics of this practical goodness in Plato's matured thought correspond to the fundamental conceptions in his view of the universe. The soul of man, in its good or normal condition, must be ordered and harmonized under the guidance of reason. The question then arises, " Wherein does this order or harmony precisely consist?" In explaining how Plato was led to answer this question, it will be well to notice that, while faithfully maintaining the Socratic doctrine that the highest virtue was inseparable from knowledge of the good, he had come to recognize an inferior kind of virtue, possessed by men who were not philosophers.

It is plain that if the good that is to be known is the ultimate ground of the whole of things, it is attainable only by a select and carefully trained few. Yet we can hardly restrict all virtue to these alone. What account, then, was to be given of ordinary " civic " bravery, temperance and justice? It seemed clear that men who did their duty, resisting the seductions of fear and desire, must have right opinions, if not knowledge, as to the good and evil in human life; but whence comes this right " opinion "? Partly, Plato said, it comes by nature and " divine allotment, " but for its adequate development " custom and practice " are required.

Hence the paramount importance of education and discipline for civic virtue; and even for future philosophers such moral culture, in which physical and aesthetic training must co-operate, is indispensable; no merely intellectual preparation will suffice. His point is that perfect knowledge cannot be implanted in a soul that has not gone through a course of preparation including much more than physical training. What, then, is this preparation? A distinct step in psychological analysis was taken when Plato recognized that its effect was to produce the " harmony " above mentioned among different parts of the soul, by subordinating the impulsive elements to reason.

These non-rational elements he further distinguished as appetitive (ro E7rLOvi..arr KOv) and spirited (TO Ov,uoabS or Ovu6r) - the practical separateness of which from each other and from reason he held to be established by our inner experience.

On this triple division of the soul he founded a systematic view of the four kinds of goodness recognized by the common moral consciousness of Greece, and in later times known as the Cardinal Virtues. Of these the two most fundamental were (as has been already indicated) wisdom - in its highest form philosophy - and that harmonious and regulated activity of all the elements of the soul which Plato regards as the essence of uprightness in social relations (&Kac06uv77) . The import of this term is essentially social; and we can explain Plato's use of it only by reference to the analogy which he drew between the individual man and the community.

In a rightly ordered polity social and individual well-being alike would depend on that harmonious action of diverse elements, each performing its proper function, which in its social application is more naturally termed SLKawwVGv7. We see, moreover, how in Plato's view the fundamental virtues, Wisdom and Justice in their highest forms, are mutually involved. Wisdom will necessarily maintain orderly activity, and this latter consists in regulation by wisdom, while the two more special virtues of Courage (avbpeia) and Temperance (6cwcpotruvf) are only different sides or aspects of this wisely regulated action of the complex soul.

Such, then, are the forms in which essential good seemed to manifest itself in human life. It remains to ask whether the statement of these gives a complete account of human well-being, or whether pleasure also is to be included. On this point Plato's view seems to have gone through several oscillations. After apparently maintaining (Protagoras) that pleasure is the good, he passes first to the opposite extreme, and denies it (Phaedo, Gorgias) to be a good at all. For (r), as concrete and transient, it is obviously not the real essential good that the philosopher seeks; (2) the feelings most prominently recognized as pleasures are bound up with pain, as good can never be with evil; in so far, then, as common sense rightly recognizes some pleasures as good, it can only be from their tendency to produce some further good.

This view, however, was too violent a divergence from Socratism for Plato to remain in it. That pleasure is not the real absolute good, was no ground for not including it in the good of concrete human life; and after all only coarse and vulgar pleasures were indissolubly linked to the pains of want. Accordingly, in the Republic he has no objection to trying the question of the intrinsic superiority of philosophic or virtuous' life by the standard of pleasure, and argues that the philosophic (or good) man alone enjoys real pleasure, while the sensualist spends his life in oscillating between painful want and the merely neutral state of painlessness, which he mistakes for positive pleasure. Still more 1 It is highly characteristic of Platonism that the issue in this dialogue, as originally stated, is between virtue and vice, whereas, without any avowed change of ground, the issue ultimately discussed is between the philosophic life and the life of vulgar ambition or sensual enjoyment.

emphatically is it declared in the Laws that when we are " discoursing to men, not to gods," we must show that the life which we praise as best and noblest is also that in which there is the greatest excess of pleasure over pain. But though Plato holds this inseparable connexion of best and pleasantest to be true and important, it is only for the sake of the vulgar that he lays this stress on pleasure. For in the most philosophical comparison in the Philebus between the claims of pleasure and wisdom the former is altogether worsted; and though a place is allowed to the pure pleasures of colour, form and sound, and of intellectual exercise, and even to the " necessary " satisfaction of appetite, it is only a subordinate one.

At the same time, in his later view, Plato avoids the exaggeration of denying all positive quality of pleasure even to the coarser sensual gratifications; they are undoubtedly cases of that " replenishment " or " restoration " to its " natural state " of a bodily organ, in which he defines pleasure to consist (see Timaeus, pp. 64, 65); he merely maintains that the common estimate of them is to a large extent illusory, or a false appearance of pleasure is produced by contrast with the antecedent or concomitant painful condition of the organ.

It is not surprising that this somewhat complicated and delicately balanced view of the relations of " good " and " pleasure " was not long maintained within the Platonic school, and that under Speusippus, Plato's successor, the main body of Platonists took up a simply anti-hedonistic position, as we learn from the polemic of Aristotle. In the Philebus, however, though a more careful psychological analysis leads him to soften down the exaggerations of this attack on sensual pleasure, the antithesis of knowledge and pleasure is again sharpened, and a desire to depreciate even good pleasures is more strongly shown; still even here pleasure is recognized as a constituent of that philosophic life which is the highest human good, while in the Laws, where the subject is more popularly treated, it is admitted that we cannot convince man that the just life is the best unless we can also prove it to be the pleasantest.

When a student passes from Plato to Aristotle, he is so forcibly impressed by the contrast between the habits of mind of the two authors, and the literary manners of the two philosophers, that it is easy to under stand how their systems have come to be popularly conceived as diametrically opposed to each other; and the uncompromising polemic which Aristotle, both in his ethical and in his metaphysical treatises, directs against Plato and the platonists, has tended strongly to confirm this view. Yet a closer inspection shows us that when a later president of the Academy (Antiochus of Ascalon) repudiated the scepticism which for two hundred years had been accepted as the traditional Platonic doctrine, he had good grounds for claiming Plato and Aristotle as consentient authorities for the ethical position which he took up.

For though Aristotle's divergence from Plato is very conspicuous when we consider either his general conception of the subject of ethics, or the details of his system of virtues, still his agreement with his master is almost complete as regards the main outline of his theory of human good; the difference between the two practically vanishes when we view them in relation to the later controversy between Stoics and Epicureans. Even on the cardinal point on which Aristotle entered into direct controversy with Plato, the definite disagreement between the two is less than at first appears; the objections of the disciple hit that part of the master's system that was rather imagined than thought; the main positive result of Platonic speculation only gains in distinctness by the application of Aristotelian analysis.

Plato, we saw, held that there is one supreme science or wisdom, of which the ultimate object is absolute good; in the knowledge of this, the knowledge of all particular goods - that is, of all that we rationally desire to know - is implicitly contained; and also all practical virtue, as no one who truly knows what is good can fail to realize it. But in spite of the intense conviction with which he thus identified metaphysical speculation and practical wisdom, we find in his writings no serious attempt to deduce the particulars of human well-being from his knowledge of absolute good, still less to unfold from it the particular cognitions of the special arts and sciences.

Indeed, we may say that the distinction which Aristotle explicitly draws between speculative science or wisdom and practical wisdom (on its political side statesmanship) is really indicated in Plato's actual treatment of the subjects, although the express recognition of it is contrary to his principles. The discussion of good (e.g.) in his Philebus relates entirely to human good, and the respective claims of Thought and Pleasure to constitute this; he only refers in passing to the Divine Thought that is the good of the ordered world, as something clearly beyond the limits of the present discussion. So again, in his last great ethico-political treatise (the Laws) there is hardly a trace of his peculiar metaphysics. On the other hand, the relation between human and divine good, as presented by Aristotle, is so close that we can hardly conceive Plato as having definitely thought it closer.

The substantial good of the universe, in Aristotle's view, is the pure activity of universal abstract thought, at once subject and object, which, itself changeless and eternal, is the final cause and first source of the whole process of change in the concrete world. And both he and Plato hold that a similar activity of pure speculative intellect is that in which the philosopher will seek to exist, though he must, being a man, concern himself with the affairs of ordinary human life, a region in which his highest good will be attained by realizing perfect moral excellence.

No doubt Aristotle's demonstration of the inappropriateness of attributing moral excellence to the Deity seems to contradict Plato's doctrine that the just man as such is " likest the gods," but here again the discrepancy is reduced when we remember that the essence of Plato's justice (8ucacoouvfl) is harmonious activity. No doubt, too, Aristotle's attribution of pleasure to the Divine Existence shows a profound metaphysical divergence from Plato; but it is a divergence which has no practical importance. Nor, again, is Aristotle's divergence from the Socratic principle that all " virtue is knowledge "substantially greater than Plato's, though it is more plainly expressed.

Both accept the paradox in the qualified sense that no one can deliberately act contrary to what appears to him good, and that perfect virtue is inseparably bound up with perfect wisdom or moral insight. Both, however, recognize that this actuality of moral insight is not a function of the intellect only, but depends rather on careful training in good habits applied to minds of good natural dispositions, though the doctrine has no doubt a more definite and prominent place in Aristotle's system. The disciple certainly takes a step in advance by stating definitely, as an essential characteristic of virtuous action, that it is chosen for its own sake, for the beauty of virtue alone; but herein he merely formulates the conviction that his master inspires.

Nor, finally, does Aristotle's account of the relation of pleasure to human well-being (although he has to combat the extreme anti-hedonism to which the Platonic school under Speusippus had been led) differ materially from the outcome of Plato's thought on this point, as the later dialogues present it to us. Pleasure, in Aristotle's view, is not the primary constituent of well-being, but rather an inseparable accident of it; human well-being is essentially well-doing, excellent activity of some kind, whether its aim and end be abstract truth or noble conduct; knowledge and virtue are objects of rational choice apart from the pleasure attending them; still all activities are attended and in a manner perfected by pleasure, which is better and more desirable in proportion to the excellence of the activity.

He no doubt criticizes Plato's account of the nature of pleasure, arguing that we cannot properly conceive pleasure either as a " process " or as " replenishment " - the last term, he truly says, denotes a material rather than a psychical fact. But this does not interfere with the general ethical agreement between the two thinkers; and the doctrine that vicious pleasures are not true or real pleasures is so characteristically Platonic that we are almost surprised to find it in Aristotle.

In so far as there is any important difference between the Platonic and the Aristotelian views of human good, we may observe that the latter has substantially a closer correspondence to the positive element in the ethical teaching of Socrates, though it is presented in a far more technical and scholastic form, and involves a more distinct rejection of the fundamental Socratic paradox. The same result appears when Aristotle's we compare the methods of the three philosophers.

ethics. p p p Although the Socratic induction forms a striking feature of Plato's dialogues, his ideal method of ethics is purely deductive; he admits common sense only as supplying provisional steps and starting-points from which the mind is to ascend to knowledge of absolute good, through which knowledge alone, as he conceives, the lower notions of particular goods are to be truly conceived. Aristotle, discarding the transcendentalism of Plato, naturally retained from Plato's teaching the original Socratic method of induction from and verification by common opinion.

Indeed, the windings of his exposition are best sunderstood if we consider his literary manner as a kind of Socratic dialogue formalized and reduced to a monologue. He first leads us by an induction to the fundamental notion of ultimate end or good for man. All men, in acting, aim at some result, either for its own sake or as a means to some further end; but obviously not everything can be sought merely as a means; there must be some ultimate end. In fact men commonly recognize such an end, and agree to call it well-being 1 (EUSatµovia).

But they take very different views of its nature; how shall we find the true view ? We observe that men are classified according to their functions; all kinds of man, and indeed all organs of man, have their special functions, and are judged as functionaries and organs according as they perform their functions well or ill. May we not then infer that man, as man, has his proper function, and that the well-being or " doing well " that all seek really lies in fulfilling well the proper function of man, - that is, in living well that life of the rational soul which we recognize as man's distinctive attribute ?

Again, this Socratic deference to common opinift is not shown merely in the way by which Aristotle reaches his fundamental conception; it equally appears in his treatment of the conception itself. In the first place, though in Aristotle's view the most perfect well-being consists in the exercise of man's " divinest part," pure speculative reason, he keeps far from the paradox of putting forward this and nothing else as human good; so far, indeed, that the greater part of his treatise is occupied with an exposition of the inferior good which is realized in practical life when the appetitive or impulsive (semi-rational) element of the soul operates under the due regulation of reason.

Even when the notion of " good performance of function " was thus widened, and when it had further taken in the pleasure that is inseparably connected with such functioning, it did not yet correspond to the whole of what a Greek commonly understood as " human well-being." We may grant, indeed, that a moderate provision of material wealth is indirectly included, as an indispensable pre-requisite of a due performance of many functions as Aristotle conceives it - his system admits of no beatitudes for the poor; still there remain other goods, such as beauty, good birth, welfare of progeny, the presence or absence of which influenced the common view of a man's well-being, though they could hardly be shown to be even indirectly important to his " well-acting."

These Aristotle attempts neither to exclude from the philosophic conception of well-being nor to include in his formal definition of it. The deliberate looseness which is thus given to his fundamental doctrine characterizes more or less his whole discussion of ethics. He plainly says that the subject does not admit of completely scientific treatment; his aim is to give not a definite theory of human good, but a practically adequate account of its most important constituents.

The most important element, then, of well-being or good life for ordinary men Aristotle holds to consist in well-doing as determined by the notions of the different moral excellences.

1 This cardinal term is commonly translated " happiness "; and it must be allowed that it is the most natural term for what we (in English) agree to call " our being's end and aim." But happiness so definitely signifies a state of feeling that it will not admit the interpretation that Aristotle (as well as Plato and the Stoics) expressly gives to eu5acuovia; the confusion is best avoided by rendering the word by the less familiar " well-being." In expounding these, he gives throughout the pure result of analytical observation of the common moral consciousness of his age.

Ethical truth, in his view, is to be attained by careful comparison of particular moral opinions, just as physical truth is to be obtained by induction from particular physical observations. On account of the conflict of opinion in ethics we cannot hope to obtain certainty upon all questions; still reflection will lead us to discard some of the conflicting views and find a reconciliation for others, and will furnish, on the whole, a practically sufficient residuum of moral truth.

This adhesion to common sense, though it involves a sacrifice of both depth and completeness in Aristotle's system, gives at the same time an historical interest which renders it deserving of special attention as an analysis of the current Greek ideal of " fair and good life " (KaXoKa7aOia). His virtues are not arranged on any clear philosophic plan; the list shows no serious attempt to consider human life exhaustively, and exhibit the standard of excellence appropriate to its different departments or aspects. He seems to have taken as a starting-point Plato's four cardinal virtues.

The two comprehensive notions of Wisdom and Justice (StKato- (fuvm) he treats separately. As regards both his analysis leads him to diverge considerably from Plato. As we saw, his distinction between practical and speculative Wisdom belongs to the deepest of his disagreements with his master; and in the case of StKatoQ5vi again he distinguishes the wider use of the term to express Law-observance, which (he says) coincides with the social side of virtue generally, and its narrower use for the virtue that " aims at a kind of equality," whether (I) in the distribution of wealth, honour, &c., or (2) in commercial exchange, or (3) in the reparation of wrong done.

Then, in arranging the other special virtues, he begins with courage and temperance, which (after Plato) he considers as the excellences of the " irrational element " of the soul. Next follow two pairs of excellences, concerned respectively with wealth and honour: (I) liberality and magnificence, of which the latter is exhibited in greater matters of expenditure, and (2) laudable ambition and highmindedness similarly related to honour. Then comes gentleness - the virtue regulative of anger; and the list is concluded by the excellences of social intercourse, friendliness (as a mean between obsequiousness and surliness), truthfulness and decorous wit.

The abundant store of just and close analytical observation contained in Aristotle's account of these notions give it a permanent interest, even beyond its historical value as a delineation of the Greek ideal of " fair and good " life. 2 But its looseness of arrangement and almost grotesque co-ordination of qualities widely differing in importance are obvious. Thus his famous general formula for virtue, that it is a mean or middle state, always to be found somewhere between the vices which stand to it in the relation of excess and defect, scarcely avails to render his treatment more systematic.

It was important, no doubt, to express the need of observing due measure and proportion, in order to attain good results in human life no less than in artistic products; but the observation of this need was no new thing in Greek literature; indeed, it had already led the Pythagoreans and Plato to find the ultimate essence of the ordered universe in number. But Aristotle's purely quantitative statement of the relation of virtue and vice is misleading, even where it is not obviously inappropriate; and sometimes leads him to such eccentricities as that of making simple veracity a mean between boastfulness and mock-modesty.3

2 Aristotle follows Plato and Socrates in identifying the notions of KaXos (" fair," " beautiful ") and ayaBor ("good") in their application to conduct. We may observe, however, that while the latter term is used to denote the virtuous man, and (in the neuter) equivalent to End generally, the former is rather chosen to express the quality of virtuous acts which in any particular case is the end of the virtuous agent.

Aristotle no doubt faithfully represents the common sense of Greece in considering that, in so far as virtue is in itself good to the virtuous agent, it belongs to that species of good which we distinguish as beautiful. In later Greek philosophy the term KaXdv (" honestum ") became still more technical in the signification of " morally good." The above account is considerably expanded in H. Sidgwick's Hist. of Ethics (5th ed., 1902), pp. 59-70.

It ought to be said that Aristotle does not present the formula just discussed as supplying a criterion of good conduct in any particular case; he expressly leaves this to be determined by " correct reasoning, and the judgment of the practically-wise man (6 cppovcµos)." We cannot, however, find that he has furnished any substantial principles for its determination; indeed, he hardly seems to have formed a distinct general idea of the practical syllogism by which he conceives it to be effected.'

The kind of reasoning which his view of virtuous conduct requires is one in which the ultimate major premise states a distinctive characteristic of some virtue, and one or more minor premises show that such characteristic belongs to a certain mode of conduct under given circumstances; since it is essential to good conduct that it should contain its end in itself, and be chosen for its own sake.

But he has not failed to observe that practical reasonings are not commonly of this kind, but are rather concerned with actions as means to ulterior ends; indeed, he lays stress on this as a characteristic of the " political " life, when he wishes to prove its inferiority to the life of pure speculation.

Though common sense will admit that virtues are the best of goods, it still undoubtedly conceives practical wisdom as chiefly exercised in providing those inferior goods which Aristotle, after recognizing the need or use of them for the realization of human well-being, has dropped out of sight; and the result is that, in trying to make clear his conception of practical wisdom, we find ourselves fluctuating continually between the common notion, which he does not distinctly reject, and the notion required as the keystone of his ethical system.

On the whole, there is probably no treatise so masterly as Aristotle's Ethics, and containing so much close and valid thought, that yet leaves on the reader's mind so strong Transi= an impression of dispersive and incomplete work.

S I t is only by dwelling on these defects that we can Stoicism. Y Y g understand the small amount of influence that his system exercised during the five centuries after his death, as compared with the effect which it has had, directly or indirectly, in shaping the thought of modern Europe. Partly, no doubt, the limited influence of his disciples, the Peripatetics, is to be attributed to that exaltation of the purely speculative life which distinguished the Aristotelian ethics from other later systems, and which was too alien from the common moral consciousness to find much acceptance in an age in which the ethical aims of philosophy had again become paramount.

Partly, again, the analytical distinctness of Aristotle's manner brings into special prominence the difficulties that attend the Socratic effort to reconcile the ideal aspirations of men with the principles on which their practical reasonings are commonly conducted. The conflict between these two elements of Common Sense was too profound to be compromised; and the moral consciousness of mankind demanded a more trenchant partisanship than Aristotle's.

Its demands were met by the Stoic school which separated the moral from the worldly view of life, with an absoluteness and definiteness that caught the imagination; which regarded practical goodness as the highest manifestation of its ideal of wisdom; and which bound the common notions of duty into an apparently coherent system, by a formula that comprehended the whole of human life, and exhibited its relation to the ordered process of the universe. The intellectual descent of its ethical doctrines is principally to be traced to Socrates through the Cynics, though an important element in them seems attributable to the school that inherited the " Academy " of Plato.

Both Stoic and Cynic maintained, in its sharpest form, the fundamental tenet that the practical knowledge which is virtue, with the condition of soul that is inseparable from it, is alone to be accounted good. He who exercises this wisdom or knowledge has complete well-being; all else is indifferent to 1 There is a certain difficulty in discussing Aristotle's views on the subject of practical wisdom, and the relation of the intellect to moral action, since it is most probable that the only accounts that we have of these views are not part of the genuine writings of Aristotle. Still books vi. and vii. of the Nicomachean Ethics contain no doubt as pure Aristotelian doctrine as a disciple could give, and appear to supply a sufficient foundation for the general criticism expressed in the text.

him. It is true that the Cynics were more concerned to emphasize the negative side of the sage's well-being, while the Stoics brought into more prominence its positive side. This difference, however, did not amount to disagreement. The Stoics, in fact, seem generally to have regarded the eccentricities of Cynicism as an emphatic manner of expressing the essential antithesis between philosophy and the world; a manner which, though not necessary or even normal, might yet be advantageously adopted by the sage under certain circumstances.2 Wherein, then, consists this knowledge or wisdom that makes free and perfect? Both Cynics and Stoics agreed that the most important part of it was the knowledge that the sole good of man lay in this knowledge or wisdom Stoicism. itself. It must be understood that by wisdom they meant wisdom realized in act; indeed, they did not conceive the existence of wisdom as separable from such realization.

We may observe, too, that the Stoics rejected the divergence which we have seen gradually taking place in Platonic-Aristotelian thought from the position of Socrates, " that no one aims at what he knows to be bad." The stress that their psychology laid on the essential unity of the rational self that is the source of voluntary action prevented them from accepting Plato's analysis of the soul into a regulative element and elements needing regulation. They held that what we call passion is a morbid condition of the rational soul, involving erroneous judgment as to what is to be sought or shunned. From such passionate errors the truly wise man will of course be free.

He will be conscious indeed of physical appetite; but he will not be misled into supposing that its object is really a good; he cannot, therefore, hope for the attainment of this object or fear to miss it, as these states involve the conception of it as a good. Similarly, though like other men he will be subject to bodily pain, this will not cause him mental grief or disquiet, as his worst agonies will not disturb his clear conviction that it is really indifferent to his true reasonable self.

That this impassive sage was a being not to be found among living men the later Stoics at least were fully aware. They faintly suggested that one or two moral heroes of old time might have realized the ideal, but they admitted that all other philosophers (even) were merely in a state of progress towards it. This admission did not in the least diminish the rigour of their demand for absolute loyalty to the exclusive claims of wisdom. The assurance of its own unique value that such wisdom involved they held to be an abiding possession for those who had attained it; 3 and without this assurance no act could be truly wise or virtuous.

Whatever was not of knowledge was of sin; and the distinction between right and wrong being absolute and not admitting of degrees all sins were equally sinful; whoever broke the least commandment was guilty of the whole law. Similarly, all wisdom was somehow involved in any one of the manifestations of wisdom, commonly distinguished as particular virtues; though whether these virtues were specifically distinct, or only the same knowledge in different relations, was a subtle question on which the Stoics do not seem to have been agreed.

Aristotle had already been led to attempt a refutation of the Socratic identification of virtue with knowledge; but his attempt had only shown the profound difficulty of attacking the paradox, so long as it was admitted that no one could of deliberate purpose act contrary to what seemed to him best. Now, Aristotle's divergence from Socrates had not led him so far as to deny this; while for the Stoics who had receded to the original Socratic position, the difficulty was still more patent. This theory of virtue led them into two dilemmas. Firstly, if virtue is knowledge, does it follow that vice is involuntary? If not, it must be that ignorance is voluntary.

This alternative is the less dangerous to morality, and as such the Stoics chose it. But they were 2 It has been suggestively said that Cynicism was to Stoicism what monasticism was to early Christianity. The analogy, however, must not be pressed too far, since orthodox Stoics do not ever seem to have regarded Cynicism as the more perfect way.

The Stoics were not quite agreed as to the immutability of virtue, but they were agreed that, when once possessed, it could only be lost through the loss of reason itself.

not yet at the end of their perplexities; for while they were thus driven to an extreme extension of the range of human volition, their view of the physical universe involved an equally thorough-going determinism. How could the vicious man be responsible if his vice were strictly pre-determined? The Stoics answered that the error which was the essence of vice was so far voluntary that it could be avoided if men chose to exercise their reason. No doubt it depended on the innate force and firmness' of a man's soul whether his reason was effectually exercised; but moral responsibility was saved if the vicious act proceeded from the man himself and not from any external cause.

With all this we have not ascertained the positive practical content of this wisdom. How are we to emerge from the barren circle of affirming (I) that wisdom is the sole good and unwisdom the sole evil, and (2) that wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil; and attain some method for determining the particulars of good conduct? The Cynics made no attempt to solve this difficulty; they were content to mean by virtue what any plain man meant by it, except in so far as their sense of independence led them to reject certain received precepts and prejudices.

The Stoics, on the other hand, not only worked out a detailed system of duties - or, as they termed them, " things meet and fit " (Ka6 r i Kovra) for all occasions of life; they were further especially concerned to comprehend them under a general formula. They found this by bringing out the positive significance of the notion of Nature, which the Cynic had used chiefly in a negative way, as an antithesis to the " consentions " (voµos), from which his knowledge had made him free.

Even in this negative use of the notion it is necessarily implied that whatever active tendencies in man are found to be " natural " - that is, independent of and uncorrupted by social customs and conventions - will properly take effect in outward acts, but the adoption of " conformity to nature " as a general positive rule for outward conduct seems to have been due to the influence on Zeno of Academic teaching. Whence, however, can this authority belong to the natural, unless nature be itself an expression or embodiment of divine law and wisdom? The conception of the world, as organized and filled by divine thought, was common, in some form, to all the philosophies that looked back to Socrates as their founder, - some even maintaining that this thought was the sole reality.

This pantheistic doctrine harmonized thoroughly with the Stoic view of human good; but being unable to conceive substance idealistically, they (with considerable aid from the system of Heraclitus) supplied a materialistic side to their pantheism, - conceiving divine thought as an attribute of the purest and most primary of material substances, a subtle fiery aether. This theological view of the physical universe had a double effect on the ethics of the Stoic. In the first place it gave to his cardinal conviction of the all-sufficiency of wisdom for human well-being a root of cosmical fact, and an atmosphere of religious and social emotion.

The exercise of wisdom was now viewed as the pure life of that particle of divine substance which was in very truth the " god within him "; the reason whose supremacy he maintained was the reason of Zeus, and of all gods and reasonable men, no less than his own; its realization in any one individual was thus the common good of all rational beings as such; " the sage could not stretch out a finger rightly without thereby benefiting all other sages," - nay, it might even be said that he was " as useful to Zeus as Zeus to him." 2 But again, the same conception served to harmonize the higher and the lower elements of human life.

For even in the physical or non-rational man, as originally constituted, we may see clear indications of the divine design, which it belongs to his rational will to carry into conscious execution; indeed, in the first stage of human life, before reason is fully developed, uncorrupted natural impulse effects what is afterwards the work of reason. Thus the formula of " living according to nature," in its application to man as the " rational animal," 1 Hence some members of the school, without rejecting the definition of virtue = knowledge, also defined it as " strength and force." 2 It is apparently in view of this union in reason of rational beings that friends are allowed to be " external goods " to the sage, and that the possession of good children is also counted a good.

may be understood both as directing that reason is to govern, and as indicating how that government is to be practically exercised. In man, as in every other animal, from the moment of birth natural impulse prompts to the maintenance of his physical frame; then, when reason has been developed and has recognized itself as its own sole good, these " primary ends of nature " and whatever promotes these still constitute the outward objects at which reason is to aim; there is a certain value (a La) in them, in proportion to which they are " preferred " (7rponyµtva) and their opposites " rejected " (ci roirpony,ubm); indeed it is only in the due and consistent exercise of such choice that wisdom can find its practical manifestation. In this way all or most of the things commonly judged to be " goods " - health, strength, wealth, fame,' &c., - are brought within the sphere of the sage's choice, though his real good is solely in the wisdom of the choice, and not in the thing chosen.

The doctrine of conformity to Nature as the rule of conduct was not peculiar to Stoicism. It is found in the theories of Speusippus, Xenocrates, and also to some extent in those of the Peripatetics. The peculiarity of the Stoics lay in their refusing to use the terms " good and evil " in connexion with " things indifferent," and in pointing out that philosophers, though independent of these things, must yet deal with them in practical life.

So far we have considered the " nature " of the individual man as apart from his social relations; but the sphere of virtue, as commonly conceived, lies chiefly in these, and this was fully recognized in the Stoic account of duties (Ka89)Kovra); indeed, in their exposition of the " natural " basis of justice, the evidence that man was born not for himself but for mankind is the most important part of their work in the region of practical morality. Here, however, we especially notice the double significance of " natural," as applied to (I) what actually exists everywhere or for the most part, and (2) what would exist if the original plan of man's life were fully carried out; and we find that the Stoics have not clearly harmonized the two elements of the notion.

That man was " naturally " a social animal Aristotle had already taught; that all rational beings, in the unity of the reason that is common to all, form naturally one community with a common law was (as we saw) an immediate inference from the Stoic conception of the universe as a whole. That the members of this " city of Zeus " should observe their contracts, abstain from mutual harm, combine to protect each other from injury, were obvious points of natural law; while again, it was clearly necessary to the preservation of human society that its members should form sexual unions, produce children, and bestow care on their rearing and training.

But beyond this nature did not seem to go in determining the relations of the sexes; accordingly, we find that community of wives was a feature of Zeno's ideal commonwealth, just as it was of Plato's; while, again, the strict. theory of the school recognized no government or laws as true or binding except those of the sage; he alone is the true ruler, the true king. So far, the Stoic " nature " seems in danger of being as revolutionary as Rousseau's. Practically, however, this revolutionary aspect of the notion was kept for the most part in the background; the rational law of an ideal community was not distinguished from the positive ordinances and customs of actual society; and the " natural " ties that actually bound each man to family, kinsmen, fatherland, and to unwise humanity generally, supplied the outline on which the external manifestation of justice was delineated.

It was a fundamental maxim that the sage was to take part in public life; and it does not appear that his political action was to be regulated by any other principles than those commonly accepted in his community. Similarly, in the view taken by the Stoics of the duties of social decorum, and in their attitude to the popular religion, we find a fluctuating compromise between the disposition to repudiate what is conventional, and the disposition to revere what is 1 The Stoics seem to have varied in their view of " good repute," eu50 ia; at first, when the school was more under the influence of Cynicism, they professed an outward as well as an inward indifference to it; ultimately they conceded the point to common sense, and included it among rrponyp. va.

established, each tendency expressing in its own way the principle of " conforming to nature." Among the primary ends of nature, in which wisdom recognized a certain preferability, the Stoics included freedom from bodily pain; but they refused, even in this outer Stoics and court of wisdom, to find a place for pleasure. They hedonists. held that the latter was not an object of uncor rupted natural impulse, but an " aftergrowth " (.ieyEvvnµa). They thus endeavoured to resist Epicureanism even on the ground where the latter seems prima facie strongest; in its appeal, namely, to the natural pleasure-seeking of all living things. Nor did they merely mean by pleasure (i/Sovi) the gratification of bodily appetite; we find (e.g.)Chrysippus urging, as a decisive argument against Aristotle, that pure speculation was " a kind of amusement; that is, pleasure."

Even the " joy and gladness " (Xapa, eu4po n vn) that accompany the exercise of virtue seem to have been regarded by them as merely an inseparable accident, not the essential constituent of well-being. It is only by a later modification of Stoicism that cheerfulness or peace of mind is taken as the real ultimate end, to which the exercise of virtue is merely a means. At the same time it is probable that the serene joys of virtue and the grieflessness which the sage was conceived to maintain amid the worst tortures, formed the main attractions of Stoicism for ordinary minds. In this sense it may be fairly said that Stoics and Epicureans made rival offers to mankind of the same kind of happiness; and the philosophical peculiarities of either system may be traced to the desire of being undisturbed by the changes and chances of life.

The Stoic claims on this head were the loftiest; as the well-being of their sage was independent, not only of external things and bodily conditions, but of time itself; it was fully realized in a single exercise of wisdom and could not be increased by duration. This paradox is violent, but it is quite in harmony with the spirit of Stoicism; and we are more startled to find that the Epicurean sage, no less than the Stoic, is to be happy even on the rack; that his happiness, too, is unimpaired by being restricted in duration, when his mind has apprehended the natural limits of life; that, in short, Epicurus makes no less strenuous efforts than Zeno to eliminate imperfection from the conditions of human existence.

This characteristic, however, is the key to the chief differences between Epicureanism and the more naïve hedonism of Aristippus. The latter system gave the simplest and most obvious answer to the inquiry after ultimate good for man; but besides being liable, when developed consistently, to offend the common moral consciousness, it conspicuously failed to provide the " completeness " and " security " which, as Aristotle says, " one divines to belong to man's true 'Good." Philosophy, in the Greek view, should be the art as well as the science of good life; and hedonistic philosophy would seem a bungling and uncertain art of pleasure, as pleasure is ordinarily conceived.

Nay, it would even be found that the habit of philosophical reflection often operated adversely to the attainment of this end, by developing the thinker's selfconsciousness, so as to disturb that normal relation to external objects on which the zest of ordinary enjoyment depends. Hence we find that later thinkers of the Cyrenaic school felt themselves compelled to change their fundamental notion; thus Theodorus defined the good as" gladness " (Xapa) depending on wisdom, as distinct from mere pleasure, while Hegesias proclaimed that happiness was unattainable, and that the chief function of wisdom was to render life painless by producing indifference to all things that give pleasure.

But by such changes their system lost the support that it had had in the pleasureseeking tendencies of ordinary men. It was clear that if philosophic hedonism was to be established on a broad and firm basis, it must in its notion of good combine what the plain man naturally sought with what philosophy could plausibly offer. Such a combination was effected, with some little violence, by Epicurus; whose system with all its defects showed a remarkable power of standing the test of time, as it attracted the unqualified adhesion of generation after generation of disciples for a period of some six centuries.

In the fundamental principle of his philosophy Epicurus is not original. Aristippus (cf. also Plato in the Protagoras and Eudoxus) had already maintained that pleasure Epicurus. is the sole ultimate good, and pain the sole evil; that no pleasure is to be rejected except for its painful consequences, and no pain to be chosen except as a means to greater pleasure; that the stringency of all laws and customs depends solely on the legal and social penalties attached to their violation; that, in short, all virtuous conduct and all speculative activity are empty and useless, except as contributing to the pleasantness of the agent's life.

And Epicurus assures us that he means by pleasure what plain men mean by it; and that if the gratifications of appetite and sense are discarded, the notion is emptied of its significance. So far the system would seem to suit the inclinations of the most thorough-going voluptuary. The originality of Epicurus lay in his theory that the highest point of pleasure, whether in body or mind, is to be attained by the mere removal of pain or disturbance, after which pleasure admits of variation only and not of augmentation; that therefore the utmost gratification of which the body is capable may be provided by the simplest means, and that " natural wealth " is no more than any man can earn.

When further he teaches that the attainment of happiness depends almost entirely upon insight and right calculation, fortune having very little to do with it; that the pleasures and pains of the mind are far more important than those of the body, owing to the accumulation of feeling caused by memory and anticipation; and that an indispensable condition of mental happiness lies in relieving the mind of all superstitions, which can be effected only by a thorough knowledge of the physical universe - he introduces an ample area for the exercise of the philosophic intellect. So again, in the stress that he lays on the misery which the most secret wrong-doing must necessarily cause from the perpetual fear of discovery, and in his exuberant exaltation of the value of disinterested friendship, he shows a sincere, though not completely successful, effort to avoid the offence that consistent egoistic hedonism is apt to give to ordinary human feeling. As regards friendship, Epicurus was a man of peculiarly unexclusive sympathies.

1 The genial fellowship of the philosophic community that he collected in his garden remained a striking feature in the traditions of his school; and certainly the ideal which Stoics and Epicureans equally cherished of a brotherhood of sages was most easily realized on the Epicurean plan of withdrawing from political and dialectical conflict to simple living and serene leisure, in imitation of the gods apart from the fortuitous concourse of atoms that we call a world. No doubt it was rather the practical than the theoretical side of Epicureanism which gave it so strong a hold on succeeding generations.

The two systems that have just been described were those that most prominently attracted the attention of the ancient world, so far as it was directed to ethics, from their Later almost simultaneous origin to the end of the 2nd Greek century A.D., when Stoicism almost vanishes from our philo- view. But side by side with them the schools of Plato sophy. and Aristotle still maintained a continuity of tradition, i t Ro e. and a more or less vigorous life; and philosophy, as a recognized element of Graeco-Roman culture, was understood to be divided among these four branches. The internal history, however, of the four schools was very different.

We find no development worthy of notice in Aristotelian ethics (see PExIPATETICS). The Epicureans, again, from their unquestioning acceptance of the " dogmas " 2 of their founder, almost deserve to be called a sect rather than a school. On the other hand, the changes in Stoicism are very noteworthy; and it is the more easy to trace them, as the only original writings of this school which we possess are those of the later Roman Stoics. These changes may be attributed partly to the natural inner development of the system, partly to the reaction of the Roman mind 1 It is noted of him that he did not disdain the co-operation either of women or of slaves in his philosophical labours.

2 The last charge of Epicurus to his disciples is said to have been, Twv Soy / 2t Twv µe%cv11 vOac. on the essentially Greek doctrine which it received, - a reaction all the more inevitable from the very affinity between the Stoic sage and the ancient Roman ideal of manliness. It was natural that the earlier Stoics should be chiefly occupied with delineating the inner and outer characteristics of ideal wisdom and virtue, and that the gap between the ideal sage and the actual philosopher, though never ignored, should yet be somewhat overlooked.

But when the question " What is man's good ?" had been answered by an exposition of perfect wisdom, the practical question " How may a man emerge from the folly of the world, and get on the way towards wisdom ? " naturally attracted attention; and the preponderance of moral over scientific interest, which was characteristic of the Roman mind, gave this question especial prominence. The sense of the gap between theory and fact gives to the religious element of Stoicism a new force; the soul, conscious of its weakness, leans on the thought of God, and in the philosopher's attitude towards external events, pious resignation preponderates over self-poised indifference; the old self-reliance of the reason, looking down on man's natural life as a mere field for its exercise, makes room for a positive aversion to the flesh as an alien element imprisoning the spirit; the body has come to be a " corpse which the soul sustains," 1 and life a " sojourn in a strange land "; 2 in short, the ethical idealism of Zeno has begun to borrow from the metaphysical idealism of Plato.

In no one of these schools was the outward coherence of tradition so much strained by inner changes as it was in Plato's. The alterations, however, in the metaphysical position of the Academics had little effect on their ethical teach ing, as, even during the period of Scepticism, they appear to have presented as probable the same general view of human good which Antiochus afterwards dogmatically announced as a revival of the common doctrine of Plato and Aristotle.

And during the period of a century and a half between Antiochus and Plutarch, we may suppose the school to have maintained the old controversy with Stoicism on much the same ground, accepting the formula of " life according to nature," but demanding that the " good " of man should refer to his nature as a whole, the good of his rational part being the chief element, and always preferable in case of conflict, but yet not absolutely his sole good. In Plutarch, however, we see the same tendencies of change that we have noticed in later Stoicism.

The conception of a normal harmony between the higher and lower elements of human life has begun to be disturbed, and the side of Plato's teaching that deals with the inevitable imperfections of the world of concrete experience becomes again prominent. For example, we find Plutarch amplifying the suggestion in Plato's latest treatise (the Laws) that this imperfection is due to a bad world-soul that strives against the good, - a suggestion which is alien to the general tenor of Plato's doctrine, and had consequently been unnoticed during the intervening centuries.

We observe, again, the value that Plutarch attaches, not merely to the sustainment and consolation of rational religion, but to the supernatural communications vouchsafed by the divinity to certain human beings in dreams, through oracles, or by special warnings, like those of the genius of Socrates. For these flashes of intuition, he holds, the soul should be prepared by tranquil repose and the subjugation of sensuality through abstinence. The same ascetic effort to attain by aloofness from the body a pure receptivity for supernatural influences, is exhibited in Neo-Pythagoreanism. But the general tendency that we are noting did not find its full expression in a reasoned system until we come to the Egyptian Plotinus.

The system of Plotinus (205-270 A.D.) is a striking development of that element of Platonism which has had most fascina tion for the medieval and even for the modern mind, but which had almost vanished out of sight in the controversies of the post-Aristotelian schools. At the same time the differences are the more noteworthy from the reverent adhesion which the Neoplatonists always maintain to Plato. Plato identified good with the real essence of things; 1 Epictetus. ' Marcus Aurelius.

with that in them which is definitely conceivable and knowable. It belongs to this view to regard the imperfection of things as devoid of real being, and so incapable of being definitely thought or known; accordingly, we find that Plato has no technical term for that in the concrete sensible world which hinders it from perfectly expressing the abstract ideal world, and which in Aristotle's system is distinguished as absolutely formless matter (An). And so, when we pass from the ontology to the ethics of Platonism, we find that, though the highest life is only to be realized by turning away from concrete human affairs and their material environment, still the sensible world is not yet an object of positive moral aversion; it is rather something which the philosopher is seriously concerned to make as harmonious, good and beautiful as possible.

But in Neoplatonism the inferiority of the condition in which the embodied human soul finds itself is more intensely and painfully felt; hence an express recognition of formless matter (An) as the " first evil," from which is derived the " second evil," body (QC:oya), to whose influence all the evil in the soul's existence is due. Accordingly the ethics of Plotinus represent, we may say, the moral idealism of the Stoics cut loose from nature.

The only good of man is the pure existence of the soul, which in itself, apart from the contagion of the body, is perfectly free from error or defect; if only it can be restored to the untrammelled activity of its original being, nothing external, nothing bodily, can positively impair its perfect welfare. It is only the lowest form of virtue - the " civic " virtue of Plato's Republic - that is employed in regulating those animal impulses whose presence in the soul is due to its mixture with the body; higher or philosophic wisdom, temperance, courage and justice are essentially purifications from this contagion; until finally the highest mode of goodness is reached, in which the soul has no community with the body, and is entirely turned towards reason.

It should be observed that Plotinus himself is still too Platonic to hold that the absolute mortification of natural bodily appetites is required for purifying the soul; but this ascetic inference was drawn to the fullest extent by his disciple Porphyry.

There is, however, a yet higher point to be reached in the upward ascent of the Neoplatonist from matter; and here the divergence of Plotinus from Platonic idealism is none the less striking, because it is a bona fide result of reverent reflection on Plato's teaching. The cardinal assumption of Plato's metaphysic is, that the real is definitely thinkable and knowable in proportion as it is real; so that the further the mind advances in abstraction from sensible particulars and apprehension of real being, the more definite and clear its thought becomes.

Plotinus, however, urges that, as all thought involves difference or duality of some kind, it cannot be the primary fact in the universe, what we call God. He must be an essential unity prior to this duality, a Being wholly without difference or determination; and, accordingly, the highest mode of human existence, in which the soul apprehends this absolute, must be one in which all definite thought is transcended, and all consciousness of self lost in the absorbing ecstasy. Porphyry tells us that his master Plotinus attained the highest state four times during the six years which he spent with him.

Neoplatonism, originally Alexandrine, is often regarded as Hellenistic rather than Hellenic, a product of the mingling of Greek with Oriental civilization. But however Oriental may have been the cast of mind that welcomed this theosophic asceticism, the forms of thought by which these views were philosophically reached are essentially Greek; and it is by a thoroughly intelligible process of natural development, in which the intensification of the moral consciousness represented by Stoicism plays an important part, that the Hellenic pursuit of knowledge culminates in a preparation for ecstasy, and the Hellenic idealization of man's natural life ends in a settled antipathy to the body and its works.

At the same time we ought not to overlook the affinities between the doctrine of Plotinus and that remarkable combination of Greek and Hebrew thought which Philo Judaeus had expounded two centuries before; nor the fact that Neoplatonism was developed in conscious antagonism to the new religion which had spread from Judea, and was already threatening the conquest of the GraecoRoman world, and also to the Gnostic systems (see Gnosticism); nor, finally, that it furnished the chief theoretical support in the last desperate struggle that was made under Julian to retain the old polytheistic worship.

B. Christianity and Medieval Ethics. - In the present article we are not concerned with the origin of the Christian religion, nor with its outward history. Nor have we to consider the special doctrines that have formed the bond of union of the Christian communities except in their ethical aspect, their bearing on the systematization of human aims and activities. This aspect, however, must necessarily be prominent in discussing Christianity, which cannot be adequately treated merely as a system of theological beliefs divinely revealed, and special observances divinely sanctioned; for it claims to regulate the whole man, in all departments of his existence.

It was not till the 4th century A.D. that the first attempt was made to offer a systematic exposition of Christian morality; and nine centuries more had passed away before a genuinely philosophic intellect, trained by a full study of Aristotle, undertook to give complete scientific form to the ethical doctrine of the Catholic church. Before, however, we take a brief survey of the progress of systematic ethics from Ambrose to Thomas Aquinas, it may be well to examine the chief features of the new moral consciousness that had spread through Graeco-Roman civilization, and was awaiting philosophic synthesis. It will be convenient to consider first the new form or universal characteristics of Christian morality, and afterwards to note the chief points in the matter or particulars of duty and virtue which received development or emphasis from the new religion.

The first point to be noticed is the new conception of morality as the positive law of a theocratic community possessing a Christian written code imposed by divine revelation, and and Jewish sanctioned by divine promises and threatenings. It "law of is true that we find in ancient thought, from Socrates God." downwards, the notion of a law of God, eternal and immutable, partly expressed and partly obscured by the shifting codes and customs of actual human societies. But the sanctions of this law were vaguely and, for the most part, feebly imagined; its principles were essentially unwritten, and thus referred not to the external will of an Almighty Being who claimed unquestioning submission, but rather to the reason that gods and men shared, by the exercise of which alone they could be adequately known and defined.

Hence, even if the notion of law had been more prominent than it was in ancient ethical thought, it could never have led to a juridical, as distinct from a philosophical, treatment of morality. In Christianity, on the other hand, we early find that the method of moralists determining right conduct is to a great extent analogous to that of jurisconsults interpreting a code. It is assumed that divine commands have been implicitly given for all occasions of life, and that they are to be ascertained in particular cases by interpretation of the general rules obtained from texts of scripture, and by inference from scriptural examples. This juridical method descended naturally from the Jewish theocracy, of which Christendom was a universalization.

Moral insight, in the view of the most thoughtful Jews of the age immediately preceding Christianity, was conceived as knowledge of a divine code, emanating from an authority external to human reason which had only the function of interpreting and applying its rules. This law was derived partly from Moses, partly from the utterances of the later prophets, partly from oral tradition and from the commentaries and supplementary maxims of generations of students. Christianity inherited the notion of a written divine code acknowledged as such by the " true Israel " - now potentially including the whole of mankind, or at least the chosen of all nations, - on the sincere acceptance of which the Christian's share of the divine promises to Israel depended.

And though the ceremonial part of the old Hebrew code was altogether rejected, and with it all the supplementary jurisprudence resting on tradition and erudite commentary, still God's law was believed to be contained in the sacred books of the Jews, supplemented by the teaching of Christ and his apostles. By the recognition of this law the church was constituted as an ordered community, essentially distinct from the State; the distinction between the two was emphasized by the withdrawal of the early Christians from civic life, to avoid the performance of idolatrous ceremonies imposed as official expressions of loyalty, and by the persecutions which they had to endure, when the spread of an association apparently so hostile to the framework of ancient society had at length alarmed the imperial government. Nor was the distinction obliterated by the recognition of Christianity as the state religion under Constantine.

Thus the jural form in which morality was conceived only emphasized the fundamental difference between it and the laws of the state. The ultimate sanctions of the moral code were the infinite rewards and punishments awaiting the immortal soul hereafter; but the church early felt the necessity of withdrawing the privileges of membership from apostates and allowing them to be gradually regained only by a solemn ceremonial expressive of repentance, protracted through several years. This formal and regulated " penitence " was extended from apostasy to other grave - or, as they were subsequently called, " deadly " - sins; while for minor offences all Christians were called upon to express contrition by fasting and abstinence from ordinarily permitted pleasures, as well as verbally in public and private devotions. "

Excommunication " and " penance " thus came to be temporal ecclesiastical sanctions of the moral law. As the graduation of these sanctions naturally became more minute, a correspondingly detailed classification of offences was rendered necessary, and thus a system of ecclesiastical jurisprudence was gradually produced, somewhat analogous to that of Judaism. At the same time this tendency to make prominent a scheme of external duties has always been counteracted in Christianity by the remembrance of its original antithesis to Jewish legalism.

We find that this antithesis, as exaggerated by some of the Gnostic sects of the and and 3rd centuries A.D., led, not merely to theoretical antinomianism, but even (if the charges of their orthodox opponents are not entirely to be discredited) to gross immorality of conduct. A similar tendency has shown itself at other periods of church history. And though such antinomianism has always been sternly repudiated by the moral consciousness of Christendom, it has never been forgotten that " inwardness," rightness of heart or spirit, is the preeminent characteristic of Christian goodness. It must not, of course, be supposed that the need of something more than mere fulfilment of external duty was ignored even by the later Judaism.

Rabbinic erudition could not forget the repression of vicious desires in the tenth commandment, the stress laid in Deuteronomy on the necessity of service to God, or the inculcation by later prophets of humility and faith. " The real and only Pharisee," says the Talmud, " is he who does the will of his Father because he loves Him." But it remains true that the contrast with the " righteousness of the scribes and pharisees " has always served to mark the requirement of " inwardness " as a distinctive feature of the Christian code - an inwardness not merely negative, tending to the repression of vicious desires as well as vicious acts, but also involving a positive rectitude of the inner state of the soul.

In this aspect Christianity invites comparison with Stoicism, and indeed with pagan ethical philosophy generally, if we except the hedonistic schools. Rightness of purpose, preference of virtue for its own sake, suppression of vicious desires, were made essential points by the - Aristotelians, who attached the most importance to outward circumstances in their view of virtue, no less than by the Stoics, to whom all outward things were indifferent. The fundamental differences between pagan and Christian ethics depend not on any difference in the value set on rightness of heart, but on different views of the essential form or conditions of this inward rightness. In neither case is it presented purely and simply as moral rectitude.

By the pagan philosophers it was always conceived under the form of Knowledge or Wisdom, it being inconceivable to all the schools sprung from Socrates that a man could truly know his own good and yet deliberately choose anything else. This knowledge, as Aristotle held, might be permanently precluded by vicious habits, or temporarily obliterated by passion, but if present in the mind it must produce rightness of purpose. Or even if it were held with some of the Stoics that true wisdom was out of the reach of the best men actually living, it none the less remained the ideal condition of perfect human life.

By Christian teachers, on the other hand, the inner springs of good conduct were generally conceived as. Faith and Love. Of these notions the former has a somewhat complex ethical import; it seems to blend several elements differently prominent in different minds. Its simplest and commonest meaning is that emphasized in the contrast of " faith " with " sight "; where it signifies belief in the invisible divine order represented by the church, in the actuality of the law, the threats, the promises of God, in spite of all the influences in man's natural life that tend to obscure this belief.

Out of this contrast there ultimately grew an essentially different opposition between faith and knowledge or reason, according to which the theological basis of ethics was contrasted with the philosophical; the theologians maintaining sometimes that the divine law is essentially arbitrary, the expression of will, not reason; more frequently that its reasonableness is inscrutable, and that actual human reason should confine itself to examining the credentials of God's messengers, and not the message itself. But in early Christianity this latter antithesis was as yet undeveloped; faith means simply force in clinging to moral and religious conviction, whatever their rational grounds may be; this force, in the Christian consciousness, being inseparably bound up with personal loyalty and trust towards Christ, the leader in the battle with evil, the ruler of the kingdom to be realized.

So far, however, there is no ethical difference between Christian faith and that of Judaism, or its later imitation, Mahommedanism; except that the personal affection of loyal trust is peculiarly stirred by the blending of human and divine natures in Christ, and the rule of duty impressively taught by the manifestation of his perfect life. A more distinctively Christian, and a more deeply moral, significance is given to the notion in the antithesis of " faith " and " works." Here faith means more than loyal acceptance of the divine law and reverent trust in the lawgiver; it implies a consciousness, at once continually present and continually transcended, of the radical imperfection of all human obedience to the law, and at the same time of the irremissible condemnation which this imperfection entails.

The Stoic doctrine of the worthlessness of ordinary human virtue, and the stern paradox that all offenders are equally, in so far as all are absolutely, guilty, find their counterparts in Christianity; but the latter (maintaining this ideal severity in the moral standard, with an emotional consciousness of what is involved in it quite unlike that of the Stoic) overcomes its practical exclusiveness through faith. This faith, again, may be conceived in two modes, essentially distinct though usually combined. In one view it gives the believer strength to attain, by God's supernatural aid or " grace," a goodness of which he is naturally incapable; in the other view it gives him an assurance that, though he knows himself a sinner deserving of utter condemnation, a perfectly just God still regards him with favour on account of the perfect services and suffering of Christ.

Of these views the former is the more catholic, more universally present in the Christian consciousness; the latter more deeply penetrates the mystery of the Atonement, as expounded in the Pauline epistles.

But faith, however understood, is rather an indispensable pre-requisite than the essential motive principle of Christian good conduct. This motive is supplied by the other Love. central notion, love. On love depends the " fulfilling of the law," and the sole moral value of Christian duty - that is, on love to God, in the first place, which in its fullest development must spring from Christian faith; and, secondly, love to all mankind, as the objects of divine love and sharers in the humanity ennobled by the incarnation. This derivative philanthropy characterizes the spirit in which all Christian performance of social duty is to be done; loving devotion to God being the fundamental attitude of mind that is to be maintained throughout the whole of the Christian's life.

But further, as regards abstinence from unlawful acts and desires Purity. prompting to them, we have to notice another form in which the inwardness of Christian morality manifests itself, which, though less distinctive, should yet receive attention in any comparison of Christian ethics with the view of GraecoRoman philosophy. The profound horror with which the Christian's conception of a suffering as well as an avenging divinity tended to make him regard all condemnable acts was tinged with a sentiment which we may perhaps describe as a ceremonial aversion moralized - the aversion, that is, to foulness or impurity.

In Judaism, as in other, especially Oriental, religions, the natural dislike of material defilement has been elevated into a religious sentiment, and made to support a complicated system of quasi-sanitary abstinences and ceremonial purifications; then, as the ethical element predominated in the Jewish religion, a moral symbolism was felt to reside in the ceremonial code, and thus aversion to impurity came to be a common form of the ethico-religious sentiment. Then, when Christianity threw off the Mosaic ritual, this religious sense of purity was left with no other sphere besides morality; while, from its highly idealized character, it was peculiarly well adapted for that repression of vicious desires which Christianity claimed as its speci