but, according to the necessity of law, in beauty and in order ever and as much as that, in its terms at least, must be confessed to be theistic rather than pantheistic. The argument of Socrates is put by them: Can we fancy that there is consciousness in us-the parts, only and not also, and much more, in the All from which we come. Aulus Gellius (vii. 1) testifies to the cogency with which the celebrated Stoic, Chrysippus, redargued the reasonings in denial of a Providence, because of the evils in the world, the reasonings, namely, that if Providence were, evil were not; but evil is, therefore Providence is not. "Nothing can be more absurd," says Chrysippus, "than to suppose that there could be good, if there were not evil. Without correspondent and opposing contrary, contrary at all there could be none. How could there be a sense of justice, unless there were a sense of injustice? How possibly understand bravery, unless from the opposition of cowardice? or temperance, unless from that of intemperance? prudence, from imprudence, etc.? Men might as well require," he cries, "that there should be truth and not falsehood. There are together in a single relation, good and evil, happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain. They are bound together, the one to the other, as Plato says, with opposing heads; if you take the one, you withdraw both (si tuleris unum, abstuleris utrumque)." On similar grounds Chrysippus vindicates or explains the fact of man suffering from disease. That is not something, he would seem to say, ordered, express, and on its own account. It is only there κατὰ παρακολούθησιν, as it were by way of sequela and secondary consequence. The greater intrinsic good is necessarily attended by the lesser extrinsic evil. If you make the bones of the head delicate and fine for the business of thought within, you only expose it the more to blows and injuries from without. NEGATION-NEO-PLATONISTS. 161 "In the same way diseases also and sicknesses enter, while it is for health that the provision is made. And so, by Hercules, while by the counsel of nature there springs in men virtue, faults at the very same moment by a contrary affinity are born." In this way the Stoics have put hand on a most important and cardinal truth-this truth, namely, that discernibleness involves negation. We should not know what warmth is, were there no cold; nor light, were there not twin with it darkness. Everything that is, is what it is, as much by what it is not, as by what it is. The chair is not a table; the table is not a chair. Negation, nevertheless, is no infringement on affirmation: evil may be without prejudice to the perfection of the world. Evil in the creation of the universe was not the design: it is but the necessary shadow of the good, as the dark of light. "Just as little," says Epictetus (Enchirid. c. 27), there is a target set up not to be hit, is there in the world a nature of the bad"-an independent bad. "In partial natures and partial movements, stops and hindrances there may be many, but in the relation of the wholes, none" (Plut. ref. St. 35). as The Neo-Platonists belong to a much later period than the principal Stoics; but, being Greek, we may refer to them here-not that we can illustrate the arguments for the existence of God technically from their writings, or at all further from them themselves, than by their devotion to God, a devotion which manifested itself in the form of what has been named ecstasy. This phase of humanity, however, or of philosophy, is to be better understood by reference to the historical period at which it appeared. From the death of Aristotle in 322 B.C. to the conversion of Constantine, or say, to the date, more memorial as a date, of the Council of Nice in 325 A.D., there is an interval of some six hundred and more years. Now these L six hundred years belong to that period in the history of the world when it is probable that a greater number of civilised men were intellectually interested, occupied, and active than ever before or since. The cause of this was, so far, politics without, and religion within. The general course in the common life of mankind seems to be this: men are at first hunters, passing gradually, perhaps, into nomads; and intellect can assert itself for many many years only in wild warfare, crude art, superstition rather than religion, and a dawning literature that is, for the most part, exclamation or song. By and by the wanderers settle themselves, and take to agriculture. Agriculture necessitates dwelling-places and implements - quite an assemblage of coverings and shelters, of goods and chattels. This assemblage necessitates the artizan to make them and mend them; and the artizan, to be paid and to buy, necessitates exchange. Then exchange itself necessitates, or, in fact, is trade; while trade, again, necessitates the town. Now, in this settled life, what men are to become the leaders? Not any longer, as was formerly the case, necessarily the young, the strong, and the bold. What is required now is, so to speak, counsel, advice, direction in practical conduct; and counsel, advice, direction-direction in practical conduct-belongs to him who is tempered, chastened, matured by experience; enlarged, enlightened, and enriched, made wise by actually living life's many and multiform eventualities. The calm hearts and grey heads are now the guides, and this their guidance naturally, in expression, takes the form of proverbs. Practical sagacity is the crown of life. But the faculty thus brought into action is the intellect. Insight into results and the means of results, the causes of results, is now the life of the matured brain. Every event is canvassed, every proposal is canvassed, with all that appertains to it, in the new light that now is ever spreading, and ever clearing around them. But in the midst of all this science is seen to have taken birth, and to grow. Step by step man learns to harness to his own ends the very powers that were his fears; and step by step he becomes presumptuous, contemptuous. What he feared is weak, he finds; and he that feared is now strong. There are cobwebs all round about him from that old past; he laughs as he thinks of them, and will scatter them to the winds. Betimes it is an age of scepticism; and bit by bit, politically, socially, religiously, the whole furniture of humanity is drawn into examination and doubt. And the more they examine, and ever the more they doubt, the more their rebellion at the old grows. Not a man but issues from his old wont as from a bondage and darkness in which he has been wronged. He is bitter as he thinks of what is and of what was. They are all bitter as they think of what is and of what was. They are in their Aufklärung, and their Revolution must come-has come. They rush with a cry from their corners; and, all together, like a flood, they lay flat the walls and the roof that had sheltered and saved them. For a time all is joy, happiness, delight, action, in the new light and the fresh air. But presently the mood is changed, and they wander disconsolate amid the ruins. They have nothing now to come to them and lift them into a life that is common; they have nothing to believe in. They are together; but they are single, each man by himself. Had they been scattered down from a pepper-box, they could not be more disjunct. This is the condition of the Sects and of the atoms around them; for we are still in the ancient world -the ancient world at its close. Everywhere, at that time, there was the reality of political, social, religious revolution, if not the madness and violence, if not the blood, with which it has been convulsed and disfigured into hideousness and horror here in Europe within a century. And what, generally over the known world, saved them from as much as that then was the shadow of a vast vulture in the air that had not even yet filled its all-devouring maw, and that, making their hearts beat, suddenly darkened and terrified them into the silence and stillness of an awaited doom. That vulture was Rome. Her prey was helpless, and she had but to seize. Any and everywhere she could stoop; and any and everywhere she could seize. The entire world, within all its bounds, was her booty. And with this her booty at her feet, the insatiable maw was at length glutted, but not, even so, the fierce heart stilled. Even so, the fierce heart could not be stilled. The one vulture became a crowd of vultures. Each in the fierceness of its own heart-each in its own pain, turned and tore at the other; and it was a distracted universe in fight, until at length and finally, utterly worn out, exhausted to the dregs, they sank in apathy at the feet of one, a single one of themselves, who, all too soon, drunk with solitude -the solitude of power and of place-reeled into the imbecility and delirium of the irresponsible, abstract, absolute self that knows not what to do with itself, nor any more what not to do the realized Cæsar! What I endeavour to picture thus in these brief terms is the condition of the whole world during the greater part of the six hundred years which I have signalized. The fall of the old world, which was at once political, religious, and philosophical, was characterized by a universal atomism. Politically, the individual, as an atom, found himself alone, without a country, hardly with a home. Religiously, the individual, as an atom, has lost his God; he looks up into an empty heaven; his heart is broken, and he is hopeless, helpless, hapless in despair. |