And again:
Need I pass on to Aristotle, and show in detail how his philosophy so dominated mediæval learning that it was adopted and protected by the Church, and that it became one of the efforts of the spirit of reform in logic and in psychology to break the shackles which this great thinker had, as the modern spirits often complained, forged to keep the human intellect from its advance? Need I tell you that this was owing to a travesty of the great man, learned not from his own pregnant words but through translations and commentaries?
I will conclude with a reference to the two great systems that dominated the Roman world after Plato and Aristotle had turned philosophy into an ethical channel—I mean those of the Stoics and of the Epicureans, who mapped out human character with a clearness that makes them our teachers to the present day. Not that they avoided speculating on the nature of the universe. The physics of Epicurus, borrowed from Democritus, are among the most difficult of studies, and the Stoics embraced in their view as the motive of action of their wise man all the harmony of the universe. These speculations may now be antiquated, but as the teachers of ethical types, as the expounders of what the highest human wisdom finds in its search for happiness, these two schools have fixed the types of civilised men for all time. Every man in this audience is born either a Stoic or an Epicurean, or what is perhaps far more common, alternates from one to the other according to circumstances. In its simplest form the great question is: Are we to live for duty, or live for pleasure—not of course mere vulgar pleasure of the senses, but that refined balance of intellectual and moral pleasure which you will find best explained in my old friend Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean; or else are we to seek for our standard outside ourselves, in the laws which the Moral Governor of the world has established for its welfare, and co-operate with Him in the promotion of His great ends? Such is the ideal wise man of the Stoics, who despised all earthly delights, all physical pleasures, for the sake of the great law of duty, and the great mission of living for some nobler purpose than mere animal or social comforts. We have its best expression in the peroration of Cicero’s account of the system[47]; or if you will have it in a more familiar shape, in the loud clarion of Saint Paul: “As deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing all things.”[48] For he too was bred a Stoic, and was not afraid in his addresses to cultivated men of his day to preach Stoic theology, akin to Pantheism.
If the time should ever come when men will no longer be led by revelation, when they will reject miracle and prophecy, and determine to be led by the mere light of reason (men have often anticipated such a future, regardless of the fact that hitherto religious scepticism has always ended in a recoil from this liberty, and a revival of positive and even superstitious creeds)—if, I say, such an age should ever lay aside the Christian faith, there will still remain the ethical types which Zeno and Epicurus have crystallised in their systems—there will always remain the man of duty and the man of pleasure, the man who lives for others and he who lives for himself, in terms of modern philosophic jargon, the Altruist and the Egoist, the Spiritualist and the Materialist.
And here I break off my unfinished task, unfinished indeed as it must be, for beyond the many things that I have omitted though I knew them, there are many more omitted because I knew them not, because I have not fathomed the unfathomable depth and the myriad variety of that genius which is living, and suggesting, and working all through the ideal aspects of our modern life. There are probably few men who have lived longer and more intimately with the old Greeks, in more phases of their life, ever probing and seeking for deeper and better knowledge of their vast legacy to mankind, of which the rodent tooth of time, the sacrilegious hands of men, have lost or destroyed so much. The farther I seek, the wider the vistas I see opening before me. So now, when my part in the race is nearly run, there remains to me no higher earthly satisfaction than this, that I have carried the torch of Greek fire alight through a long life—no higher earthly hope than this, that I may pass that torch to others, who in their turn may keep it aflame with greater brilliancy perhaps, but not with more earnest devotion, “in the Parliament of men, the Federation of the world.”
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