INITIATION INTO PHILOSOPHY 1

	INITIATION INTO PHILOSOPHY 1

INITIATION INTO PHILOSOPHY By Emile Faguet Of the French Academy PREFACE This volume, as indicated by the title, is designed to show the way to the beginner, to satisfy and more especially to excite his initial curiosity. It affords an adequate idea of the march of facts and of ideas. The reader is led, somewhat rapidly, from the remote origins to the most recent efforts of the human mind. It should be a convenient repertory to which the mind may revert in order to see broadly the general opinion of an epoch--and what connected it with those that followed or preceded it. It aims above all at being _a frame_ in which can conveniently be inscribed, in the course of further studies, new conceptions more detailed and more thoroughly examined. It will have fulfilled its design should it incite to research and meditation, and if it prepares for them correctly. E. FAGUET. CONTENTS PART I ANTIQUITY CHAPTER I BEFORE SOCRATES Philosophical Interpreters of the Universe, of the Creation and Constitution of the World. CHAPTER II THE SOPHISTS Logicians and Professors of Logic, and of the Analysis of Ideas, and of Discussion. CHAPTER III SOCRATES Philosophy Entirely Reduced to Morality, and Morality Considered as the End of all Intellectual Activity. CHAPTER IV PLATO Plato, like Socrates, is Pre-eminently a Moralist, but he Reverts to General Consideration of the Universe, and Deals with Politics and Legislation. CHAPTER V ARISTOTLE A Man of Encyclopaedic Learning; as Philosopher, more especially Moralist and Logician. CHAPTER VI VARIOUS SCHOOLS The Development in Various Schools of the General Ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. CHAPTER VII EPICUREANISM Epicureanism Believes that the Duty of Man is to seek Happiness, and that Happiness Consists in Wisdom. CHAPTER VIII STOICISM The Passions are Diseases which can and must be Extirpated. CHAPTER IX ECLECTICS AND SCEPTICS Philosophers who Wished to Belong to No School. Philosophers who Decried All Schools and All Doctrines. CHAPTER X NEOPLATONISM Reversion to Metaphysics. Imaginative Metaphysicians after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess. CHAPTER XI CHRISTIANITY Philosophic Ideas which Christianity Welcomed, Adopted, or Created; How it must Give a Fresh Aspect to All Philosophy, even that Foreign to Itself. PART II IN THE MIDDLE AGES CHAPTER I FROM THE FIFTH CENTURY TO THE THIRTEENTH Philosophy is only an Interpreter of Dogma. When it is Declared Contrary to Dogma by the Authority of Religion, it is a Heresy. Orthodox and Heterodox Interpretations. Some Independent Philosophers. CHAPTER II THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY Influence of Aristotle. His Adoption by the Church. Religious Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. CHAPTER III THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES Decadence of Scholasticism. Forebodings of the Coming Era. Great Moralists. The Kabbala. Sorcery. CHAPTER IV THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY It Is Fairly Accurate to Consider that from the Point of View of Philosophy, the Middle Ages Lasted until Descartes. Free-thinkers More or Less Disguised. Partisans of Reason Apart from Faith, of Observation, and of Experiment. PART III MODERN TIMES CHAPTER I THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Descartes. Cartesianism. CHAPTER II CARTESIANS All the Seventeenth Century was under the Influence of Descartes. Port-Royal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz. CHAPTER III THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. Locke: His Ideas on Human Liberty, Morality, General Politics, and Religious Politics. CHAPTER IV THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Berkeley: A Highly Idealist Philosophy which Regarded Matter as Non-existent. David Hume: Sceptical Philosophy. The Scottish School: Philosophy of Common Sense. CHAPTER V THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Voltaire a Disciple of Locke. Rousseau a Free-thinking Christian, but deeply Imbued with Religious Sentiments. Diderot a Capricious Materialist. D'Holbach and Helvetius Avowed Materialists. Condillac a Philosopher of Sensations. CHAPTER VI KANT Kant Reconstructed all Philosophy by Supporting it on Morality. CHAPTER VII THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: GERMANY The Great Reconstructors of the World, Analogous to the First Philosophers of Antiquity. Great General Systems, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc. CHAPTER VIII THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ENGLAND The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism: Lamarck (French), Darwin, Spencer. CHAPTER IX THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: FRANCE The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin. The Positivist School: Auguste Comte. The Kantist School: Renouvier. Independent and Complex Positivists: Taine, Renan. INDEX INITIATION INTO PHILOSOPHY PART I ANTIQUITY CHAPTER I BEFORE SOCRATES Philosophical Interpreters of the Universe, of the Creation and Constitution of the World. PHILOSOPHY.--The aim of philosophy is to seek the explanation of all things: the quest is for the first _causes_ of everything, and also _how_ all things are, and finally _why_, with what design, with a view to what, things are. That is why, taking "principle" in all the senses of the word, it has been called the science of first principles. Philosophy has always existed. Religions--all religions--are philosophies. They are indeed the most complete. But, apart from religions, men have sought the causes and principles of everything and endeavoured to acquire general ideas. These researches apart from religious dogmas in pagan antiquity are the only ones with which we are here to be concerned. THE IONIAN SCHOOL: THALES.--The Ionian School is the most ancient school of philosophy known. It dates back to the seventh century before Christ. Thales of Miletus, a natural philosopher and astronomer, as we should describe him, believed matter--namely, that of which all things and all beings are made--to be in perpetual transformation, and that these transformations are produced by powerful beings attached to every portion of matter. These powerful beings were gods. Everything, therefore, was full of gods. His philosophy was a mythology. He also thought that the essential element of matter was water, and that it was water, under the influence of the gods, which transformed itself into earth, air, and fire, whilst from water, earth, air, and fire came everything that is in nature. ANAXIMANDER; HERACLITUS.--Anaximander of Miletus, an astronomer also, and a geographer, believed that the principle of all things is _indeterminate_--a kind of chaos wherein nothing has form or shape; that from chaos come things and beings, and that they return thither in order to emerge again. One of his particular theories was that fish were the most ancient of animals, and that all animals had issued from them through successive transformations. This theory was revived for a while about fifty years ago. Heraclitus of Ephesus (very obscure, and with this epithet attached permanently to his name) saw all things as a perpetual growth--in an indefinite state of becoming. Nothing is; all things grow and are destined to eternal growth. Behind them, nevertheless, there is an eternal master who does not change. It is our duty to resemble him as much as we can; that is to say, as much as an ape can resemble a man. Calmness is imperative: to be as motionless as transient beings can. The popular legend runs that Heraclitus "always wept"; what is known of him only tends to prove that he was grave, and did not favour emotionalism. ANAXAGORAS; EMPEDOCLES.--Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, above all else a natural philosopher, settled at Athens about 470 B.C.; was the master and friend of Pericles; was on the point of being put to death, as Socrates was later on, for the crime of indifference towards the religion of the Athenians, and had to take refuge at Lampsacus, where he died. Like Anaximander, he believed that everything emerged from something indeterminate and confused; but he added that what caused the emergence from that state was the organizing intelligence, the Mind, just as in man, it is the intelligence which draws thought from cerebral undulations, and forms a clear idea out of a confused idea. Anaxagoras exerted an almost incomparable influence over Greek philosophy of the classical times. Empedocles of Agrigentum, a sort of magician and high-priest, almost a deity, whose life and death are but little known, appears to have possessed an encyclopaedic brain. From him is derived the doctrine of the four elements, for whereas the philosophers who preceded him gave as the sole source of things--some water, others air, others fire, others the earth, he regarded them all four equally as the primal elements of everything. He believed that the world is swayed by two contrary forces--love and hate, the one desiring eternally to unite, the other eternally to disintegrate. Amid this struggle goes on a movement of organization, incessantly retarded by hate, perpetually facilitated by love; and from this movement have issued--first, vegetation, then the lower animals, then the higher animals, then men. In Empedocles can be found either evident traces of the religion of Zoroaster of Persia (the perpetual antagonism of two great gods, that of good and that of evil), or else a curious coincidence with this doctrine, which will appear again later among the Manicheans. PYTHAGORAS.--Pythagoras appears to have been born about B.C. 500 on the Isle of Elea, to have travelled much, and to have finally settled in Greater Greece (southern Italy). Pythagoras, like Empedocles, was a sort of magician or god. His doctrine was a religion, the respect with which he was surrounded was a cult, the observances he imposed on his family and on his disciples were rites. What he taught was that the true realities, which do not change, were numbers. The fundamental and supreme reality is _one_; the being who is one is God; from this number, which is one, are derived all the other numbers which are the foundation of beings, their inward cause, their essence; we are all more or less perfect numbers; each created thing is a more or less perfect number. The world, governed thus by combinations of numbers, has always existed and will always exist. It develops itself, however, according to a numerical series of which we do not possess the key, but which we can guess. As for human destiny it is this: we have been animated beings, human or animal; according as we have lived well or ill we shall be reincarnated either as superior men or as animals more or less inferior. This is the doctrine of _metempsychosis_, which had many adherents in ancient days, and also in a more or less fanciful fashion in modern times. To Pythagoras have been attributed a certain number of maxims which are called the _Golden Verses_. XENOPHANES; PARMENIDES.--Xenophanes of Colophon is also a "unitarian." He accepts only one God, and of all the ancient philosophers appears to be the most opposed to mythology, to belief in a multiplicity of gods resembling men, a doctrine which he despises as being immoral. There is one God, eternal, immutable, immovable, who has no need to transfer Himself from one locality to another, who is _without place_, and who governs all things by His thought alone. Advancing further, Parmenides told himself that if He alone really exists who is one and eternal and unchangeable, all else is not only inferior to Him, but is only a _semblance_, and that mankind, earth, sky, plants, and animals are only a vast illusion--phantoms, a mirage, which would disappear, which would no longer exist, and _would never have existed_ if we could perceive the Self-existent. ZENO; DEMOCRITUS.--Zeno of Elea, who must be mentioned more especially because he was the master of that Gorgias of whom Socrates was the adversary, was pre-eminently a subtle dialectician in whom the sophist already made his appearance, and who embarrassed the Athenians by captious arguments, at the bottom of which always could be found this fundamental principle: apart from the Eternal Being all is only semblance; apart from Him who is all, all is nothing. Democritus of Abdera, disciple of Leucippus of Abdera (about whom nothing is known), is the inventor of the theory of atoms. Matter is composed of an infinite number of tiny indivisible bodies which are called atoms; these atoms from all eternity, or at least since the commencement of matter, have been endued with certain movements by which they attach themselves to one another, and agglomerate or separate, and thence is caused the formation of all things, and the destruction, which is only the disintegration, of all things. The soul itself is only an aggregation of specially tenuous and subtle atoms. It is probable that when a certain number of these atoms quit the body, sleep ensues; that when nearly all depart, it causes the appearance of death (lethargy, catalepsy); that when they all depart, death occurs. We are brought into relation with the external world by the advent in us of extremely subtle atoms--reflections of things, semblances of things--which enter and mingle with the constituent atoms of our souls. There is nothing in our intelligence which has not been brought there by our senses, and our intelligence is only the combination of the atoms composing our souls with the atoms that external matter sends, so to speak, into our souls. The doctrines of Democritus will be found again in those of Epicurus and Lucretius. CHAPTER II THE SOPHISTS Logicians and Professors of Logic, and of the Analysis of Ideas, and of Discussion. DOCTRINES OF THE SOPHISTS.--The Sophists descend from Parmenides and Zeno of Elea; Gorgias was the disciple of the latter. By dint of thinking that all is semblance save the Supreme Being, who alone is real, it is very easy to arrive at belief in all being semblance, including that Being; or at least what is almost tantamount, that all is semblance, inclusive of any idea we can possibly conceive of the Supreme Being. To believe nothing, and to demonstrate that there is no reason to believe in anything, is the cardinal principle of all the Sophists. Then, it may be suggested, there is nothing for it but to be silent. No, there is the cultivation of one's mind (the only thing of the existence of which we are sure), so as to give it ability, readiness, and strength. With what object? To become a dexterous thinker, which in itself is a fine thing; to be also a man of consideration, listened to in one's city, and to arrive at its government. The Sophists accordingly gave lessons, especially in psychology, dialectics, and eloquence. They further taught philosophy, but in order to demonstrate that all philosophy is false; and, as Pascal observed later, that to ridicule philosophy is truly philosophical. They seem to have been extremely intellectual, very learned, and most serious despite their scepticism, and to have rendered Greece the very great service of making a penetrating analysis--the first recorded--of our faculty of knowledge and of the limitations, real, possible, or probable, of that faculty. PROTAGORAS; GORGIAS; PRODICUS.--They were very numerous, the taste for their art, which might be called philosophical criticism, being widespread in Attica. It may be believed, as Plato maintains, that some were of very mediocre capacity, and this is natural; but there were also some who clearly were eminent authorities. The most illustrious were Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus of Ceos. Protagoras seems to have been the most philosophical of them all, Gorgias the best orator and the chief professor of rhetoric, Prodicus the most eminent moralist and poet. Protagoras rejected all metaphysics--that is, all investigation of first causes and of the universe--and reduced all philosophy to the science of self-control with a view to happiness, and control of others with a view to their happiness. Like Anaxagoras, he was banished from the city under the charge of impiety, and his books were publicly burnt. Gorgias appears to have maintained the same ideas with more moderation and also with less profundity. He claimed, above all, to be able to make a good orator. According to Plato, it was he whom Socrates most persistently made the butt of his sarcasms. Prodicus, whom Plato himself esteemed, appears to have been principally preoccupied with the moral problem. He was the author of the famous apologue which represented Hercules having to choose between two paths, the one being that of virtue, the other of pleasure. Like Socrates later on, he too was subject to the terrible accusation of impiety, and underwent capital punishment. The Sophists furnish the most important epoch in the history of ancient philosophy; until their advent the philosophic systems were great poems on the total of all things, known and unknown. The Sophists opposed these ambitious and precipitate generalizations, in which imagination had the larger share, and their discovery was to bring philosophy back to its true starting point by affirming that the first thing to do, and that before all else, was to know our own mind and its mechanism. Their error possibly was, while saying that it was the first thing to do, too often to affirm that it was the only thing to do; still the fact remains that they were perfectly accurate in their assurance that it was primary. CHAPTER III SOCRATES Philosophy Entirely Reduced to Morality, and Morality Considered as the End of all Intellectual Activity. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCRATES.--Of Socrates nothing is known except that he was born at Athens, that he held many public discussions with all and sundry in the streets of Athens, and that he died under the Thirty Tyrants. Of his ideas we know nothing, because he wrote nothing, and because his disciples were far too intelligent; in consequence of which it is impossible to know if what they said was thought by him, had really been his ideas or theirs. What seems certain is that neither Aristophanes nor the judges at the trial of Socrates were completely deceived in considering him a Sophist; for he proceeded from them. It is true he proceeded from them by reaction, because evidently their universal scepticism had terrified him; but nevertheless he was their direct outcome, for like them he was extremely mistrustful of the old vast systems of philosophy, and to those men who pretended to know everything he opposed a phrase which is probably authentic: "I know that I know nothing;" for, like the Sophists, he wished to recall philosophy to earth from heaven, namely from metaphysics to the study of man, and nothing else; for, like the Sophists, he confined and limited the field with a kind of severe and imperious modesty which was none the less contemptuous of the audacious; for, finally, like the Sophists, but in this highly analogous to many philosophers preceding the Sophists, he had but a very moderate and mitigated respect for the religion of his fellow-citizens. According to what we know of Socrates from Xenophon, unquestionably the least imaginative of his disciples, Socrates, like the Sophists, reduced philosophy to the study of man; but his great and incomparable originality lay in the fact that whereas the Sophists wished man to study himself in order to be happy, Socrates wished him to study himself in order to be moral, honest, and just, without any regard to happiness. For Socrates, everything had to tend towards morality, to contribute to it, and to be subordinated to it as the goal and as the final aim. He applied himself unceasingly, relates Xenophon, to examine and to determine what is good and evil, just and unjust, wise and foolish, brave and cowardly, etc. He incessantly applied himself, relates Aristotle--and therein he was as much a true professor of rhetoric as of morality--thoroughly to define and carefully to specify the meaning of words in order not to be put off with vague terms which are illusions of thought, and in order to discipline his mind rigorously so as to make it an organ for the ascertainment of truth. HIS METHOD.--He had dialectical methods, "the art of conferring," as Montaigne called it, more or less happy, which he had probably borrowed from the Sophists, that contributed to cause him to be considered one of them, and exercised a wide vogue long after him. He "delivered men's minds," as he himself said--that is, he believed, or affected to believe, that the verities are in a latent state in all minds, and that it needed only patience, dexterity, and skillful investigation to bring them to light. Elsewhere, he _interrogated_ in a captious fashion in order to set the interlocutor in contradiction to himself and to make him confess that he had said what he had not thought he had said, agreed to what he had not believed he had agreed to; and he triumphed maliciously over such confusions. In short, he seems to have been a witty and teasing Franklin, and to have taught true wisdom by laughing at everyone. Folk never like to be ridiculed, and no doubt the recollection of these ironies had much to do with the iniquitous judgment which condemned him, and which he seems to have challenged up to the last. HIS INFLUENCE.--His influence was infinite. It is from him that morality became the end itself, the last and supreme end of all philosophy--the reason of philosophy; and, as was observed by Nietzsche, the Circe of philosophers, who enchants them, who dictates to them beforehand, or who modifies their systems in advance by terrifying them as to what their systems may contain irreverent towards itself or dangerous in relation to it. From Socrates to Kant and thence onward, morality has been the Circe of philosophers, and morality is, as it were, the spiritual daughter of Socrates. On the other hand, his influence was terrible for the religion of antiquity because it directed the mind towards the idea that morality is the sole object worthy of knowledge, and that the ancient religions were immoral, or of such a dubious morality as to deserve the desertion and scorn of honest men. Christianity fought paganism with the arguments of the disciples of Socrates--with Socratic arguments; modern philosophies and creeds are all impregnated with Socraticism. When it was observed that the Sophists form the most important epoch in the history of ancient philosophy, it was because they taught Socrates to seek a philosophy which was entirely human and preoccupied solely with the happiness of man. This led a great mind, and in his track other very great minds, to direct all philosophy, and even all human science, towards the investigation of goodness, goodness being regarded as the condition of happiness. CHAPTER IV PLATO Plato, like Socrates, is Pre-eminently a Moralist, but he reverts to General Consideration of the Universe and Deals with Politics and Legislation. PLATO A DISCIPLE OF SOCRATES.--Plato, like Xenophon, was a pupil of Socrates, but Xenophon only wanted to be the clerk of Socrates; and Plato, as an enthusiastic disciple, was at the same time very faithful and very unfaithful to Socrates. He was a faithful disciple to Socrates in never failing to place morality in the foremost rank of all philosophical considerations; in that he never varied. He was an unfaithful disciple to Socrates in that, imaginative and an admirable poet, he bore back philosophy from earth to heaven; he did not forbid himself--quite the contrary--to pile up great systems about all things and to envelop the universe in his vast and daring conceptions. He invincibly established morality, the science of virtue, as the final goal of human knowledge, in his brilliant and charming _Socratic Dialogues_; he formed great systems in all the works in which he introduces himself as speaking in his own name. He was very learned, and acquainted with everything that had been written by all the philosophers before Socrates, particularly Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras. He reconsidered all their teaching, and he himself brought to consideration a force and a wealth of mind such as appear to have had no parallel in the world. THE "IDEAS."--Seeking, in his turn, what are the first causes of all and what is eternally real behind the simulations of this transient world, he believed in a single God, as had many before him; but in the bosom of this God, so to speak, he placed, he seemed to see, _Ideas_--that is to say, eternal types of all things which in this world are variable, transient, and perishable. What he effected by such novel, original, and powerful imagination is clear. He replaced the Olympus of the populace by a spiritual Olympus; the material mythology by an idealistic mythology; polytheism by polyideism, if it may be so expressed--the gods by types. Behind every phenomenon, stream, forest, mountain, the Greeks perceived a deity, a material being like themselves, more powerful than themselves. Behind every phenomenon, behind every thought as well, every feeling, every institution--behind _everything, no matter what it be_, Plato perceived an idea, immortal, eternal, indestructible, and incorruptible, which existed in the bosom of the Eternal, and of which all that comes under our observation is only the vacillating and troubled reflection, and which supports, animates, and for a time preserves everything that we can perceive. Hence, all philosophy consists in having some knowledge of these Ideas. How is it possible to attain such knowledge? By raising the mind from the particular to the general; by distinguishing in each thing what is its permanent foundation, what it contains that is least changing, least variable, least circumstantial. For example, a man is a very complex being; he has countless feelings, countless diversified ideas, countless methods of conduct and existence. What is his permanent foundation? It is his conscience, which does not vary, undergoes no transformation, always obstinately repeats the same thing; the foundation of man, the eternal idea of which every man on earth is here the reflection, is the consciousness of good; man is an incarnation on earth of that part of God which is the will for good; according as he diverges from or approaches more nearly to this will, is he less or more man. THE PLATONIC DIALECTIC AND MORALITY.--This method of raising oneself to the ideas is what Plato termed dialectic--that is to say, the art of discernment. Dialectic differentiates between the fundamental and the superficial, the permanent and the transient, the indestructible and the destructible. This is the supreme philosophic method which contains all the others and to which all the others are reduced. Upon this metaphysic and by the aid of this dialectic, Plato constructed an extremely pure system of morality which was simply an _Imitation of God_ (as, later on, came the Imitation of Jesus Christ). The whole duty of man was to be as like God as he could. In God exist the ideas of truth, goodness, beauty, greatness, power, etc.; man ought to aim at relatively realizing those ideas which God absolutely realizes. God is just, or justice lies in the bosom of God, which is the same thing; man cannot be the just one, but he can be a just man, and there is the whole matter; for justice comprises everything, or, to express it differently, is the characteristic common to all which is valuable. Justice is goodness, justice is beautiful, justice is true; justice is great, because it reduces all particular cases to one general principle; justice is powerful, being the force which maintains, opposed to the force which destroys; justice is eternal and invariable. To be just in all the meanings of the word is the duty of man and his proper goal. THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.--Plato shows marked reserve as to the immortality of the soul and as to rewards and penalties beyond the grave. He is neither in opposition nor formally favourable. We feel that he wishes to believe in it rather than that he is sure about it. He says that "it is a fine wager to make"; which means that even should we lose, it is better to believe in this possible gain than to disbelieve. Further, it is legitimate to conclude--both from certain passages in the _Laws_ and from the beautiful theory of Plato on the punishment which is an expiation, and on the expiation which is medicinal to the soul and consequently highly desirable--that Plato often inclined strongly towards the doctrine of posthumous penalties and rewards, which presupposes the immortality of the soul. PLATONIC LOVE.--Platonic love, about which there has been so much talk and on which, consequently, we must say a word, at least to define it, is one of the applications of his moral system. As in the case of all other things, the idea of love is in God. There it exists in absolute purity, without any mixture of the idea of pleasure, since pleasure is essentially ephemeral and perishable. Love in God consists simply in the impassioned contemplation of beauty (physical and moral); we shall resemble God if we love beauty precisely in this way, without excitement or agitation of the senses. POLITICS.--One of the originalities in Plato is that he busies himself with politics--that is, that he makes politics a part of philosophy, which had barely been thought of before him (I say _barely_, because Pythagoras was a legislator), but which has ever since been taken into consideration. Plato is aristocratic, no doubt because his thought is generally such, independently of circumstances, also, perhaps, because he attributed the great misfortunes of his country which he witnessed to the Athenian democracy; then yet again, perhaps, because that Athenian democracy had been violently hostile and sometimes cruel to philosophers, and more especially to his own master. According to Plato, just as man has three souls, or if it be preferred, three centres of activity, which govern him--intelligence in the head, courage in the heart, and appetite in the bowels--even so the city is composed of three classes: wise and learned men at the top, the warriors below, and the artisans and slaves lower still. The wise men will govern: accordingly the nations will never be happy save when philosophers are kings, or when kings are philosophers. The warriors will fight to defend the city, never as aggressors. They will form a caste--poor, stern to itself, and redoubtable. They will have no individual possessions; everything will be in common, houses, furniture, weapons, wives even, and children. The people, finally, living in strict equality, either by equal partition of land, or on land cultivated in common, will be strictly maintained in probity, honesty, austerity, morality, sobriety, and submissiveness. All arts, except military music and war dances, will be eliminated from the city. She needs neither poets nor painters not yet musicians, who corrupt morals by softening them, and by making all feel the secret pang of voluptuousness. All theories, whether aristocratic or tending more or less to communism, are derived from the politics of Plato either by being evolved from them or by harking back to them. THE MASTER OF THE IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY.--Plato is for all thinkers, even for his opponents, the greatest name in human philosophy. He is the supreme authority of the idealistic philosophy--that is, of all philosophy which believes that ideas govern the world, and that the world is progressing towards a perfection which is somewhere and which directs and attracts it. For those even who are not of his school, Plato is the most prodigious of all the thinkers who have united psychological wisdom, dialectical strength, the power of abstraction and creative imagination, which last in him attains to the marvellous. CHAPTER V ARISTOTLE A Man of Encyclopedic Learning; as Philosopher, more especially Moralist and Logician. ARISTOTLE, PUPIL OF PLATO.--Aristotle of Stagira was a pupil of Plato, and he remembered it, as the best pupils do as a rule, in order to oppose him. For some years he was tutor to Alexander, son of Philip, the future Alexander the Great. He taught long at Athens. After the death of Alexander, being the target in his turn of the eternal accusation of impiety, he was forced to retire to Chalcis, where he died. Aristotle is, before all else, a learned man. He desired to embrace the whole of the knowledge of his time, which was then possible by dint of prodigious effort, and he succeeded. His works, countless in number, are the record of his knowledge. They are the _summa_ of all the sciences of his epoch. Here we have only to occupy ourselves with his more especially philosophical ideas. To Aristotle, as to Plato, but more precisely, man is composed of soul and body. The body is composed of organs, a well-made piece of mechanism; the soul is its final purpose; the body, so to speak, results in the soul, but, in turn, the soul acts on the body, and is in it not its end but its means of acting upon things, and the whole forms a full and continuous harmony. The faculties of the soul are its divers aspects, and its divers methods of acting; for the soul is one and indivisible. Reason is the soul considered as being able to conceive what is most general, and in consequence it forms within us an intermediary between ourselves and God. God is unique; He is eternal; from all eternity He has given motion to matter. He is purely spiritual, but all is material save Him, and He has not, as Plato would have it, _ideas_--immaterial living personifications--residing in His bosom. Here may be perceived, in a certain sense, progress, from Plato to Aristotle, towards monotheism; the Olympus of ideas in Plato was still a polytheism, a spiritual polytheism certainly, yet none the less a polytheism; there is no longer any polytheism at all in Aristotle. HIS THEORIES OF MORALS AND POLITICS.--The moral system of Aristotle sometimes approaches that of Plato, as when he deems that the supreme happiness is the supreme good, and that the supreme good is the contemplation of thought by thought--thought being self-sufficing; which is approximately the imitation of God which Plato recommended. Sometimes, on the contrary, it is very practical and almost mediocre, as when he makes it consist of a mean between the extremes, a just measure, a certain tact, art rather than science, and practical science rather than conscience, which will know how to distinguish which are the practices suitable for an honest and a well-born man. It is only just to add that in detail and when after all deductions he describes the just man, he invites us to contemplate virtues which if not sublime are none the less remarkably lofty. His very confused political philosophy (the volume containing it, according to all appearance, having been composed, after his death, of passages and fragments and different portions of his lectures) is specially a review of the divergent political constitutions which existed throughout the Greek world. The tendencies, for there are no conclusions, are still very aristocratic, but less radically aristocratic than those of Plato. THE AUTHORITY OF ARISTOTLE.--Aristotle, by reason of his universality, also because he is clearer than his master, and again because he dogmatises--not always, but very frequently--instead of discussing and collating, had throughout both antiquity and the Middle Ages an authority greater than that of Plato, an authority which became (except on matters of faith) despotic and well-nigh sacrosanct. Since the sixteenth century he has been relegated to his due rank--one which is still very distinguished, and he has been regarded as among the geniuses of the widest range, if not of the greatest power, that have appeared among men; even now he is very far from having lost his importance. For some he is a transition between the Greek genius--extremely subtle, but always poetic and always somewhat oriental--and the Roman genius: more positive, more bald, more practical, more attached to reality and to pure science. CHAPTER VI VARIOUS SCHOOLS The Development in Various Schools of the General Ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. THE SCHOOL OF PLATO; THEOPHRASTUS.--The school of Plato (not regarding Aristotle as belonging entirely to that school) was continued by Speusippus, Polemo, Xenocrates, Crates, and Crantor. Owing to a retrograde movement, widely different from that of Aristotle, it dabbled in the Pythagorean ideas, with which Plato was acquainted and which he often appreciated, but not blindly, and to which he never confined himself. The most brilliant pupil of Aristotle was Theophrastus, naturalist, botanist, and moralist. His great claim to fame among posterity, which knows nothing of him but this, is the small volume of _Characters_, which served as a model for La Bruyere, and before him to the comic poets of antiquity, and which is full of wit and flavour, and--to make use of a modern word exactly applicable to this ancient work--"humour." SCHOOLS OF MEGARA AND OF ELIS.--We may just mention the very celebrated schools which, owing to lack of texts, are unknown to us--that of Megara, which was called the Eristic or "wrangling" school, so marked was its predilection for polemics; and that of Elis, which appears to have been well versed in the sophistic methods of Zeno of Elea and of Gorgias. THE CYNIC SCHOOL; ANTISTHENES; DIOGENES.--Much more important is the Cynic school, because a school, which was nothing less than Stoicism itself, emanated or appeared to emanate from it. As often happens, the vague commencements of Stoicism bore a close resemblance to its end. The Stoics of the last centuries of antiquity were a sort of mendicant friars, ill-clothed, ill-fed, of neglected appearance, despising all the comforts of life; the Cynics at the time of Alexander were much the same, professing that happiness is the possession of all good things, and that the only way to possess all things is to know how to do without them. It was Antisthenes who founded this school, or rather this order. He had been the pupil of Socrates, and there can be no doubt that his sole idea was to imitate Socrates by exaggeration. Socrates had been poor, had scorned wealth, had derided pleasure, and poured contempt on science. The cult of poverty, the contempt for pleasures, for honours, for riches, and the perfect conviction that any knowledge is perfectly useless to man--that is all the teaching of Antisthenes. That can lead far, at least in systematic minds. If all is contemptible except individual virtue, it is reversion to savage and solitary existence which is preached: there is no more civilization or society or patriotism. Antisthenes in these ideas was surpassed by his disciples and successors; they were cosmopolitans and anarchists. The most illustrious of this school--illustrious especially through his eccentricity--was Diogenes, who rolled on the ramparts of Corinth the tub which served him as a house, lighted his lantern in broad daylight on the pretext of "searching for a man," called himself a citizen of the world, was accused of being banished from Sinope by his fellow-countrymen and replied, "It was I who condemned them to remain," and said to Alexander, who asked him what he could do for him: "Get out of my sunshine; you are putting me in the shade."