counterpoise: now this view of Socrates is, in my judgment, not only partial, but incorrect. He entertained no such doubts of the powers of the mind to attain certainty. About physics he thought man could know nothing; but respecting the topics which concern man and society, this was the field which the Gods had expressly assigned, not merely to human practice, but to human study and knowledge; and he thought that every man, not only might know these things, but ought to know them; that he could not possibly act well unless he did know them; and that it was his imperative duty to learn them as he would learn a profession, otherwise he was nothing better than a slave, unfit to be trusted as a free and accountable being. He was possessed by the truly Baconian idea, that the power of steady moral action depended upon, and was limited by, the rational comprehension of moral ends and means.”
The system, then, of Socrates was animated by the truest spirit of positive science, and formed an indispensable precursor to its attainment.
And we may form some estimate of his worth and genius if we recollect, that while the systems and speculations of other ancient philosophers serve only as curiosities to make us wonder, or as beacons to warn us into what absurdities the ablest men may fall, the principles and the system of Socrates and his followers, and of that school alone, exercise to this day an important influence on all human argument and speculation.
_Aristippus_ (whom we will consider before Plato, that Aristotle may follow Plato more immediately) came when a young man to Athens, for the express purpose of becoming acquainted with Socrates, with whom he remained almost till his death. He was, however, very different from his master, being a person of most luxurious and sensual habits. He was also the first of Socrates’ disciples who took money for teaching. He was the founder of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy, which followed Socrates in limiting all philosophical inquiries to ethics; though under this name they comprehended a more varied range of subjects than Socrates did, inasmuch as one of the parts into which they divided philosophy, referred to the feelings; another to causes, which is rather a branch of physics; and a third to proofs, which is clearly connected with logic.
He pronounced pleasure to be the chief good, and pain the chief evil; but he denied that either of these was a mere negative inactive state, considering them, on the contrary, both to be motions of the soul,—pain a violent, and pleasure a moderate one.
As to actions, he asserted that they were all morally indifferent, that men should only look to their results, and that law and custom are the only authorities which make an action either good or bad. Whatever conduces to pleasure, he thought virtue; in which he agreed with Socrates that the mind has the principal share.
_Plato_, the greatest of all the disciples of Socrates, was the son of Ariston and Perictione, and was born probably in the year B.C. 428, and descended, on the side of his father, from Codrus, and on his mother’s side related to Solon. At the age of twenty, he became a constant attendant of Socrates, and lived at Athens till his death. After this event, in consequence of the unpopularity of the very name of his master, he retired to Megara, and subsequently to Sicily. He is said also to have been at some part of his life, after the death of Socrates, a great traveller. About twelve years after the death of Socrates he returned to Athens, and began to teach in the Academy, partly by dialogue, and partly, probably, by connected lectures. He taught gratuitously; and besides Speusippus, Xenocrates, Aristotle, Heraclides Ponticus, and others, who were devoted solely to philosophical studies, he is said to have occasionally numbered Chabrias, Iphicrates, Timotheus, Phocion, Isocrates, and (by some) Demosthenes among his hearers. He died at a great age, B.C.
347.
His works have come down to us in a more complete form than those of any other ancient author who was equally voluminous; and from them we get a clear idea of the principal doctrines which he inculcated on his followers.
Like Socrates, he was penetrated with the idea, that knowledge and wisdom were the things most necessary to man, and the greatest goods assigned to him by God. Wisdom he looked on as the great purifier of the soul; and as any approach to wisdom presupposes an original communion with _Being_, properly so called, this communion also presupposes the divine nature, and consequent immortality of the soul, his doctrine respecting which was of a much purer and loftier character than the usual theology of the ancients.
Believing that the world also had a soul, he considered the human soul as similar to it in nature, and free from all liability to death, in spite of its being bound up with the appetites, in consequence of its connexion with the body, and as preserving power and consciousness after its separation from the body. What he believed, however, to be its condition after death is far less certain, as his ideas on this subject are expressed in a mythical form.
The chief point, however, to which Plato directed his attention, was ethics, which, especially in his system, are closely connected with politics. He devotes the Protagoras, and several shorter dialogues, to refute the sensual and selfish theories of some of his predecessors, in order to adopt a more scientific treatment of the subject; and in these dialogues he urges that neither happiness nor virtue are attainable by the indulgence of our desires, but that men must bring these into proper restraint, if they are desirous of either. He supposes an inward harmony, the preservation of which is pleasure, while its disturbance is pain; and as pleasure is always dependent on the activity from which it springs, the more this activity is elevated the purer the pleasure becomes.
Virtue he considered the fitness of the soul for the operations that are proper to it; and it manifests itself by means of its inward harmony, beauty, and health. Different phases of virtue are distinguishable so far as the soul is not pure spirit, but just as the spirit should rule both the other elements of the soul, so also should wisdom, as the inner development of the spirit, rule the other virtues.
Politics he considered an inseparable part of ethics, and the state as the copy of a well-regulated individual life: from the three different activities of the soul he deduced the three main elements of the state, likening the working class to the appetitive element of the soul, both of which equally require to be kept under control; the military order, which answered, in his idea, to the emotive element, ought to develop itself in thorough dependence on the reason; and from that the governing order, answering to the rational faculty, must proceed. The right of passing from a subordinate to a dominant position must depend on the individual capacity and ability for raising itself. But from the difficulties of realizing his theories, he renounces this absolute separation of ranks in his book on Laws, limits the power of the governors, attempts to reconcile freedom with unity and reason, and to mingle monarchy with democracy.
With respect to his theology, he appears to have agreed entirely with Socrates.
_Aristotle_ was born at Stageira, B.C. 384. His father, Nicomachus, was physician to Amyntas II., king of Macedon. At the age of seventeen he went to Athens, in hopes to become a pupil of Plato; but Plato was in Sicily, and did not return for three years, which time Aristotle applied to severe study, and to cultivating the friendship of Heraclides Ponticus. When Plato returned, he soon distinguished him above all his other pupils. He remained at Athens twenty years, maintaining, however, his connexion with Macedonia; but on the death of Plato, B.C. 347, which happened while Aristotle was absent in Macedonia on an embassy, he quitted Athens, thinking, perhaps, that travelling was necessary to complete his education. After a short period, he accepted an invitation from Philip to superintend the education of Alexander. He remained in Macedonia till B.C.
335, when he returned to Athens, where he found Xenocrates had succeeded Speusippus as the head of the Academy. Here the Lyceum was appropriated to him, in the shady walks (περίπατοι) of which he delivered his lectures to a number of eminent scholars who flocked around him. From these walks the name of Peripatetic was given to the School which he subsequently established. Like several others of the Greek philosophers, he had a select body of pupils, to whom he delivered his esoteric doctrines; and a larger, more promiscuous, and less accomplished company, to whom he delivered his exoteric lectures on less abstruse subjects. When he had resided thirteen years at Athens, he found himself threatened with a prosecution for impiety, and fled to Chalcis, in Eubœa, and died soon after, B.C. 322.
His learning was immense, and his most voluminous writings embraced almost every subject conceivable; but only a very small portion of them has come down to us. Cicero, however, alludes to him only as a moral philosopher, and occasionally as a natural historian; so that it may be sufficient here for us to confine our view of him to his teaching on the Practical Sciences; his Ethics, too, being one of his works which has come down to us entire.
God he considered to be the highest and purest energy of eternal intellect,—an absolute principle,—the highest reason, the object of whose thought is himself; expanding and declaring, in a more profound manner, the νοῦς of Anaxagoras. With respect to man, the object of all action, he taught, was happiness: and this happiness he defines to be an energy of the soul (or of life) according to virtue, existing by and for itself.
Virtue, again, he subdivided into moral and intellectual, according to the distinction between the reasoning faculty and that quality in the soul which obeys reason. Again, moral virtue is the proper medium between excess and deficiency, and can only be acquired by practice; intellectual virtue can be taught; and by the constant practice of moral virtue a man becomes virtuous, but he can only practise it by a resolute determination to do so. Virtue, therefore, is defined further as a habit accompanied by, or arising out of, deliberate choice, and based upon free and conscious action. From these principles, Aristotle is led to take a wider view of virtue than other philosophers: he includes friendship under this head, as one of the very greatest virtues, and a principal means for a steady continuance in all virtue; and as the unrestricted exercise of each species of activity directed towards the good, produces a feeling of pleasure, he considers pleasure as a very powerful means of virtue.
Connected with Aristotle’s system of ethics was his system of politics, the former being only a part, as it were, of the latter; the former aiming at the happiness of individuals, the latter at that of communities; so that the latter is the perfection and completion of the former. For Aristotle looked upon man as a “political animal”—as a being, that is, created by nature for the state, and for living in the state; which, as a totality consisting of organically connected members, is by nature prior to the individual or the family. The state he looked upon as a whole consisting of mutually dependent and connected members, with reference as well to imaginary as to actually existing constitutions. The constitution is the arrangement of the powers in the state—the soul of the state, as it were,—according to which the sovereignty is determined. The laws are the determining principles, according to which the dominant body governs and restrains those who would, and punishes those who do, transgress them. He defines three kinds of constitutions, each of them having a corresponding perversion:—a republic, arising from the principle of equality; this at times degenerates into democracy; monarchy, and aristocracy, which arise from principles of inequality, founded on the preponderance of external or internal strength and wealth, and which are apt to degenerate into tyranny and oligarchy. The education of youth he considers as a principal concern of the state, in order that, all the individual citizens being trained to a virtuous life, virtue may become predominant in all the spheres of political life; and, accordingly, by means of politics the object is realized of which ethics are the groundwork, namely, human happiness, depending on a life in accordance with virtue.
_Heraclides_ Ponticus, as he is usually called, was, as his name denotes, a native of Pontus. He migrated to Athens, where he became a disciple of Plato, who, while absent in Sicily, entrusted him with the care of his school.
_Speusippus_ was the nephew of Plato, and succeeded him as President of the Academy; but he continued so but a short time, and, within eight years of the death of Plato, he died at Athens, B.C. 339. He refused to recognise _the Good_ as the ultimate principle; but, going back to the older theologians, maintained that the origin of the universe was to be set down indeed as a cause of the Good and Perfect, but was not the Good and Perfect itself; for that was the result of generated existence or development, just as plants are of the seeds. When, with the Pythagoreans, he reckoned _the One_ in the series of good things, he probably thought of it only in opposition to _the Manifold_, and wished to point out that it is from _the One_ that _the Good_ is to be derived. He appears, however, (see De Nat. Deor. i. 13,) to have attributed vital activity to the primordial unity, as inseparably belonging to it.
_Theophrastus_ was a native of Eresus, from whence he migrated to Athens, where he became a follower of Plato, and afterwards of Aristotle, by whom, when he quitted Athens for Chalcis, he was designated as his successor in the presidency of the Lyceum; while in this position, he is said to have had two thousand disciples, and among them the comic poet Menander. When, B.C. 305, the philosophers were banished from Athens, he also left the city, but returned the next year on the repeal of the law. He lived to a great age, though the date of his birth is not certainly known.
He was a very voluminous writer on many subjects, but directed his chief attention to continuing the researches into natural history which had been begun by Aristotle. As, however, only a few fragments of his works have come down to us, and these in a very corrupt state, we know but little what peculiar views he entertained; though we learn from Cicero (De Inv.
i. 42-50) that he departed a good deal from the doctrines of Aristotle in his principles of ethics, and also in his metaphysical and theological speculations; and Cicero (De Nat. Deor. i. 13) complains that he did not express himself with precision or with consistency about the Deity; and in other places (Acad. i. 10, Tusc. Quæst. v. 9), that he appeared unable to comprehend a happiness resting merely on virtue; so that he had attributed to virtue a rank very inferior to its deserts.
_Xenocrates_ was a native of Chalcedon, born probably B.C. 396. He was a follower of Plato, and accompanied him to Sicily. After his death, he betook himself, with Aristotle, to the court of Hermias, tyrant of Ptarneus, but soon returned to Athens, and became president of the Academy when Speusippus, through ill health, was forced to abandon that post. He died B.C. 314.
He was not a man of great genius, but of unwearied industry and the purest virtue and integrity. None of his works have come down to us; but, from the notices of other writers, we are acquainted with some of his peculiar doctrines. He stood at the head of those who, regarding the universe as imperishable and existing from eternity, looked upon the chronic succession in the theory of Plato as a form in which to denote the relations of conceptual succession. He asserted that the soul was a self-moving member,—called Unity and Duality deities, considering the former as the first male existence, ruling in heaven, father and Jupiter; the latter as the female, as the mother of the Gods, and the soul of the universe, which reigns over the mutable world under heaven. He approximated to the Pythagoreans in considering Number as the principle of consciousness, and consequently of knowledge; supplying, however, what was deficient in the Pythagorean theory by the definition of Plato, that it is only in as far as number reconciles the opposition between _the same_ and the different, and can raise itself to independent motion, that it is soul.
In his ethics he endeavoured to render the Platonic theory more complete, and to give it a more direct applicability to human life; admitting, besides the good and the bad, of something which is neither good nor bad, and some of these intermediate things, such as health, beauty, fame, good fortune, he would not admit to be absolutely worthless and indifferent. He maintained, however, in the most decided manner, that virtue is the only thing valuable in itself, and that the value of everything else is conditional, (see Cic. de Fin. iv. 18, de Leg. i. 21, Acad. i. 6, Tusc.
Quæst. v. 10-18,) that happiness ought to coincide with the consciousness of virtue. He did not allow that mere intellectual scientific wisdom was the only true wisdom to be sought after as such by men: and in one point he came nearer the precepts of Christianity than any of the ancients, when he asserted the indispensableness of the morality of the thoughts to virtue, and declared it to be the same thing, whether a person cast longing eyes on the possessions of his neighbour, or attempted to possess himself of them by force.
_Antisthenes_ was older than Plato; though the exact time of his birth is uncertain: but he fought at the battle of Tanagra, B.C. 420, though then very young. He became a disciple of Gorgias, and afterwards of Socrates, at whose death he set up a school in the Cynosarges, a gymnasium for the use of Athenians born of foreign mothers, near the temple of Hercules, from which place of assembly his followers were called Cynics. He lived to a great age, though the year of his death is not known, but he certainly was alive after the battle of Leuctra, B.C. 371.
In his philosophical system, which was almost confined to ethics, he appears to have aimed at novelty rather than truth or common sense. He taught that in all that the wise man does he conforms to perfect virtue, and that pleasure is so far from being necessary to man, that it is a positive evil. He is reported also to have gone the length of pronouncing pain and infamy blessings rather than evils, though when he spoke of pleasure as worthless, he probably meant that pleasure which arises from the gratification of sensual or artificial desires; for he praised that which arises from the intellect, and from friendship. The _summum bonum_ he placed in a life according to virtue.
In a treatise in which he discussed the nature of the Gods he contended for the unity of the Deity, and asserted that man is unable to know him by any sensible representation, since he is unlike any being on earth; and demonstrated the sufficiency of virtue for happiness, by the doctrine that outward events are regulated by God so as to benefit the wise and good.
_Diogenes_, a native of Sinope in Pontus, who was born B.C. 412, was one of his few disciples; he came at an early age to Athens, and became notorious for the most frantic excesses of moroseness and self-denial. On a voyage to Ægina he was taken by pirates and sold as a slave to Xeniades, a Corinthian, over whom he acquired great influence, and was made tutor to his children. His system consisted merely in teaching men to dispense with even the simplest necessaries of civilized life: and he is said to have taught that all minds are air, exactly alike, and composed of similar particles; but that in beasts and in idiots they are hindered from properly developing themselves by various humors and incapacities of their bodies. He died B.C. 323, the same year that Epicurus came to Athens.
_Zeno_ was born at Citium, a city of Cyprus; but having been shipwrecked near Cyprus, he settled in that city, where he devoted himself to severe study for a great length of time, cultivating, it is said, the acquaintance of the philosophers of the Megaric school, Diodorus and Philo, and of the Academics, Xenocrates and Polemo. After he had completed his studies, he opened a school himself in the porch, adorned with the paintings of Polygnotus (Στοὰ ποικίλη), from which his followers were called Stoics. The times of his birth and of his death are not known with any exactness; but he is said to have reached a great age.
In speaking of the Stoic doctrines, it is not very clear how much of them proceeded from Zeno himself, and how much from Chrysippus and other eminent men of the school in subsequent years. In natural philosophy he considered that there was a primary matter which was never increased or diminished, and which was the foundation of everything which existed: and which was brought into existence by the operative power,—that is, by the Deity. He saw this operative power in fire and in æther as the basis of all vital activity, (see Cic. Acad. i. 11, ii. 41; de Nat. Deor. ii. 9, iii. 14,) and he taught that the universe comes into being when the primary substance passing from fire through the intermediate stage of air becomes liquefied, and then the thick portion becomes earth, the thinner portion air, which is again rarefied till it becomes fire. This fire he conceived to be identical with the Deity, (Cic. de Nat. Deor. ii. 22,) and to be endowed with consciousness and foresight. At other times he defined the Deity as that law of nature which ever accomplishes what is right, and prevents the opposite, and identified it with unconditional necessity. The soul of man he considered as being of the nature of fire, or of a warm breath, (Cic. Tusc. Quæst. i. 9; de Nat. Deor. iii. 4,) and therefore as mortal.
In ethics he agreed with the Cynics in recognising the constitutional nature of moral obligations, though he differed from them with respect to things indifferent, and opposed their morose contempt for custom, though he did not allow that the gratification of mere external wants, or that external good fortune, had any intrinsic value. He comprised everything which could make life happy in virtue alone (Cic. Acad. i. 10), and called it the only good which deserved to be striven after and praised for its own sake (Cic. de Fin. iii. 6, 8), and taught that the attainment of it must inevitably produce happiness. But as virtue could, according to his system, only subsist in conjunction with the perfect dominion of reason, and vice only in the renunciation of the authority of reason, he inferred that one good action could not be more virtuous than another, and that a person who had one virtue had all, and that he who was destitute of one was destitute of all.
_Cleanthes_ was born at Assos in the Troas, about 300 B.C.; he came to Athens at an early age, and became the pupil of Zeno, whom at his death he succeeded in his school. He differed from his master in regarding the soul as immortal, and approximated to the Cynics in denying that pleasure was agreeable to nature, or in any respect good. He died of voluntary starvation at the age of eighty.
_Chrysippus_ was born B.C. 280, at Soli in Cilicia. He came at an early age to Athens, and became a pupil of Cleanthes; and among the later Stoics he was more regarded than either Zeno or Cleanthes. He died B.C. 207.
His doctrines do not appear to have differed from those of Zeno; only that, from feeling the dangerous influence of the Epicurean principles, he endeavoured to popularize the Stoic ethics.
_Epicurus_ was an Athenian of the Attic demos Gargettus, whence he is sometimes simply called the Gargettian. He was, however, born at Samos, B.C. 342, and did not come to Athens till the age of eighteen, when he found Xenocrates at the head of the Academy, and by some authors is said to have become his pupil, though he himself would not admit it (Cic. de Nat. Deor. i. 26). At the outbreak of the Samian war he crossed over to Colophon, where he collected a school. It is said that the first thing that excited him to the study of philosophy was the perusal of the works of Democritus while he resided at Colophon. From thence he went to Mitylene and Lampsacus, and B.C. 306 he returned to Athens, and finally established himself as a teacher of philosophy. His own life was that of a man of simple, pure, and temperate habits. He died of the stone, B.C. 270, and left Hermarchus of Mitylene as his successor in the management of his school.
None of his works have come down to us. With regard to his philosophical system, in spite of his boast of being self-taught and having borrowed from no one, he clearly derived the chief part of his natural philosophy from Democritus, and of his moral philosophy from Aristippus and the Cyrenaics. He considered human happiness the end of all philosophy, and agreed with the Cyrenaics that pleasure constituted the greatest happiness; still this theory in his hands acquired a far loftier character; for pleasure, in his idea, was not a mere momentary and transitory sensation, but something lasting and imperishable, consisting in pure mental enjoyments, and in the freedom from pain and any other influence which could disturb man’s peace of mind. And the _summum bonum_, according to him, consisted in this peace of mind; which was based upon correct wisdom (φρόνησις).
In his natural philosophy he embraced the atomic theories of Democritus and Diagoras, carrying them even further than they themselves had done, to such a degree that he drew upon himself the reproach of Atheism. He regarded the Gods themselves as consisting of atoms, and our notions of them as based upon the images (εἴδωλα) which are reflected from them, and so pass into our minds. And he believed that they exercised no influence whatever on the world, or on the actions or fortunes of man.
_Theodorus_ was a native of Cyrene, who flourished about B.C. 320. He was of the Cyrenaic sect, and the founder of that branch of it which was called after him, the Theodorean; though we scarcely know in what his doctrines differed from those of Aristippus, unless they were, if possible, of a still more lax character. He taught, for instance, that there was nothing really wrong or disgraceful in theft, adultery, or sacrilege; but that they were branded by public opinion to restrain fools.
He is also reproved with utter atheism; and Cicero classes him with Diagoras, as a man who utterly denied the existence of any Gods at all.
_Pyrrho_ was a contemporary of Alexander the Great, whose expedition into Asia he joined. He appears, as far as his philosophy went, to have been an universal sceptic. He impeached, however, none of the chief principles of morality, but, regarding Socrates as his model, directed all his endeavours towards the production in his pupils of a firm well-regulated moral character.
_Crantor_ was a native of Soli in Cilicia; we do not know when he was born or when he died, but he came to Athens before B.C. 315. He was the first of Plato’s followers who wrote commentaries on the works of his master. He died of dropsy, and left Arcesilaus his heir.
_Arcesilaus_, or _Arcesilas_, flourished about B.C. 280; he was born at Pitane, but came to Athens and became the pupil of Theophrastus and of Crantor, and afterwards of some of the more sceptical philosophers. On the death of Crantor he succeeded to the chair of the Academy, in the doctrines of which he made so many innovations that he is called the founder of the New Academy. What his peculiar views were is, however, a matter of great uncertainty. Some give him the credit of having restored the doctrines of Plato in an uncorrupted form; while, according to Cicero, on the other hand, (Acad. i. 12,) he summed up all his opinions in the statement that he knew nothing, not even his own ignorance. He, and the New Academy, do not, however, seem to have doubted the existence of truth in itself, but only the capacity of man for arriving at the knowledge of it.
_Carneades_ was born at Cyrene about B.C. 213. He went early to Athens, and at first attended the lectures of the Stoics; but subsequently attached himself to the Academy, and succeeded to the chair on the death of Hegesinus. In the year B.C. 155, he came to Rome on an embassy, but so offended Cato by speaking one day in praise of justice as a virtue, and the next day, in answer to all his previous arguments, that he made a motion in the senate, that he should be ordered to depart from Rome. He died B.C. 129.
_Philo_ of Larissa, who is often mentioned by Cicero, was his own master, having removed to Rome after the conquest of Athens by Mithridates, where he settled as a teacher of philosophy and rhetoric. He would not admit that there was any difference between the Old and New Academy, in which he differed from his pupil Antiochus. The exact time of his birth or death is not known; but he was not living when Cicero composed his Academics. (ii.
6.)
_Antiochus_ of Ascalon has been called by some writers the founder of the Fifth Academy; he also was a teacher of Cicero during the time he studied at Athens; he had also a school at Alexandria, and another in Syria, where he died. He studied under Philo, but was so far from agreeing with him that he wrote a treatise on purpose to refute what he considered as the scepticism of the Academics. And undoubtedly the later philosophers of that school had exaggerated the teaching of Plato, that the senses were not in all cases trustworthy organs of perception, so as to infer from it a denial of the certainty of any knowledge whatever. Antiochus professed that his object was to revive the real doctrines of Plato in opposition to the modern scepticism of Carneades and Philo. He appears to have considered himself as an eclectic philosopher, combining the best parts of the doctrines of the Academic, Peripatetic, and Stoic schools.
_Diodorus_ of Tyre flourished about B.C. 110. He lived at Athens, where he succeeded Critolaus as the head of the Peripatetic school. Cicero, however, denies that he was a genuine Peripatetic, and says that his doctrine that the _summum bonum_ consisted in a combination of virtue with the absence of pain was an attempt to reconcile the theory of the Stoics with that of the Epicureans.
_Panætius_ was a native of Rhodes; his exact age is not known, but he was a contemporary of Scipio Æmilianus, who died B.C. 129. He went to Athens at an early age, where he is said to have been a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus, and also of Polemo Periegetes. He became associated with P. Scipio Æmilianus, who valued him highly. The latter part of his life he spent at Athens, where he had succeeded Antipater as head of the Stoic school. He was the author of a treatise on “What is Becoming,” which Cicero professes to have imitated, though carried rather further, in his De Officiis. He softened down the harsher features of the Stoic doctrines, approximating them in some degree to the opinions of Xenocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and made them attractive by the elegance of his style; indeed, he modified the principles of the school so much, that some writers called him a Platonist. In natural philosophy he abandoned the Stoic doctrine of the conflagration of the world; endeavoured to simplify the division of the faculties of the soul; and doubted the reality of the science of divination. In ethics he followed the method of Aristotle; and, in direct opposition to the earlier Stoics, vindicated the claim of certain pleasurable sensations to be regarded as in accordance with nature.
_Polemo_ was a pupil of Xenocrates, and succeeded him as the head of his school. There is a story that he had been a very dissolute young man, and that one day, at the head of a band of revellers, he burst into the school of Xenocrates, when his attention was so arrested by the discourse of the philosopher, which happened to be on the subject of temperance, that he tore off his festive garland, remained till the end of the lecture, and devoted himself to philosophy all the rest of his life. He does not appear to have varied at all from the doctrines of his master. He died B.C. 273.
_Archytas_ was a native of Tarentum: his age is not quite certain, but he is believed to have been a contemporary of Plato, and he is even said to have saved his life by his interest with the tyrant Dionysius. He was a great general and statesman, as well as a philosopher. In philosophy he was a Pythagorean; and, like most of that school, a great mathematician; and applied his favourite science not only to music, but also to metaphysics. Aristotle is believed to have borrowed from him his System of Categories.
The limits of this volume forbid more than the preceding very brief sketch of the chiefs of the ancient philosophy. For a more detailed account the reader is referred to the Biographical Dictionary edited by Dr. Smith, from which valuable work much of this sketch has been derived. The account of Socrates has been principally derived from Mr. Grote’s admirable history of Greece: in which attention has so successfully been devoted to the history of philosophy and the sophists, that a correct idea of the subject can hardly be acquired without a careful study of that work.
It was intended to subjoin a comparison of the systems of the different sects, but it would take more space than can be spared; and it is moreover unnecessary, as, the distinctive tenets of each having been explained, the reader is supplied with sufficient materials to institute such a comparison for himself. He will not wonder that men without the guidance of revelation should at times have lost their way in speculations beyond the reach of human faculties, but will the more admire that genius and virtue which manifested itself in such men as Socrates, Plato, and Cicero, for the perpetual enlightenment of the human race.
INTRODUCTION.
The following account of the two Books of the Academics is extracted from the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, edited by Dr. W. Smith:— “The history of this work, before it finally quitted the hands of its author, is exceedingly curious and somewhat obscure; but must be clearly understood before we can explain the relative position of those portions of it which have been transmitted to modern times. By comparing carefully a series of letters written to Atticus, in the course of B.C. 45 (Ep. ad that Cicero had drawn up a treatise upon the Academic Philosophy, in the