Part 12

Thus you have a conglomerate of civilised communities, all speaking the same language and with similar ideals of culture, not separated by hostile creeds, and with the power, when united, of exercising a dominant influence upon the world around them; and yet their power and their development are paralysed by mutual jealousies and constant quarrels, resulting in frequent and desolating wars. We have no cases in Europe at all parallel except the condition of Italy in the Renaissance and of Germany in the middle of the last century. When I was a boy and we travelled in a carriage through that country (railways had not yet been introduced) we used in the course of a day to pass through a whole principality and across a border with custom houses, and a new flag, and often a new coinage. There were then, I believe, sixty-six reigning personages--grand dukes, electors, etc.--in Germany. You know how all were either absorbed or reduced to one empire, or allowed to live on as vassal states, to use rather a hard word, within the compass of a few years. That was what happened ultimately in Greece, where the Macedonian power played a part analogous to that of Prussia, and made itself by a successful war against a foreign power not only accepted but popular. The important point in which Greece gives modern nations a further lesson is this; Revolutionary or extemporised monarchies in such a case will not succeed. The Greeks, especially in Asia Minor and in Sicily, where there was danger from foreign powers, had come to the conclusion that a monarch was necessary to combine them into a strong military and financial power, and they were therefore again willing to submit themselves to tyrants or despots, as they had been of old, when they wanted relief from the internecine disputes between the classes and the masses. There were some brilliant essays in this direction made, notably by Dionysius of Syracuse, and by Mausollus of Halicarnassus. But they failed to found a dynasty, even as the Bonapartes failed, in spite of their greatness and the benefits they had conferred.

Thus not only the achievements, but the failures of the Greeks may convey to us valuable lessons, because they constituted a thoroughly “modern” society and suffered from the weaknesses and vices of such societies.

As this last statement may seem to some of you a paradox, I proceed in conclusion to illustrate it, by some observations on the condition of Greek society as described to us by Aristotle and by Polybius. The former, in describing his ideal (for he had not yet renounced it) of a small, well-ordered state, governed in the interest of the majority of the citizens by good laws and humane rulers, makes it his _sine qua non_ that the middle class shall outweigh in public importance both the wealthy and the indigent. Now that was exactly the condition which in the days of Polybius was becoming rarer and rarer, nay, practically unknown. This was the very class disappearing rapidly from every state in Greece. And why? The economic conditions were changing, and owing to the great influx of gold from the East and other causes, living was becoming dearer every day. Luxuries were also coming to be regarded as necessities, and so for the poor who had the bribe of large pay and great license offered them in the mercenary service of Hellenistic kings, emigration became the rule, and the want of labour turned farming from the agricultural to the pastoral type. Hence the middle classes, which had no capital to work large farms, became poorer and the rich richer and more selfish.

And what was the remedy adopted by the middle classes to maintain themselves in comfort? An expedient not unknown in this country and for not very dissimilar reasons. It was the limitation of families, the avoidance of the duty and cost of bringing up children, so that Polybius speaks of it as the signal feature of the Greece of his day--the strange barrenness that had come upon the once prolific inhabitants of the land. Such a misfortune can be avoided only when great immigration exists, and even then it results in replacing the old population, the cream of the country, by the scum gathered from abroad. There were no inducements for immigration into Greece and so the country which was once teeming with population sunk into somnolence and decay.

Could I offer you a clearer proof of the modern character of this civilisation, which had not only a youth and an age of gold, but then a silver autumn or a Martinmas summer, when Plutarch lived in his little deserted town, surrounded by a complete and terrible decadence? And it may not be out of place to remind you that even with many differences of age, of place, and of circumstances, the same moral causes that produce decay in one civilisation are likely to produce it in another.

The societies that fell into these vices were not ignorant or uneducated. The average Greek public was probably better trained in the knowledge of great ideas and the enjoyment of great literature than any public nowadays. Grote said very deliberately that the ordinary Attic citizen who attended the assemblies where Pericles and Theramenes and Demosthenes spoke, and where many others of like culture joined in the debate--that such a man was better educated, in the political sense, than the average member of the House of Commons in his day; and Grote had attended to the business of that House for ten years of his life. It was then, moreover, an assembly of English gentlemen, of the middle and upper classes, with a strong aristocratic flavour. What language would he have used had he compared his Periclean citizen to the House of Commons of the twentieth century? But in any case, we may say one thing with certainty, and it is one of the greatest lessons which the Greeks have to tell us: Intellectual culture by itself is no certain antidote to decadence in any society--nay, not even in that of Boston, Massachusetts.

The moral conditions of refined Attic life in these dying days are best known from the remains, or from the Latin translations of the society plays of the famous Menander. The life which Menander portrayed has been discussed and estimated in a chapter of my _Greek Life and Thought_, and you will there see at length how trivial, how selfish, how immoral, how ignoble that life was. If such was indeed the true character of Attic society in Menander’s days, we may well congratulate the world that the Macedonian conquerer arose to show the world that there were greater ideals than to while away one’s time in the rotten refinements of decadent Athens.

When I wrote that chapter, we were still dependent for our estimate of Menander and his society in the Latin translations, or adaptations, by Plautus and Terence, and there were those that thought the Roman adapters had chosen the trivial side of a society which might be not only refined but serious and thoughtful. The recent discovery of large fragments of four plays on a papyrus roll in Egypt has dissipated any such hopes. The same triviality, the same stupid repetition of vulgar and immoral plots and topics meet us throughout these scenes. If there be any moral lesson conveyed by the picture we here have of Attic society, it is this: that the slave and the prostitute were not only more intelligent, but less immoral than their masters. In all these so-called pictures of life, not a single person of the least distinction appears--not a single philosopher, or politician, or poet, or man of letters, or benefactor--though we know that the walls of temples and cities were being covered with panegyrics of leading citizens and their civic and private virtues. Not a single problem of religious or political importance is ever discussed. There is not even, in the new fragments, any wealth of that vulgar proverbial wisdom, or sententiousness posing as wisdom, which was gathered from the plays of Menander by diligent collectors, and which, surviving in thousands of lines, has given him a false importance in the histories of Greek literature. But here, as elsewhere, the lapse of ages had separated the wheat from the chaff; the later scholiasts and commentators gathered from Menander the stray gems, as one might pick from the array of a gay but stupid lady the real diamonds with which she had adorned her worthless person.

In relation to Greek politics, which is our subject to-day, this is no idle digression. For it shows us clearly that the higher society of Athens had abandoned this great human interest and so had narrowed and impoverished their spiritual life. It is usual to repeat in our histories that the growth of the Macedonian power, of the Hellenistic kings, of the Roman Republic, killed all possibility of any serious Greek politics, and that in consequence serious men were driven into anti-social philosophy at home, active men into mercenary service abroad. In Menander’s day and long after it, there was still plenty of work for honest and capable men in saving the liberties and the dignities of their native cities. A century later, Polybius shows how the total ruin of Greece and the disastrous conquest by Mummius were mainly produced by the follies and violences of stupid and corrupt demagogues. But these demagogues were invested with official power by the votes of those that still practised politics, when the better classes had retired in disgust. If this disgust dated from Menander’s time, then we can only reflect that those who have abdicated their influence in the day of their country’s prosperity, are not likely to regain it when a crisis comes, and when the masses have found for themselves other leaders.

I have seen a very similar catastrophe in the Ireland of my own time. I have seen the old landed gentry, who had long lived a gay, idle, hospitable life, when their privileges and their properties were attacked by a dangerous agitation, show such want of public spirit, such miserable mistrust in one another, such reckless folly in not spending time, money, and energy in resisting their plunderers, that they lost the sympathy of all their friends, and while they called on English influence to protect them, and railed against all concession and compromise, they have seen their land filched from them by successive legislative inroads upon their rights, and their fortunes ruined even by those on whom they relied to defend them. Many a time did I warn those about me of these inevitable consequences, but there I have seen another instance, and one which came home to me with poignant regret, of the miseries induced by mere incompetence. _Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat._

VIII

HIGHER THINKING, PHILOSOPHY, SPECULATIVE AND PRACTICAL THEOLOGY

In my last lecture I spoke of the small effect, or want of effect, which a mere intellectual training in the liberal arts might have upon the average morals of a large society. To-day I propose to take you into a higher atmosphere, and consider what occupied the élite of Greek society in their advanced education, and in their speculations on the nature of things. You must not underrate the enormous advantages the well-born youth then possessed in training his mind, as compared with the youth of to-day. In the first place, a very moderate income would keep a household in comfort, and remove all the grinding care which, in this our modern life with its myriad exigencies, torments so many respectable families. In the next place, the demon of competition had not invaded these states, nor was it possible to do as I and many others have done, to be a slave for some years in order to obtain a competence by passing first in a single examination. In the third place, there was no object in travelling long distances. What was worth seeing, lay within easy reach. In modern life there is only Holland, and perhaps Northern Italy, which offers the same delights within short distances. The huge amount of time spent by Americans in travelling is perhaps one of the most serious obstacles to their intellectual advancement. If North America were compressed into one tenth its size, its inhabitants might gain some leisure for better education.

The obvious thing that will strike any intelligent American, who has only heard of Plato, and wants to make his acquaintance through Jowett’s noble translation, is the amount of time these Dialogues waste in arriving at a conclusion. Nay often they represent a very long conversation which comes to no conclusion at all. Yet that feature is essential to all higher training of the human mind. You may appear to the vulgar to be wasting time, and yet it is not wasting time, but doing the best you can for a great object. The earth moving in its orbit need not delay its regular course because it revolves upon its axis, and causes its whole surface to enjoy the blessed light of the sun. And the next thing you will find in Plato’s Dialogues (the best exponent of higher education I know) is that the objects in view are not those of sense, or of the material needs of life, or of obtaining success in the world. They all, like Saint Paul’s reasonings with Felix, have to do with righteousness and temperance, and judgment to come. But even this field, that of ethical inquiry, is not the highest to which Greek education attained. For their early teachers taught them to think about the universe and its constitution, the nature of mind, the nature of matter, and other high questions of abstract metaphysic.

A notable point about this Greek philosophy is that the priest or the enchanter has nothing to say to it. The sage was a layman, who need fear no pope, no ban of the Church, in using his reason freely upon the problems even of theology. There were indeed isolated cases, where a man who denied the existence of the traditional gods, or was supposed so to do, was pursued by popular indignation. Diagoras of Melos, called the atheist, was driven from the societies which thought such teaching dangerous; Socrates was prosecuted in like manner, because he was suspected of spreading scepticism among the youth, but he was executed only because he behaved in a manner highly contumacious to the established order of the State. Had he defended himself in the ordinary routine, he would at most have been subjected to a fine. These isolated cases are only mentioned lest you should imagine that they were typical. Greek philosophy being secular, was therefore free.

The earliest thinkers, those of the Ionic school, set themselves to solve by speculation the very question which now engrosses our deepest researches in physics. They thought out, or they inferred from their observations, that “things are not as they seem”; they found out, what we have attained by long experiment, that the many qualities our senses perceive are not fundamental or primary, that as Descartes and Locke and Spinoza taught, mechanical composition and varying degrees of motion in minute particles of the same kind may produce wholly diverse impressions. The most obvious and striking of these to the ordinary man is the case of colour. Descartes had anticipated that the pace of the rotation of particles made the differences; we know now that it is not rotation, but vibration of ether, and so with variation in tones. But the differences both of colours and sounds are due to the more or less rapid motion of the vibration. This was what Thales and Anaximenes and Anaximander felt when they said that the world consisted of one element, that moisture, caloric, ether, were the primitive stuff of which the world was composed. And these famous men were not mere metaphysicians, they showed their intellectual greatness in various ways. Thales actually predicted an eclipse, to the astonishment of his contemporaries.[45] He showed them that the lesser bear, ending in the pole star, was a better indication for the sailor to use than the greater. He solved the problem of measuring the height of an inaccessible object by comparing its shadow with that of a small one within reach. He gave valuable advices in politics. So that his metaphysic was both the source and the climax of a wide mental activity. So with Anaximander. He attempted the first map of the known world and made signal advances in astronomy. Anaximenes declared that eclipses were the concealing of one heavenly body by the interposition of another. These were great feats; but they were nothing in comparison to the bold attempts at solving the problem of the origin and nature of the world, wherein their speculations, often erroneous, nevertheless left a residuum of thoughts that were the seeds of all our higher philosophy.

If Thales laid it down that in all the varieties of plant and animal life there was a common element which was their real or original substance, Anaximander thought that caloric (or the igneous principle) was necessary to develop the original material. His book is lost, and his views not clear to us, but we know that his geological observations told him that our world had once been covered with water, from which land had emerged. He was moreover the first to maintain that nothing was eternal except the primeval substance of things.

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

In the largest sense, even applying it to the gods of the Greek Pantheon, did he assert this colossal doctrine. Anaximenes went further, and, assuming that the particles of ether are the most subtle in the universe, he set up the principle of rarification and condensation of matter, asserting that this was the one great cause of the differences in the bodies we perceive. This then was the first expression of the doctrine of the Atomists, which has lasted to the present day.

It is a common piece of arrogance among experimentalists to say that these wonderful anticipations of modern science were mere gropings in the dark, supported not by experiment, but by what we should call superficial observations. The wonder is all the greater that these men should in their theories have gone to the root of the matter, and thought out the metaphysical possibilities of the composition of the world. Abstract thinking--theory--is after all the true basis of every great discovery. In complete disregard of the theological cosmogony derived from the old poets, they openly inaugurated the birth of a natural science engendered by pure and high thinking.

This is even more signally the case with Heracleitus of Ephesus. But I can only give you some of his marvellous anticipations in a few words; to go into any one of these systems would require a whole lecture, not a passage in this discourse. In the first place he agreed with both his predecessors, that one subtle element was the foundation of all nature and this he sought in what the vulgar call fire, but with him a far more subtle essence, never still for an instant. From this all the universe had been evolved by a process of cooling, and had developed into earth, water, and the rest, but in the end these would return into their original condition, “so that the earth would be rolled up as a scroll, and the elements dissolved with fervent heat.” This far-off glimpse of Laplace’s theory, which postulates our whole planetary system starting from a revolving mass at white heat, is less striking than another that lays down the principle that there are endless motions in things which the senses cannot perceive, and that absolute rest is impossible in nature.

The world was never made; It will change, but it will not fade. So let the wind range For even and morn, ever will be, thro’ eternity. Nothing was born, nothing will die, All things will change.[46]

It is but yesterday that the newest physical philosophers have declared themselves for this doctrine, and tell us that every particle of matter is made up of lesser particles in perpetual motion. Heracleitus was no less clear on the relativity of the qualities of matter, which are good or bad according to the percipient, and from that he drew the conclusion that apparent contradictions may coexist and that all nature consists in a perpetual conflict between opposites. Nature is a state of war said he, using the term in a far deeper sense than did later men.

These amazing conjectures were set down in a quaint, picturesque, but abstruse treatise, which even Aristotle found difficult to grasp, but if ever a great imagination sowed seeds in the minds of men, which after long generations germinated into modern science, it was that of Heracleitus. His dark enigmas, seasoned with pessimistic utterances, with supreme contempt of the ordinary public, were always attractive and stimulating to keen minds.

The next great name in this magnificent series is Pythagoras, whose influence revolutionised not only the science but the politics and ethics of Greece, and created new ideals among men, higher and purer than those of traditional morality. But as I have already said something of him in a former discourse, I will hurry on to his contemporaries and his successors.

The founder of the great school of Elea, an old Greek colony of Ionians in the Italian bay south of Pæstum, was Xenophanes, whose main feature was a bold criticism of the popular theology, as represented by the poetry of Homer. He could easily show the moral defects of the denizens of the Homeric Olympus, and hence inferring their unreality, he pressed home the great doctrine of the unity of the universe, whether ideal or real, and the identification of the Maker (if there ever was a Maker) with his work--a theory which has existed from that day to this under the name of Pantheism, and as such has fascinated the higher spirits even among the cold and practical Anglo-Saxons. This feeling of unity in all the world with the Eternal Cause of the world has indeed appeared in the far East in other and strange systems of philosophy; but never was the doctrine discussed with such variety as among the Greeks. Lofty poetry, hard logic, bitter controversy were all called in to support it, and among a clear-sighted, sceptical race, like the Greeks, so vague and transcendent a theory is far more striking and therefore more fruitful in its spiritual consequences, than when professed by mere ascetics or anchorites who have no contact with common life, and who will not condescend to argument. The Greek Pantheists of the early period were men of high character in public life, respected for their practical wisdom and their literary eminence, and it was they that forced upon the world the astounding theory that not only are all the data of our senses illusory and vain, but that even the assumption of any number of original elements or substances is idle, and must terminate in the great _One_, which embraces them all, and merges gods and men, matter and mind, into that all-embracing Single Being, of whom a forgotten mystic in a later age (but still a Greek) has used this tremendous metaphor: the “gods are his laughter, the race of mortal men his tears.”

The positive side of the doctrine was mainly due to Parmenides, of whom Plato speaks with greater respect than of any other thinker except Socrates, and it was clearly a further development, or urging to their extreme consequences, of the older theories which reduced all the various qualities of the world of sense to the manifestations of a single substance. But they had each made some one reservation and upheld one of the data of the senses, but each a different one. Was not therefore the inference clear that this was but a half-way house, and that what we call mind and matter are after all not radically distinct but only separate aspects of the primeval one?