established, each tendency expressing in its own way the principle of “conforming to nature.”
Among the primary ends of nature, in which wisdom recognized a certain preferability, the Stoics included freedom from bodily pain; but they refused, even in this outer court of wisdom, to find a place for pleasure. They held that the latter was not an object of uncorrupted Stoics and hedonists. natural impulse, but an “aftergrowth” (ἐπιγέννημα). They thus endeavoured to resist Epicureanism even on the ground where the latter seems prima facie strongest; in its appeal, namely, to the natural pleasure-seeking of all living things. Nor did they merely mean by pleasure (ἡδονή) the gratification of bodily appetite; we find (e.g.) Chrysippus urging, as a decisive argument against Aristotle, that pure speculation was “a kind of amusement; that is, pleasure.” Even the “joy and gladness” (χαρά, εὐφροσύνη) that accompany the exercise of virtue seem to have been regarded by them as merely an inseparable accident, not the essential constituent of well-being. It is only by a later modification of Stoicism that cheerfulness or peace of mind is taken as the real ultimate end, to which the exercise of virtue is merely a means. At the same time it is probable that the serene joys of virtue and the grieflessness which the sage was conceived to maintain amid the worst tortures, formed the main attractions of Stoicism for ordinary minds. In this sense it may be fairly said that Stoics and Epicureans made rival offers to mankind of the same kind of happiness; and the philosophical peculiarities of either system may be traced to the desire of being undisturbed by the changes and chances of life. The Stoic claims on this head were the loftiest; as the well-being of their sage was independent, not only of external things and bodily conditions, but of time itself; it was fully realized in a single exercise of wisdom and could not be increased by duration. This paradox is violent, but it is quite in harmony with the spirit of Stoicism; and we are more startled to find that the Epicurean sage, no less than the Stoic, is to be happy even on the rack; that his happiness, too, is unimpaired by being restricted in duration, when his mind has apprehended the natural limits of life; that, in short, Epicurus makes no less strenuous efforts than Zeno to eliminate imperfection from the conditions of human existence. This characteristic, however, is the key to the chief differences between Epicureanism and the more naïve hedonism of Aristippus. The latter system gave the simplest and most obvious answer to the inquiry after ultimate good for man; but besides being liable, when developed consistently, to offend the common moral consciousness, it conspicuously failed to provide the “completeness” and “security” which, as Aristotle says, “one divines to belong to man’s true Good.” Philosophy, in the Greek view, should be the art as well as the science of good life; and hedonistic philosophy would seem a bungling and uncertain art of pleasure, as pleasure is ordinarily conceived. Nay, it would even be found that the habit of philosophical reflection often operated adversely to the attainment of this end, by developing the thinker’s self-consciousness, so as to disturb that normal relation to external objects on which the zest of ordinary enjoyment depends. Hence we find that later thinkers of the Cyrenaic school felt themselves compelled to change their fundamental notion; thus Theodorus defined the good as “gladness” (χαρά) depending on wisdom, as distinct from mere pleasure, while Hegesias proclaimed that happiness was unattainable, and that the chief function of wisdom was to render life painless by producing indifference to all things that give pleasure. But by such changes their system lost the support that it had had in the pleasure-seeking tendencies of ordinary men. It was clear that if philosophic hedonism was to be established on a broad and firm basis, it must in its notion of good combine what the plain man naturally sought with what philosophy could plausibly offer. Such a combination was effected, with some little violence, by Epicurus; whose system with all its defects showed a remarkable power of standing the test of time, as it attracted the unqualified adhesion of generation after generation of disciples for a period of some six centuries.
In the fundamental principle of his philosophy Epicurus is not original. Aristippus (cf. also Plato in the Protagoras and Eudoxus) had already maintained that pleasure is the sole ultimate good, and pain the sole evil; that no pleasure is to be rejected except for its painful consequences, Epicurus. and no pain to be chosen except as a means to greater pleasure; that the stringency of all laws and customs depends solely on the legal and social penalties attached to their violation; that, in short, all virtuous conduct and all speculative activity are empty and useless, except as contributing to the pleasantness of the agent’s life. And Epicurus assures us that he means by pleasure what plain men mean by it; and that if the gratifications of appetite and sense are discarded, the notion is emptied of its significance. So far the system would seem to suit the inclinations of the most thorough-going voluptuary. The originality of Epicurus lay in his theory that the highest point of pleasure, whether in body or mind, is to be attained by the mere removal of pain or disturbance, after which pleasure admits of variation only and not of augmentation; that therefore the utmost gratification of which the body is capable may be provided by the simplest means, and that “natural wealth” is no more than any man can earn. When further he teaches that the attainment of happiness depends almost entirely upon insight and right calculation, fortune having very little to do with it; that the pleasures and pains of the mind are far more important than those of the body, owing to the accumulation of feeling caused by memory and anticipation; and that an indispensable condition of mental happiness lies in relieving the mind of all superstitions, which can be effected only by a thorough knowledge of the physical universe—he introduces an ample area for the exercise of the philosophic intellect. So again, in the stress that he lays on the misery which the most secret wrong-doing must necessarily cause from the perpetual fear of discovery, and in his exuberant exaltation of the value of disinterested friendship, he shows a sincere, though not completely successful, effort to avoid the offence that consistent egoistic hedonism is apt to give to ordinary human feeling. As regards friendship, Epicurus was a man of peculiarly unexclusive sympathies.[1] The genial fellowship of the philosophic community that he collected in his garden remained a striking feature in the traditions of his school; and certainly the ideal which Stoics and Epicureans equally cherished of a brotherhood of sages was most easily realized on the Epicurean plan of withdrawing from political and dialectical conflict to simple living and serene leisure, in imitation of the gods apart from the fortuitous concourse of atoms that we call a world. No doubt it was rather the practical than the theoretical side of Epicureanism which gave it so strong a hold on succeeding generations.
The two systems that have just been described were those that most prominently attracted the attention of the ancient world, so far as it was directed to ethics, from their almost simultaneous origin to the end of the 2nd century A.D., when Stoicism almost vanishes from our Later Greek philosophy. Stoicism in Rome. view. But side by side with them the schools of Plato and Aristotle still maintained a continuity of tradition, and a more or less vigorous life; and philosophy, as a recognized element of Graeco-Roman culture, was understood to be divided among these four branches. The internal history, however, of the four schools was very different. We find no development worthy of notice in Aristotelian ethics (see Peripatetics). The Epicureans, again, from their unquestioning acceptance of the “dogmas”[2] of their founder, almost deserve to be called a sect rather than a school. On the other hand, the changes in Stoicism are very noteworthy; and it is the more easy to trace them, as the only original writings of this school which we possess are those of the later Roman Stoics. These changes may be attributed partly to the natural inner development of the system, partly to the reaction of the Roman mind
