arriving on its northern shore, among the Greeks, we shall meet first a counsellor of morals whose views are as worldly-wise and plainly practical as those of Confucius, and whose teachings hardly rise to the height of the doctrine of Reciprocity. It is Hesiod, the ancient bard, who, in one part of his "Works and Days," addresses moral advice to a certain Perses, apparently his brother. The advice all tends correctly enough to good conduct, to respect for virtue, to desire for wisdom, to piety, to hospitality, to neighborly good-will, to general prudence and decency of life. But the motives appealed to are not high, as may be seen in a few passages taken out of the translation made by Mr. C. A. Elton:

"Bid to thy feast a friend; thy foe forbear."

And:

"Love him who loves thee; to the kind draw nigh;
Give to the giver, but the churl pass by.

Men fill the giving, not the ungiving hand."

Another sentiment of the poem is significant of the prevalence of bad faith among the Greeks:

"Not e'en thy brother on his word believe,
But, as in laughter, set a witness by."

If Hesiod, who is supposed to have lived in the eighth century before Christ, represented the moral ideas of the better-cultured Greeks of his time, and if the "Golden Verses" ascribed to Pythagoras were composed in the sixth or fifth century before Christ, the moral advance made in the intervening two or three hundred years was very great. In the "Golden Verses " there is no trace of utilitarianism, either practical or philosophical. The appeal is always to the soul itself, as its own monitor:

"Let rev'rence of thyself thy thoughts control,
And guard the sacred temple of thy soul."
"Let no example, let no soothing tongue,

Prevail upon thee with a syren's song,
To do thy soul's immortal essence wrong."
"Let not the stealing god of sleep surprise,
Nor creep in slumbers on thy weary eyes,
E'er ev'ry action of the former day
Strictly thou dost and righteously survey.
With rev'rence at thy own tribunal stand,
And answer justly to thy own demand:
Where have I been? In what have I transgress'd?
What good or ill has this day's life express'd?
Where have I failed in what I ought to do?
In what to God, to man, or to myself I owe? . . .
If evil were thy deeds, repenting mourn,

And let thy soul with strong remorse be torn.
If good, the good with peace of mind repay,
And to thy secret self with pleasure say,

Rejoice, my heart, for all went well to-day."

I quote from a translation made by the old English dramatist, Nicholas Rowe. This undoubtedly takes some modernness of tone from the translator, as the poetry of the ancients is almost sure to do; but the fine spirit of it is readily seen.

Thus far all the ethical teachings we have reviewed have come from what Principal Sir Alexander Grant, of the University of Edinburgh, has called "the era of popular or unconscious morals." We are now, in Greece, approaching the beginnings of such inquisitive thinking upon the nature and sources of moral obligation as produce, first, a "skeptic or sophistic era," in Principal Grant's division, and then a "conscious or philosophic era." From the Greek sophists, little or nothing seems to have embodied itself in lasting precepts. Nor is anything of that description to be got from the teachings of Socrates and Plato, who made the passage for Greek thought from sophistic to philosophic morals. Of all the teachers ever given to mankind, Socrates was the least dogmatic, — the least likely to frame a positive precept or rule of conduct.

His mission was to cure men's minds of half-thinking, to drive them to the end of a thought, force them to rummage the contents of an idea, and find all that belongs to it. As Plato's dialogues represent him, he pulled to pieces the Greek notions of virtue and the virtues, one after another temperance, or moderation, for example, in the dialogue called "Charmides," and courage in the "Laches" and the "Protagoras," with the result that no positive definitions are found, and none seem discoverable. The constant inference to be drawn from the destructive dialectic of Socrates is, that all virtue is substantially one and indivisible, and that a man may possess its complete guidance in his own consciousness, if he will improve himself in wisdom, with which it is really identified.

With Aristotle, who succeeded Plato in the founding of great schools of Greek thought, moral philosophy, strictly speaking, had its birth. He was the first of all men to attempt the construction of a logical science of the principles of human conduct, and to explain its rightness and wrongness on rational grounds. Since his day, no subject of speculative philosophy has received more thought, and system after system of the theory of ethics has been worked out and discussed. Of the intellectual value of such theories and the discussion of them, as part of the process of the enlightenment of the human mind, contributing essentially to its comprehension of itself and of the Cosmos, there can be no doubt. But that the practical morality of mankind has been much influenced by systems of moral philosophy seems doubtful in the

extreme.

From the beginning, these systems have been divided by a single main contention, and have followed one or the other of two lines of theory, namely: the stoical and the epicurean, or the intuitive and the inductive, or the ab

solute and the utilitarian. In one view, Right and Wrong are absolute facts, belonging to the nature of things; the human mind is endowed with the power to recognize them, and the recognition carries with it an inherent feeling of obligation on the side of Right, which is the "ought to of our sense of duty. In the other view, Right and Wrong in human conduct are mere backward reflections from its consequences, and our recognition of them is derived from our observation of what is and what is not conducive to happiness. To the stoic, virtue is the end, happiness a result from it an incident. To the epicurean, on the contrary, happiness (which the utilitarian of modern times explains to be "the greatest happiness of the greatest number ") is the end, and virtue the necessary means to the attainment of it. The stoic doctrine lifts morality to the nobler level, and right conduct that is wholly denied by the epicurean or utilitarian philosophy. It has a powerful attraction, therefore, for noble minds; it is congenial to noble spirits; they incline naturally to the acceptance of it, as a true representation of what they find in themselves. But how far different would they have found the springs of conduct in themselves if they had never known the philosophic doctrine? It has satisfied them intellectually, but how far has it influenced them morally? I suspect that the influence has really been small, and that the practical importance, as affecting motives and conduct, of all that has been written in systematic moral philosophy, by philosophers of either school, from Aristotle to Mill, is estimated commonly with much exaggeration.

gives a dignity to

Plutarch, who wrote moral essays on the cure of anger, on envy and hatred, on tranquillity of mind, and like topics, was neither a moral philosopher nor a maker of precepts; and neither a stoic nor an epicurean. He

wrote against epicureanism, but rather in protest against sensual notions of happiness than in support of any phi losophical theory of ethics; and he moralizes in his essays by the pleasant method of anecdote and example, more than by pointed admonition.

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The two great representatives of stoic morality among the ancients were Epictetus, the slave, and Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor. In no proper sense of the term were they moral philosophers, as they are frequently called. They were greater than philosophers, they were practical moralists, of the sublimest order. They did not support the stoic philosophy by any systematic writing, but they illustrated the ethical ideas of stoicism by their lives and by the precepts they formulated; and the stoic creed has influenced morals a thousand times more through the pregnant injunctions and examples of these two men, the slave and the emperor, than through the logic of all its philosophers. Stoicism as a philosophy founds itself, as I have said, on the belief in an intuitive cognition of right and wrong, an innate moral sense. Stoicism as a doctrine of life is the acted consciousness of an eternal superiority in the soul of man to all the conditions of its existence in a body of clay. It was an inspiring faith in the world before Zeno composed a philosophy to support it. It was voiced, as we have seen, in the most ancient moral poetry of the Hindus. Socrates illuminated it in his life and in everything that he taught. It was set forth broadly and strongly by Aristotle. But the great stoic moralists made it conspicuous, as never before,

supreme above other considerations that bear on conduct and life. Sovereignty of spirit over flesh, of reason over passion, is the surpassing attainment through moral discipline, in the stoic view. Thence come temperance, or moderation in all things; fortitude, or courage to deal