have only got to rise and depart; the door is always open.' Various circumstances were specified in which the sage would exercise the privilege of 'taking himself off,' as they euphemistically expressed it. Severe pain, mutilation, incurable disease, advanced old age, the hopelessness of escaping from tyranny, and in general any hindrance to leading a 'natural' life, were held to be a sufficient justification for such a step.1 t The first founders of the school set an example afterwards frequently followed. Zeno is said to have hanged himself for no better reason than that he fell and broke his finger through the weakness of old age; and Cleanthes, having been ordered to abstain temporarily from food, resolved, as he expressed it, not to turn back after going half-way to death. This side of the Stoic doctrine found particular favour in Rome, and the voluntary death of Cato was always spoken of as his chief title to fame. Many noble spirits were sustained in their defiance of the imperial despotism by the thought that there was one last liberty of which not even Caesar could deprive them. Objections were silenced by the argument that, life not being an absolute good, its loss might fairly be preferred to some relatively greater inconvenience.3 But why the sage should renounce an existence where perfect happiness depends entirely on his own will, neither was, nor could it be, explained.

V.

If now, abandoning all technicalities, we endeavour to estimate the significance and value of the most general ideas contributed by Stoicism to ethical speculation, we shall find that they may be most conveniently considered under the following heads. First of all, the Stoics made morality completely inward. They declared that the intention was equivalent to the deed, and that the wish was equivalent to the

1 Diog., VII., 130; Cic., De Fin., III., xviii., 60; Zeller, pp. 305-9.

2 Diog., VII., 31, 176.

3 Plutarch, De Stoic. Repug., xviii., 5.

intention—a view which has been made familiar to all by the teaching of the Gospel, but the origin of which in Greek philosophy has been strangely ignored even by rationalistic writers. From the inaccessibility of motives and feelings to direct external observation, it follows that each man must be, in the last resort, his own judge. Hence the notion of conscience is equally a Stoic creation. That we have a mystical intuition informing us, prior to experience, of the difference between right and wrong is, indeed, a theory quite alien to their empirical derivation of knowledge. But that the educated wrongdoer carries in his bosom a perpetual witness and avenger of his guilt, they most distinctly asserted. The difference between ancient and modern tragedy is alone sufficient to prove the novelty and power of this idea; for that the Eumenides do not represent even the germ of a conscience is as certain as anything in mythology can be.3

2

'Omnia scelera, etiam ante effectum operis, quantum culpae satis est, perfecta sunt.'-Seneca, De Const. Sap., vii., 4. Cf. Zeno apud Sext. Emp., Adv. Math., XI., 190.

2 Prope est a te Deus, tecum est, intus est sacer intra nos spiritus sedet bonorum malorumque nostrorum observator et custos.'-Seneca, Epp., xli., 1. Cf. Horace, Epp., I., i., 61; Lucan, IX., 573; Persius, III., 43; Juvenal, XIII., 192-235.

It may be desirable to give some reasons in support of this opinion, as the contrary has been stated by scholars writing within a comparatively recent period. Thus Welcker says: Das Gewissen ward bei den Griechen als ein göttliches Wesen, Erinys, gescheut und wie wir es sonst nicht finden, zur Gottheit erhoben' (Griechische Götterlehre, I., 233); and again (p. 699) "'Epivús . . . . ist das Gewissen.' Similarly, M. Alfred Maury observes that, 'les remords se personnifiaient sous la forme de déesses Erinnyies, chargées de punir tous les forfaits' (Histoire des Religions de la Grèce Antique, I., 342). And Preller, while entertaining sounder views respecting their origin, contents himself with the caution that, 'Man sich hüten muss die Furien blos für die subjectiven Mächte des menschlichen Gewissen zu halten' (Griechische Mythologie, I., 686, 3rd ed.) Now, in the first place, the Erinyes did not punish all crime, as they ought to have done had they represented conscience. According to Aeschylus (Eumen., 604-5), they considered that the murder of her husband by Clytaemnestra was no affair of theirs, there being no blood relationship between the parties concerned. They did not persecute Electra, who, short of striking the fatal blow, had as much hand in her mother's death as Orestes. And even when a father was killed by his son, they do not always seem to have taken up the matter; for in the Odyssey it is not by the Erinyes of Laius, but by those of Epicastê that Oedipus is pursued a conception very unlike that of Sophocles, who makes him feel as

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On the other hand, the fallibility of conscience and the extent to which it may be sophisticated were topics not embraced within the limits of Stoicism, and perhaps never adequately illustrated by any writer, even in modern times, except the great English novelist whose loss we still deplore.?

The second Stoic idea to which we would invite attention is that, in the economy of life, every one has a certain function to fulfil, a certain part to play, which is marked out for him by circumstances beyond his control, but in the adequate performance of which his duty and dignity are peculiarly involved. It is true that this idea finds no assignable place in the teaching of the earliest Stoics, or rather in the few fragments of their teaching which alone have been preserved; but it is touched upon by Cicero under the head of Temperance, in the adaptation from Panaetius already referred to; it frequently recurs in the lectures of Epictêtus; and it is enunciated with energetic concision in the solitary meditations of Marcus Aurelius.' The belief spoken of is, indeed, closely connected with the Stoic teleology, and only applies to the sphere of free intelligence a principle like that supposed to regulate the activity of inanimate or irrational

much remorse for the parricide as for the incest and its consequences. In the next place, the Erinyes are let loose not by the action itself but by the curses of the injured or offended blood-relation, as we see by Homer, I., IX., 454 and 566; which seems to show that if they personified anything human it was the imprecations of the victim, not the self-reproach of the aggressor. Thirdly, the Orestes of Aeschylus, so far from feeling conscience-smitten, disclaims all responsibility for his mother's death, inflicted as it was in consequence of a direct command from the higher gods, accompanied by threats of heavy punishment in case of disobedience. (Eumen., 443 ff.). And, finally, the office assigned to the Erinyes of seeing that the laws of nature are not broken (vol. I., 67) shows that the Greeks conceived their existence as something altogether objective and physical. [There is a short but very sensible account of the Erinyes in Keightley's Mythology, p. 175, 4th ed.]

1 Cicero, De Off., I., xxxi.; Epictêtus, Man., 17, b., 30; Diss., I., ii., 33; xvi., 20; xxix.. 39; II., v., 10; ib., 21; x., 4, xiv., 8; xxiii., 38; xxv., 22; Antoninus, Comm., VI., 39, 43; IX., 29; cf. Seneca, Epp., lxxxv., 34, and the saying of Marcus Aurelius quoted by Dion Cassius (Epit., LXXI., xxxiv., 4), that we cannot make men what we wish them to be; we can only turn what faculties they have to the best account in working for the public good.

beings. If every mineral, every plant, and every animal has ts special use and office, so also must we, according to the capacity of our individual and determinate existence. By accomplishing the work thus imposed on us, we fulfil the purpose of our vocation, we have done all that the highest morality demands, and may with a clear conscience leave the rest to fate. To put the same idea into somewhat different terms: we are born into certain relationships, domestic, social, and political, by which the lines of our daily duties are prescribed with little latitude for personal choice. What does depend upon ourselves is to make the most of these conditions and to perform the tasks arising out of them in as thorough a manner as possible. 'It was not only out of ivory,' says Seneca, 'that Pheidias could make statues, but out of bronze as well; had you offered him marble or some cheaper material still, he would have carved the best that could be made out of that. So the sage will exhibit his virtue in wealth, if he be permitted; if not, in poverty; if possible, in his own country; if not, in exile; if possible, as a general; if not, as a soldier; if possible, in bodily vigour; if not, in weakness. Whatever fortune be granted him, he will make it the means for some memorable achievement.' Or, to take the more homely comparisons of Epictêtus: 'The weaver does not manufacture his wool, but works up what is given him.' 'Remember that you are to act in whatever drama the manager may choose, a long or short one according to his pleasure. Should he give you the part of a beggar, take care to act that becomingly; and the same should it be a lame man, or a magistrate, or a private citizen. For your business is to act well the character that is given to you, but to choose it is the business of another.' So spoke the humble freedman; but the master of the world had also to recognise what fateful limits were imposed on his beneficent activity. 'Why wait, O man!' exclaims Marcus Aurelius. 'Do what Nature now demands; make haste and look not round to see

if any know it; nor hope for Plato's Republic, but be content with the smallest progress, and consider that the result even of this will be no little thing.' Carlyle was not a Stoic; but in this respect his teaching breathes the best spirit of Stoicism; and, to the same extent also, through his whole life he practised what he taught

The implications of such an ethical standard are, on the whole, conservative; it is assumed that social institutions are, taking them altogether, nearly the best possible at any moment; and that our truest wisdom is to make the most of them, instead of sighing for some other sphere where our grand aspirations or volcanic passions might find a readier outlet for their feverish activity. And if the teaching of the first Stoics did not take the direction here indicated, it was because they, with the communistic theories inherited from their Cynic predecessors, began by condemning all existing social distinctions as irrational. They wished to abolish local religion, property, the family, and the State, as a substitute for which the whole human race was to be united under a single government, without private possessions or slaves, and with a complete community of women and children. It must, however, have gradually dawned on them that such a radical subversion of the present system was hardly compatible with their belief in the providential origin of all things; and that, besides this, the virtues which they made it so much their object to recommend, would be, for the most part, superfluous in a communistic society. At the same time, the old notion of Sôphrosynê as a virtue which consisted in minding one's own business, or, stated more generally, in discerning and doing whatever work one is best fitted for, would continue to influence ethical teaching, with the effect of giving more and more individuality to the definition of duty. And the

2

1 For the references to these and other similar passages, see the last note. 2 Plutarch, De Alex. Virt., I., vi. ; Diog., VII., 33.

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