Principles of western civilisation

212 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

of the untrammelled expression of nature in the present was represented in the art of Greece and the empire of Rome. So also in the standards of virtue in the ancient philosophy. All virtue was, in its essence, regarded as conformity to nature. It was, therefore, the superiority of the wise man to all the changing reverses of fortune, the dignity of the individual, and the equilibrium of the intellect, which constituted the dominant note in all the higher philosophy of the time.*

The two great rival systems of Epicureanism and Stoicism were really the same in this respect. Epicureanism in its founder might be held to be shrewd, calculating, utilitarian ; in Lucretius it might sometimes be taken as rising to a consistent heroism amid the crash of misfortune. But in both the distinctive feature of the virtue aimed at was the establishment of an equilibrium between the individual and his surroundings. In neither was there a conception of any antithesis between the individual and any principle which transcended all his interests in the present. The ideal of virtue was, in short, a self-centred stable equilibrium in the present. Stoicism might, and did in the best minds, rise to a high, passionless conception of philanthropy, and even reach, at times, to a vision of the fraternity of all men. But we distinguish beneath it always, that its main effort was directed simply towards creating a kind of equilibrium of the intellect centred

1 In Aristotle’s Ethics (ii--x.) and Plato’s Republic and Déalogues (¢.gProtagoras), as in the Drscourses of Epictetus (I. xii--xiii.; II. i., and II. vii.-vili.) and the Wedztatzons of Marcus Aurelius (ii.-ix.), the object of virtue, it may be distinguished, is assumed to be to get the most out of the individual’s relations to the existing world by an enlightened and philosophic adjustment of the desires and passions in all circumstances whatever which might arise.