Plato seems to have felt very strongly that all virtuous action tends towards a good exceeding in value any temporary sacrifice which it may involve; and the accepted connotation of ethical terms went entirely along with this belief. But he could not see that a particular action might be good for the community at large and bad for the individual who performed it, not in a different sense but in the very same sense, as involving a diminution of his happiness. For from Platos abstract and generalising point of view all good was homogeneous, and the welfare of the individual was absolutely identified with the welfare of the whole to which he belonged. As against those who made right dependent on might and erected self-indulgence into the law of life Plato occupied an impregnable position. He showed that such principles made society impossible, and that without honour even a gang of thieves cannot hold together.140 He also saw that it is reason which brings each individual into relation with the whole and enables him to understand his obligations towards it; but at the same time he gave this232 reason a personal character which does not properly belong to it; or, what comes to the same thing, he treated human beings as pure entia rationis, thus unwittingly removing the necessity for having any morality at all. On his assumption it would be absurd to break the law; but neither would there be any temptation to break it, nor would any unpleasant consequences follow on its violation. Plato speaks of injustice as an injury to the souls health, and therefore as the greatest evil that can befall a human being, without observing that the inference involves a confusion of terms. For his argument requires that soul should mean both the whole of conscious life and the system of abstract notions through which we communicate and co-operate with our fellow-creatures. All crime is a serious disturbance to the latter, for it cannot without absurdity be made the foundation of a general rule; but, apart from penal consequences, it does not impair, and may benefit the former.
With an instant return of his old amused self he threw back his head and let out a deep howl of delight.The strangely assorted trio turned into a tea room close by. They had a table to themselves where they could talk freely.
Director
We must now bring this long and complicated, but it is hoped not uninteresting, study to a close. We have accompanied philosophy to a point where it enters on a new field, and embraces themes sufficiently important to form the subject of a separate chapter. The contributions made by its first cultivators to our positive knowledge have already been summarised. It remains to mention that there was nothing of a truly transcendental character about their speculations. Whatever extension we may give to that terrible bugbear, the Unknowable, they did not trespass on its domain. Heracleitus and his compeers, while penetrating far beyond the horizon of their age and country, kept very nearly within the limits of a possible experience. They confused some conceptions which we have learned to distinguish, and separated others which we have learned to combine; but they were the lineal progenitors of our highest scientific thought; and they first broke ground on a path where we must continue to advance, if the cosmos which they won for us is not to be let lapse into chaos and darkness again.Thus, where Zeller says that the Greek philosophers confounded the objective with the subjective because they were still imperfectly separated from Nature, we seem to have come on a less ambitious but more intelligible explanation of the facts, and one capable of being stated with as much generality as his. Not only among the Greeks but everywhere, culture is more or less antagonistic to originality, and the diffusion to the enlargement of knowledge. Thought is like water; when spread over a wider surface it is apt to become stagnant and shallow. When ideas could only live on the condition ofxiv being communicated to a large circle of listeners, they were necessarily adapted to the taste and lowered to the comprehension of relatively vulgar minds. And not only so, but the habit of taking their opinions and prejudices as the starting-point of every enquiry frequently led to the investment of those opinions and prejudices with the formal sanction of a philosophical demonstration. It was held that education consisted less in the acquisition of new truth than in the elevation to clearer consciousness of truths which had all along been dimly perceived.It was a consequence of the principle just stated that in formal logic the Stoics should give precedence to the hypothetical over the categorical syllogism.40 From one point of view their preference for this mode of stating an argument was an advance on the method of Aristotle, whose reasonings, if explicitly set out, would have assumed the form of disjunctive syllogisms. From another point of view it was a return to the older dialectics of Socrates and Plato, who always looked on their major premises as possessing only a conditional validityconditional, that is to say, on the consent of their interlocutor. We have further to note that both the disjunctive and the hypothetical syllogism were first recognised as such by the Stoics; a discovery connected with the feature which most profoundly distinguishes their logic from Aristotles logic. We showed, in dealing with the latter, that it is based on an analysis of the concept, and that all its imperfections are due to that single circumstance. It was the Stoics who first brought judgment, so fatally neglected by the author of the Analytics, into proper prominence. Having once grasped propositions as the beginning and end of reasoning, they naturally and under the guidance of common language, passed from simple to complex assertions, and immediately detected the arguments to which these latter serve as a foundation. And if we proceed to ask why they were more interested in judgment than in conception, we shall probably find the explanation to be that their17 philosophy had its root in the ethical and practical interests which involve a continual process of injunction and belief, that is to say, a continual association of such disparate notions as an impression and an action; while the Aristotelian philosophy, being ultimately derived from early Greek thought, had for its leading principle the circumscription of external objects and their representation under the form of a classified series. Thus the naturalistic system, starting with the application of scientific ideas to human life, ultimately carried back into science the vital idea of Law; that is, of fixed relations subsisting between disparate phenomena. And this in turn led to the reinterpretation of knowledge as the subsumption of less general under more general relations.