ONE:"But why must it have been me?" Leona asked.52
ONE:Zeller, while taking a much wider view than Hegel, still assumes that Platos reforms, so far as they were suggested by experience, were simply an adaptation of Dorian practices.148 He certainly succeeds in showing that private property, marriage, education, individual liberty, and personal morality were subjected, at least in Sparta, to many restrictions resembling those imposed in the Platonic state. And Plato himself, by treating the Spartan system as the first form of degeneration from his own ideal, seems to indicate that this of all existing polities made the nearest approach to it. The declarations of the Timaeus149 are, however, much more distinct; and according to them it was in the caste-divisions of Egypt that he found the nearest parallel to his own scheme of social reorganisation. There, too, the priests, or wise men came first, and after them the warriors, while the different branches of industry were separated from one another by rigid demarcations. He may also have been struck by that free admission of women to employments elsewhere filled exclusively by men, which so surprised Herodotus, from his inability to discern its real causethe more advanced differentiation of Egyptian as compared with Greek society.150Yet there was a difference between them, marking off each as the head of a whole School much wider than the Academy or the Lyceum; a difference which we can best express by saying that Plato was pre-eminently a practical, Aristotle pre-eminently a speculative genius. The object of the one was to reorganise all human life, that of the other to reorganise all human knowledge. Had the one lived earlier, he would more probably have been a great statesman or a great general than a great writer; the other would at no time have been anything but a philosopher, a mathematician, or a historian. Even from birth they seemed to be respectively marked out for an active and for a contemplative life: the one, a citizen of the foremost State in Hellas, sprung from a family in which political ambition was hereditary, himself strong, beautiful, fascinating, eloquent, and gifted with the keenest insight into mens capacities and motives; the other a Stagirite and an Asclepiad, that is to say, without opportunities for a public career, and possessing a hereditary aptitude for anatomy and natural history, fitted by his insignificant person and delicate constitution for sedentary pursuits, and better able to acquire a knowledge even of human nature from books than from a living converse with men and affairs. Of course, we are not for a moment denying to Plato a fore294most place among the masters of those who know; he embraced all the science of his age, and to a great extent marked out the course which the science of future ages was to pursue; nevertheless, for him, knowledge was not so much an end in itself as a means for the attainment of other ends, among which the preservation of the State seems to have been, in his eyes, the most important.M Aristotle, on the other hand, after declaring happiness to be the supreme end, defines it as an energising of mans highest nature, which again he identifies with the reasoning process or cognition in its purest form.
ONE:It remains to glance at another aspect of the dialectic method first developed on a great scale by Plato, and first fully defined by Aristotle, but already playing a certain part in the Socratic teaching. This is the testing of common assumptions by pushing them to their logical conclusion, and rejecting those which lead to consequences inconsistent with themselves. So understood, dialectic means the complete elimination of inconsistency, and has ever since remained the most powerful weapon of philosophical criticism. To take an instance near at hand, it is constantly employed by thinkers so radically different as Mr. Herbert Spencer and Professor T. H. Green; while it has been generalised into an objective law of Nature and history, with dazzling though only momentary success, by Hegel and his school.The other great ethical method of the eighteenth century, its hedonism, was closely connected with the sceptical movement in speculative philosophy, and, like that, received an entirely new significance by becoming associated with the idea of law. Those who isolate man from the universe are necessarily led to seek in his interests as such the sole regulator of his actions, and their sole sanction in the opinion of his fellows. Protagoras went already so far, notwithstanding his unwillingness to recognise pleasure as the supreme end; and in the system of his true successor, Aristippus, the most extreme hedonism goes hand in hand with the most extreme idealism; while with Epicurus, again, both are tempered by the influence of naturalism, imposing on him its conceptions of objective law alike in science and in practice. Still his system leaned heavily to the side of self-gratification pure and simple; and it was reserved for modern thought to establish a complete equilibrium between the two competing tendencies of Greek ethics. This has been effected in Utilitarianism; and those critics are entirely mistaken who, like M. Guyau, regard that system as a mere reproduction of Epicureanism. It might with full as much reason be called a modern version of Stoicism. The idea of humanity is essentially Stoic; to work for the good of humanity was a424 Stoic precept; and to sacrifice ones own pleasure for that higher good is a virtue which would have satisfied the most rigorous demands of a Cleanthes, an Epicttus, or an Aurelius.
