ONE:Yet, while the Stoics were far from anticipating the methods of modern Utilitarianism, they were, in a certain sense, strict Utilitariansthat is to say, they measured the goodness or badness of actions by their consequences; in other words, by39 their bearing on the supposed interest of the individual or of the community. They did not, it is true, identify interest with pleasure or the absence of pain; but although, in our time, Hedonism and Utilitarianism are, for convenience, treated as interchangeable terms, they need not necessarily be so. If any one choose to regard bodily strength, health, wealth, beauty, intellect, knowledge, or even simple existence, as the highest good and the end conduciveness to which determines the morality of actions, he is a Utilitarian; and, even if it could be shown that a maximum of happiness would be ensured by the attainment of his end, he would not on that account become a Hedonist. Now it is certain that the early Stoics, at least, regarded the preservation of the human race as an end which rightfully took precedence of every other consideration; and, like Charles Austin, they sometimes pushed their principles to paradoxical or offensive extremes, apparently for no other purpose than that of affronting the common feelings of mankind,84 without remembering that such feelings were likely to represent embodied experiences of utility. Thusapart from their communistic theoriesthey were fond of specifying the circumstances in which incest would become legitimate; and they are said not only to have sanctioned cannibalism in cases of extreme necessity, but even to have recommended its introduction as a substitute for burial or cremation; although this, we may hope, was rather a grim illustration of what they meant by moral indifference than a serious practical suggestion.85The religious tendency of Senecas philosophy appears rather in his psychology than in his metaphysics, in the stress which he lays on human immortality rather than in his discussions on creation and divine providence. His statements on this subject are not, indeed, very consistent, death being sometimes spoken of as the end of consciousness, and at other times, as the beginning of a new life, the birthday of eternity, to quote a phrase afterwards adopted by Christian preachers. Nor can we be absolutely certain that the promised eternity is not merely another way of expressing the souls absorption into and identification with the fiery element whence it was originally derived. This, however, is an ambiguity to be met with in other doctrines of a spiritual existence after death, nor is it entirely absent from the language even of Christian theologians. What deserves attention is that, whether the future life spoken of by Seneca be taken in a literal or in a figurative sense, it is equally intended to lead our thoughts away from the world of sensible experience to a more ideal order of things; and, to that extent, it falls in with the more general religious movement of the age. Whether Zeller is, for that reason, justified in speaking of him as a Platonising Stoic seems more questionable; for the Stoics always agreed with Plato in holding that the soul is distinct from and superior to the body, and that it is consubstantial with the animating principle of Nature. The same circumstances which were elsewhere leading to a revival of Platonism, equally tended to develope this side of Stoicism, but it seems needless to seek for a closer connexion between the two phenomena.376
