The Stoics, so called from a portico[19] adorned with [pg 202] magnificent paintings by Polygnotus, in which their doctrines were first taught, owe their origin to Zeno, who lived to a very great age, illustrious for self-control, temperance, and the severest type of virtue, and at length, in accordance with a favorite dogma and practice of his school, when he found that he had before him only growing infirmity with no hope of restoration, terminated his life by his own hand.
According to the Stoic philosophy, virtue is the sole end of life, and virtue is the conformity of the will and conduct to universal nature. Virtue alone is good; vice alone is evil; and whatever is neither virtue nor vice is neither good nor evil in itself, but is to be sought or shunned, according as it is auxiliary to virtue or conducive to vice,—if neither, to be regarded with utter indifference. Virtue is indivisible. It does not admit of degrees. He who only approximates to virtue, however closely, is yet to be regarded as outside of its pale. Only the wise man can be virtuous. He needs no precepts of duty. His intuitions are always to be trusted. His sense of right cannot be blinded or misled. As for those who do not occupy this high philosophic ground, though they cannot be really virtuous, they yet may present some show and semblance of virtue, and they may be aided in this by precepts and ethical instruction.[20] It [pg 203] was for the benefit of those who, on account of their lack of true wisdom, needed such direction, and were at the same time so well disposed as to receive and follow it, that treatises on practical morality were written by many of the later Stoics, and that in Rome there were teachers of this school who exercised functions closely analogous to those of the Christian preacher and pastor.
Stoicism found its most congenial soil in the stern, hardy integrity and patriotism of those Romans, whose incorruptible virtue is the one redeeming feature of the declining days of the Republic and the effeminacy and coarse depravity of the Empire. Seneca's ethical writings[21] are almost Christian, not only in their faithful rebuke of every form of wrong, but in their tender humanity for the poor, the slaves, the victims of oppression, in their universal philanthropy, and in their precepts of patience under suffering, forbearance, forgiveness, and returning good for evil. Epictetus, the deformed slave of a capricious and [pg 204] cruel master, beaten and crippled in mere wantonness, enfranchised in his latter years, only to be driven into exile and to sound the lowest depths of poverty, exhibited a type of heroic virtue which has hardly been equalled, perhaps never transcended by a mere mortal; and though looking, as has been already said, to annihilation as the goal of life, he maintained a spirit so joyous, and has left in his writings so attractive a picture of a soul serenely and supremely happy, that he has given support and consolation to multitudes of the bravest and best disciples of the heaven-born religion, which he can have known—if at all—only through its slanderers and persecutors. Marcus Aurelius, in a kindred spirit, and under the even heavier burdens of a tottering empire, domestic dissensions, and defeat and disaster abroad, maintained the severest simplicity and purity of life, appropriated portions of his busiest days to devout contemplation, meditated constantly on death, and disciplined himself to regard with contempt alike the praise of flatterers and the contingency of posthumous fame. We have, especially in Nero's reign, the record of not a few men and women of like spirit and character, whose lofty and impregnable virtue lacked only loving faith and undoubting trust in a fatherly Providence to assimilate them to the foremost among the Apostles and martyrs of the Christian Church.
The Sceptical school of philosophy claims in this connection a brief notice. Though so identified in common speech with the name of a single philosopher, [pg 205] that Pyrrhonism is a synonyme for Scepticism, it was much older than Pyrrho, and greatly outnumbered his avowed followers. It was held by the teachers of this school that objective truth is unattainable. Not only do the perceptions and conceptions of different persons vary as to every object of knowledge; but the perceptions and conceptions of the same persons as to the same object vary at different times. Nay, more, at the same time one sense conveys impressions which another sense may negative, and not infrequently the reflective faculty negatives all the impressions derived from the senses, and forms a conception entirely unlike that which would have taken shape through the organs of sense. The soul that seeks to know, is thus in constant agitation. But happiness consists in imperturbableness of spirit, that is, in suspense of judgment; and as it is our duty to promote our own happiness, it is our duty to live without desire or fear, preference or abhorrence, love or hatred, in entire apathy,—a life of which Mohammed's fabled coffin is the fittest symbol.
The New Academy, whose philosophy was a hybrid of Platonism and Pyrrhonism, while it denied the possibility of ascertaining objective truth, yet taught that on all subjects of speculative philosophy probability is attainable, and that, if the subject in hand be one which admits of being acted upon, it is the duty of the moral agent to act in accordance with probability,—to pursue the course in behalf of which the more and the better reasons can be given. There [pg 206] are moral acts and habits which seem to be in accordance with reason and the nature of things. We may be mistaken in thinking them so; yet the probability that they are so creates a moral obligation in their favor. The New Academy professed a hypothetical acquiescence in the ethics of the Peripatetic school, maintaining, therefore, that the mean between two extremes is probably in accordance with right and duty, and that virtue is probably man's highest good, yet probably not sufficient in itself without the addition of exterior advantages.
Cicero considered himself as belonging to the New Academy. His instincts as an advocate, often induced by professional exigencies to deny what he had previously affirmed, made the scepticism of this school congenial to him; while his love of elegant ease and luxury and his lack of moral courage were in closer harmony with the practical ethics of the Peripatetics than with the more rigid system of the Stoics. At the same time, his pure moral taste and his sincere reverence for the right brought him into sympathy with the Stoic school. His “De Officiis” is an exposition of the Stoic system of ethics, though by the professed disciple of another philosophy. It is as if a Mohammedan, without disclaiming his own religion, should undertake an exposition of the ethics of Christianity, on the ground that, though Mohammed was a genuine prophet, there was, nevertheless, a higher and purer morality in the New Testament than in the Koran.