We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of this tribute. It is true that all the charges brought against Socrates hold even more forcibly as against Zeno. But the spirit of political and religious independence was now dead, and the advantage of the philosophical schools to the fame and business interests of the city had become clearer; so that nothing prevented any longer the open recognition of Zeno’s virtues and eminence. Who will may also read in the decree a belated mark of respect to the memory of Socrates.
Zeno’s breadth of view.
87. In this sketch of the life of Zeno no attempt has been made to give a complete view of his philosophy; but a few landmarks have been indicated, by which it may be possible to distinguish which parts of it were his own, which were taken over from others, and how all were gradually combined in one whole. Zeno had not the kind of originality which begins by assuming a general principle, and then explains all things human and divine by deductions from it. Instead of this he gathered together (as Aristotle had done before, but with a very different bias) what seemed most sound and illuminating in the teaching of all the schools which surrounded him. He did this in a positive spirit, feeling assured that truth exists and is discernible, and must be consistent in all its parts. We seem unable to say that in his writings he attained to this consistency, but at least he worked steadily towards it. The effort for consistency led him in the direction of monistic principle, though his points of departure both in physics and in ethics are dualistic. But the teaching of Zeno does not lend itself to that kind of study which assigns all new facts to compartments of thought ready labelled in advance, nor can it be summarized by any of the technical terms which are in use in modern philosophical thought. Enough has perhaps been said to shew that, great as was the debt of Zeno to his predecessors, he was no mere imitator or plagiarist; the history of the following centuries will shew that he had in some sense touched the pulses of human life more truly than any of his contemporaries.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Thucydides, passim.
[2] Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, ch. 1.
[3] ‘Plato combined the various elements, the, so to speak, prismatically broken rays of the Socratic spirit in a new, higher, and richer unity’ Ueberweg, Eng. transl. i p. 89.
[4] ‘The philosophy of Greece reached its highest point in Plato and Aristotle’ Zeller, Stoics etc., p. 11. ‘The bloom of Greek philosophy was short lived’ ib. p. 10.
[5] The phrases ‘cum Platone errare,’ ‘amicus Plato, magis amica veritas’ agree in expressing the general incredulity with which Platonism was received in the ancient world. In our own days an ill-balanced sympathy for Platonic dogma is often a serious hindrance to philosophic progress.