§ 5
Stoicism had a long and vigorous life. More than ever during the first and second centuries of our era did it fulfil its real task of acting as a practical guide to conduct, not as a mere museum of dead erudition. It made good its claim to provide its adherents with the autonomous freedom and independence of a mind at peace with itself, whose virtue was proof against the tribulation and failure of life, and not corrupted by its plenty. It was not always blind imitation of a literary fashion or the love of displaying virtuous paradoxes that attracted the noblest of the higher Roman aristocracy to the doctrines of Stoicism. Not a few of them guided their lives in accordance with its principles and even died for their convictions. Not entirely “without tragic emotion”, as the Stoic Emperor would prefer it, but at any rate with conscious and deliberate purpose—not in mere unreasoning stubbornness[63]—did these Stoic martyrs go to their death. Nor was it the unquestioned certainty of a continued life in a higher existence that made them so ready to give up life upon this earth.[64] Each in the special manner dictated to him by his own temperament and the circumstances of his life, they still speak to us, these leaders of Roman Stoicism—Seneca the philosophic director of the world’s conscience, Marcus Aurelius the Emperor, and those instructors and patterns of the aspiring youth of Rome, Musonius and Epictetus. The eager and unswerving effort of these wise men to educate themselves to the attainment of freedom and peace, of purity and goodness of heart, wins our admiration—not least in the case of Seneca in whom the struggle for self-mastery and philosophic calm must have been a continual war with his own too-receptive and imaginative nature. But just as they looked for no supernatural helper and redeemer but trusted to the power of their own spirit for the assurance of success, so they required no promise of a future crowning of their labours in an after-life of the soul. The whole scope of their endeavour lies within the limits of this world. The old Stoic belief in the continued life of the individual soul until the annihilation of all separate creation in the World Conflagration[65] is regarded at the best as one possibility among many[66]—it is perhaps but a “beautiful dream”.[67] But whether death is a transition to another form of being or a complete termination of individual life—to the wise man it is equally welcome, for he measures the value of life not by the number [504] of its years but by the richness of its content. At bottom Seneca is inclined to the view that death is the end of all things for man, after which “everlasting peace” awaits the restless spirit.[68]
The Stoic Emperor is uncertain whether death is a dissipation of the elements of the soul (as the atomists teach) or whether the mind survives in a conscious or an unconscious existence that must yet disappear eventually in the life of the Whole. All things are in perpetual flux—so the Law of the universe has willed it—nor shall the human personality maintain itself untouched and unchanged. But even supposing that death is a “putting out” of his small individual candle, the wise man is not afraid: to the melancholy that is the prevailing mood of his gentle, pure, and high-strung character Death, the annihilator, seems to beckon like a friend.[69]
The tougher spirit of the Phrygian slave and freedman needed no conviction of personal survival to enable him to face the battle of earthly life with courage and intrepidity. What has been made must be unmade: without hesitation and without regret the wise man gives himself up to the laws of the rationally-ordered universe in which the present must make way for the future—not indeed to be lost entirely, but to be changed and to merge its individuality, its unimportant self in new manifestations of the creative stuff of Life. The Whole does not perish, but its parts change and alter their relations among themselves.[70] The pantheistic principles of the school which had been taken over from Herakleitos and which made it permanently inconceivable that the diminutive individual spark of life could achieve a lasting separation from the central fiery mass, had become a settled conviction. The passionate abandonment of the personal, short-lived self to the everlasting Whole and One had become a fixed habit of mind. No longer did it seem intolerable that the individual existence should pass away after a brief span of life; it was possible to remain a Stoic and yet assert expressly, like Cornutus the teacher of Persius, that with the death of its body there is an end, too, of the individual soul.[71]
§ 6
The atomist doctrine renewed by Epicurus demanded in the most emphatic manner of its adherents that they should abandon the belief in personal survival.
For the atomist the soul is corporeal, a compound made [505] up of the most mobile of the atoms which form the plastic elements of air and fire. It occupies all parts of the body, and is held together by the body, while at the same time, and in spite of this, holding itself in essential distinctness from the body.[72] Epicurus also speaks of the “Soul” as a special and enduring substance within the body, a “part” of the corporeal, not a mere “harmony” resulting from the association of the parts of the body.[73] He even speaks of two parts or modes of manifestation in the “soul”; the irrational, which holds the whole body in its sway as its vital force, and the rational, situated in the breast, which exercises will and intelligence and is the last and most essential source of life in living things, without the undivided presence of which death occurs.[74] Anima and animus (as Lucretius calls them), distinct but not separable from one another,[75] come into being in the embryo of man and grow to maturity, old age and decay, together with the body.[76] If death occurs it means that the atoms belonging to the body are separated and the soul-atoms withdrawn—even before the final dissolution of the body, the separable “soul” disappears. No longer held together by the body, it is blown away in the wind, it disappears “like smoke” in the air.[77] The soul, this soul that had animated the individual man, is no more.[78] The material elements of which it was composed are indestructible; it is quite possible that they may at some future time combine together with the life-stuff to produce new life and consciousness of exactly the same kind as had once been joined together in the living man. But, if so, it will be a new creature that thus comes into being: the original man has been annihilated by death; there is no bond of continuous consciousness uniting him with the fresh creation.[79] The vital forces of the world are continuous, undiminished, indestructible, but in the formation of the individual living creature they are only lent temporarily, for this occasion and for a brief period, after which they are withdrawn for ever from the particular creature. Vitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu.
After his death the individual is unaffected by the fate of his inanimate body;[80] nor should he be troubled by the thought of what may happen to the atoms of his soul. Death does not concern him at all; for he only is when death is not; where death is, he is no longer there.[81] Sensation and consciousness have left him at the dissolution of body and soul; what he cannot possibly feel affects him no longer. Epicurean maxims are never tired of driving home [506] this proposition: death is nothing to us.[82] From every possible direction, from abstract principle and practical experience in actual life, Lucretius labours to demonstrate the truth of this view[83] as ardently as other philosophers seek to prove its opposite. Physical science has no more valuable service to render than that of convincing us of its truth.[84] Just as the wisdom of Epicurus has no other purpose than to protect man, of all creatures the one most sensitive to pain, from distress and anguish—and even pleasure is but the removal of pain—so more particularly, in putting an end to the fear of death and the craving after unceasing life, it serves this finite life itself,[85] that is committed to us once and for all and never repeated.[86] If a man has once succeeded in realizing that he will cease to be in the moment of death’s coming, he will neither be oppressed with terror at the threatened loss of self-consciousness nor will the terrors of eternity[87] or the fabulous monsters of the spirit-world below the earth[88] darken his existence by casting their dark shadow over all his life.[89] He will devote himself to life without repining, neither fearing death nor seeking it.[90]
He alone—the ideal Wise Man of the Epicurean faith—will know how to live as the true artist of his own life;[91] he will not waste the precious time in vain preparations for the future,[92] but will cram every moment to the full so that his brief span of existence will have all that a long life could give. Long life, in fact, even life without an end, would not make him any happier or any richer. What life has to offer it has already offered—anything further must only be a repetition of what has gone before: eadem sunt omnia semper.[93] The Wise Man has no reason even to look for an eternity of life.[94] In his own personality, in this present “now”, he possesses all the conditions necessary to happiness. The very transience of this supreme happiness to which mortality can attain makes it seem the more valuable to him. To the development and the enjoyment of this, the only life that belongs to him he will devote himself exclusively. In ethical matters, too, the atomist doctrine holds good. There is no such thing in nature as an essential community of human beings—still less of humanity—there are only individuals.[95] In associations entered into by free and unforced choice the individual may attach himself to the individual as one friend to another; but the political societies that men have invented and set up among themselves have no obligations for the Wise Man. He is himself the centre and indeed the whole circumference of the world surrounding [507] him. State and society are valuable, and indeed only exist for the protection of the individual and to make it possible for him under their enfolding care to develop his own personality in freedom.[96] The individual, on the other hand, does not exist for the state, but for himself. “It is no longer necessary to save the Hellenes or to win crowns of victory from them in contests of wisdom.”[97] Such is the decision reached with a sigh of relief by a civilization that has attained the highest point of its development and is now overcome by a lassitude in which it no longer sets itself new tasks, but takes its ease as age may be permitted to do. In its lassitude it no longer hopes, and in all honesty no longer cares, to extend the period of its existence beyond the limits of this earthly life. Calm and untroubled it sees this life, dear though it may once have been, fade away, taking its leave and sinking into nothingness without a struggle.