[90]. Herbert Spencer, writing to a correspondent, once well expressed the harmlessness—if we choose so to regard it—of moral teaching: “After nearly two thousand years’ preaching of the religion of amity, the religion of enmity remains predominant, and Europe is peopled by two hundred million pagans, masquerading as Christians, who revile those who wish them to act on the principles they profess.”
[91]. But later asceticism was strictly the outcome of a Greek tendency, to be traced in Plato, developed through Antisthenes, through Zeno, through Epictetus, who all desired to liberate the soul from the bonds of matter. The Neo-Platonists carried this tendency further, for in their time, the prevailing anarchy and confusion rendered the world and society less than ever a fitting haven for the soul. It was not Christianity that made the world ascetic (and there were elements of hedonism in the teaching of Jesus), but the world that made Christianity ascetic, and it was easy for a Christian to become a Neo-Platonist, for they were both being moulded by the same forces.
[92]. Maurice Croiset devotes a few luminous critical pages to Plotinus in the Croisets’ Histoire de la Littérature Grecque, vol. V, pp. 820-31. As an extended account of Plotinus, from a more enthusiastically sympathetic standpoint, there are Dr. Inge’s well-known Gifford Lectures, The Philosophy of Plotinus (1918); I may also mention a careful scholastic study, L’Esthétique de Plotin (1913), by Cochez, of Louvain, who regards Plotinus as the climax of the objective æsthetics of antiquity and the beginning of the road to modern subjective æsthetics.
[93]. Ennead, bk. III, chap. VI. I have mostly followed the translation of Stephen McKenna.
[94]. St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, bk. IV, chap. XXI.
[95]. Kant was habitually cold and calm. But he was very fond of dried fruits and used to have them specially imported for him by his friend Motherby. “At one time he was eagerly expecting a vessel with French fruits which he had ordered, and he had already invited some friends to a dinner at which they were to be served. The vessel was, however, delayed a number of days by a storm. When it arrived, Kant was informed that the provisions had become short on account of the delay, and that the crew had eaten his fruit. Kant was so angry that he declared they ought rather to have starved than to have touched it. Surprised at this irritation, Motherby said, ‘Professor, you cannot be in earnest.’ Kant answered, ‘I am really in earnest,’ and went away. Afterwards he was sorry.” (Quoted by Stuckenberg, The Life of Kant, p. 138.) But still it was quite in accordance with Kantian morality that the sailors should have starved.
[96]. Georg von Gizycki, Die Ethik David Hume’s, p. 11.
[97]. F. C. Sharp, Mind (1912), p. 388.
[98]. Shaftesbury held that Locke swept away too much and failed to allow for inborn instincts (or “senses,” as he sometimes called them) developing naturally. We now see that he was right.
[99]. There is no need to refer to the value of salt, and therefore the appreciation of the flavour of salt, to primitive people. Still to-day, in Spain, sal (salt) is popularly used for a more or less intellectual and moral quality which is highly admired.