Thus it seems that Aristotle is the true successor of Socrates, inasmuch as Philosophy, which under the spells of Platonism had withdrawn again to the empyrean, is charmed down once more by the Stageirite to the business and bosoms of mankind. To use the expressive metaphor of Aristotle himself, though not, of course, in this connexion, if the creator of the “Republic” shines as one of “the most beautiful and the strongest” present at the Olympian Games, the author of the “Ethics” is one of the “Combatants” who have been crowned, because they have descended into the arena, and by right action have secured what is noble and good in life.[85] After Aristotle, it was improbable that Philosophy would ever again render itself obnoxious to the reproach levelled against Plato by some of his contemporaries that “they went to him expecting to hear about the chief good, but he put them off with a quantity of remarks about numbers and things they could not understand.”[86]
Contemporary with the work of Aristotle and his insistence upon the necessity that each individual man should seek for the chief good in the sphere of his own actual experience, occurred the relaxation of the dominant claims of the State to the best part of the energies and activities of the citizen. The change in the political condition of Greece consequent upon the Macedonian conquest had turned the Greek citizen back upon his own soul for inspiration to guide his steps aright. The philosophical tendency was thus aided by external conditions, and the joint operation of both these influences established in Stoicism and Epicureanism the satisfaction of the moral requirements of the individual man as the aim and end of Philosophy.
Whatever importance the leaders of the Stoics attached to Logic and Physics—and different philosophers formed different estimates of their value[87]—all were agreed that these parts of Philosophy were only useful in so far as they enabled mankind to lead a virtuous life; a life in harmony with nature and its laws; a life which placed them above the domination of “Fear and hope and phantasy and awe, And wistful yearning and unsated loves, That strain beyond the limits of this life.”[88] The Epicureans repudiated Dialectic,[89] and, as already stated, studied Physics with a view only to freeing the mind of man from those supernatural fears which hampered him in his attainment of terrestrial virtue and happiness:—
“Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia cæcis
In tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
Interdum nilo quæ sunt metuenda magis quam
Quæ pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.
Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necesse est
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturæ species ratioque.”