Standing aloof from the popular religion as well as from the deeper conceptions
of Herodotus and the Tragic School, he no longer thought of God as of one with
fair limbs and treacherous face haunting wood and glade nor would he see in
him a jealous judge continually interfering in the world's history to bring
the wicked tu punishment and the proud to a fall. God to him was the incarnation
of the pure Intellect, a being whose activity was the contemplation of his own
perfection, one whom Philosophy might imitate but whom prayers could never move,
to the sublime indifference of whose passionless wisdom what were the sons of
men, their desires or their sins? While as regards the other difficulty and
the formation of a philosophy of history, the conflict of free will with general
laws appears first in Greek thought in the usual theological form in which all
great Ideas seem to be cradled at their birth.
It was such legends as those of Oedipus and Adrastus exemplifying the struggles
of individual humanity against the overpowering force of circumstances and necessity,
which gave to the early Greeks those same lessons which we of modern days draw,
in somewhat less artistic fashion, from the study of statistics and the laws
of physiology.
In Aristotle, of course, there is no trace of supernatural influence. The Furies,
which drive their victim into sin first and then punishment, are no longer "viper-tressed
goddesses with eyes and mouth aflame," but those evil thoughts which harbour
within the impure soul. In this, as in all other points, to arrive at Aristotle
is to reach the pure atmosphere of scientific and modern thought.
But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as essentially
a reductio ad absurdum of life, he was fully conscious of the fact that the
will is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of force beyond which we cannot go
and whose special characteristic is inconsistency, but a certain creative attitude
of the mind which is, from the first, continually influenced by habits, education
and circumstance; so absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good and the
bad man alike seem to lose the power of free will; for the one is morally unable
to sin, the other physically incapacitated for reformation.
And of the influence of climate and temperature in forming the nature of man
(a conception perhaps pressed too far in modern days when "race theory"
is supposed to be a sufficient explanation of the Hindoo, and the latitude and
longitude of a country the best guide to its morals, Aristotle is completely
unaware. I do not allude to such smaller points as the oligarchical tendencies
of a horse-breeding country and the democracy influence of the proximity of
the sea (important though they are for the consideration of Greek history),
but rather to those wider views in the seventh book of his Politics, where he
attributes the happy union in the Greek character of intellectual attainments
with the spirit of progress to the temperate climate they enjoyed, and points
out how the extreme cold of the north dulls the mental faculties of its inhabitants
and renders them incapable of social organisation or extended empire; while
to the enervating heat of eastern countries was due that want of spirit and
bravery which then, as now, was the characteristic of the population in that
quarter of the globe.
Thucydides has shown the casual connection between political revolutions and
the fertility of the soil, but goes a step farther and points out the psychological
influences on a people's character exercised by the various extremes of climate
-- in both cases the first appearance of a most valuable form of historical
criticism.
To the development of Dialectic, as to God, intervals of time are of no account.
From Plato and Aristotle we pass direct to Polybius.
The progress of thought from the philosopher of the Academe to the Arcadian
historian may be best illustrated by a comparison of the method by which each
of the three writers, whom I have selected as the highest expressions of rationalism
of his respective age, attained to his ideal state: for the latter conception
may be in a measure regarded as representing the most spiritual principle which
they could discern in history.
Now, Plato created his own a priori principles: Aristotle formed his by an analysis
of existing constitutions; Polybius found his realised for him in the actual
world of fact. Aristotle criticised the deductive negative instances, but Polybius
will not take the "Cloud City" of the Republic into account at all.
He compares it to an athlete who has never run on "Constitution Hill,"
to a statue so beautiful that it is entirely removed from the ordinary conditions
of humanity, and consequently from the canons of criticism.
The Roman state had attained in his eyes, by means of the mutual counteraction
of three opposing forces (the monarchical, aristocratic and democratic elements
of the Roman constitution are referred to), that stable equilibrium in politics
which was the ideal of all the theoretical writers of antiquity. And in connection
with this point it will be convenient to notice here how much truth there is
contained in the accusation so often brought against the ancients that they
knew nothing of the idea of Progress, for the meaning of many of their speculations
will be hidden from us if we do not try and comprehend first what their aim
was, and secondly why it was so.
Now, like all wide generalities, this statement is at least inaccurate. The
prayer of Plato's ideal city -- ejx ajgaqw'n ajmeivnou", kai; ejx wjfelimwtevrou"
ajei; tou;" ejkgovnou" givgnesqai [that the sons of good men should
always be better than their fathers, and the sons of useful citizens more useful
than their fathers] might be written as a text over the door of the last Temple
to Humanity raised by the disciples of Fourier and Saint Simon, but it is certainly
true that their ideal principle was order and permanence, not indefinite progress.
For, setting aside the artistic prejudices which would have led the Greeks to
reject this idea of unlimited improvement, we may note that the modern conception
of progress rests partly on the new enthusiasm and worship of humanity, partly
on the splendid hopes of material improvements in civilisation which applied
science has held out to us, two influences from which ancient Greek thought
seems to have been strangely free. For the Greeks marred the perfect humanism
of great men whom they worshipped, by imputing to them divinity and its supernatural
powers; while their science was eminently speculative and often almost mystic
in its character, aiming at culture and not utility, at higher spirituality
and more intense reverence for law, rather than at the increased facilities
of locomotion and the cheap production of common things about which our modern
scientific school ceases not to boast. And lastly, and perhaps chiefly, we must
remember that the "plague spot of the Greek states," as one of their
own writers has called it, was the terrible insecurity to life and property
which resulted from the factions and revolutions which ceased not to trouble
Greece at all times, raising a spirit of fanaticism such as religion raised
in the middle ages of Europe.
These considerations, then, will enable us to understand first how it was that,
radical and unscrupulous reformers as the Greek political theorists were, yet,
their end once attained, no modern conservatives raised such outcry against
the slightest innovation. Even acknowledged improvements in such things as the
games of children or the modes of music were regarded by them with feelings
of extreme apprehension as the herald of the drapeau rouge [red flag] of reform.
And secondly, it will show us how it was that Polybius found his ideal in the
commonwealth of Rome, and Aristotle, like Mr. Bright, in the middle classes.
Polybius, however, is not content merely with pointing out his ideal state,
but enters at considerable length into the question of those general laws whose
consideration forms the chief essential of the philosophy of history.
He starts by accepting the general principle that all things are fated to decay
(which I noticed in the case of Plato), and that "as iron produces rust
and as wood breeds the animals that destroy it, so every state has in it the
seeds of its own corruption." He is not, however, content to rest there,
but proceeds to deal with the more immediate causes of revolutions, which he
says are twofold in nature, either external or internal. Now, the former, depending
as they do on the synchronous conjunction of other events outside the sphere
of scientific estimation, are from their very character incalculable; but the
latter, though assuming many forms, always result from the over-great preponderance
of any single element to the detriment of the others, the rational law lying
at the base of all varieties of political changes being that stability can result
from the statistical equilibrium produced by the counteraction of opposing parts,
since the more simple a constitution is the more it is insecure. Plato had pointed
out before how the extreme liberty of a democracy always resulted in despotism,
but Polybius analyses the law and shows the scientific principles on which it
rests.
The doctrine of the instability of pure constitution forms an important era
in the philosophy of history. Its special applicability to the politics of our
own day has been illustrated in the rise of the great Napoleon, when the French
state had lost those divisions of caste and prejudice, of landed aristocract
and moneyed interest, institutions in which the vulgar see only barriers to
Liberty but which are indeed the only possible defences against the coming of
that periodic Sirius of politics, the tuvranno" ejk prostatikh'" rJivzh"
[lord of an aristocratic family].
TO BE CONTINUED