There is one more aspect deserving our attention, under which the theory of Nature has been presented both in ancient and modern times. A dialogue which, whether rightly or wrongly attributed to Plato, may be taken as good evidence on the subject it relates to,65 exhibits Hippias in the character of a universal genius, who can not only teach every science and practise every kind of literary composition, but has also manufactured all the clothes and other articles about his person. Here we have precisely the sort of versatility which characterises uncivilised society, and which believers in a state of nature love to encourage at all times. The division of labour, while it carries us ever farther from barbarism, makes us more dependent on each other. An Odysseus is master of many arts, a Themistocles of two, a Demosthenes of only one. A Norwegian peasant can do more for himself than an English countryman, and therefore makes a better colonist. If we must return to Nature, our first step should be to learn a number of trades, and so be better able to shift for ourselves. Such was the ideal of Hippias, and it was also the ideal of the eighteenth century. Its literature begins with Robinson Crusoe, the story of a man who is accidentally compelled to provide himself, during many years, with all the necessaries of life. Its educational manuals are, in France, Rousseau’s Émile; in England, Day’s Sandford and Merton, both teaching that the young should be thrown as much as possible on their own resources. One of its types is Diderot, who learns handicrafts that he may describe them in the Encyclopédie. Its two great spokesmen are Voltaire and Goethe, who, after cultivating every department of literature, take in statesmanship as well. And its last word is Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Culture, holding up totality of existence as the supreme ideal to be sought after.
There is no reason to believe that Hippias used his distinction between Nature and convention as an argument for despotism. It would rather appear that, if anything, he and his school desired to establish a more complete equality among men. Others, however, both rhetoricians and practical statesmen, were not slow to draw an opposite conclusion. They saw that where no law was recognised, as between different nations, nothing but violence and the right of the stronger prevailed. It was once believed that aggressions which human law could not reach found no favour with the gods, and dread of the divine displeasure may have done something towards restraining them. But religion had partly been destroyed by the new culture, partly perverted into a sanction for wrong-doing. By what right, it was asked, did Zeus himself reign? Had he not unlawfully dethroned his father, Cronos, and did he not now hold power simply by virtue of superior strength? Similar reasonings were soon applied to the internal government of each state. It was alleged that the ablest citizens could lay claim to uncontrolled supremacy by a title older than any social fiction. Rules of right meant nothing but a permanent conspiracy of the weak to withdraw themselves from the legitimate dominion of their born master, and to bamboozle him into a voluntary surrender of his natural privileges. Sentiments bearing a superficial resemblance to these have occasionally found utterance among ourselves. Nevertheless, it would be most unjust to compare Carlyle and Mr. Froude with Critias and Calliclês. We believe that their preference of despotism to representative government is an entire mistake. But we know that with them as with us the good of the governed is the sole end desired. The gentlemen of Athens sought after supreme power only as a means for gratifying their worst passions without let or hindrance; and for that purpose they were ready to ally themselves with every foreign enemy in turn, or to flatter the caprices of the Dêmos, if that policy promised to answer equally well. The antisocial theories of these ‘young lions,’ as they were called by their enemies and sometimes by themselves also, do not seem to have been supported by any public teacher. If we are to believe Plato, Pôlus, a Sicilian rhetor, did indeed regard Archelaus, the abler Louis Napoleon of his time, with sympathy and envious admiration, but without attempting to justify the crimes of his hero by an appeal to natural law. The corruption of theoretical morality among the paid teachers took a more subtle form. Instead of opposing one principle to another, they held that all law had the same source, being an emanation from the will of the stronger, and exclusively designed to promote his interest. Justice, according to Thrasymachus in the Republic, is another’s good, which is true enough, and to practise it except under compulsion is foolish, which, whatever Grote may say, is a grossly immoral doctrine.
V.
We have seen how the idea of Nature, first evolved by physical philosophy, was taken by some, at least, among the Sophists as a basis for their ethical teaching; then how an interpretation utterly opposed to theirs was put on it by practical men, and how this second interpretation was so generalised by the younger rhetoricians as to involve the denial of all morality whatever. Meanwhile, another equally important conception, destined to come into speedy and prolonged antagonism with the idea of Nature, and like it to exercise a powerful influence on ethical reflection, had almost contemporaneously been elaborated out of the materials which earlier speculation supplied. From Parmenides and Heracleitus down, every philosopher who had propounded a theory of the world, had also more or less peremptorily insisted on the fact that his theory differed widely from common belief. Those who held that change is impossible, and those who taught that everything is incessantly changing; those who asserted the indestructibility of matter, and those who denied its continuity; those who took away objective reality from every quality except extension and resistance, and those who affirmed that the smallest molecules partook more or less of every attribute that is revealed to sense—all these, however much they might disagree among themselves, agreed in declaring that the received opinions of mankind were an utter delusion. Thus, a sharp distinction came to be drawn between the misleading sense-impressions and the objective reality to which thought alone could penetrate. It was by combining these two elements, sensation and thought, that the idea of mind was originally constituted. And mind when so understood could not well be accounted for by any of the materialistic hypotheses at first proposed. The senses must differ profoundly from that of which they give such an unfaithful report; while reason, which Anaxagoras had so carefully differentiated from every other form of existence, carried back its distinction to the subjective sphere, and became clothed with a new spirituality when reintegrated in the consciousness of man.
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