Ancient Ideals

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XVI. THE EMPIRE: PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS REVIVAL. TH E poets of the Empire naturally express more of the sentiments and emotions of the age than its philosophers. And it was a time when men were advancing through growth of feeling and through the recognition of its ethical worth, and not through...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XVI. THE EMPIRE: PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS REVIVAL. TH E poets of the Empire naturally express more of the sentiments and emotions of the age than its philosophers. And it was a time when men were advancing through growth of feeling and through the recognition of its ethical worth, and not through the development of reason. Hence the poets The Age represent most fully the spiritual progress of and its j.he j-ime. The great philosophers of Greece Philoso- phers I6't l'tt;le unattained in qualities of mind. In knowledge the world has passed beyond them; it has seen no men more intellectual. But they left much unattained in the development of the human heart; and this development went on throughout the entire period from Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius. Such progress as is shown by the philosophers of the Empire lies in the growth of feeling, and in the thoughts to which that growth gave rise. These men represent no philosophical advance, while, even in their disavowals, they show the human heart pressing to recognition. Share in this spirit-growth drives Seneca to rhetorical exaggeration in his denial of the claims of emotion,1 strengthens the love of God and man in Epictetus and Marcus, and saddens the Stoic emperor with longings unjustified in his philosophy. There is another aspect of the change between the earlier and the later philosophers. Greek philosophy, until the death of Aristotle, loved knowledge for its own sake, and deemed a search for it to be a crowning part of life. The Stoical as well as the Epicurean philosophy was rather a guide of life, a means of bringing peace to men. Among the Romans these systems became almost exclusively ethical, that is, practical. By the time of Epictetus and Marcus, the helplessness of man without philosophy was ...