← catalogue

Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8

by Elbert Hubbard · English · Gutenberg #23640 · 540,492 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8

Author: Elbert Hubbard


        
Release date: November 27, 2007 [eBook #23640]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23640

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS, VOLUME 8 ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT, VOLUME 8

Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Philosophers

by

ELBERT HUBBARD

Memorial Edition

New York

1916.





CONTENTS

  SOCRATES
  SENECA
  ARISTOTLE
  MARCUS AURELIUS
  IMMANUEL KANT
  SWEDENBORG
  SPINOZA
  AUGUSTE COMTE
  VOLTAIRE
  HERBERT SPENCER
  SCHOPENHAUER
  HENRY D. THOREAU




SOCRATES


     I do not think it possible for a better man to be injured by a
     worse.... To a good man nothing is evil, neither while living nor
     when dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the gods.

                                               --_The Republic_

[Illustration: SOCRATES]


It was four hundred seventy years before Christ that Socrates was born.
He never wrote a book, never made a formal address, held no public
office, wrote no letters, yet his words have come down to us sharp,
vivid and crystalline. His face, form and features are to us
familiar--his goggle eyes, bald head, snub nose and bow-legs! The habit
of his life--his goings and comings, his arguments and wrangles, his
infinite leisure, his sublime patience, his perfect faith--all these
things are plain, lifting the man out of the commonplace and setting him
apart.

The "Memorabilia" of Xenophon and the "Dialogues" of Plato give us
Boswellian pictures of the man.

Knowing the man, we know what he would do; and knowing what he did, we
know the man.

Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonecutter, and his wife
Phaenarete. In boyhood he used to carry dinner to his father, and sitting
by, he heard the men, in their free and easy way, discuss the plans of
Pericles. These workmen didn't know the plans--they were only privates
in the ranks, but they exercised their prerogatives to criticize, and
while working to assist, did right royally disparage and condemn. Like
sailors who love their ship, and grumble at grub and grog, yet on shore
will allow no word of disparagement to be said, so did these Athenians
love their city, and still condemn its rulers--they exercised the
laborer's right to damn the man who gives him work.

Little did the workmen guess--little did his father guess--that this
pug-nosed boy, making pictures in the sand with his big toe, would also
leave his footprints on the sands of time, and a name that would rival
that of Phidias and Pericles!

Socrates was a product of the Greek renaissance. Great men come in
groups, like comets sent from afar. Athens was seething with thought and
feeling: Pericles was giving his annual oration--worth thousands of
weekly sermons--and planning his dream in marble; Phidias was cutting
away the needless portions of the white stone of Pentelicus and
liberating wondrous forms of beauty; Sophocles was revealing the
possibilities of the stage; AEschylus was pointing out the way as a
playwright; and the passion for physical beauty was everywhere an
adjunct of religion.

Prenatal influences, it seems, played their part in shaping the destiny
of Socrates. His mother followed the profession of Sairy Gamp, and made
her home with a score of families, as she was needed. The trained nurse
is often untrained, and is a regular encyclopedia of esoteric family
facts. She wipes her mouth on her apron and is at home in every room of
the domicile from parlor to pantry. Then as now she knew the trials and
troubles of her clients, and all domestic underground happenings
requiring adjustment she looked after as she was "disposed."

Evidently Phaenarete was possessed of considerable personality, for we
hear of her being called to Mythaeia on a professional errand shortly
before the birth of Socrates; and in a month after his birth, a similar
call came from another direction, and the bald little philosopher was
again taken along--from which we assume, following in the footsteps of
Conan Doyle, that Socrates was no bottle-baby. The world should be
grateful to Phaenarete that she did not honor the Sairy Gamp precedents
and observe the Platonic maxim, "Sandal-makers usually go barefoot": she
gave her customers an object-lesson in well-doing as well as teaching
them by precept. None of her clients did so well as she--even though her
professional duties were so exacting that domesticity to her was merely
incidental.

It was only another case of the amateur distancing the professional.

       *       *       *       *       *

From babyhood we lose sight of Socrates until we find him working at his
father's trade as a sculptor. Certainly he had a goodly degree of skill,
for the "Graces" which he carved were fair and beautiful and admired by
many. This was enough: he just wanted to reveal what he could do; and
then to show that to have no ambition was his highest ambition, he threw
down his tools and took off his apron for good. He was then thirty-five
years old. Art is a jealous mistress, and demands that "thou shalt have
no other gods before me." Socrates did not concentrate on art. His mind
went roaming the world of philosophy, and for his imagination the
universe was hardly large enough.

I said that he deliberately threw down his tools; but possibly this was
by request, for he had acquired a habit of engaging in much wordy
argument and letting the work slide. He went out upon the streets to
talk, and in the guise of a learner he got in close touch with all the
wise men of Athens by stopping them and asking questions. In physique he
was immensely strong--hard work had developed his muscles, plain fare
had made him oblivious of the fact that he had a stomach, and as for
nerves, he had none to speak of.

Socrates did not marry until he was about forty. His wife was scarcely
twenty. Of his courtship we know nothing, but sure it is Socrates did
not go and sue for the lady's hand in the conventional way, nor seek to
gain the consent of her parents by proving his worldly prospects. His
apparel was costly as his purse could buy, not gaudy nor expressed in
fancy. It consisted of the one suit that he wore, for we hear of his
repairing beyond the walls to bathe in the stream, and of his washing
his clothing, hanging it on the bushes and waiting for it to dry before
going back to the city. As for shoes, he had one pair, and since he
never once wore them, going barefoot Summer and Winter, it is presumed
that they lasted well. One can not imagine Socrates in an opera-hat--in
fact, he wore no hat, and he was bald. I record the fact so as to
confound those zealous ones who badger the bald as a business, who have
recipes concealed on their persons, and who assure us that baldness has
its rise in headgear.

Socrates belonged to the leisure class. His motto was, "Know Thyself."
He considered himself of much more importance than any statue he could
make, and to get acquainted with himself as being much more desirable
than to know physical phenomena. His plan of knowing himself was to ask
everybody questions, and in their answers he would get a true reflection
of his own mind. His intellect would reply to theirs, and if his
questions dissolved their answers into nothingness, the supremacy of his
own being would be apparent; and if they proved his folly he was equally
grateful--if he was a fool, his desire was to know it. So sincere was
Socrates in this wish to know himself that never did he show the
slightest impatience nor resentment when the argument was turned upon
him.

He looked upon his mind as a second party, and sat off and watched it
work. Should it become confused or angered, it would be proof of its
insufficiency and littleness. If Socrates ever came to know himself, he
knew this fact: as an economic unit he was an absolute failure; but as a
gadfly, stinging men into thinking for themselves, he was a success. A
specialist is a deformity contrived by Nature to get the work done.
Socrates was a thought-specialist, and the laziest man who ever lived in
a strenuous age. The desire of his life was to live without
desire--which is essentially the thought of Nirvana. He had the power
never to exercise his power except in knowing himself.

He accepted every fact, circumstance and experience of life, and counted
it gain. Life to him was a precious privilege, and what were regarded as
unpleasant experiences were as much a part of life as the pleasant ones.
He who succeeds in evading unpleasant experiences cheats himself out of
so much life. You know yourself by watching yourself to see what you do
when you are thwarted, crossed, contradicted, or deprived of certain
things supposed to be desirable. If you always get the desirable things,
how do you know what you would do if you didn't have them? You exchange
so much life for the thing, that's all, and thus do we see Socrates
anticipating Emerson's Essay on Compensation.

Everything is bought with a price--all things are of equal value--no one
can cheat you, for to be cheated is a not undesirable experience, and in
the act, if you are really filled with the thought, "Know Thyself," you
get the compensation by increase in mental growth.

However, to deliberately go in search of experience, Socrates said,
would be a mistake, because then you would so multiply impressions that
none would be of any avail and your life would be burned out. To clutch
life by the throat and demand that it shall stand and deliver is to
place yourself so out of harmony with your environment that you will get
nothing.

Above all things, we must be calm, self-centered, never anxious, and be
always ready to accept whatever the gods may send. The world will come
to us if we only wait. It will be seen that Socrates is at once the
oldest and most modern of thinkers. He was the first to express the New
Thought. A thought, to Socrates, was more of a reality than a block of
marble--a moral principle was just as persistent as a chemical agent.

       *       *       *       *       *

The silken-robed and perfumed Sophist was sport and game for Socrates.
For him Socrates recognized no closed season. If Socrates ever came near
losing his temper, it was in dealing with this Edmund Russell of Athens.
Grant Allen used to say, "The spores of everything are everywhere, and a
certain condition breeds a certain microbe." A period of prosperity
always warms into life this social paragon, who lives in a darkened room
hung with maroon drapery where incense is burned and a turbaned Hindu
carries your card to the master, who faces the sun and exploits a
prie-dieu when the wind blows east. Athens had these men of refined
elegance, Rome evolved them, London has had her day, New York knows
them, and Chicago--I trust I will not be contradicted when I say that
Chicago understands her business! And so we find these folks who
cultivate a pellucid passivity, a phthisicky whisper, a supercilious
smirk, and who win our smothered admiration and give us gooseflesh by
imparting a taupe tinge of mystery to all their acts and words, thus
proving to the assembled guests that they are the Quality and Wisdom
will die with them.

This lingo of meaningless words and high-born phrases always set
Socrates by the ears, and when he could corner a Sophist, he would very
shortly prick his pretty toy balloon, until at last the tribe fled him
as a pestilence. Socrates stood for sanity. The Sophist represented
moonshine gone to seed, and these things, proportioned ill, drive men
transverse.

Extremes equalize themselves: the pendulum swings as far this way as it
does that. The saponaceous Sophist who renounced the world and yet lived
wholly in a world of sense, making vacuity pass legal tender for
spirituality, and the priest who, mystified with a mumble of words,
evolved a Diogenes who lived in a tub, wore regally a robe of rags, and
once went into the temple, and cracking a louse on the altar-rail, said
solemnly, "Thus does Diogenes sacrifice to all the gods at once!" are
but two sides of the same shield.

In Socrates was a little jollity and much wisdom pickled in the scorn of
Fortune; but the Sophists inwardly bowed down and worshiped the fickle
dame on idolatrous knees. Socrates won immortality because he did not
want it, and the Sophists secured oblivion because they deserved it.

       *       *       *       *       *

We hear of Socrates going to Aspasia, and holding long conversations
with her "to sharpen his mind." Aspasia did not go out in society much:
she and Pericles lived very simply. It is worth while to remember that
the most intellectual woman of her age was democratic enough to be on
friendly terms with the barefoot philosopher who went about regally
wrapped in a table-spread. Socrates did not realize the flight of time
when making calls--he went early and stayed late. Possibly prenatal
influences caused him often to call before breakfast and remain until
after supper.

Just imagine Pericles, Aspasia and Socrates sitting at table--with
Walter Savage Landor behind the arras making notes! Doubtless Socrates
and Mrs. Pericles did most of the talking, while the First Citizen of
Athens listened and smiled indulgently now and then as his mind wandered
to construction contracts and walking delegates. Pericles, the builder
of a city--Pericles, first among practical men since time began, and
Socrates, who jostles history for first place among those who have done
nothing but talk--imagine these two eating melons together, while
Aspasia, gentle and kind, talks of spirit being more than matter and
love being greater than the Parthenon!

Socrates is usually spoken of as regarding women with slight favor, but
I have noticed that your genus woman-hater holds the balance true by
really being a woman-lover. If a man is enough interested in women to
hate them, note this: he is only searching for the right woman, the
woman who compares favorably with the ideal woman in his own mind. He
measures every woman by this standard, just as Ruskin compared all
modern painters with Turner and discarded them with fitting adjectives
as they receded from what he regarded as the perfect type. If Ruskin had
not been much interested in painters, would he have written scathing
criticisms about them?

In several instances we hear of Socrates reminding his followers that
they are "weak as women," and he was the first to say "woman is an
undeveloped man." But Socrates was a great admirer of human beauty,
whether physical or spiritual, and his abrupt way of stopping beautiful
women on the streets and bluntly telling them they were beautiful,
doubtless often confirmed their suspicions. And thus far he was
pleasing, but when he went on to ask questions so as to ascertain
whether their mental estate compared with their physical, why, that was
slightly different. It is good to hear him say, "There is no sex in
intellect," and also, "I have long held the opinion that the female sex
is nothing inferior to ours, save only in strength of body and possibly
in steadiness of judgment." And Xenophon quotes him thus: "It is more
delightful to hear the virtue of a good woman described than if the
painter Zeuxis were to show me the portrait of the fairest woman in the
world."

Perhaps Thackeray is right when he says, "The men who appreciate woman
most are those who have felt the sharpness of her claws." That is to
say, things show up best on the darkest background. If so, let us give
Xantippe due credit. She tested the temper of the sage by railing on him
and deluging him with Socratic propositions, not waiting for the
answers; she often broke in with a broom upon his introspective efforts
to know himself; if this were not enough, she dashed buckets of
scrubbing-water over him; presents that were sent him by admiring
friends she used as targets for her mop and wit; if he invited friends
with faith plus to dine, she upset the table, dishes and all, before
them--not much to their loss; she occasionally elbowed her way through a
crowd where her husband was entertaining the listeners upon the divine
harmonies, and would tear off his robe and lead him home by the ear. But
these things never ruffled Socrates--he might roll his eyes in comic
protest at the audiences as he was being led away captive, but no
resentment was shown. He had the strength of a Hercules, but he was a
far better non-resistant than Tolstoy, because he took his medicine with
a wink, while Fate is obliged to hold the nose of the author of "Anna
Karenina," who never sees the comedy of an inward struggle and an
outward compliance, any more than does the benedict, safely entrenched
under the bed, who shouts out, "I defy thee, I defy thee!" as did
Mephisto when Goethe thrust him into Tophet.

       *       *       *       *       *

The popular belief is that Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, was a shrew,
and had she lived in New England in Cotton Mather's time would have been
a candidate for the ducking-stool. Socrates said he married her for
discipline. A man in East Aurora, however, has recently made it plain to
himself that Xantippe was possessed of a great and acute intellect. She
knew herself, and she knew her liege as he never did--he was too close
to his subject to get the perspective. She knew that under right
conditions his name would live as one of the world's great teachers, and
so she set herself to supply the conditions. She deliberately sacrificed
herself and put her character in a wrong light before the world in order
that she might benefit the world. Most women have a goodly grain of
ambition for themselves, and if their husbands have genius, their
business is not to prove it, but to show that they themselves are not
wholly commonplace.

Not so Xantippe--she was quite willing to be misunderstood that her
husband might live.

What the world calls a happy marriage is not wholly good--ease is bought
with a price. Suppose Xantippe and Socrates had settled down and lived
in a cottage with a vine growing over the portico, and two rows of
hollyhocks leading from the front gate to the door; a pathway of
coal-ashes lined off with broken crockery, and inside the house all
sweet, clean and tidy; Socrates earning six drachmas a day carving
marble, with double pay for overtime, and he handing the pay-envelope
over to her each Saturday night, keeping out just enough for tobacco,
and she putting a tidy sum in the AEgean Savings-Bank every month--why,
what then?

Well, that would have been an end of Socrates. Xantippe was big enough
to know this and so she supplied the domestic cantharides and drove him
out upon the streets--he grew to care very little for her, not much for
the children, nothing for his home. She drove him out into the world of
thought, instead of allowing him to settle down and be content with her
society.

I once knew a sculptor--another sculptor--an elemental bit of nature,
original and, better still, aboriginal. He used to sleep out under the
stars so as to wake up in the night and see the march of the Milky Way,
and watch the Pleiades disappear over the brink of the western horizon.
He wore a flannel shirt, thick-soled shoes, and overalls, no hat, and
his hair was thick and coarse as a horse's mane. This man had talent,
and he had sublime conceptions, great dreams, and splendid aspirations.
His soul was struggling to find expression. "Leave him alone," I said.
"He needs time to ripen. He is a Michelangelo in embryo!"

Did he ripen? Not he. He married a Wellesley girl of good family. She,
too, had ideas about art--she painted china-buttons for shirtwaists,
embroidered chasubles and sang "The Rosary" in a raucous Quinsigamond
voice. The big barbarian became respectable, and the last time I saw
him he wore a Tuxedo and was passing out platitudes and raspberry-shrub
at a lawn-party. The Wellesley girl had tamed her bear--they were very
happy, he assured me, and she was preparing a course of lectures for him
which he was to give at Mrs. Jack Gardner's. A Xantippe might have saved
him.

       *       *       *       *       *

A captious friend once suggested to Socrates this: "If you prize the
female nature so highly, how does it happen that you do not instruct
Xantippe?"--a rather indelicate proposition to put to a married man. And
Socrates, quite unruffled, replied: "My friend, if one wants to learn
horsemanship, does he choose a tame horse or one with mettle and a hard
mouth? I wish to converse with all sorts of people, and I believe that
nothing can disturb me after I grow accustomed to the tongue of
Xantippe."

Again we hear of his suggesting that his wife's scolding tongue may have
been only the buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and if he did not
call forth these qualities in her they would not otherwise have
appeared. And so, beholding her impatience and unseemliness, he would
realize the folly of an ill temper and thus learn by antithesis to curb
his own. Old Doctor Johnson used to have a regular menagerie of
wrangling, jangling, quibbling, dissatisfied pensioners in his
household; and so far as we know he never learned the truth that all
pensioners are dissatisfied. "If I can stand things at home, I can stand
things anywhere," he once said to Boswell, as much as to say, "If I can
stand things at home, I can stand even you." Goldsmith referred to
Boswell as a cur; Garrick said he thought he was a bur. Socrates had a
similar satellite by the name of Cheropho, a dark, dirty, weazened, and
awfully serious little man of the tribe of Buttinsky, who sat
breathlessly trying to catch the pearls that fell from the ample mouth
of the philosopher. Aristophanes referred to Cheropho as "Socrates'
bat," a play-off on Minerva and her bird of night, the owl. There were
quite a number of these "bats," and they seemed to labor under the same
hallucination that catches the lady students of the Pundit Vivakenanda
H. Darmapala: they think that wisdom is to be imparted by word of mouth,
and that by listening hard and making notes one can become very wise.
Socrates said again and again, "Character is a matter of growth and all
I hope to do is to make you think for yourselves."

That chilly exclusiveness which regards a man's house as his castle, his
home, the one sacred spot, and all outside as the cold and cruel world,
was not the ideal of Socrates. His family was his circle of friends, and
these were of all classes and conditions, from the First Citizen to
beggars on the street.

He made no charge for his teaching, took up no collections, and never
inaugurated a Correspondence School. America has produced one man who
has been called a reincarnation of Socrates; that man was Bronson
Alcott, who peddled clocks and forgot the flight of time whenever any
one would listen to him expound the unities. Alcott once ran his
wheelbarrow into a neighbor's garden and was proceeding to load his
motor-car with cabbages, beets and potatoes. Glancing up, the
philosopher saw the owner of the garden looking at him steadfastly over
the wall. "Don't look at me that way," called Alcott with a touch of
un-Socratic acerbity, "don't look at me that way--I need these things
more than you!" and went on with the annexation.

The idea that all good things are for use and belong to all who need
them was a favorite maxim of Socrates. The furniture in his house never
exceeded the exemption clause. Once we find him saying that Xantippe
complained because he did not buy her a stewpan, but since there was
nothing to put in it, he thought her protests ill-founded.

The climate of Athens is about like that of Southern California--one
does not need to bank food and fuel against the coming of Winter. Life
can be adjusted to its simplest forms. From his fortieth to his fiftieth
year, Socrates worked every other Thursday; then he retired from active
life, and Xantippe took in plain sewing.

Socrates was surely not a good provider, but if he had provided more for
his family, he would have provided less for the world. The wealthy Crito
would have turned his pockets inside out for Socrates, but Socrates had
all he wished, and explained that as it was he had to dance at home in
order to keep down the adipose. Aristides, who was objectionable because
he so shaped his conduct that he was called "The Just" and got himself
ostracized, was one of his dear friends. Antisthenes, the original
Cynic, used to walk six miles and back every day to hear Socrates talk.
The Cynic was a rich man, but so captivated was he with the preaching
of Socrates that he adopted the life of simplicity and dressed in rags
and boycotted both the barber and the bath. On one occasion Socrates
looked sharply at a rent in the cloak of his friend and said, "Ah,
Antisthenes, through that hole in your cloak I see your vanity!"

Xenophon sat at the feet of Socrates for a score of years, and then
wrote his recollections of him as a vindication of his character. Euclid
of Megara was nearly eighty when he came to Socrates as a pupil, trying
to get rid of his ill-temper and habit of ironical reply. Cebes and
Simmias left their native country and became Greek citizens for his
sake. Charmides, the pampered son of wealthy parents, learned pedagogics
by being shown that, in households where there were many servants, the
children got cheated out of their rightful education because others did
all the work, and to deprive a child of the privilege of being useful
was to rob him of so much life. AEschines, the ambitious son of a
sausage-maker, was advised by Socrates to borrow money of himself on
long time without interest, by reducing his wants. So pleased was the
recipient with this advice, that he went to publishing Socratic
dialogues as a business and had the felicity to fail with tidy
liabilities.

But the two men who loom largest in the life of Socrates are Alcibiades
and Plato--characters very much unlike.

Alcibiades was twenty-one years old when we find him first. He was
considered the handsomest young man in Athens. He was aristocratic,
proud, insolent, and needlessly rich. He had a passion for gambling,
horse-racing, dog-fighting, and indulged in the churchly habit of doing
that which he ought not and leaving undone that which he should have
done. He was worse than that degenerate scion of a proud ancestry, who
a-kneiping went with his lady friends in the Cincinnati fountain, after
the opera, on a wager. He whipped a man who admitted he did not have a
copy of the "Iliad" in his house; publicly destroyed the record of a
charge against one of his friends; and when his wife applied for a
divorce, he burst into the courtroom and vacated proceedings by carrying
the lady off by force. At banquets he would raise a disturbance, and
while he was being forcibly ejected from one door, his servants would
sneak in at another and steal the silverware, which he would give away
as charity. He also indulged in the Mark Antony trick of rushing into
houses at night and pulling good folks out of bed by the heels, and then
running away before they were barely awake.

His introduction to Socrates came in an attempt to break up a Socratic
prayer-meeting. Socrates succeeded in getting the roysterer to listen
long enough to turn the laugh on him and show all concerned that the
life of a rowdy was the life of a fool. Alcibiades had expected Socrates
to lose his temper, but it was Alcibiades who gave way, and blurted out
that he could not hope to beat his antagonist talking, but he would like
to wrestle with him.

Legend has it that Socrates gave the insolent young man a shock by
instantly accepting his challenge. In the bout that followed, the
philosopher, built like a gorilla, got a half-Nelson on his man, who was
a little the worse for wine, and threw him so hard, jumping on his
prostrate form with his knees, that the aristocratic hoodlum was laid up
for a moon. Ever after Alcibiades had a thorough respect for Socrates.
They became fast friends, and whenever the old man talked in the Agora,
Alcibiades was on hand to keep order.

When war came with Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesus they
enlisted, Socrates going as corporal and Alcibiades as captain. They
occupied the same tent during the entire campaign. Socrates proved a
fearless soldier, and walked the winter ice in bare feet, often pulling
his belt one hole tighter in lieu of breakfast, to show the complaining
soldiers that endurance was the thing that won battles. At the battle of
Delium, when there was a rout, Xenophon says Socrates walked off the
field leisurely, arm in arm with the general, explaining the nature of
harmony.

Through the influence of Socrates, the lawless Alcibiades was tamed and
became almost a model citizen, although his head was hardly large enough
for a philosopher.

"Say what you will, you'll find it all in Plato," said Emerson. If
Socrates had done nothing else but give bent to the mind of Plato, he
would deserve the gratitude of the centuries. Plato is the mine to
which all thinkers turn for treasure. When they first met, Plato was
twenty and Socrates sixty, and for ten years, to the day of Socrates'
death, they were together almost constantly. Plato died aged eighty-one,
and for fifty years he had lived but to record the dialogues of
Socrates. It was curiosity that first attracted this fine youth to the
old man--Socrates was so uncouth that he was amusing. Plato was
interested in politics, and like most Athenian youths, was intent on
having a good time. However, he was no rowdy, like Alcibiades: he was
suave, gracious, and elegant in all of his acts. He had been taught by
the Sophists and the desire of his life was to seem, rather than to be.
By very gentle stages, Plato began to perceive that to make an
impression on society was not worth working for--the thing to do was to
be yourself, and yourself at your best. And we can give no better answer
to the problem of life than Plato gives in the words of Socrates: "It is
better to be than to seem. To live honestly and deal justly is the meat
of the whole matter."

Plato was not a disciple--he was big enough not to ape the manners and
eccentricities of his Master--he saw beneath the rough husk and beyond
the grotesque outside the great controlling purpose in the life of
Socrates. He would be himself--and himself at his best--and he would
seek to satisfy the Voice within, rather than to try to please the
populace. Plato still wore his purple cloak, and the elegance and grace
of his manner were not thrown aside.

Wouldn't it have been worth our while to travel miles to see these
friends: the one old, bald, short, fat, squint-eyed, barefoot; and the
other with all the poise of aristocratic youth--tall, courtly and
handsome, wearing his robe with easy, regal grace! And so they have
walked and talked adown the centuries, side by side, the most perfect
example that can be named of that fine affection which often exists
between teacher and scholar.

Plato's "Republic," especially, gives us an insight into a very great
and lofty character. From his tower of speculation, Plato scanned the
future, and saw that the ideal of education was to have it continue
through life, for none but the life of growth and development ever
satisfies. And love itself turns to ashes of roses if not used to help
the soul in her upward flight. It was Plato who first said, "There is no
profit where no pleasure's ta'en." He further perceived that in the life
of education, the sexes must move hand in hand; and he also saw that,
while religions are many and seemingly diverse, goodness and kindness
are forever one.

His faith in the immortality of the soul was firm, but whether we are to
live in another world or not, he said there is no higher wisdom than to
live here and now--live our highest and best--cultivate the receptive
mind and the hospitable heart, "partaking of all good things in
moderation."

It takes these two to make the whole. There is no virtue in poverty--no
merit in rags--the uncouth qualities in Socrates were not a
recommendation. Yet he was himself. But Plato made good, in his own
character, all that Socrates lacked. Some one has said that Fitzgerald's
Omar is two-thirds Fitzgerald and one-third Omar. In his books, Plato
modestly puts his wisest maxims into the mouth of his master, and just
how much Plato and how much Socrates there is in the "Dialogues," we
will never know until we get beyond the River Styx.

       *       *       *       *       *

Socrates was deeply attached to Athens, and he finally became the best
known figure in the city. He criticized in his own frank, fearless way
all the doings of the times--nothing escaped him. He was a
self-appointed investigating committee in all affairs of state, society
and religion. Hypocrisy, pretense, affectation and ignorance trembled at
his approach. He was feared, despised and loved. But those who loved him
were as one in a hundred. He became a public nuisance. The charge
against him was just plain heresy--he had spoken disrespectfully of the
gods and through his teaching he had defiled the youth of Athens. Ample
warning had been given to him, and opportunity to run away was provided,
but he stuck like a leech, asking the cost of banquets and making
suggestions about all public affairs.

He was arrested, bailed by Plato and Crito, and tried before a jury of
five hundred citizens. Socrates insisted on managing his own case. A
rhetorician prepared an address of explanation, and the culprit was
given to understand that if he read this speech to his judges and said
nothing else, it would be considered as an apology and he would be
freed--the intent of the trial being more to teach the old man a lesson
in minding his own business than to injure him.

But Socrates replied to his well-meaning friend, "Think you I have not
spent my whole life in preparing for this one thing?" And he handed back
the smoothly polished manuscript with a smile. Montaigne says, "Should
a suppliant voice have been heard out of the mouth of Socrates now;
should that lofty virtue strike sail in the very height of its glory,
and his rich and powerful nature be committed to flowing rhetoric as a
defense? Never!"

Socrates cross-questioned his accusers in the true Socratic style and
showed that he had never spoken disrespectfully of the gods: he had only
spoken disrespectfully of their absurd conception of the gods. And here
is a thought which is well to consider even yet: The so-called "infidel"
is often a man of great gentleness of spirit, and his disbelief is not
in God, but in some little man's definition of God--a distinction the
little man, being without humor, can never see.

When Socrates had confounded his accusers, this time not giving them the
satisfaction of the last word, he launched out on a general criticism of
the city, and told where its rulers were gravely at fault. Being
cautioned to bridle his tongue, he replied, "When your generals at
Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium assigned my place in the battle I
remained there, did my work, and faced the peril, and think you that
when Deity has assigned me my duty at this pass in life I should,
through fear of death, evade it, and shirk my post?"

This man appeared at other times, to some, as an idle loafer, but now he
arose to a sublime height. He repeated with emphasis all he had ever
said against their foolish superstitions, and arraigned the waste and
futility of the idle rich. The power of the man was revealed as never
before, and those who had intended to let him go with a fine, now
thought it best to dispose of him. The safety of the state was
endangered by such an agitator--the question of religion is really not
what has sent the martyrs to the stake--it is the politician, not the
priest, who fears the heretic.

By a small majority, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Let Plato tell of that last hour--he has done it once for all:

     When he had done speaking, Crito said, "And have you any commands
     for us, Socrates--anything to say about your children, or any other
     matter in which we can serve you?"

     "Nothing particular," he said; "only, as I have always told you, I
     would have you to look to your own conduct; that is a service which
     you may always be doing to me and mine as well as to yourselves."
     ...

     "We will do our best," said Crito. "But in what way would you have
     us bury you?"

     "In any way that you like; only you must get hold of me, and take
     care that I do not walk away from you." Then he turned to us, and
     added with a smile: "I can not make Crito believe that I am the
     same Socrates who has been talking and conducting the argument; he
     fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead
     body--and he asks, 'How shall he bury me?' And though I have spoken
     many words in the endeavor to show that when I have drunk the
     poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed--these
     words of mine, with which I comforted you and myself, have had, as
     I perceive, no effect upon Crito. And therefore I want you to be
     surety for me now, as he was surety for me at the trial: but let
     the promise be of another sort; for he was my surety to the judges
     that I would remain, but you must be my surety to him that I shall
     not remain, but go away and depart; and then he will suffer less at
     my death, and not be grieved when he sees my body being burned. I
     would not have him sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the
     burial,'Thus we lay out Socrates,' or, 'Thus we follow him to the
     grave or bury him'; for false words are not only evil in
     themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Be of good cheer
     then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and
     do with that as is usual, and as you think best."

     When he had spoken these words, he arose and went into the
     bath-chamber with Crito, who bid us wait; and we waited, talking
     and thinking of the subject of discourse, and also of the greatness
     of our sorrow; he was like a father of whom we were being bereaved,
     and we were about to pass the rest of our lives as orphans. When he
     had taken his bath, his children were brought to him--and the women
     of his family also came, and he talked to them and gave them a few
     directions in the presence of Crito; and he then dismissed them and
     returned to us.

     Now the hour of sunset was near. When he came out, he sat down with
     us again after his bath, but not much was said. Soon the jailer,
     who was the servant, entered and stood by him, saying: "To you,
     Socrates, whom I know to be the noblest and gentlest and best of
     all who ever came to this place, I will not impute the angry
     feelings of other men, who rage and swear at me when, in obedience
     to the authorities, I bid them drink the poison--indeed I am sure
     that you will not be angry with me; for others, as you are aware,
     and not I, are the guilty cause. And so fare you well, and try to
     bear lightly what must needs be; you know my errand." Then bursting
     into tears, he turned away, and went out.

     Socrates looked at him and said, "I return your good wishes, and
     will do as you bid." Then turning to us, he said: "How charming the
     man is! Since I have been in prison, he has always been coming to
     see me, and at times, he would talk to me, and was as good as could
     be to me, and now see how generously he sorrows for me. But we must
     do as he says, Crito; let the cup be brought."

     "Not yet," said Crito; "the sun is still upon the hill-tops, and
     many a one has taken the draft late, and after the announcement has
     been made to him, he has eaten and drunk and indulged in sensual
     delights; do not hasten then--there is still time."

     Socrates said: "Yes, Crito, and they of whom you speak are right in
     doing thus, but I do not think that I should gain anything by
     drinking the poison a little later; I should be sparing and saving
     a life which is already gone: I could only laugh at myself for
     this. Please then to do as I say, and not to refuse me."

     Crito, when he heard this, made a sign to the servant; and the
     servant went in, and remained for some time, and then returned with
     the jailer carrying the cup of poison. Socrates said, "You, my good
     friend, who are experienced in these matters, shall give me
     directions how I am to proceed." The man answered, "You have only
     to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and
     the poison will act." At the same time, he handed the cup to
     Socrates, who, in the easiest and gentlest manner, without the
     least fear or change of color or feature, looking at the man with
     his eyes, Echecrates, as his manner was, took the cup and said:
     "What do you say about making the libation out of this cup to any
     god? May I, or not?" The man answered, "We only prepare, Socrates,
     just so much as we deem enough." "I understand," he said. "Yet I
     may and must pray to the gods to prosper my journey from this to
     that other world--may this, then, which is my prayer, be granted to
     me!" Then holding the cup to his lips, quite readily and
     cheerfully, he drank off the poison. And hitherto most of us had
     been able to control our sorrow; but now we saw him drinking, and
     saw, too, that he had finished the draft, we could no longer
     forbear, and in spite of myself, my own tears were flowing fast; so
     that I covered my face and wept over myself, for certainly I was
     not weeping over him, but at the thought of my own calamity in
     having lost such a companion. Nor was I the first, for Crito, when
     he found himself unable to restrain his tears, had got up and moved
     away, and I followed; and at that moment, Apollodorus, who had been
     weeping all the time, broke out into a loud cry, which made cowards
     of us all. Socrates alone retained his calmness. "What is this
     strange outcry?" he said, "I sent away the women mainly in order
     that they might not offend in this way, for I have heard that a man
     should die in peace. Be quiet, then, and have patience." When we
     heard that, we were ashamed, and refrained our tears; and he
     walked about until, as he said, his legs began to fail, and then he
     lay on his back, according to directions, and the man who gave him
     the poison, now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a
     while, he pressed his foot hard and asked him if he could feel; and
     he said, "No"; and then his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and
     showed us that he was cold and stiff. And he felt them himself, and
     said, "When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end." He
     was beginning to grow cold, when he uncovered his face, for he had
     covered himself up, and said (they were his last words), "Crito, I
     owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?"

     "The debt shall be paid," said Crito. "Is there anything else?"
     There was no answer to this question; but in a minute or two, a
     movement was heard, and the attendants uncovered him; his eyes were
     set, and Crito closed his eyes and mouth.

     Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend, whom I may truly call
     the wisest, the justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever
     known.




SENECA


     If we wish to be just judges of all things, let us first persuade
     ourselves of this: that there is not one of us without fault; no
     man is found who can acquit himself; and he who calls himself
     innocent does so with reference to a witness, and not to his
     conscience.

                                                --_Letters of Seneca_

[Illustration: SENECA]


True Americans and patriotic, who live in York State, often refer you to
the life of Red Jacket as proof that "Seneca" is an Iroquois Indian
word. The Indians, however, whom we call the Senecas never called
themselves thus until they took to strong water and became civilized.
Before that they were the Tsonnundawaonas. The Dutch traders, intent on
pelts and pelf, called them the Sinnekaas, meaning the valiant or the
beautiful. Then came that fateful day when the Reverend Peleg Spooner,
the discoverer of the Erie Canal, journeyed to Niagara Falls, and having
influence with the authorities at Washington, gave to towns along the
way these names: Troy, Rome, Ithaca, Syracuse, Ilion, Manlius, Homer,
Corfu, Palmyra, Utica, Delhi, Memphis and Marathon. He really exhausted
Grote's "History of Greece" and Gibbon's "Rome," revealing a most
depressing lack of humor. This classic flavor of the map of New York is
as surprising to English tourists as was the discovery to Hendrik Hudson
when, on sailing up the North River, he found on nearing Albany that the
river bore the same name as himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the eighteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read of Paul
being brought before Gallio, Proconsul of Achaia. And the accusers,
clutching the bald and bow-legged bachelor by the collar, bawl out to
the Judge, "This fellow persuadeth men to worship God contrary to law!"

And the little man is about to make reply, when Gallio says, with a
touch of impatience: "If indeed it were a matter of wrong or of wicked
villainy, O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with you: but if
they are questions about words and names and your own law, look to it
yourselves; I am not minded to be a judge of these matters!" And the
account concludes, "And he drove them from the judgment-seat."

That is to say, he gave Saint Paul a "nolle pros." Had Gallio wished to
be severe, he might have put the quietus on Christianity for all time,
for Saint Paul had all there was of it stowed in his valiant head and
heart.

Gallio was the elder brother of Seneca; his right name was Annaeus
Seneca, but he changed it to Junius Gallio, in honor of a patron who had
especially befriended him in youth.

Gallio seems to have been a man of good, sturdy commonsense--he could
distinguish between right living and a mumble of words, man-made rules,
laws such as heresy, blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking and marrying one's
deceased wife's sister. The Moqui Indians believe that if any one is
allowed to have a photograph taken of himself he will dry up in a month
and blow away. Moreover, lists of names are not wanting with memoranda
of times and places. In America there are yet people who hotly argue as
to what mode of baptism is correct; who talk earnestly about the "saved"
and the "lost"; and who will tell you of the "heathen" and those who are
"without the pale." They seem to think that the promise, "Seek and ye
shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you," applies only to the
Caucasian race.

In the earlier translations of Seneca there were printed various letters
that were supposed to have passed between Saint Paul and Seneca. Later
editors have dropped them out for lack of authenticity. But the fact
that Saint Paul met Seneca's brother face to face, as well as the fact
that the brother was willing to discuss right living, but had no time to
waste on the Gemara and theological quibbles, is undisputed.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was the proud boast of Augustus that he found Rome a place of brick
and left it a city of marble. Commercial prosperity buys the leisure
upon which letters flourish. We flout the businessman, but without him
there would be no poets. Poets write for the people who have time to
read. And out of the surplus that is left after securing food, we buy
books. Augustus built his marble city, and he also made Vergil, Horace,
Ovid and Livy possible.

Augustus reigned forty-four years, and it was in the twenty-seventh year
of his reign that there was born in Bethlehem of Judaea a Babe who was to
revolutionize the calendar. The Dean of Ely subtly puts forth the
suggestive thought that if it had not been for Augustus we might never
have heard of Jesus. It was Augustus who made Jerusalem a Roman
Province; and it was the economic and political policy of Augustus that
evolved the Scribes and Pharisees; and ill-gotten gains made the
hypocrites and publicans possible; then comes Pontius Pilate with his
receding chin.

Jesus was seventeen years old when Augustus died--Augustus never heard
of him, and the Roman's unprophetic mind sent no searchlight into the
future, neither did his eyes behold the Star in the East.

We are all making and shaping history, and how much, none of us knows,
any more than did Augustus.

Julius Caesar had no son to take his place, so he named his nephew,
Augustus, his heir. Augustus was succeeded by Tiberius, his adopted
child. Caligula, successor of Tiberius, was the son of the great Roman
General, Germanicus. Caligula revealed his good sense by drinking life
to its lees in a reign of four years, dying without heirs--Nature
refusing to transmit either infamy or genius. Claudius, an uncle of
Caligula, accepted the vacant place, as it seemed to him there was no
one else could fill it so well. Claudius had the felicity to be married
four times, and left several sons, but Fate had it that he should be
followed by Nero, his stepson, who called himself "Caesar," yet in whose
veins there leaped not a single Caesarean corpuscle.

The guardian and tutor of Nero was Lucius Seneca, the greatest, best and
wisest man of his time, a fact I here state in order to show the vanity
of pedagogics. Harking back once more to Augustus, let it be known that
but for him Seneca would probably have never left his mark upon this
bank and shoal of time. Seneca was a Spaniard, born in Cordova, a Roman
Province, that was made so by Augustus, under whose kindly and placating
influence all citizens of Hispania became Roman citizens--just as, when
California was admitted to the Union, every man in the State was
declared a naturalized citizen of the United States, the act being
performed for political purposes, based on the precedents of Augustus,
and never done before nor since in America.

Seneca was four years old when his father's family moved from Cordova
to Rome; this was three years before the birth of Christ. Years pass,
but the human heart is forever the same. The elder Seneca, Marcus
Seneca, had ambitions--he was a great man in Cordova: he could memorize
a list of two thousand words. These words had no relationship one to
another, and Marcus Seneca could not put words together so as to make
good sense, but his name was "Loisette": he had a scheme of mnemonics
that he imparted for a consideration. He was also a teacher of
elocution, and had compiled a yearbook of the sayings of Horace, which
secured him a knighthood. Augustus paid his colonists pretty
compliments, very much as England gives out brevets to Strathcona and
other worthy Canadians, who raise troops of horse to fight England's
battles in South Africa when duty calls.

Marcus Seneca made haste to move to Rome when Augustus let down the
bars. Rome was the center of the art-world, the home of letters, and all
that made for beauty and excellence. There were three boys and a girl in
the Seneca family.

The elder boy, Annaeus, was to become Gallio, the Roman governor, and
have his name mentioned in the most widely circulated book the world has
ever known; the second boy was Lucius, the subject of this sketch; the
younger boy, Mela, was to become the father of Lucan, the poet.

The sister of Seneca became the wife of the Roman Governor of Egypt. It
was at a time when the scheming rapacity of women was so much in
evidence that the Senate debated whether it should not forbid its
representatives abroad to be accompanied by their wives. France has seen
such times--England and America have glanced that way. Women, like men,
often do not know that the big prizes gravitate where they belong;
instead, they set traps for them, lie in wait and consider prevarication
and duplicity better than truth. When women use their beauty, their wit
and their pink persons in politics, trouble lies low around the corner.
But this sister of Seneca was never seen in public unless it was at her
husband's side; she asked no favors, and presents sent to her personally
by provincials were politely returned. The province praised her, and
perhaps what was better, didn't know her, and begged the Emperor to send
them more of such excellent and virtuous women--from which we infer that
virtue consists in minding one's own business.

In making up a list of great mothers, do not leave out Helvia, mother of
three sons and a daughter who made their mark upon the times. It is no
small thing to be a great mother!

Women of intellect were not much appreciated then, but Seneca dedicated
his "Consolations," his best book, to his mother. The very mintage of
his mind was for her, and again and again he tells of her insight, her
gentle wit, and her appreciation of all that was beautiful and best in
the world of thought. In a letter addressed to her when he was past
forty, he says, "You never stained your face with walnut-juice nor
rouge; you never wore gowns cut conspicuously low; your ornaments were a
loveliness of mind and person that time could not tarnish."

But the father had the knighthood, and he called his family to witness
it at odd times and sundry.

In Rome, Marcus Seneca made head as he never did in Cordova. There he
was only Marcus Micawber: but here his memory feats won him the
distinction that genius deserves. There is a grave question whether a
verbal memory does not go with a very mediocre intellect, but Marcus
said this argument was put out by a man with no memory worth mentioning.

Rome was at her ripest flower--the petals were soon to loosen and
flutter to the ground, but nobody thought so--they never do. Everywhere
the Roman legions were victorious, and commerce sailed the seas in
prosperous ships. Power manifests itself in conspicuous waste, and the
habit grows until conspicuous waste imagines itself power. Conditions in
Rome had evolved our old friend, the Sophist, the man who lived but to
turn an epigram, to soulfully contemplate a lily, to sigh mysteriously,
and cultivate the far-away look. These men were elocutionists who
gesticulated in curves, and let the thought follow the attitude. They
were not content to be themselves, but chased the airy, fairy fabric of
a fancy and called it life.

       *       *       *       *       *

The pretense and folly of Roman society made the Sophists possible--like
all sects they ministered to a certain cast of mind. Over against the
Sophists there were the Stoics, the purest, noblest and sanest of all
ancient cults, corresponding very closely to our Quakers, before Worth
and Wanamaker threw them a hawse and took them in tow. It is a tide of
feeling produces a sect, not a belief: primitive Christianity was a
revulsion from Phariseeism, and a William Penn and a wan Ann Lee form
the antithesis of an o'ervaulting, fantastic and soulless ritual.

The father of Seneca hung upon the favor of the Sophists: he taught them
mnemonics, rhetoric and elocution, and the fact that he was a courtly
Spaniard was in his favor--we dote on a foreign accent and relish the
thing that comes from afar.

Marcus Seneca was getting rich. He never perceived the absurdity of a
life of make-believe; but his son, Lucius Seneca, heir to his mother's
discerning mind, when nineteen years old forswore the Sophists, and
sided with the unpopular Stoics, much to the chagrin of the father.

Seneca--let us call him so after this--wore the simple white robe of the
Stoics, without ornament or jewelry. He drank no wine, and ate no meat.
Vegetarianism comes in waves, and it is interesting to see that in an
essay on the subject, Seneca plagiarizes every argument put forth by
Colonel Ernest Crosby, even to mentioning a butcher as an "executioner,"
his goods as "dead corpses," and the customers as "cannibals."

This kind of talk did not help the family peace, and the father spoke of
disowning the son, if he did not cease affronting the Best Society.

Soon after, the Emperor Tiberius issued an edict banishing all "strange
sects who fasted on feast-days, and otherwise displeased the gods." This
was a suggestion for the benefit of the Crosbyites. It is with a feeling
of downright disappointment that we find Seneca shortly appearing in an
embroidered robe, and making a speech wherein the moderate use of wine
is recommended, also the flesh of animals for those who think they need
it.

This, doubtless, is the same speech we, too, would have made had we been
there; but we want our hero to be strong, and defy even an Emperor, if
he comes between the man and his right to eat what he wishes and wear
what he listeth, and we blame him for not doing the things we never do.
But Seneca was getting on in the world--he had become a lawyer, and his
Sophist training was proving its worth. Henry Ward Beecher, in reply to
a young man who asked him if he advised the study of elocution, said,
"Elocution is all right, but you will have to forget it all before you
become an orator." Seneca was shedding his elocution, and losing himself
in his work. A successful lawsuit had brought him before the public as a
strong advocate. He was able to think on his feet. His voice was low,
musical and effective, and the word, "dulcis," was applied to him as it
was to his brother, Gallio. Possibly there was something in ol' Marcus
Micawber's pedagogic schemes, after all!

In moderating his Stoic philosophy, Seneca gives us the key to his
character: the man wanted to be gentle and kind; he wished to affront
neither his father nor society; so he compromised--he would please and
placate. Ease and luxury appealed to him, and yet his cool intellect
stood off, and reviewing the proceeding pronounced it base. He succumbed
to the strongest attraction, and attempted the feat of riding two horses
at once.

From his twentieth year, Seneca dallied with the epigram, found solace
in a sentence, and got a sweet, subtle joy by taking a thought captive.
Lucullus tells us of the fine intoxication of oratory, but neither opium
nor oratory imparts a finer thrill than successfully to drive a flock of
clauses, and round up an idea, roping it in careless grace, with what my
lord Hamlet calls words, words, words.

The early Christian Fathers spoke of him as "our Seneca." His writings
abound in the purest philosophy--often seemingly paraphrasing Saint
Paul--and every argument for directness of speech, simplicity, manliness
and moderation is put forth. His writings became the rage in Rome: at
feasts he read his essays on the Ideal Life, just as the disciples of
Tolstoy often travel by the gorge road, and give banquets in honor of
the man who no longer attends one; or princely paid preachers glorify
the Man who said to His apostles, "Take neither scrip nor purse."

Seneca was a combination of Delsarte and Emerson. He was as popular as
Henry Irving, and as wise as Thomas Brackett Reed. His writings were in
demand; when he spoke in public, crowds hung upon his words, and the
families of the great and powerful sent him their sons, hoping he would
impart the secret of success. The world takes a man at the estimate he
puts upon himself. Seneca knew enough to hold himself high. Honors came
his way, and the wealth he acquired is tokened in those five hundred
tables, inlaid with ivory, to which at times he invited his friends to
feast. As a lawyer, he took his pick of cases, and rarely appeared,
except on appeal, before the Emperor. The poise of his manner, the
surety of his argument, the gentle grace of his diction, caused him to
be likened to Julius Caesar.

And this led straight to exile, and finally--death. To mediocrity,
genius is unforgivable.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are various statements to the effect that Claudius was a mental
defective, a sort of town fool, patronized by the nobles for their sport
and jest. We are also told that he was made Emperor by the Pretorian
Guards, in a spirit of rollicking bravado. Men too much abused must have
some merit, or why should the pack bay so loudly? Possibly it is true
that, in the youth of Claudius, his mother used to declare, when she
wanted a strong comparison, "He is as big a fool as my son, Claudius."
But then the mother of Wellington used exactly the same expression; and
Byron's mother had a way of referring to the son who was to rescue her
from oblivion, and send her name down the corridors of time, as "that
lame brat."

Claudius was a brother of the great Germanicus, and was therefore an
uncle of Caligula. Caligula was the worst ruler that Rome ever had; and
he was a brother of Agrippina, mother of Nero. This precious pair had a
most noble and generous father, and their gentle mother was a fit mate
for the great Germanicus--these things are here inserted for the
edification of folks who take stock in that pleasant fallacy, the Law of
Heredity, and who gleefully chase the genealogical anise-seed trail.

Caligula happily passed out without an heir, and Claudius, next of kin,
put himself in the way of the Pretorian Guard, and was declared Emperor.

He was then fifty years old, a grass-widower--twice over--and on the
lookout for a wife. He was neither wise nor great, nor was he very bad;
he was kind--after dinner--and generous when rightly approached. Canon
Farrar likened Claudius to King James the First, who gave us our English
Bible. His comparison is worth quoting, not alone for the truth it
contains, but because it is an involuntary paraphrase of the faultless
literary style of the Roman rhetors. Says Canon Farrar: "Both were
learned, and both were eminently unwise. Both were authors, and both
were pedants. Both delegated their highest powers to worthless
favorites, and both enriched these favorites with such foolish
liberality that they remained poor themselves. Both of them, though of
naturally good dispositions, were misled by selfishness into acts of
cruelty; and both of them, though laborious in the discharge of duty,
succeeded only in rendering royalty ridiculous. King James kept Sir
Walter Raleigh, the brightest intellect of his time, in prison; and
Claudius sent Seneca, the greatest man in his kingdom, into exile."

New-made kings sweep clean. The impulses of Claudius were right and
just, a truthful statement I here make in pleasant compliment to a
brother author. The man was absent-minded, had much faith in others, and
moved in the line of least resistance. Like most students and authors,
he was decidedly littery. He secured a divorce from one wife because she
cleaned up his room in his absence so that he could never find
anything; and the other wife got a divorce from him because he refused
to go out evenings and scintillate in society--but this was before he
was made Emperor.

God knows, people had their troubles then as now. To take this man who
loved his slippers and easy-chair, and who was happy with a roll of
papyrus, and plunge him into a seething pot of politics, not to mention
matrimony, was refined cruelty.

The matchmakers were busy, and soon Claudius was married to Messalina,
the handsomest summer-girl in Rome.

For a short time he bore up bravely, and was filled with the wish to
benefit and bless. One of his first acts was to recall Julia and
Agrippina from exile, they having been sent away in a fit of jealous
anger by their brother, the infamous Caligula.

Julia was beautiful and intellectual, and she had a high regard for
Seneca.

Agrippina was beautiful and infamous, and pretended that she loved
Claudius.

Both men were undone. Seneca's friendship for Julia, as far as we know,
was of a kind that did honor to both, but they made a too conspicuous
pair of intellects. The fear and jealousy of Claudius was aroused by his
young and beautiful wife, who showed him that Seneca, the courtly, was
plotting for the throne, and in this ambition Julia was a party. A
charge of undue intimacy with Julia, the beloved niece and ward of the
Emperor, was brought against Seneca, and he was exiled to Corsica.
Imagine Edmund Burke sent to Saint Helena, or John Hay to the Dry
Tortugas, and you get the idea.

The sensitive nature of Seneca did not bear up under exile as we would
have wished. Unlike Victor Hugo at Guernsey, he was alone, and
surrounded by savages. Yet even Victor Hugo lifted up his voice in
bitter complaint. Seneca failed to anticipate that, in spite of the
barrenness of Corsica, it would some day produce a man who would jostle
his Roman Caesar for first place on history's page.

At Corsica, Seneca produced some of his loftiest and best literature.
Exile and imprisonment are such favorable conditions for letters, having
done so much for authorship, that the wonder is the expedient has fallen
into practical disuse. Banishment gave Seneca an opportunity to put into
execution some of the ideas he had so long expressed concerning the
simple life, and certain it is that the experience was not without its
benefits, and at times the grim humor of it all came to him.

Read the history of Greek ostracism, and one can almost imagine that it
was devised by the man's friends--a sort of heroic treatment prescribed
by a great spiritual physician. Personality repels as well as attracts:
the people grow tired of hearing Aristides called the Just--he is
exiled. For a few days there is a glad relief; then his friends begin to
chant his praises--he is missed. People tell of all the noble, generous
things he would do if he were only here.

If he were only here!

Petitions are circulated for his return.

The law's delay ensues, and this but increases desire. Hate for the man
has turned to pity, and pity turns to love, as starch turns to gluten.

The man comes back, and is greeted with boughs and bays, with love and
laurel. His homecoming is that of a conquering hero. If the Supreme
Court were to issue an injunction requiring all husbands to separate
themselves by at least a hundred miles from their wives, for several
months in every year, it would cut down divorces ninety-five per cent,
add greatly to domestic peace, render race-suicide impossible, and
generally liberate millions of love vibrations that would otherwise lie
dormant.

       *       *       *       *       *

As an example of female depravity, Valeria Messalina was sister in crime
to Jezebel, Bernice, Drusilla, Salome and Herodias.

Damned by a dower of beauty, with men at her feet whenever she so
ordered, her ambition knew no limit. This type of dictatorial womanhood
starts out by making conquests of individual men, but the conquests of
pretty women are rarely genuine. Women hold no monopoly on duplicity,
and there is a deep vein of hypocrisy in men that prompts their playing
a part, and letting the woman use them. When the time is ripe, they toss
her away as they do any other plaything, as Omar suggests the potter
tosses the luckless pots to hell.

When Julia and Agrippina were recalled, the act was done without
consulting Messalina; and we can imagine her rage when these two women,
as beautiful as herself, came back without her permission. Messalina had
never found favor in the eyes of Seneca--he treated her with patronizing
patience, as though she were a spoilt child.

Now that Julia was back, Messalina hatched the plot that struck them
both. Messalina insisted that the wealth of Seneca should be
confiscated. Claudius at this rebelled.

History is replete with instances of great men ruled by their barbers
and coachmen. Claudius left the affairs of state to Narcissus, his
private secretary; Polybius, his literary helper; and Pallas, his
accountant. These men were all of lowly birth, and had all risen in the
ranks from menial positions, and one of them at least had been sold as a
slave, and afterward purchased his freedom. Then there was Felix, the
ex-slave, another protege of Claudius, who trembled when Paul of Tarsus
told him a little wholesome truth. These men were all immensely rich,
and once, when Claudius complained of poverty, a bystander said, "You
should go into partnership with a couple of your freedmen, and then your
finances would be all right." The fact that Narcissus, Pallas and
Polybius constituted the real government is nothing against them, any
more than it is to the discredit of certain Irish refugees that they
manage the municipal machinery of New York City--it merely proves the
impotence of the men who have allowed the power to slip from their
grasp, and ride as passengers when they should be at the throttle.

Messalina managed her husband by alternate cajolings and threats. He was
proud of her saucy beauty, and it was pleasing to an old man's vanity to
think that other people thought she loved him. She bore him two sons--by
name, Brittanicus and Germanicus. A local wit of the day said, "It was
kind of Messalina to present her husband with these boys, otherwise he
would never have had any claim on them."

But the lines were tightening around Messalina, and she herself was
drawing the cords. She had put favorites in high places, banished
enemies, and ordered the execution of certain people she did not like.
Narcissus and Pallas gave her her own way, because they knew Claudius
must find her out for himself. They let her believe that she was the
real power behind the throne. Her ambitions grew--she herself would be
ruler--she gave it out that Claudius was insane. Finally she decided
that the time was right for a "coup de grace." Claudius was absent from
Rome, and Messalina wedded at high noon with young Silius, her lover.
She was led to believe that the army would back her up, and proclaim her
son, Brittanicus, Emperor, in which case, she herself and Silius would
be the actual rulers. The wedding festivities were at their height, when
the cry went up that Claudius had returned, and was approaching to
demand vengeance. Narcissus, the wily, took up the shout, and
panic-stricken, Messalina fled for safety in one way and Silius in
another.

Narcissus followed the woman, adding to her drunken fright by telling
her that Claudius was close behind, and suggested that she kill herself
before the wronged man should appear. A dagger was handed her, and she
stabbed herself ineffectually in hysteric haste. The kind secretary
then, with one plunge of his sword, completed the work so well begun.

A truthful account of Messalina's death was told to Claudius while he
was at dinner. He finished the meal without saying a word, gave a
present to the messenger, and went about his business, asking no
questions, and never again mentioned the matter.

The fact is worthy of note that the name of Messalina is never once
mentioned by Seneca. He pitied her vileness and villainy so much he
could not hate her. He saw, with prophetic vision, what her end would
be; and when her passing occurred, he was too great and lofty in spirit
to manifest satisfaction.

       *       *       *       *       *

Scarcely had the funeral of Messalina occurred, when there was a pretty
scramble among the eligible to see who should solace the stricken
widower. Among other matrimonial candidates was Agrippina, a beautiful
widow, twenty-nine in June, rich in her own right, and with only a small
encumbrance in the way of a ten-year-old boy, Nero by name.

Agrippina was a niece of Claudius, and such marriages were considered
unnatural; but Agrippina had subtly shown that, the deceased Emperor
being her brother, she already had a sort of claim on the throne, and
her marriage with Claudius would strengthen the State. Then she
marshaled her charms past Claudius, in a phalanx and back, and so they
were married. There was much pomp and ceremony at the wedding, and the
high priest pronounced the magic words--I trust I use the right
expression.

Very soon after her marriage, Agrippina recalled Seneca from exile. It
was the infamous Messalina who had disgraced him and sent him away, and
for Agrippina, the sister of Julia, to bring him back, was regarded as a
certificate of innocence, and a great diplomatic move for Agrippina.

When Seneca returned, the whole city went out to meet him. It is not at
all likely that Seneca had a suspicion of the true character of
Agrippina, any more than Claudius--which sort of tends to show the
futility of philosophy.

How could Seneca read her true character when it had not really been
formed? No one knows what he will do until he gets a good chance. It is
unkind condition that keeps most of us where we belong.

And even while the honeymoon--or should we say the harvest-moon?--was at
full, Seneca was made the legal guardian and tutor of Nero, the son of
the Empress, and became a member of the royal household. This was done
in gratitude, and to make amends, if possible, for the wrong of
banishment inflicted upon the man by scandalously linking his name with
that of the sister of the woman who was now First Lady of the Land.

Seneca was then forty-nine years of age. He had fifteen years of life
yet before him, and was to gain much valuable experience, and get an
insight into a side of existence he had not yet known.

Agrippina was born in Cologne, which was called, in her honor, Colonia
Agrippina, and now has been shortened to its present form. Whenever you
buy cologne, remember where the word came from.

Agrippina, from her very girlhood, had a thirst for adventure, and her
aim was high. When fourteen, she married Domitius, a Roman noble, thirty
years her senior. He was as worthless a rogue as ever wore out his
physical capacity for sin in middle life, and filled his dying days with
crimes that were only mental. He knew himself so well that when Nero was
born he declared that the issue of such a marriage could only breed a
being who would ruin the State--a monster with his father's vices and
his mother's insatiable ambition.

Agrippina was woman enough to hate this man with an utter detestation;
but he was rich, and so she endured him for ten years, and then assisted
Nature in making him food for worms.

The intensity of Agrippina's nature might have been used for happy ends
if the stream of her life had not been so early dammed and polluted. She
loved her child with a clutching, feverish affection, and declared that
he would some day rule Rome. This was not really such a far-away dream,
when we remember that her brother was then Emperor and childless. Her
thought was more for her child than for herself, and her expectation was
that he would succeed Caligula. The persistency with which she told this
ambition for her boy is both beautiful and pathetic. Every mother sees
her own life projected in her child, and within certain bounds this is
right and well.

Glimpses of kindness and right intent are shown when Agrippina recalled
Seneca, and when she became the mother of the motherless children of
Claudius. She publicly adopted these children, and for a time gave them
every attention and advantage that was bestowed upon her own son. Gibbon
says for one woman to mother another woman's children is a diplomatic
card often played, but Gibbon sometimes quibbles.

Gradually the fierce desire of Agrippina's heart began to manifest
itself. She plotted and arranged that Nero should marry Octavia, the
daughter of Claudius. Octavia was seven years older than Nero, but the
sooner the marriage could be brought about, the better--it would give
her a double hold on the throne. To this end suitors for the hand of
Octavia were disgraced by false charges, and sent off into exile, and
the same fate came to at least three young women who stood in the way.

But the one real obstacle was Claudius himself--he was sixty, and might
be so absurd as to live to be eighty. Locusta, a famous professional
chemist, was employed, and the deed was done by Agrippina serving the
deadly dish herself. The servants carried Claudius off to bed, thinking
he was merely drunk, but he was to wake no more.

Burrus, the blunt and honest old soldier, Captain of the Pretorian
Guard, sided with Agrippina; Brittanicus, the son of Claudius, was kept
out of the way, and Nero was proclaimed Emperor.

Here Seneca seems to have shown his good influence, and sent home a
desire in the heart of Agrippina to serve her people with moderation and
justice. She had attained her ends: her son, a youth of fifteen, was
Emperor, and his guardian, the great and gentle Seneca, the man of her
own choosing, was the actual ruler. She was the sister of one Emperor,
wife of another, and now mother of a third--surely this was glory enough
to satisfy one woman's ambition!

Then there came to Rome the famed Quinquennium Neronis, when, for five
years, peace and plenty smiled. It is a trite saying that men who can
not manage their own finances can look after those of a nation, but
Seneca was a businessman who proved his ability to manage his own
private affairs and also succeeded in managing the exchequer of a
kingdom. During his reign, gladiatorial contests were relieved of their
savage brutality, work was given to many, education became popular, and
people said, "The Age of Augustus has returned."

But the greatest men are not the greatest teachers. Seneca's policy with
his pupil, Nero, was one of concession.

A close study of the youth of Nero reveals the same traits that outcrop
in one-half the students at Harvard--traits ill-becoming to grown-up
men, but not at all alarming in youth. Nero was self-willed and
occasionally had tantrums--but a tantrum is only a little whirl-wind of
misdirected energy. A tantrum is life plus--it is better far than
stagnation, and usually works up into useful life, and sometimes into
great art. We have some verses written by Nero in his seventeenth year
that show a good Class B sophomoric touch. He danced, played in the
theatricals, raced horses, fought dogs, twanged the harp, and exploited
various other musical instruments. He wasn't nearly so bad as
Alcibiades, but his mother lavished on him her maudlin love, and allowed
the fallacy to grow in his mind concerning the divinity that doth hedge
a king. In fact, when he asked his mother about his real father, she hid
the truth that his father was a rogue--perhaps to shield herself, for it
is only a very great person who can tell the truth--and led him to
believe his paternal parent was a god, and his birth miraculous. Now,
let such an idea get into the head of the average freshman and what will
be the result? A woman can tell a full-grown man that he is the greatest
thing that ever happened, and it does no special harm, for the man knows
better than to go out on the street and proclaim it; but you tell a boy
of eighteen such pleasing fallacies, and then have fawning courtiers
back them up, and at the same time give the youth free access to the
strong box, and it surely would be a miracle if he is not doubly damned,
and quickly, too. Agrippina would not allow the blunt old Burrus to
discipline her boy, and Seneca's plan was one of concession--he loved
peace. He hated to thwart the boy, because he knew that it would arouse
the ire of the mother, whose love had run away with her commonsense.
Love is beautiful--soft, yielding, gentle love--but the common law of
England upholds wife-beating as being justifiable and desirable on
certain occasions.

The real trouble was, the dam was out for Agrippina and Nero--there was
no restraint for either. There was no one to teach them that the liberty
of one man ends where the right of another begins. No more frightful
condition for any man or woman can ever occur than this: to take away
all responsibility.

When Socrates put the chesty Alcibiades three points down, and jumped on
his stomach with his knees, the youth had a month in bed, and after he
got around again he possessed a most wholesome regard for his teacher.
If Burrus and Seneca had applied Brockway methods to Agrippina and her
saucy son, as they easily might, it would have made Rome howl with
delight, and saved the State as well as the individuals.

Julius Caesar, like Lincoln, let everybody do as they wished, up to a
certain point. But all realized that somewhere behind that dulcet voice
and the gentle manner was a heart of flint and nerves of steel. No woman
ever made Julius Caesar dance to syncopated time, nor did a youth of
eighteen ever successfully order him to take part in amateur theatricals
on penalty. Julius Caesar and Seneca were both scholars, both were
gentlemen and gentle men: their mental attitude was much the same, but
one had a will of adamant, and the other moved in the line of least
resistance.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gradually, Nero evolved a petulance and impatience toward his mother and
his tutor, all of which was quite a natural consequence of his
education. Every endeavor to restrain him was met with imprecations and
curses. About then would have been a good time to apply heroic
treatment, instead of halting fear and worshipful acquiescence.

The raw stock for making a Nero is in every school, and given the
conditions, a tyrant-culture would be easy to evolve. The endeavor to
make Nero wed Octavia caused a revulsion to occur in his heart toward
her and her brother Brittanicus. He feared that these two might combine
and wrest from him the throne.

Locusta, the specialist, was again sent for and Brittanicus was gathered
to his fathers.

Soon after, Nero fell into a deep infatuation for Poppae Sabina, wife of
Otho, the most beautiful woman in Rome. Sabina refused to accept his
advances so long as he was tied to his mother's apron-strings--I use the
exact phrase of Tacitus, so I trust no exceptions will be taken to the
expression. Nero came to believe that the tagging, nagging, mushy love
of his mother was standing in the way of his advancement. He had come to
know that Agrippina had caused the death of Claudius, and when she
accused him of poisoning Brittanicus, he said, "I learned the trick from
my dear mother!" and honors were even.

He knew the crafty quality of his mother's mind and grew to fear her.
And fear and hate are one. To secure Sabina he must sacrifice Agrippina.

He would be free.

To poison her would not do--she was an expert in preventives.

So Nero, regardless of expense, bargained with Anicetus, admiral of the
fleet, to construct a ship so that, when certain bolts were withdrawn,
the craft would sink and tell no tale. This was a bit of daring deviltry
never before devised, and by turn, Nero chuckled in glee and had cold
sweats of fear as he congratulated himself on his astuteness.

The boat was built and Agrippina was enticed on board. The night of the
excursion was calm, but the conspirators, fearing the chance might never
come again, let go the canopy, loaded with lead, which was over the
queen. It fell with a crash; and at the same time the bolts were
withdrawn and the waters rushed in. Several of the servants in
attendance were killed by the fall of the awning, but Agrippina and
Aceronia, a lady of quality, escaped from the debris only slightly hurt.
Aceronia, believing the ship was about to sink, called for help, saying,
"I am Agrippina." She erred slightly in her diplomacy, for she was at
once struck on the head with an oar and killed. This gave Agrippina a
clew to the situation and she was silent. By a strange perversity, the
royal scuttling patent would not work and the boat stubbornly refused to
sink.

Agrippina got safely ashore and sent word to her son that there had been
a terrible accident, but she was safe--the intent of her letter being to
let him know that she understood the matter perfectly, and while she
could not admire the job, it was so bungling, yet she would forgive him
if he would not try it again.

In wild consternation, Nero sent for Burrus and Seneca. This was their
first knowledge of the affair. They refused to act in either way, but
Burrus intimated that Anicetus was the guilty party and should be held
responsible.

"For not completing the task?" said Nero.

"Yes," said the blunt old soldier, and retired.

Anicetus was notified that the blame of the whole conspiracy was on him.
A big crime, well carried out, is its own excuse for being; but failure,
like unto genius, is unforgivable.

Anicetus was in disgrace, but only temporarily, for he towed the
obstinate, telltale galley into deep water and sank her at dead of
night. Then with a few faithful followers he surrounded the villa where
Agrippina was resting, scattered her guard and confronted her with drawn
sword.

Years before, a soothsayer had told her that her son would be Emperor
and that he would kill her. Her answer was, "Let them slay me, if he but
reign."

Now she saw that death was nigh. She did not try to escape, nor did she
plead for mercy, but cried, "Plunge your sword through my womb, for it
bore Nero."

And Anicetus, with one blow, struck her dead.

Nero returned to Naples to mourn his loss. From there he sent forth a
lengthy message to the Senate, recounting the accidental shipwreck, and
telling how Agrippina had plotted against his life, recounting her
crimes in deprecatory, sophistical phrase. The document wound up by
telling how she had tried to secure the throne for a paramour, and the
truth coming to some o'erzealous friends of the State, they had arisen
and taken her life. In Rome there was a strong feeling that Nero should
not be allowed to return, but this message of explanation and promise,
written by Seneca, downed the opposition.

The Senate accepted the report, and Nero, at twenty-two, found himself
master of the world.

Yet what booted it when he was not master of himself!

From this time on, the career of Seneca was one of contumely, suffering
and disgrace. This was to endure for six years, when kindly death was
then to set him free.

The mutual, guilty knowledge of a great crime breeds loathing and
contempt. History contains many such instances where the subject had
knowledge of the sovereign's sins, and the sovereign found no rest until
the man who knew was beneath the sod.

Seneca knew Nero as only his Maker knew him.

After the first spasm of exultation in being allowed to return to Rome,
a jealous dread of Seneca came over the guilty monarch.

Seneca hoped against hope that, now that Nero's wild oats were sown and
the crop destroyed, all would be well. The past should be buried and
remembrance of it sunk deep in oblivion.

But Nero feared Seneca might expose his worthlessness and the
philosopher himself take the reins. In this Nero did not know his man:
Seneca's love was literary--political power to him was transient and not
worth while.

It became known that the apology to the Senate was the work of Seneca,
and Nero, who wanted the world to think that all his speeches and
addresses were his own, got it firmly fixed in his head he would not be
happy until Seneca was out of the way. Sabina said he was no longer a
boy, and should not be tagged and dictated to by his old teacher.

Seneca, seeing what was coming, offered to give his entire property to
the State and retire. Nero would not have it so--he feared Seneca would
retire only to come back with an army. A cordon of spies was put around
Seneca's house--he was practically a prisoner. Attempts were made to
poison him, but he ate only fruit, and bread made by his wife, Paulina,
and drank no water except from running streams.

Finally a charge of conspiracy was fastened upon him, and Nero ordered
him to die by his own hand. His wife was determined to go with him, and
one stroke severed the veins of both.

The beautiful Sabina realized her hopes--she divorced her husband, and
married the Emperor of Rome. She died from a sudden kick given her by
the booted foot of her liege.

Three years after the death of Seneca, Nero passed hence by the same
route, killing himself to escape the fury of the Pretorian Guard. And so
ended the Julian line, none of whom, except the first, was a Julian.

       *       *       *       *       *

From the death of Augustus on to the time of Nero there was for Rome a
steady tide of disintegration. The Emperor was the head of the Church,
and he usually encouraged the idea that he was something different from
common men--that his mission was from On High and that he should be
worshiped. Gibbon, making a free translation from Seneca, says,
"Religion was regarded by the common people as true, by the philosophers
as false, and by the rulers as useful." And Saint Augustine, using the
same smoothly polished style, says, in reference to a Roman Senator, "He
worshiped what he blamed, he did what he refuted, he adored that with
which he found fault." The sentence is Seneca's, and when he wrote it he
doubtless had himself in mind, for in spite of his Stoic philosophy the
life of luxury lured him, and although he sang the praises of poverty he
charged a goodly sum for so doing, and the nobles who listened to him
doubtless found a vicarious atonement by applauding him as he played to
the gallery gods of their self-esteem, like rich ladies who go
a-slumming mix in with the poor on an equality, and then hasten home to
dress for dinner.

       *       *       *       *       *

Seneca was one of the purest and loftiest intellects the world has ever
known. Canon Farrar calls him "A Seeker after God," and has printed
parallel passages from Saint Paul and Seneca which, for many, seem to
show that the men were in communication with each other. Every ethical
maxim of Christianity was expressed by this "noble pagan," and his
influence was always directed toward that which he thought was right.
His mistakes were all in the line of infirmities of the will. Voltaire
calls him, "The father of all those who wear shovel hats," and in
another place refers to him as an "amateur ascetic," but in this the
author of the Philosophical Dictionary pays Seneca the indirect
compliment of regarding him as a Christian. Renan says, "Seneca shines
out like a great white star through a rift of clouds on a night of
darkness." The wonder is not that Seneca at times lapsed from his high
estate and manifested his Sophist training, but that to the day of his
death he saw the truth with unblinking eyes and held the Ideal firmly in
his heart.




ARISTOTLE


     Happiness itself is sufficient excuse. Beautiful things are right
     and true; so beautiful actions are those pleasing to the gods. Wise
     men have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest
     wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. The answer
     to the last appeal of what is right lies within a man's own breast.
     Trust thyself.

                                                --_Ethics of Aristotle_

[Illustration: ARISTOTLE]


The Sublime Porte recently issued a request to the American Bible
Society, asking that references to Macedonia be omitted from all Bibles
circulated in Turkey or Turkish provinces. The argument of His Sublimity
is that the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us!" puts him and his
people in a bad light. He ends his most courteous petition by saying,
"The land that produced a Philip, an Alexander the Great and an
Aristotle, and that today has citizens who are the equal of these, needs
nothing from our dear brothers, the Americans, but to be let alone."

As to the statement that Macedonia today has citizens who are the equals
of Philip, Alexander and Aristotle, the proposition, probably, is based
on the confession of the citizens themselves, and therefore may be
truth. Great men are only great comparatively. It is the stupidity of
the many that allows one man to bestride the narrow world like a
Colossus. In the time of Alexander and Aristotle there wasn't so much
competition as now, so perhaps what we take to be lack of humor on the
part of the Sublime Porte may have a basis in fact.

Aristotle was born Three Hundred Eighty-four B.C., at the village of
Stagira in the mountains of Macedonia. King Amyntas used to live at
Stagira several months in the year and hunt the wild hogs that fed on
the acorns which grew in the gorges and valleys. Mountain climbing and
hunting was dangerous sport, and it was well to have a surgeon attached
to the royal party, so the father of Aristotle served in that capacity.
No doubt, though, but the whole outfit was decidedly barbaric, even
including the doctor's little son "Aristo," who refused to be left
behind. The child's mother had died years before, and boys without
mothers are apt to manage their fathers. And so Aristo was allowed to
trot along by his father's side, carrying a formidable bow, which he
himself had made, with a quiver of arrows at his back.

Those were great times when the King came to Stagira!

When the King went back to the capital everybody received presents, and
the good doctor, by some chance, was treated best of all, and little
Aristo came in for the finest bow that ever was, all tipped with silver
and eagle-feathers. But the bow did not bring good luck, for soon after,
the boy's father was caught in an avalanche of sliding stone and crushed
to death.

Aristo was taken in charge by Proxenus, a near kinsman. The lad was so
active at climbing, so full of life and energy and good spirits, that
when the King came the next year to Stagira, he asked for Aristo. With
the King was his son Philip, a lad about the age of Aristo, but not so
tall nor so active. The boys became fast friends, and once when a
stranger saw them together he complimented the King on his fine,
intelligent boys, and the King had to explain, "The other boy is
mine--but I wish they both were."

Aristo knew where the wild boars fed in gulches, and where the stunted
oaks grew close and thick. Higher up in the mountains there were bears,
which occasionally came down and made the wild pigs scamper. You could
always tell when the bears were around, for then the little pigs would
run out into the open. The bears had a liking for little pigs, and the
bears had a liking for the honey in the bee-trees, too. Aristo could
find the bee-trees better than the bears--all you had to do was to watch
the flight of the bees as they left the clover.

Then there were deer--you could see their tracks any time around the
mountain marshes where the springs gushed forth and the watercress grew
lush. Still higher up the mountains, beyond where bears ever traveled,
there were mountain-sheep, and still higher up were goats. The goats
were so wild that hardly any one but Aristo had ever seen them, but he
knew they were there.

The King was delighted to have such a lad as companion for his son, and
insisted that he should go back to the capital with them and become a
member of the Court.

Not he--there were other ambitions. He wanted to go to Athens and study
at the school of Plato--Plato, the pupil of the great Socrates.

The King laughed--he had never heard of Plato. That a youth should
refuse to become part of the Macedonian Court, preferring the company of
an unknown school-master, was amusing--he laughed.

The next year when the King came back to Stagira, Aristo was still
there. "And you haven't gone to Athens yet?" said the King.

"No, but I am going," was the firm reply.

"We will send him," said the King to Proxenus, Aristo's guardian.

And so we find Aristo, aged seventeen, tall and straight and bronzed,
starting off for Athens, his worldly goods rolled up in a bearskin, tied
about with thongs. There is a legend to the effect that Philip went with
Aristo, and that for a time they were together at Plato's school. But,
anyway, Philip did not remain long. Aristo--or Aristotle, we had better
call him--remained with Plato just twenty years.

At Plato's school Aristotle was called by the boys, "the Stagirite," a
name that was to last him through life--and longer. In Winter he wore
his bearskin, caught over one shoulder, for a robe, and his mountain
grace and native beauty of mind and body must have been a joy to Plato
from the first. Such a youth could not be overlooked.

To him that hath shall be given. The pupil that wants to learn is the
teacher's favorite--which is just as it should not be. Plato proved his
humanity by giving his all to the young mountaineer. Plato was then a
little over sixty years of age--about the same age that Socrates was
when Plato became his pupil. But the years had touched Plato
lightly--unlike Socrates, he had endured no Thracian winters in bare
feet, neither had he lived on cold snacks picked up here and there, as
Providence provided. Plato was a bachelor. He still wore the purple
robe, proud, dignified, yet gentle, and his back was straight as that of
a youth. Lowell once said, "When I hear Plato's name mentioned, I always
think of George William Curtis--a combination of pride and intellect, a
man's strength fused with a woman's gentleness."

Plato was an aristocrat. He accepted only such pupils as he invited, or
those that were sent by royalty. Like Franz Liszt, he charged no
tuition, which plan, by the way, is a good scheme for getting more money
than could otherwise be obtained, although no such selfish charge should
be brought against either Plato or Liszt. Yet every benefit must be paid
for, and whether you use the word fee or honorarium, matters little. I
hear there be lecturers who accept invitations to banquets and accept an
honorarium mysteriously placed on the mantel, when they would scorn a
fee.

Plato's Garden School, where the pupils reclined under the trees on
marble benches, and read and talked, or listened to lectures by the
Master, was almost an ideal place. Not the ideal for us, because we
believe that the mental and the manual must go hand in hand. The world
of intellect should not be separated from the world of work. It was too
much to expect that in a time when slavery was everywhere, Plato would
see the fallacy of having one set of men to do the thinking, and another
do the work. We haven't got far from that yet; only free men can see the
whole truth, and a free man is one who lives in a country where there
are no slaves. To own slaves is to be one, and to live in a land of
slavery is to share in the bondage--a partaker in the infamy and the
profits.

Plato and Aristotle became fast friends--comrades. With thinking men
years do not count--only those grow old who think by proxy. Plato had no
sons after the flesh, and the love of his heart went out to the
Stagirite: in him he saw his own life projected.

When Aristotle had turned twenty he was acquainted with all the leading
thinkers of his time; he read constantly, wrote, studied and conversed.
The little property his father left had come to him; the King of Macedon
sent him presents; and he taught various pupils from wealthy
families--finances were easy. But success did not spoil him. The
brightest scholars do not make the greatest success in life, because
alma mater usually catches them for teachers. Sometimes this is well,
but more often it is not. Plato would not hear of Aristotle's leaving
him, and so he remained, the chief ornament and practical leader of the
school.

He became rich, owned the largest private library at Athens, and was
universally regarded as the most learned man of his time.

In many ways he had surpassed Plato. He delved into natural history,
collected plants, rocks, animals, and made studies of the practical
workings of economic schemes. He sought to divest the Platonic teaching
of its poetry, discarded rhetoric, and tried to get at the simple truth
of all subjects.

Toward the last of Plato's career this repudiation by Aristotle of
poetry, rhetoric, elocution and the polite accomplishments caused a
schism to break out in the Garden School. Plato's head was in the clouds
at times; Aristotle's was, too, but his feet were always on the earth.

When Plato died, Aristotle was his natural successor as leader of the
school, but there was opposition to him, both on account of his sturdy,
independent ways and because he was a foreigner.

He left Athens to become a member of the Court of Hermias, a former
pupil, now King of Atarneus.

He remained here long enough to marry the niece of his patron, and
doubtless saw himself settled for life--a kingly crown within his reach
should his student-sovereign pass away.

And the royal friend did pass away, by the dagger's route. As
life-insurance risks I am told that Kings have to pay double premium.
Revolution broke out, and as Aristotle was debating in his mind what
course to pursue, a messenger with soldiers arrived from King Philip of
Macedon, offering safe convoy, enclosing transportation, and asking that
Aristotle come and take charge of the education of his son, Alexander,
aged thirteen.

Aristotle did not wait to parley: he accepted the invitation. Horses
were saddled, camels packed and that night, before the moon arose, the
cavalcade silently moved out into the desert.

       *       *       *       *       *

The offer that had been made twenty-four years before, by Philip's
father, was now accepted. Aristotle was forty-two years old, in the
prime of his power. Time had tempered his passions, but not subdued his
zest in life. He had the curious, receptive, alert and eager mind of a
child. His intellect was at its ripest and best. He was a lover of
animals, and all outdoor life appealed to him as it does to a growing
boy. He was a daring horseman, and we hear of his riding off into the
desert and sleeping on the sands, his horse untethered watching over
him. Aristotle was the first man to make a scientific study of the
horse, and with the help of Alexander he set up a skeleton, fastening
the bones in place, to the mighty astonishment of the natives, who
mistook the feat for an attempt to make a living animal; and when the
beast was not at last saddled and bridled there were subdued chuckles of
satisfaction among the "hoi polloi" at the failure of the scheme, and
murmurs of "I told you so!"

Eighteen hundred years were to pass before another man was to take up
the horse as a serious scientific study; and this was Leonardo da Vinci,
a man in many ways very much like Aristotle. The distinguishing feature
in these men--the thing that differentiates them from other men--was the
great outpouring sympathy with every living creature. Everything they
saw was related to themselves--it came very close to them--they wanted
to know more about it. This is essentially the child-mind, and the
calamity of life is to lose it.

Leonardo became interested in Aristotle's essay on the horse, and
continued the subject further, dissecting the animal in minutest detail
and illustrating his discoveries with painstaking drawings. His work is
so complete and exhaustive that nobody nowadays has time to more than
read the title-page. Leonardo's bent was natural science, and his first
attempts at drawing were done to illustrate his books. Art was
beautiful, of course--it brought in an income, made friends and brought
him close to people who saw nothing unless you made a picture of it. He
made pictures for recreation and to amuse folks, and his threat to put
the peeping Prior into the "Last Supper," posed as Judas, revealed his
contempt for the person to whom a picture was just a picture. The marvel
to Leonardo was the mind that could imagine, the hand that could
execute, and the soul that could see.

And the curious part is that Leonardo lives for us through his play and
not through his serious work. His science has been superseded, but his
art is immortal.

This expectant mental attitude, this attitude of worship, belongs to all
great scientists. The man divines the thing first and then looks for it,
just as the Herschels knew where the star ought to be and then patiently
waited for it. The Bishop of London said that if Darwin had spent
one-half as much time in reading his Bible as in studying earthworms, he
would have really benefited the world, and saved his soul alive. To
Walt Whitman, a hair on the back of his hand was just as curious and
wonderful as the stars in the sky, or God's revelation to man through a
printed book.

Aristotle loved animals as a boy loves them--his house was a regular
menagerie of pets, and into this world of life Alexander was very early
introduced. We hear of young Alexander breaking the wild horse,
Bucephalus, and beyond a doubt Aristotle was seated on the top rail of
the paddock when he threw the lariat.

Aristotle and his pupil had the first circus of which we know, and they
also inaugurated the first Zoological Garden mentioned in history,
barring Noah, of course.

So much was Alexander bound up in this menagerie, and in his old teacher
as well, that in after-life, in all of his travels, he was continually
sending back to Aristotle specimens of every sort of bird, beast and
fish to be found in the countries through which he traveled.

When Philip was laid low by the assassin's thrust, it was Aristotle who
backed up Alexander, aged twenty--but a man--in his prompt suppression
of the revolution. The will that had been used to subdue man-eating
stallions and to train wild animals, now came in to repress riot, and
the systematic classification of things was a preparation for the
forming of an army out of a mob. Aristotle said, "An army is a huge
animal with a million claws--it must have only one brain, and that the
commander's."

Alexander gave credit again and again to Aristotle for those elements in
his character that went to make up success: steadiness of purpose,
self-reliance, systematic effort, mathematical calculation, attention to
details, and a broad and generous policy that sees the end.

When Aristotle argued with Philip, years before, that horse-breaking
should be included in the educational curriculum of all young men, he
evidently divined football and was endeavoring to supplant it.

       *       *       *       *       *

I think history has been a trifle severe on Alexander. He was elected
Captain-General of Greece, and ordered to repel the Persian invasion.
And he did the business once for all. War is not all
fighting--Providence is on the side of the strongest commissariat.
Alexander had to train, arm, clothe and feed a million men, and march
them long miles across a desert country. The real foe of a man is in his
own heart, and the foe of an army is in its own camp--disease takes more
prisoners than the enemy. Fever sniped more of our boys in blue than did
the hostile Filipinos.

Alexander's losses were principally from men slain in battle; from this,
I take it that Alexander knew a deal of sanitary science, and had a
knowledge of practical mathematics, in order to systematize that mob of
restless, turbulent helots. We hear of Aristotle cautioning him that
safety lies in keeping his men busy--they must not have too much time to
think, otherwise mutiny is to be feared. Still, they must not be
over-worked, or they will be in no condition to fight when the eventful
time occurs. And we are amazed to see this: "Do not let your men drink
out of stagnant pools--Athenians, city-born, know no better. And when
you carry water on the desert marches, it should be first boiled to
prevent its getting sour."

Concerning the Jews, Alexander writes to his teacher and says, "They are
apt to be in sullen rebellion against their governors, receiving orders
only from their high priests, and this leads to severe measures, which
are construed as persecution"; all of which might have been written
yesterday by the Czar in a message to The Hague Convention.

Alexander captured the East, and was taken captive by the East. Like the
male bee that never lives to tell the tale of its wooing, he succeeded
and died. Yet he vitalized all Asia with the seeds of Greek philosophy,
turned back the hungry barbaric tide, and made a new map of the Eastern
world. He built far more cities than he destroyed. He set Andrew
Carnegie an example at Alexandria, such as the world had never up to
that time seen. At the entrance to the harbor of the same city he
erected a lighthouse, surpassing far the one at Minot's Ledge, or Race
Rock. This structure endured for two centuries, and when at last wind
and weather had their way, there was no Hopkinson Smith who could erect
another.

At Thebes, Alexander paid a compliment to letters, by destroying every
building in the city except the house of the poet, Pindar. At Corinth,
when the great, the wise, the noble, came to pay homage, one great man
did not appear. In vain did Alexander look for his card among all those
handed in at the door--Diogenes, the Philosopher, oft quoted by
Aristotle, was not to be seen.

Alexander went out to hunt him up, and found him sunning himself,
propped up against the wall in the Public Square, busy doing nothing.

The philosopher did not arise to greet the conqueror; he did not even
offer a nod of recognition.

"I am Alexander--is there not something I can do for you?" modestly
asked the descendant of Hercules.

"Just stand out from between me and the sun," replied the philosopher,
and went on with his meditations.

Alexander enjoyed the reply so much that he said to his companions, and
afterward wrote to Aristotle, "If I were not Alexander, I would be
Diogenes," and thus did strenuosity pay its tribute to
self-sufficiency.

       *       *       *       *       *

Aristotle might have assumed important affairs of State, but practical
politics were not to his liking. "What Aristotle is in the world of
thought I will be in the world of action," said Alexander.

On all of his journeys Alexander found time to keep in touch with his
old teacher at home; and we find the ruler of Asia voicing that old
request, "Send me something to read," and again, "I live alone with my
thoughts, amidst a throng of men, but without companions."

Plutarch gives a copy of a letter sent by Alexander wherein Aristotle is
chided for publishing his lecture on oratory. "Now all the world will
know what formerly belonged to you and me alone," plaintively cries the
young man who sighed for more worlds to conquer, and therein shows he
was the victim of a fallacy that will never die--the idea that truth can
be embodied in a book. When will we ever learn that inspired books
demand inspired readers!

There are no secrets. A book may stimulate thought, but it can never
impart it.

Aristotle wrote out the Laws of Oratory. "Alas!" groans Alexander,
"everybody will turn orator now." But he was wrong, because Oratory and
the Laws of Oratory are totally different things.

A Boston man of excellent parts has just recently given out the Sixteen
Perfective Laws of Oratory, and the Nineteen Steps in Evolution.

The real truth is, there are Fifty-seven Varieties of Artistic Vagaries,
and all are valuable to the man who evolves them--they serve him as a
scaffolding whereby he builds thought. But woe betide Alexander and all
rareripe Bostonians who mistake the scaffolding for the edifice.

There are no Laws of Art. A man evolves first, and builds his laws
afterward. The style is the man, and a great man, full of the spirit,
will express himself in his own way.

Bach ignored all the Laws of Harmony made before his day and set down
new ones--and these marked his limitations, that was all. Beethoven
upset all these, and Wagner succeeded by breaking most of Beethoven's
rules. And now comes Grieg, and writes harmonious discords that Wagner
said were impossible, and still it is music, for by it we are
transported on the wings of song and uplifted to the stars.

The individual soul striving for expression ignores all man-made laws.
Truth is that which serves us best in expressing our lives. A rotting
log is truth to a bed of violets, while sand is truth to a cactus. But
when the violet writes a book on "Expression as I Have Found It," making
laws for the evolution of beautiful blossoms, it leaves the Century
Plant out of its equation, or else swears, i' faith, that a cactus is
not a flower, and that a Night-Blooming Cereus is a disordered thought
from a madman's brain. And when the proud and lofty cactus writes a
book it never mentions violets, because it has never stooped to seek
them.

Art is the blossoming of the Soul.

We can not make the plant blossom--all we can do is to comply with the
conditions of growth. We can supply the sunshine, moisture and aliment,
and God does the rest. In teaching, he only is successful who supplies
the conditions of growth--that is all there is of the Science of
Pedagogics, which is not a science, and if it ever becomes one, it will
be the Science of Letting Alone, and not a scheme of interference. Just
so long as some of the greatest men are those who have broken through
pedagogic fancy and escaped, succeeding by breaking every rule of
pedagogy, as Wagner discarded every Law of Harmony, there will be no
such thing as a Science of Education.

Recently I read Aristotle's Essays on Rhetoric and Oratory, and I was
pained to see how I had been plagiarized by this man who wrote three
hundred years before Christ. Aristotle used charts in teaching and
indicated the mean by a straight horizontal line, and the extreme by an
upright dash. He says: "From one extreme the mean looks extreme, and
from another extreme the mean looks small--it all depends upon your
point of view. Beware of jumping to conclusions, for beside the
appearance you must look within and see from what vantage-ground you
gain the conclusions. All truth is relative, and none can be final to a
man six feet high, who stands on the ground, who can walk but forty
miles at a stretch, who needs four meals a day and one-third of his time
for sleep. A loss of sleep, or loss of a meal, or a meal too much, will
disarrange his point of view, and change his opinions," And thus do we
see that a belief in "eternal punishment" is a mere matter of
indigestion.

A certain bishop, we have seen, experienced a regret that Darwin
expended so much time on earthworms; and we might also express regret
that Aristotle did not spend more. As long as he confined himself to
earth, he was eminently sure and right: he was really the first man who
ever used his eyes. But when he quit the earth, and began to speculate
about the condition of souls before they are clothed with bodies, or
what becomes of them after they discard the body, or the nature of God,
he shows that he knew no more than we. That is to say, he knew no more
than the barbarians who preceded him.

He attempted to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as
the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the
unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point--the net
bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition,
expressed by Hegel to make lucid a thing nobody comprehends: "Essential
being as being that meditates with itself, with itself by the negativity
of itself, is relative to itself only as it is relative to another;
that is, immediate only as something posited and meditated." It gives
one a slight shock to hear him speak of headache being caused by wind on
the brain, or powdered grasshopper-wings being a cure for gout, but when
he calls the heart a pump that forces the blood to the extremities, we
see that he anticipates Harvey, although more than two thousand years of
night lie between them.

Some of Aristotle reads about like this Geometrical Domestic Equation:

_Definitions:_

All boarding-houses are the same boarding-houses.

Boarders in the same boarding-house, and on the same flat, are equal to
one another.

A single room is that which hath no parts and no magnitude.

The landlady of the boarding-house is a parallelogram--that is, an
oblong figure that can not be described, and is equal to anything.

A wrangle is the disinclination to each other of two boarders that meet
together, but are not on the same floor.

All the other rooms being taken, a single room is a double room.

_Postulates and Propositions:_

A pie may be produced any number of times.

The landlady may be reduced to her lowest terms by a series of
propositions.

A bee-line is the shortest distance between the Phalanstery and By
Allen's.

The clothes of a boarding-house bed stretched both ways will not meet.

Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than one meal at the
Phalanstery.

On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two
charges for the same thing.

If there be two boarders on the same floor, and the amount of the side
of the one be equal to the amount of the side of the other, and the
wrangle between the one boarder and the landlady be equal to the wrangle
between the landlady and the other boarder, then shall the weekly bills
of the two boarders be equal. For, if not, let one bill be the greater,
then the other bill is less than it might have been, which is absurd.
Therefore the bills are equal.

_Quod erat demonstrandum._

       *       *       *       *       *

The business of the old philosophers was to philosophize. To
philosophize as a business is to miss the highest philosophy. To do a
certain amount of useful work every day, and not trouble about either
the past or the future, is the highest wisdom. The man who drags the
past behind him, and dives into the future, spreads the present out
thin. Therein lies the bane of most religions. A man goes out into the
woods to study the birds: he walks and walks and walks and sees no
birds. But just let him sit down on a log and wait, and lo! the branches
are full of song.

Those who pursue Culture never catch up with her. Culture takes alarm at
pursuit and avoids the stealthy pounce. Culture is a woman, and a
certain amount of indifference wins her. Ardent wooing will not secure
either wisdom or a woman--except in the case where a woman marries a man
to get rid of him, and then he really does not get the woman--he only
secures her husk. And the husks of culture are pedantry and sciolism.
The highest philosophy of the future will consist in doing each day that
which is most useful. Talking about it will be quite incidental and
secondary.

       *       *       *       *       *

After Alexander had completed his little task of conquering the world,
it was his intention to sit down and improve his mind. He was going back
to Greece to complete the work Pericles had so well begun. To this end
Aristotle had left Macedonia and established his Peripatetic School at
Athens. Plato was exclusive, and taught in the Garden with its high
walls. Aristotle taught in the "peripatos," or porch of the Lyceum, and
his classes were for all who wished to attend. Socrates was really the
first peripatetic philosopher, but he was a roustabout. Nothing
sanctifies like death--and now Socrates had become respectable, and his
methods were to be made legal and legitimate.

Socrates discovered the principle of human liberty; he taught the rights
of the individual, and as these threatened to interfere with the State,
the politicians got alarmed and put him to death. Plato, much more
cautious, wrote his "Republic," wherein everything is subordinated for
the good of the State, and the individual is but a cog in a most
perfectly lubricated machine. Aristotle saw that Socrates was nearer
right than Plato--sin is the expression of individuality and is not
wholly bad--the State is made up of individuals, and if you suppress the
thinking-power of the individual, you will get a weak and effeminate
body politic; there will be none to govern. The whole fabric will break
down of its own weight. A man must have the privilege of making a fool
of himself--within proper bounds, of course. To that end learning must
be for all, and liberty both to listen and to teach should be the
privilege of every man.

This is a problem that Boston has before it today: Shall free speech be
allowed on the Common? William Morris tried it in Trafalgar Square, to
his sorrow; but in Hyde Park, if you think you have a message, London
will let you give it. But this is not considered good form, and the
"Best Society" listen to no speeches in the park. However, there are
signs that Aristotle's outdoor school may come back. Phillips Brooks
tried outdoor preaching, and if his health had not failed, he might have
popularized it. It only wants a man who is big enough to inaugurate it.

Aristotle had various helpers, and arranged to give his lectures and
conferences daily in certain porches or promenades. These lectures
covered the whole range of human thought--logic, rhetoric, oratory,
physics, ethics, politics, esthetics, and physical culture. These
outdoor talks were called exoteric, and there gradually grew up esoteric
lessons, which were for the rich or luxurious and the dainty. And there
being money in the esoteric lessons, these gradually took the place of
the exoteric, and so we get the genesis of our modern private school or
college, where we send our children to be taught great things by great
men, for a consideration.

Will the exoteric, peripatetic school come back?

I think so.

I believe that university education will soon be free to every boy and
girl in America, and this without going far from home. Esoteric
education is always more or less of a sham. Our public-school system is
purely exoteric, only we stop too soon. We also give our teachers too
much work and too little pay. Stop building warships, and use the money
to double the teachers' salaries, making the profession respectable,
raise the standard of efficiency, and the free university with the old
Greek Lyceum will be here.

America must do this--the Old World can't. We have the money, and we
have the men and the women; all that is needed is the desire, and this
is fast awakening.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Alexander died, of acute success, aged thirty-two, Aristotle's
sustaining prop was gone. The Athenians never thought much of the
Macedonians--not much more than Saint Paul did, he having tried to
convert both and failed.

Athens was jealous of the power of Alexander: that a provincial should
thus rule the Mother-Country was unforgivable. It was as if a Canadian
should make himself King of England!

Everybody knew that Aristotle had been the tutor of Alexander, and that
they were close friends. And that a Macedonian should be the chief
school-teacher in Athens was an affront. The very greatness of the man
was his offense: Athens had none to match him, and the world has never
since matched him, either. How to get rid of the Macedonian philosopher
was the question.

And so our old friend, heresy, comes in again. A poem was found, written
by Aristotle many years before, on the death of his friend, King
Hermias, wherein Apollo was disrespectfully mentioned. It was the old
charge against Socrates come back--the hemlock was brewing. But life was
sweet to Aristotle; he chose discretion to valor, and fled to his
country home at Chalcis in Euboea.

The humiliation of being driven from his work, and the sudden change
from active life to exile, undermined his strength, and he died in a
year, aged sixty-two.

In morals the world has added nothing new to the philosophy of
Aristotle: gentleness, consideration, moderation, mutual helpfulness,
and the principle that one man's privileges end where another man's
rights begin--these make up the sum. And on them, all authorities agree,
and have for twenty-five hundred years.

The family relations of Aristotle were most exemplary. The unseemly
wrangles of Philip and his wife were never repeated in the home of
Aristotle. Yet we will have to offer this fact in the interests of
stirpiculture: the inconstant Philip and the termagant Olympias brought
into the world Alexander; whereas the sons of Aristotle lived their day
and died, without making a ripple on the surface of history.

As in the scientific study of the horse, no progress was made from the
time of Aristotle to that of Leonardo, so Hegel says there was no
advancement in philosophy from the time of Aristotle to that of Spinoza.

Eusebius called Aristotle "Nature's Private Secretary."

Dante spoke of him as the "Master of those who know."

Sir William Hamilton said, "In the range of his powers and perceptions,
only Leonardo can be compared with him."




MARCUS AURELIUS


     We are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids,
     like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one
     another then is contrary to Nature, and it is acting against one
     another to be vexed and turn away.

                                                --_The Meditations_

[Illustration: MARCUS AURELIUS]


Annius Verus was one of the great men of Rome. He had been a soldier,
governor of provinces, judge, senator and consul. Sixty years had passed
over his head and whitened his hair, but the lines of care that were on
his fine face ten years before had now given way to a cherubic double
chin, and his complexion was ruddy as a baby's. The entire atmosphere of
the man was one of gentleness, repose and kindly good-will. Annius Verus
was grateful to the gods, for the years had brought him much good
fortune, and better still, knowledge. "Being old I shall know ... the
last of life for which the first was made!"

Religion isn't a thing outside of a man, taught by priests out of a
book. Religion is in the heart of man, and its chief quality is
resignation and a grateful spirit. Annius Verus was religious in the
best sense, and his life was peaceful and happy.

And surely Annius Verus should have been content--he was a Roman Consul,
rich, powerful, honored by the wisest and best men in Rome, who
considered it a privilege to come and dine at his table. His villa was
on Mount Coelius, a suburb of Rome. The house was surrounded by a big
stone wall enclosing a tract of about ten acres, where grew citron,
orange and fig trees, and giant cedars of Lebanon lifted their branches
to the clouds.

At least it seemed to little Marcus, grandson of the Consul, as if they
reached the clouds. There was a long ladder running up one of these big
cedar trees to a platform or "crow's-nest" nearly a hundred feet from
the ground. No boy was allowed to climb up there until he was twelve
years old, and when Marcus was ten, time got stuck, he thought, and
refused to budge. But this was only little Marcus' idea, for he finally
got to be twelve years old, and then he climbed the long ladder to the
lookout in the tree and looked down on the Eternal City that lay below
in the valley and stretched away over the seven hills. Often the boy
would take a book and climb up there to read; and when the good
grandfather missed him, he knew where to look, and standing under the
tree the old man would call: "Come down, Marcus, come down and kiss your
old grandfather--it is lonesome down here! Come down and read to your
grandfather who loves his little Marcus!"

Such an appeal as this was irresistible, and the boy, slight, slim and
agile, would clamber over the side of the crow's-nest and down the
ladder to the outstretched arms.

The boy's father had died when he was only three months old, and the
grandfather had adopted the child as his heir, and brought Lucilla, the
widowed mother, and her baby to live in his house.

Years before, the Consul's wife had passed away, and Faustina, his
daughter, became the lady of the house. Lucilla and Faustina didn't get
along very well together--no house is big enough for two families, some
man has said. Lucilla was gentle, gracious, spiritual, modest and
refined; Faustina was beautiful and not without intellect, but she was
proud, domineering and fond of admiration. But be it said to the credit
of the good old Consul, he was able to suffuse the whole place with
love, and even if Faustina had a tantrum now and then, it did not last
long.

There were always visitors in the household--soldiers home on furloughs,
governors on vacations, lawyers who came to consult the wise and
judicial Verus.

One visitor of note was a man by the name of Aurelius Antoninus. He was
about forty years old as Marcus first remembered him--tall and straight,
with a full, dark beard, and short, curly hair touched with gray. He was
a quiet, self-contained man, and at first little Marcus was a bit afraid
of him. Aurelius Antoninus had been a soldier, but he showed such a
studious mind, and was so intent on doing the right thing that he was
made an under-secretary, then private secretary to the Emperor, and
finally he had been sent away to govern a rebellious province, and put
down mutiny by wise diplomacy instead of by force of arms.

Aurelius Antoninus was inclined towards the Stoics, although he didn't
talk much about it. He usually ate but two meals a day, worked with the
servants, and wrote this in his diary, "Men are made for each other:
even the inferior for the superior, and these for the sake of one
another."

This philosophy of the Stoics rather appealed to the widow Lucilla,
also, and she read Zeno with Aurelius Antoninus. Verus did not object to
it--he had been a soldier and knew the advantages of doing without
things and of being able to make the things you needed, and of living
simply and being plain and direct in all your acts and speech. But
Faustina laughed at it all--to her it was preposterous that one should
wear plain clothing and no jewelry when he could buy the costliest and
best; and why one should eschew wine and meat and live on brown bread
and fruit and cold water, when he could just as well have spiced and
costly dishes--all this was clear beyond her. Various fetes and banquets
were given by Faustina, to which the young nobles were invited. She was
a beautiful woman and never for a moment forgot it, and by some mistake
or accident she got herself betrothed to three men at the same time. Two
of these fought a duel and one was killed. The third man looked on and
hoped both would be killed, for then he could have the woman. Faustina
got this third man to challenge the survivor, and then by one of those
strange somersaults of fate the unexpected occurred.

Faustina and Aurelius Antoninus were married.

It was a most queer mismating, for the man was plain, sincere and
honorable, and she was almost everything else. Yet she had wit and she
had beauty, and Aurelius had been living in the desert so long he
imagined that all women were gentle and good. The Consul was very glad
to unite his house with so fine and excellent a man as Aurelius; Lucilla
cried for two days and more and little Marcus cried because his mother
did, and neither cried because Faustina had gone away.

But grief is transient.

In a little over a year Antoninus and Faustina came back to Rome, and
brought with them a little girl baby, Faustina Second. Marcus was very
much interested in this baby, and made great plans about how they would
play together when she got older.

Among other visitors at the house of the old Consul often came the
Emperor himself. Hadrian and Verus were Spaniards and had been soldiers
together, and now Hadrian often liked to get away from the cares of
State, and in the evening hide himself from the office-seekers and
flattering parasites, in the quiet villa on Mount Coelius--he liked it
here even better than at his own wonderful gardens at Tivoli. And little
Marcus wasn't afraid of him, either. Marcus would sit on the Emperor's
knee and listen to tales about hunting wild boars and bears, or men as
wild. Then they would play tag or I-spy among the bushes and trees; and
once Marcus dared the Emperor to climb the long ladder to the lookout in
the big cedar. Hadrian accepted the challenge and climbed to the
crow's-nest and cut his initials in the trunk of the tree.

Instead of calling the boy Marcus Verus, the Emperor gave him the name
"Verissimus," which means "the open-eyed truthful one," and this name
stuck to Marcus for life.

Between Antoninus and Marcus there grew up a very close friendship.
Antoninus could scale the ladder up the tall cedar, three rungs at a
time, and come down hand over hand without putting his foot on a rest.

He and Marcus built another crow's-nest thirty feet above the first.
They drew up the lumber by ropes, and Antoninus being sinewy and strong
climbed up first, and with thongs and nails they fixed the boards in
place, and made a rope ladder such as sailors make, that they could pull
up after them so no one could reach them. When the kind old Emperor came
to the villa they showed him what they had done. He said he would not
try to climb up now as he had a touch of rheumatism. But a light was
fixed in the upper lookout, drawn up by a cord, so they could signal to
the Emperor down at the palace.

Then Antoninus taught Marcus to ride horseback and pick up a spear off
the ground, with his horse at a gallop. This was great sport for the
Consul and the Emperor, who looked on, but they did not try it then,
but said they would later on when they were feeling just right.

And beside all this Aurelius Antoninus taught Marcus to read from
Epictetus, and told him how this hunchback slave, Epictetus, who was
owned by a man who had been a slave himself, was one of the sweetest,
gentlest souls who had ever lived. Together they read the Stoic-slave
philosopher and made notes from him. And so impressed was Marcus that,
boy though he was, he adopted the simple robe of the Stoics, slept on a
plank, and made his life and language plain, truthful and direct.

This was all rather amusing to those near him--to all except Antoninus
and the boy's mother. The others said, "Leave him alone and he'll get
over it."

Faustina was still fond of admiration--the simple, studious ways of her
husband were not to her liking. He was twenty years her senior, and she
demanded gaiety as her right. Her delight was to tread the borderline of
folly, and see how close she could come to the brink and not step off.
Julius Caesar's wife was put away on suspicion, but Faustina was worse
than that! She would go down to the city to masquerades, leaving her
little girl at home, and be gone for three days.

When she returned Aurelius Antoninus spoke no word of anger or reproof.
Her father said to her, "Beware! your husband's patience has a limit. If
he divorces you, I shall not blame him; and even if he should kill you,
Roman law will not punish him!"

But long years after, Marcus, in looking back on those days, wrote: "His
patience knew no limit; he treated her as a perverse child, and he once
said to me: 'I pity and love her. I will not put her away--this were
selfish. How can her follies injure me? We are what we are, and no one
can harm us but ourselves. The mistakes of those near us afford us an
opportunity for self-control--we will not imitate their errors, but
rather strive to avoid them. In this way what might be a great
humiliation has its benefits.'"

Let no one imagine, however, that the tolerance of Antoninus was the
soft acquiescence of weakness. After his death Marcus wrote: "Whatsoever
excellent thing he had planned to do, he carried out with a persistency
that nothing could divert. If he punished men, it was by allowing them
to be led by their own folly--his foresight, wisdom and calm
deliberation were beyond those of any man I ever knew."

The studious, direct and manly ways of Marcus were not cast aside when
he put on the toga virilis, as Faustina had predicted. In spite of the
difference in their ages, Antoninus and Marcus mutually sustained each
other.

Little Faustina was much more like her father than her mother, and very
early showed her preference for her father's society. Marcus was her
playmate and taught her to ride a pony astride, just as her father had
taught him. The three would often ride over to the village of Lorium,
twelve miles from Rome, where Antoninus had a summer villa. At Lanuvium,
near at hand, the Emperor spent a part of his time, and he would
occasionally join the party and listen to Marcus recite from Cicero and
Caesar.

When Marcus was sixteen, Hadrian appointed him prefect of festivities in
Rome, to take the place of the regular officer, a man of years, who was
out of the city. So well did Marcus fill the place and make up his
report, that when they again met, the old Emperor kissed his cheek,
calling him, "My brave Verissimus," and said, "If I had a son, I would
want him just like you."

Not long after this the Emperor was taken violently ill. He called his
counselors about his bedside and directed that Aurelius Antoninus should
be his successor, and that, further, Antoninus should adopt Marcus
Verus, so that Marcus should succeed Aurelius Antoninus.

Hadrian loved Marcus for his own sake, and he loved him, too, for the
sake of the grandfather, his old soldier comrade, Annius Verus; and
beside that he was intent on preserving the Spanish strain.

In a short time Hadrian passed away, and Aurelius Antoninus was crowned
Emperor of Rome, and Marcus Verus, aged seventeen, slim, slender and
studious, took the name, Marcus Aurelius.

       *       *       *       *       *

The new reign did not begin under very favorable auspices. There was a
prejudice against the Spanish blood, and Hadrian had alienated some of
the aristocrats by measures they considered too democratic.

Aurelius Antoninus knew of these prejudices toward his predecessor and
he boldly met them by carrying the ashes of Hadrian to the Senate,
demanding that the dead Emperor should be enrolled among the gods. So
earnest and convincing was his eulogy of the great man gone, that a vote
was taken and the resolution passed without a dissenting voice. This
gives us a slight clew to the genesis of the gods, and also reveals to
us the character of Antoninus. He so impressed the Senate that this
honorable body thought best to waive all matters of difference, and in
pretty compliment they voted to bestow on the new Emperor the degree of
"Pius." Antoninus Pius was a man born to rule--in little things,
lenient, but firm at the right time. Faustina still had her little
social dissipations, but as she was not allowed to mix in affairs of
State, her pink person was not a political factor.

Marcus Aurelius was only seventeen years old: his close studies had
robbed him of a bit of the robust health a youth should have. But
horseback-riding and daily outdoor games finally got him back into good
condition. He was the secretary and companion of the Emperor wherever he
went.

Great responsibilities confronted these two strong men. In point of
intellect and aspiration they were far beyond the people they
governed--so far, indeed, that they were almost isolated. There was a
multitude of slaves and consequently there was a feeling everywhere that
useful work was degrading. The tendency of the slave-owner is always
toward profligacy and conspicuous waste. To do away with slavery was out
of the question--that was a matter of time and education--the ruler can
never afford to get much in advance of his people. The court was
infected with parasites in the way of informers and busybodies who knew
no way to thrive except through intrigue. Superstitions were taught by
hypocritical priests in order to make the people pay tithes; and
attached to the state religion were soothsayers, fortune-tellers,
astrologers, gamblers and many pretenders who waxed fat by ministering
to ignorance and depravity. These were the cheerful parasites mentioned
as "money-changers" a hundred years before, that infested the entrance
to every temple.

Many long consultations did the Emperor and his adopted son have
concerning the best policy to pursue. They could have issued an edict
and swept the wrongs out of existence, but they knew that folly sprouts
from a disordered brain, and so they did not treat a symptom: the
disease was ignorance, the symptom, superstition. For themselves they
kept an esoteric doctrine, and for the many they did what they could.

Twenty-three years of probation lay before Marcus Aurelius--years of
study, work, and patient endeavor. He shared in all the honors of the
Emperor and bore his part of the burden as well. Never did he thirst for
more power--the responsibilities of the situation saddened him--there
was so much to be done and he could do so little. Well does Dean Farrar
call him "a seeker after God."

The office of young Marcus Aurelius at first was that of Questor, which
literally means a messenger, but the word with the Romans meant more--an
emissary or an ambassador. When Marcus was eighteen he read to the
Senate all speeches and messages from the Emperor; and in a few years
more he wrote the messages as well as delivered them. And all the time
his education was being carried along by competent instructors.

One of these teachers, Fronto, has come down to us, his portrait well
etched on history's tablets, because he saved all the letters written
him by Marcus Aurelius; and his grandchildren published them in order to
show the excellence of true scientific teaching. That old Fronto was a
dear old dear, these letters do fully attest. When Marcus went away on a
little journey, even to Lorium, he wrote a letter to Fronto telling
about the trip--the sheep by the wayside, the dogs that herded them, the
shower they saw coming across the Campagna, and incidentally a little
freshman philosophy mixed in, for Fronto had cautioned his pupil always
to write out a great thought when it came, for fear he would never have
another. Marcus was a sprightly letter-writer, and must have been a
quick observer, and Fronto's gentle claims that he made the man are
worthy of consideration. As a literary exercise the daily theme,
prompted by love, can never be improved upon. The way to learn to write
is to write. And Pronto, who resorted to many little tricks in order to
get his pupil to express himself, was a teacher whose name should be
written high. The correspondence-school has many advantages--Fronto
purposely sent his pupil away or absented himself, that the carefully
formulated or written thought might take the place of the free and easy
conversation. In one letter Marcus ends: "The day was perfect but for
one thing--you were not here. But then if you were here, I would not now
have the pleasure of writing to you, so thus is your philosophy proved:
that all good is equalized, and love grows through separation!" This
sounds a bit preachy, but is valuable, as it reveals the man to whom it
is written: the person to whom we write dictates the message.

Fronto's habit of giving a problem to work out was quite as good a
teaching plan as anything we have to offer now. Thus: "An ambassador of
Rome visiting an outlying province attended a gladiatorial contest. And
one of the fighters being indisposed, the ambassador replied to a taunt
by putting on a coat of mail and going into the ring to kill the lion.
Question, was this action commendable? If so, why, and if not, why
not?"

The proposition was one that would appeal at once to a young man, and
thus did Fronto lead his pupils to think and express.

Another teacher that Marcus had was Rusticus, a blunt old farmer turned
pedagog, who has added a word to our language. His pupils were called
Rusticana, and later plain rustics. That Rusticus developed in Marcus a
deal of plain, sturdy commonsense there is no doubt. Rusticus had a way
of stripping a subject of its gloss and verbiage--going straight to the
vital point of every issue. For the wisdom of Marcus' legal opinions
Rusticus deserves more than passing credit.

For the youth who was destined to be the next Emperor of Rome, there was
no dearth of society if he chose to accept it. Managing mammas were on
every corner, and kind kinsmen consented to arrange matters with this
heiress or that. For the frivolities of society Marcus had no use--his
hours were filled with useful work or application to his books. His
father and Fronto we find were both constantly urging him to get out
more in the sunshine and meet more people, and not bother too much about
the books.

How best to curtail over-application, I am told, is a problem that
seldom faces a teacher.

As for society as a matrimonial bazaar, Marcus Aurelius could not see
that it had its use. He was afraid of it--afraid of himself, perhaps. He
loved the little Faustina. They had been comrades together, and played
"keep house" under the olive-trees at Lorium; and had ridden their
ponies over the hills. Once Marcus and Faustina, on a ride across the
country, bought a lamb out of the arms of a shepherd, and kept it until
it grew great curling horns, and made visitors scale the wall or climb
trees. Then three priests led it away to sacrifice, and Marcus and
Faustina fell into each other's arms and rained tears down each other's
backs, and refused to be comforted. What if their father was an Emperor,
and Marcus would be some day! It would not bring back Beppo, with his
innocent lamblike ways, and make him get down on his knees and wag his
tail when they fed him out of a pail! Beppo always got on his knees to
eat, and showed his love and humility before he grew his horns and
reached the age of indiscretion; then he became awfully wicked, and it
took three stout priests to lead him away and sacrifice him to the gods
for his own good!

But gradually the grass grew on Beppo's make-believe grave in the
garden, and Fronto's problems filled the vacuum in their hearts. Fronto
gave his lessons to Marcus, and Marcus gave them to Faustina--thus do we
keep things by giving them away.

But problems greater than pet sheep grown ribald and reckless were to
confront Marcus and Faustina. They had both been betrothed to others,
years before, and this they now resented. They talked of this much, and
then suddenly ceased to talk of it, and each evaded mentioning it, and
pretended they never thought of it. Then they explosively began
again--began as suddenly to talk of it, and always when they met they
mentioned it. Folks called them brother and sister--they were not
brother and sister, only cousins.

Finally the matter was brought to Antoninus, and he pretended that he
had never thought about it; but in fact he had thought of little else
for a long time. And Antoninus said that if they loved each other very
much, and he was sure they did, why, it was the will of the gods that
they should marry, and he never interfered with the will of the gods; so
he kissed them both and cried a few foolish tears, a thing an Emperor
should never do.

So they were married at the country seat at Lorium, out under the
orange-trees as was often the custom, for orange-trees are green the
year 'round, and bear fruit and flowers at the same time, and the
flowers are very sweet, and the fruit is both beautiful and useful--and
these things symbol constancy and fruitfulness and good luck, and that
is why we yet have orange-blossoms at weddings and play the "Lohengrin
March," which is orange-trees expressed in sweet sounds.

Marcus was only twenty, and Faustina could not have been over
sixteen--we do not know her exact age. There are stories to the effect
that the wife of Marcus Aurelius severely tried her husband's temper at
times, but these tales seem to have arisen through a confusion of the
two Faustinas. The elder Faustina was the one who set the merry pace in
frivolity, and once said that any woman with a husband twenty years her
senior must be allowed a lover or two--goodness gracious!

As far as we know, the younger Faustina was a most loyal and loving
wife, the mother of a full dozen children. Coins issued by Marcus
Aurelius stamped with the features of his wife, and the inscription
Concordia, Faustina and Venus Felix, attest the felicity, or "felixity,"
of the marriage.

Their oldest boy, Commodus, was very much like his grandmother,
Faustina, and a man who knows all about the Law of Heredity tells me
that children are much more apt to resemble their grandparents than
their father and mother.

I believe I once said that no house is big enough for two families, but
this truth is like the Greek verb--it has many exceptions. In the same
house with Emperor Antoninus Pius dwelt Lucilla, mother of Marcus, and
Marcus and his wife. And they were all very happy--but life was rather
more peaceful after the death of Faustina, the elder, which occurred a
few years after her husband became Emperor.

She could not endure prosperity.

But her husband mourned her death and made a public speech in eulogy of
her, determined that only the best should be remembered of one who had
been the wife of an Emperor and the mother of his children. As far as
we know, Antoninus never spoke a word concerning his wife except in
praise, not even when she left his house to be gone for months.

It was Ouida, she of the aqua-fortis ink, who said, "A woman married to
a man as good as Antoninus must have been very miserable, for while men
who are thoroughly bad are not lovable, yet a man who is not
occasionally bad is unendurable." And so Ouida's heart went out in
sympathy and condolence to the two Faustinas, who wedded the only two
men mentioned in Roman history who were infinitely wise and good.

In one of his essays, Richard Steele writes this, "No woman ever loved a
man through life with a mighty love if the man did not occasionally
abuse her." I give the remark for what it is worth. However, Montesquieu
somewhere says that the chief objection to heaven is its monotony; so
possibly there may be something in the Ouida-Steele philosophy--but of
this I really can't say, knowing nothing about the subject, myself.

       *       *       *       *       *

Happy is the man who has no history. The reign of Antoninus Pius was
peaceful and prosperous. No great wars nor revulsions occurred, and the
times made for education and excellence. Antoninus worked to conserve
the good, and that he succeeded, Gibbon says, there is no doubt. He left
the country in better condition than he found it, and he could have
truthfully repeated the words of Pericles, "I have made no person wear
crape."

But there came a day when Antoninus was stricken by the hand of death.
The captain of the guard came to him and asked for the password for the
night. "Equanimity," replied the Emperor, and turning on his side, sank
into sleep, to awake no more. His last word symbols the guiding impulse
of his life. Well does Renan say: "Simple, loving, full of sweet gaiety,
Antoninus was a philosopher without saying so, almost without knowing
it. Marcus was a philosopher, but often consciously, and he became a
philosopher by study and reflection, aided and encouraged by the older
man. You can not consider the one man and leave the other out, and the
early contention that Antoninus was, in fact, the father of Marcus has
at least a poetic and spiritual basis in truth."

There was much in Renan's suggestions. The greatest man is he who works
his philosophy up into life--this is better than to talk about it. We
only discuss that to which we have not attained, and the virtues we
talk most of are those beyond us. The ideal outstrips the actual. But
it is no discredit that a man pictures more than he realizes--such a one
is preparing the way for others. Marcus Antoninus has been a guiding
star--an inspiration--to untold millions.

Marcus Aurelius was forty years old when he became Emperor of Rome. At
the age of forty a man is safe, if ever: character is formed, and what
he will do or become, can be safely presaged.

More than once Rome has repudiated the man in the direct line of
accession to the throne, and before Marcus Aurelius took the reins of
government he asked the Senate to ratify the people's choice, and thus
make it the choice of the gods, and this was done.

As Emperor, we find Marcus endeavored to carry out the policy of his
predecessor. He did not favor expansion, but hoped by peace and
propitiation to cement the empire and thus work for education, harmony
and prosperity.

It is interesting to see how Marcus Aurelius in the year One Hundred
Sixty-four was cudgeling his brains concerning problems about which we
yet argue and grow red in the face. The Emperor was also Chief Justice,
and questions were being constantly brought to him to decide. From him
there was no appeal, and his decisions made the law upon which all
lesser judges based their rulings. And curiously enough we are dealing
most extensively in judge-made law even today.

One vexed question that confronted Marcus was the lessening number of
marriages, with a consequent increase in illegitimate births and a
gradual dwindling of the free population. He seems to have disliked this
word illegitimate, for he says, "All children are beautiful
blessings--sent by the gods." But people who were legally married
objected to this view, and said to recognize children born out of
wedlock as entitled to all the privileges of citizenship is virtually to
do away with legal marriage. As a compromise, Marcus decided to
recognize all people as married who said they were married. This is
exactly our common-law marriage as it exists in various States today.

However, a man could put away his wife at will, and by recording the
fact with the nearest pretor, the act was legalized. It will thus be
seen that if a man could marry at will and put away his wife at will,
there was really no marriage beyond that of nature. To meet the issue,
and prevent fickle and unjust men from taking advantage of women, Marcus
decided that the pretor could refuse to record the desired divorce, if
he saw fit, and demand reasons. We then for the first time get a divorce
trial, and on appeal to Marcus, he decided that if the man were in the
wrong, he must still support the injured wife.

Then, for the first time, we find women asking for a divorce. Now,
nearly three-fourths of all divorces are granted to women; but at first,
that a woman should want marital freedom caused a howl of merriment.
Marcus was the first Roman Emperor to allow women the right of petition,
and the privilege, too, of practising law, for Capitolanus cites various
instances of women coming to ask for justice, and women friends coming
with them to help plead their case, and the Emperor of Rome, leaning his
tired head on his arm, listening for hours with great patience. We also
hear of petitions for damages being presented for failure to keep a
promise to marry--the action being brought against the girl's father.
This would be thought a trifle strange, but an action against a woman
for breach of promise is quite in order yet.

Recently the Honorable Henry Ballard of Vermont won heavy damages
against a coy and dallying heiress who had played pitch and toss with a
good man's heart. The case was carried to the United States Supreme
Court and judgment sustained.

The question of marriage and divorce now in the United States is almost
precisely where it was in Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius. No two
States have the same marriage-laws, and marriages which are illegal in
one State may be made legal in another. Yet with us, any court of
jurisdiction may declare any marriage illegal, or set any divorce aside.
What makes marriage and what constitutes divorce are matters of opinion
in the mind of the judge. We have gone a bit further than Marcus,
though, in that we allow couples to marry if they wish, yet divorce is
denied if both parties desire it. The fact that they want it is
construed as proof that they should not have it. We meet the issue,
however, by connivance of the lawyers, who are officers of the court,
and a legal fiction is inaugurated by allowing a little bird to tell the
judge what decision will be satisfactory to both sides. And in States or
countries where no divorce is allowed, marriage can be annulled if you
know how--see Ruskin versus Ruskin, Coleridge, J.

Our zealous New Thought friends, who clamor to have marriage made
difficult and divorce easy, forget that the whole question has been
threshed over for three thousand years, and all schemes tried. The
Romans issued marriage-licenses, but before doing so a pretor passed on
the fitness of the candidates for each other. This was so embarrassing
to many coy couples that they just waived formal proceedings and set up
housekeeping. To declare these people lawbreakers, Marcus Aurelius said,
would put half of Rome in limbo, just as, if we should technically
enforce all laws, it would send most members of the Legislature to the
penitentiary. So the Emperor declared de-facto marriage de jure, and for
a short time succeeded in striking out the word illegitimate as applied
to a person, on the ground that, in justice, no act of a parent could be
charged up against and punished in the offspring.

       *       *       *       *       *

Men who make laws have forever to watch most closely and dance
attendance on Nature. Laws which fly in the face of Nature are gently
waived or conveniently forgotten. Should Chief Justice Fuller issue an
injunction restraining all men from coming within a quarter of a mile of
a woman, on penalty of death, we would all place ourselves in contempt
in an hour; and should the army try to enforce the order, we would
smother Justice Fuller in his wool-sack and hang his effigy on a
sour-apple tree. Law isn't worth the paper it is written on unless it
embodies the will and natural tendencies of the governed. Where poaching
is popular, no law can stop it. Marriage is easy, and divorce difficult,
because this is Nature's plan. The natural law of attraction brings men
and women together, and it is difficult to separate them. Natural things
are easy, and artificial ones difficult. Most couples who desire freedom
only think they do: what they really want is a vacation; but they would
not separate for good if they could. It is hard to part--people who have
lived together grow to need each other. They want some one to quarrel
with.

Caesar Augustus, in his close study of character, introduced a limited
divorce. That is, in case of a family quarrel, he ordered the couple to
live apart for six months as a penalty. Quintilian says that usually
before the expired time the man and woman were surreptitiously living
together again, at which the court quietly winked, and finally this
form of penalty had to be abandoned because it made the courts
ridiculous.

Men and women do not get married because marriage is legal, nor do they
continue living together because divorce is difficult. They marry
because they desire to, and they do not separate because they do not
want to. The task that confronts the legislator is to find out what the
people want to do, and then legalize it.

In Rome, the custom of the parties divorcing themselves was prevalent,
and the courts were called upon to ratify the act, just to give the
matter respectability. Below a certain stratum in society, the formality
of legal marriage and divorce was waived entirely, just as it is
largely, now, among our colored population in the South. During the
French Revolution, the same custom largely obtained in France. And about
the year One Hundred Fifty in Rome there was danger that the people
would overlook the majesty of the law entirely in their domestic
affairs. This condition is what prompted Marcus Aurelius to recognize as
legal the common-law marriage and say if a couple called themselves
husband and wife, they were. And for a time, if they said they were
divorced, they were. But as a mortgage owned by a man on his own
property cancels the debt, and legally there is no mortgage, so if the
people could get married at will and divorce themselves at their
convenience, there really was no legal marriage. Thus the matter was
argued. So Marcus adopted the plan of making marriage easy and divorce
difficult, and this has been the policy in all civilized countries ever
since.

It is very evident, however, that Marcus Aurelius looked forward to a
time when men and women would be wise enough, and just enough, to
arrange their own affairs, without calling on the police to ratify
either their friendships or their misunderstandings. He says: "Love is
beautiful, and that a man and a woman loving each other should live
together is the will of God, but if there comes a time when they can not
live in peace, let them part. To have no relationship is not a disgrace;
to have wrong relations is, for disgrace means lack of grace, discord,
and love is harmony."

Marcus Aurelius tried the plan of probationary marriages; and to offset
this he also introduced the Augustinian plan of probationary
divorces--that is, the interlocutory decree. This scheme has recently
been adopted in several States in America with the avowed intent of
preventing fraud in divorce procedure, but actually the logic of the
situation is the same now as in the time of Marcus Aurelius--it
postpones the final decree so as to prevent the couple from becoming the
victims of their own rashness, and to give them an opportunity to become
reconciled if possible.

So anxious was Marcus Aurelius to decide justly with his people that he
found himself swamped with cases of every sort and description. He tried
to pass upon each case by its merits, regardless of law and precedent.
Then other judges construed his decisions as law, and the lesser courts
cited the upper ones, until Gibbon says, "There grew up such a mass of
judge-made laws that a skilful lawyer could prove anything, and legal
practise swung on the ability to cite similar cases and call attention
to desired decisions."

In America we are now back exactly to the same condition. A lawyer in
New York State requires over fourteen thousand law-books if he would
cover all the ground; and his business is to make it easy for the judge
to dispense justice and not dispense with law. That is to say, before a
judge can decide a case, he must be able to back up his opinion by
precedent. Judges are not elected to deal out justice between man and
man; they are elected to decide on points of law. Law is often a great
disadvantage to a judge--it may hamper justice--and in America there
must surely soon come a day when we will make a bonfire of every
law-book in the land, and electing our judges for life, we will make the
judiciary free. We will then require our lawyers and judges to read, and
pass examinations on Browning's "Ring and the Book," and none other. And
if we would follow the Aurelian suggestion of remitting all direct taxes
to every citizen who had not been plaintiff in a lawsuit for ten years,
we would gradually get something approaching pure justice. The people
must be educated to decide quietly and calmly their own disputes, and
this can be done only by placing an obvious penalty on litigation.
Progress in the future will consist in having less law, and fulfilment
will be reached when we have no law at all--each man governing himself,
and being willing that his neighbor shall do the same. Trouble arises
largely from each man regarding himself as his brother's keeper, and
ceasing to be his friend. Marcus Aurelius, the wise judge, saw that most
litigation is foolish and absurd--both parties are at fault, and both
right. And to bring about the good time when men shall live in peace, he
began earnestly to govern himself. His ideal was a state where men would
need no governing. Hence his "Meditations," a book which Dean Farrar
says is not inferior to the New Testament in its lofty aim and purity of
conception.

Every great book is an evolution: Marcus had been getting ready to write
this immortal volume for nearly half a century. And now in his
fifty-seventh year he found himself in the desert of Asia at the head of
the army, endeavoring to put down an insurrection of various barbaric
tribes. Later, the seat of war was shifted to the north. The enemy
struck and retreated, and danced around him as the Boers fought the
English in South Africa.

But Marcus Aurelius had time to think, and so with no books near and all
memoranda far away, he began to write out his best thoughts. At first he
expressed just for his own satisfaction, but later, as the work
progressed, we see that its value grew upon him, and it was his
intention to put it in systematic form for posterity. And while working
at this task, the exposures of field and camp, and the business of war,
in which he had no heart, worked upon him so adversely that he sickened
and died, aged fifty-nine.

His body was carried back to Rome and placed by the side of that of his
beloved adopted father, Antoninus Pius. And so he sleeps, but the
precious legacy of the "Meditations," written during those last two
years of travel, turmoil and strife, is ours.

A few quotations seem in order:

     Remember, on every occasion which leads thee to vexation, to apply
     this principle: not that this is a misfortune, but that to bear it
     nobly is good fortune.

     Things do not touch the soul, for they are eternal, and remain
     immovable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which
     is within.... The Universe is transformation; life is opinion.

     To the jaundiced, honey tastes bitter; and to those bitten by mad
     dogs, water causes fear; and to little children, the ball is a fine
     thing. Why then am I angry? Dost thou think that a false opinion
     has less power than the bile in the jaundiced, or the poison in him
     who is bitten by a mad dog?

     How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is
     troublesome and unsuitable, and immediately to be in all
     tranquillity!

     All things come from the universal Ruling Power, either directly or
     by way of consequence. And accordingly the lion's gaping jaws, and
     that which is poisonous, and every hurtful thing, as a thorn, as
     mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful. Do not
     therefore imagine that they are of another kind from that which
     thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.

     Pass through the rest of life like one who has entrusted to the
     gods, with his whole soul, all that he has, making himself neither
     the tyrant nor the slave of any man.

     Never value anything as profitable to thyself which shall compel
     thee to break thy promise, to lose thy self-respect, to hate any
     man, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything
     which needs walls and curtains.

     I am thankful to the gods that I was subjected to a ruler and a
     father who was able to take away all pride from me, and to bring me
     to the knowledge that it is possible for a man to live in a palace
     without wanting either guards or embroidered dresses, or torches
     and statues, and such-like show; but that it is in such a man's
     power to bring himself very near to the fashion of a private
     person, without being, for this reason, either meaner in thought or
     more remiss in action, with respect to the things which must be
     done for the public interest in a manner that befits a ruler.

     What more dost thou want when thou hast done a man a service? Art
     thou not content that thou hast done something conformable to thy
     nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it? Just as if the eye
     demanded a recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking. As a
     horse when he has run, a dog when he has traced the game, a bee
     when it has made the honey, so a man, when he has done a good act,
     does not call out for others to come and see, but goes on to
     another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in
     season.

     Accustom thyself to attend carefully to what is said by another,
     and as much as it is possible, be in the speaker's mind.

     Some things are hurrying into existence, and others are hurrying
     out of it; and of that which is coming into existence, part is
     already extinguished. Motions and changes are continually renewing
     the world, just as the uninterrupted course of time is always
     renewing the infinite duration of ages.

     Understand that every man is worth just so much as the things are
     worth about which he busies himself.

     Wickedness does no harm at all to the universe--it is only harmful
     to him who has it in his power to be released from it.

     Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a
     round, and pries into the things beneath the earth, as the poet
     says, and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his
     neighbors, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to
     the deity within him, and to reverence it sincerely.

     The prayers of Marcus Aurelius to the gods are for one thing
     only--that their will be done. All else is vain, all else is
     rebellion against the universe itself. Our form of worship should
     be like this: Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to
     thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which
     is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy
     seasons bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all
     things, to thee all things return.

     In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be
     present--I am rising to the work of a human being. Why, then, am I
     dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist, and
     for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for
     this, to lie in the bedclothes and keep myself warm? But this is
     more pleasant. Dost thou exist, then, to take thy pleasure, and not
     for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the
     little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees, working together to
     put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou
     unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make
     haste to do that which is according to thy nature?

     Judge every word and deed which are according to Nature to be fit
     for thee, and be not diverted by the blame which follows.... But if
     a thing is good to be done or said, do not consider it unworthy of
     thee.

     Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very
     moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.... Death
     certainly, and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, all
     these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which
     make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good
     nor evil.

     To say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a
     stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor; and life
     is a warfare, and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion.
     What, then, is that which is able to enrich a man? One thing, and
     only one--philosophy. But this consists in keeping the guardian
     spirit within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to
     pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet
     falsely, and with hypocrisy ... accepting all that happens and all
     that is allotted ... and finally waiting for death with a cheerful
     mind.

     If thou findest in human life anything better than justice, truth,
     temperance, fortitude, and, in a word, than thine own soul's
     satisfaction in the things which it enables thee to do according to
     right reason, and in the condition that is assigned to thee without
     thy own choice; if, I say, thou seest anything better than this,
     turn to it with all thy soul, and enjoy that which thou hast found
     to be the best. But ... if thou findest everything else smaller and
     of less value than this, give place to nothing else.... Simply and
     freely choose the better, and hold to it.

     Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores,
     and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very
     much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men,
     for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into
     thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from
     trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when
     he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is
     immediately in perfect tranquillity--which is nothing else than the
     good ordering of the mind.

     Unhappy am I, because this has happened to me? Not so, but happy am
     I though this has happened to me, because I continue free from
     pain; neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future.

     Be cheerful, and seek no external help, nor the tranquillity which
     others give. A man must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.

     Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break,
     but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.

     It is not fit that I should give myself pain, for I have never
     intentionally given pain even to another.




IMMANUEL KANT


     The canons of scientific evidence justify us neither in accepting
     nor rejecting the ideas upon which morality and religion repose.
     Both parties to the dispute beat the air; they worry their own
     shadow; for they pass from Nature into the domain of speculation,
     where their dogmatic grips find nothing to lay hold upon. The
     shadows which they hew to pieces grow together in a moment like the
     heroes in Valhalla, to rejoice again in bloodless battles.
     Metaphysics can no longer claim to be the cornerstone of religion
     and morality. But if she can not be the Atlas that bears the moral
     world she can furnish a magic defense. Around the ideas of religion
     she throws her bulwark of invisibility; and the sword of the
     skeptic and the battering-ram of the materialist fall harmless on
     vacuity.

                                                --_Immanuel Kant_

[Illustration: IMMANUEL KANT]


We find that most men fit easily into types. You describe to me one
Durham cow and you picture all Durham cows. So it is with men: they
belong to breeds, which we politely call denominations, sects or
parties. Tell me the man's sect, and I know his dress, his habit of
life, his thought. His dress is the uniform of his party, and his
thought is that which is ordered and prescribed. Dull indeed is the
intellect which can not correctly prophesy the opinions to which this
man will arrive on any subject.

Durham cows are not exactly alike, I well know, but a trifle more length
of leg, a variation in color, or an off-angle of the horn, and that cow
is forever barred from exhibition as a Durham. She is fit only for beef,
and the first butcher that makes a bid takes her, hide and horns.

Members of sects do not think exactly alike, but there are well-defined
limits of thought and action, beyond which they dare not stray lest the
butcher bag them. In joining a sect they have given bonds to uniformity,
and have signed their willingness to think and act like all other
members of the sect.

Herbert Spencer deals with this "jiner" propensity in man, and describes
it as a manifestation of the herding instinct in animals. It is a
combination for mutual protection--a social contract, each one waiving a
part of his personality in order to secure a supposed benefit. A herd of
cattle can stand against a pack of wolves, but a cow alone is doomed.

Few men indeed can stand against the pack. Wise are the many who seek
safety in numbers! Think of those who have stood out alone and expressed
their individuality, and you count on your fingers God's patriots dead
and turned to dust.

The paradox of things is shown in that the entrenched many, having found
safety in aggregation, pay their debt of homage to the bold few who
lived their lives and paid the penalty by death.

Across the disk of existence, each decade, there glide five hundred
million souls, and disappear forever in the dim and dusk of the eternity
that lies behind. Out of the bare handful that are remembered, we
cherish only the memories of those who stood alone and expressed their
honest, inmost thought. And this thought is, always and forever, the
thought of liberty. Exile, ostracism, death, have been their fate, and
on the smoke of martyr-fires their souls mounted to immortality.

Future generations often confuse these men with Deity, the Maker of the
Worlds. And thus do we arrive at truth by indirection, for in very fact
these were the Sons of God, vitalized by Divinity, part and parcel of
the Power that guides the planets on their way and holds the worlds in
space. Upon their tombs we carve a single word: _Savior_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kant was sixty years old before he was known to any extent beyond his
native town; but so fast then did his fame travel that at his death it
was recognized that the greatest thinker of the world had passed away.
Kant founded no school; but Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herde and
Schopenhauer were all his children--and all but Schopenhauer showed
their humanity by denouncing him, for men are prone to revile that which
has benefited them most. Kant marks an epoch and all thinkers who came
after him are his debtors. His philosophy has passed into the current
coin of knowledge.

Kant's lifelong researches revolve around four propositions:

  1. Who am I?
  2. What am I?
  3. What can I do?
  4. What can I know?

The answer to Number Four is that I can not know anything. That is to
say, the wise man is the man who knows that he does not know. And this
disposes of Number One and Number Two, leaving only Number Three for our
consideration. It took, however, a good many years and a vast amount of
study and writing for Kant to thus simplify. For years he toiled with
algebraic formulas and syllogistic theorems before he concluded that the
best wisdom of life lies in simplification, not complexity.

"What can I do?" resolves itself into, "What must I do?" And the answer
is: You must do four things in order to retain your place as a normal
being upon this earth: eat, work, associate with your kind, rest. Just
four things we must do, and outside of this everything is incidental,
accidental, irrelevant and inconsequential. Then how to eat, work,
associate and rest wisely and best constitutes life. Every man should be
free to work out these four equations for himself, his freedom ending
where another man's rights begin. To these four questions we should
bring our highest reason, our ripest experience and our best endeavor.
As for himself we know that Kant made a schedule of life which evolved a
sickly boy into a reasonably strong man who banished pain, sorrow and
regret from his existence and lived a long life of deep, quiet
satisfaction, sane to the end, watching every symptom of approaching
dissolution with keen interest, and at the last passing into quiet
sleep, his spirit gliding peacefully away, perhaps to answer those two
great questions which he said were unanswerable here: "Who am I?" "What
am I?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Immanuel Kant was born in Seventeen Hundred Twenty-four at the City of
Konigsberg, in the northeastern corner of Prussia. There he received his
education; there he was a teacher for nearly half a century; and there,
in his eightieth year, he died. He was never out of East Prussia and
never journeyed sixty miles from his birthplace during his whole life.
Professor Josiah Royce of Harvard, himself in the sage business, and
perhaps the best example that America has produced of the pure type of
philosopher, says, "Kant is the only modern thinker who in point of
originality is worthy to be ranked with Plato and Aristotle." Like
Emerson, Kant regarded traveling as a fool's paradise; only Emerson had
to travel much before he found it out, while Kant gained the truth by
staying at home. Once a lady took him for a carriage ride, and on
learning from the footman that they were seven miles from home he was so
displeased that he refused to utter a single orphic on the way back; and
further, the story is that he never after entered a vehicle, and living
for thirty years was never again so far from the lodging he called home.

In his lectures on physical geography Kant would often describe
mountains, rivers, waterfalls, volcanoes, with great animation and
accuracy, yet he had never seen any of these. Once a friend offered to
take him to Switzerland, so he could actually see the mountains; but he
warmly declined, declaring that the man who was not satisfied until he
could touch, taste and see was small, mean and quibbling as was Thomas,
the doubting disciple. Moreover, he had samples of the strata of the
Alps, and this was enough, which reminds us of the man who had a house
for sale and offered to send a prospective purchaser a sample brick.

Mind was the great miracle to Kant--the ability to know all about a
thing by seeing it with your inward eye. "The Imagination hath a stage
within the brain upon which all scenes are played," and the play to Kant
was greater than the reality. Or, to use his own words: "Time and Space
have no existence apart from Mind. There is no such thing as Sound
unless there be an ear to receive the vibrations. Things and places,
matter and substance come under the same law, and exist only as mind
creates them."

       *       *       *       *       *

The parents of Kant were very lowly people. His father was a day
laborer--a leather-cutter who never achieved even to the honors and
emoluments of a saddler. There were seven children in the family, and
never a servant crossed the threshold. One daughter survived Immanuel,
and in her eighty-fourth year she expressed regrets that her brother had
proved so recreant to the teachings of his parents as practically to
alienate him from all his relatives. One brother became a Lutheran
minister and lived out an honored career; the others vanish and fade
away into the mist of forgetfulness.

So far as we know, all the children were strong and well except this
one. At birth he weighed but five pounds, and his weakness was pitiable.
He was the kind of child the Spartans used to make way with quickly, for
the good of the State. He had a big, bulging head, thin legs, a weak
chest, and one shoulder was so much higher than the other that it
amounted almost to a deformity.

As the years went by, the parents saw he was not big enough to work, but
hope was not dead--they would make a preacher of him! To this end he was
sent to the "Fredericianium," a graded school of no mean quality. The
master of this school was a worthy clergyman by the name of Schultz, who
was attracted to the Kant boy, it seems, on account of his insignificant
size. It was the affection of the shepherd for the friendless ewe lamb.
A little later the teacher began to love the boy for his big head and
the thoughts he worked out of it. Brawn is bought with a price--young
men who bank on it get it as legal tender. Those who have no brawn have
to rely on brain or go without honors. Immanuel Kant began to ask his
school-teacher questions that made the good man laugh.

At sixteen Kant entered Albertina University. And there he was to remain
his entire life--student, tutor, teacher, professor.

He must have been an efficient youth, for before he was eighteen he
realized that the best way to learn is to teach. The idea of becoming a
clergyman was at first strong upon him; and Pastor Schultz occasionally
sent the youth out to preach, or lead religious services in rural
districts. This embryo preacher had a habit of placing a box behind the
pulpit and standing on it while preaching. Then we find him reasoning
the matter out in this way: "I stand on a box to preach so as to impress
the people by my height or to conceal my insignificant size. This is
pretense and a desire to carry out the idea that the preacher is bigger
every way than common people. I talk with God in pretended prayer, and
this looks as if I were on easy and familiar terms with Deity. Is it
like those folks who claim to be on friendly terms with princes: If I do
not know anything about God, why should I pretend I do?"

This desire to be absolutely honest with himself gradually grew until
he informed the Pastor that he had better secure young men for preachers
who could impress people without standing on a box. As for himself, he
would impress people by the size of his head, if he impressed them at
all. Let it here be noted that Kant then weighed exactly one hundred
pounds, and was less than five feet high. His head measured twenty-four
inches around, and fifteen and one-half inches over "firmness" from the
opening of the ears. To put it another way, he wore a seven-and-a-half
hat.

It is a great thing for a man to pride himself on what he is and make
the best of it. The pride of craftsman betokens a valuable man. We
exaggerate our worth, and this is Nature's plan to get the thing done.

Kant's pride of intellect, in degree, came from his insignificant form,
and thus do all things work together for good. But this bony little form
was often full of pain, and he had headaches, which led a wit to say,
"If a head like yours aches, it must be worse than to be a giraffe and
have a sore throat."

Young Kant began to realize that to have a big head, and get the right
use from it, one must have vital power enough to feed it.

The brain is the engine--the lungs and digestive apparatus the boiler.
Thought is combustion.

Young Kant, the uncouth, became possessed of an idea that made him the
butt of many gibes and jeers. He thought that if he could breathe
enough, he would be able to think clearly, and headaches would be gone.
Life, he said, was a matter of breathing, and all men died from one
cause--a shortness of breath. In order to think clearly, you must
breathe.

We believe things first and prove them later; our belief is usually
right, when derived from experience, but the reasons we give are often
wrong. For instance, Kant cured his physical ills by going out of doors,
and breathing deeply and slowly with closed mouth. Gradually his health
began to improve. But the young man, not knowing at that time much about
physiology, wrote a paper proving that the benefit came from the fresh
air that circulated through his brain. And of course in one sense he was
right. He related the incident of this thesis many years after in a
lecture, to show the result of right action and wrong reasoning.

The doctors had advised Kant he must quit study, but when he took up his
breathing fad, he renounced the doctors, and later denounced them. If he
were going to die, he would die without the benefit of either the clergy
or the physicians.

He denied that he was sick, and at night would roll himself in his
blankets and repeat half-aloud, "How comfortable I am, how comfortable I
am," until he fell asleep.

Near his house ran a narrow street, just a half-mile long. He walked
this street up and back, with closed mouth, breathing deeply, waving a
rattan cane to ward away talkative neighbors, and to keep up the
circulation in his arms. Once and back--in a month he had increased this
to twice and back. In a year he had come to the conclusion that to walk
the length of that street eight times was the right and proper
thing--that is to say, four miles in all. In other words, he had found
out how much exercise he required--not too much or too little. At
exactly half-past three he came out of his lodging, wearing his cocked
hat and long, snuff-colored coat, and walked. The neighbors used to set
their clocks by him. He walked and breathed with closed mouth, and no
one dare accost him or walk with him. The hour was sacred and must not
be broken in upon: it was his holy time--his time of breathing.

The little street is there now--one of the sights of Konigsberg, and the
cab-drivers point it out as the Philosopher's Walk. And Kant walked that
little street eight times every afternoon from the day he was twenty to
within a year of his death, when eighty years old.

This walking and breathing habit physiologists now recognize as
eminently scientific, and there is no sensible physician but will
endorse Kant's wisdom in renouncing doctors and adopting a regimen of
his own. The thing you believe in will probably benefit you--faith is
hygienic.

The persistency of the little man's character is shown in the breathing
habit--he believed in himself, relied on himself, and that which
experience commended, he did.

This firmness in following his own ideas saved his life. When we think
of one born in obscurity, living in poverty, handicapped by pain,
weakness and deformity; never traveling; and then by sheer persistency
and force of will rising to the first place among thinking men of his
time, one is almost willing to accept Kant's dictum, "Mind is supreme,
and the Universe is but the reflected thought of God."

       *       *       *       *       *

Kant was great enough to doubt appearances and distrust popular
conclusions. He knew that fallacies of reasoning follow fast upon
actions--reason follows by slow freight. It is quite necessary that we
should believe in a Supreme Power, but quite irrelevant that we should
prove it.

Truth for the most part is unpopular, and the proof of this statement
lies in the fact that it is so seldom told. Preachers tell people what
they wish to hear, and indeed this must be so as long as the
congregation that hears the preaching pays for it. People will not pay
for anything they do not like. Hence, preaching leads naturally to
sophistication and hypocrisy, and the promise of endless bliss for
ourselves and a hell for our enemies comes about as a matter of course.
What men will listen to and pay for is the real science of theology.
That is to say, the science of theology is the science of manipulating
men. Success in theology consists in finding a fallacy that is palatable
and then banking on it. Again and again Kant points out that a
clergyman's advice is usually worthless, because pure truth is out of
his province--unaccustomed, undesirable, inexpedient.

And Kant thought this was true also of doctors--doctors care more about
pleasing their patients than telling them truth. "In fact," he said, "no
doctor with a family to support can afford to tell his patients that his
symptoms are no token of a disease--rather uncomfortable feelings are
proof of health, for dead men don't have them." Most of the aches,
pains and so-called irregularities are remedial moves on the part of
Nature to keep the man well. Kant says that doctors treat symptoms, not
diseases, and often the treatment causes the disease; so no man can tell
what proportion of diseases is caused by medicine and what by other
forms of applied ignorance.

As for lawyers, our little philosopher considered them, for the most
part, sharks and wreckers. A lawyer looks over an estate, not with the
idea of keeping it intact, but of dissolving it, and getting a part of
it for himself. Not that men prefer to do what is wrong, but
self-interest can always produce sufficient reasons to satisfy the
conscience. Lawyers, being attaches of courts of justice, regard
themselves as protectors of the people, when really they are the
plunderers of the people, and their business is quite as much to defeat
justice as to administer it. The evasion of law is as truly a lawyer's
work as compliance with law. Then our philosopher explains that if law
and justice were synonymous, this state of affairs would be most
deplorable; but as it is, no particular harm is worked, save in the
moral degradation of the lawyers. The connivance of lawyers tames the
rank injustices of law; hence, to a degree, we live in a land where
there is neither law nor justice--save such justice as can be
appropriated by the man who is diplomat enough to do without lawyers and
wise enough to have no property. Justice, however, to Kant is a very
uncertain quantity, and he is rather inclined to regard the idea that
men are able to administer justice as on a par with the assumption of
the priest that he is dealing with God.

Kant once said, "When a woman demands justice, she means revenge."

A pupil here interposed, and asked the master if this was not equally
true of men, and the answer was, "I accept the amendment--it certainly
is true of all men I ever saw in courtrooms."

"Does death end all?"

"No," said Kant; "there is the litigation over the estate."

Kant's constant reiteration that he had no use for doctors, lawyers and
preachers, we can well imagine did not add to his popularity. As for his
reasoning concerning lawyers, we can all, probably, recall a few
jug-shaped attorneys who fill the Kant requirements--takers of
contingent fees and stirrers-up of strife: men who watch for vessels on
the rocks and lure with false lights the mariner to his doom. But
matters since Kant's day have changed considerably for the better. There
is a demand now for a lawyer who is a businessman and who will keep
people out of trouble instead of getting them in. And we also have a few
physicians who are big enough to tell a man there is nothing the matter
with him, if they think so, and then charge him accordingly--in inverse
ratio to the amount of medicine administered.

And while we no longer refer to the clergyman as our spiritual adviser,
except, perhaps, in way of pleasantry, he surely is useful as a social
promoter.

       *       *       *       *       *

The parents of Kant were Lutherans--punctilious and pious. They were
descended from Scotch soldiers who had come over there two hundred years
before and settled down after the war, just as the Hessians settled down
and went to farming in Pennsylvania, their descendants occasionally
becoming Daughters of the Revolution, because their grandsires fought
with Washington.

This Scotch strain gave a sturdy bias to the Kants--these Lutherans were
really rebels, and as every one knows, there are only two ways of
dealing with a religious Scotchman--agree with him or kill him.

Most people said that Kant was supremely stubborn--he himself called it
"firmness in the right." Once, when a couple of calumniators were
thinking up all the bad things they could say about him, one of them
exclaimed, "He isn't five feet high!"

"Liar!" came the shrill voice of the Philosopher, who had accidentally
overheard them, "Liar! I am exactly five feet!" And he drew himself up,
and struck his staff proudly and defiantly on the ground.

Which reminds one of the story told of Professor Josiah Royce, who once
rang up six fares on the register when he wished to stop a Boston
street-car. When the conductor protested, the philosopher called him
"up-start," "curmudgeon" and "nincompoop," and showed the fallacy of his
claim that thirty cents had been lost, since nobody had found it.
Moreover, he offered to prove his proposition by algebraic equation, if
one of the gentlemen present had chalk and blackboard on his person.

Once Kant was looking at the flowers in a beautiful garden. But instead
of looking through the iron pickets, he stooped over and was squinting
through the key-hole of the lock. A student coming along asked him why
he didn't look through the pickets and thus get a perfect view.

"Go on, you fool," was the stern reply; "I am studying the law of
optics--the unobstructed vision reveals too much--the vivid view is only
gotten through a small aperture."

All of which was believed to be a sudden inspiration in way of reply
that came to the great professor when caught doing an absent-minded
thing. That Kant was not above a little pious prevarication is shown by
a story he himself tells. He was never inside of a church once during
the last fifty years of his life. But when he became Chancellor of the
University, one of his duties was to lead a procession to the Cathedral,
where certain formal religious services were held. Kant tried to have
the exercises in a hall, but failing in this, he did his duty, and
marched like a pigmy drum-major at the head of the cavalcade.

"Now he will have to go in," the scoffers said.

But he didn't. Arriving at the church-door, he excused himself, pleading
an urgent necessity, walked around to the back of the church,
sacrificed, like Diogenes, to all the gods at once, and made off for
home, quietly chuckling to himself at the thought of how he had
circumvented the enemy.

Every actor has just so many make-ups and no more. Usually the
characters he assumes are variations of a single one. Steele Mackaye
used to say, "There are only five distinct dramatic situations." The
artist, too, has his properties. And the recognition of this truth
caused Massillon to say, "The great preacher has but one sermon, yet out
of this he makes many--by giving portions of it backwards, or beginning
in the middle and working both ways, or presenting patchwork pieces,
tinted and colored by his mood." All public speakers have canned goods
they fall back upon when the fresh fruit of thought grows scarce.

The literary man also has his puppets, pet phrases, and situations to
his liking. Victor Hugo always catches the attention by a blind girl, a
hunchback, a hunted convict or some mutilated and maimed unfortunate.

In his lectures, Kant used to please the boys by such phrases as this,
"I dearly love the muse, although I must admit that I have never been
the recipient of any of her favors." This took so well that later he was
encouraged to say, "The Old Metaphysics is positively unattractive, but
the New Metaphysics is to me most lovely, although I can not boast that
I have ever been honored by any of her favors."

A large audience caused Kant to lose his poise--he became
self-conscious--but in his own little lecture-room, with a dozen, or
fifty at the most (because this was the capacity of the room), he was
charming. He would fix his eye on a single boy, and often upon a single
button on this boy's coat, and forgetting the immediate theme in hand,
would ramble into an amusing and most instructive monolog of criticism
concerning politics, pedagogy or current events. In his writing he was
exact, heavy and complex, but in these heart-to-heart talks, Herder, who
attended Kant's lectures for five years, says, "The man had a deal of
nimble wit, and here Kant was at his best."

So we have two different men--the man who wrote the "Critique" and the
man who gave the lectures and clarified his thought by explaining things
to others. It was in the lectures that he threw off this: "Men are
creatures that can not do without their kind, yet are sure to quarrel
when together." This took fairly well, and later he said, "Men can not
do without men, yet they hate each other when together." And in a year
after, comes this: "A man is miserable without a wife, and is seldom
happy after he gets one." No doubt this caused a shout of applause from
the students, college boys being always on the lookout for just such
things; and coming from a very confirmed old bachelor it was peculiarly
fetching.

To say that Kant was devoid of wit, as many writers do, is not to know
the man. About a year after the "Critique of Pure Reason" appeared, he
wrote this: "I am obliged to the learned public for t

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/23640