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by
Will Durant
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July 28 - September 24, 2022
“Everything,” said Leucippus, “is driven by necessity.” “In reality,” said Democritus, “there are only atoms and the void.”
God does not create, but he moves, the world; and he moves it not as a mechanical force but as the total motive of all operations in the world; “God moves the world as the beloved object moves the lover.”37 He is the final cause of nature, the drive and purpose of things, the form of the world; the principle of its life, the sum of its vital processes and powers, the inherent goal of its growth, the energizing entelechy of the whole. He is pure energy;38 the Scholastic Actus Purus— activity per se; perhaps the mystic “Force” of modern physics and philosophy. He is not so much a person as a
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so tragedy, “through pity and fear, effects the proper purgation of these emotions.”46
Aristotle begins by frankly recognizing that the aim of life is not goodness for its own sake, but happiness. “For we choose happiness for itself, and never with a view to anything further; whereas we choose honor, pleasure, intellect. . . because we believe that through them we shall be made happy.”
The qualities of character can be arranged in triads, in each of which the first and last qualities will be extremes and vices, and the middle quality a virtue or an excellence.
and discovers itself only to mature and flexible reason. Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions”;50 we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: “the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life;. . . for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”51
The noblest of these external aids to happiness is friendship. Indeed, friendship is more necessary to the happy than to the unhappy; for happiness is multiplied by being shared. It is more important than justice: for “when men are friends, justice is unnecessary; but when men are just, friendship is still a boon.” “A friend is one soul in two bodies.” Yet friendship implies few friends rather than many; “he who has many friends has no friend”; and “to be a friend to many people in the way of perfect friendship is impossible.”
communism breaks down because it provides no adequate incentive for the exertion of superior abilities. The stimulus of gain is necessary to arduous work; and the stimulus of ownership is necessary to proper industry, husbandry and care. When everybody owns everything nobody will take care of anything, “That which is common to the greatest number has the least attention bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly ever of the public, interest.”65 And “there is always a difficulty in living together, or having things in common, but especially in having common property. The
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and to help them with state subsidies is “like pouring water into a leaking cask.”
Woman is to man as the slave to the master, the manual to the mental worker, the barbarian to the Greek. Woman is an unfinished man, left standing on a lower step in the scale of development.
nothing is so attractive as the different. “The courage of a man and that of a woman are not, as Socrates supposed, the same: the courage of a man is shown in commanding; that of a woman in obeying.. . . As the poet says, ‘Silence is a woman’s glory.’ ”78
If the natural rate of increase is too high, the cruel practice of infanticide may be replaced by abortion; and “let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun.”80
“Man, when perfected, is the best of animals; but when isolated he is the worst of all; for injustice is more dangerous when armed, and man is equipped at birth with the weapon of intelligence, and with qualities of character which he may use for the vilest ends. Wherefore if he have not virtue he is the most unholy and savage of animals, full of gluttony and lust.”
An autocratic ruler particularly “should appear to be earnest in the worship of the gods; for if men think that a ruler is religious and reveres the gods, they are less afraid of suffering injustice at his hands, and are less disposed to conspire against him, since they believe that the gods themselves are fighting on his side.”86
Hence the best practicable polity is aristocracy, the rule of the informed and capable few. Government is too complex a thing to have its issues decided by number, when lesser issues are reserved for knowledge and ability.
Yet democracy is on the whole inferior to aristocracy.92 For it is based on a false assumption of equality; it “arises out of the notion that those who are equal in one respect (e. g., in respect of the law) are equal in all respects; because men are equally free they claim to be absolutely equal.”
“It is necessary to begin by assuming a principle of general application, namely, that that part of the state which desires the continuance of the government must be stronger than that which does not”;93
that the community should determine the ends to be pursued, but that only experts should select and apply the means; that choice should be democratically spread, but that office should be rigidly reserved for the equipped and winnowed best.
His specialty is the collection and classification of data; in every field he wields his categories and produces catalogues.
The works of Aristotle came to be for European philosophy what the Bible was for theology—an almost infallible text, with solutions for every problem.
No other mind had for so long a time ruled the intellect of mankind.
Very wisely, he left the city, saying that he would not give Athens a chance to sin a second time against philosophy. There was no cowardice in this; an accused person at Athens had always the option of preferring exile.
“If what you have seems insufficient to you,” said the Roman Stoic Seneca (d. 65 a.; d.), “then, though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.”
In the face of warfare and inevitable death, there is no wisdom but in ataraxia,—“to look on all things with a mind at peace.”
“Seek not to have things happen as you choose them, but rather choose that they should happen as they do; and you shall live prosperously.”
“Never in any case say, I have lost such a thing; but, I have returned it. Is thy child dead?—it is returned. Is thy wife dead?—she is returned. Art thou deprived of thy estate?—is not this also returned?”8
the thirteenth century all Christendom was startled and stimulated by Arabic and Jewish translations of Aristotle: but the power of the Church was still adequate to secure, through Thomas Aquinas and others, the transmogrification of Aristotle into a medieval theologian.
It was Francis Bacon, “the most powerful mind of modern times,”12 who “rang the bell that called the wits together,” and announced that Europe had come of; age.
That is, if we know how to select our books. “Some books are to be tasted,” reads a famous passage, “others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.
At the end of his survey he comes to the conclusion that science by itself is not enough: there must be a force and discipline outside the sciences to coördinate them and point them to a goal. “There is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress, which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.”67 What science needs is philosophy—the analysis of scientific method, and the ;coördination of scientific purposes and results; without this, any science must be superficial.
Philosophy, rather than science, is in the long run Bacon’s love; it is only philosophy which can give even to a life of turmoil and grief the stately peace that comes of understanding. “Learning conquers or mitigates the fear of death and adverse fortune.” He quotes Virgil’s great lines: Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Quique metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum, Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari— “happy the man who has learned the causes of things, and has put under his feet all fears, and inexorable fate, and the noisy strife of the hell of greed.”
“Philosophy directs us first to seek the goods of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or not much wanted.”
“indeed opera basilica,”—kingly tasks —“towards which the endeavors of one man can be but as an image on a cross—road, which points out the way but cannot tread it.”
“The understanding must not be allowed to jump and fly from particulars to remote axioms and of almost the highest generality;. . . it must not be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights to keep it from leaping and flying.”
Some minds, e. g., are constitutionally analytic, and see differences everywhere; others are constitutionally synthetic, and see resemblances; so we have the scientist and the painter on the one hand, and on the other hand the poet and the philosopher. Again, “some dispositions evince an unbounded admiration for antiquity, others eagerly embrace novelty; only a few can preserve the just medium, and neither tear up what the ancients have correctly established, nor despise the just innovations of the moderns.”
“from the commerce and association of men with one another. For men converse by means; of language; but words are imposed according to the understanding of the crowd; and there arises from a bad and inapt formation of words, a wonderful obstruction to the mind.”
Philosophers talk about “first cause uncaused,” or “first mover unmoved”; but are not these again fig—leaf phrases used to cover naked ignorance, and; perhaps indicative of a guilty conscience in the user? Every clear and honest head knows that no cause can be causeless, nor any mover unmoved. Perhaps the greatest reconstruction in philosophy would be simply this—that we should stop lying.
Now “if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties”
We must; go to nature instead of to books, traditions and authorities; we must “put nature on the rack and compel her to bear witness” even against herself, so that we may control her to our ends.
We strive to learn the forms of things not for the sake of the forms but because by knowing the forms, the laws, we may remake things in the image of our desire.
for what does logic do but formulate the experience and methods of the wise?—what does any discipline do but try by rules to turn the art of a few into a science teachable to all?
Every man has his sources, as every organism has its food; what is his is the way in which he digests them and turns them into flesh and blood. As Rawley puts it, Bacon “contemned no man’s observations, but would light his torch at every man’s candle.”105
The cleverest defenders of a faith are its greatest enemies; for their subtleties engender doubt and stimulate the mind.
“I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum).
Those who wish to seek out the causes of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.
To one who advised him to trust in revelation rather than in reason, he answered: “Though I were at times to find the fruit unreal which I gather by my natural understanding, yet this would not make me otherwise than content; because in the gathering I am happy, and pass my days not in sighing and sorrow, but in peace, serenity and joy.”11 “If Napoleon had been as intelligent as Spinoza,” says a great sage, “he would have lived in a garret and written four books.”12
‘It is unreasonable to wrap up things of little or no value in a precious cover.’ ”13
“Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also”;
Again, the apostles resorted to miracle stories for the same reason that they resorted to parables; it was a necessary adaptation to the public mind.
Interpreted on this principle, the Bible, says Spinoza, contains nothing contrary to reason.25 But interpreted literally, it is full of errors, contradictions, and obvious impossibilities—as that the Pentateuch was written by Moses. The more philosophical ;interpretation reveals, through the mist of allegory and poetry, the profound thought of great thinkers and leaders, and makes intelligible the persistence of the Bible and its immeasurable influence upon men.
