rank from formulae. Unvarying rules petrified action; the need of
flexibility, of perpetual adjustment, was strongly felt" (Butcher, _The
Greek Genius_, p. 182). For this reason their interest in ethical
speculations was all the keener; their great thinkers were endlessly
engaged in settling what the relation ought to be between duty and
self-interest. Ought one to swallow up the other--and, if so, which
should prevail? Or was it possible to patch up a compromise between
them? The great Stoic philosophers took the austerest line, and held
that duty should always and everywhere be our only law. But it was one
thing to enunciate such magnificent theories in a lecture, and quite
another to apply them in the market-place. Casuistry came to the aid of
average human nature--that is to say, pupils began to confront the
master with hard cases taken from daily life. And more than one master
was disposed to make large--even startlingly large--concessions to the
exigencies of practice. This concrete side of moral philosophy came
specially into evidence when Stoicism was transplanted to Rome. Cicero's
_De Officiis_ abounds in the kind of question afterwards so warmly
discussed by Dr Johnson and his friends. Is it ever right to tell a lie?
May a lawyer defend a client whom he knows to be guilty? In selling my
goods, is it enough not to disguise their shortcomings, or ought I
candidly to admit them? Seneca even made the discussion of such problems
into a regular discipline, claiming that their concrete character gave
an interest in morality to those who had no love for abstractions; while
they prevented those who had from losing themselves in the clouds. And
M. Thamin maintains that, if his heroes did not form great characters,
at any rate they taught the Roman child to train its conscience. But,
then, Cicero and Seneca took common-sense as their guide. They decided
each problem on its merits, looking more to the spirit than to the
letter, and often showing a practical sagacity worthy of Johnson
himself. Quite in the great doctor's spirit is Cicero's counsel to his
son, to hear what the philosophers had to say, but to decide for himself
as a man of the world. Such advice could not be grateful to the
philosophers themselves--then a definite professional class, not unlike
the "spiritual directors" of a later Rome, who earned their bread by
smoothing away the doubts of the scrupulous on all matters intellectual
and moral. Their great weap