THE IDEALS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD.* WERE he living now
Coleridge (or was it Leigh Hunt?) would scarcely have put his question, Who reads an American book ? While the American people have yet to come to complete self- consciousness and to produce a mighty genius who shall fuse the thoughts and emotions of mankind in some new state- ment, they are giving to the world some Of the most thought- ful and balanced studies in history and philosophy now being produced. Mr. Taylor's work is an admirable example of this class of writings. In many respects it reminds the reader of Dr. Crozier's attempt to grasp the sequence and to appraise the value of the great systems of thought evolved by the mind of the ancient world. We cannot say that Mr. Taylor's style has the distinction of Dr. Crozier's, nor do we think that he has either disclosed, or perhaps even attempted to disclose, the evolution of thought as Dr. Crozier has done, or as Professor Lewis Campbell has done in his able treatment of Plato as the link .between the world of Greek ideals and that of Christian thought. But Mr. Taylor's learning is competent, his survey is wide, his mind is remark- ably sympathetic, and his judgments are generally sound. There are some thinkers who would dispute his exact estimate of Buddhism, and for ourselves we should have been glad, especially at the present time, of a somewhat fuller exposition of the ethical ideals of China, to which only some ten pages out of nearly nine hundred are devoted; for, -while we see no spiritual life in China, we do seem to see a powerful secular ethic which has given rules of life for thousands of years.
On the other hand, some of the chapters in this work (all of which is excellently arranged) are really admirable. Within the same limits of space we should not know where to find a better account of the religions ideal of ancient Israel than her just, sympathetic, and discriminating. How excellent is this characterisation :—" Israel had no light heart for innocent mirth. With her there was the laugh of scorn and scorn of laughter; but laughter was natural only to the scorner and the fool. Israel was the dark Puritan of antiquity; her high energies were set on the business of her God." So, too, the treatment of Virgil as the poet of the ideal Rome as he hoped it might yet become under "the mild Augustus," and as the singer of a richer life with more heart, deeper love, than was known in the stern Rome of remote antiquity, seems
• etnelent Ideals: a Study of Intellectual and Spiritual 6troibth..from Earty 7'imPs to the Establishment of Christianity. By Bears Osborn Taylor. 2 'rola. London : Matrallan and Co. (21a.]
to us admirable. The connection of philosophy with the religious revival in Roman thought, the attempt to press Greek philosophy into the service of the intensely practical, non-philosophic mind of Rome, is well told; and the criticism of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius is quite admirable, the weakness and strength of that fine yet impotent Roman Stoicism being clearly set forth. One point which Mr. Taylor especially attempts to make is the strong influence all along of the Greek mind on Rome; it was, as he suggests, something like the perfect blending of man and woman—the solid strength of Rome with the subtle beauty of Greece—though the Romans quite missed the artistic perfection of the Greek ideal, and used Greek influence rather as affording a philo- sophic rationale for conduct than in those spheres of thought in which we think Greece supreme.
After a very interesting sketch of the ideas of Homeric Greece, Mr. Taylor gives us briefly the oft-written story of Greek philosophic thought. To him Plato is the embodiment of Greek culture and the Greek ideal, and Aristotle is a little too summarily dismissed. We should be inclined to say that, though a leas rare mind than Plato, Aristotle yet embodied in his Ethics and Politics, and hi the Metaphysics also, more purely Greek conceptions than did Plato, though the embodiment lacked the perfect beauty of him of whom it
was said that if Zeus came to earth he would speak the language of Plato. The /211'619 eiyee9, the "not too much,"
which was the very core of the Greek esthetic spirit has its strongest expression in Aristotle. Plato was Greek, but he was a little more than Greek ; his Republic suggests that he did not look for that perfecting of life within the limits of
the State beyond which Aristotle did not go. Plato was reaching forward to the Christian ideal, though he was philosophically hampered by his inability to relate God to human life. We cannot, perhaps, judge Aristotle properly since so much of his work is lost, but his system hints at a mind more self-contained, more bounded, and therefore more
essentially Greek, than the mind of Plato, with it grand poetry and mystic depths and heights. We think Mr.
Taylor, with his just admiration of Plato as the richest and finest mind of antiquity, might have traced with greater amplitude the influence of Plato on a certain side of early Christian thought. The great Greek idea of the immanence of God (quite different from the theory of emanation of Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists) was for many centuries obscured by Augustinianism, and in Protestantism by Calvin; but its revival is one of the clear signs of our day, and we think it destined to impart a new life to the doctrinal state- ment of Christianity.
The chapters on Christianity itself are excellent, especially when taken along with those on the religion of IsraeL Mr. Taylor's position is, we imagine, that of liberal orthodoxy, but his object is not to treat Christianity in any conventional or purely theological way, but to reach its ideal as it lay pure and perfectly enfolded in the heart of Christ. Perhaps we cannot do better, in order to convey his conception of this, than to quote his concluding words which sum up the matter :—
"Love which gives itself, yet gives up nothing, and in the end gains all, as it is the perfect mode of Christian life, so it is the type of all in Christianity. By himself, man can hold himself erect only in modes of renunciation ; witness India, witness Greece. But Christianity was attainment absolute and universal; and every Christian act, through belief, obedience, faith and love of God, contained within itself the power of God's command, which is eternal life. Followers of Christ gain all and give up nothing; they give themselves, and perfectly save and fulfil themselves. The universal, the infinite, God, and all his creation, is reached ; the Christian's individuality is retained."
Here is the greatest of all ideals, an ideal the last to be reached in the ancient world, but an ideal for all time, which can never be exhausted. We see at once its difference from that in many ways noble but uninspiring Eastern creed—" a faith as vague as all unsweet "—of the final "merging in the
general soul." We see also the difference from the Greek doctrine of self-sufficiency which leaves God and man in barren isolation. "Stern destiny" as taught in "heathen schools of philosophic lore" is transformed into the living God
"Acts which still had won a fleeting grace From thadowy fountains of the Infinite Communed with that Idea face to face."
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