An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.The smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promises of impossibilities.The wise man of the Stoics would, no doubt, be a grander object than a steam-engine.But there are steam-engines.And the wise man of the Stoics is yet to be born.Aphilosophy which should enable a man to feel perfectly happy while in agonies of pain would be better than a philosophy which assuages pain.But we know that there are remedies which will assuage pain; and we know that the ancient sages liked the toothache just as little as their neighbours.A philosophy which should extinguish cupidity would be better than a philosophy which should devise laws for the security of property.But it is possible to make laws which shall, to a very great extent, secure property.And we do not understand how any motives which the ancient philosophy furnished could extinguish cupidity.We know indeed that the philosophers were no better than other men.From the testimony of friends as well as of foes, from the confessions of Epictetus and Seneca, as well as from the sneers of Lucian and the fierce invectives of Juvenal, it is plain that these teachers of virtue had all the vices of their neighbours, with the additional vice of hypocrisy.Some people may think the object of the Baconian philosophy a low object, but they cannot deny that, high or low, it has been attained.They cannot deny that every year makes an addition to what Bacon called "fruit." They cannot deny that mankind have made, and are making, great and constant progress in the road which he pointed out to them.Was there any such progressive movement among the ancient philosophers? After they had been declaiming eight hundred years, had they made the world better than when they began? Our belief is that, among the philosophers themselves, instead of a progressive improvement there was a progressive degeneracy.An abject superstition which Democritus or Anaxagoras would have rejected with scorn, added the last disgrace to the long dotage of the Stoic and Platonic schools.Those unsuccessful attempts to articulate which are so delightful and interesting in a child shock and disgust in an aged paralytic; and in the same way, those wild and mythological fictions which charm us, when we hear them lisped by Greek poetry in its infancy, excite a mixed sensation of pity and loathing, when mumbled by Greek philosophy in its old age.We know that guns, cutlery, spy-glasses, clocks, are better in our time than they were in the time of our fathers, and were better in the time of our fathers than they were in the time of our grandfathers.We might, therefore, be inclined to think that, when a philosophy which boasted that its object was the elevation and purification of the mind, and which for this object neglected the sordid office of ministering to the comforts of the body, had flourished in the highest honour during many hundreds of years, a vast moral amelioration must have taken place.Was it so? Look at the schools of this wisdom four centuries before the Christian era and four centuries after that era.Compare the men whom those schools formed at those two periods.Compare Plato and Libanius.
Compare Pericles and Julian.This philosophy confessed, nay boasted, that for every end but one it was useless.Had it attained that one end?
