Stoicism talks, it is true, with deep earnestness of responsibility and duty, but since it cannot draw either from nature-philosophy or from ethics a well-established and living notion of activity, it shows us in these words nothing but beautiful corpses. It is impotent to command anything whatever that is bound up with voluntary activity which is conscious of its aim. Again and again evidence breaks through that its thinking has been pushed aside on to the track of passivity. Nature-philosophy only provides the cosmic background for the resignation to which ethics have come. The ideal which gives life to Chinese Monism, of the perfecting of a world through ethical and ethically organized mankind, is not really discerned, much less securely grasped. One watches with dismay the shaping of the fate of [pg 039] ancient ethics in Epicureanism and Stoicism. In place of the vigorous life-affirming ethic which Socrates expects from rational thinking, resignation steps in. An inconceivable impoverishment takes place in the representation of the moral. The notion of action cannot be worked out to completion. Even so much of it as, thanks to tradition, still survives in the simple thought-methods of the Greek world in general, is lost. The ancient Greek was more citizen than man. Active devotion to the cause of the community was to him a matter of course. Socrates presupposes it. In the conversations which Xenophon hands down to us in the _Memorabilia_ he is ever insisting on it that the individual must improve himself in order to become an active citizen. The natural course would have been that the thought which originated with him should deepen this mentality by setting before it the highest social aims. It was, however, never at all in a position to maintain the mentality as it received it. More and more it leads the individual to withdraw himself from the world and from all that goes on in it. By a never-ceasing process of change the ethics of Greek thought become in Epicureanism and Stoicism ethics of decadence. Not being capable of producing ideals of progressive development for collective bodies, they are also impotent to become really ethics of civilization. In place of the ideal of the man who works for civilization they set the ideal of the “wise man.” It is only the inward individual civilization of refined and reflective self-liberation from the world that now floats before its eyes, but this in all its depth. It is true that there is power in the preaching of resignation which ancient thought, now become knowing about life, allows to go forth to mankind. Resignation is the lofty porch through which one enters upon ethics. But Epicurus and the Stoics stop in this porch. Resignation becomes for them an ethical world-view. Hence they are incapable of leading ancient society from its untutored life- and world-affirmation to one based on thought. [pg 040]