The Stoic Philosophy
- Availability
- Text available
- Text quality
- Automatic checks passed
- Text format
- Digital text extracted from the document
- Document type
- Scholarly study
- Usage rights
- Public domain
- Excerpts
- 59
page 1
CON WAY MEMORIAL LECTURE
:cr
LT)
:-D
:~D
.LT)
-co
r^
ia
THE STOIC
HILOSOPHY
DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE INSTITUTE ON
MARCH 16, 1915
BY
Professor GILBERT
WATTS
MURRAY
CO.,
,
SOX S COURT, FLEKT STREET, E.U.
523
RGK ALLEN & LNWIN, LTD.,
\ HOUSE, MUSEUM STREET, W.C.
Price Sixpence Net
page 6
UNIFORM WITH THIS LECTURE.
Each in boards, 6d. net (by post y^d.)
in cloth, gd.
;
net (by post ud.).
THE TASK OF RATIONALISM. By JOHN RUSSELL, M.A.
PEACE AND WAR IN THE BALANCE.
By HENRY W. NEVINSON.
ART AND THE COMMONWEAL. By WILLIAM ARCHER.
WAR AND THE ESSENTIAL REALITIES.
By NORMAN ANGELL.
THE LIFE PILGRIMAGE OF MONCURE DANIEL
CON WAY.
By J. M. ROBERTSON, M. P.
page 7
CONWAY MEMORIAL LECTURE
THE STOIC
PHILOSOPHY
DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE INSTITUTE ON
MARCH 16, 1915
BY
PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY
( William Archer in the Chair )
17
WATTS & CO.,
JOHNSON S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN, LTD.,
RUSKIN HOUSE, MUSEUM STREET, W.C.
1915
page 9
CHAIRMAN S INTRODUCTORY
ADDRESS
IN the
far-off,
almost fabulous, Golden
before the War,
I
Age
once attended a lecture by
our speaker of to-night, Professor Gilbert
It was a most entertaining and
Murray.
but
instructive
lecture
learned on
that occasion
;
what
was
I
a
chiefly
lesson
I
hope never to forget as to the duties of a
Chairman.
Nothing would tempt me to
who the Chairman was
reveal
:
I
will
only
say that I don t think he has ever figured, or
ever will figure, on this platform.
His speech
was a conspicuous and masterly example of
how not to do it. He began by confessing
that he knew nothing of Professor
subject, but went
read
it
paedia
;
on
Murray s
to explain that
5
he had
an Encyclo
up for the occasion
and thereupon he retailed
in
at
great
page 10
INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS
the
and
in
a most lugubrious fashion,
information
he had gleaned from that
length,
work
of reference.
There happened
to
be
two or three anecdotes, manifestly the plums
of the subject
;
and the Chairman must needs
put in his thumb and pull out those plums,
and
them
for the
lecturer
by serving
them up with consummate insipidity. What
spoil
Murray must
Professor
have
suffered
in
having his subject thus broken on the wheel,
His conduct
I shudder even now to think.
was certainly a noble example
of Stoicism.
Had I been in his place, I should infallibly
have risen up and slain that Chairman, and
claimed from a jury of my countrymen a
verdict of
"
Served him right
!"
The lesson of that occasion was burnt into
my soul
;
so Professor
Murray need not fear
that I am going to pour out to you the stores
of my erudition on the subject of the Stoics.
No doubt, half an hour with the Encyclopaedia
Britannica would have supplied me with some
capital anecdotes of Zeno, and Epictetus, and
page 11
^
IN TROD UCTOR Y A DDKESS
Marcus Aurelius
;
but I have sternly averted
The ideal Chair
my face from temptation.
man, as I conceive him, ought to emulate as
nearly as possible the ideal
"
seen but not
that ideal,
If
heard."
I
child,
fall
who
is
away from
my belief that
England whom Moncure
only to express
it is
there is no man
in
Conway, were he alive, would more warmly
welcome to this platform than our speaker
His presence here
of to-night.
is
a proof
humanism for which
that that large-minded
Conway stood and strove is making
ordinary progress even
extra
our apparently
in
slow-moving England. For Professor Murray,
as you
all
know,
is
not a biologist, not a
physicist, not a chemist.
He has not pursued
any of those studies of cause and effect which
were supposed, in the Victorian era, to lead
enlightenment and did, in fact,
enlightenment, whether perilous or
to perilous
lead to
not.
He
hardened
in
even
a
mathematician,
the audacious
heresy that two
not
is
and two make
four.
No,
his life-work has
page 12
INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS
lain
among those literae humaniores which
have so often been associated,
in the
past,
with violent Toryism in politics and dense
obscurantism in thought.
He does not
come
sity,
to
nor
us from godless
from
even
London
Cambridge
mildly Whiggish proclivities.
and a very loyal son, of Oxford
Univer
with
its
He is a son,
but he has
;
known how to absorb the best of her culture
if
I
may use a somewhat discredited word
without drinking in either her prejudices or
her snobbishnesses or her cowardices.
I
sup
pose we may take Matthew Arnold as a type
of Oxford enlightenment in the last genera
tion,
and I am far from undervaluing his work
or his influence
;
but imagine Matthew Arnold
coming down to address us here to-night
Think of the vague and
Or think of Pater
aesthetic
vaporous
paganism which was all
!
!
that
Pater could extract from the spiritual
sustenance offered him by Oxford
!
Professor
Murray, as we know, occupies one of the
greatest
positions
in
English scholarship
;
page 13
INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS
but while he
scholars, he
is
is
eminently a scholar among
pre-eminently a man among
His imagination and insight, working
a
upon solid basis of knowledge, give him an
men.
extraordinary power
as
no
show you to-night
of
re-vivifying
doubt
he will
Greek
thought and experience, and making it human
and real to us.
Ancient Greece is not, to him,
a picturesque phenomenon to be contemplated
under a glass case, but an absorbing chapter
in the story of
humanity, full of vital mean
What
ings for the present and for the future.
,
has specially attracted him to Euripides, we
may be sure, is, in the last analysis, neither
hTs lyric splendour nor his dramatic subtlety,
but his daring rationalism and his passionate
resentment of
the stupidities and
cruelties
which are summed up in the phrase
inhumanity
to
man."
"
man s
These cruelties, these
and are,
always with us, more or less,
as we know to our cost, liable to
frightful
recrudescences.
stupidities, are
resolute in
No one
is
more
combating them than Professor
page 14
IN TROD UCTOR V ADDRESS
io
He is one of our foremost cham
I
am sure
pions of reason and humanity.
Murray.
Moncure Conway would warmly have
appreciated the consistency, the sincerity, and
that
the courage of his intellectual attitude, and
would especially have welcomed it as a pro
duct of modern Oxford.
For Professor Murray does not stand alone.
He is one of a group of scholars, his contem
poraries and his juniors, who are converting
Oxford from a home of
lost
causes into a
Great Headquarters for causes yet to be won.
Is it not a most encouraging sign of the times
Home Univer
sity Library, should be edited by two New
that that admirable series, the
Professor
Murray and
Mr.
now
Vice-Chancellor
of
College
dons,
Herbert
Fisher,
Sheffield University?
What would Moncure
Conway have said
anyone had predicted
if
that, within seven years of his death, such a
book as Professor Bury s History of Freedom
of Thought would be written by the Regius
Professor
of
History
at
Cambridge,
and
page 15
IN TROD UCTOR Y A DDRESS
1 1
published under the editorship of the Regius
Professor of Greek at Oxford?
would have said,
"
No, no
;
move so quickly as that
move
it
has moved
and
not
;
;
think he
I
the world does
"
!
I
But it does
am
optimist
enough to hope that the present outburst of
colossal
unreason, alleged to be under the
patronage of God, may in the end promote
the cause of reason, or at any rate may not
involve any intellectual set-back.
hope
in view,
let
With that
us not cease to fight the
good fight of spiritual illumination.
I
now call upon Professor Murray.
page 17
THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY
I
FEEL a peculiar pleasure
to give
in
being asked
address in commemoration
this
of
Moncure D. Conway. I knew Mr. Conway
But when I was a boy and
but slightly.
struggling
with
religious
difficulties
books were among those which brought
both comfort and liberation.
his
me
And all those
who in our generation are stirred either by
their doubts or their
convictions to a con
sciousness of duties not yet stamped by the
approval
of
recognize
him
community,
may
as
one
of
history of his
life.
Few men
beacons.
the
their
well
their
guiding
His character is written large in
time have been put so clearly to
of
our
the
test
and so unhesitatingly sacrificed their worldly
13
page 18
14
THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY
interests
to
of
heroic quality,
which
I
think,
address this evening
lay
Mr.
beneath
kindliness and easy
Conway s unpretentious
humour, makes,
This strain
consciences.
their
not
the subject of
my
inappropriate
to
his memory.
wish
I
outline
lecture
this
in
to
some account of
give
in
rough
the greatest system
of organized thought which the
mind of man
had built up for itself in the Graeco-Roman
world before the coming of Christianity with
its
inspired book and
tion.
Stoicism
its
authoritative revela
may be
philosophy or a religion.
in
its
exalted passion
;
it
called
It
either
a
was a religion
was a philosophy
inasmuch as it made no pretence to magical
powers or supernatural
knowledge.
I
do
a perfect system, with
not suggest that
it
no errors of
and no inconsistencies of
theory.
It
fact
is
is
certainly not that
;
and
I
do