When we come to Plotinus in the third century (-269) we find a philosophy more Oriental than Greek. He was born in Egypt in 204. He studied in Alexandria. He visited the East, and in 243 he established a school at Rome.

The union of the soul and the body is an evil. Plotinus would not speak of his body or of his birthplace. He would not allow any portrait of himself to be made. It was bad enough to have a body without perpetuating its image. He would not even speak of his family. The function of philosophy was the purgation of the soul from the body. The barbarians were pouring in on the Empire. One should renounce his property, free his slaves, and refuse political office. True reality is beyond the world. The goal of philosophy is the identity of the soul with God. Plotinus at times reached this identity. In Plotinus one seems to be transplanted to India. The ideal is a mystical union of seer and seen in one undistinguishable reality. Ideas cease to be objective. The mind knows itself rather than objects. Indeed knowledge itself must be transcended, for the fall of the soul from God is produced by the subject seeing himself as an object. Family, property and state are now extraneous

interests.

But

This is essentially the doctrine of the Upanishads, the orthodox philosophy of India. Ordinarily one sees another, one hears another, as another thing. when one has become Brahma (God) there is no other outside oneself; one has become identical with the Absolute.

Goodness and temperance no longer mean a control

of sense and behavior. They mean the ability to be independent of bodily feelings. Courage means the loss of fear regarding the separation from the body.

In Plotinus an orientalized Platonism has brought about a complete disassociation of the mind from the classical pagan world.

CHAPTER XII

DISASSOCIATION IN THE CYRENAICS AND THE
EPICUREANS

The founding of the Academy (about 380) and the Peripatetic school (about 350) were followed toward the end of the century by the Cyrenaics, the forerunners of the Epicureans, and the Cynics, the forerunners of the Stoics. These two opposing schools, the Cyrenaic and the Cynic, which grew out of the Socratic teaching, agreed in their indifference to the study of the objective sciences.

Aristippus of Cyrene (born about 435) held that we know only our sensations; we do not know the causes of our sensations. The object of life, therefore, to Aristippus is to grasp the pleasure as it goes by in the flux of time. This is no easy matter. How difficult was this extraction of pleasure from the flow of sensations may be inferred from the fact that the teaching of some of the Cyrenaics led to suicide. The Cyrenaics attempt to escape all the ties that bind the mind and the will to objective ends. The will no longer follows through to the old objects, wife, child, property, art, the state.

That the Cyrenaic philosophy is a defense reaction is evident from the saying of Aristippus: "Habeo, non habeor" (I possess, I am not possessed). The mind of

the Cyrenaic floats entirely free from the old ethnic objects and interests. It knows no objects. It knows only occurrences and these occurrences are painful and pleasurable sensations. In the language of modern psychology Aristippus attempts to abstract the pleasure element, which we now call the affect, from that total complex which includes a response of body and mind to some object. The Cyrenaic knows no object; he knows only subjective pleasures and pains. He commits his will to no objective world, physical or social. This is plainly a defense attitude.

The pleasure theory was worked out more systematically by Epicurus (341-270) who taught in his famous Garden at Athens. There was an attempt to get beyond the momentary pleasure of Aristippus. According to Epicurus "many pains are better than -pleasures, when a greater pleasure follows them, if we endure the pain for a time." But the teaching of Epicurus is undoubtedly a philosophy of defense. He tells us that "those men enjoy luxury most completely who are best able to do without it;" that "everything which is natural is easily provided;" that to accustom oneself to simple habits renders one fearless with respect to fortune; that "the chief good is easily perfected and easily provided;" that "that which removes the pain which arises from want, and which makes the whole of life perfect, is easily procurable." Therefore we have no need of those things which can only be attained with trouble.

This defense character of Epicurus' philosophy is apparent in his treatment of death. Since the will of the Epicurean is disassociated from family and prop

erty and state, since there is no going forth of the will into the traditional objectives of pagan life, there arises a painful loss of moral orientation. There is a nervous lack of perspective. This is the explanation of the feverish search for ataraxy, or undisturbedness. In the earlier ethnic cultus the individual identified himself with the ends of nature as she expressed them, through his coöperative will, in the family, in agriculture, in commerce, in state building, in art, in science. He was a part of a comparatively immortal life. But these objectives through which life was formerly enlarged were no longer vital. The old interests which had furnished objectives to the will were dead. The family was to be avoided. The state was to be absolutely eschewed. Friendship was emphasized because it was voluntary and because it seemed to be necessary for the individual's happiness. The old objects of the will were pulverized into pleasurable and painful sensations. The loss of objectives by frustrating the will forced the feelings and emotions to float free in a world of disoriented introspection. This is the explanation of the fears, the terrors, the mental confusion, mentioned by Epicurus. This is the explanation of every pleasure-pain philosophy. The will being detached from objective ends, pleasure and pain ceased to be elements in the reaction of the individual to his world. The mind was shut up in a world of pleasurable and painful sensations.

When life meant a realization of the will in all the richest possible objects of experience, pleasures and pains were incidental to the things done, the objects achieved. There was no dualism of inner and outer,