WERE THE STOICS UTILITARIANS? 179 



WERE THE STOICS UTILITARIANS ? 



BY F. M. HOLLAND, BARABOO. 



The practical value of Stoicism was long ago fully demonstrated 

 iu the energy, justice and philanthropy with which, for more than 

 eight}' years after the death of its worst enemy, Boraitian, five of 

 its pupils successively ruled the Roman Empire. It is well to ask 

 if the philosophy, for which Nerva went into exile at the same time 

 as Epictetus, in which the latter, with Dion Chrysostom and Arrian, 

 instructed Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, and of which 

 Marcus Aurelius made himself the grandest embodiment, has still a 

 place among living systems of ethics. 



The few writers who have tried to find such a place for the Stoics 

 differ widely. Mr. Lecky and Miss Cobbe labor to array them among 

 the transcendentalists, the Histor^^ of European Morals asserting 

 that of '"' the two rival theories, one is generally described as the 

 stoical, the intuitive, the independent or the sentimental — the other 

 as the epicurean, the inductive, the utilitarian, the selfish," (vol. i. p. 

 3,) while the Essay on Intuitive Morals frequently appeals to the 

 authority of the Stoics, in quotations, for the most part mistrans- 

 lated, as is especially that from Lucan,ix., 573, (Am. Ed., page 120,) 

 which owes its significance wholly to the words, ''inborn precepts," 

 which are rightly italicized by Miss Cobbe, for they are not con- 

 tained in the original Latin printed beneath them. This libertj^ 

 like the similar ones with Marcus Aurelius, I. 13; and V. 27, was 

 undoubtedly taken in the firm belief, that the real views of the auth- 

 ors were thus fully manifested. Even J. S. Mill so far agrees with 

 his two antagonists, as to speak of "eyery writer, from Epicurus to 

 Benthara, who maintained the theor}' of utility," and to say ''let 

 ntilitarians never cease to claim the morality of self-devotion as a 

 possession which belongs by as good a right to them, as either to 

 the Stoic or to the Transcendentalist." (Utilitarianism, Ch. II.) 

 Everybody knows Jeremy Bentham's hatred of "the sort of trash 

 which a set of people used to amuse themselves with talking, while 

 parading backward and forward in colonnades called porches," but 

 everybody does not know that Alexander Bain, who is, except Her- 

 bert Spencer, the ablest living advocate of utilitarianism, declares 



