WERE THE STOICS UTILITARIANS? 193 



tury ago, of the doctrine of association of ideas, so little was known 

 of the process by which we rise, from desiring certain qualities, as 

 means to happiness, to desiring them for their own sake, and rec- 

 ognizing them as virtuous, that the Stoics were obliged to content 

 themselves with sometimes enjoining disinterestedness, but not 

 giving any adequate reason, and sometimes demonstrating the ten- 

 dency of virtue to produce happiness without showing how knowl- 

 edge of this is compatible with the duty of being disinterested. 

 Similar ignorance of the fact, perhaps never yet made sufficiently 

 prominent, that no happiness can be universal, except that which 

 consists mostly in the enjoyment of the higher pleasures, because 

 these are the only ones w^iich can become objects of common de- 

 sire, without exciting general strife, compelled the defenders of the 

 Portico to maintain that virtue was the only means of happiness, 

 though they occasionall}' admitted that mental pleasure can become 

 felicity. In the same way their lack of knowledge of the full psy- 

 chological value of pleasure, as an indication of utility, as well as of 

 the distinction afterwards made by Mill and Mackintosh, between 

 taking utility as a test or as a motive, forced them either to deny as 

 stoutly that it is the best motive as to disparage its value as a test, 

 or else to use it as a test so inconsiderately as almost to sanction it 

 as a motive. They stated all the facts in turn of the Utilitarian 

 theory, as held by its most advanced modern advocate, but without 

 being able to see the relations of these parts so accurately as to 

 present the whole truth. Their zeal for practical moral culture 

 and universal progress in virtue was another chief cause of these 

 inconsistencies, which, indeed, in that age could scarcely be avoided, 

 except either by the recklessness with which the Epicureans de- 

 clared pleasure to be the best of motives as well as tests, and even 

 in its grossest forms the equivalent of happiness, or by the insipid 

 understatements which prevented the Peripatetics, despite the 

 consummate genius of their mighty founder, from leaving any deep 

 imprint, except his own, on either literature or history. 



The fact that only one school of ancient philosophy was able to 

 produce a crowded series of noble patriots and philanthrophists, 

 among whom Tiberius Gracchus, Cato, Portia, Thrasea, Epictetus, 

 Dion Chrysostom, the younger Pliny, Trajan, Antoninus Pius, and 

 Marcus Aurelius are merely the best known instances, shows that 

 stoicism was able to do the practical work of utilitarianism with a 

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