Volume 1

Plutarch's Morals / translated from the Greek by several hands, corrected and rev. by William W. Goodwin with an introd. by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  • Plutarch.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Plutarch's Morals / translated from the Greek by several hands, corrected and rev. by William W. Goodwin with an introd. by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    20/554
    physicist. His humanity stooped affectionately to trace the virtues which lie loved in the animals also. “ Knowing and not knowing is the affirmative or negative of the dog ; knowing you is to he your friend ; not knowing you, your enemy.” He quotes Thucydides, saying, “ that not the desire of honor only never grows old, but much less also the inclination to society and affection to the State, which continue even in ants and bees to the very last.” But though curious in the questions of the schools on the nature and genesis of things, his extreme interest in every trait of character, and his broad humanity, lead him constantly to Morals, to the study of the Beautiful and Good. Hence his love of heroes, his rule of life, and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the soul. La Harpe said “ that Plutarch is the genius the most naturally moral that ever existed.” ’Tis almost inevitable to compare Plutarch with Seneca, who, born fifty years earlier, was for many years his contem- porary, though they never met, and their writings were perhaps unknown to each other. Plutarch is genial, with an endless interest in all human and divine things ; Seneca, a professional philosopher, a writer of sentences, and, though he keep a sublime path, is less interesting, because less humane ; and when wre have shut his book, we forget to open it again. There is a certain violence in his opinions, and want of sweetness. He lacks the sympathy of Plutarch. He is tiresome through perpetual didac- tics. He is not happily living. Cannot the simple lover of truth enjoy the virtues of those he meets, and the virtues suggested by them, so to find himself at some time purely contented ? Seneca was still more a man of the world than Plutarch ; and, by his conversation with the Court of Nero, and his own skill, like Vol- taire’s, of living with men of business, and emulating their ad- dress in affairs by great accumulation of his own property, learned to temper his philosophy with facts. He ventured far — appar- ently too far — for so keen a conscience as he inly had. Yet we owe to that wonderful moralist illustrious maxims ; as if the scar- let vices of the times of Nero had the natural effect of driving- virtue to its loftiest antagonisms. “ Seneca,” says L’Estrange, “ was a pagan Christian, and is very good reading for our Chris- tian pagans.” He was Buddhist in his cold abstract virtue, with a certain impassibility beyond humanity. He called “ pity, that