The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    moreover, a man of fragile physical constitution, as Kant was ; but, unlike Kant, he was not a childish hypo¬ chondriac in seclusion, but a man in the world, heroically seeking to live a complete and harmonious life. By temperament he was a Stoic, and he wrote a character¬ istic book of Exercises, as he proposed to call what his modern editor calls the Philosophical Regimen, in which he consciously seeks to discipline himself in fine thinking and right living, plainly acknowledging that he is the disciple of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But Shaftes¬ bury was also a man of genius, and as such it was his good fortune to throw afresh into the stream of thought a fruitful conception, in part absorbed indeed from Greece, and long implicit in men’s minds, but never before made clearly recognisable as a moral theory and an ethical temper, susceptible of being labelled by the philosophic historian, as it since has been under the name, passable no doubt as any other, of “ Aesthetic Intuitionism.” Greek morality, it has been well said, is not a conflict of light and darkness, of good and evil, the clear choice between the broad road that leads to destruction and the narrow path of salvation : it is “an artistic balance of light and shade.” Gizycki, remarking that Shaftesbury has more affinity to the Greeks than perhaps any other modern moralist, says that “ the key lay not only in his head but in his heart, for like can only be recognised by like.” 1 We have to remember at the same time that Shaftesbury was really something of a classical scholar even from childhood. Born in 1671, the grandson of the 1 Georg von Gizycki, Die Ethik David Hume’s, p. n.