THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

FRANCIS BACON 79
to twisting Epictetus' leg to pass the time away. "If you go on/' said
Epictetus calmly, "you will break my leg." The master went on, and the
leg was broken. "Did I not tell you," Epictetus observed mildly, "that you
would break my leg?" 7 Yet there is a certain mystic nobility in this
philosophy, as in the quiet courage of some Dostoievskian pacifist. "Never
in any case say, I have lost such a thing; but, I have returned it. Is thy
child dead? it is returned. Is thy wife dead? she is returned. Art
thou deprived of thy estate? is not this also returned?" 8 In such passages
we feel the proximity of Christianity and its dauntless martyrs; indeed
were not the Christian ethic of self-denial, the Christian political ideal of
an almost communistic brotherhood of man, and the Christian eschatol-
ogy of the final conflagration of all the world, fragments of Stoic doctrine
floating on the stream of thought? In Epictetus the Greco-Roman soul
has lost its paganism, and is ready for a new faith. His book had the dis-
tinction of being adopted as a religious manual by the early Christian
Church. From these "Dissertations" and Aurelius' "Meditations" there is
but a step to "The Imitation of Christ."
Meanwhile the historical background was melting into newer scenes.
There is a remarkable passage in Lucretius 9 which describes the decay
of agriculture in the Roman state, and attributes it to the exhaustion of
the soil. Whatever the cause, the wealth of Rome passed into poverty,
the organization into disintegration, the power and pride into decadence
and apathy. Cities faded back into the undistinguished hinterland; the
roads fell into disrepair and no longer hummed with trade; the small
families of the educated Romans were outbred by the vigorous and tin-
tutored German stocks that crept, year after year, across the frontier;
pagan culture yielded to Oriental cults; and almost imperceptibly the
Empire passed into the Papacy.
The Church, supported in its earlier centuries by the emperors whose
powers it gradually absorbed, grew rapidly in numbers, wealth, and range
of influence. By the thirteenth century it owned one-third of the soil of
Europe, 10 and its coffers bulged with donations of rich and poor. For a
thousand years it united, with the magic of an unvarying creed, most of
the peoples of a continent; never before or since was organization so
widespread or so pacific. But this unity demanded, as the Church thought,
a common faith exalted by supernatural sanctions beyond the changes
and corrosions of time; therefore dogma, definite and defined, was cast
like a shell over the adolescent mind of medieval Europe. It was within
this shell that Scholastic philosophy moved narrowly from faith to reason
and back again, in a baffling circuit of uncriticized assumptions and pre*
xxxvi. *Ibid., 86.
*II, 1 170. This oldest is also the latest theory of the decline of Rome; cf. Simkho*
tdtch: Toward the Understanding of Jesus; New York, 1921.
^Robinson and Beard: Outlines of European History; Boston, 1914, i, 443.