MEGARIAN SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. This school was founded by Euclides of Megara, one of the pupils of Socrates. Two main elements went to make up the Megarian doctrine. Like the Cynics and the Cyrenaics, Euclides started from the Socratic principle that virtue is knowledge. But into combination with this he brought the Eleatic doctrine of Unity. Perceiving the difficulty of the Socratic dictum he endeavoured to give to the word "knowledge" a definite content by divorcing it absolutely from the sphere of sense and experience, and confining it to a sort of transcendental dialectic or logic. The Eleatic unity is Goodness, and is beyond the sphere of sensible apprehension. This good ness, therefore, alone exists; matter, motion, growth and decay are figments of the senses ; they have no existence for Reason. "Whatever is, is!" Knowledge is of ideas and is in conformity with the necessary laws of thought. Hence Plato in the Sophist describes the Megarians as "the friends of ideas." Yet the Megarians were by no means in agreement with the Platonic idealism. For they held that ideas, though eternal and immovable, have neither life nor action nor movement.
This dialectic, initiated by Euclides, became more and more opposed to the testimony of experience; in the hands of Eubulides and Alexinus it degenerated into hairsplitting, mainly in the form of the reductio ad absurdum. The strength of these men lay in destructive criticism rather than in construction : as dialecticians they were successful, but they contributed little to ethical specula tion. They spent their energy in attacking Plato and Aristotle, and hence earned the opprobrious epithet of Eristic. They used their
dialectic subtlety to disprove the possibility of motion and decay; unity is the negation of change, increase and decrease, birth and death. None the less, in ancient times they received great respect owing to their intellectual pre-eminence. Cicero (Academics, ii. 42) describes their doctrine as a "nobilis disciplina," and identifies them with Parmenides and Zeno of Elea. But their most im mediate influence was upon the Stoics (q.v.), whose founder, Zeno of Citium, studied under Stilpo. This sage, a man of striking and attractive personality, succeeded in fusing the Megarian dialectic with Cynic naturalism. The result of the combination was in fact a juxtaposition rather than a compound ; it is mani festly impossible to find an organic connection between a practical code like Cynicism and the transcendental logic of the Megarians. But it served as a powerful stimulus to Zeno, who by descent was imbued with oriental mysticism.
For bibliographical information about the Megarians, see EUCLID; EUBULIDES ; DIODORUS CRONUS ; STILPO. See also ELEATIC SCHOOL ; CYNICS ; STOICS ; and, for the connection between the Megarians and the Eretrians, MENEDEMUS and PHAEDO. Also Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools; Mallet, Histoire de l'ecole de Megare (Paris, 1845) ; Ritter, Uber die Philosophie der meg. Schule; Prantl, Ge schichte der Logik, i. 32 ; Henne, L'ecole de Megare (Paris, ; Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (Eng. trans., 1905), ii. 170 seq.