Page:EB1911 - Volume 05.djvu/377

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CARNEGIE, A.
  

were the works of Chrysippus, opposition to whose views is the mainspring of his philosophy. “If Chrysippus had not been,” he is reported to have said, “I had not been either.” In 155, together with Diogenes the Stoic and Critolaus the Peripatetic, he was sent on an embassy to Rome to justify certain depredations committed by the Athenians in the territory of Oropus. On this occasion he delivered two speeches on successive days, one in favour of justice, the other against it. His powerful reasoning excited among the Roman youth an enthusiasm for philosophical speculations, and the elder Cato insisted on Carneades and his companions being dismissed from the city.

Carneades, practically a 5th-century sophist, is the most important of the ancient sceptics. Negatively, his philosophy is a polemic against the Stoic theory of knowledge in all its aspects. All our sensations are relative, and acquaint us, not with things as they are, but only with the impressions that things produce upon us. Experience, he says, clearly shows that there is no true impression. There is no notion that may not deceive us; it is impossible to distinguish between false and true impressions; therefore the Stoic φαντασἰα καταληπτική (see Stoics) must be given up. There is no criterion of truth. Carneades also assailed Stoic theology and physics. In answer to the doctrine of final cause, of design in nature, he points to those things which cause destruction and danger to man, to the evil committed by men endowed with reason, to the miserable condition of humanity, and to the misfortunes that assail the good man. There is, he concludes, no evidence for the doctrine of a divine superintending providence. Even if there were orderly connexion of parts in the universe, this may have resulted quite naturally. No proof can be advanced to show that this world is anything but the product of natural forces. Carneades further attacked the very idea of God. He points out the contradiction between the attributes of infinity and individuality. Like Aristotle, he insists that virtue, being relative, cannot be ascribed to God. Not even intelligence can be an attribute of the divine Being. Nor can he be conceived of as corporeal or incorporeal. If corporeal, he must be simple or compound; if a simple and elementary substance, he is incapable of life and thought; if compound, he contains in himself the elements of dissolution. If incorporeal, he can neither act nor feel. In fact, nothing whatever can be asserted with certainty in regard to God. The general line of argument followed by Carneades anticipates much in modern thought.

The positive side of his teaching resembles in all essentials that of Arcesilaus (q.v.). Knowledge being impossible, a wise man should practise ἐποχή (suspension of judgment). He will not even be sure that he can be sure of nothing. Ideas or notions are never true, but only probable; nevertheless, there are degrees of probability, and hence degrees of belief, leading to action. According to Carneades, an impression may be probable in itself; probable and uncontradicted (ἀπερίσπαστος, lit. “not pulled aside,” not distracted by synchronous sensations, but shown to be in harmony with them) when compared with others; probable, uncontradicted, and thoroughly investigated and confirmed. In the first degree there is a strong persuasion of the propriety of the impression made; the second and third degrees are produced by comparisons of the impression with others associated with it, and an analysis of itself. His views on the summum bonum are not clearly known even to his disciple and successor Clitomachus. He seems to have held that virtue consisted in the direction of activity towards the satisfaction of the natural impulses. Carneades left no written works; his opinions seem to have been systematized by Clitomachus.

See A. Geffers, De Arcesilae Successoribus (1845); C. Gouraud, De Carneadis Vita et Placitis (1848); V. Brochard, Les Sceptiques grecs (1887); C. Martha, “Le Philosophe Carneade a Rome,” in Revue des deux mondes, xxix. (1878), and the histories of philosophy; also Academy, Greek.

CARNEGIE, ANDREW (1837–), American “captain of industry” and benefactor, was born in humble circumstances in Dunfermline, Scotland, on the 25th of November 1837. In 1848 his father, who had been a Chartist, emigrated to America, settling in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. The raw Scots lad started work at an early age as a bobbin-boy in a cotton factory, and a few years later was engaged as a telegraph clerk and operator. His capacity was perceived by Mr T. A. Scott of the Pennsylvania railway, who employed him as a secretary; and in 1859, when Scott became vice-president of the company, he made Carnegie superintendent of the western division of the line. In this post he was responsible for several improvements in the service; and when the Civil War opened he accompanied Scott, then assistant secretary of war, to the front. The first sources of the enormous wealth he subsequently attained were his introduction of sleeping-cars for railways, and his purchase (1864) of Storey Farm on Oil Creek, where a large profit was secured from the oil-wells. But this was only a preliminary to the success attending his development of the iron and steel industries at Pittsburg. Foreseeing the extent to which the demand would grow in America for iron and steel, he started the Keystone Bridge works, built the Edgar Thomson steel-rail mill, bought out the rival Homestead steel works, and by 1888 had under his control an extensive plant served by tributary coal and iron fields, a railway 425 m. long, and a line of lake steamships. As years went by, the various Carnegie companies represented in this industry prospered to such an extent that in 1901, when they were incorporated in the United States Steel Corporation, a trust organized by Mr J. Pierpont Morgan, and Mr Carnegie himself retired from business, he was bought out at a figure equivalent to a capital of approximately £100,000,000.

From this time forward public attention was turned from the shrewd business capacity which had enabled him to accumulate such a fortune to the public-spirited way in which he devoted himself to utilizing it on philanthropic objects. His views on social subjects, and the responsibilities which great wealth involved, were already known in a book entitled Triumphant Democracy, published in 1886, and in his Gospel of Wealth (1900). He acquired Skibo Castle, in Sutherlandshire, Scotland, and made his home partly there and partly in New York; and he devoted his life to the work of providing the capital for purposes of public interest, and social and educational advancement. Among these the provision of public libraries in the United States and United Kingdom (and similarly in other English-speaking countries) was especially prominent, and “Carnegie libraries” gradually sprang up on all sides, his method being to build and equip, but only on condition that the local authority provided site and maintenance, and thus to secure local interest and responsibility. By the end of 1908 he had distributed over £10,000,000 for founding libraries alone. He gave £2,000,000 in 1901 to start the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburg, and the same amount (1902) to found the Carnegie Institution at Washington, and in both of these, and other, cases he added later to the original endowment. In Scotland he gave £2,000,000 in 1901 to establish a trust for providing funds for assisting education at the Scottish universities, a benefaction which resulted in his being elected lord rector of St Andrews University. He was a large benefactor of the Tuskegee Institute under Booker Washington for negro education. He also established large pension funds—in 1901 for his former employés at Homestead, and in 1905 for American college professors. His benefactions in the shape of buildings and endowments for education and research are too numerous for detailed enumeration, and are noted in this work under the headings of the various localities. But mention must also be made of his founding of Carnegie Hero Fund commissions, in America (1904) and in the United Kingdom (1908), for the recognition of deeds of heroism; his contribution of £500,000 in 1903 for the erection of a Temple of Peace at The Hague, and of £150,000 for a Pan-American Palace in Washington as a home for the International Bureau of American republics. In all his ideas he was dominated by an intense belief in the future and influence of the English-speaking people, in their democratic government and alliance for the purpose of peace and the abolition of war, and in the progress of education on unsectarian lines. He was a powerful supporter of the movement for spelling reform, as a means of promoting