If we consider the philosophical tendencies of the day, we shall
probably observe first of all that the artificial wall of partition
between philosophy and science--and especially mathematical science--is
beginning to wear very thin. On the other hand, we cannot fail to notice
a reaction against what is called intellectualism. This reaction takes
many forms, the most characteristic perhaps of which is a renewed
interest in Mysticism. It leads also to a strong insistence on the
practical aspect of philosophic thought, and to a view of its bearing on
what had been regarded as primarily theoretical issues, which is known
by the rather unfortunate name of Pragmatism. Now it is just on these
points that we have most to learn from the Greeks, and Greek philosophy
is therefore of special importance for us at the present time. At its
best, it was never divorced from science, while it found a way of
reconciling itself both with the interests of the practical life and
with mysticism without in any way abating the claims of the intellect.
It is solely from these points of view that it is proposed to regard
Greek philosophy here. It would be futile to attempt a summary of the
whole subject in the space available, and such a summary would have no
value. Many things will therefore be passed over in silence which are
important in themselves and would have to be fully treated in a complete
account. All that can be done now is to indicate the points at which
Greek philosophy seems to touch our actual problems. It will be seen
that here, as elsewhere, 'all history is contemporary history', and that
the present can only be understood in the light of the past.
The word 'philosophy' is Greek and so is the thing it denotes. Unless we
are to use the term in so wide a sense as to empty it of all special
meaning, there is no evidence that philosophy has ever come into
existence anywhere except under Greek influences. In particular,
mystical speculation based on religious experience is not itself
philosophy, though it has often influenced philosophy profoundly, and
for this reason the pantheism of the _Upanishads_ cannot be called
philosophical. It is true that there is an Indian philosophy, and indeed
the Hindus are the only ancient people besides the Greeks who ever had
one, but Indian science was demonstrably borrowed from Greece after the
conquest of Alexander, and there is every reason to believe that those
Indian systems which can be regarded as genuinely philosophical are a
good deal more recent still. On the other hand, the earliest
authenticated instance of a Greek thinker coming under Indian influence
is that of Pyrrho (326 B. C.), and what he brought back from the East
was rather the ideal of quietism than any definite philosophical
doctrine. The barrier of language was sufficient to prevent any
intercourse on important subjects, for neither the Greeks nor the
Indians cared to learn any language but their own. Of course philosophy
may culminate in theology, and the best Greek philosophy certainly does
so, but it begins with science and not with religion.
By philosophy the Greeks meant a serious endeavour to understand the
world and man, having for its chief aim the discovery of the right way
of life and the conversion of people to it. It would not, however, be
true to say that the word had always borne this special sense. At any
rate the corresponding verb (φιλοσοφειν {philosophein}) had at first a
far wider range. For instance, Herodotus (i. 30) makes Croesus say that
Solon had travelled far and wide 'as a philosopher' (φιλοσοφεων
{philosopheôn}), and it is clear from the context that this refers to
that love of travel for the sake of the 'wonders' to be seen in strange
lands which was so characteristic of the Ionian Greeks in the fifth
century B. C. That is made quite plain by the phrase 'for the sake of
sightseeing' (θεωριης ἑινεκεν {theôriês heineken}) with which the word
is coupled. Again, when Thucydides (ii. 40) makes Pericles say of his
fellow citizens 'we follow philosophy without loss of manliness'
(φιλοσοφουμεν ανευ μαλακιας {philosophoumen aneu malakias}), it is
certainly not of philosophy in the special sense he is thinking. He is
only contrasting the culture of Athens with the somewhat effeminate
civilization of the Ionians in Asia Minor. Even in the next century,
Isocrates tried to revert to this wider sense of the word, and he
regularly uses it of the art of political journalism which he imparted
to his pupils.
Tradition ascribes the first use of the term 'philosophy' in the more
restricted sense indicated above to Pythagoras of Samos, an Ionian who
founded a society for its cultivation in southern Italy in the latter
half of the sixth century B. C. It is notoriously difficult to make any
positive statements about Pythagoras, seeing that he wrote nothing; but
it is safer on general grounds to ascribe the leading ideas of the
system to the master rather than to his followers. Moreover, this
particular tradition is confirmed by the fact, for which there is
sufficient evidence, that the name 'philosophers' originally designated
the Pythagoreans in a special way. For instance, we know that Zeno of
Elea (_c._ 450 B. C.) wrote a book 'Against the Philosophers', and in
his mouth that can only mean 'Against the Pythagoreans'. Now the
Pythagorean use of the term depends on a certain way of regarding man,
which there is good reason for ascribing to Pythagoras himself. It has
become more or less of a commonplace now, but we must try to seize it in
its original freshness if we wish to understand the associations the
word 'philosophy' came to have for the Greeks. To state it briefly, it
is the view that man is something intermediate between God and 'the
other animals' (ταλλα ζωα {talla zôa}). As compared with God, he is
'mere man', liable to error and death (both of which are spoken of as
specially _human_, ανθρωπινα {anthrôpina}); as compared with 'the other
animals', he is kindly and capable of civilization. The Latin word
_humanus_ took over this double meaning, which is somewhat arbitrarily
marked in English by the spellings _human_ and _humane_. Now it is clear
that, for a being subject to error and death, wisdom (σοφια {sophia}) in
the full sense is impossible; that is for God alone. On the other hand,
man cannot be content, like 'the other animals' to remain in ignorance.
If he cannot be wise, he can at least be 'a lover of wisdom', and it
follows that his chief end will be 'assimilation to God so far as
possible' (ὁμοιωσις τω θεω κατα το δυνατον {homoiôsis tô theô kata to
dynaton}), as Plato put it in the _Theaetetus_. The mathematical studies
of the Pythagoreans soon brought them face to face with the idea of a
constant approximation which never reaches its goal. There is, then,
sufficient ground for accepting the tradition which makes Pythagoras the
author of this special sense of the word 'philosophy' and for connecting
it with the division of living creatures into God, men and 'the other
animals'. If the later Pythagoreans went a step further and classified
rational animals into gods, men and 'such as Pythagoras', that was due
to the enthusiasm of discipleship, and is really a further indication of
the genuinely Pythagorean character of this whole range of ideas. We may
take it, then, that the word 'philosophy' had acquired its special sense
in southern Italy before the beginning of the fifth century B. C.
It is even more certain that this sense was well known at Athens, at
least in certain circles, not long after the middle of the fifth
century. To all appearance, this was the work of Socrates (470-399
B.C.). Whatever view may be taken of the philosophy of Socrates or of
its relation to that expounded in Plato's earlier dialogues (a point
which need not be discussed here), it is at least not open to question
that he was personally intimate with the leading Pythagoreans who had
taken refuge at Thebes and at Phlius in the Peloponnesus when their
society came to be regarded as a danger to the state at Croton and
elsewhere in southern Italy. That happened about the middle of the fifth
century, and Socrates must have made the acquaintance of these men not
long after. At that time it would be quite natural for them to visit
Athens; but, after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431 B. C.),
all intercourse with them must have ceased. They were resident in enemy
states, and Socrates was fighting for his country. With the exception of
the brief interval of the Peace of Nicias (421 B. C.), he can have seen
nothing of them for years. Nevertheless it is clear that they did not
forget him; for we must accept Plato's statement in the _Phaedo_ that
many of the most distinguished philosophers of the time came to Athens
to be with Socrates when he was put to death, and that those of them who
could not come were eager to hear a full account of what happened. It is
highly significant that, even before this, two young disciples of the
Pythagorean Philolaus, Simmias and Cebes, had come from Thebes and
attached themselves to Socrates. For that we have the evidence of
Xenophon as well as of Plato, and Xenophon's statement is of real value
here; for it was just during these few years that he himself associated
with Socrates, though he saw him for the last time a year or two before
his trial and death. Whatever other inferences may be drawn from these
facts, they are sufficient to prove that Socrates had become acquainted
with some of the leading philosophers of the Greek world before he was
forty, and to make it highly probable that it was he who introduced the
word 'philosophy' in its Pythagorean sense to the Athenians.
So much for the word; we have next to ask how there came to be such a
thing as philosophy at all. It has been mentioned that Pythagoras was an
Ionian, and we should naturally expect to find that he brought at least
the beginnings of what he called philosophy from eastern Hellas. Now it
has been pointed out that Greek philosophy was based on science, and
science originated at Miletus on the mainland of Asia Minor nearly
opposite the island of Samos, which was the original home of Pythagoras.
The early Milesians were, in fact, men of science rather than
philosophers in the strict sense. The two things were not differentiated
yet, however, and the traditional account of the matter, according to
which Greek philosophy begins with Thales (_c._ 585 B. C.), is after all
quite justified. The rudimentary mathematical science of which, as
explained elsewhere in this volume, he was the originator in fact led
him and his successors to ask certain questions about the ultimate
nature of reality, and these questions were the beginning of philosophy
on its theoretical side. It is true that the Milesians were unable to
give any but the crudest answers to these questions, and very likely
they did not realise their full importance. These early inquirers only
wanted to know what the world was made of and how it worked, but the
complete break with mythology and traditional views which they effected
cleared the way for everything that followed. It was no small thing that
they were able to discard the old doctrine of what were afterwards known
as the 'elements'--Fire, Air, Earth, and Water--and to regard all these
as states of a single substance, which presented different appearances
according as it was more or less rarefied or condensed. Moreover,
Anaximander at least (_c._ 546 B. C.), the successor of Thales, shook
himself free of the idea that the earth required support of some kind to
keep in its place. He held that it swung free in space and that it
remained where it was because there was no reason for it to fall in one
direction rather than another. In general these early cosmologists saw
that weight was not an inherent quality of bodies and that it could not
be used to explain anything. On the contrary, weight was itself the
thing to be explained. Anaximander also noted the importance of rotary
or vortex motion in the cosmical scheme, and he inferred that there
might be an indefinite number of rotating systems in addition to that
with which we are immediately acquainted. He also made some very
important observations of a biological character, and he announced that
man must be descended from an animal of a different species. The young
of most animals, he said, can find their food at once, while that of the
human species requires a prolonged period of nursing. If, then, man had
been originally such as he is now, he could never have survived. All
this, no doubt, is rudimentary science rather than philosophy, but it
was the beginning of philosophy in this sense, that it completely
transformed the traditional view of the world, and made the raising of
more ultimate problems inevitable.
This transformation was effected in complete independence of religion.
What we may call secularism was, in fact, characteristic of all eastern
Ionian science to the end. We must not be misled by the fact that
Anaximander called his innumerable worlds 'gods' and that his successor
Anaximenes spoke of Air as a 'god'. These were never the gods of any
city and were never worshipped by any one, and they did not therefore
answer at all to what the ordinary Greek meant by a god. The use of the
term by the Milesians means rather that the place once occupied by the
gods of religion was now being taken by the great fundamental phenomena
of nature, and the later Greeks were quite right, from their own point
of view, in calling that atheism. Aristophanes characterizes this way of
speaking very accurately indeed in the _Clouds_ when he makes
Strepsiades sum up the teaching he has received in the words 'Vortex has
driven out Zeus and reigns in his stead', and when he makes Socrates
swear by 'Chaos, Respiration and Air'. So too the Milesians spoke of the
primary substance as 'ageless and deathless', which is a Homeric phrase
used to mark the difference between gods and men, but this only means
that the emotion formerly attached to the divine was now being
transferred to the natural.
The Milesians, then, had formed the conception of an eternal matter out
of which all things are produced and into which all things return, and
the conception of Matter belongs to philosophy rather than to science.
But besides this they had laid the foundations of geometry, and that led
in other hands to the formulation of the correlative conception of Limit
or Form. It is needless to enumerate here the Milesian and Pythagorean
contributions to plane geometry; it will be sufficient to remind the
reader that they covered most of the ground of _Euclid_, Books I, II,
IV, and VI, and probably also of Book III. In addition, Pythagoras
founded Arithmetic, that is, the scientific theory of numbers
(αριθμητικη {arithmêtikê}), as opposed to the practical art of
calculation (λογιστικη {logistikê}). We also know that he discovered the
sphericity of the earth, and the numerical ratios of the intervals
between the concordant notes of the octave. It is obvious that he was a
scientific genius of the first order, and it is also clear that his
methods included those of observation and experiment. The discovery of
the earth's spherical shape was due to observation of eclipses, and that
of the intervals of the octave can only have been based on experiments
with a stretched string, though the actual experiments attributed by
tradition to Pythagoras are absurd. It was no doubt this last discovery
that led him to formulate his doctrine in the striking saying 'Things
are numbers', thus definitely giving the priority to the element of form
or limit instead of to the indeterminate matter of his predecessors.
Pythagoras further differed from his predecessors in one respect which
proved of vital moment. So far was he from ignoring religion, that he
founded a society in southern Italy which was primarily a religious
community. It is quite possible that he was influenced by the growth of
the Orphic societies which had begun to spread everywhere in the course
of the sixth century, but his religion differed from the Orphic in many
ways. In particular, Apollo and not Dionysus was the chief god of the
Pythagoreans, and all our evidence points to the conclusion that
Pythagoras brought his religion, as he had brought his science, from
eastern Hellas, though rather from the islands of the Aegean than from
mainland Ionia. He was much influenced, we can still see, by certain
traditions of the temple of Delos, which had become the religious centre
of the Ionic world. There had, of course, been plenty of religious
speculation among the Greeks before Pythagoras, and it was of a type not
unlike that we find in India, though there are insuperable difficulties
in the way of assuming any Aegean influence on India or any Indian
influence on the Aegean at this date. It may be that the beginnings of
such ideas go back to the time when the Greeks and the Hindus were
living together, though it is still more likely that both the Greeks and
the Indians were affected by a movement originating in the north, which
brought to both of them a new view of the soul. The Delian legend of the
Hyperboreans may be thought to point in this direction. However that may
be, the main purpose of the religious observances practised by the
Orphics and Pythagoreans alike was to secure by means of 'purifications'
(καθαρμοι {katharmoi}) the ransom (λυσις {lysis}) of the soul, which was
regarded as a fallen god, from the punishment of imprisonment in
successive bodies. There is no reason to suppose that Pythagoras
displayed any particular originality in this part of his teaching. It
all depends on the doctrine of transmigration or rebirth (παλιγγενεσια
{palingenesia}), which is often incorrectly designated by the late and
inaccurate term 'metempsychosis'. There is no doubt that Pythagoras
taught this, and also the rule of abstinence from animal flesh which is
its natural corollary, but such ideas had been well known in many parts
of Greece before his time. The real difficulty is to see the connexion
between all this and his scientific work. Here we are of course confined
to inferences from what we are told by later writers; but, if the
doctrine which Plato makes Socrates expound in the early part of the
_Phaedo_ is Pythagorean, as it is generally supposed to be, we may say
that what Pythagoras did was to teach that, while the ordinary methods
of purification were well enough in their way, the best and truest
purification for the soul was just scientific study. It is only in some
such way as this that we can explain the religious note which is
characteristic of all the best Greek science. It involves the doctrine
that the Theoretic Life is the highest way of life for man, a belief
still held by Plato and Aristotle, and to which we shall have to return.
We may note at once, however, that it is not an 'intellectualist' ideal.
There is no question of idle contemplation; it is a strenuous way of
life, the aim of which is the soul's salvation, and it gives rise to an
eager desire to convert other men. Just for that reason, the Pythagorean
philosopher will take part in practical life when the opportunity
offers, and he will even rule the state if called upon to do so. The
Pythagorean society was a proselytizing body from the first, and it
tried to bring in all it could reach, without distinction of
nationality, social position, or sex (for women played a great part in
it from the first). It was precisely its zeal for the reform of human
life, and its attempt to set up a Rule of the Saints in the cities of
southern Italy that led to its unpopularity. If the Pythagoreans had
contented themselves with idle speculation, they would not have been
massacred or forced to take refuge in flight, a fate which overtook them
before the middle of the fifth century.
It soon proved, however, that the Pythagorean doctrine in its entirety
was too high a one for its adherents, and a rift between Pythagorean
religion and Pythagorean science was inevitable. Those who were capable
of appreciating the scientific side of the movement would tend more and
more to neglect the religious rule which it prescribed, and we find
accordingly that before the end of the fifth century the leading
Pythagoreans, the men whose names we know, are first of all men of
science, and more and more inclined to drop what they doubtless regarded
as the superstitious side of the doctrine. In the end they were absorbed
in the new philosophical schools which arose at Athens. The mass of the
faithful, on the other hand, took no interest in arithmetic, geometry,
music, and astronomy, and with them to follow Pythagoras meant to go
barefoot and to abstain from animal flesh and beans. These continued the
tradition even after scientific Pythagoreanism had become extinct as
such, and they were a favourite subject of ridicule with the comic poets
of the fourth century B. C.
It is easy for us to see now that all this indicates a real weakness in
Pythagoreanism. Science and religion are not to be brought into union by
a simple process of juxtaposition. We do not know how far Pythagoras
himself was conscious of the ambiguity of his position; it would not be
surprising if he came to feel it towards the end of his life, and we
know for certain that he lived long enough to witness the beginnings of
the revolt against his society in Croton and elsewhere. It is for this
reason that he removed to Metapontum where he died, and where Cicero was
able to visit his tomb long afterwards. We shall see later what the weak
point in his system was, and we shall have to consider how the discord
he had left unresolved was ultimately overcome. For the present, it is
more important to note that he was the real founder both of science, and
of philosophy as we understand them now. It is specially true of science
that it is the first steps which are the most difficult, and Pythagoras
left a sufficient achievement in mathematics behind him for others to
elaborate. The Greeks took less than three centuries to complete the
edifice, and that was chiefly due to Pythagoras, who had laid the
foundations truly and well.
We have now seen how the two great conceptions of Matter and Form were
reached; the next problem Greek philosophy had to face was that of
Motion. At first the fact of movement had simply been taken for granted.
The Ionian tendency was to see motion everywhere; it was rest that had
to be explained, or rather the appearance of it. However, when the new
conception of an eternal matter began to be taken seriously,
difficulties made themselves felt at once. If reality was regarded as
continuous, it appeared that there was no room for anything else, not
even for empty space, which could only be identified with the unreal,
and it was easy to show that the unreal could not exist. But, if there
is no empty space, it seems impossible that there should be any motion,
and the world of which we suppose ourselves to be aware must be an
illusion. Such, briefly stated, was the position taken up by another
Ionian of southern Italy, Parmenides of Elea (_c._ 475 B. C.), who had
begun as a Pythagorean, but had been led to apply the rigorous method of
reasoning introduced into geometry with such success by the Pythagoreans
to the old question of the nature of the world which had occupied the
Milesians. The remarkable thing about the earliest geometers is, in
fact, that they did not formulate the conception of Space, which seems
to us at the present day fundamental. They were able to avoid it because
they possessed the conception of Matter, and regarded Air as the normal
state of the material substratum. The confusion of air with empty space
is, of course, a natural one, though it may be considered surprising
that it should not have been detected by the founders of geometrical
science. Such failures to draw all the consequences from a new discovery
are common enough, however, in the history of scientific thought.
Parmenides cleared up this ambiguity, not by affirming the existence of
empty space, but by denying the possibility of such a thing, even before
it had been asserted by any one. He saw that the Pythagoreans really
implied it, though they were quite unconscious of the fact. He is
interesting to us as the first philosopher who thought of expounding his
system in verse. It was not a very happy thought, as the arguments in
which he deals do not readily lend themselves to this mode of
expression, and we may be thankful that none of his successors except
Empedocles followed his example. It has the very great inconvenience of
making it necessary to use different words for the same thing to suit
the exigencies of metre. And if there ever was an argument that demanded
precise statement, it was that of Parmenides. As it is, his poem has the
faults we should look for in a metrical version of Euclid. On the other
hand, Parmenides is the first philosopher of whom we have sufficient
remains to enable us to follow a continuous argument; for we have
nothing of Pythagoras at all, and only detached fragments of the rest.
We can see that he was ready to follow the argument wherever it might
lead. He took the conception of matter which had been elaborated by his
predecessors and he showed that, if it is to be taken seriously, it must
lead to the conclusion that reality is continuous, finite, and
spherical, with nothing outside it and no empty space within it. For
such a reality motion is impossible, and the world of the senses is
therefore an illusion. Of course that was not a result in which it was
possible for men to acquiesce for long, and historically speaking, the
Eleatic doctrine must be regarded as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of earlier
speculation. There is no reason to believe, however, that Parmenides
himself meant it to be understood in this way. He believed firmly that
he had found the truth.
Several attempts were made to escape the conclusions of Parmenides, and
they all start by abandoning the assumption of the homogeneity and
continuity of matter which had been implicit in the earlier systems,
though it was first brought to the light of day by Parmenides. Here
again the influence of contemporary science on philosophic thought is
clearly marked. Empedocles of Agrigentum (_c._ 460 B. C.), the only
citizen of a Dorian state who finds a place in the early history of
science and philosophy, was the founder of the Sicilian school of
medicine, and it was probably his pre-occupation with that science that
led him to revive the old doctrine of Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, which
the Milesians had cast aside, but which lent itself readily to the
physiological theories of the day. He did not use the word afterwards
translated 'elements' (στοιχεια {stoicheia}) for these. It means
literally 'letters of the alphabet', and appears to have been first
employed in this connexion by the Pythagoreans at a later date, when
they found it necessary to take account of the new theory. Empedocles
spoke of the 'four roots' of things, and by this he meant to imply that
these four forms of matter were equally original and altogether
disparate. That furnished at least a partial answer to the arguments of
Parmenides, which depended on the assumption that matter was
homogeneous. He also found it necessary to assume two sources of motion
or forces, as we might call them, though Empedocles thought of them as
substances, one of which tended to separate the 'four roots' and the
other to combine them. These he called Love and Strife, and he supposed
the life of the world to take the form of alternate cycles, in which one
or the other prevailed in turn. In all this he was plainly influenced by
his physiological studies. He thinks of the world as an animal organism
subject to what are now called anabolism and catabolism. The details of
the theory make this quite clear. A similar doctrine was taught by
Anaxagoras (_c._ 460 B. C.), who came from Clazomenae in Asia Minor to
Athens after the Persian Wars, and was one of the teachers of Pericles.
His doctrine of 'seeds', in which the traditional 'opposites'--wet and
dry, cold and hot--were combined in different proportions, is rather
more subtle than that of Empedocles, and it is possible to see in it a
curious anticipation of certain features in modern chemistry.
Anaxagoras too felt it necessary to assume a force or source of motion,
but he thought that one would suffice to account for the rotation
(περιχωρησις {perichôrêsis}) to which he attributed the formation of the
world. He called that force Mind (νους {nous}), but his own
description of it shows that he regarded it as corporeal, though he
thought it was something more tenuous and unmixed than other bodies.
There is little doubt that he selected the term in order to mark the
identity of the source of motion in the world with that in the animal
organism. That again is in accordance with the scientific interests of
the time. In his astronomical theories, however, Anaxagoras showed
himself a true eastern Ionian, and lagged far behind the Pythagoreans.
For him, as for the Ionians of the Aegean down to and including
Democritus, the earth was flat, and the eddy or vortex which gave rise
to the world was still rotation in a plane. A more satisfying answer to
Parmenides was the doctrine of Atomism, which frankly accepted the
existence of space, and asserted that it was just as real as body. The
first hint of such a solution was given by Melissus (_c._ 444 B. C.),
who was a Samian but a member of the Eleatic school. He said, 'If things
are a many, then each of them must be such as I have shown the One to
be.' That was meant as a _reductio ad absurdum_; but, when Leucippus of
Miletus (_c._ 440 B. C.), who had also studied in the school of Elea,
ventured to assert the existence of the Void, there was no longer any
reason for shirking the conclusion which Melissus had stated only to
show its impossibility. The atoms are, in fact, just the continuous
indivisible One of Parmenides multiplied _ad infinitum_ in an infinite
empty space. On that side at least, the theory of body was now complete,
and the question asked by Thales was answered, and it is of great
interest to observe that this was brought about by the renewal of
intercourse between the Ionians of Italy and those of the Aegean, a
renewal which was made possible by the establishment of the Athenian
Empire. Nothing makes us feel the historical connexion more vividly than
the re-emergence of the names of Miletus and Samos after all these
years. There were, however, certain more fundamental problems which
Atomism could not solve, and which were first attacked at Athens itself.
So far, it will be noted, Athens has played no part at all in our story,
and in fact no more than two Athenians ever became philosophers of the
first rank. It is true that they were called Socrates and Plato, so the
exception is a considerable one. It was the foundation of the Athenian
Empire that made Athens the natural meeting-place of the most diverse
philosophical and scientific views. It was here that the east and west
of Hellas came together, and that the two streams of tradition became
one, with the result that a new tradition was started which, though
often interrupted for a time, continues to the present day.
If we wish to understand the development of Greek philosophy, it is of
the first importance that we should realize the intellectual ferment
which existed at Athens in the great days of the Periclean age. It has
been mentioned already that Anaxagoras of Clazomenae had settled there,
and it was not long before his example was followed by others. In
particular, Zeno of Elea (_c._ 450 B. C.), the favourite disciple of
Parmenides, had a considerable following at Athens. He made it his
business to champion the doctrine of his master by showing that those
who refused to accept it were obliged to give their assent to views
which were at least as repugnant to common sense, and in this way he
incidentally did much for mathematics and philosophy by raising the
difficulties of infinite divisibility and continuity in an acute form.
All that is something quite apart from the influence of the 'sophists'
at a rather later date, though they too came both from the east and from
the west, and though they had been influenced by the more strictly
philosophical schools of these regions. It was into this Athens that
Socrates was born (470 B. C.) about ten years after the battle of
Salamis, and he was naturally exposed to all these conflicting
influences, of which Plato has given us a vivid description in the
_Phaedo_, from his earliest youth. He cannot, in fact, be understood at
all unless this historical background is kept constantly in view. There
can be no reasonable doubt that at a very early age he attached himself
to Archelaus, an Athenian who had succeeded Anaxagoras, when that
philosopher had to leave Athens for Lampsacus. Ion of Chios, a
contemporary witness, said that Socrates had visited Asia Minor with
Archelaus, and that appears to refer to the siege of Samos, when
Socrates was under thirty. There is no reason whatever to doubt the
statement, which Plato makes more than once, that he had met Parmenides
and Zeno at a still earlier date. At any rate, the influence of Zeno on
the dialectic of Socrates is unmistakable. We may also take it that he
was familiar with all sorts of Orphic and Pythagorean sectaries.
Aeschines of Sphettos wrote a dialogue entitled _Telauges_, in which he
represented Socrates as rallying the extreme asceticism of the strict
followers of Pythagoras. So far, however, as we can form a picture of
him for ourselves, he was not the sort of man to become the disciple of
any one. He was a genuine Athenian in respect of what is called his
'irony', which implies a certain humorous reserve which kept him from
all extravagances, however interested he might be in the extravagances
of others. Nevertheless, while still quite a young man, he had somehow
acquired a reputation for 'wisdom', though he himself disclaimed
anything of the sort. He had also, it appears, gathered round him a
circle of 'associates' (ἑταιροι {hetairoi}). The only direct evidence we
have for these early days is the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes (423 B. C.),
which is of course a comedy and must not be taken too literally. On the
other hand, a comic poet who knew his business (and surely Aristophanes
did) could hardly present a well-known man to the Athenian public in a
manner which had no relation to fact at all. It is fortunate that there
is a passage in Xenophon's _Memorabilia_ (i. 6) which seems to supply us
with the very background we need to make the _Clouds_ intelligible. It
represents Socrates in an entirely different light from that in which he
appears in the rest of the work, and it can hardly be Xenophon's own
invention. It seems to refer to a time when Plato and Xenophon were
babies, if not to a time before they were born, and it is probable that
it comes from some literary source which we can no longer trace. We are
told, then, that Antiphon the sophist was trying to detach his
companions (συνουσιασται {synousiastai}) from Socrates, and a
conversation followed in which he charged him with teaching his
followers to be miserable rather than happy, and added that he was right
not to charge a fee for his teaching, since in fact it was of no value.
It will be seen that this implies a regular relation between Socrates
and his followers which was sufficiently well known to arouse
professional jealousy. Socrates does not attempt to deny the fact. He
says that what he and his companions do is to spend their time together
in studying the wisdom of the men of old which they have left behind
them in books, and that, if they come upon anything which they think is
good, they extract it for their own use, and count it great gain if, in
doing this, they become friends to one another. It is obvious that this
suggests something quite different from the current view of Socrates as
a talker at street corners, something much more like a regular school,
and that, so far as it goes, it explains the burlesque of Aristophanes.
The Socrates of whom we know most is, however, quite differently
engaged. He has devoted his life to a mission to his fellow men, and
especially to his fellow citizens. If we may so far trust Plato's
_Apology_, the occasion of that was the answer received from the Delphic
oracle by Chaerephon, whom we know from Aristophanes as one of the
leading disciples of Socrates in the earlier part of his life.
Chaerephon asked the god of Delphi whether there was any one wiser than
Socrates, and this of course implies that Socrates had a reputation for
'wisdom' before his mission began. The oracle declared that there was no
one wiser, and Plato makes Socrates say in the _Apology_ that this was
the real beginning of that mission. He set out at first to prove that
the oracle was wrong, and for that purpose he tried to discover some one
wiser than himself, a search in which he was disappointed, since he
could only find people who thought they were wise, and no one who really
was so. He therefore concluded that what the oracle really meant was
that Socrates was wiser than other people in one respect only. Neither
he nor any one else was really 'wise', but Socrates was wiser than the
rest because he knew he was not wise and they thought they were. It
ought to be clear that this is mostly 'irony', and it is not to be
supposed that Socrates attached undue importance to the oracle, which he
speaks of quite lightly, but he could hardly have told the story at all
unless it was generally known that his mission did in fact date roughly
from that period of his life. Historically it would probably be truer to
say that the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, in which Socrates served
with great distinction as a hoplite, marked the decisive turning-point.
It was in the camp at Potidaea that he once stood in a trance for
twenty-four hours (431 B. C.), and that seems to point to some great
psychological change, which may very well have been occasioned or
accelerated by his experiences in the war. At any rate we now find him
entirely devoted to the conversion of his fellow citizens, and we must
try to understand what the message he had for them was.
In the _Apology_ Socrates declares that his mission was divinely imposed
upon him, so that he dare not neglect it, even if it should lead to his
death, as in fact it did. The tone here is quite different from the
half-humorous style in which he deals with the Delphic oracle, and even
the 'divine sign'. That only warned him not to do things, mostly quite
trivial things, which he was about to do, and never told him to do
anything; this, on the contrary, was a positive command, laid upon him
by God, and there can be no doubt that Plato means us to understand this
to have been the innermost conviction of Socrates. It is hard to believe
that Plato could have misrepresented his master's attitude on such a
point. He was present at the trial, and the _Apology_ must have been
written not very long afterwards, when the memory of it was still fresh
in people's minds. Now Plato tells us quite clearly that what Socrates
tried to get the Athenians to understand was the duty of 'caring for
their souls' (ψυχης επιμελειο {psychês epimeleio}). That is confirmed
from other sources, and indeed it is generally admitted. The phrase has,
however, become so familiar that it does not at once strike us as
anything very new or important. To an Athenian of the fifth century B.
C., on the other hand, it must have seemed very strange indeed. The word
translated 'soul' (ψυχη {psychê}) occurs often enough, no doubt, in the
literature of the period, but it is never used of anything for which we
could be called upon to 'care' in the sense evidently intended by
Socrates. Its normal use is to denote the breath of life, the 'ghost' a
man 'gives up' at the moment of death. It can therefore be rendered by
'life' in all cases where there is a question of risking or losing life
or of clinging to it when we ought to be prepared to sacrifice it, but
it is not used for the seat of conscious life at all. It is sometimes
employed to signify the seat of the dream-consciousness or of what is
now called the subconscious or subliminal self, but never of the
ordinary waking consciousness which is the seat of knowledge and
ignorance, goodness and badness.[2] On the other hand, that use of the
word is quite common in the fourth century, and it may be inferred that
this change was due to Socrates. More than once Aristophanes ridicules
him for holding some strange view of the 'soul', and these jests were
made at a time when Plato was only a child. We cannot, of course, expect
to get any very definite idea from them as to the real teaching of
Socrates on this subject, but it is not impossible to see what it was,
if we take into account the views of the soul which had been held by the
philosophical schools of eastern and western Ionia.
[2] See my paper on 'The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul'.
_Proceedings of the British Academy_, 1915-16, pp. 235 sqq.
The Ionians of Asia Minor had certainly identified the soul with that in
us which is conscious, and which is the seat of goodness and badness,
wisdom and folly; but they did not regard it as what we call the self or
treat it as an individual. Anaximenes and his school held that the soul
was what they called Air, but that was just because they regarded Air as
the primary substance of which all things are made. The soul was
something, in fact, that comes to us from outside (θυραθεν {thyrathen})
by means of respiration. As Diogenes of Apollonia expresses it, it is 'a
small portion of the god', that is, of the primary substance, enclosed
in a human body for a time, and returning at death to the larger mass of
the same substance outside. The formula 'Earth to earth and air to air'
was accepted as an adequate description of what takes place at death.
The western Ionians, and especially the Pythagoreans, held a very
different view. For them, the soul was something divine. It was, in
fact, a fallen god, imprisoned in the body as a punishment for antenatal
sin, and it deserved our care in this sense, that it was our chief
business in life to purify it so as to secure its release from the
necessity of reincarnation in another body. But, during this present
life, they held that this divine element slumbers, except in prophetic
dreams. As Pindar puts it, 'It sleeps when the limbs are active.'
Neither of these views was familiar to the ordinary Athenian, but
Socrates of course knew both well, and felt satisfied with neither. When
he spoke of the soul he did not mean any mysterious fallen god which
was the temporary tenant of the body, but the conscious self which it
lies with us to try to make wise and good. On the other hand, his
insistence on our duty to 'care for' it is quite inconsistent with the
view that it is merely something extrinsic, as all the eastern Ionians
down to Anaxagoras had taught. It is, on the contrary, our very self,
the thing in us which is of more importance to us than anything else
whatever. It was to this doctrine of the soul and our duty to it that
Socrates felt he must convert mankind and especially his
fellow-citizens. It was a strange and novel doctrine then; and, if it
has become a commonplace since, that only shows that he was successful,
if not in persuading his fellowmen to act on this knowledge, at least in
making them aware of it. It was in this way that Socrates healed the
rift between science and religion which had proved fatal to the
Pythagorean society, and it may be suggested that the significance of
his teaching is not exhausted yet. As has been indicated above it is to
be found clearly stated in Plato's _Apology of Socrates_, and it
furnishes the only clue to a right understanding of the great series of
Platonic dialogues down to and including the _Republic_ in which
Socrates is represented as the chief speaker. Whether Plato added much
or little of his own to the doctrine of his master in these dialogues is
an interesting historical problem, but it need not concern the ordinary
reader, at least in the first instance. We know from the allusions of
Aristophanes that Socrates himself taught a new doctrine of the soul
when Plato was a child, and no sympathetic reader can fail to see that
the passage of the _Apology_ to which we have referred is intended to be
a faithful account of that doctrine. All the rest is simply its
legitimate development, and it is not of very great importance for us to
determine whether that development is due to Socrates or to Plato. The
inspiration which has been derived from these writings by many
generations will not be lessened by any decision we may come to on this
point, so long as we keep clearly in mind that the new doctrine of soul
is their principal theme, and that this must be understood in the light
of the doctrines which had prepared the way for it. What Socrates did
was really this. He deepened the meaning of the Eastern Ionian doctrine
by informing it with some of the feeling and emotion which had
characterized the Pythagorean teaching on the subject, while on the
other hand he rationalized the Pythagorean theory by identifying the
soul with our conscious personality.
Now if this is a correct account of what Socrates taught, he must be
regarded as inaugurating an entirely new period in the history of
philosophy. That is implied in the common term 'Presocratics' generally
applied to his predecessors, though the ordinary textbooks are by no
means clear as to the grounds for assigning this pre-eminent position to
Socrates. We can also see how natural it was for him to lay such
emphasis on the conversion of souls as he certainly did. That purpose
continued to dominate Greek philosophy to the very end. No doubt
successive schools varied in their conception of what conversion meant,
but that is the link which binds them all together. In fact, it gave
rise to a new literary form, the 'hortatory discourse' (προτρεπτικος
λογος {protreptikos logos}), which was more and more cultivated as time
went on, and was at last taken over by the fathers of the Christian
church along with much else of a more fundamental character.
It has been noted already that Socrates had followers among all the
leading philosophical schools of the time, and the possibility is not to
be excluded that we may still learn more of him from the discovery of
new sources. For the present, the recovery of some new and fairly
extensive fragments of the _Alcibiades_ of Aeschines of Sphettos is the
chief addition to our sources of information. We know that Aeschines was
a disciple of Socrates, and the tradition of antiquity was that his
dialogues gave the most faithful picture of the man as he really was. If
so, that was probably because Aeschines had no philosophy of his own.
For us the chief importance of the new fragments is that, if we read
them along with those already known (and it is unfortunate that the old
and the new have not yet been printed together), they strongly confirm
the impression we get from Plato of the manner of Socrates and his
method of argument, and that helps to reassure us as to the essentially
historical character of the Platonic Socrates. The fragments of
Aeschines also corroborate Plato by showing that the conversion of
Alcibiades (whose life he had saved when a young man) was one of the
things that lay nearest his heart.
But the real successor of Socrates was, of course, Plato himself
(427-347 B. C.). It is not possible to give even an outline of Plato's
philosophy here. Indeed the time has hardly come for that yet, though
much admirable work is now being done, especially by a French professor,
M. Robin, which promises more certain conclusions than have yet been
possible. All that can be attempted here is to indicate the attitude of
Plato to some of the problems we have been discussing. His very great
contributions to the theory of knowledge will be passed over, as they
are beginning to be well understood, and the _Theaetetus_ in particular,
with its sequel the _Sophist_, is more and more coming to occupy its
rightful place as the best introduction to philosophy in general. It is
necessary, however, just to notice in passing a fundamental question of
method which the Platonic dialogues themselves suggest. It is this.
While Socrates is present in every one of them except the _Laws_, he
takes practically no part in some of them, and the dialogues in which
this is the case are known on other grounds to belong to the later years
of Plato's life. There must be some reason for this, and it is obviously
prudent to treat these later dialogues in the first instance as our
primary evidence for Plato's own views. Indeed, it is only after his
philosophy has been reconstructed from these sources and from the
sometimes obscure references to it in Aristotle, that it will be safe
to attempt an answer to the question of how much there may be in the
dialogues of his early life which is properly to be assigned to Plato
himself rather than to Socrates. That is a historical question of great
interest; but, as has been said, the solution of it, if that should ever
prove possible, would not greatly affect the impression that Athenian
philosophy leaves upon us as a whole.
Now, if we consider Plato's later, and presumably therefore most
independent writings, we find, just as we should expect from a disciple
of Socrates, that the doctrine of soul holds the first place, but that
it has certain features of its own which there is no sufficient ground
for attributing to Socrates. We are too apt to think of Plato as mainly
occupied with what is called the 'theory of Ideas', a theory which is
discussed once or twice in his earlier dialogues, and which is there
ascribed to Socrates, but which plays no part at all in his mature
works. There the chief place is undoubtedly taken by the doctrine of the
soul, and we can see that it is of the first importance for Plato. Soul
is regarded as the source of all motion in the world, because it is the
only thing in the world that moves without being itself moved by
anything else. It is this and this alone that enables Plato to account
for the existence of the world and of mankind, and to avoid the theory
of 'two worlds' into which, as he points out in the _Sophist_, 'the
friends of the Ideas', whoever they may have been, were only too apt to
fall. In Plato this view of the soul culminates in theology of a kind
which he nowhere attributes to Socrates. He represents him, indeed, as a
man of a deeply religious nature, but we do not gather that he had felt
the need of a formal doctrine of God. Plato, on the other hand, has left
us the first systematic defence of Theism we know of, and it is based
entirely on his doctrine of soul as the self-moved mover. But the
highest soul, or God, is not only the ultimate source of motion, but
also supremely good. Now, since there are many things in the world which
are not good, and since it would be blasphemy to attribute these to
God, there must be other souls in the world which are relatively at
least independent. God is not, directly at least, the cause of all
things, but it is not easy to discover the relation in which these other
souls are thought of as standing to God. In the _Timaeus_, the matter is
put in this way. The soul of the world, and all other souls human and
divine, are the work of the Creator, who is identified with God, and
they are not inherently indestructible, since anything that has been
made can be unmade. They are, however, practically indestructible, since
God made all things because He was good and wished them also to be as
good as possible. His goodness, therefore, will not suffer Him to
destroy what He has once made. That of course is mythically expressed,
and Plato is not committed to it as a statement of his own belief, since
it is only the account which _Timaeus_ puts into the mouth of the
Creator. We can see, however, what was the problem with which he was
occupied, and it is not perhaps illegitimate to infer that he approached
the question which still baffles speculation from the point of view that
God's omnipotence, as we should call it, is limited by his goodness.
This is a much more important limitation than that imposed by the
existence of matter, to which Timaeus also refers. In that, he is simply
following the tradition of the Pythagorean society to which he belonged,
as is shown by his identification of matter with space, or rather with
'room'. So far as can be seen at present, we are not entitled to ascribe
this view to Plato without more ado, but that is a point on which the
last word has not yet been said.
The description of the creation given by Timaeus is of course to be
regarded as mythical in its details, but it has features from which we
may learn a good deal as to the direction taken by Plato's thoughts
about the world. In particular, while the important part played by
geometry is quite intelligible in the mouth of a Pythagorean, he makes
use of certain theories which we know to belong to the most recent
mathematics of the day, in particular the complete doctrine of the five
regular solids, which was due to Theaetetus, who was one of the earliest
members of the Academy, and whom Plato represents as having made the
acquaintance of Socrates just before the master's death. Theaetetus died
young, but we know enough of him to feel sure that he was one of the few
great original mathematicians who have appeared in history. In the
_Timaeus_ the theory of the regular solids is used to get rid once more
of the doctrine of four ultimate 'elements'. These, Timaeus says, are so
far from being elements or letters of the alphabet, that they are not
even syllables. The way in which the so-called elements are built up out
of molecules corresponding in their configuration to the regular solids,
and the explanations of their transmutation into one another based on
the geometrical construction of these figures, is apt to strike the
average reader as fantastic, but one of the most distinguished living
mathematicians and physicists has stated that he is struck most of all
by their resemblance to the scientific theories of the twentieth
century. It will be well, therefore, to avoid hasty judgements on this
point. It is at any rate easy to understand how the study of mathematics
came to hold the preponderating place it did in the Platonic Academy.
In accordance with the plan of this paper, something must now be said of
Plato's attitude to the practical life, a point on which it is very easy
to make mistakes. No one has insisted more strongly than he has on the
primacy of the Theoretic Life. The philosopher is the man who is in love
with the spectacle of all time and all existence and that is what
delivers him from petty ambitions and low desires. He has made the
toilsome ascent out of the Cave in which the mass of men dwell, and in
which they only behold the shadows of reality. But, even in this
enthusiastic description of the philosophic life, an equal stress is
laid on the duty of philosopher to descend into the Cave in turn and to
rescue as many of their former fellow-prisoners as may be, even against
their will, by turning them to the light and dragging them up into the
world of truth and reality. It is quite easy to understand, in view of
this, that Plato devoted some of the best years of his life to practical
affairs and that he relinquished the studies of the Academy for a time
in order to direct the education of Dionysius II. The thing appeared
well worth doing; for Greek civilization in Sicily, and consequently, as
we can now see, the civilization of western Europe, was seriously
threatened by the Carthaginians. They had been held at bay by Dionysius
I, but after his death everything depended on his successor. Now the
education of Dionysius II had been completely neglected, but he had good
natural abilities, and his uncle Dion, who was Plato's friend, was ready
to answer for his good intentions. Plato could not turn a deaf ear to
such a call. Unfortunately Dionysius was vain and obstinate, and he soon
became impatient of the serious studies which Plato rightly regarded as
necessary to prepare him for his task. The result was a growing
estrangement between Plato and his pupil, which made it impossible to
hope for a successful issue to the plans of Dion. It is unnecessary to
tell the whole story here, but it is right to say that there was nothing
at all impracticable in what Plato undertook, and that he was certainly
justified in holding that the education of Dionysius must be completed
before it would be safe to entrust him with the championship of the
cause of Hellenism in the west.
His failure to make anything of Dionysius did not lead Plato to abandon
his efforts to heal the wounds of Hellenism. One of the studies most
ardently pursued in the Academy was Jurisprudence, of which he is the
real founder. It was not uncommon for Greek states to apply to the
Academy for legislators to codify existing law or to frame a new code
for colonies which had just been founded. That is the real explanation
of the remarkable work entitled the _Laws_, which must have occupied
Plato for many years, and which was probably begun while he was still
directing the studies of Dionysius. It appears to have been left
unfinished; for, while some parts of it are highly elaborated, there are
others which make upon us the impression of being a first draft. Even
so, it is a great work if we regard it from the proper point of view. It
is, in the first place, a codification of Greek, and especially Athenian
law, of course with those reforms and improvements which suggest
themselves when the subject is systematically treated, and it formed the
basis of Hellenistic, and through that of Roman law, to which the world
owes so much. There is no more useful corrective of the popular notion
of Plato as an unpractical visionary than the careful study of the
dullest and most technical parts of the _Laws_ in the light of the
_Institutes_.
No attempt has been made here to describe the system of Plato as a
whole, and indeed the time has not yet come when such an attempt can
profitably be made. We have no direct knowledge of his teaching in the
Academy; for we only possess the works which he wrote with a wider
public in view. In the case of Aristotle (384-322 B. C.), a similar
reservation must be made, though for just the opposite reason. We have
only fragments of his published works and what we possess is mainly the
groundwork of his lectures in the Lyceum. It will be seen that there is
still very much to be done here too. From the nature of the case, notes
for lectures take a great deal for granted that would be more fully
explained when the lectures were delivered, and some of the most
important points are hardly developed at all. Nevertheless there are
certain things which come out clearly enough, and it so happens that
they are points of great importance from which we can learn something
with regard to the philosophical problems of the present day.
In the first place, it is desirable to point out that Aristotle was not
an Athenian, but an Ionian from the northern Aegean, and that he was
strongly influenced by eastern Ionian science, especially by the system
of Democritus (which Plato does not appear to have known) and by the
medical theories of the time. That is why he is so unsympathetic to the
western schools of philosophy, and especially to the Pythagoreans and
the Eleatics. Empedocles alone, who was a biologist like himself, and
the founder of a medical school, finds favour in his eyes. He is not,
therefore, at home in mathematical matters and his system of Physics can
only be regarded as retrograde when we compare it with that of the
Academy. He did indeed accept the doctrine of the earth's sphericity,
but with that exception his cosmological views must be called
reactionary. Where he is really great is in biology, a field of research
which was not entirely neglected by the Academy, but which had been
treated as secondary in comparison with mathematics and astronomy. The
contrast between Plato and Aristotle in this respect seems to repeat on
a higher plane that between Pythagoras and Empedocles, and this suggests
something like a law of philosophical development which may perhaps
throw light on the present situation. It seems as if this alternation of
the mathematical and the biological interest was fundamental in the
development of scientific thought and that the philosophy of different
periods takes its colour from it. The philosophy of the nineteenth
century was dominated in the main by biological conceptions, while it
seems as if that of the twentieth was to be chiefly mathematical in its
outlook on the world. We must not, of course, make too much of such
formulas, but it is instructive to study such alternations in the
philosophy of the Greeks, where everything is simpler and more easily
apprehended.
On the other hand, Aristotle had been a member of the Academy for twenty
years, and that could not fail to leave its mark upon him. This no doubt
explains the fact, which has often been noted, that there are two
opposite and inconsistent strains in all Aristotle's thinking. On the
one hand, he is determined to avoid everything 'transcendental', and his
dislike of Pythagorean and Platonist mathematics is mainly due to that.
On the other hand, despite his captious and sometimes unfair criticisms
of Plato, he evidently admired him greatly and had been much influenced
by him. It may be suggested that the tone of his criticisms is partly
due to his annoyance at finding that he could not shake off his
Platonism, do what he would. This is borne out by the fact that, when he
has come to the furthest point to which his own system will take him, he
is apt to take refuge in metaphors of a mythical or 'transcendental'
character, for which we are not prepared in any way and of which no
explanation is vouchsafed us. That is particularly the case when he is
dealing with the soul and the first mover. On the whole his account of
the soul is simply a development of eastern Ionian theories, and we feel
that we are far removed indeed from the Platonist conception of the
soul's priority to everything else. But, when he has told us that the
highest and most developed form of soul is Mind, we are suddenly
surprised by the statement that Mind in this sense is merely passive,
while there is another form of it which is separable from matter, and
that alone is immortal and everlasting. This has given rise to endless
controversy which does not concern us here, but it seems best to
interpret it as an involuntary outburst of the Platonism Aristotle could
not wholly renounce. Very similar is the passage where he tries to
explain how the first mover, though itself unmoved, communicates motion
to the world. 'It moves it like a thing beloved,' he tells us, and
leaves us to make what we can of that. And yet we cannot help feeling
that, in passages like this, we come far nearer to the beliefs Aristotle
really cared about than we do anywhere else. At heart he is a Platonist
in spite of himself.
Aristotle's attitude to the practical life is also dependent on
Plato's. In the Tenth Book of the _Ethics_ he puts the claims of the
Contemplative Life even higher than Plato ever did, so that the
practical life appears to be only ancillary to it. He does not feel in
the same degree as Plato the call for the philosopher to descend once
more into the Cave for the sake of the prisoners there, and altogether
he seems far more indifferent to the practical interests of life.
Nevertheless he followed Plato's lead in giving much of his time to the
study of Politics and that too with the distinctly practical aim of
training legislators. He has often been criticized for his failure to
see that the days of the city-state were numbered, and for the way in
which he ignores the rise of an imperial monarchy in the person of his
own pupil Alexander the Great. That, however, is not quite fair.
Aristotle had a healthy dislike of princes and courts, and the
city-state still appealed to him as the normal form of political
organization. He could not believe that it would ever be superseded, and
he wished to contribute to its better administration. He had, in fact, a
much more conservative outlook than Plato, who was inclined to think
with Isocrates, that the revival of monarchy was the only thing that
could preserve Hellenism as things were then. We must remember that
Aristotle was not himself a citizen of any free state, and that he could
hardly be expected to have the same political instincts as Plato, who
belonged by birth to the governing classes of Athens and had inherited
the liberal traditions of the Periclean Age. This comes out best of all
perhaps, in the attitude of the two philosophers to the question of
slavery. In the _Laws_, which deals with existing conditions, Plato of
course recognizes the _de facto_ existence of slavery, though he is very
sensible of its dangers and makes many legislative proposals with a view
to their mitigation. In the _Republic_, on the other hand, where there
is no need to trouble about existing conditions, he makes Socrates
picture for us a community in which there are apparently no slaves at
all. Aristotle is also anxious to mitigate the worst abuses of slavery,
but he justifies the institution as a permanent one by the consideration
that barbarians are 'slaves by nature' and that it is for their own
interest to be 'living tools'. This insistence upon the fundamental
distinction between Greeks and barbarians must have seemed an
anachronism to many of Aristotle's contemporaries and it had been
expressly denounced by Plato as unscientific.
The immediate effect of Aristotle's rejection of Platonist mathematics
was one he certainly neither foresaw nor intended. It was to make a
breach between philosophy and science. Mathematical science, whether
Aristotle realized it or not, was still in the vigour of its first
youth, and mathematicians were stirred by the achievements of the last
generation to attempt the solution of still higher problems. If the
Lyceum turned away from them, they were quite prepared to carry on the
Academic tradition by themselves, and they succeeded for a time beyond
all expectation. The third century B. C. was, in fact, the Golden Age of
Greek mathematics, and it has been suggested that this was due to the
emancipation of mathematics from philosophy. If that were true, it would
be very important for us to know it; but it can, I think, be shown that
it is not true. The great mathematicians of the third century were
certainly carrying on the tradition of their predecessors who had been
philosophers as well as mathematicians, and it is not to be wondered at
that they were able to do so for a time. But the really striking fact is
surely that Greek mathematics became sterile in a comparatively short
time, and that no further advance was made till the days of Descartes
and Leibniz, with whom philosophy and mathematics once more went hand in
hand.
Nor was the effect of this divorce on philosophy itself less
disastrous. Theophrastus continued Aristotle's work on Aristotle's
lines, and founded the science of Botany as his predecessor had founded
that of Zoology, but the Peripatetic School practically died out with
him and had very little influence till the study of Aristotle was
revived long afterwards by the Neoplatonists.
For the present, the divorce of science and philosophy was complete. The
Stoics and the Epicureans had both, indeed, a scientific system, but
their philosophy was in no sense based upon it. The attitude of Epicurus
to science is particularly well marked. He took no interest in it
whatever as such, but he used it as an instrument to free men from the
religious fear to which he attributed human unhappiness. For that
purpose, the science of the Academy, which had led up to a theology, was
obviously unsuitable, and, like a true eastern Ionian as he was,
Epicurus harked back to the atomic theory of Democritus, adding to it,
however, certain things which really made nonsense of it, such, for
instance, as the theory of absolute weight and lightness, which
Aristotle had unfortunately taught. The Stoics too were corporealists,
and found such science as they required in the system of Heraclitus,
though they also adopted for polemical purposes much of Aristotle's
Logic, taking pains, however, to alter his terminology. Both these
schools, in fact, while remaining faithful to the idea of philosophy as
conversion, forgot that it had always been based on science in its best
days. It was this, no doubt, which chiefly commended Stoicism and
Epicureanism to the Romans, who were never really interested in science.
Both Stoicism and Epicureanism made a practical appeal, though of a
different kind, and that served to gain credit for them at Rome.
The Academy which Plato had founded still continued to exist, though it
was diverted from its original purpose not more than a generation after
Plato's death. Mathematics, we have seen, had made itself independent,
and the most pressing necessity of the time was certainly the criticism
of the new dogmatism which the Stoics had introduced. That was really
carrying on one side of Platonism and not the least important. It is
true indeed that the Academy appears to us at this distance of time
mainly as a school of scepticism, but we must remember that its
scepticism was directed entirely to the sensible world, as to which the
attitude of Plato himself was not fundamentally different. The real
sceptics always refused to admit that the Academics were sceptics in the
proper sense of the word, and it is possible that the tradition of
Platonism proper was never wholly broken. At any rate, by the first
century B. C., we begin to notice that Stoicism tends to become more and
more Platonic. The study of Plato's _Timaeus_ came into favour again,
and the commentary which Posidonius (_c._ 100 B. C.) wrote upon it had
great influence on the development of philosophy down to the end of the
Middle Ages. It is this period of eclecticism which is reflected for us
in the philosophical writings of Cicero. It had great importance for the
history of civilization, but it is far removed from the spirit of
genuine Greek philosophy. That was dead for the present, and it did not
come to life again till the third century of our era, when Platonism was
revived at Rome by Plotinus.
It is only quite recently that historians of Greek philosophy have begun
to do justice to 'Neoplatonism'. That is partly due to the contemporary
philosophical tendencies noted at the beginning of this paper, and
partly to historical investigations into the philosophy of the Middle
Ages, which is more and more seen to be dependent mainly on Neoplatonism
down to and including the system of St. Thomas Aquinas. It was in fact
the most decisive fact in the history of Western European civilization
that Plotinus founded his school at Rome rather than at Athens or
Alexandria; for that is how Western Europe became the real heir to the
philosophy of Greece. Every one knows, of course, that Plotinus was a
'mystic', but the term is apt to suggest quite wrong ideas about him. He
is often spoken of still as a man who introduced oriental ideas into
Greek philosophy, and he is popularly supposed to have been an Egyptian.
That is most improbable; and, if it were true, it would only make it the
more remarkable that, though he certainly studied at Alexandria for
eleven years, he never even mentions the religion of Isis, which was so
fashionable at Rome in his day, and which had fascinated so genuine a
Greek as Plutarch some generations before. There is no doubt that what
Plotinus believed himself to be teaching was genuine Platonism, and that
he had prepared himself for the task by a careful study of Aristotle and
even of Stoicism, so far as that served his purpose. No doubt he was too
great a man to make himself the mere mouthpiece of another's thought;
but, for all that, he was the legitimate successor of Plato, and it may
be added that M. Robin, who has taken upon himself the arduous task of
extracting Plato's real philosophy from the writings of Aristotle, has
come to the conclusion that there is a great deal more 'Neoplatonism' in
Plato than is sometimes supposed.
Plotinus is a mystic, then, though not at all in the sense in which the
term is often misused. He sets before his disciples a 'way of life'
which leads by stages to the highest life of all, but that is just what
Pythagoras and Plato had done, and it is only the continuation of a
tradition which goes back among the Greeks to the sixth century B. C.,
nearly a thousand years before the time of Plotinus. His aim, like that
of his predecessors, is the conversion of souls to this way of life, and
he differs from such thinkers as the Stoics and the Epicureans in
holding that the 'way of life' to which he calls them must be based once
more on a systematic doctrine of God, the World and Man. The result was
that the divorce which had existed for centuries between science and
philosophy was once more annulled. We cannot say, indeed, that Plotinus
himself made any special study of Mathematics, but there is no doubt at
all that his followers did, and it is due to them, and especially to
Proclus, that we know as much of Greek Mathematics as we do. Proclus was
indeed the systematizer of the doctrine of Plotinus, though he differs
from him on certain points, and his influence on later philosophy cannot
be overestimated. It can be distinctly traced even in Descartes, whom it
reached through a number of channels, the study of which has recently
been undertaken by a French scholar, Professor Gilson, of the University
of Strasbourg. When his researches are complete, the continuity of Greek
and modern philosophy will be plainly seen, and the part played by
Platonism in the making of the modern European mind will be made
manifest. We shall then understand better than ever why Greek philosophy
is a subject of perennial interest.
The history of Greek philosophy is, in fact, the history of our own
spiritual past, and it is impossible to understand the present without
taking it into account. In particular, the Platonist tradition underlies
the whole of western civilization. It was at Rome, as has been pointed
out, that Plotinus taught, and it was in certain Latin translations of
the writings of his school that St. Augustine found the basis for a
Christian philosophy he was seeking. It was Augustine's great authority
in the Latin Church that made Platonism its official philosophy for
centuries. It is a complete mistake to suppose that the thinking of the
Middle Ages was dominated by the authority of Aristotle. It was not till
the thirteenth century that Aristotle was known at all, and even then he
was studied in the light of Platonism, just as he had been by Plotinus
and his followers. It was only at the very close of the Middle Ages that
he acquired the predominance which has made so strong an impression on
the centuries that followed. It was from the Platonist tradition, too,
that the science of the earlier Middle Ages came. A considerable portion
of Plato's _Timaeus_ had been translated into Latin in the fourth
century by Chalcidius with a very elaborate commentary based on ancient
sources, while the _Consolation of Philosophy_, written in prison by the
Roman Platonist Boethius in A. D. 525, was easily the most popular book
of the Middle Ages. It was translated into English by Alfred the Great
and by Chaucer, and into many other European languages. It was on these
foundations that the French Platonism of the twelfth century, and
especially that of the School of Chartres, was built up, and the
influence of that school in England was very great indeed. The names of
Grosseteste and Roger Bacon may just be mentioned in this connexion, and
it would not be hard to show that the special character of the
contribution which English writers have been able to make to science and
philosophy is in large measure attributable to this influence.
But the interest of Greek philosophy is not only historical; it is full
of instruction for the future too. Since the time of Locke, philosophy
has been apt to limit itself to discussions about the nature of
knowledge, and to leave questions about the nature of the world to
specialists. The history of Greek philosophy shows the danger of this
unnatural division of the province of thought, and the more we study it,
the more we shall feel the need of a more comprehensive view. The
'philosophy of things human', as the Greeks called it, is only one
department among others, and the theory of knowledge is only one
department of that. If studied in isolation from the whole, it must
inevitably become one-sided. From Greek philosophy we can also learn
that it is fatal to divorce speculation from the service of mankind. The
notion that philosophy could be so isolated would have been wholly
unintelligible to any of the great Greek thinkers, and most of all
perhaps to the Platonists who are often charged with this very heresy.
Above all, we can learn from Greek philosophy the paramount importance
of what we call the personality and they called the soul. It was just
because the Greeks realized this that the genuinely Hellenic idea of
conversion played so great a part in their thinking and in their lives.
That, above all, is the lesson they have to teach, and that is why the
writings of their great philosophers have still the power to convert the
souls of all that will receive their teaching with humility.