a mere intellectual training in the liberal arts might have upon the
average morals of a large society. To-day I propose to take you into a
higher atmosphere, and consider what occupied the élite of Greek society
in their advanced education, and in their speculations on the nature of
things. You must not underrate the enormous advantages the well-born
youth then possessed in training his mind, as compared with the youth of
to-day. In the first place, a very moderate income would keep a
household in comfort, and remove all the grinding care which, in this
our modern life with its myriad exigencies, torments so many respectable
families. In the next place, the demon of competition had not invaded
these states, nor was it possible to do as I and many others have done,
to be a slave for some years in order to obtain a competence by passing
first in a single examination. In the third place, there was no object
in travelling long distances. What was worth seeing, lay within easy
reach. In modern life there is only Holland, and perhaps Northern Italy,
which offers the same delights within short distances. The huge amount
of time spent by Americans in travelling is perhaps one of the most
serious obstacles to their intellectual advancement. If North America
were compressed into one tenth its size, its inhabitants might gain some
leisure for better education.
The obvious thing that will strike any intelligent American, who has
only heard of Plato, and wants to make his acquaintance through Jowett’s
noble translation, is the amount of time these Dialogues waste in
arriving at a conclusion. Nay often they represent a very long
conversation which comes to no conclusion at all. Yet that feature is
essential to all higher training of the human mind. You may appear to
the vulgar to be wasting time, and yet it is not wasting time, but doing
the best you can for a great object. The earth moving in its orbit need
not delay its regular course because it revolves upon its axis, and
causes its whole surface to enjoy the blessed light of the sun. And the
next thing you will find in Plato’s Dialogues (the best exponent of
higher education I know) is that the objects in view are not those of
sense, or of the material needs of life, or of obtaining success in the
world. They all, like Saint Paul’s reasonings with Felix, have to do
with righteousness and temperance, and judgment to come. But even this
field, that of ethical inquiry, is not the highest to which Greek
education attained. For their early teachers taught them to think about
the universe and its constitution, the nature of mind, the nature of
matter, and other high questions of abstract metaphysic.
A notable point about this Greek philosophy is that the priest or the
enchanter has nothing to say to it. The sage was a layman, who need fear
no pope, no ban of the Church, in using his reason freely upon the
problems even of theology. There were indeed isolated cases, where a man
who denied the existence of the traditional gods, or was supposed so to
do, was pursued by popular indignation. Diagoras of Melos, called the
atheist, was driven from the societies which thought such teaching
dangerous; Socrates was prosecuted in like manner, because he was
suspected of spreading scepticism among the youth, but he was executed
only because he behaved in a manner highly contumacious to the
established order of the State. Had he defended himself in the ordinary
routine, he would at most have been subjected to a fine. These isolated
cases are only mentioned lest you should imagine that they were typical.
Greek philosophy being secular, was therefore free.
The earliest thinkers, those of the Ionic school, set themselves to
solve by speculation the very question which now engrosses our deepest
researches in physics. They thought out, or they inferred from their
observations, that “things are not as they seem”; they found out, what
we have attained by long experiment, that the many qualities our senses
perceive are not fundamental or primary, that as Descartes and Locke and
Spinoza taught, mechanical composition and varying degrees of motion in
minute particles of the same kind may produce wholly diverse
impressions. The most obvious and striking of these to the ordinary man
is the case of colour. Descartes had anticipated that the pace of the
rotation of particles made the differences; we know now that it is not
rotation, but vibration of ether, and so with variation in tones. But
the differences both of colours and sounds are due to the more or less
rapid motion of the vibration. This was what Thales and Anaximenes and
Anaximander felt when they said that the world consisted of one
element, that moisture, caloric, ether, were the primitive stuff of
which the world was composed. And these famous men were not mere
metaphysicians, they showed their intellectual greatness in various
ways. Thales actually predicted an eclipse, to the astonishment of his
contemporaries.[45] He showed them that the lesser bear, ending in the
pole star, was a better indication for the sailor to use than the
greater. He solved the problem of measuring the height of an
inaccessible object by comparing its shadow with that of a small one
within reach. He gave valuable advices in politics. So that his
metaphysic was both the source and the climax of a wide mental activity.
So with Anaximander. He attempted the first map of the known world and
made signal advances in astronomy. Anaximenes declared that eclipses
were the concealing of one heavenly body by the interposition of
another. These were great feats; but they were nothing in comparison to
the bold attempts at solving the problem of the origin and nature of the
world, wherein their speculations, often erroneous, nevertheless left a
residuum of thoughts that were the seeds of all our higher philosophy.
If Thales laid it down that in all the varieties of plant and animal
life there was a common element which was their real or original
substance, Anaximander thought that caloric (or the igneous principle)
was necessary to develop the original material. His book is lost, and
his views not clear to us, but we know that his geological observations
told him that our world had once been covered with water, from which
land had emerged. He was moreover the first to maintain that nothing was
eternal except the primeval substance of things.
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
In the largest sense, even applying it to the gods of the Greek
Pantheon, did he assert this colossal doctrine. Anaximenes went further,
and, assuming that the particles of ether are the most subtle in the
universe, he set up the principle of rarification and condensation of
matter, asserting that this was the one great cause of the differences
in the bodies we perceive. This then was the first expression of the
doctrine of the Atomists, which has lasted to the present day.
It is a common piece of arrogance among experimentalists to say that
these wonderful anticipations of modern science were mere gropings in
the dark, supported not by experiment, but by what we should call
superficial observations. The wonder is all the greater that these men
should in their theories have gone to the root of the matter, and
thought out the metaphysical possibilities of the composition of the
world. Abstract thinking--theory--is after all the true basis of every
great discovery. In complete disregard of the theological cosmogony
derived from the old poets, they openly inaugurated the birth of a
natural science engendered by pure and high thinking.
This is even more signally the case with Heracleitus of Ephesus. But I
can only give you some of his marvellous anticipations in a few words;
to go into any one of these systems would require a whole lecture, not a
passage in this discourse. In the first place he agreed with both his
predecessors, that one subtle element was the foundation of all nature
and this he sought in what the vulgar call fire, but with him a far more
subtle essence, never still for an instant. From this all the universe
had been evolved by a process of cooling, and had developed into earth,
water, and the rest, but in the end these would return into their
original condition, “so that the earth would be rolled up as a scroll,
and the elements dissolved with fervent heat.” This far-off glimpse of
Laplace’s theory, which postulates our whole planetary system starting
from a revolving mass at white heat, is less striking than another that
lays down the principle that there are endless motions in things which
the senses cannot perceive, and that absolute rest is impossible in
nature.
The world was never made;
It will change, but it will not fade.
So let the wind range
For even and morn, ever will be, thro’ eternity.
Nothing was born, nothing will die,
All things will change.[46]
It is but yesterday that the newest physical philosophers have declared
themselves for this doctrine, and tell us that every particle of matter
is made up of lesser particles in perpetual motion. Heracleitus was no
less clear on the relativity of the qualities of matter, which are good
or bad according to the percipient, and from that he drew the
conclusion that apparent contradictions may coexist and that all nature
consists in a perpetual conflict between opposites. Nature is a state of
war said he, using the term in a far deeper sense than did later men.
These amazing conjectures were set down in a quaint, picturesque, but
abstruse treatise, which even Aristotle found difficult to grasp, but if
ever a great imagination sowed seeds in the minds of men, which after
long generations germinated into modern science, it was that of
Heracleitus. His dark enigmas, seasoned with pessimistic utterances,
with supreme contempt of the ordinary public, were always attractive and
stimulating to keen minds.
The next great name in this magnificent series is Pythagoras, whose
influence revolutionised not only the science but the politics and
ethics of Greece, and created new ideals among men, higher and purer
than those of traditional morality. But as I have already said something
of him in a former discourse, I will hurry on to his contemporaries and
his successors.
The founder of the great school of Elea, an old Greek colony of Ionians
in the Italian bay south of Pæstum, was Xenophanes, whose main feature
was a bold criticism of the popular theology, as represented by the
poetry of Homer. He could easily show the moral defects of the denizens
of the Homeric Olympus, and hence inferring their unreality, he pressed
home the great doctrine of the unity of the universe, whether ideal or
real, and the identification of the Maker (if there ever was a Maker)
with his work--a theory which has existed from that day to this under
the name of Pantheism, and as such has fascinated the higher spirits
even among the cold and practical Anglo-Saxons. This feeling of unity in
all the world with the Eternal Cause of the world has indeed appeared in
the far East in other and strange systems of philosophy; but never was
the doctrine discussed with such variety as among the Greeks. Lofty
poetry, hard logic, bitter controversy were all called in to support it,
and among a clear-sighted, sceptical race, like the Greeks, so vague and
transcendent a theory is far more striking and therefore more fruitful
in its spiritual consequences, than when professed by mere ascetics or
anchorites who have no contact with common life, and who will not
condescend to argument. The Greek Pantheists of the early period were
men of high character in public life, respected for their practical
wisdom and their literary eminence, and it was they that forced upon
the world the astounding theory that not only are all the data of our
senses illusory and vain, but that even the assumption of any number of
original elements or substances is idle, and must terminate in the great
_One_, which embraces them all, and merges gods and men, matter and
mind, into that all-embracing Single Being, of whom a forgotten mystic
in a later age (but still a Greek) has used this tremendous metaphor:
the “gods are his laughter, the race of mortal men his tears.”
The positive side of the doctrine was mainly due to Parmenides, of whom
Plato speaks with greater respect than of any other thinker except
Socrates, and it was clearly a further development, or urging to their
extreme consequences, of the older theories which reduced all the
various qualities of the world of sense to the manifestations of a
single substance. But they had each made some one reservation and upheld
one of the data of the senses, but each a different one. Was not
therefore the inference clear that this was but a half-way house, and
that what we call mind and matter are after all not radically distinct
but only separate aspects of the primeval one?
If you think this old-world and idle speculation, I need only refer you
to Descartes, the father of modern scientific metaphysic, who held that
his two universal factors, extension and thought, were after all but
qualities of the one all-embracing substance which he called God; or I
may refer to Spinoza, the spiritual pupil of Descartes, and the most
important Pantheist of the seventeenth, or perhaps of any, century.
The positive arguments in favour of this subtle speculation, which to
the vulgar public of any age must always remain absurd, were in the
first place the untrustworthy character of our senses, which could be
shown not only to be misleading but to give contradictory reports
concerning the same thing; next the general consent of all thinkers that
there must be something permanent and indestructible in the midst of all
the changes of phenomena; then the inability of any perceived substance,
such as water, or air, however subtle, to satisfy this condition of
permanence, and to take a position superior to the attacks of rival
theories. You must therefore abstract more and more from all qualities
till you reach that pure Being, which is all and none, spirit and body,
unity and infinity, eternal, indestructible, invariable, the source and
substance of all that ever did or ever will exist.
You can well imagine how these splendid dreams were regarded by the
clever and practical Greek public, as indeed they have been by average
men from that day to this, whenever the great theory has been stated
afresh by metaphysicians or by mystics. It was the special merit of the
Eleatic Zeno (not the great Stoic who lived far later) to show the
carping critic that the difficulties which had led the philosopher to
discard the senses as guides to truth, can be raised in the case of the
common facts of our everyday life, and that the scoffer cannot solve
them. I lay stress on these intellectual puzzles, because they have
occupied philosophers perpetually down to the present day, and in no
particular case can we affirm more decidedly that the Greeks were the
fathers of modern thinking. And do not for a moment imagine that because
these subtleties lead to no immediate result, they are therefore barren.
You might as well say that physical games and exercises are of no use,
because they merely result in strengthening and improving the human
frame and the human temper, apart from any further result. Now what were
Zeno’s puzzles? I will mention but the most obvious. Is it conceivable
that sound should be made up of non-sounding things? And yet this
absurdity is demonstrable. Drop a single millet seed from your hand upon
the grass. It will not make the smallest noise. Go on with a second, a
third, and so on, till you reach thousands; it is so with them all. Yet
if you turn out a cartful of such seeds, it will make a considerable
noise. How is it possible, if each individual grain is silent? Again,
you imagine that if two bodies are moving in the same direction, one
slower, the other faster, the latter will soon overtake the former. It
is not so, and can be proved impossible. Conceive the swift-footed
Achilles trying to overtake a tortoise, and that he runs one hundred
yards, while the other is crawling but ten. When he has completed his
one hundred, the tortoise is still one ahead, when he has added this
one, the tortoise is still 1/10 ahead, then 1/100, then 1/1000, and so
on _ad infinitum_, for it is mathematically certain that neither series
can ever reach the limit, in the one case of III, in the other of II
yards. Therefore it is demonstrated that Achilles can never in all time
overtake the tortoise.
But we may go even farther and say that the very idea of motion is
inconceivable. Every moving body must move in time, and time is divided
into moments of time. At each moment the moving body must either be in
the place where it is, or the place where it is not. The latter being
manifestly absurd, the body must be in the place where it is. But then
of course it is not moving, for motion can only be defined as a change
of place. Continuous motion is therefore inconceivable.
I need not do more than mention to you, that these very problems, handed
down by Zeno to the schools, formed the subject of interminable disputes
for centuries, and if you even now, with all your boasted progress, take
them in hand, you will not easily find a logical solution. Happily we
are no longer in the condition of those mediæval pedants, of whom we
hear that not a few went mad, or died of brain fever, because they could
not reconcile the foreknowledge and foreordaining of things by God with
the absolute free will of men. Nor are any of you, I sincerely trust,
encumbered with the extraordinary fairness of mind of the mediæval ass
of Buridanus which being set between two bundles of hay exactly and
precisely alike, died of starvation because it could see no possible
reason for preferring to eat the one before the other. Nevertheless, I
trust you will appreciate that the mental subtlety we inherit from the
Greeks is no small part of our education.
But it is not merely in the hard logic of controversy that the Greek
Pantheists have left a great legacy to mankind. If I mistake not, the
higher poetry of these latter days is deeply indebted to that grandiose
theory, that all nature is but one, that all things whether mute or
speaking, whether still or moving, whether fair or hideous, are all the
manifestations of the one great All, the ineffable substance which some
call a world-soul, some the universe, some God, the supreme _One_,
without variableness or shadow of turning, though only apprehended by
man in myriad variations. You can find that view of things in Shelley,
in Wordsworth, in Tennyson, and it is not too much to say that at their
highest moments, and in their noblest verse, they are all inspired with
this Divine intoxication. It is common to call it Platonism, and my old
friend Mr. Shorthouse even wrote an essay to show that the respectable
and orderly Wordsworth could hardly be called a Christian, so saturated
was he with this Pantheistic feeling. His visions of the pre-existence
of the human soul--these were indeed Platonic; his Pantheistic passages
come from the influence which Plato acknowledges, but which he does not
allow to subjugate him. Wordsworth is the most uneven and often prosaic
of poets, but in his greatest moments he too feels that intercommunion
of all nature which is unmistakably Greek and not English--
A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,--
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things.
Time fails me to go into the fascinating subject of the Pantheism of
Tennyson, and of other of our poets. It is indeed only spasmodic, but it
is there, and is a strange note in the singing of an otherwise tame and
prosaic race.
Let us now return to the great procession of the sages of Hellas. It
does not seem necessary to delay long upon Anaxagoras and Empedocles,
though both were very great figures in their day. The principle feature
in both their systems was that they felt the want of some ideal, or
semi-ideal principle to work as a cause in producing the changes in
nature. Anaxagoras postulated the original particles to be very diverse
in quality and to enter into the composition of ordinary things so as
to make up what we call their various qualities. The food we eat, for
example, affects all the various parts of human bodies, however
different, such as the tissue of the flesh, the hair, the nails, the
viscera, because there is in this food, which is made up from corn or
other vegetable and animal substances, an assortment of particles each
of which contributes to nourish the member or part akin to it. If we ask
how external bodies are brought together, and made up into unities,
Anaxagoras felt so keenly the necessity of a moving cause that he set up
his famous _Nous_, which we cannot translate by the word _mind_, for it
was still a material cause, though far more subtle and active than the
rest, such as we now imagine ether to be. But even so, Aristotle speaks
of Anaxagoras as a great and fruitful innovator, inasmuch as he saw that
brute matter cannot begin to act or even to move without some
non-material or spiritual, or ideal cause. From what we know of
Anaxagoras, he advanced but a little step in this direction himself; he
was only groping his way, but to have been pioneer to Plato and to
Aristotle is itself no mean praise. In a similar direction, the famous
Empedocles postulated the principles of Love and Hate, much as we now
postulate Attraction and Repulsion, to explain the varieties, and the
movements, in external nature.
Observe that not one of these Ionic philosophers had yet asserted the
great contrast of mind and matter, the still greater contrast of a
Divine architect and his work. The phenomena of mind seemed to them but
to be the result of a subtle and more impalpable combination of elements
not differing in kind from the nature of material substances. So when a
wholly different school came to review what the ancients had
accomplished, the _Nous_ of Anaxagoras, and the Love and Hate of
Empedocles, were hardly felt to be steps in advance. In fact for a while
the development seemed to be the other way, for the last great theory we
have to notice, before we come to the ideal philosophy of Plato and his
followers, is more decidedly materialistic than all its predecessors.
That is the famous Atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus, which
maintained that the universe contains no elements but atoms and the
void, the atoms being hard physical particles of only one quality but
capable of myriad mechanical combinations in and by means of the void,
or empty space which existed more or less in every body. As a
hypothesis, this is the simplest that has ever been offered to explain
the constitution of matter; it has consequently lasted all through the
Renascence of learning into the newer age and has formed the very basis
of the modern science of chemistry. The original atoms were not
conceived as mathematical points, or as having any spiritual quality
like the monads of Leibnitz; they were merely very small, impenetrable,
and differing in figure. It was the density of their combination and
hence the small fraction of void spaces in any body which made the
difference of specific gravity, and the difference of their shape
produced other qualities.