CHAPTER I.

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THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS

VOL I.

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS

by

ALFRED WILLIAM BENN

Εὑρηκέναι μὲν οὖν τινὰς τῶν ἀρχαίων καὶ μακαρίων φιλοσόφων τὸ ἀληθὲς

δεῖ νομίζειν· τίνες δὲ οἱ τυχόντες μάλιστα καὶ πῶς ἂν καὶ ἡμῖν σύνεσις

περὶ τούτων γένοιτο ἐπισκέψασθαι προσήκει

PLOTINUS

Quamquam ab his philosophiam et omnes ingenuas disciplinas habemus:

sed tamen est aliquid quod nobis non liceat, liceat illis

CICERO

In Two Volumes

VOL. I.

London

Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1 Paternoster Square

1882

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

TO

J. B. B.

PREFACE.

A considerable portion of the present work, comprising the whole of the

first volume and the first two chapters of the second, is reprinted

with corrections and additions from the _Westminster Review_. The last

chapter of the second volume has already appeared under a slightly

different title in _Mind_ for January and April 1882. The chapters

entitled, ‘The Sceptics and Eclectics,’ ‘The Religious Revival,’ and

‘The Spiritualism of Plotinus,’ are now published for the first time.

The subject of Greek philosophy is so vast that, in England at least,

it has become customary to deal with it in detached portions rather

than as a connected whole. This method has its advantages, but it has

also its drawbacks. The critic who singles out some one thinker for

special study is apt to exaggerate the importance of his hero and

to credit him with the origination of principles which were really

borrowed from his predecessors. Moreover, the appearance of a new idea

can only be made intelligible by tracing the previous tendencies which

it either continues, combines, or contradicts. In a word, the history

of philosophy has itself a philosophy which requires that we should go

beyond particular phenomena and view them as variously related parts of

a single system.

The history of Greek philosophy, whether conceived in this

comprehensive sense or as an erudite investigation into matters of

detail, is a province which the Germans have made peculiarly their own;

and, among German scholars, Dr. Zeller is the one who has treated it

with most success. My obligations to his great work are sufficiently

shown by the copious references to it which occur throughout the

following pages. It is in those instances--and they are, unfortunately,

very numerous--where our knowledge of particular philosophers and

of their opinions rests on fragmentary or second-hand information,

that I have found his assistance most valuable. This has especially

been the case with reference to the pre-Socratic schools, the minor

successors of Socrates, the earlier Stoics, the Sceptics, and the later

Pythagoreans. I must, however, guard against the supposition that my

work is, in any respect, a popularisation or abridgment of Zeller’s. To

popularise Zeller would, indeed, be an impertinence, for nothing can

be more luminous and interesting than his style and general mode of

exposition. Nor am I playing the part of a finder to a large telescope;

for my point of view by no means coincides with that of the learned

German historian. Thus, while my limits have obliged me to be content

with a very summary treatment of many topics which he has discussed

at length, there are others, and those, in my opinion, not the least

important, to which he has given less space than will be found allotted

to them here. On several questions, also, I have ventured to controvert

his opinions, notably with reference to the Sophists, Socrates,

Aristotle, and Plotinus. My general way of looking at the Greeks

and their philosophy also differs from his. And the reasons which

have led me to follow an independent course in this respect involve

considerations of such interest and importance, that I shall take the

liberty of specifying them in some detail.

Stated briefly, Zeller’s theory of ancient thought is that the Greeks

originally lived in harmony with Nature; that the bond was broken by

philosophy and particularly by the philosophy of Socrates; that the

discord imperfectly overcome by Plato and Aristotle revealed itself

once more in the unreconciled, self-concentrated subjectivity of the

later schools; that this hopeless estrangement, after reaching its

climax in the mysticism of the Neo-Platonists, led to the complete

collapse of independent speculation; and that the creation of a new

consciousness by the advent of Christianity and of the Germanic races

was necessary in order to the successful resumption of scientific

enquiry. Zeller was formerly a Hegelian, and it seems to me that he

still retains far too much of the Hegelian formalism in his historical

constructions. The well-worked antithesis between object and subject,

even after being revised in a positivist sense, is totally inadequate

to the burden laid on it by this theory; and if we want really to

understand the causes which first hampered, then arrested, and finally

paralysed Greek philosophy, we must seek for them in a more concrete

order of considerations. Zeller, with perfect justice, attributes

the failure of Plato and Aristotle to their defective observation of

Nature and their habit of regarding the logical combinations of ideas

derived from the common use of words as an adequate representative

of the relations obtaining among things in themselves. But it seems

an extremely strained and artificial explanation to say that their

shortcomings in this respect were due to a confusion of the objective

and the subjective, consequent on the imperfect separation of the

Greek mind from Nature--a confusion, it is added, which only the

advent of a new religion and a new race could overcome.[1] It is

unfair to make Hellenism as a whole responsible for fallacies which

might easily be paralleled in the works of modern metaphysicians;

and the unfairness will become still more evident when we remember

that, after enjoying the benefit of Christianity and Germanism for a

thousand years, the modern world had still to take its first lessons

in patience of observation, in accuracy of reasoning, and in sobriety

of expression from such men as Thucydides and Hippocrates, Polybius,

Archimêdes and Hipparchus. Even had the Greeks as a nation been less

keen to distinguish between illusion and reality than their successors

up to the sixteenth century--a supposition notoriously the reverse of

true--it would still have to be explained why Plato and Aristotle,

with their prodigious intellects, went much further astray than their

predecessors in the study of Nature. And this Zeller’s method does not

explain at all.

Again, I think that Zeller quite misconceives the relation between

Greek philosophy and Greek life when he attributes the intellectual

decline of the post-Aristotelian period, in part at least, to the

simultaneous ruin of public spirit and political independence. The

degeneracy of poetry and art, of eloquence and history, may perhaps

be accounted for in this way, but not the relaxation of philosophical

activity. On the contrary, the disappearance of political interests

was of all conditions the most favourable to speculation, as witness

the Ionians, Democritus, and Aristotle. Had the independence and

power of the great city-republics been prolonged much further, it

is probable--as the example of the Sophists and Socrates seems to

show--that philosophy would have become still more absorbingly moral

and practical than it actually became in the Stoic, Epicurean, and

Sceptical schools. And theoretical studies did, in fact, receive

a great impulse from the Macedonian conquest, a large fund of

intellectual energy being diverted from public affairs to the pursuit

of knowledge, only it took the direction of positive science rather

than of general speculation.[2]

The cause which first arrested and finally destroyed the free movement

of Greek thought was not any intrinsic limitation or corruption of the

Greek genius, but the ever-increasing preponderance of two interests,

both tending, although in different ways and different degrees, to

strengthen the principle of authority and to enfeeble the principle of

reason. One was the theological interest, the other was the scholastic

interest. The former was the more conspicuous and the more mischievous

of the two. From the persecution of Anaxagoras to the prohibition

of philosophical teaching by Justinian, we may trace the rise and

spread of a reaction towards superstition, sometimes advancing and

sometimes receding, but, on the whole, gaining ground from age to age,

until from the noontide splendour of Pericles we pass to that long

night which stretches in almost impenetrable darkness down to the

red and stormy daybreak of the Crusades. And it was a reaction which

extended through all classes, including the philosophers themselves.

It seems to me that where the Athenian school, from Socrates on, fall

short of their predecessors, as in some points they unquestionably

do, their inferiority is largely due to this cause. Its influence

is very perceptible in weakening the speculative energies of those

who stand at the greatest distance from the popular beliefs. It was

because dislike for theology occupied so large a place in the thoughts

of Epicurus and his disciples, that they valued science only as a

refutation of its teaching, instead of regarding it simply as an

obstacle to be removed from the path of enquiry. More than this; they

became infected with the spirit of that against which they fought, and

their absolute indifference to truth was the shadow which it cast on

their minds.

The theological interest and the scholastic interest, though not

necessarily associated, have, as already observed, a point of contact

in their common exaltation of authority. Thus, for our present purpose

they may be classified under the more general notion of traditionalism.

By this term I understand a disposition to accept as true opinions

received either by the mass of mankind or by the best accredited

teachers, and to throw these opinions into a form adapted for easy

transmission to others. In this sense, traditionalism is Janus-faced,

looking on one side to the past and on the other to the future. Now

philosophy could only gain general acceptance by becoming a tradition.

For a long time the Greek thinkers busied themselves almost exclusively

with the discovery of truth, remaining comparatively indifferent to

its diffusion. As Plato says, they went their own way without caring

whether they took us along with them or not.[3] And it was at this

period that the most valuable speculative ideas were first originated.

At last a strong desire arose among the higher classes to profit by the

results of the new learning, and a class of men came into existence

whose profession was to gratify this desire. But the Sophists, as

they were called, soon found that lessons in the art of life were

more highly appreciated and more liberally rewarded than lessons in

the constitution of Nature. Accordingly, with the facile ingenuity of

Greeks, they set to work proving, first that Nature could not be known,

and finally that there was no such thing as Nature at all. The real

philosophers were driven to secure their position by a change of front.

They became teachers themselves, disguising their lessons, however,

under the form of a search after truth undertaken conjointly with their

friends, who, of course, were not expected to pay for the privilege

of giving their assistance, and giving it for so admirable a purpose.

In this co-operative system, the person who led the conversation was

particularly careful to show that his conclusions followed directly

from the admissions of his interlocutors, being, so to speak, latent

in their minds, and only needing a little obstetric assistance on his

part to bring them into the light of day. And the better to rivet their

attention, he chose for the subject of discussion questions of human

interest, or else, when the conversation turned to physical phenomena,

he led the way towards a teleological or aesthetical interpretation of

their meaning.

Thus, where Zeller says that the Greek philosophers confounded the

objective with the subjective because they were still imperfectly

separated from Nature, we seem to have come on a less ambitious but

more intelligible explanation of the facts, and one capable of being

stated with as much generality as his. Not only among the Greeks but

everywhere, culture is more or less antagonistic to originality,

and the diffusion to the enlargement of knowledge. Thought is like

water; when spread over a wider surface it is apt to become stagnant

and shallow. When ideas could only live on the condition of being

communicated to a large circle of listeners, they were necessarily

adapted to the taste and lowered to the comprehension of relatively

vulgar minds. And not only so, but the habit of taking their opinions

and prejudices as the starting-point of every enquiry frequently led

to the investment of those opinions and prejudices with the formal

sanction of a philosophical demonstration. It was held that education

consisted less in the acquisition of new truth than in the elevation

to clearer consciousness of truths which had all along been dimly

perceived.

To the criticism and systematisation of common language and common

opinion succeeded the more laborious criticism and systematisation of

philosophical theories. Such an enormous amount of labour was demanded

for the task of working up the materials amassed by Greek thought

during the period of its creative originality, and accommodating them

to the popular belief, that not much could be done in the way of adding

to their extent. Nor was this all. Among the most valuable ideas of the

earlier thinkers were those which stood in most striking opposition

to the evidence of the senses. As such they were excluded from the

system which had for its object the reorganisation of philosophy on

the basis of general consent. Thus not only did thought tend to become

stationary, but it even abandoned some of the ground which had been

formerly won.

Not that the vitality of Hellenic reason gave way simultaneously at

every point. The same independent spirit, the same imaginative vigour

which had carried physical speculation to such splendid conquests

during the first two centuries of its existence were manifested with

equal effect when the energies previously devoted to Nature as a

whole concentrated themselves on the study of conduct and belief. It

was thus that Socrates could claim the whole field of human life for

scientific treatment, and create the method by which it has ever since

been most successfully studied. It was thus that Plato could analyse

and ideally reconstruct all practices, institutions, and beliefs. It

was thus that Aristotle, while definitely arresting the progress of

research, could still complete the method and create the language

through which the results of new research have been established,

recognised, and communicated ever since. It was thus that the Stoics

advanced from paradox to paradox until they succeeded in co-ordinating

morality for all time by reference to the three fundamental ideas of

personal conscience, individual obligation, and universal humanity.

And not only were dialectics and ethics at first animated by the same

enterprising spirit as speculative physics, but their very existence

as recognised studies must be ascribed to its decay, to the revolution

through which philosophy, from being purely theoretical, became social

and didactic. While in some directions thought was made stationary

and even retrogressive by the very process of its diffusion, in

other directions this diffusion was the cause of its more complete

development. Finally, ethics and logic were reduced to a scholastic

routine, and progress continued to be made only in the positive

sciences, until, here also, it was brought to an end by the triumph of

superstition and barbarism combined.

If the cessation of speculative activity among the Greeks needs to

be accounted for by something more definite than phrases about the

objective and the subjective, so also does its resumption among the

nations of modern Europe. This may be explained by two different

circumstances--the disappearance of the obstacles which had long

opposed themselves to the free exercise of reason, and the stimulus

given to enquiry by the Copernican astronomy. After spreading over

the whole basin of the Mediterranean, Hellenic culture had next to

repair the ravages of the barbarians, and, chiefly under the form of

Christianity, to make itself accepted by the new nationalities which

had risen on the ruins of the Roman empire. So arduous a task was

sufficient to engross, during many centuries, the entire intellectual

energies of Western Europe. At last the extreme limits of diffusion

were provisionally reached, and thought once more became available for

the discovery of new truth. Simultaneously with this consummation,

the great supernaturalist reaction, having also reached its extreme

limits, had so far subsided, that Nature could once more be studied on

scientific principles, with less freedom, indeed, than in old Ionia,

but still with tolerable security against the vengeance of interested

or fanatical opponents. And at the very same conjuncture it was shown

by the accumulated observations of many ages that the conception of

the universe on which the accepted philosophy rested must be replaced

by one of a directly opposite description. I must confess that in this

vast revolution the relation between the objective and the subjective,

as reconstituted by Christianity and the Germanic genius, does not seem

to me to have played a very prominent part.

If Zeller’s semi-Hegelian theory of history does scant justice to

the variety and complexity of causes determining the evolution of

philosophy, it also draws away attention from the ultimate elements,

the matter, in an Aristotelian sense, of which that evolution consists.

By this I mean the development of particular ideas as distinguished

from the systems into which they enter as component parts. Often

the formation of a system depends on an accidental combination of

circumstances, and therefore cannot be brought under any particular law

of progress, while the ideas out of which it is constructed exhibit a

perfectly regular advance on the form under which they last appeared.

Others, again, are characterised by a remarkable fixity which enables

them to persist unchanged through the most varied combinations and the

most protracted intervals of time. But when each system is regarded

as, so to speak, an organic individual, the complete and harmonious

expression of some one phase of thought, and the entire series of

systems as succeeding one another in strict logical order according

to some simple law of evolution, there will be a certain tendency to

regard the particular elements of each as determined by the character

of the whole to which they belong, rather than by their intrinsic

nature and antecedent history. And I think it is owing to this

limitation of view that Zeller has not illustrated, so fully as could

be desired, the subtler references by which the different schools of

philosophy are connected with one another and also with the literature

of their own and other times.

An interesting example of the process on which I have just touched

is offered by the reappearance and further elaboration of some most

important Greek ideas in modern philosophy. In the concluding chapter

of this work I have attempted to indicate the chief lines along

which such a transmission may be traced. The subject is one which

has hitherto been unduly neglected. No critic would be justified in

describing the speculative movement of the nineteenth century without

constant reference to the metaphysicians and moralists of the two

preceding centuries. Yet the dependence of those thinkers on the

schools of antiquity is hardly less intimate than our dependence on

Spinoza and Hume. Nevertheless, in no work that I am acquainted with

has this circumstance been used to elucidate the course pursued by

modern thought; indeed, I may say that the persistence of Hellenic

ideas down to the most recent times has not been fully recognised by

any scholar except Prof. Teichmüller, who has particularly devoted

his attention to the history of conceptions as distinguished from the

history of systems.

The introduction of Teichmüller’s name affords me an opportunity

for mentioning that my attention was not directed to his brilliant

researches into various questions connected with Greek philosophy,

and more particularly with the systems of Plato and Aristotle,

until it was too late for me to profit by them in the present work.

I allude more particularly to his _Studien zur Geschichte der

Begriffe_ (Berlin, 1874), and to his recently published _Literarische

Fehden im vierten Jahrhundert vor Chr._ (Breslau, 1881). The chief

points of the former work are, that Plato was really a pantheist

or monist, not, as is commonly believed and as I have myself taken

for granted, a dualist; that, as a consequence of the suppression

of individuality which characterises his system, he did not really

accept or teach the doctrine of personal immortality, although he

wished that the mass of the people should believe it; that Plato

no more attributed a transcendent existence to his ideas than did

Aristotle to his substantial forms; and that in putting an opposite

interpretation on his old master’s theory, Aristotle is guilty of

gross misrepresentation. The most important point of the _Literarische

Fehden_ is that Aristotle published his _Ethics_ while Plato was still

alive and engaged in the composition of his _Laws_, and that certain

passages in the latter work, of which one relates to free-will and the

other to the unity of virtue (861, A ff. and 962 ff.) were intended as

a reply to Aristotle’s well-known criticisms on the Platonic theory of

ethics.

I have been necessarily brief in my statement of Teichmüller’s

theses; and to judge of them apart from the facts and arguments by

which they are supported in the two very interesting volumes above

named would be in the highest degree unfair. I feel bound, however,

to mention the chief reasons which make me hesitate to accept his

conclusions. It seems to me, then, that although Plato was moving

in the direction of pantheism--as I have myself pointed out in more

than one passage of this work--he never actually reached it. For

(i.) he does not, like Plotinus, attempt to deduce his material from

his ideal principle, but only blends without reconciling them in the

world of sensible experience. (ii.) In opposing the perishable nature

of the individual (or rather the particular) to the eternal nature

of the universal, he is going on the facts of experience rather than

on any necessary opposition between the two, and on experience of

material or sensible objects rather than of immaterial souls; while,

even as regards material objects, the heavenly bodies, to which he

attributes everlasting duration, constitute such a sweeping exception

to his rule as entirely to destroy its applicability. (iii.) Plato’s

multiplied and elaborate arguments for the immortality of the soul

would be superfluous were his only object to prove that the soul, like

everything else, contains an eternal element. (iv.) The Pythagorean

theory that the soul is a harmony, which Plato rejects, would have

been perfectly compatible with the ideal and impersonal immortality

which Teichmüller supposes him to have taught; for while the particular

harmony perishes, the general laws of harmony remain. (v.) Teichmüller

does not dispose satisfactorily of Plato’s crowning argument that the

idea of life is as inseparable from the soul as heat from fire or cold

from snow. He says (_op. cit._, p. 134) that, on this principle, the

individual soul may still perish, just as particular portions of fire

are extinguished and particular portions of snow are melted. Yes, but

portions of fire do not grow cold, nor portions of snow hot, which and

which alone would offer an analogy to the extinction of a soul.

I agree, however, with Teichmüller that the doctrines of reminiscence

and metempsychosis have a purely mythical significance, and I should

have expressed my views on the subject with more definiteness and

decision had I known that his authority might be quoted in their

support. I think that Plato was in a transition state from the Oriental

to what afterwards became the Christian theory of retribution. In

the one he found an allegorical illustration of his metaphysics,

in the other a very serious sanction for his ethics. He felt their

incompatibility, but was not prepared to undertake such a complete

reconstruction of his system as would have been necessitated by

altogether denying the pre-existence of the soul. Of such vacillation

Plato’s later Dialogues offer, I think, sufficient evidence. For

example, the Matter of the _Timacus_ seems to be a revised version

of the Other or principle of division and change, which has already

figured as a pure idea, in which capacity it must necessarily be

opposed to matter. At the same time, I must observe that, from my point

of view, it is enough if Plato inculcated the doctrine of a future life

as an important element of his religious system. And that he did so

inculcate it Teichmüller fully admits.[4]

With regard to the _Nicomachean Ethics_, I think Teichmüller has proved

this much, that it was written before Aristotle had read the _Laws_

or knew of its existence. But this does not prove that he wrote it

during Plato’s lifetime, since the _Laws_ was not published until after

Plato’s death, possibly not until several years after. And, published

or not, Aristotle may very well have remained ignorant of its existence

until his return to Athens, which, according to the tradition, took

place about 336 B.C. Teichmüller does, indeed, suppose that Aristotle

spent some time in Athens between his flight from Mitylênê and his

engagement as tutor to Alexander (_Literarische Fehden_, p. 261). But

this theory, besides its purely conjectural character, would still

allow the possibility of Aristotle’s having remained unacquainted with

the _Laws_ up to the age of forty. And it is obvious that the passages

which Teichmüller interprets as replies to Aristotle’s criticisms admit

of more than one alternative explanation. They may have originated

in doubts and difficulties which spontaneously suggested themselves

to Plato in the course of his independent reflections; or, granting

that there is a polemic reference, it may have been provoked by some

other critic, or by the spoken criticisms of Aristotle himself. For

the supposition that Aristotle wrote his _Ethics_ at the early age of

thirty-two or thirty-three seems to me so improbable that we should not

accept it except under pressure of the strongest evidence. That a work

of such matured thought and observation should have been produced by

so young a man is, so far as I know, a phenomenon unparalleled in the

history of literature. And to this we must add the further circumstance

that the Greek mind was not particularly remarkable for precocity in

any field except war and statesmanship. We do, indeed, find instances

of comparatively juvenile authorship, but none, I believe, of a Greek

writer, whether poet, historian, or philosopher, who reached the

full maturity of his powers before a considerably advanced period of

middle age. That the _Ethics_ is very imperfect I fully admit, and

have expressly maintained against its numerous admirers in the course

of this work. But, although imperfect, it is not crude. It contains

as good a discussion of the subject undertaken as Aristotle was ever

capable of giving, and its limitations are not those of an unripe

intellect, but of an intellect at all times comparatively unsuited for

the treatment of practical problems, and narrowed still further by the

requirements of an elaborate speculative system. Now to work out this

system must have demanded considerably more labour and independent

thought than one can suppose even an Aristotle to have found time for

before thirty-three; while the experience of life shown in the _Ethics_

is such as study, so far from supplying, would, on the contrary, have

delayed. Moreover, the _Rhetoric_, which was confessedly written

before the _Ethics_, exhibits the same qualities in about an equal

degree, and therefore, on Teichmüller’s theory, testifies to a still

more extraordinary precocity. And there is the further circumstance

that while Aristotle is known to have begun his public career as a

teacher of rhetoric, his earliest productions seem to have been of a

rather diffuse and declamatory character, quite opposed to the severe

concision which marks the style both of the _Rhetoric_ and of the

_Ethics_. In addition to these general considerations, one may mention

that in a well-known passage of the _Ethics_, referring to a question

of logical method (I., iv.), Plato is spoken of in the imperfect

tense, which would seem to imply that he was no longer living when it

was written. Speaking from memory, I should even be inclined to doubt

whether the mention of a living writer by name at all is consistent

with Aristotle’s standard of literary etiquette.

These are difficulties which Teichmüller has, no doubt, fully weighed

and put aside as not sufficiently strong to invalidate his conclusions.

I have stated them in order to show that enough can be said for the

old view to justify the republication of what was written on the

assumption of its unquestionable truth. Moreover, researches conducted

with so much skill and learning as those of Teichmüller demand some

public acknowledgment in a work like the present, even when the results

are such that the writer cannot see his way to accepting them as

satisfactorily made out. There are many English scholars more competent

than I am to discuss the whole question at issue. Perhaps these lines

may induce some of them to give it the attention which it merits, but

which, in England at least, it does not seem to have as yet received.

My obligations to other writers have been acknowledged throughout this

work, so far as I was conscious of them, and so far as they could be

defined by reference to specific points. I take the present opportunity

for mentioning in a more general way the valuable assistance which

I have derived from Schwegler’s _Geschichte der Griechischen

Philosophie_, Lange’s _Geschichte des Materialismus_, and Dühring’s

_Geschichte der Philosophie_. The parallel between Socrates, Giordano

Bruno, and Spinoza was probably suggested to me by Dühring, as also

were some points in my characterisation of Aristotle. As my view of the

position occupied by Lucretius with respect to religion and philosophy

differs in many important points from that of Prof. Sellar, it is the

more incumbent on me to state that, but for a perusal of Prof. Sellar’s

eloquent and sympathetic chapters on the great Epicurean poet, my own

estimate of his genius would certainly not have been written in its

present form and would probably not have been written at all.

On the whole, I am afraid that my acquaintance with the modern

literature of the subject will be found rather limited for an

undertaking like the present. But I do not think that wider reading in

that direction would have much furthered the object I had in view. That

object has been to exhibit the principal ideas of Greek philosophy in

the closest possible connexion with the characters of their authors,

with each other, with their developments in modern speculation, with

the parallel tendencies of literature and art, with the history of

religion, of physical science, and of civilisation as a whole. To

interpret all things by a system of universal references is the method

of philosophy; when applied to a series of events this method is the

philosophy of history; when the events are ideas, it is the philosophy

of philosophy itself.

CONTENTS

OF

THE FIRST VOLUME.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY GREEK THOUGHT pages 1-52

I. Strength and universality of the Greek intellect, 1—Specialisation

of individual genius, 2—Pervading sense of harmony and union,

3—Circumstances by which the intellectual character of the Greeks

was determined, 3—Philosophy a natural product of the Greek mind,

4—Speculation at first limited to the external world, 4—Important

results achieved by the early Greek thinkers, 5—Their conception of

a cosmos first made science possible, 6—The alleged influence of

Oriental ideas disproved, 6.

II. Thales was the first to offer a purely physical explanation of the

world, 7—Why he fixed on water as the origin of all things, 8—Great

advance made by Anaximander, 9—His conception of the Infinite,

9-Anaximenes mediates between the theories of his two predecessors,

10—The Pythagoreans: their love of antithesis and the importance

attributed to number in their system, 11—Connexion between their

ethical teaching and the general religious movement of the age,

13—Analogy with the mediaeval spirit, 13.

III. Xenophanes: his attacks on the popular religion, 14—Absence of

intolerance among the Greeks, 15—Primitive character of the monotheism

taught by Xenophanes, 16—Elimination of the religious element from

philosophy by Parmenides, 16—His speculative innovations, 17—He

discovers the indestructibility of matter, 17—but confuses matter

with existence in general, 18—and more particularly with extension,

19—In what sense he can be called a materialist, 19—New arguments

brought forward by Zeno in defence of the Eleatic system, 20—The

analytical or mediatorial moment of Greek thought, 21—Influence of

Parmenides on subsequent systems of philosophy, 22—Diametrically

opposite method pursued by Heracleitus, 22—His contempt for the

mass of mankind, 22—Doctrine of universal relativity, 23—Fire as

the primordial element, 24—The idea of Law first introduced by

Heracleitus, 25—Extremes to which his principles were afterwards

carried, 25—Polarisation of Greek thought, 26.

IV. Historical order of the systems which succeeded and mediated

between Parmenides and Heracleitus, 26—Empedocles: poetic and

religious character of his philosophy, 27—His inferiority to previous

thinkers, 28—Eclectic tendency of his system, 29—In what respects it

marks an advance on that of Parmenides, 29—His alleged anticipation

of the Darwinian theory, 30—The fixity of species a doctrine held

by every ancient philosopher except Anaximander, 31—The theory of

knowledge put forward by Empedocles: its objective and materialistic

character, 32—How it suggested the Atomic theory, 33—The possibility

of a vacuum denied by Parmenides and asserted by Leucippus, 34—The

Atomic theory developed and applied by Democritus: encyclopaedic range

of his studies, 35—His complete rejection of the supernatural, 36.

V. Anaxagoras at Athens, 36—He is accused of impiety and compelled to

fly, 37—Analysis of his system, 38—Its mechanical and materialistic

tendency, 39—Separation of Nous from the rest of Nature, 40—In

denying the divinity of the heavenly bodies, Anaxagoras opposed himself

to the universal faith of antiquity, 40—The exceptional intolerance

of the Athenians and its explanation, 42—Transition from physical to

dialectical and ethical philosophy, 43.

VI. Early Greek thought as manifested in literature and art, 45—The

genealogical method of Hesiod and Herodotus, 47—The search for first

causes in Pindar and Aeschylus, 48—Analogous tendencies of sculpture

and architecture, 49—Combination of geographical with genealogical

studies, 50—The evolution of order from chaos suggested by the

negative or antithetical moment of Greek thought, 50—Verifiable and

fruitful character of early Greek thought, 52.

CHAPTER II.

THE GREEK HUMANISTS: NATURE AND LAW pages 53-107

I. The reaction of speculation on life, 53—Moral superiority of the

Greeks to the Hebrews and Romans, 54—Illustrations of humanity from

the Greek poets, 55—Temporary corruption of moral sentiment and its

explanation, 56—Subsequent reformation effected by philosophy, 57—The

Greek worship of beauty not incompatible with a high moral standard,

58—Preference of the solid to the showy virtues shown by public

opinion in Greece, 59—Opinion of Plato, 60.

II. Virtues inculcated in the aphorisms of the Seven Sages,

62—Sôphrosynê as a combination of moderation and self-knowledge,

62—Illustrations from Homer, 62—Transition from self-regarding to

other-regarding virtue, 63—How morality acquired a religious sanction

(i.) by the use of oaths, 64—(ii.) by the ascription of a divine

origin to law, 65—(iii.) by the practice of consulting oracles on

questions of right and wrong, 65—Difference between the Olympian and

Chthonian religions, 66—The latter was closely connected with the

ideas of law and of retribution after death, 67—Beneficent results due

to the interaction of the two religions, 68.

III. The religious standpoint of Aeschylus, 69—Incipient dissociation

of religion from morality in Sophocles, 70—Their complete separation

in Euripides, 71—Contrast between the Eteocles of Aeschylus and the

Eteocles of Euripides, 72—Analogous difference between Herodotus

and Thucydides, 73—Evidence of moral deterioration supplied by

Aristophanes and Plato, 74—Probability of an association between

intellectual growth and moral decline, 75.

IV. The Sophists, 76—Prodicus and Hippias, 77—Their theory of Nature

as a moral guide, 79—Illustration from Euripides, 80—Probable

connexion of the Cynic school with Prodicus, 81—Antithesis between

Nature and Law, 81—Opposition to slavery, 82—The versatility of

Hippias connected with his advocacy of Nature, 83—The right of the

stronger as a law of Nature, 84.

V. Rise of idealism and accompanying tendency to set convention above

Nature, 85—Agnosticism of Protagoras, 87—In what sense he made man

the measure of all things, 88—His defence of civilisation, 89—Similar

views expressed by Thucydides, 90—Contrast between the naturalism of

Aeschylus and the humanism of Sophocles, 91—The flexible character

of Nomos favourable to education, 92—Greek youths and modern women,

93—The teaching of rhetoric, 93—It is subsequently developed into

eristicism, 94.

VI. The nihilism of Gorgias, 95—His arguments really directed against

the worship of Nature, 96—The power of rhetoric in ancient Athens and

modern England, 97—The doctrines of Protagoras as developed by the

Cyrenaic school, 99—and by the Megaric school, 100—Subsequent history

of the antithesis between Nature and Law, 100.

VII. Variety of tendencies represented by the Sophists, 102—Their

position in Greek society, 103—The different views taken of their

profession in ancient and modern times, 104—Their place in the

development of Greek philosophy, 107.

CHAPTER III.

THE PLACE OF SOCRATES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY pages 108-170

I. Universal celebrity of Socrates, 108—Our intimate knowledge of his

appearance and character, 109—Conflicting views of his philosophy,

110—Untrustworthiness of the Platonic _Apologia_, 111—Plato’s account

contradicted by Xenophon, 113—Consistency of the _Apologia_ with the

general standpoint of Plato’s Dialogues, 114—The Platonic idea of

science, 115-— How Plato can help us to understand Socrates, 116.

II. Zeller’s theory of the Socratic philosophy, 117—Socrates did

not offer any definition of knowledge, 119—Nor did he correct the

deficiencies of Greek physical speculation, 120—His attitude towards

physics resembled that of Protagoras, 121—Positive theories of

morality and religion which he entertained, 123.

III. True meaning and originality of the Socratic teaching,

125—Circumstances by which the Athenian character was formed, 126—Its

prosaic, rationalistic, and utilitarian tendencies, 127—Effect

produced by the possession of empire, 128—The study of mind in art

and philosophy, 128—How the Athenian character was represented by

Socrates, 129—His sympathy with its practical and religious side,

130—His relation to the Humanists, 131—His identification of virtue

with knowledge, 132—The search for a unifying principle in ethics,

133—Importance of knowledge as a factor in conduct and civilisation,

133—Fundamental identity of all the mental processes, 136.

IV. Harmony of theory and practice in the life of Socrates, 137—Mind

as a principle (i.) of self-control, (ii.) of co-operation, and

(iii.) of spontaneous energy, 137—Derivation and function of the

cross-examining elenchus, 138—How it illustrates the negative moment

of Greek thought, 139—Conversations with Glauco and Euthydemus,

139—The erotetic method as an aid to self-discipline, 141—Survival of

contradictory debate in the speeches of Thucydides, 142.

V. Why Socrates insisted on the necessity of defining abstract terms,

142—Subsequent influence of his method on the development of Roman

law, 144—Substitution of arrangement by resemblance and difference

for arrangement by contiguity, 145—The One in the Many, and the Many

in the One: conversation with Charmides, 146—Illustration of ideas

by their contradictory opposites, 147—The Socratic induction, (i.)

an interpretation of the unknown by the known, 148—Misapplication of

this method in the theory of final causes, 149—(ii.) A process of

comparison and abstraction, 150—Appropriateness of this method to the

study of mental phenomena, 151—Why it is inapplicable to the physical

sciences, 151—Wide range of studies included in a complete philosophy

of mind, 151—The dialectical elimination of inconsistency, 152.

VI. Consistency the great principle represented by Socrates,

152—Parallelism of ethics and logic, 154—The ethical dialectic of

Socrates and Homer, 154—Personal and historical verifications of

the Socratic method, 155—Its influence on the development of art

and literature, 156—and on the relations between men and women,

158—Meaning of the Daemonium, 160.

VII. Accusation and trial of Socrates, 161—Futility of the charges

brought against him, 162—Misconceptions of modern critics, 164—His

defence and condemnation, 165—Worthlessness of Grote’s apology for

the Dicastery, 166—Refusal of Socrates to save himself by flight,

168—Comparison with Giordano Bruno and Spinoza, 169—The monuments

raised to Socrates by Plato and Xenophon, 169.

CHAPTER IV.

PLATO; HIS TEACHERS AND HIS TIMES pages 171-213

I. New meaning given to systems of philosophy by the method of

evolution, 171—Extravagances of which Plato’s philosophy seems to be

made up, 172—The high reputation which it, nevertheless, continues

to enjoy, 174—Distinction between speculative tendencies and the

systematic form under which they are transmitted, 174—Genuineness

of the Platonic Dialogues, 175—Their chronological order, 177—They

embody the substance of Plato’s philosophical teaching, 177.

II. Wider application given to the dialectic method by Plato, 179—He

goes back to the initial doubt of Socrates, 180—To what extent

he shared in the religious reaction of his time, 181—He places

demonstrative reasoning above divine inspiration, 182—His criticism

of the Socratic ethics, 183—Exceptional character of the _Crito_

accounted for, 184—Traces of Sophistic influence, 185—General

relation of Plato to the Sophists, 186—Egoistic hedonism of the

_Protagoras_, 188.

III. Plato as an individual: his high descent, personal beauty, and

artistic endowment, 189—His style is neither poetry nor eloquence

nor conversation, but the expression of spontaneous thought, 190—The

Platonic Socrates, 191—Plato carries the spirit of the Athenian

aristocracy into philosophy, 192—Severity with which great reformers

habitually view their own age, 192—Plato’s scornful opinion of

the many, 194—His loss of faith in his own order, 195—Horror of

despotism inspired by his intercourse with Dionysius, 195—His

dissatisfaction with the constitution of Sparta, 196—His theory

of political degeneration verified by the history of the Roman

republic, 196—His exclusively Hellenic and aristocratic sympathies,

197—Invectives against the corrupting influence of the multitude and

of their flatterers, 198—Denunciation of the popular law-courts,

199—Character of the successful pleader, 200—Importance to which he

had risen in Plato’s time, 200—The professional teacher of rhetoric,

201.

IV. Value and comprehensiveness of Plato’s philosophy, 202—Combination

of Sicilian and Italiote with Attic modes of thought, 203—Transition

from the _Protagoras_ to the _Theaetêtus_, 205—‘Man is the measure

of all things’: opinion and sensation, 206—Extension of the

dialectic method to all existence, 207—The Heracleitean system true

of phenomena, 208—Heracleitus and Parmenides in the _Cratylus_,

209—Tendency to fix on Identity and Difference as the ultimate

elements of knowledge, 210—Combination of the mathematical method

with the dialectic of Socrates, 210—Doctrine of _à priori_ cognition,

211—The idea of Sameness derived from introspection, 212—Tendency

towards monism, 213.

CHAPTER V.

PLATO AS A REFORMER pages 214-274

I. Recapitulation, 214—Plato’s identification of the human with

the divine, 215—The Athanasian creed of philosophy, 216—Attempts

to mediate between appearance and reality, 216—Meaning of Platonic

love, 217—Its subsequent development in the philosophy of Aristotle,

218—And in the poetry of Dante, 219—Connexion between religious

mysticism and the passion of love, 219—Successive stages of Greek

thought represented in the _Symposium_, 220—Analysis of Plato’s

dialectical method, 221—Exaggerated importance attributed to

classification, 222—Plato’s influence on modern philosophy, 223.

II. Mediatoral character of Plato’s psychology, 223—Empirical

knowledge as a link between demonstration and sense perception,

224—Pride as a link between reason and appetite, 224—Transition from

metaphysics to ethics: knowledge and pleasure, 225—Anti-hedonistic

arguments of the _Philébus_, 226—Attempt to base ethics on the

distinction between soul and body, 227—What is meant by the Idea of

Good? 228—It is probably the abstract notion of Identity, 229.

III. How the practical teaching of Plato differed from that of

Socrates, 229—Identification of justice with self-interest,

230—Confusion of social with individual happiness, 231—Resolution of

the soul into a multitude of conflicting impulses, 232—Impossibility

of arguing men into goodness, 233.

IV. Union of religion with morality, 234—Cautious handling of

the popular theology, 234—The immortality of the soul, 235—The

Pythagorean reformation arrested by the progress of physical

philosophy, 237—Immortality denied by some of the Pythagoreans

themselves, 237—Scepticism as a transition from materialism to

spiritualism, 238—The arguments of Plato, 239—Pantheism the natural

outcome of his system, 240.

V. Plato’s condemnation of art, 241—Exception in favour of religious

hymns and edifying fiction, 241—Mathematics to be made the basis of

education, 242—Application of science to the improvement of the race,

242—Inconsistency of Plato’s belief in heredity with the doctrine

of metempsychosis, 243—Scheme for the reorganisation of society,

244—Practical dialectic of the _Republic_, 245.

VI. Hegel’s theory of the _Republic_, 246—Several distinct tendencies

confounded under the name of subjectivity, 247—Greek philosophy not

an element of political disintegration, 250—Plato borrowed more from

Egypt than from Sparta, 253.

VII. The consequences of a radical revolution, 254—Plato constructed

his new republic out of the elementary and subordinate forms of social

union, 254—Inconsistencies into which he was led by this method,

254—The position which he assigns to women, 256—The Platonic State

half school-board and half marriage-board, 258—Partial realisation of

Plato’s polity in the Middle Ages, 259—Contrast between Plato and the

modern Communists, 259—His real affinities are with Comte and Herbert

Spencer, 261.

VIII. Reaction of Plato’s social studies on his metaphysics, 262—The

ideas resolved into different aspects of the relation between soul and

body, 263—Dialectic dissolution of the four fundamental contrasts

between reality and appearance, 263—Mind as an intermediary between

the Ideas and the external world, 265—Cosmogony of the _Timaeus_,

265—Philosophy and theology, 267.

IX. Plato’s hopes from a beneficent despotism, 268—The _Laws_,

269—Concessions to current modes of thought, 270—Religious

intolerance, 271—Recapitulation of Plato’s achievements,

272—Fertility of his method, 273.

CHAPTER VI.

CHARACTERISTICS OF ARISTOTLE pages 275-329

I. Recent Aristotelian literature, 275—Reaction in favour of

Aristotle’s philosophy, 277—and accompanying misinterpretation of its

meaning, 278—Zeller’s partiality for Aristotle, 280.

II. Life of Aristotle, 280—His relation to Plato, 281-Aristotle and

Hermeias; 284—Aristotle and Alexander, 285—Aristotle’s residence

in Athens, flight, and death, 288—His choice of a successor,

288—Provisions of his will, 289—Personal appearance, 289—Anecdotes

illustrating his character, 290—Want of self-reliance and originality,

291.

III. Prevalent misconception of the difference between Aristotle

and Plato, 291—Plato a practical, Aristotle a theoretical genius,

293—Contrast offered by their views of theology, ethics, and politics,

294—Aristotle’s ideal of a State, 296—His want of political insight

and prevision, 297—Worthlessness of his theories at the present day,

298.

IV. Strength and weakness of Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_, 299—Erroneous

theory of aesthetic enjoyment put forward in his _Poetics_, 300—The

true nature of tragic emotion, 303—Importance of female characters

in tragedy, 303—Necessity of poetic injustice, 305—Theory of the

Catharsis, 306—Aristotle’s rules for reasoning compiled from Plato,

307—The _Organon_ in Ceylon, 307.

V. Aristotle’s unequalled intellectual enthusiasm, 308—Illustrations

from his writings, 309—His total failure in every physical science

except zoology and anatomy, 311—His repeated rejection of the just

views put forward by other philosophers, 312—Complete antithesis

between his theory of Nature and ours, 316.

VI. Supreme mastery shown by Aristotle in dealing with the surface of

things, 318—His inability to go below the surface, 319—In what points

he was inferior to his predecessors, 320—His standpoint necessarily

determined by the development of Greek thought, 321—Analogous

development of the Attic drama, 323.

VII. Periodical return to the Aristotelian method, 325—The

systematising power of Aristotle exemplified in all his writings,

326—but chiefly in those relating to the descriptive sciences,

327—His biological generalisations, 328—How they are explained and

corrected by the theory of evolution, 329.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SYSTEMATIC PHILOSOPHY OF ARISTOTLE pages 330-402

I. Homogeneity of Aristotle’s writings, 330—The _Metaphysics_,

331—What are the causes and principles of things? 331—Objections

to the Ionian materialism, 332—Aristotle’s teleology a study of

functions, 332—Illegitimate generalisation to the inorganic world,

333—Aristotle’s Four Causes, 334—Derivation of his substantial Forms

from the Platonic Ideas, 335—His criticism of the Ideal theory,

336—Its applicability to every kind of transcendental realism,

338—Survival of the Platonic theory in Aristotle’s system, 338.

II. Specific forms assumed by the fundamental dualism of Greek

thought, 339—Stress laid by Aristotle on the antithesis between Being

and not Being, 339—Its formulation in the highest laws of logic,

340—Intermediate character ascribed to accidents, 340—Distinction

between truth and real existence, 341—The Categories: their import

and derivation, 341—Analysis of the idea of Substance, 343—Analysis

of individuality, 345—Substitution of Possibility and Actuality for

Matter and Form, 346—Purely verbal significance of this doctrine,

347—Motion as the transformation of Power into Act, 347.

III. Aristotle’s theology founded on a dynamical misconception,

348—Necessity of a Prime Mover, 349—Aristotle not a pantheist

but a theist, 350—Mistaken interpretation of Sir A. Grant,

351—Inconsistency of Aristotle’s metaphysics with Catholic theology,

352—and with the modern arguments for the existence of a God, 353—as

well as with the conclusions of modern science, 353—Self-contradictory

character of his system, 354—Motives by which it may be explained,

354—The Greek star-worship and the Christian heaven, 356—Higher

position given to the earth by Copernicus, 356—Aristotle’s

glorification of the heavens, 357—How his astronomy illustrates the

Greek ideas of circumscription and mediation, 358.

IV. Aristotle’s general principle of systematisation, 359—Deduction

of the Four Elements, 360—Connexion of the Peripatetic physics with

astrology and alchemy, 361—Revolution effected by modern science,

361—Systematisation of biology, 362—Aristotle on the Generation of

Animals, 363—His success in comparative anatomy, 364.

V. Antithetical framework of Aristotle’s psychology, 365—His theory

of sensation contrasted with that of the Atomists, 365—His successful

treatment of imagination and memory, 366—How general ideas are

formed, 366—The active Nous is a self-conscious idea, 367—The train

of thought which led to this theory, 368—Meaning of the passage in

the _Generation of Animals_, 369—Supposed refutation of materialism,

370—Aristotle not an adherent of Ferrier, 371—Form and matter not

distinguished as subject and object, 373—Aristotle rejects the

doctrine of personal immortality, 374.

VI. Aristotle’s logic, 375—Subordination of judgments to concepts,

376—Science as a process of definition and classification,

377—Aristotle’s theory of propositions, 378—His conceptual analysis

of the syllogism, 379—Influence of Aristotle’s metaphysics on his

logic, 380—Disjunction the primordial form of all reasoning, 381—How

it gives rise to hypothetical and categorical reasoning, 382.

VII. Theory of applied reasoning: distinction between demonstration and

dialectic, 383—Aristotle places abstractions above reasoned truth,

384—Neglect of axioms in comparison with definitions, 384—‘Laws

of nature’ not recognised by Aristotle, 385—He failed to perceive

the value of deductive reasoning, 387—Derivation of generals from

particulars: Aristotle and Mill, 387—In what sense Aristotle was

an empiricist, 390—Examination of Zeller’s view, 391—Induction as

the analysis of the middle term into the extremes, 393—Theory of

experimental reasoning contained in the _Topics_, 394.

VIII. Systematic treatment of the antithesis between Reason and

Passion, 395—Relation between the _Rhetoric_ and the _Ethics_,

395—Artificial treatment of the virtues, 396—Fallacious opposition

of Wisdom to Temperance, 397—Central idea of the _Politics_: the

distinction between the intellectual state and the material state,

398—Consistency of the _Poetics_ with Aristotle’s system as a whole,

399.

IX. Aristotle’s philosophy a valuable corrective to the modern

glorification of material industry, 399—Leisure a necessary condition

of intellectual progress, 400—How Aristotle would view the results of

modern civilisation, 401.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Die Philosophie der Griechen_, III., a, pp. 5 f.

[2] If I remember rightly, Polybius makes the same observation, but I

cannot recall the exact reference.

[3] _Sophist_, 243, A.

[4] See especially the interesting note on the subject in his recent

work, _Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt_, Vorrede, pp x. ff.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES.

Transcriber’s Note: These have been marked up as footnotes in the

text, using alphabetic coding. This identifies the page and line number

rather than any precise text.

[A] Page 9, line 18. Plutarch (_ut fertur_), _Plac. Phil._, I., iii., 4.

[B] Page 15, line 26. Xenophanes, _Fragm._ 19 and 21, ed. Mullach.

[C] Page 41, line 25. Diogenes Laert., IX., 34. The words ‘in the

Eastern countries where he had travelled,’ are a conjectural addition,

but they seem justified by the context.

[D] Page 43, line 11. Plutarch, _Pericles_, iv.

[E] Page 65. For the story of Glaucus, see Herodotus VI., lxxxvi.

[F] Page 77, line 21. Plato, _Protag._, 315, D.

[G] Page 78, line 1. _Ibid._, 341, A.

[H] Page 103. For the opinion of Socrates respecting the Sophists, see

Xenophon, _Mem._, I., vi., 11 ff.

[I] Page 114, line 4. Xenophon, _Mem._, I., iv., 1.

[J] Page 194, line 28. _Repub._, 493, A; _ibid._, line 33. Gorgias,

521, E.

[K] Page 195, line 23. _Theaetêt._, 175, A and 174, E. Jowett’s

Transl., IV., p. 325.

[L] Page 233, last line. _Sophist._, 246, D.

[M] Page 294, line 7. For Plato’s preference of practice to

contemplation, see _Repub._, 496, E.

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY GREEK THOUGHT.

I.

During the two centuries that ended with the close of the Peloponnesian

war, a single race, weak numerically, and weakened still further

by political disunion, simultaneously developed all the highest

human faculties to an extent possibly rivalled but certainly not

surpassed by the collective efforts of that vastly greater population

which now wields the accumulated resources of modern Europe. This

race, while maintaining a precarious foothold on the shores of the

Mediterranean by repeated prodigies of courage and genius, contributed

a new element to civilisation which has been the mainspring of all

subsequent progress, but which, as it expanded into wider circles and

encountered an increasing resistance from without, unavoidably lost

some of the enormous elasticity that characterised its earliest and

most concentrated reaction. It was the just boast of the Greek that

to Asiatic refinement and Thracian valour he joined a disinterested

thirst for knowledge unshared by his neighbours on either side.[5] And

if a contemporary of Pericles could have foreseen all that would be

thought, and said, and done during the next twenty-three centuries

of this world’s existence, at no period during that long lapse of

ages, not even among the kindred Italian race, could he have found

a competitor to contest with Hellas the olive crown of a nobler

Olympia, the guerdon due to a unique combination of supreme excellence

in every variety of intellectual exercise, in strategy, diplomacy,

statesmanship; in mathematical science, architecture, plastic art, and

poetry; in the severe fidelity of the historian whose paramount object

is to relate facts as they have occurred, and the dexterous windings

of the advocate whose interest leads him to evade or to disguise

them; in the far-reaching meditations of the lonely thinker grappling

with the enigmas of his own soul, and the fervid eloquence by which a

multitude on whose decision hang great issues is inspired, directed,

or controlled. He would not, it is true, have found any single Greek

to pit against the athletes of the Renaissance; there were none who

displayed that universal genius so characteristic of the greatest

Tuscan artists such as Lionardo and Michael Angelo; nor, to take a much

narrower range, did a single Greek writer whose compositions have come

down to us excel, or even attempt to excel, in poetry and prose alike.

But our imaginary prophet might have observed that such versatility

better befitted a sophist like Hippias or an adventurer like Critias

than an earnest master of the Pheidian type. He might have quoted

Pindar’s sarcasm about highly educated persons who have an infinity

of tastes and bring none of them to perfection;[6] holding, as Plato

did in the next generation, that one man can only do one thing well,

he might have added that the heroes of modern art would have done much

nobler work had they concentrated their powers on a single task instead

of attempting half a dozen and leaving most of them incomplete.

This careful restriction of individual effort to a single province

involved no dispersion or incoherence in the results achieved. The

highest workers were all animated by a common spirit. Each represented

some one aspect of the glory and greatness participated in by all. Nor

was the collective consciousness, the uniting sympathy, limited to a

single sphere. It rose, by a graduated series, from the city community,

through the Dorian or Ionian stock with which they claimed more

immediate kinship, to the Panhellenic race, the whole of humanity, and

the divine fatherhood of Zeus, until it rested in that all-embracing

nature which Pindar knew as the one mother of gods and men.[7]

We may, perhaps, find some suggestion of this combined distinctness and

comprehensiveness in the aspect and configuration of Greece itself;

in its manifold varieties of soil, and climate, and scenery, and

productions; in the exquisite clearness with which the features of its

landscape are defined; and the admirable development of coast-line by

which all parts of its territory, while preserving their political

independence, were brought into safe and speedy communication with

one another. The industrial and commercial habits of the people,

necessitating a well-marked division of labour and a regulated

distribution of commodities, gave a further impulse in the same

direction.

But what afforded the most valuable education in this sense was their

system of free government, involving, as it did, the supremacy of an

impersonal law, the subdivision of public authority among a number of

magistrates, and the assignment to each of certain carefully defined

functions which he was forbidden to exceed; together with the living

interest felt by each citizen in the welfare of the whole state, and

that conception of it as a whole composed of various parts, which is

impossible where all the public powers are collected in a single hand.

A people so endowed were the natural creators of philosophy. There

came a time when the harmonious universality of the Hellenic genius

sought for its counterpart and completion in a theory of the external

world. And there came a time, also, when the decay of political

interests left a large fund of intellectual energy, accustomed to work

under certain conditions, with the desire to realise those conditions

in an ideal sphere. Such is the most general significance we can

attach to that memorable series of speculations on the nature of

things which, beginning in Ionia, was carried by the Greek colonists

to Italy and Sicily, whence, after receiving important additions and

modifications, the stream of thought flowed back into the old country,

where it was directed into an entirely new channel by the practical

genius of Athens. Thales and his successors down to Democritus were

not exactly what we should call philosophers, in any sense of the

word that would include a Locke or a Hume, and exclude a Boyle or a

Black; for their speculations never went beyond the confines of the

material universe; they did not even suspect the existence of those

ethical and dialectical problems which long constituted the sole

object of philosophical discussion, and have continued since the

time when they were first mooted to be regarded as its most peculiar

province. Nor yet can we look on them altogether or chiefly as men of

science, for their paramount purpose was to gather up the whole of

knowledge under a single principle; and they sought to realise this

purpose, not by observation and experiment, but by the power of thought

alone. It would, perhaps, be truest to say that from their point of

view philosophy and science were still undifferentiated, and that

knowledge as a universal synthesis was not yet divorced from special

investigations into particular orders of phenomena. Here, as elsewhere,

advancing reason tends to reunite studies which have been provisionally

separated, and we must look to our own contemporaries—to our Tyndalls

and Thomsons, our Helmholtzes and Zöllners—as furnishing the fittest

parallel to Anaximander and Empedocles, Leucippus and Diogenes of

Apollonia.

It has been the fashion in certain quarters to look down on these

early thinkers—to depreciate the value of their speculations because

they were thinkers, because, as we have already noticed, they reached

their most important conclusions by thinking, the means of truly

scientific observation not being within their reach. Nevertheless,

they performed services to humanity comparable for value with the

legislation of Solon and Cleisthenes, or the victories of Marathon

and Salamis; while their creative imagination was not inferior to

that of the great lyric and dramatic poets, the great architects and

sculptors, whose contemporaries they were. They first taught men to

distinguish between the realities of nature and the illusions of sense;

they discovered or divined the indestructibility of matter and its

atomic constitution; they taught that space is infinite, a conception

so far from being self-evident that it transcended the capacity of

Aristotle to grasp; they held that the seemingly eternal universe was

brought into its present form by the operation of mechanical forces

which will also effect its dissolution; confronted by the seeming

permanence and solidity of our planet, with the innumerable varieties

of life to be found on its surface, they declared that all things had

arisen by differentiation[8] from a homogeneous attenuated vapour;

while one of them went so far as to surmise that man is descended from

an aquatic animal. But higher still than these fragmentary glimpses

and anticipations of a theory which still awaits confirmation from

experience, we must place their central doctrine, that the universe

is a cosmos, an ordered whole governed by number and law, not a blind

conflict of semi-conscious agents, or a theatre for the arbitrary

interference of partial, jealous, and vindictive gods; that its

changes are determined, if at all, by an immanent unchanging reason;

and that those celestial luminaries which had drawn to themselves in

every age the unquestioning worship of all mankind were, in truth,

nothing more than fiery masses of inanimate matter. Thus, even if the

early Greek thinkers were not scientific, they first made science

possible by substituting for a theory of the universe which is its

direct negation, one that methodised observation has increasingly

tended to confirm. The garland of poetic praise woven by Lucretius

for his adored master should have been dedicated to them, and to them

alone. His noble enthusiasm was really inspired by their lessons, not

by the wearisome trifling of a moralist who knew little and cared less

about those studies in which the whole soul of his Roman disciple was

absorbed.

When the power and value of these primitive speculations can no longer

be denied, their originality is sometimes questioned by the systematic

detractors of everything Hellenic. Thales and the rest, we are told,

simply borrowed their theories without acknowledgment from a storehouse

of Oriental wisdom on which the Greeks are supposed to have drawn as

freely as Coleridge drew on German philosophy. Sometimes each system is

affiliated to one of the great Asiatic religions; sometimes they are

all traced back to the schools of Hindostan. It is natural that no two

critics should agree, when the rival explanations are based on nothing

stronger than superficial analogies and accidental coincidences. Dr.

Zeller in his wonderfully learned, clear, and sagacious work on Greek

philosophy, has carefully sifted some of the hypotheses referred to,

and shown how destitute they are of internal or external evidence,

and how utterly they fail to account for the facts. The oldest and

best authorities, Plato and Aristotle, knew nothing about such a

derivation of Greek thought from Eastern sources. Isocrates does,

indeed, mention that Pythagoras borrowed his philosophy from Egypt,

but Isocrates did not even pretend to be a truthful narrator. No Greek

of the early period except those regularly domiciled in Susa seems to

have been acquainted with any language but his own. Few travelled very

far into Asia, and of those few, only one or two were philosophers.

Democritus, who visited more foreign countries than any man of his

time, speaks only of having discussed mathematical problems with the

wise men whom he encountered; and even in mathematics he was at least

their equal.[9] It was precisely at the greatest distance from Asia,

in Italy and Sicily, that the systems arose which seem to have most

analogy with Asiatic modes of thought. Can we suppose that the traders

of those times were in any way qualified to transport the speculations

of Confucius and the Vedas to such a distance from their native homes?

With far better reason might one expect a German merchant to carry a

knowledge of Kant’s philosophy from Königsberg to Canton. But a more

convincing argument than any is to show that Greek philosophy in its

historical evolution exhibits a perfectly natural and spontaneous

progress from simpler to more complex forms, and that system grew out

of system by a strictly logical process of extension, analysis, and

combination. This is what, chiefly under the guidance of Zeller, we

shall now attempt to do.

II.

Thales, of Miletus, an Ionian geometrician and astronomer, about whose

age considerable uncertainty prevails, but who seems to have flourished

towards the close of the seventh century before our era, is by general

consent regarded as the father of Greek physical philosophy. Others

before him had attempted to account for the world’s origin, but none

like him had traced it back to a purely natural beginning. According

to Thales all things have come from water. That the earth is entirely

enclosed by water above and below as well as all round was perhaps a

common notion among the Western Asiatics. It was certainly believed

by the Hebrews, as we learn from the accounts of the creation and the

flood contained in Genesis. The Milesian thinker showed his originality

by generalising still further and declaring that not only did water

surround all things, but that all things were derived from it as their

first cause and substance, that water was, so to speak, the material

absolute. Never have more pregnant words been spoken; they acted like

a ferment on the Greek mind; they were the grain whence grew a tree

that has overshadowed the whole earth. At one stroke they substituted

a comparatively scientific, because a verifiable principle for the

confused fancies of mythologising poets. Not that Thales was an

atheist, or an agnostic, or anything of that sort. On the contrary, he

is reported to have said that all things were full of gods; and the

report sounds credible enough. Most probably the saying was a protest

against the popular limitation of divine agencies to certain special

occasions and favoured localities. A true thinker seeks above all for

consistency and continuity. He will more readily accept a perpetual

stream of creative energy than a series of arbitrary and isolated

interferences with the course of Nature. For the rest, Thales made

no attempt to explain how water came to be transformed into other

substances, nor is it likely that the necessity of such an explanation

had ever occurred to him. We may suspect that he and others after him

were not capable of distinguishing very clearly between such notions

as space, time, cause, substance, and limit. It is almost as difficult

for us to enter into the thoughts of these primitive philosophers as it

would have been for them to comprehend processes of reasoning already

familiar to Plato and Aristotle. Possibly the forms under which we

arrange our conceptions may become equally obsolete at a more advanced

stage of intellectual evolution, and our sharp distinctions may prove

to be not less artificial than the confused identifications which they

have superseded.

The next great forward step in speculation was taken by Anaximander,

another Milesian, also of distinguished attainments in mathematics

and astronomy. We have seen that to Thales water, the all-embracing

element, became, as such, the first cause of all things, the absolute

principle of existence. His successor adopted the same general point

of view, but looked out from it with a more penetrating gaze. Beyond

water lay something else which he called the Infinite. He did not mean

the empty abstraction which has stalked about in modern times under

that ill-omened name, nor yet did he mean infinite space, but something

richer and more concrete than either; a storehouse of materials whence

the waste of existence could be perpetually made good. The growth

and decay of individual forms involve a ceaseless drain on Nature,

and the deficiency must be supplied by a corresponding influx from

without.[A] For, be it observed that, although the Greek thinkers were

at this period well aware that nothing can come from nothing, they had

not yet grasped the complementary truth inalienably wedded to it by

Lucretius in one immortal couplet, that nothing can return to nothing;

and Kant is quite mistaken when he treats the two as historically

inseparable. Common experience forces the one on our attention much

sooner than the other. Our incomings are very strictly measured out and

accounted for without difficulty, while it is hard to tell what becomes

of all our expenditure, physical and economical. Yet, although the

indestructibility of matter was a conception which had not yet dawned

on Anaximander, he seems to have been feeling his way towards the

recognition of a circulatory movement pervading all Nature. Everything,

he says, must at last be reabsorbed in the Infinite as a punishment for

the sin of its separate existence.[10] Some may find in this sentiment

a note of Oriental mysticism. Rather does its very sadness illustrate

the healthy vitality of Greek feeling, to which absorption seemed like

the punishment of a crime against the absolute, and not, as to so many

Asiatics, the crown and consummation of spiritual perfection. Be this

as it may, a doctrine which identified the death of the whole world

with its reabsorption into a higher reality would soon suggest the idea

that its component parts vanish only to reappear in new combinations.

Anaximander’s system was succeeded by a number of others which cannot

be arranged according to any order of linear progression. Such

arrangements are, indeed, false in principle. Intellectual life, like

every other life, is a product of manifold conditions, and their varied

combinations are certain to issue in a corresponding multiplicity of

effects. Anaximenes, a fellow-townsman of Anaximander, followed most

closely in the footsteps of the master. Attempting, as it would appear,

to mediate between his two predecessors, he chose air for a primal

element. Air is more omnipresent than water, which, as well as earth,

is enclosed within its plastic sphere. On the other hand, it is more

tangible and concrete than the Infinite, or may even be substituted for

that conception by supposing it to extend as far as thought can reach.

As before, cosmogony grows out of cosmography; the enclosing element is

the parent of those embraced within it.

Speculation now leaves its Asiatic cradle and travels with the Greek

colonists to new homes in Italy and Sicily, where new modes of thought

were fostered by a new environment. A name, round which mythical

accretions have gathered so thickly that the original nucleus of fact

almost defies definition, first claims our attention. Aristotle, as

is well known, avoids mentioning Pythagoras, and always speaks of the

Pythagoreans when he is discussing the opinions held by a certain

Italian school. Their doctrine, whoever originated it, was that all

things are made out of number. Brandis regards Pythagoreanism as an

entirely original effort of speculation, standing apart from the main

current of Hellenic thought, and to be studied without reference to

Ionian philosophy. Zeller, with more plausibility, treats it as an

outgrowth of Anaximander’s system. In that system the finite and the

infinite remained opposed to one another as unreconciled moments of

thought. Number, according to the Greek arithmeticians, was a synthesis

of the two, and therefore superior to either. To a Pythagorean the

finite and the infinite were only one among several antithetical

couples, such as odd and even, light and darkness, male and female,

and, above all, the one and the many whence every number after unity

is formed. The tendency to search for antitheses everywhere, and to

manufacture them where they do not exist, became ere long an actual

disease of the Greek mind. A Thucydides could no more have dispensed

with this cumbrous mechanism than a rope-dancer could get on without

his balancing pole; and many a schoolboy has been sorely puzzled by the

fantastic contortions which Italiote reflection imposed for a time on

Athenian oratory.

Returning to our more immediate subject, we must observe that the

Pythagoreans did not maintain, in anticipation of modern quantitative

science, that all things are determined by number, but that all

things are numbers, or are made out of numbers, two propositions not

easily distinguished by unpractised thinkers. Numbers, in a word,

were to them precisely what water had been to Thales, what air was to

Anaximenes, the absolute principle of existence; only with them the

idea of a limit, the leading inspiration of Greek thought, had reached

a higher degree of abstraction. Number was, as it were, the exterior

limit of the finite, and the interior limit of the infinite. Add to

this that mathematical studies, cultivated in Egypt and Phoenicia

for their practical utility alone, were being pursued in Hellas with

ever-increasing ardour for the sake of their own delightfulness, for

the intellectual discipline that they supplied—a discipline even

more valuable then than now, and for the insight which they bestowed,

or were believed to bestow, into the secret constitution of Nature;

and that the more complicated arithmetical operations were habitually

conducted with the aid of geometrical diagrams, thus suggesting

the possibility of applying a similar treatment to every order of

relations. Consider the lively emotions excited among an intelligent

people at a time when multiplication and division, squaring and cubing,

the rule of three, the construction and equivalence of figures, with

all their manifold applications to industry, commerce, fine art, and

tactics, were just as strange and wonderful as electrical phenomena are

to us; consider also the magical influence still commonly attributed to

particular numbers, and the intense eagerness to obtain exact numerical

statements, even when they are of no practical value, exhibited by all

who are thrown back on primitive ways of living, as, for example, in

Alpine travelling, or on board an Atlantic steamer, and we shall cease

to wonder that a mere form of thought, a lifeless abstraction, should

once have been regarded as the solution of every problem, the cause of

all existence; or that these speculations were more than once revived

in after ages, and perished only with Greek philosophy itself.

We have not here to examine the scientific achievements of Pythagoras

and his school; they belong to the history of science, not to that

of pure thought, and therefore lie outside the present discussion.

Something, however, must be said of Pythagoreanism as a scheme of

moral, religious, and social reform. Alone among the pre-Socratic

systems, it undertook to furnish a rule of conduct as well as a theory

of being. Yet, as Zeller has pointed out,[11] it was only an apparent

anomaly, for the ethical teaching of the Pythagoreans was not based

on their physical theories, except in so far as a deep reverence for

law and order was common to both. Perhaps, also, the separation of

soul and body, with the ascription of a higher dignity to the former,

which was a distinctive tenet of the school, may be paralleled with

the position given to number as a kind of spiritual power creating

and controlling the world of sense. So also political power was to be

entrusted to an aristocracy trained in every noble accomplishment,

and fitted for exercising authority over others by self-discipline,

by mutual fidelity, and by habitual obedience to a rule of right.

Nevertheless, we must look, with Zeller, for the true source of

Pythagoreanism as a moral movement in that great wave of religious

enthusiasm which swept over Hellas during the sixth century before

Christ, intimately associated with the importation of Apollo-worship

from Lycia, with the concentration of spiritual authority in the

oracular shrine of Delphi, and the political predominance of the

Dorian race, those Normans of the ancient world. Legend has thrown

this connexion into a poetical form by making Pythagoras the son of

Apollo; and the Samian sage, although himself an Ionian, chose the

Dorian cities of Southern Italy as a favourable field for his new

teaching, just as Calvinism found a readier acceptance in the advanced

posts of the Teutonic race than among the people whence its founder

sprang. Perhaps the nearest parallel, although on a far more extensive

scale, for the religious movement of which we are speaking, is the

spectacle offered by mediaeval Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries of our era, when a series of great Popes had concentrated

all spiritual power in their own hands, and were sending forth army

after army of Crusaders to the East; when all Western Europe had

awakened to the consciousness of its common Christianity, and each

individual was thrilled by a sense of the tremendous alternatives

committed to his choice; when the Dominican and Franciscan orders

were founded; when Gothic architecture and Florentine painting arose;

when the Troubadours and Minnesängers were pouring out their notes

of scornful or tender passion, and the love of the sexes had become a

sentiment as lofty and enduring as the devotion of friend to friend

had been in Greece of old. The bloom of Greek religious enthusiasm

was more exquisite and evanescent than that of feudal Catholicism;

inferior in pure spirituality and of more restricted significance as

a factor in the evolution of humanity, it at least remained free from

the ecclesiastical tyranny, the murderous fanaticism, and the unlovely

superstitions of mediaeval faith. But polytheism under any form was

fatally incapable of coping with the new spirit of enquiry awakened by

philosophy, and the old myths, with their naturalistic crudities, could

not long satisfy the reason and conscience of thinkers who had learned

in another school to seek everywhere for a central unity of control,

and to bow their imaginations before the passionless perfection of

eternal law.

III.

Such a thinker was Xenophanes, of Colophon. Driven, like Pythagoras,

from his native city by civil discords, he spent the greater part of

an unusually protracted life wandering through the Greek colonies of

Sicily and Southern Italy, and reciting his own verses, not always,

as it would appear, to a very attentive audience. Elea, an Italiote

city, seems to have been his favourite resort, and the school of

philosophy which he founded there has immortalised the name of this

otherwise obscure Phocaean settlement. Enough remains of his verses to

show with what terrible strength of sarcasm he assailed the popular

religion of Hellas. ‘Homer and Hesiod,’ he exclaims, ‘have attributed

to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among men—theft,

adultery, and mutual deception.’[12] Nor is Xenophanes content with

attacking these unedifying stories, he strikes at the anthropomorphic

conceptions which lay at their root. ‘Mortals think that the gods have

senses, and a voice and a body like their own. The negroes fancy that

their deities are black-skinned and snub-nosed, the Thracians give

theirs fair hair and blue eyes; if horses or lions had hands and could

paint, they too would make gods in their own image.’[13] It was, he

declared, as impious to believe in the birth of a god as to believe

in the possibility of his death. The current polytheism was equally

false. ‘There is one Supreme God among gods and men, unlike mortals

both in mind and body.’[14] There can be only one God, for God is

Omnipotent, so that there must be none to dispute his will. He must

also be perfectly homogeneous, shaped like a sphere, seeing, hearing,

and thinking with every part alike, never moving from place to place,

but governing all things by an effortless exercise of thought. Had such

daring heresies been promulgated in democratic Athens, their author

would probably have soon found himself and his works handed over to the

tender mercies of the Eleven. Happily at Elea, and in most other Greek

states, the gods were left to take care of themselves.

Xenophanes does not seem to have been ever molested on account of

his religious opinions. He complains bitterly enough that people

preferred fiction to philosophy, that uneducated athletes engrossed

far too much popular admiration, that he, Xenophanes, was not

sufficiently appreciated;[B] but of theological intolerance, so

far as our information goes, he says not one single word. It will

easily be conceived that the rapid progress of Greek speculation

was singularly favoured by such unbounded freedom of thought and

speech. The views just set forth have often been regarded as a step

towards spiritualistic monotheism, and so, considered in the light of

subsequent developments, they unquestionably were. Still, looking at

the matter from another aspect, we may say that Xenophanes, when he

shattered the idols of popular religion, was returning to the past

rather than anticipating the future; feeling his way back to the

deeper, more primordial faith of the old Aryan race, or even of that

still older stock whence Aryan and Turanian alike diverged. He turns

from the brilliant, passionate, fickle Dyaus, to Zên, or Ten, the

ever-present, all-seeing, all-embracing, immovable vault of heaven.

Aristotle, with a sympathetic insight unfortunately too rare in his

criticisms on earlier systems, observes that Xenophanes did not make

it clear whether the absolute unity he taught was material or ideal,

but simply looked up at the whole heaven and declared that the One

was God.[15] Aristotle was himself the real creator of philosophic

monotheism, just because the idea of living, self-conscious personality

had a greater value, a profounder meaning for him than for any other

thinker of antiquity, one may almost say than for any other thinker

whatever. It is, therefore, a noteworthy circumstance that, while

warmly acknowledging the anticipations of Anaxagoras, he nowhere speaks

of Xenophanes as a predecessor in the same line of enquiry. The latter

might be called a pantheist were it not that pantheism belongs to a

much later stage of speculation, one, in fact, not reached by the Greek

mind at any period of its development. His leading conception was

obscured by a confusion of mythological with purely physical ideas, and

could only bear full fruit when the religious element had been entirely

eliminated from its composition. This elimination was accomplished

by a far greater thinker, one who combined poetic inspiration with

philosophic depth; who was penetrating enough to discern the logical

consequences involved in a fundamental principle of thought, and bold

enough to push them to their legitimate conclusions without caring for

the shock to sense and common opinion that his merciless dialectic

might inflict.

Parmenides, of Elea, flourished towards the beginning of the fifth

century B.C. We know very little about his personal history.

According to Plato, he visited Athens late in life, and there made

the acquaintance of Socrates, at that time a very young man. But an

unsupported statement of Plato’s must always be received with extreme

caution; and this particular story is probably not less fictitious than

the dialogue which it serves to introduce. Parmenides embodied his

theory of the world in a poem, the most important passages of which

have been preserved. They show that, while continuing the physical

studies of his predecessors, he proceeded on an entirely different

method. Their object was to deduce every variety of natural phenomena

from a fundamental unity of substance. He declared that all variety and

change were a delusion, and that nothing existed but one indivisible,

unalterable, absolute reality; just as Descartes’ antithesis of thought

and extension disappeared in the infinite substance of Spinoza, or as

the Kantian dualism of object and subject was eliminated in Hegel’s

absolute idealism. Again, Parmenides does not dogmatise to the same

extent as his predecessors; he attempts to demonstrate his theory by

the inevitable necessities of being and thought. Existence, he tells

us over and over again, _is_, and non-existence is not, cannot even

be imagined or thought of as existing, for thought is the same as

being. This is not an anticipation of Hegel’s identification of being

with thought; it only amounts to the very innocent proposition that

a thought is something and about something—enters, therefore, into

the general undiscriminated mass of being. He next proceeds to prove

that what is can neither come into being nor pass out of it again.

It cannot come out of the non-existent, for that is inconceivable;

nor out of the existent, for nothing exists but being itself; and the

same argument proves that it cannot cease to exist. Here we find the

indestructibility of matter, a truth which Anaximander had not yet

grasped, virtually affirmed for the first time in history. We find

also that our philosopher is carried away by the enthusiasm of a new

discovery, and covers more ground than he can defend in maintaining

the permanence of all existence whatever. The reason is that to him,

as to every other thinker of the pre-Socratic period, all existence

was material, or, rather, all reality was confounded under one vague

conception, of which visible resisting extension supplied the most

familiar type. To proceed: Being cannot be divided from being, nor is

it capable of condensation or expansion (as the Ionians had taught);

there is nothing by which it can be separated or held apart; nor is it

ever more or less existent, but all is full of being. Parmenides goes

on in his grand style:—

‘Therefore the whole extends continuously,

Being by Being set; immovable,

Subject to the constraint of mighty laws;

Both increate and indestructible,

Since birth and death have wandered far away

By true conviction into exile driven;

The same, in self-same place, and by itself

Abiding, doth abide most firmly fixed,

And bounded round by strong Necessity.

Wherefore a holy law forbids that Being

Should be without an end, else want were there,

And want of that would be a want of all.’[16]

Thus does the everlasting Greek love of order, definition, limitation,

reassert its supremacy over the intelligence of this noble thinker,

just as his almost mystical enthusiasm has reached its highest pitch

of exaltation, giving him back a world which thought can measure,

circumscribe, and control.

Being, then, is finite in extent, and, as a consequence of its absolute

homogeneity, spherical in form. There is good reason for believing that

the earth’s true figure was first discovered in the fifth century B.C.,

but whether it was suggested by the _à priori_ theories of Parmenides,

or was generalised by him into a law of the whole universe, or whether

there was more than an accidental connexion between the two hypotheses,

we cannot tell. Aristotle, at any rate, was probably as much indebted

to the Eleatic system as to contemporary astronomy for his theory

of a finite spherical universe. It will easily be observed that the

distinction between space and matter, so obvious to us, and even to

Greek thinkers of a later date, had not yet dawned upon Parmenides.

As applied to the former conception, most of his affirmations are

perfectly correct, but his belief in the finiteness of Being can only

be justified on the supposition that Being is identified with matter.

For it must be clearly understood (and Zeller has the great merit of

having proved this fact by incontrovertible arguments)[17] that the

Eleatic Being was not a transcendental conception, nor an abstract

unity, as Aristotle erroneously supposed, nor a Kantian noumenon, nor

a spiritual essence of any kind, but a phenomenal reality of the most

concrete description. We can only not call Parmenides a materialist,

because materialism implies a negation of spiritualism, which in his

time had not yet come into existence. He tells us plainly that a man’s

thoughts result from the conformation of his body, and are determined

by the preponderating element in its composition. Not much, however,

can be made of this rudimentary essay in psychology, connected as it

seems to be with an appendix to the teaching of our philosopher, in

which he accepts the popular dualism, although still convinced of its

falsity, and uses it, under protest, as an explanation of that very

genesis which he had rejected as impossible.

As might be expected, the Parmenidean paradoxes provoked a considerable

amount of contradiction and ridicule. The Reids and Beatties of that

time drew sundry absurd consequences from the new doctrine, and offered

them as a sufficient refutation of its truth. Zeno, a young friend and

favourite of Parmenides, took up arms in his master’s defence, and

sought to prove with brilliant dialectical ability that consequences

still more absurd might be deduced from the opposite belief. He

originated a series of famous puzzles respecting the infinite

divisibility of matter and the possibility of motion, subsequently

employed as a disproof of all certainty by the Sophists and Sceptics,

and occasionally made to serve as arguments on behalf of agnosticism

by writers of our own time. Stated generally, they may be reduced to

two. A whole composed of parts and divisible _ad infinitum_ must be

either infinitely great or infinitely little; infinitely great if its

parts have magnitude, infinitely little if they have not. A moving body

can never come to the end of a given line, for it must first traverse

half the line, then half the remainder, and so on for ever. Aristotle

thought that the difficulty about motion could be solved by taking the

infinite divisibility of time into account; and Coleridge, according to

his custom, repeated the explanation without acknowledgment. But Zeno

would have refused to admit that any infinite series could come to an

end, whether it was composed of successive or of co-existent parts. So

long as the abstractions of our understanding are treated as separate

entities, these and similar puzzles will continue to exercise the

ingenuity of metaphysicians. Our present business, however, is not to

solve Zeno’s difficulties, but to show how they illustrate a leading

characteristic of Greek thought, its tendency to perpetual analysis,

a tendency not limited to the philosophy of the Greeks, but pervading

the whole of their literature and even of their art. Homer carefully

distinguishes the successive steps of every action, and leads up to

every catastrophe by a series of finely graduated transitions. Like

Zeno, again, he pursues a system of dichotomy, passing rapidly over the

first half of his subject, and relaxes the speed of his narrative by

going into ever-closer detail until the consummation is reached. Such

a poem as the ‘Achilleis’ of modern critics would have been perfectly

intolerable to a Greek, from the too rapid and uniform march of its

action. Herodotus proceeds after a precisely similar fashion, advancing

from a broad and free treatment of history to elaborate minuteness of

detail. So, too, a Greek temple divides itself into parts so distinct,

yet so closely connected, that the eye, after separating, as easily

recombines them into a whole. The evolution of Greek music tells the

same tale of progressive subdivision, which is also illustrated by the

passage from long speeches to single lines, and from these again to

half lines in the dialogue of a Greek drama. No other people could have

created mathematical demonstration, for no other would have had skill

and patience enough to discover the successive identities interposed

between and connecting the sides of an equation. The dialectic of

Socrates and Plato, the somewhat wearisome distinctions of Aristotle,

and, last of all, the fine-spun series of triads inserted by Proclus

between the superessential One and the fleeting world of sense,—were

all products of the same fundamental tendency, alternately most

fruitful and most barren in its results. It may be objected that Zeno,

so far from obeying this tendency, followed a diametrically opposite

principle, that of absolutely unbroken continuity. True; but the

‘Eleatic Palamedes’ fought his adversaries with a weapon wrested out

of their own hands; rejecting analysis as a law of real existence, he

continued to employ it as a logical artifice with greater subtlety than

had ever yet been displayed in pure speculation.[18]

Besides Zeno, Parmenides seems to have had only one disciple of

note, Melissus, the Samian statesman and general; but under various

modifications and combined with other elements, the Eleatic absolute

entered as a permanent factor into Greek speculation. From it were

lineally descended the Sphairos of Empedocles, the eternal atoms of

Leucippus, the Nous of Anaxagoras, the Megaric Good, the supreme

solar idea of Plato, the self-thinking thought of Aristotle, the

imperturbable tranquillity attributed to their model sage by Stoics

and Epicureans alike, the sovereign indifference of the Sceptics, and

finally, the Neo-platonic One. Modern philosophers have sought for

their supreme ideal in power, movement, activity, life, rather than in

any stationary substance; yet even among them we find Herbart partially

reviving the Eleatic theory, and confronting Hegel’s fluent categories

with his own inflexible monads.

We have now to study an analogous, though far less complicated,

antagonism in ancient Greece, and to show how her most brilliant period

of physical philosophy arose from the combination of two seemingly

irreconcilable systems. Parmenides, in an address supposed to be

delivered by Wisdom to her disciple, warns us against the method

pursued by ‘ignorant mortals, the blind, deaf, stupid, confused

tribes, who hold that to be and not to be are the same, and that all

things move round by an inverted path.’[19] What Parmenides denounced

as arrant nonsense was deliberately proclaimed to be the highest

truth by his illustrious contemporary, Heracleitus, of Ephesus. This

wonderful thinker is popularly known as the weeping philosopher,

because, according to a very silly tradition, he never went abroad

without shedding tears over the follies of mankind. No such mawkish

sentimentality, but bitter scorn and indignation, marked the attitude

of Heracleitus towards his fellows. A self-taught sage, he had no

respect for the accredited instructors of Hellas. ‘Much learning,’

he says, ‘does not teach reason, else it would have taught Hesiod

and Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.’[20] Homer, he declares,

ought to be flogged out of the public assemblages, and Archilochus

likewise. When the highest reputations met with so little mercy,

it will readily be imagined what contempt he poured on the vulgar

herd. The feelings of a high-born aristocrat combine with those of a

lofty genius to point and wing his words. ‘The many are bad and few

are the good. The best choose one thing instead of all, a perpetual

well-spring of fame, while the many glut their appetites like beasts.

One man is equal to ten thousand if he is the best.’ This contempt

was still further intensified by the very excusable incapacity of the

public to understand profound thought conveyed in a style proverbial

for its obscurity. ‘Men cannot comprehend the eternal law; when I

have explained the order of Nature they are no wiser than before.’

What, then, was this eternal law, a knowledge of which Heracleitus

found so difficult to popularise? Let us look back for a moment at

the earlier Ionian systems. They had taught that the universe arose

either by differentiation or by condensation and expansion from a

single primordial substance, into which, as Anaximander, at least,

held, everything, at last returned. Now, Heracleitus taught that this

transformation is a universal, never-ending, never-resting process;

that all things are moving; that Nature is like a stream in which no

man can bathe twice; that rest and stability are the law, not of life,

but of death. Again, the Pythagorean school, as we have seen, divided

all things into a series of sharply distinguished antithetical pairs.

Heracleitus either directly identified the terms of every opposition,

or regarded them as necessarily combined, or as continually passing

into one another. Perhaps we shall express his meaning most thoroughly

by saying that he would have looked on all three propositions as

equivalent statements of a single fact. In accordance with this

principle he calls war the father and king and lord of all, and

denounces Homer’s prayer for the abolition of strife as an unconscious

blasphemy against the universe itself. Yet, even his powerful

intellect could not grasp the conception of a shifting relativity

as the law and life of things without embodying it in a particular

material substratum. Following the Ionian tradition, he sought for a

world-element, and found it in that cosmic fire which enveloped the

terrestrial atmosphere, and of which the heavenly luminaries were

supposed to be formed. ‘Fire,’ says the Ephesian philosopher, no doubt

adapting his language to the comprehension of a great commercial

community, ‘is the general medium of exchange, as gold is given for

everything, and everything for gold.’ ‘The world was not created by any

god or any man, but always was, and is, and shall be, an ever-living

fire, periodically kindled and quenched.‘ By cooling and condensation,

water is formed from fire, and earth from water; then, by a converse

process called the way up as the other was the way down, earth again

passes into water and water into fire. At the end of certain stated

periods the whole world is to be reconverted into fire, but only to

enter on a new cycle in the series of its endless revolutions—a

conception, so far, remarkably confirmed by modern science. The whole

theory, including a future world conflagration, was afterwards adopted

by the Stoics, and probably exercised a considerable influence on the

eschatology of the early Christian Church. Imagination is obliged to

work under forms which thought has already superseded; and Heracleitus

as a philosopher had forestalled the dazzling consummation to which as

a prophet he might look forward in wonder and hope. For, his elemental

fire was only a picturesque presentation indispensable to him, but

not to us, of the sovereign law wherein all things live and move and

have their being. To have introduced such an idea into speculation

was his distinctive and inestimable achievement, although it may have

been suggested by the εἱμαρμένη or destiny of the theological poets,

a term occasionally employed in his writings. It had a moral as well

as a physical meaning, or rather it hovers ambiguously between the

two. ‘The sun shall not transgress his bounds, or the Erinyes who help

justice will find him out.’ It is the source of human laws, the common

reason which binds men together, therefore they should hold by it even

more firmly than by the laws of the State. It is not only all-wise but

all-good, even where it seems to be the reverse; for our distinctions

between good and evil, just and unjust, vanish in the divine harmony of

Nature, the concurrent energies and identifying transformations of her

universal life.

According to Aristotle, the Heracleitean flux was inconsistent with

the highest law of thought, and made all predication impossible. It

has been shown that the master himself recognised a fixed recurring

order of change which could be affirmed if nothing else could. But the

principle of change, once admitted, seemed to act like a corrosive

solvent, too powerful for any vessel to contain. Disciples were

soon found who pushed it to extreme consequences with the effect of

abolishing all certainty whatever. In Plato’s time it was impossible

to argue with a Heracleitean; he could never be tied down to a

definite statement. Every proposition became false as soon as it was

uttered, or rather before it was out of the speaker’s mouth. At last,

a distinguished teacher of the school declined to commit himself

by using words, and disputed exclusively in dumb show. A dangerous

speculative crisis had set in. At either extremity of the Hellenic

world the path of scientific inquiry was barred; on the one hand by

a theory eliminating non-existence from thought, and on the other

hand by a theory identifying it with existence. The luminous beam

of reflection had been polarised into two divergent rays, each light

where the other was dark and dark where the other was light, each

denying what the other asserted and asserting what the other denied.

For a century physical speculation had taught that the universe was

formed by the modification of a single eternal substance, whatever

that substance might be. By the end of that period, all becoming was

absorbed into being at Elea, and all being into becoming at Ephesus.

Each view contained a portion of the truth, and one which perhaps

would never have been clearly perceived if it had not been brought

into exclusive prominence. But further progress was impossible until

the two half-truths had been recombined. We may compare Parmenides and

Heracleitus to two lofty and precipitous peaks on either side of an

Alpine pass. Each commands a wide prospect, interrupted only on the

side of its opposite neighbour. And the fertilising stream of European

thought originates with neither of them singly, but has its source

midway between.

IV.

We now enter on the last period of purely objective philosophy, an

age of mediating and reconciling, but still profoundly original

speculation. Its principal representatives, with whom alone we have

to deal, are Empedocles, the Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, and

Anaxagoras. There is considerable doubt and difficulty respecting the

order in which they should be placed. Anaxagoras was unquestionably the

oldest and Democritus the youngest of the four, the difference between

their ages being forty years. It is also nearly certain that the

Atomists came after Empedocles. But if we take a celebrated expression

of Aristotle’s[21] literally (as there is no reason why it should not

be taken), Anaxagoras, although born before Empedocles, published

his views at a later period. Was he also anticipated by Leucippus? We

cannot tell with certainty, but it seems likely from a comparison of

their doctrines that he was; and in all cases the man who naturalised

philosophy in Athens, and who by his theory of a creative reason

furnishes a transition to the age of subjective speculation, will be

most conveniently placed at the close of the pre-Socratic period.

A splendid tribute has been paid to the fame of Empedocles by

Lucretius, the greatest didactic poet of all time, and by a great

didactic poet of our own time, Mr. Matthew Arnold. But the still more

rapturous panegyric pronounced by the Roman enthusiast on Epicurus

makes his testimony a little suspicious, and the lofty chant of

our own contemporary must be taken rather as an expression of his

own youthful opinions respecting man’s place in Nature, than as a

faithful exposition of the Sicilian thinker’s creed. Many another

name from the history of philosophy might with better reason have

been prefixed to that confession of resigned and scornful scepticism

entitled _Empedocles on Etna_. The real doctrines of an essentially

religious teacher would hardly have been so cordially endorsed by

Mr. Swinburne. But perhaps no other character could have excited the

deep sympathy felt by one poetic genius for another, when with both

of them thought is habitually steeped in emotion. Empedocles was the

last Greek of any note who threw his philosophy into a metrical form.

Neither Xenophanes nor Parmenides had done this with so much success.

No less a critic than Aristotle extols the Homeric splendour of his

verses, and Lucretius, in this respect an authority, speaks of them

as almost divine. But, judging from the fragments still extant, their

speculative content exhibits a distinct decline from the height reached

by his immediate predecessors. Empedocles betrays a distrust in man’s

power of discovering truth, almost, although not quite, unknown to

them. Too much certainty would be impious. He calls on the ‘much-wooed

white-armed virgin muse’ to—

‘Guide from the seat of Reverence thy bright car,

And bring to us the creatures of a day,

What without sin we may aspire to know.’[22]

We also miss in him their single-minded devotion to philosophy and

their rigorous unity of doctrine. The Acragantine sage was a party

leader (in which capacity, to his great credit, he victoriously upheld

the popular cause), a rhetorician, an engineer, a physician, and a

thaumaturgist. The well-known legend relating to his death may be

taken as a not undeserved satire on the colossal self-conceit of the

man who claimed divine honours during his lifetime. Half-mystic and

half-rationalist, he made no attempt to reconcile the two inconsistent

sides of his intellectual character. It may be compared to one of

those grotesque combinations in which, according to his morphology,

the heads and bodies of widely different animals were united during

the beginnings of life before they had learned to fall into their

proper places. He believed in metempsychosis, and professed to remember

the somewhat miscellaneous series of forms through which his own

personality had already run. He had been a boy, a girl, a bush, a

bird, and a fish. Nevertheless, as we shall presently see, his theory

of Nature altogether excluded such a notion as the soul’s separate

existence. We have now to consider what that theory actually was. It

will be remembered that Parmenides had affirmed the perpetuity and

eternal self-identity of being, but that he had deprived this profound

divination of all practical value by interpreting it in a sense which

excluded diversity and change. Empedocles also declares creation and

destruction to be impossible, but explains that the appearances so

denominated arise from the union and separation of four everlasting

substances—earth, air, fire, and water. This is the famous doctrine

of the four elements, which, adopted by Plato and Aristotle, was

long regarded as the last word of chemistry, and still survives in

popular phraseology. Its author may have been guided by an unconscious

reflection on the character of his own philosophical method, for was

not he, too, constructing a new system out of the elements supplied

by his predecessors? They had successively fixed on water, air, and

fire as the primordial form of existence; he added a fourth, earth,

and effected a sort of reconciliation by placing them all on an equal

footing. Curiously enough, the earlier monistic system had a relative

justification which his crude eclecticism lacked. All matter may exist

either in a solid, a liquid, or a gaseous form; and all solid matter

has reached its present condition after passing through the two other

degrees of consistency. That the three modifications should be found

coexisting in our own experience is a mere accident of the present

régime, and to enumerate them is to substitute a description for an

explanation, the usual fault of eclectic systems. Empedocles, however,

besides his happy improvement on Parmenides, made a real contribution

to thought when, as Aristotle puts it, he sought for a moving as well

as for a material cause; in other words, when he asked not only of

what elements the world is composed, but also by what forces were they

brought together. He tells us of two such causes, Love and Strife,

the one a combining, the other a dissociating power. If for these

half-mythological names we read attractive and repulsive forces, the

result will not be very different from our own current cosmologies.

Such terms, when so used as to assume the existence of occult qualities

in matter, driving its parts asunder or drawing them close together,

are, in truth, as completely mythological as any figments of Hellenic

fancy. Unlike their modern antitypes, the Empedoclean goddesses did

not reign together, but succeeded one another in alternate dominion

during protracted periods of time. The victory of Love was complete

when all things had been drawn into a perfect sphere, evidently the

absolute Eleatic Being subjected to a Heracleitean law of vicissitude

and contradiction. For Strife lays hold on the consolidated orb, and

by her disintegrating action gradually reduces it to a formless chaos,

till, at the close of another world-period, the work of creation begins

again. Yet growth and decay are so inextricably intertwined that

Empedocles failed to keep up this ideal separation, and was compelled

to admit the simultaneous activity of both powers in our everyday

experience, so that Nature turns out to be composed of six elements

instead of four, the mind which perceives it being constituted in a

precisely similar manner. But Love, although on the whole victorious,

can only gradually get the better of her retreating enemy, and Nature,

as we know it, is the result of their continued conflict. Empedocles

described the process of evolution, as he conceived it, in somewhat

minute detail. Two points only are of much interest to us, his alleged

anticipation of the Darwinian theory and his psychology. The former,

such as it was, has occasionally been attributed to Lucretius, but

the Roman poet most probably copied Epicurus, although the very brief

summary of that philosopher’s physical system preserved by Diogenes

Laertius contains no allusion to such a topic. We know, however, that

in Aristotle’s time a theory identical with that of Lucretius was

held by those who rejected teleological explanations of the world in

general and of living organisms in particular. All sorts of animals

were produced by spontaneous generation; only those survived which

were accidentally furnished with appliances for procuring nourishment

and for propagating their kind. The notion itself originated with

Empedocles, whose fanciful suppositions have already been mentioned

in a different connexion. Most assuredly he did not offer it as a

solution of problems which in his time had not yet been mooted, but as

an illustration of the confusion which prevailed when Love had only

advanced a little way in her ordering, harmonising, unifying task.

Prantl, writing a few years before the appearance of Mr. Darwin’s

book on the Origin of Species, and therefore without any prejudice

on the subject, observes with truth that this theory of Empedocles

was deeply rooted in the mythological conceptions of the time.[23]

Perhaps he was seeking for a rationalistic explanation of the centaurs,

minotaurs, hundred-handed giants, and so forth, in whose existence he

had not, like Lucretius, learned completely to disbelieve. His strange

supposition was afterwards freed from its worst extravagances; but

even as stated in the _De Rerum Naturâ_, it has no claim whatever

to rank as a serious hypothesis. Anything more unlike the Darwinian

doctrine, according to which all existing species have been evolved

from less highly-organized ancestors by the gradual accumulation of

minute differences, it would be difficult to conceive. Every thinker of

antiquity, with one exception, believed in the immutability of natural

species. They had existed unchanged from all eternity, or had sprung

up by spontaneous generation from the earth’s bosom in their present

form. The solitary dissentient was Anaximander, who conjectured that

man was descended from an aquatic animal.[24] Strange to say, this

lucky guess has not yet been quoted as an argument against the Ascidian

pedigree. It is chiefly the enemies of Darwinism who are eager to find

it anticipated in Empedocles or Lucretius. By a curious inversion of

traditionalism, it is fancied that a modern discovery can be upset

by showing that somebody said something of the kind more than two

thousand years ago. Unfortunately authority has not the negative value

of disproving the principles which it supports. We must be content

to accept the truths brought to light by observation and reasoning,

even at the risk of finding ourselves in humiliating agreement with a

philosopher of antiquity.[25]

Passing from life to mind, we find Empedocles teaching an even more

pronounced materialism than Parmenides, inasmuch as it is stated in

language of superior precision. Our souls are, according to him,

made up of elements like those which constitute the external world,

each of these being perceived by a corresponding portion of the same

substances within ourselves—fire by fire, water by water, and so on

with the rest. It is a mistake to suppose that speculation begins from

a subjective standpoint, that men start with a clear consciousness of

their own personality, and proceed to construct an objective universe

after the same pattern. Doubtless they are too prone to personify the

blind forces of Nature, and Empedocles himself has just supplied us

with an example of this tendency, but they err still more by reading

outward experience into their own souls, by materialising the processes

of consciousness, and resolving human personality into a loose

confederacy of inorganic units. Even Plato, who did more than anyone

else towards distinguishing between mind and body, ended by laying down

his psychology on the lines of an astronomical system. Meanwhile, to

have separated the perception of an object from the object itself, in

ever so slight a degree, was an important gain to thought. We must not

omit to notice a hypothesis by which Empedocles sought to elucidate

the mechanism of sensation, and which was subsequently adopted by the

atomic school; indeed, as will presently be shown, we have reason to

believe that the whole atomic theory was developed out of it. He held

that emanations were being continually thrown off from the surfaces of

bodies, and that they penetrated into the organs of sense through fine

passages or pores. This may seem a crude guess, but it is at any rate

much more scientific than Aristotle’s explanation. According to the

latter, possibilities of feeling are converted into actualities by the

presence of an object. In other words, we feel when and because we do;

a safe assertion, but hardly an addition to our positive knowledge of

the subject.

We have seen how Greek thought had arrived at a perfectly just

conception of the process by which all physical transformations are

effected. The whole extended universe is an aggregate of bodies, while

each single body is formed by a combination of everlasting elements,

and is destroyed by their separation. But if Empedocles was right, if

these primary substances were no other than the fire, air, water, and

earth of everyday experience, what became of the Heracleitean law,

confirmed by common observation, that, so far from remaining unaltered,

they were continually passing into one another? To this question the

atomic theory gave an answer so conclusive, that, although ignored or

contemned by later schools, it was revived with the great revival of

science in the sixteenth century, was successfully employed in the

explanation of every order of phenomena, and still remains the basis

of all physical enquiry. The undulatory theory of light, the law

of universal gravitation, and the laws of chemical combination can

only be expressed in terms implying the existence of atoms; the laws

of gaseous diffusion, and of thermodynamics generally, can only be

understood with their help; and the latest developments of chemistry

have tended still further to establish their reality, as well as to

elucidate their remarkable properties. In the absence of sufficient

information, it is difficult to determine by what steps this admirable

hypothesis was evolved. Yet, even without external evidence, we may

fairly conjecture that, sooner or later, some philosopher, possessed of

a high generalising faculty, would infer that if bodies are continually

throwing off a flux of infinitesimal particles from their surfaces,

they must be similarly subdivided all through; and that if the organs

of sense are honeycombed with imperceptible pores, such may also be

the universal constitution of matter.[26] Now, according to Aristotle,

Leucippus, the founder of atomism, did actually use the second of these

arguments, and employed it in particular to prove the existence of

indivisible solids.[27] Other considerations equally obvious suggested

themselves from another quarter. If all change was expressible in

terms of matter and motion, then gradual change implied interstitial

motion, which again involved the necessity of fine pores to serve as

channels for the incoming and outgoing molecular streams. Nor, as was

supposed, could motion of any kind be conceived without a vacuum,

the second great postulate of the atomic theory. Here its advocates

directly joined issue with Parmenides. The chief of the Eleatic school

had, as we have seen, presented being under the form of a homogeneous

sphere, absolutely continuous but limited in extent. Space dissociated

from matter was to him, as afterwards to Aristotle, non-existent and

impossible. It was, he exclaimed, inconceivable, nonsensical. Unhappily

inconceivability is about the worst negative criterion of truth ever

yet invented. His challenge was now taken up by the Atomists, who

boldly affirmed that if non-being meant empty space, it was just as

conceivable and just as necessary as being. A further stimulus may have

been received from the Pythagorean school, whose doctrines had, just

at this time, been systematised and committed to writing by Philolaus,

its most eminent disciple. The hard saying that all things were made

out of number might be explained and confirmed if the integers were

interpreted as material atoms.

It will have been observed that, so far, the merit of originating

atomism has been attributed to Leucippus, instead of to the more

celebrated Democritus, with whose name it is usually associated. The

two were fast friends, and seem always to have worked together in

perfect harmony. But Leucippus, although next to nothing is known of

his life, was apparently the older man, and from him, so far as we

can make out, emanated the great idea, which his brilliant coadjutor

carried into every department of enquiry, and set forth in works

which are a loss to literature as well as to science, for the poetic

splendour of their style was not less remarkable than the encyclopaedic

range of their contents. Democritus was born at Abdêra, a Thracian

city, 470 B.C., a year before Socrates, and lived to a very advanced

age—more than a hundred, according to some accounts. However this

may be, he was probably, like most of his great countrymen, possessed

of immense vitality. His early manhood was spent in Eastern travel,

and he was not a little proud of the numerous countries which he had

visited, and the learned men with whom he had conversed. His time was

mostly occupied in observing Nature, and in studying mathematics;

the sages of Asia and Egypt may have acquainted him with many useful

scientific facts, but we have seen that his philosophy was derived from

purely Hellenic sources. A few fragments of his numerous writings still

survive—the relics of an intellectual Ozymandias. In them are briefly

shadowed forth the conceptions which Lucretius, or at least his modern

English interpreters, have made familiar to all educated men and women.

Everything is the result of mechanical causation. Infinite worlds are

formed by the collision of infinite atoms falling for ever downward

through infinite space. No place is left for supernatural agency;

nor are the unaided operations of Nature disguised under Olympian

appellations. Democritus goes even further than Epicurus in his

rejection of the popular mythology. His system provides no interstellar

refuge for abdicated gods. He attributed a kind of objective existence

to the apparitions seen in sleep, and even a considerable influence for

good or for evil, but denied that they were immortal. The old belief in

a Divine Power had arisen from their activity and from meteorological

phenomena of an alarming kind, but was destitute of any stronger

foundation. For his own part, he looked on the fiery spherical atoms as

a universal reason or soul of the world, without, however, assigning

to them the distinct and commanding position occupied by a somewhat

analogous principle in the system which we now proceed to examine, and

with which our survey of early Greek thought will most fitly terminate.

V.

Reasons have already been suggested for placing Anaxagoras last in

order among the physical philosophers, notwithstanding his priority in

point of age to more than one of them. He was born, according to the

most credible accounts, 500 B.C., at Clazomenae, an Ionian city, and

settled in Athens when twenty years of age. There he spent much the

greater part of a long life, illustrating the type of character which

Euripides—expressly referring, as is supposed, to the Ionian sage—has

described in the following choric lines:

‘Happy is he who has learned

To search out the secret of things,

Not to the townsmen’s bane,

Neither for aught that brings

An unrighteous gain.

But the ageless order he sees

Of nature that cannot die,

And the causes whence it springs,

And the how and the why.

Never have thoughts like these

To a deed of dishonour been turned.’[28]

The dishonour was for the townsmen who, in an outbreak of insane

fanaticism, drove the blameless truthseeker from his adopted home.

Anaxagoras was the intimate companion of Pericles, and Pericles had

made many enemies by his domestic as well as by his foreign policy.

A coalition of harassed interests and offended prejudices was formed

against him. A cry arose that religion and the constitution were in

danger. The Athenians had too much good sense to dismiss their great

democratic Minister, but they permitted the illustrious statesman’s

political opponents to strike at him through his friends.[29] Aspasia

was saved only by the tears of her lover. Pheidias, the grandest,

most spiritual-minded artist of all time, was arrested on a charge

of impiety, and died in a prison of the city whose temples were

adorned with the imperishable monuments of his religious inspiration.

A decree against ‘astronomers and atheists’ was so evidently aimed

at Anaxagoras that the philosopher retired to Lampsacus, where he

died at the age of seventy-two, universally admired and revered.

Altars dedicated to Reason and Truth were erected in his honour, and

for centuries his memory continued to be celebrated by an annual

feast.[30] His whole existence had been devoted to science. When

asked what made life worth living, he answered, ‘The contemplation of

the heavens and of the universal cosmic order.’ The reply was like a

title-page to his works. We can see that specialisation was beginning,

that the positive sciences were separating themselves from general

theories about Nature, and could be cultivated independently of them.

A single individual might, indeed, combine philosophy of the most

comprehensive kind with a detailed enquiry into some particular order

of phenomena, but he could do this without bringing the two studies

into any immediate connexion with each other. Such seems to have been

the case with Anaxagoras. He was a professional astronomer and also

the author of a modified atomic hypothesis. This, from its greater

complexity, seems more likely to have been suggested by the purely

quantitative conception of Leucippus than to have preceded it in the

order of evolution. Democritus, and probably his teacher also, drew a

very sharp distinction between what were afterwards called the primary

and secondary qualities of matter. Extension and resistance alone

had a real existence in Nature, while the attributes corresponding

to our special sensations, such as temperature, taste, and colour,

were only subjectively, or, as he expressed it, conventionally true.

Anaxagoras affirmed no less strongly than his younger contemporaries

that the sum of being can neither be increased nor diminished, that

all things arise and perish by combination and division, and that

bodies are formed out of indestructible elements; like the Atomists,

again, he regarded these elementary substances as infinite in number

and inconceivably minute; only he considered them as qualitatively

distinct, and as resembling on an infinitesimal scale the highest

compounds that they build up. Not only were gold, iron, and the other

metals formed of homogeneous particles, but such substances as flesh,

bone, and blood were, according to him, equally simple, equally

decomposable, into molecules of like nature with themselves. Thus, as

Aristotle well observes, he reversed the method of Empedocles, and

taught that earth, air, fire, and water were really the most complex

of all bodies, since they supplied nourishment to the living tissues,

and therefore must contain within themselves the multitudinous variety

of units by whose aggregation individualised organic substance is

made up.[31] Furthermore, our philosopher held that originally this

intermixture had been still more thoroughgoing, all possible qualities

being simultaneously present in the smallest particles of matter. The

resulting state of chaotic confusion lasted until Nous, or Reason, came

and segregated the heterogeneous elements by a process of continuous

differentiation leading up to the present arrangement of things. Both

Plato and Aristotle have commended Anaxagoras for introducing into

speculation the conception of Reason as a cosmic world-ordering power;

both have censured him for making so little use of his own great

thought, for attributing almost everything to secondary, material,

mechanical causes; for not everywhere applying the teleological method;

in fact, for not anticipating the Bridgewater Treatises and proving

that the world is constructed on a plan of perfect wisdom and goodness.

Less fortunate than the Athenians, we cannot purchase the work of

Anaxagoras on Nature at an orchestral book-stall for the moderate price

of a drachma; but we know enough about its contents to correct the

somewhat petulant and superficial criticism of a school perhaps less in

sympathy than we are with its author’s method of research. Evidently

the Clazomenian philosopher did not mean by Reason an ethical force, a

power which makes for human happiness or virtue, nor yet a reflecting

intelligence, a designer adapting means to ends. To all appearances the

Nous was not a spirit in the sense which we attach, or which Aristotle

attached to the term. It was, according to Anaxagoras, the subtlest

and purest of all things, totally unmixed with other substances, and

therefore able to control and bring them into order. This is not how

men speak of an immaterial inextended consciousness. The truth is that

no amount of physical science could create, although it might lead

towards a spiritualistic philosophy. Spiritualism first arose from

the sophistic negation of an external world, from the exclusive study

of man, from the Socratic search after general definitions. Yet, if

Nous originally meant intelligence, how could it lose this primary

signification and become identified with a mere mode of matter? The

answer is, that Anaxagoras, whose whole life was spent in tracing out

the order of Nature, would instinctively think of his own intelligence

as a discriminating, identifying faculty; would, consequently, conceive

its objective counterpart under the form of a differentiating and

integrating power. All preceding thinkers had represented their supreme

being under material conditions, either as one element singly or as a

sum total where elemental differences were merged. Anaxagoras differed

from them chiefly by the very sharp distinction drawn between his

informing principle and the rest of Nature. The absolute intermixture

of qualities which he presupposes bears a very strong resemblance

both to the Sphairos of Empedocles and to the fiery consummation of

Heracleitus, it may even have been suggested by them. Only, what with

them was the highest form of existence becomes with him the lowest;

thought is asserting itself more and more, and interpreting the law of

evolution in accordance with its own imperious demands.

A world where ordering reason was not only raised to supreme power,

but also jealously secluded from all communion with lower forms of

existence, meant to popular imagination a world from which divinity

had been withdrawn. The astronomical teaching of Anaxagoras was well

calculated to increase a not unfounded alarm. Underlying the local

tribal mythology of Athens and of Greece generally, was an older,

deeper Nature-worship, chiefly directed towards those heavenly

luminaries which shone so graciously on all men, and to which all

men yielded, or were supposed to yield, grateful homage in return.

_Securus judicat orbis terrarum._ Every Athenian citizen from Nicias to

Strepsiades would feel his own belief strengthened by such a universal

concurrence of authority. Two generations later, Plato held fast to

the same conviction, severely denouncing its impugners, whom he would,

if possible, have silenced with the heaviest penalties. To Aristotle,

also, the heavenly bodies were something far more precious and perfect

than anything in our sublunary sphere, something to be spoken of

only in language of enthusiastic and passionate love. At a far later

period Marcus Aurelius could refer to them as visible gods;[32] and

just before the final extinction of Paganism highly-educated men still

offered up their orisons in silence and secresy to the moon.[33]

Judge, then, with what horror an orthodox public received Anaxagoras’s

announcement that the moon shone only by reflected light, that she was

an earthy body, and that her surface was intersected with mountains and

ravines, besides being partially built over. The bright Selênê, the

Queen of Heaven, the most interesting and sympathetic of goddesses,

whose phases so vividly recalled the course of human life, who was

firmly believed to bring fine weather at her return and to take it away

at her departure, was degraded into a cold, dark, senseless clod.[34]

Democritus observed that all this had been known a long time in the

Eastern countries where he had travelled.[C] Possibly; but fathers of

families could not have been more disturbed if it had been a brand-new

discovery. The sun, too, they were told, was a red-hot stone larger

than Peloponnesus—a somewhat unwieldy size even for a Homeric god.

Socrates, little as he cared about physical investigations generally,

took this theory very seriously to heart, and attempted to show by a

series of distinctions that sun-heat and fire-heat were essentially

different from each other. A duller people than the Athenians would

probably have shown far less suspicion of scientific innovations. Men

who were accustomed to anticipate the arguments of an orator before

they were half out of his mouth, with whom the extraction of reluctant

admissions by cross-examination was habitually used as a weapon of

attack and defence in the public law courts and practised as a game in

private circles—who were perpetually on their guard against insidious

attacks from foreign and domestic foes—had minds ready trained to

the work of an inquisitorial priesthood. An Athenian, moreover, had

mythology at his fingers’ ends; he was accustomed to see its leading

incidents placed before him on the stage not only with intense realism,

but with a systematic adaptation to the demands of common experience

and a careful concatenation of cause and effect, which gave his belief

in them all the force of a rational conviction while retaining all the

charm of a supernatural creed. Then, again, the constitution of Athens,

less than that of any other Greek State, could be worked without the

devoted, self-denying co-operation of her citizens, and in their

minds sense of duty was inseparably associated with religious belief,

based in its turn on mythological traditions. A great poet has said,

and said truly, that Athens was ‘on the will of man as on a mount of

diamond set,’ but the crystallising force which gave that collective

human will such clearness and keenness and tenacity was faith in the

protecting presence of a diviner Will at whose withdrawal it would have

crumbled into dust. Lastly, the Athenians had no genius for natural

science; none of them were ever distinguished as savants. They looked

on the new knowledge much as Swift looked on it two thousand years

afterwards. It was, they thought, a miserable trifling waste of time,

not productive of any practical good, breeding conceit in young men,

and quite unworthy of receiving any attention from orators, soldiers,

and statesmen. Pericles, indeed, thought differently, but Pericles was

as much beyond his age when he talked about Nature with Anaxagoras as

when he charged Aspasia with the government of his household and the

entertainment of his guests.

These reflections are offered, not in excuse but in explanation of

Athenian intolerance, a phenomenon for the rest unparalleled in ancient

Greece. We cannot say that men were then, or ever have been, logically

obliged to choose between atheism and superstition. If instead of using

Nous as a half-contemptuous nickname for the Clazomenian stranger,[D]

his contemporaries had taken the trouble to understand what Nous really

meant, they might have found in it the possibility of a deep religious

significance; they might have identified it with all that was best

and purest in their own guardian goddess Athênê; have recognised it

as the very foundation of their own most characteristic excellences.

But vast spiritual revolutions are not so easily accomplished; and

when, before the lapse of many years, Nous was again presented to the

Athenian people, this time actually personified as an Athenian citizen,

it was again misunderstood, again rejected, and became the occasion for

a display of the same persecuting spirit, unhappily pushed to a more

fatal extreme.

Under such unfavourable auspices did philosophy find a home in Athens.

The great maritime capital had drawn to itself every other species

of intellectual eminence, and this could not fail to follow with the

rest. But philosophy, although hitherto identified with mathematical

and physical science, held unexhausted possibilities of development in

reserve. According to a well-known legend, Thales once fell into a tank

while absorbed in gazing at the stars. An old woman advised him to look

at the tank in future, for there he would see the water and the stars

as well. Others after him had got into similar difficulties, and might

seek to evade them by a similar artifice. While busied with the study

of cosmic evolution, they had stumbled unawares on some perplexing

mental problems. Why do the senses suggest beliefs so much at variance

with those arrived at by abstract reasoning? Why should reason be more

trustworthy than sense? Why are the foremost Hellenic thinkers so

hopelessly disagreed? What is the criterion of truth? Of what use are

conclusions which cannot command universal assent? Or, granting that

truth is discoverable, how can it be communicated to others? Such were

some of the questions now beginning urgently to press for a solution.

‘I sought for myself,’ said Heracleitus in his oracular style. His

successors had to do even more—to seek not only for themselves but for

others; to study the beliefs, habits, and aptitudes of their hearers

with profound sagacity, in order to win admission for the lessons they

were striving to impart. And when a systematic investigation of human

nature had once begun, it could not stop short with a mere analysis

of the intellectual faculties; what a man did was after all so very

much more important than what he knew, was, in truth, that which alone

gave his knowledge any practical value whatever. Moral distinctions,

too, were beginning to grow uncertain. When every other traditional

belief had been shaken to its foundations, when men were taught to

doubt the evidence of their own senses, it was not to be expected that

the conventional laws of conduct, at no time very exact or consistent,

would continue to be accepted on the authority of ancient usage.

Thus, every kind of determining influences, internal and external,

conspired to divert philosophy from the path which it had hitherto

pursued, and to change it from an objective, theoretical study into an

introspective, dialectic, practical discipline.

VI.

And now, looking back at the whole course of early Greek thought,

presenting as it does a gradual development and an organic unity

which prove it to be truly a native growth, a spontaneous product

of the Greek mind, let us take one step further and enquire whether

before the birth of pure speculation, or parallel with but apart from

its rudimentary efforts, there were not certain tendencies displayed

in the other great departments of intellectual activity, fixed forms

as it were in which the Hellenic genius was compelled to work, which

reproduce themselves in philosophy and determine its distinguishing

characteristics. Although the materials for a complete Greek ethology

are no longer extant, it can be shown that such tendencies did actually

exist.

It is a familiar fact, first brought to light by Lessing, and

generalised by him into a law of all good literary composition, that

Homer always throws his descriptions into a narrative form. We are not

told what a hero wore, but how he put on his armour; when attention is

drawn to a particular object we are made acquainted with its origin

and past history; even the reliefs on a shield are invested with life

and movement. Homer was not impelled to adopt this method either by

conscious reflection or by a profound poetic instinct. At a certain

stage of intellectual development, every Greek would find it far easier

to arrange the data of experience in successive than in contemporaneous

order; the one is fixed, the other admits of indefinite variation.

Pictorial and plastic art also begin with serial presentations, and

only arrive at the construction of large centralised groups much later

on. We have next to observe that, while Greek reflection at first

followed the order of time, it turned by preference not to present or

future, but to past time. Nothing in Hellenic literature reminds us of

Hebrew prophecy. To a Greek all distinct prevision was merged in the

gloom of coming death or the glory of anticipated fame. Of course, at

every great crisis of the national fortunes much curiosity prevailed

among the vulgar as to what course events would take; but it was

sedulously discouraged by the noblest minds. Herodotus and Sophocles

look on even divine predictions as purposely ambiguous and misleading.

Pindar often dwells on the hopeless uncertainty of life.[35] Thucydides

treats all vaticination as utterly delusive. So, when a belief in

the soul’s separate existence first obtained acceptance among the

Greeks, it interested them far less as a pledge of never-ending life

and progress hereafter, than as involving a possible revelation of

past history, of the wondrous adventures which each individual had

passed through before assuming his present form. Hence the peculiar

force of Pindar’s congratulation to the partaker in the Eleusinian

mysteries; after death he knows not only ‘the end of life,’ but also

‘its god-given beginning.’[36] Even the present was not intelligible

until it had been projected back into the past, or interpreted by the

light of some ancient tale. Sappho, in her famous ode to Aphroditê,

recalls the incidents of a former passion precisely similar to the

unrequited love which now agitates her heart, and describes at length

how the goddess then came to her relief as she is now implored to come

again. Modern critics have spoken of this curious literary artifice as

a sign of delicacy and reserve. We may be sure that Sappho was an utter

stranger to such feelings; she ran her thoughts into a predetermined

mould just as a bee builds its wax into hexagonal cells. Curtius,

the German historian, has surmised with much plausibility that the

entire legend of Troy owes its origin to this habit of throwing back

contemporary events into a distant past. According to his view, the

characters and scenes recorded by Homer, although unhistorical as

they now stand, had really a place in the Achaean colonisation of

Asia Minor.[37] But, apart from any disguised allusions, old stories

had an inexhaustible charm for the Greek imagination. Even during the

stirring events of the Peloponnesian war, elderly Athenian citizens

in their hours of relaxation talked of nothing but mythology.[38] When

a knowledge of reading became universally diffused, and books could

be had at a moderate price, ancient legends seem to have been the

favourite literature of the lower classes, just as among ourselves in

Caxton’s time. Still more must the same taste have prevailed a century

earlier. A student who opens Pindar’s epinician odes for the first

time is surprised to find so little about the victorious combatants

and the struggles in which they took part, so much about mythical

adventures seemingly unconnected with the ostensible subject of the

poem. Furthermore, we find that genealogies were the framework by which

these distant recollections were held together. Most noble families

traced their descent back to a god or to a god-like hero. The entire

interval separating the historical period from the heroic age was

filled up with more or less fictitious pedigrees. A man’s ancestry

was much the most important part of his biography. It is likely that

Herodotus had just as enthusiastic an admiration as we can have for

Leonidas. Yet one fancies that a historian of later date would have

shown his appreciation of the Spartan king in a rather different

fashion. We should have been told something about the hero’s personal

appearance, and perhaps some characteristic incidents from his earlier

career would have been related. Not so with Herodotus. He pauses in

the story of Thermopylae to give us the genealogy of Leonidas up to

Heraclês; no more and no less. That was the highest compliment he could

pay, and it is repeated for Pausanias, the victor of Plataea.[39] The

genealogical method was capable of wide extension, and could be applied

to other than human or animal relationships. Hesiod’s Theogony is a

genealogy of heaven and earth, and all that in them is. According to

Aeschylus, gain is bred from gain, slaughter from slaughter, woe from

woe. Insolence bears a child like unto herself, and this in turn gives

birth to a still more fatal progeny.[40] The same poet terminates his

enumeration of the flaming signals that sped the message of victory

from Troy to Argos, by describing the last beacon as ‘not ungrandsired

by the Idaean fire.’[41] Now, when the Greek genius had begun to move

in any direction, it rushed forward without pausing until arrested by

an impassable limit, and then turned back to retraverse at leisure

the whole interval separating that limit from its point of departure.

Thus, the ascending lines of ancestry were followed up until they led

to a common father of all; every series of outrages was traced through

successive reprisals back to an initial crime; and more generally every

event was affiliated to a preceding event, until the whole chain had

been attached to an ultimate self-existing cause. Hence the records

of origination, invention, spontaneity were long sought after with

an eagerness which threw almost every other interest into the shade.

‘Glory be to the inventor,’ sings Pindar, in his address to victorious

Corinth; ‘whence came the graces of the dithyrambic hymn, who first

set the double eagle on the temples of the gods?’[42] The _Prometheus_

of Aeschylus tells how civilisation began, and the trilogy to which it

belongs was probably intended to show how the supremacy of Zeus was

first established and secured. A great part of the _Agamemnon_ deals

with events long anterior to the opening of the drama, but connected

as ultimate causes with the terrible catastrophe which it represents.

In the _Eumenides_ we see how the family, as it now exists, was first

constituted by the substitution of paternal for maternal headship, and

also how the worship of the Avenging Goddesses was first introduced

into Athens, as well as how the Areopagite tribunal was founded. It

is very probable that Sophocles’s earliest work, the _Triptolemus_,

represented the origin of agriculture under a dramatic form; and if

the same poet’s later pieces, as well as all those of Euripides,

stand on quite different ground, occupied as they are with subjects of

contemporaneous, or rather of eternal interest, we must regard this

as a proof that the whole current of Greek thought had taken a new

direction, corresponding to that simultaneously impressed on philosophy

by Socrates and the Sophists. We may note further that the Aeginetan

sculptures, executed soon after Salamis, though evidently intended to

commemorate that victory, represent a conflict waged long before by

the tutelary heroes of Aegina against an Asiatic foe. We may also see

in our own British Museum how the birth of Athênê was recorded in a

marble group on one pediment of the Parthenon, and the foundation of

her chosen city on the other. The very temple which these majestic

sculptures once adorned was a petrified memorial of antiquity, and,

by the mere form of its architecture, must have carried back men’s

thoughts to the earliest Hellenic habitation, the simple structure in

which a gabled roof was supported by cross-beams on a row of upright

wooden posts.

Turning back once more from art and literature to philosophy, is

it not abundantly clear that if the Greeks speculated at all, they

must at first have speculated according to some such method as that

which history proves them to have actually followed? They must have

begun by fixing their thoughts, as Thales and his successors did, on

the world’s remotest past; they must have sought for a first cause

of things, and conceived it, not as any spiritual power, but as a

kind of natural ancestor homogeneous with the forms which issued

from it, although greater and more comprehensive than they were; in

short, as an elemental body—water, air, fire, or, more vaguely, as

an infinite substance. Did not the steady concatenation of cause and

effect resemble the unrolling of a heroic genealogy? And did not the

reabsorption of every individual existence in a larger whole translate

into more general terms that subordination of personal to family and

civic glory which is the diapason of Pindar’s music?

Nor was this all. Before philosophising, the Greeks did not think only

in the order of time; they learned at a very early period to think

also in the order of space, their favourite idea of a limit being

made especially prominent here. Homer’s geographical notions, however

erroneous, are, for his age, singularly well defined. Aeschylus has a

wide knowledge of the earth’s surface, and exhibits it with perhaps

unnecessary readiness. Pindar delights to follow his mythological

heroes about on their travels. The same tendency found still freer

scope when prose literature began. Hecataeus, one of the earliest

prose-writers, was great both as a genealogist and as a geographer;

and in this respect also Herodotus carried out on a great scale the

enquiries most habitually pursued by his countrymen. Now, it will be

remembered that we have had occasion to characterise early Ionian

speculation as being, to a great extent, cosmography. The element from

which it deduced all things was, in fact, that which was supposed to

lie outside and embrace the rest. The geographical limit was conceived

as a genealogical ancestor. Thus, the studies which men like Hecataeus

carried on separately, were combined, or rather confused, in a single

bold generalisation by Anaximenes and Heracleitus.

Yet, however much may be accounted for by these considerations, they

still leave something unexplained. Why should one thinker after

another so unhesitatingly assume that the order of Nature as we know

it has issued not merely from a different but from an exactly opposite

condition, from universal confusion and chaos? Their experience was

far too limited to tell them anything about those vast cosmic changes

which we know by incontrovertible evidence to have already occurred,

and to be again in course of preparation. We can only answer this

question by bringing into view what may be called the negative moment

of Greek thought. The science of contraries is one, says Aristotle, and

it certainly was so to his countrymen. Not only did they delight to

bring together the extremes of weal and woe, of pride and abasement,

of security and disaster, but whatever they most loved and clung to in

reality seemed to interest their imagination most powerfully by its

removal, its reversal, or its overthrow. The Athenians were peculiarly

intolerant of regal government and of feminine interference in

politics. In Athenian tragedy the principal actors are kings and royal

ladies. The Athenian matrons occupied a position of exceptional dignity

and seclusion. They are brought upon the comic stage to be covered with

the coarsest ridicule, and also to interfere decisively in the conduct

of public affairs. Aristophanes was profoundly religious himself, and

wrote for a people whose religion, as we have seen, was pushed to

the extreme of bigotry. Yet he shows as little respect for the gods

as for the wives and sisters of his audience. To take a more general

example still, the whole Greek tragic drama is based on the idea of

family kinship, and that institution was made most interesting to Greek

spectators by the violation of its eternal sanctities, by unnatural

hatred, and still more unnatural love; or by a fatal misconception

which causes the hands of innocent persons, more especially of tender

women, to be armed against their nearest and dearest relatives in

utter unconsciousness of the awful guilt about to be incurred. By an

extension of the same psychological law to abstract speculation we are

enabled to understand how an early Greek philosopher who had come to

look on Nature as a cosmos, an orderly whole, consisting of diverse but

connected and interdependent parts, could not properly grasp such a

conception until he had substituted for it one of a precisely opposite

character, out of which he reconstructed it by a process of gradual

evolution. And if it is asked how in the first place did he come by the

idea of a cosmos, our answer must be that he found it in Greek life,

in societies distinguished by a many-sided but harmonious development

of concurrent functions, and by voluntary obedience to an impersonal

law. Thus, then, the circle is complete; we have returned to our point

of departure, and again recognise in Greek philosophy a systematised

expression of the Greek national genius.

We must now bring this long and complicated, but it is hoped not

uninteresting, study to a close. We have accompanied philosophy to a

point where it enters on a new field, and embraces themes sufficiently

important to form the subject of a separate chapter. The contributions

made by its first cultivators to our positive knowledge have already

been summarised. It remains to mention that there was nothing of a

truly transcendental character about their speculations. Whatever

extension we may give to that terrible bugbear, the Unknowable, they

did not trespass on its domain. Heracleitus and his compeers, while

penetrating far beyond the horizon of their age and country, kept very

nearly within the limits of a possible experience. They confused some

conceptions which we have learned to distinguish, and separated others

which we have learned to combine; but they were the lineal progenitors

of our highest scientific thought; and they first broke ground on a

path where we must continue to advance, if the cosmos which they won

for us is not to be let lapse into chaos and darkness again.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Plato, _Rep._ IV., 435, E; Aristotle, _Pol._ VII., 1327, b., 29.

[6] _Nem._ III. 40-42. (Donaldson.)

[7] _Nem._ VI. _sub in._

[8] The word differentiation (ἑτεροίωσις) seems to have been first used

by Diogenes Apolloniates. Simpl. _Phys._ fol. 326 ff., quoted by Ritter

and Preller, _Hist. Phil._, p. 126 (6th ed.)

[9] Ritter and Preller, p. 112.

[10] Ritter and Preller p. 8.

[11] _Die Philosophie der Griechen_, I. p. 401 (3rd ed.)

[12] Ritter and Preller, p. 54.

[13] Ritter and Preller, p. 54.

[14] _Ib._

[15] _Metaph._ I. v.

[16] Ritter and Preller, p. 63.

[17] _Op. cit._ p. 475.

[18] The tendency which it has been attempted to characterise as a

fundamental moment of Greek thought can only be called analytical in

default of a better word. It is a process by which two related terms

are at once parted and joined together by the insertion of one or

more intermediary links; as, for instance, when a capital is inserted

between column and architrave, or when a proposition is demonstrated by

the interposition of a middle term between its subject and predicate.

The German words Vermitteln and Vermittelung express what is meant with

sufficient exactitude. They play a great part in Hegel’s philosophy,

and it will be remembered that Hegel was the most Hellenic of modern

thinkers. So understood, there will cease to be any contradiction

between the Eleates and Greek thought generally, at least from one

point of view, as their object was to fill up the vacant spaces

supposed to separate one mode of existence from another.

[19] Ritter and Preller, p. 62.

[20] For the originals of this and the succeeding quotations from

Heracleitus, see Ritter and Preller, pp. 14-23.

[21] Τῇ μὲν ἡλικίᾳ πρότερος ὢν, τοῖς δ’ ἔργοις ὕστερος. _Metaph._ I.

iii.

[22] Ritter and Preller, p. 90.

[23] Prantl, _Aristoteles’ Physik_, p. 484.

[24] Ritter and Preller, p. 11.

[25] Since the above remarks were first published, Mr. Wallace, in

his work on Epicureanism, has stated that, according to Epicurus,

‘the very animals which are found upon the earth have been made what

they are by slow processes of selection and adaptation through the

experience of life;’ and he proceeds to call the theory in question,

‘ultra-Darwinian’ (_Epicureanism_, p. 114). Lucretius—the authority

quoted—says nothing about ‘slow processes of adaptation,’ nor yet does

he say that the animals were ‘made what they are’ by ‘selection,’ but

by the procreative power of the earth herself. Picking out a ready-made

pair of boots from among a number which do not fit is a very different

process from manufacturing the same pair by measure, or wearing it into

shape. To call the Empedoclean theory ultra-Darwinian, is like calling

the Democritean or Epicurean theory of gravitation ultra-Newtonian. And

Mr. Wallace seems to admit as much, when he proceeds to say on the very

same page, ‘Of course in this there is no implication of the peculiarly

Darwinian doctrine of descent or development of kind from kind with

structure modified and complicated to meet changing circumstances.’

(By the way, this is _not_ a peculiarly Darwinian doctrine, for it

originated with Lamarck, spontaneous variation and selection being the

additions made by the English naturalists). But what becomes then of

the ‘slow processes of adaptation’ and the ‘ultra-Darwinian theory’

spoken of just before?

[26] By a curious coincidence, the atomic constitution of matter still

finds its strongest proof in optical phenomena. Light is propagated by

transverse waves, and such waves are only possible in a discontinuous

medium. But if the luminiferous ether is composed of discrete

particles, so also must be the matter which it penetrates in all

directions.

[27] Ar. _De Gen. et Corr._, I., viii., 325, b, 5.

[28] Eurip. _Frag. Incert. Fab._, CXXXVI. Didot, p. 850. [I am indebted

for this version to Miss A. M. F. Robinson, the translator of the

_Crowned Hippolytus_.]

[29] Curtius, _Griechische Geschichte_, 342-5 (3rd ed.).

[30] Zeller, _op. cit._, p. 791.

[31] Ar. _De Coelo_, III., iii., 302, a, 28.

[32] M. Antoninus, XII., 28.

[33] Zeller, _Ph. d. Gr._, III., b, p. 669.

[34] Even regulating the calendar by the sun instead of by the moon

seems to have been regarded as a dangerous and impious innovation by

the more conservative Athenians—at least judging from the half-serious

pleasantry of Aristophanes, _Nub._, 608-26. (Dindorf.)

[35] σύμβολον δ’ οὔ πώ τις ἐπιχθονίων

πιστὸν ἀμφὶ πράξιος ἐσσομένας εὗρεν θεόθεν.—_Ol._, XII., 8-9.

[36] _Frag._, 102.

[37] _Griechische Geschichte_, ii., 112-3 (3rd ed.).

[38] Aristophanes, _Vesp._, 1176.

[39] Herod., VII., 204; IX., 64.

[40] _Agam._, 750-71.

[41] _Ib._, 311.

[42] _Ol._, XIII., 17 (Donaldson).