THE PHILOSOPHERS
The Orphic teaching, in which a protracted movement of religion in
Greece reached comprehensive expression, might seem almost an
anachronism, appearing as it did in an age when a religious
interpretation of the world and of mankind was hardly any longer
admissible. Eastwards, on the coasts of Ionia, a new view of the
world had arisen which, like a youth that has come of age, demanded
the right to pursue its course without any guidance from traditional
beliefs. The Ionic maritime cities were the meeting-place of all the
collected wisdom and experience of mankind; and there all the more
serious knowledge and study--both indigenous and of foreign
origin--of "Nature", the earth, and the heavenly bodies, was
gathered together in the intelligence of those ever-memorable
spirits who at that time were laying the foundations of natural
science, and of all science in general. This knowledge was now
attempting to turn itself into an organized and all-embracing whole.
Observation and constructive study combined with an imaginative
vision to hazard a picture of the world and reality as a whole.
Because it was impossible anywhere in this world to find anything
completely and for ever fixed and dead, speculation inevitably
pressed forward to the discovery of the undying source of Life, that
perpetually fills, moves, and rebuilds this whole, and of the laws
according to which it works and necessarily must work.
This was the direction pursued by these earliest pioneers of
philosophy; and they pursued it unhampered by any subservience to
mythical or religious modes of thought. Where mythology and the
theology founded upon it saw a complete history of cosmic events
each one of which was the result of the separate and unique action
of divine personalities endowed with consciousness and the power of
arbitrary choice--there the philosopher saw the play of everlasting
forces which could not be completely resolved into the single events
of any historical process, for, without beginning or end they had
been ever in action, tirelessly fulfilling themselves in accordance
with unchanging laws. In such a universe there seemed {363} to be
little room left for divine figures created by man after his own
image, and worshipped by him as the guiding and supreme powers of
the world. And in fact, the foundations were now laid of that
tremendous structure of free inquiry, which finally succeeded in
weaving out of its treasure new worlds of thought, where even those
who had quarrelled or were dissatisfied with the old religion (now
inwardly falling into decay for all its outward appearance of being
at the most brilliant zenith of its powers) might yet find a refuge
if they would not fall back upon sheer nothingness.
And yet Greece never saw a thorough-going opposition and conscious
quarrel between science and religion. In a few special cases the
religion of the state was forced to recognize its incompatibility
with the openly expressed opinions of individual philosophers, and
took steps to make its claims to universal supremacy respected. But
for the most part, the two streams of influence flowed on side by
side for centuries without ever coming into hostile contact. The
propagandist temper was completely absent from philosophy from the
very beginning. (Even when it appeared later as among the Cynics it
produced very little effect on the supremacy of the state religion.)
Religion on its side was not represented by any priestly caste which
might have been led to take up arms for religion and for what it
believed to be its own interest alike. Theoretic contradictions
might the more easily remain unobserved when religion depended so
little upon fixed dogma or upon a world-embracing whole of opinions
and doctrines; while Theology, wherever it accompanied the worship
of the gods (~euse/beia~), which was the real core of religion, was,
just as much as philosophy, the business of individuals and their
adherents gathered together outside the limits of the official
religion of the state. Philosophy (except in a few special and
unrepresentative cases) never sought open war with religion--not
even with the weakened and diluted religion of the masses. In fact
the juxtaposition of philosophy and religion (with theology itself
by their side) sometimes went beyond the external conditions of the
time, and affected the private intellectual life of certain
thinkers. It might seem as if religion and philosophy were not
merely different but dealt with different provinces of reality, and
thus even strict and philosophically minded thinkers could honestly
and without imagining disloyalty to philosophy, adopt particular and
even fundamental conceptions from the creed of their fathers, and
allow them to grow up side by side and at peace with their own
purely philosophical ideas. {364}
§ 2
What the Ionic philosophers in connexion with the rest of their
cosmology had to say about the soul of man did not for all its
striking novelty bring them into direct conflict with religious
opinion. Philosophy and religion used the same words to denote
totally different things; it could surprise no one if different
things were said about quite different objects.
According to the popular view, which finds expression in Homer, and
with which, in spite of their very different estimate of the
relative values of body and soul, the religious theory of the
Orphics and other _theologi_ also agreed--according to this view the
"psyche" was regarded as a unique creature of combined spiritual and
material nature that, wherever it may have come from, now dwells
within man and there, as his second self, carries on its separate
existence, making itself felt when the visible self loses
consciousness in dream, swoon, or ecstasy (see above, pp. 6 f.). In
the same way, the moon and the stars become visible when no longer
obscured by the brighter light of the sun. It was already implied in
the conception itself that this double of mankind, which could be
detached from him temporarily, had a separate existence of its own;
it was no very great step from this to the idea that in death, which
is simply the permanent separation of the visible man from the
invisible, the latter did not perish, but only then became free and
able to live by and for itself.
This spiritual being and the obscure manifestations of its existence
in the living man, did not attract the observation of the Ionian
philosophers. Their thoughts were all for the universe as a whole;
they looked for the "origins" (~archai/~) of all that is and
becomes; for the simple elements of multifarious appearance and for
the force which turns the simple into the multifarious while
controlling, moving, and giving life to primeval matter. The power
of life, the force which can set in motion both itself and all else
that without it would be fixed and motionless--this force penetrates
all being; where it manifests itself most strikingly in separate
individual beings, there it is what these philosophers call the
"psyche".
Thought of in this way, the psyche is something quite different from
the old psyche of popular belief, idly observing the life and
activities of its body, as of some stranger, concentrated in itself,
and pursuing its own secret, hidden life. And yet the name given to
these very different concepts remained the same. The application of
the word "psyche" {365} to the power which gives life and movement
to the visible body--man's power of life--might have been suggested
to the philosophers by a manner of expression which, though in the
strict sense of the words conflicting with Homeric conceptions, is
occasionally observable in the Homeric poems, and seems to have
become more and more frequent in late times.[1\11] In more exact
language, the "psyche" of these philosophers is a collective
expression for all the powers of thought, desire, and will (~no/os,
me/nos, mê=tis, boulê/~), and especially for the functions denoted
by the untranslatable word ~thumo/s~--powers which according to the
Homeric and popular partition all belong entirely to the side of the
visible man and his body.[2\11] According to that view, they are all
expressions of the body's natural powers of life--though they cannot
indeed be awakened to real life before the arrival of the
"psyche"--and in Homeric usage are almost the exact opposite of the
"psyche", for they perish at death, while the psyche leaves them
behind to wander about in its separate shadow-life.
But the soul, according to the view of the physiologists, has quite
a different relation to the totality of life and living, and differs
in this respect both from the Homeric psyche and the Homeric
~thumo/s~. The same force which manifests itself so strongly, as
though specially concentrated there, in the psyche of man, works and
rules in all matter as the general source of life that creates and
preserves the world. Thus, the psyche loses the special singularity
that distinguished it from all the other things and substances in
the world, and made it incomparable and unique. Later reporters are
wrong in attributing to these Ionic thinkers (for whom vital power
and material substance seemed immediately and indissolubly united)
the conception of a separate, independent "World-Soul". Not as
emanations from a single Soul of the World did they conceive the
separate souls of men; but neither did they conceive them as simply
independent, unique, and entirely incomparable essences. They are
expressions of that force which everywhere in all the phenomena of
the world produces life and is itself _life_. Attributing spiritual
qualities to the primeval source of things, the physiology of the
"Hylozoists" naturally could not assume any profound distinction
between that source and the "soul". Deprived in this way of its
separateness, the soul acquired a new importance in exchange; in
another sense from that of the mystics and theologians it could
still be thought of as something divine, for it was a participator
in the one Force which builds and rules the world. It is not the
abode of a single daimonic {366} nature, but instead, the very
nature of god is alive within it.
The closer its inward connexion with the universal Whole the less,
of course, will the soul be able to preserve its individual
existence, which was only lent to it while it gave life and movement
to the body, when that body, the sign and support of its
separateness, is overtaken by death. These earliest philosophers
whose view was almost entirely concentrated on the broad outlines of
the life of nature as a whole, would hardly have regarded it as part
of their task to formulate a deliberate opinion about the fate of
the puny individual soul after the death of its body. In no case
could they have spoken of an _immortality_ of the soul in the same
sense as did the mystics who regarded the soul of which they spoke
as something which has entered from without into material existence,
and as a spiritual essence quite distinct from everything material.
The latter were thus able to attribute to the psyche a capacity for
separate and continued existence which was inadmissible in the case
of a force of movement and sensation completely inhering in matter
and in the shaping of matter. And it was such a force which the
physiologists called the soul.
Ancient tradition, nevertheless, asserts that Thales of Miletos,
whose genius first began the philosophic study of nature, was the
first "to call the soul (of man) immortal".[3\11] But Thales, who
recognized a "soul" also in magnets and plants,[4\11] and thought of
the material stuff and the motive force of the "soul" as
inseparable, can only have spoken of the "immortality" of the human
soul in the same sense as he might have spoken of the immortality of
all "soul-forces" in nature. Like the primal Matter which works and
creates by reason of its own natural powers of life, so, too, the
universal Force which permeates it[5\11] is imperishable and
indestructible, as it is uncreated. It is entirely and essentially
alive and can never be "dead".
Anaximander said of the "Unlimited" from which all things have been
developed by separation, and by which all things are enveloped and
directed, that it never grows old, but is immortal and
imperishable.[6\11] This cannot be intended to apply to the human
soul as a separate existence; for like all separate creations out of
the "Unlimited" it must "in the order of the time" pay the penalty
for the "offence" of its separate existence,[7\11] and lose itself
again in the one primordial matter.
Nor could the third in this series--Anaximenes of Miletos--have
differed seriously from Thales in the sense in which {367} he spoke
of the soul as "immortal"; for him it was of the same nature[8\11]
as the one divine[9\11] primal element of Air that is eternally in
movement and produces all things out of itself.
§ 3
In the teaching of Herakleitos of Ephesos the living power of the
primal essence--the one[10\11] and universal, out of which arises
through change the many and the particular, which manifests itself
in the union, regarded as indissoluble, of matter and motive
force--received even greater prominence than with the older Ionians.
By them matter itself--described as either limited or not limited in
reference to one particular quality--is regarded as self-evidently
in motion. For Herakleitos the origin of all multiplicity lies
rather in the creative energy of absolute Life itself which is at
the same time a definite material substance or analogous to one of
the known substances. The idea of _life_, and that form of it which
makes its appearance in man, must have been more important for him
than for any of his predecessors.
This never-resting force and activity of becoming that has neither
beginning nor end, is represented by the Hot and Dry and called by
the name of that elementary condition which cannot be thought of as
ceasing to move, namely, Fire. The ever-living (~aei/zôon~) fire,
which periodically kindles itself and periodically goes out
(Bywater, _fr._ 20), is formed entirely of movement and livingness.
Living belongs to everything; but living is becoming, changing,
becoming something different without cessation. Every appearance
brings forth from itself, at the moment of its appearance, the
opposite of itself. Birth, life, and death, and fresh birth clash
together in a single burning moment, like the lightning (_fr._ 28).
That which thus moves itself in unceasing vitality and has all its
being in becoming; which perpetually changes and "in
backward-straining effort" finds itself again--this is something
endowed with reason, creative in accordance with reason and "art";
is Reason (~lo/gos~) itself. In creating the world it loses itself
in the elements; it suffers its "death" (_frr._ 66, 67) when in the
"Way downwards" it becomes water and earth (_fr._ 21). There are
degrees of value in the elements decided by the relation which they
hold towards the moving and self-vivifying fire. But that which in
the multiplicity of the phenomena in the world, yet preserves its
godlike fiery nature--this is for Herakleitos "psyche". Psyche is
fire.[11\11] Fire and psyche are interchangeable terms.[12\11] And
so, too, the psyche of man is fire, a part of the universal fiery
{368} energy that surrounds it and upholds it, through the
"inhalation" of which it maintains itself alive;[13\11] a portion of
the World-Reason by participation in which it is itself rational. In
men God is living.[14\11] But god does not descend into man, as in
the teaching of the Theologians, entering as a finite individuality
into the vessel of the individual human life. As a united whole he
surrounds men with his flood and reaches after and into them, as
though with fiery tongues. A portion[15\11] of his universal Wisdom
is living in the soul of man: the "drier", more fiery, nearer to the
universal Fire and further from the less living elements he is, the
wiser will he be (_frr._ 74, 75, 76). If he sundered himself from
the universal wisdom, man would become nothing; it is his business
in thinking, as in acting and in moral behaviour, to surrender
himself to the One Living essence that "nourishes" him and is the
Mind and Law of the world (_frr._ 91, 92, 100, 103).
But the soul itself is also a portion of the universal Fire that in
the perpetual variation of its form of being has been encompassed by
the body and become entangled in corporeality. Here we no longer
have the rigid, unmediated contrast between "Body" and "Soul" such
as it appeared from the standpoint of the theologian. The elements
of the body, water and earth, have themselves arisen and perpetually
arise out of the fire which changes into all other things, and into
which everything else changes (_fr._ 22). So it is the soul itself,
the creative fire, which _creates_ the body. "Soul," i.e. Fire,
unceasingly turns itself into the lower elements; there is no
contrast between them, and it is but a continual flux of transition.
While it is enclosed in the body the soul is still affected by
unceasing change. In this it is like everything else. Nothing in the
world can for a single moment preserve the parts which compose it
unaltered; the perpetual movement and alteration of its being
constitute its life. The sun itself, the greatest fire-body, becomes
another sun every day (_fr._ 32). So, too, the soul, though distinct
from the body and a self-existing substance, yet is a substance that
never remains like itself. In unceasing alteration of its material
substance, its contents are perpetually being transposed. It loses
its fire of life in the lower elements; it absorbs fresh fire from
the living Fire of the universe that surrounds it. There can be no
question of the permanent identity of the soul, of the spiritual
personality, with itself. What in the unbroken process of upward and
downward straining seems to maintain itself as a single person, is
in reality a series of souls and {369} personalities, one taking the
place of another and ousting and being ousted in turn.
Thus, even while it is in life, the soul is perpetually dying--but
to live again; ever supplementing the departing soul-life or
supplying its place with another. So long as it can recruit itself
from the surrounding World-Fire, so long the individual lives.
Separation from the source of all life, the living and universal
fire of the world, would be death for it. The soul may temporarily
lose its life-giving contact with the "common world": this happens
in sleep and dreaming which enclose it in their own world (_frr._
94, 95), and this is already a partial death to it. Sometimes, too,
the soul has a tendency to transform itself to a humidity not always
made good by fresh fire; the drunkard has a "moist soul" (_fr._ 73).
Finally, there comes the moment when the soul of man cannot any
longer repair the loss of the living fire which is taken from it in
the perpetual alteration of its matter. Then it dies; death carries
off the last of the series of living fires which in their continuity
made up the human soul.[16\11]
But in Herakleitos' world there is no such thing as death in the
absolute sense--an end followed by no beginning, an unconditional
cessation of becoming. "Death" is for him only a point where one
condition of things gives way to another; a relative "not-being",
involving death for one but simultaneously bringing birth and life
for another (_frr._ 25, [64], 66, 67). Death, just as much as life,
is for him a positive thing. "Fire lives the death of earth, and air
lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air, and earth the
death of water" (_fr._ 25). The One that is in all things is at once
dead and alive (_fr._ 78), immortal and mortal (_fr._ 67); a
perpetual "death and becoming" agitates it. So, too, the "death" of
man must be the exit from one positive state of things, and the
entry into another, also positive, condition. Death occurs for man
when the "soul" is no longer within him. Only the body is then left;
alone and by itself it is no better than dung (_fr._ 85). But the
soul--what becomes of that? It must have altered; it was fire, but
now it has descended on the "Way downwards" and become water--to
become earth after that. So it must happen to all fire. In death the
fire in man "goes out" (_fr._ 77). "It is death for the souls to
become water" says Herakleitos clearly enough (_fr._ 68).[17\11] The
soul must tread this path at last, and treads it willingly; change
is for the soul its delight and refreshment (_fr._ 83). The soul has
then changed itself into the elements of the body, has lost itself
in the body. {370}
But it cannot rest permanently in this transformation. "For the
souls it is death to become water; for the water it is death to
become earth. And yet from earth comes water; and from water, soul"
(_fr._ 68). Thus, in the restless up and down of becoming, in the
"Way upwards" the soul reconstitutes itself out of the lower
elements. But not _that_ soul which had formerly animated the
particular individual and of whose complete self-identity in the
midst of the influx of the Fire-spirit there could be no question
even during the life of the body. The inquiry after an individual
immortality or even a continued existence of the separate soul could
hardly have had any meaning at all for Herakleitos. Nor can he have
admitted it under the form of the "transmigration of the
soul".[18\11] It is quite certain that Herakleitos can never have
distinctly asserted the changeless persistence of the individual
human soul in the midst of the unbroken stream of becoming in which
all fixity is nothing but an illusion of the senses. But it is also
incredible that, in despite of his own fundamental principles, he
even admitted the possibility of this popular view with an
indulgence quite foreign to his nature.[19\11] What could have
tempted him to do so? We are told[20\11] that it was from the
mysteries that he adopted this opinion which was one of their most
important doctrines. Herakleitos, however, only casts an occasional
glance at the mysteries and what might be called their "doctrine"
(just as he glanced at other prominent manifestations of the excited
religious life of his time[21\11]); and he does so in order to
harmonize their teaching with his own--a result which he achieves
rather by imposing an interpretation than by patiently eliciting
one. He demonstrates that the mysteries might be harmonized with his
own doctrine,[22\11] which seemed to him able to explain all the
phenomena of the world; that contrariwise he ever sought to set his
own teaching in harmony with that of the mysteries, or that the
latter had shown him the way to his thought, or could ever have
tempted him to set foot outside his own self-chosen path--of this
there is not a scrap of evidence to be had.
The individual in its isolation has, for Herakleitos, neither value
nor importance: to persist in this isolation (if it had been
possible would have seemed to him a crime.[23\11] The Fire is for
him indestructible and immortal as a totality, not as divided into
individual particles, but only as the one Universal Mind that
transforms itself into all things and draws all things back again
into itself. The soul of man has a claim to immortality as an
emanation of this universal Reason, {371} and shares the immortality
which belongs to it. So, too, the soul, even when it has lost itself
in the elements, finds itself again. Between "want" and
"satisfaction" (_frr._ 24, 36), this process of becoming has its
perpetual being. A day will come when the Fire will "overtake"
everything (_fr._ 26); God will then be utterly by himself--all in
all. But that is not the purpose of this world; here change,
becoming and passing away will never end. Nor should they end; the
"Strife" (_fr._ 43) which has created the world, and ever fashions
it anew, is the most inward nature of the All-living which it
perpetually stirs to insatiable desire of becoming. For the desire
and refreshment of all things is Change (_frr._ 72, 83), the coming
and going in the interplay of Becoming.
It is the precise opposite of a quietistic mood that speaks from the
whole teaching of Herakleitos. His voice is a trumpet call that
grows louder and louder as his lofty and majestic spirit with
ever-increasing intensity proclaims prophet-like the last word of
wisdom. He knows well that it is only labour that can give meaning
to rest, and hunger to satisfaction; only sickness can call forth
the desire of health (_fr._ 104). That is the law of the world which
binds together the opposing contraries, each of which is engendered
from the last, with an inward and complete necessity. He bows before
it and assents to it. For him the fixity of the soul in a
Blessedness that was without activity and without change--even if
such were thinkable[24\11]--would not have seemed a possible goal of
desire.
§ 4
Even before the days of Herakleitos the torch of philosophic inquiry
had been borne from the coasts of Ionia to the West by Xenophanes of
Kolophon who in a life of adventure had wandered as far as Southern
Italy and Sicily. For his fiery temperament the most subtle
reflection was turned into life and experience, and the one enduring
source of Being to which he ever directed his gaze became the
universal Divinity that is all perception and thought, that
tirelessly embraces all things in its thought and intelligence, and,
without beginning or end, perpetually remains the same with itself.
What Xenophanes had to say about this God which for him is the same
as the world, became the basis for the elaborated doctrine of the
Eleatic school which, in declared opposition to Herakleitos,[25\11]
denied all possibility of movement, becoming, alteration, division
of the One into Many, to the one absolute Being that completely and
entirely occupies Space, is raised {372} above all development,
whether temporal or spatial, and remains perpetually enclosed in
itself in absolute self-sufficiency.
For this view the whole multiplicity of things that presses itself
upon sense-perception is an _illusion_. Deceptive also is the
apparent existence of a multiplicity of animated beings, just as the
whole of nature is an illusion. It was not "Nature", the content of
actual experience, that provided the starting-point of the
philosophy of Parmenides. Without any assistance from experience,
simply by the pure logical deductions to be made from a single
fundamental concept (that of "Being"), which was to be grasped only
by the understanding, this philosophy claimed to arrive at the whole
content of its teaching. For the philosophic scientists of Ionia the
soul also had been a part of nature and the science of the soul a
department of the science of nature; and this inclusion of the
psychical within the physical was the peculiarity in their doctrine
of the soul which distinguished it from the ordinary popular
psychology. When, however, the whole of Nature was to be ruled out
of account as a subject of scientific knowledge, the derivation of
psychology from physiology had to be given up as well. These
_aphysici_[26\11] were logically debarred from holding any doctrine
of the soul.
With a complaisance that is remarkable in view of the uncompromising
logical vigour with which they deduced their main theory and based
it on abstract, super-sensual knowledge, the Eleatics conceded so
much at least to the region of appearance and the pressure of
sense-perception that, although they did not deduce from their own
fundamental conceptions a physical theory of multifarious appearance
and its development, yet, side by side with their rigid doctrine of
being, in unjustified and unjustifiable relation with it, they did
in fact put forward such a theory. Xenophanes, himself, had already
in the same way offered a physical theory of limited and relative
validity. Parmenides in the second part of his doctrinal poem,
developed, "in deceptive adornment of words," not an authoritative
statement of the true nature of being, but "human opinions" of
becoming and creation in the world of multiplicity. This, too, must
be the standpoint of the physiological doctrines put forward by Zeno
of Elea, the boldest dialectician who upheld the doctrine of the
motionless All-One. In the course of such a physiology, and with the
same implied reservations, the Eleatic philosophers dealt also with
the nature and origin of the soul. Their physical doctrine was
framed entirely on the lines of the older type of {373} natural
philosophy, and they regarded the relation of the spiritual to the
corporeal from exactly the same point of view as their predecessors
had done. For Parmenides (146 ff, Mull. = _fr._ 16 Diels) the mind
(~no/os~) of man depends for its existence upon the mixture of two
ingredients of which everything, including its body, is composed.
These ingredients are the "Light" and the "Night" (the Warm and the
Cold, Fire and Earth). What is intellectually active is, even in
mankind, the "nature of his limbs"; the character of his thought is
determined by the one of the two elements which preponderates in the
individual. Even the dead man (because he still has a body) has
feeling and sensation; but these powers are deserted by the warm and
the fiery and given over to the cold, the dark, and silence. All
that is has some capacity of knowledge.[27\11]--It would be
impossible to condemn the "soul" to corporeality more completely
than is here done by the bold philosopher of abstract Reason, who at
the same time denied so unconditionally all validity to
sense-perception. The soul is evidently no longer an independent
substance but a mere resultant of material mixture, a function of
elements in composition. For Zeno, too, the "soul" in the same way
was an exactly equal mixture of the four elementary properties of
matter, the Warm, the Cold, the Dry, and the Wet.[28\11]
It is, therefore, startling, in the face of these utterances, to
find that Parmenides also said about the "soul" that the deity that
rules the world "at one time, sends it out of the Invisible into the
Visible, and at another time back again".[29\11] Here, the soul is
no longer a condition arising from the mixture of material elements,
but an independent being credited with pre-existence before its
entry into the "Visible", i.e. before its entry into the life of the
body, and also with a continued existence after its separation from
the realm of visibility--and indeed, with a sojourn, several times
repeated, in those two worlds. Did Parmenides distinguish between
this independently existing soul and the being that perceives in the
mixture of the elements and as mind (~no/os~) thinks, but whose
existence is bound up with the elements and the body they together
compose? It is obvious at any rate that in what he says of the
psyche, and its alternate life in the visible and the invisible,
Parmenides is not speaking as a physiologist, but as an adherent of
the Orphic-Pythagorean theosophy. While reserving for himself his
knowledge of "Truth" and unalterable Being, he could select as he
liked among the "opinions of men" when speaking only hypothetically.
In his doctrine as a practical teacher with an ethical purpose {374}
in view he preferred to adopt the conceptions of the Pythagoreans
with whom he lived in close association.[30\11]
§ 5
Ionic physiology had fixed its attention on Nature as a whole, and
on the phenomena of life displayed in every nook and corner of the
universe; man, as a mere ripple on the surface of the ocean of
becoming and taking form, was almost entirely neglected. A
philosophy that made it its main effort to learn the nature of man,
and, still further, with the knowledge so acquired, to show man the
way and purpose of his living, had to try other paths.
This is what Pythagoras of Samos did. What he called his
"Philosophy"[31\11] was in essence a practical effort. Plato[32\11]
tells us that Pythagoras was so peculiarly honoured because he
discovered a special mode of directing one's life. A distinct way of
living, formed on a religious and ethical basis, was his creation.
How far his "polymathy",[33\11] which indubitably contained already
the substance of Pythagorean science, may have become a system in
his hands, is not distinctly known. What is certain is that in
Kroton he formed a society which, together with the strict rules in
accordance with which he organized their manner of life for his
associates, eventually spread far and wide among the Achæan and
Dorian cities of the Italian "great Greece". In this society a
profound conception of human life and its purposes was given
practical and visible application, and to have brought this about
must be regarded as the act and the special service of Pythagoras.
The fundamental conception of this way of life, except in so far as
it may have contained from the beginning a mystic philosophy of
numbers, was by no means the special invention of Pythagoras; the
new and potent feature which he introduced was the force of
personality which was able to give life and body to the ideal. What
was apparently lacking in similar movements in ancient Greece was
now provided by a great man who for his followers was a pattern and
an example, a leader inspiring imitation and emulation. His
personality became a centre to which a whole community was attracted
by a sort of inward necessity. Before very long this founder of a
community appeared to his followers as a superman, unique and
incomparable among all other men. Some lines of Empedokles,[34\11]
who did not himself belong to the Pythagorean society, bear witness
to this fact, and to his followers Pythagoras became in memory a
saint or even a god in human form, and they related legends of the
miracles he had {375} performed. For us it is difficult to form a
connected picture or trace the real features of the man beneath the
dazzling halo of the saint.
The teaching which enabled him to knit together his followers in a
far closer bond of fellowship in living than had been achieved by
any Orphic sect, must still in the main have coincided with what in
the Orphic doctrine immediately related to the religious life. He
too pointed out the way of salvation for the soul and his doctrine
of the soul formed the central feature of his philosophy.
So far as our scanty and dubious evidence serves us, the substance
of the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul may be stated as follows.
The soul of man, once more regarded entirely as the "double" of the
visible body and its powers, is a daimonic immortal being[35\11]
that has been cast down from divine heights and for a punishment is
confined within the "custody" of the body.[36\11] It has no real
relationship with the body; it is not what may be called the
personality of the individual visible man; any soul may dwell in any
body.[37\11] When death separates it from the body the soul must
first endure a period of purgation in Hades[38\11] and then return
again to the upper world. The souls invisibly swarm about the
living;[39\11] in the tremulous motion of motes in the sunbeam the
Pythagoreans saw the movement of the "souls".[40\11] The whole air
is full of souls.[41\11] Upon earth, however, the soul must seek out
another body, and this may be repeated many times. So it wanders a
long way, passing through many bodies of men and beasts.[42\11] Very
ancient tradition[43\11] said that Pythagoras himself remembered the
earlier incarnations through which his soul had passed (and of which
he gave information for the instruction and warning of the
faithful). Here, too, the doctrine of the soul's transmigrations
took on an edificatory character in a religious and ethical sense.
The conditions of the new incarnations and the character of the new
lifetime are governed by the performances of the past life. What the
soul has done in the past, that it must suffer in its own person
when it becomes a man again.[44\11]
It is thus of primary importance both for the present life and for
future incarnations to know and to follow the methods of salvation
delivered by Pythagoras to his followers. The society points out the
way to its company of the faithful in purifications and initiations,
in a "Pythagorean life"[45\11] entirely organized with the same
purpose in view--to "follow the god".[46\11] Much of the old ritual
symbolism that had been {376} in use for ages must have been
incorporated in this Pythagorean asceticism.[47\11] The theological
ethic of asceticism was essentially negative in character, and here,
too, it meant nothing more than a protecting of the soul against the
attacks of external evil that might come and pollute it.[48\11] All
that matters is to keep the soul pure: no need for moral
reformation--only that it be kept free from external evil. The fact
of immortality, the soul's perpetuity, stands fast and unalterable;
as it was from the beginning so it must ever be and live.[49\11] To
lift it at last altogether from this earthly existence and restore
it to a free divine state of being--that, at least, was the final
goal.[50\11]
The practical philosophy of the Pythagorean school is founded upon a
conception of the soul as absolutely distinct from "nature", and, in
fact, opposed to it. It is thrust into the life of nature, but it is
in a foreign world where it preserves its self-enclosed
individuality intact and from which it escapes into independence to
undergo ever-renewed incarnations. Its origin is supra-mundane, and
so, too, when liberated from the shackles of natural life it will
one day be enabled to return to a supernatural existence as a
spirit.
Not one of these ideas is achieved by a process of scientific
thinking. Physiology, the science of the world and all the phenomena
of the world could never lead to the conception of the soul's
separateness from nature and its life. It was not from Greek
science, but neither was it, as ancient tradition would have us
believe, from foreign lands, that Pythagoras got his belief in the
fallen nature of the soul, descended from supra-mundane heights to
this earthly nature, and in its long pilgrimage through many bodies
on the completion of which it is to be free at last, through
purifications and initiations. He may have owed much to his travels;
from his stay in Egypt, perhaps, he may (like Demokritos after him)
have derived the stimulus to his mathematical discoveries and much
else besides of the "learning" which Herakleitos ascribes to him.
His doctrine of the soul, on the other hand, simply reproduces in
essentials the fanciful ideas of the old popular psychology, as it
had been enlarged and transformed by the _theologi_ and the
purification priests. Tradition was right in its estimation of his
character, when it set him in this company and made him the pupil of
Pherekydes of Syros, the _theologos_.[51\11]
It can hardly be doubted that Pythagoras himself laid the
foundations of the Pythagorean science--the doctrine of the creation
of the world and perhaps, too, the interpretation of {377} all being
and becoming in the world as due to the action and relation of
numbers, as the essential basis of all things--all this, at least in
elementary outline, must have been handed on by him to his
followers. After his death the two sides of his doctrine continued
to develop for a period in loose conjunction side by side; the
guidance of life by the mystical and religious philosophy (though
this, indeed, was hardly capable of further development), and the
scientific interest which grew into a fairly elaborate system.
Indeed, with the break-up of the Pythagorean society and its
bifurcation in the fifth century, the scattered members of the band
now brought into touch with the scientific studies of other
communities and cut off from the ideal of the Pythagorean life which
could only be realized within the limits of the society, were forced
to continue their scientific studies in solitude. Pythagorean
science, evolving, as it did, a picture of the world as a whole, no
less than Ionian physiology deprived the soul of the unique and,
indeed, antagonistic relation to nature that Pythagorean theology
had given it. Philolaos, conceiving it in a manner strictly
conforming to the mathematical and musical theory, called the soul a
_Harmony_ of contrary elements united together in the body.[52\11]
If, however, the soul is only a binding-together of opposites to
unity and harmony, then it must, when death breaks up the
conjunction of the united elements, itself pass away and
perish.[53\11] It is difficult to imagine how the older Pythagorean
faith in the soul as an independent being dwelling in the body and
surviving it--in the immortal soul, in fact--could be accommodated
to this conception. Can it be that the two conceptions were not
originally intended to be brought into conjunction at all, or were
not meant to exclude each other? Ancient tradition spoke of
different groups among the followers of Pythagoras who had also
different objects, methods, and aims of study; nor shall we be
inclined to deny all credibility to this tradition when we observe
how little, in fact, Pythagorean science and Pythagorean faith had
to do with each other.[54\11]
And yet we have to admit that the same Philolaos, who described the
soul as a harmony of its body, also spoke of the soul as an
independent and imperishable being. We may well doubt whether these
two contradictory utterances can really come from the same man and
apply to the same object; though the same man might really speak in
varying language about the one soul if he recognized different
_parts_ of the soul of which different truths held good; and this
was, in fact, first suggested by the Pythagorean school.[55\11]
{378}
§ 6
Empedokles of Akragas did not belong to the Pythagorean school (it
lost its external unity in his time); but he approaches Pythagorean
doctrine so closely in his opinions and teaching about the soul of
man, its problems and destinies, that there can be no doubt about
Pythagorean influence upon the formation of his convictions on these
points. His many-sided activities also included the study of natural
science and he took up the researches of the Ionic Physiologists
with zeal and a marked aptitude for the observation and synthesis of
natural phenomena. But the roots of his peculiar individuality--the
_pathos_ which moved and agitated him--lay in a practical activity
far removed from scientific investigation and representing a
brilliant resuscitation in a very different age of the character and
practice of the _mantis_, the purification-priest and
magical-physician of the sixth century. The introduction to his
"Purifications"[56\11] gives a picture of his triumphal progress
from city to city, crowned with ribbons and garlands, adored as a
god and questioned by thousands: "Where is the road to healing?" He
intends to give his disciple Pausanias the results of his own
experience and to teach him all his remedies for disease and their
virtues, the arts of stilling the winds and stirring them up,
producing drought or rain, raising the dead from Hades.[57\11] He
himself boasted of being a magician and his pupil Gorgias saw him
"do magic".[58\11] Through him those efforts of the _Kathartes_, the
expiation-priest and seer, which an earlier and already
distant-seeming time had honoured as the highest form of wisdom, at
last achieved a voice and literary expression--an expression given
them with the fullest personal experience of the truth of their
claims by one who was convinced of their power to control nature and
sure of the godlike status of the man who had reached these almost
superhuman heights of empire over nature. As a god, an immortal no
longer subject to death, he passed through all the land--so
Empedokles himself tells us.[59\11] He may have won credit in many
places. He did not, indeed, found an ordered society of disciples
and adherents, a sect: this does not seem to have been his
intention. But he alone as a unique and unparalleled being, a
self-confident personality of the greatest force and weight
impressed himself masterfully both as mystic and politician upon the
mundane affairs of his contemporaries and pointed the way beyond
time and all things temporal to a blessed and divine state as the
final goal of human life. He {379} must have made a profound
impression upon the men among whom he lived,[60\11] though he
disappeared from their midst like a comet, and left no permanent
traces of his presence behind him. Many legends still witness to the
astonishment that his appearance among men provoked, more especially
those legends that in varying form related his end.[61\11] They are
all expressions of the same belief: that he, as his own verses had
foretold, in his departure did not have to suffer death; he had
vanished, "translated" body and soul together to an everlasting
divine life, as once Menelaos had been and so many great figures of
the ancient days, and even a few Heroes of more recent times.[62\11]
Once more the ancient conception shows in this story that it still
lives on: immortal life can only be obtained by undissolved union of
the psyche with its body. Such a legend hardly did justice to
Empedokles' own idea. When he claimed to be a god who would never
die he certainly did not mean that his psyche would remain for ever
bound to his body. On the contrary, he thought that in "death", as
men[63\11] call it, it would be freed from this last corporeal
envelope[64\11] and never again have to enter into a body, but would
live for ever in freedom and divinity. His conception of the
conscious after-life of the psyche was as different as it was
possible for it to be from the Homeric conception on which that
translation legend was based.
Empedokles united in his own person to an astonishing degree the
most sober attempts at a study of nature that was scientific
according to its lights, and quite irrational beliefs and
theological speculations. Occasionally the scientific impulse passes
over to influence even the world of his beliefs;[65\11] but as a
rule theology and natural science exist side by side in his mind
quite independently. As a physiologist he inherited the already
extensive and variously developed stock of ideas belonging to the
older generations of inquirers and thinkers. He himself was able to
unite conceptions derived from the most different sources into an
original whole that satisfied himself at least. Becoming and
passing-away, all qualitative change, were denied by him as by the
Eleatics, but the permanent substance of Being is for him no single
indivisible unity. There are four "roots" of things, the four bodies
of elements, which in this division are for the first time clearly
distinguished. It is the mixture and separation of the essentially
indivisible elements that cause the appearance of becoming and
perishing; and those two processes are caused by the two
forces--clearly distinguished from the elements--of attraction and
repulsion, {380} Love and Hate, which in the creative process
struggle and in turn overmaster each other until at last, in the
final victory of one of the two forces, all things are either united
or divided; in either case an organic world ceases to exist. The
present state of the universe is one in which "Love", the tendency
to amalgamation of differences, is prevailing; when this tendency is
completed, there will be an absolute levelling-out of all
distinction; a result which Empedokles, a quietist in his scientific
studies as well, regards as the most desirable end.
In this world, then, that experiences only mechanical movement and
change, and from whose evolution Empedokles by an ingenious turn is
able to exclude all idea of purpose, there are also to be found
souls; or rather psychical powers which grow up entirely within it.
Sense-perception is expressly distinguished from the capacity of
thought by Empedokles.[66\11] The former takes place when each of
the elements, from the mixture of which the perceiving being has its
origin, comes into contact with, and so becomes aware of, the same
elements in the object perceived, through the "passages" that
connect the interior of the body with the exterior.[67\11]
"Thinking" has its seat in the heart's blood, where the elements and
their powers are mixed most equally. Or rather this blood actually
_is_ thinking and the power of thought;[68\11] the material
substance and its vital functions thus also for Empedokles
completely coincide. Plainly, nothing in the nature of a permanent
substantial "soul" is here intended by the thinking-power of the
"mind", but rather a capacity of bringing together and unifying the
individual sense-activities;[69\11] a capacity no less than the
individual powers of sensation bound up with the elements, the
senses, and the body.[70\11] With the varying constitution of the
body, they too vary.[71\11] Both capacities, that of
sense-perception, and that of thought, as vital expressions of the
matter that is combined together in the organic creature, are
present in all organisms; in men, in beasts, and even in
plants.[72\11]
If we give the name of "soul"[73\11] to the sum of these psychical
powers--a name generally reserved for the common permanent
substratum of the changing psychical activities--we cannot avoid
concluding, in accordance with the logic of this philosopher, that
the "soul" must be perishable. With the death and destruction of the
individual the elementary parts that go to compose him are
disunited, and the soul which in this case is nothing but the
highest resultant of that composition, must itself disappear with
their dissolution--as it had come into being with their
union.[74\11] {381}
It might seem as if Empedokles himself was as far as possible
removed from drawing such conclusions from his own premises. No one
speaks more distinctly and forcibly of the spiritual, individual
beings that dwell in men and in other creatures of nature as well.
They are regarded by him as Daimones fallen to the corporeal world,
who have to pass through many different forms of life till they may
at last hope for release.
In the introduction to his poem on Nature, he describes, from his
own experience, and the information of the Daimones who had once led
his soul down to this earthly Vale of Grief,[75\11] how by an
ancient decree of the gods and the compulsion of Necessity, every
daimon that has "polluted" itself by drinking the blood or eating
the flesh of living beings,[76\11] or has broken its oath,[77\11] is
banished for a long period[78\11] from the company of the blessed.
It is thrust down to the "Meadow of Disaster", into the realm of
contradiction,[79\11] the cave of misery upon this earth, and must
now wander through many "painful ways of life"[80\11] in changing
incarnations. "Thus, I myself was once a boy and also a maiden, a
bush, a bird, and a voiceless fish in the salty flood" (ll. 11, 12 =
_fr._ 117). This daimon that in expiation of its crime must wander
through the forms of men, beasts, and even plants, is evidently no
other than what popular speech and that of theologians as well
called the "psyche", the soul-spirit.[81\11] In all essentials
though perhaps in clearer language, Empedokles merely
repeated[82\11] what the adherents of the doctrine of Transmigration
had long told of its divine origin, its fall and penal banishment in
earthly bodies. So, too, when as teacher of the means that bring
salvation, he tells how more gracious forms and conditions of life
may be obtained in the series of births, till at last complete
release from rebirth is achieved,[83\11] Empedokles follows in the
footsteps of the purification-priests and _theologi_ of old. It is a
matter of keeping the daimon within us free from the pollutions that
bind it fast to the earthly life. To this end the methods of
religious purification are most efficacious; Empedokles respects
them quite as much as did the old _Kathartai_. It is necessary to
keep the internal daimon far removed from every kind of
"sin",[84\11] more particularly from the drinking of blood and the
eating of meat which must necessarily involve the murder of kinsmen
daimones which are dwelling in the slaughtered beasts.[85\11] By
purification and asceticism (which here again dispenses with a
positive form of morality aimed at reforming the man) a gradual
process to purer and better births is achieved;[86\11] in the end
the persons thus reborn in a purified condition {382} become seers,
poets, doctors, and are the leaders of mankind.[87\11] Finally, when
they have emerged superior even to these highest steps of earthly
life, they return to the other immortals, and become themselves gods
released from human misery, escaping death, and now
indestructible.[88\11] Empedokles regard himself as one who has
reached the last stage,[89\11] and points out to others the way up
to it.
Between what Empedokles the mystic here tells us of the soul that
was once living its divine life, but has since been plunged into the
world of the elements, though it is not for ever bound to them; and
what Empedokles the physiologist teaches of the psychical powers
that dwell in the elements and are bound to the body that is
composed of the elements and perish with their dissolution, there
seems to be a hopeless contradiction. And yet if we are to grasp the
whole truth of what Empedokles means, we must neither leave on one
side half of what he says,[90\11] nor yet by well-meaning
interpretation seek to bring the philosopher into harmony with
himself,[91\11] when he clearly speaks with two different voices.
The two voices say different things, and yet in the mind of
Empedokles, there is no contradiction in what they say, for they are
dealing with totally distinct objects. The psychical powers and
faculties of feeling and perception which are functions of matter,
born in matter, and determined by it, together with the thinking
faculty that is no other than the heart's blood of men--these
neither make up the character and content of that soul-spirit which
dwells in men, beasts, and flowers, nor are they expressions of its
activity. They are entirely bound up with the elements and their
combination, and in man they are joined to the body and its organs;
they are the powers and faculties of this body, and not of a special
and invisible entity, the soul. The soul-daimon is not made out of
the elements, nor is it for ever chained to them. It enters as a
stranger into this world in which the only permanent component parts
are[92\11] the four elements, and the two forces of Love and Hate;
and it enters it from another world, the world of gods and spirits,
to its detriment; the elements cast it about from one to another
"and they all hate it" (_fr._ 115, 12, l. 35 M.). This living soul,
with its independent existence, that thus enters into foreign and
hostile surroundings, only enters into such earthly creatures as
already possess senses, feeling and perception, together with reason
or the faculty of thinking, the crowning manifestation of their
material union. It is, however, as little identical with these
psychical faculties as it is with the mixture of elementary matter
or, in {383} the case of men, with the heart's blood. It exists,
unmixed and incapable of mixture, _alongside_ the body and its
faculties which indeed only have life--"what men call life"--(_fr._
15, 2, l. 117 M.) when united with it. When they are separated from
it they fall into dissolution; not so the soul, which continues its
journey and visits other dwelling places, and does not share in
their dissolution.
This peculiar dualistic doctrine reflects the two sides of
Empedokles' own mental activity. He probably intended in this way to
unite the views of both the physiologists and the theologians. To
the Greeks, such a twofold division of the inner life may have
seemed less surprising than it does to us. The conception of a
"soul" that as an independent, unique, and self-contained spiritual
being dwells within the body, while the body does not receive its
intellectual faculties of perceiving, feeling, willing and thinking
from the soul, but exercises these by its own power--this conception
agrees at bottom with the ideas of popular psychology that are as a
rule described or implied in the Homeric poems.[93\11] The only
difference is that these ideas of poet and populace are elaborated
and defined by the speculations of theologians and philosophers. How
deeply impressed upon the Greek mind such conceptions, derived
eventually from Homer, actually were, can be measured by the fact
that a conception of the twofold origin of psychic activity, its
twofold nature and sphere of action, closely related to that of
Empedokles, is continually recurring in more advanced stages of
philosophy. It occurs not merely in Plato, but even in Aristotle,
who in addition to the "soul" that directs and expresses itself in
the physico-organic nature of man, recognizes another being of
divine descent that enters into man "from without", the "mind"
(~nou=s~) which is separable both from the soul and from the body,
and is alone destined to survive the death of the man to which it
was assigned.[94\11] In the doctrine of Empedokles, too, it is a
stranger-guest from the distant land of gods that enters into man to
give him a soul. This being is indeed far below the "mind" of
Aristotle in philosophic importance; nevertheless, in the
introduction of this Stranger into the world composed of the
elements and vital faculties, a sense of the absolute uniqueness of
spirit, its unlikeness to everything material, its essential
distinctness from matter, finds expression, if only in a limited
theological fashion.
In the light of such theological considerations, the soul seems also
to Empedokles something essentially distinct from its prototype, the
Homeric psyche, which after its separation {384} from the body
passes to the twilight of a shadowy dream-life. To him, the soul is
of divine race, too noble for this world of visibility, and only
when it escapes from this world does it seem to him to begin its
real and full life. Though confined within the body, it has its
separate existence there; it has no concern with the everyday
business of perception and sensation--not even with that of
thinking, which is nothing else but the heart's blood. But it is
active in the "higher" mode of knowledge, in ecstatic
inspiration;[95\11] to it alone belongs the profound insight of the
philosopher who is enabled to pass beyond the limits of mere
experience and sense-perception, and behold the totality of the
universe in its true nature.[96\11] To it alone apply all the
requirements of ethical and religious systems--duties in this higher
sense belong only to the soul; it is something in the nature of a
"conscience". Its highest duty is to free itself from the unhallowed
union with the body, and the elements of this world; the rules of
purification and asceticism refer solely to it.
Between this soul-daimon that yearns after its divine home, and the
world of the elements, there exists no inward bond or necessary
connexion. And yet, since they have become implicated in each
other's existence, a certain parallelism exists between them in
character and destiny. In the mechanically moved world, too, the
separate and particular phenomena tend back again towards their
starting point, the inwardly coherent Unity from which they once
took their origin. A day will come when, after all struggle has been
done away, "Love" alone will have absolute rule; and this means for
the poet--who in his description even of this world of mechanical
attraction and repulsion interpolates half-realized ethical
concepts[97\11]--a state of absolute goodness and happiness. If
there is no longer any world, then, until another one is created, no
soul-daimon can be bound any more to the individual organisms of a
world. Have they then all returned to the blessed communion of the
immortal gods? It appears that not even the gods and daimones (and
so not the spirits enclosed in world as "souls") are regarded by
Empedokles as having everlasting life. "Long-living" is the name he
repeatedly applies to them; he never distinctly ascribes _eternal_
life to them.[98\11] They, too, shall for a period enjoy "the
happiness of profoundest peace" until, just as the elements and
forces are drawn into the unity of the Sphairos, they, too, come
together in the unity of the godlike Universal Mind, thence at a new
world-creation to appear once more as individual separate
being.[99\11] {385}
§ 7
Empedokles took a fully developed "hylozoic" system (which in
itself, with its introduction of the motive forces of Conflict and
Love, already betrayed a latent dualism) and attempted to combine
with it an extreme form of spiritualist teaching. His attempt
illustrates very clearly the observation that a philosophic science
of nature in itself could never lead to the establishment of the
axiom that the individual "soul" after its separation from the body
continues to exist, still less that it is indestructible. Any one
who still felt it necessary to assert that axiom could find support
for it only by allowing physiology to be either overwhelmed by
theological speculation, or else supplemented by it in the manner
attempted by Empedokles.
Such an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable can have found few
adherents among those who were accessible to scientific ideas, nor
was it likely to tempt the physiological philosophy from the path
which it had hitherto followed. Soon after Empedokles, and in
essentials hardly influenced by him, Anaxagoras and Demokritos
developed those doctrinal systems which were the last products of
the independent speculation of Ionia. Demokritos was the founder and
completer of the atomic doctrine according to which there exist "in
reality" only the indivisible, minutest material bodies--which,
while qualitatively indistinguishable, yet differ in shape,
position, and arrangement in space as well as in bulk and
weight--and empty space. He was obliged to seek for the "soul"
(which to the _materialist_ may easily present itself as being a
separate, substantial, self-existent thing) among those minutest
bodies out of which the whole fabric of the world of appearance is
built up. The soul is that which confers movement upon the
inherently motionless collections of bodies. It is composed of the
round and smooth atoms which, in the universal condition of unrest
that keeps all the atoms in agitation, are the most easily moved,
for they offer least resistance to change of position, and can most
easily penetrate others. These atoms compose fire and the soul. It
is the soul-atom--one being inserted between every two of the other
atoms[100\11]--which gives these their movement; and it is from all
the soul-atoms uniformly disposed throughout the whole body that the
body gets its movement, whence also (though it must be admitted in
an unintelligible manner) comes the power of perception, which
equally depends on movement, and the thought arising thence, of this
same body. {386} During the life-time of the individual body, the
continuance of the soul-atoms is secured by the breathing which
continually replaces the smooth soul-particles that are as
continually being expelled from the whole atom-complex by the
pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. The breathing is always
drawing in fresh soul-stuff from the air which is full of floating
soul-atoms, and supplies it to the body. A time comes, however, when
the breathing refuses this function, and death occurs, which is
simply the insufficient supply of these moving and animating
atoms.[101\11] With the coming of death, there is an end to the
union of the atoms, whose amalgamation had formed the particular
living organism. Neither the soul-atoms nor any of the other atoms
are destroyed; they do not alter in kind; but from the loose state
of aggregation which even in the living body hardly amounted to an
absolute unity to which a single common name could be applied--from
this they now escape entirely. It is scarcely possible to see how,
on this view of what essentially constitutes mental and vital
phenomena, as a mere resultant of the separate and individual
activities of individual and disconnected bodies, the unity of the
living organism and the spiritual entity could ever come into being.
It is even more evident that a unified "soul" could not possibly
continue to exist after the dissolution which takes place at death
of the atoms that in their union made up the organism. And, in fact,
the soul-atoms disperse;[102\11] they return whence they came into
the restless mass of world-stuff. The human individual, in this view
of the case, perishes in death entirely.[103\11] The materials out
of which he was shaped and composed are indestructible, and reserved
for future construction; but his personality--the invisible
personality, the "soul", just as much as the visible--has but a
single existence strictly limited to its one appearance in time. The
continued existence of the soul after death, an immortality in
whatever manner the thing may be conceived, is here for the first
time in the history of Greek thought, expressly denied. The Atomist,
with the candid precision that distinguishes him, draws the
necessary consequences of his premises.
Anaxagoras strikes out a path almost directly opposed to this
materialist doctrine. As the first decisive and conscious dualist
among Greek philosophers, he takes the material substratum of being,
the inexhaustible many of distinctly characterized and distinctly
separate "Seeds" of things--which are nevertheless indistinguishably
intermingled with each other--and sets over against them a force
which he {387} obviously did not mean to derive from them, to which
he gives a name usually attached to the faculty of thought in man,
and which in any case he thought of as analogous to that
faculty.[104\11] This "Mind", simple, unmixed and unchangeable, is
given such titles and adjectives that it is impossible to mistake
the effort of Anaxagoras to think of it as something distinct from
everything material, and in fact, absolutely immaterial and
incorporeal.[105\11] It is at once power of thought and force of
will; at the creation of the world it gives the first circular
impulse to the intrinsically motionless lump of matter; the creation
of distinct forms in accordance with a conscious purpose is begun by
it--though the carrying out of this purpose is indeed to be
completed in accordance with pure mechanical laws without the
interference of "Mind". This "Mind" that plans and orders but does
not make the world, that with the conscious insight of its
omniscient wisdom[106\11] influences matter without being influenced
in turn, that moves without being moved;[107\11] set over against
the multiplicity of things as an indivisible unity,[108\11] "having
nothing in common with anything outside itself"[109\11] but entirely
self-contained[110\11]--how shall we conceive of it otherwise than
as an almost personified, transcendent divine power confronting the
world of matter as something foreign to it, ruling the world from
without by magical, not mechanical, means?
But this transcendent is also completely immanent. **Wherever in
this world life and independent movement are found, there, too, the
mind as the source of life and movement must be active. "Mind rules
all that has soul" says Anaxagoras.[111\11] In saying this he has
not indeed asserted the presence of "Mind" within the animated being
nor yet identity of nature as between soul and mind. But when we
hear that Mind "goes through all things,[112\11] that in everything
there is a part of all things, except of mind, and in some things of
mind also",[113\11] that must imply the penetration of many
associations of matter by mind (hardly any longer to be thought of
as immaterial) whereby the previously asserted transcendency of mind
seems to be given up. At any rate, as such associations in which is
"Mind", living and animated beings are regarded. It is in them that
"Mind" is present in continual, equal creativeness, though in
different degrees;[114\11] indeed, Mind is or constitutes that very
thing that we call the "soul" of a living being.[115\11] Among these
living beings, which exist upon the moon,[116\11] as well as on
earth, are not only men and beasts, but also plants.[117\11] In all
these "Mind" is active; without losing any of its purity or unity,
it is mixed with them.[118\11] {388} How we are to conceive the
omnipotent Mind, whose oneness and self-containedness has been so
emphatically asserted, as nevertheless entering simultaneously into
the infinity of individual being--that certainly remains obscure. It
is clear, however, that having thus derived all animated being from
the single World-Mind, Anaxagoras could not speak of the continued
existence of individual, self-existent "souls" after the dissolution
of the material concretions in which moving and animating
"soul-force" had once lived. The view is definitely ascribed to him
that separation from the body is also "the soul's death".[119\11]
Nothing, indeed, of the component parts that belong to the whole
perishes, and no change in its nature takes place. So "Mind", whose
manifestations the "souls" were, maintains itself unaltered and
undiminished; but after the dissolution of the united, which "the
Hellenes" regard as its destruction,[120\11] though the component
parts of the individual remain, yet not _that_ particular mixture in
which the peculiarity of the individual was inherent--"Mind"
remains, but not the soul . . .
Thus, the first distinct separation of the intellectual thinking
principle from the material substance with which it was--not fused,
much less identified, but--contrasted in sovereignty and
independence, did not lead to the recognition of the
indestructibility of the individual spirit.
Shall we say that the mental, self-moved, life-giving principle,
whether set over against the material and corporeal or indivisibly
united with it, is for the physiologist always something
universal--that the essentially real is impersonal? For him the
individual, the personality conscious of itself and of the outer
world, can be nothing but a manifestation of the universal, whether
the latter is regarded as fixed and at rest, or as a living process
that untiringly develops itself, recruits itself, and reconstructs
itself in ever renewed creations. The only permanent, unchanging
reality is the universal, the essential and fundamentally real
Nature which appears in all individual things, speaks out of their
mouth, and, in reality, only works and lives in them. The individual
human soul has its indestructibility only in its identity with the
universal that represents itself in it. The individual forms of
"appearance", having no independence of their own, cannot
permanently abide.
The view that imperishable life belongs to the individual soul could
only be reached by a line of thought that took as a fact and held
fast to it as something given that the individual spirit is a
reality. (Its appearance and disappearance in the {389} midst of the
one universe was indeed for the physiologists the true miracle, the
problem never satisfactorily solved.) Such a belief in
individuality, the belief in an independently existent individual
substance that had never had a beginning and could therefore never
have an end, was the contribution, however fancifully it might be
expressed, of the theologians and the mystics. For them immortality,
the power of substantive duration unlimited by time, was extended
also to include the individual. The individual soul is for them a
self-existent, individual, divine being, indestructible because it
is divine.
Greek philosophy underwent many changes in the course of its
speculations during the following ages; but exactly in proportion as
it, to a greater or lesser degree, accepted theological elements or
on the other hand rejected such elements, did it give fundamental
support to the view of the soul's immortality, or grudgingly admit
it, or absolutely reject it.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XI
[1\11: ~psuchê/~ = "life," "concept of life," in Homer (though not
indeed used to denote psychical powers during lifetime): see above,
pp. 30, 31. So, too, occasionally in the remains of the Iambic and
Elegiac poets of the earliest period: Archil. 23; Tyrt. 10, 14; 11,
5; Sol. 13, 46; Thgn. 568 f., 730; (Hippon. 43, 1?). ~psuchê/~ =
"life" in the proverbial phrase ~peri\ psuchê=s trechei=n~ (see
Wessel. and Valck. on Hdt. vii, 57; Jacobs on Ach. Tat., p. 896**).
~psuchê/~ frequently = "life" in the idiom of the Attic orators (see
Meuss, _Jahrb. f. Philol._ 1889, p. 803).]
[2\11: See above, pp. 5, 30. Even the Homeric poems in one case show
a slight uncertainty of language and of psychological conception
when they use ~thumo/s~, the highest and most general of the powers
of life dwelling within the visible and living man, in the sense of
~psuchê/~, the double of the man who dwells as a lodger in his body,
separate and taking no part in the ordinary business of his life.
The ~thumo/s~ (see above, chap. i, n. 57) is active during the man's
lifetime, is enclosed in the midriff (~en phresi\ thumo\s~) and when
that is overtaken by death is itself overwhelmed (~Ps~ 104): on the
arrival of death it leaves the body and perishes--while the
~psuchê/~ flies away intact. The distinction is clearly maintained,
e.g. in ~l~ 220 f.: "fire destroys the body" ~epei/ ken prô=ta
li/pê| leu/k' oste/a _thumo/s, psuchê\ d'_ êu/t' o/neiros
apoptame/nê pepo/têtai~. ~thumo/s~ and ~psuchê/~ therefore leave the
body of the slain man simultaneously (~thumou= kai\ psuchê=s
kekadô/n~ ~L~ 334, ~ph~ 154); but in very different ways. The
relation between them becomes, however, interchangeability in the
single case when it is said of the ~thumo/s~ that _it_ in death will
enter ~apo\ me/le/ôn do/mon A/idos ei/sô~--~Ê~ 131; in reality this
could only be said of that very different being, the ~psuchê/~.
(When a fainting-fit has passed over we do indeed hear, not that the
~psuchê/~--though this it was that had left the man: see above,
chap. i, n. 8--but that ~es phre/na _thumo\s_ age/rthê~, ~Ch~ 475,
~e~ 458, ~ô~ 349. This, however, is not a case of ~thumo/s~ instead
of ~psuchê/~, but ~thumo/s~ is merely an abbreviated form of the
whole statement which would be in full: _both_ ~thumo/s~ and
~psuchê/~ have now returned into the man; cf. ~E~ 696. It is a kind
of synecdoche.) In the line ~Ê~ 131 we really, then, do have
~thumo/s~ instead of ~psuchê/~ either as the result of a
misunderstanding of the real meaning of the two words or merely
through an oversight. But never (and this is the most essential
point) do we have a case in Homer of the opposite exchange of
significance: i.e. of ~psuchê/~ used in the sense ~thumo/s~ (~no/os,
me/nos, êtor~, etc.), as meaning the mental power and its activity
in the living and waking man. Just this, however, and more than
this, the sum and substance of all the mental powers in general, is
what the word ~psuchê/~ means in the language of the philosophers
(except those affected by religious tendencies). They left out of
account altogether that spiritual double of mankind whom the popular
psychology called the ~psuchê/~, and were thus free to use the word
to express the whole psychical content of the human individual. From
the fifth century onwards we find the word ~psuchê/~ used commonly,
and even regularly, in this sense in the vocabulary of
non-philosophical poets and prose writers. Only theologians and
poets, or philosophers of a theological tendency, continued to use
the {391} word in its ancient and primitive sense. Indeed, when the
separation of a spiritual being from the body of a man in death was
being spoken of, ~psuchê/~ always continued to be the proper word
for this sense even in popular language. (An extremely rare example
of ~thumo/s~ in this sense, comparable with ~Ê~ 131, is [Arist.]
_Pepl_. 61 Bgk.; ~_thumo/n_ . . . aithê\r lampro\s e/chei~. In the
corresponding epigram, _Epigr. Gr._ 41, we have ~psuchê/n~.)]
[3\11: ~e/nioi~, among them Choirilos of Samos: D.L. i, 24 (from
Favorinus): _Vors._^4, i, p. 1, 21.]
[4\11: Arist., _An._ 1, 2, p. 405a, 20 f. "Aristotle and Hippias"
ap. D.L. i, 24; _Vors._, p. 2, 1. ~ta\ phuta\ e/mpsucha zô=|a~,
_Dox._ 438a, 6, b, 1.]
[5\11: Metaphorical language: ~Thalê=s ô|ê/thê pa/nta plê/rê theô=n
ei=nai~, Arist., _An._ 1, 5, p. 411a, 8. ~to\n ko/smon (e/mpsuchon
kai\) daimo/nôn plê/rê~, D.L. i, 27; _Dox._ 301b, 2; _Vors._ p. 2,
20. Pl., _Lg._ 899 B, is an allusion to the ~theô=n plê/rê pa/nta~
(as Krische remarks, _Theol. Lehr. d. Gr. Denker_, p. 37). There is
perhaps a half-mocking reference to the words in the saying
attributed by anecdotal tradition to Herakleitos: ~ei=nai kai\
entau=tha theou/s~ (i.e. in his own hearth) Arist., _PA._ 1, 5, p.
645a, 17 ff. Hence Herakleitos himself was credited with the opinion
of Thales in slightly altered form: ~pa/nta psuchô=n ei=nai kai\
daimo/nôn plê/rê~, D.L. ix, 7 (_Vors._, p. 68, 29), in the first
(and valueless) of the two lists of the doctrines of Herakl. there
given.]
[6\11: Arist., _Phys._ 3, 4, p. 203b, 10-14. _Dox._ 559, 18.
_Vors._, p. 17, 35.]
[7\11: Anaximander, _fr._ 2 Mull. _Vors._, p. 15, 26. That
Anaximander declared the soul to be "like air" is an erroneous
statement of Theodoret.: see Diels, _Dox._ 387b, 10 (_Vors._ 21,
5).]
[8\11: Anaximenes in _Dox._ 278a, 12 ff.; b, 8 ff. _fr._ 2 Diels.]
[9\11: Anaxim. calls ~to\n ae/ra theo/n~, i.e. it has divine power:
_Dox._ 302b, 5; 531a, 17, b, 1-2. _Vors._ 24, 18. This at least is
to be understood in the same sense in which Anaximander is said to
have called ~to\ a/peiron, to\ _thei=on_~ (Arist., _Phys._ 3, 4, p.
203b, 13; _Vors._, p. 17, 35).]
[10\11: ~he\n pa/nta ei=nai~, _fr._ 1 (Byw.); 50 (Diels).]
[11\11: Arist., _An._ 1, 2, p. 405a, 25 ff. _Vors._ 74, 30. Hkl. is
also meant in p. 405a, 5. _Dox._ 471, 2 (Arius Didymus); 389a, 3
ff.]
[12\11: Arist., p. 405a. 25 ff. Hkl. _fr._ 68 (36 D.).]