They did not have the name, which originated long after in quite an
absurd fashion,[18] but they reveled in the thing. Nowadays
metaphysics is revered by some as our noblest effort to reach the
highest truth, and scorned by others as the silliest of wild-goose
chases. I am inclined to rate it, like smoking, as a highly gratifying
indulgence to those who like it, and, as indulgences go, relatively
innocent. The Greeks found that the mind could carry on an absorbing
game with itself. We all engage in reveries and fantasies of a homely,
everyday type, concerned with our desires or resentments, but the
fantasy of the metaphysician busies itself with conceptions,
abstractions, distinctions, hypotheses, postulates, and logical
inferences. Having made certain postulates or hypotheses, he finds new
conclusions, which he follows in a seemingly convincing manner. This
gives him the delightful emotion of pursuing Truth, something as the
simple man pursues a maiden. Only Truth is more elusive than the
maiden and may continue to beckon her follower for long years, no
matter how gray and doddering he may become.
Let me give two examples of metaphysical reasoning.[19] We have an
idea of an omnipotent, all-good, and perfect being. We are incapable,
knowing as we do only imperfect things, of framing such an idea for
ourselves, so it must have been given us by the being himself. And
perfection must include existence, so God must exist. This was good
enough for Anselm and for Descartes, who went on to build a whole
closely concatenated philosophical system on this foundation. To them
the logic seemed irrefragable; to the modern student of comparative
religion, even to Kant, himself a metaphysician, there was nothing
whatsoever in it but an illustration of the native operations of a
mind that has made a wholly gratuitous hypothesis and is victimized by
an orderly series of spontaneous associations.
A second example of metaphysics may be found in the doctrines of the
Eleatic philosophers, who early appeared in the Greek colonies on the
coast of Italy, and thought hard about space and motion. Empty space
seemed as good as nothing, and, as nothing could not be said to exist,
space must be an illusion; and as motion implied space in which to
take place, there could be no motion. So all things were really
perfectly compact and at rest, and all our impressions of change were
the illusions of the thoughtless and the simple-minded. Since one of
the chief satisfactions of the metaphysicians is to get away from the
welter of our mutable world into a realm of assurance, this doctrine
exercised a great fascination over many minds. The Eleatic conviction
of unchanging stability received a new form in Plato's doctrine of
eternal "ideas", and later developed into the comforting conception of
the "Absolute", in which logical and world-weary souls have sought
refuge from the times of Plotinus to those of Josiah Royce.
But there was one group of Greek thinkers whose general notions of
natural operations correspond in a striking manner to the conclusions
of the most recent science. These were the Epicureans. Democritus was
in no way a modern experimental scientist, but he met the Eleatic
metaphysics with another set of speculative considerations which
happened to be nearer what is now regarded as the truth than theirs.
He rejected the Eleatic decisions against the reality of space and
motion on the ground that, since motion obviously took place, the void
must be a reality, even if the metaphysician could not conceive it. He
hit upon the notion that all things were composed of minute,
indestructible particles (or atoms) of fixed kinds. Given motion and
sufficient time, these might by fortuitous concourse make all possible
combinations. And it was one of these combinations which we call the
world as we find it. For the atoms of various shapes were inherently
capable of making up all material things, even the soul of man and the
gods themselves. There was no permanence anywhere; all was no more
than the shifting accidental and fleeting combinations of the
permanent atoms of which the cosmos was composed. This doctrine was
accepted by the noble Epicurus and his school and is delivered to us
in the immortal poem of Lucretius "On the Nature of Things".
The Epicureans believed the gods to exist because, like Anselm and
Descartes, they thought we had an innate idea of them. But the divine
beings led a life of elegant ease and took no account of man; neither
his supplications, nor his sweet-smelling sacrifices, nor his
blasphemies, ever disturbed their calm. Moreover, the human soul was
dissipated at death. So the Epicureans flattered themselves that they
had delivered man from his two chief apprehensions, the fear of the
gods and the fear of death. For, as Lucretius says, he who understands
the real nature of things will see that both are the illusions of
ignorance. Thus one school of Greek thinkers attained to a complete
rejection of religious beliefs in the name of natural science.
9. INFLUENCE OF PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
In Plato we have at once the skepticism and the metaphysics of his
contemporaries. He has had his followers down through the ages, some
of whom carried his skepticism to its utmost bounds, while others
availed themselves of his metaphysics to rear a system of arrogant
mystical dogmatism. He put his speculations in the form of dialogues
--ostensible discussions in the market place or the houses of
philosophic Athenians. The Greek word for logic is dialectic, which
really means "discussion". argumentation in the interest of fuller
analysis, with the hope of more critical conclusions. The dialogues
are the drama of his day, employed in Plato's magical hand as a
vehicle of discursive reason. Of late we have in Ibsen, Shaw, Brieux,
and Galsworthy the old expedient applied to the consideration of
social perplexities and contradictions. The dialogue is indecisive in
its outcome. It does not lend itself to dogmatic conclusions and
systematic presentation, but exposes the intricacy of all important
questions and the inevitable conflict of views, which may seem
altogether irreconcilable. We much need to encourage and elaborate
opportunities for profitable discussion to-day. We should revert to
the dialectic of the Athenian agora and make it a chosen instrument
for clarifying, co-ordinating and directing our co-operative thinking.
Plato's indecision and urbane fair-mindedness is called irony. Now
irony is seriousness without solemnity. It assumes that man is a
serio-comic animal, and that no treatment of his affairs can be
appropriate which gives him a consistency and dignity which he does
not possess. He is always a child and a savage. He is the victim of
conflicting desires and hidden yearnings. He may talk like a
sentimental idealist and act like a brute. The same person will devote
anxious years to the invention of high explosives and then give his
fortune to the promotion of peace. We devise the most exquisite
machinery for blowing our neighbors to pieces and then display our
highest skill and organization in trying to patch together such as
offer hope of being mended. Our nature forbids us to make a definite
choice between the machine gun and the Red Cross nurse. So we use the
one to keep the other busy. Human thought and conduct can only be
treated broadly and truly in a mood of tolerant irony. It belies the
logical precision of the long-faced, humorless writer on politics and
ethics, whose works rarely deal with man at all, but are a stupid form
of metaphysics.
Plato made terms with the welter of things, but sought relief in the
conception of supernal models, eternal in the heavens, after which all
things were imperfectly fashioned. He confessed that he could not bear
to accept a world which was like a leaky pot or a man running at the
nose. In short, he ascribed the highest form of existence to ideals
and abstractions. This was a new and sophisticated republication of
savage animism. It invited lesser minds than his to indulge in all
sorts of noble vagueness and impertinent jargon which continue to
curse our popular discussions of human affairs. He consecrated one of
the chief foibles of the human mind and elevated it to a religion.
Ever since his time men have discussed the import of names. Are there
such things as love, friendship, and honor, or are there only lovely
things, friendly emotions in this individual and that, deeds which we
may, according to our standards, pronounce honorable or dishonorable?
If you believe in beauty, truth, and love _as such_ you are a
Platonist. If you believe that there are only individual instances and
illustrations of various classified emotions and desires and acts, and
that abstractions are only the inevitable categories of thought, you
would in the Middle Ages have been called a "nominalist".
This matter merits a long discussion, but one can test any book or
newspaper editorial at his leisure and see whether the writer puts you
off with abstractions--Americanism, Bolshevism, public welfare,
liberty, national honor, religion, morality, good taste, rights of
man, science, reason, error--or, on the other hand, casts some light
on actual human complications. I do not mean, of course, that we can
get along without the use of abstract and general terms in our
thinking and speaking, but we should be on our constant guard against
viewing them as forces and attributing to them the vigor of
personality. Animism is, as already explained, a pitfall which is
always yawning before us and into which we are sure to plunge unless
we are ever watchful. Platonism is its most amiable and complete
disguise.
Previous to Aristotle, Greek thought had been wonderfully free and
elastic. It had not settled into compartments or assumed an
educational form which would secure its unrevised transmission from
teacher to student. It was not gathered together in systematic
treatises. Aristotle combined the supreme powers of an original and
creative thinker with the impulses of a textbook writer. He loved
order and classification. He supplied manuals of Ethics, Politics,
Logic, Psychology, Physics, Metaphysics, Economics, Poetics, Zoölogy,
Meteorology, Constitutional Law, and God only knows what not, for we
do not have by any means all the things he wrote. And he was equally
interested, and perhaps equally capable, in all the widely scattered
fields in which he labored. And some of his manuals were so
overwhelming in the conclusiveness of their reasoning, so
all-embracing in their scope, that the mediaeval universities may be
forgiven for having made them the sole basis of a liberal education
and for imposing fines on those who ventured to differ from "The
Philosopher". He seemed to know everything that could be known and to
have ordered all earthly knowledge in an inspired codification which
would stand the professors in good stead down to the day of judgment.
Aristotle combined an essentially metaphysical taste with a
preternatural power of observation in dealing with the workings of
nature. In spite of his inevitable mistakes, which became the curse of
later docile generations, no other thinker of whom we have record can
really compare with him in the distinction and variety of his
achievements. It is not his fault that posterity used his works to
hamper further progress and clarification. He is the father of book
knowledge and the grandfather of the commentator.
After two or three hundred years of talking in the market place and of
philosophic discussions prolonged until morning, such of the Greeks as
were predisposed to speculation had thought all the thoughts and
uttered all the criticisms of commonly accepted beliefs and of one
another that could by any possibility occur to those who had little
inclination to fare forth and extend their knowledge of the so-called
realities of nature by painful and specialized research and
examination. This is to me the chief reason why, except for some
advances in mathematics, astronomy, geography, and the refinements of
scholarship, the glorious period of the Greek mind is commonly and
rightfully assumed to have come to an end about the time of
Aristotle's death. Why did the Greeks not go on, as modern scientists
have gone on, with vistas of the unachieved still ahead of them?
In the first place, Greek civilization was founded on slavery and a
fixed condition of the industrial arts. The philosopher and scholar
was estopped from fumbling with those everyday processes that were
associated with the mean life of the slave and servant. Consequently
there was no one to devise the practical apparatus by which alone
profound and ever-increasing knowledge of natural operations is
possible. The mechanical inventiveness of the Greeks was slight, and
hence they never came upon the lens; they had no microscope to reveal
the minute, no telescope to attract the remote; they never devised a
mechanical timepiece, a thermometer, nor a barometer, to say nothing
of cameras and spectroscopes. Archimedes, it is reported, disdained to
make any record of his ingenious devices, for they were unworthy the
noble profession of a philosopher. Such inventions as were made were
usually either toys or of a heavy practical character. So the next
great step forward in the extension of the human mind awaited the
disappearance of slavery and the slowly dawning suspicion, and final
repudiation, of the older metaphysics, which first became marked some
three hundred years ago.
NOTES.
[18] When in the time of Cicero the long-hidden works of Aristotle
were recovered and put into the hands of Andronicus of Rhodes to edit,
he found certain fragments of highly abstruse speculation which he did
not know what to do with. So he called them "addenda to the
Physics"--_Ta meta ta physica_. These fragments, under the caption
"Metaphysica", became the most revered of Aristotle's productions, his
"First Philosophy", as the Scholastics were wont to call it.
[19] John Dewey deduces metaphysics from man's original reverie and
then shows how in time it became a solemn form of rationalizing
current habits and standards. _Reconstruction in Philosophy_, lectures
i-ii. It is certainly surprising how few philosophical writers have
ever reached other than perfectly commonplace conclusions in regard to
practical "morality".
* * * * *
V
And God made the two great lights; the greater light to rule the
day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also.
And God set them in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the
earth.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after
its kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after
its kind: and it was so.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and
let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl
of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.--Gen. i.
Ibi vacabimus et videbimus, videbimus et amabimus, amabimus et
laudabimus. Ecce quod erit in fine sine fine. Nam quis alius noster
est finis nisi pervenire ad regnum, cuius nullus est finis?--AUGUSTINE.
10. ORIGIN OF THE MEDIAEVAL CIVILIZATION
In the formation of what we may call our historical mind--namely, that
modification of our animal and primitive outlook which has been
produced by men of exceptional intellectual venturesomeness--the
Greeks played a great part. We have seen how the Greek thinkers
introduced for the first time highly subtle and critical ways of
scrutinizing old beliefs, and, how they disabused their minds of many
an ancient and naïve mistake. But our current ways of thinking are not
derived directly from the Greeks; we are separated from them by the
Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. When we think of Athens we think of
the Parthenon and its frieze, of Sophocles and Euripides, of Socrates
and Plato and Aristotle, of urbanity and clarity and moderation in all
things. When we think of the Middle Ages we find ourselves in a world
of monks, martyrs, and miracles, of popes and emperors, of knights and
ladies; we remember Gregory the Great, Abélard, and Thomas Aquinas
--and very little do these reminiscences have in common with those of
Hellas.
It was indeed a different world, with quite different fundamental
presuppositions. Marvelous as were the achievements of the Greeks in
art and literature, and ingenious as they were in new and varied
combinations of ideas, they paid too little attention to the common
things of the world to devise the necessary means of penetrating its
mysteries. They failed to come upon the lynx-eyed lens, or other
instruments of modern investigation, and thus never gained a godlike
vision of the remote and the minute. Their critical thought was
consequently not grounded in experimental or applied science, and
without that the western world was unable to advance or even long
maintain their high standards of criticism.
After the Hellenes were absorbed into the vast Roman Empire critical
thought and creative intelligence--rare and precarious things at
best--began to decline, at first slowly and then with fatal rapidity
and completeness. Moreover, new and highly uncritical beliefs and
modes of thought became popular. They came from the Near East
--Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor--and largely supplanted
the critical traditions of the great schools of Greek philosophy.
The Stoic and Epicurean dogmas had lost their freshness. The Greek
thinkers had all agreed in looking for salvation through intelligence
and knowledge. But eloquent leaders arose to reveal a new salvation,
and over the portal of truth they erased the word "Reason" and wrote
"Faith" in its stead; and the people listened gladly to the new
prophets, for it was necessary only _to believe_ to be saved, and
believing is far easier than thinking.
It was religious and mystical thought which, in contrast to the
secular philosophy of the Greeks and the scientific thought of our own
day, dominated the intellectual life of the Middle Ages.
Before considering this new phase through which the human mind was to
pass it is necessary to guard against a common misapprehension in the
use of the term "Middle Ages". Our historical textbooks usually
include in that period the happenings between the dissolution of the
Roman Empire and the voyages of Columbus or the opening of the
Protestant revolt. To the student of intellectual history this is
unfortunate, for the simple reason that almost all the ideas and even
institutions of the Middle Ages, such as the church and monasticism
and organized religious intolerance, really originated in the late
Roman Empire. Moreover, the intellectual revolution which has ushered
in the thought of our day did not get well under way until the
seventeenth century. So one may say that medieval thought began long
before the accepted beginning of the Middle Ages and persisted a
century or so after they are ordinarily esteemed to have come to an
end. We have to continue to employ the old expression for convenience'
sake, but from the standpoint of the history of the European mind
three periods should be distinguished, lying between ancient Greek
thought as it was flourishing in Athens, Alexandria, Rhodes, Rome, and
elsewhere at the opening of the Christian era, and the birth of modern
science some sixteen hundred years later.
The first of these is the period of the Christian Fathers, culminating
in the authoritative writings of Augustine, who died in 430. By this
time a great part of the critical Greek books had disappeared in
western Europe. As for pagan writers, one has difficulty in thinking
of a single name (except that of Lucian) later than Juvenal, who had
died nearly three hundred years before Augustine. Worldly knowledge
was reduced to pitiful compendiums on which the mediaeval students
were later to place great reliance. Scientific, literary, and
historical information was scarcely to be had. The western world, so
far as it thought at all, devoted its attention to religion and all
manner of mystical ideas, old and new. As Harnack has so well said,
the world was already intellectually bankrupt before the German
invasions and their accompanying disorders plunged it into still
deeper ignorance and mental obscurity.
The second, or "Dark Age", lasted with only slight improvement from
Augustine to Abélard, about seven hundred years. The prosperous
_villas_ disappeared; towns vanished or shriveled up; libraries were
burned or rotted away from neglect; schools were closed, to be
reopened later here and there, after Charlemagne's educational edict,
in an especially enterprising monastery or by some exceptional bishop
who did not spend his whole time in fighting.
From about the year 1100 conditions began to be more and more
favorable to the revival of intellectual ambition, a recovery of
forgotten knowledge, and a gradual accumulation of new information and
inventions unknown to the Greeks, or indeed to any previous
civilization. The main presuppositions of this third period of the
later Middle Ages go back, however, to the Roman Empire. They had been
formulated by the Church Fathers, transmitted through the Dark Age,
and were now elaborated by the professors in the newly established
universities under the influence of Aristotle's recovered works and
built up into a majestic intellectual structure known as
Scholasticism. On these mediaeval university professors--the
schoolmen--Lord Bacon long ago pronounced a judgment that may well
stand to-day. "Having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure,
and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the
cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle, their dictator), as their
persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and
knowing little history, either of nature or time [they], did out of no
great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto
us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books."
Our civilization and the human mind, critical and uncritical, as we
now find it in our western world, is a direct and uninterrupted
outgrowth of the civilization and thought of the later Middle Ages.
Very gradually only did peculiarly free and audacious individual
thinkers escape from this or that mediaeval belief, until in our own
day some few have come to reject practically all the presuppositions
on which the Scholastic system was reared. But the great mass of
Christian believers, whether Catholic or Protestant, still professedly
or implicitly adhere to the assumptions of the Middle Ages, at least
in all matters in which religious or moral sanctions are concerned. It
is true that outside the Catholic clergy the term "mediaeval" is often
used in a sense of disparagement, but that should not blind us to the
fact that mediaeval presumptions, whether for better or worse, are
still common. A few of the most fundamental of these presuppositions
especially germane to our theme may be pointed out here.
11. OUR MEDIAEVAL INTELLECTUAL INHERITANCE
The Greeks and Romans had various theories of the origin of things,
all vague and admittedly conjectural. But the Christians, relying upon
the inspired account in the Bible, built their theories on information
which they believed vouchsafed to them by God himself. Their whole
conception of human history was based upon a far more fundamental and
thorough supernaturalism than we find among the Greeks and Romans. The
pagan philosophers reckoned with the gods, to be sure, but they never
assumed that man's earthly life should turn entirely on what was to
happen after death. This was in theory the sole preoccupation of the
mediaeval Christian. Life here below was but a brief, if decisive,
preliminary to the real life to come.