GENERAL VIEW OF THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY.
1. The universal tendency of the pre-Socratic philosophy is to find some
principle for the explanation of nature. Nature, the most immediate,
that which first met the eye and was the most palpable, was that which
first aroused the inquiring mind. At the basis of its changing
forms,—beneath its manifold appearances, thought they, lies a first
principle which abides the same through all change. What then, they
asked, is this principle? What is the original ground of things? Or,
more accurately, what element of nature is the fundamental element? To
solve this inquiry was the problem of the _Ionic_ natural philosophers.
One proposes as a solution, water, another, air, and a third, an
original chaotic matter.
2. The _Pythagoreans_ attempted a higher solution of this problem. The
proportions and dimensions of matter rather than its sensible
concretions, seemed to them to furnish the true explanation of being.
They, accordingly, adopted as the principle of their philosophy, that
which would express a determination of proportions, _i. e._ numbers.
“Number is the essence of all things,” was their position. Number is the
mean between the immediate sensuous intuition and the pure thought.
Number and measure have, to be sure, nothing to do with matter only in
so far as it possesses extension, and is capable of division in space
and time, but yet we should have no numbers or measures if there were no
matter, or nothing which could meet the intuitions of our sense. This
elevation above matter, which is at the same time a cleaving to matter,
constitutes the essence and the character of Pythagoreanism.
3. Next come the _Eleatics_, who step absolutely beyond that which is
given in experience, and make a complete abstraction of every thing
material. This abstraction, this negation of all division in space and
time, they take as their principle, and call it pure being. Instead of
the sensuous principle of the Ionics, or the symbolic principle of the
Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, therefore, adopt an intelligible principle.
4. Herewith closes the analytic, the first course in the development of
Grecian philosophy, to make way for the second, or synthetic course. The
Eleatics had sacrificed to their principle of pure being, the existence
of the world and every finite existence. But the denial of nature and
the world could not be maintained. The reality of both forced itself
upon the attention, and even the Eleatics had affirmed it, though in
guarded and hypothetical terms. But from their abstract being there was
no passage back to the sensuous and concrete; their principle ought to
have explained the being of events, but it did not. To find a principle
for the explanation of these, a principle which would account for the
becoming, the event was still the problem. _Heraclitus_ solved it, by
asserting that, inasmuch as being has no more reality than not being,
therefore the unity of the two, or in other words the becoming, is the
absolute principle. He held that it belonged to the very essence of
finite being that it be conceived in a continual flow, in an endless
stream. “Every thing flows.” We have here the conception of original
energy, instead of the Ionic original matter; the first attempt to
explain being and its motion from a principle analytically attained.
From the time of Heraclitus, this inquiry after the cause of the
becoming, remained the chief interest and the moving spring of
philosophical development.
5. Becoming is the unity of being and not-being, and into these two
elements is the Heraclitic principle consciously analyzed by the
_Atomists_. Heraclitus had uttered the principle of the becoming, but
only as a fact of experience. He had simply expressed it as a law, but
had not explained it. The necessity for this universal law yet remained
to be proved. WHY is every thing in a perpetual flow—in an eternal
movement? From the dynamical combination of matter and the moving force,
the next step was to a consciously determined distinction, to a
mechanical division of the two. Thus Empedocles combining the doctrines
of Heraclitus and Parmenides, considered matter as the abiding being,
while force was the ground of the movement. But the Atomists still
considered the moving mythic energies as forces; Empedocles regarded
them as love and hate; and Democritus as unconscious necessity. The
result was, therefore, that the becoming was rather limited as a means
for the mechanical explanation of nature, than itself explained.
6. Despairing of any merely materialistic explanation of the becoming,
_Anaxagoras_ next appears, and places a world-forming Intelligence by
the side of matter. He recognized mind as the primal causality, to which
the existence of the world, together with its determined arrangement and
design (_zweckmässigkeit_) must be referred. In this, philosophy gained
a great principle, viz.—an ideal one. But Anaxagoras did not know how to
fully carry out his principles. Instead of a theoretical comprehension
of the universe—instead of deriving being from the idea, he grasped
again after some mechanical explanation. His “world-forming reason”
serves him only as a first impulse, only as a moving power. It is to him
a _Deus ex machina_. Notwithstanding, therefore, his glimpse of
something higher than matter, yet was Anaxagoras only a physical
philosopher, like his predecessors. Mind had not yet appeared to him as
a true force above nature, as an organizing soul of the universe.
7. It is, therefore, a farther progress in thought, to comprehend
accurately the distinction between mind and nature, and to recognize
mind as something higher and contra-distinguished from all natural
being. This problem fell to the _Sophists_. They entangled in
contradictions, the thinking which had been confined to the object, to
that which was given, and gave to the objective world which had before
been exalted above the subject, a subordinate position in the dawning
and yet infantile consciousness of the superiority of subjective
thinking. The Sophists carried their principle of subjectivity, though
at first this was only negative, into the form of the universal
religious and political changing condition (_Aufklärung_).[1] They stood
forth as the destroyers of the whole edifice of thought that had been
thus far built, until _Socrates_ appeared, and set up against this
principle of _empirical_ subjectivity, that of the _absolute_
subjectivity,—that of the spirit in the form of a free moral will, and
the thought is positively considered as something higher than existence,
as the truth of all reality. With the Sophist closes our first period,
for with these the oldest philosophy finds its self-destruction
(_Selbstauflösung_).