THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS (_concluded_)
_Air the beginning of things--All things pass--The eternal and the
temporary--The weeping philosopher_
[17]
III. ANAXIMENES.--This philosopher was also a native of Miletus, and is
said to have been a hearer or pupil of Anaximander. As we have said,
the [19] tendency of the later members of the school was towards
emphasising the _motive_ side of the supposed underlying principle of
nature, and accordingly Anaximenes chose Air as the element which best
[18] represented or symbolised that principle. Its fluidity, readiness
of movement, wide extension, and absolute neutrality of character as
regards colour, taste, smell, form, etc., were obvious suggestions.
The breath also, whose very name to the ancients implied an identity
with the life or soul, was nothing but air; and the identification of
Air with Life supplied just that principle of productiveness and
movement, which was felt [20] to be necessary in the primal element of
being. The process of existence, then, he conceived as consisting in a
certain concentration of this diffused life-giving element into more or
less solidified forms, and the {15} ultimate separation and expansion
of these back into the formless air again. The contrary forces
previously used by Anaximander--heat and cold, drought and
moisture--are with Anaximenes also the agencies which institute these
changes.
This is pretty nearly all that we know of Anaximenes. So far as the
few known facts reveal him, we can hardly say that except as supplying
a step towards the completer development of the _motive_ [22] idea in
being, he greatly adds to the chain of progressive thought.
IV. HERACLITUS.--Although not a native of Miletus, but of Ephesus,
Heraclitus, both by his nationality as an Ionian and by his position in
the development of philosophic conceptions, falls naturally to be
classed with the philosophers of Miletus. His period may be given
approximately as from about 560 to 500 B.C., though others place him a
generation later. Few authentic particulars have been preserved of
him. We hear of extensive travels, of his return to his native city
only to refuse a share in its activities, of his retirement to a
hermit's life. He seems to have formed a contrast to the preceding
philosophers in his greater detachment from the ordinary interests of
civic existence; and much in his teaching suggests the ascetic if not
the misanthrope. He received the nickname of 'The Obscure,' from the
studied mystery in which he was supposed to involve his {16} [23]
teaching. He wrote not for the vulgar, but for the gifted few. 'Much
learning makes not wise' was the motto of his work; the man of gift, of
insight, that man is better than ten thousand. He was savage in his
criticism of other writers, even the greatest. Homer, he said, and
Archilochus too, deserved to be hooted from the platform and thrashed.
Even the main purport of his writings was differently interpreted.
Some named his work 'The Muses,' as though it were chiefly a poetic
vision; others named it 'The sure Steersman to the Goal of Life';
others, more prosaically, 'A Treatise of Nature.'
[26]
The fundamental principle or fact of being Heraclitus formulated in the
famous dictum, 'All things pass.' In the eternal flux or flow of being
consisted its reality; even as in a river the water is ever changing,
and the river exists as a river only in virtue of this continual
change; or as in a living body, wherein while there is life there is no
stability or fixedness; stability and fixedness are the attributes of
the unreal image of life, not of life itself. Thus, as will be
observed, from the _material_ basis of being as conceived by Thales,
with only a very vague conception of the counter-principle of movement,
philosophy has wheeled round in Heraclitus to the other extreme; he
finds his permanent element in the negation of permanence; being or
reality consists in never 'being' but always 'becoming,' not in
stability but in change.
{17}
[27]
This eternal movement he pictures elsewhere as an eternal strife of
opposites, whose differences nevertheless consummate themselves in
finest harmony. Thus oneness emerges out of multiplicity, multiplicity
out of oneness; and the harmony of the universe is of contraries, as of
the lyre and the bow. _War_ is the father and king and lord of all
things. Neither god nor man presided at the creation of anything that
is; that which was, is that which is, and that which ever shall be;
even an ever-living Fire, ever kindling and ever being extinguished.
[28]
Thus in _Fire_, as an image or symbol of the underlying reality of
existence, Heraclitus advanced to the furthest limit attainable on
physical lines, for the expression of its essentially _motive_
character. That this Fire was no more than a symbol, suggested by the
special characteristics of fire in nature,--its subtlety, its mobility,
its power of penetrating all things and devouring all things, its
powers for beneficence in the warmth of living bodies and the
life-giving power of the sun,--is seen in the fact that he readily
varies his expression for this principle, calling it at times the
Thunderbolt, at others the eternal Reason, [29] or Law, or Fate. To
his mental view creation was a process eternally in action, the fiery
element descending by the law of its being into the cruder [30] forms
of water and earth, only to be resolved again by upward process into
fire; even as one sees the {18} vapour from the sea ascending and
melting into the [32] aether. As a kindred vapour or exhalation he
recognised the Soul or Breath for a manifestation of the essential
element. It is formless, ever changing with every breath we take, yet
it is the constructive and unifying force which keeps the body
together, and conditions its life and growth. At this point [33]
Heraclitus comes into touch with Anaximenes. In the act of breathing
we draw into our own being a portion of the all-pervading vital element
of all being; in this universal being we thereby live and move and have
our consciousness; the eternal and omnipresent wisdom becomes, through
the channels of our senses, and especially through the eyes, in
fragments at least our wisdom. In sleep we are not indeed cut off
wholly from this wisdom; through our breathing we hold as it were to
its root; but of its flower we are then deprived. On awaking again we
begin once more to partake according to our full measure of the living
thought; even as coals when brought near the fire are themselves made
partakers of it, but when taken away again become quenched.
[34]
Hence, in so far as man is wise, it is because his spirit is kindled by
union with the universal spirit; but there is a baser, or, as
Heraclitus termed it, a moister element also in him, which is the
element of unreason, as in a drunken man. And thus the trustworthiness
or otherwise of the senses, as the {19} channels of communication with
the divine, depends on the _dryness_ or _moistness_,--or, as we should
express it, using, after all, only another metaphor,--on the
_elevation_ or _baseness_ of the spirit that is within. To those whose
souls are base and barbarous, the eternal movement, the living fire, is
invisible; and thus what they do see is nothing but death. Immersed in
the mere appearances of things and their supposed stability, they,
whether sleeping or waking, behold only dead forms; their spirits are
dead.
[35]
For the guidance of life there is no law but the common sense, which is
the union of those fragmentary perceptions of eternal law, which
individual men [37] attain, in so far as their spirits are dry and
pure. Of absolute knowledge human nature is not capable, but only the
Divine. To the Eternal, therefore, alone all things are good and
beautiful and just, because to Him alone do things appear in their
totality. To the human partial reason some things are unjust and
others just. Hence life, by reason of the limitations [38] involved in
it, he sometimes spoke of as the death of the soul, and death as the
renewal of its life. And so, [39] in the great events of man's life
and in the small, as in the mighty circle of the heavens, good and
evil, life and death, growth and decay, are but the systole and
diastole, the outward and inward pulsation, of an eternal good, an
eternal harmony. Day and {20} night, winter and summer, war and peace,
satiety and hunger--each conditions the other, all are part of God. It
is sickness that makes health good and sweet, hunger that gives its
pleasure to feeding, weariness that makes sleep a good.
[39]
This vision of existence in its eternal flux and interchange, seems to
have inspired Heraclitus with a contemplative melancholy. In the
traditions of later times he was known as the _weeping_ philosopher.
Lucian represents him as saying, "To me it is a sorrow that there is
nothing fixed or secure, and that all things are thrown confusedly
together, so that pleasure and pain, knowledge and ignorance, the great
and the small, are the same, ever circling round and passing one into
the other in the sport of time." "Time," he says elsewhere, "is like a
child that plays with the dice." The highest good, therefore, for
mortals is that clarity of perception in respect of oneself and all
that is, whereby we shall learn to apprehend somewhat of the eternal
unity and harmony, that underlies the good and evil of time, the shock
and stress of circumstance and place. The highest virtue for man is a
placid and a quiet constancy, whatever the changes and chances of life
may bring. It is the pantheistic apathy.
The sadder note of humanity, the note of Euripides and at times of
Sophocles, the note of Dante and of the _Tempest_ of Shakespeare, of
Shelley and Arnold {21} and Carlyle,--this note we hear thus early and
thus clear, in the dim and distant utterances of Heraclitus. The
mystery of existence, the unreality of what seems most real, the
intangibility and evanescence of all things earthly,--these thoughts
obscurely echoing to us across the ages from Heraclitus, have remained,
and always will remain, among the deepest and most insistent of the
world's thoughts, in its sincerest moments and in its greatest thinkers.
{22}