Produced by Al Haines

A SHORT HISTORY

OF

GREEK PHILOSOPHY

BY

JOHN MARSHALL

M.A. OXON., LL.D. EDIN.

RECTOR OF THE ROYAL HIGH SCHOOL, EDINBURGH

FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY

IN THE YORKSHIRE COLLEGE, LEEDS

LONDON

PERCIVAL AND CO.

1891

All rights reserved

PREFACE

The main purpose which I have had in view in writing this book has been to present an account of Greek philosophy which, within strict limits of brevity, shall be at once authentic and interesting—authentic, as being based on the original works themselves, and not on any secondary sources; interesting, as presenting to the ordinary English reader, in language freed as far as possible from technicality and abstruseness, the great thoughts of the greatest men of antiquity on questions of permanent significance and value. There has been no attempt to shirk the really philosophic problems which these men tried in their day to solve; but I have endeavoured to show, by a sympathetic treatment of them, that these problems were no mere wars of words, but that in fact the philosophers of twenty-four centuries ago were dealing with exactly similar difficulties as to the bases of belief and of right action as, under different forms, beset thoughtful men and women to-day.

In the general treatment of the subject, I have followed in the main the order, and drawn chiefly on the selection of passages, in Ritter and Preller's Historia Philosophiae Graecae. It is hoped that in this way the little book may be found useful at the universities, as a running commentary on that excellent work; and the better to aid students in the use of it for that purpose, the corresponding sections in Ritter and Preller are indicated by the figures in the margin.

In the sections on Plato, and occasionally elsewhere, I have drawn to some extent, by the kind permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press and his own, on Professor Jowett's great commentary and translation.

JOHN MARSHALL.

Transcriber's notes:

The passage numbers in the Ritter-Preller book mentioned in the second paragraph above are indicated in this book with square brackets, e.g. "[10]". In the original book they were formatted as sidenotes. In this e-book they are embedded in the text approximately where they appear in the original book, unless they are at the start of a paragraph, in which case they appear immediately before that paragraph.

Page numbers are indicated with curly brackets, e.g. "{5}". They are embedded into the text where page breaks occurred in the original book.

In the original book, pages had headings that varied with the material being discussed on that pair of pages. In this e-book, those headings have been collected into an "introductory" paragraph at the beginning of each chapter.

The original book uses several Greek words. These words, the chapters they are used in, and their transliterations are as follows:

Chapter I (pages 3, 4, 12) - "arche" - alpha (with the soft-breathing mark), rho, chi, eta; "phloios" - phi, lambda, omicron, iota, omicron, final sigma.

Chapter III (page 28) - "soma" - sigma, omega, mu, alpha; "sema" - sigma, eta, mu, alpha.

Chapter IV (page 33, 34 - "doxa" - delta, omicron, xi, alpha; "Peri" - PI, epsilon, rho, iota; "Phueos" - PHI, upsilon, sigma, epsilon, omega, final sigma.

Chapter V (page 48) - "logos" - lambda, omicron, gamma, omicron, final sigma; "hule" - upsilon with rough breathing mark, lambda, eta.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

I.—THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS—
I. Thales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II. Anaximander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

II.—THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS (concluded)—
III. Anaximenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
IV. Heraclitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

III.—PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS . . . . . . . . . 22

IV.—THE ELEATICS—
I. Xenophanes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
II. Parmenides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

V.—THE ELEATICS (concluded)—
III. Zeno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
IV. Melissus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

VI.—THE ATOMISTS—
I. Anaxagoras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

VII.—THE ATOMISTS (continued)—
II. Empedocles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

VIII.—THE ATOMISTS (concluded)—
III. Leucippus and Democritus . . . . . . . . . . 74

IX.—THE SOPHISTS—
I. Protagoras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

X.—THE SOPHISTS (concluded)—
II. Gorgias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

XI.—SOCRATES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

XII.—SOCRATES (concluded) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

XIII.—THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS—
I. Aristippus and the Cyrenaics . . . . . . . . 124
II. Antisthenes and the Cynics . . . . . . . . . 128
III. Euclides and the Megarics . . . . . . . . . . 132

XIV.—PLATO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

XV.—PLATO (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

XVI.—PLATO (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

XVII.—PLATO (concluded) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

XVIII.—ARISTOTLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

XIX.—ARISTOTLE (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

XX.—ARISTOTLE (concluded) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

XXI.—THE SCEPTICS AND EPICUREANS . . . . . . . . . . . . 210

XXII.—THE STOICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

{1}

CHAPTER I

THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS

The question of Thales—Water the beginning of things—Soul in all things—Mystery in science—Abstraction and reality—Theory of development

I. THALES.—For several centuries prior to the great Persian invasions of Greece, perhaps the very greatest and wealthiest city of the Greek world was Miletus. Situate about the centre of the Ionian coasts of Asia Minor, with four magnificent harbours and a strongly defensible position, it gathered to itself much of the great overland trade, which has flowed for thousands of years eastward and westward between India and the Mediterranean; while by its great fleets it created a new world of its own along the Black Sea coast. Its colonies there were so numerous that Miletus was named 'Mother of Eighty Cities.' From Abydus on the Bosphorus, past Sinope, and so onward to the Crimea and the Don, and thence round to Thrace, a busy community of colonies, mining, manufacturing, ship-building, corn-raising, owned Miletus for their mother-city. Its {2} marts must therefore have been crowded with merchants of every country from India to Spain, from Arabia to Russia; the riches and the wonders of every clime must have become familiar to its inhabitants. And fitly enough, therefore, in this city was born the first notable Greek geographer, the first constructor of a map, the first observer of natural and other curiosities, the first recorder of varieties of custom among various communities, the first speculator on the causes of strange phenomena,—Hecataeus. His work is in great part lost, but we know a good deal about it from the frequent references to him and it in the work of his rival and follower, Herodotus.

The city naturally held a leading place politically as well as commercially. Empire in our sense was alien to the instincts of the Greek race; but Miletus was for centuries recognised as the foremost member of a great commercial and political league, the political character of the league becoming more defined, as first the Lydian and then the Persian monarchy became an aggressive neighbour on its borders.

[8]

It was in this active, prosperous, enterprising state, and at the period of its highest activity, that Thales, statesman, practical engineer, mathematician, philosopher, flourished. Without attempting to fix his date too closely, we may take it that he was a leading man in Miletus for the greater part of the {3} first half of the sixth century before Christ. We hear of an eclipse predicted by him, of the course of a river usefully changed, of shrewd and profitable handling of the market, of wise advice in the general councils of the league. He seems to have been at once a student of mathematics and an observer of nature, and withal something having analogy with both, an inquirer or speculator into the origin of things. To us nowadays this suggests a student of geology, or physiography, or some such branch of physical science; to Thales it probably rather suggested a theoretical inquiry into the simplest thinkable aspect of things as existing. "Under what form known to us," he would seem to have asked, "may we assume an identity in all known things, so as best to cover or render explicable the things as we know them?" The 'beginning' of things (for it was thus he described this assumed identity) was not conceived by him as something which was long ages before, and which had ceased to be; rather it meant the reality of things now. Thales then was the putter of a question, which had not been asked expressly before, but which has never ceased to be asked since. He was also the formulator of a new meaning for a word; the word 'beginning' ((Greek) arche) got the meaning of 'underlying reality' and so of 'ending' as well. In short, he so dealt with a word, on the surface of it implying {4} time, as to eliminate the idea of time, and suggest a method of looking at the world, more profound and far-reaching than had been before imagined.[1]

It is interesting to find that the man who was thus the first philosopher, the first observer who took a metaphysical, non-temporal, analytical view of the world, and so became the predecessor of all those votaries of 'other-world' ways of thinking,—whether as academic idealist, or 'budge doctor of the Stoic fur,' or Christian ascetic or what not, whose ways are such a puzzle to the 'hard-headed practical man,'—was himself one of the shrewdest men of his day, so shrewd that by common consent he was placed foremost in antiquity among the Seven Sages, or seven shrewd men, whose practical wisdom became a world's tradition, enshrined in anecdote and crystallised in proverb.

[9]

The chief record that we possess of the philosophic teaching of Thales is contained in an interesting notice of earlier philosophies by Aristotle, the main part of which as regards Thales runs as follows:

"The early philosophers as a rule formulated the originative principle ((Greek) arche) of all things under some material expression. By the originative principle or element of things they meant that of which all {5} existing things are composed, that which determines their coming into being, and into which they pass on ceasing to be. Where these philosophers differed from each other was simply in the answer which they gave to the question what was the nature of this principle, the differences of view among them applying both to the number, and to the character, of the supposed element or elements.

"Thales, the pioneer of this philosophy, maintained that Water was the originative principle of all things. It was doubtless in this sense that he said that the earth rested on water. What suggested the conception to him may have been such facts of observation, as that all forms of substance which promote life are moist, that heat itself seems to be conditioned by moisture, that the life-producing seed in all creatures is moist, and so on."

Other characteristics of water, it is elsewhere suggested, may have been in Thales' mind, such as its readiness to take various shapes, its convertibility from water into vapour or ice, its ready mixture with other substances, and so forth. What we have chiefly to note is, that the more unscientific this theory about the universe may strike us as being, the more completely out of accord with facts now familiar to everybody, the more striking is it as marking a new mood of mind, in which unity, though only very partially suggested or discoverable by the senses, is {6} preferred to that infinite and indefinite variety and difference which the senses give us at every moment. There is here the germ of a new aspiration, of a determination not to rest in the merely momentary and different, but at least to try, even against the apparent evidence of the senses, for something more permanently intelligible. As a first suggestion of what this permanent underlying reality may be, Water might very well pass. It is probable that even to Thales himself it was only a symbol, like the figure in a mathematical proposition, representing by the first passable physical phenomenon which came to hand, that ideal reality underlying all change, which is at once the beginning, the middle, and the end of all. That he did not mean Water, in the ordinary prosaic sense, to be identical with this, is suggested by some [10] other sayings of his. "Thales," says Aristotle elsewhere, "thought the whole universe was full of gods." "All things," he is recorded as saying, "have a soul in them, in virtue of which they move other things, and are themselves moved, even as the magnet, by virtue of its life or soul, moves the iron." Without pushing these fragmentary utterances too far, we may well conclude that whether Thales spoke of the soul of the universe and its divine indwelling powers, or gods, or of water as the origin of things, he was only vaguely symbolising in different ways an idea as yet formless and void, like the primeval chaos, but nevertheless, {7} like it, containing within it a promise and a potency of greater life hereafter.

II. ANAXIMANDER.—Our information with respect to thinkers so remote as these men is too scanty and too fragmentary, to enable us to say in what manner or degree they influenced each other. We cannot say for certain that any one of them was pupil or antagonist of another. They appear each of them, one might say for a moment only, from amidst the darkness of antiquity; a few sayings of theirs we catch vaguely across the void, and then they disappear. There is not, consequently, any very distinct progression or continuity observable among them, and so far therefore one has to confess that the title 'School of Miletus' is a misnomer. We have already quoted the words of Aristotle in which he classes the Ionic philosophers together, as all of them giving a material aspect of some kind to the originative principle of the universe (see above, P. 4). But while this is a characteristic observable in some of them, it is not so obviously discoverable in the second of their number, Anaximander.

This philosopher is said to have been younger by [11] one generation than Thales, but to have been intimate with him. He, like Thales, was a native of Miletus, and while we do not hear of him as a person, like Thales, of political eminence and activity, he was certainly the equal, if not the superior, of Thales in {8} mathematical and scientific ability. He is said to have either invented or at least made known to Greece the construction of the sun-dial. He was associated with Hecataeus in the construction of the earliest geographical charts or maps; he devoted himself with some success to the science of astronomy. His familiarity with the abstractions of mathematics perhaps accounts for the more abstract form, in which he expressed his idea of the principle of all things.

[21]

To Anaximander this principle was, as he expressed it, the infinite; not water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a different thing from any of them, something hardly namable, out of whose formlessness the heavens and all the worlds in them came to be. And by necessity into that same infinite or indefinite existence, out of which they originally emerged, did every created thing return. Thus, as he poetically expressed it, "Time brought its revenges, and for the wrong-doing of existence all things paid the penalty of death."

The momentary resting-place of Thales on the confines of the familiar world of things, in his formulation of Water as the principle of existence, is thus immediately removed. We get, as it were, to the earliest conception of things as we find it in Genesis; before the heavens were, or earth, or the waters under the earth, or light, or sun, or moon, or grass, or the beast of the field, when the "earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the {9} face of the deep." Only, be it observed, that while in the primitive Biblical idea this formless void precedes in time an ordered universe, in Anaximander's conception this formless infinitude is always here, is in fact the only reality which ever is here, something without beginning or ending, underlying all, enwrapping all, governing all.

To modern criticism this may seem to be little better than verbiage, having, perhaps, some possibilities of poetic treatment, but certainly very unsatisfactory if regarded as science. But to this we have to reply that one is not called upon to regard it as science. Behind science, as much to-day when our knowledge of the details of phenomena is so enormously increased, as in the times when science had hardly begun, there lies a world of mystery which we cannot pierce, and yet which we are compelled to assume. No scientific treatise can begin without assuming Matter and Force as data, and however much we may have learned about the relations of forces and the affinities of things, Matter and Force as such remain very much the same dim infinities, that the originative 'Infinite' was to Anaximander.

It is to be noted, however, that while modern science assumes necessarily two correlative data or originative principles,—Force, namely, as well as Matter,—Anaximander seems to have been content {10} with the formulation of but one; and perhaps it is just here that a kinship still remains between him and Thales and other philosophers of the school. He, no more than they, seems to have definitely raised the question, How are we to account for, or formulate, the principle of difference or change? What is it that causes things to come into being out of, or recalls them back from being into, the infinite void? It is to be confessed, however, that our accounts on this point are somewhat conflicting. One authority actually says that he formulated motion as eternal also. So far as he attempted to grasp the idea of difference in relation to that of unity, he seems to have regarded the principle of change or difference as inhering in [13] the infinite itself. Aristotle in this connection contrasts his doctrine with that of Anaxagoras, who formulated two principles of existence—Matter and Mind (see below, p. 54). Anaximander, he points out, found all he wanted in the one.

As a mathematician Anaximander must have been familiar in various aspects with the functions of the Infinite or Indefinable in the organisation of thought. To the student of Euclid, for example, the impossibility of adequately defining any of the fundamental elements of the science of geometry—the point, the line, the surface—is a familiar fact. In so far as a science of geometry is possible at all, the exactness, which is its essential characteristic, is only {11} attainable by starting from data which are in themselves impossible, as of a point which has no magnitude, of a line which has no breadth, of a surface which has no thickness. So in the science of abstract number the fundamental assumptions, as that 1=1, x=x, etc., are contradicted by every fact of experience, for in the world as we know it, absolute equality is simply impossible to discover; and yet these fundamental conceptions are in their development most powerful instruments for the extension of man's command over his own experiences. Their completeness of abstraction from the accidents of experience, from the differences, qualifications, variations which contribute so largely to the personal interests of life, this it is which makes the abstract sciences demonstrative, exact, and universally applicable. In so far, therefore, as we are permitted to grasp the conception of a perfectly abstract existence prior to, and underlying, and enclosing, all separate existences, so far also do we get to a conception which is demonstrative, exact, and universally applicable throughout the whole world of knowable objects.

Such a conception, however, by its absolute emptiness of content, does not afford any means in itself of progression; somehow and somewhere a principle of movement, of development, of concrete reality, must be found or assumed, to link this ultimate abstraction of existence to the multifarious phenomena {12} of existence as known. And it was, perhaps, because Anaximander failed to work out this aspect of the question, that in the subsequent leaders of the school movement, rather than mere existence, was the principle chiefly insisted upon.

Before passing, however, to these successors of Anaximander, some opinions of his which we have not perhaps the means of satisfactorily correlating with his general conception, but which are not without their individual interest, may here be noted. [14] The word husk or bark ((Greek) phloios) seems to have been a favourite one with him, as implying and depicting a conception of interior and necessary development in things. Thus he seems to have postulated an inherent tendency or law in the infinite, which compelled it to develop contrary characters, as hot and cold, dry and moist. In consequence of this fundamental tendency an envelope of fire, he says, came into being, encircling another envelope of air, which latter in turn enveloped the sphere of earth, each being like the 'husk' of the other, or like the bark which encloses the tree. This concentric system he conceives as having in some way been parted up into various systems, represented by the sun, the moon, the stars, and the earth. The last he figured as hanging in space, and deriving its stability from the inherent and perfect balance or relation of its parts.

{13}

[16]

Then, again, as to the origin of man, he seems to have in like manner taught a theory of development from lower forms of life. In his view the first living creatures must have come into being in moisture (thus recalling the theory of Thales). As time went on, and these forms of life reached their fuller possibilities, they came to be transferred to the dry land, casting off their old nature like a husk or bark. More particularly he insists that man must have developed out of other and lower forms of life, because of his exceptional need, under present conditions, of care and nursing in his earlier years. Had he come into being at once as a human creature he could never have survived.

The analogies of these theories with modern speculations are obvious and interesting. But without enlarging on these, one has only to say in conclusion that, suggestive and interesting as many of these poor fragments, these disjecti membra poetae, are individually, they leave us more and more impressed with a sense of incompleteness in our knowledge of Anaximander's theory as a whole. It may be that as a consistent and perfected system the theory never was worked out; it may be that it never was properly understood.

[1] By some authorities it is stated that Anaximander, the second philosopher of this school, was the first to use the word arche in the philosophic sense. Whether this be so or not, Thales certainly had the idea.

{14}

CHAPTER II

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}

CHAPTER III

PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS

The Pythagorean Brotherhood—Number the master—God the soul of the world—Music and morals

[41]

The birthplace of Pythagoras is uncertain. He is generally called the Samian, and we know, at all events, that he lived for some time in that island, during or immediately before the famous tyranny [43] of Polycrates. All manner of legends are told of the travels of Pythagoras to Egypt, Chaldaea, Phoenicia, and even to India. Others tell of a mysterious initiation at the sacred cave of Jupiter in Crete, and of a similar ceremony at the Delphic oracle. What is certain is that at some date towards the end of the sixth century B.C. he removed to Southern Italy, which was then extensively colonised by Greeks, and that there he became a great philosophic teacher, and ultimately even a predominating political influence.

[46]

He instituted a school in the strictest sense, with its various grades of learners, subject for years to a vow of silence, holding all things in common, and admitted, according to their approved fitness, to {23} [47] successive revelations of the true doctrine of the Master. Those in the lower grades were called Listeners; those in the higher, Mathematicians or Students; those in the most advanced stage, Physicists or Philosophers. With the political relations of the school we need not here concern ourselves. In Crotona and many other Greek cities in Italy Pythagoreans became a predominant aristocracy, who, having learned obedience under their master, applied what they had learned in an anti-democratic policy of government. This lasted for some thirty years, but ultimately democracy gained the day, and Pythagoreanism as a political power was violently rooted out.

Returning to the philosophy of Pythagoras, in its relation to the general development of Greek theory, we may note, to begin with, that it is not necessary, or perhaps possible, to disentangle the theory of Pythagoras himself from that of his followers, Philolaus and others. The teaching was largely oral, and was developed by successive leaders of the school. The doctrine, therefore, is generally spoken of as that, not of Pythagoras, but of the Pythagoreans. Nor can we fix for certain on one fundamental conception, upon which the whole structure of their doctrine was built.

[52]

One dictum we may start with because of its analogies with what has been said of the earlier {24} philosophies. The universe, said the Pythagoreans, was constituted of indefinites and definers, i.e. of that which has no character, but has infinite capacities of taking a character; and secondly, of things or forces which impose a character upon this. Out of the combination of these two elements or principles all knowable [53] existences come into being. "All things," they said, "as known have Number; and this number has two natures, the Odd and the Even; the known thing is the Odd-Even or union of the two."

[66]

By a curious and somewhat fanciful development of this conception the Pythagoreans drew up two parallel columns of antithetical principles in nature, ten in each, thus:—

Definite Indefinite
Odd Even
One Many
Right Left
Male Female
Steadfast Moving
Straight Bent
Light Dark
Good Evil
Four Square Irregular

Looking down these two lists we shall see that the first covers various aspects of what is conceived as the ordering, defining, formative principle in nature; and that the second in like manner comprises various {25} aspects of the unordered, neutral, passive, or disorganised element or principle; the first, to adopt a later method of expression, is Form, the second Matter. How this antithesis was worked out by Plato and Aristotle we shall see later on.

[54]

While, in a sense, then, even the indefinite has number, inasmuch as it is capable of having number or order imposed upon it (and only in so far as it has this imposed upon it, does it become knowable or intelligible), yet, as a positive factor, Number belongs only to the first class; as such it is the source of all knowledge and of all good. In reality the Pythagoreans had not got any further by this representation of nature than was reached, for example, by Anaximander, and still more definitely by Heraclitus, when they posited an Indefinite or Infinite principle in nature which by the clash of innate antagonisms developed into a knowable universe (see above, pp. 12, 16). But one can easily imagine that once the idea of Number became associated with that of the knowable in things, a wide field of detailed development and experiment, so to speak, in the arcana of nature, seemed to be opened. Every arithmetical or geometrical theorem became in this view another window giving light into the secret heart of things. Number became a kind of god, a revealer; and the philosophy of number a kind of religion or mystery. And this is why the {26} second grade of disciples were called Mathematicians; mathematics was the essential preparation for and initiation into philosophy.

Whether that which truly exists was actually identical with Number or Numbers, or whether it was something different from Number, but had a certain relation to Number; whether if there were such a relation, this was merely a relation of analogy or of conformability, or whether Number were something actually embodied in that which truly exists—these were speculative questions which were variously answered by various teachers, and which probably interested the later more than the earlier leaders of the school.

[56]

A further question arose: Assuming that ultimately the elements of knowable existence are but two, the One or Definite, and the Manifold or Indefinite, it was argued by some that there must be some third or higher principle governing the relations of these; there must be some law or harmony which shall render their intelligible union [57] possible. This principle of union was God, ever-living, ever One, eternal, immovable, self-identical. [58] This was the supreme reality, the Odd-Even or Many in One, One in Many, in whom was gathered up, as in an eternal harmony, all the contrarieties of lower [61] existence. Through the interchange and intergrowth of these contrarieties God realises Himself; the {27} universe in its evolution is the self-picturing of God. [62] God is diffused as the seminal principle throughout [68] the universe; He is the Soul of the world, and the world itself is God in process. The world, therefore, is in a sense a living creature. At its heart and circumference are purest fire; between these circle the sun, the moon, and the five planets, whose ordered movements, as of seven chords, produce an eternal music, the 'Music of the Spheres.' Earth, too, like the planets, is a celestial body, moving like them around the central fire.

[71]

By analogy with this conception of the universe as the realisation of God, so also the body, whether [72] of man or of any creature, is the realisation for the time being of a soul. Without the body and the life of the body, that soul were a blind and fleeting ghost. Of such unrealised souls there are many in various degrees and states; the whole air indeed is full of spirits, who are the causes of dreams and omens.

[73]

Thus the change and flux that are visible in all else are visible also in the relations of soul and body. Multitudes of fleeting ghosts or spirits are continually seeking realisation through union with bodies, passing at birth into this one and that, and at death issuing forth again into the void. Like wax which takes now one impression now another, yet remains in itself ever the same, so souls vary in the outward {28} [74] form that envelops and realises them. In this bodily life, the Pythagoreans are elsewhere described as saying, we are as it were in bonds or in a prison, whence we may not justly go forth till the Lord calls us. This idea Cicero mistranslated with a truly Roman fitness: according to him they taught that in this life we are as sentinels at our post, who may not quit it till our Commander orders.

On the one hand, therefore, the union of soul with body was necessary for the realisation of the former ((Greek) soma, body, being as it were (Greek) sema, expression), even as the reality of God was not in the Odd or Eternal Unity, but in the Odd-Even, the Unity in Multiplicity. On the other hand this union implied a certain loss or degradation. In other words, in so far as the soul became realised it also became corporealised, subject to the influence of passion and [75] change. In a sense therefore the soul as realised was double; in itself it partook of the eternal reason, as associated with body it belonged to the realm of unreason.

This disruption of the soul into two the Pythagoreans naturally developed in time into a threefold division, pure thought, perception, and desire; or even more nearly approaching the Platonic division (see below, p. 169), they divided it into reason, passion, and desire. But the later developments were largely influenced by Platonic and other doctrines, and need not be further followed here.

{29} [78] Music had great attractions for Pythagoras, not only for its soothing and refining effects, but for the intellectual interest of its numerical relations. Reference has already been made (see above, p. 27) to their quaint doctrine of the music of the spheres; and the same idea of rhythmic harmony pervaded the whole system. The life of the soul was a harmony; the virtues were perfect numbers; and the influence of music on the soul was only one instance among many of the harmonious relations of things throughout the universe. Thus we have Pythagoras described as soothing mental afflictions, and bodily ones also, by rhythmic measure and by song. With the morning's dawn he would be astir, harmonising his own spirit to his lyre, and chanting ancient hymns of the Cretan Thales, of Homer, and of Hesiod, till all the tremors of his soul were calmed and still.

Night and morning also he prescribed for himself and his followers an examination, as it were a tuning and testing of oneself. At these times especially was it meet for us to take account of our soul and its doings; in the evening to ask, "Wherein have I transgressed? What done? What failed to do?" In the morning, "What must I do? Wherein repair past days' forgetfulness?"

But the first duty of all was truth,—truth to one's own highest, truth to the highest beyond us. Through truth alone could the soul approach the divine. {30} Falsehood was of the earth; the real life of the soul must be in harmony with the heavenly and eternal verities.

Pythagoreanism remained a power for centuries throughout the Greek world and beyond. All subsequent philosophies borrowed from it, as it in its later developments borrowed from them; and thus along with them it formed the mind of the world, for further apprehensions, and yet more authentic revelations, of divine order and moral excellence.

{31}

CHAPTER IV

THE ELEATICS

God and nature—Knowledge and opinion—Being and evolution—Love the creator—The modern egotism

[79]

I. XENOPHANES.—Xenophanes was a native of Colophon, one of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, but having been forced at the age of twenty-five to leave his native city owing to some political revolution, he wandered to various cities of Greece, and ultimately to Zancle and Catana, Ionian colonies in Sicily, and thence to Elea or Velia, a Greek city on the coast of Italy. This city had, like Miletus, reached a high pitch of commercial prosperity, and like it also became a centre of philosophic teaching. For there Xenophanes remained and founded a school, so that he and his successors received the name of Eleatics. His date is uncertain; but he seems to have been contemporary with Anaximander [80] and Pythagoras, and to have had some knowledge of the doctrine of both. He wrote in various poetic measures, using against the poets, and especially against Homer and Hesiod, their own weapons, to [83] denounce their anthropomorphic theology. If oxen {32} or lions had hands, he said, they would have fashioned gods after their likeness which would have been as [85] authentic as Homer's. As against these poets, and the popular mythology, he insisted that God must be one, eternal, incorporeal, without beginning or ending. [87] As Aristotle strikingly expresses it, "He looked forth over the whole heavens and said that God is one, [88] that that which is one is God." The favourite antitheses of his time, the definite and the indefinite, movable and immovable, change-producing and by change produced—these and such as these, he maintained, were inapplicable to the eternally and [86] essentially existent. In this there was no partition of organs or faculties, no variation or shadow of turning; the Eternal Being was like a sphere, everywhere equal; everywhere self-identical.

[84]

His proof of this was a logical one; the absolutely self-existent could not be thought in conjunction with attributes which either admitted any external influencing Him, or any external influenced by Him. The prevailing dualism he considered to be, as an ultimate theory of the universe, unthinkable and therefore false. Outside the Self-existent there could be no second self-existent, otherwise each would be conditioned by the existence of the other, and the Self-existent would be gone. Anything different from the Self-existent must be of the non-existent, i.e. must be nothing.

{33}

One can easily see in these discussions some adumbration of many theological or metaphysical difficulties of later times, as of the origin of evil, of freewill in man, of the relation of the created world to its Creator. If these problems cannot be said to be solved yet, we need not be surprised that Xenophanes did not solve them. He was content to emphasise that which seemed to him to be necessary and true, that God was God, and not either a partner with, or a function of, matter.

[89]

At the same time he recognised a world of phenomena, or, as he expressed it, a world of guesswork or opinion ((Greek) doxa). As to the origin of things within this sphere he was ready enough to borrow [90] from the speculations of his predecessors. Earth and water are the sources from which we spring; and he imagined a time when there was neither sea nor land, but an all-pervading slough and slime; nay, many such periods of inundation and emergence had been, hence the sea-shells on the tops of mountains and the fossils in the rocks. Air and fire also as agencies of change are sometimes referred to by him; anticipations in fact are visible of the fourfold classification of the elements which was formally made by some of his successors.

[91]

II. PARMENIDES.—The pupil and successor of Xenophanes was PARMENIDES, a native of Elea. In a celebrated dialogue of Plato bearing the name of {34} this philosopher he is described as visiting Socrates when the latter was very young. "He was then already advanced in years, very hoary, yet noble to look upon, in years some sixty and five." Socrates was born about 479 B.C. The birth of Parmenides might therefore, if this indication be authentic, be about 520. He was of a wealthy and noble family, and able therefore to devote himself to a learned leisure. Like his master he expounded his views in verse, and fragments of his poem of considerable length and importance have been preserved. The title of the work was Peri Phueos—Of Nature.

[93]

The exordium of the poem is one of some grandeur. The poet describes himself as soaring aloft to the sanctuary of wisdom where it is set in highest aether, the daughters of the Sun being his guides; under whose leading having traversed the path of perpetual day and at length attained the temple of the goddess, he from her lips received instruction in the eternal verities, and had shown to him the deceptive guesses of mortals. "'Tis for thee," she says, "to hear of both,—to have disclosed to thee on the one hand the sure heart of convincing verity, on the other hand the guesses of mortals wherein is no ascertainment. Nevertheless thou shalt learn of these also, that having gone through them all thou may'st see by what unsureness of path must he go who goeth the way of opinion. From such a way of searching {35} restrain thou thy thought, and let not the much-experimenting habit force thee along the path wherein thou must use thine eye, yet being sightless, and the ear with its clamorous buzzings, and the chattering tongue. 'Tis by Reason that thou must in lengthened trial judge what I shall say to thee."

[94]

Thus, like Xenophanes, Parmenides draws a deep division between the world of reason and the world of sensation, between probative argument and the guess-work of sense-impressions. The former is the world of Being, the world of that which truly is, self-existent, uncreated, unending, unmoved, unchanging, ever self-poised and self-sufficient, like a sphere. [98] Knowledge is of this, and of this only, and as such, knowledge is identical with its object; for outside this known reality there is nothing. In other words, Knowledge can only be of that which is, and that which is alone can know. All things which mortals have imagined to be realities are but words; as of the birth and death of things, of things which were and have ceased to be, of here and there, of now and then.

It is obvious enough that in all this, and in much more to the same effect reiterated throughout the poem, we have no more than a statement, in various forms of negation, of the inconceivability by human reason of that passage from being as such, to that world of phenomena which is now, but was not before, {36} and will cease to be,—from being to becoming, from eternity to time, from the infinite to the finite (or, as Parmenides preferred to call it, from the perfect to the imperfect, the definite to the indefinite). In all this Parmenides was not contradicting such observed facts as generation, or motion, or life, or death; he was talking of a world which has nothing to do with observation; he was endeavouring to grasp what was assumed or necessarily implied as a prior condition of observation, or of a world to observe.

What he and his school seem to have felt was that there was a danger in all this talk of water or air or other material symbol, or even of the indefinite or characterless as the original of all,—the danger, namely, that one should lose sight of the idea of law, of rationality, of eternal self-centred force, and so be carried away by some vision of a gradual process of evolution from mere emptiness to fulness of being. Such a position would be not dissimilar to that of many would-be metaphysicians among evolutionists, who, not content with the doctrine of evolution as a theory in science, an ordered and organising view of observed facts, will try to elevate it into a vision of what is, and alone is, behind the observed facts. They fail to see that the more blind, the more accidental, so to speak, the process of differentiation may be; the more it is shown that the struggle for existence drives the wheels of progress along the {37} lines of least resistance by the most commonplace of mechanical necessities, in the same proportion must a law be posited behind all this process, a reason in nature which gathers up the beginning and the ending. The protoplasmic cell which the imagination of evolutionists places at the beginning of time as the starting-point of this mighty process is not merely this or that, has not merely this or that quality or possibility, it is; and in the power of that little word is enclosed a whole world of thought, which is there at the first, remains there all through the evolutions of the protoplasm, will be there when these are done, is in fact independent of time and space, has nothing to do with such distinctions, expresses rather their ultimate unreality. So far then as Parmenides and his school kept a firm grip on this other-world aspect of nature as implied even in the simple word is, or be, so far they did good service in the process of the world's thought. On the other hand, he and they were naturally enough disinclined, as we all are disinclined, to remain in the merely or mainly negative or defensive. He would not lose his grip of heaven and eternity, but he would fain know the secrets of earth and time as well. And hence was fashioned the second part of his poem, in which he expounds his theory of the world of opinion, or guess-work, or observation.

[99]

In this world he found two originative principles {38} at work, one pertaining to light and heat, the other to darkness and cold. From the union of these two principles all observable things in creation come, and over this union a God-given power presides, whose name is Love. Of these two principles, the bright one being analogous to Fire, the dark one to Earth, he considered the former to be the male or formative element, the latter the female or passive element; the former therefore had analogies to Being as such, the latter to Non-being. The heavenly existences, the sun, the moon, the stars, are of pure Fire, have therefore an eternal and unchangeable being; they are on the extremest verge of the universe, and corresponding to them at the centre is another fiery sphere, which, itself unmoved, is the cause of all motion and generation in the mixed region between. The motive and procreative power, sometimes called Love, is at other times called by Parmenides Necessity, Bearer of the Keys, Justice, Ruler, etc.

But while in so far as there was union in the production of man or any other creature, the [102] presiding genius might be symbolised as Love; on the other hand, since this union was a union of opposites (Light and Dark), Discord or Strife also had her say in the union. Thus the nature and character in every creature was the resultant of two antagonistic forces, and depended for its particular excellence or defect on the proportions in which these two elements—the {39} light and the dark, the fiery and the earthy—had been commingled.

No character in Greek antiquity, at least in the succession of philosophic teachers, held a more honoured position than Parmenides. He was looked on with almost superstitious reverence by his fellow-countrymen. Plato speaks of him as his "Father Parmenides," whom he "revered and honoured more than all the other philosophers together." To quote Professor Jowett in his introduction to Plato's dialogue Parmenides, he was "the founder of idealism and also of dialectic, or in modern phraseology, of metaphysics and of logic." Of the logical aspect of his teaching we shall see a fuller exemplification in his pupil and successor Zeno; of his metaphysics, by way of summing up what has been already said, it may be remarked that its substantial excellence consists in the perfect clearness and precision with which Parmenides enunciated as fundamental in any theory of the knowable universe the priority of Existence itself, not in time merely or chiefly, but as a condition of having any problem to inquire into. He practically admits that he does not see how to bridge over the partition between Existence in itself and the changeful, temporary, existing things which the senses give us notions of. But whatever the connection may be, if there is a connection, he is convinced that nothing would be more absurd than {40} to make the data of sense in any way or degree the measure of the reality of existence, or the source from which existence itself comes into being.

On this serenely impersonal position he took his stand; we find little or nothing of the querulous personal note so characteristic of much modern philosophy. We never find him asking, "What is to become of me in all this?" "What is my position with regard to this eternally-existing reality?"

Of course this is not exclusively a characteristic of Parmenides, but of the time. The idea of personal relation to an eternal Rewarder was only vaguely held in historical times in Greece. The conception of personal immortality was a mere pious opinion, a doctrine whispered here and there in secret mystery; it was not an influential force on men's motives or actions. Thought was still occupied with the wider universe, the heavens and their starry wonders, and the strange phenomena of law in nature. In the succession of the seasons, the rising and setting, the fixities and aberrations, of the heavenly bodies, in the mysteries of coming into being and passing out of it, in these and other similar marvels, and in the thoughts which they evoked, a whole and ample world seemed open for inquiry. Men and their fate were interesting enough to men, but as yet the egotism of man had not attempted to isolate his destiny from the general problem of nature. {41} To the crux of philosophy as it appeared to Parmenides in the relation of being as such to things which seem to be, modernism has appended a sort of corollary, in the relation of being as such to my being. Till the second question was raised its answer, of course, could not be attempted. But all those who in modern times have said with Tennyson—

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why;
He thinks he was not made to die;
And Thou hast made him: Thou art just,

may recognise in Parmenides a pioneer for them. Without knowing it, he was fighting the battle of personality in man, as well as that of reality in nature.

{42}

CHAPTER V

THE ELEATICS (concluded)

Zeno's dialectic—Achilles and the tortoise—The dilemma of being—The all a sphere—The dilemmas of experience

[106]

III. ZENO.—The third head of the Eleatic school was ZENO. He is described by Plato in the Parmenides as accompanying his master to Athens on the visit already referred to (see above, p. 34), and as being then "nearly forty years of age, of a noble figure and fair aspect." In personal character he was a worthy pupil of his master, being, like him, a devoted patriot. He is even said to have fallen a victim to his patriotism, and to have suffered bravely the extremest tortures at the hands of a tyrant Nearchus rather than betray his country.

His philosophic position was a very simple one. He had nothing to add to or to vary in the doctrine of Parmenides. His function was primarily that of an expositor and defender of that doctrine, and his particular pre-eminence consists in the ingenuity of his dialectic resources of defence. He is in fact pronounced by Aristotle to have been the inventor of dialectic or systematic logic. The relation of {43} the two is humorously expressed thus by Plato (Jowett, Plato, vol. iv. p. 128); "I see, Parmenides, said Socrates, that Zeno is your second self in his writings too; he puts what you say in another way, and would fain deceive us into believing that he is telling us what is new. For you, in your poems, say, All is one, and of this you adduce excellent proofs; and he, on the other hand, says, There is no many; and on behalf of this he offers overwhelming evidence." To this Zeno replies, admitting the fact, and adds: "These writings of mine were meant to protect the arguments of Parmenides against those who scoff at him, and show the many ridiculous and contradictory results which they suppose to follow from the affirmation of the One. My answer is an address to the partisans of the many, whose attack I return with interest by retorting upon them that their hypothesis of the being of many if carried out appears in a still more ridiculous light than the hypothesis of the being of one."

The arguments of Zeno may therefore be regarded as strictly arguments in kind; quibbles if you please, but in answer to quibbles. The secret of his method was what Aristotle calls Dichotomy—that is, he put side by side two contradictory propositions with respect to any particular supposed real thing in experience, and then proceeded to show that both these contradictories alike imply what is {44} [105] inconceivable. Thus "a thing must consist either of a finite number of parts or an infinite number." Assume the number of parts to be finite. Between them there must either be something or nothing. If there is something between them, then the whole consists of more parts than it consists of. If there is nothing between them, then they are not separated, therefore they are not parts; therefore the whole has no parts at all; therefore it is nothing. If, on the other hand, the number of parts is infinite, then, the same kind of argument being applied, the magnitude of the whole is by infinite successive positing of intervening parts shown to be infinite; therefore this one thing, being infinitely large, is everything.

[107]

Take, again, any supposed fact, as that an arrow moves. An arrow cannot move except in space. It cannot move in space without being in space. At any moment of its supposed motion it must be in a particular space. Being in that space, it must at the time during which it is in it be at rest. But the total time of its supposed motion is made up of the moments composing that time, and to each of these moments the same argument applies; therefore either the arrow never was anywhere, or it always was at rest.

Or, again, take objects moving at unequal rates, as Achilles and a tortoise. Let the tortoise have a start of any given length, then Achilles, however {45} much he excel in speed, will never overtake the tortoise. For, while Achilles has passed over the originally intervening space, the tortoise will have passed over a certain space, and when Achilles has passed over this second space the tortoise will have again passed over some space, and so on ad infinitum; therefore in an infinite time there must always be a space, though infinitely diminishing, between the tortoise and Achilles, i.e. the tortoise must always be at least a little in front.

These will be sufficient to show the kind of arguments employed by Zeno. In themselves they are of no utility, and Zeno never pretended that they had any. But as against those who denied that existence as such was a datum independent of experience, something different from a mere sum of isolated things, his arguments were not only effective, but substantial. The whole modern sensational or experiential school, who derive our 'abstract ideas,' as they are called, from 'phenomena' or 'sensation,' manifest the same impatience of any analysis of what they mean by phenomena or sensation, as no doubt Zeno's opponents manifested of his analyses. As in criticising the one, modern critics are ready with their answer that Zeno's quibbles are simply "a play of words on the well-known properties of infinities," so they are quick to tell us that sensation is an "affection of the sentient organism"; ignoring in {46} the first case the prior question where the idea of infinity came from, and in the second, where the idea of a sentient organism came from.

Indirectly, as we shall see, Zeno had a great effect on subsequent philosophies by the development of a process of ingenious verbal distinction, which in the hands of so-called sophists and others became a weapon of considerable, if temporary, power.

[109]

IV. MELISSUS.—The fourth and last of the Eleatic philosophers was Melissus, a native of Samos. His date may be fixed as about 440 B.C. He took an active part in the politics of his native country, and on one occasion was commander of the Samian fleet in a victorious engagement with the Athenians, when Samos was being besieged by Pericles. He belongs to the Eleatic school in respect of doctrine and method, but we have no evidence of his ever having resided at Elea, nor any reference to his connection with the philosophers there, except the statement that he was a pupil of Parmenides. He developed very fully what is technically called in the science of Logic [110] the Dilemma. Thus, for example, he begins his treatise On Existence or On Nature thus: "If nothing exists, then there is nothing for us to talk about. But if there is such a thing as existence it must either come into being or be ever-existing. If it come into being, it must come from the existing or the non-existing. Now that anything which exists, {47} above all, that which is absolutely existent, should come from what is not, is impossible. Nor can it come from that which is. For then it would be already, and would not come into being. That which exists, therefore, comes not into being; it must therefore be ever-existing."

[111]

By similar treatment of other conceivable alternatives he proceeds to show that as the existent had no beginning so it can have no ending in time. From this, by a curious transition which Aristotle quotes as an example of loose reasoning, he concludes that the existent can have no limit in space [112] either. As being thus unlimited it must be one, therefore immovable (there being nothing else into which it can move or change), and therefore always self-identical in extent and character. It cannot, therefore, have any body, for body has parts and is not therefore one.

[113]

Being incapable of change one might perhaps conclude that the absolutely existing being is incapable of any mental activity or consciousness. We have no authority for assuming that Melissus came to this conclusion; but there is a curious remark of Aristotle's respecting this and previous philosophers of the school which certain critics have [114] made to bear some such interpretation. He says: "Parmenides seems to hold by a Unity in thought, Melissus by a Material unity. Hence the first {48} defined the One as limited, the second declared it to be unlimited. Xenophanes made no clear statement on this question; he simply, gazing up to the arch of heaven, declared, The One is God."

But the difference between Melissus and his master can hardly be said to be a difference of doctrine; point for point, they are identical. The difference is a difference of vision or mental picture as to this mighty All which is One. Melissus, so to speak, places himself at the centre of this Universal being, and sees it stretching out infinitely, unendingly, in space and in time. Its oneness comes to him as the sum of these infinities. Parmenides, on the other hand, sees all these endless immensities as related to a centre; he, so to speak, enfolds them all in the grasp of his unifying thought, and as thus equally and necessarily related to a central unity he pronounces the All a sphere, and therefore limited. The two doctrines, antithetical in terms, are identical in fact. The absolutely unlimited and the absolutely self-limited are only two ways of saying the same thing.

This difference of view or vision Aristotle in the passage quoted expresses as a difference between thought ((Greek) logos) and matter ((Greek) hule). This is just a form of his own radical distinction between Essence and Difference, Form and Matter, of which much will be said later on. It is like the difference {49} between Deduction and Induction; in the first you start from the universal and see within it the particulars; in the second you start from the particulars and gather them into completeness and reality in a universal. The substance remains the same, only the point of view is different. To put the matter in modern mathematical form, one might say, The universe is to be conceived as a sphere (Parmenides) of infinite radius (Melissus). Aristotle is not blaming Melissus or praising Parmenides. As for Xenophanes, Aristotle after his manner finds in him the potentiality of both. He is prior both to the process of thought from universal to particular, and to that from particular to universal. He does not argue at all; his function is Intuition. "He looks out on the mighty sky, and says, The One is God."

Melissus applied the results of his analysis in an interesting way to the question already raised by his predecessors, of the trustworthiness of sensation. His argument is as follows: "If there were many real existences, to each of them the same reasonings must apply as I have already used with reference to the one existence. That is to say, if earth really exists, and water and air and iron and gold and fire and things living and things dead; and black and white, and all the various things whose reality men ordinarily assume,—if all these really exist, and our sight and our hearing give us facts, then each of these as {50} really existing must be what we concluded the one existence must be; among other things, each must be unchangeable, and can never become other than it really is. But assuming that sight and hearing and apprehension are true, we find the cold becoming hot and the hot becoming cold; the hard changes to soft, the soft to hard; the living thing dies; and from that which is not living, a living thing comes into being; in short, everything changes, and what now is in no way resembles what was. It follows therefore that we neither see nor apprehend realities.

"In fact we cannot pay the slightest regard to experience without being landed in self-contradictions. We assume that there are all sorts of really existing things, having a permanence both of form and power, and yet we imagine these very things altering and changing according to what we from time to time see about them. If they were realities as we first perceived them, our sight must now be wrong. For if they were real, they could not change. Nothing can be stronger than reality. Whereas to suppose it changed, we must affirm that the real has ceased to be, and that that which was not has displaced it."

To Melissus therefore, as to his predecessors, the world of sense was a world of illusion; the very first principles or assumptions of which, as of the truthfulness of the senses and the reality of the various objects which we see, are unthinkable and absurd.

{51}

The weakness as well as the strength of the Eleatic position consisted in its purely negative and critical attitude. The assumptions of ordinary life and experience could not stand for a moment when assailed in detail by their subtle analysis. So-called facts were like a world of ghosts, which the sword of truth passed through without resistance. But somehow the sword might pierce them through and through, and show by all manner of arguments their unsubstantiality, but there they were still thronging about the philosopher and refusing to be gone. The world of sense might be only illusion, but there the illusion was. You could not lay it or exorcise it by calling it illusion or opinion. What was this opinion? What was the nature of its subject matter? How did it operate? And if its results were not true or real, what was their nature? These were questions which still remained when the analysis of the idea of absolute existence had been pushed to its completion. These were the questions which the next school of philosophy attempted to answer. After the Idealists, the Realists; after the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of matter.

{52}

CHAPTER VI

THE ATOMISTS

Anaxagoras and the cosmos—Mind in nature—The seeds of existence

[129]

I. ANAXAGORAS.—Anaxagoras was born at Clazomenae, a city of Ionia, about the year 500 B.C. At the age of twenty he removed to Athens, of which city Clazomenae was for some time a dependency. This step on his part may have been connected with the circumstances attending the great invasion of Greece by Xerxes in the year 480. For Xerxes drew a large contingent of his army from the Ionian cities which he had subdued, and many who were unwilling to serve against their mother-country may have taken refuge about that time in Athens. At Athens he resided for nearly fifty years, and during that period became the friend and teacher of many eminent men, among the rest of Pericles, the great Athenian [118] statesman, and of Euripides, the dramatist. Like most of the Ionian philosophers he had a taste for mathematics and astronomy, as well as for certain practical applications of mathematics. Among other books he is said to have written a treatise on the art {53} of scene-designing for the stage, possibly to oblige his friend and pupil Euripides. In his case, as in that of his predecessors, only fragments of his philosophic writings have been preserved, and the connection of certain portions of his teaching as they have come down to us remains somewhat uncertain.

[119]

With respect to the constitution of the universe we have the following: "Origination and destruction are phrases which are generally misunderstood among the Greeks. Nothing really is originated or destroyed; the only processes which actually take place are combination and separation of elements already existing. [120] These elements we are to conceive as having been in a state of chaos at first, infinite in number and infinitely small, forming in their immobility a confused and characterless unity. About this chaos was spread the air and aether, infinite also in the multitude of their particles, and infinitely extended. Before separation commenced there was no clear colour or appearance in anything, whether of moist or dry, of hot or cold, of bright or dark, but only an infinite number of the seeds of things, having concealed in them all manner of forms and colours and savours."

There is a curious resemblance in this to the opening verses of Genesis, "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." Nor is the next step in his philosophy without its resemblance to that in the Biblical record. [122] As summarised by Diogenes Laertius it takes this form, "All things were as one: then cometh Mind, and by division brought all things into order." [121] "Conceiving," as Aristotle puts it, "that the original elements of things had no power to generate or develop out of themselves things as they exist, philosophers were forced by the facts themselves to seek the immediate cause of this development. They were unable to believe that fire, or earth, or any such principle was adequate to account for the order and beauty visible in the frame of things; nor did they think it possible to attribute these to mere innate necessity or chance. One (Anaxagoras) observing how in living creatures Mind is the ordering force, declared that in nature also this must be the cause of order and beauty, and in so declaring he seemed, when compared with those before him, as one sober amidst a crowd of babblers."

[122]

Elsewhere, however, Aristotle modifies this commendation. "Anaxagoras," he says, "uses Mind only as a kind of last resort, dragging it in when he fails otherwise to account for a phenomenon, but never thinking of it else." And in the Phaedo Plato makes Socrates speak of the high hopes with which he had taken to the works of Anaxagoras, and how grievously he had been disappointed. "As I proceeded," he says, "I found my philosopher altogether forsaking Mind or any other principle of order, and having {55} recourse to air, and aether, and water, and other eccentricities."

Anaxagoras, then, at least on this side of his teaching, must be considered rather as the author of a phrase than as the founder of a philosophy. The phrase remained, and had a profound influence on subsequent philosophies, but in his own hands it was little more than a dead letter. His immediate interest was rather in the variety of phenomena than in their conceived principle of unity; he is theoretically, perhaps, 'on the side of the angels,' in practice he is a materialist.

[12]

Mind he conceived as something apart, sitting throned like Zeus upon the heights, giving doubtless the first impulse to the movement of things, but leaving them for the rest to their own inherent tendencies. As distinguished from them it was, he conceived, the one thing which was absolutely pure and unmixed. All things else had intermixture with every other, the mixtures increasing in complexity towards the centre of things. On the outmost verge were distributed the finest and least complex forms of things—the sun, the moon, the stars; the more dense gathering together, to form as it were in the centre of the vortex, the earth and its manifold existences. By the intermixture of air and earth and water, containing in themselves the infinitely varied seeds of things, plants and animals were {56} developed. The seeds themselves are too minute to be apprehended by the senses, but we can divine their character by the various characters of the visible things themselves, each of these having a necessary correspondence with the nature of the seeds from which they respectively were formed.

[128]

Thus for a true apprehension of things sensation and reason are both necessary—sensation to certify to the apparent characters of objects, reason to pass from these to the nature of the invisible seeds or atoms which cause those characters. Taken by themselves our sensations are false, inasmuch as they give us only combined impressions, yet they are a necessary stage towards the truth, as providing the materials which reason must separate into their real elements.

From this brief summary we may gather that Mind was conceived, so to speak, as placed at the beginning of existence, inasmuch as it is the first originator of the vortex motions of the atoms or seeds of things; it was conceived also at the end of existence as the power which by analysis of the data of sensation goes back through the complexity of actual being to the original unmingled or undeveloped nature of things. But the whole process of nature itself between these limits Anaxagoras conceived as a purely mechanical or at least physical development, the uncertainty of his view as between these two alternative ways of considering it being {57} typified in his use of the two expressions atoms and seeds. The analogies of this view with those of modern materialism, which finds in the ultimate molecules of matter "the promise and the potency of all life and all existence," need not be here enlarged upon.

After nearly half a century's teaching at Athens Anaxagoras was indicted on a charge of inculcating doctrines subversive of religion. It is obvious enough that his theories left no room for the popular mythology, but the Athenians were not usually very sensitive as to the bearing of mere theories upon their public institutions. It seems probable that the accusation was merely a cloak for political hostility. Anaxagoras was the friend and intimate of Pericles, leader of the democratic party in the state, and the attack upon Anaxagoras was really a political move intended to damage Pericles. As such Pericles himself accepted it, and the trial became a contest of strength, which resulted in a partial success and a partial defeat for both sides. Pericles succeeded in saving his friend's life, but the opposite party obtained a sentence of fine and banishment against him. Anaxagoras retired to Lampsacus, a city on the Hellespont, and there, after some five years, he died.

{58}

CHAPTER VII

THE ATOMISTS (continued)

Empedocles at Etna—Brief life and scanty vision—The four elements—The philosophy of contradiction—Philosophy a form of poesy—The philosopher a prophet—Sensation through kinship—The whole creation groaneth

[129]

II. EMPEDOCLES.—Empedocles was a native of Agrigentum, a Greek colony in Sicily. At the time when he flourished in his native city (circa 440 B.C.) it was one of the wealthiest and most powerful communities in that wealthy and powerful island. It had, however, been infested, like its neighbours, by the designs of tyrants and the dissensions of rival factions. Empedocles was a man of high family, and he exercised the influence which his position and his abilities secured him in promoting and maintaining the liberty of his fellow-countrymen. Partly on this account, partly from a reputation which with or without his own will he acquired for an almost miraculous skill in healing and necromantic arts, Empedocles attained to a position of singular personal power over his contemporaries, and was indeed regarded as semi-divine. His death was hedged about with mystery. According to one story he gave a great feast to his friends and offered a {59} sacrifice; then when his friends went to rest he disappeared, and was no more seen. According to a story less dignified and better known—

Deus immortalis haberi
Dum cupit Empedocles, ardentem frigidus Aetnam
Insiluit. HOR. Ad Pisones, 464 sqq.

"Eager to be deemed a god, Empedocles coldly threw himself in burning Etna." The fraud, it was said, was detected by one of his shoes being cast up from the crater. Whatever the manner of his end, the Etna story may probably be taken as an ill-natured joke of some sceptic wit; and it is certain that no such story was believed by his fellow-citizens, who rendered in after years divine honours to his name.

Like Xenophanes, Parmenides, and other Graeco-Italian philosophers, he expounded his views in verse; but he reached a poetic excellence unattained by any predecessor. Aristotle characterises his gift as Homeric, and himself as a master of style, employing freely metaphors and other poetic forms. Lucretius also speaks of him in terms of high admiration (De Nat. Rer. i. 716 sqq.): "Foremost among them is Empedocles of Agrigentum, child of the island with the triple capes, a land wondrous deemed in many wise, and worthy to be viewed of all men. Rich it is in all manner of good things, and strong {60} in the might of its men, yet naught within its borders men deem more divine or more wondrous or more dear than her illustrious son. Nay, the songs which issued from his godlike breast are eloquent yet, and expound his findings wondrous well, so that hardly is he thought to have been of mortal clay."

[180]

Like the Eleatics he denies that the senses are an absolute test of truth. "For straitened are the powers that have been shed upon our frames, and many the frets that cross us and defeat our care, and short the span of unsatisfying existence wherein 'tis given us to see. Shortlived as a wreath of smoke men rise and fleet away, persuaded but of that alone which each has chanced to light upon, driven hither and thither, and vainly do they pray to find the whole. For this men may not see or hear or grasp with the hand of thought." Yet that there is a kind or degree of knowledge possible for man his next words suggest when he continues: "Thou therefore since hither thou hast been borne, hear, and thou shalt learn so much as 'tis given to mortal thought to reach." Then follows an invocation in true Epic style to the "much-wooed white-armed virgin Muse," wherein he prays that "folly and impurity may be far from the lips of him the teacher, and that sending forth her swift-reined chariot from the shrine of Piety, the Muse may grant him to hear so much as is given to mortal hearing."

{61}

Then follows a warning uttered by the Muse to her would-be disciple: "Thee the flowers of mortal distinctions shall not seduce to utter in daring of heart more than thou mayest, that thereby thou mightest soar to the highest heights of wisdom. And now behold and see, availing thyself of every device whereby the truth may in each matter be revealed, trusting not more to sight for thy learning than to hearing, nor to hearing with its loud echoings more than to the revelations of the tongue, nor to any one of the many ways whereby there is a path to knowledge. Keep a check on the revelation of the hands also, and apprehend each matter in the way whereby it is made plain to thee."

The correction of the one sense by the others, and of all by reason, this Empedocles deemed the surest road to knowledge. He thus endeavoured to hold a middle place between the purely abstract reasoning of the Eleatic philosophy and the unreasoned first guesses of ordinary observation suggested by this or that sense, and chiefly by the eyes. The senses might supply the raw materials of knowledge, unordered, unrelated, nay even chaotic and mutually destructive; but in their contradictions of each other he hoped to find a starting-point for order amidst the seeming chaos; reason should weigh, reason should reject, but reason also should find a residuum of truth.

{62}

[181]

In our next fragment we have his enunciation in symbolical language of the four elements, by him first formulated: "Hear first of all what are the root principles of all things, being four in number,—Zeus the bright shiner (i.e. fire), and Hera (air), and life-bearing Aidoneus (earth), and Nestis (water), who with her teardrops waters the fountain of mortality. Hear also this other that I will tell thee. Nothing of all that perisheth ever is created, nothing ever really findeth an end in death. There is naught but a mingling, and a parting again of that which was mingled, and this is what men call a coming into being. Foolish they, for in them is no far-reaching thought, that they should dream that what was not before can be, or that aught which is can utterly perish and die." Thus again Empedocles shows himself an Eclectic; in denying that aught can come into being, he holds with the Eleatics (see above, p. 47); in identifying all seeming creation, and ceasing to be with certain mixtures and separations of matter eternally existing, he links himself rather to the doctrine of Anaxagoras (see above, p. 53).

[132]

These four elements constitute the total corpus of the universe, eternal, as a whole unmoved and immovable, perfect like a sphere. But within this sphere-like self-centred All there are eternally proceeding separations and new unions of the elements of things; and every one of these is at once a birth {63} and an infinity of dyings, a dying and an infinity of births. Towards this perpetual life in death, and death in life, two forces work inherent in the universe. One of these he names Love, Friendship, Harmony, Aphrodite goddess of Love, Passion, Joy; the other he calls Hate, Discord, Ares god of War, Envy, Strife. Neither of the one nor of the other may man have apprehension by the senses; they are spiritually discerned; yet of the first men have some adumbration in the creative force within their own members, which they name by the names of Love and Nuptial Joy.

Somewhat prosaically summing up the teaching of Empedocles, Aristotle says that he thus posited six first principles in nature—four material, two motive or efficient. And he goes on to remark that in the working out of his theory of nature Empedocles, though using his originative principles more consistently than Anaxagoras used his principle of Nous or Thought, not infrequently, nevertheless, resorts to some natural force in the elements themselves, or even to chance or necessity. "Nor," he continues, "has he clearly marked off the functions of his two efficient forces, nay, he has so confounded them that at times it is Discord that through separation leads to new unions, and Love that through union causes diremption of that which was before." At times, too, Empedocles seems to have had a vision of these two forces, not as the counteracting yet {64} co-operative pulsations, so to speak, of the universal life, but as rival forces having had in time their periods of alternate supremacy and defeat. While all things were in union under the influence of Love, then was there neither Earth nor Water nor Air nor Fire, much less any of the individual things that in eternal interchange are formed of them; but all was in perfect sphere-like balance, enwrapped in the serenity of an eternal silence. Then came the reign of Discord, whereby war arose in heaven as of the fabled giants, and endless change,—endless birth, and endless death.

These inconsistencies of doctrine, which Aristotle notes as faults in Empedocles, are perhaps rather proofs of the philosophic value of his conceptions. Just as Hegel in modern philosophy could only adequately formulate his conceptions through logical contradictions, so also, perhaps, under the veil of antagonisms of utterance, Empedocles sought to give a fuller vision,—Discord, in his own doctrine, not less than in his conception of nature, being thus the co-worker with Love. The ordinary mind for the ordinary purposes of science seeks exactness of distinction in things, and language, being the creation of ordinary experience, lends itself to such a purpose; the philosophic mind, finding ready to its hand no forms of expression adapted to its conceptions, which have for their final end Union and not Distinction, {65} can only attain its purpose by variety, or even contradictoriness, of representation. Thus to ordinary conception cause must precede effect; to the philosophic mind, dealing as it does with the idea of an organic whole, everything is at once cause and effect, is at once therefore prior to and subsequent to every other, is at once the ruling and the ruled, the conditioning and that which is conditioned.

So, to Empedocles there are four elements, yet in the eternal perfection, the silent reign of Love, there are none of them. There are two forces working upon these and against each other, yet each is like the other either a unifying or a separating force, as one pleases to regard them; and in the eternal silence, the ideal perfectness, there is no warfare at all. There is joy in Love which creates, and in creating destroys; there is joy in the eternal Stillness, nay, this is itself the ultimate joy. There are two forces working, Love and Hate, yet is there but one force, and that force is Necessity. And for final contradiction, the universe is self-balanced, self-conditioned, a perfect sphere; therefore this Necessity is perfect self-realisation, and consequently perfect freedom.

The men who have had the profoundest vision of things—Heraclitus, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, ay, and Aristotle himself when he was the thinker and not the critic; not to speak of the great moderns, whether preachers or philosophers—have none of {66} them been greatly concerned for consistency of expression, for a mere logical self-identity of doctrine. Life in every form, nay, existence in any form, is a union of contradictories, a complex of antagonisms; and the highest and deepest minds are those that are most adequate to have the vision of these antagonisms in their contrariety, and also in their unity; to see and hear as Empedocles did the eternal war and clamour, but to discern also, as he did in it and through it and behind it and about it, the eternal peace and the eternal silence.

Philosophy, in fact, is a form of poesy; it is, if one pleases so to call it, 'fiction founded upon fact.' It is not for that reason the less noble a form of human thought, rather is it the more noble, in the same way as poetry is nobler than mere narrative, and art than representation, and imagination than perception. Philosophy is indeed one of the noblest forms of poetry, because the facts which are its basis are the profoundest, the most eternally interesting, the most universally significant. And not only has it nobility in respect of the greatness of its subject matter, it has also possibilities of an essential truth deeper and more far-reaching and more fruitful than any demonstrative system of fact can have. A great poem or work of art of any kind is an adumbration of truths which transcend any actual fact, and as such it brings us nearer to the underlying fundamentals of {67} reality which all actual occurrences only by accumulation tend to realise. Philosophy, then, in so far as it is great, is, like other great art, prophetic in both interpretations of the word, both as expounding the inner truth that is anterior to actuality, and also as anticipating that final realisation of all things for which 'the whole creation groaneth.' It is thus at the basis of religion, of art, of morals; it is the accumulated sense of the highest in man with respect to what is greatest and most mysterious in and about him.

The facts, indeed, with which philosophy attempts to deal are so vital and so vast that even the greatest intellects may well stagger occasionally under the burden of their own conceptions of them. To rise to the height of such an argument demands a more than Miltonic imagination; and criticisms directed only at this or that fragment of the whole are as irrelevant, if not as inept, as the criticism of the mathematician directed against Paradise Lost, that it 'proved nothing.' The mystery of being and of life, the true purport and reality of this world of which we seem to be a part, and yet of which we seem to have some apprehension as though we were other than a part; the strange problems of creation and change and birth and death, of love and sin and purification; of a heaven dreamt of or believed in, or somehow actually apprehended; of life here, and of an immortality yearned after and hoped for—these {68} problems, these mysteries, no philosophy ever did or ever can empty of their strangeness, or bring down to the level of the commonplace 'certainties' of daily life or of science, which are no more than shadows after all, that seem certainties because of the background of mystery on which they are cast.

But just as an individual is a higher being, a fuller, more truly human creature, when he has got so far removed from the merely animal existence as to realise that there are such problems and mysteries, so also the humanisation of the race, the development of its noblest peoples and its noblest literatures, have been conditioned by the successive visions of these mysteries in more and more complex organisation by the great philosophers and poets and preachers. The systems of such men may die, but such deaths mean, as Empedocles said of the ordinary deaths of things, only an infinity of new births. Being dead, their systems yet speak in the inherited language and ideas and aspirations and beliefs that form the never-ending, still-renewing material for new philosophies and new faiths. In Thales, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles we have been touching hands with an apostolic succession of great men and great thinkers and great poets—men of noble life and lofty thoughts, true prophets and revealers. And the apostolic succession even within the Greek world does not fail for centuries yet.

{69}

Passing from the general conceptions of Empedocles to those more particular rationalisations of particular problems which very largely provided the motive of early philosophies, while scientific methods were in an undeveloped and uncritical condition, we may notice such interesting statements as the following: [135] "The earth, which is at the centre of the sphere of the universe, remains firm, because the spin of the universe as a whole keeps it in its place like the water in a spinning cup." He has the same conception of the early condition of the earth as in other cosmogonies. At first it was a chaos of watery slough, which slowly, under the influence of sky and sun, parted off into earth and sea. The sea was the 'sweat' of the earth, and by analogy with the sweat it was salt. The heavens, on the other hand, were formed of air and fire, and the sun was, as it were, a speculum at which the effulgence and the heat of the whole heavens concentrated. But that the aether and the fire had not been fully separated from earth and water he held to be proved by the hot fountains and fiery phenomena which must have been so familiar to a native of Sicily. Curiously enough he imagined fire to possess a solidifying power, and therefore attributed to it the solidity of the earth and the hardness of the rocks. No doubt he had observed some effects of fire in 'metamorphic' formations in his own vicinity.

{70}

[137]

He had also a conception of the gradual development on the earth of higher and higher forms of life, the first being rude and imperfect, and a 'struggle for existence' ensuing in which the monstrous and the deficient gradually were eliminated—the "two-faced, the double-breasted, the oxen-shaped with human prows, or human-shaped with head of ox, or hemaphrodite," and so forth. Love and Strife worked out their ends upon these varied forms; some procreated and reproduced after their image, others were incapable of reproduction from mere monstrosity or [138] weakness, and disappeared. Something other than mere chance thus governed the development of things; there was a law, a reason, a Logos governing the process. This law or reason he perhaps fancifully illustrated by attributing the different characters of flesh and sinew and bone to the different numerical proportions, in which they severally contain the different elements.

On this Aristotle, keen-scented critic as he was, has a question, or series of questions, to ask as to the relation between this Logos, or principle of orderly combination, and Love as the ruling force in all unions of things. "Is Love," he asks, "a cause of mixtures of any sort, or only of such sorts as Logos dictates? And whether then is Love identical with this Logos, or are they separate and distinct; and if so, what settles their separate functions?" Questions {71} which Empedocles did not answer, and perhaps would not have tried to answer had he heard them.

[139]

The soul or life-principle in man Empedocles regarded as an ordered composite of all the elements or principles of the life in nature, and in this kinship of the elements in man and the elements in nature he found a rationale of our powers of perception. "By the earth," said he, "we have perception of earth; by water we have perception of water; of the divine aether, by aether; of destructive fire, by fire; of love, by love; of strife, by strife." He therefore, as Aristotle observes, drew no radical distinction between sense-apprehension and thought. He located the faculty of apprehension more specifically in the blood, conceiving that in it the combination of the elements was most complete. And the variety of apprehensive gift in different persons he attributed to the greater or lesser perfectness of this blood mixture in them individually. Those that were dull and stupid had a relative deficiency of the lighter and more invisible elements; those that were quick and impulsive had a relatively larger proportion of these. Again, specific faculties depended on local perfection of mixture in certain organs; orators having this perfectness in their tongues, cunning craftsmen possessing it in their hands, and so on. And the degrees of capacity of sensation, which he found in various animals, or even plants, he explained in similar fashion.

{72} The process of sensation he conceived to be conditioned by an actual emission from the bodies perceived of elements or images of themselves which found access to our apprehension through channels [140] congruous to their nature. But ordering, criticising, organising these various apprehensions was the Mind or Nous, which he conceived to be of divine nature, to be indeed an expression or emanation of the Divine. And here has been preserved a strangely interesting passage, in which he incorporates and develops in characteristic fashion the doctrine of transmigration [141] of souls: "There is a decree of Necessity, a law given of old from the gods, eternal, sealed with mighty oaths, that when any heavenly creature (daemon) of those that are endowed with length of days, shall in waywardness of heart defile his hands with sin of deed or speech, he shall wander for thrice ten thousand seasons far from the dwellings of the blest, taking upon him in length of time all manner of mortal forms, traversing in turn the many toilsome paths of existence. Him the aetherial wrath hurries onward to the deep, and the deep spews him forth on to the threshold of earth, and unworn earth casts him up to the fires of the sun, and again the aether hurls him into the eddies. One receives him, and then another, but detested is he of them all. Of such am I also one, an exile and a wanderer from God, a slave to strife and its madness."

{73}

Thus to his mighty conception the life of all creation, and not of man only, was a great expiation, an eternal round of punishment for sin; and in the unending flux of life each creature rose or fell in the scale of existence according to the deeds of good or ill done in each successive life; rising sometimes to the state of men, or among men to the high functions of physicians and prophets and kings, or among beasts to the dignity of the lion, or among trees to the beauty of the laurel; or, on the contrary, sinking through sin to lowest forms of bestial or vegetable life. Till at the last they who through obedience and right-doing have expiated their wrong, are endowed by the blessed gods with endless honour, to dwell for ever with them and share their banquets, untouched any more with human care and sorrow and pain.

[143]

The slaying of any living creature, therefore, Empedocles, like Pythagoras, abhorred, for all were kin. All foul acts were forms of worse than suicide; life should be a long act of worship, of expiation, of purification. And in the dim past he pictured a vision of a golden age, in which men worshipped not many gods, but Love only, and not with sacrifices of blood, but with pious images, and cunningly odorous incense, and offerings of fragrant myrrh. With abstinence also, and above all with that noblest abstinence, the abstinence from vice and wrong.

{74}

CHAPTER VIII

THE ATOMISTS (concluded)

The laughing philosopher—Atoms and void—No god and no truth

[143]

III. LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS.—Leucippus is variously called a native of Elea, of Abdera, of Melos, of Miletus. He was a pupil of Zeno the Eleatic. [144] Democritus was a native of Abdera. They seem to have been almost contemporary with Socrates. The two are associated as thorough-going teachers of the 'Atomic Philosophy,' but Democritus, 'the laughing philosopher,' as he was popularly called in later times, in distinction from Heraclitus, 'the weeping philosopher,' was much the more famous. [145] He lived to a great age. He himself refers to his travels and studies thus: "Above all the men of my time I travelled farthest, and extended my inquiries to places the most distant. I visited the most varied climates and countries, heard the largest number of learned men, nor has any one surpassed me in the gathering together of writings and their interpretation, no, not even the most learned of the Egyptians, with whom I spent five years." We {75} are also informed that, through desire of learning, he visited Babylon and Chaldaea, to visit the astrologers and the priests.

[146]

Democritus was not less prolific as a writer than he was voracious as a student, and in him first the division of philosophy into certain great sections, such as physical, mathematical, ethical, was clearly [147] drawn. We are, however, mainly concerned with his teaching in its more strictly philosophical aspects. His main doctrine was professedly antithetical to that of the Eleatics, who, it will be remembered, worked out on abstract lines a theory of one indivisible, eternal, immovable Being. Democritus, on the contrary, declared for two co-equal elements, the Full and the Empty, or Being and Nonentity. The latter, he maintained, was as real as the former. As we should put it, Body is unthinkable except by reference to space which that body does not occupy, as well as to space which it does occupy; and conversely Space is unthinkable except by reference to body actually or potentially filling or defining it.

What Democritus hoped to get by this double or correlative system was a means of accounting for or conceiving of change in nature. The difficulty with the Eleatics was, as we have seen, how to understand whence or why the transition from that which absolutely is, to this strange, at least apparent, system of eternal flux and transformation. Democritus {76} hoped to get over this difficulty by starting as fully with that which is not, in other words, with that which wants change in order to have any recognisable being at all, as with that which is, and which therefore might be conceived as seeking and requiring only to be what it is.

[148]

Having got his principle of stability and his principle of change on an equal footing, Democritus next laid it down that all the differences visible in things were differences either of shape, of arrangement, or of position; practically, that is, he considered that what seem, to us to be qualitative differences in things, e.g. hot or cold, sweet or sour, green or yellow, are only resulting impressions from different shapes, or different arrangements, or different modes of presentation, among the atoms of which things are composed.

Coming now to that which is, Democritus, as against the Eleatics, maintained that this was not a unity, some one immovable, unchangeable existence, but an innumerable number of atoms, invisible by reason of their smallness, which career through empty space (that which is not), and by their union bring objects into being, by their separation bring these to destruction. The action of these atoms on each other depended on the manner in which they were brought into contact; but in any case the unity of any object was only an apparent unity, it being really constituted of a multitude of interlaced and mutually related {77} particles, and all growth or increase of the object being conditioned by the introduction into the structure of additional atoms from without.

[149]

For the motions of the atoms he had no anterior cause to offer, other than necessity or fate. They existed, and necessarily and always had existed, in a state of whirl; and for that which always had been he maintained that no preceding cause could legitimately or reasonably be demanded.

[150]

Nothing, then, could come out of nothing; all the visible structure of the universe had its origin in the movements of the atoms that constituted it, and conditioned its infinite changes. The atoms, by a useful but perhaps too convenient metaphor, he called the seeds of all things. They were infinite in number, though not infinite in the number, of their shapes. Many atoms were similar to each other, and this similarity formed a basis of union among them, a warp, so to speak, or solid foundation across which the woof of dissimilar atoms played to constitute the differences of things.

[151]

Out of this idea of an eternal eddy or whirl Democritus developed a cosmogony. The lighter atoms he imagined flew to the outmost rim of the eddy, there constituting the heavenly fires and the heavenly aether. The heavier atoms gathered at the centre, forming successively air and water and the solid earth. Not that there was only one such {78} system or world, but rather multitudes of them, all varying one from the other; some without sun or moon, others with greater luminaries than those of our system, others with a greater number. All, however, had necessarily a centre; all as systems were necessarily spherical.

[152]

As regards the atoms he conceived that when they differed in weight this must be in respect of a difference in their essential size. In this he was no doubt combating the notion that the atoms say of lead or gold were in their substance, taking equal quantities, of greater weight than atoms of water or air. The difference of weight in objects depended on the proportion which the atoms in them bore to the amount of empty space which was interlaced with them. On the other hand, a piece of iron was lighter yet harder than a piece of lead of equal size, because of the special way in which the atoms in it were linked together. There were fewer atoms in it, but they were, in consequence of their structure and arrangement, more tightly strung.

[153]

In all this Democritus was with great resolution working out what we may call a strictly mechanical theory of the universe. Even the soul or life-principle in living creatures was simply a structure of the finest and roundest (and therefore most nimble) atoms, with which he compared the extremely attenuated dust particles visible in their never-ending {79} dance in a beam of light passed into a darkened room. This structure of exceeding tenuity and nimbleness was the source of the motion characteristic of living creatures, and provided that elastic counteracting force to the inward-pressing nimble air, whereby were produced the phenomena of respiration. Every object, in fact, whether living or not, kept its form and distinctive existence by its possession in degree of a kind of soul or spirit of resistance in its structure, adequate to counteract the pressure of external forces upon its particles.

[155]

Sensation and perception were forms in which these external forces acted upon the more nimble and lively existences, more particularly on living creatures. For every body was continually sending forth emanations or images resembling itself sufficiently in form and structure to affect perceptive bodies with an apprehension of that form and structure. These images travelled by a process of successive transmission, similar to that by which wave-motions are propagated in water. They were, in other words, not movements of the particles of the objects, which latter must otherwise in time grow less and fade away, but a modification in the arrangement of the particles immediately next the object, which modification reproduced itself in the next following, and so on right through the medium to the perceptive body.

{80}

[156]

These images tended by extension in all directions to reach vast dimensions at times, and to influence the minds of men in sleep and on other occasions in strange ways. Hence men imagined gods, and attributed those mighty phenomena of nature—earthquakes, tempests, lightning and thunder, and dire eclipses of sun and moon, to the vaguely visible powers which they imagined they saw. There was indeed a soul or spirit of the universe, as there was a soul or spirit of every individual thing that constituted it. But this was only a finer system of atoms after all. All else is convention or dream; the only realities are Atoms and Emptiness, Matter and Space.

[157]

Of absolute verity through the senses we know nothing; our perceptions are only conventional interpretations of we know not what. For to other living creatures these same sensations have other meanings than they have to us, and even the same person is not always affected alike by the same thing; which then is the true of two differing perceptions we cannot say. And therefore either there is no such thing as truth, or, at all events, we know through the senses nothing of it. The only genuine knowledge is that which transcends appearances, and reasons out what is, irrespective of appearances,—in other words, the only genuine knowledge is that of the (atomic) philosopher. And his knowledge is {81} the result of the happy mixture of his atoms whereby all is in equal balance, neither too hot nor too cold. Such a man seeing in the mind's eye the whole universe a tissue of whirling and interlacing atoms, with no real mystery or terror before or after, will live a life of cheerful fearlessness, undisturbed by terrors of a world to come or of powers unseen. His happiness is not in feastings or in gold, but in a mind at peace. And three human perfections he will seek to attain: to reason rightly, to speak graciously, to do his duty.

{82}

CHAPTER IX

THE SOPHISTS

Anarchic philosophy—Success not truth—Man the measure—All opinions true—Reductio ad absurdum

A certain analogy may perhaps be discerned between the progression of philosophic thought in Greece as we have traced it, and the political development which had its course in almost every Greek state during the same period. The Ionic philosophy may be regarded as corresponding with the kingly era in Greek politics. Philosophy sits upon the heights and utters its authoritative dicta for the resolution of the seeming contradictions of things. One principle is master, but the testimony of the senses is not denied; a harmony of thought and sensation is sought in the interpretation of appearances by the light of a ruling idea. In Pythagoras and his order we have an aristocratic organisation of philosophy. Its truths are for the few, the best men are the teachers, equal as initiated partakers in the mysteries, supreme over all outside their society. A reasoned and reasonable order and method are {83} symbolised by their theory of Number; their philosophy is political, their politics oligarchic. In the Eleatic school we have a succession of personal attempts to construct a domination in the theory of Nature; some ideal conception is attempted to be so elevated above the data of sensation as to override them altogether, and the general result we are now to see throughout the philosophic world, as it was seen also throughout the world of politics, in a total collapse of the principle of forced authority, and a development, of successively nearer approaches to anarchic individualism and doubt. The notion of an ultimately true and real, whatever form it might assume in various theorists' hands, being in its essence apart from and even antagonistic to the perceptions of sense, was at last definitely cast aside as a delusion; what remained were the individual perceptions, admittedly separate, unreasoned, unrelated; Reason was dethroned, Chaos was king. In other words, what seemed to any individual sentient being at any moment to be, that for him was, and nothing else was. The distinction between the real and the apparent was definitely attempted to be abolished, not as hitherto by rejecting the sensually apparent in favour of the rationally conceived real, but by the denial of any such real altogether.

The individualistic revolution in philosophy not {84} only, however, had analogies with the similar revolution contemporaneously going on in Greek politics, it was greatly facilitated by it. Each, in short, acted and reacted on the other. Just as the sceptical philosophy of the Encyclopaedists in France promoted the Revolution, and the Revolution in its turn developed and confirmed the philosophic scepticism, so also the collapse of contending philosophies in Greece promoted the collapse of contending systems of political authority, and the collapse of political authority facilitated the growth of that individualism in thought with which the name of the Sophists is associated.

[178]

Cicero (Brut. 12) definitely connects the rise of these teachers with the expulsion of the tyrants and the establishment of democratic republics in Sicily. From 466 to 406 B.C. Syracuse was democratically governed, and a 'free career to talents,' as in revolutionary France, so also in revolutionary Greece, began to be promoted by the elaboration of a system of persuasive argument. Devices of method called 'commonplaces' were constructed, whereby, irrespective of the truth or falsehood of the subject-matter, a favourable vote in the public assemblies, a successful verdict in the public courts, might more readily be procured. Thus by skill of verbal rhetoric, the worse might be made to appear the better reason; and philosophy, so far as it continued its functions, {85} became a search, not for the real amidst the confusions of the seeming and unreal, but a search for the seeming and the plausible, to the detriment, or at least to the ignoring, of any reality at all.

The end of philosophy then was no longer universal truth, but individual success; and consistently enough, the philosopher himself professed the individualism of his own point of view, by teaching only those who were prepared to pay him for his teaching. All over Greece, with the growth of democracy, this philosophy of persuasion became popular; but it was to Athens, under Pericles at this time the centre of all that was most vivid and splendid in Greek life and thought, that the chief teachers of the new philosophy flocked from every part of the Greek world.

[177]

The first great leader of the Sophists was Protagoras. He, it is said, was the first to teach for pay; he also was the first to adopt the name of Sophist. In the word Sophist there was indeed latent the idea which subsequently attached to it, but as first used it seems to have implied this only, that skill was the object of the teaching rather than truth; the new teachers professed themselves 'practical men,' not mere theorists.

The Greek word, in short, meant an able cultivated man in any branch of the arts; and the development of practical capacity was doubtless what Protagoras {86} intended to indicate as the purpose of his teaching, when he called himself a Sophist. But the ability he really undertook to cultivate was ability to persuade, for Greece at this time was nothing if not political; and persuasive oratory was the one road to political success. And as Athens was the great centre of Greek politics, as well as of Greek intellect, to Athens Protagoras came as a teacher.

He was born at Abdera, in Thrace (birthplace also of Democritus), in 480 B.C., began to teach at Athens about 451 B.C., and soon acquired great influence with Pericles, the distinguished leader of the Athenian democracy at this time. It is even alleged that when in 445 the Athenians were preparing to establish a colony at Thurii in Italy, Protagoras was requested to draw up a code of laws for the new state, and personally to superintend its execution.

After spending some time in Italy he returned to Athens, and taught there with great success for a number of years. Afterwards he taught for some time in Sicily, and died at the age of seventy, after [178] about forty years of professional activity. He does not seem to have contented himself with the merely practical task of teaching rhetoric, but in a work which he, perhaps ironically, entitled Truth, he enunciated the principles on which he based his teaching. Those principles were summed up in the sentence, "Man (by which he meant each man) is {87} the measure of all things, whether of their existence when they do exist, or of their non-existence when [179] they do not." In the development of this doctrine Protagoras starts from a somewhat similar analysis of things to that of Heraclitus and others. Everything is in continual flux, and the apparently real objects in nature are the mere temporary and illusory result of the in themselves invisible movements and minglings of the elements of which they are composed; and not only is it a delusion to attempt to give a factitious reality to the things which appear, it is equally a delusion to attempt to separate the (supposed) thing perceived from the perception itself. A thing is only as and when it is perceived. And a third delusion is to attempt to separate a supposed perceiving mind from the perception; all three exist only in and through the momentary perception; the supposed reality behind this, whether external in the object or internal in the mind, is a mere imagination. Thus the Heraclitean flux in Nature was extended to Mind also; only the sensation exists, and that only at the moment of its occurrence; this alone is truth, this alone is reality; all else is delusion.

[180]

It followed from this that as a man felt a thing to be, so for him it veritably was. Thus abstract truth or falsity could not be; the same statements could be indifferently true or false—to different {88} individuals at the same time, to the same individual at different times. It followed that all appearances were equally true: what seemed to be to any man, that was alone the true for him. The relation of such a doctrine as this to politics and to morals is not far to seek. Every man's opinion was as good as another's; if by persuasion you succeeded in altering a man's opinion, you had not deceived the man, his new opinion was as true (to him) as the old one. Persuasiveness, therefore, was the only wisdom. Thus if a man is ill what he eats and drinks seems bitter to him, and it is so; when he is well it seems the opposite, and is so. He is not a wiser man in the second state than in the first, but the second state is pleasanter. If then you can persuade him that what he thinks bitter is really sweet, you have done him good. This is what the physician tries to do by his drugs; this is what the Sophist tries to do by his words. Virtue then is teachable in so far as it is possible to persuade a boy or a man by rhetoric that that course of conduct which pleases others is a pleasant course for him. But if any one happens not to be persuaded of this, and continues to prefer his own particular course of conduct, this is for him the good course. You cannot blame him; you cannot say he is wrong. If you punish him you simply endeavour to supply the dose of unpleasantness which may {89} be needed to put the balance in his case on the same side as it already occupies in the case of other people.

It may be worth while to anticipate a little, and insert here in summary the refutation of this position put into the mouth of Socrates by Plato in the Theaetetus: "But I ought not to conceal from you that there is a serious objection which may be urged against this doctrine of Protagoras. For there are states, such as madness and dreaming, in which perception is false; and half our life is spent in dreaming; and who can say that at this instant we are not dreaming? Even the fancies of madmen are real at the time. But if knowledge is perception, how can we distinguish between the true and the false in such cases? . . . Shall I tell you what amazes me in your friend Protagoras? 'What may that be?' I like his doctrine that what appears is; but I wonder that he did not begin his great work on truth with a declaration that a pig, or a dog-faced baboon, or any other monster which has sensation, is a measure of all things; then while we were reverencing him as a god he might have produced a magnificent effect by expounding to us that he was no wiser than a tadpole. For if truth is only sensation, and one man's discernment is as good as another's, and every man is his own judge, and everything that he judges is right and true, then {90} what need of Protagoras to be our instructor at a high figure; and why should we be less knowing than he is, or have to go to him, if every man is the measure of all things?" . . . Socrates now resumes the argument. As he is very desirous of doing justice to Protagoras, he insists on citing his own words: 'What appears to each man is to him.' "And how," asks Socrates, "are these words reconcilable with the fact that all mankind are agreed in thinking themselves wiser than others in some respects, and inferior to them in others? In the hour of danger they are ready to fall down and worship any one who is their superior in wisdom as if he were a god. And the world is full of men who are asking to be taught and willing to be ruled, and of other men who are willing to rule and teach them. All which implies that men do judge of one another's impressions, and think some wise and others foolish. How will Protagoras answer this argument? For he cannot say that no one deems another ignorant or mistaken. If you form a judgment, thousands and tens of thousands are ready to maintain the opposite. The multitude may not and do not agree in Protagoras' own thesis, 'that man is the measure of all things,' and then who is to decide? Upon hip own showing must not his 'truth' depend on the number of suffrages, and be more or less true in proportion as he has more or fewer of them? And {91} [the majority being against him] he will be bound to acknowledge that they speak truly who deny him to speak truly, which is a famous jest. And if he admits that they speak truly who deny him to speak truly, he must admit that he himself does not speak truly. But his opponents will refuse to admit this as regards themselves, and he must admit that they are right in their refusal. The conclusion is, that all mankind, including Protagoras himself, will deny that he speaks truly; and his truth will be true neither to himself nor to anybody else" (Jowett, Plato, iv. pp. 239 sqq.)

The refutation seems tolerably complete, but a good deal had to happen before Greece was ready to accept or Plato to offer such a refutation.

{92}

CHAPTER X

THE SOPHISTS (concluded)

Nothing knowable—The solitude of scepticism—The lawlessness of scepticism—The good in scepticism

[183]

Gorgias was perhaps even more eminent a Sophist than Protagoras. He was a native of Leontini in Sicily, and came to Athens in the year 427 B.C. on a public embassy from his native city. The splendid reputation for political and rhetorical ability, which preceded him to Athens, he fully justified both by his public appearances before the Athenian assembly, and by the success of his private instructions to the crowds of wealthy young men who resorted to him. He dressed in magnificent style, and affected a lofty and poetical manner of speech, which offended the more critical, but which pleased the crowd.

[181]

He also, like Protagoras, published a treatise in which he expounded his fundamental principles, and like Protagoras, he preceded it with a striking if somewhat ironical title, and an apophthegm in which he summarised his doctrine. The title of his work was Of the Non-Existent, that is, Of Nature, and {93} his dictum, "Nothing exists, or if anything exists, it cannot be apprehended by man, and even if it could be apprehended, the man who apprehended it could not expound or explain it to his neighbour." In support of this strange doctrine, Gorgias adopted the quibbling method of argument which had been applied with some success to dialectical purposes by Zeno, Melissus, and others (see above, pp. 44 sqq.)