I
With the term “philosophy” as our guide, we have made a rapid superficial survey of the progress of the studies it included in these eleven hundred years of development (585 B.C.-529 A.D.). We will now consider in somewhat fuller detail the three phases which cover the Greek epoch proper, i.e., the first three centuries, from Thales to Pyrrho (585-270), with a special view to the study of their internal evolution.
The Greek nation is almost the last of all the civilised peoples of the ancient world to enter upon the scene of history and bulk largely in the minds of men. The long period during which the Greeks dwelt among their Aryan kindred, fruitful in intellectual progress as their language proves it to have been, has passed utterly out of the historic memory of the race. And yet the beginnings of scientific knowledge must have fallen within this period, in so far as the dim prevision of eternal and perpetual motion dawned upon men’s minds from the observation of the moon (mēnē, from the root mē, to measure), from chronology, and the consequent observation of cosmic laws. Nor have any other than mythical records come down to us from the first thousand years in which the Hellenes dwelt in the Balkan peninsula, then-future home, side by side with the original inhabitants and other migratory tribes; but from the buildings and monuments which the earth has yielded to Schliemann’s and Evans’ spades we can form some conception of the might of these rulers and the splendour of the knightly life they led.
A faint reflection of the Middle Age of Greece has been preserved in the epic poetry of Homer, the most ancient portions of which date back to the year 1000 B.C., while the latest bring us down to the time of Thales, that is to say, to the sixth century. The Homeric bards do not philosophise as the Stoics fancied they did, they look upon life with living eyes in the true artist spirit, and reproduce it “not sickbed o’er with the pale cast of thought.” Only in a few later passages of the Iliad and the Odyssey do we catch strange notes that harmonise ill with that joie de vivre which is the keynote of the epics. We see that in those strenuous days, when the Greeks were bent upon carrying their commerce to the uttermost ends of the earth and satisfying the ever increasing clamour of the populace for food and power, the nation begins to pass over from the light-hearted carelessness of the epic of chivalry to the harsher and more reflective didactic poetry of Hesiod. Indeed, in one of the later passages of the Odyssey (Nekyia) we note an evident reflex of the Orphic cosmologies, in which, under the name of a Thracian bard of remote antiquity, a mournful and pessimistic strain of poetry, dealing with sin and penitence, stands contrasted with the optimistic acceptance of the existing order of things which is characteristic of Homer.
The forces which brought philosophy, properly so called, to the birth at the beginning of the sixth century were three in number. First, the poetry then extant, which had cast into artless shape a number of speculative observations on the subject of the Cosmos—such as the conceptions of Oceanus encircling the earth, of Zeus dwelling in ether above it, of Tartarus beneath it, and so forth. Nothing but a cool head and a turn for systematisation was needed to convert these images into “ideas” and to combine the latter into a homogeneous and coherent conception. Another service was rendered by the study of geography, mathematics, and astronomy, developed as it had been by the long voyages of Milesians and Phocæans in the Mediterranean after they had supplanted the Phœnicians. A school of navigation came into being at Miletus, which city had successfully opened up the Euxine in the seventh century; and both Thales and Anaximander were trained in it. Miletus, where the trade with Egypt was started about the same time and the establishment of permanent factories like Naucratis taken in hand, likewise constituted the meeting-place of the geometry and astronomy of the Egyptians, whose learning was formerly much over estimated, with the far superior astronomical science of the Babylonians. The reports of mariners, charts, the catalogue of the stars, all combined with Oriental tradition and the unbiassed perspicacity of the Greeks to give the world the first science, i.e., research built upon a basis of empiricism, tested by the methods of mathematics and logic, and aiming at a harmonious interpretation of the Cosmos. To give a name to this study the Ionians evolved the idea of Historia, which in the sixth century took the place of Philosophia; the latter not coming into use until the fifth century.
In this place I must mention the third element, although it is not in evidence in the earliest exponents of Ionian philosophy. It is the tendency to mysticism, to abstraction from the world, then beginning to develop in the Orphic school, which has left traces of its influence with ever-increasing distinctness in Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles. It favoured the rise of a transcendental idealism which, although we do not find it matured into immaterial conceptions in these first natural philosophers, yet contains the germ of Plato’s dualistic idea of the universe. Not that the curve of development runs in smooth ascent from Thales to Plato; it exhibits the spiral windings inseparable from historic processes, since every new tendency calls forth the antagonistic principle to that which has spent its force, and thus brings about the necessity of reaction in a retrospective sense.
Thales, who enjoyed great repute in his native city of Miletus and throughout Asia Minor at the commencement of the sixth century, calls water the beginning of all things. This was no new idea. For before his time poets had spoken of Oceanus, of the origin of the gods, and of the deluge from which the world was born anew. And the infinite sea could not but lie close to the thoughts of a seafaring nation.
The novel and genuinely philosophic element in this proposition is rather the monistic endeavour to refer all phenomena to a single cause, to be sought not in heaven but on earth. For that which is taken as the beginning is not Oceanus, or, it may be, Poseidon, as in the older cosmogonies, but this palpable substance of water, out of which all things come and to which they all return. This original matter is indeed supposed to be animated by a divine spirit, but this divinity is not a person. There is no place for it on Olympus. Rather is it the expression of the immanent force which this philosopher recognised in the incomprehensible properties of the magnet, and there called “soul.” This enduing of nature with a soul is characteristic of the infancy of speculation, and hence this Ionic philosophy has also been called Hylozoism (the doctrine of living matter). The monistic impulse, which would bind the world and this single and supposed divine primeval force together, is diametrically opposed to the polytheistic tendency of the popular religion of Greece. Even in the first Greek philosophers this aspiration after unity points forward to monotheism, which was preached by Xenophanes, the Ionian, at the end of this same century.
Of all the achievements of Thales his prediction of the eclipse of the sun (May 28, 585) is that which caused the greatest amazement, although its scientific significance is the most trifling of any. For, as the history of astronomy proves beyond controversy, Thales and his whole generation lacked the rudiments of knowledge necessary for the calculation of eclipses, and had not the faintest notion of how they came about. Hence he can only have employed according to a fixed method some such formula as the Chaldeans had gained from empiric observation in calculating their eclipse period of eighteen years and eleven days (Saros). The rule only suffices for approximate predictions. As a matter of fact, Herodotus, the earliest witness to this event, states that Thales allowed a margin of a whole year for the occurrence of the eclipse.
Thales himself left no written works, and this Ionic Historia first emerges into the full light of day with Anaximander of Miletus, who founded the Ionic school about a generation later. In him the three forces are strongly marked and defined—first the scientific spirit, which impelled him to give visible expression to the geographical ideas of his countrymen by means of a map of the earth’s surface, and to make a systematic description of the heavens with the stationary and revolving celestial bodies. With him originated the conception of the constellations as a system of spheres rotating through and within one another, and it was his mathematical imagination that led him to assume the existence of certain fixed intervals between the revolving spheres, arbitrarily determined as to number, but expressing in their proportion the idea of harmony.
Here we have the germ of the speculations of Pythagoras, on which, as is well known, the laws of Copernicus and Kepler are founded. The vein of poetry in the Ionian character is manifest not only in this intuitive perception but in the aptness of his imagery, when he calls these spheres “chariot-wheels,” from the rim of which the fiery flames of the sun, moon, etc., start out like felloes. The scientific element in his system is evident in the manner in which he follows out biologically the idea of Thales concerning water. If all things have at one time been water, then organisms cannot originally have been created as land animals. Hence man, who now comes into the world utterly helpless, has been gradually evolved from pisciform creatures—the first germ of Darwinism.
Lastly the pessimistic mysticism which had lately arisen is clearly manifest in him. When he regards the origin of all individual existences as a wrong committed by them in separating themselves from the All-One, we can only understand him by referring to Orphic religious ideas, in which birth is looked upon as a decline and fall from the blissful seats of the gods and earthly life is represented as a vale of misery. Death is consequently the penalty which the individual pays for his presumption, whether the individual be a man or a celestial body. For the earth and all other Cosmoi are doomed to extinction in an “Infinite” which corresponds to the ancient idea of Chaos, and, like that, is not conceived of as a vacuum but as matter in an undefined form. This alternation of creation and annihilation, this perpetual motion, anticipates the eternal flux of Heraclitus of Ephesus, who at the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth, transformed the teaching of Anaximander into keener dialectics.
In comparison with this Ephesian thinker the successors of Anaximander at Miletus and whatsoever following they had down to the end of the fifth century sink into total obscurity. Before turning our attention to Heraclitus, however, we must first consider the man who transplanted the Ionic Historia from Ionia to Italy and there elaborated both the scientific and mystic side of it with marvellous assiduity—that is, Pythagoras.
Pythagoras left Samos about the year 530, and turned his steps towards Croton in lower Italy, where he found virgin soil for his labours. The mathematical foundation upon which the Ionic school is based attains an excessive predominance with Pythagoras. Epoch-making maxims are associated with his name, and probably not without good reason. But the speculative tendency of the Ionic mind prompted him to set up number itself as a principle; the Infinite of Anaximander being conceived of arithmetically as the Uneven, i.e., that which cannot be divided by two. Since the Even and Uneven alone co-exist, the sacred Three is compounded of Unity and Duality, as is also the Four (tetraktys), the root of Being. By simply adding these first four numbers together the Decas (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10) is obtained. The cosmos is made to consist of ten celestial bodies, corresponding to this Decas, by the addition of the heaven of the fixed stars as an outermost crust, and the earth and the “anti-earth” (antichthon) containing the central fire, at the heart of it. The earth and other stars moved round this centre, and here we have the first glimpse of the modern conception which explains the apparent diurnal motion of the heavens by the rotation of the earth. This rudimentary idea, as elaborated by later Pythagoreans, and particularly by Aristarchus of Samos in the Alexandrine period, constitutes the first starting-point we can assign to the Copernican system of the universe.
Pythagoras made the astounding discovery that the harmonic intervals of the seven-stringed lyre can be reduced to simple rational proportions (the octave = 1:2, the fifth 2:3, the fourth 3:4, the whole tone 8:9). He then sought for a like scheme in the harmony of the spheres, and, as the geometric habit of the Greek mind converted these arithmetical relations into lines and planes, the whole process by which the universe came into existence seemed to be a sum in arithmetic.
The strong tinge of mysticism which Pythagoras had brought with him from the Orphic influences of his native land to his new home in Italy served as a wholesome corrective to this exaggerated rationalism. Every religious sect thrives better in a colony than in the mother-country, as is demonstrated in the case of William Penn and many others. The aristocratic and religious league which Pythagoras founded at Croton prospered mightily, and presently the whole of lower Italy and Sicily was covered with branches of the order. Its religious ideas, particularly that of the transmigration of souls, were not new, although they have been claimed as peculiarly Pythagorean. Orphic mysticism had adopted in precisely the same fashion the notion of the fall of the spirit and its purification by transmigrations of all kinds into the bodies of men and animals. But the earnestness with which noble-minded men lived conformably to these ideas in matters of practice and brought them into connection with the results of scientific research strongly impressed the ancient world; and the close freemasonry which linked Pythagoreans from every quarter with one another set forth an ideal of manly friendship which served as a model for the institution of the Academy and similar philosophic societies.
But the too strongly marked political complexion of these Pythagorean societies contained the seed of their destruction. At the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth the aristocratic principle was everywhere on the decline, and in Italy itself the Pythagoreans were attacked on democratic grounds by Xenophanes of Colophon, who ridiculed the aristocratic physical sports in which even distinguished Pythagoreans (such as Milo) indulged, and vaunted the intellectual sport of his own Sophia. The said wisdom, it must be confessed, was of a negative rather than a positive character.
Xenophanes attacked Homer, the Bible of the ancients, in verses of fierce satire, showing the gods as there depicted to be examples of every kind of immorality. By the unparalleled vigour with which he transferred the monistic tendency of Ionic rationalism to the religious problem, he, first of all Greeks, originated the monotheistic conception of the Deity, which none of the later philosophers ventured to maintain with such unflinching boldness in face of the polytheism of the vulgar herd. To the aristocratic submission to authority in matters of belief required by the Pythagoreans this democratic philosopher opposed the prerogative of doubt, and he has consequently been lauded by the sceptics of all ages as their standard-bearer. At this stage of physical observation, indeed, doubt sets in concerning natural objects. Xenophanes discovers that the rainbow is an optical illusion. He promptly generalises in his scepticism; the sun and the other stars are nothing but fiery exhalations. This assumption will lead to further results among his Eleatic friends.
Meanwhile in the mother-country speculation advanced with huge strides. Heraclitus, a descendant of the royal dynasty of Ephesus, withdrew from his democratic fellow-citizens into haughty isolation. Instead of concerning himself with the scientific gossip which tended to make the Ionic Historia lose itself in detail, he laid stress upon the vast concatenation of things. He made the fundamental laws of thought his starting-point, in place of the principles of mathematics. The selection of physical propositions which he deduced poetically from his observations of nature are far more than mere natural symbolism. Fire, constantly transformed into water and earth and as constantly exhaling upwards to the celestial fire, is to him a type of the perpetual change of phenomena that veils the eternal and immutable Law (logos), identical in everything but name with the Harmony of the Pythagoreans, which expresses itself in numbers eternally the same. The law of man feeds, he says, upon the divine law manifesting itself in fire.
Here we have the germ of the vast scheme of law which binds God and the world, physics and morals, into a compact entity in the Pantheism of the Stoic philosophy. Since he places fire and soul upon the same footing, it follows that human physiology and psychology are explicable by the same formula, to which he likewise ingeniously adapts the Orphic ideas. Thus Heraclitus has exercised great influence upon succeeding generations, and Hegel’s system avowedly leans upon him.
Equally great is the influence of Parmenides, the Kant of the ancient world. Descended from an Ionian family of rank which had taken refuge at Elea in Italy at the time of the occupation of Phocæa (560), he carries on the tradition of the philosophic poetry of Xenophanes, whose Pantheistic Monism he defends in acute polemics against the “two-headed” Heraclitus. Being—one, eternal, indivisible, immutable, unchangeable—is alone intellectually conceivable. All beside—multiplicity, divisibility, mobility, variability—is logically inconceivable and therefore non-existent. Reason (logos) is consequently the measure of all things. His system is abstract and logical to absurdity, but his postulate that this monistic Being must be bounded like a globe that is equally closed in all directions reminds us that we are still in the age of physics. In him the scepticism of Xenophanes hardens into the assertion that everything which contravenes his logical postulate of the Sole Existent—such as multiplicity, colour, motion, becoming and ceasing to be—is mere illusion.
The logical and sceptical bias of the Eleatics is surpassed by the hair-splitting dialectics of Zeno, whose evidences against motion and multiplicity still perplex the thinkers of to-day. On the one hand this precise manipulation of the laws of thought which represents the culminating point of Ionic rationalism redeems the negative Sophism which was beginning to deny the actuality and perceptibility of things themselves (Protagoras, Gorgias), while on the other hand the positive result of this strict definition of the highest conception of Being was to call forth a series of systems which came into existence almost simultaneously, though subject in part to reciprocal influence, a little before the middle of the fifth century. Such was the Doctrine of the Elements taught by Empedocles of Agrigentum, who once more found the idea of the imperishable principle in the fourfold root of Being (the four elements) and brought about the Heraclitic alternation of the external world by the introduction of the two polar forces of love and hate.
The idea of the Element in endless subdivision (which could not be evaded in the world-process of Empedocles) and in endless diversity of quality was strongly brought out by Anaxagoras the Ionian in his homoiomere. To this chaos he opposed the thinking and directing reason (nous) as a distinct existence, thus definitely breaking with the idea of a hylozoistic union of matter and force, which had already threatened to go to pieces in the systems of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and setting forth the positive dualism of God and the world, i.e., of the Universal Reason working towards predetermined ends and the blind chaotic mass of matter.
More important than either of these two is Leucippus of Miletus, the founder of the atomistic theory, who, as Theophrastus rightly asserts, starts from the position of Parmenides. For he finds the homogeneous, eternal, complete, and indivisible, unchangeable Existence, to which no quality can be ascribed, in the “atom,” and solves the difficulties which arose for the Eleatics out of the idea of multiplicity by assuming the existence of an infinite number of such units. Hence results a mechanical interpretation of nature, which proved of all ancient systems the most serviceable for the elucidation of physical and physiological facts. By explaining sensory impressions by mechanical transmission from object to subject, he propounds the first theory of sensory perception, and since, in consequence of this assumption, he regards such qualities as colour, taste, etc., as subjective sensory impressions to which atoms in different arrangements correspond objectively, he lays the foundation of a distinction between primary and secondary qualities which has not been rightly appreciated until modern days.
Generally speaking, the value of the Leucippic theory has only been recognised since the Renaissance. For although Democritus of Abdera extended his master’s admirable system to fresh departments of knowledge, established it more firmly by combating the sensualism of Protagoras and other theories arising from a misunderstanding of Leucippus, and, above all, brought it to a high pitch of mathematical and notional exactitude, yet the atomistic school which continued to exist at Abdera till into the fourth century has passed almost utterly out of mind. Plato ignored it, although he adopted many of its theories indirectly; Aristotle alone made use of it, though not as regards the main points of its teachings; and Epicurus, who borrowed from it almost the whole of his theoretical science, by this very absorption played the chief part in the destruction of the Abderite writings, the greatest loss that science has ever suffered.
How can we explain this astounding disregard of atomistic philosophy? In some degree by the fact that Leucippus settled in the barbarous north, far away from Athens, which had grown since the Persian wars to be more and more the prytaneion, or central focus of warmth to Hellas, and drew all talent to itself from every quarter; and further, from the fact that the natural science which was dominant in the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth—and was regarded, indeed, as the only legitimate kind of scientific thought—lost its hold on men’s minds towards the middle of the fifth century. We have evidence of this in Eleatism, which, with Zeno and Melissus, devoted itself to purely dialectical questions and abandoned the interpretation of nature. We have evidence of it, again, in Empedocles, who in his second series of didactic poems (Katharmoi) flings himself into the arms of Orphic mysticism; and in his pupil, Gorgias, who proceeded from physics to nihilism and thence to mere superficial rhetoric. We have the strongest proof of all in Democritus himself, who embraced inductive logic, æsthetics, grammar, and ethics within the range of his studies as well as the old questions of physics. Thus during the Peloponnesian War the way was prepared for the new epoch which was performed with Athens for a stage, and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle for heroes.