Nevertheless 'picture-thoughts' (it has been well said),[1] and nothing more, were represented by these prefatory genealogies. Night and darkness loomed into personal shape, and from the obscurity of their union the creatures of light radiantly sprang, and proceeded, according to a predetermined law of order, to sort out the elements of chaos and dispose them into cosmical harmony.
This mythical phase of thought terminated in Greece with the rise of the Ionian School of Philosophy. Immemorial legends, discredited by the advent of a new wisdom, took out a fresh lease of life under the guise of folk-lore; Orphic fables were left to the poets and the people; and the sage of Miletus set on foot a speculative tradition, maintained by a long succession of metaphysicians down to the very threshold of the recent scientific epoch. All were what we should call evolutionists—Thales of Miletus no less than Descartes and Swedenborg; their main object, in other words, was to find a practicable mode of evoking a systematic arrangement of related parts from the monotony of undifferentiated confusion. Now, in essaying this enterprise they encountered two distinct problems. One was concerned with the nature of the primeval world-stuff; the other with the operations to which it had been submitted. Modern theorists have made it their primary object to expound the mechanism of cosmic growth—the play of forces involved in it, the transformations and progressive redistribution of energy attending it. But questions of this kind could only in the scantiest measure be formulated by early thinkers, who accordingly devoted their chief attention to selecting an appropriate material for the exercise of their constructive ingenuity.
Thales asserted all things to have been derived from water, and water is still among unsophisticated tribes the favourite 'Urstoff.' Anaximenes substituted air. Heracleitus gave the preference to the mobile and vital element (as he thought it) of fire. Anaximander, on the other hand, might put forward a colourable claim to priority over Sir William Crookes in the invention of 'protyle.' He imagined as the matrix of the world a boundless expanse of generalized matter, containing potentially all the chemical species, which, separating out by degrees through the affinity of like for like, formed, by their contrasts and conjunctions, the infinitely varied sum of things. The successors of Anaximander had recourse to spontaneously arising condensations and rarefactions as the mainspring of development; but all these vague principles were quickly crowded into oblivion by the definite and intelligible doctrine of the 'four elements' enunciated by Empedocles, which, guaranteed by the imprimatur of Plato, took a place unchallenged for nearly two millenniums among the fundamentals of science. Erroneous and misleading though it was, it yet served as a means of regulating appearances and guiding vagrant ideas—it was a track to follow in the absence of any better method of orientation.
Leucippus and his more famous disciples, Democritus and Epicurus, were the first who ventured to trace the mechanical history of the cosmos. Their primordial atoms were endowed with weight, and it was weight or gravity which ultimately determined their spacial arrangement and mutual relations. Rectilinear in the first draft of the scheme, their movements were somewhat arbitrarily deflected by Epicurus; and the gyrations thence ensuing eventually became, so to speak, authentic and precise in the Cartesian vortices and in Swedenborg's solar maelstrom. Kant's Natural History of the universe was another, though an entirely separate branch of the atomistic stock. The Democritean atoms, however, and in a lesser degree the Kantian atoms, differed essentially from the ultimates of chemical analysis postulated by Dalton. They were a scratch lot—an incongruous assortment of fragments, rather than of elementary portions of matter, indefinitely various in size, shape, and mass.
Nor was this diversity created as a mere play of fancy. It was strictly necessary to the plan of action adopted. For, apart from heterogeneity, there could obviously be no development. Absolute uniformity involves absolute permanence. Change can originate only through inequality. There must be a tilt of level before the current will begin to flow; some cause of predominance is needed to set it going in a given direction. Here, of a surety, is the initial crux of all cosmogonists. They usually surmount it by assuming the occurrence of casual condensations, secure against disproof, while incapable of verification. The expedient thus begs the question.
Theories of world-history made an integral part of antique philosophy. Each founder of a school aimed at establishing a complete system of knowledge, co-extensive with phenomena, embracing all things, from the primum mobile overhead to the blade of grass underfoot, and rationalizing the past, present, and future of the comprehensive whole. Modern science is less ambitious. Aspiring to no such vast synthesis, it is content to make laborious acquaintance with the facts of nature, to ponder their implications, and, if possible, to reconstruct on the basis supplied by them the condition of things in the 'dim backward' of unmeasured time. By no such means, it is true, can their beginning in any real sense be arrived at; the weapons of induction become blunted long before they strike home to the heart of that mystery; yet the recognition of their inadequacy brings compensation in a fuller mastery over their properly adapted use. Science, so called, was, indeed, down to the Baconian era, a turbid mixture of physics with metaphysics. The solution, it might be said, was attempted of an insoluble material which refused to dissolve and was hindered from precipitating.
The Greek view of nature was essentially pantheistic. The Ionian speculators appear to have presumed without expressly insisting upon its self-regulating power. Aristotle alone emphatically rejected the doctrine of cosmic vitality or sub-conscious tendencies. But Plato accepted and magnified the Oriental tradition; the conception of a 'World-Soul' owed to him its vague splendour and perennial fascination. The function of the Platonic vice-creator (for such the World-Soul must be accounted) was that of moulding brute matter into conformity with the archetypal ideas of the Divine mind; this was not, however, accomplished once for all, but by a progressive spiritualizing of what in its nature was dead and inanimate. The spiritual agent, becoming incorporated with the universal frame, lent to it a semblance of life, an obscure sensitiveness, and even some kind of latent intelligence; and so the anima mundi was shaped into existence, and continued century by century to be the subject and source of imaginings beyond measure wild and fantastic.
One great thought—that of the unity of nature—lay behind them, but its significance was lost amid the phantasmagoria of Neo-Platonist exaltations. Hence the Bacchic fervours of Giordano Bruno took their inspiration; here was the groundwork of Spinoza's pantheism. Shelley's Demiorgon, felt as 'a living spirit,' seen as 'a mighty darkness,' descended lineally from that strange essence—formless, inarticulate, devoid of individual self-consciousness—which animated the submerged philosophy of Neo-Pagan times with the barren ardours of mysticism. The doctrine, in its original and more sober version, obtained memorable expression in Virgil's melodious hexameters:
'Principio cœlum, ac terras, camposque liquentes,
Lucentemque globum lunæ, Titaniaque astra,
Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.'
In Conington's rhymed version they run as follows: