Christianity and Greek Philosophy / or, the relation between spontaneous and reflective thought in Greece and the positive teaching of Christ and His Apostles

by B. F. Cocker

[Footnote 457: ][ (return) ] Lewes's "Biographical History of Philosophy," p. 60.

[Footnote 458: ][ (return) ] Ritter's "History of Ancient Philosophy," vol. i. pp. 475, 476.

Aristotle assures us that Zeno, "by his one Ens, which neither was moved nor movable, meaneth God." And he also informs us that "Zeno endeavored to demonstrate that there is but one God, from the idea which all men have of him, as that which is the best, supremest, most powerful of all, or an absolutely perfect being" ("De Xenophane, Zenone, et Gorgia"). [⁴⁵⁹]

With Zeno we close our survey of the second grand line of independent inquiry by which philosophy sought to solve the problem of the universe. The reader will be struck with the resemblance which subsists between the history of its development and that of the modern Idealist school. Pythagoras was the Descartes, Parmenides the Spinoza, and Zeno the Hegel of the Italian school.

In this survey of the speculations of the pre-Socratic schools of philosophy, we have followed the course of two opposite streams of thought which had their common origin in one fundamental principle or law of the human mind--the intuition of unity--"or the desire to comprehend all the facts of the universe in a single formula, and consummate all conditional knowledge in the unity of unconditioned existence." The history of this tendency is, in fact, the history of all philosophy. "The end of all philosophy," says Plato, "is the intuition of unity." "All knowledge," said the Platonists, "is the gathering up into one." [⁴⁶⁰]

[Footnote 459: ][ (return) ] Cudworth's "Intellectual System," vol. i. p. 518.

[Footnote 460: ][ (return) ] Hamilton's "Metaphysics," vol. i. pp. 67-70 (English edition).

Starting from this fundamental idea, that, beneath the endless flux and change of the visible universe, there must be a permanent principle of unity, we have seen developed two opposite schools of speculative thought. As the traveller, standing on the ridges of the Andes, may see the head-waters of the great South American rivers mingling in one, so the student of philosophy, standing on the elevated plane of analytic thought, may discover, in this fundamental principle, the common source of the two great systems of speculative thought which divided the ancient world. Here are the head-waters of the sensational and the idealist schools. The Ionian school started its course of inquiry in the direction of sense; it occupied itself solely with the phenomena of the external world, and it sought this principle of unity in a physical element. The Italian school started its course of inquiry in the direction of reason; it occupied itself chiefly with rational conceptions or à priori ideas, and it sought this principle of unity in purely metaphysical being. And just as the Amazon and La Plata sweep on, in opposite directions, until they reach the extremities of the continent, so these two opposite streams of thought rush onward, by the force of a logical necessity, until they terminate in the two Unitarian systems of Absolute Materialism and Absolute Idealism, and, in their theological aspects, in a pantheism which, on the one hand, identifies God with matter, or, on the other hand, swallows up the universe in God.

The radical error of both these systems is at once apparent. The testimony of the primary faculties of the mind was not regarded as each, within its sphere, final and decisive. The duality of consciousness was not accepted in all its integrity; one school rejected the testimony of reason, the other denied the veracity of the senses, and both prepared the way for the skepticism of the Sophists.