CHAPTER XI
THE PHILOSOPHERS
The Orphic teaching, in which a protracted movement of religion in Greece reached comprehensive expression, might seem almost an anachronism, appearing as it did in an age when a religious interpretation of the world and of mankind was hardly any longer admissible. Eastwards, on the coasts of Ionia, a new view of the world had arisen which, like a youth that has come of age, demanded the right to pursue its course without any guidance from traditional beliefs. The Ionic maritime cities were the meeting-place of all the collected wisdom and experience of mankind; and there all the more serious knowledge and study—both indigenous and of foreign origin—of “Nature”, the earth, and the heavenly bodies, was gathered together in the intelligence of those ever-memorable spirits who at that time were laying the foundations of natural science, and of all science in general. This knowledge was now attempting to turn itself into an organized and all-embracing whole. Observation and constructive study combined with an imaginative vision to hazard a picture of the world and reality as a whole. Because it was impossible anywhere in this world to find anything completely and for ever fixed and dead, speculation inevitably pressed forward to the discovery of the undying source of Life, that perpetually fills, moves, and rebuilds this whole, and of the laws according to which it works and necessarily must work.
This was the direction pursued by these earliest pioneers of philosophy; and they pursued it unhampered by any subservience to mythical or religious modes of thought. Where mythology and the theology founded upon it saw a complete history of cosmic events each one of which was the result of the separate and unique action of divine personalities endowed with consciousness and the power of arbitrary choice—there the philosopher saw the play of everlasting forces which could not be completely resolved into the single events of any historical process, for, without beginning or end they had been ever in action, tirelessly fulfilling themselves in accordance with unchanging laws. In such a universe there seemed [363] to be little room left for divine figures created by man after his own image, and worshipped by him as the guiding and supreme powers of the world. And in fact, the foundations were now laid of that tremendous structure of free inquiry, which finally succeeded in weaving out of its treasure new worlds of thought, where even those who had quarrelled or were dissatisfied with the old religion (now inwardly falling into decay for all its outward appearance of being at the most brilliant zenith of its powers) might yet find a refuge if they would not fall back upon sheer nothingness.
And yet Greece never saw a thorough-going opposition and conscious quarrel between science and religion. In a few special cases the religion of the state was forced to recognize its incompatibility with the openly expressed opinions of individual philosophers, and took steps to make its claims to universal supremacy respected. But for the most part, the two streams of influence flowed on side by side for centuries without ever coming into hostile contact. The propagandist temper was completely absent from philosophy from the very beginning. (Even when it appeared later as among the Cynics it produced very little effect on the supremacy of the state religion.) Religion on its side was not represented by any priestly caste which might have been led to take up arms for religion and for what it believed to be its own interest alike. Theoretic contradictions might the more easily remain unobserved when religion depended so little upon fixed dogma or upon a world-embracing whole of opinions and doctrines; while Theology, wherever it accompanied the worship of the gods (εὐσέβεια), which was the real core of religion, was, just as much as philosophy, the business of individuals and their adherents gathered together outside the limits of the official religion of the state. Philosophy (except in a few special and unrepresentative cases) never sought open war with religion—not even with the weakened and diluted religion of the masses. In fact the juxtaposition of philosophy and religion (with theology itself by their side) sometimes went beyond the external conditions of the time, and affected the private intellectual life of certain thinkers. It might seem as if religion and philosophy were not merely different but dealt with different provinces of reality, and thus even strict and philosophically minded thinkers could honestly and without imagining disloyalty to philosophy, adopt particular and even fundamental conceptions from the creed of their fathers, and allow them to grow up side by side and at peace with their own purely philosophical ideas. [364]
§ 2
What the Ionic philosophers in connexion with the rest of their cosmology had to say about the soul of man did not for all its striking novelty bring them into direct conflict with religious opinion. Philosophy and religion used the same words to denote totally different things; it could surprise no one if different things were said about quite different objects.
According to the popular view, which finds expression in Homer, and with which, in spite of their very different estimate of the relative values of body and soul, the religious theory of the Orphics and other theologi also agreed—according to this view the “psyche” was regarded as a unique creature of combined spiritual and material nature that, wherever it may have come from, now dwells within man and there, as his second self, carries on its separate existence, making itself felt when the visible self loses consciousness in dream, swoon, or ecstasy (see above, [pp. 6] f.). In the same way, the moon and the stars become visible when no longer obscured by the brighter light of the sun. It was already implied in the conception itself that this double of mankind, which could be detached from him temporarily, had a separate existence of its own; it was no very great step from this to the idea that in death, which is simply the permanent separation of the visible man from the invisible, the latter did not perish, but only then became free and able to live by and for itself.
This spiritual being and the obscure manifestations of its existence in the living man, did not attract the observation of the Ionian philosophers. Their thoughts were all for the universe as a whole; they looked for the “origins” (ἀρχαί) of all that is and becomes; for the simple elements of multifarious appearance and for the force which turns the simple into the multifarious while controlling, moving, and giving life to primeval matter. The power of life, the force which can set in motion both itself and all else that without it would be fixed and motionless—this force penetrates all being; where it manifests itself most strikingly in separate individual beings, there it is what these philosophers call the “psyche”.
Thought of in this way, the psyche is something quite different from the old psyche of popular belief, idly observing the life and activities of its body, as of some stranger, concentrated in itself, and pursuing its own secret, hidden life. And yet the name given to these very different concepts remained the same. The application of the word “psyche” [365] to the power which gives life and movement to the visible body—man’s power of life—might have been suggested to the philosophers by a manner of expression which, though in the strict sense of the words conflicting with Homeric conceptions, is occasionally observable in the Homeric poems, and seems to have become more and more frequent in late times.[1] In more exact language, the “psyche” of these philosophers is a collective expression for all the powers of thought, desire, and will (νόος, μένος, μῆτις, βουλή), and especially for the functions denoted by the untranslatable word θυμός—powers which according to the Homeric and popular partition all belong entirely to the side of the visible man and his body.[2] According to that view, they are all expressions of the body’s natural powers of life—though they cannot indeed be awakened to real life before the arrival of the “psyche”—and in Homeric usage are almost the exact opposite of the “psyche”, for they perish at death, while the psyche leaves them behind to wander about in its separate shadow-life.