It can hardly be doubted that Pythagoras himself laid the foundations of the Pythagorean science—the doctrine of the creation of the world and perhaps, too, the interpretation of [377] all being and becoming in the world as due to the action and relation of numbers, as the essential basis of all things—all this, at least in elementary outline, must have been handed on by him to his followers. After his death the two sides of his doctrine continued to develop for a period in loose conjunction side by side; the guidance of life by the mystical and religious philosophy (though this, indeed, was hardly capable of further development), and the scientific interest which grew into a fairly elaborate system. Indeed, with the break-up of the Pythagorean society and its bifurcation in the fifth century, the scattered members of the band now brought into touch with the scientific studies of other communities and cut off from the ideal of the Pythagorean life which could only be realized within the limits of the society, were forced to continue their scientific studies in solitude. Pythagorean science, evolving, as it did, a picture of the world as a whole, no less than Ionian physiology deprived the soul of the unique and, indeed, antagonistic relation to nature that Pythagorean theology had given it. Philolaos, conceiving it in a manner strictly conforming to the mathematical and musical theory, called the soul a Harmony of contrary elements united together in the body.[52] If, however, the soul is only a binding-together of opposites to unity and harmony, then it must, when death breaks up the conjunction of the united elements, itself pass away and perish.[53] It is difficult to imagine how the older Pythagorean faith in the soul as an independent being dwelling in the body and surviving it—in the immortal soul, in fact—could be accommodated to this conception. Can it be that the two conceptions were not originally intended to be brought into conjunction at all, or were not meant to exclude each other? Ancient tradition spoke of different groups among the followers of Pythagoras who had also different objects, methods, and aims of study; nor shall we be inclined to deny all credibility to this tradition when we observe how little, in fact, Pythagorean science and Pythagorean faith had to do with each other.[54]
And yet we have to admit that the same Philolaos, who described the soul as a harmony of its body, also spoke of the soul as an independent and imperishable being. We may well doubt whether these two contradictory utterances can really come from the same man and apply to the same object; though the same man might really speak in varying language about the one soul if he recognized different parts of the soul of which different truths held good; and this was, in fact, first suggested by the Pythagorean school.[55] [378]
§ 6
Empedokles of Akragas did not belong to the Pythagorean school (it lost its external unity in his time); but he approaches Pythagorean doctrine so closely in his opinions and teaching about the soul of man, its problems and destinies, that there can be no doubt about Pythagorean influence upon the formation of his convictions on these points. His many-sided activities also included the study of natural science and he took up the researches of the Ionic Physiologists with zeal and a marked aptitude for the observation and synthesis of natural phenomena. But the roots of his peculiar individuality—the pathos which moved and agitated him—lay in a practical activity far removed from scientific investigation and representing a brilliant resuscitation in a very different age of the character and practice of the mantis, the purification-priest and magical-physician of the sixth century. The introduction to his “Purifications”[56] gives a picture of his triumphal progress from city to city, crowned with ribbons and garlands, adored as a god and questioned by thousands: “Where is the road to healing?” He intends to give his disciple Pausanias the results of his own experience and to teach him all his remedies for disease and their virtues, the arts of stilling the winds and stirring them up, producing drought or rain, raising the dead from Hades.[57] He himself boasted of being a magician and his pupil Gorgias saw him “do magic”.[58] Through him those efforts of the Kathartes, the expiation-priest and seer, which an earlier and already distant-seeming time had honoured as the highest form of wisdom, at last achieved a voice and literary expression—an expression given them with the fullest personal experience of the truth of their claims by one who was convinced of their power to control nature and sure of the godlike status of the man who had reached these almost superhuman heights of empire over nature. As a god, an immortal no longer subject to death, he passed through all the land—so Empedokles himself tells us.[59] He may have won credit in many places. He did not, indeed, found an ordered society of disciples and adherents, a sect: this does not seem to have been his intention. But he alone as a unique and unparalleled being, a self-confident personality of the greatest force and weight impressed himself masterfully both as mystic and politician upon the mundane affairs of his contemporaries and pointed the way beyond time and all things temporal to a blessed and divine state as the final goal of human life. He [379] must have made a profound impression upon the men among whom he lived,[60] though he disappeared from their midst like a comet, and left no permanent traces of his presence behind him. Many legends still witness to the astonishment that his appearance among men provoked, more especially those legends that in varying form related his end.[61] They are all expressions of the same belief: that he, as his own verses had foretold, in his departure did not have to suffer death; he had vanished, “translated” body and soul together to an everlasting divine life, as once Menelaos had been and so many great figures of the ancient days, and even a few Heroes of more recent times.[62] Once more the ancient conception shows in this story that it still lives on: immortal life can only be obtained by undissolved union of the psyche with its body. Such a legend hardly did justice to Empedokles’ own idea. When he claimed to be a god who would never die he certainly did not mean that his psyche would remain for ever bound to his body. On the contrary, he thought that in “death”, as men[63] call it, it would be freed from this last corporeal envelope[64] and never again have to enter into a body, but would live for ever in freedom and divinity. His conception of the conscious after-life of the psyche was as different as it was possible for it to be from the Homeric conception on which that translation legend was based.
Empedokles united in his own person to an astonishing degree the most sober attempts at a study of nature that was scientific according to its lights, and quite irrational beliefs and theological speculations. Occasionally the scientific impulse passes over to influence even the world of his beliefs;[65] but as a rule theology and natural science exist side by side in his mind quite independently. As a physiologist he inherited the already extensive and variously developed stock of ideas belonging to the older generations of inquirers and thinkers. He himself was able to unite conceptions derived from the most different sources into an original whole that satisfied himself at least. Becoming and passing-away, all qualitative change, were denied by him as by the Eleatics, but the permanent substance of Being is for him no single indivisible unity. There are four “roots” of things, the four bodies of elements, which in this division are for the first time clearly distinguished. It is the mixture and separation of the essentially indivisible elements that cause the appearance of becoming and perishing; and those two processes are caused by the two forces—clearly distinguished from the elements—of attraction and repulsion, [380] Love and Hate, which in the creative process struggle and in turn overmaster each other until at last, in the final victory of one of the two forces, all things are either united or divided; in either case an organic world ceases to exist. The present state of the universe is one in which “Love”, the tendency to amalgamation of differences, is prevailing; when this tendency is completed, there will be an absolute levelling-out of all distinction; a result which Empedokles, a quietist in his scientific studies as well, regards as the most desirable end.
In this world, then, that experiences only mechanical movement and change, and from whose evolution Empedokles by an ingenious turn is able to exclude all idea of purpose, there are also to be found souls; or rather psychical powers which grow up entirely within it. Sense-perception is expressly distinguished from the capacity of thought by Empedokles.[66] The former takes place when each of the elements, from the mixture of which the perceiving being has its origin, comes into contact with, and so becomes aware of, the same elements in the object perceived, through the “passages” that connect the interior of the body with the exterior.[67] “Thinking” has its seat in the heart’s blood, where the elements and their powers are mixed most equally. Or rather this blood actually is thinking and the power of thought;[68] the material substance and its vital functions thus also for Empedokles completely coincide. Plainly, nothing in the nature of a permanent substantial “soul” is here intended by the thinking-power of the “mind”, but rather a capacity of bringing together and unifying the individual sense-activities;[69] a capacity no less than the individual powers of sensation bound up with the elements, the senses, and the body.[70] With the varying constitution of the body, they too vary.[71] Both capacities, that of sense-perception, and that of thought, as vital expressions of the matter that is combined together in the organic creature, are present in all organisms; in men, in beasts, and even in plants.[72]
If we give the name of “soul”[73] to the sum of these psychical powers—a name generally reserved for the common permanent substratum of the changing psychical activities—we cannot avoid concluding, in accordance with the logic of this philosopher, that the “soul” must be perishable. With the death and destruction of the individual the elementary parts that go to compose him are disunited, and the soul which in this case is nothing but the highest resultant of that composition, must itself disappear with their dissolution—as it had come into being with their union.[74] [381]
It might seem as if Empedokles himself was as far as possible removed from drawing such conclusions from his own premises. No one speaks more distinctly and forcibly of the spiritual, individual beings that dwell in men and in other creatures of nature as well. They are regarded by him as Daimones fallen to the corporeal world, who have to pass through many different forms of life till they may at last hope for release.
In the introduction to his poem on Nature, he describes, from his own experience, and the information of the Daimones who had once led his soul down to this earthly Vale of Grief,[75] how by an ancient decree of the gods and the compulsion of Necessity, every daimon that has “polluted” itself by drinking the blood or eating the flesh of living beings,[76] or has broken its oath,[77] is banished for a long period[78] from the company of the blessed. It is thrust down to the “Meadow of Disaster”, into the realm of contradiction,[79] the cave of misery upon this earth, and must now wander through many “painful ways of life”[80] in changing incarnations. “Thus, I myself was once a boy and also a maiden, a bush, a bird, and a voiceless fish in the salty flood” (ll. 11, 12 = fr. 117). This daimon that in expiation of its crime must wander through the forms of men, beasts, and even plants, is evidently no other than what popular speech and that of theologians as well called the “psyche”, the soul-spirit.[81] In all essentials though perhaps in clearer language, Empedokles merely repeated[82] what the adherents of the doctrine of Transmigration had long told of its divine origin, its fall and penal banishment in earthly bodies. So, too, when as teacher of the means that bring salvation, he tells how more gracious forms and conditions of life may be obtained in the series of births, till at last complete release from rebirth is achieved,[83] Empedokles follows in the footsteps of the purification-priests and theologi of old. It is a matter of keeping the daimon within us free from the pollutions that bind it fast to the earthly life. To this end the methods of religious purification are most efficacious; Empedokles respects them quite as much as did the old Kathartai. It is necessary to keep the internal daimon far removed from every kind of “sin”,[84] more particularly from the drinking of blood and the eating of meat which must necessarily involve the murder of kinsmen daimones which are dwelling in the slaughtered beasts.[85] By purification and asceticism (which here again dispenses with a positive form of morality aimed at reforming the man) a gradual process to purer and better births is achieved;[86] in the end the persons thus reborn in a purified condition [382] become seers, poets, doctors, and are the leaders of mankind.[87] Finally, when they have emerged superior even to these highest steps of earthly life, they return to the other immortals, and become themselves gods released from human misery, escaping death, and now indestructible.[88] Empedokles regard himself as one who has reached the last stage,[89] and points out to others the way up to it.
Between what Empedokles the mystic here tells us of the soul that was once living its divine life, but has since been plunged into the world of the elements, though it is not for ever bound to them; and what Empedokles the physiologist teaches of the psychical powers that dwell in the elements and are bound to the body that is composed of the elements and perish with their dissolution, there seems to be a hopeless contradiction. And yet if we are to grasp the whole truth of what Empedokles means, we must neither leave on one side half of what he says,[90] nor yet by well-meaning interpretation seek to bring the philosopher into harmony with himself,[91] when he clearly speaks with two different voices. The two voices say different things, and yet in the mind of Empedokles, there is no contradiction in what they say, for they are dealing with totally distinct objects. The psychical powers and faculties of feeling and perception which are functions of matter, born in matter, and determined by it, together with the thinking faculty that is no other than the heart’s blood of men—these neither make up the character and content of that soul-spirit which dwells in men, beasts, and flowers, nor are they expressions of its activity. They are entirely bound up with the elements and their combination, and in man they are joined to the body and its organs; they are the powers and faculties of this body, and not of a special and invisible entity, the soul. The soul-daimon is not made out of the elements, nor is it for ever chained to them. It enters as a stranger into this world in which the only permanent component parts are[92] the four elements, and the two forces of Love and Hate; and it enters it from another world, the world of gods and spirits, to its detriment; the elements cast it about from one to another “and they all hate it” (fr. 115, 12, l. 35 M.). This living soul, with its independent existence, that thus enters into foreign and hostile surroundings, only enters into such earthly creatures as already possess senses, feeling and perception, together with reason or the faculty of thinking, the crowning manifestation of their material union. It is, however, as little identical with these psychical faculties as it is with the mixture of elementary matter or, in [383] the case of men, with the heart’s blood. It exists, unmixed and incapable of mixture, alongside the body and its faculties which indeed only have life—“what men call life”—(fr. 15, 2, l. 117 M.) when united with it. When they are separated from it they fall into dissolution; not so the soul, which continues its journey and visits other dwelling places, and does not share in their dissolution.