This peculiar dualistic doctrine reflects the two sides of Empedokles’ own mental activity. He probably intended in this way to unite the views of both the physiologists and the theologians. To the Greeks, such a twofold division of the inner life may have seemed less surprising than it does to us. The conception of a “soul” that as an independent, unique, and self-contained spiritual being dwells within the body, while the body does not receive its intellectual faculties of perceiving, feeling, willing and thinking from the soul, but exercises these by its own power—this conception agrees at bottom with the ideas of popular psychology that are as a rule described or implied in the Homeric poems.[93] The only difference is that these ideas of poet and populace are elaborated and defined by the speculations of theologians and philosophers. How deeply impressed upon the Greek mind such conceptions, derived eventually from Homer, actually were, can be measured by the fact that a conception of the twofold origin of psychic activity, its twofold nature and sphere of action, closely related to that of Empedokles, is continually recurring in more advanced stages of philosophy. It occurs not merely in Plato, but even in Aristotle, who in addition to the “soul” that directs and expresses itself in the physico-organic nature of man, recognizes another being of divine descent that enters into man “from without”, the “mind” (νοῦς) which is separable both from the soul and from the body, and is alone destined to survive the death of the man to which it was assigned.[94] In the doctrine of Empedokles, too, it is a stranger-guest from the distant land of gods that enters into man to give him a soul. This being is indeed far below the “mind” of Aristotle in philosophic importance; nevertheless, in the introduction of this Stranger into the world composed of the elements and vital faculties, a sense of the absolute uniqueness of spirit, its unlikeness to everything material, its essential distinctness from matter, finds expression, if only in a limited theological fashion.
In the light of such theological considerations, the soul seems also to Empedokles something essentially distinct from its prototype, the Homeric psyche, which after its separation [384] from the body passes to the twilight of a shadowy dream-life. To him, the soul is of divine race, too noble for this world of visibility, and only when it escapes from this world does it seem to him to begin its real and full life. Though confined within the body, it has its separate existence there; it has no concern with the everyday business of perception and sensation—not even with that of thinking, which is nothing else but the heart’s blood. But it is active in the “higher” mode of knowledge, in ecstatic inspiration;[95] to it alone belongs the profound insight of the philosopher who is enabled to pass beyond the limits of mere experience and sense-perception, and behold the totality of the universe in its true nature.[96] To it alone apply all the requirements of ethical and religious systems—duties in this higher sense belong only to the soul; it is something in the nature of a “conscience”. Its highest duty is to free itself from the unhallowed union with the body, and the elements of this world; the rules of purification and asceticism refer solely to it.
Between this soul-daimon that yearns after its divine home, and the world of the elements, there exists no inward bond or necessary connexion. And yet, since they have become implicated in each other’s existence, a certain parallelism exists between them in character and destiny. In the mechanically moved world, too, the separate and particular phenomena tend back again towards their starting point, the inwardly coherent Unity from which they once took their origin. A day will come when, after all struggle has been done away, “Love” alone will have absolute rule; and this means for the poet—who in his description even of this world of mechanical attraction and repulsion interpolates half-realized ethical concepts[97]—a state of absolute goodness and happiness. If there is no longer any world, then, until another one is created, no soul-daimon can be bound any more to the individual organisms of a world. Have they then all returned to the blessed communion of the immortal gods? It appears that not even the gods and daimones (and so not the spirits enclosed in world as “souls”) are regarded by Empedokles as having everlasting life. “Long-living” is the name he repeatedly applies to them; he never distinctly ascribes eternal life to them.[98] They, too, shall for a period enjoy “the happiness of profoundest peace” until, just as the elements and forces are drawn into the unity of the Sphairos, they, too, come together in the unity of the godlike Universal Mind, thence at a new world-creation to appear once more as individual separate being.[99] [385]
§ 7
Empedokles took a fully developed “hylozoic” system (which in itself, with its introduction of the motive forces of Conflict and Love, already betrayed a latent dualism) and attempted to combine with it an extreme form of spiritualist teaching. His attempt illustrates very clearly the observation that a philosophic science of nature in itself could never lead to the establishment of the axiom that the individual “soul” after its separation from the body continues to exist, still less that it is indestructible. Any one who still felt it necessary to assert that axiom could find support for it only by allowing physiology to be either overwhelmed by theological speculation, or else supplemented by it in the manner attempted by Empedokles.
Such an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable can have found few adherents among those who were accessible to scientific ideas, nor was it likely to tempt the physiological philosophy from the path which it had hitherto followed. Soon after Empedokles, and in essentials hardly influenced by him, Anaxagoras and Demokritos developed those doctrinal systems which were the last products of the independent speculation of Ionia. Demokritos was the founder and completer of the atomic doctrine according to which there exist “in reality” only the indivisible, minutest material bodies—which, while qualitatively indistinguishable, yet differ in shape, position, and arrangement in space as well as in bulk and weight—and empty space. He was obliged to seek for the “soul” (which to the materialist may easily present itself as being a separate, substantial, self-existent thing) among those minutest bodies out of which the whole fabric of the world of appearance is built up. The soul is that which confers movement upon the inherently motionless collections of bodies. It is composed of the round and smooth atoms which, in the universal condition of unrest that keeps all the atoms in agitation, are the most easily moved, for they offer least resistance to change of position, and can most easily penetrate others. These atoms compose fire and the soul. It is the soul-atom—one being inserted between every two of the other atoms[100]—which gives these their movement; and it is from all the soul-atoms uniformly disposed throughout the whole body that the body gets its movement, whence also (though it must be admitted in an unintelligible manner) comes the power of perception, which equally depends on movement, and the thought arising thence, of this same body. [386] During the life-time of the individual body, the continuance of the soul-atoms is secured by the breathing which continually replaces the smooth soul-particles that are as continually being expelled from the whole atom-complex by the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. The breathing is always drawing in fresh soul-stuff from the air which is full of floating soul-atoms, and supplies it to the body. A time comes, however, when the breathing refuses this function, and death occurs, which is simply the insufficient supply of these moving and animating atoms.[101] With the coming of death, there is an end to the union of the atoms, whose amalgamation had formed the particular living organism. Neither the soul-atoms nor any of the other atoms are destroyed; they do not alter in kind; but from the loose state of aggregation which even in the living body hardly amounted to an absolute unity to which a single common name could be applied—from this they now escape entirely. It is scarcely possible to see how, on this view of what essentially constitutes mental and vital phenomena, as a mere resultant of the separate and individual activities of individual and disconnected bodies, the unity of the living organism and the spiritual entity could ever come into being. It is even more evident that a unified “soul” could not possibly continue to exist after the dissolution which takes place at death of the atoms that in their union made up the organism. And, in fact, the soul-atoms disperse;[102] they return whence they came into the restless mass of world-stuff. The human individual, in this view of the case, perishes in death entirely.[103] The materials out of which he was shaped and composed are indestructible, and reserved for future construction; but his personality—the invisible personality, the “soul”, just as much as the visible—has but a single existence strictly limited to its one appearance in time. The continued existence of the soul after death, an immortality in whatever manner the thing may be conceived, is here for the first time in the history of Greek thought, expressly denied. The Atomist, with the candid precision that distinguishes him, draws the necessary consequences of his premises.
Anaxagoras strikes out a path almost directly opposed to this materialist doctrine. As the first decisive and conscious dualist among Greek philosophers, he takes the material substratum of being, the inexhaustible many of distinctly characterized and distinctly separate “Seeds” of things—which are nevertheless indistinguishably intermingled with each other—and sets over against them a force which he [387] obviously did not mean to derive from them, to which he gives a name usually attached to the faculty of thought in man, and which in any case he thought of as analogous to that faculty.[104] This “Mind”, simple, unmixed and unchangeable, is given such titles and adjectives that it is impossible to mistake the effort of Anaxagoras to think of it as something distinct from everything material, and in fact, absolutely immaterial and incorporeal.[105] It is at once power of thought and force of will; at the creation of the world it gives the first circular impulse to the intrinsically motionless lump of matter; the creation of distinct forms in accordance with a conscious purpose is begun by it—though the carrying out of this purpose is indeed to be completed in accordance with pure mechanical laws without the interference of “Mind”. This “Mind” that plans and orders but does not make the world, that with the conscious insight of its omniscient wisdom[106] influences matter without being influenced in turn, that moves without being moved;[107] set over against the multiplicity of things as an indivisible unity,[108] “having nothing in common with anything outside itself”[109] but entirely self-contained[110]—how shall we conceive of it otherwise than as an almost personified, transcendent divine power confronting the world of matter as something foreign to it, ruling the world from without by magical, not mechanical, means?
But this transcendent is also completely immanent. Wherever in this world life and independent movement are found, there, too, the mind as the source of life and movement must be active. “Mind rules all that has soul” says Anaxagoras.[111] In saying this he has not indeed asserted the presence of “Mind” within the animated being nor yet identity of nature as between soul and mind. But when we hear that Mind “goes through all things,[112] that in everything there is a part of all things, except of mind, and in some things of mind also”,[113] that must imply the penetration of many associations of matter by mind (hardly any longer to be thought of as immaterial) whereby the previously asserted transcendency of mind seems to be given up. At any rate, as such associations in which is “Mind”, living and animated beings are regarded. It is in them that “Mind” is present in continual, equal creativeness, though in different degrees;[114] indeed, Mind is or constitutes that very thing that we call the “soul” of a living being.[115] Among these living beings, which exist upon the moon,[116] as well as on earth, are not only men and beasts, but also plants.[117] In all these “Mind” is active; without losing any of its purity or unity, it is mixed with them.[118] [388] How we are to conceive the omnipotent Mind, whose oneness and self-containedness has been so emphatically asserted, as nevertheless entering simultaneously into the infinity of individual being—that certainly remains obscure. It is clear, however, that having thus derived all animated being from the single World-Mind, Anaxagoras could not speak of the continued existence of individual, self-existent “souls” after the dissolution of the material concretions in which moving and animating “soul-force” had once lived. The view is definitely ascribed to him that separation from the body is also “the soul’s death”.[119] Nothing, indeed, of the component parts that belong to the whole perishes, and no change in its nature takes place. So “Mind”, whose manifestations the “souls” were, maintains itself unaltered and undiminished; but after the dissolution of the united, which “the Hellenes” regard as its destruction,[120] though the component parts of the individual remain, yet not that particular mixture in which the peculiarity of the individual was inherent—“Mind” remains, but not the soul . . .
Thus, the first distinct separation of the intellectual thinking principle from the material substance with which it was—not fused, much less identified, but—contrasted in sovereignty and independence, did not lead to the recognition of the indestructibility of the individual spirit.
Shall we say that the mental, self-moved, life-giving principle, whether set over against the material and corporeal or indivisibly united with it, is for the physiologist always something universal—that the essentially real is impersonal? For him the individual, the personality conscious of itself and of the outer world, can be nothing but a manifestation of the universal, whether the latter is regarded as fixed and at rest, or as a living process that untiringly develops itself, recruits itself, and reconstructs itself in ever renewed creations. The only permanent, unchanging reality is the universal, the essential and fundamentally real Nature which appears in all individual things, speaks out of their mouth, and, in reality, only works and lives in them. The individual human soul has its indestructibility only in its identity with the universal that represents itself in it. The individual forms of “appearance”, having no independence of their own, cannot permanently abide.