Now we have to remember that Parmenides had, already in early Greek times, been equally emphatic, perhaps equally impressive, on the other side of this very question,—on the impossibility of Becoming, of Change; and on the certainty and knowableness of the utter Oneness and Permanence of all Being.[1] All that really is, he maintained, excludes all Becoming: the very notion of Being is incompatible with that of Becoming: the first is utterly without the second. All real Becoming would be equivalent to the real existence of Non-Being. Hence all Multiplicity and Becoming is necessarily but apparent, and masks an underlying absolute Unity and Permanence, which can be reached by the intellect alone. And this position of Parmenides was felt to be so strong, that all the subsequent Greek Physicists took their stand upon it: the four unchangeable elements of Empedocles, the Atoms of Leucippus and Democritus (atoms of eternally unchanging shape and size, and of one absolutely uniform and unchanging quality) are but modifications of the doctrine of Parmenides concerning the Oneness and Unchangeableness of Being.
But even Heraclitus himself is far removed from denying all Oneness, all Permanence. For, according to him, a permanent law of permutation runs through and expresses itself in the shiftingness of all things perceptible by sense; or rather one eternal physical substance, Fire, of ceaselessly active properties, is continually manifesting itself, in a regular succession of appearances, from fire to air, from air to water, from water to earth, and then backwards up again to fire.
And when once the Greeks begin to break away from all this Hylozoism,—these systems which uniformly, from Thales to Democritus, attempt to explain all things by some one living or moving Matter, without the intervention of Spirit or of Mind,—Spirit appears in Anaxagoras as the One, and as present, everywhere and in varying degrees, as the principle of the motion of that co-eternal matter which is here, on the contrary, conceived of as but apparently homogeneous anywhere, and as really composed of an indefinite number and combination of qualitatively differing constituents.
Thus in all its schools, even before Socrates and Plato, Greek philosophy clung to the One and the One’s reality, however differently it conceived the nature of this Unity, and however much it may have varied as to the nature and reality of the Many, or as to the relation and the bond subsisting between that Unity and this Multiplicity. Only at the end of this first period do the Sophists introduce, during a short time marked by all the symptoms of transition, uncertainty, and revolution, the doctrine, of the unknowableness, indeed of the unreality, of the One, and with it of the exclusive reality of mere Multiplicity, of evanescent Appearances.
2. In Socrates.
But Socrates opens out the second and greatest period of Greek philosophy, by reverting to, indeed by indefinitely deepening, the general conviction that Oneness underlies Multiplicity. And he does so through the virtual discovery of, and a ceaseless insistence upon, two great new subject-matters of philosophy: Dialects and Ethics. It is true that in both these respects the Sophists had prepared the ground: they had, before him and all around him, discussed everything from every then conceivable point of view; and they had, at the same time, helped to withdraw man’s attention from pure speculation about physical nature to practical occupation with himself. But the Sophistic Dialectic had ended in itself, in universal negation and scepticism; and the Sophistic Anthropology had, partly as cause, partly as effect of that scepticism, more and more completely narrowed and dragged down all human interest, capacity, and activity to a selfish, materialistic self-aggrandizement and a frank pleasure-seeking. Socrates indeed took over both these subjects; but he did so in a profoundly different spirit, and worked them into a thoroughly antagonistic view of knowledge and of life.
Socrates begins, like the Sophists, with the Multiplicity of impression and opinion, which we find occasioned by one and the same question or fact; and like them he refuses to take the Physicists’ short cut of immediate and direct occupation with things and substances, say the elements. Slowly and laboriously he works his way, by the help of Dialectics, (for these have now become a means and not an end,) around and through and into the various apprehensions, and, at last, out of and beyond them, to a satisfactory concept of each thing. And the very means taken to arrive at this concept, and the very test which is applied to the concept, when finally arrived at, for gauging the degree of its finality, both these things help to deepen profoundly the sense of a certain Multiplicity in all Oneness and of a certain Oneness in all Multiplicity. For the means he takes are a careful and (as far as may be) exhaustive and impartial discussion and analysis of all the competing and conflicting notions and connotations occasioned by each matter in dispute; and the test he applies to the final concept, in view of gauging the degree of its finality, is how far this concept reconciles and resolves within its higher unity all such various and contrary aspects suggested by the thing, as have stood the brunt of the previous discussion and have thereby proved themselves true and objective.
Socrates again, like the Sophists, turns his attention away from Physics to Ethics; he drops speculation about external nature, and busies himself with the interior life and development of man. But the world in which Socrates’ method necessarily conceives and places man, and the work and standard which he finds already latent in each man, for that man to do and to endorse in himself and in the world, are both entirely different from those of the Sophists, and occasion a still further, indeed the greatest of all possible deepenings of the apprehension of Oneness and of Multiplicity.