The dialectical movement emanated at the same time from the Eleatic school of philosophers,—Zeno, and his contemporary the Samian Melissus, 460-440,—if not from their common teacher Parmenidês. Melissus also, as well as Zeno and Empedoklês, was a distinguished citizen as well as a philosopher; having been in command of the Samian fleet at the time of the revolt from Athens, and having in that capacity gained a victory over the Athenians.
All the philosophers of the fifth century B.C., prior to Sokratês, inheriting from their earliest poetical predecessors the vast and unmeasured problems which had once been solved by the supposition of divine or superhuman agents, contemplated the world, physical and moral, all in a mass, and applied their minds to find some hypothesis which would give them an explanation of this totality,[540] or at least appease curiosity by something which looked like an explanation. What were the elements out of which sensible things were made? What was the initial cause or principle of those changes which appeared to our senses? What was change?—was it generation of something integrally new and destruction of something preëxistent,—or was it a decomposition and recombination of elements still continuing. The theories of the various Ionic philosophers, and of Empedoklês after them, admitting one, two, or four elementary substances, with Friendship and Enmity to serve as causes of motion or change; the Homœomeries of Anaxagoras, with Nous, or Intelligence, as the stirring and regularizing agent; the atoms and void of Leukippus and Demokritus, all these were different hypotheses answering to a similar vein of thought. All of them, though assuming that the sensible appearances of things were delusive and perplexing, nevertheless, were borrowed more or less directly from some of these appearances, which were employed to explain and illustrate the whole theory, and served to render it plausible when stated as well as to defend it against attack. But the philosophers of the Eleatic school—first Xenophanês, and after him Parmenidês—took a distinct path of their own. To find that which was real, and which lay as it were concealed behind or under the delusive phenomena of sense, they had recourse only to mental abstractions. They supposed a Substance or Something not perceivable by sense, but only cogitable or conceivable by reason; a One and All, continuous and finite, which was not only real and self-existent, but was the only reality; eternal, immovable, and unchangeable, and the only matter knowable. The phenomena of sense, which began and ended one after the other, they thought, were essentially delusive, uncertain, contradictory among themselves, and open to endless diversity of opinion.[541] Upon these, nevertheless, they announced an opinion; adopting two elements, heat and cold, or light and darkness.
Parmenidês set forth this doctrine of the One and All in a poem, of which but a few fragments now remain, so that we understand very imperfectly the positive arguments employed to recommend it. The matter of truth and knowledge, such as he alone admitted, was altogether removed from the senses and divested of sensible properties, so as to be conceived only as an Ens Rationis, and described and discussed only in the most general words of the language. The exposition given by Parmenidês in his poem,[542] though complimented by Plato, was vehemently controverted by others, who deduced from it many contradictions and absurdities. As a part of his reply, and doubtless the strongest part, Parmenidês retorted upon his adversaries; an example followed by his pupil Zeno with still greater acuteness and success. Those who controverted his ontological theory, that the real, ultra-phenomenal substance was One, affirmed it to be not One, but Many; divisible, movable, changeable, etc. Zeno attacked this latter theory, and proved that it led to contradictions and absurdities still greater than those involved in the proposition of Parmenidês.[543] He impugned the testimony of sense, affirming that it furnished premises for conclusions which contradicted each other, and that it was unworthy of trust.[544] Parmenidês[545] had denied that there was any such thing as real change either of place or color: Zeno maintained change of place, or motion, to be impossible and self-contradictory; propounding many logical difficulties, derived from the infinite divisibility of matter, against some of the most obvious affirmations respecting sensible phenomena. Melissus appears to have argued in a vein similar to that of Zeno, though with much less acuteness; demonstrating indirectly the doctrine of Parmenidês, by deducing impossible inferences from the contrary hypothesis.[546]
Zeno published a treatise to maintain the thesis above described, which he also upheld by personal conversations and discussions, in a manner doubtless far more efficacious than his writing; the oral teaching of these early philosophers being their really impressive manifestation. His subtle dialectic arguments were not only sufficient to occupy all the philosophers of antiquity, in confuting them more or less successfully, but have even descended to modern times as a fire not yet extinguished.[547] The great effect produced among the speculative minds of Greece by his writing and conversation, is attested both by Plato and Aristotle. He visited Athens, gave instruction to some eminent Athenians, for high pay, and is said to have conversed both with Periklês and with Sokratês, at a time when the latter was very young; probably between 450-440 B.C.[548]
His appearance constitutes a remarkable era in Grecian philosophy, because he first brought out the extraordinary aggressive or negative force of the dialectic method. In this discussion respecting the One and the Many, positive grounds on either side were alike scanty: each party had to set forth the contradictions deducible from the opposite hypothesis, and Zeno professed to show that those of his opponents were the more flagrant. We thus see that, along with the methodized question and answer, or dialectic method, employed from henceforward more and more in philosophical inquiries, comes out at the same time the negative tendency, the probing, testing, and scrutinizing force, of Grecian speculation. The negative side of Grecian speculation stands quite as prominently marked, and occupies as large a measure of the intellectual force of their philosophers, as the positive side. It is not simply to arrive at a conclusion, sustained by a certain measure of plausible premise,—and then to proclaim it as an authoritative dogma, silencing or disparaging all objectors,—that Grecian speculation aspires. To unmask not only positive falsehood, but even affirmation without evidence, exaggerated confidence in what was only doubtful, and show of knowledge without the reality; to look at a problem on all sides, and set forth all the difficulties attending its solution, to take account of deductions from the affirmative evidence, even in the case of conclusions accepted as true upon the balance, all this will be found pervading the march of their greatest thinkers. As a condition of all progressive philosophy, it is not less essential that the grounds of negation should be freely exposed, than the grounds of affirmation. We shall find the two going hand in hand, and the negative vein, indeed, the more impressive and characteristic of the two, from Zeno downwards in our history. In one of the earliest memoranda illustrative of Grecian dialectics,—the sentences in which Plato represents Parmenidês and Zeno as bequeathing their mantle to the youthful Sokratês, and giving him precepts for successfully prosecuting those researches which his marked inquisitive impulse promised,—this large and comprehensive point of view is emphatically inculcated. He is admonished to set before him both sides of every hypothesis, and to follow out both the negative and the affirmative chains of argument with equal perseverance and equal freedom of scrutiny; neither daunted by the adverse opinions around him, nor deterred by sneers against wasting time in fruitless talk; since the multitude are ignorant that without thus travelling round all sides of a question, no assured comprehension of the truth is attainable.[549]
We thus find ourselves, from the year 450 B.C., downwards, in presence of two important classes of men in Greece, unknown to Solon or even to Kleisthenês, the Rhetoricians, and the Dialecticians; for whom, as has been shown, the ground had been gradually prepared by the politics, the poetry, and the speculation, of the preceding period.
Both these two novelties—like the poetry and other accomplishments of this memorable race—grew up from rude indigenous beginnings, under native stimulus unborrowed and unassisted from without. The rhetorical teaching was an attempt to assist and improve men in the power of continuous speech as addressed to assembled numbers, such as the public assembly or the dikastery; it was therefore a species of training sought for by men of active pursuits and ambition, either that they might succeed in public life, or that they might maintain their rights and dignity if called before the court of justice. On the other hand, the dialectic business had no direct reference to public life, to the judicial pleading, or to any assembled large number. It was a dialogue carried on by two disputants, usually before a few hearers, to unravel some obscurity, to reduce the respondent to silence and contradiction, to exercise both parties in mastery of the subject, or to sift the consequences of some problematical assumption. It was spontaneous conversation[550] systematized and turned into some predetermined channel; furnishing a stimulus to thought, and a means of improvement not attainable in any other manner; furnishing to some, also, a source of profit or display. It opened a line of serious intellectual pursuit to men of a speculative or inquisitive turn, who were deficient in voice, in boldness, in continuous memory, for public speaking; or who desired to keep themselves apart from the political and judicial animosities of the moment.
Although there were numerous Athenians, who combined, in various proportions, speculative with practical study, yet generally speaking, the two veins of intellectual movement—one towards active public business, the other towards enlarged opinions and greater command of speculative truth, with its evidences—continued simultaneous and separate. There subsisted between them a standing polemical controversy and a spirit of mutual detraction. If Plato despised the sophists and the rhetors, Isokratês thinks himself not less entitled to disparage those who employed their time in debating upon the unity or plurality of virtue.[551] Even among different teachers, in the same intellectual walk, also, there prevailed but too often an acrimonious feeling of personal rivalry, which laid them all so much the more open to assault from the common enemy of all mental progress; a feeling of jealous ignorance, stationary or wistfully retrospective, of no mean force at Athens, as in every other society, and of course blended at Athens with the indigenous democratical sentiment. This latter sentiment[552] of antipathy to new ideas, and new mental accomplishments, has been raised into factitious importance by the comic genius of Aristophanês, whose point of view modern authors have too often accepted; thus allowing some of the worst feelings of Grecian antiquity to influence their manner of conceiving the facts. Moreover, they have rarely made any allowance for that force of literary and philosophical antipathy, which was no less real and constant at Athens than the political; and which made the different literary classes or individuals perpetually unjust one towards another.[553] It was the blessing and the glory of Athens, that every man could speak out his sentiments and his criticisms with a freedom unparalleled in the ancient world, and hardly paralleled even in the modern, in which a vast body of dissent both is, and always has been, condemned to absolute silence. But this known latitude of censure ought to have imposed on modern authors a peremptory necessity of not accepting implicitly the censure of any one, where the party inculpated has left no defence; at the very least, of construing the censure strictly, and allowing for the point of view from which it proceeds. From inattention to this necessity, almost all the things and persons of Grecian history are presented to us on their bad side; the libels of Aristophanês, the sneers of Plato and Xenophon, even the interested generalities of a plaintiff or defendant before the dikastery, are received with little cross-examination as authentic materials for history.
If ever there was need to invoke this rare sentiment of candor, it is when we come to discuss the history of the persons called sophists, who now for the first time appear as of note; the practical teachers of Athens and of Greece, misconceived as well as misesteemed.
The primitive education at Athens consisted of two branches; gymnastics, for the body; music, for the mind. The word music is not to be judged according to the limited signification which it now bears. It comprehended, from the beginning, everything appertaining to the province of the Nine Muses; not merely learning the use of the lyre, or how to bear part in a chorus; but also the hearing, learning, and repeating, of poetical compositions, as well as the practice of exact and elegant pronunciation; which latter accomplishment, in a language like the Greek, with long words, measured syllables, and great diversity of accentuation between one word and another, must have been far more difficult to acquire than it is in any modern European language. As the range of ideas enlarged, so the words music and musical teachers acquired an expanded meaning, so as to comprehend matter of instruction at once ampler and more diversified. During the middle of the fifth century B.C., at Athens, there came thus to be found, among the musical teachers, men of the most distinguished abilities and eminence; masters of all the learning and accomplishments of the age, teaching what was known of astronomy, geography, and physics, and capable of holding dialectical discussions with their pupils, upon all the various problems then afloat among intellectual men. Of this character were Lamprus, Agathoklês, Pythokleidês, Damon, etc. The two latter were instructors of Periklês; and Damon was even rendered so unpopular at Athens, partly by his large and free speculations, partly through the political enemies of his great pupil, that he was ostracized, or at least sentenced to banishment.[554] Such men were competent companions for Anaxagoras and Zeno, and employed in part on the same studies; the field of acquired knowledge being not then large enough to be divided into separate, exclusive compartments. While Euripidês frequented the company, and acquainted himself with the opinions, of Anaxagoras, Ion of Chios, his rival as a tragic poet, as well as the friend of Kimon, bestowed so much thought upon physical subjects, as then conceived, that he set up a theory of his own, propounding the doctrine of three elements in nature;[555] air, fire, and earth.