The open-minded Greek sought to picture, to ascertain,to present. He was not dominated by the wish to show how things should be. To know and to understand, to explain by understanding the abiding reason in things, to find out the fundamental principle in things rather than to adjust it to the personal desires—this was the objective attitude of mind of the Greeks. The Greek saw before he reasoned; he visualized his thought in form before he subjected the form to rational analysis. The cosmos was a harmony and an art before which he stood in contemplation rather than in criticism. Human elements were found in it everywhere, but only as parts of that cosmos. “The unity of the spiritual and the natural, which Greek thought demands and presupposes,is the direct unbroken unity of the classic theory of the world.”[20]
By whatever names the great theories of the Systematic Period are called, we must remember that they did not depart from this objective Greek point of view. At certain times the moorings of Greek thought seem about to be shifted, as when Plato passes beyond the ancient Greek attitude and anticipates Christian morality by flight from the world of sense, and when Aristotle elaborates his doctrine of a transcendent god. But the tie never breaks, and the Systematic philosophers remain Greek and not modern. They have the Greek objective attitude of mind. The inner consciousness does not stand with its attestations over against all other things. The greatest of these philosophers never thought of himself but as “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh” of the world surrounding him. In art the classic Greek “could obey but not surpass nature”; in religion he worshiped beings that were only superiorhuman beings; in politics he was a member of a social whole. To Æschylus, Pericles, Socrates, Protagoras, Aristophanes, Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle alike, human nature is a part of the world and not vice versa. The Greek mind interpreted nature rather than recreated it.
What, then, is the nature of the development of Greek thought, and in what respect does the Greek Systematic philosophy differ from the philosophy of the Greek Cosmologists? Greek philosophy in the Cosmological Period starts with a conception of an objective harmony of nature and spirit which is called hylozoism. Step by step in the Anthropological and Systematic Periods that harmony becomes broken into a dualism of mind and matter. The philosophy of this Systematic Period is a dualism of the parts of one objective world, not a subjective-objective antithesis. The realm of spirit lies side by side with that of nature, and the separation and alienation never reached the complete form that it did in the Middle Ages. The great Greek Systematizers in part represent this dualistic tendency, in part are a scientific effort to overcome it. “In spite of this tendency [to a dualism] the original presupposition there remains to it no possible way of filling up a chasm which, according to its own standpoint, cannot exist.”[21]
A Summary of Greek Philosophy. At this point a summary of Greek objective philosophy will be helpful.The philosophical problem that had been working itself out since Thales had been this: How may we think the Being that abides amid the changes of phenomena? The Cosmologists scrutinized physical nature and, without differentiating nature and spirit, conceived abiding Being to be living matter. The Anthropologists (except Socrates) doubted if there is any abiding Being. Among the Systematic Philosophers a dualism for the first time appears. Nature and spirit are differentiated, but both remain entirely objective. Democritus regarded the material universe as abiding Being, but in so large a way as to be able to construct upon it a psychology and an ethics. Plato found abiding Being in the realm of the spirit, in a group of moral and æsthetic entities. Aristotle attempts to overcome the opposition between materialism and Platonism. To him abiding Being is neither physical nature nor the spirit apart from physical nature. Abiding Being to Aristotle is the spirit in nature.
Greek Philosophy (objective).
1. The Cosmologists—Hylozoism.
Abiding Being is living nature—some form of living matter.
2. The Anthropologists—Relativism (except Socrates).
Being is not abiding, but consists of transitory mental states. This is a form of what was called by the schoolmen Nominalism, and summed up by the phrase Universalia post rem.
3. The Systematic Philosophers.
Democritus—Materialism.
Being consists in material atoms, but regarded in so large a way as to furnish a basis for a psychology and an ethics.