Whether as teaching meant for public currency or as a philosophic message for the few, the pantheism of Xenophanes expressed itself in an attack on anthropomorphic religion, no less direct and much more ratiocinative than that of any Hebrew prophet upon idolatry. “Mortals,” he wrote, in a famous passage, “suppose that the Gods are born, and wear man’s clothing,[104] and have voice and body. But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and make works of art as men do, they would paint their Gods and give them bodies like their own—horses like horses, cattle like cattle.” And again: “Ethiopians make their Gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have reddish hair and blue eyes; so also they conceive the spirits of the Gods to be like themselves.”[105] On Homer and Hesiod, the myth-singers, his attack is no less stringent: “They attributed to the Gods all things that with men are of ill-fame and blame; they told of them countless nefarious things—thefts, adulteries, and deception of each other.”[106] It is recorded of him further that, like Epicurus, he absolutely rejected all divination.[107] And when the Eleans, perhaps somewhat shaken by such criticism, asked him whether they should sacrifice and sing a dirge to Leukothea, the child-bereft Sea-Goddess, he bade them not to sing a dirge if they thought her divine, and not to sacrifice if she were human.[108]
Beside this ringing radicalism, not yet out of date, the physics of the Eleatic freethinker is less noticeable. His resort to earth as a material first principle was but another guess or disguised theosophy added to those of his predecessors, and has no philosophic congruity with his pantheism. It is interesting to find him reasoning from fossil-marks that what was now land had once been sea-covered, and been left mud; and that the moon is probably inhabited.[109] Yet, with all this alertness of speculation, Xenophanes sounds the note of merely negative skepticism which, for lack of fruitful scientific research, was to become more and more common in Greek thought:[110] “no man,” he avows in one verse, “knows truly anything, and no man ever will.”[111] More fruitful was his pantheism or pankosmism. “The All (οὖλος)” he declared, “sees, thinks, and hears.”[112] “It was thus from Xenophanes that the doctrine of Pankosmism first obtained introduction into Greek philosophy, recognizing nothing real except the universe as an indivisible and unchangeable whole.”[113] His negative skepticism might have guarded later Hellenes against baseless cosmogony-making if they had been capable of a systematic intellectual development. His sagacity, too, appears in his protest[114] against that extravagant worship of the athlete which from first to last kept popular Greek life-philosophy unprogressive. But here least of all was he listened to.
It is after a generation of such persistent questioning of Nature and custom by pioneer Greeks that we find in Herakleitos of Ephesus (fl. 500 B.C.)—still in the Ionian culture-sphere—a positive and unsparing criticism of the prevailing beliefs. No sage among the Ionians (who had already produced a series of powerful thinkers) left a deeper impression than he of massive force and piercing intensity: above all of the gnomic utterances of his age, his have the ring of character and the edge of personality; and the gossiping Diogenes, after setting out by calling him the most arrogant of men, concedes that the brevity and weight of his expression are not to be matched. It was due rather to this, probably, than to his metaphysic—though that has an arresting quality—that there grew up a school of Herakliteans calling themselves by his name. And though doubt attaches to some of his sayings, and even to his date, there can be small question that he was mordantly freethinking, though a man of royal descent. He has stern sayings about “bringing forth untrustworthy witnesses to confirm disputed points,” and about eyes and ears being “bad witnesses for men, when their souls lack understanding.”[115] “What can be seen, heard, and learned, this I prize,” is one of his declarations; and he is credited with contemning book-learning as having failed to give wisdom to Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hekataios.[116] The belief in progress, he roundly insists, stops progress.[117] From his cryptic utterances it maybe gathered that he too was a pantheist;[118] and from his insistence on the immanence of strife in all things,[119] as from others of his sayings, that he was of the Stoic mood. It was doubtless in resentment of immoral religion that he said[120] Homer and Archilochos deserved flogging; as he is severe on the phallic worship of Dionysos,[121] on the absurdity of prayer to images, and on popular pietism in general.[122] One of his sayings, ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων,[123] “character is a man’s dæmon,” seems to be the definite assertion of rationalism in affairs as against the creed of special providences.
A confusion of tradition has arisen between the early Herakleitos, “the Obscure,” and the similarly-named writer of the first century of our era, who was either one Herakleides or one using the name of Herakleitos. As the later writer certainly allegorized Homer—reducing Apollo to the Sun, Athenê to Thought, and so on—and claimed thus to free him from the charge of impiety, it seems highly probable that it is from him that the scholiast on the Iliad, xv, 18, cites the passage scolding the atheists who attacked the Homeric myths. The theme and the tone do not belong to 500 B.C., when only the boldest—as Herakleitos—would be likely to attack Homer, and when there is no other literary trace of atheism. Grote, however (i, 374, note), cites the passages without comment as referring to the early philosopher, who is much more probably credited, as above, with denouncing Homer himself. Concerning the later Herakleitos or Herakleides, see Dr. Hatch’s Hibbert Lectures on The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 1890, pp. 61, 62.
But even apart from the confusion with the late Herakleides, there is difficulty in settling the period of the Ephesian thinker. Diogenes Laërtius states that he flourished about the 69th Olympiad (504–500 B.C.). Another account, preserved by Eusebius, places him in the 80th or 81st Olympiad, in the infancy of Sokrates, and for this date there are other grounds (Ueberweg, i, 40); but yet other evidences carry us back to the earlier. As Diogenes notes five writers of the name—two being poets, one a historian, and one a “serio-comic” personage—and there is record of many other men named Herakleitos and several Herakleides, there is considerable room for false attributions. The statement of Diogenes that the Ephesian was “wont to call opinion the sacred disease” (i, 6, § 7) is commonly relegated to the spurious sayings of Herakleitos, and it suggests the last mentioned of his namesakes. But see Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures on Indian Religion, p. 6, for the opinion that it is genuine, and that by “opinion” was meant “religion.” The saying, says Dr. Müller, “seems to me to have the massive, full, and noble ring of Herakleitos.” It is hardly for rationalists to demur.
Much discussion has been set up by the common attribution to Herakleitos in antiquity of the doctrine of the ultimate conflagration of all things. But for this there is no ground in any actual passage preserved from his works; and it appears to have been a mere misconception of his doctrine in regard to Fire. His monistic doctrine was, in brief, that all the opposing and contrasted things in the universe, heat and cold, day and night, evil and good, imply each other, and exist only in the relation of contrast; and he conceived fire as something in which opposites were solved.[124] Upon this stroke of mysticism was concentrated the discussion which might usefully have been turned on his criticism of popular religion; his negative wisdom was substantially ignored, and his obscure speculation, treated as his main contribution to thought, was misunderstood and perverted.
A limit was doubtless soon set to free speech even in Elea; and the Eleatic school after Xenophanes, in the hands of his pupil Parmenides (fl. 500 B.C.), Zeno (fl. 464), Melissos of Samos (fl. 444), and their successors, is found turning first to deep metaphysic and then to verbal dialectic, to discussion on being and not being, the impossibility of motion, and the trick-problem of Achilles and the tortoise. It is conceivable that thought took these lines because others were socially closed. Parmenides, a notably philosophic spirit (whom Plato, meeting him in youth, felt to have “an exceptionally wonderful depth of mind,” but regarded as a man to be feared as well as reverenced),[125] made short work of the counter-sense of not being, but does not seem to have dealt at close quarters with popular creeds. Melissos, a man of action, who led a successful sally to capture the Athenian fleet,[126] was apparently the most pronounced freethinker of the three named,[127] in that he said of the Gods “there was no need to define them, since there was no knowledge of them.”[128] Such utterance could not be carried far in any Greek community; and there lacked the spirit of patient research which might have fruitfully developed the notable hypothesis of Parmenides that the earth is spherical in form.[129] But he too was a loose guesser, adding categories of fire and earth and heat and cold to the formative and material “principles” of his predecessors; and where he divagated weaker minds could not but lose themselves. From Melissos and Parmenides there is accordingly a rapid descent in philosophy to professional verbalism, popular life the while proceeding on the old levels.
It was in this epoch of declining energy and declining freedom that there grew up the nugatory doctrine, associated with the Eleatic school,[130] that the only realities are mental,[131] a formula which eluded at once the problems of Nature and the crudities of religion, and so made its fortune with the idle educated class. Meant to support the cause of reason, it was soon turned, as every slackly-held doctrine must be, to a different account. In the hands of Plato it developed into the doctrine of ideas, which in the later Christian world was to play so large a part, as “Realism,” in checking scientific thought; and in Greece it fatally fostered the indolent evasion of research in physics.[132] Ultimately this made for supernaturalism, which had never been discarded by the main body even of rationalizing thinkers.[133] Thus the geographer and historian Hekataios of Miletos (fl. 500 B.C.), living at the great centre of rationalism, while rejecting the mass of Greek fables as “ridiculous,” and proceeding in a fashion long popular to translate them into historical facts, yet affected, in the poetic Greek fashion, to be of divine descent.[134] At the same time he held by such fables as that of the floating island in the Nile and that of the supernormal Hyperboreans. This blending of old and new habits of mind is indeed perhaps the strongest ground for affirming the genuineness of his fragments, which has been disputed.[135] But from his time forward there are many signs of a broad movement of criticism, doubt, inquiry, and reconstruction, involving an extensive discussion of historical as well as religious tradition.[136] There had begun, in short, for the rapidly-developing Greeks, a “discovery of man” such as is ascribed in later times to the age of the Italian Renaissance. In the next generation came the father of humanists, Herodotos, who implicitly carries the process of discrimination still further than did Hekataios; while Sophocles [496–405 B.C.], without ever challenging popular faith, whether implicitly as did Æschylus, or explicitly as did Euripides, “brought down the drama from the skies to the earth; and the drama still follows the course which Sophocles first marked out for it. It was on the Gods, the struggles of the Gods, and on destiny that Æschylus dwelt; it is with man that Sophocles is concerned.”[137]
Still, there was only to be a partial enlightenment of the race, such as we have seen occurring, perhaps about the same period, in India. Sophocles, even while dramatizing the cruel consequences of Greek religion, never made any sign of being delivered from the ordinary Greek conceptions of deity, or gave any help to wiser thought. The social difference between Greece and the monarchic civilizations was after all only one of degree: there, as elsewhere, the social problem was finally unsolved; and the limits to Greek progress were soon approached. But the evolution went far in many places, and it is profoundly interesting to trace it.