What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

You can well imagine how these splendid dreams were regarded by the clever and practical Greek public, as indeed they have been by average men from that day to this, whenever the great theory has been stated afresh by metaphysicians or by mystics. It was the special merit of the Eleatic Zeno (not the great Stoic who lived far later) to show the carping critic that the difficulties which had led the philosopher to discard the senses as guides to truth, can be raised in the case of the common facts of our everyday life, and that the scoffer cannot solve them. I lay stress on these intellectual puzzles, because they have occupied philosophers perpetually down to the present day, and in no particular case can we affirm more decidedly that the Greeks were the fathers of modern thinking. And do not for a moment imagine that because these subtleties lead to no immediate result, they are therefore barren. You might as well say that physical games and exercises are of no use, because they merely result in strengthening and improving the human frame and the human temper, apart from any further result. Now what were Zeno’s puzzles? I will mention but the most obvious. Is it conceivable that sound should be made up of non-sounding things? And yet this absurdity is demonstrable. Drop a single millet seed from your hand upon the grass. It will not make the smallest noise. Go on with a second, a third, and so on, till you reach thousands; it is so with them all. Yet if you turn out a cartful of such seeds, it will make a considerable noise. How is it possible, if each individual grain is silent? Again, you imagine that if two bodies are moving in the same direction, one slower, the other faster, the latter will soon overtake the former. It is not so, and can be proved impossible. Conceive the swift-footed Achilles trying to overtake a tortoise, and that he runs one hundred yards, while the other is crawling but ten. When he has completed his one hundred, the tortoise is still one ahead, when he has added this one, the tortoise is still 1/10 ahead, then 1/100, then 1/1000, and so on ad infinitum, for it is mathematically certain that neither series can ever reach the limit, in the one case of III, in the other of II yards. Therefore it is demonstrated that Achilles can never in all time overtake the tortoise.

But we may go even farther and say that the very idea of motion is inconceivable. Every moving body must move in time, and time is divided into moments of time. At each moment the moving body must either be in the place where it is, or the place where it is not. The latter being manifestly absurd, the body must be in the place where it is. But then of course it is not moving, for motion can only be defined as a change of place. Continuous motion is therefore inconceivable.

I need not do more than mention to you, that these very problems, handed down by Zeno to the schools, formed the subject of interminable disputes for centuries, and if you even now, with all your boasted progress, take them in hand, you will not easily find a logical solution. Happily we are no longer in the condition of those mediæval pedants, of whom we hear that not a few went mad, or died of brain fever, because they could not reconcile the foreknowledge and foreordaining of things by God with the absolute free will of men. Nor are any of you, I sincerely trust, encumbered with the extraordinary fairness of mind of the mediæval ass of Buridanus which being set between two bundles of hay exactly and precisely alike, died of starvation because it could see no possible reason for preferring to eat the one before the other. Nevertheless, I trust you will appreciate that the mental subtlety we inherit from the Greeks is no small part of our education.

But it is not merely in the hard logic of controversy that the Greek Pantheists have left a great legacy to mankind. If I mistake not, the higher poetry of these latter days is deeply indebted to that grandiose theory, that all nature is but one, that all things whether mute or speaking, whether still or moving, whether fair or hideous, are all the manifestations of the one great All, the ineffable substance which some call a world-soul, some the universe, some God, the supreme One, without variableness or shadow of turning, though only apprehended by man in myriad variations. You can find that view of things in Shelley, in Wordsworth, in Tennyson, and it is not too much to say that at their highest moments, and in their noblest verse, they are all inspired with this Divine intoxication. It is common to call it Platonism, and my old friend Mr. Shorthouse even wrote an essay to show that the respectable and orderly Wordsworth could hardly be called a Christian, so saturated was he with this Pantheistic feeling. His visions of the pre-existence of the human soul—these were indeed Platonic; his Pantheistic passages come from the influence which Plato acknowledges, but which he does not allow to subjugate him. Wordsworth is the most uneven and often prosaic of poets, but in his greatest moments he too feels that intercommunion of all nature which is unmistakably Greek and not English—

A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,—
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things.

Time fails me to go into the fascinating subject of the Pantheism of Tennyson, and of other of our poets. It is indeed only spasmodic, but it is there, and is a strange note in the singing of an otherwise tame and prosaic race.

Let us now return to the great procession of the sages of Hellas. It does not seem necessary to delay long upon Anaxagoras and Empedocles, though both were very great figures in their day. The principle feature in both their systems was that they felt the want of some ideal, or semi-ideal principle to work as a cause in producing the changes in nature. Anaxagoras postulated the original particles to be very diverse in quality and to enter into the composition of ordinary things so as to make up what we call their various qualities. The food we eat, for example, affects all the various parts of human bodies, however different, such as the tissue of the flesh, the hair, the nails, the viscera, because there is in this food, which is made up from corn or other vegetable and animal substances, an assortment of particles each of which contributes to nourish the member or part akin to it. If we ask how external bodies are brought together, and made up into unities, Anaxagoras felt so keenly the necessity of a moving cause that he set up his famous Nous, which we cannot translate by the word mind, for it was still a material cause, though far more subtle and active than the rest, such as we now imagine ether to be. But even so, Aristotle speaks of Anaxagoras as a great and fruitful innovator, inasmuch as he saw that brute matter cannot begin to act or even to move without some non-material or spiritual, or ideal cause. From what we know of Anaxagoras, he advanced but a little step in this direction himself; he was only groping his way, but to have been pioneer to Plato and to Aristotle is itself no mean praise. In a similar direction, the famous Empedocles postulated the principles of Love and Hate, much as we now postulate Attraction and Repulsion, to explain the varieties, and the movements, in external nature.

Observe that not one of these Ionic philosophers had yet asserted the great contrast of mind and matter, the still greater contrast of a Divine architect and his work. The phenomena of mind seemed to them but to be the result of a subtle and more impalpable combination of elements not differing in kind from the nature of material substances. So when a wholly different school came to review what the ancients had accomplished, the Nous of Anaxagoras, and the Love and Hate of Empedocles, were hardly felt to be steps in advance. In fact for a while the development seemed to be the other way, for the last great theory we have to notice, before we come to the ideal philosophy of Plato and his followers, is more decidedly materialistic than all its predecessors. That is the famous Atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus, which maintained that the universe contains no elements but atoms and the void, the atoms being hard physical particles of only one quality but capable of myriad mechanical combinations in and by means of the void, or empty space which existed more or less in every body. As a hypothesis, this is the simplest that has ever been offered to explain the constitution of matter; it has consequently lasted all through the Renascence of learning into the newer age and has formed the very basis of the modern science of chemistry. The original atoms were not conceived as mathematical points, or as having any spiritual quality like the monads of Leibnitz; they were merely very small, impenetrable, and differing in figure. It was the density of their combination and hence the small fraction of void spaces in any body which made the difference of specific gravity, and the difference of their shape produced other qualities.

But how did these atoms come together? Here Democritus showed a prophetic clearness of sight which may well astonish modern critics. He regarded motion in these atoms as a primal fact, probably deriving it from the theory of Heracleitus. He held that as these atoms collided in the void, not always directly, but obliquely, the striking and the struck assumed a rotatory motion, and so established vortices which either attracted suitable atoms or rejected others by the centrifugal force of this rotation. Thus were constructed not only the great spheres that we observe in the sky, but all the ordinary objects around us. Into his explanations of the causes of the irregular forms of these objects I cannot enter, by reason of their intricacy. But to what consequences his theory led him may be told you in a sentence. He maintained, with the imagination of a great scientific mind, that there were an endless number of world-systems through space, differing merely in magnitude, some furnished with several moons, some in process of becoming, others, owing to collisions, in process of destruction, some of them wholly deficient in moisture, and hence devoid of animal and plant life. These are all consequences which we have drawn from the use of the telescope and even the spectroscope, but which this wonderful man reached by way of philosophical thinking.

Aristotle makes it his chief objection to the Atomic theory that it is purely descriptive of phenomena without assigning any cause for the primeval motion of the atoms; that it recognises no Architect, no Demiurge who set the myriad crowd of particles into motion, and then into regulated action. But Aristotle was misled by an assumption which has infected philosophy down to the present day—the assumption that a state of rest is prior to, and more natural to matter than a state of motion. This prejudice did not mislead Democritus, though it is an idol not only of the cave, as Bacon would say, but also of the forum. We have been misled and deceived by relative want of motion, to consider that until disturbed by an active impulse matter occupies a fixed place. But now, I would almost say since the twentieth century dawned, this old fallacy is giving way to the newer conception that there is no such thing as rest in nature, nay not even within the particles of any solid body. So then the primal assumption of the Greek thinker that motion is the natural state of matter was a wonderful anticipation of science, and shows once more what giant strides the human race may make by thinking as compared with the mere recording of experiments. Even now, when students of experimental physics are degenerating into mere mechanics, who seek to interrogate nature by the use of delicate machinery, and carefully recorded occurrences, I am assured by those in our great University who have been compelled in earlier life to acquire a sound knowledge of Greek philosophy, that the study of the old Hylozoists—the Ionic schools we have reviewed—is the very best introduction to the higher task of framing theories from experiments, and when I have heard read in the schools essays written in ignorance of these theories, I have often wondered at the absence of scientific logic of consistent thinking, of clear imagining which characterises the modern scientist. And when we are faced in our universities by the gigantic demands of modern scientists for laboratories, machinery, upkeep, and what not, by way of promoting what they call very ridiculously original research, they should be told openly and constantly that no mere mechanic, no mere tradesman, however splendidly equipped, will ever be worth one straw in original research. Such a high calling, if it is not to be mere name, a mere imposture, requires as its first implement a trained intellect, taught to speculate, and to devise theories which may or may not be verified or illustrated by mechanical tools. The greatest discoverers in modern science were men with bad tools, and small equipment. The old Greeks had none at all, and yet how many of the world’s mysteries did they approach and solve, merely by the force of pure and sound speculation! When we hear little modern men of science wondering how the Greeks could have got so far without modern instruments, we feel rather inclined to tell them we wonder the moderns have done so much with the help of these, for in abstract thinking lies the real basis of every great discovery.