It dwelt with the feeble glimmering,

It brought forth the night.

Hesiod must have had some such primitive speculation to work on, but he does not tell us anything clearly on the subject.

We have records of great activity in the production of cosmogonies during the whole of the sixth century B.C., and we know something of the systems of Epimenides, Pherekydes,[[9]] and Akousilaos. As there were speculations of this kind even before Hesiod, we need have no hesitation in believing that the earliest Orphic cosmogony goes back to that century too.[[10]] The feature which is common to all these systems is the attempt to get behind the gap, and to put Kronos or Zeus in the first place. This is what Aristotle has in view when he distinguishes the “theologians” from those who were half theologians and half philosophers, and who put what was best in the beginning.[[11]] It is obvious, however, that this process is the very reverse of scientific, and might be carried on indefinitely; so we have nothing to do with the cosmogonists in our present inquiry, except so far as they can be shown to have influenced the course of more sober investigations. Indeed, these speculations are still based on the primitive view of the world, and so fall outside the limits we have traced for ourselves.

General characteristics of early Greek cosmology.

VI. What, then, was the step that placed the Ionian cosmologists once for all above the level of the Maoris? Grote and Zeller make it consist in the substitution of impersonal causes acting according to law for personal causes acting arbitrarily. But the distinction between personal and impersonal was not really felt in antiquity, and it is a mistake to lay much stress on it. It seems rather that the real advance made by the scientific men of Miletos was that they left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what all things really are now.

Ex nihilo nihil.

The great principle which underlies all their thinking, though it is first put into words by Parmenides, is that Nothing comes into being out of nothing, and nothing passes away into nothing. They saw, however, that particular things were always coming into being and passing away again, and from this it followed that their existence was no true or stable one. The only things that were real and eternal were the original matter which passed through all these changes and the motion which gave rise to them, to which was soon added that law of proportion or compensation which, despite the continual becoming and passing away of things, secured the relative permanence and stability of the various forms of existence that go to make up the world. That these were, in fact, the leading ideas of the early cosmologists, cannot, of course, be proved till we have given a detailed exposition of their systems; but we can show at once how natural it was for such thoughts to come to them. It is always the problem of change and decay that first excites the wonder which, as Plato says, is the starting-point of all philosophy. Besides this, there was in the Ionic nature a vein of melancholy which led it to brood upon the instability of things. Even before the time of Thales, Mimnermos of Kolophon sings the sadness of change; and, at a later date, the lament of Simonides, that the generations of men fall like the leaves of the forest, touches a chord already struck by the earliest singer of Ionia.[[12]] Now, so long as men could believe everything they saw was alive like themselves, the spectacle of the unceasing death and new birth of nature would only tinge their thoughts with a certain mournfulness, which would find its expression in such things as the Linos dirges which the Greeks borrowed from their Asiatic neighbours;[[13]] but when primitive animism, which had seen conscious life everywhere, was gone, and polytheistic mythology, which had personified at least the more striking natural phenomena, was going, it must have seemed that there was nowhere any abiding reality. Nowadays we are accustomed, for good and for ill, to the notion of dead things, obedient, not to inner impulses, but solely to mechanical laws. But that is not the view of the natural man, and we may be sure that, when first it forced itself on him, it must have provoked a strong sense of dissatisfaction. Relief was only to be had from the reflexion that as nothing comes from nothing, nothing can pass away into nothing. There must, then, be something which always is, something fundamental which persists throughout all change, and ceases to exist in one form only that it may reappear in another. It is significant that this something is spoken of as “deathless” and “ageless.”[[14]]

Φύσις

VII. So far as I know, no historian of Greek philosophy has clearly laid it down that the word which was used by the early cosmologists to express this idea of a permanent and primary substance was none other than φύσις; and that the title Περὶ φύσεως, so commonly given to philosophical works of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.,[[15]] means simply Concerning the Primary Substance. Both Plato and Aristotle use the term in this sense when they are discussing the earlier philosophy,[[16]] and its history shows clearly enough what its original meaning must have been. In Greek philosophical language, φύσις always means that which is primary, fundamental, and persistent, as opposed to what is secondary, derivative, and transient; what is “given,” as opposed to that which is made or becomes. It is what is there to begin with. It is true that Plato and his successors also identify φύσις with the best or most normal condition of a thing; but that is just because they held the goal of any development to be prior to the process by which it is reached. Such an idea was wholly unknown to the pioneers of philosophy. They sought the explanation of the incomplete world we know, not in the end, but in the beginning. It seemed to them that, if only they could strip off all the modifications which Art and Chance had introduced, they would get at the ultimately real; and so the search after φύσις, first in the world at large and afterwards in human society, became the chief interest of the age we have to deal with.