And free from toil, by force of mind, he moves the mighty whole.”
Blackie.
The noble conception of Deity entertained by Xenophanes was soon perverted. We find his pupil Parmen’ides “the Great” in the next century doing away with the personality of God, and confounding the divine nature with pure being, which he made equivalent to thought.
Democ’ritus, of Abde’ra in Thrace (460-357 B.C.), known as the laughing philosopher from his constantly deriding the weaknesses of men, put forth the atomic theory,—that the universe is made up of countless minute, intangible atoms, and that in the motion of such atoms, round and fiery, consisted the movements of the mind and soul. God had no place in this philosophy; matter, time, space, and motion, were eternal. Bodies were formed by the fortuitous concurrence of atoms; and by the affinities and motions of atoms in the vacuum that made up the universe, all natural phenomena were produced.
Such was the wisdom of one who laughed at the follies of his fellows, and is stated to have put out his own eyes that nothing might distract the current of his thoughts.
School of Epicurus.—The materialism of Democritus was at a later day elaborated by Epicurus (born on Samos about 340 B.C.) into a system of philosophy which gained so many converts that we are told whole cities could not contain the friends and followers of its author. According to the Epicurean philosophy, chance governed the world of atoms; there was no life beyond the grave. The gods were immortal, but were mere figure-heads, enjoying an emotionless inactivity, indifferent alike to the vices and fortunes of men: most likely Epicurus did not believe in any gods at all, but allowed their existence, as nonentities, that he might not shock the prejudices of the Athenians. Pleasure he made the chief end of life; but with him pleasure was not sensual indulgence; it lay in freedom from pain, the sober exercise of reason, and the nobler enjoyments of man’s higher nature. Such a doctrine, it is plain, was but too easy of perversion. The pure, high-toned “pleasure” of the moral Epicurus degenerated with the voluptuaries and profligates that adopted his tenets into the vilest excesses, and the very name epicure is applied to one unduly addicted to the gratifying of the appetite.
The Skeptical Philosophy.—Pyrrho, who flourished about 300 B.C., was the father of the Skeptics. They held that there was no standard of truth appreciable by the human mind; nothing can therefore be asserted as true. Pyrrho doubted everything; his disciples used to follow him, lest, in practically applying his theory, he should be run over in the streets or walk off a precipice.
The Socratic School.—When Socrates (470-399 B.C.) came upon the stage in the golden period of Athens, it was to denounce the atheistical philosophy of his predecessors, and take the field against the Sophists, who made endless disputation, fallacious but specious, the head and front of their system. “These word-snapping quibblers,” says Felton, “were prodigious favorites with the Athenians,—men who proved that right was wrong, and wrong right, and that there was neither wrong nor right; that knowing one thing is knowing everything, and that there is no such thing as knowing anything at all; that as the beautiful exists by the presence of beauty, so a man becomes an ass by the presence of an ass; and so on, ringing myriads of changes, like the fools in Shakespeare, upon these quirks of jugglery.”
Socrates had an effective way of dealing with these gentry. By cunningly contrived questions, which at first seemed to have no bearing on the point at issue, he led them on from admission to admission, until he involved them in absurdities and convicted them out of their own mouths.
For one like Socrates, the mythology of Greece was too gross, the speculations of the philosophy then current were too unreal and hollow. He aspired to something better. At length the unity of God, the soul’s immortality, and the moral responsibility of man, dawned upon his mind—sublime truths which he might well have drawn from revelation itself. The practice of virtue he inculcated as indispensable to happiness and true religion. A demon, or secret influence, he said, constantly attended him, and was his director in the work of social reform no less than in the every-day affairs of life. Whether he deceived himself in this belief or strove to deceive others into it that he might gain credence for his doctrines, certain it is that his teachings exercised a most wholesome influence. All subsequent Greek philosophy is stamped with their impress. (See Blackie’s “Horæ Hellenicæ.”)