External evidence tells us that already, a thousand years before the Aryans began to move, Egypt had mapped out the stars in constellations and divided the zodiac into twelve signs, and we are told by Aristotle that the Egyptians “excelled in mathematics”. But if there was among the priests a “philosophy” in our sense of the word, we know little of it—perhaps because truth, unadorned by myth, was regarded in those days as something dangerous, to be kept religiously secret from all save those who were specially prepared to receive it. This idea of inner religious teachings, guarded carefully from the ignorant and impure, survived in great force among the Greeks themselves, and we come across references in their philosophy to institutions called Mysteries, which were evidently felt by them to lie at the core of their national and intellectual life. Thus that hard-worked little English trisyllable, without which minor poetry and sensational journalism could barely eke out a miserable existence, has a long and dignified history, into which we must pry a little farther if we wish to understand how Greek thought and feeling have passed over into our language.
We have adopted from Latin the word initiate, which meant ‘to admit a person to these Mysteries’, and the importance attached to secrecy is shown by the fact that ‘muein’, the Greek for ‘to initiate‘, meant originally ‘to keep silent’. From it the substantive ‘mu-sterion’ was developed, thence the Latin ‘mysterium’, and so the English word. The secrets of the Greek Mysteries were guarded so jealously and under such heavy penalties that we still know very little about them. All we can say is that the two principal ideas attaching to them in contemporary minds were, firstly, that they revealed in some way the inner meaning of external appearances, and secondly, that the “initiate” attained immortality in a sense different from that of the uninitiated. The ceremony he went through symbolized dying in order to be “born again”, and when it was over, he believed that the mortal part of his soul had died, and that what had risen again was immortal and eternal. Such were the associations which St. Paul had in mind, and which he called to the imaginations of his hearers, when he made use of the impressive words: “Behold, I tell you a mystery!” And it is the same whenever the word occurs elsewhere in the New Testament and in writings of that period, for it retained its technical meaning and associations well on into the Christian era.[26]
The first man—as far as we know—to call himself a ‘philosophos’, or lover of wisdom, was Pythagoras, who applied the label to himself and his followers. Philosophy among the Pythagoreans, with its emphasis on astronomy, geometry, and number, was still decidedly Egyptian; but gradually, from these starry beginnings, the Greek mind built up a vast, independent edifice of thought and language. The words that have come into our language directly from Greek philosophy are numerous enough, but if we were to add those which have reached us in Latinized form, and finally those words which are actually Latin, but which take their whole meaning from the Greek thought they were used to translate, we should fill several pages with the mere enumeration of them. The list would spread itself all over the dictionary, varying from such highly technical terms as homonym and noumena to common ones like individual, method, and subject.
Perhaps a more accurate term than Greek philosophy would be “Greek thought”, for Greek thinkers took some time to arrive at the distinction, so familiar to us, between philosophy and other branches of study such as history. The Greek word ‘historia’ meant at first simply ‘knowledge gained by inquiry’, and some of the words which follow are first found in the works of Hesiod and Herodotus.
Among the words which have come to us from earlier Greek thought are cosmos[27]—the name applied by the Pythagoreans to the universe, which they perceived as a “shapely” and harmonious whole—geometrical terms such as pyramid (probably of Egyptian origin), hypotenuse and isosceles; many of the technical terms of music, as chord, harmony, melody, tone; of literature: hyperbole, metaphor, rhetoric, syntax, trope; and a host of common words of wider significance, such as academy, analogy, aristocracy, astronomy, cosmogony, critic, democracy, eclipse, economic, enthusiasm, ethical, genesis, grammatical, hypothesis, mathematical, method, phenomenon, physical, poetic, politics, rhythm, theology, theory. Of those which were translated into Latin by Cicero and other Latin writers, and possibly by Greek schoolmasters in Rome, we may mention air, element, essence, ideal, individual, quality, question, science, species, and vacuum, together with most of the terminology of grammar, such as adjective, case, gender, noun, number, verb,... Type comes from ‘tupos’, the name of the preliminary sketch made by a Greek painter before he started on the work itself.
In a sense, the thought of the earlier Greek philosophers may be said to have reached its consummation, its very fullest expression, in the writings of Plato. Among the words which are first found in his works are the Greek originals of analogy, antipodes, dialectic, enthusiasm, mathematical, synthesis, and system; while he imparted a new and special meaning to many others like method, musical, philosopher, sophist, theory, type, irony (the name he gave to Socrates’s peculiar method of simulating ignorance in order to impart knowledge), and, of course, idea and ideal. Before Plato used it, the word ἰδέα meant simply the form or semblance of anything. It is connected with ‘idein’, ‘to see’[28], and when Cicero came to translate it, he had to use the Latin word ‘species’, which had a similar meaning, being connected with ‘specere’, ‘to see’ and ‘speculum’, ‘a mirror’. To-day idea does not mean to us quite what ἰδέα did to Plato; but tracing the whole history of the word, we can see how it was Plato who, by his creative use of these four letters, began to make it possible for us to get outside our thoughts and look at them, to separate our “ideas” about things from the things themselves.
Thus, it was not only Greek words of which he was to alter the meanings, nor only Greek and Latin words. Love and good, for instance, are neither Greek nor Latin, and beauty is only Latin remotely, yet the spirit of Plato really works more amply in them, and in a thousand others bearing on the presence or absence of these qualities, than it does in such specifically Platonic terms as idea and dialectic. Let us try and trace the origin of some of the meanings which are commonly attached to the word love. As in the Mysteries, so at the heart of early Greek philosophy lay two fundamental assumptions. One was that an inner meaning lay hid behind external phenomena. Out of this Plato’s lucid mind brought to the surface of Europe’s consciousness the stupendous conception that all matter is but an imperfect copy of spiritual “types” or “ideas”—eternal principles which, so far from being abstractions, are the only real Beings, which were in their place before matter came into existence, and which will remain after it has passed away. The other assumption concerned the attainment by man of immortality. The two were complementary. Just as it was only the immortal part of man which could get into touch with the eternal secret behind the changing forms of Nature, so also it was only by striving to contemplate that eternal that man could develop the eternal part of himself and put on incorruption. There remained the question of how to rise from the contemplation of the transient to the contemplation of the eternal, and, for answer, Plato and Socrates evolved that other great conception—perhaps even more far-reaching in its historical effects—that love for a sensual and temporal object is capable of gradual metamorphosis into love for the invisible and eternal. It is not only in the New Testament and the Prayer Book, in the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and all great Romantic poetry that the results of this thinking are to be seen. Through the Church and the poets to the dramatist and the novelist, and through them to the common people—there is no soulful drawing-room ballad, no cinema-plot, no day-dream novelette or genteel text on the wall of a cottage parlour through which, every time the hackneyed word is brought into play, the authentic spirit of Plato does not peep for a moment forlornly out upon us.
In the latter days of Plato’s life there came to the “Academy” where he taught a young man from Stagira, in Macedonia. His name was Aristotle, and after he left Plato he became for a time the tutor of Alexander the Great. In spite of their proximity in time and space, the difference between Plato’s method of thought and the Aristotelian or peripatetic system can hardly be exaggerated. While Plato had concentrated his intellectual effort on mapping out what we should now call the “inner” world of human consciousness; starting from the point of view of ancient tradition and myth, and working outward; relating his thoughts to one another in accordance, as it were, with their own inherent qualities; and deducing the sense-world from the spiritual world; Aristotle turned to the acquisition of knowledge about the outer world of matter and energy—that is to say, that part of the world which can be apprehended by the five senses and the brain. The two philosophers were alike in their emphasis on the importance of cultivating immortality—or rather of “immortalling” (for they used a special verb which we have lost), but otherwise there were few resemblances indeed. To Plato the soul of the universe had seemed inseparable from his own soul, and natural phenomena such as the revolutions of the planets had interested him rather as tangible, outward pictures of the life within that soul. To Aristotle the world outside himself was interesting more for its own sake. Plato had looked up to “Ideas”—real Beings with an existence of their own, which stood behind physical phenomena rather than within them. Aristotle deliberately attacked this doctrine, maintaining that the Ideas were immanent; they could not have existed before visible Nature, nor could they have any being apart from it; and they could only be arrived at, he said, by investigating Nature itself. When Aristotle laid down his pen after writing the Metaphysics, the word idea had taken a long step towards its present meaning.
Thus in Aristotle’s imagination the two worlds, outer and inner, met and came into contact in quite a new way. The mind was, as it were, put at the absolute disposal of matter; it ceased to brood on what arose from within, and turned its attention outwards. The result of this was, of course, an enormous increase in the amount of knowledge concerning the material processes of the outer world. But that was not the first result. For, curiously enough, the first result was a pronounced hardening and sharpening of the mind’s own outlines. Struggling to fit herself, as into a glove, to the processes of cause and effect observed in physical phenomena, the mind became suddenly conscious of her own shape. She was astonished and delighted. She had discovered logic. The actual Greek word ‘logic’ (ή λογική τέχνη) is first found with its present meaning in Cicero, but he is speaking of Aristotle; the thing itself and the technique of it was the invention of Aristotle, and it was Aristotle who first used the word syllogism in its modern sense.
Perhaps the most significant of all those words which are first found in Aristotle’s treatise on Logic is analytic. Here is indeed a new word made to express a new kind of thinking. Energy, entelechy, ethics, physiology, and synonym, are further examples of words which, as far as we know, were actually created by Aristotle, while we owe metaphysics to the accident of his having treated that subject after (‘meta’) his treatise on Physics. Axiom, category, mechanics, organic, physics, and synthesis are Greek words which take their modern meanings chiefly from Aristotle; but his emphasis on the concrete and his constant gravitation towards a kind of knowledge which might turn out to be practically useful evidently made him a favourite with the Roman mind. Consequently many of his words have come down to us translated into Latin. Among those which we can actually trace are absolute, actual, definition, equivocal, induction, instance, moral, potential, property, quintessence, subject,[29] substance, virtual, and the grammatical term particle; of the plentiful number which have flown more indirectly from his mind we may mention conceit and concept, deduction, difference, experiment, principle, and universal. In quantity (a translation of the Greek ‘posotes’—‘how-muchness’—and seemingly formed by Aristotle on the analogy of Plato’s ‘poiotēs’, from which we have quality) we can perhaps see the beginning of that interest in the calculable aspect of the objects of the visible world from which the exact sciences have arisen. The human mind had now begun to weigh and measure, to examine and compare; and that weighing and measuring has gone on—with intervals—for twenty-three centuries.