Cut keenly through the liquid air,
And in their own pure tints arrayed,
Scorn earth's green robes which change and fade,
And stand in beauty undecayed,
Guards of the bold and free.”[326]
It seems to me essential to bear in mind throughout our whole inquiry this standing-point of the Greek mind, because through all the succession of schools and the fluctuation of doctrines, it remains, so to say, the ground-work on which they are embroidered. It is the very texture of Hellenic thought upon which first Pythagoras, then Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Cleanthes, Panætius, and even Plotinus and Porphyrius spin their web. They vary the decoration, but the substance remains unaltered. This standing-point rules the conception of virtue, and therefore of the whole moral world. It reaches also to the final end of man, and determines it.
Moreover as the intellectual power of man seems to have culminated in the Hellenic race, so it would seem that a state of things existed among that people which left the human reason practically more to its own unaided resources than we find to have been the case elsewhere. No doubt the Greek mind had lived and brooded for ages upon the remains of original revelation, nor can any learning now completely unravel the interwoven threads of tradition and reason so as to distinguish their separate work. However, it is certain that in the sixth century before Christ the [pg 383] Greeks were without a hierarchy, and without a definite theology: not indeed without individual priesthoods, traditionary rites, and an existing worship, as well as certain mysteries which professed to communicate a higher and more recondite doctrine than that exposed to the vulgar gaze. But in the absence of any hierarchy holding this priesthood together, and teaching anything like a specific doctrine about divine and human things, a very large range indeed was given to the mind, acting upon this shadowy religious belief, and reacted upon by it, to form their philosophy. The Greeks did not, any more than antiquity in general, use the acts of religious service for instruction by religious discourse.[327] In other words, there was no such thing as preaching among them. A domain therefore was open to the philosopher on which he might stand without directly impeaching the ancestral worship, while he examined its grounds, and perhaps sapped its foundations. He was therein taking up a position which their priests, the civil functionaries of religious rites scarcely any longer retaining a spiritual meaning or a moral cogency, had not occupied.
Thus it was that in the midst of a people who worshipped traditionally a multitude of gods and [pg 384] goddesses, such as we have them exhibited in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, the chief, perhaps the only, and the yet unwritten literature of that day, beings with a personal character and will, who were supposed to divide the government of the world between them, with a more or less recognised sovereignty of one chief, arose men who set themselves by the light of reason to think steadily and continuously how that world in which they were living had become what it was. Such a movement of mind indicated in itself dissatisfaction with the existing religion, wherein the gods were considered the causes of things, and their wills the rulers of them, though in the background even here loomed the idea of fate, the representative, as it were, of brute matter, from which the Greek mind could never disengage itself. Yet we do not find that these philosophers set themselves openly to attack the existing religion; rather leaving it in possession, and themselves usually complying with its forms, they pursued their own train of thought, as it were by its side, not choosing to look whither it would lead them.
Such very much appears the position of inquirers in the first period of Greek philosophy, which is generally made to extend from its rise under Thales to the time of the Sophists and Socrates. Their thoughts were mainly occupied with the appearances of the physical world: they speculated [pg 385] how it could have arisen. Thus Thales, we are told, imagined its first principle to be water; Anaximander, boundless matter; Anaximenes, air; the Pythagoreans said, all is number; the Eleatic school, all is the one unchangeable being.[328] On the contrary Heracleitus conceived the one Being as ever in motion, involved in perpetual change: in accordance with which he nowhere finds true knowledge, and thinks the mass of men have no understanding for eternal truth.[329] Empedocles of Agrigentum sets forth the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, as the material principles or roots of things, attaching to these two ideal principles as moving forces, Love as the unitive, and Hatred as the severing.[330] Anaxagoras, over and above mechanical causes, to which he limited himself in the explanation of everything in particular, recognises a divine spirit, which as the finest of all things is simple, unmixed, passionless reason, which came upon chaos, forming and ordering the world out of it.[331] Democritus of Abdera takes for his principles the Full and the Empty, identifying these with Being and Non-being, or Something and Nothing. His Full consists of indivisible atoms.[332]
The remarkable thing about all these systems, if we may so call them, is, that while the existing popular religion teemed over, so to say, with the [pg 386] idea of a number of personal agents directing human things, these philosophers nearly all concurred in the attempt to find some one agent, and that material, from which all should spring. As yet even the radical distinction of matter and spirit was not clear to their minds:[333] the soul of the individual man was to them merely a particle of the vital power which disclosed itself through the universe, the purest portion, but a portion still, of primal matter. In their conception of the constituent cause while they advanced towards unity they receded from personality. Even the world-forming Intelligence of Anaxagoras, who first distinctly declares that spirit is not mixed with matter, works only as a power of nature, and is portrayed to us in a semi-sensuous form, as a finer matter.[334]