Division I.—Period Before Socrates
Section I. Greek Wisdom in the Legendary Ages
1. Greece and Asia: the contrast between the histories. The opposition between Greece and Asia presents itself to the schoolboy who is reading the Homeric poems. It meets him again in the first pages of Herodotus; he traces it through the whole of his varied narrative; it connects the episodes with the main story; it gives a unity to books which strike him at first as confused and miscellaneous. In them, Persia gradually becomes the representative of Asia; the glorious conflict of the historian’s own age interprets all the ages that had preceded it. Wherever the young reader turns he is reminded of this contrast, and the connection between the two people. He finds it in the retreat of the Ten Thousand; it is forced upon him by the efforts of the leader of that retreat to bring Persian manners and Persian virtues before the minds of his countrymen. He cannot dwell upon the conflicts of the republics among themselves without some event to recall to him the monarchy which had sought to crush them, and which they had defied. The mind of Demosthenes is inspired by the thought of that republican triumph, when he determines that a pretended Greek shall not obtain the dominion which the ruler of the whole barbarian world could not win. It inspires no less the heart of the son of the hated Macedonian, when he goes forth to prove that the signal-fires which proclaimed that Troy had fallen were faithful prophecies that the furthest regions of the East should bow before the descendants of Odysseus and Neoptolemus.
2. Ground of this contrast. A few very notorious facts will show that the opposition which thus presents itself on the surface of the history existed in the heart of these nations. Ormuzd and Zeus. The student perceives at once that Ormuzd was not the god of the Greeks. Goodness is not the primary characteristic of any one of their divinities. What their essential and common quality is, it is not, we think, hard to discover. The continually recurring epithet μητίετα, as applied to Zeus, immediately suggests it. The title Cloudcompeller may express his acts: this is clearly meant to be significant of his very nature. For it is not a solitary expression; the more we consider the different transactions which Homer attributes to the father of gods and men, the more do we find “counsel” to be the main quality which is indicated by them. The mind of the god may be swayed by various impulses and passions, but he always acts with a purpose and devises a train of means for the accomplishment of it.
3. Counsel the attribute of the Greek god. The other gods are like Zeus. Apollo is the deviser and suggester of counsels; Athene still more conspicuously. If this character is wanting in Ares and Aphrodite, they become, for that reason, objects of ridicule to mortals, let the sword of the first and the girdle of the other be ever so mighty.
4. This quality seems to involve at once the idea of secresy and of society. The counsels are carried on deep within the heart of the divinity, but they must be shared. The divine assembly. Zeus must communicate his intentions, or part of his intentions, to the Olympian assembly; they must be submitted to discussion, deliberation, opposition: there must be ministers to execute them; often opposing agents to thwart them. Instead of various beneficent powers, all proceeding from Ormuzd, all invoked by his name, all united against the realm of darkness, the Greek does homage to a number of beings who are bringing about a result by their conspiracies and contradictions, who are in themselves neither good nor evil, who have the same inclinations to good and evil with human beings, who often seem physically not more powerful, but who have a depth and subtlety of wisdom to which men cannot attain.
5. The Greek heroes and kings spring from Zeus. In Persia the king presents an image of god, but he is not personally related to him. Ormuzd is continually contemplated as the unapproachable light; his goodness, though it is shown in acts of mercy to man, is not to be confounded with human goodness. But the counsellors in Olympus are always related to sages below; they meet with mortal nymphs, become the fathers of earthly heroes, impart to them their sceptres and their wisdom. The kings reign as sons of Jove. In early times the feeling of belonging to the divine race is the warrant of their sharing the divine attributes. Wisdom or counsel the royal characteristic. There is never the least doubt what is the special and necessary constituent of royalty; it is not physical strength—it is not mercy, kindness, justice—it is not courage; it is the being a man of many devices. Courage, justice, mercy, may or may not be added to this gift or be involved in it; but it is the fundamental one, all others are accessory. Strength is thrown into the shade in those heroes in whom we would expect it most; lightness and grace are preferred to it: Achilles is the “swift-of-foot.” The ambush and stratagem, as has been so often observed, are quite as much the test of the hero as the open fight. Diomed shows his heroic talent not more in wounding Ares than in persuading Glaucon to change the golden armour for the iron, that worth a hundred oxen’s hides for that worth nine, when they are meeting as friends on the field of battle and telling the story of their kinsmanship. These are indications of a deep and pervading spirit, exhibiting itself, be it remembered, in a stage of society which we are wont to speak of, and in one sense rightly, as one of great simplicity, and in those fights where strength and personal prowess might seem to be all in all. The Homeric battle-field and council-chamber. Clearly they are not all in all; the council-chamber is as much a part of the Homeric picture as the field of battle: on that field, if we see distinct heroes in a death-struggle, we see also the troops moving collected, in ranks, in silence (an excellence which, except on a field of battle, would not have been specially characteristic of Greeks).
6. Odysseus the type of the Greek nation. No one who considers the story of Odysseus, and feels, as all have felt, that he represented actually and prophetically all of his country’s mind and tendencies, will doubt that πολύμητις is the epithet for the Greek hero as much as for the god. But no one who feels the exceeding beauty, delicacy, pathos of that story, will admit for a moment that “cunning” or “crafty” is an adequate—even the most distant approximation to an adequate—version of that title. All possibilities of craft and cunning lie in it; such qualities can scarcely have been morally offensive to the man or the nation that claimed it as the most honourable of all badges. Trick not essential to the character. Within it also lay the possibilities of a wisdom which might rise superior to tricks and falsehood, which might discover them to be essentially foolish. The “man of many counsels” had a large sympathy, a wonderful power of communicating with men, of receiving impressions from them, of making an impression on them. Its noble qualities. He had the clearest, sharpest faculty of observation; all the forms of nature presented themselves to him in their distinctest outline, with all their varying shadows. Animal nature did homage to the higher instinct which dwelt in him. He felt that material things were given him to shape and mould, and quicken. Though fond of seeing the ways and the cities of men, he had still the sense of a home; the rocks of Ithaca were dearer to him than all the world besides—dear to him for the sake of those who dwelt there. Sacredness of voluntary ties: marriage. He might cast away many ties which he found established at his birth; he might leave his father’s house to become a wanderer and seeker of new lands: but the voluntary bonds into which he had entered, the marriage-tie, the oath to the kinsman, or fellow-citizen, or even the stranger, confirmed by the divine sacrifice, were unspeakably precious; no perils or wars were too long or distant to punish the breach of them. Of all men he most understands the meaning and worth of association, yet he is of all men the most tempted to choose a way of his own: of all men he is most disposed to recognise law and government as especially belonging to man, and distinguishing them from the inferior creatures; the most inclined to break loose from law and government, in his eagerness to assert the skill of men to create them for themselves.
7. Contrast of Dorian and Ionian. In process of time some of these great contrasts, especially the last, were exhibited in the rivalship of the Dorian and Ionian tribes. Though we may be continually tempted to fix upon the last as the proper specimens of the Greek character, though there is great excuse for such a notion, yet it is only in contemplating them as both equally Greeks that we can attain to a full appreciation of that which distinguished this people from every other on the face of the earth. The character of both opposed to the Persian. If there were points of sympathy between the Lacedæmonian and the Persian character, there was also the strongest repulsion between them. The Spartan Pausanias, affecting the airs of an Asiatic satrap, is a far more ludicrous object than Themistocles would have been in the same position. The Spartan kings when compared with the king exhibit the difference between the East and West even more strikingly than the Athenian democracy. The legislation of Lycurgus is as little like that of the Medes and Persians as Solon’s. Both essentially Greek. If we inquire the reason of the difference, we shall find that counsel or wisdom, not goodness, is the object of faith and reverence as much with one tribe as the other. It was the very fact of their having this common ground to start from—the sense of a community of feeling and of language—which made the differences of their conceptions respecting the conditions of wisdom and the modes of attaining it so remarkable, and their actual contests so terrible. Indeed, the existence of such opposing tribes, and the vast influence which they were both able to exert, suggest the greatest and most memorable contrast between European and Asiatic life. The vastness of the oriental despotism, with all the different races blended together, submitting to one central lord—what a picture is this to contemplate side by side with the struggles of two small cities, each possessed with the idea of one government or principle being better than another, ready to destroy or be sacrificed for the sake of its own maxim—imparting the conviction of it, and the enthusiasm for it, to twenty other cities in different parts of the world, and in a measure to every man who dwelt in every one of them! And it must never be forgotten that, amidst all these conflicts, there was still the common Hellenic name—there was still the feeling in all Greeks that they were separated from barbarians by that name, and by the gifts which it indicated—there was still the god of Delphi who gave counsel to the Ionians and Dorians alike, and from whom the rulers of Asia believed that oracles proceeded, by which they also might be guided.
8. Delphi. The acknowledgment of this teacher of civil wisdom, who at the same time could not easily be separated from the source of light to the world, is one of those facts in Greek history which every thoughtful student has seen to be full of significance. Apollo and the light. Apollo and Artemis, as our own great poet has said, “held the sun and moon in fee;” they, beautiful beings, with human forms and human sympathies, possessed and governed these natural orbs; the material light which proceeded from them was only an emblem of the light which was imparted to the mind of him who sought help from the divine priestess. This inspiration was not merely produced by the exhalations of the cave, nor was it confined to her—the votary shared it in a much more practical sense. Inspiration. In later times, belief in an inspiring god, prompting the highest song as well as the wildest revelry, became embodied in the legends and the festivals of Dionysus. The Greek felt an impulse near him which was degrading him into a beast and a slave, and one which could raise him into a man and freeman. His actual history proved the truth of both his convictions.
9. Zeus and Brahm. If the Zeus of the Greeks is very different from Ormuzd, he is almost as unlike to Brahm. The object of Hindoo worship we have seen is Intelligence, but it is intelligence as contrasted with action. Every Greek legend exhibits gods or heroes as the teachers of some art, as deliverers from some plague or nuisance, as making some one region habitable, or introducing communication between different regions, as establishers of law and order, as builders or defenders of cities. The main tendency of the Greek mind is certainly to contemplate intelligence only as bearing upon action, leading to direct practical results, governing material things and bodies of men.
10. Hence the skill, or counsel, or wisdom of the Greek was especially valued for its creative or productive powers. The more this power exerted itself, the more various the directions which it took; Greek scepticism. the more the suspicion began to arise in the minds of the people, that they were themselves the authors of that to which they looked up,—that the king, the priest, the god, were their own handiwork. Hence there lay in the very heart of the faith of the Greek a seed of unbelief, which was continually fructifying. Hence this unbelief was likely to be most active in those whose faculties were the liveliest and the most energetic. Hence, also, there was something akin to it in the popular feeling and sympathy, even then when it clung most fondly to its old legends and ceremonies. These were loved with a parental more than a childlike fondness; the Greek clave to them as his own, as something which he was to hold against others, not which he depended upon and revered himself.
11. Hermes. If Zeus and Apollo hold the highest place as objects of Greek devotion, Hermes had his own special honour. The teacher of words, the author of eloquence, had conferred a gift upon mortals which the Greeks felt to be greater and more wonderful than the gifts of corn and wine. The power of words. Their latest historian points out with especial carefulness and earnestness, how in the very infancy of the nation the power of words was recognised; how significant was the picture on the shield of Achilles, of the trial in the Agora, and the pleaders who supported each side; how public speaking was felt to be “the standing engine of government and the proximate cause of obedience,”1 long before the heroical had given place to the historical period. The most careless reader of the Iliad must have been struck by the poet’s sense of the wonder which lies in “winged words,” by the emphasis with which he recognises them as the especial characteristic of human beings, by his feeling that through them men held communication with the gods as well as with each other. The power of wisdom and the power of words became indissolubly connected in the Greek mind. By these, men exerted the highest influence of which they were capable; they flew forth from the lips of the speaker messengers of health or of destruction; they were in the most remarkable sense his. Yet there was that in them which he did not make; an order to which he was obliged to conform.
12. The mysteries: what they imported. The mysteries expressed something which words could not express. So far as these were connected with Demeter and her worship, they bore reference of course to the secret and productive powers of vegetables or animals; they might be invested with a more material significance, they might be associated with all gross and sensual images. But the importance which was attached to them by statesmen showed that they were acknowledgments of a wisdom dwelling somewhere, which could not be measured or reduced into human forms, by which the operations of nature, of the mind, and even of political society, were ultimately regulated.
Section II. The Beginning of Philosophy
1. The wise men of Greece. The seven wise men bear the same relation to the after history of Greece which the seven champions of Christendom bear to the history of the Middle Ages. No doubt Bias, Pittacus, Periander, Solon, belong to the region of fact; St. George and St. Denys chiefly to that of fable. But their mystical number shows that they were felt to represent different aspects of the same character. Amongst them are included tyrants, legislators, students of nature. There were the most various reports respecting them. One said that they all occupied themselves with poetry.2 Another that they were merely a set of clever men concerned about law-making.3 They were reported to be favourites of Croesus, with the exception of Thales. Others spoke of their meeting together at the Panionium, or at Delphi. The various notions of them reconcilable. These reports may all be correct. They were, no doubt, mainly men of sagacity, συνετοί, held to possess the divine, heroic, Odyssean gift in a greater degree than their neighbours. That they should have been fond of putting their thoughts in verse was natural. It was a language different from that which men spoke in the market—more than met the ear was expressed by it; common men felt the power of it; a notion of prophecy was still connected with it. That these sages should have cultivated the acquaintance of a great Asiatic dynast, some for a directly personal object, some for the sake of their city, some for the pleasure of exhibiting the power of the Greek in contrast with that which seemed so much greater and was so inferior, is probable. That they should still have been thoroughly Greeks, should have interested themselves in all Greek events for council and government, might also have been concluded. For this reason they will no doubt have held much intercourse with Delphi.
2. The different directions which their wisdom took But, supposing these to have been common characteristics, there was room for the widest divergency in their pursuits. One might glorify himself upon his knowledge of all the weaknesses of his fellows; might apply to his own use the recognised Greek maxim, that the wise man was to have dominion over fools; by fair means or foul, by courtesy or violence, by beneficent acts or destructive ones, he might make himself a tyrant. The tyrant. His claim to that title, his power of holding it, would still be, not that he was member of some illustrious family, or that he supported some particular theory, or that he was a military chief; but that he was a wise man. Another might count it a much nobler work to lay down rules for the preservation and well-being of the city in which he dwelt—rules that would endure after he ceased to belong to it; he might part with ease, wealth, temporary power, for the sake of compassing this end. The legislator. Such a man would be a legislator in the higher sense of the word; but his legislation would still be a form of his “wisdom.” He would be listened to and obeyed only so far as he had acquired the reputation of being a wise man, and could retain it. The student of physics. Lastly, if a man had acquired any of the properly oriental lore, if he had studied astrology, and could calculate eclipses of the sun, there would be some perplexity in the Greek mind respecting him. If he turned his studies in nature to account, either for his own benefit or for the good of his country, he would be regarded as essentially a politician; if he was seen to retire from society for the sake of contemplation, he would be stigmatised as a stargazer. But still the phrase “wise man” would describe him in both characters. It would denote the shrewdness which he displayed in the common affairs of life; it would intimate that he knew or pretended to know things which people in general were ignorant of.
3. Thales, born Ol. 35, 3, or 36, 1. B.C. 639, or 636. Clinton, F.H. In this last description our reader will recognise Thales, who commonly holds the first place among the σοφοί. Herodotus says that “he was a citizen of Miletus, and a Phœnician by descent;” Diogenes Laertius,4 that “he was believed by some to have come from Phœnicia, and to have been made a citizen of Miletus, but that the greater number of people believed him to have been a native, and of an illustrious family.” His Asiatic origin. The authority of Herodotus must assuredly outweigh the judgment of this “greater number of people,” who, of course, were not willing to share the glory of such a name with Asiatics. After all, the Greeks have immeasurably the largest portion in him. If he brought his astrology from Phœnicia, he was a thorough Milesian in the application of it. To the Ionians, says Herodotus,5 he predicted the eclipse which happened when the Lydians and Medes were fighting, and which led to a peace between them. It was he, the Greeks generally believed—Herodotus had a different opinion—who enabled Croesus to pass the Halys, by turning the course of the river, when he was making his fatal attack upon Persia.6 It was said, however, by others that he was no friend of Croesus, that he prevented Miletus from allying itself with his fortunes, and so saved it from the wrath of the conqueror. Bias of Priene gave good advice to the Ionian cities after their overthrow by Harpagus, but Thales, says Herodotus,7 had urged them before their fall to establish a common assembly, and to fix it at Teos.
4. The perplexity of the Greeks respecting him. There were very opposite reports current respecting Thales. Some said that he bought up the oil-presses just before the olive season, that he might show how easily a wise man could make himself rich; others told of his falling into a pit while he was looking at the stars, and of his being mocked by an old woman for knowing that which was over his head so much better than that which lay at his feet.8 These stories are both probably the produce of Greek invention, but they indicate the uncertainty of his countrymen whether they should assign him a place among men of business or theorists, and their notion that in some way or other he blended the two characters. Neither of them, however, accounts for the special distinction which he has acquired, that of being separated from the rest of the σοφοί, and being named a philosopher. He obtains that title from no less an authority than Aristotle,9 who certainly would not have given it him merely because he calculated eclipses, or studied astrology, or made himself rich, or turned the course of the Halys, or suggested a common assembly of Ionians. Nor was the judge a specially favourable one. Aristotle seems to have known little of the Ionian sage. His words intimate that he had seen no writings of Thales, or that there were none. He includes him in a class which he compares to the untrained boxers, who deal out many good blows, but without science.10
5. The philosophy of Thales. “He maintained water to be the ground of all things, and the world to have a soul, and to be full of demons.” Such is the account which the gossiping Greek biographer gives of the “philosophy” of Thales. But this surely was not his philosophy; it is merely the index to his philosophy. How came Thales to think about water at all, or about a ground of all things, or about a world with or without a soul, full or empty of demons? What put him upon seeking when he had the reputation of having found out so much more than other men? And what was he seeking for? The word Philosophy is the plainest and best answer to the question. Wisdom seeking to regulate human affairs. He was thought to have got Wisdom, a wisdom which might be used for ruling men, or making bridges, or making money, or making laws. He had tried it in some of these ways; not altogether without success. He had obtained his full share of admiration. Probably if he had wished to put himself at the head of some party in Miletus, or to embroil it with some other city, he would have found his wisdom amply sufficient. Disappointment. But he had cherished a more extravagant ambition; he had thought he could bind his countrymen and their cities together; that he could make them a peaceful community. Then he discovered that he had elements to deal with which did not acknowledge fixed laws, like the stars; bodies subject to alternations of light and darkness that could not certainly be predicted; strong currents which could not be turned out of their courses so easily as the Halys. The order of nature. Was it among these that he could look with any hope for the principle of order and unity? Must it not rather be in the world which offered itself to his senses, a world subject no doubt to fierce convulsions, but even in them confessing a control? And the wisdom that we boast of so much, can the first principle and root of it be in us? Must it not be somewhere else? Must it not be there where the caprices of men are not at work, or are counterworked by an order which is mightier than they are? Philosophy was the search not for something else, but for Wisdom itself; for the very thing of which other people thought he had the full usufruct and mastery.
6. The application of wisdom changed into the search for it. Whether, then, Thales dealt straight blows or random ones, he was the Greek who discovered that he must ask the question which the man of Uz asked long before: “Where is wisdom found, and where is the place of understanding?”—that it was one to which he and his countrymen were not yet provided with an answer; that it was one to which they might from some source or another expect an answer. If it is said, the answer of Thales was poor and unsatisfactory—even more poor and unsatisfactory on this showing than on any other—we may admit at once that it was not the answer which was wanted for the sake of Thales, or of Ionia, or of mankind. The result at which Thales arrived. But we cannot admit that it was a worthless answer. The fact that moisture is necessary to the life of all things that live, to the growth of all things that grow, is it nothing? Does it not deserve to be noted? No doubt every one has noted it; as every one has remarked the fall of an apple. Is not almost the whole difference between a man whose eyes are in his head and one whose eyes are in the ends of the earth, just this, that the one observes commonplaces, and thinks of them, and that the other passes by and despises them? It cannot be said that Thales exaggerated the importance of the fact which seemed to him so wonderful. He probably underrated its importance. His fact not an insignificant one. And if it appeared to him the one all-absorbing fact, that to which every other was to bow and do homage, let it be remembered that it was his fact, that for which he had travelled, that which had presented itself with mighty force and conviction to his mind. The world would not surely be the better if there were not some to treasure such facts with a mother’s love; we suspect it would be very barren of all precious observations and discoveries.
7. Greek scepticism. It may, however, be urged that such a course actually led and could only lead to scepticism; that the early Greeks, if they had an insecure faith, had still some faith; that they referred wisdom to divine persons, if those persons were called Zeus, Apollo, Athene; that what is personal must be better than what is impersonal; that to find the beginning of things in an element like water is virtually to deny the existence of any distinct divinity; that the doctrines attributed to Thales concerning the world’s soul, and the world being full of demons, contain the germ of all the later Greek pantheism.
8. The true source of this scepticism. These objections are very important, and require a serious treatment. What we shall say of them at present will only be for the sake of removing perplexities from the student’s mind, and enabling him to see more clearly the answer which the subsequent history gives to them. We have observed already that the seed of the most widely-spreading scepticism lay in the Greek mind. The wise Greek had learnt to believe that he was not sprung from the gods, but that they were sprung from him; that their wisdom was derived to them from his. Every new exercise of his faculties—those exercises especially which led to the production of beautiful forms of the divinity—strengthened this conviction; it had already taken unconscious possession of a multitude of minds, it was working itself rapidly into consciousness. Now surely the feeling, “I do not possess wisdom, I must look for it,” instead of being an aggravation of this tendency, was a powerful counteraction of it. The philosophy of Thales an effort to rise out of himself. If Thales had discarded all faith in Apollo and Athene, and had substituted the belief in water as the first germ of all things for it, he would at least have been laying hold of a fact in nature of which he was not the author, while the tendency of his countrymen was to believe nothing except that which they had created. But, so far as we see, the effect of physical inquiries on his mind was not this at all. The religious awe which accompanied it. The acknowledgment of something beyond himself, out of himself, seems rather to have given a religious awe to his mind. “Can our ill doings escape the eye of the gods?” “Nay, not our thoughts,” Thales is said to have answered. The words are less like what a later Greek would have uttered than most of those which are attributed to him; if they are genuine, they may be taken to interpret the other words, “that all things are full of the gods or of demons.”
9. The world full of demons. Whether this phrase of Thales pointed most directly to the connection of demons with himself, or with the world which he beheld through his senses, we may not be able to ascertain. Probably if we had asked him, he could not have told us. The question which occupied him was just this: whether that which he knew was working in him might not have its original home, its highest throne, in Nature; whether the order which he perceived there might not be the order to which he belonged? But it would be a very great mistake to suppose that because he was engaged in this inquiry, all past traditions which reminded him of beings like and related to man were indifferent to him. The World. Poseidon and Oceanus may have been more, not less, venerable to him, from the significance which he attached to the element of water. And when he is said to have believed in “a world with a soul,” we must not allow ourselves to be perplexed by the determinations of the more recent schools from which this language is derived.11 Aristotle felt that Thales was rather seeking to know what the soul is, than settling whether it should be attributed to the universe. Thales seems, he says, to have considered it “a moving power or principle.”12 He found a living moving power in himself, apart from which his own solid body would have been a mere heap of atoms ready to fall into pieces. He found a living power in nature—water or moisture—apart from which the solid framework of things would have been a mere dead heap of atoms. The two facts illustrated and explained each other. It was natural to give a common name to both. The soul. What is this which I call soul, or wisdom, in myself—that which distinguishes Greeks from barbarians, slaves from freemen? Is it not here also, or a particle of it, or perhaps the very root and ground of it?
Section III. The First School
1. The word “school:” what it meant to the early Greeks. We ought to distinguish the first philosopher from those who follow him, that we may not be confused by the word school, or derive our definition of it from times in which it meant chiefly the receivers, transmitters, expounders, developers of a certain set of theories about gods, men, and nature. The men of that which is called the Ionic school were not, in this sense, disciples of Thales. They did not adopt his maxim respecting water, incorporate it with certain maxims of their own, and establish a sect called after their founder. They were connected together by a real bond; but it was one of quite another kind. They were all seekers after wisdom, and they all sought in the same direction, though the conclusions at which they arrived were markedly distinct and opposite. There have been some who have represented this opposition as even more decided than it actually was. It was a favourite practice in old digests of philosophy to speak of Thales as referring all things to water, Anaximander to earth, Anaximenes to air, Heraclitus to fire. Thus the so-called four elements were amicably apportioned among four Ionic teachers. The elements divided between the philosophers In more learned and modern treatises, the natural philosophers of Greece are divided into the dynamical and mechanical—Thales being assigned to the former class; his immediate successor, Anaximander, to the second: whence it is concluded that they cannot have stood to each other in the relation of master and disciple.
2. Anaximander, born B.C. 610. Ol. 42,3. Clinton, F.H. Now Thales did, as we have seen, refer to water as a first principle. Anaximander was a geographer and an inventor of geographical instruments. The earth, therefore, considered as the complex of sea and land, occupied much of his thoughts. But the Infinite (τὸ ἄπειρον), not the earth, was his watchword. Such a phrase shows that an aggregate of phenomena seemed to him a worthier and more profitable subject of contemplation than a vital power. On this ground he may be called antidynamical. But the historian of philosophy has no right to adopt a classification which is formally correct, if it is not one which represents the contrast between the mind and purpose of two inquirers. Division between dynamical and mechanical philosophers: why objectionable. This opposition of “mechanical” and “dynamical” suggests the notion that Thales and Anaximander devoted themselves to the study of nature, in the sense and spirit in which a modern German or Englishman devotes himself to it; that is to say, with a distinct consciousness that the physical world is one field of investigation, and the political or human world another. It is very important, we conceive, to recollect that this was not the case at all; that they were by vocation wisdom-hunters; that they started their game in another ground, and were led by various accidents and impulses to follow it hither. The track of the first pursuer was that in which the next ran, till some fresh scent turned him out of it. Relation of Anaximander to Thales. Anaximander can hardly have been old enough to hear Thales, yet he belonged to the same city, and was greatly influenced at least by the reports and traditions of his predecessor. But Thales discoursed; he wrote—a difference of the greatest practical importance. Thales, seeking for that order in things which he could not find among men, lighted upon a fact. The Ionian philosophers were seeking for an ἀρχή. Anaximander having to set down in written characters the object of the student’s inquiries calls it the beginning or element (ἀρχή or στοιχεῖον).13 The name which seems so convenient for pointing out the direction of the philosophy, to a certain extent changes it. The pursuit of an ἀρχή threatens to take the place of the pursuit of wisdom. Still more dangerous was Anaximander’s other phrase, “the Infinite.” A formula so comprehensive seemed to exhaust all possibility. Philosophy, just beginning, had already reached its goal. What could it find which lay beyond the unbounded! The infinite no mere phrase. Anaximander. Let us, however, do Anaximander the justice to believe that “the Infinite” was not merely a formula in his mind; that the name expressed thoughts too deep for utterance; that he really bowed before that which he could not measure and comprehend, while he seemed ambitious of summing it up in a few syllables.
3. ANAXIMENES WAS flourishing B.C. 548; Ol. 58; lived to Ol. 74. In Anaximenes we perceive the effect of the step which Anaximander had taken, and at the same time evident indications of a return to the line which he abandoned. The double force of the word ἀρχή. The word ἀρχή is equivocal. It suggests the idea of “rule” as well as that of “beginning.” Anaximenes seems to have perceived that the philosopher should seek for a power which rules, not merely for an element or starting-point. Plutarch, who can never be taken as a fair judge of the old philosophers, seeing that he contemplated all the subjects of their inquiry from entirely a different point of view, may be received as evidence respecting them when he attributes language to them which he is not likely to have invented, and which has all the marks of an earlier stage of thought. The air and the soul. Anaximenes, he says, held that “the air rules over all things, as the soul, being air, rules in man.”14 Such a phrase at once explains the assertion of Aristotle, that Anaximenes made air his ἀρχή, and connects him with the seekers for wisdom. This ruling power in man—this invisible, intangible power, which nevertheless accomplishes such wonders, compels huge bodies to obey it—what is it, where is it? We are looking into the natural universe to see if it is there. Is not this air—invisible, impalpable, all-penetrating, all-commanding,—the very thing? The air and Jove. Jove was said of old to rule in the air; to be the cloud-compeller. May he not be this air? It was a perilous question. When it was answered in the affirmative by the untrembling lips of later teachers, the result was fatal to all sense of a personal moral ruler. We conceive the suggestion of it by Anaximenes may have been in quite a different spirit. The air may rather have been humanised and glorified by its association with Jove, than Jove naturalised and materialised by his identification with the air. The coarseness of the old mythology may have been diminished in the mind of the student; it may not have been stripped of all its real associations.
4. HERACLITUS flourished B.C. 503; Ol. 69,2 died at the age of 60. Clinton, F.H. There was, however, another danger lurking in such language, though not caused by it. The Greek was more liable, in practice, to confound the “great Counsellor” with the soul, the ruling element which dwelt in himself, than with the air. Heraclitus. Of that tendency in his countryman, Heraclitus the Ephesian seems to have been especially aware; his dread of it seems to be connected with all his political theories, his physical speculations, his individual sorrows. Politics of Heraclitus. In his mind, it is quite evident that these were never separated.
5. Love of law. He believed that we should fight to death for the law. But he would not be a magistrate of Ephesus; he would rather play at dice with the children before the temple of Artemis.15 Dislike of Greek democracy. What good could come of making laws for evil men? He would live upon herbs upon the mountains rather than among those who banished their best citizens, and would not of their own choice have a good one left among them. Heraclitus, therefore, was considered a stern aristocrat and despiser of the people. Yet he is said to have received the civilities of the great king with even more indifference than those of his countrymen. His feelings towards them were, we should judge, much more those of a disappointed lover than of a scorner. “Pride or insolence,” he said, “should be stifled more diligently than a fire.” The vaunting of the Greeks, their sense of superiority to the rest of the world, seems to have inspired him with pity and mourning. “Your knowledge of many things,” he said, “does not give you reason or wisdom.” An obvious saying, in which, nevertheless, much of his philosophy is latent. Is the individual soul, as Anaximenes thought, the ruling power in man? How his natural philosophy grew out of his personal feelings. Is it not in itself a very poor, weak, insignificant thing, most contemptible when it is most presuming? All things, considered apart, unreal. Separate a man from his fellows, and what is he worth? Abolish laws, government, and what becomes of the atoms which compose your society? What is each good for? You Greeks are always making the experiment. See what comes of it in this city of mine! See what infinite disorder, what infinite cause for sorrow. Would not nature have told you the secret if you had studied her? We do not find a set of individual energies and powers at work there. All things are efficient and energetical only in their harmony; The central force. only in their subjection to some central principle of life. Flux and reflux. Take that away, and the things we behold are only phantoms; the phenomena of the universe exhibit only an endless flux. The coal without the fire, is a man trying to exist in himself; the coal ignited, receiving communication from another nature, there is a man’s soul enkindled by communication with a higher diviner reason.
6. Fire. This statement and this comparison may explain why Heraclitus has been supposed to attach so much sacredness and significance to the element of fire. Heraclitus. It seemed to him (old fables, diligently considered and connected with facts of experience, might teach him the lesson,) the vital quickening power of the universe; Symbol of the central law or power. that which was or which expressed—sometimes it might present itself to him as the symbol, sometimes as the thing symbolised—the universal life, by participation in which all particular things have their being; apart from which they are unsubstantial, unreal. But this physical fire was never divorced from the law which holds societies together, from the higher and universal mind with which the individual mind is meant to be in communion. The name of Jupiter. When, therefore, we are told that Heraclitus said the object of man’s life is to know the name of Jupiter, we may be sure that Jupiter did not mean to him either air or fire; that it did mean a reality which he could not comprehend, which he desired should comprehend him.
7. Such was Heraclitus, a man with a marked individual character, full of deep and pregnant intuitions. The crying philosopher. The vulgar notion of him as the crying philosopher must not be discarded as if it meant nothing, or had no connection with the history of his speculations. His thoughts are like fragments torn from his own personal being, and not torn from it without such effort and violence as must needs have drawn many a sigh from the sufferer. Neither is that other notion of him, as “the obscure or dark” man, an unfounded one. The fire that was in his heart and brain, and of which all the world around had presented to him the image, no doubt emitted much smoke which confused and stifled, not, perhaps, to his displeasure, the careless gazers and passers by. But there was something within him which neither his tears nor his smoke at all adequately represent. The sense of a harmony existing beneath a perpetual conflict of powers, and making that very conflict the means of their preservation, pervaded his being, gave the tone to all his thoughts, and realised itself to him in all the inner forms and outward images of nature.
8. The Ionians proper. The other naturalists. These four men, Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, have been usually regarded as constituting the Ionic school. There is a reason and an advantage in the classification. They belonged to the same region, they were exposed to similar external influences; they succeeded each other at no very considerable intervals; there was, we think, a certain transmission of apprehensions and discoveries from the first to the last. Still it is a needful preparation for the study of those writers who were technically and practically the moral and metaphysical philosophers of Greece, that we should speak briefly of two or three others, who, in different circumstances, were led to occupy themselves chiefly with the phenomena and powers of Nature.
9. DEMOCRITUS. B.C. 460. Ol. 80. Clinton. The traditional contrast between him and Heraclitus not unimportant. We depart a little from chronological order,16 for the sake of bringing Democritus of Abdera into immediate juxtaposition with Heraclitus of Ephesus. The old story, which opposes the smiles of the one to the tears of the other, is not without its significance, either as to the characters of the men or of their philosophies. He who recognises the existence of a central power adequate to keep all things at one, who believes in an order, must at times be overwhelmed by the distractions which the actual world presents to him. In proportion to the intensity of his belief will he be oppressed by the contradictions of experience. Heraclitus worshipped law, and saw a multitude of incoherent elements resolving to disregard it. He found a refuge (but how imperfect a refuge!) in nature. There he could detect an uniting organising energy. But how, with his mind harassed and tormented by human confusions, could he help also seeing their counterpart here; a whirl of atoms, which, if the invisible compulsion that bound them together was for a moment forgotten, must make the brain sick, and the heart sadder than it was before.
10. Effects of a good temper and easy circumstances. But suppose a man should arise, whose position did not lead him to meditate much on the perplexities of human society, or to seek for the removal of them; a man provided with external comforts, blessed with a good digestion, indifferent to fame,17 with a Greek habit of observation, with opportunities of seeing various cities and men, for no one of which he has any passionate preference; and we need be at no loss to conjecture the results at which he would arrive both in practice and theory. Every one will see in such a man the elements of a benignant, agreeable, sociable companion; View of humanity. of one who would regard the disorders of humanity as mere eccentricities, to be noticed with so much the more kindliness if the suspicion should intrude itself that some of their results may be serious, even painful, to those who exhibit them. View of nature. He would gradually come to think even the word “eccentricities” too strong to express variations which after all might not be deviations from any standard. Atoms, no centre. For is there a standard, is there a centre? Can we find one in human beings, can we find one in the physical world? Our senses tell us of no such. Perhaps we cannot depend on our senses. But have we anything better to depend upon? Can we see more than those atoms, the sight of which so disturbed Heraclitus? Is it not worth while to get at them; to examine and dissect the world; to see what it is actually made of; to leave our own guesses, dreams, beliefs, hopes, as much as may be out of the question? Democritus. Is not that the course for the sound physical inquirer who wishes to know what may be known? How a wise man is to behave himself. Is it not the course for the man who wishes to keep his mind quiet, easy, and healthy, without the disturbance of expectations, dark or cheerful, that may never be realised?
11. Democritus held in respect by Aristotle and Bacon. Here we seem to have Democritus the Thracian, whom Aristotle and Bacon both honoured above the majority of Greek speculators, because he mixed, they thought, less of speculation with the actual observation of facts—because he looked hardily at the materials of which the world is composed, without fearing that he might meet something in it which must not be looked at. We do not undervalue qualities which two such judges felt to be important. Use of the atomic doctrine. Democritus no doubt has filled his place among physical inquirers, and has brought to light a kind of investigation which is indispensable. Insufficiency of it for its own ends. But we may venture to remark that if there had been no men more sombre and less pleasant than he was, no inquirers who were haunted by the sense of powers and mysteries of which he ignored the existence, physical philosophy would have been as little possible as moral, the examination of atoms would have been as lazily pursued and as little productive as the study of laws and of spirit.
12. Empedocles, flourishing B.C. 455. Ol. 81, 2. Empedocles of Agrigentum presents us with yet another phase of Greek life and feeling. A lover of equality. Utterly unlike Democritus in his indifference and equanimity, not less unlike Heraclitus in his scorn of the mob and his hatred of equality, this enthusiastic Sicilian exhibited in his acts, his poetry, and his philosophy, all the strange elements that were at work through so many ages in the political and physical microcosm in which he dwelt.
13. Influence of Sicily upon his mind and philosophy. Nowhere had a man such an opportunity as in Sicily of witnessing every change and condition of society; nowhere had he more temptation to take part in its revolutions. Nowhere would he be more constantly reminded of the similar convulsions which are going on in the earth’s womb, of the influence of Nature upon man, of the powers which man is able to put forth in opposing Nature. The last observation seems to have impressed Empedocles most, and to have connected itself with all he had heard and read of divine helpers of men, who had instructed them in mysterious arts, and had delivered them from oppressive plagues. Divine teachers and inspirers. That there were still such helpers, and that he who studied the powers of nature diligently might still be guided and inspired by them, seems to have been his inmost conviction. It procured him the name of an enchanter; it was mixed partially in his own mind with a confused notion that he was himself a kind of celestial person, who could wield natural powers at his pleasure. Empedocles. But in general it would seem that he used the wisdom which he had, honestly and benevolently, for the good of others more than for his own glory; and it is certain that he was not content with that wisdom; he was a seeker after the springs and fountain of it. For him the varied powers in the universe could reduce themselves into no one element; The war of elements. the endless warfare of opposing forces, none of which could destroy the other, none of which, perhaps, could subsist without the other—this was the marvel which filled his heart.
14. The human passions at war in nature. It was no imaginary battle-field in the mind of Empedocles; the selfsame powers which Homer had exhibited fighting for Greeks and Trojans were engaged in it. The human passions,—love, hatred, friendship, dissension,—were all seen mixing in the war of earth, air, fire, and water. Aristotle, the great classifier of the world, is of course shocked at this confusion of physics and ethics. With much admiration for Empedocles as an artist, he seems to have had a more than common dislike to him as a speculator. Value of this seeming confusion. We may be excused from participating in his feelings, since that which offended him is for the historian of human inquiries one of the most interesting of all facts, that these early and zealous students of the outward world did not and could not disengage it from the deeper perplexities which they found in themselves and in human intercourse. To insist upon their doing so is simply to insist upon their not following out the great question which agitated their whole being. For ourselves, we have no wish to separate Empedocles who won at the chariot race, as his father had done before him, and who fought for the liberty of Agrigentum, from Empedocles the author of the Καθαρμοί, who as a poet forms a curious link between Homer, Pindar, and his Roman admirer Lucretius.
15. Anaxagoras, born B.C. 500, died B.C. 428. Clinton. Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ belongs by birth and early education to the Ionic school. Teaches in Athens. But it was at Athens that he taught; to the influences which surrounded him at Athens the direction of his mind and the peculiarity of his doctrines may, we think, clearly be traced. Anaxagoras would have been most reluctant to confess this obligation; he was, it would seem, even more utterly without patriotism, in the ordinary sense, than even Democritus. “You care nothing for your country,” some one said to him. The stars his country. “Very much indeed,” was the answer; “my country is there,” pointing to the stars. There appears to have been no affectation in such language. He was, to a degree in which no Greek before him ever had been, absorbed in mere physical contemplation. Natural philosophy in his mind was separated from political wisdom, even opposed to it.
16. Anaxagoras. Effect of Athenian life upon him. But this violent reaction against the habits and tendencies of his countrymen must have been produced by seeing them in their fullest activity. The bustle of Athens drove him to the stars. And into that country of his choice and adoption one finds him unawares introducing the maxims of the one which he despised. As he listened, wearily and with forced interest, to the accounts of party affinities, club fellowships, alliances among leaders formed and broken, which were brought him by some favourite and admiring disciple, one can conceive how he was led to reflect on the way in which a whole is made up of certain portions that seem perfectly distinct, and which have a mysterious attraction for each other; how the loss of that attraction is what we mean by dissolution or destruction, how by it all things are preserved in life. Homœomeriæ. Out of such reflections, quickly transferred from the region for which he had an utter distaste to the one in which he delighted to dwell, the theory of Homœomeriæ, in which modern students have perceived the germs of important discoveries respecting the laws of cohesion, may easily have developed itself. Political and natural. Application of the doctrine by Pericles. Pericles, we may be sure, would at once perceive the human analogy of which his master had lost the sense, and though he might feel pleasure at being transported for a while into a world so different from that in which his ordinary work lay, and may have found his thoughts elevated by the clearer and rarer atmosphere which he breathed there, we cannot doubt how he applied the doctrine; where he looked for the similar particles which he was to combine. For that there must be a combiner, Anaxagoras also taught. The mere cohesion of particles was not sufficient. As Aristotle observes, the particles could not be the cause of the change which took place in their position and relation to each other.
17. Nous. Its part in the scheme of the universe. Nous (Intelligence) was called in to produce and maintain their fellowship—called in, the critic remarks, merely as a resource when the other expedient for solving the difficulty had been tried and failed. Be that as it may, the philosopher clearly told the Athenians that “all things at first were in a heap; that Nous came in and set them in order” (turned a chaos into a universe); a doctrine which had been always latent in the Greek mind, of which the μητίετα Ζεύς in Homer had been the indication which was implied in the Ionic search for wisdom amidst natural elements.
18. Connection of Nous with the old divinities. But if Anaxagoras had brought to light the principle which his countrymen half-unconsciously recognised, he had stripped that principle not only of certain confused sensual additions which they had made to it, but of all which had rendered it practically and vitally precious to them. This Nous, which had set the stars in order, what was it to them? It was not Zeus; Anaxagoras. not the acting, living ruler, taking part in human affairs and interests, whom Homer had brought before them. Athenian suspicions. Yet it seemed to assume all his functions; to do all the work which they had ascribed to him. Was this what they had meant; was there nothing else in their traditions and their hearts besides this? The conscience of the Athenians answered that there was something besides this. But the answer was a confused muttering one, mixed with a painful suspicion that they did not habitually believe more than Anaxagoras told them; not generally quite as much as he told them. Grounds for suspicions. Accusation of Μηδισμὸς. Out of that mixed impression, with the true indignation, the malignant hypocritical bitterness which the different portions of it engendered, an accusation of impiety against him naturally proceeded. Mixed with it was another, which Anaxagoras must have listened to with profound astonishment. He was accused of Medism—a disposition to betray Athens into the hands of Persia. Probably the fact that there was such an empire as the Persian existing had escaped him, or only remained with him as connected with some geographical observation. But his devotion to the stars may have furnished those who wished to wound Pericles through the side of his teacher with a very plausible plea for representing him as having Magian tastes and propensities. Excuse for it. The charge of malignancy during the English Civil Wars, and of the Popish Plot—of incivisme during the French Revolution—was established by evidence which can leave us and our neighbours little excuse for condemning the Athenian democracy, if they yielded to such proofs. Anaxagoras, whether condemned for political or religious offences, retired to Lampsacus, we are told, with a smile of regret that his countrymen had exiled themselves from him. He suffered less than almost any man would have suffered from the loss of home ties and affections; the stars were to be seen at Lampsacus as at Athens. His banishment. It is difficult to feel all the sympathy we wish for a victim to the injustice of men in whose welfare he took no interest, whose evils he had never sought to reform.
Section IV. Pythagoras
born b.c. 608 or 605 (bentley); b.c. 570 (dodwell and clinton).
1. Transition to a new kind of inquiry. We pass from the least political to the most political of all the Greek philosophers. The records concerning Pythagoras which we possess, imperfect as they are, are important, not only as an introduction to the next division of our subject,—to the life of Socrates, and to the doctrines of Plato; they also throw light upon the Ionic school, out of which this eminent teacher arose—some members of which, Empedocles especially, confessed the greatest obligations to him.
2. The name “philosopher.” The same traditions which speak of Thales as the first philosopher of Greece, affirm that Pythagoras first used the name. He dared not, we are told, arrogate to himself wisdom. That he held to be a divine possession; men could only love it and seek for it. Such modesty, in the judgment of some, is very inconsistent with the character of Pythagoras; if he exhibited it, they say it must have been feigned. Belief in his inspiration. For he habitually claimed a divine inspiration, he took to himself the credit of most unusual gifts. Could he have renounced a name which had been freely bestowed upon quite ordinary mortals?
3. The answer to this question lies in his history. Word “Philosopher” sometimes attributed to Socrates. At present we shall only remark that the difficulty is not diminished, if, following other authorities, we suppose Socrates to have invented, as he pertinaciously adopted, the word Philosopher, in the sense we have given it. Socrates also claimed to be under divine teaching, and, what is more remarkable, made that claim the very reason for renouncing the title of “wise man.” The nature of the inspiration which Pythagoras believed was vouchsafed to him, we may consider presently; we only ask our readers not to judge of it or of him by the reports of fanatical admirers in the post-Christian period, or by the satires of Lucian of Samosata.
4. Pythagoras was born at Samos, in what precise year may be doubtful. His master and his early studies. Under what master he studied has been a subject of great controversy; if we might venture to choose one guess out of many, which may all be false or all true, we should take that which assigns his early training to Anaximander. That philosopher, as we have seen, carried his mathematical studies further than any of his predecessors; his geometry in a great degree determined the nature of his theory. A youthful pupil of earnest character and high imagination, coming into contact with such a thinker, would be likely to experience a great conflict of feelings. The science, new not only to himself, but in some measure to all around him, would seem to him strange, wonderful, sublime; the doctrine appended to it would repel him as cold, vague, and unsatisfactory. He would begin, we may fancy, to meditate on his teacher’s favourite phrases, “the Infinite”—τὸ ἄπειρον—this forsooth is the sum of all things in the universe. Geometry. A conclusion how unlike that which geometry would have suggested! that leads us to the idea of limitation, distinctness, in each thing and in all things. And is not such limitation, such distinctness, that which constitutes their perfection? Surely it is this, the πέρας—the ultimate limit, and not the limitless, which the wise man is to seek after. Arithmetic. Again, Anaximander talked of an ἀρχή. Here, indeed, he has profited by his science. Mathematics did not teach him the necessity of this. He found every line starting from a point, every series beginning from a fixed number. “But why forsake the teacher? Why go abroad to look for your beginning when you have it in the very instrument which you carry with you? You Ionian philosophers are groping after unity in the world about you. But where did you get that idea? Was it not from these numbers, from this geometry? Surely it is there that we find not the mere shadow of unity, but unity itself.”
5. The τὸ πέρας. Such thoughts we may fancy began to work in the mind of Pythagoras while he was yet among Ionians; to excite in him a discontent with previous methods of inquiry, and a hope that he might discover a better. With these feelings we may suppose him to set out on his travels, his impulse to leave his country being, it is said, the tyranny of Polycrates. He carried away another (perhaps a greater) benefit from his Asiatic education. The rhapsodists, who used to sing the legends of earlier days to the Greeks of that region in which Troy stood, and in which Homer or a number of Homers lived, these were perhaps silent. But not only their words were preserved, and by this time at least committed to enduring characters, but the melodies in which they had spoken still lived in the hearts of the people. Music. The impression of the Dorian and Lydian measures on a young Greek must have been very deep; it might be effaced afterwards in some by the passion for abstract speculation, in others it would give speculation itself a richer and more poetical character. All the thoughts of Pythagoras respecting the mystery of number seemed to have combined themselves from the first with musical feelings and associations. Was not music itself an illustration, the highest illustration, of this mystery? Whence came that strange disposition of thoughts and words into verse? whence the fascination of melody and tune? whence, if number be not the secret law, the moving soul of the universe?
6. Pythagoras a traveller. All these apprehensions and imaginations might have dwelt in his mind and produced little fruit, or no better fruit than a crude philosophical system. But Pythagoras, as we said, became a traveller. The reports of the regions through which he journeyed are all uncertain. This at least we may conjecture with tolerable confidence, that he was brought into contact with human beings in a variety of different positions and circumstances, and that he began to think more deeply of their nature and destiny. And then what with new interest, in what a new light, would the number-mystery present itself to him! This surely was the very problem which all legislators had been seeking to solve,—in what way a number of apparently separate units might be able to feel themselves really a unity. All society, all government, was but the working out of this problem. Away then once and for ever with all Ionian experiments after a physical unity! here was the true field for examination and discovery. But what is it in man which has the capacity for association and organization? It is not resemblance in feature which produces it; it is not contiguity in space which produces it. It is that wonderful thing which inhabits this animal frame—which can transport itself beyond all limits of space and time. I, Pythagoras, can carry myself back to the age of Achilles and Agamemnon; doubtless in some condition or other I actually lived in their time. I can project myself forwards into ages that shall come; doubtless under some condition or other I shall live in those ages. But in what condition? Metempsychosis. This soul, which can thus look before and after, can shrink and shrivel itself into an incapacity of contemplating aught but the present moment: of what depths of degeneracy it is capable! what a beast it may become! And if something lower than itself, why not something higher? And if something higher or lower, why may there not be a law accurately determining its elevations and descents? Each soul has its particular evil tastes, bringing it to the likeness of different creatures beneath itself; why may it not be under a necessity of abiding in the condition of that thing to which it has adapted and reduced itself?
7. Where he learnt it. Such thoughts Pythagoras may, or may not, have borrowed from Egyptian priests. Doubtless to a man in his posture of mind every old tradition, every relic of national faith, will have been precious; still there was nothing in the doctrine of a metempsychosis which might not easily and naturally have grown out of his reflections upon that which makes men human, and enables them as human beings to associate with each other. To another and deeper discovery he was no doubt led by studying the governments of different countries, especially those which had received the Dorian impress. Law. He found everywhere in these communities that the bond of connection was the recognition of a power superior to man, a righteous law-giving power. No human legislature ever dared to dispense with this recognition, no society could cohere without it. Deep and awful idea! The union of men presumes a still deeper ground. Is not this ground the πέρας, the ultimate unity, after which we are seeking?
8. Results of his inquiry. Thus gradually we suppose the idea of limitation, which Pythagoras had acquired from geometry, and which had been brought out in his mind in opposition to the notion of an all-comprehending Infinite or Indefinite; and the idea of beginning and succession which he had acquired from arithmetic, and which had come out in his mind in opposition to the notion of a mere external ground of things, fused and softened as they both were by a sense of music dwelling deep in the heart of the world, may have become associated with practical thoughts respecting the nature of the human soul, and the bonds by which souls are related to each other.
9. The more this feeling of the sacredness and mysteriousness of human fellowship unfolded itself in the mind of Pythagoras, the more peril and evil he will have seen in the pretensions of men to wisdom. The destruction of order lay in such individual pretensions. Wisdom above the soul. Wisdom must be contemplated as altogether above the soul; as something which it cannot appropriate, to which it must do homage; which it must seek in silence, yet not in solitude; which each man must reverence for himself, but yet which he must feel is not his more than his fellows’; which can only be truly pursued by those who are willing to abandon outward enjoyments for the sake of it. The philosophy of Pythagoras therefore could not be carried out except in a community of living men.
10. In the bonds by which they were held together in their dealings with each other and with men without—in the silence and fear with which they acknowledged an invisible ruler—was his inmost meaning to be expressed. Thus would the proportions and relations of the universe be manifested on their highest ground; thus would the mystical harmony be felt and acknowledged; thus would the dignity of the human soul, its capacity for growth and perfectionment, be proved; thus would the nature of distributive justice, the geometry and arithmetic of politics, be practically realised; thus would the idea of God be felt as the foundation of social life. The society in South Italy. Such we apprehend was the feeling that led to the formation of the Pythagorean society, which grew up in the South of Italy; which after all deductions for the extravagance of later reporters, must have exercised a great influence on various cities of Magna Grecia; which wrought legislative and moral reforms, engaged in political intrigues, and was finally put down as a dangerous religious confederacy, incompatible with the existence of regular government.
11. In calling this society “an order,” Bishop Thirlwall and Mr. Grote have done much to explain the secret of its strength and influence, as well as of its errors and its decay. Its character and perils. The earnest seeker of wisdom found hearts yearning for it like his own. It was an inheritance intended for them and him: in proportion as they could make it the common object of their lives, they might hope to share it together. The lessons which they received from their master were not communicable except to those who formed the circle around him; to others they would have been different lessons: apart from the practical discipline which accompanied them, they were not true; they served no purpose of purification, they were not a method of seeking wisdom. The allegiance which men so associated pay to him who has given the first impulse to their minds, and who is directing all their energies, is affectionate, devout, dangerous. They are united by sympathies and reverence. A man is the object of their reverence and sympathy. Sense of a vocation in the teacher. If that man has felt deeply that their union does not stand in any power or wisdom of his, he will tell them so continually; he will strive, by all the forms and arrangements of their polity, to preserve them in the recollection. But if he believes that what he teaches is not his own, he must believe, and strive to make them believe, that it has been imparted to him; he must regard his work as a vocation. The more he uses the language which expresses this conviction, the more it will be perverted by passionate idolatrous followers; the more will his earnest desire to disclaim wisdom be made an excuse for maintaining that he possesses it under conditions altogether new and peculiar. How can that idolatry fail to react upon the object of it? Idolatry of disciples. How can it fail to awaken in him a vanity, a self-consciousness, a self-glorification, which have to maintain a fearful struggle with the earnest truth-seeking, truth-loving temper which led him to say, “I did not choose this course for myself; I did not make this discovery. A mightier wisdom has guided me on my way, and showed me what I could never have found.” The histories of such struggles are not written, or written very imperfectly, even in the autobiographies and secret confessions of great teachers: another day may reveal them to us, with all the strange contradictions which have provoked our harsh judgments, and should have called forth our pity and sorrow. The outward results of the secret battles are better known, and are often very tragical. In the case of the Pythagoreans, we have only indistinct glimpses of them, but enough, with the experience we have since acquired, to show how zealous the society must have been to bring others within the circle of their light; yet how proud in their boast of enjoying that light by some exclusive tenure! how resolute they must have been not to separate their essential and moral practices from their outward doctrines, yet how apt, in the vehemence of propagandism, to part with all inconvenient austerity, to tolerate and use the corruptions which they undertook to remove; how their first object will have been to use their society as a means of making all society deeper in its foundations, truer in its acts; how at last they may have come to think that it had no deeper foundation than the Pythagorean rule, and that false and dishonest means might be legitimate for the establishment of that rule. Some traditions would represent the founder as forwarding the ambitious views of his order, as sharing in its downfall. We have no means of testing their accuracy. If they are true, they need not make us doubt the sincerity of his purpose, nor the real worth of the principle for which he testified. The failure of a noble scheme may make good the internal conviction of him who planned it better than its success. Destruction of the order desirable. If Pythagoras believed that human society had a mysterious and divine ground, and that every true philosopher and reformer lives to convince it of that fact, it was fitting that he and his order should perish when he or they began to fancy that they could build up society by their devices, upon their wisdom. His name remained a sacred and venerable name for Greece. None might be able to tell in terms what it had done for them. Those who spoke of Pythagorean doctrines in earlier times meant the doctrine of Philolaus, Lysis, Eurytus, Archytas,—men who knew nothing of the Italian master, who had never shared his discipline, who had been brought up amidst the ordinary influences of Greek society. The feeling about Pythagoras in after times. Those who spoke of Pythagoras himself in neo-Platonic times meant a Thaumaturgist whom they had created by mixing Christian and Pagan records together, to convince the world that the Christian church was a plagiarism. But Plato and Aristotle retained a reverence for the name of the original master, which they never transferred to the school where his opinions were dried for use and exportation. Iamblichus and Porphyry were bearing unconscious testimony to the fact that the best and wisest teachers of ancient Greece had been led by all their studies of nature and of man, and, as they rightly deemed, by some guide who was higher than either, to seek for a brotherhood which did not rest on human wisdom; that they tried to create one, and that they failed.
Section V. Xenophanes—Parmenides—Zeno
1. Poetry and philosophy. It has been observed before, that most of the Greek sages were poets. Verse seemed the natural language for thoughts which were to be a kind of oracles meant for the experienced ear, perplexing to the vulgar. When the wise man became the philosopher, he more rarely used this medium of communication. The mind of Empedocles was evidently rich and poetic: Anaxagoras, Anaximander, Anaximenes, probably never departed from ordinary discourse. But in each, whether they used this vehicle or not, the suspicion began to arise, that the poet, so far as he answered to his name, so far as he was a Maker, was the antagonist of the philosopher. Homer had a hold upon the sympathies of the Greek, which the most profound student did not possess. Whence did it arise? Was it a wholesome influence? Were not his creations hindrances in the way of the investigator? Had he not assumed the result of an inquiry which they were pursuing?
2. XENOPHANES, flourished B. C. 540-500. Ol. 60-70. The sense of this opposition reached its highest point in Xenophanes. He was, like Pythagoras, an Ionian by birth: he became, like him, an Italian colonist. He felt bitterly the luxury of his own city, Colophon. Education of Xenophanes. The manners, and especially the love of amusement in the Greeks of Asia and of the islands, disgusted him. He must have gone to Italy a discontented man,—discontented, probably, with the investigations of Ionians, as well as with their political life. The example of Pythagoras, or his own reflections, will have taught him that what he wanted was not an element or ἀρχή. But he does not seem to have been much interested in geometry or arithmetic, or to have received any of the same deep impressions which Pythagoras received from music. The thoughts of Pythagoras respecting the soul of man and its migrations took no hold of him. In one of his fragments he ridicules a sage for not suffering a dog to be beaten because he recognised in his growl the voice of an old friend.
3. Neither does he seem to have had a desire to be the founder or the member of any political association. He may have heard of the dispersion of the Pythagorean society, and may have turned with dislike from similar experiments. His genius, however, did not impel him in that direction. Social unity was not the problem which he sought to resolve. The problem which did present itself to him concerned unity, but in quite a different sense. His question respecting the gods. What are the gods in the Homeric poems? Is there any reality corresponding to them? Are they not formed by the poet’s brain, and clothed by him in sensible forms and images? Is it to sensible forms and images that our minds do homage? Pythagoras had approached the last question, but from a different side and in a different spirit. He had recognised a Being near to man, to be adored in silence and awe. Such a Being had not much in common with the gods whom his countrymen worshipped; but he never denied that homage was due to them. Nor can his secret instructions to his disciples have been that this homage was only to be paid in deference to the opinions of the vulgar. They must have been efforts to make it more sincere and significant than it was with the majority. Pythagoras felt that he had no substitute to offer for the personal objects he had been taught to revere. He felt that some living being, not an abstraction, not a creation of his own mind, must sustain his and every human polity.
4. In Xenophanes all these checks to freedom of inquiry respecting the faith of his country were wanting. The nature of the answer. The naked question, “What does my soul affirm respecting God; what conceptions can it or can it not form respecting Him?” came before him. His verses—for he wrote in verse of various styles and measures—were answers to it. The philosopher tries as a poet to criticise the poets; to show that they have been making the beings to whom they bow down. All the Homeric gods have the shapes and forms of men; why, but because men have formed them after their own likeness? If an ox were to form a god, would he not give him horns and hoofs? How is it possible to form any conceptions of God? What mean your finite and your infinite? Are they not both alike terms of your own mind? How can you make Him out of them?
5. Not a sceptic. This may sound like scepticism; but it was not scepticism in the mind of Xenophanes. He did not say that because the senses cannot tell us of God—because we cannot measure Him by our conceptions, therefore He is not. He said just the reverse: he said, “My senses do not tell me that which is; they only tell me of appearances. My conceptions do not measure that which is; it lies deeper.” Instead, therefore, of denying that to be, of which he said the Homeric pictures presented no likeness, his disapprobation of them arose from his desire to assert a real ground of things, independent of man’s conclusions or conceptions; which he affirms to be, but which he does not make.
A very wonderful process of thought indeed, pregnant with results which our future history must unfold. Xenophanes was no atheist, but a very earnest theist. He asserted a Being. If he had been asked “what Being?” he would have owned that he could not reply. He could only say what he was not. But the Being he worshipped almost a negation. He approached the border of negation, but he approached it manfully and reverently; therefore he did not pass it. He pointed out a void which he could not fill. That alone would have been a reason for feeling gratitude to him. But he also saw the way to a deep and radical truth.
6. PARMENIDES, born about B.C. 536. Ol. 61. A healthier thinker than Xenophanes, yet one in whom it is not perhaps possible to feel the same interest, took up his course of inquiry: this was Parmenides. The question respecting the nature of God, which had so occupied the philosopher of whom we have just been speaking, does not seem at all in the same degree to have agitated him. His mind rested on the principle of Xenophanes, that what the senses present to us are appearances; that only that which the mind affirms without the aid of the senses actually is. What is this, then, that the mind affirms? Xenophanes had said “God.” Parmenides said “Unity,” or “The One.” The One. My senses tell me thousands of things, and yet has not every man who thinks and feels ever been groping after some one root and ground of all these things? This, verily, is what man wants, and this is affirmed to be by that within him which fights against apparitions and phantoms. Plurality an apparition. Plurality is merely one of these apparitions—deceitful, transitory; nothing abides but unity: this is permanent, eternal. Such a belief could not dawn upon the mind of a Greek philosopher without imparting to him a feeling of deep wonder. He had seen a succession of Ionians questioning all nature to tell them of this unity. He had seen Pythagoras evoking it out of the relations of number, and actually constructing a human society to illustrate it. And now this unity declared itself to be a condition of the human mind itself—it had been seeking for that in all other things which really dwelt only with itself. The confused look of a child gazing upon a new world, is but a faint emblem of the surprise with which such a thought must have possessed the mind of an earnest seeker on whom it has just burst. Yet he cannot doubt that it is a true thought. It makes so much of all that had before been perplexed in his mind intelligible, it accounts so well for the thoughts which have revealed themselves to other men. But what consequences follow? Faith in the things about us becomes impossible; we live in a shadow world; we do not, in fact, behold anything. For these distinctions of things, this apparent multitude of objects, exists not; it speaks to our fancy only. The unity which the mind beholds and demands, this only has substance.
7. Every one must see how this doctrine of Parmenides laid him open to the jests of witty men, such as grow upon the surface of all lands, and of which Greece and her colonies were certainly not less productive than others. These wits believed no doubt that they were opposing self-evident facts to mere dreams. But Parmenides had a friend and disciple who was not willing to leave them in undisturbed possession of this opinion. ZENO, born about B.C. 500. Ol. 70. His answer to the wits and men of experience. Zeno of Elea was convinced that there was not only positive falsehood, but direct absurdity in that doctrine which experience seemed so irresistibly to establish, and he boldly undertook to make this absurdity palpable to the popular mind. In a series of arguments, some of which are still preserved to us, he endeavoured to show that space cannot exist, that we cannot suppose a plurality of objects without attributing self-destructive qualities to them; that if there be a number of real existences this number must be both finite and infinite; lastly, that the notion of movement involves a contradiction. Our readers would not, perhaps, be much interested in these early specimens of Greek subtlety; nay, they would be inclined to denounce them as the exploits of a mere word-conjurer. But assuredly Zeno deserves no such name. He was both in action and speculation a brave man, and we owe to him a great practical discovery. In fact, he occupies a peculiarly important position as a thinker, which it is for the advantage of our future studies in Greek philosophy that we should understand.
8. The Eleatic organ. Every philosophy must have an instrument or organ to work with if it would make itself intelligible. Some external object served this purpose for the Ionic philosopher; lines and numbers for the Pythagorean. But what was the instrument of the Eleatic philosopher? He seems to have ascended into a region of such pure metaphysic, and so entirely to have rejected all common and sensible analogies, that one does not at first see how he can ever impart his doctrine to others, or at least suggest any successful method of pursuing investigations in his own direction. This difficulty seems to have been felt by Xenophanes, and to a certain extent by Parmenides. Precious and pregnant as are the hints which each of them presents us with, it seems likely that they will be obliged to stop at the point which they have already obtained, and to leave no race of successors. But Zeno has found the solution of the puzzle; he has found that words bear to this philosophy the relation which sensible objects and numbers bear respectively to the other two. The language in which we discourse with each other must needs embody the law and principle of our own mental workings, and it was exactly this principle which the Eleatics were dealing with.
9. Zeno honest in the use of words. Zeno had only an imperfect consciousness of this truth, but he acted upon it, and it bore useful fruits for him and for us. There was no falseness in his use of words. He felt that they did affirm and embody truths, and he employed them for the purpose of elucidating truths. And herein he was surely as honest as those wits who set themselves to confute Parmenides and philosophers of his class by an appeal to experience. For they too profit by our belief in words. They awaken our consciousness to the fact, that the words which we speak bear on them an impress and image of the external world; and it is this consciousness which they rest upon as their real defence against the philosophers who set at nought the evidence of the external world. Zeno awakens our consciousness to the fact, that the words which we utter express something to which there is no counterpart in the external world, and he rests upon this consciousness to oppose the conclusions of those who set at nought the witness of their own minds. Both appeals are in themselves fair, and carry conviction with them. But the one merely convinces us of a fact which we took for granted previously; the other obliges us to perceive truths lying very near our inmost being, which were yet almost entirely hidden from us.
10. But it is the practical discovery which was the direct result of this search after an organ or instrument for the Parmenidean philosophy that obliges us to regard Zeno with most admiration and gratitude. Mathematical science we owe, according to the best historical evidence, to the East. And it entirely accords with the calm, contemplative, and yet sensual character of the Orientals, that this should have been their contribution to human knowledge. But the science of Logic, the science which declares, not what are the conditions to which external things are subject, but the conditions under which we ourselves speak and judge—this was of purely Greek invention. No other people had ever the subtlety to conceive the possibility of such a science, far less to ascertain its distinct province and its appointed work. a Greek discovery. Though logic, in a formal and narrow sense, is considered as the antagonist of poetry, yet only a most imaginative and poetical nation could have discovered the meaning and necessity of logic, and have given it the statue-like perfection which it has attained in Greek hands. Now Zeno is believed, on the best grounds, to be the inventor of logic. He first was led clearly to perceive that the mind has a distinct law regulating its own affirmations, and he consequently was first stimulated to inquire what this law may be. How much we owe to him for this achievement we shall understand better as we advance. Our principal object here has been to point out the connection between it and the Eleatic philosophy, of which Zeno was the accomplished and able defender; to indicate the kind of influence which that philosophy exercised upon the mind of Greece; to show how important a place it fills in the history of human inquiry; and to excite our readers’ interest in the future development of the doctrine which they have beheld in its first germ. In so very rapid a sketch as ours it is clearly impossible to do more than notice what seems to us the living and central peculiarity of each thinker as he arises up before us. But the real germinant principle is often hard to discover amidst the multitude of mere notions and opinions with which it has environed itself. An historian will distrust his own sagacity in detecting it, and will rejoice greatly if he can find it anywhere in its rude and primitive shape. Value of the early schools. Little value as it may seem to have, nay, as it may actually have, while it remains in this condition, yet he deems it not wise to wait till the animalcule has become a perfect insect, or till the insect has died, before he commences his examination of it. We offer this apology for noticing the ante-Socratic schools, briefly indeed, but yet at a length which many may think disproportionate to the time that we shall be able to bestow upon their successors. We are convinced that our readers, whom we wish not to furnish with a history, but to put in a right method of procuring one for themselves, will have a clear or confused understanding of the palmy period of Greek philosophy between the age of Socrates and of Aristotle, as well as of the age of senility which followed, exactly in proportion as they study or pass over the years of its infancy. Let them not hope to understand Plato or Aristotle, or even Epicurus, Zeno of Cittium, and Carneades, if they have begun with despising Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Parmenides. Nay, we might go further, and say that we should greatly doubt the pretensions of any one professing to have a real acquaintance with Hobbes, Locke, Leibnitz, or Kant, who could discover nothing but confusion and barrenness in these early inquiries.
Notes
Grote, vol. ii. c. xx. p. 106.↩︎
Diog. Laert. lib. i. c. i. s. 14.↩︎
συνετούς τινας καὶ νομοθετικούς.↩︎
Diog. Laert. lib. i. c. i. s. 1↩︎
Κλείω, c. lxxiv.↩︎
Κλείω, c. lxxv.↩︎
Κλείω, c. clxx.↩︎
Diog. Laert. lib. i. c. i. pp. 5 and 8.↩︎
The words of Aristotle are not so strong as they are sometimes made to appear. He calls him (Met. A. c. 3) ὁ τῆς τοιαύτης ἀρχηγὸς φιλοσοφίας, meaning the philosophy which sought for a physical ἀρχή or element. But as this was the first school of Greek inquiry, the language certainly implies that he was the first philosopher.↩︎
Ἀμυδρῶς καὶ οὐδὲν σαφῶς, ἀλλ᾽ οἷον ἐν ταῖς μάχαις οἱ ἀγύμναστοι ποιοῦσιν. These words apply directly to Empedocles, but they evidently include all of whom he has been speaking before.↩︎
Ἔμψυχος κόσμος. Diog Laert. lib. i. cap. i. 27.↩︎
Κινητικόν τι Περὶ ψυχῆς, lib. i. cap. v.↩︎
Diog. Laert. lib. ii. cap. i. s. 1.↩︎
Plutarch, De Placitis Philosophorum, lib. i. (περὶ τῶν ἀρχῶν) οἷον ἡ ψυχή, ἡ ἡμετέρα, ἀὴρ οὖσα, συγκρατεῖ ἡμᾶς.↩︎
Diog. Laert. lib. ix. cap. i.↩︎
Γέγονε δὲ τοῖς χρόνοις (ὡς αὐτός φησιν ἐν τῷ μικρῷ Διακόσμῳ) νέος κατὰ πρεσβύτην Ἀναξαγόραν. Diog. Laert. i. ix. c. 7.↩︎
Δοκεῖ δὲ καὶ Ἀθήνασε ἐλθεῖν καὶ μὴ σπουδάσαι γνωσθῆναι, δόξης καταφρονῶν. Diog. Laert. ubi sup. 5.↩︎