Chapter VI. Grecian Philosophy

Division I.—Period Before Socrates

Section I. Greek Wisdom in the Legendary Ages

1. The opposition between Greece and Asia shows itself to the schoolboy reading the Homeric poems. It meets him again in the first pages of Herodotus, and he follows it through that whole varied narrative. It links the episodes to the main story and gives unity to books that at first seem confused and miscellaneous. In them Persia gradually becomes the representative of Asia, and the glorious conflict of the historian’s own age interprets all the ages before it. Wherever the young reader turns, the contrast and the connection between the two peoples is before him. He finds it in the retreat of the Ten Thousand, and in the efforts of its leader to bring Persian manners and virtues before his countrymen. He cannot read of the republics’ conflicts among themselves without some event recalling the monarchy that tried to crush them and was defied. Demosthenes is inspired by the thought of that triumph when he determines that a pretended Greek shall not win the dominion which the ruler of the whole barbarian world could not. It inspires no less the son of the hated Macedonian, when he goes out to prove that the signal-fires announcing Troy’s fall were faithful prophecies that the farthest East would bow to the descendants of Odysseus and Neoptolemus.

2. A few notorious facts will show that this opposition, visible on the surface of the history, existed in the heart of these nations. The student sees at once that Ormuzd was not the god of the Greeks, and that goodness is not the primary characteristic of any of their divinities. Their essential common quality is not hard to discover, I think. The constantly recurring epithet for Zeus, metieta (“counsellor”), suggests it. A title like Cloudcompeller may describe his acts, but this one is plainly meant to describe his very nature. It is not a solitary expression: the more we consider what Homer attributes to the father of gods and men, the more “counsel” appears as the main quality shown. The god’s mind may be swayed by various impulses and passions, but he always acts with a purpose and devises a series of means to achieve it.

3. The other gods are like Zeus. Apollo is a deviser and suggester of counsels, and Athene still more clearly. Where this character is lacking, as in Ares and Aphrodite, they become objects of ridicule to mortals, however mighty the sword of the one and the girdle of the other.

4. This quality seems to involve both secrecy and society. The counsels are formed deep within the divinity’s heart, but they must be shared. Zeus must tell the Olympian assembly his intentions, or part of them; they must be discussed, deliberated, opposed; there must be ministers to carry them out and often opposing agents to thwart them. The Persian has various beneficent powers, all proceeding from Ormuzd, all invoked by his name, all united against the realm of darkness. The Greek instead honours a number of beings who bring about a result through their conspiracies and contradictions. They are in themselves neither good nor evil and have the same inclinations to both as human beings. They often seem no more powerful physically, but they have a depth and subtlety of wisdom that men cannot reach.

5. In Persia the king is an image of god but is not personally related to him. Ormuzd is always contemplated as the unapproachable light, and his goodness, though shown in mercy to man, is not to be confused with human goodness. But the counsellors of Olympus are always related to sages below: they meet mortal nymphs, father earthly heroes, and give them their sceptres and wisdom. The kings reign as sons of Jove, and in early times the feeling of belonging to the divine race is the warrant of sharing the divine attributes. There is never any doubt what the essential constituent of royalty is. It is not physical strength, mercy, kindness, justice, or courage; it is being a man of many devices. Courage, justice and mercy may or may not be added to this gift or be involved in it, but it is the fundamental one and the rest are accessory. Strength is thrown into the shade in just those heroes where we would expect it: lightness and grace are preferred, and Achilles is “swift-of-foot.” Ambush and stratagem, as often observed, test the hero as much as open fight. Diomed shows his heroic talent no more in wounding Ares than in persuading Glaucus, as they meet as friends on the battlefield telling the story of their kinship, to exchange golden armour for iron, the worth of a hundred oxen’s hides for that of nine. These indications of a deep and pervading spirit appear in a stage of society we rightly call, in one sense, very simple, and in fights where strength and prowess might seem everything. Clearly they are not everything: the council-chamber is as much a part of the Homeric picture as the field of battle. On that field, besides distinct heroes in a death-struggle, we see troops moving together, in ranks, in silence, an excellence which off the battlefield would not have been specially Greek.

6. No one who considers the story of Odysseus, and feels as all have felt that he represented, in fact and in prophecy, his country’s whole mind and tendencies, will doubt that polymetis (“of many counsels”) is the epithet of the Greek hero as much as of the god. But no one who feels the beauty, delicacy and pathos of that story will admit that “cunning” or “crafty” is anywhere near an adequate translation. All the possibilities of craft and cunning lie in it, and such qualities can hardly have offended the morals of a man or nation that claimed it as the most honourable of badges. Yet it also held the possibility of a wisdom that might rise above tricks and falsehood and find them foolish. The “man of many counsels” had large sympathy and a wonderful power of communicating with men, receiving impressions from them and making impressions on them. He had the clearest, sharpest power of observation; all natural forms showed themselves to him in distinct outline, with all their shifting shadows. Animals did homage to the higher instinct in him. He felt that material things were given him to shape, mould and quicken. Though fond of seeing the ways and cities of men, he had a sense of home; the rocks of Ithaca were dearer to him than all the world, for the sake of those who lived there. He might cast off many ties he was born into, and leave his father’s house to wander and seek new lands. But the bonds he entered voluntarily were unspeakably precious: the marriage-tie, and the oath to kinsman, fellow-citizen or even stranger, confirmed by sacrifice. No peril or war was too long or distant to punish their breach. Of all men he best understands the meaning and worth of association, yet he is the most tempted to choose his own way. He is most disposed to see law and government as belonging especially to man and distinguishing him from the lower creatures, and most inclined to break loose from them in his eagerness to assert men’s skill to create them for themselves.

7. In time some of these great contrasts, especially the last, appeared in the rivalry of the Dorian and Ionian tribes. We are often tempted to take the Ionians as the true specimens of the Greek character, and there is great excuse for that. Yet only by seeing both as equally Greek can we fully appreciate what distinguished this people from every other on earth. If the Lacedæmonian and Persian characters had points of sympathy, there was also the strongest repulsion between them. The Spartan Pausanias, affecting the airs of an Asiatic satrap, is far more ludicrous than Themistocles would have been in his place. Compared with the king, the Spartan kings show the difference between East and West even more strikingly than the Athenian democracy does. Lycurgus’s legislation is as unlike that of the Medes and Persians as Solon’s. If we ask the reason, we find that counsel or wisdom, not goodness, is the object of faith and reverence as much for one tribe as the other. It was just this common ground, the sense of shared feeling and language, that made their differing conceptions of the conditions of wisdom and the ways of attaining it so remarkable, and their actual contests so terrible. Indeed, the existence of such opposing tribes, and the vast influence both could exert, points to the greatest contrast between European and Asiatic life. On one side is the vastness of oriental despotism, with all its different races blended and submitting to one central lord. On the other are the struggles of two small cities, each possessed by the idea that one government or principle is better than another, ready to destroy or be sacrificed for its own maxim, and passing on the conviction and the enthusiasm to twenty other cities in different parts of the world, and in a measure to every man in them. And it must never be forgotten that amid all these conflicts there was still the common Hellenic name; all Greeks still felt that it, and the gifts it indicated, separated them from barbarians; and there was still the god of Delphi, who gave counsel to Ionians and Dorians alike, and from whom the rulers of Asia also believed oracles came to guide them.

8. The acknowledgment of this teacher of civil wisdom, who could not easily be separated from the source of light to the world, is one of those facts in Greek history that every thoughtful student has seen to be full of significance. Apollo and Artemis, as our own great poet says, “held the sun and moon in fee.” They were beautiful beings with human forms and sympathies who possessed and governed these natural orbs, and the material light that came from them was only an emblem of the light given to the mind of the one who sought help from the divine priestess. This inspiration was not merely produced by the exhalations of the cave, nor confined to her; the votary shared it in a much more practical sense. In later times the belief in an inspiring god, who prompts the highest song as well as the wildest revelry, was embodied in the legends and festivals of Dionysus. The Greek felt near him an impulse that could degrade him into a beast and a slave, and one that could raise him into a man and a freeman. His actual history proved both convictions true.

9. If the Zeus of the Greeks is very different from Ormuzd, he is almost as unlike Brahm. The object of Hindoo worship, we have seen, is Intelligence, but intelligence as contrasted with action. Every Greek legend shows gods or heroes as teachers of some art, deliverers from some plague or nuisance, makers of a region habitable, openers of communication between regions, establishers of law and order, builders or defenders of cities. The main tendency of the Greek mind is certainly to contemplate intelligence only as bearing on action, leading to direct practical results and governing material things and bodies of men.

10. Hence the skill, counsel or wisdom of the Greek was especially valued for its creative or productive power. The more this power was exercised, and the more varied its directions, the more the people began to suspect that they were themselves the authors of what they looked up to, and that king, priest and god were their own handiwork. So there lay in the heart of the Greek’s faith a seed of unbelief, continually bearing fruit. This unbelief was likely to be most active in those whose faculties were liveliest and most energetic. Something akin to it was also in the popular feeling, even when it clung most fondly to its old legends and ceremonies. These were loved with a parent’s fondness more than a child’s: the Greek clung to them as his own, to be held against others, not as something he depended upon and revered.

11. If Zeus and Apollo hold the highest place in Greek devotion, Hermes had his own special honour. The teacher of words and author of eloquence had given mortals a gift the Greeks felt to be greater and more wonderful than corn and wine. Their latest historian points out carefully how the power of words was recognised in the very infancy of the nation. He notes the significance of the picture on Achilles’s shield, of the trial in the Agora with pleaders supporting each side, and how public speaking was felt to be “the standing engine of government and the proximate cause of obedience,” long before the heroic period gave way to the historical. The most careless reader of the Iliad must be struck by the poet’s sense of the wonder in “winged words,” by his emphasis on them as the special characteristic of human beings, and by his feeling that through them men communicate 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 they were capable of; words flew from the speaker’s lips as messengers of health or destruction, and were in a most remarkable sense his. Yet there was something in them he did not make, an order to which he had to conform.

12. The mysteries expressed something words could not. So far as they were connected with Demeter and her worship, they referred of course to the secret productive powers of plants and animals; they might be given a more material meaning, and be associated with gross and sensual images. But the importance statesmen attached to them showed that they were acknowledgments of a wisdom dwelling somewhere, which could not be measured or reduced to human forms, and 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 seven wise men stand in the same relation to the later history of Greece as the seven champions of Christendom do to the Middle Ages. Bias, Pittacus, Periander and Solon belong to fact, while St. George and St. Denys belong chiefly to fable. But the mystical number shows that both groups were felt to represent different sides of one character. Among the seven are tyrants, legislators and students of nature, and the reports about them varied widely. One said that they all occupied themselves with poetry. Another said they were merely clever men concerned with lawmaking. They were reported to be favourites of Croesus, except Thales. Others spoke of their meeting at the Panionium or at Delphi. All these reports may be correct. They were mainly men of understanding, held to have the divine, heroic, Odyssean gift in greater measure than their neighbours. It was natural that they put their thoughts into verse. Verse was a language unlike that of the market. It expressed more than met the ear, ordinary men felt its power, and a notion of prophecy still clung to it. It is probable that they cultivated the friendship of a great Asiatic ruler. Some did so for a personal aim, some for their city’s sake, and some for the pleasure of showing the Greek against what seemed so much greater and was so inferior. We might also have concluded that they remained thoroughly Greek, taking an interest in every Greek matter of council and government. For this reason they will have had much to do with Delphi.

2. Granting these common traits, there was room for the widest divergence in their pursuits. One man might pride himself on knowing all his fellows’ weaknesses and apply to himself the Greek maxim that the wise man should rule over fools. By fair means or foul, by courtesy or violence, by good acts or destructive ones, he might make himself a tyrant. His claim to the title, and his power to keep it, would rest not on his family, a theory, or military command, but on being a wise man. Another might think it nobler to lay down rules for the preservation and well-being of his city, rules that would outlast him, and he might give up ease, wealth and temporary power to do it. He would be a legislator in the higher sense, yet his legislation would still be a form of his “wisdom.” He would be heard and obeyed only as long as he held the reputation of a wise man. Lastly, the Greek mind would be puzzled by a man who had acquired true oriental lore, studied astrology, and could calculate eclipses. If he used his studies in nature for his own profit or his country’s good, he would be counted a politician. If he withdrew from society to contemplate, he would be scorned as a stargazer. Either way the phrase “wise man” would fit him. It would name the shrewdness he showed in everyday affairs, and it would suggest that he knew, or claimed to know, what most people did not.

3. In this last description the reader will recognise Thales, who usually holds first place among the wise. Herodotus says he was a citizen of Miletus and a Phœnician by descent. Diogenes Laertius says some believed he came from Phœnicia and was made a citizen of Miletus, but that most people believed him a native of an illustrious family. The authority of Herodotus must outweigh the judgment of those “most people,” who naturally did not want to share such a name with Asiatics. Even so, the Greeks have by far the largest share in him. If he brought his astrology from Phœnicia, he was thoroughly Milesian in how he used it. Herodotus says he predicted to the Ionians the eclipse that occurred while the Lydians and Medes were fighting, and which led to peace between them. The Greeks generally believed (Herodotus thought otherwise) that it was Thales who enabled Croesus to cross the Halys by turning the river’s course, when Croesus made his fatal attack on Persia. Others said he was no friend of Croesus, and that he kept Miletus from allying itself with him and so saved it from the conqueror’s wrath. Bias of Priene gave good advice to the Ionian cities after Harpagus overthrew them. But Herodotus says Thales had urged them before their fall to set up a common assembly at Teos.

4. Opposite reports circulated about Thales. Some said he bought up the oil-presses just before the olive season to show how easily a wise man could get rich. Others told how he fell into a pit while watching the stars and was mocked by an old woman for knowing what was over his head better than what lay at his feet. Both stories are probably Greek invention, but they show his countrymen’s uncertainty whether to class him with men of business or with theorists, and their sense that he somehow combined the two. Neither story explains his special distinction of being set apart from the other wise men and called a philosopher. He gets that title from no less an authority than Aristotle, who certainly would not have given it merely because he calculated eclipses, studied astrology, made himself rich, turned the Halys, or proposed a common Ionian assembly. Nor was the judge a favourable one. Aristotle seems to have known little of the Ionian sage. His words suggest that he had seen no writings of Thales, or that there were none. He puts Thales in a class he compares to untrained boxers, who land many good blows but without skill.

5. “He maintained water to be the ground of all things, and the world to have a soul, and to be full of demons.” That is what the gossiping Greek biographer gives as the “philosophy” of Thales. But this was surely not his philosophy, only the index to it. How did Thales come to think about water, or a ground of all things, or a world with or without a soul, full or empty of demons? What put him on seeking when he was reputed to have found out so much more than other men? And what was he seeking? The word Philosophy is the plainest answer. He was thought to have got Wisdom, which could be used for ruling men, building bridges, making money or making laws. He had tried it in some of these ways, not without success, and had won his full share of admiration. Had he wished to head a party in Miletus, or to embroil it with another city, his wisdom would probably have been enough. But he had a more extravagant ambition: to bind his countrymen and their cities together into a peaceful community. Then he found that he had to deal with elements that did not obey fixed laws as the stars did. There were bodies subject to alternations of light and darkness that could not be reliably predicted, and strong currents that could not be turned from their courses as easily as the Halys. Was it among these that he could hope to find the principle of order and unity? Must it not rather lie in the world offered to his senses, which is subject to fierce convulsions but confesses a control even in them? And as for the wisdom we boast of, can its first principle and root be in us? Must it not be somewhere else, where men’s caprices are not at work or are overruled by an order mightier than they? Philosophy was the search not for something else but for Wisdom itself, the very thing which other people thought he fully possessed and commanded.

6. Whether Thales dealt straight blows or random ones, he was the Greek who found that he must ask the question the man of Uz had asked long before: “Where is wisdom found, and where is the place of understanding?” He saw that neither he nor his countrymen yet had an answer, and that they might expect one from some source. If it is said that his answer was poor and unsatisfactory, and more so on this showing than any other, I admit at once that it was not the answer needed for his sake, Ionia’s, or mankind’s. But I cannot admit that it was worthless. Is it nothing that moisture is necessary to the life of all living things and the growth of all growing things? Does that not deserve notice? Everyone has no doubt noticed it, as everyone has seen an apple fall. Is not the whole difference between a man whose eyes are in his head and one whose eyes are at the ends of the earth just this, that the one observes commonplaces and thinks about them, while the other passes them by and despises them? Thales cannot be said to have exaggerated the importance of the fact that so amazed him. He probably underrated it. And if it seemed to him the one all-absorbing fact to which every other must bow, let us remember that it was his fact, the one he had travelled for, and the one that had struck his mind with mighty force and conviction. The world would not be better without some who treasure such facts with a mother’s love. I suspect it would be very barren of precious observations and discoveries.

7. It may be urged, however, that this course led, and could only lead, to scepticism. The early Greeks, though their faith was insecure, still had some faith. They referred wisdom to divine persons, whether called Zeus, Apollo or Athene, and what is personal must be better than what is impersonal. To find the beginning of things in an element like water is virtually to deny any distinct divinity. And the doctrines attributed to Thales, that the world has a soul and is full of demons, contain the germ of all later Greek pantheism.

8. These objections are important and need serious treatment. What I say of them now is only to remove perplexities from the student’s mind and help him see the answer that the later history gives. I have observed already that the seed of the most widespread scepticism lay in the Greek mind. The wise Greek had learnt to believe that he was not sprung from the gods but they from him, and that their wisdom was derived from his. Every new exercise of his faculties, especially those that produced beautiful forms of the divinity, strengthened this conviction. It had already taken unconscious possession of a multitude of minds and was rapidly becoming conscious. Now the feeling “I do not possess wisdom, I must look for it” was surely a powerful counteraction of this tendency, not an aggravation of it. Even if Thales had discarded all faith in Apollo and Athene and put belief in water as the first germ of things in its place, he would at least have laid hold of a fact in nature of which he was not the author, while his countrymen tended to believe nothing but what they had created. But so far as we can see, the effect of physical inquiry on his mind was not this at all. Acknowledging something beyond and outside himself seems rather to have given his mind a religious awe. “Can our ill doings escape the eye of the gods?” he was asked, and he is said to have answered, “Nay, not our thoughts.” Those words are less like what a later Greek would have said than most of what is attributed to him. If they are genuine, they may interpret the other saying, that all things are full of gods or demons.

9. Whether that phrase of Thales pointed most directly to the connection of demons with himself or with the world he saw through his senses, we may not be able to learn. Probably he could not have told us if we had asked. The question that occupied him was whether what he knew was working in him might have its original home and highest throne in Nature, and whether the order he perceived there might be the order to which he belonged. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that, because he was engaged in this inquiry, past traditions of beings like and related to man meant nothing to him. Poseidon and Oceanus may have become more venerable to him, not less, because of the significance he attached to water. And when he is said to have believed in “a world with a soul,” we must not be perplexed by the definitions of the more recent schools from which that language comes. 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.” He found a living, moving power in himself, without which his solid body would be a mere heap of atoms ready to fall apart. He found a living power in nature, water or moisture, without which the solid framework of things would be a dead heap of atoms. The two facts illustrated and explained each other, and it was natural to give a common name to both. What is this that I call soul, or wisdom, in myself, which distinguishes Greeks from barbarians and 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. We should separate the first philosopher from those who follow him, so that the word school does not mislead us into defining it by later times, when it meant mainly the receivers, transmitters and expounders of a set of theories about gods, men, and nature. The men of the Ionic school were not disciples of Thales in that sense. They did not adopt his maxim about water, combine it with maxims of their own, and found a sect named after him. A real bond joined them, but of another kind: they were all seekers after wisdom, and all sought in the same direction, though they reached markedly different and opposite conclusions. Some have made the opposition greater than it was. Old digests of philosophy liked to say that Thales traced all things to water, Anaximander to earth, Anaximenes to air, Heraclitus to fire, so that the four elements were shared out among four Ionic teachers. More learned modern treatises divide the Greek natural philosophers into dynamical and mechanical, placing Thales in the first class and his successor Anaximander in the second, and conclude that they cannot have been master and disciple.

2. Thales, as we have seen, did name water as a first principle. Anaximander was a geographer and inventor of geographical instruments, so the earth, as the complex of sea and land, occupied much of his thought. But his watchword was the Infinite (τὸ ἄπειρον), not the earth. That phrase shows he found an aggregate of phenomena a worthier subject of contemplation than a vital power, and in that sense he may be called antidynamical. But the historian has no right to adopt a classification that is formally correct if it does not represent the contrast between the minds and purposes of two inquirers. The opposition of “mechanical” and “dynamical” suggests that Thales and Anaximander studied nature as a modern German or Englishman does, conscious that the physical world is one field of investigation and the political or human world another. That was not the case at all. They were by vocation wisdom-hunters, who started their game in other ground and were led by accidents and impulses to follow it here. The track of the first pursuer was the one the next ran in, until some fresh scent turned him out of it. Anaximander can hardly have been old enough to hear Thales, yet he belonged to the same city and was greatly influenced by reports and traditions of him. But Thales discoursed, while Anaximander wrote, a difference of great practical importance. Thales, seeking in things the order he could not find among men, lighted upon a fact. Anaximander, setting down in writing the object of the student’s inquiry, called it the beginning or element (ἀρχή or στοιχεῖον). The name, convenient as it seems for pointing the direction of philosophy, to some extent changes it: the pursuit of an ἀρχή threatens to replace the pursuit of wisdom. Still more dangerous was his other phrase, “the Infinite.” A formula so comprehensive seemed to exhaust all possibility; philosophy, just beginning, had already reached its goal, for what could lie beyond the unbounded? Let us do Anaximander the justice to believe that “the Infinite” was not merely a formula to him; that it expressed thoughts too deep for utterance; that he really bowed before what he could not measure or comprehend, even while he seemed ambitious to sum it up in a few syllables.

3. In Anaximenes we see the effect of Anaximander’s step, and also signs of a return to the line he abandoned. The word ἀρχή is equivocal: it suggests “rule” as well as “beginning.” Anaximenes seems to have seen that the philosopher should seek a power that rules, not merely an element or starting-point. Plutarch, who can never be a fair judge of the old philosophers, since he viewed their subjects from a quite different standpoint, may still be taken as evidence when he attributes to them language he is unlikely to have invented and which bears the marks of an earlier stage of thought. Anaximenes, he says, held that “the air rules over all things, as the soul, being air, rules in man.” This explains Aristotle’s statement that Anaximenes made air his ἀρχή, and connects him with the seekers for wisdom. This ruling power in man, invisible and intangible yet accomplishing wonders and compelling huge bodies to obey—what is it, and where? We look in the natural universe to see if it is there. Is not air, invisible, impalpable, all-penetrating, all-commanding, the very thing? Jove was said of old to rule in the air, the cloud-compeller; may he not be this air? It was a perilous question. When later teachers answered yes with untrembling lips, the result was fatal to all sense of a personal moral ruler. But Anaximenes may have raised it in a different spirit. The air may rather have been humanised and glorified by its association with Jove than Jove materialised by identification with the air. The coarseness of the old mythology may have lessened in the student’s mind without being stripped of all its real associations.

4. Another danger lurked in such language, though it did not cause it. In practice the Greek was more liable to confound the “great Counsellor” with the soul, the ruling element in himself, than with the air. Heraclitus the Ephesian seems to have been especially aware of this tendency in his countrymen, and his dread of it seems connected with all his political theories, physical speculations, and personal sorrows. In his mind these were evidently never separated.

5. He believed that we should fight to the 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. What good could come of making laws for evil men? He would live on herbs in the mountains rather than among people who banished their best citizens and would not willingly keep one good man among them. So he was thought a stern aristocrat who despised 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 feeling toward the Ephesians was, I judge, more that of a disappointed lover than of a scorner. “Pride or insolence,” he said, “should be stifled more diligently than a fire.” The Greeks’ vaunting and sense of superiority to the rest of the world seem 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, yet much of his philosophy lies hidden in it. Is the individual soul, as Anaximenes thought, the ruling power in man? Is it not in itself a poor, weak, insignificant thing, most contemptible when most presuming? Separate a man from his fellows and what is he worth? Abolish laws and government and what becomes of the atoms that make up your society? You Greeks are always making the experiment; see what comes of it in this city of mine, what infinite disorder and cause for sorrow. Would not nature have told you the secret if you had studied her? There we find no set of individual energies at work. All things are efficient only in their harmony, only in subjection to some central principle of life. Take that away and the things we see are phantoms, and the universe shows only endless flux. The coal without the fire is a man trying to exist in himself; the coal ignited, receiving communication from another nature, is a man’s soul enkindled by communication with a higher, diviner reason.

6. This may explain why Heraclitus is supposed to have attached such sacredness to fire. Old fables, carefully considered and joined to experience, might teach him that fire was the vital, quickening power of the universe: sometimes the symbol, sometimes the thing symbolised, of the universal life by participation in which all particular things have being, and apart from which they are unsubstantial and unreal. But this physical fire was never divorced from the law that holds societies together, or from the higher universal mind with which the individual mind is meant to be in communion. So when we are told that Heraclitus said the object of man’s life is to know the name of Jupiter, we may be sure Jupiter meant to him neither air nor fire, but a reality he could not comprehend and desired should comprehend him.

7. Such was Heraclitus: a man of marked individual character, full of deep and pregnant intuitions. The popular notion of him as the crying philosopher should not be discarded as meaningless or unconnected with his speculations. His thoughts are like fragments torn from his own being, and not without effort and violence that must have drawn many a sigh from him. The other notion of him, as “the obscure” or “dark” man, is also not unfounded. The fire in his heart and brain, of which the whole world gave him the image, no doubt gave off much smoke that confused and stifled the careless gazers and passers-by, perhaps not to his displeasure. But something in him is not adequately represented by either his tears or his smoke. The sense of a harmony beneath a perpetual conflict of powers, 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. These four, Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Heraclitus, are usually regarded as the Ionic school. The classification has a reason and an advantage: they belonged to one region, were exposed to similar influences, succeeded each other at short intervals, and, I think, passed on some apprehensions and discoveries from first to last. Still, before studying those who were technically and practically the moral and metaphysical philosophers of Greece, we need to speak briefly of two or three others who, in different circumstances, came to occupy themselves chiefly with the phenomena and powers of Nature.

9. I depart a little from chronological order in order to set Democritus of Abdera next to Heraclitus of Ephesus. The old story that contrasts the smiles of one with the tears of the other has significance for both the men and their philosophies. A man who recognises a central power adequate to keep all things at one, who believes in an order, must at times be overwhelmed by the distractions of the actual world, and the more intense his belief, the more the contradictions of experience oppress him. Heraclitus worshipped law and saw a multitude of incoherent elements resolved to disregard it. He found a refuge, but how imperfect a one, in nature, where he could detect a uniting, organising energy. But with his mind harassed by human confusions, how could he fail to see their counterpart there: a whirl of atoms which, if the invisible compulsion binding them were forgotten for a moment, must make the brain sick and the heart sadder than before?

10. But suppose a man arose whose position did not lead him to brood on the perplexities of human society or seek to remove them: provided with external comforts, blessed with good digestion, indifferent to fame, with the Greek habit of observation, and with opportunities of seeing many cities and men, none of which he passionately preferred. We need not wonder at the results he would reach in practice and theory. He would be a benignant, agreeable, sociable companion, who would regard the disorders of humanity as mere eccentricities, treated all the more kindly if he suspected that some results might be serious or painful to those who showed them. He would come to think even “eccentricities” too strong a word for variations that might not be deviations from any standard. For is there a standard, a centre? Can we find one in human beings, or in the physical world? Our senses tell us of none. Perhaps we cannot depend on our senses; but have we anything better? Can we see more than those atoms whose sight 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, and to leave our own guesses, dreams, beliefs and hopes out of the question as far as we can? Is that not the course for the sound physical inquirer, and for the man who wants a quiet, easy, healthy mind, undisturbed by expectations, dark or cheerful, that may never be realised?

11. Here, it seems, we have Democritus the Thracian, whom Aristotle and Bacon both honoured above most Greek speculators because, they thought, he mixed less speculation with observation of facts, and looked hardily at the materials of the world without fearing to meet something that must not be looked at. We do not undervalue qualities that two such judges thought important. Democritus has filled his place among physical inquirers and brought to light a kind of investigation that is indispensable. But I venture to remark that if there had been no men more sombre and less pleasant than he, no inquirers haunted by a sense of powers and mysteries whose existence he ignored, physical philosophy would have been as impossible as moral, and the examination of atoms as lazily pursued and unproductive as the study of laws and of spirit.

12. Empedocles of Agrigentum shows yet another phase of Greek life and feeling. He was utterly unlike Democritus in indifference and equanimity, and no less unlike Heraclitus in his scorn of the mob and hatred of equality. This enthusiastic Sicilian showed in his acts, poetry and philosophy all the strange elements at work through so many ages in the political and physical microcosm where he lived.

13. Nowhere had a man such opportunity as in Sicily to witness every change and condition of society, or more temptation to join its revolutions. Nowhere would he be more reminded of the similar convulsions in the earth’s womb, of Nature’s influence on man, and of the powers man can put forth against Nature. This last observation seems to have impressed Empedocles most, and to have joined with all he had heard and read of divine helpers of men, who taught them mysterious arts and delivered them from oppressive plagues. His inmost conviction seems to have been that such helpers still existed, and that whoever diligently studied the powers of nature might still be guided and inspired by them. It won him the name of an enchanter, and mixed in his own mind with a confused notion that he was himself a kind of celestial person who could wield natural powers at will. But in general he seems to have used his wisdom honestly and benevolently, more for others’ good than his own glory; and certainly he was not content with that wisdom but sought the springs and fountain of it. For him the varied powers of the universe could not be reduced to any one element. The marvel that filled his heart was the endless warfare of opposing forces, none of which could destroy the other and none, perhaps, of which could exist without the other.

14. For Empedocles this was no imaginary battlefield; the very powers Homer showed fighting for Greeks and Trojans were engaged in it. The human passions, love, hatred, friendship, dissension, were seen mixing in the war of earth, air, fire and water. Aristotle, the great classifier of the world, is naturally shocked at this confusion of physics and ethics. While admiring Empedocles as an artist, he seems to have disliked him unusually as a speculator. We may be excused from sharing his feeling, since what offended him is, for the historian of human inquiries, one of the most interesting facts: these early, zealous students of the outward world did not and could not detach it from the deeper perplexities they found in themselves and in human intercourse. To insist that they should is to insist that they not follow the great question that agitated their whole being. For ourselves, we have no wish to separate Empedocles who won at the chariot race, as his father had done, and fought for the liberty of Agrigentum, from Empedocles the author of the Καθαρμοί (the Purifications), who as a poet forms a curious link between Homer, Pindar, and his Roman admirer Lucretius.

15. Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ belongs by birth and early education to the Ionic school. But he taught at Athens, and I think the direction of his mind and the peculiarity of his doctrines can clearly be traced to the influences around him there. Anaxagoras would have been most reluctant to confess this debt; he seems to have been even more utterly without patriotism, in the ordinary sense, than Democritus. When someone said, “You care nothing for your country,” he answered, “Very much indeed; my country is there,” pointing to the stars. There seems to have been no affectation in this. He was absorbed in mere physical contemplation as no Greek before him had been; natural philosophy in his mind was separated from political wisdom, even opposed to it.

16. But this violent reaction against his countrymen’s habits must have been produced by seeing them in full activity: the bustle of Athens drove him to the stars. Yet one finds him unawares bringing into his chosen country the maxims of the one he despised. As he listened wearily, with forced interest, to accounts of party affinities, club fellowships, and alliances among leaders formed and broken, brought him by some favourite, admiring disciple, one can imagine him reflecting on how a whole is made up of portions that seem perfectly distinct yet have a mysterious attraction for each other; how the loss of that attraction is what we mean by dissolution or destruction; and how by it all things are preserved in life. From such reflections, quickly transferred from the region he disliked to the one he loved, the theory of Homœomeriæ may easily have developed, in which modern students have seen the germs of important discoveries about the laws of cohesion. Pericles would surely at once see the human analogy that his master had lost the sense of. He might enjoy being transported for a while into a world so unlike his daily work, and find his thoughts lifted by its clearer, rarer atmosphere, but we cannot doubt how he applied the doctrine, or where he looked for the similar particles he was to combine. For Anaxagoras also taught that there must be a combiner; the mere cohesion of particles was not enough. As Aristotle observes, the particles could not be the cause of the change in their position and relation to each other.

17. 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). This doctrine had always been latent in the Greek mind; Homer’s Zeus of counsel was its indication, and the Ionic search for wisdom amidst natural elements implied it.

18. But if Anaxagoras brought to light the principle his countrymen half-unconsciously recognised, he stripped it not only of certain confused sensual additions they had made, but of everything that made it practically and vitally precious to them. What was this Nous, which had set the stars in order, to them? It was not Zeus, not the acting, living ruler taking part in human affairs whom Homer had set before them. Yet it seemed to assume all his functions and do all the work they had ascribed to him. Was this what they had meant? Was there nothing else in their traditions and hearts? The conscience of the Athenians answered that there was something else, but the answer was a confused muttering, mixed with a painful suspicion that they did not habitually believe more than Anaxagoras told them, and generally not quite as much. Out of that mixed impression, with the true indignation and malignant, hypocritical bitterness that its different parts bred, an accusation of impiety against him naturally came. Mixed with it was another that Anaxagoras must have heard with profound astonishment: he was accused of Medism, a disposition to betray Athens to Persia. Probably the very existence of the Persian empire had escaped him, or remained with him only in connection with some geographical observation. But his devotion to the stars may have given those who wished to wound Pericles through his teacher a plausible plea for representing him as having Magian tastes. The charge of malignancy during the English Civil Wars, of the Popish Plot, and of incivisme during the French Revolution was established by evidence that leaves us and our neighbours little excuse for condemning the Athenian democracy if it 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 from the loss of home ties and affections; the stars could be seen at Lampsacus as at Athens. It is difficult to feel all the sympathy we wish for the victim of injustice from men in whose welfare he took no interest and whose evils he never sought to reform.

Section IV. Pythagoras

1. We pass from the least political of the Greek philosophers to the most political. The records we have of Pythagoras, imperfect as they are, matter for two reasons. They introduce the next part of our subject, the life of Socrates and the doctrines of Plato. They also throw light on the Ionic school from which he came, whose members, Empedocles especially, confessed great debts to him.

2. The traditions that call Thales the first philosopher of Greece say that Pythagoras first used the name. He did not dare claim wisdom for himself, we are told; wisdom was a divine possession, which men could only love and seek. Some judge this modesty inconsistent with his character and say that, if he showed it, it was feigned, since he habitually claimed divine inspiration and unusual gifts. Could he have renounced a title that had been freely given to quite ordinary mortals?

3. The answer lies in his history. For now I note only that the difficulty remains if, as other authorities say, Socrates invented the word “Philosopher” in this sense and stubbornly held to it. Socrates also claimed divine teaching, and, more remarkably, made that claim his very reason for refusing the title “wise man.” What inspiration Pythagoras believed he had been given we may consider shortly; I only ask readers not to judge it, or him, by the reports of fanatical admirers after Christ’s time, or by the satires of Lucian of Samosata.

4. Pythagoras was born at Samos, in a year that is uncertain. Under what master he studied is hotly disputed; if I may choose one guess out of many, any of which may be true or false, I take the one that assigns his early training to Anaximander. Anaximander, as we have seen, carried mathematics further than his predecessors, and his geometry largely shaped his theory. A young pupil of earnest character and high imagination meeting such a thinker would feel a great conflict. The science, new to him and in some measure to everyone around him, would seem strange, wonderful and sublime; the doctrine attached to it would seem cold, vague and unsatisfying. He would begin, we may fancy, to ponder his teacher’s favourite phrase, “the Infinite” (τὸ ἄπειρον), said to be the sum of all things. How unlike what geometry suggests! Geometry leads to limitation and distinctness in each thing and in all; and is not that limitation what constitutes their perfection? Surely the wise man must seek the πέρας, the ultimate limit, not the limitless. Again, Anaximander spoke of an ἀρχή, a beginning. Here he did profit by his science, though mathematics did not teach him the necessity of it: he found every line starting from a point and every series beginning from a fixed number. “But why go abroad to look for your beginning when you have it in the instrument you carry with you? You Ionian philosophers grope after unity in the world around you. Where did you get that idea? Was it not from these numbers, this geometry? There we find not the mere shadow of unity, but unity itself.”

5. Such thoughts, we may fancy, began to work in Pythagoras while he was still among Ionians, making him discontented with earlier methods of inquiry and hopeful of finding a better. We may suppose him setting out on his travels, driven, it is said, by the tyranny of Polycrates. He took away another, perhaps greater, benefit from his Asiatic education. The rhapsodists who sang the old legends to the Greeks of the region where Troy stood, and where Homer or many Homers lived, were perhaps silent by then. But their words were preserved, by this time written down, and the melodies in which they had been sung still lived in the people’s hearts. The Dorian and Lydian measures must have impressed a young Greek deeply; in some the passion for abstract speculation might later efface this, but in others it would give speculation a richer, more poetical character. All Pythagoras’s thoughts on the mystery of number seem to have joined with musical feelings from the first. Was not music the highest illustration of that mystery? Whence come the disposition of thoughts and words into verse, and the fascination of melody, if number is not the secret law, the moving soul of the universe?

6. All these ideas might have lived in his mind and borne little fruit, or no better fruit than a crude philosophical system. But Pythagoras became a traveller. The reports of where he went are all uncertain. We may conjecture with fair confidence that he met people in many different positions and circumstances, and began to think more deeply about their nature and destiny. Then the mystery of number appeared to him in a new light. This was the very problem every legislator had tried to solve: how a number of apparently separate units could feel themselves a real unity. All society and government was the working out of this problem. So away with Ionian experiments after a physical unity; here was the true field for discovery. But what in man has the capacity for association and organization? Not likeness of feature, and not nearness in space. It is that wonderful thing inhabiting this animal frame, which can carry 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 I actually lived then. I can project myself forward into ages to come; doubtless in some condition I shall live then. But in what condition? This soul, which can look before and after, can also shrink into an incapacity to contemplate anything but the present moment. Of what degeneracy it is capable! What a beast it may become! And if something lower than itself, why not something higher? And if higher or lower, why may there not be a law exactly determining its rises and falls? Each soul has its own evil tastes, which bring it to the likeness of different creatures beneath it; why may it not be bound to remain in the condition of the thing to which it has adapted and reduced itself?”

7. Pythagoras may or may not have borrowed such thoughts from Egyptian priests. To a man in his frame of mind every old tradition and relic of national faith would be precious; still, nothing in the doctrine of transmigration could not easily have grown from his reflections on what makes men human and able to associate. He was surely led to another, deeper discovery by studying the governments of different countries, especially those with the Dorian stamp. Everywhere he found that the bond of the community was the recognition of a power above man, a righteous lawgiving power. No human legislature ever dared dispense with this, and no society could hold together without it. A deep and awful idea! The union of men presumes a still deeper ground. Is not this ground the πέρας, the ultimate unity we are seeking?

8. So, we suppose, the idea of limitation, got from geometry and set against the notion of an all-comprehending Infinite or Indefinite, and the idea of beginning and succession, got from arithmetic and set against the notion of a merely external ground of things, were fused and softened by a sense of music dwelling deep in the heart of the world. They may thus have become joined to practical thoughts about the nature of the human soul and the bonds that relate souls to each other.

9. The more this sense of the sacredness and mystery of human fellowship grew in Pythagoras, the more peril and evil he will have seen in men’s pretensions to wisdom. Order is destroyed by such individual pretensions. Wisdom must be seen as altogether above the soul, something it cannot appropriate but must honour; to be sought in silence yet not in solitude; which each man must reverence for himself yet feel is no more his than his fellows’; and which can be truly pursued only by those willing to give up outward enjoyments for it. So the philosophy of Pythagoras could not be carried out except in a community of living men.

10. His inmost meaning was to be expressed in the bonds that held them together in their dealings with each other and with outsiders, and in the silence and fear with which they acknowledged an invisible ruler. Thus the proportions and relations of the universe would be shown on their highest ground; the mystical harmony felt; the dignity of the human soul, and its capacity for growth and perfecting, proved; distributive justice, the geometry and arithmetic of politics, realised in practice; and the idea of God felt as the foundation of social life. This, I think, was the feeling that led to the Pythagorean society, which grew up in southern Italy. Even after deducting the extravagance of later reporters, it must have had great influence on various cities of Magna Graecia. It brought about legislative and moral reforms, engaged in political intrigue, and was finally put down as a dangerous religious confederacy incompatible with regular government.

11. By calling this society “an order,” Bishop Thirlwall and Mr. Grote have done much to explain the secret of its strength and influence, and of its errors and decay. The earnest seeker of wisdom found hearts yearning for it like his own. It was an inheritance meant for them and him, and the more they made it the common object of their lives, the more they might hope to share it. The lessons from their master could be communicated only to the circle around him; to others they would have been different lessons. Apart from the practical discipline that went with them they were not true, and served no purpose of purification or seeking of wisdom. The allegiance of men so joined to the one who gave their minds their first impulse and directs their energies is affectionate, devout, dangerous. They are united by sympathy and reverence, and a man is the object of both. If he has felt deeply that their union rests on no power or wisdom of his, he will tell them so continually and try, through every form of their polity, to keep them mindful of it. But if he believes that what he teaches is not his own, he must believe, and make them believe, that it was imparted to him; he must regard his work as a vocation. The more he uses language expressing this, the more passionate, idolatrous followers will pervert it, and make his earnest disclaiming of wisdom an excuse for saying he possesses it on altogether new and peculiar terms. How can such idolatry fail to react on its object? It must awaken in him vanity, self-consciousness and self-glorification, which struggle fearfully with the truth-seeking, truth-loving temper that led him to say, “I did not choose this course for myself; I did not make this discovery. A mightier wisdom has guided me and shown 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, with all the strange contradictions that provoked our harsh judgments and should have drawn our pity and sorrow. The outward results are better known and often tragic. Of the Pythagoreans we have only indistinct glimpses, but enough, with the experience we have since gained, to show how zealous the society must have been to bring others into its light, yet how proud in boasting of an exclusive hold on it; how resolved not to separate their moral practices from their outward doctrines, yet how apt, in the heat of propagandism, to drop all inconvenient austerity and to tolerate and use the corruptions they undertook to remove; how their first aim will have been to use their society to make all society deeper in its foundations and truer in its acts, yet how at last they may have come to think it had no deeper foundation than the Pythagorean rule, and that false and dishonest means might be legitimate to establish that rule. Some traditions represent the founder as advancing the ambitions of his order and sharing in its downfall. We cannot test their accuracy. If true, they need not make us doubt the sincerity of his purpose or the real worth of the principle he testified to. The failure of a noble scheme may vindicate its planner’s inner conviction better than success would. If Pythagoras believed that human society had a mysterious, divine ground, and that every true philosopher and reformer lives to convince society of it, it was fitting that he and his order should perish when they began to fancy they could build society by their devices, on their wisdom. His name remained sacred and venerable for Greece, though none could say in words what it had done for them. Those who spoke of Pythagorean doctrines in earlier times meant the doctrine of Philolaus, Lysis, Eurytus and Archytas, men who knew nothing of the Italian master, never shared his discipline, and were raised amid ordinary Greek influences. Those who spoke of Pythagoras himself in neo-Platonic times meant a wonder-worker they had created by mixing Christian and pagan records, to convince the world that the Christian church was a plagiarism. But Plato and Aristotle kept a reverence for the original master’s name that they never gave to the school where his opinions were dried for use and export. Iamblichus and Porphyry were unconsciously testifying that the best and wisest teachers of ancient Greece had been led, by all their studies of nature and man, and, as they rightly judged, by some guide higher than either, to seek a brotherhood that did not rest on human wisdom; that they tried to create one, and failed.

Section V. Xenophanes—Parmenides—Zeno

1. I have observed before that most of the Greek sages were poets. Verse seemed the natural language for thoughts meant as oracles, for the experienced ear and puzzling to the crowd. Once the wise man became the philosopher, he used verse less often. Empedocles had a rich, poetic mind, but Anaxagoras, Anaximander and Anaximenes probably never left ordinary speech. Yet whichever medium they used, a suspicion began to rise in them: the poet, insofar as he was a Maker, was the philosopher’s antagonist. Homer held the sympathies of the Greeks as the most profound student never did. Why? Was his influence healthy? Were his creations not obstacles to the investigator, since he had assumed the very result the inquirers were still pursuing?

2. This sense of opposition reached its height in Xenophanes. Like Pythagoras he was an Ionian by birth and became an Italian colonist. He felt bitterly the luxury of his own city, Colophon, and was disgusted by the manners and love of amusement among the Greeks of Asia and the islands. He must have gone to Italy a discontented man, discontented probably with the Ionian investigations as well as with their political life. Pythagoras’s example, or his own reflection, will have taught him that what he wanted was not an element or ἀρχή. But he seems to have had little interest in geometry or arithmetic, and music did not impress him as it did Pythagoras. Pythagoras’s thoughts on the soul and its migrations took no hold of him. In one fragment he ridicules a sage who would not let a dog be beaten, because he recognised in its growl the voice of an old friend.

3. Nor does he seem to have wanted to found or join any political association. He may have heard of the scattering of the Pythagorean society and turned away from such experiments. But his genius did not lead that way anyway. Social unity was not his problem. His problem concerned unity in quite a different sense. What are the gods of the Homeric poems? Does any reality correspond to them? Are they not formed in 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 this last question from a different side and in a different spirit. He had recognised a Being near to man, to be adored in silence and awe. That Being had little in common with the gods of his countrymen, yet he never denied that they were owed homage. His secret teaching to his disciples cannot have been that the homage was merely a concession to the vulgar; it must have been an effort to make it more sincere and significant. Pythagoras felt he had no substitute for the personal objects he had been taught to revere. He felt that some living being, not an abstraction and not a creation of his own mind, must sustain his polity and every human one.

4. In Xenophanes all these checks on free inquiry into his country’s faith were missing. The naked question came before him: “What does my soul affirm about God; what conceptions can it or can it not form of Him?” His verses, written in various styles and measures, were his answers. As a poet-philosopher he criticises the poets, to show that they have been making the beings they bow down to. The Homeric gods all have human shapes because men made them in their own likeness; if an ox made a god, would he not give him horns and hoofs? How can any conception of God be formed? What do your finite and infinite mean, if both are terms of your own mind? How can you make Him out of them?

5. This may sound like scepticism, but in Xenophanes it was not. He did not argue that because the senses cannot tell us of God, and we cannot measure Him by our conceptions, He therefore is not. He said the reverse: “My senses do not tell me what is; they tell me only of appearances. My conceptions do not measure what is; it lies deeper.” So he did not deny the being of that which the Homeric pictures failed to resemble. His disapproval of them came from his wish to assert a real ground of things, independent of man’s conclusions or conceptions, which he affirms to be but does not make.

This was a wonderful process of thought, and our later history must unfold its results. Xenophanes was no atheist but an earnest theist. He asserted a Being. Asked “what Being?”, he would have owned he could not say; he could only say what that Being was not. He approached the border of negation manfully and reverently, and so did not cross it. He pointed out a void he could not fill, and for that alone we should be grateful. But he also saw the way to a deep and radical truth.

6. A healthier thinker than Xenophanes, though one in whom it is harder to take the same interest, took up his inquiry: Parmenides. The question about God that had so occupied Xenophanes does not seem to have agitated him nearly as much. His mind rested on Xenophanes’s principle that what the senses present are appearances, and that only what the mind affirms without the senses actually is. What, then, does the mind affirm? Xenophanes had said “God.” Parmenides said “Unity,” or “The One.” My senses tell me thousands of things, yet has not every thinking and feeling man groped after some one root and ground of them all? This is what man wants, and it is affirmed to be by that within him which fights against apparitions and phantoms. Plurality is one such apparition, deceitful and transitory; only unity is permanent and eternal. Such a belief could not dawn on a Greek philosopher without deep wonder. He had seen Ionians in succession question all nature for this unity. He had seen Pythagoras evoke it from the relations of number and actually build a human society to illustrate it. Now unity declared itself a condition of the human mind itself; it had been sought in all other things, when it really dwelt only with the mind. A child’s confused look at a new world is a faint emblem of the surprise of an earnest seeker on whom this thought has just burst. Yet he cannot doubt it is true. It makes intelligible so much that had perplexed him, and accounts so well for what other men have thought. But what follows? Faith in the things about us becomes impossible; we live in a shadow world and behold nothing. The distinctions of things, the apparent multitude of objects, do not exist and speak only to our fancy. Only the unity the mind beholds and demands has substance.

7. Anyone can see how this doctrine exposed Parmenides to the jests of witty men, who grow on the surface of every land, and Greece and her colonies produced their share. These wits no doubt thought they were setting self-evident facts against mere dreams. But Parmenides had a friend and disciple unwilling to leave them undisturbed in this opinion. Zeno of Elea was convinced that the doctrine experience seemed so irresistibly to establish was not only false but absurd, and he boldly undertook to make the absurdity palpable to the popular mind. In a series of arguments, some still preserved, he tried to show that space cannot exist; that we cannot suppose a plurality of objects without giving them self-destructive qualities; that if real existences are many, their number must be both finite and infinite; and lastly that the notion of movement involves a contradiction. Readers may not care for these early specimens of Greek subtlety and may denounce them as a word-conjurer’s tricks. Zeno deserves no such name. He was brave in both action and speculation, and we owe him a great practical discovery. He holds an especially important position as a thinker, and it will help our later studies of Greek philosophy to understand it.

8. Every philosophy needs an instrument or organ to make itself intelligible. For the Ionic philosopher it was some external object; for the Pythagorean, lines and numbers. What was the Eleatic’s instrument? He seems to have risen into a region of such pure metaphysic, rejecting every common and sensible analogy, that at first one cannot see how he could impart his doctrine or suggest any method for pursuing it. Xenophanes seems to have felt this difficulty, and Parmenides somewhat. Precious as their hints are, it seems likely they would have had to stop where they were and leave no successors. But Zeno solved the puzzle. He found that words stand to this philosophy as sensible objects and numbers stand to the other two. Our language must embody the law and principle of our own mental workings, and that was exactly what the Eleatics were dealing with.

9. Zeno was only imperfectly conscious of this truth, but he acted on it, with useful fruit for him and for us. There was no falseness in his use of words. He felt that they affirm and embody truths, and he used them to elucidate truths. In this he was as honest as the wits who tried to confute Parmenides and his kind by appeal to experience. For they too profit from our belief in words. They awaken our consciousness that the words we speak carry the impress and image of the external world, and they rest on this against philosophers who set the evidence of the external world at nought. Zeno awakens our consciousness that the words we utter express something with no counterpart in the external world, and he rests on this against those who set at nought the witness of their own minds. Both appeals are fair and carry conviction. But one merely convinces us of a fact we already took for granted; the other forces us to perceive truths lying very near our inmost being, yet almost entirely hidden from us.

10. But the practical discovery that came directly from this search for an instrument for the Parmenidean philosophy is what most obliges us to admire and thank Zeno. According to the best historical evidence, we owe mathematical science to the East, and it fits the calm, contemplative yet sensual character of the Orientals that this was their contribution. But Logic, the science that declares not the conditions of external things but the conditions under which we ourselves speak and judge, was purely a Greek invention. No other people had the subtlety to conceive such a science, still less to find its province and work. Logic in its formal, narrow sense is thought the antagonist of poetry, yet only a most imaginative and poetical nation could have discovered its meaning and necessity and given it its statue-like perfection in Greek hands. Zeno is believed, on the best grounds, to be the inventor of logic. He first saw clearly that the mind has a distinct law governing its own affirmations, and so was first stirred to ask what that law is. How much we owe him we shall understand better as we advance. My main object here has been to point out the connection between this achievement and the Eleatic philosophy, which Zeno ably defended; to indicate the influence of that philosophy on the Greek mind; to show its important place in the history of human inquiry; and to excite interest in the later development of a doctrine we have seen in its first germ. In so rapid a sketch we can only notice what seems the living and central peculiarity of each thinker. But the real germinant principle is hard to find amid the mass of notions and opinions around it. An historian will distrust his own sagacity in detecting it, and will rejoice to find it anywhere in its rude, primitive shape. However little value it has in that state, he thinks it unwise to wait until the animalcule has become a perfect insect, or the insect has died, before examining it. This is my apology for treating the ante-Socratic schools briefly, yet at a length that may seem out of proportion to the time we can give their successors. We wish not to furnish readers with a history but to put them in a right method of procuring one for themselves, and I am convinced that their understanding of the palmy period between Socrates and Aristotle, and of the age of senility that followed, will be clear or confused exactly in proportion as they study or pass over its infancy. Let them not hope to understand Plato, Aristotle, or even Epicurus, Zeno of Cittium and Carneades, if they begin by despising Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Parmenides. We might go further and say we would greatly doubt the claim of anyone to know Hobbes, Locke, Leibnitz or Kant who could find nothing but confusion and barrenness in these early inquiries.