CHAPTER LXVII

SICILIAN AFFAIRS (317-216 B.C.) 578

Agathocles, 578. Pyrrhus and the Romans, 583.

CONCLUDING SUMMARY

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HELLENIC SPIRIT. By Dr. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff 587

BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS 614

A GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GRECIAN HISTORY 617

THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY

WRITTEN SPECIALLY FOR THE PRESENT WORK

BY DR. HERMANN DIELS

Professor in the University of Berlin.

It is a primary law of development that each generation should supplant and supersede that which preceded it. The parents bring forth the child, and when the child has advanced to full maturity they themselves lapse into oblivion; and the same fate overtakes their children and children’s children.

So it is with nations. One civilisation rises above the level of the rest, then sinks, yielding place to the fresh vigour of younger nations, to which it bequeaths its heritage of culture. For a while the elder mother-nation is held in remembrance as a teacher and model; but ultimately--when the new generation of nations has grown strong enough to maintain an independent existence--the elder vanishes to return no more.

Such a stage we ourselves seem to have reached. The peoples of the Classic Age have long passed away, but in the Renaissance the culture of their time rose again from the dead. A bevy of daughters entered upon the heritage of this mother--Italy, France, England, Germany, and many others--and added to it, each after her own fashion. Then they outgrew the imitation and mere echo of the antique, passing on to express in act an independent culture of their own; and now the time seems to have come when the modern spirit claims absolute liberty of action in every sphere, without the slightest reference to the traditions of antiquity. For the modern technician, the modern naturalist, the modern historian, the modern artist, the modern poet, the ancient world has no message. It is dead--dead past recovery, as we may say.

There is, however, one sphere in which it is not dead, where it still imparts fresh stimulus to the minds of men from day to day, in which it is still recognised as the guide to every fresh enterprise. This sphere is philosophy.

The last and loftiest height to which thinking humanity can climb is that comprehensive vision of all things which we Germans call _Weltanschauung_, and which the Greeks called _Philosophia_. In speculation of this illimitable range we have made but little advance upon the Greeks; nay, even those most modern of philosophers who, on the basis of biological knowledge, have built up the most modern of all conceptions of the world, are in unconscious agreement with the rudiments of Greek natural science in the sixth century B.C. Let anyone compare the “cosmological perspective” to which Ernest Haeckel has attained in his book _Die Welträthsel_ [_The Riddle of the Universe_] (1900) p. 15, “from the highest point of monistic science yet reached,” with what Anaximandros taught in the reign of Cyrus, and he will perceive with amazement that modern times have hardly gone further by a single step. The eternity, infinity, and illimitability of the Cosmos; the substance thereof, with its attributes of matter and energy, which in perpetual motion occupy the boundless space; perpetual motion itself in its periodic changes of becoming and ceasing to be; the constant progress of decay and destruction in the innumerable celestial bodies which give place to fresh formations of a similar character; the process of biogenesis on our own planet, by which in the course of æons animal life was brought forth, and by which, through gradual metamorphoses, the vertebrates were evolved from its earliest forms, the mammalia from vertebrates, the primary apes from mammalia, and lastly, through progressive evolution, man was brought into being towards the end of the tertiary period--all these propositions had already been recognised and stated in germ by the Greek thinker who lived during the first generation of Greek philosophy. The sum total of the progress made in twenty-five hundred years, that what was then surmised from, rather than disclosed by, an empiric consideration of some few facts, has now been demonstrated in detail by scientific observation.

But these main propositions, which the modern scientist regards as his own gains, because he has had to win them afresh by his own toil from the errors of the ancient and mediæval world, are of no great significance when compared with the far greater residuum of questions that still remain unanswered. Du Bois-Raymond, as is well known, described these “world riddles” in the year 1880 as in part unsolved, in part insoluble. They are seven in number: (1) The nature of matter and force; (2) the origin of motion; (3) the first beginning of life; (4) the adaptation of nature to certain ends; (5) the rise of sensation and consciousness; (6) the origin of thought and speech; (7) freedom of will.

It is easy to see that, compared with these fundamental questions, which may be summed up in the great question of all, “God and the world,” the whole sequence of cosmic research from Anaximander to Haeckel is merely of secondary importance. It is, as it were, the surface of the matter; and even if, with Goethe, we feel the inadequacy of the apothegm of Haller, the poet and naturalist, “Into the heart of nature no created spirit may penetrate,” yet we cannot but see that as yet we poor mortals are only nibbling at the rind, and that centuries more of labour are needed to penetrate its diamond hardness.

Thus everything that has hitherto been achieved is, as it were, a mere prelude to the abstract presentment of cosmic principles, and consequently the rudimentary beginnings of study in this sphere are far less remote from its present condition than is the case in any other department of the intellectual activity of mankind. And hence, even at the present day, the consideration of Greek philosophy is not only the most interesting, but also by far the most directly profitable part of the study of antiquity. No man who has not thoroughly studied the systems of Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle can become a profound philosopher in our own time.

“The love of wisdom” was the name which, from the fifth century B.C. onwards, the Greeks bestowed on any kind of intellectual endeavour which was diverted from the practice and directed to the theory of life. The scope of this striving naturally varied in different periods. In the infancy of Greek speculation, _i.e._, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., men pored with wide, childlike eyes over the marvels of nature that lay about them and tried to find in natural science the solution of the riddle of existence. Philosophy was then mainly the embodiment of scientific and mathematical research, that is to say, it was what we nowadays call “Science.”

A troublous period followed, represented by the Sophists, a time of youthful storm and stress, out of which the mature philosophy of ideas developed towards the end of the fifth century. The term “philosopher” begins to acquire a professional meaning. Side by side with the Sophist, who supplied “culture” in return for money, stood the philosopher, who directed the course of education without remuneration. At first, it is true, this education was confined to morals. But in Plato it proceeded to expand into a study that comprised mathematics, logic, physics, and ethics, as well as politics, forming a pyramid built on the broadest of possible bases and culminating in the idea of Good. By that time a “philosopher” had come to mean one who is capable of grasping the eternal idea (Plato, Rep. VI, 484 A). Next, in the Universal Encyclopædia of Aristotle, this platonic structure is completed and made habitable within and fitted to human requirements. Under him the idea and the term “philosopher” attained its maximum extension. Thereafter both begin to narrow down. The end of the fourth century witnessed the collapse of the Greek state, to the insecure structure of which the philosophers had never been blind.

With the fall of the Hellenic municipal system and the rise of the Macedonian sovereignty a new world comes into being, in which the leaders are monarchs and no longer individual citizens. The outlook and sphere of action of the individual is restricted. Men grow to be eminent in practical affairs, experts in the art of living, less eager to solve the riddle of the universe than that of the personal Ego, by withdrawing men from the tumult of external affairs and guiding them into the imperturbable calm of philosophic conviction as into a sure haven. Hence in the systems of the Stoa and of Epicurus and Pyrrho the designation of philosopher assumes the meaning of a counsellor in the conduct of life, who, in the lack of political liberty then prevailing, held up an ideal of liberty within, which no tyrant could menace.

In proportion as the sphere of philosophy in the Hellenistic world narrowed to the consideration of the Useful and the Practicable, the sphere of its influence widened. Alexander’s expedition had thrown the East open to Greek civilisation, and the assiduous and subjective temperament of the youth of the Semitic peoples was drawn to the wisdom of the Greeks. An active process of endosmosis and exosmosis set in between the countries of the West and East. During the period from the third to the first century B.C. this interchange created a new civilisation, destined to form the basis of the _Imperium Romanum_ in matters temporal and the _Imperium Christi_ in matters spiritual. But at this period the clear outlines of development tend to become blurred.

As the Hellenic nation expands into the Hellenistic peoples, as the national language of Greece becomes the common medium of the East, nay, of the whole civilised world, the eclecticism which had been formed out of certain elements of the old Greek philosophy under the dominant influence of the Stoa gained ground on all sides. In the time of Christ, Greek philosophy is an indispensable requisite of the higher culture, and the university of Athens, with its professors, whose appointment the state soon took upon itself, is the one where the educated Roman and Cappadocian alike must have studied. The Greek private tutor, recommended by the head of some school or other at Athens, becomes a standing institution in Roman families of distinction, and is treated with the contempt due to such a _Græculus_, ranking first among the slaves of the household.

Times soon change, however. Under the philosopher Marcus, philosophy gained admission to courtly circles, and presently became indispensable in the conflict with the increasing might of Christianity. After the Christian conception of the world had conquered under Constantine, the university of Athens became the bulwark of Paganism. Neo-Platonism, a new philosophy bred of the enthusiastic temperament of the East, the congenial philosophy of Plato and the erudition of Aristotle, fought the last fight with the courage of despair. But though its champions were, for the most part, superior in courage, moral character, and scientific learning to the bishops whom they withstood, philosophy and the ancient world had played out their part. In the latter end of the period of antiquity the overseer of any craft (as, for example, the overseer of the quarrymen in the _Passio Sanctorum IV Coronatorum_) was called in popular parlance _philosophus_ to distinguish him from the artisans. _Sic transit gloria mundi._

I

With the term “philosophy” as our guide, we have made a rapid superficial survey of the progress of the studies it included in these eleven hundred years of development (585 B.C.-529 A.D.). We will now consider in somewhat fuller detail the three phases which cover the Greek epoch proper, _i.e._, the first three centuries, from Thales to Pyrrho (585-270), with a special view to the study of their internal evolution.

The Greek nation is almost the last of all the civilised peoples of the ancient world to enter upon the scene of history and bulk largely in the minds of men. The long period during which the Greeks dwelt among their Aryan kindred, fruitful in intellectual progress as their language proves it to have been, has passed utterly out of the historic memory of the race. And yet the beginnings of scientific knowledge must have fallen within this period, in so far as the dim prevision of eternal and perpetual motion dawned upon men’s minds from the observation of the moon (_mēnē_, from the root _mē_, to measure), from chronology, and the consequent observation of cosmic laws. Nor have any other than mythical records come down to us from the first thousand years in which the Hellenes dwelt in the Balkan peninsula, then-future home, side by side with the original inhabitants and other migratory tribes; but from the buildings and monuments which the earth has yielded to Schliemann’s and Evans’ spades we can form some conception of the might of these rulers and the splendour of the knightly life they led.

A faint reflection of the Middle Age of Greece has been preserved in the epic poetry of Homer, the most ancient portions of which date back to the year 1000 B.C., while the latest bring us down to the time of Thales, that is to say, to the sixth century. The Homeric bards do not philosophise as the Stoics fancied they did, they look upon life with living eyes in the true artist spirit, and reproduce it “not sickbed o’er with the pale cast of thought.” Only in a few later passages of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ do we catch strange notes that harmonise ill with that _joie de vivre_ which is the keynote of the epics. We see that in those strenuous days, when the Greeks were bent upon carrying their commerce to the uttermost ends of the earth and satisfying the ever increasing clamour of the populace for food and power, the nation begins to pass over from the light-hearted carelessness of the epic of chivalry to the harsher and more reflective didactic poetry of Hesiod. Indeed, in one of the later passages of the _Odyssey_ (_Nekyia_) we note an evident reflex of the Orphic cosmologies, in which, under the name of a Thracian bard of remote antiquity, a mournful and pessimistic strain of poetry, dealing with sin and penitence, stands contrasted with the optimistic acceptance of the existing order of things which is characteristic of Homer.

The forces which brought philosophy, properly so called, to the birth at the beginning of the sixth century were three in number. First, the poetry then extant, which had cast into artless shape a number of speculative observations on the subject of the Cosmos--such as the conceptions of Oceanus encircling the earth, of Zeus dwelling in ether above it, of Tartarus beneath it, and so forth. Nothing but a cool head and a turn for systematisation was needed to convert these images into “ideas” and to combine the latter into a homogeneous and coherent conception. Another service was rendered by the study of geography, mathematics, and astronomy, developed as it had been by the long voyages of Milesians and Phocæans in the Mediterranean after they had supplanted the Phœnicians. A school of navigation came into being at Miletus, which city had successfully opened up the Euxine in the seventh century; and both Thales and Anaximander were trained in it. Miletus, where the trade with Egypt was started about the same time and the establishment of permanent factories like Naucratis taken in hand, likewise constituted the meeting-place of the geometry and astronomy of the Egyptians, whose learning was formerly much over estimated, with the far superior astronomical science of the Babylonians. The reports of mariners, charts, the catalogue of the stars, all combined with Oriental tradition and the unbiassed perspicacity of the Greeks to give the world the first science, _i.e._, research built upon a basis of empiricism, tested by the methods of mathematics and logic, and aiming at a harmonious interpretation of the Cosmos. To give a name to this study the Ionians evolved the idea of _Historia_, which in the sixth century took the place of _Philosophia_; the latter not coming into use until the fifth century.

In this place I must mention the third element, although it is not in evidence in the earliest exponents of Ionian philosophy. It is the tendency to mysticism, to abstraction from the world, then beginning to develop in the Orphic school, which has left traces of its influence with ever-increasing distinctness in Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles. It favoured the rise of a transcendental idealism which, although we do not find it matured into immaterial conceptions in these first natural philosophers, yet contains the germ of Plato’s dualistic idea of the universe. Not that the curve of development runs in smooth ascent from Thales to Plato; it exhibits the spiral windings inseparable from historic processes, since every new tendency calls forth the antagonistic principle to that which has spent its force, and thus brings about the necessity of reaction in a retrospective sense.

Thales, who enjoyed great repute in his native city of Miletus and throughout Asia Minor at the commencement of the sixth century, calls water the beginning of all things. This was no new idea. For before his time poets had spoken of Oceanus, of the origin of the gods, and of the deluge from which the world was born anew. And the infinite sea could not but lie close to the thoughts of a seafaring nation.

The novel and genuinely philosophic element in this proposition is rather the monistic endeavour to refer all phenomena to a single cause, to be sought not in heaven but on earth. For that which is taken as the beginning is not Oceanus, or, it may be, Poseidon, as in the older cosmogonies, but this palpable substance of water, out of which all things come and to which they all return. This original matter is indeed supposed to be animated by a divine spirit, but this divinity is not a person. There is no place for it on Olympus. Rather is it the expression of the immanent force which this philosopher recognised in the incomprehensible properties of the magnet, and there called “soul.” This enduing of nature with a soul is characteristic of the infancy of speculation, and hence this Ionic philosophy has also been called Hylozoism (the doctrine of living matter). The monistic impulse, which would bind the world and this single and supposed divine primeval force together, is diametrically opposed to the polytheistic tendency of the popular religion of Greece. Even in the first Greek philosophers this aspiration after unity points forward to monotheism, which was preached by Xenophanes, the Ionian, at the end of this same century.

Of all the achievements of Thales his prediction of the eclipse of the sun (May 28, 585) is that which caused the greatest amazement, although its scientific significance is the most trifling of any. For, as the history of astronomy proves beyond controversy, Thales and his whole generation lacked the rudiments of knowledge necessary for the calculation of eclipses, and had not the faintest notion of how they came about. Hence he can only have employed according to a fixed method some such formula as the Chaldeans had gained from empiric observation in calculating their eclipse period of eighteen years and eleven days (_Saros_). The rule only suffices for approximate predictions. As a matter of fact, Herodotus, the earliest witness to this event, states that Thales allowed a margin of a whole year for the occurrence of the eclipse.

Thales himself left no written works, and this Ionic _Historia_ first emerges into the full light of day with Anaximander of Miletus, who founded the Ionic school about a generation later. In him the three forces are strongly marked and defined--first the scientific spirit, which impelled him to give visible expression to the geographical ideas of his countrymen by means of a map of the earth’s surface, and to make a systematic description of the heavens with the stationary and revolving celestial bodies. With him originated the conception of the constellations as a system of spheres rotating through and within one another, and it was his mathematical imagination that led him to assume the existence of certain fixed intervals between the revolving spheres, arbitrarily determined as to number, but expressing in their proportion the idea of harmony.

Here we have the germ of the speculations of Pythagoras, on which, as is well known, the laws of Copernicus and Kepler are founded. The vein of poetry in the Ionian character is manifest not only in this intuitive perception but in the aptness of his imagery, when he calls these spheres “chariot-wheels,” from the rim of which the fiery flames of the sun, moon, etc., start out like felloes. The scientific element in his system is evident in the manner in which he follows out biologically the idea of Thales concerning water. If all things have at one time been water, then organisms cannot originally have been created as land animals. Hence man, who now comes into the world utterly helpless, has been gradually evolved from pisciform creatures--the first germ of Darwinism.

Lastly the pessimistic mysticism which had lately arisen is clearly manifest in him. When he regards the origin of all individual existences as a wrong committed by them in separating themselves from the All-One, we can only understand him by referring to Orphic religious ideas, in which birth is looked upon as a decline and fall from the blissful seats of the gods and earthly life is represented as a vale of misery. Death is consequently the penalty which the individual pays for his presumption, whether the individual be a man or a celestial body. For the earth and all other Cosmoi are doomed to extinction in an “Infinite” which corresponds to the ancient idea of Chaos, and, like that, is not conceived of as a vacuum but as matter in an undefined form. This alternation of creation and annihilation, this perpetual motion, anticipates the eternal flux of Heraclitus of Ephesus, who at the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth, transformed the teaching of Anaximander into keener dialectics.

In comparison with this Ephesian thinker the successors of Anaximander at Miletus and whatsoever following they had down to the end of the fifth century sink into total obscurity. Before turning our attention to Heraclitus, however, we must first consider the man who transplanted the Ionic _Historia_ from Ionia to Italy and there elaborated both the scientific and mystic side of it with marvellous assiduity--that is, Pythagoras.

Pythagoras left Samos about the year 530, and turned his steps towards Croton in lower Italy, where he found virgin soil for his labours. The mathematical foundation upon which the Ionic school is based attains an excessive predominance with Pythagoras. Epoch-making maxims are associated with his name, and probably not without good reason. But the speculative tendency of the Ionic mind prompted him to set up number itself as a principle; the Infinite of Anaximander being conceived of arithmetically as the Uneven, _i.e._, that which cannot be divided by two. Since the Even and Uneven alone co-exist, the sacred Three is compounded of Unity and Duality, as is also the Four (_tetraktys_), the root of Being. By simply adding these first four numbers together the Decas (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10) is obtained. The cosmos is made to consist of ten celestial bodies, corresponding to this Decas, by the addition of the heaven of the fixed stars as an outermost crust, and the earth and the “anti-earth” (_antichthon_) containing the central fire, at the heart of it. The earth and other stars moved round this centre, and here we have the first glimpse of the modern conception which explains the apparent diurnal motion of the heavens by the rotation of the earth. This rudimentary idea, as elaborated by later Pythagoreans, and particularly by Aristarchus of Samos in the Alexandrine period, constitutes the first starting-point we can assign to the Copernican system of the universe.

Pythagoras made the astounding discovery that the harmonic intervals of the seven-stringed lyre can be reduced to simple rational proportions (the octave = 1:2, the fifth 2:3, the fourth 3:4, the whole tone 8:9). He then sought for a like scheme in the harmony of the spheres, and, as the geometric habit of the Greek mind converted these arithmetical relations into lines and planes, the whole process by which the universe came into existence seemed to be a sum in arithmetic.

The strong tinge of mysticism which Pythagoras had brought with him from the Orphic influences of his native land to his new home in Italy served as a wholesome corrective to this exaggerated rationalism. Every religious sect thrives better in a colony than in the mother-country, as is demonstrated in the case of William Penn and many others. The aristocratic and religious league which Pythagoras founded at Croton prospered mightily, and presently the whole of lower Italy and Sicily was covered with branches of the order. Its religious ideas, particularly that of the transmigration of souls, were not new, although they have been claimed as peculiarly Pythagorean. Orphic mysticism had adopted in precisely the same fashion the notion of the fall of the spirit and its purification by transmigrations of all kinds into the bodies of men and animals. But the earnestness with which noble-minded men lived conformably to these ideas in matters of practice and brought them into connection with the results of scientific research strongly impressed the ancient world; and the close freemasonry which linked Pythagoreans from every quarter with one another set forth an ideal of manly friendship which served as a model for the institution of the Academy and similar philosophic societies.

But the too strongly marked political complexion of these Pythagorean societies contained the seed of their destruction. At the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth the aristocratic principle was everywhere on the decline, and in Italy itself the Pythagoreans were attacked on democratic grounds by Xenophanes of Colophon, who ridiculed the aristocratic physical sports in which even distinguished Pythagoreans (such as Milo) indulged, and vaunted the intellectual sport of his own _Sophia_. The said wisdom, it must be confessed, was of a negative rather than a positive character.

Xenophanes attacked Homer, the Bible of the ancients, in verses of fierce satire, showing the gods as there depicted to be examples of every kind of immorality. By the unparalleled vigour with which he transferred the monistic tendency of Ionic rationalism to the religious problem, he, first of all Greeks, originated the monotheistic conception of the Deity, which none of the later philosophers ventured to maintain with such unflinching boldness in face of the polytheism of the vulgar herd. To the aristocratic submission to authority in matters of belief required by the Pythagoreans this democratic philosopher opposed the prerogative of doubt, and he has consequently been lauded by the sceptics of all ages as their standard-bearer. At this stage of physical observation, indeed, doubt sets in concerning natural objects. Xenophanes discovers that the rainbow is an optical illusion. He promptly generalises in his scepticism; the sun and the other stars are nothing but fiery exhalations. This assumption will lead to further results among his Eleatic friends.

Meanwhile in the mother-country speculation advanced with huge strides. Heraclitus, a descendant of the royal dynasty of Ephesus, withdrew from his democratic fellow-citizens into haughty isolation. Instead of concerning himself with the scientific gossip which tended to make the Ionic _Historia_ lose itself in detail, he laid stress upon the vast concatenation of things. He made the fundamental laws of thought his starting-point, in place of the principles of mathematics. The selection of physical propositions which he deduced poetically from his observations of nature are far more than mere natural symbolism. Fire, constantly transformed into water and earth and as constantly exhaling upwards to the celestial fire, is to him a type of the perpetual change of phenomena that veils the eternal and immutable Law (_logos_), identical in everything but name with the Harmony of the Pythagoreans, which expresses itself in numbers eternally the same. The law of man feeds, he says, upon the divine law manifesting itself in fire.

Here we have the germ of the vast scheme of law which binds God and the world, physics and morals, into a compact entity in the Pantheism of the Stoic philosophy. Since he places fire and soul upon the same footing, it follows that human physiology and psychology are explicable by the same formula, to which he likewise ingeniously adapts the Orphic ideas. Thus Heraclitus has exercised great influence upon succeeding generations, and Hegel’s system avowedly leans upon him.

Equally great is the influence of Parmenides, the Kant of the ancient world. Descended from an Ionian family of rank which had taken refuge at Elea in Italy at the time of the occupation of Phocæa (560), he carries on the tradition of the philosophic poetry of Xenophanes, whose Pantheistic Monism he defends in acute polemics against the “two-headed” Heraclitus. Being--one, eternal, indivisible, immutable, unchangeable--is alone intellectually conceivable. All beside--multiplicity, divisibility, mobility, variability--is logically inconceivable and therefore non-existent. Reason (_logos_) is consequently the measure of all things. His system is abstract and logical to absurdity, but his postulate that this monistic Being must be bounded like a globe that is equally closed in all directions reminds us that we are still in the age of physics. In him the scepticism of Xenophanes hardens into the assertion that everything which contravenes his logical postulate of the Sole Existent--such as multiplicity, colour, motion, becoming and ceasing to be--is mere illusion.

The logical and sceptical bias of the Eleatics is surpassed by the hair-splitting dialectics of Zeno, whose evidences against motion and multiplicity still perplex the thinkers of to-day. On the one hand this precise manipulation of the laws of thought which represents the culminating point of Ionic rationalism redeems the negative Sophism which was beginning to deny the actuality and perceptibility of things themselves (Protagoras, Gorgias), while on the other hand the positive result of this strict definition of the highest conception of Being was to call forth a series of systems which came into existence almost simultaneously, though subject in part to reciprocal influence, a little before the middle of the fifth century. Such was the Doctrine of the Elements taught by Empedocles of Agrigentum, who once more found the idea of the imperishable principle in the fourfold root of Being (the four elements) and brought about the Heraclitic alternation of the external world by the introduction of the two polar forces of love and hate.

The idea of the Element in endless subdivision (which could not be evaded in the world-process of Empedocles) and in endless diversity of quality was strongly brought out by Anaxagoras the Ionian in his _homoiomere_. To this chaos he opposed the thinking and directing reason (_nous_) as a distinct existence, thus definitely breaking with the idea of a hylozoistic union of matter and force, which had already threatened to go to pieces in the systems of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and setting forth the positive dualism of God and the world, _i.e._, of the Universal Reason working towards predetermined ends and the blind chaotic mass of matter.

More important than either of these two is Leucippus of Miletus, the founder of the atomistic theory, who, as Theophrastus rightly asserts, starts from the position of Parmenides. For he finds the homogeneous, eternal, complete, and indivisible, unchangeable Existence, to which no quality can be ascribed, in the “atom,” and solves the difficulties which arose for the Eleatics out of the idea of multiplicity by assuming the existence of an infinite number of such units. Hence results a mechanical interpretation of nature, which proved of all ancient systems the most serviceable for the elucidation of physical and physiological facts. By explaining sensory impressions by mechanical transmission from object to subject, he propounds the first theory of sensory perception, and since, in consequence of this assumption, he regards such qualities as colour, taste, etc., as subjective sensory impressions to which atoms in different arrangements correspond objectively, he lays the foundation of a distinction between primary and secondary qualities which has not been rightly appreciated until modern days.

Generally speaking, the value of the Leucippic theory has only been recognised since the Renaissance. For although Democritus of Abdera extended his master’s admirable system to fresh departments of knowledge, established it more firmly by combating the sensualism of Protagoras and other theories arising from a misunderstanding of Leucippus, and, above all, brought it to a high pitch of mathematical and notional exactitude, yet the atomistic school which continued to exist at Abdera till into the fourth century has passed almost utterly out of mind. Plato ignored it, although he adopted many of its theories indirectly; Aristotle alone made use of it, though not as regards the main points of its teachings; and Epicurus, who borrowed from it almost the whole of his theoretical science, by this very absorption played the chief part in the destruction of the Abderite writings, the greatest loss that science has ever suffered.

How can we explain this astounding disregard of atomistic philosophy? In some degree by the fact that Leucippus settled in the barbarous north, far away from Athens, which had grown since the Persian wars to be more and more the _prytaneion_, or central focus of warmth to Hellas, and drew all talent to itself from every quarter; and further, from the fact that the natural science which was dominant in the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth--and was regarded, indeed, as the only legitimate kind of scientific thought--lost its hold on men’s minds towards the middle of the fifth century. We have evidence of this in Eleatism, which, with Zeno and Melissus, devoted itself to purely dialectical questions and abandoned the interpretation of nature. We have evidence of it, again, in Empedocles, who in his second series of didactic poems (_Katharmoi_) flings himself into the arms of Orphic mysticism; and in his pupil, Gorgias, who proceeded from physics to nihilism and thence to mere superficial rhetoric. We have the strongest proof of all in Democritus himself, who embraced inductive logic, æsthetics, grammar, and ethics within the range of his studies as well as the old questions of physics. Thus during the Peloponnesian War the way was prepared for the new epoch which was performed with Athens for a stage, and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle for heroes.

II

Socrates, the Athenian, brought philosophy, as Cicero says, from heaven to earth; that is to say, in place of one-sided speculation upon nature he pursued an equally one-sided study of ethics. In his practical, matter-of-fact way he availed himself of what Eleatic ontology had acquired in order to settle the fundamental ideas of morality and to demonstrate the possibility of scientific proof in face of the nihilistic fallacies of sophistry which despaired of both. So much we may accept as certain from received accounts. All the details of his teaching are wrapped in doubt, for we possess no historical account of it, but merely works of an apologetic character, in which liberal and justifiable advantage is taken of the prerogatives of fiction. Neither Plato nor Xenophon (the latter of whom did not take up his pen until after a superabundant crop of Socratic literature had come into being) can be accepted as historic evidence without further ado. Nevertheless both the disciples of Socrates and his opponents, Aristophanes and Spintharus (the father of Aristoxenus), bear witness to the extraordinary personality of the man.

The rights of the individual were not recognised until the fifth century. The atomistic theory of Leucippus and Democritus sees the Eternal and Constant not in the All-One of Xenophanes and Parmenides, but in the individual. The philosophy of the Sophists breaks the bonds of authority, and in the motto “Man (the individual) is the measure of all things,” Protagoras sets up the charter of subjective inclination. This charter Socrates adopts, but he opposes to the liberty of the individual will the counteracting force of obedience to the dictates of the individual conscience. But conscience, as the German and Latin name for it alike imply, means knowledge. A man should therefore act upon his own judgment, but only in so far as his action is founded upon norms scientifically determined. Thus Socrates reads a deeper meaning into the admonition of the Delphic god, “Know thyself,” by recognising the independence of the will.

Inasmuch as traditional usage and the law of the state are thus tacitly set aside (and on this point Aristophanes judged more correctly in his caricature than the apologists Plato and especially Xenophon will admit) Socrates is the preacher of a new private morality which traverses the public morality of classic antiquity. His death sentence is so far intelligible, though it remains an act of crude, reactionary violence. The greatness of soul, so far beyond the ordinary level of mankind, which, according to all accounts, the philosopher displayed at the near prospect of death, wrought upon a far wider circle than that of his disciples and contemporaries. His martyrdom set the seal upon the victory of the Ideal philosophy in Athens.

Socrates himself represents a complete individuality, hence his method of education has been of service to individualities the most dissimilar. What contrasting types do we find in Xenophon, the bigoted and stupid cavalry officer; and Plato, the witty and profound thinker; the cynic Antisthenes full of the pride of beggary, and the frivolous courtier Aristippus! They all portrayed themselves rather than their master in their writings, and yet each one of them has in some way or other his part in him.

Of all these disciples of Socrates, two only have influenced the afterworld, Antisthenes and Plato, Athenians both, the former a plebeian and founder of the philosophy of the proletariat, the latter, sprung from an old and noble family, an aristocrat of the purest water in all his philosophic ideas. Antisthenes carried the practical and matter-of-fact temper of his master to extremes. Virtue with him is a question of character, and therefore scorns empty words and learning. Logic and mathematics are superfluous, virtue is the only good, vice the only evil; everything else is a matter of indifference. This meagreness of theory is made good by strength of will. Force of character, freedom from the prejudices of conventional custom, conventional religion or conventional government--these are what distinguish the true freeman, the man free in soul, from the slave.

The impression produced by this king in rags in the midst of that age of decadence was striking beyond belief. He with his barking voice seemed to be the warning cry of the proletarian admonishing men to return to nature and to simplicity of life. His acute and witty writings were gladly read. His school, which can show one disciple of world-wide celebrity in the person of Diogenes, was gradually merged into the Stoa, which owes to Cynicism the popular tone of its influential system of ethics. Since the birth of Christ, the Cynic has come to life again, as of old in the guise of the mendicant preacher, proclaiming the gospel of renunciation and holding up the mirror to the corruption of the age. This new Cynicism was one of the most important precursors of the Christian apostolate. It awoke once more in the age of the Renaissance, finding its wittiest exponent in Montaigne, in whose steps J. J. Rousseau afterwards trod. In him we have the best typical example of the strength and weakness of this anti-scientific movement.

Plato, the antithesis of Antisthenes, continued in a direct line the thread of Athenian philosophy. He accomplished, in the widest sense of the term, the task which Socrates had only begun--that of establishing science, now discredited by the Sophist, on a new basis.

We are but imperfectly acquainted with the life of Plato and the phases of his development, for the chronology of his dialogues has not been determined up to this time, either absolutely or relatively, and it is a matter of doubt how far their artistic intention admits of a complete exposition of his system. For Plato’s true work was not his literary productions, which he himself regarded as of secondary importance and which obviously reproduce only a fraction of his researches and speculations, but his Academy, in which, from the eighties of the fourth century onwards, he gathered together the ablest scholars from amongst the youth of Greece for study and life in community. If all the transactions of this Academy had been preserved (like the information Aristotle gives us concerning the latter years), it may be that we should be able to trace distinctly the development of this wonderful man. For Plato is both the most gifted and the most complicated personality of Greek antiquity, and the depths and recesses of his nature were not wholly penetrated by his intimate friends, not even by Aristotle; how much less by us of this latter day. What we do possess is, however, amply sufficient to indicate at least his place in this summary.

If from the ranks of the Greek thinkers we have so far considered, we choose out the most eminent leaders and mark the lines of connection between them, we shall see how they all converge to Plato. He is the focus of ancient philosophy, whither all that went before him tends, and whence bright light and warmth stream forth upon posterity down to our own day.

The range of his achievements alone is enough to make this evident. Like the Ionians his grasp embraces cosmology, physics, and anthropology. Like the Pythagoreans he pursues the study of mathematics with ever increasing devotion, presumably as the basis of his speculations. Like Xenophanes he enters the school of the ancient Orphic Mysticism, and in the _Timæus_ exalts it into a theology culminating in Monotheism. Like the Eleatics he ponders the problems of ontology. Like Heraclitus he inquires into the eternal flow of genesis; he ponders on the ideals of culture and the political theories of the Sophists, he wrestles with the ideal method of Socrates, he strives with hostile philosophers of the Socratic school on this hand and on that (Aristippus, Euclides, and Antisthenes), and, lastly, he strives with himself as his speculation develops more and more along theological and mathematical lines. For, as the genuine servant of Truth, Plato regards himself up to old age as in process of growing and learning. Nothing is so hateful to him as Dogmatism. Nevertheless there are so many opinions to which he held with unwavering constancy that we are probably justified in speaking of the system of Plato.

At the centre of it lies what has crystallised in more living shape out of the dry conceptions of the Socratic method--the domain of ideas. Even as Parmenides perceived Being in the eternal All-Existent, accessible to Reason alone, so Plato sees the being of individual things in that which pertains to them in common and as such can be grasped by the Reason. But even as the Eleatic “One” exists even apart from its recognition as an objective being, so these eternal and unchangeable archetypes (_ideai_) live in and by themselves as objective essences which exist wholly apart from the individual objects which partake of their form. These archetypes, like the Eleatic All-Existent, bear the name of unit (monad), only in Plato’s scheme there are many such monads, and their unchangeableness does not exclude the idea of causation. Thus his “ideas” are the “units” of Parmenides in multiplicity and the “conceptions” of Socrates endued by metaphysics with the breath of life.

To Socrates the idea of Good and of Virtue lay at the heart of his teaching, and thus the preponderance of the idea of Good is confirmed to his pupil, and in its theological elaboration this abstract idea is converted into the Supreme Reason, the first cause of Being, which is identical with the Deity.

As to the Eleatics, the external world was an illusion of the senses, and in any case a thing irrational, so matter and the world of phenomena which occupies the middle place between matter and ideas is hard to grasp, and Plato’s notion of the World-Soul which hovers between the two is as contradictory and obscure as that of the human soul. For with this gifted poet-philosopher there is much that tarries on the threshold of consciousness, and fails to struggle into clear light, a circumstance that harmonises with his own teachings, which find clearness and singleness of purport in the Eternal and Divine alone, obscurity and ambiguity in the intermediate terrestrial sphere of genesis, and utter darkness and inconceivability in the lower sphere of matter and non-existence. These three stages are repeated in his theory of the soul, which from desire rises to courage and ultimately to reason. His ethics and politics, which according to his Hellenic ideas are one and the same, are calculated for three classes of humanity--the iron, the silver, and the golden. The last two, the military and learned classes, are the only ones taken into account in the educational system of his ideal state; for the proletariat there is no need to be concerned, although Antisthenes and his successors regarded this very class as the only one capable of genuine philosophy. But Plato, like the aristocrat he was, has in view an elect type of humanity, exalted by exceptional intelligence above the brute multitude and the solid middle-class element and called by philosophy, _i.e._, the doctrine of ideas, to the helm of the ideal state.

The teaching of the Sophists had abolished law. Plato likewise knows no law on the lofty level of his ideal state. But the constraint of law seems superfluous where each individual is trained to be the ideal man. Forced by bitter experience to moderate his demands upon human nature and the state towards the end of his life, he sketched in the _Laws_, a model state on the basis of the old established system of government. But this system, like the metaphysics of his old age, seems, as it were, a desertion of his ideals. All that Plato achieved was the education of a race of pupils in his Academy who far surpassed the common standard of learning and morals, and who, though unable to save the state, yet maintained a high standard of knowledge and an ideal of morality for mankind in the midst of a corrupt society.

The greatest of these Academicians is Aristotle of Stagira, who displayed a versatility and thoroughness of research which appears absolutely incomprehensible in our eyes. Like Plato, he steadfastly held that knowledge is never complete, but that truth is to be found by unremitting persistence in inquiry. This is probably the reason why he gave the world some dialogues adapted to the public taste, and with the help of some of his pupils accumulated and published collections of historico-philological and scientific matter in an unpretentious form; but the systematic lectures in which he propounded to the more advanced followers of his school the results of his speculations and of his wide empirical observation, together with a critical treatment of his predecessors, were never published by him. He worked at these papers his whole life long, and many of the didactic writings which were edited by his pupils after his death, and which are all we possess of the whole body of Aristotle’s works, bear evident traces of gradual growth, correction, and amplification.

In a sketch like the present it is impossible to give so much as a summary of the contents of this admirably arranged encyclopædia, which ranked as the richest storehouse of every kind of empiric and speculative science from the beginning of the Christian era down to modern times. The essential points in which his life-work makes an advance on that of Plato are as follows:

Plato never went so far as to reduce his great discoveries and intuitions in every department of science to a complete and connected whole, being averse, on scientific and ethical grounds alike, from the dogmatic definition inseparable from any systematic treatise. This Aristotle did, dividing the whole body of philosophy under three principal heads (theoretical, practical, and poetical) and distinguishing subdivisions (logic, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics, and so forth) within these divisions by strongly marked lines of demarcation and methods rigorously exact. He is a Platonist in all things and feels himself so to be. Even where he displays most independence, as in the development of syllogisms or in biology, it is impossible to overlook his indebtedness to the bold speculations of the master.

If the whole work of Plato’s life and of his scholars between 388 and 348 had been preserved to us, the ultimate connection between Aristotle and the researches of the Academy would probably be even more evident than it is. Nevertheless there is a marked difference between the speculations of these two great philosophers. Plato wholly dissevered the Universal and Essential in things from the Terrestrial and placed it in a heaven beyond the earth.

Aristotle repudiates this transcendentalism all along the line. The Universal cannot exist without the archetype, the essence must be immanent in it. Hence the individual is the only true Substantive, containing Substance and Matter. This opposition of opinion concerning “Universalia” is, as is well known, the starting-point of mediæval Scholasticism (Nominalism, Realism).

The motion of passive substance towards the active form, _i.e._, the realisation of the Possible, leads up to the idea of development, of genesis (though not, indeed, in the modern sense) on which Plato’s speculations had made shipwreck, and passes over Plato’s rigid Eleatism to join hands with Heraclitus, the philosopher of change, with whom Aristotle sees the ultimate cause of all motion and all things in the Deity, itself as eternal as the world, which “yearns towards It as the bridegroom towards the bride.” Thus soul, too, is the pattern of the body, hence the purpose of its being. The body is but the instrument (_organon_) of the soul. Thus Aristotle first coins the name and idea of organic being and draws a sharp distinction between these animate creatures (plants, animals, and man) and inanimate nature. In ethics and politics his speculation treads in the footsteps of Plato, save that, in this province of thought also, he mitigates the uncompromising rigourism of the master by his innate bias towards the historically-established and practically-possible, and turns it to more profitable uses. The ethico-political speculations of both are, however, adapted to the aristocratic class at that time dominant in Greece. Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, conquered the East during his master’s life-time, but the philosopher’s opinion that the newly acquired continent should be governed by other laws than those of Hellas was not practically feasible. His ethics failed him utterly in face of the new political situation thus created.

III

At this juncture the cosmopolitan Cynicism, which had outgrown the narrow particularism of Hellenism as early as the time of Antisthenes, and the Stoicism which was built upon its foundation later on, proved the form best fitted to the times. Zeno, sprung of Phœnician blood and brought up in Cyprus, that is on semi-Asiatic soil, elaborated this theory of life at Athens, whither he came shortly after the death of Aristotle (about 320). After the dualism that had prevailed from Anaxagoras to Plato and Aristotle, in which God and the World were set over against one another as antagonistic principles, Zeno’s theory harks back to the monistic tendency of the Ionic period. Like that, it is realistic, nay, grossly materialistic, in contrast to the Idealism of Athenian philosophy. The result is a consistent Pantheism in which soul and body represent the analogon to God and the World. Both are of the same essential nature, and only temporarily divided by transitory differentiation of manifestation. Zeno’s morality is rigorous, and aims not at the moderation of the passions (like that of Plato and Aristotle) but at their extirpation. The inexorable law that holds the world and man in bonds from which there is no escape, exacts obedience, and to render it voluntarily is virtue.

Since the main object of the Stoic school is the training of the will, and since wisdom as such is only a means to an end, the dogmatic form that corresponds to Oriental modes of thought and the despotic system of contemporary government prevails throughout its teachings. Hence we can understand how this somewhat coarse, wire-drawn, as it were, but effective form of philosophy dominates the whole world from this time forward till about the second century A.D. In essentials it represents a revival of Heraclitism, just as the antithetical philosophy of Epicureanism, which prevailed for the same length of time, is in essence reminiscent of the Abderitic system.

Epicurus (born 342) was the son of an Athenian, but born at Samos. Thus he had opportunities of making himself acquainted with the philosophy of Democritus, which was more highly esteemed in Ionia than at Athens. He did not care for learning for its own sake, however, but for the sake of its practical application. In this respect, as also in his consistent materialism, he is closely akin to the Stoic school.

In dogmatic positiveness and immutability Epicurus far surpasses even the Stoic philosophy. With him the main consideration is a mode of life which induces a tranquil cheerfulness of temper by the refusal to admit all disquieting thoughts (as of death, immortality or divine punishment) and troublesome passions, and by which his followers, while here below, become partakers of the felicity of the gods. This quietist philosophy harmonised with the ideals of life which obtained at that period, and the ardent exaltation of friendship among this free-thinking fellowship and their ideal of human freedom and dignity atone in some degree for the hollowness of their theory of life.

Finally Scepticism takes the form of a school in Greece with Pyrrho, who died in the same year as Epicurus, 270 B.C. He, too, is only solicitous for tranquillity of mind, but he does not win it by dogmatic faith in this system of doctrine or that, but in believing nothing whatever, in thinking nothing right and nothing important. This thorough-going scepticism is bound to doubt even itself. As a result it neutralises itself and thus marks the spontaneous dissolution of Hellenic philosophy.