A Short History Of Greek Philosophy

Preface

The main purpose which I have had in view in writing this book has been to present an account

v. t\

of Greek philosophy*.which, within strict limits of brevity,--shall be at once authentic and interesting 1 — authentic , as being based on the original works themselves, and not on any secondary sources; interesting ; as presenting to the ordinary English reader, in language freed as far as possible from technicality and abstruseness, the great thoughts of the greatest men of antiquity on questions of permanent significance and value. There has been no attempt to shirk the really philosophic problems which these men fried in their day to solve ; but I have endeavoured to show, by a sympathetic treat¬ ment of them, that these problems were no mere wars of words, but that in fact the philosophers of twenty-four centuries ago were dealing with exactly similar difficulties as to the bases of belief and of

VI

PREFACE fight action as, under different forms, beset thoughtful men and women to-day.

In the general treatment of the subject, I have followed in the main the order, and drawn chiefly on the selection of passages, in Ritter and Preller’s Historia PJiilosophiae Graccae . It is hoped that in this way the little book may be found useful at the universities, as a running commentary on that ex¬ cellent work; and the better to aid students in the use of it for that purpose, the corresponding sections in Ritter and Preller are indicated by the figures in the margin.

In the sections on Plato, and occasionally else¬ where, I have drawn to some extent, by the kind permission of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press and his own, on Professor Jowett’s great commentary and translation.

JOHN MARSHALL.

THE QUESTION OF THALES 3

first half of the sixth century before Christ. We hear of an eclipse predicted by him, of the course of a river usefully changed, of shrewd and profitable handling of the market, of wise advice in the general councils of the league. He seems to have been at once a student of mathematics and an observer of nature, and withal something having analogy with both, an inquirer or speculator into the origin of things. To us nowadays this suggests a student of geology, or physiography, or some such branch of physical science ; to Thales it pro¬ bably rather suggested a theoretical inquiry into the simplest thinkable aspect of things as existing. “ Under what form known to us,” he would seem to have asked, “ may we assume an identity in all known things, so as best to cover or render explic¬ able the things as we know them ? ” The ‘ beginning ’ of things (for it was thus he described this assumed identity) was not conceived by him as something which was long ages before, and which had ceased to be ; rather it meant the reality of things now. Thales then was the putter of a question, which had not been asked expressly before, but which has never ceased to be asked since. He was also the formulator of a new meaning for a word ; the word ‘ beginning ’ (ap^v) got the meaning of £ underlying reality ’ and so of ‘ ending ’ as well. In short, he so dealt with a word, on .the surface of it implying

THALES time , as to eliminate the idea of time, and suggest a method of looking at the world, more profound and far-reaching than had been before imagined. 1

It is interesting to find that the man who was thus the first philosopher, the first observer who took a metaphysical, non-temporal, analytical view of the world, and so became the predecessor of all those votaries of ‘other-world’ ways of thinking,—whether as academic idealist, or ‘ budge doctor of the Stoic fur/ or Christian ascetic or what not, whose ways are such a puzzle to the‘hard-headed practical man/—(-was

x 1

himself one of the shrewdest men of his day, so shrewd

that by common consent he was placed foremost in antiquity among the Seven Sages, or seven shrewd men,' whose practical wisdom became a world’s tradition, enshrined in anecdote and crystallised in proverb.

9 The chief record that we possess of the philo¬ sophic teaching of Thales is contained in an interest¬ ing notice of earlier philosophies by Aristotle, the main part of which as regards Thales runs as follows : “The early philosophers as a rule formulated the originative principle of all things under some

material expression. By the originative principle or element of things they meant that of which all

1 By some authorities it is stated that Anaximander, the second philosopher of this school, was the first to use the word apxn in the philosophic sense. Whether this he so or not, Thales certainly had the idea.

WATER THE BEGINNING OF THINGS 5

existing things are composed, that which determines their coming into being, and into which they pass on ceasing to be. Where these philosophers differed from each other was simply in the answer which they gave to the question what was" the nature of this principle, the differences of view among them applying both to the number, and to the character, of the sup¬ posed element or elements.

“ Thales, the pioneer of this philosophy, main¬ tained that Water was the originative principle of all things. It was doubtless in this sense that he said that the earth rested on water. What suggested the conception to him may have been such facts of observation, as that all forms of substance which promote life are moist, that heat itself seems to be conditioned by moisture, that the life-producing seed in all creatures is moist, and so on.”

Other characteristics of water, it is elsewhere sug¬ gested, may have been in Thales’ mind, such as its readiness to take various shapes, its convertibility from water into vapour or ice, its ready mixture with other substances, and so forth. What we have chiefly to note is, that the more unscientific this theory about the universe may strike us as being, the more completely out of accord with facts now familiar to everybody, the more striking is it as marking a new mood of mind, in which unity, though only very partially suggested or discoverable by the senses, is

THALES preferred to that infinite and indefinite variety and difference which the senses give us at every moment. There is here the germ of a new aspiration, of a deter¬ mination not to rest in the merely momentary and different, but at least to try, even against the apparent evidence of the senses, for something more perma¬ nently intelligible. As a first suggestion of what this permanent underlying reality may be, Water might very well pass. It is probable that even to Thales himself it was only a symbol, like the figure in a mathematical proposition, representing by the first passable physical phenomenon which came to hand, that ideal reality underlying all change, which is at once the beginning, the middle, and the end of all. That he did not mean Water, in the ordinary prosaic sense, to be identical with this, is suggested by some 10 other sayings of his. “Thales,” says Aristotle else¬ where, “ thought the whole universe was full of gods.” “ All things,” he is recorded as saying, “ have a soul in themyin virtue of which they move other things, and are themselves moved, even as the magnet, by virtue of its life or soul, moves the iron.” Without pushing these fragmentary utterances too far, we may well conclude that whether Thales spoke of the soul of the universe and its divine indwelling powers, or gods, or of water as the origin of things, he was only vaguely symbolising in different ways an idea as yet formless and void, like the primeval chaos, but nevertheless,

SOUL IN ALL THINGS like it, containing within it a promise and a potency of greater life hereafter.

II. Anaximander. —Our information with respect to thinkers so remote as these men is too scanty and too fragmentary, to enable us to say in what manner or degree they influenced each other. We cannot say for certain that any one of them was pupil or antagonist of another. They appear each of them, one might say for a moment only, from amidst the darkness of antiquity ; a few sayings of theirs we catch vaguely across the void, and then they disappear. There is not, consequently, any very distinct progression or continuity observable among them, and so far therefore one has to confess that the title £ School of Miletus ’ is a misnomer. We have already quoted the words of Aristotle in which he classes the Ionic philosophers together, as all of them giving a material aspect of some kind to the originative principle of the universe (see above, p. 4). But while this is a characteristic observable in some of them, it is not so obviously discoverable in the second of their number, Anaximander.

This philosopher is said to have been younger by 11 one generation than Thales, but to have been inti¬ mate with him. He, like Thales, was a native of Miletus, and while we do not hear of him as a person, like Thales, of political eminence and activity, he was certainly the equal, if not the superior, of Thales in

A JS/AXIMANDER mathematical and scientific ability. He is said to have either invented or at least made known to Greece the construction of the sun-dial. He was associated with Hecataeus in the construction of the earliest geographical charts or maps; he devoted himself with some success to the science of astronomy. His familiarity with the abstractions of mathematics per¬ haps accounts for the more abstract form, in which he expressed his idea of the principle of all things.

21 To Anaximander this principle was, as he expressed | it, the infinite; not water nor any other of the so-called .* elements, but a different thing from any of them, some- ; thing hardly namable, out of whose formlessness the ' heavens and all the worlds in them came to be. And by ’necessity into that same infinite or indefinite existence, ; out of which they originally emerged, did every created thing return. Thus, as he poetically expressed it, “ Time brought its revenges, and for the wrong-doing of existence all things paid the penalty of death/’ The momentary resting-place of Thales on the confines of the familiar world of things, in his formu¬ lation of Water as the principle of existence, is thus immediately removed. We get, as it were, to the earliest conception of things as we find it in Genesis ; before the heavens were, or earth, or the waters under the earth, or light, or sun, of moon, or grass, or the beast of the field, when the “ earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the

MYSTER Y IN SCIENCE $

face of the deep.” Only, be it observed, that whi|e in the primitive Biblical idea this formless void precedes in time an ordered universe, in Anaxi¬ mander's conception this formless infinitude is always here, is in fact the only reality which ever is here, something without beginning or ending, underlying all, enwrapping all, governing all.

To modern criticism this may seem to be little better than verbiage, having, perhaps, some possi¬ bilities of poetic treatment, but certainly very un¬ satisfactory if regarded as science. But to this we have to reply that one is not called upon to regard it as science. Behind science, as much to-day when our knowledge of the details of phenomena •is so enormously increased, as in the times when science had hardly begun, there lies a world of mystery which we cannot pierce, and yet which we are compelled to assume. No scientific treatise can begin without assuming Matter and Force as data, and however much we may have learned about the relations of forces and the affinities of things , Matter and Force as such remain very much the same dim infinities, that the originative infinite ’ was to Anaximander.

It is to be noted, however, that while modern science assumes necessarily two correlative data or originative principles,—Force, namely, as well as Matter,—Anaximander seems to have been content

ANAXIMANDER with the formulation of but one ; and perhaps it is just here that a kinship still remains between him and Thales and other philosophers of the school. He, no more than they, seems to have definitely raised the question, How are we to account for, or formulate, the principle of difference or change ? What is it that causes things to come into being out of, or recalls them back from being into, the infinite void ? It is to be confessed, however, that our accounts on this point are somewhat conflicting. One authority actually says that he formulated motion as eternal also. So far as he attempted to grasp the idea of difference in relation to that of unity, he seems to have regarded the principle of change or difference as inhering in 13 the infinite itself. Aristotle in this connection con- • trasts his doctrine with that of Anaxagoras, who formulated two principles of existence—Matter and Mind (see below, p. 54). Anaximander, he points out, found all he wanted in the one.

As a mathematician Anaximander must have been familiar in various aspects with the functions of the Infinite or Indefinable in the organisation of thought. To the student of Euclid, for example, the impossibility of adequately defining any of the fundamental elements of the science of geometry— the point, the line, the surface—is a familiar fact. In so far as a science of geometry is possible at all, the exactness, which is its essential characteristic, is only

ABSTRACTION AND REALITY ii attainable by starting from data which are in them-, selves impossible, as of a point which has no magni¬ tude, of a line which has no breadth, of a surface which has no thickness. So in the science of abstract number the fundamental assumptions, as that i = i, x~x> etc., are contradicted by every fact of experi¬ ence, for in the world as we know it, absolute equality is simply impossible to discover; and yet these funda¬ mental conceptions are in their development most powerful instruments for the extension of man’s com¬ mand over his own experiences. Their completeness of abstraction from the accidents of experience, from the differences, qualifications, variations which contribute so largely to the personal interests of life, this it is which makes the abstract sciences demonstrative, exact, and universally applicable. In so far, therefore, as we are permitted to grasp the conception of a per¬ fectly abstract existence prior to, and underlying, and enclosing, all separate existences, so far also do we get to a conception which is demonstrative, exact, and universally applicable throughout the whole world of knowable objects.

Such a conception, however, by its absolute emptiness of content, does not afford any means in itself of progression ; somehow and somewhere a principle of movement, of development, of concrete reality, must be found or assumed, to link this ultimate abstraction of existence to the multifarious phenomena

ANAXIMANDER of existence as known. And it was, perhaps, because Anaximander failed to work out this aspect of the question, that in the subsequent leaders of the school movement , rather than mere existence,was the principle chiefly insisted upon.

Before passing, however, to these successors of Anaximander, some opinions of his which we have not perhaps the means of satisfactorily correlating with his general conception, but which are not without their individual interest, may here be noted.

14 The word husk or bark ( <f>\oi 6 9) seems to have been a favourite one with him, as implying and depicting a conception of interior and necessary development in things. Thus he seems to have postulated an inherent tendency or law in the infinite, which compelled it to develop contrary characters, as hot and cold,, dry and moist. In consequence of this fundamental tendency an envelope of fire, he says, came into being, encircling another envelope of air, which latter in turn enveloped the sphere of earth, each being like the ‘husk’ of the other, or like the bark which encloses the tree. This concentric system he conceives as having in some way been parted up into various systems, represented by the sun, the moon, the stars, and the earth. The last he figured as hanging in space, and deriving its stability from the inherent and perfect balance or relation of its parts.

THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT n

Then, again, as to the origin of man, he seems to.16 have in like manner taught a theory of development from lower forms of life. In his view the first living creatures must have come into being in moisture * (thus recalling the theory of Thales). As time went on, and these forms of life reached their fuller possi¬ bilities, they came to be transferred to the dry land, casting off their old nature like a husk or bark. More particularly he insists that man must have developed out of other and lower forms of life, because of his exceptional need, under present con¬ ditions, of care and nursing in his earlier years. Had he come into being at once as a human creature he could never have survived.

The analogies of these theories with modern speculations are obvious and interesting. But with¬ out enlarging on these, one has only to say in con¬ clusion that, suggestive and interesting as many of these poor fragments, these disjecti membra poetce , are individually, they leave us more and more im¬ pressed with a sense of incompleteness in our know¬ ledge of Anaximander’s theory as a whole. It may be that as a consistent and perfected system the theory never was worked out; it may be that it never was properly understood.

CHAPTER II THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS ( concluded )

17 III. Anaximenes. —This philosopher was also a native of Miletus, and is said to have been a hearer or pupil of Anaximander. As we have said, the

19 tendency of the later members of the school was towards emphasising the motive side of the supposed underlying principle of nature, and accordingly

Anaximenes chose Air, as the element which best

18 represented or symbolised that principle. Its fluidity, readiness of movement, wide extension, and absolute neutrality of character as regards colour, taste, smell, form, etc., were obvious suggestions. The breath also, whose very name to the ancients implied an identity with the life or soul, was nothing but air ; and the identification of Air with Life supplied just that prin¬ ciple of productiveness and movement, which was felt

20 to be necessary in the primal element of being. The

( process of existence, then, he conceived as consisting in a certain concentration of this diffused life-giving i element into more or less solidified forms, and-the

ALL TILINGS PASS

1 7

This eternal movement he pictures elsewhere as 27 an eternal strife of opposites, whose differences never¬ theless consummate themselves in finest harmony. Thus oneness emerges out of multiplicity, multiplicity out of oneness ; and the harmony of the universe is of contraries, as of the lyre and the bow. War is the father and king and lord of all things. Neither god nor man presided at the creation of anything that is ; that which was, is that which is, and that which ever .shall be; even an ever-living Fire, ever kindling and ever being extinguished.

Thus in Fh r e, as an image or symbol of the 28 underlying reality of existence, Heraclitus advanced to the furthest limit attainable on physical lines, for the expression of its essentially motive character. That this Fire was no more than a symbol, suggested by the special characteristics of fire in nature,—its subtlety, its mobility, its power of penetrating all . things and devouring all things, its powers for benefi¬ cence in the warmth of living bodies and the life-giving power of the sun,—is seen in the fact that he readily varies his expression for this principle, calling it at times the Thunderbolt, at others the eternal .Reason, 29 or Law, or Fate. To his mental view creation was a process eternally in action, the fiery element descending by the law of its being into the cruder 30 forms of water and earth, only to be resolved again by upward process into fire ; even as one sees the

HERACLITUS vapour from the sea ascending and melting into the

32 aether. As a kindred vapour or exhalation he recognised the Soul or Breath for a manifestation of the essential element It is formless, ever changing with every breath we take, yet it is the constructive and unifying force which keeps the body together, and conditions its life and growth. At this point

33 Heraclitus comes into touch with Anaximenes. In the act of breathing we draw into our own being a portion of the all-pervading vital element of all being; in this universal being we thereby live and move and have our consciousness; the eternal and omnipresent wisdom becomes, through the channels of our senses, and especially through the eyes, in fragments at least our wisdom. In sleep we are not indeed cut off wholly from this wisdom ; through our breathing we hold as it were to its root; but of its flower we are then deprived. On awaking again we begin once more to partake according to our full measure of the living thought; even as coals when brought near the fire are themselves made partakers of it, but when taken away again become quenched.

u Hence, in so far as man is wise, it is because his spirit is kindled by union with the universal spirit ; but there is a baser, or, as Heraclitus termed it, a moister element also in him, which is the element of unreason, as in a drunken man. And thus the trustworthiness or otherwise of the senses, as the

THE ETERNAL AND THE TEMPORARY 19

channels of communication with the divine, depends on the dryness or moistness ,—or, as we should express it, using, after all, only another metaphor,—on the elevation or baseness of the spirit that is within. To those whose souls are base and barbarous, the eternal movement, the living fire, is invisible; and thus what they do see is nothing but death. Immersed in the mere appearances of things and their supposed stability, they, whether sleeping or waking, behold only dead forms ; their spirits are dead.

For the guidance of life there is no law but the 35 common sense, which is the union of those fragment¬ ary perceptions of eternal law, which individual men 37 attain, in so far as their spirits are dry and pure. Of absolute knowledge human nature is not capable, but only the Divine. To the Eternal, therefore, alone all things are good and beautiful and just, because to Him alone do things appear in their totality. To the human partial reason some things are unjust and others just. Hence life, by reason of the limitations 38 involved in it, he sometimes spoke of as the death of the soul, and death as the renewal of its life. And so, 39 in the great events of man's life and in the small, as in the mighty circle of the heavens, good and evil, life and death, growth and decay, are but the "systole and diastole, the outward and inward pulsation, of an eternal good, an eternal harmony. Day and

HERACLITUS night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger—each conditions the other, all are part of God. It is sickness that makes health good and sweet, hunger that gives its pleasure to feeding, weariness that makes sleep a good.

39 This vision of existence in its eternal flux and interchange, seems to have inspired Heraclitus with a contemplative melancholy. In the traditions of later times he was known as the weeping philosopher. Lucian represents him as saying, “To me it is a sorrow that there is nothing fixed or secure, and that all things are thrown confusedly together, so that pleasure and pain, knowledge and ignorance, the great and the small, are the same, ever circling round and passing one into the other in the sport of time.” “ Time,” he says elsewhere, “ is like a child that plays with the dice.” The highest good, there¬ fore, for mortals is that clarity of perception in respect of oneself and all that is, whereby we shall learn to apprehend somewhat of the eternal unity and harmony, that underlies the good and evil of time, the shock and stress of circumstance and place. The highest virtue for man is a placid and a quiet constancy, whatever the changes and chances of life may bring. It is the pantheistic apathy.

The sadder note of humanity, the note of Euripides and at times of Sophocles, the note of Dante and of the Tempest of Shakespeare, of Shelley and Arnold

THE WEEPING PHILOSOPHER and Carlyle,—this note we hear thus early and th.us clear, in the dim and distant utterances of Heraclitus. The mystery of existence, the unreality of what seems most real, the intangibility and evanescence of all things earthly,—these thoughts obscurely echoing to us across the ages from Heraclitus, have remained, and always will remain, among the deepest and most insistent of the world’s thoughts, in its sincerest moments and in its greatest thinkers.

Chapter III Pythagoras And The Pythagoreans

41 The birthplace of Pythagoras is uncertain. He is generally called the Samian, and we know, at all events, that he lived for some time in that island, during or immediately before the famous tyranny

43 of Polycrates. All manner of legends are told of the travels of Pythagoras to Egypt, Chaldaea, Phoenicia, and even to India. Others tell of a mysterious initiation at the sacred cave of Jupiter in Crete, - and of a similar ceremony at the Delphic oracle. What is certain is that at some date towards the end of the sixth century B.C. he re¬ moved to Southern Italy, which was then extensively colonised by Greeks, and that there he became a great philosophic teacher, and ultimately even a predominating political influence.

46 He instituted a school in the strictest sense, with its various grades of learners, subject for years to a vow of silence, holding all things in common, and admitted, according to their approved fitness, to

THE PYTHAGOREAN BROTHERHOOD 23

successive revelations of the true doctrine of the 47 Master. Those in the lower grades were called Listeners; those in the higher, Mathematicians or Students ; those in the most advanced stage, Physi¬ cists or Philosophers. With the political relations of the school we need not here concern ourselves.

In Crotona and many other Greek cities in Italy Pythagoreans became a predominant aristocracy, who, having learned obedience under their master, applied what they had learned in an anti-democratic policy of government. This lasted for some thirty years, but ultimately democracy gained the day, and Pythagoreanism as a political power was violently rooted out.

Returning to the philosophy of Pythagoras, in its relation to the general development of Greek theory, we may note, to begin with, that it is not necessary, or perhaps possible, to disentangle the theory of Pythagoras himself from that of his followers, Philolaus and others. The teaching was largely oral, and was developed by successive leaders of the school. The doctrine, therefore, is generally spoken of as that, not of Pythagoras, but of the Pythagoreans. Nor can we fix* for certain on one fundamental conception, upon which the whole structure of their doctrine was built.

•One dictum we may start with because of its 52 analogies with what has been said of the earlier

PYTHAGORAS philosophies. The universe, said the Pythagoreans, was constituted of indefinites and definers , i.e. of that which has no character, but has infinite capacities of taking a character ; and secondly, of things or forces which impose a character upon this. Out of the com¬ bination of these two elements or principles all know- 53 able existences come into being. “ All things/’ they said, “ as known have Number ; and this number has i two natures, the Odd and the Even ; the known | thing is the Odd-Even or union of the two.”

55 By a curious and somewhat fanciful development of this conception the Pythagoreans drew up two parallel columns of antithetical principles in nature, ten in each, thus :—

Definite

Indefinite

Odd

Even

One

Many-

Right

Left

Male

Female

Steadfast

Moving

Straight

Bent

Light

Dark

Good

Evil

Four Square

Irregular.

Looking down these two lists we shall see that the first covers various aspects of what is conceived as the ordering, defining, formative principle in nature ; and that the second in like manner comprises various

NUMBER THE MASTER aspects of the unordered, neutral, passive, or disorgan¬ ised element or principle ; the first, to adopt a later method of expression, is Form , the second Matter. How this antithesis was worked out by Plato and Aristotle we shall see later on.

While, in a sense, then, even the indefinite has 54 number, inasmuch as it is capable of having number or order imposed upon it (and only in so far as it has this imposed upon it, does it become knowable or intelligible), yet, as a positive factor, Number belongs only to the first class ; as such it is the source of all knowledge and of all good. In reality the Pythagoreans had not got any further by this representation of nature than was reached, for example, by Anaximander, and still more definitely by Heraclitus, when they posited an Indefinite or Infinite principle in nature which by the clash of innate antagonisms developed into a knowable universe (see above, pp. 12 , 16 ). But one can easily imagine that once the idea of Number became associated with that of the knowable in things, a wide field of detailed development and experiment, so to speak, in the arcana of nature, seemed to be opened. Every arithmetical or geometrical theorem became in this view another window giving light into the secret heart of things. Number became a kind of god, a revealer; and the philosophy of number a kind of religion or mystery. And this is why the