The searching mind of Greece

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Preface

This book was written that the pursuit which Plato called “the noblest of them all” might, if possible, be made more attractive to my countrymen. It is a daring book, because the quest appears to be an endless one and has elicited heroic efforts from most searching minds. But I hope it may be an inspiriting one as well. Philosophy has sometimes been compared to mountain-climbing, and its purest springs of joy are then said to flow from the most rugged heights of endeavor. The figure, however, is misleading. For it has helped to foster the idea that the few who scale these heights are undertaking an icy, futile, or even unearthly venture. This, indeed, is common opinion to-day. How many accidents to human minds is not philosophy held responsible for! Our very newspapers seem to take it for granted that any untoward personal event, from a runaway youth, to a divorce, an apostasy, or a suicide, is the product of some new “philosophy.” What that is, is generally left unsaid—whereby the fearsome mystery becomes more ominous still. And yet our William James has characterized philosophy as “only an unusually obstinate effort at clear thinking.”

It is time that a nearly universal desire “‘to see life steadily and see it whole” should be cleared from misunderstanding. We should no longer dishonor those gallant explorers, who (as a matter of history) have brought to our minds whole continents of what we call “modern” in our science, our religion, our conceptions of government, and ethical practice. They should no longer be esteemed altogether ‘foolish in their own conceits,” dark, dismal, and dangerous men, because there have been such among them. Nor should the vii viii PREFACE hazards of their new ventures, even on uncharted seas, be frowned upon. All things excellent are dangerous—from human love to human arts, and human life itself. If thought is dangerous, and no doubt it is, our hope for progress in every desirable thing that can be named, from happy marriage and the just conduct of a state, to the coordination of science and religion, as surely depends upon it—the most comprehensive and searching thought of which our minds are capable.

Now it is a matter of record that Greek thinkers have, again and again in the course of time, been a potent inspiration in this direction. Why this is true will later appear. But here we must note that the way is not one of imitation, but a more direct and vital one. These men are not authorities who did our thinking for us many years ago; the idea is itself a negation of the ever-progressive Greek spirit. Modern artists who realize the intuitions of an Alcamenes or a Praxiteles are not impelled to a copy, or a “barren rehearsal,” but to creative expressions of their own. The same is true of modern poets. Mere imitation of Homer or Sophocles would produce only feigning and sentimentality. Neo-classicism is always a falsification. What Greek philosophy engenders is native to the mind of the student and brings to birth new and genuine creations.

Perhaps it is this exuberance of life which makes so much of Greek artistry and thought seem as natural, as spontaneous, and as generous, sometimes also as naive, as the love of a youth. There could be no better introduction to the problems of philosophy. Greek ideas of morality, for instance, are not of a kind to “make you dreary”—as Stevenson characterized some others. On the contrary, they inspire to joy and fulfillment by conceptions of success and excellence native to every open-minded human. It was no Greek thinker who invented the sorrowful dogma of mankind’s total depravity ! Crime and vice they pronounced—not

PREFACE ix by word of power or authority, but by examination of the evidence—as the unnatural, unreasonable, and unhappy thing. At this point their so-called “pagan” liberality promises a new wholesomeness in ethical matters. And the same might be illustrated by the extraordinary influence of a new reality-sense which is developing in religion; or by the natural interpretation of the state as dissociated from any and every idea of mere power or sovereignty as such.

In this study of the Greek quest for enlightenment, I have aimed throughout to coordinate their conceptions and hypotheses with our own. Only thus can their significance be understood, and our own efforts toward the solution of these problems be furthered. It is of great value to know as a matter of record, that a group of important ideas was the gift of a certain man in a given period of history. We must preserve, and extend, exact and exhaustive data concerning things so precious. But ultimately they are tools to serve our own philosophic insight, lacking which our study of any sources, facts, and records, is without its reason for being. I have, of course, aimed never to violate the meaning and intention of the sources. Under the spell of great apergus it is easy to read into them somewhat more than their authors contemplated. But there is equal danger of reading too little—which is no less a limitation and perhaps a more serious one.

It was my constant source of regret, in reading the originals, that the Greek language itself is numbered among the dead. Surely it is one of humanity’s most remarkable creations, a vehicle lending itself to the utmost refinement and abstraction, yet with a robust directness and clear-cut precision which defy comparison. This language itself appears to be the work of a master-artist, thrilled by the possibilities of beauty. Yet I started the work with the determination, if possible, to bring our heritage of Greek thought home to those who have no knowledge of the original tongue. I rex PREFACE gret nothing more than this “lost cause” in our present-day education. Yet I trust that for English readers the book will be more comprehensible than if it had been filled with foreign phrases.

These pages were written primarily for students taking courses in Greek Philosophy or Introductions to Philosophy in our colleges and universities. But the general reader may derive some help from the thought of men at once so rich, open-minded, penetrating, and disinterested, on subjects which are of so great import for the future of mankind. Should he desire to limit himself to a study of ancient Pragmatism (the Sophists), Plato’s Communism, or his Interpretation of Art, the various conceptions of Evolution (Anaximander, Empedocles, Aristotle), Atomism, or Aristotle’s Natural Interpretation of the State, and of Morality, etc., he will find it possible. But it is recommended that he “drink” at least as “deep” as the sections devoted to a given philosopher, or his period, in order to secure an adequate perspective.

Many colleagues and friends have freely offered me counsel and advice of a stimulating kind. Here I should, perhaps, acknowledge the courtesy of those who have taken the trouble critically to read parts or all of the manuscript. These were Professors James Bissett Pratt, William J. Newlin, Anna Cutler, Mary G. Williams, Gilbert Murray, David Rogers, and Edgar A. Singer. To the penetrating judgment and unending kindness of Professor Singer I am indebted in more ways than words can express. My wife, as in all our pilgrimage so far, encouraged every step, even to the reading of the proofs together.

J. M. W.

Preface

Contents

Intropuctory: WHat Manner or Men Turvy WERE

CHAPTER

I

Vil VIII

The Greek Spirit

Part One: Tue Quest ror MEcHANISM

Forms and Numbers in Nature: The Pythagoreans Nature in Ceaseless Change: Heraclitus

Is the Universe a Unity? The Eleatic School

“Elements.” The Problem of “Mind.”

Empedocles and Anaxagoras

A Wholly Mechanical Scheme: The Atomists From Gods to Atoms. A Résumé .

Nature as

Part Two: Tue Quest ror Purpose DomINAantT IX

The Proper Study of Mankind is Man: The Sophists SocRATEs

The Followers of Socrates Plato: The Man and His Works .

Ideas as Basis of Science. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge Plato’s Psychology xi

PAGE

0 - 189

Xi

CHAPTER

XV

XVI

COIN DE EANSES

Plato’s Ethical Ideal: Success and the Means of At- . 200 taining It

Plato’s Social Theory and Conception of Govern- . 218 ment Plato’s Religious Conceptions Plato’s Interpretation of Art .

Aristotle, The Man and His Life Work . The Foundations of Logic Metaphysics (Aristotle) Philosophy of Nature (Aristotle) The Psychology of Aristotle .

Aristotle’s Moral Ideal Aristotle’s Political Science Aristotle on Poetry and Other Arts .

The Academy, Pyrrho’s “School,” and the Lyceum

Part Turee: THe Quest ror A Way oF LIFE

Greek Ideas in Rome .

Epilogue

Bibliography

PAGE

INTRODUCTORY:

What Manner of Men They Were

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE GREEK SPIRIT if

History very likely can show no greater contrast between two neighboring civilized peoples than that between Pheenicians and the Ionian Greeks in the respective times of their florescence. The story of the former is soon told. They were an amazingly skillful and prosperous folk whose dominant interests were business and money-diplomacy. Their wars, which seem to have grown out of trade rivalries, have little to interest historians. They were the master bankers, middlemen, manufacturers, ship and warehouse owners of antiquity. They had the swiftest vessels on the seven seas. They possessed trade-stations on the western coasts of Europe and Africa and even pushed beyond the Cape of Good Hope to the shores of the Indian Ocean. Their own country, north and south of the Lebanon, was, and still is, remarkably fertile, despite its long intensive cultivation. They lived on one of the most important overland trade routes, and doubtless profited by that. Yet the record tells of almost no poets, prophets, sculptors, scientists, composers, historians, or philosophers among them. The story, like that of their kindred Philistines, has little to amuse, instruct, or inspire.

The Ionian Greeks, on the other hand, were much devoted to what a typical Phoenician must have deemed a waste of time. They listened to stories told in verse by rhapsodes about the very market-place. They chiseled endless blocks of marble into statues merely intended to please the fancy of the passer-by—or perchance some god. They attended 3 many dramatic contests in which the imaginary woes of Jegendary heroes were set forth with endless variations ; and then they presented the victor with a worthless sprig of laurel. Cisterns were carved below their houses, and kitchen utensils molded, as delicately as though intended for royal palaces. They discussed endless and useless questions, metaphysics, psychology, abstract mathematics, as though these could be utilized for something more than mere talk. They assumed, in short, that new creations of their special invention called beauty, or the discovery of original ideas and interpretations of the universe, are what a human being should chiefly aim for in an unrestricted leisure. Yet the Pheenicians would also recall that these Greeks knew quite well how to carry on war; and that trade, although with them more a means to an end, was hardly unsuccessful. Modern students when they come into possession of their heritage from the Greeks are often disposed to think of them in terms of a human Golden Age with its climax in Periclean Athens. And no wonder. Poets and artists in endless succession have exclaimed: Here were the happiest, most gifted, most vital, and resourceful men who so far have lived on our planet. Doubtless imagination has often colored such judgments. Modern poets, captivated by the dramatic quality of that life, set in a beauty which seems to epitomize all that land and sea can afford, have sometimes amplified their pictures. Shelley, when he wrote of “faultless productions whose very fragments are the despair of modern art,” ! was perhaps unjust to modern art. Sometimes even historians, excited by the characters and events of an amazingly active and significant age, have not seen the picture as a whole. Not a few classical scholars have appeared to believe in supermen. So judicial and learned a student of law and government as Sir Henry Maine could write: “Except the blind forces of nature, noth- 1 Preface to Hellas.

DBE GR EE KY S Pre R Ter 5 ing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.” ”

What manner of men were these, and what the products of their minds and hands that they should have aroused so much enthusiasm? Why do so many critical scholars say: If by some catastrophe the heritage from Greece and what it has engendered in the world were now to be removed, it would be equivalent to the destruction of Western civilization? A part of the record is very clear. They who have traced the origins of the sciences from pure mathematics, astronomy, and physics, to biology and psychology; or who have followed the course of liberal theories of government; or the development of European literatures, say they recognize the fathers of our spirits in that race. Its citystates are held to be the prototypes of our modern forms of self-government, and are still confessedly a forlorn hope to many who crave a more perfect democracy. Greek annalists first realized that history is an interpretation and not merely a chronicle. The scientific undertakings developed there brought into existence many of the fundamental concepts and principles by whose light our knowledge of the world in these later centuries has been so greatly extended. Their arts are so woven into the fabric of what we call liberal education—training towards the maximum richness of human existence—that we designate them and their fruits as hwmanities.

If we could remove all these interests we should probably revert to the mentality of superstitious barbarians, unacquainted with the freedom of common rights, submitting our ignorant fears to the sway of arbitrary satraps, going our way without any strong initiative toward disinterested knowledge, or creation for their own sakes of monumental works of beauty. Much that our typical Pheenician would have regarded as “too idealistic,” weak, impractical, and “high-brow” would also have disappeared. For there is not

2 Rede Lecture, p. 38.

a little in this heritage which has led to “Utopian” ideas. Boys and girls who have read even the political history of Greece can never again be brought to think of their fellows as merely merchants, doctors, politicians, or commodityproducers. The pages of Herodotus and Thucydides will have told them indeed of unscrupulous men and terrible events. But the dramatic issues there at stake reflect the course of persistent and spontaneous aspirations toward excellence, and events are traced to their sources in the characters of men. Hence the perennial appeal to ideals inspired by their history. No lad who has read so much as a speech of Pericles or of Demosthenes will henceforward be wholly content with anarchy and license, or with arbitrary power wheresoever found. This is the tragic hope which Sir Henry Maine considered the mainspring of Western civilization—the Greek idea of progress.

The same marriage of real and ideal is consummated in Greek poetry. Where refinement is a condition of workmanship the besetting sin of an artist is easily over-subtlety, straining, and empty conceits. But Greek poets from Homer to Aristophanes have scarcely a tinge of Kuphuism, romanticism, melodrama, sentimentality, or even form for form’s sake. Whether it be in the stories of prodigious Polyphemus, the wizard Circe, and Nausicai, she of the fair arms with her maidens washing the clothes, or in the very Cloudcuckooland of Aristophanes, everywhere the sense of reality dominates. Homer is simple enough to delight the imaginations of children, and so penetrating in his knowledge of men and affairs that he holds us in our greatest maturity. Of overt sentiment there is none. Yet a passing observation speaks pages to feeling and reflection, a mere adjective among his wingéd words is often a poem in itself. The free, yet perfect form of the verse and the spontaneous narrative of his tales are fused into a unity of intuitions so rich that time increases their originality. Thus Hesiod, shepherd-

TRC GRE Ke S PLR YD %, poet of Helicon, writes of spades as spades and of ordinary work-a-day matters, sometimes indeed making up stories like Pandora’s box, or imagining the life-histories of some ancient and almost forgotten gods, but with sentiment which is never falsified or distorted. The stories of heroic fate as told by AXschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, require no violent change of attitude, a retreat to some foreign world of high romance. The scene is generally near at hand though the heroes may be of old. And authentic poetry is found in the daily thought and actions, the rich variety, of men’s lives, their destiny similar to all their fellows—from cicadas chirping in the shade to the very blessed gods, who might any one of them on occasion be disguised as a passing stranger in the street, or a playful shepherd on the hills. Restraint expresses itself with all the ease of natural law in these tragedies, though differently, of course, in the three writers.

By the time of Aristophanes the lesser comic poets had come to farces and strained absurdities. But the greatest of comedy writers, though he deals with the ugly, and often with what is contemptible, rarely stoops to exaggeration or mere stage effects, and constantly delights his audience by the beauty of his ideas and the exquisite forms of his language. Myriad fragments of lyric song from dozens of lesser poets bespeak the same love of reality and genuineness. To many of us moderns (as to Friedrich Schiller in his youth) Greek poets seem cold—as too restrained, or even factual. But what most Greeks abhorred was unnaturalness, unreality, sentimentality. And that is why their poetry was a part of life no less than other forms of speech. That is why the prose of a Plato, a Demosthenes, or Thucydides is robustly mundane and part of the day’s work, even though it scintillates with intelligence and refinement.

In the other arts we find a similar union of reason with nature. For example, in sculpture, an art which so far is only on the periphery of modern life, the Greeks made an effort to show how the inmost spirit of a man is expressed in every line, surface, and form of his body. Was it mistaken? Or have we here another projected ideal? Let him answer who has studied the plastic art of the Golden Age beckoning us through the centuries to a glorified human life! The calm figures of men and women, whose very existence, whether in their grief or piety, war or love, presents to contemplation the unity of what is admirable in body and in soul, will summon him beyond the feverish nonentity of a life caught up in the machinery of livelihood, or unaware of its purpose! Whether in the serene severity of Peonius and Phidias, or the tender grace of Praxiteles, or the restrained passion of Scopas, character always implies this integrity of the physical and spiritual, as well as an inner harmony, a living above the petty discords of life. Never during that brief florescence of almost miraculous sculpture does exaggeration, vulgarity, or uncontrolled passion assert itself. Never was more poignant embodiment of human perfectibility put into bronze and marble.

Or consider Greek architecture at its best which too is yet to be surpassed in refinement of design and significance as expression of human character. Not only can one say of the Parthenon: “There are no lies in this building.” One must also say it is imbued throughout with exuberant imagination. So transparently honorable is the workmanship, so choice every block of marble, that one cannot even to-day find room for a needle between their uncemented edges where the walls have not been blasted apart. Such joy in labor is itself an interesting light on the sort of life even slaves enjoyed in Athens. It also points a practical ideal of perfection whose importance it would be hard to overestimate. From granite foundations to pediments and acroteria the honest blocks of the Parthenon embody pure serenity combined with strength that is perfectly poised.

Refinement and power are the two seemingly antithetical presuppositions of art! Here they are combined with formal grace, proportion, sensuous charm, and inner significance, into so rich a variety that study seems never to exhaust its originality. Even what was thought of as decoration in frieze and metopes is itself so full of significant intuitions of vital men and women, that the fabric, even in its mutilation, seems vibrant with spiritual energy.

One feels the pulse of Greek life in these arts of which the “lesser”? ones—from that of the goldsmith to the glassblower—might have provided even more striking examples. For there seems to have been no distinction between artisan and artist among them. Their most trivial possessions, from copper coins to wine-jars or kitchen-sieves, were assumed to be as much in need of charm as their frescoed walls, their language, or athletic contests, which last were spectacles intended for the gods as well as a joy to humans. The frescoed walls as well as the canvas pictures had great celebrity in antiquity. But to-day we can only judge of Greek painting from examples in the lesser arts, chiefly water and wine receptacles. Their music, which gave us our various scales, seems to have consisted almost entirely of melodies. If so, it is fairly certain that in our classical harmonic and contrapuntal music, we moderns have developed an art which greatly surpasses its Greek prototype in richness of form and sensuous quality.

One cannot say what might have happened if the peoples of Europe and their colonies had never come under the influence of Greek conceptions of government. But it is significant that when, as in the Middle Ages, that influence was obscured, autocratic social institutions prevailed, just as, before the advent of Greek democracy, they had character-

10 THE SEARCHING MIND‘OF GREEGG ized pretty generally the governments of the ancient world. It was also coincident with the later Renaissance, that representative or parliamentary systems developed. ‘These were (and are) modifications of the Greek, or literal, self-government, under which each citizen took his turn by lot at the common business of the state. The latter form was obviously possible only under certain very remarkable presuppositions! -

A number of institutions aiming for the common good which have come into being, or developed more fully, since the Renaissance, were also inspired by Greek prototypes. Among these should be mentioned: public school education, municipal theaters, and international associations for peace. One cannot, of course, forget the serious limitations of character presented by the all too common self-superiority of Hellenic leaders, whatever the basis for it in fact. The difference between ‘“‘barbarians” and Hellenes was indeed marked. Again they were all too fickle and nimble in their loyalties. Like their neighbors, they practiced slavery, usually upon these “barbarians.” But historic fact none the less constrains one to say, that those who have come under the influence of Greek conceptions of social life and government have developed a marked sense of personal liberty, both in thought and in action. Along with this individualism has also come a sense of form, or reasonableness in social life, which, as an ideal of natural, or common, law, has opposed the autocratic, the merely artificial, the hieratic agencies, wherever it has come into contact with them. The conception of the state as an ethical agency whose function is to provide its citizens with the richest opportunities of life, physically, westhetically, and intellectually, is one inspired not only by Plato’s Republic, and the Politics of Aristotle, but is inherent in the actual laws and constitutions which have come down to us.

DE RGR EK S Pe Rael 11

The love of knowledge was another distinctive trait among these Greeks. Not that they were pioneers in gathering information or in keeping records and chronicles. The ancient Chaldeans long before had made painstaking observations of the heavens. Egyptian “learning,” and the “wisdom” of the Hebrews, had collected very significant records for our knowledge both of men and of external nature. But a new and dramatic moment appears with the little question “Why?” one so characteristic of Greek minds. Egyptians knew very well that the square of the hypotenuse of a rightangled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, and found this fact very convenient in their geometry, or “measurement of land.” But they seem never to have asked why this is so, much less how one might demonstrate the Pythagorean proposition. “Come now and let us reason together” wrote the first prophet Isaiah. But his appeal was to exalted emotions and beloved traditions rather than to dispassionate inferences from observable facts. The Assyrians mapped the constellations and collected data with accuracy—for the sake of divination.

Greek devotion to “theory” was a baffling, incomprehensible phenomenon to their neighbors. The surprise which Solon awakened when he answered the question: Why was he traveling so far? by saying: “On account of theory,” had its analogues in many other directions. There was no money in it for these “lovers of wisdom” (philosophers) or sophists as they were called at first. The pioneers of the new learning even refused fees from their students who, kindled to new intellectual adventure, also devoted themselves to theory for theory’s sake. Nothing seemed too insignificant or remote, too large or too invisible, to exercise the ingenuity of these intrepid seekers. Curiosity led them to inquire what reason might discover concerning mere points and lines, and the properties of every imaginable figure, or a long array of-abstract numbers. They wanted to know the structure and origins of plants and animals, their mechanisms, and whether they were kindred to those of lifeless things. They proceeded to analyze invisible minds, to discover, if possible, how their functions are linked up with other activities about us. They challenged even their own minds in the midst of the process by demanding: How can we know when we really know? When are we thinking straight? They made reason try its best to storm the very gates of death and project itself into the “dark backward and abyss of time.” They tried if by seeking they might find out God. They projected the rational way for humans to live in the light of their character as men and of all possible sources of happiness. They boldly demanded reason in society; and with unflinching eye examined the shrinking form of beauty.

This insatiable curiosity to know how and why things are what they are, and act as they do, made Greeks the originators both of Western philosophy and of science. The former became the mother of all the special sciences. Originally physics, mathematics, biology, psychology, theory of government, literary criticism, astronomy and some other departments of knowledge were all included as part of the philosopher’s undertaking. Specialization was gradually recognized to be the necessary condition of progress. Mathematics early set up an establishment of its own. In Aristotle’s day the principle had become generally accepted. Yet from first to last these Greek investigators knew that the “body of human knowledge” is a living organism, whose functions, howsoever various, are all interdependent. They never expected a hand or a tongue to function cut off from that body. And although the later thinkers recognized the almost hopeless task of realizing this codrdination—even Plato thought it worthy of Deity—they knew that willy-

THE GREEK SPIRIT 13 nilly every intelligence has some “‘vision of all time and all existence,” the only question being: Is it crude and ignorant, or a more penetrating and enlightened one?

The intensely dramatic character of this search can be appreciated only as we see the individual actors. We may, however, divide the piece for our better understanding into three main “acts.” The first is the Quest for Mechanism, which dominates all the early seekers. Their stage is a very wide one from Miletus in the east to Italy in the west, but Athens is not included. The second “act” is played almost exclusively on the stage of Athens and may be called the Quest for Purpose. The last unfortunately is a little anticlimax, for reasons which will appear in the sequel. But it has an interesting motive, the Quest for Practical Wisdom, and perhaps will be even nearer to the modern pragmatic “lover of wisdom” than are the earlier “acts.” Be that as it may, Greek thinkers, sooner or later, will intrigue even those who “bear a wary eye,” perhaps by some unimagined originality, it may be by the generosity of their adventure. Possibly their detachment will then make empires and worldcommerce dwindle to some quickly passing incidental episode. Yet in their drama of “lost causes,” the Tragic Story of Human Reason in Evolution, they will be found to act gallantly, directly, simply, humanly, even in their most persistent penetration.

Beauty, justice, truth—three master-passions—were combined in the genius of classic Greece to a degree never since equaled. How and why it was that this handful of people in two short periods of their florescence, one in the ninth, the other in the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries B. c., should have attained what they did, no historian has adequately explained. They inhabited a land of bold outlines and charming valleys, they enjoyed the constant challenge to imagination which nearness to the sea provides. Their harbors were mostly on the eastern coasts of the archipelago, a fact which would have tended to keep them in contact with the more ancient life of Asia Minor, even if their own colonies on those shores had not existed. At the same time their individuality was fostered by the degree of isolation which mountains and difficult navigation provide. Although fertile valleys and smiling plains relieved the rocky slopes, and commerce also brought in gain, the people must have been poor compared with the “standard of living” which seventh century Phoenicians enjoyed, or with our own resources. Their life was hampered by constant warfare, much of it against great empires whose armies and navies repeatedly tried to crush their institutions. But climate, environment, external resources, the challenge of great events, all these fail to explain an age of Pericles, as they fail to explain the torpor of medieval Hellas. Perhaps one must, in the end, have recourse to vague terms: a certain quality of blood, a peculiar distinction of character (preéminently present in the Ionian race) by virtue of which Greeks faced the opposition of a world of enemies, carried out their purposes both ideal and practical, by willing to do them, notwithstanding all lack of precedent and aggressive obstacles, maintaining all the while a poise and genial harmony of life which in so many respects reminds one of their works of art.