The history of European Philosophy; an introductory book

Preface

The purpose I have had in mind to fulfill in writing this book has been solely pedagogical. I have not endeavored to add anything whatever to our knowledge of the history of philosophy, and if by chance I have anywhere offered new points of view, this has been quite subordinate to my main purpose. On the contrary, I have in several chapters deliberately depended upon one selected secondary source and in a few chapters I have ventured even to quote my secondary authority at length. (I have indicated this indebtedness wherever I have thought it of any importance to the reader to do so.)

Two pedagogical considerations have determined the character of the book. First, my experience is, that the traditional and conventional text-book on the history of philosophy, however excellent and scholarly, is not well adapted to the needs of undergraduate students. Such a book is an epitome of the doctrines of the great philosophical thinkers, and is both unintelligible to the beginner and too detailed to be learned and remembered by him. It attempts to make the student acquainted with the difficult and detailed doctrines and reasonings of the philosophers when only a long and careful study of their writings can really bring this about. Moreover, it fails by not relating the information it gives to the other historical information prerequisite to the study of the history of philosophy, and thus it forms, if learned, a sort of logictight compartment with no openings into the fields of psychology and anthropology, of general political, social and economic history, and of the history of literature,

vii viii PREFACE

art, and general culture. It ignores the fact that the philosophy of any period or age is the outcome of the total civilization and of the changing civilization of the time. Hence to avoid these errors, I have tried to confine my book to major philosophical movements and to approach the study of any philosophical movement from the general history of the era, and I have tried to indicate the relations between the philosophy of the age and the other great spiritual and social changes that were taking place. Second, a beginner's text-book on the history of philosophy, in my opinion, should include as few details as possible, should leave much to be taught directly by the instructor in charge of the course, and should presuppose that the student is to do a large amount of outside reading. To make this reading possible the text-book must be brief and concise, and must resemble in its character a syllabus. However, it may properly include more topics than the student will have time to study at length, so that the instructor may select from the list the topics most suitable to the needs and interests of the individual student.

The readings I have suggested are merely suggestions, though serious ones. They are not bibliographies.

Walter T. Marvin.

Rutgers College,

Part I— Introductory Chapter Page

I. The Recency of Civilization 1

1. The relative recency of civilization. 2. The causes of the rise and growth of civilization. 3. The primitive beliefs and customs the source of the later civilization. 4. The survival of the primitive within civilization. 5. Conclusion.

II. The History of Philosophy 12

1. The history of the growth of knowledge. 2. The meaning of the term, philosophy. 3. Philosophical growth and its causes. 4. The program of this book.

III. Changes in Man's Mental Nature Wrought by

Civilization 20

1. Introductory. 2. Learning by imitation. 3. The broadening of curiosity. 4. Increase of the ability to analyze. 5. Man becomes less crudely emotional 6. Man becomes less crudely suggestible. 7. Man becomes more sociable. 8. Conclusion.

IV. Primitive Knowledge and Thought 31

1. Primitive thought. 2. Three kinds of beliefs held by the primitive thinker. 3. Primitive verified knowledge. 4. Primitive speculative knowledge. 5. The influence of social organization. 6. Conclusion.

V. From Primitive Thought to Science 49

1. Introductory. 2. Primitive custom and religion. 3. National and international religions. 4. From religion to science. 5. The conflict of science with religion. 6. The mutual influence of religion and science.

ix x CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

VI. The Two Major Periods in the History of European Philosophy 59

1. The three major periods of history. 2. The first coming of science. 3. The major periods in the development of scientific thought.

Part Ii— Ancient Philosophy

VII. The Mediterranean Period 67

1. Greek science and philosophy. 2. The periods of Greco-Roman science.

VIII. From Religion to Science in Greece 71

1. Greek religion. 2. Greek theology. 3. The influence of Greek theology upon Greek science. 4. The two currents in Greek philosophy. 5. Intellectualistic naturalism and romanticism have remained rivals throughout the history of European philosophy.

IX. The Early Period 78

1. Introductory. 2. The important discoveries known to have been made in the early period of Greek science. 3. The eastern, or Ionic philosophical tradition. 4. The western, or Italic philosophical tradition.

X. The Atomic Theory 95

1. Important stages in the evolution of early cosmology toward atomism. 2. The atomic theory. 3. Conclusion.

XI. The Athenian Period 109

1. The major political changes in the Athenian period. 2. Athens the center of greatest Greek culture. 3. The age of enlightenment. 4. The field of the enlightenment. 5. The new fields of scientific development. 6. Scientific progress along the older lines. 7. The major philosophical problems of the Athenian period.

XII. The Great Thinkers of the Athenian Period:

Protagoras and Democritus 120

1. Protagoras. 2. Democritus.

CONTENTS xi

CHAPTER PAGE

XIII. The Great Thinkers op the Athenian Period:

Socrates and Plato 132

1. Socrates. 2. The Socratic doctrine of forms, or ideas. 3. The Socratic doctrine of the nature of the good. 4. Plato. 5. Plato's contribution to science. 6. The Platonic philosophy. 7. Plato's defense of science against the Eleatics of Megara. 8. In Plato's philosophy mathematics is the fundamental science. 9. The world-soul. 10. Plato's cosmology.

XIV. The Great Thinkers op the Athenian Period:

Aristotle . 150

1. Introductory. 2. The relation of the philosophy of Aristotle to that of Plato and Democritus. 3. Aristotle the Platonist. 4. Aristotle the vitalist. 5. The Aristotelian cosmology. 6. Aristotle's philosophy of life.

XV. The Hellenistic and Roman Periods 164

1. Introductory. 2. Religion. 3. Philosophy. 4. Scientific progress.

XVI. The Philosophical Schools 185

1. Introductory. 2. The philosophical schools of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. 3. The Epicurean school. 4. The Stoic school. 5. Neoplatonism.

XVII. The Roman Law 211

1. Introductory. 2. The entrance of Hellenic culture into Rome. 3. The development of the Roman private law. 4. The jus naturale.

XVIII. The Christian Philosophy 223

1. Introductory. 2. The development of Christian philosophy. 3. Augustine. 4. Gregory the Great. 5. Conclusion.

Part Iii— Modern Philosophy

XIX. The Atlantic Period 243

1. Introductory. 2. The development of medieval and modern culture. 3. The culture of the Atlantic period contrasted with that of the Mediterranean xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

period. 4. Ancient philosophy contrasted with modern philosophy.

XX. Medieval Thought 250

1. The medieval mind. 2. The three factors at work in medieval thought. 3. The course through which medieval thought developed. 4. The content of medieval philosophic thought.

XXI. The Age op Discovery 275

1. Introductory. 2. The factors giving rise to the age of discovery. 3. The course of discovery and the great discoveries. 4. The broadening of the field of discovery and of science. 5. The conflict of science with prescientific and medieval belief and custom.

XXII. The Modern Philosophical Movements 301

1. Introductory. 2. The survival of prescientific thought. 3. The modern philosophical movements.

4. The course of modern philosophical movements and the philosophical tendencies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

XXIII. Rationalism and Naturalism „■ 314

1. The problem of method. 2. Naturalism: The universe conceived as a perpetual motion machine. 3. Rationalism and naturalism in religion. 4. Rationalism and naturalism in physiology. 5. Rationalism and naturalism in psychology. 6. Rationalism and naturalism in social and moral science.

7. The development of toleration. 8. The idea of progress. 9. The effect of naturalism upon the general intellectual life of the modern world.

XXIV. Phenomenalism, Positivism, and Idealism 341

1. Introductory. 2. The terms, Phenomenalism and Empiricism defined. 3. Phenomenalism and Idealism. 4. Phenomenalism in modern thought.

5. The subjectivistic problem of knowledge. 6. Empiricism and positivism. 7. Objective idealism.

8. The influence of phenomenalism and positivism upon the intellectual life of the past two centuries.

CONTENTS

Xlll

CHAPTER

XXV.

PAGE

The Doctrine op Evolution

1. Introductory. 2. Geological and biological evolution. 3. The doctrine of natural selection.

4. Evolution as a part of the philosophy of the intellectual world. 5. The influence of evolution upon the general trend of present philosophical thought.

XXVI. Romanticism 369

1. Introductory. 2. Romanticism as a philosophical movement. 3. Romanticism as a philosophical doctrine. 4. Romanticism and science. 5. Romanticism and primitive thought. 6. The influence of romanticism upon the thought of the nineteenth century.

XXVII. Present Philosophical Tendencies 384

1. Introductory. 2. The scientific achievement of the nineteenth century. 3. The great discoveries of marked philosophical importance. 4. Naturalism.

5. Rationalism and experimentalism. 6. Intellectualism and pragmatism. 7. The new realism. 8. Social democracy.

XXVIII. Conclusion 429

1. The complexity of our present intellectual life. 2. The central tendency man of to-day and the central tendency man of the intellectual class. 3. The near future of present philosophical tendencies. 4. The individual and the group mind. 5. The two aspects of man's intellectual progress.

Chapter I

1. The relative recency of civilization. — Man has not

always been the man we now behold. Man sprang from a brute ancestry and took many tens of thousands of years to reach the level of civilization found at the beginning of what we usually call history, that is, the level attained four thousand years before Christ in the lands bordering upon the Mediterranean Sea. Even the beginnings of Egyptian, Sumerian and Babylonian civilization seem but of yesterday, if their recency is compared with the remoteness of the time when man first used the rudest stone tools. Moreover, from the dawn of history to our own day, during this period of less than ten thousand years, parts of the human race have developed not only relatively but also absolutely to a far greater extent than man developed during the preceding one hundred thousand years. The three familiar and wonderful examples of this rapidly developing civilization in the western world have been the three thousand years of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia preceding the Christian era, the twelve hundred years of Greco-Roman history from 800 B. C. to 400 A. D. and the seven hundred years of modern Europe from the beginning of the thirteenth century to the present time.

Robinson, J. H., The New History, 1911, 236-266; Marett, R. R., Anthropology (Home University Library); Clodd, E., The Story of Primitive Man, 1910; Ratzel, The History of Mankind, 1896, Book I.

Osborn, H. F., Men of the Old Stone Age, 1915;

Sollas, Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives, 1915;

Buttel-Reepen, Man and his Forerunners, 1913;

Keith, A., Antiquity of Man, 1915;

Meyer, E., Geschichte des Altertums, 3te. Aufl. } 1910, Bd. I, Erste Halfte;

MacCurdy, G. G., Recent Discoveries Bearing on the Antiquity of Man, 1910 (from Smithsonian Report of 1909);

Haddon, A. C., History of Anthropology, 1910.

2. The causes of the rise and growth of civilization: (a) The further evolution of man's brain. — Psychology limits the possible causes at work in evolving civilization to two distinct types. First, man's inborn mental nature, the nervous system given him by heredity, may have been improving. Second, man's environment, that is, the sum total of the factors acting upon this inborn nature, may have become more and more favorable to further civilization. If the first cause has been present, man's progress can be explained in the same way as can man's superiority to the brute. That is to say, we can argue that precisely as the brain of prehistoric man had evolved to a higher type than that possessed by his prehuman ancestor; so man's brain has continued to evolve to a higher and higher type, with the result that the European has a better brain to-day than had the European six thousand years ago. To repeat, if such an evolution has indeed taken place, it would explain man's recent progress in civilization; for it would give the modern a superior intellect, or capacity for civilization, to that of prehistoric man, precisely as the earlier neural evolution gave to prehistoric man an intellect superior to that of the beasts whom he hunted, not by his greater strength or speed, but by his manual dexterity, his weapons and his strategy. However, we may not accept this possible cause; for all the evidence that we as yet have from historian, anthropologist, and psychologist, indicates no important advance in the inborn structure of the human brain during the past six thousand years, and certainly no advance comparable to that which must have taken place in our race's evolution remote ages ago. Perhaps the most that can be maintained in favor of the belief that man's inborn nature has improved, is that natural selection may have tended to weed out the feebler intellects, may have favored the better intellects, and thereby may have raised slightly not the best but the average intellect.

(b) The influence of the environment. — Be this as it may, the second possible cause, namely, the environment, has been by far the more potent factor; for the evidence we have, indicates that environment has been not only an indispensable but also a sufficient cause of human progress. Expressed in briefest and baldest form, the invention of tools and of arts has increased the food supply, this has increased the population, and the last has increased socialization and civilization. Once in existence, a little civilization can by the same process beget further civilization and an increased civilization can beget a higher and higher civilization at a rate comparable to a geometrical progression. A stimulating and favorable climate, a good geographical habitat, natural wealth in food, in wood, and in minerals, more efficient instruments for tillage, for transportation, for building, and for the various industries, a denser population, an increased socialization, a more efficient language, a wider acquaintance with other lands, their people, and their customs, a nobler architecture and nobler plastic arts, a richer industrial, biographical, social, and artistic tradition, and a written lore, have each and all been either contributing or indispensable causes for the continued growth of civilization. Many of them have been stimuli that excite curiosity, that suggest problems, and that arouse novel thoughts and other new ways of reacting. Moreover, such a growth in civilization provides more and more the indispensable tolerance and reward for inventiveness, for analytical thought, and for critical reflection. Soon it provides also as stimuli the deeds and thoughts of great men, stimuli which excite younger men to study, to imitate, and to criticise the arts, the customs, and the doctrines of their elders. Thus the very enterprise of progress becomes itself a tradition and a profession. Finally, from the very beginning, civilization tends to become an international possession and nations tend to contribute mutually to further progress; for in the early stages of civilization as well as in the later, beliefs and customs tend to spread, carried by the trader, the traveller, and the warrior.

However, a word of caution must be added to this story of the influence of environment upon civilization. Civilization does not always beget higher civilization. Civilization can remain stationary, it can decline back even into savagedom. Civilized environments are exceeding complex and are never alike in different times and in different places; and unfortunately some of the greatest or most rapid advances in civilization seem to have been dependent upon some quite exceptional combination of environmental factors, since often in man's history these most rapid advances have persisted for but relatively short periods.

(c) The influence of the exceptional man. — The presence of a subordinate psychological factor indispensable to the growth of civilization should be noted in addition to the two ultimate factors, change in inborn nature and environment. This factor is the man of exceptionally high ability. Could we see the thousands and thousands of inventions and novel thoughts and deeds actually in the making, the thousands of individual acts that have been the most important events in history, whom should we see to have been their true authors? From what we know regarding some of these events which the historian has been able to examine in detail, and from what is psychologically most probable, we can infer that the true authors were in most instances men above the average ability of their horde, tribe, or nation. To guess what the history of Europe would have been, had this or that man of genius not been born, may be utterly idle; but it is not venturesome to assert that our civilization would never have arisen, had some superhuman agent destroyed in each generation all the children whose inborn mental nature ranked among the highest ten per cent in excellence. If this is true, then the following propositions are of great importance in the study of history. First, the denser the population the greater will be the absolute number of these exceptional children and the higher will be the probability that among them are some children of quite extraordinary ability. In other words, though the average inborn mental nature may not have improved in the course of the past six thousand years, the inborn nature can be said to have improved absolutely wherever population has greatly increased in number. And such an increase is typical of advancing civilization. Second, psychology shows that environment brings about far greater and far more desirable changes in the mental nature of the exceptionally capable child than in that of his mediocre companion. That is, he is more easily civilized. Third, the exceptionally capable men are as a type far more masterful and inventive than the mediocre, and therefore they are to a greater degree makers of their environment, to a less degree dependent upon favorable environment, and in general they are the probable human authors of progress. 1

(d) The causes of the slowness of progress in primitive civilization. — Such being the causes of the growth of civilization, why were the earliest stages of primitive culture so very long? This problem is for the most part psychological and, if so studied, is easily solved. The first tools must have been the objects that untutored man would pick up and use instinctively, such as sticks and stones. However, that a stone could be fastened to a stick, was as far beyond this wild man's dreams as was the electric locomotive; and of course that a stone could be chipped or polished into useful shapes never entered his thoughts. Such habits must have had several stages and each of these stages doubtless had to wait for some happy accident to occur among man's animal-like and quite unreflective experiments. Indeed, to expect them to occur as reflective inventions rather than as lucky accidents would be as absurd as to expect the baby to begin his mathematical thinking with the notions of the calculus. We should recall that it is quite impossible for us to imagine or to think about objects that lie altogether beyond our experience, for example, for an infant to think about bacteria or for a savage to invent an automobile. Thinking always presupposes knowledge. Therefore the beginnings of culture had to be unreflective or quite accidental. Moreover, if this conclusion is probable of such simple habits as fastening a stone to a stick, how much the

1 1 say "human authors of progress," for we must not forget that even the most gifted of men but shares in this authorship with his environment. Without a favorable environment to stimulate him he would not invent or progress and without such an environment to reward and to foster his enterprises they would die in their very beginnings.

more should we expect that only the happiest and most infrequent of accidents could have led to the discovery of such processes as the making of fire, the tilling of the soil, the making of pottery, and the working of copper and iron!

3. The primitive beliefs and customs the source of the later civilization. — Precisely as man's body has evolved out of the body of his anthropoid ancestor and precisely as human instincts have grown out of the instincts of the early primates; so also has the civilization that we study in history evolved from the primitive customs of prehistory. Moreover, there follows the important corollary: a people's culture, as found by the historian, cannot be understood by him until he discovers the primitive beliefs and customs from which that culture evolved. Nowadays this principle seems to us almost a truism; for with our evolutionary habits of thought we cannot see how history can be studied otherwise.

During the period of recorded history the fact of evolution is evident. Civil law and political institutions, industrial, commercial and banking customs, methods of transportation and numberless machines have evolved by stages that are known in detail; and some of these stages have been gone through almost before our very eyes. And if the new has grown out of the old when progress has been so largely the result of reflective thought, how surely must it have so grown in the early days of history! The evidence that it did so is abundant. The anthropologists and the students of the dawn of history are revealing to us everywhere the growth of early civilization out of primitive culture, for example, in the political and social organization of peoples, in their religion and speculations, in their buildings, and in their tools and industries. Even such sciences as medicine, chemistry, astronomy, and history grew directly from primitive magic and myths.

Let us consider a few familiar instances. The Greek tragedy grew out of religious ritual and songs and retained even in the days of its greatest glory its thoroughly religious character. The epic is evidently the outgrowth of the songs or ballads chanted or recited by the bards. In the ancient religions of the Mediterranean world the sacrifices and the sacraments grew directly from the savage practices of totemism Qr similar customs. The fast and other holy days are the offspring of earlier savage tabooes. The prayers are later stages of the magic words by which the seer compelled the totem or other power to obey him; and some gods at least are the descendants of totems worshipped by earlier generations. The domestication of animals probably goes back to the customs of caring for the totem or sacred animal. The beginnings of the study of the stars and of theories that we may call the first astronomy grew out of early magic and related religious customs of which astrology is another descendant. The beginnings of what may be rightly called medical science developed out of the practices of the magician or medicine man; and modern chemistry is the offspring of medieval alchemy. The ancestry of Roman and English civil law is to be found in the customs of these peoples in earlier generations. Finally, the political and social organization of ancient Rome or of any other great nation, ancient or modern, goes back to the tribal customs of their ancestors; and those differences between nations in their political and social organization which even revolutions and centuries of intercourse cannot eradicate often go back to ancestral customs older than the nation itself. The solidly practical and efficient management of the Roman government as compared with that of the typical Greek governments is an example of such a difference. " We can see this peculiar gift showing itself at all stages of their (Roman) development: in the agricultural family which was the germ of all their later growth, in the city-state which grew from that germ, and in the Empire, founded by the leaders of the city-state, and organized by Augustus and his successors." 1

4. The survival of the primitive within civilization. — A remarkable fact in the evolution of civilization, as in all other evolution, is that the old persists often along with the new. As man's skeleton remains to a large extent the skeleton of his quadrupedal ancestors; so also do tools, customs, laws, institutions, and beliefs retain countless vestiges of the older or even savage beginnings from which they evolved. For example, the marriage ring, the rice thrown at the departing bride, the gargoyles on Gothic churches, the shaking of hands are vestiges of the customs of an immemorial past. The common law retains numerous elements going back to the customs of barbaric ancestors and the treatment of the criminal remains still partly barbaric. Church and college are especially rich in vestiges of great antiquity. Among our beliefs, even in the most cultured circles, remain to this day many stupid fears or superstitions. Finally in science as well vestiges of savage beliefs are not difficult to find. Psychology and biology still retain many remnants of the animism, or 'demon theory of primitive peoples. For many the mind and its faculties are a sort of jack-in-the-box that does things and needs not itself to be explained. A similar vestige of the day when nature was thought of as full of demons, spooks, and other living agents is to be found in the notion, "force," as entertained by physicists in recent centuries.

However, the most extensive survival of primitive beliefs and customs is to be found in what we may call the humbler strata of civilized societies. Precisely, as some areas of the earth's surface reveal in the geological strata that compose them deposits not only of many periods but 1 Fowler, Rome, p. 14.

also of periods of remote geological ages; so civilized society reveals in the groups of people that compose it, from the most ignorant to the most cultured, the survival of different levels of civilization. In lands that are least progressive, in remote and lonely districts, among the lowest peasantry, fisher folk and sailors and in the slums of our great cities we are likely to find prevalent many beliefs and customs of the distant past. Here the religion, the superstitions, the medical practice, and the beliefs regarding the growth of plants and animals, regarding life and mind, and regarding the processes of nature about us and above us are often not only as crude as that of barbarians but also as ancient.

If all of this is true, the student of history is to seek and to expect to find everywhere within the beliefs and customs which make up the culture of any land or age, older and even primitive beliefs and customs, which have come from the ancestral culture of that land or age. For example, the religion of the golden age of Greece, as students of Greek religion are to-day pointing out, contains numerous vestiges of the savage religion of a vastly older culture. And what is true of the religion of Greece is true of all ancient religions. And what is true of these religions is in a greater or less degree true of everything else in ancient and modern history. Thus you and I still speak habitually of the sun rising and setting, and during nine hundred and ninetynine moments out of a thousand the earth beneath us is unreflectively regarded as the motionless bottom of the universe. In other words, the culture of any age or land is not one thing, rather it is a multitude or vast collection of habits, among which some may be new but others are older and some may be even prehistoric. As the culture changes only part of the collection of habits is altered. That is, new habits are added and only some of the older habits die out in competition with the new ones; whereas others that do not compete at all or only feebly, survive.

5. Conclusion. — This recency of rapidly developing civilization compared with the length of man's prehistoric period and these truths regarding the origin and growth of civilization are most significant. On the one hand, they suggest that civilization may still be but an infant and therefore that man may yet be far from the best solution of life's problems. On the other hand, they show with what exceeding difficulty man discovered the first tools and methods for subduing nature and outgrew the customs and beliefs that in each generation he acquired from the social group to which he belonged. Indeed, the fact that change and progress have been so difficult suggests that the greatest dangers and obstacles to progress man faces in all ages are conservatism rather than radicalism, inertia rather than perseverance, group restraint rather than individual initiative, and the ready acceptance of the old and customary rather than investigation and invention.

Boas, F., The Mind of Primitive Man, 1911, Chaps. I-IV;

Thorndike, E. L., Educational Psychology, 1913, Vol. Ill, Chap. X;

Ratzel, The History of Mankind, Book I. For more extensive study read:

Thomas, W. I., Source Book for Social Origins, 1909.

Chapter II

1. The history of the growth of knowledge. — As stated in the preceding chapter, a civilization, or culture, is an exceeding complex group of more or less closely interconnected social habits, or customs, within which group are an indefinite number of minor, or subordinate, groups. Corresponding to these minor groups the study of the history of any great civilization can be divided into an indefinite number of possible subdivisions. For example, the study of the history of Roman civilization includes within it the study of the history of many minor groups of customs such as that of the Roman law or the Roman military art, and finally the study of the history of individual customs such as that of the Roman triumphal arch or that of the Roman imperium.