Early Greek Philosophy

Philosophies Ancient and Modern
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY

NOTE
As a consequence of the success of the series of Religions
Ancient and Modern, Messrs. Constable have decided to issue
a set of similar primers, with brief introductions, lists of dates,
and selected authorities, presenting to the wider public the
salient features of the Philosophies of Greece and Rome and of
the Middle Ages, as well as of modern Europe. They will
appear in the same handy Shilling volumes, with neat cloth
bindings and paper envelopes, which have proved so attractive
in the case of the Religions,
'
The writing in each case will be
confided to an eminent authority, and one who has already
proved himself capable of scholarly yet popular exposition
within a small compass.
Among the first volumes to appear will be
:
Early Greek Philosophy. By A. W. Benn, author of The Philo-

sophy
of
Greece, Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century,
Stoicism. By Professor St. George Stock, author of Deduc-
tive Logic, editor of the Apology
of
Plato, etc.
Plato. By Professor A. E. Taylor, St. Andrews University,
author of The Problem
of
Conduct,
Scholasticism. By Father Rickaby, S.J.
Hohhes. By Professor A. E. Taylor.
Locke. By Professor Alexander, of Owens College.
Comte and Mill. By T. W. Whittaker, author of The
Neoplatonists, Apollonius
of
Tyana and other Essays.
Herbert Spencer. By W. H. Hudson, author oi An Intro-
duction to Spencer's Philosophy.
Schopenhauer. By T. W. Whittaker.
Berkeley. By Professor Campbell Eraser, D.C.L., LL.D.
Bergsen.
By Father Tyrrell.
EARLY
GREEK
PHILOSOPHY
By
ALFRED
WILLIAM
BENN, B.A,
LONDON
ARCHIBALD
CONSTABLE ^ CO
Ltd
1908
FOKEWORD
References to authorities, except of the most
general kind, are precluded by the plan of the
Series to which this Primer belongs. It is, there-
fore, as well for me to mention that I have gone
to the original sources for my materials. The
admirable work of Hermann Diels, Fragmente
der Vorsokratiker, Bd. i., Berlin, 1906, has been
most helpful for the prse-Sophistic philosophers.
As regards the interpretation of early Greek
philosophy I have found no reason to depart
from the views given in my Philosophy
of
Greece
(1898).
At the same time I wish it to be under-
stood that, in my opinion, the very scanty in-
formation at our disposal permits no more than
a conjectural interpretation of what the Greek
philosophers from Thales to Socrates really
taught. And it is only fit that the beginner
should be told as much on his first introduction
to the subject. The great thing is that he should
become interested enough in these uncertainties
to think that the time spent on them has not
been thrown away. A. W. B.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. The School of Miletus .
iL The First Metaphysicians
in. The Analytical Philosophers
IV. The Sophists
PAGE
1
24
55
83
V. Socrates 100
Works bearing on Early Greek Philosophy 123
Index 125
EARLY GEEEK PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER I
THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS
1. The Meaning of Philosophy.It is related
of an old Greek sage that on being asked to
explain what was meant by philosophy he replied
:
Life is like a public festival. Some go there to
buy and sell, others go to compete in the games,
but a third class go simply to look on, and these
are the best of all. Well, just in the same way
most men are born slaves to the pursuit of gain
or glory, whereas the philosopher freely devotes
himself to the study of truth.
This idea of philosophy as disinterested specu-
lation has been handed down from the Greeks to
ourselves, and has even been widely popularised,
as common language seems to prove. Any one
who shows a great curiosity about things in
general, apart from their utility to himself, any
student who, like the young Francis Bacon, takes
A I
all knowledge for his province, is apt to be called
a philosopher; while conversely, he who has
gained the reputation of being a philosopher is
expected to know everythingnot merely every-
thing that is known already but everything that
ever will be known, and some things that perhaps
cannot be known at all.
Even popular language, however, is dimly
conscious of a distinction between the philosopher
and the scholar. Broadly speaking, the one is
expected to know all about nature, the other is
expected to know all about history and literature.
Even his warmest admirers would hardly have
called Mr. Gladstone a philosopher; while it
might have excited some surprise if any recorded
deed or word of any human being from the
creation down to the most modern times had
escaped his notice. On the other hand it seemed
quite in character that the typical philosopher,
Herbert Spencer, should be rather proud of not
knowing the date of something that happened
f\ three centuries ago; and that he should con-
\
wJ
gratulate himself on not having received a
p
classical education.
Agaong the Qreeks also philosophyijvas
asgo-^
!ciated in a peculiar^ ma>nner with the ^study of
hatur(5 as distinguished from the study of history
2
and literature, which are more the subjects of
what we call scholarship and erudition. And
this fact explains how the word philosophy itself
came into being. Originally all men who were
particularly distinguished for the extent of their
knowledge
poets among otherswent by the

name of crocfôi, the nearest English equivalent to
which is wise, although wisdom with us seems
more limited to knowing what is useful for the
conduct of life than what a Greek meant by
Sophia. Now, in a relatively simple state of
society, to know all that can be known about
literature, history, and human interests generally
seems a not impossible or inordinate ambition.
It is otherwise with nature. True, the Greeks
as compared with ourselves had hardly an idea
of the vastness and complexity of the physical
universe ; still, such acute and sincere observers
could not fail to perceive, when they set their
minds to it, how infinitely greater is the world
of nature than the world of man. And so it
came about that those who took nature rather
than man for their province disclaimed the title
of wise or knowing men, modestly preferring to
be called lovers
of
knowledge or, as we now say,
students, which is precisely what is meant by
philosophers.
3
We are told that the first to adopt the name
was the celebrated Pythagoras, who is also
credited with the definition of philosophy as
disinterested speculation, quoted at the beginning
of this book. But it seems likely that both the
word and the definition belong to a somewhat
later age than that in which Pythagoras lived.
2. Greek Religion.-/-Before philosophy arose,
Greek curiosity about tEe^rigin and structure of
the material universe was satisfied by an elaborate
system of mythology It is still a matter of dis-
pute how religion first began, but it seems to be
generally agreed that all the progressive races
have passed through a stage in which their gods
are conceived as personified natural objects or
natural forces. lAt
any rate, that was how the
Greeks represented to themselves the beings whom
they
worshipped. Working, as we may suppose,
on a mass of loose and discordant traditions, their
poets elaborated the figments of popular religion
into a literary scheme of such unfading interest
that an acquaintance with Greek mythology has
remained part of a liberal education all over the
modern Christian world.
It was a unique circumstance in the history of
religion that the Greek poets should play such a
4
decisive part in the evolution of theological belief.
That the poets were able to exercise this com-
manding influence over public opinion arose from
the absence among the Greeks of a priestly caste
or corporation like those which dominated the
great Oriental civilisations. Priests as a class
abounded, but they were neither united nor
powerful. Each particular sanctuary had its
priest, claiming special knowledge of the god to
whom it belonged, ready to explain how the
favour of that particular divinity could be won
or his anger appeased, able perhaps also to tell
the legend of the sanctuary, the particular cir-
cumstances in which the god came to settle at
that place. And even in very ancient times
Greek armies on a campaign were attended by
soothsayers whom the generals consulted in
reference to any great calamity or any striking
apparition presumed to be of supernatural origin.
But these officials, although habitually treated
with great respect, had no more than a personal
authority; neither priests nor soothsayers belonged
to an order possessing the enormous wealth and
political influence of the Babylonian or Egyptian
hierocracies, or of the Catholic Church in mediaeval
Europe. Assuming intellectual curiosity and
intellectual progress to be good things, it was
S
fortunate for the Greek mind that traditional
beliefs had no stronger support than the ordinary
conservatism of human nature, that they were
not bound up with the material interests of a
body accustomed to identify the truth of their
opinions about the gods with the preservation of
their corporate property.
Greek Mythology in a systematised form was, as
I have said, a creation of the poets, and more par-
ticularly of Homer and Hesiod. With Hesiod
the conception of the gods as nature-powers is
quite evident ; Homer presents them more as
personal beings; but with him also evidence of
their purely physical origin and nature is never far
to seek. Zeus constantly appears as the cloud-
collector, that is, the upper heaven ; Athene bears
the segis or cloud-shield of her father Zeus ; Apollo,
his son, the far-darter, is distinguished by the un-
mistakable attributes of a solar deity. And there
seems to be a latent consciousness, at least in what
are supposed to be the more recent portions of
the Iliad, not only that the Olympian gods are
nature-powers but also that they have no exist-
ence except as indwelling spirits of nature.
Their detachment from material objects, the con-
ception of them as self-conscious personal beings,
is of course most complete when they are brought
6
together in conclave for purposes of deliberation
or festivity. Now it is just on those occasions
that Homer takes his gods and goddesses least
iQ.
'
seriously, presenting them even in a ludicrous
>^ light, with a certain sceptical irony.
A
\^y)
NatjjTP-
IS not. Trmrg.1
;
and the gods of Greek
^ôetry are neither exhibited as themselves models
of good conduct, nor as necessarily encouraging
good conduct among mortals. In fact they
behave as men and women might be expected
to behave if they lived for ever and were clothed
with irresistible power. Their life among them-
selves is that of a dissolute aristocracy; their
treatment of the hum^ race is determined by
the frankest favouritism(. An organised priest-
hood would not have tolerated such undignified
proceedings in the objects of its worship as
Homer reports.
At the same time, in default of a priesthood
better even in some ways than a priesthood
public opinion among the Greeks did something

to moralise religion. The gods were supposed to
govern human affairs; and rulers, whether real
or imaginary, cannot but become associated to
some extent with ideas of justice. They became
more particularly associated with the keeping of
promises, which is the very foundation of social
7
order, by the Greek custom of invoking them as
witnesses to oaths. For to break an oath which
a god had witnessed was, as the Decalogue puts
it, taking his name in vainconduct which he
naturally resented. Moreover Zeus, the supreme
god,
'
father of gods and men,' was regarded as
being in a particular way the patron of destitute
persons and of strangers. At the same time it
must not be supposed that morality ever became
so completely identified with religion in Greece
as in ancient Israel or among Christian nations.
And to the fact of their distinction is due the
constitution of an independent moral philosophy
by the early Greek thinkers perhaps also the
constitution of an independent physical philo-
sophy as well.
3. The Seven Sages.In an early stage of
civilisation people are saved the trouble of think-
ing about moral philosophy or abstract principles
of right conduct by learning the laws and cus-
toms of their land or tribe, just as mythology
saves them the trouble of finding scientific ex-
planations of natural processes. But where a
number of petty states exist side by side, each
with laws of its own, where repeated changes of
government involve the necessity of making new
8
laws, above all where the individual members of
the community have so far emancipated them-
selves from the yoke of custom as to exercise a
certain discretion in the management of their
private affairs, there a sort of moral rationalism
will arise, an idea that certain things should be
done because they are good in themselves, not
because they are prescribed by authority.
These conditions were fulfilled to a remarkable
extent in the Hellenic world during the first half
of the sixth century B.C. The old patriarchal
monarchies, such as we find still existing in
Homer's time, had given place to aristocratic
republics ; and in many instances one of the
aristocrats had succeeded for a time in making
himself what the Greeks called a tyrant, or abso-
lute ruler, by playing off the people against the
nobles. Men who formerly occupied a leading
position in their own city were driven into exile
and spent their enforced leisure in visiting foreign
parts and studying the varieties of human life
there offered to their observation. A vast exten-
sion of commerce brought the Greek mind into
vivifying contact with the great Oriental civilisa-
tions and with the uncivilised inhabitants of
Northern Europe. Moreover, the economical
revolution brought with it unexpected changes
9
of fortune and new valuations of personal worth.
It came to be a popular saying that 'money
makes the man
'
long descent counting for little
or nothing when the hereditary magnate had lost
his paternal estates.
It was in these circumstances that a group of
worthies became widely celebrated under the
name of the Seven Sages of Greece. Each sage
got the credit of having originated some pithy
saying which thenceforward became a current
coin in the treasure of popular wisdom. What
strikes us most about these adages is their brevity
and the abstract wording that distinguishes them
from the proverbs of other nations. Some of them
had the glory of being inscribed on the walls of
the temple at Delphi ; and two in particular are
pregnant with a wisdom that the highest Greek
ethical teaching did but expand and apply.
These are,
'
Be moderate/ and
'
Know thyself.'
To realise and practise the duties they recom-
mend was to possess in its fulness what was par
excellence the Greek virtue of Sophrosyne. We
ordinarily render the word by Temperance; but
temperance even in the wide sense of avoiding
excess in every direction fails to convey its full
meaning ; for he to whom nature or training has
given Sophrosyne adds the faculty of self-know-
lO
ledge to the faculty of self-control. He is what
artists call the master of his means; he has
learned what he can do, and does it ; something
tells him how far he can go ; up to that point he
goes, but not a step beyond.
Opposed to Sophrosyne as the ideal Greek
virtue was what one may call the ideal Greek
vice, in the sense of what wise Greeks most
abhorred, that is, Hybris. Literally hybris means
no more than excess, and some trace of this sig-
nificance survives in our own word hybrid, used
primarily of animals that are a cross between two
species, thus as it were exceeding the limits
assigned to them by nature. Morally and
etymologically hybris is also connected with the
word outrage, which literally means no more than
'
going beyond
'
that is, beyond what reason and
law prescribe, but which in the evolution of lan-
guage has come to mean going beyond the bounds
of ordinary licence and crime. The Greeks as a
dignified and self-respecting people were pecu-
liarly sensitive to all such transgressions, from
insolent and overbearing language to acts of
unprovoked and gross personal violence committed
in the mere wantonness of irresistible power.
Nature, as they conceived her, is bound by strict
laws of limitation ; and therefore the gods, being
II
nature-powers, showed themselves particularly-
hostile to hybris ; and the poetic interpretations
of mythology all went to show that the old
kingly races had perished by drawing down
divine vengeance on their parricidal crimes or on
their incestuous loves. In historic times the
same feeling was particularly directed against
the outrageous abuses of power committed by-
tyrants on the one side and by unbridled
democracies on the other. As a mean between
these two extremes, aristocracy found most
favour with thinking men ; while if a democracy
had become firmly established, they looked to
the middle class as the best guardian of social
order against the turbulence of the nobles or of
the people.
4. The Reign of Law.
I have said that the

I
Greeks conceived nature as bound by a law of
L-iimitation. This conception is so closely con-
nected with their habits of political self-govern-
ment, with the fact that their cities were
constituted as free republics, each jealously-
guarding its independence against all the others,
that we cannot tell which came first, the political
organisation or the
creed.
J At any rate, that their
republican habits led tothe philosophical idea of
12
nature as a self-sufficing orderly universe, de-
veloped on impersonal lines, undisturbed by the
arbitrary volitions of supernatural beings, seems
likel}^ An Oriental, brought up on traditions of
personal government, could not easily grasp that
idea, could not but conceive the material world
as subject like himself to the will of an irrespon-
sible master. And even the few self-governing
Semitic communities remained subject in religion
to priesthoods that preserved the tradition of a
celestial autocracy intact. The Greeks, as we saw,
had no such priesthood, and therefore their high
intelligence was left free to work out a truly
scientific philosophy of nature.
In positive science, on the other hand, Greece
was much behind the great Oriental theocracies.
These had long promoted the study of arithmetic,
geometry, and astronomy, although more as
adjuncts to magic and religion than from pure
speculative curiosity. Such curiosity was, as we
have seen, the characteristic note of philosophy
;
and it is a signal merit of the early Greek
thinkers that they should have known how to
carry away what was really valuable in Eastern
learning while discarding nearly the whole of the
superstition in which it was embedded.
13
5. Thales.Among the seven sages of Greece,
Solon of Athens has remained through all ages
the most celebrated for practical genius; and
many who would be puzzled to tell when or
where he lived have heard of him as an ideally
wise man. To those, however, who are not study-
ing the history of politics but the history of
thought, the most interesting of the whole band
is not Solon but Thales of Miletus, the founder of
Greek and indeed of all European philosophy.
It is no accident that this wonderful man should
have been a Milesian. At the time when he
flourished, that is to say, early in the sixth century
B.C., Miletus was the most prosperous of the
Ionian cities in Asia Minor, and the lonians stood
intellectually at the head of the whole Hellenic
race, the furthest removed from primitive barbar-
ism, the least exposed to contagion from the
contemporary barbarism that surrounded Hellas
like a sea on every side. We know that religious
scepticism began at a comparatively early date
among the Ionian Greeks, for those parts of the
Homeric poems where the gods are exhibited in a
rather ridiculous light, although among the latest
additions to the original epic, are still very
ancient, and these are evidently the work of an
Ionian hand. It only remained to substitute a
14
serious scientific explanation of the world for the
discredited Olympian mythology, and this was
first attempted in the school of Miletus.
Thales was not a writer of books, and what we
know about him comes from reports of which the
earliest cannot be dated nearer than half a
century after his death, while the most important
information of all comes from Aristotle, who lived
not much less than two and a half centuries later
than his time. But it all seems credible enough
;
and on putting these scattered notices together
we reach the conception of Thales as a true
master of those who know, combining great
practical sagacity with a firm grasp of scientific
realities, so far as they were then accessible, and
an instinctive feeling out after that universality
which alone can lift positive science to the
supreme heights of synthetic philosophy. He
is credited with having discovered certain ele-
mentary propositions of geometry: that the
angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are
equal, and that if two straight lines intersect the
opposite angles are equal. Any one can see by
looking at the figures that the fact is so
;
per-
haps Thales first proved that it must be so. And
he is also stated on good authority to have pre-
dicted an eclipse of the sun which the calculations
15
of modern astronomy show to have occurred in
the year 585 B.C. Apparently Thales owed his
place among the Seven Sages to that lucky fore-
cast. I say lucky, because at that time
astronomers knew no more than that eclipses
recur at certain intervals; they were unable to
tell whether a particular eclipse would be visible
on a certain part of the earth's surface or not.
Thales, no doubt, ascertained by studying the
tables drawn up by Babylonian astrologers that a
solar eclipse would be visible somewhere or other
that year. By good fortune not only was it
visible in Asia Minor but it also fell on the day
of a great battle between the Lydians and the
Medes, so alarming the combatants that they
separated and made peace.
So much for Thates as a man of science. As a
philosopher, he taught that water is the principle
of all things, or what we should call the funda-
mental element. It was a Semitic idea, quite
familiar to us from the earlier chapters of Genesis,
that the earth is surrounded by water on all sides,
being protected against an inflooding of the great
deep below by its own solid structure, and against
irruptions from above by the solid vault of heaven
a notion whence our word 'firmament' is
derived.
In like manner modern science con-
i6
ceives the earth and all the heavenly bodies as
surrounded by a vast sea of ether, the medium by
whose pulsations light, heat, electricity, and per-
haps even gravitation are constituted and trans-
mitted. Now the idea has been gaining ground
for some years past that matter is made out of
ether, was originally evolved from ethereal par-
ticles or pulses, and is perhaps destined to
resolve itself into them again. And it would
seem that Thales came to the same conclusion
about the derivation of all things from water by a
more summary process than modern science
would approve of, but in a spirit closely akin to
that of our OAvn most advanced physical investi-
gators, the generalising, assimilating spirit so
characteristic of philosophy in every age.
Another recorded saying of the Milesian
pioneer points in the same direction :
'
All things
are full of gods.' Here, at first sight, we seem to
have the old mythology back again, to be no
further advanced than Hesiod was when he
represented the great cosmic powers as personal
beings, marrying, begetting children, and quarrel-
ling with one another. If, however, we take
the
words in connection with the general drift of his
teaching, they acquire another meaning.
Had
the citizens of a Greek republic been addressed
B
17
as so many kings they would none the less have
represented a realm of law and order as against
the personal despotisms of the East; and so,
when Thales said that there was a god in amber
or a god in the loadstone, he really meant that
the drifting cloud and the falling thunderbolt
belonged to the same world of natural occur-
rences as the phenomena, then first beginning to
be scientifically observed, of magnetism and
electricity.
6. Anaximander.
I have said that Thales

probably learned what astronomy he knew from
Babylon, and that his view of the relation
between earth and water was Semitic. Now it is
certain that the philosopher was not of pure
Greek race; and one rather doubtful pedigree
even makes him belong to a Phoenician, that is
to say, a Semitic family. There seem to be very
insufficient grounds for the belief; but were it
true, philosophy would remain a product of Euro-
pean not of Asiatic culture, while the fertilising
stimulus that first started Greek thought seems
to have come not from any Semitic source but
from Egypt. At any rate the beginnings of
speculation at Miletus coincide with the perma-
nent establishment of a Milesian colony at
i8
Naucratis in the Delta, a concession due to
the liberality of the very enlightened Pharaoh,
Amasis.
With Anaximander, the pupil of Thales, and
like him a Milesian (born 610 B.C.), we already
stand on more solid ground. This marvellous
thinker may be caviled the second founder of
philosophy, for he first gave it literary expres-
sion in a book of Avhich some fragments still
survive. According to him the primary sub-
stance whence all things arise is not water, nor,
indeed, any form of matter known to us, but an
infinite something without limit in space or time.
Out of this all the worlds are evolved by a neces-
sary process of succession, and into it they return
when their fated term of existence is completed.
Only so, as Anaximander thinks, can the eternal
laws of justice be fulfilled. No single combina-
tion of material conditions among the boundless
possibilities of existence has a right to continue
for ever, blocking the way that others also are
waiting to traverse in their turn. Here we have
the cardinal Greek virtue of Sophrosyne, the
Ionian rule of self-limitation, raised to the dignity
of a universal law, determining the life and death
of things in themselves.
There is no room in Anaximander's system for
19
the immortal gods of Homer ; each world in the
infinite succession of worlds is a god indeed, but
a god destined to perish like ourselves.
Like Thales, Anaximander has a place in the
history of science no less than in the history of
philosophy
perhaps even a greater place. We

are told that he made the first map ; and that he
conceived the earth as hanging unsupported in
space, although he did not conceive it as a globe
but as a cylinder. This, however, marks a con-
siderable advance on his master's view of the
earth as a flat disk floating on the water.
According to him the heavenly bodies are vast
revolving hoops of fire pierced with circular
apertures which give us the notion of them as
luminous disks. And he anticipated the nebular
hypothesis so far as to teach that these hoops
were evolved out of the formless Infinite by a
process of gradual differentiation.
Evolution was an idea familiar to all the early
Greek philosophers. It presents, indeed, no
difficulties to men at a much more primitive
stage of thought than theirs. We ourselves have
grown up gradually from very small beginnings,
and the natural thing is to conceive the world
as having been developed in the same fashion.
Moreover, primitive folk are accustomed to look
20
on the transformation of men into animals or
plants, and of animals or plants into men, as
quite an ordinary occurrence. It is not, there-
fore, surprising to find Anaximander saying that
land animals were originally developed from
aquatic or fishlike animals, and that 'man was
born from animals of a different species/ The
remarkable thing is the reason he gives for his
theory.
'
While other animals quickly find food
for themselves, man alone requires a prolonged
period of suckling. Hence had he been origin-
ally such as he is now, he could never have
survived/
7. Anaximenes.We shall see presently what
causes brought the genuinely scientific movement
of the Milesian school to an end. Before expir-
ing it produced one more great representative
in Anaximenes, the successor of Anaximander.
With less speculative daring, he seems to show a
closer observation of fact. For him also there
is a primal substance of infinite extent, in which
and from which all finite things have their being.
That elementary substance is Air, the air that we
breathe, our very life. To use his own words,
'
that which is our soul and constitutive principle,
also holds the universe together.' A philosopher
21
Ml
< i
who so expressed himself now, or indeed at any
time after Plato, would be properly called a
materialist. But we can hardly apply the name
to Anaximenes. Materialism and spiritualism
are a correlated couple. Each term first becomes
intelligible as the antithesis and contradiction of
the other.
We have better grounds for crediting Anaxi-
menes with what would now be called a me-
chanical theory of nature, as distinguished from
what, by another modernism, may be described
as the
'
specific energies ' or
'
occult qualities ' of
his predecessor. Anaximander taught that such
antithetical pairs as wet and dry, hot and cold,
etc., were separated out or 'differentiated' from
the homogeneous Infinite where they had previ-
ously existed in a latent state. To Anaximenes,
on the other hand, heat and cold, like the solid,
liquid, and gaseous states of matter, were all
merely so many products of rarefaction and con-
densation. Air squeezed together became cloudy
''
vapour, under additional pressure vapour turned
to rain, and rain by the same process to vegetable
and animal substances, which ultimately pass
into air again. Observing with perfect accuracy
that heat and cold are somehow connected with
dilatation and compression, this early precursor
22
of Bacon unfortunately reversed the real relation
by supposing that air is chilled by being con-
densed and warmed by being expanded. And
that is why, says Anaximenes, we press our lips
together when we want to blow cold, and open
them when we want to blow hot. In studying
the errors of such a man we must remember
that to ask questions and answer them wrongly
helps progress incomparably more than not to ask
them at all.
Good care is taken, says a German proverb,
that the trees shall not grow into the sky.
Milesian philosophy, with its splendid promise
of positive knowledge, perished after the third
generation, first choked by rank undergrowths of
superstition, then uprooted by earthquake and
storm. But the same causes that put an end
to speculation in one part of Hellas favoured
its rise and propagation from new centres of
intelligence elsewhere. It was just this multipli-
cation of intellectual centres, leading to the cross-
fertilisation of mental growths, that gave the
Greek genius such an extraordinary productivity,
a productivity of which the world's history
affords no second example.
23
II
CHAPTER II
THE FIRST METAPHYSICIANS
1. The Religious Revival.In all times and
countries the philosophy of a nation has been
intimately related to its religious beliefs. And if
this is true of modern European thought which
has Greek thought to build on as an independent
foundation, much more is it true of the original
Greek thought which started without any such
inheritance from the past. Now it is a remarkable
fact that Greek philosophy as it goes on evolving
seems to come into closer and closer connection
with popular religious belief, with the current
pagan theology. Among ourselves, as is well
known, rather the reverse process obtains. Since
the Middle Ages speculation has tended on the
whole to break away from dogmatic trammels.
Fully to set out the causes of what seems to us so
singular an inversion of the natural order would
require a volume ; and indeed the problem is one
24
that classical scholarship has not yet completely
elucidated; but a few summary indications will be
found helpful for the intelligence of what is to follow.
The Greeks had not one religion but two
religions ; or rather they had many religions,
the objects of which grouped themselves under
two general headings, according as their home
was in the heavens or under the earth. We
speak of the one class as Olympian, of the other
class as Chthonian deities. The Olympian gods
typified above all by the great triad, Zeus,
Apollo, and Athene,are associated in a peculiar
way with the bright upper sky and the sun;
apart from their human interests they enjoy un-
changing and immortal felicity. The Chthonian
gods are associated in the first instance with the
dead, and their shadowy chief, Pluto, exists only
as a personification of the grave ; but they are
also conceived in a more concrete way as powers
of vegetation and growth, of what is sent up from
the underworld to the earth's surface, whether
plants or springing waters; and these find their
most characteristic representatives in Demeter
(literally Mother Earth), her daughter
Perse-
phone, and Dionysus, originally a god of all
subterranean springs, but tending to become
specialised as a wine-god.
25
From their great prominence in Greek classic
literature, the Olympian gods have come to figure
in our imagination as the proper objects of Greek
worship and the centres of Greek religious belief.
It seems likely that the religion of the higher
classes, whose thoughts and feelings classic litera-
ture above all expresses, was in fact Olympian,
turning itself by preference to the bright and
immortal aspects of nature. On the other hand
it was to be expected that the vast labouring
population, whose interests lay especially in
agriculture, should turn by preference to the
Chthonian gods, to the givers of corn, and wine,
and oil. These too were more human, more
sympathetic than the Olympians in that they
shared man*s mortality and grief. Every year
Demeter, the Earth goddess, mourns for her
daughter Persephone, the flower-crowned spring,
carried off by the King of Death to share his
subterranean throne. Every year Dionysus, the
vine-god, gives his body to be torn to pieces
and mangled by the vintage and the wine-press.
Nor did the process of assimilation end here.
From the idea of a dying god came forth the
idea of an undying life for man. Persephone
returns to her mother every spring in a resur-
rection of leaves and flowers. And by a still
26
more significant symbolism Dionysus, the twice-
born, first from the fruitful vine, then from the
wine vat, celebrates a joyful immortality in that
life-giving draught which gladdens the hearts of
gods and men. Thus for mortal men also the grave
came to be thought of as the gateway to another
existencethough not necessarily to an existence
of everlasting joy. For as it is the very law of
life that death should be dreaded, if we cease to
fear death as the end of all our happiness here
we must learn to fear it as opening the possibility
of endless unhappiness hereafter.
It is an economic law that morality should be
more prized and more practised among the lower
than among the higher classes of society. For
justice is the appeal of the poor against the
tyranny of the rich, and temperance is the
guardian of the poor against the vicious self-
indulgence and extravagance which are so much
more speedily fatal to them than to the rich.
Hence we find a distinctly more moral tone in
Hesiod, who addressed himself to the hard-
working rural population, than in Homer, who
addressed himself to the idle and warlike aris-
tocracy. Thus when a belief in human immor-
tality came to be developed out of the Chthonian
religion it was utilised by the superior moral
27
feeling of the industrial classes as an additional
sanction for the laws of right and wrong. A
state of future rewards and punishments is
unknown to the authors of the Iliad, but we find
a scheme of retributive justice after death set out
in what critics suppose to be a late addition to
the Odyssey.
It is a common experience to find the belief in
another world utilised by a particular class to
further their own interests by working on the
superstitious imagination of the vulgar ; and such
seems to have been also the case in Greece. An
elaborate system of ritualistic observances took
the place of righteous conduct as a passport to
the dwellings of the blest ; and bloody
sacrifices
came into high repute as a means for expiating
real or imaginary guilt. Such phenomena as
Revivalism and Salvationism were not without
their counterpart in old Hellas; only there the
first stimulus to these tumultuous manifestations
of religious feeling seems to have been imported
from among the barbarous Thracians or from
the rot-heaps of decaying Semitic civilisation.
Two general causes, subsequently reinforced by
a third, operated in the sixth century B.C. to set
on foot a great religious movement, beginning
with the lower strata of Greek society and spread-
28
ing upward till it absorbed the highest. A great
wave of Asiatic conquest, started long before,
but only becoming formidable to the West when
it came under the energetic direction of Persia,
brought with it a general sense of insecurity
and terror most favourable to religious excite-
ment. Simultaneously with this the growth of
democracy in the Greek city-states gave a new
prominence to the popular faiths whose nature
has just been analysed, imposing them even on
the higher classes and endangering the old aristo-
cratic ideal of Sophrosyne, that is, self-limitation
and self-control.
The lonians had always been a colonising race,
and under the stress of Persian conquest their
migratory tendency received an additional im-
pulse. New settlements were founded in
Southern Italy, and some of these became the
homes of philosophic schools marked by extra-
ordinary originality of thought, but somewhat
lacking in the sanity and balance so character-
istic of Ionian speculation in its first beginnings,
steadied as these were by the traditions of an
immemorial civilisation.
2. The Pythagorean School.
Considerable
uncertainty prevails with regard to the chrono-
29
logy of the Italian Schools, and our authorities
hold conflicting views about their origin and
mutual relations. Pythagoras, whom for con-
venience we may take first, is an especially
problematic figure. There is good contemporary
evidence for the fact of his existence; but in
what we are told about him the historical
element (if any) is not easily distinguishable from
the mythical. To be made the subject of marvel-
lous legendsor inventionsis usually the fate
of prophets or religious teachers rather than of
philosophers; and in fact there is good reason
to believe that Pythagoras belonged to both
orders, to the lovers of simple knowledgefor
whom, as will be remembered, he is said to have
invented that incomparable name philosopher
and to those others who also claim truth for their

heritage, but with a higher warrant than mere
reason can give, to the class whom we generally
call mystics.
According to the best of our information the
life of Pythagoras extended through the greater
part of the sixth century B.C., and ended with its
close. Thus he came under the double influence
of the scientific movement started by Thales,
and of the great religious movement known as
Orphicism. Orpheus was a mythical personage
30
who stood godfather to a vast, spurious literature,
the scriptures of a new Salvationist method, the
worship of a dying god, and the hope of a blessed
hereafter. Pythagoras associated this belief in
immortality with the old Oriental doctrine of
metempsychosis. He or his disciples taught that
the eternal soul passed through a series of
reincarnations, rising or falling in the scale of
existence according as each earthly life had or
had not been spent in accordance with the law
of purity. As a help towards leading the perfect
life Pythagoras founded a religious order to which
women were admitted equally with men. At
what period the sage began his social experiments
is not known. Perhaps an attempt to set up the
order in his native island of Samos may have
excited the wrath of Polycrates, its brilliant and
successful tyrant. At any rate, Pythagoras fled
from Samos and settled in Croton, an Achaean
colony on the Gulf of Tarentum. There, under
his direction, the order flourished for many years
until, like some more modern churches, it tried
to obtain political supremacy in alliance with the
aristocratic faction. A popular tumult, in which
according to some accounts Pythagoras himself
perished, put an end to the reforming
movement
as an organised community. But as a ferment of
31
thought the school lived on, exercising an un-
paralleled influence on the whole later course of
Greek philosophy, down to the final extinction
of paganism under the Roman Empire.
3. Pythagorean Science and Philosophy.
'
Much learning does not give intelligence, or
Pythagoras would have possessed it/ So, with
his usual scornfulness, wrote a somewhat later
sage, the celebrated Heracleitus. And as a
general principle the sarcasm is not without
truth, as many a modern instance teaches. But
it was not true of Pythagoras. If tradition may
be trusted he had not only mastered all the
knowledge of his age but had enriched it with
important discoveries. He is said to have
demonstrated the most fruitful proposition of
elementary geometry, the theorem that the
square on the base of a right-angled triangle
equals the sum of the squares on the two
containing sides. And he is also credited with
the discovery that the height of notes on the
musical scale is determined by the proportionate
lengths of the chords by whose vibration they
are produced, so that a vibrating string of half
the length produces a note an octave higher.
How much of the astronomy peculiar to his
32
school goes back to its first founder we cannot
tell. But he seems to have started that daring
course of speculation which resulted between
two and three centuries after his time in the
theory, revived by Copernicus from Greek science,
that the earth revolves on her own axis and is
carried with the planets round the sun as the
central orb of the system to which we belong.
No European teacher has ever been so com-
pletely identified with his school as Pythagoras;
and if this fact precludes any accurate distinction
between the original contributions of the master
to science and the subsequent additions made by
his disciples, it makes the task of determining
what was individual to him in philosophy almost
impossible. In after ages the central Pythagorean
doctrine undoubtedly was that all things are
made out of number. Not, be it observed, that
numbers or, more generally, mathematical rela-
tions constitute the very soul of nature, but that
number is, like the Water of Thales or the Air
of Anaximenes, the very stuff of which the world
is made. But this seems too abstract a theory,
not to say too subtle and elaborate, for so primitive
a philosopher as Pythagoras himself to have con-
structed, even in outline; nor do we find any
reference to it among his immediate successors.
C
33
What we do find them referring to as a current
notion is the system of opposites, the idea that
the universe is built up out of antithetical couples:
the Limit and the Unlimited ; the One and the
Many; Rest and Motion; Light and Darkness;
Good and Evil. To conceive things in general,
and more particularly human affairs, under the
form of balanced opposition was a fixed mental
habit with the Greeks : our very word antithesis,
taken straight from their language, still perpetuates
that form of thought among ourselves ; although
no modernnot even Macaulayhas pushed its
use to such excess. By its help Homer and
Herodotus arrange their materials; by its laws
the great sculptors disposed the reliefs on the
pediments of the temples they had to adorn with
groups of statuary ; as a rhetorical artifice it dis-
figures the noble eloquence of Thucydides. In
philosophy we find the employment of antitheti-
cal couples first exemplified by Anaximander,
who, as will be remembered, assumes an eternal
Infinite out of which the finite and perishable
things of experience are formed, developing such
contrasted qualities as heat and cold, dryness
and wetness, by a process of differentiation from
its homogeneous substance. We may suppose^
that the individual service of Pythagoras was to
v
34
'^^take up and generalise this fundamental idea,
jbringing the great social conflict of good and evil
into line with the universal processes by which
order is evolved out of chaos.
4. Heracleitus.So far the philosophers with
whom we have had to deal have been little more
than names, distinguished from one another by
purely intellectual attributes, not recognisable as
living personalities. But Greece was the very
land of strongly-marked, vivid, individual char-
acteristics, as the Homeric poems already show,
and the personal note, so conspicuous for two
centuries in her lyric poets, could not fail ulti-
mately to make itself felt in the creations of
abstract thought. It meets us for the first time
in Heracleitus of Ephesus, universally
acknow-
ledged as the greatest of the prse
-
Socratic
philosophers, and probably destined to rank for
original genius among the greatest that the world
has ever seen. We may add that with him the
separation of philosophy from science in the
strict sense begins. His interest lies solely
with
the one universal law of nature, possibly
general-
ised from particulars, but not dependent on them,
rather dictating to them what they shall
be.
Science and common sense have always
protested
35
against such an assumption: our own Francis
Bacon has given the weightiest and most splendid
expression to their protest; but others were
found to utter it long before him. We have to
ask, however, whether science itself could have
dispensed with those paradoxes of pure thought,
whether Bacon himself did not miss more truth
by a servile adhesion to supposed facts than the
Greeks missed by a sovereign disregard for them.
Our personal knowledge of Heracleitus comes
almost entirely from what fragments of his com-
position survive ; for no reliance can be placed on
the stories current about his life, beyond the bare
statement, confirmed by some references of his
own, that he flourished at the end of the sixth
century B.C. Thus, in the order of succession he
comes immediately after Anaximenes, the last
representative of the Milesian School ; and in fact
he seems to have followed the Milesian method
of seeking for a universal principle, a substance of
which all things are made. Two elements had
already figured in that capacity. Water and Air.
Heracleitus supersedes them by a third, which is
Fire. He appeals to its function as a universal
medium of exchange.
'
As goods are given for
gold and gold for goods, so everything is given
for fire and fire for everything.' Our philosopher
36
would have entered heartily into the modern
speculation that every form of energy is electric
and the whole material world merely so much
congealed electricity.
For Heracleitus fire is what we now call the
Absolute, the eternally self-existent reality under-
lying all appearance. 'This order of things
(Koo-fio^), the same for all, was not made by any
god or any man, but was and is and will be for
ever, a living fire, kindled by measure and
quenched by measure.' If any one likes to call
the eternal One by the consecrated name of Zeus
he may, only on the understanding, as seems to be
hinted, that it is not to be the Zeus of the poets,
'
a magnified non-natural man,' but an impersonal
power, and a relation rather than a substance.
There is an obvious contradiction in describing
fire as both ever-living and as alternately kindled
and quenched. And the Ephesian sage would
not have hesitated for a moment to acknowledge
that there was a contradiction. For, according to
him, contradiction is the central fact of existence,
the spring, as we should say now, that makes the
wheels of the universe go round. In human
affairs this is clear enough.
'
War is the father
and king of all things ' : it originates our social
distinctions,
'
jnaking some gods and others men,
37
some slaves and others free/
'
Homer was wrong
in wishing strife to perish; and he ought to be
flogged out of the competitive games/
It seems likely that the contempt of Heracleitus
for Pythagoras may be explained by the same
cause that accounts for his depreciatory estimate
of Homer. When the Samian philosopher
divided the great principles of nature into a series
of antithetical couples he was right; but his
whole system was vitiated by the failure to per-
ceive that these opposites are necessary to each
other's existence, that the whole frame of things
is determined by their conflict and interplay.
And that is just what makes fire so representative
an element, so fit a type of the world-pervading
law. Fire lives by struggling with and assimilat-
ing its own opposites, perishing at the moment
of its complete triumph. Speaking more accur-
ately, it only seems to perish, living again as air,
whose birth is the death of fire, as similarly water
lives by the death of air, earth by the death of
water, and fire once more by the death of earth.
5. The Flux.This endless process of trans-
formation was summed up by the Greeks in two
words, not known to have been used by Hera-
cleitus himself, but admirably expressing his
38
philosophy : iravra pelall things flow. In some
instances the universal flux is attested by the
evidence of our senses : no man bathes twice in
the same river; in others we know it by reason
:
*
a new sun rises every day
'
a conclusion de-
duced, we must suppose, from the fact that our
own fires need perpetual supplies of fresh fuel to
keep them burning. Solid earth must have
proved, in more senses than one, a hard nut for
the theory to crack ; for thousands of years had
still to pass before science could show that the
most quiescent bodies are composed of molecules
in a state of perpetual rotation and revolution.
Probably Heracleitus argued that as earth is
potentially fire, water, and air, it must partake in
some way not evident to our imperfect senses of
their mobility and evasiveness.
That which in material bodies presents the
appearance of a perpetual flowing from one form
to another, assumes in our sensations, appetites,
and ideas the still higher aspect of a universal
relativity. 'If all things were turned to smoke
the nostrils would distinguish them
'
; and in fact
'
souls do smell in the underworld
'
;
where, as
seems to be implied, everything is smoke. Fishes
find salt water life-sustaining which to men is
poisonous.
'
Asses prefer chopped straw to gold.'
39
'Swine bathe in mud, fowls in dust or ashes/
'
The most beautiful ape is ugly when compared
with a man ; the wisest or most beautiful man
would be an ape compared with the gods/
'
Good
and evil are one. Physicians expect to be paid
for inflicting all sorts of torments on their
patients/
'
We should not know there was such
a thing as justice did injustice not exist/ 'To
God
'
or, as we should say, from the absolute
point of view
'
all things are fair and good and
just. The distinction between just and unjust is
human.'
'
God is day and night, winter and
summer, war and peace, plenty and famine.'
Yet for us also the union of opposites holds good.
'
Health, goodness, satiety, and rest are made
pleasant by sickness, evil, hunger, and fatigue/
6. The Logos.Heracleitus might have pushed
his negation of all the usual distinctions em-
balmed in common sense to a system of dissolving
scepticism, in which every fixed principle, whether
of knowledge or of action, would have disappeared.
But he did not go to that extreme. After the
doctrine of fire as the world element, after the
dogma of an all-pervading relativity, comes the
third and greatest idea of his philosophy, the idea
of universal law and order. We have already
40
come across it in that great sentence describing
the Cosmos as an ever-living fire kindled and
quenched
'
according to measure/ The meaning
is that fire transforms itself into water, water into
earth, and so on on a basis of strict quantitative
equivalence, so much of the one being paid in and
so much of the other paid out. To the same
effect we are told elsewhere that ' the sun will not
transgress his measures, or the Erinyes who guard
Justice will find him out.' In Greek mythology
the Erinyes had for their original function to
avenge the violated sanctities of blood-relation-
ship, and more particularly to punish the crime
of matricide, a function subsequently extended to
the punishment of all crime. By a crowning
generalisation they are here thought of as the
guardians of natural law in the widest sense.
Our philosopher calls this world-wide law by a
name which had a great future before it. It is
no other than the Logos, so familiar to us as the
Word, proclaimed in the proem to St. John's
Gospel, which became incarnate in Jesus Christ.
St. John had derived it perhaps from Philo of
Alexandria, Philo from the Stoics, and the Stoics
from Heracleitus. To the Ephesian sage also, as
to the fourth Evangelist, the Logos is the light that
lighteth every man that cometh into the world
41
the reason within him by which the cosmic
Reason is revealed, his individual portion of the
universal fire. For just as Anaximenes had
assimilated the breath of life, the animating and
sustaining spirit of man, with the all-constituting
Air, Heracleitus assigns the same twofold
activity to his elemental Fire. It was a common
principle in Greek philosophy that like knows
like : and so the burning stream of consciousness
within us recognises the eternal flux without
recognises it also as reasonable, or rather as more

reasonable in proportion to its vastly greater
dominion and duration.
Agreement, community, identity are the essen-
tial notes of reality and reason. It will be
remembered that the eternal order was, in
modern phraseology, established as objectively true
by being the same for all men.
'
All human laws
draw their sustenance from the one divine law
'
;
and to judge things truly we should hold fast to
the common reason, even more forcibly than good
citizens cling to the law of the State, which they
defend like the city-wall, putting down the
insolent self-assertion and arrogance of indi-
viduals. Individual sovereignty and the right of
private judgment divorced from reason are
fantastic illusions. Such individuality is at its
42
height when we are asleep and dreaming, each of
us in a world of his own. When we are awake it
is the same world for all.
Not that Heracleitus believes in the wisdom of
the majority as an infallible guide.
'
Most people
are foolish and bad ; the good are few, and one
man is worth ten thousand if he be the best.'
Nevertheless personal authority should go for
nothing ; arguments not words are the thing.
Unfortunately argument is thrown away on the
generality
;
as we saw, asses prefer chopped straw
to gold. And the law of relativity itself explains
why the law is not understood. Fire is only
intelligible to the soul of fire, to the dry soul.
Degenerating minds in which the vital spark
turns to water are thrown out of touch with the
essence of things: theirs is a savour of death
unto death. More particularly our prophet's own
countrymen, the Ephesians, are a hopelessly
irreformable set with a vicious hatred for superior
persons as such. Better if the adult population
were all to hang themselves and leave the city to
their children.
Such utterances are marked with the essenti-
ally aristocratic stamp of early Greek thought.
It is probable that in the case of Heracleitus this
contemptuous estimate of the vulgar was accentu-
43
ated by a rationalistic disdain for the new popular
religion. When he observes that the ritual of
Dionysus would be shameless indecency were it
not an act of divine worship, his reference, stand-
ing alone, might be meant for no more than an
illustration of the universal relativity. But when
taken in company with his attack on the Bacchic
mysteries and the prevalent rage for secret cere-
monies of all kinds, the words can only be
interpreted as an unequivocal condemnation of
the Orphic revival. Plato spoke no otherwise of
the same manifestations a hundred and twenty
years later, and Huxley's comments on Salvation-
ism are less severe.
7. Xenophanes.Among those whom Hera-
cleitus mentions as examples of learning without
intelligence Xenophanes is one. In the order of
time this philosopher, an Ionian of Colophon,
precedes the great Ephesian ; but for our purposes
he may be most conveniently studied in connec-
tion with a school developed in express opposition
to the theory of a perpetual flux.
I have called Xenophanes a philosopher ; but
he was primarily rather a poet of alert and many-
sided interests who spent a long life wandering
about Hellas and making a profession of reciting
44
his own compositions at the banquets of the rich.
It would appear that the conversation at such
social gatherings largely consisted in repeating
fabulous stories about the quarrels of Titans and
Centaurs ; and we know from Homer that scandal-
ous ballads about the amours of gods and god-
desses were sometimes part of the entertainment.
Xenophanes wished to introduce a higher tone, and
as a preliminary he attacks the mythology of the
old poets with uncompromising vigour.
'
Homer
and Hesiod/ he exclaims,
'
have attributed to the
gods everything that is a shame and reproach
among mentheft, adultery, and mutual decep-
tion.' But not to think of the gods as like bad
men is merely the first step in true religion ; we
should not think of them as like men at all.
'
Mortals think that the gods are generated, that
they have senses, a voice, and a body like their
own. The Ethiopians fancy that their deities are
black-skinned and snub-nosed; the Thracians
give theirs fair hair and blue eyes. If oxen or
lions had hands and could paint they too would
make gods in their own image/
So much for the aristocratic, Olympian religion
of the poets. As to the popular Chthonian
religion of the mysteries, with its suffering and
dying gods, he is reported to have dismissed it
45
with even briefer and more cutting sarcasm.
Asked by the Eleates should they sacrifice to
Leucothea and mourn for her or not, he advised
them not to mourn if they believed her to be a
goddess, not to sacrifice if they believed her to be
a woman.
For himself Xenophanes, like Anaximander,
believed in an infinite source of existence; but,
unlike his Milesian predecessor, he identified
this one and eternal element with the visible
earth, which he supposed to stretch downward
beneath our feet without end. This infinite and
eternal reality is God and the only God, resem-
bling mortals neither in form nor thought, but
perceiving and thinking through its whole extent.
We are told that Xenophanes created palae-
ontology, pointing to the impressions of marine
animals and plants found embedded in the quarries
of Syracuse as evidence that what is now dry
land was once water, teaching also that it would
at some future period be covered with water once
morea theory probably suggested by Anaxi-
mander's idea that man was evolved from a fish-
like creature.
8. Parmenides.Interesting in himself, Xeno-
phanes interests us still more as the immediate
46
predecessor of Parmenides, the poet-thinker to
whom Elea, an otherwise obscure Ionian colony
in Southern Italy, owes its immortal renown.
Grown to manhood, as would seem, early in the
fifth century B.C., and therefore a contemporary
of the great Persian war, Parmenides comes a
little later than Heracleitus, as whose polar oppo-
site and complement he appears in the history of
Greek philosophy. In point of genius there can
be no comparison between them, Heracleitus was
so much the greater of the two ; indeed it is only
within the last century that we have been able to
appreciate his astonishing genius at something
like its true value. At the same time, Parmenides
had a more typically Greek mind, and therefore
he counts for more in the history of Greek
thought ; indeed from Plato on his ideas dominate
its evolution to the end.
It will be remembered that Pythagoras (or his
followers) conceived reality under the form of so
many antithetical couples, confronting each other
in unreconciled opposition; the Limit and the
Unlimited, the One and the Many, Rest and
Motion, Light and Darkness, being the most con-
spicuous among them. And it will also
be
remembered that Heracleitus, while fully admit-
ting the existence of such a pervading
antithesis,
47
refused to admit it as absolute. According to his
interpretation, the members of each couple are
necessary to each other's existence, are always
passing into one another, are in truth at bottom
the same thing. Now Parmenides, starting also
from the Pythagorean conception, utterly rejects
this theory, and even reacts so violently against
it as to deny reality to what may be called the
negative side of the antithesis. There are no
such things as infinity, plurality, change, or dark-
ness. The whole of being is one uniform, un-
changeable, limited, luminous sphere, without
parts, without a beginning, and without an end-
He describes it in verses of great power and
dignity, which may be translated as follows
:
*
The Whole extends continuously,
Being by Being set, immovable,
Subject to the restraint of mighty bonds,
Both increate and indestructible,
Since birth and death have wandered far away,
By true conviction into exile driven.
The same in self-same place and by itself
Abiding doth abide most firmly fixed,
And bounded round by strong Necessity.
Wherefore a holy law forbids that Being
Should be without a bound, else want were there,
And want of that would be a want of all.'
To US moderns, with our habitual prostration
before the idea of infinity, this dogmatic con-
48
elusion seems anything but self-evident ; and
'
to
be without a bound' strikes one as a proof of
affluence rather than of destitution ; but Par-
menides here shows himself a true Greek, for to
the Hellenic genius a boundary was associated
with finish rather than with finitude.
9. The Theory of Being.It has been sug-
gested that the Parmenidean conception of Being
as something without movement, variety, or
change is not meant to describe the world of
sense and experience, but rather the hidden
reality that underlies sensible appearances, the
world as revealed to pure intelligence, the
'
thing
in itself of modern metaphysics. This, however,
is an entire misconception. Early Greek thought
had not risen to the idea of a fundamental dis-
tinction between reality and appearance; the
delusions it recognised were occasional, acci-
dental, individual errors of perception, not in-
herent in human perception as such. What is
more, Parmenides leaves no sort of doubt as to
his meaning. He tells us that only what is can
be conceived or even spoken of; the non-existent
is also the unthinkable. Moreover, what is can
never not have been, can never cease to be. In
other words, what most philosophers still believe
D
49
of the world as a whole, what most men of science
till lately believed of material atoms or of the
smallest pulses of energythat they are
'
both
increate and indestructible
'
this Parmenides
believed so absolutely and universally that for
him the conviction excluded the possibility even
of movement and change. Suppose a body passes
from one place to another, or suppose its colour
to be altered, say, from green to redin either
case something that was has ceased to be, some-
thing is now that was not before. And so the
very first law of existence would be broken, being
would be identical with non-being, in fact just
what was taught by Heracleitus, whose very
words are quoted in this connection as a vain
thing.
There is another and even stronger reason for
interpreting the absolute reality of Eleatic philo-
sophy as no mysterious ideal existence, but a
direct object of sensuous perception. Parmenides
describes it as not only bounded, but as shaped
like a perfect sphere, extending equally in all
directions from a central point. And his words
so evidently apply to the visible world that all
subsequent thinkers who came under his influ-
ence continued for many centuries to regard the
material universe as a perfect sphere.
SO
This conception had its root in a great scientific
discoveryno less a discovery than that the
earth is a globe. Before Parmenides no Greek
was aware of the fact, nor perhaps was any
Oriental astronomer. Thales and his successors
were, in more senses than one, quite at sea on the
subject. Xenophanes, with every opportunity,
through a long life, of assimilating the most
advanced ideas of his age, thought that the earth
stretched-downwards to infinity. Now, whether
Parmenides himself actually discovered the
earth's sphericity is not quite certain. We can
only say that there is good authority for be-
lieving that he did. That he knew it to be a
fact is therefore highly probable. And this fact,
so astounding, so contrary to common opinion,
would influence his whole way of thinking. Its
suggestiveness would, so to speak, go to his head.
A sphere is the one absolutely perfect thing in
experience, excluding change, excluding
variety,
without beginning or end, the very type of what
is finished. And now it turns out that earth,
the
greatest thing we know, is a sphere. No more
remained than to represent all existence on the
same model and to invest it with every imagin-
able perfection.
Astronomy was not the only positive
science
51
that influenced the thought of Parmenides. As
a South Italian Greek he must have come into
touch with the Pythagoreans; indeed we have
seen reason to believe that his severe monism
was a protest against their dualistic view of
nature. And apart from such ultimate questions
he would have much to learn from them about
geometry, in which they were at that time the
world's acknowledged masters. Now geometry is
the science of space; and it will be found on
examination that Parmenides in enumerating the
properties of Being almost identifies them with
the properties of absolute space. It is extended,
continuous, homogeneous, unchanging, with parts
completely immovable among one another. He
did not indeed conceive it as infinite ; but for the
Greek philosophers, as for modern mathematicians,
the infinity of space remained an open question.
What really differentiated his view from ours
was the ascription of intelligence to that rigid
unalterable sphere. We habitually think of mind
as the inextended ; to Parmenides mind and
extension were one and the same. And we need
only place ourselves at his point of view to see
why this should be. From the beginning Greek
thought had retained much of that animism
which is the sole philosophy of primitive men.
5^
Not to repeat what has already been pointed out
in the case of the Milesian School, Xenophanes in
identifying the world with God had described
it as perceiving and thinking through its whole
infinite extent. And Heracleitus had represented
the reasonable principle within ourselves as a
fiery particle, able by virtue of its common
nature to recognise and act in harmony with the
cosmic fire by which the universe is shaped and
directed. Parmenides moves on the same lines
with his predecessors, but goes a step beyond
them. According to him mind and its object
are not merely akin; they are the same. Nor
indeed was any other conclusion compatible with
the first principle of his system, that difference
neither does nor can exist. Or again, we may say
that the world without has been simplified down
to pure extension; the world within has been
simplified down to pure reason, which, as it
merely repeats and reflects that external uni-
formity, is logically indistinguishable from it.
After his uncompromising enunciation of
absolute truth, Parmenides made the concession
to common opinion of writing a sequel to his First
Philosophy on the lines of old Ionian speculation,
in which a place is given to those negative elements
of darkness, cold, and opacity which he had begun
53
by dismissing as unthinkable. A theory of
evolution found its place here, leading up to what
would now be called a materialistic view of mind,
as determined by the excess of some one element
in the composition of man's bodily organisation.
But these were accommodations to the world's
opinions that the world has willingly let die. It
was by his relentless paradoxes, not by his con-
temptuous concessions, that Parmenides exercised
a decisive influence on the subsequent courses of
thought. And it was through their combination
with the almost equally daring paradoxes of
Heracleitus that the element of truth contained
in the respective systems of these two great men
told for all that it was worth.
54
THE ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHERS
CHAPTER III
1. Zeno of Elea.Parmenides seems never to
have made more than one disciple. This was a
young Eleate named Zeno, to whom he was
united not only by common opinions but by the
bonds of devoted private affection. Yet closely
as they agree in principle, the two thinkers belong
to distinct ages with widely contrasted tendencies
and methods : the one dogmatic, the other argu-
mentative
;
the one more comprehensive, the
other more analytic
;
the one potent to unite and
simplify ; the other excelling in subtlety and
minuteness.
What struck people most about the philosophy
of Parmenides was that it denied motion ; and to
such a laughter-loving race as the Greeks this
paradox gave much occasion for ridicule. Zeno
came to his master's assistance by showing, or
attempting to show, that the idea of motion in-
volves greater difficulties than its denial; and
55
this he did by a series of examples whose interest
is not exhausted even for the speculation of our
own times. His most celebrated puzzle is that
known as Achilles and the tortoise. Let us sup-
pose that there is a race between the two, and
that the tortoise is allowed a start, say, of ten
feet ; then Achilles will never overtake his slow-
footed competitor, for while he is getting over
the first ten feet the tortoise will have accom-
plished, say, one foot, or as much less than that
as you please. Anyhow it will be some measurable
distance, however small. Then while Achilles is
traversing that space the tortoise will have ad-
vanced through the same fraction of it as before,
and so on ad infinitum.
It is no answer to say
that as a matter of fact the swifter does always
overtake the slower runner ; the question is how
space can be conceived except as infinitely divis-
ible, and how, granting that, an infinite number
of divisions can be run through in a finite time.
It has been suggested as a solution that the in-
finite divisibility of time makes this possible.
But, in fact, it only doubles the difficulty, for
then we have two infinite series to be run out
instead of one.
Sceptical arguments are dangerous allies to
dogmatic theories; and Zeno's method might
56
have been turned with destructive effect against
his master. For it goes to disprove the possi-
bility of continuously extended space as a thing
in itself; and this Parmenides had assumed with-
out question ; nor indeed was it questioned until
thousands of years after his time.
2. Empedocles.

Change and motion held
their own notwithstanding all that the Eleatics
could say to prove their impossibility. But
Parmenides by his daring paradoxes had brought
into full view an aspect of the truth that Hera-
cleitus, going to the opposite extreme, had tended
to obscure, and that common sense had yet to
learn as something self-evident when it was once
stated. This was the perpetuity through all
change of a reality underlying appearance, a
substance that is neither created nor destroyed.
We may say that the lonians had practically
assumed the existence of such a substance,
variously identifying it with one of the so-called
elements,water, air, earth, or fire. But their
analysis had been what chemists call qualitative
rather than quantitative. They did not sharply
formulate the generalisation that matter persists
through all metamorphoses without loss or gain.
Heracleitus alone, with his wonderful sagacity,
57
grazed but did not grasp this law. Fully to
realise it was reserved for the inferior genius of
Empedocles.
Empedocles stands as an isolated, somewhat
problematic, figure among the early Greek philo-
sophers. By exception he was not an Ionian
but a Dorian; by exception not an aristocrat
but a democrat. His restless and insatiable
vanity also makes an unpleasant contrast with
the singular personal majesty of the rest. For
the first though not for the last time in history,
he makes us feel that to be a charlatan and a
great thinker are not incompatible predicates.
His birthplace may have had something to do
with his ambiguous character and attitude. This
was Acragas, the modern Girgenti, a Sicilian city,
renowned for the luxury of its inhabitants and
the splendour of its public edifices, still as ruins
pre-eminent among the glories of Doric archi-
tecture. It was a chief seat of the Chthonian
religion, whose two great goddesses, Demeter and
Persephone, were especial objects of popular wor-
ship. Standing, moreover, almost on the frontier
between Hellenic and Phoenician civilisation,
Acragas was exposed in a peculiar way to the
evil influences of Semitic example with the
least restraint from the old Greek traditions of
58
Sophrosyne, of self-knowledge and self-control.
Empedocles tells his countrymen that he walked
through the Sicilian cities crowned with garlands,
honoured as an immortal god, followed by crowds
of men and women entreating him to heal their
diseases, to give them oracles, to show them the
way to gain.
What the multitude asked from Empedocles
was no more than his philosophy undertook to
give. His disciples were to learn the arts by
which old age is warded off, the winds controlled,
and the dead restored to life.
Our prophet claimed, in fact, to be nothing less
than a fallen divinity, who in some far distant
pre-natal stage of existence had stained himself
with bloodshed, and was condemned as an expia-
tion of his guilt to pass through a long cycle of
existences, vegetable, animal, and human, as a
dweller in the water, in the air, or on the earth.
Apparently the period of purification was now
nearly complete, and his restoration to the abodes
of the blessed in sight. Like the sages of the
Far East he preaches the kinship of all living
things, the sacredness of animal life, and the
pollution incurred by eating meat. A deep vein
of Oriental pessimism also enters into his theory
of existence.
59
Standing alone such utterances might be inter-
preted as no more than an enthusiastic expression
of the new Orphic religion, derived proximately
from the Pythagorean schools of South Italy.
The puzzling thing is that they have come down
to us in close association with a thoroughly
materialistic philosophy, where no place seems to
be left for an immortal human soul, and hardly
even for gods, except as poetic names for the
elements and forces of nature. Empedocles lived
towards the middle of the fifth century B.C. One
is tempted to think of him as a 'modernist' in
reference to the religion of his age, giving a
mythological colouring to speculations really
destructive of all mythology.
3. The Four Elements.
'No wise man,' the

Sicilian philosopher tells us,
'
would imagine that
[mortals] had no existence before their birth, and
will have none after their dissolution.' These
words might be taken to imply the soul's eternity.
But probably they mean no more than that the
body is composed of imperishable parts. Empedo-
cles is credibly reported to have been a pupil of
Parmenides; and he repeats the master's assertion
that what is can neither begin nor cease to be,
but without pushing it to the extent of denying
60
all reality to change and motion. What men call
birth and death are simply a mixture and separa-
tion of pre-existing substances. Fire, air, earth,
and water are the ultimate elements whence all
things arise and into which they return. Each of
these had been erected by one or other of the
Ionian thinkers into the sole principle of nature
:
Empedocles follows the facile method of eclectics
in every age by granting equal rights to all.
And his philosophy has left a permanent stamp
on language which the discoveries of modern
chemistry have not been able to efface.
4. Love and Strife.The tendency to harmon-
ise and combine carries him on to a further and
more daring speculative effort. Parmenides has
to be reconciled not only with common sense but
also with Heracleitus. Experience tells us that
the world is not now constituted as a perfect
homogeneous sphere in the way dreamed of at
Elea; but that happy consummation has been
reached already in the eternal revolutions of
existence, and will be reached again. Two
powers control the universal process, Love and
Strife; Love drawing the elements into one.
Strife tearing them apart ; and the whole world-
cycle passes through four phases distinguished
by
6i
their alternating predominance and decline. As
Love gains ground things draw together; when
it triumphs they are united in the perfect sphere,
but only to fly asunder on their way to complete
separation when Strife becomes lord of the
ascendant. We are now on the down-grade
;
that is to say, we are living in a period of
increasing differentiation and ever greater sub-
jection of nature to the law of Strife. Empedocles
may have been led to this gloomy diagnosis by
the sentence in which Heracleitus speaks of war
as the father of all things.
Love and Strife answer in some ways to the
attractive and repulsive forces of modern science.
But they are conceived as material or at least as
extended objects, with just as much, or as little,
self- consciousness as the four elements. We
ourselves are composed of all six ; and as like is
only known by like, we recognise the presence of
each in the external world through that portion
of it which helps to make up our separate indi-
viduality.
5. Theory of Sensation.
A current phrase
speaks of the external world as known to us
through the channels of sense. The phrase is
now merely metaphorical, but it contains a
62
reminiscence of what Empedocles thought literal
truth. He imagined that streams of material
particles emanated from the bodies about us, and
that these made their way through certain minute
passages or pores with which the organs of sense
are supplied, thus producing the characteristic
sensation by which the element within is enabled
to recognise the element from without as akin to
itself There is an exact adaptation between the
particles and the pores of the same element, so
that fire, for example, is only penetrable by fire,
and water by water. By this theory, much more
than by his ambitious cosmology, Empedocles
showed himself an original and progressive
thinker, in harmony, like Zeno, with the minutely
analytical tendencies of his age, and contributing
far more than Zeno to the subsequent develop-
ment of speculation.
6. Glimpses of Modern Science.
Like his
Ionian predecessors the wonder-working
Acra-
gantine poet has a place in the history of science
no Jess than in the history of philosophy.
He
divined the truth that light travels with an
appreciable velocity
; he knew that the
revolution
of one body round another can only be maintained
by the composition of two forces, a centrifugal
63
and a centripetal ; and he recognised the sexual
reproduction of plants. He even suggested the
famous doctrine of the non-survival of the unfit,
afterwards borrowed from him by Lucretius. And
if we could take the account already referred to
of his triumphal progress through Sicily as less
an expression of intoxicated personal vanity than
a dream of the victories in store for human
knowledge, no Greek would be so justly entitled
to the name of a prophet.
7. Melissus.Empedocles founded no school.
After him the scene changes once more to East
Hellas, and the language of philosophy relapses
from poetry to sober prose. But through all
external vicissitudes the new method of infini-
tesimal analysis is maintained, leading to fresh
conquests in the invisible world. Change of
scene was indeed the best possible security for
continued progress. It saved speculation from
sinking into a routine. Unlike Moab, the Greek
genius did not
*
settle on its lees,' but was
'
emptied from vessel to vessel,' escaping the
reproach of a taste that remains and a scent that
is not changed.
In East Hellas, as in Sicily, the problem was to
reconcile
Heracleitus with Parmenides, the theory
64
of an unceasing flux with the theory of an un-
changing reality. We may assume that the
Ephesian philosophy was well known and widely
canvassed in those parts ever since its first
introduction, seeing that its fame had spread
within a few years to Italy. And we have proof
positive that the Eleatic philosophy was studied
in Ionia by a contemporary of Empedocles, the
Samian admiral Melissus, who defeated an
Athenian fleet in the year 440 B.C. This remark-
able man, the only speculative sailor mentioned
in all history, wrote a prose treatise, of which
considerable fragments survive, reproducing the
main ideas of Parmenides with some important
variations. Unlike the master, he declared that
the eternal reality was without a boundidentify-
ing it, as would seem, with infinite space; and
while denying movement or multiplicity to
absolute Being, he allows them at least a place
in thought as illusions of sense. Such an
enlargement of view meant much, how much will
be apparent when we come to study the grandest
result of early Greek thought, the Atomic Theory.
8. Atomism.

Before explaining how the
theory of atoms arose, let me explain what it
means. Atomism implies first of all that matter,
E
65
or the substance of which bodies are composed,
while it occupies space and is therefore extended,
is not, hke pure space, continuous, but discrete.
That is, it consists of perfectly distinct and separ-
ate parts, moving about in void space, solid,
indivisible, impenetrable, differing from one an-
other only in size and shape, capable of being
united together in mechanical groups, but only
communicating with one another by external
contact and collision. In the next place, the
atoms are so small as to lie beyond the reach of
our senses ; but, assuming space to be infinitely
extended,
they are infinite in number, for other-
wise the
universe would in the course of infinite
ages
have
disappeared by dissipation into the
surrounding
void. They are also eternal; for
the
least tendency to decay acting through end-
less time
would equally have involved their total
annihilation
before the present date. And, being
indestructible,
there is no reason to suppose that
they
ever
began to exist, not to mention the
general
inconceivability that out of nothing
something
could arise.
Evidently the atom of Greek philosophy is an
incomparably more meagre idea than the atom of
modern science with its formidable outfit of
energies,
conceived as endowed with gravitation,
66
cohesion, elasticity, radio-activity, electro-mag-
netic properties, and chemical affinities. At the
same time we must remember that all this elabor-
ate mechanism has been built up stone by stone
on the simple foundation supplied by the con-
structive genius of two Ionian Greeks, Leucippus,
whose birth-place is unknown, and Democritus, a
native of Abdera on the barbarous Thracian
coast, enjoying little popularity in their lifetime
and unhonoured after death even by the in-
heritors who traded most successfully on their
discoveries.
9. Leucippus.From the scanty information
supplied to us on the subject it appears that
Leucippus, the real founder of atomism, lived a
little after Empedocles and Melissus. Generalis-
ing from the doctrine of subtle material emana-
tions as the cause of external perception, put
forward by the one, he would form the conception
of multitudinous invisible particles as the basis of
all real existence. And the infinite space of the
other, dissociated from its material contents,
would supply him with the equallj^ essential con-
ception of a void giving full scope for their move-
ment and interplay. By a remarkable anticipation
of what is now called atomicity he supposed that
67
these particles or at least some of them were
supplied with little hooks by which they became
woven into chains and membranes, ultimately
forming, so to speak, the cell-wall of a closed
universe, within which the cosmic evolution of
order out of chaos was conducted.
'
Nothing,' he
said,
'
happens by chance, everything by law and
necessity'or, as we should say, by purely
mechanical causation.
For the original cause of motion Greek atom-
ism refers us to weight, which at that time
seemed to be an inseparable quality of matter.
It had not yet been discovered that the fall of
heavy bodies was connected with a tendency to
move towards the centre of the earth ; nor was it
known that bodies falling in a vacuum move
with equal velocities, so that collisions between
them cannot occur. Accordingly Leucippus
credited all his atoms alike with a downward
motion through infinite space ; and he supposed
that the larger atoms, having a greater velocity
than the smaller, would overtake, collide, and
become entangled with them. As the knowledge
of astronomy and physics spread, the inconsistency
of this primitive atomism with natural law came
to be understood, and therefore no man of science
after Democritus ever adopted it in antiquity,
68
although the contrary has been stated by ill-
informed literary critics in our own day.
10. Democritus.Democritus seems to have
adopted the atomic theory of Leucippus without
any essential modification. What distinguishes
him as a philosopher is the enormous range of
his interests. We have seen that the love of
knowledge for its own sake was recognised at a
very early time as the characteristic feature
in philosophy. Democritus expressed this
passion vividly by saying,
'
I had rather discover
a single new explanation than be King of Persia.'
But his ambition went beyond a knowledge of
things, which, taken alone, is merely science. He
asked what was the nature of knowledge itself,
thus giving a still wider extension to philosophy,
of which that question has ever since formed an
integral part. And he seems to have been the
first to point out the distinction, since grown so
familiar,
between the two great sources of know-
ledge
;
sense which gives us the appearances, and
understanding which gives us the reality, of things.
He owed it to the atomic theory. Atomism is a
reasonable inference from our sensations, but, at
the same time, in a way, it denies them. As he
puts it,
^
sweet and bitter, hot and cold, exist by
69
convention'or, as we now say, subjectively
'
colour exists by convention ; in reality, atoms and
the void/ So little truth is there in the reproach
commonly brought against the materialists, of
whom Democritus was a precursor, that they
believe nothing but the evidence of their senses.
11. Moral Philosophy.Philosophy, however,
is not complete even when we have added a
theory of knowing to our theory of being. Man
is by nature not only contemplative but active,
and even more active than contemplative.
Accordingly if we would attain true universality,
to those other theories a theory of practice
must be added. And just as he who takes all
knowledge for his province must needs simplify
the task by an effort of extreme generalisation, by
going back to first principles, by singling out the
fundamental element, or the original cause, or
the widest law of things, or again by fixing on the
true criterion of knowledge, so also the supreme
master of practice will make it his object to pick
out from the infinite details of social intercourse,
politics, industry, and fine art, the absolute end
to which everything else is a means, which alone
gives a real value to all those multifarious activi-
ties. In a word, as the later Greeks put it, after
70
physics and logic comes ethics or the philosophy
of conduct.
It proves the wonderful genius of Democritus
as a systematising thinker that he took not only
the second step but the third. Here also, as in
the case of the Milesian school, with their general
theories of the world as a natural growth, the
absence of an organised priesthood teaching a
fixed theology was essential to speculative free-
dom. After the first outburst of scientific
speculation there had indeed been a danger that
the great religious revival we call Orphicism
might intervene to check its further progress, at
least in the direction of bringing conduct also
under natural law; and not to speak of the
Pythagoreans, there are very marked symptoms
in Empedocles of a desire to keep well with the
mystical movement, a nervous anxiety to disclaim
too great freedom of thought. Now, for the
atomists at least there could be no such obscur-
antist leanings. While formally acknowledging
the possible existence of superhuman beings,
their theory left no place for gods in any true
sense of the word : in a world where the atoms
alone were eternal, where necessity and mechani-
cal law alone ruled, there could be neither
creation, nor providence, nor immortality.
71
Democritus in fact boldly explained theology as a
primitive personification of natural objects.
At the time when Democritus taught, which
seems to have been in the last third of the fifth
century b.c, ethics was, as it still continues to
be, much less advanced than physical science.
But the facts of moral experience being better
known left less room for error. Thus what he had
to say on the subject took the form of proverbial
philosophy, of short sentences, true so far as they
go, but not worked up into systematic form. They
are not inspired by the great social enthusiasm of
Plato and the Stoics ; but neither is there the
low standard vulgarly supposed to go with
philosophical materialism. The highest end is
declared to be a contented mind, which is won by
avoiding excess and by fixing the desires not on
sensual indulgences but on imperishable things.
Sins are to be avoided not from fear but from a
sense of duty. Goodness is not abstinence from
doing wrong, but from the wish to do wrong.
Encouragement and persuasion are a better train-
ing to virtue than law and compulsion. The
whole world is the fatherland of a good soul. Yet
our aphorist is too genuine a Greek to merge
political duty in a vague cosmopolitanism. He
tells us to put the interests of the state above all
72
others, not grasping at more power for ourselves
than is good for the community. For a well-
administered city best secures the safety of all.
Democritus has been called
'
the laughing
philosopher ' because a late legend describes him
as always making merry over the follies and vices
of mankind. As it happens this silly story is
sufficiently answered by one of his own maxims.
*Men should not laugh but mourn over each
other's misfortunes.' And to those who know
Heracleitus at first hand the parallel designation
of him as
'
the weeping philosopher
'
must seem
an equally infelicitous description of his lofty
contempt for the common herd.
12. Anaxagoras.Anaxagoras of Clazomenae,
who has been reserved for the last place in this
chapter, was older than any of the thinkers who
have so far been dealt with in it ; but as a link
with the schools of Athens it will be found more
convenient to discuss his teaching after that of
the atomists, with the earliest form of which he
may have had some acquaintance.
Our informants tell us that Anaxagoras was
born about 500 B.C., that he settled in Athens
when entering on middle age, and remained there
for thirty years. His was the true philosophic
73
temperament. Asked what made life worth
living, he replied, ' contemplating the heavens and
the universal order.' The great statesman
Pericles was his pupil and friend. Euripides is
mentioned among his admirers, and is believed to
have had the Ionian sage in mind when he wrote
these noble lines
:
*
Happy is he who has learned
To search out the secret of things,
Not for the citizens' bane,
Neither for aucrht that brin^rs
An unrighteous gain.
Bat the ageless order he sees
Of Nature that cannot die,
And the causes whence it springs,
And the how and the why.
Never have thoughts like these
To a deed of dishonour been turned.'
^
In their religious beliefs, however, neither
Pericles nor Euripides represented average public
opinion at Athens. There may have been as
superstitious communities in Hellas: none were
so suspicious of new views or so intolerant.
Possibly the wonderful cleverness of the Athenians
made them more keenly alive than other Greeks
to the dissolving effect of the new speculations on
the old beliefs. We have seen that, in fact, from
^
Translated by Madame Duclaux.
74
Thales on, the radical incompatibility between the
two was becoming more and more obvious. A
crisis was bound to come at last, and it came at a
spot where political animosities and democratic
jealousies helped to organise the forces of re-
actionary prejudice.
13. A Martyr of Science.
In the year 432 an
attempt was made to dislodge Pericles from the
position he had long occupied as the trusted
leader of the Athenian people. For tactical
reasons his assailants began by bringing charges
of impiety against Aspasia, his wife in all but the
name, the great sculptor Pheidias, whom he had
employed for the embellishment of the Acropolis,
and Anaxagoras. The charges against Aspasia
and Pheidias were of a frivolous character and do
not concern us here. Against the Clazomenian
philosopher there was, unhappily, a very strong
case. He taught that the sun was a red-hot mass
of stone, larger than the Peloponnesus, that the
stars were not fire, that the moon was an earthy
body, shining by reflected light, with an irregular
surface, and partially built over. Now at Athens
the sun and moon passed for being blessed gods,
and a pious belief prevailed that they were wor-
shipped as such by the whole human race. To
75
treat them as lumps of inanimate matter seemed
therefore not only irreligious but absurd.
According to some of our authorities Anaxa-
goras was tried for blasphemy and condemned.
According to others he escaped condemnation by
a timely flight from Athens. It seems certain
that he ended his days at Lampsacus in an
honoured old age among a people who contrived
to reconcile their reverence for the sun and moon
with their reverence for intellectual and moral
grandeur. At his own desire the philosopher's
death was annually commemorated by giving a
holiday to the children of the town. His image
may still be seen on the coins of his native place,
Clazomenae, probably copied from a statue
erected there in his honour.
14. Qualitative Atomism.
Democritus ob-
served with truth that the astronomical heresies
which brought Anaxagoras into such trouble
were not new. Nor was it new to sayalthough
a fragment of his states it as something para-
doxical and unfamiliar
that what people

commonly call becoming and perishing is really
the combination and separation of pre-existent
parts. For Empedocles had preceded him in start-
ing with this assumption. The originality of An-
76
axagoras lay in giving this great principle an exten-
sion undreamed of by any of his predecessors or
contemporaries. According to him, not only does
the mass of matter remain a fixed quantity, but
its qualities also are permanent, that is such
properties as temperature, colour, smell, and the
like. There is always the same amount of these
in the world, more or less latent, more or less
apparent, as they are more or less confused or
distinct. In the beginning the confusion was
infinite; analysis might have gone on for ever
without arriving at an ultimate element that did
not combine all shapes, temperatures, colours,
smells, and tastes. What the atomists declared
to exist only
'
by convention,' or in modern par-
lance 'subjectively,' is 'objective,' real, eternal.
And even now the separation of qualities is not
perfect. Everything contains a trace of every-
thing else. What we say of human nature, that
no man is quite without good or without evil,
without wisdom or without folly, Anaxagoras
said of all nature.
15. Nous.How then from the primal con-
fusion did the present world of order, of at least
relative distinction arise ? The answer is strong
and simple. 'All things were together: then
77
Nous (Reason) came and disposed them in
order/ Such words suggest the idea of an intelli-
gent First Cause; and in fact that was what
Greek readers at first took them to mean. But it
has always remained doubtful what Anaxagoras
himself understood by Nous. In some respects
he clearly conceived it as like human reason, but
with far greater powers. It 'knows everything
about everything and controls everything.' On
the other hand, if not exactly a material, it is an
extended substance,
'
the thinnest and purest of
all things,'unmixed with the elements, and
enabled by this absolute separateness, of which it
is a unique example, to act on them. Its action,
however, is of a merely mechanical kind, and has
no other effect than to set up a vortical move-
ment by which the component elements of the
original mixture are segregated, what is unlike
being parted and what is like being thrown
together.
If, as seems the only possible interpretation of
his words, Parmenides identified pure reason with
pure space or extension, we may presume that
Anaxagoras adopted this view from the Eleatic
philosophy. Some modern thinkers have called
space
'
the possibility of movement
'
; and para-
doxical as the idea may seem to us, an ancient
78
thinker may well have expressed the connection
between the two by saying that space was the
cause of motion. Such a confusion had, indeed,
already become quite incredible to Plato and
Aristotle. They supposed that when Anaxagoras
talked about Reason as an ordering power he
meant something like the reason of an architect
or a legislator; and so when in the sequel they
found him treating the evolution of the universe
as a process of mechanical causation they could
not reconcile such materialism in the details of
the system with the spiritualism of its first prin-
ciple. On the other hand, the modern interest in
evolution as at first an unconscious process and
only becoming self-reflective in its last stages,
gives us perhaps a clearer insight into the true
significance of Nous than was possible to the
great founders of idealism. To describe it as an
anticipation of Herbert Spencer would of course
be an anachronism. Yet there is at least a germ
of the 'differentiation and integration' that
Spencer made so much of in the activity ascribed
to the cosmic Nous by Anaxagoras. And perhaps
it was the consciousness of their own reason as a
discriminating and identifying faculty that led
both philosophers to look on all nature as exempli-
fying the same process on a far vaster scale.
79
16. Diogenes of ApoUonia.As it happens, the
Greek word of which differentiation is the exact
equivalent was first brought into use by Diogenes
of ApoUonia, a second-rate Dorian eclectic who
popularised the study of natural philosophy at
Athens by combining the doctrine of Anaxagoras
with that of Anaximenes. Anaximenes had
taught that Air was the fundamental principle
of existence, the substance out of which all things
are made, the animating soul of man and the
great conservative force of nature. Diogenes
took the further step of identifying this elemental
Air with the Nous, thus, as might seem, giving
more prominence to the material and mechanical
side of the latter. In point of fact, however, he
laid more stress than Anaxagoras on the evidences
of design in nature, the beautiful harmonies of
which, according to him, could only be explained
as the work of an intelligent cause.
During the fifth century great progress was
made by the Greeks in the study of physiology
;
and this science came to exercise an even more
decisive influence on speculation than mathe-
matics and astronomy. We see this in Diogenes,
who was indeed a doctor by profession ; and the
idea of diflferentiation, to which, as has been said,
he first gave a name, would be especially brought
8q
home to him by his knowledge of the human
organism, affording as this does a most complete
example of the division of labour. Of course the
uses of its various parts were then very imperfectly
understood ; but Diogenes was sagacious enough
to conjecture that the vascular system, of which
he wrote a careful account, had something to do
with the distribution of airor, as we should say,
oxygenover the whole body; and he acutely
explained the absence of intelligence in plants to
their want of such a system.
17. Aristophanes.

Aristophanes, the great
comic dramatist of the age, wrote a play called
The Clouds, satirising the philosophers, in the
year 423 B.C., and from this we can gather that
the system of Diogenes was then the fashionable
philosophy at Athens. The poet had no eye for
the religious value of the new theories, regarding
them solely as an impious attempt to substitute
material agencies for the time-honoured Olympian
divinities, with the belief in whom he conceived
the interests of private morality to be inseparably
bound up. In this respect he thoroughly repre-
sented the public opinion of Athens, already
exhibited in the persecution of Anaxagoras, and
destined under the guidance of the greatest
F 8i
Athenian thinkers to lead Greek philosophy away
from the physical studies it had pursued with
such success into other directions more in harmony
with the religious genius of the city where it was
henceforth to find a home.
82
i
THE SOPHISTS
CHAPTER IV
I^HE SOPHISTS
1. Education at Athens.Speculative freedom,
complete everywhere else in the Hellenic world,
was, as we have seen, not complete at Athens.
But in that city which called herself the school
of Greece, education always remained free, to this
extent at least, that it was a matter of individual
enterprise. Although in other ways sufficiently
absorbing and despotic, the State neither provided
the means of instruction nor did it attempt to
prescribe what the course of instruction should
be. Apparently any one that liked could open a
school, and fathers could send their sons to any
school they liked. The system seems to have
worked well. Every Athenian citizen could read
to some extent, and it was considered rather
disreputable not to read well. Boys of the higher
classes were also taught to write, to play on the
lyre, and to repeat a good deal of poetry by heart.
In the best times of the republic they were also
83
trained to be hardy, obedient, and pure In later
life some people continued to read literature
besides hearing some of the greatest things that
were ever written, in the theatre, and some of the
greatest things that were ever spoken, in the public
assemblies. Booksellers' shops existed, and there
is reason to believe that even so abstruse a work
as that of Anaxagoras could be bought for a
drachmaa little under tenpence in our money.
Educated women are mentioned as a class by
Plato in the fourth century B.C., and we are told
that tragedies were their favourite reading, as
indeed of most persons, which, considering the
austerity of the Greek tragic drama, shows a
considerable refinement of taste.
What we call the higher or University educa-
tion was a creation of philosophy, and had only
just begun to dawn in the age of Pericles. At
first young men entering on public life learned
what it was essential for them to know about the
world and about great affairs from some older
friend to whom they were attached by ties of
affectionate intimacy. Sometimes they profited
also by conversing with women of genius.
Under a free government the power of speech
is the surest road to success. Hence in modern
democracies lawyers command a disproportionate
84
THE SOPHISTS
share of political influence. In old Athens there
was no such profession: as prosecutor or as
defendant every one had to plead his own cause
before a large popular jury./ Thus, even apart
from any ambition to lead the State, every citizen
was interested in mastering the arts both of
cross-examination and of continuous delivery;
while to men of high birth and wealth, being
marked out as special objects of attack for
political opponents and blackmailers, address in
using the weapons of tongue-fence became even
a matter of life and death. In course of time
litigants made up to some extent for the want
of counsel by employing a professional hand to
write a speech for them which they then learned
by heart and delivered in court as if it had been
their own composition. This practice, however,
although it might relieve the mass of Athenian
citizens from the necessity of studying rhetoric
as an art, left the demand for a professional train-
ing in rhetoric unaffected, as the speech-writers
themselves required to be educated for their work.
2. Philosophy and Rhetoric.Philosophy as
the study of things in themselves does not seem
at first sight in any way related to rhetoricat
least not to the rhetoric of law-courts and de-
85
liberative assemblies where human interests are
the subject of discussion, and appeals to human
passion the means adopted by a skilful speaker
for making his opinions prevail. It must, how-
ever, be borne in mind that Greek philosophy
owed its origin to the schools of science, a circum-
stance which from the beginning brought it into
connection with the practice of teaching ; that it
systematised the habit of taking wide views, so
characteristic, even in Homer, of Greek eloquence
;
that the earliest sages had something to say
about man as well as about nature, while their
successors gave an ever greater place to the laws
of life and conduct as the evolution of thought
went on; and finally that a knowledge of the
world's secrets, by raising its possessor above all
petty cares, interests, and prejudices, surrounded
him with a certain halo of intellectual and moral
superiority well calculated to impose on a Greek
audience. For these reasons the two seemingly
independent spheres of rhetoric and philosophy
the study of words and the study of things
expanded until they met and overlapped, a wide

range of subjects being either treated as common
ground or hotly disputed between the rival
teachers who regarded education from opposite
points of view.
86
THE SOPHISTS
It was agreed that the youth of good family,
after he had left school, needed some further
training as a preparation for taking part in public
or private business with credit to himself and his
ancestry. In other words, there was a demand
for the higher education. And just as now, it was
a moot-point what
,
that education should consist
of, above all what place, if any, should be held in
it by religion and morality ; morality more parti-
cularly occupying the very centre of the ground
shared or disputed between rhetoric and philo-
sophy. Not that a contemporary of Aristophanes
used such abstract terms as religion and morality
to express his meaning ; but he had consecrated
traditions of belief and conduct which may con-
veniently be summed up under those two names,
and which meant for him all that religion and
morality mean for us.
3. The Sophists.The demand for higher
education called into existence a class of teachers
known as Sophists. In modern language a
ôphist .iL. .ana. whaîises fallacious arguments,
knowing them to be such. When Aristotle
wrote, the name bore a still more opprobrious
significance, for he
defineg
it as one who reasons
.
falsely for the sake of gain. In earlier time&,
87
however, this was not so, for Pindar and Hero-
dotus use sophist in an altogether creditable
sense, as meaning a man of superior skill or
wisdom, whether he happened to be a great philo-
sopher or an ordinary intellectual craftsman.
What seems to have first raised a prejudice
against this originally honourable appellation was
the_êmrgenceof certain persons
who professed
^0
teach wisdom and_yirtue in
Return for a sub
-
stantial payment. Money-making as such was
not thought disreputaWe_in good_G^^^^
for even so
haughtily aristocratic a poet as
Pindar wrote odes to order. But then it must be
remembered that a poem, like a picture or a statue,
seems to possess a certain tangible reality making
it a more appropriate equivalent for so much hard
cash than such purely ideal values as wisdom and
virtue, which also are universally associated
with a considerable indifference to this world's
goods.
^Jlnd
this feeling would_be still further
strengthened by the fact
Jthat
no philosopher
had ever exacted a fee from his pupils.
Again, for reasons already stated, that higher
education which the sophists sold to rich young
men always included a training in rhetoric. Now
an Athenian who was used to hear rival states-
men supporting opposite policies in the Assembly
88
THE SOPHISTS
and rival pleaders presenting mutually contra-
dictory views of law and fact to the popular
tribunals, must have had it strongly borne in on
him that while one speaker was certainly wrong
each in turn managed to make it seem that he
was right
a clear proof that one of them at

least knew the art of making the worse appear
the better reason. From whom could they have
learned this nefarious art but from their sophist
teachers ; and was it not scandalous that a class
of persons should exist who made it their pro-
fession, and a very lucrative profession also, to
êrjrort the^mâ^^ of the community ?
Again, as all philosophers were popularly called
sophists, and as all attempted to explain meteoro-
logical phenomena by other than divine agencies,
besides expressing more or less paradoxical
opinions about the nature of things in general,
the paid teachers of wisdom got the credit of
what the vulgar considered the impieties and
absurdities of philosophy. And so much being
certain, it was easy to believe, with or without
evidence, thatJ/hey^
J
-^
aught thoir pupils-^-dis-
regard every duty but the pursuit of their_own
private advantage.
4. Protagoras.The first and most famous of
89
the Sophists was Protagoras of Abdera. Born in
the year 480 B.C., he became a paid teacher at
thirty, and pursued that calling for a period of
forty years with brilliant success, traversing the
whole breadth of the Hellenic world, and, if we
may judge from what seems to be the typical
instance of Athens, exciting immense enthusiasm
among the more enlightened classes of Greek
society. Pericles debated moral problems with
him, and he was employed to make laws for the
Athenian colony of Thurii. On the occasion of
a later visit to the imperial city public attention
was drawn to the fact that Protagoras was
a declared agnostic. A book of his began with
the words: 'As to the gods, I do not know
whether they exist or not. Life is too short for
such difficult enquiries.' The author was expelled
from Athens : a herald was sent round demand-
ing the surrender of the book from all private
individuals who possessed it; and the copies
collected were burnt in the market-place. Prota-
goras himself was lost at sea on his way to Sicily.
He was then nearly seventy. It may be that the
treatise which gave occasion to such an outbreak
of inquisitorial fanaticism had only just been
written, and that the words about the shortness
of life refer to the very limited time during which
90
THE SOPHISTS
the author might expect his own intellectual
activity to continue.
5. Humanism.

Judging from the scanty
materials at our disposal Protagoras was not only
a great educator but also a great and original
thinker. His profession of agnosticism must be
read in company with another celebrated sentence
quoted from the beginning of his work on Truth
;
'
Man is the measure of all things, determining
what does, and what does not, exist/ Plato in
his old age opposed to this the principle that (jro.d
and not man is the true measure. That is to say,
the standard of truth and good must be some-
thing ideal and beyond experience. And else-
where he has tried to reduce the human test of
reality to an absurdity by identifying it with the
doctrine that when two people disagree they must
both be right. It seems likely enough that
Protagoras attached great importance to indi-
vidual experience and conviction, to what we now
call
'
the point of view.' But, as Plato himself
suggests, this was not inconsistent with dis-
criminating between one person's opinion and
another's with due regard to their respective
authorities. And the Sophist's object would be
to make his pupils better judges than they were
91
before, the ultimate test of Tightness being refer-
ence to human interests rather than to the oracles
of problematic gods.
While the standard varies from man to man,
but with an appeal from the stupid and ignorant
to the educated and intelligent, it also varies
between ages and nations, involving a similar
appeal from barbarism to civilisation, from a less
to a more advanced stage of social progress.
Protagoras seems to have first discovered the
doctrine of human development, viewing it as
above all a moral growth. Perhaps the evolu-
tionism of early Greek science suggested this
view. According to a speech put into his mouth
by Plato morality is the very foundation of
human life, the condition of every other art, the
essential distinction between brutes and men,
between savages and civilised communities.
Some are born with more, and some with less
capacity for acquiring virtue ; but that it is an
acquisition is proved, among other ways, by the
existence of penal law. For punishment can only
be justified as a deterrent from wrong-doingin
other words as a moralising agency.
It would appear that the method followed by
Protagoras as a teacher was quite in harmony
with his Humanist philosophy. While the other
92
THE SOPHISTS
Sophists gave young men the sort of scientific
education that age afforded, i.e., a course of arith-
metic, geometry, and astronomy, he took them
straight to ethics and politics, interspersing his
lectures with literary illustrations from the poets.
According to him, the absolutely straight lines
and perfect circles of geometry are fictions to
which nothing in reality corresponds ; nor do
the celestial movements exhibit that exact uni-
formity assumed by the astronomers.
6. Hippias the Naturalist.That system of
scientific education from which Protagoras so
markedly separated himself found its most
typical representative in Hippias of Elis. This
very remarkable man seems to have originated
the idea of natural law as the foundation of
morality, distinguishing nature from the arbi-
trary conventions or fashions, differing according
to the different times or regions in which they
arise, imposed by arbitrary human enactment,
and often unwillingly obeyed. He held that there
is an element of right common to the laws of all
countries and constituting their essential basis.
He held also that the good and wise of all coun-
tries are naturally akin and should regard one
another as citizens of a single state. This idea
93
was subsequently developed by the Cynic and
still more by the Stoic schools, passing from the
latter to the jurists, in whose hands it became
the great instrument for converting Roman law
into a legislation for all mankind.
Hippias set a high value on truth as a virtue,
preferring Achilles to Ulysses on account of his
superior veracity. Perhaps it was as an exercise in
pure truth that he inculcated the study of mathe-
matics. And seeing how large a part equality
plays in that study also, some Greeks cherished it
as a lesson in justice. Euripides may have had
the method of Hippias in view when he wrote the
noble lines
:
'
Honour Equality who binds together
Both friends and cities and confederates
;
For equity is law, law equity,
The lesser is the greater's enemy,
And disadvantaged aye begins the strife.
From her our measures, \yeights, and numbers come,
Defined and ordered by Equality.
So do the night's blind eye and sun's bright orb
Walk equal courses in their yearly round,
And neither is embittered by defeat.'
7. Prodicus.We sometimes find the name of
Prodicus associated with that of Hippias, as like
him a somewhat younger contemporary of Prota-
goras. Both taught at Athens, and both seem to
94
THE SOPHISTS
have represented the same naturalistic tendency
of thought. Plato, it is true, satirises Prodicus
as a rather pedantic lecturer on the niceties of
language ; but in this instance we probably get a
juster idea of his importance from Aristophanes,
who describes him as the most remarkable of the
natural philosophers for wisdom and character,
and who elsewhere playfully broaches a new-
theory of evolution which is to send Prodicus
away howling. We also hear of this Sophist as
having explained the origin of religion by the
personification of natural objects; and Xenophon
quotes a famous apologue of his, called 'The
Choice of Heracles,' breathing the very spirit of
naturalistic ethics. In particular it harmonises
admirably with the lines quoted above from
Euripides, by showing that pleasure must either
be purchased by toil or paid for by premature
exhaustion.
8. Natural Law as the right of the Stronger.
It will be remembered that Heracleitus brought
the laws of the State into connection with the
great cosmic law as the source whence their
energy is derived. This idea was afterwards
taken up and developed by the Stoics, who also
adopted the physical philosophy of
Heracleitus
95
as the foundation of their system. Now, as the
central precept of Stoicism is
'
follow Nature
'
an obvious summary of what Hippias and Pro-

dicus taughtwe may legitimately regard these
two Sophists as worthy successors in the ethical
field to the great Ephesian master.
Their appeal to nature was not, however, to
pass unchallenged. If, as seems more than pos-
sible, Protagoras first turned author in his later
years, his proscription of physical studies and his
theory of inorality as a_purely human product
may well be interpreted as a criticism of the
attempt made by his younger rivals to found
morality on natural law, more especially as their
ethical method was soon twisted, in a way that
must have revolted them, into a justification of
the claim put forward on behalf of the stronger,
whether as states or as individuals, to plunder
and destroy the weaker. Thucydides represents
the Athenians as openly basing their foreign
policy on the law of brute force ; and it has been
supposed that their cynical declarations in this
respect, as well as the private demoralisation
described in their own literature, was the result
of Sophistic teaching. Only since the last hundred
years has it been made clear, chiefly by the labours
of English scholars, that nîJbherâ^JhLi^^
'96
THE SOPHISTS
as naturalists can the Sophists be justly charged
3TlTrfln3rsuch coryiipl^^g
inflnp.np.ft
Their prin-
ciples were liable to be misrepresented or mis
-
apjtliedâs are the principles of any philosophy,
and, we may add, of any religion; but to no
greater extent than has happened, for instance,
with the lessons of their great opponent, Plato.
On the whole, the new ideas they put in cur-
rency were distinctly a gain to Greece and to the
'world.
9. Gorgias the Anti-Naturalist.Gorgias of
Leontini, a Sicilian teacher of rhetoric, counts
among the great Sophists, while occupying a place
somewhat apart from the three above considered.
His principal contribution to philosophy, how-
ever, seems to associate him more nearly with
Protagoras than with the naturalist couple. It
is, in fact, a bold attempt to get rid of the idea
of nature altogether by showing that there is no
such thing. Gorgias conducts his campaign
against objective reality in the paradoxical Greek
style by establishing three propositions :
(1)
no-
thing is
;
(2)
if anything existed it could not be
known
;
(3)
if it could be known the knowledge
could not be communicated. For what contra-
dicts itself cannot exist; and the philosophers
G
97
have proved with equal cogency that nature is
one and many, finite and infinite, with and with-
out change. To be known, reality should be
identified with thought, whereas some thoughts
evidently represent nothing real. Nor can know-
ledge be communicated unless words are identi-
fied with the sensations they signify, which is not
the fact.
As regards virtue, Gorgias taught that it is
relative to the age and social position of the
person concerned, a principle that reminds us
of the short modern formula for conduct
'My
station and its duties/
10. Abolitionism.It was quite in consonance
with the humanist spirit that Agathon, a disciple
of Gorgias, should make justice a result of mutual
agreement among men rather than an image of
mathematical equality; and that another of his
disciples, Alcidamas, should call the laws 'the
bulwark of the city,' and philosophy
'
the bulwark
of the laws.' Yet this reverence for human law,
which all over the ancient world upheld slavery
as a permanent social institution, did not prevent
the same Alcidamas from declaring slavery ille-
gitimate.
*
God,' according to him, ' sent all men
to be free; Nature made none a slave.' That is
98
THE SOPHISTS
the greatest, most pregnant word of Greek practi-
cal philosophy. Plato and Aristotle never got so
far ; Aristotle even explicitly denied that for one
man to treat another as an animated tool was
wrong. To accomplish so great an effort of
thought it seems to have been necessary that
the two principles which the two rival schools of
Sophisticism had opposed to one another should
be combinedthat the ideal of nature should be
recognised in the completed humanity of man.
99
CHAPTER V
SOCRATES
1. Personality.Socrates is the greatest name
in the history of philosophy and at the same
time its most popular, most familiar figure. J. A.
Symonds tells us how the sight of a hemlock
plant recalled the manner of his death to a Vene-
tian gondolier. The charm of his personality is
unique. We think of the Greek philosophers
before and after him as of so many marble
statues, but of him as a living, speaking human
figure. Yet this figure is surrounded by a sort of
mystery. It is still a question for what did he
live and die. An enigma to his own age, he re-
mains an enigma to us. If Plato may be trusted,
he was even an enigma to himself. From that
fame and that obscurity one fact at least emerges
to begin with : the immense importance of the
personal factor in his work, whatever the value of
that
work may turn out to be.
100
SOCRATES
2. Sources of Information.Socrates himself
never wrote a line about philosophy; and
although numerous reports of his conversation
have been preserved, it is doubtful whether any
two consecutive sentences have been put down
exactly as they were uttered. Nor can the
numerous busts bearing his name be relied on as
faithful copies of an original portrait. It is sus-
pected that they merely reproduce the conven-
tional mask of a Silenus mentioned by those who
remembered him, as giving a good idea of the
sage's unprepossessing features. We know that
he was born about 469 B.C., and that by family
and fortune he belonged to the poorer class of
Athenian citizens, his father being a working
sculptor and his mother a midwife. But the
incidents of his early life are buried in deep
obscurity. It would seem that he practised his
father's trade for a time and then abandoned it in
order to devote himself exclusively to the cultiva-
tion of his own and of other people's intelligence.
Before the age of forty Socrates must have already
gained a high reputation for wisdom, for we find
the beautiful, gifted, and aristocratic Alcibiades
frequenting his society as a fitting preparation
for filling the highest political offices. Some
ten years later Aristophanes, in his comedy The
lOT
Clouds, already mentioned as a brilliant satire
on the new culture, takes Socrates as a type of
the whole Sophistic movement, an eager student
of physical science, a dishonest atheist, and a
corrupter of the youths who come to him for
instruction.
Plato, writing long afterwards, puts into the
mouth of Socrates an explicit repudiation of ever
having been engaged in physical speculations,
and in this respect he is fully borne out by the
evidence of Xenophon, a fellow-disciple. We
may take their word for it, without excluding the
possibility that their master had gone into such
studies enough to convince himself that for him
at any rate they would be a waste of time. He
was no less a genuine Athenian than Aristophanes
;
and except as a fashionable craze for a short
period, physics never appealed to the Attic taste,
nor did it owe at any time a single discovery
to Attic genius. Like Protagoras, Socrates
devoted himself to human interests, but unlike
the great agnostic he shared the strq^^^
faith which nowhere had struck such deep
roots as in Attic soil; and this faith stood
high among the causes alienating him and his
countrymen from the method of Hippias and
Prodicus.
1 02
SOCRATES
3. Not a Sophist.On the strength of his re-
putation as a teacher, Socrates was popularly
classed among the Sophists. His intimate friends,
however, justly insisted on the fundamental
difference separating him from them. It con-
sisted, to begin with, in the circumstance that
the Sophists took pay and that he did not.
Quite apart from the direct evidence of Plato and
Xenophon, who only knew him late in life, we
may gather as much from the satire of Aristo-
phanes on his poverty-stricken appearance
a
fact absolutely inconsistent with his making a
trade of tuition.
The profession of Sophist was indeed con-
^deredmore lucrative than honourable; and an
Athenian citizen may well have considered it
beneath his dignity to barter wisdom for gold,
especially in the case of one's own countrymen,
whom it seemed a sort of natural duty to help
with advice. Protagoras and the others were
strangers,
with
something of the discredit
attaching to foreign adventurers about them.
Socrates never left his native city except on
military duty, which he performed as a
heavy-armed foot -soldier in three arduous
campaigns, on one occasion saving the life of
Alcibiades.
103
4. Irony.Supposing, however, that the posi-
tion of the paid teacher at Athens had been not less
dignified than that of a salaried professor among
ourselves, still it was one that Socrates would have
scrupled to assume. It would have been dis-
honest on his part to take money for teaching,
because by his account he had nothing to teach.
Our authorities are not agreed as to what was
meant by this profession of universal ignorance
the Socratic irony, as it is called. Plato gives it

a strong religious colouring. According to his
story, an ardent admirer of Socrates, one
Chaerephon, asked the oracle at Delphi was
there any man wiser than he. The Pythian
prophetess answered that there was no man wiser.
Much surprised at being singled out for such a dis-
tinction, and conscious of not in the least deserving
it, Socrates went about seeking for some one wiser
than himself, but found none even among those
whose reputation stood highest. For their pre-
tended wisdom invariably broke down under his
cross-examination; while at the same time he could
not convince them that they knew no more than
he did. Then at last the meaning of the oracle
became plain. Wisdom belongs to the gods alone;
no man knows anything, and he is wisest who has
come to the consciousness of his own ignorance.
104
SOCRATES
One is sorry to question such a beautiful story
;
but, like the Athenian celebrities, it breaks down
under cross-examination. Socrates could not
have got so great a reputation as is here pre-
supposed without some more positive achievement
than a general confession of ignorance; and as
depicted by Xenophon, in this respect a much
more trustworthy informant than Plato, it is only
about natural philosophy that he professes to
know nothing or to hold that nothing can be
known, the causes of physical phenomena being,
in his opinion, a secret that the gods have kept
to themselves. On the other hand, the whole
range of human interests lies open to man, and
among the rest to himself.
5. The Dialectic Method.In limiting philo-
sophy to the study of man, Socrates agrees with
Protagoras, except that he approaches the subject
from a religious rather than from an agnostic point
of view. The distinctive originality of the Athenian
thinker lies in his creation of a new method.
Socrates figures in the history of philosophy before
all things as the founder of logic, the first to attempt
an organisation of reason as such. Reasoning of
course is as old as language, in a way it is as old
as conscious life ; the behaviour of the most rudi-
105
mentary animals is guided by their experience of
the past. And long before Socrates the Greeks
had learned to distinguish this power from all the
lower manifestations of consciousness, to look on
it as constituting their own superiority to the
barbariansthe secret also of one man's superi-
ority to another in the State. Then came philo-
sophy, and raised reason to a higher pinnacle
still as the cause alike of physical order and of
civil law, the ruling power of the world. As such,
Anaxagoras had introduced it to Athens under the
name of Nousthe one Greek word still known to
the most ignorant sporting man among ourselves.
Another Greek word for reason, the one used
by Heracleitus, is logos, whence comes our word
logic, which means the science of reasoning, the
analysis of its operations, the systematic exposi-
tion of the process by which conception, judg-
ment, and inference, are successfully carried on.
Socrates did not create the science of logicthat
was an achievement reserved for his successor,
Aristotlebut without his pioneer work it could
not have been created. How much he actually
did we cannot tell with certainty, for Xenophon,
to whom our most trustworthy information is
due, had but a feeble hold on pure theory, and
Plato's dramatic presentation of the old master
1 06
SOCRATES
gives such an immense extension to his method
that the original nucleus cannot be isolated from
subsequent accretions.
6. Definition.We know on the authority of
Aristotle, confirmed by the detailed statements
of Xenophon, that Socrates first introduced the
methods of definition and induction. That is, he
took some abstract term, by preference the name
of a virtue or vice, such as Courage or Justice,
Cowardice or Injustice, and by comparing together
a number of concrete instances where those
qualities were exhibited, sought to arrive at a
general notion of what the word meant, of what
we now call its connotation. According to him,
such a procedure was necessary in order that
discussions on subjects of general interest might
be carried on in a friendly and profitable manner.
And not only were definitions necessary in order
that people might know what they were talking
about, but the definitions themselves were to be
arrived at as the result of a search jointly under-
taken by the whole company, everybody present
helping to the best of his ability in the hunt
after truth. Socrates in fact applied the demo-
cratic tradition of Athens to scientific inquiry,
not speaking with authority as the Sophists, but
107
as professing to know no more than any one else
;
more concerned to ask questions than to answer
them ; always on the look-out for new facts and
new ideas. His method reflected both the de-
liberations of the sovereign Assembly and the
cross-examination to which defendants could
subject their prosecutors in the popular law-
courts.
Of course Athens, even more than other Greek
cities, abounded in persons having a good conceit
of themselves ; and pretenders to universal know-
ledge found a merciless critic in the poorly-dressed
old man with the thick lips and flat, turned-up
nose who, under the appearance of reverence for
their superior wisdom and an insatiable thirst
for information, by a series of searching questions
speedily involved the pontifical charlatan in a
mesh of hopeless self-contradiction. Such scenes
no doubt suggested to Plato his imposing picture
of Socrates as a divinely-commissioned prophet
going about to convince the world of universal
and hopeless ignorance, as prophets of another
school go about to convince it of universal
depravity. But the picture as it stands is not
historical; and the real prophet had a message
of reasoned truth rather than of reasoned nescience
to deliver.
1 08
SOCRATES
7. Division.

More important even than
Definition to clear thinking is the logical process
of Divisionthe distribution of every subject
discussed under a number of distinct headings.
Descartes, the founder of modern French philo-
sophy, mentions the plan of breaking up difficulties
into the greatest possible number of parts as a
first step to discovering their solution; and the
same method was practised by Socrates two
thousand years before him. If, for instance, he
were discussing the comparative claims of two
rival statesmen to the name of a good citizen he
would bring down the question to a specific
estimate of their respective services in the various
departments of political activity. A good citizen
increases the resources of the State, defeats the
enemy in war, wins allies by diplomacy, appeases
intestine discords by his eloquence.
8.
Reasoning.

Definition and division are
spoken of in logic as processes subsidiary to
Inferencethat is the discovery of new truths as
necessary consequences of the truths we already
know. Socrates was fully alive to this character-
istic property of reasoning, and illustrated it in
his conversations by starting from principles
about which he and his interlocutor were agreed.
109
Unfortunately Xenophon, on account of his very
narrow range of interests, does not quote examples
enough to show how Socrates habitually worked
out his conclusions. But he gives us the valuable
information that no man whom he ever knew
was so successful in gaining the assent of his
hearersa fact quite inconsistent with Plato's
account of his hero as an exasperating personage,
reducing every one to shame if not to confession
by his dialectical skill.
9. Final Causes.
As it happens, the most

celebrated instance of Socratic reasoning is one
that modern science has shown to be much less
convincing than used to be imagined. This is the
well-known Theistic argument from design. As
the structure of the human body exhibits an
adaptation of means to ends such as we find in
the works of skilful artificers, the existence of a
powerful, intelligent, and benevolent Being is
assumed as necessary to explain its origin.
Whatever the argument may be worth, the credit
of having discovered it clearly belongs to Socrates,
for Anaxagoras, who comes nearest to him as a
Theistic philosopher, conceived his Nous as work-
ing by mechanical impulse, not by design. And
if there is any truth in the story of the oracle
no
SOCRATES
declaring him to be the wisest of men, we may
suppose that it was due to the impression made
on the Delphic authorities by his fame as the
contributor of a new reason for believing in the
gods at a time when philosophers in general passed
for being atheists. As to the Socratic profession
of ignorance, we are now in a better position to
appreciate its value. It is a paradoxical way of
saying that the logician as such need know
nothing that commonly passes for knowledge.
By exposing the flaws in other people's theories
he may prove that they are as ignorant as he is
himself. Or again, by unfolding the implications
of the facts supplied to him by other people,
while securing their assent to every step in the
chain of inference, he may make it seem as if the
result obtained did as much credit to their wisdom
as to his own. This is the method constantly
followed by the Platonic Socrate^, who in this
respect may reproduce the spirit of the master
more faithfully than Xenophon's photographic
illustrations.
10. Socrates as a Moral Reformer.
While
Socrates interests us chiefly as the creator of
logical method, the philosopher himself only
valued that method as an instrument of moral
III
reformation. As an Athenian citizen he took a
profound personal interest in the good govern-
ment of his country; and this patriotic motive
was alone suflficient to distinguish him from the
Sophiîs, who.jaa..îd^Jeachers^^^^^
_could...nat.ha^ actuated by-
passion for the public good. At the same time
Jit
is clear that their comparative detachment
and wide range of culture gave their ethical
ideas a reach, an originality, and an emancipating
power that his did not possess. The Humanism
of Protagoras was pregnant with hopes of
a higher civilisation
than. Greece had reached.
The Naturalism of Hippias _ and_ Prodicus em-
bodied a reaction against perverted appetites
from which Greece in less civilised ages had been
free.
11. Utilitarianism.In accordance with the
systematising bent of his genius, Socrates seems
to have sought for a single principle in ethics,
and to have found it provisionally in the idea of
utility ; that is to say he introduced the method
of estimating the morality of actions neither by
public opinion nor by individual taste, but by
their calculable consequences. We must not
suppose, however, that his attempts in this direc-
112
SOCRATES
tion amounted to an anticipation of utilitarianism
in the modern sense.
As reported by Xenophon, he never commits
himself to the assertion that pleasure and the
absence of pain are the only desirable things.
Nor, assuming that we have discovered in what
utility consistswhether pleasurableness or any-
thing else
does Socrates ever make it clear

whether the conduct of the individual is to be
determined by regard for his own advantage, or
for the advantage of the community to which he
belongs, or for that of the whole human race.
That these respective claims might, apparently at
least, collide was a difficulty first seriously
discussed in all its bearings by Plato, who only
hoped to solve it by revolutionising public opinion,
society, and religion. Socrates habitually appeals
to self-interest, as if it were the only available
motive; but he seems at the same time to be
persuaded that the happiness of the citizen is in
the long run identified with the happiness of
the State. That, in fact, was not his question,
but rather the question how an art of social life
could be constructed comparable for systematic
completeness to the industrial arts of which
a city like Athens offered such multifarious
examples.
H 113
12. The Lessons of Town Life.Aristophanes
could not see the soul of Socrates, but he has
taken a snapshot of the philosopher as he appeared
to the man in the street, the accuracy of which is
vouched for by Plato, ' stalking about like a peli-
can and rolling his eyes.' Nothing escaped those
curious eyes, as nothing escaped Mr. Gladstone's,
and their inquisitiveness found a rich harvest in a
city where every calling was taught and practised
with complete publicity. Now what struck
Socrates chiefly was the high value set on expert
attainments, and the ready obedience given to
professional trainers wherever a special technique
had come to be recognised, as in the army and
navy, the theatre, the artist's studio, or the
gymnasium, compared with the haphazard
methods of politics, of the higher education,
of social intimacies, of pleasure-seeking among the
leisured classes. That any one should follow for
his personal satisfaction a line of conduct which
would not be tolerated for a day in the hired
occupants of a responsible office, seemed to the
philosopher a revolting paradox. Some may call
this a bourgeois or Philistine morality. But what
makes those names terms of reproach is their
association with a slavish deference to custom
and
tradition. Socratic morality, by reducing
114
SOCRATES
life to a fine art, discards convention and opens
possibilities of endless improvement.
13. Virtue as Knowledge.Greek philosophy
delighted in paradoxes, and Socrates was credited
with two such : first, the paradox of ignorance,
which as we saw expressed in a picturesque way
the discovery of fact by talking things over
methodically,the evolution by logical processes
of the unknown into the known ; and secondly, the
paradox, that virtue is identical with knowledge,
so that he who has the right theory of conduct
necessarily does what is right. Every one, said
SocrateS; does what he thinks is for his good ; if
he does wrong that only proves that he is mis-
taken in his belief and ought to be taught better.
Such an idea is closely connected with the inter-
pretation of morality as an art : the artist has in
fact been defined as one who does his best. And
it might be said that the man who scamps his
work has mistaken beliefs about the good of
making money or the good of saving time. The
question ends by becoming a verbal one. If my
friend tells me that he does what he knows is
bad for him, and I observe that, if he really knew
that, he would not do it, we are evidently not
using the word
'
know ' in the same sense. Or to
lis
put it somewhat differently, the Socratic philo-
sophy which began as ultra-intellectualism ends in
what would now be called ultra-pragmatism.
Belief does not lead to practice ; it is practice and
nothing else,
14. The Divine Voice.Socrates did not suc-
ceed in reducing his own life to a work of art
capable of being explained and justified as the
expression of right theory in right practice. A
place had to be left for the free play of unaccount-
able instincts or intuitions warning him without
a reason that certain actions would have bad
results. He interpreted these inward monitions
as a divine voice accompanying him through life.
By a misinterpretation which goes back to his
own time this voice has often been described as a
daemon or personal spirit. More recently it has
been identified with conscience. But this view
is inconsistent with the circumstance, mentioned
by Plato, that the monitor always intervened to
forbid, never to give a positive command. Con-
science both forbids and commands; while in
each instance its promptings can be referred to
the known laws of moral obligation.
15. The Hero as a Philosopher.With Socrates
ii6
SOCRATES
himself to know the right and to do it were the
same thing, and no doubt it was from a conviction
that what was possible to him was equally possible
to all men that he identified virtue with knowledge.
For the unflinching performance of duty at all
costs he is, so far as our information goes, with-
out an equal in the ancient world. His services
as a soldier in the field have been already men-
tioned. His conduct as a citizen at home is
marked by still greater fortitude. It was his
customat the bidding as he declared of the
divine monitorto abstain from all political
activity. But there came a moment when a
civic duty, accidentally imposed on the philo-
sopher, showed of what mettle he was made.
Athens had won her last great victory over a
Peloponnesian fleet at Arginusse. But to her
people the victory became an occasion for mourn-
ing and indignation, because through the neglect,
as was alleged, of the admirals a number of
sailors had been left to perish in the waves, and
what seemed still worse, the bodies of the dead
were' not picked up and brought home for burial.
It was, therefore, resolved that the admirals who
returned home, six in number, should be tried on
this charge. So far no objection could be taken
to the proceedings. The case was altered when
117
the Senate accepted a resolution decreeing that
the guilt or innocence of the accused parties
should be submitted to a direct vote of the whole
people instead of to a regular sworn jury, that
they should not be heard in their own defence,
and that their cases should be decided in a batch
instead of being submitted one by one to the
popular judgment, as was prescribed by law.
At first the Prytanes, a sort of municipal Board
whose business it was to preside over the delibera-
tions of the Sovereign Assembly, refused to
commit the illegality of putting the question to
the vote, but eventually all, with a single excep-
tion, yielded to the clamour of the multitude.
That solitary representative of law and justice
was Socrates, whom the chances of the lot had
enrolled among the Prytanes of that day. His
protest could not be overcome by threats of im-
prisonment and death, but being eventually
passed over, it was powerless to save the unfortun-
ate victors of Arginusse from condemnation and
execution.
Two years after these events the democracy
that had so abused its power was abolished by a
foreign conqueror, and an oligarchy of thirty
members imposed on Athens. These men soon
inaugurated a reign of terror, killing and plunder-
ii8
SOCRATES
ing to their heart's content. Within the city one
voice alone was raised in fearless criticism of their
insane violence, this time also the voice of Socrates.
Critias, the leader of the terrorists, had been his
pupil and was content to let the old philosopher
off with a private warning to hold his tongue.
Socrates also braved an insidious attempt
of the thirty to make him an accomplice
in their crimes. A certain Leon of Salamis,
whose only offence was his wealth, had been
marked out by them for proscription. Five
citizens, of whom Socrates was one, received
orders to arrest this man and bring him over to
be executed. The other four went on the dis-
graceful errand ; he remained at home.
16. Trial and Death of Socrates.It was re-
served for the restored democracy to commit a
crime from which even the cruel and unscrupu-
lous oligarchs had recoiled. In the year 399 B.C.
Socrates was prosecuted on a capital charge
before the popular tribunal by Anytus, a demo-
cratic politician, Lycon, a public speaker, and
Meletus, a poet. They accused him of denying
the gods whom the State acknowledged, of intro-
ducing new gods whom the State did not acknow-
ledge, and of being a corrupter of youth. In
119
short, they represented the greatest and purest
reUgious teacher Greece had ever seen of being an
immoral and superstitious atheist.
Athens, as has already been mentioned, was dis-
tinguished above all other Greek cities for
intolerant bigotry. So far the victims of perse-
cution had been philosophers whose ideas were
irreconcilable with the current mythology, such
as Anaxagoras and Protagoras, or who openly
criticised it, such as Diagoras of Melos. But what
makes the habit of punishing people for their
opinions so peculiarly poisonous is that sooner or
later it victimises originality of every kind, even
the originality that finds new arguments for old
beliefs. Socrates incurred the suspicion of athe-
ism simply because he met the atheists on their
own ground, encountering reason with reason,
and because he betrayed a thorough acquaintance
with the theories he set himself to refute. To
describe his divinely sent warnings as a new-
fangled religion was of course a misconception
that a few words of explanation would dispel.
A pamphleteer who renewed the attack on
Socrates some years after his death supported the
charge of corrupting youth by the examples of
Alcibiades and Critias. Both had been his pupils,
and both had turned out badly ; but as Xenophon
120
SOCRATES
truly observes, whatever influence Socrates exer-
cised over them was used to keep them straight,
not to lead them astray.
Plato's account of his master's trial and death
is a historical romance ; but the main facts may
be taken as faithfully related. The court which
sat in judgment on Socrates consisted of 501
citizens chosen by lot. It seems to have made a
bad impression on many of these persons that the
old philosopher appealed to their reason instead
of humbly throwing himself on their mercy,
which in Xenophon's opinion would have insured
his acquittal. Condemned by a small majority,
and invited to propose a lighter penalty than
the capital sentence demanded by his accuser,
Socrates began by suggesting that maintenance
at the public expense in the Prytaneum would be
the proper recompense for the services he had
rendered to the State. Then, waiving this claim
as impracticable, he offered to pay a fine of thirty
minae (about
122),
as his friends would be
willing to make up that much money among
them. On a second vote the fearless old man was
condemned to death, eighty of those who had
pronounced him innocent now going over to the
side of the majority.
It so happened that the condemnation fell at a
121
time when, owing to the absence of a sacred
mission sent to Delos, no capital sentence could be
carried out at Athens. This gave a respite of
thirty days to Socrates, who, had he chosen,
might have profited by the delay to make his
escape from prison. Everything had in fact
been arranged for the purpose by his friends, but
he refused to avail himself of their offers, on the
ground that it would have involved disobedience
to the laws. Accordingly on the expiration of the
fatal term, after a last conversation with his
followers, Socrates cheerfully met death in the
way humanely prescribed at Athens, by swallow-
ing a draught of hemlock.
We owe it to the method and the example of
this heroic sage, first, that philosophy has ever
since centred in the study of mind rather than
in the study of matter ; and also that it has been
understood to demand, so far as human frailty
permits, a realisation in its teachers' lives of the
ideal that their moral theories set up. Hence
the later schools of Greek philosophy, while more
largely indebted to the Ionian cosmologists and to
the Sophists than to Socrates for their speculative
principles, exhibit in the character and attitude of
their founders and chief representatives the unmis-
takable impress of his commanding personality.
122
WORKS BEARING ON EARLY GREEK
PHILOSOPHY
Grote, History
of
Greece^ chapters xvi., Ixvii., and Ixviii.
Plato, chapters i. and ii.
Zeller, Ed., Die Philosophie der Griechen, Bd. i.,
5*^
Auflage
(1892),
and Bd. ii., 1.
4*^
Auflage, 1-232
(1889).
Tannery, Paul, Four VHistoire de la Science Hellene
(1887).
Burnet, John, Early Greek Philosophy (1892).^
MiLHAUD, Gaston, La Science Grecque
(1893).
Les Philosophes Geometres de la Grece
(1900).
Gomperz, Th., The Greek Thinkers, vol. i. Translated by
Laurie Magnus
(1896).
DoRiNG, A., Die Lehre des Sokrates
(1896).
Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie, i. 1-427
(1903).
Benn, a. W., The Philosophy
of
Greece, chapters i.-vi.
(1898).
PiAT, C, Socrate
(1900).
Diels, H., Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Band i.
(1906).
1
A second edition, entirely rewritten, of this important work has just
appeared (July 1908).
INDEX
Abdera,
67, 90.
Abolitionism, 98.
Acragas, 58.
Agathon, 98.
Alcibiades, 101, 120.
Alcidamas, 98.
Anaxagoras, 73 sqq.^ 84, 110, 120.
Anaximander, 18 sqq.^ 34.
Anaximenes. 21 sqq.
, 33, 36, 80.
Antithesis, 34.
Arginusae, 117.
Aristophanes, 81, 95, 101, 102,
103.
Aristotle,
15, 79, 87, 99, 107.
Aspasia, 75.
Athens, 73 sqq^, 80 sqq,, 102 sqq,,
108, 120.
Atomism, 65 sqq.
Bacon, Francis,
1, 23, 36.
Chthonian and Olympian deities,
25, 45.
Clouds, The,
81, 101 sq,
Copernicus, 33.
Critias, 119, 120.
Definition, 107.
Democritus, 69 sqq,
Descartes, 109.
Diagoras of Melos, 120.
Dialectic method, 105 sqq.
Diogenes of Apollonia, 80 sq.
Education at Athens, 83 sq,, 87.
Elea, 47.
Empedocles, 57 sqq,
Euripides,
74,
94.
Evolution,
20, 79.
Flux, the, 38 sqq.
Gladstone, W. E., 2, 114.
Gods of Greece,
6,
26 sq,
Gorgias, 97 sq.
Heracleitus, 35 sqq., 47, 54, 62,
95.
Hesiod,
6, 17, 27.
Hippias of Elis, 93 sq., 96, 102,
112.
Homer, 6, 7, 27, 38, %Q.
Humanism, 91 sqq., 112.
Huxley, T. H., 44.
Hybris, 11.
lONIANS, 14.
Law, reign of, 12.
Leucippus, 67 sq.
Logos, the, 40 sqq. , 106.
125
Materialism, 22, 60, 70.
Melissus, 64,
Miletus, 14.
Mythology, Greek, 6.
Naturalism, 93 sqq.
Nous,
n sqq., 106.
Orphicism, 39, 44, 60, 71.
Parmenides, 46 sqq,, 78.
Pericles,
74, 75, 90.
Pheidias, 75.
Philosophy, meaning of,
1,
69 sq.
Plato, 22, 44, 47, 72, 84, 91, 92,
95, 99, 100, 108, 110, 113, 121.
Prodicus, 94 sq., 102, 112.
Protagoras, 89 sqq.,
96, 102, 103.
Pythagoras of Samos,
4, 30 sqq.y
47.
Pythagorean school, 29 sqq,
,
52.
Reasoning, 109 sq.
Religion, Greek, 4:sqq.^ 24 sqq.
Revivalism in Greece, 28.
Rhetoric, teaching of, 85 sqq.
Sages, the Seven, 8 sqq.
Salvationism in Greece, 28.
Socrates, 100 sqq.
Sophists, the, 87 sqq., 103, 112.
Sophrosyn^, 10 sq., 29, 69.
Spencer, Herbert,
2, 79.
Stoics, 41, 95.
Thales, lisqq.j 33.
Thucydides, 34, 96.
Utilitarianism, 112 sq.
Virtue as knowledge, 115 sq.
Xenophanes, 44 sqq.
Xenophon, 95, 102, 105, 106, 107,
110, 113, 120, 121.
Zeno of Elea, 55 sq.
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
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Early Greek Philosophy - Benn, Alfred William

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Philosophies Ancient and Modern

Early Greek Philosophy. By A. W. Benn, author of The Philo-

poets among otherswent by the

better even in some ways than a priesthood

public opinion among the Greeks did something

I have said that the

I have said that Thales

perhaps even a greater place. We

and to those others who also claim truth for their

recognises it also as reasonable, or rather as more

'No wise man,' the

that what people

expanded until they met and overlapped, a wide

a clear proof that one of them at

an obvious summary of what Hippias and Pro-

the Socratic irony, as it is called. Plato gives it

As it happens, the most

does Socrates ever make it clear

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