A short history of Greek philosophy

A SHORT HISTORY

OF

GREEK PHILOSOPHY

,
A SHORT HISTORY

OF

GREEK PHILOSOPHY

BY

JOHN MARSHALL

M.A. OXON., LL.D. EDIN.

RECTOR OF THE ROYAL HIGH SCHOOL, EDINBURGH

FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY
IN THE YORKSHIRE COLLEGE, LEEDS

LONDON

PERCIVAL AND CO.
i 891

A II rights reserved

PREFACE

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

vi PREFACE

right action as, under different forms, beset thoughtful

men and women to-day.

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

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

and translation.

JOHN MARSHALL.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

PAGE

I. THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS

i. Thales. ... j

II. Anaximander . . -

II. THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS (concluded}

t - ill. Anaximenes ... I4

j>" IV. Heraclitus ... x r

III. PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS . 22

IV. THE ELEATICS

I. Xenophanes .... 3I

/ II. Parmenides ...

V. THE ELEATICS (concluded}

in. Zeno ..... 42

iv. Melissus

40

VI. THE ATOMISTS

I. Anaxagoras ... c 2

VII. THE ATOMISTS (continued}

II. Empedocles .... 5 8

VIII. THE ATOMISTS (concluded}

in. Leucippus and Democritus . 74

viii

CONTENTS

CHAP.

IX. THE SOPHISTS

I. Protagoras 8 5

X. THE SOPHISTS (concluded}

II. Gorgias . 9 2
XL SOCRATES .

XII. SOCRATES (concluded} .

XI 1 1. THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS

I. Aristippus and the Cyrenaics . .124
II. Antisthenes and the Cynics . 128

in. Euclides and the Megarics . . I3 2

XIV. PLATO : 34

XV. PLATO (continued} . .146

XVI. PLATO (continued} . ! 54
XVII. PLATO (concluded}

XVIII. ARISTOTLE ! 7 2
XIX. ARISTOTLE (continued}

XX. ARISTOTLE (concluded} *99

XXL THE SCEPTICS AND EPICUREANS . 210
XXII. THE STOICS

INDEX 2 45

CHAPTER I

THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS

I. THALES. For several centuries prior to the
great Persian invasions of Greece, perhaps the very
greatest and wealthiest city of the Greek world was
Miletus. Situate about the centre of the Ionian coasts
of Asia Minor, with four magnificent harbours and
a strongly defensible position, it gathered to itself
much of the great overland trade, which has flowed
for thousands of years eastward and westward
between India and the Mediterranean ; while by its
great fleets it created a new world of its own along
the Black Sea coast. Its colonies there were so
numerous that Miletus was named Mother of Eighty
Cities. From Abydus on the Bosphorus, past
Sinope, and so onward to the Crimea and the Don,
and thence round to Thrace, a busy community of
colonies, mining, manufacturing, ship-building, corn-
raising, owned Miletus for their mother -city. Its

B

2 THALES

marts must therefore have been crowded with
merchants of every country from India to Spain,
from Arabia to Russia ; the riches and the wonders
of every clime must have become familiar to its
inhabitants. And fitly enough, therefore, in this city
was born the first notable Greek geographer, the
first constructor of a map, the first observer of natural
and other curiosities, the first recorder of varieties of
custom among various communities, the first specu
lator on the causes of strange phenomena, Heca-
taeus. His work is in great part lost, but we know
a good deal about it from the frequent references
to him and it in the work of his rival and follower,
Herodotus.

The city naturally held a leading place politically
as well as commercially. Empire in our sense was
alien to the instincts of the Greek race ; but Miletus
was for centuries recognised as the foremost member
of a great commercial and political league, the political
character of the league becoming more defined, as
first the Lydian and then the Persian monarchy
became an aggressive neighbour on its borders.
8 It was in this active, prosperous, enterprising
state, and at the period of its highest activity, that
Thales, statesman, practical engineer, mathematician,
philosopher, flourished. Without attempting to fix
his date too closely, we may take it that he was a
leading man in Miletus for the greater part of the

THE QUESTION OF THALES 3

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

4 THALES

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

It is interesting to find that the man who was thus
the first philosopher, the first observer who took a
metaphysical, non-temporal, analytical view of the
world, and so became the predecessor of all those
votaries of other-world ways of thinking, whether
as academic idealist, or budge doctor of the Stoic
fur, or Christian ascetic or what not, whose ways are
such a puzzle to the hard-headed practical man/ was
himself one of the shrewdest men of his day, so shrewd
that by common consent he was placed foremost in
antiquity among the Seven Sages, or seven shrewd
men, whose practical wisdom became a world s
tradition, enshrined in anecdote and crystallised in
proverb.

9 The chief record that we possess of the philo
sophic teaching of Thales is contained in an interest
ing notice of earlier philosophies by Aristotle, the
main part of which as regards Thales runs as follows :
"The early philosophers as a rule formulated the
originative principle (/>%??) of all things under some
material expression. By the originative principle or
element of things they meant that of which all

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

WATER THE BEGINNING OF THINGS 5

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

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

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

6 THALES

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

SOUL IN ALL THINGS 7

like it, containing within it a promise and a potency
of greater life hereafter.

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

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

8 AAAXIMANDER

mathematical and scientific ability. He is said to have
either invented or at least made known to Greece
the construction of the sun-dial. He was associated
with Hecataeus in the construction of the earliest
geographical charts or maps ; he devoted himself
with some success to the science of astronomy. His
familiarity with the abstractions of mathematics per
haps accounts for the more abstract form, in which he
expressed his idea of the principle of all things.
21 To Anaximander this principle was, as he expressed
it, the infinite^ not water nor any other of the so-called
elements, but a different thing from any of them, some
thing hardly namable, out of whose formlessness the
heavens and all the worlds in them came to be. And by
necessity into that same infinite or indefinite existence,
out of which they originally emerged, did every created
thing return. Thus, as he poetically expressed it,
" Time brought its revenges, and for the wrong-doing
of existence all things paid the penalty of death."

The momentary resting-place of Thales on the
confines of the familiar world of things, in his formu
lation of Water as the principle of existence, is thus
immediately removed. We get, as it were, to the
earliest conception of things as we find it in
Genesis ; before the heavens were, or earth, or the
waters under the earth, or light, or sun, or moon, or
grass, or the beast of the field, when the " earth was
without form, and void, and darkness was upon the

MYSTER Y IN SCIENCE 9

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

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

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

io ANAXIMANDER

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

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

ABSTRACTION AND REALITY 11

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

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

12 ANAXIMANDER

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

Before passing, however, to these successors of
Anaximander, some opinions of his which we have
not perhaps the means of satisfactorily correlating
with his general conception, but which are not
without their individual interest, may here be noted.
14 The word husk or bark (</>Xoto9) seems to have
been a favourite one with him, as implying and
depicting a conception of interior and necessary
development in things. Thus he seems to have
postulated an inherent tendency or law in the infinite,
which compelled it to develop contrary characters,
as hot and cold, dry and moist. In consequence of
this fundamental tendency an envelope of fire, he
says, came into being, encircling another envelope
of air, which latter in turn enveloped the sphere
of earth, each being like the husk of the other,
or like the bark which encloses the tree. This
concentric system he conceives as having in some
way been parted up into various systems, represented
by the sun, the moon, the stars, and the earth. The
last he figured as hanging in space, and deriving its
stability from the inherent and perfect balance or
relation of its parts.

THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT 13

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

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

CHAPTER II

THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS (concluded]

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

19 tendency of the later members of the school was
towards emphasising the motive side of the supposed
underlying principle of nature, and accordingly
Anaximenes chose Air as the element which best

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

20 to be necessary in the primal element of being. The
process of existence, then, he conceived as consisting
in a certain concentration of this diffused life-giving
element into more or less solidified forms, and the

AIR THE BEGINNING OF THINGS 15

ultimate separation and expansion of these back into
the formless air again. The contrary forces previously
used by Anaximander heat and cold, drought and
moisture are with Anaximenes also the agencies
which institute these changes.

This is pretty nearly all that we know of
Anaximenes. So far as the few known facts reveal
him, we can hardly say that except as supplying a
step towards the completer development of the motive 22
idea in being, he greatly adds to the chain of pro
gressive thought.

IV. HERACLITUS. Although not a native of
Miletus, but of Ephesus, Heraclitus, both by his
nationality as an Ionian and by his position in the
development of philosophic conceptions, falls naturally
to be classed with the philosophers of Miletus. His
period may be given approximately as from about 560
to 500 B.C., though others place him a generation
later. Few authentic particulars have been preserved
of him. We hear of extensive travels, of his return
to his native city only to refuse a share in its activities,
of his retirement to a hermit s life. He seems to
have formed a contrast to the preceding philosophers
in his greater detachment from the ordinary interests
of civic existence ; and much in his teaching suggests
the ascetic if not the misanthrope. He received
the nickname of The Obscure, from the studied
mystery in which he was supposed to involve his

!6 HERACLITUS

23 teaching. He wrote not for the vulgar, but for the
gifted few. * Much learning makes not wise was the
motto of his work ; the man of gift, of insight, that
man is better than ten thousand. He was savage
in his criticism of other writers, even the greatest.
Homer, he said, and Archilochus too, deserved to be
hooted from the platform and thrashed. Even the
main purport of his writings was differently inter
preted. Some named his work The Muses, as
though it were chiefly a poetic vision ; others named
it The sure Steersman to the Goal of Life ; others,
more prosaically, A Treatise of Nature.

26 The fundamental principle or fact of being
Heraclitus formulated in the famous dictum, All
things pass. In the eternal flux or flow of being
consisted its reality ; even as in a river the water is
ever changing, and the river exists as a river only in
virtue of this continual change ; or as in a living body,
wherein while there is life there is no stability or
fixedness ; stability and fixedness are the attributes of
the unreal image of life, not of life itself. Thus, as will
be observed, from the material basis of being as con
ceived by Thales, with only a very vague conception of
the counter-principle of movement, philosophy has
wheeled round in Heraclitus to the other extreme ; he
finds his permanent element in the negation of per
manence ; being or reality consists in never being
but always becoming, not in stability but in change.

ALL THINGS PASS 17

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

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

C

jg HERACLITUS

vapour from the sea ascending and melting into the

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

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

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

THE ETERNAL AND THE TEMPORARY 19

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

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

20 HERACLITUS

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

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

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

THE WEEPING PHILOSOPHER 21

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

CHAPTER III

PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS

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

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

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

THE PYTHAGOREAN BROTHERHOOD 23

successive revelations of the true doctrine of the 47
Master. Those in the lower grades were called
Listeners ; those in the higher, Mathematicians or
Students ; those in the most advanced stage, Physi
cists or Philosophers. With the political relations
of the school we need not here concern ourselves.
In Crotona and many other Greek cities in Italy
Pythagoreans became a predominant aristocracy,
who, having learned obedience under their master,
applied what they had learned in an anti-democratic
policy of government. This lasted for some thirty
years, but ultimately democracy gained the day, and
Pythagoreanism as a political power was violently
rooted out.

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

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

24 PYTHAGORAS

philosophies. The universe, said the Pythagoreans,
was constituted of indefinites and definers, i.e. of that
which has no character, but has infinite capacities of
taking a character ; and secondly, of things or forces
which impose a character upon this. Out of the com
bination of these two elements or principles all know-

53 able existences come into being. " All things," they
said, " as known have Number ; and this number has
two natures, the Odd and the Even ; the known
thing is the Odd-Even or union of the two."

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

Definite Indefinite

Odd Even

One Many

Right Left

Male Female

Steadfast Moving

Straight Bent

Light Dark

Good Evil

Four Square Irregular.

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

NUMBER THE MASTER 25

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

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

26 PYTHAGORAS

second grade of disciples were called Mathematicians;
mathematics was the essential preparation for and
initiation into philosophy.

Whether that which truly exists was actually
identical with Number or Numbers, or whether it
was something different from Number, but had a
certain relation to Number ; whether if there were
such a relation, this was merely a relation of analogy
or of conformability, or whether Number were some
thing actually embodied in that which truly exists
these were speculative questions which were variously
answered by various teachers, and which probably
interested the later more than the earlier leaders of
the school.

56 A further question arose : Assuming that ulti
mately the elements of knowable existence are but
two, the One or Definite, and the Manifold or
Indefinite, it was argued by some that there must
be some third or higher principle governing the
relations of these ; there must be some law or
harmony which shall render their intelligible union

57 possible. This principle of union was God, ever-
living, ever One, eternal, immovable, self-identical.

58 This was the supreme reality, the Odd-Even or Many
in One, One in Many, in whom was gathered up, as
in an eternal harmony, all the contrarieties of lower

61 existence. Through the interchange and intergrowth
of these contrarieties God realises Himself; the

GOD THE SOUL OF THE WORLD 27

universe in its evolution is the self-picturing of God.
God is diffused as the seminal principle throughout 62
the universe ; He is the Soul of the world, and the 68
world itself is God in process. The world, therefore,
is in a sense a living creature. At its heart and
circumference are purest fire ; between these circle
the sun, the moon, and the five planets, whose ordered
movements, as of seven chords, produce an eternal
music, the Music of the Spheres. Earth, too, like
the planets, is a celestial body, moving like them
around the central fire.

By analogy with this conception of the universe 71
as the realisation of God, so also the body, whether
of man or of any creature, is the realisation for the 72
time being of a soul. Without the body and the
life of the body, that soul were a blind and fleeting
ghost. Of such unrealised souls there are many in
various degrees and states ; the whole air indeed is
full of spirits, who are the causes of dreams and
omens.

Thus the change and flux that are visible in all 73
else are visible also in the relations of soul and body.
Multitudes of fleeting ghosts or spirits are continually
seeking realisation through union with bodies, passing
at birth into this one and that, and at death issuing
forth again into the void. Like wax which takes
now one impression now another, yet remains in
itself ever the same, so souls vary in the outward

28 PYTHAGORAS

<"4 form that envelops and realises them. In this
bodily life, the Pythagoreans are elsewhere described
as saying, we are as it were in bonds or in a prison,
whence we may not justly go forth till the Lord calls
us. This idea Cicero mistranslated with a truly
Roman fitness : according to him they taught that
in this life we are as sentinels at our post, who may
not quit it till our Commander orders.

On the one hand, therefore, the union of soul
with body was necessary for the realisation of the
former (aw^a, body, being as it were arj/jia, expression},
even as the reality of God was not in the Odd or
Eternal Unity, but in the Odd-Even, the Unity in
Multiplicity. On the other hand this union implied
a certain loss or degradation. In other words, in
so far as the soul became realised it also became
corporealised, subject to the influence of passion and

75 change. In a sense therefore the soul as realised was
double; in itself it partook of the eternal reason, as as
sociated with body it belonged to the realm of unreason.
This disruption of the soul into two the Pytha
goreans naturally developed in time into a threefold
division, pure thought, perception, and desire ; or even
more nearly approaching the Platonic division (see
below, p. 169), they divided it into reason, passion, and
desire. But the later developments were largely
influenced by Platonic and other doctrines, and need
not be further followed here.

MUSIC AND MORALS 29

Music had great attractions for Pythagoras, not 78
only for its soothing and refining effects, but for the
intellectual interest of its numerical relations. Refer
ence has already been made (see above, p. 27) to their
quaint doctrine of the music of the spheres ; and the
same idea of rhythmic harmony pervaded the whole
system. The life of the soul was a harmony; the vir
tues were perfect numbers ; and the influence of music
on the soul was only one instance among many of
the harmonious relations of things throughout the
universe. Thus we have Pythagoras described as
soothing mental afflictions, and bodily ones also, by
rhythmic measure and by song. With the morning s
dawn he would be astir, harmonising his own spirit
to his lyre, and chanting ancient hymns of the Cretan
Thales, of Homer, and of Hesiod, till all the tremors
of his soul were calmed and still.

Night and morning also he prescribed for himself
and his followers an examination, as it were a tuning
and testing of oneself. At these times especially
was it meet for us to take account of our soul and
its doings ; in the evening to ask, " Wherein have I
transgressed ? What done ? What failed to do ? "
In the morning, " What must I do ? Wherein repair
past days forgetfulness ?"

But the first duty of all was truth, truth to one s
own highest, truth to the highest beyond us. Through
truth alone could the soul approach the divine.

30 PYTHAGORAS

Falsehood was of the earth ; the real life of the soul
must be in harmony with the heavenly and eternal
verities.

Pythagoreanism remained a power for centuries
throughout the Greek world and beyond. All sub
sequent philosophies borrowed from it, as it in its
later developments borrowed from them ; and thus
along with them it formed the mind of the world, for
further apprehensions, and yet more authentic revela-.
tions, of divine order and moral excellence.

CHAPTER IV

THE ELEATICS

I. XENOPHANES. Xenophanes was a native of 79
Colophon, one of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor,
but having been forced at the age of twenty-five to
leave his native city owing to some political revolu
tion, he wandered to various cities of Greece, and
ultimately to Zancle and Catana, Ionian colonies in
Sicily, and thence to Elea or Velia, a Greek city on
the coast of Italy. This city had, like Miletus,
reached a high pitch of commercial prosperity, and
like it also became a centre of philosophic teaching.
For there Xenophanes remained and founded a
school, so that he and his successors received the
name of Eleatics. His date is uncertain ; but he
seems to have been contemporary with Anaximander
and Pythagoras, and to have had some knowledge of so
the doctrine of both. He wrote in various poetic
measures, using against the poets, and especially
against Homer and Hesiod, their own weapons, to
denounce their anthropomorphic theology. If oxen 83

32 XENOPHANES .

or lions had hands, he said, they would have fashioned
gods after their likeness which would have been as

o

85 authentic as Homer s. As against these poets, and
the popular mythology, he insisted that God must be
one, eternal, incorporeal, without beginning or ending.

87 As Aristotle strikingly expresses it, " He looked forth
over the whole heavens and said that God is one,

88 that that which is one is God." The favourite
antitheses of his time, the definite and the indefinite,
movable and immovable, change-producing and by
change produced these and such as these, he main
tained, were inapplicable to the eternally and essen-

86 tially existent. In this there was no partition of
organs or faculties, no variation or shadow of turning ;
the Eternal Being was like a sphere, everywhere equal
everywhere self-identical.

84 His proof of this was a logical one ; the absolutely
self-existent could not be thought in conjunction with
attributes which either admitted any external in
fluencing Him, or any external influenced by Him.
The prevailing dualism he considered to be, as an
ultimate theory of the universe, unthinkable and
therefore false. Outside the Self-existent there could
be no second self-existent, otherwise each would be
conditioned by the existence of the other, and the
Self- existent would be gone. Anything different
from the Self-existent must be of the non-existent, i.e.
must be nothing.

GOD AND NATURE 33

One can easily see in these discussions some
adumbration of many theological or metaphysical
difficulties of later times, as of the origin of evil,
of freewill in man, of the relation of the created
world to its Creator. If these problems cannot be
said to be solved yet, we need not be surprised that
Xenophanes did not solve them. He was content
to emphasise that which seemed to him to be neces
sary and true, that God was God, and not either a
partner with, or a function of, matter.

At the same time he recognised a world of 89
phenomena, or, as he expressed it, a world of guess
work or opinion (Sofa). As to the origin of things
within this sphere he was ready enough to borrow
from the speculations of his predecessors. Earth and 90
water are the sources from which we spring ; and he
imagined a time when there was neither sea nor land,
but an all-pervading slough and slime ; nay, many
such periods of inundation and emergence had been,
hence the sea-shells on the tops of mountains and
the fossils in the rocks. Air and fire also as agencies
of change are sometimes referred to by him ; antici
pations in fact are visible of the fourfold classifica
tion of the elements which was formally made by
some of his successors.

II. PARMENIDES. The pupil and successor of 91
Xenophanes was PARMENIDES, a native of Elea. In
a celebrated dialogue of Plato bearing the name of

D

34 PARMENIDES

this philosopher he is described as visiting Socrates
when the latter was very young. " He was then
already advanced in years, very hoary, yet noble to
look upon, in years some sixty and five." Socrates
was born about 479 B.C. The birth of Parmenides
might therefore, if this indication be authentic, be
about 520. He was of a wealthy and noble family,
and able therefore to devote himself to a learned
leisure. Like his master he expounded his views in
verse, and fragments of his poem of considerable
length and importance have been preserved. The
title of the work was Tiepl Qvcrecos Of Nature.

The exordium of the poem is one of some grand
eur. The poet describes himself as soaring aloft to
the sanctuary of wisdom where it is set in highest
aether, the daughters of the Sun being his guides ;
under whose leading having traversed the path of
perpetual day and at length attained the temple of
the goddess, he from her lips received instruction in
the eternal verities, and had shown to him the decep
tive guesses of mortals. " Tis for thee," she says,
" to hear of both, to have disclosed to thee on the
one hand the sure heart of convincing verity, on the
other hand the guesses of mortals wherein is no ascer
tainment. Nevertheless thou shalt learn of these also,
that having gone through them all thou may st see
by what unsureness of path must he go who goeth
the way of opinion. From such a way of searching

KNOWLEDGE AND OPINION 35

restrain thou thy thought, and let not the much-ex
perimenting habit force thee along the path wherein
thou must use thine eye, yet being sightless, and the
ear with its clamorous buzzings, and the chattering
tongue. Tis by Reason that thou must in lengthened
trial judge what I shall say to thee."

Thus, like Xenophanes, Parmenides draws a deep 94
division between the world of reason and the world
of sensation, between probative argument and the
guess-work of sense-impressions. The former is the
world of Being, the world of that which truly is, self-
existent, uncreated, unending, unmoved, unchanging,
ever self- poised and self- sufficient, like a sphere.
Knowledge is of this, and of this only, and as such, 98
knowledge is identical with its object ; for outside
this known reality there is nothing. In other words,
Knowledge can only be of that which is, and that
which is alone can know. All things which mortals
have imagined to be realities are but words ; as of
the birth and death of things, of things which were
and have ceased to be, of here and there, of now and
then.

It is obvious enough that in all this, and in much
more to the same effect reiterated throughout the
poem, we have no more than a statement, in various
forms of negation, of the inconceivability by human
reason of that passage from being as such, to that
world of phenomena which is now, but was not before,

36 PARMENIDES

and will cease to be, from being to becoming, from
eternity to time, from the infinite to the finite (or, as
Parmenides preferred to call it, from the perfect to the
imperfect, the definite to the indefinite). In all this
Parmenides was not contradicting such observed facts
as generation, or motion, or life, or death ; he was
talking of a world which has nothing to do with
observation ; he was endeavouring to grasp what
was assumed or necessarily implied as a prior con
dition of observation, or of a world to observe.

What he and his school seem to have felt was
that there was a danger in all this talk of water or
air or other material symbol, or even of the indefinite
or characterless as the original of all, the danger,
namely, that one should lose sight of the idea of law,
of rationality, of eternal self-centred force, and so be
carried away by some vision of a gradual process of
evolution from mere emptiness to fulness of being.
Such a position would be not dissimilar to that of
many would-be metaphysicians among evolutionists,
who, not content with the doctrine of evolution as a
theory in science, an ordered and organising view of
observed facts, will try to elevate it into a vision of
what is, and alone is, behind the observed facts.
They fail to see that the more blind, the more
accidental, so to speak, the process of differentiation
may be ; the more it is shown that the struggle for
existence drives the wheels of progress along the

BEING AND EVOLUTION 37

lines of least resistance by the most commonplace of
mechanical necessities, in the same proportion must
a law be posited behind all this process, a reason in
nature which gathers up the beginning and the
ending. The protoplasmic cell which the imagination
of evolutionists places at the beginning of time as
the starting-point of this mighty process is not
merely this or that, has not merely this or that
quality or possibility, it is ; and in the power of that
little word is enclosed a whole_world_jof thought,
which is there at the^hrst^remains there all through
the evolutions of the protoplasm, will be there when
these are done, is in fact independent of time and
space, has nothing to do with such distinctions,
expresses rather their ultimate unreality. So far
then as Parmenides and his school kept a firm grip
on this other-world aspect of nature as implied even
in the simple word is, or be, so far they did good
service in the process of the world s thought. On
the other hand, he and they were naturally enough
disinclined, as we all are disinclined, to remain in the
merely or mainly negative or defensive. He would
not lose his grip of heaven and eternity, but he would
fain know the secrets of earth and time as well.
And hence was fashioned the second part of his
poem, in which he expounds his theory of the world
of opinion, or guess-work, or observation.

In this world he found two originative principles 99

3 8 PARMENIDES

at work, one pertaining to light and heat, the other
to darkness and cold. From the union of these two
principles all observable things in creation come, and
over this union a God-given power presides, whose
name is Love. Of these two principles, the bright
one being analogous to Fire, the dark one to Earth,
he considered the former to be the male or formative
element, the latter the female or passive element ;
the former therefore had analogies to Being as such,
the latter to Non-being. The heavenly existences,
the sun, the moon, the stars, are of pure Fire, have
therefore an eternal and unchangeable being ; they
are on the extremest verge of the universe, and
corresponding to them at the centre is another fiery
sphere, which, itself unmoved, is the cause of all
motion and generation in the mixed region between.
The motive and procreative power, sometimes called
Love, is at other times called by Parmenides
Necessity, Bearer of the Keys, Justice, Ruler, etc.

But while in so far as there was union in the
production of man or any other creature, the pre-
102 siding genius might be symbolised as Love ; on the
other hand, since this union was a union of opposites
(Light and Dark), Discord or Strife also had her say
in the union. Thus the nature and character in
every creature was the resultant of two antagonistic
forces, and depended for its particular excellence or
defect on the proportions in which these two elements

LOVE THE CREATOR

39

the light and the dark, the fiery and the earthy-
had been commingled.

No character in Greek antiquity, at least in the
succession of philosophic teachers, held a more
honoured position than Parmenides. He was looked
on with almost superstitious reverence by his fellow-
countrymen. Plato speaks of him as his " Father
Parmenides," whom he " revered and honoured more
than all the other philosophers together." To quote
Professor Jowett in his introduction to Plato s dia
logue Parmenides^ he was " the founder of idealism
and also of dialectic, or in modern phraseology, of
metaphysics and of logic." Of the logical aspect of
his teaching we shall see a fuller exemplification in
his pupil and successor Zeno ; of his metaphysics, by
way of summing up what has been already said, it
may be remarked that its substantial excellence
consists in the perfect clearness and precision with
which Parmenides enunciated as fundamental in any
theory of the knowable universe the priority of
Existence itself, not in time merely or chiefly, but as
a condition of having any problem to inquire into.
He practically admits that he does not see how to
bridge over the partition between Existence in itself
and the changeful, temporary, existing things which
the senses give us notions of. But whatever the
connection may be, if there is a connection, he is
convinced that nothing would be more absurd than

4 o

PARMENIDES

to make the data of sense in any way or degree the
measure of the reality of existence, or the source
from which existence itself comes into being.

On this serenely impersonal position he took his
stand ; we find little or nothing of the querulous
personal note so characteristic of much modern
philosophy. We never find him asking, " What is
to become of me in all this ? " " What is my position
with regard to this eternally-existing reality?"

Of course this is not exclusively a characteristic
of Parmenides, but of the time. The idea of personal
relation to an eternal Rewarder was only vaguely
held in historical times in Greece. The conception
of personal immortality was a mere pious opinion, a
doctrine whispered here and there in secret mystery ;
it was not an influential force on men s motives or
actions. Thought was still occupied with the wider
universe, the heavens and their starry wonders, and
the strange phenomena of law in nature. In the
succession of the seasons, the rising and setting, the
fixities and aberrations, of the heavenly bodies, in
the mysteries of coming into being and passing out
of it, in these and other similar marvels, and in the
thoughts which they evoked, a whole and ample
world seemed open for inquiry. Men and their fate
were interesting enough to men, but as yet the
egotism of man had not attempted to isolate his
destiny from the general problem of nature.

THE MODERN EGOTISM 41

To the crux of philosophy as it appeared to
Parmenides in the relation of being as such to things
which seem to be, modernism has appended a sort
of corollary, in the relation of being as such to my
being. Till the second question was raised its
answer, of course, could not be attempted. But all
those who in modern times have said with Tennyson

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust :

Thou madest man, he knows not why ;
He thinks he was not made to die ;

And Thou hast made him : Thou art just,

may recognise in Parmenides a pioneer for them.
Without knowing it, he was fighting the battle of
personality in man, as well as that of reality in
nature.

CHAPTER V

THE ELEATICS (concluded)

106 III. ZENO. The third head of the Eleatic
school was ZENO. He is described by Plato in the
Parmenides as accompanying his master to Athens
on the visit already referred to (see above, p. 34),
and as being then " nearly forty years of age, of a
noble figure and fair aspect." In personal character
he was a worthy pupil of his master, being, like him,
a devoted patriot. He is even said to have fallen a
victim to his patriotism, and to have suffered bravely
the extremest tortures at the hands of a tyrant
Nearchus rather than betray his country.

His philosophic position was a very simple one.
He had nothing to add to or to vary in the doctrine
of Parmenides. His function was primarily that of
an expositor and defender of that doctrine, and his
particular pre-eminence consists in the ingenuity of
his dialectic resources of defence. He is in fact
pronounced by Aristotle to have been the inventor
of dialectic or systematic logic. The relation of

ZENO S DIALECTIC

43

the two is humorously expressed thus by Plato
(Jowett, Plato, vol. iv. p. 128) : " I see, Parmenides,
said Socrates, that Zeno is your second self in his
writings too ; he puts what you say in another way,
and would fain deceive us into believing that he is
telling us what is new. For you, in your poems,
say, All is one, and of this you adduce excellent
proofs ; and he, on the other hand, says, There is no
many ; and on behalf of this he offers overwhelming
evidence." To this Zeno replies, admitting the fact,
and adds : " These writings of mine were meant to
protect the arguments of Parmenides against those
who scoff at him, and show the many ridiculous and
contradictory results which they suppose to follow
from the affirmation of the One. My answer is an
address to the partisans of the many, whose attack
I return with interest by retorting upon them that
their hypothesis of the being of many if carried out
appears in a still more ridiculous light than the
hypothesis of the being of one."

The arguments of Zeno may therefore be re
garded as strictly arguments in kind ; quibbles
if you please, but in answer to quibbles. The secret
of his method was what Aristotle calls Dichotomy
that is, he put side by side two contradictory pro
positions with respect to any particular supposed
real thing in experience, and then proceeded to show
that both these contradictories alike imply what is

44 ZENO

105 inconceivable. Thus " a thing must consist either of
a finite number of parts or an infinite number." Assume
the number of parts to be finite. Between them there
must either be something or nothing. If there is some
thing between them, then the whole consists of more
parts than it consists of. If there is nothing between
them, then they are not separated, therefore they
are not parts ; therefore the whole has no parts at
all ; therefore it is nothing. If, on the other hand,
the number of parts is infinite, then, the same kind
of argument being applied, the magnitude of the
whole is by infinite successive positing of intervening
parts shown to be infinite ; therefore this one thing,
being infinitely large, is everything.

107 Take, again, any supposed fact, as that an arrow
moves. An arrow cannot move except in space.
It cannot move in space without being in space.
At any moment of its supposed motion it must be
in a particular space. Being in that space, it must
at the time during which it is in it be at rest But
the total time of its supposed motion is made up of
the moments composing that time, and to each of
these moments the same argument applies ; therefore
either the arrow never was anywhere, or it always
was at rest.

Or, again, take objects moving at unequal rates,
as Achilles and a tortoise. Let the tortoise have a
start of any given length, then Achilles, however

ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE 45

much he excel in speed, will never overtake the
tortoise. For, while Achilles has passed over the
originally intervening space, the tortoise will have
passed over a certain space, and when Achilles has
passed over this second space the tortoise will have
again passed over some space, and so on ad infinitum ;
therefore in an infinite time there must always be
a space, though infinitely diminishing, between the
tortoise and Achilles, i.e. the tortoise must always be
at least a little in front.

These will be sufficient to show the kind of
arguments employed by Zeno. In themselves they
are of no utility, and Zeno never pretended that
they had any. But as against those who denied
that existence as such was a datum independent of
experience, something different from a mere sum of
isolated things, his arguments were not only effective,
but substantial. The whole modern sensational or
experiential school, who derive our abstract ideas/
as they are called, from phenomena or sensation,
manifest the same impatience of any analysis of
what they mean by phenomena or sensation, as no
doubt Zeno s opponents manifested of his analyses.
As in criticising the one, modern critics are ready
with their answer that Zeno s quibbles are simply " a
play of words on the well-known properties of
infinities," so they are quick to tell us that sensation
is an " affection of the sentient organism"; ignoring in

46 MELISSUS

the first case the prior question where the idea of
infinity came from, and in the second, where the
idea of a sentient organism came from.

Indirectly, as we shall see, Zeno had a great
effect on subsequent philosophies by the development
of a process of ingenious verbal distinction, which in
the hands of so-called sophists and others became a
weapon of considerable, if temporary, power.

109 IV. MELISSUS. The fourth and last of the
Eleatic philosophers was Melissus, a native of Samos.
His date may be fixed as about 440 B.C. He took
an active part in the politics of his native country,
and on one occasion was commander of the Samian
fleet in a victorious engagment with the Athenians,
when Samos was being besieged by Pericles. He be
longs to the Eleatic school in respect of doctrine and
method, but we have no evidence of his ever having
resided at Elea, nor any reference to his connection
with the philosophers there, except the statement that
he was a pupil of Parmenides. He developed very
fully what is technically called in the science of Logic

110 the Dilemma. Thus, for example, he begins his
treatise On Existence or On Nature thus: "If nothing
exists, then there is nothing for us to talk about.
But if there is such a thing as existence it must
either come into being or be ever-existing. If it
come into being, it must come from the existing or
the non-existing. Now that anything which exists,

THE DILEMMA OF BEING 47

above all, that which is absolutely existent, should
come from what is not, is impossible. Nor can it
come from that which is. For then it would be
already, and would not come into being. That
which exists, therefore, comes not into being ; it must
therefore be ever-existing."

By similar treatment of other conceivable alterna- 111
tives he proceeds to show that as the existent had
no beginning so it can have no ending in time.
From this, by a curious transition which Aristotle
quotes as an example of loose reasoning, he con
cludes that the existent can have no limit in space
either. As being thus unlimited it must be one, 112
therefore immovable (there being nothing else into
which it can move or change), and therefore always
self-identical in extent and character. It cannot,
therefore, have any body, for body has parts and is
not therefore one.

Being incapable of change one might perhaps us
conclude that the absolutely existing being is
incapable of any mental activity or consciousness.
We have no authority for assuming that Melissus
came to this conclusion ; but there is a curious
remark of Aristotle s respecting this and previous
philosophers of the school which certain critics have
made to bear some such interpretation. He says : iu
" Parmenides seems to hold by a Unity in thought,
Melissus by a Material unity. Hence the first

48 MELISSUS

defined the One as limited, the second declared it to
be unlimited. Xenophanes made no clear statement
on this question ; he simply, gazing up to the arch
of heaven, declared, The One is God."

But the difference between Melissus and his
master can hardly be said to be a difference of
doctrine ; point for point, they are identical. The
difference is a difference of vision or mental picture
as to this mighty All which is One. Melissus,
so to speak, places himself at the centre of this
Universal being, and sees it stretching out in
finitely, unendingly, in space and in time. Its
oneness comes to him as the sum of these infinities.
Parmenides, on the other hand, sees all these end
less immensities as related to a centre ; he, so to
speak, enfolds them all in the grasp of his unifying
thought, and as thus equally and necessarily related
to a central unity he pronounces the All a sphere,
and therefore limited. The two doctrines, anti
thetical in terms, are identical in fact. The
absolutely unlimited and the absolutely self-limited
are only two ways of saying the same thing.

This difference of view or vision Aristotle in the
passage quoted expresses as a difference between
thought (Xoyo?) and matter (v\rj). This is just a
form of his own radical distinction between Essence
and Difference, Form and Matter, of which much
will be said later on. It is like the difference

THE ALL A SPHERE 49

between Deduction and Induction ; in the first you
start from the universal and see within it the par
ticulars ; in the second you start from the particulars
and gather them into completeness and reality in a
universal. The substance remains the same, only
the point of view is different. To put the matter in
modern mathematical form, one might say, The
universe is to be conceived as a sphere (Parmenides)
of infinite radius (Melissus). Aristotle is not blaming
Melissus or praising Parmenides. As for Xenophanes,
Aristotle after his manner finds in him the potentiality
of both. He is prior both to the process of thought
from universal to particular, and to that from par
ticular to universal. He does not argue at all ; his
function is Intuition. " He looks out on the mighty
sky, and says, The One is God."

Melissus applied the results of his analysis in an
interesting way to the question already raised by his
predecessors, of the trustworthiness of sensation. His
argument is as follows : " If there were many real
existences, to each of them the same reasonings must
apply as I have already used with reference to the
one existence. That is to say, if earth really exists,
and water and air and iron and gold and fire and
things living and things dead, and black and white,
and all the various things whose reality men ordin
arily assume, if all these really exist, and our sight
and our hearing give us facts, then each of these as

E

S o MELISSUS

really existing must be what we concluded the one
existence must be ; among other things, each must be
unchangeable, and can never become other than it
really is. But assuming that sight and hearing and
apprehension are true, we find the cold becoming
hot and the hot becoming cold ; the hard changes
to soft, the soft to hard ; the living thing dies ; and
from that which is not living, a living thing comes
into being ; in short, everything changes, and what
now is in no way resembles what was. It follows
therefore that we neither see nor apprehend realities.

" In fact we cannot pay the slightest regard to
experience without being landed in self-contradictions.
We assume that there are all sorts of really existing
things, having a permanence both of form and power,
and yet we imagine these very things altering and
changing according to what we from time to time
see about them. If they were realities as we first
perceived them, our sight must now be wrong. For
if they were real, they could not change. Nothing
can be stronger than reality. Whereas to suppose
it changed, we must affirm that the real has ceased
to be, and that that which was not has displaced it."

To Melissus therefore, as to his predecessors, the
world of sense was a world of illusion ; the very first
principles or assumptions of which, as of the truth
fulness of the senses and the reality of the various
objects which we see, are unthinkable and absurd.

THE DILEMMAS OF EXPERIENCE 51

The weakness as well as the strength of the Eleatic
position consisted in its purely negative and critical
attitude. The assumptions of ordinary life and
experience could not stand for a moment when
assailed in detail by their subtle analysis. So-called
facts were like a world of ghosts, which the sword
of truth passed through without resistance. But
somehow the sword might pierce them through and
through, and show by all manner of arguments their
unsubstantiality, but there they were still thronging
about the philosopher and refusing to be gone. The
world of sense might be only illusion, but there the
illusion was. You could not lay it or exorcise it by
calling it illusion or opinion. What was this opinion ?
What was the nature of its subject matter? How
did it operate? And if its results were not true
or real, what was their nature ? These were ques
tions which still remained when the analysis of the
idea of absolute existence had been pushed to its
completion. These were the questions which the
next school of philosophy attempted to answer.
After the Idealists, the Realists ; after the philosophy
of mind, the philosophy of matter.

CHAPTER VI

THE ATOMISTS

129 I. ANAXAGORAS. Anaxagoras was born at
Clazomenae, a city of Ionia, about the year 500 B.C.
At the age of twenty he removed to Athens, of which
city Clazomenae was for some time a dependency.
This step on his part may have been connected with
the circumstances attending the great invasion of
Greece by Xerxes in the year 480. For Xerxes drew
a large contingent of his army from the Ionian cities
which he had subdued, and many who were unwilling
to serve against their mother-country may have taken
refuge about that time in Athens. At Athens he
resided for nearly fifty years, and during that period
became the friend and teacher of many eminent men,
among the rest of Pericles, the great Athenian

118 statesman, and of Euripides, the dramatist. Like
most of the Ionian philosophers he had a taste for
mathematics and astronomy, as well as for certain
practical applications of mathematics. Among other
books he is said to have written a treatise on the art

ANAXAGORAS AND THE COSMOS 53

of scene-designing for the stage, possibly to oblige
his friend and pupil Euripides. In his case, as in
that of his predecessors, only fragments of his philo
sophic writings have been preserved, and the con
nection of certain portions of his teaching as they
have come down to us remains somewhat uncertain.

With respect to the constitution of the universe we 119
have the following: "Origination and destruction are
phrases which are generally misunderstood among the
Greeks. Nothing really is originated or destroyed ;
the only processes which actually take place are com
bination and separation of elements already existing. 120
These elements we are to conceive as having been in a
state of chaos at first, infinite in number and infinitely
small, forming in their immobility a confused and
characterless unity. About this chaos was spread
the air and aether, infinite also in the multitude
of their particles, and infinitely extended. Before
separation commenced there was no clear colour or
appearance in anything, whether of moist or dry,
of hot or cold, of bright or dark, but only an infinite
number of the seeds of things, having concealed in
them all manner of forms and colours and savours."

There is a curious resemblance in this to the
opening verses of Genesis, " The earth was without
form and void, and darkness was upon the face of
the deep." Nor is the next step in his philosophy
without its resemblance to that in the Biblical record.

54 ANAXAGORAS

122 As summarised by Diogenes Laertius it takes this
form, " All things were as one : then cometh Mind,
and by division brought all things into order."

121 "Conceiving," as Aristotle puts it, "that the original
elements of things had no power to generate or
develop out of themselves things as they exist,
philosophers were forced by the facts themselves
to seek the immediate cause of this development.
They were unable to believe that fire, or earth, or
any such principle was adequate to account for the
order and beauty visible in the frame of things ; nor
did they think it possible to attribute these to mere
innate necessity or chance. One (Anaxagoras) ob
serving how in living creatures Mind is the ordering
force, declared that in nature also this must be the
cause of order and beauty, and in so declaring he
seemed, when compared with those before him, as
one sober amidst a crowd of babblers."

122 Elsewhere, however, Aristotle modifies this com
mendation. " Anaxagoras," he says, " uses Mind only
as a kind of last resort, dragging it in when he fails
otherwise to account for a phenomenon, but never
thinking of it else." And in the Phaedo Plato makes
Socrates speak of the high hopes with which he had
taken to the works of Anaxagoras, and how grievously
he had been disappointed. "As I proceeded," he
says, " I found my philosopher altogether forsaking
Mind or any other principle of order, and having

MIND IN NATURE 55

recourse to air, and aether, and water, and other
eccentricities."

Anaxagoras, then, at least on this side of his
teaching, must be considered rather as the author of
a phrase than as the founder of a philosophy. The
phrase remained, and had a profound influence on
subsequent philosophies, but in his own hands it was
little more than a dead letter. His immediate
interest was rather in the variety of phenomena than
in their conceived principle of unity ; he is theoreti
cally, perhaps, on the side of the angels, in practice
he is a materialist.

Mind he conceived as something apart, sitting 12
throned like Zeus upon the heights, giving doubtless
the first impulse to the movement of things, but
leaving them for the rest to their own inherent
tendencies. As distinguished from them it was, he
conceived, the one thing which was absolutely pure
and unmixed. All things else had intermixture with
every other, the mixtures increasing in complexity
towards the centre of things. On the outmost verge
were distributed the finest and least complex forms
of things the sun, the moon, the stars ; the more
dense gathering together, to form as it were in the
centre of the vortex, the earth and its manifold
existences. By the intermixture of air and earth
and water, containing in themselves the infinitely
varied seeds of things, plants and animals were

56 AXAXAGORAS

developed. The seeds themselves are too minute to
be apprehended by the senses, but \ve can divine their
character by the various characters of the visible
things themselves, each of these having a necessary
correspondence with the nature of the seeds from
which they respectively were formed.
128 Thus for a true apprehension of things sensation
and reason are both necessary sensation to certify to
the apparent characters of objects, reason to pass from
these to the nature of the invisible seeds or atoms
which cause those characters. Taken by themselves
our sensations are false, inasmuch as they give us
only combined impressions, yet they are a necessary
stage towards the truth, as providing the materials
which reason must separate into their real elements.
From this brief summary we may gather that
Mind was conceived, so to speak, as placed at the
beginning of existence, inasmuch as it is the first
originator of the vortex motions of the atoms or
seeds of things ; it was conceived also at the end
of existence as the power which by analysis of
the data of sensation goes back through the com
plexity of actual being to the original unmingled or
undeveloped nature of things. But the whole pro
cess of nature itself between these limits Anaxagoras
conceived as a purely mechanical or at least physical
development, the uncertainty of his view as between
these two alternative ways of considering it being

THE SEEDS OF EXISTENCE 57

typified in his use of the two expressions atoms and
seeds. The analogies of this view with those of
modern materialism, which finds in the ultimate
molecules of matter " the promise and the potency
of all life and all existence," need not be here
enlarged upon.

After nearly half a century s teaching at Athens
Anaxagoras was indicted on a charge of inculcating
doctrines subversive of religion. It is obvious enough
that his theories left no room for the popular
mythology, but the Athenians were not usually very
sensitive as to the bearing of mere theories upon
their public institutions. It seems probable that the
accusation was merely a cloak for political hostility.
Anaxagoras was the friend and intimate of Pericles,
leader of the democratic party in the state, and the
attack upon Anaxagoras was really a political move
intended to damage Pericles. As such Pericles him
self accepted it, and the trial became a contest of
strength, which resulted in a partial success and
a partial defeat for both sides. Pericles succeeded
in saving his friend s life, but the opposite party
obtained a sentence of fine and banishment against
him. Anaxagoras retired to Lampsacus, a city on
the Hellespont, and there, after some five years,
he died.

CHAPTER VII
THE ATOMISTS (continued]

129 II. EMPEDOCLES. Empedocles was a native of
Agrigentum, a Greek colony in Sicily. At the time
when he flourished in his native city (circa 440 B.C.)
it was one of the wealthiest and most powerful
communities in that wealthy and powerful island.
It had, however, been infested, like its neighbours,
by the designs of tyrants and the dissensions of rival
factions. Empedocles was a man of high family, and
he exercised the influence which his position and his
abilities secured him in promoting and maintaining
the liberty of his fellow-countrymen. Partly on this
account, partly from a reputation which with or
without his own will he acquired for an almost
miraculous skill in healing and necromantic arts,
Empedocles attained to a position of singular per
sonal power over his contemporaries, and was indeed
regarded as semi-divine. His death was hedged
about with mystery. According to one story he
gave a great feast to his friends and offered a

EMPEDOCLES AT ETNA 59

sacrifice ; then when his friends went to rest he dis
appeared, and was no more seen. According to a
story less dignified and better known

Deus immortalis haberi

Dum cupit Empedocles, ardentem frigidus Aetnam
Insiluit. HOR. Ad Pisones, 464 sqq.

" Eager to be deemed a god, Empedocles coldly
threw himself in burning Etna." The fraud, it was
said, was detected by one of his shoes being cast up
from the crater. Whatever the manner of his end,
the Etna story may probably be taken as an ill-
natured joke of some sceptic wit ; and it is certain
that no such story was believed by his fellow-citizens,
who rendered in after years divine honours to his
name.

Like Xenophanes, Parmenides, and other Graeco-
Italian philosophers, he expounded his views in
verse ; but he reached a poetic excellence unattained
by any predecessor. Aristotle characterises his gift
as Homeric, and himself as a master of style,
employing freely metaphors and other poetic forms.
Lucretius also speaks of him in terms of high ad
miration (De Nat. Rer. i. 716 sqq) : " Foremost
among them is Empedocles of Agrigentum, child of the
island with the triple capes, a land wondrous deemed
in many wise, and worthy to be viewed of all men.
Rich it is in all manner of good things, and strong

60 EMPEDOCLES

in the might of its men, yet naught within its borders
men deem more divine or more wondrous or more
dear than her illustrious son. Nay, the songs which
issued from his godlike breast are eloquent yet, and
expound his findings wondrous well, so that hardly
is he thought to have been of mortal clay."
130 Like the Eleatics he denies that the senses are
an absolute test of truth. " For straitened are the
powers that have been shed upon our frames, and
many the frets that cross us and defeat our care, and
short the span of unsatisfying existence wherein tis
given us to see. Shortlived as a wreath of smoke
men rise and fleet away, persuaded but of that alone
which each has chanced to light upon, driven hither
and thither, and vainly do they pray to find the
whole. For this men may not see or hear or grasp
with the hand of thought." Yet that there is a kind
or degree of knowledge possible for man his next
words suggest when he continues : " Thou there
fore since hither thou hast been borne, hear, and
thou shalt learn so much as tis given to mortal
thought to reach." Then follows an invocation in
true Epic style to the " much- wooed white -armed
1 virgin Muse," wherein he prays that " folly and im
purity may be far from the lips of him the teacher,
and that sending forth her swift-reined chariot from
the shrine of Piety, the Muse may grant him to
hear so much as is given to mortal hearing."

BRIEF LIFE AND SCANTY VISION 61

Then follows a warning uttered by the Muse to
her would-be disciple : " Thee the flowers of mortal
distinctions shall not seduce to utter in daring of
heart more than thou mayest, that thereby thou
mightest soar to the highest heights of wisdom.
And now behold and see, availing thyself of every
device whereby the truth may in each matter be
revealed, trusting not more to sight for thy learning
than to hearing, nor to hearing with its loud echoings
more than to the revelations of the tongue, nor to
any one of the many ways whereby there is a path
to knowledge. Keep a check on the revelation of
the hands also, and apprehend each matter in the
way whereby it is made plain to thee."

The correction of the one sense by the others,
and of all by reason, this Empedocles deemed the
surest road to knowledge. He thus endeavoured to
hold a middle place between the purely abstract
reasoning of the Eleatic philosophy and the un
reasoned first guesses of ordinary observation sug
gested by this or that sense, and chiefly by the eyes.
The senses might supply the raw materials of know
ledge, unordered, unrelated, nay even chaotic and
mutually destructive ; but in their contradictions of
each other he hoped to find a starting-point for order
amidst the seeming chaos ; reason should weigh,
reason should reject, but reason also should find a
residuum of truth.

62 EMPEDOCLES

131 In our next fragment we have his enunciation
in symbolical language of the four elements, by him
first formulated : " Hear first of all what are the
root principles of all things, being four in number,
Zeus the bright shiner (i.e. fire), and Hera (air),
and life-bearing Aidoneus (earth), and Nestis (water),
who with her teardrops waters the fountain of
mortality. Hear also this other that I will tell thee.
Nothing of all that perisheth ever is created, nothing
ever really findeth an end in death. There is naught
but a mingling, and a parting again of that which
was mingled, and this is what men call a coming
into being. Foolish they, for in them is no far-
reaching thought, that they should dream that what
was not before can be, or that aught which is can
utterly perish and die." Thus again Empedocles
shows himself an Eclectic ; in denying that aught can
come into being, he holds with the Eleatics (see above,
p. 47) ; in identifying all seeming creation, and ceasing
to be with certain mixtures and separations of matter
eternally existing, he links himself rather to the
doctrine of Anaxagoras (see above, p. 5 3).

132 These four elements constitute the total corpus of
the universe, eternal, as a whole unmoved and im
movable, perfect like a sphere. But within this
sphere-like self-centred All there are eternally pro
ceeding separations and new unions of the elements
of things ; and every one of these is at once a birth

THE FOUR ELEMENTS 63

and an infinity of dyings, a dying and an infinity of
births. Towards this perpetual life in death, and
death in life, two forces work inherent in the universe.
One of these he names Love, Friendship, Harmony,
Aphrodite goddess of Love, Passion, Joy; the other he
calls Hate, Discord, Ares god of War, Envy, Strife.
Neither of the one nor of the other may man have
apprehension by the senses ; they are spiritually dis
cerned ; yet of the first men have some adumbration in
the creative force within their own members, which
they name by the names of Love and Nuptial Joy.

Somewhat prosaically summing up the teaching
of Empedocles, Aristotle says that he thus posited
six first principles in nature four material, two
motive or efficient. And he goes on to remark that
in the working out of his theory of nature Empedocles,
though using his originative principles more consist
ently than Anaxagoras used his principle of Nous
or Thought, not infrequently, nevertheless, resorts to
some natural force in the elements themselves, or
even to chance or necessity. " Nor," he continues,
" has he clearly marked off the functions of his two
efficient forces, nay, he has so confounded them that
at times it is Discord that through separation leads
to new unions, and Love that through union causes
diremption of that which was before." At times,
too, Empedocles seems to have had a vision of
these two forces, not as the counteracting yet

64 EMPEDOCLES

co-operative pulsations, so to speak, of the universal
life, but as rival forces having had in time their periods
of alternate supremacy and defeat. While all things
were in union under the influence of Love, then was
there neither Earth nor Water nor Air nor Fire,
much less any of the individual things that in eternal
interchange are formed of them ; but all was in
perfect sphere-like balance, enwrapped in the serenity
of an eternal silence. Then came the reign of
Discord, whereby war arose in heaven as of the
fabled giants, and endless change, endless birth, and
endless death.

These inconsistencies of doctrine, which Aristotle
notes as faults in Empedocles, are perhaps rather
proofs of the philosophic value of his conceptions.
Just as Hegel in modern philosophy could only
adequately formulate his conceptions through logical
contradictions, so also, perhaps, under the veil of
antagonisms of utterance, Empedocles sought to give
a fuller vision, Discord, in his own doctrine, not
less than in his conception of nature, being thus the
co-worker with Love. The ordinary mind for the
ordinary purposes of science seeks exactness of
distinction in things, and language, being the creation
of ordinary experience, lends itself to such a purpose ;
the philosophic mind, finding ready to its hand no
forms of expression adapted to its conceptions, which
have for their final end Union and not Distinction,

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONTRADICTION 65

can only attain its purpose by variety, or even
contradictoriness, of representation. Thus to ordin
ary conception cause must precede effect ; to the
philosophic mind, dealing as it does with the idea of
an organic whole, everything is at once cause and
effect, is at once therefore prior to and subsequent
to every other, is at once the ruling and the ruled,
the conditioning and that which is conditioned.

So, to Empedocles there are four elements, yet
in the eternal perfection, the silent reign of Love,
there are none of them. There are two forces work
ing upon these and against each other, yet each is
like the other either a unifying or a separating
force, as one pleases to regard them ; and in the
eternal silence, the ideal perfectness, there is no war
fare at all. There is joy in Love which creates, and in
creating destroys ; there is joy in the eternal Stillness,
nay, this is itself the ultimate joy. There are two
forces working, Love and Hate, yet is there but one
force, and that force is Necessity. And for final contra
diction, the universe is self-balanced, self-conditioned,
a perfect sphere ; therefore this Necessity is perfect
self-realisation, and consequently perfect freedom.

The men who have had the profoundest vision of
things Heraclitus, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, ay,
and Aristotle himself when he was the thinker and
not the critic ; riot to speak of the great moderns,
whether preachers or philosophers have none of

F

66 EMPEDOCLES

them been greatly concerned for consistency of
expression, for a mere logical self-identity of doctrine.
Life in every form, nay, existence in any form, is a
union of contradictories, a complex of antagonisms ;
and the highest and deepest minds are those that
are most adequate to have the vision of these
antagonisms in their contrariety, and also in their
unity ; to see and hear as Empedocles did the
eternal war and clamour, but to discern also, as he
did in it and through it and behind it and about it,
the eternal peace and the eternal silence.

Philosophy, in fact, is a form of poesy ; it is, if
one pleases so to call it, fiction founded upon fact
It is not for that reason the less noble a form of
human thought, rather is it the more noble, in the
same way as poetry is nobler than mere narrative,
and art than representation, and imagination than
perception. Philosophy is indeed one of the noblest
forms of poetry, because the facts which are its basis
are the profoundest, the most eternally interesting,
the most universally significant. And not only has
it nobility in respect of the greatness of its subject
matter, it has also possibilities of an essential truth
deeper and more far-reaching and more fruitful than
any demonstrative system of fact can have. A great
poem or work of art of any kind is an adumbration of
truths which transcend any actual fact, and as such it
brings us nearer to the underlying fundamentals of

PHILOSOPHY A FORM OF POESY 67

reality which all actual occurrences only by accumula
tion tend to realise. Philosophy, then, in so far as
it is great, is, like other great art, prophetic in both
interpretations of the word, both as expounding the
inner truth that is anterior to actuality, and also as
anticipating that final realisation of all things for
which c the whole creation groaneth. It is thus at
the basis of religion, of art, of morals ; it is the accumu
lated sense of the highest in man with respect to what
is greatest and most mysterious in and about him.

The facts, indeed, with which philosophy attempts
to deal are so vital and so vast that even the great
est intellects may well stagger occasionally under
the burden of their own conceptions of them. To
rise to the height of such an argument demands
a more than Miltonic imagination ; and criticisms
directed only at this or that fragment of the whole
are as irrelevant, if not as inept, as the criticism of
the mathematician directed against Paradise Lost,
that it c proved nothing. The mystery of being
and of life, the true purport and reality of this world
of which we seem to be a part, and yet of which we
seem to have some apprehension as though we were
other than a part ; the strange problems of creation
and change and birth and death, of love and sin and
purification ; of a heaven dreamt of or believed in, or
somehow actually apprehended ; of life here, and of
an immortality yearned after and hoped for these

68 EMPEDOCLES

problems, these mysteries, no philosophy ever did or
ever can empty of their strangeness, or bring down
to the level of the commonplace certainties of
daily life or of science, which are no more than
shadows after all, that seem certainties because of
the background of mystery on which they are cast.

But just as an individual is a higher being, a fuller,
more truly human creature, when he has got so far
removed from the merely animal existence as to
realise that there are such problems and mysteries,
so also the humanisation of the race, the development
of its noblest peoples and its noblest literatures, have
been conditioned by the successive visions of these
mysteries in more and more complex organisation
by the great philosophers and poets and preachers.
The systems of such men may die, but such deaths
mean, as Empedocles said of the ordinary deaths of
things, only an infinity of new births. Being dead,
their systems yet speak in the inherited language
and ideas and aspirations and beliefs that form the
never-ending, still-renewing material for new philoso
phies and new faiths. In Thales, Heraclitus, Pytha
goras, Parmenides, Empedocles we have been touching
hands with an apostolic succession of great men and
great thinkers and great poets men of noble life
and lofty thoughts, true prophets and revealers. And
the apostolic succession even within the Greek world
does not fail for centuries yet.

THE PHILOSOPHER A PROPHET 69

Passing from the general conceptions of Empedocles
to those more particular rationalisations of particular
problems which very largely provided the motive of
early philosophies, while scientific methods were in
an undeveloped and uncritical condition, we may
notice such interesting statements as the following :
" The earth, which is at the centre of the sphere of the 135
universe, remains firm, because the spin of the uni
verse as a whole keeps it in its place like the water
in a spinning cup." He has the same conception of
the early condition of the earth as in other cosmo
gonies. At first it was a chaos of watery slough,
which slowly, under the influence of sky and sun,
parted off into earth and sea. The sea was the
sweat of the earth, and by analogy with the sweat
it was salt. The heavens, on the other hand, were
formed of air and fire, and the sun was, as it were, a
speculum at which the effulgence and the heat of the
whole heavens concentrated. But that the aether
and the fire had not been^ fully separated from earth
and water he held to be proved by the hot fountains
and fiery phenomena which must have been so familiar
to a native of Sicily. Curiously enough he imagined
fire to possess a solidifying power, and therefore attri
buted to it the solidity of the earth and the hardness
of the rocks. No doubt he had observed some effects
of fire in metamorphic formations in his own
vicinity.

70 EMPEDOCLES

137 He had also a conception of the gradual develop
ment on the earth of higher and higher forms of life,
the first being rude and imperfect, and a * struggle
for existence ensuing in which the monstrous and
the deficient gradually were eliminated the " two-
faced, the double-breasted, the oxen -shaped with
human prows, or human-shaped with head of ox, or
hemaphrodite," and so forth. Love and Strife worked
out their ends upon these varied forms ; some pro
created and reproduced after their image, others were
incapable of reproduction from mere monstrosity or

138 weakness, and disappeared. Something other than
mere chance thus governed the development of things ;
there was a law, a reason, a Logos governing the
process. This law or reason he perhaps fancifully
illustrated by attributing the different characters of
flesh and sinew and bone to the different numerical
proportions, in which they severally contain the
different elements.

On this Aristotle, keen-scented critic as he was,
has a question, or series of questions, to ask as to
the relation between this Logos, or principle of orderly
combination, and Love as the ruling force in all
unions of things. " Is Love," he asks, " a cause of
mixtures of any sort, or only of such sorts as Logos
dictates ? And whether then is Love identical with
this Logos, or are they separate and distinct ; and if
so, what settles their separate functions ?" Questions

SENS A TION THR UGH KINSHIP 7 1

which Empedocles did not answer, and perhaps would
not have tried to answer had he heard them.

The soul or life -principle in man Empedocles 139
regarded as an ordered composite of all the elements
or principles of the life in nature, and in this kinship
of the elements in man and the elements in nature
he found a rationale of our powers of perception.
" By the earth," said he, " we have perception of earth ;
by water we have perception of water ; of the divine
aether, by aether ; of destructive fire, by fire ; of love,
by love ; of strife, by strife." He therefore, as Aris
totle observes, drew no radical distinction between
sense -apprehension and thought. He located the
faculty of apprehension more specifically in the blood,
conceiving that in it the combination of the elements
was most complete. And the variety of apprehensive
gift in different persons he attributed to the greater
or lesser perfectness of this blood mixture in them
individually. Those that were dull and stupid had
a relative deficiency of the lighter and more invisible
elements ; those that were quick and impulsive had
a relatively larger proportion of these. Again, specific
faculties depended on local perfection of mixture in
certain organs ; orators having this perfectness in
their tongues, cunning craftsmen possessing it in
their hands, and so on. And the degrees of capacity
of sensation, which he found in various animals, or
even plants, he explained in similar fashion.

72 EMPEDOCLES

The process of sensation he conceived to be con
ditioned by an actual emission from the bodies per
ceived of elements or images of themselves which
found access to our apprehension through channels

140 congruous to their nature. But ordering, criticising,
organising these various apprehensions was the Mind
or Nous, which he conceived to be of divine nature, to
be indeed an expression or emanation of the Divine.
And here has been preserved a strangely interesting
passage, in which he incorporates and develops in
characteristic fashion the doctrine of transmigration

141 of souls: "There is a decree of Necessity, a law
given of old from the gods, eternal, sealed with
mighty oaths, that when any heavenly creature
(daemon) of those that are endowed with length of
days, shall in waywardness of heart defile his hands
with sin of deed or speech, he shall wander for thrice
ten thousand seasons far from the dwellings of the
blest, taking upon him in length of time all manner
of mortal forms, traversing in turn the many toilsome
paths of existence. Him the aetherial wrath hurries
onward to the deep, and the deep spews him forth
on to the threshold of earth, and unworn earth casts
him up to the fires of the sun, and again the aether
hurls him into the eddies. One receives him, and
then another, but detested is he of them all. Of
such am I also one, an exile and a wanderer from
God, a slave to strife and its madness."

THE WHOLE CREATION GROANETH 73

Thus to his mighty conception the life of all crea
tion, and not of man only, was a great expiation, an
eternal round of punishment for sin ; and in the un
ending flux of life each creature rose or fell in the
scale of existence according to the deeds of good or
ill done in each successive life ; rising sometimes to
the state of men, or among men to the high functions
of physicians and prophets and kings, or among
beasts to the dignity of the lion, or among trees to
the beauty of the laurel ; or, on the contrary, sinking
through sin to lowest forms of bestial or vegetable
life. Till at the last they who through obedience and
right-doing have expiated their wrong, are endowed
by the blessed gods with endless honour, to dwell for
ever with them and share their banquets, untouched
any more with human care and sorrow and pain.

The slaying of any living creature, therefore, 142
Empedocles, like Pythagoras, abhorred, for all were
kin. All foul acts were forms of worse than suicide ;
life should be a long act of worship, of expiation, of
purification. And in the dim past he pictured a
vision of a golden age, in which men worshipped not
many gods, but Love only, and not with sacrifices of
blood, but with pious images, and cunningly odorous
incense, and offerings of fragrant myrrh. With
abstinence also, and above all with that noblest absti
nence, the abstinence from vice and wrong.

CHAPTER VIII
THE ATOMISTS (concluded}

143 III. LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS. Leucippus is
variously called a native of Elea, of Abdera, of Melos,
of Miletus. He was a pupil of Zeno the Eleatic.

144 Democritus was a native of Abdera. They seem
to have been almost contemporary with Socrates.
The two are associated as thorough-going teachers
of the Atomic Philosophy, but Democritus, the
laughing philosopher, as he was popularly called
in later times, in distinction from Heraclitus, the
weeping philosopher, was much the more famous.

145 He lived to a great age. He himself refers to
his travels and studies thus : " Above all the men
of my time I travelled farthest, and extended my
inquiries to places the most distant. I visited
the most varied climates and countries, heard the
largest number of learned men, nor has any one sur
passed me in the gathering together of writings and
their interpretation, no, not even the most learned of
the Egyptians, with whom I spent five years." We

THE LAUGHING PHILOSOPHER 75

are also informed that, through desire of learning,
he visited Babylon and Chaldaea, to visit the astro
logers and the priests.

Democritus was not less prolific as a writer than 146
he was voracious as a student, and in him first the
division of philosophy into certain great sections,
such as physical, mathematical, ethical, was clearly
drawn. We are, however, mainly concerned with his 147
teaching in its more strictly philosophical aspects.
His main doctrine was professedly antithetical to
that of the Eleatics, who, it will be remembered,
worked out on abstract lines a theory of one in
divisible, eternal, immovable Being. Democritus, on
the contrary, declared for two co-equal elements, the
Full and the Empty, or Being and Nonentity. The
latter, he maintained, was as real as the former. As
we should put it, Body is unthinkable except by
reference to space which that body does not occupy,
as well as to space which it does occupy ; and con
versely Space is unthinkable except by reference to
body actually or potentially filling or defining it.

What Democritus hoped to get by this double or
correlative system was a means of accounting for or
conceiving of change in nature. The difficulty with
the Eleatics was, as we have seen, how to understand
whence or why the transition from that which
absolutely is, to this strange, at least apparent, sys
tem of eternal flux and transformation. Democritus

76 DEMOCRITUS

hoped to get over this difficulty by starting as fully
with that which is not, in other words, with that
which wants change in order to have any recognisable
being at all, as with that which is, and which there
fore might be conceived as seeking and requiring only
to be what it is.

148 Having got his principle of stability and his
principle of change on an equal footing, Democritus
next laid it down that all the differences visible in
things were differences either of shape, of arrange
ment, or of position ; practically, that is, he considered
that what seem to us to be qualitative differences in
things, e.g. hot or cold, sweet or sour, green or yellow,
are only resulting impressions from different shapes, or
different arrangements, or different modes of presenta
tion, among the atoms of which things are composed.
Coming now to that which is, Democritus, as
against the Eleatics, maintained that this was not a
unity, some one immovable, unchangeable existence,
but an innumerable number of atoms, invisible by
reason of their smallness, which career through empty
space (that which is not\ and by their union bring
objects into being, by/ their separation bring these to
destruction. The action of these atoms on each other
depended on the manner in which they were brought
into contact ; but in any case the unity of any object
was only an apparent unity, it being really constituted
of a multitude of interlaced and mutually related

ATOMS AND VOID 77

particles, and all growth or increase of the object
being conditioned by the introduction into the struc
ture of additional atoms from without.

For the motions of the atoms he had no anterior 149
cause to offer, other than necessity or fate. They
existed, and necessarily and always had existed, in a
state of whirl ; and for that which always had been
he maintained that no preceding cause could legiti
mately or reasonably be demanded.

Nothing, then, could come out of nothing ; all the 150
visible structure of the universe had its origin in the
movements of the atoms that constituted it, and con
ditioned its infinite changes. The atoms, by a useful
but perhaps too convenient metaphor, he called the
seeds of all things. They were infinite in number,
though not infinite in the number of their shapes.
Many atoms were similar to each other, and this
similarity formed a basis of union among them, a
warp, so to speak, or solid foundation across which
the woof of dissimilar atoms played to constitute the
differences of things.

Out of this idea of an eternal eddy or whirl 151
Democritus developed a cosmogony. The lighter
atoms he imagined flew to the outmost rim of the
eddy, there constituting the heavenly fires and the
heavenly aether. The heavier atoms gathered at
the centre, forming successively air and water and
the solid earth. Not that there was only one such

78 DEMOCRITUS

system or world, but rather multitudes of them, all
varying one from the other ; some without sun or
moon, others with greater luminaries than those of
our system, others with a greater number. All,
however, had necessarily a centre ; all as systems
were necessarily spherical.

152 As regards the atoms he conceived that when
they differed in weight this must be in respect of a
difference in their essential size. In this he was no
doubt combating the notion that the atoms say of
lead or gold were in their substance, taking equal
quantities, of greater weight than atoms of water or
air. The difference of weight in objects depended
on the proportion which the atoms in them bore to
the amount of empty space which was interlaced
with them. On the other hand, a piece of iron was
lighter yet harder than a piece of lead of equal size,
because of the special way in which the atoms in it
were linked together. There were fewer atoms in
it, but they were, in consequence of their structure
and arrangement, more tightly strung.

153 In all this Democritus was with great resolution
working out what we may call a strictly mechanical
theory of the universe. Even the soul or life-
principle in living creatures was simply a structure
of the finest and roundest (and therefore most
nimble) atoms, with which he compared the extremely
attenuated dust particles visible in their never-ending

THE WHIRL OF WORLDS 79

dance in a beam of light passed into a darkened
room. This structure of exceeding tenuity and
nimbleness was the source of the motion character
istic of living creatures, and provided that elastic
counteracting force to the inward -pressing nimble
air, whereby were produced the phenomena of re
spiration. Every object, in fact, whether living or
not, kept its form and distinctive existence by its
possession in degree of a kind of soul or spirit of
resistance in its structure, adequate to counteract the
pressure of external forces upon its particles.

Sensation and perception were forms in which 155
these external forces acted upon the more nimble and
lively existences, more particularly on living creatures.
For every body was continually sending forth ema
nations or images resembling itself sufficiently in
form and structure to affect perceptive bodies with
an apprehension of that form and structure. These
images travelled by a process of successive trans
mission, similar to that by which wave-motions are
propagated in water. They were, in other words,
not movements of the particles of the objects, which
latter must otherwise in time grow less and fade
away, but a modification in the arrangement of the
particles immediately next the object, which modi
fication reproduced itself in the next following, and
so on right through the medium to the perceptive
body.

8o DEMOCRITUS

156 These images tended by extension in all direc
tions to reach vast dimensions at times, and to
influence the minds of men in sleep and on other
occasions in strange ways. Hence men imagined
gods, and attributed those mighty phenomena of
nature earthquakes, tempests, lightning and thunder,
and dire eclipses of sun and moon, to the vaguely
visible powers which they imagined they saw. There
was indeed a soul or spirit of the universe, as there
was a soul or spirit of every individual thing that
constituted it. But this was only a finer system of
atoms after all. All else is convention or dream ;
the only realities are Atoms and Emptiness, Matter
and Space.

157 Of absolute verity through the senses we know
nothing ; our perceptions are only conventional
interpretations of we know not what. For to other
living creatures these same sensations have other
meanings than they have to us, and even the same
person is not always affected alike by the same
thing ; which then is the true of two differing per
ceptions we cannot say. And therefore either there
is no such thing as truth, or, at all events, we know
through the senses nothing of it. The only genuine
knowledge is that which transcends appearances,
and reasons out what is, irrespective of appearances,
in other words, the only genuine knowledge is that
of the (atomic) philosopher. And his knowledge is

NO GOD AND NO TRUTH 81

the result of the happy mixture of his atoms whereby
all is in equal balance, neither too hot nor too cold.
Such a man seeing in the mind s eye the whole
universe a tissue of whirling and interlacing atoms,
with no real mystery or terror before or after, will
live a life of cheerful fearlessness, undisturbed by
terrors of a world to come or of powers unseen.
His happiness is not in feastings or in gold, but in a
mind at peace. And three human perfections he
will seek to attain : to reason rightly, to speak
graciously, to do his duty.

CHAPTER IX

THE SOPHISTS

A CERTAIN analogy may perhaps be discerned
between the progression of philosophic thought in
Greece as we have traced it, and the political develop
ment which had its course in almost every Greek
state during the same period. The Ionic philosophy
may be regarded as corresponding with the kingly
era in Greek politics. Philosophy sits upon the
heights and utters its authoritative dicta for the
resolution of the seeming contradictions of things.
One principle is master, but the testimony of the
senses is not denied ; a harmony of thought and
sensation is sought in the interpretation of appear
ances by the light of a ruling idea. In Pythagoras
and his order we have an aristocratic organisation of
philosophy. Its truths are for the few, the best men
are the teachers, equal as initiated partakers in the
mysteries, supreme over all outside their society. A
reasoned and reasonable order and method are

ANARCHIC PHILOSOPHY 83

symbolised by their theory of Number ; their
philosophy is political, their politics oligarchic. In
the Eleatic school we have a succession of personal
attempts to construct a domination in the theory
of Nature ; some ideal conception is attempted to be
so elevated above the data of sensation as to override
them altogether, and the general result we are now
to see throughout the philosophic world, as it was
seen also throughout the world of politics, in a
total collapse of the principle of forced authority,
and a development of successively nearer approaches
to anarchic individualism and doubt. The notion
of an ultimately true and real, whatever form it
might assume in various theorists hands, being
in its essence apart from and even antagonistic to
the perceptions of sense, was at last definitely cast
aside as a delusion ; what remained were the
individual perceptions, admittedly separate, un
reasoned, unrelated ; Reason was dethroned, Chaos
was king. In other words, what seemed to any
individual sentient being at any moment to be, that
for him was, and nothing else was. The distinction
between the real and the apparent was definitely
attempted to be abolished, not as hitherto by reject
ing the sensually apparent in favour of the rationally
conceived real, but by the denial of any such real
altogether.

The individualistic revolution in philosophy not

84 THE SOPHISTS

only, however, had analogies with the similar revolu
tion contemporaneously going on in Greek politics,
it was greatly facilitated by it. Each, in short, acted
and reacted on the other. Just as the sceptical
philosophy of the Encyclopaedists in France promoted
the Revolution, and the Revolution in its turn
developed and confirmed the philosophic scepticism,
so also the collapse of contending philosophies in
Greece promoted the collapse of contending systems
of political authority, and the collapse of political
authority facilitated the growth of that individualism
in thought with which the name of the Sophists is
associated.

175 Cicero (Brut. 1 2) definitely connects the rise of
these teachers with the expulsion of the tyrants and
the establishment of democratic republics in Sicily.
From 466 to 406 B.C. Syracuse was democratically
governed, and a ( free career to talents, as in revolu
tionary France, so also in revolutionary Greece, began
to be promoted by the elaboration of a system of
persuasive argument. Devices of method called
* commonplaces were constructed, whereby, irre
spective of the truth or falsehood of the subject-
matter, a favourable vote in the public assemblies, a
successful verdict in the public courts, might more
readily be procured. Thus by skill of verbal rhetoric,
the worse might be made to appear the better reason ;
and philosophy, so far as it continued its functions,

SUCCESS NOT TRUTH 85

became a search, not for the real amidst the
confusions of the seeming and unreal, but a search for
the seeming and the plausible, to the detriment, or
at least to the ignoring, of any reality at all.

The end of philosophy then was no longer
universal truth, but individual success ; and con
sistently enough, the philosopher himself professed
the individualism of his own point of view, by teaching
only those who were prepared to pay him for his
teaching. All over Greece, with the growth of
democracy, this philosophy of persuasion became
popular ; but it was to Athens, under Pericles at this
time the centre of all that was most vivid and splendid
in Greek life and thought, that the chief teachers of
the new philosophy flocked from every part of the
Greek world.

The first great leader of the Sophists was Prota- 177
goras. He, it is said, was the first to teach for
pay ; he also was the first to adopt the name of
Sophist. In the word Sophist there was indeed latent
the idea which subsequently attached to it, but as
first used it seems to have implied this only, that
skill was the object of the teaching rather than
truth; the new teachers professed themselves
practical men, not mere theorists.

The Greek word, in short, meant an able cultivated
man in any branch of the arts ; and the development
of practical capacity was doubtless what Protagoras

86 PROTAGORAS

intended to indicate as the purpose of his teaching,
when he called himself a Sophist. But the ability
he really undertook to cultivate was ability to
persuade, for Greece at this time was nothing if not
political ; and persuasive oratory was the one road
to political success. And as Athens was the great
centre of Greek politics, as well as of Greek intellect,
to Athens Protagoras came as a teacher.

He was born at Abdera, in Thrace (birthplace
also of Democritus), in 480 B.C., began to teach at
Athens about 451 B.C., and soon acquired great
influence with Pericles, the distinguished leader of the
Athenian democracy at this time. It is even alleged
that when in 445 the Athenians were preparing to
establish a colony at Thurii in Italy, Protagoras was
requested to draw up a code of laws for the new
state, and personally to superintend its execution.

After spending some time in Italy he returned to
Athens, and taught there with great success for a
number of years. Afterwards he taught for some
time in Sicily, and died at the age of seventy, after
178 about forty years of professional activity. He does
not seem to have contented himself with the merely
practical task of teaching rhetoric, but in a work
which he, perhaps ironically, entitled Truth, he
enunciated the principles on which he based his
teaching. Those principles were summed up in the
sentence, " Man (by which he meant each man) is

MAN THE MEASURE 87

the measure of all things, whether of their existence
when they do exist, or of their non-existence when
they do not." In the development of this doctrine 179
Protagoras starts from a somewhat similar analysis
of things to that of Heraclitus and others. Every
thing is in continual flux, and the apparently real
objects in nature are the mere temporary and
illusory result of the in themselves invisible move
ments and minglings of the elements of which they
are composed ; and not only is it a delusion to
attempt to give a factitious reality to the things
which appear, it is equally a delusion to attempt to
separate the (supposed) thing perceived from the
perception itself. A thing is only as and when it is
perceived. And a third delusion is to attempt to
separate a supposed perceiving mind from the per
ception ; all three exist only in and through the
momentary perception ; the supposed reality behind
this, whether external in the object or internal in the
mind, is a mere imagination. Thus the Heraclitean
flux in Nature was extended to Mind also ; only the
sensation exists, and that only at the moment of its
occurrence ; this alone is truth, this alone is reality ;
all else is delusion.

It followed from this that as a man felt a thing 180
to be, so for him it veritably was. Thus abstract
truth or falsity could not be ; the same statements
could be indifferently true or false to different

88 PROTAGORAS

individuals at the same time, to the same individual
at different times. It followed that all appearances
were equally true : what seemed to be to any man,
that was alone the true for him. The relation of
such a doctrine as this to politics and to morals is
not far to seek. Every man s opinion was as good
as another s ; if by persuasion you succeeded in
altering a man s opinion, you had not deceived the
man, his new opinion was as true (to him) as the
old one. Persuasiveness, therefore, was the only
wisdom. Thus if a man is ill what he eats and
drinks seems bitter to him, and it is so ; when he is
well it seems the opposite, and is so. He is not a
wiser man in the second state than in the first, but
the second state is pleasanter. If then you can
persuade him that what he thinks bitter is really
sweet, you have done him good. This is what the
physician tries to do by his drugs ; this is what the
Sophist tries to do by his words. Virtue then is
teachable in so far as it is possible to persuade a
boy or a man by rhetoric that that course of conduct
which pleases others is a pleasant course for him.
But if any one happens not to be persuaded of this,
and continues to prefer his own particular course of
conduct, this is for him the good course. You
cannot blame him ; you cannot say he is wrong.
If you punish him you simply endeavour to
supply the dose of unpleasantness which may

ALL OPINIONS TRUE 89

be needed to put the balance in his case on the
same side as it already occupies in the case of other
people.

It may be worth while to anticipate a little,
and insert here in summary the refutation of this
position put into the mouth of Socrates by Plato in
the Theaetetus : " But I ought not to conceal from
you that there is a serious objection which may be
urged against this doctrine of Protagoras. For there
are states, such as madness and dreaming, in which
perception is false ; and half our life is spent in
dreaming ; and who can say that at this instant we
are not dreaming ? Even the fancies of madmen
are real at the time. But if knowledge is perception,
how can we distinguish between the true and the
false in such cases ? . . . Shall I tell you what
amazes me in your friend Protagoras ? What may
that be ? I like his doctrine that what appears is ;
but I wonder that he did not begin his great work
on truth with a declaration that a pig, or a dog-
faced baboon, or any other monster which has
sensation, is a measure of all things ; then while we
were reverencing him as a god he might have
produced a magnificent effect by expounding to us
that he was no wiser than a tadpole. For if truth
is only sensation, and one man s discernment is as
good as another s, and every man is his own judge,
and everything that he judges is right and true, then

00

PROTAGORAS

what need of Protagoras to be our instructor at a
high figure ; and why should we be less knowing
than he is, or have to go to him, if every man is the
measure of all things ? " . . . Socrates now resumes
the argument. As he is very desirous of doing just
ice to Protagoras, he insists on citing his own words :
What appears to each man is to him. "And
how," asks Socrates, "are these words reconcilable
with the fact that all mankind are agreed in thinking
themselves wiser than others in some respects, and
inferior to them in others ? In the hour of danger
they are ready to fall down and worship any one
who is their superior in wisdom as if he were a god.
And the world is full of men who are asking to be
taught and willing to be ruled, and of other men who
are willing to rule and teach them. All which
implies that men do judge of one another s impres
sions, and think some wise and others foolish. How
will Protagoras answer this argument ? For he
cannot say that no one deems another ignorant or
mistaken. If you form a judgment, thousands
and tens of thousands are ready to maintain the
opposite. The multitude may not and do not agree
in Protagoras own thesis, that man is the measure
of all things, and then who is to decide ? Upon
his own showing must not his truth depend on
the number of suffrages, and be more or less true in
proportion as he has more or fewer of them ? And

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM 91

[the majority being against him] he will be bound to
acknowledge that they speak truly who deny him to
speak truly, which is a famous jest And if he
admits that they speak truly who deny him to speak
truly, he must admit that he himself does not speak
truly. But his opponents will refuse to admit this
as regards themselves, and he must admit that they
are right in their refusal. The conclusion is, that
all mankind, including Protagoras himself, will deny
that he speaks truly ; and his truth will be true
neither to himself nor to anybody else " (Jowett,
Plato, iv. pp. 239 sqq.}

The refutation seems tolerably complete, but a
good deal had to happen before Greece was ready
to accept or Plato to offer such a refutation.

CHAPTER X

THE SOPHISTS (concluded}

183 GORGIAS was perhaps even more eminent a
Sophist than Protagoras. He was a native of
Leontini in Sicily, and came to Athens in the year
427 B.C. on a public embassy from his native city.
The splendid reputation for political and rhetorical
ability, which preceded him to Athens, he fully
justified both by his public appearances before the
Athenian assembly, and by the success of his private
instructions to the crowds of wealthy young men
who resorted to him. He dressed in magnificent
style, and affected a lofty and poetical manner of
speech, which offended the more critical, but which
pleased the crowd.

184 He also, like Protagoras, published a treatise in
which he expounded his fundamental principles, and
like Protagoras, he preceded it with a striking if
somewhat ironical title, and ah apophthegm in which
he summarised his doctrine. The title of his work
was Of the Non-Existent, that is, Of Nature, and

NOTHING KNOWABLE 93

his dictum, " Nothing exists, or if anything exists,
it cannot be apprehended by man, and even if it
could be apprehended, the man who apprehended it
could not expound or explain it to his neighbour."
In support of this strange doctrine, Gorgias adopted
the quibbling method of argument which had been
applied with some success to dialectical purposes by
Zeno, Melissus, and others (see above, pp. 44 sqq^)

His chief argument to prove the first position laid 185
down by him depended on a double and ambiguous
use of the word is ; " That which is not, is the non
existent : the word is must, therefore, be applicable
to it as truly as when we say That which is, is ;
therefore, being is predicable of that which is not."
So conversely he proved not-being to be predicable
of that which is. And in like manner he made away
with any possible assertions as to the finite or infinite,
the eternal or created, nature of that which is. Logic
could supply him with alternative arguments from
whatever point he started, such as would seem
to land the question in absurdity. Hence his
first position was (he claimed) established, that
Nothing is.

To prove the second, that even if anything is, 186
it cannot be known to man, he argued thus : " If
what a man thinks is not identical with what is,
plainly what is cannot be thought. And that what
a man thinks is not identical with what is can be

94 GORGIAS

shown from the fact that thinking does not affect
the facts. You may imagine a man flying, or a
chariot coursing over the deep, but you do not find
these things to occur because you imagine them.
Again, if we assume that what we think is identical
with what is, then it must be impossible to think of
what is not. But this is absurd ; for we can think
of such admittedly imaginary beings as Scylla and
Chimaera, and multitudes of others. There is there
fore no necessary relation between our thoughts and
any realities ; we may believe, but we cannot prove,
which (if any) of our conceptions have relation to an
external fact and which have not.

187 Nor thirdly, supposing any man had obtained an
apprehension of what is real, could he possibly com
municate it to any one else. If a man saw anything,
he could not possibly by verbal description make
clear what it is he sees to a man who has never
seen. And so if a man has not himself the appre
hension of reality, mere words from another cannot
possibly give him any idea of it. He may imagine
he has the same idea as the speaker, but where is he
going to get the common test by which to establish
the identity ?

Without attempting to follow Gorgias further, we
can see plainly enough the object and purport of the
whole doctrine. Its main result is to isolate. It
isolates each man from his fellows ; he cannot tell

THE SOLITUDE OF SCEPTICISM 95

what they know or think, they cannot reach any
common ground with him. It isolates him from
nature ; he cannot tell what nature is, he cannot tell
whether he knows anything of nature or reality at
all. It isolates him from himself; he cannot tell for
certain what relation exists (if any) between what
he imagines he perceives at any moment and any
remembered or imagined previous experiences ; he
cannot be sure that there ever were any such experi
ences, or what that self was (if anything) which
had them, or whether there was or is any self per
ceiving anything.

Let us imagine the moral effect on the minds of
the ablest youth of Greece of such an absolute
collapse of belief. The philosophic scepticism did
not deprive them of their appetites or passions ; it
did not in the least alter their estimate of the prizes
of success, or the desirability of wealth and power.
All it did was to shatter the invisible social bonds of
reverence and honour and truth and justice, which in
greater or less degree act as a restraining force upon
the purely selfish appetites of men. Not only belief
in divine government disappeared, but belief in any
government external or internal ; justice became a
cheating device to deprive a man of what was ready
to his grasp ; good-faith was stupidity when it was
not a more subtle form of deceit ; morality was at
best a mere convention which a man might cancel if

96 GORGIAS

he pleased ; the one reality was the appetite of the
moment, the one thing needful its gratification ;
society, therefore, was universal war, only with
subtler weapons.

Of course Protagoras and Gorgias were only
notable types of a whole horde of able men who in
various ways, and with probably less clear notions
than these men of the drift or philosophic significance
of their activity, helped all over Greece in the pro
mulgation of this new gospel of self-interest. Many
Sophists no doubt troubled themselves very little
with philosophical questions ; they were agnostics,
know-nothings ; all they professed to do was to
teach some practical skill of a verbal or rhetorical
character. They had nothing to do with the nature
or value of ideals ; they did not profess to say
whether any end or aim was in itself good or bad,
but given an end or aim, they were prepared to help
those who hired them to acquire a skill which would
be useful towards attaining it.

But whether a philosophy or ultimate theory of
life be expressly stated or realised by a nation or an
individual, or be simply ignored by them, there
always is some such philosophy or theory underlying
their action, and that philosophy or theory tends to
work itself out to its logical issue in action, whether
men openly profess it or no. And the theory of
negation of law in nature or in man which underlay

THE LA WLESSNESS OF SCEPTICISM 97

the sophistic practice had its logical and necessary
effect on the social structure throughout Greece, in a
loosening of the bonds of religion, of family rever
ence and affection, of patriotism, of law, of honour.
Thucydides in a well-known passage (iii. 82) thus
describes the prevalent condition of thought in
his own time, which was distinctively that of the
sophistic teaching : " The common meaning of
words was turned about at men s pleasure ; the
most reckless bravo was deemed the most desirable
friend ; a man of prudence and moderation was
styled a coward ; a man who listened to reason was
a good-for-nothing simpleton. People were trusted
exactly in proportion to their violence and unscrupu-
lousness, and no one was so popular as the successful
conspirator, except perhaps one who had been clever
enough to outwit him at his own trade, but any one
who honestly attempted to remove the causes of such
treacheries was considered a traitor to his party. As
for oaths, no one imagined they were to be kept a
moment longer than occasion required ; it was, in
fact, an added pleasure to destroy your enemy if you
had managed to catch him through his trusting to
your word."

These are the words not of Plato, who is supposed
often enough to allow his imagination to carry him
beyond his facts about the Sophists as about others,
nor are they the words of a satiric poet such as

H

98 THE SOPHISTS

Aristophanes. They are the words of the most
sober and philosophic of Greek historians, and they
illustrate very strikingly the tendency, nay, the
absolute necessity, whereby the theories of philoso
phers in the closet extend themselves into the
market-place and the home, and find an ultimate
realisation of themselves for good or for evil in the
business and bosoms of the common crowd.

It is not to be said that the individualistic and
iconoclastic movement which the Sophists represented
was wholly bad, or wholly unnecessary, any more
(to again quote a modern instance) than that the
French Revolution was. There was much, no doubt,
in the traditional religion and morality of Greece at
that time which represented obsolete and antiquated
conditions, when every city lived apart from its
neighbours with its own narrow interests and local

o

cults and ceremonials. Greece was ceasing to be an
unconnected crowd of little separate communities ;
unconsciously it was preparing itself for a larger
destiny, that of conqueror and civiliser of East
and West. This scepticism, utterly untenable and
unworkable on the lines extravagantly laid down
by its leading teachers, represented the birth of
new conditions of thought and action adapted to
the new conditions of things. On the surface, and
accepted literally, it seemed to deny the possibility of
knowledge ; it threatened to destroy humanity and

THE GOOD IN SCEPTICISM 99

civilisation. But its strength lay latent in an
implied denial only of what was merely traditional ; it
denied the finality of purely Greek preconceptions ;
it was laying the foundations of a broader humanity.
It represented the claim of a new generation to have
no dogma or assumption thrust on it by mere force,
physical or moral " / too am a man," it said ; " /
have rights ; my reason must be convinced." This
is the fundamental thought at the root of most
revolutions and reformations and revivals, and the
thought is therefore a necessary and a just one.

Unfortunately it seems to be an inevitable con
dition of human affairs that nothing new, however
necessary or good can come into being out of the
old, without much sorrow and many a birth-pang.
The extravagant, the impetuous, the narrow-minded
on both sides seize on their points of difference,
raise them into battle-cries, and make what might
be a peaceful regeneration a horrid battlefield of
contending hates. The Christ when He comes
brings not peace into the world, but a sword. And
men of evil passions and selfish ambitions are quick
on both sides to make the struggle of old and new
ideals a handle for their own indulgence or their
own advancement ; the Pharisees and the Judases
between them make the Advent in some of its aspects
a sorry spectacle.

A reconciler was wanted who should wed what

ioo THE SOPHISTS

was true in the new doctrine of individualism with
what was valuable in the old doctrine of universal
and necessary truth ; who should be able to say,
"Yes, I acknowledge that your individual view of
things must be reckoned with, and mine, and every
body else s ; and for that very reason do I argue for
a universal and necessary truth, because the very
truth for you as an individual is just this universal."
The union and identification of the Individual and
Universal, this paradox of philosophy is the doctrine
of Socrates

CHAPTER XI

SOCRATES

THE sophistic teaching having forced philosophy to
descend into the practical interests and personal
affairs of men, it followed that any further step in
philosophy, any reaction against the Sophists, could
only begin from the moral point of view. Philosophy,
as an analysis of the data of perception or of nature,
had issued in a social and moral chaos. Only by
brooding on the moral chaos could the spirit of truth
evoke a new order ; only out of the moral darkness
could a new intellectual light be made to shine.
The social and personal anarchy seemed to be a
reductio ad dbsurdum of the philosophy of nature ; if
ever the philosophy of nature was to be recovered it
must be through a revision of the theory of morals.
If it could be proved that the doctrine of individual
ism, of isolation, which the analysis of a Protagoras
or a Gorgias had reached, was not only unlivable
but unthinkable, carried the seeds of its own de
struction, theoretical as well as practical, within

102 SOCRATES

itself, then the analysis of perception, from which
this moral individualism issued, might itself be called
to submit to revision, and a stable point of support
in the moral world might thus become a centre of
stability for the intellectual and the physical also.

By a perfectly logical process, therefore, the crisis
of philosophy produced in Greece through the moral
and social chaos of the sophistic teaching had two
issues, or perhaps we may call it one issue, carried
out on the one side with a less, on the other side
with a greater completeness. The less complete
reaction from sophistic teaching attempted only such
reconstruction of the moral point of view as should
recover a law or principle of general and universally
cogent character, whereon might be built anew a
moral order without attempting to extend the in
quiry as to a universal principle into the regions of
abstract truth or into physics. The more complete
and logical reaction, starting, indeed, from a universal
principle in morals, undertook a logical reconstruction
on the recovered universal basis all along the line of
what was knowable.

To Socrates it was given to recover the lost point
of stability in the world of morals, and by a system
of attack, invented by himself, to deal in such a
manner with the anarchists about him as to prepare
the way for his successors, when the time was ripe
for a more extended exposition of the new point of

THE CRISIS OF PHILOSOPHY 103

view. Those who in succession to him worked out
a more limited theory of law, mainly or exclusively
in the world of morals, only were called the Incom
plete Socratics. Those who undertook to work it
out through the whole field of the knowable, the
Complete Socratics, were the two giants of philosophy,
Plato and Aristotle.

Greek philosophy then marks with the life of
Socrates a parting of the ways in two senses : first,
inasmuch as with him came the reaction from a
physical or theoretical philosophy, having its issue in
a moral chaos ; and second, inasmuch as from him
the two great streams of later philosophy issued
the one a philosophy of law or universals in action,
the other a philosophy of law or universals in thought
and nature as well.

Socrates, son of Sophroniscus a sculptor and
Phaenarete a midwife, was born at Athens in or
about the year 469 B.C. His parents were probably
poor, for Socrates is represented as having been too
poor to pay the fees required for instruction by the
Sophists of his time. But in whatever way acquired
or assimilated, it is certain that there was little of
the prevalent culture in cultivated Athens with which
Socrates had not ultimately a working acquaintance.

Among a people distinguished generally for their
handsome features and noble proportions, Socrates
was a notable exception. His face was squat and

104 SOCRATES

round, his eyes protruding, his lips thick ; he was
clumsy and uncouth in appearance, careless of dress,
a thorough Bohemian, as we should call him. He
was, however, gifted with an uncommon bodily
vigour, was indifferent to heat and cold, by tempera
ment moderate in food and drink, yet capable on
occasion of drinking most people under the table.
He was of an imperturbable humour, not to be
excited either by danger or by ridicule. His vein
of sarcasm was keen and trenchant, his natural
shrewdness astonishing, all the more astonishing
because crossed with a strange vein of mysticism
and a curious self-forgetfulness. As he grew up he
felt the visitation of a mysterious internal voice, to
which or to his own internal communings he would
sometimes be observed to listen in abstracted stillness
for hours. The voice within him was felt as a
restraining force, limiting his action in various ways,
but leaving him free to wander about among his
fellows, to watch their doings and interpret their
thoughts, to question unweariedly his fellows of
every class, high and low, rich and poor, concerning
righteousness and justice and goodness and purity
and truth. -He did not enter on his philosophic
work with some grand general principle ready-made,
to which he was prepared to fit the facts by hook
or by crook. Rather he compared himself to his
mother, the midwife ; he sought to help others to

PHILOSOPHIC MIDWIFERY 105

express themselves ; he had nothing to tell them, he
wanted them to tell him. This was the irony of
Socrates, the eternal questioning, which in time came
to mean in people s minds what the word does now.
For it was hard, and grew every year harder, to
convince people that so subtle a questioner was as
ignorant as he professed to be ; or that the man who
could touch so keenly the weak point of all other
men s answers, had no answer to the problems of life
himself.

In striking contrast, then, to the method of all
previous philosophies, Socrates busied himself to
begin with, not with some general intellectual
principle, but with a multitude of different people,
with their notions especially on moral ideas, with the
meaning or no-meaning which they attached to par
ticular words, in short, with the individual, the par
ticular, the concrete, the every-day. He did not at
all deny that he had a purpose in all this. On the
contrary, he openly professed that he was in search
of the lost universal, the lost law of men s thoughts
and actions. He was convinced that life was not
the chaos that the Sophists made out ; that nobody
really believed it to be a chaos ; that, on the contrary,
everybody had a meaning and purport in his every
word and act, which could be made intelligible to him
self and others, if you could only get people to think
out clearly what they really meant. Philosophy

io6 SOCRATES

had met her destruction in the busy haunts of men ;
there where had been the bane, Socrates firm faith
sought ever and everywhere the antidote.

This simple enough yet profound and far-
reaching practice of Socrates was theorised in later
times as a logical method, known to us as Induction,
or the discovery of universal laws or principles out
195 of an accumulation of particular facts. And thus
Aristotle, with his technical and systematising
intellect, attributes two main innovations in philo
sophy to Socrates ; the Inductive process of reason
ing, and the establishing of General Ideas or
Definitions upon or through this process. This, true
enough as indicating what was latent in the Socratic
method, and what was subsequently actually de
veloped out of it by Aristotle himself, is nevertheless
probably an anachronism if one seeks to repre
sent it as consciously present in Socrates mind.
Socrates adopted the method unconsciously, just
because he wanted to get at the people about him,
and through them at what they thought. He was
the pioneer of Induction rather than its inventor ; he
created, so to speak, the raw material for a theory of
induction and definition ; he knew and cared nothing
about such theories himself.

A story which may or may not be true in fact
is put in Socrates mouth by Plato, as to the cause
which first started him on his " search for definitions."

THE WISEST OF MEN 107

One of his friends, he tells us, named Chaerephon,
went to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, and asked
whether there was anybody wiser than Socrates.
The answer was given that there was none wiser.
This answer was reported to Socrates, who was
much astonished, his own impression being that he
had no wisdom or knowledge at all. So with a view
to prove the oracle wrong he went in succession to
various people of eminence and reputation in the
various walks of life, statesmen and poets and handi
craftsmen and others, in the expectation that they
would show, on being questioned, such a knowledge
of the principles on which their work was based as
would prove their superior wisdom. But to his
astonishment he found one after another of these
men wanting in any apprehension of principles at
all. They seemed to work by a kind of haphazard
or rule of thumb, and indeed felt annoyed that
anything more should be expected of them. From
which at the last Socrates came to the conclusion
that perhaps the oracle was right in this sense at
least, that, if he himself knew nothing more than
his fellows, he was at least conscious of his own
ignorance, whereas they were not.

Whether this tale may not itself be a specimen of
Socrates irony we cannot tell, but at all events it
illustrates from another point of view the real mean
ing of Socrates life. He, at least, was not content

io8 SOCRATES

to rest in haphazard and rule of thumb ; he was
determined to go on till he found out what was the
law or principle of men s acts and words. The
ignorance of others as to any such law or principle
in their own case did not convince him that there
was no such law or principle ; only it was there (he
thought) working unconsciously, and therefore in a
way defencelessly. And so he compares himself at
times to a gadfly, whose function it is to sting and
irritate people out of their easy indifference, and force
them to ask themselves what they were really driving
at. Or again, he compares himself to the torpedo-
fish, because he tried to give people a shock when
ever they attempted to satisfy him with shallow and
unreal explanations of their thoughts and actions.

The disinterested self-sacrificing nobility of So
crates life, thus devoted to awakening them that
sleep out of their moral torpor ; the enmities that
his keen and trenchant questionings of quacks and
pretenders of every kind induced ; the devotion
of some of his friends, the unhappy falling away
of others ; the calumnies of interested enemies,
the satires of poets ; and lastly, the story of the
final attack by an ungrateful people on their one
great teacher, of his unjust condemnation and heroic
death all this we must pass over here. The
story is in outline, at least, a familiar one, and it is
one of the noblest in history. What is more to

THE GADFLY OF ATHENS 109

the purpose for us is to ascertain how far his search
for definitions was successful ; how far he was
able to

Take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them ;

how far, in short, he was able to evolve a law, a
universal principle, out of the confused babel of
common life and thought and speech, strong enough
and wide enough on which to build a new order for
this world, a new hope for the world beyond.

We have said that Socrates made the individual
and the concrete the field of his search. And not
only did he look to individuals for light, he looked
to each individual specifically in that aspect of his
character and faculty which was most particular to
himself. That is to say, if he met a carpenter, it
was on his carpentering that he questioned him ; if
a sculptor, on his practice as a sculptor ; if a states
man, on his statesmanship. In short, he did not
want general vague theories on subjects of which his
interlocutors could not be supposed to have any
special experience or knowledge ; he interrogated
each on the subject which he knew best.

And what struck him, in contrast to the confusion
and uncertainty and isolation of the sophistic teach
ing in the air/ was that when you get a man to
talk on his own trade, which he knoivs, as is proved by
the actual work he produces, you find invariably two

110

SOCRATES

things -first, that the skill is the man s individual
possession no doubt, the result of inborn capacity
and continuous training and practice ; but second,
that just in proportion to that individual skill is the
man s conviction that his skill has reference to a law
higher than himself, outside himself. If the man
whom Socrates interviewed was a skilful statesman,
he would tell you he sought to produce obedience to
law or right among the citizens ; if he was a skilful
sculptor, he produced beautiful things ; if he was a
skilful handicraftsman, he produced useful things.
Justice, beauty, utility ; these three words in different
ways illustrated the existence of something always
realising itself no doubt in individuals and their
works, but nevertheless exercising a governing in
fluence upon these to such a degree that this ideal
something might be conceived as prior to the indi
vidual or his work ; or secondly, as inherent in them
and giving value to them ; or thirdly, as coming in
at the end as the perfection or completion of them.
This law or ideal then had a threefold aspect in its
own nature, being conceivable as Justice, as Beauty,
as Utility ; it had a threefold aspect in relation to
the works produced in accordance with it, as the
cause producing, the cause inhering, the cause com
pleting or perfecting.

We may therefore conceive Socrates as arguing
thus : " You clever Sophists, when we let you take

JUSTICE, BEAUTY, UTILITY in

us into the region of abstract talk, have a knack of
so playing with words that in the end we don t seem
to know anything for certain, especially on such
subjects as we have hitherto thought the most im
portant, such as God and right and truth and justice
and purity. We seem to be perfectly defenceless
against you ; and what is more, any smart youth,
whose opinion on any practical matter no one would
think of taking, can very soon pick up the trick from
you, and bewilder plain people really far wiser than
himself by his clever argumentation ; all going to
prove that there is nothing certain, nothing real,
nothing binding ; nothing but opinions and con
ventions and conscious or unconscious humbug in
the universe.

" But when I go and have a quiet talk with any
man who really is a known master of some craft or
skill, about that craft or skill, I find no doubt what
ever existing in his mind about there being a law, a
something absolutely real and beautiful and true in
connection with it He, on the contrary, lives with
no other purpose or hope or desire but as far as he
can to realise in what he works at something of this
real and beautiful and true, which was before him,
will be after him, is the only valuable thing in him,
but yet which honours him with the function of, in
his day and generation, expressing it before the eyes
of men.

ii2 SOCRATES

" Have we not here a key to the great secret ?
If each man, in respect of that which he knows best
because he lives by it and for it, knows with intimate
knowledge and certainty that there at least there is
a Law working, not himself, but higher and greater
than he, have we not here a hint of the truth for
the universe as a whole ; that there also and in all
its operations, great as well as small, there must be a
Law, a great Idea or Ideal working, which was before
all things, works in and gives value to all things, will
be the consummation of all things ? Is not this
what we mean by the Divine?"

Thus Socrates, despising not the meaner things
of life, but bending from the airy speculations of the
proud to the realities which true labour showed him,
laid his ear, so to speak, close to the breast of nature,
and caught there the sound of her very heart-beats.

" Virtue is knowledge," thus he formulated his
new vision of things. Knowledge, yes ; but real
knowledge ; not mere head-knowledge or lip-know
ledge, but the knowledge of the skilled man, the
man who by obedience and teachableness and self-
restraint has come to a knowledge evidencing itself
in works expressive of the law that is in him, as he
is in it. Virtue is knowledge ; on the one hand,
therefore, not something in the air, unreal, intangible ;
but something in me, in you, in each man, something
which you cannot handle except as individual and

VIRTUE IS KNOWLEDGE 113

in individuals ; on the other hand, something more
than individual or capricious or uncertain, some
thing which is absolute, over-ruling, eternal.

Virtue is knowledge. And so if a man is
virtuous, he is realising what is best and truest in
himself, he is fulfilling also what is best and truest
without himself. He is free, for only the truth
makes free ; he is obedient to law, but it is at once
a law eternally valid, and a law which he dictates to
himself. And therefore virtue is teachable, inasmuch
as the law in the teacher, perfected in him, is also
the law in the taught, latent in him, by both indi
vidually possessed, but possessed by both in virtue
of its being greater than both, of its being something
more than individual.

Virtue is knowledge. And therefore the law
of virtuous growth is expressed in the maxim
engraved on the Delphic temple, Know thyself.
Know thyself, that is, realise thyself; by obedience
and self-control come to your full stature ; be in fact
what you are in possibility ; satisfy yourself, in the
only way in which true self-satisfaction is possible,
by realising in yourself the law which constitutes
your real being.

Virtue is knowledge. And therefore all the
manifold relations of life, the home, the market,
the city, the state ; all the . multiform activities of
life, labour and speech and art and literature and

i

ii 4 SOCRATES

law ; all the sentiments of life, friendship and love
and reverence and courage and hope, all these are
parts of a knowable whole ; they are expressions
of law ; they are Reason realising itself through
individuals, and in the same process realising them.

CHAPTER XII
SOCRATES (concluded}

IT must not be imagined that anywhere in the
recorded conversations of Socrates can we find thus
in so many words expounded his fundamental
doctrine. Socrates was not an expositor but a
questioner ; he disclaimed the position of a teacher,
he refused to admit that any were his pupils or
disciples. But his questioning had two sides, each
in its way leading people on to an apprehension of
the ideal in existence. The first side may be called
the negative or destructive, the second, the positive
or constructive. In the first, whose object was to
break down all formalism, all mere regard for rules
or traditions or unreasoned maxims, his method had
considerable resemblance to that of the Sophists ;
like them he descended not infrequently to what
looked very like quibbling and word-play. As
Aristotle observes, the dialectic method differed from
that of the Sophists not so much in its form, as in the
purpose for which it was employed. The end of the

ii6 SOCRATES

Sophists was to confuse, the end of Socrates was
through confusion to reach a more real, because a
more reasoned certainty ; the Sophists sought to
leave the impression that there was no such thing
as truth ; he wished to lead people to the conviction
that there was a far deeper truth than they were as
yet possessed of.

A specimen of his manner of conversation pre
served for us by Xenophon (Memor. IV. ii.) will
make the difference clearer. Euthydemus was a
young man who had shown great industry in forming
a collection of wise sayings from poets and others,
and who prided himself on his superior wisdom
because of his knowledge of these. Socrates skilfully
manages to get the ear of this young man by com
mending him for his collection, and asks him what
he expects his learning to help him to become ? A
physician ? No, Euthydemus answers. An architect ?
No. And so in like manner with other practical
skills, the geometrician s, astronomer s, professional
reciter s. None of these he discovers is what Euthy
demus aims at. He hopes to become a great
politician and statesman. Then of course he hopes
to be a just man himself? Euthydemus flatters
himself he is that already. " But," says Socrates,
" there must be certain acts which are the proper
products of justice, as of other functions or skills ?"
" No doubt." " Then of course you can tell us what

THE DIALECTIC METHOD 117

those acts or products are?" " Of course I can, and
the products of injustice as well." " Very good ;
then suppose we write down in two opposite columns
what acts are products of justice and what of in
justice." "I agree," says Euthydemus. "Well
now, what of falsehood ? In which column shall we
put it?" " Why, of course in the unjust column."
" And cheating?" " In the same column." " And
stealing ?" "In it too."" And enslaving ?" " Yes."
" Not one of these can go to the just column ?"
" Why, that would be an unheard-of thing."

" Well but," says Socrates, " suppose a general
has to deal with some enemy of his country that has
done it great wrong ; if he conquer and enslave this
enemy, is that wrong?" "Certainly not." "If he
carries off the enemy s goods or cheats him in his
strategy, what about these acts?" "Oh, of course
they are quite right. But I thought you were talk
ing about deceiving or ill-treating friends." " Then
in some cases we shall have to put these very same
acts in both columns?" " I suppose so."

" Well, now, suppose we confine ourselves to
friends. Imagine a general with an army under
him discouraged and disorganised. Suppose he tells
them that reserves are coming up, and by cheat
ing them into this belief he saves them from their
discouragement, and enables them to win a victory.
What about this cheating of one s friends?" "Why, I

ii8 SOCRATES

suppose we shall have to put this too on the just
side." " Or suppose a lad needs medicine, but
refuses to take it, and his father cheats him into
the belief that it is something nice, and getting him
to take it, saves his life ; what about that cheat ? "
" That will have to go to the just side too." " Or
suppose you find a friend in a desperate frenzy, and
steal his sword from him, for fear he should kill him
self ; what do you say to that theft ? " " That will
have to go there too." " But I thought you said there
must be no cheating of friends ? " " Well, I must
take it all back, if you please." "Very good. But
now there is another point I should like to ask you.
Whether do you think the man more unjust who is
a voluntary violator of justice, or he who is an
involuntary violator of it?" "Upon my word,
Socrates, I no longer have any confidence in my
answers. For the whole thing has turned out to be
exactly the contrary of what I previously imagined.
However, suppose I say that the voluntary deceiver
is the more unjust." " Do you consider that justice
is a matter of knowledge just as much (say) as writ
ing ?___ Yes, I do." "Well now, which do you
consider the better skilled as a writer, the man who
makes a mistake in writing or in reading what is
written, because he chooses to do so, or the man who
does so because he can t help it ? " " Oh, the first ;
because he can put it -right whenever he likes."

INSTR UCTION THR O UGH HUMILIA TION 1 1 9

"Very well, if a man in the same way breaks the
rule of right, knowing what he is doing, while an
other breaks the same rule because he can t help it,
which by analogy must be the better versed in
justice?" "The first, I suppose." "And the man
who is better versed in justice must be the juster
man ? " " Apparently so ; but really, Socrates, I
don t know where I am. I have been flattering
myself that I was in possession of a philosophy
which could make a good and able man of me. But
how great, think you, must now be my disappoint
ment, when I find myself unable to answer the
simplest question on the subject ? "

Many other questions are put to him, tending to
probe his self-knowledge, and in the end he is
brought to the conclusion that perhaps he had better
hold his tongue, for it seems he knows nothing at
all. And so he went away deeply despondent,
despising himself as an absolute dolt. " Now
many," adds Xenophon, " when brought into this
condition by Socrates, never came near him again.
But Euthydemus concluded that his only hope of
ever being worth anything was in seeing as much of
Socrates as he could, and so he never quitted his
side as long as he had a chance, but tried to follow
his mode of living. And Socrates, when he per
ceived this to be his temper, no longer tormented
him, but sought with all simplicity and clearness to

120 SOCRATES

show him what he deemed it best for him to do and
think."

Was this cross-examination mere * tormenting
with a purpose, or can we discover underlying it any
hint of what Socrates deemed to be the truth about
justice ?

Let us note that throughout he is in search of a
definition, but that as soon as any attempt is made
to define or classify any particular type of action as
just or unjust, special circumstances are suggested
which overturn the classification. Let us note
further that while the immediate result is apparently
only to confuse, the remoter but more permanent
result is to raise a suspicion of any hard and fast
definitions, and to suggest that there is something
deeper in life than language is adequate to express,
a law in the members/ a living principle for good,
which transcends forms and maxims, and which
alone gives real value to acts. Note further the
suggestion that this living principle has a character
analogous to the knowledge or skill of an accom
plished artificer ; it has relation on the one hand to
law, as a principle binding on the individual, it has
relation on the other hand to utility, as expressing
itself, not in words, but in acts beneficial to those
concerned. Hence the Socratic formula, Justice is
equivalent to the Lawful on the one hand, to the
Useful on the other.

JUSTICE AND UTILITY 121

Socrates had thus solved by anticipation the
apparently never-ending controversy about morality.
Is it a matter imposed by God upon the heart and
conscience of each individual ? Is it dictated by the
general sense of the community ? Is it the product
of Utility? The Socratic answer would be that it
is all three, and that all three mean ultimately the
same thing. What^God prescribes is what man when
he is trulyjnan desires ; and what God prescribes
and man desires is that which is good and useful
for man. It is not a matter for verbal definition but
for vital realisation ; the true morality is that which
works ; the ideally desirable, is ultimately the only
possible, course of action, for all violations of it are
ultimately suicidal.

Note finally the suggestion that the man who
knoivs (in Socrates sense of knowledge) what is
right, shows only more fully his righteousness when
he voluntarily sins ; it is the unwilling sinner who
is the wrongdoer. When we consider this strange
doctrine in relation to the instances given, the
general with his army, the father with his son, the
prudent friend with his friend in desperate straits,
we see that what is meant is that c sin in_the real

some formal standard^ ^ least UP ,
thecase of hose who jr^^Jj^tj^j n, thp rgg_of^
goodness in itsjtnieLQaturejn

122 SOCRATES

their characters and lives. As St. Paul expressed it
(Rom. xiii. 10), "Love is the fulfilling of the law."
Or again (Gal. v. 23), after enumerating the fruits
of the spirit love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentle
ness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance he adds,
"Against such there is no law."

In the domain of life, not less than in that of the
arts, the highest activity does not always or neces
sarily take the form of conformity to rule. There
are critical moments when rules fail, when, in fact,
obedience to rule would mean disobedience to that
higher law, of which rules and formulae are at best
only an adumbration. The originality of the great
musician or painter consists in just such tran
scendence of accepted formulae ; this is why he in
variably encounters opposition and obloquy from the
learned conventional pedants of his time. And in
the domain of morals the martyrs, reformers, prophets
are in like manner willing sinners. They are
denounced, persecuted, crucified ; for are they not
disturbers of society ; do they not unsettle young
men ; do they not come, as Christ came, not
to bring peace into the world, but a sword ? And
thus it is that the willing sinners of one generation
are the martyrs and heroes of the next. Through
their life and death a richer meaning has been given
to the law of beauty or of rectitude, only, alas ! in
its turn to be translated into new conventions, new

RIGHTEOUSNESS TRANSCENDING RULE 123

formulae, which shall in due time require new martyrs
to transcend them. And thus, on the other hand,
the perfectly honest sticklers for the old and common
place, unwilling sinners all unconscious of their sin,
are fated to bear in history the brand of men who
have persecuted the righteous without cause. To
each, according to the strange sad law of life, time
brings its revenges.

CHAPTER XIII

THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS

204 I. ARISTIPPUS AND THE CYRENAICS. Aristippus
was a native of Cyrene, a Greek colony on the north
coast of Africa. He is said to have come to Athens
because of his desire to hear Socrates ; but from the
notices of him which we find in Xenophon s memoirs
he appears to have been from the first a somewhat
intractable follower, dissenting especially from the
poverty and self-denial of the master s mode of life.

205 He in course of time founded a school of his own,
called the Cyrenaic from his own place of birth, and
from the fact that many subsequent leaders of the
school also belonged to Cyrene. Among his notable
disciples were his daughter Arete, her son named
Aristippus after his grandfather, Ptolemaeus the
Aethiopian, Antipater of Cyrene, and a long succes
sion of others.

Aristippus was a man of considerable subtlety of
mind, a ready speaker, clever in adapting himself to
persons and circumstances. On one occasion, being

A PHILOSOPHER AT EASE 125

asked what benefit he considered philosophy had
conferred upon him, he answered, " The capacity of
associating with every one without embarrassment."
Philosophy, in fact, was to Aristippus a method of
social culture, a means of making the best of life as
he found it. As Horace observes of him (Epp. i.
17- 23)

Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res
Tentantem majora, fere praesentibus aequum.

" Every aspect and manner of life and fortune fitted
Aristippus ; he aimed at what was greater, yet kept
an even mind whatever his present condition."

As we have already said, this school was incom- 206
pletely Socratic, inasmuch as philosophy was not an
end in itself, knowledge whether of oneself or of other
matters had no intrinsic interest for them ; philo
sophy was only a means towards pleasurable living,
enabling them so to analyse and classify the several
experiences of life as to render a theory of satisfactory
existence possible. With them first came into promi- 207
nence a phrase which held a large place in all sub
sequent Greek philosophy, the End of existence, by
which was meant that which summed up the good in
existence, that which made life worth living, that
which was good and desirable in and for itself, and
not merely as a means to something else. What
then according to the Cyrenaics was the End of life ?

126 ARIS7IPPUS

Their answer was that life had at each moment its
own End, in the pleasure of that moment. The past
was gone, the future not yet with us ; remembrance
of the one, fear or hope of the other, might contribute
to affect the purity of the present pleasure, but such
as it was the present pleasure was a thing apart,
complete in and for itself. Nor was its perfection
qualified by any question of the means by which it
was procured ; the moment s pleasure was pleasur
able, whatever men might say as to the manner of its

208 procuring. This pleasure was a tranquil activity of
the being, like the gently heaving sea, midway be
tween violent motion which was pain, and absolute
calm which was insensibility. As a state of activity
it was something positive, not a mere release from

209 pain, not a simple filling up of a vacuum. Nothing
was in its essential nature either just or noble or base ;
custom and convention pronounced them one or
other. The wise man made the best he could of his
conditions ; valuing mental activity and friendship
and wealth and bodily exercise, and avoiding envy
and excessive indulgence of passion and superstition,
not because the first were in themselves good or the
second evil, but because they were respectively helpers
or hinderers of pleasure. He is the master and
possessor of pleasure not who abstains from it, but
who uses it and keeps his self-command in the using.
Moderate indulgence this is wisdom.

THE SENSUAL STY 127

The one criterion, whether of good or of truth, 210
is the feeling of the moment for the man who feels
it; all question of causes of feelings is delusive.
We can say with truth and certainty, I have the
sensation of white or the sensation of sweet. But
that there is a white or a sweet thing which is the
cause of the sensation, that we cannot say for certain.
A man may very well have the sensation white or
sweet from something which has no such quality, as
men in delusion or madness have impressions that are
true and real inasmuch as they have them, although
other people do not admit their reality. There is,
therefore, no criterion of truth as between man and
man ; we may employ the same words, but each
has his own impressions and his own individual
experiences.

One can easily understand this as the doctrine of
such a man as Aristippus, the easy-going man of the
world, the courtier and the wit, the favourite of the
tyrant Dionysius ; it fits in well enough with a life of
genial self-indulgence ; it always reappears whenever
a man has reconciled himself to roll with pleasure
in a sensual sty. But life is not always, nor for
most persons at any time, a thing of ease and soft
enchantments, and the Cyrenaic philosophy must
remain for the general work-a-day world a stale
exotic. Every man for himself and the devil take
the hindmost, is a maxim which comes as a rule

128 THE CYNICS

only to the lips of the worldly successful, while they
think themselves strong enough to stand alone. But
this solitude of selfishness neither works nor lasts ;
every man at some time becomes the hindmost, if
not before, at least in the hour of death for him or
his ; at that hour he is hardly disposed, for himself
or those he loves, to repeat his maxim.

II. ANTISTHENES AND THE CYNICS. Aristippus,
in his praises of pleasure as the one good for man
(see above, p. 126), remarks that there were some who

209 refused pleasure " from perversity of mind," taking
pleasure, so to speak, in the denial of pleasure. The
school of the Cynics made this perverse mood, as
Aristippus deemed it, the maxim of their philosophy.
As the Cyrenaic school was the school of the rich,
the courtly, the self-indulgent, so the Cynic was the
school of the poor, the exiles, the ascetics. Each
was an extreme expression of a phase of Greek life
and thought, though there was this point of union

215 between them, that liberty of a kind was sought by
both. The Cyrenaics claimed liberty to please
themselves in the choice of their enjoyments ; the
Cynics sought liberty through denial of enjoyments.

219 Both, moreover, were cosmopolitan ; they mark the
decay of the Greek patriotism, which was essentially
civic, and the rise of the wider but less intense
conception of humanity. Aristippus, in a conversa
tion with Socrates (Xenoph. Memor. II. i.) on the

CITIZENS OF THE WORLD 129

qualifications of those who are fitted to be magis
trates, disclaims all desire to hold such a position
himself. " There is," he says, " to my thinking, a
middle way, neither of rule nor of slavery, but of
freedom, which leads most surely to true happiness.
So to avoid all the evils of partisanship and faction
I nowhere take upon me the position of a citizen,
but in every city remain a sojourner and a stranger."
And in like manner Antisthenes the Cynic, being
asked how a man should approach politics, answered,
" He will approach it as he will fire, not too near,
lest he be burnt ; not too far away, lest he starve of
cold." And Diogenes, being asked of what city he
was, answered, " I am a citizen of the world." The
Cynic ideal, in fact, was summed up in these four
words wisdom, independence, free speech, liberty.

Antisthenes, founder of the school, was a native 214
of Athens, but being of mixed blood (his mother
was a Thracian) he was not recognised as an Athenian
citizen. He was a student first under Gorgias, and
acquired from him a considerable elegance of literary
style ; subsequently he became a devoted hearer of
Socrates, and became prominent among his followers
for an asceticism surpassing his master s. One day,
we are told, he showed a great rent in the thread
bare cloak which was his only garment, whereupon
Socrates slily remarked, " I can see through your
cloak your love of glory." He carried a leathern

K

1 30 THE CYNICS

scrip and a staff, and the scrip and staff became
distinctive marks of his school. The name Cynic,
derived from the Greek word for a dog, is variously
accounted for, some attributing it to the c doglike
habits of the school, others to their love of barking
criticism, others to the fact that a certain gymnasium
in the outskirts of Athens, called Cynosarges, sacred
to Hercules the patron-divinity of men in the political
position of Antisthenes, was a favourite resort of his.
He was a voluminous, some thought a too voluminous,

216 expounder of his tenets. Like the other Incomplete
Socratics, his teaching was mainly on ethical questions.

215 His chief pupil and successor was the famous
Diogenes, a native of Sinope, a Greek colony on the
Euxine Sea. He even bettered the instructions of
his master in the matter of extreme frugality of
living, claiming that he was a true follower of Her
cules in preferring independence to every other good.
The tale of his living in a cask or tub is well
known. His theory was that the peculiar privilege
of the gods consisted in their need of nothing ; men
approached nearest the life of the gods in needing
as little as possible.

217 Many other sayings of one or other teacher are
quoted, all tending to the same conclusion. For
example, " I had rather be mad than enjoying my
self ! " " Follow the pleasures that come after pains ,
not those which bring pains in their train." " There

THE TUB OF DIOGENES 131

are pains that are useless, there are pains that are
natural : the wise choose the latter, and thus find
happiness even through pain. For the very contempt
of pleasure comes with practice to be the highest
pleasure." " When I wish a treat," says Antisthenes,
" I do not go and buy it at great cost in the market
place ; I find my storehouse of pleasures in the
soul."

The life of the wise man, therefore, was a training 218
of mind and body to despise pleasure and attain
independence. In this way virtue was teachable,
and could be so acquired as to become an inseparable
possession. The man who had thus attained to
wisdom, not of words, but of deeds, was, as it were,
in an impregnable fortress that could neither crumble
into ruin nor be lost by treachery. And so Antis
thenes, being asked what was the most essential
point of learning, answered, " To unlearn what is
evil." That is to say, to the Cynic conception, men
were born with a root of evil in them in the love of
pleasure ; the path of wisdom was a weaning of soul
and body by practice from the allurements of pleasure,
until both were so perfectly accustomed to its denial
as to find an unalloyed pleasure in the very act of
refusing it. In this way virtue became absolutely 219
sufficient for happiness, and so far was it from being
necessary to have wealth or the admiration of men
in addition, that the true kingly life was " to do well,

1 32 THE MEGARICS

and be ill spoken of." All else but virtue was a
matter of indifference.

The cosmopolitan temper of these men led them
to hold of small account the- forms and prejudices of
ordinary society : they despised the rites of marriage ;
they thought no flesh unclean. They believed in no
multifarious theology ; there was but one divinity
the power that ruled all nature, the one absolutely
self-centred independent being, whose manner of

221 existence they sought to imitate. Nor had they any
sympathy with the subtleties of verbal distinction
cultivated by some of the Socratics, as by other
philosophers or Sophists of their time. Definitions
and abstractions and classifications led to no good.
A man was a man ; what was good was good ; to
say that a man was good did not establish the
existence of some abstract class of goods. As
Antisthenes once said to Plato, " A horse I see, but
horseness I do not see." What the exact point
of this criticism was we may reserve for the
present.

222 III. EUCLIDES THE MEGARic. Euclides, a native
of Megara on the Corinthian isthmus, was a devoted
hearer of Socrates, making his way to hear him,
sometimes even at the risk of his life, in defiance of
a decree of his native city forbidding intercourse
with Athens. When Plato and other Athenian
followers of Socrates thought well to quit Athens for

A PHILOSOPHY OF ABSTRACTS 133

a time after Socrates execution, they were kindly
entertained by Euclides at Megara.

The exact character of the development which
the Socratic teaching received from Euclides and his
school is a matter of considerable doubt. The
allusions to the tenets of the school in Plato and
others are only fragmentary. We gather, however, 223
from them that Euclides was wholly antithetical to
the personal turn given to philosophy, both by the
Cyrenaics and the Cynics. He revived and de
veloped with much dialectical subtlety the meta
physical system of Parmenides and the Eleatics,
maintaining that there is but one absolute existence,
and that sense and sense-perceptions as against this
are nothing. This one absolute existence was alone 224
absolutely good, and the good for man could only
be found in such an absorption of himself in this one
absolute good through reason and contemplation, as
would bring his spirit into perfectness of union with
it. Such absorption raised a man above the troubles
and pains of life, and thus, in insensibility to these
through reason, man attained his highest good.

The school is perhaps interesting only in so far
as it marks the continued survival of the abstract
dialectic method of earlier philosophy. As such it
had a very definite influence, sometimes through
agreement, sometimes by controversy, on the systems
of Plato and Aristotle now to be dealt with.

CHAPTER XIV

PLATO

239 THIS great master, the Shakespeare of Greek philo
sophy, as one may call him, for his fertility, his
variety, his humour, his imagination, his poetic grace,
was born at Athens in the year 429 B.C. He was
of noble family, numbering among his ancestors no
less a man than the great lawgiver Solon, and
tracing back his descent even further to the legend-

240 ary Codrus, last king of Athens. At a very early
age he seems to have begun to study the philo
sophers, Heraclitus more particularly, and before he
was twenty he had written a tragedy. About that
time, however, he met Socrates ; and at once giving
up all thought of poetic fame he burnt his poem,
and devoted himself to the hearing of Socrates. For
ten years he was his constant companion. When
Socrates met his death in 399, Plato and other
followers of the master fled at first to Megara, as
already mentioned (above, p. 132); he then entered
on a period of extended travel, first to Cyrene and

STUDENT AND WANDERER 135

Egypt, thence to Italy and Sicily. In Italy he
devoted himself specially to a study of the doctrine
of Pythagoras. It is said that at Syracuse he
offended the tyrant Dionysius the elder by his
freedom of speech, and was delivered up to the
Spartans, who were then at war with Athens.
Ultimately he was ransomed, and found his way 241
back to Athens, but he is said to have paid a second
visit to Sicily when the younger Dionysius became
tyrant He seems to have entertained the hope
that he might so influence this young man as to be
able to realise through him the dream of his life, a
government in accordance with the dictates of philo
sophy. His dream, however, was disappointed of 242
fruition, and he returned to Athens, there in the
groves of Academus a mythic hero of Athens, to
spend the rest of his days in converse with his
followers, and there at the ripe age of eighty-one he
died. From the scene of his labours his philosophy
has ever since been known as the Academic
philosophy. Unlike Socrates, he was not content 243
to leave only a memory of himself and his con
versations. He was unwearied in the redaction
and correction of his written dialogues, altering
them here and there both in expression and in
structure. It is impossible, therefore, to be
absolutely certain as to the historical order of
composition or publication among his numerous

136 PLATO

dialogues, but a certain approximate order may be
fixed.

We may take first a certain number of compara
tively short dialogues, which are strongly Socratic
in the following respects : first, they each seek a
definition of some particular virtue or quality ; second,
each suggests some relation between it and know
ledge ; third, each leaves the answer somewhat open,
treating the matter suggestively rather than dog
matically. These dialogues are Channides, which
treats of Temperance (incus sana in corpore sand) ;
Lysis, which treats of Friendship ; Laches, Of
Courage ; Ion, Of Poetic Inspiration ; Mcno, Of the
teachableness of Virtue ; Enthyphro, Of Piety.

The last of these may be regarded as marking a
transition to a second series, which are concerned
with the trial and death of Socrates. The
Etithyphro opens with an allusion by Socrates to
his approaching trial, and in the Apology we have a
Platonic version of Socrates speech in his own
defence ; in Crito we have the story of his noble
self-abnegation and civic obedience after his con
demnation ; in Phaedo we have his last conversation
with his friends on the subject of Immortality, and
the story of his death.

Another series of the dialogues may be formed of
those, more or less satirical, in which the ideas and
methods of the Sophists are criticised : Protagoras,

THE DIALOGUES 137

in which Socrates suggests that all virtues are
essentially one ; Euthydemus^ in which the assumption
and airs of some of the Sophists are made fun of ;
Cratylus, Of the sophistic use of words ; Gorgias,
Of the True and the False, the truly Good and the
truly Evil ; Hippias, Of Voluntary and Involuntary
Sin ; Alcibiades, Of Self-Knowledge ; Menexemis, a
(possibly ironical) set oration after the manner of
the Sophists, in praise of Athens.

The whole of this third series are characterised
by humour, dramatic interest, variety of personal
type among the speakers, keenness rather than depth
of philosophic insight. There are many suggestions
of profounder thoughts, afterwards worked out more
fully ; but on the whole these dialogues rather
stimulate thought than satisfy it ; the great poet-
thinker is still playing with his tools.

A higher stage is reached in the Symposium,
which deals at once humorously and profoundly
with the subject of Love, human and divine, and its
relations to Art and Philosophy, the whole con
summated in a speech related by Socrates as having
been spoken to him by Diotima, a wise woman of
Mantineia. From this speech an extract as trans
lated by Professor Jowett may be quoted here. It
marks the transition point from the merely playful
and critical to the relatively serious and dogmatic
stage in the mind of Plato :

138 PLATO

" Marvel not," she said, " if you believe that love is of the
immortal, as we have already several times acknowledged ; for
here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is
seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal :
and this is only to be attained by generation, because genera
tion always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the
old. Nay even in the life of the same individual there is suc
cession and not absolute unity : a man is called the same, and
yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age,
and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he
is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation hair,
flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing.
Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose
habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never
remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and
going ; and equally true of knowledge, which is still more
surprising for not only do the sciences in general come and
go, so that in respect of them we are never the same ; but
each of them individually experiences a like change. For what
is implied in the word recollection, but the departure of
knowledge, which is ever being forgotten and is renewed and
preserved by recollection, and appears to be the same although
in reality new, according to that law of succession by which
all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely the same, but
by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another new
and similar existence behind unlike the divine, which is
always the same and not another ? And in this way, Socrates,
the mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality ;
but the immortal in another way. Marvel not then at the love
which all men have of their offspring ; for that universal love
and interest is for the sake of immortality."

I was astonished at her words, and said : " Is this really
true, O thou wise Diotima ? " And she answered with all the
authority of a sophist: " Of that, Socrates, you may be assured;
think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at
the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they
are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are
ready to run risks greater far than they would have run for
their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of

IMMORTAL LONGINGS 139

toil, and even to die for the sake of leaving behind them a name
which shall be eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would
have died to save Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus,
or your own Codrus in order to preserve the kingdom for his
sons, if they had not imagined that the memory of their
virtues, which is still retained among us, would be immortal ?
Nay," she said, " I am persuaded that all men do all things,
and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of
the glorious fame of immortal virtue ; for they desire the
immortal.

" They whose bodies only are creative, betake themselves to
women and beget children this is the character of their love ;
their offspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and
give them the blessedness and immortality which they desire
in the future. But creative souls for there certainly are men
who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies
conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or retain.
And what are these conceptions ? wisdom and virtue in
general. And such creators are poets and all artists who
are deserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and
fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned
with the ordering of states and families, and which is called
temperance and justice. And he who in youth has the seed
of these implanted in him and is himself inspired, when
he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. He
wanders about seeking beauty that he may beget offspring
for in deformity he will beget nothing and naturally embraces
the beautiful rather than the deformed body ; above all when
he finds a fair and noble and well-nurtured soul, he embraces
the two in one person, and to such an one he is full of speech
about virtue and the nature and pursuits of a good man ; and
he tries to educate him ; and at the touch of the beautiful
which is ever present to his memory, even when absent, he
brings forth that which he had conceived long before, and in
company with him tends that which he brings forth ; and they
are married by a far nearer tie and have a closer friendship
than those who beget mortal children, for the children who are
their common offspring are fairer and more immortal. Who,
when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets,

140 PLATO

would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones ?
Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such
as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them
everlasting glory ? Or who would not have such children
as Lycurgus left behind him to be the saviours, not only of
Lacedaemon, but of Hellas, as one may say ? There is Solon,
too, who is the revered father of Athenian laws ; and many
others there are in many other places, both among Hellenes
and barbarians. All of them have given to the world many
noble works, and have been the parents of virtue of every kind,
and many temples have been raised in their honour for the
sake of their children ; which were never raised in honour of
any one, for the sake of his mortal children.

" These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even
you, Socrates, may enter ; to the greater and more hidden ones
which are the crown of these, and to which, if you pursue
them in a right spirit, they will lead, I know not whether you
will be able to attain. But I will do my utmost to inform you,
and do you follow if you can. For he who would proceed aright
in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms ;
and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one
such form only out of that he should create fair thoughts ;
and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one
form is akin to the beauty of another ; and then if beauty of
form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to re
cognise that the beauty in every form is one and the same ! And
when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one,
which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become
a lover of all beautiful forms ; in the next stage he will consider
that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the
beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous soul have
but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him,
and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may
improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and
see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand
that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal
beauty is a trifle ; and after laws and institutions he will go on
to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like
a servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or

ART IS LOVE 141

institution, himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but draw
ing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will
create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless
love of wisdom ; until on that shore he grows and waxes
strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single
science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this
I will proceed ; please to give me your very best attention.

" He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love,
and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and
succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly per
ceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the
final cause of all our former toils) a nature which in the first
place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and
waning ; in the next place not fair in one point of view and
foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place
fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place
foul, as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of
a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in
any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being ;
as for example, in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in
any other place, but beauty only, absolute, separate, simple,
and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase,
or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing
beauties of all other things. He who under the influence of
true love rising upward from these begins to see that beauty,
is not far from the end. And the true order of going or being
led by another to the things of love, is to use the beauties of
earth as steps along which he mounts upwards for the sake of
that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all
fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair
practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the
notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence
of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates," said the stranger of
Mantineia, "is that life above all others which a man should live,
in the contemplation of beauty absolute ; a beauty which if you
once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold,
and garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now
entrances you ; and you and many a one would be content to
live seeing only and conversing with them without meat or drink,

1 42 PLATO

if that were possible you only want to be with them and to
look at them. But what if man had eyes to see the true
beauty the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and un
alloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all
the colours and vanities of human life thither looking, and
holding converse with the true beauty divine and simple ? Do
you not see that in that communion only, beholding beauty
with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not
images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image
but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue
to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man
may. Would that be an ignoble life ? " (Jowett, Plato, vol. ii.
p. 58).

Closely connected in subject with the Symposium
\st\\QPhaedms. As Professor Jowett observes: "The
two dialogues together contain the whole philosophy
of Plato on the nature of love, which in The Republic
and in the later writings of Plato is only introduced
playfully or as a figure of speech. But in the
Phaedrus and Symposium love and philosophy join
hands, and one is an aspect of the other. The
spiritual and emotional is elevated into the ideal, to
which in the Symposium mankind are described as
looking forward, and which in the Phaedrus, as well
as in the Phaedo, they are seeking to recover from
a former state of existence."

We are here introduced to one of the most famous
conceptions of Plato, that of Reminiscence, or Recol
lection, based upon a theory of the prior existence
of the soul. In the Meno, already alluded to, Socrates
is representing as eliciting from one of Meno s slaves

KNO WLED GE THR UGH REMEMBRANCE \ 43

correct answers to questions involving a knowledge
or apprehension of certain axioms of the science
of mathematics, which, as Socrates learns, the
slave had never been taught. Socrates argues that
since he was never taught these axioms, and yet
actually knows them, he must have known them
before his birth, and concludes from this to the
immortality of the soul. In the Phaedo this same
argument is worked out more fully. As we grow
up we discover in the exercise of our senses that
things are equal in certain respects, unequal in many
others ; or again, we appropriate to things or acts
the qualities, for example, of beauty, goodness,
justice, holiness. At the same time we recognise
that these are ideals, to which in actual experience
we never find more than an approximation, for we
never discover in any really existing thing or act
absolute equality, or justice, or goodness. In other
words, any act of judgment on our part of actual
experiences consists in a measuring of these experi
ences by standards which we give or apply to them,
and which no number of experiences can give to us
because they do not possess or exemplify them. We
did not consciously possess these notions, or ideals,
or ideas, as he prefers to call them, at birth ; they
come into consciousness in connection with or in
consequence of the action of the senses ; but since
the senses could not give these ideas, the process of

144 PLATO

knowledge must be a process of Recollection. Socrates
carries the argument a step further. " Then may we
not say," he continues, " that if, as we are always re
peating, there is an absolute beauty and goodness and
other similar ideas or essences, and to this standard,
which is now discovered to have existed in our former
state, we refer all our sensations, and with this compare
them assuming these ideas to have a prior existence,
then our souls must have had a prior existence, but
if not, not? There is the same proof that these ideas
must have existed before we were born, as that our
souls existed before we were born ; and if not the
ideas, then not the souls."

In the Phaedrus this conception of a former
existence is embodied in one of the Mytlis in which
Plato s imaginative powers are seen at their highest.
In it the soul is compared to a charioteer driving two
winged steeds, one mortal, the other immortal ; the
one ever tending towards the earth, the other seeking
ever to soar into the sky, where it may behold those
blessed visions of loveliness and wisdom and good
ness, which are the true nurture of the soul. When
the chariots of the gods go forth in mighty and
glorious procession, the soul would fain ride forth
in their train ; but alas ! the mortal steed is ever
hampering the immortal, and dragging it down.

If the soul yields to this influence and descends
to earth, there she takes human form, but in higher

PLATONIC LOVE 145

or lower degree, according to the measure of her
vision of the truth. She may become a philosopher,
a king, a trader, an athlete, a prophet, a poet, a
husbandman, a sophist, a tyrant. But whatever her
lot, according to her manner of life in it, may she
rise, or sink still further, even to a beast or plant

Only those souls take the form of humanity that
have had some vision of eternal truth. And this
vision they retain in a measure, even when clogged
in mortal clay. And so the soul of man is ever
striving and fluttering after something beyond ; and
specially is she stirred to aspiration by the sight of
bodily loveliness. Then above all comes the test of
good and evil in the soul. The nature that has been
corrupted would fain rush to brutal joys ; but the
purer nature looks with reverence and wonder at this
beauty, for it is an adumbration of the celestial joys
which he still remembers vaguely from the heavenly
vision. And thus pure and holy love becomes an
opening back to heaven ; it is a source of happiness
unalloyed on earth ; it guides the lovers on upward
wings back to the heaven whence they came.

CHAPTER XV

PLATO (continued}

AND now we pass to the central and crowning work
of Plato, The Republic, or Of Justice the longest
with one exception, and certainly the greatest of all
his works. It combines the humour and irony, the
vivid characterisation and lively dialogue of his earlier
works, with the larger and more serious view, the
more constructive and statesmanlike aims of his later
life. The dialogue opens very beautifully. There
has been a festal procession at the Piraeus, the
harbour of Athens, and Socrates with a companion
is wending his way homeward, when he is recalled by
other companions, who induce him to visit the house
of an aged friend of his, Cephalus, whom he does
not visit too often. Him he finds seated in his court,
crowned, as the custom was, for the celebration of a
family sacrifice, and beholds beaming on his face the
peace of a life well spent and reconciled. They talk of
the happiness that comes in old age to those who have
done good and not evil, and who are not too severely

THE REPUBLIC 147

tried in the matter of worldly cares. Life to this
good old man seems a very simple matter ; duty to
God, duty to one s neighbours, each according to
what is prescribed and orderly ; this is all, and this
is sufficient.

Then comes in the questioning Socrates, with his
doubts and difficulties as to what is one s duty in
special circumstances ; and the discussion is taken up,
not by the good old man, "who goes away to the sacri
fice," but by his son, who can quote the authorities ;
and by Thrasymachus, the Sophist, who will have
nothing to do with authority, but maintains that
interest is the only real meaning of justice, and that
Might is Right. Socrates, by analogy of the arts,
shows that Might absolutely without tincture of
justice is mere weakness, and that there is honour
even among thieves. Yet the exhibition of the law
working in the members seems to have its weak
side so long as we look to individual men, in whom
there are many conflicting influences, and many
personal chances and difficulties, which obscure the
relation between just action and happiness.

Socrates therefore will have justice writ large
in the community as a whole, first pictured in its
simpler, and then in its more complex and luxurious
forms. The relation of the individual to the com
munity is represented chiefly as one of education and
training ; and many strange theories as of the equal

148 PLATO

training of men and women, and the community
of wives, ideas partially drawn from Sparta are
woven into the ideal structure. Then the dialogue
rises to a larger view of education, as a preparation
of the soul of man, not for a community on earth,
but for that heavenly life which was suggested above
(p. 1 44) in the myth of the steeds.

The purely earthly unideal life is represented as a
life of men tied neck and heels from birth in a cave,
having their backs to the light, and their eyes fixed
only on the shadows which are cast upon the wall.
These they take for the only realities, and they may
acquire much skill in interpreting the shadows. Turn
these men suddenly to the true light, and they will
be dazzled and blinded. They will feel as though
they had lost the realities, and been plunged into
dreams. And in pain and sorrow they will be
tempted to grope back again to the familiar darkness.

Yet if they hold on in patience, and struggle up
the steep till the sun himself breaks on their vision,
what pain and dazzling once more, yet at the
last what glorious revelation ! True, if they revisit
their old dwelling-place, they will not see as well as
their fellows who are still living contentedly there,
knowing nothing other than the shadows. They may
even seem to these as dreamers who have lost their
senses ; and should they try to enlighten these
denizens of the cave, they may be persecuted or

DENIZENS OF THE CAVE 149

even put to death. Such are the men who have
had a sight of the heavenly verities, when compared
with the children of earth and darkness.

Yet the world will never be right till those who
have had this vision come back to the things of earth
and order them according to the eternal verities ; the
philosopher must be king if ever the perfect life is to
be lived on earth, either by individual or community.
As it would be expressed in Scriptural language,
" The kingdoms of this world must become the king
doms of the Lord and of His Christ."

For the training of these ideal rulers an ideal
education is required, which Plato calls dialectic ;
something of its nature is described later on (p. 1 70),
and we need not linger over it here.

The argument then seems to fall to a lower level.
There are various approximations in actual experience
to the ideal community, each more or less perfect
according to the degree in which the good of the in
dividual is also made the good of all, and the interests
of governors and governed are alike. Parallel with
each lower form of state is a lower individual nature, the
worst of all being that of the tyrant, whose will is his
only law, and his own self-indulgence his only motive.
In him indeed Might is Right ; but his life is the
very antithesis of happiness. Nay, pleasure of any
kind can give no law to reason ; reason can judge of
pleasure, but not vice versa. There is no profit to a

ISO PLATO

man though he gain the whole world, if Jiimself be
lost ; if he become worse ; if the better part of him
be silenced and grow weaker. And after this fitful
fever is over, may there not be a greater bliss
beyond ? There have been stories told us, visions
of another world, where each man is rewarded
according to his works. And the book closes with
a magnificent Vision of Judgment. It is the story
of Er, son of Armenius, who being wounded in
battle, after twelve days trance comes back to life,
and tells of the judgment seat, of heavenly bliss and
hellish punishments, and of the renewal of life and
the new choice given to souls not yet purified wholly
of sin. " God is blameless ; Man s Soul is immortal ;
Justice and Truth are the only things eternally good."
Such is the final revelation. .

The Timaetts is an attempt by Plato, under the
guise of a Pythagorean philosopher, to image forth
as in a vision or dream the actual framing of the.
universe, conceived as a realisation of the Eternal
Thought or Idea. It will be remembered that in
the analysis already given (p. 143) of the process of
knowledge in individual men, Plato found that prior
to the suggestions of the senses, though not coming
into consciousness except in connection with sensa
tion, men had ideas that gave them a power of render
ing their sensations intelligible. In the Timaeus Plato
attempts a vision of the universe as though he saw

THE TIMAEUS 151

it working itself into actuality on the lines of those
ideas. The vision is briefly as follows : There is ^
the Eternal Creator, who desired to make the world
because He was good and free from jealousy, and
therefore willed that all things should be like Him
self; that is, that the formless, chaotic, unrealised
void might receive form and order, and become, in
short, real as He was. Thus creation is the process
by which the Eternal Creator works out His own
image, His own ideas, in and through that which is
formless, that which has no name, which is nothing
but possibility, dead earth, namely, or Matter. And
first the world-soul, image of the divine, is formed,
on which as on a " diamond network " the manifold
structure of things is fashioned the stars, the seven
planets with their sphere-music, the four elements, and
all the various creatures, aetherial or fiery, aerial, aque
ous, and earthy, with the consummation of them all in
microcosm, in the animal world, and specially in man.
One can easily see that this is an attempt by
Plato to carry out the reverse process in thought
to that which first comes to thinking man. Man has
sensations, that is, he comes first upon that which is
conceivably last in creation, on the immediate and
temporary things or momentary occurrences of earth.
In these sensations, as they accumulate into a kind
of habitual or unreasoned knowledge or opinion, he
discovers elements which have been active to

152 PLATO

correlate the sensations, which have from the first
exercised a governing influence upon the sensations,
without which, indeed, no two sensations could be
brought together to form anything one could name.
These regulative, underlying, permanent elements
are Ideas, i.e. General Forms or Notions, which,
although they may come second as regards time
into consciousness, are by reason known to have
been there before, because through them alone can the
sensations become intelligibly possible, or thinkable,
or namable. Thus Plato is led to the conception of
an order the reverse of our individual experience, the
order of creation, the order of God s thought, which
is equivalent to the order of God s working ; for
God s thought and God s working are inseparable.

Of course Plato, in working out his dream of
creation absolutely without any scientific knowledge,
the further he travels the more obviously falls into
confusion and absurdity ; where he touches on some
ideas having a certain resemblance to modern
scientific discoveries, as the law of gravitation, the
circulation of the blood, the quantitative basis of
differences of quality, etc., these happy guesses are
apt to lead more frequently wrong than right, because
they are not kept in check by any experimental
tests. But taken as a myth, which is perhaps all
that Plato intended, the work offers much that is
profoundly interesting.

A DREAM OF CREATION 153

With the Timaeus is associated another dialogue
called the Critias, which remains only as a fragment.
In it is contained a description of the celebrated
visionary kingdom of Atlantis, lying far beyond the
pillars of Hercules, a land of splendour and luxury
and power, a land also of gentle manners and wise
orderliness. " The fiction has exercised a great in
fluence over the imagination of later ages. As many
attempts have been made to find the great island as
to discover the country of the lost tribes. Without
regard to the description of Plato, and without a
suspicion that the whole narrative is a fabrication,
interpreters have looked for the spot in every part of
the globe America, Palestine, Arabia Felix, Ceylon,
Sardinia, Sweden. The story had also an effect on
the early navigators of the sixteenth century"
(Jowett, PlatO) vol. iii. p. 679).

CHAPTER XVI
PLATO (continued]

WE now come to a series of highly important
dialogues, marked as a whole by a certain diminution
in the purely artistic attraction, having less of vivid
characterisation, less humour, less dramatic interest,
less perfect construction in every way, but, on the
other hand, peculiarly interesting as presenting a
kind of after- criticism of his own philosophy. In
them Plato brings his philosophic conceptions into
striking relation with earlier or rival theories such
as the Eleatic, the Megarian, the Cyrenaic, and the
Cynic, and touches in these connections on many
problems of deep and permanent import.

The most remarkable feature in these later dia
logues is the disappearance, or even in some cases
the apparently hostile criticism, of the doctrine of
Ideas, and consequently of Reminiscence as the
source of knowledge, and even, apparently, of Personal

METAPHYSICS AND PSYCHOLOGY 155

Immortality, so far as the doctrine of Reminiscence
was imagined to guarantee it. This, however, is
perhaps to push the change of view too far. We
may say that Plato in these dialogues is rather the
psychologist than the metaphysician ; he is attempting
a revised analysis of mental processes. From this
point of view it was quite intelligible that he should
discover difficulties in his former theory of our mental
relation to the external reality, without therefore see
ing reason to doubt the existence of that reality. The
position is somewhat similar to that of a modern philo
sopher who attempts to think out the psychological
problem of Human Will in relation to Almighty
and Over-ruling Providence. One may very clearly
see the psychological difficulties, without ceasing to
believe either in the one or the other as facts.

Throughout Plato s philosophy, amidst every
variation of expression, we may take these three as
practically fixed points of belief or of faith, or at
least of hope ; first, that Mind is eternally master of
the universe ; second, that Man in realising what is
most truly himself is working in harmony with the
Eternal Mind, and is in this way a master of nature,
reason governing experience and not being a product
of experience ; and thirdly (as Socrates said before
his judges), that at death we go to powers who are
wise and good, and to men departed who in their day
shared in the divine wisdom and goodness, that, in

156 PLATO

short, there is something remaining for the dead, and
better for those that have done good than for those
that have done evil.

The first of the psychological dialogues, as we
have called them, is the Philebus. The question
here is of the summum bonum or chief good. What
is it ? Is it pleasure ? Is it wisdom ? Or is it
both ? In the process of answering these questions
Plato lays down rules for true definition, and estab
lishes classifications which had an immense influence
on his successor Aristotle, but which need not be
further referred to here.

The general gist of the argument is as follows.
Pleasure could not be regarded as a sufficient or
perfect good if it was entirely emptied of the purely
intellectual elements of anticipation and consciousness
and memory. This would be no better than the
pleasure of an oyster. On the other hand, a purely
intellectual existence can hardly be regarded as
perfect and sufficient either. The perfect life must
be a union of both.

But this union must be an orderly and rational
union ; in other words, it must be one in which
Mind is master and Pleasure servant ; the finite, the
regular, the universal must govern the indefinite,
variable, particular. Thus in the perfect life there
are four elements ; in the body, earth, water, air, fire ;
in the soul, the finite, the indefinite, the union of the

REASON AND PLEASURE 157

two, and the cause of that union. If this be so, he
argues, may we not by analogy argue for a like four
fold order in the universe ? There also we find
regulative elements, and indefinite elements, and the
union of the two. Must there not also be the Great
Cause, even Divine Wisdom, ordering and governing
all things ?

The second of the psychological series is the Par
menides, in which the great Eleatic philosopher, in
company with his disciple Zeno, is imagined instruct
ing the youthful Socrates when the two were on a
visit to Athens, which may or may not be historical
(see above, p. 34). The most striking portion of this
dialogue is the criticism already alluded to of Plato s
own theory of Ideas, put into the mouth of Par
menides. Parmenides ascertains from Socrates that
he is quite clear about there being Ideas of Justice,
Beauty, Goodness, eternally existing, but how about
Ideas of such common things as hair, mud, filth,
etc. ? Socrates is not so sure ; to which Parmenides
rejoins that as he grows older philosophy will take
a surer hold of him, and that he will recognise the
same law in small things and in great.

But now as to the nature of these Ideas. What,
Parmenides asks, is the relation of these, as eter
nally existing in the mind of God, to the same ideas
as possessed by individual men ? Does each indi
vidual actually partake in the thought of God through

158 PLATO

the ideas, or are his ideas only resemblances of the
eternal ? If he partakes, then the eternal ideas are
not one but many, as many as the persons who
possess them. If his ideas only resemble, then there
must be some basis of reference by which the resem
blance is established, a tcrtium quid or third exist
ence resembling both, and so ad infinitum. Socrates
is puzzled by this, and suggests that perhaps the
Ideas are only notions in our minds. But to this it
is replied that there is an end in that case of any
reality in our ideas. Unless in some way they have
a true and causal relation with something beyond our
minds, there is an end of mind altogether, and with
mind gone everything goes.

This, as Professor Jowett remarks, " remains a diffi
culty for us as well as for the Greeks of the fourth
century before Christ, and is the stumbling-block of
Kant s Critic, and of the Hamiltonian adaptation of
Kant as well as of the Platonic ideas. It has been
said that you cannot criticise Revelation. * Then
how do you know what is Revelation, or that there
is one at all ? is the immediate rejoinder. c You
know nothing of things in themselves. Then how
do you know that there are things in themselves ?
In some respects the difficulty pressed harder upon
the Greek than upon ourselves. For conceiving
of God more under the attribute of knowledge than
we do, he was more under the necessity of

CRITICISM OF THE IDEAS 159

separating the divine from the human, as two
spheres which had no communication with one
another."

Next follows an extraordinary analysis of the
ideas of Being and Unity, remarkable not
only for its subtlety, but for the relation which
it historically bears to the modern philosophic
system of Hegel. " Every affirmation is ipso facto
a negation ; " " the negation of a negation is an
affirmation ; " these are the psychological (if not
metaphysical) facts, on which the analysis of
Parmenides and the philosophy of Hegel are both
founded.

We may pass more rapidly by the succeeding
dialogues of the series : the Theaetetus (already quoted
from above, p. 89), which is a close and powerful in
vestigation of the nature of knowledge on familiar
Platonic lines ; the Sophist, which is an analysis of
fallacious reasoning ; and the Statesman, which, under
the guise of a dialectical search for the true ruler of
men, represents once more Plato s ideal of government,
and contrasts this with the ignorance and charlatan
ism of actual politics.

In relation to subsequent psychology, and more
particularly to the logical system of Aristotle, these
dialogues are extremely important. We may indeed
say that the systematic logic of Aristotle, as con
tained in the Organon, is little more than an abstract

160 PL A TO

or digest of the logical theses of these dialogues.
Definition and division, the nature and principle of
classification, the theory of predication, the processes
of induction and deduction, the classification and
criticism of fallacies, all these are to be found in
them. The only addition really made by Aristotle
was the systematic theory of the syllogism.

The Laws, the longest of Plato s works, seems
to have been composed by him in the latest years
of his long life, and was probably not published till
after his death. It bears traces of its later origin
in the less artful juncture of its parts, in the absence
of humour, in the greater overloading of details, in
the less graphic and appropriate characterisation of
the speakers. These speakers are three an Athenian,
a Cretan, and a Spartan. A new colony is to be led
forth from Crete, and the Cretan takes advice of the
others as to the ordering of the new commonwealth.
We are no longer, as in The Republic, in an ideal
world, a city coming down from, or set in, the
heavens. There is no longer a perfect community ;
nor are philosophers to be its kings. Laws more or
less similar to those of Sparta fill about half the
book. But the old spirit of obedience and self-
sacrifice and community is not forgotten ; and on
all men and women, noble and humble alike, the
duty is cast, to bear in common the common burden
of life.

LAST IDEALS 161

Thus, somewhat in sadness and decay, yet with a
dignity and moral grandeur not unworthy of his life s
high argument, the great procession of the Ideal
Philosopher s dialogues closes.

M

CHAPTER XVII

PLATO (concluded]

IF we attempt now, by way of appendix to this very
inadequate summary of the dialogues, to give in
brief review some account of the main doctrines of
Plato, as they may be gathered from a general view
of them, we are at once met by difficulties many
and serious. In the case of a genius such as Plato s,
at once ironical, dramatic, and allegorical, we cannot
be absolutely certain that in any given passage Plato
is expressing, at all events adequately and completely,
his own personal views, even at the particular stage
of his own mental development then represented.
And when we add to this that in a long life of
unceasing intellectual development, Plato inevitably
grew out of much that once satisfied him, and
attained not infrequently to new points of view even
of doctrines or conceptions which remained essentially
unchanged, a Platonic dogma in the strict sense
must clearly not be expected. One may, however,
attempt in rough outline to summarise the main

SEARCH FOR UNIVERSALS 163

tendencies of his thought, without professing to repre
sent its settled and authenticated results.

We may begin by an important summary of 251
Plato s philosophy given by Aristotle (Met. A. 6) :
" In immediate succession to the Pythagorean and
Eleatic philosophies came the work of Plato. In
many respects his views coincided with these ; in
some respects, however, he is independent of the
Italians. For in early youth he became a student
of Cratylus and of the school of Heraclitus, and
accepted from them the view that the objects of
sense are in eternal flux, and that of these, therefore,
there can be no absolute knowledge. Then came
Socrates, who busied himself only with questions of
morals, and not at all with the world of physics.
But in his ethical inquiries his search was ever for
universals, and he was the first to set his mind to
the discovery of definitions. Plato following him in
this, came to the conclusion that these universals
could not belong to the things of sense, which were
ever changing, but to some other kind of existences.
Thus he came to conceive of universals as forms or
ideas of real existences, by reference to which, and
in consequence of analogies to which, the things of
sense in every case received their names, and became
thinkable objects."

From this it followed to Plato that in so far as the
senses took an illusive appearance of themselves giving

1 64 PLATO

the knowledge which really was supplied by reason as
the organ of ideas, in the same degree the body which
is the instrument of sense can only be a source of illu
sion and a hindrance to knowledge. The wise man,
therefore, will seek to free himself from the bonds of
the body, and die while he lives by philosophic con
templation, free as far as possible from the disturb
ing influence of the senses. This process of rational
realisation Plato called Dialectic. The objects con
templated by the reason, brought into consciousness
on the occurrence of sensible perception, but never
caused by these, were not mere notions in the mind of
the individual thinker, nor were they mere properties
of individual things ; this would be to make an end
of science on the one hand, of reality on the other.
Nor had they existence in any mere place, not even
beyond the heavens. Their home was Mind, not this
mind or that, but Mind Universal, which is God.

In these * thoughts of God was the root or
essence which gave reality to the things of sense ;
they were the Unity which realised itself in multi
plicity. It is because things partake of the Idea that
we give them a name. The thing as such is seen,
not known ; the idea as such is known, not seen.
252 The whole conception of Plato in this connection
is based on the assumption that there is such a thing
as knowledge. If all things are ever in change, then
knowledge is impossible ; but conversely, if there is

THE THOUGHTS OF GOD 165

such a thing as knowledge, then there must be a con
tinuing object of knowledge ; and beauty, goodness,
reality are then no dreams. The process of apprehen- 253
sion of these thoughts of God, these eternal objects
of knowledge, whether occasioned by sensation or not,
is essentially a process of self-inquiry, or, as he in one
stage called it, of Reminiscence. The process is the
same in essence, whether going on in thought or
expressed in speech ; it is a process of naming,
Not that names ever resemble realities fully ; they
are only approximations, limited by the conditions
of human error and human convention. There is 254
nevertheless an inter-communion between ideas and
things. We must neither go entirely with those who
affirm the one (the Eleatics), nor with those who
affirm the many (the Heracliteans), but accept both.
There is a union in all that exists both of That Which
Is, and of that concerning which all we can say is that
it is Other than what is. This Other, through union
with what is, attains to being of a kind ; while on
the other hand, What Is by union with the Other
attains to variety, and thus more fully realises itself.

That which Plato here calls < What Is he else- 25 8
where calls The Limiting or Defining ; the
* Other he calls The Unlimited or^ Undefined.
Each has a function in the divine process. The
thoughts of God attain realisation in the world of
things which change and pass, through the infusion

1 66 PLATO

of themselves in, or the superimposing of themselves
upon, that which is Nothing apart from them, the
mere negation of what is, and yet necessary as the
Other or correlative of what is. Thus we get, in
fact, four forms of existence : there is the Idea or
Limiting (apart) ; there is the Negative or Unlimited
(apart), there is the Union of the two (represented
in language by subject and predicate), which as a
whole is this frame of things as we know it; and
fourthly, there is the Cause of the Union, which is
God. And God is cause not only as the beginning
of all things, but also as the measure and law of
their perfection, and the end towards which they go.
He is the Good, and the cause of Good, and the
consummation and realisation of Good.

This absolute Being, this perfect Good, we cannot
see, blinded as we are, like men that have been
dwelling in a cave, by excess of light. We must,
therefore, look on Him indirectly, as on an image of
Him, in our own souls and in the world, in so far as
in either we discern, by reason, that which is rational
and good.

259 Thus God is not only the cause and the end of
all good, He is also the cause and the end of all
knowledge. Even as the sun is not only the most
glorious of all visible objects, but is also the cause
of the life and beauty of all other things, and the
provider of the light whereby we see them, so also

GOD CAUSE AND CONSUMMATION 167

is it for the eye of the soul God is its light, God
is the most glorious object of its contemplation, God
we behold imaged forth in all the objects which the
soul by reason contemplates.

The ideas whereof the Other (or, as he again 260
calls it, the Great and Small or More and Less/
meaning that which is unnamable, or wholly neutral
in character, and which may therefore be represented
equally by contradictory attributes) by participation
becomes a resemblance, Plato compared to the
Numbers of the Pythagoreans (cf. above, p. 25).
Hence, Aristotle remarks (Met. A. 6), Plato found
in the ideas the originative or formative Cause of
things, that which made them what they were or
could be called, their Essence ; in the Great and
Small he found the opposite principle or Matter
(Raw Material) of things.

In this way the antithesis of Mind and Matter,
whether on the great scale in creation or on the
small in rational perception, is not an antithesis of
unrelated opposition. Each is correlative of the
other, so to speak as the male and the female ; the
one is generative, formative, active, positive ; the
other is capable of being impregnated, receptive,
passive, negative ; but neither can realise itself apart
from the other.

This relation of Being with that which is 262
Other than Being is Creation, wherein we can

1 68 PLATO

conceive of the world as coming to be, yet not in
261 Time. And in the same way Plato speaks of a third
form, besides the Idea and that which receives it,
namely, * Formless Space, the mother of all things.
As Kant might have formulated it, Time and Space
are not prior to creation, they are forms under which
creation becomes thinkable.

271 The Other or Negative element, Plato more or
less vaguely connected with the evil that is in the
world. This evil we can never expect to perish
utterly from the world ; it must ever be here as
the antithesis of the good. But with the gods it
dwells not ; here in this mortal nature, and in this
region of mingling, it must of necessity still be
found. The wise man will therefore seek to die to
the evil, and while yet in this world of mortality, to
think immortal things, and so as far as may be
flee from the evil. Thereby shall he liken himself
to the divine. For it is a likening to the divine to
be just and holy and true.

273 This, then, is the summum bonum, the end of
life. For as the excellence or end of any organ or
instrument consists in that perfection of its parts,
whereby each separately and the whole together
work well towards the fulfilling of that which it is
designed to accomplish, so the excellence of man
must consist in a perfect ordering of all his parts
to the perfect working of his whole organism as a

DYING TO EARTH 169

rational being. The faculties of man are three : the 276
Desire of the body, the Passion of the heart, the
Thought of the soul ; the perfect working of all
three, Temperance, Courage, Wisdom, and conse
quently the perfect working of the whole man, is
Righteousness. From this springs that ordered
tranquillity which is at once true happiness and
perfect virtue.

Yet since individual men are not self-sufficient, 277
but have separate capacities, and a need of union
for mutual help and comfort, the perfect realisation
of this virtue can only be in a perfect civic com
munity. And corresponding with the three parts of 278
the man there will be three orders in the commun
ity : the Workers and Traders, the Soldiers, and the
Ruling or Guardian class. When all these perform
their proper functions in perfect harmony, then is
the perfection of the whole realised, in Civic Excel
lence or Justice.

To this end a careful civic education is necessary, 231
fir sty because to know what is for the general good
is difficult, for we have to learn not only in general
but in detail that even the individual good can be
secured only through the general ; and second,
because few, if any, are capable of seeking the
general good, even if they know it, without the guid
ance of discipline and the restraints of law. Thus,
with a view to its own perfection, and the good of all

170 PLATO

its members, Education is the chief work of the
State.

It will be remembered (see foregoing page) that
in Plato s division of the soul of man there are three
faculties, Desire, Passion, Reason ; in the division
of the soul s perfection three corresponding virtues,
Temperance, Courage, Wisdom ; and in the division
of the state three corresponding orders, Traders,
Soldiers, Guardians. So in Education there are
three stages. First, Music (including all manner of
artistic and refining influences), whose function it is
so to attemper the desires of the heart that all
animalism and sensualism may be eliminated, and
only the love and longing for that which is lovely
and of good report may remain. Second, Gymnastic,
whose function it is through ordered labour and
suffering so to subdue and rationalise the passionate
part of the soul, that it may become the willing and
obedient servant of that which is just and true. And
third, Mat/iematicS) by which the rational element
of the soul may be trained to realise itself, being
weaned, by the ordered apprehension of the diamond
net of laws which underlie all the phenomena of
nature, away from the mere surface appearances of
things, the accidental, individual, momentary, to the
deep-seated realities, which are necessary, universal,
eternal.

And just as there was a perfectness of the soul

THE PL A TONIC ED UCA TION 1 7 1

transcending all particular virtues, whether of Tem
perance or Courage or Wisdom, namely, that absolute
Rightness or Righteousness which gathered them all
into itself, so at the end of these three stages of
education there is a higher mood of thought, wherein
the soul, purified, chastened, enlightened, in com
muning with itself through Dialectic (the Socratic art
of questioning transfigured) communes also with the
Divine, and in thinking out its own deepest thoughts,
thinks out the thoughts of the great Creator Him
self, becomes one with Him, finds its final realisation
through absorption into Him, and in His light sees
light.

CHAPTER XVIII

ARISTOTLE

PLATO before his death bequeathed his Academy to
his nephew Speusippus, who continued its president
for eight years ; and on his death the office passed
to Xenocrates, who held it for twenty -five years.
From him it passed in succession to Polemo, Crates,
Grantor, and others. Plato was thus the founder of
a school or sect of teachers who busied themselves
with commenting, expanding, modifying here and
there the doctrines of the master. Little of their
works beyond the names has been preserved, and
indeed we can hardly regret the loss. These men no
doubt did much to popularise the thoughts of their
master, and in this way largely influenced the later
development of philosophy ; but they had nothing
substantial to add, and so the stern pruning-hook of
time has cut them off from remembrance.
297 Aristotle was the son of a Greek physician,
member of the colony of Stagira in Thrace. His
father, Nicomachus by name, was a man of such

AN UNRUL Y PUPIL 173

eminence in his profession as to hold the post of
physician to Amyntas, king of Macedonia, father of
Philip the subverter of Greek freedom. Not only
was his father an expert physician, he was also a
student of natural history, and wrote several works
on the subject. We shall find that the fresh ele
ment which Aristotle brought to the Academic philo
sophy was in a very great measure just that minute
attention to details and keen apprehension of vital
phenomena which we may consider he inherited
from his father. He was born 384 B.C., and on the
death of his father, in his eighteenth year, he came
to Athens, and became a student of philosophy
under Plato, whose pupil he continued to be for
twenty years, indeed till the death of the master.
That he, undoubtedly a far greater man than
Speusippus or Xenocrates, should not have been
nominated to the succession has been variously
explained ; he is said to have been lacking in
respect and gratitude to the master ; Plato is said
to have remarked of him that he needed the curb as
much as Xenocrates needed the spur. The facts
really need no explanation. The original genius
is never sufficiently subordinate and amenable to
discipline. He is apt to be critical, to startle his
easy-going companions with new and seemingly
heterodox views, he is the ugly duckling whom
all the virtuous and commonplace brood must cackle

174 ARISTOTLE

at. The Academy, when its great master died, was
no place for Aristotle. He retired to Atarneus, a
city of Mysia opposite to Lesbos, where a friend
named Hermias was tyrant, and there he married
Hermias niece. After staying at Atarneus some
three years he was invited by Philip, now king of
Macedon, to undertake the instruction of his son
Alexander, the future conqueror, who was then
thirteen years old. He remained with Alexander
for eight years, though of course he could hardly be
regarded as Alexander s tutor during all that time,
since Alexander at a very early age was called to
take a part in public affairs. However a strong
friendship was formed between the philosopher and
the young prince, and in after years Alexander
loaded his former master with benefits. Even while
on his march of conquest through Asia he did not
forget him, but sent him from every country through
which he passed specimens which might help him in
his projected History of Animals, as well as an enor
mous sum of money to aid him in his investigations.
After the death of Philip, Aristotle returned to
Athens, and opened a school of philosophy on his
own account in the Lyceum. Here some authorities
tell us he lectured to his pupils while he paced up
and down before them ; hence the epithet applied to
the school, the Peripatetics. Probably, however, the
name is derived from the * Peripati or covered

THE PHILOSOPHER S LIBRARY 175

walks in the neighbourhood of that temple in which
he taught. He devoted his mornings to lectures of
a more philosophical and technical character ; to
these only the abler and more advanced students
were admitted. In the afternoons he lectured on
subjects of a more popular kind rhetoric, the art of
politics, etc. to larger audiences. Corresponding
with this division, he also was in the habit of
classifying his writings as Acroatic or technical, and
Exoteric or popular. He accumulated a large
library and museum, to which he contributed an
astonishing number of works of his own, on every
conceivable branch of knowledge.

The after history of Aristotle s library, including
the MSS. of his own works, is interesting and even
romantic. Aristotle s successor in the school was
Theophrastus, who added to the library bequeathed
him by Aristotle many works of his own, and others
purchased by him. Theophrastus bequeathed the
entire library to Neleus, his friend and pupil, who,
on leaving Athens to reside at Scepsis in the Troad,
took the library with him. There it remained for
nearly two hundred years in possession of the
Neleus family, who kept the collection hidden in a
cellar for fear it should be seized to increase the
royal library of Pergamus. In such a situation the
works suffered much harm from worms and damp,
till at last (circa 100 B.C.) they were brought out

i;6 ARISTOTLE

and sold to one Apellicon, a rich gentleman resident
in Athens, himself a member of the Peripatetic
school. In 86 B.C. Sulla, the Roman dictator,
besieged and captured Athens, and among other
prizes conveyed the library of Apellicon to Rome,
and thus many of the most important works of
Aristotle for the first time were made known to
the Roman and Alexandrian schools. It is a
curious circumstance that the philosopher whose
influence was destined to be paramount for more
than a thousand years in the Christian era,
was thus deprived by accident of his legitimate
importance in the centuries immediately following
his own.

But his temporary and accidental eclipse was
amply compensated in the effect upon the civilised
world which he subsequently exercised. So all-
embracing, so systematic, so absolutely complete did
his philosophy appear, that he seemed to after genera
tions to have left nothing more to discover. He at
once attained a supremacy which lasted for some
two thousand years, not only over the Greek-speaking
world, but over every form of the civilisation of that
long period, Greek, Roman, Syrian, Arabic, from the
Euphrates to the Atlantic, from Africa to Britain.
His authority was accepted equally by the learned
doctors of Moorish Cordova and the Fathers of
the Church ; to know Aristotle was to have all

THE PREDOMINANCE OF ARISTOTLE 177

knowledge ; not to know him was to be a boor ; to
deny him was to be a heretic.

His style has nothing of the grace of Plato ; he
illuminates his works with no. myths or allegories ;
his manner is dry, sententious, familiar, without the
slightest attempt at ornament. There are occasional
touches of caustic humour, but nothing of emotion,
still less of rhapsody. His strength lies in the vast
architectonic genius by which he correlates every
domain of the knowable in a single scheme, and in
the extraordinary faculty for illustrative detail with
which he fills the scheme in every part. He knows,
and can shrewdly criticise every thinker and writer
who has preceded him ; he classifies them as he
classifies the mental faculties, the parts of logical
speech, the parts of sophistry, the parts of rhetoric,
the parts of animals, the parts of the soul, the parts
of the state ; he defines, distinguishes, combines,
classifies, with the same sureness and minuteness of
method in them all. He can start from a general
conception, expand it into its parts, separate these
again by distinguishing details till he brings the
matter down to its lowest possible terms, or infimae
species. Or he can start from these, find analogies
among them constituting more general species, and
so in ascending scale travel surely up to a general
conception, or summum genus.

In his general conception of philosophy he was
N

178 ARISTOTLE

to a large extent in agreement with Plato ; but he
endeavoured to attain to a more technical precision ;
he sought to systematise into greater completeness ;
he pared off everything which he considered merely
metaphorical or fanciful, and therefore non-essential.
The operations of nature, the phenomena of life, were
used in a much fuller and more definite way to
illustrate or even formulate the theory ; but in its
main ideas Aristotle s philosophy is Plato s philosophy.
The one clothed it in poetry, the other in formulae ;
the one had a more entrancing vision, the other a
clearer and more exact apprehension ; but there is
no essential divergence.

Aristotle s account of the origin or foundation of
300 philosophy is as follows (Met. A. 2) : " Wonder is
and always has been the first incentive to philosophy.
At first men wondered at what puzzled them near
at hand, then by gradual advance they came to
notice and wonder at things still greater, as at the
phases of the moon, the eclipses of sun and moon,
the wonders of the stars, and the origin of the uni
verse./ Now he who is puzzled and in a maze regards
himself as a know-nothing ; wherefore the philosopher
is apt to be fond of wondrous tales or myths. And
inasmuch as it was a consciousness of ignorance
that drove men to philosophy, it is for the correction
of ^this ignorance, and not for any material utility,
that the pursuit of knowledge exists. Indeed it is,

RELATION TO PLATO 179

as a rule, only when all other wants are well supplied
that, by way of ease and recreation, men turn to
this inquiry. And thus, since no satisfaction beyond
itself is sought by philosophy, we speak of it as we
speak of the freeman. We call that man free whose
existence is for himself and not for another ; so also
philosophy is of all the sciences the only one that is
free, for it alone exists for itself.

" Moreover, this philosophy, which is the investiga
tion of the first causes of things, is the most truly
educative among the sciences. For instructors are
persons who show us the causes of things. And
knowledge for the sake of knowledge belongs most
properly to that inquiry which deals with what is
most truly a matter of knowledge. For he who is
seeking knowledge for its own sake will choose to
have that knowledge which most truly deserves the
name, the knowledge, namely, of what most truly
appertains to knowledge. Now the things that most
truly appertain to knowledge are the first causes ;
for in virtue of one s possession of these, and by
deduction from these, all else comes to be known ;
we do not come to know them through what is
inferior to them and underlying them. . . . The wise
man ought therefore to know not only those things
which are the outcome and product of first causes,
he must be possessed of the truth as to the first
causes themselves. And wisdom indeed- is just this

i8o ARISTOTLE

thoughtful science, a science of what is highest, not
truncated of its head.

301 " To the man, therefore, who has in fullest
measure this knowledge of universals, all knowledge
must lie to hand ; for in a way he knows all that
underlies them. Yet in a sense these universals are
what men find hardest to apprehend, because they
stand at the furthest extremity from the perceptions
of sense.

302 " Yet if anything exist which is eternal, immov
able, freed from gross matter, the contemplative
science alone can apprehend this. Physical science
certainly cannot, for physics is of that which is ever
in flux ; nor can mathematical science apprehend it ;
we must look to a mode of science prior to and
higher than both. The objects of physics are neither
unchangeable nor free from matter ; the objects of
mathematics are indeed unchangeable, but we can
hardly say they are free from matter ; they have
certainly relations with matter. But the first and
highest science has to do with that which is unmoved
and apart from matter ; its function is with the
eternal first causes of things. There are therefore
three modes of theoretical inquiry : the science of
physics, the science of mathematics, the science of
God. For it is clear that if the divine is anywhere,
it must be in that form of existence I have spoken
of (i.e. in first causes). ... If, therefore, there be

THE HIGHEST PHILOSOPHY 181

any form of existence immovable, this we must
regard as prior, and the philosophy of this we must
consider the first philosophy, universal for the same
reason that it is first. It deals with existence as
such, inquiring what it is and what are its attributes
as pure existence."

This is somewhat more technical than the
language of Plato, but if we compare it with what
was said above (p. 142) we shall find an essential
identity. Yet Aristotle frequently impugns Plato s
doctrine of ideas, sometimes on the lines already
taken by Plato himself (above, p. 1 5 8), sometimes 322
in other ways. Thus (Met. Z. I 5, 1 6) he says : " That
which is one cannot be in many places at one time,
but that which is common or general is in many
places at one time. Hence it follows that no uni
versal exists apart from the individual things. But
those who hold the doctrine of ideas, on one side are
right, viz. in maintaining their separate existence, if
they are to be substances or existences at all. On
the other side they are wrong, because by the idea
or form which they maintain to be separate they
mean the one attribute predicable of many things.
The reason why they do this is because they cannot
indicate what these supposed imperishable essences
are, apart from the individual substances which are
the objects of perception. The result is that they
simply represent them under the same forms as

i82 ARISTOTLE

those of the perishable objects of sensation which
are familiar to our senses, with the addition of a
phrase i.e. they say * man as such, horse as such/
or the absolute man, * the absolute horse. "

Aristotle here makes a point against Plato and
his school, inasmuch as, starting from the assumption
that of the world of sense there could be nojcnc-w*
ledge, no apprehension fixed or certain, and setting
over against this a world of general forms which
were fixed and certain, they had nothing with which
to fill this second supposed world except the data of
sense as found in individuals. Plato s mistake was
in confusing the mere this, which is the conceived
starting-point of any sensation, but which, like a
mathematical point, has nothing which can be said
about it, with individual objects as they exist and
are known in all the manifold and, in fact, infinite
relations of reality. The bare subject this pre
sents at the one extreme the same emptiness, the
same mere possibility of knowledge, which is pre
sented at the other by the bare predicate * is. But
Plato, having an objection to the former, as represent
ing to him the merely physical and therefore the
passing and unreal, clothes it for the nonce in the
various attributes which are ordinarily associated
with it when we say, this man, this horse, only
to strip them off successively as data of sensa
tion, and so at last get, by an illusory process of

IDEAS AND THINGS 183

abstraction and generalisation, to the ultimate gener
ality of being, which is the mere * is of bare
predication converted into a supposed eternal sub
stance.

Aristotle was as convinced as Plato that there
must be some fixed and immovable object or reality
corresponding to true and certain knowledge, but
with his scientific instincts he was not content to have
it left in a condition of emptiness, attractive enough
to the more emotional and imaginative Plato. And
hence we have elsewhere quite as strong and definite
statements as those quoted above about universals
(p. 1 80), to the effect that existence is in the fullest 316
and most real sense to be predicated of individual
things, and that only in a secondary sense can exist-
tence be predicated of universals, in virtue of their
being found in individual things. Moreover, among
universals the species, he maintains, has more of
existence in it than the genus, because it is nearer to
the individual or primary existence. For if you pre
dicate of an individual thing of what species it is,
you supply a statement more full of information and
more closely connected with the thing than if you
predicate to what genus it belongs ; for example, if
asked, " What is this ? " and you answer, " A man,"
you give more information than if you say, "A living
creature."

How did Aristotle reconcile these two points of

1 84 ARISTOTLE

view, the one, in which he conceives thought as start-
ing from first causes, the most universal objects of
knowledge, and descending to particulars ; the other,
in which thought starts from the individual objects,
and predicates of them by apprehension of their
properties ? The antithesis is no accidental one ; on
the contrary, it is the governing idea of his Logic,
with its ascending process or Induction, and its
descending process or Syllogism. Was thought a
mere process in an unmeaning circle, the upward
and downward way of Plato ?

As to this we may answer first that while formally
Aristotle displays much the same dualism or un
reconciled separation of the thing and the idea
as Plato, his practical sense and his scientific instincts
led him to occupy himself largely not with either the
empty thing or the equally empty idea, but with
the true individtials, which are at the same time the
true universals, namely, real objects as known, hav
ing, so far as they are known, certain forms or
categories under which you can class them, having,
so far as they are not yet fully known, a certain raw
material for further inquiry through observation. In
this way Thought and Matter, instead of being in
eternal and irreconcilable antagonism as the Real
and the Unreal, become parts of the same reality,
the first summing up the knowledge of things
already attained, the second symbolising the infinite

THE TRUE REALISM 185

possibilities of further ascertainment. And thus the 317
word Matter is applied by Aristotle to the highest
genus,"~aTthe relatively indefinite compared with the
more fully defined species included under it ; it is
also applied by him to the individual object, in so far
as that object contains qualities not yet fully brought
into predication.

And second, we observe that Aristotle introduced 319
a new conception which to his view established a
vital relation between the universal and the individual.
This conception he formulated in the correlatives,
Potentiality and Actuality. With these he closely
connected the idea of Final Cause. The three to
Aristotle constituted a single reality ; they are
organically correlative. In a living creature we find
a number of members or organs all closely inter
dependent and mutually conditioning each other.
Each has its separate function, yet none of them can
perform its particular function well unless all the
others are performing theirs well, and the effect of
the right performance of function by each is to enable
the others also to perform theirs. The total result
of all these mutually related functions is Life ; this
is their End or Final Cause, which does not exist
apart from them, but is constituted at every moment
by them. This Life is at the same time the condi
tion on which alone each and every one of the
functions constituting it can be performed. Thus

1 86 ARISTOTLE

life in an organism is at once the end and the middle
and the beginning ; it is the cause final, the cause
formal, the cause efficient. Life then is an Entelechy,
as Aristotle calls it, by which he means the realisa
tion in unity of the total activities exhibited in the
members of the living organism.

In such an existence every part is at once a
potentiality and an actuality, and so also is the whole.
We can begin anywhere and travel out from that
point to the whole ; we can take the whole and find
in it all the parts.

CHAPTER XIX
ARISTOTLE (continued}

IF we look closely at this conception Tof Aristotle s
we shall see that it has a nearer relation to the
Platonic doctrine of Ideas, and even to the doctrine
of Reminiscence, than perhaps even Aristotle himself
realised. The fundamental conception of Plato, it
will be remembered, is that of an eternally existing
thought of God, in manifold forms or ideas,
which come into the consciousness of men in connec
tion with or on occasion of sensations, which are
therefore in our experience later than the sensations,
but which we nevertheless by reason recognise as
necessarily prior to the sensations, inasmuch as it is
through these ideas alone that the sensations are
knowable or namable at all. Thus the final end for
man is by contemplation and daily dying to the
world of sense, to come at last into the full inherit
ance in conscious knowledge of that * thought of
God which was latent from the first in his soul, and
of which in its fulness God Himself is eternally and
necessarily possessed.

1 88 ARISTOTLE

3ii This is really Aristotle s idea, only Plato expresses
it rather under a psychological, Aristotle under a
vital, formula. God, Aristotle says, is eternally and
necessarily Entelechy, absolute realisation. To us,
that which is first in time (the individual perception)
is not first in essence, or absolutely. What is first in
essence or absolutely, is the universal, that is, the
form or idea, the datum of reason. And this dis
tinction between time and the absolute, between our
individual experience and the essential or ultimate
reality, runs all through the philosophy of Aristotle.
The Realisation of Aristotle is the Reminiscence
of Plato.

This conception Aristotle extended to Thought,
to the various forms of life, to education, to morals,
to politics.

Thought is an entelechy, an organic whole, in
which every process conditions and is conditioned
by every other. If we begin with sensation, the sensa
tion, blank as regards predication, has relations to that
which is infinitely real, the object, the real thing be
fore us, which relations science will never exhaust.
If we start from the other end, with the datum of
thought, consciousness, existence, mind, this is equally
blank as regards predication, yet it has relations to
another existence infinitely real, the subject that
thinks, which relations religion and morality and
sentiment and love will never exhaust. Or, as Aris-

REALISATION AND REMINISCENCE 189

totle and as common sense prefers to do, if we, with
our developed habits of thought and our store of ac
cumulated information, choose to deal with things
from a basis midway between the two extremes, in
the ordinary way of ordinary people, we shall find
both processes working simultaneously and in organic
correlation. That is to say, we shall be increasing the
individuality of the objects known, by the operation
of true thought and observation in the discovery of
new characters or qualities in them ; we shall be
increasing by the same act the generality of the
objects known, by the discovery of new relations, new
genera under which to bring them. Individualisa-
tion and generalisation are only opposed, as mutually
conditioning factors of the same organic function.

This analysis of thought must be regarded rather 316
as a paraphrase of Aristotle than as a literal tran
script. He is hesitating and obscure, and at times
apparently self-contradictory. He has not, any more
than Plato, quite cleared himself of the confusion
between the mutually contrary individual and uni
versal in propositions, and the organically correlative
individual and universal in tilings as known. But on
the whole the tendency of his analysis is towards an
apprehension of the true realism, which neither denies
matter in favour of mind nor mind in favour of
matter, but recognises that both mind and matter are
organically correlated, and ultimately identical.

190 ARISTOTLE

The crux of philosophy, so far as thus appre
hended by Aristotle, is no longer in the supposed
dualism of mind and matter, but there is a crux still.
What is the meaning of this Ultimately ? Or,
putting it in Aristotle s formula, Why this relation of
potentiality and actuality? Why this eternal com
ing to be, even if the coming to be is no unreasoned
accident, but a coming to be of that which is vitally
or in germ there ^ Or theologically, Why did God
make the world ? Why this groaning and travailing
of the creature? Why this eternal By and by
wherein all sin is to disappear, all sorrow to be con
soled, all the clashings and the infinite deceptions of
life to be stilled and satisfied? An illustration of
Aristotle s attempt to answer this question will be
given later on (p. 201). That the answer is a failure
need not surprise us. If we even now see only as
in a glass darkly on such a question, we need not
blame Plato or Aristotle for not seeing * face to
face.

326 Life is an entelechy, not only abstractedly, as
already shown (above, p. 186), but in respect of the
varieties of its manifestations. We pass from the
elementary life of mere growth common to plants and
animals, to the animal life of impulse and sensation,
thence we rise still higher to the life of rational action
which is the peculiar function of man. Each is a
potentiality to that which is immediately above it ; in

THE CRUX OF PHILOSOPHY 191

other words, each contains in germ the possibilities
which are realised in that stage which is higher.
Thus is there a touch of nature which makes the
whole world kin, a purpose running through all the
manifestations of life ; each is a preparation for
something higher.

Education is in like manner an entelechy. For 339
what is the differentia, the distinguishing character
of the life of man ? Aristotle answers, the possession
of reason. It is the action of reason upon the desires
that raises the life of man above the brutes. This,
observe, is not the restraining action of something
wholly alien to the desires, which is too often how
Plato represents the matter. This would be to lose
the dynamic idea. The desires, as Aristotle generally
conceives them, are there in the animal life, prepared,
so to speak, to receive the organic perfection which
reason alone can give them. Intellect, on the other
hand, is equally in need of the desires, for thought
without desire cannot supply motive. If intellect is
logos or reason, desire is that which is fitted to be
obedient to reason.

It will be remembered that the question to which
Plato addressed himself in one of his earlier dialogues,
already frequently referred to, the Meno, was the
teachableness of Virtue ; in that dialogue he comes
to the conclusion that Virtue is teachable, but that
there are none capable of teaching it ; for the

192 ARISTOTLE

wise men of the time are guided not by know
ledge but by right opinion, or by a divine instinct
which is incommunicable. Plato is thus led to
seek a machinery of education, and it is with a
view to this that he constructs his ideal Republic.
Aristotle took up this view of the state as educative
of the individual citizens, and brought it under the
dynamic formula. In the child reason is not actual ;
there is no rational law governing his acts, these are
the immediate result of the strongest impulse. Yet
only when a succession of virtuous acts has formed
the virtuous habit can a man be said to be truly
good. How is this process to begin ? The answer
is that the reason which is only latent or dynamic in
the child is actual or realised in the parent or teacher,
or generally in the community which educates the
child. The law at first then is imposed on the child
from without, it has an appearance of unnaturalness,
but only an appearance. For the law is there in the
child, prepared, as he goes on in obedience, gradually
to answer from within to the summons from without,
till along with the virtuous habit there emerges also
into the consciousness of the child, no longer a child
but a man, the apprehension of the law as his own
truest nature.

These remarks on education are sufficient to
show that in Morals also, as conceived by Aristotle,
there is a law of vital development. It may be

REASON IN ED UCA TION 193

sufficient by way of illustration to quote the intro
ductory sentences of Aristotle s Ethics, in which
the question of the nature of the chief good is, in
his usual tentative manner, discussed : " If there be
any end of what we do which we desire for itself,
while all other ends are desired for it, that is, if we
do not in every case have some ulterior end (for if
that were so we should go on to infinity, and our
efforts would be vain and useless), this ultimate end
desired for itself will clearly be the chief good and
the ultimate best. Now since every activity, whether
of knowing or doing, aims at some good, it is for us
to settle what the good is which the civic activity
aims at, what, in short, is the ultimate end of all
goods connected with conduct ? So far as the
name goes all are pretty well agreed as to the answer ;
gentle and simple alike declare it to be happiness,
involving, however, in their minds on the one hand
well-living, on the other hand, well-doing. When
you ask them, however, to define this happiness more
exactly, you find that opinions are divided, and the
many and the philosophers have different answers.

" But if you ask a musician or a sculptor or any
man of skill, any person, in fact, who has some special
work and activity, what the chief good is for him, he
will tell you that the chief good is in the work well
done. If then man has any special work or func
tion, we may assume that the chief good for man

O

I 9 4 ARISTOTLE

will be in the well-doing of that function. What
now is man s special function ? It cannot be mere
living, for that he has in common with plants, and
we are seeking what is peculiar to him. The mere
life of nurture and growth must therefore be put on
one side. We come next to life as sensitive to
pleasure and pain. But this man shares with the
horse, the ox, and other animals. What remains is
the life of action of a reasonable being. Now of
reason as it is in man there are two parts, one obey
ing, one possessing and considering. And there
are also two aspects in which the active or moral life
may be taken, one potential, one actual. Clearly for
our definition of the chief good we must take the
moral life in its full actual realisation, since this is
superior to the other.

"If our view thus far be correct, it follows that the
chief good for man consists in the full realisation and
perfection of the life of man as man, in accordance
with the specific excellence belonging to that life,
and if there be more specific excellences than one,
then in accordance with that excellence which is the
best and the most rounded or complete. We must
add, however, the qualification, in a rounded life. For
one swallow does not make a summer, nor yet one
day. And so one day or some brief period of
attainment is not sufficient to make a man happy
and blest"

THE CHIEF GOOD 195

The close relation of this to the teaching of
Socrates and Plato need hardly be insisted on, or
the way in which he correlates their ideas with his
own conception of an actualised perfection.

Aristotle then proceeds to a definition of the 340
specific excellence or virtue of man, which is to be
the standard by which we decide how far he has fully
and perfectly realised the possibilities of his being.
To this end he distinguishes in man s nature three
modes of existence : first, feelings such as joy, pain,
anger ; second, potentialities or capacities for such
feelings ; third, habits which are built upon these
potentialities, but with an element of reason or
deliberation superadded. He has no difficulty in
establishing that the virtue of man must be a habit
And the test of the excellence of that habit, as of
every other developed capacity, will be twofold ; it
will make the worker good, it will cause him to
produce good work.

So far Aristotle s analysis of virtue is quite on
the lines of his general philosophy. Here, however,
he diverges into what seems at first a curiously
mechanical conception. Pointing out that in every
thing quantitative there are two extremes conceivable,
and a mean or average between them, he proceeds
to define virtue as a mean between two extremes, a
mean, however, having relation to no mere numerical
standard, but having reference to us. In this last

196 ARISTOTLE

qualification he perhaps saves his definition from its
mechanical turn, while he leaves himself scope for
much curious and ingenious observation on the
several virtues regarded as means between two
extremes. He further endeavours to save it by
adding, that it is " defined by reason, and as the wise
man would define it."

Reason then, as the impersonal ruler, the wise
man, as the personification of reason, this is the
standard of virtue, and therefore also of happi
ness. How then shall we escape an externality
in our standard, divesting it of that binding char
acter which comes only when the law without is
also recognised and accepted as the law within ?
The answer of Aristotle, as of his predecessors, is
that this will be brought about by wise training and
virtuous surroundings, in short, by the civic com
munity being itself good and happy. Thus we get
another dynamic relation ; for regarded as a member
of the body politic each individual becomes a poten
tiality along with all the other members, conditioned
by the state of which he and they are members, brought
gradually into harmony with the reason which is in
the state, and in the process realising not his own
possibilities only, but those of the community also,
which exists only in and through its members. Thus
each and all, in so far as they realise their own well-
being by the perfect development of the virtuous

ORIGIN OF COMMUNITIES 197

habit in their lives, contribute ipso facto to the
supreme end of the state, which is the perfect
realisation of the whole possibilities ^of the total
organism, and consequently of every member of it.

The State therefore is also an entelechy. For 342
man is not made to dwell alone. " There is first the
fact of sex ; then the fact of children ; third, the fact
of variety of capacity, implying variety of position,
some having greater powers of wisdom and fore
thought, and being therefore naturally the rulers ;
others having bodily powers suitable for carrying out
the rulers designs, and being therefore naturally
subjects. Thus we have as a first or simplest com
munity the family, next the village, then the full or
perfect state, which, seeking to realise an absolute
self-sufficiency within itself, rises from mere living to
well-living as an aim of existence. This higher
existence is as natural and necessary as any simpler
form, being, in fact, the end or final and necessary
perfection of all such lower forms of existence. Man
therefore is by the natural necessity of his being a
political animal, and he who is not a citizen, that
is, by reason of something peculiar in his nature and
not by a mere accident, must either be deficient
or something superhuman. And while man is the
noblest of animals when thus fully perfected in
an ordered community, on the other hand when
deprived of law and justice he is the very worst.

198 ARISTOTLE

For there is nothing so dreadful as lawlessness armed.
And man is born with the arms of thought and
special capacities or excellences, which it is quite
possible for him to use for other and contrary
purposes. And therefore man is the most wicked
and cruel animal living when he is vicious, the most
lustful and the most gluttonous. The justice which
restrains all this is a civic quality ; and law is the
orderly arrangement of the civic community " (Arist.
Pol. i. p. 2).

CHAPTER XX

ARISTOTLE (concluded]

THROUGHOUT Aristotle s physical philosophy the
same conception runs : " All animals in their fully 334
developed state require two members above all one
whereby to take in nourishment, the other whereby
to get rid of what is superfluous. For no animal
can exist or grow without nourishment. And there
is a third member in them all half-way between
these, in which resides the principle of their life.
This is the heart, which all blood-possessing animals
have. From it comes the arterial system which
Nature has made hollow to contain the liquid blood.
The situation of the heart is a commanding one,
being near the middle and rather above than below,
and rather towards the front than the back. For
Nature ever establishes that which is most honour
able in the most honourable places, unless some
supreme necessity overrules. We see this most
clearly in the case of man ; but the same tendency
for the heart to occupy the centre is seen also in

200 ARISTOTLE

other animals, when we regard only thalt portion of
their body which is essential, and the limit of this is
at the place where superfluities are removed. The
limbs are arranged differently in different animals,
and are not among the parts essential to life ; con
sequently animals may live even if these are
removed. . . . Anaxagoras says that man is the
wisest of animals because he possesses hands. It
would be more reasonable to say that he possesses
hands because he is the wisest. For the hands are
an instrument ; and Nature always assigns an instru
ment to the one fitted to use it, just as a sensible
man would. For it is more reasonable to give a
flute to a flute-player than to confer on a man who
has some flutes the art of playing them. To that
which is the greater and higher she adds what is less
important, and not vice versa. Therefore to the
creature fitted to acquire the largest number of
skills Nature assigned the hand, the instrument
useful for the largest number of purposes " (Arist.
De Part. An. iv. p. 10).

And in the macrocosm, the visible and invisible
world about us, the same conception holds : " The
existence of God is an eternally perfect entelechy, a
life everlasting. In that, therefore, which belongs to
the divine there must be an eternally perfect move
ment. Therefore the heavens, which are as it were
the body of the Divine, are in form a sphere, of

GOD AND NECESSITY 201

necessity ever in circular motion. Why then is
not this true of every portion of the universe ?
Because there must of necessity be a point of rest of
the circling body at the centre. Yet the circling
body cannot rest either as a whole or as regards any
part of it, otherwise its motion could not be eternal,
which by nature it is. Now that which is a violation
of nature cannot be eternal, but the violation is
posterior to that which is in accordance with nature,
and thus the unnatural is a kind of displacement or
degeneracy from the natural, taking the form of a
coming into being.

" Necessity then requires earth, as the element
standing still at the centre. Now if there must be
earth, there must be fire. For if one of two opposites
is natural or necessary, the other must be necessary
too, each, in fact, implying the necessity of the other.
For the two have the same substantial basis, only
the positive form is naturally prior to the negative ;
for instance, warm is prior to cold. And in the
same way motionlessness and heaviness are predicated
in virtue of the absence of motion and lightness, i.e.
the latter are essentially prior.

" Further, if there are fire and earth, there must
also be the elements which lie between these, each
having an antithetic relation to each. From this it
follows that there must be a process of coming into
being, because none of these elements can be eternal,

202 ARISTOTLE

but each affects, and is affected by each, and they
are mutually destructive. Now it is not to be argued
that anything which can be moved can be eternal,
except in the case of that which by its own nature
has eternal motion. And if coming into being
must be predicated of these, then other forms of
change can also be predicated " (Arist. De Coelo,
ii. p. 3).

This passage is worth quoting as illustrating, not
only Aristotle s conception of the divine entelechy,
but also the ingenuity with which he gave that
appearance of logical completeness to the vague and
ill-digested scientific imaginations of the time, which
remained so evil an inheritance for thousands of
years. It is to be observed, in order to complete
Aristotle s theory on this subject, that the four
elements, Earth, Water, Air, Fire, are all equally
in a world which is " contrary to nature," that is,
the world of change, of coming into being, and
going out of being. Apart from these there is the
element of the Eternal Cosmos, which is " in accord
ance with nature," having its own natural and eternal
motion ever the same. This is the fifth or divine
element, the aetherial, by the schoolmen translated
Quinta Essentia, whence by a curious degradation
we have our modern word Quintessence, of that
which is the finest and subtlest extract.

Still more clearly is the organic conception carried

THE VITAL PRINCIPLE 203

out in Aristotle s discussion of the Vital principle or
Soul in the various grades of living creatures and in
man. It will be sufficient to quote at length a
chapter of Aristotle s treatise on the subject (De
Anima> ii. p. i) in which this fundamental conception of
Aristotle s philosophy is very completely illustrated :

" Now as to Substance we remark that this is one
particular category among existences, having three
different aspects. First there is, so to say, the raw
material or Matter, having in it no definite character
or quality ; next the Form or Specific character, in
virtue of which the thing becomes namable ; and
third, there is the Thing or Substance which these
two together constitute. The Matter is, in other
words, the potentiality of the thing, the Form is the
realisation of that potentiality. We may further
have this realisation in two ways, corresponding
in character to the distinction between knowledge
(which we have but are not necessarily using) and
actual contemplation or mental perception.

"Among substances as above defined those are
most truly such which we call bodily objects, and
among these most especially objects which are the
products of nature, inasmuch as all other bodies
must be derived from them. Now among such
natural objects some are possessed of life, some are
not ; by life I mean a process of spontaneous
nourishment, growth, and decay. Every natural

204 ARISTOTLE

object having life is a substance compounded, so to
say, of several qualities. It is, in fact, a bodily
substance defined in virtue of its having life.
Between the living body thus defined and the Soul
or Vital principle, a marked distinction must be
drawn. The body cannot be said to subsist in
something else ; rather must we say that it is the
matter or substratum in which something else
subsists. And what we mean by the soul is just
this substance in the sense of the form or specific
character that subsists in the natural body which
is potentially living. In other words, the Soul is
substance as realisation, only, however, of such a
body as has just been defined. Recalling now the
distinction between realisation as possessed know
ledge and as actual contemplation, we shall see that
in its essential nature the Soul or Vital principle
corresponds rather with the first than with the.
second. For both sleep and waking depend on the
Soul or Life being there, but of these waking only
can be said to correspond with the active form of
knowledge ; sleep is rather to be compared with the
state of having without being immediately conscious
that we have. Now if we compare these two states
in respect of their priority of development in a
particular person, we shall see that the state of
latent possession comes first. We may therefore
define the Soul or Vital principle as The earliest

SOUL AS REALISATION 205

realisation (entelechy] of a natural body having in it
the potentiality of life.

" To every form of organic structure this definition
applies, for even the parts of plants are organs,
although very simple ones ; thus the outer leaf is a
protection to the pericarp, and the pericarp to the
fruit. Or, again, the roots are organs bearing an
analogy to the mouth in animals, both serving to
take in food. Putting our definition, then, into a
form applicable to every stage of the Vital principle,
we shall say that The Soul is the earliest realisation
of a natural body having organisation.

"In this way we are relieved from the necessity
of asking whether Soul and body are one. We
might as well ask whether the wax and the impres
sion are one, or, in short, whether the matter of any
object and that whereof it is the matter or substratum
are one. As has been pointed out, unity and sub
stantiality may have several significations, but the
truest sense of both is found in realisation.

" The general definition of the Soul or Vital
principle above given may be further explained as
follows. The Soul is the rational substance (or
function), that is to say, it is that which gives essen
tial meaning and reality to a body as knowable.
Thus if an axe were a natural instrument or organ,
its rational substance would be found in its realisation
of what an axe means ; this would be its soul Apart

206 ARISTOTLE

from such realisation it would not be an axe at all,
except in name. Being, however, such as it is, the
axe remains an axe independently of any such
realisation. For the statement that the Soul is the
reason of a thing, that which gives it essential mean
ing and reality, does not apply to such objects as an
axe, but only to natural bodies having power of
spontaneous motion (including growth) and rest.

" Or we may illustrate what has been said by
reference to the bodily members. If the eye be a
living creature, sight will be its soul, for this is the
rational substance (or function) of the eye. On the
other hand, the eye itself is the material substance
in which this function subsists, which function being
gone, the eye would no longer be an eye, except in
name, just as we can speak of the eye of a statue or
of a painted form. Now apply this illustration from
a part of the body to the whole. For as any one
sense stands related to its organ, so does the vital
sense in general to the whole sensitive organism as
such, always remembering that we do not mean a
dead body, but one which really has in it potential
life, as the seed or fruit has. Of course there is a
form of realisation to which the name applies in a
specially full sense, as when the axe is actually cutting,
the eye actually seeing, the man fully awake. But
the Soul or Vital principle corresponds rather with
the function of sight, or the capacity for cutting which

FUNCTION AND CAPACITY 207

the axe has, the body, on the other hand, standing in
a relation of potentiality to it. Now just as the eye
may mean both the actual organ or pupil, and also
the function of sight, so also the living creature means
both the body and the soul. We cannot, therefore,
think of body apart from soul, or soul apart from
body. If, however, we regard the soul as composed
of parts, we can see that the realisation to which we
give the name of soul is in some cases essentially a
realisation of certain parts of the body. We may,
however, conceive the soul as in other aspects
separable, in so far as the realisation cannot be con
nected with any bodily parts. Nay, we cannot be
certain whether the soul may not be the realisation
or perfection of the body as the sailor is of his
boat."

Observe that at the last Aristotle, though very
tentatively, leaves an opening for immortality, where,
as in the case of man, there are functions of the soul,
such as philosophic contemplation, which cannot be
related to bodily conditions. He really was convinced
that in man there was a portion of that diviner aether
which dwelt eternally in the heavens, and was the
ever-moving cause of all things. If there was in
man a passive mind, which became all things, as all
things through sensation affected it, there was also,
Aristotle argued, a creative mind in man, which is
above, and unmixed with, that which it apprehends,

aoS ARISTOTLE

gives laws to this, is essentially prior to all particular
knowledge, is therefore eternal, not subject to the
conditions of time and space, consequently inde
structible.

Finally, as a note on Aristotle s method, one may
observe in this passage, first, Aristotle s use of f defin
ing examples, the wax, the leaf and fruit, the axe,
the eye, etc. ; second, his practice of developing his
distinctions gradually, Form and Matter in the ab
stract, then in substances of every kind, then in
natural bodies, then in organic bodies of various
grades, in separate organs, in the body as a whole,
and in the Soul as separable in man ; and thirdly,
his method of approaching completeness in thought,
by apparent contradictions or qualifications, which
aim at meeting the complexity of nature by an
equally organised complexity of analysis. To this
let us simply add, by way of final characterisation,
that in the preceding pages we have given but the-
merest fragment here and there of Aristotle s vast
accomplishment. So wide is the range of his ken, so
minute his observation, so subtle and complicated
and allusive his illustrations, that it is doubtful if any
student of his, through all the centuries in which he
has influenced the world, ever found life long enough
to fairly and fully grasp him. Meanwhile he retains
his grasp upon us. Form and matter, final and
efficient causes, potential and actual existences,

HIS METHOD 209

substance, accident, difference, genus, species, predica
tion, syllogism, deduction, induction, analogy, and
multitudes of other joints in the machinery df
thought for all time, were forged for us in the work
shop of Aristotle.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SCEPTICS AND EPICUREANS

PHILOSOPHY, equally complete, equally perfect in
all its parts, had its final word in Plato and Aristotle ;
on the great lines of universal knowledge no further
really original structures were destined to be raised
by Greek hands. We have seen a parallelism
between Greek philosophy and Greek politics in
their earlier phases (see above, p. 82) ; the same
parallelism continues to the end. Greece broke the
bonds of her intense but narrow civic life and civic
thought, and spread herself out over the world in a
universal monarchy and a cosmopolitan philosophy ;
but with this widening of the area of her influence
reaction came and disruption and decay ; an immense
stimulus was given on the one hand to the political
activity, on the other, to the thought and knowledge
of the world as a whole, but at the centre Greece
was living Greece no more, her politics sank to the
level of a dreary farce, her philosophy died down to
a dull and spiritless scepticism, to an Epicureanism

GREEK DECAY 211

that { seasoned the wine-cup with the dust of death, or
to a Stoicism not undignified yet still sad and narrow
and stern. The hope of the world, alike in politics
and in philosophy, faded as the life of Greece decayed.

The first phase of the change, Scepticism^ or 356
Pyrrhonism, as it was named from its first teacher,
need not detain us long. Pyrrho was priest of Elis ;
in earlier life he accompanied Alexander the Great
as far as India, and is said to have become acquainted
with certain of the philosophic sects in that country.
In his sceptical doctrine he had, like his predecessors,
a school with its succession of teachers ; but the
world has remembered little more of him or them 358
than two phrases suspense of judgment this for
the intellectual side of philosophy ; impassibility
this for the moral. The doctrine is a negation of
doctrine, the idle dream of idle men ; even Pyrrho
once, when surprised in some sudden access of fear,
confessed that it was hard for him to get rid of the
man in himself. Vigorous men and growing nations
are never agnostic. They decline to rest in mere
suspense ; they are extremely the opposite of impas
sive ; they believe earnestly, they feel strongly.

A more interesting, because more positive and 365
constructive, personality was that of Epicurus. This
philosopher was born at Samos, in the year 341 B.C.,
of Athenian parents. He came to Athens in his
eighteenth year. Xenocrates was then teaching at

212 EPICURUS

the Academy, Aristotle at the Lyceum, but Epicurus
heard neither the one nor the other. After some
wanderings he returned to Athens and set up on his
366 own account as a teacher of philosophy. He made
it a matter of boasting that he was a self-taught
philosopher; and Cicero (De Nat. Deor. i. 26) sar
castically remarks that one could have guessed as
much, even if Epicurus had not stated it himself ; as
one might of the proprietor of an ugly house, who
should boast that he had employed no architect. The
style of Epicurus was, in fact, plain and unadorned,
but he seems all the same to have been able to say
what he meant ; and few if any writers ancient
or modern have ever had so splendid a literary
tribute, as Epicurus had from the great Roman poet
Lucretius, his follower and expositor.

" Glory of the Greek race," he says, " who first
hadst power to raise high so bright a light in the
midst of darkness so profound, shedding a beam on
all the interests of life, thee do I follow, and in the
markings of thy track do I set my footsteps now.
Not that I desire to rival thee, but rather for love of
thee would fain call myself thy disciple. For how
shall the swallow rival the swan, or what speed may
the kid with its tottering limbs attain, compared with
the brave might of the scampering steed ? Thou,
O father, art the discoverer of nature, thou suppliest
to us a father s teachings, and from thy pages,

THE PRAISES OF LUCRETIUS 213

illustrious one, even as bees sip all manner of sweets
along the flowery glades, we in like manner devour
all thy golden words, golden and right worthy to
live for ever. For soon as thy philosophy, birth of
thy godlike mind, hath begun to declare the origin
of things, straightway the terrors of the soul are
scattered, earth s walls are broken apart, and through
all the void I see nature in the working. I behold
the gods in manifestation of their power, I discern
their blissful seats, which never winds assail nor rain-
clouds sprinkle with their showers, nor snow falling
white with hoary frost doth buffet, but cloudless
aether ever wraps them round, beaming in broad
diffusion of glorious light. For nature supplies their
every want nor aught impairs their peace of soul.
But nowhere do I see any regions of hellish darkness,
nor does the earth impose a barrier to our sight of
what is done in the void beneath our feet. Where
fore a holy ecstasy and thrill of awe possess me,
while thus by thy power the secrets of nature are
disclosed to view" (Lucret. De Nat. Rer. iii. 1-30).

This devotion to the memory of Epicurus on 367
the part of Lucretius was paralleled by the love felt
for him by his contemporaries ; he had crowds of
followers who loved him and who were proud to
learn his words by heart. He seems indeed to have
been a man of exceptional kindness and amiability,
and the garden of Epicurus became proverbial as

214 EPICURUS

a place of temperate pleasures and wise delights.
Personally we may take it that Epicurus was a man of
simple tastes and moderate desires ; and indeed
throughout its history Epicureanism as a rule of
conduct has generally been associated with the finer
forms of enjoyment, rather than the more sensual.
The * sensual sty is a nickname, not a description.

369 Philosophy Epicurus defined as a process of
thought and reasoning tending to the realisation of
happiness. Arts or sciences which had no such
practical end he contemned ; and, as will be observed
in Lucretius praises of him above, even physics
had but one purpose or interest, to free the soul from

370 terrors of the unseen. Thus philosophy was mainly
concerned with conduct, i.e. with Ethics, but second
arily and negatively with Physics, to which was
appended what Epicurus called Canonics, or the
science of testing, that is, a kind of logic.

371 Beginning with Canonics, as the first part of phil
osophy in order of time, from the point of view of
human knowledge, Epicurus laid it down that the
only source of knowledge was the senses, which gave
us an immediate and true perception of that which
actually came into contact with them. Even the
visions of madmen or of dreamers he considered
were in themselves true, being produced by a physical
cause of some kind, of which these visions were the
direct and immediate report. Falsity came in with

CANONICS 2I5

people s interpretations or imaginations with respect
to these sensations.

Sensations leave a trace in the memory, and out
of similarities or analogies among sensations there
are developed in the mind general notions or types,
such as man, house, which are also true, because
they are reproductions of sensations. Thirdly, 373
when a sensation occurs, it is brought into rela
tion in the mind with one or more of these types
or notions ; this is predication, true also in so far as
its elements are true, but capable of falsehood, as
subsequent or independent sensation may prove. If
supported or not contradicted by sensation, it is or
may be true ; if contradicted or not supported by
sensation, it is or may be false. The importance of
this statement of the canon of truth or falsehood
will be understood when we come to the physics of
Epicurus, at the basis of which is his theory of
Atoms, which by their very nature can never be
directly testified to by sensation.

This and no more was what Epicurus had to 374
teach on the subject of logic. He had no theory of
definition, or division, or ratiocination, or refutation,
or explication ; on all these matters Epicurus was,
as Cicero said, naked and unarmed. Like most
self-taught or ill-taught teachers, Epicurus trusted to
his dogmas ; he knew nothing and cared nothing for
logical defence.

216 EPICURUS

375 In his Physics Epicurus did little more than
reproduce the doctrine of Democritus. He starts
from the fundamental proposition that nothing can
be produced from nothing, nothing can really perish.
The veritable existences in nature are the Atoms,
which are too minute to be discernible by the
senses, but which nevertheless have a definite size,
and cannot further be divided. They have also
a definite weight and form, but no qualities other
than these. There is an infinity of empty space ; this
Epicurus proves on abstract grounds, practically
because a limit to space is unthinkable. It follows
that there must be an infinite number of the atoms,
otherwise they would disperse throughout the infinite
void and disappear. There is a limit, however, to
the number of varieties among the atoms in respect
of form, size, and weight. The existence of the void
space is proved by the fact that motion takes place,
to which he adds the argument that it necessarily
exists also to separate the atoms one from another.
So far Epicurus and Democritus are agreed.

To the Democritean doctrine, however, Epicurus
made a curious addition, to which he himself is said to
have attached much importance. The natural course
(he said) for all bodies having weight is downwards
in a straight line. It struck Epicurus that this bekig
so, the atoms would all travel for ever in parallel
lines, and those clashings and interminglings of

PHYSICS 217

atoms out of which he conceived all visible forms to
be produced, could never occur. He therefore laid it
down that the atoms deviated the least little bit from
the straight, thus making a world possible. And
Epicurus considered that this supposed deviation of
the atoms not only made a world possible, but human
freedom also. In the deviation, without apparent
cause, of the descending atoms, the law of necessity
was broken, and there was room on the one hand for
man s free will, on the other, for prayer to the gods,
and for hope of their interference on our behalf.

It may be worth while summarising the proofs
which Lucretius in his great poem, professedly
following in the footsteps of Epicurus, adduces for
these various doctrines.

Epicurus first dogma is, Nothing proceeds from
nothing, that is, every material object has some
matter previously existing exactly equal in quantity
to it, out of which it was made. To prove this
Lucretius appeals to the order of nature as seen in
the seasons, in the phenomena of growth, in the fixed
relations which exist between life and its environ
ment as regards what is helpful or harmful, in the
limitation of size and of faculties in the several
species and the fixity of the characteristics generally
in each, in the possibilities of cultivation and im
provement of species within certain limits and under
certain conditions.

218 EPICURUS

To prove his second position, * Nothing passes
into nothing, Lucretius points out to begin with that
there is a law even in destruction ; force is required
to dissolve or dismember anything ; were it other
wise the world would have disappeared long ago.
Moreover, he points out that it is from the elements
set free by decay and death that new things are built
up ; there is no waste, no visible lessening of the
resources of nature, whether in the generations of
living things, in the flow of streams and the fulness
of ocean, or in the eternal stars. Were it not so,
infinite time past would have exhausted all the matter
in the universe, but Nature is clearly immortal.
Moreover, there is a correspondence between the
structure of bodies and the forces necessary to their
destruction. Finally, apparent violations of the law,
when carefully examined, only tend to confirm it.
The rains no doubt disappear, but it is that their
particles may reappear in the juices of the crops and
the trees and the beasts which feed on them.

Nor need we be surprised at the doctrine that the
atoms, so all-powerful in the formation of things, are
themselves invisible. The same is true of the forest-
rending blasts, the viewless winds which lash the
waves and overwhelm great fleets. There are odours
also that float unseen upon the air ; there are heat,
and cold, and voices. There is the process of evap
oration, whereby we know that the water has gone,

THE PROOFS OF LUCRETIUS 219

yet cannot see its vapour departing. There is the
gradual invisible detrition of rings upon the ringer,
of stones hollowed out by dripping water, of the
ploughshare in the field, and the flags upon the
streets, and the brazen statues of the gods whose
fingers men kiss as they pass the gates, and the rocks
that the salt sea-brine eats into along the shore.

That there is Empty Space or Void he proves by
all the varied motions on land and sea which we
behold ; by the porosity even of hardest things, as
we see in dripping caves. There is the food also
which disperses itself throughout the body, in trees
and cattle. Voices pass through closed doors, frost
can pierce even to the bones. Things equal in size
vary in weight ; a lump of wool has more of void in
it than a lump of lead. So much for Lucretius.

For abstract theories on physics, except as an
adjunct and support to his moral conceptions,
Epicurus seems to have had very little inclination.
He thus speaks of the visible universe or Cosmos.
The Cosmos is a sort of skyey enclosure, which holds 375
within it the stars, the earth, and all visible things.
It is cut off from the infinite by a wall of division
which may be either rare or dense, in motion or at
rest, round or three-cornered or any other form.
That there is such a wall of division is quite admis
sible, for no object of which we have observation is
without its limit. Were this wall of division to

220 EPICURUS

break, everything contained within it would tumble
out. We may conceive that there are an infinite
number of such Cosmic systems, with inter-cosmic
intervals throughout the infinity of space.

He is very disinclined to assume that similar
phenomena, e.g. eclipses of the sun or moon, always
have the same cause. The various accidental impli
cations and interminglings of the atoms may produce
the same effect in various ways. In fact Epicurus
has the same impatience of theoretical physics as of
theoretical philosophy. He is a * practical man.
378 He is getting nearer his object when he comes to
the nature of the soul. The soul, like everything else,
is composed of atoms, extremely delicate and fine.
It very much resembles the breath, with a mixture
of heat thrown in, sometimes coming nearer in nature
to the first, sometimes to the second. Owing to the
delicacy of its composition it is extremely subject to
variation, as we see in its passions and liability to
emotion, its phases of thought and the varied experi
ences without which we cannot live. It is, moreover,
the chief cause of sensation being possible for us.
Not that it could of itself have had sensation, without
the enwrapping support of the rest of the structure.
The rest of the structure, in fact, having prepared
this chief cause, gets from it a share of what comes
to it, but not a share of all which the soul has.

The soul being of material composition equally

THE ATOMIC SOUL 221

with the other portions of the bodily structure, dies
of course with it, that is, its* particles like the rest are
dispersed, to form new bodies. There is nothing
dreadful therefore about death, for there is nothing
left to know or feel anything about it.

As regards the process of sensation, Epicurus,
like Democritus, conceived bodies as having a power
of emitting from their surface extremely delicate
images of themselves. These are composed of very
fine atoms, but, in spite of their tenuity, they are
able to maintain for a considerable time their
relative form and order, though liable after a time to
distortion. They fly with great celerity through the
void, and find their way through the windows of the
senses to the soul, which by its delicacy of nature is
in sympathy with them, and apprehends their form.

The gods are indestructible, being composed of 379
the very finest and subtlest atoms, so as to have
not a body, but as it were a body. Their life is one
of perfect blessedness and peace. They are in
number countless ; but the conceptions of the vulgar
are erroneous respecting them. They are not
subject to the passions of humanity. Anger and
joy are alike, alien to their nature ; for all such
feelings imply a lack of strength. They dwell apart
in the inter -cosmic spaces. As Cicero jestingly
remarks : " Epicurus by way of a joke introduced
his gods so pure that you could see through them,

222 EPICURUS

so delicate that the wind could blow through them,
having their dwelling-place outside between two
worlds, for fear of breakage."

380 Coming finally to Epicurus theory of Ethics,
we find a general resemblance to the doctrine of
Democritus and Aristippus. The end of life is
pleasure or the absence of pain. He differs, however,
from the Cyrenaics in maintaining that not the
pleasure of the moment is the end, but pleasure
throughout the whole of life, and that therefore we
ought in our conduct to have regard to the future.
Further he denies that pleasure exists only in
activity, it exists equally in rest and quiet ; in short,
he places more emphasis in his definition on the
absence of pain or disturbance, than on the presence
of positive pleasure. And thirdly, while the Cyrenaics
maintained that bodily pleasures and pains were the
keenest, Epicurus claimed these characteristics for
the pleasures of the mind, which intensified the
present feeling by anticipations of the future and
recollections of the past. And thus the wise man
might be happy, even on the rack. Better indeed
was it to be unlucky and wise, than lucky and
foolish. In a similar temper Epicurus, on his death
bed wrote thus to a friend : " In the- enjoyment of
blessedness and peace, on this the last day of my
life I write this letter to you. Strangury has
supervened, and the extremest agony of internal

MENTAL PLEASURES 223

pains, yet resisting these has been my joy of soul,
as I recalled the thoughts which I have had in the
past."

We must note, however, that while mental 381
pleasures counted for much with the Epicureans,
these mental pleasures consisted not in thought for
thought s sake in any form ; they had nothing to
do with contemplation. They were essentially
connected with bodily experiences ; they were the
memory of past, the anticipation of future, bodily
pleasures. For it is to be remembered that thoughts
were with Epicurus only converted sensations, and
sensations were bodily processes. Thus every joy of
the mind was conditioned by a bodily experience
preceding it. Or as Metrodorus, Epicurus disciple,
defined the matter : " A man is happy when his
body is in good case, and he has good hope that it
will continue so." Directly or indirectly, therefore,
every happiness came back, in the rough phrase of
Epicurus, to one s belly at last.

This theory did not, however, reduce morality to 382
bestial self-indulgence. If profligate pleasures could
be had free from mental apprehensions of another
world and of death and pain and disease in this, and
if they brought with them guidance as to their own
proper restriction, there would be no reason what
ever to blame a man for filling himself to the full of
pleasures, which brought no pain or sorrow, that is,

224 EPICURUS

no evil, in their train. But (Epicurus argues) this is
far from being the case. Moreover there are many
pleasures keen enough at the time, which are by no
means pleasant in the remembering. And even when
we have them they bring no enjoyment to the highest
parts of our nature. What those highest parts are,
and by what standard their relative importance is
determined, Epicurus does not say. He probably
meant those parts of our nature which had the widest
range in space and time, our faculties, namely, of
memory and hope, of conception, of sight and hearing.

Moreover there are distinctions among desires ;
some are both natural and compulsory, such as thirst ;
some are natural but not compulsory, as the desire
for dainties ; some are neither natural nor com
pulsory, such as the desire for crowns or statues.
The last of these the wise man will contemn, the
second he will admit, but so as to retain his freedom.
For independence of such things is desirable, not
necessarily that we may reduce our wants to a,
minimum, but in order that if we cannot enjoy many
things, we may be content with few. " For I am
convinced," Epicurus continues, " that they have the
greatest enjoyment of wealth, who are least dependent
upon it for enjoyment."

Thus if Epicurus did not absolutely teach sim
plicity of living, he taught his disciples the necessity
of being capable of such simplicity, which they could

NATURAL PLEASURES 225

hardly be without practice. So that in reality the
doctrine of Epicurus came very near that of his
opponents. As Seneca the Stoic observed, " Pleasure
with him comes to be something very thin and pale.
In fact that law which we declare for virtue, the
same law he lays down for pleasure."

One of the chief and highest pleasures of life
Epicurus found in the possession of friends, who
provided for each other not only help and protec
tion, but a lifelong joy. For the larger friendship
of the civic community, Epicurus seems to have had
only a very neutral regard. Justice, he says, is a
convention of interests, with a view of neither hurting
or being hurt. The wise man will have nothing to
do with politics, if he can help it.

In spite of much that may offend in the doctrines
of Epicurus, there is much at least in the man which
is sympathetic and attractive. What one observes,
however, when we compare such a philosophy with
that of Plato or Aristotle, is first, a total loss of con
structive imagination. The parts of the philosophy,
if we are so to call it, of Epicurus hang badly together,
and neither the Canonics nor the Physics show any
real faculty of serious thinking at all. The Ethics
has a wider scope and a more real relation to
experience if not to reason. But it can never satisfy
the deeper apprehension of mankind.

The truest and most permanently valid revelations
Q

226 EPICURUS

of life come not to the many but to the one or the
few, who communicate the truth to the many, some
times at the cost of their own lives, always at the
cost of antagonism and ridicule. A philosophy
therefore which only represents in theoretical form
the average practice of the average man, comes
into the world still-born. It has nothing to say;
its hearers know it all, and the exact value of it all,
already. And in their heart of hearts, many even
of those who have stooped to a lower ideal, and sold
their birthright of hopes beyond the passing hour,
for a mess of pottage in the form of material suc
cess and easy enjoyment, have a lurking contempt
for the preachers of what they practise ; as many a
slaveholder in America probably had for the clerical
defenders of the divine institution.

There is a wasting sense of inadequacy in this
hand-to-mouth theory of living, which compels
most of those who follow it to tread softly and
speak moderately. They are generally a little
weary if not cynical ; they don t think much of
themselves or of their success ; but they prefer
to hold on as they have begun, rather than launch
out into new courses, which they feel they have not
the moral force to continue. " May I die," said the
Cynic, " rather than lead a life of pleasure." " May
I die," says the Epicurean, " rather than make a
fool of myself." The Idealist is to them, if not

LOWER PHILOSOPHY AND HIGHER 227

a hypocrite, at least a visionary, if not a Tar-
tuffe, at least a Don Quixote tilting at wind
mills. Yet even for poor Don Quixote, with all
his blindness and his follies, the world retains a
sneaking admiration. It can spare a few or a good
many of its worldly-wisdoms, rather than lose alto
gether its enthusiasms and its dreams. And the
one thing which saves Epicureanism from utter
extinction as a theory, is invariably the idealism
which like a purple patch adorns it here and there.
No man and no theory is wholly self-centred.
Pleasure is supplanted by Utility, and Utility becomes
the greatest Happiness of the greatest Number, and
so, as Horace says (Ep. I. x. 24)

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret,

Nature (like Love) thrust out of the door, will come
back by the window ; and the Idealism which is
not allowed to make pain a pleasure, is required at
last to translate pleasure into pains.

CHAPTER XXII

THE STOICS

ZENO, the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy
(born circa 340 B.C.), was a native of Citium in
Cyprus. The city was Greek, but with a large
Phoenician admixture. And it is curious that in
this last and sternest phase of Greek thought, not the
founder only, but a large proportion of the successive
leaders of the school, came from this and other places
having Semitic elements in them. Among these
places notable as nurseries of Stoicism was Tarsus
in Cilicia, the birthplace of St. Paul. The times of
preparation were drawing to a close ; and through
these men, with their Eastern intensity and capaci
ties of self-searching and self-abasement, the philo
sophy of Greece was linking itself on to the wisdom
of the Hebrews.

Zeno came to Athens to study philosophy, and
for twenty years he was a pupil first of Crates the
Cynic, and then of other teachers. At length he
set up a school of his own in the celebrated Stoa

SEMITIC ADMIXTURE 229

Poecile (Painted Colonnade), so named because it
was adorned with frescoes by Polygnotus. There
he taught for nearly sixty years, and voluntarily
ended his life when close on a century old. His
life, as Antigonus, King of Macedon, recorded on
his tomb, was consistent with his doctrine ab
stemious, frugal, laborious, dutiful. He was sue- 386
ceeded by Cleanthes, a native of Assos in Asia
Minor. But the great constructor of the Stoic 337
doctrine, without whom, as his contemporaries said,
there had been no Stoic school at all, was Chrysippus,
a native of Soli or of Tarsus in Cilicia. He wrote
at enormous length, supporting his teachings by an
immense erudition, and culling liberally from the
poets to illustrate and enforce his views. Learned
and pedantic, his works had no inherent attraction,
and nothing of them but fragments has been pre
served. We know the Stoic doctrine mainly from
the testimony and criticisms of later times.

Like the Epicureans, Zeno and his successors 339
made philosophy primarily a search for the chief
good, a doctrine of practice and morals. But like
them they were impelled to admit a logic and a
physics, at least by way of preliminary basis to their
ethics. The relations of the three they illustrated 390
by various images. Philosophy was like an animal ;
logic was its bones and sinews, ethics its flesh,
physics its life or soul. Or again, philosophy was

230 THE STOICS

an egg ; logic was the shell, ethics the white, physics
the yolk. Or again, it was a fruitful field ; logic was
the hedge, ethics the crop, physics the soil. Or it
was a city, well ordered and strongly fortified, and
so on. The images seem somewhat confused, but
the general idea is clear enough. Morality was the
essential, the living body, of philosophy ; physics
supplied its raw material, or the conditions under
which a moral life could be lived ; logic secured that
we should use that material rightly and wisely for
the end desired.

391 Logic the Stoics divided into two parts Rhetoric,
the science of the open hand, and Dialectic, the
science of the closed fist, as Zeno called them.
They indulged in elaborate divisions and subdivisions
of each, with which we need not meddle. The only
points of interest to us are contained in their analysis

392 of the processes of perception and thought A
sensation, Zeno taught, was the result of an external
imptilse, which when combined with an internal assent,
produced a mental state that revealed at the same
time itself and the external object producing it.
The perception thus produced he compared to the
grip which the hand took of a solid object ; and real
perceptions, those, that is, which were caused by a
real external object, and not by some illusion, always
testified to the reality of their cause by this sensa
tion of grip.

CLOSED FIST AND OPEN HAND 231

The internal assent of the mind was voluntary,
and at the same time necessary ; for the mind could
not do otherwise than will the acceptance of that
which it was fitted to receive. The peculiarity of
their physics, which we shall have to refer to later
on, namely, the denial of the existence of anything
not material, implied that in some way there was a
material action of the external object on the structure
of the perceiving mind (itself also material). What
exactly the nature of this action was the Stoics
themselves were not quite agreed. The idea of an
impression such as a seal makes upon wax was a
tempting one, but they had difficulty in comprehend
ing how there could be a multitude of different
impressions on the same spot without effacing each
other. Some therefore preferred the vaguer and
safer expression, modification ; had they possessed
our modern science, they might have illustrated their
meaning by reference to the phenomena of magnetism
or electricity.

An interesting passage may be quoted from
Plutarch on the Stoic doctrine of knowledge : " The
Stoics maintain," he says, "that when a human being is
born, he has the governing part of his soul like a sheet
of paper ready prepared for the reception of writing,
and on this the soul inscribes in succession its various
ideas. The first form of the writing is produced
through the senses. When we perceive, for example,

232 THE STOICS

a white object, the recollection remains when the
object is gone. And when many similar recollections
have accumulated, we have what is called experience.
Besides the ideas which we get in this natural and
quite undesigned way, there are other ideas which
we get through teaching and information. In the
strict sense only these latter ought to be called ideas ;
the former should rather be called perceptions. Now
the rational faculty, in virtue of which we are called
reasoning beings, is developed out of, or over and
beyond, the mass of perceptions, in the second seven
years period of life. In fact a thought may be
defined as a kind of mental image, such as a rational
animal alone is capable of having."

Thus there are various gradations of mental
apprehensions ; first, those of sensible qualities ob
tained through the action of the objects and the
assent of the perceiving subject, as already described ;
then by experience, by comparison, by analogy, by
the combinations of the reasoning faculty, further
and more general notions are arrived at, and con
clusions formed, as, for example, that the gods exist
and exercise a providential care over the world. By
this faculty also the wise man ascends to the appre
hension of the good and true.

The physics of the Stoics started from the funda
mental proposition that in the universe of things
there were two elements the active and the passive.

TABULA RASA 233

The latter was Matter or unqualified existence ; the
former was the reason or qualifying element in
Matter, that is, God, who being eternal, is the
fashioner of every individual thing throughout the
universe of matter. God is One ; He is Reason,
and Fate, and Zeus. In fact all the gods are only
various representations of His faculties and powers.
He being from the beginning of things by Himself,
turneth all existence through air to water. And
even as the genital seed is enclosed in the semen, so
also was the seed of the world concealed in the
water, making its matter apt for the further birth of
things ; then first it brought into being the four
elements fire, water, air, earth. For there was a
finer fire or air which was the moving spirit of things ;
later and lower than this were the material elements
of fire and air. It follows that the universe of things
is threefold ; there is first God Himself, the source
of all character and individuality, who is indestructible
and eternal, the fashioner of all things, who in certain
cycles of ages gathers up all things into Himself,
and then out of Himself brings them again to birth ;
there is the matter of the universe whereon God
works ; and thirdly, there is the union of the two.
Thus the world is governed by reason and fore
thought, and this reason extends through every part,
even as the soul or life extends to every part of us.
The universe therefore is a living thing, having a

234 THE STOICS

soul or reason in it. This soul or reason one
teacher likened to the air, another to the sky, another
to the sun. For the soul of nature is, as it were,
a finer air or fire, having a power of creation in it,
and moving in an ordered way to the production of
things.

399 The universe is one and of limited extension,
being spherical in form, for this is the form which
best adapts itself to movement. Outside this uni
verse is infinite bodiless space ; but within the uni
verse there is no empty part ; all is continuous and
united, as is proved by the harmony of relation which
exists between the heavenly bodies and those upon
the earth. The world as such is destructible, for its
parts are subject to change and to decay ; yet is this
change or destruction only in respect of the qualities
imposed upon it from time to time by the Reason
inherent in it ; the mere unqualified Matter remains
indestructible.

403 In the universe evil of necessity exists ; for evil
being the opposite of good, where no evil is there no
good can be. For just as in a comedy there are
absurdities, which are in themselves bad, but yet add
a certain attraction to the poem as a whole, so also
one may blame evil regarded in itself, yet for the
whole it is not without its use. So also God is
the cause of death equally with birth ; for even as
cities when the inhabitants have multiplied overmuch,

NECESSITY OF EVIL 235

remove their superfluous members by colonisation or
by war, so also is God a cause of destruction. In
man in like manner good cannot exist save with
evil ; for wisdom being a knowledge of good and evil,
remove the evil and wisdom itself goes. Disease
and other natural evils, when looked at in the light
of their effects, are means not of evil but of good ;
there is throughout the universe a balance and inter
relation of good and evil. Not that God hath in
Himself any evil ; the law is not the cause of law
lessness, nor God Himself responsible for any violation
of right.

The Stoics indulged in a strange fancy that the 404
world reverted after a mighty cycle of years in all
its parts to the same form and structure which it
possessed at the beginning, so that there would be
once more a Socrates, a Plato, and all the men that
had lived, each with the same friends and fellow-
citizens, the same experiences, and the same en
deavours. At the termination of each cycle there
was a burning up of all things, and thereafter a
renewal of the great round of life.

Nothing incorporeal, they maintained, can be 408
affected by or affect that which is corporeal ; body
alone can affect body. The soul therefore must be
corporeal. Death is the separation of soul from
body, but it is impossible to separate what is in
corporeal from body ; therefore, again, the soul must

236 THE STOICS

be corporeal. In the belief of Cleanthes, the souls of
all creatures remained to the next period of cyclic
conflagration ; Chrysippus believed that only the
souls of the wise and good remained.
413 Coming finally to the Ethics of the Stoic philo
sophy, we find for the chief end of life this definition,
A life consistent with itself, or, as it was otherwise
expressed, A life consistent with Nature. The
two definitions are really identical ; for the law of
nature is the law of our nature, and the reason in our
being the reason which also is in God, the supreme
Ruler of the universe. This is substantially in
accordance with the celebrated law of right action
laid down by Kant, " Act so that the maxim of thine
action be capable of being made a law of universal
action." Whether a man act thus or no, by evil if
not by good the eternal law will satisfy itself; the
question is of import only for the man s own happiness.
Let his will accord with the universal will, then the
law will be fulfilled, and the man will be happy.
Let his will resist the universal will, then the law
will be fulfilled, but the man will bear the penalty.
This was expressed by Cleanthes in a hymn which
ran somewhat thus

Lead me, O Zeus most great,

And thou, Eternal Fate :
What way soe er thy will doth bid me travel
That way I ll follow without fret or cavil.

HYMN OF CLEANTHES 237

Or if I evil be
And spurn thy high decree.
Even so I still shall follow, soon or late.

Thus in the will alone consists the difference of
good or ill for us ; in either case Nature s great law
fulfils itself infallibly. To their view on this point
we may apply the words of Hamlet : " If it be now,
tis not to come ; if it be not to come, it will be now ;
if it be not now, yet it will come ; the readiness
is all."

This universal law expresses itself in us in various
successive manifestations. From the moment of birth
it implants in us a supreme self-affection, whereby of
infallible instinct we seek our own self-preservation,
rejoice in that which is suitable to our existence,
shrink from that which is unsuitable. As we grow

o

older, further and higher principles manifest them
selves reason and reflection, a more and more care
ful and complete apprehension of that which is
honourable and advantageous, a capacity of choice
among goods. Till finally the surpassing glory of
that which is just and honourable shines out so clear
upon us, that any pain or loss is esteemed of no
account, if only we may attain to that. Thus at
last, by the very law of our being, we come to know
that nothing is truly and absolutely good but good
ness, nothing absolutely bad but sin. Other things,
inasmuch as they have no character of moral good

238 THE STOICS

or moral evil, cannot be deemed really good or bad ;
in comparison with the absolutely good, they are
things indifferent, though in comparison with each
other they may be relatively preferable or relatively
undesirable. Even pleasure and pain, so far as
concerns the absolute end or happiness of our being,
are things indifferent ; we cannot call them either
good or evil. Yet have they a relation to the higher
law, for the consciousness of them was so implanted
in us at the first that our souls by natural impulse
are drawn to pleasure, while they shrink from pain
as from a deadly enemy. Wherefore reason neither
can nor ought to seek wholly to eradicate these
primitive and deep-seated affections of our nature;
but so to exercise a resisting and ordering influence
upon them, as to render them obedient and sub
servient to herself.

415 That which is absolutely good wisdom, righteous
ness, courage, temperance does good only and never
ill to us. All other things, life, health, pleasure,
beauty, strength, wealth, reputation, birth, and their
opposites, death, disease, pain, deformity, weakness,
poverty, contempt, humility of station, these are in
themselves neither a benefit nor a curse. They may
do us good, they may do us harm. We may use
them for good, we may use them for evil.

417 Thus the Stoics worked out on ideal and absolute
lines the thought of righteousness as the chief and

THINGS INDIFFERENT 239

only good. Across this ideal picture were con
tinually being drawn by opponents without or in
quirers within, clouds of difficulty drawn from real
experience. * What, it was asked, of progress in
goodness ? Is this a middle state between good and
evil ; or if a middle state between good and evil be
a contradiction in terms, how may we characterise
it? Here the wiser teachers had to be content to
answer that it tended towards good, was good in
possibility, would be absolutely good when the full
attainment came, and the straining after right had
been swallowed up in the perfect calm of settled
virtue.

How also of the wise man tormented by pain,
or in hunger and poverty and rags, is his perfectness
of wisdom and goodness really sufficient to make
him happy? Here, again, the answer had to be
hesitating and provisional, through no fault of the
Stoics. In this world, while we are still under the
strange dominion of time and circumstance, the ideal
can never wholly fit the real. There must still be
difficulty and incompleteness here, only to be solved
and perfected when iniquity shall have an end.
Our eyes may fail with looking upward, yet the
upward look is well ; and the jibes upon the Stoic
* king in rags that Horace and others were so fond
of, do not affect the question. It may have been,
and probably often was, the case that Stoic teachers

24 o THE STOICS

were apt to transfer to themselves personally
the ideal attributes, which they justly assigned
to the ideal man in whom wisdom was perfected.
The doctrine gave much scope for cant and mental
pride and hypocrisy, as every ideal doctrine does,
including the Christian. But the existence of these
vices in individuals no more affected the doctrine of
an ideal goodness in its Stoic form, than it does now
in its Christian one. That only the good man is
truly wise or free or happy ; that vice, however
lavishly it surround itself with luxury and ease and
power, is inherently wretched and foolish and slavish ;
these are things which are worth saying and worth
believing, things, indeed, which the world dare not
and cannot permanently disbelieve, however difficult
or even impossible it may be to mark men off into
two classes, the good and the bad, however strange
the irony of circumstance which so often shows the
wicked who are not troubled as other men, neither
are they plagued like other men ; they have more
than their heart could wish, while good men battle
with adversity, often in vain. Still will the permanent,
fruitful, progressive faith of man look to the end ;
still will the ideal be powerful to plead for the painful
right, and spoil, even in the tasting, the pleasant
wrong.

The doctrine, of course, like every doctrine worth
anything, was pushed to extravagant lengths, and

IDEAL AND REAL 241

thrust into inappropriate quarters, by foolish doc
trinaires. As that the wise man is the only orator,
critic, poet, physician, nay, cobbler if you please ;
that the wise man knows all that is to be known,
and can do everything that is worth doing, and so
on. The school was often too academic, too abstract,
too fond of hearing itself talk. This, alas ! is what
most schools are, and most schoolmasters.

Yet the Stoics were not altogether alien to the
ordinary interests and duties of life. They admitted a
duty of co-operating in politics, at least in such states as
showed some desire for, or approach to, virtue. They
approved of the wise man taking part in education,
of his marrying and bringing up children, both for
his own sake and his country s. He will be ready
even to withdraw himself from life on behalf of
his country or his friends. This withdrawal, which
was their word for suicide, came unhappily to be
much in the mouths of later, and especially of the
Roman, Stoics, who, in the sadness and restraint of
prevailing despotism, came to thank God that no one
was compelled to remain in life ; he might withdraw
when the burden of life, the hopelessness of useful
activity, became too great.

With this sad, stern, yet not undignified note, the
philosophy of Greece speaks its last word. The later
scepticism of the New Academy, directed mainly to
a negative criticism of the crude enough logic of the

R

242 THE STOICS

Stoics, or of the extravagances of their ethical
doctrine, contributed no substantial element to
thought or morals. As an eclectic system it had
much vogue, side by side with Stoicism and
Epicureanism, among the Romans, having as its
chief exponent Cicero, as Epicureanism had Lucretius,
and Stoicism, Seneca.

The common characteristic of all these systems
in their later developments, is their cosmopolitanism.
Homo sum, nil humani a me alienum puto, I am a
man ; nothing appertaining to humanity do I deem
alien from myself, this was the true keynote of
whatever was vital in any of them. And the reason
of this is not far to seek. We have seen already
(p. 82) how the chaos of sophistic doctrine was
largely conditioned, if not produced, by the break
down of the old civic life of Greece. The process
hardly suffered delay from all the efforts of Socrates
and Plato. Cosmopolitanism was already a point
of union between the Cynics and Cyrenaics (see
p. 128). And the march of politics was always
tending in the same direction. First through great
leagues, such as the Spartan or Athenian or Theban,
each with a predominant or tyrannical city at the
head ; then later through the conquest of Greece
by Alexander, and the leaguing of all Greek-speaking
peoples in the great invasion of Asia ; then through
the spread of Greek letters all over the Eastern

PHILOSOPHY AND HUMANITY 243

world, and the influx upon Greek centres such as
Athens and Alexandria, of all manner of foreign
intelligences ; and finally, through the conquest of
all this teeming world of culture by the discipline
and practical ability of Rome, and its incorporation
in a universal empire of law, all the barriers which
had divided city from city and tribe from tribe and
race from race disappeared, and only a common
humanity remained.

The only effective philosophies for such a
community were those which regarded man as an
individual, with a world politically omnipotent
hedging him about, and driving him in upon himself.
Thus the New Academy enlarged on the doubtful
ness of all beyond the individual consciousness ;
Stoicism insisted on individual dutifulness, Epicurean
ism on individual self-satisfaction. The first sought
to make life worth living through culture, the second
through indifference, the third through a moderate
enjoyment. But all alike felt themselves very
helpless in face of the growing sadness of life,
in face of the deepening mystery of the world
beyond. All alike were controversial, and quick
enough to ridicule their rivals ; none was hopefully
constructive, or (unless in the poetic enthusiasm of a
Lucretius) very confident of the adequacy of its own
conceptions. They all rather quickened the sense
of emptiness in human existence, than satisfied it ;

244 THE STOICS

at the best they enabled men to " absent themselves
a little while from the felicity of death."

Thus all over the wide area of Greek and Roman
civilisation, the activity of the later schools was
effectual to familiarise humanity with the language
of philosophy, and to convince humanity of the
inadequacy of its results. Both of these things the
Greeks taught to Saul of Tarsus ; at a higher Source
he found the satisfying of his soul ; but from the
Greek philosophies he learned the language through
which the new Revelation was to be taught in the
great world of Roman rule and Grecian culture. And
thus through the Pauline theology, Greek philosophy
had its part in the moral regeneration of the world ;
as it has had, in later times, in every emancipation
and renascence of its thought.

INDEX

ABDERA, birthplace of Democritus,
74 ; of Protagoras, 86

Absolute knowledge, unattainable
by man, 19 ; absorption in, 133 ;
no separate existence, 182

Abstract ideas not derivable from
experience, 45 ; abstract truth
impossible, 87; of no value, 132;
revival of, 133

Acadeimts, grove of, 135

Achilles and tortoise, 44 ; death of,
139

Acroatic, kind of lectures, 175

Actuality, see Realisation.

Agrigentum, birthplace of Empe-
docles, 59

Air, beginning of things, 14

Alcestis, referred to, 139

Alcibiades, dialogue, 137

Alexander, relations with Aristotle,
174; influence of conquests of, 242

Anarchy, in politics and in philo
sophy, 83 ; reaction against, by
Socrates, 102

Anaxagoras, 52 ; relation of Em-
pedocles to, 62 ; quoted by Aris
totle, 200

Anaximander, J

Anaxi?nenes , 14

Anthropomorphism, criticised, 32

Antigonus, friend of Zeno, 229

Antisthenes, 128

Apology, dialogue, 136

Appetite, the only reality, 96

Archilochtis, criticised by Hera-
clitus, 1 6

Aristippus, 124

Aristocracy, in politics and in
philosophy, 82

Aristotle, on Thales, 4 ; on Xeno-
phanes, 32 ; on Zeno, 42 ; on
Melissus, 47 ; on Anaxagoras,
54 ; on Empedocles, 59, 63, 70 ;
a complete Socratic, 103 ; on
Socrates, 106; on Sophists, 115;
debt to Plato, 159; on Plato,
163 ; chapters on, 172 sqq. ; his
fresh contributions to Academic
philosophy, 173; two classes of
lectures, 175 ; library, il>. ; pre
dominance of, 176; style, 177;
differences from Plato, 178

Art, a greater revealer than science,
66 ; relation of Love to, 137 ; a
mode of creation, 139

Asceticism, of Cynics, 128 ; of
Plato, 1 68 ; of Epicurus, 225

Atarneus, residence of Aristotle, 174

Athens, visited by Parmenides and
Zeno, 34, 42, 157 ; residence of
Anaxagoras, 52 ; centre of soph
istry, 85 ; birthplace of Socrates,
103 ; visited by Aristippus, 124 ;
birthplace of Antisthenes, 129 ;
and of Plato, 1 34 ; dialogue in
praise of, 137 ; residence of Aris
totle, 173; of Epicurus, 211

Atlantis, kingdom of, 153

Atomists, 52; revived theory of,
215

Atoms, constituents of nature, 76,
216 ; deviation of, 216

2 4 6

INDEX

BEAUTY, one aspect of ideal, no ;
relation to creative instinct, 139 ;
science of universal beauty, 141

Becoming, the fundamental prin
ciple, 1 6 ; passage from Being to,
36, 39

Beginning (apx n ), of Thales, 3 ;
Aristotle s definition, 4 ; diffi
culties of material theories of,
36i

Being, eternal being like a sphere,
32 ; passage from, to Becoming,
36, 39 ; a co-equal element with
Nonentity, 75 ; analysis of, 159 ;
and the Other, 165

Body, realisation of soul, 27 ; a
prison, 28 ; unthinkable except
with reference to space, 75 ;
source of illusion, 164

CANONICS, form of logic, 215
Cause, three causes, no; equals

essence, 167 ; first causes subject

of philosophy, 179; relation of,

to potentiality, 185
Cave, of this life, 148, 166
Chaldaea, visited by Pythagoras,

22 ; by Democritus, 74
Change, how account for, 10, 35,

39, 75
Chaos, of the Atomists, 53 ; of Em-

pedocles, 69 ; king in philosophy,

83 ; life not a chaos, 105
Charmides, dialogue, 136
Christ, brings sword, 99 ; king
dom of, 149
Chrysippus, successor of Cleanthes,

229
Cicero, mistranslates Pythagoras,

28 ; criticises Epicurus, 212, 221 ;

exponent of New Academy,

242

Citium, birthplace of Zeno, 228
Clazomenae, birthplace of Anaxa-

goras, 52
Cleanthes, successor of Zeno, 229 ;

hymn of, 236
Codrus, Plato descended from, 134;

sacrifice of, 139

Colophon, birthplace of Xeno-
phanes, 31

Commonplaces, function of, in
sophistry, 84

Community of wives, 148 ; ideal
community, 149 (and see State]

Contradiction, philosophy of, 65

Cosmogony, of Democritus, 77 ; of
Plato, 150; of Aristotle, 200;
of Epicurus, 219 ; of the Stoics,
231

Cosmopolitanism, of Cyrenaics and
Cynics, 128 ; of later systems,
242

Courage, treated of in Laches, 136

Cratylus, dialogue, 137

Creation, a great expiation, 73 ; in
the soul, 139; working out of
God s image, 151 ; union of
Essence and Matter, 167

Criterion, feeling the only, 127

Critias, dialogue, 153

Crito, dialogue, 136

Crux, in philosophy, 190

Cynic, origin of name, 13; i n
fluence of school on Plato, 154;
v. Epicurean, 226

Cyrene, seat of Cyrenaic school,
124; visited by Plato, 134; in
fluence of school on Plato, 154

DEATH, birth of the soul, 19

Deduction, z>. Induction, 48 ; func
tion of, in Aristotle, 184

Definitions, search for, by Socrates,
106 ; of no value, 132 ; rules for,
laid down by Plato, 156

Democritus, 74 ; relation of Epi
curus to, 216

Demonstrative science, based on
abstraction, 1 1

Desire, part of soul, 28, 169 ;
thought without, gives no motive,
191 ; distinctions among, 224

Destruction, meaning of, 53

Dialectic, Parmenides founder of,
39 ; Zeno inventor of, 42 ; Pla
tonic theory of, 164, 171

Dichotomy, invented by Zeno, 43

INDEX

247

Difference (see Essence], all differ
ence quantitative, 76 ; condi
tioned by dissimilarity in atoms,

77

Dilemma, Melissus use of, 46

Diogenes, pupil of Antisthenes, 130

Dionysitis, elder and younger, con
nection of Plato with, 135

Diotima, conversation of, with
Socrates, 137

Dry light, 19

Dualism, unthinkable, 32 ; in
nature, 38 ; of Plato and Aris
totle, 184

Dynamic, see Potentiality

EARTH, principle in nature, 38
Education, preparation for heaven,

148 ; ideal, 149 ; true function

of, 169; three stages, 170; an

entelechy, 191
Egypt, visited by Pythagoras, 22 ;

Democritus, 74; Plato, 135
Elect, seat of Eleatic school, 30 ;

birthplace of Parmenides, 33
Eleatics, relation of Empedocles

to, 62 ; of Democritus, 75 ; of

Plato, 154, 165
Elements, the four, 62 ; in creation,

151 ; in body and in soul, 156
Empedocles, 58
Ends of Life, indifference as to,

96 ; importance in later Greek

philosophy, 125 ; Plato s view

of, 1 68 ; Aristotle s, 193 ; Epi
curean, 222
Entelechy, Life, 186, 190; God,

1 88 ; Thought, ib. ; Education,

191; Morality, 193; State, 197;

physical world, 199 ; Soul, 203
Ephesus, birthplace of Heraclitus,

15
Epicurus, 211 ; praises of, by

Lucretius, 212 ; garden of, 213 ;

relation to Democritus, 216
Essence v. Difference, 48 ; equals

Cause, 167
Eiidides, 132
Euripides, friend of Anaxagoras, 52

Euthydemus, conversation with So
crates, 116; dialogue, 137

Etithyphro, dialogue, 136

Even, v. Odd, 24

Evil, origin of, 33 ; necessary on
earth, 168 ; God cause of evil,
but hath none, 234

Evolution, Anaximander s concep
tion of, 12 ; Xenophanes theory
of, 33 ; relation of, to funda
mental conception of Being, ib. ;
view of Empedocles, 70

Existence, an idea prior to Time
and Space, 37 ; not given by
Experience, 45 ; four forms of,
1 66 ; philosophy treats of exist
ence as such, 181

Exoteric kind of lectures, 175

FEMALE, see Male

Fire, original of things, 1 7 ; one of
two principles, 38

Flux, of all things, 16 ; of life, 27,
73 ; sophistic theory of, 87

Form,v. Matter, 25, 48; Aristotle s
theory of, 203

Formulae, never adequate, 122

Freewill, problem of, 33 ; relation
to law, 113; and overruling pro
vidence, 155

Friendship, treated of in Lysis,
136

GENUS, has less of existence than
species, 183

God, soul of the world, 27 ; the
Odd-Even, 26; the universe His
self-picturing, 26 ; God is one,
32 ; not a function of matter, 33 ;
atomic origin of idea of, 80 ; the
law or ideal in the universe, 112;
Man the friend of God, 142 ;
works out His image in creation,
151 ; God s thought and God s
working, 152; is Mind universal,
164 ; cause of union in crea
tion, 1 66 ; His visible images
in Man and Nature, ib. ; cause
both of good and of knowledge,

2 4 8

INDEX

166 ; thoughts of, eternally exist
ing, 187 ; an entelechy, 188 ;
Epicurean theory of, 221 ; Stoic
theory of, 233

Golden age, 73

Gorgias, 92 ; Antisthenes pupil of,

129; dialogue, 137
Greek v. Modern difficulties, 158
Gymnastic, function of, 170

HABIT, Aristotle s definition of,

195

Happiness, chief good, 193 ; reason
standard of, 196

Harmony, the eternal, 19 ; soul a
harmony, 29

ffecataeuSf referred to by Hero
dotus, 2

Hegel, philosophic system of, 159

Heraclitus, 1 5 ; z>. Democritus, 74 ;
Plato student of, 134; relation of
Plato to, 163

Herctiles, patron - god of Cynics,
130

Herodotus, notices Hecataeus, 2

Hesiod, praised, 139

Hippias, dialogue, 137

Homer, criticised by Heraclitus,
1 6 ; anthropomorphism of, 31 ;
praised, 139

Horace, quoted, 125

Htimanitarianism , began in scep
ticism, 99

Humanity, granted only to pos
sessors of eternal truth, 145

Husk, symbol of evolution, 12

IDEA, exists prior to sensation, 143 ;
eternal in universe, 150 ; rational
element in sensation, 152 ; Pla
tonic criticism of, 157 ; universals
are ideas of real existences, 163 ;
things partake of, 164 ; relation
of, to Pythagorean Numbers,

167 ; Aristotelian criticism of,
181 ; necessarily prior to sensa
tion, 187

Ideal, struggle of old and new, 99 ;

in the arts, 1 10 ; has three as
pects, Justice, Beauty, Utility, ib. ;
great ideal in the universe, 1 12 ;
can never wholly fit the real,

239

Idealism, v. Practicality, 4, 96 ;
Parmenides founder of, 39 ; v.
Realism, 5 1 j z\ Epicureanism,
216

Immortality, aspect of, to Greeks,
40 ; Parmenides pioneer for, 41 ;
Phaedo dialogue on, 136 ; Love
and immortality, 138 ; of soul,
150 ; relation of doctrine to
Platonic recollection, 154 ; faith
as to, 155 > Man must put on,
1 68 ; Aristotle s view of, 207

Inconsistency, not forbidden in
philosophy, 64

Individual, v. Universal, 99 ; rela
tion of, to community, 147, 196 ;
reality of, 184 ; importance of, in
later systems, 243

Individualism, in philosophy, 83,
85 ; not wholly bad, 98 ; required
reconciling with universalism,
100

I Induction (see Deduction) ; Socrates
inventor of, 106 ; Plato s con
tributions to, 1 60; function of,
in Aristotle, 184

i Infinite or indefinite, origin of
things, 8 ; function of, in mathe
matics, 10 ; relation to definite,
24, 26, 165

Infinity, origin of idea of, 46

Intellect, division of soul, 28, 169 ^

Ion, dialogue, 136

Irony, of Socrates, 105

JOWETT, Prof., quoted, 39, 43,
89, 138, 142, 153, 158

Judgment, vision of, 150

Justice, a cheating device, 95 ; one
form of ideal or universal, no;
related to law and to utility, 120 ;
the fairest wisdom, 139 ; dialogue
on, 146; only interest of stronger,
147 ; writ large in state, 147 ;

INDEX

249

perfection of whole man, and o
state, 169 ; a civic quality re
straining, 198 ; Epicurean theor>
of, 225

,^ his Critic referred to, 158
maxim of, 236

Knowledge, v. Opinion, 33, 35, 51
impossible, 93; really exists, 164,
first causes pertain to, 179 ; must
have real object, 183 ; potential
and actual, 203

Know thyself J 113; dialogue on,
137

LACHES, dialogue, 136

Lampsacus, place of death of An-
axagoras, 57

Laughing philosopher, 74

Law, in universe, 112; relation
to Freewill, 113; relation to
Justice, 120; fulfilled through
Love, 122 ; Laws, dialogue, 160;
potential and actual, 192

Leontini, birthplace of Gorgias, 92

Leucippus, 74

Life^ death of the soul, 19 ; a
prison, 28 ; a sentinel-post, ib. ;
a union of contradictories, 66 ; a
dwelling in cave, 148 ; organic
idea of, 185 ; an entelechy, 190;
different kinds of, 194; Aristotle s
definition, 203

Listeners, in Pythagorean system, 23

Logic, Parmenides founder of, 39 ;
Zeno inventor of, 42 ; contribu
tions of Plato and Aristotle to,
: 59; governing idea of Aris
totle s, 184 ; of Epicurus, 215 ;
Stoic divisions of, 230

Love, motive force in Nature, 38 ;
one of two principles, 38, 63 ;
fulfilling of the law, 122 ; dia
logues on, 137, 144; pure and
impure, 145

Liuretius, praises Empedocles, 59;
Epicurus, 212; proofs by, of
Epicurus theory, 217; exponent
of Roman Epicureanism, 242

Lyceum, school of Aristotle, 174
Lycurgus, praised, 140
Lysis, dialogue, 136

MAGNET, soul of, 6

Male and Female, Pythagorean
view of, 24 ; principles in Nature,
38 ; equality of, 148 ; correlative,
167 ; basis of State, 197

Man, measure of truth, 87 ; work
ing with Eternal Mind, 155 ;
Does Man partake in God s
ideas? 158; differentia of, pos
session of reason, 191 ; function
of, 193 ; a political animal, 197 ;
wisest of animals, why ? 200

Materialism, ancient and modern,
57; of Epicureans, 220; of Stoics,
233

Mathematicians, in system of
Pythagoras, 23

Mathematics, based on indefin-
ables, 10 ; function of, in Pytha
gorean philosophy, 25 ; and in
Platonic, 170

Matter (see Mind], v. Thought, 48 ;
another name for the formless,
151, 167 ; correlative of Mind,
167 ; what it symbolises, 184 ;
relation to Form, 203

Mechanical theory, of universe, 56,
78 ; of virtue, 195

Megara, birthplace of Euclides,
132 ; influence of school on Plato,

154

Mehssus, 46

Menexemis, dialogue, 137

Meno, dialogue, 136 ; relation to
Aristotle s doctrine, 191

Midwifery of Socrates, 104

Might, without Right is weak, 147;
is Right in tyrant, 149

Milet^ts, birthplace of Thales, I ;
of Anaximander, 7 > f Anaxi-
menes, 14

Mind, v. Matter, 51, 167 ; func
tion of, in the universe, 54 ;
God s mind working on matter,
151; ruler of universe, 155;

250

INDEX

must rule pleasure, 156; home
of ideas, 164 ; correlative of
matter, 167 ; passive and crea
tive, 207

Moist or base element, 18

Monarchy, in politics and in philo
sophy, 82

Morality, a convention, 95, 126 ;
traditional morality of Greece
required remodelling, 98 ; ques
tion as to origin solved by
Socrates, 121 ; can never ex
haust Subject, 188; anentelechy,
192 ; potential and actual, 194

Motion, animal, how accounted for,

79

Multiplicity, see Unity

Music, of the spheres, 27 ; of
seven planets, 151 ; function of,
in education, 29, 170

Myth, of Steeds, 144; of Judg
ment, 150; of Creation, 152;
philosophers fond of, 178

NAMES, approximations to reality,

165

Nature, treatises on, 16, 34, 46,
217 ; a reason in, 37 ; male and
female principles in, 38 ; Love
motive force in, ib. ; the non
existent, 92 ; touch of nature,
191 ; Aristotle s conception of,
199 ; violations of, 201 ; order
of, 217 ; clearly immortal, 218
a life consistent with, 236
Necessity, creative power, 38, 63 ;
how used by Democritus, 78
Aristotle s conception of, 201
Neleus, family (owners of Aristotle s

library), 175
NicomackuSf father of Aristotle, 172
Notions, Epicurus view of, 215
Number, original of things, 24
relation of ideas to, 167

OBEDIENCE, through disobedience

122

Obscttre, epithet of Heraclitus, 1 5
Odd, v. Even, 24

Opinion, v. Knowledge, 33, 35
Oracle, answer of, respecting So
crates, 107 ; maxim engraved
on, 113
Organism, idea of, in Aristotle,

185, 205

Organon, of Aristotle, 159
Origination, meaning of, 53> 62
Other, the Other of Plato, 165

PAINS, classification of, 131 ; con
verted into pleasures, 131, 227 ;
moral function of, 238

Pantheistic apathy, 20

Parmenides, 33 ; relation of Zeno
to, 42 ; visited Athens, 157 ;
dialogue, ib.

Particiilar, see Universal

Passion, part of soul, 28, 169

Paul, St., influence of Stoicism on,
228 ; relation of, to Greek philo
sophy, 244

Pericles, friend of Anaxagoras, 52 ;
and of Protagoras, 86

Peripatetics, origin of name, 174

Personality, absence of, in Greek
thought, 40

Persuasion, only true wisdom, 88

Phaedo, quoted from, 54 ; dialogue,
136

Phaedrus, dialogue, 142

Phenomena, not source of abstract
ideas, 15

Philebus, dialogue, 156

Philosophy, different from science,
9 ; does not forbid inconsistency,
64 ; a form of poesy or fiction,
66 ; at the basis of religion, art,
and morals, 67 ; great philoso
phies never die, 68 ; first sys
tematically divided by Democri
tus, 75 ; relation to politics, 82,
97 ; paradox of, 100 ; crisis of,
ib. ; of nature and of moral,
101 ; a means of social culture,
125; relation of Love to, 137;
must rule on earth, 149 ; only
makes happy guesses in science,
152; origin of, 178; investigates

INDEX

251

first causes, 179; crux in, 190;
Epicurus definition of, 214 ; a
search for chief good, 229

Plato, criticism of Protagoras, 89 ;
a complete Socratic, 103 : took
refuge with Euclides, 132, 134;
compared to Shakespeare, 134 ;
as psychologist, 155; central
doctrines of, 155 ; dogma im
possible, 162 ; Aristotle on,
163; relation to Heraclitus, ib, ;
and to the Eleatics, 165 ; rela
tion of Aristotle to, 178, 181 ;
his mistake as to universals,
182

Pleasure, end of life, 126 ; con
tempt of, 131 ; reason gives law
to, 149; is it chief good? 156;
Epicurean theory of, 222 ; moral
function of, 238

Politics, relation to philosophy, 82,
97 ; influence of sophistry upon,

Politicus, see Statesman
Potentiality (Dynamic idea), how
used by Aristotle, 185 ; of feel
ing* J 95 5 equals matter, 203
Practicality, v. Idealism, 4
Predication, Epicurus view of, 215
Propositions, v. Things, 189
Protagoras, 85 ; Plato s criticism of,

89; dialogue, 136
Protoplasm, explains nothing, 37
Punishment, Sophistic theory of,

88

Pyrrho, founder of Scepticism, 21 1
Pythagoras, 23

QUINT A ESSENTIA, origin of, 202
Quixote, the world admires, 227

REALISATION (Actuality), corre
lative of potentiality, 185 ; re
lation to Plato s Recollection,
1 88 ; chief good, 194

Reality, standard of, 40, 51 ; dis
tinction between, and appearance,
abolished, 83, 87 ; no necessary
relation between thought and

reality, 94; the only reality
appetite, 96; thoughts of God
the only reality, 164 ; approxi
mations to, 165 ; ideal can never
wholly fit, 239

Reason, function of, 37, 56 ; cor
rector of the senses, 61 ; governs
evolution, 70 ; worse made to
appear better, 84 ; realises itself
through individuals, 114; gives
law to pleasure, 149, 156 ; man
possesses, 191 ; actual and latent,
192 ; partly obedient, partly
contemplative, 194 ; an element
in Habit, 195 ; an impersonal
ruler, 196

Recollection (or Reminiscence), de
parture and renewal of know
ledge, 138 ; doctrine of, in Plato,
142 ; Platonic criticism of, 154 ;
nature of, 165 ; relation of
Aristotle s theory to, 1 88
Reminiscence, see Recollection
Republic, dialogue, 146 ; relation

of, to Aristotle s doctrine, 192
Revelation, how criticise? 158
Right, Might without, is weak,
147

SAMOS, birthplace of Pythagoras,
23 ; of Melissus, 46 ; of Epicurus,

211

Scepticism, its isolating influence,
94 ; destroys not appetite, but
moral restraint, 95 ; represented
birth of new conditions, 98 ;
phase of decay in distinctively
Greek life, 211

Science, philosophy different from,
9; happy guesses in, 152;
different kinds of, 1 80 ; can
never exhaust object, 188

Scrip and staff, emblems of Cynics,
130

Semitic elements in later Greek
philosophy, 228

Seneca, on Epicurus, 225 ; expon
ent of Roman Stoicism, 242

Senses (or Sensation), channel for the

252

INDEX

eternal wisdom, 18 ; data of, no
measure of reality, 40 ; not source
of ideas, 45 ; untrustworthy, 49 ;
necessary to truth, 56 ; no test of
truth, 60 ; relation to reason, 61 ;
based on composite character of
body, 71 ; atomic theory of, 79 ;
give no absolute truth, 80 ;
no distinction between, and
thing or mind, 87 ; reaction of
moral theory on theory of sensa
tion, 102 ; invalid as against
reason, 133 ; has rational ele
ments conditioning, 151 ; uni
versal cannot belong to, 163 ;
universals furthest removed
from, 1 80 ; only source of know
ledge, 214 ; Epicurean theory of
emission, 221 ; Stoic theory, 230
Shakespeare, Plato compared to,

134

Sicily, birthplace of Empedocles,
58 ; connection with rise of
Sophistry, 84, 86, 92 ; connection
of Plato with, 135

Sin, willing and unwilling, 12 1

Sinope, birthplace of Diogenes,
130

Sleep, cuts us off from eternal
wisdom, 1 8

Socrates, 101 ; relation to Anaxa-
goras, 54; his doctrine in general,
100 ; marks a parting of ways,
103 ; warning voice or dae
mon of, 104 ; philosophic mid
wifery, ib. ; irony, 105 ; not an
expositor, 115; relation to
Sophists, ib. ; Aristippus student
of, 124 ; criticises Antisthenes,
129 ; Plato pupil of, 134 ;
dialogue concerning, 136 ; con
versation of Diotima with, 137 ;
in Republic, 146

Socratics, complete and incomplete,
103; incomplete, 125, 128

Solon,^ Plato descended from, 134 ;
praised, 140

Sophists, 82 ; name first used by
Protagoras, 85 ; influence of, on

politics, 88, 97 ; refuted by the
arts, in ; relation to Socrates,
115; Platonic dialogues on, 136 ;
dialogue so named, 159

Soul of all things, 6 ; a fiery ex
halation, 18; God soul of the
world, 27 ; soul realised in body,
ib. ; soul double, 28 ; triple, 28,
169 ; life of soul a harmony, 29 ;
composed of finest atoms, 78 ;
even that of universe, 80 ; loss
of one s soul, 150; world-soul
the first creation, 151 ; divisions
of, 169 ; an entelechy, 203 ;
definition of, 204 ; v. body, 205 ;
Epicurean theory of, 220

Space, existence prior to, 37, 167 ;
unthinkable except with refer
ence to body, 75

Sparta, ideas from, in Republic,
148 ; influence on Plato s Laws,
1 60

Species, has more of existence than
genus, 183

Speusippus, successor of Plato, 1 72

Stagira, birthplace of Aristotle,
172

State, Justice writ large in, 147 ;
classes in, 169 ; an entelechy,
196

Statesman (or Politicus), dialogue,

159

Stoicism, Semitic element in, 228 ;

origin of name, 229
Strife, original of things, 17 ; one

of two principles, 38, 63
Substance defined, 203
Siilla, brought Aristotle s library to

Rome, 176
Summum bonum, what? 156;

relation of man s perfection, 168;

philosophy search for, 229
Symposium, dialogue, 137

TABULA RASA, Stoic theory of, 231
Tarsus, birthplace of St. Paul

and (possibly) of Chrysippus,

229
Temperance, treated of in Char-

INDEX

253

mides, 136 ; fairest sort of
wisdom, 139

Thales, 2

Theaetetus, quoted from, 89 ; dia
logue, 159

Theophrastus, successor of Aristotle,
175

Things, in themselves, how
known? 158; partake in the
idea, 164 ; v. Propositions, 189

Thought, of God, 1 50 ; ideal ele
ments in, 152; of God, source
of reality, 164 ; relation to
matter, 184; of God, eternally
existing in ideas, 187 ; an
entelechy, 188 ; without desire,
no motive, 191 ; arms of, 198 ;
only converted sensation, 223

Thucydides, quoted, 97

Thurii, code for, drawn up by
Protagoras, 86

Timaeus, dialogue, 150

Time, brings its revenges, 8 ; plays
with the dice, 20 ; existence
prior to, 37, 168

Tortoise, see Achilles

Transmigration of souls, 27, 73

Truth, first duty of man, 29 ;
senses give no absolute, 80 ;
title of work by Protagoras, 86 ;
man measure of, 87 ; abstract
truth impossible, ib. ; dialogue
concerning, 137

Tyranny, in politics and in philo
sophy, 83

ULTIMATELY, significance of word,
190

Unity, v. Multiplicity, 28 ; of
objects only apparent, 76 ; no
absolute unity either of body or
soul, 138; analysis of, 159; in
thoughts of God, 164

Universal, v. Particular, 48 ; v.
Individual, 99 ; search after lost,
105, 163 ; three forms, Justice,
Beauty, Utility, no; cannot
belong to sense, 163 ; know
ledge of, function of philosophy,

1 80; does not exist apart from

particulars, 181 ; has less of

existence than particulars, 183 ;

they are not antithetical, 189
Universe, the self-picturing of God,

27 ; mechanical theory of, 56 ;

ideal working in, 112 ; origin of,

151, 165, 200, 216, 232
Utility, relation to Justice, 1 20;

philosophy does not seek, 178

VIRTUE, teachable through per
suasion, 88; is knowledge, 112,
118 ; teachable through training,
131 ; sufficient for happiness,
ib. ; teachableness of, 136, 191 ;
immortal product of soul, 139;
a habit, 195 ; a mean, ib. ;
Reason standard of, 196 ; alone
absolutely good, 238

Void, existence of, 75 ; proofs of,
219

WA TER, beginning of things, 4

Weeping philosopher, 20; v. laugh
ing philosopher, 74

Wisdom, persuasion only true, 88 ;
moderate indulgence, 126; a
weaning of soul from pleasure,
131 ; temperance and justice
the fairest, 139 ; heavenly and
earthly, 148; Is it chief good?
156; Divine wisdom governor,
157 > Aristotle s definition of, 180

Wise man, personification of reason,
196

Withdrawal, Stoic name for suicide,
241

World, a living creature, 27 ; why
did God make? 190

XENOCRATES, academic philoso
pher, 172

Xenophanes, 31, 48
Xenophon, quoted, 116
Xerxes, invasion of, 52

ZENO, the Eleatic, 42 ; the Stoic,
238

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