that of universally valid law, the conception of knowing acquires a normative significance* aad
subjection
to the common, to the law, appears as a duty \z the intellectual realm as well as in the political, ethical, and religious.
Windelband - History of Philosophy
K.
Steinhart in Ersch und GrUber's Encyclopadie.
6. All these doctrines, however, presuppose the conception of motion as one that is intelligible of itself and in need of no further explanation. They thought they had explained qualitative change •hen they had pointed out as its true essence motion, whether between the parts of a continuously connected matter, or in empty
The opposition, therefore, which the Eleatic School brought tu bear upon all these doctrines was directed first of all against this conception of motion, and Zeno showed that this could by no means be taken so simply, but was rather full of contradictions which inca pacitated it for serving as principle of explanation.
Among Zeno's famous proofs of the impossibility of motion,1 the weakest is that which proceeds from the relativity of the amount of station, by showing that the movement of a wagon is variously esti mated if it is observed either from wagons also in motion but in different directions and at varying rates of speed, or again from two
vagons one of which is moving and one standing still. The three other proofs, on the contrary, which made use of the analysis into hscrete parts, infinitely many and infinitely small, of the space passed through by motion, and the time occupied by were ftronger. and for a long time were not overcome. The first proof was with reference to the impossibility of passing through a fixed space. This was regarded as proved by the infinite divisibility of
:he line, since the infinite number of points which must be attained before reaching the goal permitted no beginning of motion. The nae thought appears, somewhat varied, in the second argument, »Lxh seeks to prove the impossibility of passing through a space vA*A has movable boundaries. The argument (known as that of
int Pkfs VL 239 b. 9. Cf Ed. Wellmann, Ztnon't Beweise gegen die a*mr*mg umd ikrt Widerlegungen (Frankfurt a. O. 1870).
space.
.
»
0,
it,
56 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [Part L
Achilles and the tortoise) is, that since the pursuer in every inter val or subdivision of time must first reach the point from which the pursued simultaneously starts, it follows that the latter will always be in advance, though by an interval which becomes constantly smaller and approaches a minimum. The third argument has refer ence to the infinitely small extent of tlie motion performed in a. 7iy instant. According to this argument, called "the resting arrow," the moved body is in every instant in some one point of its track ; its movement in this instant is then equal to zero; but from ever so many zeros no real magnitude arises.
Together with the above-mentioned difficulties (<bropuu) with regard to space and plurality, these argumentations of Zeno set forth an extremely skilfully projected system of refuting the mechanical theories, especially Atomism, — a refutation which was intended to serve at the same time as indirect proof of the correct ness of the Eleatic conception of Being.
7. The number-theory of the Pythagoreans, too, was determined by Eleatic conceptions in so far as its procedure was, in the main, to demonstrate mathematical forms to be the fundamental relations of reality. When, however, they termed the actual world of reality an imitation of the mathematical forms, they thereby ascribed a sort of reality, even though of a derivative and secondary character, to individual things, and to what takes place among them. They were also the less inclined to withdraw from answering cosmological and physical questions as they were able to bring to philosophy the brilliant results of their astronomical investigation. They had come to a knowledge of the spherical form of the earth and of the heav enly bodies ; they were aware also that the change of day and night depends upon a movement of the earth itself. At first, indeed, they thought of this movement as a circuit performed about a central fire to which the earth presented always the same side, a side unknown to us. 1 On the other hand, they assumed that about this same cen tral fire there moved in concentric circles, outside the earth's track, successively the moon, the sun, the planets, and finally the heaven containing the fixed stars. They brought into this system, however, in a way, the metaphysical dualism which they had maintained be tween the perfect and the imperfect, inasmuch as they regarded the
1 Already in Plato's time the hypothesis of the central fire was given up by the younger Pythagoreans, Ecphantus, Hicetus of Syracuse (and with it that of the "counter-earth," which had hitherto been assumed as placed between the central fire and the earth, invented merely to fill out the number ten), and instead the earth was located in the centre of the universe and provided with a rotation on its axis. With this latter assumption that of a resting position of the heaven of the fixed stars was connected.
Chap. 1, § 6. ] Conceptions of Cognition. 57
heaven of the stars, on account of the sublime uniformity of its motions, as the realm of perfection ; the world " beneath the moon," on the contrary, on account of the unrest of its changing formations and motions, they regarded as that of imperfection.
This way of looking at things runs parallel to that of Anaxagoias, and leads, though in another way, to the interweaving and complica tion of theory with considerations of worth [ethical or aesthetic
It teas in connection with astronomical insight that the thought of an order of Nature in conformity to law dawned as clear knowledge upon the Grecian mind. Anaxagoras reasons from this to an ordering principle. Pythagoreanism finds in the heavens the divine rest of unchangeableness {Sichgleichbleibens) which it misses upon the earth. Here we have a meeting of the ancient religious ideas and the very different result yielded thus far by the scientific work of the Greeks. This latter, seeking a Permanent in the muta tion of occurrence, found such a permanence only in the great, simple relations, in the revolution of the stars, which abides ever the same. In the terrestrial world, with its whole change of manifold, con stantly intersecting motions, this uniformity remained still hidden from Greek science : she regarded this terrestrial world rather as a domain of the imperfect, the lower, which wants the sure order of that other world. In a certain sense this may be looked upon as the ultimate result of the first period, a result which had a determin ing influence for after time.
What the attitude of the Pythagoreans was to the question concerning a peri odic change of origination and annihilation of the world is uncertain. A plurality of co-existing worlds is excluded in their system. In their theory of world-for mation and in their particular physical doctrines they concede so prominent a place to fire that they come very near to Heraclitus. Aristotle even places one of the contemporaries of Philolaus, Hippasus of Metapontura, in immediate con nection with Heraclitus (Met. I. 3).
Their assumption of ether as a fifth element out of which the spherical shells of the heavens were formed, in addition to the four elements of Empedocles, is doubtless connected with the separation which they made between heaven and earth. It is not less difficult to decide whether they derived the elements from a common ground, and if so, how : according to many passages it would seem as if they had spoken of a progressive "attraction," i. e. in this case (cf. above, p. M), mathematical shaping out or forming of empty space by the Iv (one), the original number, which is exalted above limitation and the unlimited. Yet it max, too, that in regard to these questions various views were held within the •ebool side by side.
§ 6. The Conception! of Cognition.
values].
It Schneidewin, Uebtr dieKeime erkenntnitstheorttischer und ethiseher Phi- lotopkrme bei den vortokratischen Denkern, Pbilos. Monatshefte, II. (1860), pp. 157. 345, 429.
B. Mfinz, Die Keime der Brkenntnitstheorit in der vorsophittischen Periods in griechiteMn Philotophie. Vienna, 1880.
. 58 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [Part L
The question, what things really are, or what is the intrinsic nature of things, which is already contained in the Milesian con ception of the apxn, presupposes that the current, original and naive mode of thinking of the world has been shaken, although this pre supposition has not come to clear recognition in consciousness. The question proves that reflective thought is no longer satisfied with the ideas which it finds current, and that it seeks truth behind or above them. Those ideas are given, however, through sense-per ception and through the involuntary elaboration of this in thought, —an elaboration that has been transmitted from generation to generation, until it has became consolidated and fixed and embodied in language, and so forms a part of the thinker's data. When the individual with his reflection transcends these ideas so given — and it is in this that philosophical activity ultimately consists — he does it on the ground of logical needs which assert themselves as he re flects on the given. His philosophising, then, even though he takes no account of this fact, grows out of discrepancies between his expe rience and his thought — out of the inadequacy exhibited by what is presented to his perception or imagination, when set over against the demands and presuppositions of his understanding. However unconscious of this its inner ground naive philosophising may be at the outset, attention cannot fail to be turned in time to the diver sity in the sources of the conflicting ideas within.
1. The first observations, therefore, which the Grecian philosophers made on human knowledge concern this contrast between experience and reflection. The farther the explanatory theories of science became separated from the way of looking at things which belongs to daily life, the clearer it became to their authors that those theories sprang from another source than that of the customary opinions. To be sure they have not as yet much to say on this point. They set opinion (Sofa) over against truth, and this often means only that their own doctrines are true and the opinions of others false. So much only is certain to them, that they owe their own views to reflection, while the mass of mankind — concerning whose intellectual activity it is just the older philosophers, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, who express themselves in an extremely depreciatory manner — persist in the illusion of the senses. Only through thinking (<f>p<wtiv, vohv, Aoyos), then, is the truth found ; the senses, if alone, give fraud and a lie. l So strong has reflection become in itself that it not only proceeds to con sequences which to the common thinking have become absolutely
» Heracl. Frag. (Schust. ) 11, 123 ; Parmen. Frag. (Karrten) 64 ft.
Caar. 1, $ 6. J Conceptions of Cognition: Heraclitus, Parmenidet. 59
paradoxical, but also maintains expressly that it is itself the sole •oarce of truth as opposed to opinions.
This, to be sure, works oddly when we notice that completely
illustrations of this same assertion are given by Heracli- t*s and Parmenides in close succession. The former finds the i«-eit caused by the senses, and the error of the multitude, to consist a the illusory appearance of the Being of permanent things, which j presented to men by sense-perception ; the Eleatic, on the contrary, u zealous against the senses, because they would fain ]>ersuade us thai there are in truth motion and change, becoming and arising, phuality and variety. Precisely this double form in which this
one claim is put forward shows that it is not the result of an jTestigation, but the expression of a demand made on other rrounds.
Moreover, this proposition fits very differently into the general theories of the two great metaphysicians. The flux of all things, with its restless change of individual phenomena, as taught by Heraclitus, makes it easy to comprehend also the possibility of the 'mergence of false ideas, and the seeming of permanence and Being sad besides a special explanation in the counter-course or opposi tion (ivamorpoiria) of the two " ways," for this causes the illusion of permanence or Being to arise where there is just as much change in one direction as in the other [i. e. from primitive fire into things and tier versa]. On the contrary, it is quite impossible to see where the •eat of illusion and error was to be sought in the one world-sphere of Parmenides, everywhere the same, which was held to be at the
tan* time the one, true world-thought. The search could be only aaong individual things and their changing activities, which were themselves declared to be illusion, non-existent. Nevertheless these is no support to be found in the literature preserved, for (apposing that this so simple a thought1 which would have over thrown the entire Eleatic system, ever occurred to the investigators %l that time. In any case, the Eleatics contented themselves with tie assertion that all particular existence and all change were decep- tnjo and illusion of the senses.
The same naive denial of that which they could not explain seems to lure been employed also by the successors of the Eleatics in the natter of the qualitative attributes of individual things. Emjted- ■<iei at least maintained that all things were mixtures of the ele-
aenu. The task that logically grew out of this was to show how tie other qualities arise from the mixture of the properties of the
opposite
> First carried out in I'lalo, Sophist, 237 A.
60 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [Part L
elements. But this he did not perform ; so far as our knowledge extends, he did not at all set himself this task; he probably re garded these particular qualities as not being (objectively), and as a deception of the senses, just as all qualities whatever were such in the view of Parmenides. And so the oldest view of the Ato- mists, as supported by Leucippus, may well have gone just to this point, maintaining that in" individual things only the form, arrange ment, situation, and motion of the constituent atoms were real, and that the other properties were a deceitful product of the senses, which here, too, found no further explanation. 1
These difficulties were perhaps jointly influential in the mind of Anaxagoras when he regarded all qualities as original, and not as having become what they are, and accordingly postulated countless elements. But for him arose the opposite difficulty of showing how it could come about, if all was regarded as contained in all, every quality in every thing, that only some of these qualities seemed to be present in individual things. He explained this in part from the consideration that many of the constituent parts are imperceptible because of their minuteness ; hence it is only by thought that we can learn the true qualities of things. 8 Besides this, however, he seems to have followed up the thought, found already in Anaximan- der's idea of the anapov, that a complete mingling of definite quali ties yields something indefinite. So, at least, he described the primitive mixture of all substances which preceded the formation of the world as completely devoid of quality,' and a similar thought seems to have permitted him to regard the four elements of Emped- ocles not as primitive substances, but rather as already mixtures. 4
The rationalism common to the pre-Sophistic thinkers assumes, among the Pythagoreans, the particular form of affirming that knowledge consists in mathematical thought. This, though in itself a narrowing, is yet, on the other hand, a great step in advance, in asmuch as there is here given for the first time a positive definition of "thought" as contrasted with "perception. " Only through number, taught Philolaus,* is the essential nature of things to be
known ; that when the definite mathematical relations lying at their basis are recognised that things are properly conceived or
It extremely improbable that the solution of the problem through the subjectivity of the sense-qualities, which found in Democritus, was presented already by Leucippus, and therefore before Protagoras, who universally regarded as the founder of this theory.
frag. (Schorn) From this passage the true light may, perhaps, be thrown upon the sense in which Anaximander designates the ireipov as &6f>irror.
Arist. De Gen. et Corr. 314 24. Frag. (Mull. ) 13.
Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VII. 90
***»1 is
I. 1,
a
f.
is
4.
is, it is
is
Chap. 1, 5 6. ] Conception* of Cognition : Pkilolaus, Zeno. 61
understood. This had been the experience of the Pythagoreans in music and in astronomy, and this was the object of their desire and effort in all other fields. When, however, they ultimately came to the result that this requirement could be completely met only in
the knowledge of the perfect world of the stars, they concluded from this that science (<ro<t>ui) relates only to the realm of order and perfection, that to heaven, and that in the realm of the imper fect, of change not subject to order, i. e. on earth, only practical ability (<! *>«■>? ) of avail. 1
Another positive characteristic of the "thinking" which the earlier investigators had set over against "perceiving," without closer specification, appears obscurely in the reasonings of Zeno, viz. conformity to logical laws. At the basis of all his attacks against plurality and motion lie the principle of contradiction and the presupposition that that can not be actual of which the same thing must be affirmed and also denied. This principle and presup position were applied with clearness and certainty, though not ab stractly expressed. The Eleatic theory of the world, so highly paradoxical, forced its supporters to enter into polemic more than did others, and the accounts as to Zeno's treatise, which, as seems, was also logically well arranged and divided, offer notable evi dence of the developed technique of refutation to which the school attained in consequence. To be sure, this formal training which prevailed in Eleatic circles does not seem to have led as yet to the abstract statement of logical laws. " " "
2. The setting over against each other of thinking and per ceiving" arose, then, from an estimation of their relative epistemo- logical value (erkenntniastheoretischen Werthbestimmung) [i. e. from the postulate that one of these two forms of mental activity worth more epistemologically for attaining truth]. In decided contradiction with this, however, stand the psychological principles with which these same investigators sought to apprehend the origin and process of knowing. For although their thinking was directed first and chiefly toward the outer world, man's mental activity came under their attention in so far as they were obliged to see in this activity one of the formations, or transformations, or products of motion, of the universe. The mind or soul and its action are then at this time considered scientifically only in connection with the entire course of the universe, whose product they are as truly as are all other things and since among the men of this period the general principles of explanation are everywhere as yet conceived corpore-
Stob. Bel. 488.
»
I.
;
is
a
it
is
is,
62 The Greeks: Cosmological Period. [Part L
ally it follows that we meet also a thorough-going materialistic
psychology. 1
Now mind or soul is in the first place moving force. Thales
ascribed such a soul to magnets, and declared that the whole world was full of souls. The essential nature of individual souls was therefore sought at first in that which had been recognised as the moving principle in the whole. Anaximenes found it in air, Heraclitus and likewise Parmenides (in his hypothetical physics) in fire, Leucippus in the fiery atoms,' and Anaxagoras in the world- moving, rational substance, the vow. Where, as in the system of Empedocles, a corporeal moving principle was lacking, the mixed substance which streams through the living body, the blood, was regarded as soul. Diogenes of Apollonia found the essence of the soul in the air mixed with the blood. 8 With the Pythagoreans, too, the individual soul could not be considered as the same with the iv (One) which they conceived as moving principle of the world, nor regarded as a part of it ; instead, they taught that the soul was a number, and made this very vague statement more definite by say ing that it was a harmony, —an expression which we can only interpret4 as meaning a harmony of the body; that the living, harmonious activity of its parts.
If now to this moving force, which leaves the body in death, were ascribed at the same time those properties which we to-day designate as " psychical," we find clear characterisation of the specifically theoretical interest by which this oldest science was filled, in the fact that among these attributes that of ideation, of " knowing," which almost exclusively the object of attention. * Of feelings and volitions there scarcely incidental mention. * But as the
Besides those characterisations of the soul, which resulted from their gen eral scientific theory, we find in the tradition in case of several of these men
(Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and the Pythagoreans) still other doc trines which are not only not connected witli the former, but are even in con tradiction to them. A conception of the body as prison of the soul (ri. ua = <rijjui), personal immortality, recompense after death, transmigration of souls. — all these are ideas which the philosophers took from their relations to the mysteries and retained in their priestly teaching, however little they accorded with their scientific teachings. Such expressions are not treated above.
In like manner, some of the Pythagoreans declared the motes which the sunlight discloses in the air to be souls.
Since, with reference to this, he recognised the distinction between venous ami arterial blood, he meant by his irwO/ux what the chemistry of to-day calls oxygen.
Ace. to Plato. Phmdo, 85 ff. , where the view rejected ns materialistic.
The w>Bs of Anaxagoras only knowing air with Diogenes of Apollonia great, powerful, eternal, intelligent body. Being with Parmenides at the
same time votlv, etc. Only ^iXAttjs and w«o« with Empedocles are mythically hypostasised impulses, and these, too, have nothing to do with his psychological views.
With this connected the fact that in general we cannot once speak
a 664*2
1
is
o(
is
is
is
is
a
;
is
is
it is
is,
Cm*». 1,§ 6. ] Conception* of Cognition: Her aclitus, Anaxagoras. 03
individual soul in so far as it is moving force was held to be a part of the force which moves the entire universe, so also the " knowing " rf the individual could be conceived only as a part of the knowing activity of the world. ' This is clearest in the systems of Heraclitus lad Anaxagoras ; each individual has so much knowledge as there a contained in him of the general World-reason, —fire with Htraelitus,* the rofc with Anaxagoras. In the case of Leucippus and of Diogenes of Apollonia the ideas are similar.
This physical conception, which with Anaxagoras especially is portly quantitative, was given a turn by Heraclitus, in which the ;;&stemological postulate again forces its way to the front, and asserts itself in the interest of a deeper insight and a profounder new. The World-reason in which the individual participates in his knowledge is everywhere the same; the Xoyot of Heraclitus3 and the io£« of Anaxagoras, as homogenous Reason, are distributed through the whole universe as moving force. Knowing, then, is that which is common to all. It is therefore the law and order to »iich every one has to unite himself. In dreams, in personal opin ion, each one has his own world; knowing is common ((wov) to tlL By means of this characteristic, viz.
that of universally valid law, the conception of knowing acquires a normative significance* aad subjection to the common, to the law, appears as a duty \z the intellectual realm as well as in the political, ethical, and religious. *
i at ethical investigation in this period. For single moralising reflections ana cannot be regarded as beginnings of ethics. On the only excep-
tm ef. below, note 6.
• Th« expression " World-soul " was first used by Plato, or at the earliest by
? VVWana (in the fragment which has certainly been much questioned just for t&s reason. Mull. 21). The idea is certainly present in Anaximenes, Heraclitus, aaexagnra*. and perhaps also among the Pythagoreans.
' Heoop
■araJBg u> guard the soul from the wet (intoxication).
the paradoxical expression, the dryest soul is the wisest, and the
• CI. , for this and the following, M. Heinze, Die Lthre vom Logos in der frwraurton Philotopkie (Oldenburg, 1872).
• Fr*g. (Schust. ) 123.
• This is the only conception in the development of pre-Sophistic thought, in a» iw ot which we can speak of an attempt to propound a scientific principle «< ttkir*. If Heraclitus had in mind a universal expression for all moral duties ■i •prxkme of this subordination to law, or at least hit upon such, he attached - at once u> the fundamental thoughts of his metaphysics, which declared thin
a* u> be the abiding essence of the world. Yet attention has above ($4) been aJed to the fact that in the conception of the world-order which hovered before I^m, he did not as yet separate consciously the different motives (especially the pcTacml from the ethical), and so ethical investigation does not as yet work
uctf cU»r from the physical to an Independent position. The same is true of '■*»pTthaxoreans, who expressed the conception of order by the term "harmony " »iaj> also might be adopted from Heraclitus), and therefore designated virtue • ~eannony. " To be sure, they used the term " harmony " for the soul, for
awe*, ami for many other things.
64 The Greeks : Cosmological Period.
[Part ,
3. If now we ask how under these assumptions the fact was explained that " knowledge " comes into the individual man, i. e. into his body, we find that the only answer offered by Heraclitus and the whole company of his successors "through the door of the senses. " When man awake, the World-reason streams into his body through the opened senses (sight and hearing are of course chiefly noticed1), and, therefore, he knows. This comes about, to be sure, only there besides, in the man himself, so much reason or soul that the motion coming from without met by an inner motion but upon this interaction, effected through the senses> between the outer and the inner reason knowledge rests.
A psychological distinction, then, between perceiving and think ing, which, as regards their respective epistemological values, are so abruptly opposed, Heraclitus does not know how to state. Par- menides,* however, was just as little in position to make such distinction. 4 Rather, he expressed more sharply still the dependence upon bodily relations in which the thinking of the individual man involved, when he said that every one so thought as the conditions constituted by the mixture of substances in the members of the body permitted, and when he found in this confirmation of his general thought of the identity of corporeality and thinking in general. * Still more express the testimony6 that Empedocles declared thinking and perceiving to be the same, that he thought change in thinking as dependent upon change of the body, and that he regarded the constitution of the blood as of decisive importance for the intellectual capacity of the man.
These two last-named thinkers did not hesitate, moreover, to make their conception more plain to the imagination by means of physio logical hypotheses. Parmenides taught in his hypothetical physics
Also smell (Empedocles) and taste (Anaxagoras). Only the Atomists, and in particular Democritus, seem to have given value to the sense of touch.
Arist. De An. 405 a 27.
Theophr. De Sens.
So, too, reported (Theophr. De Sens. 26) of Alcmseon, the Pythago-
reanising physician, that he declared thought or consciousness (Jh-i jiAwj \vrijpi) to be the characteristic which distinguishes man from the other animals. But a more precise determination lacking here also unless, in accordance with the expression, we think of something similar to the Aristotelian Kotviv al<rSrrr-^pu>w With this would agree the circumstance that the first attempts to localise the particular psychical activities in particular parts of the body seem to have been made in the circles of the Pythagoreans and of the physicians who stood in near relations to them localising, e. g. , thought in the brain, perception in the indi vidual organs and in the heart, and the emotions also in the latter organ. From them Diogenes of Apollonia, and after him Democritus, seem to have taken these beginnings of physiological psychology.
Frag. (Karst. ) vv. 146-149.
Arist. De An. 404 Theophr. De Sens. 10
III. 427 21 Met. III. 1009 17
I. f. 2,
I.
7 ;
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3,
; a
it is
if
a
b is
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Caar. 1, | •. ] Conception* of Cognition : Parmenides, Empedocles. 65
a*t like is always perceived by like, warmth without by the warmth
:a man, the cold without by the cold even in the dead body.
jclea, with the aid of his theory of effluxes and pores, carried out
tae thought that every element in our body perceives the same ele ment in the outer world, so as to teach that each organ is accessible w the impress of those substances only whose effluxes fit into its pores ; i. e. he derived the specific energy of the sense organs from relations of similarity between their outer form and their objects, lad carried this out for sight, hearing, and smell, with observations vhich in part are very acute. 1
This view, that like is apprehended by like, was opposed by Anaxagoras, —on what ground it is not certain. ' He taught that perception is only of opposite by opposite, warmth without by the eoU in man, etc. * At all events, his doctrine also is a proof that '. iiese metaphysical rationalists maintained all of them in their
fyckology a crass sensationalism.
1 Tbeopbr. De Sens. 7.
Emped-
* ftrfeapa we have here a remembrance of Heraclitus, who also explained pneeptioo from the iparrurrpoxla, — motion against motion, — and with whom jppcaitioD was the principle of all motion.
• Tbeopbr. De Sens. 27 ft. It U interesting that Anaxagoras inferred from •±m that every perception is joined with pain (XAri)).
CHAPTER II.
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERIOD.
O. Grote, History of Greece, VIII. (London, 1850), pp. 474-644.
C. F. Hermann, Geschichte und System der platonischen Philosophie, I. (Heidel
berg, 1839), pp. 179-231.
Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit von Gorgias"bis zu Lysias. Leips. 1808. " H. Kochly, Sokrates und sein Volk, 1855, in Akad. Vortragen und Reden, I.
(ZUrich, 1859), pp. 219 fl. "
H. Siebeck, Ueber Sokrates' Verhaltniss zur Sophistik, in Untersuchungen
zur PhiloBophie der Griechen," 1873, 2 Aufl. (Freiburg i. B. 1888).
W. Windelband, Sokrates in " Prseludien " (Freiburg i. B. 1884), pp. 64 ft*. [H. Jackson, Art. Sophists, in Enc. Brit. ]
The farther development of Greek science was determined by the circumstance that in the powerful, universal upward movement of the mental and spiritual life which the nation achieved after the victorious result of the Persian wars, science was torn away from the restraints of close schools in which it had been quietly pursued, and brought out upon the stage of publicity, where all was in vehe ment agitation.
The circles in which scientific research was fostered had widened from generation to generation, and the doctrines which at first had been presented in smaller societies and spread abroad in writings that were hard to understand, had begun to filter through into the general consciousness. The poets, as Euripides and Epicharmus, began already to translate into their language scientific conceptions and views ; the knowledge gained by investigation of Nature had already been made practically effective, as by Hippodaraus in his architecture. Even medicine, which had formerly been only an art practised according to traditions, became so permeated with the general conceptions of natural philosophy, and with the special doc trines, information, and hypotheses of physiological research which in the course of time had occupied an ever-broader space in the
systems of science, that it became encumbered with an excessive 06
Cnar. 2. ] The Anthropological Period. 67
growth of etiological theories,1 and first found in Hippocrates the reformer who reduced this tendency to its proper measure and gave hack, to the physician's art its old character in contrast to scientific
Moreover, the Greek nation, matured by the stern experience viueh had been its lot within and without, had entered upon the age of manhood. It had lost its naive faith in old tradition, and :nd learned the value of knowledge and ability for practical life. Of science, which up to this time had followed in quiet the pure impulse of investigation — the noble curiosity which seeks knowledge for its own sake — the state now demanded light on the questions
counsel and help in the doubt into which the jixnnance of its own development in culture had plunged it. In tie feverish emulation of intellectual forces which this greatest
[mod in the world's history brought with the thought everywhere zuned recognition that in every walk in life the man of knowledge . » the most capable, the most useful, and the most successful. In every department of practical activity, the fruitful innovation of independent reflection, of individual judgment, took the place of the
•iii life controlled by custom. The mass of the people was seized with
ke K« ruing desire to make the results of science its otcn. It was espe- rially true, however, that at this time family tradition, habituation, personal excellence of character and address were no longer suffi- 'teot. im formerly, for the man who wished to play political part. Tbe variety of transactions and the attendant difficulties, as well as the intellectual status of those with whom and upon whom he would
work, made a theoretical schooling for the political career indispen sable. Nowhere was this movement so powerful as in Athens, then •ie capital of Greece, and here also these desires found their fullest •aexfaction.
For the supply followed the demand. The men of science, the Stfkkts (vo+urrm), stepped forth out of the schools into public life, tad taught the people what they themselves had learned or discov- -rwi. They did this, indeed, partly out of the noble impulse to >*rh their fellow-citizens,3 but was none the less true that this Earning became their business. From all parts of Greece men of •J* different schools flocked toward Athens to expound their doc-
•hieh disturbed
■This innovation in medicine began among the physicians who stood in near r*iuti<a to Pythagoreanism, especially with Alcmseon. As literary instance ■ ft. the writing which goes falsely under the name of Hippocrates, rtpl tialr^t, ■rua. Ct. H. Siebeck, Ot$eh. d. Ptyrh. 04 ff.
(T principally his writings wtpl dpxa'<r< hrpiKiji and rtpl Siairiii ijfar. CT- Protnjoras in Plato, Prot. 316 d.
•'
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a
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it
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68 The Philosophy of the Greeks. [Part I.
trines, and from so expounding them in the capital as well as in the smaller cities, to gain honour and wealth.
In this way it happened that in a short time not only the social position of science, but its own inner nature, its tendency and the questions for its solution, were fundamentally changed. It became a social power, a determining factor in political life, as in the case of Pericles ; but just by this means it came into a state of dependence upon the demands of practical, and in particular, of political life.
These demands showed themselves principally in the facts that the democratic polity demanded of politicians first of all the capac ity for public speaking, and that in consequence the instruction of the Sophists was especially sought as a preparation for public life, and converged more and more upon this object. Men of science became teachers of eloquence.
As such, however, they lost sight of the goal of nature-knowledge, the vision of which had formerly hovered before the eyes of science. At the most they presented transmitted doctrines in the most grace ful and pleasing form possible. But their own investigations, if they were not confined to a formal routine, were necessarily directed toward man's thinking and willing, — the activities which public speaking was designed to determine and control, — toward the manner in which ideas and volitions arise, and the way in which they contend with one another and maintain their mutual rights. In this way Greek science took an essentially anthropological or subjective direction, studying the inner activities of man, his ideation and volition, and at the same time lost its purely theoretical character and acquired a preponderantly practical significance. 1
But while the activity of the Sophists found itself brought face to face with the manifold character of human thought and will, while the teachers of eloquence were presenting the art of persua sion and pursuing the path upon which every opinion could be helped to victory, every purpose to its achievement, the question rose before them whether above and beyond these individual opin ions and purposes which each one feels within himself as a necessity and can defend against others, there is anything whatever that is right and true in itself. The question whether there is anyUting universally valid, is the problem of the anthropological period of Greek philosophy, or of the Greek Enlightenment.
For it is likewise the problem of the time, — of a time in which religious faith and the old morality were wavering, a time when the
1 Cicero's well-known expression (Tusc V. 4, 10) with regard to Socrates holds good for the entire philosophy of this period.
Caar. 2. J The Anthropological Period. 69
respect which authority had commanded sank more and more, and ill tended towards an anarchy of individuals who had become self- governing. Very soon this internal disintegration of the Greek spirit became clearly evident in the disorders of the Peloponnesian nr, and with the fall of Athenian supremacy the flower of Grecian -slture withered.
The dangers of this condition were at first decidedly increased by
For while the Sophists were perfecting the scientific ierelopment of the formal art of presentation, verification, and refu- uaoo which they had to teach, they indeed created with this rheto- rx, on the one hand, the beginnings of an independent psychology, ud raised this branch of investigation from the inferior position which it had taken in the cosmological systems to the importance of t fundamental science, and developed, on the other hand, the prelim inaries for a systematic consideration of the logical and ethical norms. Bat as they considered what they practised and taught, — viz. the >kill to carry through any proposition whatever,1 — the relativity of aoBan ideas and purposes presented itself to their consciousness so
clearly and with such overwhelming force that they disowned in quiry as to the existence of a universally valid truth in the theoreti cal, at well as in the practical sphere, and so fell into a scepticism •hich at first was a genuine scientific theory, but soon became a fnrolous play. With their self-complacent, pettifogging advocacy, tie Sophists made themselves the mouth-piece of all the unbridled tendencies which were undermining the order of public life.
The intellectual head of the Sophists was Protagoras; at least, he m the only one who was the author of any conceptions philosophi cally fruitful and significant. Contrasted with him, Gorgias, who is anally placed at his side, appears only as a rhetorician who occa- woally attempted the domain of philosophy and surpassed the *rnfices of the Eleatic dialectic. IJippias and Prodicus are only to
» mentioned, the one as the type of a popularising polyhistor, and ia* other as an example of superficial moralising.
To the disordered activity and lack of conviction of the younger Sophists, Socrates opposed faith in reason and a conviction of the esttence of a universally valid truth. This conviction was with fea of an essentially practical sort; it was his moral disposition, but
led him to an investigation of knowledge, which he anew set over gainst opinions, and whose essence he found in conceptianul thought.
Socrates and the Sophists stand, accordingly, on the ground of
'CI the well-known fir {rrw \tyor xptirrm wjuir. ri»li . Vn/i 112 II. , •»t Ariat. RhH. II. 24, 1408 23.
philosophy.
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70 The Philosophy of the Greeks. [Part I.
the same common consciousness of the time, and discuss the same problems ; but where the Sophists with their skill and learning re main caught in the confusion of the opinions of the day and end with a negative result, there the plain, sound sense, and the pure and noble personality of Socrates find again the ideals of morality and science.
The strong impression which the teaching of Socrates made forced the Sophistic activity into new lines. It followed him in the at tempt to gain, through scientific insight, sure principles for the ethical conduct of life. While the old schools had for the most part become disintegrated, and had diverted their activity to the teaching of rhetoric, men who had enjoyed intercourse with the Athenian sage now founded new schools, in whose scientific work Socratic and Sophistic principles were often strangely intermingled, while the exclusively anthropological direction of their investigation remained the same.
Among these schools, called for the most part " Socratic," though not quite accurately, the Megarian, founded by Euclid, fell most deeply into the unfruitful subtleties of the later Sophists. Con nected with this is the Elean-Eretrian School, the most unimportant. The fundamental contrast, however, in the conception of life which prevailed in the Greek life of that day, found its scientific expression in the teachings of those two schools whose opposition permeates all ancient literature from that time on: namely, the Cynic and the Cyrenaic, the precursors of the Stoic and Epicurean. The first of these schools numbers among its adherents, besides its founder Antisthenes, the popular figure of Diogenes. In the latter, which is also called the Hedonistic School, the founder, Aristippus, was suc ceeded by a grandson of the same name, and later by Theodoras, Anniceris, Hegesias, and Euemerus.
The wandering teachers known as the Sophists came in part from the earlier scholastic societies. In the second half of the fifth century these had for the most part disappeared, and had given place to a freer announcement of opinions attained, which was not unfavourable to special research, particularly physiologi cal research, as in the case of Hippo, Cleidemus, and Diogenes of Apollonia, but which was attended by a crippling of general speculation. Only the school of Abdera and the Pythagorean School survived this time of dissolution. A society of Heracliteans which maintained itself in Ephesus appears soon to have fallen away into the pursuits of the Sophists, as in the case of Cratylus.
6. All these doctrines, however, presuppose the conception of motion as one that is intelligible of itself and in need of no further explanation. They thought they had explained qualitative change •hen they had pointed out as its true essence motion, whether between the parts of a continuously connected matter, or in empty
The opposition, therefore, which the Eleatic School brought tu bear upon all these doctrines was directed first of all against this conception of motion, and Zeno showed that this could by no means be taken so simply, but was rather full of contradictions which inca pacitated it for serving as principle of explanation.
Among Zeno's famous proofs of the impossibility of motion,1 the weakest is that which proceeds from the relativity of the amount of station, by showing that the movement of a wagon is variously esti mated if it is observed either from wagons also in motion but in different directions and at varying rates of speed, or again from two
vagons one of which is moving and one standing still. The three other proofs, on the contrary, which made use of the analysis into hscrete parts, infinitely many and infinitely small, of the space passed through by motion, and the time occupied by were ftronger. and for a long time were not overcome. The first proof was with reference to the impossibility of passing through a fixed space. This was regarded as proved by the infinite divisibility of
:he line, since the infinite number of points which must be attained before reaching the goal permitted no beginning of motion. The nae thought appears, somewhat varied, in the second argument, »Lxh seeks to prove the impossibility of passing through a space vA*A has movable boundaries. The argument (known as that of
int Pkfs VL 239 b. 9. Cf Ed. Wellmann, Ztnon't Beweise gegen die a*mr*mg umd ikrt Widerlegungen (Frankfurt a. O. 1870).
space.
.
»
0,
it,
56 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [Part L
Achilles and the tortoise) is, that since the pursuer in every inter val or subdivision of time must first reach the point from which the pursued simultaneously starts, it follows that the latter will always be in advance, though by an interval which becomes constantly smaller and approaches a minimum. The third argument has refer ence to the infinitely small extent of tlie motion performed in a. 7iy instant. According to this argument, called "the resting arrow," the moved body is in every instant in some one point of its track ; its movement in this instant is then equal to zero; but from ever so many zeros no real magnitude arises.
Together with the above-mentioned difficulties (<bropuu) with regard to space and plurality, these argumentations of Zeno set forth an extremely skilfully projected system of refuting the mechanical theories, especially Atomism, — a refutation which was intended to serve at the same time as indirect proof of the correct ness of the Eleatic conception of Being.
7. The number-theory of the Pythagoreans, too, was determined by Eleatic conceptions in so far as its procedure was, in the main, to demonstrate mathematical forms to be the fundamental relations of reality. When, however, they termed the actual world of reality an imitation of the mathematical forms, they thereby ascribed a sort of reality, even though of a derivative and secondary character, to individual things, and to what takes place among them. They were also the less inclined to withdraw from answering cosmological and physical questions as they were able to bring to philosophy the brilliant results of their astronomical investigation. They had come to a knowledge of the spherical form of the earth and of the heav enly bodies ; they were aware also that the change of day and night depends upon a movement of the earth itself. At first, indeed, they thought of this movement as a circuit performed about a central fire to which the earth presented always the same side, a side unknown to us. 1 On the other hand, they assumed that about this same cen tral fire there moved in concentric circles, outside the earth's track, successively the moon, the sun, the planets, and finally the heaven containing the fixed stars. They brought into this system, however, in a way, the metaphysical dualism which they had maintained be tween the perfect and the imperfect, inasmuch as they regarded the
1 Already in Plato's time the hypothesis of the central fire was given up by the younger Pythagoreans, Ecphantus, Hicetus of Syracuse (and with it that of the "counter-earth," which had hitherto been assumed as placed between the central fire and the earth, invented merely to fill out the number ten), and instead the earth was located in the centre of the universe and provided with a rotation on its axis. With this latter assumption that of a resting position of the heaven of the fixed stars was connected.
Chap. 1, § 6. ] Conceptions of Cognition. 57
heaven of the stars, on account of the sublime uniformity of its motions, as the realm of perfection ; the world " beneath the moon," on the contrary, on account of the unrest of its changing formations and motions, they regarded as that of imperfection.
This way of looking at things runs parallel to that of Anaxagoias, and leads, though in another way, to the interweaving and complica tion of theory with considerations of worth [ethical or aesthetic
It teas in connection with astronomical insight that the thought of an order of Nature in conformity to law dawned as clear knowledge upon the Grecian mind. Anaxagoras reasons from this to an ordering principle. Pythagoreanism finds in the heavens the divine rest of unchangeableness {Sichgleichbleibens) which it misses upon the earth. Here we have a meeting of the ancient religious ideas and the very different result yielded thus far by the scientific work of the Greeks. This latter, seeking a Permanent in the muta tion of occurrence, found such a permanence only in the great, simple relations, in the revolution of the stars, which abides ever the same. In the terrestrial world, with its whole change of manifold, con stantly intersecting motions, this uniformity remained still hidden from Greek science : she regarded this terrestrial world rather as a domain of the imperfect, the lower, which wants the sure order of that other world. In a certain sense this may be looked upon as the ultimate result of the first period, a result which had a determin ing influence for after time.
What the attitude of the Pythagoreans was to the question concerning a peri odic change of origination and annihilation of the world is uncertain. A plurality of co-existing worlds is excluded in their system. In their theory of world-for mation and in their particular physical doctrines they concede so prominent a place to fire that they come very near to Heraclitus. Aristotle even places one of the contemporaries of Philolaus, Hippasus of Metapontura, in immediate con nection with Heraclitus (Met. I. 3).
Their assumption of ether as a fifth element out of which the spherical shells of the heavens were formed, in addition to the four elements of Empedocles, is doubtless connected with the separation which they made between heaven and earth. It is not less difficult to decide whether they derived the elements from a common ground, and if so, how : according to many passages it would seem as if they had spoken of a progressive "attraction," i. e. in this case (cf. above, p. M), mathematical shaping out or forming of empty space by the Iv (one), the original number, which is exalted above limitation and the unlimited. Yet it max, too, that in regard to these questions various views were held within the •ebool side by side.
§ 6. The Conception! of Cognition.
values].
It Schneidewin, Uebtr dieKeime erkenntnitstheorttischer und ethiseher Phi- lotopkrme bei den vortokratischen Denkern, Pbilos. Monatshefte, II. (1860), pp. 157. 345, 429.
B. Mfinz, Die Keime der Brkenntnitstheorit in der vorsophittischen Periods in griechiteMn Philotophie. Vienna, 1880.
. 58 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [Part L
The question, what things really are, or what is the intrinsic nature of things, which is already contained in the Milesian con ception of the apxn, presupposes that the current, original and naive mode of thinking of the world has been shaken, although this pre supposition has not come to clear recognition in consciousness. The question proves that reflective thought is no longer satisfied with the ideas which it finds current, and that it seeks truth behind or above them. Those ideas are given, however, through sense-per ception and through the involuntary elaboration of this in thought, —an elaboration that has been transmitted from generation to generation, until it has became consolidated and fixed and embodied in language, and so forms a part of the thinker's data. When the individual with his reflection transcends these ideas so given — and it is in this that philosophical activity ultimately consists — he does it on the ground of logical needs which assert themselves as he re flects on the given. His philosophising, then, even though he takes no account of this fact, grows out of discrepancies between his expe rience and his thought — out of the inadequacy exhibited by what is presented to his perception or imagination, when set over against the demands and presuppositions of his understanding. However unconscious of this its inner ground naive philosophising may be at the outset, attention cannot fail to be turned in time to the diver sity in the sources of the conflicting ideas within.
1. The first observations, therefore, which the Grecian philosophers made on human knowledge concern this contrast between experience and reflection. The farther the explanatory theories of science became separated from the way of looking at things which belongs to daily life, the clearer it became to their authors that those theories sprang from another source than that of the customary opinions. To be sure they have not as yet much to say on this point. They set opinion (Sofa) over against truth, and this often means only that their own doctrines are true and the opinions of others false. So much only is certain to them, that they owe their own views to reflection, while the mass of mankind — concerning whose intellectual activity it is just the older philosophers, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, who express themselves in an extremely depreciatory manner — persist in the illusion of the senses. Only through thinking (<f>p<wtiv, vohv, Aoyos), then, is the truth found ; the senses, if alone, give fraud and a lie. l So strong has reflection become in itself that it not only proceeds to con sequences which to the common thinking have become absolutely
» Heracl. Frag. (Schust. ) 11, 123 ; Parmen. Frag. (Karrten) 64 ft.
Caar. 1, $ 6. J Conceptions of Cognition: Heraclitus, Parmenidet. 59
paradoxical, but also maintains expressly that it is itself the sole •oarce of truth as opposed to opinions.
This, to be sure, works oddly when we notice that completely
illustrations of this same assertion are given by Heracli- t*s and Parmenides in close succession. The former finds the i«-eit caused by the senses, and the error of the multitude, to consist a the illusory appearance of the Being of permanent things, which j presented to men by sense-perception ; the Eleatic, on the contrary, u zealous against the senses, because they would fain ]>ersuade us thai there are in truth motion and change, becoming and arising, phuality and variety. Precisely this double form in which this
one claim is put forward shows that it is not the result of an jTestigation, but the expression of a demand made on other rrounds.
Moreover, this proposition fits very differently into the general theories of the two great metaphysicians. The flux of all things, with its restless change of individual phenomena, as taught by Heraclitus, makes it easy to comprehend also the possibility of the 'mergence of false ideas, and the seeming of permanence and Being sad besides a special explanation in the counter-course or opposi tion (ivamorpoiria) of the two " ways," for this causes the illusion of permanence or Being to arise where there is just as much change in one direction as in the other [i. e. from primitive fire into things and tier versa]. On the contrary, it is quite impossible to see where the •eat of illusion and error was to be sought in the one world-sphere of Parmenides, everywhere the same, which was held to be at the
tan* time the one, true world-thought. The search could be only aaong individual things and their changing activities, which were themselves declared to be illusion, non-existent. Nevertheless these is no support to be found in the literature preserved, for (apposing that this so simple a thought1 which would have over thrown the entire Eleatic system, ever occurred to the investigators %l that time. In any case, the Eleatics contented themselves with tie assertion that all particular existence and all change were decep- tnjo and illusion of the senses.
The same naive denial of that which they could not explain seems to lure been employed also by the successors of the Eleatics in the natter of the qualitative attributes of individual things. Emjted- ■<iei at least maintained that all things were mixtures of the ele-
aenu. The task that logically grew out of this was to show how tie other qualities arise from the mixture of the properties of the
opposite
> First carried out in I'lalo, Sophist, 237 A.
60 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [Part L
elements. But this he did not perform ; so far as our knowledge extends, he did not at all set himself this task; he probably re garded these particular qualities as not being (objectively), and as a deception of the senses, just as all qualities whatever were such in the view of Parmenides. And so the oldest view of the Ato- mists, as supported by Leucippus, may well have gone just to this point, maintaining that in" individual things only the form, arrange ment, situation, and motion of the constituent atoms were real, and that the other properties were a deceitful product of the senses, which here, too, found no further explanation. 1
These difficulties were perhaps jointly influential in the mind of Anaxagoras when he regarded all qualities as original, and not as having become what they are, and accordingly postulated countless elements. But for him arose the opposite difficulty of showing how it could come about, if all was regarded as contained in all, every quality in every thing, that only some of these qualities seemed to be present in individual things. He explained this in part from the consideration that many of the constituent parts are imperceptible because of their minuteness ; hence it is only by thought that we can learn the true qualities of things. 8 Besides this, however, he seems to have followed up the thought, found already in Anaximan- der's idea of the anapov, that a complete mingling of definite quali ties yields something indefinite. So, at least, he described the primitive mixture of all substances which preceded the formation of the world as completely devoid of quality,' and a similar thought seems to have permitted him to regard the four elements of Emped- ocles not as primitive substances, but rather as already mixtures. 4
The rationalism common to the pre-Sophistic thinkers assumes, among the Pythagoreans, the particular form of affirming that knowledge consists in mathematical thought. This, though in itself a narrowing, is yet, on the other hand, a great step in advance, in asmuch as there is here given for the first time a positive definition of "thought" as contrasted with "perception. " Only through number, taught Philolaus,* is the essential nature of things to be
known ; that when the definite mathematical relations lying at their basis are recognised that things are properly conceived or
It extremely improbable that the solution of the problem through the subjectivity of the sense-qualities, which found in Democritus, was presented already by Leucippus, and therefore before Protagoras, who universally regarded as the founder of this theory.
frag. (Schorn) From this passage the true light may, perhaps, be thrown upon the sense in which Anaximander designates the ireipov as &6f>irror.
Arist. De Gen. et Corr. 314 24. Frag. (Mull. ) 13.
Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VII. 90
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Chap. 1, 5 6. ] Conception* of Cognition : Pkilolaus, Zeno. 61
understood. This had been the experience of the Pythagoreans in music and in astronomy, and this was the object of their desire and effort in all other fields. When, however, they ultimately came to the result that this requirement could be completely met only in
the knowledge of the perfect world of the stars, they concluded from this that science (<ro<t>ui) relates only to the realm of order and perfection, that to heaven, and that in the realm of the imper fect, of change not subject to order, i. e. on earth, only practical ability (<! *>«■>? ) of avail. 1
Another positive characteristic of the "thinking" which the earlier investigators had set over against "perceiving," without closer specification, appears obscurely in the reasonings of Zeno, viz. conformity to logical laws. At the basis of all his attacks against plurality and motion lie the principle of contradiction and the presupposition that that can not be actual of which the same thing must be affirmed and also denied. This principle and presup position were applied with clearness and certainty, though not ab stractly expressed. The Eleatic theory of the world, so highly paradoxical, forced its supporters to enter into polemic more than did others, and the accounts as to Zeno's treatise, which, as seems, was also logically well arranged and divided, offer notable evi dence of the developed technique of refutation to which the school attained in consequence. To be sure, this formal training which prevailed in Eleatic circles does not seem to have led as yet to the abstract statement of logical laws. " " "
2. The setting over against each other of thinking and per ceiving" arose, then, from an estimation of their relative epistemo- logical value (erkenntniastheoretischen Werthbestimmung) [i. e. from the postulate that one of these two forms of mental activity worth more epistemologically for attaining truth]. In decided contradiction with this, however, stand the psychological principles with which these same investigators sought to apprehend the origin and process of knowing. For although their thinking was directed first and chiefly toward the outer world, man's mental activity came under their attention in so far as they were obliged to see in this activity one of the formations, or transformations, or products of motion, of the universe. The mind or soul and its action are then at this time considered scientifically only in connection with the entire course of the universe, whose product they are as truly as are all other things and since among the men of this period the general principles of explanation are everywhere as yet conceived corpore-
Stob. Bel. 488.
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62 The Greeks: Cosmological Period. [Part L
ally it follows that we meet also a thorough-going materialistic
psychology. 1
Now mind or soul is in the first place moving force. Thales
ascribed such a soul to magnets, and declared that the whole world was full of souls. The essential nature of individual souls was therefore sought at first in that which had been recognised as the moving principle in the whole. Anaximenes found it in air, Heraclitus and likewise Parmenides (in his hypothetical physics) in fire, Leucippus in the fiery atoms,' and Anaxagoras in the world- moving, rational substance, the vow. Where, as in the system of Empedocles, a corporeal moving principle was lacking, the mixed substance which streams through the living body, the blood, was regarded as soul. Diogenes of Apollonia found the essence of the soul in the air mixed with the blood. 8 With the Pythagoreans, too, the individual soul could not be considered as the same with the iv (One) which they conceived as moving principle of the world, nor regarded as a part of it ; instead, they taught that the soul was a number, and made this very vague statement more definite by say ing that it was a harmony, —an expression which we can only interpret4 as meaning a harmony of the body; that the living, harmonious activity of its parts.
If now to this moving force, which leaves the body in death, were ascribed at the same time those properties which we to-day designate as " psychical," we find clear characterisation of the specifically theoretical interest by which this oldest science was filled, in the fact that among these attributes that of ideation, of " knowing," which almost exclusively the object of attention. * Of feelings and volitions there scarcely incidental mention. * But as the
Besides those characterisations of the soul, which resulted from their gen eral scientific theory, we find in the tradition in case of several of these men
(Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and the Pythagoreans) still other doc trines which are not only not connected witli the former, but are even in con tradiction to them. A conception of the body as prison of the soul (ri. ua = <rijjui), personal immortality, recompense after death, transmigration of souls. — all these are ideas which the philosophers took from their relations to the mysteries and retained in their priestly teaching, however little they accorded with their scientific teachings. Such expressions are not treated above.
In like manner, some of the Pythagoreans declared the motes which the sunlight discloses in the air to be souls.
Since, with reference to this, he recognised the distinction between venous ami arterial blood, he meant by his irwO/ux what the chemistry of to-day calls oxygen.
Ace. to Plato. Phmdo, 85 ff. , where the view rejected ns materialistic.
The w>Bs of Anaxagoras only knowing air with Diogenes of Apollonia great, powerful, eternal, intelligent body. Being with Parmenides at the
same time votlv, etc. Only ^iXAttjs and w«o« with Empedocles are mythically hypostasised impulses, and these, too, have nothing to do with his psychological views.
With this connected the fact that in general we cannot once speak
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Cm*». 1,§ 6. ] Conception* of Cognition: Her aclitus, Anaxagoras. 03
individual soul in so far as it is moving force was held to be a part of the force which moves the entire universe, so also the " knowing " rf the individual could be conceived only as a part of the knowing activity of the world. ' This is clearest in the systems of Heraclitus lad Anaxagoras ; each individual has so much knowledge as there a contained in him of the general World-reason, —fire with Htraelitus,* the rofc with Anaxagoras. In the case of Leucippus and of Diogenes of Apollonia the ideas are similar.
This physical conception, which with Anaxagoras especially is portly quantitative, was given a turn by Heraclitus, in which the ;;&stemological postulate again forces its way to the front, and asserts itself in the interest of a deeper insight and a profounder new. The World-reason in which the individual participates in his knowledge is everywhere the same; the Xoyot of Heraclitus3 and the io£« of Anaxagoras, as homogenous Reason, are distributed through the whole universe as moving force. Knowing, then, is that which is common to all. It is therefore the law and order to »iich every one has to unite himself. In dreams, in personal opin ion, each one has his own world; knowing is common ((wov) to tlL By means of this characteristic, viz.
that of universally valid law, the conception of knowing acquires a normative significance* aad subjection to the common, to the law, appears as a duty \z the intellectual realm as well as in the political, ethical, and religious. *
i at ethical investigation in this period. For single moralising reflections ana cannot be regarded as beginnings of ethics. On the only excep-
tm ef. below, note 6.
• Th« expression " World-soul " was first used by Plato, or at the earliest by
? VVWana (in the fragment which has certainly been much questioned just for t&s reason. Mull. 21). The idea is certainly present in Anaximenes, Heraclitus, aaexagnra*. and perhaps also among the Pythagoreans.
' Heoop
■araJBg u> guard the soul from the wet (intoxication).
the paradoxical expression, the dryest soul is the wisest, and the
• CI. , for this and the following, M. Heinze, Die Lthre vom Logos in der frwraurton Philotopkie (Oldenburg, 1872).
• Fr*g. (Schust. ) 123.
• This is the only conception in the development of pre-Sophistic thought, in a» iw ot which we can speak of an attempt to propound a scientific principle «< ttkir*. If Heraclitus had in mind a universal expression for all moral duties ■i •prxkme of this subordination to law, or at least hit upon such, he attached - at once u> the fundamental thoughts of his metaphysics, which declared thin
a* u> be the abiding essence of the world. Yet attention has above ($4) been aJed to the fact that in the conception of the world-order which hovered before I^m, he did not as yet separate consciously the different motives (especially the pcTacml from the ethical), and so ethical investigation does not as yet work
uctf cU»r from the physical to an Independent position. The same is true of '■*»pTthaxoreans, who expressed the conception of order by the term "harmony " »iaj> also might be adopted from Heraclitus), and therefore designated virtue • ~eannony. " To be sure, they used the term " harmony " for the soul, for
awe*, ami for many other things.
64 The Greeks : Cosmological Period.
[Part ,
3. If now we ask how under these assumptions the fact was explained that " knowledge " comes into the individual man, i. e. into his body, we find that the only answer offered by Heraclitus and the whole company of his successors "through the door of the senses. " When man awake, the World-reason streams into his body through the opened senses (sight and hearing are of course chiefly noticed1), and, therefore, he knows. This comes about, to be sure, only there besides, in the man himself, so much reason or soul that the motion coming from without met by an inner motion but upon this interaction, effected through the senses> between the outer and the inner reason knowledge rests.
A psychological distinction, then, between perceiving and think ing, which, as regards their respective epistemological values, are so abruptly opposed, Heraclitus does not know how to state. Par- menides,* however, was just as little in position to make such distinction. 4 Rather, he expressed more sharply still the dependence upon bodily relations in which the thinking of the individual man involved, when he said that every one so thought as the conditions constituted by the mixture of substances in the members of the body permitted, and when he found in this confirmation of his general thought of the identity of corporeality and thinking in general. * Still more express the testimony6 that Empedocles declared thinking and perceiving to be the same, that he thought change in thinking as dependent upon change of the body, and that he regarded the constitution of the blood as of decisive importance for the intellectual capacity of the man.
These two last-named thinkers did not hesitate, moreover, to make their conception more plain to the imagination by means of physio logical hypotheses. Parmenides taught in his hypothetical physics
Also smell (Empedocles) and taste (Anaxagoras). Only the Atomists, and in particular Democritus, seem to have given value to the sense of touch.
Arist. De An. 405 a 27.
Theophr. De Sens.
So, too, reported (Theophr. De Sens. 26) of Alcmseon, the Pythago-
reanising physician, that he declared thought or consciousness (Jh-i jiAwj \vrijpi) to be the characteristic which distinguishes man from the other animals. But a more precise determination lacking here also unless, in accordance with the expression, we think of something similar to the Aristotelian Kotviv al<rSrrr-^pu>w With this would agree the circumstance that the first attempts to localise the particular psychical activities in particular parts of the body seem to have been made in the circles of the Pythagoreans and of the physicians who stood in near relations to them localising, e. g. , thought in the brain, perception in the indi vidual organs and in the heart, and the emotions also in the latter organ. From them Diogenes of Apollonia, and after him Democritus, seem to have taken these beginnings of physiological psychology.
Frag. (Karst. ) vv. 146-149.
Arist. De An. 404 Theophr. De Sens. 10
III. 427 21 Met. III. 1009 17
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Caar. 1, | •. ] Conception* of Cognition : Parmenides, Empedocles. 65
a*t like is always perceived by like, warmth without by the warmth
:a man, the cold without by the cold even in the dead body.
jclea, with the aid of his theory of effluxes and pores, carried out
tae thought that every element in our body perceives the same ele ment in the outer world, so as to teach that each organ is accessible w the impress of those substances only whose effluxes fit into its pores ; i. e. he derived the specific energy of the sense organs from relations of similarity between their outer form and their objects, lad carried this out for sight, hearing, and smell, with observations vhich in part are very acute. 1
This view, that like is apprehended by like, was opposed by Anaxagoras, —on what ground it is not certain. ' He taught that perception is only of opposite by opposite, warmth without by the eoU in man, etc. * At all events, his doctrine also is a proof that '. iiese metaphysical rationalists maintained all of them in their
fyckology a crass sensationalism.
1 Tbeopbr. De Sens. 7.
Emped-
* ftrfeapa we have here a remembrance of Heraclitus, who also explained pneeptioo from the iparrurrpoxla, — motion against motion, — and with whom jppcaitioD was the principle of all motion.
• Tbeopbr. De Sens. 27 ft. It U interesting that Anaxagoras inferred from •±m that every perception is joined with pain (XAri)).
CHAPTER II.
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERIOD.
O. Grote, History of Greece, VIII. (London, 1850), pp. 474-644.
C. F. Hermann, Geschichte und System der platonischen Philosophie, I. (Heidel
berg, 1839), pp. 179-231.
Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit von Gorgias"bis zu Lysias. Leips. 1808. " H. Kochly, Sokrates und sein Volk, 1855, in Akad. Vortragen und Reden, I.
(ZUrich, 1859), pp. 219 fl. "
H. Siebeck, Ueber Sokrates' Verhaltniss zur Sophistik, in Untersuchungen
zur PhiloBophie der Griechen," 1873, 2 Aufl. (Freiburg i. B. 1888).
W. Windelband, Sokrates in " Prseludien " (Freiburg i. B. 1884), pp. 64 ft*. [H. Jackson, Art. Sophists, in Enc. Brit. ]
The farther development of Greek science was determined by the circumstance that in the powerful, universal upward movement of the mental and spiritual life which the nation achieved after the victorious result of the Persian wars, science was torn away from the restraints of close schools in which it had been quietly pursued, and brought out upon the stage of publicity, where all was in vehe ment agitation.
The circles in which scientific research was fostered had widened from generation to generation, and the doctrines which at first had been presented in smaller societies and spread abroad in writings that were hard to understand, had begun to filter through into the general consciousness. The poets, as Euripides and Epicharmus, began already to translate into their language scientific conceptions and views ; the knowledge gained by investigation of Nature had already been made practically effective, as by Hippodaraus in his architecture. Even medicine, which had formerly been only an art practised according to traditions, became so permeated with the general conceptions of natural philosophy, and with the special doc trines, information, and hypotheses of physiological research which in the course of time had occupied an ever-broader space in the
systems of science, that it became encumbered with an excessive 06
Cnar. 2. ] The Anthropological Period. 67
growth of etiological theories,1 and first found in Hippocrates the reformer who reduced this tendency to its proper measure and gave hack, to the physician's art its old character in contrast to scientific
Moreover, the Greek nation, matured by the stern experience viueh had been its lot within and without, had entered upon the age of manhood. It had lost its naive faith in old tradition, and :nd learned the value of knowledge and ability for practical life. Of science, which up to this time had followed in quiet the pure impulse of investigation — the noble curiosity which seeks knowledge for its own sake — the state now demanded light on the questions
counsel and help in the doubt into which the jixnnance of its own development in culture had plunged it. In tie feverish emulation of intellectual forces which this greatest
[mod in the world's history brought with the thought everywhere zuned recognition that in every walk in life the man of knowledge . » the most capable, the most useful, and the most successful. In every department of practical activity, the fruitful innovation of independent reflection, of individual judgment, took the place of the
•iii life controlled by custom. The mass of the people was seized with
ke K« ruing desire to make the results of science its otcn. It was espe- rially true, however, that at this time family tradition, habituation, personal excellence of character and address were no longer suffi- 'teot. im formerly, for the man who wished to play political part. Tbe variety of transactions and the attendant difficulties, as well as the intellectual status of those with whom and upon whom he would
work, made a theoretical schooling for the political career indispen sable. Nowhere was this movement so powerful as in Athens, then •ie capital of Greece, and here also these desires found their fullest •aexfaction.
For the supply followed the demand. The men of science, the Stfkkts (vo+urrm), stepped forth out of the schools into public life, tad taught the people what they themselves had learned or discov- -rwi. They did this, indeed, partly out of the noble impulse to >*rh their fellow-citizens,3 but was none the less true that this Earning became their business. From all parts of Greece men of •J* different schools flocked toward Athens to expound their doc-
•hieh disturbed
■This innovation in medicine began among the physicians who stood in near r*iuti<a to Pythagoreanism, especially with Alcmseon. As literary instance ■ ft. the writing which goes falsely under the name of Hippocrates, rtpl tialr^t, ■rua. Ct. H. Siebeck, Ot$eh. d. Ptyrh. 04 ff.
(T principally his writings wtpl dpxa'<r< hrpiKiji and rtpl Siairiii ijfar. CT- Protnjoras in Plato, Prot. 316 d.
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68 The Philosophy of the Greeks. [Part I.
trines, and from so expounding them in the capital as well as in the smaller cities, to gain honour and wealth.
In this way it happened that in a short time not only the social position of science, but its own inner nature, its tendency and the questions for its solution, were fundamentally changed. It became a social power, a determining factor in political life, as in the case of Pericles ; but just by this means it came into a state of dependence upon the demands of practical, and in particular, of political life.
These demands showed themselves principally in the facts that the democratic polity demanded of politicians first of all the capac ity for public speaking, and that in consequence the instruction of the Sophists was especially sought as a preparation for public life, and converged more and more upon this object. Men of science became teachers of eloquence.
As such, however, they lost sight of the goal of nature-knowledge, the vision of which had formerly hovered before the eyes of science. At the most they presented transmitted doctrines in the most grace ful and pleasing form possible. But their own investigations, if they were not confined to a formal routine, were necessarily directed toward man's thinking and willing, — the activities which public speaking was designed to determine and control, — toward the manner in which ideas and volitions arise, and the way in which they contend with one another and maintain their mutual rights. In this way Greek science took an essentially anthropological or subjective direction, studying the inner activities of man, his ideation and volition, and at the same time lost its purely theoretical character and acquired a preponderantly practical significance. 1
But while the activity of the Sophists found itself brought face to face with the manifold character of human thought and will, while the teachers of eloquence were presenting the art of persua sion and pursuing the path upon which every opinion could be helped to victory, every purpose to its achievement, the question rose before them whether above and beyond these individual opin ions and purposes which each one feels within himself as a necessity and can defend against others, there is anything whatever that is right and true in itself. The question whether there is anyUting universally valid, is the problem of the anthropological period of Greek philosophy, or of the Greek Enlightenment.
For it is likewise the problem of the time, — of a time in which religious faith and the old morality were wavering, a time when the
1 Cicero's well-known expression (Tusc V. 4, 10) with regard to Socrates holds good for the entire philosophy of this period.
Caar. 2. J The Anthropological Period. 69
respect which authority had commanded sank more and more, and ill tended towards an anarchy of individuals who had become self- governing. Very soon this internal disintegration of the Greek spirit became clearly evident in the disorders of the Peloponnesian nr, and with the fall of Athenian supremacy the flower of Grecian -slture withered.
The dangers of this condition were at first decidedly increased by
For while the Sophists were perfecting the scientific ierelopment of the formal art of presentation, verification, and refu- uaoo which they had to teach, they indeed created with this rheto- rx, on the one hand, the beginnings of an independent psychology, ud raised this branch of investigation from the inferior position which it had taken in the cosmological systems to the importance of t fundamental science, and developed, on the other hand, the prelim inaries for a systematic consideration of the logical and ethical norms. Bat as they considered what they practised and taught, — viz. the >kill to carry through any proposition whatever,1 — the relativity of aoBan ideas and purposes presented itself to their consciousness so
clearly and with such overwhelming force that they disowned in quiry as to the existence of a universally valid truth in the theoreti cal, at well as in the practical sphere, and so fell into a scepticism •hich at first was a genuine scientific theory, but soon became a fnrolous play. With their self-complacent, pettifogging advocacy, tie Sophists made themselves the mouth-piece of all the unbridled tendencies which were undermining the order of public life.
The intellectual head of the Sophists was Protagoras; at least, he m the only one who was the author of any conceptions philosophi cally fruitful and significant. Contrasted with him, Gorgias, who is anally placed at his side, appears only as a rhetorician who occa- woally attempted the domain of philosophy and surpassed the *rnfices of the Eleatic dialectic. IJippias and Prodicus are only to
» mentioned, the one as the type of a popularising polyhistor, and ia* other as an example of superficial moralising.
To the disordered activity and lack of conviction of the younger Sophists, Socrates opposed faith in reason and a conviction of the esttence of a universally valid truth. This conviction was with fea of an essentially practical sort; it was his moral disposition, but
led him to an investigation of knowledge, which he anew set over gainst opinions, and whose essence he found in conceptianul thought.
Socrates and the Sophists stand, accordingly, on the ground of
'CI the well-known fir {rrw \tyor xptirrm wjuir. ri»li . Vn/i 112 II. , •»t Ariat. RhH. II. 24, 1408 23.
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70 The Philosophy of the Greeks. [Part I.
the same common consciousness of the time, and discuss the same problems ; but where the Sophists with their skill and learning re main caught in the confusion of the opinions of the day and end with a negative result, there the plain, sound sense, and the pure and noble personality of Socrates find again the ideals of morality and science.
The strong impression which the teaching of Socrates made forced the Sophistic activity into new lines. It followed him in the at tempt to gain, through scientific insight, sure principles for the ethical conduct of life. While the old schools had for the most part become disintegrated, and had diverted their activity to the teaching of rhetoric, men who had enjoyed intercourse with the Athenian sage now founded new schools, in whose scientific work Socratic and Sophistic principles were often strangely intermingled, while the exclusively anthropological direction of their investigation remained the same.
Among these schools, called for the most part " Socratic," though not quite accurately, the Megarian, founded by Euclid, fell most deeply into the unfruitful subtleties of the later Sophists. Con nected with this is the Elean-Eretrian School, the most unimportant. The fundamental contrast, however, in the conception of life which prevailed in the Greek life of that day, found its scientific expression in the teachings of those two schools whose opposition permeates all ancient literature from that time on: namely, the Cynic and the Cyrenaic, the precursors of the Stoic and Epicurean. The first of these schools numbers among its adherents, besides its founder Antisthenes, the popular figure of Diogenes. In the latter, which is also called the Hedonistic School, the founder, Aristippus, was suc ceeded by a grandson of the same name, and later by Theodoras, Anniceris, Hegesias, and Euemerus.
The wandering teachers known as the Sophists came in part from the earlier scholastic societies. In the second half of the fifth century these had for the most part disappeared, and had given place to a freer announcement of opinions attained, which was not unfavourable to special research, particularly physiologi cal research, as in the case of Hippo, Cleidemus, and Diogenes of Apollonia, but which was attended by a crippling of general speculation. Only the school of Abdera and the Pythagorean School survived this time of dissolution. A society of Heracliteans which maintained itself in Ephesus appears soon to have fallen away into the pursuits of the Sophists, as in the case of Cratylus.
