No More Learning

"'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
ascertainment. 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
{35} restrain thou thy thought, and let not the much-experimenting
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. "

[94]

Thus, like Xenophanes, Parmenides draws a deep 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. [98] Knowledge is of this, and of this only, and as
such, 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} 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 condition 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 {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 of thought, which
is there at the first, 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.

[99]

In this world he found two originative principles {38} 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 [102] presiding 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--the {39} 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
dialogue _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 {40} 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.
{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.




{42}

CHAPTER V

THE ELEATICS (_concluded_)

_Zeno's dialectic--Achilles and the tortoise--The dilemma of being--The
all a sphere--The dilemmas of experience_


[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
{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 regarded 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 propositions with respect to any
particular supposed real thing in experience, and then proceeded to
show that both these contradictories alike imply what is {44} [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
something 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 {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} 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
engagement with the Athenians, when Samos was being besieged by
Pericles. He belongs 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, {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. "

[111]

By similar treatment of other conceivable alternatives 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 concludes that the existent can have no
limit in space [112] either. As being thus unlimited it must be one,
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.

[113]

Being incapable of change one might perhaps 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 [114] made to bear some such interpretation. He says:
"Parmenides seems to hold by a Unity in thought, Melissus by a Material
unity. Hence the first {48} 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 infinitely,
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 endless 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, antithetical
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_ ((Greek) _logos_) and
_matter_ ((Greek) _hule_). 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 {49} between
Deduction and Induction; in the first you start from the universal and
see within it the particulars; 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 particular 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 ordinarily assume,--if all these really exist,
and our sight and our hearing give us _facts_, then each of these as
{50} 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 truthfulness of the senses and the reality of the various
objects which we see, are unthinkable and absurd.

{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 questions 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.




{52}

CHAPTER VI

THE ATOMISTS

_Anaxagoras and the cosmos--Mind in nature--The seeds of existence_


[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 {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 philosophic writings have been
preserved, and the connection of certain portions of his teaching as
they have come down to us remains somewhat uncertain.

[119]

With respect to the constitution of the universe we 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 combination
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. [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) observing 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 commendation.
"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 {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
theoretically, perhaps, 'on the side of the angels,' in practice he is
a materialist.

[12]

Mind he conceived as something apart, sitting 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} developed. The seeds
themselves are too minute to be apprehended by the senses, but we 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 complexity of
actual being to the original unmingled or undeveloped nature of things.
But the whole process 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 {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 himself 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.




{58}

CHAPTER VII

THE ATOMISTS (_continued_)

_Empedocles at Etna--Brief life and scanty vision--The four
elements--The philosophy of contradiction--Philosophy a form of
poesy--The philosopher a prophet--Sensation through kinship--The whole
creation groaneth_


[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 personal 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 {59} sacrifice; then when his
friends went to rest he disappeared, 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
admiration (_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} 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. "

[180]

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 therefore 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 virgin Muse," wherein he prays that "folly and
impurity 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. "

{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 unreasoned first guesses of
ordinary observation suggested by this or that sense, and chiefly by
the eyes. The senses might supply the raw materials of knowledge,
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}

[181]

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. 53).

[132]

These four elements constitute the total _corpus_ of the universe,
eternal, as a whole unmoved and immovable, perfect like a sphere. But
within this sphere-like self-centred All there are eternally proceeding
separations and new unions of the elements of things; and every one of
these is at once a birth {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 discerned; 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 consistently 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} 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,
{65} can only attain its purpose by variety, or even contradictoriness,
of representation. Thus to ordinary 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 working 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 warfare 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
contradiction, 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; not to speak of the great moderns, whether
preachers or philosophers--have none of {66} 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 {67}
reality which all actual occurrences only by accumulation _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 'the whole
creation groaneth. ' It is thus at the basis of religion, of art, of
morals; it is the accumulated 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 greatest 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 '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} 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 philosophies and new faiths. In Thales, Heraclitus,
Pythagoras, 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.

{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: [135] "The earth, which is at
the centre of the sphere of the universe, remains firm, because the
spin of the universe 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 cosmogonies. 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 attributed 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}

[137]

He had also a conception of the gradual development 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 procreated 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 {71} which
Empedocles did not answer, and perhaps would not have tried to answer
had he heard them.

[139]

The soul or life-principle in man Empedocles 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 Aristotle 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} The process of sensation he conceived to be conditioned by an
actual emission from the bodies perceived 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. "

{73}

Thus to his mighty conception the life of all creation, and not of man
only, was a great expiation, an eternal round of punishment for sin;
and in the unending 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.

[143]

The slaying of any living creature, therefore, 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 abstinence, the abstinence from vice and
wrong.




{74}

CHAPTER VIII

THE ATOMISTS (_concluded_)

_The laughing philosopher--Atoms and void--No god and no truth_


[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 surpassed 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 {75} are
also informed that, through desire of learning, he visited Babylon and
Chaldaea, to visit the astrologers and the priests.

[146]

Democritus was not less prolific as a writer than 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 [147]
drawn. We are, however, mainly concerned with his 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 indivisible, 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 conversely
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, system of eternal flux and transformation.
Democritus {76} 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 therefore 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 arrangement, 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 presentation,
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
{77} particles, and all growth or increase of the object being
conditioned by the introduction into the structure of additional atoms
from without.

[149]

For the motions of the atoms he had no anterior 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 legitimately or reasonably be
demanded.

[150]

Nothing, then, could come out of nothing; all the visible structure of
the universe had its origin in the movements of the atoms that
constituted it, and conditioned 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.

[151]

Out of this idea of an eternal eddy or whirl 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} 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 {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 characteristic of living creatures, and provided that
elastic counteracting force to the inward-pressing nimble air, whereby
were produced the phenomena of respiration. 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.

[155]

Sensation and perception were forms in which these external forces
acted upon the more nimble and lively existences, more particularly on
living creatures. For every body was continually sending forth
emanations 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
transmission, 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 modification reproduced itself in
the next following, and so on right through the medium to the
perceptive body.

{80}

[156]

These images tended by extension in all directions 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 perceptions
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
{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.




{82}

CHAPTER IX

THE SOPHISTS

_Anarchic philosophy--Success not truth--Man the measure--All opinions
true--Reductio ad absurdum_


A certain analogy may perhaps be discerned between the progression of
philosophic thought in Greece as we have traced it, and the political
development 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 appearances 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 {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, unreasoned,
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 rejecting 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} only, however,
had analogies with the similar revolution 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.

[178]

Cicero (_Brut_. 12) definitely connects the rise of these teachers with
the expulsion of the tyrants and the establishment of democratic
republics in Sicily.