A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF HELLENISM

  CHAPTER II

THE STAGES OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY

 

AT the time of the Persian wars the civilization of the East was in complexity, specialism, organized industry—whatever relative importance we may attach to those features of progress—in all probability ahead of the civilization of Greece. The conscious assumption of self-government by the Greek cities had, however, been closely followed by the beginnings of what we may call speculative science, which was a distinctive product of the Greek intellect. For this, the starting-point was furnished by the empirical observations of Egyptians and Chaldeans, made with a view to real or fancied utility—measurement of land or prediction of future events. The earliest Greek philosophers, natives of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, and thus on the borders of the fixed and the growing civilizations, took up a few generalized results of the long and laborious but unspeculative accumulation of facts and methods by the leisured priesthoods of Egypt and Babylonia, and forthwith entered upon the new paths of cosmical theorizing without regard to authoritative tradition, and of deductive thinking about numbers and figures without regard to immediate utility. As early as Pythagoras, still in the sixth century BC, speculative science had begun to show signs of its later division into philosophy properly so-called, and positive science; the first special sciences to become detached, after mathematics, being those to which mathematical treatment seemed applicable. All this took place before the continuous movement of reflective thinking on human knowledge, which marks a new departure in philosophy, not its first origin, began at Athens.

The emotion in which philosophy and science had their common source was exactly the same in ancient Greece and in renascent Europe. Plato and Aristotle, like Descartes and Hobbes, define it as "wonder." The earliest thinkers did not define it at all. Their outlook has still something very impersonal. With them, there is little inquiry about happiness or the means of attaining it. When the speculative life has been lived by several generations of thinkers, and a self-conscious theory of it is at length set forth, as at the opening of Aristotle's Metaphysics, the happiness involved in it is regarded as something that necessarily goes with mere thinking and understanding.

This is the subjective form of early Greek philosophy. In objective content, it is marked by complete detachment from religion. No traditional authority is acknowledged. Myths are taken merely as offering points of contact, quite as frequently for attack as for interpretation in the sense of the individual thinker. The handling of them in either case is perfectly free. Results of the thought and observation of one thinker are summed up by him, not to be straightway accepted by the next, but to be examined anew. The aim is insight, not edification.

The general result is a conception of the cosmos in principle not unlike that of modern science; in detail necessarily crude, though still scientific in spirit, and often anticipating the latest phases thought in remarkable ways. Even the representations of the earth as a disc floating on water and of the stars as orifices in circular tubes containing fire, are less remote in spirit from modern objective science than the astronomy of later antiquity and of the instructed Middle Ages. This was far more accurate in its conception shapes and magnitudes and apparent motions, but it was teleological in a way that purely scientific astronomy cannot be. The earliest Ionian thinkers, like modern men of science, imposed no teleological conceptions on their astronomical theories.

At the same time, early Greek philosophy was not merely objective, as modern science has become. It was properly philosophical in virtue of its "hylozoism." Life an mind, or their elements, were attributed to the world or its parts. Later, a more objective "naturalism" appears, as in the system of Democritus. Here the philosophical character is still retained by the addition of an explicit theory of knowledge to the scientific explanation of the cosmos. "Primary" and "secondary" qualities of matter are distinguished, and these last are treated as in a sense unreal. Thus the definite formulation of materialism is accompanied by the beginnings of subjective idealism. But with the earliest thinkers of all, there is neither an explicit theory of knowledge nor an exclusion of life and mind from the elements of things.

The atomism of Democritus and his predecessors was the result of long thinking and perhaps of much controversy. The "Ionians," down to Heraclitus, regarded the cosmos as continuously existing, but as ruled by change in all its parts if not also as a whole. The Eleatics, who came later, affirmed that unchanging Being alone exists: this is permanent and always identical; "not-being" absolutely does not exist, and change is illusory. The Being of Parmenides, it is now held, was primarily the extended cosmos regarded as a closed sphere coincident with all that is. Yet, though the conception was in its basis physical and not metaphysical, the metaphysical abstraction made by Plato was doubtless implicit in it. And Parmenides himself evidently did not conceive reality as purely objective and mindless. If he had intended to convey that meaning, he would have been in violent contradiction with his predecessor Xenophanes, and this would hardly have escaped notice. The defect of Eleaticism was that apparent change received no satisfactory explanation, though an attempt was made to explain it in what Parmenides called a "deceptive" discourse as dealing with illusory opinion and no longer with demonstrative truth. Atomism mediated between this view and that of the Ionians by asserting a plurality of real beings, each having the characters of the Eleatic "being." "Not-being" for the atomists was empty space; change in the appearances of things was explained by mixture and separation of unchanging elements. The mechanical conception of the purely quantitative atom, which modern science afterwards took up, was completed by Democritus. Anaxagoras, though fundamentally a mechanicist, did not deprive his atoms of quality. And Empedocles, along with ideas of mixture and separation—explained by the attractive and repulsive agents, at once forces and media, to which he gave the mythological names of Love and Strife—retained something of the old hylozoism. Over against the material elements of things, Anaxagoras set Mind as the agent by which they are sifted from their primitive chaos. This was the starting-point for a new development, less purely disinterested than the first because more colored by ethical and religious motives, but requiring even greater philosophic originality for its accomplishment.

The new departure of philosophy, though adopting the Anaxagorean Mind as its starting-point, had its real source in the ethical and political reflection which began effectively with the Sophists and Socrates. To give this reflective attitude consistency, to set up the principles suggested by it against all exclusive explanations of reality from the material ground of things, and yet to do this without in the end letting go the notion of objective science, was the work of Plato. Aristotle continued Plato's work, while carrying forward science independently and giving it relatively a more important position. One great characteristic result of the earlier thinking—the assertion that materially nothing is created and nothing destroyed—was assumed, as an axiom both by Plato and by Aristotle whenever they had to deal with physics. They did not take up from the earlier thinkers those specific ideas that afterwards turned out the most fruitful scientifically—though Plato had a kind of atomic theory—but they affirmed physical law in its most general principle. This they subordinated to their metaphysics by the conception of a universal teleology. The teleological conception of nature there is good historical ground for attributing also to Socrates.

The special importance which Plato's Timaeus acquired for his successors is due to its being the most definite attempt made by the philosopher himself to bring his distinctive thought into relation with objective science. Thus, in view of knowledge as it was in antiquity, the later Platonists were quite right in the stress they laid on this dialogue.

For the period following upon the death of Aristotle, during which Stoicism and Epicureanism were the predominant schools, the most important part of Plato's and Aristotle's thought was the ethical part. Both schools were, on the theoretical side, a return to naturalism as opposed to the Platonic and Aristotelian idealism. Both alike held that all reality is body; though the Stoics regarded it as continuous and the Epicureans as discrete. The soul, for the Stoics as for the Epicureans, was a particular kind of matter. The most fruitful conception in relation to the science of the future was preserved by Epicurus when he took up the Democritean idea of the atom, defined as possessing figured extension, resistance and weight; all "secondary" qualities being regarded as resulting from the changes of order and the interactions of the atoms. And, on the whole, the Epicureans appealed more to genuine curiosity about physics for itself, though ostensibly cultivating it only as a means towards ridding human life of the fear of meddlesome gods. If the determinism of the Stoics was more rigorous, it did not prevent their undertaking the defense of some popular superstitions which the Epicureans have the credit of opposing. On the other hand, Stoicism did more for ethics. While both schools, in strict definition, were "eudaemonist," the Stoics brought out far more clearly the social reference of morality. Their line of thought here, as the Academics and Peripatetics were fond of pointing out, could be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. So also could the teleology which they combined with their naturalism. But all the systems of the time were more or less eclectic.

The social form under which the Stoics conceived of morality was the reference, no longer to a particular State, but to a kind of universal State. Since the social reference in Greek morality had been originally to the "city," the name was retained, but it was extended to the whole world, and the ideal morality was said to be that of a citizen of the world. This "cosmopolitanism" is prepared in Plato and Aristotle. Socrates (as may be seen in the Memorabilia of Xenophon) had already conceived the idea of a natural law or justice which is the same for all States. And in Aristotle that conception of "natural law" which, transmitted by Stoicism, had so much influence on the Roman jurisprudence, is definitely formulated. The humanitarian side of Stoicism—which is not quite the same thing as its conception of universal justice —is plainly visible in Cicero.

Although (Zeno) the founder of Stoicism, was by race half a Phoenician, cannot be said that the East contributed anything definable to the content of his ethics. Its sources were evidently Greek. Down to the end of the ancient world, philosophy was continued by men of various races, but always by those who had taken the impress of Greek or of Graeco-Roman civilization.

The same general account is true of the Neo-Platonists. They too were men who had inherited or adopted the Hellenic tradition. On the ethical side they continue Stoicism; although in assigning a higher place to the theoretic virtues they return to an earlier view. Their genuine originality is in psychology and metaphysics. Having gone to the centre of Plato's idealistic thought, they demonstrated, by a new application of its principles, the untenableness of the Stoic materialism; and, after the long intervening period, they succeeded in defining more rigorously than Plato had done, in psychology the idea of consciousness, in metaphysics the idea of immaterial and subjective existence. Scientifically, they incorporated elements of every doctrine with the exception of Epicureanism; going back with studious interest to the pre-Socratics, many fragments of whom the latest Neo-Platonist commentators rescued just as they were on the point of being lost. On the subjective side, they carried thought to the highest point reached in antiquity. And neither in Plotinus, the great original thinker of the school, nor in his successors, was this the result of mystical fancies or of Oriental influences. These, when they appeared, were super induced. No idealistic philosophers have ever applied closer reasoning or subtler analysis to the relations between the inner and the outer world. If the school to some extent "Orientalised," in this it followed Plato; and it diverged far less from Hellenic ideals than Plato himself.

A certain affinity of Plato with the East has often been noticed. This led him to the most remarkable previsions of the later movement of the world. The system of caste in the Republic is usually said to be an anticipation of the mediaeval order of society. Now in the introduction to the Timaeus and in the Critias, the social order of Egypt is identified in its determining principles with that of the ideal State, and both with the constitution of prehistoric Athens, also regarded as ideal. Hence it becomes evident that, for his specialization and grading of social functions, Plato got the hint from the Egyptian caste of occupations. Thus his idea society is in contact, on one side with the pre-Hellenic East, on the other side with the Orientalised Europe of the Middle Ages. By its communism it touches modern schemes of reform.

Mr. Benn has remarked that the stages of degeneration from the ideal aristocracy to a tyranny, set forth in the Republic, are the same as the actual stages of degeneration of the Roman State. To this it may be added that in the Laws Plato lays down the exact conditions that concurred for the establishment of Christianity. The problem is to get a new system of legislation received in the projected colony. For this he finds that, though citizens from the same State are better in so far as they are likely to be more orderly, yet they will be too attached to their own laws. There is therefore an advantage in beginning with a mixture of colonists from several States. The character of such colonists will make the task in any case difficult, but the most favorable condition is that the ideas of a great legislator should be taken up by a young and vigorous tyrant. Generalize a little, putting for a single legislator the succession of those who formulated ecclesiastical doctrine and discipline, and for a single tyrant the consummated autocracy of the later Roman Empire, and the conditions are historically given. For there was, in the cosmopolitan Empire, exactly that mixture of different inherited customs which Plato desiderates. Add, what is continually insisted on in the Laws, that towards getting particular precepts enforced it would conduce much if they could be regarded as proceeding from a god, and it will be seen that here also the precise condition of success was laid down.

The philosopher even anticipated some of the actual legislation of the Church. In the tenth book of the Laws, he proposes a system of religious persecution. Three classes of the impious are to be cast out,—those who deny the existence of all gods, those who say that the gods take no heed of human affairs, and those who say that they can be bought off with prayers and gifts; or, as we may put it compendiously,—Atheists, Epicureans and Catholics. As, however, the last class would have been got rid of with least compunction, the anticipation here was by no means exact. And probably none of these glimpses, extraordinary as they were, into the strange transformation that was to come in a thousand years, had any influence in bringing it to pass.

The Neo-Platonists would have carried out an ethical reform of polytheism in the spirit of the Republic and the Laws; but they did not propose to set up persecution as a sanction. On the contrary, they were the champions of the old intellectual liberty of Hellenism against the new theocracy. One of the most Orientalising sayings to be found in the later Platonists, namely, that the "barbarians" have an advantage over the Greeks in the stability of their institutions and doctrines as contrasted with the Greek innovating spirit, occurs both in the Timaeus and in the Laws. And Plato's attack, in the Republic, on the myths of Greek religion, was continued by the Christians, not by his Neo-Platonic successors; who sought to defend by allegorical interpretations whatever they could not accept literally; or at least, in repudiating the fables, did not advocate the expulsion of the poets.

It is to be remembered further that in the philosophical tradition of antiquity even more than in its general culture, the republican ideal was always upheld. Aristotle as well as Plato, it is true, was less favorable than the statesmen, orators and historians of the great Athenian period to personal spontaneity uncontrolled by the authority of the State. But of course what the philosophers desired was the supremacy of reason, not of arbitrary will. Licence in the city seemed to them condemnable on this ground among others, that under the show of liberty it paved the way for a tyrant. And the later schools, in which philosophy had fixed a sort of official attitude, were always understood to be hostile to despotism. The Stoics in particular had this reputation, which they justified under the early Empire. That the Neo-Platonists, although by their time philosophy had almost ceased to have a political branch, were still of the ancient tradition, is proved by the republican spirit of Julian, who had received from them his self-chosen training. In the chiefs of the school also, slight indications to the same effect may be discerned. This attitude of the philosophers had its importance in preserving the memory of the higher ideal notwithstanding the inevitable descent due to circumstance. And even in the early Middle Ages, deriving their knowledge of antiquity as they did mainly from a few late compilations, such discussions as there are on the origin of society and of government seem traceable to reminiscences from the philosophic schools; the idea of a social contract in particular coming probably from the Epicureans.