A Short History of Greek Philosophy

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[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."

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