A Short History of Greek Philosophy

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{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. From 466 to 406 B.C. Syracuse was democratically
governed, and a 'free career to talents,' as in revolutionary France,
so also in revolutionary Greece, began to be promoted by the
elaboration of a system of persuasive argument. Devices of method
called 'commonplaces' were constructed, whereby, irrespective of the
truth or falsehood of the subject-matter, a favourable vote in the
public assemblies, a successful verdict in the public courts, might
more readily be procured. Thus by skill of verbal rhetoric, the worse
might be made to appear the better reason; and philosophy, so far as it
continued its functions, {85} became a search, not for the real amidst
the confusions of the seeming and unreal, but a search for the seeming
and the plausible, to the detriment, or at least to the ignoring, of
any reality at all.

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

[177]

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

The Greek word, in short, meant an able cultivated man in any branch of
the arts; and the development of practical capacity was doubtless what
Protagoras {86} intended to indicate as the purpose of his teaching,
when he called himself a Sophist. But the ability he really undertook
to cultivate was ability to _persuade_, for Greece at this time was
nothing if not political; and persuasive oratory was the one road to
political success. And as Athens was the great centre of Greek
politics, as well as of Greek intellect, to Athens Protagoras came as a
teacher.

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

After spending some time in Italy he returned to Athens, and taught
there with great success for a number of years. Afterwards he taught
for some time in Sicily, and died at the age of seventy, after [178]
about forty years of professional activity. He does not seem to have
contented himself with the merely practical task of teaching rhetoric,
but in a work which he, perhaps ironically, entitled _Truth_, he
enunciated the principles on which he based his teaching. Those
principles were summed up in the sentence, "Man (by which he meant
_each_ man) is {87} the measure of all things, whether of their
existence when they do exist, or of their non-existence when [179] they
do not." In the development of this doctrine Protagoras starts from a
somewhat similar analysis of things to that of Heraclitus and others.
Everything is in continual flux, and the apparently real objects in
nature are the mere temporary and illusory result of the in themselves
invisible movements and minglings of the elements of which they are
composed; and not only is it a delusion to attempt to give a factitious
reality to the things which appear, it is equally a delusion to attempt
to separate the (supposed) thing perceived from the perception itself.
A thing is only as and when it is perceived. And a third delusion is
to attempt to separate a supposed perceiving mind from the perception;
all three exist only in and through the momentary perception; the
supposed reality behind this, whether external in the object or
internal in the mind, is a mere imagination. Thus the Heraclitean flux
in Nature was extended to Mind also; only the sensation exists, and
that only at the moment of its occurrence; this alone is truth, this
alone is reality; all else is delusion.

[180]

It followed from this that as a man felt a thing to be, so for him it
veritably was. Thus abstract truth or falsity could not be; the same
statements could be indifferently true or false--to different {88}
individuals at the same time, to the same individual at different
times. It followed that all appearances were equally true: what seemed
to be to any man, that was alone the true for him. The relation of
such a doctrine as this to politics and to morals is not far to seek.
Every man's opinion was as good as another's; if by persuasion you
succeeded in altering a man's opinion, you had not deceived the man,
his new opinion was as true (to him) as the old one. Persuasiveness,
therefore, was the only wisdom. Thus if a man is ill what he eats and
drinks seems bitter to him, and it is so; when he is well it seems the
opposite, and is so. He is not a wiser man in the second state than in
the first, but the second state is pleasanter. If then you can
persuade him that what he thinks bitter is really sweet, you have done
him good. This is what the physician tries to do by his drugs; this is
what the Sophist tries to do by his words. Virtue then is teachable in
so far as it is possible to persuade a boy or a man by rhetoric that
that course of conduct which pleases others is a pleasant course for
him. But if any one happens not to be persuaded of this, and continues
to prefer his own particular course of conduct, this _is_ for him the
good course. You cannot blame him; you cannot say he is wrong. If you
punish him you simply endeavour to supply the dose of unpleasantness
which may {89} be needed to put the balance in his case on the same
side as it already occupies in the case of other people.

It may be worth while to anticipate a little, and insert here in
summary the refutation of this position put into the mouth of Socrates
by Plato in the _Theaetetus_: "But I ought not to conceal from you that
there is a serious objection which may be urged against this doctrine
of Protagoras. For there are states, such as madness and dreaming, in
which perception is false; and half our life is spent in dreaming; and
who can say that at this instant we are not dreaming? Even the fancies
of madmen are real at the time. But if knowledge is perception, how
can we distinguish between the true and the false in such cases? . . .
Shall I tell you what amazes me in your friend Protagoras? 'What may
that be?' I like his doctrine that what appears is; but I wonder that
he did not begin his great work on truth with a declaration that a pig,
or a dog-faced baboon, or any other monster which has sensation, is a
measure of all things; then while we were reverencing him as a god he
might have produced a magnificent effect by expounding to us that he
was no wiser than a tadpole. For if truth is only sensation, and one
man's discernment is as good as another's, and every man is his own
judge, and everything that he judges is right and true, then {90} what
need of Protagoras to be our instructor at a high figure; and why
should we be less knowing than he is, or have to go to him, if every
man is the measure of all things?" . . . Socrates now resumes the
argument. As he is very desirous of doing justice to Protagoras, he
insists on citing his own words: 'What appears to each man is to him.'
"And how," asks Socrates, "are these words reconcilable with the fact
that all mankind are agreed in thinking themselves wiser than others in
some respects, and inferior to them in others? In the hour of danger
they are ready to fall down and worship any one who is their superior
in wisdom as if he were a god. And the world is full of men who are
asking to be taught and willing to be ruled, and of other men who are
willing to rule and teach them. All which implies that men do judge of
one another's impressions, and think some wise and others foolish. How
will Protagoras answer this argument? For he cannot say that no one
deems another ignorant or mistaken. If you form a judgment, thousands
and tens of thousands are ready to maintain the opposite. The
multitude may not and do not agree in Protagoras' own thesis, 'that man
is the measure of all things,' and then who is to decide? Upon hip own
showing must not his 'truth' depend on the number of suffrages, and be
more or less true in proportion as he has more or fewer of them? And
{91} [the majority being against him] he will be bound to acknowledge
that they speak truly who deny him to speak truly, which is a famous
jest. And if he admits that they speak truly who deny him to speak
truly, he must admit that he himself does not speak truly. But his
opponents will refuse to admit this as regards themselves, and he must
admit that they are right in their refusal. The conclusion is, that
all mankind, including Protagoras himself, will deny that he speaks
truly; and his truth will be true neither to himself nor to anybody
else" (Jowett, _Plato_, iv. pp. 239 _sqq._)

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

{92}

CHAPTER X

THE SOPHISTS (_concluded_)

_Nothing knowable--The solitude of scepticism--The lawlessness of
scepticism--The good in scepticism_

[183]

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

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