Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3rd ed. Volume 1

The first feeling of any reader accustomed to the astronomy and physics of the present century, on considering the various theories noticed in the preceding chapter, is a sort of astonishment that such theories should have been ever propounded or accepted as true. Yet there can be no doubt that they represent the best thoughts of sincere, contemplative, and ingenious men, furnished with as much knowledge of fact, and as good a method, as was then attainable. The record of what such men have received as scientific truth or probability, in different ages, is instructive in many ways, but in none more than in showing how essentially relative and variable are the conditions of human belief; how unfounded is the assumption of those modern philosophers who proclaim certain first truths or first principles as universal, intuitive, self-evident; how little any theorist can appreciate à priori the causes of belief in an age materially different from his own, or can lay down maxims as to what must be universally believed or universally disbelieved by all mankind. We shall have farther illustration of this truth as we proceed: here I only note variety of belief, even on the most fundamental points, as being the essential feature of Grecian philosophy even from its outset, long before the age of those who are usually denounced as the active sowers of discord, the Sophists and the professed disputants.

Each philosopher followed his own individual reason, departing from traditional or established creeds, and incurring from the believing public more or less of obloquy; but no one among the philosophers acquired marked supremacy over the rest. There is no established philosophical orthodoxy, but a collection of Dissenters — ἄλλη δ’ ἄλλων γλῶσσα μεμιγμένη — small sects, each with its own following, each springing from a special individual as authority, each knowing itself to be only one among many.

It is a misfortune that we do not possess a complete work, or even considerable fragments, from any one of these philosophers, so as to know what their views were when stated by themselves, and upon what reasons they insisted. All that we know is derived from a few detached notices, in very many cases preserved by Aristotle; who, not content (like Plato) with simply following out his own vein of ideas, exhibits in his own writings much of that polymathy which he transmitted to the Peripatetics generally, and adverts often to the works of predecessors. Being a critic as well as a witness, he sometimes blends together inconveniently the two functions, and is accused (probably with reason to a certain extent) of making unfair reports; but if it were not for him, we should really know nothing of the Hellenic philosophers before Plato. It is curious to read the manner in which Aristotle speaks of these philosophical predecessors as “the ancients” (οἱ ἀρχαῖοι), and takes credit to his own philosophy for having attained a higher and more commanding point of view.1

During the century and a half between Thales and the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, we have passed in review twelve distinct schemes of philosophy — Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Herakleitus, Empedokles, Anaxagoras, the Apolloniate Diogenes, Leukippus, and Demokritus. Of most of these philosophers it may fairly be said that each speculated upon nature in an original vein of his own. Anaximenes and Diogenes, Xenophanes and Parmenides, Leukippus and Demokritus, may indeed be coupled together as kindred pairs yet by no means in such manner that the second of the two is a mere disciple and copyist of the first. Such abundance and variety of speculative genius and invention is one of the most memorable facts in the history of the Hellenic mind. The prompting of intelligent curiosity, the thirst for some plausible hypothesis to explain the Kosmos and its generation, the belief that a basis or point of departure might be found in the Kosmos itself, apart from those mythical personifications which dwelt both in the popular mind and in the poetical Theogonies, the mental effort required to select some known agency and to connect it by a chain of reasoning with the result — all this is a new phenomenon in the history of the human mind.

An early Greek philosopher found nothing around him to stimulate or assist the effort, and much to obstruct it. He found Nature disguised under a diversified and omnipresent Polytheistic agency, eminently captivating and impressive to the emotions — at once mysterious and familiar — embodied in the ancient Theogonies, and penetrating deeply all the abundant epic and lyric poetry, the only literature of the time. It is perfectly true (as Aristotle remarks2) that Hesiod and the other theological poets, who referred everything to the generation and agency of the Gods, thought only of what was plausible to themselves, without enquiring whether it would appear equally plausible to their successors; a reproach which bears upon many subsequent philosophers also. The contemporary public, to whom they addressed themselves, knew no other way of conceiving Nature than under this religious and poetical view, as an aggregate of manifestations by divine personal agents, upon whose volition — sometimes signified beforehand by obscure warnings intelligible to the privileged interpreters, but often inscrutable — the turn of events depended. Thales and the other Ionic philosophers were the first who became dissatisfied with this point of view, and sought for some “causes and beginnings” more regular, knowable, and predictable. They fixed upon the common, familiar, widely-extended, material substances, water, air, fire, &c.; and they could hardly fix upon any others. Their attempt to find a scientific basis was unsuccessful; but the memorable fact consisted in their looking for one.

In the theories of these Ionic philosophers, the physical ideas of generation, transmutation, local motion, are found in the foreground: generation in the Kosmos to replace generation by the God. Pythagoras and Empedokles blend with their speculations a good deal both of ethics and theology, which we shall find yet more preponderant when we come to the cosmical theories of Plato. He brings us back to the mythical Prometheus, armed with the geometrical and arithmetical combinations of the Pythagoreans: he assumes a chaotic substratum, modified by the intentional and deliberate construction of the Demiurgus and his divine sons, who are described as building up and mixing like a human artisan or chemist. In the theory of Aristotle we find Nature half personified, and assumed to be perpetually at work under the influence of an appetite for good or regularity, which determines her to aim instinctively and without deliberation (like bees or spiders) at constant ends, though these regular tendencies are always accompanied, and often thwarted, by accessories, irregular, undefinable, unpredictable. Both Plato and Aristotle, in their dialectical age, carried abstraction farther than it had been carried by the Ionic philosophers.3 Aristotle imputes to the Ionic philosophers that they neglected three out of his four causes (the efficient, formal, and final), and that they attended only to the material. This was a height of abstraction first attained by Plato and himself; in a way sometimes useful, sometimes misleading.

The earlier philosophers had not learnt to divide substance from its powers or properties; nor to conceive substance without power as one thing, and power without substance as another. Their primordial substance, with its powers and properties, implicated together as one concrete and without any abstraction, was at once an efficient, a formal, and a material cause: a final cause they did not suppose themselves to want, inasmuch as they always conceived a fixed terminus towards which the agency was directed, though they did not conceive such fixed tendency under the symbol of an appetite and its end. Water, Air, Fire, were in their view not simply inert and receptive patients, impotent until they were stimulated by the active force residing in the ever revolving celestial spheres — but positive agents themselves, productive of important effects. So also a geologist of the present day, when he speculates upon the early condition4 of the Kosmos, reasons upon gaseous, fluid, solid, varieties of matter, as manifesting those same laws and properties which experience attests, but manifesting them under different combinations and circumstances. The defect of the Ionic philosophers, unavoidable at the time, was, that possessing nothing beyond a superficial experience, they either ascribed to these physical agents powers and properties not real, or exaggerated prodigiously such as were real; so that the primordial substance chosen, though bearing a familiar name, became little better than a fiction.

Parmenides and Pythagoras, taking views of the Kosmos metaphysical and geometrical rather than physical, supplied the basis upon which Plato’s speculations were built. Aristotle recognises Empedokles and Anaxagoras as having approached to his own doctrine — force abstracted or considered apart from substance, yet not absolutely detached from it. This is true about Empedokles to a certain extent, since his theory admits Love and Enmity as agents, the four elements as patients: but it is hardly true about Anaxagoras, in whose theory Noûs imparts nothing more than a momentary shock, exercising what modern chemists call a catalytic agency in originating movement among a stationary and stagnant mass of Homœomeries, which, as soon as they are liberated from imprisonment, follow inherent tendencies of their own, not receiving any farther impulse or direction from Noûs.

In the number of cosmical theories proposed, from Thales to Demokritus, as well as in the diversity and even discordance of the principles on which they were founded — we note not merely the growth and development of scientific curiosity, but also the spontaneity and exuberance of constructive imagination.5 This last is a prominent attribute of the Hellenic mind, displayed to the greatest advantage in their poetical, oratorical, historical, artistic, productions, and transferred from thence to minister to their scientific curiosity. None of their known contemporaries showed the like aptitudes, not even the Babylonians and Egyptians, who were diligent in the observation of the heavens. Now the constructive imagination is not less indispensable to the formation of scientific theories than to the compositions of art, although in the two departments it is subject to different conditions, and appeals to different canons and tests in the human mind. Each of these early Hellenic theories, though all were hypotheses and “anticipations of nature,” yet as connecting together various facts upon intelligible principles, was a step in advance; while the very number and discordance of them (urged by Sokrates6 as an argument for discrediting the purpose common to all), was on the whole advantageous.

It lessened the mischief arising from the imperfections of each, increased the chance of exposing such imperfections, and prevented the consecration of any one among them (with that inveterate and peremptory orthodoxy which Plato so much admires7 in the Egyptians) as an infallible dogma and an exclusive mode of looking at facts. All the theorists laboured under the common defect of a scanty and inaccurate experience: all of them were prompted by a vague but powerful emotion of curiosity to connect together the past and present of Nature by some threads intelligible and satisfactory to their own minds; each of them followed out some analogy of his own, such as seemed to carry with it a self-justifying plausibility; and each could find some phenomena which countenanced his own peculiar view. As far as we can judge, Leukippus and Demokritus greatly surpassed the others, partly in the pains which they took to elaborate their theory, partly in the number of facts which they brought into consistency with it. The loss of the voluminous writings of Demokritus is deeply to be regretted.8