HISTORY OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY 



I HISTORY OF 
GREEK PHILOSOPHY 

THALES TO DEMOCRITUS 



BY 

B. A. G. FULLER, Ph.D. 

SOMETIME INSTRUCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
AUTHOR OF "THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN PLOTINUS" 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1923 



DEC 1 1945 



Copyright, 1923 
BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



November, 193S 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 



DEDICATION 

To my friends, my former pupils, 
who inspired this book by their 
difficulties and questions, and who 
will find in it little or nothing that 
I did not tell them. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

PREFACE 



I. WHAT is PHILOSOPHY? ........ 1 

II. GREEK RELIGION .......... 19 

III. THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS, THE FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 76 

IV. PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS ..... 103 

V. HERACLEITUS ........... 118 

VI. THE ELEATIC SCHOOL ......... 143 

VII. THE PLURALISTS .......... 180 

VIII. SUMMARY ............ 255 

APPENDIX I. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE ...... 269 

II. BIBLIOGRAPHY ......... 279 

INDEX 283 



PREFACE 

To add another to the numerous histories of Greek 
Philosophy available in English may seem uncalled for and 
imprudent, if not downright impertinent. The books already 
at hand are excellent, and, it would appear, sufficient. The 
more detailed and critical are standard and exhaustive works 
of reference and of advanced instruction; the shorter and the 
more concise serve to aid and refresh the memory, or to give 
an accurate small scale map, easily readable to the practised 
or interested eye. But the fact remains that however invalu 
able they may be to one already familiar with the subject, or 
born with a natural bent for it and therefore quick to under 
stand its problems and tolerate its terminology, they prove too 
learned, too technical, or too bloodless and in the nature of a 
text-book, for the use and pleasure of the "general reader." 
They are apt to give merely the plan without the panorama 
which infuses it with color and shape and animation. Or else 
they confuse the untrained observer with the spectacle of the 
novelty, the wealth, the tropical luxuriance of a vast and 
incredible landscape teeming with the strange forms of a mon 
strous fauna and flora, in which everything familiar seems 
turned topsy-turvy. And in either case they assume, deliber 
ately or unconsciously, a previous knowledge of philosophy, 
or an already awakened flair for philosophic imaginings and 
speculations such as shall prepare the reader to follow with 
sympathy and understanding minute and elaborate discussions, 
or at least enable him to make the often over-dry bones of rapid 
and highly condensed accounts live. 

For example, many American university curricula are faced 
with the problem of acquainting, wholesale and in the brief 
term of a semester, large numbers of innocent and incurious 

ix 



x PREFACE 

youths with what every young man should know about the his 
tory of Greek Philosophy. And this problem, hard at the 
best, is, not a little aggravated, so far as my experience, which 
I fancy to be fairly typical, goes, by the difficulty of finding 
any book sufficiently untechnical and vivid to supplement the 
teacher s lectures and arouse the understanding and the interest 
of his pupils. Again, one is frequently not a little embarrassed 
and at a loss for an answer, when indiscreet friends among "the 
general public" come with a modest disclaimer of any knowl 
edge of philosophy save a certainty that it is "beyond them," 
and ask for the name of some work which may instruct 
them without too greatly straining their limited powers of 
comprehension. 

In the present volume I have tried to meet this want so far 
as the early Greek philosophers are concerned, and to get under 
way with a simple, painless, and, I hope, not unentertainingj 
history of Greek Philosophy as a whole. I am encouraged to 
this attempt by my own feeling that philosophy is not really 
the impossibly abstract, abstruse, cold, and difficult thing 
of the popular imagination, but rather something essentially 
warm, close, nay, clinging to everyday life, highly colored, 
melodramatic, and naturally provocative and engrossing. Anc 
with this feeling goes the opinion that its history is the stor} 
of perhaps the most exciting and sensational pursuit with which 
the human mind has diverted as well as ennobled itself. If I 
shall have succeeded in insinuating that philosophy is not so 
dull and respectable after all, and in troubling the reader, 
however vaguely, with something of its fascination, I shall feel 
that I have done what apart from amusing myself I set 
out to do. 

This volume is based upon other histories, and so far as 
I know, there is nothing original in it. The sources have been 
before me, but I have tried to rely entirely upon the interpre 
tation of them given by such historians as, for instance, Zeller, 
Gomperz, and Professor Burnet. I do not see that at the 
present time anything new can be said, except by experts, and 
it has been my aim merely to rehash in a lighter and more easily 
digested form what they have already thrashed out and pre- 



PREFACE xi 

pared. Where divergencies of opinion and interpretation exist, 
they have been noted, but no side has been taken. Further 
more. I have wished to be quite unpartisan. Being devoid of 
any "system," or even strong conviction save, perhaps, that 
the growth of philosophic speculation, as well as the evolution 
of the Universe and the course of human events, is without 
culmination my mental furniture lacks that Procrustean bed 
of a fixed point of rest and reference upon which the history of 
philosophy is sometimes stretched. I have no child or even pet 
view of my own, for which to seek forerunners in the wilderness 
among the ancients. At the same time, it has not been my 
intention to take a severely objective and impartial attitude. 
I have sought rather to be thoroughly partial to each new 
system, to imagine myself the disciple, not the critic, of the 
successive philosophers with whom I have dealt, to make all 
their ideas as plausible as I can, and in general to say as much 
good and as little ill as possible about everybody and every 
thing. 

Two bibliographies have been appended, dealing respectively 
with Greek Religion and Early Greek Philosophy, as well as 
a chronological table, which may be useful for framing philo 
sophical, with their setting of historical, events. The bibliog 
raphies make no pretence at being complete. They include 
only such books as I myself happen to have found useful, and 
betray, if anything, the limitations of my library. 

Practically all the translations, and the major part of the 
interpretation, have been taken from Professor Burnet s "Early 
Greek Philosophy," and his "Greek Philosophy Part I. Thales 
to Plato." My thanks are due to the publishers for having in 
my absence kindly reviewed the translations taken from "Early 
Greek Philosophy" and verified them in accordance with the 
third edition (1920). I am indebted to many friends for 
reading parts of the manuscript, and among them particularly 
to Professors J. H. Woods and R. B. Perry of Harvard Univer 
sity, who have made many helpful suggestions ; also to Mr. E. A. 
Mowrer, Roman correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, to 
Mrs. Mowrer, and to Mr. A. L. de Bosis, for the time and 
trouble that they have so generously given to reading the 



xii PREFACE 

proofs. The portion of Chapter II dealing with the Eleusinian 
and Orphic Mysteries has already appeared, with some altera 
tions, in the Hibbert Journal for October, 1922, and I must 
acknowledge the kindness of the Editor, Dr. Jacks, in allowing 
me to republish it. 

B. A. G. F. 
Rome, April, 1923. 



HISTORY OF GREEK 
I PHILOSOPHY 

CHAPTER I 
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 

THERE are few of us who, at one time or another, have not 
found ourselves speculating about the character and daily 
existence of some chance individual seated opposite us in a tram 
or railway car, and making up some story about him to fit and 
explain his looks and behavior. It may be merely the natural 
curiosity about other people s business with which we are all 
endowed, that attracts and holds our attention, or it may be 
something odd and interesting in our subject s appearance that 
puzzles and challenges us. But whatever the grounds of our 
interest, they are apt to impel us to construct deliberately or 
insensibly especially if the journey be long and tedious, and 
we lack other means of entertainment a picture of what this 
odd, or charming, or commonplace individual is really like. 

It is obvious, however, that the trend of our questions will 
be determined not by the look of our hero alone. Our own 
personal interests and the impossibility of studying every side 
of his character in the brief course of our journey will have 
much to do with determining and limiting the nature of our 
speculations. Still, if we confine our interest and investigation 
either by instinct or by choice, we shall be obliged to admit that 
our point of view is only partial, that our hero possesses other 
sides to his character other selves, we might say than the 
particular self with which we were dealing. But these other 
sides or selves also are equally part of him, and inasmuch as 

they are also expressions of what we might call his central 

l 



2 WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 

or total personality, they have equally to be taken into account 
in making a true and inclusive picture or story of his total life 
and character. 

Now we are all of us seated for a journey that sometimes 
lasts for many years opposite a fellow-traveler towards whom 
we cannot feel, or even pretend to feel, indifference. We are 
strapped into our seats, and we cannot turn our heads away, 
but must perforce stare at him all our life long, and only death 
can free us from the otherwise unescapable fact of his presence. 
And that presence is all-engrossing. We would not keep our 
eyes off him if we could, so strange, so self-contradictor} , 
so baffling, and so full of challenge are his appearance and 
behavior. His expression is ever changing now kindly, now 
cruel, now sad, now gay, now full of encouragement, now of 
menace, and now again of a great and weary indifference. This 
strange Being, in those moments of almost personal contact 
when he returns our fascinated stare, and meets our eye with 
something of intelligence or friendliness or hostility in his face, 
we call Life spelled with a capital L. In his more impersonal 
phases of unresponsiveness and aloofness, when we feel less on 
Christian-name terms with him, we are apt to call him the 
World, or the Universe, or Reality, or on even very correct 
and formal occasions, the Absolute. 

We can no more escape an interest in the nature of this 
Universe or Reality with which we are surrounded and con 
fronted at every turn, than we can the fact of its presence. 
There is in the first place the blank surprise produced by the 
mere fact of finding one s self alive and tete-a-tete with a 
World. Through wondering, says Aristotle, men began in the 
beginning, and, we might add, begin to-day, to philosophize. 
But this round-eyed wonder speedily turns into a keen-eyed 
and sophisticated curiosity. The Universe is not only astonish 
ing, it is perplexing. It puzzles and intrigues us. We begin 
to suspect that it is not altogether what it seems. It may have 
private affairs. It may lead a double life, the life of what 
it appears to be in public and the life of what it really is in 
private. At the mention of a double life we are naturally all 
agog, and begin to philosophize spontaneously. As we begin 



WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 3 

to pry into the affairs of the Universe, we find our suspicions 
confirmed. Its affairs are more private and more difficult to 
get at than we had supposed. Idle speculation and gossip will 
get us nowhere. The behavior and appearance of the World 
present a problem, a riddle, and perhaps a case for the police. 
It is more and more obvious that there is a mystery, and that 
the Universe does not wear its heart on its sleeve. Behind the 
Universe as it appears in public there is the Universe at home 
an inner nature and constitution of things which, if only we 
could penetrate to it, might be found to explain all the various 
and apparently conflicting activities and aims which confuse 
and complicate the surface of the World. 

In this standing invitation to discover what the inner life 
of the Universe is like lies a perpetual challenge to the amateur 
detective that lives and moves and has its being in every one 
of us. Idle curiosity is reinforced by the no less primeval pas 
sion for hunting down a quarry. We are not only prying into 
the private affairs of a very mysterious and extraordinary 
Being, we are also stalking a prey. But once off on the scent, 
we find that we are embarked on an adventure the difficulty and 
wildness of which is beyond that of any big game or man hunt 
ever undertaken by a Roosevelt or a Sherlock Holmes. No 
wild beast, no criminal in fact or fiction, not even Arsene Lupin 
himself, ever displayed half the genius for covering his tracks 
and setting false trails, and escaping just at the moment when 
finally the net seemed closing nay closed about him, as does 
the true character of the Universe in eluding our pursuit. Just 
when we think that at last we have grasped it, it slips through 
our fingers. However careful and complete our story or theory 
is, some fact has escaped or contradicts it. But humanity 
takes up the repeated challenge, laying its plans each time 
more carefully, and spreading its nets more and more widely 
and with finer meshes. Hence the fact that philosophy has 
a history, and on the whole progresses. 

It is, however, not merely for the sake of entertainment, and 
for the mere fun of turning someone else s private life into 
a public scandal, or of doing amateur detective work, that we 
find ourselves speculating about the hidden nature of the 



4 WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 

World. That desire to know, with which Aristotle said all men 
were endowed by nature, has also a sound practical basis. We 
are not only spectators of our world but actors in it. And the 
way in which we act is a matter of life and death to us. The 
Universe is not only a tough-looking, but a tough-acting, cus 
tomer. We have to be continually on our guard against it, 
and the length of time for which we can successfully maintain 
that guard is dependent upon our ability to foresee what the 
World will do next. This ability, again, varies in proportion 
to the correctness of our guess as to what the character and 
motives of the World what its machinery or its psychology, 
we might almost say are really like. 

Huxley has likened this relation of man to the World to that 
of a chess-player pitted against an unseen opponent. This 
opponent will beat us all in the end, to be sure, but by skilful 
play some of us can postpone the inevitable for some three 
score and ten or four score years. Meantime our antagonist 
plays fair and according to fixed rules. He never overlooks or 
fails to take advantage of an error on our part, but on the 
other hand he never fails to recognize and accept a check. The 
success with which we delay defeat is measured by our under 
standing of his game, for that understanding gives us an insight 
into what probably will be his next move, and thus puts us in 
a position to forestall or counteract it. 

Knowledge then is not merely enjoyable and exciting; it is 
useful. It is power, as Bacon said, because through under 
standing Nature we are able to overcome her, in part through 
obedience to her ways when and where they cannot be changed, 
in part through the deliberate exploitation of her forces and 
the turning of them to our service and advantage. "To submit 
to fate and serve God is to rule." (Fato obedire, Deo servire, 
regnare est.) These lines, scratched on the walls of a cell in 
the Tower of London, suffice to set forth a whole philosophy 
of Life. To realize the limitations of one s own nature and of 
the nature of things of which one is a part, and within these 
limitations to seek to make the Good sovereign and the Ideal 
real, are the conditions of human dignity and of our mastery 
of the world. But to know God from Fate, to distinguish that 



WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 5 

which is perforce unalterable from that which perhaps may 
be changed and bettered and recast in the image of the divine, 
is at the same time the most useful and the most philosophic 
of all knowledge. 

We are now ready, I think, to answer the question which 
forms the title of this chapter. Philosophy is inquiry into the 
real nature of the Universe in which we live. It is merely an 
extension of natural curiosity from other people s private 
affairs to other things private affairs, and to the private affairs 
of this lump sum of all people and all things, which we call the 
World. We know more or less what Reality looks like and how 
it behaves in public. But what is it like at home? Under the 
third degree? To its valet? Philosophers, then, are essentially 
busybodies and detectives, but on a large scale and with the 
grand manner. Their problem is to find out the truth, if they 
can, about the totality of existence. They ransack all space 
and all time for their evidence. But at the same time they can 
leave nothing untouched in their search. Every feature and 
movement of the World is a clue. They must scrutinize every 
past and passing event. Nothing can be a matter of indiffer 
ence to them, if they are to frame with any measure of success 
a theory which will fit and explain all the facts in this immensely 
complicated and mysterious Case, which the existence and 
nature of the Universe present. 

A philosophic system, then, is simply the story made up by 
the philosopher to account for the looks and behavior of this 
strange Being, the World, with which he finds himself con 
fronted. Of our friend in the tram-car we might seek cor- 
roboration of our speculations concerning him, if we were 
impertinent to the point of asking him outright. But there is 
no such short-cut to knowledge of the truth about the Universe. 
The Universe is deaf and dumb, or else reticent enough to pass 
for such. It reveals to us directly nothing of its inward self. 
It has nothing to say in response to our attempted inter 
views. It neither affirms nor denies the correctness of our 
guesses. No confession of its real character can be wrung from 
it. All the evidence a philosopher has for writing up his story 
is circumstantial. The only clue to what the nature of things is 



6 WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 

really like is to be found in their appearance. And, to change 
the figure slightly, the verification of the correctness of our 
conclusion as to the true inwardness of the behavior of the 
Universe does not mean that Reality has finally owned up to 
feeling as from its behavior we suspected it did, but simply 
that it has gone on exhibiting without contra-indication the 
same symptoms upon which our diagnosis was originally 
founded. 

But our diagnosis, of course, may be and is simply one of 
many. Doctors of medicine may, doctors of philosophy do, 
disagree, and compared with the disagreements of the philoso 
phers over the real, inner condition of Reality, the differences 
of physicians in consultation over an interesting and baffling 
case are a chorus of unanimity. So far as the philosophic 
problem is concerned, everybody is entitled to his guess. There 
is no authority, no court of final appeal, no expert opinion 
even, to give a decision to which the inquiring mind must bow. 
At the same time this liberty is not license. We must not guess 
merely at random. Our opinions must be dictated not by our 
fancies or hopes, but by the facts of the case. Here lies the 
World before us, and the question is not what theory regarding 
it is prettiest and nicest and most edifying, but rather what 
theory about the nature of things best fits their actual look 
and behavior. Everybody then is bound to give reasons for his 
guess, and to show if he can that his particular guess is more 
in accord with the evidence than any other. 

The absence of eye-witnesses to the private life of the 
Universe imposes upon philosophers a peculiar carefulness in 
their research. At every step their results have to be checked 
up by the data provided by the actions and appearance of the 
World, and conformed to them, lest what aims at being a plaus 
ible theory and explanation deteriorate into unfounded gossip 
or even out and out libel based upon personal prejudice. We 
might liken the philosopher in this respect to the artist who in 
painting the picture of a landscape has to keep raising his eyes 
from his canvas to his subject, in order to be sure that he is 
catching the spirit of the landscape as it is, and not substitut 
ing a sketch of objects and values composed as he would prefer 



WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 7 

them. Or again we may liken him to the scientist whose suppo 
sitions or hypotheses regarding the constitution of the physical 
world must never for an instant lose touch with the phenomena 
upon which they are based. The moment that a scientific 
theory ignores any fact within its sphere, it is in danger ; the 
moment that any fact declines to fit it, it is doomed. In 
the same way, if the philosopher, who, as Plato says, has to 
be the spectator of all time and existence, fails to note any 
aspect or action of the World, his system is inadequate; if he 
will not bring it into conformity with events, it is untenable. 

Indeed, the method and the tests employed by philosophy 
should differ in no wise from those of science. A philosophy is 
an interpretation of the Universe based upon existence as we 
find it, and maintains its validity so long, and in so far, as it 
keeps itself fitted to the facts and events which go to make 
up the phenomenal world. But the scope of philosophy is wider 
than that of a science. It will be remembered that in speak 
ing of our fellow-traveler in the tram-car we pointed out that 
our speculations regarding him might perhaps be restricted to 
some one particular side of his character in which we happened 
to be specially interested, or, on the other hand, might deal 
with the whole man. Now, in the same way, the scientist is one 
who devotes himself to the study of a single aspect of the 
Universe. As things stand, the World happens to present a 
number of sides which can be investigated comparatively inde 
pendently of one another. We can, for example, more or less 
isolate the physical or material side of the Universe, and study 
it. And this aspect of things we may again subdivide, and 
study in detail, making it the object of such semi-independent 
spheres of research as physics, chemistry, mechanics, astron 
omy, geology, and the like. Or again we may investigate the 
activities of living matter, without for the moment bothering 
with physics and mechanics or even chemistry, and by sub 
dividing our subject separate the provinces of the various 
biological sciences from one another. Or yet again we may 
turn the microscope upon our own inner experience, and inquire 
as mere psychologists into the nature and behavior of con 
sciousness, without concerning ourselves with biological sciences 



8 WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 

or chemistry. We may even within the field of consciousness 
confine ourselves to a particular problem such as that pre 
sented by the fact that consciousness among other things 
displays preferences, likes this, and dislikes that, pursues what 
it likes, avoids what it dislikes, and in general makes the dis 
tinction between good and evil, creates values, and conducts 
itself accordingly. Then our interest is that of the moralist or 
student of ethics, in determining what the human Good really 
is, and what kind of conduct is best calculated to realize it. 
We may, however, not bother about the question of moral 
values, but turn our attention simply to the study of the 
behavior of our mind when it is in the process of what we call 
thinking or reasoning, and attempt to make out a description 
of what that process is like. In that case we have decided to 
restrict ourselves to logic, and to leave ethical questions 
to others. If, however, we persist in being interested in and 
speculating about the nature of the whole World, of which these 
various aspects and sides are parts and manifestations, and in 
making up a story or theory about its character which will 
include and explain all the manifold activities and character 
istics which it presents to us, we are then philosophers, rather 
than physicists or chemists or psychologists or logicians. 

Of course no scientist, and for that matter no one whosoever, 
can wholly avoid this central philosophic question. The vari 
ous aspects of the World treated by the scientists cannot, since 
they are parts of one whole, be wholly isolated from one 
another. Sooner or later investigation of any one of them will 
confront us with problems the solution of which has to be 
sought beyond its borders. For instance, the psychologist 
in the end can scarcely evade the question of the relation of 
the mind to the body, and generally of consciousness to matter. 
Some people, indeed, think that the problem of consciousness 
can be immensely simplified if only its behavior can be dealt 
with in the same terms as simplify and render intelligible the 
behavior of the physical world ; that is, if only we can reduce 
it to a form of mechanical energy. In the same way the 
biologist cannot well avoid the subject of chemistry. It is an 
open question whether or no life can be understood in terms 



WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 9 

of chemical activity; that is, whether biology is not just a 
branch of chemistry. Similarly a study of chemistry in the 
end tends to involve questions which the physicist has made his 
special province. Chemists ask themselves whether the differ 
ences and relations between the various chemical elements are 
not capable of further reduction of being detected and caught 
in the act, as it were, of being after all only different groupings, 
in this or that geometrical relation, of qualitatively similar 
atoms or electrons or ions, or whatever the ultimate unit of 
matter may be. 

If we could carry out this particular series of reductions, we 
should of course immensely simplify our world. Its whole 
behavior could then be expressed in the comparatively uncom 
plicated formulae which describe the behavior of matter in 
motion. But this reduction is far from being attained, and 
even if it were, our troubles would not be over. For physics 
itself takes certain facts such as space and time and motion 
pretty much for granted, and does not bother to analyze them. 
And it has been held that these aspects of the World are not 
really founded in the outside Universe at all, but are merely 
our ways of perceiving things forms of the activity of our 
consciousness like our senses, which alter and change the real 
nature of the outside world, as colored glasses alter for the 
eye the real colors of a landscape. In fact, it has even been 
held that the whole so-called physical and material aspect of 
the World can be understood in terms of consciousness. After 
all, what are time and space but ways in which we experience? 
We get our perceptions one after another, or we get several 
presented side by side, and we call this sequence and coexistence; 
which are universal characteristics of our presentations, time 
and space. Furthermore what is the material world but just 
a lump sum of sensations and experiences of different sorts? 
Try to get outside the World as it is given to your senses and 
your thoughts. Try to get outside your experience. It is like 
trying to get out of your own skin. You can get more experi 
ence have more in your consciousness just as you can 
expand your skin and grow fat. But although your periphery 
niay be extended in either case, you are still shut up within the 



10 WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 

vicious circle, mental or physical. Therefore, some philoso 
phers argue, the least common denominator of the sum total 
of existence which we are seeking is to be found in terms of 
consciousness. And so we find ourselves back again precisely 
where we started. 

I have mentioned these different arguments and points of 
view simply to show how quickly all our questionings, even 
the most simple, land us on difficult and debatable ground. 
Philosophy is sometimes reproached with being remote from 
life, but in reality nothing is closer and more intimately inter 
woven with everyday existence. To ask the simplest or the 
most trivial question about anything, is to set on foot an 
inquiry into the nature of the World. To indulge in an instant 
of reflection is to embark on a train of thought whose ultimate 
destination is a philosophic system. The fall of an apple in an 
orchard seems a homely and simple enough occurrence, yet 
Newton found himself unable to deal with it satisfactorily till, 
after long research and meditation, he had formulated the law 
of gravitation. But even Newton got out at a way-station, so 
to speak. For the law of gravitation itself suggests many 
further problems. What is the scope of the law? What war 
rant have we for supposing that it applies everywhere, that it 
always has applied, that it always will apply? How do we 
know for that matter, do we know, that there may not be vast 
tracts of space where bodies do not attract each other in direct 
proportion to their masses and in inverse ratio to the square 
of their distances, but rather according to some quite different 
formula, or perhaps not at all? Anyway, why should the for 
mula remain the same even for us in the future, or why should 
we not believe that bodies may altogether outgrow their present 
habit of attracting each other? Is the law of gravitation, 
when all is said and done, more than a mere snap-shot of the 
way in which bodies happen to be behaving at the present time? 
Can it be said in any way to prescribe, or more than provision 
ally and roughly to describe, how they shall behave? And what 
of all the other laws and concepts with which the sciences have 
familiarized us? What ground, if any, have we for supposing 
that they hold good for all space and all time? Thus it is only 



WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 11 

a step, under modern conditions of mental transportation, from 
the apple to the Absolute. 

We, of course, habitually get off the train of thought much 
further down the line than Newton did. The apple falls, we 
say, because it is heavy, and we stop there. And in general 
we are quite willing to be put off by rough and ready answers, 
and to direct our lives by rule of thumb. The answers pass and 
the rules work because, if we take the trouble to investigate 
them, we find that they are based eventually on theories regard 
ing the real nature of things which nothing has happened as 
yet seriously to contradict. 

The debatable ground to which all questioning and all science 
finally leads is the sphere of metaphysics. When the different 
sciences have finished their tasks and handed their results in, 
we find that we are still unable to understand how those various 
aspects of the World of which they have treated are related 
to one another and to the Whole of which they are part, or to 
estimate the final significance and position in the character 
of the Universe of such things as space, and time, and matter, 
and motion, and life, and consciousness, and thinking, and 
valuing, and pursuing ends and ideals. It is the business of 
metaphysics to deal in surmises as to the answers to such ques 
tions, to frame a theory, as it were, which shall wholly cover 
our opposite neighbor in the tram-car and show how his many 
sides his profession, his hobbies and amusements, his home- 
life and all either hang together and make up a consistent 
character, or pull apart and leave him a multiple and disrupted 
personality, as the case may be. 

There may arise at this point a misunderstanding against 
which we must guard ourselves. It might appear from what 
we have said that metaphysics, or, for that matter, philosophy, 
is a kind of afterthought invoked to supplement and bind 
together the results of the investigations made by the separate 
sciences. We get as far as we can, it might seem, in physics 
and chemistry and biology and psychology, and then being 
unable to proceed further, we make conjectures as to whether 
and where and how the various lines of investigation might 
plausibly meet. But such a view is really a reversal of the 



12 WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 

procedure both of the individual mind and of the history of 
philosophy. The primitive wonder of the individual or the race 
face to face with the Universe expresses itself in questions and 
speculations of the most comprehensive sort. What is it made 
of? What is its meaning? What is its general attitude toward 
ourselves? Later, as we gather in more data and notice that 
they fall into more or less definite and separable groups, inves 
tigation becomes specialized. Finally, the different aspects and 
activities of the World become distinct, and speculation in 
various fields begins to result in theories where fidelity to the 
facts within their province is comparatively complete, exact, 
and tested by time and by the occurrence of the new data which 
time brings with it. Thus it is that the individual sciences 
begin to grow within the more general philosophic point of view 
and interest and eventually to detach themselves from it. 

The sciences, then, are not the source but the offspring of 
philosophic speculation. Even the most full-grown and inde 
pendent of them show unmistakably the mark of their origin. 
The motives which actuate them are the same motives as 
actuate the philosophical interest, their method is the method 
of philosophy, their subject-matter its subject-matter, their 
questions are metaphysical questions cut short, as it were. But 
whereas in them the all-impelling curiosity is chastened and 
restrained, in philosophy it still has the courage and the fresh 
ness to survey and challenge the nature of things in its entirety. 
The sciences, one might almost say, are philosophy disillusioned. 

There remains the question whether philosophy is worth 
while. We often hear such queries as "What is the use of 
philosophy?" "Does it get us anywhere?" These interroga 
tions are really covert reproaches. In defending philosophy 
against them much depends, of course, on what we consider 
worth while and useful. If by the question "Is philosophy use 
ful ?" we mean does it help us to make money, we might as well 
admit at once that it isn t and doesn t. But then neither does 
rowing nor tennis nor cruising nor stamp-collecting nor reading 
detective stories nor falling in love. Yet all these avocations 
are pleasant, and rest upon and give expression to some 
interest for the absence of which our life and Life as a whole 



WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 13 

would be the poorer. The same is true of philosophy. If people 
like to philosophize and philosophy as we have seen is the 
indulgence of a curiosity which nobody probably is wholly 
without then philosophy is worth while and useful, inasmuch 
as it does its share towards contributing to the sum total of 
self-expression and of happiness. It makes life more entertain 
ing for some people, to say the least. We might add, also, that 
a man s life is presumably the richer and the better rounded 
and balanced, in proportion to the number of interests it can 
muster and resources it can command. Each new interest is 
another root struck deep into the infinite fertility of the World, 
and another source of nourishment and stimulation to the 
more complete and brilliant flowering of the individual s per 
sonality and career. To add, then, philosophy to our other 
interests is to have enlarged our life by just so much. 

Moreover, philosophy is an added interest in a double sense. 
Not only is it one more interest, but it also gives a new zest to 
our other interests. Just as it means looking at the World as 
a whole, so it also means looking at any one of our interests in 
the light of all the others. It is not a self-contained and sep 
arable activity. It is rather an outlook on Life which pervades 
and organizes and unifies all the partial and separate views 
which our numerous minor selves our business self, and our 
sporting self, and our artistic self, and our self at home, and 
all the rest take about things. It is a sort of mobile army in 
reserve, which may be brought up to reinforce any point of 
that extended line with all its irregularities and salients, its 
precarious and its sure positions, along which we are in con 
tact with the Universe. Or, to descend from the language of 
the camp to that of the kitchen, we may liken it to the season 
ing of a dish which does not destroy the other flavors, and can 
not well be separated from them, but rather brings them all 
out with an added intensity, losing none and combining all in a 
single expression of pleasure upon the palate. Philosophy is, 
in very truth, the spice of life. 

But the practical man or the Puritan will not be put off by 
any such justifications of philosophy as these. What he means 
by "useful" and "worth while" has nothing to do with any in- 



14 WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 

crease of the pleasurableness of Life, or of its interest, its bril 
liancy, and its richness. What he wishes to know is whether 
philosophy contributes anything to efficiency and character. 
Confronted even with tests like these, philosophy need not quail. 
It can argue with considerable force that the habits of mind 
which it tends to inculcate are of practical assistance in the 
making of a living for one s self, and in contributing to the 
welfare of society as a whole. The habits of looking at all 
sides of a question, of taking all possible factors into account, 
of suspending judgment and not making hasty decisions, of 
recognizing the right to existence, and even the importance and 
value, of interests other than one s own; all these are useful 
habits to acquire, whatever one s occupation may be. Surely it 
can harm the efficiency of no man, if he raise his eyes now and 
then from his own profession and cast a sympathetic glance at 
that of others, perhaps even if he catch for an instant a glimpse 
of Life as a whole, and feel that his own career and his own 
achievements are merely one of the many ways in which Life 
fulfils itself. And these are habits which a study of philosophy 
should assist us in forming. 

They may, of course, like any others, be carried to excess. 
A suspension of judgment and an impartiality which mean 
vacillation and indecision and consequent inability to act are 
harmful if not counter-balanced, and are said to be the peculiar 
vice of the philosophic temperament. It cannot be denied that 
there is some truth in this view. It would be a bad thing, prob 
ably, if there were too many philosophers in the world. Prog 
ress would be slow if it had to be gained by that steady and 
equal contact and pressure all along the front which philosophy 
advocates. Life gets ahead by concentrating its forces beyond 
all reason and at considerable peril, now at this point, now at 
that, by creating sharp and awkward salients, by planting its 
flag with an air of final triumph, in positions which the medi 
tative mind sees at a glance to be untenable, and then by grad 
ually straightening its line through retreat and compromise. 
But in the campaign as a whole, the philosophic temperament 
even in its extreme form has its value and justification. It 
tends to keep the line from growing too thin in the neglected 



WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 15 

spots, and the salients from becoming so sharp as to be de 
tached from the main advance and destroyed, and it prepares 
the reserve trenches in which the inevitable retreat from the 
positions taken with such splendid finality by the cranks and 
the reformers may find shelter. 

If, however, a great deal of the philosophic point of view in 
a few persons is not harmful but advantageous to Life as a 
whole, we can say the same of a moderate amount of it in the 
great run of people, in whom its effects are more than offset by 
the exigencies of practical life. We are not apt to do too much 
star-gazing if our noses are held to the grindstone, and, after 
all, it is on a level somewhere between the star and the grind 
stone that we meet Life face to face. We can look too low and 
with too fixed and narrow a gaze, just as we can look vaguely 
to impracticable and empty heights. The one no less than the 
other makes us blind to the living world. Indeed, to be awake 
only to our particular business is deadlier than to dream. So, 
in an age where the stress is laid on making a living, rather than 
in living on what we have made, dreaming is a habit to be 
encouraged, not repressed. Even in one too much and beyond 
redemption a looker-on at Life by temperament, and a dreamer 
rather than an actor, philosophy is still not an unmitigated evil. 
It will stimulate, to be sure, the already over-emphasized con 
templative habit, but it will in some measure carry with it an 
antidote to its poison. For it is well that the looker-on at Life 
should be not simply an audience to the mere passing show of 
events, however gorgeous and however moving it may be, but 
"the spectator of all time and existence." And this nobler out 
look the habit of philosophizing brings. In the same way, the 
visions of the dreamer will be more effective, more readily trans 
lated, that is, into action by others, if they are checked and 
steadied by that perception of what things can and what things 
cannot be, which the philosopher-poet Lucretius regarded as one 
of the greatest gifts bestowed by philosophy upon mankind. 

There remains the question of the relation of philosophy to 
"character." If a heightened sensibility to what we might call 
the iridescence of Life Life with all its brilliancy and its 
subtlety, its tragedy and its comedy, its deeps and its shallows, 



16 WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 

its ceaseless shift and play of events and values is a contribu 
tion to "character," philosophy certainly should breed and 
train this keenness and delicacy of appreciation. Again such 
things as moderation and tolerance, a feeling that Life fulfils 
itself in many and other ways besides our way and that these 
other ways are equally necessary to its balance and its fulness, 
and a corresponding willingness to live and let live are qualities 
which are fostered by the philosophic view. Take the habit of 
looking at our own life as a whole, of seeing behind the self of 
the moment the larger and truer self in the long run, and of 
estimating the worth of any decision or deed, not at the face 
and often fictitious value of the present moment, but by its 
relation to the general scheme and career which we have 
planned. Here certainly we have a habit which means strength 
of character, if it means anything. But such a habit is simply 
the transference to our own life and self of that way of specu 
lating about the nature of the World in general and in the long 
run, and of forming an opinion about its plan and career as a 
whole, which is the distinctive mark of the philosophic interest. 
It is hard to be interested in philosophy without philosophizing 
about ourselves, and it is hard to think about ourselves without 
forming some idea of what we really want and are really after 
It is also hard to form such an idea without its becoming tc 
some extent operative in our life. But the moment that it be 
comes thus operative, our actions are inspired, in part at least, 
by what we call principles. And principles are simply the 
plural of character. 

Finally we might point out that if the word philosophy is 
mentioned in the drawing-room or on the street-corner, it is apt 
to suggest to the majority of people a meaning quite different 
from that which we have ascribed to it. In popular parlance it 
has come to mean not so much a way of meditating upon and 
speculating about the World as a way of meeting and dealing 
with what the World brings. We say that a man is philosoph 
ical about some misfortune which has befallen him or that he 
takes life in general philosophically. The term here has been 
taken over into the sphere of moral action, to specify the kind 



WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 17 

of behavior which might naturally be expected in trying cir 
cumstances from one bred to the philosophic point of view. 
But it is noteworthy that the kind of behavior which we describe 
as philosophic we also regard as an indication of the presence 
of "character" in the narrowest sense of the word. 

Let us sum up. Philosophy is the interest in puzzling out 
from the data presented by the face and behavior of things a 
plausible theory regarding their heart. A philosophic system 
is simply a guess, not at random but based on a comprehensive 
survey of the world, and ready with its reasons as to the real 
nature and constitution of the Universe. Philosophy differs 
from science, in that its interest is in the "whole man" so to 
speak, whereas that of a science is confined to making out sim 
ply some one side or feature of the whole. 

A philosophic system differs from a scientific hypothesis sim 
ply in the amount of ground that it attempts to cover. The 
method of philosophy the processes of inference and verifi 
cation differs in no essential way from scientific method. To 
put it all in terms of the detective agency, the sciences are like 
the individual detectives following up and reporting upon that 
particular aspect of the case to which each has been assigned, 
whereas philosophy is like the chief who gathers all their re 
ports together, reflects upon them, tries to harmonize them 
where they conflict, and to supplement them by reasonable con 
jecture where they fail to connect or are unable to follow the 
clue further into the unknown. Thus it constructs, using their 
reports as its data, a theory regarding the true inwardness of 
the case which seems to it to throw some light, at least, upon 
the central Mystery. 

The history of philosophy, then, is simply an account of the 
various guesses, made from time to time, as to the real nature 
of the World. The different solutions of the problem are not, 
however, propounded entirely independent of one another. 
Each new philosopher will be influenced by what acquaintance 
he has with the work of his contemporaries or predecessors. 
He will accept, modify, reject, react against the opinions of 
others in the light of his own estimation of the significance of 



7 t 



18 WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 

the evidence in the case. Hence we may reasonably expect that 
the history of philosophy will exhibit continuity, and perhaps 
progress. It is to a study of the development of philosophic 
theories among the Greeks and the Romans a full thousand 
years of guessing that we are now to turn. 



CHAPTER II 
GREEK RELIGION 



ARISTOTLE surmised that philosophy first arose in Egypt be 
cause the priesthood there had leisure. With the geographical 
correctness of this statement we are not concerned, but Aris 
totle s reasons for making it are significant. In the first place 
he lays down one of the conditions necessary to philosophic 
speculation. The Egyptian priesthood, he tells us, had leisure. 
Philosophy requires time time to wonder and meditate and 
make our guess about the inner constitution of the world. For 
that matter, if we are going to live at all, if we are going to 
have even the time to be busy about other things, we must 
philosophize a little. We must stop long enough to make up 
at least a rough and ready theory about the nature of things 
in general, and lay down rules of thumb about their behavior. 
Otherwise we are liable to be retired early and forcibly from 
business of any sort. But to push the matter beyond the rough 
and ready stage, to follow up the clues and work out a fairly 
intelligent and comprehensive theory tested by logic, and at 
tested by experience: this is something of a task in itself, and 
requires a certain freedom from the distraction of other occu 
pation. And such freedom can be enjoyed only under condi 
tions of social stability and prosperity. We must have escaped 
from the bare struggle for existence, whether it be with our 
fellow men or with the forces of nature. There must be at least 
intervals of peace and of an assured income, when we can stop 
making or defending a living long enough to draw breath and 
look about. Philosophy, then, presupposes a state of society 
rich enough to afford leisure, and civilized enough to enjoy it. 
This point will interest us when in the next chapter we come to 

19 



20 GREEK RELIGION 

survey the conditions in those Greek cities of Asia Minor where 
European philosophy had its beginnings. 

But there is another implication in Aristotle s statement 
which claims our attention for the present. His mention of the 
priesthood in Egypt will at once bring to our minds a familiar 
association. Most of us are apt quite spontaneously to connect 
philosophy with religion in a peculiarly immediate and inti 
mate way. What is the basis of this association in our minds? 
Why should a preoccupation with the problems of the one be 
likely to mean an interest in the questions of the other? In 
short, what is the relation of religion and philosophy that we 
should feel it advisable to preface our consideration of Greek 
philosophy with a discussion of Greek religion? A satisfactory 
reply cannot but involve us in some discussion of what religion 
is in general. 

Let us turn back once more to our opposite neighbor in the 
tram-car. Nudge the man beside you and ask him what he 
thinks that person opposite looks like. Ask him further why 
he thinks so. The chances are that he will reply, "Oh I don t 
know, I just have a feeling that the man is a good sort, or a 
bad lot, or what not." It will be only when you have pressed 
him and pinned him down that he will begin to argue his reasons 
for feeling as he does. We are perhaps most familiar with 
these first impressions, which are prior to any use of rational 
inference and often quite unconquerable by any amount of rea 
soning, in the guise of what women call their intuitions about 
situations or people. 

In precisely the same way we all of us have instinctive feel 
ings about the world. These feelings are not the result of any 
conscious process of inference. They exist before the intelli 
gence has begun to examine them at all, and often they continue 
to exist after intelligence has said all it can possibly say against 
them. They are irrational, not in the sense that they are neces 
sarily unreasonable or wrong, for after all our first impression 
about a person may be correct, or a woman s intuition may 
accurately size up a situation, but in the sense that reasoning 
has little or nothing to do with their foundation. They are 
prejudices in the original meaning of the word things which 



GREEK RELIGION 21 

exist prior to judgment. The general place and validity of 
these feelings or intuitions in our life is of great interest to 
philosopher and theologian alike. How far are they to be 
trusted? Are they short cuts to a far closer touch with the 
heart of things than can ever be gained by the roundabout and 
formal way of reasoning? Or are they blind alleys which lead 
nowhere? After all, superstitions and prejudices and obviously 
unreasonable instinctive feelings about things are also intui 
tions or impressions as deeply rooted in consciousness as those 
which are taken for revelations of the inmost nature of Reality. 
Perhaps, then, the longer way round of careful thinking is the 
shorter way home so far as home can be reached at all. Such 
are some of the questions raised by the existence of this sphere 
of feeling in our life. 

It is within this realm of feelings and intuitions that the 
springs of religion are to be found. Religion flows from, in 
deed religion is, a feeling about the world which precedes any 
process of rational inferring or thinking out anything on the 
basis of carefully sifted evidence. When we come to define and 
justify our impressions, and to argue that what we feel about 
the real nature of the world is logically defensible and sup 
ported by the data at hand, we have added theology to religion. 
Since people differ in their interpretation of this first impres 
sion and in their definition of that which their intuition reveals 
to them, there are many ways of formulating religion, such 
as the systems with which we are all familiar, Christianity, 
Mohammedanism, Judaism, Buddhism, and the like. 

But the feeling about the nature of the world which under 
lies all these various formulations seems to be the same. It is 
the feeling that at the heart of the world there is Something 
akin to our own heart with which we may communicate and 
from which we may receive strength and support. We might 
almost say, indeed, that religion is a sense of personal relation 
ship to the inner nature of the Universe, an impression that the 
face of things masks another self like our own with which we 
may deal as we would with a fellow being. And we might add 
that as the moral experience of the race grows and the vision 
of perfection becomes more distinct, more intense, and more 



22 GREEK RELIGION 

ardently yearned for, this living Something at the heart of 
things is felt more and more to be in sympathy with the Good 
and our pursuit of it. It becomes a friend to whom we may 
turn for advice and sympathy and help in our struggle towards 
the ideal, sure that they will not be denied us. 

We all of us know the difference that it makes if we go for a 
walk or a ride with a friend, even if it be only a dog or a horse. 
The two of us may go in single file, and I may not hear even the 
breathing or the footfalls of my companion, or both may go in 
silence each preoccupied with his own thoughts. The dog may 
range far afield in his own engrossing, adventurous world, with 
but scant time for me, or the horse may pick his way so softly 
and evenly down the wood-road that I may forget him alto 
gether. But nevertheless such a walk or ride has a difference 
as real as it is subtle from walking, or running, or from driving 
a motor car, alone. We are familiar, too, with the contrast 
between the atmosphere of an untenanted and that of an occu 
pied house. The one is cold and aloof with no response to our 
presence save echoes, the other is warm and personal and wel 
coming, though we may not see the occupants. Or again, for 
example, the Catholic finds the Protestant church empty and 
dreary and unhomelike, for the want of the real presence of the 
living Christ in the Host upon the altar. 

Now to religious experience the Universe is not untenanted, 
but occupied. Life is not a solitary journey, but walking with 
a friend whose presence though not seen is felt, and the feeling 
of whose presence makes all the difference in the world. This 
definition of religion in terms of a "personal equation" will cover 
those forms of religious experience with which we are most 
familiar. But it must be remembered that there is a tempera 
ment and there are religions to which personality and what we 
call "self" mean limitation and imperfection to be escaped and 
transcended. From such a point of view the sympathetic Some 
thing existing behind the outward semblance of things will nat 
urally be felt and thought of as impersonal in character. But 
it is still regarded as of like nature to our own deepest and 
truest character, of which our own personality is no more than 
a passing and illusory expression. Such is the teaching, for 



GREEK RELIGION 23 

example, of certain forms of Buddhism, where we find, instead 
of a personal God, an impersonal condition called Nirvana, and 
such we shall find to be the underlying thought of mysticism in 
general in connection with whatever religion or system of phi 
losophy it may appear. 

There are few people who have not had this feeling of a living 
and companionable presence astir, it may be in the outer world 
in the silence of a forest, or the level lights and quiets of a 
sunset, or snow mountains far away, or it may be far down 
within one s self in the storms and calms that move and brood 
over the depths of one s most inaccessible and incommunicable 
experience. Such impressions may be infrequent and fleeting, 
but they are the drops which go to make up that great ocean 
of religious experience which beats perpetually along the shores 
of philosophic and scientific thought. 

It is easy now to understand the preoccupation of philosophy 
with religious questions. Philosophy when it approaches its 
task of framing a theory about the inner nature of the world, 
finds someone ahead of it in the field. It is met by religion and 
confronted with an established sentiment as to what Reality 
ought to be like. It cannot then go about its work with a per 
fectly free hand and unbiased mind. It knows from the start 
what the impression of religion is in the matter, and in forming 
its own conclusions it cannot ignore that impression. Try as 
it may, it cannot follow out its line of thought as it would if 
that feeling did not exist. It may find itself denying the valid 
ity of the intuitions of religion and maintaining that they are 
to be rejected along with other irrational and unreasonable 
prejudice and superstition. Or, on the other hand, it may try 
to confirm them by logic and evidence. Again, it may accept 
them in part, reject them in part, or modify them as reason and 
the data at hand would seem to dictate. But whether it ex 
plains or explains away, defends or attacks, its volubility is 
due to the unescapable presence of this religious feeling about 
the real nature of things. Even if a philosophic system ignores 
religion with a studied indifference, and in its effort after per 
fect detachment of point of view banishes from its vocabulary 
every term that is suggested, however remotely, by theology, its 



24 GREEK RELIGION 

unconsciousness of the religious interpretation of the world is 
about as genuine as one man s unawareness of another whom 
he is deliberately cutting on the street. 

If philosophy cannot help noticing the presence of religion 
in life, we need not apologize for this chapter. Greek philos 
ophy, like all philosophies, grows up in the midst of the re 
ligious beliefs of the day, and it is very much our business to 
inquire what the particular religious atmosphere of the Greek 
day was like. It should be understood, however, that we can 
not concern ourselves with Greek mythology as such. Inter 
esting as the subject is, it is beyond our province to investigate, 
for example, that half-descried primitive cult which seems to 
have existed long before the invasion or the development of the 
mythology which we find crystallized in Homer. We must con 
tent ourselves with remarking that it was a cult of the creative 
and destructive powers of nature as manifested in the death of 
the fertile earth in winter and its resurrection in the spring, 
and of the corresponding cycle of birth and death in man ; and 
that it involved a ritual of propitiation of the dead, invocation 
of life, sacrifice of sacred animals, and communion with the 
divine through a partaking of their revivifying flesh and blood. 

Nor can we rehearse again the long and splendid story of the 
Olympian Gods as told by Hesiod how they sprang originally 
from a monstrous ancestry of chaos and black night, how they 
were brought to slow and painful birth through the death pangs 
of intermediate dynasties and generations, and how, born at 
length, they warred with and overthrew the Titans in a last 
tremendous battle which made them masters of the world. 
Again, we have no time to trace in the pages of Homer and the 
later poets the slow growth of the Gods out of brute force 
into goodness and beauty, or to show how their worship be 
came less and less a worship of the untamed and unmoral ele 
ments and forces of nature, and more and more the vision and 
adoration of an ideal world purified from violence and inhu 
manity and made the friend and support of all that is best 
in man. 

Finally, we cannot give the consideration they deserve to the 
doctrines and rituals of the Eleusinian and Orphic Mysteries, 



GREEK RELIGION 25 

focusing as they do religious aspirations and demands other 
than, and often in their direction counter to, those which in 
spire Olympianism. We have time only for a brief discussion 
of the underlying religious experience of the Greek, to which 
theology and ceremonial but give articulate and appropriate 
expression. To the consideration of this inward and invisible 
grace of which myth and rite are the "outward and visible sign" 
we must now turn. 



It will be remembered that in speaking of religion as essen 
tially a feeling that at the heart of things there is Something 
akin and responsive to our own hearts to which we may turn 
for companionship and help, we pointed out that this sense of 
sympathy and support might seem to come to us either from 
the outside world of nature or from within our hearts through 
a still small voice speaking out of the hidden depths of inner 
experience. To some it might come most vividly when they 
went out and raised up their eyes to the hills, or to the "mighty 
marching and the golden burning" of the starry night, to others 
when they had closed their eyes and shut out the world and had 
retired to some far-away, secret recess of the soul. 

Now, the religious experience with which we are most famil 
iar, and under whose influence our modern philosophy has de 
veloped, is of the latter inward-turning, subjective type. From 
the beginning Christianity has bade man seek God within him 
self, and has taught that the external, physical world and the 
ranges of experience with which it furnishes us are if anything 
obstacles to that search. The process of salvation is essen 
tially an inner process. It is a rescue of the inner life from 
dependence upon the outward world and a restoration of it to 
an immediate communion with God in which the physical and 
the external are forgotten. The objective side of Christianity, 
the historic Incarnation and Redemption, is but the lever for 
applying pressure from without to loosen the soul from the 
hold of the body and the bonds of Nature, and to impel her to 
a "supernatural," "spiritual" career and destiny. 



26 GREEK RELIGION 

The interest and solicitude of Christianity, then, center 
about the soul, the character, the personality, the private rela 
tion of the individual will to the will of God. The world for 
which the blood of redemption was spilled is the moral world, 
the great company of immortal spirits estranged for a while 
from each other and from God by the barrier of the body and 
the limitations of the material universe. No drop of that blood 
overflows into the outer and physical world. In the benefits of 
salvation no being, animate or inanimate, save the human, 
shares. The physical world remains unchanged. But after all, 
from the Christian point of view, why should Nature be affected 
by the process of redemption? Except for man, we are told, 
her animate forms are unmoral and without souls, and for the 
rest she is mere inert, dead matter, a creation, not a creature. 
Her relation to humanity is at the worst that of a prison for 
the brief incarceration of the soul ; at the best a temporary 
stage for a transitory actor, from both of which there is speedy 
exit to a supernatural life and destiny. 1 

Greek religious experience, however, presents in all these 
points a great contrast to Christianity. In the first place, it 
was not an introspective experience. The ancient Greek was 
not given to self-analysis and self-questioning. He did not iso 
late his self, as something different and apart from the rest of 
things. He did not regard his consciousness as having a dif 
ferent kind of being from other things, or even mark it off very 
clearly from the things by which it was surrounded. He was 
scarcely conscious of having a soul, or of being a person in the 
exclusive and self-conscious sense in which we use the terms. 
The problem of the "inner life," the reverent discussion of 
"moral personality," the painstaking effort to distinguish the 
real behind the apparent duty, would not have interested him. 
For that matter he had no words in his language to reproduce 
the tone, and in many cases even to translate the terms, we use 
when we speak of "person," "personality," "individual," "indi 
viduality," "the self," "selfhood," "self-consciousness," the 

1 It is interesting to contrast this preoccupation of Christianity with the 
human soul, with the saying of the Buddhists, "There is not a particle of 
dust that shall not enter into Buddhahood." 



GREEK RELIGION 27 

"ego," the "I," "conscience," etc. Still less would he have un 
derstood us when we hyphenate them with the words "moral" 
and "ethical" and "higher" and "inner" and "inmost," and gen 
erally exhaust the vocabulary inspired by that painstaking self- 
examination which plays so large a part in the religious expe 
rience of to-day, and is the source and essence of so much of our 
modern philosophy. 

This lack of self-importance and self-consciousness in the 
temper of the Greek mind has its complement in the attitude of 
the Greek towards the external, physical world. As he did not 
feel that a person was essentially different from other things, 
so he did not feel that other things were essentially different 
from persons. The world, including himself, was all of one 
piece, and the life moving and feeling within his own body was 
but a sample of the life that moved and felt in all other bodies, 
in sky and sun and sea, mountain and river, field and wood. 
The distinction between the animate and inanimate he had not 
as yet drawn. He looked upon Nature as essentially akin to 
himself, not dead, but alive to the very twig-tips of the shim 
mering, quivering olive-groves that set his own cities about. 
She was not a creation but a fellow-creature, not a machine but 
something to treat as one would treat one s fellow-men and 
responsive to such treatment. He found a warmth, a pulse, a 
breathing, and a trembling in the things which for us are still 
and cold and inanimate. In a word, whereas the events and 
objects of the physical world are for us at the best mere staging 
or furniture to the play of human life, for the Greek they were 
co-actors, with their appropriate costumes, lines, and parts in 
a larger drama which included men and things alike. 

Perhaps we come as near as we may to understanding the 
Greek feeling for Nature, if we say that the attitude towards 
the outer world which is sometimes the privilege of the imagina 
tive, country-bred child was kept by the Greek always, not 
stifled but intensified by the maturing of his experience. To 
the child, also, things move and whisper, alert with something 
alive and akin to himself, forever hiding and peering from be 
hind them. He does not personify deliberately, but things for 
him as for the Greek are still people and have not yet been 



28 GREEK RELIGION 

divested of their personality. Most of us have had the experi 
ence of catching for an instant in the lines of a gnarled tree- 
trunk or rocky cliff the vague yet startling semblance of a hu 
man face. But, to make of the experience a sort of parable, we 
might say that whereas for us such haunting semblances are 
soon dissolved and lost in the other lines and forms discovered 
by further observation of nature, for the Greek they persisted, 
and continued to dominate the other patterns which a closer 
examination of Nature revealed. Things did not die as they 
do with us into cold fact and disembodied fancy. Shades of the 
prison house did not close upon him; and in the sunlight he 
never saw simply "the light of common day." 

Religious experience, then, came to the Greek from without. 
The sense of companionship and sympathy at the heart of 
things led him not to an inner, secret communion with an un 
seen friend but to friendship with the outer world. He com 
municated with his Gods not by a telepathy or thought-trans 
ference, which takes place beneath the surface without any per 
ceptible medium of exchange, but by the ordinary means of 
communication between human beings. He heard the voices of 
things. He looked upon the face of Nature, and beheld its 
beauty, its joy, its sorrow, its wrath, and its desire. He saw 
the "tears of things," and their "innumerable laughter." And 
he knew how the Gods felt, and felt with them, even as one man 
will catch the meaning of another from the expression of his 
features, his gestures, and his spoken words. 

It is true, as we shall find when we come to discuss the doc 
trine of the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries, that there is 
also in Greek religion a powerful undercurrent setting in the 
other direction and seeking God through the channels of the 
inner life. This tendency gathers strength later, colors and 
directs to a considerable extent the philosophy of the Roman 
Period, and contributes not a little even to the subjective aspect 
of Christian thought. Very early, too, in the history of ancient 
philosophy we shall come upon a presentation of the "mechani 
cal" view of Nature so nearly complete and definite that modern 
science has done little save to fill in the outlines in greater de 
tail. But neither the "mechanical" view of the Atomists nor 



GREEK RELIGION 29 

the "subjective" and "mystical" tendencies of the Mysteries 
could turn the Greek mind back from the outer world and in 
upon itself for its religious experience. This was true even in 
the later days of the final triumph of the subjective and mys 
tical cults, when a world-weary and introspective age sought 
refuge from the religious and moral chaos of the old order in 
the sure and inner communion with the divine which they prom 
ised. Not even then could they dispossess the Hellenic mind of 
the feeling that though Nature might be far removed from God 
she was still sprung and descended from him, and that the 
radiance of her face was still the light, diminished and darkened 
perhaps, of his countenance. 

Upon the essential humanity of the Greek Gods we cannot 
too strongly insist. Hauntings there were, of course, in myth 
and rite of the ancestral terrors of primitive man helpless be 
fore forces which he could not control or comprehend. But the 
age of terror and the disordered and monstrous deities which it 
bred had long since passed. The sense of kinship with Nature 
meant to the Greek a world not only as living but as human 
and as sane as himself. As his vision of civilization became 
clearer and steadier, and his grasp of it more sure, he neither 
detached his Gods from Nature and opposed them to her, nor 
contrasted his conduct and the ideals and rules which inspired 
and governed it with the behavior of physical phenomena. He 
simply infused Nature with his own growing civilization, and 
found more and more clearly revealed in her processes examples 
of the order and balance and harmony and fitness which he had 
learned to worship, and sought to realize in human life. 

As a result the Hellenic mind drew late and indistinctly the 
line which we make so sharp between natural or physical, and 
moral, law. Natural law, we say, is simply a description of how 
Nature actually does behave; moral law prescribes how people 
ought and perhaps are obliged to behave. But Science insists 
that the processes of the physical world must not be regarded 
as governed by moral obligations or motives. The movement of 
bodies in space is not actuated by ethical considerations. The 
formula of gravitation is not a police regulation. Chemical 
elements do not combine because combination is to the advan- 



g GREEK RELIGION 

tage of the world as a whole, or dissolve out of obedience to the 
decree of some higher court which has the interests of the 
Universe at heart. To explain the behavior of the natural 
world on moral grounds is, we feel, to turn Science, and for 
that matter Ethics, topsy-turvy. But we only feel so because 
we have isolated ourselves and our ideals from our universe, and 
have contrasted ourselves as moral beings with moral aims to 
the unsympathetic mechanism of the physical order which sur 
rounds us. 

To one who felt, however, as the Greek did, that the material 
world about him was not a machine but essentially a society of 
beings similar to himself of which he was an integral member, 
the law of gravitation, for example, might well seem a moral 
law, which holds physical phenomena to their appointed places 
and appropriate tasks with all due consideration for one an 
other, in the same way that it exacts from men an observance 
of their duties, and a respect for one another s rights. And 
conversely he might regard the laws of human society as repre 
sentative articles of the constitution of the world and that con 
stitution as a Bill of Rights and duties for all beings alike. In 
a Universe so conceived the notion of mechanical and physical 
necessity would not as yet be sharply distinguished from the 
idea of propriety and right, when it came to explaining why 
things are what they are and behave as they do. The distinc 
tion was drawn fairly soon ; but we shall find persistent in an 
cient philosophy interesting expressions of this tendency to 
consider moral and physical law, as well as animate and inani 
mate things, essentially the same. 

"We can sum up and restate this attitude of the Greeks 
towards their Gods by saying that the analogy dominant in 
their conception of the Universe was that of a society. To 
Greek religion the Universe looked and behaved as if it were 
an enlarged edition of the city-state. Men and things were 
alike citizens of it, and equal before its laws. The Gods were 
the aristocracy, men the commoners, of this commonwealth. 
The constitution of Nature was through and through a politi 
cal constitution. 

That the Universe was the fatherland and home of Gods and 



GREEK RELIGION 31 

men alike, implied for the Greek not only a physical but a moral 
tie between the divine and human natures such as Christian 
theology has no conception of. The Gods shared our space 
and time and bodily conditions and were in and of our world. 
They had, in a word, the same physical environment as we. And 
the base, like the range of their experience, was similar to ours. 
They shared our passions, and feelings, and interests. Their 
ways were our ways, and their thoughts our thoughts. So, to 
use rather a daring figure, man and dog live together in the 
sympathetic tie of a habitation and an animal nature and expe 
rience shared in common. But, as the poet Maeterlinck has 
somewhere said, the dog is the only creature which has really 
found its God. And even as the nature of man is the nature of 
the dog raised, as it were, to a higher power, so for the Greek 
the divine was human nature with all its body, passions, and 
intellectual and moral parts intact but perfected and glorified. 

This community of the divine and human natures in so many 
respects put man on a friendly and familiar footing with his 
universe and his Gods. In the words of Mr. Dickinson, it 
"made him at home in the world." 2 The Greek would not have 
understood, and would have rejected as barbarous, the feeling 
that no man could look upon the face of God and live. Even 
the Christian analogy of a Father and his children would not 
have best expressed their feeling of the familiarity of God and 
man. For the Greek at the most thought only of Zeus as a 
Father, and even he was so human in point of view as to seem 
like an elder brother. And as for the others, they were older 
brothers pure and simple, more grown up, more experienced, 
greater, stronger, wiser, better than we, but still of the same 
race and parentage and to be treated with fraternal camara 
derie. 

In a word, the Greek felt himself the social equal of his God. 
God and man met in the same house and ate at the same table. 
The distinction between them was a distinction of title and 
ability and office alone. In the same way to-day royalty and 
gentry are both members of the same class and as such mingle 
with one another. So it was that the Greeks prayed, neither 

2 The Greek View of Life, p. 4. 



32 GREEK RELIGION 

prostrate in the dust like the Oriental, nor kneeling with bowed 
head like the Christians, but with uplifted face and outstretched 
hands. In the divine presence they behaved as Kipling tells us 
the souls of the heroes behave: 

"And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen 

unafraid." 

At the same time, this social equality and familiarity of man 
with God was tempered in the attitude of the orthodox wor 
shiper by a recognition and punctilious observance of the dif 
ference in rank between himself and his divinity. Familiarity 
with him bred not contempt but respect. "One is the race of 
men and Gods and from one mother we both derive the breath 
of life ; but in power we are altogether diverse ; for the race of 
man is nought whereas the brazen heaven abides a dwelling 
place unshaken forever." And again, "Seek not to become 
Zeus. . . . Mortal things befit a mortal." So the poet Pindar 
sings, and his words are a fair index to the mind of the orthodox 
Greek. A trespass upon the prerogative of the Godhead 
brought upon it a rebuke as swift and sharp as any adminis 
tered by a king to an impertinent courtier. Man must keep his 
place, or he would be summarily put in it. The fact that under 
neath the difference in rank Gods and men were fellow-beings 
and alike gentlemen, gave man no license. Where there is the 
chance and temptation to presume, etiquette has to be the nicer 
and the more rigid. 

In its worst form, this feeling of the Greek that every nature 
in the Universe has its proper excellence upon which it is folly 
to attempt to improve, and bounds which it must not overstep, 
crystallized in the famous doctrine of the envy of the Gods. It 
was a popular belief that the Gods were jealous of overmuch 
even strictly human happiness and prosperity, because man was 
raised thereby towards a dangerous equality with the divine. 
This view was by no means confined to Hellenic thought. In 
the Old Testament Jehovah proclaims himself a jealous God, 
and Adam, we may remember, was expelled from the garden of 

3 Pindar, Nem. 6, 1-7 (trans. Adam). 



GREEK RELIGION 33 

Eden not so much for disobeying the divine command as from 
the divine fear lest man having "become as one of us, to know 
good and evil," should now "put forth his hand and take also 
of the tree of life and eat and live for ever." The sentiment 
persists to-day in the habit of accompanying any boasting 
thought or speech with an apologetic and propitiatory tap upon 
the nearest wooden object. In its finer manifestations, how 
ever, the feeling was bound up with the Hellenic sensitiveness to 
moderation and balance and reasonableness as the essence of 
all the virtues, and with the conviction that blindness to the 
limitations of one s nature and station with its consequent im- 
moderateness and presumption and insolence is the root of all 
moral evil. 



m 

For us to revitalize this social and political analogy is as 
impossible as it is to recover the Greek sense of kinship with 
nature. But it is obvious that in its light many notions com 
mon both to philosophy and theology, such as the omnipotence 
and omniscience, infinity and perfection, of the divine nature 
must have had a meaning for the Greek very different from 
their significance for us. We speak of God as both infinite and 
perfect with no sense of contradiction. Indeed, we feel that 
perfection is enhanced by infinity. The Hellenic mind, however, 
found the two terms absolutely incompatible. It was the clear- 
cut, the comprehended, the definite, the familiar, which was the 
perfect. The limitless was that which had no definite nature 
to know a definite law. But only that which had a determinate 
and attested character and was under obligation to fill a spe 
cific place and fulfil a specific function could be part of a thor 
oughly civilized and ordered world. The Gods then could not 
be infinite. They were rooted in a definite moral ideal. Their 
outlines, at last descried and held in clear and steady vision, 
were not to be blurred and erased again by the concept of 
infinity. 

The Greek habitually spoke of the Gods as all-powerful and 

* Gen. iii. 22. 



34 GREEK RELIGION 

all-knowing, but here again it is plain they did not mean by the 
terms what we mean by omnipotence and omniscience. They 
used the words in a qualitative rather than a quantitative sense. 
We, for example, are not surprised at the notion that the 
universe was created out of nothing by the mere fiat of a divine 
will. "And God said, Let there be light, and there was light." 
But the idea of thus conjuring a world into existence from 
sheer nothingness by a simple word of command was wholly 
foreign to the Hellenic intelligence. Indeed, the Greek version 
of the matter was the exact reverse of the Christine doctrine. 
God did not create the Universe, but the Universe produced 
the Gods. Or rather the Gods and the ordered world arose alike 
by successive stages out of the same primaeval chaos. And 
when the Gods did finally take a hand in the direction of affairs 
and became active factors in the further evolution of the cosmic 
order, it was as powers in contact or even in conflict with other 
already existent forces. They did not create, they merely 
remodeled and reconstructed. They were subject to the limi 
tations imposed by the inherent properties of a given material 
and by the features of a plan already for the most part drawn 
out. Their nature and position were more exalted than ours, to 
be sure. Their roles were more splendid, and they played them 
perfectly, but like ourselves they were still actors, not authors, 
of the world-drama. 

This feeling that Gods like men are subject to the con 
stitution of a world-state which allots them their places, lays 
down their privileges and powers, and holds them to their offices, 
was expressed by the Greek in the concept of Moira or Destiny. 
The idea perhaps was bound up originally with some primitive 
habit of thinking of the world as a sort of field on which the 
"claims" of all things were staked out and the bounds of each 
plot or lot sharply drawn. 5 But it also soon carried with it the 
suggestion of a dim Power or Necessity behind the Gods which 
laid a restraining hand upon their natures and activities, and 
compelled them to keep within the bounds of their allotments. 

A sense of such an all-compelling Fate whose decrees even 
the Gods cannot bend was strong in Homer. Later, as the idea 
5 Cy. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 10 seq; p. 40 seq. 



GREEK RELIGION 35 

of the Gods developed, Destiny and Necessity tended to become 
identified with the supreme will and authority of Zeus. But 
even in ^Eschylus where the exaltation of Zeus above the other 
Gods is carried to an almost monotheistic conclusion, we find 
the query whether the Most High himself may not be weaker 
than the Fates and those implacable avenging ministers of Jus 
tice, the Erinyes ; and the answer is that even he cannot escape 
what has been apportioned him. 6 In connection with this theo 
logical point of view it is interesting to note that the idea of an 
absolute creator was entirely absent from Greek philosophy, 
and that until very late matter was regarded as uncreated and 
coeternal with whatever other first principles were invoked to 
explain the world. Moreover, in later Graeco-Roman philos 
ophy the question was of the possibility not of a creation of 
matter out of nothing, but only of deriving it from or identify 
ing it with the divine substance itself. 

When the Greek then spoke of his Gods as all-powerful, as 
he frequently did, he did not mean that the Gods did or could 
create or annihilate or radically alter a world at their pleasure. 
He meant merely that they had all the powers suitable to their 
office. They could effect everything it was incumbent upon 
them to perform. The dignity and authority of the rulers of 
a city were not curtailed but enhanced in his eyes by the fact 
that they were constitutional rulers, nor were their powers less 
full because defined by law. And the Gods were constitutional 
magistrates, not absolute or despotic rulers such as ruled the 
barbarians. They had their office determined by the nature of 
things, and powers commensurate with that office. They were 
the administrators of the moral and physical equilibrium of the 
Universe. They could keep things to their courses and places, 
and men to their places and duties. They could control natural 
forces and subordinate them to the enforcement of Right and 
Justice throughout the world. More power than that would 
have added nothing to the divine majesty and would have im 
periled the "constitutional" character of the Universe. For 
power prostituted by disorderly means to wayward ends only 
makes the concept of omnipotence meretricious. 

e yEschylus, Prometheus Bound, 11, 531 et seq. 



36 GREEK RELIGION 

The same is true of the Hellenic view of the divine omnis 
cience. When the Greeks said that a God knew all things, they 
meant simply that he knew all that it was necessary or appro 
priate for him to know at the moment or in the long run. They 
did not mean that his mind was congested with an observance 
and knowledge of all that happens everywhere and at all times. 
The amount of his information was governed by fitness and 
relevancy to circumstances. 

This qualitative as compared with our quantitative view of 
omniscience, is expressed very clearly in the system of Aristotle, 
which marks the highest point reached by Greek, or perhaps 
any, philosophy in its speculations about the nature and activ 
ity of the divine mind. God is represented as without experi 
ence of the world of sense, or even knowledge of the existence 
of such a world. His thought is purely abstract of forms 
and laws and these, again, the forms and laws of abstract 
thinking without any content of perceptions or images. Thus 
his intelligence, freed from the distraction of any external ob 
jects of knowledge, is at liberty to contemplate only itself. But 
this is no restriction upon a divine intelligence, for nothing but 
its own supreme and perfect nature is worthy of the attention 
and thought of a divine mind. There could be no greater con 
trast to this view than the modern idea of the all-seeing eye and 
the all-inclusive mind of God. 



IV 

We have seen that because of fundamental differences in 
attitude and feeling towards the world, the Greek view of the 
divine nature and its relation to the Universe was quite re 
moved from our own. What we are wont to regard as abso 
lute and unlimited, the Greek drew quite frankly to a human 
relative scale, taking the measure of the completeness of the 
divine by merely remedying the shortcomings in human nature. 
We turn now to certain oppositions between Greek and modern 
thought touching questions of ethics, which we may refer to 
the same underlying tendency to think of the order of the Uni- 



GREEK RELIGION 87 

verse as a sort of enlarged city-state of which men and natural 
forces and phenomena were all alike citizens. 

In human society the individual man is limited by certain 
conditions. He has his place, his part, his lot, to which he 
must keep. He may enlarge his individual sphere, and may 
grow, to be sure, but his growth must not unduly interfere with 
the self-development of his fellows and neighbors. Friction 
and interference there is bound to be, but it is the business 
and the very condition of the existence of the state to reduce 
the amount of trespass upon property and personality to a 
minimum. But mankind was for the Greeks also part of a 
larger cosmic society which defined and limited the sphere and 
activity of human nature with the same respect for justice 
and equity as dictates the action of the state in setting bounds 
to the activity of the individual. Upon these two considera 
tions the Greek view of virtue rested. The essence of virtue lay 
in the observance by the individual of the restrictions placed 
upon his particular nature by the human society of which he 
was a member, and upon human nature as a whole by the cosmic 
social order to which it in its turn belonged. Virtue was re 
spect for the established order of things human and divine, ex 
pressing itself in appropriately restrained and directed actions. 
It was not doing the things which "are not done" in dealing 
with a fellow-being or a God. 

But it is difficult to know just what the bounds are, and 
to see clearly when we are within our rights and upon our own 
property, and when we are trespassing upon the rights or lots 
of others. We are only too apt to be blind to the line that 
separates the one from the other. But if we are thus heedless, 
we overstep the line, go beyond the appointed limit, and pre 
sume beyond our station. We are insolent to the established 
order. This heedlessness, if persisted in, becomes a habit, a 
chronic blindness to the proprieties of things and disrespect 
of the social and cosmic law of Justice. Thus little by little 
sin sets and hardens in the character. 

The Greeks, of course, like all other peoples and times, had 
their own code, dictated by the particular circumstances of 
their existence, of what especially constituted transgression 



38 GREEK RELIGION 

of the moral law. And this code, naturally enough, differed 
from our own. But the interesting comparison for us is the 
difference in the fundamental concept of sin. 

We must note, in the first place, the objective and, one 
might say, impersonal character of the Greek idea. We are 
taught to think of sin as something whose real significance and 
results are internal, involving an inner estrangement of the 
soul from God which is far worse than the objective character 
and the possible objective consequences of the sinful act. The 
will is perverted, the soul corrupted and diseased. From this 
state of sin there is no natural recovery. The healing power 
of the divine grace must be called in before the soul can be re 
stored to spiritual health and a reconciliation of the human 
with the divine will be effected. But on the other hand if the 
reconciliation is effected, and the reassurance is at hand, the 
whole objective side of the evil deed, its consequences for others, 
and the penalty which society may exact for its commission, 
no longer matter. The soul has made its peace with God. All 
that is of importance, then, in sin and conversion and abso 
lution is subjective and unseen. 

But the Greek temperament, in its dominant mood at least, 
suffered little from what modern theology calls the "convic 
tion of sin." It was not burdened with a sense of unworthi- 
ness, or with a feeling of being stained through and through, 
beyond hope of cleansing itself, with the taint of moral evil. 
The objective and external character of the act and its conse 
quences exhausted the sinfulness of the deed, and left no residue 
to corrode the soul. When the retributive action of human 
society and the compensatory workings of the divine justice 
had exacted the due penalty from the sinner, he might be re 
garded as discharged and his account as cleared. Indeed, the 
payment of a fine, in the shape of gifts and sacrifices and pro 
pitiatory acts, could often be substituted for punishment, and 
the divine vengeance thus averted. But although the sinner 
were left bruised and sore, as well as out of pocket, his soul 
was not internally and organically injured. If only he had 
learned wisdom through his suffering and come to a realization 
of his place and limitations, he was as good as new. Of course 



GREEK RELIGION 39 

if he did not profit by his lesson, but persisted in his short 
sightedness, blindness to the true proportion and perspective 
of things would grow on him as a habit. But, even so, the 
sinful propensity was not thought of as a disease of the inner 
nature and nerve of moral vision, but rather as a kind of film 
of progressively denser stupidity drawn like a cataract over 
the surface of the eye. Remove the cataract, enable the indi 
vidual to see clearly his true relation to others, and his nat 
urally intact and healthy vision would reassert itself unim 
paired, and keep him upright and from losing his sense of 
balance. 

In short, whereas for Christianity the origin and seat of 
moral evil lies in the will, for the Greek it lay in the intellect. 
We talk of the will disobeying the better judgment, ignoring 
a clearly seen and recognized distinction between right and 
wrong, and deliberately flouting the plainly heard voice of con 
science and of God. But the Greek would have said that we 
did wrong primarily because we did not know the right. The 
judgment became confused, the sense of proportion was blinded, 
and as a result we lost our balance and fell into evil ways. The 
very word for sin meant originally "a missing of the mark." 
It is to this old conception of sin as mental aberration, which 
goes back to Homer, that we must look in part at any rate for 
the intellectual bias of all Greek ethics, and for Socrates fa 
mous dictum that "virtue is knowledge" and that if a man 
only knows the right, he will always do it. 

Finally, the difference between right and wrong doing was 
for the Greek a mere difference of quantity. The impulse to 
virtue and the temptation to vice did not come into the human 
heart from different directions and sources. Both had the same 
origin in the instincts and the energy with which human beings 
are endowed. These instincts and interests were the main 
springs of human progress and happiness. Yet in so far as 
they also urged men to aspire beyond the bounds of their indi 
vidual provinces, and to encroach upon those of their neigh 
bors, or incited mankind as a whole to dream of becoming as 
a God, they were at the bottom of unhappiness and sin. That 
is, sin was simply overdoing, or it might be underdoing, some- 



40 GREEK RELIGION 

thing that was in itself a good. This feeling manifested itself 
strongly, as we shall see later, in the Aristotelian teaching 
that vice is the deficiency or excess of the same qualities which 
in moderate and adequate amount constitute virtue. 

For the Christian, however, the difference between good and 
evil is more than quantitative. The arrogance of the sinner 
is not simply too much of the same assurance which makes a 
man efficient and successful and happy. The force which 
makes one miss, is essentially different from that which makes 
one hit, the mark. The motives of right and wrong doing 
spring from different sources and flow in morally opposite 
directions. Indeed, so radically opposed is the character of 
the vicious to that of the virtuous will that it almost seems 
as if they could not belong to the same nature. They are in 
tertwined, to be sure, in every man, but they are rooted in sepa 
rate soils. The human being thus tends to split asunder into 
two conflicting natures, a higher and a lower, the "Lord from 
Heaven," to use St. Paul s phrase, and the "old Adam," the 
one sustained and directed by the grace of God, the other ex 
cited by the prompting of a devil. 

A movement towards this point of view we shall have pres 
ently to remark also in Greek religion. But it never attained 
the virulence of Christian dualism. Nor could it vitally affect 
the more fundamental tendency of Greek ethics to regard vir 
tue and vice as different degrees of the same activity, the 
right and wrong amounts of which were determined by outer 
considerations and by a sense of the proportion and harmony 
and balance necessary to the completest life of the individ 
ual, the most harmonious constitution of society, and the most 
order in the universe at large. 



Another point of contrast between orthodox Greek religion 
and the religious doctrines to which we are accustomed is the 
comparatively slight part which the doctrine of immortality 
plays in the worship of the Olympians. There has been fre 
quent notice by students of Greek literature and religion of 



GREEK RELIGION 41 

the lack of interest in the question of the survival of the soul 
after death shown by Homer, by the poets of the Seventh and 
Sixth Centuries, B. C., and by the great tragedians, whom we 
may regard as representative of the educated and reflective 
thought of their times. In Homer, to be sure, the dead left 
behind them souls which went wailing down into the dark house 
of Hades beneath the earth. But these souls were shadowy 
and witless images without substance or intelligence, drained 
of the red blood of real existence, and deprived of all that 
makes life worth living. And their habitation was a gray and 
sunless land where nothing bloomed save the ashen flowers of 
the asphodel. When Odysseus in his descent into Hades met 
the ghost of Achilles, the latter told him that he had rather 
be the servant of some man of mean estate above ground than 
rule over all the worn-out dead below, and the speech voiced 
the attitude of Homeric times towards an after-life. Nor 
was there any idea, save in the cases of a few notorious sinners 
against the Divine Majesty itself, of future reward and pun 
ishments. As for the rest, the good and the wicked fared 
alike in the spectral twilight of Hades. 

Again, the poets of the Seventh and Sixth Centuries, im 
pressed as they were with the misery and injustice of life, and 
with the problem of justifying the Gods apparent failure to 
apportion reward according to merit, never invoked Immor 
tality and the idea of compensation and retribution in another 
world as a possible explanation and palliative of the state of 
affairs on earth. The tragedians, too, although they must 
have been subject to the counter-influences of the Orphic and 
Eleusinian Mysteries which we are about to discuss, made 
astonishingly slight reference, so far as we can tell, to an ex 
istence after death. It may very well be that the proprieties 
of their dramatic art demanded that they should exhibit jus 
tice done and the moral equilibrium of the Universe restored 
here and now, on this earth, before the eyes of the audience. A 
play could not well be ended with the statement that the hero 
or the villain would receive what he deserved after death. But 
at the same time their silence may be taken as a suggestion 



4 2 GREEK RELIGION 

that orthodox Greek thought as a whole up to the time of 
Socrates paid little attention to the idea of immortality. 



VI 



We have already given warning that there were in Hellenic 
religious experience tendencies in some respects different from 
the points of view which we have been describing. They merge 
indeed into the general background of Greek religion, with its 
unwillingness to distinguish between persons and things, and 
its sense of the solidarity of Gods and men as alike the children 
and the dependents of the same World-Process and World- 
Order. But upon this common stock of sentiment and attitude 
they grafted religious needs and yearnings which the estab 
lished cult of the Olympian Gods failed to satisfy, and out of 
it they developed an answer which seems often more in keeping 
with the Christian than the traditional Hellenic point of view. 
It is to these counter-currents that we have to devote the rest 
of this chapter. We can best effect the transition by drawing 
attention to a paradox inherent in religious experience in 
general. 

We have defined religion roughly as a feeling that behind 
the face of things there is at their heart Something akin to our 
own inner life, which can be treated and treats us like a fellow- 
being. And we have pointed out that as the moral evolution 
of man progresses, this Something is conceived as sympathetic, 
helpful to the right rather than the wrong, and possessing 
and exemplifying the qualities and condition of life which we 
regard as ideal and after which we struggle. God is God be 
cause he is good, and on the side of the Good. 

If now we reflect upon what we mean when we say that God 
is good, we shall find that we really have two quite different 
and opposed ideas in mind. On the one hand we mean by 
the goodness, the perfection of God. God is divine, is God, 
because he is lifted clear of all imperfection above the sin and 
sorrow and suffering which render human life incomplete and 
distressed and restless. He is the Ideal, the unbroken Peace, 
the fulfilled and sorrowless and deathless Life that knows no 



GREEK RELIGION 43 

evil, the Happiness upon which no shadow lies. And it is be 
cause he holds before us this Vision of a Life detached and 
liberated from all the weaknesses, the temptations, the strug 
gles, the failures, the bereavements of human life, that he is 
worshiped and glorified. 

But although by thus focusing all the dreams and desires 
of the world in a vision of existence made perfect and happy, 
the idea of God fulfils the noblest of its functions in human life, 
religious experience makes another no less insistent demand 
upon it. God must be more than a still and splendid Vision 
of Perfection. He must love mankind as well as be loved by 
it, must stoop to the world, must know, and in order to know 
fully, must undergo the temptations and struggles and suffer 
ings of our life. And he must ardently yearn and strive and 
even sacrifice himself for the redemption of his creatures. But 
in that case his life must be as full of dissatisfaction and rest 
lessness and pain, and of longing for the coming of his king 
dom, as ours. To say this, however, is to contradict our first 
demand and mar our Ideal, which is ideal precisely because of 
its freedom from the imperfect aspects of our life. We are 
asking in the same breath that the Divine Life shall be both as 
unacquainted w r ith pain and sorrow and death as we should 
like our life to be, and as acquainted with grief as our life 
actually is. We are permitting in Heaven precisely the con 
ditions which we are striving to banish so far as we can from 
earth. 

This paradox has troubled theology and philosophy not a 
little. In ancient philosophy, for example, it took the form of 
a controversy between the Stoics and the Epicureans, as to 
whether God was worthy of worship because he was a beneficent 
and active Providence, or because he simply enshrined, free 
from all contact with the world, the vision of Perfection. 
Aristotle prior to the Epicureans had already declared for the 
latter view, and carried it to its logical conclusion. God, he 
had said, did not bestir himself in the matter of the progress 
or the salvation of the world. He was simply the motionless 
Goal towards which all things aspired, the one Example of 
achieved perfection, whose completely fulfilled and happy ex- 



44 GREEK RELIGION 

istence incited all other natures to strive, each after the real 
ization of its own capacities and excellence. So absorbed, in 
deed, was the Aristotelian God in his own perfection that he 
did not even know of the existence of the world which his exam 
ple aroused out of formless lethargy to energy and order. It 
is interesting to contrast this view and Aristotle s famous state 
ment that God incites motion in the world simply "as something 
beloved," unmoved himself, with the saying of the author of the 
Fourth Gospel that "God so loved the world, that he gave his 
only-begotten Son" for its redemption. Indeed, the two state 
ments might almost be taken as the mottoes of the two opposed 
demands upon the goodness of the divine nature. 

Now it is fair, I think, to say that the cult of the Olympian 
Gods drew its chief sustenance from the demand that the divine 
nature should present a vision of attained perfection. The 
Gods, to be sure, intervened in human affairs, bestowing bene 
fits, rewarding the righteous, punishing the unjust, and were 
to be petitioned and placated as the case might be. But their 
worship came less and less to depend upon what they did, and 
more and more upon what they were. Their righteous gov 
ernment of the world was if anything but a reflex expression 
of their ideal characters. Had they been retired from active 
service to the world, as the Aristotelian and the Epicurean 
Gods actually were, their characters alone, formed and built 
up out of the Hellenic yearning for beauty and serenity and 
order, were sufficient to insure divinity and adoration. As a 
matter of fact, the nature of their activity in the world, their 
administration of the cosmic balance and justice and their 
direction of human affairs, never involved them in the coop 
erative and redemptive relation craved by one side of our re 
ligious experience. They were the patrons and protectors 
of particular states or cities or individuals whose prosperity 
and happiness they had at heart. But in spite of their glori 
fied humanity, they never broke down the barriers of superior 
rank which separated them from human nature, or abandoned 
their prerogative of luxurious and immortal life, and became 
like one of us, knowing our infirmities and our fate. They 
knew about our misery from without, they did not experience 



GREEK RELIGION 45 

it from within. Their deathless felicity was unclouded by the 
mortality and unhappiness of our lot. As Hermes says of 
Zeus in the "Prometheus Bound" of ^Eschylus, they did not 
know the meaning of the word "alas." They dwelt afar off 
in the calm, unclouded peaks of that Olympus up whose steep 
cliffs shrouded by mists, swept by storms, and chilled by snows, 
all men toil, but they could not guide and help or even tell us 
the path to their serene, unshaken seats. 

But Greek religious experience, being but part of universal 
religious experience, craved also Gods who gave help and guid 
ance, and groped after the God who knew the meaning of the 
word "alas." The more fortunate and the more spiritual might, 
indeed, sustain themselves on the level of the Olympian worship 
and adore, for the sake of their sheer beauty and happiness, 
its splendid visions of that complete and perfected existence 
after which all men yearn. But to the less fortunate, and the 
less assured, to the simple and the ignorant, to the great mass 
of mankind on whom the injustice and imperfection of life 
bore more heavily and evoked a more naive response, the pres 
ence of evil in the world was a more important and compelling 
fact than the vision of the Good. To them the prime function 
of religion was not to portray however nobly the Ideal, but 
to afford man relief and escape from his present sorrows and 
infirmities. Man might reverence from afar the sorrowless 
life of the august Olympians, but his immediate need was for 
salvation from his own imperfection. So it is that we find 
side by side with the Olympian cult, with its stress upon the 
perfection of the divine life, another religious movement, with 
its stress upon the imperfections of human life and responsive 
to the cry for redemption from evil. 

This "religion of redemption" then, we shall naturally expect 
to find concerned with an attempt to devise a cure for evil 
and incidentally to explain its existence. Now the cure cannot 
be found simply in a reformation by man s unaided efforts of 
the conditions of his earthly existence. It is only the strong 
and fortunate, even among the virtuous, who can wring hap 
piness from life by might and main. For the others "super 
natural" and divine assistance is necessary. But again, the 



46 GREEK RELIGION 

cure is obviously not effected in this present life. The rain 
falls on the good and evil alike. The wicked prosper and the 
righteous are ground to the dust beneath their heel. The trust 
of the righteous must be then in a life after death where they 
may have reward for their merits, and rest from their labors. 

Even so, however, the misery of this world is not explained. 
Evil here and now is not justified by the promise that in the 
future it will cease. But if we apply the idea of immortality 
to the past as well as the future, the existence of evil becomes 
more explicable. Not only will man live on after death and 
reap hereafter what he is sowing now, but he has lived before 
birth and is reaping now, by the workings of a law of moral 
cause and effect which the Buddhists call "Karma," the fruits 
of his sowing in past existence. His present misfortunes are 
then, but the wages of sin committed in former lives. Misery 
is an expiation of guilt. Thus the sense of immediate and burn 
ing injustice is removed, and man is shown to the satisfaction 
of his moral sense why he suffers as he does, and how eventually 
he may escape. 

We shall not be surprised, then, to find that the tendencies 
in Greek religion which we are about to study gave a central 
place to the ideas of immortality and reincarnation. Nor 
shall we wonder when we see them seek to turn the hope of future 
existence and redemption from evil to a certainty by the wor 
ship of Gods who have actually suffered and splendidly tri 
umphed over death. 

It should be understood, however, that these cults did not 
arise in Greek religion suddenly without preparation and prece 
dent. There is considerable evidence for believing that prior 
to Homer there had existed a worship of the dead and a belief 
in their power to harm or help the living, and certainly shortly 
after Homeric times the cultus was revived. In Hesiod again, 
who seems to occupy himself with the traditions and beliefs 
of the common people, we find such ideas as those of a degen 
eration and fall of man from an earlier Golden Age of hap 
piness into his present misery; of a blessed immortality re 
warding the virtues of the men of the long past happier time; 
of guardian angels mediating between God and man, protect- 



GREEK RELIGION 47 

ing the righteous and punishing the wicked ; and, in the battle 
of the Gods and the Titans, of a dualistic conflict between 
powers of good and evil, order and disorder. Finally there 
was a persistence of the primitive cult of the fertility of the 
earth and her creatures. Men continued to worship the Life 
which in crop and vine and tree dies again and again in winter 
only to arise and rearise triumphantly in the spring, and in 
herd and flock and the race of man himself goes down into the 
dust with one generation only to reanimate the dust of the 
next. The means, then, of theologically formulating and sup 
porting the yearning for redemption from evil and for life 
after death were at hand from the beginning in Greek religious 
experience. 

VII 

The two great movements which expressed in an articulate 
and organized form the rebellion against the imperfection, the 
mortality, and the finitude of man s lot, and fanned the hope 
of escape and peace in some life beyond the brief span of human 
existence, were the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries. 

The Eleusinian Mysteries centered about the story of 
Demeter and Persephone. Demeter, the earth-goddess, so runs 
as much of the story as concerns us, had been robbed of her 
daughter Persephone by Hades, God of the dead. Mourning 
and searching for her she wandered about the world, and mean 
time there was winter over the whole earth and the crops died 
and grew no more. Finally Zeus, touched by the plight of 
mankind who were like to die for want of food, prevailed on 
Hades to restore Persephone for a portion of the year. As 
often as Persephone returns from below and Demeter rejoices, 
it is spring and summer time. But when Persephone goes down 
again to Hades and the dead, and her mother mourns for her, 
the crops and fruits and trees die with her and it is winter 
again. 

The connection of Eleusis with the myth came from the story 
that during her wandering Demeter, disguised as an old beggar, 
had been received kindly into the house of Celeus the king of 
Eleusis and made nurse to his son. She would have made the 



48 GREEK RELIGION 

child immortal by anointing him with ambrosia and laying him 
in the fire, had she not been surprised at her task by the terri 
fied mother. Thereupon, revealing her godhead to the king, 
she bade him institute rites in her honor, and then went on her 
way. Out of these rites grew a local cult of Demeter and 
Persephone, which, after Eleusis in the Seventh Century B. C. 
had become Athenian territory, was made part of the estab 
lished worship of Athens. Finally, as the importance of 
Athens increased, it came by the Sixth Century to assume a 
Pan-Hellenic significance, welcomed to its fold all who could 
call themselves Hellenes by race, and celebrated each year fes 
tivals to which the members came not only from all Hellas but 
from Asia Minor and Italy and Sicily and generally all parts 
of the Greek-born world. Other than the restriction of the 
cult to Greeks there seem to have been few bars to eligibility. 
Women and children as well as men could become members, and 
we are told that even slaves and prostitutes were numbered 
among the initiate. 

The cult, however, formed a secret society with rites of 
initiation through which the candidate had to pass before he 
could assist at the Mysteries. To reveal the rites or Mys 
teries was an offense punishable, at least at Athens, by death. 
The tradition of the inviolability of the pledge to secrecy was 
so well maintained even in later and more free-thinking times 
that we have little more than indirect and obscure testimony 
as to the character of the Eleusinian "liturgy." 7 It is certain, 
however, that the ritual was divided into two parts, a ceremony 
of initiation followed by a celebration of the Mysteries proper 
at which the initiated assisted. The initiation seems to have 
included a period of instruction and preparation of the neo 
phyte at Athens marked by fasting, and total abstinence from 
certain foods regarded as impure. There was a ceremonial puri 
fication through the efficacy both of holy water and of the 
cleansing blood of swine sacrificed by each candidate as a scape 
goat for his impurity. Finally, the preparation involved a 

7 For an account of The Mysteries Of. Foucart, MysUres d Eleusis. 
Part III, Chaps. X-XV. 



GREEK RELIGION 49 

retreat from the world and from the dangers of ceremonial 
pollution which it offered. 

The candidates thus purified were now ready to repair in 
procession to Eleusis where the initiation proper took place. 
This consisted of rites of further purification, and of com 
munion with the Goddesses. The neophyte assisted at the sac 
rifice of sacred bulls and partook of their flesh. He fasted for 
a day in memory of Demeter s abstinence from all food and 
drink during the first nine days of her grieving for Persephone, 
and broke his fast by partaking of the mixture of meal and 
water with which the Goddess also had first quenched her thirst. 
He enacted a symbolical descent into the underworld com 
memorative of the descent of Persephone. He saw and handled 
various sacred objects connected with the story and the at 
tributes of Demeter. And finally he received further instruc 
tion regarding the significance of the Mysteries and the benefits 
to be derived from them. 

The actual celebration of the Mysteries which the initiate 
were at last permitted to behold was, so far as we can conjec 
ture from the evidence, something like the mediaeval miracle, 
and the modern Passion, play. There was a dramatic repre 
sentation of the story of Demeter and Persephone by the 
priests of the cult, depicting the rape of Persephone by Hades, 
the grief, the wanderings, the search of Demeter, the restora 
tion of Persephone, and the joyful reunion of Mother and 
Daughter. In addition there seems also to have been a rep 
resentation of a marriage of Demeter with Zeus, and of the 
birth of a divine infant, symbol and promise of prosperity and 
happiness for the devotees of the Goddesses. 

But although just what the Eleusinian initiate did and saw 
was a secret not to be divulged, there was complete publicity 
as to the object and benefits of the Mysteries. The sect prom 
ised and restricted to its members the enjoyment of a vivid 
and happy immortality. Thrice blessed he who had been 
initiated into these Mysteries, who had confessed his faith in 
Demeter and Persephone, associated himself with their sorrow 
and their joy, and assisted at the sacred spectacle of death 
and resurrection. By some mystical grace he was set apart 



60 GREEK RELIGION 

from his fellows, blessed by the special favor of the Goddesses 
on earth, redeemed by them from black nothingness or shadowy 
half-existence after death, and granted as a special privilege 
their gift of a bright and joyous after-life. Such an one not 
only rested from his labors, but perpetual light lightened him 

as well. 

With the claim of the Eleusinian Mysteries to dispense and 
confine the gift of a life of felicity after death to its initiates, 
we are familiar enough in the uncertainty which Christianity 
has professed regarding the fate which may befall the non- 
Christian in a future existence, or the doubt which some Chris 
tian sects have entertained as to the character of the immor 
tality conferred upon those without their immediate folds. In 
the case of the Mysteries, as in that of Christianity, the belief 
of the initiate that to him alone had been confided the secret 
of salvation and eternal life must have been an element of grea : 
strength in increasing both the inner self-assurance of the cuh 
and its hold upon the popular imagination. The social and 
moral pressure exerted in excluding the "outsider" proved then 
as now a potent means of insuring cohesion and esprit de corpt 
among the elect within. If we add to this the glamour whicl 
any secret society with a carefully guarded ceremony of initia 
tion and a mystic ritual possesses both for its members and 
the world at large, we have at hand the bases of a powerful 
moral and religious organization. 

From the Passion Play at Oberammergau, or some of the 
Holy Week processions in the Italian hill towns, or from the 
Mass with its highly symbolized but none the less splendid and 
dramatic presentation of God s perpetual sacrifice of himself 
for his creatures, we may get some idea of the impressiveness 
of the Eleusinian "liturgy." We can guess with what awe 
and spiritual exaltation the neophyte, admitted at last into 
the torch-lit darkness of the great temple, his emotions fanned 
and his imagination kindled by the solemn rites of initiation, 
must have beheld the sacred story, so full of meaning and prom 
ise for him, unfold itself before his eyes. He may well, like 
the early Christians, have felt the thrill of a new faith and a 
new hope to which men had hitherto been blind, that possessed 



GREEK RELIGION 51 

the power to save those who lived according to it, and to give 
to them a peace which the world could neither give nor take 
away. 

The actual teaching of the Eleusinian Mysteries, however, 
was somewhat shallow and commonplace. It failed to give any 
distinctively moral value and function to the idea of immor 
tality. The fortunes of the soul after death were determined 
not by moral character and deserts but by a formal relation 
to the Mysteries. The indispensable condition of reaching the 
Islands of the Blest lay not in being virtuous but in being an 
Eleusinian. The merit of the "noble heathen" availed him 
nothing. Faith without works sufficed for salvation. The 
benefit of initiation fell upon the righteous and unrighteous 
alike, the same happy existence beyond the grave awaited 
both. 

There is no evidence again for supposing that the Eleusinian 
teaching pretended to any inner or higher significance, or 
sought, as Christianity has sought, to make of the divine death 
and resurrection not only a promise of immortality, but a 
parable of the moral life of man. Material benefits on earth 
as well as felicity in heaven were indeed promised the believer, 
but he was apparently not bidden to seek in the divine example 
of the Goddesses a meaning and a justification for the struggle 
and sacrifice and renunciation attendant upon his own daily 
existence. But it is hard to believe that among the many 
sorts and conditions of men, gathered from so many lands and 
cities, there were not some to whom the pathos and beauty of 
the story did not strike more deeply home, and carry the higher 
message, bringing insight and consolation and strength in sor 
row, just as generation after generation of Christians have 
drawn understanding and peace amid the misfortune and pain 
and injustice of life from the story of the agony, the death, 
and the resurrection of their God. 

So, too, the vision of the future life vouchsafed to the 
Eleusinian initiate was matter of fact and without suggestion 
of inner and higher meaning. It did no more than elaborate 
the pictures of that cloudless serenity of Olympus, and those 
amenities of the climate and scenerv of the Islands of the Blest 



52 GREEK RELIGION 

set far in the golden west beyond the storm and tumult of 
the world, amid which the imagination of the poets at times 
loved to play. The souls of the redeemed wandered over 
flowery fields, by streams of living waters, beneath trees laden 
with delicious fruits. There were gentle breezes to fan them, 
golden sunshine to cheer them, thickets of myrtle for shade 
and repose. And amid the delights they sang and feasted, 
listened to the music of the heavenly choirs, and enjoyed philo 
sophic converse with one another. In a word, the Eleusinian 
Mysteries offered to the believer the hope of escape and sal 
vation in a heaven which differs only in some details of dress, 
custom, and landscape, from the Christian or the Mohammedan 
Paradise of the popular imagination. 



vm 

The rebellion, however, of more "spiritual" natures against 
the imperfections of humanity and the burden of the flesh and 
the world is not to be put down, nor is their yearning for re 
lease and peace to be quieted, by such a vision of Paradise. At 
best, life eternal in such a heaven can only alleviate the earthly 
symptoms of imperfection. But it neither diagnoses the origin 
of evil, nor by destroying its root effects a radical cure. For 
the religious mystic the fundamental and significant symptom 
of the imperfection of human nature, which points directly to 
the cause of evil, lies in man s insatiable thirst for spiritual ad 
venture, his growing hunger after new forms of experience in 
describable and undreamed of, his fits of weeping for new and 
strange worlds of existence to conquer. Human nature is not 
content to be simply its own definite and specific self, even 
though that self be wholly perfected and completed. The 
very waters of Paradise would not suffice to quench its smoul 
dering resentment against the limitation of individuality which 
makes us only ourselves and thwarts our yearning to burst 
through the spiritual skin of our own personalities and merge 
ourselves in the Life and Essence of the Universe. We should 
still cry out in heaven against the loneliness of being impris 
oned in a particular nature and separated by its bars from 



GREEK RELIGION 53 

our fellow spirits and from God. But could we only break 
asunder the barriers of our separate individualities and embrace 
and unite ourselves with the All, then we should somehow know 
in an indescribable and mystical way that we had come into 
our own. 

This mystical rebellion against individuality is not a rare 
or remote feeling confined to a few great saints and ascetics. 
In its less extreme forms it is a common everyday experience 
of most human beings. We all of us have moments when we 
are chafed and harassed by the complications and responsi 
bilities of the daily grind of existence. Cities and civilization 
suddenly become hateful and we are haunted by the vision of the 
mountains and the sea. We long to close up, as it were, the 
great and pretentious and burdensome establishment of the 
higher centers of our brains and live, like God s humbler crea 
tures, the simple, cottage life of the cerebellum and the spinal 
cord, where homely and straightforward instincts, reactions, 
and sensations attend on no less direct and homely wants, and 
nerves good, honest, pleasant-faced, calloused nerves, with 
no airs come in only by the day, and sleep out and sleep 
deep at night, after their simple daily tasks are done. All 
the inner complexity of consciousness, in a word, correspond 
ing to the complexity of civilized life, seems simply to confuse 
experience for us and to stand in the way of that "simplifica 
tion and self-surrender" in which, could we achieve it, we feel 
that we should find healing and relief. 

So we spend our vacations in "getting back" to Nature, in 
detaching so far as may be the compelling and pitiless hand 
of daily life from our shoulders, and in escaping from the bustle 
and confusion and constraint of our ordinary surroundings. 
We go out in summer to cruise or camp. We put off the 
clothes and conventions and complexities of the daily grind. 
And we suddenly feel that in losing the everyday routine life, 
we are finding our real and essential life, and regaining, as it 
were, a birthright of which civilization has robbed us. We 
draw a long breath of relief, as we drop down the harbor or 
pitch our first camp, and say to ourselves, "This is the life." 

The mysticism of the "man in the street," in many cases 



64 GREEK RELIGION 

perhaps, does not penetrate more deeply beneath the surface 
of things than this. But if he is also even unconsciously a poet, 
it may carry him a step further. It is not merely that "the 
hum of cities" has been discovered for the moment to be 
torture. Suddenly, as he goes overboard for his first dip, or 
opens his eyes the first morning upon the hill-tops edged with 
sunrise, he may feel, like Byron, that he lives not in himself 
but as a portion of a larger Life around him, and that "high 
mountains are a feeling," not really outside him but part of 
his deepest self. He is one in some mysterious way with sea 
and sky and land, with hill and valley and stream. And yet 
as long as he is shut away from them by the barrier of his 
particular body, and their hidden spirits are barred off from 
his own by their separate existence, that unity remains un 
realized. Could this too solid flesh but melt and thaw, or 
could this soul "be changed into little water-drops and fall 
into the ocean," perhaps he and they might meet and merge. 
Or might there not be some deeper form of existence in which 
all of them including himself were soluble? Might it not be 
possible for us all alike to render up the separate natures 
and individualities which keep us apart, and disappear to 
gether, dissolved and dissipated in this profounder reality, 
as all the many shapes and colors of clouds at sunset with 
draw and dissolve into the empty and transparent air which 
is their true home and substance? 

If now we translate this feeling from the language of poetry 
into that of ethics and religion, there can be no mistaking 
the message it bears to the devout and aspiring spirit. It 
reveals to him the secret of man s sin and imperfection, and 
the way of his salvation. This yearning to embrace and become 
the All, to lose and dissolve himself and the separate natures 
of all other things in the absolute simplicity of some deeper 
form of being, is to the mystic no vain flight of the poet s fancy. 
It is rather the most important and significant phase of our 
experience. It is the homing instinct of the soul, guiding her 
unerringly through the trackless vacuity of the manifold 
world with all its swirling confusion of a myriad phantom 
forms and things, back to the undivided unity and calm of 



GREEK RELIGION 55 

God, there to yield up her distraught and restless individuality 
and forget her separate self and the separate selves of all 
other things in him. 

So, too, the existence of many natures and things in their 
difference and isolation from one another is no mere innocuous 
restraint upon the all-embracing imagination of the poet, to 
be bewailed in melodious verse. It is rather the shadow of a 
spiritual death upon our life, the evidence of metaphysical 
catastrophe, of some degeneration and fall of the divine Unity 
from its original simplicity and peace into the great restless 
ness of a world caged in space and time and multiplicity. Or 
it is at least the sign of some monstrous deformity of our 
vision which makes us see what is really One as if it were Many, 
what is really perfect as if it were imperfect. That the world 
is not God, or at any rate seems to be not God but a thing 
apart from God, all shivered by its fall from the divine into 
a thousand individual fragments ; in fine that the world exists 
at all that is the primal evil, the original sin, the source of 
all the sufferings of the world. For how can that which is 
not God be wholly good? 

The way of salvation is now plain. Redemption is to be 
found by overcoming this difference of ourselves from God, and 
regaining in ourselves that identity with God which is the lost 
birthright of the entire world. But in order to regain oneness 
with the divine, we must lose the whole world of our everyday 
experience. For in that experience, to whatever extent we 
order and simplify it by reason, there are always many things, 
forms, natures, laws, atoms, molecules or what not, and always 
the fatal distinction between ourselves and the objects of our 
thought. Even were all the complexity of the external world 
reduced to the movements of a single atom, I should still be 
different from it, the outside observer of its lonely flight 
through space. I must then discard all known forms and 
categories of my experience as means of access to God. He 
cannot be perceived, or known, or even felt, for in all these 
experiences there is present at least the distinction between 
the perceiver or feeler and what he perceives or feels. Only in 
some indescribable, ecstatic state of being of which the ordi- 



56 GREEK RELIGION 

nary forms of our consciousness give us no hint can the soul 
lose herself and find salvation and become God. 

For the mystic, then, a heaven painted in terms of earthly 
experience, however purified and idealized, is as unsatisfactory 
as that experience itself. The soul still retains her separate 
personality, and moves amid variety and multiplicity, however 
splendid. Even the higher Christian notion of Paradise as 
the Beatific Vision in which the soul is intent upon God and 
God alone, falls short of the mystic mark. For again, though 
the soul sees God and God only, and is flooded with his Presence, 
she retains her individuality and is still herself and not the 
object of her vision, forever separated from him by her finite 
and created character. Not till that last enemy is overcome 
and God is all in all, and she is no longer herself but God him 
self, will the thoroughgoing mystic allow that she has fulfilled 
her destiny. 

Hence the Eleusinian Mysteries, appropriate as their doc 
trine and liturgy were to the development of mystical feeling, 
failed to meet the extreme demand of mysticism, just as they 
failed to make the story of Demeter and Persephone a symbol 
and interpretation of the deeper moral experiences, or to base 
even the promise of immortality on moral considerations. In 
the Orphic Mysteries, however, the yearning for redemption 
from evil, and the mystical desire to slough off not only the 
body but human personality and to melt the soul in God, 
received far more adequate expression. 



rx 



As the Eleusinian Mysteries grew up about the story of 
Demeter and Persephone, so the Orphic cult focused the atten 
tion and devotion of its adherents upon the figure and story 
of Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Semele. Dionysus seems to 
have been originally a stranger God, brought down from the 
wild, northern "frontier" country of Thrace, and made at 
home among the still youthful and growing band of the Olym 
pian deities. Like Demeter and Persephone he was a God of 
the fertility of the earth, of the harvest, of the trees, and 



GREEK RELIGION 57 

especially of the vine and the vintage and wine. Like Demeter 
and Persephone again, he was God not only of the living and 
fruitful earth, of spring and summer and autumn, but of the 
seeming death of all things in winter. He, too, died each year, 
and each year rose again triumphant over death. 

The rites with which his worship was celebrated were orig 
inally primitive and barbaric. The priests of the cult were 
considered at times, when, through frenzied dancing, intoxica 
tion, and other orgiastic means, they had thrown themselves 
into a sort of trance, to be possessed by, and even to incarnate, 
the God. It seems possible that in early times the priest so 
possessed was sacrificed and even eaten. Later a sacred animal, 
a kid or a bull, supposed also to incarnate the God, was torn 
to pieces by the frenzied worshipers, who believed that by 
partaking of its flesh and blood they absorbed into themselves 
the strength and divinity of Dionysus himself. 

As early as the Eighth Century, almost before the migration 
of the lonians to Asia Minor, this cult seems to have penetrated 
Greece. There it spread with all the rapidity of any wave of 
religious enthusiasm and revival throughout Hellas proper and 
the Mediterranean coasts colonized by the Greeks. The 
reasons for its swift advance are not far to seek. Its ritual 
was one of exaltation and self-abandonment. The dancing, the 
drunkenness, the general excitement of "letting one s self go," 
seemed to liberate the believer for the time being from the com 
monplace, monotonous routine of daily life and to create within 
him a new self more powerful, more happy, more master of its 
world, more deeply living and glowing, than the ordinary, every 
day self. The worshiper was a new person, was possessed by a 
superhuman, divine being. He had thrown off for the moment 
his humanity and was one with the divine, nay, was actually 
for a supreme and fleeting instant himself "very God of very 
God." And might it not be that after death, rising again 
with Dionysus, the moment would be made eternity and the 
devotee would find himself forever this diviner self? 

By its contact with Greek civilization the grosser and more 
barbarous elements of the myth were refined away. But the 
fundamental spirit and appeal remained with their promise 



68 GREEK RELIGION 

of immortality, their new hope of transcending the limitations 
of human life, of casting off human nature altogether and 
becoming God, and their ritual of "omophagia," or communion 
with the God by partaking of the flesh and blood of the sacred 
animal. The frenzied dance and drunkenness persisted as a 
means of inducing the superhuman ecstasy and exaltation in 
which the possibility of escape from the ordinary world and 
the essential divinity of human nature were revealed. There 
seem also to have been rites commemorating the birth and the 
resurrection of Dionysus. 

We do not need, I think, to insist upon the adaptability of 
such a cult to those needs of the "sick soul," self-convicted 
of sin and impurity, or of the mystic spirit aspiring to absorp 
tion in the Ineffable, which we have just discussed. We may 
pass at once to the elaboration of its doctrine and liturgy 
which we find among the Orphics. 

Of the beginnings of the process of "moralizing" the worship 
of Dionysus and assigning to it an inner and spiritual signifi 
cance we know nothing. Tradition has it that Orphism was 
introduced into Athens from Italy and Sicily in the middle 
of the Sixth Century B. C., and it seems probable that at that 
period it was already well developed in those countries. The 
Sixth Century, which was a period of general religious revival 
marked by a notable purification and moralization of the 
Olympian theology, and by the first philosophical speculations 
and systems, afforded fertile soil for the growth of the cult. 
Though never, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, made part of 
the established religion of the Athenian State, it spread with 
great rapidity, and by the Fifth Century had permeated and 
obtained a very considerable influence throughout the Greek 
world. 

By this time the original myth of Dionysus had developed 
into a complicated theology. The origin of all things this 
theology left in doubt, calling it now Night, now Chaos, now 
Water and primitive Slime, now Time. The first steps by 
which the world evolved out of the basic element were left 
similarly vague. Eventually, in one version of the myth, from 
the union of Time and Necessity, in another, from that of 



GREEK RELIGION 59 

Chaos and ^Ether, there proceeded a gigantic egg from which 
there appeared a God variously called Zeus, Pan, or Phanes. 
But however they might call him, the Orphic cosmogonies were 
agreed that he was the World-All, the One Substance from 
which all things proceeded. From this God were now produced 
the later generations of deities in the "orthodox" order given 
by Hesiod: first Uranus and Gaea, who were overthrown and 
followed by Cronos and Rhea, who in their turn met a like 
fate at the hands of Zeus. When Zeus at length had subdued 
all things into himself, he devoured Phanes and so became him 
self all in all, the One from which all things proceed. Then 
he in his turn generated the Olympian dynasty and the present 
world. Last and mightiest of all his children, he begat by 
Persephone, Dionysus. 

So much by way of introduction to the advent of Dionysus. 
The tendency of the teaching so far was, we see, pantheistic 
and mystical. God was the World-All. All things originally 
and fundamentally were one in him. Now for the divine story 
itself. To Dionysus in his childhood Zeus entrusted the 
dominion of the world. But Hera was jealous of the child of 
Persephone and at her instigation the Titans plotted his 
destruction. This they endeavored to accomplish by trickery. 
They gave him a mirror for a plaything and while he was 
gazing at his own reflection they fell upon and sought to 
kill him. He, seeking to escape, assumed one form after 
another, but finally in the shape of a bull was overcome by 
them, torn to pieces, and devoured. Only his heart was saved, 
and brought by Athene to Zeus. 

Then Zeus ate the heart of the first Dionysus, and imme 
diately begat by a human mother, Semele, the second Dionysus, 
Dionysus Zagreus. Semele begged to see her lover in all the 
majesty of his Godhead, and perished, consumed by the thun 
derbolt in which Zeus revealed himself to her. The unborn 
Dionysus, however, was saved, and transferred to the thigh of 
his father, from which he was eventually born. And he was 
again made Lord of the world. 8 

But the Titans Zeus blasted with a thunderbolt, and from 

8 Abel, Fragmenta Orphica, 190. 



60 GREEK RELIGION 

their ashes he made Man. And Man because he was made of 
the ashes of the Titans is sinful and imperfect ; but because the 
ashes contained also the substance of Dionysus whom the 
Titans had devoured, there is also within him the spark and 
possibility of the divine. With the final establishment of 
Dionysus as Lord of the world and with the creation of Man the 
present world-period begins. The central interest now becomes 
the condition and destiny of Man. Man is imperfect, his life is 
beset with sin and misery, but he is haunted also by the hope 
of finding the way of salvation. To cherish and amplify this 
hope, and to show this way now became the chief business of 
Orphism. 

The cause of human evils, and the cure for them were 
plain. The Neo-Platonic mystics of a later age saw in the 
episodes of the death of the first Dionysus the reflection and 
consequent reduplication of his face in the mirror given him 
by the Titans as a plaything, his assumption of various shapes 
in his flight from his enemies, and the rending of him at their 
hands into a thousand pieces a symbol of that emergence of 
the diversity and plurality of the phenomenal world from the 
absolute and unbroken unity of God, with which the origin of 
evil in their eyes was associated. We may doubt whether the 
Orphics themselves read the story in so abstract and meta 
physical a manner. But certainly for them the evil in man 
had its roots in his inheritance from the Titans, and the moral 
conflict between the good and the evil within us was a struggle 
between the Titanic and Dionysiac elements, which repeated 
the struggle between the God and his enemies. And in that 
struggle the good, the Dionysus within us, was wounded and 
rent even as the God had been torn to pieces. Finally, the hope 
of salvation lay in the possibility of freeing the fragment of 
the divine imprisoned within us from the bonds and foes which 
kept it from its origin, and of reuniting it with its source, even 
as Dionysus had been saved and restored out of the death 
and mutilation which he had suffered at the hands of the powers 
of evil. 

These bonds and foes, so far as human life is concerned, the 
Orphics found in the desires and experiences of the body. The 



GREEK RELIGION 61 

Titanic element was the physical, the flesh, the senses, and the 
"world" connected with them; the Dionysiac was the mind or 
soul. The body they likened to a prison or tomb in which the 
soul lay captive or buried. This dualistic opposition of soul 
to body, as the opposition of a principle of good to one of 
evil, stood in interesting contrast, as we have seen, to the 
general tenor of Greek ethics and religion. It cannot but 
remind us of St. Paul with his contrast, some centuries later, 
between the "Old Adam," "the burden of the flesh," "of the 
earth earthy" with the "new man," "the Lord from Heaven." 
We may read here as we run the direct application, omitted 
by the Eleusinian Mysteries, of the episodes of the divine story 
to the incidents of moral experience. The myth of Dionysus 
became for the Orphic the warp and pattern of human life. 
He was taught that the situation with which he was confronted, 
the presence of evil in the world about him and in his own 
nature, was a result and as it were a prolongation of the agony 
of his God. So, too, the intermittent golden thread running 
athwart the warp of life, bright with the fitful hope of immor 
tality and the fleeting radiance of good triumphant over evil, 
did but repeat again and again Dionysus conquest over death, 
and reassure his worshipers that he reigned. Each Orphic 
initiate, then, might well have seen in the divine history the 
type and explanation of his own personal experiences of 
trial and shortcoming, success and content, and felt that in 
his humble way he too died and lived again daily with Dionysus ; 
nay, that the moral struggle within him was in some mystical 
way actually part of the very struggle of the God against the 
Titans. 

Thus a new glamour was imparted to experience. The moral 
became at the same time a romantic life. Temptation acquired 
grandeur, suffering took on dignity, while resistance, endur 
ance, and victory revealed nothing less than the essential 
divinity of man. Attention, in a word, was concentrated upon 
man s situation in this world, and the moral life resolved itself 
into a conflict between two superhuman principles, one of 
good, the other of evil. Furthermore, the soul was sharply 



62 GREEK RELIGION 

distinguished from the body by a moral as well as a physical 
line of cleavage. 

To such a point of view salvation and its appurtenances 
necessarily appeared much more complicated than they did 
to the Eleusinian. The latter showed no curiosity as to the 
nature or origin of the moral evil present in the world. Had 
we asked him to define and explain wrongdoing, he would prob 
ably have replied in the orthodox and objective way that it 
sprang from bad judgment due to a confused and deficient 
knowledge for the time being of what was really best. That 
the existence of sin presented a theological problem, or that 
its nature had a deeper significance, which might even affect 
the eligibility of candidates to the blessed immortality which 
his Mysteries promised, would not have occurred to him. 

But the Orphic felt a theological curiosity and had for 
mulated a theological doctrine regarding the origin of evil, 
and he prescribed his cure for it with reference to what he 
thought to be its cause. Sin was an organic not a functional 
disturbance of human nature. It was the symptom, not of 
an acquired short-sightedness of the soul removable by external 
means, but of a congenital blindness which no earthly means 
could cure. The soul was separated and estranged from God. 
Corrupted by the heritage of evil from the Titans, the mind s 
eye had lost its vision of the divine. Or to use another figure 
actually employed by the Orphic, the soul had drunk of the 
waters of Lethe and been drugged by them. She had for 
gotten her origin and goal. 

Tainted by so mortal a disease, the soul could not hope to 
find health and restored vision and memory in any mere change 
of scene and climate in an Eleusinian Paradise, however bright 
the sun and spiced the breezes and luxurious the heavenly 
home. Indeed in such circumstances her lethargy and her 
blindness to her true destiny would only become more complete. 
Salvation could be found only in restoring her memory and 
vision of the divine, and in reuniting her with Dionysus, of 
whom, though laid low by the "star-flung thunderbolt" 9 of 
fate, she was still a fragment. In order to restore this sight 
9 Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 669. 



GREEK RELIGION 63 

and recollection a mystical and supernatural change in the 
inner character and disposition of human nature must take 
place. The hereditary taint, the curse of the Titan, the burden 
of the flesh and the senses, must be sloughed off, and the soul 
appear at length in her true character as "the image of 
Dionysus," reenacting in the process of her salvation, as it 
were, the resurrection of the God. 

Like the Eleusinian, and later the Christian, the Orphic was 
certain that this restoration of the soul to God was impossible 
without outside aid. The soul could not recover of her own 
native powers. Her taint was of supernatural origin, and 
demanded a supernatural cure. There must be a physician, 
a prescription, and a regimen. The nature of the cure and 
the methods of its administration were, the Orphic thought, 
known to his sect alone, and in this again he reminds us of the 
Christian and the Eleusinian. Only those initiated into his 
Mysteries could hope to be healed of that primal taint where 
with all humanity is infected, and regain their no less primal 
birthright of reunion with the divine. Those who rejected 
Dionysus must bear forever the burden of man s heritage from 
the Titans. 

The Orphics, however, promised their initiates no such 
quick and easy access to Dionysus as did the Eleusinians to 
their Paradise. To cleanse the soul of the original sin in 
herited from the Titans, to restore her to the Gods, ready 
to "avow herself of their blessed race" and be found worthy 
of acceptance in their sight, required a time and a discipline 
to which no determined end could safely be set. So it was that, 
like the Buddhists, the Orphics foresaw even for themselves 
an indefinite process of transmigration and reincarnation in 
which the soul was born again and again, reaping in each 
new life the fruits, bitter or sweet, of the degree of her 
adherence to Orphic precept and practice in former existences. 
And like the Buddhists again, they allowed their fancy to play 
with the disembodied interval which separated rebirth from 
death. They imagined the soul led to the underworld by 
Hermes to be judged. The uninitiated they saw lying in a 
10 Of. Harrison, op. cit., p. 669. 



64 GREEK RELIGION 

morass of mud waiting reincarnation. The initiates they pic 
tured as enjoying greater or less felicity, or undergoing pur 
gatorial cleansing according to the state of purity attained 
on earth. But these intervals, however bright, even though 
they were spent in an Eleusinian Paradise on the Islands of 
the Blest, were at the best only passing episodes along the 
way of salvation. They were but spokes of the "sorrowful, 
weary wheel" of birth and rebirth from which it was the desiro 
and destiny of the soul to be gone. Only by breaking through 
the vicious circle of transmigration and reincarnation alto 
gether could the soul attain enlightenment and rest eternally 
in Dionysus. Then and then only, having at last turned away 
from the well of Lethe and drunk of the living waters of 
Memory of her divine nature and oneness with Dionysus, could 
she hear the voice confirming her redemption, "Happy and 
Blessed One, Thou shalt be God instead of mortal." 1X "Thou 
art become God from Man." 12 It was the business of the 
Mysteries to teach man how to effect this escape. "This is 
what those who are initiated by Orpheus to Dionysus and 
Kore pray that they may attain To stop the Wheel and 
breathe once more from ill. " 13 

The ritual of the Orphic is even more difficult to reconstruct 
than that of the Eleusinian Mysteries, so fragmentary are our 
data. But so far as we can make out, the neophytes performed 
various acts symbolical of their escape from the wheel of birth 
and rebirth, and of their union with Dionysus. They seem 
also to have enacted a dramatic representation of the death 
of Dionysus at the hands of the Titans, and to have partaken 
of the raw flesh and blood of a sacred animal representing 
and supposed to incarnate the god. And this "Omophagia" 
appears to have had the significance not only of a communion 
with the God, but of a mystical sacrifice repeating his death. 

Along with the performance of these ceremonial acts by 
which the Orphic signalized and aided his renunciation of the 
world, the flesh, and the Titan, and sought to restore his soul 

11 Harrison, op. cit., p. 669. 

12 Harrison, op. cit., p. 662. 

is Abel, Fragmenta Orphica, p. 226. 



GREEK RELIGION 65 

to her essential and original divinity, the sect also enjoined 
upon its members a special discipline of life appropriate to 
their theoretical retirement from the world. This discipline 
was supposedly but not onerously ascetic. It commanded, in 
addition apparently to the ordinary virtues, an abstention 
from animal food and an avoidance of certain vegetables and 
of certain materials for clothing which were especially 
associated by tradition or superstition with decay and death 
and therefore regarded as unclean. 

So far as the relation of practice to precept is concerned, 
it is probable that in Orphism as in most religions the two 
were far from identical. Men lived up to its teachings in 
varying degree and were more or less faithful in the observance 
of their religious duties, according to circumstance and tem 
perament. Still it must be remembered that Orphism was a 
"dissenting" sect ; that is, that it was not incorporated, as 
were the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the worship established and 
supported by the Athenian state. It was rather a protestant 
movement actuated by a new hope and vision which it con 
sidered more complete than that afforded by the established 
religion. Its adherents, then, may well have shown that 
greater enthusiasm and strictness in practice which are apt 
to mark reformed sects and produce what we call the "non 
conformist conscience." 

We must not, however, infer from the fact that Orphism 
was never recognized as part of the established worship of 
the Olympian gods, that it was therefore considered heretical. 
Heresy was a concept absent from Greek religious thought. 
The richness and fluidity of Greek theology naturally lent itself 
to all sorts of special cults. Worship might be concentrated 
upon the person of any one God, provided only the existence of 
the others was recognized and their divinity honored. More 
over, the worship of Dionysus was widespread and fervent 
at Athens, and his festivals played an important part in the 
state ritual. If some people wished also to find in the episodes 
of his life a mystical inner and universal significance and draw 
from them the hope of a mysterious salvation in the next 
world and the sanction of a peculiar and semi-ascetic life in 



66 GREEK RELIGION 

this, it was after all their own affair. And on its side, Orphism 
had no quarrel with the Olympian theology, which it accepted 
as a background to its particular cult. In the same way the 
Christian to-day may with perfect orthodoxy display a special 
devotion to one Person of the Trinity or the Blessed Virgin 
or some Saint, in meditation upon whose attributes or life he 
finds a source of courage and consolation suited to his indi 
vidual needs. 

Still, the Orphic undoubtedly came in for his share of the 
suspicion and contempt with which "dissenters" and "non 
conformists" are apt to be regarded by members of an estab 
lished communion. His doctrines, if still within the pale of 
orthodox belief, were none the less eccentric and extravagant, 
and ran counter to the traditional view of human life and 
destiny handed down from Homer and the sages. That view, 
as we have seen, contrasted the human and the divine estate, 
and had shown to the Greek again and again the line forever 
drawn between the mutability and mortality of his life and 
happiness and the untroubled and deathless felicity of the 
blessed Gods in which there was neither any change noi 
shadow of turning. Preacher and poet had warned him noi 
only against seeking to overstep that line, but against excess 
of even such prosperity as is permitted to men, lest very great 
good fortune seem to exalt him too close to the jealous skies or 
to engender within him that blindness to his own frailties which 
is the root of all evil. Seek not to be God ; seek not to be 
other than mere man, or more than mortal. Know the position 
in the Universe to which it has pleased the Gods to call men 
and man, and be submissive to its limitations. In obedience 
to such precepts and to the caution, moderation, and controlled 
aspiration which they inculcated, lay the way of wisdom and 
virtue. To a disregard of them, to a vain seeking to trespass 
beyond the reasonable bounds imposed upon the individual 
man, and mankind in general, the manifold paths of folly and 
sin might all be traced. 

But here was a speculation which ignored, or rather defied, 
these maxims, and audaciously claimed that what seemed to 
wisdom the reasonable and generous bounds accorded human 



GREEK RELIGION 67 

nature were in reality intolerable and cramping bonds. Here 
was a teaching which found in aspiration beyond the limitations 
of our nature the very breath of life for conduct and religion, 
and held before all men alike the vision of a destiny mightier 
than human, nay, even the obliteration in the end of the 
distinction between the human and the divine. At the old, 
wise warning "seek not to be God . . . mortal things befit a 
mortal," so expressive of the balance and the aversion from 
excess which we regard as typical of the Greek point of view, 
it flung the challenge of its startling message, "Happy and 
Wise One, thou shalt be God instead of Mortal." "Thou art 
become God from Man." 

Doubtless, too, the ritual like the claims and promises of 
the sect appeared extravagant and sensational, and made 
much the same impression upon the adherent of the estab 
lished forms of worship, as the Oxford movement and High 
Church practices made upon the rank and file of the Church 
of England, or to use a more extreme example, as revival and 
camp meetings to-day make upon the typical Bostonian. 
Euripides is perhaps expressing the attitude not only of the 
free-thinking, but of the orthodox Athenian in the "fling" 
at Orphism in Theseus bitter reproach of the apparent 
treachery of his son, in the "Hippolytus": 

"Now is thy day! Now vaunt thee; thou so pure 
No flesh of life may pass thy lips ! Now lure 
Fools after thee; call Orpheus King and Lord; 
Make ecstasies and wonders ! Thumb thine hoard 
Of ancient scrolls and ghostly mysteries. . . ." 14 

Still Orphism does not seem to have perturbed the Athenian 
Church to anything like the degree that the High Church 
movement shook the Anglican. 

However, it must be admitted that by the beginning of the 
Fourth Century Orphism had been badly infected with really 
serious abuses. The lines just quoted from the "Hippolytus" 
may, then, be not so much a casual fling against eccentricity 
and sensationalism as a well founded protest on Euripides part 

14 II, 952 seq. (trans. Murray). 



68 GREEK RELIGION 

against tendencies towards corruption already developing or 
developed in his day. The ritual and dogma of the sect were 
only too apt to degenerate into a highly scented and vulgar 
formalism, lacking not only in inward warmth and sincerity 
of religious feeling, but also in the outward dignity and restraint 
which characterized even such a picturesque rite of the estab 
lished church as the celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries. 
Worse still, they invited to superstitious beliefs and practices 
of all sorts, like magic and divination, the purchase of indul 
gences, and the hawking of absolution and salvation. Tho 
result was, that, though nothing could dim the splendor and 
the consolation of its promise to the "sick" and yearning soul, 
or cool the fascination which its doctrines of reincarnation 
redemption, and reunion with the divine, exercised over a mind 
like Plato s, Orphism also became a rallying point for a host 
of religious quacks, and malpractitioners whose wares have a 
familiar look even to-day. 15 These hangers-on ran on about 
Dionysus name talking a clap-trap designed to entice or 
frighten the simple and the credulous into a kind of spiritual 
"confidence-game." They told fortunes, practised divination, 
and offered even to rid you of your enemies through absent 
treatment by incantation; all, of course, for a consideration. 
Furthermore, they rattled the keys of heaven and hell in a truly 
impressive and terrifying manner. They would come to your 
door, particularly if you happened to be rich, carrying a 
prodigious lot of old books purporting to have been written 
by Orpheus himself. They would descant upon the horrors of 
hell-fire, from which they assured you only their charms and 
rites could save you, and, thumbing their "hoard of ancient 
scrolls and ghostly mysteries," they would do their best to 
frighten you into buying, cash down, plenary absolutions for 
all your own and your ancestors sins in this world, and infallible 
prescriptions guaranteeing a general immunity from purga 
torial pains, and the enjoyment of everlasting felicity in the 
next. And the pictures which they drew of the fate awaiting 
the rash man who refused to hand over an initiation fee, were 
doubtless vivid, and if you happened to be a bit uneasy in your 
is Of. Heracleitus, Fr. 124. 



GREEK RELIGION 69 

own mind about the world to come, convincing. However that 
may be, these salvation-mongers seem to have carried on a 
brisk and lucrative trade, even among the well-to-do, though 
their profits, as may be imagined, did not improve the credit 
of Orphism with less superstitious and better balanced people. 18 
The influence of the Orphic mysteries on philosophy was 
considerable. We shall find them looming large in the teach 
ings of the Pythagoreans and Empedocles, and perhaps 
coloring to some extent the systems of Heracleitus and the 
Eleatics. Later on Socrates and Plato drew upon them for 
their visions of the immortality of the soul. And in the 
mystical Neo-Pythagorean and Neo-Platonist movements, 
which gained such headway in the first centuries of the 
Christian era, they came into their own again. 



The apparent ease with which Orphism escaped with nothing 
worse than a charge of sensationalism and vulgarity is perhaps 
but an expression of the same point of view as permitted the 
extraordinary freedom of Greek philosophic speculation from 
religious restrictions. We to-day wonder that by virtue of 
its mere acceptance of the Olympian theology as a background 
to its special teaching, Orphism was able without serious pro 
test and censure to paint so unconventional a picture of 
subjects like the nature and destiny of man and his relation 
to God, which for us stand in the foreground of importance 
and may not appear before the public at large unless in ortho 
dox guise. So, too, we might wonder again and again, when 
we come to trace the development of Greek thought, that con 
temporary theology so seldom felt shocked and demoralized 
at the picture drawn by philosophic speculation. When Thales, 
for example, announced that in his opinion all things were 
made of water, or Anaximenes proclaimed that they were 
nothing but condensed or rarefied air, we should not unnatu 
rally expect theology to feel that its gods were being evap 
orated or dissolved, and to fight such destructive teaching 

i Cf. Plato, Republic, II, 364 C et seq. Legge, Forerunners and Rivals 
of Christianity, I, p. 140. Campbell, Religion in Greek Literature, p. 254. 



70 GREEK RELIGION 

with might and main. That, when confronted with Orphic 
doctrines or philosophic speculations, religion showed no fear 
throws the relations of religion to philosophy and science in 
Greece into interesting contrast with the modern situation. 

The reason, however, for the difference is not far to seek. 
Philosophy did not come into conflict with established belief 
for the same reason that Orphism escaped collision with it. 
The matters with which philosophy, like those with which 
Orphism, was mainly concerned were points of little or no 
concern to "orthodox" belief. Such questions as the origin, 
the composition, and the constitution of the Universe, which 
modern theology finds of great moment and has answered 
with an authority and finality based upon divine revelation, 
were from the point of view of Greek religion mere fields for 
conjecture, upon which opinions might take different paths 
and arrive at different conclusions without trespass or prosecu 
tion for damage done to any revealed truth. Provided only 
a man believed in the accepted Gods, or at least did not deny 
their existence, he could speculate at will and hold any opinion 
he chose as to what stuff they were made of, or how they 
originated and developed into the beings they now are. If 
Thales was right, the Gods like everything else were made of 
water, if Anaximenes, of air, but a God was a God, just as a 
man was a man "for a that." What they were made of, or how 
they were produced out of the primal World-Stuff made no 
difference to their existence or their divinity. These were 
interesting and inevitable questions, like those discussed by the 
Orphics, but they raised no point of concern to the estab 
lished cult and could be answered in diametrically opposed 
but equally orthodox ways. 

Moreover, it is perhaps too much to insist even on the neces 
sity of belief in the Olympian Gods. Certainly in Sicily, as 
early as the Sixth Century, the philosopher Xenophanes re 
jected undisturbed the conventional polytheism and taught that 
the divine nature was not collected and focussed in the persons 
of different Gods, but was suffused and omnipresent throughout 
the entire Universe. At Athens, however, the case was dif 
ferent. The Athenians were conservative in temper in all per- 



GREEK RELIGION 71 

taining to the state religion, and Anaxagoras in the Fourth 
Century was accused of impiety for maintaining that the sun 
was not a God but a lump of red-hot iron "larger than the 
Peloponnesus." Socrates, too, was condemned to death, a 
few years later on the charge, among others, of denying the 
Gods which the city worshiped. 

However that may be, and even granting Athenian con 
servatism, it must be obvious how favorable was the atmos 
phere of Greek religion to the development of philosophic 
speculation. Religion was first in the field, to be sure, and 
philosophy had to recognize and reckon with it. But its 
influence was that of suggestion as to what might be believed, 
not of dictation as to what must be accepted. It did not claim, 
like Judaism and Christianity and Mohammedanism, a revealed 
and final knowledge of all that is important in the constitution 
of the Universe and the destiny of man, and bar from free 
philosophic discussion and conclusion most points of philo 
sophic interest. It was opinion with no higher authority than 
that of tradition, most of which could be discarded or re 
molded by philosophy without offense to the religious interest. 
There were no trespass signs bidding the adventurous thinker 
beware the dogmas of a revealed truth, no stiles of scripture 
and creed to keep the traveler to one only permitted path. 

The rise of ancient philosophy, then, is almost unembittered 
by that conflict with theology which has marked the growth 
of modern thought. Speculation could develop openly without 
resort to subterfuge and equivocation in order to escape active 
persecution, and without incurring the modern penalty of 
ostracism and defamation at the hands of established cults. 
For where the modern man feels his faith shocked and shaken, 
the Greek felt only his curiosity gratified and his knowledge 
enlarged, using, as it were, for walking and advancing, the 
toes which in us exist only to be trodden upon. 



XI 

We have now hastily and partially surveyed certain features 
of Greek religion which we shall find reflected from time to 



72 GREEK RELIGION 

time in varying degree in the history of Greek philosophy. We 
have noted similarities and differences to the religious beliefs 
and practices of to-day. The background of all Greek 
religious experience was, we saw, much more objective and 
external than the point of view to which we are accustomed. 
The Hellenic mind was less self-conscious, less introspective, 
less isolated from the world about it than our own. It dwelt 
less upon itself and contrasted its spirituality less sharply 
with the experience forced upon it by the instincts and senses 
of a "physical" body and a material world. The Greek 
language, indeed, lacked any adequate terms for expressing 
the ideas of "self" and "personality," "conscience" and "duty" 
which so distress modern religion and philosophy. Indeed, 
we might say that, in its dominant mood at least, the Hellenic 
genius never burdened the body and the natural life and self- 
expression of man with an alien "spirit" to crush its roots, 
pinch its growth, and wither its flowering. 

Again, just as the Greek did not set himself over against an 
external, "material" world, so he did not distinguish sharply 
things from persons. All bodies were living like his own, all 
natural phenomena were essentially beings like himself. The 
Universe was conceived as fundamentally a city-state, a con 
stitutionally governed society of living beings, including Gods 
and men, whose character, relations, and rules of conduct could 
be inferred from human nature. 

He naturally sought, then, his Gods in the external Universe 
rather than in the recesses of an inner, private experience 
remote from the world, and found them to be like men, children 
of the same World-Order and evolution, citizens of the same 
commonwealth, co-actors in the same drama, elder brothers 
of the same family. They, too, had grown in wisdom and 
goodness. The Universe, like human society, had developed out 
of primitive savagery into law and order and civilization. 
Being part of this larger order, the creatures rather than the 
creators of Nature, their omnipotence was limited and their 
omniscience reserved to such power and knowledge as enabled 
them to play their parts as constitutional rulers of the world. 
In all this, we pointed out, there is a great contrast to the 



GREEK RELIGION 73 

Christian idea of God as the absolute Creator and arbitrary 
Ruler of the Universe. 

Emerging from the common background we observed two 
tendencies of thought. On the one hand we had the Olympian 
worship, on the other a "religion of redemption." The cult 
of the Olympians became more and more a worship of Beings 
who led that easy and deathless, liberated and perfected human 
life towards which man aspires and struggles, and protected 
such order, civilization, and happiness as social and political 
institutions had attained. 

Along with this "established" worship of the Olympians 
went the traditional attitude of Greek ethics. The Universe 
had allotted Gods and men alike their places and their limita 
tions. Virtue lay in each man s keeping to his place; the 
root of evil, in his tendency to trespass upon his neighbor s, 
be that neighbor human or divine. The difference between 
virtue and vice was purely quantitative, since the excess which 
led a man to overstep the bounds was but an exuberance of 
the instincts and activities which kept him interested and busy 
in developing his own lot in life. 

From this point of view there was no moral opposition of 
the flesh to the spirit, of the "natural" man to a hostile soul 
of supernatural origin and destiny. Sin had its root in a 
man s ignorance of the bounds set to his individual lot and 
to human nature, not in an inner disobedience to the will of 
God which corrupted and stained a spiritual essence. Sim 
ilarly the compensation exacted by the sense of fitness and 
balance inherent in the Universe was sufficient to clear the 
sinner s account and start him anew. He needed no inner 
absolution from God. 

Here again we found a great antithesis to Christian teach 
ing, particularly in its ascetic and puritan form, with its fear 
of the natural man, its suspicion of beauty, its horror of 
physical pleasure, and its feeling that the body and the mate 
rial world obstruct and endanger the happiness and salvation 
of man. From the Christian point of view the essence of sin 
lay in the harm it did the sinner; from the Greek point of 
view, as might be expected from the greater objectivity and 



74 GREEK RELIGION 

lack of self-consciousness of the Hellenic mind, it lay rather 
in the hurt it might do to others. 

The general background and "orthodox" Olympian tendency 
in Greek religious experience had, as we also pointed out, a 
strong echo in Greek philosophy. They were associated with 
the tardiness with which Hellenic thought distinguished natural 
from moral law, and consciousness from matter, and they 
inspired such typical expressions of Greek ethics as Socrates 
dictum that "virtue is knowledge," and the Aristotelian doc- 
trine of virtue as a golden mean between excess and deficiency. 

But we discovered that beneath this serene and sunny stream 
of Greek naturalism, there swept a darker counter-current oi 
religious experience. It was not enough to worship Perfection 
and build slowly towards it generation after generation. 
Those whose lot was less easy, who were harassed or over 
whelmed with temptation and failure and sorrow, cried out 
for justice and redemption. And since salvation and happi 
ness could not be attained in this life, they looked for it in 
the next. The ideas of immortality and reincarnation, which 
Olympianism ignored, were seized upon and developed. The 
accent of worship was shifted from the God whose perfection 
was lifted clear of human suffering, to the God who had 
suffered and died like ourselves, and whose resurrection might 
seem to hold out to humanity the promise of an ultimate 
triumph over death and redemption from evil. 

The material to feed these longings was found in the ancient 
cults of the infinite life and fertility of Nature, which seemed 
to perish in winter only to be revived again in the spring, and 
whose animal forms appeared, by the recurrence of their 
generation, birth, and death, now to deplete, now to restore, the 
level of an inexhaustible, hidden reservoir of existence. In 
particular the "religion of redemption" seized upon the cults 
of Demeter and Persephone, and of Dionysus. 

About the first, which later became part of the established 
church of Athens, centered the hope of a happy immortality 
of the ordinary Christian or Mohammedan sort. The Orphic 
Mysteries, however, of wild Thracian origin and orgiastic 
ritual, developed a complicated theology in which the ideas of 



GREEK RELIGION 75 

reincarnation and reabsorption into the Godhead played a 
prominent part, and a dualistic opposition of the soul to the 
body was a prominent feature. To this cult rallied all that 
was ascetic, puritanical, and mystical in the Greek tempera 
ment. 

The ethics of such a movement were naturally out of har 
mony with the dominant mood of Greek morality. They urged 
man to seek self-realization and happiness, not by a balanced 
development of the resources of the natural man within the 
limits of finite human nature, but by breaking the attachment 
of the soul to the body, stopping the wheel of birth and rebirth, 
transcending the human lot, and becoming God instead of 
mortal. And to this end they prescribed a semiascetic dis 
cipline. They could not, however, push the Greek genius to 
the extremes of Pauline Christianity, or imbue with our modern 
Puritanism its natural joy in living, its satisfaction in exer 
cising the activities of the body, and its pleasure in the physical 
beauty of the world. 

Orphism, however, spread through the Greek world with 
great rapidity, and assumed the proportions of a great 
reforming and protestant movement. And it had considerable 
influence upon the development of Greek philosophy, to which 
we now turn. 17 

17 A short bibliography for the further study of Greek religion is included 
in the Appendix to this volume. 



CHAPTER III 

THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS, THE FIRST 
PHILOSOPHERS 

AT the beginning of the Sixth Century B. C. there was no 
city on all the coast of Asia Minor which could compare with 
Miletus in strength and magnificence. Her foundation already 
lay in the immemorial past. Her traditions assigned her origin 
to Crete, and modern research has borne out her claim and 
traced her parentage to the great sea empire of Minos 
thought by some to be the fabled Atlantis which in the third 
and second millennium before Christ dominated the shores and 
islands of the ^Egean. Later, when "the Princes of the Isles 
set in the Midst of the Great Green Sea" slept in their splendid 
tombs, and the ancient Minoan civilization had crumbled before 
the Greek invaders from the north into the ruins of cyclopean 
Tiryns and golden Mycenae, the palace of the Double Axe at 
Cnossus, and the "topless towers of Ilium," Miletus, along with 
the rest of the coast as far north as Smyrna, passed into the 
hands of Ionian traders and explorers as they ventured east 
ward isle by isle from their lately won and settled possessions 
in Greece itself. 

In time colonies grew up, united to their mother cities by 
ties of blood and family history and tradition, and to one 
another by the bonds of a common race, language, religion, and 
civilization. Among them, twelve, the so-called Ionian dodecap- 
olis, were preeminent, and again of these the old Miletus, now 
newly colonized from Attica, was first in wealth and power. 

The situation of these cities was, however, precarious from 
the start. Inland, the threat of the growing Lydian kingdom 
was becoming more and more ominous. The campaigns of 
Gyges, the founder of the Lydian power, had brought him 
into conflict with the coast colonies and had perhaps subdued 

76 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 77 

two of them, Colophon and Magnesia, to his rule. Under his 
successors, Ardys, Sadyattes, and Alyattes, the struggle and 
the process of slow subjugation continued, to be at length 
completed by Croesus under whom the Lydian kingdom came 
to its height and its end. Miletus alone held out, though again 
and again her territories on the mainland were harried and the 
war was carried up to her very walls. Her successful resistance 
won for her at last a treaty of peace and a recognition of her 
independence from Alyattes, which were respected by Croesus in 
his~final conquest of the other cities of the coast. 

Meantime Miletus, whilst preserving her independence on 
land prospered exceedingly by sea. A goodly share of the 
carrying trade between all known peoples was in hei- hands. 
Caravans freighted with the riches of the East wound down to 
her gates from the Asiatic "hinterland." Her ships sailed into 
her ample and sheltered harbor from the ends of the Mediter 
ranean world. Through her busy port passed in ceaseless 
traffic the wealth of Egypt and the West, of the wild Euxine 
shores and Lydia, of Ormuz, and perhaps of Ind. She had 
her trading posts away to the south of the mouths of the 
Nile; her colonies she had established in the far north on 
the Black Sea coasts, in the shadow of Cimmerian darkness. 

So Miletus g^ew rich. In her markets much gold was 
exchanged for wares, and wares for much gold, and much 
remained in the coffers of her merchants and traders. She 
was secure, for her walls had proved impregnable to her 
foes, and the sea with its inexhaustible resources of trade 
lay always free and open before her. She was active and 
energetic, for not only her commercial interests but at first 
the taste, and then the threat, of the ever-present Lydian 
danger kept her continually on the alert. She was cosmo 
politan, for along with the stream of foreign commerce there 
must have poured through her streets a refluent tide of the 
men, the tongues, the fashions, the customs, and the ideas of 
all nations. In a word,; not only did she possess the leisure 
which Aristotle, as we have seen, considered to be a prerequisite 
of philosophy, but her circumstances were such as~6 keep 
her outlook broad and her intelligence keen, and to turn an 



78 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

ease which might have become mere intellectual lethargy into 
time and interest for reflection and speculation. 

So much for the place where European philosophy was born. 
A word in passing as to the times. The Sixth Century was an 
epoch of ferment, political and social, moral, religious, and 
intellectual. The ancient monarchies such as Homer describes 
had given way in the various cities to government by aristoc 
racy and oligarchy, and this in its turn was being challenged, 
often for a time successfully, by the growing Greek aspiration 
towards democracy and popular government. The age was 
one of revolution and counter-revolution. The lower classes 
would rise and overthrow the oligarchic governments, drive out 
the old noble families, and confiscate their property. The 
exiled aristocracy in its turn would await some favorable op 
portunity for return to power, repossess itself of the city, and 
repeat the process of exile, execution, and confiscation. Mean 
time the continual turmoil bred, in the ranks of the democracy 
itself, a host of adventurers and demagogues and nouveaux 
riches along with a sprinkling of true patriots, who, in one way 
or another, worked themselves forward to popular leadership. 
Thus, ironically enough, a whole hierarchy of social distinc 
tions arose below stairs. Sometimes the richer or abler of these 
"self-made men" would "arrive," and succeed, as the poet 
Theognis complains, in marrying themselves, their sons, or 
their daughters, into the old nobility. And again members of 
the nobility would sometimes for profit or from principle 
espouse the cause and make themselves the tribunes of the 
people. 

Such a state of affairs was apt to breed an interest in reflec 
tion upon the problems of government and society and human 
life in general. It was also likely to result in the establishment 
of despotisms. A man of daring and ability, declaring himself 
the champion of one or the other party and possessing the 
confidence of the army and the gratitude of the victorious fac 
tion, would not find it hard to possess himself also of the su 
preme power. So it is that the latter part of the Seventh 
Century and the Sixth are preeminently the age of "tyrants" 
in Greece of Cypselus and Periander at Corinth, of the Peisis- 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 79 

tratidse at Athens, and of Thrasybulus at Miletus, to mention 
a few of the more famous. But the Hellenic love of liberty 
made the maintenance of these despotisms difficult, especially 
in Greece proper. Even if a man succeeded in retaining and in 
dying peacefully upon the throne which he had built for him 
self, his son was liable to come to a violent end along with the 
tyranny he had inherited. In the Greek cities on the Asiatic 
coast the idea of a despotism seems to have been less repugnant, 
and the despotisms were longer-lived. This was due perhaps to 
the proximity of the Lydian Empire and to familiarity with 
the glories of its capital, Sardis, and with the wealth of Croesus 
which did not breed contempt for kings. 

Whatever one may think of tyranny as a political expedient, 
it helped stimulate one of the most brilliant epochs of Greek 
civilization. The tyrants took pride in their cities. They pro 
moted the economic interests of their states and worked for 
their material prosperity and aggrandizement. They kept 
peace and order as no aristocratic or democratic administra 
tion could. Socially, too, they improved in some ways upon 
both democracy and aristocracy. They prized dignity and 
magnificence, and admired and cherished both the refinement 
which the common man despises because he is incapable of it, 
and the talent which he disparages because it is more than 
average. At the same time they welcomed to their courts, as 
no old nobility would have received within its ranks, the gifted, 
the distinguished, and the brilliant, from whatever source de 
rived. 

By energy and unscrupulousness, and at times by oppressive 
taxation the tyrants amassed great riches. But however ill- 
gotten, their wealth was as a rule well-spent. They lavished it, 
to be sure, on themselves, their favorites, and their courts. But 
they also poured it out upon their cities, to make them more 
stately and more splendid. They built public works and build 
ings and temples, the latter for the first time in enduring stone. 
Over across the ^Egean the Ionic, in Hellas proper the Doric, 
style sprang into being. Corinthian builders by first using 
tiles for roofing made the pitched roof with its triangular pedi 
ment possible. Temple and monument invited adornment with 



80 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

the statues of Gods and heroes, and the blank spaces of the 
newly fashioned pediments welcomed more ambitious groups of 
sculpture, in which the great events of myth and history could 
be set forth. 

Sculpture and buildings require architects and sculptors. 
The courts of the tyrants, like those of their "cousins," the 
Italian despots of the Renaissance two thousand years later, 
became the rendezvous of artists. But it was not only the com 
pass and the chisel whose ingenuity was stimulated and exer 
cised. The pen as well was encouraged to discover new subjects 
and invent new styles. To the old Homeric hexameter wero 
added fresh measures and meters adapted to fresh uses th<> 
lyric with all its many forms and possibilities, and the dithy 
ramb evolved at Corinth out of the songs in honor of Dionysus 
and destined to play so important a part in the formation of 
Greek tragedy. Alcaeus fought and drank in fact and verse, 
and "burning Sappho loved and sang," at the brilliant and 
luxurious court of the Penthelids in Lesbos. Archilochus urged 
on the Spartans with his war songs. And Solon and Theognis, 
though no friends of tyranny, were shining revelations of the 
splendor of its age. 

As we have said, poetry found new subjects as well as new 
forms. The poet no longer, as in the epic, watched and re 
corded from a hidden post of observation another s adventures. 
He held the mirror to the face of his own inner thoughts and 
feelings. He had a sudden vision of human experience with all 
its instincts, its passions, its emotions, its vicissitudes, its per 
plexities and problems, its windings and gropings towards the 
light of happiness and perfection. He saw its inexhaustible 
variety and richness as something to be delved into and ex 
ploited and refashioned by his hand into beautiful and ideal 
shapes, which should reveal to man the meaning of his yearn 
ings and beckon him to their fulfilment. The poets were the 
thinkers and the teachers of the age, and for a long time re 
flection upon life and even, as we shall see, sometimes philo 
sophical speculation regarding the nature of the Universe, 
found poetry as well as prose a natural vehicle of expression. 

It was inevitable that this contact with new peoples and this 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 81 

flaming up of self-questioning and self-expression should fire 
also the scientific interest. From Phoenicia and Babylonia and 
Egypt, traders and travelers brought back novel ideas about 
measuring the courses of the stars and the surface of the earth, 
which acquainted the Greek spirit of investigation with astron 
omy, geometry, and mathematics, of a developed and scientific 
type. The reports of strange adventures and of sights and 
places far away inland or over the seas were mapped and or 
dered into geography. And observation of the teeming animal 
life by sea and land and air crystallized into an ordered bio 
logical curiosity. 

Nor could Greek religion escape the general effervescence of 
such an age. The Sixth Century, as we saw in the last chapter, 
was the epoch of the rise and spread of the mystical flood of 
Orphism. It was also a period of disquiet and readjustment in 
the orthodox cult. The Homeric and Hesiodic Scriptures were 
weighed in the balance of new visions and ideals and were found 
wanting. The immorality, the caprice, the disunion of the 
Olympians were felt to be unworthy of divine natures. The 
Gods must be good. The misrepresentations of their behavior 
in the canonical myths must be passed over or explained away. 
Thus it is that at the end of the century we find the poet 
Stesichorus, the immediate forerunner of the great tragedians, 
"bowdlerizing" the canon and rewriting the Homeric and 
Hesiodic theology in a form more palatable to a nicer moral 
taste. 

But the development of the idea of the divine righteousness 
and goodness had to encounter difficulties of its own making. 
The world-old problem of the existence of evil and the divorce 
of reward from merit was raised in an acute form. The reflec 
tive poetry of the age abounds in pessimistic thoughts upon the 
vanity and misery of human life, the futility of virtue, the pros 
perity of the wicked, and the sufferings of the just. Such re 
flection naturally bred doubts as to the moral government of 
the world and the goodness of the Gods who permitted so much 
misery and countenanced such injustice. Of the two great 
Gnomic poets, Solon contented his religious sense with assert 
ing that the happiness of the wicked is but seeming and passing, 



82 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

and with the doctrine, so familiar to us in the Old Testament, 
that the divine justice is satisfied by visiting the sins of the 
fathers on the children. But Theognis, who was a bitterer and 
more rebellious spirit, would have none of this explanation. He 
confronted great Zeus himself with the spectacle of the misfor 
tunes of the righteous, asked him how any one beholding so 
sorry a sight could reverence the Gods, and boldly challenged 
the Father of Gods and men to justify his ways to men. 

Faith, however, then as so many times since in the same or 
deal, emerged from the test triumphant. The immediate out 
come of these questionings was not skepticism but a purer re 
ligion. Theognis, himself, still believed in the righteousness of 
Zeus. The way was prepared both for the grandeur of ^Eschy- 
lus vision of the eternal and unescapable Justice of God hound 
ing the wicked to their doom, and turning even sin to a moral 
purpose, and for the Olympian serenity of Sophocles confidence 
that all things are ordered by a divine Providence and happen 
for the best. The Gods were purified of the dross of natural 
forces and primitive instincts and refined into golden ideals 
embodying the ease, the happiness, the deathlessness of thai 
perfected human life in a frictionless world, of which mar 
dreams. Their very images turned from fetishes and symbols 
to statues alive with every grace and beauty of the human form 
Their rude shrines gave way to temples, and their cults, in 
creasingly controlled by the State, developed into stately and 
splendid ceremonials, constructed and enriched by all the genius 
of the architect and poet. 1 

In a word, we have in the Sixth Century B. C. in Greece 8 
period which reminds us not a little of the Italian Renaissance. 
There were the same city-states ruled by the same despots, 
who, springing from like origins and availing themselves of 
like opportunities, had grasped their power by similar methods. 
And once in power these despots, like the Italians, proved them 
selves "culture-mad" rulers, endowed with a universal sensitive 
ness to life in all its many phases, loving beauty, encouraging 
art and science, and vying with one another in gathering at 
their brilliant courts the most gifted men of the age. 
i Cf. Fairbanks, Greek Religion, pp. 237, 238. 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 83 

Similar causes provoke similar results. At both epochs man 
was awakening to himself to the possibilities of his body, his 
senses, his mind. The world, ever widening through trade and 
adventure, poured in upon him unaccustomed and startling im 
pressions. His own nature suddenly hinted at resources, and 
incited to an exploitation, no less strange and delightful. It 
dawned upon him that he himself and his surroundings need 
not be accepted as they stood, but could be made to yield almost 
anything he wished. And at the same time his wants became 
articulate and his visions enlightening. He found that he could 
measure his mind with outer Nature, that he could understand 
and control her, making her the servant of his comfort and the 
slave of his desires. He discovered that he could invent new 
gratifications for his senses and new delights for his heart and 
mind. He knew himself to be, within limits, master of his fate. 
Life and the world lay before him like an uncut block of stone, 
calling him to test, unaided but confident, his own untried 
power, if perhaps he might turn them by his own cunning and 
forethought into a work of art more wonderful and more reveal 
ing than any temple or statue built by hands. The mutability 
of human affairs, to be sure, must forever thwart him. The 
shadow of mortality lay heavy upon him. The consummate 
ease of the deathless and ever-happy Gods was beyond his 
grasp. Still, if he willed and strove, it was in his power even 
within the short space which intervened between birth and death 
to make earth almost Olympus and himself a creature almost 
divine. 

In Italy this awakening of man s insight into the possibilities 
of himself and of his world, and this arousing of his ambition 
to fulfil them, meant the recovery of the Greek spirit by a race 
fitted to be its heir. In the Sixth Century in Hellas it meant 
the Greek s discovery of his own supreme genius. 

Thales, the first Greek philosopher, was born in the early 
part of this extraordinary epoch. His life spanned the greater 
part of a brilliant century, and all but outlasted the most 
splendid period of Milesian history. He was still alive just 
prior to the fall of Sardis and the collapse of the Lydian King 
dom before the onslaught of the Persians in 546 or 541 B. C. 



84 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

Many stories are told of him, most of them apocryphal, 
which testify to that universality of interest and genius which 
was so characteristic of the age. He is said to have cornered 
the olive market, and effected a monopoly in olive-oil for those 
days a feat of high finance. Again he appears as the prototype 
of "Johnny Head-in-Air" in the "Slovenly Peter" of our 
childhood, so given to star-gazing as to fall unwittingly into a 
well, even though it lay immediately beneath his nose. He is 
also reported to have accompanied Croesus on the disastrous 
campaign against the Persians, and by his engineering skill to 
have diverted the river Halys from its course. More credible 
tradition has it that he introduced geometry to the Hellenic 
world, and that he predicted an eclipse of the sun which too.c 
place in 585 B. C. However that may be, he was certainly in 
terested in mathematics and astronomy. In the world of poli 
tics he had the foresight to oppose the selfish, and in the end 
fatal, foreign policy of his city, which was to disentangle and 
isolate its interests from those of the other Ionian cities, 
to find the cause and objects of their struggle against a 
common danger of no concern to itself, and to let Lydia and 
later Persia take the hindermost one by one, till Miletus 
turned out to be the one in question. Thales, however, advo 
cated not merely a Pan-Ionian Confederacy, but an actual 
Union in which each city should sacrifice its independence to a 
central federal government with a new capital, not at Miletus. 
This he perhaps thought better than the inevitable surrender 
of liberty to a foreign conqueror. 

To these keen and varied interests Thales added the prying 
curiosity about the Universe in general, the flair for generali 
zation, and the bold imagination which make him the starting 
point for European philosophy. The idea of the unity of the 
world, to be sure, had already dawned on the Greeks. They 
had long suspected that all things, in spite of their immense 
variety and confusion, might after all be only sides or aspects 
or derivatives of One Thing which underlay and expressed itself 
in them all. The old cosmogonies of the poets and theologians 
had pictured the evolution of the Universe from a single source 
like Night or Chaos. Again, at the center of the primitive 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 85 

worship of the fertility of nature, which antedated the ortho 
dox theology and lay at the root of the Orphic Mysteries, there 
lurked the feeling that all beings emerged from and expired 
into the same inexhaustible reservoir of Existence. Some writ 
ers, indeed, trace this suspicion that the whole Universe is made 
throughout of the same single stuff far back to a primitive 
tribal and social consciousness, more fundamental and more 
ancient than man s sense of the separate existence of individual 
persons and things. 

But this idea of a single Substance underlying all things had 
heretofore never been reasoned out, nor had there been any 
attempt to argue a description of its nature based upon a 
methodical observation of phenomena. In a word, it had never 
been studied. Thales claim to be the father of European 
philosophy lies just in the fact that he was the first to transfer 
the World-Stuff from the realm of poetry and mystical feeling 
and vague conjecture, and to make its existence and nature the 
subject of a "scientific" investigation and hypothesis. He seems 
to have looked the world over from head to foot, to have re 
flected upon what he saw, and in the light of his observations 
and reflections to have asked himself and answered to his own 
satisfaction, what this Substance was of which all things were 
made. 

The solution to his problem he found in Water. Water was 
the World-Stuff to which all the variety and complexity of 
phenomena could be reduced. The clouds and heavenly bodies 
he imagined apparently as overhanging, and the earth as a flat 
disc floating upon, an ocean whose contents sustained, exhaled, 
and composed them. Even so we might picture to ourselves an 
ice-floe overhung with luminous mist and lying on the waters 
of which ice and vapor alike are made. 

Thales may have been influenced in his conclusion by the old 
belief that all things originally sprang from Ocean, but he had 
also sound philosophic reasons for it. He had observed, so 
Aristotle and the later commentators tell us, that the seed of 
all animals is wet, that even all vegetable life requires moisture, 
and that the very fire of the sun and stars appears to draw 
water from the sea. Probably, too, he had in mind the fact to 



86 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

which we have just referred, that water assumes beneath our 
eyes gaseous and solid forms so unlike its real liquid self that 
we should not guess their origin without experience of the 
transformation. After witnessing daily so radical and aston 
ishing a change, it need not strain the philosopher s credulity 
or stretch his imagination to suppose a further alteration of 
water into the manifold and diverse kinds of solid bodies and 
all the various degrees of vapor from the thick storm clouds 
verging on liquid rain, or solid hail and snow, to the thin bright 
blue of the sky, or even the collected and focused luminousness 
of the sun and moon and stars. 

How far Thales elaborated his theory, it is impossible to say 
with any certainty. Aristotle mentions a tradition which rep 
resents him as saying that all things are full of Gods, and that 
the loadstone has a soul because it moves iron. Later com 
mentators drew from this the unwarranted inference that he 
believed in a divine mind permeating, animating, and control 
ling all things. This conclusion is undoubtedly quite false, but 
it seems reasonable to suppose that Thales regarded his World- 
Substance not as something in itself inert and in need of an 
outside force to move and direct it, but as something in which 
movement and life and development were always and naturally 
inherent. Or better still, we might say that just as Greek re 
ligion did not for a long time distinguish things from persons 
or the animate from the inanimate, so Greek philosophy did not 
at first discriminate between the ideas of matter and motion and 
force and life and consciousness, but left them all fused together 
in the as yet unanalyzed notion of the Something of which the 
world was made. 

Anaximander, a pupil of Thales, was born about 610 B. C. 
He lived to see the fall of Sardis and the destruction of the 
Lydian Empire. Indeed, the publication of his book on phi 
losophy, perhaps the first Greek work in prose, is said to have 
taken place in the same memorable year 546 B. C. Only 
fragments of this book have come down to us, but it was 
extant in the time of Aristotle. The exact date of his death is 
unknown. 

Anaximander seems to have shared the universality of his 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 87 

age and of his master. He evinced a profound and scientific 
interest in astronomy, geography, and biology, and drew the 
maps the first in existence in the Western world to illustrate 
the descriptions of his fellow-townsman, the geographer Heca- 
tseus. 

With the philosophical conclusions of his teacher the pupil 
was unable to agree. He asked the same simple and compre 
hensive question, and answered it also in a single word. But 
the word was different. Apparently he found water too 
specific, too wedded to its own nature and ways, in a word, 
"too essentially watery, to be transformed without protest 
in fact and imagination into all the myriad things which water 
to all intents and purposes, save those of theory, so palpably 
is not. The Stuff of which all things are made must be some 
thing more versatile, more adaptable, more capable of throw 
ing itself wholeheartedly and with utter self-effacement into 
its innumerable and absolutely different roles and parts. 
Indeed, that one specific kind of thing should be the substance 
of which all other sorts of things are composed might well 
seem unreasonable. Only something which was no one thing 
in particular could turn itself with equal facility into any 
thing and everything. And perhaps, too, he was struck with 
the way in which ^the confusion of things may be sorted out 
into pairs of opposites, and thought that Thales gave undue 
prominence to the wet and unduly disparaged the importance 
of the dry. 2 

However that may be, Anaximander refused to specify the 
nature of the World-Substance. It was simply something 
to which no particular character or limitations of any sort 
could be assigned. It was the Boundless, the Indeterminate. 
Being undefined and unbounded, it could be imagined without 
difficulty as assuming any shape whatsoever. Out of it all 
things arose and into it all things were resolved again without 
any alteration of its essential character. 

In addition to the question, "What is the world made of?" 
Anaximander asks and attempts to answer a second question, 
"What is the process like by which the world is formed?" 

2 Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 54. 



88 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

This problem he tries to solve somewhat as follows : There is 
an eternal motion in the Boundless, in the course of which pairs 
of opposites like hot and cold, wet and dry, light and darkness, 
become separated out from the indefinite substance. These 
opposites conflict with and suppress one another and are 
thus continually resolved again into the undifferentiated 
World-Substance. This happens, we are told, in a somewhat 
perplexing phrase, "as is ordained, for they give satisfaction 
and reparation to one another for their injustice according 
to the ordering of time." 

What does this passage mean? Is it, as the compiler who 
quotes it suggests, simply a poetic way of speaking? It may 
well be that Anaximander is merely remarking rather figura 
tively that as any one thing by monopolizing a certain amount 
of space and material keeps some other thing from existing, it 
only seems turn about and fair play for it eventually to step 
out and make room for something else in the crowded world. 
Or he may have the balance of opposites in mind, and the 
disturbance to the order and equilibrium of the Universe which 
would result if one member of a pair permanently triumphed 
over and suppressed its adversary. Again, he is not perhaps 
from his own point of view speaking figuratively and poetically 
at all. It may be that we are simply dealing with a philo 
sophical example of that tendency, noted in the last chapter, 
to leave physical and moral law indistinguishable from one 
another, and to regard the behavior of things as controlled 
by the same considerations of propriety and equity as regulate 
the conduct of men. 

Anaximander seems to have continued his description of 
the way in which the world arose, with considerable astronom 
ical, geological, and biological detail. He believed apparently 
in the existence of other worlds besides our own. But whether 
he conceived the process of separation into opposites as occur 
ring throughout the Indeterminate and Boundless Substance 
and thus giving rise simultaneously to an indefinite number 
of cosmic systems, or believed rather in an infinite succession 

sDiels, Vorsokratiker, I. p. 15 (trans. Burnet). 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 89 

of such systems, one after another, is a debatable point. 4 
These worlds he also spoke of as Gods. 

The manner in which a world-system was evolved he con 
ceived as follows : The original opposition of the hot and the 
dry to the cold and the moist became, when once they were 
separated out, a ring of fire surrounding a core of cold and 
wet. In the course of the interaction between these two, earth, 
water, and air or vapor were differentiated within the core, 
while the enclosing fire became broken into three revolving 
hoops or rings, solar, lunar, and stellar. These rings were 
veneered with air or mist except at holes through which the 
fire shone out. The hole in the first is the sun, in the second 
the moon. The many perforations of the third are the stars. 
The earth itself is a cylinder on the top of which we live. 

Anaximander s account of the origin of man is even more 
interesting. "Living creatures," he tells us, "arose from the 
moist element as it was evaporated by the sun 5 . . . each 
enclosed in a prickly bark. As they advanced in age, they 
came out upon the drier part. When the bark broke off, they 
survived for a short time." Man himself "was born from 
animals of another species," 7 and was "like a fish, in the 
beginning." For had he been subject in the old days to his 
present disadvantages of a prolonged infancy and of inability 
immediately to forage for himself, he could never have sur 
vived primeval conditions. 

It seems astonishing to find at the very outset of Greek 
thought a theory anticipating some of the most important 
conclusions and arguments of the modern doctrine of evolu 
tion, but it should be remembered that the idea of the develop 
ment of all things out of less highly organized beginnings was, 
as we have pointed out, natural to the Greek mind, and that 
the notion of the fixity of species was a later development in 
ancient philosophy. And as for the doctrine of the special 

*The latter view is Zeller s, the former Mr. Burnet s. 

s Hipp. Ref. 1, 7 (trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 73). 

6 Aet. v. 19, 4 (trans. Burnet, Joe. cit.}. 

7Ps.-Plut. Strom, fr. 2 (trans. Burnet, loc. cit.). 

s Hipp. Ref. 1, 6 (trans. Burnet, loc. cit.) 



90 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

creation by fiat of the different kinds of animals, we remarked 
in the last chapter that it was quite foreign to Hellenic ways 
of thinking. 

The third and last of the Milesian School was Anaximenes, 
a pupil of Anaximander s. Concerning his life we know almost 
nothing, save that he was younger than Anaximander and that 
his work and teaching must have been accomplished prior to 
the year 494 B. C. In that year the independence and impor 
tance of Miletus came to an end. Her rulers, not content with 
freedom from the Persian yoke, dreamed of new colonies and 
conquests. The tyrant Aristagoras had enlisted Persian aid 
in a scheme for the joint conquest of the islands of the southern 
^Egean. A quarrel broke out, the Persian commander played 
him false, and the plan fell through. Aristagoras, finding 
himself and his city discredited and suspected in the eyes of 
the Great King, made a desperate bid for self-preservation. 
He stirred up a general revolt of the Ionian cities, and enlisted 
the aid of Athens and of Eretria, a city on the island of Euboea. 
At first things went well for the Greeks, and Sardis, the old 
Lydian capital, was taken. But the tide soon turned. The 
Greeks were defeated, and the Athenians returned home, having 
sown the wind which they were so soon to reap in the whirl 
wind of the two Persian invasions of Attica and the sack of 
Athens. The siege of Miletus, already begun, was now rein 
forced by a blockade by sea. Finally the city was taken by 
storm. Her philosophic preeminence was gone, along with the 
rest of her strength and splendor. Though the teachings of 
the School still continued to inspire and influence philosophic 
speculation in Ionia, the succession of great thinkers was at 
an end. 

The writings of Anaximenes, however, survived the catas 
trophe and were known in later times. Only one direct quota 
tion, however, has come down to us. But we can reconstruct 
his teachings, as in the case of Thales and Anaximander, from 
the reports of commentators. Like both his predecessors he 
asked what the Stuff was of which all things are composed, and 
like Anaximander he sought to discover by what sort of a 
process this Substance turns into all the variety of things 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 91 

which go to make up the sensible, work-a-day world. He 
agreed, however, in his conclusions with neither Thales nor 
Anaximander. The World-Stuff, he thought, was Vapor or 
Air, the same stuff which we breathe in its invisible form and 
see quivering and shimmering, or thickening into mist, under 
the influence of heat and cold. Indeed, it seems as if this con 
clusion were suggested to him by his remarking the dependence 
of men and animals upon inbreathed air, just as Thales was 
led to adopt his theory by noticing the necessity and presence 
of moisture in all living things. Again, vapor could be detected 
in the act of becoming liquid as easily as water could be seen 
turning into mist, while in the dance and shimmer of rising 
heat it could be observed apparently transforming itself into 
light and fire. This Air or Vapor, though conceived as possess 
ing a definite nature, was considered by Anaximenes to be 
boundless in extent like the Boundless of Anaximander. And 
like the Boundless it was naturally and always in motion. He 
called it also a God. 

The process by which our world arose from the original 
World-Stuff was, Anaximenes believed, one of condensation 
and rarefaction. When Air "is dilated so as to be rarer, it 
becomes fire ; while winds, on the other hand, are condensed 
Air. Cloud is formed from Air by felting " (that is, by 
compression) ; "and this, still further condensed becomes 
water. Water, condensed still more, turns to earth ; and when 
condensed as much as it can be, to stones." 

The result of this process of compression is a slab of solid 
material, which is our earth with all its different substances. 
This slab is very broad and is upheld by the air underneath 
it. The moisture rising from it produces the heavenly bodies 
"which are of a fiery nature," and "are supported by the 
air because of their breadth." The sun and moon and the 
planets are discs of fire floating free; "the stars are fixed like 
nails in the crystalline vault of the heavens." al The orbits of 

9 Hipp. Ref. 1, 7 (trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rded.,p. 73.). 
Hipp. Ref. 1, 7 (trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd cd., 
pp. 75-76). 

11 Act. 11, 14, 3 (trans. Burnet, op. cit., p. 76). 



92 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

the heavenly bodies do not carry them under the earth, as 
Anaximander supposed, "but round it, as a cap turns round 
our head. The sun is hidden from sight, not because it goes 
under the earth, but because it is concealed by the higher parts 
of the earth, and because its distance from us becomes 
greater." 12 The risings and settings of the moon and the 
other planets, and the various constellations were doubtless 
to be explained in the same way. The cosmic system thus 
evolved floats in the infinite Air from which it breathes in and 
draws its life and cohesion and organization, just as we are 
held together as organic beings by the air which, inhaled by 
us, becomes our soul and vital principle. 

We need not follow Anaximenes into further astronomical 
and meteorological detail, and we may note in passing the 
apparent lack in his case of the biological speculation regard 
ing the origin of animals and man which makes the system 
of Anaximander so interesting. 

To us in retrospect it looks as if Anaximenes were trying 
with his theory of Air as the World-Substance to strike a 
compromise between the opinions of Thales and Anaximander. 
If Water seemed too specific and too set in its ways to turn 
itself easily into the great variety of objects which go to make 
up the world, the Boundless might well appear to be too vague, 
too vacant, too lacking in stuff and character, to be the sub 
stance of anything at all. Nothing in particular is not 
promising material for every sort of particular thing. The 
imagination, forced to leave it blank without definition or 
determination in the first place, finds difficulty in following and 
picturing its growth from mere blankness into the crowded 
and diversified and highly colored spectacle which existence 
presents. Anaximenes, however, might claim with some show 
of reason to have found a happy mean combining the good 
and discarding the bad points in the theories of his predeces 
sors. Air was as infinite, as all-pervading, as pliable and 
supple and capable of all sorts of far-fetched contortions and 
transformations, as the Boundless. It had none of the heavi 
ness, and stiffness, and solidity, which made it difficult to 
12 Hipp. Ref. 1, 7 (trans. Burnet, op. cit., p. 76). 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 93 

imagine Water in the act of assuming all kinds of shapes 
unlike its own and becoming all kinds of things different from 
itself. At the same time, unlike the Boundless, but like Water, 
it had a definite character which enabled one to get a grip 
on it. One could say what it was like, breathe it, feel it, often 
see it, and test by the senses its airy, mobile, and essentially 
changeable nature. Here, then, was something which was 
something in particular and could be named and described, and 
yet was capable, as it seemed to sense and imagination, of turn 
ing quickly and easily, without resistance or friction, into 
other things. 

Anaximenes theory regarding the process by w r hich the One 
Substance gives rise to the variety and complexity on the sur 
face of the world is also more definite than the statements of 
Anaximander. The latter had contented himself by saying 
vaguely that a separation and conflict of opposing qualities 
went on within the Indeterminate, but he did not tell us how 
either the separation or the conflict takes place. Anaximenes, 
on the other hand, points to an ordinary, everyday occurrence 
like condensation and rarefaction with which we are all familiar 
and tells us that this is what the whole World-Process is really 
like. We thus get a clear image of what goes on and are able 
to follow it in imagination when it is not apparent to per 
ception. 

Moreover, Anaximenes came very near to enunciating a 
cardinal principle of modern science. The success of science 
in helping us see through and understand the world is due to 
its reduction of all the differences and alterations of quality 
and nature in things to a mere difference and shifting of the 
place and spatial relations of similar and unchanging particles 
like atoms or ether vortices. And Anaximenes was on the verge 
of discovering this principle when he found that the diverse 
properties and characters of objects were nothing but different 
degrees of dilation or compression of one simple thing which 
had a single unalterable character and constant and unchange 
able properties. But as it turned out it took another century 
of analysis and reflection to bring the scientific view to clear 



94 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

and final expression in the philosophy of Leucippus and 
Democritus. 

The astronomical speculations of Anaximenes, however, are 
not so much in line with later discovery as those of Anaxi- 
mander. If Anaximander did not reach the point of declaring 
the earth a sphere, he at least took into account its possible 
thickness and made it cylindrical in shape, whereas Anaximenes 
never got beyond the popular belief that it was flat or dis 
played any interest in its shape so far as its depth was con 
cerned. Similarly his theory that the sun and the moon and 
the planets were flat, leaf-like discs which circled round the 
earth horizontally, lacked the possibilities and suggestiveness 
of Anaximander s vision of hoops revolving in a more or less 
vertical plane about the earth and hiding beneath it, by night 
or day, the fiery orifices which are the heavenly bodies. Still, 
Anaximenes made a distinction, which Anaximander failed to 
grasp, between the planets and the heaven of fixed stars. 

It is interesting thus to find European philosophy at its 
inception occupied with profound and central problems. To 
ask what the World is really like at heart, to seek what the 
Nature of Things really is, is for philosophy the commandment 
on which hangs all the law and the prophets. And the second 
is like unto it to show by what process the everyday, phenom 
enal world issues from the World-Principle or Substance ; or, 
in other words, why and how Reality manifests itself as it 
does and wears this particular familiar external expression 
and clothing rather than some other. Indeed, the second 
commandment has sometimes proved for philosophers, as for 
Christians, more difficult of observance than the first. It is 
much easier to extract a theory from facts than to reextract 
the facts from the theory. When we have reached the Prin 
ciple which seems to account for our particular universe, 
we are frequently at a loss to see why it should not just as 
well develop into any one of many other sorts of worlds. The 
nature of Reality, whatever else it may be like, has something 
of the fly-trap about it. Many a thinker who has buzzed his 
way in complacently enough and settled, with convinced pro 
boscis and wings folded in attainment, upon the Ultimate 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 95 

Truth regarding the Real Constitution of Things, has exhibited 
less assurance and success when it came time to crawl painstak 
ingly out again to the same data from which he started. 

These two questions, then, What is the real Nature of 
Things? and, How does this Nature manage to become the 
things themselves and appear to us the world it does? which 
are the Alpha and Omega of philosophy, are explicitly raised 
by the Milesian School. And they are answered with a clear 
ness, an understanding of the problem, and a power of gen 
eralization quite equal to our own. To us, to be sure, from our 
vantage point at the summit of nearly twenty-five centuries of 
further analysis and meditation, it may seem at first thought 
rather odd and primitive ever to have supposed that the 
Universe could be reduced to Water or Air or the Boundless 
and reextracted therefrom by a simple process of separation 
into opposites or of rarefaction and condensation. But a 
moment s reflection will convince us that in relation to the 
data upon which they were founded, these guesses were quite 
as reasonable as our own. We have not learned to think 
any more to the point or more profoundly. We have col 
lected more data and sorted them out more carefully. We 
have invented more adequate means of cataloguing them. 
And we have made new attempts to organize them and to 
arrive at some comprehensive hypothesis regarding them, in 
the light of our more detailed analysis of the situation. But 
that is all. 

We should remember also that we ourselves have not reached 
the summit of all thinking. If the centuries slope away behind 
and below us, they also stretch above us towards unknown 
peaks. The process of investigation, of collecting and sorting 
out and cataloguing, and of framing new hypotheses to fit new 
analyses and associations of data, has not come to an end. 
Twenty-five hundred years hence our present scientific and 
philosophic systems will doubtless seem as immature and unso 
phisticated as the speculations of the Milesians appear to us 
to-day. The recently propounded Einstein theory, for ex 
ample, shows how complete a revolution may take place at any 
moment in our views regarding the nature of the physical 



96 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

world. The philosophers of that distant future may perhaps 
find it quite odd and primitive, too, that we could ever have 
believed that the Universe was a Mechanism, or that it was 
governed by a moral Purpose. To them ether vortices, ions 
and electrons, or mind-stuff or souls or selves may seem as 
lacking in subtlety as Water does to us. And even the theory 
which has been so much in vogue that the world can be reduceS 
to a flow of ideas in an Infinite Mind, or regarded as the Career 
and Experience of an Absolute Consciousness, may look to 
their eyes, for all we know to the contrary, like airy vaporing. 
It is better for us not to judge the past lest we, too, be judged 
by the future. 

Various designations have been applied to the Milesian 
philosophers, and for that matter to the early Greek thinkers 
in general. They have been called "physicists," because they 
appeared to later critics to be describing Reality in purely 
physical or material terms. Again, they are sometimes re 
ferred to as "monists," because they regarded the world with 
all its different phenomena as reducible to a single, simple 
principle like Water or Air. And they are also termed 
"hylozoists" on account of their belief that the World-Stuff 
was of itself alive and in motion. There is no objection to these 
characterizations so long as we keep it in mind that they rep 
resent, not the earlier philosophers opinions about themselves, 
but the judgment passed on them by their later critics and 
historians in the light of considerable development in the interim 
of analysis and speculation. To call the Milesian School 
"physicists" in our use of the word, for example, presupposes, 
if not an evolution of physics as a separate science which in 
their time had not yet taken place, at least a distinction of the 
notion of matter from that of form and law and life and soul, 
which it would never have occurred to them to make. In its 
earlier Greek sense, to be sure, they might have accepted the 
term, but then in its original meaning "physics" meant inter 
est in the Nature of Things in general or philosophy. But, as 
we understand it, the designation would have had no signifi 
cance for those to whom it was applied. In their own estima 
tion they were not "physicists" but philosophers. Their prob- 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 97 

lem was not what the physical side, as differentiated from the 
other aspects, of the Universe was like, but what the Universe 
as a whole, what Reality was like. When they spoke of Water, 
or the Indeterminate, or Air, they believed themselves to be 
describing not the nature of Matter as such, but the essence 
of the whole conglomerate mass twisting and writhing, teem 
ing with all sorts of forms, crawling with life, bubbling and 
bursting into passion and emotion and thought in human careers 
and history which we call Existence. 

Similarly to call them "hylozoists" is equally misleading. 
We apply it out of the knowledge that later on the concepts 
of Life and Consciousness and Matter were extricated from 
that of the World-Whole and divorced from one another, and 
that Matter came eventually in many systems to be regarded 
as in itself quite inert and dead. To many of us, indeed, it 
seems quite nai ve and surprising that Matter ever should have 
been thought of as alive. But the Milesians would never have 
suspected that it could be regarded otherwise, supposing even 
that they had ever laid any special stress upon the solid and 
spatial aspects of the world and thus even approached the 
notion of Matter as such. In order to make the term "hylo- 
zoism" comprehensible and acceptable to them as a description 
of their views, we should have had to acquaint them with the 
future course which speculation was to take. The term 
"monist" is even more deceptive. It is a modern invention 
suggested by much sad experience of "dualistic" and "plural 
istic" people who do not believe that the Universe is all of one 
piece and cut from the same cloth, but feel that it is a patch 
work or even crazy quilt of at least two and very likely more 
eternally independent and irreducible principles. It contrasts 
the Milesian School with more recent theories, and is not a 
term which, without having studied the history of subsequent 
philosophy, the School could have applied to themselves. It 
is much safer then, it seems to me, to avoid such tags and to 
stick to the simple geographical designation which the Mile 
sians themselves would have recognized. 

The philosophic preeminence of Miletus came to an end, as 
we have seen, with the fall of the city into the hands of the 



98 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

Persians. But Anaximenes and Anaximander had left pupils 
who kept the traditions and doctrines of the School alive. We 
shall later have occasion to note a reappearance of the Milesian 
teaching in a form modified by the new developments in philoso 
phy to which we are about to turn. The revival, however, will 
prove a side-issue of little importance. The main currents of 
thought were destined to run in fresh channels through new 
lands. 

But the Ionian cities had still to contribute two great think 
ers, Xenophanes and Heracleitus, to the history of philosophy 
before its center of gravity shifted, first to the Greek settle 
ments in Italy and Sicily, and then to Athens. The former, 
we may take up at once, as his exile at the age of twenty-five 
from his native city of Colophon, near Ephesus, and his emi 
gration to Sicily symbolize the transplantation of philosophy 
from Ionia to Magna Grecia. He seems to have spent much 
of his life on the island, and was at the Court of Hiero, tyrant 
of Syracuse, whose reign lasted from 478 to 467 B. C. . He 
lived to be over ninety-two years old. More exact dates in 
connection with his life and death it is impossible to establish. 

There was considerable reaction at the end of the Sixth 
Century against the over-civilization and luxury of the age, 
and it has been suggested that Xenophanes is best understood 
in the light of this movement. It is certain that he had the 
spirit of a reformer. In the fragments preserved to us of the 
poem in which he gave vent to his philosophical and other opin 
ions we find a sharp and very modern attack on the cult of the 
athletic hero and the sporting type to the neglect of brains and 
solid worth. And he inveighs against over-dressing and per 
fuming, and warns his readers against getting so drunk at 
dinner-parties that they are unable to get home alone, or allow 
ing their conversation to degenerate into empty babble about 
the "battles of Titans or Giants and Centaurs." 

But his chief claim to fame lies in his bold and unqualified 
attack upon the orthodox religious views of his day. It has 
the point, though it lacks the brevity and wit, of Voltaire s 
remark that if God created man in his own image man had 
returned the compliment. 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 99 

"Homer and Hesiod," he tells us, "have ascribed to the gods all 
things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealings and 
adulteries and deceivings of one another. . . . 

"But mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are, and 
have clothes like theirs, and voice and form. 

"Yes, and if oxen or lions had hands and could paint with their 
hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the 
forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their 
bodies in the image of their several kinds. 

"The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the 
Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair." 

The truth, so far as the truth in such matters can be ascer 
tained, is that there is 

"One god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form like 
unto mortals nor in thought. 

"H sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over. 

"But without toil he swayeth all things by the thought of his 
mird. 

"And he abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all; 
nor doth it befit him to go about now hither now thither." 

Until recently these verses were believed to indicate a belief 
in one God, as we to-day understand such a belief, and 
Xenophanes has been hailed by many modern historians of 
philosophy as the harbinger of a dawning monotheism. But 
this view is now generally discredited. Xenophanes more prob 
ably thought of his "one god the greatest among gods and 
men," abiding "ever in the same place, moving not at all" as 
merely the World- All, the Universe. He meant by it no more, 
nay even less, than did the Milesians by their World-Substance. 
For the Milesians reduced the variety of the world to mani 
festations of one principle, whereas Xenophanes, as we shall 
see in a moment, thought that there were two ultimate constitu 
ents, earth and water, of which all things were composed. 

Incidentally it is also well to remember in connection with 
his application of the term "god" to the World-All, that 
Anaximenes, too, had said that the World-Substance was di 
vine. And Anaximander had applied the term to the world- 
is Trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 119-120. 



100 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

systems which he conceived to be differentiated out of the 
Boundless, while Thales, we may recollect, had said that "all 
things were full of gods." 

So far then, Xenophanes seems to have made no advance 
over the speculations of his predecessors. The same is true 
when we consider such lines as "God sees all over, and hears 
all over," and "without toil he swayeth all things by the thought 
of his mind." Here, too, there is no reason to suppose that 
he had in mind anything very different from the view of the 
Milesian School. The world for him, as the World-Substance 
for them, was inherently full of motion and pregnant with life 
and consciousness, and was capable of evolving by its own 
innate powers into an everyday world of definite things and 
orderly processes, organic beings and reasoning minds. Ho 
is testifying not to a precocious monotheism, but is one more 
witness to that absence as yet in the Greek mind of any dis 
tinction of the ideas of matter and motion and life and con 
sciousness from one another. 

We have very little evidence as to how Xenophanes sup 
posed different things to come into being within the World- 
All. He tells us that "we all are born of earth and water, ; 
that "all things are earth and water that come into being 
and grow," and furthermore that "the mighty sea is father of 
clouds and of winds and of rivers." He was interested, too, 
like Anaximander, in the depth of the earth and said that 
"below it reaches down without a limit." 14 Compared with the 
speculations of Anaximander and Anaximenes, these opinions 
seem superficial and perfunctory. 

Indeed, it might be maintained that the really surprising 
and interesting thing about Xenophanes is not contained in 
his positive teaching at all. It lies rather in the boldness of 
his critical and destructive work, and in the fact that as early 
as the last part of the Sixth Century the established religious 
beliefs of the day could be with impunity so bluntly attacked 
and rejected. The moral sense, as we have already seen, was 
already aroused to the incompatibility of the theology of 
Homer and Hesiod with the newer vision of the ideal, and lib- 
i* Trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 120. 



SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 101 

eral and free thinking, as well as reforming, tendencies were 
obviously abroad. Preparation was not only afoot both for 
a purified theology like that of the poet ./Eschylus, but also 
for a religious skepticism such as we shall find when we come 
to the teachings of the philosopher Protagoras. 

Furthermore, there are in Xenophanes very interesting fore- 
shadowings not only of religious agnosticism, but of the later 
philosophic skepticism. He quite frankly suspected the valid 
ity not only of the speculations of other philosophers, but even 
of his own theories. He recognized the obscurity and diffi 
culty of the problem, and he felt that the answers he suggested 
were as tentative, and needed to be taken with as many grains 
of salt, as the solutions proposed by any one else. Philosophic 
"systems" in general were matters of conjecture rather than 
conviction, and his was simply one guess among others. 

"Let these," he says, apparently referring to his own views, 
"be taken as fancies something like the truth. There never was 
nor will be a man who has a certain knowledge about the gods 
and about all the things I speak of. Even if he should chance 
to say the complete truth, yet he himself knows not that it is 
so. But all may have their fancy." 14a 

Taken all in all, then, Xenophanes in spite of his edifying 
start comes to rather a dubious end. If we were to try to 
label him with modern tags, we might say that he was a 
vaguely pantheistic sort of person with a strong tinge of 
agnosticism. 

There is one more fragment of Xenophanes which may serve 
as a close to the present, and an introduction to the next chap 
ter. "Now, however," it runs, "I come to another topic, and 
I will show the way. They say that once on a time when a 
hound was badly treated, a passer-by pitied him, and said, 
Stop beating him for it is the soul of a dear friend ; I recog 
nized him on hearing his voice. This passage shows a 
familiarity with the belief in the Transmigration of Souls, 
which, as we have seen, was one of the central tenets of the 

i^aFrs. 35, 34 (trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophers, 3rd ed., p. 121). 
is Frs. 18 (trans. Fairbanks, First Philosophers of Greece, p. 70). 



102 SCHOOL OF MILETUS, FIRST PHILOSOPHERS 

Orphics. -It has been suggested that it is a deliberate hit at 
the philosopher Pythagoras, a contemporary of Xenophanes, 
who made much of the doctrine in his teachings. Let us then 
follow the way pointed out by Xenophanes and pass to an 
other topic the philosophy of the Pythagoreans. 



CHAPTER IV 
PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 

THERE is no figure in the history of philosophy so mysteri 
ously shrouded in the phosphorescent mists of legend as the 
person of Pythagoras. Revered by his more immediate fol 
lowers as a superior being, he acquired among later disciples 
the majesty of a demi-god. He was variously reputed to be 
the son of Apollo in his present existence, and to have been the 
child of Hermes in a prior incarnation. 

Like the Bodhisattvas on the threshold of Nirvana and 
Buddhahood, he was said to possess through the grace of his 
parent, Hermes, the memory of all his past existences. As for 
his teachings, they were derived straight from his other father, 
Apollo, through the lips of the Delphic oracle. And it was re 
ported that in the flesh he had descended into Hades. He was 
also credited with other scarcely less distant but more mun 
dane journey ings which had acquainted him at first hand with 
all the lore of the Phoenicians, the Chaldeans, the Magi, the 
Hindoos, the Arabians, and the Egyptians. 

It is highly improbable that, even in an age when super 
natural fathers were plentiful and direct confabulation with 
the divine was frequent, a commonplace personality could have 
attracted to itself so many and so flattering legends. It is 
true that Pythagoras own adherence to mystical beliefs and 
rites like those of the Orphics and the votaries of the Delian 
Apollo, made his exaltation by his followers almost a bit of 
routine. In them transmigration, the partial incarnation of 
the divine in human nature, and ecstatic union with the deity 
through mystical sacrament and ritual, were a matter of course. 
Still, the myth suggests that Pythagoras was a remarkable 
and distinguished man, and such historic fact as we can gather 
goes to bear out this assumption. 

103 



104 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 

He was born at Samos, probably in the last half of the Sixth 
Century. His dislike of the rule of Polycrates, who became 
tyrant of Samos in 532 B. C., caused him to emigrate to south 
ern Italy, where at Croton he gathered about him a company 
of disciples and formed them into a religious order. This 
Order soon became powerful and influential and, like many later 
religious foundations of which history readily reminds us, 
tried to take a hand in politics and interfere in the government 
of the state. The School became a target for political abuse 
and disorder, so much so that the Master himself had to leave 
Croton, and take refuge in the city of Metapontium, where 
he died. By the middle of the Fifth Century the political 
activities of the Pythagoreans had become so obnoxious that 
the opposition rose, burned their lodge or monastery, killed 
many of them, and drove out the rest. Thus the Order became 
diffused through Magna Graecia and Greece proper. 

As we have said, the Pythagoreans were a religious com 
munity, drawing their inspiration and doctrine irom the mys 
tical side of Greek religion. Their interest centered in the 
purification and the redemption of the soul from the taint of 
the physical and the prison of the body, in her final release 
from the wheel of transmigration and rebirth, and her reunion 
with the Divine. To effect these ends the Pythagoreans offered 
the old mystical means of ceremonial purgations and absti 
nences, the avoidance of certain food and clothing, and the 
performance of certain ritual acts. Among them, as among 
the adherents of all religions, there were many doubtless who 
stopped with the dead letter of observance, but there were 
doubtless many also who reached the spirit which gave them 
a new and deeper life. 

The exact source of the Pythagorean religious mysticism 
is somewhat in dispute. It has been argued that just as the 
Orphics reformed and purified the older cult of Dionysus out 
of which they sprang, so the Pythagorean Society might be 
regarded as essentially a reformed branch of Orphism, which 
sought to correct and supplement the tendency towards mere 
ritualism and formalism in the parent body by emphasizing 
the need of a real rule of life, not only in outward observances, 



PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 105 

but in thought and meditation. 1 But it has also been sug 
gested that the fountainhead of Pythagoras religious beliefs 
lay not so much in Orphism as in the worship of the Delian 
Apollo, who had become, like Dionysus, the center of a "re 
ligion of redemption" with mystical rites of purification dat 
ing back it may be to Minoan Crete. 2 

However that may be, the Order, in addition to enjoying 
the practice of a formal ritual of purification, like the Orphics 
and the Apollonian worship, also divided the sheep from the 
goats on broader and more spiritual lines than that of mere 
church membership. They distinguished three types of men 
in general ; the lovers of pleasure and gain, the lovers of prac 
tical activity, competition, worldly success, and honor, and, 
best of all, the lovers of contemplation and wisdom, who were 
devoted to the knowledge of the highest and deepest things 
of life. In fact, the term "philosophy" or "love of wisdom" 
is reported to have been first used by Pythagoras. And it was 
perhaps this third way of life, inspired and devoted to the 
philosophic interest, rather than any mere routine of cere 
monial abstinences and participation in sacraments, which he 
regarded as religion pure and undefiled, making clean the heart 
within and preparing the spirit for mystical salvation and 
reunion with the Godhead. Such a view receives support from 
the fact that for Plato, as we shall soon see, who was much 
influenced by Pythagorean ideas, philosophy had precisely this 
high and solemn office. 

But whether the interest in scientific and philosophical in 
vestigation and speculation had in the eyes of the Pythagorean 
this religious value and function, or was simply, like the mod 
ern Jesuit s occupation with similar interests, additional and 
subsidiary to a central and separate religious life and experi 
ence, the fact of that interest is undoubted. Like the most 
distinguished and learned of modern religious orders, the 
Pythagoreans, also, were preeminent in their application to 

i Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 198. 

2Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Tholes to Plato, pp. 40-41, Early Greek 
Philosophy, 3r<J ed., p. 90. 



106 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 

the problems of science particularly of music, mathematics, 
medicine, and astronomy and of philosophy. 

The philosophy of the Pythagoreans is largely indebted to 
the Milesian School. Pythagoras is said to have been in his 
youth, before he left Samos, a pupil of Anaximander, and he 
was a contemporary of Anaximenes. Like Anaximander he 
believed that the substratum of all things was the Unlimited, 
but he seems to have characterized this Unlimited as Air, and 
like Anaximenes to have conceived the world as supported and 
animated by the inbreathing of this Air in the midst of which 
it floated. 

Pythagorean science was also in part sprung from Milesian 
sources. The so-called "Pythagorean" proposition in geom 
etry had already been debated in Miletus, and some of the astro 
nomical ideas of the Order suggest the influence of Anaxi- 
mander s theories. 

The important and original contribution to philosophy 
comes, however, in connection with the Pythagorean answer 
to what we have called the Second Commandment of philosophy 
to show by what means and process all the richness and variety 
of the manifold and parti-colored world arises from the simple 
and undifferentiated World-Substance. Anaximander had sug 
gested a process of separation of pairs of opposites, Anaxi 
menes, one of condensation and rarefaction. The Pythagore 
ans hold in a way to Anaximander s notion of opposites, but 
these opposites are not conceived by them as eventually and 
secondarily produced within and by the Unlimited, like suc 
cessive or even simultaneous births of dissimilar and quarrel 
some twins. On the contrary, the opposition is a fundamental 
and eternal one, of one primary World-Principle with another. 
From all eternity, so to speak, the Unlimited finds itself con 
fronted and conjoined with another Principle, that of Limit 
and Determination, which exists outside and beside it. It is 
only through the action of this Principle upon the Unlimited 
that the interminable vacancy and monotony of the latter can 
be broken up, and mapped, and plotted, and specified out into 
a world of separate, distinct, individual things, each fenced 
within the bounds of its particular and specific self. The 



PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 107 

world, then, is the result of the interaction of these two fac 
tors. In a word, the Universe is a measuring out or off of the 
Unlimited by the Limited. 

But this is very vague. It leaves two questions pressing for 
an answer. In the first place, is there any rule for determin 
ing how much of the Unlimited must be measured out in order 
to make definite objects] 1 And secondly, how can different 
kinds of objects all be composed of one and the same inde 
terminate stuff? What is the difference, for instance, between 
a receipt for a cat and that for a dog? 

An answer to the first question was suggested to the Pythago 
reans by their studies in music and medicine. They knew when 
they played the lyre that musical notes were vibrations im 
parted to the air by the quivering strings ; and they were also 
familiar by experiment with the fact that those intervals in 
the scale which struck their ears as melodious and concordant 
were always associated with invariable arithmetical proportions 
in the length of one string to another. Further scrutiny 
showed them that the four perfectly concordant notes of which 
the lyre was capable were in such proportion that the two 
middle notes stood in the relation, also, of arithmetical means 
to the two extremes. The means, then, might be regarded as 
mixtures, according to an invariable arithmetical formula, of 
the extremes. 

This notion of the mean as a balanced and harmonious 
mixture of opposites was reinforced by the Pythagoreans med 
ical theories. The body was obviously a combination of oppo 
site qualities of dry here, and moist there, of heat in one place, 
and coolness in another. When these qualities were harmoni 
ously balanced, when there was a "happy" mean of hot and 
cold, etc., the body was healthy and perfect and in a state of 
well-being. If there w r as a disturbance of the balance and 
one opposite upset the proportion by excess or deficiency, then 
there was disease. 

The application of these studies in music and medicine to 
the philosophical situation was obvious enough. It was but 
a short, easy step to say that all sound, solid, clear-cut things 
owe, like healthy bodies, their definite and articulate nature to 



108 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 

a harmony and balance of the factors which compose and sus 
tain them. Every object was a correct and shapely mean be 
tween extremes of possible lopsidedness and deformity in one 
direction or another. The Universe, then, was the stable and 
well ordered, the neatly mapped and plotted and fenced affair 
it was, because to each of its component parts, to each cat, 
and dog, and tree, and blade of grass, "just enough" for that 
particular kind of thing, and not "too much" or "too little" 
had been allotted. 

We should by this time be almost prepared for the answer 
which the Pythagoreans gave to the second question the ques 
tion which asks by what principle that balanced and happy 
"middle term" which means the lithe and purring cat, is dif 
ferentiated from that golden mean which manifests itself in 
the faithful, barking watch-dog. The reply might almost rise 
to our lips unprompted. The measure of the one is different 
from the measure of the other. Each thing is a specific num 
ber, a specific amount, of the Indeterminate. Every kind of 
object has its own particular, mathematically expressible re 
ceipt or formula. The differences between things are then 
essentially differences in amount and number. In a word, the 
Limited, the Principle of Determination which divides up and 
lays out the Unlimited as an ordered and definite Universe is 
Number, and different things are, if one looks beyond their 
faces into their hearts, really nothing but different Numbers. 

Before relegating this doctrine to the realm of fantastic and 
incomprehensible theories, let us stop and ponder it a moment. 
When we think of a number we generally have in mind simply 
the Roman or Arabic numeral by which we sum it up and sym 
bolize it. For instance, if we think of the number "eight" 
there comes before our eyes simply the figure 8, or VIII. But 
this figure is nothing in itself. It stands for something, for 
eight something, or at least for eight anything. It means 
among other things the ability to point your finger at a line 
of objects and count them out. This line may be a line of 
all sorts of things, or, if one is abstractedly minded, it may 
be simply a line of plots or positions in empty space which 
things might occupy. But in any case the plot of space occu- 



PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 109 

pied by the series is the sum, so to speak, of the plots occupied 
by each member of the line. 

Or, again, any one of the plots occupied by any member 
of the series may be subdivided into smaller plots that shrink 
eventually into points. And we may finally come to the con 
clusion that it would take such or such a number of little plots 
or points to fill in the outlines of any given object. It might 
take, for instance, thirty-seven of them to fill in, or rather 
out, the contours of a pug-dog, and two hundred and fifty to 
complete the measure of a man. In that case the nature of the 
pug would be the number 37; the essence of man, the number 
250. And the difference between the "just enough" which 
makes that perfect and harmonious balance which we call a 
pug, and that which constitutes the proportion and equilibrium 
known as man, would be simply the arithmetical difference be 
tween the numbers 37 and 250. 

Now this seems to be very much the way by which Pythago 
reans came to the conclusion that things were really Numbers. 
They appear to have thought of numbers geometrically and 
to have used arrangements of dots in different forms as numeri 
cal symbols, along with, or instead of, the letters of the alpha 
bet which the Greek commonly used. Aristotle tells us that 
Eurytus, a Pythagorean of the early Fourth Century, used to 
illustrate the "nature of horse, man and plant { by means of 
pebbles or counters," 3 in very much the same way, it would 
seem, as aesthetic station-masters to-day adorn the railway line 
at intervals with the names of their stations, or hospitable sen 
timents, or even symbolical figures, compounded of variegated 
plants or of the chaster and less frail material of whitewashed 
stones. Indeed, the commentator Alexander reports of Eury 
tus method that "smearing the wall with plaster and sketching 
on it the figures of a man and a plant, he proceeded to fix some 
of the counters in the outline of his face, some in that of the 
hands, and some in that of the other parts, and so he com 
pleted the outline of the man he had imaged by a number of 

8 Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Thales to Plato, p. 90. 



110 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 
counters equal in number to the units which he said defined 



man." 



Later, after the impossibility of constructing the line, and 
hence the plane or the solid, out of pure mathematical points 
had been recognized, the Pythagoreans seem to have modified 
their views. Things were still ultimately composed of geo 
metrical figures to be sure, but those figures and the objects 
which they constituted were no longer regarded as actually 
numbers (that is, aggregates of points) but only as like num 
bers. This, new twist in their teaching made possible all sorts 
of fantastic applications. Many things, such as moral quali 
ties, social institutions, etc., which could scarcely be regarded 
as composed of mathematical points might be fancied to have 
some picturesque or mysterious affinity with this number rather 
than that. Thus we find a square number assigned to justice, 
and the number five, which is the union of the first odd with 
the first even combination of units, applied to marriage. 

The religious beliefs and the philosophical speculations of 
the Pythagoreans could not exist side by side in the same indi 
vidual minds and the same school of thought without infecting 
each other to some extent. Just as the confluent waters of 
the Rhone and the Saone, so distinct from one another in color 
at their conjunction, soon mingle and merge, so the two ele 
ments in Pythagoreanism, drawn apparently from quite dif 
ferent sources, rapidly blended. The process was doubtless 
facilitated by the essential congeniality of the two lines of 
thought. Both were dualistic and emphasized the conflict of 
opposites in the world. The Orphic strain set the soul in 
violent opposition to the body, as a principle of good at war 
with one of evil, while philosophic speculation found Limit 
and Determination forever at variance with the Indeterminate. 

The result was that the moral dualism was reinforced with 
a philosophic foundation, and the philosophic doctrine of the 
conflict of opposites took on a moral and religious significance. 
As the world split asunder into pairs of arithmetical qualities 
(which in the end were reduced to the fundamental opposition 
of the Limited and the Unlimited), all those on one side of the 

* Quoted by Burnet, op. cit., p. 91. 



PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 111 

line of cleavage tended to be regarded as better than those on 
the other. The fundamental contrast of good and bad was 
already patent ; so, also, that of the soul to the body was obvi 
ously one of the better to the worse. And the dry, the bright, 
and the warm were pleasanter, so far at any rate as weather 
and many other important considerations were concerned, than 
the wet, the dark, and the cold. So, too, the straight was 
easier and neater and honester than the crooked, and activity 
was to be preferred to inertia, or again the square is a trig, 
the oblong a lopsided, figure. Whatever the logical character 
of any antithesis, a reason could always be found for regarding 
one of its members as more respectable, the other as more dis 
reputable, than its opposite. 

Again, this pervasive contrast of good and evil in the world 
found in the opposition of Limit and the Indeterminate a ready 
and appropriate foundation. The idea of the Infinite, it will 
be remembered, did not strike the Hellenic as it has struck 
the modern mind. It suggested not perfection but formless 
ness and confusion. It was the limited and the definite in 
things which gave them character and perfection. Only as 
they were distinct and defined did they have a nature to realize 
and express. The logical, then, already suggested a moral, 
opposition between the principle of Limit and that of Inde- 
termination. The Indeterminate was the natural and inev 
itable candidate for the principle of evil and imperfection, 
Limit and Number for the principle of good. 

Now everything, whether good or bad, actually is, or at least 
is like, some number. But how is it possible that the things 
which are undesirable and evil should be composed of or modeled 
after that which is the principle of goodness and perfection? 
A scrutiny of the number series gives the answer. In that 
series a most convenient and suggestive opposition immediately 
reveals itself. We make a distinction between odd and even 
numbers. This distinction arises out of the quite different 
attitudes assumed by the two series towards the process of 
bisection. Every even number is naturally addicted to the 
habit of bisection. All may be bisected at least once without 
resistance or protest, and will go on taking "just one more" 



112 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 

till some odd number appears on the scene and arrests them. 
If left, however, to the dictates of their even nature they go on 
bisecting and are soon increased to Falstaffian proportions 
below the line. Infinity alone can bound their capacity and 
slake their thirst. They display, that is, a propensity and 
sometimes a passion for the Unlimited and Indeterminate. 

The even numbers, then, will always "go the limit" set by 
the odd, and are often literally beyond it. But the odd have 
principles which forbid indulgence in bisection and dalliance 
with the Unlimited. If they are forced to it by some over- 
zealous admirer of arithmetic, the result is apt to be an im 
proper, vulgar fraction and a "hang-over." Essentially limited 
in nature, they make it their chief mission in mathematical life 
to prohibit and suppress in others the bisection which they 
are incapable of enjoying themselves. Many a pleasant proc 
ess of division is stopped, many an even number is kept from 
going entirely to pieces, by their interference. Nay more, 
each even number whose bisection they interrupt is straightway 
converted by them into two odd ones. All in all, if the even 
numbers are the Cavaliers, the odd are the Puritans, of arith 
metic. 

So it is that the even numbers by their addiction to bisection 
betray the cloven hoof. They are "limbs of Satan," in close 
alliance with the Indeterminate. And being already in them 
selves so full of the devil, they make fit material and filling 
for his works. It is with them that the worse member in each 
pair of opposites is indubitably stuffed. Scratch the crooked, 
or the damp, or the oblong, or the feminine, and you will surely 
find their Tartar "even" nature. The better member of the 
pair, on the other hand a true straight line, or a dry, bright 
day, or a "well-rounded" square, or a real man is some re 
spectable odd number, the product pure and undefiled of Limit 
and Determination and integrity and good form. 

The general development of Pythagoreanism and the modi 
fications and embellishments which it received at the hands of 
its various adherents and exponents, it is very difficult, and for 
our purposes perhaps unprofitable, to follow. We may, how 
ever, note the view that the immediate successors of Pythagoras 



PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 113 

tended to minimize and eliminate the religious and mystical 
elements in his teaching, and to emphasize and develop philo 
sophical and scientific speculation. 5 The Pythagorean doc 
trine, for example, current in the time of Plato, that the soul 
was the harmony of the various parts and functions of the 
body, follows naturally enough from the views about the Mean 
and Number which we have just been discussing. But it is 
quite out of keeping with the religious belief that the soul is 
antagonistic to and imprisoned in the body, and is reincar 
nated in one new life after another. This way of looking 
at the matter may help explain the unembarrassed way in which 
during the Fourth Century Pythagoreanism as a philosophy 
disappeared within the portals of the School of Plato never 
to reemerge. 

However, the religious side of Pythagoreanism, or as we 
might say, the Pythagorean version of Orphism, was kept alive 
by some members of the School. And if it was discredited and 
scorned by the philosophically and scientifically minded branch 
of the Society, it lived to taste a splendid revenge. It was to 
come into its own again, riding on the crest of the swelling 
wave of mysticism which inundated the Graeco-Roman world in 
the First Century B. C. To it, rather than to the scientific 
and philosophical attainments of the School, were due the 
revival of the name and the mysterious prestige of the Master, 
in the so-called Neo-Pythagorean movement. 

Besides their work in music and medicine and mathematics, 
the Pythagoreans made a distinguished contribution to as 
tronomy. Pythagoras himself seems to have held to Anaxi- 
mander s three-ring theory of hoops of fire, lunar, solar, and 
stellar, revolving about the earth. And apparently he thought 
of these rings as revolving in a musical relation to one another 
like that of the intervals between the concordant notes of the 
lyre. This is the origin of our well-known phrase "the music 
of the spheres." 

To later members of the School, however, it occurred that 
the earth was not the center of the universe, but itself revolved 
along with the other planets about some central point. This 

o Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 86. 



114 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 

point, in their estimation, was not the sun (which they reckoned 
among the planets) but what they called the central fire. We 
cannot see this fire because the face of the earth on which we 
live is always turned away from it, just as the other side of 
the moon is always invisible to us. They also assumed a body 
called the "counter-earth," which like the central fire, and 
for the same reasons, was always beyond our ken. But its 
shadow is visible in the eclipses of the moon, to explain which, 
apparently, its existence was assumed. 

* Let us now conclude our discussion of the Pythagoreans by 
noting such new turns as they may seem to have given to the 
development of philosophical speculation. The most obvious 
novelty perhaps is their dualistic suggestion that the world is 
not all of one piece, but must be referred to two equally fun 
damental and opposed Principles. To the Milesian School 
it did not occur that there could be more than one World-Sub 
stance or Principle. The great step forward of the earlier 
philosophers, that indeed which conferred upon their specu 
lations the title of philosophy, lay in their sudden realization 
and grasp of the surface unity of the Universe. The World 
at any rate is one Fact ; the sum total of existence is a single 
thing. And the singleness of its face they transferred quite 
naively to its heart, accepting as a matter of course that there 
was only one Principle at the basis of all things, and asking 
only whether that Principle was Water or Air or what not. 
Even Xenophanes, who had suggested that the World was 
made of two kinds of stuff, earth and water, seems to have 
been kept by his pantheistic musings and agnostic doubts from 
ever pressing the question to a point where he would have been 
forced to choose between a one substance theory like that of 
the Milesians, or some sort of dualism. He, too, was engrossed 
with the vision of the World as one sum and aggregate of 
things. 

But the attention of the Pythagoreans was drawn from the 
very start to the diversities and contradictions on the face of 
things. They saw their world riven asunder on every side 
by oppositions, logical, moral, and perceptual, of ideas, values, 
and natural phenomena. When they looked more closely at 



PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 115 

these antitheses, they saw, not, like Anaximander, some sort of 
indefinite Unity behind them in which all were merged and 
swallowed up, but rather more and deeper opposition, till 
finally Reality was cleft to its very roots, and fell apart into 
the two antithetical World-Principles which we have been dis 
cussing. 

Henceforth the question whether Reality was at heart One 
or Many was to be a philosophic problem of the first impor 
tance. And the dualistic reply which the Pythagoreans gave 
when they raised the question was to exert great influence in 
the succeeding centuries of ancient philosophy. 

Furthermore, the Pythagoreans not only mothered if in 
deed they did not father the idea that the World was to be 
explained by the interaction of two opposite principles, but 
they also made a suggestion, accepted and developed by sub 
sequent philosophers, as to what those two principles were. 
And in so doing they added two new and indispensable 



cepts to the philosophic tool-shop, notably the concept of"\ 
"Form" as distinguished from that of "Matter." 

The Milesians, as we have seen, were apparently unconscious 
that this distinction made any philosophic difference. Prac 
tically, of course, they used it every day of their lives, as any 
intelligence must which is human and whose experience is not 
a chaos. They recognized the similarities of things, and 
grouped them under the same or diverse species. They made 
different materials into the same form, as when they fashioned 
bronze or gold or ivory or marble into a statue. And they 
molded the same material into different forms, gold into a 
coin, or a ring, or a cup, marble into a bath or a column. But 
they did not think of the distinction between the "Form" and 
the "Matter" of a thing as something which perhaps bit deep 
into the inmost reality of the object and might even reach that 
core of things to which their speculations were seeking to 
penetrate. Form and Matter were for them superficial phases 
which were not essentially contrasted, but were soon lost and 
dissolved in the unity of the one living, moving, developing 
Thing which lay so close beneath the surface variety of the 
world. 



116 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 

The Pythagoreans, however, evoked the two concepts into 
separate and distinct life and made them philosophically sig 
nificant. v The Number which defined the space and quantity 
of any given thing was, as we have seen, literally its Form 
was in fact an aggregate of points or dots taking on the shape 
of the object in question. The difference between things was 
a difference of Form only. * It was the enumerating Number, 
the enclosing Figure, which made this plot of space a man, and 
that a tree. In the same way, the Unlimited simply provided 
the wherewithal for enclosure and enumeration. It was the 
medium on which the points or dots were laid out or impressed. 
In other words, it was the material which was measured out 
according to this or that number to take on this or that shape. 
Without it there would have been nothing to arrange the dots 
in, or to impress them on. Numbers and figures would ha\e 
had to remain purely abstract and purely imaginary. The 
lion would have been no more fearsome than the unicorn, and 
there would have been no land but fairyland. *In a word, if 
Limit and Number gave its shape to the world and determined 
the forms of all that dwell therein, it was the Unlimited whici 
turned these shapes, otherwise fantastic and "unreal," into .1 
tangible, concrete, solid, energetic, "real" Universe. The Un 
limited was the matter of which things are made, just as* Num 
bers were the forms in which they were molded. 

We can see how easily this notion of the shape or figure of 
an object as something distinct from the matter which takes 
the shape in question, might develop into a wider and pro- 
founder view. After all, things do not differ from one another 
in point of shape alone, but in many other respects. A treo 
is different from a man not only in size and figure, but also 
in the uses to which it can be put. Its total value and sig 
nificance in the world is quite different. It is defined differ 
ently. It has its own character or nature of "tree-ness." And 
it is this character that is, all which is summed up in tho 
logical concept of tree that makes the concrete plots of exist 
ence in which it embodies itself a forest of particular tree? 
rather than a crowd of individual men. Form has now passed 
from a merely physical to a logical significance. It is no longer 



PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 117 

simply the outer shape, but the total definable character of 
an object. This further development of the meaning of Form, 
and the great importance of the Pythagorean distinction be 
tween Form and Matter we shall realize when we come to dis 
cuss the Platonic and the Aristotelian systems. 

We take leave, then, of the Pythagoreans, feeling that 
philosophy has made a notable advance. It has begun to dis 
sect the World, and it has made a startling discovery about the 
anatomy of the Universe. Reality is not all one inside, but 
it has an internal apparatus which presents rather a compli 
cated appearance. There, for instance, is Matter, and there, 
rather closely adhering to Matter but still obviously a distinct 
organ with a distinct function, is Form. There, too, is the 
Soul hitherto not clearly differentiated and localized, but now 
discovered to be a separate part of Reality with distinctive 
marks of its own and indeed displaying a marked antipathy 
for the physical aspect of the Universe. 

Again, we find an interesting process going on by which two 
or three sciences are being "budded off," like young polyps 
or potatoes from a parent organism. Music is bulging out 
here, medicine and astronomy and mathematics there. They 
have not yet broken through the skin of the all-inclusive 
philosophic interest, but it is obvious that nuclei have formed 
about which more specialized and detached interests have begun 
to gather and grow. That they will eventually break out and 
away, and the form which they will take, can now be predicted. 



CHAPTER V 
HERACLEITUS 

JUST a hundred years separate Heracleitus from Thales. 
Born at Ephesus some time in the latter half of the Seventh 
Century, he was in his prime about 500 B. C., and it is prob 
able that he lived to see the battle of Marathon, and perhaps 
that of Salamis. Of his work we possess only fragments, and 
these are written in a style which already in antiquity had 
gained him the title of "the obscure." By birth an aristocrat 
of the aristocrats the religious title and office of "king" seems 
to have been hereditary in his family he was himself, a later 
biographer 1 tells us, an arrogant and haughty man. For the 
"people" and democratic government he had a keen disdain, 
founded not wholly upon the prejudice of his class, but in part 
at any rate upon a very just appreciation of their faults. Cer 
tainly he had estimated quite correctly what has proved to be 
a constant and apparently incorrigible petulance in the tem 
per of democracy at all times and places, when, apropos of the 
exile of his friend Hermodorus, he put into the mouths of his 
fellow-Ephesians the cry, "We will have none who is best among 
us ; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among 
others." 2 We may wonder what he would have said had he 
known that in later times this sentiment would come to be re 
garded by some as the last word in the art of government, and 
that the voice which uttered it would be called the voice of God. 

For such middle-class nonconformity, half ritualistic, half 
evangelical, as Orphism he had also scant respect. The Orphics, 

1 Diogenes Laertius. 

2 Fragment 114. (The translations of Heracleitus are all taken from 
Burnet s Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 132-141.) 

118 



HERACLEITUS 119 

he tells us, are to be classed along with "night-walkers" and 
"mystery-mongers." "The mysteries practised among men are 
unholy mysteries." 3 The phallic rites with which Dionysus was 
worshiped are shameless, praying to images as senseless as in 
voking the walls of a house, and purification by the cleansing 
blood of a sacred animal as foolish as trying to wash off mud 
with mud. The "orthodox" Homeric theology, however, fared 
no better at his hands than at those of Xenophanes. Homer he 
tells us "should be turned out of the lists and whipped," 4 and 
for Hesiod he had as little use. "The wisest man" he felt was 
"an ape compared to God, just as the most beautiful ape is 
ugly compared to man." God is all things, as Xenophanes 
had declared. He is "day and night, winter and summer, war 
and peace, surfeit and hunger ; but he takes various shapes, just 
as fire, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the 
savor of each." 

Still, for reasons which we shall point out later, Heracleitus 
considered Xenophanes superficial and second-rate. Nor had 
he any higher opinion of Pythagoras. Both of them he dis 
missed with the remark that a varied learning does not inculcate 
understanding, else it would have taught them something. 7 In- 
deed he seems to have felt that all of his predecessors had been 
quite in the dark, and that it had been reserved for him to dis j 
cover and enunciate the first philosophic system of any account. 
This conceit was in part justified, for his interpretation of the 
world is regarded by many as by far the most brilliant and 
profound philosophy of the two centuries which intervene be^ 
tween Thales and the teachings of Democritus and Plato. 

In their table of the ten fundamental oppositions the Pythag 
oreans had already included the antithesis of Rest and Motion. 
In their preoccupation, however, with the relations of the Lim 
ited and Unlimited, which their interest in music and mathe 
matics disposed them to regard as the central philosophic 
problem, they had passed over the other antitheses as of sec 
ondary importance. 

3Fr. 125. *Fr. 119. 5 Fr. 98,99. e Fr. 36. 7 Fr. 16. 



120 HERACLEITUS 

But the interweaving of change and changelessness through 
out the pattern and fabric of the world, though it might for the 
moment escape the attention of the philosopher, had already 
arrested the vision and moved the imagination of the prophet 
and the poet. Man had measured the transitoriness of his own 
existence against the fixity of nature and the deathlessness of 
the blessed Gods, and Homer and Hesiod and the Gnomic poets 
had divined the tragedy of a creature whose mind could move 
for a brief space, free and godlike, amid things eternal, whilst 
its body must stumble a little while and fall at last amid the 
wreckage of Time. 

The conflicting magic, too, of rest and restlessness is as old 
as the human soul, whose varying moods of zest and weariness., 
its "bugles of dawn" and "flutes of rest" alternately enchant. 
Desire wavers like Odysseus between the longing for final home 
coming and the thirst for fresh adventure. The Gods of the 
one mood are throned in unshaken serenity high above all the 
noise and the running to and fro, rescued from Time and 
Change. Their seats are upon the "pillours of Eternity," afar 
off in some bright stormless space unreached by wind and frost 
and rain, bathed in steady and unclouded light. The Gods of 
the other are no calm Olympians. Their dwelling is the storm 
cloud, the surge, the hurricane, the misty land seen through the 
driving rain, the beckoning finger of smoke spied over the tree- 
tops of the unknown forests, the cave of Polyphemus, the 
Sirens Isle. For they are, Dionysus-like, just the wine, the 
intoxication, the exhilaration, the inexhaustible novelty of the 
ever-unfolding adventure. 

With the contrast, then, of change and changelessness ever 
before his eyes, and his desire continually torn by their appeal 
to the intermingling moods of a spirit half eager and half 
weary, it was inevitable that as soon as man began to guess 
behind the face of things a heart, he should ask himself whether 
permanence or change was the truer index to its nature. Is 
the essence of all things restlessness or rest? Is Reality chang 
ing or changeless ? Is it, to use the language of modern science, 
dynamic or static, energy or matter? Is it, as the modern 
philosopher might say, an Activity and Process, or is it a Sub- 



HERACLEITUS 121 

stance? Is it, to employ the terms which the Greek used, Be 
coming or Being? . . . 

It is perhaps from the quarter of the Milesian School that 
we may best directly approach the Heracleitan theory that . 
Reality is essentially Change rather than a Substance unaltered v 
by its apparent changes. The Milesians had unwittingly raised 
a question as important as it was difficult. In reducing the 
variety of the world to a single principle they had assumed 
both that a simple substance like Water or Air can become dif 
ferent things, and that it can somehow at the same time remain 
itself and still continue to be Water or Air underneath all its 
apparent transformations. To speak more technically, they 
had on their hands without handling it the problem of the 
relation of the One to the Many, and of the persistence of 
Identity through Change. 

Now, a little reflection upon this problem might easily breed 
a certain skepticism of mind. Is it thinkable, we might ask, 
that any given substance should of its own initiative, and with 
out thejadmixfure^ turn into 
something else? Is it any more reasonable to suppose that 
Water really can surreptitiously turn itself into a suit of 
clothes, for instance, than that a red bandana handkerchief 
can actually within the privacy of a conjurer s tophat become 
a white rabbit or a glass of beer? This, however, represents 
only half the strain to which our credulity is put. For we are 
also asked to believe that the World-Substance remains the 
same during and in spite of its transformations. The suit of 
clothes is really Water all the time that Water is supposed to 
have become a suit of clothes. The red bandana handkerchief 
is both itself and also a white rabbit and a glass of beer all at 
once. The One is both One and Many, Realityjs simultaneously v ^ 
both the single homogeneous thing it really is and the many 
different things it reallyjj^not. 

The Milesian theory, then/that all things are made of one 
and the same single World-Substance might on investigation 
look suspiciously like a mere juggler s trick, and the marvel- V 
ousness of its feat was bound to inspire criticism and distrust. 
We would seem, indeed, to be confronted with a dilemma. If 



122 HERACLEITUS 

the Universe is really always the same single substance, then it 
is not really many different things and does not really change. 
In other words, the many, variety, alteration, motion are 
merely matters of false opinion. On the other hand, if change 
and variety are real there can be no unchanging self-identical 
Unity at the heart of things. 

As we shall see later, the Eleatic School apparently accepted 
this dilemma as absolute, and faced frankly the consequences 
of clinging to the theory that the World is a single self- 
identical Substance. Whether Heracleitus really faced the diffi 
culty at all, and deliberately sought to escape it, we cannot say. 
Certainly he was not caught on either of its horns. Both his 
own words and the testimony of later philosophers show how his 
imagination was obsessed by the changing, impermanent, diver- , 
sjfied, kaleidoscopic character of the spectacle of existence. 1 
[Becoming, multiplicity, the ceaseless transformation and inter- 
I change of the Many, are no superficial misinterpretation of the 
/ nature of the Universe but are rather its very self and essence. 
I But at the same time, Heracleitus was just as convinced as the 
/Milesians or the Eleatic Parmenides that the Universe is one. 
^He would not entertain the Pythagorean supposition that two 
equally fundamental and absolutely opposed Principles were 
needed to explain things. He felt like Anaximander that eve^il 
the deepest and most irreconcilable opposition was grounded \ 
in an underlying unity. His problem, then, might well have i 
--"teen to find some sort of Oneness which, unlike the unity of the 
fixed elemental substances or unities proposed by the Milesians 
and Xenophanes, should preserve and explain, instead of de- \ 
stroying, the reality of Change and Multiplicity. 

The solution occurred to him perhaps even before the prob 
lem was articulate in his mind. And it was very likely this sud 
den insight which in his opinion distinguished him from his 
predecessors as the first pmosopher of any consequence. It 
seems to have flashed across him that this new kind of Oneness 
which he sought lay plain and bright before the eyes of every 
man who had the mind to understand the witness of his senses. 
To see it from without a man had only to look at the fire on his 
hearth. To feel it from within he had only to give heed to his 



HERACLEITUS 123 

own consciousness of living and experiencing. Life and experi 
ence are forever going on, different at each new instant, crowded 
with variety and novelty. Yet they are somehow one and the 
same life and experience and career through all their changes 
and episodes. So, too, fire in its flaring, quivering restlessness 
is never the same from moment to moment. It is all bright 
movement and agitation, the antithesis of an ever self-identical 
stuff like Water or Air. Yet it, too, is unbroken and continu 
ous, one and the same fire through all its ceaseless alteration. 
Here, so plain that not only he who runs may read, but curi 
ously enough that he who runs fastest may read best, is this 
new sort of Oneness and Identity which permits of Multiplicity 
and Change. Only think of the Nature oFThings as something 
which goes on like Life or Fire, and not as a mere state of being 
always the same thing like Water or Air, and we have recon 
ciled the real change and variety of the world with its no less 
real unity. 

We shall not be surprised, then, to learn that Heracleitus felt 
that in Fire he was beholding face to face the stuff of .ghich^all 
things are made. At its touch he could see all things yielding 
up their individual natures and disappearing merged and indis 
tinguishable in the moving brightness of its burning. To life 
and thought it exhibited an extraordinary affinity. Our bodies 
glow. All higher forms of life are warm to the touch. And j 
even to-day, for all our modern chemistry and physics, we still 
find Fire the most animate of inanimate beings, likening, as 
figure after figure of speech shows, our inner experience to its 
brightness and heat and fitful moodiness, and making of it a 
companion and fellow-being in whose presence we never feel 
quite friendless and alone. "This world," says Heracleitus, 
"which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made ; but 
it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with/ 
measures of it kindling, and measures going out." "All things 
are an exchange for Fire, and Fire for all things, even as wares 
for gold and gold for wares." 

So swift, fluid, and unarrestable is this process of ceaseless 
transformation and exchange of which Reality consists, that 

8 Fr. 20. "~ Fr. 22. 



124 HERACLEITUS 

the senses are unable to keep pace with_it. They are always 
lagging behind, perceiving and recording the events of any 
given instant only after they are gone. They really only 
photograph, as it were, the trajectory of a flying projectile, 
and so-called specific things or moments are in reality merely 
sections of flight. In the words of Heracleitus own simile, 
"You cannot step twice into the same rivers ; for fresh waters 
are ever flowing in upon you." 

But the idea of Reality as Flux and Fire did more than over 
come the difficulties, inherent in the Milesian systems, of deriv 
ing the Many from the One, and Change from a single simple 
Substance. It also enabled Heracleitus to see through the con 
flict of opposites which the Pythagoreans had regarded as 
fundamental, and to supplement the vague statements of 
Anaximander that opposites can arise within a single Principle, 
with the startling assertion that they are really identical. 
Flowing and burning mean a multiplicity of aspects and epi 
sodes succeeding, superseding, melting out of and into one 
another. Without another and different moment into which to 
go on, and another and different aspect to assume, there could 
be no such thing as Change and Flux. For it is by the contrast 
and opposition of the new to the pld_that_we mark and measure 
change. Thus we only note and measure the waning of winter 
by the waxing of summer, the disappearance of hunger by the 
increasing feeling of satiety, the coming of day by the going 
of night. It is the very essence then of Process that all things 
should be constantly melting into their opposites, _ of Becoming 
that all things should be constantly becoming the negations of 
their_former selves. 

But at what precise instant in this inconceivably smooth, 
oily, and unbroken Flux of things are we to say that the old has 
become the new, that one moment of time has become another, 
that day has at last faded into night, or that spring has really 
come? Such an instant cannot be discovered or even conceived. 
For divide and subdivide Time and Change as you will, it is im 
possible to discover a moment which contains simply the old, 01; 
simply the new. On the contrary, there is no moment so minute 

10 Fr. 41. 



HERACLEITUS 125 

as not to contain both the old and the new caught in the act of 
the one becoming the other, v 

Indeed, could we find an instant which was not a transition 
an instant, for example, in which we could say that winter or 
night had come to a definite end but that spring or dawn had 
not yet begun we should have arrested Time and destroyed 
Change. We should be dealing not with a transition and trans 
formation of the old into the new, but with a mere substitution 
of the new for the old. The old would have been cut off short 
and an absolutely fresh beginning made in its place. In that 
case the Universe, if such it could be called, would be a collec 
tion of full stops and fresh starts, of moments and things anni 
hilated with a bump and new moments and things suddenly 
jerked with a jolt into being from nowhere, like an American 
railway train entering and leaving way stations. And the in 
habitant of such a world would be like a traveler forced to 
change cars at the junction of each instant with the next. 

Change and Becoming cannot, then, consist in a succession 
of different occurrences rapidly substituted for one another. 
The new occurrence must be developed, budded off, prolonged 
from the old. _ In a word, it must be one with the old. Change 
means Id^ptjty in Difference. 

This doctrine that opposites are identical is at first sight 
startling, and Aristotle later accused it of transgressing the law 
of self-contradiction. But after all, to take even the pairs of 
opposites upon which the Pythagoreans laid so much stress, 
what is day but a process of waning, and waxing night, night 
save a process of waning and waxing day? What is hunger 
but satiety in process of passing away, satiety but hunger dis 
appearing? How should we ever know justice if it were not for 
injustice? ai And according to even the very Orphics of whom 
the Pythagoreans were the disciples, what were the winter of 
nature and the death of man but life transformed and sleeping? 
What were summer-time and life but death and winter reawak 
ened and risen from their sleep? "It is the same thing in us 
that is quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old ; the 
former are shifted and become the latter, and the latter in turn 

11 Fr. 60. 



126 HERACLEITUS 

are shifted and become the former." "Hades is the same as 
Dionysus." 13 "Mortals are immortals and immortals are 
mortals, one living the others death and dying the others 
life." 14 God really is both "day and night, winter and summer, 
war and peace, surfeit and hunger." He really can "take 
various shapes," 16 for he is a "Going on" and a Becoming, not 
a permanent state of Being. 

The fragments which we have been considering also suggest 
another remarkable characteristic of the Flux of the ever-living 
Fire. Change may bring novelty, but it also brings repetition. 
The number of pieces, colors, shapes, and combinations in its 
kaleidoscope is limited. The transformation of opposites 
works either way. Day becomes night and night becomes day 
again, summer winter and winter summer, life death and death 
life. Underlying the reciprocal conversions of these lesser 
cycles there is the great wheel of the elemental transformation 
of Fire down through fiery storm-cloud to water and thence to 
earth, and back through water to itself again. 

At this point, perhaps, an objection might be made. Have 
we not fallen into a difficulty similar to that which beset the 
Milesian School? If Reality is Becoming, and there is really 
nothing but a Flux and melting of things into their opposites 
so swift that the mind can photograph in any given instant 
only a mere blurred trajectory, how do we come by the experi 
ence of permanent objects at all? Stability, permanence, rest 
are just as apparent in the world as flux and change and_ mo 
tion. But how account for them, if the latter alone are real? 

Heracleitus has his answer ready. In the first place there is 
the fact that of the ever-living Fire fixed measures are ever 
kindling and fixed measures going out, 17 and that Change is a 
reciprocal exchange of Fire for all things, and all things for 
Fire. The "measures" sufficiently counterbalance each other 
and the exchange is sufficiently fair to assure no robbery of the 
other elements, but rather the presence of an approximately 
constant quantity of water and e^jdJ^_ajidjthe_ot}iej"_variations 
of Fire. 18 

12 Fr. 78. is Fr. 127. 14 Fr. 67. is Fr. 36. ie Fr. 36. IT Fr. 20. 

isC/. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 150-151; also Burnet, 
Greek Philosophy, Thales to Plato, pp. 61-62. 



HERACLEITUS 127 

But his explanation does not stop here. Take the great 
fundamental cycle of the transformation of Fire through water 
to earth and back to Fire again. This- cycle, since it is a, 
process of circulation, has a downward and an upward sweep 
which Heracleitus calls the Upward and the Downward Ways. 
In water, for example, there is at once a "downward" tendency 
to change into earth, and an "upward" tendency to change into 
fire. And fire and earth, which are at the top and bottom of 
the process of circulation, are moments and states of hesitation, 
pulled both backwards and forwards, as it were, when the up 
ward swing of the cycle from water is on the point of bending 
over and becoming the downward swing towards water again, 
or when the downward plunge from water is turning into the 
upward return arc towards water. It follows that since the two 
ways are simply the prolongation of each other, they are one 
and the same, and afford a fundamental example of the identity 
of opposites. 19 But it also follows and this more immediately 
concerns us that each one of the three elements is pulled at 
one and the same time in opposite directions. It is a com 
ponent of two conflicting forces, a friction of two antagonistic 
movements dragging against and retarding each other. 

It is this pull of the Upward and Downward Way against 
each other which Tceeps fire, water, and earth all in existence, \ 
with their specific characters, at the same time. Abolish the 
Downward Way, for instance, and all water released from the 
downward drag in its nature would evaporate and shimmer 
away into fire. Abolish the Upward Way, and all fire would 
precipitate itself into water, and water turn to solid earth. But . 
each drop of water because it is an equilibrium due to a tension. * 
of forces pulling in opposite directions, is held rigid and re- * 
mains itself. When the sun is "drawing water" or water rises 
in mist, the "Upward Way" has for a time partially mastered 
the Downward ; when it rains or freezes the Downward tendency 
has for the moment overcome the Upward. "Men do not know," 
says Heracleitus, "how what is at variance agrees with itself. 
It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow 
and the lyre." 20 

i Fr. 69, 70. 20 Fr. 45. 



128 HERACLEITUS 

Obviously permanence and stability of this sort are not mere 
illusions due to the deception of our senses. The Flux will 
really bear our weight here and there, and has characteristics 
which are frozen and firm and definable. But this fixed and 
structural character of the world is, as we secret due to any 
restful and sedentary habit on its parE The immobility of any 
thing and all things is 1 rather theJmmobility of a pair of wres- 
tlcrs putting forth all their strength against each other and 
held rigid in a deadlock in which neither is able to down the 

~- . n _ 

other. The cycles in nature and history are but the slow sway- 
ing*lmd bending back and forth of these antagonists in their 
struggle. And the adversaries, like the Siamese twins, are one 
at heart. A common Life and Fire circulating from one to the 
other animates their struggle with each other. Could either 
slay or even really down the other, he would also have downed 
or slain himself. "War" in very truth "is the father of all and 
the king of all." 21 "Homer was wrong in saying : Would that 
strife might perish from among gods and men ! He did not see 
that he was praying for the destruction of the universe ; for, if 
his prayer were heard, all things would pass away." 22 

Later commentators, to be sure, particularly those of the 
Stoic School, found in Heracleitus the belief that from time to 
time one of the wrestlers does fall and the whole universe "goes 
up like smoke," consumed by the ever-living Fire. Then again 
Fire makes all things new, and there is a new heaven and a new 
earth and a new sea. In the fullness of time these, too, go the 
way of their predecessors. And to this last and most tremen 
dous cycle of world succeeding world there is no end. This 
interpretation, however, has been challenged on the ground that 
it is incompatible with the doctrine of the strife of opposites 
and the counterbalancing of the Upward by the Downward 
Way. 23 From this other point of view Heracleitus teaches in 
deed a periodic oscillation in the proportional strength of the 
wrestlers and in the amount of the basic elements into which 
Fire transforms itself. But at no time does one of the Ways 

21 Fr. 44. 22 Fr. 43. 

23 Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Thales to Plato, pp. 178 et seq. 



HERACLEITUS 129 

completely nullify the other or one of the wrestling opposites 
wholly down its opponent., 

Heracleitus is also quick to recognize in the Universe another 
kind of permanence, invisible to the eye but readily appre 
hended by the mind, which does not depend for a ticklish exist 
ence upon the unstable equilibrium of conflicting activities and 
cross currents of change. If, for instance, the Heracleitan 
philosophy be true, it is a fact that all things are in perpetual 
and uninterrupted flux. But this fact does not itself change, 
any more than the fact, say, that there is a constant move 
ment of traffic on Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly moves along 
with the traffic on top of a bus. For if the fact that all things 
are constantly "on the go" were itself to go, then some things 
at least would stop, and the Heracleitan theory would no longer 
be a true description of the nature of Reality. The real con 
stitution of the Universe might now be such that at times all 
things move on, and at times stand still, just as the traffic on 
Fifth Avenue is as a matter of fact periodically checked and 
allowed to proceed by the policemen at the cross-streets. But 
again, if this be the real way in which things behave, this man 
ner of behavior does not itself now stand and now change, any 
more than the fact that the traffic on Fifth Avenue is halted 
from time to time by a policeman is itself arrested and inter 
rupted by him. 

The same considerations hold good of those things which are 
stated as true about the nature of Change. If it be the nature 
of Becoming to involve a differentiation and at the same time 
an identification of opposites, this fact does not itself become 
different or turn into its opposite. If it be a rule of the wres 
tling match that the relative strength of the two opponents 
shall vary but that neither shall ever wholly fail, this rule is 
not itself now more, now less, in force. If it be a law of change 
that the ever-living Fire shall pursue a cycle of transforma 
tions in which its Downward Way through water to earth is 
checked and balanced by its Upward Way from earth through 
water to fire again, it is as absurd to say that this law circu 
lates or offsets itself as it would be to maintain that the rules 



130 HERACLEITUS 

which govern the uptown and downtown movement of the traffic 
on Fifth Avenue are themselves moving in either direction. 

In a word, the truth about the Universe, whatever it may be, 
is changeless, ^not^with the permanence of something lasting or 
even everlasting in Time, but with the validity of something 
^whose existence is altogether outside of and independent of the 
Flux of Change and Becoming and Time. -1 The fact that all 
things change and that their change takes place in certain 
definite ways and along certain well-drawn lines is an eternal 
thing. 

Now it is the method which the thinker may descry in the 
apparent madness of Becoming, J}ie orderliness^ which hejmay 
discover in the restless flaming of the ever-living Fire, that 
Heracleitus calls the "Logos." Literally the term means 
"word" or "thought," but we might translate it in a way more 
comprehensible to ourselves and at the same time not untrue to 
what Heracleitus has in mind, if we call it the "Law" or "Order" 
or "Constitution" of the world. 

The "Logos" has, however, much more behind it than we ex 
press by the phrase "natural law" or "natural order." It 
expresses in the first place not the mere fact of how things do 
behave. It is prescriptive as well as descriptive, determining 
things to behave as they do. "Nature is constrained byTTTe 
rational order of her law which lives infused in her." This 
fragment from Leonardo da Vinci might be a fragment from 
Heracleitus. The Logos enforces itself. It is a "Destiny," 
allotting to all things their places. 24 

Again, it includes the idea of a Reason or Wisdom immanent 
in the world. We must not understand by this, however, that 
Heracleitus regards the Logos as a personal God or a Divine 
Mind. He feels simply that in the Flux and the Fire there is 
something which responds to man s desire to know and justifies 
his claim to knowledge. Experience is not delirium. The world 
is a rational world. Its ways can be understood. And this 
responsive, systematic, and intelligible character of things cor 
responds to thought and reason in man, and is, as it were, the 

24 Fr. 137 (Diels, Fragmenta der Vorsokratiker), Cf. Frs. 19, 28 (Bur- 
net), Doring, Geschichte der Oriechischen Philosophic, p. 95. 



HERACLEITUS 131 

objective and external counterpart of his wisdom and philos 
ophy. 

Furthermore, the Logos carries with it the notion of Justice 
ajnc^ Right. In this respect Heracleitus, like Anaximander, is 
an interesting witness on the philosophical side to that very 
late distinction by the Greek mind between natural and moral 
law and order which we discussed in connection with Greek re 
ligion. We to-day should not seek to explain the fixed size of 
the sun on grounds of ethical propriety, nor should we, if some 
irregularity in its size took place, indignantly feel that the sun 
had "gone wrong" and violated the moral law, and upbraid the 
inefficiency of nature for not preventing or at least immediately 
detecting and setting right the aberration. But this is pre 
cisely what Heracleitus does feel. "The sun," he tells us, "will 
not overstep his measures: if he does the Erinyes, the hand 
maids of Justice, will find him out." The size of the sun, that 
is, is the right, the moral size for it to be, if the law of measure 
for measure is to hold. Any alteration in it would be not 
merely puzzling to the intellect but shocking to the moral sense. 
Astronomical conditions and ethical considerations are not as 
yet disentangled. 

The same is true of all natural phenomena. Their behavior 
is not to be judged or explained differently from that of human 
beings. The World-Order is cut out of the same cloth as the 
moral order. The Law apparent in the World Process, a Law 
of compensating movement holding all things to their natures, 
their places, and their courses, is the same Law as forbids and 
checks the excess of insolence or "hybris" among men, and 
counsels and enforces restraint and temperance as the funda 
mental virtue. The resultant stable equilibrium which is the 
marrow of the frame of the world is all of one piece with moral 
stability. There is justness as well as intelligibility in the sys 
tematic character of the transformations of the ever-living and 
ever-changing Fire. The "Logos" is not only the Law, the 
Order, the allotting Destiny, it is also the Justice which flames, 
world without end, at the heart of things. 

Indeed, Heracleitus seems to have had a scarcely less vivid 
25 Fr. 29. 



182 HERACLEITUS 

conviction of this eternal Justice at work in the World-Process 
than had the poet JEschylus, in the next generation, of its 
presence as the controlling force in human history. Both men 
alike saw it where it was least evident to the common eye, and 
wrung a reluctant testimony to its presence from the appar 
ently most hostile evidence. As ^Eschylus in his tragedies 
found it attained and exemplified amid all the intricacies of the 
strife of counterbalancing motives and the balance of conflict 
ing moral obligations, so Heracleitus saw it clearly manifest in 
the inextinguishable warfare which Fire, in the strife of op- 
posites and the counterpoising of the Upward and Downward 
Ways, is forever waging with itself. "Strife is justice," 6 h>? 
tells us. Nay, the very evil in the world in reality contributes 
to this "hidden attunement" which is, he tells us, "better than 
the open." 27 Human laws and arrangements are full of igno 
rance and often wrong, but the divine arrangements of things 
"are fair and good and right." 

It would be going too far, perhaps, to say that Heracleitu? 
is here deliberately facing and struggling with the so-called 
"problem of evil," which later was to assume an important 
place in philosophy. All the difficulties connected with the 
presence of evil in a world wholly subservient to justice and 
goodness had not yet become articulate. But undoubtedly he 
is once more a witness to the Greek lack of distinction between 
natural and moral phenomena, and thinks that the opposition 
of good and evil is as easily harmonized as that of day and 
night in the general identification of opposites^. 

Finally we may perhaps find in the Logos fresh evidence of 
the tendency of the Greek mind to think of the constitution of 
the Universe in political and social terms. In discussing Greek 
religion we contrasted this analogy, so unfamiliar to us, with 
our own habit of likening the World-Process to the running of 
a machine, the functioning of an organism, or even the develop 
ment of a personal career. By Heracleitus the political anal 
ogy is given a philosophic application. The Logos or Wisdom 
which is common to all things and all minds, and comprehensible 
by all who do not "sleeping turn aside each into a world of his 

26 Fr. 62. 27 Fr. 47. 28 Fr. 61. 



HERACLEITUS 133 

own," 29 and "live as if they had a wisdom of their own," 30 is 
like the laws of a city by which all the citizens are bound and to 
which if they are wise they must hold fast. Nay, more, all 
man-made laws and constitutions are derived from and part of 
the divine Law which "prevails as much as it will, and suffices 
for all things with something to spare." If a man then wishes 
to know what the Logos is like, he has only to turn to the con- 
stitution and statutes of his own city-state. Philosophy as yet 
knows no dividing the substance or distinguishing the persons 
in this trinity of social, moral, and physical law and order. 32 

Let us fix firmly in our minds this concept of a Logos of a 
Law and Order and Wisdom and Justice in things, which it is 
the business and the reward of philosophy to discover amid the 
kaleidoscopic instability of the Flux by which our senses are 
bewildered and our thinking confused. It has a great and 
splendid part to play in the future development of Greek phi 
losophy. We may make, for instance, one of the most interest 
ing among the many approaches to Plato, if we regard his sys 
tem as essentially an amplification of the Heracleitan philos 
ophy in which the weight of real existence has been shifted 
from the Flux of phenomena to a more deeply pondered Logos 
analyzed and enriched by the inclusion within it, not only of 
cosmic laws such as Heracleitus had discovered, but also of 
the fixed species and forms of things by which the senses are 
steadied and the foundations of thinking laid, and of the moral 
and aesthetic values by which human happiness is given content 
and definition, and human conduct is regulated. In Stoicism, 
too, we shall find the Logos in the concept of a rational and 
providential World-Order assigning to all things and men their 
places and roles in the play of events, and in the idea of the 
universe as a commonwealth of Gods and men constituting the 
"dear city of Zeus." Finally, it enters Christian theology, and 
becomes part of the "faith once for all delivered unto the 
saints" in the opening lines of the Fourth Gospel. "In the be 
ginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the 

29 Fr. 95. so Fr. 92. si Fr. 9lb. 

32 Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed., pp. 131-132, 3rd ed., p. 
168, and Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, pp. 191-192. 



134 HERACLEITUS 

Word was God. . . . And the Word was made flesh and dwelt 
among us." 32a 

Some account of Heracleitus astronomical and meteorologi 
cal views has come down to us in a passage, generally consid 
ered trustworthy, of Diogenes Laertius. 

"He held, too, that exhalations arose both from the sea and the 
land; some bright and pure, others dark. Fire was nourished by 
the bright ones, and moisture by the others. 

"He does not make it clear what is the nature of that which sur 
rounds the world. He held, however, that there were bowls in it 
with the concave sides turned towards us, in which the bright ex 
halations were collected and produced flames. These were the 
heavenly bodies. 

"The flame of the sun was the brightest and warmest; for the 
other heavenly bodies were more distant from the earth; and for 
that reason gave less light and heat. The moon, on the other hand, 
was nearer the earth ; but it moved through an impure region. The 
sun moved in a bright and unmixed region and at the same time was 
at just the right distance from us. That is why it gives more heat 
and light. The eclipses of the sun and moon were due to the turn 
ing of the bowls upwards, while the monthly phases of the moon 
were produced by a slight turning of its bowl. 

"Day and night, months and seasons and years, rains and winds, 
and things like these were due to the different exhalations. The 
bright exhalation, when ignited in the circle of the sun, produced , 
day, and the preponderance of the opposite exhalations produced 
night. The increase of warmth proceeding from the bright exhala 
tions produced summer, and the multiplication of moisture from the 
dark exhalation produced winter. He assigns the causes of other 
things in conformity with this. 

"As to the earth he makes no clear statement about, its nature, 
any more than he does about that of the bowls." 33 

There are also fragments which evince a considerable inter 
est on Heracleitus part in the problems of human conduct and 
happiness. It may be, indeed, that could we recover his works 

32aBut cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 133, note 1, 
for the view that Heracleitus meant by the Logos merely his own teaching, 
and that the Christian Logos is of Hebrew, not Greek origin. 

33 Diogenes Laertius (trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 
pp. 147-148). 



HERACLEITUS 135 

in their entirety, we should find among them something like a 
treatise on ethics. The fragments show an aristocratic disdain 
of the common people, their standards, and their ways. Moral 
as well as intellectual enlightenment comes from a perception 
of the Logos, or order in things, and through conformity with 
it. The means for such conformity is present in the shape of 
reason in all men, but the ordinary people make no use of it. 
"We must follow the common, yet . . . the many live as if they 
had a wisdom of their own. They are estranged from that with 
which they have most constant intercourse." 3 * As a result 
"they follow the poets and take the crowd as their teacher," and 
"even the best of them choose one thing above all others, im 
mortal glory among mortals, while most of them are glutted 
like beasts." 35 

But this "wantonness needs putting out even more than a 
house on fire. It is not good for men to get all they wish to get. 
It is sickness that makes health pleasant ; evil, good ; hunger, 
plenty; weariness, rest." This last truth is just what the 
truly wise man perceives by virtue of his acquaintance with the 
law of contradiction inherent in the ever-living and ever-chang 
ing Fire. Hence, where the common herd complain, he will 
cheerfully accept, where they seek to avoid hardship he will 
welcome it, where they flinch at pain he will bear it, knowing 
that by so doing he is conforming his nature to the nature of 
the Universe, and that "the way of man has no wisdom, but that 
of God has." 3r 

"It is hard," however, "to fight with one s heart s desire." 38 
For the conflict of desire with reason is part of the cosmic 
struggle of opposites. Wisdom and reason are dryness and fire 
in the soul. "The dry soul is the wisest and best." 39 It de 
teriorates when it gets wet ; witness the man who "when he gets 
drunk is led by a beardless lad, tripping, knowing not where he 
steps, having his soul moist." But it is "pleasure to souls to 
become moist," ll as almost every one can testify. The seduc 
tion, then, of the rational will by pleasure is incidental to the 
cyclical transformation of the World-Fire, and the difficult 

84 Fr. 92,93. ss Fr. 111. se Fr. 103, 104. 37 Fr. 96. 

as Fr. 105-107. 89 Fr. 74-76. <o Fr. 73. *i Fr. 72. 



136 HERACLEITUS 

questions of conduct and morality are the inevitable problems 
of a life torn literally between the Upward and the Downward 
Ways. 

Psychology, also, as well as ethics, is beginning in Hera- 
cleitus to "bud off" from the parent organism of general, un~ 
differentiated philosophic speculation. We have noted how 
naturally reflection upon the fact and behavior of the living, 
moving, streaming consciousness within one s own heart might 
inspire the idea that perhaps the inner Nature of Things in 
general was also a living Activity, one and many, different and 
identical, all at the same time. Mr. Burnet, indeed, considers 
Heracleitus emphasis on the Soul as of first importance to an 
understanding of his system, and carries the interpretation of 
the phenomena of the outer world in terms of the inner states 
and experiences of consciousness so far as to say that "Life, 
Sleep, Death correspond to Fire, Water, Earth, and the latter 
are to be understood from the former." Both he and Mr. 
Cornford 43 suggest that this stress upon the animate aspects 
of the world is due to the influence of the Mysteries, with their 
insistence upon the Soul as an inexhaustible principle of Life 
in Man and Nature, of whose activity death is but a momentary 
phase. 44 However that may be, there can be no doubt of Hera 
cleitus persistent use of the term "Soul" and his interest in 
what we should call "psychological" phenomena. "You will 
not find the boundaries of the soul by traveling in any direc 
tion." And, as we saw in connection with his ethical views, 
he regarded wisdom and virtue as a state of dryness and fire in 
the soul, folly as a state of moisture. 

Again, he distinguishes fairly clearly within the soul between 
the senses and reason. The senses, he implies, present us only 
with the Flux, with a confused, inevitably rapid kaleidoscope of 
experience. It is another faculty which discovers the real 

42 Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Tholes to Plato, p. 60. 

43 From Religion to Philosophy, pp. 187 et seq. 

44 It has even been argued that the whole system of Heracleitus is 
merely the Orphic theology, and particularly the doctrine of rebirth, cast 
into philosophic form. Cf. Macchioro, Zagreus, pp. 247 et seq., and his 
Eraclito Efesio. 

46 Fr. 71. 



HERACLEITUS 137 

method of Logos in the apparent madness of the Flux. To put 
j it in modern terms : we perceive with our senses falling apples 
I only, not the law of gravitation. It is reflection and reasoning 
/ which give us the mathematical formula that bodies attract 
I each other in direct proportion to their masses and in inverse 
I proportion to the square of their distances, to which the per 
ceived movements of bodies always conform. 

We may, then, discover in Heracleitus a sufficient preoccupa 
tion with the fact and phenomena of consciousness to impute 
to him a rudimentary psychology. But we must accompany 
even this statement with a reservation. Psychology has been 
defined as the "description and explanation of states of con 
sciousness as such." Certainly it denotes a clear demarca 
tion of conscious from other phenomena. But we may very 
much doubt whether Heracleitus ever cornered "consciousness 
as such," or distinguished sharply between the conscious and 
living and the other aspects of the world. It was rather that 
the other aspects tended in his mind to become blurred and con 
fused in the ceaseless flowing and sparkling of things, which was 
to be seen at its best in the restless brilliancy of both the flaming 
Fire and the life and experiences going on within us. He no 
more than the Milesians really extricated the conscious and 
living properties from the spatial and solid and substantial 
qualities of the world-mass in which they lay infused and im 
bedded, or erected them into a separate principle or even a 
really distinct aspect of Reality. There is nowhere in the frag 
ments any direct opposition of soul to body or of mind to mat 
ter, excellent illustration as he might have made it of his theory 
of the conflict and identity of opposites. Nor can we claim 
with any more right that he had distinguished the concepts of 
matter and motion, energy and substance, from one another. 

The truth would seem to be that he had not reached the point 
of drawing and sorting the separate threads which enter into 
the intricate spinning of the world. The Universe struck him, 
as it had struck the Milesians, as all cut of the same cloth, 
though the cloth to his eye was not solid and substantial but a 
changeable silk all sheen and shimmer. He simply accented the 
*eLadd, quoted by James, "Psychology" (Briefer Course), p. 1. 



138 HERACLEITUS 

dynamic the living and the moving rather than the spatial 
and solid properties of Reality, and resolved without having 
previously clearly differentiated them the solid and rigid into 
terms of the fluid, as when he found in Rest the tension of con 
flicting and compensating Motions. 

In somewhat the same way, more than two thousand years 
later, the philosopher Leibnitz was to see in the extended and 
impenetrable qualities of matter mere secondary phases of 
energy, and was to find in a carefully reasoned idea of Force 
a least common denominator for the external world and the 
inner life, such as Heracleitus had found in Fire. But whereas 
Heracleitus had started with the whole cloth, caught the gen 
eral effect, and outlined the pattern, without really unraveling 
and separating the interwoven principles and concepts, Leib 
nitz began with the notions of force, life, mind, extension, solid 
ity and the like, all clear and distinct, carefully disentangled 
and sorted in his mind, and then proceeded to weave them into 
a system. 

There is another point also with reference to which we should 
be on our guard. A long and imposing development in the his 
tory of philosophy has predisposed us to contrast the presen 
tations of the senses with the results of reflection and reason 
ing in terms of Appearance and Reality. The senses we feel, 
if they do not deceive us out and out, at least present us with 
a very distorted and unreal view of the Nature of Things. It 
is the business of thought and reflection to correct this false 
view of things, and to tell us what the Universe is really like. 
Now when Heracleitus distinguishes within the mind between 
wisdom and sensation, and in the objective world between the 
Logos and the Flux, it is not unnatural to hail him as the 
prophet of this differentiation of Appearance from Reality. 
But the contrast of the Logos to the Flux carries no such im 
plication in his mind. The Flux is no less real than the Logos. 
It is not an illusion. It is not "false opinio^n." It is not "mere" 
appearance. The senses in recording it do not falsify the real 
Nature of Things, but present it as it is. They see face to face 
not as through a glass darkly the ever-living Fire and the 
ceaseless transformation which is its essence and the essence of 



HERACLEITUS 139 

all things. Wisdom, Reason, merely beholds in addition the 
systematic character of the World-Process. 

It is equally dubious to run to the other extreme, and classify 
Heracleitus as an "empiricist." For by empiricism we habit 
ually understand not simply the teaching that the senses pre 
sent us with the Nature of Things as it really is, but also the 
doctrine that no amount of hard thinking can find out anything 
more about the world than the senses already have revealed, 
and that the so-called "real worlds" which science and philos 
ophy think they can read between the lines of the world of 
phenomena are nothing but rather arid though useful synopses 
of the rich and vivid text of the book of immediate life. Hera 
cleitus may be called an empiricist in one sense of the term, but 
not in the other. He has confidence in the senses, but he has 
no distrust of reason. Reason for him was not a mere extension 
of the process of sensation. It discovered more in Reality than 
the senses revealed. It spied the Logos, to which the senses 
were congeriitally blind. Nor was this Logos a mere abstrac 
tion. It was something as real, as vital, as the process and 
movement itself. 

But though Heracleitus distinction between the Logos and 
the Flux probably does not imply any invidious distinction on 
his part between the senses and reason in point of trustworthi 
ness, or justify us in classifying him as either an empiricist or 
a rationalist or, for that matter, in even imputing to him the 
common philosophic differentiation of Appearance from Real 
ity, it perhaps does permit us to see in his doctrine a further 
development of concept of "Form" and "Matter." These no 
tions, we found, were distinguished by the Pythagoreans in 
their doctrine of a Principle of Limit demarcating within the 
Field of the Unlimited the allotments and boundaries of the 
specific plots which we call individual things. The Form was 
the actual outline or figure of the object and the measure of the 
amount of ground or stuff or "matter" enclosed by it. And we 
saw how susceptible these concepts were of a much wider and 
more profound application. 

In this application the concept of the Logos marks an im 
portant step. Form is no longer merely an outline and ex- 



140 HERACLEITUS 

ternal figure or an enumeration of the visible measure of a 
thing, as it was for the Pythagoreans. The doctrine of the 
Logos adds to it as constituents, the ideas of Law and Order 
and System, enlarges it so as to cover the whole Universe with 
one comprehensive Constitution or Law or Form of Existence, 
and deepens it by asserting that Law and Order are not super 
ficial but rather sink so much more profoundly into the fiery 
essence of things than the unaided eye can reach as to require 
the assistance of reason to perceive them. In a word, the idea 
of the principle of Form is passing in the system of Hera- 
cleitus from the realm of the picturesque__into that_qf the ab 
stract and the logical. It is no longer a representation of the 
shape, it is the definition of the nature, of an object. Beneath 
the panorama of existence a map has been once and for all 
discerned. 

In the same way, Heracleitus, though he does not follow the 
Pythagoreans in their metaphysical separation of the principle 
of Matter from that of Form, nevertheless contributes largely 
to the growth in later philosophy of the concept of such a sepa 
rate principle. The Pythagoreans, with their doctrine of the 
Unlimited, had already suggested indefiniteness and lack of 
determination as characteristic of "Matter" in contradistinc 
tion to "Form." And Heracleitus in contrasting the liquid and 
impermanent stuff of a world dissolved in Time and Change 
with the rigidity and unchangeableness of the Law regulating 
the Flux, added the transitoriness and the restlessness, the 
ceaseless growth and decay, which in the systems of Plato and 
Aristotle are such essential marks of Matter as opposed to 
Form or Idea. 

With the death of Heracleitus, the philosophic preeminence 
of Ionia came to an end. The cities which for a brilliant and 
fertile century had been the mother and nurse of the speculative 
genius ceased to bear and foster. The spirit of philosophy 
passed westwards to Southern Italy and Sicily, to a home al 
ready in part prepared for it by the Pythagoreans. Nor was 
it to return to the coasts and islands of Asia Minor for well- 
nigh a hundred and fifty years ; and then to find a cradle only 
and not a home. Melissus, to be sure, was a Samian, but he is 



HERACLEITUS 141 

identified with the Eleatic School. Leucippus, born perhaps at 
Miletus, is a shadowy figure whose whole substance lies in 
Democritus. And though Anaxagoras came from Clazomenae, 
and Epicurus and the founder of the Stoic School, Zeno, were 
born in Samos and in Cyprus, they lived and taught in Athens, 
and their fame redounded to the glory of their adopted rather 
than of their native country. So, too, later leaders of the 
Stoic School, Asiatic by birth, settled in Athens, or passed on 
to Rome. We are, then, taking our last look at Ionia. 

But before embarking on the next chapter, let us review for 
a moment such restoration of the system of Heracleitus as we 
were able to make from the fragments and ruins of his writings. 

Reality is something whose essence is Becoming, not mere 
Being. It is ever-changing Fin-, not ever-the-same Water or 
Air as the Milesians ..thought. 

Change and Activity, however, involve a startling paradox. 
The changing object is both the same and not the same. It is 
not the same, since it is forever passing on into a new moment 
of time, a new state of being, a new self, different from and 
opposed to the old. It remains the same, nevertheless, for 
otherwise we should be dealing, not with the successive trans 
formations of a single object, but simply with a succession of 
different objects created and annihilated one after the other. 
Change, then, somehow joins together the moments and states 
and selves which it puts asunder. It is a unity of differences, 
an identity of opposites, paradoxical though such a statement 
may seem. 

But Change also involves tension and conflict. It holds both 
together and apart pairs of moments, conditions, selves, which 
are struggling away from each other to be different, and 
towards each other in order to be the same. Locked in one 
another s embrace, these opposites wrestle against each other. 
And the pitting of effort against effort, motion against motion, 
gives the world its stability and permanence. Hence, instead 
of all things being each moment wholly cEanged and rechanged 
in the twinkling of an eye, we have the prolongations and slow 
regularities characteristic of the Flux. There is a .Law_.tp 
which the World-Process conforms. And this Order which 



142 HERACLEITUS 

change always follows itself never changes. The nature of 
the World-Fire is a Process of Transformation taking place 
in a fixed and definite way. This nature is equally present and 
exemplified in any and every mood and moment of the restless 
Fire. It is unaltered by Time, the passage of which makes no 
difference to it. Its permanence, then, is not like the duration 
of a thing floating on and on, it may be forever, on the surface 
of the Flux. It is not everlasting in Time. It is lifted clear of 
Time and Becoming altogether. It is eternal. 

This Nature or Law or Order Heracleitus calls the Logos. 
It is the object and counterpart of reason within us. JSince it 
is a law of balance and compensation, building up harmony and 
stability out of conflict, it also appeals to our sense of justice. 
Indeed to understand and accept it, we have only to reflect 
upon the social and political order which is the expression both 
of the Logos and of the rational will of man. To resolve the 
Universe, then, into the fitful flaming of Fire, to analyze all rest 
into motion and all stability into change, is not to reduce all 
things to chaos. For the Universe still has an eternal Form 
and Constitution, which guarantees that everything which 
happens is in conformity with a law^ which^ is comprehensible 
and just. 

Both the concepts of the Logos and the Flux, as we have 
seen, are great steps forward in the development of the impor 
tant distinction in Greek Philosophy between the Form of a 
thing, which defines its Nature, and the Material Principle 
which stuffs the Form with concrete existence and enacts it 
temporarily and incompletely in a specific object. 

We also detected in the Heracleitan system signs that ethics 
and psychology were already beginning to differentiate and 
specify themselves, and to bud off from the parent organism of 
general speculative interest. 

And now let us set sail for Elea in Italy, there to take up 
the subject of the next chapter. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

THE flight of philosophy from the coasts of Asia Minor to 
the southern shores of Italy is full of romance and adventure. 
Before the Lydian Empire and all the wealth of Croasus had 
fallen into the hands of the victorious Persians, the philosopher 
Thales, it will be remembered, advocated in vain the union of 
the Ionian cities in a single league, the better to withstand the 
advancing hosts of Cyrus. A Pan-Ionian Congress which 
was finally convened to consider the emergency turned a deaf ear 
also to the suggestion of another statesman, Bias of Priene, 
that all the lonians should desert their hearths en masse and 
seek a new home in the island of Sardinia far in the western 
seas. But the advice of Bias proved to be not altogether 
barren, and bore its fruit in two cities when at length the 
barbarians were actually at their gates and the Persian siege- 
works began to overtop their walls. Phocsea, on the coast 
somewhat north of present-day Smyrna, was the first of the 
Ionian cities to be attacked. Its inhabitants apparently had 
always been a bold and venturesome lot. According to Herod 
otus x they were the first of the Greeks to give up hugging 
the shores in little, tubby, cargo boats and to launch swift 
fifty-oar power ships fit for the high and open seas. In them 
they undertook long voyages in distant waters, and brought 
back to the Hellenic world its first acquaintance with the 
Adriatic, the Tyrrhenian, and the Spanish coasts. 

However that may be, the Phocaeans at the Persian summons 
to surrender utilized the truce of a day, which had been granted 
them for the discussion of terms, in embarking their entire 
population and setting sail for the neighboring island of 
Chios. There they thought they might be able to buy land 
i I, 162 et seq. 

143 



144 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

and settle. But the Chians refused to receive them. Disheart 
ened at their failure to find a refuge, the more timid and home 
sick souls went back to such homes as the Persians had left 
them. The stouter hearts, however, 

". . . . shook out more sail 

And day and night held on indignantly," 

shaping their course for Alalia in Corsica, where earlier voy 
agers had already established a Phocaean colony. Here for 
five years they led a piratical and freebooting existence, a 
public nuisance to their neighbors by land and by sea. Finally 
their swift penteconters were raided by a combined Cartha 
ginian and Tyrrhenian fleet. They succeeded in beating up, 
or rather off, the police, but their victory cost them so dear 
that they decided to move on. Once more they emigrated 
en masse, this time to Rhegium on the Straits of Messina. 
Thence they worked their way north along the coast, and in 
536 B. C. finally settled to the south of Paestum and founded 
Velia or Elea. 

Curiously enough, the cradle of an even greater school of 
philosophy was built as the result of similar action on the 
part of the only other Ionian city to heed Bias counsel. The 
inhabitants of Teos also eluded their besiegers by packing 
themselves and their belongings aboard ship and sailing away. 
They voyaged, however, no further than the northern ^Egean 
where on the coast of Thrace they founded Abdera. Here the 
philosopher Democritus was born whose mechanical and atomic 
theory of the world is still an inspiration of our scientific 
thinking. 

The Eleatic School, then, which so sharply contradicted the 
teachings of Heracleitus, was itself the result of an episode 
in a thoroughly Heracleitan adventure. Indeed, Parmenides, 
its founder, if he did not actually "come over on the May 
flower" as is suggested by Diogenes statement that he 
"flourished" about 504 B. C., must at any rate have stood 
in close succession to the Pilgrim Fathers of the movement. In 
the dialogue named after him, Plato tells us that accompanied 
by his pupil Zeno he visited Athens at the age of sixty-five, 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 145 

"very white with age but well-favored," and was interviewed 
by Socrates, who at the time was still a youth. If this story 
be fact and not a bit of dramatic license, Parmenides was born 
about twenty years after the founding of the city. He came 
of a rich and distinguished family, and himself attained politi 
cal eminence. We are told that he drew up a code of laws 
which the Eleans each year swore to obey. As a philosopher 
he enjoyed throughout all antiquity a great reputation, and 
is always mentioned with much respect by Plato and Aristotle. 

Apparently Parmenides interest in philosophy was awak 
ened by the Pythagoreans, by two of whom, the story goes, 
he was "converted" to the philosophic life. He did not, 
however, prove a docile pupil to his first masters. It is an 
open question whether he ever actually followed their religious 
rule, and it is certain that he soon fell foul of the dualism of 
their chief philosophic tenet. He could accept as little as Hera- 
cleitus the Pythagorean doctrine that the Universe can be re 
solved into two essentially distinct and opposed Principles, 
and proclaimed with equal vigor that the World is One. But 
he found the kind of unity attributed by Heracleitus to Reality 
as unsatisfactory as the Pythagorean teaching of two Princi 
ples. To him the doctrine of the identity of opposites, and 
the assertion that what is one and the same may be at the 
same time many and different, seemed as contrary to the law 
of self-contradiction as it later seemed to Aristotle. "Undis- 
cerning crowds," he exclaims, "who hold that it is and is not 
the same and not the same, and all things travel in opposite 
directions." To his mind the Milesians and Xenophanes 
were on the right track, but they had not pushed their doctrine 
of the oneness of things to its logical conclusion. 

To what extent Xenophanes is directly responsible for 
Parmenides revolt from his Pythagorean teachers and for 
the further shaping of his thought is a mooted point. By 
some it is thought that he settled at Elea, made a disciple 
of Parmenides, and handed on to him the leadership of the 
School. 3 Others, however, criticize this view on the ground 

2 Fr. 6 (trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 174). 
Cf. Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, I, pp. 555 et seq. 



146 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

that Xenophanes was always a wanderer, and that there is 
no evidence that he ever even visited Elea. From this point 
of view his influence on Parmenides would have been either 
indirect, through hearsay, or the result of a chance and 
passing contact. 4 Even Parmenides choice of verse rather 
than prose as a vehicle for the expression of his philosophy 
may be due to the example not so much of Xenophanes as of 
Hesiod and the Orphic literature. 

Parmenides himself has perhaps given us in the introductory 
lines of his poem a figurative account of his apostasy from 
Pythagoreanism and perception of the truth as set forth in 
his own system. He was, he tells us, translated in a chariot 
from the realms of Night to those of Day. There he was 
ushered into the presence of a goddess who recited to him, 
in verses which constitute the main portion of his work, both 
the truth about the Universe and the false opinion of mortals 
"in which is no true belief at all." 

"The Way of Opinion" is a dualistic theory obviously of 
Pythagorean inspiration. The origin of all things is assigned 
to the interaction of the two opposed Principles of Light and 
Darkness. The Universe itself is described as a series of rings, 
somewhat like those of Anaximander. The outer, which walls 
in the Universe, and the inner, which is the earth, are dark and 
solid. Between them is a circle of brightness the luminous 
heaven or atmosphere. Intermediate rings cores of fire 
encased in dark intervene between these circles. Between the 
earth and the heavens sits a Goddess called by later com 
mentators, "Justice," the "Key-Bearer," or Necessity. She 
is the mother of all the other Gods, of whom Love is the 
first-born. 6 

The suggestion has been made that the "Way of Opinion" 
is meant by Parmenides as an account or sample of his earlier 
Pythagorean beliefs, which he later recanted and came to 

* For a discussion of this point cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd 
ed., pp. 193 et seq. 

s Fr. 1. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 172. 

e Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 177. Also his Greek 
Philosophy, Tholes to Plato, pp. 65-66. 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 147/ 

\ * 

regard as wholly erroneous. 7 It is only fair to say, however, 
that other interpretations have been put forth. Parmenides, 
it has been held, is not regaling us with an account of the 
errors of his philosophic youth of which he has repented. 
He is rather expounding a cosmology, or theory of the struc 
ture of the surface world of phenomena, which he means to * 
have taken seriously. That this should follow and seem 
to supplement a "Way of Truth" in which a quite different 
doctrine regarding the nature of the Reality underlying 
phenomena is set forth, need not perplex us. Similarly, the 
modern philosopher Kant in one breath expounded a carefully 
reasoned "Universal Natural History and Theory of the 
Heavens," and in the next criticized reason as incapable of 
grasping Reality and declared things in themselves to be 
unknowable. 8 So, too, Herbert Spencer, after demonstrating 
to his own satisfaction that the Power behind phenomena is 
inscrutable, devoted volumes to the elaboration of a theory 
of the principles by which phenomena are governed. 

Or again, it may be that we are dealing with something 
analogous to the doctrine of the "two-fold Truth," by which 
the philosophers of the Renaissance, sought to square them 
selves with an inquisitorial Church. Any conclusion of theirs 
which conflicted with Christian dogma was, they declared, 
simply the logical conclusion to which mere reasoning unaided 
by revelation must come. In the same way, Parmenides may 
be describing the opinions at which any train of philosophic 
thought unguided by his reasoning will naturally arrive. 

But whether he meant the "Way of Opinion" as a recantation 
of former error, a serious account of the external appearance 
and behavior of things, or an example of the results of unaided, 
vulgar philosophy, it occupies in any case a secondary place 
in his system. He concerns himself with it only after he has 
already reached his real position by the "Way of Truth." 

In the "Way of Truth" Parmenides follows up the implica- 

TBurnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 171, 184. Also Greek 
Philosophy, I, pp. 65-66. 

s Cf. Gomperz Griechische Denker, I, 2, ii, 5. Cf. Burnet on this view. 
Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 182 et seq. 



148 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

tions which, to his mind, lie clear and unescapable in the state 
ment that a thing exists. He begins by setting up as a com 
pass a standard employed as a matter of course by his prede 
cessors although never explicitly proclaimed by them. Log 
ical reasoning is the only method of discovering andjbesting 
what exists. The unthinkable ^cannot be. Any evidence of the 
senses, however direct, which fails to pass the cro_ss-examina- 
tion of reason must be rejected so far as the determination of 
the real nature of the Universe is concerned^ 

Now, what are the results of a rigorous application of this 
rule in working out the consequences of asserting the existence 
of anything? In the first place, there can be no such thin, 
as nothing. Mere vacuity, sheer emptiness cannot exist. For 
it is impossible to think or discourse about absolutely nothing 
the evidence of the senses sometimes notwithstanding. 
Thought and speech have to be about something, howeve- 
vague. Again, and here Parmenides as we have already noted 
is apparently paying his respects to Heracleitus, it is equally 
impossible to think that anything which exists "is and is not, 
the same and not the same." To assert the identity of oppo- 
sites is to flout the logical law of self-contradiction. What 
ever is, simply is, full blown and without reserve. It is_what 
is, and nothing else. Existence as such has no degrees or 
variety. 

These, however, are by no means the only restrictions laid 
by logic upon what can exist. A further analysis of the im 
plications of the verb "to be" leads to truly startling conclu 
sions. We are accustomed to regard the everyday world, 
packed with variety and movement, birth and growth and 
death, change and transformation, as something very real and 
substantial. Nevertheless, says Parmenides, if we will only 
reflect and use our reasons, we shall be forced to conclude that 
this world can have no real existence at all. Consider, for 
example, the seeming generation and dissolution, change and 
decay which are always going on about us. The things which 
come and go in the round of birth and death cannot be created 
out of nothing or dissolved into nothing, since there is no such 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 149 

thing as nothing. We recognize this readily enough, as it is 
the equivalent of our modern doctrine of the indestructibility 
of matter. The appearance upon the scene of a new object 
does not increase the amount of substance and energy in exist 
ence. It is simply a remolding of old stuff already there. 
Similarly, the seeming destruction of an object does not de 
crease the sum of matter by so much as an atom. The com 
bination is broken up and the particles are dispersed that 
is all. 

But, Parmenides goes on, examine more carefully this so- 
called process of remolding and breaking up. It cannot mean 
a real coming into or passing out of existence. Upon that 
point we agreed in the last paragraph. But if it does not mean 
a real coming into or going out of being, how can generation 
and dissolution, birth and death be a real process? For ex 
istence must come out of existence, that is, out of itself; and 
being will pass away into being, in other words into itself. 
Again, in any seeming change what exists merely turns into 
what exists. But can we say that a thing is really trans 
formed, or takes on a new form, if it has really turned only 
into itself? On the contrary, whatever the appearance may 
be, it has really remained itself. Or to put it mathematically, 
we might say that every case of seeming change resolves itself, 
if logically analyzed, into an identical equation. A does not 
really become 6, it simply continues throughout to equal a. 

Birth and death then, growth and decay, transformation 
and alteration, change in all its phases, do not touch Reality. 
They go on without increasing or decreasing the amount of 
what exists, without affecting the meaning of the verb "to be," 
without altering the nature or definition of Being. In other 
words, they do not go on in Reality. They merely go on in 
our false opinion, and deluded senses. They are illusions. 

Again, time, the twin-brother of change, cannot be logically 
regarded as real. We have no business to speak of what was, 
since that implies that something no longer is, or in other 
words, has gone out of existence. It is equally impossible to 
speak of what will be, since that implies that something is not 



150 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

as yet, but will come into existence. What exists is simply 
now, here, all at once. 9 

With the idea of change, the idea of variety is also banished 
fwmTttpfllify^ The definition of existence, the nature of Being, 
is the same in every object. Hence, all objects so far as they 
exist and are real are the same. . , -Reality is homogeneous and 
undifferentiated through and through. Nor can what realty 
exists be thought of as spatially divided into a multiplicit} 
of parts and points, moving about in space, as the Pythagore 
ans had supposed. For what is to separate these parts or 
points? There cannot be nothing between them, since nothing 
does not exist. But if there is something between them, then 
"what is, is in contact with what is," and the being of this 
something and the being of the things which it is supposed to 
separate are not divided, but are fused and merged with one 
another in one continuous, unbroken mass of Being. This 
absolute fullness, compactness, and continuity of what exists 
left, in Parmemdes opinion, no room for any change of place 
or movement whatsoever within the sphere of Being. Nor 
could Reality as a whole move, since outside it there is not even 
nothing for it to movejn^" 

We may speak literally of the sphere of Being, since Par- 
menides does not deny spatial extension and solidity to what 
exists, but asserts that it is shaped like a ball. Reality is for 
him a globe of absolutely solid, continuous, homogeneous, trans 
parent stuff, wholly devoid of cracks and flaws or iridescent 
play of qualities. And we might represent the dream world 
of our experience, of variety and multiplicity, change and 
motion, as an optical illusion we have of something flickering 
and stirring and reflecting rainbow lights in its rigid, color 
less, and motionless depths. 

The reasons brought forward for supposing Reality to be 
a sphere, are that roundness is logically implied in its undiffer 
entiated and even character, which permits of no "more or less 
or greater or smaller," or deformation or lack of equidistance 

9 Fr. 8, 1. 4, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 174. 

10 Fr. 8, 1. 26, Burnet, op. cit., p. 175. 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 151 

from the center. Nor is there anything outside it to "keep it 
from reaching out equally." " But considerations other than 
scientific may have helped determine this description of Real 
ity. The symmetry of the sphere made it to the Greek eye 
the very "mold of form." As the beau ideal of all geometrical 
figures, its best and most beautiful shape was the "natural" 
and proper shape for complete and perfect Being. Later on, 
we shall also find Plato conceiving the Universe as a sphere, 
for the express reason that this figure is excellent above all 
others and therefore the only fitting form for a world created 
in the image of the Good. 12 

Our first impression, indeed, is that these aesthetic and quasi- 
moral considerations outweighed science and logic in Par- 
menides mind, and that his doctrine of Reality as a sphere 
is a curious twist in his philosophy, for which at any rate no 
modern scientific justification can be found. His disciple 
Melissus, as we shall presently see, could not accept a curved 
Reality and endeavored to set things straight again by teach 
ing that "what is" stretches out to infinity in every direction. 
We are inclined to approve the correction and to ask how it 
is possible to conceive a sphere bounded even by nothing, with 
no extension outside its periphery. There must be, it would 
seem, a convex as well as a concave side to its curvature. 

But quite apart from the fact that, as Parmenides pupil 
Zeno showed, it proves equally difficult to conceive space as 
infinitely extended, modern science has given us another warn 
ing to look before we leap too hastily to a conclusion. It is 
one of the revenges of the whirligig of time that the most recent 
developments of mathematics and physics should suggest that 
after all Parmenides may be right. According to the Einstein 
and other cognate theories, Reality in its spatial aspects 
actually is a self-contained sphere, or at any rate, curved. 13 

11 Fr. 8, 1. 43 seq. Burnet, op. cit., p. 176. 

12 Plato, Timceus. 33b. 

13 Of. Einstein, Relativity, the Special and General Theory, p. 108 et seq, 
For a discussion of non-Euclidian geometries and the most recent develop 
ments of physics, cf. Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation, particularly 
Chapters V and X and the Historical Note. Appendix, p. 210. It should 
be noted that in Einstein s theory the sphere of closed and self-contained 



152 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

All so-called straight lines and flat surfaces are really slightly 
curved and if sufficiently projected would in the long run re 
turn upon themselves. Our solar system, however, is so small 
a fraction of this spherical whole that we are unable to detect 
the curvature. 14 Hence, straight lines and flat surfaces give 
us a false opinion of extension as something which enables us 
to proceed indefinitely in any direction away from any given 
point without ever coming back to it. Similarly, the lost 
traveler who is in reality wandering in a circle on the surface 
of a vast plain calls his course a straight line and feels posi 
tively that he is not returning upon his tracks. Or again, the 
globe-trotter going round the world has no perception of the 
curvature of the earth (save perhaps at sea on a calm day) 
and, if unsophisticated, could scarcely be brought to believe 
without the experimental verification of homecoming, that as 
he proceeded in a straight line over a flat surface away from 
his front gate he was in reality always approaching his back 
door. 

Submitted and habituated as we are, then, to thinking of 
the whole of space in terms of the false perspective afforded 
by our perception of an infinitesimal fraction of extension, our 
provincialism makes us cling obstinately to the view that 
straight lines do not return to their starting point. This in 
its turn gives us a prejudiced and incorrect notion of the 
meaning of such terms as "outside of" and "beyond," and 
leads us to the inadequate and unsophisticated concept of space 
as necessarily infinite in three dimensions. 

Let us now sum up Parmenides theory in his own words. 
That which exists, he says, must be thought of as a sphere 
"uncreated and indestructible; . . . complete, immovable, and 

space is infinitely extended in both directions in time. His Universe then 
is really "cylindrical curved in the three space dimensions and straight 
in the time dimension." (Eddington, p. 161.) 

14 Crude estimates of the size of the spatial sphere on Einstein s hypoth 
eses suggest that it would take a ray of light 1,000 million years to "go 
round the world" and return to its starting point. (Eddington, p. 161.) 
If the sphere, however, were throughout of the density of water, its radius 
would be 570 million kilometers, or could be traversed by light in about 
half an hour. (Eddington, p. 148.) 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 153 

without end . . . 1S coining into being and passing away, being 
and not being, change of place and alteration of bright color 
. . . are but names which mortals have given, believing them 
to be true." 16 

What the Stuff is that composes this globe of Reality, 
Parmenides does not further specify. But there is no need of 
his doing so, since his argument is equally applicable to all 
theories which suppose Reality to be absolutely one and simple 
in character, whatever that character may be. If for example, 
Thales be right and all things be really Water, then no thing 
except water really exists. All the so-called different things 
will be really the same thing, i.e., Water. All the seeming 
changes of water will leave water itself the same water, in 
reality unchanged. And since water fills existence to the 
brim and is hermetically sealed within it, as it were, there exists 
no room for any drop of water to move or change its place. 

In other words, the suspicion which overtook us early in 
the last chapter now deepens into a certainty. The senses 
actually are juggling with us when they proceed to fish red 
bandana handkerchiefs, glasses of beer, white rabbits, canary 
birds, and all the rest of the infinite complexity and variety 
of the world out of a cosmic top-hat filled with nothing but 
pure water or air. None of these transformations really occur, 
none of this variety really is. Time, Change, the Many, are 
tricks which the senses play us. But reason sees through them 
and knows that in Reality nothing ever occurs or changes, 
or begins or ends. 

Cold, abstract, and difficult as the argument and conclusions 
of Parmenides are, they, no less than the warm and vivid 
teaching of Heracleitus, can stir the imagination and enlist 
in their behalf a passionate volunteer support of tempera 
mental preference. For we are either bored or pacified by 
Rest as we are either sickened or exhilarated by Motion, and 
it touches the quest not only of truth but of happiness to 
know whether Life be really forever tossed upon the Flux 
and driven before the gale, or in reality lie becalmed upon the 

15 Fr. 8. 11. 2-3, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 176. 

16 Fr. 8. 11. 39-43 loc. cit. 



154 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

surface of an Existence so still that the merest semblance 
of a ripple is sheerest fancy. The conflict between Parmenides 
and Heracleitus at which we have just been assisting is then 
no academic difference of opinion. When Heracleitus makes 
Motion and Chance the essence of Reality he has with him 
all the restlessness and love of adventure in man, all the 
lure of sea-horizons and the challenge flung over the crests 
of the secretive hills. And the Eleatic doctrine that in Reality 
there is neither any variableness nor shadow of turning, and 
that all the fret and hurry of things is mere false opinion, and 
all our noisy years but "moments in the being of the eternal 
Silence," also expresses not simply a logical conviction but 
voices the great longing for peace and rest, for port and still 
waters and furled sails, which contends with restlessness for 
the mastery of the soul. 

Indeed, it has been maintained that Parmenides drew his 
inspiration largely from the mystical side of Greek religion, 
and that even the Way of Truth and the doctrine of the One 
Reality set out from a Pythagorean and Orphic starting 
point and led to mystical conclusions. The One Substance, it 
is said, is but the Pythagorean unit of which the whole number 
series is composed, deprived of its power to generate the many. 
The Way of Opinion depicts a process similar to the fall of 
the soul from absorption in the divine essence of Dionysus into 
the darkness and tribulation, the struggle and the suffering, 
of the body and the senses. For this straying of the soul 
from truth along the Way of Opinion the perfection of Reality 
cannot account. So, too, according to this interpretation, 
the return to Reality by the Way of Truth is for Parmenides 
really a mystical salvation, like the reunion of the purified 
and enlightened soul with Dionysus. 17 But we are here tread 
ing on difficult and contentious ground, which we shall do 
well to content ourselves with skirting.^, 

Parmenides failure to specify the nature of that which 
exists has left room also for various less mystical conjec 
tures regarding his views. It is maintained, for example, that 
he conceived Reality as something immaterial and highly 
" Cf. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, pp. 214-224. 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 155 

abstract, 18 or again that he anticipated the modern philosopher 
Spinoza by first sharply distinguishing consciousness from the 
material world, and then proclaiming the essential identity of 
thought and its material object as two aspects of one and the 
same Being. 19 Another interpretation, seemingly less strained 
and more in accord with both Parmenides own words and the 
philosophic concepts of the times, suggests that he thought 
of Reality "as something quite as solid and substantial as 
Water or Air, and that he, no more than the Milesians, drew 
any hard and fast line between the living and thinking, and 
the material and extended, aspects of the world. 20 His solid 
sphere of Being, like Xenophanes God probably "sees all 
over, thinks all over, and hears all over" with a diffuse pro 
toplasmic sensitization, as it were, rather than with a mind 
collected and isolated in a principle separate from and opposed 
to bodily Reality. 

It may be, even, that Parmenides gave a very concrete and 
corporeal twist to the abstract form of his reasoning and to 
such assertions as that of the non-existence of nothing. He 
was, it has been said, merely refusing to distinguish between 
the solid and the spatial aspects of the Universe and to admit 
the existence of empty space. In particular he was attacking 
the Pythagorean dualism which conceived the world as a 
porous mass of the Limited, or as he calls it in the "Way of 
Opinion," of "compact and heavy body," afloat and steeped 
in the "light, thin" Unlimited. 21 

Perhaps we might also find in his refusal to differentiate 
space from matter fresh evidence that he had not outgrown 
the Milesian habit of confusing all kinds of existence in a 
blended World-Substance tasting equally everywhere of all its 
flavors. "What is" not only "thinks all over." It is what 
ever it is "all over" and through and through. If it is solid, 
it is equally solid everywhere throughout its entire extent. 

is Cf. Deussen, Philosophie der Griechen, p. 83, 3. 

19 Cf. Gomperz, Oriechische Denker, I, 2, ii, 4. 

20 Cf. Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, pp. 589-90 ; Burnet, Early Greek 
Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 178 et seq. Also Greek Philosophy, Thales to 
Plato, p. 68. 

21 Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 186-7. 



156 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

Solidity and being are one just as thought and being are one. 
Space as little as thought can be separated from body and 
opposed to it. 

In his attempt to confirm with his logic this habit of view 
ing the Universe en bloc, Parmenides brings out some of the 
difficulties inherent in the idea of a vacuum, and of the rela 
tions of matter to space, by which the physical sciences are 
still balked. Thus in the Seventeenth Century, Descartes, 
who was one of the founders of modern science, joined hands 
with him in asserting that there can be no such thing as nothing 
or emptiness ; that a true vacuum is impossible, since "two 
bodies must touch each other when there is nothing between 
them" ; 22 and hence that material substance must be abso 
lutely compact, continuous, and coterminous and identical 
with extension. But the Eleatic would not have admitted the 
success of Descartes attempt to imbue a substance so con 
ceived with motion and to divide it into a multiplicity of 
material bodies. 

Again, Parmenides might have remarked the perplexities 
which beset our most modern scientific theories. Driven by the 
difficulties of conceiving of action at a distance without some 
intervening medium to carry the impulse, science has packed 
all interstellar space solid with a continuous, omnipresent, 
Eleatic ether, of which the grosser forms of matter are 
regarded as nodules, and through which the waves of light, 
heat, electrical energy, and perhaps gravitation are supposed 
to be transmitted. But in so doing physics has created for 
itself the unsolved problem of explaining how the heavenly 
bodies can push their way and change their place without 
friction in this dense Parmenidean substance, or how any dif 
ferentiation of the elements can occur within its homogeneous, 
unbroken depths. The questions raised by Parmenides are, 
then, not outworn and dead. They still press for an answer, 
and if we cling to the view that Reality is all cut of the same 
cloth and is in all respects One, his is perhaps the only answer 
that can logically be given them. 23 

22 Principia, II, 18. 

23 Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 179 et seq. 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 157 

The modern philosopher, however, unlike Parmenides, is also 
plagued by the necessity of explaining away the appearance 
of multiplicity and variety, of time, of "coming into being and 
passing away ... of change of place and alteration of bright 
color" with which the surface of this unrippled stillness and 
this flawless transparency are overspread. If the materialist 
be right and life and consciousness and mind be really nothing 
but mechanical energy, and all the seemingly different forms 
of that energy be nothing but movements of the ether, why do 
they seem to be so different from what they really are? If, 
as the Brahmin says, when Brahma ceases to dream the worlds 
will pass away, why does Brahma dream at all and dream what 
is not so? If, as some Buddhists claim, there exists in Reality 
nothing but the unbroken and dreamless peace of Nirvana, how 
can there arise or exist even the nightmare illusion of a strug 
gling, suffering world torn asunder into a myriad selves and 
things? In Realities thus conceived there would seem to be 
no ground or room for even the appearance, the dream, the 
illusion of anything else. 

So, too, beside the Way of Truth as Parmenides pursued 
it there should be no room for a Way of Opinion. All that 
is is the ball of undifferentiated, unbroken, unchanging, and 
immovable World-Substance. In it there can be found no 
reason for mortals believing Reality to be other than it is, 
or, for that matter, no reason for the existence of mortals 
and their opinions at all. Outside it no reason can be sought 
for, since it is all that is. 

That this difficulty is never faced by Parmenides is due to 
the nebulous character of his distinction between Appearance 
and Reality. The distinction and the problem which it in 
volves occurs to him as little as it did to Heracleitus. He, like 
the latter, differentiates between the senses and reason, and 
perhaps advances upon him in that he explicitly contrasts the 
fallibility of perception with the corrective function of reason 
and the reliability of correct thinking. We are probably 
entitled in his case to anticipate the distinction between 
"rationalism" and "empiricism," and dub him a rationalist. 
But we ought to do so in all caution. He may insist that only 



158 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

the results of thinking are to be accepted as true, whatever 
the senses may protest; but he never asks what it means to 
have a false opinion,, OIL- why false opinions occur, much less 
how they can occur. In a word, neither error nor knowledge 
presents any problem to him. But until the problem of error 
and of knowledge is recognized and pondered, the terms 
"rationalist" and "empiricist" have but a vague application, 
and the distinction between Appearance and Reality remains 
without philosophic weight. 

As it is, Parmenides, having once noted the untrustworthi- 
ness of the Way of Opinion and jotted down the kind of view 
to which it leads, dismisses it from his mind and system. He 
is concerned with Truth, not with the "names which mortals 
have given believing them to be true," and it does not seem 
to enter his mind that a true account of Reality must include 
and explain these wrong names and erroneous beliefs applied 
to and held regarding it. f In his eagerness to scale the Way* 
of Truth he fails to look behind him, forgetful that it, too, 
is an untrustworthy path which thought cannot traverse in 
both directions, and oblivious to the perils of a logic that 
reasons out a Nature of Things in which no reason for things 
can be found. It is, however, only just to remember that the 
whole history of philosophy is plaintive with the mewings of 
metaphysicians who have found it easier to get up the tree of 
knowledge than to get down again. Parmenides is by no means 
the last thinker to prove a view of the world in which the world 
proves not to be seen. 

But although Parmenides is treed by his argument, and 
only its collapse can bring him down to earth again, the mere 
fact that he argues and proves at all marks a great step for 
ward in the development of philosophy. Previous philosophers, 
as we have already observed, must, to be sure, have used logical 
methods in their thinking and found logical reasons for their 
conclusions regarding the real substance of the world. The 
Milesians, the Pythagoreans, and Heracleitus did not work 
out their views innocent of logical procedure and of the dif 
ference between good reasons and bad ones. They must even 
have implicitly assumed that what cannot be thought cannot 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 159 

exist, and that the more thinkable hypothesis is the more ten 
able. But they had reasoned out their systems in privacy 
and silence and published only their conclusions, and these in 
a dogmatic and often obscure form. They do not show why 
they are right, or why others of whom they speak slightingly 
are wrong. Parmenides, on the contrary, does his thinking out 
loud and in public, and not only announces D all the worlcLMs 
conclusions but confides to everyone the .whole process ..of 
reasoning by which he reaches them._ He tells you not merely 
that you are a fool, but why you are a fool if you do not 
agree with him. In a word, he demonstrates his theory. Thus, 
incidentally to the exposition of his hypothesis regarding the 
characteristics of the World-Substance, he also lays bare 
the mechanism and method of sound thinking and discloses 
some of the tests for determining the superiority of one 
hypothesis over another. 

Just, then, as in Heracleitus we perceived quite plainly ethics 
and psychology in bud upon the parent stem of philosophy, 
so in Parmenides we may see the special subject-matter and 
science of logic assuming a distinct and recognizable form. In 
his pupil Zeno, as we shall find in a moment, the bud flowers 
into a special form of argumentation, called by the Greek 
"dialectic," which is employed by^ Socrates_ and J^ata^ We 
may not, however, call Parmenides the father of logic since, 
as we have already noted, some degree of formal reasoning is 
the Siamese-twin of any articulate thought. But we are en 
titled to believe that we are assisting if not at the Nativity, at 
least at the Epiphany, of methodical thinking. 

Parmenides contribution, however, is not limited to his 
public-spirited gift of open and reasoned argument. Phi 
losophy is also the richer for his conclusions, extreme as they 
are. His view of the nature of Reality is, as we have pointed 
out, essentially Milesian. But seen in the dry light of his 
generalizations and abstract reasoning the real profundities 
as well as the dangerous shallows of the Milesian doctrine 
become evident. For example Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaxi- 
mander, and for that matter Xenophanes and Heracleitus, had 
all assumed that the World-Substance, be it Water, Fire, Air, 



160 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

or what not, is neither increased nor diminished in amount by 
the changes which it undergoes. In Parmenides hands this 
assumption matures into an explicit statement and a logical 
demonstration which anticipates the scentific teaching of to-day 
that the sum total of matter and energy in existence is a con 
stant and not a variable quantity. Again the Milesian feeling 
that the World-Stuff preserves its original qualities intact 
in the midst of its transformations, inconsistent as such a 
feeling is with a belief in the reality of change, is justified by 
the Eleatic in an argument for the qualitative sameness of 
Reality, which is prophetic of the modern hypothesis that 
chemistry can be understood in terms of physics, and the 
various chemical elements reduced to a single homogeneous 
matter, like the ether for example. 24 

Finally, the severity of Parmenides conclusion that since 
Reality is invariable and constant both in quality and quantity, 
therefore motion, change, multiplicity, and variety are logi 
cally unthinkable and hence non-existent, was both a warning 
and a stimulus to speculation. Philosophy had reached for the 
moment a dead center, and had to be set in motion again, 
either by ousting thought with the eccentricities of mystical 
emotion and feeling or by restoring to reason its momentum. 
The moment, however, was not ripe for philosophic mysticism, 
which presupposes an exhaustion of reason as a means of 
reaching truth, and an impatience and despair of its incom 
plete and self-contradictory results. Logic had just become 
conscious of itself and, far from being jaded, was over-eager 
and confident. The self-stultification of Parmenides reason 
ing was no evidence of final failure and disgrace, or cause for 
permanent discouragement. It showed no more than an in 
complete acquaintance with the complexity of the world, and 
taught a lesson calculated to steady thinking and set it on 
the path of real advance. It emphasized the necessity of a 
further analysis on the one hand of the nature and validity 
of logic and knowledge, and on the other of the structure 
of the physical world, before leaping too hastily to logical 
conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall find before long 

2* Of. Gomperz, Griechische Denker, 1, 2, ii, 3 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 161 

the interest of philosophy centered upon the problem of 
knowledge, and focused in a brilliant and searching skepti 
cism as to the existence of any absolute and universal truths. 
And in the next chapter we shall trace successive steps in so 
reconstructing the physical universe that the reality of 
multiplicity, motion, and change can be reasserted and recon 
ciled with the Parmenidean and modern scientific doctrine 
that the World-Substance is constant and invariable both in_ 
Quantity and quality. 

The disciples or Parmenides, nevertheless, persisted in 
regarding the appearance of multiplicity and variety and the 
trick of transformation and motion as all "hypnotism," so 
to speak, and false opinion, and refused to admit the possi 
bility of any "scientific" explanation. They found, however, 
that the Pythagoreanism against which they were revolting 
was by no means scotched by their master s logic. On the 
contrary, it was very much alive, and evinced a tendency to 
shed its old skin of religious mysticism and emerge with more 
brilliantly marked mathematical and scientific characteristics. 
Moreover, in the coils of its dualism the Eleatic solid sphere 
of pure unbroken Existence was being slowly crushed to bits 
before their eyes and dispersed throughout a specious space 
which was self-confessedly no thing. That unthinkable ab 
surdity, the existence of a vacuum, was being reasserted, and 
the immutable World-Substance broken up into the four 
elements of Empedocles and the molecules of Anaxagoras, or 
pulverized into a dust-storm of swirling atomic, Pythagorean 
points or units. There was dire need, then, to rearray all the 
forces of logic for a final onslaught on the philosophic coun 
tenance increasingly given to the things which are "but names 
which mortals have given, believing them to be true coming 
into being and passing away, being and not being, change of 
place and alteration. . . . " 25 

At Parmenides death the leadership of the School fell to 
his pupil Zeno, said by some to have been his favorite, by others 
his adopted son. With it devolved the task of defending the 

28 Parmenides, Fr. 8. 1. 39, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 
p. 176. 



162 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

master s doctrines. We have already run across Zeno in the 
company of Parmenides at the time of the visit to Athens men 
tioned by Plato. He is portrayed as some twenty-five years 
younger, "tall and fair to look upon." Like Parmenides, he 
seems to have started his philosophic career as a Pythagorean 
and like him also, to have played an eminent and honorable 
part in Elean politics. The story goes that having been 
arrested and brought before the tyrant of the city on the 
charge of conspiracy, he made the pretext of wishing to whisper 
information in private an occasion for biting the royal ear 
and holding on till the tyrant was stabbed by other con 
spirators. Another version of the story, to which the narrator 
gives more credence, relates that by biting out his own tongue 
he shamed the bystanders into stoning the tyrant to death. 28 

But even if the story be true, and his zeal for political liberty 
eventually precluded him from reading aloud his discourses 
and defending Parmenides doctrines by word of mouth, as 
he did during his sojourn at Athens, he seems to have used 
his pen to good advantage. His writings have been lost, but 
a portion at least of their substance has been reported by 
other ancient philosophers. So much as has come down to us 
is a reiteration of the already familiar thesis that multiplicity 
and motion are unthinkable and hence unreal. 

In his manner of dealing with the subject, however, Zeno 
differs from Parmenides. The latter had argued directly that 
if we analyze what we mean when we assert that a thing is, we 
shall find, if our reasoning be close and correct, that we mean 
that it cannot move, change, or be divided into or composed 
of many parts. Zeno, on the contrary, begins by conceding 
the reality of the Many, of Space, and of Motion, and then 
shows that the self-contradictions and absurdities which follow 
on the concession are far greater than those involved in the 
denial of their existence. This particular method of reasoning 
by admitting for the moment the truth of an opponent s view 
and then exposing the contradictions of thought to which its 
truth commits him, was called by the Greeks "dialectic." It 
was later made famous by Socrates and was perfected by the 

26 Diogenes Laertius, IX, 26 et aeq. 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 163 

genius of Plato, not only as a fashion of argument but as a 
style for literary and artistic expression. Zeno is regarded 
by Aristotle 2T as its inventor, although, as we have already 
seen, he probably owes his inspiration to Parmenides more 
general formulation of logic. 

Let us now see how this method is exemplified in his handling 
of the objections raised, perhaps by Pythagorean contempo 
raries, against Parmenides views on multiplicity, space, and 
motion. Take first the case of the Many vs. the One. Suppose, 
Zeno says, that the world is not the unbroken continuous Sphere 
which Parmenides thought it to be, but is really an aggregate 
of many constituent parts. If Reality is made up of parts, it. 
must obviously be made up of a definite number ^ ojhejn. This 
is only common-sense. But common-sense just as obviously 
demands that every part, however small, shall be divisible into 
still smaller parts, and that this process of subdivision shall 
continue indefinitely or ad-inftnitiLm. The statement, then, that 
Reality is a Many involves with equal logic the contradictory 
assertions that the Many must be finite, and that they must 
be infinite, in number. It is even more difficult to swallow such 
a contradiction than to stomach Parmenides doctrine that 
plurality is false opinion and that the Universe is a single, 
indivisible Substance. 

If Reality is a Many and therefore composed of a certain 
number of units, this final definite number must be incapable 
of extension by further subdivision. But only that which has 
no magnitude can be thought of as indivisible. Hence these 
units will have no magnitude. Reality, then, being made up of 
parts which have no magnitude, will have no magnitude itself, 
or in other words will be infinitely small. Suppose, however, 
the other alternative that the units which compose Reality 
are divisible ad infinitum. In that case Being will be composed 
of an infinite number of parts. But that which has an infinite 
number of parts is infinitely large. Reality, therefore, will 
be infinitely large, as well as infinitely small. Once more, the 
Many prove even more difficult of mental digestion than the 
Parmenidean One. 

27 Diogenes Laertius, IX, 25. 



164 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

Finally, if Reality is not essentially One, but a mere aggre 
gate of the Many, the effect produced by the sum total__of 
many units ought to le no more than the sum of the .effects 
produced by each separately. Take, however, a measure of 
millet seed. Drop the ten thousandth part of a grain, or even 
a whole grain, and it will make no noise. Drop the whole 
measure and there will be a noise. But how can a noise be 
a sum of silences and the audible be composed of that which 
cannot be heard? If, then, the whole is nothing but an aggre 
gate of parts, and "the measure of millet makes a noise," the 
one "grain and the ten-thousandth part of a grain make a 
noise" 8 and are audible, too which is contrary to fact^, 

Having disposed of the view that Reality is a Many by 
showing that it involves more self-contradictions than the Par- 
menidean hypothesis that Being is One, Zeno turns to defend 
the teaching that Reality is a sphere outside of which there is 
no empty space. The difficulties of twisting our minds to the 
modern presentation of this view, we have already noted. 
Apparently the Pythagorean mathematicians, also, had imme 
diately objected that a sphere with no space outside to bound 
and shape it was unthinkable. However, says Zeno, suppose 
that such a space exists. If it exists, "it will be in something ; 
for all that is, is in something, and what is in something is 
in space." And this space in which the space containing the 
Parmenidean sphere of Being is placed, must itself be placed 
and contained in still another space. "This goes on ad infin- 
itum. Therefore there is no space* r 9 in the sense of a final 
something in which all things are~ placed and contained but 
which itself can be conceived as contained and placed in nothing 
outside itself. The dilemma is absolute. We must stop some 
where or nowhere. But if we are going to stop anywhere, we 
might just as well have stopped in the beginning with the 
Eleatic self-contained sphere of Existence, outside of which 
no extension exists. For in any case we shall be conceiving 

28 Simplicius 255 r. (trans. Fairbanks, The First Philosophers of Greece, 
p. 117). 

29 Simplicius, p. 562, 3 (trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 
p. 317). 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 165 

space as eventually self-contained and finite. If, however, we 
do not stop anywhere, we shall certainly get nowhere and never 
reach anything which we can properly call the real space inside 
of which all bodies and extensions are contained. The idea, 
then, of the infinity of space is not a whit less perplexing and 
self-contradictory than Parmenides idea of the bounded and 
spherical character of extension. 

Had Zeno been a prophet, he might have reinforced this 
negative argument with a positive appeal to the modern mathe 
matical and physical theories which we were discussing a 
moment ago. But as matters stood, he had shown that even 
if s Parmenides were wrong, his critics were no nearer right. 
Indeed the twin yet incompatible necessities of conceiving space 
as both infinite and finite, and the seeming impossibility of 
conceiving them as either, led the modern philosopher Kant to 
reject the reality of space altogether and regard it as a wholly 
subjective form of human perception. 

We pass now to the question of motion. Granting for. the 
moment that motion j_s real, what will be the consequences of 
its reality ? Take these two examples : Swift Achilles in pur 
suit of the lumbering tortoise, and the still swifter arrow flying 
through the air. Achilles surely seems to catch the tortoise, 
and apparently the arrow moves. But consider the real situa 
tion. To catch the tortoise Achilles must certainly first 
traverse half the space w r hich separates him from the object 
of his pursuit, and then half the remaining space, and yet 
again half that which still intervenes. Now look closer. 
Achilles though always "winning near the goal" can never 
reach it, for he will always be separated from it by half a 
distance still to go. This distance may in the end be infini 
tesimal, but it is still real and will always intervene. Nay, 
more, the tortoise would be just as safe from Achilles ad 
vance if it never moved but stood waiting for him, since a 
fixed limit by the same reasoning is just as inaccessible as a 
moving one. Motion, then, logically cannot take place. It is 
not thinkable. Parmenides assertion that it is an illusion is 
less absurd than the belief in its reality. 

Or, take again the arrow flying in the air. Obviously, it 



166 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

would seem, the arrow is always somewhere. But how can we 
say that it is somewhere if it is moving? If it is moving it 
will be always between "wheres," on its way from one point 
to another. To think of it as really at one point or anywhere 
we must think of it as at rest. Its so-called flight, then, turns 
out on analysis to be made up of a series of contiguous points 
at which it cannot be conceived as flying. A movement, how 
ever, which is nothing but a sum of stops is self-contradictory 
and impossible. Much the easiest way out of these difficulties 
is, after all, to agree with Parmenides that motion is unreal. 

But apparently, Zeno s opponents had their answer ready 
and retorted that at any given indivisible instant of time the 
arrow need not be regarded as at rest but could be conceived 
as moving and on its way from one point in space to the next. 
At any rate, Zeno is prepared to answer an objection of this 
sort. Take, he says, "equal bodies moving in opposite direc 
tions past each other in the stadium at equal speeds." To 
be more specific and at the same time to modernize an argument 
whose difficulties are not obviated by the explanations of the 
ancient commentators, we may suppose these bodies to be two 
motor-cars of equal wheel-base moving along a road in opposite 
directions, each making say fifty miles an hour. Since their 
velocities are equal they will travel equal distances, as for 
example their own lengths, in equal times. Moreover, they 
will approach and pass each other at a speed equal to their 
combined velocities, or at a rate of one hundred miles an 
hour. In other words, either car will pass and clear the length 
of the other, in one-half the time necessary to cover the same 
distance on the ground. Furthermore, in any fraction of the 
moment of passing, however minute, the two cars will still be 
passing each other at double the speed, that is, in one-half the 
time, that they are passing over the road. So far so good. 

But now Parmenides critics had argued that the ultimate 
fractions into which time might be divided were indivisible in 
stants, and that in these instants the arrow or the motor-car 
moved from point to point. In that case, it must be possible 
for the two cars to take half of an indivisible instant to pass a 
so Aristotle, Physics, VI, 9, 2396. 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 167 

fraction of each other s lengths and the whole of it to traverse 
a like amount of stationary ground. But it is by definition 
impossible to take half of an indivisible instant. It cannot 
be halved, since there is no time less than it. In such an instant, 
therefore, despite all the evidence of the senses, the two cars 
cannot be conceived as taking less time to pass some portion 
of each other s lengths than to go the same distance on the 
ground. But in that case one hundred miles an hour is really 
no faster than fifty miles an hour. "Double the time," to 
quote from Aristotle s account of Zeno, is really "equal to the 
half." 31 

Such are the difficulties of trying to move in indivisible 
instants, or in a time composed of them. Half as fast proves 
to be the same as twice as fast, and the brake and the throttle 
give identical results. In these circumstances, it is madness 
to maintain that the motor-car can run except into fatal 
absurdities. The reasonable man, anxious to avoid suicide by 
self-contradiction, will rather heed in time the warnings of logic, 
submit without protest to arrest by Parmenides, and enter 
a plea of "nolo contendere" to the charge of really standing 
still while under the false opinion of "speeding." The arrow, 
too, or any other body intoxicated by the impression of motion, 
will do well to appear with the motorist at the bar and plead 
guilty to having mistaken for a successful flight a series of 
points in each of which it now recognizes itself to have been 
at rest. By so doing it will escape with a far lighter reprimand 
from reason than if it persists in the drunken assertion that 
it was actually moving in an indivisible instant or in a time 
composed of a series of such instants. 

It may seem to us at first as if Zeno overshot his mark, 
and was too smart and subtle to be really trustworthy in 
detecting and writing up the paradoxical character of motion. 
We instinctively feel that it is all too absurd, and that there 
must be a "joker" somewhere in his argument. This is per 
fectly true; but it has taken the mathematical world some 
twenty-two centuries to discover just what the "joker" really 

si Aristotle, Physics, VI, 9, 2396. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd 
ed., pp. 319-20. 



168 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

is, and to give a satisfactory solution of the problems which 
Zeno raised. To answer his objections, revolutionary methods 
of dealing with the concepts of the infinitesimal, the infinite, 
and the continuous have been necessary. The results of this 
revolution have been to banish the infinitesimal and to redefine 
infinity and continuum in terms which render the Pythagorean 
view that everything is a sum or number of discreet units as 
paradoxical as Zeno had found it. 32 

We may then take leave of Zeno feeling that his arrow, 
albeit motionless, is a very penetrating criticism of "those 
who uphold a many" and that it "gives them back as good 
and better than they gave." If his argument is aimed at 
showing that his opponents "assumption of multiplicity will be 
involved in still more absurdities than the assumption of 
unity," J3 it hits its mark squarely. Parmenides position that 
motion and multiplicity are unreal may be untenable, but an 
attack on it on the ground that space, time, and the World- 
Stuff are aggregates of many indivisible mathematical points 
or parts will be hoist with its own petard long before it reaches 
its objective. 

Parmenides next greatest defender, Melissus, was recruited 
overseas from the island of Samos. Like Zeno, of whom he was 
a somewhat younger contemporary, he was eminent in the 
politics of his native city, and, as events showed, he could try 
his hand at the defense of other things than philosophic 
theories. The consummation of the defeat of the Persians at 
Salamis by the Greek victories the following year at Plataea 
and Mycale had been the signal for immediate disaffection and 
revolt on the part of the Ionian cities whose subjugation by 
Cyrus we noted at the beginning of this chapter. In this 
revolt Samos had taken a leading part. The battle of Mycale, 
in fact, had been precipitated by her offer of alliance to the 
combined Athenian and Spartan naval forces at Delos, and 

32 For a discussion of Zeno s paradoxes in the light of modern mathe 
matics, cf. Russell, Mysticism and Logic, Ch. V. 

33 Plato, Parmenides, I28c (trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd 
ed., p. 313). 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 169 

her appeal to them for help against the Persian fleet of four 
hundred ships mobilized off her shores. Later, she had been 
one of the most powerful states to enter along with the other 
Asiatic and island Greeks into the Confederacy of Delos, which, 
formed in the beginning under the hegemony of Athens as a 
defense against further Persian aggression, was transformed 
through the inevitable ascendency of the leading partner into 
the Athenian Empire of the Periclean Age. 

The former allies, however, now become subordinate if not 
subject, proved unruly members. Revolts and attempted seces 
sions were frequent, in the most formidable of which Melissus 
came to the fore. A quarrel arose between the Samos and 
Miletus over the possession of the same Priene which we have 
already had occasion to mention in connection with the found 
ing of Elea. The Athenian Government not only intervened 
but extended its intervention to interference in the domestic 
affairs of the island. The ruling aristocracy was overthrown 
and a democratic regime was set up under the protection of 
an Athenian garrison. The aristocracy, however, came back 
in force one fine night, seized the garrison and handed it over 
to the Persians on the mainland, and reestablished themselves. 
Pericles, who commanded the Athenians, returned post-haste 
at the news and invested the town. And, Plutarch tells us, 
"Melissus was captain of the Samians against Pericles at 
what time he did lay siege unto the city of Samos." 34 The 
Athenian statesman s attention, however, was diverted by the 
rumors of the arrival of a rescuing Phoenician fleet, and leaving 
a blockading force under command of the poet Sophocles, he 
went off with a part of his ships to attack the enemy. Then 
"Melissus, the son of Ithagenes, a great philosopher, being at 
the time general of the Samians: perceiving that few ships 
were left behind at the siege of the city, and that the captains 
also that had the charge of them were no very expert men of 
war, persuaded his citizens to make a sally upon them. Where 
upon they fought a battell and the Samians overcame: the 
Athenians were taken prisoners, and they sunk many of their 

s* Plutarch, Themistocles, Ch. 2 (North s trans.). 



170 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

ships." 35 The Samian success, however, was short-lived. The 
Phoenician fleet failed to materialize, Pericles returned, resumed 
the siege, and after nine months, forced a surrender (439 
B. C.). The city was compelled to destroy its fortifications, 
hand over its fleet, and pay an indemnity. The admiral, 
we may fancy, returned to his philosophy for refuge and 
consolation. 

Both Parmenides and Zeno, it will be remembered, began 
their philosophic careers as Pythagoreans and delivered their 
most telling shafts against their former masters. Melissus, 
however, seems to have done his first philosophizing under the 
influence of the Milesians and Heracleitus, 36 and in his writings 
has principally in mind a reformation, or when that was not 
possible, a refutation, of Ionian doctrines by Eleatic logic. 
In his use of argument he abandons the "dialectical" method 
introduced by Zeno, and returns to the direct reasoning, though 
not to the poetical form, employed by Parmenides. At the 
same time, he is not, like Zeno, wholeheartedly devoted to his 
master but differs from him, as we shall see in a moment, in 
two important points. 

Melissus begins by reiterating the Parmenidean dictum that 
nothing cannot exist since it cannot be talked about "as of 
something real." From this initial statement he deduces 
the twin conclusions that since emptiness is nothing 38 empty 
time and empty space cannot exist. Reality, then, cannot be 
preceded or followed by empty time, or bounded by empty 
space. He.nce it must be conceived as unlimited in both dura 
tion and extent. 39 

In this doctrine of the infinity of Reality in spare ftnj_jjmg ? 
Melissus modifies veryjconsiderablv the teaching of Parmenides. 
The latter, it will be remembered, had logically enough 
relegated time along with its sister notions of change and 
motion to the realm of false opinion. "What is" simply is. 

SB Plutarch, Pericles, Ch. 26 (North s trans.). 

SB Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 321. Zeller, Pre-8ocratic 
Philosophy, I, p. 628, note 1. 
37 Fr. la, Burnet, loc. cit. 
ss Fr. 7, Burnet, op. cit., p. 323. 
39 Fr. 1, 2, 3, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 321-2. 






THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 171 

The past and future have no true existence. Melissus, how 
ever, seems to take the reality of time for granted, although 
he is as stern as Parmenides in proclaiming the unreality of 
everything which happens in its course. 

This view is less profound and consistent than that of 
Parmenides. Time, apart from the march of events whose 
occurrence and novelty it marks and measures, is like the 
Smile without the Cheshire Cat. If the mobile features of the 
world must fade into unreality and illusion, time should 
disappear with them. Melissus, however, had less sense of 
metaphysical propriety than Alice. She, at least, thought it 
odd that the Cat should fade and leave her alone with the 
Smile. But he exhibits no surprise at seeing Time still there 
without the change and motion upon whose face it ordinarily 
plays. Nor does he wonder that it should still be really going 
on, although everything which seems to go on in it is really at 
a standstill, and "going on" itself has proved to be a false 
opinion. 

In his teaching that Reality is infinite in extent, Melissus 
disagrees with Parmenides view that it is an all inclusive, 
self-contained sphere. This modification of the older Eleatic 
doctrine is perhaps due in part to the lingering influence of 
his early masters. The Milesians had all assumed that the 
World-Stuff is boundless and Anaximander had merely called 
it the Boundless or Unlimited, and let it go at that. In part, 
too, Melissus was probably influenced by the same difficulties 
of conceiving a sphere with nothing, not even empty space, 
outside it, which make it so hard for us to-day to grasp the 
Einstein theory. There would seem to be no end to extension, 
and since all extension in Melissus opinion was packed full 
of World-Stuff, Reality must stretch away to infinity in every 
direction. 

The rest of Melissus doctrine is orthodox enough. Since 
Reality is infinite it must be One. 40 Since there is no empty 
space, there is nothing for Reality to move in, and hence no 
such thing as motion. Arguing apparently against Anaxi 
mander, Melissus also points out that the non-existence of 

40 Fr. 6, Burnet, loc. cit. 



172 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

empty space precludes the existence of degrees of emptiness 
and fullness, and thus renders any process of condensation 
and rarefaction unthinkable. 41 The unreality of motion, again, 
makes the apparent spatial division of Reality into many 
different things also unreal. For "if what is real is divided, 
it moves." 42 

Qualitative variety and alteration are equally inconceivable. 
All change of quality and nature proves on examination to 
involve the old unthinkable self-contradictions of creation out 
of nothing and extinction in nothing. A new quality or nature 
would not exist anywhere before it appeared or after it dis 
appeared. Melissus reinforces this argument by pointing out 
that if any characteristic of Reality, however humble or minute, 
could be actually erased and annihilated, as the idea of change 
implies, there would be no logical reason why in time all the 
qualities of the World-Stuff should not be rubbed out, and 
Reality reduced to blank nothing. 43 

The impossibility of qualitative change is also made the 
basis of an attack on the view that the order or arrangement, 
or as we might almost say, the internal relations of Reality 
can differ from time to time. Here, Melissus has in mind 
perhaps, such "evolutionary" theories of the origin of the 
Universe, as Anaximander s view that the world is formed by 
a separation of opposites within the Unlimited, 44 or the teach 
ing of his contemporaries. Empedocles and Anaxagoras, that 
the world is formed by the alternate separation and mixture, 
or the whirling apart, of an originally conglomerate mass 
of various elements. Finally, a curious statement that the 
World-All cannot suffer grief or pain, 45 is perhaps directed 
against the Heracleitan doctrine that opposites are identical 
and that the seeming evils and imperfections of existence all 
contribute to the "hidden attunement" and completeness of 
Reality. 46 

41 Fr. 7, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 323. 

42 Fr. 10, op. cit., p. 324. 

43 Fr. 7, op. cit., p. 322. 

44 Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 326. 

45 Fr. 7, Burnet, op. cit., p. 323. 

46 Op. cit., p. 326. 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 173 

Melissus supplements these direct arguments in favor of 
the unity, the eternity, and the unchangeableness of the All, 
with an indirect demonstration in the style of Zeno s "dia 
lectic." Suppose, he says, that Reality is after all Many, not 
One, and is composed of different elements and qualities like 
"earth and water, and air, and iron, and gold and fire," black 
and white, warm and cold, soft and hard, the living and the 
dead. 47 Even in that case the old argument against creation 
out of nothing and absolute annihilation will still hold good, and 
hence the ultimate constituents of the Universe, if they are 
to be conceived as really existing, cannot be conceived as 
coming into or passing out of being or as altering their 
natures. Each one of the Many, then, will prove to be a 
miniature Parmenidean One, and their apparent alteration 
and interchange will still be unreal and illusory. 48 But if the 
Many lie to us when they seem to change, we may also reason 
ably suspect the truthfulness of their seeming multiplicity and 
variety. The transformation of one thing into another and 
the difference of one thing from another might be held to stand 
or fall together. 

This argument, it has been suggested, is directed principally 
against the teaching of Melissus contemporary, Anaxagoras, 
that Reality was originally a mixture of many articles en 
dowed with the qualities and natures perceived by our senses 
such as white, black, iron rust, etc., and that the first step in 
the evolution of the world was a separation from one another 
of opposite kinds of molecules. 49 Still, Anaxagoras agreed 
perfectly with Melissus that the particles of hot, cold, soft, 
hard, and what not were eternal and unalterable, and tried to 
explain apparent transformations of quality as in reality a 
simple presence of now more, now less, of one kind of atoms than 
of another. It would seem as if at any rate the reference to the 
belief "that what is warm becomes cold, and what is cold warm ; 
that what is hard turns soft, and what is soft hard ; that what 
is living dies, and that things are born from w r hat lives not, and 

4" Fr. 8, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 323-4. 

48 Loc. cit. 

49 Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 328. 



m THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

that all these things are changed," might be more direct!} 
aimed at Heracleitus. 

We must note finally, a statement of Melissus which has given 
rise to considerable speculation and difference of opinion among 
commentators. "Now," he says, "if it were to exist, it must 
needs be one ; but if it is one, it cannot have body ; for, if it 
had body it would have parts, and would no longer be one." 51 
The "it" has commonly been taken to refer to Being, and the 
fragment as a whole has been interpreted as an assertion that 
Reality is incorporeal. This view, however, has been opposed 
both on the ground of its inconsistency with Melissus other 
statements, as for example that Being is "infinite in magni 
tude," 2 and for reasons of textual criticism into which we 
need not enter. Melissus is referring, it is said, not to Reality 
but to the indivisible yet spatially extended units of which the 
Pythagoreans believed all things to be composed, and is join 
ing hands with Zeno in attacking them. 53 A similar question 
arose, we may remember, as to whether Parmenides considered 
Being abstract and immaterial or concrete and material, and 
was decided in favor of the latter alternative. So, too, in the 
case of Melissus it seems much more in accord not only with 
the general tenor of his teaching but with all we know of the 
previous development of philosophy to suppose that he had 
not differentiated the incorporeal, from the spatial and mate 
rial, aspect of existence. He still thought of Reality in the 
old Milesian way, as a World-Stuff. 

We may now attempt a summary of the Eleatic doctrine as 
a whole. Whatever exists must be thinkable, that is, logically 
consistent. Nothing cannot exist since it is impossible to think 
of nothing. But creation and destruction, and even change 
of nature and quality, involve coming into being from nothing, 
and going out of being into nothing. Hence Reality must be 
uncreated and indestructible, and of an unchangeable nature 

so Fr. 8, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 323. 
si Fr. 9, op. cit., p. 324. 

52 Fr. 3, op. cit., p. 322. 

53 Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 327. 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 175 

subject to no alteration of any sort. Qualitative difference 
cannot arise within it. 

Again, since nothing cannot exist, empty space cannot exist, 
for empty space is no thing, but is void. Reality, therefore, 
must pack space solid. Or rather, the corporeal and spatial 
aspects of Reality are inseparable. But if there is no empty 
space, there can be no motion, since movement requires room 
and room implies unfilled extension. In Reality, therefore, 
there can be no spatial movement or, to put it technically, no 
locomotion. "What is" must be as still as it is colorless. 
Finally, if there is no empty space, no quantitative divisions 
or parts can take place or exist in the Real, since division 
would imply movement apart, and the distinction of parts from 
one another would imply the existence of empty space between 
them. In a word, Reality, whatever it may look like, can be 
logically conceived only as one single rigid block of solid, abso 
lutely continuous and transparent substance, without crack or 
flaw or iridescence. Hence multiplicity, variety, change, alter 
ation, development, motion, etc., are all illusion and false 
opinion. 

Reality is One, in contradiction to the Pythagorean doc 
trine of Number and the two Principles of the Odd and Even, 
against which both Parmenides and Zeno had revolted. It 
packs space solid in protest against the implication of empty 
space, and hence of the existence of nothing, latent both in 
Anaximenes doctrine of condensation and rarefaction, and in 
the Pythagorean teaching that the dense Limited is surrounded 
and permeated by the light, thin Unlimited. It is a severely 
simple static, unchanging, ever-the-same sort of One, in logical 
succession to the Milesian World-Stuffs, and in opposition to 
the brilliant, restless, versatile, never-the-same Oneness of the 
perpetual Flame and Becoming of the Heracleitan Fire. 

According to Parmenides, the unchangeable and motionless 
Reality is lifted clear of time. In it there is no past or future, 
but simply what modern philosophers have called the timeless 
present. In other words, it is eternal. Time shares the fate 
of its blood-brothers, change and motion, and is relegated with 
them to the realm of false opinion and illusion. According to 



176 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

Melissus, however, Reality is infinite in time. It is not eternal 
but everlasting. 

Again, Parmenides teaches that Reality is a sphere, thereby 
curiously anticipating some of the most recent hypotheses of 
the mathematics and physics of to-day, as, for instance, the 
Einstein Theory. Melissus, on the other hand, reverts to the 
view, more popular then as now, that the spatial extension of 
Reality is infinite in every direction. 

Both Parmenides and Melissus use a direct method of argu 
mentation. Parmenides develops his case by analyzing the 
meaning and deducing the consequences of the statement that 
something exists. He sets up reason as the test of truth and 
of the possibility of existence. Anything which proves to be 
unthinkable cannot really exist, however evident it may seem 
to the senses. By virtue of this out and out assertion that 
what cannot be thought cannot be, and because of his habit 
of demonstrating his conclusions step by step in public, he may 
be regarded as the promoter if not the discoverer of logic as a 
special science or subdivision of philosophy. 

Zeno s method is different. In his attack upon the existence 
of the Many, and in his famous paradoxes of Achilles and the 
tortoise, the flying arrow, and the bodies moving at different 
speeds, with which he seeks to disprove the possibility of mo 
tion, he uses what is called the dialectical method. He admits 
for the moment the truth of his opponents theories and then 
exposes the self-contradictions which their truth entails. Zeno 
is regarded by Aristotle as the inventor of this method, which 
later plays so brilliant a part in the philosophizing of Socrates 
and Plato. 

We may conclude our discussion of the Eleatics by also 
briefly reviewing and summarizing our estimate of their con 
tribution to the development and future direction of philosophy. 
We noted, in the first place, that Parmenides brought about a 
metaphysical crisis by pushing to its logical conclusion the 
Milesian hypothesis of a single homogeneous World-Substance, 
and showing that it rendered multiplicity, variety, change, 
empty space, and motion all unthinkable. At the same time 
he had proved to the satisfaction of his opponents as well as 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 177 

of his followers that the World-Stuff must be changeless and 
fixed both in quantity and quality. Two alternatives were 
now possible to speculation. Either the unfixed and changing 
everyday world could be regarded as unreal and illusory, and 
philosophy could turn skeptical or mystical, or a new theory 
of the World-Stuff might be reasoned out which should recon 
cile the indestructible and unalterable nature of matter with 
the multiplicity, the variety^the ..change^ and^the motion appar 
ent to the senses. This latter alternative was embraced first 
by philosophy. The immediate result and concomitant of 
Eleaticism was an assertion of the existence of motion, and a 
division of the Parmenidean One into a fixed quantity of unal 
terable particles or atoms whose shifting combinations and 
arrangements accounted for the variety, the "becoming," and 
the apparent coming into and passing out of being, of phe 
nomena. Eventually a further study of motion made the 
possibility of movement depend upon the real existence or empty 
space as something distinct from the matter which moves in it. 
Thus the Eleatic School played the part of an unkind and 
provocative stepmother to the developments which we shall 
take up in the next chapter. 

But the other alternative lay dangerously open. By insisting 
upon the exercise of pure reason as the only means of deter 
mining what really exists, Parmenides, curiously enough, paved 
the way both for skepticism and mysticism. The mind thrown 
back upon logic for its only guide not unnaturally asked reason 
to give an account of the Reality to which the way of Truth 
led. But reason in reply could give no positive description of 
Reality except to say that it was round. For the rest it could 
describe it only negatively. And the inquiring mind might 
well feel that the single negation "unknowable" covered all the 
other "un-s" and "im-s," and "a-s." Melissus is well on his 
way to skepticism when he says that although we "say that we 
see and hear and understand aright ... it turns out that we 
neither see nor know realities." Another step, and we have 
reached the verdict of the Sophists that the evidence for any 
Reality outside our individual experience is undemonstrable, 

C4 Fr. 8, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 323-4. 



178 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 

and that no such thing as absolute truth can be established. 
Thus Eleaticism inspires not only the reconstruction under 
taken by Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus, but also 
the agnosticism by which their theories were condemned. 

But skepticism, thanks to man s inveterate curiosity and 
self-confidence, is seldom a fixed or universal mood. If the 
mind is convinced, that the Way of Truth and Reason is as 
blind an alley as that of Sense and Opinion, it will press on 
towards the heart of things by a third way of mystical inner 
experience, immediate feeling, and direct contact with the Real. 
Otherwise it will try the way of Truth again, confident thai, 
the mirage of phenomena is not a mere trick played the senses 
by an interminable desert of logical negations, but rathei 
reflects the existence beyond the horizon of a fertile and fruit 
ful World-Ground which thought can really reach. In a more 
jaded age, the Eleatic School might have not only stimulated 
but also guided a mystical reaction. That the world of phe 
nomena is all false opinion and illusion; and that all things 
are really One are cardinal points of any mystical theory. 
And the failure of reason to describe Reality except in nega 
tives invited feeling and ecstasy and beatific vision to fill in 
the blank. 

But logic was too fresh to be dismayed by skepticism, and 
reasserted that the Truth can be known. The agnosticism of 
the Sophists was followed by the philosophies of Plato and 
Aristotle. To this new reconstruction, also, the Eleatics min 
istered. Their tests of "what is" were again accepted. Reality 
had to be thinkable, unalterable, eternal. Skepticism, however, 
had sharpened the critical faculty and diverted philosophic 
interest from the physical to the mental aspects of the world. 
The new analysis of experience discovered that what is think 
able, unalterable, eternal, and therefore real, in things is not 
the Stuff of which they are composed but the universal Types 
and Laws by which a matter otherwise fluid and formless is 
molded and stabilized. Thus, when the empty frame of the 
Parmenidean Reality was again filled in, the picture was not 
of concrete indestructible and unchangeable elements and atoms, 
such as constituted the World-Stuffs of Empedocles and Anax- 



THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 179 

agoras and Leucippus. It was rather of the Heracleitan Logos 
amplified into a system of abstract changeless and abiding 
Forms to which the Universe owes its enduring structure and 
its rational and orderly character. Conversely, Matter which 
had once been the substance of the Real and had paved the 
Way of Truth with solid Being, now became the ground of 
appearance, error, and illusion, and paved the Way of Opinion 
with "such stuff as dreams are made of." 

But we have already posted far in advance the road which 
we are to travel. Let us now pass on to inspect that section 
of it which is laid on a foundation of material elements and 
atoms. 



CHAPTER VII 
THE PLURALISTS 



ALTHOUGH they hailed from different ends of the Hellenic 
world and differed widely in their teaching, the philosophers 
whom we are about to study are, with the exception of Diog 
enes, frequently grouped together by historians of philosophy. 
The reasons for this grouping lie in certain fundamental simi 
larities beneath the surface diversity of their doctrines, in the 
common bias with which they seem to approach some of the 
philosophic problems of the day, and in the continuity of 
development which we can trace in their theories. The nature 
of their agreement is indicated by the epithets applied to them. 
By some they are called the Pluralists, because they are at one 
in asserting the reality of the Many, by others the Materialists 
or the Mechanists because in the course of their speculations 
they evolve a theory of Reality as Matter in motion running 
automatically like a machine. Again, their philosophies are 
sometimes considered attempts at the reconciliation of Hera- 
cleitus with the Eleatics, since they combine a belief in the 
reality of change and motion with the view that the World- 
Stuff is changeless and eternal. These headlines are vivid and 
useful generalizations. But we should remember that, with 
the possible exception of their pluralism, the thinkers in ques 
tion were not necessarily gifted with the power of seeing them 
selves as others see them. Like the Milesians they would prob 
ably have demanded further explanations only possible in the 
perspective of subsequent history, before professing a willing 
ness to own these soft impeachments. 

The gossip which obscures the life of Empedocles is second 
only to the legends which enshroud Pythagoras, and sometimes 

180 



THE PLURALISTS 181 

outvies them. For this gossip it must be admitted, Empedocles 
himself is somewhat to blame, seeing that he claimed that he 
was an "immortal god . . . honored among all as is meet, 
crowned with fillets and flowery garlands," * who possessed "the 
power to heal old age and sickness, to raise and calm the 
winds, to summon rain and draught and to bring the dead to 
life." 2 By later commentators he is credited with having 
actually raised the dead and stopped the northern "monsoon" 
from blowing upon his native city, as well as with the more 
practical work of delivering the city of Selinus from pestilence 
by flooding the adjacent marshes. The manner of his death is 
also variously reported. He is said to have disappeared in 
the night at the summons of a great voice and in the midst of 
a great light from heaven ; to have jumped into the crater of 
Etna ; to have hanged himself ; to have fallen out of a chariot ; 
and to have fallen into the sea and drowned from sheer senility. 
The truth is that Empedocles like Pythagoras lived a double 
life. On the one hand he was a doctor, a scientist, and a philos 
opher, the founder of Italian medicine according to Galen, and 
of rhetoric according to Aristotle. On the other he was a 
religious mystic, profoundly influenced in his beliefs by the 
Pythagoreans and the Orphic movement. And, as has so often 
happened in other cases of the same sort, he kept from his 
right hand all knowledge of the doings of his left, and v ice versa. 
His religion and his philosophy, like the Catholicism and the 
science of Pasteur, to take a modern example, went their way 
side by side unhampered and unprejudiced by one another. 
Thus he could believe in his own supernatural origin and pow 
ers and get the name of a miracle-worker at the same time that 
he thought out a philosophic system and built up a great scien 
tific reputation. Moreover, it should be remembered that then 
as now medicine was fringed with mystery and magic. But in 
those days it was mostly fringe and its patent medicines, pana 
ceas, quacks, and healers had not been curbed by the develop 
ment of sound practice. 

i Purifications. Fr. 112. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 
p. 222. 

2Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, II, p. 119, note. 



182 THE PLURALISTS 

Besides being a devout mystic, a self-deceived miracle-worker, 
a keen physiologist and doctor, and a great philosopher, 
Empedocles also inherited the political traditions and talents 
of a governing class. He came of one of the most aristocratic 
and richest families of Acragas or Agrigentum in Sicily. His 
grandfather, after whom he was named, had bred and run the 
horses which won for his family and city the additional dis 
tinction of victory in the chariot-race at the Olympic games. 
His father had taken part in the overthrow of the tyrant Thras- 
ydasus and became one of the most influential leaders of the 
newly established democracy. Empedocles likewise, when he 
grew up, was to prove himself an eminent man of affairs. 

The times to which he was born, probably a little before 
490 B. C., were stirring enough. The news of Marathon he 
would have been too young to remember. But as a small boy 
he may well have seen the Acragantine troops marching out to 
attack Himaera, a town on the other side of the island, and to 
depose its tyrant. And he must have shared in the terror 
and excitement when Carthage made of this incident a pretext 
for launching the attack on Sicily which she had long been 
preparing, in secret alliance with Xerxes, to accompany the 
renewal of the Persian offensive against Greece. He must also 
have watched the troops march out once more, this time against 
seemingly overwhelming odds, and have taken part in the 
mingled mourning and rejoicing when the messengers returned 
to tell how, after a desperate battle, the Carthaginians had 
been routed at Himsera by the combined forces of Acragas and 
Syracuse, and Sicily was saved. Later would have come the 
news of the almost simultaneous defeat of Xerxes at Salamis 
(480 B.C.). 

Empedocles grew to manhood in the eight brilliant and pros 
perous years which followed the repulse of Hamilcar. He was 
about twenty years old when the able and beloved tyrant Theron 
died. The death of the tyrant was almost immediately fol 
lowed by the overthrow of his son, the worthless Thrasydseus, 
who in his short year of misrule had involved Acragas in a 
disastrous war with Syracuse, and a democratic constitution 
was established. Empedocles showed himself even more mark- 



THE PLURALISTS 183 

edly liberal in his politics than his father, for later when the 
aristocracy had regained control of the government and there 
were whispers of a restoration of the tyranny, he thwarted the 
plot and assumed the leadership of the popular cause. He 
even anticipated the example of George Washington by refus 
ing the kingly crown offered him by the grateful people. 

But Empedocles soon had cause to mourn the gratitude of 
men. The Acragantine democrats, like Heracleitus fellow- 
Ephesians, would suffer none above the average among them. 
Empedocles went off to Olympia, perhaps not altogether will 
ingly, to present his philosophic poem at the Games. His ene 
mies succeeded in turning his absence into an exile from which 
he never returned. The manner, time, and place of his death 
are unknown. It probably took place in the Peloponnesus or 
at Thurii in southern Italy about 435 B. C. 

In his religion, as we have said, Empedocles was under the 
spell of Pythagorean and Orphic mysticism. Both these move 
ments, it will be remembered, were reformations, and the open 
ing lines of the religious portion of Empedocles poem announce 
his own sturdy protestantism. In his initial protest, however, 
the scientist and philosopher would seem to have joined hands 
for the moment with the religious reformer. It begins with a 
fervent prayer that he may "utter a pure discourse concerning 
the blessed gods." 3 and this petition is followed and answered 
by a denunciation of the popular Homeric theology with its 
Gods made in man s own image. In a spirit and in language 
which strongly suggest the influence of Xenophanes he pro 
claims that "It is not possible to set God before our eyes or 
to lay hold of him with our hands." God is without body, 
passions, or parts, "a sacred and unutterable mind flashing 
through the whole world with rapid thoughts." 

These verses, however, like similar utterances of Xenophanes, 
should not be regarded as an indication of a belief in mono 
theism. Empedocles protestantism did not suggest, and his 
science forbade, such a conclusion. In the philosophic part of 

3 Fr. 131, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 225. 
* Fr. 133, loc. cit. 
c Fr. 134, loc. cit. 



184 THE PLURALISTS 

his poem he speaks of the World-All as God, 6 and we are 
told that he also considered its constituent elements divine. 7 
The flashing through the whole world of sacred and unutterable 
mind is probably little more than a brilliantly phrased equiva 
lent to the homely seeing, thinking, and hearing "all over" of 
Xenophanes God. Indeed, far from preaching a personal God, 
Empedocles like his predecessor would seem to be protesting 
against the confinement of the divine to the persons of the man 
like popular deities. God, he feels, can no more be separated 
from the World-Stuff than can thought or life or empty space. 
The Universe not only sees, thinks, and hears, it is also God 
"all over." Empedocles, to be sure, in both the religious and 
scientific portions of his poem speaks conventionally enough of 
"the Gods," but they correspond more closely to what we should 
call "angels," and the only scientific note he takes of them is 
to mention them along with "trees and men and women, beasts 
and birds and the fishes," 8 as sample products of the World- 
Stuff. 

This rejection of the "established" Homeric theology Emped 
ocles supplements with a positive declaration of faith in the 
central article of the Orphic creed the doctrine of reincarna 
tion. Man, he tells us, is a fallen "god" or "daemon," an "exile 
and a wanderer from the gods," 9 doomed to "wander thrice 
ten thousand seasons from the abodes of the blessed, being born 
throughout the time in all manners of mortal forms, changing 
one toilsome path of life for another." 10 Such is the fate which 
has befallen Empedocles himself. Already in the course of birth 
and rebirth "he has been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird, 
and a dumb fish in the sea." X1 

The hope and means of salvation are of the familiar mystic 
type. As with the Buddhists, a long discipline of purification is 
necessary lasting through many births. This discipline, mod- 

Fr. 30, 31, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 211. 
7 Cicero, De Nat. Deorum, XII, Diels, Doxographi greed, 535; Aristotle, 
Gen. Corr., II, 333b. Cf. Fr. 59, Burnet, op. cit., p. 214. 
s Fr. 23, Burnet, op. cit., pp. 209-10. 

9 Fr. 115, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 222. 

10 Fr. 115, loc. cit. 

11 Fr. 117, op. cit., p. 223. 



THE PLURALISTS 185 

eled apparently on the Pythagorean rule, lay not merely in the 
observance of moral precepts but in the avoidance of tabooed 
articles. The eating of flesh, and incidentally the established 
rite of animal sacrifice with which the worship of the Olympian 
Gods was celebrated, were particularly abhorrent, since it may 
be that the "father lifts up his own son in changed form and 
slays him with a prayer," and that "in like manner does the 
son seize his father, and children their mother, tear out their 
life and eat the kindred flesh." Laurel, which represented 
the highest stage of purification to be attained in vegetable 
form, and the already familiar Pythagorean bean, were also 
taboo. 

In the end, the wholly purified and redeemed, who stand, as 
the Buddhists would say, on the brink of Nirvana, are reincar 
nated in the noblest human forms and at their death are reunited 
with their divine source. Empedocles describes their release in 
words inspired, it would almost seem, by the famous picture 
of the Islands of the Blest in the great ode with which Pindar 
immortalized the victory of Theron of Acragas at the Olympic 
Games. 13 The purified "appear among mortal men, as proph 
ets, song-writers, physicians, and princes ; and thence they rise 
up as gods exalted in honor, sharing the hearth of the other 
gods, and the same table, free from human woes, safe from 
destiny, and incapable of hurt." 

To match this vision of the "prophets, song-writers, physi 
cians, and princes" awaiting the moment of their final redemp 
tion, Empedocles has also the vision of a Golden Age. In verses 
which again remind us of Pindar s ode he sings of a time when 
men even in their human state were as yet innocent of evil, and 
dwelt at peace with one another and with beasts and birds, 
shaded by ever fruitful trees, and charmed by the wise discourses 
of Orpheus. 15 

We turn now from Empedocles the Orphic mystic to the 
other Empedocles, the scientist and philosopher. Just as his 

12 Fr. 137, op. cit., pp. 225-6. 

is Olymp. II. cf. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, pp. 228-9. 

i* Fr. 146, 147, Biirnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 226. 

IB Fr. 129, 130, Burnet, op. cit., pp. 224-5. Cf. Ibid., 1st ed., p. 236, note 7. 






186 THE PLURALISTS 

religious beliefs were the result of Pythagorean influence, so his 
chief scientific interests medicine, physiology, and the like 
can scarcely have been developed independently of the medical 
studies fostered by the Brotherhood and already so brilliantly 
exemplified in the researches of his fellow philosopher-doctor, 
Alcmaeon. But if his religious, and to some extent his scien 
tific, views were the result of Pythagorean influence, his philo 
sophical speculations may be traced directly to Eleatic teach 
ing. Tradition, indeed, makes him in a literal sense a school 
mate of Zeno and a pupil of Parmenides. However, that may 
be, he adopted, like Parmenides, verse as his vehicle of expres 
sion, and accepted many of the fundamental Eleatic tenets, 
such as the indestructible and unchangeable character of the 
World-Stuff, the impossibility of any real coming into, or 
passing out of being, and the non-existence of empty space. 
He even thought of the World-Stuff as originally at any rate 
a Parmenidean Sphere. 

But just as Parmenides had revolted from the Pythagoreans, 
so Empedocles in his turn rebelled against the extreme con 
clusions of the Eleatics. He might be persuaded by their argu 
ments that Reality must be changeless and eternal and that 
empty space cannot exist, but he could not agree to their 
further deduction that therefore the everyday world of change, 
motion, and multiplicity is all "hypnotism," false opinion, and 
illusion. The reason is not far to seek. The cast of his mind 
was quite different from that of Parmenides. Parmenides was 
a born logician, Empedocles a born experimental scientist, 
turned philosopher. It was the native impulse of the one to 
start from a logical principle and deduce his system at all 
costs from the exigencies of pure reasoning ; of the other to 
start from the perceived data of the everyday world and build 
according to the suggestions of observation and experiment. 
Furthermore, the fields in which Empedocles was most inter 
ested medicine, physiology, natural history, and the like 
were just those in which movement and change, generation and 
dissolution, were most marked. He could scarcely be expected 
to accept without examination the results of a logic which pro 
claimed all natural phenomena unreal, made all scientific re- 



THE PLURALISTS 187 

search mere idle dalliance along the Way of False Opinion and 
rendered his favorite studies particularly ridiculous. 

His problem, then, was to justify his interest in natural 
science in the face of Eleatic reasoning. He may possibly have 
also had in mind a reconciliation of Heracleitus views with 
those of Parmenides. The question, however, of the extent, 
and indeed of the existence, of Empedocles debt to Heracleitus 
is disputed and obscure. 16 In any case, with or without Hera 
cleitus in mind, he daily perceived and studied the Many, their 
flux, their movement and interchange, their apparent coming 
into and passing out of being. And yet the Eleatics had per 
suaded him that any real coming into being or passing away 
was out of the question, and brought forward the most cogent 
arguments against the possibility of multiplicity and motion. 
Could the evidence of his senses be reconciled with the exigencies 
of their logic? 

So far as motion was concerned the non-existence of an empty 
space to move in need not have troubled him. Descartes later 
denied the existence of a vacuum and still successfully asserted 
motion ; and within the Parmenidean sphere of solid, continuous 
Being circulation and change of place were still conceivable. 
The Sphere might even have spun on its axis like a top, and 
yet been stationary. But Empedocles is not driven to these 
expedients. Though he denies the possibility of a void he sur 
reptitiously admits it, when, as we shall see in a moment, he 
conceives of Reality as a loose mass of particles between jvhich 
chinks and interstices, and therefore free plaj jand interpene- 
tration, exist. Tlir Flr.-itif truths, then, need not preclude the 
possibility of movement. 

The question of multiplicity and variety proved a harder nut 
to crack. The old Milesian assumption that the One can 
juggle itself into a Many had been shown up by Parmenides. 
If Reality is simple and homogeneous, the distinction of one 
thing from another must be unreal. But need Reality be con 
ceived as One? Cannot the Many be equally indestructible and 
changeless ? Might not even the Sphere be compounded of dif- 

16 Cf. Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, p. 202; Burnet, Early Greek Phi 
losophy, 3rd ed., p. 227. 



188 THE PLURALISTS 

ferent elements without prejudice to its eternal and unalterable 
character? Whether or not Empedocles punctuated with just 
these interrogation points his questioning of Parmenides doc 
trine, is immaterial. In any case they are answered in a plu 
ralistic sense in the course of his speculations. 

The Parmenidean Sphere he "quarters," as it were, and 
compounds it of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. Incidentally 
he had differentiated air Trom the vapor or mist confused with 
it in the system of Anaximenes, and had proved experimentally 
that its seemingly empty transparency was really a substance 
like the others. 17 Why he hit upon four substances, and these 
particular four, has been much discussed and never settled. 18 
He set, however, a fashion which struck the popular fancy 
and persists even to-day. Though they were long ago outgrown 
and discarded by science, the "four elements" are still a 
popular figure of speech. Empedocles also distinguishes them 
with the mythological titles, Hera, Zeus, Nestis, and Aidoneus. 
But as these titles play no part in his system, and their precise 
application is in dispute, we need not bother further with 
them. 19 

The problem of multiplicity and variety was now solved to 
Empedocles satisfaction. All the surface complexity of the 
world as it appears to the senses could be reduced tp__forms 
of these four substances or different mixtures of them. "Be 
hold the sun everywhere bright and warm, and all the immortal 
things that are bathed in heat and bright radiance. Behold 
the rain, everywhere dark and cold ; and from the earth issue 
forth all things close-pressed and solid." 20 Of just what quali 
ties in the sensible world Air is the substratum, he does not 
mention. 

We start, then, in Empedocles system with the four elemen 
tary substances, Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, each one of 
which, after the fashion of the Eleatic Reality, is uncreated 
(md jndestrnctiljle, unalterable, and incapable of transforma- 

17 Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 229. 
is Of. Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, II, p. 127 et seq. 
is Cf. Zeller, op. cit., II, 125, note. Burnet, loc. cit. 
20 Fr. 21, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 209. 



THE PLURALISTS 1* 

tion into anything else. Combined with this hypothesis we 
have the un-Eleatic and Heracleitan belief in the reality of 
motion, and the assurance that the kaleidoscope of phenomena " 
can be explained as due to the varying mixture and separation 
in space of the four ultimate elements. 

The case, however, is not so evident as it seems. For how 
does motion originate? The Sphere of Being is full to the brim 
of substances completely intermingled and dissolved in one 
another s natures. What is to shake them down? And after 
they have been isolated from one another, what is to shake 
them up again? The problem which confronted Empedocles 
was but a philosophic form of the difficulty which Roosevelt 
found in "unscrambling the eggs" when he set about breaking 
up the American Trusts. 

Empedocles realization that the existence of motion con 
stitutes a problem marks a step forward in the development 
of philosophy. The Milesians had taken it for granted that 
the World-Stuff naturally moves and transforms itself. Fur 
thermore, the solution which Empedocles offers is an advance 
in the direction of separating the concept of Energy and 
Activity from that of Matter. He does not himself arrive 
at the idea of Force as distinguished from the solid and cor 
poreal aspects of the world, but he collects all the energy 
in the Universe and concentrates it in two dynamic, energetic 
substances apart from whose activity the four elements would 
be Inert. The mixture and separation of Earth, Water, Air, 
and Fire is affected by the alternate give and take of Love 
and Strife. It is commonly considered that Empedocles 
thought these agents to be quite as corporeal in nature as 
the other elements, to which they are said to be equal in length, 
breadth, weight, and age. 21 The suggestion, however, has also 
been made that they are indications of the Greek habit, already 
noted in our discussion of Greek religion, of viewing the world 
as essentially a social order, and that they represent the 
transference to Nature of the opposed tendencies in human 
society towards tribal amalgamation and solidarity on the one 

21 Of. Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, II, p. 138; Fr. 17, Burnet, Early 
Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 207-8. 



190 THE PLURALISTS 

hand and disintegration into smaller units on the other. 22 
From this point of view they are "life-forces" or "vital- 
fluids," 23 expressions of that companionable feeling towards 
Nature which so long kept Greek religion from distinguishing 
between persons and things, and Greek philosophy from finding 
principles distinct from body for life and consciousness. 

However that may be, they possess an animation and a 
"push" which the other substances lack. Lo_ve is the stuff or 
"fluid" which impels the four elements to mingle and fuse with 
one another, Strife the stuff whi^h drives them ap^rt, isolates 



them, and precipitates them from the fusion. It almost seems 
as if Empedocles were seeing through a glass darkly the modern 
forces of attraction and repulsion or even those mysterious 
substances known to the chemist as catalyzers, which with 
cynical indifference are always provoking reactions and stir 
ring up trouble among the other elements in which they 
themselves are not involved or affected. 

The picturesque and passionate character of these dynamic 
substances has provoked considerable discussion and specula 
tion among critics from the time of Aristotle on. Aristotle, 
and later Plutarch, conferred upon their activities a moral 
significance, making Love the author of the good, and Strife 
the worker of the evil, in the world. 24 Aristotle, however, in 
another passage points out that the roles of hero and villain 
are really interchangeable, since Strife in tearing the elements 
from the inextricable confusion of one another s embrace re 
unites the scattered particles of all four elements with particles 
of their own kind. Similarly, Love produces fusion only by 
breaking up the homogeneous masses of Earth, Water, Air, 
and Fire and driving them apart. 25 

It has also been maintained by a modern school of criticism 
that we have here a very real and extensive leakage from the 
religious and mystical compartment of Empedocles mind into 
his science and philosophy. The alternate precipitation and 

22 Cf. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, pp. 60-63. 
nibid., pp. 151-152. 

24 Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 4, 9846, 32. Plutarch, De Is. 48, p. 370. 

25 Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 4, 985a, 21. 



THE PLURALISTS 191 

fusion of the elements by Strife and Love, are, it is claimed, 
the objective and cosmic counterpart of the fall and redemp 
tion of man. "The sphere is the body of God, and Love is 
the Soul which pervades it." The intermingling of all 
things, intoxicated, as it were, by Love, is all of one piece 
with the original union of all souls with the divine. Strife is 
the principle which produces a multiplicity of beings, estranges 
them from Soul, allots them their limited natures, and submits 
them to the harsh yoke of necessity. The fallen soul has put 
her trust "in insensate strife." The Golden Age is appar 
ently placed at the very beginning of the epoch in which Strife 
overcomes Love. The Orphic fall of the divine into human 
form, and the breaking up of the Sphere would then seem to 
be only two sides of one and the same process. 28 

Here again, however, as in the case of the Orphic interpre 
tation of Parmenides, we are treading on very difficult and 
debatable ground. The conservative view which minimizes 
the influence of Empedocles religion on his philosophy has 
plenty of precedent in other philosophers and scientists, and 
is perhaps the safer. 

Empedocles himself connects Love, more immediately at 
least, with his physiological observations of the sexual instinct 
in man and the other animals, and claims to be the first to 
note that the human passion is also a world-force. The antith 
esis, too, of Love and Strife would seem to have been sug 
gested by the antithesis and alternations in the World-Process 
of birth and decay and of the apparent coming into and passing 
out of existence which his system tried to explain. 

Having thus given himself matter and motion, Empedocles 
was now in a position to construct his w r orld. The point at 
which he chooses to begin is the moment when Strife was 
altogether outside the Sphere, and the four elements, suffused 
and completely intermingled by Love, lay indistinguishable 
in the Sphere "so fast was the god bound in the close cover 
ing of Harmony, spherical and round, rejoicing in his circu- 

26 Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 234. 

27 Cornford, op. cit., p. 231, p. 236 et seq. 

zFr. 115, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 222. 



192 THE PLURALISTS 

lar solitude." 29 In the fullness of Time, Strife began to enter 
the Sphere and to precipitate the elements held in solution. 
Love began to retire slowly checking and offsetting Strife as 
it went. Eventually, when Strife had completely entered in 
and permeated all things and Love had been wholly squeezed 
out, the process of disentanglement was complete, and the four 
elements were altogether apart from one another. This period 
of isolation was followed by a reverse process, in which Love 
entered in and slowly gained the ascendency. Little by little 
Strife was squeezed out, till once more Fire, Air, Water, and 
Earth were completely fused in the Sphere. 

The alternate ebb and flow of Strife and Love and the con 
sequent separation and mixture of the four elements are ap 
parently conceived as automatic, and Empedocles among others 
is taken to task by Plato for having taught that the creation 
of the world is effected "not by the action of mind ... or of 
any God, or from art, but ... by chance and nature only." 30 
Mixture and separation are accomplished by the elements "run 
ning through one another." This they can do as their masses 
are loose and porous, and the holes in the coarser elements are 
larger than those which break up the finer substances. Earth, 
then, can soak up or squeeze out water, Air can permeate the 
chinks and crannies between the water-drops, and Fire can find 
its way in and out of the interstices of the Air. Love and 
Strife, it would seem, can even go through Fire, and insinuate 
themselves everywhere. That this loose-laid character of the 
elements implied the existence of empty space Empedocles did 
not seem to realize. 

When the counterwise tides of Love and Strife are just at 
the turn, and the elements are either wholly fused or completely 
precipitated, obviously no Universe can exist. The formation 
of a world can take place only during the periods when inter 
mingling or separating is still in process. The world in which 
we are living belongs, Empedocles thinks, to the period in which 
Strife is in the act of casting out Love. 

The way in which our world arises is as follows. First, Air 

29 Fr. 27, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 210, 
so Laws X, 889b. 



THE PLURALISTS 198 

is separated out, then Fire, and then Earth. Fire rushes up 
and solidifies a portion of the Air into a sort of crystalline 
egg-shell surrounding the Universe a reminder perhaps of the 
Orphic world-egg from which the God Phanes was hatched. It 
attaches itself here and there in spots to the crystallized Air, 
and forms the fixed stars. Below the upper portion of the egg 
shell a hemisphere of Fire is created. The upward rush of Fire 
also causes displaced Air mixed with Fire to sink below the 
earth and form a corresponding hemisphere. It furthermore 
makes the sphere as a whole top-heavy and sets the heavens in 
motion. The revolution of the sphere, presenting a face now 
of Fire, now of Air, to the earth produces the alternation of 
day and night. The sun is the light poured down by the 
fiery hemisphere upon the earth and reflected from its surface 
upon the heavens. Here we perhaps detect the echoes of the 
Pythagorean doctrine of a central fire about which the sun 
revolves and from which it gets its light. The moon is a crys 
talline body which reflects the light of the sun. The planets 
are made of the fire pressed down with the displaced Air. The 
Earth is precipitated to the center, and Water is separated 
from it by the squeezing due to increasing pressure. The spin 
ning motion of the Universe acts like a sort of cosmic gyro 
scope, and holds the earth and the heavens in their proper 
places. 

Of the origin and development of life Empedocles gives us 
an interesting account which, like the views of Anaximander, 
forestalls to some extent the Darwinian theory of evolution. A 
certain mixture of the four elements forms the primitive organic 
compound, or, as we might say, the "protobion." The Love 
which still holds this mixture together is being slowly overcome 
by Strife and each of the elements is seeking to be precipitated 
and united with its own kind. The complications which ensue 
form first vegetable, and then animal, life. To vegetable life 
Empedocles attributed bi-sexuality a fact rediscovered by 
modern botany as well as sensation, pleasure and pain, and 
even desire. The upward growth of plants is due to the striv 
ing of the Fire still mixed with Earth and Water to shake itself 



194 THE PLURALISTS 

free and unite with the upper hemisphere ; their downward root 
ing to Water and Earth sinking each to its respective level. 

The separation of Fire from the other elements also causes 
the evolution of animals and man. "Whole natured forms first 
arose from the earth, having a portion both of water and fire. 
These did the fire, desirous of reaching its like, send up." 
As yet the sex and species of these forms were unrecognizable. 
The origin of species as well as the distinction of sex would be 
incidental to the further separation of the elements, caused by 
the increase of Strife. Such species as were "better suited to 
it took to the water ; others were wafted up into the air for 
such time as they possessed more of the fiery matter, and the 
heavier remained on the earth." Curiously enough, however, 
the species that took to the water seemed to have been the 
"warmest and the most fiery" which "sought refuge from the 
excess of their natural heat" and from "their lack of cold and 
wetness." Meantime Love, still present though receding, 
would preserve the organic mixture, keep it molded in animal 
bodies and organs, and insure reproduction. 

Even more striking, however, is the picture given of the evo 
lution which occurs in the antipodes of our world-period when 
Strife has passed its flood, and the Universe is being reconsti 
tuted by the rising tide of Love. The first organic mingling of 
the elements takes the shape of a chaos of scattered limbs and 
organs, "heads . . . without necks, arms . . . bare and bereft 
of shoulders . . . eyes ... in want of foreheads," l which 
"wander seeking for union." These limbs and organs are 
thrown together by chance, and united in all sorts of haphazard 
and fantastic ways. "Many creatures with faces and breasts 
looking in different directions were born; some, offspring of 
oxen with faces of men, while others, again, arose as offspring 
of men with the heads of oxen, and creatures in whom the na 
ture of women and men was mingled. . . ." 36 The creatures 

si Fr. 62, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 214-5. 

32 Act. V, 19 (Diels, Doxographi greed, 430). 

as Aristotle, De Resp., 14, 478a. 

s* Fr. 57, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 214. 

as Fr. 58, loc. cit. 

36 Fr. 61, loc. cit. 



THE PLURALISTS 195 

which prove to have "spontaneously acquired a fitting struc 
ture" 37 survive, whereas the unsuitable combinations perish. 
The fauna and flora, then, including the human beings, of the 
period dominated by Love are the results of a true Darwinian 
evolution, the direction of which is explained entirely by chance, 
by the struggle for life, and by the survival of the fittest. And 
just as the Nineteenth Century clergy denounced the Dar 
winian theory as godless and clung to the "argument from de 
sign," so Aristotle with something of their severity, but, it 
should be said, with nothing of their invective, attacked the 
mechanistic character of the Empedoclean theory with his 
favorite argument that things come into existence and develop 
their characteristic structures not by chance or from mechani 
cal necessity, but in order to perform a certain function and 
fulfil a specific purpose. 38 

Empedocles was also a keen physiologist. His theory of 
evolution was supplemented from the field of comparative anat 
omy with various analogies between the structure of animals 
and plants. He thought, for example, that "hair and leaves 
and thick feathers of birds and the scales that grow on mighty 
limbs are the same thing." He also developed theories of 
reproduction and nutrition and has left a long passage on the 
nature of respiration which leads in the direction of Harvey s 
discovery of the circulation of the blood. The blood, he says, 
pulses to and fro between the surface and the interior of the 
body. When it recedes inwards from the limbs the air streams 
in through the pores as well as the mouth and nose, to take its 
place ; and when it returns towards the surface the air is ex 
pelled and "breathes out again in equal quantity." 

The "budding-off" of psychology as a special field of philo 
sophic interest and investigation progresses rapidly in Empedo 
cles system. He does not, as we have seen, distinguish con 
sciousness from the other aspects of the Universe any more 
clearly than did the Milesians or Heracleitus or Parmenides. 41 

37 Aristotle, Physics, B, 8, 1986, 29 (trans. Burnet, op. cit., p. 243). 

38 Physics, B, 8. 

39 Fr. 82, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 217. 
Fr. 150, Ibid., p. 220. 

4i Cf. Gomperz, Oriechische Denker, I, 2, v, 5. 



196 THE PLURALISTS 

Just as Xenophanes God "sees all over, thinks all over, and 
hears all over," so for Empedocles "all things have wisdom and 
a share of thought," 42 and in ourselves it is the basic substances 
mixed in the human body which think and feel pleasure and 
pain. 43 In the case of human beings, however, he tends to 
localize the seat of consciousness. He finds the part of the 
body "in which men s thought chiefly revolve" to be the blood, 
and particularly the blood round the heart. "The blood round 
the heart is the thought of men." He chose the blood, we 
are told, because "in it of all parts of the body all the elements 
are most completely mingled." Incidentally, the different 
capacities, temperaments, and humors displayed by mankind 
are the expressions of varying conditions and proportions in 
the mixture. 46 Again "sleep is a moderate cooling of the 
warmth of the blood, death a complete cooling," 7 due to the 
partial or entire separation of the Fire that is in a man from 
the other elements. 48 

It is, however, for its theory of perception that Empedocles 
psychology is famous. The general principle is that "like per 
ceives like." The Earth, Water, Air, Fire, Love, and Hate 
mingled in our bodies perceive each its kindred element in the 
external world. This sensitiveness of the elements within to the 
corresponding substances without is a matter of the similarity 
of their pores. Particles of Fire, for example, will dovetail with 
one another, whereas particles of Fire if fitted into the spaces 
between water drops would be like round pegs in square holes. 
External objects are continually giving off "effluences" as a 
result perhaps of the action of Strife in driving the elements 
apart. These effluences strike upon the body, enter the sense- 
organ whose pores are fitted to receive them, and are picked up 
by the like element within. Smell and taste are due to the con 
tact of particles carried into the nose by the inbreathed Air, 



. 110, Burnet, op. cit., p. 221. 
5 Fr. 107, Ibid., p. 220. 

44 Fr. 105, loc. cit. 
s." Theophrastus, De Sensu, 10 (trans. Burnet, op. cit., p. 247). 

46 Theophrastus, De Sensu, 11. 
-,4j Act. V, 24. 

*8 Act. V, 25. 



THE PLURALISTS 197 

or into the mouth by moisture. Hearing is the result of dis 
turbances in the Air which enter the ear and make it resound. 
Of sight, Empedocles has a more complicated explanation. The 
eye is composed of Fire and Water. Particles of these glance 
out and meet the corresponding effluences from external ob 
jects. The Fire sees the bright, the Water the dark. 49 Pleasure, 
pain, and desire are also linked up with the affinity of like for 
like. 50 

Empedocles utterances on the trustworthiness of percep 
tion and the relation of sense to reason 51 are not developed and 
are not altogether clear. According as they are punctuated, 
they may voice either a mild distrust of perception and an in 
sistence on checking and correcting the reports of the senses 
by the opposed activity of reason, 52 or a plea not to withhold 
confidence from any of the sensory channels by which under 
standing in no wise opposed to perception may enter in. 53 But 
whichever interpretation be true, Empedocles did not lean far 
enough in either direction to fall into the problems of error and 
knowledge, and the question of Appearance vs. Reality. The 
senses introduced him to the Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Love, 
and Strife, which constituted his Universe. It was equally 
obvious that their presentations did not altogether acquaint 
him with the "home life," the relations, and the movements of 
these elements, and even suggested false ideas about them, such 
as their apparent coming into and passing out of being. Hence, 
in addition to perception some checking up by the exercise of 
common sense and thought was necessary, if he was to get a 
true view of things as they really are. Beyond this point, ex 
cept for a rhetorical lamentation over the brevity of human 
life, the inadequacy of man s powers, the propensity of others 
to jump to hasty conclusions, and the difficulties of working 

49 For a more detailed discussion of the theory of sensation, cf. Zeller, 
Pre-Socratic Philosophy, II, pp. 165-166; Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 
3rd ed., pp. 246-248. 

so Cf. Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, II, p. 171. 

si Fr. 2, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 204. 

52 Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, II, pp. 169-170. 

53 Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 227. Cf. 2nd ed., pp. 
219, 268. 



198 THE PLURALISTS 

out a philosophic system (difficulties, however, with which he 
feels himself able to cope), Empedocles theory of knowledge 
does not go. 

The affinity between medicine and philosophy which we find 
in Empedocles has lasted till to-day. In the great Skeptic, 
Sextus Empiricus, who lived at Alexandria about 300 A. D., 
in Avicenna and Averrhoes, the mediaeval Arabian followers of 
Aristotle, in John Locke, the father of British Empiricism, and 
in the American, William James, we have other illustrious ex 
amples of the physician turned philosopher. Nor should we 
forget the medical and physiological studies with which Plato, 
Aristotle, and Lucretius in ancient times, and Descartes in 
modern, accompanied their metaphysical speculations. 

For a while, too, the theory and practice of ancient medicine 
tended to be governed by philosophical considerations. The 
so-called father of medicine, Hippocrates of Cos, who was a 
contemporary of Empedocles, had rejected the view that some 
diseases, like epilepsy for instance, are of divine origin. All, 
he said, are equally God-sent, if you like, but none occurs with 
out a natural cause. Doctors, however, for want of recourse 
to the will of God, began to take refuge in philosophy. Equiva 
lents for the various fluids and substances in the body were 
sought in the World-Stuff, and the natural causes of illness 
were found in the relations of metaphysical principles. Dis 
eases were instances in the human body of an upset of the bal 
ance of opposites or a lack of equilibrium between Fire, the 
principle of motion, and Water, the principle of nutrition, and 
were to be treated accordingly. To cases of too much wet the 
dry must be administered ; as a remedy for a superfluity of cold, 
the hot was indicated. A sort of comparative anatomy of man 
and the universe likewise grew up. The stony structure of the 
earth was likened to the human skeleton, the water in the rivers 
to the blood in the veins ; 54 and the parallel was even carried to 
the point of comparing the Peloponnesus to the head, Ionia to 
the diaphragm, and Egypt to the belly. 

But this method of interpreting and treating the human body 

54 Gomperz, Oriechische Denker, I, 3, i, 4. For a similar analogy cf. the 
beginning of Leonardo da Vinci s Trattato de I Acqua. 



THE PLURALISTS 199 

and its ailments met almost immediately with vigorous criticism 
and opposition. Treatment, it was maintained, should be gov 
erned not by hypotheses but by observation of individual cases. 
Disease was too complicated a condition ever to manifest in its 
symptoms unalloyed cosmic principles, like fire and water, the 
wet and the dry, or to permit of the administration of them as 
a cure. Philosophical entities had no more to do with healing 
a patient than with painting a picture, and Empedocles, along 
with other physicians and thinkers, was to be severely blamed 
for approaching medicine and physiology with a philosophical 
bias. 55 

The controversy thus initiated lasted long in the history of 
ancient medicine. The philosophic background faded, but the 
doctors continued to dispute whether abstract generalization 
and deduction, or observation of the particular case, should 
play the more important part in treatment. The last outburst 
of the controversy took the form of the uprising at Alexandria 
of a new empirical movement of protest against the dogmatism 
which by this time had infected the assertions of all schools 
alike. By Sextus Empiricus, an adherent of this movement, the 
revolt was carried back from the field of medicine to that of 
philosophy, and at the end of seven centuries the whirligig of 
time had another of its revenges in this reversed, skeptical alli 
ance of the philosopher and the doctor. 

Before passing on to Anaxagoras, who stands next on our 
list, let us review and consolidate our impressions of Empedo 
cles. We have been dealing with a not uncommon type of man 
who can be without confusion or contradiction both a keenly 
observant, careful empirical scientist and philosopher, and the 
fervent devotee of a mystical religion and even of superstition 
and charlatanism. Empedocles drew his mystical religion from 
Orphic sources probably through Pythagorean channels, his 
medical training from the Pythagoreans, and his philosophy 
directly from the Eleatics, with some admixture perhaps of 
Heracleitan influence. He accepts Parmenides view that any 
real coming into and passing out of being are unthinkable and 
that hence the World-Stuff must be eternal and unchangeable, 

ss Gomperz, op. cit., I, 3, i, 5. 



200 THE PLURALISTS 

but his "empirical" habit of thought revolts against the further 
conclusion that the multiplicity, change, and motion of the 
everyday world are therefore unreal and illusory. His prob 
lem as a philosopher is to save the reality of the world in which 
he takes so keen a scientific interest from being annihilated by 
the Eleatic logic. 

His solution is as follows : Against Parmenides he asserts, 
though he does not argue, the possibility of the existence of the 
Many, and of movement in space. The Eleatic Reality he 
analyzes into four basic, inert stuffs, Fire, Air, Water, and 
Earth, and two dynamic, active elements, Love and Strife. 
Each of these substances is as eternal and unalterable in its 
nature as Eleatic Reality. But, since movement in space is 
possible, the four inert stuffs can be intermingled or separated 
out, as the case may be, by the two active agents. The multi 
plicity, variety, change, and seeming coming into and passing 
out of being in the everyday world can then be explained as the 
mere motion, juxtaposition, and dispersion in space of many 
changeless and indestructible Parmenidean Ones. 

A livable world can only exist when the process of fusion or 
separation is still going on. For when the process is accom 
plished the elements are either all massed and indistinguishably 
mingled in a compact Eleatic Sphere, or else wholly precipi 
tated from one another and foregathered each with its own 
kind. The world in which we live is incidental to the slow break 
ing up of the Sphere and isolation of the elements under the 
influence of Strife. 

The astronomical portion of Empedocles account of the 
formation of our world is of comparatively little interest. 
When, however, we come to his speculations regarding the 
origin and development of life we find a theory of evolution 
which goes well beyond Anaximander s teaching that man has 
been developed out of lower forms of life in accordance with a 
general law of modification of structure by environment, and 
forecasts the accidental variation, the struggle for existence, 
and the survival of the fittest that play so large a part in the 
Darwinian theory. This doctrine of evolution is supplemented 
in the field of comparative anatomy by interesting observations 



THE PLURALISTS (gofc 

on the similar laws which govern the development both of 
plants and animals, and on the analogous structures and func 
tions which occur in both animal and vegetable forms of life. 
We mentioned also Empedocles physiological studies of repro 
duction and nutrition, his observation of sex in plants, and his 
theory of respiration as related to the movement of the blood 
which verges on Harvey s discovery of circulation. 

In the realm of physiological psychology, we should espe 
cially note his famous theory of sensation as a perception of 
like by like, and the essential correctness of his suggestions 
regarding the nature of taste, smell, and hearing. 

The undeveloped state of his views on the relation of percep 
tion to reason does not warrant us in attributing to him a 
theory of knowledge or any preoccupation with the problems 
of error and of Appearance vs. Reality. 



ii 

The next philosopher to whom we come is Anaxagoras. Born 
about 500 B. C. of a noble family of Clazomense, a town not 
far from present-day Smyrna, he was somewhat older than 
Empedocles. But, as a passage in Aristotle may mean that 
his system was matured and published after the appearance of 
Empedocles poems, 56 and as his views mark an advance in the 
development of the atomic theory, we are justified in having 
deferred our consideration of his teaching. He seems as a 
young man to have become fascinated with philosophy, and to 
have exhibited some of the symptoms popularly believed to be 
characteristic of this passion. Many anecdotes recount his 
amiable peculiarities. For love of knowledge he is said to have 
neglected his worldly goods and at last to have turned his 
property over to his relatives. Unlike most of the other philos 
ophers whom we have been considering, he took no interest in 
the politics of his city. When reproached for this lack of pub 
lic spirit he replied by pointing to the sky as the fatherland 
which he loved; and again when asked what he had been born 
for at any rate, he answered, to gaze at the stars. All in all he 

SB Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 261, note 1. 



202 THE PLURALISTS 

seems to have been like Thales, a somewhat eccentric, absent- 
minded, Johnny Head-in- Air sort of person, very much wrapped 
up in his own thoughts. That these were kindly, as 
well as profound, is to be seen in the desire expressed in his will 
that the children of Lampsacus, the town where he had passed 
his last days, should be given a holiday from school, each year, 
on the anniversary of his death. 

The life of Anaxagoras is chiefly identified with Athens and 
with the splendors of the Periclean age. In discussing Melissus 
in his role as a Samian admiral, we saw how Athens, under the 
leadership of Pericles, transformed into a powerful maritime 
empire the Confederacy of Delos, which had started as a mere 
defensive alliance of certain coast and island states against 
possible further aggression on the part of Persia. The reduc 
tion of the greater number of her co-partners to the condition 
of vassals had been hastened by the transfer of the common 
treasury of the League from Delos to the Acropolis, and by the 
lazy habit, into which all but a few of the stronger confederates 
fell, of paying Athens tribute money in return for protection, 
instead of contributing a quota of ships and men to the com 
mon safety. 57 Thus the confederate fleet, being almost entirely 
Athenian built and controlled, not only secured the League as 
a whole from foreign aggression but also insured the naval 
supremacy of Athens over her so-called allies, and made her the 
capital and mistress of a far-flung empire of isles and coast- 
lands which encompassed the JSgean, and had its outposts in 
the Euxine and the Propontis, in Egypt, Phoenicia, and Sicily. 
Under the aegis of her sea-power a great expansion of trade and 
commercial prosperity took place, of which she got the lion s 
share. And as she felt justified, on the whole, in reserving for 
purely home uses any surplus of the tribute which might remain 
after the obligation of protection had been fulfilled, she quickly 
accumulated both in private fortunes and in public treasure the 
wealth which has always been a prerequisite of all the great 
"floreats" of civilization. 

At the same time the opportunities and responsibilities of an 
imperial position unfolded the capacities of the extraordinary 

B7 C/. Thucydides, I, 99. 



THE PLURALISTS 203 

Athenian genius. By nature and education the Athenians were 
a nation of energetic, enterprising, and adventurous business 
men who loved novelty, experiment, and risk. But this com 
mercial and practical flair for making a living was enlightened 
by qualities of mind and taste which taught them also how to 
live. It was inborn in them to perceive and prefer the beautiful, 
and to feel that the noblest of human satisfactions lay in re 
setting the world as a stage to the living of life as a fine art. 
Their passion for beauty was, however, reinforced and steadied 
by an almost sensual pleasure in thinking. They loved just for 
the "frisson" it excited, the sensation of reflecting and knowing. 
By instinct, as it were, they were excited and guided to the use 
and enjoyment of their minds, not as a mere economic tooth 
and claw for gorging the material wants of existence, but as a 
discriminating and delicate palate for apprehending and savor 
ing the subtle delights of the flavor of human life. This innate 
sensitiveness to beauty and to the uses of the intellect as an 
instrument of pleasure permeated all classes and interests. The 
average intelligence of the whole mass of Athenian citizens in 
town-meeting assembled has been ranked above that of the 
British House of Commons forty years ago, when its members 
were still almost altogether aristocratic by birth or univer 
sity bred. 58 And the perfection and universal dissemination 
of taste has never since been even approached, save perhaps by 
the Japanese in the days before the keen edge of their instinc 
tive perception and creation of beauty had been blunted and 
turned by contact with Europe and America. Only in the 
courts of the Ionian tyrants, and of the culture-mad despots of 
the Italian Renaissance can we find the peer of the spirit with 
which at Athens a whole people was suffused. 

Of all this wealth and genius Pericles made himself the master 
and the center. Like those other great patrons of splendid 
ages, Augustus Caesar and Lorenzo the Magnificent, he utilized 
the old republican form and machinery of government for the 
maintenance and exercise of his power, but he reigned no less 

es Freeman, History of Federal Government, I, p. 37 et seq. Quoted by 
Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, p. 255. Cf. Ferguson, Greek Imperialism, 
pp. 57, 65. 



204 THE PLURALISTS 

and perhaps even more truly than they. "Deriving authority 
from his capacity and acknowledged worth, being also a man 
of transparent integrity," says Thucydides, "he was able to 
control the multitude in a free spirit; he led them rather than 
was led by them. . . . Thus Athens, though still in name a 
democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen." 

Of the imperial destiny of Athens Pericles dreamed a great 
dream. Her glorious part in the Persian War still fired the 
imagination of men. Even the Theban Pindar, though during 
the struggle he had been pacifist and neutral to the point of 
uttering no protest when his own city welcomed the Persians, 
had cried out in spite of himself, "O shining, violet-crowned 
city of song, great Athens, bulwark of Hellas, walls divine." 6t 
And Themistocles, whose will and daring had sustained and 
helped bring her safely through the ordeal, had seen her en 
throned in the splendor of her victory as the capital of a united 
Greece and perhaps of the whole Mediterranean world. This 
vision of political dominion Pericles enlightened with the ideal 
of spiritual supremacy. He saw Athens also crowned with 
laurel, and exalted in honor, the shining capital of civilization. 
It was her mission to be the "school of Hellas," as he calls her 
in his famous Funeral Oration, privileged to teach by her ex 
ample how noble man and how beautiful the world might be. 
The test and justification of a democracy, he felt, lay not in 
leveling all men into commoners but in elevating them all into 
noblemen. Equality, if it implied that those who possessed 
breeding and manners, taste and intelligence, were no better 
than those who did not, was a lie. Freedom meant not the 
evasion of aristocratic ideals but a permission to a whole people 
to be ranked as gentlemen if, but only if, they would behave as 
such. That democracy should and might mean aristocracy 
made universal was, as Pericles saw it, the Athenian message to 
the world. 61 

But when it came to realizing this ideal the Athenians were 
not altogether as clay in the potter s hands. They were quick 

89 Thucydides, II, 65 (trans. Jowett). 

eo Fr. 76 (trans. Murray, Ancient Greek Lit., p. 178). 

61 Cf. Ferguson, Greek Imperialism, p. 64 et seq. 



THE PLURALISTS 205 

in learning to think imperially in matters of domestic and for 
eign policy. Like the Japanese, they were conscious and proud 
as a people of their innate sensitiveness and amenability to the 
refinements of human life and of the distinction which these 
thoroughbred qualities, inbred in the multitude, conferred upon 
them. They shared Pericles patriotism and his enthusiasm for 
pouring out their public and their private wealth in the service 
of the city for which they had had so lately, and were so soon 
again, to pour forth their blood. 62 And they rejoiced with him 
at seeing their love of Athens and their pride of empire, their 
genius and their ideals, at last expressed and enshrined in monu 
ments whose ruins still remind the world that beauty was once 
within the reach of man. 

Across this splendor, however, there lay a shadow, all the 
darker for the contrast, through which even Pericles in the end 
could not see his way. The keen curiosity of the Athenians, 
their hospitality to new ideas, their delight in looking on at life, 
their passion for thinking and reflecting all these were stopped 
short of science and philosophy by an indifference to inquiry 
and speculation, and by a blank wall of theological traditional 
ism and intolerance which forbade the spirit of investigation to 
trespass on the grounds of the established religion. In their 
dealings with the divine the Athenians were as old-fashioned, as 
bigoted, and as superstitious, as they were enlightened and pro 
gressive in their love of surveying and embellishing the spectacle 
of human existence. Their curiosity, their restlessness, and 
their enterprise urged them to extend their empire to the utter 
most ends of the earth, but woe to the adventurous mind that 
reported any new thing of the Gods whom the city worshiped ! 

Athens, then, in spite of her artistic temperament, her cul 
ture, her love of thought and conversation, was no place for 
untrammeled scientific and philosophic investigation. Not only 
her out-and-out philosophers, but her philosophic poets suffered 
from the presence of these forbidden topics ; just as in modern 
times, in Anglo-Saxon countries, both literature and science 
have been impeded by a constitutional fear of countenancing any 

62 Of. Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, pp. 96, 97; Bury, History 
of Greece, Vol. I, p. 398 et seq. 



206 THE PLURALISTS 

investigation or facing any truth which might shock British 
respectability or corrupt a belief in the superiority of Ameri 
can ideals. This may be the reason why Athens, in spite of her 
brilliancy and her attractions as an imperial capital, failed to 
attract or to hold so many brilliant minds. The charm of the 
Periclean court could not persuade the historian Herodotus to 
settle definitely there, and the philosopher Democritus, rich and 
free to live where he chose, preferred to travel or to live at 
Abdera. Even the poet zEschylus, it has been suggested, for 
all his piety and Miltonic Puritanism found the atmosphere too 
stifling, and used to visit Sicily for air. Perhaps, too, Eurip 
ides found the concealed irony and skepticism with which he 
edified the religious majority, and entertained the cynical 
minority, of his audience, an insufficient vent for his revolt, and 
sought relief at last in the grandes espaces and the pleins airs 
of the New World of Thrace. 63 Sophocles was more fortunate 
in having in Pericles a near-by refuge. 

In this matter of religious intolerance Athens contrasted very 
unfavorably with the Greek cities of Asia Minor and Magna 
Graecia. It may be, as we remarked in discussing the Milesian 
School, that the "continental" situation of the Ionian cities 
and the proximity of Sicily and Southern Italy to the foreign 
civilizations of Carthage and of the Italian peoples accustomed 
them to the presence and importance in the world of non-Hel 
lenic institutions, ideals, and Gods, and mellowed them with a 
cosmopolitan sense of the relativity of morals and theologies. 64 
In any case the lonians and the Magna Grecians were keen in 
vestigators and speculators by nature, fearless of any truth to 
which scientific or philosophic inquiry might lead. Among them 
one could hold and express what religious or irreligious beliefs 
one chose without danger of molestation or ostracism, and even 
with no uncomfortable feeling of being out of tune with one s 
environment. 

Athens, on the other hand, whose immediate neighbors were 
all and wholly Greek, and, with the exception of Corinth, rather 
hidebound, lacked cosmopolitan experience, and was not to be 

63 Cf. Holm, History of Greece, II, p. 293. 

64 Cf. Lange, History of Materialism (Eng. trans., 1877), I, p. 33. 



THE PLURALISTS 207 

shaken out of her theological provincialism and her old-fash 
ioned ideas even by her imperialism and the new and close ties 
which knit her to broad-minded and free-thinking dependencies. 
If anything, the new contacts only settled her the more firmly 
in her old-fashioned ways, and excited against Ionian ideas and 
influence a prejudice very similar to that which the "one-hun 
dred per cent American," to use a cant and popular American 
phrase, entertains against European culture in general, or the 
insular Englishman used to express against "atheistic," "im 
moral," and "frivolous" France. The Ionian, however, who 
crossed the ^Egean to Athens had his revenge. Save that to-day 
the forbidden topic about which no disturbing truths may be 
aired or unearthed is the nature of the good rather than of the 
Gods, he must have been oppressed with much the same feeling 
of loss of essential liberty as astonishes the Parisian on arriv 
ing in London, or as half amuses, half irritates, the European 
on entering the United States. 

A man with such vision as Pericles, and master of a people 
possessed of such virtues and shortcomings, naturally became 
the rallying point not only for the writers and artists who ex 
pressed the Athenian genius, but also for the liberals and free 
thinkers who were suppressed by the Athenian narrow-minded 
ness. So it was that both deliberately and unconsciously he 
gathered about himself the brightness of the Athenian glory, 
and became the focus of the splendor to which he has given his 
name. In forming this brilliant circle he owed no little help 
and inspiration to his mistress, or perhaps we should say, in 
view of his constancy and the fact that the Athenian law for 
bade legal marriage with foreigners, his morganatic wife, 
Aspasia. She was a Milesian, whose past, although it had been 
associated only with a very select few, was still not altogether 
above reproach. But she was faithful to Pericles, and as she 
added charm, wit, intelligence, a genius for conversation (as 
the Europeans, and particularly the French, understand it), 
and a talent for housekeeping, to her beauty, she made of her 
self one of the famous hostesses of all time. In her skilful hands 
the house of Pericles became the stage for a "salon" which was 



208 THE PLURALISTS 

frequented not only by all the great men, but by the more 
emancipated women of the day. 

Into this circle Pericles tried also to draw distinguished 
"colonials" and foreigners, just as the despots of the Italian 
Renaissance vied with one another in attaching famous men to 
their courts, irrespective of nationality. But he had in mind a 
nobler goal than the mere acquisition of another lion for the 
Periclean or even the Athenian garden. He wished, if possible, 
to overcome the blind spot in the point of view of his fellow- 
citizens by subjecting them to a course of Ionian enlightenment. 
It was not that he underestimated their virtues of piety anc 
patriotism or failed to appreciate their extraordinary sensitive 
ness to beauty. But he saw that without liberality of thought 
and interest in science and philosophy, their experience of and 
reflection upon life must necessarily be one sided and incomplete. 
If only he could graft the Ionian breadth of vision and mind 
upon the purity of taste, the physical energy, and the pride of 
pity and empire which characterized his countrymen, then his 
dream of Athens as the "school of Hellas" and the capital of 
civilization as well as of the world would be near to coming 
true. 

Pericles, however, had set himself a task beyond both his own 
powers and the capacities of his people. No nation, however 
quick, versatile, and brilliant, could change its spots and assimi 
late a new culture at the behest of one man, or within the span 
of a single lifetime. The Athenian defects were shortcomings 
which can be overcome only by many generations of experience, 
and disillusionment, and reflection, and slowly increasing per 
ception of "what things can and what things cannot be," not 
to speak of what are really worth while. 

The immediate result of Pericles superior field of vision and 
profundity of insight was that he himself got the reputation 
of being an "lonio-maniac," and that those who shared his 
views laid themselves open to the vague and dreadful charge of 
being "un-Athenian" in spirit, and were correspondingly sus 
pect in the eyes of the mob. Such accusations proved a power 
ful weapon in the hands of his enemies, who let no opportunity 
slip for wounding him politically by charging his friends with 
impiety towards the Gods of the city or to put it in modern 



THE PLURALISTS 209 



terms, towards the social and moral shibboleths of the peopl< 
and by thus seeking to arouse and enlist against him the pro 
vincial patriotism of the Athenian. Aspasia naturally was a 
favorite object of disfavor. Next to the nature of the Gods 
the Athenians were perhaps most bigoted about the position of 
women, who, they thought, should be neither seen nor heard, 
but kept in their proper position of almost Oriental seclusion 
in the home. Aspasia defied their two pet prejudices. Her 
unveiled and independent behavior, her habit of conversing 
familiarly and on equal terms with men, and worse still, her 
habit of inviting the legitimate wives of respectable citizens to 
do so too, scandalized the old-fashioned, and sowed seeds of 
feminism in Athenian households which brought the scandal 
home. These loose foreign ways coupled with her Ionian lib 
eralism, her patronage of dreadful, free-thinking scientists and 
philosophers, and her vulnerable past rendered her a popular 
target for scurrilous jest and even for serious, if malicious, 
attack. Once indeed she was haled into the courts on the 
double charge of impiety and of using her salon as a means of 
procuring other men s wives to be Pericles mistresses ; and only 
Pericles eloquence and influence secured her acquittal. 

But who were Pericles friends and the frequenters of As- 
pasia s salon? In order to answer this question, let us drop in 
and look about for a moment at one of Aspasia s evenings at 
home. The first to be pointed out to us would very likely have 
been the sculptor Pheidias. He was Pericles right-hand man, 
so some friendly social reporter might have informed us, and 
his minister, as it were, of fine arts and public works. To 
gether they had worked out the plans for making Athens so 
beautiful, and it was he who had supervised all the laying out 
of the building. He had "done" with his own hand the frieze 
of the Parthenon and the great statue of Athene, all ivory and 
gold, up on the Acropolis. Now he was just home from Olym- 
pia, where he had been working on a colossal statue of Zeus. 
Those who had seen it said it was so wonderful that when you 
stood before it you forgot everything else even all your own 
troubles and fears. Pheidias* position, though, was at the 
moment just a bit shaky. He had shocked and offended a lot 
of people by carving a figure of Pericles fighting a centaur on 



210 THE PLURALISTS 

the shield of Athene, which was thought quite blasphemous. 
The scandalmongers, too, were spreading the report that he 
had stolen some of the gold-leaf with which the statue was 
covered. The same silly canard had got about at Olympia also. 
It was a pity, for the people were so touchy and bigoted in re 
ligious matters. Let a story of that sort get going, and a man, 
no matter how high up, might easily land in jail. 

The four men over there, the reporter might have continued, 
as our attention wandered from his gossip, were Ictinus and 
Callicrates, the planning and supervising architects of the 
Parthenon, and Mnesicles who planned the Propylaea by which 
one mounted the slope of the Acropolis and entered the pri?- 
cincts of the temple. Perhaps we had noticed a little temple to 
Victory on the right as we went up. Callicrates had done that 
also. The fourth man was a compatriot of Aspasia s, Her- 
modorus by name, a philosopher as well as an architect. Very 
likely they were discussing the merits of his new rectangular 
scheme of city-planning a novel idea which he had got from 
the East and was applying at the Piraeus down by the docks, 
and also at Thurii and Rhodes. 

The man to our left was the poet Sophocles, a great personal 
friend of Pericles and one of his generals in the Samian war. 
He had done well enough in handling reinforcements and sup 
plies, but he had had to be reprimanded for mixing business 
and pleasure, and when left by Pericles to conduct the siege h(; 
had been badly worsted by the philosopher Melissus, who com 
manded the Samian fleet. He had written, as we probably re 
membered, a tragedy called "Antigone" to celebrate his pro 
motion. Talking with him were a fellow-tragedian, Ion, who 
was a colonial from Chios, and Damon, one of the most brilliant 
and cultivated men in Athens, a specialist in the theory of 
music, and reputed to have great influence with Pericles. 
Athens had another good poet, too, named Euripides, but he 
persisted in living over at Salamis, wrote his plays, they said, 
in a cave by the sea, and could not be persuaded to go into 
society or take any more part in public life than he had to. 

Did we see the man just coming into the room? That was 
the well-known traveler and historian, Herodotus from Hali- 



THE PLURALISTS 211 

carnassus over in Asia Minor. He was always "on the go" and 
never stopped in Athens long at a time. It was whispered that 
he was employed by the government as a secret intelligence 
agent and kept them furnished with much more valuable infor 
mation about foreign countries than was allowed to appear in 
the instalments of his book. Speaking of historians, the young 
man just taking leave of Aspasia was called Thucydides. His 
family were notoriously anti-Periclean, and he belonged to the 
opposition. But he much admired Pericles personally, and, it 
was said, meditated imitating Herodotus by writing a history 
of the times. 

Had we noticed the group at the end of the room gathered 
about Pericles, who were discussing so vehemently among them 
selves? They were mostly scientists interested in the investi 
gation of natural phenomena, and Sophists or teachers of 
rhetoric who instructed young men how to argue in the law- 
courts and make telling speeches in the Assembly. They were 
almost all out-and-out foreigners or from the dependencies. 
The tall, fine-looking man was Zeno of Elea, a pupil of the 
philosopher Parmenides. He could talk you into believing that 
black was white, and that motion and multiplicity and every 
thing else one commonly accepted were quite self-contradictory 
and did not really exist. The man with whom he was arguing 
was a Sicilian Sophist from Leontini, Gorgias by name. 65 No 
wonder they seemed rather heated in their discussion, since 
Gorgias had beat him at his own game and demonstrated by 
his own methods that "what is" really is not. Standing beside 
them was another Sophist, Protagoras, a Thracian from Ab- 
dera. He said really quite dreadful things that there is no 
such thing as a universal standard of right and wrong, for 
instance. And it was rumored that he had expressed uncer 
tainty as to whether the Gods existed or not. He had better 
beware. Statements of that sort were apt to get one into 
trouble at Athens. The short, ugly, snub-nosed youth listening 
to them was called Socrates. He was of no birth, but Pericles 

es This is, of course, an anachronism. Georgias did not reach Athens till 
after Pericles death. But he was already famous at Leontini and is part 
of the brilliance of the Periclean Age. 



212 TH.E PLURALISTS 

and Aspasia were the last people to care about the sort of 
thing if a man were well-mannered, intelligent, and interesting. 
He was very brilliant, and was developing a habit of walking 
round the streets questioning people and showing them and 
the by-standers how inexact their ideas were and how little 
they really knew. Finally, we must certainly have a look at 
the older man by Pericles side. He was an Ionian scientist 
whem Aspasia, it was said, had got Pericles to invite to Athens 
nearly twenty years ago. Pericles and he had been insepa 
rable friends from the first, and he was supposed to have more 
influence with the great man than even Damon or Pheidias. He 
was also reputed to be largely responsible for Pericles liberal 
and pro-Ionian ideas. The common people, however, who 
thought that Attica was the Gods own country and all for 
eigners, particularly from overseas, were decadent, made fun 
of him. They had nicknamed him "Brains" 66 because he had 
written a book showing that Mind was the stuff which set the 
world going. You could buy it for next to nothing in the 
market-place. He had also declared in his book that the sun 
was not a God but a bit of fiery iron about the size of the 
Peloponnesus. This second statement was no joking matter. 
That sort of thing might be said and written perhaps in degen 
erate and atheistic Ionia, but god-fearing Athenian manhood 
would not stand for it. It had already raised quite a hue and 
cry among the pious and the orthodox. The yellow-press 
comic poets could be counted on to take it up. For that matter 
there was a story going the rounds that the opposition would 
make it the occasion for another anti-Periclean demonstration. 
He would be brought to trial for impiety and his association 
with Pericles would be used as a means for inflaming religious 
prejudice against the statesman. What was his name? Anax- 
agoras, son of Hegesibulos, from Clazomenae. 67 

Had our friend the social reporter poured all this gossip into 
our ears, he would have been substantially correct. Pheidias 

66 This would appear a defensible translation of "Nous," used as a 
derisive nickname. 

67 The poetic license of these paragraphs and such anachronisms as have 
resulted demand perhaps apology. 



THE PLURALISTS 218 

was soon to be accused of embezzling part of the funds set aside 
for public works, condemned, and thrown into the prison where 
he died. And within a short time Anaxagoras, too, was to be 
brought to trial for the impiety of his utterances about the 
sun. That he had also made derogatory statements about the 
divinity of the moon as, for instance, that it was made "of earth 
and had plains and ravines in it" 8 rendered his case all the 
more serious. He, too, was condemned and imprisoned. But 
in some way he escaped, perhaps with Pericles connivance, and 
fled home to Ionia. In three years time Pericles himself was 
dead of the great plague which devastated Athens in 429 B. C., 
having lived to see the first stages of the long war that was to 
end in the dissolution of the Athenian Empire and the tem 
porary reduction of Athens herself to a second-rate power. 
Anaxagoras did not long survive his friend or the age of which 
he had been one of the chief glories. He had taken refuge in 
the Milesian colony of Lampsacus, and there he died honored 
and mourned by the adopted country men of his exile and old 
age. As a memorial to him an altar dedicated to Mind and 
Truth was set up in the market-place and the little schoolboys 
were given each year the holiday he had asked for them. 

We ought not to be less harsh, but we may be less hasty in 
our judgment of the Athenians conduct towards Anaxagoras, 
if we reflect upon the history of our own times. We do not 
need to go back to Roger Bacon writing his scientific discov 
eries and theories in cipher in order to be safe, or even to Galileo 
recanting on his knees before the Inquisition his statement that 
the earth and the other planets revolve about the sun. We 
have only to look back some sixty years in England to the 
reception accorded the Darwinian theory of evolution and the 
attitude adopted towards its supporters. It was safe by that 
time to say that the sun was not a God but a fiery mass many 
times larger than Peloponnesus, and even that it did not revolve 
about the earth. But it still required courage and a willingness 
to brave disagreeable incidents to maintain that man was not 
specially created by a God, but was descended along with all 
other vertebrates from lower forms of life, and had outstripped 

68 Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 271 (Fr. 10). 



214 THE PLURALISTS 

his brothers and cousins only by the workings of a chance and 
a natural selection which had sharpened his brains. Nor 
should we forget that there exist even to-day in the United 
States institutions of learning where exile is the penalty for 
advocating the evolutionary theory and that as late as 1922 
the teaching of it came within an ace of being forbidden by law 
in the State of Kentucky. Another recent equivalent of the 
Athenian temper towards Anaxagoras is to be found in the 
curious state of mind, half bigotry, half panic, into which even 
the educated classes can be still thrown, most noticeably, per 
haps, in America, by the mere question of any new discovery or 
hypothesis in the field of political and social science. 

Anaxagoras seems to have received his first lessons in philos 
ophy from instructors who counted themselves disciples of 
Anaximenes and successors to the Milesian heritage. But his 
opinions, like those of Parmenides and Empedocles, are to be 
understood as a reaction against his early teachers. In his 
divergence he was swayed by the doctrines of the great Eleatic. 
He found it as impossible as did Empedocles to escape the con 
clusion that there can be no such thing as coming into and 
passing out of being, and that therefore the quantity and prop 
erties of the World-Stuff must be invariable. And he was 
equally convinced that no real thing could turn into another, 
and that the apparent change of quality and transformation 
of natures which we see going on about us could not be taken 
at its face value, but required explanation. 

At the same time, he was no more prepared than Empedocles 
to accept the extreme view of the Eleatics that change and 
multiplicity are false opinion and illusion, pure and simple. 
He preferred to steer the middle course already charted by the 
Sicilian and to reduce qualitative alteration to terms of the 
movement and transposition in space of fixed and unalterable 
elements. "Nothing," he tells us, "comes into being or passes 
away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are." 
We should therefore "be right to call coming into being mix 
ture, and passing away separation." 

So far so good. Empedocles had helped him see his way out 

69 Fr. 17, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., pp. 260-1. 



THE PLURALISTS 215 

of the woods. But once in open country again Anaxagoras felt 
that Empedocles was not following the right path. The four 
substances, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, were too hard and 
too definite, too "divided and cut off from one another with 
a hatchet," 70 as it were.__ Moreover, they were too few. It was 
well-nigh impossible to make only four basic elements, however 
delicately mixed, account for all the infinite variety and com 
plexity of phenomena. Nor could their sharp outlines afford 
a sufficient explanation for the haze, the indeterminateness, the 
"atmosphere," in which the countless objects and aspects of 
the phenomenal world are blurred and confused and melted into 
one another. 

After all, thought Anaxagoras, perhaps there was something 
in the old notion of an indeterminate World-Substance such as 
his first teachers had impressed upon him. Such a substance 
need not be necessarily one and continuous. It might be a col 
lection of particles free to move about in space. Moreover, its 
indeterminate character need not be merely a matter of quan 
tity. It might be conceived as also qualitatively boundless 
an iridescent mass shot through and through with every one of 
the innumerable qualities that we perceive in things, in some 
what the same way that opposites were mingled in the Hera- 
cleitan Fire. In that case no one port; on or particle of it, 
however small, would be simply hot, or simply white, or simply 
sweet. Each molecule would be, as it were, a tiny prism pos 
sessed of all the iridescence and variety of the whole mass, hot 
and cold, black and white, bitter and sweet, all at the same 
time and fused beyond distinction into one. Only._in one par- 
P miht bo mnro swfffnm fo" ^.^-^^^t^^TTV 



heat or cold ; in another more cold than heat or taste or visi 
bility ; in still another more white than black or temperature 
or appeal to the tongue. The first we should call after jts_pre- 
dominant quality, a particle of cold, the second, a little bit of 
sweetness, the third a molecule of white. Similarly any par 
ticle of the World-Substance with which we came in contact we 
should name after the quality in it which struck our senses most 
forcibly. But the prevalence in a thing of one property over 
70 Fr. 8, Burnet, op. cit., p. 259. 



216 THE PLURALISTS 

all others should not cause us to forget that it, along with 
every other piece of World-Stuff, possessed to some degree all 
the qualities of the whole. "In everything," as in a well-shaken 
cocktail, "there is a portion of everything." 71 

These particles of mingled quality were called by Aristotle 
"homceomera,^ or things whose parts are of the same nature 
as the whole. The technical vocabulary of philosophy has 
taken over the word and its application, and perpetuated them. 
We need not, therefore, be dismayed if we meet now and then 
in philosophical literature with references to the "homoeomera," 
or, to adopt a phrase used by later writers, the "homceomeriae," 
of Anaxagoras. 

We have used the words "quality" and "property," in order 
to express in our own thought and language the idea which 
Anaxagoras seems to have in mind. But we should do so ad 
visedly. The distinction between a "thing" and its "qualities" 
which to us is so familiar and natural was still vague and little 
felt by philosophers. They made it, of course, continually, but 
unconsciously, when they used nouns and adjectives as different 
parts of their everyday speech ; but the grammatical distinction 
had not yet received a philosophical meaning and application. 
It had occurred to Anaxagoras as little as the differentiation 
of mind from matter or of space from stuff had occurred to his 
Milesian forbears. These broader distinctions were, as we have 
seen, only just beginning to emerge from an idea of World- 
Stuff in general which was mind, life, matter, solidity, space, 
and everything else through and through and "all over." The 
more technical and sharply defined opposition of a "substance" 
to its "properties" required an even longer period of reflection 
to mature it. 

So it is that we find Anaxagoras confusing in his particles 
of World-Substance the two notions of "property" and 
"thing." Hot, cold, dry, moist, and the like are real stuffs. 
The iridescence of qualities with which each prismatic particle 
shimmers is conceived as a complete fusion in the World-Stuff 
of many different material ingredients. 

To what extent Anaxagoras carried this profusion of basic 

71 Fr. 11, Burnet, op. cit,, p. 259. 



THE PLURALISTS 217 

qualities or elements is a mooted point. An ancient commen 
tator represents him as explaining the process of nutrition on 
the hypothesis that bread and water and other food contain 
minute particles of hair, veins, arteries, sinews, bones, and the 
other parts of the body. 72 Many modern historians, arguing 
from this passage, have imputed to him the belief that there are 
as many different sorts of molecules as there are kinds of nat 
ural objects. Fire, for example, would be composed primarily 
of fire molecules, but it would also contain, to a minor degree 
and imperceptibly, particles of blood, and hair, and water, and 
bread, and wheat, and every species of substance. This view, 
however, has been recently challenged. Anaxagoras, it is held, 
had in mind simply the old tables of opposites, such as hot and 
cold, light and dark, with which the Milesians, the Pythagore 
ans, and Heracleitus have already familiarized us. These are 
the primary qualities or stuffs, as it were, which are so inter 
fused that no particle of the World-Stuff can be found which 
does not contain them all. Other kinds of things, such as the 
four elements of Empedocles, or hair, or flesh and blood, must 
rather be regarded as secondary combinations which owe their 
different natures to different proportions and arrangements of 
the primary molecules. 73 

Anaxagoras had now reached the point where the kaleido 
scopic change and complexity of the phenomenal world could 
be reconciled with the Eleatic indestructibility and the invari 
able quantity and character of the World-Stuff. Like Empedo 
cles, he had pulverized Reality into many particles which, 
though indestructible and unalterable in nature, possessed dif 
ferent characteristics and could shift their positions in space. 
And like him he had seen that creation and destruction and 
transformation need not imply absolute coming into or passing 
out of being, but could be explained as a mere mixture and 
separation of uncreated, indestructible, and unchangeable ele 
ments. Moreover, he had improved upon the crudeness of the 
Empedoclean theory by expanding the sum of primary differ- 

72 Act. Plac., I, 3 (Diels, Doxographi greed, 279). 

73 For a discussion of this point, cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 
3rd ed., pp. 262-5. 



218 THE PLURALISTS 

ences and elements from four to an indefinite number, and had 
thus provided a broader and more subtle ground for the extent 
and nuances of the variety perceived by the senses. 

At this point also, he found himself faced with the problem 
which confronted Empedocles in the same circumstances. Mix 
ture and separation imply motion. But where does motion 
come from? In answering this question he again followed 
Empedocles lead. He isolated and located in a particular ele 
ment the energetic, self-moving, aspect of the Universe, which 
the Milesians had taken for granted, along with consciousness, 
matter, space, and the rest, as one of the universal undifferen- 
tiated characteristics of the World-Stuff. This dynamic sub 
stance was inherently active and had the power of setting in 
motion the other kinds of molecules, which, if left to themselves, 
would be inert. But whereas Empedocles had posited two such 
stuffs, Love and Strife, Anaxagoras reduced the number to one. 
And when he sought to identify this stuff with some one of the 
qualities or elements with which we are acquainted he found its 
alter-ego or "twin-soul" not in a physiological instinct or mys 
tical emotion, but in the thinking and reasoning activity of life 
and consciousness. 74 The stuff which possessed the power of 
moving other things was perhaps most naturally the stuff 
which possessed The power of knowing them. ^At any rate, 
Anaxagoras located his active element in Mind.-. 

Mind, however, in spite of the suggestions the name has for 
us, was quite as material as Love or Strife or as the Fire of 
Heracleitus or the World-Stuffs of the Milesians. We should 
be almost justified, indeed, in using the term "Brains" as a 
serious translation, since it is the only word in English that 
mixes up mind and matter in a single stuff in just the Anaxag- 
orean manner. The one feature which distinguished Mind or 
"Brains" from other substances lay in the fact that its par 
ticles were "straight gray matter," so to speak, exempt from 
the alloy of all other qualities to which common elements were 
subject. A molecule of Mind contained nothing but Mind. It 
had no trace of hot or cold, or black or white, or hair or blood 
or wheat about it. It "is mixed with nothing but is alone, itself 

74 Cf. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 154. 



THE PLURALISTS 219 

by itself." And in comparison with other kinds of particles 
i* w ^ s .Mii t . ^ a tL c ^^ fr? 6 anc l Ihin. I ts exclusive nature, how 
ever, did not condemn it to dwell altogether apart. Being un- 
adulterable it was privileged to appear in the mixed and gay 
society of some of the other elements, without sullying its 
purity or incurring even so much as a noblesse oblige reputa 
tion for return entertainment. "In everything there is a por 
tion of everything except Mind, and there are some things in 
which there is Mind also." The more favored few which con 
tain Mind in addition to the general intermixture were, as we 
shall presently see, perhaps animate beings as compared with 
inanimate things. 

But we should be on our guard not merely against imputing 
to Anaxagoras a belief in an immaterial Consciousness or Rea 
son. Mind, he tells us, "has power over all things, both greater 
and smaller, that have life . . . and set in order all things that 
were to be, and all things that were and are not now and that 
are, and this revolution in which now revolve the stars and the 
sun and the moon. . . ." Such a statement inevitably sug 
gests to us the Hebraic idea of the spirit of God moving on the 
face of the waters, and of a divine intelligence creating and 
controlling the world. We should be careful, however, not to 
read any such idea into Anaxagoras thought. The action of 
Mind in setting the other stuffs in motion seemed to him as un 
premeditated and mechanical as the commotion caused in a 
tumbler of water by the ingredients of a Seidlitz powder seems 
to us. And the formation of the world due to the spread of the 
initial commotion was not in any way planned or directed by 
the cosmic brain-matter. It was a wholly purposeless and blind 
process, like the series of changes started and sustained among 
chemical elements by the mere presence of a catalyzer. Both 
Plato and Aristotle, who believed that purpose was the main 
factor in the formation and ordering of the world, were severe 
with him for using Mind as a mere mechanical cause which did 

75 Fr. 12, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 259. 

76 Fr. 11 (Mr. Burnet, however, transliterates "Nous" instead of translat 
ing it as "Mind"). 

77 Fr. 12, Burnet, op. cit. 



220 THE PLURALISTS 

no more than wind the world up and then left it to run by its 
own mechanism/ 8 And Plato doubtless was thinking of him as 
well as of Empedocles when he spoke of those philosophers who 
taught that the Universe was formed "not by the action of mind 
... or of any God, or from art, but ... by chance and 
nature only." 79 We have then no more right to attribute to 
him a "teleological" or "design" theory of the activity of Mind 
than we had to ascribe to him an immaterial view of its char 
acter. 

Anaxagoras hypothesis regarding the World-Stuff was now 
complete. He had found the energetic, dynamic substance to 
give his inert, unchangeable particles of many kinds the neces 
sary shove and set them going. It remained to fill in the out 
lines with a description of the formation of the world. This, 
he tells us, was effected as follows ; In the beginning there was 
so complete a fusion of all the different particles that no one 
kind could be distinguished from another. Air and ether, how 
ever, which are infinite, predominated in the mixture (here 
he seems to be thinking of Anaximenes). Mind set a portion 
of this mass whirling with unparalleled rapidity, and the spin 
ning motion spread little by little and involved larger areas. 
The speed generated force, and particles of different sorts were 
separated out from the indiscriminate mixture and brought 
together with molecules of their own kind. "The dense and the 
moist and the cold and the dark came together where the earth 
is now, while the rare and the warm and the dry (and the 
bright) went out toward the further part of the aether." 80 
From the qualities or elements which spin nearest to the center, 
"as they are separated off, earth is solidified ; for from mists 
water is separated off and from water, earth." 

The spinning of the central mass caused the stones to "rush 
outwards more than water," 81 and great fragments of rock 
were flung off and caught up into heaven where they continue to 
fly round and round the earth. They were set on fire by the 

78 Plato, Phcedo, 97b. Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 4. 985a. 

79 Laws X, 889b. 

so Fr. 15, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 260. 
si Fr. 16, loc. cit. 



THE PLURALISTS 221 

rotation of the sether, and became the stars, the sun, and the 
planets. There were also other fragments flung off which were 
not ignited and are therefore unseen in their revolution. 

As to Anaxagoras exact ideas about the moon we are not so 
clear. Commentators variously describe him as saying that it, 
like the sun, is incandescent 82 ; that it is a mixture of dark and 
fiery stuff, the result of which is its shadowy appearance 8S ; 
and that it has no light of its own but reflects the light of the 
sun. 84 The earth, as in the system of Anaximenes, is conceived 
as flat and floating upon a cushion of air. 

We are also somewhat in the dark as to his ideas regarding 
the development of life upon the earth. Apparently the dis 
tinction between the animate and the inanimate was bound up 
in his opinion with the appearance of Mind as an ingredient in 
the composite natures of some of the elements, but not of 
others. 85 Though Mind is everywhere the same in gualjt j and 
degree, the amount of it present in the different kinds of mole 
cules into whose composition it enters, or in the secondary com 
bination of these particles, may differ. If is to this difference 
of quantity and to differences of physical structure that higher 
and lower forms of life and degrees of intelligence are due. The 
mind of man, for example, is of the same quality and kind as 
the mind of a plant only there is more of it. 86 This doctrine 
of the qualitative sameness of all life and intelligence, it will be 
noticed, anticipates the point brought home by the doctrine of 
evolution, that human consciousness, like the human body, has 
been slowly developed out of less conscious forms of existence. 

Anaxagoras also seems to have had some sort of theory of 
physical evolution, though we lack a detailed account such as 
we find in Anaximander and Empedocles. He taught, we are 
told, that the air contained the seeds of both vegetable and 
animal life which the falling rain brought down to earth ; and 
also that "animals arose in the first place from moisture and 

82 Hippolytus, I, 8 (Diels, Dox. 562). Burnet, op. cit., p. 271. 

ss Act. Plac., II, 30 (Dox. 36). 

s* Hippolytus, Phil. I, 8 (Dox. 562). 

85 Burnet, op. cit., p. 272. 

86 Cf. Fr. 12 end. Burnet, op. cit., p. 260. 



222 THE PLURALISTS 

afterwards one from another." The superior intelligence of 
man he laid to the possession and use of hands, 88 which gave a 
greater scope to the exercise of mind. This association of in 
telligence and hands may perhaps remind us of the modern dis 
covery that the speech center in the brain is always in the 
hemisphere which controls the dominant hand in the left hemi 
sphere in the case of right-handed people and vice versa. 

Whether or no he believed in a succession of world cycles 
separated by periods of chaotic confusion and complete inter 
mixture of the world-particles with one another, is a doubtful 
question, probably to be answered in the negative. 89 Whether 
he believed, as Anaximander and Anaximenes seem to have done, 
in the simultaneous existence of innumerable worlds similar to 
our own is a matter of dispute. A passage from his writings is 
preserved which at its face value appears to refer to the in 
habitants, both animal and human, the cities, and the culti 
vated fields, the sun and the moon, and all the rest of the furni 
ture of other systems like our own produced elsewhere by the 
spread of the spinning movement and the ensuing separation 
of particles. 90 But although the seeming implication of a plu 
rality of worlds has been vigorously defended, 91 it is only fair 
to say that it has also been vigorously attacked, and that the 
passage has been held to refer merely to conditions prevailing, 
in Anaxagoras opinion, upon our own moon. 92 

The growth of a specialized psychological interest, which we 
have noted from time to time, made a further advance in An 
axagoras philosophy. His theory of sensation was more de 
tailed than that of Empedocles, with whom it seems as if he 
were carrying on a controversy. To the latter s view that per 
ception was essentially of like by like he opposed the hypothesis 
that sensation was produced by the stimulation of one opposite 
by another. Like, he pointed out, could not be affected by like ; 

87 Hippolytus, Phil. 8 (Diels, Doxographi greed, 563). Trans. Fairbanks, 
Handbook of Greek Religion, p. 261. 

88 Aristotle, Part. Anim., IV, 10, 687a, 7. 

89 Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, II, p. 358. 

so Fr. 4, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 258. 

91 Burnet, op. cit., pp. 269-270. 

92 Zeller, op. cit., II, p. 359, note 3. 



THE PLURALISTS 223 

witness the insensibility of the black pupil of the eye to dark- 
ness and the indifference of the body to temperatures similar 
to its own. The dark depths of the eye were sensitive to light, 
cold was known by the warm in us, warm by the cold, sweet 
by the sour, fresh by the salt. The same was true of smell and 
hearing which were due, the one to contact through respiration, 
the other to the percussion of the air upon the skull, and the 
consequent reverberation in the brain. Keenness of perception, 
he thought, was in proportion to the size of the sense organ. 

Pain was caused by the contact of opposites, and therefore 
to some degree accompanied all sensation. It eventually be 
came perceptible when a stimulus was excessive or had been 
too long continued, as was shown by the disagreeable character 
of too bright light or loud noises, and the weariness which 
resulted from prolonged attention to the same thing. 93 

That the senses do not acquaint us with Reality exactly as 
it is, Anaxagoras also explicitly recognized. They are too 
weak to perceive the complexity of qualities and elements 
which is present in every particle of the World-Stuff. For 
example, if we take two colors like black and white and mix 
them, the eye no longer perceives molecules of white lying 
beside molecules of black, but only particles of uniform gray. 
Similarly, we do not perceive the blackness lurking in the 
seemingly pure w r hite of snow, or the minute amount of sweet 
ness and of other primary qualities which in reality is mixed 
with every particle of sour. 

This admission of the untrustworthiness of the senses, how 
ever, does not warrant us in considering Anaxagoras either a 
skeptic or a rationalist. The senses, he thought, do not take 
us the whole way to the truth, to be sure, but they do not 
mislead us. Their presentations acquaint us grossly, and with 
the finer detail blurred, with things as they really are, "What 
appears is a vision of the unseen." Reason supplements them 
by carrying the process of dissection of phenomena to a point 

3 cf. Theophr., De sens., 27 (Dox. 507). (Fairbanks Handbook of Greek 
Religion, p. 258.) 

94 Fr. 21a. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 261. 



224 THE PLURALISTS 

where perception fails, but beyond which imagination con 
tinues, to follow it. The mind s eye can still see all the colors 
in the rainbow-like nature of particles too small for even their 
dominant tint to strike the physical vision. But Reason, in 
his view r does not descry a new world of immaterial or "super 
sensible" realities. It is merely a sort of microscope held to 
the naked eye of perception, which discovers nothing that the 
senses might not detect if only they were sharpened. 

We may now pause for a moment to sum up our impressions 
of Anaxagoras. We find him pushing on some distance beyond 
Empedocles towards the atomistic and mechanical view of 
Reality finally attained by Leucippus and Democritus. Th< 
four passive constituent elements of the Empedoclean World- 
Stuff are expanded by him into an indefinite number of parti 
cles, each one of which shimmers with all the basic qualities, 
but is predominantly and distinctly colored with that which 
gives it its name. Each unit of iron, for example, contains 
also gold, and water, and the like, but we call it iron because 
there is much more iron in it than there is of any other nature. 
The particles of Mind, alone, are absolutely pure and unadul 
terated, and Mind also is the only element which is inherently 
active and self-moving. Thus the two active elements of 
Empedocles were reduced to one, and their semi-mythological 
natures were supplanted by a more scientific and a declaredly 
material principle. 

It is to the initial impulse given by this "Mind-Stuff" that 
the formation of the Universe is due. In the beginning all the 
particles of the various elements lay mixed in a chaotic con 
fusion. Then Mind entered into the mixture and set the 
other particles spinning. This spinning spread throughout 
the Universe and in a perfectly mechanical manner brought 
about a separation of the different elements from one another; 
and gradually built up the world. The sun and the moon and 
the stars, instead of being divine are merely great pieces of 
fiery rock, shot off from the original central mass by the 
whirling motion and set on fire by the rotation of the ether. 
The remnant of the mass became the earth, which is conceived 



THE PLURALISTS 225 

as flat and as floating on a cushion of air. It is an open ques 
tion whether he thought that innumerable worlds of this sort 
were evolved. 

Of Anaxagoras theory of the origin and growth of life we 
know only that he thought that the first animals arose from 
moisture, and then from one another, and that he associated 
the development of the human intelligence with that of the 
hand. Of his psychology, however, we are more fully informed. 
His views on sensation are as famous as those of Empedocles, 
though diametrically opposed to them. Instead of believing 
that like was perceived by like, he argued that sensation was 
caused by the contact and interaction of the qualities in the 
human body with their opposites in the external world. The 
inability of the senses to reach Reality was explicitly recog 
nized by Anaxagoras, and some attempt was made to explain 
it. But he feels that the deficiencies of the senses are com 
pensated by the power of Reason to carry on the process of 
analysis beyond the point at which perception fails, and to 
attain a vision of the ultimate constituents and structure of 
things. 

During his last years, Anaxagoras gathered disciples at 
Lampsacus, and founded a school of philosophy which con 
tinued to exist after his death. Apparently, however, his 
teachings were quickly modified by his followers and tended 
to revert to the older Milesian doctrine. Archelaus, his suc 
cessor and the only member of the school whose name and 
views are specifically known to us, held that the original mix 
ture of all elements and qualities was Air, and that Mind 
instead of being a pure, unalloyed stuff contained an admixture 
of foreign particles like the other elements, and like them was 
suffused throughout the molecules of the airy World-Substance. 
The Universe arose from the condensation and rarefaction 
of the World-Stuff, and from the interaction of the two re 
sultant principles of fire and water. All forms of life, including 
man, also appeared as a consequence of the intermingling of 
the warm and the cold, and were nourished by the primeval 
slime. They lived but a short time, and then a process of 



226 THE PLURALISTS 

generation from one another and of evolution began, in the 
course of which men were distinguished from the rest. 95 

The same tendency to make phil