A Short History of Greek Philosophy

by John Marshall

Under what form known to us," he would seem to have asked, "may we assume an identity in all known things, so as best to cover or render explicable the things as we know them?"

It is interesting to find that the man who was thus the first philosopher, the first observer who took a metaphysical, non-temporal, analytical view of the world, and so became the predecessor of all those votaries of 'other-world' ways of thinking,—whether as academic idealist, or 'budge doctor of the Stoic fur,' or Christian ascetic or what not, whose ways are such a puzzle to the 'hard-headed practical man,'—was himself one of the shrewdest men of his day, so shrewd that by common consent he was placed foremost in antiquity among the Seven Sages, or seven shrewd men, whose practical wisdom became a world's tradition, enshrined in anecdote and crystallised in proverb.

Thales' contribution was that he tried to explain the mysteries of the world scientifically: he supposed that there was one source (water) from which everything sprang and everything dissolved into it. A great mind indeed!

a new mood of mind, in which unity, though only very partially suggested or discoverable by the senses, is {6} preferred to that infinite and indefinite variety and difference which the senses give us at every moment. There is here the germ of a new aspiration, of a determination not to rest in the merely momentary and different, but at least to try, even against the apparent evidence of the senses, for something more permanently intelligible.

How are we to account for, or formulate, the principle of difference or change? What is it that causes things to come into being out of, or recalls them back from being into, the infinite void? It is to be confessed, however, that our accounts on this point are somewhat conflicting. One authority actually says that he formulated motion as eternal also. So far as he attempted to grasp the idea of difference in relation to that of unity, he seems to have regarded the principle of change or difference as inhering in [13] the infinite itself. Aristotle in this connection contrasts

his doctrine with that of Anaxagoras, who formulated two principles of existence—Matter and Mind (see below, p. 54). Anaximander, he points out, found all he wanted in the one.

Heraclitus formulated in the famous dictum, 'All things pass.' In the eternal flux or flow of being consisted its reality; even as in a river the water is ever changing, and the river exists as a river only in virtue of this continual change; or as in a living body, wherein while there is life there is no stability or fixedness; stability and fixedness are the attributes of the unreal image of life, not of life itself. Thus, as will be observed, from the material basis of being as conceived by Thales, with only a very vague conception of the counter-principle of movement, philosophy has wheeled round in Heraclitus to the other extreme; he finds his permanent element in the negation of permanence; being or reality consists in never 'being' but always 'becoming,' not in stability but in change.

To his mental view creation was a process eternally in action, the fiery element descending by the law of its being into the cruder [30] forms of water and earth, only to be resolved again by upward process into fire;

Nature, and {93} his dictum, "Nothing exists, or if anything exists, it cannot be apprehended by man, and even if it could be apprehended, the man who apprehended it could not expound or explain it to his neighbour."

Protagoras and Gorgias, the great sophists...

Again, if we assume that what we think is identical with what is, then it must be impossible to think of what is not. But this is absurd; for we can think of such admittedly imaginary beings as Scylla and Chimaera, and multitudes of others.

Protagoras and Gorgias, the great sophists...

Not only belief in divine government disappeared, but belief in any government external or internal; justice became a cheating device to deprive a man of what was ready to his grasp; good-faith was stupidity when it was not a more subtle form of deceit; morality was at best a mere convention which a man might cancel if {96} he pleased; the one reality was the appetite of the moment, the one thing needful its gratification; society, therefore, was universal war,

And thus Aristotle, with his technical and systematising intellect, attributes two main innovations in philosophy to Socrates; the Inductive process of reasoning, and the establishing of General Ideas or Definitions upon or through this process.

Virtue is knowledge," thus he formulated his new vision of things.

Virtue is knowledge. And so if a man is virtuous, he is realising what is best and truest in himself, he is fulfilling also what is best and truest without himself.

realise thyself;

Virtue is knowledge. And therefore all the manifold relations of life,—the home, the market, the city, the state; all the multiform activities of life,—labour and speech and art and literature and {114} law; all the sentiments of life,—friendship and love and reverence and courage and hope,—all these are parts of a knowable whole; they are expressions of law; they are Reason realising itself through individuals, and in the same process realising them.

Let us note further that while the immediate result is apparently only to confuse, the remoter but more permanent result is to raise a suspicion of any hard and fast definitions, and to suggest that there is something deeper in life than language is adequate to express, a 'law in the members,' a living principle for good, which transcends forms and maxims, and which alone gives real value to acts. Note further the suggestion that this living principle has a character analogous to the knowledge or skill of an accomplished artificer; it has relation on the one hand to law, as a principle binding on the individual, it has relation on the other hand to utility, as expressing itself, not in words, but in acts beneficial to those concerned. Hence the Socratic formula, Justice is equivalent to the Lawful on the one hand, to the Useful on the other.

what God prescribes and man desires is that which is good and useful for man.

Note finally the suggestion that the man who knows (in Socrates' sense of knowledge) what is right, shows only more fully his righteousness when he voluntarily sins; it is the 'unwilling sinner' who is the wrongdoer.

This is a very interesting thought. But is it right?

Philosophy, in fact, was to Aristippus a method of social culture, a means of making the best of life as he found it. As

philosophy was only a means towards pleasurable living, enabling them so to analyse and classify the several experiences of life as to render a theory of satisfactory [207] existence possible.

Their answer was that life had at each moment its own End, in the pleasure of that moment.

The one criterion, whether of good or of truth, is the feeling of the moment for the man who feels it;

Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost,' is a maxim which comes as a rule {128} only to the lips of the worldly successful, while they think themselves strong enough to stand alone. But this solitude of selfishness neither works nor lasts; every man at some time becomes 'the hindmost,' if not before, at least in the hour of death for him or his; at that hour he is hardly disposed, for himself or those he loves, to repeat his maxim.

The Cyrenaics claimed liberty to please themselves in the choice of their enjoyments; the Cynics sought liberty through denial of enjoyments. [219] Both, moreover, were cosmopolitan; they mark the decay of the Greek patriotism, which was essentially civic, and the rise of the wider but less intense conception of humanity. Aristippus, in a conversation with Socrates (Xenoph. Memor. II. i.) on the {129} qualifications of those who are fitted to be magistrates, disclaims all desire to hold such a position himself.

The Cynic ideal, in fact, was summed up in these four words—wisdom, independence, free speech, liberty.

The name Cynic, derived from the Greek word for a dog, is variously accounted for, some attributing it to the 'doglike' habits of the school, others to their love of 'barking' criticism, others to the fact that a certain gymnasium in the outskirts of Athens, called Cynosarges, sacred to Hercules the patron-divinity of men in the political position of Antisthenes, was a favourite resort of his.

Nor had they any sympathy with the subtleties of verbal distinction cultivated by some of the Socratics, as by other philosophers or Sophists of their time. Definitions and abstractions and classifications led to no good. A man was a man; what was good was good; to say that a man was good did not establish the existence of some abstract class of goods. As Antisthenes once said to Plato, "A horse I see, but 'horseness' I do not see." What the exact point of this criticism was we may reserve for the present.

The fundamental conception of Plato, it will be remembered, is that of an eternally existing 'thought of God,' in manifold forms or 'ideas,' which come into the consciousness of men in connection with or on occasion of sensations, which are therefore in our experience later than the sensations, but which we nevertheless by reason recognise as necessarily prior to the sensations, inasmuch as it is through these ideas alone that the sensations are knowable or namable at all.

Xenocrates was then teaching at {212} the Academy, Aristotle at the Lyceum, but Epicurus heard neither the one nor the other.

Nothing proceeds from nothing,'

but they had difficulty in comprehending how there could be a multitude of different impressions on the same spot without effacing each other. Some therefore preferred the vaguer and safer expression, 'modification'; had they possessed our modern science, they might have illustrated their meaning by reference to the phenomena of magnetism or electricity.

Both of these things the Greeks taught to Saul of Tarsus; at a higher Source he found the satisfying of his soul; but from the Greek philosophies he learned the language through which the new Revelation was to be taught in the great world of Roman rule and Grecian culture.