Timaeus
generation, confined to a period of six thousand years; he was
able to speculate freely on the effects of infinite ages in the
production of physical phenomena. He could imagine cities which
had existed time out of mind (States.; Laws), laws or forms of
art and music which had lasted, ‘not in word only, but in very
truth, for ten thousand years’ (Laws); he was aware that natural
phenomena like the Delta of the Nile might have slowly
accumulated in long periods of time (Hdt.). But he seems to have
supposed that the course of events was recurring rather than
progressive. To this he was probably led by the fixedness of
Egyptian customs and the general observation that there were
other civilisations in the world more ancient than that of
Hellas.
The ancient philosophers found in mythology many ideas which, if
not originally derived from nature, were easily transferred to
her—such, for example, as love or hate, corresponding to
attraction or repulsion; or the conception of necessity allied
both to the regularity and irregularity of nature; or of chance,
the nameless or unknown cause; or of justice, symbolizing the law
of compensation; are of the Fates and Furies, typifying the fixed
order or the extraordinary convulsions of nature. Their own
interpretations of Homer and the poets were supposed by them to
be the original meaning. Musing in themselves on the phenomena of
nature, they were relieved at being able to utter the thoughts of
their hearts in figures of speech which to them were not figures,
and were already consecrated by tradition. Hesiod and the Orphic
poets moved in a region of half-personification in which the
meaning or principle appeared through the person. In their vaster
conceptions of Chaos, Erebus, Aether, Night, and the like, the
first rude attempts at generalization are dimly seen. The Gods
themselves, especially the greater Gods, such as Zeus, Poseidon,
Apollo, Athene, are universals as well as individuals. They were
gradually becoming lost in a common conception of mind or God.
They continued to exist for the purposes of ritual or of art; but
from the sixth century onwards or even earlier there arose and
gained strength in the minds of men the notion of ‘one God,
greatest among Gods and men, who was all sight, all hearing, all
knowing’ (Xenophanes).
Under the influence of such ideas, perhaps also deriving from the
traditions of their own or of other nations scraps of medicine
and astronomy, men came to the observation of nature. The Greek
philosopher looked at the blue circle of the heavens and it
flashed upon him that all things were one; the tumult of sense
abated, and the mind found repose in the thought which former
generations had been striving to realize. The first expression of
this was some element, rarefied by degrees into a pure
abstraction, and purged from any tincture of sense. Soon an inner
world of ideas began to be unfolded, more absorbing, more
overpowering, more abiding than the brightest of visible objects,
which to the eye of the philosopher looking inward, seemed to
pale before them, retaining only a faint and precarious
existence. At the same time, the minds of men parted into the two
great divisions of those who saw only a principle of motion, and
of those who saw only a principle of rest, in nature and in
themselves; there were born Heracliteans or Eleatics, as there
have been in later ages born Aristotelians or Platonists. Like
some philosophers in modern times, who are accused of making a
theory first and finding their facts afterwards, the advocates of
either opinion never thought of applying either to themselves or
to their adversaries the criterion of fact. They were mastered by
their ideas and not masters of them. Like the Heraclitean
fanatics whom Plato has ridiculed in the Theaetetus, they were
incapable of giving a reason of the faith that was in them, and
had all the animosities of a religious sect. Yet, doubtless,
there was some first impression derived from external nature,
which, as in mythology, so also in philosophy, worked upon the
minds of the first thinkers. Though incapable of induction or
generalization in the modern sense, they caught an inspiration
from the external world. The most general facts or appearances of
nature, the circle of the universe, the nutritive power of water,
the air which is the breath of life, the destructive force of
fire, the seeming regularity of the greater part of nature and
the irregularity of a remnant, the recurrence of day and night
and of the seasons, the solid earth and the impalpable aether,
were always present to them.
The great source of error and also the beginning of truth to them
was reasoning from analogy; they could see resemblances, but not
differences; and they were incapable of distinguishing
illustration from argument. Analogy in modern times only points
the way, and is immediately verified by experiment. The dreams
and visions, which pass through the philosopher’s mind, of
resemblances between different classes of substances, or between
the animal and vegetable world, are put into the refiner’s fire,
and the dross and other elements which adhere to them are purged
away. But the contemporary of Plato and Socrates was incapable of
resisting the power of any analogy which occurred to him, and was
drawn into any consequences which seemed to follow. He had no
methods of difference or of concomitant variations, by the use of
which he could distinguish the accidental from the essential. He
could not isolate phenomena, and he was helpless against the
influence of any word which had an equivocal or double sense.
Yet without this crude use of analogy the ancient physical
philosopher would have stood still; he could not have made even
‘one guess among many’ without comparison. The course of natural
phenomena would have passed unheeded before his eyes, like fair
sights or musical sounds before the eyes and ears of an animal.
Even the fetichism of the savage is the beginning of reasoning;
the assumption of the most fanciful of causes indicates a higher
mental state than the absence of all enquiry about them. The
tendency to argue from the higher to the lower, from man to the
world, has led to many errors, but has also had an elevating
influence on philosophy. The conception of the world as a whole,
a person, an animal, has been the source of hasty
generalizations; yet this general grasp of nature led also to a
spirit of comprehensiveness in early philosophy, which has not
increased, but rather diminished, as the fields of knowledge have
become more divided. The modern physicist confines himself to one
or perhaps two branches of science. But he comparatively seldom
rises above his own department, and often falls under the
narrowing influence which any single branch, when pursued to the
exclusion of every other, has over the mind. Language, two,
exercised a spell over the beginnings of physical philosophy,
leading to error and sometimes to truth; for many thoughts were
suggested by the double meanings of words (Greek), and the
accidental distinctions of words sometimes led the ancient
philosopher to make corresponding differences in things (Greek).
‘If they are the same, why have they different names; or if they
are different, why have they the same name?’—is an argument not
easily answered in the infancy of knowledge. The modern
philosopher has always been taught the lesson which he still
imperfectly learns, that he must disengage himself from the
influence of words. Nor are there wanting in Plato, who was
himself too often the victim of them, impressive admonitions that
we should regard not words but things (States.). But upon the
whole, the ancients, though not entirely dominated by them, were
much more subject to the influence of words than the moderns.
They had no clear divisions of colours or substances; even the
four elements were undefined; the fields of knowledge were not
parted off. They were bringing order out of disorder, having a
small grain of experience mingled in a confused heap of a priori
notions. And yet, probably, their first impressions, the
illusions and mirages of their fancy, created a greater
intellectual activity and made a nearer approach to the truth
than any patient investigation of isolated facts, for which the
time had not yet come, could have accomplished.
There was one more illusion to which the ancient philosophers
were subject, and against which Plato in his later dialogues
seems to be struggling—the tendency to mere abstractions; not
perceiving that pure abstraction is only negation, they thought
that the greater the abstraction the greater the truth. Behind
any pair of ideas a new idea which comprehended them—the (Greek),
as it was technically termed—began at once to appear. Two are
truer than three, one than two. The words ‘being,’ or ‘unity,’ or
essence,’ or ‘good,’ became sacred to them. They did not see that
they had a word only, and in one sense the most unmeaning of
words. They did not understand that the content of notions is in
inverse proportion to their universality—the element which is the
most widely diffused is also the thinnest; or, in the language of
the common logic, the greater the extension the less the
comprehension. But this vacant idea of a whole without parts, of
a subject without predicates, a rest without motion, has been
also the most fruitful of all ideas. It is the beginning of a
priori thought, and indeed of thinking at all. Men were led to
conceive it, not by a love of hasty generalization, but by a
divine instinct, a dialectical enthusiasm, in which the human
faculties seemed to yearn for enlargement. We know that ‘being’
is only the verb of existence, the copula, the most general
symbol of relation, the first and most meagre of abstractions;
but to some of the ancient philosophers this little word appeared
to attain divine proportions, and to comprehend all truth. Being
or essence, and similar words, represented to them a supreme or
divine being, in which they thought that they found the
containing and continuing principle of the universe. In a few
years the human mind was peopled with abstractions; a new world
was called into existence to give law and order to the old. But
between them there was still a gulf, and no one could pass from
the one to the other.
Number and figure were the greatest instruments of thought which
were possessed by the Greek philosopher; having the same power
over the mind which was exerted by abstract ideas, they were also
capable of practical application. Many curious and, to the early
thinker, mysterious properties of them came to light when they
were compared with one another. They admitted of infinite
multiplication and construction; in Pythagorean triangles or in