&'i Mr m CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF G. H. Salmi B82 .W/fTlw"'*"'""' """^ olin The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028978140 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY .m^ A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY WITH ESPECIAL KEFERENCB TO THE FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF ITS PROBLEMS AND CONCEPTIONS BY DR. W. WINDELBAND Peofebsoe of Philosophy in the Univeesity op Steassbueg AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY JAMES H. TUFTS, Ph.D. Assistant Professor op Philosophy in the University of Chicago MACMILLAN AND CO. AND LONDON 1893 All rights reserved COPTEIGHT, 1893, By MACMILLAN AND CO. Norluoolr ^am ; J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith. Boston, Mass., U.S.A. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. o»:o Kegaeded simply as a historical discipline, the history of thought might fairly claim a prominent place in education, and an equal share of the attention now given to comparative and historical studies. The evolution of an idea is in itself as interesting and valuable an object of study as the evolution of a word, of an insti- tution, of a state, or of a vegetable or animal form. But aside from this interest which it has in common with other historical sciences, the history of philosophy has a peculiar value of its own. For the moment we attempt any serious thinking in any field, — natural science, history, literature, ethics, theology, or any other, — we find ourselves at the outset quite at the mercy of the words and ideas which form at once our intellectual atmosphere and the instruments with which we must work. We cannot speak, for example, of mind or matter, of cause or force, of species or indi- vidual, of universe or God, of freedom or necessity, of substance or evolution, of science or law, of good or true or real, without involv- ing a host of assumptions. And the assumptions are there, even though we may be unconscious of them, or ignore them in an effort to dispense with metaphysics. To dispense with these conceptions is impossible. Our only recourse, if we would not beg our questions in advance, or remain in unconscious bondage to the instruments of our thought, or be slaves to the thinking of the past generations that have forged out our ideas for us, is to " criticise our categories." And one of the most important, if not the only successful, means to this end is a study of the origin and development of these categories. We can free ourselves from the past only by mastering it. We may not hope to see beyond Arjstotle or Kant until we have stood vi Translator' s Preface. on their shoulders. We study the history of philosophy, not so much to learn what other men have thought, as to learn to think. For an adequate study of the history of thought, the main requi- sites are a careful study of the works of the great thinkers — a requisite that need not be enlarged on here, although such study is a comparatively recent matter in both Britain and America, with a few notable exceptions — and a text-book to aid us in singling out the important problems, tracing their development, disentangling their complications, and sifting out what is of permanent value. To meet this second need is the especial aim of the present work, and, with all the excellencies of the three chief manuals already in use, it can scarcely be questioned that the need is a real one. Those acquainted with the work here translated (W. Windelband's Ge- schichte der Philosophie, Freiburg i. B., 1892) have no hesitation in thinking that it is an extremely valuable contribution toward just this end. The originality of its conception and treatment awaken an interest that is greater in proportion to the reader's acquaintance with other works on the subject. The author shows not only historical learning and vision, but philosophical insight ; and in his hands the comparative treatment of the history of thought proves as suggestive and fruitful as the same method applied to other subjects in recent times. A work like the present could only have been written with some such preparation as has come in this case from the previous treatment of Greek and Modern Philosophy at greater length, and in presenting it to English readers I am confident that it will meet the wants, not only of special students of philosophy, but also of all who wish to understand the development of thought. Teachers will, I think, find it very valuable in connection with lecture courses. As regards the work of the Translator, little need be said. He has tried — like many others— to make a faithful translation into intelligible English, and is fully conscious that it has been with varying success. Of course translation in the strict sense is often impossible, and I cannot hope to have adopted the happiest com- promise or found the most felicitous rendering in all cases. "Being" (spelled with a capital) is used for " Sein." Where the German "Form" seemed to differ enough from the ordinary Eno-lish Translator's Preface. vii sense of the word to make "form" misleading, I have spelled it "Form," and the same course has been taken with "Real," " Be- alitat," where the German seemed to desire to distinguish them from "wirJcUch," which has been translated sometimes by "real," some- times by " actual." " Vorstellung " is usually rendered by " idea," following Locke's usage, except in connection with the system of Leibniz, where " representation " is necessary to bririg out his thought. "Idee," in the Platonic and Kantian use, is rendered "Idea" (spelled with a capital). The convenient word "GescJiehen" has no exact counterpart, and has been variously rendered, most frequently per- haps by " cosmic processes." In the additions made to the bibliog- raphy, no attempt has been made to be exhaustive ; I have simply tried to indicate some works that might aid the student. It is scarcely necessary to say that any corrections or suggestions will be gratefully received and utilised if possible. Material in square brackets is added by the translator. In conclusion, I desire to express my indebtedness to my col- leagues. Professors Shorey, Strong, and Cutting, and Dr. Schwill for helpful suggestions. My chief indebtedness, however, is to the critical taste and unwearied assistance of my wife. If I have in any degree succeeded in avoiding German idioms, it is largely due to her. JAMES H. TUFTS. University op Chicago, July, 1893. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. oXKo Aftek many painful delays and interruptions I now present at last the conclusion of the work whose first sheets appeared two years ago. The reader will not confuse this with the compendiums which have very likely sometimes been prepared by dressing out lecture notes on the general history of philosophy. What I offer is a serious text-book, which is intended to portray in comprehensive and compressed exposition the evolution of the ideas of European philosophy, with the aim of showing through what motives the principles, by which we to-day scientifically conceive and judge the universe and human life, have been brought to consciousness and developed in the course of the movements of history. This end has determined the whole form of the book. The literary-historical basis of research, the biographical and biblio- graphical material, were on this account necessarily restricted to the smallest space and limited to a selection that should open the way to the best sources for the reader desiring to work farther. The philosophers' own expositions, too, have been referred to in the main, only where they afford a permanently valuable formulation or rationale of thoughts. Aside from this there is only an occa- sional citation of passages on which the author supports an inter- pretation differing from that ordinarily adopted. The choice of material has fallen everywhere on what individual thinkers have produced that was new and fruitful, while purely individual turns of thought, which may indeed be a welcome object for learned research, but afford no philosophical interest, have found at most a brief mention. X Author's Preface. As is shown even by the external form of the exposition, chief emphasis has been laid upon the development of what is weightiest from a philosophical standpoint: the history of problems and concep- tions. To understand this as a connected and interrelated whole has been my chief purpose. The historical interweaving of the various lines of thought, out of which our theory of the world and life has grown, forms the especial object of my work, and I am convinced that this problem is to be solved, not by any a prion logical construction, but only by an all-sided, unprejudiced investi- gation of the facts. If in this exposition a relatively large part of the whole seems to be devoted to antiquity, this rests upon the conviction that for a historical understanding of our intellectual existence, the forging out of the conceptions which the Greek mind wrested from the concrete reality found in Nature and human life, is more important than all that has since been thought — the Kantian philosophy excepted. The task thus set required, however, a renunciation which no one can regret more than myself. The purely topical treatment of the historical movement of philosophy did not permit of giving to the personality of the philosophers an impressiveness corre- sponding to their true worth. This could only be touched upon where it becomes efficient as a causal factor in the combination and transformation of ideas. The aesthetic fascination which dwells in the individual nature of the great agents of the movement, and which lends its especial charm to the academic lecture, as well as to the more extended exposition of the history of philosophy, had to be given up here in favour of a better insight into the pragmatic necessity of the mental process. Finally, I desire to express at this place also my lively gratitude to my colleague. Dr. Hensel, who has not only aided me with a part of the proofs, but has also essentially increased the usefulness of the book by a subject index. WILHELM WINDELBAND. Stbasseurg, November, 1891. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. PAGE § 1. Name and Conception of Philosophy 1 § 2. The History of Philosophy 8 § 3. Division of Philosophy and of its History 18 .>^*- PART I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GREEKS. Introduction ' 23 Chapter I. The Cosmolo'gical Period 27 § 4. Conceptions of Being 31 § 5. Conceptions of the Cosmic Processes or Becoming ... 47 § 6. Conceptions of Cognition . : 57 Chapter H. The Anthropologicai, Period 66 § 7. The Problem of Morality 72 § 8. The Problem of Science 87 Chapter HI. The Systematic Period 99 § 9. Metaphysics grounded anew by Epistemology and Ethics . 104 § 10. The System of Materialism 109 § 11. The System of Idealism 116 § 12. The Aristotelian Logic 132 § 13. The System of Development 139 PART II. THE HELLENISTIC-KOMAN PHILOSOPHY. Intboduction 155 Chapter I. The Ethical Period 159 § 14. The Ideal of the Wise Man 163 § 15. Mechanism and Teleology 178 § 16. The Freedom of the Will and the Perfection of the Uni- verse ... 190 § 17. The Criteria of Truth 197 xi xii Contents. PAGE Chaptkk II. The Keligioub Period ^^^ § 18. Authority and Revelation . ■ ^^^ § 19. Spirit and Matter -229 §20. God and the World -235 § 21. The Problem of the World's History 255 PART III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES. Introduction . '. 263 Chapter I. First Period 270 § 22. The Metaphysics of Inner Experience 276 § 23. The Controversy over Universals 287 § 24. The Dualism of Body and Soul 301 Chapter II. Second Period .310 § 25. The Realm of Nature and the Realm of Grace .... 318 § 26. The Primacy of the Will or of the InteUect 328 § 27. The Problem of Individuality 337 PART IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE RENAISSANCE. Introduction . . 348 Chapter I. The Humanistic Period 352 § 28. The Struggle between the Traditions 357 § 29. Macrocosm and Microcosm 3gg Chapter II. The Natural Science Period .... . . 378 § 30. The Problem of Method 333 § 31. Substance and Causality ggg § 32. Natural Right " . ! . 4^5 PART V. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT. Introduction Chapter I. Theoretical Questions § 33. Innate Ideas § 3-t. Knowledge of the External World § 35. Natural Religion 437 447 449 466 486 Contents. xiii PAGB Chapter II. Practical Questions 500 § 36. The Principles of Morals 502 § 37. The Problem of Civilisation . . . . • 518 PART VI. THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. Introduction 529 Chapter I. Kant's Critique op the Reason 582 § 38. The Object of Knowledge 537 § 39. The Categorical Imperative 551 § 40. Natural Purposiveness '. . . 559 Chapter H. The Development op Idealism 568 § 41. The Thing-in-itself 573 § 42. The System of Reason 590 § 43. The Metaphysics of the Irrational 615 PART VII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Introduction ... . . . 623 § 44. The Controversy about the Soul 630 § 45. Nature and History 636 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. oVUo INTRODUCTION. § 1. The Name and Conception of FMlosopliy. E. Haym, Art. Philosophie in Ersoh und Griiber's Encyclopddie, III. Abth., Bd. 24. W. "Windelband, Praeludien (Freiburg i. B., 1884), 1 ff. [A. Seth, Art. Philosophy in Enc. Brit.'\ [G. T. Ladd, Introduction to Philosophy. N.Y. 1891.] By philosophy present usage understands the scientific treatment of the general questions relating to the universe and human life. Individual philosophers, according to the presuppositions with which they have entered upon their work, and the results which they have reached in it, have sought to change this indefinite idea common to all, into more precise definitions,^ which in part diverge so widely that the common element in the conception of the science may seem lost. But even the more general meaning given above is itself a limitation and transformation of the original significance which the Greeks connected with the name philosophy, — a limita- tion and transformation brought about by the whole course of the in- tellectual and spiritual life of the West, and following along with the same. 1. While in the first appearance in literature^ of the words 4>iXoa-oLa the simple and at the same time indefinite meaning, " striving after wisdom," may still be recognised, the word " philosophy " in the literature after Socrates, particularly in the school of Plato and Aristotle, acquired the fixed significance accord- 1 Cited in detail in TJeberweg-Heinze, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philoso- phie, I. § 1. [Eng. trans. TJeberweg's History of Philosophy, trans, by G. S. Morris. N.Y. 1871.] 2 Herodotus, I. .30 and 50 ; Thucydides, II. 40 ; and frequently also even in Plato, e.g. Apol 29 ; Lysis, 218 A ; Symp. 202 E ff. 1 2 Introduction. ing to which it denotes exactly the same as the German wordi " Wissenschaft." ^ According to this meaning philosophy in general ^ is the methodical work of thought, through which we are to know that which " is " ; individual " philosophies " are the particular sci- ences in which individual realms of the existent are to be investi- gated and known.* With this first theoretical meaning of the word " philosophy " a second was very early associated. The development of Greek philosophy came at the time when the naive religious and ethical consciousness was in process of disintegration. This not only made the questions as to man's vocation and tasks more and more important for scientific investigation (of. below, Part I. ch. 2), but also made instruction in the right conduct of life appear as an essential aim, and finally as the main content of philosophy or science. Thus philosophy in the Hellenistic period received the practical meaning of an art of life, based upon scientific principles,'' — a meaning for which the way had already been prepared by the Sophists and Socrates. In consequence of this change, purely theoretical interest passed over to the particular " philosophies," which now in part assumed the names of their special subjects of research, historical or belong- ing to natural science, while mathematics and medicine kept all the more rigorously that independence which they had possessed from the beginning with relation to science in general.' The name of philosophy, however, remained attached to those scientific efforts which hoped to win from the most general results of human knowl- edge a conviction for the direction of life, and which finally culmi- nated in the attempt (made by Neo-Platonism) to create from such a philosophy a new religion to replace the old that had been lost.« 1 A conception which it is well known is of much greater compass than the English and French " science " [In this translation the words "science " and scientific " are used m this larger sense. The term "natural science " will be used for the narrower meaning which "science " alone often has. If it should serve to remind the beginner that philosophy and scientific thought should be one, and that natural science is not ali of science, it may be of value 1 2 Plato, Bep. 480 B ; Aristotle, Met. VI. 1, 1026 a 18 "' 3 Plato, ThecEt. USD. Aristotle sets the doctrine "of Beinc as such" Cthe ater so-caled Metaphysics) as "First Philosophy" over alahist the other " phi osophies," and distinguishes further theoretical and praot cal " nhiloso phy." In one passage {Met. I. 6, 987 a 29) he annlies the iilnral if I, ^ to the different systems of science which have fXweM Itnrit^V''''* ^ '° as we should speak of the philosophies of St pfchtt Heget tc' """"' the^'tLi\\nrrnf °leSX-«J: 8^' ^'''- ^'^ ^^^- ^^- '^'^ -<^ ^"^ 6 Cf. below, Part I. theoS"' ''""'"'' ''' '^''^^''' ^^'^'^ P-*- to have philosophy called § 1.] Name and Conception of Philosophy. 3 There was at first little change in these relations, when the remains of ancient science passed over into the culture of the present peoples of Europe as the determining forces of their intellectual life. Con- tent and task of that which the Middle Ages called philosophy coin- cided with the conception held by later antiquity.^ And yet the meaning of philosophy underwent an essential change by finding philosophy's task already performed, in a certain sense, by religion. For religion, too, afforded not only a sure conviction as a rule for the guidance of personal life, but also in connection with this, a gen- eral theoretical view of all reality, which was the more philosophical in its character, as the dogmas of Christianity had been formulated entirely under the influence of ancient philosophy. Under these circumstances, during the unbroken dominance of Church doctrine, there remained for philosophy, for the most part, only the position of a handmaid to ground, develop, and defend dogma scientifically. But just by this means philosophy came into a certain opposition to theology as regards method ; for what the latter taught on the ground of divine revelation, the former was to win and set forth by means of human knowledge.^ But the infallible consequence of this relation was, that the freer individual thinking became in its relation to the Church, the more independently philosophy began the solution of the problem which she had in common with religion ; from presentation and defence of doctrine she passed to its criticism, and finally, in complete inde- pendence of religious interests, sought to derive her teaching from the sources which she thought she possessed in the " natural light " of human reason and experience.' The opposition to theology, as regards methods, grew in this way to an opposition in the subiect matter, and modern philosophy as " world-wisdom " set itself over against Church dogma.* However manifold the aspects which this relation took on, shading from a clinging attachment to a passionate conflict, the office of "philosophy" remained always that which ^ Cf., for example, Augustine, Solil. I. 7 ; Conf. V. 7; Scotus Erigena, De Div. Prmdest. I. 1 (Migne, 358) ; Anselm Prosl'og., ch. 1. (Migne, I. 227) ; Abelard, Introd. in Theol. II. 3 ; Raymundus Lullus, De Quinque Sap. 8. 2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. I. 32, 1 ; Contr. Gent. I. 8 f., II. 1 ff. ; Duns Scotus, Op. Ox. I. 3, qu. 4 ; Durand de Pour^ain, In Sent. Prol., qu. 8 ; Eaymundus of Sabunde, Theol. Natur. Prooem. 8 Laur. Valla, Dialect. Disp. III. 9 ; B. Telesio, De Nat. Her. Prooem. ; Tr. Bacon, De Augm, III. 1 (Works, ^Spedding, I. 539 = 111. 336); Taurellus, Philos. Triumph. I. 1 ; Paracelsus, Paragr. (ed. Huser) II. 23 f. ; G. Bruno, Delia Causa, etc., IV. 107 (Lagarde, I. 272) ; Hobbes, De Corpor. I. (Works, Molesworth, I. 2 and 6 f.). * Characteristic definitions, on the one hand, in Gottsched, Erste Grunde der gesammten Weltweisheit (Leips. 1756), pp. 97 ff. ; on the other hand, in the article Philosophie, in the Encyclopidie (Vol. XXV. pp. 632 ff.) . 4 Introduction. antiquity had assigned to it, to supply from scientific insignt a foundation for a theory of the world and of human life, where relig- ion was no longer able to meet this need, or at least to meet it alone. In the conviction that it was equal to this task, the philosophy of the eighteenth century, like that of the Greeks, considered it its right and duty to enlighten men with regard to the nature of things, and from this position of insight to rule the life of the individual and of society. In this position of self-security philosophy was shaken by Kant, who demonstrated the impossibility of a philosophical (i.e. metar physical) knowledge of the world beside of or above the individual sciences, and thereby restricted once more the conception and the task of philosophy ; for after this quitclaim the realm of philosophy, as a particular science, was narrowed to just that critical consideration by Season of itself, from which Kant had won his decisive insight, and which needed only to be extended systematically to activities other than that of knowing. With this function could be united what Kant ^ called the universal or cosmical conception of philosophy, — its vocation in the practical direction of life. It is, to be sure, far from true that this new and apparently final conception of philosophy gained universal acceptance at once. It is rather the case that the great variety of philosophical movements of the nineteenth century has left no earlier form of philosophy unre- peated, and that a luxuriant development of the "metaphysical need " ' even brought back, for a time, the inclination to swallow up all human knowledge in philosophy, and complete this again as an all-embracing science. 2. In view of these mutations through which the meaning of the word "philosophy " has passed in the course of time, it seems im- practicable to pretend to gain a general conception of pJiilosophy from historical comparison. None of those brought forward for this purpose' apply to all those structures of mental activity which lay claim to the name. Even the subordination of philosophy under the more general conception "science" is questionable in the case of those types of teaching which place a one-sided emphasis on the 1 Critique of Pure Season, A. 839 ; B. 866. ^ Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, Vol. II oh 17 8 Instead of criticising particular conceptibns it is sufficient here to point to the widely diyergmg formulas in which the attempt has been made to perform this impossible task: of., for example, only the introductions to works such™ those of Brdmann, IJeberweg, Kuno Fischer, Zeller, etc. All thele concTptioSi thus determined apply only in so far as the history of phUoswhv C vieldS the result which they express, but they do not appl/with Snce tfthe i«ie« ' tions expressed hv the nh InarvniioTO fv,o™>„i — ^^ ' j-oicieui.e lo xne mien- tions expressed by the philosophers themselves. § !■] Name and Conception of Philosophy. 5 practical significance of their doctrine : ' still less can we define the subject-matter and form of philosophy considered as a special science, in a way that shall hold good for all cases. For even aside from the primitive or the revived standpoint for MYAah. philosophy is a universal science," the attempts to limit it are extremely vari- ous. The problems of natural science form at first almost the sole objects of interest for philosophy, then for a long period are in- cluded in its scope, and do not separate from it until modern times. History, on the other hand, has remained an object of indifference to most philosophical systems, and has emerged as an object of philo- sophical investigation relatively late and in isolated cases. Meta- physical doctrines, again, in which the centre of philosophy is usually sought, we see either pushed one side at important turning- points in history or declared to be entirely impossible ' ; and if at times the ability of philosophy to determine the life of the indi- vidual or of society is emphasised, a proud standpoint of pure theory has renounced such a menial occupation.* From still another side it has been claimed that philosophy treats the same subjects as the other sciences, but in another sense and by another method ; but neither has this specific characteristic of form historical universality. That there is no such acknowledged his- torical method would of course be no objection if only the endeavour after such a method were a constant characteristic of all philoso- phies. This is, however, so far from being the case that in fact many philosophers imprint on their science the method of other disciplines, e.g. of mathematics or of investigation of nature,* while others will have nothing at all to do with a methodical treatment of their problems, and regard the philosophic activity as analogous to the creations of genius in art. 3. From these circumstances is explained also the fact that there is no fixed relation of philosophy to the other sciences, which is capar ble of a definition valid for all history. Where philosophy presents itself as the universal science, the other sciences appear only as its more or less distinctly separated parts.^ Where, on the contrary, philosophy is assigned the task of grasping the results of the par- ^ So in the case of the majority of the philosophers of later antiquity. 2 As for Chr. Wolf ; cf . his Logica, §§ 29 ff. 8 This is especially the case where philosophy is regarded solely as " science of cognition." Cf., e.g., W. Hamilton in his notes to Keid's works, II. 808. Among the French at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of this cen- tury, philosophy = analyse de Ventendement humain. * E.g. with Plotinus. 5 So Descartes and Bacon. ^ So, for example, in the Hegelian system. g Introduction. ticular sciences in their general significance, and harmonising them into a comprehensive knowledge of the world, we have as the resuit, peculiarly complex relations: in the first place, a dependence of philosophy npon the existing condition of insight reached m the par- ticular disciplines -a dependence which expresses itself principally in the furtherance of philosophy by the prominent advances made by individual sciences ;i in the next place, an influence in the opposite direction, when philosophy takes part m the work of the, particular sciences. This action is felt as help or as hindrance, according as the philosophical treatment of the questions embraced under the particular disciplines sometimes contributes valuable factors for their solution, by means of its wider range of vision and its tendency toward unity,^ but at other times presents itself only as a duplication which, if it leads to like results, appears useless, or if it wishes to furnish other results, dangerous.^ From what has been said it is evident farther, that the relations of philosophy to the other activities of civilisation are no less close than its relation to the individual sciences. For the conceptions arising from the religious and ethical and artistic life, from the life of the state and of society, force their way everywhere, side by side with the results won from scientific investigation, into the idea of the universe which the philosophy of metaphysical tendencies aims to frame ; and the reason's valuations ( Werthbestimmungen) and stand- ards of judgment demand their place in that idea the more vigor, ously, just in proportion as it is to become the basis for the practical significance of philosophy. In this way humanity's convictions and ideals find their expression in philosophy side by side with its intellectual insights ; and if these convictions and ideals are regarded, erroneously often, as gaining thereby the form of scientific intelli- gence, they may receive under certain circumstances valuable clari- fication and modification by this means. Thus this relation also of philosophy to general culture is not only that of receiving, but also that of giving. It is not without interest to consider also the mutations -in external position and social relations which philosophy has experienced. It may he assumed that science was from the first, with perhaps a few exceptions (Socrates), pursued in Greece in closed schools.* The fact that these, even at a later time, had the form 1 As the Influence of astronomy upon the beginnings of Greek, or that of mechanics upon those of modern, philosophy. 2 The Protestant theology of the nineteenth century stands in this relation to German philosophy. 8 Cf. the opposition of natural science to Schelling's philosophy of nature. * H. Diels, Ueher Me dltesten Philosophenschulen der Oriechen in Philos. Aufsatze zum Juhiiaum E. Zeller's, Leips. 1887, pp. 241 ft. § 1-J Name and Conception of Philosophy. 7 of societies with religious laws ' would not in itself alone, in view of the religious ■ character of all Greek judicial institutions, prove a religious origin of these schools, but the circumstance that Greek science worked out its contents directly from, religious ideas, and that certain connections with religious cults present themselves unmistakably in a number of directions,^ makps it not improbable that the scientific societies sprang originally from religious unions (the Mys- teries) and continued in a certain connection with them. But when the scien- tific life had developed to complete independence, these connections fell away and purely scientific schools were founded as free unions of men who, under the guidance of persons of importance, shared with each other the work of research, exposition, defence, and polemic,^ and at the same time had an ethical bond in a common ideal of the conduct of life. With the advent of the larger relations of life in the Hellenistic and Roman period, these unions naturally became loosened, and we frequently meet writers, especially among the Romans, who are active in the field of philosophy in a purely individual way, neither members of a school nor professional teachers. Such were Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Not until the latest period of antiquity were the ties of the schools drawn more closely again, as in Neo- Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism. Among the Romanic and Germanic peoples the course of events has been not unlike that in the ancient world. The science of the Middle Ages also appears in the train of the Church civilisation ; it has its seats in the cloister-schools, and is stimulated toward independent development primarily by questions of religious interest. In it, too, the oppositions of various religious orders, such as the Do- minicans and Franciscans, assert themselves for a time, and even the freer scientific associations out of which the universities gradually developed, had originally a religious background and an ecclesiastical stamp.* Hence there was always but a slight degree of independence with reference to Church doc- trine in this corporate philosophy of the universities, and this held true on into the eighteenth century for the Protestant universities also, in the foundation and development of which ecclesiastical and religious interests had a, foremost place. On the other hand, it is characteristic of the "World-wisdom" or secular philosophy which was gaining its independence at the beginning of the modern period, that those who bring and support it are not at all men of the schools, but men of the world and of life. An escaped monk, a state-chancellor, a cobbler, a nobleman, a proscribed Jew, a learned diplomat, independent men of letters and journalists, — these are the founders of modem philosophy, and in accord with this, their work takes for its outer form not the text-book or the deposit of academical disputations, but the free literary production, the essay. Not until the second half of the eighteenth century did philosophy again become corporate, and domesticated in the universities. This took place first in Germany, where the most favourable conditions were afforded by the rising independence of the universities, and where a fruitful interchange between teachers and students of the university was beneficial to philosophy also.' ^ v. Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, Antigonos von Karystos (Philol. Stud. IV. Berlin, 1881, pp. 263 ff.). 2 The Pythagoreans, as is well known, offer a pre-eminent example of this ; but sympathies with the Apollo cultus are plain enough in the Platonic Academy also. Pfleiderer has lately sought to bring the apparently isolated Heraclitus into connection with the Mysteries (E. Pfleiderer, Heraklit von Ephesus. Berlin, 1886). ' Cf. H. Usener, Uebei- die Organisation der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit im Alterthum (Preuss. Jahrb., Jahrg. LIII., 1884, pp. 1 ff.), and E. Heitz, Die Philo- sophenschulen Athens (Deutsche Revue, 1884, pp. 326 ff.). * Cf . G. Kaufmann, Geschichte der deutschen Universitdten I. pp. 98 ft. (Stuttg. 1888). = Schelling has erected the finest monument to the ideal conception of science in the activity of German universities, in his Vorlesungen iiber die Methode des akademischen Sttuliums (2. and 3. Vorlesung. Ges. Werke, I. Abth., Vol. 6, pp. 223 ff.). ' 8 Introduction. From Germany this spread to Scotland, England, France, and Italy, and in gen- eral it may be said that in the nineteenth century the seat of philosopny is easen- tially to be sought in the universities. ^ , , . , „i,:i„<,„i lu conclusion, the share of the various peoples in the development ot Pnuoso| phy deserves a brief mention. As with all developments of European culture, so with philosophy, -the Greeks created it, and the primitive structure of philosophy due to their creative activity is still to-day an essential basis of the science. What was added in antiquity by the mixed peoples of Hel enism and by the Romans does not, in general, amount to more than a special form and practical adaptation of the Greek philosophy. Only in the religious turn which this last movement took (cf. below. Part II. ch. 2) do we find something essen- tially new which sprang from the harmonising of national diHerences in the Roman Empire. The scientific culture of the Middle Ages was also international, as is implied in the universal employment of the Latin language. It is with modern philosophy that the special characters of particular nations first present themselves as of decisive influence. While the traditions of mediaeval scholas- ticism maintain themselves most vigorously and independently in Spain and Portugal, the Italians, Germans, English, and French supply the first movements of the new science which reached its highest point in the classical period, of German philosophy. Compared with these four nations, the rest stand almost entirely in a receptive attitude ; a certain independence is noticeable, if any- where, in more recent time among the Swedes. § 2. The History of Philosophy. The more varied the character assumed by the problems and con- tent of philosophy in the course of time, 'the more the question rises, what meaning there can be in uniting in historical investigar tion and] exposition products of thought which are not only so manifold, but also so difEerent in kind, and between which there seems to be ultimately nothing in common but the name. For the anecdotal interest in this checkered diversity of vari- ous opinions on various things, which was perhaps formerly the chief motive of a " History of Philosophy," stimulated too by the remarkable and strange nature of many of these views, cannot possibly serve as the permanent centre of a genuine scientific disci- pline. 1. At all events, however, it is clear that the case stands other- wise with the history of philosophy than with that of any other science. For with all these the field of research remains fixed, on the whole at least, however many the variations to which its extent, its separation from a still more general field, and its limitation with reference to neighbouring fields, may be subject in the course of his- tory. In such a case there is no difficulty in tracing the develop- ment of knowledge over a field which can be determined in this way, and in eventually making just those variations intelligible as the natural consequences of this development of insight. 1 This relation is so influential, that the poisonous attacks which Schopenhauer made upon it proved to be ultimately only the attacks of a Privatdocent irritated by lack of success. § 2.] The History of Philosophy. 9 Quite otherwise, however, in the case of philosophy, which has no such subject-matter common to all its periods, and whose " his- tory," therefore, sets forth no constant advance or gradual approxi- mation to a knowledge of the subject in question. Eather, it has always been emphasised that while in other sciences, a quiet build- ing up of knowledge is the rule, as soon as they have once gained a sure methodical footing after their rhapsodical beginnings, — a rule which is interrupted only from time to time by a sudden new beginning, — in philosophy the reverse is true. There it is the exception that successors gratefully develop what has been already achieved, and each of the great systems of philosophy begins to solve its newly formulated problem ah ovo, as if the other systems had scarcely existed. 2. If in spite of all of this we are still to be able to speak of a " his- tory of philosophy," the unity of connection, which we find neither in the objects with which philosophers busy themselves, nor in the problems they have set themselves, can be found only in the common work which they have accomplished in spite of all the variety in their subject-matter and in the purposes with which they have worked. But this common product, which constitutes the meaning of the history of philosophy, rests on just the changing relations which the work of philosophers has' sustained in the course of history, not only to the maturest results of science in general and of the special sciences in particular, but also to the other activities of European civilisation. For was it that philosophy had in view the project of a general scientific knowledge of the universe, which she would win either in the role of univetsal science, or as a generalising compre- hension of the results of the special sciences, or was it that she sought a view of life which should give a complete expression to the highest values of will and feeling, or was it finally that with a clearly defined limitation of her field she made reason's self-knowl- edge her goal, — the result always was that she was labouring to bring to conscious expression the necessary forms and principles in which the human reason manifests its activity, and to transfer these from their original form of perceptions, feelings, and impulses, into that of conceptions. In some direction and in some fashion every philosophy has striven to reach, over a more or less extensive field, a formulation in conception of the material immediately given in the world and in life ; and so, as these efforts have passed into his- tory, the constitution of the mental and spiritual life have been step by step disclosed. ITie History of Philosophy is the process in which European humanity has embodied in scientific conceptions its views of the world and its judgments of life. 10 Introduction. It is this common fruit of all the intellectual creations -which present themselves as "philosophies," which alone gives to the history of philosophy as a genuine science its content, its problem, and its justification. This, too, is the reason why a knowledge of the history of philosophy is a necessary requirement, not only for all scholarly education, but for all culture whatever; for it teaches how the conceptions and forms have been coined, in which we all, in every-day life as well as in the particular sciences, think and judge the world of our experience. The beginnings of the history of philosophy are to be sought in the historical compositions (for the most part lost) of the great schools of antiquity, especially the Peripatetic School. As we may see in the examples given by Aristotle,' these works had the critical purpose of preparing for the development of their own views by a dialectical examination of views previously brought forward. Such collections of historical material were planned for the various fields of science, and doxographies ^ in philosophy arose in this way side by side with histories of particular disciplines, such as mathematics, astronomy, physios, etc. As inclination and power for independent philosophic thought later declined, this literature degenerated into a learned scrap-book work, in which were mingled anecdotes from the lives of the philosophers, individual epigrammatic sayings, and sketches of their doctrines. Those expositions belonging to the modem period which were based upon the remains of ancient tradition had this same character of collections of curiosi- ties. Such were Stanley'' s* reproduction of Diogenes Laertius, and Brucker't works.* Only with time do we find critical discernment in use of the sources {Buhle,^ Falleborn^'), a more unprejudiced apprehension of the historical significance of individual doctrines ( Tiedemann,"' Degerando *), and systematic criticism of these upon the basis of the new standpoint (^Tennemann,^ Fries,'^'' and Schleiermacher^^) . It was, however, through Hegel ^ that the history of philosophy was first made an independent science, for he discovered the essential point that the 1 E.g. in the beginning of the Metaphysics. 2 More in detail on these below. 3 Th. Stanley, The. History of Philosophy. Loud. 1685. * J. J. Brucker, Historia Critica Philosophic. 5 vols. Leips. 1742 ff. Insti- tutiones Hiatorioe Philosophioe. Leips. 1747. » J. G. Buhle, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie. 8 vols. Gottingen, 1796 ff. * G. G. FUlleborn, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie. 12 Studien. ZuUichau, 1791 ff. ' D. Tiedemann, Geist der Speculativen Philosophie. 7 vols. Marburg, 1791 ff. * De Gfirando, Histoire Comparee des Systemes de Philosophie. 2d ed. in 4 vols. Paris, 1822 f. ^ W. G. Tennemann, Geschichte der Philosophie. 11 vols. Leips. 1798 ft. Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie fur den aJcademischen UnterricM. Leips. 1812. [Eng. trans. 183.3 and 1852.] i» J. Fr. Fries, Geschichte der Philosophie. 2 vols. Halle, 1837 ff. n Fr. Schleiermacher, Geschichte der Philosophie, from his literary remains in the Coll. Works. III. Abth., 4 Bd., 1 Th. Berlin, 1839. 12 Cf. the introductions of the Phdnomenologie des Geistes, of the lectures on the Philosophy of History, and those on the History of Philosophy. Ges. Werke, Bd. II. pp. 62 ff.; IX. pp. 11 ff. ; XIII. pp. 11-134. In Hegel's works the Geschichte der Philosophie, edited from his lectures by Michelet, occupies Vols. XIII.-XV. Berlin, 1833-36. [Lectures on the History of Philosophy, by G. W. Hegel, Trans, by E. S. Haldane in 3 vols. Vol. I. Lond. 1892.] On his standpoint § 2.] The History of Philosophy. 11 history of philosophy can set forth neither a motley collection of opinions of various learned gentleman "de omnibus rebus et de quibusdam aliis," nor a constantly widening and perfecting elaboration of the same subject-matter, but rather only the limited process in which the " categories" of reason have suc- cessively attained distinct consciousness and reached the form of conceptions. This valuable insight was, however, obscured and injured m the case of Hegel by an additional asumption, since he was convinced that the chronological order in which the above "categories" have presented themselves in the historical systems of philosophy must necessarily correspond with the logical and syste- matic order in which these same categories should appear as "elements of truth " in the logical construction of the final system of philosophy (i.e. in Hegel's view, his own). The fundamental thought, right in itself, thus led to the mistake of a construction of the history of philosophy under the control of a philosophical system, and so to a frequent violation of historical fact. This error, which the development of a scientific history of philosophy in the nine- teenth century has set aside in favour of historical accuracy and exactness, arose from the wrong idea (though an idea in logical consistence with the principles of Hegel's philosophy) that the historical progress of philosophical thought is due solely, or at least essentially, to an ideal necessity with which one " category " pushes forward another in the dialectical movement. In truth, the picture of the historical movement of philosophy is quite a different one. It depends not solely upon the thinking of "humanity " or even of the " Weltgeist," but just as truly upon the reflections, the needs of mind and heart, the presaging thought and sudden flashes of insight, of philosophising individuals. 3. The history of philosophy, considered as such a sum-total, in which the fundamental conceptions of man's views of the world and judgments of life have been embodied, is the product of a great variety of single movements of thought. And as the actual motives of these movements, various factors are to be distinguished, both in the setting of the problems and in the attempts at their logical solution. The logical, pragmatic factor is no doubt sufficiently important. For the problems of philosophy are in the main given, and this is shown by the fact that they are constantly recurring in the histor- ical movement of thought as the " primeval enigma of existence," and are ever anew demanding imperiously the solution which has never completely succeeded. They are given, however, by the inadequacy and internal contradictions of the material which con- sciousness presents for philosophical consideration.^ But just for stand G. O. Marbach, Lehrbueh der Gfeschichie Fhilosophie (2. Abth. Leips. 1838 fl.), C. Hermann, Geschichte der Fhilosophie in pragmatischer Behandlung (Leips. 1867), and in part also the survey of the entire history of philosophy which J. Braniss has published as the first (only) volume of a Geschichte der Fhilosophie seit Kant (Breslau, 1842). In France this line is represented by V. Cousin, Introduction a I'Histoire de la Fhilosophie (Paris, 1828 ; 7th ed. 1872) ; Sistoire Ginirale de la Fhilosophie (12th ed., Paris, 1884). ^ More precisely, this inadequacy, which cannot here be more exactly devel- oped, and which can be fully brought out only in a system of epistemology, coilsists in the circumstance that that which is given in experience never meets completely the conceptional demands- which, in elaborating the same according to the inner nature of the reason, we set up, at first naively and immediately, and later with reflective consciousness. This antinomism (or failure to meet the laws of thought) can be escaped by ordinary life, or even by experiential 12 Introduction. this reason this material contains the real presuppositions and the logical constraining forces for all rational reflection upon it, and because from the nature of the case these are always asserting themselves anew in the same way, it follows that not only the chief problems in the history of philosophy, but also the chief lines along which a solution is attempted, are repeated. Just this constancy in all change, which, regarded from without, makes the impression that philosophy is striving fruitlessly in ever-repeated circles for a goal that is never attained, proves only this, — that the problems of philosophy are tasks which the human mind cannot escape.^ And so we understand how the same logical necessity in repeated instances causes one doctrine to give birth to another. Hence prog- ress in the history of philosophy is, during certain periods, to be understood entirely pragmatically, i.e. through the internal necessity of the thoughts and through th'fe " logic of things." The mistake of Hegel's mentioned above, consists, then, only in his wishing to make of a factor which is effective within certain limits, the only, or at least the principal, factor. It would be the opposite error to deny absolutely the " reason in history," and to see in the successive doctrines of philosophy only confused chance- thoughts of individuals. It is rather true that the total content of the history of philosophy can be explained only through the fact that the necessities existing in the nature of things assert themselves over and over in the thinking of individuals, however accidental the special conditions of this latter may be. On these relations rest the attempts made to classify all philo- sophical doctrines under certain types, and to establish a sort of rhythmical repetition in their historical development. On this basis V. Cousin 2 brought forward his theory of the four systems. Idealism, Sensualism, Scepticism, Mys- ticism ; so too August Comte * his of the three stages, the theological, the meta- physical, and the positive. An interesting and in many ways instructive grouping of philosophical doctrines about the particular main problems is afforded by A. Eenouvier in his Esquisse d'une Classification Systimatique des Doctrines Philosophiques (2 vols., Paris, 1885 f.). A school-book which arranges the philosophical doctrines according to problems and schools has been issued by PaulJanet and S6ailles ; Histoire de la Philosophie ; les problemes et les ecoles (Paris, 1887). 4. But the pragmatic thread very often breaks off in the history of philosophy. The historical order in particular, in which prob- lems have presented themselves, shows almost a complete absence science, by working with auxiliary conceptions, which indeed remain problem- atical in themselves, but which, within certain bounds, suffice for an elaboration of the material of experience that meets our practical needs. But it is just in these auxiliary conceptions that the problems of philosophy inhere. 1 In this way the results of Kant's investigations on "The Antinomy of Pure Reason ' ' ( Critique of Pure Season, Transcendental Dialectic, second sec.) might be historically and systematically extended ; cf. W. Windelband, Geschiakte der neueren Philosophie, II. 95 f. 2 Cf. Note 12, p. 10. A. Comte, Gours de Philosophie Positive I. 9, with which Vols. V. and VI. are to be compared as the carrying out of the scheme. Similar thoughts are also found in D'Alembert's Discours Preliininaire in the Encyclopedie. § 2.] The History of Philosophy. 13 of such an immanent logical necessity. Here, on the contrary, another factor asserts itself which may best be designated as the factor contributed by the history of civilisation. Tor philosophy receives both its problems and the materials for thiir solution from the ideas of the general consciousness of the time, and from the needs of society. The great conquests and the newly emerging questions of the special sciences, the movements of the religious consciousness, the intuitions of art, the revolutions in social and political life, — all these give philosophy new impulses at irregular intervals, and condition the directions of the interest which forces, now these, now those, problems into the foreground, and crowds others for the time being aside ; and no less do they condition also the changes which questions and answers experience in course of time. Where this dependence shows itself with especial clearness, we have under certain circumstances a philosophical system appear- ing, that represents exactly the knowledge which a definite age has of itself ; or we may have the oppositions in the general culture of the age finding their expression in the strife of philosophical sys- tems. And so besides the constant dependence upon the essential character of the subject-matter — the pragmatic factor — there pre- vails also a necessity growing out of the history of civilisation, or current state of culture, which warrants a historical right of exist- ence to structures of thought in themselves untenable. This relation also was first brought to notice in a greater degree than before by Hegel, although the "relative truth" which he ascribes to the particular systems has with him at the same time a systematic meaning, owing to his dialectical fundamental thought. On the other hand, the element due to the history of civilisation has been best formulated among his successors by Kuno Fischer,''- who has also availed himself of it in most brilliant manner in his expo- sition of the subject. He regards philosophy in its historical unfolding as the progressive self-knowledge of the human mind, and makes its development appear as constantly conditioned by the development of the object which in it is attaining self-knowledge. Although this applies to a number of the most important systems, it is yet but one of the factors involved. The influences from the history of civilisation which condition the statement and solution of philosophic problems, afford an explanation in most cases of an extremely interesting phenomenon which is of great importance for understand- ing the historical development ; viz. the complication or interweaving of prob- lems. For when interest is directed chiefly on certain lines of thought, it is inevitable, according to psychological laws, that associations will be formed between different bodies of thought, — associations which are not based on the subject-matter, — and so, that questions which in themselves have nothing to do with each other become blended and made to depend upon each other in their solution. An extremely important and very often recurring example of this is the intermingling of ethical and aesthetic interests in the treatment of theoretical problems. The well-known fact of daily life that men's views are determined by their wishes, hopes, fears, and inclinations, that their theoretical are condi- 1 Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, I. 1, Einleitung I.-V. [trans, by J. P. Gordy, Descartes and his School, N.Y. 1887]. 14 Introduction. tioned by their ethical and aesthetic judgments ( Urtheile durch ihre Beurthe^ lungeii'), — this fact is repeated on a larger scale in their views of the universe, and has even heen ahle to rise so high in philosophy that what had been pre-1 viously involuntarily practised, was proclaimed (by Kant) an epistemologic^ii postulate. 5. Mean-wLile the historical process we are tracing owes all its variety and multiplicity of forms to the circumstance that the de-; velopment of ideas and the formulation of general beliefs into abstract conceptions are accomplished only through the thinking of individual personalities, who, though rooted ever so deeply with their thought in the logical connection and prevalent ideas of a historical period, always add a particular element by their own individuality and conduct of life. This individual factor in the development of the history of philosophy deserves so great atten- tion for the reason that those who have borne the leading part in the movement have shown themselves to be marked, independent personalities, whose peculiar nature has been a determining in- fluence, not merely for the selection and combination of problems, but also for working out the conceptions to furnish solutions, both in their own doctrines and in those of their successors. That history ' is the kingdom of individualities, of details which are not to be repeated and which have value in themselves, is shown also in the history of philosophy : here, too, great personalities have exercised far-reaching and not exclusively benefieial influences. It is clear that the above-mentioned complication of problems is brought about by the subjective relations in which individual philosophers stand, in a much greater degree than by the occasions presented in the general conscious- ness of a time, of a people, etc. There is no philosophical system that is free from this influence of the personality of its founder. Hence all philosophical systems are creations of individuality, presenting in this respect a certain re- semblance with works of art, and as such are to be understood from the point of view of the personality of their founder. The elements of every philosopher's Weltanschauung grow out of the problems of reality which are ever the same, and out of the reason as it is directed to their solution, but besides this out of the views and ideals of his people and his time ; the form and arrangement, however, the connection and valuation which they find in the system, are condi- tioned by his birth and education, his activity and lot in life, his character and his experience. Here, accordingly, the universality which belongs to the other two factors is often wanting. In the case of these purely individual creations, aesthetic charm must take the place of the worth of abiding knowledge, and the impressiveness of many phenomena of the history of philosophy rests, in fact, only upon the magic of their "poetry of ideas" (Begrifsdiohtung). In addition, then, to the complication of problems and to the ideas determined by fancy and feeling, which are already enough to lead the general conscious- ness astray, there are in the case of individuals similar, but purely personal, processes to lend to the formation and solution of problems still more the char- acter of artificiality. We cannot fail to recognise that philosophers have often gone about struggling with questions which have no basis in reality, so that all thought expended upon them was in vain, and that, on the other hand, even in connection with the solution of real problems, unfortunate attempts in the a priori construction of conceptions have slipped in, which have been hindrances rather than helps toward the issue of the matter. § 2.] The History of Philosophy. 15 The wonderful feature in the history of philosophy remains just this, that out of such a multitude of individual and general complications there has yet been on the whole laid down that outline of universally valid conceptions for viewing the world and judging life, which presents the scientific significance of this development. « 6. Investigation in the history of philosophy has accordingly the following tasks to accomplish: (1) To establish with precision what may be derived from the available sources as to the circumstances in life, the mental development, and the doctrines of individual philosophers ; (2) from these facts to reconstruct the genetic pro- cess in such a way that in the case, of every philosopher we may understand how his doctrines depend in part upon those of his predecessors, in part upon the general ideas of his time, and in part upon his own nature and the course of his education ; (3) from the consideration of the whole to estimate what value for the total result of the history of philosophy belongs to the theories thus established and explained as regards their origin. With reference to the first two points, the history of philosophy is a philologico-Mstorical, with reference to the third element it is a critico-pMlosophical science. (a) To establish its facts the history of philosophy must proceed to a careful and comprehensive examination of the sources. These sources, however, vary greatly at different times in their transparency and fulness. The main sources for investigation in the history of philosophy are of course the works of the philosophers themselves. For the modei-n period we stand here upon a relatively safe footing. Since the discovery of the art of printing, literary tradition has become so well established and clear that it offers in gen- eral no difficulties of any kind. The writings which philosophers have pub- lished since the Renaissance are throughout accessible for the research of to-day. The cases in which questions of genuineness, of the time of origina/- tion, etc., give rise to controversies are extremely seldom ; a philological criti- cism has here but a narrow field for activity, and where it can enter (as is the case in part in reference to the different editions of Kant's works), it concerns solely subordinate, and in the last instance indifferent, points. Here, too, we are tolerably sure of the completeness of the material ; that anything of weight is lost, or still to be expected from later publication, is scarcely to be assumed ; if the sharpened philological attentiveness of the last decades has brought us new material for Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Maine de Biran, the philosophical outcome has been only vanishing in comparison with the value of what was already known. At most it has concerned the question of supplementing our knowl- edge, and this must continue to be its province. The importance of occasional expressions in letters has been specially felt here, for these are adapted to shed more light on the individual factor in the historical development of philosophy. With the sources of the Medioeval Philosophy the case stands less favourably. These have in part (a small part, to be sure) still only a manuscript existence. V. Cousin and his school have rendered valuable service in publishing the texts, and in general we may be convinced that for this period also we possess material, which has indeed gaps, but is on the whole adequate for our purpose. On the other hand, our knowledge of the Arabian and Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages, and so of the influence of those systems on the course of Western Thought, is still very problematical in details ; and this is perhaps the gap most sorely felt in our investigation of the sources for the history of philosophy. Much worse still is the situation as regards the direct sources for Ancient Philosophy. Of the original works, we have preserved, to be sure, the most -^Q Introduction. important : the fundamental portion of the works of Plato and Aristotlfe, though even these are often doubtful in form. Besides these we have only the writings of later time, such as those of Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, the Church Fathen and the Neo-Platonists. By far the greater part of the philosophical writings of antiquity is lost. In their stead we must content ourselves with the frag- ments which the accident of an incidental mention in the writings of extant authors has kept for us, here too often in a questionable form.^ K, nevertheless, success has been attained in gaining a view of the develop- ment of the ancient philosophy, clearer than that of the medlseval, presenting a picture whose accuracy extends even to details and is scientifically assured, this is due not only to the unremitting pains of philologists and philosophers in working through their material, but also to the circumstance that beside tHf remains of the original works of the philosophers there are preserved also, as secondary sources, remains of historical records made in antiquity. The best indeed, of these also is lost : namely, the historical works which arose from the learned collection made by the Peripatetic and Stoic schools at the end of the fourth and in the third century b.c. These works passed later through many hands before they were preserved for us in the extant compilations prepared in the Eoman period, as in the Placita Fhilosophonim,'^ going by the name of Plutarch, in the writings of Sextus Empiricus,' in the DeipnosopMstce of Athe- nseus,* in the treatise of Diogenes Laertius, irepl fituv Soytidrav xai d-iro8eyiiirm Twv iv 0i\o. (3) Mediaeval Philosophy : from Augustine to Nicolaus Cusanus, — from the fifth to the fifteenth century. (4) The Philosophy of the Renaissance : from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. 22 Introduction. (5) The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: from Locke to the death of Lessing, — 1689-1781. (6) The German Philosophy : from Kant to Hegel and Herbart, — 1781-1820. (7) The Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. PAKT I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GREEKS. Chr. A. Brandis, Handbuch der Geschichte der griechisch-romischen Philosophie. 3 pts. in 6 vols. Berlin, 1835-66. Same author, Geschichte der Sntwickelungen der griechischen Philosophie und ihrer NacMwirkungen im romischen Beiche. 2 pts. Berlin, 1862-66. Ed. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Oriechen. 3 pts. in 5 vols. 1 and 2 vols, in the 4th, 3-5 vols, in 3d ed. Leips. 1879-89. [Trans., with the exception of the portion on Aristotle and the Elder Peripatetics and that on the concluding religious period, as five works: The Pre-Socratic Schools (2 vols.), Socrates and the Socratic Schools, Plato and the Older Academy, Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, History of Eclecticism, chiefly by S. F. AUeyne and O. J. Eeichel. Lond. and N.Y., Longmans.] A. Schwegler, Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie. Ed. by K. Kostlin. 3d ed. Treiburg, 1882. L. Striimpell, Die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie. 2 pts. Leips. 1854-61. W. Windelband, Geschichte der alten Philosophie. NSrdlingen, 1888. Eitter et Preller, Sistoria philosophioe grceco-romance (Grcecce}. In 7th ed. Edited by Schultess and Wellman. Gotha, 1886-88. An excellent collection of the most important sources. [A. W. Benn, The Greek Philosophers. 2 vols. Lond. 1883.] [J. E. Ferrier, Lectures on Greek Philosophy. Lond. 1888.] [J. B. Mayor, A Sketch of Ancient Philosophy, from Thales to Cicero. Camb. 1881.] If by science we understand that independent and self-conscious work of intelligence which seeks knowledge methodically for its own sake, then it is among the Greeks, and the Greeks of the sixth century B.C., that we first find such a science, — aside from some tendencies among the peoples of the Orient, those of China and India 1 particularly, only recently disclosed. The great civilised 1 Even if it be conceded that the beginnings of moral philosophy among the Chinese rise above moralising, and especially those of logic in India above inci- dental reflections on the scientific formation of conceptions, — on which we shall not here pronounce, — these remain so remote from the course of European philosophy, which forms a complete unity in itself, that a text-book has no occasion to enter upon them. The literature is brought together in Ueber- weg, I. § 6. 23 24 The Philosophy of the Crreeks. peoples of earlier antiquity were not, indeed, wanting either in an abundance of information on single subjects, or in general views of the universe ; but as the former was gained in connection with prac- tical needs, and the latter grew out of mythical fancy, so they remained under the control, partly of daily need, partly of religioijg,;; poetry ; and, as was natural in consequence of the peculiar restraint of the Oriental mind, they lacked, for their fruitful and independent development, the initiative activity of individuals. Among the Greeks, also, similar relations existed until, at the time mentioned, the mighty upward movement of the national life unfet- tered the mental powers of this most gifted of all peoples. For this result the democratic development of constitutions which in passion- ate party struggle tended to bring out independence of individual opinions and judgments, and to develop the significance of person- ality, proved even more favourable than the refinement and spiritual- isation of life which increasing wealth of trade brought with it The more the luxuriant development of individualism loosened the old bonds of the common consciousness, of faith, and of morals, and threatened the youthful civilisation of Greece with the danger of anarchy, the more pressing did individual men, prominent by their position in life, their insight, and their character, find the duty of recovering in their own reflection the measure that was becoming lost. This ethical reflection found its representatives in the lyric and gnomic poets, especially, however, in the so-called seven wise men} It could not fail to occur, also, that a similar movement, in which individual opinions asserted their independence, should trench upon the religious life already so varied, in which the opposition betweeB* the old mystery-cults and the sesthetie national mythology stimu- lated the formation of so many special types. Already in the cos- mogonic poetry ^ the poet had dared to portray the heaven of the myths according to his own individual fancy ; the age of the seven sages began to read its ethical ideals into the gods of the Homeric poetry, and in the ethico-religious reformation attempted by Pythag- oras,' coming as it did in the outer form of a return to the old strict- ness of life, the new content which life had gained came all the more clearly to view. „,„ Jv r, J!r sages, "among whom Thales, Bias, Pittacus, and Solon are usually named while with regard to the rest tradition is not aweed, must not, 7i»V T T^^^^°^ of Thales, be regarded as representatives of science. Diog. Laert. I. 40 ; Plato, Protag. 343. mnl;^^ff ^f^' Z^ ^^"^^ '? *° ^^ regarded as the most Important of these cos- Zrirn??i,n,fJ.^ "^T ^"i prose at the time of the first philosophies, but his wri?fr,™ ^SoVt "cP ^y^'r "r^^ throughout, not scientific Fragments of his writings collected by Sturz (Leips. 1834). « Cf . below at the opening of the first chapter of this part. The PMloBophy of the Greeks. 25 From such conditions of fermentation the science of the Greeks to which they gave the name philosophy was born. The independ- ent reflection of individuals, aided by the fluctuations of religious fancy, extended itself from the questions of practical life to the knowledge of Nature, and there first won that freedom from exter- nal ends, that limitation of knowledge to itself, which constitutes the essence of science. All these processes, however, took place principally in the outly- ing parts of Greek civilisation, in the colonies, which were in advance of the so-called Mother-country in mental as in material develop- ment. In Ionia, in Magna Grsecia, in Thrace, stood the cradles of science. It was only after Athens in the Persian wars had assumed together with the political hegemony the mental as well, which she was to keep so much longer than the former, thait Attic soil, conse- crated to all the muses, attracted science also. Its advent was at the time of the Sophists ; it found its completion in the doctrine and school of Aristotle. It was in connection with the disinterested consideration of Nature that reflection first rose to the scientific construction of conceptions. The result of this was that Greek science devoted all the freshness of youthful joy and knowledge primarily to the prob- lems of Nature, and in this work stamped out fundamental concep- tions, or Forms of thought, for apprehending the external world. In. order to turn the look of philosophy inward and make human action the object of its study, there was first need, for one thing, of subse- quent reflection upon what had, and what had not, been accomplished by this study of Nature, and, for another thing, of the imperious demands made by public life on science now so far matured as to be a social factor. The effect of this change might for a time seem to be to check the pure zeal for research which had marked the begin- nings, but after positive results had been reached in the field of the knowledge of man's inner nature this same zeal developed all the more vigorously, and led to the construction of those great systems with which purely Greek philosophy reached its consummation. The philosophy of the Greeks divides, therefore, into three periods : a cosmologiccd, which extends from about 600 to about 450 b.c. ; an anthropological, which fills out about the second half of the fifth century b.c. (450-400) ; and a systematic, which contains the development of the three great systems of Greek science, those of Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle (400-322). The philosophy of the Greeks forms the most instructive part of the whole history of philosophy from a theoretical point of view, not only because the fundamental conceptions created in it have become the permanent foundations 26 The Philosophy of the Greeks. for all further development of thought, and promise to remain such, but also because in it the formal presuppositions contained in the postulates of the thinking Reason itself, attained sharp formulation as set over against the mate- rial of knowledge, which, especially at the beginning, was still relatively small in amount. In this the Greek philosophy has its typical value and its didactic importance. These advantages appear already in the transparency and simplicity of the entire development, which enable us to see the inquiring mind at first turned outward, then thrown back upon itself, and from this point of view returning to a deeper apprehension of reality as a whole. There is, therefore, scarcely any controversy with regard to this course of the general development of Greek philosophy, though different expositions have located the divisions between the periods at different points. Whether Socrates is made to begin a new period, or is placed together with the Sophists in the period of Greek Enlightenment, depends ultimately only on whether the result (negative or positive), or the object-matter of the philosophising, is regarded as of decisive importance. That, however, Democritus must in any case be sepa- rated from the " Pre-Socratics " and assigned to the great systematic period of Greek Philosophy, has been proved by the Author in his survey of the Gfeschichte der alten Philosophie, ch. 5. CHAPTER I. THE COSMOLOGICAL PEEIOD. S. A. Byk, Die vorsokratische Philosophie der Oriechen in ihrer organischen Qliederung. 2 Parts. Leips. 1875-77. [E. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy. Lond. 1892.] The immediate background for the beginnings of Greek philoso- phy was formed by the cosmogonic poetry, which aimed to present in mythical garb the story of the prehistoric ages of the given world, and' so, in the form of narratives of the origination of the universe, made use of prevailing ideas as to the constant mutations of things. The more freely individual views developed in this pro- cess, the more the time factor in the myth retreated in favour of the emphasising of these abiding relations; and the question finally emerged : " What is then the original ground of things, which out- lasts all temporal change, and how does it change itself into these particular things, or change these things back into itself ? " The solution of this question was first attempted in the sixth century by the Milesian School of natural philosophy, of which Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes are known to us as the three chief representatives. Information of many kinds, which had long been publicly accumulating in the practical experience of the sea^faring lonians, stood at their disposal, as well as many true observations, often of an acute sort. They kept in touch, also, no doubt, with the experience of the Oriental peoples, especially the Egyptians, with whom they stood in so close relation.^ Knowledge fjom these various sources was brought together with youthful zeal. The chief interest fell upon physical questions, particularly upon 1 The influence of the Orient upon the beginnings of Greek philosophy has been overestimated by Glabisoh (Die Beligion und die Philosophie i/n ihrer loeltgeschichtlichen Entwieklung, Breslau, 1852) and Roth (Geschichte unserer dbendldndischen Philosophie, 2 Vols., Mannheim, 1858 ff.). In the case of information upon particular fields such influence is certainly to be recognised ; on the other hand, the scientific conceptions are throughout independent works of Greek thought. 27 28 The Philosophy of the Crreeks. [Part I. the great elementary phenomena, to explain which many hypotheses |vi were thought out. Besides this, interest turned chiefly to geo- graphical and astronomical problems, such as the form of the earth, its relation to the sidereal heavens, the nature of the sun, moon, and planets, and the manner and cause of their motion. On the other hand, there are but feeble indications of a z6al for knowledge . applied to the organic world and man. Such -were the objects of experience studied by the first "philosophy." It stood quite far removed from medical science, which, to be sure, was limited to technical information and proficiency in the art, and was handed down as a secret doctrine, guarded in priest-like fashion in orders and schools, such as those of Rhodes, Gyrene, Crotona, Cos, and Cnidus. Ancient medicine, wliieh aimed expressly to be an art and not a science (so Hippocrates), came into contact with philosophy when this was an all-embracing science, only at a late period and quite transiently. Cf. Haser, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin, I. (2d ed., Jena, 1875). .j ,, , So also the beginnings of mathematics go along independently beside those of ancient philosophy. The propositions ascribed to the Milesians make the im- pression of individual pieces of information picked up and put together, rather than of results of genuine research, and are quite out of relation with their doctrines in natural science and philosophy. In the circles of the Pythagoreans, also, mathematical studies were at first evidently pursued for their own sake, to be drawn all the more vigorously into the treatment of general problems. C£. G. Cantor, Geschichte der Mathematik, I. (Leips. 1880). The efforts of the Milesians to determine the nature of the one world-ground had already in the case of Anaximander led beyond experience to the construction of a metaphysical conception to be used for explanation, viz. the aimpov, and thereby drew science away from the investigation of facts to the consideration of conceptions. While Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic School, drew the con- sequences which result for the religious consciousness from the philosophical conception of the unity of the world, HeracUtus, in hard struggle with ideas that were obscure and religiously coloured, analysed destructively the presupposition of an abiding substance, * and allowed only a law of change to stand as ultimate content of knowledge. All the more sharply, on the other hand, did the Eleatic School, in its great representative, Parmenides, shape out the con- ception of Being until it reached that regardless boldness of formu- lation which, in the following generation of the School, was defended by Zeno, and softened down in some measure only by Melissus. Very soon, however, a series of efforts appeared, which brought anew into the foreground the interest in explanatory natural science that had been thrust aside by this development of the first meta- physical antitheses. In behalf of this interest more comprehensive efforts were made toward an enrichment of knowledge ; this time, more than in the case of previous observations, questions and hypotheses from the organic and physiological realms were kept in Cha?. 1.] The Cosmological Period. 29 mind; and the attempt was made to mediate with explanatory theories between the opposing conceptions of Heraclitus and Par- menides. Out of these needs arose, about the middle of the fifth century, side by side, and with many reciprocal relations, positive and polem- ical, the theories of Empedodes, Anaxagoras, and Leucippus, founder of the Atomistic School of Abdera. The number of these theories and their well-known dependence upon one another prove that in spite of the distance by which individual men and schools found themselves separated, there was already a great vigour in exchange of thought and in literary activity. The picture of this life takes on a much fuller form as we reflect that tradition, in sifting its material, has obviously preserved only the memory of what was most important, and that each of the names remaining known to us indicates, in truth, an entire circle of scientific activity. The Pythagoreans, during this same period, occupied a peculiar position at one side. They also took up the metaphysical problem given by the opposition between Heraclitus and the Eleatics, but hoped to find its solution by the aid of mathematics, and, by their theory of numbers, as whose first literary representative Philolaus is known, added a number of most important factors to the further movement of thought. The original purpose or tendency of their league made itself felt in their doctrines, in that, in fixing these, they conceded a considerable influence to considerations of (ethical or sesthetic) worth. They indeed attempted a scientific treatment of ethical questions as little as did the entire philosophy of this period, but the cosmology which they based upon their astronomical ideas, already widely developed with the help of mathematics, is yet at the same time permeated by sesthetic and ethical motives. Of the Milesian School only three names — Thales, Anaximander, and An- aximenes — have been handed down to us. From this it appears that the school flourished in what was then the Ionic capital during the entire sixth century, and perished with the city itself, which was laid waste by the Persians in 494, after the battle of Lade. Thales, sprung from an old merchant family, is said to have predicted the solar eclipse in 585, and survived the invasion of the Persians in the middle of the sixth century. He had perhaps seen Egypt, and was not deficient in mathe- matical and physical knowledge. So early an author as Aristotle did not know writings from him. Anaximander seems to have been little younger. Of his treatise irepl iiireu>s remains. Aside from that given by Aristotle (in the beginning of the Metaphysics) we owe our meagre information concerning the theories of the Milesians chiefly to the Commentary of Simplicius. Cf. H. Ritter, Geschichte der joiiischen Philos- ophie (Berlin, 1821) ; R. Seydel, Der Fortachritt der Metaphysik unter den altes- ten jonischen Philosophen (Leips. 1861) . 30 The Greeks: Cosmological Period. [Part I. At the head of the Bleatio School, Xenophanes, who at all events was concerned in its establishment, is generally placed. Born about 570 in Colophon, he fled in 546, in consequence of the Persian conquest of Ionia, and gained a living as wandering poet. At last, in Elea, founded by the lonians who fled into Ma^na Grsecia, he found a permanent dwelling. He died after 480. The frag- ments of his partly gnomic, partly philosophical, sayings have been collected by Karsten (Amsterdam, 1835). Concerning him see Fr. Kern (Naumburg, 1864, Oldenburg, 1867, Danzig, 1871, Stettin, 1874 and 1877) and J. Freudenthal (Bres- lau, 1886). ,,.,,. . ^ ^ ^v Parmenidea, an Eleatic of renowned family, who was not a stranger to the Pythagorean society, wrote about 470. The fragments of his didactic poem have been collected by Peyron (Lelps. 1810) and H. Stein (Leips. 1864). [Met. tr in Jour. Spec. Phil, IV.] The lost treatise of Zeno (about 490^30) was probably the first which was separated into chapters and arranged dialectically. He, too, came from Elea. j ^^ a^i. Melissos, on the contrary, was the Samian general who conquered the Athe- nians in 442. Concerning his personal connection with the Eleatic school nothing is known. . , ,. j v The unimportant fragments of the Eleatics are m a measure supplemented by the accounts of Aristotle, Simplicius, and others. The pseudo- Aristotelian work. Be Xenephone, Zenone, Gorgia (Arist., Berl. ed., 974 ft.), which must be used with great discretion, gives an account in the first chapter probably of Melissos ; in the second, from confusedly intermingling sources, of Zeno ; in the third, of Gorgias. Heraolitus of Epheaus ("the Obscure"), about 536-470, disgusted with the ever-growing power of the democracy, gave up the high position which was his by birth, and in tlie moody leisure of the last decade of his life, wrote a treatise which was pronounced difdcult of comprehension even by the ancients, while the fragments of it which we possess are often very ambiguous. Collected and edited by P. Schuster (Leips. 1873) and J. By water (Oxford, 1877). Cf. Fr. Sohleierinacher (Ges. W-, III. Abth., Bd. 2, pp. 1-146); J. Bernays {Ges.Abhand- lungen, Bd. I., 1885); F. Lasalle (2 Bde., Berlin, 1858); E. Pfleiderer (Berlm, 1886). [G. T. W. Patrick, Beraclitus in Am. Jour. Psy., I., 1888, contains trans, of the Fr.~i The first Dorian in the history of philosophy is Empedocles of Agrigentum, about 490-430, a priestly and prophetic personality, much regarded in his char- acter as statesman, physician, and worker of miracles. He had, too, relations with the Sicilian school of orators, of which the names of Korax and Tisias are familiar ; and besides his Kadapiwl (Songs of Purification) has left a didactic poem, the fragments of which have been published by Sturz (Leips. 1805), Karsten (Amsterdam, 1838), and Stein (Bonn, 1852). Anaxagoras of Klazomene (500 till after 430) settled, toward the middle of the fifth century, in Athens, where he made friends with Pericles. In 434 he was accused of impiety and obliged to leave the city, and founded a school in Lampsacus. Schaubach (Leips. 1827) and Schorn (Bonn, 1829) have col- lected the fragments of his treatise, irepl (piveois. Cf. Breier (Berlin, 1840), Zgvort (Paris, 1843). So little is known of the personality of Leucippus, that even in ancient times his very existence was doubted. The great development of the atomistic theory by iJemocritus (see ch. 3) had completely overshadowed its founder. But traces of Atomism are to be recognised with certainty in the entire structure of thought after Parmenides. Leucippus, if not born in Abdera, yet active there as head of the school out of whicli Protagoras and Democritus went later, must have been contemporary with Empedocles and Anaxagoras, even though somewhat older. Whether he wrote anything is uncertain. Cf. Diels, Verh. der Stett. Philol. Vers. (1886). — A Brieger, Die Urbewegung der Atome (Halle, 1884); H. Liepmann, Die Mechanik der leucipp-demokritischen Atome (Leips. 1885). The Pythagorean Society first appeared in the cities of Magna Grsecia as a religious-political association toward the end of the sixth century. Its founder was Pythagoras, of Samos, who, born about 580, after long journeys, which probably led him toward Egypt also, made the aristocratic city of Crotona the starting-point of a reform movement which had for its aim a moral and religious Chap. 1, § 4.] Conceptions of Being. 31 purification. We are first apprised of the internal relations of the society through subsequent narratives ( Jamblichus, De Vita Pythagorica, and Porphyrius, Be Vita Pythagoroe published by Kiesling (Leips. 1815-16), whose trustworthiness . is doubtful. It seems, however, to be certain that already the^ld society imposed definite duties upon its members, even for private life, and mtroduced the prac- tice of working in common at intellectual pursuits, especially at music and mathematics. In consequence of its political position (in regard to which B. Krische, Gottingen, 1830) the external conditions of the society assumed at first a very favourable form, inasmuch as, after the plunder of the democratic Sybaris, 609, Crotona won a kind of hegemonic influence in Magna Grsecia. In time, however, the Pythagoreans became the losers in the bitter party struggles of the cities, and often suffered bitter persecution, by which the society was finally destroyed in the fourth century. To Pythagoras himself, who died about 500, we can trace back no philosoph- ical writings, although the subsequent myth-making process sought so strenu- ously to make him the idol of all Hellenic wisdom. (E. Zeller in Vortr. u. Abhandl., I, Leips. 1865.) Plato and Aristotle knew only of a philosophy of the Pythagoreans. Fhilolaus, who seems to have been somewhat younger than Empedocles and Anaxagoras, appears as the most prominent representative of this philosophy. Almost nothing is known of the circumstances of his life, and the fragments of his treatise (ed. by Boeckh, Berlin, 1819 ; cf. C. Schaar- schmidt, Bonn, 1864) lie under considerable suspicion. Of the remaining adherents of the society, only the names are known. The latest representatives came into so close relations with the Platonic Academy that, as regards their philosophy, they may almost be said to have belonged to it. Among them Archytas of Tarentum, the well-known savant and statesman, should be mentioned. Concerning the very doubtful fragments attributed to him, cf. G. Hartenstein (Leips. 1833), Fr. Petersen (Zeltschr. f. Alterthumsk ; 1886), 0. Gruppe (Berlin, 1840), Er. Beckman (Berlin, 1844). The reports concerning the teaching of the Pythagoreans, especially in the later accounts, are clouded by so many additions from foreign sources, that perhaps at no point in ancient philosophy is it so difficult to determine the actual facts in the case as here, even if we sift out the most trustworthy, namely Aristotle and his best taught commentators, notably Simplicius, many dark points and contradictory statements remain, particularly in details. The reason for this lies probably in the fact that in the school, which for a time was widely extended, various trends of thought ran side by side, and that among these the general fun- damental thought first brought forward perhaps by Philolaus, was worked out in different ways. It would be of great service to attempt such a separation. H. Eitter, Geschichte der pythagoreischen Philosophie (Hamburg, 1826) ; Eothenbucher, Das System der Pythagbreer nach Aristoteles (Berlin, 1867) ; E. Chaignet, Fythagore et la philosophie pythagoricienne (2 vols., Paris, 1873). § 4. The Conceptions of Being. The fact that things of experience change into one another was the stimulus to the first philosophical reflections, and -wonder^ at this must indeed have arisen early among a people so mobile and with so varied an experience of Nature as the lonians. To this fact, which furnished the fundamental motive of its reflection, the Ionic philosophy gave liveliest expression in Heraclitus, who seems to have been unwearied ^ in seeking the most pointed formulations for this universal mutability of all things, and especially for the sudden changes of opposites into each other. But while myth gave ^ Cf. upon the philosophical value of the Bav/ii^eiv, Arist. Met. I. 2, 982 b 12. 2 Fragm. (Schust.) 41-44, 60, 63, 67. 32 The Greeks : Cosmologieal Period. [Part L to this view the garb of a fabled account of the formation of the ■world, science asked for the abiding ground of all these changes, " and fixed this question in the conception of the cosmic matter, o^^ "world-stuff" {Weltstoff), which, experiences all these transformap tions, from which all individual things arise, and into which they become again transformed {apxn)- !« this conception ^ was tacitly contained the presupposition of the unity of the world; whether the -Milesians ' already sought to justify this we do not know. It was a later eclectic straggler ^ who first attempted to justify this Monism by the transformation of all things into one another, and by the inter-connection of all things without exception. 1. That, however, a single cosmic matter, or world-stuff, lies at the basis of the entire process of nature, appears in ancient tradi- tion as a self-evident presupposition of the Ionic School. The only question was to determine what this elementary matter was. The nearest course was then to seek for it in what was given in experi- ence, and so Thales declared it to be water; Anaximenes, air. To this choice they were probably determined only by the mobility, changeability, and apparent inner vitality * of water and air. It is evident, too, that the Milesians thought little in this connection of the chemical peculiarities of water and air, but only of the states of aggregation ' concerned. While the solid appears in itself dead, moved only from without, the liquid and volatile make the impres- sion of independent mobility and vitality ; and the monistic prepos- session of this first philosophising was so great that the Milesians never once thought of asking for a reason or ground of this cease- less change of the cosmic matter, but instead assumed this as a self- intelligible fact — a matter of course — as they did all change or occurrence ; at most they described its individual forms. The cos- mic matter passed with them for something in itself living : they thought of it as animated, just as are particular organisms,* and for this reason their doctrine is usually characterised from the stand- point of the later separation in conceptions as Hylozoism. 1 Which Aristotle in the Met. I. 3, 983 b 8, has deiined, not without the admixture of his own categories. 2 The expression dpx^i which, moreover, hears in itself the memory of the chronological fancies of the Cosmologists, is said by Simplicius to have been used first by Anaximander. s Diogenes of Apollonia. Cf. Simpl. Phys. (D.) 32' 151, 30, and Arist. Gen. et Corr. I. 6, 322 b 13. * Schol. in Arist. 514 a 83. 5 For iSap, iypiv is frequently substituted. "With regard to the While here a predominantly theological turn of philosophy is already manifested, the exchange of the point of view of metaphysics and natural science taken by Anaximander, for the religious point of view of Xenophanes shows itself in two essential deviations. The conception of the World-God is for the latter an object of religious reverence, and scarcely a means for understanding Nature. The Colophonian's sense for knowledge of Nature is slight, his ideas are in part very childlike, and, as compared with those of the Mile- sians, undeveloped. And so for his views, the characteristic of infinity, which Milesian science regarded as necessary in the cosmic matter, could be dispensed with ; on the contrary, it seemed to him more in accordance with the dignity of the divine Nature,^ to think of this as limited within itself, as entirely shut up or complete, con- sequently as regards its spatial aspect, spherical. And while the Milesians thought of the original ground of things as ever in motion spontaneously, and as characterised by living variety in its inter- nal structure, Xenophanes struck out this postulate hitherto in use for the explanation of Nature, and declared the World-God to be immovable and perfectly homogeneous in all its parts. How, indeed, he thought that the variety of individual things whose reality he did not doubt, could be reconciled with this view, must remain uncertain. 4. As was required by the conception of change, the Milesian conception of the World-substance had united without clear discrim- ination two essential elements : the one that of a substance re- maining like itself, the other that of independent or self-subsistent 1 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. IX. 193. 2 Hippol. Bef. I. 14 (^Doxogr. D. 565). In other passages, again, it is said that he would have the deity thought neither limited nor unlimited (?). 36 The Greeks : Oosmological Period. [Part I, changeability. In the thought of Xenophanes the first element was isolated ; the same process took place for the second through Hera- clitus. His doctrine presupposes the work of the Milesians, from the conclusion of which it is separated by a generation, in this way; their effort to determine or define in conceptions an abiding world- ground has been recognised as hopeless. There is nothing abiding, either in the world or in its constitution taken as a whole. Not only individual things, but also the universe as a whole, are involved in perpetual, ceaseless revolution : all flows, and nothing abides. We cannot say of things that they are ; they become only, and pass away in the ever-changing play of the movement of the universe. That, then, which abides and deserves the name of deity, is not a thing, and not substance or matter, but motion, the cosmic process. Becom- ing itself. To meet a strong demand that seems made by this turn to abstrac- tion, Heraelitus found help in the sensuous perception in which this motion presented itself to him : that of fire. The co-operation of this in the conversion of things of ]S"ature into each other had been already noticed by the Milesians ; to this may have been added ancient Oriental mystical ideas, which contact with the Persians made especially accessible to the lonians of that day. But when Heraelitus declared the world to be an ever-living fire, and Fire, therefore, to be the essence of all things, he understood by this djox^ not a material or substance which survived all its transformations, but just the transforming process itself in its ever-darting, vibrating activity {zungelnde) , the soaring up and vanishing which corre- spond to the Becoming and passing away.^ At the same time, however, this idea takes on a still firmer form, in that Heraelitus emphasised much more strongly than the Mile- sians the fact that this change is accomplished in accordance with definite relations, and in a succession that remains always the same.* This rhythm of events (which later times have called the uniformity of Nature under law) is therefore the only permanent ; it is termed by Heraelitus the destiny (ci|ixap/u,ei/i;) , the order (SUri), the reason (Xdyos) of the world. These predicates, in which physical, ethical, 1 The difficulty of ascribing to such a motion without any substrate, to a mere Becoming, the highest reality and the capacity to produce things, was evidently very much less for undeveloped thought not yet conscious of its categories than for later apprehension. The conception of Becoming as fire, hovering between the symbolic and the real meaning of the term, was supported by the use of language which treats of functions and relations as also substantives. Bat Heraelitus does not disdain to let the dim idea of a World-substance stand in the background in his metaphors (of the clay kneaded ever anew, of the drink continually stirred). 2 Further in detail on this point in the following paragraph. Chap. 1, § 4.] Conceptions of Being : HeraclituB, Parmenidea. 37 and logical order in the world appear as still identified, prove only the undeveloped state of thought which does not yet know how to separate the different motives. The conception, however, which Heraclitus ias grasped with complete clearness, and carried though with all the strength of his austere personality, is that of order, a conception, nevertheless, whose validity was for him as much a matter of conviction as of knowledge. 5. In evident opposition to this theory of the Ephesian, the con- ception of Being was worked out by Parmenides, the head of the Eleatic School, and the most important thinker of this period. Yet it is not easy to reconstruct his formulation of this conception from the few fragments of his didactic poem, the quite unique character of which consists in the union of dryest abstraction with grand and rich imagery. That there is a Being (eo-ti yap Jvat), is for the Ele- atic a postulate of such cogent evidence that he only states this position without proving it, and that he explains it only by a nega- tive turn of thought which first discloses to us completely the sense in which we are to understand his main thought. "Non-being" (firj ilvai), he adds, or that which "is" not (to ju,^ iov), cannot be and cannot be thought. For all thought is in relation to a some- thing that is, which forms its content.^ This view of the correla^ tive nature of Being and consciousness leads so far with Parmenides that the two, thought and Being, are declared to be fully identical. No thought to whose content Being does not belong, — no Being that is not thought : thought and Being are the same. These propositions, which look so abstractly ontological if we con- sider only the words, take on quite another meaning when we con- sider that the fragments of the great Elean leave no doubt as to what he desired to have regarded as " Being " or that which " is." This was corporeality, materiality (t6 ttXIov). For him, "being" and "filling space" are the same. This "Being," this function of filling space, is precisely the same in the case of all that " is '' ; there is, therefore, only the one, single Being which has no internal distinc- tions. " Non-being," or what is not [has not the attribute of Being], means, accordingly, incorporeality, empty space (to kcvov). This double meaning of the eimi (Being) employed by Parmenides, ac- cording to which the word means at one time " the full " and at an- other time " Reality," leads then to the proposition that empty space cannot be. Now for the naive, sensuous way of looking at things which lurks even in these principles of Parmenides, the separateness of 1 Fr., ed. Karsten, vv. 94 ff. gg The O-reeks: Cosmologieal Period. [Part 1^: things, by virtue of which they present themselves in their plurality and multiplicity, consists in their separation by empty space ; and, on the other hand, all that takes place in the corporeal world, i.e. all motion, consists in the change of place which the "full" experi- ences in the " empty " (or the " Void"). If, therefore, the Void is not real or actual, then the plurality and '/notion of individual things cannot be real. The number and variety of things presented in co-existence and succession by experience had given the Milesians occasion to ask for the common abiding ground of which all these things were metamorphoses. When, however, the conception of cosmic sub- Stance or world-stuff has culminated with Parmenides in the con- ception of Being, there seems so little possibility of uniting these individual things with it, that reality is denied them, and the one unitary Being remains also the only being.^ The conception formed for the purpose of explanation has so developed internally that to maintain it involves the denial of that which was to be explained by it. In this sense the Eleatic doctrine is acosmism : the mani- foldness of things has sunk in the All-one: the latter alone "is," the former are deception and seeming. According to Parmenides, however, we are to predicate of the One that it is eternal, has never come into being, is imperishable, and especially (as Xenophanes had maintained) that it is through and through one in kind, one with itself, without any distinctions or differences, i.e. completely homogeneous and absolutely unchange- able. He follows Xenophanes also in regarding the One as limited, complete, and definitive. Being is then a well-rounded sphere, per- fectly homogeneous within itself, and this only and unitary world- body is at the same time the world-thought,^ simple, excluding all particulars from itself : to yap irXcov la-rl v6rjij.a. 6. All these attempts, in part fantastic, in part regardlessly abstract, were needed in order to gain the presuppositions for the development of the first usable conceptions for apprehending Nature. For important as were the motives of thought that had come to recognition therein, neither the world-stuff or cosmic matter of the Milesians, nor the "Fire-Becoming" of Heraclitus, nor the Being of Parmenides were available for explaining Nature. Now the imper- fection of the first had become clear through the contrast which 1 A great role in these considerations of the Eleatics is obviously played by the ambiguities in language, by which, on the one hand, the (v means both numerical unity and also qualitative unity or simplicity, while the verb elvai has not only the function of the copula, but also the meaning of " Reality." 2 Hence, terms like "materialism" and "idealism" do not apply to this naive identification of consciousness and its object, the corporeal world. Chap. 1, § 4.] Conceptions of Being :■ Umpedocles. 39 separated the two latter as by a gulf, and with the recognition of this, occasion was given for the more independent investigators of the next period to separate in their conceptions the two motifs (being and becoming), and by setting them over ag'S.inst one another to think out new forms of relation, out of which permanently valua- ble categories for the knowledge of Nature resulted. These mediating attempts have in common, on the one hand, the recognition of the Eleatic postulate that that which " is " must be thought throughout not only as eternal, without a beginning and imperishable, but also as homogeneous, and as regards its qualities unchangeable ; on the other hand, however, they assent also to the thought of Heraclitus that an undeniable reality belongs to Becom- ing and change {Geschehen), and so to the manifoldness of things. Common to them, also, in their adjustment of these two needs of thought is the attempt to assume a plurality of beings, each of which should satisfy for itself the postulate of Parmenides; while, on the other hand, by changing their spatial relations, they were to bring about the changeful variety of individual things which expe- rience shows. If the Milesians had spoken of qualitative changes of the cosmic substance or matter, the Eleatic principle had ex- cluded the possibility of it ; if, nevertheless, change ought to receive recognition, as with Heraclitus, and be attributed to Being itself, it must be reduced to a kind of change which leaves untouched the qualities of the existent. Such a change, however, was think- able only as a change of place, i.e. as motion. The investigators of Nature in the fifth century maintained, therefore, with the Eleatics, the (qualitative) unchangeableness of the existent, but against the Eleatics, its plurality and motion;^ with Heraclitus, they insisted upon the reality of occurrence and change, and against Heraclitus, upon the Being of permanent and unchangeable substances as under- lying and producing the same. Their common view is this : there is a plurality of existing beings which, unchangeable in them- selves, make the change and variety of individual things compre- hensible. 7. This principle seems to have been asserted first and in its most imperfect form by Empedocles, — in a form, however, that was widely influential historically. He put forward as " elements" ^ the four which are still current in the popular modes of thought, — earth, 1 In the later literature (Aristotle) dXXofwo-is (qualitative alteration) and Klvq(ns (change of place) are contrasted. In reality this is done here, though the terms are as yet lacking. 2 Instead of the later expression o-Toixeio, we find in Empedocles the more poetic term "roots of all things," ^ifi6/toTo. 40 The Grreeks : Oosmological Period. [Part L water, air, and fire.-' Each of these is according to this system^ without beginning and imperishable, homogeneous and unchange- able, but at the same time divisible into parts, and in these parts capable of change of place. Out of the mixture of the elements arise individual things, which in turn cease to exist when the mix- ture is separated into the elements ; to the kind of mixture made are due the various qualities of individual things, which are often different from the properties of the elements themselves. At the same time the note of unchangeableness and a deviation from the Milesian Hylozoism assert themselves in the system of Empedocles to the extent that he could not assign independent oar pacity of motion to these material elements which experience only changing states of motion and mechanical mixings. On this account he was obliged to seek a cause of motion independent of the four elements. As such a cause he designated love and hate. The out- come, however, of this first attempt to set over against a dead matter, deprived by abstraction of all motion of its own, the force whick moves it, as a metaphysically independent something, was very obscure. Love and hate are, with Empedocles, not mere properties,* functions, or relations of the elements, but rather independent powers set over against them ; but how we are to think the reality of these moving forces is not disclosed in any satisfactory way in the fragments.'' Only this seems certain, that in fixing the dual nature of the principle of motion the thought was also operative that two distinct causes, love and hate, were requisite to account for the good and the evil in the change of things of our experience,^ — a first indication that determinations of " worth " or value are beginning to be introduced into the theory of Nature. 8. Empedocles thought it possible to derive the special qualities of individual things from the proper mixture of the four elements : whether he attempted so to derive them, and if so, how, we do not indeed know. This difficulty was avoided by Anaxagoras, who, from the Eleatic principle that nothing that is can arise or pass away, drew the conclusion that as many elements must be assumed' 1 Aside from dependence upon his predecessors, his selection was evidently- due to the inclination to regard the different states of aggregation as the original essence of things. No importance seems to have attached to the number four, in this. The dialectical construction which Plato and Aristotle gave for this is quite remote from the thought of the Agrigentine. 2 If 0iXia and mras are occasionally counted by the later recorders as fifth and sixth i.pxi of Empedocles, we must not infer from this that he regarded st them as substances. His obscure and almost mythical terminology rests, for "" the most part, upon the fact that conceptions standing for functions are substan- f tives in language. a Arist. Met. I. 4, 984 b 32. He called them avip^ra (seeds of things), or also simply xP^mTo. (sub- , Chap. 1, § 4.] Conceptions of Being : Anaxagoras. 41 as there are simple substances in the things of experience, meaning by simple substances those which on repeated division always sep- arate into parts qualitatively the same with their wholes. Such elementary substances were later, in accordance with his definition, called homoiomeriai. At that time, however, when only mechanical division or change of temperature were known as means of investi- gation, this conception of element (in principle entirely correspond- ing to the conceptions of the chemistry of to-day) applied to the greater part of the substances given in experience,' and on that ac- count Anaxagoras maintained that there were countless elements dif- fering in form, colour, and taste. He held that they were present throughout the entire universe in a very finely divided state. Their coming together or compounding (o-wyxpto-ts) constitutes the arising, their separation (SiaKptcris) the passing away, of individual things. There is, accordingly, something of every substance present in every. thing: it is only for our sensuous apprehension that the individual thing takes on the properties of that substance or of those sub- stances which may be present in a preponderating degree. The elements, as the true being, are regarded now by Anaxagoras also as eternal, without beginning or end, unchangeable, and though movable in space, yet not in motion of themselves. Here, too, then, we must ask for a force which is the cause of motion. Since, how- ever, this force must be regarded as existent, a something that is, Anaxagoras hit upon the expedient of assigning it to a special, single sort of matter or elementary substance. This force-element or motive-matter (Bewegungsstoff) is conceived to be the lightest and most mobile of all elements. In distinction from all the others it is that one of the homoiomeriai which alone is in motion of itself, and communicates this its own motion to the rest ; it moves itself and the rest. To determine the inner nature of this "force-substance," however, two lines of thought unite : the property of originating mo- tion is, for the naive mode of looking at things, the surest sign of the animate ; this exceptional kind of matter, then, which is self -moved, must be animate matter or "soul-stuff" (Seelenstoff), its quality must be animate or psychical.^ And, secondly, a power is known through its effect : if, now, this motive-matter is the cause of the formation of the world, to bring about which it has separated out the remaining idle elements, then we must be able to know its nature from this which it has accomplished. But the universe, in particular the regular revolution of the stars, makes the impression ' According to the fragments of Anaxagoras, bones, flesh, and marrow also ; on the other hand, the metals. ' [The Greek ^uxi) and German Seele include both these meanings.] 42 The Gfreeks : Oosmologieal Period. [Part I. of beautiful and purposive order (Koaynos). Such a mastering of gigantic masses in a harmonious system, — this undisturbed circling of countless worlds, on which Anaxagoras turned his wondering contemplation, it seemed to him could be the result only of a mind arranging the movements according to ends, and ruling them. For this reason he characterised the force-substance as Reason (voSs) or as " Thought-stuff." The voBs of Anaxagoras is then a stuff or substance, a corporeal element, homogeneous, unproduced, and imperishable, diffused in a finely divided state throughout the universe; different from the other substances, however, not only in degree, as being the finest, lightest, and most mobile, but also in essence, since it alone is self- moved, and by virtue of its own motion moves the other elements in the purposive way which we recognise in the order of the world. This emphasising of the order in the universe is a Heraclitic element in the teaching of Anaxagoras, and the conclusion drawn from the ordered movements to a rational cause of them, acting according to ends, is the first instance of the teleogical explanation of nature} With this procedure a conception of worth ( Werthbegriff) — namely, beauty and perfection — is made a principle of explanation in the theoretical field also. 9. The Atomism of Leucippus developed from the Eleatic concep- tion of Being in a direction opposite to that just traced. While Empedocles maintained that some, and Anaxagoras that all, qualities were metaphysically primitive, the founder of the school of Abdera remained in accord with the position of Parmenides, that no "Being'' belongs to any of all the various qualitative determinations exhibited by experience, and that the sole property of Being is the property of filling space, corporeality, to TrXe'oi'. If now, however, the plurality of things, and the mutations taking place among them as they come and go, were to be made intelligible, then instead of the single world- body, with no internal distinctions which Parmenides had taught, a plurality of such must be assumed, separated from one another, not by other Being, but by that which is not Being, Non-being: i.e. by the incorporeal, by empty space. This entity, then, which is Non-being [i.e. not Being in the true sense], must have in its turn a kind of Being, or of metaphysical reality ascribed to it,^ and Leucippus regarded it 1 As such he was praised by Plato (Phced. 97 B), and overestimated by Aristotle (Met. I. 3, 984 b). Cf., however, § 5. The moderns (Hegel) have added the further over-estimate of seeking to interpret the voSs as an immate- rial principle. But the fragments (Simpl. Fhys. (D.) 33'' 156, 13) leave no doubt that this lightest, purest element, which does not mingle with the rest, but only plays about them and moves them as living force, was also a space- filling matter or stuff. a Plut. Adv. Col. 4, 2, 1109. Ghap. 1, § 4.] Conceptions of Being : Leucippus, Zeno. 43 as the unlimited, the awupov, in contrast with the limitation which Being proper possesses, according, to Parmenides. Leucippus, there- fore, shatters in pieces the world-body of Parmenides, and scatters its parts through infinite space. Each of these'parts, however, is, like the absolute Being of Parmenides, eternal and unchangeable, without beginning, indestructible, homogeneous, limited, and indi- visible. Hence these portions of Being are called atoms, aro^oi; and for the reasons which had led Anaximander to his concept of the oTTtipov Leucippus maintained that there were countless numbers of such atoms, infinitely varied in form. Their size must be taken as imperceptibly small, since all things in our experience are divisible. Since, however, they all possess only the one like quality of filling space, differences between them can be only quan- titative ; differences in size, form, and situation. Out of such metaphysical considerations grew the concept of the atom, which has proved so fruitful for the theoretical science of Nature just because, as was evident already in the system of Leu- cippus, it contains the postulate that all qualitative differences exhibited by Nature are to be reduced to quantitative. The things which we perceive, Leucippus taught, are combinations of atoms ; they arise when atoms unite, and pass away when they part. The properties which we perceive in these complexes are only seeming or appearance ; there exist in truth only the determinations of size, form, arrangement, and situation of the individual atoms which constitute Being. Empty space is, accordingly, the presupposition as well for the uniting and separating of atoms as for their separateness and shape. All " becoming," or change, is in its essence motion of atoms in space. If we ask for the ground of this motion of the atoms,^ since space as properly not a true Being cannot be allowed as cause, and Atomism recognises nothing as actual except space and the atoms, this ground can be sought only in the atoms themselves; i.e. the atoms are of themselves in motion, and this, their independent mo- tion, is as truly without beginning and end as is their being. And as the atoms are indefinitely varied in size and form, and completely independent of one another, so their original motions are infinite in variety. They fly confusedly about in infinite space, which knows no above and below, no within and without, each for itself, until their accidental meeting leads to the formation of things and worlds. The separation between the conceptions of matter and moving force 1 Arist. Phys. VIII. 1, 252 a 32, says of the Atomists that they did not ask as to the origin of motion — as a matter of course, for they declared motion itself to be causeless. 44 The Greeks : Cosmologieal Period. [Pakt I. which Empedocles and Anaxagoras, each in his way had attempted, was thus in turn abolished by the Atomists. They ascribed to the particles of matter the capacity, not indeed of qualitative change (dXXoto)o-w), but of independent motion (kiVtjctis), and took up again the principle of the Milesian Hylozoism, in this restricted sense, as it had been limited by the Eleatic teaching. 10. In opposition to these pluralistic systems, Zeno, the friend and disciple of Parmenides, sought to defend the Eleatic doctrine by setting forth the contradictions in which the assumption of a plural- ity of Beings is involved. As regards size, he pointed out, it fol- lows that the totality of Being must be on the one hand infinitely small, on the other hand infinitely great : infinitely small, because the combination of any number whatever of parts, each of which is to be infinitely small, never yields anything more than an infinitely small sum;^ infinitely great, on the contrary, because the bound- ary which is to separate two parts must itself be an existent some- thing, i.e. spatial magnitude, which again is itself separated from the two-parts by a boundary of which the same holds true, and so on in infinitum. Erom the latter argument, which was called that from dichotomy (the Ik Sixoro/itas), Zeno reasoned also that as regards number, what is must be unlimited, while, on the other hand, this complete Being, not in process of becoming, is to be regarded also as numerically limited [i.e. as complete]. And just as with the assumption of the " many," so the position that empty space is real is held to refute itself by a regress ad infinitum : if all that is is in space, and thus space is itself an existing entity, then it must itself be in a space, and this last likewise, etc. When the concept of the infinite, to which the Atomists had given a new turn, became thus prominent, all the enigmas involved in it for the contrasting points of view of intellect and sense-perception became prominent also, and Zeno used them to involve in a reductio ad absurdum the opponents of the doctrine of the one, self-limited Being. This dialectic, however, cut both ways, as was shown in the Ele- atic School itself, by the fact that a cotemporary of Zeno, Melissus, who shared his opinions, saw himself forced to declare that the Being of Parmenides was as unlimited in space as in time. Eor as Being can arise neither from other Being nor from Non-being, so it can be limited neither by existing Being (for then there must be a second Being), nor by a non-existent (for then this non-existent must be) : a line of argument more consistent from a purely theo- 1 The argument can be directed only against Atomism, and applies to this weakly. Chap. 1, § 4.] Conceptions of Being : Pythagoreans. 45 retical point of view than the position of the master, which had been influenced by determinations of worth. 11. The Pythagoreans took a mediating position in these ques- tions : for this, as for their other doctrines, they -vrere happily fitted by their emplpyment with mathematics, and by the manner in which they prosecuted this study. Its chief direction seems to have been arithmetical ; even the geometrical knowledge ascribed to them (as the well-known proposition named after Pythagoras) amounts to a linear representation of simple relations between numbers (.3^ + 4^ = 6^, etc.). It was not, however, in the general relations of construc- tions in space only that the Pythagoreans found numbers to be the determining principles ; the same was found to be true also in such phenomena of the corporeal world as they were chiefly engaged with. Their theoretical investigations concerning music taught them that harmony was based upon simple numerical relations of the length of the strings (octave, third, fourth), and their knowledge of astronomy, which was far advanced, led them to the view that the harmony prevailing in the motions in the heavenly bodies had, like the harmony in music,^ its ground in an order, in accordance with which the various spheres of the universe moved about a com- mon centre at intervals fixed by numbers. Suggestions so various as these mentioned seem to have united to evoke in a man like Philolaus the thought, that the permanent Being which philosophy was seeking was to be found in numbers. In contrast with the changing things of experience mathematical conceptions possess as regards their content the marks of a validity not subject to time — they are eternal, without beginning, imperishable, unchangeable, and even immovable ; and while they thus satisfy the Eleatic postu- late for Being, they present, on the other hand, fixed relations, — that rhythmical order which Heraclitus had demanded. Thus, then, the Pythagoreans found the abiding essense of the world in the mathematical relations, and in particular in numbers, — a solution of the problem more abstract than the Milesian, more capable of being represented to perception or imagination than the Eleatic, clearer than the . Heraclitic, more difiieult than those offered by cotemporary mediating attempts. The Pythagorean doctrine of numbers, as carried out by them, was attached partly to the numerous observations they had made on the arithmetical relations, partly to analogies which they discovered or sometimes artificially introduced, between numerical and philosophi- cal problems. The definite nature of each individual number and 1 Out of this analogy arose the fantastic idea of the harmony of the spheres. 46 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. ^ [Part I. the endlessness of the number series must indeed have ^t first sug- gested that reality belongs as well to the limited as to the unlimited, and by transferring this thought into the geometrical sphere the Pythagoreans came to recognise, in addition to the elements as the limited, a Eeality as belonging also to space as the unlimited void. They thought of the elements, however, as determined by the forms of the simple solids : fire by the tetrahedron, earth by the cube, air by the octahedron, water by the icosahedron, and a fifth material, sether, which they added as the celestial element to the four terres- trial elements assumed by Empedocles, by the dodecahedron.^ In these conceptions the prevailing idea was this : corporeality, or the essential quality of bodies, consists in the mathematical limitation of the unlimited, in the shaping out of space into forms. Mathemati- cal forms are made the essence of physical reality. The Pythagoreans further believed that in the antithesis between the limited and the unlimited they recognised the antithesis found in numbers between the odd and the even ; ^ and this antithesis was again identified with that between the perfect and the imperfect, the good and the bad,' in this last case not without the influence of old ideas connected with the religious faith of the oracles. Their Weltanschauung becomes thus dualistic: over against the limited, odd, perfect, and good stands the limitless, even, imperfect, and bad. As, however, both principles are united in the number one,^ which has the value of an even as well as of an odd number, so in the world as a whole these antitheses are adjusted to form a harmony. The world is harmony of numbers. Some of the Pythagoreans,* moreover, sought to trace out through the various realms of experience that fundamental antithesis, in the assumption of which all the school were agreed, and so a table of ten pairs of opposites came into existence: viz. limited and unlimited — odd and even — one and many — right and left — male and female — at rest and in motion — straight and crooked — light and dark — 1 While the main line of the Pythagoreans thus followed Empedocles, a later, Ecphantus, conceived of this limitation of space in the sense of Atomism. 2 The reason presented for this, viz. that even numbers permit of bisection to infinity (?), is indeed very questionable and artificial (Simpl. Phvs. D. WS^ 455, 20). 8 Nor must we here overlook the factor which had already asserted itself with Xenophanes and Parmenides, viz. that to the Greek the conception of measure was one that had a high ethical worth ; so that the infinite, which derides all measure, must to him appear imperfect, while the definite or limited (TreTrepoir- nivov) was necessarily regarded as more valuable. < Arist. Met. I. 5, 986 a 19. 5 Or men standing in close relations with Pythagoreanism, such as the physi- cian Alcmaeon, a perhaps somewhat older contemporarv of Philolaus. Cf. Arist. Met. I. 5, 986 a 22. Chap. 1, § 5.] Conceptions of Cosmic Processes. 47 good and bad — square and oblong or with unequal sides. This is evidently a collection put together without system, to fill out the sacred number ten, but an attempt at an articulation may at least be recognised. In accordance, then, with this or a similar scheme the Pythagoreans exerted themselves to make an order of things corresponding to the system of numbers, by assigning the fundamental conceptions in every department of knowledge to various numbers, and on the other hand by adjudging to every individual number, but especially to those from one to ten, determining significance in the various spheres of reality. The fantastic nature of the symbolic interpretation into which they fell in doing this must yet not cause us to overlook the fact that the attempt was therewith made to recognise an abiding order of things which could be grasped and expressed in conceptions, and to find the ultimate ground of this order in mathematical relations. ISTor did it escape the notice of the Pythagoreans themselves, notably of the later members of the school, that numbers could not be called the principles {apxp-O^ °^ things in the same way in which the term is applied to the various " stuffs," or kinds of matter, to the elements, etc., that things have not arisen out of them, but are formed according to them; and perhaps they best and most effec- tively express their thoughts when they say that all things are copies or imitations of numbers. With this conception the world of mathematical forms was thought as a higher, more original reality, of which the empirical reality was held to be only a copy : to the former belonged abiding Being ; the latter was the contrasted world of Becoming and change. § 5. Conceptions of Cosmic Processes.^ E. Hardy, Der Begriff der Physis in griechischen Fhilosophie, I. Berlin, 1884. As the fact of change — that is, the cosmic processes — furnished the most immediate occasion for reflection upon the abiding Being, so, on the other hand, the various conceptions of Being had as their ultimate aim only to make the processes of Nature intel- ligible. This task was indeed occasionally forgotten, or set aside, in the development of the conceptions of Being, as by the Eleatics ; but immediately afterward the further progress of thought proved to be determined all the more by the renewed attention given to 1 [Geschehen. I have translated this word variously by " change," " occur- rence," "event," "taking place," "coming to pass," "becoming," etc. The last, which is ordinarily used for the Greek jljvoiiai seems hardly broad enough. The German means any natural process or event.] 48 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [Part I. Becoming and change, and by the need of so' thinking Being that Becoming and change could not only be reconciled with it, but also be made intelligible by it. Hand in hand, then, with ideas of Beingr go those of Becoming, the two in constant relation to one another. 1. To the lonians the living activity of the world was something so much a matter of course that they never thought of asking for a cause of it. NWive Hylozoism could have in view only the explana- tion of a particular occurrence or cosmic process. Eocplanation, however, consists in reducing what is striking — not a matter of course or intelligible in itself — to such simpler forms of occur- rence as seem to need no explanation, inasmuch as they are most familiar to our perception. That things change their form, their qualities, their working upon one another, seemed to the Mile- sians to require explanation. They contented themselves in this with conceiving these changes as condensation or rarefaction of the cosmic matter. This latter process did not seem to them to need a farther explanation, though Anaximenes at least did add, that these changes in the state of aggregation were connected with changes in temperature — condensation with cooling, rarefaction with growing warm. This contrast gave rise to the arrangement of the states of aggregation in a series corresponding to the degree of rarefaction or condensation of the primitive matter : ^ viz. fire, air, water, earth (or stone). The Milesians used these ideas not only to explain individual phenomena of Nature, particularly the meteorological processes so important for a sea-faring people, but also to explain the develop' ment of the present state of the world out of the prime matter. Thus Thales conceived water as in part rarefying to form air and fire, and in part condensing to form earth and stone ; Anaximenes, starting from air, taught an analogous process of world-formation. As a result of these views it was assumed that the earth — resting on water, according to the first, on air, according to the second — occupied the centre of the sphere of air revolving about it, and this sphere of air was yet again surrounded by a sphere of fire, which either broke through or shone through in the stars. In setting forth this process of world-origination, which was per- haps still regarded by Thales and Anaximander as a process occur- ring once for all, the Milesians attached themselves closely to the cosmogonic poetry.^ JSTot until later does the consideration seem to 1 Hence it is intelligible that there were also physicists (not known to us by name) who would regard the world-stuff as an intermediate stage between air and water, or between air and Are. 2 Hence, also, the designation of the world-stuff as &pxi (beginning). Chap. 1, § 5.] Cosmic Processes : Anaximander, Meraclitus. 49 have gained prevalence, that if to change of form a change back to the original form corresponds, and if, at the same time, matter is to be regarded as not only eternal but eternally living, it is necessary to assume a ceaseless process of world-formation and world-destruc- tion, a countless number of successive worlds} 2. Although these essential constituents characterise also the physical theories of Anaximander, he was led beyond them by his metaphysical conception of the aneipov. The infinite, self-moved matter which was intended by this obscure conception was indeed, as a whole, to have no definite properties. It was held, however, to contain qualitative opposites within itself, and in its process of evolu- tion to exclude them from itself, so that they became separate.^ Anaximander remained then a Hylozoist in so far as he regarded matter as self -moved; he had seen, however, that the difEerences must be put into it if they were to come forth out of it on occasion of its self-motion. If, then, as regards his doctrine of Being, he ap- proached the later theory of a plurality of primitive substances, and abandoned the doctrine that the primitive matter was changeable in quality, he was yet entirely at one with the other Milesians as regards his conception of the causelessness of the cosmic process, and thought that by the union of the two opposites, the warm and the cold, which he conceived as the first to come out from the airapov, he could explain water. This done, he could proceed with his cosmog- ony along the oceanic path taken by Thales. But besides these physical and metaphysical determinations, the only fragment * preserved from him, giving his own words, repre- sents the perishing of things as an expiation for injustice, and so presents the first dim attempt to present the world-process as ethical necessity, and to conceive of the shadows of transitoriness, which rest even on the bright picture of Hellenic life, as retribution for sin. However doubtful the particular interpretation of this utterance, there is yet without doubt voiced in it the need of giving to physical necessity the worth of an ethical order. Here Anaxi- mander appears as a predecessor of Heraclitus. 3. The order of events which Heraclitus thought he could estab- lish as the only constant amid the mutation of things, had two essential marks, the harmony of opposites and the circuit completed by 1 This doctrine was supported, probably by Anaximander, certainly by Anaximenes. It is repeated in Heraclitus, Empedooles, and Leucippus. 2 The decisive passages for this very controverted question (Ritter, Seydel, Zeller) are Arist. Fhys. I. 4, 187 a 20, and Simpl. Fhys. (D.) .33' 154, 14 (after Theophrastus) ; also the continuation of the passage in the following note. s Simpl. Fhys. (D.) 6' 24, 18. Cf. Th. Ziegler, Arch. f. Gesch. d. Fhilos., I. 16 ff. 50 The Crreeks : Cosmological Period. [Part I. matter in its successive changes in the universe. The observation that everything in the world is in process of constant change was exaggerated by Heraclitus to the claim that everything is con- tinually changing into its opposite. The " other " was for him eo ipso the opposed. The "flux of things " became transformed in his poetic rhetoric into a ceaseless strife of opposites, and this strife (iroXc/uos) he declared to be the father of things. All that seems to be for a shorter or longer time is the product of opposed motions and forces which in their operation maintain themselves in equilib- rium. The universe is thus at every moment a unity divided in itself and again re-united, a strife which finds its reconciliation, a want that finds its satisfaction. The essence of the world is the invisible harmony in which all differences and oppositions are solved. The world is Becoming, and Becoming is unity of oppo- sites. These antitheses, according to the view of Heraclitus, present themselves particularly in the two processes taking place in con- trary directions, through which, on the one hand, tire becomes changed into all things, and, on the other hand, all things change back into fire. The same stages are passed through in both processes: on the "way downward" fire passes over,,by condensation, into water and earth, on the "way upward" earth and water, by rare- faction, pass over into fire ; and these two ways are alike. Change and counter-change run on side by side, and the semblance of a per- manent thing makes its appearance where for a time there is as much counter-change upon the one way as there is change upon the other. The fantastic forms in which Heraclitus put these views envelop the essential thought of a sequence of changes taking place in conformity to law, and of a continual compensation of these changes. The world is produced from the fire in ever-repeated rhythm and at fixed intervals of time, and then again flashes up in fire, to arise from it anew, a Phoenix.^ In this ceaseless transformation of all things nothing individual persists, but only the order, in which the exchange between the contrary movements is effected, — the law of change, which consti- tutes the meaning and worth of the whole. If in the struggle be- tween opposites it seems as though something new were constantly arising, this new is at the same time always a perishing product. The Becoming of Heraclitus produces no Being, as the Being of Parmenides produces no Becoming. 1 In details his physical, and especially his astronomical, ideas are weak. Metaphysical inquiry is more important with him than explanatory investiga- tion. He shares this with his opponent, Parmenides. Chap. 1, § 5.] Qosmio Processes : Parmenides, Empedocles. 51 4. In fact, the doctrine of Being held by the Eleatics excluded with plurality and change, events or cosmic processes, also. Ac- cording to their metaphysics an event or occurrenqe is incomprehen- sible, it is impossible. This metaphysics tolerates no physics. Parmenides denies to time, as to space, independent reality {SXKo irdpe^ Tov eovTos) : for him there is only timeless Being with no dis- tinctions. Although Parmenides added to the first part of his didac- tic poem, which presents the doctrine of Being, a second part which treats physical problems, this is yet done with the protest in advance that he is here presenting not truth, but the " opinions of mortals." ^ At the basis of all these ordinary opinions lies the false presupposi- tion, previously rejected, that in addition to Being there is still another, Non-being. All becoming, all plurality and motion, rest on the interaction of these opposites, which are then further designated as light and darkness, warmth and cold. A Weltanschauung is then portrayed in poetic imagery, in which fire shapes the dark empty space into corporeal structures, a mode of representation which in part reminds us of Heraclitus, and in part accords with the astro- nomical teaching of the Pythagoreans. The all-ruling Pire-power (Satju.oii'), as inexorable necessity (StKiy), with the help of love (I/dms) forces together what is akin, working from the centre of the world outward. Appropriation of the doctrines of others and polemic against them appear in motley mixture, agreeably to the purpose of the whole. Over this tissue thus interwoven hovers a poetic breath of plastic formative power, but original research and clear concep- tions are lacking. 5. Ideas more definite, and more usable for explaining the par- ticular, are found among the successors, who transformed the Eleatic conception of Being into the conceptions of element, homoiomerise, and atom, expressly for this purpose. They all declare that by occurrence or coming to be nothing else is to be understood than the motion of unchangeable corporeal particles. Empedodes and Anax- agoras seem still to have sought to connect with this the denial of empty space, — a principle which they received from Parmenides. They ascribed to their substances universal divisibility, and re- garded parts as capable of displacement in such a way that as these parts mixed and reciprocally interpenetrated, all space should be always filled out. The motion in the world consists, then, in this 1 The hypothetical exposition of how the world would have to be thought if, in addition to Being, Non-being, plurality, and becoming were also regarded as real, had, on the one hand, a polemic purpose; and on the other, it met the want of his disciples, who probably demanded of the master an explanation of his own of the empirical world. 52 The Greeks : Oosmological Period. [Part I. displacement of the parts of matter, each of which is always crowd- iug and displacing the other. Things at a distance from one another cannot act upon one another, except as parts of the one flow out and penetrate into the other. This action is the more possible in pro- portion as the efluxes of the one body resemble in their spatial form the pores of the other. So at least Empedocles taught, and the assumption of an infinite divisibility of substances is attested in the case of Anaxagoras also. Another picture of occurrence more akin to the present way of thinking is that presented by Leucippus. The atoms which impinge upon each other in empty space act upon each other by pressure and impact, group themselves together, and so form greater or smaller things or masses which are not separated and destroyed until some impact or pressure of other masses comes from without. All occurrence and coming to be consists in this process in which atom-complexes are successively formed and shattered. The fundamental form of world-motion in all three systems, how- ever, is that of the vortex, of circular rotation {hivrj). According to Empedocles it is brought about by the forces of love and hate acting among the elements ; according to Anaxagoras it is begun by the Reason-stuff acting according to ends, and then continues with mechanical consistency ; according to Leucippus it is the result always occurring from the collision of several atoms. The principle of mechanism was with Empedocles still enveloped in myth, with Anaxagoras it first made a half-successful attempt to break through the covering, and was completely carried through only by Leucippus. What hindered the first two from reaching this position was the introduction of considerations of worth into their explanatory theory. The one was for tracing the good and the evil back to cor- responding powers of mind, which were, to be sure, not ascribed to any being, but mythically hypostatised ; the other believed that he could explain the order of the whole only from the assumption that purposive, rationally considered impulse had originated the motions. Yet both came so near the position of Leucippus as to demand a teleological explanation for the beginning only of the vortex-motion; the farther course of the motions, and thus every individual occur- rence, they explained, as did Leucippus, purely mechanically, by the pushing and crowding of the particles of matter after these are once in motion in the manner determined. They proceeded so con- sistently in this that they did not exclude from this mechanical explanation even the origination and functions of organisms, among which, moreover, plants are regarded as being as truly animate as are animals. Anaxagoras is reproached for this by Plato and Aristotle, Chap. 1, § 5.] Cosmic Processes : Anaxagoras, Leucippus. 53 and an expression of Empedocles has been handed down/ according to which he taught that the animals had arisen here and there, with- out any rule, in odd and grotesque forms, and th«,t in the course of time only those fitted for life maintained themselves. The principle of the survival of the fittest, which plays so great a part in the biology of to-day, i.e. in Darwinism, is here already clearly formu- lated. On the ground of these ideas, an interesting contrast discloses itself in the ease of the three investigators, as regards their atti- tude toward cosmogonic theories. For Empedocles and for Leu- cippus, namely, the process of world-formation and world-dissolu- tion is a perpetual one ; for Anaxagoras, on the contrary, it is one that takes place once for all. Between the first two there is again the difference that Empedocles, like Heraclitus, teaches that the world arises and perishes in periodic alternation ; while Atomism, on the contrary, holds, that a countless number of worlds come into being and pass away. According to the principles of Empedocles, to be more explicit, there are four different states of the elements ; their complete intermixture, in which love alone rules, and hate is excluded, he calls o-^alpos ^ (sphere) ; when hate penetrates, this homogeneous world-sphere becomes separated into the individual things, until the elements are completely parted from one another ; and out of this separate condition love brings" them again together, until full union is again attained. Neither in the case of complete mixture, nor in that of complete separation, are there individual things ; in both cases the Eleatic acosmism makes its appearance. A world of individual things in motion exists only where love and hate struggle with one another in mingling and separating the elements. It is otherwise with Leucippus. Some of the atoms that dart about irregularly in the universe strike together here and there. Erom the various impulses to motion which the individual particles bring with the-m, where such aggregations occur, there results, according to mathematical necessity (drayKiy), a whirling movement of the whole, which draws into itself neighbouring atoms and atom- complexes, and sometimes even whole " worlds," and so gradually 1 Arist. Phys. II. 8, 198 b 29. Moreover, we find an expression already- attributed to Anaximander, wtiich teaches a transformation of organisms by adaptation to changed conditions of life : Pint. Plac. V. 19, 1 {Dox. D. 430, 15). For man, also, the oldest thinkers claimed no other origin than that of growth out of the animal world : so Empedocles in Plut. Strom, fr. 2. {Dox. D. 579, 17). 2 Evidently not without suggestion from the Eleatic world-sphere, which this absolute, fully adjusted mingling of all elements, taught by Empedocles, much resembles. 64 The Greeks : Oosmological Period. [Part L extends. Meanwhile such a system in process of revolution is differentiating itself, since, by the rotation, the finer, more movable atoms are driven to the periphery, the more inert and massy are gathered in the centre ; and so like finds its way to like, not by inclination or love, but through their like conformity to the law of pressure and impact. So there arise at various times and in differ- ent places in the boundless universe, various worlds, each of which continues in motion within itself, according to mechanical law, until it perhaps is shattered in pieces by collision with another world, or is drawn into the revolution of a greater. So, the Atomists main- tained, the sun and moon were at one time worlds by themselves, which subsequently fell into the greater vortex of which our earth is the centre. How near in principle this whole conception is to the natural science of to-day is obvious. The teleological pdint of view taken by Anaxagoras excludes, on the contrary, a plurality of worlds in time as well as a plurality of worlds in space. The ordering mind, which introduces the pur- posive motion of the elements, forms just this one world only, which is the most perfect."^ Anaxagoras, therefore, quite in the manner of the cosmogonic poetry, describes how the beginning of the world was preceded by a chaotic primitive condition, in which the ele- ments were intermingled without order and without motion. Then came the vovs, the " Eeason-stuff " (Vernunftstoff), and set it into ordered motion. This vortex-motion began at one point, the pole of the celestial vault, and extended gradually throughout the entire mass of matter, separating and dividing the elements, so that they now perform their mighty revolution in a uniformly harmonious manner. The teleological motive of the doctrine of Anaxagoras is due essentially to his admiration of the order in the stellar world, which, after it has performed the rotations started by the voSs, moves on without disturbance always in the same track. There is no ground for assuming that this teleological cosmology directed attention to the adaptation to ends in living beings, or even to the connected system of Nature as beneficent to man ; its gaze was fixed on the beauty of the starry heavens ; and what is related of the views of Anaxagoras on terrestrial things, on organisms, and on man, keeps quite within the setting of the mechanical mode of explanation in vogue among his contemporaries. What he said, too, with regard to the presence of life on other heavenly bodies, might just as well have come from the Atomists. 1 This motive, fully carried out, is found in Plato, Tim. 31, with unmistak- able reference to the opposition between Anaxagoras and the Atomists. Chap. 1, § 5.] Cosmic Processes : Zeno, the Pythagoreans. 55 Accordingly, although Anaxagoras conceived of the raffs as also the principle of animation, and thought of the particles of this substance as mingled in greater or lesser number with organic bodies, yet the central point in this con- ception is that of the authorship of the astronomical world-order. The other side, the moment or factor of the cause of animate life, % much more energeti- cally emphasised in the transformation which a younger eclectic natural philosopher, Diogenes of AppUonia, undertook to effect in the conception of Anaxagoras by connecting it with the hylozoistic principle of Anaximenes. He designated air as apx-h [first principle, primitive element], fitted it out, however, with the characteristics of the voii, — omniscience and force acting according to ends, — named this "rational air" also Tri-cO/ia [spirit], and found this formative principle in man and other organisms as well as in the universe. A rich physiological knowledge enabled him to carry through in detail this thought as applied to the structure and functions of the human body. With him teleology became the dominant mode of apprehending also the organic world. His fragments have been collected by Schorn (Bonn, 1829) and Panzerbieter (Leips. 1830). Cf. K. Steinhart in Ersch und Griiber's Encyclopadie. 6. All these doctrines, however, presuppose the conception of motion as one that is intelligible of itself and in need of no further explanation. They thought they had explained qualitative change when they had pointed out as its true essence motion, whether between the parts of a continuously connected matter, or in empty space. The opposition, therefore, which the Eleatic School brought to bear upon all these doctrines was directed first of all against this conception of motion, and Zeno showed that this could by no means be taken so simply, but was rather full of contradictions which inca- pacitated it for serving as principle of explanation. Among Zeno's famous proofs of the impossibility of motion,^ the weakest is that which proceeds from the relativity of the amount of motion, by showing that the movement of a wagon is variously esti- mated if it is observed either from wagons also in motion but in different directions and at varying rates of speed, or again from two wagons one of which is moving and one standing still. The three other proofs, on the contrary, which made use of the analysis into discrete parts, infinitely many and infinitely small, of the space passed through by motion, and the time occupied by it, were stronger, and for a long time were not overcome. The first proof was with reference to the impossibility of passing through a fixed space. This was regarded as proved by the infinite divisibility of the line, since the infinite nuniber of points which must be attained before reaching the goal permitted no beginning of motion. The same thought appears, somewhat varied, in the second argument, which seeks to prove the impossibility of passing through a space which has movable boundaries. The argument (known as that of 1 Arist. Phys. VI. 9, 239 b. 9. Cf . Ed. Wellmann, Zenon's Beweise gegen die Bewegung und ihre Widerlegungen (Frankfurt a. 0. 1870). 56 The Greeks : Oosmological Period. [Part I. Achilles and the tortoise) is, that since the pursuer in every inter- val or subdivision of time must first reach the point from which the pursued simultaneously starts, it follows that the latter will always be in advance, though by an interval which becomes constantly smaller and approaches a minimum. The third argument has refer- ence to the infinitely small extent of the motion performed in any instant. According to this argument, called "the resting arrow," the moved body is in every instant in some one point of its track ; its movement in this instant is then equal to zero; but from ever so many zeros no real magnitude 'arises. Together with the above-mentioned difficulties {airopiai) with regard to space and plurality, these argumentations of Zeno set forth an extremely skilfully projected system of refuting the mechanical theories, especially Atomism, — a refutation which was intended to serve at the same time as indirect proof of the correct- ness of the Eleatic conception of Being. 7. The number-theory of the Pythagoreans, too, was determined by Eleatic conceptions in so far as its procedure was, in the main, to demonstrate mathematical forms to be the fundamental relations of reality. When, however, they termed the actual world of reality an imitation of the mathematical forms, they thereby ascribed a sort of reality, even though of a derivative and secondary character, to individual things, and to what takes place among them. They were also the less inclined to withdraw from answering cosmological and physical questions as they were able to bring to philosophy the brilliant results of their astronomical investigation. They had come to a knowledge of the spherical form of the earth and of the heav- enly bodies ; they were aware also that the change of day and night depends upon a movement of the earth itself. At first, indeed, they thought of this movement as a circuit performed about a central fire to which the earth presented always the same side, a side unknown to us.^ On the other hand, they assumed that about this same cen- tral fire there moved in concentric circles, outside the earth's track, successively the moon, the sun, the planets, and finally the heaven containing the fixed stars. They brought into this system, however, in a way, the metaphysical dualism which they had maintained be- tween the perfect and the imperfect, inasmuch as they regarded the 1 Already in Plato's time the hypothesis of the central fire was given up by the younger Pythagoreans, Eophantus, Hicetus of Syracuse (and with it that of the " counter-earth," which had hitherto been assumed as placed between the central fire and the earth, invented merely to fill out the number ten), and instead the earth was located in the centre of the universe and provided with a rotation on its axis. With this latter assumption that of a resting position of the heaven of the fixed stars was connected. Chap. 1, § 6.] Conceptions of Cognition. b1 heaven of the stars, on account of the sublime uniformity of its motions, as the realm of perfection ; the world " beneath the moon," on the contrary, on account of the unrest of its changing formations and motions, they regarded as that of imperfection. This way of looking at things runs parallel to that of Anaxagoras, and leads, though in another way, to the interweaving and complicar tion of theory with considerations of worth [ethical or aesthetic values]. It was in connection with astronomical insight that the thought of an order of Nature in conformity to law dawned as clear knowledge upon the Grecian mind. Anaxagoras reasons from this to an ordering principle. Pythagoreanism finds in the heavens the divine rest of unchangeableness (Sichgleichbleibens) which it misses upon the earth. Here we have a meeting of the ancient religious ideas and the very different result yielded thus far by the scientific work of the Greeks. This latter, seeking a Permanent in the muta- tion of occurrence, found such a permanence only in the' great, simple relations, in the revolution of the stars, which abides ever the same. In the terrestrial world, with its whole change of manifold, con- stantly intersecting motions, this uniformity remained still hidden from Greek science : she regarded this terrestrial world rather as a domain of the imperfect, the lower, which wants the sure order of that other world. In a certain sense this may be looked upon as the ultimate result of the first period, a result which had a determin- ing influence for after time. What the attitude of the Pythagoreans was to the question concerning a peri- odic change of origination and annihilation of the world is uncertain. A plurality of co-existing worlds is excluded in their system. In their theory of world-for- mation and in their particular physical doctrines they concede so prominent a place to fire that they come very near to Heraclitus. Aristotle even places one of the contemporaries of Philolaus, Hippasus of Metapontum, in immediate con- nection with Heraclitus (Met. I. 3). Their assumption of aether as a fifth element out of which the spherical shells of the heavens were formed, in addition to the four elements of Empedocles, is doubtless connected with the separation which they made between heaven and earth. It is not less difficult to decide whether they derived the elements from a common ground, and if so, how : according to many passages it would seem as if they had spoken of a progressive " attraction," i.e. in this case (cf. above, p. 46), mathematical shaping out or forming of empty space by the ^v (one), the original number, which is exalted above limitation and the unlimited. Yet it seems, too, that in regard to these questions various views were held within the school side by side. § 6. The Conceptions of Cognition. M. Schneidewin, JJeber die Ke.ime erkenntnisstheoretischer und ethischer Phi- losopheme bei den vorsokratischen Denkern, Philos. Monatshefte, II. (1869), pp. 257, 345, 429. B. Mtinz, Die Keime der Erkenntnisstheorie in der vorsophistischen Periods der griechischen Philosophie. Vienna, 1880. 58 The G-reeks : Cosmological Period. [Part I. The question, -what things really are, or what is the intrinsic nature of things, -which is already contained in the Milesian con- ception of the apxrit presupposes that the current, original and naive mode of thinking of the -world has been shaken, although this pre- supposition has not come to clear recognition in consciousness. The question proves that reflective thought is no longer satisfied -with the ideas -which it finds current, and that it seeks truth behind or above them. Those ideas are given, ho-wever, through sense-per- ception and through the involuntary elaboration of this in thought, — an elaboration that has been transmitted from generation to generation, until it has became consolidated and fixed and embodied in language, and so forms a part of the thinker's data. When the individual -with his reflection transcends these ideas so given — and it is in this that philosophical activity ultimately consists — he does it on the ground of logical needs -which assert themselves as he re- flects on the given. His philosophising, then, even though he takes no account of this fact, gro-ws out of discrepancies between his expe- rience and his thought — out of the inadequacy exhibited by what is presented to his perception or imagination, when set over against the demands and presuppositions of his understanding. However unconscious of this its inner ground naive philosophising may he at the outset, attention cannot fail to be turned in time to the diver- sity in the sources of the conflicting ideas within. 1. The first observations, therefore, which the Grecian philosophers made on human knowledge concern this contrast between experience and reflection. The farther the explanatory theories of science became separated from the way of looking at things which belongs to daily life, the clearer it became to their authors that those theories sprang from another source than that of the customary opinions. To be sure they have not as yet much to say on this point. They set opinion (So^a) over against truth, and this often means only that their own doctrines are true and the opinions of others false. So much only is certain to them, that they owe their own views to reflection, while the mass of mankind — concerning whose intellectual activity it is just the older philosophers, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, who express themselves in an extremely depreciatory manner — persist in the illusion of the senses. Only through thinking {^povuv, voeiv, Xdyos), then, is the truth found ; the senses, if alone, give fraud and a lie. ^ So strong has reflection become in itself that it not only proceeds to con- sequences which to the common thinking have become absolutely 1 Heracl. Frag. (Schust.) 11, 123 ; Parmen. Frag. (Karsten) 54 fl. Chap. 1, § 6.] Conceptions of Cognition: Heraelitm, Parmenides. 59 paradoxical, but also maintains expressly that it is itself the sole source of truth as opposed to opinions. This, to be sure, works oddly when we notice that completely opposite illustrations of this same assertion are given by HeracU- tus and Farmenides in close succession. The former finds the deceit caused by the senses, and the error of the multitude, to consist in the illusory appearance of the Being of permanent things, which is presented to men by sense-perception ; the Eleatic, on the contrary, is zealous against the senses, because they would fain persuade us that there are in truth motion and change, becoming and arising, plurality and variety. Precisely this double form in which this same claim is put forward shows that it is not the result of an investigation, but the expression of a demand made on other grounds. Moreover, this proposition fits very differently into the general theories of the two great metaphysicians. The flux of all things, with its restless change of individual phenomena, as taught by Heraclitus, makes it easy to comprehend also the possibility of the emergence of false ideas, and the seeming of permanence and Being had besides a special explanation in the counter-course or opposi- tion (ivavTiorpowia) of the two " ways," for this causes the illusion of permanence or Being to arise where there is just as much change in one direction as in the other [i.e. from primitive fire into things and vice versa] . On the contrary, it is quite impossible to see where the seat of illusion and error was to be sought in the one world-sphere of Parmenides, everywhere the same, which was held to be at the same time the one, true world-thought. The search could be only among individual things and their changing activities, which were themselves declared to be illusion, non-existent. Nevertheless there is no support to be found in the literature preserved, for supposing that this so simple a thought ^ which would have over- thrown the entire Eleatic system, ever occurred to the investigators of that time. In any case, the Eleatics contented themselves with the assertion that all particular existence and all change were decep- tion and illusion. The same naive denial of that which they could not explain seems to have been employed also by the successors of the Eleatics in the matter of the qualitative attributes of individual things. Emped- ocles at least maintained that all things were mixtures of the ele- ments. The task that logically grew out of this was to show how the other qualities arise from the mixture of the properties of the 1 First carried out in Plato, Sophist, 237 A. 60 The Grreeks : Oosmological Period. [Part I. elements. But this he did not perform; so far as our knowledge extends, he did not at all set himself this task; he probably re- garded these particular qualities as not being (objectively), and as a deception of the senses, just as all qualities whatever were such in the view of Parmenides. And so the oldest view of the Ato- mists, as supported by Leucippus, may well have gone just to this point, maintaining that in individual things only the form, arrange- ment, situation, and motion of the constituent atoms were real, and that the other properties were a deceitful product "of the senses, which here, too, found no further explanation.^ These difficulties were perhaps jointly influential in the mind of Anaxagoras when he regarded all qualities as original, and not as having become what they are, and accordingly postulated countless elements. But for him arose the opposite difficulty of showing how it could come about, if all was regarded as contained in all, every quality in every thing, that only some of these qualities seemed to be present in individual things. He explained this in part from the consideration that many of the constituent parts are imperceptible because of their minuteness ; hence it is only by thought that we can learn the true qualities of things.^ Besides this, however, he seems to have followed up the thought, found already in Anaximan- der's idea of the awapov, that a complete mingling of definite quali- ties yields something indefinite. So, at least, he described the primitive mixture of all substances which preceded the formation of the world as completely devoid of quality,' and a similar thought seems to have permitted him to regard the four elements of Emped- ocles not as primitive substances, but rather as already mixtures.* The rationalism common to the pre-Sophistic thinkers assumes, among the Pythagoreans, the particular form of affirming that knowledge consists in mathematical thought. This, though in itself a narrowing, is yet, on the other hand, a great step in advance, in- asmuch as there is here given for the first time a positive definition of "thought" as contrasted with "perception." Only through number, taught Philolaus,^ is the essential nature of things to be : known ; that is, it is when the definite mathematical relations lying at their basis are recognised that things are properly conceived or 1 It is extremely improbable that the solution of the problem through the suDjectivity of the sense-qualities, which is found in Democtritus, was presented already by Leucippus, and therefore before Protagoras, who is universally regarded as the founder of this theory. 2 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VII. 90 f . « Frag. (Schorn) 4. From this passage the true light may, perhaps, be thrown upon the sense in which Anaximander designates the aTreipoi- as iSpuiTov. * Arist. Be Gen. et Oorr. I. 1, 314 a 24. s Frag. (Mull.) 13. Chap. 1, § 6.] Conceptions of Cognition : Philolaus, Zeno. 61 understood. This had been the experience of the Pythagoreans in music and in astronomy, and this was the object of their desire and effort in all other fields. When, however, they^ltimately came to the result that this requirement could be completely met only in the knowledge of the perfect world of the stars, they concluded from this that science (o-oc^ia) relates only to the realm of order and perfection, that is, to heaven, and that in the realm of the imper- fect, of change not subject to order, i.e. on earth, only practical ability (dpET)?) is of avail.^ Another positive characteristic of the "thinking" which the earlier investigators had set over against "perceiving," without closer specification, appears obscurely in the reasonings of Zeno, viz. conformity to logical laws. At the basis of all his attacks against plurality and motion lie the principle of contradiction and the presupposition that that can not be actual of which the same thing must be affirmed and also denied. This principle and presup- position were applied with clearness and certainty, though not ab- stractly expressed. The Eleatic theory of the world, so highly paradoxical, forced its supporters to enter into polemic more than did others, and the accounts as to Zeno's treatise, which, as it seems, was also logically well arranged and divided, offer a notable evi- dence of the developed technique of refutation to which the school attained in consequence. To be sure, this formal training which prevailed in Eleatic circles does not seem to have led as yet to the abstract statement of logical laws. : 2. The setting over against each other of "thinking" and "per- ceiving " arose, then, from an estimation of their relative epistemo- logical value {erkenntnisstheoretischen Werthbestimmung) [i.e. from the postulate that one of these two forms of mental activity is worth more epistemologically for attaining truth]. In decided contradiction with this, however, stand the psychological principles with which these same investigators sought to apprehend the origin and process of knowing. Eor although their thinking was directed first and chiefly toward the outer world, man's mental activity came under their attention in so far as they were obliged to see in this activity one of the formations, or transformations, or products of motion, of the universe. The mind or soul and its action are then at this time considered scientifically only in connection with the entire course of the universe, whose product they are as truly as are all other things ; and since among the men of this period the general principles of explanation are everywhere as yet conceived corpore- 1 Stob. Eel. I. 488. 62 The G-reehs : Qosmological Period. [Part I. ally it follows that we meet also a thorough-going materialistic psychology} Now mind or soul is in the first place moving force. Thales ascribed such a soul to magnets, and declared that the whole world was full of souls. The essential nature of individual souls was therefore sought at first in that which had been recognised as the moving principle in the whole. Anaximenes found it in air, Heraclitus and likewise Parmenides (in his hypothetical physics) in fire, Leucippus in the fiery atoms,^ and Anaxagoras in the world- moving, rational substance, the toBs. Where, as in the system of Empedocles, a corporeal moving principle was lacking, the mixed substance which streams through the living body, the blood, was regarded as soul. Diogenes of ApoUonia found the essence of the soul in the air mixed with the blood.' With the Pythagoreans, too, the individual soul could not be considered as the same with the h (One) which they conceived as moving principle of the world, nor regarded as a part of it ; instead, they taught that the soul was a number, and made this very vague statement more definite by say- ing that it was a harmony, — an expression which we can only interpret^ as meaning a harmony of the body; that is, the living, harmonious activity of its parts. If now to this moving force, which leaves the body in death, were ascribed at the same time those properties which we to-day designate as " psychical," we find a clear characterisation of the specifically theoretical interest by which this oldest science was filled, in the fact that among these attributes it is that of ideation, of " knowing," which is almost exclusively the object of attention.* Of feelings and volitions there is scarcely incidental mention.^ But as the 1 Besides those characterisations of the soul, which resulted from their gen- eral scientific theory, we find in the tradition in case of several of these men (Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and the Pythagoreans) still other doc- trines which are not only not connected with the former, but are evpn in con- tradiction to them. A conception of the body as prison of the sodl (o-ii^iui = p6vyi So indeed in tlie case of Xenoplion and JEschines ; the pliilosopliising cob- bler Simon, too, seems to have have been thus dependent on Socrates. What the Megarian and the Elean-Eretrian schools accomplished in this respect is too indefinitely transmitted to us, and is too closely in contact with Cynicism, to deserve separate mention. Chap. 2, § 7.] Problem of Morality : Antisthenes. . 83 of life brought about by civilisation yield for the fortune of the individual. The criticism of the social conditions and authorities, begun by the Sophists, has won a fixed standard through the medi- ating aid of the Socratic conception of virtue. The doctrine of virtue taught by Antisthenes ^ takes at the begin- ning a high and specious turn at the point where the doctrine finds itself hopelessly entangled in the Socratic circle. He declines to define more closely the contents of the concept of the good, and declares virtue itself to be not only the highest, but the only good, understanding, however, by virtue essentially only the intelligent con- duct of life. This alone makes happy, not indeed through the conse- quences which it brings about, but through itself. The contentment that dwells within the right life itself is accordingly completely independent of the world's course : virtue is itself sufficient for happiness ; the wise man stands free in the presence of fate and fortune. But this Cynic conception of virtue as sufficient in itself is, as is shown by its further development, in nowise to be interpreted as meaning that the virtuous man should find his fortune in doing good for its own sake amid all the whims of fate. Cynicism did not rise to this height, however much it may sound like it when virtue is celebrated as the only sure possession in the vicissitudes of life, when it is designated as the only thing to be striven for, and baseness, on the contrary, as the only thing to be avoided. This doctrine is a postulate derived with great logical consistency from the Socratic principle that virtue necessarily makes happy (cf. above, 7), and from this postulate Antisthenes sought in turn to define the real contents of the concept of virtue. If, namely, virtue is to make happy with certainty and under all circumstances, it must be that conduct of life which makes man as independent as possible of the course of events. Now every want and every desire is a bond which makes man dependent upon fortune, in so far as his happiness or unhappiness is made to consist in whether a given wish is fulfilled or not by the course of life. We have no power over the outer world, but we have power over our desires. We expose ourselves the more to alien powers, the more we desire, hope, or fear from them ; every desire makes us slaves of the outer world. Virtue, then, which makes man independent, can consist only in suppression of desires, and restriction of wants to the smallest conceivable measure. Virtue is freedom from- wants,' — from the standpoint of eudsemonism certainly the most 1 Principally preserved in Diog. Laert. VI. " Xen. Symp. 4, 34 ft. 84 The Greeks .• Anthropological Period. [Part I. consistent conclusion, and one that must have appealed especially to men of a humble position in life such as -we find the Cynics to be in part. By carrying out this thought in a radical manner the Cynics came to occupy a purely negative attitude toward civilisation. By aiming to reduce the measure of the virtuous wise man's wants to what was absolutely inevitable, and to regard all other strivings as pernicious or indifferent, they rejected all the goods of civilisation and attained the ideal of a state of Nature, — an ideal stripped of all higher worth. Taking up earlier Sophistic theories and developing them farther, they taught that the wise man accommodates himself only to what Nature peremptorily demands, but despises all that appears desir- able or worthy of obedience merely as the result of human opinion or institution. Wealth and refinement, fame and honour, seemed to them just as superfluous as those enjoyments of the senses which went beyond the satisfg[.ction of the most elementary wants of hunger and love. Art and science, family and native land, were to them indifferent, and Diogenes owed his paradoxical popularity to the ostentatious jest of attempting to live in civilised Greece as if in a state of Nature, solely <^uo-ei. In this way the philosophising proletarian forced himself to despise all the good things of civilisation, from the enjoyment of which he found himself more or less excluded. On the other hand, he recog- nised none of the laws to which civilised society subjected itself, as binding in themselves, and if there is any truth at all in the coarse anecdotes which antiquity relates on the subject, this class took pleasure in scofl&ng openly at the most elementary demands of morals and decency. This forced and, in part, openly affected nat- uralism knows nothing any longer of 81K17 and atSuis (justice and rev- erence), which the older Sophistic teaching had allowed to remain as natural impulses, and elicits a conception of virtue which sup- poses that greed and lust complete the essential qualities of the natural man. Yet the Cynics were not so bad as they made themselves. Diogenes even preserved a remnant of respect for mental training, as the only thing which could free man from the prejudices of con- ventional institutions and lead to freedom from wants by insight into the nothingness of the pretended goods of civilisation. He also conducted the education of the sons of Xeniades, a Corinthian Sophist, according to the principles of the Cynic naturalism, and not without success. On the whole, this philosophy is a characteristic sign of the time, the mark of a disposition which, if not hostile, was yet indifferent Chap. 2, § 7.] Problem of Morality : Aristippus. 85 to society and had lost all comprehension of its ideal goods ; it enor bles us to see from within how at that time Greek society was dis- integrating into individuals. When Diogenes called himself a cosmopolitan, there was in this no trace of the ideal thought of a community of all men, but only the denial of his adherence to any civilised community ; and if Crates taught that the plurality of gods exists only in the opinion of men, and that, " according to Nature," there is but one God, there is in the Cynic doctrine no trace to war- rant the conclusion that this monotheism was Ifor them an especially clear idea or even an especially deep feeling. 9. In complete contrast with this system stands Hedonism, the philosophy of regardless enjoyment. Starting as did the Cynics from the incompleteness of the Socratic doctrine, Aristippus struck out in the opposite direction. He was quick to give to the concept of the good, a clear and simple content, — that of pleasure (Ji&ovrf). This latter conception at first does duty under the general psycholo- gical meaning of the feeling of contentment which grows out of the fulfilment of every striving and wish.' Happiness is then the state of pleasure which springs from the satisfied will. If this is the only thing to be considered, it is a matter of indifference what the object of will and of gratification is; all depends on the degree of pleasure, on the strength of the feeling of satisfaction.' This, however, in the opinion of Aristippus, is present in the highest degree in the case of sensuous, bodily enjoyment which relates to the immediate present, to the satisfaction of the moment. If, then, virtue is knowledge directed toward happiness, it must enable man to enjoy as much and as vigorously as possible. Virtue is ability for enjoyment. Every one, to be sure, may and can enjoy ; but only the man of education, of intelligence, of insight — the wise man — understands how to enjoy rightly. In this we must consider not only the intelligent appraisal (c^povT/o-is), which knows how to select, among the various enjoyments that present themselves in the course of life, those which will afford the pleasure that is highest, purest, least mixed with pain ; we must consider also the inner self-posses- sion of the man who is not blindly to follow every rising appetite, and who, when he enjoys, is never to give himself entirely up to the enjoyment, but is to stand above it and control it. The enjoy- ment which makes man the slave of things is, indeed, as the Cynics 1 Besides this, also, Xenophon not infrequently puts the rjSi into the mouth of Socrates. ciple. Socrates. 2 This, too, is a completely correct consequence from the eudsemonistic prin- ]le. 86 The Q-reeks : Anthropological Period. [Part I. say, to be rejected; but to delight in pleasure and yet not give one's self up to it is harder than to renounce it, as they do. Of this, however, man becomes capable through right insight only.^ On this ground the Cyrenaics, in particular the younger Aristippus (called /xiyTpoStSaKTos, "mother-taught," because his grandfather's wisdom was transmitted to him through his mother Arete), set on foot systematic investigations as to the origin of the mOr], the feelings and impulses. In a physiological psychology which was connected with that of Protagoras (cf. below, § 8), they traced the varieties in feeling back to states of motion in the' body : to rest corresponded indifference, to violent motion pain, to gentle motion pleasure. Besides such explanatqry theories, however, this philos- ophy of bonvivants extended to an unprejudiced general theory of things. Vov them, too, as Theodorus taught, all ethical and legal prescriptions were ultimately' merely institutions that were valid for the mass of men; the educated man of enjoyment gives himself no trouble about them, and enjoys things when they come into his possession. Theodorus, who bears the surname " the Atheist," put aside also all religious scruples which are opposed to devotion to sensuous enjoyment, and the school also exerted itself in this interest to strip the halo from religious faith, so far as possible, as is proved by the well-known theory of Euemerus, who in his lepJi avaypa^ri undertook to trace belief in the gods back to the worship of ancestors and veneration of heroes. Thus the Cyrenaics ultimately agreed with the Cynics in this, that they, too, regarded all that is fixed vo/au, i.e. by the social convention of morals and law, as a limitation of that right to enjoy- ment which man has by nature {^wra), and which the wise man exercises without troubling himself about historical institutions. The Hedonists gladly shared the refinement of enjoyment which eivilisation brought with it ; they found it convenient and per- inissible that the intelligent man should enjoy the honey which others prepared; but no feeling of duty or thankfulness bound them to the civilisation whose fruits they enjoyed. This same con- dition of recognising no native land, this same turning aside froni the feeling of political responsibility, which among the Cynics grew out of despising the enjoyments of civilisation, resulted for the Cyrenaics from the egoism of their enjoyment. Sacrifice for others, patriotism, and devotion to a general object, Theodorus declared to be a form of foolishness which it did not become the wise man to share, and even Aristippus rejoiced in the freedom from 1 Cf. Diog. Laert. II. 65 ff. Chap. 2, § 8.] JProblem of Science : the Sophists. 87 connection with, any state, which his wandering life afforded him.^ The philosophy of the parasites, who feasted at the full table of Grecian beauty, was as far removed from the ideal meaning of that beauty as was the philosophy of the beggars who lay at the threshold. In the meantime, the principle of the expert weighing of enjoy- ments contains an element which necessarily leads beyond that doctrine of enjoyment for the moment which Aristippus preached, and this advance was made in two directions. Aristippus himself had already admitted that in the act of weighing, the pleasure and pain which would in future result from the enjoyment must be taken into account ; Theodorus found that the highest good was to be sought rather in the cheerful frame of mind (xapa) than in the enjoyment of the moment, and Anniceris came to see that this could be attained in a higher degree through the spiritual joys of human intercourse, of friendship, of the family, and of civil society than through bodily enjoyments. This knowledge that the enjoy- ments afforded by the intellectual and spiritual aspects of civilisar tion are ultimately finer, richer, and more gratifying than those of bodily existence, leads directly over into the doctrine of the Epicureans. But, on the other hand, the Hedonistic school could not fail ultimately to see that the painless enjoyment to which it aimed to educate the man of culture is but a rare lot. In general, found Hegesias, he is to be accounted as already happy who attains the painless state, is free from actual discomfort. With the great mass of men discomfort, the pain of unsatisfied desires, pre- ponderates: for them it would be better, therefore, not to live. The impressiveness with which he presented this, brought him the surname Treitrt^omTos, — he persuaded to death. He is the first representative of eudoemonistic pessimism; with this doctrine, how- ever, eudsemonism refutes itself. He shows that if happiness, satisfaction of wishes, and enjoyment are to be the meaning and end of human life, it misses this end, and is to be rejected as worthless. Pessimism is the last but also the annihilating con- sequence of eudaemonism, — its immanent criticism. § 8. The Problem of Science.^ P. Natorp, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Erkenntnissproblems bei den Alten. Berlin, 1884. The Sophists were teachers of political eloquence. They were obliged in the first instance to give instruction on the nature and 1 Xen. Mem. 11. 1, 8 ff. 2 IWissenschaft. Science, as used in this section, is nearly equivalent to " scientific knowledge." Sometimes the subjective aspect of the term is promi- nent, and sometimes the objective.] 88 The Q-reeks : Anthropological Period. [Part I. right use of language. And while they were transforming rhetoric from a traditional art to a science, they applied themselves in the first place to linguistic researches, and became creators of grammar and syntax. They instituted investigations as to the parts of the sentence, the use of words, synonyms, and etymology. Prodicus, Hippias, and Protagoras distinguished themselves in this respect; as to the fruit of their investigations, we are only imperfectly informed. 1. Our knowledge of their logical acquisitions, which with the exception of a few allusions are lost, is in a still more unfortunate condition. For, as a matter of course, the teachers of rhetoric treated also the train of thought in discourse. This train of thought, however, consists in proof and refutation. It was then inevitable that the Sophists should project a theory of proof and refutation, and there is explicit testimony to this in the case of Protagoras.' Unfortunately, there is no more precise information as to how far the Sophists proceeded with this, and as to whether they attempted to separate out the logical Forms from those elements which belong to the content of thought. It is characteristic that the little information which we have concerning the logic of the Sophists relates almost without exception to their emphasising of the principle of contradiction. To the essential nature of the advo- cate's task, refutation was more closely related than proof. Protag- oras left a special treatise ^ concerning Grounds of Refutation, perhaps his most important writing, and formulated the law of the contradictory opposite, so far, at least, as to say that there are with reference to every object two mutually opposing propositions, and to draw consequences from this. He thus formulated, in fact, the procedure which Zeno had practically employed, and which also played a great part in the disciplinary exercises of the Sophists, indeed the greatest part. For it was one of the main arts of these " Enlighteners " to per- plex men as to the ideas previously regarded as valid, to involve them in contradictions, and when the victims were thus confused, to force them if possible, by logical consequences, real or manufac- tured, to such absurd answers as to make them become ridiculous to themselves and others. From the examples which Plato ' and Aristotle ^ have preserved, it is evident that this procedure was not 1 Diog. Laert. IX. 51 fi. 2 It is probable that KarajSiiXXoi'rcs {sc. \tiyoi) and "AiTtXoyfot are only two different titles of this work, the first chapter of which treated truth. 8 Plato. in the Euthydemus and in the Oratylus, Aristotle in the book "0« the Sophistic Fallacies." Chap. 2, § 8.] Problem of Science : the Megarians. 89 always any too purely logical, but was thoroughly sophistical in the present sense of the word. The examples show that these people let slip no ambiguity in speech, no awkwardness in popular expres- sion, if out of it they might weave a snare of absurdity. The witticisms which result are often based merely upon language, grammar, and etymology ; more rarely they are properly logical ; quite often, however, coarse and dull. Characteristic here, too, are the catch-questions, where either an affirmative or negative answer, according to the customs and presuppositions of the ordinary mean, ings of the words, gives rise to nonsensical consequences, unforeseen by the one answering.' Plato has portrayed two brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysidorus, who practised this art of logomachy or eristic, which had great success among the Athenians who were great talkers and accus- tomed to word-quibbling. Aside from them, it was prosecuted principally by the Megarians, among whom the head of the school, Euclid, busied himself with the theory of refutation.'' His adhe- rents, EubuUdes and Alexinus, were famous for a series of such catches, which made a great sensation and called forth a whole lit- erature.' Among these there are two, the " Heap " and the " Bald- head," * the fundamental thought in which is to be traced back to Zeno, and was introduced by him into the arguments by which he wished to show that the composition of magnitudes out of small parts is impossible. In like manner, Zeno's arguments against motion were amplified, even if not deepened or strengthened,' by another Megarian, Diodorus Gronos. Unwearied in finding out such aporioe, difficulties, and contradictions, this same Diodorus invented also the famous argument (Kvpievwv) which was designed to destroy the conception of possibility : only the actual is possible ; for a possible which does not become actual evinces itself thereby to be impossible.' In another manner, also, the Sophists who were affiliated with the Eleatics, show an extreme application of the principle of contradic- tion, and a corresponding exaggeration of the principle of identity. Even Gorgias seems to have supported his opinion that all state- ments are false, upon the assumption that it is incorrect to predicate 1 As a typical example, " Have you left off beating your father ? " or " Have you shed youi- horns ? " 2 Diog. Laert. II. 107. 8 Cf. Prantl, Gesch. der Log, I. 33 ft. * Which kernel of grain by being added makes the heap ? Which hair falling out makes the bald head ? 6 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. X. 85 fl. « Cie. Be Fato, 7, 13. 90 The Greeks : Anthropological Period. [Part I. of any subject anything else than just this subject itself; and the Cynics, as well as Stilpo the Megarian, made this thought their own. There remain, accordingly, only such purely identical judgments as, good is good, man is man, etc' As a logical consequence of this, judging and talking are made as impossible as were plurality and motion according to the Eleatic principle. As in the metaphysics of Parmenides, the ghost of which appears occasionally both among the Megarians and the Cynics (cf. below, No. 5), the lack of concep- tions of relation permitted no combination of unity with plurality and led to a denial of plurality, so here the lack of conceptions of logical relation made it appear impossible to assert of the subject a variety of predicates. 2. In all these devious windings taken by the researches of the Sophists concerning the knowing activity, the sceptical direction is manifesting itself. If on such grounds the logical impossibility of all formation of synthetic propositions was maintained, this showed that knowledge itself was irreconcilable with the abstract principle of identity, as it had been formulated in the Eleatics' doctrine of Being. The doctrine of Parmenides had itself become ensnared past help in the dichotomies of Zeno. This came to most open expression in the treatise of Gorgias,^ which declared Being, Knowl- edge, and Communication of Knowledge to be impossible. There is nothing; for both Being, which can be thought neither as eternal nor as transitory, neither as one nor as manifold, and Non-being are conceptions that are in themselves contradictory. If, however, there were anything, it would not be knowable ; for that which is tJiought is always something else than that which actually is, other- wise they could not be distinguished. Finally, if there were knowl- edge, it could not be taught ; for every one has only his own ideas, and in view of the difference between the thoughts and the signs which must be employed in their communication, there is no guar- anty of mutual understanding. This nihilism, to be sure, scarcely claimed to be taken in earnest ; even the title of the book, -n-tpl <^i;crea)s ov irepl Tov jxrj oi/Tos {Concei-n- ing Nature, or concerning that which is not), appears like a grotesque farce. The Rhetorician, trained to formal dexterity, who despised all earnest science and pursued only his art of speaking,' indulged in the jest of satirising as empty the entire labour of philos- 1 Plat. Theoet. 201 E. Cf. Soph. 251 B. 2 Extracts are found partly in the third chapter of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise De Xenophane, Zenone, Cforgia (cf. p. 30), in part in Sext. Emp. VII. 66-86. « Plat. Meno. 95 C. Chap. 2, § 8.] Problem of Science : Protagoras. 91 ophy, and doing this ironically in the style of Zeno's pinching-mill of contradictions. But just the facts that he did this, and that his work found applause, show how among the men^vho occupied them- selves in instructing the people, and in the circles of scientific culture itself, faith in science was becoming lost at just the time when the mass of the people was seeking its welfare in it. This despair of truth is the more comprehensible, as we see how the serious scientific investigation of Protagoras attained the same result. E. Laas, Idealismus und Positivismus. I. Berlin, 1880. W. Halbfass. Die Beriehte des Platan und Aristoteles uber Protagoras. Strassb. 1882. Sattig, Der Protagoreische Sensualismus (Zeitsohrift fiir Phllosophie, vols. 86-89). 3. The germ of the doctrine of Protagoras is found in his effort to explain the ideas of the human mind psycho-genetioally. Insight into the origin and development of ideas was absolutely necessary for the practical aspect of a system of ethics, and particularly for the cultivation of rhetoric. The statements, however, which the metaphysicians had occasionally uttered, were in nowise sufficient for the purpose, constructed as they were from general presupposi- tions and permeated by them ; on the contrary, the observations in physiological psychology which had been made in the more recent circles of investigators who were more given to natural science, offered themselves as fit for the purpose. Thinking and perceiving had been set over against each other from the point of view of their relative worth ; this determining element now disappeared for Protagoras, and so there remained for him only the view of the psychological identity of thinking and perceiving, — a view to which even those metaphysicians had committed themselves as soon as they attempted to explain ideation from the world-process (cf. § 8). In consequence of this he declared that the entire psychical life co?i- sists only in perceptions.^ This sensualism was then illustrated by the great mass of facts which physiological psychology had assembled in connection with the teaching of the physicians that were scien- tific investigators, and by the numerous theories which had been brought forward with special reference to the process of the action of the senses. All these, however, had in common the idea that perception rests in the last instance upon motion, as does every process by which things come to be or occur in the world. In this even Anaxagoras 1 Diog. Laert. IX. 51. 92 The Grreehs: Anthropological Period. [PartL and Empedocles were at one with the Atomists, from whose school Protagoras, as a native of Abdera, had probably gone out. This agreement extended still farther to the assumption, made on all sides, that in perception there was not only a condition of motion in the thing to be perceived, but also a like condition in the percip- ient organ. Whatever view might be taken as to the metaphysical essence of that which was there in motion, it seemed to be acknowl- edged as undoubted that every perception presupposed this double motion. Empedocles had already anticipated the doctrine that the inner organic motion advances to meet the outer.' On this foundation ^ the Protagorean theory of knowledge is built up. If, that is to say, perception is the product of these two motions directed toward one another, it is obviously something else than the perceiving subject, but just as obviously it is something else than the object which calls forth the perception. Conditioned by both, it is yet different from both. This pregnant discovery is designated as the doctrine of the subjectivity of sense-perception. Nevertheless, in the case of Protagoras this appears with a peculiar restriction. Since, like all earlier thinkers, he evidently could not assume a consciousness without a corresponding existent content of consciousness, he taught that from this double motion there was a two- fold result : viz. perception (ato-flj^o-is) in the man, and content of per- ception (to aia-drjTov) in the thing. Perception is therefore indeed the completely adequate knowledge of what is perceived, but no knowl- edge of the thing. Every perception is then in so far true as, at the instant when it arises, there arises also in connection with the thing the represented content, as aia-drjTov, but no perception knows the thing itself. Consequently every one knows things not as they are, but as they are in the moment of perception for him, and for him only ; and they are in this moment with reference to him such as he represents them to himself. This is the meaning of the Protagorean relativism, according to which things are for every individual such as they appear to him ; and this he expressed in the famous proposition that man is the measure of all things. According to this, therefore, every opinion which grows out of per- ception is true, and yet in a certain sense, just for this reason, it is 1 Whether these two motions were already designated by Protagoras as active and passive (iroiovv and irdo-xox), as is the case in Plato's presentation (^Theoet. 156 A), may remain undecided. At all events, such anthropological categories in the mouth of the Sophist are not surprising. 2 With regard to such preparatory ideas, there is no ground to trace this theory of the motions which advance to meet one another, to direct connection with Heraclitus. Its Heraclitean element, which Plato very correctly saw, was sufficiently maintained by those direct predecessors who reduced all Becoming and change to relations of motion. Chap. 2, § 8.] Problem of Science : Protagoras. 93 also false. It is valid only for the one perceiving, and for him even only at the moment when it arises. All universal validity forsakes it. And since, according to the view of Protagoras, there is no other kind of ideas, and therefore na other knowledge than percep- tion, there is for human knowledge nothing whatever that is univer- sally valid. This view is phenomenalism in so far as it teaches in this entirely definite sense a knowledge of the phenomenon, limited to the individual and to the moment ; it is, however, scepticism in so far as it rejects all knowledge which transcends that. How far Protagoras himself drew practical consequences from this principle that every one's opinion is true for himself, we do not know. Later Sophists concluded that, according to this, error would not be possible ; everything, and again nothing, belongs to everything as attribute. In particular they concluded that no actual contradic- tion is possible ; for since every one talks about the content of his perception, different assertions can never have the same object. At all events, Protagoras refused to make any positive statement con- cerning what is; he spoke not of the actual reality that moves, but only of motion, and of the phenomena which it produces for perception. Moreover, the attempt was now made, whether by Protagoras him- self, or by the Sophistic activity dependent upon him, to trace dif- ferences in perception, and so also in the phenomenon, back to differences in this motion. It was principally the velocity of the motion which was considered in this connection, though the form also was probably regarded.'' It is interesting to note further that under the concept of perception not only sensations and perceptions, but also the sensuous feelings and desires, were subsumed ; it is note- worthy especially because to these states also an ala-O-qrov, a momen- tary qualification of the thing which produced the perception, was held to correspond. The predicates of agreeableness and desir- ability receive in this way the same valuation epistemologically as do the predicates of sensuous qualification. What appears agreeable, useful, and desirable to any one is agreeable, useful, and desirable for hini. The individual state of consciousness is here, too, the measure of things, and no other universally valid determination of the worth of things exists. In this direction the Hedonism of Aristippus was developed out of the Protagorean doctrine ; .we know, teaches Aristippus, not things, but only their 1 Doubtless we have here asserting itself the development of the Pythagorean theory of knowledge out of the Atomistic school, to which this reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative was essential (cf. above, § 6), even though the So- phist declined from principle to enter into such metaphysical theories as Atomism. 94 The Greeks : Anthropological Period. [Part I. worth for us, and the states {irddr]) into which they put us. These, however, are rest and indifference, violent motion and pain, or gentle motion and pleasure. Of these only the last is worth striving for (of. above, § 7, 9). 4. Thus all courses of Sophistic thought issued in giving up truth as unattainable. Socrates, however, needed truth, and on this account he believed that it was to be attained if it were honestly sought for. Virtue is knowledge ; and since there must be virtue, there must be knowledge also. Here for the first time in history the moral con- sciousness appears with complete clearness as an epistemological postulate. Because morality is not possible without knowledge, there must be knowledge ; and if knowledge is not here and now existent, it must be striven for as the lover seeks for the possession of the loved object. Science is the yearning, struggling love for knowledge, — ^iXof the results of the extraordinarily comprehensive literary activity of Aris- totle only the smallest part, but the most important part from the point of view of science, is extant. The dialogues published by himself, which in the eyes of the ancients placed him on a level with Plato as an author also, are lo.st with the exception of a few fragments, and so also are the great compilations which with the aid of his scholars he prepared for the different branches of scientific knowl- edge. Only Iiis scientific didactic writings, which were designed as text-books to be made the foundation of lectures in the Lyceum, are extant. The plan of execution in his works varies greatly ; in many places there are only sketchy notes, in others complete elaborations ; there are also different revisions of the same sketch, and it is probable that supplementary matter by different scholars has been inserted in the gaps of the manuscripts. ,*Since the finst complete edi- tion prepared in ancient times (as it appears, on the occasion of a new discovery of original manuscripts) by Andronicus of Rhodes '(fiO-50 e.g.) did not separate these parts, many critical questions are still afloat concerning it. Cf. A. Stahr, Aristotelia, II. (Leips. 1832); V. Rose (Berlin, 1854); H. Bonitz (Vienna, 1862 ft.); ,T. Bernays (Berlin, ]«();!); B. Heitz (Leips. 18Ur, and in the second ed. of i"). Miiller's Gesch. dur griech. Lit., II. 2, 286-321); E. Vahlen (Vienna, 1870 ff.). This text-book collection,! as it were, is arranged in the following manner : (a) Logical treatises ; the Categories, on the Proposition, on Interpretation, the Analytics, the 7'opirs including the book on the Fallacies — brought together by the school as '■^Onjaimti" ; (ft) Theoretical Philosophy : Fundamental Science (Metajilii/xics), the Phi/:iirs, the History of Animals, and the Psychology ; to the three last are attached a number of separate treatises ; (c) Practical Philosophy: the Etliics in the Nicomachean and Eudemian editions and the Politics (which likewise is not complete) ; (d) Poietical or Poetioal Philosophy : the Bhetoric and the Peictic. Fr. Biese, Die Philosophie des Aristoteles (2* vols., Berlin, 1830-42); A. Rosmini Sirliati, Aristotele Fxposto ed Esaminato i'l^onno, 1858); G. H. Lewes, Aristotle, a Chapter from the History of Science' (Loud. 1864) ; G. Grote, Aristotle (published from his literary remains, Lond. 1872). [Trans, of the Psycltuhii/ii by E. Wallace (Carnb. 1882) ; of the Ethics, by Peters (Lond. 1881), Welldun (Lond. and N.Y.), Williams (Lond. 1876), Chase (Lond. 1877), Hatch (Lond. 1879); of the Poetics, h\ Wharton (Camb. 1883) ; of the Politics, by Welldon (Camb. 1888), Jowett (2 vols., Oxford, 1885-88) ; of the Mlietorir, by Welldon (Lond. and N.Y. 1886) ; also tr. of all of the above and of the Metaphysics, Orymwn, and History of A)limals in the Bohn Library. Editions of the Politics with valuable introduction by Newman (Oxford, 1887, 2 vols.); of the Etliics, by A. Grant. Cf. also Art. in Eiic. Brit., Arisintle by A.liiaiit; T. H. Green in Works; A. C. Bradley,.. I. 's Theory of the State, in Hellenica. E. Wallace, Outlines of A.^s Phil, is convenient for the student.] § 9. Metaphysics grounded anew in EpiStemology and Ethics. The great systematisers of Greek science exercised a swift but just criticism upon tlie Sopliistic doctrine. Tliey saw at once that among the doctrines of the Sophists but a; single one possessed the worth of lasting validity and scientiiic fruitfulness — the perception tlieonj of Protagoras. 1 Of the newer editions, that of the Berlin Ac'ademy (J. Bekker, Brandis, Rose, Usener, Bonitz), 5 vols., Berlin, 1831-70, is, made the basis of citations. The Parisian edition (Didot) is also to be noticed (Dtibner, Bussemaker, Ileitz) 5 vols., Paris, 1848-74. Chap. 3, § 9.] The New Metaphysics. 105 1. This," therefore, became the starting-point for Democritus and for Plato ; and both adopted it in order to transcend it and attack the consequences which the Sophist had drawn from it. Both admit that perception, as being itself only a product of a natural process, can be the knowledge of something only which likewise arises and passes away as transitory product of the same natural process. Perception then gives only opinion (8d^a) ; it teaches what appears in and for human view (called vd/io) in Democritus with a genuine Sophistic mode of expression), not what truly or really (cteij with Democritus, oi/tms with Plato) is. For Protagoras, who regarded perception as the only source of knowledge, there was consequently no knowledge of what is. That he took the farther step of denying Being altogether and declaring the objects of perception to be the sole reality, behind which there is no Being to be sought for, — this "positivist" conclusion is not to be demonstrated in his case : the doctrine of "nihilism" ("there is no Being ") is expressly ascribed by tradition only to Gorgias. If, nevertheless, from any grounds whatever, a universally valid knowledge {yvrja-it] yv^iirj with Democritus, iiruxT-fifni) with Plato) was to be again set over against opinions, the sensualism of Protagoras must be abandoned and the position of the old metaphysicians, who distinguished thought (Stavota), as a higher and better knowledge, from perception, must be taken again (cf. § 6). Thus Democritus and Plato both in like manner transcend Protagoras by acknowledg- ing the relativity of perception, and looking to "thought" again for knowledge of what truly is. Both are outspoken rationalists} 2. This new metaphysical rationalism is yet distinguished from the older rationalism of the cosmological period, not only by its broader psychological basis, which it owed to the Protagorean analysis of perception, but also in consequence of this, by another valuation of perception itself from the standpoint of the theory of knowledge. The earlier metajjliysicians, where they could not fit the contents of perception into their conceptional idea of the world, had simply rejected them as deceit and illusion. Now this illusion had been explained (by Protagoras), but in such a way that while surrendering its universal validity the content of perception might yet claim at least the value of a transient and relative reality. This, in connection with the fact that scientific knowledge was 1 Cf. Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VIII. 56. The doctrine of Democritus with regard to "genuine " Icnowledge is most shaiply formulated in Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VII. 139. Plato's attack upon the Protagorean sensualism is found prin- cipally in the Thecetetus, his positive rationalistic attitude in the Fhxdrus, Sym- posium, Republic, and Phcedo. 106 The Greeks: Systematic Period. [Part I. directed toward the abiding " true " Being, led to a division in the conception of reality, and with this the fundamental need of explanar tory thought came to clear, explicit consciousness, — a need which unconsciously lay at the basis of the beginnings of science. To the two kinds of knowledge — so Democritus and Plato taught — cor- respond two different kinds of reality: to perception a changing, relative, transient reality or actuality ; to thought a reality homo- geneous, absolute and abiding. For the former Democritus seems to have introduced the expression phenomena ; Plato designates it as the world of generation, ytVeo-is : the other kind of reality Democ- ritus calls TO. irey oira ; Plato, to ovtws ov or oio-ta [that which really is, or essence]. In this way perception and opinion gain a correctness which is analogous to that of scientific thought. Perception cognises chang- ing reality as thought cognises abiding reality. To the two modes of cognition correspond two domains of reality."^ But between these two domains there exists for this reason the same relation, as regards their respective values, as obtains between the two kinds of cognition. By as much as thought, the universally valid act of consciousness, is above perception, the knowledge valid only for individuals and for the particular, by so much is the true Being higher, purer, more primitive, raised above the lower actuality of phenomena and the changing processes and events among them. This relation was especially emphasised and carried out by Plato for reasons hereafter to be unfolded. But it appears also with Democ- ritus, not only in his theory of knowledge, but also in his ethics. In this way the two metaphysicians agree with the result which the Pythagoreans (cf. § 5, 7, and § 6, 1) had likewise won from their premises, viz. the distinction of a higher and lower kind of reality. Nevertheless, in the presence of this similarity we are not to think of a dependence ; in nowise in the case of Democritus, who was a complete stranger to the astronomical view of the Pythag- oreans, and scarcely in the case of Plato, who indeed later adopted the astronomical theory, but whose idea of the higher reality (the doctrine of Ideas) has an entirely different content. The case rather is that the common, fundamental motive which came from the conception of Being propounded by Parmenides, led in these three quite different forms to the division of the world into a sphere of higher and one of lower reality. 3. The pragmatic parallelism in the motives of the two opposed systems of Democritus and Plato reaches a step farther, although 1 Best formulated in Plat., Tim. 27 D ff., especially 29 C. Chap. 3, § 9.] The New Metaphysics : Democritus, Plato. 107 but a short step. To the world of perception belong, without doubt, the specific qualities of the senses, for these disclose their relativity in the fact that the same thing appears differently *o different senses. But after we have abstracted these qualities, that which remains as an object for the knowledge of the truly actual, is primarily the form which things have, and both thinkers designated as the true essential nature of things the pure /orms (iSeai). But it almost seems as though here they had nothing in common but the name, striking as this fact is ; for if Democritus understood by the iSaii, which he also called o-^jf/xaTa, his atom-forms, while Plato understood by his iSiai or uSrj the conceptions corresponding to logical species (Gattungsbegi-iffe) , then the apparently like state- ment that the truly existent consists in " forms " has a completely different meaning in the two authors. For this reason we must here, too, remain in doubt as to whether we should see a parallel dependence upon Pythagoreanism, which, to be sure, had previously found the essence of things in mathematical forms, and whose influ- ence upon the two thinkers may be assumed without encountering any difficulties in the assumption itself. At all events, however, if a common suggestion was present, it led to quite different results in the two systems before us, and though in both of them knowledge of mathematical relations stands in very close relation to knowledge of true reality, these relations are yet' completely different with the^ respective thinkers. 4. The relationship thus far unfolded between the two rational- istic systems changes now suddenly to a sharp opposition as soon as we consider the motives from which the two thinkers transcended the Protagorean sensualism and relativism; and observe also the consequences which result therefrom. Here the circumstance be- comes of decisive importance, that Plato luas the disciple of Socrates, while Democritus experienced not even the slightest influence from the great Athenian sage. With Democritus the demand which drives him to transcend the position of Protagoras grows solely out of his theoretical need and develops according to his personal nature, — the demand, namely, that there is a knowledge, and that this, if it is not to be found in perception, must be sought for in thought; the investigator of Nat- ure believes, as against all the Sophistic teaching, in the possibility of a theory that shall explain phenomena. Plato, on the contrary, sets out with his postulate of the Socratic conception of virtue. Virtue is to be gained only through right knowledge ; knowledge, however, is cognition of the true Being : if, then, this is not to be found in perception, it must be sought for through thought. Por 108 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [Part I. Plato philosophy grows, according to the Socratic principle,' out of the ethical need. But while the Sophistic friends of Socrates were endeavouring to give to the knowledge that constituted virtue some object in the form of a general life-purpose, the good, pleasure, etc., Plato wins his metaphysical position with one stroke, by drawing the inference that this knowledge in which virtue is to consist must be the cognition of what is truly real, the oio-ta, — as opposed to opinions which relate to the relative. In his case the knowledge in which virtue is to consist demands a metaphysics. Here, then, the ways are already parting. Knowledge of the truly real was for Democritus, as for the old metaphysicians, essentially an idea of the unchangeably abiding Being, but an idea by means of which it should be possible to understand the derivative form of reality which is cognised in perception. His rationalism amounted to an explanation of phenomena, to be gained through thought; it was essentially theoretical rationalism. For Plato, on the contrary, knowledge of the truly real had its ethical purpose within itself ; this knowledge was to constitute virtue, and hence it had no other relation to the world given through per- ception than that of sharply defining its limits. True Being has for Democritus the theoretical value of explaining phenomena; for Plato, the practical value of being the object of that knowledge which constitutes virtue. His doctrine is, as regards its original principle, essentially ethical rationalism. Democritus, therefore, persevered in the work undertaken in the school of Abdera, — the construction of a metaphysics of Nature. With the help of the Sophistic psychology he developed Atomism to a comprehensive system. Like Leucippus, he regarded empty space and the atoms moving in it as the true reality. He then attempted not only to explain from the motion of these atoms all qualitative phenomena of the corporeal world as quantitative phenomena, but also to explain from these motions all mental activities, including that knowing activity which is directed toward true Being. Thus he created the system of materialism. Plato, however, was led to the entirely opposite result by his attachment to the Socratic doctrine, which proved to be of decisive importance for his conception of the essential nature of science. 5. Socrates had taught that knowledge consists in general concep- tions. If, however, this knowledge, in contrast with opinions, was to be knowledge of what truly, actually is, there must belong to the content of these conceptions that higher Being, that true essential 1 Set forth most clearly in the Meno, 96 ff. Chap. 3, § 10.] System of Materialism : Democritus. 109 reality which, it was held, could be grasped only by thought, in contrast with perception. The " forms " of true reality, knowledge of which constitutes virtue, are the species or class-moncepts {Oattung- sbegriffe), dSr]. With this consideration, the Platonic conception of the " Idea " first gains its complete determination. So understood, Plato's doctrine of Ideas presents itself as the summit of Greek philosophy. In it are combined all the different lines of thought which had been directed toward the physical, the ethical, the logical first principle {apxv or <^v(ns). The Platonic Idea, the species or class-concept, is firstly the abiding Being in the change of phenomena; secondly, the object of knowledge in the change of opinions ; thirdly, the true end in the change of desires. But this oia-ia, from the nature of its definition, is not to be found within the sphere of what may be perceived, and everything cor- poreal is capable of being perceived. The Ideas are then something essentially different from the corporeal world. True reality is incorporeal. The division in the conception of reality takes on accordinglj' a fixed form ; the lower reality of natural processes or generation (yevca-is), which forms the object of perception, is the corporeal world ; the higher reality of Being, which thought knows, is the incorporeal, the immaterial world, tottos vorp-o's. Thus the Platonic system becomes immaterialism, or, as we call it after the meaning given by him to the word "Idea," Idealism. 6. In the Platonic system, accordingly, we find perhaps the most extensive interweaving and complication of problems which history has seen. The doctrine of Democritus, on the contrary, is ruled throughout by the one interest of explaining Nature. However rich the results which this latter doctrine might achieve for this its proper end, — results which could be taken up again in a later, similarly disposed condition of thought, and then first unfold their whole fruitfulness, — at first the other doctrine must surpass this, all the more in proportion as it satisfied all needs of the time and united within itself the entire product of earlier thought. More points of attack for immanent criticism are perhaps offered by the Platonic system than by that of Democritus ; but for Greek thought the latter was a relapse into the cosmology of the first period, and it vras Plato's doctrine that must become the system of the future. § 10. The System of Haterialism. The systematic character of the doctrine of Democritus consists in the way in which he carried through in all departments of his work the fundamental thought, that scientific theory must so far 110 The Gfreeks : . /Systematic Period. [Part I. gain knowledge of the true reality, i.e. of the atoms and their motions in space, as to be able to explain from them the reality which appears in phenomena, as this presents itself in perception. There is every indication (even the titles of his books would show this) that Democritus tools up this task by means of investigations covering the entire compass of the objects of experience, and in this connection devoted himself with as great an interest to the psy- chological as to the physical problems. So much the more must we regret that the greater part of his teachings has been lost, and that what is preserved, in connection with accounts of others, permits only a hypothetical reconstruction of the main conceptions of his great work, a reconstruction which must always remain defective and uncertain. 1. It must be assumed in the first place that Democritus was fully conscious of this task of science, viz. that of explaining the world of experience through conceptions of the true reality. That which the Atomists regard as the Existent, viz. space and the par- ticles whirring in it, has no value except for theoretical purposes. It is only thought in order to make intelligible what is perceived ; but for this reason the problem is so to think the truly real that it may explain the real which appears in phenomena, that at the same time this latter reality may "remain preserved"^ as some- thing that " is " in a derived sense, and that the truth which inheres in it may remain recognised. Hence Democritus knew very well that thought also must seek the truth in perception, and win it out of perception.^ His rationalism is far removed from being in con- tradiction with experience, or even from being strange to experience. Thought has to infer from perception that by means of which the latter is explained. The motive which lay at the foundation of the mediating attempts following the Eleatic paradox of acosmism became with Democritus the clearly recognised principle of metar physics and natural science. Yet unfortunately nothing is now known as to how he carried out in detail the methodical relation between the two modes of cognition, and how the process by which knowledge grows out of perception in the particular instance was thought by him. More particularly, the theoretical explanation which Democritus 1 The very happy expression for this is Staaii^nv tA a. Cf. also Arist. G'eji. et Corr. I. 832, 5 a. 2 Hence, the expressions in which he recognised the truth in the phenome- non ; e.g. Arist. De An. I. 2, 404 a 27, and the like. To attempt, however, to construe out of this a " sensualism" of Democritus, as has been attempted hy E. Johnson (Plauen, 1868), contradicts completely the accounts with regard to his attitude toward Protagoras. Chap. 3, § 10.] System of Materialism : Bemooritus. Ill gave for the contents of perception consists, as with Leucippus, iu the reduction of all phenomena to the mechanics of atoms. What appears in perception as qualitatively determinei^ and also as in- volved iu qualitative change (dA,A.oioiJju.e/Aov), exists "in truth," only as a quantitative relation of the atoms, of their order, and their motion. The task of science is then to reduce all qualitative to quantitative relations, and to show in detail what quantitative rela- tions of the absolute reality produce the qualitative characteristics of the reality which appears in phenomena. Thus, the prejudice in favour ofwhai may ie perceived or imaged (anschaulich) , as if spatial form and motion were something simpler, more comprehensible in themselves, and less of a problem than qualitative character and alteration, is made the principle for the theoretical explanation of the world. Since this principle is applied with complete systematic rigour to the whole of experience, Atomism regards the psychical life with all its essential elements and values as also a phenomenon, and the form and motion of the atoms which constitute the true Being of this phenomenon must be stated by the explanatory theory. Thus matter in its form and motion is regarded as that which alone is truly real, and the entire mental or spiritual life as the derived, phenomenal reality. With this the system of Democritus first assumes the character of conscious, outspoken materialism. 2. In the properly physical doctrines, the teaching of Democritus presents, therefore, no change in principle as compared with that of Leucippus, though there is a great enrichment by careful detailed investigation. He emphasised still more sharply than his predeces- sor, where possible, the thought of the mechanical necessity (dmyKi;^ which he also occasionally called Xdyos), in accordance with which all occurrence or change whatever takes place, and further defined this thought as involving that no operation of atoms upon one another is possible except through impact, through immediate con- tact, and further, that this operation consists only in the change of the state of motion of the atoms which are also unchangeable as regards their form. The atom itself as that which "is," in the proper sense of the word, has accordingly only the characteristics of abstract corpore- ality, viz. the filling of a limited space, and the quality of being in motion in the void. Although all are imperceptibly small, they yet exhibit an endless variety of forms (tSe'at or a-xoiJ-aTa) . To form, which constitutes the proper fundamental difference in the atoms, belongs in a certain sense also size ; yet it is to be observed that the same geometrical form, e.g. the sphere, may appear in different 112 The Grreeks : Systematic Period. [Part I. sizes. The larger the atom, the greater its mass ; for the essential quality of what is, is indeed materiality, space-claiming. For this reason Democritus asserted weight or lightness to be a function of size,^ evidently yielding to the mechanical analogies of daily life. In connection with these terms {fiapv and koS^ov), however, we are not to think of the falling motion, but solely of the degree of mechani- cal movability or of inertia.^ Hence it was also his opinion that as the atom-complexes whirled about, the lighter parts were forced out- ward, while the more inert with their inferior mobility were gath- ered in the middle. The same properties communicate themselves as metaphysical qualities to things which are composed of atoms. The form and size of things is produced by the simple summation of the form and size of the component atoms ; though in this ease, the inertia is not dependent solely upon the sum total of the magnitudes of the atoms, but upon the greater or less amount of empty space that remains between the individual particles when they are grouped together. The inertia depends therefore upon the less or greater degree of density. And since the ease with which particles may be displaced with reference to one another depends upon this interruption of the mass by empty space, the properties of hardness and softness belong also to the true reality that is known by thought. All other properties, however, belong to things not in them- selves, but only in so far as motions proceeding from things act upon the organs of perception ; they are " states of perception as it is in process of qualitative change." But these states are also conditioned throughout by the things in which the perceived prop- erties appear, and here the arrangement and the situation which the atoms have taken with reference to each other in the process of composition are of principal importance.' While, then, form, size, inertia, density, and hardness are properties of things ETeij, i.e. in truth, all that is perceived in them by the indi- vidual senses as colour, sound, smell, taste, exists only vofiwOT Oi