impulse in the revulsion from the popular mythology. He condemned anthropomorphism and polytheism altogether, and said that Homer and Hesiod had attributed to the Gods conduct which would have been disgraceful in men. God is one, all eye, all ear, all understanding; he is for ever unmoved, unchangeable, a vast allembracing sphere. See N. D. 1 28. It is disputed whether the last expression is to be taken literally, implying that the universe is God, or whether it is a metaphor to express God's perfection and omnipresence. The chief representative of the Eleatic School is Parmenides (b. 515 B.C.). He disengaged the doctrine of Xenophanes from its theological form, and ascribed to Being what his predecessor had ascribed to God. His philosophy is the antithesis of that of Heraclitus. While Heraclitus said all is motion and change, the appearance of fixity is merely illusion of the senses; Parmenides asserted, with distinct reference to him, that all that exists has existed and will exist the same for ever, that it is change and multiplicity which is illusory. It is only by thought we can become conscious of the really existent; being and thought are the same, sense can only give rise to uncertain opinion. In such language we see partly a protest against the vagueness of the conception of development or becoming,' by which the Ionic philosophers endeavoured to explain the origin of things, 'You say fire becomes water, but each thing is what it is, and can never be otherwise ;' partly an idea of the indestructibility of matter; partly an anticipation of the later distinction between necessary and contingent truth; thus one point dwelt upon by him was the impossibility of - any separation of parts of space.

4

But though truth only belonged to the world of real existence, Parmenides condescended to give his romance of nature for the benefit of those who could not penetrate beyond the world of phenomena. He begins with two principles, light and darkness, also called fire and earth, or male and female; and supposes all things to proceed from their mixture. The existing universe consists of a central fire, the seat of the presiding Deity, and of several concentric rings of mingled light and darkness, bounded on the outside by a wall of flame. The first-born of Gods was Love, by whom the union of opposites is brought about. In this we may trace a reminiscence of the Hesiodic "Epws (N. D. 1 28).

Zeno of Elea (b. 490 B.C.) is chiefly known from his arguments showing the absurd consequences of the ordinary belief in the

phenomenal world. Parmenides must be right in denying motion and multiplicity, for their assertion leads to self-contradiction. Zeno was in consequence called the inventor of Dialectic. His arguments, especially the famous 'Achilles,' still find a place in treatises on Logic (N. D. III 82).

The clearly marked opposition between the Ionic and the Eleatic views of nature, as shown in Heraclitus and Parmenides, had a powerful influence on the subsequent course of philosophy. Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists agreed in accepting the Eleatic principle of the immutability of substance, while denying its absolute Oneness; and they explained the Ionic 'becoming' as the result of the mixture of a number of unchangeable substances. Empedocles of Agrigentum (b. 500 B.C.) held that there were four eternal, self-subsistent elements or 'roots of things,' which were being continually separated and combined under the influence of Love and Hatred. At times Love has the upper hand, at times Hate. When Love has the complete supremacy the elements are at rest, united in one all-including sphere (paîpos): when Hate prevails, the elements are entirely separate. The soul, like all other things, is formed by the mixture of the elements, and is thus capable of perception, for like can only be perceived by like. In his opinions on the Gods and on religion, Empedocles was chiefly influenced by Pythagoras. He believed in the existence of Daemons intermediate between Gods and men, some of which had passed into mortal bodies as an atonement for former sins, and could only be restored to their original state after long ages of discipline. While he speaks of God at one time as one spirit pervading the world in swift thought, in other places he speaks of Gods produced like men from the mixture of the elements, but possessed of a longer existence, and then again we find divinity attributed to Sphaerus and the four elements and two moving powers (N. D. 1 29).

Returning now to Ionia, we see the effect of the Eleatic school in the speculations of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (b. 500 B.C.), of whom Aristotle says that he appeared among the older philosophers like a sober man among drunkards. Instead of the four elements of Empedocles, which he declared to be themselves compounds, he assumed an indefinite number of 'seeds' of the different kinds of matter. To these seeds later philosophers gave the distinctive name

of homœomeries,' denoting that the constituent particles of bodies were of the same nature as the bodies which they composed, while the unqualitied atoms of Democritus gave rise to the different qualities of their compounds by the mode in which they were compounded. In the beginning these seeds were huddled together in a confused chaos, then came Nous, the pure self-moving intelligence, almighty and all-wise (this takes the place of the halfconscious Love and Hate of Empedocles), and communicated a rotatory impulse to the inert mass, by means of which the cognate particles were gradually brought together and reduced to order. Nous is the soul of the world and dwells in all living things, even plants, as the principle of their life. Whether Anaxagoras called it by the name of God is doubtful. Plato and Aristotle complain that, having begun well, he failed to make full use of the right principle with which he started, and turned his attention to mechanical causes, only having recourse to Nous as a deus ex machina when the others failed. (N. D. 1 26.)

Diogenes of Apollonia in Crete was a younger contemporary of Anaxagoras, against whom he took up a reactionary position and defended the older Ionic doctrine, assuming Air to be the one principle out of which all things were produced, and assigning to it all the attributes of Nous. Both he and Anaxagoras taught at Athens, but were compelled to leave it on a charge of impiety. (N. D. 1 29.)

Of far greater importance is Democritus, born at the Ionic colony of Abdera in Thrace, B.C. 460, the chief expositor of the Atomic theory, which was originated by his elder contemporary and friend, Leucippus the Eleatic (N. D. 1 66). Briefly stated, their doctrine is that of Anaxagoras, minus Nous and the qualitative diversity in the seeds or atoms. They adopted the Eleatic view so far as relates to the eternal sameness of Being, applying this to the indivisible, unchangeable atoms, but they denied its unity, continuity and immobility, and they asserted that 'Not-being' (the Vacuum of their system) existed no less than ‘Being,' and was no less essential as an dpxý, since without it motion would be impossible. The atoms are absolutely solid and incompressible, they are without any secondary qualities, and differ only in size (and therefore in weight), in figure, position and arrangement. Though too small to be seen or felt by us, they produce all things by their combinations; and the compounds have various qualities in accordance with the differences in

GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

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the constituent atoms, the mode of arrangement, and the
smaller amount of vacuum separating the atoms. Thus Soul, the
divine element pervading the world, is a sort of fire made up of
small, round, smooth atoms in continual motion, and largely mixed
with vacuum. The account given by Democritus of the origin of
the existing universe is that there were, to begin with, an infinite
number of atoms carried downwards by their own inherent gravity
at different rates in proportion to their magnitude, that thus they
impinged one upon another, and gave rise to all sorts of oblique and
contrary movements, out of which was generated an all-absorbing
rotatory motion or vortex. Under these various movements cor-
responding atoms found their fitting places and became entangled
and hooked together so as to form bodies. Thus the earthy and
watery particles were drawn to the centre where they remained at
rest, while the airy and fiery rebounded from them and rose to the
circumference, forming a sort of shell between the organized world
and the infinitude of unorganized atoms on the outside. There was
an endless number of such worlds in various stages of growth or
decay under the influx or efflux of atoms; the destruction of each
world followed upon its collision with another world.

The account given of the mind and its operations was as follows:-Particles of mind or soul were distributed throughout the body, and were continually escaping owing to their subtle nature, but, as they escaped, their place was taken by other particles inhaled in the breath. When breathing ceased there was nothing to recruit the living particles, and death speedily followed. Every mental impression was of the nature of touch, and was caused either by actual contact with atoms as in the case of taste and hearing, or by images thrown off from bodies external to us, and entering in through

the pores.

These images were a kind of film consisting of the surface atoms which were continually floating off from all bodies without any disturbance of their mutual order, and were, so to speak, a sample of the object from which they were detached. Democritus also used the same word (eïdwλa) for the anthropomorphic combinations of the finest soul-atoms which he believed to exist in the air, and to be at times perceived by men. These were the Gods of the popular religion, not immortal, though longer lived than men: some were friendly, some malignant; he prayed that he might himself only meet with the former. Cf. N. D. 1 29 & 120.

Democritus closes the series of the pre-Socratic dogmatists, men who devoted themselves to the investigation of Nature as a whole, believing that the investigation would lead to the discovery of the truth. Between these and Socrates, the great regenerator of philosophy, is interposed the sceptical or Sophistic era. That the latter was a natural and necessary stage in the development of Greek thought will be apparent from the following considerations:

What we are told about Pythagoras and his disciples must have been more or less true of all the early philosophers. The sage no less than the poet believed himself the organ of a special inspiration, which in the case of the former revealed to him the inner truth of nature; those who were worthy to receive the revelation listened with reverence to his teaching, and rested their faith implicitly on their master's authority. But when different schools sprang up, each asserting their own doctrines with equal positiveness; when the increase of intercommunication spread the knowledge of these contradictory systems throughout the Greek-speaking world; when philosophical questions began to be popularized by poets like Euripides, and discussed in the saloons of a Pericles or an Aspasia; when Zeno's criticisms had made clear to the public, what had been an esoteric truth to the hearers of Parmenides and Heraclitus, that not merely traditional beliefs, but even the evidence of the senses was incapable of standing against the reason of the philosophers,-the result of all this was a widespread scepticism either as to the existence of objective truth altogether (Protagoras) or as to the possibility of the attainment of physical truth by man (Socrates). If we remember at the same time the incredibly rapid development in every department of life which took place in Greece and especially in Athens during the 5th century B.C.; the sense which must have forced itself on all the more thoughtful minds, of the incompetency of the old beliefs to explain the problems of the new age which was dawning upon them; and on the other hand the growing importance of oratory and the immense stimulus to ambition, held out in a state like Athens, to those who were of a more practical turn of mind,we shall not be surprised if there was much curiosity to learn the opinions of the most advanced thinkers, and much eagerness to acquire the argumentative power by which a Zeno could make the worse cause appear the better. The enlightened men who came forward to supply this demand called themselves by the name of Sophists, or teachers of wisdom. They were the first who made