THE LIBRARY INTRODUCTION. (UNIVERSITY § 1. HISTORICAL SKETCH OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY FROM As Cicero continually refers to the views of earlier philosophers, it seems desirable here to give a short preliminary sketch, which may serve to show their relations to each other, leaving points of detail to be discussed in the notes on each particular passage. Greek philosophy had its origin not in the mother country, but in the colonies of Asia Minor and Magna Graecia. This is owing partly to the reflectiveness belonging to a more advanced civilization, and partly to the fact that the colonists were brought in contact with the customs and ideas of foreign nations. The philosophers of the earliest, or Pre-Socratic period, are broadly divided into the Ionic and the Italic Schools. Both had the same object of interest, to ascertain the nature, the origin, the laws, the destiny of the visible * The modern works which have been found most useful in drawing up this sketch are the following, arranged in what I consider to be their order of importance. Full references will be found in the two which stand at the head of the list. Ritter and Preller, Historia Philosophiae Graecae et Romanae ex fontium locis contexta. Zeller, History of Greek Philosophy. Grote, History of Greece, together with his Plato and Aristotle. Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, Vol. 1. tr. by Morris. Schwegler, Hist. of Philosophy, tr. by Sterling. Krische, Die theologischen Lehren der griechischen Denker. A. Butler, Lectures on Ancient Philosophy. The Fragmenta Philosophorum in Didot's series ought to have been more useful than any of these, but its value is much lessened by the want of discrimination shown in the selection and arrangement of the writers quoted. M. C. b world. But while the former with the Ionic sensitiveness to all outward influences dwelt more upon the material element itself and the life which manifested itself in its ever-changing developments, the latter (who, if not themselves Dorian, were yet surrounded by Dorian settlers, with their Doric ideal of discipline, order, stability, superiority to sense, as opposed to the Ionic ideal of free growth, of ease, beauty and nature,) turned their thoughts more to the laws by which the world was governed, or the one unchanging substance which they believed to underlie its shifting phenomena. The first name in Greek philosophy is the so-called founder of the Ionic or physical school, Thales of Miletus, a contemporary of Solon (B.c. 640-550), said to be of Phenician descent. With him begins the transition from the mythological to the scientific interpretation of nature, the transition, as Grote puts it, from the question Who sends rain, or thunder, or earthquakes, and why does he send it? to the question What are the antecedent conditions of rain, thunder, or earthquakes? The old cosmogonies and theogonies suggested the idea of development under the form of a personal history of a number of supernatural beings variously related to each other. The first parent of all, according to Homer, was Oceanus (II. XIV. 201, 240), perhaps a nature-myth to be interpreted of the sun rising and setting in the sea. Thales stripped him of his personality, and laid down the proposition that water is the one original substance out of which all things are produced. Aristotle conjectures that he was led to this belief by observing that moisture is essential to animal and vegetable life: probably it was also from the fact that water supplies the most obvious example of the transmutation of matter under its three forms, solid, fluid and gaseous. Thales further held that the universe is a living creature; which he expressed by saying that ‘all things are full of God,' and in agreement with this he is reported to have said that 'the magnet had a soul.' It is this portion of his doctrine which is travestied by the Epicurean critic in Bk. 1 § 25. The second of the Ionic philosophers was Anaximander, also añ inhabitant of Miletus (B.c. 610-540). He followed Thales in seeking for an original substance to which he gave the name of άpxý, but he found this not in Water, but in the amepov, matter indeterminate (i. e. not yet developed into any one of the forms familiar to us) and infinite, which we may regard as bearing the same relation to Hesiod's primaeval Chaos, as Water did to the Homeric Oceanus. The elementary contraries, hot, cold, moist, dry, are separated from this first matter by virtue of the eternal movement belonging to it; thus are produced the four elements; the earth was in the form of a cylinder, self-poised, in the centre of the universe; round it was air, and round that again a fiery sphere which was broken up so as to form the heavenly bodies. As all substances are produced out of the Infinite so they are resolved into it, thus 'atoning for their injustice' in arrogating to themselves a separate individual existence. The Infinite is divine, containing and directing all things: divine too are the innumerable worlds which it is ever generating and re-absorbing into its own bosom. (N. D. 1 25.) After Anaximander comes Anaximenes, also of Miletus, who is supposed to have flourished about 520 B. C. While his doctrine approaches in many respects to that of Anaximander, he nevertheless returned to the principle of Thales in so far that he assumed as the dpyn, a definite substance, Air, in contradistinction to the indefinite aπeɩрoν of his immediate predecessor. Air is infinite in extent and eternal in duration. It is in continual motion, and produces all things out of itself by condensation and rarefaction, passing through successive stages from fire downwards to wind, cloud, water, earth and stone. As man's life is supported by breathing, so the universe subsists by the air which encompasses it. We are told that Anaximenes gave the name of God both to his first principle Air, and to certain of its products, probably the stars. (N. D. I 26.) The greatest of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus of Ephesus, known among the ancients as the obscure and the weeping philosopher, was a little junior to Anaximenes. Following in the steps of his predecessor, he held that it was one and the selfsame substance which by processes of condensation and rarefaction changed itself into all the elements known by us, but he preferred to name this from its highest potency fire, rather than to stop at the intermediate stage of air. But the point of main interest with him was not the original substance, but the process, the everlasting movement upwards and downwards, fire (including air), water, earth; earth, water, fire. All death is birth into a new form, all birth the death of the previous form. There is properly no existence but only 'becoming,' i. e. a continual passing from one existence into another. Each moment is the union of opposites, being and notbeing: the life of the world is maintained by conflict, Tóλeμos TаTYP TávτWV. Every particle of matter is in continual movement. All things are in flux like the waters of a river. One thing alone is permanent, the universal law which reveals itself in this movement. This is Zeus, the all-pervading reason of the world. It is only the illusion of the senses which makes us fancy that there are such things as permanent substances. Fire exhibits most clearly the incessant movement and activity of the world: confined in the body it constitutes the human soul, in the universe at large it is God (the substance and the process being thus identified). Heraclitus is the first philosopher of whom we read that he referred to the doctrines of other philosophers. He is said to have spoken highly of some of the seven Wise Men, but condemned severely Pythagoras and Xenophanes as well as the poets Hesiod, Homer and Archilochus. Though I agree with Ueberweg in classing him with the older Ionics, yet his philosophy was no doubt largely developed with a reference to the rival schools of Italy. In the N. D. allusion is twice made to the obscurity of Heraclitus (1 74, III 35), but he does not appear in the catalogue of philosophers criticized by Velleius, and this though Philodemus had certainly treated of him, as we may see from the allusions in the Fragments (Gompertz, pp. 70, 81). The reason for this omission is probably that, his philosophy having been incorporated into the Stoic system, it was unnecessary to discuss it separately. See Hirzel, p. 7 foll., and N. D. 111 35, 1 74. We must now cross the water with Pythagoras of Samos, born 582 B.C., who settled at Crotona in Italy, 529 B.C., and there founded what is known as the Italic school. He seems to have found in the mysteries and in the Orphic hymns the starting point which Thales had discovered in Homer; and there can be little doubt that his doctrine and system were also in part suggested by his travels in Egypt. He established a sort of religious brotherhood with strict rules and a severe initiation, insisted on training in gymnastics, mathematics and music, and taught the doctrines of immortality and of the transmigration of souls, and the duty of abstaining from animal food. He is said to have committed nothing to writing himself, but his doctrines were religiously guarded by his disciples (cf. N. D. I 10), and recorded by Archytas and Philolaus, the latter a contemporary of Socrates. The new and startling feature in the Pythagorean philosophy as opposed to the Ionic systems, was that it found its axý, its key of the universe, not in any known substance, but in number and proportion. This might naturally have occurred to one who had listened to the teaching of Thales and Anaximander. After all it makes no difference, he might say, what we take as our original matter, it is the law of development, the measure of condensation which determines the nature of each thing. Number rules the harmonies of music, the proportions of sculpture and architecture, the movements of the heavenly bodies. It is Number which makes the universe into a kóσμos, and is the secret of a virtuous and orderly life. Then by a confusion similar to that which led Heraclitus to identify the law of movement with Fire, the Pythagoreans went on to identify number with substance. One, the Monad, evolved out of itself Limit (order) and the Unlimited (freedom, expansiveness), the Dyad; out of the harmonious mixture of these contraries all particular substances were produced. Again, One was the point, Two the line, Three the plane, Four the concrete solid (but from another point of view, as being the first square number, equal into equal, it was conceived to be Justice). Yet once more, One was the central fire, the hearth of the universe, the throne of Zeus, round which revolved not only the heavenly bodies, but the earth itself. The Decad is the ordered universe surrounded by its fiery envelope.. The Pythagorean doctrine of the soul and of God is variously reported. Zeller thinks that Cicero's representation belongs to the later teachers, and not to Pythagoras himself, as it is not supported by Plato and Aristotle. If we may trust the oldest accounts, there does not seem to have been any close connexion between the religious and philosophical opinions of Pythagoras. We are told that he believed in One God eternal, unchangeable, ruling and upholding all things, that the soul was a 'harmony,' that the body was its prison, in which it was punished for past sin and disciplined for a divine life after death, that those who failed to profit by this discipline would pass into lower forms of life, or suffer severer penalties in Hades (N. D. 1 27, 74, III 27, 88). The second of the Italic schools was the Eleatic, founded by Xenophanes of Colophon in Asia Minor (b. 569 B.C.), who migrated to Elea in Italy about 540 B.C. While the Pythagoreans strove to explain nature mathematically and symbolically, the Eleatics in their later developments did the same by their metaphysical abstractions. Xenophanes himself seems to have received his first philosophical |