A Short History of Greek Philosophy

Chapter V (page 48) - "logos" - Lambda, Omicron, Gamma, Omicron, Final

sigma; "hule" - upsilon with rough breathing mark, lambda, eta.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

I.--THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS-- I. Thales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 II. Anaximander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

II.--THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS (concluded)-- III. Anaximenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 IV. Heraclitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

III.--PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS . . . . . . . . . 22

IV.--THE ELEATICS-- I. Xenophanes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 II. Parmenides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

V.--THE ELEATICS (concluded)-- III. Zeno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 IV. Melissus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

VI.--THE ATOMISTS-- I. Anaxagoras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

VII.--THE ATOMISTS (continued)-- II. Empedocles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

VIII.--THE ATOMISTS (concluded)-- III. Leucippus and Democritus . . . . . . . . . . 74

IX.--THE SOPHISTS-- I. Protagoras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

X.--THE SOPHISTS (concluded)-- II. Gorgias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

XI.--SOCRATES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

XII.--SOCRATES (concluded) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

XIII.--THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS-- I. Aristippus and the Cyrenaics . . . . . . . . 124 II. Antisthenes and the Cynics . . . . . . . . . 128 III. Euclides and the Megarics . . . . . . . . . . 132

XIV.--PLATO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

XV.--PLATO (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

XVI.--PLATO (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

XVII.--PLATO (concluded) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

XVIII.--ARISTOTLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

XIX.--ARISTOTLE (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

XX.--ARISTOTLE (concluded) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

XXI.--THE SCEPTICS AND EPICUREANS . . . . . . . . . . . . 210

XXII.--THE STOICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

{1}

CHAPTER I. The School of Miletus

THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS

The question of Thales--Water the beginning of things--Soul in all things--Mystery in science--Abstraction and reality--Theory of development

I. THALES.--For several centuries prior to the great Persian invasions of Greece, perhaps the very greatest and wealthiest city of the Greek world was Miletus. Situate about the centre of the Ionian coasts of Asia Minor, with four magnificent harbours and a strongly defensible position, it gathered to itself much of the great overland trade, which has flowed for thousands of years eastward and westward between India and the Mediterranean; while by its great fleets it created a new world of its own along the Black Sea coast. Its colonies there were so numerous that Miletus was named 'Mother of Eighty Cities.' From Abydus on the Bosphorus, past Sinope, and so onward to the Crimea and the Don, and thence round to Thrace, a busy community of colonies, mining, manufacturing, ship-building, corn-raising, owned Miletus for their mother-city. Its {2} marts must therefore have been crowded with merchants of every country from India to Spain, from Arabia to Russia; the riches and the wonders of every clime must have become familiar to its inhabitants. And fitly enough, therefore, in this city was born the first notable Greek geographer, the first constructor of a map, the first observer of natural and other curiosities, the first recorder of varieties of custom among various communities, the first speculator on the causes of strange phenomena,--Hecataeus. His work is in great part lost, but we know a good deal about it from the frequent references to him and it in the work of his rival and follower, Herodotus.

The city naturally held a leading place politically as well as commercially. Empire in our sense was alien to the instincts of the Greek race; but Miletus was for centuries recognised as the foremost member of a great commercial and political league, the political character of the league becoming more defined, as first the Lydian and then the Persian monarchy became an aggressive neighbour on its borders.

It was in this active, prosperous, enterprising state, and at the period of its highest activity, that Thales, statesman, practical engineer, mathematician, philosopher, flourished. Without attempting to fix his date too closely, we may take it that he was a leading man in Miletus for the greater part of the {3} first half of the sixth century before Christ. We hear of an eclipse predicted by him, of the course of a river usefully changed, of shrewd and profitable handling of the market, of wise advice in the general councils of the league. He seems to have been at once a student of mathematics and an observer of nature, and withal something having analogy with both, an inquirer or speculator into the origin of things. To us nowadays this suggests a student of geology, or physiography, or some such branch of physical science; to Thales it probably rather suggested a theoretical inquiry into the simplest thinkable aspect of things as existing. "Under what form known to us," he would seem to have asked, "may we assume an identity in all known things, so as best to cover or render explicable the things as we know them?" The 'beginning' of things (for it was thus he described this assumed identity) was not conceived by him as something which was long ages before, and which had ceased to be; rather it meant the reality of things now. Thales then was the putter of a question, which had not been asked expressly before, but which has never ceased to be asked since. He was also the formulator of a new meaning for a word; the word 'beginning' ((Greek) arche) got the meaning of 'underlying reality' and so of 'ending' as well. In short, he so dealt with a word, on the surface of it implying {4} time, as to eliminate the idea of time, and suggest a method of looking at the world, more profound and far-reaching than had been before imagined.

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

The chief record that we possess of the philosophic teaching of Thales is contained in an interesting notice of earlier philosophies by Aristotle, the main part of which as regards Thales runs as follows:

"The early philosophers as a rule formulated the originative principle ((Greek) arche) of all things under some material expression. By the originative principle or element of things they meant that of which all {5} existing things are composed, that which determines their coming into being, and into which they pass on ceasing to be. Where these philosophers differed from each other was simply in the answer which they gave to the question what was the nature of this principle, the differences of view among them applying both to the number, and to the character, of the supposed element or elements.

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