Part 2

On this ground--that there is nothing higher than reality, that Socialism is in harmony with all reality and that in the end reality must triumph--the future lectures of these courses will stand or fall.

=Arthur M. Lewis.=

Chicago, Dec. 27, ’07.

EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC

THALES TO LINNAEUS.

“Early ideas,” says Herbert Spencer, “are usually vague adumbrations of the truth,” and however numerous may be the exceptions, this was undoubtedly the case with the evolutionary speculations of the ancient Greeks. The greatness of that remarkable republic finds one of its most striking manifestations in the fact that so many great modern ideas trace their ancestry back to Greece. Sir Henry Maine, the historical jurist, said that, “except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves that is not Greek in its origin.” Compared with her dreamy oriental neighbors, Greece shone like a meteor in a moonless night. As Professor Burnet says, “They left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was, when as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what all things really are now,” while the Oriental shrunk from the search after causes, looking, as Professor Butcher aptly remarks “on each fresh gain of earth as so much robbery of heaven.”

The Greeks very largely discarded the theological mind, peopled with its pious phantasms, and sought to probe into the nature of the material universe. This is why we discover a fairly distinct, and sometimes startlingly clear “adumbration” of the theory of evolution running like a chain of gold through the immortal fragments of their greatest thinkers.

What is it that really is, and what that only seems to be? What is real, and what is only apparent? This is the theme which Greek philosophy has in common with modern thought, and this is why the remnants of Greek literature are so precious in the twentieth century.

Thales, of Miletus, in Asia Minor, is conceded to have been the founder of Greek philosophy. “He asserted water to be the principle of all things,” says Diogenes Laertius, and he regarded all life as coming from water, a position by no means foreign to modern science.

Anaximander, also a Milesian and a younger contemporary of Thales, who like him flourished between 500 and 600 B. C., said that the material cause of all things was the Infinite. “It is neither water nor any other of what are now called the elements, but a substance different from them which is infinite, from which arise all the heavens and the worlds within them.” “Man,” he boldly asserts, “is like another animal, namely, a fish, in the beginning,” a shrewd guess which is now an established fact.

Anaximenes, the third and last of the Milesian philosophers, while following his predecessors closely in time, disagreed with them as to the raw material of the universe. He declares it to be air which, “when it is dilated so as to be rarer becomes fire while winds, on the other hand, are condensed air, Cloud is formed from air by ‘felting’ and this, still further condensed, becomes water. Water, condensed still more, turns to earth; and when condensed as much as it can be, to stones.” All of which proves that Anaximenes had a very fertile brain.

Herakleitos, one of the greatest of all Greek thinkers, lived for a time at Ephesus and expressed the following forceful opinion of his fellow citizens: “The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless youths; for they have cast out Hermodoros, the best man among them, saying: ‘We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others.’” According to him everything comes from and returns to fire and “all things are in a state of flux like a river.” Here is the intellectual ancestor of Hegel with his great saying. “Nothing is, everything is becoming.” Herakleitos sagaciously observed: “You cannot step twice into the same rivers, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.”

Parmenides, born at Elea about 515 B. C., was poet and philosopher both, and insisted in his hexameter verse that the universe is a unity, which neither came out of nothing, nor could, in any degree, pass away, thus anticipating by over 2,000 years Lavoisier’s doctrine of the permanence of matter.

Empedocles, of Akragas in Sicily, about the same time, stated this great truth with still greater force and clearness: “Fools!--for they have no far-reaching thoughts--who deem that what before was not, comes into being or that aught can perish and be utterly destroyed. For it cannot be that aught can arise from what in no way is, and it is impossible and unheard of that what is should perish; for it will always be, wherever one may keep putting it.” He also endeavored to combine and reconcile the ideas of some of his predecessors, teaching that all things come from four roots--water, air, fire and earth.

Anaxagoras, born about 500 B. C., was the first Greek to suffer for science. He was brought to trial for asserting the sun to be a red hot stone, and it would have probably gone hard with him had not the mighty Pericles been his friend. If the sun was merely a fiery ball, what became of the religion founded on the worship of Apollo?

Nearly a half a century earlier Xenophanes, of Colophon, had ventilated ideas much more obnoxious to the priests. He had done for his age what Feuerbach did to the Nineteenth century--he had explained the origin of the gods by Anthropomorphism. Said he: “If oxen or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses and oxen like oxen. Each would represent them with bodies according to the form of each. So the Ethiopians make their gods black and snubnosed; the Thracians give theirs red hair and blue eyes.” Had Xenophanes lived at Athens, where a religious revival had just taken place, he would have shared the fate which later overtook the impious Socrates. Luckily for Xenophanes, in the colony where he lived “the gods were left to take care of themselves.” Anaxagoras was the first to determine what causes the eclipses and the illumination of the moon:--“The moon has not a light of her own but gets it from the sun. The moon is eclipsed by the earth screening the sun’s light from it. The sun is eclipsed at the new moon, when the moon screens it from us.”

The Pythagoreans who must be distinguished from the medicine man Pythagoras, from whom they only take their name indirectly, and not as disciples, believed the reality of the universe was to be found in numbers. They were deceived into this absurdity by the exactness of mathematical conclusions. This was excusable among the Greeks to whom arithmetical combinations were as wonderful as electrical phenomena are to us, but its revival in our day by astrologers and theosophists has no such justification.

Socrates, born about 470 B. C., at Athens, is described as “pug-nosed, thick-lipped, big-bellied and bulging-eyed”--the very opposite of the Greek ideal of beauty. He believed that knowledge itself would bring virtue, and sought to discover the true ground of knowledge. His search brought him into conflict with the religious bigotry of his day and he was finally sentenced to death and died from drinking hemlock in 399 B. C. He wrote nothing and his work is preserved mainly through his influence on Plato.

Leukippos and Demokritos are linked together through their statements of the atomic theory, made more than twenty centuries before Dalton. They placed the permanent reality of things in numberless atoms, of which Leukippos said “there are an infinite number of them, and they are invisible owing to the smallness of their bulk.”

Plato we shall pass by; his metaphysical doctrine of ideas contributed little of value to the solution of the riddle of the universe.

We now come to the great Stagirite, Aristotle, founder of the experimental school and father of natural history. Born in 384 B. C., he entered the Academy under Plato when a boy of eighteen. When he was thirty-six Plato died, and Aristotle then left Athens. At forty-one he became the teacher of Alexander the Great. He was the greatest of all the Greeks, and his studies took a wider range than had been embraced by any previous thinker.

Stageira, where he spent his boyhood, was on the Strynomid gulf, and here he observed the variations and gradations between marine plants and animals. It is an evidence of his keen insight that he classified the sponge as an animal. Compare this with Agassiz, the opponent of Darwinism, who, in the 19th century, declared the sponge to be a vegetable.

Aristotle insisted on observation and experience as the foundation of knowledge. “We must not accept a general principle from logic only, but must prove its application to each fact. For it is in facts we must seek general principles, and these must always accord with facts.” He repudiated the idea of purpose in nature, saying, “Jupiter rains not that corn may be increased, but from necessity.” He came very near Von Mohl’s protoplasm when he said, “Germs should have been first produced, and not immediately animals; and that soft mass which first subsisted was the germ.”

Passing over the much misrepresented Epicurus we come two centuries later to the illustrious Roman poet philosopher, Lucretius. In this last century preceeding the Christian era, Greece had fallen from her high estate and become a Roman province. But while Rome had annexed Greece, Greek learning had conquered the Roman mind.

Lucretius in his poem, “The System of Nature,” expounds, with great force, the atomic theory of his Greek forerunners. The first anthropologist, he comes so near to Spencer and Tylor that his ideas, and sometimes even his sentences smack of the 19th century. “The past history of man” he asserts, “lies in no heroic or golden age, but in one struggle out of savagery.” Of the origin of language he says, “Nature impelled them to utter the various sounds of the tongue, and use struck out the names of things.” Of the early struggles of primitive men he says, “Man’s first arms were hands, nails and teeth and stones and boughs broken off from the forests, and flame and fire, as soon as they had become known. Afterward the force of iron and copper was discovered, and the use of copper was known before that of iron, as its nature is easier to work, and it is found in greater quantity. With copper they would labor the soil of the earth and stir up the billows of war. Then by slow steps the sword of iron gained ground and the make of the copper sickle became a byword.” The name of Lucretius closes the long line of the evolutionary pioneers of the ancient world. There the golden vein ceases so far as thinking is concerned, not to reappear until many centuries have passed.

With the decline and fall of the Roman empire, and the rise to power of Christianity, learning was driven from Europe and found refuge among the Arabians. This brings us to the dark or middle ages. It is in the interpretation of the phenomena of this period, that bourgeois free thinkers like Clodd and Draper break down. They tacitly assume that in Europe evolution was suspended for over a thousand years; and all because of the Christian church. They fail to recognize that deeper cause, the medieval form of wealth production, which gave the church its power to repress learning in the interest of the lords of the land, among which the church herself was greatest; owning as she did one-third of the soil of Europe.

The bourgeois radical cannot perceive that during this period social processes were being gradually transformed and that an economic foundation was being laid that would make possible the renaissance and put science in an impregnable position, and make the progressive acceptance of evolution inevitable. Engels says: “The Middle Ages were reckoned as a mere interruption of history by a thousand years of barbarism. The great advances of the Middle Ages--the broadening of European learning, the bringing into existence of great nations, which arose, one after the other, and finally the enormous technical advances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries--all this no one saw”.

But it cannot be denied that this was a terrible period for any thinker who had the misfortune to be born in it. All that was great and noble in the thought of Greece and Rome was rigorously suppressed. The “perfecting principle” of Aristotle was wrested to theological uses. An emaciated form of his philosophy, and a literal interpretation of the scriptures, constituted the only permissible studies. Outside this dilution of Aristotle, the only thing in Greek thought which appealed to the medieval mind was the Pythagorean mystical use of numbers. The conclusions reached by that method were truly remarkable, especially when we remember that they engaged such notable men as Augustine, the celebrated Bishop of Hippo.