Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley. Edward Clodd

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СКАЧАТЬ but in the Greece which then included Ionia, on the opposite seaboard of Asia Minor.

      From times beyond memory or record, the islands of the Ægean had been the nurseries of culture and adventure. Thence the maritime inhabitants had spread themselves both east and west, feeding the spirit of inquiry, and imbibing influences from older civilizations, notably of Egypt and Chaldæa. But, mix as they might with other peoples, the Greeks never lost their own strongly marked individuality, and, in imparting what they had acquired or discovered to younger peoples, that is, younger in culture, they stamped it with an impress all their own.

      At the later period with which we are dealing, refugees from the Peloponnesus, who would not submit to the Dorian yoke, had been long settled in Ionia. To what extent they had been influenced by contact with their neighbours is a question which, even were it easy to answer, need not occupy us here. Certain it is that trade and travel had widened their intellectual horizon, and although India lay too remote to touch them closely (if that incurious, dreamy East had touched them, it would have taught them nothing), there was Babylonia with her star-watchers, and Egypt with her land-surveyors. From the one, these Ionians probably gained knowledge of certain periodic movements of some of the heavenly bodies; and from the other, a few rules of mensuration, perchance a little crude science. But this is conjecture. For all the rest that she evolved, and with which she enriched the world, ancient Greece is in debt to none.

      While the Oriental shrunk from quest after causes, looking, as Professor Butcher aptly remarks in his Aspects of the Greek Genius, on “each fresh gain of earth as so much robbery of heaven,” the Greek eagerly sought for the law governing the facts around him. And in Ionia was born the idea foreign to the East, but which has become the starting-point of all subsequent scientific inquiry—the idea that Nature works by fixed laws. Sir Henry Maine said that “except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves which is not Greek in its origin,” and we feel how hard it is to avoid exaggeration when speaking of the heritage bequeathed by Greece as the giver of every fruitful, quickening idea which has developed human faculty on all sides, and enriched every province of life. Amid serious defects of character, as craftiness, avariciousness, and unscrupulousness, the Greeks had the redeeming grace of pursuit after knowledge which naught could baffle (Plato, Republic, vol. iv, p. 435), and that healthy outlook on things which saved them from morbid introspection. There arose among them no Simeon Stylites to mount his profitless pillar; no filth-ingrained fakir to waste life in contemplating the tip of his nose; no schoolman to idly speculate how many angels could dance upon a needle’s point; or to debate such fatuous questions as the language which the saints in heaven will speak after the Last Judgment.

      In his excellent and cautious survey of Early Greek Philosophy, which we mainly follow in this section, Professor Burnet says that the real advance made by the Ionians was through their “leaving 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.” For the early notions of the Greeks about nature, being an inheritance from their barbaric ancestors, were embodied in myths and legends bearing strong resemblance to those found among the uncivilized tribes of Polynesia and elsewhere in our day. For example, the old nature-myth of Cronus separating heaven and earth by the mutilation of Uranus occurs among Chinese, Japanese, and Maoris, and among the ancient Hindus and Egyptians.

      The earliest school of scientific speculation was at Miletus, the most flourishing city of Ionia. Thales, whose name heads the list of the “Seven Sages,” was its founder. As with other noted philosophers of this and later periods, neither the exact date of his birth nor of his death are known, but the sixth century before Christ may be held to cover the period when he “flourished.”

      That “nothing comes into being out of nothing, and that nothing passes away into nothing,” was the conviction with which he and those who followed him started on their quest. All around was change; everything always becoming something else; “all in motion like streams.” There must be that which is the vehicle of all the changes, and of all the motions which produce them. What, therefore, was this permanent and primary substance? in other words, of what is the world made? And Thales, perhaps through observing that it could become vaporous, liquid, and solid in turn; perhaps—if, as tradition records, he visited Egypt—through watching the wonder-working, life-giving Nile; perhaps as doubtless sharing the current belief in an ocean-washed earth, said that the primary substance was Water. Anaximander, his friend and pupil, disagreeing with what seemed to him a too concrete answer, argued, in more abstract fashion, that “the material cause and first element of things was the Infinite.” This material cause, which he was the first thus to name, “is neither water nor any other of what are now called the elements” (we quote from Theophrastus, the famous pupil of Aristotle, born at Eresus in Lesbos, 371 BC). Perhaps, following Professor Burnet’s able guidance through the complexities of definitions, the term Boundless best expresses the “one eternal, indestructible substance out of which everything arises, and into which everything once more returns”; in other words, the exhaustless stock of matter from which the waste of existence is being continually made good.

      Anaximander was the first to assert the origin of life from the non-living, i.e., “the moist element as it was evaporated by the sun,” and to speak of man as “like another animal, namely, a fish, in the beginning.” This looks well-nigh akin to prevision of the mutability of species, and of what modern biology has proved concerning the marine ancestry of the highest animals, although it is one of many ancient speculations as to the origin of life in slimy matter. And when Anaximander adds that “while other animals quickly find food for themselves, man alone requires a prolonged period of suckling,” he anticipates the modern explanation of the origin of the rudimentary family through the development of the social instincts and affections. The lengthening of the period of infancy involves dependence on the parents, and evolves the sympathy which lies at the base of social relations. (Cf. Fiske’s Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii, pp. 344, 360.)

      In dealing with speculations so remote, we have to guard against reading modern meanings into writings produced in ages whose limitations of knowledge were serious, and whose temper and standpoint are wholly alien to our own. For example, shrewd as are some of the guesses made by Anaximander, we find him describing the sun as “a ring twenty-eight times the size of the earth, like a cartwheel with the felloe hollow and full of fire, showing the fire at a certain point, as if through the nozzle of a pair of bellows.” And if he made some approach to truer ideas of the earth’s shape as “convex and round,” the world of his day, as in the days of Homer, thought of it as flat and as floating on the all-surrounding water. The Ionian philosophers lacked not insight, but the scientific method of starting with working hypotheses, or of observation before theory, was as yet unborn.

      In this brief survey of the subject there will be no advantage in detailing the various speculations which followed on the heels of those of Thales and Anaximander, since these varied only in non-essentials; or, like that of Pythagoras and his school, which Zeller regards as the outcome of the teachings of Anaximander, were purely abstract and fanciful. As is well known, the Pythagoreans, whose philosophy was ethical as well as cosmical, held that all things are made of numbers, each of which they believed had its special character and property. A belief in such symbols as entities seems impossible to us, but its existence in early thought is conceivable when, as Aristotle says, they were “not separated from the objects of sense.” Even in the present day, among the eccentric people who still believe in the modern sham agnosticism, known as theosophy, and in astrology, we find the delusion that numbers possess inherent magic or mystic virtues. So far as the ancients are concerned, “consider,” as Mr. Benn remarks in his Greek Philosophers (vol. i, p. 12), “the lively emotions excited at a time when multiplication and division, squaring and cubing, the rule of three, the construction and equivalence of figures, with all their manifold applications to industry, commerce, fine arts, and tactics, were just as strange and wonderful as electrical phenomena are to us … and we shall cease to wonder that a mere form of thought, a lifeless abstraction, should once have been regarded as the solution of every problem; the cause of all existence; or that these speculations СКАЧАТЬ