The Legacy of Greece. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ Theaetetus. The mathematical studies of the Pythagoreans soon brought them face to face with the idea of a constant approximation which never reaches its goal. There is, then, sufficient ground for accepting the tradition which makes Pythagoras the author of this special sense of the word ‘philosophy’ and for connecting it with the division of living creatures into God, men and ‘the other animals’. If the later Pythagoreans went a step further and classified rational animals into gods, men and ‘such as Pythagoras’, that was due to the enthusiasm of discipleship, and is really a further indication of the genuinely Pythagorean character of this whole range of ideas. We may take it, then, that the word ‘philosophy’ had acquired its special sense in southern Italy before the beginning of the fifth century BC

      It is even more certain that this sense was well known at Athens, at least in certain circles, not long after the middle of the fifth century. To all appearance, this was the work of Socrates (470–399 B.C.). Whatever view may be taken of the philosophy of Socrates or of its relation to that expounded in Plato’s earlier dialogues (a point which need not be discussed here), it is at least not open to question that he was personally intimate with the leading Pythagoreans who had taken refuge at Thebes and at Phlius in the Peloponnesus when their society came to be regarded as a danger to the state at Croton and elsewhere in southern Italy. That happened about the middle of the fifth century, and Socrates must have made the acquaintance of these men not long after. At that time it would be quite natural for them to visit Athens; but, after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431 BC), all intercourse with them must have ceased. They were resident in enemy states, and Socrates was fighting for his country. With the exception of the brief interval of the Peace of Nicias (421 BC), he can have seen nothing of them for years. Nevertheless it is clear that they did not forget him; for we must accept Plato’s statement in the Phaedo that many of the most distinguished philosophers of the time came to Athens to be with Socrates when he was put to death, and that those of them who could not come were eager to hear a full account of what happened. It is highly significant that, even before this, two young disciples of the Pythagorean Philolaus, Simmias and Cebes, had come from Thebes and attached themselves to Socrates. For that we have the evidence of Xenophon as well as of Plato, and Xenophon’s statement is of real value here; for it was just during these few years that he himself associated with Socrates, though he saw him for the last time a year or two before his trial and death. Whatever other inferences may be drawn from these facts, they are sufficient to prove that Socrates had become acquainted with some of the leading philosophers of the Greek world before he was forty, and to make it highly probable that it was he who introduced the word ‘philosophy’ in its Pythagorean sense to the Athenians.

      So much for the word; we have next to ask how there came to be such a thing as philosophy at all. It has been mentioned that Pythagoras was an Ionian, and we should naturally expect to find that he brought at least the beginnings of what he called philosophy from eastern Hellas. Now it has been pointed out that Greek philosophy was based on science, and science originated at Miletus on the mainland of Asia Minor nearly opposite the island of Samos, which was the original home of Pythagoras. The early Milesians were, in fact, men of science rather than philosophers in the strict sense. The two things were not differentiated yet, however, and the traditional account of the matter, according to which Greek philosophy begins with Thales (c. 585 BC), is after all quite justified. The rudimentary mathematical science of which, as explained elsewhere in this volume, he was the originator in fact led him and his successors to ask certain questions about the ultimate nature of reality, and these questions were the beginning of philosophy on its theoretical side. It is true that the Milesians were unable to give any but the crudest answers to these questions, and very likely they did not realise their full importance. These early inquirers only wanted to know what the world was made of and how it worked, but the complete break with mythology and traditional views which they effected cleared the way for everything that followed. It was no small thing that they were able to discard the old doctrine of what were afterwards known as the ‘elements’—Fire, Air, Earth, and Water—and to regard all these as states of a single substance, which presented different appearances according as it was more or less rarefied or condensed. Moreover, Anaximander at least (c. 546 BC), the successor of Thales, shook himself free of the idea that the earth required support of some kind to keep in its place. He held that it swung free in space and that it remained where it was because there was no reason for it to fall in one direction rather than another. In general these early cosmologists saw that weight was not an inherent quality of bodies and that it could not be used to explain anything. On the contrary, weight was itself the thing to be explained. Anaximander also noted the importance of rotary or vortex motion in the cosmical scheme, and he inferred that there might be an indefinite number of rotating systems in addition to that with which we are immediately acquainted. He also made some very important observations of a biological character, and he announced that man must be descended from an animal of a different species. The young of most animals, he said, can find their food at once, while that of the human species requires a prolonged period of nursing. If, then, man had been originally such as he is now, he could never have survived. All this, no doubt, is rudimentary science rather than philosophy, but it was the beginning of philosophy in this sense, that it completely transformed the traditional view of the world, and made the raising of more ultimate problems inevitable.

      This transformation was effected in complete independence of religion. What we may call secularism was, in fact, characteristic of all eastern Ionian science to the end. We must not be misled by the fact that Anaximander called his innumerable worlds ‘gods’ and that his successor Anaximenes spoke of Air as a ‘god’. These were never the gods of any city and were never worshipped by any one, and they did not therefore answer at all to what the ordinary Greek meant by a god. The use of the term by the Milesians means rather that the place once occupied by the gods of religion was now being taken by the great fundamental phenomena of nature, and the later Greeks were quite right, from their own point of view, in calling that atheism. Aristophanes characterizes this way of speaking very accurately indeed in the Clouds when he makes Strepsiades sum up the teaching he has received in the words ‘Vortex has driven out Zeus and reigns in his stead’, and when he makes Socrates swear by ‘Chaos, Respiration and Air’. So too the Milesians spoke of the primary substance as ‘ageless and deathless’, which is a Homeric phrase used to mark the difference between gods and men, but this only means that the emotion formerly attached to the divine was now being transferred to the natural.

       The Milesians, then, had formed the conception of an eternal matter out of which all things are produced and into which all things return, and the conception of Matter belongs to philosophy rather than to science. But besides this they had laid the foundations of geometry, and that led in other hands to the formulation of the correlative conception of Limit or Form. It is needless to enumerate here the Milesian and Pythagorean contributions to plane geometry; it will be sufficient to remind the reader that they covered most of the ground of Euclid, Books I, II, IV, and VI, and probably also of Book III. In addition, Pythagoras founded Arithmetic, that is, the scientific theory of numbers (αριθμητικη), as opposed to the practical art of calculation (λογιστικη). We also know that he discovered the sphericity of the earth, and the numerical ratios of the intervals between the concordant notes of the octave. It is obvious that he was a scientific genius of the first order, and it is also clear that his methods included those of observation and experiment. The discovery of the earth’s spherical shape was due to observation of eclipses, and that of the intervals of the octave can only have been based on experiments with a stretched string, though the actual experiments attributed by tradition to Pythagoras are absurd. It was no doubt this last discovery that led him to formulate his doctrine in the striking saying ‘Things are numbers’, thus definitely giving the priority to the element of form or limit instead of to the indeterminate matter of his predecessors.

      Pythagoras further differed from his predecessors in one respect which proved of vital moment. So far was he from ignoring religion, that he founded a society in southern Italy which was primarily a religious community. It is quite possible that he was influenced by the growth of the Orphic societies which had begun to spread everywhere in the course of the СКАЧАТЬ