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When we enter upon the one hundred and fifty years of philosophical beginnings of Greece, which are called the Cosmological Period, we find ourselves confronted with an extremely interesting social situation, which has been brought about partly by the political and geographical environment of the Greek, partly by his inherited genius. On the one hand, during this century and a half, the political troubles of the Greeks became increasingly aggravated by the growth of Persia on the east and of Carthage on the west. On the other hand, we find that the Greek religion took a sudden turn to mysticism, and by its side a slow but increasing interest in philosophical questions. All through this period Greek politics and Greek religion were a constant peril to Greek life. Greek philosophy proved to be its safety.

The Peril in the Greek Political Situation: Persia and Carthage. It must be remembered that the Greek cities never united into a nation. They were always fighting among themselves. We have already pointed out the civil disturbances between the oligarchy and the democracy throughout the land. These internal troubles continued to the end of Greek history. In this period there was added to these internal troubles a critical external situation which threatened the existence of Greece itself. The sixth century was a momentous one for Greece. In both the east and the west there arose mighty empires that threatened to wipe out its civilization. “The expansion of the Persian power (on the one hand) had suspended a stone of Tantalus over Hellas, and it seemed likely that Greek civilization might be submerged in an Oriental monarchy.”6 Cyrus had laid the foundation of Persia by taking Media in 550 B.C., Lydia in 546 B.C., Babylonia in 538 B.C.; Egypt was added by Cambyses in 528 B.C.; and Darius organized the great Persian possessions in his long reign from 528 to 486 B.C. On the west, Carthage was threatening the Greek cities of Sicily, and at the close of this period was acting in conjunction with Persia to obtain possession of the Mediterranean.

The Peril in the New Religion: The Mysteries and Pythagoras. Already in the seventh century B.C. the political society of Greece felt that it was under the wrath of the gods because of some unatoned guilt. “The earth is full of ills, of ills the sea,” sang the poet. Religious depression became universal. Dissatisfied with the old polytheism, especially as expressed in the theogony of Hesiod, the Greek in the sixth century B.C. began to interpret it according to his present need. Among the masses there appeared the craving for immortality and for personal knowledge of the supernatural. The desire to solve the mystery of life by a short road became universal. Men looked to rites to purify them from the guilt of the world and for gaining personal contact with the world of shades. This new religion became pan-Hellenic. It is called the Mysteries or the Orgia. By Mysteries is not meant societies founded on some occult intellectual belief, as the name might suggest. The Mysteries were based on cult (ceremony), and not on dogma. The special ceremonies were those of initiation and purification. They were supposed to purify the participant and put him in a new frame of mind. The soul would then be protected from the malicious spirits to which it was constantly exposed. The ceremonies are reported to have been attended sometimes by more than thirty thousand people. They consisted of processions, songs, dances, and dramatic spectacles. The most important of the Mysteries were the Orphic and the Eleusinian.

The Mysteries were the basis of the society of Pythagoreans. Pythagoras of Samos was a remarkable man, who went to Italy and settled at Crotona. His sect is of double importance to us because in later times it developed a philosophy on its mathematical and astronomical sides. Pythagoras and his immediate following must be distinguished from the later Pythagoreans. Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans were not philosophers, but a sect like the Orphic society of Mysteries, yet the sect of Pythagoreans embraced much more in its scope. It tried to control the public and private life of its members and to evolve a common method of education.7 Pythagoras was an exiled aristocrat, and his sect was an aristocratic religious body in reaction against the democratic excesses. The only doctrine upon which Pythagoras placed any emphasis was that of immortality in the form of metempsychosis (transmigration of the soul from one bodily form into another). The sect was dispersed as a religious body about 450 B.C. The scattered members formed a school of philosophy at Thebes until about 350 B.C. Of these later philosophical Pythagoreans and their number theory, we shall speak in the proper place.

At the time of the dispersion of the Pythagoreans there existed no longer any peril from the new religion. The craze of the new religion was passing away. During the sixth century B.C. it was a great peril to the future intellectual life of Greece. Had it then gained a little more power it would probably have been admitted by the priesthood to the temples. In the exercise of such enormous sacerdotal power, the priests would have enslaved the Greek mind to superstition, and the priesthood in turn would have become an easy tool for tyrants. There would then have been no Socrates, no Plato, and no Aristotle. The Mysteries were a reaction toward asceticism as a religious salvation from the political peril, but they were, however, equally as great a peril to Greece. The medium course along the line of a rational philosophy, which the Greek genius actually took, proved its salvation.

Characteristics of the Cosmologists. There are certain characteristics of this early philosophy that should be noted at the beginning.

(1) All the Cosmologists were physical scientists, and with few exceptions their scientific views were noteworthy. Aristotle calls them physicists in distinction from their predecessors, whom he calls theologians.

(2) They often worked together in schools. Tradition has been common since Bacon that philosophy centres in individuals; but history shows that frequently the Greeks worked in corporate bodies. These philosophical scientists worked in schools; just as the Homeridæ developed the epic; the Dædalidæ, a group of the earliest artists, the secret of art; the Mysteries, religion. Philosophy now is in the cloister, and the intellect of the time speaks from its retreat from public life. While the Milesian school was undisturbed, owing to the long peace that Miletus enjoyed, we shall find that most of the philosophers of the Cosmological period were in retirement on account of political persecution.

We must remember that by “school” is not necessarily meant a group of pupils under the established instruction of a teacher. A school at this early period is a group of learned men at work on the same problems. Later on in history we shall find that one of the group more learned than the others stands in the position of teacher: for example, Plato in the Academy.

(3) All the Cosmologists were hylozoists. The etymological meaning of hylozoism is its true one—matter is alive. This is the fundamental characteristic of these pre-Socratics from Thales down to Anaxagoras, although some authorities contend that those from the time of Empedocles were not hylozoists. The meaning of hylozoism is simple enough, but the conception is a difficult one for the modern mind; for to-day we are accustomed to think of an impersonal nature under mechanical laws. To the Greek of the Cosmological period the substantial constitution of the universe is impersonal living matter; to us it is impersonal dead matter. Both these views are to be contrasted with the religious belief involved in Greek polytheism, in which the cosmos is conceived to be living personal spirits; this Homeric polytheism is again to be contrasted with the animism of the tribal period, in that it had organized into an æsthetic unity the early savage animism. These hylozoistic philosophers did not, however, give up the Homeric gods, but they treated their existence in a poetic way. They usually believed in their existence, but they always subordinated them to the one living world-ground.

(4) In common with all ancient peoples these Greek philosophers did not believe that the universe had unlimited space. On the contrary, they believed that it was limited and in the shape of an egg.

Table of Cosmologists. The Cosmologists are divided into two classes: (1)the earlier were monists—those who believe that the reality of the universe is a simple, undifferentiated unity; (2)the later were pluralists—those who believe that the reality of the universe consists of several elements equally real. They are enumerated as follows:—

The Monists

1. The Milesian school Thales Anaximander Anaximenes at Miletus.

2. Xenophanes at Colophon and Elea.

3. The Eleatic school Parmenides Zeno at Elea.

4. Heracleitus at Ephesus.

The Pluralists

5. Empedocles at Agrigentum.

6. Anaxagoras at Clazomenæ.

7. The later Pythagoreans mainly at Thebes.

8. Leucippus at Abdera.

How the Philosophical Question Arose. The interests of these philosophical scientists sharply differentiate them from the preceding theogonists, like Hesiod and Epimenides, as well as from the masses who were absorbed in the religion of the Mysteries. They were, moreover, the men of Greece to whom the emotional excitement of a religious revival would not appeal as a refuge from the troubles of the time. Their own experience in the political troubles had made paramount the question as to the permanence of things. Nevertheless, its answer must be found in nature and in an intellectual way. When they turned to the traditional theogonies they found no answer to their question, for there was only a mythical chronicle of a succession of gods beginning with the unknown. The question of the Cosmologists was not, therefore, what was the original form of this changing world, but what is fundamental in the world always. The time factor is no longer important. Not the temporal prius but the real prius is what they seek. The idea of a temporal origin of things gives place to that of eternal being, and the question finally emerges, What is the real substance that constitutes the universe?

MAP SHOWING WHERE THE COSMOLOGISTS LIVED

(None of the Cosmologists, except the later Pythagoreans, lived in the motherland of Greece. Philosophical activity during this period took place in the colonies. The map shows the cities which were the centres of philosophy and the homes of the philosophers as indicated.)

The Greek Monistic Philosophies. Turning back to our classification on page20, we see that the earliest Greek philosophers emphasized the monistic tendency, which had become so prominent in Greek religion. This group of monists was composed of the Milesians, Xenophanes, the Eleatic School, and Heracleitus. The course of reasoning of these early thinkers is naïvely simple, and like all naïve thought, it contains such contradictions that the modern reader is likely to become impatient with it. The value of the study of the philosophy of these early Greeks is entirely historical. Its historical value, however, is very great, for it is a revelation of the culture of the Greece of that time, it throws light on many of the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, and most of all it contains the germs of modern metaphysical problems. These first Greek philosophers raised the question, What is the constitution of the substance of the universe? Their answers are naïve solutions to the historical metaphysical “riddle.”

The Milesians, who form the earliest philosophical school in European history, seem to have assumed two facts as self-evident about the substance of the universe: (1)There is a single cosmic substance identical with itself, which is the basis of all the changes in nature; (2)Moving matter is the same as life. The Milesians were quite unconscious that these two assumptions were contradictory, but the contradiction impressed their successors—Xenophanes, Heracleitus, and the Eleatics; and divided them in their development of philosophy. Matter which keeps identical with itself is the Unchanging8 and is brought into opposition with Life, the Changing, or matter which moves. The question for Xenophanes, Heracleitus, and the Eleatics—and indeed for all future philosophy—was: How can the changing processes of life be explained by an unchanging substance?

Xenophanes, who was more of a religious reformer than a philosopher, was so absorbed in the first of these assumptions that he developed it for his purpose in his practical social reformation to the entire neglect of the second assumption. The Eleatics, however, to whose city Xenophanes had come, could not leave his doctrine in its one-sided and undeveloped form. They accepted his teaching of the divine Unchangingness of the universe, but this compelled these profounder thinkers to offer some explanation of the natural processes of change. Change to them cannot really exist. Heracleitus, on the other hand, was impressed with the aspect of life that is expressed in the second assumption of the Milesians—living matter is moving matter. He therefore maintained in direct opposition to the Eleatics, that the changing, living processes of nature alone are real. The two contradictory assumptions that lay so mutually indifferent in the Milesian doctrine thus became the basis of a sharp metaphysical controversy between Heracleitus and the Eleatics. The substance of the world is permanent, change is an illusion, said the Eleatics. The substance of the world changes, permanence is an illusion, said Heracleitus. Either all things are permanent or all things change. These early philosophers had no wealth of empirical knowledge nor of psychological reflection upon which to draw, and it is not strange that they should take extreme positions and be blind to their practical consequences.

1. The Milesian School. Of all the Greek cities in the sixth century B.C. Miletus was the wealthiest and most prosperous. It was one of the Ionian colonies and was situated on the coast of Asia Minor, and it alone was able to preserve its autonomy as neighbor of the warring eastern empires. Not until the battle of Lade was it captured and destroyed (494 B.C.). From two generations of philosophers history has preserved three names,—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. The school is called indifferently the Milesian or the Ionic school. The proximity of Miletus to Ephesus, Colophon, and Clazomenæ (as a glance at the map will show) explains the influence of the Milesian school upon the doctrines of Heracleitus, Xenophanes, and Anaxagoras. Undoubtedly the contact of the Milesians with the Orient and Egypt had brought to them knowledge and correct scientific observations of many sorts, especially astronomical.

Thales (b.640 B.C.) was a member of one of the leading families of Miletus, and lived during the flourishing period of the city under the tyranny of Thrasybulus. He is counted among the seven Wise Men, and belonged to the rich commercial class. He probably engaged in commerce and traveled in Egypt. He was versed in the current learning, predicted an eclipse, and was acute in mathematics and physics. Probably he never committed anything to writing. Aristotle’s comments are the only data about him.

Anaximander (611–545 B.C.?) was an astronomer and geographer; he made an astronomical globe, a sundial, and a geographical map. He was an intimate disciple of Thales and wrote Concerning Nature, which is referred to as the first Greek philosophical treatise. Nothing is known of his life.

Anaximenes (560–500 B.C.?) was the disciple of Anaximander. One sentence is preserved of his writings.9

The Milesian Philosophy. The Milesians lived upon the seacoast, and the changes of the sea and air must have deeply impressed them. They had an intellectual curiosity to find the cosmic matter which remained identical with itself and at the same time moved. (See p.22.) They were not, therefore, interested to discover the chemical composition of matter, but to find what matter was most moving and therefore most alive. Thales said that it was water; Anaximenes, air; and Anaximander, the Apeiron, or the Unlimited. Their respective choices were determined by what seemed to possess the most mobility and the greatest inner vitality. Thales thought water possessed this quality. Water is always moving. Thales saw it moving. It therefore has life in itself. Anaximander felt that no object in our perceptual experience would fully explain the ceaseless mobility of nature, and he called it the Unlimited or the Indeterminate—the Apeiron. It is a mixture in which all qualities are lost. The changes in nature are endless, and therefore the single cosmic substance, from which they come, must be endless as well, for “from whatever source things come, in that they have their end.” We learn that this is just the reason for Anaximenes choosing the air for the single underlying cosmic substance. The air is the most changeable thing and is Unlimited.9

Both Thales and Anaximenes still held to the traditional polytheism of the Greek Epic. Anaximander rises above them in this respect. This conception of the Unlimited, to which his scientific search led him, is regarded by him as Deity. He calls it “the divine” (τὸ θεῖον); although he speaks of it in the neuter gender it is, nevertheless, the first European philosophical conception of God. It is the first attempt to conceive of God as purely physical and yet without any mythical dress. In Anaximander the Milesian monism has a religious aspect.

2. Xenophanes, the Religious Philosopher (570 B.C.). The scientific monism of Anaximander was after all only expressive of that religious dissatisfaction, first voiced by the Wise Men, against the Hesiod cosmogony and the immorality of the Homeric myths. Now for the first time a positive conflict between religion and philosophy arose through Xenophanes, the rhapsodist of Colophon. Colophon, an Ionian city near Miletus, was noted for its obscene and cruel religious practices, and when his native city capitulated to the Persians, Xenophanes charged its feebleness to its immoral religion. He went to Magna Græcia, and, disguised as a musician, he wandered about for sixty-seven years through its length and breadth declaiming in song against the anthropomorphism, the mystic ecstasies, and the general social practices of the Greeks. He finally settled in Elea, southern Italy (see map), and on this account he is sometimes called the founder of the Eleatic school.

Xenophanes’ influence upon the thought of Greece was threefold: (1)He preached the Milesian philosophical monism to the people of Greece in the form of a religious monism; (2)He carried this doctrine from eastern Greece (Asia Minor) to Western Greece (Magna Græcia); (3)He was the connecting link between the Milesian and the following Eleatic school.

The Philosophy of Xenophanes. Based on one of the Milesian assumptions, viz., a single cosmic substance remains identical with itself in nature, Xenophanes felt that he had a right to set down two principles about nature.

1. The single primordial substance below the changes of nature is God. The reality below nature which Thales conceived to be water, Anaximander to be unlimited substance without a name, Anaximenes to be air, was said by Xenophanes to be God. The important point here is that Xenophanes has not given the Greeks a spiritualistic conception of God; but that he has positively stated that the substance of the universe is an object of religious devotion. He calls the cosmic substance God instead of calling it water, Apeiron, or air. It is a material thing, and yet it is an object of reverence. He ascribes to this God a spherical form, and yet also mental power of omniscience. God is “one and all” ἓν καὶ πᾶν, and yet he is “one god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form and thought like unto mortals.” The positive conception of God hangs confused in the mind of Xenophanes. He is scarcely a monotheist, nor yet a pantheist. He is a hylozoist, who conceives the underlying cosmic substance to be an object of religious reverence.

2. The single cosmic substance below the changes of nature is unchangeable. To the Milesians the more moving is matter, the more alive is it. Life and activity are the same thing. To Xenophanes this is not the case, but, on the contrary, the opposite is true. He conceives God to be a definite sphere that is unchangeable and homogeneous. The material substance, God, always remains the same. “He has no need of going about, now hither, now thither, in order to carry out his wishes; but he governs all men without toil.” Xenophanes thus becomes the forerunner of the Eleatic school.

3. Heracleitus, “the Misanthropist” and “the Obscure” (about 563–470 B.C.). Heracleitus was a native of Ephesus, belonged to the aristocracy, and suffered at the hands of the democracy. He wrote a treatise that was difficult to understand even by the ancients, some fragments of which are preserved. He was called the “weeping philosopher” because of his misanthropy, and also the “dark philosopher” because of the obscurity of his writings. He was a theorist rather than a physicist, and his doctrines foreshadow our modern physical theories. His name is coupled with that of Parmenides in the deep impression he made upon Greek thought. From his complacent and gloomy retirement he looked forth upon the world around him with profound contempt, as did the Stoics after him.

a. Heracleitus’ Doctrine of Absolute and Universal Change. The wonder which the Ionians felt, that nature phenomena change into one another, found its liveliest expression in Heracleitus. He not only found that mutability was the primal aspect of nature phenomena, but he also pointed out that human experiences also had their rapid and complete transitions. Especially was he fond of citing the changes of opposites into each other. But what shows his development over the early Milesian doctrine was his isolation of the aspect of change from the Milesian conception of the cosmic matter, thereby affirming that abiding permanence is an illusion. It is one thing to affirm that reality is essentially change; it is another to universalize change by affirming that the permanent has no existence. The Milesian doctrine was too naïve to go as far as that. Heracleitus piles up figures of speech to show that there is no permanence whatever. All existing things are only “becoming”-things, passing-away things. Being is always becoming, about-to-be. The only unchanging thing is change. “You cannot step into the same rivers, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger.” “All things flow” (πάντα ῥεῖ). What abides and deserves the name of Deity is not thing, but motion—Becoming.

b. Fire is the Cosmic Substance. Here we come to a difficulty in explaining the doctrine of Heracleitus because of the confusion in his own mind. He evidently goes a long way toward conceiving the cosmic substance as an abstraction—as the process of change. But he could not be wholly abstract. He stops and tells us that the cosmic substance is fire, and he probably means by fire just the same sort of thing as Anaximenes meant by air. Fire is the cosmic substance. It is the essence of all material things because it is the most mobile. But, after all, the fire of which Heracleitus is thinking is not a localized thing, like the fire on the hearth. For the hearth fire in a sense is ever identical with itself. The fire which Heracleitus means is ever darting, ever transforming material. To sum up: Heracleitus does not mean by fire an abstraction like the law of change; he does not mean, on the other hand, a material ever remaining like itself: he does mean a material, but a transforming material.

c. The Definite Changes of Fire. Heracleitus makes some acute observations about the characteristics of the changing fire. The Milesians had been content to observe atmospheric changes and to name condensation and rarefaction as the forms of cosmic change. Heracleitus goes farther and emphasizes definite relations of change. The succession of changes always remains the same. Their definite relation is the only permanence in the world, and Heracleitus’ conception foreshadows the modern conception of the uniformity of the law of nature. The changes are (1)fateful, (2)rational, and (3)just. They show that the world is a destiny, a reason, and a justice. This identification of ethical and logical qualities with the physical betrays the undeveloped condition of the thought of Heracleitus.

In general, there are two characteristics to be noted with reference to Heracleitus’ conception of a definite succession of changes: (1)the changes are always a harmony of opposites; (2)and the changes are in a closed circuit. The process of change is not a flow in one direction like a river over its bed, but it is a movement in two opposite directions. By change Heracleitus means not only a passing into something else but a passing into the opposite. Everything is the union of opposites, and everything is the transition point of opposites about to separate. The flux of things is thus poetically conceived as a war of things, and this war is “the father of all things.” This unity of opposites has an equilibrium that illudes us into thinking it is permanent. The universe is an invisible harmony, divided into itself and again united. Investigate life and there are antitheses everywhere. War is life. The second general characteristic of the succession of changes is their closed circuit. Fire changes into all things, and all things are changing back into fire. These two movements are called the “Upward Way” and the “Downward Way.” Downward, fire changes through air and water into earth. Upward, earth changes back to water, air, and fire. With every change, there is counter-change, action is accompanied by a reaction. “Men do not know how that which is drawn in opposite directions harmonizes with itself. The harmonious structure of the world depends upon opposite tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.”

d. The Practical Philosophy of Heracleitus. Heracleitus was more of a metaphysician than a physicist, and his chief concern was in the formation and the practical application of his theory of change. He looked upon man as a bit of cosmic fire struck off and imprisoned in a body of earth, water, and air. After death this fiery soul is released and absorbed in the cosmic fire. In his present state man has a divided existence: the life of the soul, or the fire of the reason; and the life of the senses of the imprisoning body. The reason retires from the illusions of sense, and sees in its aristocratic isolation how illusory the sensations are. For the senses tell us that their objects are permanent, while the reason sees through this deception to the changingness of the world. Thus the beginning is made by Heracleitus in distinguishing the reflections of the reason from sensations. Truth is for the first time systematically set over against opinion. The reasonable Wise Man resigns himself to whatever happens because he knows that it is fateful, wise, and just. The Wise Man recognizes that all is change, and he is happy because he sees providence in the vicissitudes of his own life. Thus in the aristocratic hate, which Heracleitus holds against democracies, he makes conformity to law the only way to happiness. The reason of Wise Men, and not the senses of the multitude, must be the true guide of society.

Heracleitus was a profound observer and theorist. His physical theory foreshadowed the modern theories of natural law and of relativity; his practical theories reappear in the psychology of Protagoras and the ethics of the Stoics.

4. The Eleatic School. The town of Elea to which Xenophanes came in the course of his wanderings had been recently settled by the Ionian refugees from Phocæa, a great maritime city in Asia Minor, which had been conquered by the Persians (543 B.C.). Elea is now Castellamare on the west coast of Italy. It is celebrated as the birthplace of Parmenides and Zeno, who founded the so-called Eleatic school.

a. Parmenides (b.515 B.C.).

Parmenides wrote about 470 B.C. He is represented as a serious and influential man, with a high moral character. He exercised strong influence upon such philosophers as Plato and Democritus, and was a political power in the city of Elea, of which he was a native. He was not a stranger to the Pythagoreans. The large fragment of his poem is the most ancient monument extant of metaphysical speculation among the Greeks.

Parmenides takes the doctrine of Xenophanes with great seriousness, and what Xenophanes says about the Godhead, Parmenides says about all things. Xenophanes’ religious weapon of an unchanging cosmic substance becomes in the hands of Parmenides an academic doctrine of science and the basis of logical controversy. Parmenides used the conception of Xenophanes in his great didactic poem, The Way of Truth and the Way of Opinion, with the evident purpose of refuting the theory of Heracleitus. The fragment of the poem reveals the driest abstractions dressed in rich poetry. As a thinker Parmenides is the most important in this period. Zeno was the friend and pupil of Parmenides.

(1) The Cosmic Substance is Being. The first assumption in the Milesian doctrine—that there is a single matter that ever remains identical with itself—was so self-evident to Parmenides that he does not attempt to prove it. He assumes it, as if it were cogent to everybody. However, he explains what he means by Being in a negative statement: Not-Being, or what is not, cannot be thought. Being and thought are so correlated that they are the same. Thinking always has Being as its content, and there is no Being that is not thought. Being ＝ Thought. This explanation of Parmenides’ identification of thought and Being may be put in this logical form:—

All thinking refers to something thought, and therefore has Being for its content;

Thinking that refers to nothing, and is therefore contentless, cannot be;

Therefore, not-Being cannot be thought, much less can it be.

These propositions look very abstract, and make us believe that we are to plunge immediately into a kind of German idealism. But Parmenides leaves us in no doubt that he is one of the hylozoists of his time. Being is indeed thought, but Being is also matter. We may therefore amend our equation to Being ＝ Thought ＝ Matter. Being is what fills space, and all Being has this and only this property. All Being is therefore exactly alike, and there is only one, single Being. There are no distinctions in Being. By not-Being Parmenides means empty space or that which is not material. So that Parmenides’ assumption of Being as the cosmic substance means this: all that exists, including thought, fills space; and all that does not exist does not fill space.

Being, the cosmic substance, is one, eternal, imperishable, homogeneous, unchangeable, and material. When men see the world as it really is, when they see its cosmic substance, they see it to be one continuous material block. The world is not made up of parts with intervals of nothing between them, but it is a solid, homogeneous whole. The cosmic Being is a timeless, spaceless Being with no distinctions. The form of Being is spherical. It is cosmic-body and cosmic-thought. This is the assumption of Parmenides, which is so self-evident and so cogent to him that he does not attempt to prove but only to explain it.

(2) Other Things than the Cosmic Substance (Being) have no Real Existence. If Being is space that is filled, not-Being is empty space. However, empty space has no existence. But the existence of a plural number of things depends upon the existence of empty spaces between them. Furthermore, the motion of things and the change of things depend upon the existence of empty spaces in which they can move and change. Since empty space is not-Being and has no existence, the plurality of things and the motion and change of things have also no existence. They are illusions. The nature-world, with its richness of qualities and variety of motions, before the logic of Parmenides “folds up its tents like the Arabs and silently steals away.”

This logical drawing out of one of the aspects of the Milesian conception of the cosmic matter has a curious result. The Milesians and Xenophanes sought to explain by the cosmic substance the many nature changes. But when in the hands of Parmenides the cosmic substance is all of reality, then there is no reality to the changes. Consequently the concept formed for the explanation of change has so developed as to deny the existence of change. The cosmic substance excludes all origination and decay, all space and time differences, all divisibility, diversity, and movement. There is only one real, all else is illusion.

But what can we say of the varied world of nature as it appears to us? Do we see, hear, and touch many things and motions? In PartII of his poem he raises the question, Suppose man takes the world of change as real how must he explain it? He answers by using the explanation of Heracleitus. But these changes of eye and ear belong to the world of sense, and Parmenides is talking, in PartI of his poem, about the real world or that world known to thought. Parmenides insists as strongly as did Heracleitus that the reason and not the sense shall be our guide to what is real. Yet he arrives at exactly the opposite conclusion from Heracleitus as to what the reason sees as real. The senses show us only the many and the changing. The reason shows us nothing of the sort, but only permanence and unchangingness.

b. Zeno (b.490–430 B.C.).

Zeno was born in Elea. He was contemporary with those who tried to reconcile the two sides of the metaphysical controversy,—Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists. He wrote in prose in the form of question and answer. This is the beginning of the dialogue literature, which in the time of the Sophists, Socrates and Plato, was richly developed and became known as dialectic. On the Greek stage during the time of Pericles it came forth in dramatic form through Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

The Philosophy of Zeno. Zeno was the active controversialist of the school of Elea, and he was not a constructive philosopher. He offered no contribution to advance the thought of Parmenides. He appeared rather as the master of logical argument in defense of his predecessor, by tearing to pieces the arguments of his opponents. The opponents that Zeno is attacking are the Atomists of Abdera, who were his contemporaries, rather than Heracleitus. His contribution was negative and formal, but it was nevertheless effective and searching. His arguments and paradoxes will, however, lose their cogency unless it be kept in mind that he is trying to show how absurd magnitude, multiplicity, and change would be in discontinuous space such as the Atomists describe. While his paradoxes have been attacked again and again, they still have effectiveness against atomic theories.

His arguments are against magnitude, multiplicity, and motion. There can be no magnitude, because a thing would then be both infinitely small and infinitely great. There can be no multiplicity of things, since they would be both limited and unlimited in number. There can be no motion, because (1)it is impossible to go through a fixed space; (2)it is impossible to go though a space that has movable limits; and (3)because of the relativity of motion. The dilemmas which he proposed of Achilles and the tortoise, the flying arrow at rest, and the bushel of corn are classic.10

The Results of the Conflict between Heracleitus and Parmenides. 1.One important result of this final conflict between the inconsistent motives in the Milesian teaching was that reason was contrasted with sense, reflection with experience. The more fully the philosophers developed their doctrines, the more their doctrines became contrasted with the opinions of unreflecting people. At first the contrast appeared in this naïve form: that what they thought was right, and what others thought must be wrong, if others differed from them. Then the contrast came in this form: that reflection gives the true and sensations the false. Thus reflection came to have such conclusiveness that it gained independence. The philosopher began to feel the supremacy of reason, to assert that he has truth, to call unreasoned belief by the opprobrious name of “opinion.” This is curiously illustrated in the case of Heracleitus and Parmenides. Their opposing conceptions of the cosmic substance are claimed to be the result of reason, while each calls the other’s theory “opinion.”

2. Another result was that in the Greek thought the monistic theory was found to be useless in the study of nature. These early monistic views led up as necessary steps to pluralism, but they were not in themselves serviceable. The imperfection in the Milesian teaching appeared in the impassable gulf between Heracleitus and Parmenides. It now remained for the last Cosmologists to see if, on the basis of pluralism, they could not reconcile the preceding views and at the same time obtain a satisfactory metaphysics of nature.

3. The third result of the controversy between the Eleatics and Heracleitus was that the peril from the Orphic Mysteries was averted,—not immediately, nor in a year’s time, but after many years. Philosophy became established. The Greek reason now had an object of interest, in a sharp scientific issue. Mystery was not crushed, but subdued. The mental life of the future Greek had a topic for its reflection which supplanted, when the time came, its emotional interest in the supernatural.