CHAPTER IV.
PHILOSOPHY.
Theterm philosopher, or lover of wisdom, is an appellation which was first applied by Pythagoras, of Samos. He was the originator of the Italic, as Thales, his predecessor, one of the sophoi or wise men, was of the Ionic school, aboutB.C.640 years. Philosophy means a search after wisdom. When this is looked for among the things that are seen and handled, weighed and measured, it is physical philosophy. But he who seeks for an object which is not of this material kind, is called a metaphysical philosopher.
All philosophical elements are in the East, but enveloped in one another, needing a distinct and matured growth. As the roots of the modern world are in classic antiquity, so those of classic antiquity are on the coasts of Egypt, in the vales of Persia, and on the heights of Asia. The oriental world preceded Greece, but has left no legible record of her past. In the progressive West alone does authentic history begin, and this is embodied in history, as in every other branch of human improvement. The world of humanity was seen to take a step forward, when civilization descended through Asia Minor, and traversed the Mediterranean to rest on the coasts of Attica. Then all the elements of human nature came under a new condition, and soon adopted the permanent order of an independent march.
The earliest philosophy of Greece had an Asiatic origin, and was received through Ionia. Many fragments from that source were incorporated in the works of Homer and Hesiod, and others are quoted by the primitive annalists from the still more ancient oracular poetry. Sir William Jones was of the opinion that the six leading schools, whose principles are explained in the Dersana Sastra, comprise all the metaphysics of the old Academy, the Stoa, and theLyceum. "Nor," continues he, "is it possible to read the Vedasta, or the many compositions in illustration of it, without believing that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India." In the mathematical sciences, the Hindoos were acquainted with the decimal notation by nine digits and zero. In algebra, Mr. Colebrooke found reason to conclude that the Greeks were far behind the Hindoos; but it is possible that the latter was obtained from the Morea at a later period through the Arabs. But on the question of philosophy, there can be no doubt that incipient notions existed in Hindoostan, compared with which the antiquity of Pythagoras is but of yesterday; and in point of daring, the boldest flights of Plato were tame and commonplace.
Grecian art, which rose to absolute perfection, ended also with itself, and presents a striking exemplification of the perishable nature of merely instinctive greatness. But the philosophy of that wonderful people was more immutably founded, and has never ceased to show that the human race, unlike an unbroken circle constantly revolving upon itself, progressively advances into the infinite, and shines unremittingly with inborn ardor to attain the highest and noblest ends. Humanity, that is, thought, art, science, philosophy, and religion, the powers which are represented in history, embraces all, profits by all, advances continually through all, and never retrogrades. A given system may perish, and this may be a misfortune to itself, but not to the general weal. If it possessed real life, that life is still realized in some higher manifestation, but perhaps so modified by co-operative elements as to appear lost. It may indeed be obscured, but can never be obliterated. Vicissitudes and revolutions may rapidly succeed, and in great confusion; but human destiny is higher and better than these, it accepts all, assimilates all, and subordinates all to its own supreme behests. Every epoch, in retiring from the stage of the world, leaves after it a long heritage of contrary interests; but these only wait for a sufficient accumulation of other like elements, that with them a homogeneous amalgam may be formed as the basis of yet worthier superadditions. The Hellenic mind invented the art of deducing truth from principles by the dialectical process, and this divinest of Japhetic discoveries has exerted the most auspicious influence on subsequentphilosophy and religion. The world had already learned much when the Greek first demonstrated that reasoning might often err, but reason never. That is the only medium through which truth is conveyed, and Greek philosophy was truly precious when it became to mankind the translation of the instinctive consciousness of God into reasoning. This was first applied to fathom the depths of physical speculation; and, then, in the consecrated soul of Socrates, it labored to possess the bosom of universal humanity, that thereby it might unfold to all the highest science. Shem transformed figurative signs into simple letters, and invented the Alphabet; but that greater prophet of the human race, Japhet, did vastly more, by translating the hieroglyphics of thought into simple elements, thereby inventing dialectical philosophy. This changed myths, legends, and visions, as well as more authentic annals into the heirloom of mankind by reason, and became at once and for all time the great organon for dealing with both conception and existence of all kinds everywhere.
There was military activity enough among the Greeks to preserve them from intellectual and moral torpor, but fortunately it did not exist in sufficient force to engross the faculties of superior minds. Therefore, energies of the highest order were thrown back upon intellectual pursuits; and the masses, so led, were also inclined to like culture, especially in the direction of æsthetics and philosophy. The bold writers of the Republic shrunk not from propounding all those problems in science and morals most interesting to man; and, whatever may have been their skill in solving them, they certainly were the first to point the way to true greatness. But for the restless spirit of inquiry which was awakened by Greek philosophers, the western nations might still have been slumbering in barbarian ignorance. Ancient dialectics prepared the way for modern progress, by teaching intellect to discipline and comprehend itself, in order that it may accurately scan nature and bind her forces to the car of human welfare. Such was the idea expressed by Aristotle, when he said: "The order of the universe is like that of a family, of which each member has its part not arbitrarily or capriciously enforced, but prefixed and appointed; all in their diversified functions conspiring to the harmony of the whole."
Philosophy, like the literature, art, and science of the ancients,had its origin among the Asiatic Greeks. The same region that gave existence and character to Homer and Herodotus, produced also Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, founders of the Ionic school. They belonged to the same region, studied under like auspices, and formed continuous links in the great chain of perpetual progress. To the same source is to be accredited those who extended the Ionic doctrines to Magna Grecia and southern Italy, such as the poet Zenophanes, and that mighty founder of the most erudite confederacy, Pythagoras.
Anaxagoras, successor of Anaximenes, was bornB.C.500 years. After giving great distinction to the Ionic school, he came to reside at Athens, where he taught Pericles and Euripides, at the same time he was opening the source from which Socrates derived his knowledge of natural philosophy.
Parmenides, Zeus, and Leucippus, natives of Elea, enhanced the reputation of the Eleatic school, founded by Zenophanes, aboutB.C.500 years. Democritus, a disciple of Leucippus, increased its fame still more, but modified its doctrines extensively.
Socrates, according to Cicero, "brought down philosophy from heaven to dwell upon earth, who made her even an inmate of our habitations." His discomfiture of the Sophists, whose futile logic inflicted much injury on the Athenian mind, was a great blessing to his country, but one which cost the benefactor his life. His doctrines were never committed to writing by himself, but have been preserved in substance by his distinguished pupils Plato and Xenophon.
The Cyrenaic sect was founded by Aristippus, a disciple of Socrates. It degenerated through the varied succession of Theodorus, Hegesias, and Anniceris, to merge finally in the kindred doctrines on happiness inculcated by Epicurus.
Antisthenes was the first of the Cynics, and was succeeded by the more notorious Diogenes. This school was composed of disciplinarians, rather than doctrinists, whose whole business was the endeavor to arrange the circumstances of life, that they may produce the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. The caustic wit of Diogenes was directed against more refined teachers, especially his great cotemporary, Plato. The latter, in terms which implied respect for the evident talents of a rival whom he had so much reason to despise, called him "a Socrates run mad."
Archelaus succeeded Diogenes, and was called, by way of eminence, "the natural philosopher." Before him, Anaxagoras had taught occasional disciples in Athens; but it is probable that Archelaus was the first to open a regular school there. He transferred the chair of philosophy from Ionia to the metropolis of Minerva 450 years before Christ.
The Megaric sect of Sophists was the last and worst. It was founded by Euclides, and produced Eubulides, Alexinus, Eleensis, Diodorus, and Stilpo. Cotemporary criticism applied to some of these such epithets as the Wrangler, or the Driveler, which, doubtless, were well deserved. Stilpo was the last gleam of philosophic worth in Greece.
Of the religious views of Socrates, we shall treat in the succeeding chapter. Under the present head, it is sufficient to say, that his moral worth illustrated the age in which he lived; and his admiring disciples branched into so many distinguished families or schools, that he is justly called the great patriarch of philosophy. Socrates was the first philosophic thinker who demanded of himself and of all others a reason for their thoughts. He roused the spirit, and rendered it fruitful by rugged husbandry. He insisted that men should understand themselves, and so express their reason as to be understood by him. Thus he produced all he desired, movement, advancement in reflection; and leaving successors to arrange systems, it was enough for him to supervise the birth and growth of living thoughts. As the Pythagoreans were the authors of mathematics and cosmology, Socrates consummated the scientific endeavor, and added psychology. Thus the dignity and importance of human personality stood revealed, the crowning light most needed to complete the age of Pericles. Around this fundamental idea created by psychology was gathered the idea of personal grandeur, in heaven as upon earth, in literature, art, science, philosophy, and religion. As soon as philosophic genius proclaimed the supreme importance of the study of human personality, the higher divinities became personal, and the representations of art no longer fell into exaggerated forms, but were definite, expressive, and refined. Moreover, as this principle prevailed and was acutely felt, legislation became liberal, and the social polity was necessarily democratic.
Plato, the great glory of Athenian philosophy, was born inÆgina, aboutB.C.430 years. Descending from Codrus and Solon, his lineage was most distinguished; but his genius was much more illustrious than any ancestral fame. He learned dialectics from Euclides the Megaric; studied the Pythagorean system under Phitolaus and Archytas; and traveled into Egypt to accomplish himself in all that which the geometry and other learning of that country could impart. Returning to Greece, he became the most characteristic and renowned teacher of philosophy in the Periclean age. Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Aristotle were among his disciples, and continuators of his immense mental and moral worth. Plato also visited Italy, where he gathered the noble germs which he grafted on the doctrines of Socrates, and which are not accounted for in Xenophon. On his final return to Athens, he took possession of a modest apartment adjacent to the groves and grounds which had been bequeathed by Academus to the public, wherein he lectured to the public on sublime themes. He divided philosophy into three parts—Morals, Physics, and Dialectics. The first division included politics, and under the second, that science which afterward came to be distinguished by the name of metaphysics. In his Commonwealth, the object of Plato was to project a perfect model to which human institutions might in some remote degree approximate. He seems even at that early day to have had a presentiment of the ennobling republicanism which human progress would necessitate and attain. His writings form a mass of literary and moral wisdom, inculcated with the highest charm of thought and manner, which had ever appeared to exalt the imagination and affect the heart. He was, doubtless, the best prose writer of antiquity; in the form and force of his composition, he stands at the highest point of refinement Attic genius ever attained. He died at Athens, eighty-one years old, and was honored with a monument in the Academy, upon which his famous pupil, Aristotle, inscribed an epitaph in terms of reverence and gratitude.
The philosophy to which Plato gives his name, recalls at once all that is most profound in thought and pleasing in imagination. But no isolated genius can be correctly appreciated. His predecessors, Socrates and Anaxagoras, as well as his successors, the Neoplatonists, must be taken into joint consideration, or the great master in whom philosophic grandeur culminated will not himself be properlyunderstood. Neither is the Sceptic school of Pyrrho, nor the Stoic school of Zeus; Democritus, of Abdera, radiant with smiles, or Heraclitus, of Ephesus, bathed in tears, to be discarded from the view, when we would sum up the aggregated worth of that philosophic age. But the hour has come when the god of philosophy, a son of Metis, or Wisdom, realized the menace put into the mouth of Prometheus by Æschylus, and Zeus with his compeers is driven into the caverns of the West to share the exile of Cronus. Who was the predestined instrument of all this?
Stagirus, the birthplace of Aristotle, was situated on the western side of the Strymonic gulf; a region which, in soil and appearance, resembles much the southern part of the bay of Naples. When seventeen years old, he came to Athens, the centre of all civilization, and the focus of every thing that was brilliant in action or thought. Plato fired his mind, and fortified that wonderful industry in his hardy pupil, which enabled him, first among men, to acquire almost encyclopædic knowledge in collecting, criticizing, and digesting the most comprehensive mass of materials. So extraordinary was the application of Aristotle, that Plato called his residence "the house of the reader."
How wonderful is Providence! While Aristotle was exiled in Mytilene, and when the auspices of human progress were most foreboding, he was invited to undertake the training of one who, in the world of action, was destined to achieve an empire which only that of his master in the world of thought could ever surpass. In the conjunction of two such spirits, according to the predetermined mode and moment, the invaluable accumulation of Periclean wealth was to be distributed westward without the slightest loss. The great transition hero needed to be trained in a way befitting his mission, and this required that he should be imbued with something better than the austerity of Leonidas, or the flattery of Lysimachus, so that his character might command respect, and his judgment preserve it. Through the influence of Aristotle on Alexander, this conservative result was attained. The rude and intemperate barbarian became ameliorated, and soon manifested that love for philosophy and elegant letters, which were the fairest traits of his life. So strong did this elevating passion become, even amid the ignoble pursuits of war, that being at the extremityof Asia, in a letter to Harpalus, he desired the works of Philestris, the historian, the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the dithyrambs of Telestis and Philoxenus, to be sent to him. Homer was his constant traveling companion; a copy of whom was often in his hands, and deposited by the side of his dagger under his nightly pillow. Thus did the beautiful age of Pericles blend with the martial force about to succeed.
When Aristotle returned to Athens to close the great era of philosophic vigor, being near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, his school was known as the Lyceum, and here every morning and evening he addressed a numerous body of scholars. Among the acute and impressible Greeks nearly all objects, however ideal in their original treatment, subsequently received a practical form. As the imaginative sublimities of their poets became embodied in glorious sculptures, so the theories of their early philosophy were wrought out politically, or gave way to cumulative mathematical demonstration. Plato, in dialogues and dissertations, philosophized with all the fervor of an artist; while the method of Aristotle was strictly scientific in the minute as well as enlarged sense of the word. To the first, philosophy was a speciality which engrossed a protracted life; but the latter treated not only of natural science, and natural history as well, but he also wrote on politics, general history, and criticism, so that it may be said truly that he epitomized the entire knowledge of the Greeks. The age of Plato was an age of ideals; but with Aristotle the realistic age had dawned. Pericles had begun to take part in public affairs one year before the birth of Socrates; Olynthus was taken by Philip of Macedon the very year in which Plato died. This intermediate period of one hundred and twenty years was all occupied with some ideal of beauty, wisdom, or freedom, in the persons of poets, architects, sculptors, painters, statesmen, who were striving to realize it, dreaming of it, or sporting with it to amaze and bewilder their fellow-men. But the name of Aristotle, as that of Philip, is a signal that concentrated organizing power has appeared in the realms of thought and action, and that the coming age requires a philosophical expounder who shall in his own career govern the old and represent the new. It was at Athens that Aristotle collected all the treasures of scientific facts the conquered nations couldcontribute, and wrote there the great works which were still young in their influence when the Macedonian madman had long since crumbled into dust.
To the followers of Plato in the Academy, of Aristotle in the Lyceum, the Cynics of the Cynosargus, and Stoics of the Portico, Epicurus came in the decrepid effeminacy of the age at the moment of its lowest degradation, and, amid the parterres of prettiness which, with the pittance of eighty minæ, he purchased for the purpose, established the so-called philosophy of the Garden. Such was the last expression of that Ionian school which shared somewhat of the Hindoo national character, wherein it originated, and so far resembled a hot-house seed. Opening with gorgeous colors and rich perfume, it grew rapidly, and produced precocious and abundant fruit. But the more western growth was like the oak, hardened by wind and weather, striking its roots into solid earth, and stretching its branches in free air toward both sun and stars. In the Ionic school the human soul performed but a feeble part. The Italic school, on the contrary, was mathematic and astronomic, and at the same time idealistic; it was at once the brain and heart of Grecian progress and power. The former regarded the relations of phenomena as simple modifications of the same, and founded the abstract upon the concrete; whereas, the latter neglected the phenomena themselves for their relations, founding thus the concrete upon the abstract. To the Ionic school the centre of the world's system is the earth; but the centre of the universal system, according to conscious reason in the Italic school, is the sun. Ten fundamental numbers therein formed the decadal astronomy, the harmonious kosmos, whose laws of movement around the great central luminary produced the sweet music of the spheres.
Empedocles, of Agrigentum,B.C.455, presents the most western phase of Greek character, and the one which in the clearest manner anticipated the age to come. He noted the great changes which transpired in society, and believed he saw their counterpart in the convulsions going on within and upon the earth. The war of disorganized humanity, passions against nature, and the conflict of enraged elements among themselves, were closely considered, but doubtless with a confusion of physics and ethics in his mind.Love, hatred, friendship, treason, were all recognized mixed up in the fearful warfare of earth, air, fire, and water. Great nature was no imaginary battle-field to the mind of Empedocles; the hosts which Homer had portrayed fighting for Greeks and Trojans, were still in deadly struggle, and his vivid speculations soon after became actual history. Cotemporaries called him the enchanter; because, as a zealous student of the outer world, he could not disengage himself from the perplexities which he found within his own constitution, but followed out with fervor the greatest question of our being. He not only won at the chariot race, as his father did before him, and fought for the liberties of his native Agrigentum, that last hold of freedom in the West, but as poet, as well as philosopher, he forms a curious link between Homer, Pindar, and his Roman admirer, Lucretius.
As often as the historian and philosopher speak of heroic virtues, they will mention Lycurgus, and the influence of his legislation. But when they glance at the higher objects man was made to attain, the harmonious development and adornment of all the powers in his possession, they must look to the laws of a nobler culture in Attic climes. It was there only, that all ennobling influences were blended and subordinated to the highest use by the best minds. Plato frequented the studios of artists, to acquire correct ideas of beauty; and Aristotle, in his Politics, says, that "all were taught literature, gymnastics, and music; and many also, the art of design, as being useful and abundantly available for the purposes of life." But not one beautiful flower of intellect or art sprang in Laconian soil, to acquire thereon either healthful vigor or attractive growth. No gladdening voice of the poet has thence descended, nor were the obscurities of nature, and the depths of immortal consciousness either investigated or enlightened by any of her sons.
Thus from the sublime terrace of the Acropolis, have we cast another glance over that glorious land where Homer breathed forth those songs for six and twenty centuries unexcelled; where Phidias, like his own Jupiter, sat serene on the loftiest throne of art; where Pericles ruled with sovereign grandeur in the first of cities, not by mercenary arms, but by the magic influence of mind; where Socrates first scanned the human heart, and learned toanalyze its deep and mighty workings; and whence the royal pupil of Aristotle, the last and greatest of universal victors, went forth on the mission of conquest, not designedly to plunder and destroy, but to spread the literature, arts, science, philosophy, and religion of immortal Greece throughout the civilized world.