Early Greek Philosophy

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY Ionian Philosophers.-A group of Ionian thinkers first raised the question as to the nature of the substance of which all things are composed, from which they originate, and into which they are dissolved again. Moreover they and answered this question in a non-mythological, impersonal manner. They considered what, not who, had produced all these things. Their answers were always in terms which we may be tempted to de scribe as material. But that would not be quite correct, because as yet no hard and fast line was drawn between the mental and the material. The ultimate matter of which they thought was a living matter—they were consequently not materialists but hylozo ists. The Ionian group consisted of the following Milesia,ns: Thales (?640-55o B.c.) regarded water or moisture as the primary stuff or principle of things. In the then state of knowledge many physical phenomena must have appeared to bear out this view. For water is found in the form of gaseous vapour and of solids as well as in liquid form. In the phenomena of rising vapour and of sunbeams people saw the sun and other fiery bodies "drawing water" for their sustenance, so that water seemed capa ble of changing into fire. In the earth's absorption of rain, in the formation of deltas, in the alluvial deposits left by torrents, water appeared to be changed into earth. In the formation of dew and in the rising earth mists, earth seemed to change into moisture. And moisture was, of course, realized to be necessary for all living things. In these various phenomena Thales probably thought that he observed examples of the whole cosmic process from water and back into water.

Anaximander

(?610-545 B.c.) was impressed by the conflicting character of such natural qualities as hot and cold, dry and wet, etc., and could not believe that water could generate things with qualities opposed to its own. He held that primary matter must be something different from any of the known determinate kinds of matter which have resulted from it. He accordingly identified primary matter with the "unlimited," by which he probably meant something indeterminate, out of which the determinate things, earth, water, air and fire, differentiated or "separated out." These four kinds, according to Anaximander, arranged themselves in successive layers with earth at the centre, followed by rings of water, air and fire in turn. The sun, moon and stars he regarded as masses of fire, flung off by the world's outer ring of fire, sur rounded partly by husks or envelopes of air similarly flung off by the cosmic ring of air. Eclipses, he explained as due to tern porary obstructions in the apertures of the air husks of the sun and moon. Our world, which is only one of many, is cylindrical in form, and swings free in space. • Anaximenes (?59o-525 B.c.) identified primary matter with air, because it has the greatest mobility and is indispensable to life. He was the first to attempt to explain the process by which primary matter gives rise to the vast variety of things. The processes he suggested are condensation and rarefaction. By con densation air is changed into water or earth ; by rarefaction it is changed into fire. (See IONIAN SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.) Pythagoreanism.—The early Ionian or Milesian school of philosophy was brought to an abrupt end by the Persian conquest of Ionia. This calamity was followed by a revival of Orphic and

similar mystery religions which influenced some of the philoso phers, and so led to the foundation of the Pythagorean school.

Pythagoras (?57o-500 B.c.) was a kind of philosophical re vivalist. Influenced by the reawakening of religious interest among his contemporaries, Pythagoras endeavoured to combine religion with philosophy, and founded at Kroton (in southern Italy) a kind of religious brotherhood with a philosophic bias— something between a cloister and a college, in fact, the prototype probably of the mediaeval universities of Europe. In the history of thought the most noteworthy feature of the teaching of Pytha goras and his school is to be found in the stress laid on "form" rather than "matter," as the ultimate principle of things. The study of music taught Pythagoras that the concordance of a suc cession of notes depends on certain proportions between the lengths of the strings on which they are produced. He was greatly impressed by this discovery of the importance of proportion. And the discovery was applied in all sorts of directions. For example, one proportion of the elementary qualities of the body (hot and cold, dry and wet) constitutes health; another disease. It was also used as the key to the riddle of the universe. Numeri cal proportion thus came to be treated as the "principle" of things, in the same kind of way as the earlier philosophers had treated water, fire, etc., as primary matter. The Pythagorean view was expressed in the dictum that "all things are numbers." In order to understand this seemingly odd dictum, it is necessary to realize first of all how numbers were thought of at that time, and how easily numbers were then confused with geometrical figures. Numbers used to be represented by means of dots arranged in geometrical patterns, as they still are on cards and dominoes, e.g.; and numbers were described as triangular, or square, or oblong according to the geometrical arrangement of the dots representing them. Next, it will be observed that this custom rather encour aged the identification of the unit of number with the dot or point. And since lines can be analysed into the points, and planes into the lines, and solids into the planes that bound them, it could easily appear that it is the points that make the lines, that make the planes, that make the solids. And once the point was identified with the unit of number, it could be easily supposed that all things are constructed out of numbers. The Pythagorean doctrine is of importance chiefly because its idea of proportions or con figurations was responsible partly for Plato's doctrine of "Ideas" and Aristotle's theory of "Forms." (See PYTHAGORAS.) The Eleatic School, like the Pythagorean school, was founded in southern Italy by an Ionian refugee. Its centre was in Elea. Unlike the founder of Pythagoreanism the founder of the Eleatic school seems to have been nettled rather than carried away by the religious revival of the time, especially by the superstition which accompanied it. But the importance of the school lies in its metaphysics—it has, indeed, been described as the first really metaphysical school.