Anaxagoras came from Clazomeme to Athens just when the age of Pericles was dawning; he had indeed Pericles, Euripides and Socrates as his pupils. He attacked the patriotic religion of the proud city and was banished to Lampsa ens. He thought that all sense — knowledge was delusive until corrected by reason. He be lieved that intelligence was the creative and reg ulating influence of the universe. Things as they are were brought about by the concourse of infinite atoms; but these atoms were of all sorts, and that like was united to like in an infinite series of movement and combination; gold' by the union of gold atoms that had existed from eternity, fires from fire atoms, air from atoms of air. These atoms were the famous homceo merim spoken of and condemned by Aristotle. Empedocles (444 Lc.) was of the great city of Agrigentum; in his views of knowledge he be longed to the Eleatics and maintained that-the senses were fallible, while reason was a sure guide to truth. He was a poet and declaimed against anthropomorphic ideas of deity. He gathered in one the doctrines of the Ionian physicists declaring the primary elements were four, namely, earth, air, fire and water. Love was the formative principle of things, hate the dissolver and destroyer. One was harmony, the other discord, and God is the One, sa sphere fixed in the bosom of harmony, rejoicing in calm rest?' Democritus of Abdera (460 a.c.) was a rich man who entertained Xerxes at his house. He went one step further than Anaxagoras and al most entered the circle of our modern science by teaching the atomic theory, namely that everything in the world is the result of a for tuitous concourse of atoms, all of the same sub stance, but making various things through the various forms they take in uniting. Color, sweetness, cold, are the result not of substances essentially differing; all is form.
All attempts had so far failed to solve the problems of the material world and of human knowledge. Many theories were put forth, none were universially accepted, although they were each discussed: This brought the Sophists on to the stage of philosophy — men who taught the arts of discussion, not of investigation. One of the greatest of them was Protagoras. He was a disciple of Democritus and taught that opinion was, everything, uMan, the individual man, each for himself, is the measure of all things.° The Sophists were the first skeptics, but a new epoch rose with Socrates (469 ti.c.). He was the most remarkable man in all the Greek world; for his love of disputation he was classed by some with the Sophists, for his ridicule of traditional views in religion and physics, he was condemned to death — yet he succeeded in substituting morals for physics as as the subject of philosophy. He first gave to philosophical methods the definition and the inductive argument, or reasoning by analogy. One of his disciples, Aristippus of Cyrene, while he followed the method of his master, founded the Cyrenaic school which taught that pleasure was the criterion of the true: Socrates had taught that the good as judged by the indi vidual conscience was that criterion. Then fol lowed the Cynics, under Antisthenes who went to the opposite extreme to Aristippus, who be came an ostentatious ascetic, and in this was fol lowed by Diogenes of Sinope, who made his home in a cask or tun, and tried to set the ex ample of a rugged virtue, which is misanthropic, but triumphant over bodily appetite. It was left
to Plato to exhibit the complete adoption and application of the Socratic method. He believed that in each man resided the power of detecting the truth, from having seen the perfection of things, in an ideal world during a previous state of existence; he could judge of the good and the beautiful here from his memory of what their perfect archetypes were. His voluminous writings enable us to judge both of his ethical and political system, but they both fail in prac ticality. His most famous pupil was Aristotle (384 a.c), a man of encyclopedic mind, the first scientific observer, the inventor of the syllogism. Plato was an idealist and a rationalist; Aris totle a materialist and an empiric. The one trusted to reason, the other to experience. Aristotle always argued against the ideal the ory of his master and deduced his conclusions from things as he saw them. He invented grammar as well as logic and was in himself an epitome of the philosophic learning of his predecessors. But by reasoning from experi ence he had opened the way for the skeptics, of whom the first was Pyrrho, who taught that there is no criterion of truth. Phenomena are mere appearances, how can we prove they are anything else? This was what in modern times is called agnosticism, for we cannot prove and therefore cannot know the truth of anything we see. But after this suicide of philosophy in the school of Pyrrho, she revived again as a moral mentor in the person of Epicurus, of Sanios (342 a.c.). He taught the highest good is pleasure; this is the moral end of existence. He was controverted by the Stoics. Zeno was their leader, a man of stern unbending charac ter and abstemious life, whose aim was to show that virtue consisted in manhood and manhood in the power to endure hardness and to despise the body. Skepticism, indifference, sensuality and epicurean softness were not to be com bated by the vague dreams of Plato or the cum brous system of Aristotle. The Stoic attempted to meet the growing decadence by an exactly opposite self-denial and impassive reserve. But Stoicism was egotistic; its aim was the repres sion of feeling, it was apathy, death in life. The last struggle of Greek philosophy to dominate the mind of society was witnessed in the rise of the New Platomsts and their New Academy. Carneades (213 ac.) was their most illustrious representative, and he was the type of a school that took up the doctrines of Plato, expanded and enlarged them until the time when Chris tianity appeared and faith, not reason, as in the old days 700 years before, dominated the world of opinion. See PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY OF.
Bibliography.— Bender, 'Mythologie and Metaphysik' (Stuttgart 1899) ; Benn, 'The Philosophy of Greece) (London 1898); Bran dis, (Geschlitte den Entwickelungen der grie chischen Philosophic' (Berlin 1864) ; Burnet, 'Early Greek Philosophy' (2d ed., London 1908); Erdmann, 'History of Philosophy' (Eng. trans., London 1890) ; Windelband, der antiken Philosophic' (3d ed., Munich 1912) ; Gomperz, Thinkers' (4 vols., New York 1901-11); Zeller, (Grund riss der Geschichte der griecheschen Philoso phic) (9th ed., Leipzig 1908) ; 'Die Philosophic der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickel ung' (4th ed., Leipzig 1909).