IONIAN PHILOSOPHY, early Greek hylozoism and henism of the thinkers of the Ionian School (q.v.). The term hylozoism is apt to be misleading, the term henism to be misunderstood, and we may therefore give them passing notice. First, .hylozoism is not synonymous. with materialism. Materialism is that world-conception which attempts to explain all phenomena from matter and motion, which in a radical form materializes even things im material. Not so with hylozoism. To some, of course, it suggests theories which deny the separate reality of life and spirit. And, indeed, in the days of the first Ionian thinker, Thales, and even far later, it cannot be denied that the distinction between matter and spirit had not been keenly felt, still less formulated in such a way that it could be either definitely affirmed or denied. Btit the untreated, indestructible reality of which Ionian thought concerns it self was a body, or even matter if we choose to call it matter: bui it was not matter in the sense in which matter is opposed to Hylozoism thus is characteristic of any system which explains all life, whether physical or mental, as ultimately derivable and derived from animated matter. Ionian hylozoism con sisted chiefly in an inquiry after the first prin ciple or element, regarded as animated, out of which the sense-perceptible world is construc ted. Thus Thales, Anaxittiander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and other Ionian think ers, on account of their having followed one general tendency, possess, intellectually con sidered, another common characteristic. In thought they are henistic. By henism is to be understood those philosophic efforts to subsume everything under one notion, be it mo tion, or matter, or spirit, or matter in motion, or evolution, or an unknown substratum, like the Kantian °thing-in-itself" and the Spencerian °unknowable.° Henism is, briefly, one-notion, single-idea philosophy. All Ionian philosophers asked: From what did the world come? The growing body of thought which may be traced through successive representatives of the Ionian school is always that which concerns a pri mary substance. The astronomical and other theories are, in the main, peculiar only to the individual thinkers of the school. Greek philos ophy thus began as it ended, with the search for what was abiding in the flux of things.
Philosophy arose in Greece as elsewhere in the attempt to discover the laws of outward phe nomena, and the origin and successive stages of the world's development. The earlier think ers stand in closer relation to the previous religious or mythical views; they seek to sub stitute an intelligible hypothesis, based on real things, for the myths of the poets. Even the myths, however, which described the generation of the gods and the origination of worlds, im plied, at least, a view of a single connected world-process, and of an inclusion of all in the universe within that process. Sky, earth, sea, days, seasons, in short, all detached phenometta were given unity and relation even in the Greek poets, in such beings as Gaia (earth) and Oura nos (heaven) and similar deities. Thus, most
in tquch as were the earlier Ionian thinkers with the Olympian religion, with its deities of the sky and the ocean, their task was to sub stitute for such personifications actual concrete substances, a work they sought to complete through closer contact with nature. All sought to explain the material universe as given in sensory experience. The chief aim was to secure an answer to the inquiry: What is the one original element, if indeed it is only one, or what are the original elements, if more than one, of which the universe consists? The philosophers found ready to hand in the mythic cycles the conception that the world was one. From what did it come? Their answers were usually given in terms of matter, movement and force. Concerned mainly with the onto logical or metaphysical problem, the thought of the Ionian thinkers was in its chief char acters cosmological. The other problems of the philosopher, epistemological, logical, ethical and wsthetical, receive, when they receive any at tention, only passing notice from the Ionians. The characteristic work which distinguishes the speculations of this school is the endeavor to refer all sensible things back to one original principle in nature. And as their efforts be gan with a search for laws, so were those ef forts rewarded by the earliest conception of what became the most fruitful idea evolved in the whole body of Ionian thought, namely, the notion of °rational law" or logos, and "justice" which controls a world process and regulates allotted changes. When the regular course of nature was first realized by members of the Ionian School. no better word for it could be found than It is the same metaphor which still lives on in our expression °natural law." Here we see the de cree of Zeus, the destroyer of the gods, the social and religious law of justice, becoming the central conception for viewing the physical process, an achievement which could not dis pose of all those implications, like for example fatalism, which cling to the modern term law even in the science of to-day. A law of changes gave a union of the tone and the °many" to the thought of some of these early thinkers. All the members of the school were one in method and in aim. The one great principle which underlies all Ionian thought, though it is first put into words by Parmenides, is that °nothing comes into being. out of nothing and nothing passes away into nothing." Their acute penetration into the philosophical prob lem is testified by the fact that they attempted to recover not only the beginning of all things, but the eternal ground of all things for thought. And it is true that important beginnings of a theory of evolution are to be found in the spec ulations of the earliest Grecian school of philos ophy.