A Critical History of Greek Philosophy by W. T. Stace (short story to read txt) 📖

gods and the popular religion. Belief in gods Democritus explains as being due to fear of great terrestrial and astronomical phenomena, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, comets, and meteors. But somewhat inconsistently with this, Democritus believed that the air is inhabited by beings resembling men, but larger and of longer life, and explained belief in the gods as being due to projection from these of images of themselves composed of atoms which impinge upon human senses, and produce the ideas of gods.

Different kinds of matter must be explained, in any atomic theory, by the shape, size, and position of the atoms of which they are composed. Thus the Atomists taught that fire is composed of smooth round atoms. The soul is also composed of smooth round atoms, and is an exceptionally pure and refined fire. At death the soul atoms are scattered, and hence there is, of course, no question of a future life. Democritus also put forward a theory of perception, according to which objects project into space images of themselves composed of atoms. These images strike against the senses. Like atoms are perceived by like. Thought is true when the soul is equable in temperature. The sensible qualities of things, such as smell, taste, colour, do not exist in the things themselves, but merely express the manner in which they affect our senses, and are therefore relative to us. A number of the ethical maxims of Democritus have come down to us. But they are not based in any way upon the Atomic theory, and cannot be deduced from it. Hence they have no scientific foundation but are merely detached sayings, epitomizing the experience {93} and worldly wisdom of Democritus. That one should enjoy oneself as much and vex oneself as little as possible seems to have been his principal idea. This, however, is not to be interpreted in any low, degraded, or sensual way. On the contrary, Democritus says that the happiness of man does not depend on material possessions, but upon the state of the soul. He praises equanimity and cheerfulness, and these are best attained, he thinks, by moderation and simplicity.

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CHAPTER VIII

ANAXAGORAS

Anaxagoras was born at Clazomenae in Asia Minor about 500 B.C. He was a man of noble family, and possessed considerable property. He neglected his property in the search for knowledge and in the pursuit of science and philosophy. Leaving his home at Clazomenae, he settled down in Athens. We have not heard so far anything of Athens in the history of Greek Philosophy. It was Anaxagoras who transplanted philosophy to Athens, which from his time forward became the chief centre of Greek thought. At Athens, Anaxagoras came into contact with all the famous men of the time. He was an intimate friend of Pericles, the statesman, and of Euripides, the poet. But his friendship with Pericles cost him dear. There was a strong political faction opposed to Pericles. So far as we know Anaxagoras never meddled in politics, but he was a friend of the statesman Pericles, and that was quite enough. The enemies of Pericles determined to teach Anaxagoras a lesson, and a charge of atheism and blasphemy was accordingly brought against him. The particulars of the charge were that Anaxagoras said that the sun was a red-hot stone, and that the moon was made of earth. This was quite true, as that is exactly what Anaxagoras did say of the sun and the moon. But the Greeks {95} regarded the heavenly bodies as gods; even Plato and Aristotle thought that the stars were divine beings. To call the sun a red-hot stone, and to say that the moon was made of earth, was therefore blasphemy according to Greek ideas. Anaxagoras was charged, tried, and condemned. The details of the trial, and of what followed, are not known with accuracy. But it appears that Anaxagoras escaped, probably with the help of Pericles, and from Athens went back to his native country in Asia Minor. He settled at Lampsacus, and died there at the age of 72. He was the author of a treatise in which he wrote down his philosophical ideas. This treatise was well-known at the time of Socrates, but only fragments now remain.

The foundation of the philosophy of Anaxagoras is the same as that of Empedocles and the Atomists. He denied any absolute becoming in the strict sense of the passing of being into not-being and not-being into being. Matter is uncreated and indestructible, and all becoming must be accounted for by the mixing and unmixing of its component parts. This principle Anaxagoras himself expressed with great clearness, in a fragment of his treatise which has come down to us. "The Greeks," he says, "erroneously assume origination and destruction, for nothing originates and nothing is destroyed. All is only mixed and unmixed out of pre-existent things, and it were more correct to call the one process composition and the other process decomposition."

The Atomists had assumed the ultimate constituents of things to be atoms composed of the same kind of matter. Empedocles had believed in four ultimate and underived kinds of matter. With neither of these does Anaxagoras agree. For him, all the different kinds of {96} matter are equally ultimate and underived, that is to say, such things as gold, bone, hair, earth, water, wood, etc., are ultimate kinds of matter, which do not arise from anything else, and do not pass over into one another. He also disagrees with the conception of the Atomists that if matter is divided far enough, ultimate and indivisible particles will be reached. According to Anaxagoras matter is infinitely divisible. In the beginning all these kinds of matter were mixed together in a chaotic mass. The mass stretches infinitely throughout space. The different kinds of matter wholly intermingle and interpenetrate each other. The process of world-formation is brought about by the unmixing of the conglomeration of all kinds of matter, and the bringing together of like matter with like. Thus the gold particles separating out of the mass come together, and form gold; the wood particles come together and form wood, and so on. But as matter is infinitely divisible and the original mixing of the elements was complete, they were, so to speak, mixed to an infinite extent. Therefore the process of unmixing would take infinite time, is now going on, and will always go on. Even in the purest element there is still a certain admixture of particles of other kinds of matter. There is no such thing as pure gold. Gold is merely matter in which the gold particles predominate.

As with Empedocles and the Atomists, a moving force is required to explain the world-process of unmixing. What, in the philosophy of Anaxagoras, is this force? Now up to the present point the philosophy of Anaxagoras does not rise above the previous philosophies of Empedocles and the Atomists. On the contrary, in clearness {97} and logical consistency, it falls considerably below the teaching of the latter. But it is just here, on the question of the moving force, that Anaxagoras becomes for the first time wholly original, and introduces a principle peculiar to himself, a principle, moreover, which is entirely new in philosophy. Empedocles had taken as his moving forces, Love and Hate, mythical and fanciful on the one hand, and yet purely physical on the other. The forces of the Atomists were also completely material. But Anaxagoras conceives the moving force as wholly non-physical and incorporeal. It is called Nous, that is, mind or intelligence. It is intelligence which produces the movement in things which brings about the formation of the world. What was it, now, which led Anaxagoras to the doctrine of a world-governing intelligence? It seems that he was struck with the apparent design, order, beauty and harmony of the universe. These things, he thought, could not be accounted for by blind forces. The world is apparently a rationally governed world. It moves towards definite ends. Nature shows plentiful examples of the adaptation of means to ends. There appears to be plan and purpose in the world. The Atomists had assumed nothing but matter and physical force. How can design, order, harmony and beauty be brought about by blind forces acting upon chaotic matter? Blind forces acting upon a chaos would produce motion and change. But the change would be meaningless and purposeless. They could not produce a rationally ordered cosmos. One chaos would succeed another chaos ad infinitum. That alone which can produce law and order is intelligence. There must therefore be a world-controlling Nous.

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What is the character of the Nous, according to Anaxagoras? Is it, in the first place, really conceived as purely non-material and incorporeal? Aristotle, who was in a position to know more of the matter than any modern scholar, clearly implies in his criticism that the Nous of Anaxagoras is an incorporeal principle, and he has been followed in this by the majority of the best modern writers, such as Zeller and Erdmann. But the opposite view has been maintained, by Grote, for example, and more recently by Professor Burnet, who thinks that Anaxagoras conceived the Nous as a material and physical force. [Footnote 8] As the matter is of fundamental importance, I will mention the chief arguments upon which Professor Burnet rests his case. In the first place Anaxagoras described the Nous as the "thinnest and purest of all things." He also said that it was "unmixed," that it had in it no mixture of anything besides itself. Professor Burnet argues that such words as "thin" and "unmixed" would be meaningless in connection with an incorporeal principle. Only material things can properly be described as thin, pure, and unmixed. Secondly, Professor Burnet thinks that it is quite certain that the Nous occupies space, for Anaxagoras speaks of greater and smaller portions of it. Greater and smaller are spatial relations. Hence the Nous occupies space, and that which occupies space is material. But surely these are very inconclusive arguments. In the first place as regards the use of the words "thin" and "unmixed." It is true that these terms express primarily physical qualities. But, as I pointed out in {99} the first chapter, almost all words by which we seek to express incorporeal ideas have originally a physical signification. And if Anaxagoras is to be called a materialist because he described the Nous as thin, then we must also plead guilty to materialism if we say that the thought of Plato is "luminous," or that the mind of Aristotle is "clear." The fact is that all philosophy labours under the difficulty of having to express non-sensuous thought in language which has been evolved for the purpose of expressing sensuous ideas. There is no philosophy in the world, even up to the present day, in which expressions could not be found in plenty which are based upon the use of physical analogies to express entirely non-physical ideas. Then as regards the Nous occupying space, it is not true that greater and smaller are necessarily spatial relations. They are also qualitative relations of degree. I say that the mind of Plato is greater than the mind of Callias. Am I to be called a materialist? Am I to be supposed to mean that Plato's mind occupies more space than that of Callias? And it is certainly in this way that Anaxagoras uses the terms. "All Nous," he says, "is alike, both the greater and the smaller." He means thereby that the world-forming mind (the greater) is identical in character with the mind of man (the smaller). For Anaxagoras it is the one Nous which animates all living beings, men, animals, and even plants. These different orders of beings are animated by the same Nous but in different degrees, that of man being the greatest. But this does not mean that the Nous in man occupies more space than the Nous in a plant. But even if Anaxagoras