ni CORNELL' UNIVERSITY LIBRARY :^ ,"3 &' ::\ BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library B171 .A22 Development of Greek Philosophv, by Robe olln 3 1924 029 013 740 OLIN LIBRARY - CIRCULATION DATE DUE 1 r> ^^ ^ t^M-^.^-^ ■MlJWW i/IAY,ah^aa *B-f, #*"•■ )&G»@<$^ 4r^ ■^-lil^ ^V^^ fi3^'' St*"^**^ !V>(iffrf5ig iE7 \-^- MMMHV WOI 1 J 1 . < ^ CAYLORD PRINTEOINU-S A. Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029013740 THE DEVELOPMENT OF GEEEK PHILOSOPHY THE DEVELOPMENT OF GEEEK PHILOSOPHY BY ROBEUT ADAMSON SOMETIME PBOFESSOB OP LOOIO AND BHETORIC IN THE UHIVEBSITT OF GLASGOW EDITED BY W. E. SOELEY FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY PBOFESSOB OF MORAL FHILOeOPaY AT CAKBRIDQE E. P. HAEDIE LECTURER ON LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH '<:■-«*' jSrs yl ''}i*M,-M- ''X- ■ '■', WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS .\ , ''■ EDINBURGH AND LONDON / 3 nl .-^^j ^' ^- c I- »,_^\„ V95o352| ^TW •: I Y.I 1 '¥■ , , ,, c O >^ "« \^lA.V■•>■5'?■^''*^fUli•-'ft'^■^c<*»^^ " ^^^i'^"-"'! PREFACE The following pages do not claim to be founded upon elaborate research. The author's primary interest was philosophical; but philosophy, he held, must be studied in connexion with its history; and he devoted much of his time to the study of the Xxreek philosophers. In their writings he found an unprejudiced and continuous en- deavour to give clear answers to the fundamental ques- tions of knowledge and reality. And it is as an estimate, from the philosophical point of view, of the history and results of Greek thought that his work is now published. It is hoped also that it may prove of value to students as an introduction to Greek philosophy. The labours of the editors have been specially directed towards fitting it for the latter purpose. The author did not live to write out any part of the book. But for many years he had been accustomed, as part of his university work, to lecture upon some period of Greek philosophy. He used few notes in lecturing, but he made constant reference to the text of the writers with whom he dealt; and he spoke so slowly that a rapid writer could take down almost every word. The material placed at the disposal of the editors has been preserved in this way ; and VI PREFACE they have endeavoured to present it to the reader in a form which does not obtrude its origin in the class-room. They are encouraged to believe that this is not an impossible task by the reception already given to the author's Development of Modern Philosophy. The first three parts of the present volume, which deal with the early Greek thinkers, with Plato, and with Aristotle, are taken from lectures given in the University of Glasgow in 1897-98 and the succeeding academical year. A later course has, however, been drawn' upon for the concluding chapter both of Part II. and of Part III. The account of the Stoic philosophy which follows has been compiled from two different sets of lectures. One of these, given in 1899-1900, contains a brief sketch of the thinking of the Stoics as a whole. The other, two years later, enters in much greater detail into their dis- cussions of the theory of knowledge: but this course was brought to a sudden close by the author's fatal illness. In preparing the work for publication the editors have added a number of references to authorities in the foot- notes. These have not been distinguished in printing from the references which the author himself gave to his students. Square brackets have been used only when the note is intended to modify a statement in the text, or where the editors are not sure that the author would have adopted their words. In his lectures on the early philosophers before Plato the author seems to have used Eitter and Preller's Historia Fhilosophice Grcecce as a text-book. When this is quoted the reference to the original authority is given in parentheses. In other cases, where the original authority seems to have been used but the passage is also to be found in Eitter and Preller's book, the section of the latter is added in parentheses. The eighth edition of PREFACE Vll Eitter and Preller has been used, atid it is cited through- out as E.P. The editors desire to place on record their great obliga- tions to Dr Henry Jackson, O.M., Eegius Professor of Greek at Cambridge ; Mr H. H. Joachim, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford; and Mr W. D. Boss, Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, who have assisted them in revising the proof-sheets. They are not responsible for the final form in which any statement appears, but many valuable suggestions are due to them, and they have detected errors which otherwise might have escaped editorial notice. The thanks of the editors are due also to Mr J. A. Smith, Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, who read the work in MS.; to Mr John Handyside, Edinburgh University, who has assisted in various ways ; and to Dr John Burnet, Professor of Greek at St Andrews, for enabling them to give references to the forthcoming second edition of his Early Greek Philosophy. The Indexes have been compiled by the author's daughter, Mrs C. J. Hamilton. W. E. S. E. P. H. October 1908. CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION PAGE V 1 PAET I GEEEK PHILOSOPHY BEFOEE PLATO I. THE EARLY IONIAN PHILOSOPHERS . II. PTTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS IIL THE BLEATICS IV. HERACLITUS . V. ANAXAGORAS . VL BMPEDOCLES . VIL THE ATOMISTS VIII. THE SOPHISTS AND SOCRATES IX. THE MINOR SOCRATIC SCHOOLS 5 17 29 42 49 55 59 67 78 PAET II PLATO I. FIRST FORM OF THE THEORY OF IDEAS . . .91 II. LATER METAPHYSIC : THE PABMENIDES, SOPHIST, AND PBILEBUS ....... 104 IIL DOCTRINE OF SOUL : THE PHyEDO AND PHjEDBUS . .114 CONTENTS IV. FINAL MBTAPHYSIC : THE TIM^US . V. Plato's solution of the problem VI. THE SCHOOL OP PLATO 119 129 138 PAET III AEISTOTLE L PLATO AND ARISTOTLE II. FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS . i. General Division of the Realm of Existence ii. The Conceptions of Change and Purpose iii. The Conceptions of Form and Matter iv. The First Cause V. The Soul .... m. THEORY OF KNOWLEftGB L Demonstration and Opinion ii. The Principle of Contradiction iii. Metaphysical Principles of the Theory of Knowledge iv. The Concrete Individual V. Place of the Syllogistic Forms vi. Syllogism and Induction vii. The Ultimate Data of Knowledge viii. The Immediate Object of Apprehension ix. Induction and the Universal . X. Intuition and Discursive Thought IV. PSTOHOLOGT ..... i. The General Nature of Soul ii. The Sensitive Soul iii. Intermediates between Sense-perception and Reason iv. The Rational Soul V. Reason in Man and the Absolute Reason V. REASON AS THE FACULTY OF FIRST PRINCIPLES VI. FINAL CRITICISM .... 149 152 152 153 158 159 163 170 170 172 177 182 186 188 190 193 194 195 199 199 204 213 217 227 232 240 CONTENTS XI PAKT IV THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY I. THE STOICS ....... 267 n. PHYSICS ....... 263 m. THBOBT or KNOWLEDGE . . . . .275 IV. ETHICS ....... 289 INDEX OT AUTHOBITIES . . . . .295 INDEX OF OBEEE WORDS ..... 300 GENERAL INDEX ...... 305 THE DEVELOPMENT OF GEEEK PHILOSOPHY INTEODUCTION Greek philosophy forms a continuous development. The Aristotelian system is based on and complementary to the Platonic both in general character and in its treatment of special problems. The Platonic system, in its turn, can be understood only as carrying out tendencies which had found expression in earlier thought. The interest of these earlier thinkers is not merely historical. They exhibit philosophy in the making. And if we seek to solve the problem of the place of philosophical reflexion in human culture as a whole, we can approach an answer only by the slow method of tracing the origin and history of thought. Greek philo- sophy has impressed itself on modern thinking, raising the problems for it and suggesting the methods of their solution. It implied a conception of the general aim and possibilities of philosophy to which modern thought must adjust itself, adopting, rejecting, or modifying it. It is besides the one instance in history of a reflective move- ment which, starting from the mythical stage, has afterwards A 2 INTRODUCTION built for itself an independent foundation and established an independent position. At the same time, the influence of the earlier mythical stage may be traced in the speculative distinctions of appar- ently disinterested thinking as they come before us in the Greek philosophers. One very general point may be taken as illustrating this. The view that it is the business of philosophy to find a conception which will unify the results of the special sciences has an unmistakable resemblance to a characteristic of the earliest myths. For they seek to give a complete story of how things have come about, such as will satisfy the rudimentary needs of the inquiring mind. And this resem,blance suggests the interesting question whether the developed conception of the philosophical mind has more justification or other foundation in the reality of things than the primitive mythological impulse which expressed itself in early stories of gods and men. In the earliest efforts of Greek philosophy we can detect more than this general resemblance between philosophical and mythological conceptions. The characteristic of the mythological work is twofold. There i«, in the first place, the primitive process called personification, which lies at the root of animism, the tendency to regard objects and processes of nature as like in kind to personal beings and human activities. Equally prominent, in the second place, is the tendency to depict the personal being, his motives, thoughts, and acts, after the gross image of external things. Thus, in the stage of mythical reflexion, the Soul is represented Jn most material fashion. At first it is no more than the shadowy aerial image of the corporeal living being. Such a soul is anything but the bearer of those psychical activities which are familiar enough in the details of ordinary life. At a still earlier stage, the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the human being were not regarded as the expression of a INTRODUCTION 3 shadowy double of the concrete peseon; they were repre- sented, without distinction of corporeal and spiritual, as merely dependent on the living body. The main lines of development which proceed from this mythical basis are the cosmological and the psychological. It has been well said that the problem of cosmological speculation differs from the aim of mythology in this : that while the latter represented the connexions between its assumed ground and existing realities after the crude fashion of temporal sequence, the more philosophical view raised the question, what is the permanent element in real existence and of what are actual things composed?^ The change of question implied a restriction upon the free play of imagina- tion, which constitutes the difference between philosophy and mythology. The cosmological inquiry generally aimed, in the first instance, at what Aristotle called a material principle or cause of things.^ The simplicity of the answers given corresponds to the imperfect development of the experience which called for explanation. And the gradual deepening of I these answers was determined not merely by insight into the imperfection of preceding solutions, but by increased range and accuracy of concrete experience. Indeed, the most serious obstacle to understanding the course of Greek speculation is that the character and history of the ordinary knowledge of nature among the Greeks are known to us only in outline. From the early Ionian school to the time of Plato there can be traced a tolerably definite line of speculations as to the permanent substratum (wXi?) of natural fact and i as to the way in which that substratum is connected with the particulars of concrete experience. The psychological line of development is not conspicuous till a later stage. ' Burnet, Sarly Greek Philosophy, (Spx^O of a material kind {in SAtjs 8. (10, 2nd ed.) rfSei) alone are the principles of all 2 "The majority of the earliest things."— Ariat. ilfcJ. A 983 h 6. (R.P. philosophers thought that principles 10.) PART I GREEK PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO ( . CHAPTEE I THE EARLY IONIAN PHILOSOPHERS 1. Thales of Miletus.1 — We begin with the thinker to whom Aristotle assigned the position of leader in phil- osophical speculation. When Aristotle called Thales the leader, the first of those who speculated philosophically on nature/ he undoubtedly implied a contrast between the tenor of the new conception and something which had preceded it. What that something is, Aristotle nowhere explicitly declares. It is probable, however, that he has in view the antecedent mythologies, whether in their cruder form, as expressed, for example, in Hesiod, or in a more developed fashion, as in the speculations of Pherecydes. The characteristic of thg..n%\s'JiJaeof investigation of which Thales is regarded as the originator was certainl y that it took for its object the structure of the universe as it existed and was apprehehdeSTaiid sought to find~an explanation of ' Born about 625 B.o. ; died about ^ i t^s roiairris ipxoy^^ '^o^''s- 547 B.C. — Arist. Mel. A 983 b 20. (R.P. 10.) 6 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [PABT I it. in some component, constituent, or relation of_ that i^ verse itself. The term (pva-i? (nature), as we can see more definitely from the immediate successor of Thales, was beginning to lose its personified significance and to retain as the fundamental elements of its meaning (1) the total mass of actual fact, and (2) the generating principle thereof. Thales, then, beginning his speculation on nature, seems to have offered as the fundamental principle of explanation — Water.i All thin gs are formed fro m water; w ater is^jbhe primitive substance of al l that is. On what he based this assertion, by what arguments he defended it, we do not know. Already in Aristotle's time there was only tradition respecting the utterances of Thales.* It is to be added,, how- ever, that Thales evidently did not contemplate any such separation as afterwards was seen to be inevitable between the material substratum (as we call it) and the motive power or principle of change. To him evidently these two, being and change, were identical. Water, we may suppose, trans- formed itself into the variety of the changing universe by some inherent principle, or power of movement, which was not distinct from the material substratum itself. It cannot even be said that Thales attempted even in the most general terms to define in what way, or by what procedure, the ma- terial substratum transformed itself into the variety of the changing universe. That he identified the inherent principle of change with what is divine in nature and with the soul * must be interpreted as meaning only that for Thales the fundamental princij)le of the universe was naturally the greatest, the divine, and that, like all the early thinkers, he drew no distinction between what we call mechanical or ' Arist.jlfc<. A983b21. (E.P. 10.) ij/TiSij »eJi/To ir\^/)j7 SeSi/ e^oi. 405 a '^ Ariat. JIfeJ. A 983 b 22. (R.P. 10.) 19: ?oii:e S^ koI OaXijs . . . kivtitikSv ' Arist. De An. i. 411 a 7 : kuI ip n tJjv ipuxV ittoKa^^'iv. (R.P. 13, Tif i\(f Si rives aiir^v (t^k ^vxh") 13 a.) fiepuxiat 0a(rii>, SSev taus Kal @a\ijs CHAP. l] THE EABLY lONIANS 7 externally determined movement, and spontaneous, self- determined change such as appears to be due to the soul. Throughout the thought of this early period, the term -^vxv (soul) has a far wider denotation than with us. It signifies quite generally the principle of movement at large. 2. Anaximandee of MUetus.^— Far more important, because representing a much more advanced stage of abstraction, is the work of Anaximander, who is regarded as the immediate successor of Thales. Anaximander, according to tradition, was amMig_^e first to do work in astronomical s cience. He is said to have been the first to construct a map ; and the first to have constructed the sun-dial ^ (though this is prob- ably erroneous). His speculations about the visible universe he is said to have embodied in a work on nature (irepl ^vo-60)s), of which nothing but a few words now remain.^ Anaximander, so far as the specially philosophical side of his work is concerned, brings forward, as the principle or found a- tion of all that is, w hat he called the In finite (to aireipov) — an ambiguo us term , o f which An a ximande r does not seem to -haxejoffered any u^mbi^ugus ex^la^^^ It is perhaps from a misunderstanding of a passage in Theophrastus that a later writer has said, " Anaximander was the first to use the term principle, or beginning iapxv)-"* Probably Theo- phrastus only meant to say that Anaximander yyas the first to declare as the principle and eXe5ient_ofJhings, ' the In- luite.^ In all probability Anaximander did speak of his nSSnite ' as the 'beginning' of things, for, however con- fusedly he may have conceived the matter, his speculations about the universe involved the distinction between the primitive condition and what follows therefrom. ' Born about 610 B.o. ; died after Simpl. Phys. 24, 13.) 540 B. c. * vpuros TQVTO roSvo/Aa KOiiiffas rrjs 3 R.P. 15. ■ (Diog. Laert. ii. 1.) 4px?r.— E.P. 16. 3 R.P. 16. (Theophrast. fr. 2 ap. 8 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PliATO [paet i In the second place, Aristotle repeatedly and explicitly assigns to Anaximander a definite conception of the way in which the multiplicity , the variety, of | things is generated from the Infinite. He uses always for Ithe process the term eKKpivea-Oai (separation) , and, as the general marks of the variety, the term ivavTioTTjre^^ (th^ Opposites). The Opposites are sundered out from the Infiinite . These op- posites we no doubt name now by the terms of qua lities — dry and moist, cold and hot ; but it is quite certain that the abstract notion of quality formed no part of the philosophical equipment at that time. There was no distinction then between thing and quality, such as is logically possible now. Anaximander meant by 'the Hot,' 'the Cold,' the concrete quanta or masses, forming part of the visible, tangible world,^ brought together, so to speak, rather in a collective fashion than logically by abstraction. ' It would follow from this that Anaximander, so far as the general process of change in the universe is concerned, con- ceived of it as a constant emergence of opposites from the substratum, their coexistence in varying amounts, and in all probability their return according to some general law into the substratum itself — a cyclical process, in which the relation of the opposites to one another is metaphorically represented by the help 'of the term aSi/cia (injustice, intrusion): the one opposite being conceived to encroach or intrude on the other.^ Evidently Aristotle is proceeding on the ground ^ Arist. Phys. i. 187 a 20. (B.P. "Anaximander of Miletus, sou of 16 c.) Fraxiades, a fellow-citizen and aseo- " Hot, cold, dry, moist, are roughly date of Thales, said that the principle equivalent to fire, air, earth, water — [ = material cause] and first element the four elements. In Aristotle fire of things was the Infinite, he being is the hot -dry, air the hot -moist, the first to introduce this name for earth the cold -dry, and water the the principle. He says it is neither cold-moist. water, nor any other of what are now I ' Theophrastus's account of Anazi- called the elements, but a substance mander is as follows : — {ipiais) different from them, which is CHAP. l] THE EARLY lONIANS 9 of this notion of encroachment or ii^rusion when he says that according to Anaximander's view the ultimate com- ponent of things could not be any one of the elements, for if it were any one of these, by surpassing, as it were, all the others, it would destroy the variety of things.^ Anaximander is also credited with a quantity of specula- tion of an astronomical kind^ the outlines of which at least must be taken into account before we endeavour to answer the fundamental question, what is the significance of the term aireipov as applied to what undoubtedly must be regarded as the material substratum of the visible and tangible universe? Anaximander offers a very peculiar account of what we \ may call the cosmological system. Without defining the '' mode in which the successive changes come about, he seems to have taught that somehow from the Infinite ^ there was separated off that which contained in itself the source of the Warm and the Cold ; that these were sundered from one another in the generation of things ; that on the one hand the cold element is a kind of covering of air surrounding the earth-with-its-quantum-of-water, and that on the other hand the fiery element is wrapped round the air like bark round a tree, as he puts it pictorially.' This second envelope of fire or perhaps of fiery vapour is in some way broken up. It is not impossible that the breaking up may have been vaguely explained by Anaxi- infiuite, from which arise all the poetical terms. heavens (oiipavol) and the worlds He did not ascribe the origin of (K6irfioi) within them. things to any alteration (AWoiaais) And into that from which things in matter, but said that the opposi- take their rise they pass away once tions in the substratum, which was a more, ' as is ordained ; for they make boundless body, were separated out." reparation and satisfaction (SiSorai — R.P. 16. (Simpl. Phys. 24, 13.) Sixriv Kal tIctiv) to one another for ' Arist. Phys. iii. 204 b 22. (R.P. their injustice according to the ap- 16 b.) I pointed time ' (xari. t^jv toC xP^>""' ^ See Burnet, Early Oreeh Phil. rd(iv), as he says in these somewhat 62-73(61-72, 2nd ed.); and R.P. 19-21. / 10 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [part I mander from the analogy of the familiar experience of the sling. The circular motion, it might have been thought, would give rise to this breaking up of the continuous envelope into certain rings or hoops which Anaximander represented as encircling the earth-with-its-covering-of-air, and themselves surrounded by coverings of air. These sheaths of air had orifices through which the fiery vapour escaped and became visible; and by these orifices Anaxi- mander explained the appearance of the sun and stars and their changes. The hoops or wheels of fiery vapour which thus constituted the heavenly bodies were at vari- ous distances from the earth ; and Anaximander's con- ception, if represented pictorially, would take form as a series of three or, including the earth, of four concentric circles, the outer boundary of the wheel of the sun being the most distant from us, and the total diameter of the orbit of the sun being twenty-eight times the diameter of the earth. As the sun itself was regarded as no larger than the earth, its inner boundary was the circumference of a circle whose diameter was twenty-seven times that of the earth ; the inner diameter of the orbit of the moon was eighteen times that of the earth; the stars, especially ^he Milky Way, had an orbit whose inner diameter was nine times that of the earth.^ The only intetest here is (1) the conception of the stars as being nearer than moon or sun, and (2) the evidently designed arrangement of the numbers expressing the distances : they are multiples of three. ^ In the centre of the cosmical system was the earth, which Anaximander regarded as somehow maintained in its position in the centre by its equal distance from what ^ This is an inference of P. Tannery of the diameter of the Bun, due to (Scieruse hdline, 91). There is obvi- a confusion between the outer and ously a discrepancy in the accounts inner diameter of the ring. CHAP. l] THE EAKLY lONIANS 11 surrounded it. In figure the earth cesembled the section of a solid pillar, and the diameter of the flat surface was three times the depth of the solid section. This definitely formed system is what the later authorities seem to understand by the term Koa-fio^; and in their ex- pressions about Anaximander's view there is implied an ill-defined distinction between K6cr/io<} and ovpav6<;. We shall find later these two terms reappearing with a con- siderably altered meaning. At first the ovpav6jrT7i ovale)— s, oon- I i[ [Probably the view ascribed to the ception from which the word ' quint- Pythagoreans is really borrowed from essence ' is derived.] 26 PHILOSOPHY BEFOBE PLATO [paet I idea of the physical universe ; and, as the two are quite distinct from one another, the possibility of infinite division would be assigned to the relatively void (the vague inde- terminateness of space), while indivisibility would be the characteristic of the figures or numbers in space. There are certainly traces of some such view among the Pythagoreans. In accordance with it, as can be seen, the line would be conceived as made up of a number of indivisible points, while the indivisible point itself might fairly be said to be in the realm of abstraction what the atom in the realm of physics was for the later Atomists — an indivisible quankwm.. We shall consider later whether the puzzles of Zeno have not express reference to some such way of representing geometrical magnitudes. Later authors have naturally tended to interpret this cosmical view of the Pythagoreans in the light of ideas with which no doubt it is logically and chronologically connected. They have represented the universal fiery vapour as a soul of the world animating and sustaining it, and embodying itself in individual form in living beings. Even to Philo- laus^ there are ascribed certain utterances respecting the soul and its parts which are supposed to confirm such an interpretation of the primitive theory. These are all of later date, however ; and what Philolaus has to say of the soul has certainly been corrupted, as we have it, from Stoic sources. The Pythagoreans really cannot be said to have had the conception of a soul of the world; and, with one exception, their doctrines of psychology are rudimentary, little more than a commentary on the doctrine of transmi- P_ / gration. Aristotle says only of the Pythagoreans, (1) that y[r ' some of them seem to have thought of the soul as in itself a \ principle of movement, for they thought that the soul either ' A contemporary of Depiooritua, born perhaps about 470 B.C. ' Arist. De An. i. 404 a 17. (R.P. " Plato, Orat. 400 c. (R.P. 89 a.) 86 a.) ' Arist. Met. A 986 a 29. (R.P. 66.) = Arist. De An. i. 407 b 20. (E.P. 6 E.P. 85. (Iambi. Theol. Arithm. 86 c.) 22.) ' Plato, Phcsdr. 62 B. (R.P. 90.) 7 Plato, Phado, 96 b. \r' CHAP. ll] THE PYTHAGOREANS 27 was or was like the motes seen in «, sunbeam,^ and (2) that . f/^ ~ according to the Pythagoreans — and it was a view which to / T Aristotle seemed ludicrous — any soul might go into any/ body. 2 With this latter notion of the transmigration of the soul, and therefore its separability from the body, there is no doubt connected the Pythagorean opinion to which Plato refers, that during our earthly life the soul is, as it were, in a prison.* Some of the Pythagoreans seem to have spoken of the body as the grave of the soul,* and such a view is in the direction of that antithesis, prominent in later Pytha- goreanism, of the soul as the principle of good and the body as the principle of evil. Something a little more scientific in regard to the soul may be found, however, in the scanty fragments of Alcmseon of Croton, said by Aristotle to have been a rather younger contemporary of Pythagoras.^ He seems to have been a physician. The view is ascribed to him that the brain is, of all the parts of the body, that which is properly the seat of all psychical activities ; ® and he seems to have expressed himself in regard to the action of outer things on the soul in the familiar mechanical fashion. Moreover, there can be no doubt that a very interesting reference to a theory of the generation of knowledge in the Phcedo'' has Alcmseon in view. Even less can be made out of the early Pythagorean records with respect to ethics than to psychology. They are said to have attempted certain generalisations or defin- itions of virtues; but, so far as we know, these consisted simply in selecting a numerical equivalent or symbol for the 28 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [PAET I virtue. Thus justice was a square, and a just man a perfect cube. It is very doubtful whether the Pythagoreans them- selves applied to excellence of character their own general \. notion of harmony — a notion jnost easily adapted to it. The same doubt attaches to the application of this notion to the Isoul : that also was current in later Pythagoreanism. In the ^ Phcedo a definition of the soul is ascribed to two inter- locutors obviously Pythagoreans (for they knew Philolaus in Thebes), in which the term harmony occurs.^ But there the \ taction is of soul as the harmony of the body, which has a - \ suspiciously un-Pythagorean ring about it. The Pythagoreans contributed one important thread to the web of Greek philosophical thinking, and their influence will be found in aU the later dev^opments. , ' Plato, Phcedo, 85 ff. 29 CHAPTBE III THE ELEATICS We turn next to another system of a very characteristic kind in Greek thinking — that of the Eleatics, "the_firstL metaphysicians." In general the Eleatic school is said to' have been founded by Xenophanes of Colophon, to have had its principles formulated by Parmenides, applied rather negatively or dialectically by Zeno, and finally rather cor- rupted in their exposition by Melissus. It is to be borne in mind that these four names cover among them a con- siderable portion of time, and that therefore such changes as occur in what may be at bottom the same doctrine may find natural explanation from the conflicting views with which that doctrine was successively confronted. Modern researches have rather tended to diminish the importance of Xenophanes and to rehabilitate to some extent the reputa- tion of Melissus, who is an object of sharp and somewhat contemptuous criticism to Aristotle. si. Xenoph anes,^ younger, but not much younger, than Pythagoras, is known to us from some fragments of his own poems as a rhapsodist, one who travelled about reciting poems. It is possible that his travels, which were mainly in Sicily, may have originated in the Persian conquest of Greek territories in the East. So far as the frag- ( ' Born about 569 B.C., died about 480 B.C. / 30 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [PABT I ments of Xenophanes go, they indicate much more a severe criticism of the follies of anthropomorphism than a definite strain of philosophical thinking. "There is one supreme God, greatest among gods and men, like to mortals neither in body nor in thought." ^ " As a whole he sees ; as a whole he thinks; as a whole he hears." ^ "Without any labour his thought directs all things."' "Mortals indeed believe that the gods come into being as they do, that they have senses, voice, body, like their own. . . . But if oxen or lions had hands, could draw and produce works of art like men, oxen would make gods like oxen, horses gods like horses ; they would give to them the bodies they have themselves." * These fragments, then, no doubt mainly expressing a judgment strongly adverse to polytheism, may quite reason- ably be said to be in harmony with the more precise philosophical doctrine which is not in any of his fragments but which is ascribed to him — for example by Aristotle. Aristotle writes, "There are some who express themselves about the universe as though it were one single nature, though they are not alike either in regard to the merit of their account or in their way of defining this nature. . . . Parmenides, for example, seems to have viewed the One in its logical aspect [according to its notion, Karh Tov Tuiyov], Melissus, on the other hand, from the point of view of matter (Kara ttjv vK-qv), wherefore the former said that the One was limited, the latter that it was un- limited. Xenophanes. indeed, the first of those w ho ad opted t he theory of the Unity of things, for Parmenides is said to have been his pupil, did not make any clear statement in regard to either of these natures; but, looking to the whole universe, he said, 'The One is God.'"* 1 R.P. 100. (Clem. Strom, v. 714.) ' R.P. 108 a. (Simpl. P%j. 23, 18.) 2 R.P. 102. (Sext. Emp. Math. ix. * R.P. 100. (Clem. Strom, v. 714.) 144.) ■> Arist. Met. A 986 b 10. (E.P. 101.) flf"'" CHAP, III] THE BLEATieS 31 Aristotle, then, ascribes to Xenaphanes the first definite statement of the Unity of Existence, obviously understanding thereby something which is different from any view of the One-nes8 of existence which might naturally be ascribed to any of the earlier Ionic thinkers. Xenophanes, moreover, is said by Aristotle to have left the doctrine of the unity of existence in an indefinite condition, neither saying that it was limited nor that it was unlimited. Later authorities tend to turn this into the more precise but more doubtful and difdcult statement, that according to Xenophanes the One was neither limited nor unlimited, to which they add, 'neither in rest nor in motion.' ^ (This does not fit Xeno- phanes at all, nor does it go with what Aristotle says. Xenophanes distinctly says that this One God does not move from place to place.*) There is indeed a fragment which seemS to run counter to the statement that he did not define the One as being limited or unlimited, for he certainly speaks of the earth as extending below our feet to infinity.* It is possible that here the term Infinite (aireipov) is taken with no precision of meaning. It is possible too that in all that Xenophanes says about the physical world, he is proceeding upon the distinction which became explicit in Parmenides between truth and mere opinion, or, in other words, using the dis- tinction between the real world and the world of mere ap- pearance. There are many of his fragments which refer to the generation of things out of earth and water,* and others which very pointedly enforce the doubtfulness of all human views respecting things.^ All of these are more intelligible if we assume that the distinction between real existence (the One) and apparent or unreal existence (the Many) was 1 R.P. 109. (Simpl. Phyi. 23, 4.) « R.P. 103. (Simpl. Phys. 189, 1.) ^ R.P. 110 a. (Simpl. Phys. 23, 6.) " R.P. 104. (Sext. Emp. Math. vii. » R.P. 103. {Acbm.Iaag.Arat. 49, 110; viii. 326.) 128 ed. Pet.) 32 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [PAET I approached (however vaguely) by Xenophanes. But all this leaves in the dark what exactly is to be understood by the ' One God,' the ' One Eeal Existence ' ; and from Xenophanes, indeed, nothing is to be had in respect to that. Only ki Parmenides do we get the explicit statement that is required. 2. Parmenides ^ is said by Aristotle to have been a pupil of Xenophanes ; this may have been so, for apparently he was a younger contemporary. Of Parmenides, fortunately, we possess much more complete information as regards his doctrine than in the case of Xenophanes. Considerable fragments of his poem have been preserved ; and Plato and Aristotle frequently refer to and criticise his views. The poem consisted of an introduction and two parts, the first treating of truth, and the second of opinion : " Come, then, I will tell thee — and do thou attentively hearken — ^the only ways of search that are given to man."^ ^^ With the proposition that ' only Being is,' that Being is the ' matter or object of knowledge, the philosophical doctrine of ; Parmenides at once begins and ends. Being is and Non-Being is not, that is the goddess's reiteration. Being, that which is, must by reason of its very nature exclude from itself all j qualification, all relation, all multiplicity, all change : it is in its nature absolute : thought, which apprehends it, and which can apprehend nothing but it, apprehends in it nothing but pure, absolute, unmoved existence: "Birthless it is and deathless, ... for ever it stands a continuous One. . . . All is full of being. ... No defect is there in it." ^ It will be noted that the various predicates here assigned to Being are all really negative in character; they do not express any positive feature of Being which could be dis- tinguished from Being itself : there is no such feature. They 1 A native of Elea, who flourished ^ R.P. 114. (Procl. Tim. 105.) about 480 B.C. ' R.P. 117 f. (Simpl. Phys. 144, 25.) CHAP, in] THE ELEATICS 33 serve only to exclude from the notion of Being what ordinary experience and opimon lead us to assign to existence. (This is a very abstract expression of the Ionian doctrine, that in the last meaning of the terms there was no such thing really as an act of Becoming, or of Generation. This was recognised by later thinkers, who all assign to the lonians the author- ship of the maxim, " Out of nothing comes nothing.") With this fundamental view as regards truth it might seem impossible — and it has always been found inexplicable — that Parmenides should proceed further, and append to his treatment of truth a treatment of opinion. It is certainly not easy to make out his meaning on this point from the fragments of the poem itself. As regards the account given in the second part, it begins thus : " Two forms men have established ; and in this they err, for one is sufficient."^ These opposites, according to Parmenides, are the components of the world of phenomena ; and their intermingling underlies all natural objects, man included. Parmenides repeats a good deal of Anaximander, and probably some Pythagorean material, in these his cos- mical fancies. One of the fragments of this second part deserves more particular notice. The general idea of mixture is applied to man and to the mind of man.^ " As is at each time the condition of the well-jointed limbs, so is constituted the mind in men. In all and in each that which thinks is the same, namely, the nature of the body, for according to that which predominates is the general character of the mind." It remains to consider to what extent we can interpret further the rather obscure proposition that ' Only Being is.' Zeller — and he has been supported by several recent writers — thinks that the all-important point in the antithesis be- tween Being and Non-Being is the difference between the space-filling and the void. He insists that Parmenides, like 1R.P. 121. (SimpLPAys. 39, 1.) ^ Aiht. Met. T 1009 h 22. (R.P. 128.) C 34 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [PAET I all the early Greek thinkers, was occupied with the general structure of nature, that we have no right to ascribe to him the Conception whether of abstract thought or of the incor- poreal ; and he attaches much importance to the often- repeated statement of Aristotle that the reality with which the pre-Platonic thinkers occupied themselves was just what is perceived by the senses.^ As against this it may be urged, in the first place, that Aristotle, in speaking of the pre-Platonic thinkers, has always in mind the distinctio^ ittost familiar to him, and first made explicit in Plato, between the intelligible world and the world of the senses. It is perfectly natural that he should be found saying that the pre-Platonic thinkers did not con- template another world of existence, so to speak, over and above that of the senses, for he means the other world as represented in Plato. Moreover, when Aristotle has occasion to deal more in detail with the Eleatic doctrine (as in the first book of the Physics ^), we find him expressly saying that, al- thouglwthe Eleatic doctrine is there considered, in point of fact it does not concern the physical at all. It lies outside the range of physics, deals with general notions that go beyond the physical, and is of service, so far as investigation of nature is concerned, only because of the value that criticism of general notions always has for special purposes. Again, beyond a doubt it would be erroneous to identify the abstract notion of the Eleatic doctrine with the concep- tion of an incorporeal reality, if by that be understood, as Zeller throughout seems to understand it, something of the nature of thought, mind, or spirit. No one questions that the first approach to this discrimination of the incorporeal as psychical from the corporeal as space-filling, was made by Anaxagoras. But it is not necessary that the only antithesis should be that between the corporeal and the incorporeal 1 Zeller, Pre-Socratie Philosophy, i. 589 ff. = ^jg),. Phyg. i. oe. 2 f. CHAP. Ill] THE ELEATICS 35 in the sense of psychical or mental. Something must be done to fashion the general conception, however dim and obscure, of the non-corporeal, before it can be further defined as in its own nature mental or psychical; and the terms of the Eleatic discussions leave no doubt that they at least approached the highly abstract notion of the Non- Corporeal. If Parmenides is not very explicit in that respect, we shall find Melissus and Zeno explicit enough. Finally, as regards the view that ' space - filling ' con- stitutes the ultimate character of the Eleatic Being, it is impossible to reconcile this view with the insistence with which the Eleatics affirm the Unity of Being; and if any stress is laid on the expressions in Parmenides which seem to imply a spatial form of Being, due consideration should be allowed both to the imperfection of terminology at the time, and to the impossibility which even a developed terminology finds of expressing a distinction of thought, a logical distinction, in terms that are not redolent of external nature. Aristotle contrasts Parmenides and Melissus in regard to their way of conceiving Being. According to him, Parmenides, in characterising it as lim- ited, was more correct than Melissus, who insisted that it was unlimited ; and Aristotle's reason is that Parmenides viewed Being from the side of its notion (Kara rbv \6yov), while Melissus regarded it from the side of the matter it involved. This latter expression — xarci rijv vXtjv — implies no reference to the corporeal. ' Matter ' with Aristotle is a much wider notion than corporeality ; there is for him (for example) intelligible matter. The X670? is the abstract notion, the complete representation of what is essential to the thing. In regard to it vXt; is always in- volved, but only as a subordinate factor or element. If a thinker looks exclusively to this subordinate element, this component of a complete notion, he would in Aristotle's 36 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [part i phraseology view the thing Karh rijv vKriv. In the Physics ^ he says : " ' Whole ' (p\ov) and ' complete ' (reXetov) are the same or akin. Now nothing is complete which has not an end, and an end is a limit. Therefore Parmenides was more correct than Melissus ... for ' unlimited ' and ' whole ' are incompatible. . . . The unlimited is indeed the matter within which size may become complete, and potentially a whole but not actually so." Thus, then, none of the arguments seem to carry with them of necessity the conclusion that Parmenides was contemplating as the Existent a motionless, changeless, in- divisible plenum, something which we must say extends through space, even though thereby we do violence to our own position. On the contrary, it would seem as though the Eleatic doctrine is correctly described as inetaphysical. It arises from reflexion on the single predicate. Being ; and in itself it has the permanent interest for us, that it marks one of the perplexities in which human reflexion is always involved when it attempts to employ its own notions in working out a completely intelligible scheme. It is evident that the effect produced by the Eleatic argument lay quite outside the region of physics, that it played no part in the development of the early Greek cosmology, and that its influence is altogether logical or dialectical. 3. The later development of the Eleatic school in Zbno^ and Melissus * adds but little to the fundamental idea ; and it is somewhat hard to interpret, because we are ignorant of the precise opponents against whom their arguments were probably directed. Some recent writers have laid great stress on a supposed definite antagonism between these later developments of the Eleatic school and a doctrine 1 Arist. Phys. iii. 207 a 13. » Of Samos, flourished about 440 ° Born at Elea about 489 B.o. B.C. CHAP. Ill] THE ELEATICS 37 they ascribe to the Pythagoreans : that space, and therewith figures in space, consisted of a combination of discrete elements resembling the geometrical point. It must be said, however, that there is not such divergence between the popular conception of a plurality of real things, which Zeno (for example) is usually supposed to have attacked, and the more scientific or mathematical conception of dis- crete quantity, as would be required to substantiate this view ; also, that there is no very conclusive evidence for ascribing this conception of figures in space as made up of discrete points to the Pythagoreans. That such a conception is to be discerned early in Greek thinking is beyond a doubt. It was explicitly held by Xenocrates, an early head of Plato's school, is ascribed by Aristotle in general terms to Plato himself, and probably therefore was anticipated in the pre- Platonic thinking. But on the ground, among others, that the Pythagoreans themselves are credited on good authority with having first brought out the doctrine of Incommensur- ability, one must hesitate to ascribe to them as a fundamental position the view that the line (for example) is made up of points : for then all lines would be commensurable, as the points would be ia number definite. In Plato's Parmenides there occurs the well-known passage in reference to Zeno: "In reality, this writing is a sort of reinforcement for the argument of Parmenides against those who try to turn it into ridicule on the groimd that, if reality is One, the argument becomes involved in many absurdities and contradictions. This writing argues against those who uphold a Many, and gives them back as good and better than they gave ; its aim is to show that their assumption of multiplicity will be involved in still more absurdities than the assumption of unity, if it is sufficiently worked out." ^ Zeno then is rightly to be regarded as the first of the 1 Plato, Pa/rm. 128 c. See Burnet, Ea/rVy Greek Phil. 325 (§ 157 2nd ed.) 38 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [paet I dialecticians or logicians. In him first appears a certain perception of the generaLstructure of argument itself ; and we shall find his method, that of attacking the concTusion rather than the premisses of a counter-view, revived in the Megarian school, and intimately connected with the Platonic. Of the arguments assigned to Zeno, a quite satisfactory summary is given by Zeller.^ They consist of the fol- lowing : — A. Arguments against Multiplicity : — (a) Were being manifold, did it consist of a plurality of existents, it must be at once infinitely small and infinitely large : the former, because every plurality consists of units, which, if units, are indivisible, and no indivisible unit as such possesses magnitude ; the latter, because its parts, to be at all, must have magnitude, and the parts possessing magnitude can only be distinct from one another by an endless interposition of parts between them. This infinite quantwm, of units must be itself infinitely large.^ (&) Were being a plurality, it must be at once numerically finite and numerically infinite : the first, because there are evidently just as many units as there are; the second, because no one unit can be distinct from another save by interposition of a third something, and so ad infinitum? (c) A plurality of being implies extendedness in space; but that the existent should be in space is a contradiction ; for if all that is is in space, space either is not, or is in space, and so ad infinitwm.^ id) A measure of corn when thrown out makes a sound. Each grain and each smallest part of a grain must therefore have made a sound; yet no sound is made by a single grain.^ " Zeller, Fre-Socratio Philosophy, i. ^ j{.p. 133. (Simpl. Phys. 140, 28.) 614 ff. * R.P. 135. (Simpl. Phys. 562, 3.) "E-P. 132. (Simpl. P%s. 139, 5.) » R.P. 131. (Simpl. PAj^s.'llOS, 18.) OHAP. Ill] THE ELEATICS 39 B. Arguments against Movement j, — (a) Before a moving body can reach any point it must pass over half the distance; and before it can reach the half-way point it must do the same; and so ad infinitum. But an infinity of spaces can be passed over in no given time ; therefore movement of a body is impossible.^ (6) This is the old puzzle of Achilles and the tortoise, and a popular repetition of the first. It assumes that both move.^ (c) " The flying arrow." To be at any moment in a place is to be for that moment at rest ; but at any moment in its flight an arrow is in a place ; therefore at any, that is, at every, moment of its flight the arrow is in a place and at rest.' {d) The fourth argument may have been intended to obviate an evasion of the force of the above by laying stress on velocity as transition from point to point of space and as involving likewise change in time. Zeno appears to desire to make out that the notion of velocity involves the same contradiction as that of simple movement. Take a line AB. We have to draw two lines CD and EF equal to AB. CD is placed so that C is below B, and EF so that E is below the mid-point of AB, and F below M the mid-point of CD. A B 1-^ -. 1 ^ I ^ 1 J E ^- F CD and EF move, CD in the direction from B to A, EF in the direction from A to B. Let them move for 1 Arist. Phyi. vi. 239 b 9. (R.P. 136.) 2 Arist. Phyt. vi. 239 b 14. (R.P. 137.) » Arist. Phyi. vi. 239 b 30. (R.P. 138.) 40 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [paET i half the time required to pass over the whole space AB, then C will be found below the mid-point of AB, and E at B and below the mid-point, M, of CD. It is this point M to which Zeno attends. M in the time allotted has passed over a distance = half AB, but during the movement it has passed along the whole of EF = AB; that is, M, in the allotted time, has touched one half the points in AB and also every point in AB, for it has passed along the whole of EF.^ (Obviously he is confusing absolute and relative movement.) 4 Melissus, the last representative of the Eleatics, has at least two points of interest apart from his attempt to expound the doctrine in a more systematic fashion : (1) he makes clear the non- spatial character of the One Being ;2 and (2) he applies the Eleatic argument not only to the- prominent type of change — local movement — but also to the more vague form of change, qualitative alteration.^ As regards the first of these points, I do not think its force is at all affected by any doubt as to the precise reference in the relative passage of Melissus himself. These later developments of the Eleatic position are subsequent in time to the utterance of a very distinctly opposed thought, which may not impossibly in its turn 1 Arist. Phya. vi. 239 b 33. (R.P. that we did not see aright after all, 139.) nor are we right in believing that all ^ "Now, if it were to exist, it these things are many. They would must needs be one ; but if it is one, not change if they were real, but it cannot have body ; for if it had each thing would be just what we solidity (iri^xos) it would have parts, believed it to be ; for nothing is and would no longer be one." — E.P. stronger than true reality. But if 146. (Simpl. Phys. 110, 1 : 87, 6.) it has changed, what is has passed ' "We said that there were many away, and what is not has come into things that were eternal and had being. So then, if there were many forms and strength of their own, thingi, they would have to be just of and yet we fancy that they all suffer the same nature as the one." — E.P. alteration, and that they change with 147. (Simpl. De CaHo, 558, 21.) each perception. It is clear, then. CHAP. Ill] THE ELEATICS 41 have affected them. In Heraclitv||g the emphasis is laid exclusively on the element of change or process. The notion no doubt is conceived in a very general, and indeed somewhat obscure, fashion; and Heraclitus, on the whole, exhibits more of the meditative tendency towards religious mysteries than of the clear abstract thinking which generally characterises Greek philosophy. The spirit of his utterances is more ethical or religious than speculative or scientific; but in his own way he gives expression to a thought as fundamental as that of the Eleatics, and, so to speak, the supplement which their reflexion imperatively demands. 42 / CHAPTEK IV HERACLITITS Of Ifieraclitus ^ tnere remain considerable fragments of a workwEich probably made its appearance about ^^0 b^' or earlier. The work is said to have fallen into three sec- tions : (1) on the universe (r-epl tov iravr6<;) ; (2) on politics (to iroXiTiKov) ; (3) on theology (to BeoXoyiKov); but the fragments now cannot so be reconstructed. From the earliest time the work was celebrated for its obscurity, which indeed, Aristotle hints, was to some extent intentional.^ One source of obscurity is certainly Heraclitus's predilection for rather strained verbal analogies — a circumstance of small signifi- cance in itself, but of some interest in connexion with a remarkable development of what may be called the Heraclitean school. Plato notices as a feature of the Heracliteans in his time that they indulged to excess in obscure enigmatical terms.* The fragments as they come before us, while they un- doubtedly contain much of the same large cosmology which characterised the earlier Ionic philosophy, breathe a spirit of deeper reflexion than is present in those earlier specula- tions. It is difficult to find a word to express the tone of this meditation. It is not strictly ethical, in our sense of that ^ A native of Ephesua, who flourished about 500 B.C. = Arist. Mhet. iii. 1407 b 15. (R.P. 30 a.) ' Plato, Thecet. 180. OHAP. iv] HERACLITUS 43 word; nor is it theological or religious j but on the whole the broad ideas which elsewhere are applied to the changing phenomena of outer nature are in Heraclitus extended, and even applied with greater force, to the changes of human life and destiny. In him, perhaps moi-e than in any of the other Greek thinkers, we find it difficult to bear constantly in mind that for them symbol and thing symbolised were not distinct, that a general thought whose import is of the utmost width was formed in intimate union with the more external perceptions of natural change. For example, we find in him a series of utterances regarding fire and its transformations by which all the cosmos is constructed, which looks little more than a cosmology of the ordinary Ionian type; but we find in him also a series of thoughts, pictorially expressed, but very abstract in themselves, which bring forward the several aspects of the root idea of change or process, and its law. We can hardly avoid keeping these apart, giving pre-eminence naturally to the latter. Even with Plato and Aristotle the abstract implication of Hera- clitus's doctrine begins to be isolated from the cosmological applications with which at first it was conceived. The fragments in all probability began with certain utter- ances which indicate a profound conviction on the part of Heraclitus that the ordinary ideas of things were altogether confused and without foundation. We fortunately know, from a reference in Aristotle, what was the first, or all but the first, fragment in his work.^ This ignorance of the many, on which Heraclitus dwells, has a general source, which the fragments lead us to express thus : we incline to take the surface- view of what is given in experience as being the whole truth. No doubt this general expression has more than one particular application in 1 "Though this discourse is true stand it." — Arist. iZAefc iii. 1407 b 14. evermore, men are unable to under- (R.P. 32.) 44 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [paBT I Heraolitus's views. On the one hand, it implies that what the senses directly give is not without further consideration to be taken as the truth, and that not even a copious supply of such sense-perceptions will be equivalent to an insight into the truth : the truth lies hidden ; it is underneath the obvious. On the other hand, there is doubtless implied, though not explicit, a reference to what in the long-run constitutes the essential weakness of the surface- views of sense-perception. They do not bring us to understand the true underlying principle or law ; nay, they rather disguise that from us. It is perhaps not too much to say that the senses tend to give us the notion of the fixity of things, and therefore to hide the truth that the law of all things is change : there is no permanent in things, save only, as we shall see later, the law of all change. Thus, then, the first general conception in Heraclitus's meditations on things is that which we express by the term process or change. Heraclitus, says Plato, seems to say that all things flow and nothing stands still, and, likening ex- istence to the flow of a river, he says that you cannot go down twice into the same river.^ Such change is at the same time for Heraclitus the reality which forms the very structure of things : it is not change but the changing, and the changing is Fire. The whole world of existence is the exhibition of the constant trans- formations of Fire. This conception or thought of constant process is in itself but a half-thought ; and the remarkable feature in Hera- clitus is the clearness with which he appreciates the other I side which is implied in the thought. Pictorially, this is 'n I represented in him through the thought of all change as a \) I counter-change or opposition, a counter-flow : in all things I there is a coming-and-going, a strife, and yet this counter- ' Plato, Crai. 402 A. (R.P. 33.) CHAP, iv] HEKACLITT7S 45 flow, this strife, is only one side of r^l concord or harmony. In all things opposites not only are, but are united : a thing, so to speak, is not naerely itself and again its opposite ; its very nature consists in the union of these two opposites in itself. Harmony is implied in all opposition. It is a con- cord only through opposition; without opposition it would cease to be concord. The whole system, even though its law be change, is a system which continually preserves itself through these very changes. " This order (Koir/to?) which is the same in all things no one of gods or men has made, but it was, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living fire, kindled and extinguished in due measure."^ The soul is in no way conceived by Heraclitus as distinct from the other transformations of the ever-living Fire. It is one of the forms into which that passes. Although this is a sufficiently crude conception of the nature of soul, yet Hera- clitus is also to be credited with the more important view that, since man has the capacity for apprehending both the outer surface of things and the inner law, it is in the recognition of this inner law — of what is objective, therefore — ^that his true nature is to be found. The law of harmony is therefore extended in its scope : it has not merely the significance, as we put it, of a law of external nature ; it possesses at the same time all those attributes summed up in the term ' the Divine.' " Wisdom is one only, is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus." * ^ Thus it becomes obvious why at a later time the Stoics, who sought to overcome the dualism of the Platonic-Ari- stotelian conception, and to identify physical and psychical, should have returned to the work of Heraclitus, and ap- propriated almost all its fundamental features. Some part, indeed, of our difficulty in reaching the original thought of Heraclitus is due to the fact that his theory passed through 1 R.P. 35. (aem, Strom, v. 14.) " R.P. 35. (Clem. Strom, v. 14.) 46 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [PAET I the Stoics and has come to us coloured by the Stoic ideas and expressed in the Stoic terminology. Certain points in the Heraclitean doctrine call for further examination: First, what exactly is to be included within the idea of constant change ? Conceivably this might mean either that every possible object for our apprehension is in constant flux, or that in the stream of existence there is a cycle of change — the elements, as it were, changing into one another, but preserving throughout their changes what we must call a kind of total equilibrium. In Plato's Thecetetus,^ where the doctrine is criticised, the first of these two inter- pretations is pressed on it as its necessary and only con- sistent expression. This . probably indicates that in the original statement the question was left in some obscurity, and that the later Heracliteans, following out the path in- dicated, had been forced to a more precise statement than that made by Heraclitus himself. Indeed it may be thought that the second interpretation, if rigorously handled, and if it be borne in mind that according to Heraclitus the change of the great elementary components was of the nature of transformation, not mere alteration of relative position, would lead to exactly the same result as the first interpretation. Connected with this is a second point. The Stoics, and with them the Church Fathers, always understood Hera- clitus to speak of a final reduction of all things to the state of Fire (eKirvpmai<;): just as Fire is the original element from which all are formed, so in due order all things will again be resolved into Fire, and so on endlessly. There is only one passage which can be appealed to as in any way decisive ; ^ and it certainly appears to favour the view that 1 Thetet. Ul f(. (Hippolyt. Ref. Bar. ix. 10.) See ^ "Fire will come upon and lay Burnet, E(U-ly Greek Phil. 136 hold of all things." — E,P. 36 a. (149, 2nd ed.) CHAP, iv] HERACLITUS 47 in the cycle of existence the path upward and the path downward (which are, according to Heraclitus, one) begin and end in the one element, Pire, which, however, being itself subject to the law of constant change, immediately and in endless cycles produces the series of transformations into the other elements. Thirdly, the utterances of Heraclitus about the senses are somewhat ambiguous ; and no doubt the ambiguity indicates the want of any definite distinction between perception and understanding. The senses fail to convey the whole truth because they give the fictitious impression of fixity in things, and, moreover, what the senses have to deal with is the relatively less mobile, less living part of the universe.^ This view about the senses, and, in particular, the general ground for it, that no fixity in the objects perceived can be assumed, is singled out by both Plato and Aristotle in their criticisms of the Heraclitean doctrine. In their view that doctrine involved, though in a different way, the same fatal consequence to predication that must be drawn from the Eleatic principle. According to the Eleatic view, seeing that no element of difference is admissible, the only pre- dication possible is the same of the same : indeed, in strict- ness only one judgment is possible, ' Being is Being.' From the other view it follows with equal force that no pre- dications at aU are possible, for they imply that somehow a5 definite character can be assigned to the subject. Is it possible that the Heracliteans did not perceive this dif- ficulty and find some means of evading it? We might conjecture, following certainly more modern ideas, that the escape would be made by contrasting the fixity of a law with the flux of the particular cases. The general Hera- clitean doctrine contains something to which the appeal could be made : it contains some notion of the unity which ' Cf. Lucretius, Be Rerwm Natura, i. 690 S. 48 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [part I is exhibited in and through multiplicity or change. But this is only conjecture. It is still more conjectural to connect this difficulty with the remaining point in the Heraclitean teachings — the im- portance attached to names. There is here an approach to the same doctrine of the peculiar function of names as is found among the opinions ascribed to Antisthenes, ^though the theory of knowledge with which Antisthenes connected it is not identical with that of the Heracliteans. ' We shall find that Antisthenes combines in a curious way an empirical reading of the Eleatic doctrine with this rather startling conception of the function of names. \ 49 CHAPTEE V ANAXAGORAS The speculations which next present themselves have two marks in common, which they exhibit in different degrees. In the first place, they are profoundly affected by the Eleatic maxim : in one way or another they accept that maxim in its abstract form : — Out of nothing comes nothing ; and they endeavour to accommodate thereto their view of existence. And, in the second place, they show a decided tendency towards biological speculations. These character- istics are shared by Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and the earlier Atomists. Anaxagoras ^ has a doctrine which falls into two portions : (1) his view respecting Matter; (2) his theory of Mind (vov^). Popularly these two are combined in the brief statement : " At first all things were together in an in- discriminate mixture. Then came vou? and arranged them in order." ^ But this is a very imperfect view of Anaxa- goras's idea, and quite conceals the real points of interest. First of all, what were the things that "were aU to- gether"? To this question Anaxagoras offers a very peculiar answer. The things are the innumerable seeds of whatsoever is qualitatively distinct. Qualitative dis- ' A native of Clazomense ; born ^ jroyro xp^/iOTo^j/ 4/toS" eTra ivoSj about 500 B.C., died about 428 B.C. ; i\ei>v auri Si(ic6(riJ.rie Sens. 39. Cf. 2 Ariet. Met. r 1007 b 25. Arist. Gen. Oorr. i. 322 b 18.) » E.P. 210. (Simpl. Phys. 152, 11.) 55 CHAPTEE VI EMPEDOCLES CONSIDEKABLE fragments remain of two poems by Emped- ocles^: one on Nature (irepl ^vaewi), another called the Purifications (KoOap/ioi) — more mystical and Pythagorean in character than the former, and expressing a very slirenu- ous belief in the doctrine of Transmigration. The poem on Nature indicates pretty clearly what seem to have been the important influences determining his line of thought. These are partly the abstract arguments of the Eleatics respecting generation, partly the results of considerable meditation on the phenomena of animal life. Under the first influence, Empedocles interprets coming to be and ceasing to be as in reality only a combination and separation of what already is. There follows at once the more precise determination of what it is that is combined and separated: the four 'roots' of all things, as he calls them, are the four ele- ments, Fire, Air, Earth, Water. These are permanent in their nature: they undergo no qualitative change: all that happens is the expression or result of such external changes in them as are indicated by the terms Combining (jii^k) and Separating (StaWa^t?).^ 1 Of Agrigentum, in Sicily ; .born ^ R.P. 164 f. (Ps.-Plut. Plac. i. about 492 B.C., died about 432 B.C. 3, 20.) Hia history is legendary. 56 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [part I Obviously this view demanded as its next position that some ground or cause of the change should be introduced distinct from the elements changed. This ground of change is with Empedocles twofold: Love— the combining force; Hatred — the separating force.^ It is hard to define his con- ception of these. If his poetical expression be taken quite literally, Love and Hate must be represented as somehow components of the physical All, extending throughout the whole, and mingled with the elements. And it is probable that his conception reached no greater degree of clearness than is involved in the statement of the functions which he ascribed to these agents. As to their mode of operation — their way of bringing about changes in the world of elements — Empedocles goes a little more into detaU. He uses of course the general idea of rotation ; but what is essential and peculiar in his doctrine is the view taken of the cycle of generation as coming about from the varying preponderance of one or other of the two active agents. At first the whole is held together in one complete undivided mass by the all - embracing power of Love : the whole forms a sphere. As Hate gradually finds its way in, this perfect unity is broken up, and Hate gradu- ally acquires the upper hand, until the unity is wholly broken up, all mixture is destroyed, and apparently each of the elements is drawn together and sundered from the others. (It is impossible here to avoid the use of a term — ' drawn together,' irvyKptvea-6ai, — which Aristotle had already noted as indicating a serious inconsistency in the view of Emped- ocles ; for obviously an effect is ascribed to Hate which, on the surface at least, is identical with that otherwise ascribed to Love,*) No sooner has the epoch of complete dissolution or separa- ' R.P. 166. (Simpl. Phys. 158, 1.) 2 Arist. Met. A 985 a 21. (R.P. 166 i.) CHAP, vi] EMPEDOCLES 57 tion been arrived at, than Love ag|in begins the work of drawing together. Here, again, it is hard to make Emped- ocles consistent, for he employs throughout the conception of like being drawn to like, which, if applied to the elements, would lead just to the result of perfect dissolution. Love gradually getting the upper hand, all things are brought back to the state of perfect union, and the cycle is ready to begin again, for the process is endless. Individual existence is of course possible only in the two intermediate stages between perfect unity and absolute separation (aggregation and segregation) ; but whether it is possible for such individual existence as we experience to take place equally in both the intermediate periods is a question to which the fragments allow of no definite answer. The general idea is undoubtedly involved that what we call individual existences are gradually formed from less perfect types; but in detail Empedocles, so far at least as the formation of plants and animals is concerned, seems to regard these imperfect types also after the fashion of parts, which may be put together to make the more perfect whole.'- Even in this quaint fancy, however, is involved, though in very crude fashion, another thought already foreshadowed by Anaximander. Of the varied combinations that thus come about, only those go on surviving which are able to maintain themselves in existence : all others are destroyed.^ The mode in which the several parts operate on one another brings in a conception of some interest, which Em- pedocles, indeed, extends to a specially important mode of action — as it may be called — that of sense-perception. All action is of the nature of contact. There is no void ^ See Burnet, Ewrly Greek Fhil. An. iii. 430 a 30 ; Phys. ii. 198 b 29. 260 f. (279fE. 2nded.) (R.P. 173 a.) 2 Arist. De Ctdo, iii. 300 b 29 ; i)e 58 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [part I space. When bodies which, as we say, are at a distance from one another act on one another, they do so by means of effluxes (airoppoai); and all so-called solid bodies are full of pores, into which such effluxes may be received in so far as the pores are adapted to them. Sense-perception is a case of such receptive action ; and vision, for example, is effected by a stream of light from the eye to the object seen ^ — an idea which was soon afterwards modified by the additional hypothesis that there was also a stream of some kind from the object seen.* In a general way Empedocles applies to the action of the senses his maxim that like is drawn to like : like is drawn by like : it is because and in so far as the elements are in us that we are able to apprehend them in the world about us. By fire we know fire, by water water, and so with love and hate.* What Empedocles would have felt inclined to say of the soul, one can hardly make out from the fragments. He is taken by Aristotle as representing the view that all psychical activity is sense - perception, that thought and sense are identical ; * and he certainly expresses himself much after the fashion of Parmenides, declaring that a man's mind or thought varied with the composition of his body, and al- tered from moment to moment according to the changes of what is presented in experience. Coupling this view with what is involved in the general notion of cyclical change, it would seem hardly possible for Empedocles to retain "in any form the doctrine of an individual soul, a soul in any special way connected with the individuality of the person; and yet no doubt it is hard to reconcile this negative result with what is said of Transmigration. 1 R.P. 177 b. (Theophr. Be Sens. ^ Arist. De An. i, 404 b 7. 7.) . (R.P. 176.) ^ The problem in this form was * Arist. De An. iii. 427 a 21. debated till late in the Middle Ages. (R.P. 177.) 59 CHAPTEE VII THE ATOMISTS Along with Empedocles I think we may take the Atomist doctrine: even though in so doing we have to some extent to transgress the strictly chronological order of exposition ; for the developed doctrine of the Atomist view must be ascribed to Democritus. The Atomist school is said to have been originated by Leucippus, of whom we know in detail nothing. He is said to have been an adherent of the philosophy of Par- menides, and there can be little doubt that there must have been the very closest relation between the speculative doctrine of the Eleatics and the more physical conceptions of the Atomists.^ From the statement of Aristotle'' it is obvious that in his view the Atomist doctrine had two roots: (1) The appeal to experience, the assumption that the multiplicity and change presented in experience must be accepted, and that any explanation offered must be made to square with it — more than once in reference to the Atomists he uses^ the expression, 'to preserve phen- omena ' ; (2) The Eleatic doctrine, both in its most abstract form and in one of its special applications. There is no ^ See Burnet, Early Oreeh Phil, in Aristotle. It is frequently used 353 ff. (c. 9, 2nded.) by Simplicius, and one passage (in ^ Arist. Met. A 985 b 4 ; Gen. Corr, his commentary on Arist. De Ccelo) i. 324 b 35. (B.P. 192 f.) implies that it must have come either ' [The actual phrase does not occur from Eudemus or from Callippus.] 60 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [part I generation, no absolute coming into being or passing out of being, and there is no movement — which is one form of generation — without the Void. What the Atomists proceeded to say, then, was that (to put it paradoxically) both Being and N"on-Being must be admitted as real; that is, they in terms contradict the position of Parmenides that only Being is and Non-Being is not. The admission of Non- Being carried with it the further consequence that Being was not One : it was divisible ; and, more particularly (since the Non-Being referred to was, in the concrete, Void Space) the All was regarded as made up of Void Space and the infinite multiplicity of what was directly the opposite of Void Space— the Full. The Full (to TrX^/se?) and the Void (to Kevov) — the Full being conceived as numerically infinite — are for the Atomists the components of exist- ence; and from that view methodically, and appealing only to one ground of explanation, they maintained that it was possible to account for experience. Democeitus,^ a native of Abdera, seems to have been, like Aristotle, profoundly learned. His fellow - citizens thought him mad, and sent for Hippocrates to cure him. He himself laid claim to a wider knowledge, a more many- sided acquaintance with facts, than any of his contempor- aries, and in particular claimed to have pushed his researches far in the region of geometrical science.^ The catalogue of his works may be taken as bearing out this claim to an all -comprehensive study of nature, a study of which the fragments convey but an imperfect impression. There is one section of the catalogue and of the fragments specially noteworthy. It is evident that Democritus included within the scope of his general research the practical side of human experience. He might fairly be called the first ^ Born about 460 B.C., died about 370 B.o. = R.P. 188. (Clem. Strom, i. 69.) CHAP, vil] THE ATOMISTS 61 systematic exponent of a genera!^ ethical theory. We might gather from this what will become abundantly evident from other sources, that in and about his time speculation was beginning to be greatly exercised on the problems of Conduct, whether viewed on the side of the State or on that of the individual. Let us try then to put the general development of the Atomist position in some systematic order. The atoms are represented as indivisible bodies so small as to escape perception. They are devoid of qualitative differences; but among themselves they differ in figure (with which, I suppose, must go magnitude), arrangement or grouping, and position.^ The atoms, therefore, are to be conceived of as presenting practically infinite variety in these three respects ; and, in particular, much of the possibility of grouping or combination is made to depend on the figures or shapes of the atoms (size being also included with these). Did the atoms differ in weight ? It is natural to suppose that in accordance with the two characteristics, homogene- ousness of stuff and difference of size, there would go difference of weight; for we naturally tend to think that weight is in some way proportional to the quantity of stuff in the body concerned, and this quantity (assuming equal density) would then vary with the size. There is evidence, too, that Democritus recognised the difference of density, but confined it to what we may call composite bodies.* On the other hand, there can be no doubt that some of the later authorities^ expressly say that the atoms were not in themselves distinguished by differences of weight. In the absence, then, of any decisive evidence it seems erroneous to incorporate into the earlier Atomist view the very natural, and rather popular, explanation of the varied ^ Arist. Met. A 985 b 13. (R.P. the atoms composing them. 192.) Strictly, it is complex bodies ^ R.P. 199. (Theophr. De Sent. that differ according to the arrange- 62.) ment or to the relative position of ' E.g. Ps.-Plut. Plac. i. 3, 29. 62 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [part i movements of the atoms which is given by referring them to their varied weights. The Atomist view, recognising, as it did, an infinity of void space, in which therefore there was no up or down, could hardly have admitted this determined direction of movement of the atoms as a consequence of their weight. But having said this, we are confronted with the problem. What did the Atomists say about the movement of the atoms ? Figure, combination, position of the atoms — these alone will not suffice to account for phenomena. The broadest and most important feature of experience — Change — is not explained by them alone. Undoubtedly the Atomists placed alongside of these fundamental marks of the atoms the explanatory ground - movement of the atoms themselves. And by this movement (which they followed out in a rather unscientific pictorial fashion) they sought to account for the arrangement of things — for the cosmos and its changes. What explanation, then, did they give of movement? To this I think our answer must be that in one sense they gave no explanation. They insisted that no explanation was possible or necessary ; that is, they postulated constant movement as an ultimate. Our authority for this view is Aristotle, who not only tells us that the Atomists declined to offer any explanation of the initial movement, but also blames them for not seeing that their account of movement was thereby rendered altogether imperfect.^ Later writers have always sought to give this want of explanation a more positive content by introducing the name Necessity. I am inclined to conclude that the original- Atomist doctrine started from the postulate or conception of con- stant movement as a characteristic of the whole multiplicity of atoms. It may be stated that in this they were misled by reading in somewhat too positive a fashion the Eleatic 1 Arist. De Ocelo, iii. 300 b 8. (R.P. 195.) CHAP. VIl] THE ATOMISTS 63 doctrine that motion was impossib|£ without a void, and they may all too readily have converted that into the proposition that if there is a void there is therefore motion. Assuming, then, the constant movement of the atoms, Demoeritus seems to have proceeded to explain how, as a consequence of the different forms and magnitudes of the atoms, there originated a variety of types of movement. Through their collisions the atoms were driven hither and thither, but in different directions according to their size. Demoeritus^ especially fastened on a kind of side- way pushing as giving a key to the great type of movement — the rotatory or vortex motion — which had already begun to be employed in cosmical explanations. All the later formations were ascribed in a very general way to the vortex motion set up in the whirling crowd of atoms. The atoms being infinite in number, and void space being infinite, the rotatory motion (1) did not exhaust or include the whole at once, and (2) Was not necessarily one only: the rotation might be started at infinitely numerous points ; and there would follow an infinite number of worlds (Kotr/xoi), with interspaces between them.^ Demoeritus is probably also to be credited with the very definite distinction between what we call primary and second- ary qualities. The secondary qualities, as they are called, such as hot, bitter, colour, exist only by convention (v6fiie. rl y&p 1120.) w CHAP, ix] THE MINOR SOCRATIC SCHOOLS 87 that the only predication is ' one of one ' (Iv i(j>' ei/o?, A is A). But it seems necessary to assume that the Megarians did not throughout adhere with rigorous consistency to the Eleatic conception, according to which multiplicity is ex- cluded not only from each unit as within itself but from units as such. For it seems to me impossible to understand the Megarian view of predication without allowing that they accepted as the intelligible existents a plurality of units isolated, unrelated. Perfect consistency would have led to the conclusion not that predications are possible only ' one of one,' but that only one predication is possible, if even that, only the predication of Parmenides, "Being is." That the Megarian theory works out with great con- sistency we cannot suppose. From its very nature it not only stood in violent opposition to experience, but, as a combination of really independent thoughts, was certain to work out into a conflict. The Socratic view of notions is evidently to some extent accepted; there is united with it the Eleatic doctrine of simple unrelated being; and these will not combine. In the Sophist^ Plato, describing discussions — and, obvi- ously, more or less contemporary discussions — about the nature of real existence, opposes to each other, first, the materialists who maintain that only what can be touched, or is object of sense, is real, that body is the sole reality ; and, on the other hand, those who are described as 'friends of the Ideas,' who are said to maintain that real existence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal forms, while, negatively, they are said to break up by their arguments the asserted corporeal realities of the materialists, and to insist that, instead of constituting real existence, these bodies are only a process which is constantly going on. Moreover, separating thus real being and process (oixria ' Plato, Sophist, 246-248. 88 PHILOSOPHY BEFORE PLATO [paet i and yivecri,<}), these thinkers are said to maintain that we participate in real being by reason, and in process by sense, and, further, to maintain that the realm of real existence is wholly unchangeable. The point in debate is : Are we justified in assuming that the thinkers here referred to are the Megarians ? The point is one of importance rather as regards Plato than as regards the Megarian doctrine; for I do not think we gather any addition from it of real importance to our knowledge of the Megarian doctrine. In the face of the discussions in Diodorus in regard to movement, &c., it cannot be held that the Megarians consistently and unambiguously maintained the Eleatic position of the singleness of Being. They certainly admitted a plurality of intelligible units, however incon- sistent they might afterwards find such admission to be with their general doctrine. But if there be independent grounds for assigning the conception of plurality of being to the Megarians, then every reason disappears for refusing to recognise here the Megarian doctrine: there is no other doctrine known to us, not even any form of Plato's theory of Ideas, which could be described so accurately in the terms used in this passage. The Megarians, like the thinkers in this passage, distinguish between the intelligible and the sensible realms of existence: according to them, the only true existence is the intelligible ; the realm of true being admits of no change, and therefore there does not apply to it the conception of activity, which is meaningless without change. The intelligible world, according to them, un- questionably admits of plurality: nowhere do we find the Megarians rejecting all predication, as rejection of plurality would involve. And, finally, it would be difficult to describe better the general character of the Megarian arguments about corporeal existence, movement, space, and time, than in the phrase used here, 'breaking up into fragments.' (The CHAP, ix] THE MINOR SOCRATIC SCHOOLS 89 Megarian intelligible unit is isolated and individual, and is thus distinguished from the Platonic Idea, which is a generic universal.) A passage ascribed to Antisthenes ^ declares that God is like no other, and that therefore it is impossible to under- stand Him from an. image. No doubt this conjectural dis- cussion begins in certain statements of Socrates — that the gods alone possess knowledge, and that it is a mistake to suppose that they do not know everything. I think this remark of Antisthenes is identical in general meaning with the passage from Euclides directed against argument from illustrations. But the position may be made more significant if we suppose that the remark has in view the distinction between the world of perception and the world of intelligible reality : for then Antisthenes would be saying that there is an absolute severance between these, and that what we know in this world can throw no light on the world of intelligible reality : we can know nothing of God from an image. To a certain Polyxenus — a SopJaist said to have been educated by Bryso (of whom it is fair to conjecture that he is the Bryso noted as a pupil of Euclides) — may perhaps be assigned the first form of an argument which became of great importance in discussions in the Platonic school, — the argument called 'the Third Man,' which seems to have been intended to show that the distinction and also the relation of the sense particular and the Idea led to an absurd conclusion.^ ' R.P. 285; (Clem. Protrept. 61.) ^ x\ex. Aph. Met. 84 ed. Hayduck. PAET II PLATO CHAPTER I MUST FORM OF THE THEORY OF IDEAS In turning to the theory of Ideas, I desire to repeat the general statement that that theory does not in the history of Greek thinking present itself as absolutely new. The form and the development it received from Plato ^ are un- doubtedly of such an original stamp as to give the theory of Ideas a position of quite exceptional significance in the history of Greek philosophy; but it ought to be admitted: that the root conceptions from which it sprang are all to be discovered in the earlier types of Greek speculation, that the problems to which it was an answer had been already prepared in that earlier history, and that it is hardly possible to understand its full meaning without keeping it in constant relation to these earlier conceptions and forms. It is one of the great diflSculties in interpret- ing Plato that we are apt to conceive of the general posi- tions which constitute Platonism as being equivalent to ^ A native of Athens ; born 427 B.C., died 347 B.o. u> 92 PLATO [part II the Platonic theory in its details. From such a point of view we are in danger of misrepresenting any evidence of a change or development which we may think we can discover in the Platonic theory itself. That some such development must be discoverable might indeed be taken without further question. It is impossible that a mind like Plato's, receiving into itself all the influ- ences of an unusually rich age of intellectual culture, busy during a long life in working out its philosophical con- ceptions, should not have undergone a development which assuredly will be reflected in the various expositions of his doctrine. Our means, however, of determining the order — even the nature — of such development are very indirect. Very little is known with certainty of the events of his life, and still less of the chronological order of his writings; and the external authority to which one would first turn — Aristotle — gives extremely little indication of any perception on his part of important changes in the Platonic doctrine. There is perhaps no question, as regards this problem of the development of Plato's theory, which we find more difiicult to solve satisfactorily than that of the weight to be accorded to the evidence of Aristotle. Aristotle's position with respect to the Platonic doctrine was both favourable and unfavourable. It was favourable, because certainly he had full knowledge of the Platonic work, and himself shared largely the Platonic views: profound as the differences are between the two, they are on a common basis. On the other hand, Aristotle's interest in the pro- blems which the Platonic work involved is so intense that naturally he inclines to regard as calling for criticism or treatment on his part only the most matured results of Plato's thinking. Moreover, as his own reflexions somewhat modi- fied the problems themselves, it is natural for him to take CHAP. l] FIRST FORM OF THE IDEAL THEORY 93 into special consideration only what Plato had to say on the problems as they were now contemplated from a slightly different point of view. ' With all due allowance for the imperfections which Aristotle's critical position naturally entails, I think we are bound to consider that, if anywhere Aristotle does offer a statement which involves a comparison between earlier and later forms of the Platonic theory, it deserves to have the greatest significance attached to it. No theory which we may work out, on internal evidence, of changes in Plato's way of representing the Ideas ought to be allowed to out- weigh a statement from Aristotle which constitutes external evidence in such a case. It is possible that there may be no real conflict between the two representations of Plato, because Aristotle was in possession of a source of informa- tion bearing on Plato's development which is not now open to us. He knew the form of the treatment of Ideas which constituted the substance of Plato's teaching in the latest years of his life. It would seem that these teachings were not embodied by Plato in writings ; but, on the other hand, among the works of Aristotle which we do not now possess there seem to have been abstracts, probably with criticisms, of these latest expositions. Fortunately A ristotle , though evidently without ascribing v much importance to the change of view, does with tolerable explicitness refer to a modification in the theory of Ideas.^ "Now as regards the Ideas, we must first consider the theory in its original form, not putting it in relation to the doctrine of numbers, but treating it in the way in which it was formulated by those who first asserted the existence of Ideas. The theory of Ideas was first reached from the basis of an acceptance of the Heraclitean view respecting things of sense, that all such things were in constant flux. If, 1 Ariet. Met. M 1078 b 9. 94 PLATO [part II then, there were still possible science and knowledge of any- thing, there needed to be assumed permanent existences distinct from the sensible, for of the ever-changing no know- ledge is possible. Now, Socrates in his treatment of the virtues first sought to determine their nature by general notions, by definitions, for of the earlier physical philos- ophers Democritus alone had gone but a short distance in this direction. ... It was Socrates who rightly directed his inquiries towards determining the Essential (ro ri ia-ri), for his aim was reasoned knowledge. Now the very principle of reasoning is the Essential. ... To Socrates are to be assigned with justice (1) Inductive Arguments (irraKTiKol Xoyoi) and (2) Definition by general notions {to opi^eaOai KadoXov) — both in intimate relation to the principle of knowledge. But Socrates did not regard Universals and Definitions as separate realities (;y;ft)pto-Ta). The adherents of the doctrine of Ideas did separate them, and called such realities Ideas, It followed, as an almost direct consequence of their mode of argument, that there must be an Idea wherever there is a general term ; and their procedure much resembled that of a man who, having to count a number of objects, should think he could only manage if there were more of them — for the Ideas are just a reduplication of the things of sense. . . . For there is an Idea of the same name, answering to each group of sensible substances, and existing apart from them, and there is a One of Many in the case of other things also, both in the case of temporal and in that of eternal things." ^ According to Aristotle, the theory of Ideas, in its first form, was more definitely connected with the problem ' 'Other things.' He apparently The 'things of sense which do not means by this that there must be change ' are the heavenly bodies. See Ideas for qualities and relations. Plato, SepuUic, vi. sub. fin, and vii. CHAP. l] FIRST FORM OF THE IDEAL THEORY 95 respecting knowledge suggested by tiie two somewhat con- nected views, — that of Heraclitus with regard to the realm of perception, and that of Socrates with regard to the function of thought ; and in its latest form was definitely connected with, and almost tended to become absorbed in, a theory of a somewhat mathematical kind, connected to some extent with the earlier Pythagorean doctrine.^ That / is to say, at first the theory regards the Ideas as the permanent objects of thought (vorja-t^), thus opposing them to the fluctuating matter of sense -perception (aia-dnja-ts:), and bestows on them a kind of substantive existence superior in grade, so. to speak, to the shadowy half- existence allowed to the matter of sense -perception. In this its earlier form the theory naturally and inevitably views the Idea as the objective counterpart of the general notion: the Idea is a universal, but with the added attri- bute of substantive existence. In the later form the Idea, if not identified with a number or numerical ratio, is so closely assimilated thereto as to be hardly distinguishable from it J and, as a consequence, the systematic connexion of the Ideas with one another is explained in accord- ance with the principles by which the several numbers are brought into a systematic whole. I think it fair from the statement of Aristotle to deduce one methodical maxim respecting the interpretation of the theory of Ideas as it comes before us in Plato's Dialogues. The Dialogues do not themselves contain, at least explicitly, the later form signalised by Aristotle. But, if we accept Aristotle's statement as' authoritative (and I can see no sufficient ground for doubting it), then we are entitled to say that wherever in the Dialogues we can find traces of an approximation to that form of the Ideal theory which Aristotle calls the later, we are justified in regarding that 1 Arist. Met. M 0. 6. 96 PLATO [PABT II portion of Plato's work as relatively the later in date. Wherever, on the other hand, the treatment of the Ideas remains within the limits of the earlier discussions respect- ing knowledge and its conditions, and advances no further than that modification of the Socratic view which Aristotle points out as peculiarly Platonic, namely, the objectifying of the Ideas, there we are justified in assuming that the work is relatively earlier. No doubt this maxim gives us but a very general clue. Aristotle, to judge from his criticisms, bestowed no attention on what specially interests us — the steps through which the earlier form of the theory passed into the later. It is perhaps no great assumption to make, that these transitions were consequences partly of difficulties pressed on the Ideal theory from without, partly of difficulties experienced in working out the theory from within. Unfortunately the historical data for tracing the first of these influences are most unsatisfactory, while, as to the second, the real and insuperable difficulty which we experience is that of placing ourselves with complete satisfaction at the point of view of the Ideal theory itself. This general maxim of method, if applied to the Dia- logues, does not, as I say, give us more than a very general indication. Perhaps, pressing it as far as one may, it would justify us in selecting the representation of the theory of Ideas presented in a group of Platonic dialogues — Phoedrus, Symposium, BepuUic, Phoedo — as belonging to the earlier form. In all these dialogues the idea is connected defin- itely with the process of generalisation. The basis on which the whole proceeds is that, wherever we collect together a number of individuals and designate them by a common name, there is involved, on the one hand, an act or process of mind, wholly distinct from sense-per- ception, and, on the other hand, an object which in all OHAP. l] FIRST FORM OF THE IDEAL THEORY , 9T its essential features differs from the thing perceived by the senses.^ In such a view it is implied — the implication is often made explicit — ^that there is an exact correlation between knowledge and real existence. In fact here, more clearly than in the later Platonic work, we have to note the identi- fication current throughout all Greek speculation, of truth and real existence. Discussions which result in this sharp distinction between knowledge, with reality as its object, and sense-perception, with its indefinable changeable object, naturally connect themselves with the distinctions, already familiar in the Socratic discussion, between perception, opinion, and knowledge ; and it must at once be said that the fundamental importance of the distinction between knowledge on the one hand and opinion with perception on the other, is not in the theory of Ideas limited to this its earlier form. In the Timceus, for example, which we have every reason for regarding as relatively late, the distinction is made the basis of the more constructive treatment that is there attempted.^ In the earlier dialogues there is little or nothing of an attempt to make out a systematic interconnexion among the Ideas. Each is considered primarily in relation to a multi- plicity in the world of opinion and sense. But the nature of the process which obviously is involved in the transi- tion from things of opinion to the Ideas, suggests a kind of connexion among the Ideas : they are in relation to one another of greater or less generality. Plato gives, as it were, a new reading to the Socratic doctrine of Induction and Definition. The process is both upwards and downwards: we generalise, and then we divide the genera obtained, and ' Ae formulated, e.g. , in Republio, oh rairbv bvoiia itri^ipoiiev. %. 596 A : elSos ^ip iroi n %v l/cao-TOK ^ TvnuBua, 51 D. 'tldiOafiev rlBeaQni irspi cKatrra ra, n'oWa, G 98 PLATO [part II so complete our knowledge by connecting in a double way the lower with the higher generalities. It does not appear to me that the process here referred to — the only kind of classification alluded to in these earlier dialogues — is really identical with that special form of division which is more peculiarly connected with the name of Plato, which is frequently subjected to detailed criticism by Aristotle, and which is applied with wearisome elaboration in the Sophist and Politicus — the method of division by dichotomy. That type of division appears to me to have grown into signific- ance in Plato's mind as a consequence of the necessity imposed on him of finding a general explanation, within the Ideal realm, of the element of Negation or Difference. If we seek for a definition of the Ideas from the point of view of this earlier form we have no difficulty in finding what looks positive, though in reality, perhaps, it never succeeds in being more than a series of negations. The Idea, viewed from the side of knowledge, is the rational essence of things : it is that which each group of things is in itself; the universal as in or beside the particular; the one in or beside the many ; the common element in or beside the points of difference. Viewed more from the side of existence, the Ideas, we have to say, possess no property of sense — are invisible, intangible, incorporeal, formless, colourless : they form, taken together, absolute Being, that which is in every respect : they are eternal and immutable, self-identical, simple, unmixed, without parts, harmonious, pure. The contrast between the Ideas so represented and the world of generation (yevecri^) is certainly as absolute as possible; yet it must be remembered that Plato never regards the world of generation as the non-existent. Even in this earlier stage of the theory he is to be found allow- ing to the realm of generation a shadowy intermediate CHAP. l] FIRST FORM OF THE IDEAL THEORY 99 mode of being between being and non- being. As it is put in the BepuUio} if knowledge {yv&aK) has being {to ov) for its object, the opposite of knowledge — ignorance (ayvaxria) — must needs have non-being (to fir; ov) for its object. To opinion (Bo^a), therefore, which is neither knowledge nor ignorance, there must be allowed some intermediate object, something whose mode of existence is very hard to determine. In truth, the greater portion of Plato's work is an attempt to define in what consists this shadowy half -existence of the world of generation; and I imagine that, historically, some part of his earlier dialogues wiU be found to be occupied in distinguishing his position in this respect from the somewhat similar doctrine of the Eleatics and their successors the Megarian school, who cut the knot of the difficulty by denying that the world of generation existed at all. The general distinction which thus appears in the Platonic theory between real being (ovuLa) and process or change (yivea-K) runs parallel to the distinction between reason or intelligence on the one hand and sense - perception and opinion on the other. The simplest point of contrast in the opposed couples is that of permanence as opposed to change, determinateness as opposed to indeterminateness. In the Cratylus, one of the earlier dialogues, in which the doctrine of Ideas, though referred to as no novelty, plays but a very small part, the doctrine is based upon the necessity of some permanent, determinate element on both sides — both as regards the act of knowledge and as regards the object known. The contrast, however, if based solely on this feature, tends readily to become too absolute. It was never Plato's purpose so to define the realm of process and opinion as 1 RepvUie, v. 478. 100 PLATO [part II to put it out of all conceivable relation to the world of true being and thought. In these earlier dialogues Plato shows himself always aware of some such connexion between the two as is involved in the generalising process by which the notion is reached. An Idea, as it is put in the BepuUic} is assumed wherever we collect together a number of individuals, and, recognising their common nature, bestow on them one and the same name. Our intelligence, as it is put in the Phmdrus^ proceeds syn- thetically from a collection of particulars to a unity; It is perfectly true that Plato never succeeds in satisfactorily clearing up the relation which is thus shadowed forth between perception and opinion on the one hand and thought on the other ; for it is always his view that thought is perfectly independent, a pure unmixed energy of the soul ; and, indeed, were we interpreting after more modern fashion, we should be compelled to say that according to Plato the apprehension of the Ideas is not so much a result reached by the activity of intelligencfe, as the presence in the intellect of, or the illumination of the intellect by, the Ideas. (This modern interpretation is in fact the view, lineally descended from Plato, of St Augustine and of Malebranche.) But from the outset there appears — and we have to trace its progress — the desire to bring together into some rational form of connexion the two realms of objects and the two modes of apprehension. A somewhat similar development might be traced on the side of Plato's practical philosophy, where the first sharp opposition between the Good and perfect virtue on the one hand, and every form of pleasure and virtue of the lower type on the other hand, is gradually removed — a place being finally found for the lower type of virtue, and pleasure being recognised, not merely as a concomitant of the highest excellence, but also as an all- 1 Republic, x. 596 A. ^ Phcedrus, 265 D B. CHAP. l] riEST rOKM OF THE IDEAL THEORY 101 important fundamental instrument foj; the training of a character to its highest excellence. In the Bepuhlic, among the earlier dialogues, we find the most definite of the attempts to connect in some way the two contrasted objects and processes.^ The whole realm of opinion is allowed to possess a shadowy kind of half-existence ; that is, in Platonic language, it corresponds to imperfect knowledge ; but there is a gradation of imperfection, a gradation in which the ■connexion seems to be of the nature of imitation or copy- ing QiLfiTja-i's). The whole realm of process is an imperfect copy of the realm of real existence; and in both realms a certain subdivision is indicated, a subdivision which in one of its parts proved of decisive importance for the^ development of the whole theory. The realm of the intelligible is subdivided into two types of intelligible object, two types of mental act of apprehen- sion: (1) the mathematical aspect of objects with, as its appropriate act, understanding, what we might call ' dis- cursive' reason {hidvoia); and (2) the Ideas proper, with pure intellect, ' intuitive ' reason (i/ovs), as the mode of their apprehension. These two subdivisions are themselves in some kind of relation of imitation ; that is, in Platonic language, he who apprehends the mathematical relations of objects knows truly and to a certain extent their ulti- mate nature. The true relations of things are, so to speak, reflected in their mathematical relations, whence, indeed, follows the consequence familiar in Plato, that the ap- propriate discipline of the intellect, that which leads it most effectually to knowledge of the true world of exist- ence, is mathematics. The mathematical sciences themselves exhibit somewhat of the twofold character which consti- tutes the link we are in search of. The mathematical elements are not absolute being, not ova-ia in the full 1 Republic, vi. 509 ff. 102 PLATO • [PAET II sense; but they effect the transition to true being — a relation which seems to me to explain to some extent the very remarkable' term in the Philebus} 'generation into being ' (yeveo-t? eh ova-Lav). Again, the same relation of imitation connects the two grades of the world of generation, of which the firet — natural bodies — are the higher in the scale of existence, and the second — the images or reflexions of these — are obviously their copies. Nay, one might say that there is a closer relation, that is, more of imitation, between the natural objects — things, plants, animals — --and the mathematical ratios, than between the latter and Ideas. Thus, it will be observed, the first simple thought of a contrast or opposition between being and process is crossed and modified by the more subtle conception of a gradation or scale of existence, from the highest, the most perfect, to that which is on the point of passing into the non-existent. The processes of mind enumerated in the Bepiiblic play no great part in any other portion of Plato's exposition; and there is one of the earlier doctrines which rather tends to emphasize the distinction of kind between them, and so runs counter to the idea of a graduated connexion — the familiar doctrine of Eeminiscence (dvdfivr)}rvxv)- The soul, as we shall find in Plato, has two functions, which, indeed, enable it to play the remarkable part assigned to it by him of serving as the real intermediary between the world of generation and the world of true existence. Its functions are Knowing and Moving; by ■moving' being meant 'initiating change.' These are its functions, and its nature — inseparable from it, forming, one might say, its very idea : although in truth, according to the Platonic theory, there is no Idea of the soul. In its function as knowing, according to its nature as intellectually appre- hending, the soul is in no way dependent on the body or on the accidental circumstances of time. As knowing, — and that is its nature, — the soul is always apprehensive of the Ideas. Only as having this constant, or rather timeless, vision of the true realities, the Ideas, does soul exist at all.- The doctrine of Eeminiscence, therefore, is but an imperfect way of expressing the more important notion of the ultimate nature of the soul. Evidently, when so conceived, the soul is quite independent of the body — at all events, in its function as knowing. And therefore, from that point of view, it would appear impossible to effect any junction between pure intellect and sense-perception or opinion. In order to do that, some relation, external or internal, between soul and body becomes necessary. 104 CHAPTER II LATER METAPHYSIC: THE PABMENIDES, SOPHIST, AND PHILEBUS The Parmenides presupposes much discussion on the Ideas. The Ideas, so far as we have seen, present themselves as a series of objects corresponding to the particulars of sense- perception, but quite distinct from them in nature. Little, if anything, is determined respecting their interconnexion; and indeed, from the mode in which they are at first repre- sented, each as a unit with its own indefeasible nature, connexion or interrelation of any kind in respect to them presents a difiBculty. There are thus two features to be kept in view: (1) the contrast and yet relation between each Idea and its corresponding particulars ; and (2) the unique character of each Idea when looked at by itself. In this second feature it is obvious that the Platonic Ideas resemble strikingly the InteUigibles of the Megarian school ; and it is but a little assumption to make, that in historic fact the Megarian philosophers and Plato did for a certain time find themselves in agreement. On the other hand, the difference between the two becomes apparent as soon as the questions are raised, what constitutes the relation between the Idea and the particulars? and, in what way is it possible that among the Ideas themselves there should be relation ? The Megarian thinkers took a negative attitude with regard to CHAP. Il] LATER METAPHYSIC 105 both questions. They did not admit that the particulars in any way existed ; and they altogether refused to allow even of such mode of connexion among the Ideas as seemed to be involved in the fact of predication. That these questions had begun to press at a very early period in the working out of the Platonic doctrine, is evident from the Euthydemus and Phcedo. (The Euthydemus is generally acknowledged to be early in date.) Understanding, then, that questions touching very deeply \ the theory of Ideas were current topics of discussion, we turn to the first part of the Partmnides} where Socrates is repre- sented as bringing forward the theory of Ideas with the view fc of asking whether the subtle dialectical arguments of Zeno, i3i on, for example, the One and Many, would apply if the, is objects considered were the Ideas.^ In reply .to this B Parmenides proceeds to put a series of questions respecting a the Ideas, with a view to extracting a more definite state- ly ment as to how they are related to the things of sense, the tK Many ; and, in the first place, he inquires whether the view Il of Ideas is perfectly general in scope, whether it is confined kjl - ' to such cases as likeness, the just, the beautiful, the good, 1^ or must be applied also to rather more concrete objects, i|i such as man, and even to things which are in their nature I imperfect.^ A Assuming the wider application of the theory of Ideas, ;; Parmenides then asks,* in what way is this participation h (/j,eTdX7}'\lrii;) of the particulars in the Idea conceivable ? V and readily points out that the obvious superficial inter- , ^ PwrmenideSi 126-137. ical SiaxplveaSai airo<(>a.ltni, i.yaliif\v tv " Parmenides, 129 : ihv 54 tis . . . e7a)7c Sav^ajT&s. 'I irpuTov /ifv. Siaip^rai xoiph o«tA kuB' ' Parmenides, 130 c. : otov 9pl| ko! - a^T^ Tct eJfSTj, ojov d^oi677]Td re Kal ^rjKhs Kol p&iros ^ &\\o Tt dTtpLirariif avofiotdrTiTa Kal ir\^dos Kal t6 %v Kal re Kal ^av\6raTov. • trrdffiv Kal iravra rd ToiavTa, elro kv ^ Parmenides, 131. , eavro7s touto SwdiJ-eya crvyKepdvyvtrBai 106 PLATO [part II pretation of participation leads to a hopeless perplexity. Socrates, admitting the difficulty, is confronted with the question, whether, as the Ideas evidently arise from the process of generalising, the hypothesis of the single Idea for each group of particulars is not confronted by the difficulty which results from the unlimited possibility of generalising. The argument points out, as it were, that there is some- thing arbitrary in stopping at one Idea which contains the common features of the particulars: an infinite series of Ideas is possible.^ To this Socrates 2 suggests as an answer that perhaps after all the Ideas ought not to be supposed to exist except as notions (voijfiaTo) in the mind — a suggestion which Parmenides at once refutes by the then accepted axiom, that a notion, being always the notion of something, implies the existence of that something. The assumption that the Idea exists may, Socrates thinks, be defended by supposing that the participation is of the nature of resemblance : the Ideas are patterns (TrapaSeiryfiara) fixed in nature, and the particular things resemble them — a suggestion which Parmenides meets by bringing forward one of the forms of the argument later familiarly known as 'the Third Man.' Socrates, in a kind of despair, gives up the attempt to defend further the hypothesis of Ideas; and Parmenides proceeds^ to point out a more formidable difficulty than all the others which the hypothesis wovdd have to meet and overcome if it were seriously defended. Briefly, the difficulty is the impossibility of bridging over the antithesis between absolute being and absolute knowledge on the one hand, and relative being and relative knowledge on the other hand. The absolute existents will be related among ' 'The Third Man' argument : see '^ Parmenides, 132. above, p. 89. ' Parmenides, 133. CHAP, ii] LATER METAPHYSIC 107 themselves and to their own knowledge. Eelatives will be related to one another and to their own knowledge. But relative knowledge will not extend to absolute exist- ence, nor will absolute knowledge extend to relative existence. This enumeration of difiQculties must, I think, be under- stood as having reference to current discussions about the theory of Ideas which emphasised the points of difficulty in the elaboration of the doctrine. There is no necessity to suppose — no ground for supposing — that they constitute a criticism by Plato himself at a late period of his career on the earlier form of his doctrine of Ideas. It is possible to trace the genesis of all the objections urged, and that to sources outside of Plato. The important argument, 'the Third Man,' is often referred to by Aristotle. The argument was evidently commonly recognised in the Platonic school; and we are fortunately able to trace its first appearance, though not, unfortunately, to date that. It is to be assigned to a certain Polyxenus, a Sophist.^ He is said to have been a pupil of Euclides; and it seems reasonable to infer that the argument called 'the Third Man' was the product of the Megarian ingenuity. The Megarians could urge it; for they did not admit the existence of the Many alongside of the One, and the perplex- ity in this argument arises whenever the Idea is~placed as the One alongside of the particulars as the Many. They altogether rejected the generic character of the intelligible units, and it is this generic character that lies at the root of the difficulty — naturally only when the generic character is supposed to possess of itself a substantive existence. Again, the supposition that the Ideas may be only notions in mind undoubtedly originates with Antisthenes. It was his objection to the Platonic doctrine ; and the terms in ' See above, p. 89, note 2. 108 PLATO [PABT II which his objection is referred to by later authorities leave no doubt as to its purport and the kind of answer offered to it here in the Parmenides. As to the third, the most important of the difficulties urged, that turning on the absolute distinction between the realm of real existence and the realm of relative fact, the sources are not so definite. The argument is a general one, and it connects itself, I imagine, with a certain doubt that we find Plato repeating, even in his latest works — the doubt whether it is possible for man to be completely in communion with absolute existence. Already Socrates had dwelt on the general distinction between wisdom, as the possession of the gods only, and the love of wisdom, or philosophy, as the possession of man; and Plato had re- peated that distinction in his own way.^ But if we sought for something more pointed I imagine we should not be far wrong in looking, first, to the curious contention of Euclides already referred to,^ and then to the sharp dis- tinction which Antisthenes appears to have insisted on, according to whom we could know nothing of God from an image.^ These objections, then, taken together, are to be regarded historically as a summary of current arguments against the theory of Ideas ; and in the remainder of the dialogue the answer to them is of a twofold nature. First, and far the most irliportant, is the general remark of Parmenides * that, except on the basis of the hypothesis of Ideas, reasoning and philosophy {q tov BiaXiyea-Oai Evvafim), that is, know- ledge, are impossible ; and, secondly, the indirect demonstra- tion, which the second part contains, that the insistence on the absolute severance of the One from the Many leads merely to self-contradiction. 1 Symponvm, 204. ' P. 89. 2 P. 84. * Parmenides, 135. CHAP. ll] LATER METAPHYSIC 109 ■\ The doctrine of Ideas found na|urally much resembling itself in the earlier Eleatic metaphysic. The Ideas as a whole and individually occupy very much the position of Being in the Eleatic doctrine. Now, from the Eleatic posi- tion, it appeared quite impossible to offer any justification of the elements of Plurality and Otherness or Eelation, — terms which point abstractly to the more concrete distinc- tion between true being {pvaia) and the realm of generation {yevea-i Ideas tended to become more and more numerical in ! character, they were nevertheless characterised as being ; devoid of the special qualities of number. They could not J be combined as mathematical numbers can be combined.* I Speusippus rejects this distinction, but nevertheless, as 1 ^ Aristotle points out, since he is compelled to introduce a certain distinction between the One — Unity — which is prin- ciple of all and the One which is a factor in all number, he implicitly allows a distinction of the Platonic kind. One further doctrine is ascribed to Speusippus which has its own general interest. We find Aristotle^ contest- ing a position which seemed to threaten the possibility of scientific knowledge. To define, it was urged, requires absolutely complete knowledge. No one can define — that is, state completely the nature of what is defined — with- out distinguishing the defined from all else. In other words, there is no knowledge except absolute knowledge — absolute quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Apparently Speusippus was the author of this argument, though I admit it is not easy to see in what way it connects with the other doctrines ascribed to him. It raises definitely for the first time the question whether reality is a whole at all. (" I Something more definite may be found, in what is 1 They are non-addible {SuriupKri- ' Arist. Anal. Post. ii. 97 a 6. {R.P. Toi). 362 b.) 144 PLATO [part II known to us of the work of Xenoceates, the second head of the Older Academy,^ and a personal friend of Aristotle's, though our knowledge of him also is but fragmentary, and many of his sayings are of a mystical or allegorical nature. Xenocrates is credited with a restatement of the forms of apprehension — types of know- ledge, they may be called — which it is of special interest to note he coupled with a correlative classification of the real world of existence. Xenocrates recognises sense- perception, reason, and a third — a composite kind of knowledge to which he gave the Platonic title So^a, opinion. To sense-perception he allowed a certain measure of truth, but inferior in certainty to what was given in 'reason.' I suppose that the distinction here was more or less that previously hinted at by Plato, that sense- perceptions were, so to speak, isolated. What is given is not connected with grounds or reasons which render it intelligible. It is only — so to speak — fact. Opinion, again, was held by Xenocrates to yield both true and false. Some opinions were true, some were false. With the distinction of these three forms of knowledge was conjoined a classification of corresponding objects to be known. To rational knowledge was assigned what was outside the ovpav6<;. Sense-perception had as its province what was within the ovpav6 'art,' a term which would in- clude all exercise of human activity, rk Karh BLiris, ipopi), is divided into (1) 7e>'e(ris and ^eopi, in the categories of Quality, Quan- which relate to the category of oiirla ; tity, Place, respectively. (2) Klvtiats, which has three species 156 AEISTOTLE [paet III developing. In the complete gradation of nature there is thus, as it were, a scale of ascent and descent, descending towards privation of all that is determinate, ascending towards completed perfect actuality. Further, from its position as a realised end, an actuality, the concrete existent must always be regarded as in itself a compound (avvderov), of which it is easy to distinguish as elements the familiar Form and Matter. It is a com- pound because the actuality is not an absolutely new forma- tion; there is carried out in it, manifested in its fulness, what is also in a way present in the antecedent condition. There must therefore be a common basis, the foundation for that identity in difference which connects the potential and the actual This common basis is called by Aristotle v\ri (Matter), a notion much wider than that which we connect with the term. The other element. Form (etSos), is easily identified with the reXo? or final cause, for it is the same as that which the thing is capable of being, that which when attained constitutes the complete existence of the thing. The Form is equivalent to the end or purpose of the thing in an explicit or direct way, when the existent thing comes about by Nature (^v De An. i. 403 a 1. ^ Met. T 1005 b 18. CHAP. Ill] THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 173 by Aristotle as having for its pbject being-as-such (to 6v ^ 6v). The treatment of common axioms in general is regarded by him as forming part of metaphysic; but, in particular, the principle of contradiction falls within that part of philosophy because it connects directly with being- as-such. The principle itself is formulated by Aristotle with a rather definite objective reference — ' The same thing cannot belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect.' ^ Such an axiom is also the most firm principle of knowledge or thinking; for it implies that it is impossible for the human mind to think that what is true is at the same time, in the same sense, in the same reference, false.^ The fundamental opposition between true and false has the double refer- ence. It is incompletely expressed if not taken both with respect to the nature of things and at the same time with respect to apprehension of that nature of things. These, in Aristotle's view, are always correlative ; but, if a priority is to be assigned to either, it must be accorded to the objective aspect, the nature of things. The same axiom, when due attention is paid' to the notions of truth and falsity occurring in it, implies a further generality — that which later logicians separated off as the law or principle of Excluded Middle. When they are pro- perly defined there is no third possibility between the true and the f alse.^ Aristotle, in handling this implication of the principle of contradiction, approaches the highly important speculative proposition that all assertions which have as their apparent subject the universe, the sum-total of reality, are meaningless. The principle of contradiction from its nature cannot 1 t4 ainh &ii.a ivdpxdv re Koi /iii ^ Met. T 1005 b 24. inripx^ii' iSivarov Tif abrif Koi Kuril ' Met. T 1011 b 25. t4 avT6.—Met. T 1005 b 19. , 174 ARISTOTLE [PABT "i admit of proof. Those who seek for such, says Aristotle,^ exhibit only their ignorance of what is meant by proving. He who rejects it, then, cannot be dislodged from his posi- tion by a demonstration which shall directly establish the truth of the principle. He can be refuted only indirectly (ikeyKTiKm), by showing that it is either impossible or absurd for him to retain the position of rejecting the principle. For the purpose of this indirect confirmation of the principle it is sufficient to insist that its opponent shall allow that the terms or notions he employs have a definite meaning. If he uses any term at all, with the admission that it has a meaning, then, Aristotle thinks, it is possible to make clear to him that he must admit the truth of the principle of contradiction. If he will not allow that terms or notions have any meaning, then it is evident that he rejects thinking in toto, must resign the use of speech, and is no better than a plant. For if his terms or notions have a meaning, whatever they mean is distin- guishable from their corresponding negatives, and it must therefore be impossible that one and the ^ame term or notion can at the same time mean both the positive and negative. The possibility of thinking at all, Aristotle seems to say, depends on the admission that there is a certain fixity of significance in terms or notions, and this in the long-run is equivalent to the fixity of the nature of that which is. Thinking, in other words, is but the apprehension of what is ; and, if there be no distinction between what a thing is and what it is not, thinking becomes impossible, and we are not even in a position to reject the principle of contradiction. We have neither thoughts nor terms whereby to express our rejection, if such thoughts and terms have no fixity of meaning.^ Thus the principle of contradiction is an axiom of thought 1 Met. r 1005 b 2, 1006 a 5. « jj^gf r c. 4. CHAP. Ill] THEOEY OF KNOWLEDGE 175 only on account of the intimate correlation between think- ing as a process of apprehending anfl the nature of things to be apprehended. Aristotle is far removed from the position sometimes taken in purdy formal logic, according to which the principle of contradiction is the expression only of a condition under which the subjective activity of thinking proceeds. It is, indeed, and has always been found, impossible in any way to extract from the notion of thinking as a merely subjective activity the principle of contradiction. In the Aristotelian view, however, that principle manifests its fundamental character only when thinking in general is taken as an element, it may be an all -pervading element, in the process of apprehending reality. A severance of thinking from reality is altogether foreign to Aristotle. If the terms in which the fundamental opposition be- tween true and false is referred to in the principle of con- tradiction are clearly conceived, they lead us back, Aristotle points out, to the fundamental conception of the final sub- jects of predication. It is primarily with respect to such final subjects — concrete existents, each with a definite nature — that the principle has its application. Aristotle is therefore on the one hand making a distinction between subjects and their predicates, and on the other hand reject- ing any view which extends the conception of subject beyond the sphere of the concrete existent. Consider the first of these points. Aristotle points out that we must define carefully the terms of our opposition, as, for example, man and not-man. The principle of con- tradiction is to the effect that the concrete existent cannot at the same time have the nature of man and not have the nature of man. But, it was evidently urged, of the concrete existent man I may predicate that he is white, educated, and so on ; and evidently, it was insisted, white is not man, 176 ARISTOTLE [PART ill educated is not man; therefore it is possible to predicate not-man of man.^ Such accidents, Aristotle maintains, do not constitute the negative of the nature of the subject from which we start ; and, were we to endeavour by means of them to express exhaustively the opposite of the concrete subject with which we start, we should be compelled to try to complete the impossible enumeration of an infinite series. In the long- run all assertions about accidents are valid only in so far as they refer to the fundamental subjects; and it is the fundamental subject that must be taken as that of which the negative cannot be true at the same time with the positive. Even when we look to the accidents the axiom may receive confirmation : for certainly ' white ' is different from ' educated ' ; and, if we deny that ' being man ' is the same as ' being white ' or ' being educated,' we must allow that the difference is infinitely greater between ' being man ' and 'not being man.' The opposite, the negative, is thus regarded as, so to speak, the final term in a chain of differences.^ The principle of contradiction, then, must be admitted by any one who allows the possibility of apprehension at all. Apparent rejection of it — for Aristotle maintains that its rejection cannot really be thought — must depend on the denial of the possibility of apprehending reality. Such a denial, in the previous history of speculation, had come forward in three varieties at least :^ (1) the Heraclitean, according to which, because of the constant flux of things, no apprehension of any one definite truth was possible;* ' Met. V 1007 a 8. diction of himself or in absolute ^ Met. r 1007 a 4. cessation of thought, whence, there- ' Met. r c. 5. fore, he refers with approbation to ' Aristotle maintains that if this what was said of Cratylus, one of the view be strictly adhered to, it must followers of Heraclitus : that he had involve the thinker either in contra- given up the use of speech and con- OHAP. Ill] THBOEY OF KNOWLEDGE 177 (2) the Protagorean, according to v|hich, from the purely relative character of apprehension, it was possible and neces- sary to say that no one proposition was more true than another; and (3) finally, from the doctrine of Anaxagoras, that all things were so intermingled that it was necessary to say each thing is as much one as the other. iii. Metaphysical Principles of the Theory of Knowledge. The consideration of the special or peculiar axioms carries us at once into the Aristotelian theory of knowledge. It is impossible to understand the position accorded by Aristotle to these special axioms except in connexion with the general outlines of his view of knowledge as a whole. In that theory of knowledge we are able to recognise distinctions of aspect which have become more definite in modern philo- sophical treatment. The theory has a logical, a psychologi- cal, and a metaphysical aspect ; nor is it possible to give a statement of Aristotle's view of knowledge in any one of these aspects without consideration of the others. I shall first take into account certain of the metaphysical doctrines which bear most intimately on the view of knowledge. As a preliminary it is to be borne in mind that Aristotle's terminology shows an increasing consciousness of the ambi- guity which always attaches to the term ' knowledge.' He accepts in his own way the Platonic antithesis between opinion and knowledge, an antithesis which implied that by knowledge was meant the clear final insight into truth and reality — what we should call the final result of scientific investigation. In a similar fashion Aristotle contrasts dialectic and apodictic; defining the former as reasoning tented himself with wagging his same stream," by saying "No man finger, and that he had proposed to can go down even once into the same amend the statement of Heraclitus, stream." "No man can go down twice into the M 178 ARISTOTLE [part III which proceeds from merely probable (m eVi to -ttoXv) premisses and which attains therefore merely probable con- clusions, whereas in the latter the start is made from principles which are themselves necessary truths and the conclusion is likewise necessary. But Aristotle's more comprehensive view of experience leads him greatly to reduce the force of the antithesis as presented in the Platonic doctrine. Not only does Aristotle recognise a community of form in reasoning within the two distinct provinces, — a community of form in the more elementary processes as well as in what is fundamental, the connective operation of syllogising, — but he also recognises a variety of intermediaries which bridge over the gulf between the region of opinion and the region of scientific insight. Nay more, one might say that to a certain extent the modification thus introduced almost amounts to a denial of the distinction of kind which seems to be implied in the Platonic antithesis. Aristotle keeps so constantly in view what we call the development of knowledge — the gradual advance from the imperfect stage of merely probable judgment to that of final, assured, scientific insight — that his first contrast tends to become less and less absolute. Certainly this statement must be made with qualification ; and the qualification requisite points directly to what we shall find to be the final insoluble difficulty in the Aristot- elian treatment. The antithesis never finally vanishes. There always appears at a certain point a transition of kind — the transition which in the metaphysical sphere is indicated in the opposition between the variable and the immutable, in the psychological sphere between the functions of the soul and the mysterious activity of i/ow? or reason, in the logical sphere between the apprehension of mediated truth and the intuition of first, special, peculiar principles. Turn then to the metaphysical characteristics which are CHAP, in] THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 179 of most importance as determining the theory of knowledge. Aristotle opposes strenuously to the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, taken as separate from the particulars, the view that the only existent is the concrete individual. The Platonic Idea he regards as a class - universal which as such can possess no substantial existence. The universal as such does not indicate an independent entity, but a property or quality common to many individuals.^ No doubt such uni- versals indirectly indicate what exists, for they pointj to the common attributes of really existent subjects. Moreover, universals are absolutely necessary for knowledge : there is no knowledge of the isolated or abstract individual. A distinction is thus indicated between two senses of the term 'individual.' On the one hand, it would appear as though the individual were necessarily the ultimate, un- qualified, undetermined unit, the final result left after the withdrawal of all that constitutes its agreement with others. On the other hand, if the individual enters at all into knowledge, it must have an aspect or character which has in it something of universality. Aristotle shows himself fully aware of the difficulty involved in his antithesis between the individual and the universal, and more than once formulates it with the utmost definiteness: "Knowledge is of the universal."^ Individuals are infinitely numerous and distinct from one another. How is it possible that if knowledge be of the universal, which is on one ground necessary, it should also be of the individuals, which on another ground is equally necessary ? It can hardly be said that he succeeds in giving a solution as clear as the difficulty to be solved. An approach to a solution, however, is made through the metaphysical analysis ' clfSi) fiev oiii efcoi fj fv ti iropi tA elirfiv ii/dyKii. — AnaZ, Post. i. 77 a 5. ro\Ka oi/K AvdyKV, «' aiifSeiJij ^(rroi, ^ E.g. De An. ii. 417 b 23. eivat fiiyroL ^u Kar^ iroWau aKtiOis 180 ARISTOTLE [PART "I required in order to clear up the notion of the individual. Numerical plurality is not the ultimate feature which char- acterises the individual for Aristotle. Things, the subjects of predication, may be many in number and yet possess singleness of character. In fact, within the realm of genera- tion it might be said to be necessary that what is really one should be manifested in a plurality of numerically distinct individuals. Numerical plurality is thus regarded by Aristotle as the final accident attaching to the real subjects of predication by reason of their existence in the world of generation. The true individual is not the numerically distinct unit, but that which is manifested within the region of alternate coming to be and ceasing to be in a plurality of separate units. The separate units are cognisable only in so far as they have that fixity of character which enables them to be recognised as units of one and the same kind. Aristotle does not explicitly say, but he might very well have said, that the subject which is only characterised by numerical unity, and the indeterminate substratum which has no qualification at all, are alike beyond the range of knowledge and existence. Thus the concrete individual, though always manifested in numerical plurality, is more properly to be conceived of as the common character which finally connects together the multiplicity of numerically distinct units. Much depends in this statement on the term ' finally ' ; and we must accept as Aristotle's view that it is not merely possible but necessary to recognise in what is offered to us in experience the final characters which distinguish one type of many units from all others. When expressed logically this postulate is to the effect that there are and are discov- erable ultimate specific differences. It is Aristotle's view in general, expressed in the most pointed way, that the CHAP, hi] theory of knowledge 181 ultimate real subjects of predication are fixed by the la^t specific differences which determine one type of numeri- cally distinct individuals. What is called logically the ultimate specific difference coincides therefore with what metaphysically is termed by Aristotle the essence or form or notion of the concrete individual. Nothing exists which has not in addition to its numerical distinctness a fixed , character or nature. Individuals numerically distinct exist ' therefore only as manifestations of a fixed character or type. Logically and metaphysically Aristotle's theory is dominated by this conception of fixity of character, nature, or type, in the subjects of all possible predication. I think he regarded it as almost an axiom that, if there be knowledge and exist- ence at all, there must be fixity of character in that which is and is to be known. Aristotle's treatment of the principle of contradiction pro- ceeds on this assumption. The interpretation which on the whole is given by him to this axiom detracts somewhat from its generality. There can be no doubt that in his mind what corresponded to it, and gave it definiteness of meaning, was the representation of nature as an arrangement of fixed types, natural kinds. In practice Aristotle takes as too easily accom- plished the heavy task which is necessary in order to carry out fairly the requirements of the term ' final" or 'ultimate.' He is too ready to accept, as obviously final or ultimate, differences which are no doubt prominent in the appearance of natural objects as presented in experience. A modern thinker might accept the axiom in all its generality; but much experience would have taught him how difficult it is to be assured that in the analysis of concrete fact we have succeeded in finally determining the differences; and the new turns of investigation which were but little appreciated by Aristotle would further lead him to doubt whether the 182 ARISTOTLE [part ill final result would take expression in the only form con- templated by Aristotle — that of a complete classification of natural objects. iv. The Concrete Individual. According to the account in the Metaphysics, the ultimate subject of predicates is no doubt the concrete individual, hut not the concrete individual as a mere unit with no characteristic save that of numerical distinctness from all others. Even numerical distinctness presupposes, Aristotle seems to say, a certain common basis. The many are always a plurality of the same kind. To be concrete, to be, there- fore, the possible subject of predication, the individual must be conceived of as the numerically distinct member of a class, and, moreover, of a class or kind which itself consists merely of individuals. (Aristotle as frequently employs the term ' the individual ' to indicate the injimce spenes as the numerically distinct members of them.^) Thus the final existent, from the metaphysical point of view, is the lowest class, that which is marked out by a property or complex of properties peculiar to itself. It is, indeed, implied in Aris- totle's account — which is expressed with reference proxi- mately to the world of generation, of alternate coming to be and ceasing to be — that numerical plurality is a necessary aspect of these final classes, fixed types, or natural kinds, and that the numerical plurality is a consequence of the fact that there the (jingle, numerically one, form receives realisation only in the potentially manifold matter. So far, then, a certain solution of the problem is attained. The basis for a reconciliation in knowledge between the two features — universality and concrete individuality — is so far secured. But the solution has its own difi&culties. ^ Infima species=&To^ov eTSos. Its numerically distinct members are Sro/ia CHAP. Ill] THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 183 Though expressed proximately with reference to the world of generation, it contains nothing otherwise to limit its generality; and yet it is obvious enough that it is not, without important modification, applicable to either of the other realms of existence contemplated by Aristotle. Per- haps in the intermediate sphere where there is change but perfect uniformity — where change does not imply alterna- tion, the ceasing to be and coming to be of numerically distinct representatives of a type, where therefore type and individual coincide — a little straining might make the expression appropriate. On the other hand, there is no possibility of applying the suggested solution to the ultimate existence, the Divine nature, in which there is no feature of numerical difference, no feature dependent upon matter, no vicissitude or alterna- tion at all, in which therefore individuality seems altogether wanting. Yet Aristotle for his part seems to regard this perfect activity, this form devoid of matter, as possessing in the highest degree concrete individuality. Were we to proceed from this position, we should be compelled to regard the forms in the world of generation in their abstraction from matter as the true element of existence, and the numerically distinct subjects as a kind of falling away from the perfection of existence peculiar to the form. Such a view is a kind of feeble reproduction of Platonism, and later became the familiar, almost the characteristic, doctrine in the Neo-Platonie metaphysics. That it should thus present itself as a necessary consequence, if we reasoned from the Aristotelian theology, is another of the many indications that the whole Aristotelian metaphysic is a combination of quite incongruous and incoherent parts. Even, however, from the point of view which at present we have to occupy — namely, the extent to which the solution enables us to lay out a coherent doctrine of knowledge — 184 ARISTOTLE [PABT in there is something a little doubtful in the conception of the concrete individual as the ultimate species, the fixed type, or natural kind. The numerically distinct individual is in that theory viewed merely as the embodiment or bearer of the specific marks constituting the form or intelligible essence of the natural kind. But experience forces on us the lesson that we do not immediately apprehend numeri- cally distinct individuals as being thus merely the embodi- - ment of an essential intelligible nature. Such apprehension of them is rather the final result of completed insight, that with which we rest contented as the terminus of investiga- tion, not that with which we start. Now Aristotle is far from ignoring this lesson of experience. It is the charac- teristic feature of his theory of knowledge — what most of all distinguishes it from the Platonic — that it recognises and places in the foreground the development of our apprehension from the crude, vague, imperfect beginning to the final com- pleted insight. Yet, evidently, whoever contemplates such development is bound also to contemplate a type of indi- vidual perfectly distinct from that which in the final appre- hension is known as the manifestation or expression of the intelligible essence or form. Aristotle beyond all question admits such a distinction ; but he nowhere furnishes a satis- factory account of the relation between the individuals in the two senses in which they are considered. The term which he employs for the individuals in this new sense, as occurring in the first stage of our progress towards know- ledge, itself increases the ambiguity of the whole exposition. It is the term familiar in logic for the particular, to Ka6' eKaarov. Our knowledge always starts with ' the par- ticulars ' ; ^ and repeatedly Aristotle offers summaries of his view of knowledge which accommodate themselves most readily to what is commonly recognised as the empirical ' E.g. Nie. Eth. vi. 1143 b 4. Ik tZv xae' HKaara rb Ka96\ov. CHAP. Ill] THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 185 doctrine of knowledge: first, particulars apprehended in sense-perception ; then, just in propoftion to the degree and scope of retention, the formation of certain crude generalities which furnish the basis for what he calls eixireipla (ex- perience) — meaning by that the kind of generalised know- ledge which is adequate to recognising a new specimen of a kind already familiar to us.-' It corresponds almost to what we call empirical knowledge; and its crudest form is no doubt the familiar reasoning from particulars to particulars. It does not involve knowledge of the cause or ground {to aiTiov). Then, following experience, and proceeding from it by induction,^ we have universal propositions {to, icaOoXov), which furnish the basis for art and science ; and Aristotle seems almost continually to lay down the general position that the universals are known from the particulars, and very commonly to declare that the process by which they are reached is induction. (In nine cases out of ten, Aristotle means by iirayeorfq, 'induction,' only that which was perhaps first designated by that term — the collection of a number of resembling cases, — a collection made, no doubt, with an end in view. The term does not indicate any theory as to the nature of the process whereby from the collected instances the universal is to be gathered. Aris- totle indeed seems often to think that if a sufficient number of particulars have been collected, the universal will just be seen by immediate inspection.) Moreover, Aristotle proceeds with very definite conscious- ness of the difference between the kind of apprehension of individual things with which we begin and that with which we terminate. There runs all through his theory of know- ledge the important distinction first adequately recognised by hyn and designated the distinction between prior to us 1 Met. A 980 b 28 ; Anal. Post. ii. 100 a 5. 2 Anal. Post. ii. 100 b 4. 186 ARISTOTLE [fart hi or better known to us (prpoTepov, yvtopifMorepov rffiiv), and prior in nature or better known in nature (^va-ei). ' Eela- tively better known ' and ' absolutely better known ' express the distinction fairly well; but its full significance is only to be understood if we add what are also recurring ex- pressions in Aristotle : the particular is the relatively better known, the universal the absolutely better known ; and that which is perceptible to the senses is relatively better known, that which is apprehended by reason is absolutely better known.^ V. Place of the Syllogistic Forms. Aristotle is perfectly in earnest with the conception of development in knowledge, and through that conception is enabled so far to overcome the absoluteness of distinction which in the Platonic view had separated the region of opinion from that of knowledge proper. In accordance with the conception of development Aristotle is ready to maintain that the same general structure, the same fundamental char- acter, which constitutes knowledge, is exhibited, though in very different degrees of completeness, throughout the whole range, from the first collection of particulars up to the final insight into the essential as contrasted with the accidental. Perhaps on this ground we may explain — what would other- wise cause us some difficulty in the Aristotelian logic — the recognition of the common form of the Syllogism as, so to speak, independent of the difference of matter in dialectic and apodictjc. Two dififerent views are possible here. The first view is that syllogism, in its nature and rules, is dependent only on the formal character of the faculty of thinking, which faculty may be employed either about probable matter, in dialectic, or about necessary matter, in apodictic. That the 1 Anal. Post. i. 71 h 33. CHAP. Ill] THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 187 syllogism therefore presented itself in both, would be re- garded as a consequence of its confiexion solely with the subjective conditions of our thinking. This is the point of view familiar in the later developments of Formal Logic, It rests on an interpretation of thinking altogether foreign to Aristotle. Aristotle never makes a distinction between the formal conditions of thinking and the actual constitution of the manifestation of thinking in knowledge. As we saw, even the axiom of contradiction is taken by him to be not merely the expression of a subjective necessity, a law of our way of conceiving of things ; for him it primarily had significance only in the complex of real knowledge, in which, therefore, thinking and the objects thought of are equally necessary components. Moreover, as we also saw, it is Aristotle's view that from maxims of such generality nothing can be deduced. The other view regards syllogism as expressing formally, or in respect to its typical manifestation, what is essential in the real process of knowing. Now, according to Aristotle, that process of knowing is always the complex act in which a universal is apprehended as determining the character of the particulars in and through which it is realised. Ex- plicitly stated, the act of knowledge is always syllogistic in its structure; and, therefore, whatever be the nature of the matter within which our thinking moves, whether that matter be probable or necessary, the general structure will be the same, and the probability of the premisses in dia- lectical reasoning on this very account does not affect the reasoning itself. We proceed to reason about what is merely probable on the assumption that it contains the truth. Our conclusion is drawn as necessary; but, in so far as the hypothesis does not correspond with fact, our conclusion likewise requires qualification. 188 ARISTOTLE [paet III vi. Syllogism and Induction. The distinction which Aristotle draws between the better known relatively and the better known absolutely he con- nects not only with the contrast between sense-perception and intellection or reason but also with a contrast between syllogism and induction. The contrast between these latter, expressed in the most general way, is that of method of procedure. In syllogism we proceed from that which is prior in nature, better known absolutely; in induction we proceed from what is prior relatively to us. The distinction therefore corresponds to procedure from the universal or from the particular.^ Aristotle, however, makes an attempt to exhibit the process of reaching a conclusion by induction in the syllogistic form. His attempt, while throwing some light on the terms of his own doctrine of knowledge, can hardly be said to clear up very successfully the process whereby a conclusion is reached inductively. In the syllo- gism, whether the premisses be merely accepted for the purpose of argument or be necessary truths, the conclusion is reached through a middle term which constitutes the ground or reason for the assertion there made. The middle term and the conclusion are therefore related in the general way of ground and consequence. Syllogistically, therefore, we proceed from the ground to the consequence. Now the ground is always more universal than the conse- quence, and is therefore prior in nature though less easily apprehended by us. If induction be in any sense a form of proof, it must likewise involve the relation between con- sequent and ground; but, as in it we proceed from the relatively better known, the particulars, it is evident that even in form the process must differ from that of the ordinary syllogism. What syllogistically would appear in 1 Top. i. 105 a 13. CHAP. Ill] THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 189 the premisses must in induction agjpear in the conclusion. Technically, in the inductive argument, or, as Aristotle calls it, the inductive syllogism (o e'^ i-rray(oyr]<; a-vWoynr/ioi), the conclusion attaches the major term to the middle and employs as intermediary what syllogisticaily would be the minor term.^ Aristotle indeed at various times indicates that induc- tion never succeeds in establishing a truth of the same kind as presents itself in the premisses of a scientific syllogism, and it is possible that in his account of the in- ductive syllogism we misunderstand the point at issue by introducing our own more modern interpretation of the terms 'universal' and 'particular.' The particulars which Aristotle has in view in the inductive syllogism are not individual cases from which in our modern interpretation of induction our reasoning begins. They are always species of a genus. The inductive syllogism, as he conceives it, therefore, proceeds by showing that in a variety of species there is a constant co-existence between two marks or attri- butes, and approaches therefore — on the ground of the assumption that the enumeration of species is exhaustive — a universal proposition which would imply that the two attributes thus found constantly co-existing are in the rela- tion of ground and consequent to one another. All that induction proper can achieve is the exhibition, by enumera- tion of cases, of this constancy of co-existence. It can only lead the mind to the assv/mftion or apprehension of an essential intelligible relation corresponding to what is con- stantly exhibited in conjunction as a matter of fact. Quite in accordance with this, as we shall see, is Aristotle's mode of defining the mental process or act by which prin- ciples are extracted from the enumeration of instances. Aristotle always introduces as supervening upon the in- 1 Anal. Pr. u. 68 b 15. 190 ARISTOTLE [pAET in ductive enumeration the rather undefined act of intellectual insight, reason, or intuition (i/ow?). It would therefore be strictly correct to say that, according to Aristotle, the process of apprehending an essential necessary truth by enumeration of instances is not completed even when we either know or assume that the enumeration is exhaustive. There is still required the peculiar unique act of intellectual insight, the function of which, as one may put it, is to transform mere conjunction of fact into rational connexion. vii. The Ultimate Data of Knowledge. In the demonstrative syllogism, that is, in the process of reasoning as it appears in true knowledge, the fundamental characteristic is to be found in the kind of premisses from which the start is made. All scientific knowledge, and any syllogism which is employed in demonstration, rests on premisses which are true, prior, immediate, better known in themselves, grounds of the conclusion drawn from them, and therefore peculiar or specific, that is, of the same kind as the conclusion drawn.^ It is assumed therefore that, in knowledge strictly so-called, there is a regular connexion whereby thought may proceed, in respect to each definite object of inquiry, from fundamental data, themselves indemonstrable, to conclusions in which are gradually un- folded all that belongs to the particular object by reason of its own nature. There cannot be in proof, in knowledge strictly so called, an infinite regress ; nor is it possible that proof should be circular in form.^ There must there- fore be accepted as constituting the basis of all knowledge certain indemonstrable truths, not common axioms but 1 dviyKTi rijv AiroSeiicTiK^v 4irt Toil avuircpd^naros' oBtoj yhp ^ Anal. Post. i. o. 3. CHAP. Ill] THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 191 peculiar principles, statements therefore of what is essential in the nature of the object known. The data, then, in all genuine knowledge are the exposi- tion of what constitutes the essential nature of the object known. The essential nature we have already seen to be in its own way universal. The object known, that which is the material about which demonstration turns, is not the abstract individual but the concrete individual, the manifestation in numerically distinct units of a common essence or fixed nature. All demonstration concerns itself with some kind of existent, and must therefore start from the expressed, explicitly unfolded, nature of that kind. If there is true knowledge with respect to any object in nature (and knowledge, be it remembered, implies universality and necessity in the propositions composing it), such knowledge must consist in a series of statements all of which can be shown to follow from the given essence or fixed nature of the object known. Demonstrative knowledge, science, is thus contemplated as occupying the point of view which is not nearest to us, the point of view, as we should put it, of absolute intelligence rather than that which is occu- pied by the individual observer. From that point of view, in Aristotle's system, the essence or intelligible nature, that which is expressed in the complete notion or definition of the object, is the basis, the foundation, for all reasoning. Whatever is attached to the object necessarily and uni- versally must be attached to it because, such being the essence or nature of the object, the predicates must be so-and-so. It might appear, now, that from this absolute point of view there should be, and must be, included in the complete notion of the object all that can necessarily and universally be asserted of it. This is not, however, Aristotle's con- ception of the connectedness that holds good in the world of 192 ARISTOTLE [part III the intelligible. The notion of the thing consists only of what is peculiar to the one type of object; formally, as we have seen, it is the complex of differences marking out a lowest species. Aristotle, then, conceives of a natural gradation of predicates some of which belong to the species, the unit of knowledge, by reason of its nature, but which do not constitute part of that nature. It appears to me extraordinarily difficult to maintain this point of view, and it is undoubtedly one of the perplexities in Aristotle's general view of things that the connexion between the specific individual character of the units of knowledge and more general predicates is in no way cleared up. The subject of demonstration must therefore, as known, be intelligible ; and the indemonstrable, immediate, primary data from -which demonstration starts consist merely in the statement of this intelligible essence or notion of the subject of demonstration. The attributes possessed by a subject by reason of its nature are those which follow immediately from that nature, which are, in other words, implications already contained in its essential notion. Prom this point of view it seems clear that Aristotle is approach- ing a view of knowledge which can hardly ever be evaded when the position is taken of absolute insight, — the view that knowledge consists merely in the analysis of ultimate notions. The only qualification which Aristotle supplies is contained in that contrast which he makes, but which he fails to utilise, between the points of view of absolute know- ledge and of the individual observer. Actually his theory of demonstration holds a position of unstable equilibrium between the two conceptions of knowledge, — as it presents itself to completed insight, and as it is gradually built up in the mind of the individual observer who starts with the particular, with the things of sense, not with the universal and rational. CHAP. Ill] THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 193 viii. The Immediate Object of ApprehAision. Eelatively to us, then, the particulars, the individuals, are the nearer and the better known. Such particulars are in the first place apprehended by sense-perception. Keeping in the background for the moment the inquiry as to the psychological character of this sense-perception, we may ask. What is the logical aspect of the individual thus taken to constitute relatively to us the immediate object of apprehension ? Much of the confusion in Aristotle's theory of knowledge is due to the want of distinctions which might quite well be introduced without departing from his point of view. Perhaps naturally he tends too much to take for granted that the transition from the individual immediately apprehended to the essential in . which the determining nature, or form, of the individual is contained, is simple and almost forced on us by inspection of a number of particulars. Just as he overlooks in his logical analysis the real difficulties of the inductive procedure, so more generally he takes it for granted that a collection of the isolated particulars of sense will enable us at once to become aware of the essence involved in them. Only in one direction does he indicate a sense of the difficulties which must surround such a transition. It is an important part of his general view of knowledge that what is immediately presented is in a certain way the vague, confused, unanalysed. From this point of view the immediately apprehended might indeed continue to be designated for one reason the 'individual,' but it would be distinguished in its logical character from the individual which is known in its particularity only as correlated with the essence or universal form, and which is therefore rather the final than the initial term in knowledge. It can hardly be said, however, that on the line of logical N 194 ARISTOTLE [part III treatment Aristotle successfully introduces this more fruit- ful conception of the immediate object relatively to us. We shall see later the appearance of a somewhat similar distinction in the account given of the psychological process. ix. Induction and the Universal. The transition from the particulars of sense to the appre- hension of the essence or intelligible nature is always by Aristotle designated 'induction,' and repeatedly in words he seems to say that our knowledge of these generals, universals, intelligible forms, is reached by induction; but it must be remembered that these terms have a meaning in Aristotle's system very different from the meaning they have in our modern theories of knowledge. Indeed, the necessity of interpreting them in accordance with the peculiarity of Aristotle's system is forced on us by the occurrence side by side with them, in Aristotle's treatment of knowledge, of the definite and repeated statement that induction never establishes universal propositions. Obviously, then, the description of the attainment of first truths from induction means something special in Aristotle's doctrine. We should quite misconceive the whole character of it if we put out of sight the fundamental article in Aristotle's general scheme of things, that which gives its special colouring to all his metaphysical and logical system. Aristotle means by the universals which are reached from induction the ultimate determining characters of the primary subjects of all predication. Given, as it were, the fixed types of concrete existents, then the end to which our, at first, imperfect apprehension of their features may gradually be led is equally direct immediate apprehension of these determining marks, an insight into the intelligible notions or essences. Such ultimate characters are not themselves capable of proof. They cannot be demo];istrated ; much CHAP. Ill] THEORY OF KNOWLEBGE 195 less can they be established by induction, in the logical sense of that term. The function of induction is wholly relative. The collection of instances makes it possible for intellect to become aware of its appropriate objects, the simple, immediate, primary data; and the all-important metaphysical consideration that these data, the intelligible essences, are realised only in the material of concrete fact renders necessary the collection of instances, which is the business of induction. Neither instances per se nor intelli- gible form per se, neither sense-perception per se nor intel- lect per se, would yield the knowledge of the real essential characters determining the fixed types of concrete existence. Thus then the apprehension of primary truths from induc- tion means with Aristotle that, so soon as a sufficient col- lection of empirical material has been made, it becomes possible for the function of intellect to be called into exer- cise, it becomes possible directly, immediately, intuitively, to seize upon the universal or intelligible essence. Thus Aristotle almost in the same sentence can speak of induction and of intellect as being the source of first prin- ciples, of primary data. The difficulties inherent in Aristotle's view are not finally overcome by this assignment to induction and intuition, perception and reason, of functions equally necessary in building up knowledge. It still remains a puzzle, first, in what consists the element of imperfect apprehension which is allowed to the inductive collection of particular cases, and, secondly, in what precisely consists the activity of intellect whereby intuition of first principles is reached? X. Intuition and IKscwsive Thought. Leaving this for the moment, I draw attention to a further perplexity which besets Aristotle's doctrine of knowledge. Demonstration, as we have seen, proceeds from first prin- 196 ARISTOTLE [PABT HI oiples which are themselves necessary to a conclusion which is necessary ; and in accordance with this a distinction of an ultimate kind is made between primary data and conclusions from them. The intermediate process is obviously the realm within which the logical processes of judging and inferring find their place ; and evidently the definite view that there must be first principles, that there cannot be an infinite regress of proof, nor an infinite number of middle terms between the first principles and the conclusions deducible from them — these are all not so much results established on independent foundations as explications of the fundamental view that absolute knowledge consists in apprehension of the determining intelligible character of the types of existence, of the ultimate subjects of predication. But if this be so, then it would appear as though our mode of apprehending the primary data must be quite dis- tinct from the processes in the intermediate stage of demon- stration — assuming for the moment that the distinction here implied can be maintained. What can be demonstrated of the individual type is no doubt apprehended by us through the intermediate processes of judging and reasoning, but the primary data cannot so be apprehended. So we must introduce — and Aristotle does introduce, though not very explicitly — a distinction which we may fix in language by the terms ' intuition ' and ' thought ' or ' elaboration.' ^ The primary data — not, be it remembered, merely such common axioms as the law of contradiction, but the content of the peculiar axioms, that is, the definite determining marks of the essence, — these are immediately grasped ; and with them the opposition fundamental to thought or elaboration has no place. Our attitude to them is not that of judging their truth or falsity, but that of having them or not having 1 Met. c. 10. CHAP. Ill] THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 197 them. We either possess or do not possess the primary data. Intuition, then, is not only distinct from the discursive elaborative act of thinking as a process ; it is distinct in respect of the kind of object with which it is concerned, the kind of content that is apprehended. The definition, which is the explicit statement of the content thus apprehended by intuition, is therefore only in form a judgment. Strictly speaking, there is riot in it the distinction which in dis- cursive thought appears as that between subject and predi- cate. The element corresponding to judgment in ordinary definitions lies really, in Aristotle's view, outside the defini- tion proper, and is of the nature of an assumption or postulate. We may, for example, in certain cases assume that something exists which has the defined marks summed up in our notion of it. This assumption lies outside of the definition proper. It is evident that in this Aristotle is introducing a rather doubtful distinction. In definitions strictly so called there can be no question about existence. In them abstract essence and its realisation in concrete form flow together and are indistinguishable. The moment we recognise that there may be definitions in respect to which the postulate may or may not be made that the defined object exists, we have passed from the region of intuition, of absolute knowledge, to that of relative progressive apprehension : we are occupy- ing the point of view of the finite subject who is gradually making his way towards completed insight. Thus, then, knowledge exhibits a further mysterious separ- ation. We have intuition wholly distinct from the discursive operation whereby the ultimate subjects are connected with the last predicates in which their nature is unfolded, and both again are distinguished from the less developed func- 198 ARISTOTLE [part III tions of mind based on, growing from, sense-perception. It remains to be seen whether in the detailed psychology of these processes any further light is thrown on the rather perplexing question of their relation to one another or on their combination in the intellectual life of one and the same subject. 199 CHAPTEE IV PSYCHOLOGY i. The General Nature of Soul. The psychology of Aristotle begins with a careful and elaborate determination of the notion or fundamental nature of the soul. Proceeding from a critical survey of antecedent views, mainly those of the Platonic philosophy,^ Aristotle brings to bear on the problem of determining the nature of the soul the fundamental metaphysical notions of his own system. These he combines and applies in his ordinary fashion, with due attention to empirical detail, or, at least, to such broad characteristics of empirical fact as seem to him of decisive significance in the classification of objects of nature. Thus he accepts as an empirical basis for his treatment the important distinction in the concrete realm of natural things between those that possess life and those that do not.^ With the help of this distinction he at once effects the first limitation of the notion of soul. It seems to him inappropriate to extend the scope of soul beyond the realm of living beings : it is, in fact, one main ground of his adverse criticism of the Platonic psychology that it had extended the notion of soul to the cosmos at large, and had therefore assigned to soul certain functions necessary no doubt in respect to the cosmos, but incompatible with 1 De An. i. cc. 2-5. ^ De An. ii. 412 a 13. 200 ARISTOTLE [part III that which experience shows to be involved in the opera- tions of the soul. Movement, for example, is no doubt so obvious a feature of the cosmos that, if the soul be taken as the animating principle of the whole, it must have assigned to it the function of local movement. Plato accordingly had identified the revolutions of the heavenly bodies with psychical changes, — an identification which seemed to Aristotle wholly incompatible with what was likewise assigned to soul as a function — namely, thinking.^ Soul, then, presents itself most obviously within the range of natural bodies that possess life; and it may be said to be coextensive with life. It is an obvious fact of experience that what are admittedly functions of the soul are exhibited only in conjunction with life in its simplest sense as the function of nutrition. Only the living being shows the power of perception, desire, think- ing. It was natural, then, to assume some intimate con- nection between the principle through which explanation of life is to be given and the soul. Indeed, if the functions which specially characterise the realm of living beings be enumerated, they form a kind of scale — understanding, sense-perception, movement of the body, and that kind of change which may be called internal movement, involved in the assimilation of nutriment, and in the growth and de- crease of the organic body. These characterise the various forms of living being. Taken together, they constitute a kind of empirical survey of the functions of the soul. Soul, on the other hand, is just the vital principle — the principle in virtue of which living beings perform these functions. From this empirical foundation Aristotle proceeds, with the help of his fundamental metaphysical ideas, to deter- ' [At the same time it must be kept is the cause of the uniform cosmic in mind that in Aristotle's own sys- movements.] tern vovs, which is in some sense soul. CHAP, iv] PSYCHOLOGY 201 mine more accurately the essential intelligible character — the nature — of the soul. Just as the living being must be said to exist, to have a place among concrete realities, so in some way it must be said that the soul exists, has a place in concrete reality. But what place? Concrete reality itself exhibits always a distinction — a notional or conceptual distinction, one made by thought — corresponding, no doubt, to some difference of aspect, but not to be confused with a separation into parts or an isolation of independent wholes. It is the familiar distinction between matter and form.^ The animated concrete existent is obviously a kind of com- pound — a compound, we may assume therefore, in its general character resembling that in which the constituents are matter and form. The body in this compound is matter ; the soul is form.^ But, as we have seen, this distinction of matter and form is identical with, is but an imperfect ex- pression of, the distinction between the potential and the actual.^ The body, in so far as it is the body of the ani- mated being, is necessarily organised, is a system of which the parts are subordinate to the whole.* Such an organised body has potentially life; is adapted, therefore, by its structure to the discharge of certain functions. Our dis- tinction, of course, is only in thought ; it is not actually the case that the body, although we call it an organised whole, is potentially possessed of life in its own nature. Only when the organised body is in the condition to discharge the functions for which its structure adapts it, can it be said, strictly speaking, to be living. No doubt a finer distinction must here be introduced. We are not entitled to say that the potential is potential only when its powers are in active exercise. There is conceivable and, as experience shows, real, a stage in which the potential is 1 De An. ii. 412 a 7. ' De An. ii. 412 a 21. 2 De An. ii. 412 a 16. * De An. ii. 412 a 28. 202 ARISTOTLE [pabt III capable of exercising its functions though not at the moment in full activity, just as, for example, a rational being would be said to have knowledge even though at the moment he may not actually be contemplating this or that object of knowledge.^ This finer distinction Aristotle fixes by the technical terms First and Subsequent Eealisation (TrpmrTj, Sevrepa, ivTeXexeia) of Potentiality. If the body, as organised, potentially possesses life, then life in its varied functions of nutrition, bodily movement, sense-perception, understanding, will be the active exercise, the realisation, of that potentiality. Soul taken generally, therefore, may be defined as the realisation, the actualisa- tiori^ or rather, more strictly, the first actualisation of that life which the organised body possesses in potentiality.* Thus, then, if we put it in slightly more modern fashion, the concrete subject about which all predications which concern activities of mind are made is the living being, the animated body. As a concrete subject the living being, the animated body, has always the twofold aspect. It is not a mere composite of soul and body, nor can these be really independent of one another.^ The complete fact is the life, the expression in activity of the nature of this concrete subject, and that nature may be described in either of two ways: (1) by enumerating the potentialities of the body, or (2) by enumerating the functions discharged in the course of its existence. Soul, therefore, is the intelligible essence, the form of the organised living body ; and what is said of soul in general may equally be said with respect to its separable functions. Each of them is similarly the realisa- tion, the actuality, of what som^ part, some subordinate system, of the animated body is potentially.* Sense -per- ception, for example, taken as a whole, is the actualisation 1 De An. ii. 412 a 22. * De An. ii. 412 b 6. 2 De An. u. 412 a 27. * De An. ii. 412 b 17. CHAP, iv] PSYCHOLOGY 203 of what the perceptive system is potentially. Seeing is the actualisation of what the organ of vision is potentially, and in strictness the concrete subject about which predicates relating to vision may be made is here neither the eye taken in abstraction nor the activity of seeing taken in abstraction, but the seeing eye. The functions of the soul, like soul itself, are to be re- garded in the closest relation to the body. In all of them, in some more obviously than others, the operation is one in which soul and body are equally concerned. Just as, then, we find in experience a gradation of organised bodies, so we find a gradation in the forms of psychical activity which they exhibit ; and, generally speaking, we may contemplate this gradation as ascending from what is the minimum necessary to constitute animal life, and the several forms as holding to one another the' general relation of potential and actual. Aristotle is no doubt influenced here largely by the broad empirical classification of living beings into plants, animals, men. Such classification enables him to make the first grouping of the stages of soul, a grouping not always made in uniform fashion, but of which the most common form is the following: — (1) Fundamental to life as such are the functions of nutrition and generation, necessary in order (a) to preserve the individual, and (6) to continue the species or natural kind — nutrition being the sine qua Twn} (2) Sense-perception^ characterises animal life as distinct from vegetable. With sense-perception there go as accom- paniments or necessary consequents, on the one hand, what gives rise to movement (KtVi?<7t?) — namely, feelings of pleasure and pain {fjhovi) koX Xvittj) and appetition (ppe^isi) ; 1 Be An. ii. 413 a 31. The 'soul' (jUptov). or ' part ' of soul corresponding to this ^ De An. ii. 413 b 2. i>ux^ '^^'- type of life is most simply described iiiTiidi, -rh iuavTaaia) and memory (jivrniTJ). Sense - perception, again, exhibits within its own range a gradation; and Aristotle naturally adopts here, as throughout, the teleological view. The fundamental essential sense which all animal life exhibits is touch (a(/)»j),^ and next — and equally necessary in view of the function of nutrition — taste (yeva-ii), which is a kind of touch.^ Some animal forms seem to have little more than these rudimentary functions. Others exhibit the higher processes, smell (oo-^/37?o-ts), hearing (dxcj?), vision (oi/rt?). Not all animals exhibit the consequences of sense- perception which lie at the foundation of understanding. In most of them images, the relics of sensation, may exist ; in some of them these cohere and give rise to memory {fivrififlj) and a kind of empirical knowledge {iiitreipia)? (3) In man the basis of sense-perception supports the higher functions of reminiscence {avdfivqai'i), judgment (Sofa), and reasoning ; while in man, and in man only, there appears also reason or intellect {vovsiY ii. The Sensitive Soul. Under the general title Sensitive Soul (-^vxv aladriTiKi]) Aristotle groups together a number of activities of which sense-perception is the basis and the most characteristic. It is peculiar to animal life to possess sense - perception, and concrete animals possess sense-perception in difPerent amount and in different degree. All of them possess the ^ De An. ii. 413 b 4. plied in irpSfis, as distinct from Klrna-is. ^ De An. iii, 434 b 21. Spejis is a genv^ which includes two ' Met. A, 980 a 30 ; Anal. Post. ii. main species — littSviila, the Spelts toC 99 b 36. ^5^01, manifested, in the case of the ^ Man is distinguished from the loweranimal3,inKf>'r)(ris,and ;3oiiA.i)(ris, lower animals (tA Bnpla) by ^vxh the Upeits toB ayaSov, manifested in SiavoTiTiK'/i, t6 SiavoriTiK6v, which is im- irpSJis. CHAP, iv] PSYCHOLOGY 205 fundamental sense of touch. In t]je higher animals, and in man, there is the complete apparatus of the five senses, and the perceptions of these senses Aristotle treats from a number of different points of view, some of them of no great importance. Of no importance, perhaps rather misleading, is the attempt to demonstrate that the apparatus of sense in man is exhaustive, that no qualities of the sensible are not correlated with organs or functions of sense in man.'^ In the second place, however, importance belongs to the attempt^ to regard the functions of sense from what may be called the teleological point of view — that is, to view them systematically as contributing towards the complete existence, the self-preservation and progress, of the animal life. This is undoubtedly a fruitful point of view; but perhaps it was not possible for Aristotle to work it out satisfactorily, and this for two reasons : (1) the special limitation which always attaches to his view of end or pur- pose, invariably a preconceived or predetermined end ; and (2) the very scanty supply of empirical details at his disposal. In the third place, Aristotle proceeds to deal with the senses as furnishing knowledge of objects which without them would remain unknown. Here he advances the im- portant psychological doctrine that each sense apprehends its own specific object ; and with some detail he works out an account of the specific sensible for each of the several functions of sense-perception.' The definition of these Specific Sensibles (iSia ala-Oi^Td) naturally suggests a distinction of them from what are called Common Sensibles {Koivh alcrdijTa).* The common sensibles — motion, rest, magnitude, figure, number (with ' De An. iii. 424 b 22-425 a 13. ' De An. li. oo. 7-11. 2 De An. iii. cc. 12, 13. * Be An. ii. 418 a 10. 206 AEISTOTLB [paet III which is sometimes included unity) — are said in a general way to be apprehended by all the senses, although in fact Aristotle refers for the most part only to sight and touch as alike perceptive of magnitude and figure, with which motion is included. It is difficult to determine what weight is to be assigned to his statement that, as each sense in each moment of perception apprehends its own specific sensible, it apprehends it as a unit, and that unity therefore (and therewith, no doubt, would go number) is a common sensible in the strict acceptation, as being involved in every operation of sense-perception.-' There is something perplexing in Aristotle's account of these common sensibles. Speaking of sense - perception generally,^ he distinguishes three objects, as they are com- monly called : (1) the appropriate or specific sensible, (2) the common sensible, and (3) that which is perceived 'pe.r accidens (jcarh crv/ijSe^rjKoi;), as, for example, when seeing a white object I am said to perceive the individual — son of Diares. Now, Aristotle insists that the individual object — by which I take it he means the concrete existent — is not apprehended by sense-perception in one indivis- ible moment. The concrete existence is perceived per accidens. As we should say, what is perceived by sense suggests the complex characterising the concrete object. As opposed to this third acceptation of the perceived, the common sensibles are said to be perceived, but not per accidens. 'Accident,' unfortunately, is a term which plays a most ambiguous part in Aristotle, and it is therefore not at all surprising to find him in another connexion expressly saying that the common sensibles are perceived per accidens.^ ' Se An. iii. 426 a 20. either per se or per accidens, a Koa/hv ^ De An. ii. 418 a 6. aius • Tpihron Safftrfp fv atrdffri rp ^iffsi iffri rt rh yd.p Ttva Koi t6 ^as iroiei Tcfc huvafi^t fiev S\7] ^KiiffT^ yivfi (toCto S^ % iriivTa Spra xp^^/^ftTo ivepyeitf \piltfjLaTa. Svvdiui fKeiva), erepov Se rh bXtiov Kal ^ De An, iii. 430 a 14. Of. voiriTiK6v, Tif TTote'iv ndvTa, oTov r/ Flato'a parallel between the act of Texvn Tp6s tJji/ S\iiv TeiroyBcv, ivdy- vision and the act of intellection : the KTj Kal iv Tp ^vxv inripxttv ravras Tos analogy of eye, visible objects, and iiaipopis. Kol fariv d fifv toiovto; the sun, to vois, vooi/ieva, and the rovs Tip vivra ylveaBat, & Se t^ ttAvra ISia rov iyaiov. Rep. vi. 508 f . CHAP, iv] PSYCHOLOGY 221 and unmixed, and in no way subject to change {a7ra6rj(;) ; its very essence is pure activity. . . . When it is separated, it is nothing but what it essentially is, and this alone is immortal and eternal. But we do not remember because this is not subject to impressions (awa^e?), but the i/ov? that is subject to impressions (Tra^ijrt^o?) is perishable."^ No5?, then, is in some way to be regarded as eternal and immortal ; and the reason is not far to seek. What Aristotle has in view is the apprehension of the intelligible essences (i/oijra), which are eternal and immortal. In fact, what he seems to be saying is that the apprehension of truth presupposes, as connected with the human soul, an activity cognate to truth — with the same freedom, therefore, from temporal conditions, and hence to be described as a power which in its own nature is free from corporeal conditions, which is immortal and eternal. Evidently there is something yet to be done in the way of explaining in what the connexion between soul and this higher power consists. I understand the following chapters ^ as on the whole the attempt made by Aristotle to define this connexion, at least on one of its sides. Intellect (i/ou?) is definable only in correlation with the intelligible (to vorjrov). It is the apprehension of the intelligible, and thereby gives to the merely potential ex- istence of the intelligible, in matter whether corporeal or incorporeal, a higher form, an actualisation. But if this be so, then in accordance with Aristotle's whole theory of knowledge the act or operation of i/o5? is esstentially the simple apprehension of the abstract essence. The votjtov may from one point of view present itself as a complex, ' De An. iii. 430 a 17-25. koX ou fivTuioveio/iev S4, 8ti tovto fniv oJtos S vovi x"/"""''^* ""' inraBi)s /col oirafle's, i ik ira9r|Tiicis vovs (pOaprds, aniyiis, rp ovaiif &» ivfpycta. . . . Koi Skew Toirov ovBev i/ot?. XUfurBeU S' iini fiovov -rovff iirep itrrt, * De An. iii. cc. 6, 7, 8. Kod Tovro n6vQV 6,6iivaroy Kal cCtStoy. 222 AKISTOTLB [pabt III but just in so far as it constitutes the essential nature of one type of existence it is a unit ; and the action of vov<; can only be represented as the simple direct grasping of this intelligible unit. So conceived, the action of i/ov? resembles that of simple sense - perception, — that is, the action of sense when occupied with the proper or specific sensibles. In both the act of apprehension is direct, simple : in both there is no question of truth or falsity; what is given is always true. Thus our actual knowledge has at its lowest and at its highest extremities the same peculiar characteristic form, the direct immediate grasping of the truth. But this same form is discernible even in those inter- mediate stages which constitute the discursive work of understanding. There both on the theoretical and on the practical side we discover that the business of understand- ing, expressed on the one hand in affirmations and nega- tions, on the other hand in striving towards or aversion from, always involves the reduction of a multiplicity to unity. Every judgment, whatever complexity it involves, whether of subject and predicate merely or of subject and predicate with qualifications of time or the like, involves a unity of conception — a unity even when the judgment is negative. In such uniting conceptions is throughout dis- played the work of reason. It is reason which gives the unity apparent throughout all the discursive operations of understanding, both theoretical and practical. It cannot escape attention that, in dealing with sense- perception and even with imagination, Aristotle seemed to assign the same function of uniting, which is here ascribed to reason, to the common central sense j and it is remarkable that here, in dealing with the work of reason, he introduces again ^ the conception of the central sensibil- ^ Ve An. iii. 431 a 20. OHAP. iv] PSYCHOLOGY 223 ity in such a manner as would almost lead us to conclude that he was desirous of connecting the fundamental activity of vovi with that of the central sensibility as the higher form is connected with the lower. The central sensibility discharges functions which are preparatory to the higher activity of reason ; and, in particular, such preparatory work is achieved by the combination — retention together, as we might put it — of images, wherein vov<; or reason is able to see the intelligible form or abstract essence. Even where the objects are of a very abstract kind, such as the mathematical, reason apprehends the essence with the help of ^avrdafiara. The presence of these ipavrda-- fiara is necessary in order to enable the mind to apprehend the distinction between the essential fgrm and the matter in which it is embodied. So far as the functions of vov'; in the soul are concerned, I have tried to follow out a line which seems to be indicated in Aristotle's treatment, and which enables us to a certain extent to connect the special functions of vov<; with those of the subordinate powers of the soul. Taking knowledge in the widest sense as equivalent to any apprehension, we saw that the extremes, immediate sense on the one hand and the direct insight or intuition of vovi on the other, had one point of resemblance — simplicity. Neither presented that complex, which may be named either synthesis or analysis, and which is exhibited most clearly in the judg- ment. Nevertheless throughout all this intermediate stage, with its gradations, there was also clearly to be discerned a certain operation or series of operations of which the general character may be said to be unifying. In the region of sense-perception a certain approach to unification is given in the central function of sensibility as such. In the higher processes — whether theoretical, as in opining, believing. 224 ARISTOTLE [pabt ill judging, inferring ; or practical, as in desiring, deliberating, resolving — there is also a unification, of which the material basis is given in the ^avrda/MiTa, the relics of sense-per- ception, and in which there is traceable, though not sharply distinguished by Aristotle, an advance from a uniting which hardly goes beyond the scope of central sensibility up to a range in which the unity is evidently due to the grasping, the apprehension, of intelligible forms. With what consistency it is possible for Aristotle to work out this conception of vov^ as that which finally gives unity to our cognitive and practical experience, it is hard to de- termine. Probably much of the difficulty we experience depends on our ignorance as to the limits within which Aristotle thought right to confine participation in i/ov?. Is it, for example, only in the human race that participation in vov xal ehai fxao-Tos toBto. [It is ^ Gen. An. ii. 736 b 28. vovs that Aristotle refers to here ^ Nic. Eth. X. 1177 b 34. el yap metaphorically as ' small in bulk.'] CHAP, iv] PSYCHOLOGY 231 body, is yet invariably connected with them, and seems to require conjunction with them for the exercise of its own activity. Its functions exhibit throughout features which reflect its original peculiarity of character. Its energy is simple, uninterrupted, without contrary ; its mode of appre- hension does not involve or require that synthesis and analysis which is characteristic of the work • of under- standing. Thus it must be said that, though the development of vovf is gradual, it yet, as part of the complete whole, the human subject, is independent of the body ; and when it has reached its final stage of development exhibits most clearly of all in its self-apprehension freedom from the conditions of the body. According to this view, then, vovi; in man would be by no means identified with the primal vovv or absolute reason, although in its nature it is identical therewith : its concrete mode of existence is wholly distinct from that of the primal vov'i ; and certainly we should not interpret the development of vou? as though it were an illumination of the finite soul by some divine power. It is quite true that the view taken cannot get over the fundamental difficulty that i»ou? is still in an obscure incomprehensible way severed from the soul, that there is a transition of a quite absolute kind ; but I do not regard the difficulty which is ordinarily expressed, of accommodating the position of vovf with the unity of the subject, as insuperable. Aristotle did not define the unity of the subject from the point of view that we occupy ; and for him the concrete whole, the animated being, which is the vehicle of vov'i, constituted, I think, the individual subject. 232 CHAPTER V REASON AS THE FACULTY OF FIRST PRINCIPLES Now? is correlated with the apxal or first principles; and these, as we have seen, stand in a peculiar relation to the discursive processes of demonstration or opinion : they are not themselves matters of demonstration : they stand at the head of the demonstrative process, are presupposed there. Moreover, in a general way it has been indicated that even these immediate principles, the pure intelligible essences, which find expression in complete definitions, are always apprehended in conjunction with the material setting of sense-perceptions or ^avrda-fiaTa. Is it possible to make somewhat clearer the way in which the apprehension of such principles comes about in the soul? The Posterior Analytics closes with a chapter^ in which this very problem is formally propounded and discussed. The answer given is one of the many in which, dealing with the same kind of question, Aristotle seems to lay such em- phasis on the empirical factor as to give some justification to those who have always claimed him as the first exponent of a completely empirical theory of knowledge. " Now we have already seen that it is impossible to have demonstration except by already knowing the primary, im- ^ Post. Anal. ii. c. 19. OHAP. v] THE FACULTY OF FIRST PRINCIPLES 233 mediate, principles. Two difficulties may be raised with respect to the apprehension of these immediate principles : (1) as to whether it is the same in kind with demonstration or not, — that is, whether we have scientific knowledge (iiria-TTjfiT]) in both cases or have in the one case ivi- a-T7]/nj, in the other an apprehension of a different kind; and, again, (2) as to whether the faculty [of apprehending the principles], not being innate, comes about in us, or, being innate and possessed from the first, is latent. "There is something absurd in supposing that we from the first possess these apprehensions; for it would follow from that, that while we actually possessed a knowledge more adequate than demonstration itself, we remained in ignorance of it. On the other hand, if we attain to such apprehension, not having had it from the outset, how is it possible that we can have and acquire knowledge except from some knowledge which precedes? For this, as has been already said in respect to demonstration, involves an impossibility. Obviously, then, it is neither the case that we possess these apprehensions, nor do they come about in us as wholly devoid of some kind of apprehension. Neces- sarily, then, we must possess some capacity (Svva/ij?), even though that be not of such a kind as to transcend the others in completeness and accuracy.^ Now such a capacity seems to be possessed by all animated beings; for they aU have by nature a certain discriminative capacity which is called sense-perception. But in some living creatures possessing sense-perception there comes about a certain survival of the percepts ; in others this does not happen. "When it does not happen — whether in respect to perception in general or to a certain set of perceptions — then in such cases no know- ledge is attained beyond the immediate act of sense-perceiv- 1 By ' the others ' Aristotle means ciples and demonstration, the immediate apprehension of prin- 234 AKISTOTLE [PART m ing (efft) TOW alcrOdvea-dai). In others, through their sense- perceptions there comes about a certain unity ^ in the soul. When many such sense - perceptions are given, a certain difference manifests itself in such a way that in some, from the survival of such percepts, there arises \0709, in others, not. [The crux is just here.] From perception, then, arises memory, as we say, from repeated remembrance of the same thing, experience (ijjmeipia). . . . From experience or from a whole universal that has settled in the soul, from the One which is beside the Many, the point of identity in all the par- ticulars, there arises the principle of art or science {eiria-Trifmj), — art when it refers to the changeable, science when it refers to the unchangeable. [I give up the attempt completely to understand this.] Thus, then, the acts of apprehending first principles do not e^ist in us completely determined and separate from all else, nor are they generated from other apprehensions, which themselves contain more insight than they do, but from sense-perception. For just as in a battle when a rout has occurred, first one makes a stand and then another until a certain order is re-established, so the soul has a faculty which enables it to undergo a somewhat similar experience. What has been said before, but not distinctly enough, must here be repeated. For when one of the in- dividuals stands, then in the soul there comes about, first, a universal (for the act of sense-perception is directed to the individual, but sense-perception is of the universal : it is, for example, of man, not of the man Callias). Next, in these a stand is made until the indivisibles and the universals are reached, as for example, from animal of such-and-such a kind up to animal in general, and so on in like manner. Evidently, then, the ultimates must be made known to us by induction, for in this way perception implants the uni- versal. Now, in regard to the faculties of the understanding ^ Reading eV ti. CHAP, v] THE FACULTY OF FIRST PRINCIPLES 235 by which we apprehend truth, some of these are always true ; in others, as opinion and reasoning, there may be falsehood. Science and reason {eiriaTrni-q and j/ou?) are always true, and no kind of apprehension is more perfect than science except reason. Again, the principles from which demonstration proceeds are always the better known, and all scientific knowledge involves reference to a ground or reason. Hence it is evident that there cannot be scien- tific knowledge of first principles ; and since nothing is more true than scientific knowledge except reason, reason must be our mode of apprehending first principles ; and also because there cannot be scientific knowledge as the basis of scientific knowledge itself, since it is evident that the principle of demonstration is not itself demonstration. Since, then, over and above scientific knowledge, we have no other kind of apprehension which is unfailingly true save reason, reason is the principle of scientific knowledge." I imagine that as much consistency as can be brought into Aristotle's theory of knowledge will result, if we view it as we now are able to do, in relation to the general pos- itions of his system. Among these general positions there is one characteristic of the Aristotelian, and indeed of Greek philosophy in general, which has so entirely lost significance for us that we are apt to put it out of sight in interpreting special portions of Aristotle's work. I mean the doctrine of the eternity of the world of generation. By this eternity Aristotle meant, not merely that the generated, the change- able, is an ultimate and finally inexplicable component of the world of existence, but also, first, that the typical forms, which define as far as is possible the character of the world of generation, are eternal; and secondly, that the actual process whereby development or change within the world of generation comes about is always an efiQcient 236 ARISTOTLE [pabt III causation on the part of a definite individual — the cause of change is always an individual in full activity, fully real. Thus, for example, nothing could be farther from Aristotle's view of the world of generation than any thought of the gradual evolution of the human species from a lower animal type : the race of man is as eternal as the world of genera- tion; the development of any one man has always as its initiating circumstance some action on the part of an already fully developed human being. So in all other cases. It must therefore be carefully borne in mind that Aristotle's phrases ' coming to be ' and the like, whether in respect to nature or to the soul, are to be interpreted with reference to this permanence of the types of existence, of the causes of change, and of the series of changes they originate. Aristotle's view of development, then, is that it naturally proceeds from the highest to the lowest. He has no con- ception corresponding to the modern view bf Evolution. The representation of the world of generation from this point of view naturally suggests the relation of the forms in which its characters are defined to the thinking power. Knowledge has for its correlate such fixed forms, and is perfect in so far as they are completely known and in so far as they are separated from the material contingent factor always associated with them in the world of generation. But the forms neither exist nor can be known except as realised in individuals ; each type of existence exhibits an indefinite number of individuals in respect to whom it has to be said, first, that each of them is contingent, relatively at least ; and secondly, that each of them passes through a series of changes forming the indispensable process towards its realisation of what is essential to it. Such process is longer or shorter, more or less varied, according to the rank of the existence in the scale of being : in man, for example, the process is the longest and most varied; not merely his physical but also CHAP, v] THE FACULTY OP FIRST PRINCIPLES 237 his intellectual and practical development involve changes more numerous, more -difficult to apprehend, than in the case of any other existence. The intelligible forms are then always presented in a multiplicity of concrete individual cases vyith varying cir- cumstances attaching to them, and with a variable history of the changes of each individual. Our knowledge, then, of any one type of existence must contain (1) the apprehension of the form, the intelligible essence ; (2) the apprehension of the relations between that intelligible essence and what necessarily follows therefrom in the circumstances of each, concrete individual ; arid (3) the apprehension of the variable contingent incidents which accompany each individual, whether as it stands or throughout its development. From the point of view of the developing individual man, it is certainly not only possible but necessary to say that he only by degrees attains to a knowledge, an insight, into the intelligible essences of concrete things : for a human being is a part of nature, and can apprehend only in so far as his own capacities enable him, and must therefore in his apprehension be limited, on the one hand by those ontological conditions, the admixture of form and matter, of the intelligible and the contingent, and on the other hand by whatsoever conditions depend upon the structure of his own nature. Say for the moment that it is by means of the soul that man knows ; then his knowledge will be conditioned by the structure of the soul as well as by the ontological conditions of existence as such — meaning by ' existence ' the world of generation. Thus the individual man is not only compelled in his thinking to clothe the intelligible essence with material accompaniments ; but^ by reason of the structure of his soul, he can only apprehend this intelligible essence with the help of the concrete imagery of imagination and sense-perception. Thus, even though we can trace the development of know- 238 ARISTOTLE [paet III ledge in man from sense to reason, laying stress on the confused relative character of the first data in mind, it is to be remembered that according to Aristotle there is no evolution of reason from sense. The whole scheme already pre-exists ; and what happens is but the gradual attainment, on the part of the contingent individual, to what is already predetermined for him in consequence of his form, or in- telligible essence, or nature. That Aristotle should regard the apprehension of the in- telligible forms as a process of thought, and thereby repeat in his own way the Platonic view, is not surprising. The difference in the long-run between the Platonic and the Aristotelian view does not concern this ultimate generality. What Aristotle objects to in the Platonic system is the want of mediation, — of complete, detailed, systematic working out. In the Platonic view the world of generation is just put alongside of the Ideas, and the general reference to the Ideas is taken to be sufficient explanation of the world of genera- tion. Aristotle, for his part, emphasising the eternity of the world of generation, desires to see worked out in detail the structure of that world, and declines therefore to regard it as a sufficient explanation to say that there the Ideas are manifested. At ,the same time he perhaps deviates from the Platonic conception in another point. The apprehension of the in- telligible essences is injmediate, each stands by itself; mediation, synthesis, finds a place only in the derivative work of demonstration or reasoning from the first principles. Accordingly, from the point of view of the human spirit, one must say that, according to Aristotle, there is not possible one ultimate comprehensive insight or knowledge which will explain the whole: indeed, from any such position his strenuous adherence to the eternity of the world of genera- tion would have debarred him. That is to say, Aristotle CHAP, v] THE FACULTY OF FIRST PRINCIPLES 239 accepts difference as ultimate : there js not on his side any effort to deduce the element of difference. (This is at the basis of his criticism of Platonism.) Consequently there is left for Aristotle in the description of his ultimate cause only a series of negatives ; for the terms by which he ex- presses the action, the life, the mode of existence, of this ultimate cause, however positive they may appear, are negative in fact. It is simple, unmoved, unvarying energy, pure activity, single, not even through consciousness of itself having the element of plurality — all predicates, as one can readily see, which are but negations of the characters of the manifold world of generation. From this survey it would seem impossible to accept the interpretation of reason, particularly the active reason, as being the divine nature — an interpretation which was first introduced by Alexander of Aphrodisias. According to him, the passive intellect, the vow ^uo-t/eo?, the material or natural intellect — in itself a mere potentiality — was brought into activity by the action upon it of the divine ; and the intellect developed into what he called the vov Met. A 1075 a 14. ^ Met. A 1072 b 3. Q 242 ARISTOTLE [part ill generation with any higher conception from which they should be, so to speak, deduced. Indeed, in the case of Aristotle, the principle , to which he adheres of the eter- nity of the whole system would be hard to reconcile with such deduction. Such being the metaphysical conception, Aristotle's special problem must be regarded as this: — In what way is it possible that in the case of man, one of the types of existence in the world of generation, there should be knowledge of the constant and universal elements and of their systematic interconnexion ? Such knowledge, as we have seen, he will allow to man only ; and even in the ease of man it is a kind of know- ledge different from that which he obtains by means of the faculties which he has in common with the other animals. The universal which he has to apprehend may be preceded in order of time by something in some respects resembling it, but insight into it as constituting the ground or reason, the final explanation, of the variable and transitory — that demands an activity different in kind from the lower faculties. Thus, for example, sense-perception undoubtedly in Aristotle's view gives us something resembling the uni- versal.^ In like manner the processes of retention and imagination may give added definiteness to this first uni- versal of sense, may give us apprehension of the individual with qualities; but we do not thereby reach the peculiar apprehension of the universal as the ground of, as that which determines, the properties of the individuals in which it is found. Aristotle, then, seems to demand a kind of mental action which is unique, which in its own nature therefore cannot be explained by assimilating it to, still less by deriving it ^ This is very much what Lotze Lotze says about oonoepta in hia calls the primary universal, the uni- Logic, B. i. c. 1. versal of sense. Cf. generally what OHAP. vi] FINAL CRITICISM 243 from, the lower faculties of the soi^. Yet, on the other hand, two things have to be borne in mind : (1) that this universal ground, cause, or principle is only a ground, cause, or principle, in reference to the varied individuals, the multiplicity of contingent fact ; the forms, as he says, do not exist per se, they exist only in matter : and (2) that it is equally true in respect to knowledge in man that apprehen- sion of the form is possible only in and with the concrete representations of the material individuals. Thus in one way reason may be said to be dependent on the lower faculties, and therefore, as Aristotle puts it, reason is in the soul or connected with the soul,^ and on the other hand the peculiarity of its mode of exercise is such as to compel us to say that in its own nature it is quite unlike the lower faculties, and that it does not, like them, seem to be con- ditioned by or dependent on any state of the body. This difference may be illustrated by the consideration that in the exercise of sense-perception there is discrimination, and that this discrimination involves something which we must call a unity. In sense-perception and imagination such central func- tion is discharged by, and its discharge is dependent on, the central organ. In the case of intellectual action the chief fact is not so much discrimination. In it there is not even the need of unification which is exhibited in judgments ; the peculiarity of the apprehension is that it is the apprehension of an indivisible ultimate term.^ There is no distinction of true and false. Such absolute unity, such appropriation of the indivisible, argues, Aristotle seems to say, a total inde- pendence of bodily conditions. Moreover, these indivisibles, the ultimate terms, the pure essences, form themselves in thought a series or whole, which Aristotle says has unity like that of the series of numbers — a unity which is wholly independent of space or time, an interconnected, systematic ' [But see above, p. 219, note 1.] ^ De An. iii. 407 a 8. 244 AEISTOTLE [pART ill whole, as we should say. This exercise of thought, unique in its own way, is dependent for its occurrence , .though not for its miture, on the conditions of the life of the soul. Once it has been realised, or actualised, in man, then it is indeed unnecessary that it should be always in exercise : the man possesses reason and may be said to have it potentially — not merely in the way in which we say an intelligent being has intelligence potentially, but in the sense in which we say that a man who has acquired knowledge which is not at present before his mind has that knowledge potentially.^ When intellect has been called into exercise, when it has been realised, then, and indeed in and through this realisa- tion, intellect becomes capable of knowing itself.^ Appre- hension of these intelligible forms is at the same time the knowledge of them as apprehended or grasped by thought. Near the end of the Ethics Aristotle suddenly turns to the contemplation of the highest form of wellbeing or happiness (evSai/iovia). The general definition * from which he starts in the Ethics — that weUbeing is the conscious life {ivipyeia) in which is realised the characteristic excellence (olKeia aperrj) of man — is followed by a detailed treatment of the practical life and the so-called moral excellences or virtues (rjOuKoX dperaC). A rather detached isolated treatment is given of the intellectual excellences (SiavorjriKal aperaC) in the sixth book, but on the whole the bulk of the treatment is devoted to the consideration of the realisation of the good in human conduct. Now suddenly, in the tenth book,* the problem is resumed from a more abstract point of view. Eeferring to the general definition, Aristotle proceeds to point out that, if that defini- ^ Potential intellect {vovs ttaiit- ^ Be An. iii. 429 b 5. riK6s) is not to be identified with the ^ Nic. Eth. i. 1098 a 16. sum of the lower powers, as it is by * Nic. Eth. x. o. 7. Zeller and Trendelenburg. CHAP. Vl] FINAL CRITICISM 245 tion hold good, then the absolutely highest happiness and welfare of man must lie in the realisation of what is highest and best in him. What, then, is this highest and best in him ? It is vovaTdra noted that alBiip, iriieSiia, though in /iiv oZv eTvai rb irup, % i)) alBipa a sense fire, is distinguished from KoKiiaBai. (R.P. 504.) It is to he ordinary fire (irSp Srexvoi'), which is 270 THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY [part IV law of its own nature constantly undergoes changes, and is transformed or converted into the various elements. The law of its nature, and therewith the ground of explanation for its changes, the Stoics found in the conception of tension (toi/o?) and degrees of tension. It is by a relaxation of its tension that from the original fiery vapour there proceed in due order the various elements, and it is by the necessarily assumed reverse process of increasing concentration of tension that the world's history is reversed in order and the original state restored.^ In the transformation which the original fiery vapour undergoes we can trace a certain correspondence between the Stoic view of varying degrees of tension and the Aristotelian conception of a graduated scale of existence; and the Stoics borrow terms of the Aristotelian philosophy to indicate the more important grades of tension. Each definite thing is properly constituted when in it are com- bined the proper degrees of expansion and contraction — r the two aspects of tension.* Each thing existed in so far as it was duly held together. For each thing, then, there might be stated a kind of proportion or ratio which expressed its nature. For this the Stoics adopted the multivocal term \070s.* The \6yoi, ratios or reasons, the intelligible essences of things, were evidently all con- tained in the original elementary formation of existence, — were determined by it, not as by an external force, but as contained there as parts of the whole. From this point of view the Stoics called them seminal reasons (Koyoi a contrary and therefore capable of Each thing may be represented as destroying, as irvp Texviic6v. an equilibrium of forces at a point. 1 For details, see Pearson, Fr. of The Greeks, however, never had any Cleanthes, 24, and commentary. conception of a mechanics of the ^ Cf. Kant's view that matter can physical universe, be conceived only as the subject of ' This hunt for ambiguous words an attractive and a repulsive force, was a joy to the Stoics. CHAP. Il] PHYSICS 271 (TirepiiaTiKoi)} Each grade of existence had its corre- sponding type of Tovo?, its appropriate \6<^ds:^ Thus they called that lowest degree of tension whereby solid bodies are just held together by the Aristotelian term e^t? (state or habit). A higher grade of tension is exhibited in the combination of heterogeneous parts in the unity of organic (vegetable) life, and this is expressed by the Aristotelian term ^iJcrt? (nature). A still higher degree is exhibited in animal life, and this the Stoics called ■^vx^i (soul). And the highest degree, which appears in man only, is called vovi (reason).^ The Stoics attempted further to work out their picture of the formation of the cosmos by defining the way in which these currents of fiery vapour combine in individual bodies. According to them, it was requisite that such combination should be more than juxtaposition, while at the same time they could not accept as equivalent the Aristotelian notion of mixing, seeing that there the com- ponents, by their perfect fusing, were understood to lose their independent qualities. It was necessary for them then to insist that the commingling was perfect, consti- tuted one individual object, while nevertheless the currents mingling maintained their individuality. This was Kpaaii ^ Ps. - Plut, Plac. i. 7, 33. oi ' See Zeller, Stoics, Epicwrea-ns, cmd SraiiKol voepbv deiv dtrotpaivovrai irvp Sceptics, 137. The first kind of com- Tfxvtichv iStf PaSt^ov iirl yiveaiv K6a im- potem nisi sapientem esse neminem. posuit. Cum autetn laevam manum (Pearson, Fr. of Zeno, 33.) adverterat et ilium pugnum arte I' ^r. CHAP. Ill] THEOEY OF KNOWLEDGE 283 bution to the whole process of having a presentation. At the same time, it must be allowed that the Stoics use this term a-vyKarddea-K with a great variety of references ; and in {(articular it becomes equivalent in them to the accept- ance as true of some judgnjent propounded or contemplated. Perhaps here it might be possible to establish some kind of genetic connexion. In the same way, in regard to a corre- sponding modern problem, one may think that there is a most intimate relation — a relation of dependence — between the objectivity which present's itself first at the lower stage of perception, and the highly abstract conception of objective order which appears as implied in our developed judgments. To return now for a moment to the <}>avracrl,ai, the presen- tations. Cicero's passage gives no indication of any variation in the sources from which presentations may come. It is evident that the Stoics took the term (pavraa-ia in the wide acceptation in which 'presentation' has been employed in modern psychology, and included thereunder all contents of consciousness. Of these no doubt sense - perceptions were the most important, and they perhaps lent themselves the most readily to explanation by the metaphor 'impres- sion.' But there were others. The Stoics allowed of pre- sentations that had no real counterparts, not only for the moment, but from the nature of what was represented. They allowed of presentations of moral qualities and of the divine, both of which, though corporeal, yet did not fall within the direct sphere of sense-perception, — for example, the judgment ' this is good ' or ' is bad.' Such presentations were said by the Stoics to be formed by the understanding.^ Evidently in their case, as in the case of sense-presentations, the presentation itself is no guarantee for the existence of the corresponding reality. The senses may deceive us. (This the Epicureans denied.) 1 Ps.-Plut. Plao. iv. 11, 1. (R.P. 485.) 284 THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY [paBT IV The Stoics perhaps originally contented themselves with maintaining that, so far at least as sense-presentations were concerned, there must be points of difference sufficient to distinguish a true from a false presentation. Doubtless in support of this they advanced their general proposition that in the universe there are no two things absolutely identical. There are always differences, which it is therefore possible to apprehend. If this were the first position taken by the Stoics, it becomes intelligible how they should lay the greater stress on what may be called the internal characters of the true presentation. It is by its own light that the true presenta- tion demonstrates its truth. And thus the presentation possessed of such internal clearness and distinctness might have been regarded by them as one that constrained assent. Still, against this there has to be put the doubt as to whether by the expression 'constrained assent' we have correctly signified what is called by Cicero here comprehensio (/BaraXTji/rts), and indicated by the figure of the clenched fist. It would almost seem as though there were involved that reference from the presentation to the thing of which it is the symbol, whereby we have knowledge of the thing. The state of mind would be that in which we assert without hesitation that there does exist, and must exist, an object corresponding to the presentation in consciousness. The consciousness, the intellectual reference to the outer world, which is distinguished from the presentation, seems to be involved in the idea of comprehensio. The total state of mind is that in which the presentation plays its appropriate part as an instrument of knowledge. It is quite in accordance with this interpretation that we should find the Stoics later admitting the need for going beyond the internal characters of the presentation and con- sidering what may be called the external relations ; for ex- IHAP. Ill] THEORY OP KNOWLEDGE 285 )erience shows that it is very possi^e to be deceived even n regard to presentations that seem clear and distinct. Accordingly, all such presentations have to be tested in iccordance with such rules of evidence as can be deduced rom the general conception of science. Here again, in the sase of this comprehensio, the Stoics leave us in the dark as 10 what is the subjective contribution. It is doubtless some orm of assent or judgment — perhaps a judgment that is, so 10 speak, expressed with a special degree of force. Indeed, iheir whole manner of conceiving this problem brings them lear to the modern representation of the process as consist- ng in a combination, an adaptation, of outer impression to nner belief. 'Belief is just the term we want as an equivalent to (Phat the Stoics called avyKaTddea-ii, and with its help we ;an do justice, I think, to both sides of the Stoic doctrine. For the Stoics desire to do two things: first, to explain )bjective knowledge from the characteristics of the present- ition ; and secondly, to allow a share to the reaction of the ndividual soul on the change produced in it by the present- ition. Were the whole weight placed upon the external !onditions, the arguments of the Sceptics would be irre- sistible. But the external characters are not altogether sufficient. On the other hand, the whole weight must not je placed on the internal, for that would place human ihinking out of its relation to the system of things. The Stoics do their best to keep both sides together. The sxternal characters are those from which we start. They ire, with due correction, those to which we return. The lorrection which is essential they receive by the inner processes of thinking. What they meant, then, by Belief as we may call it) is not a purely blind emotional con- lition, but a state more or less intellectual, capable of inally being made intellectual in the highest degree. 286 THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY [PAET IV These inner processes that have been referred to are symbolised, in the passage quoted from Cicero, by the figure of the one hand laid upon and compressing the closed fist. This is called iiria-rrj/Mr} (science) ; and here the Stoic teach- ing is more than usually full of apparent contradictions. There can be no doubt that the Stoics expressed themselves at times in such a manner as to imply a doctrine very much like that of innate ideas. On the other hand, at times they indulge in the crudest empiricism. The truth is that their position enables them to combine both. The human soul and its rational part has a structure or nature of its own — thatia-ts_§ay, expressive of its place in the universe ; and there are a variety of ways in which that implicit nature may become explicit. The preconceptions or common notions, which the Stoics undoubtedly allow to the human mind, might be explained by them in either of the two ways : either as results to which all who develop normally arrive at definite stages, or as expressions of the common nature of all called forth by special occasions. The Stoics did not regard these two ways as in complete opposi- tion. Eather their systematic point of view compelled them to identify them. There is one part of the Stoic doctrine of knowledge that does not find a place in this treatment of the criterion of truth. The Stoics, as we saw, regarded everything real as corporeal. But they allowed that there were certain things incorporeal and therefore unreal,^ and yet not absolutely to be excluded from the realm of existence. In the first place, it followed from the comprehensive picture they entertained of the totality of physical existence that it was one and limited ; the world of real existence had therefore to be con- ceived as having beyond its limits the void, regarded no ' Sext. Emp. Math. x. 218. rav //.ouyrai, &s \fKrlii' Kai xevhv xal T6irov Si itruiidTav riaaapa eVSi) KarapiB- Kcd xp^^ov. (B.P. 496 b.) 3HAP. Ill] THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 287 ioubt after the fashion of void space (id Kevov)} The void had to be admitted as in some way existing, but it lay outside the cosmos in which there was no void, and was there- fore incorporeal. Likewise they regarded as incorporeal, md yet as somehow requiring recognition in the scheme of bhings, place and time, local and temporal position, and — 3 most interesting of all — what they called ' the uttered ' (ra KeKTo, or TO XeKrov).^ If we seek an equivalent for this jonception in modern language, we shall only find it by the help of the distinctions which one draws in logic and psychology between (1) the verbal act of representing an idea {arjfialvov, ^mvrj), (2) the objective facts to which this representation refers (rvyx^dvov), and (3) the content of the representation itself ({r7jfiaiv6/j,€vov, Xsktov). Or take, for jxample, as the Stoics did, a word. We distinguish there 1) the particular sound ; (2) the object referred to, John as le exists for himself ; and (3) the signification or meaning, vhat is said in or by the word. It is this third element vhich is equivalent to ro Xsktov. It is not the word ; it is lot the thing; it is something between, tied up with the )ther two factors but not identical with either.^ The Stoics with a few exceptions) had to say that it existed. It is a loctrine which, carelessly stated, can easily lead to the loctrine of representative ideas. A presentation is cor- )oreal ; the things apprehended thereby are corporeal ; the ^ Diog. Laert. vii. 140. (R.P. 496.) Sxrirep airhs 6 Alav. Toirav Si Sio ^ Sext.Emp.JlfaiA.Tm.ll. oioTrAT^i /tej» ehai trdfMra, xaBdvfp t^v (paviiv Toas rpla (pi/jiivoi crvCvyeTv o\A))A.(»s, Kal rb rvyx'ii'ov, ev 5e diriiyttOToy, Sir. 6 re v6^). Some of the Stoics tended 'ollow the Cynic line of according moral value only to the er disposition, and of regarding the outer act as in itself ifferent. All other actions were vicious — a strenuousness listinction which had to be mitigated by the re-admission lome KaOriKovTa as ijAffat wpd^ei^. Looking to the end or ice of the good, the absolute distinction between the one feet good and all else as evil had to be mitigated by 292 THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY [PART IV admitting the wide class of dSid^opa, indifferent actions, which were subdivided into the relatively preferable (wporiy- fieva) and the relatively objectionable {diroirpoTiy/ieva). It is part of the Stoic tendency to unity of principle that just as they removed the Aristotelian distinction between reason and the lower functions of the soul, so with much exaggeration they endeavoured to hold fast to the unity of virtue. From the exaggerated statement that all virtues are one, they drew the still more exasperating conclusion that he who has one virtue has all, so that he who is without one is absolutely vicious. But their doctrine of the unity of virtue, more sanely considered, must be interpreted just as we interpret the unity of the soul — that is, as compatible with differences, nay, even as requiring differences in order that the unity may exist. Virtue is not the principle of any one line of action. They gave it the name Siddea-i^ (dis- position), a certain settled and permanent state of the soul with regard to action.^ Now for a rational being the essential in every such disposition is insight, power of re- cognising the true relations of things. They thus tended to reproduce, though with important modifications, the old Socratic definition that virtue is knowledge. They evaded the difficulties of Socrates partly by denying the absoluteness of the popular antithesis between knowing and desiring or acting, partly by defining in so concrete a fashion the notion of knowledge that there could be involved in it the charac- teristic distinct virtues. Thus, for example, in knowledge as required for right action there are implied the four primary virtues — (1) The relatively more intellectual recognition called ^ The StoicB to some extent reverse = a ?Jii which does not admit of the Aristotelian use of the words 6|ii variation in intensity. See Stob. Ed, and iiiefais. With them the latter ii. 7, 5 : Diog. Laert. vii. 98. p. iv] ETHICS 293 tetimes by them ^p6v7)aiiTa(rla, 165, 216 ; early psychol- ogy of, 216 and n. ; and association, 217. dvSpeCa, Stoic definition of, a prim- ary virtue, 293. dirawjs, epithet applied to vovs, 221 and n. Aireipov, rh, the infinite of Anaxi- mander, 7, 14, 15 ; Pythagorean doctrine of, 25 ; use of term by Xenophanes, 31 ; PhUebui, nature of, 112. diroSeiKTiK'fj {hruTri\^t\), 11 n., 170, 190 n. ; (ir/M^Tairij), 190 n. &iroirpoT|7|Uva, 292. diroppoaC, effluxes by means of which, according to Empedoolea, bodies act on one another, 58, d.pE'Wj (excellence), oMeia (character- istic), 244 ; ^fliK^ (moral), ib. ; Sio- voriTwIi (intellectual), ib. dpx^, 3 n., 7 and n., 11 n. ; Speusip- pus' view of, 141 ; Aristotle on, ib. ; principle of movement (Aristotle), 160 ; voDs as faculty of apX"^) 232- 239 ; relation of, to demonstration, 232 ; apprehension of, ib., 233 ; (Stoics), 265 u. d(rii|ipXr)Tai (non-addible), character- istic of Plato's Ideas, 143 n. Ato|i.oi 'ypa)jL|jiaC, Xenocrates' doctrine of, 146 ; in Platonic writings, ib. £to|i,ov ctSos, 134 ; Urofut rif etSei, 182 n. ali^niris, 155 n., 164 n. aiTO|j,arov, rh (spontaneity), in Aris- totelian cosmology, 137, 157 and n. dif>^ (touch), fundamental animal sense, 204. PovXi)o-i,s, 204 n. INDEX OP GEEEK WOEDS 301 7fveY^ (induction), 97, 98, 185 f. ; 6 i^ iTrayatyris a'v\\oyt(r^6s, 189. eiraKTiKol Xoyoi,, 74, 94. «ri8v|iiCa, 204 n. eirio-T^liT] (science), distinction between S6^a and, 80 ; Antisthenes on, 83 ; in Plato, Aristotle's equivalent, 170 ; relation to vovs, 233 ; origin- ating in dfiireipla, 234 ; relation to the unchangeable, ib. ; always true, 235; Stoic theory of, 280 n., 286. liriirTT)|iaviK4| ato-6i)(ri$, Speusippus' doctrine of, 140. liriirTr]|i.oviKbs X^YOS, Speusippus' doctrine of, ib. cTcpo£(i»rts, 278. erefi, mode of existence of primary qualities, 63. €iSai|u>vta, definition of, as Mpyeia, 244. E{i6v|iCa, the end of life (Demooritus), 66. ta^, 163 n., 164 n. ^uov, epithet of the cosmos (Timceus), 119. i^Sov^ (pleasure), cause of movement ((ciwiiris), 203 ; ri r/Si, 204 n. iJYC|u>viKdv, rh, 272 and n. ; as vovs, 276 ; relation to the senses, 277. 302 INDEX OF GREEK WORDS i\pr]o-is (smeB), animal function, 204. ojpaviSs, its distinction from k6vo'a, 186. irpuTa, Antisthenes' theory of, 81. irpuTa olKcia, 290. irpdrri IvtcX^x'*''''') 1^3 n., 202. ■irp<4Tt| iiXr) (primary matter), Aristotle, 158 ; in Stoic doctrine, 268. irpuTOV Kivovv (prime mover), 160. irvp TExviKdv distinguished &om irvp irexvov, 269 n., 271 n. o-T)|i,aiviS|Jicvov, 287 and n. arT||i,aivov, 287 and n. o-kotCt] (-yviSiiTi), one of Democritus's two types of knowledge — the ob- scure, 65. iro<|>i$s. Stoic doctrine of, 280 n., 281 and n. ; conduct of, 291. poo-uyr), as primary virtue, 293. rairiv, 120 n. T^nov, 36. TEX»avTadvTair|ui (image), character of, 214, 215 ; mechanicEtl determination of, 215 ; relation to theoretical activity, ib. ; operation of reason through, ib. ; and the functions of desire, ih,, 216 ; tpavraff/iaTa and voSj, 223 ; material basis of unity, 224 ; re- striction of lowest form of intellect to, 251, 252. 6(aris, 155 n., 164 n. I i6opd, 155 n. (lopd, 155 n., 161. ipp(SvT|(ris, as function of imderstaud- ing, 213 ; as primary virtue, 293. <|>vcr«i)s, irtpX, Anaximander's work, 7 ; Empedocles' poem, 53. ({nio-iKiSv, rb, fundamental Stoic doc- trine, 261, 262 n. ; viTiKol, 14 n. ; v(TiKi] {ifiiKoffo^la), 165 n. i^uiris, meaning of, 6, 8, 11 n. ; Aris- totle's conception of, 156 ; Stoic term, 271 and n., 289 u. Amii\, 287. vT)TiKiSv, rh, as part of the soul, 276. Xupa, 122. Xupurrd, 94 ; xtopiffrcJi, of vims, 221 n. ijnix'^i, early denotation of the term, 6 n. , 7 ; Platonic doctrine, 103 ; and vovs, 117 ; Plato on, as principle of self - generated movement, 163; Aristotle on, as ^I'TeXe'xem, ib, and n. ; relation to (jtvcriic^, 165 n. ; to vovs, 219 n. ; (Stoic term), 271 and n. «|rux'^ aliir9r\nKf\ (the sensitive soul), 204, 213. ilmx'^l 8iavoT|riK\h 9p«rTiK. n. Chance, in Aristotle, theory of nature, 137, 157 ; relation to art, 157. Change, denied by Eleatics, 32, 40 and n. ; HeracUtus' law of, 44 : its meaning, 46 ; interpretation of, by Plato, t6. ; Atomist explanation of, 62 ; characteristic of the world of generation, 116, 129; soul, the principle of, 116, 117; causes of [Tinuxm), 125 ; not explained by the Ideas, 132 ; Aristotle's criticism of Platonic explanation, ib., 135 ; in 308 GENERAL INDEX Xenocrates, 146 ; Aristotle's concep- tion of inemPoKii), 151, 152, 155, 158 and n. ; as realisation of ends, 155 ; subdivision of, ib. n. ; nega- tive element in {(rrifnifftt), ib. ; Kant on, ib.; material element in world of, 158, 159 ; and the prime mover, 161, 226 ; distinction between self- generated and accidental move- ment, 163 ; principle of self -gen- erated movement, ii.; potentiality and actuality in, 219. Chaos, original condition of matter, 51. Chronology of Platonic dialogues, 92-98, 114 f. Chrysippus (Stoic), 259 and n., 260 ; theory of aMTiiris, 278 ; and the Sceptic (rupilrns, 294 n. Cicero, reference to Anaximander, 11 f. ; on Stoic terminology, 278 n., 279, 281 and n., 282, 284, 293 n. See also Index of Authorities. Civilisation, origin of, speculation on, 70. Cleanthes (Stoic), 259 and u. ; identi- fication of -rh 7iyefU)viK6y with the sun, 272 n. ; theory of nlfo-flijo-is, 278. See also under List of Authorities. Cleitomachus (Academician), 260 n. Clement, on Speusippus, 139. See also under List of Authorities. Clotho, Xenocrates' name for the sensible, 145. Colour, potential and actual, 220. Common notions {icoival Ivvoiai), meaning of, in Stoic philosophy, 280, 286. Complexity, in object or act of appre- hension and the problem of error, 82 ; types of, 83 ; Plato on, ib. ; vonrdv as complex, 221 ; in judg- ment, 223. Compound {trivSerov), nature of con- crete existent, 156 ; form and matter in, ib. ; compound oitrla as object of S6^a, 144 n. Comprehensio, 280 u,, 282 u., 284, 285. Conception, Dugald Stewart on, 214 n. Concrete, thing, nature of the existent subject (tcJSc t(), 154 ; as actuaUty, 155 ; relation to /teroiSoX^, ib. ; compound nature of {irivBeTov), 156 ; existence, fixed types of, 171, 172, 194, 195 ; existents, principle of contradiction and, 173-177 ; ex- istents, perception of, 206; indi- vidual, 182-186; relation of, to abstract notion, 218 ; and abstract, Aristotle's failure to connect, 227 ; existence, and truth, 246 ; world, and the divine mover, 248 ; indi- vidual, not known by the divine intelligence (Averroes), 254 and n. Condensation and rarefaction, 14, 16. Conduct, problem of, speculation on, 61 ; importance of, to Socrates, 75, 76 ; in Aristotle, 244. Consciousness, sense - perception as, 211 ; yoSs as, 225. Constancy, as intelligibility, 240. Constitution, of the body, 64 ; of man, 289. Contemplation, life of, as the highest good of man, 245 ; contrasted with practical life, ib. Contingency, matter as, 158. Continuity, nature of Parmenides' One, 32 ; factor in space, 294. Contradiction, impossibility of, accord- ing to Anaxagoras, 54, 177 ; and to Antisthenes, 80, 82 ; principle of, 172-177 ; double reference of, 173 ; incapable of proof, 174; and sub- jective thinking, 175 ; necessity of, 176 ; Heraclitean, Protagorean, de- nial of it, ib., 177. Corporeal, Eleatic One, 34 ; Plato's explanation of the, 122 ; conditions, relation of rovs to, 217 f. ; nature of reality, 265 ff., 286, 287, 288 ; vir- tues, 266 ; presentations, 287. Cosmology, and mythology, 3 ; of Anaximander, 9 ff. ;. Pythagorean, 24 ff. ; threefold division of the universe, 24, 25 ; Xenocrates', 144 f. ; Plato's, 119-122 ; Aristotle's, 152, 240; Stoic, 266-274. Cosmos, Pythagorean conception, 24 ; in Heraclitus, 44 ; in Anaxagoras, 53 ; nature of {Timceus), 119 ; soul of, ib., 120, 199 f. ; Stoic view, 266- 274, 277, 278, 282, 286-288. Courage, Stoic definition, as primary virtue, 293. Cratylus (Platonic dialogue), reference to Antisthenes, 82; basis of doc- trine of Ideas in, 99. Creation, mode of (Timweui), 119, 120 ; Christian doctrine of, 161. Criterion, of knowledge, 65, 278-281, 286. Cube, Pythagorean equivalent of the earth, 25. GENERAL INDEX 309 Cycle, Anaximander's doctrine of a, 8 n., 9, 14 f . ; of existence involved in Pythagorean doctrine, 20 ; Empe- docles', effected by love and hate, 56 ; four stages in, 57 ; of genera- tion, in Plato, 115. Cynic doctrine, relation to, of Soeratic ethics, 76 ; theory of knowledge, 79- 83 ; effect on the Stoics, 258, 259, 291. Cyrenaics, ethics of, and Democritus, 66 ; ethical views, 78 f. Data, ultimate, of knowledge, 190- 192; indemonstrable, 192, 194; source of, 195 ; mode of appre- hension of primary, 196. Deduction, Aristotle on, 187. Deductive construction of universe, 131. Definition, invented by Socrates, 74, 94 ; Antisthenes on, 80 ; Speusip- pus on, 143 ; Aristotle on, ib., 159, 197. Degree, and the operation of sense, 217 ; vms not subject to, ib. ; of tension, 266. Democritus, his doctrine of innumer- able worlds compared with Anaxi- mander's, 11 f. ; his philosophy, 60-66 ; marks transition from tradi- tional to historical period of philo- sophy, 67 ; new character of his problems, ib. ; and definition, 94. Demonstration, principles of (Aris- totle), 171 ; subject - matter, ib. ; nature of, 172 ; syllogistic mode of, ib, ; axioms in, ib. ; nature of its subject, 191 ; weakness of the theory, 192 ; and intuition, 195, 196 ; and first principles, 232 S. Design in the cosmos (Plato), 119. Desire, functions of, and ^avrdtrfiaTa, 215, 216. Development, Speusippus' view of, 141 ; Aristotle's conception of, 155, 160 ; difference from modem inter- pretations, ib. ; of the soul, 166 ; of knowledge, 178, 186 ; order of, 184 ; process of (Aristotle), 235, 236 ; cause of, 236 ; of knowledge in man, 233, 234, 237, 238. Jialectic, Plato's, Aristotle on, 134 ; (Aristotelian), 170 ; nature of its premisses, ib. and n., 178, 187 ; contrasted with apodictic, 170, 177, 178; subdivision of Stoic logic, 262 and n. Dialogue^, Platonicji chronology of, 96 ; theory of Ideas in , earlier, 97 ; classification in earlier, 98 ; division by dichotomy in later, ib. ; Lutos- lawski's chronology, 115. Dichotomy, Platonic use of, 98 ; not in earlier Ideal theory, ib. Difference, in Bleatioism, 47 ; im- portance of, in Anaxagoras, 53 ; Platonic explanation of, 98, 110, 124; specific, 154; accepted as ultimate (Aristotle), 239 ; deduction of (Platonic), ib. ; in Stoics, 284. DiodoruB Cronus (Megarian), argu- ments against potentialily and motion, 84 f. Diogenes Laertius, on the Megarians, 84 ; value of his testimony, ib. See also Index of Authorities. Diogenes of Apollonia, views, 54 ; in- fluence on Stoic doctrine, 263. Discrete, elements, quantity, 37, 85, 87 ; aspect of space, 294. Discrimination, of common and specific sensibles, 207 ; of heterogeneous sensations, 212 ; of homogeneous sensations, ib. ; and unity, ib., 243. Discursive reason, thought, 101, 197, 122. Divine, the, unity of (Aristotle), 159 ; nature of, completed actuality, 160, 161, 162, 168 ; the unmoved mover, 161 ; element in the soul (vovs), 166 ; individuality of, 183 ; as form devoid of matter, ii. ; element of, in the universe, 227, 245 ; reason and human, Aristotle's theory, 228- 231, 247-249; and the concrete world, 248 ; and the active reason (vovs 'iroiriTM6s), 249 ; Averro'es' doctrine of wnio, 253 ; nature of Its knowledge, 254 and n. Dodecahedron, Pythagorean equival- ent of the fifth, unnamed, element, 25. Doxogrwphi OrcBci, Diels', reference to, 12. Dreams, Democritus' explanation of, 64 ; Aristotle's tractate on, 213. Dualism, in Plato's theory of Ideas, Aristotle on, 135 ; fundamental, in Aristotle, 254, 255, 257 n. ; Stoics' attempt to avoid, 45, 258, 275, 292. Dugald Stewart on conception, 214 n. Duties, Stoic view, 290 ; natural foundation of, ib. ; primary, ib., 291 ; of a rational being, 291 ; relative, ib., 292. 310 GENERAL INDEX Earth, in Aristotle, the cold-dry, 8 n.; formed from the cube, according to the Pythagoreans, 25 ; one of Empedoclea' four ' roots,' 55. Elaboration and intuition, 196. Eleatic school, 25, 29-41 ; Xenophanes, 29, 30 ; Parmenides, 32-36 ; Zeno, 38, 39 ; MelisBus, 40 ; influence on the Pluralists, 49 ; on Anaxagoraa, 51 ; on Empedocles, 55 ; relation to the Atomists, 59 ; Atomist mis- interpretation of, 62 f. ; Eristics and, 69 ; Euclides and, 84 ; Megarian agreement with, 86, 87, 88 ; relation to Ideal theory, 109; to Aristotle, 168. Elements, the four, 8 n. ; Pythagorean, 25 ; in Empedocles, 55 ; Platonic, 120 and n., 121, 123 ; Aristotle's fifth, 25 n., 230; development of, from wveSfia, 269 f. Empedocles, 13, 14 n., 55 and n.; his philosophy, 55-58. Empirical doctrine of knowledge, in Aristotle, 184, 185, 232; Stoic tendency to, 259, 277 ; knowledge (i/ivetpla), 185, 204, 234; logic, 260 n. End, of life, Demooritus on, 66 ; con- ception of, Aristotle's, 153-157 ; re- lation to change (;ucTa|3a\^), 156- 157; to form, 156 ; of man, 246. Energy, continuous, of reason, 246, 247 ; pure, as the Divine first cause, 248. Enumeration, of species in induction, 189 ; of instances, 190. Epictetus (Steic), 261 n, ; view of soul, 275 n. Epicureanism, 260, 261 ; validity of sense - impressions, 283 ; Epicurus' doctrine of innumerable worlds compared with Anaximander's, 11 f. Equilibrium of forces, 270 n. Eristics, as a type of Sophist, 69. Error, problem of, 82 ; views of Antisthenes, Plato, and Aristotle, ib. ; possibility of, how arising, 83 ; Stoic explanation of, 281. Essence, of the individual, 181 ; in- telligible, of the subject of demon- stration, 192 ; transition to appre- hension of, 193 ; incapable of proof, 194 ; intuitive apprehension of, by vovs, 195, 220, 222, 223; immor- tality of, 221. Essential, Socrates on the, 94. Eternity, of the world of generation (yeMo-ii) in Plato, 115; confirma tion of, in Timueus, 116 ; in Aris' totle, 161, 235, 240, 264 ; of type 235; of human genus, 246; oj truth, ib. ; Averroes on, 258, Ethics, Pythagorean, 27 ; Democritus' 60, 66 ; Socratic, 76 f. ; deficiency ol Socratic theory, 77 ; third divisioi of Stoic phUosophy, 262, 289-294 subdivision of, 262 ; primitive im pulse of man, 289 ; KaSiiKovra, 290 291 ; nature of virtue, 291 ; natura and moral good, ib, ; class of indif ferent actions, 292 ; classification a virtues, 292-294. Eubulides (Megarian), author of thi fallacies of accident, 85. Euclides (Megarian), his teaching am school, 83 f. Eudemus (Peripatetic) on Pythagoreai doctrine of pre-existence, 20 ; am phrase ' to preserve phenomena, 59 n. ; identification of the activi reason with Ood, 249. Eicthydetrms (Platonic dialogue), dati of, 105 ; theory of Ideas in, ib. Evidentia, term used by Cicero fa ipdfyyeia, of presentation, 279. Evil, soul, 117 ; as first principle duality, 143 ; problem of, Stoi view, 274. Evolution, Aristotle and, 236. Excluded Middle, law of, 173. Existence, unity of, Xenophanes on 31 ; Ionic conception, iJ. ; Eleati doctrine, 35 ; Zeno's arguments foi 38 ; conception of, Platonic, 140 Speusippua', ib.; Xeuocrates', 144 Aristotle's threefold division o realm of, 153 ; nature of the ex istent subject, ib.; fixed types oi 141 n., 154, 157, 181, 182, 19^ 195 ; compound nature of the es istent, 156; and truth, 97, 129, 13( 226, 246; difaculty of Aristotle' theory of, 167 ; corporeal nature c (Stoics), 265-274, 286, 287, 288 ; c the incorporeal, 286, 287, 288. Experience, and the order of appr( hension, 184, 185, 204, 234. Faculty, of sense-perception, 208 ; ( vision and its exercise, 209 ; define by its object, 211 ; of apprehendin concrete fact and essence, 218 ; ( first principles, 232-289. Fallacy of accident, Eubulides, 85. Fate, Stoic view of, 273. GENEEAL INDEX 311 Fates, the three, Xenocrates' use of, 145. Eire, in Aristotle, the hot-dry, 8 n.; Heraclitus' reality, 44 ; doctrine of ixiripatris, 46 and n. ; ' root ' of Empedocles, 55; element of body of cosmos (I^mcEus), 120 ; as funda- mental element. Stoic view, 263, 266 ; fiery vapour (irveS/uj), 266- 272; distinguished as wvp tcx>"k^>' from ordinary fire, 269 n. First cause, mover, 160, 226. Fixed types, Aristotle's theory of, in nature, 141 n., 154, 157, 171, 194, 195, 236 ; deviation from, 157 ; monsters, ib. ; Aristotle's concep- tion of, in logic and metaphysics, 181 ; and the principle of contra- diction, ii. ; numerical plurality of, 182 ; gradation of, 154-159, 270. Form,(^stotle) and matter, 156, 158, 159 ; relation to final cause, 156 ; in the heavenly bodies, 159; as abstract essence expressed in definition, ib. ; in mathematics, 167, 223 ; pure, the divine as, 183, 228 ; soul as, 201, 202 ; soul as place of forms, 218 ; as intelligible essence, 236, 237; and matter, Aristotle's doctrine of, developed by Stoics, 264, 265 and n., 266 ; t6iios as form, 266, 267. Formal logic, 175, 187. Free will. Stoic denial of, 273, 274 ; nature of, in the tro(p6s, 281. Function, good as performance of, 77; scale of, in living beings, 164, 165, 200 ; of the soul, 200 ff. ; of sense, 205 ; of common sense, 207 ; dis- tinction between sensitive and nutritive, 208 ; combination of unity and plurality in one, 212 ; of understanding, 213, 214, 215 ; of reason, desire, and (^avria p-ara, 215, 216. General notion, Socrates on, 74 f. ; maxims, nothing deducible from, 172, 187. Generalisation, process of, and the Ideas, 106, 110 f. Generation, absolute, denied by Ele- atics, 33, 49 ; and by Anaxagoras, 51 ; world of, and the Pythagorean oipav6s, 25 ; denied by Megarians, 86, 99 ; Platonic Ideas and, 98 ; mode of being (Plato), 99-102, 109, 116, 119, 120, 129 ; twofold division of, 102; materiaUty of, 120-122, 127 ; soul in, 119, 120 ; explana- tionof, 127, 130, 238 ; relation to the absolute, 131; Aristotle's criti- cism of Plato's view,' 133-135; effort towards perfection in, 137 ; as a system of realised ends, 155 ; two causes in, 156 ; chance and spontaneity in, 137, 157 ; eternity of, 115, 116, 161, 220, 235, 240, 241 ; operation of bhe divine in, 161, 162, 242; eternity of type in, 220, 236 ; relation to »oCs, 236, 237 ; fundamental animal function, 203 ; faculty of, 276. Generic, universals. Ideas as, 89, 133 ; character, of intelligible units, 107. Genetic account of science, Stoics', 280 ; theory of judgment, 282. Geometrical magnitude, made up of indivisible elements, 26, 37, 146 ; Speusippus' principle of, 141, 142. Geometry, as an abstract science, 22 ; separation of form from matter due to Pythagoras, ib, ; relation to arith- metic, ib. ; relation between the ele- ments and the five solids in Pyth- agorean cosmology, 25 ; Democri- tus and, 60. God, Xenophanes on, 30 ; existence of (the gods), Protagoras on, 71 ; Antis- thenes on, 89 ; Aristotle's conception of, the unmoved mover, 160, 161 ; nature of, 161, 162 ; unity of, 159, 162 and n. ; as pure self-conscious reason, 162 ; identified with the active reason (Eudemus), 249 ; (Alexander of Aphrodisias), 251 ; and matter, Zeno's view, 267 ; Stoic doc- trine, 268 and n. ; supreme mind, \6yos ffTrepfiaTiK6Sf 273. Gomperz, SerkvianiscTie Stvdien, Heft I., 260 n. Good, discussion of the, by Socrates, 77; identified by Euolides with the One, 84; in Plato, 100, 111, 128; soul, 117; Speusippus' view of, 141 ; not identified with the One by Speu- sippus, 142 ; identified with the One by Plato, 143 ; in Platonic inter- pretation of the universe, 241 ; op- position of evil and, 274, 291, 292 ; identified with the Beautiful (Stoic), 291 ; natural and moral, ib. ; per- fect, ib. Good sense, primary virtue, 293. Gorgias, type of sophist, 69 n., 71 ; metaphysical speculation, 72 ; ag- nosticism of, ii. 312 GENERAL INDEX Oorgias (Platonic dialogue), 69 n. Gradation, of mental processes (Plato), 102 ; of fixed types in nature (Aristotle), 154-159, 171, 194, 236, 270; of organised bodies and psychi- cal activity, 203 ; of the intelligible, 222, 226 ; of the operations of reason, 229. Happiness, definition of, Socratic and Cynic, 76 ; Aristotle's, 244. Harmony, Pythagorean researches into, 23 ; scientific results of doctrine of, 24 ; Pythagorean doctrine of, and Pythagorean ethics, 28 ; defini- tion of soul as, ib.; conception of, according to Heraclitus, 45 ; scope of the law of harmony, ib.; with nature, Stoic conception, 289-291. Hate, Empedocles' separating force, 56. Hearing (oko^), animal function, 204. Heavenly bodies, Anaximander's view of, 10 ; in Plato, 123 ; Aristotle's view of, 152, 154 and n. ; matter and form in, 159 ; each std generis, ib. ; movements of, how caused, 162 n. ; movement of, and psychical change (Plato), 200. Hedonism, Aristippus' doctrine of, 78, Heraclitus, opinion of Pythagoras, 18 ; doctrines, 42-48 ; opposition of his school to the Atomists, 70 ; Prota- goras and, 71 ; effect on the Cyren- aics, 79 ; Antisthenes' use of Eera- clitean view of names, 82 ; influence on Plato, 93 ; denial of law of con- tradiction, 176 and n. ; influence on Stoic logic and physics, 258, 263, 269 ; and Stoic doctrine of language, 276 n. Hesiod, 5. Heterogeneous sensations, 212 and n. Hippolytus. See under List of Author- ities. Historical period, transition from tra- ditional to, in philosophy, 67; com- position, origin of, 70. Homogeneous sensations, 212 and n. Human species, permanence of (Aris- totle), 236, 246 ; process of realisa- tion of type in, 236 ; form and matter in, 237. lamblichus. See Index of Authorities. Icosahedron, Pythagorean equivalent of water, 25. Idea, innate, 102, 114 ; use of word in English philosophy, 278 n. ; repre- sentation of, in speech, 287; repre- sentative, theory of, ib. Idealism, modem, and Plato's theory of Ideas, 114 ; ' absolute knowledge ' of, 281 n. Ideas, Platonic theory of, influence of Socrates on, 77, 94; Idea distin- guished from Megarian unit, 89 ; Polyxenus' argument against, ib. ; early form of the theory, 91-103 ; origin of theory in early specula- tion, 91, 93; development of, 92- 96; Aristotle's evidence, 52 S.;1^ connexion of later form with Pyth- agoreanism, 95 ; importance of dis- tinction of knowledge from per- ception to theory of, 97; inter-con- nexion among, ib. ; properties of, 98 ; correlation of, to reality, 97, 99 ; apprehended by rovs, 101; and ivd/iiiriais, 102 ; and theory of in- nate ideas, ib. ; contemporary criti- cism, 104-108 ; answered in Par- menides, 105, 106, 108 ; as natural types, 106, 113 ; as absolute existence, 106-108, 119, 129; not isolated from one another {Sophist), 110 ; in the PhUebus, 112 ; relation of, to the soul, 114-118 ; modem interpretations of later theory, 114 f. ; objective existence of, 118 ; types of, in Timceus, 123 ; and numbers, 124, 126, 128, 145 ; Aris- totle on later theory, 127, 128, 132- U 135, 138, 139 ; material element in the, 127 ; and the world of genera- tion, 130, 132 ; and change, failure of Plato's explanation, 132 ; modi- fications of Platonic school, 139- 147; Speusippus, 142; nature 'of, 143-146 ; Xenocrates, 145-147. Identity, exclusive of difEerenoe, An- tisthenes' view, 80 ; Megarian view, 86 ; Stoic, of indiscemibles, 267, 269. Imagination {tpavTatrla), 204 ; as in- termediate between sense-percep- tion and reason, 213, 214 ; distin- guished from sense-perception and understanding, 214 ; activity of the soul called forth by sensation, 215 ; distinguished from memory and reminiscence, 216 ; connexion with thought, 237, 242, 243. Immortality, of the soul (Plato), 116 ; of the race, 165 ; of reason, 221. Impression, 79, 278, 283. GENERAL INDEX 313 Impulse {ip/iil), relation to intelli- gence, 289 ; nature of, in man, tb., 290 and n. Incommensurability, Pythagorean doc- trine of, 26, 37. Incorporeal, conception of the, 34 ; forms, 87 ; Ideas as, 98 ; mode of existence of the, 287, 288. Indeterminate, void of the Pythagor- eans, 25; dyad, the (^ Wpio-Tos Suiii), in Plato, 127; Speusippus' use of, 142 ; a fundamental principle of Xenocrates, 145; divisible of 2%»«eMs interpreted by Xenocrates as, 147. Individual, sense-impressions (Cyren- aic), 79 ; elements, in Antisthenes' theory, 81 ; essence of, identical with imfiTna species, 154 ; antithesis between universal and (Aristotle), 179-181 ; the concrete, 182-186 ; apprehension of, 193, 194 ; tran- sition from immediate apprehen- sion to essence, 193; and sense- perception, 234 ; as cause of change, 236 ; as realised type, ib. ; t6vos, 267 ; everything in the uni- verse, 267, 269, 271, 284. Individualism, subjective, of the Cynics, 269. Indivisible, quwnta, 26 ; plenwm, 36 ; units, 38 ; bodies, 61 ; acts of ap- prehension, corresponding to per- cepta, 81 ; mteUigibUia, 86 f. ; lines (&Toiioi ypanfiat), Xenocrates' doc- trine of, 146 ; in Platonic writings, ib.; the, in Timcevs, 120, 147; uni- versals, 234, 243. Induction, invented by Socrates, 74 ; Platonic interpretation of, 97, 98 ; meaning of iirayayfi (Aristotle), 185 ; method of discovery of the universal, ib. ; contrast between syllogism and, 188 ; i if ^iroTaiT^i p6p- ■i\. Light, illustration of vovs ■roaiTM6 220. Like to like, doctrine of Empedoclei 57 f. Limited and unlimited, distinction i Pythagoreanism, 23 ; in Plato, 11! Locke, ' substance ' of, 153 ; Esscuy o Hvmum Understanding, 278 n. Logic, Zeno, 38 ; in Socrates, 73 f 94; Antisthenes, 80; in Euclidei 84 ; in Plato, 97, 98, 100 ; Arist( telian, 154, 170 ff. ; the syllogisn 170, 186 f. ; principles, special an general, 171, 172; principle ( contradiction, 172 - 177 ; exclude middle, 173; formal, 175, 187 induction, 185, 188-190 ; process) of, distinct from intuition, 196 position in Stoic philosophy, 262 subdivision of, ib. ; Stoic confusio between psychology and, 277. Lotze, on Plato's conception of tl Idea, 130 n. ; on Aristotle's crit oism of Plato, ib. ; view of the un versal, 242 n. Love, Empedocles' combining fore 56. Lucretius, on sense-perception, 47 n expounder of Epicurean doctrin 260 n. See also Index of Authoi ties. Lutoslawski, W., on the chronology Plato's dialogues, 115 ; interpret tion of later Ideal theory, ib. ; vie of the soul in, ib. Macrocosm, 272. MagTmnimitas, 293 n. GENERAL INDEX 315 Major term, 189. Malebranche, interpretation of the Ideal theory, 100, 254 n. Man, original form of, 12 ; the meas- ure, 71 ; divine element in, 166 ; functions of, 204 and n. ; vovs peculiar to, 204 ; reason in, and the absolute reason, 227-231, 247 f.; individual, development of, 236, 237 ; conditions of his knowledge, 237 ; apprehension of the universal, 242, 243; and i/ous, 245, 246, 271; reason and lower faculties in, 249 S, ; part of the universe, 272 ; im- pulse in, .289, 290, 291; rational constitution of, 289. Many, One and, 14 n., 31, 37, 87, 105, 107, 111, 127, 130, 133, 141-145, 159, 168, 212, 234. Marcus Aureliua (Stoic), 261 n., 275 n. See also Index of Authorities. Marriage, Protagoras on, 71. Material, cause, principle, or substra- tum, 3 ; Plato's explanation of the, 122 ; factor in the Ideal realm, 127. Materialism, criticism of {Sophist), 87 f., 265; Stoic, 265-268. Materiality of world of generation, 120. Mathematical ratios, relation to the Ideas {Timceus), 124 ; and sensa- tions, 126 ; as contents of the Ideal world, 128. Mathematics, Pythagorean interest in, 17 ; symbolic interpretation of, 19 ; influence on philosophy, 21 ; dis- covery of incommensurables, ib. ; of the regular solids, i5. ; geometry as an abstract science, 22 ; theorem of the sum of the interior angles of a plane triangle, ib. ; Pythagorean conception of numbers, 23 ; Pytha- gorean doctrine of proportion, ib. ; Pythagorean theory of the relation between the five solids and the ele- ments, 25 ; line made of indivisible points, 26 ; conception of discrete quantity ascribed to the Pytha- goreans on doubtful evidence, 37 ; opposition of Demoeritus and Prota- goras, 66 ; Platonic view of, 101 ; relation to the Ideal theory, ib., 127 ; form of iiiim<"h 101 ; twofold character of, iJ. ; in Tvmwus, 122 ; form and matter in, 167 and n. ; nature of axioms in, 171 ; nature of apprehension in, 218, 223. Matter. Aristotle's notion of, 35 ; AnEKagoras' characterisation of, 51 ; chaotic state of, ib. ; move- ment in, STkos, 52 ; action of vovs upon, 53 ; element in the concrete existent, 156 ; common basis of the potential and the actual, ib. ; as substratum of change, 158 ; as potential existence, ib. ; as conting- ent individuality, ih. ; relativity of, i6. ; indeterminate final matter, ib. ; and numerical multiplicity, ib., 159 ; and the divine nature, 159, 183 ; in the heavenly bodies, 159 ; in mathematics, 167 and n. ; as potentially manifold, 182 ; body as, in relation to soul, 183 ; in theory of vovs, 219 fT. ; failure of Aristot- elian psychology to explain, 226 ; manifestation of the intelligible through, 228, 248; Stoic theory of, influence of Anaxagoras, 263 ; Kpairis, ib. ; influence of Aristotle's doctrine of, 264 ; developed by Stoics, ib., 265, 266 ; as fire, 266 ; primary, 268 ; unqualified, ib. n. Meaning, Stoic conception of, 287 f . Mechanical movement, 6 ; explanation in Anaxagoras, 53 ; conception of the universe implied by Aristotle, 136 ; representation of the process of knowledge, 277, 278. Mechanics, failure of, the Greeks to conceive, 270 u. ; Stoic, 270, 273, 274. Mediaeval interpretation of Aristotle's doctrine of vovs, 239, 251 ff. Megarian school, 83-89 ; agreement with Cynics in theory of ultimates, 83; Euclides, 83-85; Eubulides, and the fallacy of accident, 85 ; view of predication, 86 f. ; theory, inconsistency of, 87 ; opposition to experience, ib. ; theory, Plato on, ib., 88 ; unit, 88, 89; view of world of generation, compared with Plato's, 99 ; intelligibiUa, compared with the Platonic Ideas, 104, 109 ; argu- ment, 'the Third Man,' 89, 107. Melissus, contrasted by Aristotle with Parmenides, 35 ; non-spatial char- acter of Being, 40 ; on qualitative alteration, ib. Memory (/nx^/uij), 165, 204; in animal's, ib. ; tractate on, in the Parva Naturalia, 213 ; distinguished from reminiscence and imagination, 216 ; arising from perception, 234. 316 GENERAL INDEX Meno (Platonic dialogue), doctrine of ivifivriffis in, 102. MetaphyBice, the Eleatic, 29, 36 ; Plato's later, 104-113; final, 119- 128; of the Academy, 141-147; Aristotelian, 159 - 162, 172 - 186 ; nature of hiatus in Aristotelian, 167 f. ; object of Aristotelian, rbtv ^ Sv, 173 ; included in Physics, by Stoics, 261. Method, Zeno's, 38 ; Socratic, 73, 74, 94 ; Sophistic, 73 ; of Nuclides, 84 ; of division by dichotomy, 98 ; Platonic idea of, 129. Microcosm, 272. Middle term, relation of, to the con- clusion, 188 ; in the inductive argu- ment, 189 ; terms, limitation of number of, 196. Mill, J. S., view of logic, 260 n. Minor term, 189. Moderatio, 293 n. Monism, of the Eleatics, 31 ; of the Stoics, 258 ; in physics, 264 ; in theory of knowledge, 275 ; in ethics, 292, 294. Monsters (TepoTo), deviations from type, 157. Morality, Protagoras concerned with, 69, 71 ; Socrates on, 75 ff. ; Stoic, 289-294. Motion, Zeno's arguments against, 39 f. ; confusion of absolute and relative, 40 ; Melissus on qualitative alteration as distinct from, 41 ; revolving, of Anaxagoras' matter, 52 ; the source of, vovs, ii. ; of the atoms, 61 ; explanation of, 62 ; vortex, 63 ; Diodorus' arguments against, 86 ; self -originating, soul the principle of, 125, 142; Aris- totle's theory, 135 ; the first cause of, 136, 160, 248 ; teleological direction of, 136 ; and change in general, 155 and n. ; subdivisions of, 155 n. ; to cause, function of the soul, dependent on sense-apprehen- sion, 164 f. ; cosmic, and the soul, 200 ; relation of pleasure, pain, and appetition to, 203, 204 ; difficulties of Aristotelian theory of, 254 f. ; processes of soul, 258 n. Multiplicity, Zeno's arguments against, 38 ; and unity, 222 ; of inteUigible essences of the world of generation, 248. See also Plurality. Mythology, influence on philosophy, 2, 3 ; popular, Democritus' explan- ation of, 64 ; Sophistic speculation on, 70 and n. Names, importance of, in Heraclitus, 48 ; in Antisthenes, ib., 82. Natural types, Ideas as, 106, 113 ; theology, Plato's, in the Lmoa, 139. Nature, ordinary knowledge of, among the Greeks, 3 ; distinction between convention and. Sophists on, 70 ; Atomists on, ih. ; Plato on, 150 ; chance and spontaneity in, 137, 157 ; in Platonic school, 145 f. ; Aristotle's conception of, 139, 154, 156 ; gradation of fixed types in, 141 n., 154, 156, 157, 171, 172, 181- 194, 236, 270; deviation from, 157 ; cause in the world of genera- tion, 156; in Strato, 257- n. ; in Stoics, 263-274 ; conformity with, 289, 290, 291. Nebular theory, analogy of Anaxi- mander's speculations with, 12. Necessity, in Democritus, 62 ; in Timceus, 120 f, ; in propositions, 170, 191. Negation, Plato's explanation of, ii Ideal realm, 98. Negatives excluded from the Ideas. 146. Nemesius. See Index of Authorities. Neo-Platonism, doctrines of, 183 ; as e development of Aristotelian theo logy, i6. ; interpretation of Aris totelian doctrine of vovs, 289, 252 : doctrine of absorption in the absol ute, 253. Nomenclature, unscientific (Aristotel ian), 213. Nominalism, Antisthenes', 81, 259 265 n. ; in the Stoic philosophy 259, 265 n., 277, 288. Notion, general, in Socrates, 74, 87 class-notion, 86 ; Idea as generic 86, 133 ; Idea as, in the mind, 106 common (Stoic), 280, 286. Numbers, Pythagorean theory of, 21 the essence of things, ib. ; conceive( arithmetically by Pythagoras, 23 space dimensions of, ib. ; doctrine o proportion of, ib. ; barrenness o the Pythagorean theory, 24 ; separ ated by void, 25 ; indivisibility of, ii space, 26 ; type of Idea, in Hmceui 124 ; Speusippus' view of, 141, 142 Ideas as, ib. ; Xenocrates' view, 145 Ideas distinguished from, by Plate GENERAL INDEX 317 as &(rinp\riToi, 143 and n. ; Xeno- cratea' view of inteUigibUia as, 146. Nutrition, simplest function of life, 164, 200, 202; necessity of, 203; senses necessary for, 204 ; distinc- tion iDetween sensitive and nutritive functions, 208. Object of apprehension, the immedi- ate, 193 f. Objective philosophy replaced by sub- jective, 67. Objectivity, 283, 285. Octahedron, Pythagorean equivalent of air, 25. Odd and even, distinction important in Pythagoreanism, 23. Qffida (Stoic view), 290 ; primary, ib. ; KaTopOt&fwraf 291. One, Pythagorean theory of, 23 ; Xeno- phanes on, 31 ; Ionic conception, ib, ; Eleatic doctrine, 35 ; Zeuo's arguments, 38 ; identified by Euclides with the Good, 84 ; the, and the Many, 14 n., 105, 107, 111, 130, 234 ; Speusippus on, 141-143 ; Aristotle's criticism of, ib. ; Xeno- , crates on, 145, 147 ; Aristotle's doc- trine of the, 159, 168 ; the Eleatic, 168 ; negative character of the, ib. Opinion (SiJfo), and truth, 32 ; and knowledge, 80, 83 ; Platonic anti- thesis, 99-103 ; antithesis between science and (Aristotle), 170, 177, 178 ; transition from, to science, 178 ; as function of understanding, 213 ; and Stoic ^), fundamental animal sense, 204. Traditional period, transition from, to historical, in philosophy, 67. Tranquillity, the end of life, Demo- critus, 66. Transcendentalism, of Plato's ideas (Timceu!), 124. Transformation, rejected by Anaxa- goras, 51. Transmigration of souls, view of Pyth- agoras, 17, 26 f.; connexion with Orphic doctrine, 19 ; involved the idea of a continuous cycle of exist- ence, 20 ; in KaBap/iol of Empedocles, 55, 58. Trendelenburg on vovs itaSTiTMds, 244 n. Truth, and opinion, Parmenides, 32 ; Atomist criterion of, 65 ; identified with real existence in Greek specula- tion, 97; in Plato, 129 f. ; Lotzeon Plato's view of, 130 n. ; principle of contradiction and, 173-177 ; neces- sajT-, 178 ; necessary, not obtained by induction, 189 ; of primary data, indemonstrable, 190-192 ; apprehen- sion of, and vovs, 221, 222, 225 ; eternity of, 221, 226, 246 ; Averroes on, 253 ; criterion of (Stoic), 279 ff. Types, fixed, 141 n., 154, 157, 171, 181 f., 194, 195, 220, 236, 270. Ultimate, irparov, Antisthenes' theory of the nature of, 81 ; subjects, nature of, in realm of change, 154 ; specific difference, 180 f. ; data of know- ledge, 190-192 ; knowledge of, 234 ; difference, Aristotle's view of, 239. Understanding, and perception, 47; in Plato (Siacoia), 101 ; practical (Stivoia vpaKTiicfi), as cause in the world of generation (Aristotle), 156 in the scale of mental life, 164, 165. 200, 202, 204 ; imagination discrim- inated from, 214 ; function of, 222 distinguished from vovs, 224 ; pre- sentations of the (Stoic), 283. Unification, in intellectual processes, 223 ; function of vovs, 224. Vnio, Averroes's doctrine of, 253 and n. Units, indivisible, in Zeno's argu- ments, 38, 85 ; abstract, unrelated, of Megarians, 86-89 ; generic char- acter of intelligible, 107 ; reality as GENERAL INDEX 325 multiplicity of, Plato on, 109 ; inteUigible, as objects of vois, 222. Unity, of exifitence, first statement of, ascribed by Aristotle to Xenophanes, 30 f. ; insistence of the Eleatica on, 35 ; Zeno's arguments for, 38 ; of nature, Diogenes of ApoUonia on, 54 ; Speusippus' view, 141, 143 ; fundamental principle of Xeno- cratea, 147 ; indivisible, of TimcBus, interpreted by Xenoorales as, ib. ; of the divine, 159, 162 ; numerical, 180 ; as a common sensible, 206 ; of the sensitive soul, 207 ; and dis- crimination, 208 ; and plurality in the same function, 212 ; of the soul, 219 ; of the intelligible, 222, 243 ; reduction of multiplicity to, by voSs, 223, 224 ; of judgments, 222 ; and the central sense, ib, ; nature of, conveyed by vovs, 224, 225 ; of the subject, 231 ; of the cosmos. Stoic view, 263, 268 and n., 269; of the system of existence (Aris- totle), 264 ; and form, 265 and n. ; Stoic tendency to, 292 ; of virtue, ih. Universal, Socrates and Plato on, 94 ; relation to the particular, 98, 131- 134 ; antithesis between individual and, Aristotle on, 179 ; reconcilia- tion of individual and, 182 ff. ; pro- positions, 185, 234 ; in order of our knowledge of, 186; and induction, 194, 195, 234 ; apprehension of, by man, 242 ; of sense, ib. and n. Universality of vovs (reason), 217. Universe, in Anaximander, 7; divided by Pythagoreans into three regions, 24 ; conceived by Pythagoreans as reducible to figures in space, 25; element of the divine in (Aristotle), 227 ; a system, 240 f . ; individuality of things in (Stoic), 267, 269, 284 ; interdependence of parts, 269 ; ra- tionality of, 272 ; mechanical con- ception of, 273, 274. 'Unmixed,' nature of vovs, 217, 221. Vegetable life, distinguished from animal, 203. Virtue, Pythagorean definitions, 27 ; Socratic theory of, 76 ; teach- ability and unity of, ib. ; lower and higher, in Plato, 100 ; of man, moral and intellectual, 244 ; Stoic defini- tion of, 291, 292; unity of, ib.; fourfold classification of (Platonic, StoidI, 293. Vision, Empedooles' theory of, 58 and n. ; Aristotle on, 203, 204, 209, 211, 220 and n. Yiavm (term in Cicero), 278 n., 281 n., 282. Void, Pythagorean, relative, 25 f. ; as separating numbers from one another, 25 ; as drawn in by the oipavis, ib. ; resembling Anaxi- menes' Air, as the principle of things, ib. ; absolute, conception of Eleatics and Atomists, ib. ; Atomist doctrine of, 60 ; use of Eleatic doc- trine of, 63 ; Anaxagoras' denial of, SO; Empedocles' denial of, 57; ex- istence of, 286 and n., 287. Volition, relation of, to intelligence, 289. Vortex motion, in Anaxagoras, 52 f . ; of the atoms, Democritus on, 63. Water, as primitive substance, 6 in Aristotle, the cold-moist, 8 u. formed from the icosahedron, ac- cording to the Pythagoreans, 25 one of Empedocles' ' roots,' 55 ; in Plato's cosmology, 120. Weight of atoms, 61 f. Wise man. Stoic doctrine of, 281 and n., 291, 293. Word, 287 ; meaning of, incorporeal, 288. World of generation. See Generation. Xenocrates, definition of soul, 142, 147; classification of the world of real existence, and of knowledge, 144 f . ; fundamental principles of, 145 ; view of Ideas as numbers, ib., 146 ; definition of 'Idea' in Platonic school, 145 and n. ; doctrine of Arofioi ypaii/ial, 146 ; interpreta- tion of the Timceus, 147. Xenophanes, founder of the Eleatic school, 29 ; a rhapaodist, ib. ; criticism of polytheism, 30 ; doc- trine ascribed to him by Aristotle, ib. ; the unity of existence, 31 ; vague distinction between appear- ance and reality, 32. Xenophon. See Index of Authori- ties. Zeller, E., his interpretation of An- aximander's doctrine of innumer- able worlds, 11 f. ; interpretation 326 GENERAL INDEX of Farmenides, 33, 34 ; Zeno's arguments, summarised by, 38 S. ; on vovs iradriTiK6s, 244 ; Pre- Sooratio Philosophy, cited, i. 589 f., p. 34 ; i. 614 f., p. 38 ; PUto and the Older Academy, 538, p. 140 ; Stoics, Bpicureans, and Sceptics, 67 ff., p. 262; 104, p. 267; 137, p. 271 ; 141 f„ p. 273 ; 78, p. 278 (footnote in each case). Zeno of Elea, his puzzles, 23 ; Plato on, 37 ; the first logician, 38 ; his method, ib. ; Zeller's summary of his arguments, 38-40 ; arguments against multiplicity, 38 ; argu- ments against movement, 39 ; his method of indirect refutation used by Euclides, 84 ; his arguments used by Diodorus, 85 ; dialectics of, and the Platonic Ideas, 105. Zeno, founder of Stoic school, 258, 259 ; on Qod and matter, 267 ; on perception, 278 ; theory of know- ledge, 281-285. EKEATA. P. 27, note 3. Z Read Phcedo for Phcedr. P. 45, note 2. 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