Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/234

 220 CHARLES S. MYERS : of reason, the early Greek set forth on his journey, equipped only with a Fetishism which under the cloak of Religion had lovingly been fastened on to him from infancy. With this, the one weapon of which he knew the use, he was quickly forced to fight in his spirited battle against the great Unknown. In turn he endowed water, fire and earth with the necessary life-creating principle or ap^rj. When soon it became clear to him that principles like these could not exist, he appears to have treated elements as mere symbols of the principles. Abstraction thus started grew apace. Beside the Physical arose the Mathematical School, which, putting implicit faith in the truth of mathematical language, proclaimed numbers to be the principles of Things, Life and Soul to be the mani- festations of Numbers, and Numbers to have actual existence. Heraclitus and Empedocles (fl. 475 B.C.) by their inquiry into knowledge itself, did much to hasten the establishment of more clearly stated speculations on the nature of life. From Heraclitus arose the atheistic or rather pantheistic conception of instability. Every thing is in constant motion. He sets up a fate or eipp.app,evri as director of this perpetual flux, retaining, however, the everlasting fire (irvp aeLfaov) to explain all vital phenomena, Avyr) %ripa, ^rv-^rj TaT7?, " the purer the fire, the more perfect the soul ". " A drunken man has a moistened soul." Empedocles, so far as his doctrine of a rival love and hatred are concerned, makes a near approach to Dualism. Moreover, the assertion to him accredited, that living beings are created by the acci- dental union of neckless bodies, bodyless legs and similar monstrosities previously shaped by the mutual attraction and repulsion of the four elements, is one far ahead of his time. Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.) deserves mention not only for the originality of his views but as the master of Socrates who led to the foundation of the school of Attic philosophers. Water, fire and earth were to his mind the components of the primitive matter from which the body is formed. Con- fident that matter can never explain its own properties, Anaxagoras endowed it with a vovs, the most subtle of all things, having the most knowledge and the greatest strength. Even in Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.) there is little enough from which one may deduce a definite theory on the nature of vital phenomena. When the most conflicting opinions prevail as to which of his books are and are not genuine, 1 it 1 More than fifty pretended works have come down to posterity ; of these nineteen are accepted by Mercuriali, and only five by Grimm. One commentator, stating that Hippocrates paid little or no attention to the