Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIII.djvu/451

 PHILOSOPHY 437 come memorable. He insisted upon a pure and pious life, urged the duty of perfect sub- mission in all things to the will of God, and made a striving after the divine likeness the standard of duty. For his doctrines of the im- mortality and transmigration of the soul he is said to be indebted to Egyptian sources. The Eleatics exalted the One of Pythagoras into the All. They sought to apprehend pure be- ing, changeless and independent of the forms and conditions of time and space. According to Xenophanes, a younger contemporary of Pythagoras, the one is all, and the all one. God is the universal supreme intelligence, and the mythological extravagances of the poets and the anthropomorphism of the popular re- ligion are by him sharply denounced. Par- menides embodied his philosophy in an epic poem, in which he sets forth his notion of be- ing, contrasting it with all that is changeful and phenomenal. It is pure thought, and thought and being are identical. Yet in the realm of the phenomenal change prevails, and opposite forces, like heat and cold, come in conflict, but meet in unity when body and soul are combined in man. Zeno of Elea, a disci- ple of Parmenides, developed the paradoxes of his predecessor, seeking to expose the con- tradictions in which the ordinary beliefs in a phenomenal world become entangled. He thus earned the title of originator of dialectic. Pushing his antithesis of being and non-being to an extreme, he develops from the One of Xenophanes an ill-concealed dualism. Herac- litus (about 513 B. C.) sought a principle of reconciliation in the idea of becoming, the bridge from being to non-being, from the one to the many. The totality of things is in per- petual flux, and their permanence is illusive. All comes and goes. Out of all comes forth all, life from death, and death from life. The circling alternation of birth and decay is inces- sant. Unity presupposes duality, harmony dis- cord, and " strife is the father of all things." Heat is the all-vivifying, all-transforming ele- ment; it seems to combine in itself the prop- erties of matter and force. The world from time to time resolves itself into the primeval fire. The soul is fire-vapor, in its perfection freed from the grosser elements. The prac- tical bearing of his philosophy was to empha- size search for the true, and acquiescence in the fixed order of things. At the head of the later natural philosophers stand Empedocles (born about 500 B. 0.) and Anaxagoras, near- ly his contemporary. The former differed from Heraclitus in adding necessity as a third principle, along with love and hate, to explain existing phenomena. He superseded the hylo- zoism of the earlier philosophers by the sev- erance of the moving cause from matter. Anax- agoras gave a more definite shaping to this theory. He assumed, as ultimate elements, an unlimited number of primitive substances, or " seeds of things," the chaotic mixture of which was reduced to order by the intelligent principle, the vov^ or divine reason. The most noted atomists were Leucippus and De- mocritus. The former asserted the existence of space-filling matter, by the division of which we reach the atom, the element of what is real and invariable. Round atoms possess the prop- erty of motion, and as they unite or separate all originates or dissolves. Democritus, about 40 years the junior of Anaxagoras, deriving the worlds from the multiplicity of atoms, explained sensuous perception by the efflux of atoms from things perceived. Thus images are produced, not always veracious, and ever to be distin- guished from genuine knowledge. The soul, he taught, is the noblest part of man, and hap- piness, which consists in an equality of tem- perament, is to be obtained through justice and culture. In the sophists we note a transi- tion in the sphere of philosophy from nature to man. Protagoras, applying the doctrine of Heraclitus to the knowing subject, made man the measure of all things, as well of what is not as of what is. All truth is consequently relative. Of the existence of the gods there can be no certainty. Gorgias taught that nothing exists; or if it existed, it could not be known; or if existing and knowable, the knowledge of it could not be communicated. Hippias pretended to universal knowledge. Some later sophists identified right with in- terest, made instinct, caprice, or force the prin- ciple of obligation, denied moral distinctions, and justified the severest criticisms of Socrates. The latter, by elevating the practical over the speculative, by giving the vovs of Anaxagoras a moral significance, by asserting moral and religious obligation, turned philosophy into a new channel. He emphasized knowledge or moral insight, either identifying virtue with it, or making it dependent on it. Two ten- dencies, the ethical and the dialectic, were de- veloped from the Socratic principle of knowl- edge as related to virtue. The first of these was represented by the cynic school of An- tisthenes and the Cyrenaic school of Aristip- pus ; the other by the Megaric of Euclid and the Elean of Phsedo. In the cynics we have the foreshadowing of stoicism, and in the Cy- renaics the predecessors of the Epicureans. Euclid gave a new edition of the Eleatic doc- trine, and is supposed to have modified Plato's views. Phsedo was one of the most genuine disciples of Socrates, but he was less gifted than that master's favorite pupil Plato, the ablest expounder of his doctrines, which he modified and enriched with his own illustra- tions. His philosophy deals with dialectics, physics, and ethics. To the first of these the Platonic theory of ideas is fundamental. The idea was the spaceless, timeless archetype of individuals. It is the universal, the real and eternal, existing per se; the unity underlying all phenomena of the same class. The highest idea is that of the good, which is represented as the originating cause of being and cognition. In physics Plato held that matter is eternal,