Volume I Part 9 (2/2)
[Sidenote: Diogenes a.s.serts that air is the soul of the world.]
The doctrines of Anaximenes received a very important development in the hands of Diogenes of Apollonia, who a.s.serted that all things originate from one essence, which, undergoing continual changes, becoming different at different times, turns back again to the same state. He regarded the entire world as a living being, spontaneously evolving and transforming itself, and agreed with Anaximenes that the soul of man is nothing but air, as is also the soul of the world. From this it follows that the air must be eternal, imperishable, and endowed with consciousness. ”It knows much; for without reason it would be impossible for all to be arranged so duly and proportionately as that all should maintain its fitting measure, winter and summer, night and day, the rain, the wind, and fair weather; and whatever object we consider will be found to have been ordered in the best and most beautiful manner possible.” ”But that which has knowledge is that which men call air; it is it that regulates and governs all, and hence it is the use of air to pervade all, and to dispose all, and to be in all, for there is nothing that has not part in it.”
[Sidenote: Difficulty of rising above fetichism.]
[Sidenote: Astronomy and chemistry have pa.s.sed beyond the fetich stage.]
The early cultivator of philosophy emerges with difficulty from fetichism. The harmony observed among the parts of the world is easily explained on the hypothesis of a spiritual principle residing in things, and arranging them by its intelligent volition. It is not at once that he rises to the conception that all this beauty and harmony are due to the operation of law. We are so p.r.o.ne to judge of the process of external things from the modes of our own personal experience, our acts being determined by the exercise of our wills, that it is with difficulty we disentangle ourselves from such notions in the explanation of natural phenomena. Fetichism may be observed in the infancy of many of the natural sciences. Thus the electrical power of amber was imputed to a soul residing in that substance, a similar explanation being also given of the control of the magnet over iron. The movements of the planetary bodies, Mercury, Venus, Mars, were attributed to an intelligent principle residing in each, guiding and controlling the motions, and ordering all things for the best. It was an epoch in the history of the human mind when astronomy set an example to all other sciences of shaking off its fetichism, and showing that the intricate movements of the heavenly bodies are all capable not only of being explained, but even foretold, if once was admitted the existence of a simple, yet universal, invariable, and eternal law.
Not without difficulty do men perceive that there is nothing inconsistent between invariable law and endlessly varying phenomena, and that it is a more n.o.ble view of the government of this world to impute its order to a penetrating primitive wisdom, which could foresee consequences throughout a future eternity, and provide for them in the original plan at the outset, than to invoke the perpetual intervention of an ever-acting spiritual agency for the purpose of warding off misfortunes that might happen, and setting things to rights. Chemistry furnishes us with a striking example--an example very opportune in the case we are considering--of the doctrine of Diogenes of Apollonia, that the air is actually a spiritual being; for, on the discovery of several of the gases by the earlier experimenters, they were not only regarded as of a spiritual nature, but actually received the name under which they pa.s.s to this day, gheist or gas, from a belief that they were ghosts. If a labourer descended into a well and was suffocated, as if struck dead by some invisible hand; if a lamp lowered down burnt for a few moments with a lurid flame, and was then extinguished; if, in a coal mine, when the unwary workman exposed a light, on a sudden the place was filled with flas.h.i.+ng flames and thundering explosions, tearing down the rocks and destroying every living thing in the way, often, too, without leaving on the dead any marks of violence; what better explanation could be given of such catastrophes than to impute them to some supernatural agent? Nor was there any want, in those times, of well-authenticated stories of unearthly faces and forms seen in such solitudes.
[Sidenote: Origin of psychology.]
The modification made by Diogenes in the theory of Anaximenes, by converting it from a physical into a psychological system, is important, as marking the beginning of the special philosophy of Greece. The investigation of the intellectual development of the universe led the Greeks to the study of the intellect itself. In his special doctrine, Diogenes imputed the changeability of the air to its mobility; a property in which he thought it excelled all other substances, because it is among the rarest or thinnest of the elements. It is, however, said by some, who are disposed to transcendentalize his doctrine, that he did not mean the common atmospheric air, but something more attenuated and warm; and since, in its purest state, it const.i.tutes the most perfect intellect, inferior degrees of reason must be owing to an increase of its density and moisture. Upon such a principle, the whole earth is animated by the breath of life; the souls of brutes, which differ from one another so much in intelligence, are only air in its various conditions of moisture and warmth. He explained the production of the world through condensation of the earth from air by cold, the warmth rising upward and forming the sun; in the stars he thought he recognized the respiratory organs of the world. From the preponderance of moist air in the const.i.tution of brutes, he inferred that they are like the insane, incapable of thought, for thickness of the air impedes respiration, and therefore quick apprehension. From the fact that plants have no cavities wherein to receive the air, and are altogether unintelligent, he was led to the principle that the thinking power of man arises from the flowing of that substance throughout the body in the blood. He also explained the superior intelligence of men from their breathing a purer air than the beasts, which carry their nostrils near the ground. In these crude and puerile speculations we have the beginning of mental philosophy.
[Sidenote: Modern discoveries as to the relations of the air.]
[Sidenote: Inter-dependence of animals and plants.]
[Sidenote: Agency of the sun.]
I cannot dismiss the system of the Apollonian without setting in contrast with it the discoveries of modern science respecting the relations of the air. Toward the world of life it stands in a position of wonderful interest. Decomposed into its const.i.tuents by the skill of chemistry, it is no longer looked upon as a h.o.m.ogeneous body; its ingredients have not only been separated, but the functions they discharge have been ascertained. From one of these, carbonic acid, all the various forms of plants arise; that substance being decomposed by the rays of the sun, and furnis.h.i.+ng to vegetables carbon, their chief solid ingredient. All those beautifully diversified organic productions, from the mosses of the icy regions to the palms characteristic of the landscapes of the tropics--all those we cast away as worthless weeds, and those for the obtaining of which we expend the sweat of our brow--all, without any exception, are obtained from the atmosphere by the influence of the sun. And since without plants the life of animals could not be maintained, they const.i.tute the means by which the aerial material, vivified, as it may be said, by the rays of the sun, is conveyed even into the composition of man himself. As food, they serve to repair the waste of the body necessarily occasioned in the acts of moving and thinking. For a time, therefore, these ingredients, once a part of the structure of plants, enter as essential const.i.tuents in the structure of animals. Yet it is only in a momentary way, for the essential condition of animal activity is that there shall be unceasing interst.i.tial death; not a finger can be lifted without the waste of muscular material; not a thought arise without the destruction of cerebral substance. From the animal system the products of decay are forthwith removed, often by mechanisms of the most exquisite construction; but their uses are not ended, for sooner or later they find their way back again into the air, and again serve for the origination of plants. It is needless to trace these changes in all their details; the same order or cycle of progress holds good for the water, the ammonia; they pa.s.s from the inorganic to the living state, and back to the inorganic again; now the same particle is found in the air next aiding in the composition of a plant, then in the body of an animal, and back in the air once more. In this perpetual revolution material particles run, the dominating influence determining and controlling their movement being in that great centre of our system, the sun. From him, in the summer days, plants receive, and, as it were, store up that warmth which, at a subsequent time, is to reappear in the glow of health of man, or to be rekindled in the blush of shame, or to consume in the burning fever. Nor is there any limit of time. The heat we derive from the combustion of stubble came from the sun as it were only yesterday; but that with which we moderate the rigour of winter when we burn anthracite or bituminous coal was also derived from the same source in the ultra-tropical climate of the secondary times, perhaps a thousand centuries ago.
In such perpetually recurring cycles are the movements of material things accomplished, and all takes place under the dominion of invariable law. The air is the source whence all organisms have come; it is the receptacle to which they all return. Its parts are awakened into life, not by the influence of any terrestrial agency or principle concealed in itself, as Diogenes supposed, but by a star which is ninety millions of miles distant, the source, direct or indirect, of every terrestrial movement, and the dispenser of light and life.
[Sidenote: Herac.l.i.tus a.s.serts that fire is the first principle.]
[Sidenote: The fict.i.tious permanence of successive forms.]
To Thales and Diogenes, whose primordial elements were water and air respectively, we must add Herac.l.i.tus of Ephesus, who maintained that the first principle is fire. He ill.u.s.trated the tendency which Greek philosophy had already a.s.sumed of opposition to Polytheism and the idolatrous practices of the age. It is said that in his work, ethical, political, physical, and theological subjects were so confused, and so great was the difficulty of understanding his meaning, that he obtained the surname of ”the Obscure.” In this respect he has had among modern metaphysicians many successors. He founds his system, however, upon the simple axiom that ”all is convertible into fire, and fire into all.”
Perhaps by the term fire he understood what is at present meant by heat, for he expressly says that he does not mean flame, but something merely dry and warm. He considered that this principle is in a state of perpetual activity, forming and absorbing every individual thing. He says, ”All is, and is not; for though it does in truth come into being, yet it forthwith ceases to be.” ”No one has ever been twice on the same stream, for different waters are constantly flowing down. It dissipates its waters and gathers them again; it approaches and recedes, overflows and fails.” And to teach us that we ourselves are changing and have changed, he says, ”On the same stream we embark and embark not, we are and we are not.” By such ill.u.s.trations he implies that life is only an unceasing motion, and we cannot fail to remark that the Greek turn of thought is fast following that of the Hindu.
But Herac.l.i.tus totally fails to free himself from local conceptions. He speaks of the motion of the primordial principle in the upward and downward directions, in the higher and lower regions. He says that the chief acc.u.mulation thereof is above, and the chief deficiency below: and hence he regards the soul of a man as a portion of fire migrated from heaven. He carries his ideas of the transitory nature of all phenomena to their last consequences, and ill.u.s.trates the n.o.ble doctrine that all which appears to us to be permanent is only a regulated and self-renewing concurrence of similar and opposite motions by such extravagances as that the sun is daily destroyed and renewed.
[Sidenote: Physical and physiological doctrines of Herac.l.i.tus.]
In the midst of many wild physical statements many true axioms are delivered. ”All is ordered by reason and intelligence, though all is subject to Fate.” Already he perceived what the metaphysicians of our own times are ill.u.s.trating, that ”man's mind can produce no certain knowledge from its own interior resources alone.” He regarded the organs of sense as being the channels through which the outer life of the world, and therewith truth, enters into the mind, and that in sleep, when the organs of sense are closed, we are shut out from all communion with the surrounding universal spirit. In his view every thing is animated and insouled, but to different degrees, organic objects being most completely or perfectly so. His astronomy may be antic.i.p.ated from what has been said respecting the sun, which he moreover regarded as being scarcely more than a foot in diameter, and, like all other celestial objects, a mere meteor. His moral system was altogether based upon the physical, the fundamental dogma being the excellence of fire.
Thus he accounted for the imbecility of the drunkard by his having a moist soul, and drew the inference that a warm or dry soul is the wisest and best; with justifiable patriotism a.s.serting that the n.o.blest souls must belong to a climate that is dry, intending thereby to indicate that Greece is man's fittest and truest country. There can be no doubt that in Herac.l.i.tus there is a strong tendency to the doctrine of a soul of the world. If the divinity is undistinguishable from heat, whither can we go to escape its influences? And in the restless activity and incessant changes it produces in every thing within our reach, do we not recognize the tokens of the illimitable and unshackled?
[Sidenote: The puerility of Ionian philosophy.]
I have lingered on the chief features of the early Greek philosophy as exhibited in the physical school of Ionia. They serve to impress upon us its intrinsic imperfection. It is a mixture of the physical, metaphysical, and mystical which, upon the whole, has no other value than this, that it shows how feeble were the beginnings of our knowledge--that we commenced with the importation of a few vulgar errors from Egypt. In presence of the utilitarian philosophy of that country and the theology of India, how vain and even childish are these germs of science in Greece! Yet this very imperfection is not without its use, since it warns us of the inferior position in which we stand as respects the time of our civilization when compared with those ancient states, and teaches us to reject the a.s.sertion which so many European scholars have wearied themselves in establis.h.i.+ng, that Greece led the way to all human knowledge of any value. Above all, it impresses upon us more appropriate, because more humble views of our present attainments and position, and gives us to understand that other races of men not only preceded us in intellectual culture, but have equalled, and perhaps surpa.s.sed every thing that we have yet done in mental philosophy.
[Sidenote: Anaximander's doctrine of the Infinite.]
[Sidenote: Origin of cosmogony.]
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