The Legacy of GREECE

Essays by Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath,
D’Arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee,
A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield

Edited by
R. W. LIVINGSTONE

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE
UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
BY JOHN JOHNSON
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

In spite of many differences, no age has had closer affinities with
Ancient Greece than our own; none has based its deeper life so largely
on ideals which the Greeks brought into the world. History does not
repeat itself. Yet, if the twentieth century searched through the past
for its nearest spiritual kin, it is in the fifth and following
centuries before Christ that they would be found. Again and again, as we
study Greek thought and literature, behind the veil woven by time and
distance, the face that meets us is our own, younger, with fewer lines
and wrinkles on its features and with more definite and deliberate
purpose in its eyes. For these reasons we are to-day in a position, as
no other age has been, to understand Ancient Greece, to learn the
lessons it teaches, and, in studying the ideals and fortunes of men with
whom we have so much in common, to gain a fuller power of understanding
and estimating our own. This book—the first of its kind in
English—aims at giving some idea of what the world owes to Greece in
various realms of the spirit and the intellect, and of what it can still
learn from her.

The Editor.

October 1921.

[ix]

CONTENTS

• PAGE
• THE VALUE OF GREECE TO THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD. By Gilbert Murray,
  F.B.A., Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford 1
• RELIGION. By W. R. Inge, D.D., Dean of St. Paul’s 25
• PHILOSOPHY. By J. Burnett, F.B.A., Professor of Greek in the University
  of St. Andrews 57
• MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY. By Sir T. L. Heath, K.C.B., K.C.V.O., F.R.S.
  97
• NATURAL SCIENCE. By D’Arcy W. Thompson, F.R.S., Professor of
  Natural History in the University of St. Andrews 137
• BIOLOGY. By Charles Singer, Lecturer in the History of Medicine in
  University College, London 163
• MEDICINE. By Charles Singer 201
• LITERATURE. By R. W. Livingstone, Fellow of Corpus Christi College,
  Oxford 249
• HISTORY. By Arnold Toynbee, Koraés Professor of Byzantine and
  Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History in the University of
  London 289[x]
• POLITICAL THOUGHT. By A. E. Zimmern, late Wilson Professor of
  International Politics, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth 321
• THE LAMPS OF GREEK ART. By Percy Gardner, F.B.A., Merton Professor of
  Classical Archaeology in the University of Oxford 353
• ARCHITECTURE. By Sir Reginald Blomfield, F.S.A., R.A. 397

[1]

THE VALUE OF GREECE TO THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD

If the value of man’s life on earth is to be measured in dollars
and miles and horse-power, ancient Greece must count as a
poverty-stricken and a minute territory; its engines and implements were
nearer to the spear and bow of the savage than to our own telegraph and
aeroplane. Even if we neglect merely material things and take as our
standard the actual achievements of the race in conduct and in
knowledge, the average clerk who goes to town daily, idly glancing at
his morning newspaper, is probably a better behaved and infinitely
better informed person than the average Athenian who sat spellbound at
the tragedies of Aeschylus. It is only by the standard of the spirit, to
which the thing achieved is little and the quality of mind that achieved
it much, which cares less for the sum of knowledge attained than for the
love of knowledge, less for much good policing than for one free act of
heroism, that the great age of Greece can be judged as something
extraordinary and unique in value.

By this standard, if it is a legitimate and reasonable one to apply, we
shall be able to understand why classical Greek literature was the basis
of education throughout all later antiquity; why its re-discovery,
however fragmentary and however imperfectly understood, was able to
intoxicate the keenest minds of Europe and constitute a kind of
spiritual ‘Re-birth’, and how its further and further
exploration may be still a task worth men’s spending their lives
upon and capable of giving mankind guidance as well as inspiration.

[2]
But is such a standard legitimate and reasonable? We shall gain
nothing by unanalysed phrases. But I think surely it is merely the
natural standard of any philosophical historian. Suppose it is argued
that an average optician at the present day knows more optics than Roger
Bacon, the inventor of spectacles; suppose it is argued that therefore
he is, as far as optics go, a greater man, and that Roger Bacon has
nothing to teach us; what is the answer? It is, I suppose, that Roger
Bacon, receiving a certain amount of knowledge from his teachers, had
that in him which turned it to unsuspected directions and made it
immensely greater and more fruitful. The average optician has probably
added a little to what he was taught, but not much, and has doubtless
forgotten or confused a good deal. So that, if by studying Roger
Bacon’s life or his books we could get into touch with his mind
and acquire some of that special moving and inspiring quality of his, it
would help us far more than would the mere knowledge of the optician.

This truth is no doubt hard to see in the case of purely technical
science; in books of wider range, such as Darwin’s for instance,
it is easy for any reader to feel the presence of a really great mind,
producing inspiration of a different sort from that of the most
excellent up-to-date examination text-book. In philosophy, religion,
poetry, and the highest kinds of art, the greatness of the
author’s mind seems as a rule to be all that matters; one almost
ignores the date at which he worked. This is because in technical
sciences the element of mere fact, or mere knowledge, is so enormous,
the elements of imagination, character, and the like so very small.
Hence, books on science, in a progressive age, very quickly become
‘out of date’, and each new edition usually supersedes the
last. It is the rarest thing for a work of science to survive as a
text-book more than ten years or so. Newton’s Principia is
almost an isolated instance among modern writings.

[3]
Yet there are some few such books. Up till about the year 1900 the
elements of geometry were regularly taught, throughout Europe, in a
text-book written by a Greek called Eucleides in the fourth or third
century B. C.[1]
That text-book lasted over two thousand years. Now, of
course, people have discovered a number of faults in Euclid, but it has
taken them all that time to do it.

Again, I knew an old gentleman who told me that, at a good English
school in the early nineteenth century, he had been taught the
principles of grammar out of a writer called Dionysius Thrax, or Denis
of Thrace. Denis was a Greek of the first century B. C., who made or
carried out the remarkable discovery that there was such a thing as a
science of grammar, i. e. that men in their daily speech were
unconsciously obeying an extraordinarily subtle and intricate body of
laws, which were capable of being studied and reduced to order. Denis
did not make the whole discovery himself; he was led to it by his master
Aristarchus and others. And his book had been re-edited several times in
the nineteen-hundred odd years before this old gentleman was taught it.

To take a third case: all through later antiquity and the middle ages
the science of medicine was based on the writings of two ancient
doctors, Hippocrates and Galen. Galen was a Greek who lived at Rome in
the early Empire, Hippocrates a Greek who lived at the island of Cos in
the fifth century B. C. A great part of the history of modern medicine
is a story of emancipation from the dead hand of these great ancients.
But one little treatise attributed to Hippocrates was in active use in
the training of medical students in my own day in Scotland and is still
in use in some American Universities. It was the [4] Oath taken by
medical students in the classic age of Greece when they solemnly faced
the duties of their profession. The disciple swore to honour and obey
his teacher and care for his children if ever they were in need; always
to help his patients to the best of his power; never to use or profess
to use magic or charms or any supernatural means; never to supply poison
or perform illegal operations; never to abuse the special position of
intimacy which a doctor naturally obtains in a sick house, but always on
entering to remember that he goes as a friend and helper to every
individual in it.

We have given up that oath now: I suppose we do not believe so much in
the value of oaths. But the man who first drew up that oath did a great
deed. He realized and defined the meaning of his high calling in words
which doctors of unknown tongues and undiscovered countries accepted
from him and felt to express their aims for well over two thousand
years.

Now what do I want to illustrate by these three instances? The rapidity
with which we are now at last throwing off the last vestiges of the yoke
of Greece? No, not that. I want to point out that even in the realm of
science, where progress is so swift and books so short-lived, the Greeks
of the great age had such genius and vitality that their books lived in
a way that no others have lived. Let us get away from the thought of
Euclid as an inky and imperfect English school-book, to that ancient
Eucleides who, with exceedingly few books but a large table of sand let
into the floor, planned and discovered and put together and re-shaped
the first laws of geometry, till at last he had written one of the great
simple books of the world, a book which should stand a pillar and beacon
to mankind long after all the political world that Eucleides knew had
been swept away and the kings he served were conquered by the Romans,
and the Romans in course of time conquered by the barbarians,
[5] and the
barbarians themselves, with much labour and reluctance, partly by means
of Eucleides’ book, eventually educated; so that at last, in our
own day, they can manage to learn their geometry without it. The time
has come for Euclid to be superseded; let him go. He has surely held the
torch for mankind long enough; and books of science are born to be
superseded. What I want to suggest is that the same extraordinary
vitality of mind which made Hippocrates and Euclid and even Denis of
Thrace last their two thousand years, was also put by the Greeks of the
great age into those activities which are, for the most part at any
rate, not perishable or progressive but eternal.

This is a simple point, but it is so important that we must dwell on it
for a moment. If we read an old treatise on medicine or mechanics, we
may admire it and feel it a work of genius, but we also feel that it is
obsolete: its work is over; we have got beyond it. But when we read
Homer or Aeschylus, if once we have the power to admire and understand
their writing, we do not for the most part have any feeling of having
got beyond them. We have done so no doubt in all kinds of minor things,
in general knowledge, in details of technique, in civilization and the
like; but hardly any sensible person ever imagines that he has got
beyond their essential quality, the quality that has made them great.

Doubtless there is in every art an element of mere knowledge or science,
and that element is progressive. But there is another element, too,
which does not depend on knowledge and which does not progress but has a
kind of stationary and eternal value, like the beauty of the dawn, or
the love of a mother for her child, or the joy of a young animal in
being alive, or the courage of a martyr facing torment. We cannot for
all our progress get beyond these things; there they stand, like light
upon the mountains. The only question is whether we[6] can rise to them.
And it is the same with all the greatest births of human imagination. As
far as we can speculate, there is not the faintest probability of any
poet ever setting to work on, let us say, the essential effect aimed at
by Aeschylus in the Cassandra-scene of the Agamemnon, and doing it
better than Aeschylus. The only thing which the human race has to do
with that scene is to understand it and get out of it all the joy and
emotion and wonder that it contains.

This eternal quality is perhaps clearest in poetry: in poetry the
mixture of knowledge matters less. In art there is a constant
development of tools and media and technical processes. The modern
artist can feel that, though he cannot, perhaps, make as good a statue
as Pheidias, he could here and there have taught Pheidias something: and
at any rate he can try his art on subjects far more varied and more
stimulating to his imagination. In philosophy the mixture is more subtle
and more profound. Philosophy always depends in some sense upon science,
yet the best philosophy seems generally to have in it some eternal
quality of creative imagination. Plato wrote a dialogue about the
constitution of the world, the Timaeus, which was highly influential
in later Greece, but seems to us, with our vastly superior scientific
knowledge, almost nonsensical. Yet when Plato writes about the theory of
knowledge or the ultimate meaning of Justice or of Love, no good
philosopher can afford to leave him aside: the chief question is whether
we can rise to the height and subtlety of his thought.

And here another point emerges, equally simple and equally important if
we are to understand our relation to the past. Suppose a man says:
‘I quite understand that Plato or Aeschylus may have had fine
ideas, but surely anything of value which they said must long before
this have become common property. There is no need to go back to the
Greeks for it. We do not go back and read Copernicus to learn that[7] the
earth goes round the sun.’ What is the answer? It is that such a
view ignores exactly this difference between the progressive and the
eternal, between knowledge and imagination. If Harvey discovers that the
blood is not stationary but circulates, if Copernicus discovers that the
earth goes round the sun and not the sun round the earth, those
discoveries can easily be communicated in the most abbreviated form. If
a mechanic invents an improvement on the telephone, or a social reformer
puts some good usage in the place of a bad one, in a few years we shall
probably all be using the improvement without even knowing what it is or
saying Thank you. We may be as stupid as we like, we have in a sense got
the good of it.

But can one apply the same process to Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet?
Can any one tell us in a few words what they come to? Or can a person
get the good of them in any way except one—the way of vivid and loving
study, following and feeling the author’s meaning all through? To
suppose, as I believe some people do, that you can get the value of a
great poem by studying an abstract of it in an encyclopaedia or by
reading cursorily an average translation of it, argues really a kind of
mental deficiency, like deafness or colour-blindness. The things that we
have called eternal, the things of the spirit and the imagination,
always seem to lie more in a process than in a result, and can only be
reached and enjoyed by somehow going through the process again. If the
value of a particular walk lies in the scenery, you do not get that
value by taking a short cut or using a fast motor-car.

In looking back, then, upon any vital and significant age of the past we
shall find objects of two kinds. First, there will be things like the
Venus of Milo or the Book of Job or Plato’s Republic, which are
interesting or precious in themselves, because of their own inherent
qualities; secondly, there will[8] be things like the Roman code of the
Twelve Tables or the invention of the printing-press or the record of
certain great battles, which are interesting chiefly because they are
causes of other and greater things or form knots in the great web of
history—the first having artistic interest, the second only historical
interest, though, of course, it is obvious that in any concrete case
there is generally a mixture of both.

Now Ancient Greece is important in both ways. For the artist or poet it
has in a quite extraordinary degree the quality of beauty. For instance,
to take a contrast with Rome: if you dig about the Roman Wall in
Cumberland you will find quantities of objects, altars, inscriptions,
figurines, weapons, boots and shoes, which are full of historic interest
but are not much more beautiful than the contents of a modern rubbish
heap. And the same is true of most excavations all over the world. But
if you dig at any classical or sub-classical site in the Greek world,
however unimportant historically, practically every object you find will
be beautiful. The wall itself will be beautiful; the inscriptions will
be beautifully cut; the figurines, however cheap and simple, may have
some intentional grotesques among them, but the rest will have a special
truthfulness and grace; the vases will be of good shapes and the
patterns will be beautiful patterns. If you happen to dig in a
burying-place and come across some epitaphs on the dead, they will
practically all—even when the verses do not quite scan and the words
are wrongly spelt—have about them this inexplicable touch of beauty.

I am anxious not to write nonsense about this. One could prove the point
in detail by taking any collection of Greek epitaphs, and that is the
only way in which it can be proved. The beauty is a fact, and if we try
to analyse the sources of it we shall perhaps in part understand how it
has come to pass.

[9]
In the first place, it is not a beauty of ornament; it is a beauty of
structure, a beauty of rightness and simplicity. Compare an athlete in
flannels playing tennis and a stout dignitary smothered in gold robes.
Or compare a good modern yacht, swift, lithe, and plain, with a
lumbering heavily gilded sixteenth-century galleon, or even with a
Chinese state junk: the yacht is far the more beautiful though she has
not a hundredth part of the ornament. It is she herself that is
beautiful, because her lines and structure are right. The others are
essentially clumsy and, therefore, ugly things, dabbed over with gold
and paint. Now ancient Greek things for the most part have the beauty of
the yacht. The Greeks used paint a good deal, but apart from that a
Greek temple is almost as plain as a shed: people accustomed to
arabesques and stained glass and gargoyles can very often see nothing in
it. A Greek statue has as a rule no ornament at all: a young man racing
or praying, an old man thinking, there it stands expressed in a stately
and simple convention, true or false, the anatomy and the surfaces right
or wrong, aiming at no beauty except the truest. It would probably seem
quite dull to the maker of a mediaeval wooden figure of a king which I
remember seeing in a town in the east of Europe: a crown blazing with
many-coloured glass, a long crimson robe covered with ornaments and
beneath them an idiot face, no bones, no muscles, no attitude. That is
not what a Greek meant by beauty. The same quality holds to a great
extent of Greek poetry. Not, of course, that the artistic convention was
the same, or at all similar, for treating stone and for treating
language. Greek poetry is statuesque in the sense that it depends
greatly on its organic structure; it is not in the least so in the sense
of being cold or colourless or stiff. But Greek poetry on the whole has
a bareness and severity which disappoints a modern reader, accustomed as
he is to lavish ornament and exaggeration at[10] every turn. It has the
same simplicity and straightforwardness as Greek sculpture. The poet has
something to say and he says it as well and truly as he can in the
suitable style, and if you are not interested you are not. With some
exceptions which explain themselves he does not play a thousand pretty
tricks and antics on the way, so that you may forget the dullness of
what he says in amusement at the draperies in which he wraps it.

But here comes an apparent difficulty. Greek poetry, we say, is very
direct, very simple, very free from irrelevant ornament. And yet when we
translate it into English and look at our translation, our main feeling,
I think, is that somehow the glory has gone: a thing that was high and
lordly has become poor and mean. Any decent Greek scholar when he opens
one of his ancient poets feels at once the presence of something lofty
and rare—something like the atmosphere of Paradise Lost. But the
language of Paradise Lost is elaborately twisted and embellished into
loftiness and rarity; the language of the Greek poem is simple and
direct. What does this mean?

I can only suppose that the normal language of Greek poetry is in itself
in some sense sublime. Most critics accept this as an obvious fact, yet,
if true, it is a very strange fact and worth thinking about. It depends
partly on mere euphony: Khaireis horôn fôs is probably more beautiful
in sound than ‘You rejoice to see the light’, but euphony
cannot be everything. The sound of a great deal of Greek poetry, either
as we pronounce it, or as the ancients pronounced it, is to modern ears
almost ugly. It depends partly, perhaps, on the actual structure of the
Greek language: philologists tell us that, viewed as a specimen, it is
in structure and growth and in power of expressing things, the most
perfect language they know. And certainly one often finds that a thought
can be expressed with ease and grace in Greek which becomes clumsy and
involved in Latin,[11]
English, French or German. But neither of these
causes goes, I think, to the root of the matter.

What is it that gives words their character and makes a style high or
low? Obviously, their associations; the company they habitually keep in
the minds of those who use them. A word which belongs to the language of
bars and billiard saloons will become permeated by the normal standard
of mind prevalent in such places; a word which suggests Milton or
Carlyle will have the flavour of those men’s minds about it. I
therefore cannot resist the conclusion that, if the language of Greek
poetry has, to those who know it intimately, this special quality of
keen austere beauty, it is because the minds of the poets who used that
language were habitually toned to a higher level both of intensity and
of nobility than ours. It is a finer language because it expresses the
minds of finer men. By ‘finer men’ I do not necessarily mean
men who behaved better, either by our standards or by their own; I mean
men to whom the fine things of the world, sunrise and sea and stars and
the love of man for man, and strife and the facing of evil for the sake
of good, and even common things like meat and drink, and evil things
like hate and terror, had, as it were, a keener edge than they have for
us and roused a swifter and a nobler reaction.

Let us resume this argument before going further. We start from the
indisputable fact that the Greeks of about the fifth century B. C. did
for some reason or other produce various works of art, buildings and
statues and books, especially books, which instead of decently dying or
falling out of fashion in the lifetime of the men who made them, lasted
on and can still cause high thoughts and intense emotions. In trying to
explain this strange fact we notice that the Greeks had a great and
pervading instinct for beauty, and for beauty of a particular kind. It
is a beauty which never lies in irrelevant ornament,
[12] but always in the
very essence and structure of the object made. In literature we found
that the special beauty which we call Greek depends partly on the
directness, truthfulness, and simplicity with which the Greeks say what
they want to say, and partly on a special keenness and nobility in the
language, which seems to be the natural expression of keen and noble
minds. Can we in any way put all these things together so as to explain
them—or at any rate to hold them together more clearly?

An extremely old and often misleading metaphor will help us. People have
said: ‘The world was young then.’ Of course, strictly
speaking, it was not. In the total age of the world or of man the two
thousand odd years between us and Pericles do not count for much. Nor
can we imagine that a man of sixty felt any more juvenile in the fifth
century B. C. than he does now. It was just the other way, because at
that time there were no spectacles or false teeth. Yet in a sense the
world was young then, at any rate our western world, the world of
progress and humanity. For the beginnings of nearly all the great things
that progressive minds now care for were then being laid in Greece.

Youth, perhaps, is not exactly the right word. There are certain
plants—some kinds of aloe, for instance—which continue for an
indefinite number of years in a slow routine of ordinary life close to
the ground, and then suddenly, when they have stored enough vital force,
grow ten feet high and burst into flower, after which, no doubt, they
die or show signs of exhaustion. Apart from the dying, it seems as if
something like that happened from time to time to the human race, or to
such parts of it as really bear flowers at all. For most races and
nations during the most of their life are not progressive but simply
stagnant, sometimes just managing to preserve their standard customs,
sometimes slipping back to[13]
the slough. That is why history has nothing
to say about them. The history of the world consists mostly in the
memory of those ages, quite few in number, in which some part of the
world has risen above itself and burst into flower or fruit.

We ourselves happen to live in the midst or possibly in the close of one
such period. More change has probably taken place in daily life, in
ideas, and in the general aspect of the earth during the last century
than during any four other centuries since the Christian era: and this
fact has tended to make us look on rapid progress as a normal condition
of the human race, which it never has been. And another such period of
bloom, a bloom comparatively short in time and narrow in area, but
amazingly swift and intense, occurred in the lower parts of the Balkan
peninsula from about the sixth to the fourth centuries before Christ.

Now it is this kind of bloom which fills the world with hope and
therefore makes it young. Take a man who has just made a discovery or an
invention, a man happily in love, a man who is starting some great and
successful social movement, a man who is writing a book or painting a
picture which he knows to be good; take men who have been fighting in
some great cause which before they fought seemed to be hopeless and now
is triumphant; think of England when the Armada was just defeated,
France at the first dawn of the Revolution, America after Yorktown: such
men and nations will be above themselves. Their powers will be stronger
and keener; there will be exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in
new paths, of dawning hopes and untried possibilities, a confidence that
all things can be won if only we try hard enough. In that sense the
world will be young. In that sense I think it was young in the time of
Themistocles and Aeschylus. And it is that youth which is half the
secret of the Greek spirit.

And here I may meet an objection that has perhaps been
[14] lurking in the
minds of many readers. ‘All this,’ they may say,
‘professes to be a simple analysis of known facts, but in reality
is sheer idealization. These Greeks whom you call so “noble”
have been long since exposed. Anthropology has turned its searchlights
upon them. It is not only their ploughs, their weapons, their musical
instruments, and their painted idols that resemble those of the savages;
it is everything else about them. Many of them were sunk in the most
degrading superstitions: many practised unnatural vices: in times of
great fear some were apt to think that the best “medicine”
was a human sacrifice. After that, it is hardly worth mentioning that
their social structure was largely based on slavery; that they lived in
petty little towns, like so many wasps’ nests, each at war with
its next-door neighbour, and half of them at war with themselves!’

If our anti-Greek went further he would probably cease to speak the
truth. We will stop him while we can still agree with him. These charges
are on the whole true, and, if we are to understand what Greece means,
we must realize and digest them. We must keep hold of two facts: first,
that the Greeks of the fifth century produced some of the noblest poetry
and art, the finest political thinking, the most vital philosophy, known
to the world; second, that the people who heard and saw, nay perhaps,
even the people who produced these wonders, were separated by a thin and
precarious interval from the savage. Scratch a civilized Russian, they
say, and you find a wild Tartar. Scratch an ancient Greek, and you hit,
no doubt, on a very primitive and formidable being, somewhere between a
Viking and a Polynesian.

That is just the magic and the wonder of it. The spiritual effort
implied is so tremendous. We have read stories of savage chiefs
converted by Christian or Buddhist missionaries, who within a year or so
have turned from drunken corroborees and
[15] bloody witch-smellings to a
life that is not only godly but even philanthropic and statesmanlike. We
have seen the Japanese lately go through some centuries of normal growth
in the space of a generation. But in all such examples men have only
been following the teaching of a superior civilization, and after all,
they have not ended by producing works of extraordinary and original
genius. It seems quite clear that the Greeks owed exceedingly little to
foreign influence. Even in their decay they were a race, as Professor
Bury observes, accustomed ‘to take little and to give much’.
They built up their civilization for themselves. We must listen with due
attention to the critics who have pointed out all the remnants of
savagery and superstition that they find in Greece: the slave-driver,
the fetish-worshipper and the medicine-man, the trampler on women, the
bloodthirsty hater of all outside his own town and party. But it is not
those people that constitute Greece; those people can be found all over
the historical world, commoner than blackberries. It is not anything
fixed and stationary that constitutes Greece: what constitutes Greece is
the movement which leads from all these to the Stoic or fifth-century
‘sophist’ who condemns and denies slavery, who has abolished
all cruel superstitions and preaches some religion based on philosophy
and humanity, who claims for women the same spiritual rights as for man,
who looks on all human creatures as his brethren, and the world as
‘one great City of gods and men’. It is that movement which
you will not find elsewhere, any more than the statues of Pheidias or
the dialogues of Plato or the poems of Aeschylus and Euripides.

From all this two or three results follow. For one thing, being built up
so swiftly, by such keen effort, and from so low a starting-point, Greek
civilization was, amid all its glory, curiously unstable and full of
flaws. Such flaws made it, of
[16] course, much worse for those who lived in
it, but they hardly make it less interesting or instructive to those who
study it. Rather the contrary. Again, the near neighbourhood of the
savage gives to the Greek mind certain qualities which we of the safer
and solider civilizations would give a great deal to possess. It springs
swift and straight. It is never jaded. Its wonder and interest about the
world are fresh. And lastly there is one curious and very important
quality which, unless I am mistaken, belongs to Greek civilization more
than to any other. To an extraordinary degree it starts clean from
nature, with almost no entanglements of elaborate creeds and customs and
traditions.

I am not, of course, forgetting the prehistoric Minoan civilization, nor
yet the peculiar forms—mostly simple enough—into which the traditional
Greek religion fell. It is possible that I may be a little misled by my
own habit of living much among Greek things and so forgetting through
long familiarity how odd some of them once seemed. But when all
allowances are made, I think that this clean start from nature is, on
the whole, a true claim. If a thoughtful European or American wants to
study Chinese or Indian things, he has not only to learn certain data of
history and mythology, he has to work his mind into a particular
attitude; to put on, as it were, spectacles of a particular sort. If he
wants to study mediaeval things, if he takes even so universal a poet as
Dante, it is something the same. Curious views about the Pope and the
emperor, a crabbed scholastic philosophy, a strange and to the modern
mind rather horrible theology, floating upon the flames of Hell: all
these have somehow to be taken into his imagination before he can
understand his Dante. With Greek things this is very much less so. The
historical and imaginative background of the various great poets and
philosophers is, no doubt, highly important. A great part of the work of
modern scholarship[17]
is now devoted to getting it clearer. But on the
whole, putting aside for the moment the possible inadequacies of
translation, Greek philosophy speaks straight to any human being who is
willing to think simply, Greek art and poetry to any one who can use his
imagination and enjoy beauty. He has not to put on the fetters or the
blinkers of any new system in order to understand them; he has only to
get rid of his own—a much more profitable and less troublesome task.

This particular conclusion will scarcely, I think, be disputed, but the
point presents difficulties and must be dwelt upon.

In the first place, it does not mean that Greek art is what we call
‘naturalist’ or ‘realist’. It is markedly the
reverse. Art to the Greek is always a form of Sophia, or Wisdom, a
Technê with rules that have to be learnt. Its air of utter simplicity
is deceptive. The pillar that looks merely straight is really a thing of
subtle curves. The funeral bas-relief that seems to represent in the
simplest possible manner a woman saying good-bye to her child is
arranged, plane behind plane, with the most delicate skill and sometimes
with deliberate falsification of perspective. There is always some
convention, some idealization, some touch of the light that never was on
sea or land. Yet all the time, I think, Greek art remains in a
remarkable degree close to nature. The artist’s eye is always on
the object, and, though he represents it in his own style, that style is
always normal and temperate, free from affectation, free from
exaggeration or morbidity and, in the earlier periods, free from
conventionality. It is art without doubt; but it is natural and normal
art, such as grew spontaneously when mankind first tried in freedom to
express beauty. For example, the language of Greek poetry is markedly
different from that of prose, and there are even clear differences of
language between different styles of poetry. And further, the poetry is
very seldom about the present. It is about the past,
[18] and that an ideal
past. What we have to notice there is that this kind of rule, which has
been usual in all great ages of poetry, is apparently not an artificial
or arbitrary thing but a tendency that grew up naturally with the first
great expressions of poetical feeling.

Furthermore, this closeness to nature, this absence of a unifying or
hide-bound system of thought, acting together with other causes, has led
to the extraordinary variety and many-sidedness which is one of the most
puzzling charms of Ancient Greece as contrasted, say, with Israel or
Assyria or early Rome. Geographically it is a small country with a
highly indented coast-line and an interior cut into a great number of
almost isolated valleys. Politically it was a confused unity made up of
numerous independent states, one walled city of a few thousand
inhabitants being quite enough to form a state. And the citizens of
these states were, each of them, rather excessively capable of forming
opinions of their own and fighting for them. Hence came in practice much
isolation and faction and general weakness, to the detriment of the
Greeks themselves; but the same cause led in thought and literature to
immense variety and vitality, to the great gain of us who study the
Greeks afterwards. There is hardly any type of thought or style of
writing which cannot be paralleled in ancient Greece, only they will
there be seen, as it were, in their earlier and simpler forms. Traces of
all the things that seem most un-Greek can be found somewhere in Greek
literature: voluptuousness, asceticism, the worship of knowledge, the
contempt for knowledge, atheism, pietism, the religion of serving the
world and the religion of turning away from the world: all these and
almost all other points of view one can think of are represented
somewhere in the records of that one small people. And there is hardly
any single generalization in this chapter which the author himself could
not controvert by examples to the contrary.
[19] You feel in general a great
absence of all fetters: the human mind free, rather inexperienced,
intensely interested in life and full of hope, trying in every direction
for that excellence which the Greeks called aretê, and guided by some
peculiar instinct toward Temperance and Beauty.

The variety is there and must not be forgotten; yet amid the variety
there are certain general or central characteristics, mostly due to this
same quality of freshness and closeness to nature.

If you look at a Greek statue or bas-relief, or if you read an average
piece of Aristotle, you will very likely at first feel bored. Why?
Because it is all so normal and truthful; so singularly free from
exaggeration, paradox, violent emphasis; so destitute of those
fascinating by-forms of insanity which appeal to some similar faint
element of insanity in ourselves. ‘We are sick’, we may
exclaim, ‘of the sight of these handsome, perfectly healthy men
with grave faces and normal bones and muscles! We are sick of being told
that Virtue is a mean between two extremes and tends to make men happy!
We shall not be interested unless some one tells us that Virtue is the
utter abnegation of self, or, it may be, the extreme and ruthless
assertion of self; or again, that Virtue is all an infamous mistake! And
for statues, give us a haggard man with starved body and cavernous eyes,
cursing God—or give us something rolling in fat and colour….’

What is at the back of this sort of feeling? which I admit often takes
more reasonable forms than these I have suggested. It is the same
psychological cause that brings about the changes of fashion in art or
dress: which loves ‘stunts’ and makes the fortunes of yellow
newspapers. It is boredom or ennui. We have had too much of A; we are
sick of it, we know how it is done and despise it; give us some B, or
better still some Z. And after a strong dose of Z we shall crave for the
beginning[20]
of the alphabet again. But now think of a person who is not
bored at all; who is, on the contrary, immensely interested in the
world, keen to choose good things and reject bad ones; full of the
desire for knowledge and the excitement of discovery. The joy to him is
to see things as they are and to judge them normally. He is not bored by
the sight of normal, healthy muscles in a healthy, well-shaped body; he
is delighted. If you distort the muscles for emotional effect, he would
say with disappointment: ‘But that is ugly!’ or ‘But a
man’s muscles do not go like that!’ He will have noted
that tears are salt and rather warm; but if you say like a modern poet
that your heroine’s tears are ‘more hot than fire, more salt
than the salt sea’, he will probably think your statement απιθανον
‘unpersuasive’, and therefore ψυχρον
‘chilling’.

It is perhaps especially in the religious and moral sphere that we are
accustomed to the habitual use of ecstatic language: expressions that
are only true of exalted moments are used by us as the commonplaces of
ordinary life. ‘It is a thousand times worse to see another suffer
than to suffer oneself.’ ‘True love only desires the
happiness of the beloved object.’ This kind of ‘high
falutin’’ has become part of our regular mental habit, just
as dead metaphors by the bushel are a part of our daily language.
Consequently we are a little chilled and disappointed by a language in
which people hardly ever use a metaphor except when they vividly realize
it, and never utter heroic sentiments except when they are wrought up to
the pitch of feeling them true. Does this mean that the Greek always
remains, so to speak, at a normal temperature, that he never has intense
or blinding emotions? Not in the least. It shows a lack of faith in the
value of life to imagine such a conclusion. It implies that you can only
reach great emotion by pretence, or by habitually exaggerating small
emotions, whereas probably the exact reverse is the case. When[21] the
great thing comes, then the Greek will have the great word and the great
thought ready. It is the habitual exaggerator who will perhaps be
bankrupt. And after all—the great things are sure to come!

The power of seeing things straight and knowing what is beautiful or
noble, quite undisturbed by momentary boredoms or changes of taste, is a
very rare gift and never perhaps possessed in full by any one. But there
is a profound rule of art, bidding a man in the midst of all his study
of various styles or his pursuit of his own peculiar imaginations, from
time to time se retremper dans la nature—‘to steep himself
again in nature’. And in something the same way it seems as if the
world ought from time to time to steep itself again in Hellenism: that
is, it ought, amid all the varying affectations and extravagances and
changes of convention in art and letters, to have some careful regard
for those which arose when man first awoke to the meaning of truth and
beauty and saw the world freely as a new thing.

Is this exaggeration? I think not. But no full defence of it can be
attempted here. In this essay we have been concerned almost entirely
with the artistic interest of Greece. It would be equally possible to
dwell on the historical interest. Then we should find that, for that
branch of mankind which is responsible for western civilization, the
seeds of almost all that we count best in human progress were sown in
Greece. The conception of beauty as a joy in itself and as a guide in
life was first and most vividly expressed in Greece, and the very laws
by which things are beautiful or ugly were to a great extent discovered
there and laid down. The conception of Freedom and Justice, freedom in
body, in speech and in mind, justice between the strong and the weak,
the rich and the poor, penetrates the whole of Greek political thought,
and was, amid obvious flaws, actually realized to a remarkable degree
[22]
in the best Greek communities. The conception of Truth as an end to
pursue for its own sake, a thing to discover and puzzle out by
experiment and imagination and especially by Reason, a conception
essentially allied with that of Freedom and opposed both to anarchy and
to blind obedience, has perhaps never in the world been more clearly
grasped than by the early Greek writers on science and philosophy. One
stands amazed sometimes at the perfect freedom of their thought. Another
conception came rather later, when the small City States with exclusive
rights of citizenship had been merged in a larger whole: the conception
of the universal fellowship between man and man. Greece realized soon
after the Persian war that she had a mission to the world, that
Hellenism stood for the higher life of man as against barbarism, for
Aretê, or Excellence, as against the mere effortless average. First came
the crude patriotism which regarded every Greek as superior to every
barbarian; then came reflection, showing that not all Greeks were true
bearers of the light, nor all barbarians its enemies; that Hellenism was
a thing of the spirit and not dependent on the race to which a man
belonged or the place where he was born: then came the new word and
conception ανθρωποτης, humanitas, which to the Stoics made
the world as one brotherhood. No people known to history clearly
formulated these ideals before the Greeks, and those who have spoken the
words afterwards seem for the most part to be merely echoing the
thoughts of old Greek men.

These ideas, the pursuit of Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Excellence are not
everything. They have been a leaven of unrest in the world; they have
held up a light which was not always comforting to the eyes to see.
There is another ideal which is generally stronger and may, for all we
know, in the end stamp them out as evil things. There is Submission
instead[23]
of Freedom, the deadening or brutalizing of the senses instead
of Beauty, the acceptance of tradition instead of the pursuit of Truth,
the belief in hallucination or passion instead of Reason and Temperate
Thought, the obscuring of distinctions between good and bad and the
acceptance of all human beings and all states of mind as equal in value.
If something of this kind should prove in the end to be right for man,
then Greece will have played the part of the great wrecker in human
history. She will have held up false lights which have lured our ship to
dangerous places. But at any rate, through calm and storm, she does hold
her lights; she lit them first of the nations and held them during her
short reign the clearest; and whether we believe in an individual life
founded on Freedom, Reason, Beauty, Excellence and the pursuit of Truth,
and an international life aiming at the fellowship between man and man,
or whether we think these ideals the great snares of human politics,
there is good cause for some of us in each generation at the cost of
some time and trouble to study such important forces where they first
appear consciously in the minds of our spiritual ancestors. In the
thought and art of ancient Greece, more than any other, we shall find
these forces, and also to some extent their great opposites, fresh,
clean and comparatively uncomplicated, with every vast issue wrought out
on a small material scale and every problem stated in its lowest terms.

Gilbert Murray.

[25]

RELIGION

Those who write about the Greeks must beware of a heresy which is very
rife just now—the theory of racialism. Political ethnology, which is
no genuine science, excused the ambition of the Germans to themselves,
and helped them to wage war; it has suggested to the Allies a method of
waging peace. The false and mischievous doctrine of superior and
inferior races is used to justify oppression in Europe, and murder by
torture in America. It will not help us to understand the Greeks. The
Greeks were a nation of splendid mongrels, made up of the same elements,
differently mixed, as ourselves. Their famous beauty, which had almost
disappeared when Cicero visited Athens, was mainly the result of a
healthy outdoor life and physical training, combined with a very
becoming costume. They were probably not handsomer than Oxford rowing
crews or Eton boys. Their flowering time of genius was due to the same
causes which produced similar results in the Italian Renaissance. The
city-state is a forcing-house of brilliant achievement, though it
quickly uses up its human material. We cannot even regard the Greeks as
a homogeneous mixed race. The Spartiates were almost pure Nordics; the
Athenians almost pure Mediterraneans. The early colonists, from whom
sprang so many of the greatest names in the Hellenic roll of honour, are
not likely to have kept their blood pure. Nor was there ever a Greek
culture shared by all the Greeks. The Spartan system, that of a small
fighting tribe encamped in a subject country, recalls that of
Chaka’s Zulus; Arcadia was bucolic, Aetolia barbarous, Boeotia
stolid, Macedonia half outside the pale. The consciousness of race
among[26]
the Greeks counted practically for about as much as the
consciousness of being white men, or Christians, does in modern
civilization.

Greece for our purposes means not a race, but a culture, a language and
literature, and still more an attitude towards life, which for us begins
with Homer, and persists, with many changes but no breaks, till the
closing of the Athenian lecture-rooms by Justinian. The changes no doubt
were great, when politically Greece was living Greece no more, and when
the bearers of the tradition were no longer the lineal descendants of
those who established it. But the tradition, enshrined in literature, in
monuments, and in social customs, survived. The civilization of the
Roman Empire was not Italian but Greek. After the sixth century,
Hellenism—the language, the literature, and the attitude towards
life—was practically lost to the West for nearly a thousand years. It
was recovered at the Renaissance, and from that time to this has been a
potent element in western civilization. The Dark Ages, and the early
Middle Ages, are the period during which the West was cut off from
Hellenism. Yet even then the severance was not complete. For these were
the ages of the Catholic theocracy; and if we had to choose one man as
the founder of Catholicism as a theocratic system, we should have to
name neither Augustine nor St. Paul, still less Jesus Christ, but Plato,
who in the Laws sketches out with wonderful prescience the conditions
for such a polity, and the form which it would be compelled to take.
Even in speculative thought we know that Augustine owed much to the
Platonists, the Schoolmen to Aristotle, the mystics to the pupil of
Proclus whom they called Dionysius. Only Greek science, and the
scientific spirit, were almost completely lost, and a beginning de
novo had to be made when the West shook off its fetters.

Hellenism then is not the mind of a particular ethnic type, nor of a
particular period. It was not destroyed, though it
[27] was emasculated, by
the loss of political freedom; it was neither killed nor died a natural
death. Its philosophy was continuous from Thales to Proclus, and again
from Ficino and Pico to Lotze and Bradley, after a long sleep which was
not death. Its religion passes into Christian theology and cultus
without any real break. The early Church spoke in Greek and thought in
Greek. In the days of Greek freedom to be a Greek had meant to be a
citizen of a Greek canton; after Alexander it meant to have Greek
culture. None of the great Stoics were natives of Greece proper; Zeno
himself was a Semite. Of the later Greek writers, Marcus Aurelius was a
Romanized Spaniard, Plotinus possibly a Copt, Porphyry and Lucian
Syrians, Philo, St. Paul, and probably the Fourth Evangelist were Jews.
These men all belong to the history of Greek culture. And if these were
Greeks how shall we deny the name to Raphael and Michael Angelo, to
Spenser and Sidney, to Keats and Shelley? When Blake wrote—

he was summing up, not only the philosophy of the Lake Poets but the
fundamental dogma of the maturest Greek thought. Would not Plato have
rejoiced in Michael Angelo’s confession of faith, which Wordsworth
has translated for us?

Has the highest aspect of Greek religion ever been better expressed than
by Wordsworth himself, to whom, as to Blake, it came by inspiration and
not from books?

[28]

The spirit of man does not live only on tradition; it can draw direct
from the fountain-head. We are dealing with a permanent type of human
culture, which is rightly named after the Greeks, since it attained its
chief glory in the literature and art of the Hellenic cities, but which
cannot be separated from western civilization as an alien importation.
Without what we call our debt to Greece we should have neither our
religion nor our philosophy nor our science nor our literature nor our
education nor our politics. We should be mere barbarians. We need not
speculate how much we might ultimately have discovered for ourselves.
Our civilization is a tree which has its roots in Greece, or, to borrow
a more appropriate metaphor from Clement of Alexandria, it is a river
which has received affluents from every side; but its head waters are
Greek. The continuity of Greek thought and practice in religion and
religious philosophy is especially important, and it is necessary to
emphasize it because the accident of our educational curriculum leaves
in the minds of most students a broad chasm between the Stoics and the
Christians, ignores the later Greek philosophy of religion altogether,
and traces Christian dogma back to Palestine, with which it has very
little connexion.

Our sense of continuity is dulled in another way. There is a tendency to
isolate certain aspects of Hellenic life and thought as characteristic,
and to stamp others, which are equally found among the ancient Greeks,
as untypical and exceptional. In the sphere of religion, with which we
are concerned in this essay, we are bidden to regard Plato and Euripides
as rebels[29]
against the national tradition, and not as normal products of
their age and country. I do not feel at liberty to pick and choose in
this fashion. A national character may be best exemplified in its
rebels, a religion in its heretics. If Nietzsche was right in calling
Plato a Christian before Christ, I do not therefore regard him as an
unhellenic Greek. Rather, I trace back to him, and so to Greece, the
religion and the political philosophy of the Christian Church, and the
Christian type of mysticism. If Euripides anticipated to an
extraordinary degree the devout agnosticism, the vague pantheism, the
humanitarian sentiment of the nineteenth (rather than of the twentieth)
century, I do not consider that he was a freak in fifth-century Athens,
but that Greece showed us the way even in paths where we have not been
used to look to her for guidance. I am equally reluctant to assume,
without evidence, that the later Platonism, whether we call it religion
or philosophy, is unhellenic. It is quite unnecessary to look for
Asiatic influences in a school which clung close to the Attic tradition.
It is more to the purpose to show how a religious philosophy of mystical
revelation and introspection grew naturally out of the older
nature-philosophies, just as in our own day metaphysics and science have
both been driven back upon the theory of knowledge and psychology. It
should not be necessary to remind Hellenists that ‘Know
thyself’ passed for the supreme word of wisdom in the classical
period, or that Heracleitus revealed his method in the words ‘I
searched myself’.

We shall come presently to certain parts of our modern heritage which
are not Greek either by origin or by affinity. These will not be found
in Euripides or Plato any more than in Herodotus or Sophocles. But some
developments of religion which our Hellenists particularly dislike, and
are therefore anxious to disclaim as alien to Greek thought and
practice, such as asceticism, sacramental magic, religious persecution,
and timid reliance on authority, are maladies of the Greek
[30] spirit, and
came into the Church from Hellenistic and not from Jewish sources. It
was Cleanthes who wished to treat Aristarchus as the Church treated
Galileo, for anticipating Galileo’s discovery. It was Plutarch, or
rather his revered father, who said, ‘You seem to me to be
handling a very great and dangerous subject, or rather to be raising
questions which ought not to be raised at all, when you question the
opinion we hold about the gods, and ask reasons and proofs for
everything. The ancient and ancestral faith is enough; and if on one
point its fixed and traditional character be disturbed, it will be
undermined and no one will trust it’. It is true that Celsus
accused the Christians of saying, ‘Do not inquire; only
believe.’ But this was not the attitude of Clement and Origen,
still less of that most courageous pioneer St. Paul; it was rather the
attitude of the average devout pagan. At this time the defence of
popular superstition was no longer a matter of mere policy but of
heartfelt need. Marcus Aurelius was a great immolator of white cows. The
Christians were disliked, not as superstitious, but as impious.
Alexander of Abunoteichos expelled ‘Christians and
Epicureans’ by name from his séances. Lucian is the Voltaire of
a credulous age. As for sacerdotal magic, Ovid explicitly ascribed the
ex opere operato doctrine to the Greeks.

The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of the
classical culture. It is neither Asiatic nor mediaeval in its essential
character. It is not Asiatic; Christianity is the least Oriental of all
the great religions. The Semites either shook it off and reverted to a
Judaism purged of its Hellenic elements, or enrolled themselves with
fervour under the banner of Islam, which Westcott called ‘a
petrified Judaism’.[31]
Christian missions have had no success in any
Asiatic country. Nor is there anything specifically mediaeval about
Catholicism. It preserved the idea of Roman imperialism, after the
secular empire of the West had disappeared, and even kept the tradition
of the secular empire alive. It modelled all its machinery on the Roman
Empire, and consecrated the Roman claim to universal dominion, with the
Roman law of maiestas against all who disputed its authority. Even its
favourite penalty of the ‘avenging flames’ is borrowed from
the later Roman codes. It maintained the official language of antiquity,
and the imperial title of the autocrat who reigned on the Seven Hills.
Nor were the early Christians so anxious as is often supposed to
disclaim this continuity. At first, it is true, their apologetic was
directed to proving their continuity with Judaism; but Judaism ceased to
count for much after the destruction of the Holy City in A. D. 70, and
the second-century apologists appeal for toleration on the ground that
the best Greek philosophers taught very much the same as what Christians
believe. ‘We teach the same as the Greeks’, says Justin
Martyr, ‘though we alone are hated for what we teach.’
‘Some among us’, says Tertullian, ‘who are versed in
ancient literature, have written books to prove that we have embraced no
tenets for which we have not the support of common and public
literature.’ ‘The teachings of Plato’, says Justin
again, ‘are not alien to those of Christ; and the same is true of
the Stoics.’ ‘Heracleitus and Socrates lived in accordance
with the divine Logos’, and should be reckoned as Christians.
Clement says that Plato wrote ‘by inspiration of God’.
Augustine, much later, finds that ‘only a few words and
phrases’ need be changed to bring Platonism into complete accord
with Christianity. The ethics of contemporary paganism, as Harnack
shows, with special reference to Porphyry, are almost identical with
those of the Christians of his day. They differ in many points from the
standards of 500 years[32]
earlier and from those of 1,500 years later, but
the divergences are neither racial nor credal. Catholic Christianity is
historically continuous with the old civilization, which indeed
continued to live in this region after its other traditions and customs
had been shattered. There are few other examples in history of so great
a difference between appearance and reality. Outwardly, the continuity
with Judaism seems to be unbroken, that with paganism to be broken. In
reality, the opposite is the fact.

This most important truth has been obscured from many causes. The gap in
history made by our educational tradition has been already mentioned.
And our histories of the early Church are too often warped by an
unfortunate bias. Christianity has been judged at its best, paganism at
its worst. The rhetorical denunciations of writers like Seneca, Juvenal,
and Tacitus are taken at their face value, and few have remembered the
convention which obliged a satirist to be scathing, or the political
prejudice of the Stoics against the monarchy, or the non-representative
character of fashionable life in the capital. The modern Church
historian, as Mr. Benn says, has gathered his experience in a college
quadrangle or a cathedral close, and knows little enough about his own
country, next to nothing about what morality was in the Middle Ages, and
nothing at all about what it still is in many parts of Europe. In the
most recent books, however, there is a real desire to hold the scales
fairly, and Christianity has nothing to fear from an impartial
judgement.

There is also an assumption, which we find even in such learned writers
as Harnack and Hatch, that the Hellenic element in Christianity is an
accretion which transformed the new religion from its original purity
and half-paganized Europe again. They would like to prove that
underneath Catholicism was a primitive Protestantism, which owed nothing
to Greece. The truth is that the Church was half Greek from the first,
[33]
though, as I shall say presently, the original Gospel was not. St. Paul
was a Jew of the Dispersion, not of Palestine, and the Christianity to
which he was converted was the Christianity of Stephen, not of James the
Lord’s brother. His later epistles are steeped in the phraseology
of the Greek mysteries. The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Fourth Gospel
are unintelligible without some knowledge of Philo, whose theology is
more Greek than Jewish. In the conflict about the nature of the future
life, it was the Greek eschatology which prevailed over the Jewish. St.
Paul’s famous declaration, ‘We look not at the things which
are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are
seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal’,
is pure Platonism and quite alien to Jewish thought. Judaic Christianity
was a local affair, and had a very short life.

Further, too much is made of the conflict between the official cults of
paganism and Christian public worship. It is forgotten how completely,
in Hellenistic times, religion and philosophy were fused. Without
under-estimating the simple piety which, especially in country
districts, still attached itself to the temples and their ritual, we may
say confidently that the vital religion of the empire was associated
with the mystery-religions and with the discipline of the
‘philosophic life’. It is in this region that the continuity
of Catholicism with Hellenism is mainly to be found. The philosophers at
this time were preachers, confessors, chaplains, and missionaries. The
clerical profession, in nearly all its activities, is directly descended
from the Hellenistic philosophers.

This claim of continuity may seem paradoxical when we remember the
savage persecutions of the Christians by the imperial government. Of
these persecutions there were several causes. The empire, like all
empires of the same type, rested partly on religious support. Augustus
encouraged his court poets to advocate a revival of piety and sound
morals. A government[34]
cannot inquire into religious conviction, but it
can enforce conformity and outward respect for the forms of worship as
‘by law established’. The Christians and Epicureans were
held guilty of the same political offence—‘atheism’. The
State had no quarrel with the mystery-religions, which were a private
matter, but open disrespect to the national deities was flat disloyalty.
The pagans could not understand why the Church would make no terms with
the fusion of religions (θεοκρασια) which seemed to them the
natural result of the fusion of nationalities. Apuleius makes Isis say,
when she reveals herself to Lucius, ‘cuius numen unicum multiformi
specie, ritu vario, nomine multiiugo totus veneratur orbis’; and
she then recounts her various names. This more than tolerant hospitality
of the spirit seemed to the mixed population of the empire the logical
recognition of the actual political situation, and those who
deliberately stood outside it were at least potentially enemies of
society. This was the real quarrel between the Church and the empire. It
is the old State religion which Augustine attacks, ridiculing the
innumerable Roman godlings whose names he perhaps found in Varro. It is
true that Plato, Euripides, and Xenophanes had attacked the official
mythology with hardly less asperity; but they did not escape censure,
and the Christian alienation from the Olympians was far more
fundamental.

The pagan revival under the empire was rather like Neo-Catholicism in
France. It was patriotic, nationalistic, and conservative, rather than
strictly religious. Celsus, in his lost book against the Christians,
seems to have appealed to their patriotism, urging them to support their
country and its government in dangerous times. As the Church grew in
numbers and power, and the old traditions crumbled away, largely from
the fall in the birth-rate among the upper and middle classes, the
conservatives became more anxiously attached to their own culture, and
saw in Christianity a ‘shapeless darkness’
[35] which threatened
to extinguish ‘all the beautiful things in the world’. We
can partly sympathize with this alarm, though not with the foolish
policy which it inspired. The early persecutions were like Russian
‘pogroms’, instigated or connived at by the government as a
safety valve for popular discontent. For at this time the common people
hated the Christians, and half believed the monstrous stories about
them. The attacks were not continuous, and were half-hearted, very
unlike the systematic extermination of Jews and Protestants in Spain. At
Alexandria Hadrian found a money-loving population worshipping Christ
and Sarapis almost indifferently. A wrong impression is formed if we
picture to ourselves two sections of society engaged in constant war.
The first real war was the last, under Diocletian; it was to decide
whether paganism or Christianity was to be the state religion. However,
there is no doubt that the persecutions helped to seal the fate of the
old culture.

Harnack traces three stages in the Hellenization of Christianity.
‘In the earliest Christian writings, apart from Paul, Luke, and
John’, he cannot find any considerable traces of Greek influence.
‘The real influx of Greek thought and life’ began about 130.
The exception is so important as to make this statement of little or no
value. After 130, he says, ‘the philosophy of Greece went straight
to the core of the new religion’. A century or so later,
‘Greek mysteries and Greek civilization in the whole range of its
development exercise their influence on the Church, but as yet not its
mythology and polytheism; these were still to come’.
‘Another century had to elapse before Hellenism as a whole and in
every phase of its development was established in the Church.’ The
process which he describes began, in fact, as soon as Christian
preachers used the Greek language, and was never so complete as he says.
The Logos-Christology, to which he justly attributes the greatest
importance, is already present in St. Paul’s epistles;
[36] the name
only is wanting; and the sharp contradiction which he finds between the
Christian idea of a revelation made through a person at a certain date,
and the Greek idea of an apprehension of timeless and changeless truth,
always open to individuals after the appropriate discipline, was faced
and in part overcome by the Greek Fathers. Harnack also regards
Gnosticism as an embodiment of the genuinely Greek view of revelation,
forgetting that orthodox Platonism was as hostile to Gnosticism as the
Church itself. In rejecting Gnosticism, the Church in fact decided for
genuine Hellenism against a corrupted and barbarized development of it.
On the other hand, there is no period at which we can speak of a
complete conquest of Christianity by Greek ideas. There was a large part
of the old tradition which perished with its defenders, who, obeying the
melancholy law which directs human survival, died out to make way for
immigrants and for the formerly submerged classes, the people with few
wants, who were indifferent to a culture which they had never been
allowed to share.

One more cause of misunderstanding may be illustrated from the writings
of Matthew Arnold. He divides the human race into Hebraizers and
Hellenizers, and classifies the modern English and Americans as
Hebraizers. The fundamental maxim of Hebrew ethics, according to him, is
‘Walk by the light you have’; of Greek ethics, ‘Take
heed that the light which is in thee is not darkness’. The
Hebraizer is conscientious but unenlightened; the Hellenizer is
clear-headed but unscrupulous. Professor Santayana has lately noted the
same difference between the type of character developed by the Latin
nations and by the Anglo-Saxons. The Mediterranean civilization, older
and more sophisticated, is careful to get its values right; the northern
man is bent on doing something big, no matter what, and follows
Clough’s advice:

[37]

But Santayana does not make the mistake of regarding the Reformation as
a return to Palestinian Christianity. This was, indeed, the opinion of
the Reformers themselves; but all religious innovation seeks to base
itself on some old tradition. Christianity at first sought for its
credentials in Judaism, though the Jews saw very quickly that it
‘destroyed the Law’. The belief of the Reformers was
plausible; for they rejected just those parts of Catholicism which had
nothing to do with Palestine, but were taken over from the old Hellenic
or Hellenistic culture. But the residuum was less Jewish than Teutonic.
On one side, indeed, the Reformation was a return to Hellenism from
Romanism. Early Christian philosophy was mainly Platonic; early
Christian ethics (as exemplified especially in writers like Ambrose)
were mainly Stoical. There had been a considerable fusion of Plato and
the Stoa among the Neoplatonists, so that it was easy for the two to
flourish together. Augustine banished Stoical ethics from the Church,
and they were revived only at the Reformation. Calvinism is simply
baptized Stoicism; it is logically pantheistic, since it acknowledges
only one effective will in the universe. The creed of nineteenth-century
science is very similar. Puritanism was not at all like Judaism, in
spite of its fondness for the Old Testament; it was very like Stoicism.
The Reformation was a revolt against Latin theocracy and the hereditary
paganism of the Mediterranean peoples; it was not really a return to
pre-Hellenic Christianity. It sheltered the humanism of Erasmus and the
late-flowering English Renaissance, and Christian Platonism has nowhere
had a more flourishing record than in Protestant Britain.

At the present time a more drastic revolt is in progress among the
plebs urbana, which does in truth threaten with
[38] destruction
‘what we owe to Greece’. The industrial revolution has
generated a new type of barbarism, with no roots in the past. For the
second time in the history of Western Europe, continuity is in danger of
being lost. A generation is growing up, not uneducated, but educated in
a system which has little connexion with European culture in its
historical development. The Classics are not taught; the Bible is not
taught; history is not taught to any effect. What is even more serious,
there are no social traditions. The modern townsman is déraciné: he
has forgotten the habits and sentiments of the village from which his
forefathers came. An unnatural and unhealthy mode of life, cut off from
the sweet and humanizing influences of nature, has produced an unnatural
and unhealthy mentality, to which we shall find no parallels in the
past. Its chief characteristic is profound secularity or materialism.
The typical town artisan has no religion and no superstitions; he has no
ideals beyond the visible and tangible world of the senses. This of
course opens an impassable gulf between him and Greek religion, and a
still wider gulf between him and Christianity. The attempts which are
occasionally made, especially in this country, to dress up the Labour
movement as a return to the Palestinian Gospel, are little short of
grotesque. The contrast is well summed up by Belfort Bax, in a passage
quoted by Professor Gardner. ‘According to Christianity,
regeneration must come from within. The ethics and religion of modern
socialism on the contrary look for regeneration from without, from
material conditions and a higher social life.’ Here the gauntlet
is thrown down to Christ and Plato alike.

Quite logically the new spirit is in revolt against what it calls
intellectualism, which means the application of the dry light of reason
to the problems of human life. It wishes to substitute for reason what
some of its philosophers call instinct, but which should rather be
called sentiment and emotion.[39]
There is no reconciliation between this
view of life and Hellenism. For science is the eldest and dearest child
of the Greek spirit. One of the great battles of the future will be
between science and its enemies. The misologists have numbers on their
side; but ‘Nature’, whom all the Greeks honoured and
trusted, will be justified in her children.

The new spirit is especially bitter against the Stoical ethics, which as
we have seen were taken over, with the Platonic metaphysics, by
Christianity. Stoicism teaches men to venerate and obey natural law; to
accept with proud equanimity the misfortunes of life; to be beneficent,
but to inhibit the emotion of pity; to be self-reliant and
self-contained; to practise self-denial for the sake of self-conquest;
and to regard this life as a stern school of moral discipline. All this
is simply detestable to the new spirit, which is sentimental,
undisciplined, and hedonistic. It remembers the hardness of Puritanism,
and has no admiration for its virtues.

It is often said that the modern man has entirely lost the Greek love of
beauty. This is, I think, untrue, and unjust to our present
civilization, unlovely as it undoubtedly is in many ways. It is curious
that modern critics of the Greeks have not called attention to the
aesthetic obtuseness which showed itself in the defective reaction of
the ancients against cruelty. It was not that they excluded beautiful
actions from the sphere of aesthetics; they never thought of separating
the beautiful from the good in this way. But they were not disgusted at
the torture of slaves, the exposure of new-born children, or the
massacre of the population of a revolted city. The same callousness
appears in the Italian cities at the Renaissance; Ezzelino was a
contemporary of the great architects and painters. I cannot avoid the
conclusion that it is connected in some obscure way with the artistic
creativeness of these two closely similar epochs. The extreme
sensibility to physical suffering which characterizes modern
civilization arose[40]
together with industrialism, and is most marked in
the most highly industrialized countries. It has synchronized with the
complete eclipse of spontaneous and unconscious artistic production,
which we deplore in our time. Evelyn, in the seventeenth century, was
still able to visit a prison in Paris to gratify his curiosity by seeing
a prisoner tortured, and though he did not stay to the end of the
exhibition he shows that his stomach was not easily turned. It is
certain that our repugnance to such sights is aesthetic rather than
moral, and probable that it is strongest in the lower social strata.
Several years ago I went to the first night of a rather foolish play
about ancient Rome, in which an early Christian is brought in to be very
mildly tortured on the stage. At the first crack of the whip my
neighbours sprang from their seats, crying, ‘Shame! Stop
that!’; and the scene had to be removed in subsequent
performances. The operatives in a certain factory stopped the engines
for an hour because they heard a cat mewing among the machinery. Having
with difficulty rescued the animal from being crushed they strangled it.
The explanation of this extreme susceptibleness must be left to
psychologists; but I am convinced that we have here a case of
transferred aesthetic sensibility. We can walk unmoved down the streets
of Plaistow, but we cannot bear to see a horse beaten. The Athenians set
up no Albert Memorials, but they tortured slave-girls in their
law-courts and sent their prisoners to work in the horrible galleries of
the Laureion silver-mines.

This emergence of a new spirit, which seems to be almost independent of
all traditions, makes it difficult to estimate our present indebtedness
to Greece in matters of religion. It would be difficult even if the
industrial revolution had not taken place. The northern Europeans have
hardly yet attained to self-expression. Their religion is a mixture of
Greek, Latin, and Hebrew elements which refuse to be harmonized, and
[41]
which in this country sometimes clash with the ideal of a gentleman,
that lay religion of the English-speaking peoples, which has no longer
any connexion with heraldry or property in land. The English gentleman
is not a Greek any more than he is a Jew. His code makes Odysseus an
amusing rascal; Achilles a violent and sulky savage; and
Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχος (as has been said) is rather
like a nobleman in a novel by Disraeli, but not like any other sort of
gentleman. The Englishman is by nature religious; but Christianity in
its developed form is a Mediterranean religion; in all external features
it might have been very different if it had been first planted north of
the Alps. There is, therefore, a chronic confusion in Protestantism
which makes its conflicts with the Latin Church like the battles of
undisciplined barbarians against well-drilled troops.

Nevertheless, though it is so difficult to separate out the various
threads which make up the tangled skein of our modern religion, it may
be worth while to make the attempt to distinguish, first, those parts of
current Christianity which are not Greek, in the wide sense which I have
chosen for the word, and then those which, in the same sense, are Greek
by origin or affinity.

Among those elements which are not Greek, the first place must be given
to the original Gospel, of which I have said nothing yet. Our records of
the Galilean ministry, contained in the three synoptic Gospels, were not
compiled till long after the events which they describe, and must not be
used uncritically. But in my opinion, at any rate, the substance of the
teaching of Christ comes out very clearly in these books. No Hellenic
influence can be traced in it; there is not even any sign of the
Hellenized Judaism which for us is represented by his contemporary
Philo. But neither is it possible to call the Gospel Jewish, except with
many qualifications. Christ came before his countrymen as a prophet; he
deliberately placed[42]
himself in the line of the prophetic tradition.
Like other prophets of his nation, he did not altogether eschew the
framework of apocalyptic which was at that time the natural mould for
prophecy. But he preached neither the popular nationalism, nor the
popular ecclesiasticism, nor the popular ethics. His countrymen rejected
him as soon as they understood him. The Gospel was, as St. Paul said, a
new creation. It is most significant that it at once introduced a new
ethical terminology. The Greek words which we translate love (or
charity), joy, peace, hope, humility, are no part of the stock-in-trade
of Greek moralists before Christ. Men do not coin new words for old
ideas. Taken as a whole the Gospel is profoundly original; and a
Christian can find strong evidence for his belief that in Christ a
revelation was made to humanity at large, in which the religion of the
Spirit, in its purest and most universal form, was for the first time
presented to mankind. This revelation has to a considerable extent
passed into the common consciousness of the civilized world; but its
implications in matters of conduct, individual, social, and
international, are still imperfectly understood and have never been
acted upon, except feebly and sporadically. It is a reproach to us that
the teaching of Christ must be regarded as only one of many elements
which make up what we call Christianity. The Quakers, as a body, seem to
me to come nearest to what a genuinely Christian society would be.

Secondly, the Greeks escaped the evils of priestly government. The
Oriental type of theocracy, with which they were familiar in the Egypt
of the Pharaohs, was alien to their civilization. Their sacrifices were
for the most part of the genial type, a communion-meal with the god. But
even in Greece we must remember the gloomy chthonian rites, and the
degradations of Orphism mentioned by Plato in the Republic.
‘They persuade not only individuals but whole cities that
expiations and atonements for sin may be made
[43] by sacrifices and
amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of
the living and of the dead; the latter sort they call mysteries, and
they redeem us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one
knows what awaits us.’ This exploitation of sacramentalism was
common enough in Greece; but the characteristic Caesaro-Papism of
Byzantium and modern imperialism was wholly foreign to Hellenism. It was
introduced by Constantine as part of the Orientalizing of the empire
begun by Diocletian. As Seeley says, ‘Constantine purchased an
indefeasible title by a charter. He gave certain liberties and received
in return passive obedience. He gained a sanction for the Oriental
theory of government; in return he accepted the law of the Church. He
became irresponsible to his subjects on condition of becoming
responsible to Christ.’

The Greeks never had a book-religion, in the sense in which Judaism
became, and Islam always was, a book-religion. But they were in some
danger of treating Homer and Hesiod as inspired scriptures. To us it is
plain that a long religious history lies behind Homer, and that the
treatment of the gods in Epic poetry proves that they had almost ceased
to be the objects of religious feeling. Some of them are even comic
characters, like the devil in Scottish folklore. To turn these poems
into sacred literature was to court the ridicule of the Christians. But
Homer was never supposed to contain ‘the faith once delivered to
the saints’; no religion of authority could be built upon him, and
Greek speculation remained far more unfettered than the thought of
Christendom has been until our own day.

Those who have observed the actual state of Christianity in
Mediterranean countries cannot lay much stress on the difference between
Christian monotheism and pagan polytheism. The early Church fought
against the tendency to interpose objects of worship between God and
man; but Mariolatry[44]
came in through a loophole, and the worship of the
masses in Roman Catholic countries is far more pagan than the
service-books. In the imagination of many simple Catholics, Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph are the chief potentates in their Olympus.

The doctrine of the creation of the world in time, which was denied by
most pagan thinkers and affirmed by most Christian divines, belongs to
philosophy rather than to religion. The disbelief in the pre-existence
of the soul, a doctrine which for Greek thought stands or falls with the
belief in survival after death, is more important, and may be partly
attributable to Jewish influence. But pre-existence does not seem to
have been believed by the majority of Greeks, and in fact almost
disappears from Greek thought between Plato and the Neoplatonists. It is
possible that the Pythagorean and Platonic doctrine may still have a
future.

There are some who will insist that these differences are insignificant
by the side of the fact that Christianity was the idealistic side of a
revolt of the proletariat against the whole social order of the time.
This notion, which made Christ ‘le bon sans-culotte’, has
again become popular lately; some have even compared the early
Christians with Bolsheviks. It is a fair question to ask at what period
this was even approximately true. Christ and his apostles belonged to
the prosperous peasantry of Galilee, a well-educated and comfortable
middle class. The domestic slaves of wealthy Romans, who embraced the
new faith in large numbers, were legally defenceless, but by no means
miserable or degraded. After the second century the comparison of the
Christians to modern revolutionists becomes too absurd for discussion.
There is a good deal of rhetorical declamation about riches and poverty
in the Christian Fathers; but unfortunately the Church seems to have
done very little to protest against the crying economic injustices of
the fourth and fifth centuries. From first to last there was nothing of
the ‘Spartacus’ movement about the
[45] Catholic Church. As soon
as the persecutions ceased, the bishops took their place naturally among
the nobility.

When we turn to the obligations of modern religion to Greece, it is
difficult to know where to begin.

The conception of philosophy as an ars vivendi is characteristically
Greek. Nothing can be further from the truth than to call the Greeks
‘intellectualists’ in the disparaging sense in which the
word is now often used. The object of philosophy was to teach a man to
live well, and with that object to think rightly about God, the world,
and himself. This close union between metaphysics, morals, and religion
has remained as a permanent possession of the modern world. Every
philosopher is now expected to show the bearing of his system on
morality and religion, and the criticism is often justified that however
bold the speculations of the thinker, he is careful, when he comes to
conduct, to be conventional enough. The Hellenistic combination of
Platonic metaphysics with Stoic ethics is still the dominant type of
Christian religious philosophy. It is curious to observe how competing
tendencies in these systems—the praise of isolated detachment and of
active social sympathy—have continued to struggle against each other
within the Christian Church.

The place of asceticism in religion is so important, and so much has
been written rather unintelligently about the contrast between Hellenism
and Christianity in this matter, that I propose to deal with it, briefly
indeed, but with a little more detail than a strict attention to
proportion would justify. It has often been assumed that a nation of
athletes, who made heroes of Heracles and Theseus, Achilles and Hector,
could have had nothing but contempt for the ascetic ideal. But in truth
asceticism has a continuous history within Hellenism. Even Homer knows
of the priests of chilly Dodona, the Selli, whose bare feet are
unwashed, and who sleep on the ground. This is probably not, as
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff thinks,[46]
a description of savage life, but of an
ascetic school of prophets. For the fastdays which introduced the
Thesmophoria were observed by the Athenian matrons in the same way; they
went unshod and sat on the bare earth; and we may compare the
Nudipedalia, ordered by the Romans in time of dearth and mentioned by
Petronius and Tertullian. Prophets and prophetesses fasted at Miletus,
Colophon, and other places. National fasts were ordered in times of
calamity or danger, and Tarentum kept a yearly fast of thankfulness for
deliverance from a siege. The flagellation of boys at Sparta hardly
comes into account, being probably a substitute for human sacrifice; but
the continuance of the cruel rite till nearly the end of antiquity
causes surprise. The worship of Dionysus Zagreus in Thrace was
accompanied by ascetic practices before Pythagoras. Vegetarianism, which
has always played an important part in the ascetic life, was obligatory
on all Pythagoreans; but in this school there was another motive besides
the desire to mortify the flesh. Those who believe in the transmigration
of souls into the bodies of animals must regard flesh-eating as little
better than cannibalism. The Pythagorean and the Orphic rules of life
were well known throughout antiquity, and were probably obeyed by large
numbers. The rule of continence was far less strict than in the Catholic
‘religious’ life; but Empedocles, according to Hippolytus,
advised abstinence from marriage and procreation, and the tendency to
regard celibacy as part of the ‘philosophic life’ increased
steadily. The Cynic Antisthenes is quoted by Clement of Alexandria as
having expressed a wish to ‘shoot Aphrodite, who has ruined so
many virtuous women’. But the asceticism of the early Cynics and
of some Stoics was based not on self-devotion and spirituality but on
the desire for independence, and often took repulsive forms. Of some
among them it may be said that they did not object to sensual pleasure,
they only objected to having to pay for it. Desire for self-sufficiency
is[47]
always part of asceticism, but in the Christian saints it has been a
small part. The Greeks who practised it were from first to last too
anxious to be invulnerable; this was the main attraction of the
philosophic life from the time of Antisthenes, and it remained the main
attraction to the end. But Cynicism and Stoicism (which tend to run
together) became gentler, more humane, and more spiritual under the
Roman empire. Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius often seem to be
half Christian. Direct influence of Christian ethics at this early
period is perhaps unlikely; it is enough to suppose that the spirit of
the age affected in a similar way all creeds and denominations.
Self-mortification tended to assume more and more violent forms, till it
culminated in the strange aberrations of Egyptian eremitism. It is
impossible to regard these as either Greek or Christian; they indicate a
pathological state of society, which can be partly but not entirely
accounted for by the conditions of the time. After a few centuries a far
more wholesome type of monachism supplanted the hermits; the anchorites
of the Middle Ages retained the solitary life, but were very unlike the
crazy savages of the Thebaid. In modern times, those who have been most
under the Greek spirit have generally lived with austere simplicity, but
without any of the violent self-discipline which is said to be still
practised by some devout Catholics. The assiduous practice of
self-mastery and the most sparing indulgence in the pleasures of sense
are the ‘philosophic life’ which the Greek spirit recommends
as the highest. The best Greeks would blame the life of an English
clergyman, professor, or philosopher as too self-indulgent; we often
forget how frugally and hardily the Greeks lived at all times. But here
we have to consider the differences of climate, and the apparent
necessity of a rather generous diet for the Nordic race.

The influence of the Greek mysteries upon Christianity is a keenly
debated question, in which passion and prejudice play
[48] too large a part.
The information necessary for forming a judgement has been much enlarged
by recent discoveries in Egypt and elsewhere, and, as usually happens,
the importance of the new facts has been sometimes exaggerated.
Protestant theology has on the whole minimized the influence of the
mysteries, and has post-dated it, from an unwillingness to allow that
there was already a strong Catholic element in the Christianity of the
first century. Orthodox Catholicism has ignored it from different but
equally obvious motives. Modernist Catholicism has in my opinion
antedated the irruption of crude sacramentalism into the Church, and has
greatly overstated its importance in the religion of the first-century
Christians. This school practically denies anything more than a
half-accidental continuity between the preaching of the historical
Christ, whom they strangely suppose to have been a mere apocalyptist,
one of the many Messiahs or Mahdis who arose at this period in
Palestine, and the Catholic Church, which according to them belonged to
the same type of religion as the worship of Isis and Mithra. Another
bone of contention is the value of the mystery-religions of Greece. The
very able German scholars who have written on the subject, such as
Reitzenstein and still more Rohde, seem to me much too unsympathetic in
their treatment of the mystery-cults. Lastly, some competent critics
have lately urged that this side of Christianity owed more to
Judaism—Hellenized Judaism, of course—than has been hitherto supposed.

Plato in the Phaedo says that ‘those who established our
mysteries declare that all who come to Hades uninitiated will lie in the
mud; while he who has been purified and initiated will dwell with the
gods’. For, as they say in the mysteries, ‘Many are the
thyrsus-bearers, but few are the inspired’. This sacramentalism
was not unchallenged, as we have already seen from Plato himself.
Diogenes is said to have asked whether the robber Pataecion was better
off in the other world than the[49]
hero Epaminondas, because the former
had been initiated, and the latter had not. But Orphism, though liable
to degradation, purified and elevated the old Bacchic rites. As Miss
Harrison says, the Bacchanals hoped to attain unity with God by
intoxication, the Orphics by abstinence. The way to salvation was now
through ‘holiness’ (ὁσιοτης). To the initiated the
assurance was given, ‘Happy and blessed one! Thou shalt be a god
instead of a mortal.’ To be a god meant for a Greek simply to be
immortal; the Orphic saint was delivered from the painful cycle of
recurring births and deaths. And Orphic purity was mainly, though not
entirely, the result of moral discipline. Cumont says that the
mystery-cults brought with them two new things—mysterious means of
purification by which they proposed to cleanse away the defilements of
the soul, and the assurance that an immortality of bliss would be the
reward of piety. The truth, says Mr. H. A. Kennedy, was presented to
them in the guise of divine revelations, esoteric doctrines to be
carefully concealed from the gaze of the profane, doctrines which placed
in their hands a powerful apparatus for gaining deliverance from the
assaults of malicious demonic influences, and above all for overcoming
the relentless tyranny of fate. This demonology was believed everywhere
under the Roman empire, the period of which Mr. Kennedy is thinking in
this sentence, and it has unfortunately left more traces in St.
Paul’s epistles than we like to allow. The formation of
brotherhoods for mystic worship was also an important step in the
development of Greek religion. These brotherhoods were cosmopolitan, and
seem to have flourished especially at great seaports. They were
thoroughly popular, drawing most of their support from the lower
classes, and within them national and social distinctions were ignored.
Their ultimate aim cannot be summed up better than in Mr.
Kennedy’s words—‘to raise the soul above the transiency of
perishable matter through actual union with the Divine’. It has
been[50]
usual to distinguish between the dignified and officially
recognized mysteries, like those of Eleusis, and the independent
voluntary associations, some of which became important. But there was
probably no essential difference between them. In neither case was there
much definite teaching; the aim, as Aristotle says, was to produce a
certain emotional state (ου μαθειν τι δειν αλλα παθειν). A
passion-play was enacted amid the most impressive surroundings, and we
need not doubt that the moral effect was beneficial and sometimes
profound. When the Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris were fused with
the Hellenic, a type of worship was evolved which was startlingly like
Christianity. A famous Egyptian text contains the promise: ‘As
truly as Osiris lives, shall he [the worshipper] live; as truly as
Osiris is not dead, shall he not die.’ The thanksgiving to Isis at
the end of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius is very beautiful in itself,
though it is an odd termination of a licentious novel. The Hermetic
literature also contains doctrine of a markedly Johannine type, as
notably in a prayer to Isis: ‘Glorify me, as I have glorified the
name of thy son Horus.’ I agree with those critics (Cumont,
Zielinski, and others) who attach the ‘higher’ Hermetic
teaching to genuinely Hellenic sources. But it is not necessary to
ascribe all the higher teaching to Greece and the lower to Egypt.

Much of St. Paul’s theology belongs to the same circle of ideas as
these mysteries. Especially important is the psychology which divides
human nature into spirit, soul, and body, spirit being the divine
element into which those who are saved are transformed by the
‘knowledge of God’. This knowledge is a supernatural gift,
which (in the Poimandres) confers ‘deification’. St. Paul
usually prefers ‘Pneuma’ as the name of this highest part of
human nature; in the Hermetic literature it is not easy to distinguish
between Pneuma and Nous, which holds exactly the same place in
Neoplatonism. The notion of salvation as consisting in the knowledge of
God[51]
is not infrequent in St. Paul; compare, for example, 1 Cor. xiii.
12 and a still more important passage, Phil. ii. 8-10. This knowledge
was partly communicated by visions and revelations, to which St. Paul
attributed some importance; but on the whole he is consistent in
treating knowledge as the crown and consummation of faith. The pneumatic
transformation of the personality is the centre of St. Paul’s
eschatology. ‘Though our outward man perish, our inward man is
renewed day by day.’ The ‘spiritual body’ is the
vehicle of the transformed personality; for ‘flesh and blood
cannot inherit the kingdom of God’. The expression ‘to be
born again’ is common in the mystery literature.

It would be easy to find many other parallels in St. Paul’s
epistles, in the Johannine books which are the best commentary upon
them, and in the theology of the Greek Fathers, which prove the close
connexion of early Christianity with the mystery-religions of the
empire. Twenty years ago it might have been worth while to draw out
these resemblances in greater detail, even in so summary a survey as
this. But at present the tendency is, if not to over-estimate the debt
of the Christian religion to Hellenistic thought and worship, at any
rate to ignore the great difference between the higher elements in the
mystery-religions, which the new faith could gladly and readily
assimilate, and the lower type, the theosophy, magic, and theurgy, which
was not in the line of Hellenic development, and is not to be found in
the New Testament. Wendland, always a judicious critic, has said very
truly that St. Paul stands to the mystery-religions as Plato to Orphism;
they are not the centre of his religious life, but they gave him
effective forms of expression for his religious experience. Or, as
Weinel says, ‘St. Paul’s doctrine of the Spirit and of
Christ is not an imitation of mystery-doctrine, but inmost personal
experience metaphysically interpreted after the manner of his
time.’ Writers like Loisy, who say that for St. Paul Jesus
[52] was
‘a Saviour God, after the manner of Osiris, Attis, or
Mithra’, and who proceed to draw out obvious parallels between the
sufferings, death, and resurrection of these mythological personages and
the gospels of the Christian Church, surely forget that St. Paul was a
Jew, and that there are some transformations of which the religious mind
is incapable. He never speaks of Christ as a ‘Saviour God’.
Even more perverse are the arguments which are used to prove that the
centre of St. Paul’s religion was a gross and materialistic
sacramental magic. The apostle, whose antipathy to ritual in every shape
is stamped upon all his writings, who thanks God that he baptized very
few of the Corinthians, who declares that ‘Christ sent him not to
baptize but to preach the Gospel’, is accused of regarding baptism
as ‘an opus operatum which secures a man’s admission into
the kingdom apart from the character of his future conduct’. And
yet in the Epistle to the Romans, as Weinel says, ‘baptism only
once enters his mind, and the Lord’s Supper not even once’.
Baptism for him is no opus operatum, but a ceremony of social
significance, a symbol conditioning a deeper experience of divine grace,
already embraced by faith. These same critics proceed to illustrate St.
Paul’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper by references to the
religion of the Aztecs and other barbarians. But it is hardly worth
while to argue with those who suppose that a man with St. Paul’s
upbringing and culture could have dallied with the notion of
‘eating a god’. The ‘table of the Lord’ is the
table at which the Lord is the spiritual host, not the table on which
his flesh is placed. Does any one suppose that ‘the table of
demons’ which is contrasted with the ‘table of the
Lord’ is the table at which demons are eaten? Demons had no
bodies, as we learn from the ουκ ειμι δαιμονιον ασωματον of a
well-known passage in a New Testament manuscript.

Crude sacramentalism certainly came in later. Its parentage
[53] may be
traced, if we will, to those mystery-mongers whom Plato mentions with
disapproval. If Hellenism is the name of a way of thinking, this form of
religion is not healthy Hellenism; that it was held by many Hellenes
cannot be denied.

The biblical doctrine of the Fall of Man, which the Hebrews would never
have evolved for themselves, remained an otiose dogma in Jewish
religion. It was revivified in Christianity under Greek influence. Man,
as Empedocles and others had taught, was ‘an exile and vagabond
from God’; his body was his tomb; he is clothed in ‘an alien
garment of flesh’. He is in a fallen state and needs redemption.
Hellenism had become a religion of redemption; the empire was quite
ready to accept this part of Christian doctrine. The sin of Adam became
the first scene in the great drama of humanity, which led up to the
Atonement. At the same time the whole process was never mere history;
its deepest meaning was enacted in the life-story of each individual.
Greek thought gave this turn to dogmas which for a Jew would have been a
flat historical recital. In modern times the earlier scenes in the
story, at any rate, are looked upon as little more than the
dramatization of the normal experience of a human soul. But Greek
thought, while it remained true to type, never took sin so tragically as
Christianity has done. The struggle against evil has become sterner than
it ever was for the Greeks. It must, however, be remembered that the
large majority of professing Christians do not trouble themselves much
about their sins, and that the best of the Greeks were thoroughly in
earnest in seeking to amend their lives.

Redemption was brought to earth by a Redeemer who was both God and Man.
This again was in accordance with Greek ideas. The Mediator between God
and Man must be fully divine, since an intermediate Being would be in
touch with neither side. The victory of Athanasius was in no sense a
defeat for Hellenism. The only difficulty for a Greek thinker was
[54] that
an Incarnate God ought to be impassible. This was a puzzle only for
philosophers; popular religion saw no difficulty in a Christus
patiens. The doctrine of the Logos brought Christianity into direct
affinity with both Platonism and Stoicism, and the Second Person of the
Trinity was invested with the same attributes as the Nous of the
Neoplatonists. But the attempts to equate the Trinity with the three
divine hypostases of Plotinus was no more successful than the later
attempt of Hegel to set the Trinity in the framework of his philosophy.

The subject of eschatology is so vast that it is hopeless to deal with
it, even in the most summary fashion, in one paragraph. It is usually
said that the resurrection of the body is a Jewish doctrine, the
immortality of the soul a Greek doctrine. But the Jews were very slow to
bring the idea of a future life into their living faith; to this day it
does not seem to be of much importance in Judaism. Some form of
Millenarianism—a reign of the saints on earth—would seem to be the
natural form for Jewish hopes to take. This belief, which was the
earliest mould into which the treasure of the new revelation was poured,
has never quite disappeared from the Church, and in times of excitement
and upheaval it tends to reassert itself. The maturest Greek philosophy
regards eternity as the divine mode of existence, while mortals are
born, live, and die in time. Man is a microcosm, in touch with every
rung of the ladder of existence; and he is potentially a
‘participator’ in the divine mode of existence, which he can
make his own by living, so far as may be, in detachment from the vain
shadows and perishable goods of earth. That this conception of
immortality has had a great influence upon Christian thought and
practice needs no demonstration. It is and always has been the religion
of the mystic. But the Orphic tradition, with its pictures of purgatory
and of eternal bliss and torment, has on the whole dominated the other
two in popular Christian belief. It has been stripped of its
[55]
accessories—the belief in reincarnation and the transmigration of
souls, doctrines which maintain a somewhat uneasy existence within the
scheme of the Neoplatonists. The picture of future retribution is even
more terrifying without them. Both the philosophical and the popular
beliefs about the other world are far more Greek than Jewish; but the
attempt to hold these very discrepant beliefs together has reduced
Christian eschatology to extreme confusion, and many Christians have
given up the attempt to formulate any theories about what are called the
four last things. On such a mysterious subject, definiteness is neither
to be expected nor desired. The original Gospel does not encourage the
natural curiosity of man to know his future fate; and the three types of
eschatology which we have described have all their value as representing
different aspects of religious faith and hope. We must after all confess
the truth of St. Paul’s words, that ‘eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive,
the things that God hath prepared for them that love him’. The
same apostle reminds us that ‘now we see through a mirror, in
riddles, and know only in part’; the face to face vision, and the
knowledge which unites the knower and the known, may be ours when we
have finished our course. In these words, which recall Plato’s
famous myth of the Cave, St. Paul is fundamentally at one with the
Platonists; and it may well be that it is by this path that our
contemporaries may recover that belief in eternal life which is at
present burning very dimly among us.

In conclusion, what has the religion of the Greeks to teach us that we
are most in danger of forgetting? In a word, it is the faith that Truth
is our friend, and that the knowledge of Truth is not beyond our reach.
Faith in honest seeking (ζητησις) is at the heart of the Greek
view of life. ‘Those who would rightly judge of truth’, says
Aristotle, ‘must be arbitrators, not litigants’.
‘Happy is he who has learnt the value of research’
(ἱστορια), says Euripides in a fragment. Curiosity,
[56] as the Greeks knew
and the Middle Ages knew not, is a virtue, not a vice. Nature, for
Plato, is God’s vicegerent and revealer, the Soul of the universe.
Human nature is the same nature as the divine; no one has proclaimed
this more strongly. Nature is for us; chaos and ‘necessity’
are the enemy. The divorce between religion and humanism began, it must
be admitted, under Plato’s successors, who unhappily were
indifferent to natural science, and did not even follow the best light
that was to be had in physical knowledge. In the Dark Ages, when the
link with Greece was broken, the separation became absolute. The
luxuriant mythology of the early Greeks was not unscientific. In the
absence of knowledge gaps were filled up by the imagination, and the
‘method of trial and error’. The dramatic fancy which
creates myths is the raw material of both poetry and science. Of course
religious myths may come to be a bar to progress in science; they do so
when, in a rationalizing age, the question comes to be one of fact or
fiction. It is a mistake to suppose that the faith of a
‘post-rational’ age, to use a phrase of Santayana, can be
the same as that of an unscientific age, even when it uses the same
formulas. The Greek spirit itself is now calling us away from some of
the vestments of Greek tradition. The choice before us is between a
‘post-rational’ traditionalism, fundamentally sceptical,
pragmatistic, and intellectually dishonest, and a trust in reason which
rests really on faith in the divine Logos, the self-revealing soul of
the universe. It is the belief of the present writer that the
unflinching eye and the open mind will bring us again to the feet of
Christ, to whom Greece, with her long tradition of free and fearless
inquiry, became a speedy and willing captive, bringing her manifold
treasures to Him, in the well-grounded confidence that He was not come
to destroy but to fulfil.

W. R. Inge.

[57]

PHILOSOPHY

If we consider the philosophical tendencies of the day, we shall
probably observe first of all that the artificial wall of partition
between philosophy and science—and especially mathematical science—is
beginning to wear very thin. On the other hand, we cannot fail to notice
a reaction against what is called intellectualism. This reaction takes
many forms, the most characteristic perhaps of which is a renewed
interest in Mysticism. It leads also to a strong insistence on the
practical aspect of philosophic thought, and to a view of its bearing on
what had been regarded as primarily theoretical issues, which is known
by the rather unfortunate name of Pragmatism. Now it is just on these
points that we have most to learn from the Greeks, and Greek philosophy
is therefore of special importance for us at the present time. At its
best, it was never divorced from science, while it found a way of
reconciling itself both with the interests of the practical life and
with mysticism without in any way abating the claims of the intellect.
It is solely from these points of view that it is proposed to regard
Greek philosophy here. It would be futile to attempt a summary of the
whole subject in the space available, and such a summary would have no
value. Many things will therefore be passed over in silence which are
important in themselves and would have to be fully treated in a complete
account. All that can be done now is to indicate the points at which
Greek philosophy seems to touch our actual problems. It will be seen
that here, as elsewhere, ‘all history is contemporary
history’, and that the present can only be understood in the light
of the past.

[58]
The word ‘philosophy’ is Greek and so is the thing it
denotes. Unless we are to use the term in so wide a sense as to empty it
of all special meaning, there is no evidence that philosophy has ever
come into existence anywhere except under Greek influences. In
particular, mystical speculation based on religious experience is not
itself philosophy, though it has often influenced philosophy profoundly,
and for this reason the pantheism of the Upanishads cannot be called
philosophical. It is true that there is an Indian philosophy, and indeed
the Hindus are the only ancient people besides the Greeks who ever had
one, but Indian science was demonstrably borrowed from Greece after the
conquest of Alexander, and there is every reason to believe that those
Indian systems which can be regarded as genuinely philosophical are a
good deal more recent still. On the other hand, the earliest
authenticated instance of a Greek thinker coming under Indian influence
is that of Pyrrho (326 B. C.), and what he brought back from the East
was rather the ideal of quietism than any definite philosophical
doctrine. The barrier of language was sufficient to prevent any
intercourse on important subjects, for neither the Greeks nor the
Indians cared to learn any language but their own. Of course philosophy
may culminate in theology, and the best Greek philosophy certainly does
so, but it begins with science and not with religion.

By philosophy the Greeks meant a serious endeavour to understand the
world and man, having for its chief aim the discovery of the right way
of life and the conversion of people to it. It would not, however, be
true to say that the word had always borne this special sense. At any
rate the corresponding verb (φιλοσοφειν) had at first a far
wider range. For instance, Herodotus (i. 30) makes Croesus say that
Solon had travelled far and wide ‘as a philosopher’
(φιλοσοφεων),
and it is clear from the context that this refers to
that love of travel for the sake of the ‘wonders’ to be seen
in strange lands which[59]
was so characteristic of the Ionian Greeks in
the fifth century B. C. That is made quite plain by the phrase
‘for the sake of sightseeing’ (θεωριης ἑινεκεν)
with which the word is coupled. Again, when Thucydides (ii. 40) makes
Pericles say of his fellow citizens ‘we follow philosophy without
loss of manliness’ (φιλοσοφουμεν ανευ μαλακιας), it is
certainly not of philosophy in the special sense he is thinking. He is
only contrasting the culture of Athens with the somewhat effeminate
civilization of the Ionians in Asia Minor. Even in the next century,
Isocrates tried to revert to this wider sense of the word, and he
regularly uses it of the art of political journalism which he imparted
to his pupils.

Tradition ascribes the first use of the term ‘philosophy’ in
the more restricted sense indicated above to Pythagoras of Samos, an
Ionian who founded a society for its cultivation in southern Italy in
the latter half of the sixth century B. C. It is notoriously difficult
to make any positive statements about Pythagoras, seeing that he wrote
nothing; but it is safer on general grounds to ascribe the leading ideas
of the system to the master rather than to his followers. Moreover, this
particular tradition is confirmed by the fact, for which there is
sufficient evidence, that the name ‘philosophers’ originally
designated the Pythagoreans in a special way. For instance, we know that
Zeno of Elea (c. 450 B. C.) wrote a book ‘Against the
Philosophers’, and in his mouth that can only mean ‘Against
the Pythagoreans’. Now the Pythagorean use of the term depends on
a certain way of regarding man, which there is good reason for ascribing
to Pythagoras himself. It has become more or less of a commonplace now,
but we must try to seize it in its original freshness if we wish to
understand the associations the word ‘philosophy’ came to
have for the Greeks. To state it briefly, it is the view that man is
something intermediate between God and ‘the other animals’
(ταλλα ζωα). As compared with God, he is ‘mere
man’, liable to error and[60]
death (both of which are spoken of as specially human,
ανθρωπινα); as compared with ‘the
other animals’, he is kindly and capable of civilization. The
Latin word humanus took over this double meaning, which is somewhat
arbitrarily marked in English by the spellings human and humane. Now
it is clear that, for a being subject to error and death, wisdom
(σοφια) in the full sense is impossible; that is for God
alone. On the other hand, man cannot be content, like ‘the other
animals’ to remain in ignorance. If he cannot be wise, he can at
least be ‘a lover of wisdom’, and it follows that his chief
end will be ‘assimilation to God so far as possible’
(ὁμοιωσις τω θεω κατα το δυνατον), as Plato put it in the
Theaetetus. The mathematical studies of the Pythagoreans soon brought
them face to face with the idea of a constant approximation which never
reaches its goal. There is, then, sufficient ground for accepting the
tradition which makes Pythagoras the author of this special sense of the
word ‘philosophy’ and for connecting it with the division of
living creatures into God, men and ‘the other animals’. If
the later Pythagoreans went a step further and classified rational
animals into gods, men and ‘such as Pythagoras’, that was
due to the enthusiasm of discipleship, and is really a further
indication of the genuinely Pythagorean character of this whole range of
ideas. We may take it, then, that the word ‘philosophy’ had
acquired its special sense in southern Italy before the beginning of the
fifth century B. C.

It is even more certain that this sense was well known at Athens, at
least in certain circles, not long after the middle of the fifth
century. To all appearance, this was the work of Socrates (470-399
B.C.). Whatever view may be taken of the philosophy of Socrates or of
its relation to that expounded in Plato’s earlier dialogues (a
point which need not be discussed here), it is at least not open to
question that he was personally intimate with the leading Pythagoreans
who had taken refuge at Thebes[61]
and at Phlius in the Peloponnesus when
their society came to be regarded as a danger to the state at Croton and
elsewhere in southern Italy. That happened about the middle of the fifth
century, and Socrates must have made the acquaintance of these men not
long after. At that time it would be quite natural for them to visit
Athens; but, after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431 B. C.),
all intercourse with them must have ceased. They were resident in enemy
states, and Socrates was fighting for his country. With the exception of
the brief interval of the Peace of Nicias (421 B. C.), he can have seen
nothing of them for years. Nevertheless it is clear that they did not
forget him; for we must accept Plato’s statement in the Phaedo
that many of the most distinguished philosophers of the time came to
Athens to be with Socrates when he was put to death, and that those of
them who could not come were eager to hear a full account of what
happened. It is highly significant that, even before this, two young
disciples of the Pythagorean Philolaus, Simmias and Cebes, had come from
Thebes and attached themselves to Socrates. For that we have the
evidence of Xenophon as well as of Plato, and Xenophon’s statement
is of real value here; for it was just during these few years that he
himself associated with Socrates, though he saw him for the last time a
year or two before his trial and death. Whatever other inferences may be
drawn from these facts, they are sufficient to prove that Socrates had
become acquainted with some of the leading philosophers of the Greek
world before he was forty, and to make it highly probable that it was he
who introduced the word ‘philosophy’ in its Pythagorean
sense to the Athenians.

So much for the word; we have next to ask how there came to be such a
thing as philosophy at all. It has been mentioned that Pythagoras was an
Ionian, and we should naturally expect to find that he brought at least
the beginnings of what he called philosophy from eastern Hellas. Now it
has been[62]
pointed out that Greek philosophy was based on science, and
science originated at Miletus on the mainland of Asia Minor nearly
opposite the island of Samos, which was the original home of Pythagoras.
The early Milesians were, in fact, men of science rather than
philosophers in the strict sense. The two things were not differentiated
yet, however, and the traditional account of the matter, according to
which Greek philosophy begins with Thales (c. 585 B. C.), is after all
quite justified. The rudimentary mathematical science of which, as
explained elsewhere in this volume, he was the originator in fact led
him and his successors to ask certain questions about the ultimate
nature of reality, and these questions were the beginning of philosophy
on its theoretical side. It is true that the Milesians were unable to
give any but the crudest answers to these questions, and very likely
they did not realise their full importance. These early inquirers only
wanted to know what the world was made of and how it worked, but the
complete break with mythology and traditional views which they effected
cleared the way for everything that followed. It was no small thing that
they were able to discard the old doctrine of what were afterwards known
as the ‘elements’—Fire, Air, Earth, and Water—and to
regard all these as states of a single substance, which presented
different appearances according as it was more or less rarefied or
condensed. Moreover, Anaximander at least (c. 546 B. C.), the
successor of Thales, shook himself free of the idea that the earth
required support of some kind to keep in its place. He held that it
swung free in space and that it remained where it was because there was
no reason for it to fall in one direction rather than another. In
general these early cosmologists saw that weight was not an inherent
quality of bodies and that it could not be used to explain anything. On
the contrary, weight was itself the thing to be explained. Anaximander
also noted the importance of rotary or vortex motion in the cosmical
scheme, and he inferred that there might be
[63] an indefinite number of
rotating systems in addition to that with which we are immediately
acquainted. He also made some very important observations of a
biological character, and he announced that man must be descended from
an animal of a different species. The young of most animals, he said,
can find their food at once, while that of the human species requires a
prolonged period of nursing. If, then, man had been originally such as
he is now, he could never have survived. All this, no doubt, is
rudimentary science rather than philosophy, but it was the beginning of
philosophy in this sense, that it completely transformed the traditional
view of the world, and made the raising of more ultimate problems
inevitable.

This transformation was effected in complete independence of religion.
What we may call secularism was, in fact, characteristic of all eastern
Ionian science to the end. We must not be misled by the fact that
Anaximander called his innumerable worlds ‘gods’ and that
his successor Anaximenes spoke of Air as a ‘god’. These were
never the gods of any city and were never worshipped by any one, and
they did not therefore answer at all to what the ordinary Greek meant by
a god. The use of the term by the Milesians means rather that the place
once occupied by the gods of religion was now being taken by the great
fundamental phenomena of nature, and the later Greeks were quite right,
from their own point of view, in calling that atheism. Aristophanes
characterizes this way of speaking very accurately indeed in the
Clouds when he makes Strepsiades sum up the teaching he has received
in the words ‘Vortex has driven out Zeus and reigns in his
stead’, and when he makes Socrates swear by ‘Chaos,
Respiration and Air’. So too the Milesians spoke of the primary
substance as ‘ageless and deathless’, which is a Homeric
phrase used to mark the difference between gods and men, but this only
means that the emotion formerly attached to the divine was now being
transferred to the natural.

[64]
The Milesians, then, had formed the conception of an eternal matter out
of which all things are produced and into which all things return, and
the conception of Matter belongs to philosophy rather than to science.
But besides this they had laid the foundations of geometry, and that led
in other hands to the formulation of the correlative conception of Limit
or Form. It is needless to enumerate here the Milesian and Pythagorean
contributions to plane geometry; it will be sufficient to remind the
reader that they covered most of the ground of Euclid, Books I, II,
IV, and VI, and probably also of Book III. In addition, Pythagoras
founded Arithmetic, that is, the scientific theory of numbers (αριθμητικη),
as opposed to the practical art of calculation (λογιστικη).
We also know that he discovered the sphericity of the
earth, and the numerical ratios of the intervals between the concordant
notes of the octave. It is obvious that he was a scientific genius of
the first order, and it is also clear that his methods included those of
observation and experiment. The discovery of the earth’s spherical
shape was due to observation of eclipses, and that of the intervals of
the octave can only have been based on experiments with a stretched
string, though the actual experiments attributed by tradition to
Pythagoras are absurd. It was no doubt this last discovery that led him
to formulate his doctrine in the striking saying ‘Things are
numbers’, thus definitely giving the priority to the element of
form or limit instead of to the indeterminate matter of his
predecessors.

Pythagoras further differed from his predecessors in one respect which
proved of vital moment. So far was he from ignoring religion, that he
founded a society in southern Italy which was primarily a religious
community. It is quite possible that he was influenced by the growth of
the Orphic societies which had begun to spread everywhere in the course
of the sixth century, but his religion differed from the Orphic
[65] in many
ways. In particular, Apollo and not Dionysus was the chief god of the
Pythagoreans, and all our evidence points to the conclusion that
Pythagoras brought his religion, as he had brought his science, from
eastern Hellas, though rather from the islands of the Aegean than from
mainland Ionia. He was much influenced, we can still see, by certain
traditions of the temple of Delos, which had become the religious centre
of the Ionic world. There had, of course, been plenty of religious
speculation among the Greeks before Pythagoras, and it was of a type not
unlike that we find in India, though there are insuperable difficulties
in the way of assuming any Aegean influence on India or any Indian
influence on the Aegean at this date. It may be that the beginnings of
such ideas go back to the time when the Greeks and the Hindus were
living together, though it is still more likely that both the Greeks and
the Indians were affected by a movement originating in the north, which
brought to both of them a new view of the soul. The Delian legend of the
Hyperboreans may be thought to point in this direction. However that may
be, the main purpose of the religious observances practised by the
Orphics and Pythagoreans alike was to secure by means of
‘purifications’ (καθαρμοι)
the ransom (λυσις)
of the soul, which was regarded as a fallen god, from the
punishment of imprisonment in successive bodies. There is no reason to
suppose that Pythagoras displayed any particular originality in this
part of his teaching. It all depends on the doctrine of transmigration
or rebirth (παλιγγενεσια), which is often incorrectly
designated by the late and inaccurate term ‘metempsychosis’.
There is no doubt that Pythagoras taught this, and also the rule of
abstinence from animal flesh which is its natural corollary, but such
ideas had been well known in many parts of Greece before his time. The
real difficulty is to see the connexion between all this and his
scientific work. Here we are of course confined to inferences from what
we are told by later writers;[66] but, if the doctrine which Plato makes
Socrates expound in the early part of the Phaedo is Pythagorean, as it
is generally supposed to be, we may say that what Pythagoras did was to
teach that, while the ordinary methods of purification were well enough
in their way, the best and truest purification for the soul was just
scientific study. It is only in some such way as this that we can
explain the religious note which is characteristic of all the best Greek
science. It involves the doctrine that the Theoretic Life is the highest
way of life for man, a belief still held by Plato and Aristotle, and to
which we shall have to return. We may note at once, however, that it is
not an ‘intellectualist’ ideal. There is no question of idle
contemplation; it is a strenuous way of life, the aim of which is the
soul’s salvation, and it gives rise to an eager desire to convert
other men. Just for that reason, the Pythagorean philosopher will take
part in practical life when the opportunity offers, and he will even
rule the state if called upon to do so. The Pythagorean society was a
proselytizing body from the first, and it tried to bring in all it could
reach, without distinction of nationality, social position, or sex (for
women played a great part in it from the first). It was precisely its
zeal for the reform of human life, and its attempt to set up a Rule of
the Saints in the cities of southern Italy that led to its unpopularity.
If the Pythagoreans had contented themselves with idle speculation, they
would not have been massacred or forced to take refuge in flight, a fate
which overtook them before the middle of the fifth century.

It soon proved, however, that the Pythagorean doctrine in its entirety
was too high a one for its adherents, and a rift between Pythagorean
religion and Pythagorean science was inevitable. Those who were capable
of appreciating the scientific side of the movement would tend more and
more to neglect the religious rule which it prescribed, and we find
accordingly that before the end of the fifth century the leading[67]
Pythagoreans, the men whose names we know, are first of all men of
science, and more and more inclined to drop what they doubtless regarded
as the superstitious side of the doctrine. In the end they were absorbed
in the new philosophical schools which arose at Athens. The mass of the
faithful, on the other hand, took no interest in arithmetic, geometry,
music, and astronomy, and with them to follow Pythagoras meant to go
barefoot and to abstain from animal flesh and beans. These continued the
tradition even after scientific Pythagoreanism had become extinct as
such, and they were a favourite subject of ridicule with the comic poets
of the fourth century B. C.

It is easy for us to see now that all this indicates a real weakness in
Pythagoreanism. Science and religion are not to be brought into union by
a simple process of juxtaposition. We do not know how far Pythagoras
himself was conscious of the ambiguity of his position; it would not be
surprising if he came to feel it towards the end of his life, and we
know for certain that he lived long enough to witness the beginnings of
the revolt against his society in Croton and elsewhere. It is for this
reason that he removed to Metapontum where he died, and where Cicero was
able to visit his tomb long afterwards. We shall see later what the weak
point in his system was, and we shall have to consider how the discord
he had left unresolved was ultimately overcome. For the present, it is
more important to note that he was the real founder both of science, and
of philosophy as we understand them now. It is specially true of science
that it is the first steps which are the most difficult, and Pythagoras
left a sufficient achievement in mathematics behind him for others to
elaborate. The Greeks took less than three centuries to complete the
edifice, and that was chiefly due to Pythagoras, who had laid the
foundations truly and well.

We have now seen how the two great conceptions of Matter
[68] and Form were
reached; the next problem Greek philosophy had to face was that of
Motion. At first the fact of movement had simply been taken for granted.
The Ionian tendency was to see motion everywhere; it was rest that had
to be explained, or rather the appearance of it. However, when the new
conception of an eternal matter began to be taken seriously,
difficulties made themselves felt at once. If reality was regarded as
continuous, it appeared that there was no room for anything else, not
even for empty space, which could only be identified with the unreal,
and it was easy to show that the unreal could not exist. But, if there
is no empty space, it seems impossible that there should be any motion,
and the world of which we suppose ourselves to be aware must be an
illusion. Such, briefly stated, was the position taken up by another
Ionian of southern Italy, Parmenides of Elea (c. 475 B. C.), who had
begun as a Pythagorean, but had been led to apply the rigorous method of
reasoning introduced into geometry with such success by the Pythagoreans
to the old question of the nature of the world which had occupied the
Milesians. The remarkable thing about the earliest geometers is, in
fact, that they did not formulate the conception of Space, which seems
to us at the present day fundamental. They were able to avoid it because
they possessed the conception of Matter, and regarded Air as the normal
state of the material substratum. The confusion of air with empty space
is, of course, a natural one, though it may be considered surprising
that it should not have been detected by the founders of geometrical
science. Such failures to draw all the consequences from a new discovery
are common enough, however, in the history of scientific thought.

Parmenides cleared up this ambiguity, not by affirming the existence of
empty space, but by denying the possibility of such a thing, even before
it had been asserted by any one. He saw that the Pythagoreans really
implied it, though they were quite[69] unconscious of the fact. He is
interesting to us as the first philosopher who thought of expounding his
system in verse. It was not a very happy thought, as the arguments in
which he deals do not readily lend themselves to this mode of
expression, and we may be thankful that none of his successors except
Empedocles followed his example. It has the very great inconvenience of
making it necessary to use different words for the same thing to suit
the exigencies of metre. And if there ever was an argument that demanded
precise statement, it was that of Parmenides. As it is, his poem has the
faults we should look for in a metrical version of Euclid. On the other
hand, Parmenides is the first philosopher of whom we have sufficient
remains to enable us to follow a continuous argument; for we have
nothing of Pythagoras at all, and only detached fragments of the rest.
We can see that he was ready to follow the argument wherever it might
lead. He took the conception of matter which had been elaborated by his
predecessors and he showed that, if it is to be taken seriously, it must
lead to the conclusion that reality is continuous, finite, and
spherical, with nothing outside it and no empty space within it. For
such a reality motion is impossible, and the world of the senses is
therefore an illusion. Of course that was not a result in which it was
possible for men to acquiesce for long, and historically speaking, the
Eleatic doctrine must be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of earlier
speculation. There is no reason to believe, however, that Parmenides
himself meant it to be understood in this way. He believed firmly that
he had found the truth.

Several attempts were made to escape the conclusions of Parmenides, and
they all start by abandoning the assumption of the homogeneity and
continuity of matter which had been implicit in the earlier systems,
though it was first brought to the light of day by Parmenides. Here
again the influence of contemporary science on philosophic thought is
clearly[70]
marked. Empedocles of Agrigentum (c. 460 B. C.), the only
citizen of a Dorian state who finds a place in the early history of
science and philosophy, was the founder of the Sicilian school of
medicine, and it was probably his pre-occupation with that science that
led him to revive the old doctrine of Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, which
the Milesians had cast aside, but which lent itself readily to the
physiological theories of the day. He did not use the word afterwards
translated ‘elements’ (στοιχεια) for these. It
means literally ‘letters of the alphabet’, and appears to
have been first employed in this connexion by the Pythagoreans at a
later date, when they found it necessary to take account of the new
theory. Empedocles spoke of the ‘four roots’ of things, and
by this he meant to imply that these four forms of matter were equally
original and altogether disparate. That furnished at least a partial
answer to the arguments of Parmenides, which depended on the assumption
that matter was homogeneous. He also found it necessary to assume two
sources of motion or forces, as we might call them, though Empedocles
thought of them as substances, one of which tended to separate the
‘four roots’ and the other to combine them. These he called
Love and Strife, and he supposed the life of the world to take the form
of alternate cycles, in which one or the other prevailed in turn. In all
this he was plainly influenced by his physiological studies. He thinks
of the world as an animal organism subject to what are now called
anabolism and catabolism. The details of the theory make this quite
clear. A similar doctrine was taught by Anaxagoras (c. 460 B. C.), who
came from Clazomenae in Asia Minor to Athens after the Persian Wars, and
was one of the teachers of Pericles. His doctrine of
‘seeds’, in which the traditional
‘opposites’—wet and dry, cold and hot—were combined in
different proportions, is rather more subtle than that of Empedocles,
and it is possible to see in it a curious anticipation of certain
features in modern[71]
chemistry. Anaxagoras too felt it necessary to
assume a force or source of motion, but he thought that one would
suffice to account for the rotation (περιχωρησις) to which he
attributed the formation of the world. He called that force Mind
(νους), but his own description of it shows that he regarded it
as corporeal, though he thought it was something more tenuous and
unmixed than other bodies. There is little doubt that he selected the
term in order to mark the identity of the source of motion in the world
with that in the animal organism. That again is in accordance with the
scientific interests of the time. In his astronomical theories, however,
Anaxagoras showed himself a true eastern Ionian, and lagged far behind
the Pythagoreans. For him, as for the Ionians of the Aegean down to and
including Democritus, the earth was flat, and the eddy or vortex which
gave rise to the world was still rotation in a plane. A more satisfying
answer to Parmenides was the doctrine of Atomism, which frankly accepted
the existence of space, and asserted that it was just as real as body.
The first hint of such a solution was given by Melissus (c. 444 B.
C.), who was a Samian but a member of the Eleatic school. He said,
‘If things are a many, then each of them must be such as I have
shown the One to be.’ That was meant as a reductio ad absurdum;
but, when Leucippus of Miletus (c. 440 B. C.), who had also studied in
the school of Elea, ventured to assert the existence of the Void, there
was no longer any reason for shirking the conclusion which Melissus had
stated only to show its impossibility. The atoms are, in fact, just the
continuous indivisible One of Parmenides multiplied ad infinitum in an
infinite empty space. On that side at least, the theory of body was now
complete, and the question asked by Thales was answered, and it is of
great interest to observe that this was brought about by the renewal of
intercourse between the Ionians of Italy and those of the Aegean, a
renewal which was made[72] possible by the establishment of the Athenian
Empire. Nothing makes us feel the historical connexion more vividly than
the re-emergence of the names of Miletus and Samos after all these
years. There were, however, certain more fundamental problems which
Atomism could not solve, and which were first attacked at Athens itself.
So far, it will be noted, Athens has played no part at all in our story,
and in fact no more than two Athenians ever became philosophers of the
first rank. It is true that they were called Socrates and Plato, so the
exception is a considerable one. It was the foundation of the Athenian
Empire that made Athens the natural meeting-place of the most diverse
philosophical and scientific views. It was here that the east and west
of Hellas came together, and that the two streams of tradition became
one, with the result that a new tradition was started which, though
often interrupted for a time, continues to the present day.

If we wish to understand the development of Greek philosophy, it is of
the first importance that we should realize the intellectual ferment
which existed at Athens in the great days of the Periclean age. It has
been mentioned already that Anaxagoras of Clazomenae had settled there,
and it was not long before his example was followed by others. In
particular, Zeno of Elea (c. 450 B. C.), the favourite disciple of
Parmenides, had a considerable following at Athens. He made it his
business to champion the doctrine of his master by showing that those
who refused to accept it were obliged to give their assent to views
which were at least as repugnant to common sense, and in this way he
incidentally did much for mathematics and philosophy by raising the
difficulties of infinite divisibility and continuity in an acute form.
All that is something quite apart from the influence of the
‘sophists’ at a rather later date, though they too came both
from the east and from the west, and though they had been influenced by
the more strictly[73]
philosophical schools of these regions. It was into
this Athens that Socrates was born (470 B. C.) about ten years after the
battle of Salamis, and he was naturally exposed to all these conflicting
influences, of which Plato has given us a vivid description in the
Phaedo, from his earliest youth. He cannot, in fact, be understood at
all unless this historical background is kept constantly in view. There
can be no reasonable doubt that at a very early age he attached himself
to Archelaus, an Athenian who had succeeded Anaxagoras, when that
philosopher had to leave Athens for Lampsacus. Ion of Chios, a
contemporary witness, said that Socrates had visited Asia Minor with
Archelaus, and that appears to refer to the siege of Samos, when
Socrates was under thirty. There is no reason whatever to doubt the
statement, which Plato makes more than once, that he had met Parmenides
and Zeno at a still earlier date. At any rate, the influence of Zeno on
the dialectic of Socrates is unmistakable. We may also take it that he
was familiar with all sorts of Orphic and Pythagorean sectaries.
Aeschines of Sphettos wrote a dialogue entitled Telauges, in which he
represented Socrates as rallying the extreme asceticism of the strict
followers of Pythagoras. So far, however, as we can form a picture of
him for ourselves, he was not the sort of man to become the disciple of
any one. He was a genuine Athenian in respect of what is called his
‘irony’, which implies a certain humorous reserve which kept
him from all extravagances, however interested he might be in the
extravagances of others. Nevertheless, while still quite a young man, he
had somehow acquired a reputation for ‘wisdom’, though he
himself disclaimed anything of the sort. He had also, it appears,
gathered round him a circle of ‘associates’
(ἑταιροι).
The only direct evidence we have for these early days is the
Clouds of Aristophanes (423 B. C.), which is of course a comedy and
must not be taken too literally. On the other hand, a comic poet who
knew his business (and surely Aristophanes did) could hardly
[74] present a
well-known man to the Athenian public in a manner which had no relation
to fact at all. It is fortunate that there is a passage in
Xenophon’s Memorabilia (i. 6) which seems to supply us with the
very background we need to make the Clouds intelligible. It represents
Socrates in an entirely different light from that in which he appears in
the rest of the work, and it can hardly be Xenophon’s own
invention. It seems to refer to a time when Plato and Xenophon were
babies, if not to a time before they were born, and it is probable that
it comes from some literary source which we can no longer trace. We are
told, then, that Antiphon the sophist was trying to detach his
companions (συνουσιασται) from Socrates, and a conversation
followed in which he charged him with teaching his followers to be
miserable rather than happy, and added that he was right not to charge a
fee for his teaching, since in fact it was of no value. It will be seen
that this implies a regular relation between Socrates and his followers
which was sufficiently well known to arouse professional jealousy.
Socrates does not attempt to deny the fact. He says that what he and his
companions do is to spend their time together in studying the wisdom of
the men of old which they have left behind them in books, and that, if
they come upon anything which they think is good, they extract it for
their own use, and count it great gain if, in doing this, they become
friends to one another. It is obvious that this suggests something quite
different from the current view of Socrates as a talker at street
corners, something much more like a regular school, and that, so far as
it goes, it explains the burlesque of Aristophanes.

The Socrates of whom we know most is, however, quite differently
engaged. He has devoted his life to a mission to his fellow men, and
especially to his fellow citizens. If we may so far trust Plato’s
Apology, the occasion of that was the answer received from the Delphic
oracle by Chaerephon, whom we know from Aristophanes as one of the
leading disciples of[75] Socrates in the earlier part of his life.
Chaerephon asked the god of Delphi whether there was any one wiser than
Socrates, and this of course implies that Socrates had a reputation for
‘wisdom’ before his mission began. The oracle declared that
there was no one wiser, and Plato makes Socrates say in the Apology
that this was the real beginning of that mission. He set out at first to
prove that the oracle was wrong, and for that purpose he tried to
discover some one wiser than himself, a search in which he was
disappointed, since he could only find people who thought they were
wise, and no one who really was so. He therefore concluded that what the
oracle really meant was that Socrates was wiser than other people in one
respect only. Neither he nor any one else was really ‘wise’,
but Socrates was wiser than the rest because he knew he was not wise and
they thought they were. It ought to be clear that this is mostly
‘irony’, and it is not to be supposed that Socrates attached
undue importance to the oracle, which he speaks of quite lightly, but he
could hardly have told the story at all unless it was generally known
that his mission did in fact date roughly from that period of his life.
Historically it would probably be truer to say that the outbreak of the
Peloponnesian War, in which Socrates served with great distinction as a
hoplite, marked the decisive turning-point. It was in the camp at
Potidaea that he once stood in a trance for twenty-four hours (431 B.
C.), and that seems to point to some great psychological change, which
may very well have been occasioned or accelerated by his experiences in
the war. At any rate we now find him entirely devoted to the conversion
of his fellow citizens, and we must try to understand what the message
he had for them was.

In the Apology Socrates declares that his mission was divinely imposed
upon him, so that he dare not neglect it, even if it should lead to his
death, as in fact it did. The tone here is quite different from the
half-humorous style in which he deals with[76] the Delphic oracle, and even
the ‘divine sign’. That only warned him not to do things,
mostly quite trivial things, which he was about to do, and never told
him to do anything; this, on the contrary, was a positive command, laid
upon him by God, and there can be no doubt that Plato means us to
understand this to have been the innermost conviction of Socrates. It is
hard to believe that Plato could have misrepresented his master’s
attitude on such a point. He was present at the trial, and the Apology
must have been written not very long afterwards, when the memory of it
was still fresh in people’s minds. Now Plato tells us quite
clearly that what Socrates tried to get the Athenians to understand was
the duty of ‘caring for their souls’ (ψυχης επιμελειο).
That is confirmed from other sources, and indeed it is
generally admitted. The phrase has, however, become so familiar that it
does not at once strike us as anything very new or important. To an
Athenian of the fifth century B. C., on the other hand, it must have
seemed very strange indeed. The word translated ‘soul’
(ψυχη) occurs often enough, no doubt, in the literature of
the period, but it is never used of anything for which we could be
called upon to ‘care’ in the sense evidently intended by
Socrates. Its normal use is to denote the breath of life, the
‘ghost’ a man ‘gives up’ at the moment of death.
It can therefore be rendered by ‘life’ in all cases where
there is a question of risking or losing life or of clinging to it when
we ought to be prepared to sacrifice it, but it is not used for the seat
of conscious life at all. It is sometimes employed to signify the seat
of the dream-consciousness or of what is now called the subconscious or
subliminal self, but never of the ordinary waking consciousness which is
the seat of knowledge and ignorance, goodness and badness.[2] On the
other hand, that use of the word is quite common in the fourth century,
[77]
and it may be inferred that this change was due to Socrates. More than
once Aristophanes ridicules him for holding some strange view of the
‘soul’, and these jests were made at a time when Plato was
only a child. We cannot, of course, expect to get any very definite idea
from them as to the real teaching of Socrates on this subject, but it is
not impossible to see what it was, if we take into account the views of
the soul which had been held by the philosophical schools of eastern and
western Ionia.

The Ionians of Asia Minor had certainly identified the soul with that in
us which is conscious, and which is the seat of goodness and badness,
wisdom and folly; but they did not regard it as what we call the self or
treat it as an individual. Anaximenes and his school held that the soul
was what they called Air, but that was just because they regarded Air as
the primary substance of which all things are made. The soul was
something, in fact, that comes to us from outside (θυραθεν)
by means of respiration. As Diogenes of Apollonia expresses it, it is
‘a small portion of the god’, that is, of the primary
substance, enclosed in a human body for a time, and returning at death
to the larger mass of the same substance outside. The formula
‘Earth to earth and air to air’ was accepted as an adequate
description of what takes place at death. The western Ionians, and
especially the Pythagoreans, held a very different view. For them, the
soul was something divine. It was, in fact, a fallen god, imprisoned in
the body as a punishment for antenatal sin, and it deserved our care in
this sense, that it was our chief business in life to purify it so as to
secure its release from the necessity of reincarnation in another body.
But, during this present life, they held that this divine element
slumbers, except in prophetic dreams. As Pindar puts it, ‘It
sleeps when the limbs are active.’ Neither of these views was
familiar to the ordinary Athenian, but Socrates of course knew both
well, and felt satisfied with neither. When he spoke of
[78] the soul he did
not mean any mysterious fallen god which was the temporary tenant of the
body, but the conscious self which it lies with us to try to make wise
and good. On the other hand, his insistence on our duty to ‘care
for’ it is quite inconsistent with the view that it is merely
something extrinsic, as all the eastern Ionians down to Anaxagoras had
taught. It is, on the contrary, our very self, the thing in us which is
of more importance to us than anything else whatever. It was to this
doctrine of the soul and our duty to it that Socrates felt he must
convert mankind and especially his fellow-citizens. It was a strange and
novel doctrine then; and, if it has become a commonplace since, that
only shows that he was successful, if not in persuading his fellowmen to
act on this knowledge, at least in making them aware of it. It was in
this way that Socrates healed the rift between science and religion
which had proved fatal to the Pythagorean society, and it may be
suggested that the significance of his teaching is not exhausted yet. As
has been indicated above it is to be found clearly stated in
Plato’s Apology of Socrates, and it furnishes the only clue to a
right understanding of the great series of Platonic dialogues down to
and including the Republic in which Socrates is represented as the
chief speaker. Whether Plato added much or little of his own to the
doctrine of his master in these dialogues is an interesting historical
problem, but it need not concern the ordinary reader, at least in the
first instance. We know from the allusions of Aristophanes that Socrates
himself taught a new doctrine of the soul when Plato was a child, and no
sympathetic reader can fail to see that the passage of the Apology to
which we have referred is intended to be a faithful account of that
doctrine. All the rest is simply its legitimate development, and it is
not of very great importance for us to determine whether that
development is due to Socrates or to Plato. The inspiration which has
been derived from these writings by many generations will not be
lessened by any decision we may come to on this point, so long
[79] as we
keep clearly in mind that the new doctrine of soul is their principal
theme, and that this must be understood in the light of the doctrines
which had prepared the way for it. What Socrates did was really this. He
deepened the meaning of the Eastern Ionian doctrine by informing it with
some of the feeling and emotion which had characterized the Pythagorean
teaching on the subject, while on the other hand he rationalized the
Pythagorean theory by identifying the soul with our conscious
personality.

Now if this is a correct account of what Socrates taught, he must be
regarded as inaugurating an entirely new period in the history of
philosophy. That is implied in the common term
‘Presocratics’ generally applied to his predecessors, though
the ordinary textbooks are by no means clear as to the grounds for
assigning this pre-eminent position to Socrates. We can also see how
natural it was for him to lay such emphasis on the conversion of souls
as he certainly did. That purpose continued to dominate Greek philosophy
to the very end. No doubt successive schools varied in their conception
of what conversion meant, but that is the link which binds them all
together. In fact, it gave rise to a new literary form, the
‘hortatory discourse’ (προτρεπτικος λογος), which
was more and more cultivated as time went on, and was at last taken over
by the fathers of the Christian church along with much else of a more
fundamental character.

It has been noted already that Socrates had followers among all the
leading philosophical schools of the time, and the possibility is not to
be excluded that we may still learn more of him from the discovery of
new sources. For the present, the recovery of some new and fairly
extensive fragments of the Alcibiades of Aeschines of Sphettos is the
chief addition to our sources of information. We know that Aeschines was
a disciple of Socrates, and the tradition of antiquity was that his
dialogues gave the most faithful picture of the man as he really was. If
so,[80]
that was probably because Aeschines had no philosophy of his own.
For us the chief importance of the new fragments is that, if we read
them along with those already known (and it is unfortunate that the old
and the new have not yet been printed together), they strongly confirm
the impression we get from Plato of the manner of Socrates and his
method of argument, and that helps to reassure us as to the essentially
historical character of the Platonic Socrates. The fragments of
Aeschines also corroborate Plato by showing that the conversion of
Alcibiades (whose life he had saved when a young man) was one of the
things that lay nearest his heart.

But the real successor of Socrates was, of course, Plato himself
(427-347 B. C.). It is not possible to give even an outline of
Plato’s philosophy here. Indeed the time has hardly come for that
yet, though much admirable work is now being done, especially by a
French professor, M. Robin, which promises more certain conclusions than
have yet been possible. All that can be attempted here is to indicate
the attitude of Plato to some of the problems we have been discussing.
His very great contributions to the theory of knowledge will be passed
over, as they are beginning to be well understood, and the Theaetetus
in particular, with its sequel the Sophist, is more and more coming to
occupy its rightful place as the best introduction to philosophy in
general. It is necessary, however, just to notice in passing a
fundamental question of method which the Platonic dialogues themselves
suggest. It is this. While Socrates is present in every one of them
except the Laws, he takes practically no part in some of them, and the
dialogues in which this is the case are known on other grounds to belong
to the later years of Plato’s life. There must be some reason for
this, and it is obviously prudent to treat these later dialogues in the
first instance as our primary evidence for Plato’s own views.
Indeed, it is only after his philosophy has been reconstructed from
these sources and from the sometimes obscure references to it in
Aristotle, that it will[81]
be safe to attempt an answer to the question of
how much there may be in the dialogues of his early life which is
properly to be assigned to Plato himself rather than to Socrates. That
is a historical question of great interest; but, as has been said, the
solution of it, if that should ever prove possible, would not greatly
affect the impression that Athenian philosophy leaves upon us as a
whole.

Now, if we consider Plato’s later, and presumably therefore most
independent writings, we find, just as we should expect from a disciple
of Socrates, that the doctrine of soul holds the first place, but that
it has certain features of its own which there is no sufficient ground
for attributing to Socrates. We are too apt to think of Plato as mainly
occupied with what is called the ‘theory of Ideas’, a theory
which is discussed once or twice in his earlier dialogues, and which is
there ascribed to Socrates, but which plays no part at all in his mature
works. There the chief place is undoubtedly taken by the doctrine of the
soul, and we can see that it is of the first importance for Plato. Soul
is regarded as the source of all motion in the world, because it is the
only thing in the world that moves without being itself moved by
anything else. It is this and this alone that enables Plato to account
for the existence of the world and of mankind, and to avoid the theory
of ‘two worlds’ into which, as he points out in the
Sophist, ‘the friends of the Ideas’, whoever they may have
been, were only too apt to fall. In Plato this view of the soul
culminates in theology of a kind which he nowhere attributes to
Socrates. He represents him, indeed, as a man of a deeply religious
nature, but we do not gather that he had felt the need of a formal
doctrine of God. Plato, on the other hand, has left us the first
systematic defence of Theism we know of, and it is based entirely on his
doctrine of soul as the self-moved mover. But the highest soul, or God,
is not only the ultimate source of motion, but also supremely good. Now,
since there are many things in the world which are not good,
[82] and since
it would be blasphemy to attribute these to God, there must be other
souls in the world which are relatively at least independent. God is
not, directly at least, the cause of all things, but it is not easy to
discover the relation in which these other souls are thought of as
standing to God. In the Timaeus, the matter is put in this way. The
soul of the world, and all other souls human and divine, are the work of
the Creator, who is identified with God, and they are not inherently
indestructible, since anything that has been made can be unmade. They
are, however, practically indestructible, since God made all things
because He was good and wished them also to be as good as possible. His
goodness, therefore, will not suffer Him to destroy what He has once
made. That of course is mythically expressed, and Plato is not committed
to it as a statement of his own belief, since it is only the account
which Timaeus puts into the mouth of the Creator. We can see, however,
what was the problem with which he was occupied, and it is not perhaps
illegitimate to infer that he approached the question which still
baffles speculation from the point of view that God’s omnipotence,
as we should call it, is limited by his goodness. This is a much more
important limitation than that imposed by the existence of matter, to
which Timaeus also refers. In that, he is simply following the tradition
of the Pythagorean society to which he belonged, as is shown by his
identification of matter with space, or rather with ‘room’.
So far as can be seen at present, we are not entitled to ascribe this
view to Plato without more ado, but that is a point on which the last
word has not yet been said.

The description of the creation given by Timaeus is of course to be
regarded as mythical in its details, but it has features from which we
may learn a good deal as to the direction taken by Plato’s
thoughts about the world. In particular, while the important part played
by geometry is quite intelligible in the mouth of a Pythagorean, he
makes use of certain theories which[83] we know to belong to the most
recent mathematics of the day, in particular the complete doctrine of
the five regular solids, which was due to Theaetetus, who was one of the
earliest members of the Academy, and whom Plato represents as having
made the acquaintance of Socrates just before the master’s death.
Theaetetus died young, but we know enough of him to feel sure that he
was one of the few great original mathematicians who have appeared in
history. In the Timaeus the theory of the regular solids is used to
get rid once more of the doctrine of four ultimate
‘elements’. These, Timaeus says, are so far from being
elements or letters of the alphabet, that they are not even syllables.
The way in which the so-called elements are built up out of molecules
corresponding in their configuration to the regular solids, and the
explanations of their transmutation into one another based on the
geometrical construction of these figures, is apt to strike the average
reader as fantastic, but one of the most distinguished living
mathematicians and physicists has stated that he is struck most of all
by their resemblance to the scientific theories of the twentieth
century. It will be well, therefore, to avoid hasty judgements on this
point. It is at any rate easy to understand how the study of mathematics
came to hold the preponderating place it did in the Platonic Academy.

In accordance with the plan of this paper, something must now be said of
Plato’s attitude to the practical life, a point on which it is
very easy to make mistakes. No one has insisted more strongly than he
has on the primacy of the Theoretic Life. The philosopher is the man who
is in love with the spectacle of all time and all existence and that is
what delivers him from petty ambitions and low desires. He has made the
toilsome ascent out of the Cave in which the mass of men dwell, and in
which they only behold the shadows of reality. But, even in this
enthusiastic description of the philosophic life, an equal stress is
laid on the duty of philosopher to descend into the
[84] Cave in turn and to
rescue as many of their former fellow-prisoners as may be, even against
their will, by turning them to the light and dragging them up into the
world of truth and reality. It is quite easy to understand, in view of
this, that Plato devoted some of the best years of his life to practical
affairs and that he relinquished the studies of the Academy for a time
in order to direct the education of Dionysius II. The thing appeared
well worth doing; for Greek civilization in Sicily, and consequently, as
we can now see, the civilization of western Europe, was seriously
threatened by the Carthaginians. They had been held at bay by Dionysius
I, but after his death everything depended on his successor. Now the
education of Dionysius II had been completely neglected, but he had good
natural abilities, and his uncle Dion, who was Plato’s friend, was
ready to answer for his good intentions. Plato could not turn a deaf ear
to such a call. Unfortunately Dionysius was vain and obstinate, and he
soon became impatient of the serious studies which Plato rightly
regarded as necessary to prepare him for his task. The result was a
growing estrangement between Plato and his pupil, which made it
impossible to hope for a successful issue to the plans of Dion. It is
unnecessary to tell the whole story here, but it is right to say that
there was nothing at all impracticable in what Plato undertook, and that
he was certainly justified in holding that the education of Dionysius
must be completed before it would be safe to entrust him with the
championship of the cause of Hellenism in the west.

His failure to make anything of Dionysius did not lead Plato to abandon
his efforts to heal the wounds of Hellenism. One of the studies most
ardently pursued in the Academy was Jurisprudence, of which he is the
real founder. It was not uncommon for Greek states to apply to the
Academy for legislators to codify existing law or to frame a new code
for colonies which had just been founded. That is the real explanation
of[85]
the remarkable work entitled the Laws, which must have occupied
Plato for many years, and which was probably begun while he was still
directing the studies of Dionysius. It appears to have been left
unfinished; for, while some parts of it are highly elaborated, there are
others which make upon us the impression of being a first draft. Even
so, it is a great work if we regard it from the proper point of view. It
is, in the first place, a codification of Greek, and especially Athenian
law, of course with those reforms and improvements which suggest
themselves when the subject is systematically treated, and it formed the
basis of Hellenistic, and through that of Roman law, to which the world
owes so much. There is no more useful corrective of the popular notion
of Plato as an unpractical visionary than the careful study of the
dullest and most technical parts of the Laws in the light of the
Institutes.

No attempt has been made here to describe the system of Plato as a
whole, and indeed the time has not yet come when such an attempt can
profitably be made. We have no direct knowledge of his teaching in the
Academy; for we only possess the works which he wrote with a wider
public in view. In the case of Aristotle (384-322 B. C.), a similar
reservation must be made, though for just the opposite reason. We have
only fragments of his published works and what we possess is mainly the
groundwork of his lectures in the Lyceum. It will be seen that there is
still very much to be done here too. From the nature of the case, notes
for lectures take a great deal for granted that would be more fully
explained when the lectures were delivered, and some of the most
important points are hardly developed at all. Nevertheless there are
certain things which come out clearly enough, and it so happens that
they are points of great importance from which we can learn something
with regard to the philosophical problems of the present day.

In the first place, it is desirable to point out that Aristotle was not
an Athenian, but an Ionian from the northern Aegean,
[86] and that he was
strongly influenced by eastern Ionian science, especially by the system
of Democritus (which Plato does not appear to have known) and by the
medical theories of the time. That is why he is so unsympathetic to the
western schools of philosophy, and especially to the Pythagoreans and
the Eleatics. Empedocles alone, who was a biologist like himself, and
the founder of a medical school, finds favour in his eyes. He is not,
therefore, at home in mathematical matters and his system of Physics can
only be regarded as retrograde when we compare it with that of the
Academy. He did indeed accept the doctrine of the earth’s
sphericity, but with that exception his cosmological views must be
called reactionary. Where he is really great is in biology, a field of
research which was not entirely neglected by the Academy, but which had
been treated as secondary in comparison with mathematics and astronomy.
The contrast between Plato and Aristotle in this respect seems to repeat
on a higher plane that between Pythagoras and Empedocles, and this
suggests something like a law of philosophical development which may
perhaps throw light on the present situation. It seems as if this
alternation of the mathematical and the biological interest was
fundamental in the development of scientific thought and that the
philosophy of different periods takes its colour from it. The philosophy
of the nineteenth century was dominated in the main by biological
conceptions, while it seems as if that of the twentieth was to be
chiefly mathematical in its outlook on the world. We must not, of
course, make too much of such formulas, but it is instructive to study
such alternations in the philosophy of the Greeks, where everything is
simpler and more easily apprehended.

On the other hand, Aristotle had been a member of the Academy for twenty
years, and that could not fail to leave its mark upon him. This no doubt
explains the fact, which has often been noted, that there are two
opposite and inconsistent[87]
strains in all Aristotle’s thinking. On
the one hand, he is determined to avoid everything
‘transcendental’, and his dislike of Pythagorean and
Platonist mathematics is mainly due to that. On the other hand, despite
his captious and sometimes unfair criticisms of Plato, he evidently
admired him greatly and had been much influenced by him. It may be
suggested that the tone of his criticisms is partly due to his annoyance
at finding that he could not shake off his Platonism, do what he would.
This is borne out by the fact that, when he has come to the furthest
point to which his own system will take him, he is apt to take refuge in
metaphors of a mythical or ‘transcendental’ character, for
which we are not prepared in any way and of which no explanation is
vouchsafed us. That is particularly the case when he is dealing with the
soul and the first mover. On the whole his account of the soul is simply
a development of eastern Ionian theories, and we feel that we are far
removed indeed from the Platonist conception of the soul’s
priority to everything else. But, when he has told us that the highest
and most developed form of soul is Mind, we are suddenly surprised by
the statement that Mind in this sense is merely passive, while there is
another form of it which is separable from matter, and that alone is
immortal and everlasting. This has given rise to endless controversy
which does not concern us here, but it seems best to interpret it as an
involuntary outburst of the Platonism Aristotle could not wholly
renounce. Very similar is the passage where he tries to explain how the
first mover, though itself unmoved, communicates motion to the world.
‘It moves it like a thing beloved,’ he tells us, and leaves
us to make what we can of that. And yet we cannot help feeling that, in
passages like this, we come far nearer to the beliefs Aristotle really
cared about than we do anywhere else. At heart he is a Platonist in
spite of himself.

Aristotle’s attitude to the practical life is also dependent on
[88]
Plato’s. In the Tenth Book of the Ethics he puts the claims of
the Contemplative Life even higher than Plato ever did, so that the
practical life appears to be only ancillary to it. He does not feel in
the same degree as Plato the call for the philosopher to descend once
more into the Cave for the sake of the prisoners there, and altogether
he seems far more indifferent to the practical interests of life.
Nevertheless he followed Plato’s lead in giving much of his time
to the study of Politics and that too with the distinctly practical aim
of training legislators. He has often been criticized for his failure to
see that the days of the city-state were numbered, and for the way in
which he ignores the rise of an imperial monarchy in the person of his
own pupil Alexander the Great. That, however, is not quite fair.
Aristotle had a healthy dislike of princes and courts, and the
city-state still appealed to him as the normal form of political
organization. He could not believe that it would ever be superseded, and
he wished to contribute to its better administration. He had, in fact, a
much more conservative outlook than Plato, who was inclined to think
with Isocrates, that the revival of monarchy was the only thing that
could preserve Hellenism as things were then. We must remember that
Aristotle was not himself a citizen of any free state, and that he could
hardly be expected to have the same political instincts as Plato, who
belonged by birth to the governing classes of Athens and had inherited
the liberal traditions of the Periclean Age. This comes out best of all
perhaps, in the attitude of the two philosophers to the question of
slavery. In the Laws, which deals with existing conditions, Plato of
course recognizes the de facto existence of slavery, though he is very
sensible of its dangers and makes many legislative proposals with a view
to their mitigation. In the Republic, on the other hand, where there
is no need to trouble about existing conditions, he makes Socrates
picture for us a community in which[89] there are apparently no slaves at
all. Aristotle is also anxious to mitigate the worst abuses of slavery,
but he justifies the institution as a permanent one by the consideration
that barbarians are ‘slaves by nature’ and that it is for
their own interest to be ‘living tools’. This insistence
upon the fundamental distinction between Greeks and barbarians must have
seemed an anachronism to many of Aristotle’s contemporaries and it
had been expressly denounced by Plato as unscientific.

The immediate effect of Aristotle’s rejection of Platonist
mathematics was one he certainly neither foresaw nor intended. It was to
make a breach between philosophy and science. Mathematical science,
whether Aristotle realized it or not, was still in the vigour of its
first youth, and mathematicians were stirred by the achievements of the
last generation to attempt the solution of still higher problems. If the
Lyceum turned away from them, they were quite prepared to carry on the
Academic tradition by themselves, and they succeeded for a time beyond
all expectation. The third century B. C. was, in fact, the Golden Age of
Greek mathematics, and it has been suggested that this was due to the
emancipation of mathematics from philosophy. If that were true, it would
be very important for us to know it; but it can, I think, be shown that
it is not true. The great mathematicians of the third century were
certainly carrying on the tradition of their predecessors who had been
philosophers as well as mathematicians, and it is not to be wondered at
that they were able to do so for a time. But the really striking fact is
surely that Greek mathematics became sterile in a comparatively short
time, and that no further advance was made till the days of Descartes
and Leibniz, with whom philosophy and mathematics once more went hand in
hand.

Nor was the effect of this divorce on philosophy itself less
[90]
disastrous. Theophrastus continued Aristotle’s work on
Aristotle’s lines, and founded the science of Botany as his
predecessor had founded that of Zoology, but the Peripatetic School
practically died out with him and had very little influence till the
study of Aristotle was revived long afterwards by the Neoplatonists.

For the present, the divorce of science and philosophy was complete. The
Stoics and the Epicureans had both, indeed, a scientific system, but
their philosophy was in no sense based upon it. The attitude of Epicurus
to science is particularly well marked. He took no interest in it
whatever as such, but he used it as an instrument to free men from the
religious fear to which he attributed human unhappiness. For that
purpose, the science of the Academy, which had led up to a theology, was
obviously unsuitable, and, like a true eastern Ionian as he was,
Epicurus harked back to the atomic theory of Democritus, adding to it,
however, certain things which really made nonsense of it, such, for
instance, as the theory of absolute weight and lightness, which
Aristotle had unfortunately taught. The Stoics too were corporealists,
and found such science as they required in the system of Heraclitus,
though they also adopted for polemical purposes much of
Aristotle’s Logic, taking pains, however, to alter his
terminology. Both these schools, in fact, while remaining faithful to
the idea of philosophy as conversion, forgot that it had always been
based on science in its best days. It was this, no doubt, which chiefly
commended Stoicism and Epicureanism to the Romans, who were never really
interested in science. Both Stoicism and Epicureanism made a practical
appeal, though of a different kind, and that served to gain credit for
them at Rome.

The Academy which Plato had founded still continued to exist, though it
was diverted from its original purpose not more than a generation after
Plato’s death. Mathematics, we have[91] seen, had made itself
independent, and the most pressing necessity of the time was certainly
the criticism of the new dogmatism which the Stoics had introduced. That
was really carrying on one side of Platonism and not the least
important. It is true indeed that the Academy appears to us at this
distance of time mainly as a school of scepticism, but we must remember
that its scepticism was directed entirely to the sensible world, as to
which the attitude of Plato himself was not fundamentally different. The
real sceptics always refused to admit that the Academics were sceptics
in the proper sense of the word, and it is possible that the tradition
of Platonism proper was never wholly broken. At any rate, by the first
century B. C., we begin to notice that Stoicism tends to become more and
more Platonic. The study of Plato’s Timaeus came into favour
again, and the commentary which Posidonius (c. 100 B. C.) wrote upon
it had great influence on the development of philosophy down to the end
of the Middle Ages. It is this period of eclecticism which is reflected
for us in the philosophical writings of Cicero. It had great importance
for the history of civilization, but it is far removed from the spirit
of genuine Greek philosophy. That was dead for the present, and it did
not come to life again till the third century of our era, when Platonism
was revived at Rome by Plotinus.

It is only quite recently that historians of Greek philosophy have begun
to do justice to ‘Neoplatonism’. That is partly due to the
contemporary philosophical tendencies noted at the beginning of this
paper, and partly to historical investigations into the philosophy of
the Middle Ages, which is more and more seen to be dependent mainly on
Neoplatonism down to and including the system of St. Thomas Aquinas. It
was in fact the most decisive fact in the history of Western European
civilization that Plotinus founded his school at Rome rather than at
Athens or Alexandria; for that is how Western Europe
[92] became the real
heir to the philosophy of Greece. Every one knows, of course, that
Plotinus was a ‘mystic’, but the term is apt to suggest
quite wrong ideas about him. He is often spoken of still as a man who
introduced oriental ideas into Greek philosophy, and he is popularly
supposed to have been an Egyptian. That is most improbable; and, if it
were true, it would only make it the more remarkable that, though he
certainly studied at Alexandria for eleven years, he never even mentions
the religion of Isis, which was so fashionable at Rome in his day, and
which had fascinated so genuine a Greek as Plutarch some generations
before. There is no doubt that what Plotinus believed himself to be
teaching was genuine Platonism, and that he had prepared himself for the
task by a careful study of Aristotle and even of Stoicism, so far as
that served his purpose. No doubt he was too great a man to make himself
the mere mouthpiece of another’s thought; but, for all that, he
was the legitimate successor of Plato, and it may be added that M.
Robin, who has taken upon himself the arduous task of extracting
Plato’s real philosophy from the writings of Aristotle, has come
to the conclusion that there is a great deal more
‘Neoplatonism’ in Plato than is sometimes supposed.

Plotinus is a mystic, then, though not at all in the sense in which the
term is often misused. He sets before his disciples a ‘way of
life’ which leads by stages to the highest life of all, but that
is just what Pythagoras and Plato had done, and it is only the
continuation of a tradition which goes back among the Greeks to the
sixth century B. C., nearly a thousand years before the time of
Plotinus. His aim, like that of his predecessors, is the conversion of
souls to this way of life, and he differs from such thinkers as the
Stoics and the Epicureans in holding that the ‘way of life’
to which he calls them must be based once more on a systematic doctrine
of God, the World and Man. The result was that the divorce which had
existed for centuries[93]
between science and philosophy was once more
annulled. We cannot say, indeed, that Plotinus himself made any special
study of Mathematics, but there is no doubt at all that his followers
did, and it is due to them, and especially to Proclus, that we know as
much of Greek Mathematics as we do. Proclus was indeed the systematizer
of the doctrine of Plotinus, though he differs from him on certain
points, and his influence on later philosophy cannot be overestimated.
It can be distinctly traced even in Descartes, whom it reached through a
number of channels, the study of which has recently been undertaken by a
French scholar, Professor Gilson, of the University of Strasbourg. When
his researches are complete, the continuity of Greek and modern
philosophy will be plainly seen, and the part played by Platonism in the
making of the modern European mind will be made manifest. We shall then
understand better than ever why Greek philosophy is a subject of
perennial interest.

The history of Greek philosophy is, in fact, the history of our own
spiritual past, and it is impossible to understand the present without
taking it into account. In particular, the Platonist tradition underlies
the whole of western civilization. It was at Rome, as has been pointed
out, that Plotinus taught, and it was in certain Latin translations of
the writings of his school that St. Augustine found the basis for a
Christian philosophy he was seeking. It was Augustine’s great
authority in the Latin Church that made Platonism its official
philosophy for centuries. It is a complete mistake to suppose that the
thinking of the Middle Ages was dominated by the authority of Aristotle.
It was not till the thirteenth century that Aristotle was known at all,
and even then he was studied in the light of Platonism, just as he had
been by Plotinus and his followers. It was only at the very close of the
Middle Ages that he acquired the predominance which has made so strong
[94]
an impression on the centuries that followed. It was from the Platonist
tradition, too, that the science of the earlier Middle Ages came. A
considerable portion of Plato’s Timaeus had been translated into
Latin in the fourth century by Chalcidius with a very elaborate
commentary based on ancient sources, while the Consolation of
Philosophy, written in prison by the Roman Platonist Boethius in A. D.
525, was easily the most popular book of the Middle Ages. It was
translated into English by Alfred the Great and by Chaucer, and into
many other European languages. It was on these foundations that the
French Platonism of the twelfth century, and especially that of the
School of Chartres, was built up, and the influence of that school in
England was very great indeed. The names of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon
may just be mentioned in this connexion, and it would not be hard to
show that the special character of the contribution which English
writers have been able to make to science and philosophy is in large
measure attributable to this influence.

But the interest of Greek philosophy is not only historical; it is full
of instruction for the future too. Since the time of Locke, philosophy
has been apt to limit itself to discussions about the nature of
knowledge, and to leave questions about the nature of the world to
specialists. The history of Greek philosophy shows the danger of this
unnatural division of the province of thought, and the more we study it,
the more we shall feel the need of a more comprehensive view. The
‘philosophy of things human’, as the Greeks called it, is
only one department among others, and the theory of knowledge is only
one department of that. If studied in isolation from the whole, it must
inevitably become one-sided. From Greek philosophy we can also learn
that it is fatal to divorce speculation from the service of mankind. The
notion that philosophy could be so isolated would have been wholly
unintelligible to[95] any of the great Greek thinkers, and most of all
perhaps to the Platonists who are often charged with this very heresy.
Above all, we can learn from Greek philosophy the paramount importance
of what we call the personality and they called the soul. It was just
because the Greeks realized this that the genuinely Hellenic idea of
conversion played so great a part in their thinking and in their lives.
That, above all, is the lesson they have to teach, and that is why the
writings of their great philosophers have still the power to convert the
souls of all that will receive their teaching with humility.

J. Burnet.

[97]

MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY

It has been well said that, if we would study any subject properly, we
must study it as something that is alive and growing and consider it
with reference to its growth in the past. As most of the vital forces
and movements in modern civilization had their origin in Greece, this
means that, to study them properly, we must get back to Greece. So it is
with the literature of modern countries, or their philosophy, or their
art; we cannot study them with the determination to get to the bottom
and understand them without the way pointing eventually back to Greece.

When we think of the debt which mankind owes to the Greeks, we are apt
to think too exclusively of the masterpieces in literature and art which
they have left us. But the Greek genius was many-sided; the Greek, with
his insatiable love of knowledge, his determination to see things as
they are and to see them whole, his burning desire to be able to give a
rational explanation of everything in heaven and earth, was just as
irresistibly driven to natural science, mathematics, and exact reasoning
in general, or logic.

To quote from a brilliant review of a well-known work: ‘To be a
Greek was to seek to know, to know the primordial substance of matter,
to know the meaning of number, to know the world as a rational whole. In
no spirit of paradox one may say that Euclid is the most typical Greek:
he would know to the bottom, and know as a rational system, the laws of
the measurement of the earth. Plato, too, loved geometry and the wonders
of numbers; he was essentially Greek because he was essentially
mathematical…. And if one thus finds the
[98] Greek genius in Euclid and
the Posterior Analytics, one will understand the motto written over
the Academy, μηδεις αγεωμετρητος εισιτω. To know what the Greek
genius meant you must (if one may speak εν αινιγματι) begin
with geometry.’

Mathematics, indeed, plays an important part in Greek philosophy: there
are, for example, many passages in Plato and Aristotle for the
interpretation of which some knowledge of the technique of Greek
mathematics is the first essential. Hence it should be part of the
equipment of every classical student that he should have read
substantial portions of the works of the Greek mathematicians in the
original, say, some of the early books of Euclid in full and the
definitions (at least) of the other books, as well as selections from
other writers. Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff has included in his
Griechisches Lesebuch extracts from Euclid, Archimedes and Heron of
Alexandria; and the example should be followed in this country.

Acquaintance with the original works of the Greek mathematicians is no
less necessary for any mathematician worthy of the name. Mathematics is
a Greek science. So far as pure geometry is concerned, the
mathematician’s technical equipment is almost wholly Greek. The
Greeks laid down the principles, fixed the terminology and invented the
methods ab initio; moreover, they did this with such certainty that in
the centuries which have since elapsed there has been no need to
reconstruct, still less to reject as unsound, any essential part of
their doctrine.

Consider first the terminology of mathematics. Almost all the standard
terms are Greek or Latin translations from the Greek, and, although the
mathematician may be taught their meaning without knowing Greek, he will
certainly grasp their significance better if he knows them as they arise
and as part of the living language of the men who invented them. Take
the word isosceles; a schoolboy can be shown what an isosceles
[99]
triangle is, but, if he knows nothing of the derivation, he will wonder
why such an apparently outlandish term should be necessary to express so
simple an idea. But if the mere appearance of the word shows him that it
means a thing with equal legs, being compounded of ισος,
equal, and σκελος, a leg, he will understand its
appropriateness and will have no difficulty in remembering it.
Equilateral, on the other hand, is borrowed from the Latin, but it is
merely the Latin translation of the Greek ισοπλευρος,
equal-sided. Parallelogram again can be explained to a Greekless
person, but it will be far better understood by one who sees in it the
two words παραλληλος and
γραμμη and realizes that it
is a short way of expressing that the figure in question is contained by
parallel lines; and we shall best understand the word parallel itself
if we see in it the statement of the fact that the two straight lines so
described go alongside one another, παρ’ αλληλας, all the
way. Similarly a mathematician should know that a rhombus is so called
from its resemblance to a form of spinning-top (ῥομβος from
ῥεμβω, to spin) and that, just as a parallelogram is a figure
formed by two pairs of parallel straight lines, so a parallelepiped is
a solid figure bounded by three pairs of parallel planes (παραλληλος,
parallel, and επιπεδος, plane); incidentally, in
the latter case, he will be saved from writing
‘parallelopiped’, a monstrosity which has disfigured not a
few textbooks of geometry. Another good example is the word
hypotenuse; it comes from the verb ὑποτεινειν
(c. ὑπο
and acc. or simple acc.), to stretch under, or, in its Latin
form, to subtend, which term is used quite generally for ‘to be
opposite to’; in our phraseology the word hypotenuse is
restricted to that side of a right-angled triangle which is opposite to
the right angle, being short for the expression used in Eucl. i. 47,
ἡ την ορθην γωνιαν ὑποτεινουσα πλευρα, ‘the side
subtending the right angle’, which accounts for the feminine
participial form ὑποτεινουσα, hypotenuse. If mathematicians
had had[100] more Greek, perhaps the misspelt form
‘hypothenuse’ would not have survived so long.

To take an example outside the Elements, how can a mathematician
properly understand the term latus rectum used in conic sections
unless he has seen it in Apollonius as the erect side
(ορθια πλευρα)
of a certain rectangle in the case of each of the three
conics?[3] The word ordinate can hardly convey anything to one who
does not know that it is what Apollonius describes as ‘the
straight line drawn down (from a point on the curve) in the prescribed
or ordained manner (τεταγμενως κατηγμενη)’. Asymptote
again comes from ασυμπτωτος, non-meeting, non-secant, and
had with the Greeks a more general signification as well as the narrower
one which it has for us: it was sometimes used of parallel lines, which
also ‘do not meet’.

Again, if we take up a textbook of geometry written in accordance with
the most modern Education Board circular or University syllabus, we
shall find that the phraseology used (except where made more colloquial
and less scientific) is almost all pure Greek. The Greek tongue was
extraordinarily well adapted as a vehicle of scientific thought. One of
the characteristics of Euclid’s language which his commentator
Proclus is most fond of emphasizing is its marvellous exactness
(ακριβεια). The language of the Greek geometers is also
wonderfully concise, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary.
One of the complaints often made against Euclid is that he is
‘diffuse’. Yet (apart from abbreviations in writing) it will
be found that the exposition of corresponding
[101] matters in modern
elementary textbooks generally takes up, not less, but more space. And,
to say nothing of the perfect finish of Archimedes’s treatises, we
shall find in Heron, Ptolemy and Pappus veritable models of concise
statement. The purely geometrical proof by Heron of the formula for the
area of a triangle, Δ=√{s(s-a) (s-b) (s-c)}, and the
geometrical propositions in Book I of Ptolemy’s Syntaxis
(including ‘Ptolemy’s Theorem’) are cases in point.

The principles of geometry and arithmetic (in the sense of the theory of
numbers) are stated in the preliminary matter of Books I and VII of
Euclid. But Euclid was not their discoverer; they were gradually evolved
from the time of Pythagoras onwards. Aristotle is clear about the nature
of the principles and their classification. Every demonstrative science,
he says, has to do with three things, the subject-matter, the things
proved, and the things from which the proof starts (εξ ὡν). It
is not everything that can be proved, otherwise the chain of proof would
be endless; you must begin somewhere, and you must start with things
admitted but indemonstrable. These are, first, principles common to all
sciences which are called axioms or common opinions, as that
‘of two contradictories one must be true’, or ‘if
equals be subtracted from equals, the remainders are equal’;
secondly, principles peculiar to the subject-matter of the particular
science, say geometry. First among the latter principles are
definitions; there must be agreement as to what we mean by certain
terms. But a definition asserts nothing about the existence or
non-existence of the thing defined. The existence of the various things
defined has to be proved except in the case of a few primary things in
each science the existence of which is indemonstrable and must be
assumed among the first principles of the science; thus in geometry we
must assume the existence of points and lines, and in arithmetic of the
unit. Lastly, we must assume certain other things which are
[102] less
obvious and cannot be proved but yet have to be accepted; these are
called postulates, because they make a demand on the faith of the
learner. Euclid’s Postulates are of this kind, especially that
known as the parallel-postulate.

The methods of solution of problems were no doubt first applied in
particular cases and then gradually systematized; the technical terms
for them were probably invented later, after the methods themselves had
become established.

One method of solution was the reduction of one problem to another.
This was called απαγωγη, a term which seems to occur first in
Aristotle. But instances of such reduction occurred long before.
Hippocrates of Chios reduced the problem of duplicating the cube to that
of finding two mean proportionals in continued proportion between two
straight lines, that is, he showed that, if the latter problem could be
solved, the former was thereby solved also; and it is probable that
there were still earlier cases in the Pythagorean geometry.

Next there is the method of mathematical analysis. This method is said
to have been ‘communicated’ or ‘explained’ by
Plato to Leodamas of Thasos; but, like reduction (to which it is closely
akin), analysis in the mathematical sense must have been in use much
earlier. Analysis and its correlative synthesis are defined by
Pappus: ‘in analysis we assume that which is sought as if it were
already done, and we inquire what it is from which this results, and
again what is the antecedent cause of the latter, and so on, until by so
retracing our steps we come upon something already known or belonging to
the class of principles. But in synthesis, reversing the process, we
take as already done that which was last arrived at in the analysis,
and, by arranging in their natural order as consequences what were
before antecedents and successively connecting them one with another, we
arrive finally at the construction of that which was sought.’

The method of reductio ad absurdum is a variety of analysis.
[103] Starting
from a hypothesis, namely the contradictory of what we desire to prove,
we use the same process of analysis, carrying it back until we arrive at
something admittedly false or absurd. Aristotle describes this method in
various ways as reductio ad absurdum, proof per impossibile, or
proof leading to the impossible. But here again, though the term was
new, the method was not. The paradoxes of Zeno are classical instances.

Lastly, the Greeks established the form of exposition which still
governs geometrical work, simply because it is dictated by strict logic.
It is seen in Euclid’s propositions, with their separate formal
divisions, to which specific names were afterwards assigned, (1) the
enunciation (προτασις), (2) the setting-out
(εκθεσις), (3) the
διορισμος, being a re-statement of what we
are required to do or prove, not in general terms (as in the
enunciation), but with reference to the particular data contained in
the setting-out, (4) the construction
(κατασκευη), (5) the
proof (αποδειξις), (6) the conclusion
(συμπερασμα).
In the case of a problem it often happens that a solution
is not possible unless the particular data are such as to satisfy
certain conditions; in this case there is yet another constituent part
in the proposition, namely the statement of the conditions or limits of
possibility, which was called by the same name διορισμος,
definition or delimitation, as that applied to the third constituent
part of a theorem.

We have so far endeavoured to indicate generally the finality and the
abiding value of the work done by the creators of mathematical science.
It remains to summarize, as briefly as possible, the history of Greek
mathematics according to periods and subjects.

The Greeks of course took what they could in the shape of elementary
facts in geometry and astronomy from the Egyptians and Babylonians. But
some of the essential characteristics of the Greek genius assert
themselves even in[104]
their borrowings from these or other sources. Here,
as everywhere else, we see their directness and concentration; they
always knew what they wanted, and they had an unerring instinct for
taking only what was worth having and rejecting the rest. This is
illustrated by the story of Pythagoras’s travels. He consorted
with priests and prophets and was initiated into the religious rites
practised in different places, not out of religious enthusiasm ‘as
you might think’ (says our informant), but in order that he might
not overlook any fragment of knowledge worth acquiring that might lie
hidden in the mysteries of divine worship.

This story also illustrates an important advantage which the Greeks had
over the Egyptians and Babylonians. In those countries science, such as
it was, was the monopoly of the priests; and, where this is the case,
the first steps in science are apt to prove the last also, because the
scientific results attained tend to become involved in religious
prescriptions and routine observances, and so to end in a collection of
lifeless formulae. Fortunately for the Greeks, they had no organized
priesthood; untrammelled by prescription, traditional dogmas or
superstition, they could give their reasoning faculties free play. Thus
they were able to create science as a living thing susceptible of
development without limit.

Greek geometry, as also Greek astronomy, begins with Thales (about
624-547 B. C.), who travelled in Egypt and is said to have brought
geometry from thence. Such geometry as there was in Egypt arose out of
practical needs. Revenue was raised by the taxation of landed property,
and its assessment depended on the accurate fixing of the boundaries of
the various holdings. When these were removed by the periodical flooding
due to the rising of the Nile, it was necessary to replace them, or to
determine the taxable area independently of them, by an art of
land-surveying. We conclude from the Papyrus Rhind (say 1700 B. C.) and
other documents that Egyptian geometry[105] consisted mainly of practical
rules for measuring, with more or less accuracy, (1) such areas as
squares, triangles, trapezia, and circles, (2) the solid content of
measures of corn, &c., of different shapes. The Egyptians also
constructed pyramids of a certain slope by means of arithmetical
calculations based on a certain ratio, se-qeṭ, namely the ratio of
half the side of the base to the height, which is in fact equivalent to
the co-tangent of the angle of slope. The use of this ratio implies the
notion of similarity of figures, especially triangles. The Egyptians
knew, too, that a triangle with its sides in the ratio of the numbers 3,
4, 5 is right-angled, and used the fact as a means of drawing right
angles. But there is no sign that they knew the general property of a
right-angled triangle (= Eucl. I. 47), of which this is a particular
case, or that they proved any general theorem in geometry.

No doubt Thales, when he was in Egypt, would see diagrams drawn to
illustrate the rules for the measurement of circles and other plane
figures, and these diagrams would suggest to him certain similarities
and congruences which would set him thinking whether there were not some
elementary general principles underlying the construction and relations
of different figures and parts of figures. This would be in accord with
the Greek instinct for generalization and their wish to be able to
account for everything on rational principles.

The following theorems are attributed to Thales: (1) that a circle is
bisected by any diameter (Eucl. I, Def. 17), (2) that the angles at the
base of an isosceles triangle are equal (Eucl. I. 5), (3) that, if two
straight lines cut one another, the vertically opposite angles are equal
(Eucl. I. 15), (4) that, if two triangles have two angles and one side
respectively equal, the triangles are equal in all respects (Eucl. I.
26). He is said (5) to have been the first to inscribe a right-angled
triangle in a circle, which must mean that he was the first to discover
that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle (cf. Eucl. III. 31).

[106]
Elementary as these things are, they represent a new departure of a
momentous kind, being the first steps towards a theory of geometry. On
this point we cannot do better than quote some remarks from Kant’s
preface to the second edition of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft.

‘Mathematics has, from the earliest times to which the history of
human reason goes back, (that is to say) with that wonderful people the
Greeks, travelled the safe road of a science. But it must not be
supposed that it was as easy for mathematics as it was for logic, where
reason is concerned with itself alone, to find, or rather to build for
itself, that royal road. I believe on the contrary that with mathematics
it remained for long a case of groping about—the Egyptians in
particular were still at that stage—and that this transformation must
be ascribed to a revolution brought about by the happy inspiration of
one man in trying an experiment, from which point onward the road that
must be taken could no longer be missed, and the safe way of a science
was struck and traced out for all time and to distances illimitable….
A light broke on the first man who demonstrated the property of the
isosceles triangle (whether his name was Thales or what you
will)….’

Thales also solved two problems of a practical kind: (1) he showed how
to measure the distance of a ship at sea, and (2) he found the heights
of pyramids by means of the shadows thrown on the ground by the pyramid
and by a stick of known length at the same moment; one account says that
he chose the time when the lengths of the stick and of its shadow were
equal, but in either case he argued by similarity of triangles.

In astronomy Thales predicted a solar eclipse which was probably that of
the 28th May 585 B. C. Now the Babylonians, as the result of
observations continued through centuries, had discovered the period of
223 lunations after which eclipses[107]
recur. It is most likely therefore that Thales had heard of this
period, and that his prediction was based upon it. He is further said to
have used the Little Bear for finding the pole, to have discovered the
inequality of the four astronomical seasons, and to have written works
On the Equinox and On the Solstice.

After Thales come the Pythagoreans. Of the Pythagoreans Aristotle says
that they applied themselves to the study of mathematics and were the
first to advance that science, going so far as to find in the principles
of mathematics the principles of all existing things. Of Pythagoras
himself we are told that he attached supreme importance to the study of
arithmetic, advancing it and taking it out of the region of practical
utility, and again that he transformed the study of geometry into a
liberal education, examining the principles of the science from the
beginning.

The very word μαθηματα, which originally meant ‘subjects
of instruction’ generally, is said to have been first appropriated
to mathematics by the Pythagoreans.

In saying that arithmetic began with Pythagoras we have to distinguish
between the uses of that word then and now. Αριθμητικη with
the Greeks was distinguished from λογιστικη, the science of
calculation. It is the latter word which would cover arithmetic in our
sense, or practical calculation; the term αριθμητικη was
restricted to the science of numbers considered in themselves, or, as we
should say, the Theory of Numbers. Another way of putting the
distinction was to say that αριθμητικη dealt with absolute
numbers or numbers in the abstract, and λογιστικη with numbered
things or concrete numbers; thus λογιστικη included simple
problems about numbers of apples, bowls, or objects generally, such as
are found in the Greek Anthology and sometimes involve simple
algebraical equations.

The Theory of Numbers then began with Pythagoras (about
[108] 572-497 B. C.).
It included definitions of the unit and of number, and the
classification and definitions of the various classes of numbers, odd,
even, prime, composite, and sub-divisions of these such as odd-even,
even-times-even, &c. Again there were figured numbers, namely,
triangular numbers, squares, oblong numbers, polygonal numbers
(pentagons, hexagons, &c.) corresponding respectively to plane figures,
and pyramidal numbers, cubes, parallelepipeds, &c., corresponding to
solid figures in geometry. The treatment was mostly geometrical, the
numbers being represented by dots filling up geometrical figures of the
various kinds. The laws of formation of the various figured numbers were
established. In this investigation the gnomon played an important
part. Originally meaning the upright needle of a sun-dial, the term was
next used for a figure like a carpenter’s square, and then was
applied to a figure of that shape put round two sides of a square and
making up a larger square. The arithmetical application of the term was
similar. If we represent a unit by one dot and put round it three dots
in such a way that the four form the corners of a square, three is the
first gnomon. Five dots put at equal distances round two sides of the
square containing four dots make up the next square (3²), and five is
the second gnomon. Generally, if we have n² dots so arranged as to
fill up a square with n for its side, the gnomon to be put round it to
make up the next square, (n+1)², has 2n+1 dots. In the formation of
squares, therefore, the successive gnomons are the series of odd numbers
following 1 (the first square), namely 3, 5, 7, … In the formation of
oblong numbers (numbers of the form n(n+1)), the first of which is
1. 2, the successive gnomons are the terms after 2 in the series of
even numbers 2, 4, 6…. Triangular numbers are formed by adding to 1
(the first triangle) the terms after 1 in the series of natural numbers
1, 2, 3 …; these are therefore the gnomons (by analogy) for triangles.
The gnomons for pentagonal numbers[109] are the terms after 1 in the
arithmetical progression 1, 4, 7, 10 … (with 3, or 5-2, as the common
difference) and so on; the common difference of the successive gnomons
for an a-gonal number is a-2.

From the series of gnomons for squares we easily deduce a formula for
finding square numbers which are the sum of two squares. For, the gnomon
2n+1 being the difference between the successive squares n² and
(n+1)², we have only to make 2n+1 a square. Suppose that 2n+1=m²;
therefore n=½(m²-1), and {½(m²-1)}²+m²={½(m²+1)}², where m is any
odd number. This is the formula actually attributed to Pythagoras.

Pythagoras is said to have discovered the theory of proportionals or
proportion. This was a numerical theory and therefore was applicable to
commensurable magnitudes only; it was no doubt somewhat on the lines of
Euclid, Book VII. Connected with the theory of proportion was that of
means, and Pythagoras was acquainted with three of these, the
arithmetic, geometric, and sub-contrary (afterwards called harmonic). In
particular Pythagoras is said to have introduced from Babylon into
Greece the ‘most perfect’ proportion, namely:

a:(a+b)/2=2ab/(a+b):b,

where the second and third terms are respectively the arithmetic and
harmonic mean between a and b. A particular case is 12:9=8:6.

This bears upon what was probably Pythagoras’s greatest discovery,
namely that the musical intervals correspond to certain arithmetical
ratios between lengths of string at the same tension, the octave
corresponding to the ratio 2:1, the fifth to 3:2 and the fourth to 4:3.
These ratios being the same as those of 12 to 6, 8, 9 respectively, we
can understand[110]
how the third term, 8, in the above proportion came to
be called the ‘harmonic’ mean between 12 and 6.

The Pythagorean arithmetic as a whole, with the developments made after
the time of Pythagoras himself, is mainly known to us through
Nicomachus’s Introductio arithmetica, Iamblichus’s
commentary on the same, and Theon of Smyrna’s work Expositio
rerum mathematicarum ad legendum Platonem utilium. The things in these
books most deserving of notice are the following.

First, there is the description of a ‘perfect’ number (a
number which is equal to the sum of all its parts, i.e. all its integral
divisors including 1 but excluding the number itself), with a statement
of the property that all such numbers end in 6 or 8. Four such numbers,
namely 6, 28, 496, 8128, were known to Nicomachus. The law of formation
for such numbers is first found in Eucl. IX. 36 proving that, if the sum
(S_n) of n terms of the series 1, 2, 2², 2³ … is prime, then
S_n.2^n-1 is a perfect number.

Secondly, Theon of Smyrna gives the law of formation of the series of
‘side-’ and ‘diameter-’ numbers which satisfy
the equations 2x²-y²=±1. The law depends on the proposition proved in
Eucl. II. 10 to the effect that (2x+y)²-2(x+y)²=2x²-y², whence it
follows that, if x, y satisfy either of the above equations, then
2x+y, x+y is a solution in higher numbers of the other equation. The
successive solutions give values for y/x, namely 1/1, 3/2, 7/5, 17/12,
41/29, …, which are successive approximations to the value of √2 (the
ratio of the diagonal of a square to its side). The occasion for this
method of approximation to √2 (which can be carried as far as we please)
was the discovery by the Pythagoreans of the incommensurable or
irrational in this particular case.

Thirdly, Iamblichus mentions a discovery by Thymaridas, a Pythagorean
not later than Plato’s time, called the επανθημα
(‘bloom’) of Thymaridas, and amounting to the solution[111] of
any number of simultaneous equations of the following form:

x+x₁ + x₂ + … + x_n-1 = s,
x + x₁ = a₁,
x + x₂ = a₂,
….
x+x_n-1 = a_n-1,

the solution being x=((a₁+a₂+…+a_n-1)-s)/(n-2).

The rule is stated in general terms, but the above representation of its
effect shows that it is a piece of pure algebra.

The Pythagorean contributions to geometry were even more remarkable. The
most famous proposition attributed to Pythagoras himself is of course
the theorem of Eucl. I. 47 that the square on the hypotenuse of any
right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other
two sides. But Proclus also attributes to him, besides the theory of
proportionals, the construction of the ‘cosmic figures’, the
five regular solids.

One of the said solids, the dodecahedron, has twelve regular pentagons
for faces, and the construction of a regular pentagon involves the
cutting of a straight line ‘in extreme and mean ratio’
(Eucl. II. 11 and VI. 30), which is a particular case of the method
known as the application of areas. This method was fully worked out by
the Pythagoreans and proved one of the most powerful in all Greek
geometry. The most elementary case appears in Eucl. I. 44, 45, where it
is shown how to apply to a given straight line as base a parallelogram
with one angle equal to a given angle and equal in area to any given
rectilineal figure; this construction is the geometrical equivalent of
arithmetical division. The general case is that in which the
parallelogram, though applied to the straight line, overlaps it or falls
short of it in such a way that the part[112] of the parallelogram which
extends beyond or falls short of the parallelogram of the same angle and
breadth on the given straight line itself (exactly) as base is similar
to any given parallelogram (Eucl. VI. 28, 29). This is the geometrical
equivalent of the solution of the most general form of quadratic
equation ax±mx²=C, so far as it has real roots; the condition that the
roots may be real was also worked out (=Eucl. VI. 27). It is in the form
of ‘application of areas’ that Apollonius obtains the
fundamental property of each of the conic sections, and, as we shall
see, it is from the terminology of application of areas that Apollonius
took the three names parabola, hyperbola, and ellipse which he was
the first to give to the three curves.

Another problem solved by the Pythagoreans was that of drawing a
rectilineal figure which shall be equal in area to one given rectilineal
figure and similar to another. Plutarch mentions a doubt whether it was
this problem or the theorem of Eucl. I. 47 on the strength of which
Pythagoras was said to have sacrificed an ox.

The main particular applications of the theorem of the square on the
hypotenuse, e. g. those in Euclid, Book II, were also Pythagorean; the
construction of a square equal to a given rectangle (Eucl. II. 14) is
one of them, and corresponds to the solution of the pure quadratic
equation x²=ab.

The Pythagoreans knew the properties of parallels and proved the theorem
that the sum of the three angles of any triangle is equal to two right
angles.

As we have seen, the Pythagorean theory of proportion, being numerical,
was inadequate in that it did not apply to incommensurable magnitudes;
but, with this qualification, we may say that the Pythagorean geometry
covered the bulk of the subject-matter of Books I, II, IV and VI of
Euclid’s Elements. The case is less clear with regard to Book
III of the Elements; but, as the main propositions of that Book were
known to Hippocrates of Chios in the second half of the fifth
[113] century
B. C., we conclude that they, too, were part of the Pythagorean
geometry.

Lastly, the Pythagoreans discovered the existence of the incommensurable
or irrational in the particular case of the diagonal of a square in
relation to its side. Aristotle mentions an ancient proof of the
incommensurability of the diagonal with the side by a reductio ad
absurdum showing that, if the diagonal were commensurable with the
side, it would follow that one and the same number is both odd and even.
This proof was doubtless Pythagorean.

A word should be added about the Pythagorean astronomy. Pythagoras was
the first to hold that the earth (and no doubt each of the other
heavenly bodies also) is spherical in shape, and he was aware that the
sun, moon and planets have independent movements of their own in a sense
opposite to that of the daily rotation; but he seems to have kept the
earth in the centre. His successors in the school (one Hicetas of
Syracuse and Philolaus are alternatively credited with this innovation)
actually abandoned the geocentric idea and made the earth, like the sun,
the moon, and the other planets, revolve in a circle round the
‘central fire’, in which resided the governing principle
ordering and directing the movement of the universe.

The geometry of which we have so far spoken belongs to the Elements.
But, before the body of the Elements was complete, the Greeks had
advanced beyond the Elements. By the second half of the fifth century B.
C. they had investigated three famous problems in higher geometry, (1)
the squaring of the circle, (2) the trisection of any angle, (3) the
duplication of the cube. The great names belonging to this period are
Hippias of Elis, Hippocrates of Chios, and Democritus.

Hippias of Elis invented a certain curve described by combining two
uniform movements (one angular and the other rectilinear) taking the
same time to complete. Hippias himself[114] used his curve for the
trisection of any angle or the division of it in any ratio; but it was
afterwards employed by Dinostratus, a brother of Eudoxus’s pupil
Menaechmus, and by Nicomedes for squaring the circle, whence it got the
name τετραγωνιζουσα, quadratrix.

Hippocrates of Chios is mentioned by Aristotle as an instance to prove
that a man may be a distinguished geometer and, at the same time, a fool
in the ordinary affairs of life. He occupies an important place both in
elementary geometry and in relation to two of the higher problems above
mentioned. He was, so far as is known, the first compiler of a book of
Elements; and he was the first to prove the important theorem of Eucl.
XII. 2 that circles are to one another as the squares on their
diameters, from which he further deduced that similar segments of
circles are to one another as the squares on their bases. These
propositions were used by him in his tract on the squaring of lunes,
which was intended to lead up to the squaring of the circle. The
essential portions of the tract are preserved in a passage of
Simplicius’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, which
contains substantial extracts from Eudemus’s lost History of
Geometry. Hippocrates showed how to square three particular lunes of
different kinds and then, lastly, he squared the sum of a circle and a
certain lune. Unfortunately the last-mentioned lune was not one of those
which can be squared, so that the attempt to square the circle in this
way failed after all.

Hippocrates also attacked the problem of doubling the cube. There are
two versions of the origin of this famous problem. According to one
story an old tragic poet had represented Minos as having been
dissatisfied with the size of a cubical tomb erected for his son Glaucus
and having told the architect to make it double the size while retaining
the cubical form. The other story says that the Delians, suffering from
a pestilence, consulted the oracle and were told to
[115] double a certain
altar as a means of staying the plague. Hippocrates did not indeed solve
the problem of duplication, but reduced it to another, namely that of
finding two mean proportionals in continued proportion between two given
straight lines; and the problem was ever afterwards attacked in this
form. If x, y be the two required mean proportionals between two
straight lines a, b, then a:x=x:y=y:b, whence b/a=(x/a)³, and,
as a particular case, if b=2a, x³=2a³, so that, when x is found,
the cube is doubled.

Democritus wrote a large number of mathematical treatises, the titles
only of which are preserved. We gather from one of these titles,
‘On irrational lines and solids’, that he wrote on
irrationals. Democritus realized as fully as Zeno, and expressed with no
less piquancy, the difficulty connected with the continuous and the
infinitesimal. This appears from his dilemma about the circular base of
a cone and a parallel section; the section which he means is a section
‘indefinitely near’ (as the phrase is) to the base, i. e.
the very next section, as we might say (if there were one). Is it,
said Democritus, equal or not equal to the base? If it is equal, so will
the very next section to it be, and so on, so that the cone will really
be, not a cone, but a cylinder. If it is unequal to the base and in fact
less, the surface of the cone will be jagged, like steps, which is very
absurd. We may be sure that Democritus’s work on ‘The
contact of a circle or a sphere’ discussed a like difficulty.

Lastly, Archimedes tells us that Democritus was the first to state,
though he could not give a rigorous proof, that the volume of a cone or
a pyramid is one-third of that of the cylinder or prism respectively on
the same base and having equal height, theorems first proved by Eudoxus.

We come now to the time of Plato, and here the great names are Archytas,
Theodoras of Cyrene, Theaetetus, and Eudoxus.

[116]
Archytas (about 430-360 B. C.) wrote on music and the numerical ratios
corresponding to the intervals of the tetrachord. He is said to have
been the first to write a treatise on mechanics based on mathematical
principles; on the practical side he invented a mechanical dove which
would fly. In geometry he gave the first solution of the problem of the
two mean proportionals, using a wonderful construction in three
dimensions which determined a certain point as the intersection of three
surfaces, (1) a certain cone, (2) a half-cylinder, (3) an anchor-ring or
tore with inner diameter nil.

Theodorus, Plato’s teacher in mathematics, extended the theory of
the irrational by proving incommensurability in certain particular cases
other than that of the diagonal of a square in relation to its side,
which was already known. He proved that the side of a square containing
3 square feet, or 5 square feet, or any non-square number of square feet
up to 17 is incommensurable with one foot, in other words that √3, √5
… √17 are all incommensurable with 1. Theodorus’s proof was
evidently not general; and it was reserved for Theaetetus to comprehend
all these irrationals in one definition, and to prove the property
generally as it is proved in Eucl. X. 9. Much of the content of the rest
of Euclid’s Book X (dealing with compound irrationals), as also of
Book XIII on the five regular solids, was due to Theaetetus, who is even
said to have discovered two of those solids (the octahedron and
icosahedron).

Plato (427-347 B. C.) was probably not an original mathematician, but he
‘caused mathematics in general and geometry in particular to make
a great advance by reason of his enthusiasm for them’. He
encouraged the members of his school to specialize in mathematics and
astronomy; e. g. we are told that in astronomy he set it as a problem to
all earnest students to find ‘what are the uniform and ordered
movements by the assumption of which the apparent motions of the
planets[117]
may be accounted for’. In Plato’s own writings are
found certain definitions, e. g. that of a straight line as ‘that
of which the middle covers the ends’, and some interesting
mathematical illustrations, especially that in the second geometrical
passage in the Meno (86E-87C). To Plato himself are attributed (1) a
formula (n²-1)²+(2n)²=(n²+1)² for finding two square numbers the sum
of which is a square number, (2) the invention of the method of
analysis, which he is said to have explained to Leodamas of Thasos
(mathematical analysis was, however, certainly, in practice, employed
long before). The solution, attributed to Plato, of the problem of the
two mean proportionals by means of a frame resembling that which a
shoemaker uses to measure a foot, can hardly be his.

Eudoxus (408-355 B. C.), an original genius second to none (unless it be
Archimedes) in the history of our subject, made two discoveries of
supreme importance for the further development of Greek geometry.

(1) As we have seen, the discovery of the incommensurable rendered
inadequate the Pythagorean theory of proportion, which applied to
commensurable magnitudes only. It would no doubt be possible, in most
cases, to replace proofs depending on proportions by others; but this
involved great inconvenience, and a slur was cast on geometry generally.
The trouble was remedied once for all by Eudoxus’s discovery of
the great theory of proportion, applicable to commensurable and
incommensurable magnitudes alike, which is expounded in Euclid’s
Book V. Well might Barrow say of this theory that ‘there is
nothing in the whole body of the elements of a more subtile invention,
nothing more solidly established’. The keystone of the structure
is the definition of equal ratios (Eucl. V, Def. 5); and twenty-three
centuries have not abated a jot from its value, as is plain from the
facts that Weierstrass repeats it word for word as his definition of
equal[118]
numbers, and it corresponds almost to the point of coincidence
with the modern treatment of irrationals due to Dedekind.

(2) Eudoxus discovered the method of exhaustion for measuring
curvilinear areas and solids, to which, with the extensions given to it
by Archimedes, Greek geometry owes its greatest triumphs. Antiphon the
Sophist, in connexion with attempts to square the circle, had asserted
that, if we inscribe successive regular polygons in a circle,
continually doubling the number of sides, we shall sometime arrive at a
polygon the sides of which will coincide with the circumference of the
circle. Warned by the unanswerable arguments of Zeno against
infinitesimals, mathematicians substituted for this the statement that,
by continuing the construction, we can inscribe a polygon approaching
equality with the circle as nearly as we please. The method of
exhaustion used, for the purpose of proof by reductio ad absurdum, the
lemma proved in Eucl. X. 1 (to the effect that, if from any magnitude we
subtract not less than half, and then from the remainder not less than
half, and so on continually, there will sometime be left a magnitude
less than any assigned magnitude of the same kind, however small): and
this again depends on an assumption which is practically contained in
Eucl. V, Def. 4, but is generally known as the Axiom of Archimedes,
stating that, if we have two unequal magnitudes, their difference
(however small) can, if continually added to itself, be made to exceed
any magnitude of the same kind (however great).

The method of exhaustion is seen in operation in Eucl. XII. 1-2, 3-7
Cor., 10, 16-18. Props. 3-7 Cor. and Prop. 10 prove that the volumes of
a pyramid and a cone are one-third of the prism and cylinder
respectively on the same base and of equal height; and Archimedes
expressly says that these facts were first proved by Eudoxus.

In astronomy Eudoxus is famous for the beautiful theory of concentric
spheres which he invented to explain the apparent
[119] motions of the
planets and, particularly, their apparent stationary points and
retrogradations. The theory applied also to the sun and moon, for each
of which Eudoxus employed three spheres. He represented the motion of
each planet as produced by the rotations of four spheres concentric with
the earth, one within the other, and connected in the following way.
Each of the inner spheres revolves about a diameter the ends of which
(poles) are fixed on the next sphere enclosing it. The outermost sphere
represents the daily rotation, the second a motion along the zodiac
circle; the poles of the third sphere are fixed on the latter circle;
the poles of the fourth sphere (carrying the planet fixed on its
equator) are so fixed on the third sphere, and the speeds and directions
of rotation so arranged, that the planet describes on the second sphere
a curve called the hippopede (horse-fetter), or a figure of eight,
lying along and longitudinally bisected by the zodiac circle. The whole
arrangement is a marvel of geometrical ingenuity.

Heraclides of Pontus (about 388-315 B. C.), a pupil of Plato, made a
great step forward in astronomy by his declaration that the earth
rotates on its own axis once in 24 hours, and by his discovery that
Mercury and Venus revolve about the sun like satellites.

Menaechmus, a pupil of Eudoxus, was the discoverer of the conic
sections, two of which, the parabola and the hyperbola, he used for
solving the problem of the two mean proportionals. If a:x=x:y=y:b,
then x²=ay, y²=bx and xy=ab. These equations represent, in
Cartesian co-ordinates, and with rectangular axes, the conics by the
intersection of which two and two Menaechmus solved the problem; in the
case of the rectangular hyperbola it was the asymptote-property which he
used.

We pass to Euclid’s times. A little older than Euclid, Autolycus
of Pitane wrote two books, On the Moving Sphere, a work on Sphaeric
for use in astronomy, and On Risings and
[120] Settings. The former work is
the earliest Greek textbook which has reached us intact. It was before
Euclid when he wrote his Phaenomena, and there are many points of
contact between the two books.

Euclid flourished about 300 B. C. or a little earlier. His great work,
the Elements in thirteen Books, is too well known to need description.
No work presumably, except the Bible, has had such a reign; and future
generations will come back to it again and again as they tire of the
variegated substitutes for it and the confusion resulting from their
bewildering multiplicity. After what has been said above of the growth
of the Elements, we can appreciate the remark of Proclus about Euclid,
‘who put together the Elements, collecting many of Eudoxus’s
theorems, perfecting many of Theaetetus’s and also bringing to
irrefragable demonstration the things which were only somewhat loosely
proved by his predecessors’. Though a large portion of the
subject-matter had been investigated by those predecessors, everything
goes to show that the whole arrangement was Euclid’s own; it is
certain that he made great changes in the order of propositions and in
the proofs, and that his innovations began at the very beginning of Book
I.

Euclid wrote other books on both elementary and higher geometry, and on
the other mathematical subjects known in his day. The elementary
geometrical works include the Data and On Divisions (of figures),
the first of which survives in Greek and the second in Arabic only; also
the Pseudaria, now lost, which was a sort of guide to fallacies in
geometrical reasoning. The treatises on higher geometry are all lost;
they include (1) the Conics in four Books, which covered almost the
same ground as the first three Books of Apollonius’s Conics,
although no doubt, for Euclid, the conics were still, as with his
predecessors, sections of a right-angled, an obtuse-angled, and an
acute-angled cone respectively made by a plane perpendiular
[121] to a
generator in each case; (2) the Porisms in three Books, the importance
and difficulty of which can be inferred from Pappus’s account of
it and the lemmas which he gives for use with it; (3) the
Surface-Loci, to which again Pappus furnishes lemmas; one of these
implies that Euclid assumed as known the focus-directrix property of the
three conics, which is absent from Apollonius’s Conics.

In applied mathematics Euclid wrote (1) the Phaenomena, a work on
spherical astronomy in which ὁ ὁριζων (without
κυκλος or any qualifying words) appears for the first time in the sense
of horizon; (2) the Optics, a kind of elementary treatise on
perspective: these two treatises are extant in Greek; (3) a work on the
Elements of Music. The Sectio Canonis, which has come down under the
name of Euclid, can, however, hardly be his in its present form.

In the period between Euclid and Archimedes comes Aristarchus of Samos
(about 310-230 B. C.), famous for having anticipated Copernicus.
Accepting Heraclides’s view that the earth rotates about its own
axis, Aristarchus went further and put forward the hypothesis that the
sun itself is at rest, and that the earth, as well as Mercury, Venus,
and the other planets, revolve in circles about the sun. We have this on
the unquestionable authority of Archimedes, who was only some
twenty-five years later, and who must have seen the book containing the
hypothesis in question. We are told too that Cleanthes the Stoic thought
that Aristarchus ought to be indicted on the charge of impiety for
setting the Hearth of the Universe in motion.

One work of Aristarchus, On the sizes and distances of the Sun and
Moon, which is extant in Greek, is highly interesting in itself, though
it contains no word of the heliocentric hypothesis. Thoroughly classical
in form and style, it lays down certain hypotheses and then deduces
therefrom, by rigorous geometry, the sizes and distances of the sun and
[122]
moon. If the hypotheses had been exact, the results would have been
correct too; but Aristarchus in fact assumed a certain angle to be 87°
which is really 89° 50′, and the angle subtended at the centre of the
earth by the diameter of either the sun or the moon to be 2°, whereas we
know from Archimedes that Aristarchus himself discovered that the latter
angle is only ½°. The effect of Aristarchus’s geometry is to find
arithmetical limits to the values of what are really trigonometrical
ratios of certain small angles, namely

1/18 > sin 3° > 1/20, 1/45 > sin 1° > 1/60, 1 > cos 1° > 89/90.

The main results obtained are (1) that the diameter of the sun is
between 18 and 20 times the diameter of the moon, (2) that the diameter
of the moon is between 2/45ths and 1/30th of the distance of the centre
of the moon from our eye, and (3) that the diameter of the sun is
between 19/3rds and 43/6ths of the diameter of the earth. The book
contains a good deal of arithmetical calculation.

Archimedes was born about 287 B. C. and was killed at the sack of
Syracuse by Marcellus’s army in 212 B. C. The stories about him
are well known, how he said ‘Give me a place to stand on, and I
will move the earth’ (πα βω και κινω ταν γαν; how,
having thought of the solution of the problem of the crown when in the
bath, he ran home naked shouting ἑυρηκα, ἑυρηκα; and how, the
capture of Syracuse having found him intent on a figure drawn on the
ground, he said to a Roman soldier who came up, ‘Stand away,
fellow, from my diagram.’ Of his work few people know more than
that he invented a tubular screw which is still used for pumping water,
and that for a long time he foiled the attacks of the Romans on Syracuse
by the mechanical devices and engines which he used against them. But he
thought meanly of these things, and his real interest was in pure
mathematical speculation; he caused to be engraved on his tomb a
representation of a cylinder circumscribing
[123] a sphere, with the ratio
3/2 which the cylinder bears to the sphere: from which we infer that he
regarded this as his greatest discovery.

Archimedes’s works are all original, and are perfect models of
mathematical exposition; their wide range will be seen from the list of
those which survive: On the Sphere and Cylinder I, II, Measurement of
a Circle, On Conoids and Spheroids, On Spirals, On Plane
Equilibriums I, II, the Sandreckoner, Quadrature of the Parabola,
On Floating Bodies I, II, and lastly the Method (only discovered in
1906). The difficult Cattle-Problem is also attributed to him, and a
Liber Assumptorum which has reached us through the Arabic, but which
cannot be his in its present form, although some of the propositions in
it (notably that about the ‘Salinon’, salt-cellar, and
others about circles inscribed in the αρβηλος,
shoemaker’s knife) are quite likely to be of Archimedean origin.
Among lost works were the Catoptrica, On Sphere-making, and
investigations into polyhedra, including thirteen semi-regular solids,
the discovery of which is attributed by Pappus to Archimedes.

Speaking generally, the geometrical works are directed to the
measurement of curvilinear areas and volumes; and Archimedes employs a
method which is a development of Eudoxus’s method of exhaustion.
Eudoxus apparently approached the figure to be measured from below only,
i. e. by means of figures successively inscribed to it. Archimedes
approaches it from both sides by successively inscribing figures and
circumscribing others also, thereby compressing them, as it were, until
they coincide as nearly as we please with the figure to be measured. In
many cases his procedure is, when the analytical equivalents are set
down, seen to amount to real integration; this is so with his
investigation of the areas of a parabolic segment and a spiral, the
surface and volume of a sphere, and the volume of any segments of the
conoids and spheroids.

[124]
The newly-discovered Method is especially interesting as showing how
Archimedes originally obtained his results; this was by a clever
mechanical method of (theoretically) weighing infinitesimal elements
of the figure to be measured against elements of another figure the area
or content of which (as the case may be) is known; it amounts to an
avoidance of integration. Archimedes, however, would only admit that
the mechanical method is useful for finding results; he did not consider
them proved until they were established geometrically.

In the Measurement of a Circle, after proving by exhaustion that the
area of a circle is equal to a right-angled triangle with the
perpendicular sides equal respectively to the radius and the
circumference of the circle, Archimedes finds, by sheer calculation,
upper and lower limits to the ratio of the circumference of a circle to
its diameter (what we call π). This he does by inscribing and
circumscribing regular polygons of 96 sides and calculating
approximately their respective perimeters. He begins by assuming as
known certain approximate values for √3, namely 1351/780 > √3 > 265/153,
and his calculations involve approximating to the square roots of
several large numbers (up to seven digits). The text only gives the
results, but it is evident that the extraction of square roots presented
no difficulty, notwithstanding the comparative inconvenience of the
alphabetic system of numerals. The result obtained is well known, namely
3-1/7 > π > 3-10/71.

The Plane Equilibriums is the first scientific treatise on the first
principles of mechanics, which are established by pure geometry. The
most important result established in Book I is the principle of the
lever. This was known to Plato and Aristotle, but they had no real
proof. The Aristotelian Mechanics merely ‘refers’ the
lever ‘to the circle’, asserting that the force which acts
at the greater distance from the fulcrum moves the system more easily
because it describes a greater circle. Archimedes also finds the centre
of gravity[125]
of a parallelogram, a triangle, a trapezium and finally (in
Book II) of a parabolic segment and of a portion of it cut off by a
straight line parallel to the base.

The Sandreckoner is remarkable for the development in it of a system
for expressing very large numbers by orders and periods based on
powers of myriad-myriads (10,000²). It also contains the important
reference to the heliocentric theory of the universe put forward by
Aristarchus of Samos in a book of ‘hypotheses’, as well as
historical details of previous attempts to measure the size of the earth
and to give the sizes and distances of the sun and moon.

Lastly, Archimedes invented the whole science of hydrostatics. Beginning
the treatise On Floating Bodies with an assumption about uniform
pressure in a fluid, he first proves that the surface of a fluid at rest
is a sphere with its centre at the centre of the earth. Other
propositions show that, if a solid floats in a fluid, the weight of the
solid is equal to that of the fluid displaced, and, if a solid heavier
than a fluid is weighed in it, it will be lighter than its true weight
by the weight of the fluid displaced. Then, after a second assumption
that bodies which are forced upwards in a fluid are forced upwards along
the perpendiculars to the surface which pass through their centres of
gravity, Archimedes deals with the position of rest and stability of a
segment of a sphere floating in a fluid with its base entirely above or
entirely below the surface. Book II is an extraordinary tour de force,
investigating fully all the positions of rest and stability of a right
segment of a paraboloid floating in a fluid according (1) to the
relation between the axis of the solid and the parameter of the
generating parabola, and (2) to the specific gravity of the solid in
relation to the fluid; the term ‘specific gravity’ is not
used, but the idea is fully expressed in other words.

Almost contemporary with Archimedes was Eratosthenes of Cyrene, to whom
Archimedes dedicated the Method; the
[126] preface to this work shows that
Archimedes thought highly of his mathematical ability. He was indeed
recognized by his contemporaries as a man of great distinction in all
branches, though the names Beta and Pentathlos[4] applied to him
indicate that he just fell below the first rank in each subject. Ptolemy
Euergetes appointed him to be tutor to his son (Philopator), and he
became librarian at Alexandria; he recognized his obligation to Ptolemy
by erecting a column with a graceful epigram. In this epigram he
referred to the earlier solutions of the problem of duplicating the cube
or finding the two mean proportionals, and advocated his own in
preference, because it would give any number of means; on the column was
fixed a bronze representation of his appliance, a frame with
right-angled triangles (or rectangles) movable along two parallel
grooves and over one another, together with a condensed proof. The
Platonicus of Eratosthenes evidently dealt with the fundamental
notions of mathematics in connexion with Plato’s philosophy, and
seems to have begun with the story of the origin of the duplication
problem.

The most famous achievement of Eratosthenes was his measurement of the
earth. Archimedes quotes an earlier measurement which made the
circumference of the earth 300,000 stades. Eratosthenes improved upon
this. He observed that at the summer solstice at Syene, at noon, the sun
cast no shadow, while at the same moment the upright gnomon at
Alexandria cast a shadow corresponding to an angle between the gnomon
and the sun’s rays of 1/50th of four right angles. The distance
between Syene and Alexandria being known to be 5,000 stades, this gave
for the circumference of the earth 250,000 stades, which Eratosthenes
seems later, for some reason, to have changed to 252,000 stades. On the
[127]
most probable assumption as to the length of the stade used, the 252,000
stades give about 7,850 miles, only 50 miles less than the true polar
diameter.

In the work On the Measurement of the Earth Eratosthenes is said to
have discussed other astronomical matters, the distance of the tropic
and polar circles, the sizes and distances of the sun and moon, total
and partial eclipses, &c. Besides other works on astronomy and
chronology, Eratosthenes wrote a Geographica in three books, in which
he first gave a history of geography up to date and then passed on to
mathematical geography, the spherical shape of the earth, &c., &c.

Apollonius of Perga was with justice called by his contemporaries the
‘Great Geometer’, on the strength of his great treatise, the
Conics. He is mentioned as a famous astronomer of the reign of Ptolemy
Euergetes (247-222 B. C.); and he dedicated the fourth and later Books
of the Conics to King Attalus I of Pergamum (241-197 B. C.).

The Conics, a colossal work, originally in eight Books, survives as to
the first four Books in Greek and as to three more in Arabic, the eighth
being lost. From Apollonius’s prefaces we can judge of the
relation of his work to Euclid’s Conics, the content of which
answered to the first three Books of Apollonius. Although Euclid knew
that an ellipse could be otherwise produced, e. g. as an oblique section
of a right cylinder, there is no doubt that he produced all three conics
from right cones like his predecessors. Apollonius, however, obtains
them in the most general way by cutting any oblique cone, and his
original axes of reference, a diameter and the tangent at its extremity,
are in general oblique; the fundamental properties are found with
reference to these axes by ‘application of areas’, the three
varieties of which, application (παραβολη), application with
an excess (ὑπερβολη) and application with a deficiency
(ελλειψις), give the properties of the three curves
respectively and account for the names[128]
parabola, hyperbola, and ellipse, by which Apollonius called them
for the first time. The principal axes only appear, as a particular
case, after it has been shown that the curves have a like property when
referred to any other diameter and the tangent at its extremity, instead
of those arising out of the original construction. The first four Books
constitute what Apollonius calls an elementary introduction; the
remaining Books are specialized investigations, the most important being
Book V (on normals) and Book VII (mainly on conjugate diameters).
Normals are treated, not in connexion with tangents, but as minimum or
maximum straight lines drawn to the curves from different points or
classes of points. Apollonius discusses such questions as the number of
normals that can be drawn from one point (according to its position) and
the construction of all such normals. Certain propositions of great
difficulty enable us to deduce quite easily the Cartesian equations to
the evolutes of the three conics.

Several other works of Apollonius are described by Pappus as forming
part of the ‘Treasury of Analysis’. All are lost except the
Sectio Rationis in two Books, which survives in Arabic and was
published in a Latin translation by Halley in 1706. It deals with all
possible cases of the general problem ‘given two straight lines
either parallel or intersecting, and a fixed point on each, to draw
through any given point a straight line which shall cut off intercepts
from the two lines (measured from the fixed points) bearing a given
ratio to one another’. The lost treatise Sectio Spatii dealt
similarly with the like problem in which the intercepts cut off have to
contain a given rectangle.

The other treatises included in Pappus’s account are (1) On
Determinate Section; (2) Contacts or Tangencies, Book II of which
is entirely devoted to the problem of drawing a circle to touch three
given circles (Apollonius’s solution can, with the aid of
Pappus’s auxiliary propositions, be satisfactorily
[129] restored); (3)
Plane Loci, i. e. loci which are straight lines or circles; (4)
Νευσεις, Inclinationes (the general problem called a
νευσις being to insert between two lines, straight or curved, a
straight line of given length verging to a given point, i. e. so that,
if produced, it passes through the point, Apollonius restricted himself
to cases which could be solved by ‘plane’ methods, i. e. by
the straight line and circle only).

Apollonius is also said to have written (5) a Comparison of the
dodecahedron with the icosahedron (inscribed in the same sphere), in
which he proved that their surfaces are in the same ratio as their
volumes; (6) On the cochlias or cylindrical helix; (7) a
‘General Treatise’, which apparently dealt with the
fundamental assumptions, &c., of elementary geometry; (8) a work on
unordered irrationals, i. e. irrationals of more complicated form than
those of Eucl. Book X; (9) On the burning-mirror, dealing with
spherical mirrors and probably with mirrors of parabolic section also;
(10) ωκυτοκιον (‘quick delivery’). In the
last-named work Apollonius found an approximation to π closer
than that in Archimedes’s Measurement of a Circle; and possibly
the book also contained Apollonius’s exposition of his notation
for large numbers according to ‘tetrads’ (successive powers
of the myriad).

In astronomy Apollonius is said to have made special researches
regarding the moon, and to have been called ε (Epsilon) because
the form of that letter is associated with the moon. He was also a
master of the theory of epicycles and eccentrics.

With Archimedes and Apollonius Greek geometry reached its culminating
point; indeed, without some more elastic notation and machinery such as
algebra provides, geometry was practically at the end of its resources.
For some time, however, there were capable geometers who kept up the
tradition, filling in details, devising alternative solutions of
problems, or discovering new curves for use or investigation.

[130]
Nicomedes, probably intermediate in date between Eratosthenes and
Apollonius, was the inventor of the conchoid or cochloid, of which,
according to Pappus, there were three varieties. Diocles (about the end
of the second century B. C.) is known as the discoverer of the cissoid
which was used for duplicating the cube. He also wrote a book περι πυρειων,
On burning-mirrors, which probably discussed, among
other forms of mirror, surfaces of parabolic or elliptic section, and
used the focal properties of the two conics; it was in this work that
Diocles gave an independent and clever solution (by means of an ellipse
and a rectangular hyperbola) of Archimedes’s problem of cutting a
sphere into two segments in a given ratio. Dionysodorus gave a solution
by means of conics of the auxiliary cubic equation to which Archimedes
reduced this problem; he also found the solid content of a tore or
anchor-ring.

Perseus is known as the discoverer and investigator of the spiric
sections, i. e. certain sections of the σπειρα, one variety of
which is the tore. The spire is generated by the revolution of a
circle about a straight line in its plane, which straight line may
either be external to the circle (in which case the figure produced is
the tore), or may cut or touch the circle.

Zenodorus was the author of a treatise on Isometric figures, the
problem in which was to compare the content of different figures, plane
or solid, having equal contours or surfaces respectively.

Hypsicles (second half of second century B. C.) wrote what became known
as ‘Book XIV’ of the Elements containing supplementary
propositions on the regular solids (partly drawn from Aristaeus and
Apollonius); he seems also to have written on polygonal numbers. A
mediocre astronomical work (Αναφορικος) attributed to him is
the first Greek book in which we find the division of the zodiac circle
into 360 parts or degrees.

Posidonius the Stoic (about 135-51 B. C.) wrote on geography
[131] and
astronomy under the titles On the Ocean and περι μετεωρων. He
made a new but faulty calculation of the circumference of the earth
(240,000 stades). Per contra, in a separate tract on the size of the
sun (in refutation of the Epicurean view that it is as big as it
looks), he made assumptions (partly guesswork) which give for the
diameter of the sun a figure of 3,000,000 stades (39-1/4 times the
diameter of the earth), a result much nearer the truth than those
obtained by Aristarchus, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy. In elementary geometry
Posidonius gave certain definitions (notably of parallels, based on the
idea of equidistance).

Geminus of Rhodes, a pupil of Posidonius, wrote (about 70 B. C.) an
encyclopaedic work on the classification and content of mathematics,
including the history of each subject, from which Proclus and others
have preserved notable extracts. An-Nairīzī (an Arabian commentator on
Euclid) reproduces an attempt by one ‘Aganis’, who appears
to be Geminus, to prove the parallel-postulate.

But from this time onwards the study of higher geometry (except
sphaeric) seems to have languished, until that admirable mathematician,
Pappus, arose (towards the end of the third century A. D.) to revive
interest in the subject. From the way in which, in his great
Collection, Pappus thinks it necessary to describe in detail the
contents of the classical works belonging to the ‘Treasury of
Analysis’ we gather that by his time many of them had been lost or
forgotten, and that he aimed at nothing less than re-establishing
geometry at its former level. No one could have been better qualified
for the task. Presumably such interest as Pappus was able to arouse soon
flickered out; but his Collection remains, after the original works of
the great mathematicians, the most comprehensive and valuable of all our
sources, being a handbook or guide to Greek geometry and covering
practically the whole field. Among the original things in Pappus’s
Collection is an enunciation[132]
which amounts to an anticipation of what is known as Guldin’s
Theorem.

It remains to speak of three subjects, trigonometry (represented by
Hipparchus, Menelaus, and Ptolemy), mensuration (in Heron of
Alexandria), and algebra (Diophantus).

Although, in a sense, the beginnings of trigonometry go back to
Archimedes (Measurement of a Circle), Hipparchus was the first person
who can be proved to have used trigonometry systematically. Hipparchus,
the greatest astronomer of antiquity, whose observations were made
between 161 and 126 B. C., discovered the precession of the equinoxes,
calculated the mean lunar month at 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2½
seconds (which differs by less than a second from the present accepted
figure!), made more correct estimates of the sizes and distances of the
sun and moon, introduced great improvements in the instruments used for
observations, and compiled a catalogue of some 850 stars; he seems to
have been the first to state the position of these stars in terms of
latitude and longitude (in relation to the ecliptic). He wrote a
treatise in twelve Books on Chords in a Circle, equivalent to a table of
trigonometrical sines. For calculating arcs in astronomy from other arcs
given by means of tables he used propositions in spherical trigonometry.

The Sphaerica of Theodosius of Bithynia (written, say, 20 B. C.)
contains no trigonometry. It is otherwise with the Sphaerica of
Menelaus (fl. A. D. 100) extant in Arabic; Book I of this work contains
propositions about spherical triangles corresponding to the main
propositions of Euclid about plane triangles (e.g. congruence theorems
and the proposition that in a spherical triangle the three angles are
together greater than two right angles), while Book III contains genuine
spherical trigonometry, consisting of ‘Menelaus’s
Theorem’ with reference to the sphere and deductions therefrom.

Ptolemy’s great work, the Syntaxis, written about
A. D. 150[133] and
originally called Μαθηματικη συνταξις, came to be known as
Μεγαλη συνταξις; the Arabs made up from the superlative
μεγιστος the word al-Majisti which became Almagest.

Book I, containing the necessary preliminaries to the study of the
Ptolemaic system, gives a Table of Chords in a circle subtended by
angles at the centre of ½° increasing by half-degrees to 180°. The
circle is divided into 360 μοιραι, parts or degrees, and the
diameter into 120 parts (τμηματα); the chords are given in
terms of the latter with sexagesimal fractions (e. g. the chord
subtended by an angle of 120° is 103^p 53′ 23″). The Table of Chords
is equivalent to a table of the sines of the halves of the angles in
the table, for, if (crd. 2 α) represents the chord subtended by
an angle of 2 α (crd. 2 α)/120 = sin α.
Ptolemy first gives the minimum number of geometrical propositions
required for the calculation of the chords. The first of these finds
(crd. 36°) and (crd. 72°) from the geometry of the inscribed pentagon
and decagon; the second (‘Ptolemy’s Theorem’ about a
quadrilateral in a circle) is equivalent to the formula for
sin (θ-φ), the third to that for sin ½ θ. From (crd.
72°) and (crd. 60°) Ptolemy, by using these propositions successively,
deduces (crd. 1½°) and (crd. ¾°), from which he obtains (crd. 1°) by a
clever interpolation. To complete the table he only needs his fourth
proposition, which is equivalent to the formula for cos (θ+φ).

Ptolemy wrote other minor astronomical works, most of which survive in
Greek or Arabic, an Optics in five Books (four Books almost complete
were translated into Latin in the twelfth century), and an attempted
proof of the parallel-postulate which is reproduced by Proclus.

Heron of Alexandria (date uncertain; he may have lived as late as the
third century A. D.) was an almost encyclopaedic writer on mathematical
and physical subjects. He aimed at practical utility rather than
theoretical completeness; hence, apart from the interesting collection
of Definitions which has[134]
come down under his name, and his commentary on Euclid which is
represented only by extracts in Proclus and an-Nairīzī, his geometry is
mostly mensuration in the shape of numerical examples worked out. As
these could be indefinitely multiplied, there was a temptation to add to
them and to use Heron’s name. However much of the separate works
edited by Hultsch (the Geometrica, Geodaesia, Stereometrica,
Mensurae, Liber geëponicus) is genuine, we must now regard as
more authoritative the genuine Metrica discovered at Constantinople in
1896 and edited by H. Schöne in 1903 (Teubner). Book I on the
measurement of areas is specially interesting for (1) its statement of
the formula used by Heron for finding approximations to surds, (2) the
elegant geometrical proof of the formula for the area of a triangle
Δ = √{s (s–a) (s–b) (s–c)},
a formula now known to be due to Archimedes, (3) an allusion to limits
to the value of π found by Archimedes and more exact than the 3-1/7 and
3-10/71 obtained in the Measurement of a Circle.

Book I of the Metrica calculates the areas of triangles,
quadrilaterals, the regular polygons up to the dodecagon (the areas even
of the heptagon, enneagon, and hendecagon are approximately evaluated),
the circle and a segment of it, the ellipse, a parabolic segment, and
the surfaces of a cylinder, a right cone, a sphere and a segment
thereof. Book II deals with the measurement of solids, the cylinder,
prisms, pyramids and cones and frusta thereof, the sphere and a segment
of it, the anchor-ring or tore, the five regular solids, and finally the
two special solids of Archimedes’s Method; full use is made of
all Archimedes’s results. Book III is on the division of figures.
The plane portion is much on the lines of Euclid’s Divisions (of
figures). The solids divided in given ratios are the sphere, the
pyramid, the cone and a frustum thereof. Incidentally Heron shows how he
obtained an approximation to the cube root of a non-cube number (100).
Quadratic equations are solved by Heron by a regular rule not unlike
our[135]
method, and the Geometrica contains two interesting indeterminate
problems.

Heron also wrote Pneumatica (where the reader will find such things as
siphons, Heron’s Fountain, penny-in-the-slot machines, a
fire-engine, a water-organ, and many arrangements employing the force of
steam), Automaton-making, Belopoeïca (on engines of war),
Catoptrica, and Mechanics. The Mechanics has been edited from the
Arabic; it is (except for considerable fragments) lost in Greek. It
deals with the puzzle of ‘Aristotle’s Wheel’, the
parallelogram of velocities, definitions of, and problems on, the centre
of gravity, the distribution of weights between several supports, the
five mechanical powers, mechanics in daily life (queries and answers).
Pappus covers much the same ground in Book VIII of his Collection.

We come, lastly, to Algebra. Problems involving simple equations are
found in the Papyrus Rhind, in the Epanthema of Thymaridas already
referred to, and in the arithmetical epigrams in the Greek Anthology
(Plato alludes to this class of problem in the Laws, 819 B, C); the
Anthology even includes two cases of indeterminate equations of the
first degree. The Pythagoreans gave general solutions in rational
numbers of the equations x²+y²=z² and 2x²-y²=±1, which are
indeterminate equations of the second degree.

The first to make systematic use of symbols in algebraical work was
Diophantus of Alexandria (fl. about A. D. 250). He used (1) a sign for
the unknown quantity, which he calls αριθμος, and compendia
for its powers up to the sixth; (2) a sign ()
with the effect of our minus. The latter sign
probably represents ΛΙ, an abbreviation for the root of the
word λειπειν (to be wanting); the sign for
αριθμος
() is most likely an abbreviation for
the letters αρ; the compendia for the powers of the unknown are
Δ^Υ for
δυναμις, the square,
Κ^Υ
for κυβος, the cube, and so on. Diophantus
shows that he solved quadratic equations by rule, like Heron. His
Arithmetica, of[136] which six books only (out of thirteen) survive,
contains a certain number of problems leading to simple equations, but
is mostly devoted to indeterminate or semi-determinate analysis, mainly
of the second degree. The collection is extraordinarily varied, and the
devices resorted to are highly ingenious. The problems solved are such
as the following (fractional as well as integral solutions being
admitted): ‘Given a number, to find three others such that the sum
of the three, or of any pair of them, together with the given number is
a square’, ‘To find four numbers such that the square of the
sum plus or minus any one of the numbers is a square’,
‘To find three numbers such that the product of any two plus or
minus the sum of the three is a square’. Diophantus assumes as
known certain theorems about numbers which are the sums of two and three
squares respectively, and other propositions in the Theory of Numbers.
He also wrote a book On Polygonal Numbers of which only a fragment
survives.

With Pappus and Diophantus the list of original writers on mathematics
comes to an end. After them came the commentators whose names only can
be mentioned here. Theon of Alexandria, the editor of Euclid, lived
towards the end of the fourth century A. D. To the fifth and sixth
centuries belong Proclus, Simplicius, and Eutocius, to whom we can never
be grateful enough for the precious fragments which they have preserved
from works now lost, and particularly the History of Geometry and the
History of Astronomy by Aristotle’s pupil Eudemus.

Such is the story of Greek mathematical science. If anything could
enhance the marvel of it, it would be the consideration of the shortness
of the time (about 350 years) within which the Greeks, starting from the
very beginning, brought geometry to the point of performing operations
equivalent to the integral calculus and, in the realm of astronomy,
actually anticipated Copernicus.

T. L. Heath.

[137]

NATURAL SCIENCE

Aristotle

There is a little essay of Goethe’s called, simply, Die Natur.
It comes among those tracts on Natural Science in which the poet and
philosopher turned his restless mind to problems of light and colour, of
leaf and flower, of bony skull and kindred vertebra; and it sounds like
a prose-poem, a noble paean, eulogizing the love and glorifying the
study of Nature. Some twenty-five hundred years before, Anaximander had
written a book with the same title, Concerning Nature,
περι φυσεως:
but its subject was not the same. It was a variant of the old
traditional cosmogonies. It told of how in the beginning the earth was
without form and void. It sought to trace all things back to the
Infinite, το απειρον—to
That which knows no bounds of space or time but is before all worlds,
and to whose bosom again all things, all worlds, return. For Goethe
Nature meant the beauty, the all but sensuous beauty of the world; for
the older philosopher it was the mystery of the Creative Spirit.

Than Nature, in Goethe’s sense, no theme is more familiar to us,
for whom many a poet tells the story and many a lesser poet echoes the
conceit; but if there be anywhere in Greek such overt praise and worship
of Nature’s beauty, I cannot call it to mind. Yet in Latin the
divini gloria ruris is praised and Natura daedala rerum worshipped,
as we are wont to praise and worship them, for their own sweet sakes. It
is one of the ways, one of the simpler ways, in which the Roman world
seems nearer to us than the Greek: and not only seems, but is so. For
compared with the great early civilizations,
[138]
Rome is modern and of the West; while, draw her close as we may
to our hearts, Greece brings along with her a breath of the East and a
whisper of remote antiquity. A Tuscan gentleman of to-day, like a Roman
gentleman of yesterday, is at heart a husbandman, like Cato; he is
ruris amator, like Horace; he gets him to his little farm or vineyard
(O rus, quando te aspiciam!), like Atticus or the younger Pliny. As
Bacon praised his garden, so does Pliny praise his farm, with its
cornfields and meadowland, vineyard and woodland, orchard and pasture,
bee-hives and flowers. That God made the country and man made the town
was (long before Cowper) a saying of Varro’s; but in Greek I can
think of no such apophthegm.

As Schiller puts it, the Greeks looked on Nature with their minds more
than with their hearts, nor ever clung to her with outspoken admiration
and affection. And Humboldt, asserting (as I would do) that the
portrayal of nature, for her own sake and in all her manifold diversity,
was foreign to the Greek idea, declares that the landscape is always the
mere background of their picture, while their foreground is filled with
the affairs and actions and thoughts of men. But all the while, as in
some old Italian picture—of Domenichino or Albani or Leonardo
himself—the subordinated background is delicately traced and
exquisitely beautiful; and sometimes we come to value it in the end more
than all the rest of the composition.

Deep down in the love of Nature, whether it be of the sensual or
intellectual kind, and in the art of observation which is its outcome
and first expression, lie the roots of all our Natural Science. All the
world over these are the heritage of all men, though the inheritance be
richer or poorer here and there: they are shown forth in the lore and
wisdom of hunter and fisherman, of shepherd and husbandman, of artist
and poet. The natural history of the ancients is not enshrined in
Aristotle and Pliny. It pervades the vast literature of classical
antiquity.[139]
For all we may say of the reticence with which, the Greeks
proclaim it, it greets us nobly in Homer, it sings to us in Anacreon,
Sicilian shepherds tune their pipes to it in Theocritus: and anon in
Virgil we dream of it to the coo of doves and the sound of bees’
industrious murmur.

Not only from such great names as these do we reach the letter and the
spirit of ancient Natural History. We must go a-wandering into the
by-ways of literature. We must eke out the scientific treatises of
Aristotle and Pliny by help of the fragments which remain of the works
of such naturalists as Speusippus or Alexander the Myndian; add to the
familiar stories of Herodotus the Indian tales of Ctesias and
Megasthenes; sit with Athenaeus and his friends at the supper table,
gleaning from cook and epicure, listening to the merry idle troop of
convivial gentlemen capping verses and spinning yarns; read
Xenophon’s treatise on Hunting, study the didactic poems, the
Cynegetica and Halieutica, of Oppian and of Ovid. And then again we may
hark back to the greater world of letters, wherein poet and scholar,
from petty fabulist to the great dramatists, from Homer’s majesty
to Lucian’s wit, share in the love of Nature and enliven the
delicate background of their story with allusions to beast and bird.

Such allusions, refined at first by art and hallowed at last by familiar
memory, lie treasured in men’s hearts and enshrine themselves in
our noblest literature. Take, of a thousand crowding instances, that
great passage in the Iliad where the Greek host, disembarking on the
plains of the Scamander, is likened to a migrating flock of cranes or
geese or long-necked swans, as they fly proudly over the Asian meadows
and alight screaming by Cayster’s stream—and Virgil echoes more
than once the familiar lines. The crane was a well-known bird. Its lofty
flight brings it, again in Homer, to the very gates of heaven. Hesiod
and Pindar speak of its far-off cry, heard from above the clouds: and
that it ‘observed the time of its
[140] coming’,
‘intelligent of seasons’, was a proverb old in
Hesiod’s day—when the crane signalled the approach of winter, and
when it bade the husbandman make ready to plough. It follows the plough,
in Theocritus, as persistently as the wolf the kid and the peasant-lad
his sweetheart. The discipline of the migrating cranes, the serried
wedge of their ranks in flight, the good order of the resting flock, are
often, and often fancifully, described. Aristotle records how they have
an appointed leader, who keeps watch by night and in flight keeps
calling to the laggards; and all this old story Euripides, the most
naturalistic of the great tragedians, puts into verse:

Lastly, Milton gathers up the spirit and the letter of these and many
another ancient allusion to the migrating cranes:

But the natural history of the poets is a story without an end, and in
our estimation, however brief it be, of ancient knowledge, there are
other matters to be considered, and other points of view where we must
take our stand.

When we consider the science of the Greeks, and come quickly to love it
and slowly to see how great it was, we likewise see that it was
restricted as compared with our own, curiously partial or particular in
its limitations. The practical and ‘useful’ sciences of
chemistry, mechanics, and engineering, which in our modern world crowd
the others to the wall, are absent altogether, or so concealed that we
forget and pass them[141]
by. Mathematics is enthroned high over all, as it is meet she should
be; and of uncontested right she occupies her throne century after
century, from Pythagoras to Proclus, from the scattered schools of early
Hellenic civilization to the rise and fall of the great Alexandrine
University. Near beside her sits, from of old, the daughter-science of
Astronomy; and these twain were worshipped by the greatest scientific
intellects of the Greeks. But though we do not hear of them nor read of
them, we must not suppose for a moment that the practical or technical
sciences were lacking in so rich and complex a civilization. China, that
most glorious of all living monuments of Antiquity, tells us nothing of
her own chemistry, but we know that it is there. Peep into a Chinese
town, walk through its narrow streets, thronged but quiet, wherein there
is neither rumbling of coaches nor rattling of wheels, and you shall see
the nearest thing on earth to what we hear of Sybaris. To the production
of those glowing silks and delicate porcelains and fine metal-work has
gone a vast store of chemical knowledge, traditional and empirical. So
was it, precisely, in ancient Greece; and Plato knew that it was
so—that the dyer, the perfumer, and the apothecary had subtle
arts, a subtle science of their own, a science not to be belittled nor
despised. We may pass here and there by diligent search from conjecture
to assurance; analyse a pigment, an alloy or a slag; discover from an
older record than the Greeks’, the chemical prescription wherewith
an Egyptian princess darkened her eyes, or study the pictured hearth,
bellows, oven, crucibles with which the followers of Tubal-Cain smelted
their ore. Once in a way, but seldom, do we meet with ancient chemistry
even in Greek literature. There is a curious passage (its text is faulty
and the translation hard) in the story of the Argonauts, where Medea
concocts a magic brew. She put divers herbs in it, herbs yielding
coloured juices such as safflower and alkanet, and soapwort and fleawort
to give consistency or[142]
‘body’ to the lye; she put in alum and blue vitriol (or
sulphate of copper), and she put in blood. The magic brew was no more
and no less than a dye, a red or purple dye, and a prodigious deal of
chemistry had gone to the making of it. For the copper was there to
produce a ‘lake’ or copper-salt of the vegetable alkaloids,
which copper-lakes are among the most brilliant and most permanent of
colouring matters; the alum was there as a ‘mordant’; and
even the blood was doubtless there incorporated for better reasons than
superstitious ones, in all probability for the purpose of clarifying (by
means of its coagulating albumen) the seething and turbid brew.

The ‘Orphic’ version of the story, in which this passage
occurs, is probably an Alexandrine compilation, and whether the
ingredients of the brew had been part of the ancient legend or were
merely suggested to the poet by the knowledge of his own day we cannot
tell; in either case the prescription is old enough, and is at least
pre-Byzantine by a few centuries. Such as it is, it does not stand
alone. Other fragments of ancient chemistry, more or less akin to it,
have been gathered together; in Galen’s book on The making of
Simples, in Pliny, in Paulus Aegineta, and for that matter in certain
Egyptian papyri (especially a certain very famous one, still extant, of
which Clement of Alexandria speaks as a secret or ‘hermetic’
book), we can trace the broken and scattered stones of a great edifice
of ancient chemistry.

Nevertheless, all this weight of chemical learning figures scantily in
literature, and is conspicuously absent from our conception of the
natural genius of the Greeks. We have no reason to suppose that ancient
chemistry, or any part of it, was ever peculiarly Greek, or that this
science was the especial property of any nation whatsoever; moreover it
was a trade, or a bundle of trades, whose trade-secrets were too
precious to be revealed, and so constituted not a science but a
mystery.[143]
So has it always been with chemistry, the most cosmopolitan of
sciences, the most secret of arts. Quietly and stealthily it crept
through the world; the tinker brought it with his solder and his flux;
the African tribes who were the first workers in iron passed it on to
the great metallurgists who forged Damascan and Toledan steel.

This ‘trade’ of Chemistry was never a science for a
Gentleman, as philosophy and mathematics were; and Plato, greatest of
philosophers, was one of the greatest of gentlemen. Long, long
afterwards, Oxford said the same thing to Robert Boyle—that Chemistry
was no proper avocation for a gentleman; but he thought otherwise, and
the ‘brother of the Earl of Cork’ became the Father of
scientific Chemistry.

Now I take it that in regard to biology Aristotle did much the same
thing as Boyle, breaking through a similar tradition; and herein one of
the greatest of his great services is to be found. There was a wealth of
natural history before his time; but it belonged to the farmer, the
huntsman, and the fisherman—with something over (doubtless) for the
schoolboy, the idler, and the poet. But Aristotle made it a science, and
won a place for it in Philosophy. He did for it just what Pythagoras had
done (as Proclus tells us) for mathematics in an earlier age, when he
discerned the philosophy underlying the old empirical art of
‘geometry’, and made it the basis of ‘a liberal
education’.[5]

The Mediterranean fisherman, like the Chinese fisherman or the Japanese,
has still, and always has had, a wide knowledge of all that pertains to
and accompanies his craft. Our Scottish fishermen have a limited
vocabulary, which scarce extends beyond the names of the few common
fishes with which the market is supplied. But at Marseilles or Genoa or
in the Levant[144]
they have names for many hundreds of species, of fish and
shell-fish and cuttle-fish and worms and corallines, and all manner of
swimming and creeping things; they know a vast deal about the habits of
their lives, far more, sometimes, than do we ‘scientific
men’; they are naturalists by tradition and by trade. Neither, by
the way, must we forget the ancient medical and anatomical learning of
the great Aesculapian guild, nor the still more recondite knowledge
possessed by various priesthoods (again like their brethren of to-day in
China and Japan) of the several creatures, sacred fish, pigeons,
guinea-fowl, snakes, cuttlefish, and what not, which time out of mind
they had reared, tended, and venerated.

Of what new facts Aristotle actually discovered it is impossible to be
sure. Could it ever be proved that he discovered many, or could it even
be shown that of his own hand he discovered nothing at all, it would
affect but little our estimate of his greatness and our admiration of
his learning. He was the first of Greek philosophers and gentlemen to
see that all these things were good to know and worthy to be told. This
was his great discovery.

I have sought elsewhere to show that Aristotle spent two years, the
happiest years perhaps of all his life—a long honeymoon—by the
sea-side in the island of Mytilene, after he had married the little
Princess, and before he began the hard work of his life: before he
taught Alexander in Macedon, and long before he spoke urbi et orbi in
the Lyceum. Here it was that he learned the great bulk of his natural
history, in which, wide and general as it is, the things of the sea have
from first to last a notable predominance.

I have tried to illustrate elsewhere (as many another writer has done)
something of the variety and the depth of Aristotle’s knowledge of
animals—choosing an example here and there, but only drawing a little
water from an inexhaustible well.

A famous case is that of the ‘molluscs’, where either
[145]
Aristotle’s knowledge was exceptionally minute, or where it has
come down to us with unusual completeness.

These are the cuttle fish, which have now surrendered their Aristotelian
name of ‘molluscs’ to that greater group which is seen to
include them, together with the shell-fish or ‘ostracoderma’
of Aristotle. These cuttle-fishes are creatures that we seldom see, but
in the Mediterranean they are an article of food and many kinds are
known to the fishermen. All or wellnigh all of these many kinds were
known to Aristotle. He described their form and their anatomy, their
habits, their development, all with such faithful accuracy that what we
can add to-day seems of secondary importance. He begins with a
methodical description of the general form, tells us of the body and
fins, of the eight arms with their rows of suckers, of the abnormal
position of the head. He points out the two long arms of Sepia and of
the calamaries, and their absence in the octopus; and he tells us, what
was only confirmed of late, that with these two long arms the creature
clings to the rock and sways about like a ship at anchor. He describes
the great eyes, the two big teeth forming the beak; and he dissects the
whole structure of the gut, with its long gullet, its round crop, its
stomach and the little coiled coecal diverticulum: dissecting not only
one but several species, and noting differences that were not observed
again till Cuvier re-dissected them. He describes the funnel and its
relation to the mantle-sac, and the ink-bag, which he shows to be
largest in Sepia of all others. And here, by the way, he seems to make
one of those apparent errors that, as it happens, turn out to be
justified: for he tells us that in Octopus, unlike the rest, the funnel
is on the upper side; the fact being that when the creature lies prone
upon the ground, with all its arms outspread, the funnel-tube (instead
of being flattened out beneath the creature’s prostrate body) is
long enough to protrude upwards between arms and head, and to appear on
one[146]
side or other thereof, in a position apparently the reverse of its
natural one. He describes the character of the cuttle-bone in Sepia, and
of the horny pen which takes its place in the various calamaries, and
notes the lack of any similar structure in Octopus. He dissects in both
sexes the reproductive organs, noting without exception all their
essential and complicated parts; and he had figured these in his lost
volume of anatomical diagrams. He describes the various kinds of eggs,
and, with still more surprising knowledge, shows us the little embryo
cuttle-fish, with its great yolk-sac attached, in apparent contrast to
the chick’s, to the little creature’s developing head.

But there is one other remarkable feature that he knew ages before it
was rediscovered, almost in our own time. In certain male cuttle-fishes,
in the breeding season, one of the arms develops in a curious fashion
into a long coiled whip-lash, and in the act of breeding may then be
transferred to the mantle-cavity of the female. Cuvier himself knew
nothing of the nature or the function of this separated arm, and indeed,
if I am not mistaken, it was he who mistook it for a parasitic worm. But
Aristotle tells us of its use and its temporary development, and of its
structure in detail, and his description tallies closely with the
accounts of the most recent writers.

A scarcely less minute account follows of the ‘Malacostraca’
or crustaceans, the lobsters and the crabs, the shrimps and the prawns,
and others of their kind, a chapter to which Cuvier devoted a celebrated
essay. There be many kinds of crabs—the common kind, the big
‘granny’ crabs, the little horsemen-crabs, that scamper over
the sand and which are for the most part empty, that is to say, whose
respiratory cavities are exceptionally large; and there are the
freshwater crabs. There are the little shrimps and the big hump-backed
fellows, or prawns; there are the ‘crangons’ or squillae;
and the big lobsters and the crawfish or ‘langoustes’, their
spiny cousins. We read about their beady eyes, which turn every way;
about their[147]
big rough antennae and the smaller, smoother pair between;
the great teeth, or mandibles; the carapace with its projecting rostrum,
the jointed abdomen with the tail-fins at the end, and the little flaps
below on which the female drops her spawn. In more or less detail these
things are severally described, and the many limbs severally enumerated,
in one kind after another. The descriptions of the lobster and the
langouste are particularly minute, and the comparison or contrast
between the two is drawn with elaborate precision. In the former,
besides other differences between male and female, the female is said to
have the ‘first foot’ (or leg) bifurcate, while in the male
it is undivided. It seems a trifling matter, but it is true; it is so
small a point that I searched long before at last I found mention made
of it in a German monograph. The puzzling thing is that it is (as we
should say) the last and not the first leg which is so distinguished;
but after all, it is only a convention of our own to count the limbs
from before backwards. To inspect a lobster’s limbs, we lay it on
its back (as Aristotle did), and see the legs overlapping, each hinder
one above the one before; the hindmost is the first we see, and the one
we must first lift up to inspect the others.

Aristotle’s account of fishes is a prodigious history of habits,
food, migrations, modes of capture, times and ways of spawning, and
anatomical details; but it is not here that we can elucidate or even
illustrate this astonishing Ichthyology. It is not always easy to
understand—but the obstacle lies often, I take it, in our own
ignorance. The identification of species is not always plain, for here
as elsewhere Aristotle did not reckon with a time or place where the
familiar words of Greek should be unknown or their homely significance
forgotten. Among the great host of fish-names there are several
referring, somehow or other, to the Grey Mullet, which puzzle both
naturalist and lexicographer. A young officer told me the other day how
he had watched an Arab fisherman emptying out his creel of Grey
[148] Mullet
on some Syrian beach, and the Arab gave four if not five names to as
many different kinds, betwixt which my friend could see no difference
whatsoever. Had my friend been an ichthyologist he would doubtless have
noticed that one had eyelids and the others none; that one had little
brushes on its lips, another a small but wide-open slit under the jaw,
another a yellow spot on its gill-covers, and so on. The Mullets are a
difficult group, but Aristotle, like the Arab fisherman, evidently
recognized their fine distinctions and employed the appropriate names.
Again, Aristotle speaks of a certain nest-building fish, the
‘phycis’, and regarding this Cuvier fell into error (where
once upon a time I followed him). In Cuvier’s time there was but
one nest-building fish known such as to suit, apparently, the passage,
namely the little black goby; but after Cuvier’s day the
nest-building habits of the ‘wrasses’ became known to
naturalists, as they had doubtless been known ages before to the
fishermen—and to Aristotle.

Like almost every other little point on which we happen to touch, we
might make this one the starting-point (here comes in the delight and
fascination of the interpreter’s task!) for other stories.

Speusippus, Plato’s successor in the Academy, was both philosopher
and naturalist, and we may take it, if we please, that his leaning
towards biology, and the biological trend which at this time became more
and more marked in Athenian philosophy, were not unconnected with the
great impulse which Aristotle had given. However this may be, Speusippus
wrote a book περι Ὁμοιων ‘Concerning
Resemblances’; and this, of which we only possess a few
fragmentary sentences, must have been a very curious and an interesting
book. He mentions, among other similar cases, that our little fish
phycis has a close outward semblance to the sea-perch; and this is
enough to clinch the proof that Aristotle’s nest-building fish was
not a goby but a wrasse. The whole purport of
[149]
Speusippus’s book seems to have been to discuss how, or
why, with all Nature’s apparently infinite variety, certain
animals have a singularly close resemblance to certain others, though
they be quite distinct in kind. It is a problem which perplexes us
still, when we are astonished and even deluded by the likeness between a
wasp and a hover-fly, a merlin and a cuckoo. In certain extreme cases we
call it ‘mimicry’, and invoke hypotheses to account for this
‘mimetic’ resemblance; and those of us who reject these
hypotheses must fain take refuge in others, as far-reaching in their
way. This at least we know, that Speusippus seized upon a real problem
of biology, of lasting interest and even of fundamental importance.

To come back to Aristotle and his fishes, let us glance at one little
point more. The reproduction of the eel is an ancient puzzle, which has
found its full solution only in our own day. While the salmon, for
instance, comes up the river to breed and goes down again to the sea,
the eel goes down to the ocean to spawn, and the old eels come back no
more but perish in the great waters. The eel’s egg develops into a
little flattened, transparent fish, altogether different in outward
appearance from an eel, which turns afterwards into a young eel or
‘elver’; and Professor Grassi, who had a big share in
elucidating the whole matter, tells us the curious fact that he found
the Sicilian fishermen well acquainted with the little transparent larva
(the Leptocephalus of modern naturalists), that they knew well what it
was, and that they had a name for it—Casentula. Now Aristotle, in a
passage which I think has been much misunderstood (and which we must
admit to be in part erroneous), tells us that the eel develops from what
he calls γης εντερα, a word which we translate, literally, the
‘guts of the earth’, and which commentators interpret as
‘earthworms’! But in Sicilian Doric, γης εντερα
would at once become γας εντερα; and between
‘Gasentera’ and the modern Sicilian ‘Casentula’
there is scarce a hairbreadth’s[150]
difference. So we may be permitted to suppose that here again Aristotle
was singularly and accurately informed; and that he knew by sight and
name the little larva of the eel, whose discovery and identification is
one of the modest triumphs of recent investigation.

Aristotle’s many pages on fishes are delightful reading. The
anatomist may read of such recondite matters as the placenta vitellina
of the smooth dog-fish, whereby the viviparous embryo is nourished
within the womb, after a fashion analogous to that of mammalian
embryology—a phenomenon brought to light anew by Johannes Müller, and
which excited him to enthusiastic admiration of Aristotle’s minute
and faithful anatomy. Again we may read of the periodic migration of the
tunnies, of the great net or ‘madrague’ in which they are
captured, and of the watchmen, the θυννοσκοποι, the
‘hooers’ of our ancient Cornish fishery, who give warning
from tower or headland of the approaching shoal. The student may learn
what manner of fish it was (the great Eagle-ray) with whose barbed
fin-spine—most primitive of spear-heads—Ulysses was slain; and again,
he may learn not a little about that ναρκη, or torpedo, to
which Meno compared his master Socrates, in a somewhat ambiguous
compliment.

In rambling fashion Aristotle has a deal to tell us about insects, and
he has left us a sort of treatise on the whole natural history of the
bee. He knew the several inmates of the hive, though like others of his
day (save, perhaps, only Xenophon), and like Shakespeare too, he took
the queen-bee for a king. He describes the building of the comb, the
laying of the eggs, the provision of the larvae with food. He discusses
the various qualities of honey and the flowers from which these are
drawn. He is learned in the diseases and the enemies of bees. He tells
us many curious things about the economy of the hive and the arts of the
bee-keeper, some of which things have a very modern and familiar look
about them: for[151]
instance, the use of a net or screen to keep out the drones, a net so
nicely contrived that these sturdy fellows are just kept out, while the
leaner, slenderer workers are just let in. But it would be a long, long
story to tell of Aristotle’s knowledge of the bee, and to compare
it with what is, haply, the still deeper skill and learning of that
master of bee-craft, Virgil.

Then, having perfect freedom to go whithersoever we chose and to follow
the bees across the boundless fields of ancient literature, we might
read of the wild bees and of their honey out of a rock, and of the
hive-bees too, in Homer; follow them to their first legendary home in
Crete, where the infant Jupiter was fed on honey—as a baby’s lips
are touched with it even unto this day; trace their association with
Proserpine and her mother, or their subtler connexion with Ephesian
Diana; find in the poets, from Hesiod to the later Anthology, a hundred
sweet references—to the bee-tree in the oak-wood, to the flowery hill
Hymettus. Perhaps, at last, we might even happen on the place where
Origen seems so strangely to foreshadow Shakespeare—speaking of the
king of the bees with his retinue of courtiers (his officers of sorts),
the relays of workmen (the poor mechanic porters crowding in), the
punishment of the idle (where some, like magistrates, correct at home),
the wars, the vanquished, and the plunder (which pillage they with merry
march bring home To the tent-royal of their Emperor).

Go back to Aristotle, and we may listen to him again while he talks of
many other kindred insects: of the humble-bee and its kind, of the
mason-bee with its hard round nest of clay, of the robber-bees, and of
the various wasps and hornets; or (still more curiously and
unexpectedly) of the hunter-wasp or ‘ichneumon’, and how it
kills the spider, carries it home to its nest, and lays its eggs in its
poor body, that the little wasp-grubs may afterwards be fed. Or again of
the great wasps which he calls Anthrenae, and how they chase the big
flies, and cut off their heads, and fly away with
[152]
the rest of the carcass—all agreeing to the very letter with what
Henri Fabre tells us of a certain large wasp of Southern Europe, and how
it captures the big ‘taons’ or horse-flies: ‘Pour
donner le coup de grâce à leurs Taons mal sacrifiés,
et se débattants encore entre les pattes du ravisseur, j’ai
vu des Bembex mâchonner la tête et le thorax des
victimes.’ Verily, there is nothing new under the sun.

With the metamorphoses of various insects Aristotle was well acquainted.
He knew how the house-fly passes its early stages in a dung-hill, and
how the grubs of the big horse-flies and Tabanids live in decayed wood;
how certain little flies or gnats are engendered (as he calls it) in the
slime of vinegar. He relates with great care and accuracy the
life-history of the common gnat, from its aquatic larva, the little red
‘blood-worm’ of our pools; he describes them wriggling about
like tiny bits of red weed, in the water of some half-empty well; and he
explains, finally, the change by which they become stiff and motionless
and hard, until a husk breaks away and the little gnat is seen sitting
upon it; and by and by the sun’s heat or a puff of wind starts it
off, and away it flies.

Some of these stories are indeed remarkable, for the events related are
more or less hidden and obscure; and so, with all this knowledge at
hand, it is not a little strange that Aristotle has very little indeed
to tell us about the far more obvious phenomena of the life-history of
the butterfly, and of the several kinds of butterflies and moths. He
does tell us briefly that the butterfly comes from a caterpillar, which
lives on cabbage-leaves and feeds voraciously, then turns into a
chrysalis and eats no more, nor has it a mouth to eat withal; it is hard
and, as it were, dead, but yet it moves and wriggles when you touch it,
and after a while the husk bursts and out comes the butterfly. The
account is good enough, so far as it goes, but nevertheless Aristotle
shows no affection for the butterfly, does not linger and dally over it,
tells no stories about it. This is[153]
all of a piece with the rest of Greek literature, and poetry in
particular, where allusions to the butterfly are scanty and rare. I
think the Greeks found something ominous or uncanny, something not to be
lightly spoken of, in that all but disembodied spirit which we call a
butterfly, and they called by the name of ψυχη, the Soul. They had a
curious name (νεκυδαλλος) for the pupa. It sounds like a ‘little
corpse’ (νεκυς); and like a little corpse within its shroud or
coffin the pupa sleeps in its cocoon. A late poet describes the
butterfly ‘coming back from the grave to the light of day’;
and certain of the Fathers of the Church, St. Basil in particular, point
the moral accordingly, and draw a doubtless time-honoured allegory of
the Resurrection and the Life from the grub which is not dead but
sleepeth, and the butterfly which (as it were) is raised in glory.

Of one large moth, Aristotle gives us an account which has been a puzzle
to many. This begins as a great grub or caterpillar, with (as it were)
horns; and, growing by easy stages, it spins at length a cocoon. There
is a class of women who unwind and reel off the cocoons, and afterwards
weave a fabric with the thread; and a certain woman of Cos is credited
with the invention of this fabric. This is, at first sight, a plain and
straightforward description of the silkworm; but we know that it was not
till long afterwards, nearly a thousand years after, in
Justinian’s reign, that the silkworm and the mulberry-tree which
is its food were brought out of the East into Byzantine Greece. We learn
something of this Coan silkworm from Pliny, who tells us that it lived
on the ash and oak and cypress tree; and from Clement of Alexandria and
other of the Fathers we glean a little more—for instance, that the
larva was covered with thick-set hairs, and that the cocoon was of a
loose material something like a spider’s web. All this agrees in
every particular with a certain large moth (Lasiocampa otus), which
spins a rough cocoon not unlike that of our Emperor moth, and lives in
south-eastern Europe, feeding on the cypress and the oak.
[154] Many other
silkworms besides the true or common one are still employed, worms which
yield the Tussore silks of India and other kindred silks in Japan; and
so likewise was this rough silky fabric spun and woven in Hellas, until
in course of time it was surpassed and superseded by the finer produce
of the ‘Seric worm’, and the older industry died out and was
utterly forgotten.

Ere we leave the subject of insects let us linger a moment over one
which the Greeks loved, and loved most of all. When as schoolboys we
first began to read our Thucydides, we met in the very beginning with
the story of how rich Athenians wore Golden Grasshoppers (as the
schoolmaster calls them) in their hair. These golden ornaments were, of
course, no common grasshoppers, but the little Cicadas, whose sharp
chirrup seemed delightful music to the Greeks. It is unpleasant to our
ears, as Browning found it; but in a multitude of Greek poets, in
Alcaeus and Anacreon and all through the whole Anthology, we hear its
praise. We have it, for instance, in the Birds:

Of this familiar and beloved insect Aristotle gives a copious account.
He describes two separate species, which we still recognize easily; a
larger one and the better singer, the other smaller and the first to
come and last to go with the summer season. He recognized the curious
vocal organ, or vibratory drum, at the cicada’s waist, and saw
that some cicadas possessed it and others not; and he knew, as the poets
also knew, that it was the males who sang, while their wives listened
and were silent. He tells how the cicada is absent from treeless
countries, as, for instance, from Cyrene (and why, I wonder, does he go
all the way to Cyrene for his illustration?), neither is it heard in
deep and sunless woods; but in the olive-groves you hear it at its best,
for an olive-grove is sparse[155]
and the sun comes through. Then he tells us briefly, but with
remarkable accuracy, the story of the creature’s life: how the
female, with her long ovipositor, lays her eggs deep down in dead,
hollow twigs, such as the canes on which the vines are propped; how the
brood, when they escape from the egg, burrow underground; how later on
they emerge, especially in rainy weather, when the rains have softened
the soil; how then the larva changes into another form, the so-called
‘nymph’; and how at last, when summer comes, the skin of the
nymph breaks and the perfect insect issues forth, changes colour, and
begins to sing. In Aristophanes, in Theocritus, in Lucretius, Virgil,
Martial, and in the Anthology, we may gather up a host of poetical
allusions to the natural history thus simply epitomized.

The Book about Animals, the Historia Animalium as we say, from which I
have quoted these few examples of Aristotle’s store of
information, may be taken to represent the first necessary stage of
scientific inquiry. There is a kind of manual philosophy (as old Lord
Monboddo called it) which investigates facts which escape the vulgar,
and may be called the anecdotes or secret history of nature. In this
fascinating pursuit Gilbert White excelled, and John Ray and many
another—the whole brotherhood of simple naturalists. But such
accumulated knowledge of facts is but the foundation of a philosophy;
and ‘nothing deserves the name of philosophy, except what explains
the causes and principles of things’. Aristotle would have done
much had he merely shown (as Gilbert White showed to the country
gentlemen of his day) that the minute observation of nature was
something worth the scholar and the gentleman’s while; but, far
more than this, he made a Science of natural knowledge, and set it once
for all within the realm of Philosophy. He set it side by side with the
more ancient science of Astronomy, which for many hundred years in Egypt
and the East, and for some few centuries in Hellas, had occupied the
mind of philosophers[156]
and the attention of educated men. I have quoted before a great
sentence in which he explains his purpose, and makes excuse for his
temerity. ‘The glory, doubtless, of the heavenly bodies fills us
with more delight than the contemplation of these lowly things; for the
sun and stars are born not, neither do they decay, but are eternal and
divine. But the heavens are high and afar off, and of celestial things
the knowledge that our senses give us is scanty and dim. The living
creatures, on the other hand, are at our door, and if we so desire it we
may gain ample and certain knowledge of each and all. We take pleasure
in the beauty of a statue, shall not then the living fill us with
delight; and all the more if in the spirit of philosophy we search for
causes and recognize the evidences of design. Then will nature’s
purpose and her deep-seated laws be everywhere revealed, all tending in
her multitudinous work to one form or another of the Beautiful.’

Aristotle’s voluminous writings have come down to us through many
grave vicissitudes. The greatest of them all are happily intact, or very
nearly so; but some are lost and others have suffered disorder and
corruption. The work known as the ‘Parts of Animals’ opens
(as our text has it) with a chapter which seems meant for a general
exordium to the whole series of biological treatises; and I know no
chapter in all Aristotle’s books which better shows (in plainer
English or easier Greek) the master-hand of the great Teacher and
Philosopher. He begins by telling us (it has ever since been a common
saying) that every science, every branch of knowledge, admits of two
sorts of proficiency—that which may properly be termed scientific
knowledge, and that which is within the reach of ordinary educated men.
He proceeds to discuss the ‘method’ of scientific inquiry,
whether we should begin with the specific and proceed to the general, or
whether we are to deal first with common or generical characters and
thereafterward with special peculiarities. Are we entitled to treat of
animals, as is done in mathematical astronomy, by
[157]
dealing first with facts or phenomena and then proceeding to
discover and relate their several causes? At once this leads to a brief
discussion (elaborated elsewhere) of the two great Causes, or aspects of
cause—the final cause and the ‘moving’ or efficient
cause—the reason why or the purpose for which, and the
antecedent cause which, of necessity, brings a thing to be such as it
is. Here is one of the great crucial questions of philosophy, and
Aristotle’s leaning to the side of the Final Cause has been a
dominant influence upon the minds of men throughout the whole history of
learning. Empedocles had taken another view: he held that the rain comes
when it listeth, or ‘of necessity’; that we have no right to
suppose it comes to make the corn grow in spring, any more than to spoil
the autumn sheaves: that the teeth grow by the operation of some natural
(or physical) law, and that their apparent and undoubted fitness for
cutting and grinding is not purposeful but coincident; that the backbone
is divided into vertebrae because of the antecedent forces, or flexions,
which act upon it in the womb. And Empedocles proceeds to the great
evolutionary deduction, the clear prevision of Darwin’s
philosophy, that fit and unfit arise alike, but that what is fit to
survive does survive and what is unfit perishes.

The story is far too long and the theme involved too grave and difficult
for treatment here. But I would venture to suggest that Aristotle
inclined to slur over the physical and lean the more to the final cause,
for this simple reason (whatever other reasons there may be), that he
was a better biologist than a physicist: that he lacked somewhat the
mathematical turn of mind which was intrinsic to the older schools of
philosophy. For better for worse the course he took, the choice he made,
was of incalculable import, and had power for centuries to guide (dare
we say, to bias) the teaching of the schools, the progress of learning,
and the innermost beliefs of men.

In this one short but pregnant chapter of Aristotle’s there is far
more than we can hope even to epitomize. He has much
[158]
to say in it of ‘classification’, an important matter
indeed, and he discusses it as a great logician should, in all its
rigour. Many commentators have sought for Aristotle’s
‘classification of animals’; for my part I have never found
it, and, in our sense of the word, I am certain it is not there. An
unbending, unchanging classification of animals would have been
something foreign to all his logic; it is all very well, it becomes
practically necessary, when we have to arrange our animals on the
shelves of a museum or in the arid pages of a ‘systematic’
catalogue; and it takes a new complexion when, or if, we can attain to a
real or historical classification, following lines of actual descent and
based on proven facts of historical evolution. But Aristotle (as it
seems to me) neither was bound to a museum catalogue nor indulged in
visions either of a complete scala naturae or of an hypothetical
phylogeny. He classified animals as he found them; and, as a logician,
he had a dichotomy for every difference which presented itself to his
mind. At one time he divided animals into those with blood and those
without, at another into the air-breathers and the water-breathers; into
the wild and the tame, the social and the solitary, and so on in endless
ways besides. At the same time he had a quick eye for the great natural
groups, such ‘genera’ (as he called them) as Fish or Bird,
Insect or Mollusc. So it comes to pass that, while he fashioned no hard
and fast scheme of classification, and would undoubtedly (I hold) have
thought it vain to do so, the threads of his several partial or
temporary classifications come together after all, though in a somewhat
hazy pattern, yet in a very beautiful and coherent parti-coloured web.
And though his order is not always our order, yet a certain exquisite
orderliness is of the very essence of his thought and style. It is the
characteristic which Molière hits upon in Les Femmes
savantes,—‘Je m’attache pour l’ordre au
péripatétisme’.

Before he finishes the great chapter of which we have begun to speak he
indicates that there are more ways than one of
[159]
relating, or classifying, our facts; that, for instance, it may be
equally proper and necessary to deal now with the animals and their
several parts or properties, and at another time with the parts or
properties as such, explaining and illustrating them in turn by the
several animals which display or possess them. The ‘Parts of
Animals’ is, then, a corollary, a necessary corollary, to the more
anecdotal Historia Animalium. And yet again, there is a third
alternative—to discuss the great functions or actions or
potentialities of the organism, as it were first of all in the abstract,
and then to correlate them with the parts which in this or that creature
are provided and are ‘designed’ to effect them. This
involves the conception and the writing of separate physiological
treatises on such themes as Respiration, Locomotion, on Sleeping and
Waking, and lastly (and in some respects the most ambitious, most
erudite, and most astonishing of them all) the great account of the
Generation of Animals.

So the whole range, we might say the whole conceivable range, of
biological science is sketched out, and the greater part of the great
canvas is painted in. But to bring it into touch with human life, and to
make good its claim to the high places of philosophy, we must go yet
farther and study Life itself, and what men call the Soul. So grows the
great conception. We begin with trivial anecdote, with the things that
fisherman, huntsman, peasant know; the sciences of zoology, anatomy,
physiology take shape before our very eyes; and by evening we sit humbly
at the feet of the great teacher of Life itself, the historian of the
Soul. It is not for us to attempt to show that even here the story does
not end, but the highest chapters of philosophy begin. Then, when we
remember that this short narrative of ours is but the faintest
adumbration of one side only of the philosopher’s many-sided task
and enterprise, we begin to rise towards a comprehension of Roger
Bacon‘s saying, that ‘although Aristotle did not arrive at
the end of knowledge, he set in order all parts of
[160]
philosophy’. In the same spirit a modern critic declares:
‘Il n’a seulement défini et constitué chacune
des parties de la science; il en a de plus montré le lien et
l’unité’.

Aristotle, like Shakespeare, is full of old saws, tags of wisdom, jewels
five words long. Here is such a one, good for teacher and pupil
alike—Δει πιστευειν τον μανθανοντα.
It tells us that the road to Learning lies through Faith; and it means
that to be a scholar one should have a heart as well as brains.

By reason partly of extraneous interpolation, but doubtless also through
a lingering credulity from which even philosophers are not immune, we
find in Aristotle many a strange story. The goats that breathe through
their ears, the vulture impregnated by the wind, the eagle that dies of
hunger, the stag caught by music, the salamander which walks through
fire, the unicorn, the mantichore, are but a few of the ‘Vulgar
Errors’ or ‘Received Tenents’ (as Sir Thomas Browne
has it) which are perpetuated, not originated, in the Historia
Animalium. Some of them come, through Persia, from the farther East:
and others (we meet with them once more in Horapollo the Egyptian
priest) are but the exoteric or allegorical expression of the arcana of
ancient Egyptian religion.

So it comes to pass that for two thousand years and throughout all lands
men have come to Aristotle, and found in him information and
instruction—that which they desired. Arab and Moor and Syrian and Jew
treasured his books while the western world sat in darkness; the great
centuries of Scholasticism hung upon his words; the oldest of our
Universities, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, were based upon his teaching, yea,
all but established for his study. Where he has been, there, seen or
unseen, his influence remains; even the Moor and the Arab find in him,
to this day, a teacher after their own hearts: a teacher of eternal
verities, telling of sleep and dreams, of youth and age, of life and
death, of generation and corruption, of growth and of decay: a guide to
the book of Nature, a revealer of the Spirit, a prophet of the works of
God.

[161]
The purpose of these little essays, I have been told (though I had half
forgotten it), is to help though ever so little to defend and justify
the study of the language and the vast literature of Greece. It is a
task for which I am unfitted and unprepared. When Oliver Goldsmith
proposed to teach Greek at Leyden, where he ‘had been told it was
a desideratum’, the Principal of that celebrated University met
him (as we all know) with weighty objections. ‘I never learned
Greek’, said the Principal, ‘and I don’t find that I
have ever missed it. I have had a Doctor’s cap and gown without
Greek. I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek; and, in
short’, continued he, ‘as I don’t know Greek, I do not
believe there is any good in it.’—I have heard or read the story
again and again, for is it not written in the Vicar of Wakefield? But
I never heard that any man, not Goldsmith himself, attempted to confute
the argument. I agree for the most part with the Principal, and can see
clearly that all the Greek that Goldsmith knew, and all the Greek in all
the world, would have meant nothing and done nothing for him. But there
is and will be many another who finds in Greek wisdom and sweet Hellenic
speech something which he needs must have, and lacking which he would be
poor indeed: something which is as a staff in his hand, a light upon his
path, a lantern to his feet.

In this workaday world we may still easily possess ourselves, as Gibbon
says the subjects of the Byzantine Throne, even in their lowest
servitude and depression, were still possessed, ‘of a golden key
that could unlock the treasures of antiquity, of a musical and prolific
language that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the
abstractions of philosophy’.

Our very lives seem prolonged by the recollection of antiquity; for, as
Cicero says, not to know what has been transacted in former times is to
continue always a child. I borrow the citation from Dr. Johnson, who
reminds us also of a saying of Aristotle himself, that as students we
ought first to examine[162]
and understand what has been written by the ancients, and then cast our
eyes round upon the world. And Johnson prefaces both quotations by
another:

But now I, who have dared to draw my tiny draft from Aristotle’s
great well, seem after all to be seeking an excuse, seeking it in
example and precept. Precept, at least, I know to be of no avail. My
father spent all the many days of his life in the study of Greek; you
might suppose it was for Wisdom’s sake,—but my father was a
modest man. The fact is, he did it for a simpler reason still, a very
curious reason, to be whispered rather than told: he did it for love.

Nigh forty years ago, I first stepped out on the east-windy streets of a
certain lean and hungry town (lean, I mean, as regards scholarship)
where it was to be my lot to spend thereafter many and many a year. And
the very first thing I saw there was an inscription over a very humble
doorway, ‘Hic mecum habitant Dante, Cervantes, Molière’.
It was the home of a poor schoolmaster, who as a teacher of languages
eked out the scanty profits of his school. I was not a little comforted
by the announcement. So the poor scholar, looking on the ragged regiment
of his few books, is helped, consoled, exalted by the reflection: Hic
mecum habitant … Homerus, Plato, Aristoteles. And were one in a
moment of inadvertence to inquire of him why he occupied himself with
Greek, he might perchance stammer (like Dominie Sampson) an almost
inarticulate reply; but more probably he would be stricken speechless by
the enormous outrage of the request, and the reason of his devotion
would be hidden from the questioner for ever.

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson.

[163]

BIOLOGY

Before Aristotle

What is science? It is a question that cannot be answered easily, nor
perhaps answered at all. None of the definitions seem to cover the field
exactly; they are either too wide or too narrow. But we can see science
in its growth and we can say that being a process it can exist only as
growth. Where does the science of biology begin? Again we cannot say,
but we can watch its evolution and its progress. Among the Greeks the
accurate observation of living forms, which is at least one of the
essentials of biological science, goes back very far. The word
Biology, used in our sense, would, it is true, have been an
impossibility among them, for bios refers to the life of man and could
not be applied, except in a strained or metaphorical sense, to that of
other living things.[6]
But the ideas we associate with the word are clearly developed in
Greek philosophy and the foundations of biology are of great antiquity.

The Greek people had many roots, racial, cultural, and spiritual, and
from them all they inherited various powers and qualities and derived
various ideas and traditions. The most suggestive source for our purpose
is that of the Minoan race whom they dispossessed and whose lands they
occupied. That highly gifted people exhibited in all stages of its
development a marvellous power of graphically representing animal forms,
of which the famous Cretan friezes, Vaphio cups (Fig. 5), and
[164]
Mycenean lions provide well-known examples. It is difficult not to
believe that the Minoan element, entering into the mosaic of peoples
that we call the Greeks, was in part at least responsible for the like
graphic power developed in the Hellenic world, though little contact has
yet been demonstrated between Minoan and archaic Greek Art.

For the earliest biological achievements of Greek peoples we have to
rely largely on information gleaned from artistic remains. It is true
that we have a few fragments of the works of both Ionian and
Italo-Sicilian philosophers, and in them we read of theoretical
speculation as to the nature of life and of the soul, and we can thus
form some idea of the first attempts of such workers as Alcmaeon of
Croton (c. 500 B. C.) to lay bare the structure of animals by
dissection.[7]
The pharmacopœia also of some of the earliest works of the Hippocratic
collection betrays considerable knowledge of both native and foreign
plants.[8]
Moreover, scattered through the pages of Herodotus and other early
writers is a good deal of casual information concerning animals and
plants, though such material is second-hand and gives us little
information concerning the habit of exact observation that is the
necessary basis of science.

Something more is, however, revealed by early Greek Art. We are in
possession of a series of vases of the seventh and sixth centuries
before the Christian era showing a closeness of observation of animal
forms that tells of a people awake to the study of nature. We have thus
portrayed for us a number of animals—plants seldom or never appear—and
among the best rendered are wild creatures: we see antelopes quietly
feeding or startled at a sound, birds flying or picking worms from the
ground, fallow[165]
deer forcing their way through thickets, browsing peacefully, or
galloping away, boars facing the hounds and dogs chasing hares, wild
cattle forming their defensive circle, hawks seizing their prey. Many of
these exhibit minutely accurate observation. The very direction of the
hairs on the animals’ coats has sometimes been closely studied,
and often the muscles are well rendered. In some cases even the
dentition has been found[166]
accurately portrayed, as in a sixth-century representation on an Ionian
vase of a lioness—an animal then very rare on the Eastern
Mediterranean littoral, but still known in Babylonia, Syria, and Asia
Minor. The details of the work show that the artist must have examined
the animal in captivity (Figs. 1 and 2).

Fig. 1.
Lioness and young from an Ionian vase of the sixth century B. C. found
at Caere in Southern Etruria (Louvre, Salle E, No. 298), from Le Dessin
des Animaux en Grèce d’après les vases peints, by J.
Morin, Paris (Renouard), 1911. The animal is drawing itself up to attack
its hunters. The scanty mane, the form of the paws, the udders, and the
dentition are all heavily though accurately represented.

Fig. 2. A, Jaw bones of lion; B, head of lioness from Caere vase
(Fig. 1), after Morin. Note the careful way in which the artist has
distinguished the molar from the cutting teeth.

Fig. 3. Paintings of fish on plates. Italo-Greek work of the fourth
century B. C. From Morin.

1. Sargus vulgaris.
2. Crenilabrus mediterraneus.
3. Uranoscopus scaber?

Animal paintings of this order are found scattered over the Greek world
with special centres or schools in such places as Cyprus, Boeotia, or
Chalcis. The very name for a painter in Greek, zoographos, recalls the
attention paid to living forms. By the fifth century, in painting them
as in other departments of Art, the supremacy of Attica had asserted
itself, and there are many beautiful Attic vase-paintings of animals to
place by the side of the magnificent horses’ heads of the
Parthenon (Fig. 6). In Attica, too, was early developed a characteristic
and closely accurate type of representation of marine forms, and this
attained a wider vogue in Southern Italy in the fourth century. From the
latter period a number of dishes and vases have come down to us bearing
a large variety of fish forms, portrayed with an exactness that is
interesting in view of the attention to marine creatures in the
surviving literature of Aristotelian origin (Fig. 3).

These artistic products are more than a mere reflex of the
[167]
daily life of the people. The habits and positions of animals are
observed by the hunter, as are the forms and colours of fish by the
fisherman; but the methods of huntsman and fisher do not account for the
accurate portrayal of a lion’s dentition, the correct numbering of
a fish’s scales or the close study of the lie of the feathers on
the head, and the pads on the feet, of a bird of prey (Fig. 4). With
observations such as these we are in the presence of something worthy of
the name Biology. Though but little literature on that topic earlier
than the writings of Aristotle has come down to us, yet both the
character of his writings and such paintings and pictures as these,
suggest the existence of a strong interest and a wide literature,
biological in the modern sense, antecedent to the fourth century.

Fig. 4. Head and talons of the Sea-eagle,
Haliaëtus albicilla:

1. From an Ionic vase of the sixth century B. C.
2. Drawn from the object.

From Morin.

Greek science, however, exhibits throughout its history a peculiar
characteristic differentiating it from the modern scientific standpoint.
Most of the work of the Greek scientist was done in relation to man.
Nature interested him mainly in relation to himself. The Greek
scientific and philosophic world was an anthropocentric world, and this
comes out in[168] the overwhelming mass of medical as distinct from
biological writings that have come down to us. Such, too, is the
sentiment expressed by the poets in their descriptions of the animal
creation:

It is thus not surprising that our first systematic treatment of animals
is in a practical medical work, the περι διαιτης, On diet, of
the Hippocratic Collection. This very peculiar treatise dates from the
later part of the fifth century. It is strongly under the influence of
Heracleitus (c. 540-475) and contains many points of view which
reappear in later philosophy. All animals, according to it, are formed
of fire and water, nothing is born and nothing dies, but there is a
perpetual and eternal revolution of things, so that change itself is the
only reality. Man’s nature is but a parallel to that of the
universal nature, and the arts of man are but an imitation or reflex of
the natural arts or, again, of the bodily functions. The soul, a mixture
of water and fire, consumes itself in infancy and old age, and increases
during adult life. Here, too, we meet with that singular doctrine, not
without bearing on the course of later biological thought, that in the
foetus all parts are formed simultaneously. On the proportion of fire
and water in the body all depends, sex, temper, temperament, intellect.
Such speculative ideas separate this book from the sober method of the
more typical Hippocratic medical works with which indeed it has little
in common.

[169]
After having discussed these theoretical matters the work turns to its
own practical concerns, and in the course of setting out the natures of
foods gives in effect a rough classification of animals. These are set
forth in groups, and from among the larger groups only the reptiles and
insects are missing. The list has been described, perhaps hardly with
justification, as the Coan classificatory system. We have here,
indeed, no system in the sense in which that word is now applied to
the animal kingdom, but we have yet some sort of definite arrangement of
animals according to their supposed natures. The passage opens with
mammals, which are divided into domesticated and wild, the latter being
mentioned in order according to size, next follow the land-birds, then
the water-fowl, and then the fishes. These fish are divided into (1) the
haunters of the shore, (2) the free-swimming forms, (3) the
cartilaginous fishes or Selachii, which are not so named but are placed
together, (4) the mud-loving forms, and (5) the fresh-water fish.
Finally come invertebrates arranged in some sort of order according to
their structure. The characteristic feature of the
‘classification’ is the separation of the fish from the
remaining vertebrates and of the invertebrates from both. Of the fifty
animals named no less than twenty are fish, about a fifth of the number
studied by Aristotle, but we must remember that here only edible species
are mentioned. The existence of the work shows at least that in the
fifth century there was already a close and accurate study of animal
forms, a study that may justly be called scientific. The predominance of
fish and their classification in greater detail than the other groups is
not an unexpected feature. The Mediterranean is especially rich in these
forms, the Greeks were a maritime people, and Greek literature is full
of imagery drawn from the fisher’s craft. From Minoan to Byzantine
times the variety, beauty, and colour of fish made a deep impression on
Greek minds as reflected in their art.

Much more important, however, for subsequent biological
[170]
development than such observations on the nature and habits of animals,
is the service that the Hippocratic physicians rendered to Anatomy and
to Physiology, departments in which the structure of man and of the
domesticated animals stands apart from that of the rest of the animal
kingdom. It is with the nature and constitution of man that most of the
surviving early biological writings are concerned, and in these
departments are unmistakable tendencies towards systematic arrangement
of the material. Thus we have division and description of the body in
sevens from the periphery to the centre and from the vertex to the sole
of the foot,[9]
or a division into four regions or zones.[10]
The teaching concerning the four elements and four humours too became of
great importance and some of it was later adopted by Aristotle. We also
meet numerous mechanical explanations of bodily structures, comparisons
between anatomical conditions encountered in related animals,
experiments on living creatures,[11]
systematic incubation of hen’s eggs for the study of their
development, parallels drawn between the development of plants and of
human and animal embryos, theories of generation, among which is that
which was afterwards called ‘pangenesis’—discussion of
the survival of the stronger over the weaker—almost our survival
of the fittest—and a theory of inheritance of acquired
characters.[12]
All these things show not only extensive knowledge but also an attempt
to apply such knowledge to human needs. When we consider how even in
later centuries biology was linked with medicine, and how powerful and
fundamental was the influence of the Hippocratic writings, not only on
their immediate successors in antiquity, but also on the Middle Ages and
right into the nineteenth century, we shall recognize the significance
of these developments.

Fig. 5. MINOAN
GOLD CUP. SIXTEENTH CENTURY B. C.

Fig. 6.
HORSE’S HEAD. FROM PARTHENON. 440 B. C.

[171]
Such was the character of biological thought within the fifth century,
and a generation inspired by this movement produced some noteworthy
works in the period which immediately followed. In the treatise περι τροφης,
On nourishment, which may perhaps be dated about 400 B.
C., we learn of the pulse for the first time in Greek medical
literature, and read of a physiological system which lasted until the
time of Harvey, with the arteries arising from the heart and the veins
from the liver. Of about the same date is a work περι καρδιης,
On the heart, which describes the ventricles as well as the great
vessels and their valves, and compares the heart of animals with that of
man.

A little later, perhaps 390 B. C., is the treatise
περι σαρκων,
On muscles, which contains much more than its title suggests. It has
the old system of sevens and, inspired perhaps by the philosophy of
Heracleitus (c. 540-475), describes the heart as sending air, fire,
and movement to the different parts of the body through the vessels
which are themselves constantly in movement. The infant in its
mother’s womb is believed to draw in air and fire through its
mouth and to eat in utero. The action of the air on the blood is
compared to its action on fire. In contrast to some of the other
Hippocratic treatises the central nervous system is in the background;
much attention, however, is given to the special senses. The brain
resounds during audition. The olfactory nerves are hollow, lead to the
brain, and, convey volatile substances to it which cause it to secrete
mucus. The eyes also have been examined, and their coats and humours
roughly described; an allusion, the first in literature, is perhaps made
to the crystalline lens, and the eyes of animals are compared with those
of man. There is evidence not only of dissection but of experiment, and
in efforts to compare the resistance of various tissues to such
processes as boiling, we may see the small beginning of chemical
physiology.

[172]
An abler work than any of these, but exhibiting less power of
observation is a treatise, περι γονης,
On generation, that may perhaps be dated about 380
B. C.[13]
It exhibits a writer of much philosophic power, very anxious for
physiological explanations, but hampered by ignorance of physics. He
has, in fact, the weaknesses and in a minor degree the strength of his
successor Aristotle, of whose great work on generation he gives us a
fore-taste. He sets forth in considerable detail a doctrine of
pangenesis, not wholly unlike that of Darwin. In order to explain the
phenomena of inheritance he supposes that vessels reach the seed,
carrying with them samples from all parts of the body. He believes that
channels pass from all the organs to the brain and then to the spinal
marrow (or to the marrow direct), thence to the kidneys and on to the
genital organs; he believes, too, that he knows the actual location of
one such channel, for he observes, wrongly, that incision behind the
ears, by interrupting the passage, leads to impotence. As an outcome of
this theory he is prepared to accept inheritance of acquired characters.
The embryo develops and breathes by material transmitted from the mother
through the umbilical cord. We encounter here also a very detailed
description of a specimen of exfoliated membrana mucosa uteri which
our author mistakes for an embryo, but his remarks at least exhibit the
most eager curiosity.[14]

The author of this work on generation is thus a ‘biologist’
in the modern sense, and among the passages exhibiting him in this light
is his comparison of the human embryo with the chick. ‘The embryo
is in a membrane in the centre of which is the navel through which it
draws and gives its breath, and the[173]
membranes arise from the umbilical cord…. The structure of the child
you will find from first to last as I have already described…. If you
wish, try this experiment: take twenty or more eggs and let them be
incubated by two or more hens. Then each day from the second to that of
hatching remove an egg, break it, and examine it. You will find exactly
as I say, for the nature of the bird can be likened to that of man. The
membranes [you will see] proceed from the umbilical cord, and all that I
have said on the subject of the infant you will find in a bird’s
egg, and one who has made these observations will be surprised to find
an umbilical cord in a bird’s egg.’[15]

The same interest that he exhibits for the development of man and
animals he shows also for plants.

‘A seed laid in the ground fills itself with the juices there
contained, for the soil contains in itself juices of every nature
for the nourishment of plants. Thus filled with juice the seed is
distended and swells, and thereby the power (= faculty ἡ δυναμις)
diffused in the seed is compressed by pneuma and juice,
and bursting the seed becomes the first leaves. But a time comes
when these leaves can no longer get nourished from the juices in
the seed. Then the seed and the leaves erupt below, for urged by
the leaves the seed sends down that part of its power which is yet
concentrated within it and so the roots are produced as an
extension of the leaves. When at last the plant is well rooted
below and is drawing its nutriment from the earth, then the whole
grain disappears, being absorbed, save for the husk, which is the
most solid part; and even that, decomposing in the earth,
ultimately becomes invisible. In time some of the leaves put forth
branches. The plant being thus produced by humidity from the seed
is still soft and moist. Growing actively both above and below, it
cannot as yet bear fruit, for it has not the quality of force and
reserve (δυναμις ισχυρη και πιαρα)
from which a seed can be precipitated. But when, with time, the plant
becomes firmer and better rooted, it develops veins as passages
both[174]
upwards and downwards, and it draws from the soil not only water but
more abundantly also substances that are denser and fatter. Warmed, too,
by the sun, these act as a ferment to the extremities and give rise to
fruit after its kind. The fruit thus develops much from little, for
every plant draws from the earth a power more abundant than that with
which it started, and the fermentation takes place not at one place but
at many.’[16]

Nor does our author hesitate to draw an analogy between the plant and
the mammalian embryo. ‘In the same way the infant lives within its
mother’s womb and in a state corresponding to the health of the
mother … and you will find a complete similitude between the products
of the soil and the products of the womb.’

The early Greek literature is so scantily provided with illustrations
drawn from botanical study, that it is worth considering the remarkable
comparison of generation of plants from cuttings and from seeds in the
same work.

‘As regards plants generated from cuttings …
that part of a branch where it was cut from a tree is placed in the
earth and there rootlets are sent out. This is how it happens: The part
of the plant within the soil draws up juices, swells, and develops a
pneuma (πνευμα ισχει), but
not so the part without. The pneuma and the juice concentrate the power
of the plant below so that it becomes denser. Then the lower end erupts
and gives forth tender roots. Then the plant, taking from below, draws
juices from the roots and transmits them to the part above the soil
which thus also swells and develops pneuma; thus the power from being
diffused in the plant becomes concentrated and budding, gives forth
leaves…. Cuttings, then, differ from seeds. With a seed the leaves are
borne first, then the roots are sent down; with a cutting the roots form
first and then the leaves.’[17]

But with these works of the early part of the fourth century the first
stage of Greek biology reaches its finest development.
[175]
Later Hippocratic treatises which deal with physiological topics are on
a lower plane, and we must seek some external cause for the failure. Nor
have we far to seek. This period saw the rise of a movement that had the
most profound influence on every department of thought. We see the
advent into the Greek world of a great intellectual movement as a result
of which the department of philosophy that dealt with nature receded
before Ethics. Of that intellectual revolution—perhaps the
greatest the world has seen—Athens was the site and Socrates
(470-399) the protagonist. With the movement itself and its
characteristic fruit we are not concerned. But the great successor and
pupil of its founder gives us in the Timaeus a picture of the depth to
which natural science can be degraded in the effort to give a specific
teleological meaning to all parts of the visible Universe. The book and
the picture which it draws, dark and repulsive to the mind trained in
modern scientific method, enthralled the imagination of a large part of
mankind for wellnigh two thousand years. Organic nature appears in this
work of Plato (427-347) as the degeneration of man whom the Creator has
made most perfect. The school that held this view ultimately decayed as
a result of its failure to advance positive knowledge. As the centuries
went by its views became further and further divorced from phenomena,
and the bizarre developments of later Neoplatonism stand to this day as
a warning against any system which shall neglect the investigation of
nature. But in its decay Platonism dragged science down and destroyed by
neglect nearly all earlier biological material. Mathematics, not being a
phenomenal study, suited better the Neoplatonic mood and continued to
advance, carrying astronomy with it for a while—astronomy that
affected the life of man and that soon became the handmaid of astrology;
medicine, too, that determined the conditions of man’s life was
also cherished, though often mistakenly, but pure science was
doomed.

[176]
But though the ethical view of nature overwhelmed science in the end,
the advent of the mighty figure of Aristotle (384-322) stayed the tide
for a time. Yet the writer on Greek Biology remains at a disadvantage in
contrast with the Historian of Greek Mathematics, of Greek Astronomy, or
of Greek Medicine, in the scantiness of the materials for presenting an
account of the development of his studies before Aristotle. The huge
form of that magnificent naturalist completely overshadows Greek as it
does much of later Biology.

Charles Singer.

After Aristotle

All Aristotle’s surviving biological works refer primarily to the
animal creation. His work on plants is lost or rather has survived as
the merest corrupted fragment. We are fortunate, however, in the
possession of a couple of complete works by his pupil and successor
Theophrastus (372-287), which may not only be taken to represent the
Aristotelian attitude towards the plant world, but also give us an
inkling of the general state of biological science in the generation
which succeeded the master.

Fig. 7. ARISTOTLE
From HERCULANEUM
Probably work of fourth century B. C.

These treatises of Theophrastus are in many respects the most complete
and orderly of all ancient biological works that have reached our time.
They give an idea of the kind of interest that the working scientist of
that day could develop when inspired rather by the genius of a great
teacher than by the power of his own thoughts. Theophrastus is a
pedestrian where Aristotle is a creature of wings, he is in a relation
to the master of the same order that the morphologists of the second
half of the nineteenth century were to Darwin. For a couple of
generations after the appearance of the Origin of Species in 1859 the
industry and ability of naturalists all over the world were occupied in
working out in detail the structure[177]
and mode of life of living things on the basis of the Evolutionary
philosophy. Nearly all the work on morphology and much of that on
physiology since his time might be treated as a commentary on the works
of Darwin. These volumes of Theophrastus give the same impression. They
represent the remains—alas, almost the only biological
remains—of a school working under the impulse of a great idea and
spurred by the memory of a great teacher. As such they afford a parallel
to much scientific work of our own day, produced by men without genius
save that provided by a vision and a hope and an ideal. Of such men it
is impossible to write as of Aristotle. Their lives are summed up by
their actual achievement, and since Theophrastus is an orderly writer
whose works have descended to us in good state, he is a very suitable
instance of the actual standard of achievement of ancient biology.
‘Without vision the people perish’ and the very breath of
life of science is drawn, and can only be drawn, from that very small
band of prophets who from time to time, during the ages, have provided
the great generalizations and the great ideals. In this light let us
examine the work of Theophrastus.

In the absence of any adequate system of classification, almost all
botany until the seventeenth century consisted mainly of descriptions of
species. To describe accurately a leaf or a root in the language in
ordinary use would often take pages. Modern botanists have invented an
elaborate terminology which, however hideous to eye and ear, has the
crowning merit of helping to abbreviate scientific literature. Botanical
writers previous to the seventeenth century were substantially without
this special mode of expression. It is partly to this lack that we owe
the persistent attempts throughout the centuries to represent plants
pictorially in herbals, manuscript and printed, and thus the possibility
of an adequate history of plant illustration.

Theophrastus seems to have felt acutely the need of botanical
[178]
terms, and there are cases in which he seeks to give a special
technical meaning to words in more or less current use. Among such words
are carpos = fruit, pericarpion = seed vessel = pericarp, and
metra, the word used by him for the central core of any stem whether
formed of wood, pith, or other substance. It is from the usage of
Theophrastus that the exact definition of fruit and pericarp has come
down to us.[18]
We may easily discern also the purpose for which he introduces into
botany the term metra, a word meaning primarily the womb, and the
vacancy in the Greek language which it was made to fill.
‘Metra,’ he says, ‘is that which is in the middle of
the wood, being third in order from the bark and [thus] like to the
marrow in bones. Some call it the heart (καρδιαν),
others the inside (εντεριωνην),
yet others call only the innermost part of the metra itself the heart,
while others again call this marrow.’[19]
He is thus inventing a word to cover all the different kinds of core and
importing it from another study. This is the method of modern scientific
nomenclature which hardly existed for botanists even as late as the
sixteenth century of our era. The real foundations of our modern
nomenclature were laid in the later sixteenth and in the seventeenth
century by Cesalpino and Joachim Jung.

Theophrastus understood the value of developmental study, a conception
derived from his master. ‘A plant’, he says, ‘has
power of germination in all its parts, for it has life in them all,
wherefore we should regard them not for what they are but for what they
are becoming.’[20]
The various modes of plant reproduction are correctly distinguished in a
way that passes beyond the only surviving earlier treatise that deals
in[179]
detail with the subject, the Hippocratic work On generation.
‘The manner of generation of trees and plants are these:
spontaneous, from a seed, from a root, from a piece torn off, from a
branch or twig, from the trunk itself, or from pieces of the wood cut up
small.’[21]
The marvel of germination must have awakened admiration from a very
early date. We have already seen it occupying a more ancient author, and
it had also been one of the chief preoccupations of Aristotle. It is
thus not remarkable that the process should impress Theophrastus, who
has left on record his views on the formation of the plant from the
seed.

‘Some germinate, root and leaves, from the same point, some
separately from either end of the seed. Thus wheat, barley, spelt,
and all such cereals [germinate] from either end, corresponding to
the position [of the seed] in the ear, the root from the stout
lower part, the shoot from the upper; but the two, root and stem,
form a single continuous whole. The bean and other leguminous
plants are not so, but in them root and stem are from the same
point, namely, their place of attachment to the pod, where, it is
plain, they have their origin. In some cases there is a process, as
in beans, chick peas, and especially lupines, from which the root
grows downward, the leaf and stem upward…. In certain trees the
bud first germinates within the seed, and, as it increases in size,
the seeds split—all such seeds are, as it were, in two halves;
again, all those of leguminous plants have plainly two lobes and
are double—and then the root is immediately thrust out. But in
cereals, the seeds being in one piece, this does not happen, but
the root grows a little before [the shoot].

‘Barley and wheat come up monophyllous, but peas, beans, and
chick peas polyphyllous. All leguminous plants have a single woody
root, from which grow slender side roots … but wheat, barley, and
the other cereals have numerous slender roots by which they are
matted together…. There is a contrast between these two kinds;
the leguminous plants have[180]
a single root and have many side-growths above from the [single] stem
… while the cereals have many roots and send up many shoots, but these
have no side-shoots.’[22]

There can be no doubt that here is a piece of minute observation on the
behaviour of germinating seeds. The distinction between dicotyledons and
monocotyledons is accurately set forth, though the stress is laid not so
much on the cotyledonous character of the seed as on the relation of
root and shoot. In the dicotyledons root and shoot are represented as
springing from the same point, and in monocotyledons from opposite poles
in the seed.

No further effective work was done on the germinating seed until the
invention of the microscope, and the appearance of the work of Highmore
(1613-85),[23]
and the much more searching investigations of Malpighi
(1628-94[24]
and Grew (1641-1712)[25]
after the middle of the seventeenth century. The observations of
Theophrastus are, however, so accurate, so lucid, and so complete that
they might well be used as legends for the plates of these writers two
thousand years after him.

Much has been written as to the knowledge of the sex of plants among the
ancients. It may be stated that of the sexual elements of the flower no
ancient writer had any clear idea. Nevertheless, sex is often attributed
to plants, and the simile of the Loves of Plants enters into works of
the poets. Plants are frequently described as male and female in ancient
biological writings also, and Pliny goes so far as to say that some
students considered that all herbs and trees were
sexual.[26]
Yet when such passages can be tested it will be found that these
so-called males and females are usually different species.
In[181]
a few cases a sterile variety is described as the male and a fertile as
the female. In a small residuum of cases diœcious plants or flowers are
regarded as male and female, but with no real comprehension of the
sexual nature of the flowers. There remain the palms, in which the
knowledge of plant sex had advanced a trifle farther. ‘With
dates’, says Theophrastus, ‘the males should be brought to
the females; for the males make the fruit persist and ripen, and this
some call by analogy to use the wild fig
(ολυνθαζειν).[27]
The process is thus: when the male is in the flower they at once cut off
the spathe with the flower and shake the bloom, with its flower and
dust, over the fruit of the female, and, if it is thus treated, it
retains the fruit and does not shed it.’[28]
The fertilizing character of the spathe of the male date palm was
familiar in Babylon from a very early date. It is recorded by
Herodotus[29]
and is represented by a frequent symbol on the Assyrian monuments.

The comparison of the fertilization of the date palm to the use of the
wild fig refers to the practice of Caprification. Theophrastus tells us
that there are certain trees, the fig among them, which are apt to shed
their fruit prematurely. To remedy this ‘the device adopted is
caprification. Gall insects come out of the wild figs which are hanging
there, eat the tops of the cultivated figs, and so make them
swell’.[30]
These gall-insects ‘are engendered from the seeds’.[31]
Theophrastus distinguished between the process as applied to the fig and
the date, observing that ‘in both [fig and date] the[182] male aids the female—for they
call the fruit-bearing [palm] female—but whilst in the one there
is a union of the two sexes, in the other things are different’.[32]

Theophrastus was not very successful in distinguishing the nature of the
primary elements of plants, though he was able to separate root, stem,
leaf, stipule, and flower on morphological as well as to a limited
extent on physiological grounds. For the root he adopts the familiar
definition, the only one possible before the rise of chemistry, that it
‘is that by which the plant draws up
nourishment’,[33]
a description that applies to the account given by the pre-Aristotelian
author of the work περι γονης,
On generation. But Theophrastus shows by many examples that he is
capable of following out morphological homologies. Thus he knows that
the ivy regularly puts forth roots from the shoots between the leaves,
by means of which it gets hold of trees and
walls,[34]
that the mistletoe will not sprout except on the bark of living trees
into which it strikes its roots, and that the very peculiar formation of
the mangrove tree is to be explained by the fact that ‘this plant
sends out roots from the shoots till it has hold on the ground and roots
again: and so there comes to be a continuous circle of roots round the
tree, not connected with the main stem, but at a distance from
it’.[35]
He does not succeed, however, in distinguishing the real nature of such
structures as bulbs, rhizomes, and tubers, but regards them all as
roots. Nor is he more successful in his discussion of the nature of
stems. As to leaves, he is more definite and satisfactory, though wholly
in the dark as to their function; he is quite clear that the pinnate
leaf of the rowan tree, for instance, is a leaf and not a branch.

Notwithstanding his lack of insight as to the nature of sex in flowers,
he attains to an approximately correct idea of
the[183]
relation of flower and fruit. Some plants, he says, ‘have [the
flower] around the fruit itself as vine and olive; [the flowers] of the
latter, when they drop, look as though they had a hole through them, and
this is taken for a sign that it has blossomed well; for if [the flower]
is burnt up or sodden, the fruit falls with it, and so it does not
become pierced. Most flowers have the fruit case in the middle, or it
may be the flower is on the top of the pericarp as in pomegranate,
apple, pear, plum, and myrtle … for these have their seeds below the
flower…. In some cases again the flower is on top of the seeds
themselves as in … all thistle-like
plants’.[36]
Thus Theophrastus has succeeded in distinguishing between the
hypogynous, perigynous, and epigynous types of flower, and has almost
come to regard its relation to the fruit as the essential floral
element.

Fig. 8. THEOPHRASTUS
From VILLA ALBANI
Copy (second century A. D.?) of earlier work

Theophrastus has a perfectly clear idea of plant distribution as
dependent on soil and climate, and at times seems to be on the point of
passing from a statement of climatic distribution into one of real
geographical regions. The general question of plant distribution long
remained at, if it did not recede from, the position where he left it.
The usefulness of the manuscript and early printed herbals in the West
was for centuries marred by the retention of plant descriptions prepared
for the Greek East and Latin South, and these works were saved from
complete ineffectiveness only by an occasional appeal to nature.

With the death of Theophrastus about 287 B. C.
pure biological science substantially disappears from the Greek world,
and we get the same type of deterioration that is later encountered in
other scientific departments. Science ceases to have the motive of the
desire to know, and becomes an applied study, subservient to the
practical arts. It is an attitude from which in the end applied science
itself must suffer also. Yet the centuries that[184]
follow were not without biological writers of very great ability. In
the medical school of Alexandria anatomy and physiology became placed on
a firm basis from about 300 B. C., but always in the position
subordinate to medicine that they have since occupied. Two great names
of that school, Herophilus and Erasistratus, we must consider
elsewhere.[37]
Their works have disappeared and we have the merest fragments of them.
In the last pre-Christian and the first two post-Christian centuries,
however, there were several writers, portions of whose works have
survived and are of great biological importance. Among them we include
Crateuas, a botanical writer and illustrator, who greatly developed, if
he did not actually introduce, the method of representing plants
systematically by illustration rather than by description. This method,
important still, was even more important when there was no proper system
of botanical nomenclature. Crateuas by his paintings of plants, copies
of which have not improbably descended to our time, began a tradition
which, fixed about the fifth century, remained almost rigid until the
re-discovery of nature in the sixteenth. He was physician to Mithridates
VI Eupator (120-63 B. C.), but his work was well
known and appreciated at Rome, which became the place of resort for
Greek talent.[38]

Celsus, who flourished about 20 B. C., wrote
an excellent work on medicine, but gives all too little glimpse of
anatomy and physiology. Rufus of Ephesus, however, in the next century
practised dissection of apes and other animals. He described the
decussation of the optic nerves and the capsule of the crystalline lens,
and gave the first clear description that has survived of the structure
of the eye. He regarded the nerves[185]
as originating from the brain, and distinguished between nerves of
motion and of sensation. He described the oviduct of the sheep and
rightly held that life was possible without the spleen.

The second Christian century brings us two writers who, while
scientifically inconsiderable, acted as the main carriers of such
tradition of Greek biology as reached the Middle Ages, Pliny and
Dioscorides. Pliny (A. D. 23-79), though a Latin, owes almost everything
of value in his encyclopaedia to Greek writings. In his Natural
History we have a collection of current views on the nature, origin,
and uses of plants and animals such as we might expect from an
intelligent, industrious, and honest member of the landed class who was
devoid of critical or special scientific skill. Scientifically the work
is contemptible, but it demands mention in any study of the legacy of
Greece, since it was, for centuries, a main conduit of the ancient
teaching and observations on natural history. Read throughout the ages,
alike in the darkest as in the more enlightened periods, copied and
recopied, translated, commented on, extracted and abridged, a large part
of Pliny’s work has gradually passed into folk-keeping, so that
through its agency the gipsy fortune-teller of to-day is still reciting
garbled versions of the formulae of Aristotle and Hippocrates of two and
a half millennia ago.

The fate of Dioscorides (flourished A. D. 60) has been not dissimilar.
His work On Materia Medica consists of a series of short accounts of
plants, arranged almost without reference to the nature of the plants
themselves, but quite invaluable for its terse and striking descriptions
which often include habits and habitats. Its history has shown it to be
one of the most influential botanical treatises ever penned. It provided
most of the little botanical knowledge that reached the Middle Ages. It
furnished the chief stimulus to botanical research at the time of the
Renaissance. It has decided the general form of every modern
pharmacopœia. It has practically determined modern plant nomenclature
both popular and scientific.

[186]
Translated into nearly every language from Anglo-Saxon and Bohemian to
Arabic and Hebrew, appearing both abstracted and in full in innumerable
beautifully illuminated manuscripts, some of which are still among the
fairest treasures of the great national libraries, Dioscorides, the
drug-monger, appealed to scholasticized minds for centuries. The
frequency with which fragments of him are encountered in papyri shows
how popular his work was in Egypt in the third and fourth centuries. One
of the earliest datable Greek codices in existence is a glorious volume
of Dioscorides written in capitals,[39]
thought worthy to form a wedding gift for a lady who was the daughter of
one Roman emperor and the betrothed of a second.[40] The illustrations of this
fifth-century manuscript are a very valuable monument for the history of
art and the chief adornment of what was once the Royal Library at
Vienna[41]
(figs. 9-10). Illustrated Latin translations of Dioscorides were in use
in the time of Cassiodorus (490-585). A work based on it, similarly
illustrated, but bearing the name of Apuleius, is among the most
frequent of mediaeval botanical documents and the earliest surviving
specimen is contemporary with Cassiodorus himself.[42]
After the[187]
revival of learning Dioscorides continued to attract an immense
amount of philological and botanical ability, and scores of editions of
his works, many of them nobly illustrated, poured out of the presses of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Fifth-century drawings from JULIANA ANICIA M.S., copied from originals of first century B. C. (?)
Fig. 9 ΣΟΓΚΟΣ ΤΡΥΦΕΡΟΣ = Crepis paludosa, Mœn.	Fig. 10 ΓΕΡΑΝΙΟΝ = Geranium pyrenaicum, L.

But the greatest biologist of the late Greek period, and indeed one of
the greatest biologists of all time, was Claudius Galen of Pergamon (A.
D. 131-201). Galen devoted himself to medicine from an early age, and in
his twenty-first year we hear of him studying anatomy at Smyrna under
Pelops. With the object of extending his knowledge of drugs he early
made long journeys to Asia Minor. Later he proceeded to Alexandria,
where he improved his anatomical equipment, and here, he tells us, he
examined a human skeleton. It is indeed probable that his direct
practical acquaintance with human anatomy was limited to the skeleton
and that dissection of the human body was no longer carried on at
Alexandria in his time. Thus his physiology and anatomy had to be
derived mainly from animal sources. He is the most voluminous of all
ancient scientific writers and one of the most voluminous writers of
antiquity in any department. We are not here concerned with the medical
material which mainly fills these huge volumes, but only with the
physiological views which not only prevailed in medicine until Harvey
and after, but also governed for fifteen hundred years alike the
scientific and the popular ideas on the nature and workings of the
animal body, and have for centuries been embedded in our speech. A
knowledge of these physiological views of Galen is necessary for any
understanding of the history of biology and illuminates many literary
allusions of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Between the foundation of the Alexandrian school and the time of Galen,
medicine was divided among a great number of sects. Galen was an
eclectic and took portions of his teaching from many of these schools,
but he was also a naturalist of great ability and industry, and knew
well the value of the[188]
experimental way. Yet he was a somewhat windy
philosopher and, priding himself on his philosophic powers, did not
hesitate to draw conclusions from evidence which was by no means always
adequate. The physiological system that he thus succeeded in building up
we may now briefly consider (fig. 11).

[189]

Fig. 11. Illustrating Galen’s
physiological teaching.

The basic principle of life, in the Galenic physiology, is a spirit,
anima or pneuma, drawn from the general world-soul in the act of
respiration. It enters the body through the rough artery
(τραχεια αρτηρια, arteria aspera of mediaeval notation), the organ
known to our nomenclature as the trachea. From this trachea the pneuma
passes to the lung and then, through the vein-like artery
(αρτηρια φλεβωδης, arteria venalis of mediaeval writers, the
pulmonary vein of our nomenclature), to the left ventricle. Here it will
be best to leave it for a moment and trace the vascular system along a
different route.

Ingested food, passing down the alimentary tract, was absorbed as chyle
from the intestine, collected by the portal vessel, and conveyed by it
to the liver. That organ, the site of the innate heat in Galen’s
view, had the power of elaborating the chyle into venous blood and of
imbuing it with a spirit or pneuma which is innate in all living
substance, so long as it remains alive, the natural spirits
(πνευμα φυσικον,
spiritus naturalis of the mediaevals). Charged with
this, and also with the nutritive material derived from the food, the
venous blood is distributed by the liver through the veins which arise
from it in the same way as the arteries from the heart. These veins
carry nourishment and natural spirits to all parts of the body. Iecur
fons venarum, the liver as the source of the veins, remained through
the centuries the watchword of the Galenic physiology. The blood was
held to ebb and flow continuously in the veins during life.

Now from the liver arose one great vessel, the hepatic vein, from
division of which the others were held to come off as
[190]
branches. Of these branches, one, our common vena cava, entered the
right side of the heart. For the blood that it conveyed to the heart
there were two fates possible. The greater part remained awhile in the
ventricle, parting with its impurities and vapours, exhalations of the
organs, which were carried off by the artery-like vein (φλεπς αρτηριωδης, the mediaeval
vena arterialis, our pulmonary artery) to the lung and then exhaled to
the outer air. These impurities and vapours gave its poisonous and
suffocating character to the breath. Having parted thus with its
impurities, the venous blood ebbed back again from the right ventricle
into the venous system. But for a small fraction of the venous blood
that entered the right ventricle another fate was reserved. This small
fraction of venous blood, charged still with the natural spirits
derived from the liver, passed through minute channels in the septum
between the ventricles and entered the left chamber. Arrived there, it
encountered the external pneuma and became thereby elaborated into a
higher form of spirit, the vital spirits (πνευμα ζωτικον, spiritus vitalis), which is
distributed together with blood by the arterial system to various parts
of the body. In the arterial system it also ebbed and flowed, and might
be seen and felt to pulsate there.

But among the great arterial vessels that sent forth arterial blood thus
charged with vital spirits were certain vessels which ascended to the
brain. Before reaching that organ they divided up into minute channels,
the rete mirabile (πλεγμα μεγιστον θαυμα),
and passing into the brain became converted by the action of that organ
into a yet higher type of spirits, the animal spirits (πνευμα ψυχικον, spiritus animalis), an
ethereal substance distributed to the various parts of the body by the
structures known to-day as nerves, but believed then to be hollow
channels. The three fundamental faculties δυναμεις),
the natural, the vital, and the animal, which brought into action
the corresponding functions of the body, thus originated as an
expression of the primal force or pneuma.

[191]
This physiology, we may emphasize, is not derived from an investigation
of human anatomy. In the human brain there is no rete mirabile, though
such an organ is found in the calf. In the human liver there is no
hepatic vein, though such an organ is found in the dog. Dogs, calves,
pigs, bears, and, above all, Barbary apes were freely dissected by Galen
and were the creatures from which he derived his physiological ideas.
Many of Galen’s anatomical and physiological errors are due to his
attributing to one creature the structures found in another, a fact that
only very gradually dawned on the Renaissance anatomists.

The whole knowledge possessed by the world in the department of
physiology from the third to the seventeenth century, nearly all the
biological conceptions till the thirteenth, and most of the anatomy and
much of the botany until the sixteenth century, all the ideas of the
physical structure of living things throughout the Middle Ages, were
contained in a small number of these works of Galen. The biological
works of Aristotle and Theophrastus lingered precariously in a few rare
manuscripts in the monasteries of the East; the total output of hundreds
of years of Alexandrian and Pergamenian activities was utterly
destroyed; the Ionian biological works, of which a sample has by a
miracle survived, were forgotten; but these vast, windy, ill-arranged
treatises of Galen lingered on. Translated into Latin, Syriac, Arabic,
and Hebrew, they saturated the intellectual world of the Middle Ages.
Commented on by later Greek writers, who were themselves in turn
translated into the same list of languages, they were yet again served
up under the names of such Greek writers as Oribasius, Paul of Aegina,
or Alexander of Tralles.

What is the secret of the vitality of these Galenic biological
conceptions? The answer can be given in four words. Galen is a
teleologist; and a teleologist of a kind whose views happened to fit in
with the prevailing theological attitude of the Middle Ages, whether
Christian, Moslem, or Jewish. According[192]
to him everything which exists and displays activity in the human body
originates in and is formed by an intelligent being and on an
intelligent plan, so that the organ in structure and function is the
result of that plan. ‘It was the Creator’s infinite wisdom
which selected the best means to attain his beneficent ends, and it is a
proof of His omnipotence that he created every good thing according to
His design, and thereby fulfilled His will.’[43]

After Galen there is a thousand years of darkness, and biology ceases to
have a history. The mind of the Dark Ages turned towards theology, and
such remains of Neoplatonic philosophy as were absorbed into the
religious system were little likely to be of aid to the scientific
attitude. One department of positive knowledge must of course persist.
Men still suffered from the infirmities of the flesh and still sought
relief from them. But the books from which that advice was sought had
nothing to do with general principles nor with knowledge as such. They
were the most wretched of the treatises that still masqueraded under the
names of Hippocrates and Galen, mostly mere formularies, antidotaries,
or perhaps at best symptom lists. And, when the depression of the
western intellect had passed its worst, there was still no biological
material on which it could be nourished.

The prevailing interest of the barbarian world, at last beginning to
settle into its heritage of antiquity, was with Logic. Of Aristotle
there survived in Latin dress only the Categories and the De
interpretatione, the merciful legacy of Boethius, the last of the
philosophers. Had a translation of Aristotle’s Historia
animalium or De generatione animalium survived, had a Latin version
of the Hippocratic work On generation or of the treatises of
Theophrastus On plants reached the earlier Middle Ages, the whole
mental history[193]
of Europe might have been different and the rediscovery
of nature might have been antedated by centuries. But this was a change
of heart for which the world had long to wait; something much less was
the earliest biological gift of Greece. The gift, when it came, came in
two forms, one of which has not been adequately recognized, but both are
equally her legacy. These two forms are, firstly, the well-known work of
the early translators and, secondly, the tardily recognized work of
certain schools of minor art.

The earliest biological treatises to become accessible in the west were
rendered not from Greek but from Arabic.[44]
The first of them was perhaps the treatise περι μυων κινησεως, On movement of muscles of Galen, a
work which contains more than its title suggests and indeed sets forth
much of the Galenic physiological system. It was rendered into Latin
from the Arabic of Joannitius (Hunain ibn Ishaq, 809-73), probably about
the year 1200, by one Mark of Toledo. It attracted little attention, but
very soon after biological works of Aristotle began to become
accessible. The first was probably the fragment On plants. The Greek
original of this is lost, and besides the Latin, only an Arabic version
of a former Arabic translation of a Syriac rendering of a Greek
commentary is now known! Such a work appeared from the hand of a
translator known as Alfred the Englishman about 1220 or a little later.
Neither it nor another work from the same translator, On the motion of
the heart, which sought to establish the primacy of that organ on
Aristotelian grounds, can be said to contain any of the spirit of the
master.[45]

[194]
A little better than these is the work of the wizard Michael the Scot
(1175?-1234?). Roger Bacon tells us that Michael in 1230 ‘appeared
[at Oxford], bringing with him the works of Aristotle in natural history
and mathematics, with wise expositors, so that the philosophy of
Aristotle was magnified among the Latins’.[46]
Scott produced his work De animalibus about this date and he included
in it the three great biological works of Aristotle, all rendered from
an inferior Arabic version.[47]
Albertus Magnus (1206-80) had not as yet a translation direct from the
Greek to go upon for his great commentary on the History of animals,
but he depended on Scott. The biological works of Aristotle were
rendered into Latin direct from the Greek in the year 1260 probably by
William of Moerbeke.[48]
Such translations, appearing in the full scholastic age when everything
was against direct observation, cannot be said to have fallen on a
fertile ground. They presented an ordered account of nature and a good
method of investigation, but those were gifts to a society that knew
little of their real value.[49]

Yet the advent of these texts was coincident with a returning desire to
observe nature. Albert, with all his scholasticism, was no contemptible
naturalist. He may be said to have begun first-hand plant study in
modern times so far as literary records are concerned. His book De
vegetabilibus[195]
contains excellent observations, and he is worthy of inclusion among
the fathers of botany. In his vast treatise De animalibus, hampered as
he is by his learning and verbosity, he shows himself a true observer
and one who has absorbed something of the spirit of the great naturalist
to whose works he had devoted a lifetime of study and on which he
professes to be commenting. We see clearly the leaven of the
Aristotelian spirit working, though Albert is still a schoolman. We may
select for quotation a passage on the generation of fish, a subject on
which some of Aristotle’s most remarkable descriptions remained
unconfirmed till modern times. These descriptions impressed Albert in
the same way as they do the modern naturalist. To those who know nothing
of the stimulating power of the Aristotelian biological works,
Albert’s description of the embryos of fish and his accurate
distinction of their mode of development from that of birds, by the
absence of an allantoic membrane in the one and its presence in the
other, must surely be startling. Albert depends on Aristotle—a
third-hand version of Aristotle—but does not slavishly follow him.

‘Between the mode of development (anathomiam generationis) of
birds’ and fishes’ eggs there is this difference: during the
development of the fish the second of the two veins which extend from
the heart [as described by Aristotle in birds] does not exist. For we do
not find the vein which extends to the outer covering in the eggs of
birds which some wrongly call the navel because it carries the blood to
the exterior parts; but we do find the vein that corresponds to the yolk
vein of birds, for this vein imbibes the nourishment by which the limbs
increase…. In fishes as in birds, channels extend from the heart first
to the head and the eyes, and first in them appear the great upper
parts. As the growth of the young fish increases the albumen decreases,
being incorporated into the members of the young fish, and it disappears
entirely when development and[196]
formation are complete. The beating of the heart … is conveyed to the
lower part of the belly, carrying pulse and life to the inferior
members.

‘While the young [fish] are small and not yet fully developed they
have veins of great length which take the place of the navel-string, but
as they grow and develop, these shorten and contract into the body
towards the heart, as we have said about birds. The young fish and the
eggs are enclosed and in a covering, as are the eggs and young of birds.
This covering resembles the dura mater [of the brain], and beneath it is
another [corresponding therefore to the pia mater of the brain] which
contains the young animal and nothing else.’[50]

In the next century Conrad von Megenberg (1309-98) produced his Book of
Nature, a complete work on natural history, the first of the kind in
the vernacular, founded on Latin versions, now rendered direct from the
Greek, of the Aristotelian and Galenic biological works. It is well
ordered and opens with a systematic account of the structure and
physiology of man as a type of the animal creation, which is then
systematically described and followed by an account of plants. Conrad,
though guided by Aristotle, uses his own eyes and ears, and with him and
Albert the era of direct observation has begun.[51]

But there was another department in which the legacy of Greece found an
even earlier appreciation. For centuries the illustrations to herbals
and bestiaries had been copied from hand to hand, continuing a tradition
that had its rise with[197]
Greek artists of the first century B. C. But
their work, copied at each stage without reference to the object, moved
constantly farther from resemblance to the original. At last the
illustrations became little but formal patterns, a state in which they
remained in some late copies prepared as recently as the sixteenth
century. But at a certain period a change set in, and the artist, no
longer content to rely on tradition, appeals at last to nature. This new
stirring in art corresponds with the new stirring in letters, the
Arabian revival—itself a legacy of Greece, though sadly deteriorated in
transit—that gave rise to scholasticism. In much of the beautiful
carved and sculptured work of the French cathedrals the new movement
appears in the earlier part of the thirteenth century. At such a place
as Chartres we see the attempt to render plants and animals faithfully
in stone as early as 1240 or before. In the easier medium of parchment
the same tendency appears even earlier. When once it begins the process
progresses slowly until the great recovery of the Greek texts in the
fifteenth century, when it is again accelerated.

During the sixteenth century the energy of botanists and zoologists was
largely absorbed in producing most carefully annotated and illustrated
editions of Dioscorides and Theophrastus and accounts of animals,
habits, and structure that were intended to illustrate the writings of
Aristotle, while the anatomists explored the bodies of man and beast to
confirm or refute Galen. The great monographs on birds, fishes, and
plants of this period, ostensibly little but commentaries on Pliny,
Aristotle, and Dioscorides, represent really the first important efforts
of modern times at a natural history. They pass naturally into the
encyclopaedias of the later sixteenth century, and these into the
physiological works of the seventeenth. Aristotle was never a dead hand
in Biology as he was in Physics, and this for the reason that he was a
great biologist but was not a great physicist.

[198]

With the advance of the sixteenth century the works of Aristotle, and to
a less extent those of Dioscorides and Galen, became the great stimulus
to the foundation of a new biological science. Matthioli (1520-77), in
his commentary on Dioscorides (first edition 1544), which was one of the
first works of its type to appear in the vernacular, made a number of
first-hand observations on the habits and structure of plants that is
startling even to a modern botanist. About the same time Galenic
physiology, expressed also in numerous works in the vulgar tongue and
rousing the curiosity of the physicians, became the clear parent of
modern physiology and comparative anatomy. But, above all, the
Aristotelian biological works were fertilizers of the mind. It is very
interesting to watch a fine observer such as Fabricius ab Acquapendente
(1537-1619) laying the foundations of modern embryology in a splendid
series of first-hand observations, treating his own great researches
almost as a commentary on Aristotle. What an impressive contrast to the
arid physics of the time based also on Aristotle! ‘My
purpose’, says Fabricius, ‘is to treat of the formation of
the foetus in every animal, setting out from that which proceeds from
the egg: for this ought to take precedence of all other discussion of
the subject, both because it is not difficult to make out
Aristotle’s view of the matter, and because his treatise on the
Formation of the Foetus from the egg is by far the fullest, and the
subject is by much the most extensive and difficult.’[52]

The industrious and careful Fabricius, with a wonderful talent for
observation lit not by his own lamp but by that of Aristotle, bears a
relation to the master much like that held by Aristotle’s pupil in
the flesh, Theophrastus. The works of the two men, Fabricius and
Theophrastus, bear indeed a resemblance to each other. Both rely on the
same group of general ideas, both progress in much the same ordered calm
from observation to observation, both have an inspiration
which[199]
is efficient and stimulating but below the greatest, both are
enthusiastic and effective as investigators of fact, but timid and
ineffective in drawing conclusions.

But Fabricius was more happy in his pupils than Theophrastus, for we may
watch the same Aristotelian ideas fermenting in the mind of
Fabricius’s successor, the greatest biologist since Aristotle
himself, William Harvey (1578-1657).[53]
This writer’s work On generation is a careful commentary on
Aristotle’s work on the same topic, but it is a commentary not in
the old sense but in the spirit of Aristotle himself. Each statement is
weighed and tested in the light of experience, and the younger
naturalist, with all his reverence for Aristotle, does not hesitate to
criticize his conclusions. He exhibits an independence of thought, an
ingenuity in experiment, and a power of deduction that places his
treatise as the middle term of the three great works on embryology of
which the other members are those of Aristotle and Karl Ernst von Baer
(1796-1876).[54]

With the second half of the seventeenth century and during a large part
of the eighteenth the biological works of Aristotle attracted less
attention. The battle against the Aristotelian physics had been fought
and won, but with them the biological works of Aristotle unjustly passed
into the shadow that overhung all the idols of the Middle Ages.

The rediscovery of the Aristotelian biology is a modern thing. The
collection of the vast wealth of living forms absorbed the energies of
the generations of naturalists from Ray (1627-1705) and Willoughby
(1635-72) to Réaumur (1683-1757) and Linnaeus (1707-1778) and beyond to
the nineteenth century. The magnitude and fascination of the work seems
almost to have excluded general ideas. With the end of this period and
the advent of a more philosophical type of naturalist,[200]
such as Cuvier (1769-1832) and members of the Saint-Hilaire family,
Aristotle came again to his own. Since the dawn of the nineteenth
century, and since naturalists have been in a position to verify the
work of Aristotle, his reputation as a naturalist has continuously
risen. Johannes Müller (1801-58), Richard Owen (1804-92), George
Henry Lewes (1817-78), William Ogle (1827-1912) are a few of the long
line of those who have derived direct inspiration from his biological
work. With improved modern methods of investigation the problems of
generation have absorbed a large amount of biological attention, and
interest has become specially concentrated on Aristotle’s work on
that topic which is perhaps, at the moment, more widely read than any
biological treatise, ancient or modern, except the works of Darwin. That
great naturalist wrote to Ogle in 1882: ‘From quotations I had
seen I had a high notion of Aristotle’s merits, but I had not the
most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have
been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere
schoolboys to old Aristotle.’

Charles Singer.

[201]

MEDICINE

Ἡροφιλος δε εν τω Διαιτητικω και σοφιαν φησιν ανεπιδεικτον και τεχνην
αδηλον και ισχυν αναγωνιστον και πλουτον αχρειον και λογον αδυνατον,
ὑγιειας απουσης.

{Hêrophilos de en tô Diaitêtikô kai sophian phêsin anepideikton kai
technên adêlon kai ischyn anagôniston kai plouton achreion kai logon
adynaton, hygieias apousês.}

Herophilos, a Greek philosopher and physician (c. 300 B. C.),
has truly written ‘that Science and Art have equally nothing to
show, that Strength is incapable of effort, Wealth useless, and
Eloquence powerless if Health be wanting’.[55]
All peoples therefore have had their methods of treating those
departures from health that we call disease, and among peoples of higher
culture such methods have been reduced in most cases to something
resembling a system. In antiquity, as now, a variety of such systems
were in vogue, and those nations who practised the art of writing from
an early date have left considerable records of their medical methods
and doctrines. We may thus form a fairly good idea of the medical
principles of the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian, the Iranian, the Indian,
and the Chinese civilizations. Much in these systems, as in the medical
procedure of more primitive tribes, was based upon some theory of
disease which fitted in with a larger theory of the nature of evil. Of
these theories the commonest was and is the demonic, the view that
regards deviation from the normal state of health as due either to the
attacks of supernatural beings or to their actual entry into the body of
the sufferer. A medical system based on such a view is susceptible of
great elaboration in a higher civilization, but not being founded
on[202]
observation is hardly capable of indefinite development, for a point
must ultimately be reached at which the mind recoils from complex
conclusions far remote from observed phenomena. The medicine of the
ancient and settled civilization of such a people as the
Assyro-Babylonians, for instance, of which substantial traces have been
recovered, is hardly, if at all, more effective, though far more
systematized, than that of many a wild and unlettered tribe that may be
observed to-day. Of such medicine as this we may give an account, but we
can hardly write a history. We cannot establish those elements of
continuity and of development from which alone history can be
constructed.

It is the distinction of the Greeks alone among the nations of antiquity
that they practised a system of medicine based not on theory but on
observation accumulated systematically as time went on. The claim can be
made for the Greeks that some at least among them were deflected by no
theory, were deceived by no theurgy, were hampered by no tradition in
their search for the facts of disease and in their attempts at
interpreting its phenomena. Only the Greeks among the ancients could
look on their healers as physicians (= naturalists, φυσις =
nature), and that word itself stands as a lasting reminder of their
achievement.[56]

At a certain stage in the history of the Western world—the exact point
in time may be disputed but the event is admitted by all—men turned to
explore the treasures of the ancient wisdom and the whole mass of Greek
medical learning was gradually laid before the student. That mass
contained much dross, material that survived from early as
[203]
from late Greek times which was hardly, if at all, superior to the
debased compositions that circulated in the name of medicine in the
middle centuries. But the recovered Greek medical writings also
contained some material of the purest and most scientific type, and that
material and the spirit in which it was written, form the debt of modern
medicine to antiquity.

It is a debt the value of which cannot be exaggerated. The physicians of
the revival of learning, and for long after, doubtless pinned their
faith too much to the written word of their Greek forbears and sought to
imprison the free spirit of Hippocrates and Galen in the rigid wall of
their own rediscovered texts. The great medical pioneers of a somewhat
later age, enraged by this attempt, the real nature of which was largely
hidden from them, not infrequently revolted and rightly revolted against
the bondage to the Greeks in which they had been brought up. Yet it is
sure that these modern discoverers were the true inheritors of the
Greeks. Without Herophilus we should have had no Harvey and the rise of
physiology might have been delayed for centuries; had Galen’s
works not survived, Vesalius would never have reconstructed Anatomy, and
Surgery too might have stayed behind with her laggard sister, Medicine;
the Hippocratic collection was the necessary and acknowledged basis for
the work of the greatest of modern clinical observers, Thomas Sydenham,
and the teaching of Hippocrates and of his school is the substantial
basis of instruction in the wards of a modern hospital. In the pages
which follow we propose therefore to review the general character of
medical knowledge in the best Greek period and to consider briefly how
much of that great heritage remained accessible to the earlier modern
physicians. The reader will thus be able to form some estimate of the
degree to which the legacy has been passed on to our own times.

It is evident that among such a group of peoples as the Greeks, varying
in state of civilization, in mental power, in[204]
geographical and economic position and in general outlook, the practice
of medicine can have been by no means uniform. Without any method of
centralizing medical education and standardizing teaching there was a
great variety of doctrines and of practice in vogue among them, and much
of this was on a low level of folk custom. Such lower grade material of
Greek origin has come down to us in abundance, though much of it,
curiously enough, from a later time. But the overwhelming mass of
earlier Greek medical literature sets forth for us a pure scientific
effort to observe and to classify disease, to make generalizations from
carefully collected data, to explain the origin of disease on rational
grounds, and to apply remedies, when possible, on a reasoned basis. We
may thus rest fairly well assured that, despite serious and irreparable
losses, we are still in possession of some of the very finest products
of the Greek medical intellect.

There is ample evidence that the Greeks inherited, in common with many
other peoples of Mediterranean and Asiatic origin, a whole system of
magical or at least non-rational pharmacy and medicine from a remoter
ancestry. Striking parallels can be drawn between these folk elements
among the Greeks and the medical systems of the early Romans, as well as
with the medicine of the Indian Vedas, of the ancient Egyptians, and of
the earliest European barbarian writings. It is thus reasonable to
suppose that these elements, when they appear in later Greek writings,
represent more primitive folk elements working up, under the influence
of social disintegration and consequent mental deterioration, through
the upper strata of the literate Greek world. But with these elements,
intensely interesting to the anthropologist, the psychologist, the
ethnologist, and to the historian of religion, we are not here greatly
concerned. Important as they are, they constitute no part of the special
claim of the Greek people to distinction, but rather aid us in uniting
the Greek mentality with that of other kindred peoples. Here we shall
rather discuss the course of Greek scientific medicine proper, the
[205]
type of medical doctrine and practice, capable of development in the
proper sense of the word, that forms the basis of our modern system. We
are concerned, in fact, with the earliest evolutionary medicine.

We need hardly discuss the first origins of Greek Medicine. The material
is scanty and the conclusions somewhat doubtful and perhaps premature,
for the discovery of a considerable fragment of the historical work of
Menon, a pupil of Aristotle, containing a description of the views of
some of the precursors of the Hippocratic school, renews a hope that
more extended investigation may yield further information as to the
sources and nature of the earliest Greek medical
writings.[57]
The study of Mesopotamian star-lore has linked it up with early Greek
astronomical science. The efforts of cuneiform scholars have not,
however, been equally successful for medicine, and on the whole the
general tendency of modern research is to give less weight to
Mesopotamian and more to Egyptian sources than had previously been
admitted; thus very recently an Egyptian medical papyrus of about 1700
B. C. has been described which bears a distinct resemblance to some of
the Hippocratic treatises.[58]
A number of drugs, too, habitually used by the Greeks, such as
Andropogon, Cardamoms, and Sesame orientalis, are of Indian
origin. There are also the Minoan cultures to be considered, and though
our knowledge is not yet sufficient to speak of the heritage that Greek
medicine may or may not have derived from that source, it seems not
improbable that Greek hygiene may here owe a debt.[59]
Omitting, therefore, this early epoch, we pass[206]
direct to the later period, between the sixth and fourth centuries,
from which documents have actually come down to us.

The earliest medical school of which we have definite information is
that of Cnidus, a Lacedaemonian colony in Asiatic Doris. Its origin may
perhaps reach back to the seventh century B. C.
We have actual records that the teachers of Cnidus were accustomed to
collect systematically the phenomena of disease, of which they had
produced a very complex classification, and we probably possess also
several of their actual works. The physicians of Cos, their only
contemporary critics whose writings have survived, considered that the
Cnidian physicians paid too much attention to the actual sensations of
the patient and to the physical signs of the disease. The most important
of the Cnidian doctrines were drawn up in a series of Sentences or
Aphorisms, and these, it appears, inculcated a treatment along Egyptian
lines of the symptom or at most the disease, rather than the patient, a
statement borne out by the contents of the gynaecological works of
probable Cnidian origin included in the so-called ‘Hippocratic
Collection’. A few names of Cnidian physicians have, moreover,
come down to us with titles of their works, and a later statement that
they practised anatomy. There can be little doubt too that the Cnidian
school drew also on Persian and Indian Medicine.

The origin of the school of the neighbouring island of Cos was a little
later than that of Cnidus and probably dates from the sixth century
B. C. Of the Coan school, or at least of the general tendencies that it
represented, we have a magnificent and copious literary monument in the
Corpus Hippocraticum, a collection which was probably put together in
the early part of the third century B. C. by a commission of Alexandrian
scholars at the order of the book-loving Ptolemy Soter (reigned 323-285
B. C.). The elements of which this collection is composed are of varying
dates from the sixth to the fourth century B. C., and of varying value
and origin, but they mainly represent
[207]
the point of view of physicians of the eastern part of the Greek world
in the fifth and fourth centuries.

The most obvious feature, the outstanding element that at once strikes
the modern observer in these ‘Coan’ writings, is the
enormous emphasis laid on the actual course of disease. ‘It
appears to me a most excellent thing’, so opens one of the
greatest of the Hippocratic works, ‘for a physician to cultivate
pronoia.[60]
Foreknowing and foretelling in the presence of the sick
the past, present, and future (of their symptoms) and explaining all
that the patients are neglecting, he would be believed to understand
their condition, so that men would have confidence to entrust themselves
to his care…. Thus he would win just respect and be a good physician.
By an earlier forecast in each case he would be more able to tend those
aright who have a chance of surviving, and by foreseeing and stating who
will die, and who will survive, he will escape blame….’[61]

Just as the Cnidians by dividing up diseases according to symptoms
over-emphasized diagnosis and over-elaborated treatment, so the Coans
laid very great force on prognosis and adopted therefore a largely
expectant attitude towards diseases. Both Cnidian and Coan physicians
were held together by a common bond which was, historically if not
actually, related to temple worship. Physicians leagued together in the
name of a god, as were the Asclepiadae, might escape, and did escape,
the baser theurgic elements of temple medicine. Of these they were as
devoid as a modern Catholic physician might be[208]
expected to be free from the absurdities of Lourdes. But the extreme
cult of prognosis among the Coans may not improbably be traced back to
the medical lore of the temple soothsayers whose divine omens were
replaced by indications of a physical nature in the patient himself.[62]
We are tempted too to link it with that process of astronomical and
astrological prognosis practised in the Mesopotamian civilizations from
which Ionia imitated and derived so much. Religion had thus the same
relation to medicine that it would have with a modern
‘religious’ medical man as suggesting the motive and
determining the general direction of his practice though without
influence on the details and method.

During the development of the Coan medical school along these lines in
the sixth and fifth centuries, there was going on a most remarkable
movement at the very other extreme of the Greek world. Into the course
and general importance of Sicilian philosophy it is not our place to
enter, but that extraordinary movement was not without its repercussion
on medical theory and practice. Very important in this direction was
Empedocles of Agrigentum (c. 500-c. 430 B. C.).
His view that the blood is the seat of the ‘innate heat’,
εμφυτον θερμον, he took from folk belief—‘the blood is the
life’—and this innate heat he closely identified with soul.
More profitable was his doctrine that breathing takes place not only
through what are now known as the respiratory passages but also through
the pores of the skin. His teaching led to a belief in the heart as the
centre of the vascular system and the chief organ of the
‘pneuma’ which was distributed by the blood vessels. This
pneuma was equivalent to both soul and life, but it was something more.
It was identified with air and breath, and the pneuma could be seen to
rise as shimmering steam from the shed blood of the
[209]
sacrificial victim—for was not the blood its natural home? There
was a pneuma, too, that interpenetrated the universe around us and gave
it those qualities of life that it was felt to possess. Anaximenes (c.
610-c. 545 B. C.), an Ionian predecessor of Empedocles, may be said to
have defined for us these functions of the pneuma; ὁιον ἡ ψυχη ἡ ἡμετερα
αηρ ουσα συγκρατει ἡμας, ὁλον τον κοσμον πνευμα και αηρ περιεχει {hoion
hê psychê hê hêmetera aêr ousa synkratei hêmas, holon ton kosmon pneuma
kai aêr periechei}, ‘As our soul, being air, sustains us, so
pneuma and air pervade the whole universe’;[63]
but it is the speculation of Empedocles himself that came to be regarded
as the basis of the Pneumatic School in Medicine which had later very
important developments.

Another early member of the Western school who made important
contributions to medical doctrine—in which relation alone we need
consider him—was Pythagoras of Samos (c. 580-c.490 B. C.).
For him number, as the purest conception, formed the basis of
philosophy. Unity was the symbol of perfection and corresponded to God
Himself. The material universe was represented by 2, and was divided by
the number 12, whence we have 3 worlds and 4 spheres. These in turn,
according at least to the later Pythagoreans, give rise to the four
elements, earth, air, fire, and water—a primary doctrine of
medicine and of science derived perhaps from ancient Egypt and surviving
for more than two millennia. The Pythagoreans taught, too, of the
existence of an animal soul, an emanation of the soul of the universe.
In all this we may distinguish the germ of that doctrine of the relation
of man and universe, microcosm and macrocosm, which, suppressed as
irrelevant in the Hippocratic works, reappears in the Platonic and
especially in the Neoplatonic writings, and forms a very important dogma
in later medicine.

A pupil of Pythagoras and an older contemporary of Empedocles was
Alcmaeon of Croton (c. 500 B. C.),
who began to construct a positive basis for medical science by the
practice[210]
of dissection of animals, and discovered the optic nerves and the
Eustachian tubes. He even extended his researches to Embryology,
describing the head of the foetus as the first part to be
developed—a justifiable deduction from appearances. Alcmaeon
introduced also the doctrine that health depends on harmony, disease on
discord of the elements within the body. Curiosity as to the
distribution of the vessels was excited by Empedocles and Alcmaeon and
led to further dissection, and Alcmaeon’s pupils Acron (c. 480
B. C.) and Pausanias (c. 480 B. C.),
and the later Philistion of Lokri,[64]
the contemporary of Plato, all made anatomical investigations.

The views of Empedocles, and especially his doctrine that regarded the
heart as the main site of the pneuma, though rejected by the Coan school
as a whole, were not without influence on Ionia. Diogenes of Apollonia,
the philosopher of pneumatism, a late fifth-century writer who must have
been contemporary with Hippocrates the Great, himself made an
investigation of the blood vessels; and the influence of the same school
may be traced in a little work περι καρδιης,
On the heart, which is the best anatomical treatise of the Hippocratic
Collection. This work describes the aorta and the pulmonary artery as
well as the three valves at the root of each of the great vessels, and
it speaks of experiments to test their validity. It treats of the
pericardium and of the pericardial fluid and perhaps of the musculi
papillares, and contrasts the thickness of the walls of right and left
ventricles. The author considers that the left ventricle is empty of
blood—as indeed it is after death—and is the source of the
innate heat and of the absolute intelligence. These views fit in with
the doctrines of Empedocles, so that we may perhaps even venture to
regard this work as a surviving document of the Sicilian school. It is
interesting to observe that we have here the first hint of human
dissection, for the author tells us that the hearts of animals may
be[211]
compared to that of man. The distinction of having been the
first to write on human anatomy, as such, belongs however, probably to a
later writer, Diocles, son of Archidamus of Carystus, who lived in the
fourth century B. C.[65]

We may now turn to the Hippocratic Corpus as a whole. This collection
consists of about 60 or 70 separate works, written at various periods
and in various states of preservation. At best only a very small
proportion of them can be attributed to Hippocrates, but the discussion
of the general question of the ‘genuineness’ of the works is
now admitted to be futile, for it is certain that we have no criteria
whatever to determine whether or no a particular work be from the pen of
the Father of Medicine, and the most we can ever say of such a treatise
is that it appears to be of his school and in his spirit. Yet among the
great gifts of this collection to our time and to all time are two which
stand out above all others, the picture of a man, and the picture of a
method.

The man is Hippocrates himself. Of the actual details of his life we
know next to nothing. His period of greatest activity falls about 400
B. C. He seems to have led a wandering life.
Born of a long line of physicians in the island of Cos, he exerted his
activities in Thrace, Abdera, Delos, the Propontis (Cyzicus), Thasos,
Thessaly (notably at Larissa and Meliboea), Athens, and elsewhere, dying
at Larissa in extreme old age about the year 377 B. C.
He had many pupils, among whom were his two sons Thessalus and Dracon,
who also undertook journeys, his son-in-law Polybus, of whose works a
fragment has been preserved for us by Aristotle,[66]
together with three other Coans bearing the names Apollonius, Dexippus,
and Praxagoras. This[212]
is practically all we know of him with certainty. But though this
glimpse is very dim and distant, yet we cannot exaggerate the influence
on the course of medicine and the value for physicians of all time of
the traditional picture that was early formed of him and that may indeed
well be drawn again from the works bearing his name. In beauty and
dignity that figure is beyond praise. Perhaps gaining in stateliness
what he loses in clearness, Hippocrates will ever remain the type of the
perfect physician. Learned, observant, humane, with a profound reverence
for the claims of his patients, but an overmastering desire that his
experience shall benefit others, orderly and calm, disturbed only by
anxiety to record his knowledge for the use of his brother physicians
and for the relief of suffering, grave, thoughtful and reticent, pure of
mind and master of his passions, this is no overdrawn picture of the
Father of Medicine as he appeared to his contemporaries and successors.
It is a figure of character and virtue which has had an ethical value to
medical men of all ages comparable only to the influence exerted on
their followers by the founders of the great religions. If one needed a
maxim to place upon the statue of Hippocrates, none could be found
better than that from the book Παραγγελιαι,
Precepts:

ην γαρ παρη φιλανθρωπιη παρεστι και φιλοτεχνιη

‘Where the love of man is, there also is love of the Art.’[67]

The numerous busts of him which have reached our time are no portraits.
But the best of them are something much better and more helpful to us
than any portrait. They are idealized representations of the kind of man
a physician should be and was in the eyes of the best and wisest of the
Greeks.[68]

Fig. 1. HIPPOCRATES British Museum, second or third century B. C.

Fig. 2. ASCLEPIUS British Museum, fourth century B. C.

The method of the Hippocratic writers is that known to-day as the
‘inductive’. Without the vast scientific heritage that is in
our own hands, with only a comparatively small number of observations
drawn from the Coan and neighbouring schools, surrounded by all manner
of bizarre oriental religions in which no adequate relation of cause and
effect was recognized, and[213]
above all constantly urged by the exuberant genius for speculation of
that Greek people in the midst of whom they lived and whose intellectual
temptations they shared, they remain nevertheless, for the most part,
patient observers of fact, sceptical of the marvellous and the
unverifiable, hesitating to theorize beyond the data, yet eager always
to generalize from actual experience; calm, faithful, effective servants
of the sick. There is almost no type of mental activity known to us that
was not exhibited by the Greeks and cannot be paralleled from their
writings; but careful and constant return to verification from
experience, expressed in a record of actual observations—the
habitual method adopted in modern scientific departments—is rare
among them except in these early medical authors.

The spirit of their practice cannot be better illustrated than by the
words of the so-called ‘Hippocratic oath’. That document,
though of late date in its present form, throws a flood of light on the
ethics of Greek medicine.

‘I swear by Apollo the physician and Asclepius and Hygieia
and Panacea, invoking all the gods and goddesses to be my
witnesses, that I will fulfil this Oath and this written covenant
to the best of my power and of my judgment.

‘I will look upon him who shall have taught me this art even
as on mine own parents; I will share with him my substance, and
supply his necessities if he be in need; I will regard his
offspring even as my own brethren, and will teach them this art, if
they desire to learn it, without fee or covenant. I will impart it
by precept, by lecture and by all other manner of teaching, not
only to my own sons but also to the sons of him who has taught me,
and to disciples bound by covenant and oath according to the law of
the physicians, but to none other.

‘The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of the patients
to the best of my power and judgment, not for their injury or for
any wrongful purpose. I will not give a deadly drug to any one,
though it be asked of me, nor will I lead the way in such counsel;
and likewise I will not give a woman a pessary to procure abortion.
But I will keep my life and my art in purity and holiness.
Whatsoever house I enter, I will enter for the benefit of the sick,
refraining from all voluntary wrongdoing and corruption, especially
seduction of male or female, bond[214]
or free. Whatsoever things I see or hear concerning the life of men, in
my attendance on the sick or even apart from my attendance, which ought
not to be blabbed abroad, I will keep silence on them, counting such
things to be as religious secrets.

‘If I fulfil this oath and confound it not, be it mine to
enjoy life and art alike, with good repute among all men for all
time to come; but may the contrary befall me if I transgress and
violate my oath.’[69]