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1The word became fruitful, It dwelt with the feeble glimmering, It brought forth the night. Hesiod must have had some such primitive speculation to work on, but he does not tell us anything clearly on the subject. We have records of great activity in the production of cosmogonies during the whole of the sixth century ΒΟ, and we know something of the systems of Epimenides, Pherekydes,> and Akousilaos. As there were speculations of this kind even before Hesiod, we need have no hesitation in believing that the earliest Orphic cosmogony goes back to that century too.’ 1 The word χάος certainly means the “‘ gape” or “ yawn,” the Orphic χάσμα πελώριον. Grimm compared it with the Scandinavian Ginnunga- Gap, 2 Quoted from Taylor's Mew Zealand, pp. 110-112, by Mr. Andrew Lang, in A4th, Ritual, and Religion, vol. ii. p. 52 (2nd ed.). 8 For the remains of Pherekydes, see Diels, Vorsokratiker, pp. 506 sqq. (1st ed.), and the interesting account in Gomperz, Greek 7) hinkers, vol. i. pp. 85 sqq. 4 This was the view of Lobeck with regard to the so-called ‘* Rhapsodic Theogony” described by Damaskios, and was revived by Otto Kern (De Orphei Epimenidis Pherecydis Theogoniis, 1888). Its savage character is the best proof of its antiquity. Cf. Lang, Adyth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i. chap. x. a. α,,.» 4». a General char- acteristics of early Greek _ cosmology. Vv 10 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY The feature which is common to all these systems is the attempt to get behind the gap, and to put Kronos or Zeus in the first place. This is what Aristotle has in view when he distinguishes the “theologians ” from those who were half theologians and half philo- sophers, and who put what was best in the begin- ning.’ It is obvious, however, that this process is the very reverse of scientific, and might be carried on ---- indefinitely; so we have nothing to do with the cosmogonists im our present inquiry, except so far as they can be shown to have influenced the course of more sober investigations. Indeed, these speculations are still based on the primitive view of the world, and so fall outside the limits we have traced for ourselves. VI. What, then, was the step that placed the Ionian cosmologists once for all above the level of the Maoris ἢ Grote and Zeller make it consist in the substitution- of impersonal causes acting according to law for personal causes acting arbitrarily. But the distinction between _ personal and impersonal was not really felt in antiquity, and it is a mistake to lay much stress on it. It seems rather that the real advance made by the scientific men of Miletos was that they left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when | i as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what -all things really are now.
2It seems rather that the real advance made by the scientific men of Miletos was that they left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when | i as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what -all things really are now. The great principle which underlies all their thinking, though it is first put into words by Parmenides, is that Nothing comes into being out of nothing, and nothing passes away into nothing. They saw, however, that particular things were always 1 Arist. Met. N, 4. 1091 Ὁ 8. INTRODUCTION ΕΣ coming into being and passing away again, and from this it followed that their existence was no true or stable one. The only things that were real and eternal were the original matter which passed through all these changes and the motion which gave rise to them, to - which was soon added that law of proportion or compen- sation which, despite the continual becoming and passing away of things, secured the relative permanence and stability of the various forms of existence that go to make up the world. That these were, in fact, the leading ideas of the early cosmologists, cannot, of course, be proved till we have given a detailed exposition of their systems ; but we can show at once how natural it was for such thoughts to come to them. It is always 7 the problem of change and eee. that first excites the ᾿ς wonder which, as Plato says, is the starting-point of all philosophy. Besides this, there was in the Ionic nature a vein of melancholy which led it to brood upon the instability of things. Even before the time of Thales, Mimnermos of Kolophon sings the sadness_of change ; and, at a later date, the lament of Simonides, that the generations of men fall like the leaves of the forest, touches a chord already struck by the earliest singer of Ionia Now, so long as men could believe everything they saw was alive like them- selves, the spectacle of the unceasing death and new birth of. nature would only tinge their thoughts with a certain mournfulness, which would find its expression in such things as the Linos dirges which the Greeks borrowed from their Asiatic neighbours ;* but when ν΄ 1 φἰπποηΐδες, fr. 85, 2 Bergk. 722. vi. 146. 2 On Adonis-Thammuz, Lityerses, Linos, and Osiris, see Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. i. pp. 278 sqq. Φύσις. 12 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY
385, 2 Bergk. 722. vi. 146. 2 On Adonis-Thammuz, Lityerses, Linos, and Osiris, see Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. i. pp. 278 sqq. Φύσις. 12 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY primitive animism, which had seen conscious life every- where, was gone, and polytheistic mythology, which ~ had personified at least the more striking natural phenomena, was going, it must have seemed that there was nowhere any abiding reality. Nowadays we are accustomed, for good and for ill, to the notion of dead things, obedient, not to inner impulses, but solely to mechanical laws. But that is not the view of the natural man, and we may be sure that, when first it forced itself on him, it must have provoked a strong sense of dissatisfaction. Relief was only to be had from the reflexion that as nothing comes from nothing, nothing can pass away into nothing. There must, then, be something which always is, something funda- mental which persists throughout all change, and ceases to exist in one form only that it may reappear in another. It is significant that this something is spoken of as “deathless” and “ageless.” * VII. So far as JI know, no historian of Greek philosophy has clearly laid it down that the word which was used by the early cosmologists to express this idea of a permanent and primary substance was none other than φύσις ; and that the title Περὶ φύσεως, so commonly given to philosophical works of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C? means simply Cox- cerning the Primary Substance. ~ Both Plato and Aristotle use the term in this sense when they are 1 The Epic phrase ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρως seems to have suggested this. Anaximander applied both epithets to the primary substance (ΚΕ, P. 17 and 17a). Euripides, in describing the blessedness of the scientific life (fr. inc. 910), says ἀθανάτου. . . φύσεως κόσμον ἀγήρω (R. P. 148 ς fin.). 2 I do not mean to imply that the philosophers used this title them- selves; for early prose writings had no titles. The writer mentioned his name and the subject of his work in the first sentence, as Herodotos, for instance, does,
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1The word became fruitful, It dwelt with the feeble glimmering, It brought forth the night. Hesiod must have had some such primitive speculation to work on, but he does not tell us anything clearly on the subject. We have records of great activity in the production of cosmogonies during the whole of the sixth century ΒΟ, and we know something of the systems of Epimenides, Pherekydes,> and Akousilaos. As there were speculations of this kind even before Hesiod, we need have no hesitation in believing that the earliest Orphic cosmogony goes back to that century too.’ 1 The word χάος certainly means the “‘ gape” or “ yawn,” the Orphic χάσμα πελώριον. Grimm compared it with the Scandinavian Ginnunga- Gap, 2 Quoted from Taylor's Mew Zealand, pp. 110-112, by Mr. Andrew Lang, in A4th, Ritual, and Religion, vol. ii. p. 52 (2nd ed.). 8 For the remains of Pherekydes, see Diels, Vorsokratiker, pp. 506 sqq. (1st ed.), and the interesting account in Gomperz, Greek 7) hinkers, vol. i. pp. 85 sqq. 4 This was the view of Lobeck with regard to the so-called ‘* Rhapsodic Theogony” described by Damaskios, and was revived by Otto Kern (De Orphei Epimenidis Pherecydis Theogoniis, 1888). Its savage character is the best proof of its antiquity. Cf. Lang, Adyth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i. chap. x. a. α,,.» 4». a General char- acteristics of early Greek _ cosmology. Vv 10 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY The feature which is common to all these systems is the attempt to get behind the gap, and to put Kronos or Zeus in the first place. This is what Aristotle has in view when he distinguishes the “theologians ” from those who were half theologians and half philo- sophers, and who put what was best in the begin- ning.’ It is obvious, however, that this process is the very reverse of scientific, and might be carried on ---- indefinitely; so we have nothing to do with the cosmogonists im our present inquiry, except so far as they can be shown to have influenced the course of more sober investigations. Indeed, these speculations are still based on the primitive view of the world, and so fall outside the limits we have traced for ourselves. VI. What, then, was the step that placed the Ionian cosmologists once for all above the level of the Maoris ἢ Grote and Zeller make it consist in the substitution- of impersonal causes acting according to law for personal causes acting arbitrarily. But the distinction between _ personal and impersonal was not really felt in antiquity, and it is a mistake to lay much stress on it. It seems rather that the real advance made by the scientific men of Miletos was that they left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when | i as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what -all things really are now.
2It seems rather that the real advance made by the scientific men of Miletos was that they left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when | i as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what -all things really are now. The great principle which underlies all their thinking, though it is first put into words by Parmenides, is that Nothing comes into being out of nothing, and nothing passes away into nothing. They saw, however, that particular things were always 1 Arist. Met. N, 4. 1091 Ὁ 8. INTRODUCTION ΕΣ coming into being and passing away again, and from this it followed that their existence was no true or stable one. The only things that were real and eternal were the original matter which passed through all these changes and the motion which gave rise to them, to - which was soon added that law of proportion or compen- sation which, despite the continual becoming and passing away of things, secured the relative permanence and stability of the various forms of existence that go to make up the world. That these were, in fact, the leading ideas of the early cosmologists, cannot, of course, be proved till we have given a detailed exposition of their systems ; but we can show at once how natural it was for such thoughts to come to them. It is always 7 the problem of change and eee. that first excites the ᾿ς wonder which, as Plato says, is the starting-point of all philosophy. Besides this, there was in the Ionic nature a vein of melancholy which led it to brood upon the instability of things. Even before the time of Thales, Mimnermos of Kolophon sings the sadness_of change ; and, at a later date, the lament of Simonides, that the generations of men fall like the leaves of the forest, touches a chord already struck by the earliest singer of Ionia Now, so long as men could believe everything they saw was alive like them- selves, the spectacle of the unceasing death and new birth of. nature would only tinge their thoughts with a certain mournfulness, which would find its expression in such things as the Linos dirges which the Greeks borrowed from their Asiatic neighbours ;* but when ν΄ 1 φἰπποηΐδες, fr. 85, 2 Bergk. 722. vi. 146. 2 On Adonis-Thammuz, Lityerses, Linos, and Osiris, see Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. i. pp. 278 sqq. Φύσις. 12 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY
385, 2 Bergk. 722. vi. 146. 2 On Adonis-Thammuz, Lityerses, Linos, and Osiris, see Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. i. pp. 278 sqq. Φύσις. 12 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY primitive animism, which had seen conscious life every- where, was gone, and polytheistic mythology, which ~ had personified at least the more striking natural phenomena, was going, it must have seemed that there was nowhere any abiding reality. Nowadays we are accustomed, for good and for ill, to the notion of dead things, obedient, not to inner impulses, but solely to mechanical laws. But that is not the view of the natural man, and we may be sure that, when first it forced itself on him, it must have provoked a strong sense of dissatisfaction. Relief was only to be had from the reflexion that as nothing comes from nothing, nothing can pass away into nothing. There must, then, be something which always is, something funda- mental which persists throughout all change, and ceases to exist in one form only that it may reappear in another. It is significant that this something is spoken of as “deathless” and “ageless.” * VII. So far as JI know, no historian of Greek philosophy has clearly laid it down that the word which was used by the early cosmologists to express this idea of a permanent and primary substance was none other than φύσις ; and that the title Περὶ φύσεως, so commonly given to philosophical works of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C? means simply Cox- cerning the Primary Substance. ~ Both Plato and Aristotle use the term in this sense when they are 1 The Epic phrase ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρως seems to have suggested this. Anaximander applied both epithets to the primary substance (ΚΕ, P. 17 and 17a). Euripides, in describing the blessedness of the scientific life (fr. inc. 910), says ἀθανάτου. . . φύσεως κόσμον ἀγήρω (R. P. 148 ς fin.). 2 I do not mean to imply that the philosophers used this title them- selves; for early prose writings had no titles. The writer mentioned his name and the subject of his work in the first sentence, as Herodotos, for instance, does,
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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