Socrates represents the birth of self -consciousness. In
Reconstruotivb. . 77
practicing his maieutic art to this end, he little thought that he was giving the death-blow to the most beauti- ful trait of his countrymen, namely, the instinctive, the unconscious, the naive. No doubt this new birth had to take place some time, but under Socrates' direction it was premature. The old methods were not yet dead. Here historians of philosophy err. They say the pre-Socratic philosophers of Nature had in vain tried to solve the problems of the world, and it was high time for a critical philosophy that should begin with man. In vain, indeed ! Had the naturalists labored in vain when the foundation of the atomic philosophy had been laid in Abdera, that of mathematics in Italy, and a far-seeing metaphysics and ethics in Ephesus ? Soc- rates and Plato took fright too easily at the Sophists. Their philosophy would have died with them. Not so that of Democritus, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus. Soc- rates was a professor of clear thinking. Clear thinking is in itself well, but two solid centuries of clear think- ing from Descartes to Hegel have in modern times ended in failure. We long to know what natural thinking would have accomplished if it had been left an open field a while longer in Greece. Then again clear thinking was overdone. It was, to be sure, not Socrates' fault that his method was afterwards abused, but as a matter of fact it took in later history a patho- logical turn that has resulted in wide-spread evils. Over self-consciousness, too much inwardness and painful self -inspection, absence of trust in our instincts and of the healthful study of Nature, which in ethics are illustrated in modern questions of <5asuistry, and in philosophy in Cartesian doubt and the skepticism of Hume, characterize our worst faults. The philosophy and ethics of Heraclitus, as we have seen, stood in vital opposition to all these traits.
78 . HERACLITUS.
But there was another respect in which the fall of
man took place in Socrates. The love of beauty and
form, and particularly beauty of the human body,
characterized all the Greeks until Socrates, but char-
acterizes modern people in a relatively small degree.
Socrates cared nothing for outward beauty, but to the
surprise of his fellow-citizens laid all the emphasis
upon moral beauty. (We will say he was too large
hearted to have had a personal motive for so doing.)
It may be that the Greeks estimated physical beauty
relatively too high, but the rebound has been too
great. Caught up by the genius of Plato and inten-
sified by the tenor of his philosophy, and met six
centuries later in Alexandria by a powerful current
of the same tendency from Judea, it effected the com-
plete destruction of the Greek idea, and with it of
course of Greek art. In the medieval church, inherited
moral deformity was a sin of such extreme import,
that for it a man was to be forever damned ; but inher-
ited physical deformity was not only not a sin, but
often a blessing, teaching him as it did the relative
worthlessness of the earthly life and body. So far was
the Greek idea reversed that the body, instead of being
the type of beauty, became the type of impurity, and
from being the support of the soul, became its con-
taminator. The ^^ flesh," indeed, was the symbol of
evil. The results in modem life are only too well
known. Among them may be mentioned the loss of
appreciation of the worth of the present physical life
in itself, failure to recognize the close connection of
soul and body, and that the health of the former
depends on the health of the latter, resulting in all the
strange devices to secure the welfare of the soul in the
face of persistent disregard of the laws of physical
Reconstructive. 79
health, or in such attempts as that of sustaining the
moral status of a community where all hygienic laws
are violated. This idea has been groimd into the
popular mind by so long education that modern
educators find it a serious problem how to correct it.
It is not merely physical education that is wanted, but
a reconstruction of our notions about the relation of
body and mind. The Socratic work must be in part
undone, and we must get back more nearly to the pre-
Socratic conception of balance, for to them physical
ugliness was no less an evil than moral ugliness.
But there is still another aspect of the Socratic ^apostasy , as important as those we have mentioned, and so far-reaching in its effects that it determines modem thought even to the lowest ranks of society. In this movement begun by Socrates, but perfected by Plato and Aristotle, the central thought of the Heraclitic phi- losophy was denied, and denied with such power that now after twenty-two hundred years it hardly dares assert itself. We refer, of course, to the Platonic tran- scendentalism. It was designed to give the death-blow to Heraclitus, and it succeeded ultimately beyond the wildest hopes of its founders. Strictly it was begun by Anaxagoras. We have already seen with Teichmiiller how the doctrine of transcendent reason gained its first characteristic. Pure Separation, in the Nous of Anax- agoras, its second. Identity, in the definitive work of Socrates. But it was Plato who elevated it into a great system and gave it to the world for a perpetual inheritance. Finally, Aristotle, as if the fates con- spired to make this doctrine immortal, took it up and adapted it to unpoetical inductive minds. Heraclitus in a wonderful conception of the world had abolished every antithesis and enimciated a system of pure
80 HERACLITUS.
monism. The Socratic school reversed his plan and set
up a dualism of universal and particular, noumenon and
phenomenon, mind and body, spirit and matter, which
has dominated all philosophy, religion and literature.
It is with the origin of this dualism- that we are
concerned, not with the familiar history of its out-
come, but yet we may recall what to the student of
philosophy or even of history it is needless to more
than mention, how this dualism fastened itself upon
subsequent thought ; how as realism and nominalism
it divided the schoolmen ; how as mind and matter it
left Descartes in hopeless difficulty ; how Spinoza
founded a philosophy expressly to resolve it, but suc-
ceeded only by the artifice of terms ; how Leibnitz
solved the problem, though with too much violence, by
use of the same boldness with which its founders
established it ; how Kant finally left the antithesis
unexplained ; how again as the material and imma-
terial it fixed itself in the psychology of Aristotle, who
affirmed as the higher part of the human mind, the
active Nous or principle of pure immateriality, cogniz-
ant of the highest things, identical with the divine
Prime Mover, and immortal, thus constituting for
man the highest glorification that he ever received
from his own hand ; how Thomas Aquinas, spokesman
for a powerful church, adopted this psychology and fast-
ened it upon the modem popular world ; how finally,
in the sphere of religion proper, the transcendent-
alism of Plato has grown into the belief in pure Spirit
and spiritual existences, peopling heaven and earth,
and holding communion with matter and body, though
having absolutely nothing in common (if the paradox
may be excused) with them. Such has been in part
the wonderful expansion of the Platonic Idealism.
Reconstructive. 81
And what was all this for in the first place ? It was
raised primarily as a barrier against the dissolving
power of the eternal flux of the Heracliteans. A philo-
sophy had arisen in Greece that denied all perma-
nence. Misunderstood by the Sophists and abused by
Cratylus, it called out the protest of Socrates, at heart
the sincerest man of his contemporaries. Man, im-
pelled by that very faculty which connects him most
closely with Nature, namely, the sense of dependence,
demands something permanent and unchangeable,
upon which he can base his laws, religion and philo-
sophy. If he cannpt find it in Nature or in Revelation,
he will make it out of a part of himself. This is what
Socrates and Plato did. Socrates, seeking the perma-
nent for ethical motives, detesting Nature and failing
to find there anything fixed and abiding, turned to
man and man's manner of thinking. By analysis of
thought he separated out general concepts which ap-
peared to be the same for all. Plato, perhaps less in
earnest than subsequent ages gave him credit for,
hypostasized them, raised them into real objective
existences, henceforth to become idols, convenient
entities to fill all gaps in human reasoning, objects of
the dreams of poets and the worship of the religious,
archetypes from which a lazy philosophy could deduce
the universe. How, we naturally ask, could this auda-
cious piece of anthropomorphism, in which man delib-
erately took his own norms of thought, projected them ^
outward, and elevated them into gods, impose itself
upon the world as it did? There are two answers.
First, it flattered men inunensely, and like all anthro-
pomorphisms, thereby won half the battle. Second, it
did not succeed at once, but slumbered for four centu-
ries, and flnally, in the decadence of all systems of
82 HERAOLITUS.
philosophy and the breaking up of the old civilization,
awakened to supply the groundwork of a religious
revival. Platonism fell dead on the Greek world.
Plato, and Aristotle as well, shot over the heads of
their fellows. The philosophy of the Academy was a
brilliant piece of speculation such as only the age of
Pericles could call out. After that, philosophy fell
back into the old ways. The Older Academy dragged
out a short existence and died. Zeno, a Cypriote, but
in his desire for unity more Greek than Plato, studied
first with Polemo, head of the Academy, but disap-
pointed with Platonism, turned back to Heraclitus.
His school, as well as the Epicureans and Skeptics,
returned to the Heraclitic monism. These schools
loyally upheld for three centuries the Greek idea of
the unity of man and Nature. But philosophy itself
was doomed and fated to pass over into religion on the
one hand and mysticism on the other. Platonism was
admirably adapted to this end. In luxurious Alex-
andria, the weary inductive method of Aristotle, which
the Ptolemies had instituted in the Museum, soon
yielded to the fascinating lazy philosophy of Plato.
Philo the Jew, Plutarch the moralist, Valentinus the
Gnostic, Origen the Christian, all yielded to it in
greater or less degree. In Plotinus it reached its full
fruitage. Porphyry, his pupil, relates that he was
ashamed of having a body and was careless of its
needs, so anxious was he ecstatically to absorb his
soul in the Supra-rational Transcendent One. Here
we have a last consequence of the Socratic doctrine of
mind. Here we have the extreme opposition to the
naturalism of Heraclitus which considered man as a
subordinate part of Nature. Greek philosophy ended
with the triumph of Socrates and the defeat of Hera-
Reconstructive. 83
clitus. The wealth of Plato and Aristotle was the bequest that was handed over to the coming centuries. • The Greek naturalists were forgotten. It was reserved for the present century to revive and vindicate them. In what has been said in setting in relief the philo- sophy of Heraclitus, it is obvious that we have been concerned with but two or three aspects of that of Socrates and Plato, namely, its transcendental, ideal- istic and subjective character. It is not necessary to add that were we referring to other sides of it, as for instance, the undeniable importance of Socrates' con- tribution to ethics, and that of Plato to ethics and reli- gion as well as to real scientific thought, the result would be vefy different. And of the Idealism itself, its very fascination and prevalence argue that it meets some want of human beings. It is poetry, to be sure, but as poetry it has been and will still be useful in saving men from the dangers of coarse materialistic thought.
84 . HERACLITUS.
Heraclitus op Ephbsus on Nature.
I. — It is wise for those who hear, not me, but the universal Reason, to confess that all things are one.^
II. — To this universal Reason which I unfold,
although it always exists, men make themselves in-
sensible, both before they have heard it and when
they have heard it for the first time. For notwith-
standing that all things happen according to this
Reason, men act as though they had never had any
experience in regard to it when they attempt such
words and works as I am now relating, describing
each thing according to its nature and explaining how
it is ordered. And some men are as ignorant of what