CHAPTER XI
THE PHILOSOPHERS
The Orphic teaching, in which a protracted movement of religion in Greece reached comprehensive expression, might seem almost an anachronism, appearing as it did in an age when a religious interpretation of the world and of mankind was hardly any longer admissible. Eastwards, on the coasts of Ionia, a new view of the world had arisen which, like a youth that has come of age, demanded the right to pursue its course without any guidance from traditional beliefs. The Ionic maritime cities were the meeting-place of all the collected wisdom and experience of mankind; and there all the more serious knowledge and study--both indigenous and of foreign origin--of "Nature", the earth, and the heavenly bodies, was gathered together in the intelligence of those ever-memorable spirits who at that time were laying the foundations of natural science, and of all science in general. This knowledge was now attempting to turn itself into an organized and all-embracing whole. Observation and constructive study combined with an imaginative vision to hazard a picture of the world and reality as a whole. Because it was impossible anywhere in this world to find anything completely and for ever fixed and dead, speculation inevitably pressed forward to the discovery of the undying source of Life, that perpetually fills, moves, and rebuilds this whole, and of the laws according to which it works and necessarily must work.
This was the direction pursued by these earliest pioneers of philosophy; and they pursued it unhampered by any subservience to mythical or religious modes of thought. Where mythology and the theology founded upon it saw a complete history of cosmic events each one of which was the result of the separate and unique action of divine personalities endowed with consciousness and the power of arbitrary choice--there the philosopher saw the play of everlasting forces which could not be completely resolved into the single events of any historical process, for, without beginning or end they had been ever in action, tirelessly fulfilling themselves in accordance with unchanging laws. In such a universe there seemed {363} to be little room left for divine figures created by man after his own image, and worshipped by him as the guiding and supreme powers of the world. And in fact, the foundations were now laid of that tremendous structure of free inquiry, which finally succeeded in weaving out of its treasure new worlds of thought, where even those who had quarrelled or were dissatisfied with the old religion (now inwardly falling into decay for all its outward appearance of being at the most brilliant zenith of its powers) might yet find a refuge if they would not fall back upon sheer nothingness.
And yet Greece never saw a thorough-going opposition and conscious quarrel between science and religion. In a few special cases the religion of the state was forced to recognize its incompatibility with the openly expressed opinions of individual philosophers, and took steps to make its claims to universal supremacy respected. But for the most part, the two streams of influence flowed on side by side for centuries without ever coming into hostile contact. The propagandist temper was completely absent from philosophy from the very beginning. (Even when it appeared later as among the Cynics it produced very little effect on the supremacy of the state religion.) Religion on its side was not represented by any priestly caste which might have been led to take up arms for religion and for what it believed to be its own interest alike. Theoretic contradictions might the more easily remain unobserved when religion depended so little upon fixed dogma or upon a world-embracing whole of opinions and doctrines; while Theology, wherever it accompanied the worship of the gods (~euse/beia~), which was the real core of religion, was, just as much as philosophy, the business of individuals and their adherents gathered together outside the limits of the official religion of the state. Philosophy (except in a few special and unrepresentative cases) never sought open war with religion--not even with the weakened and diluted religion of the masses. In fact the juxtaposition of philosophy and religion (with theology itself by their side) sometimes went beyond the external conditions of the time, and affected the private intellectual life of certain thinkers. It might seem as if religion and philosophy were not merely different but dealt with different provinces of reality, and thus even strict and philosophically minded thinkers could honestly and without imagining disloyalty to philosophy, adopt particular and even fundamental conceptions from the creed of their fathers, and allow them to grow up side by side and at peace with their own purely philosophical ideas. {364}
§ 2
What the Ionic philosophers in connexion with the rest of their cosmology had to say about the soul of man did not for all its striking novelty bring them into direct conflict with religious opinion. Philosophy and religion used the same words to denote totally different things; it could surprise no one if different things were said about quite different objects.
According to the popular view, which finds expression in Homer, and with which, in spite of their very different estimate of the relative values of body and soul, the religious theory of the Orphics and other _theologi_ also agreed--according to this view the "psyche" was regarded as a unique creature of combined spiritual and material nature that, wherever it may have come from, now dwells within man and there, as his second self, carries on its separate existence, making itself felt when the visible self loses consciousness in dream, swoon, or ecstasy (see above, pp. 6 f.). In the same way, the moon and the stars become visible when no longer obscured by the brighter light of the sun. It was already implied in the conception itself that this double of mankind, which could be detached from him temporarily, had a separate existence of its own; it was no very great step from this to the idea that in death, which is simply the permanent separation of the visible man from the invisible, the latter did not perish, but only then became free and able to live by and for itself.
This spiritual being and the obscure manifestations of its existence in the living man, did not attract the observation of the Ionian philosophers. Their thoughts were all for the universe as a whole; they looked for the "origins" (~archai/~) of all that is and becomes; for the simple elements of multifarious appearance and for the force which turns the simple into the multifarious while controlling, moving, and giving life to primeval matter. The power of life, the force which can set in motion both itself and all else that without it would be fixed and motionless--this force penetrates all being; where it manifests itself most strikingly in separate individual beings, there it is what these philosophers call the "psyche".
Thought of in this way, the psyche is something quite different from the old psyche of popular belief, idly observing the life and
## activities of its body, as of some stranger, concentrated in itself,
and pursuing its own secret, hidden life. And yet the name given to these very different concepts remained the same. The application of the word "psyche" {365} to the power which gives life and movement to the visible body--man's power of life--might have been suggested to the philosophers by a manner of expression which, though in the strict sense of the words conflicting with Homeric conceptions, is occasionally observable in the Homeric poems, and seems to have become more and more frequent in late times.[1\11] In more exact language, the "psyche" of these philosophers is a collective expression for all the powers of thought, desire, and will (~no/os, me/nos, mê=tis, boulê/~), and especially for the functions denoted by the untranslatable word ~thumo/s~--powers which according to the Homeric and popular partition all belong entirely to the side of the visible man and his body.[2\11] According to that view, they are all expressions of the body's natural powers of life--though they cannot indeed be awakened to real life before the arrival of the "psyche"--and in Homeric usage are almost the exact opposite of the "psyche", for they perish at death, while the psyche leaves them behind to wander about in its separate shadow-life.
But the soul, according to the view of the physiologists, has quite a different relation to the totality of life and living, and differs in this respect both from the Homeric psyche and the Homeric ~thumo/s~. The same force which manifests itself so strongly, as though specially concentrated there, in the psyche of man, works and rules in all matter as the general source of life that creates and preserves the world. Thus, the psyche loses the special singularity that distinguished it from all the other things and substances in the world, and made it incomparable and unique. Later reporters are wrong in attributing to these Ionic thinkers (for whom vital power and material substance seemed immediately and indissolubly united) the conception of a separate, independent "World-Soul". Not as emanations from a single Soul of the World did they conceive the separate souls of men; but neither did they conceive them as simply independent, unique, and entirely incomparable essences. They are expressions of that force which everywhere in all the phenomena of the world produces life and is itself _life_. Attributing spiritual qualities to the primeval source of things, the physiology of the "Hylozoists" naturally could not assume any profound distinction between that source and the "soul". Deprived in this way of its separateness, the soul acquired a new importance in exchange; in another sense from that of the mystics and theologians it could still be thought of as something divine, for it was a participator in the one Force which builds and rules the world. It is not the abode of a single daimonic {366} nature, but instead, the very nature of god is alive within it.
The closer its inward connexion with the universal Whole the less, of course, will the soul be able to preserve its individual existence, which was only lent to it while it gave life and movement to the body, when that body, the sign and support of its separateness, is overtaken by death. These earliest philosophers whose view was almost entirely concentrated on the broad outlines of the life of nature as a whole, would hardly have regarded it as part of their task to formulate a deliberate opinion about the fate of the puny individual soul after the death of its body. In no case could they have spoken of an _immortality_ of the soul in the same sense as did the mystics who regarded the soul of which they spoke as something which has entered from without into material existence, and as a spiritual essence quite distinct from everything material. The latter were thus able to attribute to the psyche a capacity for separate and continued existence which was inadmissible in the case of a force of movement and sensation completely inhering in matter and in the shaping of matter. And it was such a force which the physiologists called the soul.
Ancient tradition, nevertheless, asserts that Thales of Miletos, whose genius first began the philosophic study of nature, was the first "to call the soul (of man) immortal".[3\11] But Thales, who recognized a "soul" also in magnets and plants,[4\11] and thought of the material stuff and the motive force of the "soul" as inseparable, can only have spoken of the "immortality" of the human soul in the same sense as he might have spoken of the immortality of all "soul-forces" in nature. Like the primal Matter which works and creates by reason of its own natural powers of life, so, too, the universal Force which permeates it[5\11] is imperishable and indestructible, as it is uncreated. It is entirely and essentially alive and can never be "dead".
Anaximander said of the "Unlimited" from which all things have been developed by separation, and by which all things are enveloped and directed, that it never grows old, but is immortal and imperishable.[6\11] This cannot be intended to apply to the human soul as a separate existence; for like all separate creations out of the "Unlimited" it must "in the order of the time" pay the penalty for the "offence" of its separate existence,[7\11] and lose itself again in the one primordial matter.
Nor could the third in this series--Anaximenes of Miletos--have differed seriously from Thales in the sense in which {367} he spoke of the soul as "immortal"; for him it was of the same nature[8\11] as the one divine[9\11] primal element of Air that is eternally in movement and produces all things out of itself.
§ 3
In the teaching of Herakleitos of Ephesos the living power of the primal essence--the one[10\11] and universal, out of which arises through change the many and the particular, which manifests itself in the union, regarded as indissoluble, of matter and motive force--received even greater prominence than with the older Ionians. By them matter itself--described as either limited or not limited in reference to one particular quality--is regarded as self-evidently in motion. For Herakleitos the origin of all multiplicity lies rather in the creative energy of absolute Life itself which is at the same time a definite material substance or analogous to one of the known substances. The idea of _life_, and that form of it which makes its appearance in man, must have been more important for him than for any of his predecessors.
This never-resting force and activity of becoming that has neither beginning nor end, is represented by the Hot and Dry and called by the name of that elementary condition which cannot be thought of as ceasing to move, namely, Fire. The ever-living (~aei/zôon~) fire, which periodically kindles itself and periodically goes out (Bywater, _fr._ 20), is formed entirely of movement and livingness. Living belongs to everything; but living is becoming, changing, becoming something different without cessation. Every appearance brings forth from itself, at the moment of its appearance, the opposite of itself. Birth, life, and death, and fresh birth clash together in a single burning moment, like the lightning (_fr._ 28).
That which thus moves itself in unceasing vitality and has all its being in becoming; which perpetually changes and "in backward-straining effort" finds itself again--this is something endowed with reason, creative in accordance with reason and "art"; is Reason (~lo/gos~) itself. In creating the world it loses itself in the elements; it suffers its "death" (_frr._ 66, 67) when in the "Way downwards" it becomes water and earth (_fr._ 21). There are degrees of value in the elements decided by the relation which they hold towards the moving and self-vivifying fire. But that which in the multiplicity of the phenomena in the world, yet preserves its godlike fiery nature--this is for Herakleitos "psyche". Psyche is fire.[11\11] Fire and psyche are interchangeable terms.[12\11] And so, too, the psyche of man is fire, a part of the universal fiery {368} energy that surrounds it and upholds it, through the "inhalation" of which it maintains itself alive;[13\11] a portion of the World-Reason by participation in which it is itself rational. In men God is living.[14\11] But god does not descend into man, as in the teaching of the Theologians, entering as a finite individuality into the vessel of the individual human life. As a united whole he surrounds men with his flood and reaches after and into them, as though with fiery tongues. A portion[15\11] of his universal Wisdom is living in the soul of man: the "drier", more fiery, nearer to the universal Fire and further from the less living elements he is, the wiser will he be (_frr._ 74, 75, 76). If he sundered himself from the universal wisdom, man would become nothing; it is his business in thinking, as in acting and in moral behaviour, to surrender himself to the One Living essence that "nourishes" him and is the Mind and Law of the world (_frr._ 91, 92, 100, 103).
But the soul itself is also a portion of the universal Fire that in the perpetual variation of its form of being has been encompassed by the body and become entangled in corporeality. Here we no longer have the rigid, unmediated contrast between "Body" and "Soul" such as it appeared from the standpoint of the theologian. The elements of the body, water and earth, have themselves arisen and perpetually arise out of the fire which changes into all other things, and into which everything else changes (_fr._ 22). So it is the soul itself, the creative fire, which _creates_ the body. "Soul," i.e. Fire, unceasingly turns itself into the lower elements; there is no contrast between them, and it is but a continual flux of transition.
While it is enclosed in the body the soul is still affected by unceasing change. In this it is like everything else. Nothing in the world can for a single moment preserve the parts which compose it unaltered; the perpetual movement and alteration of its being constitute its life. The sun itself, the greatest fire-body, becomes another sun every day (_fr._ 32). So, too, the soul, though distinct from the body and a self-existing substance, yet is a substance that never remains like itself. In unceasing alteration of its material substance, its contents are perpetually being transposed. It loses its fire of life in the lower elements; it absorbs fresh fire from the living Fire of the universe that surrounds it. There can be no question of the permanent identity of the soul, of the spiritual personality, with itself. What in the unbroken process of upward and downward straining seems to maintain itself as a single person, is in reality a series of souls and {369} personalities, one taking the place of another and ousting and being ousted in turn.
Thus, even while it is in life, the soul is perpetually dying--but to live again; ever supplementing the departing soul-life or supplying its place with another. So long as it can recruit itself from the surrounding World-Fire, so long the individual lives. Separation from the source of all life, the living and universal fire of the world, would be death for it. The soul may temporarily lose its life-giving contact with the "common world": this happens in sleep and dreaming which enclose it in their own world (_frr._ 94, 95), and this is already a partial death to it. Sometimes, too, the soul has a tendency to transform itself to a humidity not always made good by fresh fire; the drunkard has a "moist soul" (_fr._ 73). Finally, there comes the moment when the soul of man cannot any longer repair the loss of the living fire which is taken from it in the perpetual alteration of its matter. Then it dies; death carries off the last of the series of living fires which in their continuity made up the human soul.[16\11]
But in Herakleitos' world there is no such thing as death in the absolute sense--an end followed by no beginning, an unconditional cessation of becoming. "Death" is for him only a point where one condition of things gives way to another; a relative "not-being", involving death for one but simultaneously bringing birth and life for another (_frr._ 25, [64], 66, 67). Death, just as much as life, is for him a positive thing. "Fire lives the death of earth, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air, and earth the death of water" (_fr._ 25). The One that is in all things is at once dead and alive (_fr._ 78), immortal and mortal (_fr._ 67); a perpetual "death and becoming" agitates it. So, too, the "death" of man must be the exit from one positive state of things, and the entry into another, also positive, condition. Death occurs for man when the "soul" is no longer within him. Only the body is then left; alone and by itself it is no better than dung (_fr._ 85). But the soul--what becomes of that? It must have altered; it was fire, but now it has descended on the "Way downwards" and become water--to become earth after that. So it must happen to all fire. In death the fire in man "goes out" (_fr._ 77). "It is death for the souls to become water" says Herakleitos clearly enough (_fr._ 68).[17\11] The soul must tread this path at last, and treads it willingly; change is for the soul its delight and refreshment (_fr._ 83). The soul has then changed itself into the elements of the body, has lost itself in the body. {370}
But it cannot rest permanently in this transformation. "For the souls it is death to become water; for the water it is death to become earth. And yet from earth comes water; and from water, soul" (_fr._ 68). Thus, in the restless up and down of becoming, in the "Way upwards" the soul reconstitutes itself out of the lower elements. But not _that_ soul which had formerly animated the
## particular individual and of whose complete self-identity in the
midst of the influx of the Fire-spirit there could be no question even during the life of the body. The inquiry after an individual immortality or even a continued existence of the separate soul could hardly have had any meaning at all for Herakleitos. Nor can he have admitted it under the form of the "transmigration of the soul".[18\11] It is quite certain that Herakleitos can never have distinctly asserted the changeless persistence of the individual human soul in the midst of the unbroken stream of becoming in which all fixity is nothing but an illusion of the senses. But it is also incredible that, in despite of his own fundamental principles, he even admitted the possibility of this popular view with an indulgence quite foreign to his nature.[19\11] What could have tempted him to do so? We are told[20\11] that it was from the mysteries that he adopted this opinion which was one of their most important doctrines. Herakleitos, however, only casts an occasional glance at the mysteries and what might be called their "doctrine" (just as he glanced at other prominent manifestations of the excited religious life of his time[21\11]); and he does so in order to harmonize their teaching with his own--a result which he achieves rather by imposing an interpretation than by patiently eliciting one. He demonstrates that the mysteries might be harmonized with his own doctrine,[22\11] which seemed to him able to explain all the phenomena of the world; that contrariwise he ever sought to set his own teaching in harmony with that of the mysteries, or that the latter had shown him the way to his thought, or could ever have tempted him to set foot outside his own self-chosen path--of this there is not a scrap of evidence to be had.
The individual in its isolation has, for Herakleitos, neither value nor importance: to persist in this isolation (if it had been possible would have seemed to him a crime.[23\11] The Fire is for him indestructible and immortal as a totality, not as divided into individual particles, but only as the one Universal Mind that transforms itself into all things and draws all things back again into itself. The soul of man has a claim to immortality as an emanation of this universal Reason, {371} and shares the immortality which belongs to it. So, too, the soul, even when it has lost itself in the elements, finds itself again. Between "want" and "satisfaction" (_frr._ 24, 36), this process of becoming has its perpetual being. A day will come when the Fire will "overtake" everything (_fr._ 26); God will then be utterly by himself--all in all. But that is not the purpose of this world; here change, becoming and passing away will never end. Nor should they end; the "Strife" (_fr._ 43) which has created the world, and ever fashions it anew, is the most inward nature of the All-living which it perpetually stirs to insatiable desire of becoming. For the desire and refreshment of all things is Change (_frr._ 72, 83), the coming and going in the interplay of Becoming.
It is the precise opposite of a quietistic mood that speaks from the whole teaching of Herakleitos. His voice is a trumpet call that grows louder and louder as his lofty and majestic spirit with ever-increasing intensity proclaims prophet-like the last word of wisdom. He knows well that it is only labour that can give meaning to rest, and hunger to satisfaction; only sickness can call forth the desire of health (_fr._ 104). That is the law of the world which binds together the opposing contraries, each of which is engendered from the last, with an inward and complete necessity. He bows before it and assents to it. For him the fixity of the soul in a Blessedness that was without activity and without change--even if such were thinkable[24\11]--would not have seemed a possible goal of desire.
§ 4
Even before the days of Herakleitos the torch of philosophic inquiry had been borne from the coasts of Ionia to the West by Xenophanes of Kolophon who in a life of adventure had wandered as far as Southern Italy and Sicily. For his fiery temperament the most subtle reflection was turned into life and experience, and the one enduring source of Being to which he ever directed his gaze became the universal Divinity that is all perception and thought, that tirelessly embraces all things in its thought and intelligence, and, without beginning or end, perpetually remains the same with itself. What Xenophanes had to say about this God which for him is the same as the world, became the basis for the elaborated doctrine of the Eleatic school which, in declared opposition to Herakleitos,[25\11] denied all possibility of movement, becoming, alteration, division of the One into Many, to the one absolute Being that completely and entirely occupies Space, is raised {372} above all development, whether temporal or spatial, and remains perpetually enclosed in itself in absolute self-sufficiency.
For this view the whole multiplicity of things that presses itself upon sense-perception is an _illusion_. Deceptive also is the apparent existence of a multiplicity of animated beings, just as the whole of nature is an illusion. It was not "Nature", the content of actual experience, that provided the starting-point of the philosophy of Parmenides. Without any assistance from experience, simply by the pure logical deductions to be made from a single fundamental concept (that of "Being"), which was to be grasped only by the understanding, this philosophy claimed to arrive at the whole content of its teaching. For the philosophic scientists of Ionia the soul also had been a part of nature and the science of the soul a department of the science of nature; and this inclusion of the psychical within the physical was the peculiarity in their doctrine of the soul which distinguished it from the ordinary popular psychology. When, however, the whole of Nature was to be ruled out of account as a subject of scientific knowledge, the derivation of psychology from physiology had to be given up as well. These _aphysici_[26\11] were logically debarred from holding any doctrine of the soul.
With a complaisance that is remarkable in view of the uncompromising logical vigour with which they deduced their main theory and based it on abstract, super-sensual knowledge, the Eleatics conceded so much at least to the region of appearance and the pressure of sense-perception that, although they did not deduce from their own fundamental conceptions a physical theory of multifarious appearance and its development, yet, side by side with their rigid doctrine of being, in unjustified and unjustifiable relation with it, they did in fact put forward such a theory. Xenophanes, himself, had already in the same way offered a physical theory of limited and relative validity. Parmenides in the second part of his doctrinal poem, developed, "in deceptive adornment of words," not an authoritative statement of the true nature of being, but "human opinions" of becoming and creation in the world of multiplicity. This, too, must be the standpoint of the physiological doctrines put forward by Zeno of Elea, the boldest dialectician who upheld the doctrine of the motionless All-One. In the course of such a physiology, and with the same implied reservations, the Eleatic philosophers dealt also with the nature and origin of the soul. Their physical doctrine was framed entirely on the lines of the older type of {373} natural philosophy, and they regarded the relation of the spiritual to the corporeal from exactly the same point of view as their predecessors had done. For Parmenides (146 ff, Mull. = _fr._ 16 Diels) the mind (~no/os~) of man depends for its existence upon the mixture of two ingredients of which everything, including its body, is composed. These ingredients are the "Light" and the "Night" (the Warm and the Cold, Fire and Earth). What is intellectually active is, even in mankind, the "nature of his limbs"; the character of his thought is determined by the one of the two elements which preponderates in the individual. Even the dead man (because he still has a body) has feeling and sensation; but these powers are deserted by the warm and the fiery and given over to the cold, the dark, and silence. All that is has some capacity of knowledge.[27\11]--It would be impossible to condemn the "soul" to corporeality more completely than is here done by the bold philosopher of abstract Reason, who at the same time denied so unconditionally all validity to sense-perception. The soul is evidently no longer an independent substance but a mere resultant of material mixture, a function of elements in composition. For Zeno, too, the "soul" in the same way was an exactly equal mixture of the four elementary properties of matter, the Warm, the Cold, the Dry, and the Wet.[28\11]
It is, therefore, startling, in the face of these utterances, to find that Parmenides also said about the "soul" that the deity that rules the world "at one time, sends it out of the Invisible into the Visible, and at another time back again".[29\11] Here, the soul is no longer a condition arising from the mixture of material elements, but an independent being credited with pre-existence before its entry into the "Visible", i.e. before its entry into the life of the body, and also with a continued existence after its separation from the realm of visibility--and indeed, with a sojourn, several times repeated, in those two worlds. Did Parmenides distinguish between this independently existing soul and the being that perceives in the mixture of the elements and as mind (~no/os~) thinks, but whose existence is bound up with the elements and the body they together compose? It is obvious at any rate that in what he says of the psyche, and its alternate life in the visible and the invisible, Parmenides is not speaking as a physiologist, but as an adherent of the Orphic-Pythagorean theosophy. While reserving for himself his knowledge of "Truth" and unalterable Being, he could select as he liked among the "opinions of men" when speaking only hypothetically. In his doctrine as a practical teacher with an ethical purpose {374} in view he preferred to adopt the conceptions of the Pythagoreans with whom he lived in close association.[30\11]
§ 5
Ionic physiology had fixed its attention on Nature as a whole, and on the phenomena of life displayed in every nook and corner of the universe; man, as a mere ripple on the surface of the ocean of becoming and taking form, was almost entirely neglected. A philosophy that made it its main effort to learn the nature of man, and, still further, with the knowledge so acquired, to show man the way and purpose of his living, had to try other paths.
This is what Pythagoras of Samos did. What he called his "Philosophy"[31\11] was in essence a practical effort. Plato[32\11] tells us that Pythagoras was so peculiarly honoured because he discovered a special mode of directing one's life. A distinct way of living, formed on a religious and ethical basis, was his creation. How far his "polymathy",[33\11] which indubitably contained already the substance of Pythagorean science, may have become a system in his hands, is not distinctly known. What is certain is that in Kroton he formed a society which, together with the strict rules in accordance with which he organized their manner of life for his associates, eventually spread far and wide among the Achæan and Dorian cities of the Italian "great Greece". In this society a profound conception of human life and its purposes was given practical and visible application, and to have brought this about must be regarded as the act and the special service of Pythagoras. The fundamental conception of this way of life, except in so far as it may have contained from the beginning a mystic philosophy of numbers, was by no means the special invention of Pythagoras; the new and potent feature which he introduced was the force of personality which was able to give life and body to the ideal. What was apparently lacking in similar movements in ancient Greece was now provided by a great man who for his followers was a pattern and an example, a leader inspiring imitation and emulation. His personality became a centre to which a whole community was attracted by a sort of inward necessity. Before very long this founder of a community appeared to his followers as a superman, unique and incomparable among all other men. Some lines of Empedokles,[34\11] who did not himself belong to the Pythagorean society, bear witness to this fact, and to his followers Pythagoras became in memory a saint or even a god in human form, and they related legends of the miracles he had {375} performed. For us it is difficult to form a connected picture or trace the real features of the man beneath the dazzling halo of the saint.
The teaching which enabled him to knit together his followers in a far closer bond of fellowship in living than had been achieved by any Orphic sect, must still in the main have coincided with what in the Orphic doctrine immediately related to the religious life. He too pointed out the way of salvation for the soul and his doctrine of the soul formed the central feature of his philosophy.
So far as our scanty and dubious evidence serves us, the substance of the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul may be stated as follows.
The soul of man, once more regarded entirely as the "double" of the visible body and its powers, is a daimonic immortal being[35\11] that has been cast down from divine heights and for a punishment is confined within the "custody" of the body.[36\11] It has no real relationship with the body; it is not what may be called the personality of the individual visible man; any soul may dwell in any body.[37\11] When death separates it from the body the soul must first endure a period of purgation in Hades[38\11] and then return again to the upper world. The souls invisibly swarm about the living;[39\11] in the tremulous motion of motes in the sunbeam the Pythagoreans saw the movement of the "souls".[40\11] The whole air is full of souls.[41\11] Upon earth, however, the soul must seek out another body, and this may be repeated many times. So it wanders a long way, passing through many bodies of men and beasts.[42\11] Very ancient tradition[43\11] said that Pythagoras himself remembered the earlier incarnations through which his soul had passed (and of which he gave information for the instruction and warning of the faithful). Here, too, the doctrine of the soul's transmigrations took on an edificatory character in a religious and ethical sense. The conditions of the new incarnations and the character of the new lifetime are governed by the performances of the past life. What the soul has done in the past, that it must suffer in its own person when it becomes a man again.[44\11]
It is thus of primary importance both for the present life and for future incarnations to know and to follow the methods of salvation delivered by Pythagoras to his followers. The society points out the way to its company of the faithful in purifications and initiations, in a "Pythagorean life"[45\11] entirely organized with the same purpose in view--to "follow the god".[46\11] Much of the old ritual symbolism that had been {376} in use for ages must have been incorporated in this Pythagorean asceticism.[47\11] The theological ethic of asceticism was essentially negative in character, and here, too, it meant nothing more than a protecting of the soul against the attacks of external evil that might come and pollute it.[48\11] All that matters is to keep the soul pure: no need for moral reformation--only that it be kept free from external evil. The fact of immortality, the soul's perpetuity, stands fast and unalterable; as it was from the beginning so it must ever be and live.[49\11] To lift it at last altogether from this earthly existence and restore it to a free divine state of being--that, at least, was the final goal.[50\11]
The practical philosophy of the Pythagorean school is founded upon a conception of the soul as absolutely distinct from "nature", and, in fact, opposed to it. It is thrust into the life of nature, but it is in a foreign world where it preserves its self-enclosed individuality intact and from which it escapes into independence to undergo ever-renewed incarnations. Its origin is supra-mundane, and so, too, when liberated from the shackles of natural life it will one day be enabled to return to a supernatural existence as a spirit.
Not one of these ideas is achieved by a process of scientific thinking. Physiology, the science of the world and all the phenomena of the world could never lead to the conception of the soul's separateness from nature and its life. It was not from Greek science, but neither was it, as ancient tradition would have us believe, from foreign lands, that Pythagoras got his belief in the fallen nature of the soul, descended from supra-mundane heights to this earthly nature, and in its long pilgrimage through many bodies on the completion of which it is to be free at last, through purifications and initiations. He may have owed much to his travels; from his stay in Egypt, perhaps, he may (like Demokritos after him) have derived the stimulus to his mathematical discoveries and much else besides of the "learning" which Herakleitos ascribes to him. His doctrine of the soul, on the other hand, simply reproduces in essentials the fanciful ideas of the old popular psychology, as it had been enlarged and transformed by the _theologi_ and the purification priests. Tradition was right in its estimation of his character, when it set him in this company and made him the pupil of Pherekydes of Syros, the _theologos_.[51\11]
It can hardly be doubted that Pythagoras himself laid the foundations of the Pythagorean science--the doctrine of the creation of the world and perhaps, too, the interpretation of {377} all being and becoming in the world as due to the action and relation of numbers, as the essential basis of all things--all this, at least in elementary outline, must have been handed on by him to his followers. After his death the two sides of his doctrine continued to develop for a period in loose conjunction side by side; the guidance of life by the mystical and religious philosophy (though this, indeed, was hardly capable of further development), and the scientific interest which grew into a fairly elaborate system. Indeed, with the break-up of the Pythagorean society and its bifurcation in the fifth century, the scattered members of the band now brought into touch with the scientific studies of other communities and cut off from the ideal of the Pythagorean life which could only be realized within the limits of the society, were forced to continue their scientific studies in solitude. Pythagorean science, evolving, as it did, a picture of the world as a whole, no less than Ionian physiology deprived the soul of the unique and, indeed, antagonistic relation to nature that Pythagorean theology had given it. Philolaos, conceiving it in a manner strictly conforming to the mathematical and musical theory, called the soul a _Harmony_ of contrary elements united together in the body.[52\11] If, however, the soul is only a binding-together of opposites to unity and harmony, then it must, when death breaks up the conjunction of the united elements, itself pass away and perish.[53\11] It is difficult to imagine how the older Pythagorean faith in the soul as an independent being dwelling in the body and surviving it--in the immortal soul, in fact--could be accommodated to this conception. Can it be that the two conceptions were not originally intended to be brought into conjunction at all, or were not meant to exclude each other? Ancient tradition spoke of different groups among the followers of Pythagoras who had also different objects, methods, and aims of study; nor shall we be inclined to deny all credibility to this tradition when we observe how little, in fact, Pythagorean science and Pythagorean faith had to do with each other.[54\11]
And yet we have to admit that the same Philolaos, who described the soul as a harmony of its body, also spoke of the soul as an independent and imperishable being. We may well doubt whether these two contradictory utterances can really come from the same man and apply to the same object; though the same man might really speak in varying language about the one soul if he recognized different _parts_ of the soul of which different truths held good; and this was, in fact, first suggested by the Pythagorean school.[55\11] {378}
§ 6
Empedokles of Akragas did not belong to the Pythagorean school (it lost its external unity in his time); but he approaches Pythagorean doctrine so closely in his opinions and teaching about the soul of man, its problems and destinies, that there can be no doubt about Pythagorean influence upon the formation of his convictions on these points. His many-sided activities also included the study of natural science and he took up the researches of the Ionic Physiologists with zeal and a marked aptitude for the observation and synthesis of natural phenomena. But the roots of his peculiar individuality--the _pathos_ which moved and agitated him--lay in a practical activity far removed from scientific investigation and representing a brilliant resuscitation in a very different age of the character and practice of the _mantis_, the purification-priest and magical-physician of the sixth century. The introduction to his "Purifications"[56\11] gives a picture of his triumphal progress from city to city, crowned with ribbons and garlands, adored as a god and questioned by thousands: "Where is the road to healing?" He intends to give his disciple Pausanias the results of his own experience and to teach him all his remedies for disease and their virtues, the arts of stilling the winds and stirring them up, producing drought or rain, raising the dead from Hades.[57\11] He himself boasted of being a magician and his pupil Gorgias saw him "do magic".[58\11] Through him those efforts of the _Kathartes_, the expiation-priest and seer, which an earlier and already distant-seeming time had honoured as the highest form of wisdom, at last achieved a voice and literary expression--an expression given them with the fullest personal experience of the truth of their claims by one who was convinced of their power to control nature and sure of the godlike status of the man who had reached these almost superhuman heights of empire over nature. As a god, an immortal no longer subject to death, he passed through all the land--so Empedokles himself tells us.[59\11] He may have won credit in many places. He did not, indeed, found an ordered society of disciples and adherents, a sect: this does not seem to have been his intention. But he alone as a unique and unparalleled being, a self-confident personality of the greatest force and weight impressed himself masterfully both as mystic and politician upon the mundane affairs of his contemporaries and pointed the way beyond time and all things temporal to a blessed and divine state as the final goal of human life. He {379} must have made a profound impression upon the men among whom he lived,[60\11] though he disappeared from their midst like a comet, and left no permanent traces of his presence behind him. Many legends still witness to the astonishment that his appearance among men provoked, more especially those legends that in varying form related his end.[61\11] They are all expressions of the same belief: that he, as his own verses had foretold, in his departure did not have to suffer death; he had vanished, "translated" body and soul together to an everlasting divine life, as once Menelaos had been and so many great figures of the ancient days, and even a few Heroes of more recent times.[62\11] Once more the ancient conception shows in this story that it still lives on: immortal life can only be obtained by undissolved union of the psyche with its body. Such a legend hardly did justice to Empedokles' own idea. When he claimed to be a god who would never die he certainly did not mean that his psyche would remain for ever bound to his body. On the contrary, he thought that in "death", as men[63\11] call it, it would be freed from this last corporeal envelope[64\11] and never again have to enter into a body, but would live for ever in freedom and divinity. His conception of the conscious after-life of the psyche was as different as it was possible for it to be from the Homeric conception on which that translation legend was based.
Empedokles united in his own person to an astonishing degree the most sober attempts at a study of nature that was scientific according to its lights, and quite irrational beliefs and theological speculations. Occasionally the scientific impulse passes over to influence even the world of his beliefs;[65\11] but as a rule theology and natural science exist side by side in his mind quite independently. As a physiologist he inherited the already extensive and variously developed stock of ideas belonging to the older generations of inquirers and thinkers. He himself was able to unite conceptions derived from the most different sources into an original whole that satisfied himself at least. Becoming and passing-away, all qualitative change, were denied by him as by the Eleatics, but the permanent substance of Being is for him no single indivisible unity. There are four "roots" of things, the four bodies of elements, which in this division are for the first time clearly distinguished. It is the mixture and separation of the essentially indivisible elements that cause the appearance of becoming and perishing; and those two processes are caused by the two forces--clearly distinguished from the elements--of attraction and repulsion, {380} Love and Hate, which in the creative process struggle and in turn overmaster each other until at last, in the final victory of one of the two forces, all things are either united or divided; in either case an organic world ceases to exist. The present state of the universe is one in which "Love", the tendency to amalgamation of differences, is prevailing; when this tendency is completed, there will be an absolute levelling-out of all distinction; a result which Empedokles, a quietist in his scientific studies as well, regards as the most desirable end.
In this world, then, that experiences only mechanical movement and change, and from whose evolution Empedokles by an ingenious turn is able to exclude all idea of purpose, there are also to be found souls; or rather psychical powers which grow up entirely within it. Sense-perception is expressly distinguished from the capacity of thought by Empedokles.[66\11] The former takes place when each of the elements, from the mixture of which the perceiving being has its origin, comes into contact with, and so becomes aware of, the same elements in the object perceived, through the "passages" that connect the interior of the body with the exterior.[67\11] "Thinking" has its seat in the heart's blood, where the elements and their powers are mixed most equally. Or rather this blood actually _is_ thinking and the power of thought;[68\11] the material substance and its vital functions thus also for Empedokles completely coincide. Plainly, nothing in the nature of a permanent substantial "soul" is here intended by the thinking-power of the "mind", but rather a capacity of bringing together and unifying the individual sense-activities;[69\11] a capacity no less than the individual powers of sensation bound up with the elements, the senses, and the body.[70\11] With the varying constitution of the body, they too vary.[71\11] Both capacities, that of sense-perception, and that of thought, as vital expressions of the matter that is combined together in the organic creature, are present in all organisms; in men, in beasts, and even in plants.[72\11]
If we give the name of "soul"[73\11] to the sum of these psychical powers--a name generally reserved for the common permanent substratum of the changing psychical activities--we cannot avoid concluding, in accordance with the logic of this philosopher, that the "soul" must be perishable. With the death and destruction of the individual the elementary parts that go to compose him are disunited, and the soul which in this case is nothing but the highest resultant of that composition, must itself disappear with their dissolution--as it had come into being with their union.[74\11] {381}
It might seem as if Empedokles himself was as far as possible removed from drawing such conclusions from his own premises. No one speaks more distinctly and forcibly of the spiritual, individual beings that dwell in men and in other creatures of nature as well. They are regarded by him as Daimones fallen to the corporeal world, who have to pass through many different forms of life till they may at last hope for release.
In the introduction to his poem on Nature, he describes, from his own experience, and the information of the Daimones who had once led his soul down to this earthly Vale of Grief,[75\11] how by an ancient decree of the gods and the compulsion of Necessity, every daimon that has "polluted" itself by drinking the blood or eating the flesh of living beings,[76\11] or has broken its oath,[77\11] is banished for a long period[78\11] from the company of the blessed. It is thrust down to the "Meadow of Disaster", into the realm of contradiction,[79\11] the cave of misery upon this earth, and must now wander through many "painful ways of life"[80\11] in changing incarnations. "Thus, I myself was once a boy and also a maiden, a bush, a bird, and a voiceless fish in the salty flood" (ll. 11, 12 = _fr._ 117). This daimon that in expiation of its crime must wander through the forms of men, beasts, and even plants, is evidently no other than what popular speech and that of theologians as well called the "psyche", the soul-spirit.[81\11] In all essentials though perhaps in clearer language, Empedokles merely repeated[82\11] what the adherents of the doctrine of Transmigration had long told of its divine origin, its fall and penal banishment in earthly bodies. So, too, when as teacher of the means that bring salvation, he tells how more gracious forms and conditions of life may be obtained in the series of births, till at last complete release from rebirth is achieved,[83\11] Empedokles follows in the footsteps of the purification-priests and _theologi_ of old. It is a matter of keeping the daimon within us free from the pollutions that bind it fast to the earthly life. To this end the methods of religious purification are most efficacious; Empedokles respects them quite as much as did the old _Kathartai_. It is necessary to keep the internal daimon far removed from every kind of "sin",[84\11] more particularly from the drinking of blood and the eating of meat which must necessarily involve the murder of kinsmen daimones which are dwelling in the slaughtered beasts.[85\11] By purification and asceticism (which here again dispenses with a positive form of morality aimed at reforming the man) a gradual process to purer and better births is achieved;[86\11] in the end the persons thus reborn in a purified condition {382} become seers, poets, doctors, and are the leaders of mankind.[87\11] Finally, when they have emerged superior even to these highest steps of earthly life, they return to the other immortals, and become themselves gods released from human misery, escaping death, and now indestructible.[88\11] Empedokles regard himself as one who has reached the last stage,[89\11] and points out to others the way up to it.
Between what Empedokles the mystic here tells us of the soul that was once living its divine life, but has since been plunged into the world of the elements, though it is not for ever bound to them; and what Empedokles the physiologist teaches of the psychical powers that dwell in the elements and are bound to the body that is composed of the elements and perish with their dissolution, there seems to be a hopeless contradiction. And yet if we are to grasp the whole truth of what Empedokles means, we must neither leave on one side half of what he says,[90\11] nor yet by well-meaning interpretation seek to bring the philosopher into harmony with himself,[91\11] when he clearly speaks with two different voices. The two voices say different things, and yet in the mind of Empedokles, there is no contradiction in what they say, for they are dealing with totally distinct objects. The psychical powers and faculties of feeling and perception which are functions of matter, born in matter, and determined by it, together with the thinking faculty that is no other than the heart's blood of men--these neither make up the character and content of that soul-spirit which dwells in men, beasts, and flowers, nor are they expressions of its
## activity. They are entirely bound up with the elements and their
combination, and in man they are joined to the body and its organs; they are the powers and faculties of this body, and not of a special and invisible entity, the soul. The soul-daimon is not made out of the elements, nor is it for ever chained to them. It enters as a stranger into this world in which the only permanent component parts are[92\11] the four elements, and the two forces of Love and Hate; and it enters it from another world, the world of gods and spirits, to its detriment; the elements cast it about from one to another "and they all hate it" (_fr._ 115, 12, l. 35 M.). This living soul, with its independent existence, that thus enters into foreign and hostile surroundings, only enters into such earthly creatures as already possess senses, feeling and perception, together with reason or the faculty of thinking, the crowning manifestation of their material union. It is, however, as little identical with these psychical faculties as it is with the mixture of elementary matter or, in {383} the case of men, with the heart's blood. It exists, unmixed and incapable of mixture, _alongside_ the body and its faculties which indeed only have life--"what men call life"--(_fr._ 15, 2, l. 117 M.) when united with it. When they are separated from it they fall into dissolution; not so the soul, which continues its journey and visits other dwelling places, and does not share in their dissolution.
This peculiar dualistic doctrine reflects the two sides of Empedokles' own mental activity. He probably intended in this way to unite the views of both the physiologists and the theologians. To the Greeks, such a twofold division of the inner life may have seemed less surprising than it does to us. The conception of a "soul" that as an independent, unique, and self-contained spiritual being dwells within the body, while the body does not receive its intellectual faculties of perceiving, feeling, willing and thinking from the soul, but exercises these by its own power--this conception agrees at bottom with the ideas of popular psychology that are as a rule described or implied in the Homeric poems.[93\11] The only difference is that these ideas of poet and populace are elaborated and defined by the speculations of theologians and philosophers. How deeply impressed upon the Greek mind such conceptions, derived eventually from Homer, actually were, can be measured by the fact that a conception of the twofold origin of psychic activity, its twofold nature and sphere of action, closely related to that of Empedokles, is continually recurring in more advanced stages of philosophy. It occurs not merely in Plato, but even in Aristotle, who in addition to the "soul" that directs and expresses itself in the physico-organic nature of man, recognizes another being of divine descent that enters into man "from without", the "mind" (~nou=s~) which is separable both from the soul and from the body, and is alone destined to survive the death of the man to which it was assigned.[94\11] In the doctrine of Empedokles, too, it is a stranger-guest from the distant land of gods that enters into man to give him a soul. This being is indeed far below the "mind" of Aristotle in philosophic importance; nevertheless, in the introduction of this Stranger into the world composed of the elements and vital faculties, a sense of the absolute uniqueness of spirit, its unlikeness to everything material, its essential distinctness from matter, finds expression, if only in a limited theological fashion.
In the light of such theological considerations, the soul seems also to Empedokles something essentially distinct from its prototype, the Homeric psyche, which after its separation {384} from the body passes to the twilight of a shadowy dream-life. To him, the soul is of divine race, too noble for this world of visibility, and only when it escapes from this world does it seem to him to begin its real and full life. Though confined within the body, it has its separate existence there; it has no concern with the everyday business of perception and sensation--not even with that of thinking, which is nothing else but the heart's blood. But it is
## active in the "higher" mode of knowledge, in ecstatic
inspiration;[95\11] to it alone belongs the profound insight of the philosopher who is enabled to pass beyond the limits of mere experience and sense-perception, and behold the totality of the universe in its true nature.[96\11] To it alone apply all the requirements of ethical and religious systems--duties in this higher sense belong only to the soul; it is something in the nature of a "conscience". Its highest duty is to free itself from the unhallowed union with the body, and the elements of this world; the rules of purification and asceticism refer solely to it.
Between this soul-daimon that yearns after its divine home, and the world of the elements, there exists no inward bond or necessary connexion. And yet, since they have become implicated in each other's existence, a certain parallelism exists between them in character and destiny. In the mechanically moved world, too, the separate and particular phenomena tend back again towards their starting point, the inwardly coherent Unity from which they once took their origin. A day will come when, after all struggle has been done away, "Love" alone will have absolute rule; and this means for the poet--who in his description even of this world of mechanical attraction and repulsion interpolates half-realized ethical concepts[97\11]--a state of absolute goodness and happiness. If there is no longer any world, then, until another one is created, no soul-daimon can be bound any more to the individual organisms of a world. Have they then all returned to the blessed communion of the immortal gods? It appears that not even the gods and daimones (and so not the spirits enclosed in world as "souls") are regarded by Empedokles as having everlasting life. "Long-living" is the name he repeatedly applies to them; he never distinctly ascribes _eternal_ life to them.[98\11] They, too, shall for a period enjoy "the happiness of profoundest peace" until, just as the elements and forces are drawn into the unity of the Sphairos, they, too, come together in the unity of the godlike Universal Mind, thence at a new world-creation to appear once more as individual separate being.[99\11] {385}
§ 7
Empedokles took a fully developed "hylozoic" system (which in itself, with its introduction of the motive forces of Conflict and Love, already betrayed a latent dualism) and attempted to combine with it an extreme form of spiritualist teaching. His attempt illustrates very clearly the observation that a philosophic science of nature in itself could never lead to the establishment of the axiom that the individual "soul" after its separation from the body continues to exist, still less that it is indestructible. Any one who still felt it necessary to assert that axiom could find support for it only by allowing physiology to be either overwhelmed by theological speculation, or else supplemented by it in the manner attempted by Empedokles.
Such an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable can have found few adherents among those who were accessible to scientific ideas, nor was it likely to tempt the physiological philosophy from the path which it had hitherto followed. Soon after Empedokles, and in essentials hardly influenced by him, Anaxagoras and Demokritos developed those doctrinal systems which were the last products of the independent speculation of Ionia. Demokritos was the founder and completer of the atomic doctrine according to which there exist "in reality" only the indivisible, minutest material bodies--which, while qualitatively indistinguishable, yet differ in shape, position, and arrangement in space as well as in bulk and weight--and empty space. He was obliged to seek for the "soul" (which to the _materialist_ may easily present itself as being a separate, substantial, self-existent thing) among those minutest bodies out of which the whole fabric of the world of appearance is built up. The soul is that which confers movement upon the inherently motionless collections of bodies. It is composed of the round and smooth atoms which, in the universal condition of unrest that keeps all the atoms in agitation, are the most easily moved, for they offer least resistance to change of position, and can most easily penetrate others. These atoms compose fire and the soul. It is the soul-atom--one being inserted between every two of the other atoms[100\11]--which gives these their movement; and it is from all the soul-atoms uniformly disposed throughout the whole body that the body gets its movement, whence also (though it must be admitted in an unintelligible manner) comes the power of perception, which equally depends on movement, and the thought arising thence, of this same body. {386} During the life-time of the individual body, the continuance of the soul-atoms is secured by the breathing which continually replaces the smooth soul-particles that are as continually being expelled from the whole atom-complex by the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. The breathing is always drawing in fresh soul-stuff from the air which is full of floating soul-atoms, and supplies it to the body. A time comes, however, when the breathing refuses this function, and death occurs, which is simply the insufficient supply of these moving and animating atoms.[101\11] With the coming of death, there is an end to the union of the atoms, whose amalgamation had formed the particular living organism. Neither the soul-atoms nor any of the other atoms are destroyed; they do not alter in kind; but from the loose state of aggregation which even in the living body hardly amounted to an absolute unity to which a single common name could be applied--from this they now escape entirely. It is scarcely possible to see how, on this view of what essentially constitutes mental and vital phenomena, as a mere resultant of the separate and individual
## activities of individual and disconnected bodies, the unity of the
living organism and the spiritual entity could ever come into being. It is even more evident that a unified "soul" could not possibly continue to exist after the dissolution which takes place at death of the atoms that in their union made up the organism. And, in fact, the soul-atoms disperse;[102\11] they return whence they came into the restless mass of world-stuff. The human individual, in this view of the case, perishes in death entirely.[103\11] The materials out of which he was shaped and composed are indestructible, and reserved for future construction; but his personality--the invisible personality, the "soul", just as much as the visible--has but a single existence strictly limited to its one appearance in time. The continued existence of the soul after death, an immortality in whatever manner the thing may be conceived, is here for the first time in the history of Greek thought, expressly denied. The Atomist, with the candid precision that distinguishes him, draws the necessary consequences of his premises.
Anaxagoras strikes out a path almost directly opposed to this materialist doctrine. As the first decisive and conscious dualist among Greek philosophers, he takes the material substratum of being, the inexhaustible many of distinctly characterized and distinctly separate "Seeds" of things--which are nevertheless indistinguishably intermingled with each other--and sets over against them a force which he {387} obviously did not mean to derive from them, to which he gives a name usually attached to the faculty of thought in man, and which in any case he thought of as analogous to that faculty.[104\11] This "Mind", simple, unmixed and unchangeable, is given such titles and adjectives that it is impossible to mistake the effort of Anaxagoras to think of it as something distinct from everything material, and in fact, absolutely immaterial and incorporeal.[105\11] It is at once power of thought and force of will; at the creation of the world it gives the first circular impulse to the intrinsically motionless lump of matter; the creation of distinct forms in accordance with a conscious purpose is begun by it--though the carrying out of this purpose is indeed to be completed in accordance with pure mechanical laws without the interference of "Mind". This "Mind" that plans and orders but does not make the world, that with the conscious insight of its omniscient wisdom[106\11] influences matter without being influenced in turn, that moves without being moved;[107\11] set over against the multiplicity of things as an indivisible unity,[108\11] "having nothing in common with anything outside itself"[109\11] but entirely self-contained[110\11]--how shall we conceive of it otherwise than as an almost personified, transcendent divine power confronting the world of matter as something foreign to it, ruling the world from without by magical, not mechanical, means?
But this transcendent is also completely immanent. **Wherever in this world life and independent movement are found, there, too, the mind as the source of life and movement must be active. "Mind rules all that has soul" says Anaxagoras.[111\11] In saying this he has not indeed asserted the presence of "Mind" within the animated being nor yet identity of nature as between soul and mind. But when we hear that Mind "goes through all things,[112\11] that in everything there is a part of all things, except of mind, and in some things of mind also",[113\11] that must imply the penetration of many associations of matter by mind (hardly any longer to be thought of as immaterial) whereby the previously asserted transcendency of mind seems to be given up. At any rate, as such associations in which is "Mind", living and animated beings are regarded. It is in them that "Mind" is present in continual, equal creativeness, though in different degrees;[114\11] indeed, Mind is or constitutes that very thing that we call the "soul" of a living being.[115\11] Among these living beings, which exist upon the moon,[116\11] as well as on earth, are not only men and beasts, but also plants.[117\11] In all these "Mind" is active; without losing any of its purity or unity, it is mixed with them.[118\11] {388} How we are to conceive the omnipotent Mind, whose oneness and self-containedness has been so emphatically asserted, as nevertheless entering simultaneously into the infinity of individual being--that certainly remains obscure. It is clear, however, that having thus derived all animated being from the single World-Mind, Anaxagoras could not speak of the continued existence of individual, self-existent "souls" after the dissolution of the material concretions in which moving and animating "soul-force" had once lived. The view is definitely ascribed to him that separation from the body is also "the soul's death".[119\11] Nothing, indeed, of the component parts that belong to the whole perishes, and no change in its nature takes place. So "Mind", whose manifestations the "souls" were, maintains itself unaltered and undiminished; but after the dissolution of the united, which "the Hellenes" regard as its destruction,[120\11] though the component parts of the individual remain, yet not _that_ particular mixture in which the peculiarity of the individual was inherent--"Mind" remains, but not the soul . . .
Thus, the first distinct separation of the intellectual thinking principle from the material substance with which it was--not fused, much less identified, but--contrasted in sovereignty and independence, did not lead to the recognition of the indestructibility of the individual spirit.
Shall we say that the mental, self-moved, life-giving principle, whether set over against the material and corporeal or indivisibly united with it, is for the physiologist always something universal--that the essentially real is impersonal? For him the individual, the personality conscious of itself and of the outer world, can be nothing but a manifestation of the universal, whether the latter is regarded as fixed and at rest, or as a living process that untiringly develops itself, recruits itself, and reconstructs itself in ever renewed creations. The only permanent, unchanging reality is the universal, the essential and fundamentally real Nature which appears in all individual things, speaks out of their mouth, and, in reality, only works and lives in them. The individual human soul has its indestructibility only in its identity with the universal that represents itself in it. The individual forms of "appearance", having no independence of their own, cannot permanently abide.
The view that imperishable life belongs to the individual soul could only be reached by a line of thought that took as a fact and held fast to it as something given that the individual spirit is a reality. (Its appearance and disappearance in the {389} midst of the one universe was indeed for the physiologists the true miracle, the problem never satisfactorily solved.) Such a belief in individuality, the belief in an independently existent individual substance that had never had a beginning and could therefore never have an end, was the contribution, however fancifully it might be expressed, of the theologians and the mystics. For them immortality, the power of substantive duration unlimited by time, was extended also to include the individual. The individual soul is for them a self-existent, individual, divine being, indestructible because it is divine.
Greek philosophy underwent many changes in the course of its speculations during the following ages; but exactly in proportion as it, to a greater or lesser degree, accepted theological elements or on the other hand rejected such elements, did it give fundamental support to the view of the soul's immortality, or grudgingly admit it, or absolutely reject it.
NOTES TO