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We were physicists with Thales and that pre-Socratic "company of gallant gentlemen" for whom Sydney Smith confessed his lack of admiration. We were now Empedocleans, now believers in Heraclitus, now in Socrates, now in Plato, now in Aristotle. In each lecture our professor set up a new master and gently disintegrated him in the next. "Amurath to Amurath succeeds," as Mr.
Its steady attention to the business in hand, from the pre-Socratic philosphies down through the great age of the Greek revival, to Germany and Hegel at last, is most sustained and admirable. Indeed, few thinkers of Anglo-Saxon birth are able even to praise such a book as it deserves.
Haeckel, Ostwald, and Mach have each given the world a constructive system of thought. But these three systems have not, except in a secondary way, attempted a metaphysic of human life. Haeckel's system is mainly poetico-mythical, chiefly on the lines of some of the pre-Socratic philosophers.
Plato is warning us against two sorts of 'Idols of the Den': first, his own Ideas, which he himself having created is unable to connect in any way with the external world; secondly, against two idols in particular, 'Unity' and 'Being, which had grown up in the pre-Socratic philosophy, and were still standing in the way of all progress and development of thought.
The latest of the important pre-Socratic philosophers of the Italic school was Empedocles, who was born about 494 B.C. and lived to the age of sixty. These dates make Empedocles strictly contemporary with Anaxagoras, a fact which we shall do well to bear in mind when we come to consider the latter's philosophy in the succeeding chapter. Like Pythagoras, Empedocles is an imposing figure.
In philosophy, seeking deliverance from the skeletons of the current systems and abstractions, he recurred to the neglected fountain of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought had still presented itself with sensuous vividness.
The persons are put down in chronological order. This order will in some measure be preserved in the following survey; but regard for the continuity of the tradition of the doctrine will entail certain deviations. It will, that is to say, be natural to divide the material into four groups: the pre-Socratic philosophy; the Sophists; Socrates and the Socratics; Hellenistic philosophy.
The pre-Socratic thinkers, occupied as they were with physical questions which had little interest for Romans, were still less likely to be resorted to. The demand for a supreme moral end made it inevitable that their choice should fall on one of the two schools which offered such an end, those of the Porch and the Garden. Which of the two would a man like Lucretius prefer?
The pre-Socratic natural philosophers, on the basis of the maxim as old as philosophy itself Ἀδύνατον γίνεσθαι τι ἐκ μηδενὸς προυπάρχοντος pointed to an Ἀρχή a real behind phenomena, a permanent behind the change and thus pointed to the so-called Aetiological argument founded on the principle of causality.
This feeling, indeed, was not so extended as to become common to the whole Greek nation, but it took deep root in individual minds, and was connected with more serious and spiritual views of human nature. PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY. Philosophy was early cultivated by the Greeks, who first among all nations distinguished it from religion and mythology.
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