Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley. Edward Clodd
never was nor will be a man who has clear certainty as to what I say about the gods and about all things; for even if he does chance to say what is right, yet he himself does not know that it is so. But all are free to guess.”
“Mortals think that the gods were born as they are, and have senses and a voice and body like their own. So the Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians give theirs red hair and blue eyes.”
“There is one god, the greatest among gods and men, unlike mortals both in mind and body.”
Had such heresies been spoken in Athens, where the effects of a religious revival were still in force, the “secular arm” of the archons would probably have made short work of Xenophanes. But in Elea, or in whatever other colony he may have lived, “the gods were left to take care of themselves.”
Greater than the philosophers yet named is Heraclitus of Ephesus, nicknamed “the dark,” from the obscurity of his style. His original writings have shared the fate of most documents of antiquity, and exist, like many of these, only in fragments preserved in the works of other authors. Many of his aphorisms are indeed dark sayings, but those that yield their meaning are full of truth and suggestiveness. As for example:
“The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.”
“You will not find out the boundaries of soul by travelling in any direction.”
“Man is kindled and put out like a light in the nighttime.”
“Man’s character is his fate.”
But these have special value as keys to his philosophy:
“You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.”
“Homer was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away.”
Flux or movement, says Heraclitus, is the all-pervading law of things, and in the opposition of forces, by which things are kept going, there is underlying harmony. Still on the quest after the primary substance whose manifestations are so various, he found it in Fire, since “the quantity of it in a flame burning steadily appears to remain the same; the flames seems to be what we call a ‘thing.’ And yet the substance of it is continually changing. It is always passing away in smoke, and its place is always being taken by fresh matter from the fuel that feeds it. This is just what we want. If we regard the world as an ‘ever-living fire’—‘this order, which is the same in all things, and which no one of gods or men has made’—we can understand how fire is always becoming all things, while all things are always returning to it.” And as is the world, so is man, made up, like it, both soul and body, of the fire, the water, and the earth. We are and are not the same for two consecutive moments; “the fire in us is perpetually becoming water, and the water earth, but as the opposite process goes on simultaneously we appear to remain the same.”
As speculation advanced, it became more and more applied to details, theories of the beginnings of life being followed by theories of the origin of its various forms. This is a feature of the philosophy of Empedocles, who flourished in the fifth century BC The advance of Persia westward had led to migrations of Greeks to the south of Italy and Sicily, and it was at Agrigentum, in that island, that Empedocles was born about 490. He has an honoured place among the earliest who supplanted guesses about the world by inquiry into the world itself. Many legends are told of his magic arts, one of which, it will be remembered, Matthew Arnold makes an occasion of some fine reflections in his poem Empedocles in Etna. The philosopher was said to have brought back to life a woman who apparently had been dead for thirty days. As he ascends the mountain, Pausanias of Gela, with an address to whom the poem of Empedocles opens, would fain have his curiosity slaked as to this and other marvels reported of him:
Ask not the latest news of the last miracle,
Ask not what days and nights
In trance Pantheia lay,
But ask how thou such sights
May’st see without dismay;
Ask what most helps when known, thou son of Anchitus.
His speculations about things, like those of Parmenides before him and of Lucretius after him, are set down in verse. From the remains of his Poem on Nature we learn that he conceived “the four roots of all things” to be Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. They are “fools, lacking far-reaching thoughts, who deem that what before was not comes into being, or that aught can perish and be utterly destroyed.” Therefore the “roots” or elements are eternal and indestructible. They are acted upon by two forces, which are also material, Love and Strife; the one a uniting agent, the other a disrupting agent. From the four roots, thus operated upon, arise “the colours and forms” of living things; trees first, both male and female, then fragmentary parts of animals, heads without necks, and “eyes that strayed up and down in want of a forehead,” which, combined together, produced monstrous forms. These, lacking power to propagate, perished, and were replaced by “whole-natured” but sexless “forms” which “arose from the earth,” and which, as Strife gained the upper hand, became male and female. Herein, amidst much fantastic speculation, would appear to be the germ of the modern theory that the unadapted become extinct, and that only the adapted survive. Nature kills off her failures to make room for her successes.
Anaxagoras, who was a contemporary of Empedocles, interests us because he was the first philosopher to repair to Athens, and the first sufferer for truth’s sake of whom we have record in Greek annals. Because he taught that the sun was a red-hot stone, and that the moon had plains and ravines in it, he was put upon his trial, and but for the influence of his friend, the famous Pericles, might have suffered death. Speculations, however bold they be, pass unheeded till they collide with the popular creed, and in thus attacking the gods, attack a seemingly divinely settled order. Athens then, and long after, while indifferent about natural science, was, under the influence of the revival referred to above, actively hostile to free thinking. The opinions of Anaxagoras struck at the existence of the gods and emptied Olympus. If the sky was but an air-filled space, what became of Zeus? if the sun was only a fiery ball, what became of Apollo? Mr. Grote says (History of Greece, vol. i, p. 466) that “in the view of the early Greek, the description of the sun, as given in a modern astronomical treatise, would have appeared not merely absurd, but repulsive and impious; even in later times, Anaxagoras and other astronomers incurred the charge of blasphemy for dispersonifying Hēlios.” Of Socrates, who was himself condemned to death for impiety in denying old gods and introducing new ones, the same authority writes: “Physics and astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine class of phenomena, in which human research was insane, fruitless, and impious.” So Demos and his “betters” clung, as the majority still cling, to the myths of their forefathers. They repaired to the oracles, and watched for the will of the gods in signs and omens.
In his philosophy Anaxagoras held that there was a portion of everything in everything, and that things are variously mixed in infinite numbers of seeds, each after its kind. From these, through the action of an external cause, called Nous, which also is material, although the “thinnest of all things and the purest,” and “has power over all things,” there arose plants and animals. It is probable, as Professor Burnet remarks, “that Anaxagoras substituted Nous, still conceived as a body, for the Love and Strife of Empedocles simply because he wished to retain the old Ionic doctrine of a substance that ‘knows’ all things, and to identify this with the new theory of a substance that ‘moves’ all things.”
Thus far speculation has run largely on the origin of life forms, but now we find revival of speculation about the nature of things generally, and the formulation of a theory which links Greek cosmology with early nineteenth-century science with Dalton’s Atomic Theory. Democritus of Abdera, who was born about 460 BC, has the credit of having elaborated an atomic theory, but probably he only further developed what Leucippus had taught before him. Of this last-named philosopher nothing whatever is known; indeed, his existence has been doubted, but it counts