THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS
The question of Thales—Water the beginning of things—Soul in all
things—Mystery in science—Abstraction and reality—Theory of
development
I - THALES
For several centuries prior to the great Persian invasions
of Greece, perhaps the very greatest and wealthiest city of the Greek
world was Miletus.
Situate about the centre of the Ionian coasts of
Asia Minor, with four magnificent harbours and a strongly defensible
position, it gathered to itself much of the great overland trade, which
has flowed for thousands of years eastward and westward between India
and the Mediterranean; while by its great fleets it created a new world
of its own along the Black Sea coast. Its colonies there were so
numerous that Miletus was named 'Mother of Eighty Cities.' From Abydus
on the Bosphorus, past Sinope, and so onward to the Crimea and the Don,
and thence round to Thrace, a busy community of colonies, mining,
manufacturing, ship-building, corn-raising, owned Miletus for their
mother-city. Its marts must therefore have been crowded with
merchants of every country from India to Spain, from Arabia to Russia;
the riches and the wonders of every clime must have become familiar to
its inhabitants.
And fitly enough, therefore, in this city was born
the first notable Greek geographer, the first constructor of a map, the
first observer of natural and other curiosities, the first recorder of
varieties of custom among various communities, the first speculator on
the causes of strange phenomena, Hecataeus. His work is in great part
lost, but we know a good deal about it from the frequent references to
him and it in the work of his rival and follower, Herodotus.
The city naturally held a leading place politically as well as
commercially. Empire in our sense was alien to the instincts of the
Greek race; but Miletus was for centuries recognised as the foremost
member of a great commercial and political league, the political
character of the league becoming more defined, as first the Lydian and
then the Persian monarchy became an aggressive neighbour on its borders.
It was in this active, prosperous, enterprising state, and at the
period of its highest activity, that Thales, statesman, practical
engineer, mathematician, philosopher, flourished. Without attempting
to fix his date too closely, we may take it that he was a leading man
in Miletus for the greater part of the first half of the sixth
century before Christ. We hear of an eclipse predicted by him, of the
course of a river usefully changed, of shrewd and profitable handling
of the market, of wise advice in the general councils of the league.
He seems to have been at once a student of mathematics and an observer
of nature, and withal something having analogy with both, an inquirer
or speculator into the origin of things. To us nowadays this
suggests a student of geology, or physiography, or some such branch of
physical science; to Thales it probably rather suggested a theoretical
inquiry into the simplest thinkable aspect of things as existing.
"Under what form known to us," he would seem to have asked, "may we assume an identity in all known things, so as best to cover or render explicable the things as we know them ?"
The 'beginning' of things (for it was thus he described this assumed identity) was not conceived by him as something which was long ages before, and which had ceased to be; rather it meant the reality of things now. Thales then was the putter of a question, which had not been asked expressly before, but which has never ceased to be asked since.
He was also the formulator of a new meaning for a word; the word 'beginning' ((Greek) arche) got the meaning of 'underlying reality' and so of 'ending' as well. In short, he so dealt with a word, on the surface of it implying time, as to eliminate the idea of time, and suggest a method of looking at the world, more profound and far-reaching than had been before imagined.
It is interesting to find that the man who was thus the first
philosopher, the first observer who took a metaphysical, non-temporal,
analytical view of the world, and so became the predecessor of all
those votaries of 'other-world' ways of thinking, whether as academic
idealist, or 'budge doctor of the Stoic fur,' or Christian ascetic or
what not, whose ways are such a puzzle to the 'hard-headed practical
man,' was himself one of the shrewdest men of his day, so shrewd that
by common consent he was placed foremost in antiquity among the Seven
Sages, or seven shrewd men, whose practical wisdom became a world's
tradition, enshrined in anecdote and crystallised in proverb.
The chief record that we possess of the philosophic teaching of Thales
is contained in an interesting notice of earlier philosophies by
Aristotle, the main part of which as regards Thales runs as follows:
"The early philosophers as a rule formulated the originative principle
((Greek) arche) of all things under some material expression. By
the
originative principle or element of things they meant that of which all
existing things are composed, that which determines their coming
into being, and into which they pass on ceasing to be. Where these
philosophers differed from each other was simply in the answer which
they gave to the question what was the nature of this principle, the
differences of view among them applying both to the number, and to the
character, of the supposed element or elements.
"Thales, the pioneer of this philosophy, maintained that Water was
the originative principle of all things. It was doubtless in this
sense that he said that the earth rested on water. What suggested the
conception to him may have been such facts of observation, as that all
forms of substance which promote life are moist, that heat itself seems
to be conditioned by moisture, that the life-producing seed in all
creatures is moist, and so on."
Other characteristics of water, it is elsewhere suggested, may have
been in Thales' mind, such as its readiness to take various shapes, its
convertibility from water into vapour or ice, its ready mixture with
other substances, and so forth. What we have chiefly to note is, that
the more unscientific this theory about the universe may strike us as
being, the more completely out of accord with facts now familiar to
everybody, the more striking is it as marking a new mood of mind, in
which unity, though only very partially suggested or discoverable by
the senses, is preferred to that infinite and indefinite variety
and difference which the senses give us at every moment. There is
here the germ of a new aspiration, of a determination not to rest in
the merely momentary and different, but at least to try, even against
the apparent evidence of the senses, for something more permanently
intelligible. As a first suggestion of what this permanent underlying
reality may be, Water might very well pass.
It is probable that even to Thales himself it was only a symbol, like the figure in a mathematical proposition, representing by the first passable physical phenomenon which came to hand, that ideal reality underlying all change, which is at once the beginning, the middle, and the end of all. That he did not mean Water, in the ordinary prosaic sense, to be identical with this, is suggested by some other sayings of his. "Thales," says Aristotle elsewhere, "thought the whole universe was full of gods." "All things," he is recorded as saying, "have a soul in them, in virtue of which they move other things, and are themselves moved, even as the magnet, by virtue of its life or soul, moves the iron."
Without pushing these fragmentary utterances too far, we may well conclude that whether Thales spoke of the soul of the universe and its divine indwelling powers, or gods, or of water as the origin of things, he was only vaguely symbolising in different ways an idea as yet formless and void, like the primeval chaos, but nevertheless, like it, containing within it a promise and a potency of greater life hereafter.
Our information with respect to thinkers so remote as
these men is too scanty and too fragmentary, to enable us to say in
what manner or degree they influenced each other. We cannot say for
certain that any one of them was pupil or antagonist of another. They
appear each of them, one might say for a moment only, from amidst the
darkness of antiquity; a few sayings of theirs we catch vaguely across
the void, and then they disappear. There is not, consequently, any
very distinct progression or continuity observable among them, and so
far therefore one has to confess that the title 'School of Miletus' is
a misnomer. We have already quoted the words of Aristotle in which he
classes the Ionic philosophers together, as all of them giving a
material aspect of some kind to the originative principle of the
universe . But while this is a characteristic
observable in some of them, it is not so obviously discoverable in the
second of their number, Anaximander.
This philosopher is said to have been younger by one generation
than Thales, but to have been intimate with him. He, like Thales, was
a native of Miletus, and while we do not hear of him as a person, like
Thales, of political eminence and activity, he was certainly the equal,
if not the superior, of Thales in mathematical and scientific
ability. He is said to have either invented or at least made known to
Greece the construction of the sun-dial. He was associated with
Hecataeus in the construction of the earliest geographical charts or
maps; he devoted himself with some success to the science of astronomy.
His familiarity with the abstractions of mathematics perhaps accounts
for the more abstract form, in which he expressed his idea of the
principle of all things.
To Anaximander this principle was, as he expressed it, the infinite;
not water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a different
thing from any of them, something hardly namable, out of whose
formlessness the heavens and all the worlds in them came to be. And by
necessity into that same infinite or indefinite existence, out of which
they originally emerged, did every created thing return. Thus, as he
poetically expressed it, "Time brought its revenges, and for the
wrong-doing of existence all things paid the penalty of death."
The momentary resting-place of Thales on the confines of the familiar
world of things, in his formulation of Water as the principle of
existence, is thus immediately removed. We get, as it were, to the
earliest conception of things as we find it in Genesis; before the
heavens were, or earth, or the waters under the earth, or light, or
sun, or moon, or grass, or the beast of the field, when the "earth was
without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the
deep." Only, be it observed, that while in the primitive Biblical idea
this formless void precedes in time an ordered universe, in
Anaximander's conception this formless infinitude is always here, is in
fact the only reality which ever is here, something without beginning
or ending, underlying all, enwrapping all, governing all.
To modern criticism this may seem to be little better than verbiage,
having, perhaps, some possibilities of poetic treatment, but certainly
very unsatisfactory if regarded as science. But to this we have to
reply that one is not called upon to regard it as science. Behind
science, as much to-day when our knowledge of the details of phenomena
is so enormously increased, as in the times when science had hardly
begun, there lies a world of mystery which we cannot pierce, and yet
which we are compelled to assume. No scientific treatise can begin
without assuming Matter and Force as data, and however much we may have
learned about the relations of forces and the affinities of things,
Matter and Force as such remain very much the same dim infinities, that
the originative 'Infinite' was to Anaximander.
It is to be noted, however, that while modern science assumes
necessarily two correlative data or originative principles, Force,
namely, as well as Matter, Anaximander seems to have been content
with the formulation of but one; and perhaps it is just here that a
kinship still remains between him and Thales and other philosophers of
the school. He, no more than they, seems to have definitely raised the
question, How are we to account for, or formulate, the principle of
difference or change ? What is it that causes things to come into
being out of, or recalls them back from being into, the infinite void ?
It is to be confessed, however, that our accounts on this point are
somewhat conflicting. One authority actually says that he formulated
motion as eternal also. So far as he attempted to grasp the idea of
difference in relation to that of unity, he seems to have regarded the
principle of change or difference as inhering in the infinite
itself. Aristotle in this connection contrasts his doctrine with that
of Anaxagoras, who formulated two principles of existence—Matter and
Mind . Anaximander, he points out, found all he
wanted in the one.
As a mathematician Anaximander must have been familiar in various
aspects with the functions of the Infinite or Indefinable in the
organisation of thought. To the student of Euclid, for example, the
impossibility of adequately defining any of the fundamental elements of
the science of geometry—the point, the line, the surface—is a
familiar fact. In so far as a science of geometry is possible at all,
the exactness, which is its essential characteristic, is only
attainable by starting from data which are in themselves impossible, as
of a point which has no magnitude, of a line which has no breadth, of a
surface which has no thickness.
So in the science of abstract number the fundamental assumptions, as that 1=1, x=x, etc., are contradicted by every fact of experience, for in the world as we know it, absolute equality is simply impossible to discover; and yet these fundamental conceptions are in their development most powerful instruments for the extension of man's command over his own experiences. Their completeness of abstraction from the accidents of experience, from the differences, qualifications, variations which contribute so largely to the personal interests of life, this it is which makes the abstract sciences demonstrative, exact, and universally applicable. In so far, therefore, as we are permitted to grasp the conception of a perfectly abstract existence prior to, and underlying, and enclosing, all separate existences, so far also do we get to a conception which is demonstrative, exact, and universally applicable throughout the whole world of knowable objects.
Such a conception, however, by its absolute emptiness of content, does
not afford any means in itself of progression; somehow and somewhere a
principle of movement, of development, of concrete reality, must be
found or assumed, to link this ultimate abstraction of existence to the
multifarious phenomena of existence as known. And it was,
perhaps, because Anaximander failed to work out this aspect of the
question, that in the subsequent leaders of the school movement,
rather than mere existence, was the principle chiefly insisted upon.
Before passing, however, to these successors of Anaximander, some
opinions of his which we have not perhaps the means of satisfactorily
correlating with his general conception, but which are not without
their individual interest, may here be noted. The word husk or
bark ((Greek) phloios) seems to have been a favourite one with him,
as implying and depicting a conception of interior and necessary
development in things. Thus he seems to have postulated an inherent
tendency or law in the infinite, which compelled it to develop contrary
characters, as hot and cold, dry and moist. In consequence of this
fundamental tendency an envelope of fire, he says, came into being,
encircling another envelope of air, which latter in turn enveloped the
sphere of earth, each being like the 'husk' of the other, or like the
bark which encloses the tree. This concentric system he conceives as
having in some way been parted up into various systems, represented by
the sun, the moon, the stars, and the earth. The last he figured as
hanging in space, and deriving its stability from the inherent and
perfect balance or relation of its parts.
Then, again, as to the origin of man, he seems to have in like manner
taught a theory of development from lower forms of life. In his view
the first living creatures must have come into being in moisture (thus
recalling the theory of Thales). As time went on, and these forms of
life reached their fuller possibilities, they came to be transferred to
the dry land, casting off their old nature like a husk or bark. More
particularly he insists that man must have developed out of other and
lower forms of life, because of his exceptional need, under present
conditions, of care and nursing in his earlier years. Had he come into
being at once as a human creature he could never have survived.
The analogies of these theories with modern speculations are obvious
and interesting. But without enlarging on these, one has only to say
in conclusion that, suggestive and interesting as many of these poor
fragments, these disjecti membra poetae, are individually, they leave
us more and more impressed with a sense of incompleteness in our
knowledge of Anaximander's theory as a whole. It may be that as a
consistent and perfected system the theory never was worked out; it may
be that it never was properly understood.
By some authorities it is stated that Anaximander, the second
philosopher of this school, was the first to use the word arche in
the philosophic sense. Whether this be so or not, Thales certainly had
the idea.
Map of Miletus and other cities within the Lydian Empire
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miletus
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miletus
