Re: The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston St
Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2016 10:00 pm
Part 3 of 4
METAPHYSICS
It is essential to distinguish between philosophy and philosophy, and I think I have above warmly expressed my admiration for the Hellenic philosophy of the great epoch, particularly where it appeared as a creative activity of the human spirit closely related to poetry; in this respect Plato's theory of ideas is unsurpassed, while Aristotle appears to be incomparably great in analysis and method, but at the same time, as a philosopher in the sense given, the real originator of the decay of the Hellenic spirit. But here as elsewhere we must guard against over-simplification; we must not attribute to a single man what was peculiar to his people and only found in him its most definite expression. In reality Greek philosophy from the very beginning contained the germ of its fatal development later; the inheritance which still lies heavily upon us goes back almost to Homer's time. For it will be found upon reflection, that the old Hylozoists are related to the Neoplatonists: whoever, like Thales, without further ado "explains" the world as having arisen from water, will afterwards equally find an "explanation" of God; his nearest successor, Anaximander, establishes as principle the "Infinite" (the Apeiron), the "Unchangeable amid all changes": here in truth we are already in the toils of the most unmimtigated scholasticism and can calmly wait till the wheel of time sets down on the surface of the earth Ramon Lull and Thomas Aquinas. The fact that the eldest among the well-known Greek thinkers believed in the presence of countless daemons, but at the same time from the beginning [72] attacked the gods of the popular religion and of the poets -- Heraclitus would "gladly have scourged" [73] Homer -- serves only to complete the picture. However, one thing must be added: a man like Anaximander, so subordinate as a thinker, was a naturalist and theorist of the first rank, a founder of scientific geography, a promoter of astronomy; all these people are presented to us as philosophers, but in reality philosophy was for them something quite apart; surely we should not reckon the agnosticism of Charles Darwin or the creed of Claude Bernard among the philosophical achievements of our century? Here is a characteristic example of the many traditional consecrated confusions; we find the name of Sankara (certainly one of the greatest metaphysicians that ever lived) in no history of philosophy, while on the other hand the worthy olive-farmer Thales is ever paraded as the "first philosopher." And, if the matter be closely investigated, it will be found that almost all so-called philosophers at the zenith of Hellenic greatness are in a similar position: so far as we can judge from contradictory reports, Pythagoras did not found a philosophic school, but a political, social, dietetic and religious brotherhood; Plato himself, the metaphysician, was a statesman, moralist, practical reformer; Aristotle was a professional encyclopaedist, and the unity of his philosophy is due much more to his character than to his forced, half-traditional, contradictory metaphysics. Without therefore underestimating in any way the achievements of the Greek thinkers, We shall yet, I think, be able to assert (and so put an end to the confusion), that these men have paved the way for our science (including logic and ethics), and for our theology, and that they, through their poetically creative genius, have poured a flood of light upon the paths which speculation and intellectual investigation were afterwards to follow; as metaphysicians, in the real narrower sense of the word, they were, however, with the sole exception of Plato, comparatively of much less importance.
That nothing may remain obscure in a matter so weighty that it strikes into the depths of our life to-day, I should like briefly to refer to the fact, that in the person of the great Leonardo da Vinci we have an example -- closely related to modern thought and feeling -- of the deep gulf which separates poetical from abstract perception, religion from theologising philosophy. Leonardo brands the intellectual sciences as "deceptive" (le bugiarde scientie mentali); "all knowledge," he says, "is vain and erroneous, unless brought into the world by sense-experience, the mother of all certainty"; especially offensive to him are the disputes and proofs regarding the entity of God and of the soul: he is of opinion that "our senses revolt against" these conceptions, consequently we should not let ourselves be deluded: " where arguments of reason and clear right are wanting, clamour takes their place; in the case of things which are certain, however, this does not happen"; and thus he arrives at the conclusion: "dove si grida non e vera scientia," where there is clamour there is no genuine knowledge (Libro di pittura, Part 1., Division 33, Heinrich Ludwig's edition). This is Leonardo's theology! Yet it is this very man -- and surely the only one, the greatest not excepted -- who paints a Christ which comes near being a revelation, "perfect God and perfect man," as the Athanasian creed puts it. Here we have close intrinsic relationship with Homer: all knowledge is derived from the experience of sense, and from this the Divine, proved by no subtleties of reasoning, is formed as free creation, with popular belief as its basis -- something everlastingly true. Thanks to special circumstances and particular mental gifts, thanks above all to the advent of men of great genius who alone give life, this particular faculty had become so intensely developed in Greece that the sciences of experience received a new and greater impulse, as they did later among us through the influence of Leonardo, whereas the reaction of philosophising abstraction was never able to develop freely and naturally, but degenerated either into scholasticism or the clouds of fancy. The Hellenic artist awoke to life in an atmosphere which gave him at the same time personal freedom and the elevating consciousness that he was understood by all; the Hellenic philosopher (as soon as he trod the path of logical abstraction) had not this gift; on the contrary he was hemmed in on all sides, outwardly by custom, beliefs and civic institutions, inwardly by his whole personal education, which was principally artistic, by everything that surrounded him during his whole life, by all impressions which eye and ear conveyed to him; he was not free: because of his talent he did achieve great things, but nothing that satisfied -- as his art did -- the highest demands of harmony, truth and universal acceptance. In the case of Greek art the national element is comparable to pinions that raise the spirit to lofty heights, where "all men become brothers," where the separating gulf of times and races adds to rather than detracts from the charm; Hellenic philosophy, on the contrary, is in the limiting sense of the word fettered to a definite national life and consequently hemmed in on all sides. [74]
It is exceedingly difficult with such a view to prevail against the prejudice of centuries. Even such a man as Rohde calls the Greeks the" most fruitful in thought among nations" and asserts that their philosophers "thought in advance for all mankind"; [75] Leopold von Ranke, who has no other epithet for Homeric religion than" idolatry" (!) writes as follows: "What Aristotle says about the distinction between active and passive reason, only the first of which, however, is the true one, autonomous and related to God, I should be inclined to say was the best thing that could be said about the human spirit, with the exception of the Revelation of the Bible. We may say the same, if I am not mistaken, of Plato's doctrine of the soul." [76] Ranke tells us further that the mission of Greek philosophy was to purge the old faith of its idolatrous element, to unite rational and religious truth; but that the democracy frustrated this noble design, because it "held fast to idolatry" (i. 230). [77] These examples may suffice, though one could quote many others. I am convinced that this is all illusion, indeed baneful illusion, and in essential points the very opposite of truth. It is not true that the Greeks have thought in advance for all mankind: before them, at their time and after them there has been deeper thinking, more acute and more correct. It is not true that the red-tape theology of Aristotle ad usum of the mainstays of society is " the best thing that could be said": this Jesuitical scholastic sophistry has been the black plague of philosophy. It is not true that Greek thinkers have purified the old religion: they have rather attacked in it that very thing that deserved everlasting admiration, namely, its free, purely artistic beauty; and while they pretended to substitute rational for symbolical truth, they in reality only adopted popular superstition and set it, clad in logical rags, upon the throne, from which they -- in company with the mob -- had hurled down that poetry which proclaimed an everlasting truth.
As regards the so-called" thinking in advance," it will suffice to call attention to two circumstances to prove the erroneous nature of this assertion: in the first place, the Indians began to think before the Greeks, their thought was profounder and more consistent, and in their various systems they have exhausted more possibilities; in the second place, our own western European thought only began on the day when a great man said, " We must admit that the philosophy which we have received from the Greeks is childish, or at least that it rather encourages talk than acts as a creative stimulus." [78] To pretend that Locke, Gassendi, Hume, Descartes, Kant, &c., chewed the cud of Greek philosophy is one of the worst sins of Hellenic megalomania against our new culture. Pythagoras, the first great Hellenic thinker, offers a conclusive instance in reference to Hellenic thought. From his Oriental journeys he brought back all kinds of knowledge, significant and trifling, from the idea of redemption to the conception of the ether and the forbidding of the eating of beans: all of it was Indian ancestral property. One doctrine in particular became the central point of Pythagoreanism, its religious lever, if I may say so: this was the secret doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Plato afterwards robbed it of the aureole of secrecy and gave it a place in public philosophy. But among the Indians the belief in the transmigration of souls long before Pythagoras formed the basis of all ethics; though much divided in politics, religion and philosophy, and though living in open opposition, the whole people was united in the belief in the never-ending series of rebirths. "In India one never finds the question put, as to whether the soul transmigrates: it is universally and firmly believed." [79] But there was a class there, a small class, which did not believe in the transmigration of souls, in so far as they considered it to be a symbolical conception, a conception which to those wrapt in the illusions of world-contemplation allegorically conveys a loftier truth to be grasped more correctly by deep metaphysical thinking alone: this small class was (and is to-day) that of the philosophers. "The idea of the soul transmigrating rests on ignorance, while the soul in the sense of the highest reality is not transmigratory": such is the teaching of the Indian thinker. [80] A really "secret doctrine," such as the Greeks following Egyptian example loved, the Indians never knew: men of all castes, even women, could attain to the highest knowledge; but these profound sages knew very well that metaphysical thought requires special faculties and special development of those faculties; and so they let the figurative alone. And this figure, this magnificent conception of the transmigration of souls, which is perhaps indispensable for morals though essentially but a popular belief, while in India it was prevalent among the whole people from the highest to the lowest with the exception of the thinkers alone, became in Greece the most sublime "secret doctrine" of their first great philosopher, never quite disappeared from the highest regions of their philosophical views, and received from Plato the alluring charm of poetical form. These are the people who are said to have paved the way for us in thought, "the richest in thought of nations"! No, the Greeks were no great metaphysicians.
THEOLOGY
But they have just as little claim to be considered great moralists and theologians. Here too one example instead of many. The belief in daemons is everywhere current; the idea of a special intermediate race of daemons (between the gods in heaven and men on earth) was very probably derived by the Greeks from India (by way of Persia), [81] but that does not matter; in philosophy, or, as it may be called, in "rational religion," these creatures of superstition were first adopted by Plato. Rohde writes on this point as follows: [82] "Plato is the first of many to write about a whole intermediate hierarchy of daemons, entrusted with all that is wrought by invisible powers but seems beneath the dignity of the sublime gods. Thus the Divine itself is freed from everything evil and degrading." So with full consciousness and for the "rational" and flagrantly anthropomorphic purpose of " freeing" God of what seems evil to us men, that superstition which the Hellenes shared with bushmen and Australian blacks was adorned with a philosophical and theological aureole, recommended to the noblest minds by a noble mind and bequeathed to all future generations as an inheritance. The fortunate Indians had long before discarded the belief in daemons; it was retained only by the totally uneducated people; among the Indians the philosopher was bound no longer to any religious ceremony; for without denying their existence, like the superficial Xenophanes, he had learned to see in the gods symbols of a higher truth not able to be grasped by the senses -- what use then had such people for daemons? Homer, however, it should be noticed, had been on the same path. It is true that the hand of Athene stops the hastily raised arm of Achilles, and Here inspires the hesitating Diomedes with courage -- with such divine freedom does the poet interpret, inspiring all ages with poetical thoughts -- but genuine superstition plays a very subordinate part in Homer, and by his "divine" interpretation he raises it out of the sphere of real daemonism; his path was sunnier, more beautiful than that of the Indo-Aryan; instead of indulging in speculative metaphysics like the latter, he consecrated the empiric world and thereby guided mankind to a glorious goal. [83] Then came Socrates; -- old, superstitious, advised by Pythian oracles, taught by priestesses, possessed by daemons, and after him Plato and the others, O Hellenes! if only you had remained true to the religion of Homer and the artistic culture which it founded! If you had but trusted your divine poets, and not listened to your Heraclitus and Xenophanes, your Socrates and Plato, and all the rest of them! Alas for us who have for centuries been plunged into unspeakable sorrow and misery by this belief in daemons, now raised to sacred orthodoxy, who have been hampered by it in our whole intellectual development, who even to this day are under the delusions of the Thracian peasants! [84]
SCHOLASTICISM
Not one whit better is that Hellenic thought which follows neither the path of mysticism nor that of poetical suggestion, but openly links itself to natural science and with the help of philosophy and rational psychology undertakes to solve the great problems of existence. Here the Greek spirit at once falls into scholasticism, as already hinted. "Words, words, nothing but words!" In this case detailed treatment would unfortunately go far beyond the scope of this book. But if anyone is shy of the higher philosophy, let him take up a catechism, he will find plenty of Aristotle in it. Talk of the Divinity with such a man, and tell him that it " did not come into existence and was not created; that it has been from all time and is immortal," and he will think that you are quoting from the creed of an oecumenical council, whereas, as a matter of fact, it is a quotation from Aristotle! And if you further say to him that God is " an everlasting, perfect, unconditioned being, gifted with life, but without bulk, one who in eternal actuality thinks himself, for (this serves as explanation) thinking becomes objective to itself by the thinking of the thing thought, so that thinking and the thing thought become identical," the poor man will fancy that you are reading from Thomas Aquinas or at least from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but again it is a quotation from Aristotle. [85] The rational doctrine of God, the rational doctrine of the soul, above all the doctrine of a purposed order of the world suitable to human reason, or teleology (through which Aristotle, by the way, introduced such grotesque errors into his natural science), that was the inheritance in this sphere! How many centuries did it take till there came a brave man who threw this ballast overboard and showed that one cannot prove the existence of God, as Aristotle had made twenty centuries believe: -- till a man came who ventured to write the words, "Neither experience nor conclusions of reason adequately inform us whether man possesses a soul (as a substance dwelling in him, distinct from body and capable of thinking independently of it and therefore a spiritual substance), or whether life may not rather be a property of matter." [86]
But enough. I think I have shown with sufficient clearness that Hellenic philosophy is only genuinely great when we take the word in its widest sense, somewhat in the English sense, according to which a Newton and a Cuvier, or a Jean Jacques Rousseau and a Goethe are called "philosophers." As soon as the Greek left the sphere of intuition -- right from Thales onward-he became fatal; he became all the more fatal when he proceeded to use his incomparable plastic power (which is so strikingly absent in the metaphysical Indian) in giving a seductive shape to shadowy chimeras and in emasculating and bowdlerising deep conceptions and ideas that do not lend themselves to any analysis. I do not blame him because he had mystical tendencies and a plainly expressed need of metaphysics, but because he attempted to give shape to mysticism in a way other than the artistically mythical, and, going blindly past the central point of all metaphysics (I always naturally except Plato), tried to solve transcendent questions by prosaic empirical means. If the Greek had continued to develop his faculties on the one hand purely poetically, on the other purely empirically, his influence would have become an unmixed and inexpressible blessing for mankind; but, as it is, that same Greek who in poetry and science had given us an example of what true creative power can effect, and so of the way in which the development of man has taken place, at a later time proved to be a cramping and retarding element in the growth of the human intellect.
CONCLUSION
It may be that these last remarks rather trespass on the province of a later part of my book. But I had to face the difficulty. Great as has been the influence which the Hellenic inheritance has exercised upon our century, as upon those which preceded it, there has been no little confusion and no lack of misunderstanding concerning it. In order that the sequel might be understood, it was necessary that the mental condition of the heirs should be set out as clearly as the many-sided and complex nature of the inheritance which they received.
No summary is needed. Indeed what I have said about our rich Hellenic inheritance, which so deeply penetrates our intellectual life, is of itself a mere summary -- a mere indication. If we were to carry this experiment further we should arrive at a point where every concrete idea would become sublimated, where the sinuous lines of Life would shrivel into mere degrees in a scale, and there would remain nothing but a geometrical figure -- a construction of the mind -- instead of the representation of that manifold truth which has the gift of uniting in itself all contradictions. The philosophy of history, even in the hands of the most distinguished men, such as Herder for example, has a tendency rather to provoke contradiction than to encourage the formation of correct opinions. My object, moreover, is not so far-reaching. It is no part of my plan to pronounce judgment upon or to explain historically the spirit of ancient Greece: it suffices for me to bring home to our consciousness how boundless is the gift which it has brought us, and how actively that gift still works upon our poetry, our thought, our faith, our researches. I could not be exhaustive; -- I have contented myself with the endeavour to give a vivid and truthful picture. In so doing I have inflicted upon my readers some trouble, but this could not be avoided.
METAPHYSICS
It is essential to distinguish between philosophy and philosophy, and I think I have above warmly expressed my admiration for the Hellenic philosophy of the great epoch, particularly where it appeared as a creative activity of the human spirit closely related to poetry; in this respect Plato's theory of ideas is unsurpassed, while Aristotle appears to be incomparably great in analysis and method, but at the same time, as a philosopher in the sense given, the real originator of the decay of the Hellenic spirit. But here as elsewhere we must guard against over-simplification; we must not attribute to a single man what was peculiar to his people and only found in him its most definite expression. In reality Greek philosophy from the very beginning contained the germ of its fatal development later; the inheritance which still lies heavily upon us goes back almost to Homer's time. For it will be found upon reflection, that the old Hylozoists are related to the Neoplatonists: whoever, like Thales, without further ado "explains" the world as having arisen from water, will afterwards equally find an "explanation" of God; his nearest successor, Anaximander, establishes as principle the "Infinite" (the Apeiron), the "Unchangeable amid all changes": here in truth we are already in the toils of the most unmimtigated scholasticism and can calmly wait till the wheel of time sets down on the surface of the earth Ramon Lull and Thomas Aquinas. The fact that the eldest among the well-known Greek thinkers believed in the presence of countless daemons, but at the same time from the beginning [72] attacked the gods of the popular religion and of the poets -- Heraclitus would "gladly have scourged" [73] Homer -- serves only to complete the picture. However, one thing must be added: a man like Anaximander, so subordinate as a thinker, was a naturalist and theorist of the first rank, a founder of scientific geography, a promoter of astronomy; all these people are presented to us as philosophers, but in reality philosophy was for them something quite apart; surely we should not reckon the agnosticism of Charles Darwin or the creed of Claude Bernard among the philosophical achievements of our century? Here is a characteristic example of the many traditional consecrated confusions; we find the name of Sankara (certainly one of the greatest metaphysicians that ever lived) in no history of philosophy, while on the other hand the worthy olive-farmer Thales is ever paraded as the "first philosopher." And, if the matter be closely investigated, it will be found that almost all so-called philosophers at the zenith of Hellenic greatness are in a similar position: so far as we can judge from contradictory reports, Pythagoras did not found a philosophic school, but a political, social, dietetic and religious brotherhood; Plato himself, the metaphysician, was a statesman, moralist, practical reformer; Aristotle was a professional encyclopaedist, and the unity of his philosophy is due much more to his character than to his forced, half-traditional, contradictory metaphysics. Without therefore underestimating in any way the achievements of the Greek thinkers, We shall yet, I think, be able to assert (and so put an end to the confusion), that these men have paved the way for our science (including logic and ethics), and for our theology, and that they, through their poetically creative genius, have poured a flood of light upon the paths which speculation and intellectual investigation were afterwards to follow; as metaphysicians, in the real narrower sense of the word, they were, however, with the sole exception of Plato, comparatively of much less importance.
That nothing may remain obscure in a matter so weighty that it strikes into the depths of our life to-day, I should like briefly to refer to the fact, that in the person of the great Leonardo da Vinci we have an example -- closely related to modern thought and feeling -- of the deep gulf which separates poetical from abstract perception, religion from theologising philosophy. Leonardo brands the intellectual sciences as "deceptive" (le bugiarde scientie mentali); "all knowledge," he says, "is vain and erroneous, unless brought into the world by sense-experience, the mother of all certainty"; especially offensive to him are the disputes and proofs regarding the entity of God and of the soul: he is of opinion that "our senses revolt against" these conceptions, consequently we should not let ourselves be deluded: " where arguments of reason and clear right are wanting, clamour takes their place; in the case of things which are certain, however, this does not happen"; and thus he arrives at the conclusion: "dove si grida non e vera scientia," where there is clamour there is no genuine knowledge (Libro di pittura, Part 1., Division 33, Heinrich Ludwig's edition). This is Leonardo's theology! Yet it is this very man -- and surely the only one, the greatest not excepted -- who paints a Christ which comes near being a revelation, "perfect God and perfect man," as the Athanasian creed puts it. Here we have close intrinsic relationship with Homer: all knowledge is derived from the experience of sense, and from this the Divine, proved by no subtleties of reasoning, is formed as free creation, with popular belief as its basis -- something everlastingly true. Thanks to special circumstances and particular mental gifts, thanks above all to the advent of men of great genius who alone give life, this particular faculty had become so intensely developed in Greece that the sciences of experience received a new and greater impulse, as they did later among us through the influence of Leonardo, whereas the reaction of philosophising abstraction was never able to develop freely and naturally, but degenerated either into scholasticism or the clouds of fancy. The Hellenic artist awoke to life in an atmosphere which gave him at the same time personal freedom and the elevating consciousness that he was understood by all; the Hellenic philosopher (as soon as he trod the path of logical abstraction) had not this gift; on the contrary he was hemmed in on all sides, outwardly by custom, beliefs and civic institutions, inwardly by his whole personal education, which was principally artistic, by everything that surrounded him during his whole life, by all impressions which eye and ear conveyed to him; he was not free: because of his talent he did achieve great things, but nothing that satisfied -- as his art did -- the highest demands of harmony, truth and universal acceptance. In the case of Greek art the national element is comparable to pinions that raise the spirit to lofty heights, where "all men become brothers," where the separating gulf of times and races adds to rather than detracts from the charm; Hellenic philosophy, on the contrary, is in the limiting sense of the word fettered to a definite national life and consequently hemmed in on all sides. [74]
It is exceedingly difficult with such a view to prevail against the prejudice of centuries. Even such a man as Rohde calls the Greeks the" most fruitful in thought among nations" and asserts that their philosophers "thought in advance for all mankind"; [75] Leopold von Ranke, who has no other epithet for Homeric religion than" idolatry" (!) writes as follows: "What Aristotle says about the distinction between active and passive reason, only the first of which, however, is the true one, autonomous and related to God, I should be inclined to say was the best thing that could be said about the human spirit, with the exception of the Revelation of the Bible. We may say the same, if I am not mistaken, of Plato's doctrine of the soul." [76] Ranke tells us further that the mission of Greek philosophy was to purge the old faith of its idolatrous element, to unite rational and religious truth; but that the democracy frustrated this noble design, because it "held fast to idolatry" (i. 230). [77] These examples may suffice, though one could quote many others. I am convinced that this is all illusion, indeed baneful illusion, and in essential points the very opposite of truth. It is not true that the Greeks have thought in advance for all mankind: before them, at their time and after them there has been deeper thinking, more acute and more correct. It is not true that the red-tape theology of Aristotle ad usum of the mainstays of society is " the best thing that could be said": this Jesuitical scholastic sophistry has been the black plague of philosophy. It is not true that Greek thinkers have purified the old religion: they have rather attacked in it that very thing that deserved everlasting admiration, namely, its free, purely artistic beauty; and while they pretended to substitute rational for symbolical truth, they in reality only adopted popular superstition and set it, clad in logical rags, upon the throne, from which they -- in company with the mob -- had hurled down that poetry which proclaimed an everlasting truth.
As regards the so-called" thinking in advance," it will suffice to call attention to two circumstances to prove the erroneous nature of this assertion: in the first place, the Indians began to think before the Greeks, their thought was profounder and more consistent, and in their various systems they have exhausted more possibilities; in the second place, our own western European thought only began on the day when a great man said, " We must admit that the philosophy which we have received from the Greeks is childish, or at least that it rather encourages talk than acts as a creative stimulus." [78] To pretend that Locke, Gassendi, Hume, Descartes, Kant, &c., chewed the cud of Greek philosophy is one of the worst sins of Hellenic megalomania against our new culture. Pythagoras, the first great Hellenic thinker, offers a conclusive instance in reference to Hellenic thought. From his Oriental journeys he brought back all kinds of knowledge, significant and trifling, from the idea of redemption to the conception of the ether and the forbidding of the eating of beans: all of it was Indian ancestral property. One doctrine in particular became the central point of Pythagoreanism, its religious lever, if I may say so: this was the secret doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Plato afterwards robbed it of the aureole of secrecy and gave it a place in public philosophy. But among the Indians the belief in the transmigration of souls long before Pythagoras formed the basis of all ethics; though much divided in politics, religion and philosophy, and though living in open opposition, the whole people was united in the belief in the never-ending series of rebirths. "In India one never finds the question put, as to whether the soul transmigrates: it is universally and firmly believed." [79] But there was a class there, a small class, which did not believe in the transmigration of souls, in so far as they considered it to be a symbolical conception, a conception which to those wrapt in the illusions of world-contemplation allegorically conveys a loftier truth to be grasped more correctly by deep metaphysical thinking alone: this small class was (and is to-day) that of the philosophers. "The idea of the soul transmigrating rests on ignorance, while the soul in the sense of the highest reality is not transmigratory": such is the teaching of the Indian thinker. [80] A really "secret doctrine," such as the Greeks following Egyptian example loved, the Indians never knew: men of all castes, even women, could attain to the highest knowledge; but these profound sages knew very well that metaphysical thought requires special faculties and special development of those faculties; and so they let the figurative alone. And this figure, this magnificent conception of the transmigration of souls, which is perhaps indispensable for morals though essentially but a popular belief, while in India it was prevalent among the whole people from the highest to the lowest with the exception of the thinkers alone, became in Greece the most sublime "secret doctrine" of their first great philosopher, never quite disappeared from the highest regions of their philosophical views, and received from Plato the alluring charm of poetical form. These are the people who are said to have paved the way for us in thought, "the richest in thought of nations"! No, the Greeks were no great metaphysicians.
THEOLOGY
But they have just as little claim to be considered great moralists and theologians. Here too one example instead of many. The belief in daemons is everywhere current; the idea of a special intermediate race of daemons (between the gods in heaven and men on earth) was very probably derived by the Greeks from India (by way of Persia), [81] but that does not matter; in philosophy, or, as it may be called, in "rational religion," these creatures of superstition were first adopted by Plato. Rohde writes on this point as follows: [82] "Plato is the first of many to write about a whole intermediate hierarchy of daemons, entrusted with all that is wrought by invisible powers but seems beneath the dignity of the sublime gods. Thus the Divine itself is freed from everything evil and degrading." So with full consciousness and for the "rational" and flagrantly anthropomorphic purpose of " freeing" God of what seems evil to us men, that superstition which the Hellenes shared with bushmen and Australian blacks was adorned with a philosophical and theological aureole, recommended to the noblest minds by a noble mind and bequeathed to all future generations as an inheritance. The fortunate Indians had long before discarded the belief in daemons; it was retained only by the totally uneducated people; among the Indians the philosopher was bound no longer to any religious ceremony; for without denying their existence, like the superficial Xenophanes, he had learned to see in the gods symbols of a higher truth not able to be grasped by the senses -- what use then had such people for daemons? Homer, however, it should be noticed, had been on the same path. It is true that the hand of Athene stops the hastily raised arm of Achilles, and Here inspires the hesitating Diomedes with courage -- with such divine freedom does the poet interpret, inspiring all ages with poetical thoughts -- but genuine superstition plays a very subordinate part in Homer, and by his "divine" interpretation he raises it out of the sphere of real daemonism; his path was sunnier, more beautiful than that of the Indo-Aryan; instead of indulging in speculative metaphysics like the latter, he consecrated the empiric world and thereby guided mankind to a glorious goal. [83] Then came Socrates; -- old, superstitious, advised by Pythian oracles, taught by priestesses, possessed by daemons, and after him Plato and the others, O Hellenes! if only you had remained true to the religion of Homer and the artistic culture which it founded! If you had but trusted your divine poets, and not listened to your Heraclitus and Xenophanes, your Socrates and Plato, and all the rest of them! Alas for us who have for centuries been plunged into unspeakable sorrow and misery by this belief in daemons, now raised to sacred orthodoxy, who have been hampered by it in our whole intellectual development, who even to this day are under the delusions of the Thracian peasants! [84]
SCHOLASTICISM
Not one whit better is that Hellenic thought which follows neither the path of mysticism nor that of poetical suggestion, but openly links itself to natural science and with the help of philosophy and rational psychology undertakes to solve the great problems of existence. Here the Greek spirit at once falls into scholasticism, as already hinted. "Words, words, nothing but words!" In this case detailed treatment would unfortunately go far beyond the scope of this book. But if anyone is shy of the higher philosophy, let him take up a catechism, he will find plenty of Aristotle in it. Talk of the Divinity with such a man, and tell him that it " did not come into existence and was not created; that it has been from all time and is immortal," and he will think that you are quoting from the creed of an oecumenical council, whereas, as a matter of fact, it is a quotation from Aristotle! And if you further say to him that God is " an everlasting, perfect, unconditioned being, gifted with life, but without bulk, one who in eternal actuality thinks himself, for (this serves as explanation) thinking becomes objective to itself by the thinking of the thing thought, so that thinking and the thing thought become identical," the poor man will fancy that you are reading from Thomas Aquinas or at least from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but again it is a quotation from Aristotle. [85] The rational doctrine of God, the rational doctrine of the soul, above all the doctrine of a purposed order of the world suitable to human reason, or teleology (through which Aristotle, by the way, introduced such grotesque errors into his natural science), that was the inheritance in this sphere! How many centuries did it take till there came a brave man who threw this ballast overboard and showed that one cannot prove the existence of God, as Aristotle had made twenty centuries believe: -- till a man came who ventured to write the words, "Neither experience nor conclusions of reason adequately inform us whether man possesses a soul (as a substance dwelling in him, distinct from body and capable of thinking independently of it and therefore a spiritual substance), or whether life may not rather be a property of matter." [86]
But enough. I think I have shown with sufficient clearness that Hellenic philosophy is only genuinely great when we take the word in its widest sense, somewhat in the English sense, according to which a Newton and a Cuvier, or a Jean Jacques Rousseau and a Goethe are called "philosophers." As soon as the Greek left the sphere of intuition -- right from Thales onward-he became fatal; he became all the more fatal when he proceeded to use his incomparable plastic power (which is so strikingly absent in the metaphysical Indian) in giving a seductive shape to shadowy chimeras and in emasculating and bowdlerising deep conceptions and ideas that do not lend themselves to any analysis. I do not blame him because he had mystical tendencies and a plainly expressed need of metaphysics, but because he attempted to give shape to mysticism in a way other than the artistically mythical, and, going blindly past the central point of all metaphysics (I always naturally except Plato), tried to solve transcendent questions by prosaic empirical means. If the Greek had continued to develop his faculties on the one hand purely poetically, on the other purely empirically, his influence would have become an unmixed and inexpressible blessing for mankind; but, as it is, that same Greek who in poetry and science had given us an example of what true creative power can effect, and so of the way in which the development of man has taken place, at a later time proved to be a cramping and retarding element in the growth of the human intellect.
CONCLUSION
It may be that these last remarks rather trespass on the province of a later part of my book. But I had to face the difficulty. Great as has been the influence which the Hellenic inheritance has exercised upon our century, as upon those which preceded it, there has been no little confusion and no lack of misunderstanding concerning it. In order that the sequel might be understood, it was necessary that the mental condition of the heirs should be set out as clearly as the many-sided and complex nature of the inheritance which they received.
No summary is needed. Indeed what I have said about our rich Hellenic inheritance, which so deeply penetrates our intellectual life, is of itself a mere summary -- a mere indication. If we were to carry this experiment further we should arrive at a point where every concrete idea would become sublimated, where the sinuous lines of Life would shrivel into mere degrees in a scale, and there would remain nothing but a geometrical figure -- a construction of the mind -- instead of the representation of that manifold truth which has the gift of uniting in itself all contradictions. The philosophy of history, even in the hands of the most distinguished men, such as Herder for example, has a tendency rather to provoke contradiction than to encourage the formation of correct opinions. My object, moreover, is not so far-reaching. It is no part of my plan to pronounce judgment upon or to explain historically the spirit of ancient Greece: it suffices for me to bring home to our consciousness how boundless is the gift which it has brought us, and how actively that gift still works upon our poetry, our thought, our faith, our researches. I could not be exhaustive; -- I have contented myself with the endeavour to give a vivid and truthful picture. In so doing I have inflicted upon my readers some trouble, but this could not be avoided.