Chapter III The Problem of the Evolution of Speculative Thought

In the earliest phases of man’s social and mental life we find no trace of conscious reflection on the conditions of his existence. His view of the world is a vague fluid mass of assumptions arising without conscious will or intention on his part out of a welter of crude analogies, moulded in the forms in which his mind operated, and accumulating from untold generations. This was the era of mythology, folk-lore, of primitive thought and imagination. It had as its counterpart in the material sphere the world of a common tribal and clan life, to which the individual human being was subordinated, and apart from which he had no significance. As this material side of primitive society yielded to civilisation, by which the old social bonds became loosened and the independence of the individual began to emerge, the intellectual outlook also became gradually modified. The great factor in this modification was the awakening of conscious reflection upon himself, his beliefs and surroundings, on the part of the individual.

The awakening self-consciousness of the individual took various forms, moral and intellectual, and it passed through many phases, consisting largely in a modification and systematisation of myth and traditional modes of thought, before the conscious attempt to explain the universe on rational principles, as we now term them – in other words, before the dawn of philosophy properly so-called.

But it was not given to every race of ancient times to inaugurate philosophic inquiry in its true sense. We can trace detached fragments of philosophic thought at an early stage in more than one of the Oriental civilisations of antiquity, while in ancient India something like a definite line of philosophic development is discoverable. But for universal history – that is, for history considered as a continuous evolution of man from early beginnings up to the present time – there is only one classical line of philosophic development, and that is the one inaugurated by Ancient Greece in the sixth century B.C., with which the modern thought of the Western world is directly affiliated.

Before proceeding further it is necessary to define more clearly what constitutes philosophy as such. Philosophy is something more than a mere attempt at an explanation of things in general. The early mythologies and theogonies were also, for that matter, attempts to explain the nature of things; but what distinguishes philosophy from all earlier ways of looking at man and the world is the fact that it is the product of conscious reflection, that it works through reason and its processes of logic, and not by mere imagination or by the acceptance of traditional authority. That it was a product of conscious reflection, and that its methods were those of observation and logical reasoning, as opposed to naive imagination and tradition, clearly differentiates philosophic thought from the thought that preceded it.

When Thales asked the question, what constituted the ultimate physical substance of the Universe, that to which all others are reducible, and thought that the true answer to that question was that water was that substance, he started a new era in human thought of inestimable importance for the intellectual future of mankind. This problem of the primary and ultimate physical substance of the Universe which occupied the Ionic School, of which Thales was the reputed founder, and to which his successors gave solutions differing from his own, crude and futile though it may seem to us, gave the impulse, directly or indirectly, to all subsequent thought. New problems and their attempted solutions – problems of the nature of being and becoming, of the one and the many, and (in a crude form) of reality and appearance, besides those directly concerned with the origin, the structure, and the working of the material Universe – rose successively, and exercised the subtlety of the rapidly-expanding Greek intellect until the rise, in the fourth century, of the Sophist Schools.

The comparatively sudden development of the Greek world – economically, politically, and intellectually – induced a movement of scepticism in things speculative, and in self-seeking individualists in things practical, in which the lecturers called Sophist, who formulated these tendencies and who taught their wisdom for money, found a ready market for their wares. The significance of this movement was that it implied a shifting of the philosophic problem. Hitherto, for nearly two centuries past, the inquiry had been into the nature of things considered as existing per se; first of all, as to the ultimate physical nature of the Universe, and then as to the meaning and implications of its abstract conditions, these conditions themselves being regarded as independent realities. An illustration of the latter may be found in the hypostatisation of Number ascribed to Pythagoras, the Numbers being conceived as real existences.

The inconsistencies, the impossibility of proof, and the apparent insolubility of certain questions, resulting in a general scepticism, led the way to a new statement of the philosophic problem. Different thinkers had arrived at different conclusions. What to one man seemed true, to another seemed false; what the custom of one city approved as good, the custom of another city condemned as bad. The impetus taken by trade and travel at this time enlarged the horizon of everyone. Hence the Sophist movement, which was summed up in the well-known formula of the Sophist Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.”

Rhetorical arts, plausible speculation, and smart tricks of controversy became the fashionable studies in the leading Greek cities, and not the least so in Athens. In the latter city there was, however, one disciple of the new movement who did not rest satisfied with the results taught him by his Sophist instructor. This was Sokrates. With the general decay of traditional standards of thought and life Sokrates was not content to rest; above all, he was not content with the doctrine which reduced virtue to a mere private or individual opinion. On the other hand, he was by no means disposed to be false to the current intellectual movement of his time. He felt there was no going back upon the prevalent Sophism. His aim was, by means of the very principle which had undermined old sanctions and assumptions, to acquire a new objective standard, as we should say in the present day, in the first instance of conduct (virtue), with which he was chiefly concerned, but indirectly of intellectual theory also. The famous saying that Sokrates “brought down philosophy from heaven to earth” meant that he definitely shifted the problem from an inquiry concerning the principles of existence to one concerning the principles of knowledge. Man was the measure of all things, it was true, yet not man considered as an individual, but the reason or the logical faculty in man, the instrument of “dialectic.” Hence it was Sokrates’ aim, by means of question and answer, to discover a definition of “virtue” and the “good” that would be recognised as valid by all men.

If he was not successful in this, he was eminently so in producing a stimulus in the minds of his contemporaries, a stimulus that inaugurated a new era in human thought. It was the dialectical Sokrates that produced the thought of Plato, and through Plato furnished Aristotle with the intellectual training which enabled him to build up his encyclopaedic system. The thought common to all men, the insight or truth that Sokrates strove to evolve by means of his dialectic, for practical purposes, became with Plato the world of general concepts, of which the world, as perceived by us, is merely the imperfect copy or appearance. The “good” of Sokrates became for Plato the supreme idea, that which embraced all other ideas, and to which they led up as their end and completion. Plato’s division of all things into the world of intellect and the world of sense would, of course, have been quite unrecognised by Sokrates himself; but it may unquestionably be traced to Sokrates’ insistence on clearness of definition and on the capacity for universal application of all valid mental concepts.

With Plato the old problems of philosophy again came to the front, but treated on the method which Sokrates had employed for the attainment of ethical truth. Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, could not accept Plato’s sharp separation of the world of sense from the world of ideas. For Aristotle the universals of logic were already contained in the particular objects of sense. There were not two worlds over against each other, but one world containing two elements: an element of sense – the particular sense-impression – and an element of thought – the universal concept or idea.

For all this, Aristotle, no less than Plato, insisted on the ideal element in the real world as constituting its true “inwardness.” The alpha and omega of the real world, that which gave to it its meaning and its final purpose, was the universalising intellect. But none the less, to the realisation of the ideal purpose of the world the sense-element was necessary. To the Platonic idea of universalia ante rem, universal ideas prior to the things of sense, Aristotle opposed his universalia in rebus, universal ideas as an inseparable element in the world of things from which it is the function of the reflective reason to disentangle them through the logical process. The “creative intellect” of Aristotle realised itself in, and through, the world of appearance. The world was an eternal evolution from matter to form, from potential to actual reality. The unformed matter of one stage be-came the formed reality of the next which was its essence. The antithesis of matter and form – of sense-material and its ideal determination – is, in the world perceived by us, relative. To employ a crude illustration, the matter of the brass informed by the idea of the sculptor, becomes the reality, the essence, statue. But Aristotle distinguishes, as the ultimate elements of the real world, a primal matter and the primal intellectual activity. The ideas, however, or the general concepts, formed by this Creative Activity have not, as with Plato, any independent reality in themselves. They are realised only in indissoluble union with the sense-impression. In the real world that we perceive and know, there is no such thing as formless matter or matterless form. Reality implies the indissoluble union – synthesis – of both elements. In the perceived object the creative idea is realised as essence or substance (ούσία). The above is the root-principle of the Aristotelian philosophy, and it is to Plato and Aristotle that the main stream of subsequent thought may be traced.

In the period following the Macedonian conquest, when the whole basin of the Eastern Mediterranean came under Greek influence – the so-called Hellenistic period – under the auspices of the dynasties founded by the generals of Alexander the Great, the practical or ethical side of philosophy again came to the fore, and philosophic schools acquired prominence whose professed aim was to teach the true guiding principles of life and conduct. The ostensible objects of these schools, it may be surmised, would have been more congenial to the temperament of Sokrates, with whom they claimed a direct or indirect connection, than the speculative systems of Plato and Aristotle. These schools were the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Sceptic, which have their protagonists in those founded a century or so earlier by direct disciples of Sokrates and termed the Cynic, the Cyrenaic, and the Megaric respectively.

The old independent life of the free cities had for the most part disappeared, and the movement of introspection, of self-brooding, already apparent in Sokrates, became the dominant spirit of the age It was no longer the social life and ideals of the tribe or the city that appealed to men, it was the ideal life of the individual and his happiness that was their primary object of interest. At the same time originality in speculative thought died out. Old positions were crudely restated, where they were not taught in their original form. The Lyceum at Athens remained the seat of Aristotelian teaching and the Academy of Platonic. In the latter case the carrying out of the dialectical methods of Plato’s dialogues had resulted in a general sceptical attitude. Rome entered the political arena and began absorbing the Hellenistic States of Eastern Europe. Philosophy in the shape of the four recognised Schools, the Aristotelian, the Platonic, the Stoic, and the Epicurean, not to mention the Neoscepticism of the school of Pyrrho, got carried to Rome and struck root there. The “philosopher” now became largely a professional moralist and sermoniser, corresponding to the clergyman of modern times. It became the fashion for great families to keep a philosopher, as it was a few generations ago of aristocratic houses to keep a chaplain. The Pagan priesthood and ritual, it should be observed, were concerned exclusively with ceremonial observances and not with preaching or moral exhortation.

The next important development of Philosophy proper, however, did not take distinct literary shape till the third century of the Christian era. This was the movement which gradually absorbed all other philosophies, and ultimately the various theories and cults generally of Pagan antiquity, into itself, and which became known as the “new Platonism” (Neoplatonism). Its first systematic literary exponent was Plotinus, a native of Egypt, hailing directly from Alexandria, who settled in Rome. He is the author of numerous works dealing with the great problem of the one and the many, of the universe of thought and the manifold of sense. Unlike the early Platonists, but fully in accord with the religio-mystical movement of which his writings may be regarded as the fullest and most definite philosophical expression, Plotinus assumed a faculty of intuition, rather than intellect or logical reasoning, as the ultimate and highest source of knowledge. In accordance with this view the ultimate principle was not, as with Greek philosophy at its zenith, vows (intellect or reason), but that out of which reason arises, the infinite unity which is its ultimate source and background. This principle Plotinus calls variously the One, the Being, the First Father, etc. The world of thought, of logical universals, is an emanation from this primal alogical principle. Our real world, which, as Aristotle had shown, was a mixture of thought and sense, of universal and particular, is again an emanation from the second or logical principle, the “intelligible world,” as it was called. The creative principle of the world of ordinary reality is the world-soul, to which Plotinus ascribes a dual character, on the one hand as reaching up toward the “intelligible world,” the world of logical forms, and on the other tending downward to the purely negative matter of sense. In the above we have the celebrated Alexandrian Trinity with its three hypostases, as they are termed. The human soul, it is almost needless to observe, represented a flash or efflorescence of the world-soul. After Plotinus the Neoplatonic movement tended to become more and more mere mysticism with a Pagan religious character, absorbing finally the whole of contemporary Paganism into one eclectic system, under whose auspices the final intellectual struggle with Christianity on the part of the ancient world was fought out.

The last philosophic figure of antiquity with which we need concern ourselves is Boethius, who flourished at Rome early in the sixth century. He is interesting as the very last representative of ancient philosophy in the Western world, and important for history as having laid the foundation of the Aristotelianism which dominated the schools of the Middle Ages. His works, although they seemed to have produced no effect at the time, became the text-books of early mediaeval learning.

The first figure in mediaeval Philosophy was Johannes Scotus Eregina (John the Scot of Ireland), who flourished in the ninth century, and who wrote a metaphysical treatise of strong Platonic or Neoplatonic tendencies. But the true philosophy of the medieval schools, thence termed Scholasticism, took shape later. Such writings of Aristotle as were known and the works of Boethius formed the text-books. From the eleventh century onwards philosophy as Scholasticism formed the main branch of mediaeval learning. The great problem was still the relation of the universal of thought to the particular of sense. Did ideas, did logical forms, have an existence independently of the real world, as Plato had asserted, or did they only subsist as an element in a world of objects, or, lastly, were they mere figments obtaining solely in our minds? These were the questions occupying the schools of the Middle Ages, especially of the earlier Middle Ages, but their thought was throughout dominated by the antithesis of Philosophy and Theology, profane and sacred learning. The aim of Philosophy for the Schoolmen was the provision of a rational basis for the dogmatic structure of the Church. The elaborate systems of Thomas Aquinas and of Duns Scotus were primarily concerned with this problem, though they brought within their range the whole body of the learning of their age. The doctrine known as Nominalism, originally the old Aristotelian doctrine of the universal as element in the object, became developed by William of Occam into a thorough-going theory of existence as solely attributable to the particulars of sense as perceived. This doctrine grew and acquired popularity as the philosophical side of the general tendency of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance towards individualism, political, economic, and social, grew. It had its full fruition, however, at a later time.

Modern Philosophy, as distinguished from that of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, is usually dated from the French Descartes, on the one hand, and the English Bacon on the other. These sharp divisions are, of course, more or less arbitrary. But there is a very good reason for regarding Descartes as the starting-point of modern thought. For, not unlike Sokrates in the ancient world, he radically shifted the standpoint of Philosophy. It had already become, during the Renaissance period, freed from its slavery to dogma on the one side and to the formula of Aristotle on the other, but only partially from its reliance on ancient models generally. Descartes, in his well-known formula Cogito ergo sum, which is as much as to say I exist thinking, brought back Philosophy to the bed-rock. At the same time the establishment of psychology as the central problem of Philosophy became fixed. Henceforth the problems of Philosophy began to be treated psychologically. This was notably the case with the English school, who applied the new method of Bacon to inquiries concerning the operations of the mind. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury, was the first to start in a systematic form these investigations, which continue through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and the Scotch psychologists. To this line of philosophic thought we shall revert directly.

As for Descartes, notwithstanding that he had started with pure self-consciousness, the criterion of truth which he thought he had derived from it, that a “clear and distinct idea” was the test of truth, led him to postulate mind and matter as separate substances, of which the attribute of one was Thought and of the other Extension. He thus lost his philosophical foothold, so to say, in discussions concerning the mutual relationship of the two substances, matter and mind, the attributes of which, extension on one side and thought on the other, seemed to have nothing mutually in common. That self-consciousness, considered not as an individual, but as an ultimate fact, was the key to the difficulty, never occurred to Descartes or his followers. The difficulty, raised in the form it was by Descartes, was solved in the only way possible on the given conditions of the controversy by the Dutch-Jewish thinker Spinoza, who proclaimed “God” or the Absolute as the infinite and only substance, of which Thought and Extension were the attributes. Matter and mind were reduced to a position of mere modes of these two attributes, whose only principle of unity was to be found in the “One Substance.”

In contradistinction to Spinoza, Leibnitz (born at Leipsic, 1646) solved the problem of the relation of Descartes’ two substances, mind and matter, with their two attributes, Thought and Extension, by the assumption of an infinity of souls, each individual soul being a self-contained unity or universe within itself existing for itself alone. This is the celebrated monadology of Leibnitz. The God of Leibnitz was the supreme monad from which all other monads or souls proceeded like sparks from the fire.

The criterion of truth for Spinoza and Leibnitz, as for Descartes, was the “clearness and distinctness” of ideas, but the type of the clearness which proclaimed the truth of a conception was to be found in mathematics. Hence we find in Spinoza, the most powerful original thinker of the seventeenth century. the exposition of his system carried out on the model of a treatise on geometry. Spinoza, as we have seen, postulated Thought and Extension as the attributes, not of mind and matter, but of his One Substance, or pantheistic God. In the course of the working out of his system, however, it is the attribute of Thought with its universalising that comes to dominate the whole, and we thus arrive at what is substantially a new form of the old Platonic Idealism.

The battle of the British school during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries turned largely on the psychological question of the existence of “innate ideas.” Does the individual receive all his experience from without, or is it partly derived from ideas originally obtaining in his mind? This was another way of approaching the old question of universals, but it had lost the comprehensive metaphysical character that it possessed with the ancients, and which to some extent clung to it throughout the Middle Ages, and had become reduced to the proportions of a purely psychological issue.

The British school solved the problem in the sense of the later “Nominalist” schoolmen. Abstract ideas, universals, were names for figments of the mind resulting directly or indirectly from the experience of real things derived through the senses. The theory of innate ideas assumed by Descartes and his followers and the Continental thinkers generally, to the effect that innate ideas existed in the human mind, was inadmissible. Out of this psychological problem the question of the reality of the material world as perceived through the senses emerged in a different form and with an explicitness it had never acquired before. The notion of substance as a substratum of the qualities of matter as also of those of mind (the two substances of Descartes, in fact) was the only innate idea corresponding to a reality beyond itself that was admitted by Locke.

It was this substance of Locke, the substratum of material qualities, which the celebrated Bishop Berkeley set himself to demolish. The idea of substance, he said, is, like other abstract concepts, merely a figment of the mind, having no independent existence corresponding to it any more than any other universal concept. The general term “matter” (i.e. physical substance) meant no more than a sum of perceived qualities, i.e. a bundle of affections of our senses perceived by the mind. The conclusion was obvious, that matter exists only as an idea in the mind, a mental concept.

David Hume took up the parable of Locke and Berkeley, showing, however, that Berkeley’s criticism of the notion of substance as the substratum of qualities did not go far enough, for that Berkeley, while he had legitimately demolished the validity of the notion of material substance as the substratum of the qualities perceived through the outer senses, had left untouched the notion of mind or soul as the mental substance in which our thoughts and feelings inhere. There is no more reason, said Hume, for accepting this concept, this figment of the mind, viz., substance, as an independent existence in the latter case than there is in the former. Psychical substance has no more rational validity than physical substance. We can affirm the existence of nothing, he contends, save a succession of impressions and ideas; all else is an unprovable assumption having no rational justification. The psychological philosophy of the British school becomes at this point, therefore, dissolved in scepticism.