The Greek Philosophers, Vol. 1 (of 2)Benn, Alfred William
Philosophy
The Greek Philosophers, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Benn, Alfred William
Philosophy, Ancient
After definition and division comes reasoning. We arrange objects
in classes, that by knowing one or some we may know all. Aristotle
attributes to Socrates the first systematic employment of induction
as well as of general definitions.[96] Nevertheless, his method was
not solely inductive, nor did it bear more than a distant resemblance
to the induction of modern science. His principles were not gathered
from the particular classes of phenomena which they determined, or
were intended to determine, but from others of an analogous character
which had already been reduced to order. Observing that all handicrafts
were practised according to well-defined intelligible rules, leading,
so far as they went, to satisfactory results, he required that life
in its entirety should be similarly systematised. This was not so
much reasoning as a demand for the more extended application of
reasoning. It was a truly philosophic postulate, for philosophy is
not science, but precedes and underlies it. Belief and action tend to
divide themselves into two provinces, of which the one is more or less
organised, the other more or less chaotic. We philosophise when we try
to bring the one into order, and also when we test the foundations on
which the order of the other reposes, fighting both against incoherent
mysticism and against traditional routine. Such is the purpose that the
most distinguished thinkers of modern times—Francis Bacon, Spinoza,
Hume, Kant, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer—however widely they
may otherwise differ, have, according to their respective lights, all
set themselves to achieve. No doubt, there is this vast difference
between Socrates and his most recent successors, that physical science
is the great type of certainty to the level of which they would raise
all speculation, while with him it was the type of a delusion and an
impossibility. The analogy of artistic production when applied to
Nature led him off on a completely false track, the ascription to
conscious design of that which is, in truth, a result of mechanical
causation.[97] But now that the relations between the known and the
unknown have been completely transformed, there is no excuse for
repeating the fallacies which imposed on his vigorous understanding;
and the genuine spirit of Socrates is best represented by those who,
starting like him from the data of experience, are led to adopt a
diametrically opposite conclusion. We may add, that the Socratic method
of analogical reasoning gave a retrospective justification to early
Greek thought, of which Socrates was not himself aware. Its daring
generalisations were really an inference from the known to the unknown.
To interpret all physical processes in terms of matter and motion, is
only assuming that the changes to which our senses cannot penetrate are
homogeneous with the changes which we can feel and see. When Socrates
argued that, because the human body is animated by a consciousness,
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