The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Philosophy
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Greece -- Civilization
It is easy for us to see now that all this indicates a real weakness in
Pythagoreanism. Science and religion are not to be brought into union by
a simple process of juxtaposition. We do not know how far Pythagoras
himself was conscious of the ambiguity of his position; it would not be
surprising if he came to feel it towards the end of his life, and we
know for certain that he lived long enough to witness the beginnings of
the revolt against his society in Croton and elsewhere. It is for this
reason that he removed to Metapontum where he died, and where Cicero was
able to visit his tomb long afterwards. We shall see later what the weak
point in his system was, and we shall have to consider how the discord
he had left unresolved was ultimately overcome. For the present, it is
more important to note that he was the real founder both of science, and
of philosophy as we understand them now. It is specially true of science
that it is the first steps which are the most difficult, and Pythagoras
left a sufficient achievement in mathematics behind him for others to
elaborate. The Greeks took less than three centuries to complete the
edifice, and that was chiefly due to Pythagoras, who had laid the
foundations truly and well.
We have now seen how the two great conceptions of Matter and Form were
reached; the next problem Greek philosophy had to face was that of
Motion. At first the fact of movement had simply been taken for granted.
The Ionian tendency was to see motion everywhere; it was rest that had
to be explained, or rather the appearance of it. However, when the new
conception of an eternal matter began to be taken seriously,
difficulties made themselves felt at once. If reality was regarded as
continuous, it appeared that there was no room for anything else, not
even for empty space, which could only be identified with the unreal,
and it was easy to show that the unreal could not exist. But, if there
is no empty space, it seems impossible that there should be any motion,
and the world of which we suppose ourselves to be aware must be an
illusion. Such, briefly stated, was the position taken up by another
Ionian of southern Italy, Parmenides of Elea (_c._ 475 B. C.), who had
begun as a Pythagorean, but had been led to apply the rigorous method of
reasoning introduced into geometry with such success by the Pythagoreans
to the old question of the nature of the world which had occupied the
Milesians. The remarkable thing about the earliest geometers is, in
fact, that they did not formulate the conception of Space, which seems
to us at the present day fundamental. They were able to avoid it because
they possessed the conception of Matter, and regarded Air as the normal
state of the material substratum. The confusion of air with empty space
is, of course, a natural one, though it may be considered surprising
that it should not have been detected by the founders of geometrical
science. Such failures to draw all the consequences from a new discovery
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