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
The Ionians of Asia Minor had certainly identified the soul with that in
us which is conscious, and which is the seat of goodness and badness,
wisdom and folly; but they did not regard it as what we call the self or
treat it as an individual. Anaximenes and his school held that the soul
was what they called Air, but that was just because they regarded Air as
the primary substance of which all things are made. The soul was
something, in fact, that comes to us from outside (θυραθεν {thyrathen})
by means of respiration. As Diogenes of Apollonia expresses it, it is 'a
small portion of the god', that is, of the primary substance, enclosed
in a human body for a time, and returning at death to the larger mass of
the same substance outside. The formula 'Earth to earth and air to air'
was accepted as an adequate description of what takes place at death.
The western Ionians, and especially the Pythagoreans, held a very
different view. For them, the soul was something divine. It was, in
fact, a fallen god, imprisoned in the body as a punishment for antenatal
sin, and it deserved our care in this sense, that it was our chief
business in life to purify it so as to secure its release from the
necessity of reincarnation in another body. But, during this present
life, they held that this divine element slumbers, except in prophetic
dreams. As Pindar puts it, 'It sleeps when the limbs are active.'
Neither of these views was familiar to the ordinary Athenian, but
Socrates of course knew both well, and felt satisfied with neither. When
he spoke of the soul he did not mean any mysterious fallen god which
was the temporary tenant of the body, but the conscious self which it
lies with us to try to make wise and good. On the other hand, his
insistence on our duty to 'care for' it is quite inconsistent with the
view that it is merely something extrinsic, as all the eastern Ionians
down to Anaxagoras had taught. It is, on the contrary, our very self,
the thing in us which is of more importance to us than anything else
whatever. It was to this doctrine of the soul and our duty to it that
Socrates felt he must convert mankind and especially his
fellow-citizens. It was a strange and novel doctrine then; and, if it
has become a commonplace since, that only shows that he was successful,
if not in persuading his fellowmen to act on this knowledge, at least in
making them aware of it. It was in this way that Socrates healed the
rift between science and religion which had proved fatal to the
Pythagorean society, and it may be suggested that the significance of
his teaching is not exhausted yet. As has been indicated above it is to
be found clearly stated in Plato's _Apology of Socrates_, and it
furnishes the only clue to a right understanding of the great series of
Platonic dialogues down to and including the _Republic_ in which
Socrates is represented as the chief speaker. Whether Plato added much
or little of his own to the doctrine of his master in these dialogues is
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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