himself into Etna, thereby to withdraw himself from the notice of mankind, and to give rise to the idea that he did not really die, but that he was taken up amongst the gods.
The origin and occasion for this fable seems to lie in a poem in which there are several verses that, taken alone, make great professions. He says, according to Sturz, (p. 530: Reliquiæ _τῶν καθαρμῶν_, v. 364-376):— “Friends who dwell within the fort on yellow Acragas And who in the best of works are busy, I greet you! To you I am an immortal god, no more a mortal man, Do ye not see how that where’er I go, all honour me, My head being ‘circled round with diadems and crowns of green? When so decked out, I show myself in towns of wealth, Men and women pray to me. And thousands follow My steps, to seek from me the way to bliss, Others ask for prophecies; others again, Healing words for ailments manifold beseech. But what is this to me—as though ‘twere anything By art to conquer much corrupted man.”
But, taken in the context, this laudation means that I am highly honoured, but what is the value of that to me; it expresses weariness of the honour given him by men.
Empedocles had Pythagoreans as pupils, and went about with them; he is sometimes considered to have been a Pythagorean like Parmenides and Zeno, but this is the only ground for such a statement. It is a question whether he belonged to the League; his philosophy has no resemblance to the Pythagorean. According to Diogenes Laertius (VIII. 56), he was also called Zeno’s fellow-pupil. There have, indeed, been many isolated reflections of a physical kind preserved to us, as also some words of exhortation, and in him thought as penetrating within reality, and the knowledge of nature seem to have attained to greater breadth and compass; we find in him, however, less speculative depth than in Heraclitus, but a Notion more imbued with the point of view of reality, and a culture derived from natural philosophy or the contemplation of nature. Empedocles is more poetic than definitely philosophical; he is not very interesting, and much cannot be made of his philosophy.
As to the particular Notion which governs it, and which really begins in it to appear, we may call it Combination or Synthesis. It is as combination that the unity of opposites first presents itself; this Notion, first opening up with Heraclitus, is, while in a condition of rest, conceived of as combination, before thought grasps the universal in Anaxagoras. Empedocles’ synthesis, as a completion of the relationship, thus belongs to Heraclitus, whose speculative Idea, though in reality, is process, but this is so without the individual moments in reality being mutually related as Notions. Empedocles’ conception of synthesis holds good to the present day. He also is the originator of the common idea that has even come down to us, of regarding the four known physical elements of fire, air, water, and earth, as fundamental; by chemists they are certainly no longer held to be elements, because they understand by elements a simple chemical substance. I will now give Empedocles’ ideas shortly, and draw the many units mentioned into the connection of a whole.
His general ideas Aristotle[75] shortly sums up thus: “To the three elements, fire, air, and water, each of which was in turn considered as the principle from which everything proceeded, Empedocles added the Earth as the fourth corporeal element, saying that it is these which always remain the same, never becoming, but being united and separated as the more or the less, combining into one and coming out of one.” Carbon, metal, &c., are not something existing in and for itself which remains constant and never becomes; thus nothing metaphysical is signified by them. But with Empedocles this undoubtedly is the case: every particular thing arises through some kind of union of the four. These four elements, to our ordinary idea, are not so many sensuous things if we consider them as universal elements; for, looked at sensuously, there are various other sensuous things. All that is organic, for example, is of another kind; and, further, earth as one, as simple, pure earth, does not exist, for it is in manifold determinateness. In the idea of four elements we have the elevation of sensuous ideas into thought.
Aristotle further says in reference to the abstract Notion of their relation to one another (Met. I. 4), that Empedocles did not only require the four elements as principles, but also Friendship and Strife, which we have already met with in Heraclitus; it is at once evident that these are of another kind, because they are, properly speaking, universal. He has the four natural elements as the real, and friendship and strife as the ideal principles, so that six elements, of which Sextus[76] often speaks, make their appearance in lines that Aristotle (Met. II. 4) and Sextus (adv. Math. VII. 92) have preserved:— “With the earth, we see the earth, with water, water, With air, heavenly air, with fire, eternal fire, With love, love is seen, and strife with sorrowful strife.”
Through our participation in them they become for us. There we have the idea that spirit, the soul, is itself the unity, the very totality of elements, in which the principle of earth relates to earth, water to water, love to love, &c.[77] In seeing fire, the fire is in us for whom objective fire is, and so on.
Empedocles also speaks of the process of these elements, but he did not comprehend it further; the point to be remarked is that he represented their unity as a combination. In this synthetic union, which is a superficial relation devoid of Notion, being partly related and partly unrelated, the contradiction necessarily results that at one time the unity of elements is established and at another, their separation: the unity is not the universal unity in which they are moments, being even in their diversity one, and in their unity different, for these two moments, unity and diversity, fall asunder, and union and separation are quite indeterminate relationships. Empedocles says in the first book of his poem on Nature, as given by Sturz (p. 517, v. 106-109): “There is no such thing as a Nature, only a combination and separation of what is combined; it is merely called Nature by men.” That is to say, that which constitutes anything, as being its elements or parts, is not as yet called its nature, but only its determinate unity. For example, the nature of an animal is its constant and real determinateness, its kind, its universality, which is simple. But Empedocles does away with nature in this sense, for every thing, according to him, is the combination of simple elements, and thus not in itself the universal, simple and true: this is not what is signified by us when we speak of nature. Now this nature in which a thing moves in accordance with its own end, Aristotle (De gen. et corr. II. 6) misses in Empedocles; in later times this conception was still further lost. Because the elements were thus existent simply in themselves, there was, properly speaking, no process established in them, for in process they are only vanishing moments, and not existent in themselves. Being thus implicit, they must have been unchangeable, or they could not constitute themselves into a unity; for in the one their subsistence, or their implicit existence would be destroyed. But because Empedocles says that things subsist from these elements, he immediately establishes their unity.
These are the principal points in Empedocles’ philosophy. I will quote the remarks that Aristotle (Met. I. 4) makes in this regard.
(_α_) “If we wish to follow this up, and do so in accordance with the understanding, not merely stumbling over it like Empedocles, we should say that friendship is the principle of good and strife the principle of evil, so that in a measure we may assert that Empedocles maintained—and was the first to do so—that the evil and the good are the absolute principles, because the good is the principle of all good, and the bad the principle of all evil.” Aristotle shows the trace of universality present here; for to him it may be termed essential in dealing with the Notion of the principle, that which is in and for itself. But this is only the Notion, or the thought which is present in and for itself; we have not yet seen such a principle, for we find it first in Anaxagoras. If Aristotle found the principle of motion missed in ancient philosophers, in the Becoming of Heraclitus, he again missed in Heraclitus the still deeper principle of the Good, and hence wished to discover it in Empedocles. By the good the “why” is to be understood, that which is an end in and for itself, which is clearly established in itself, which is on its own account, and through which all else is; the end has the determination of activity, the bringing forth of itself, so that it, as end to itself, is the Idea, the Notion that makes itself objective and, in its objectivity, is identical with itself. Aristotle thus entirely controverts Heraclitus, because his principle is change alone, without remaining like self, maintaining self, and going back within self.
(_β_) Aristotle also says in criticizing further the relationship and determination of these two universal principles of Friendship and Strife, as of union and separation, that “Empedocles neither adequately made use of them nor discovered in them what they involved (_ἐξευρίσκει τὸ ὁμολογούμενον_); for with him friendship frequently divides and strife unites. That is, when the All falls asunder through strife amongst the elements, fire is thereby united into one, and so is each of the other elements.” The separation of the elements which are comprised within the All, is just as necessarily the union amongst themselves of the parts of each element; that which, on the one hand, is the coming into separation, as independent, is at the same time something united within itself. “But when everything through friendship goes back into one, it is necessary that the parts of each element undergo separation again.” The being in one is itself a manifold, a diverse relation of the four diversities, and thus the going together is likewise a separation. This is the case generally with all determinateness, that it must in itself be the opposite, and must manifest itself as such. The remark that, speaking generally, there is no union without separation, no separation without union, is a profound one; identity and non-identity are thought-determinations of this kind which cannot be separated. The reproach made by Aristotle is one that lies in the nature of the thing. And when Aristotle says that Empedocles, although younger than Heraclitus, “was the first to maintain such principles, because he did not assert that the principle of motion is one, but that it is different and opposed,” this certainly relates to the fact that he thought it was in Empedocles that he first found design, although his utterances on the subject were dubious.
(_γ_) As to the real moments in which this ideal realizes itself, Aristotle further says, “He does not speak of them as four”—equivalents in juxtaposition—“but on the contrary as two; fire he puts by itself on the one side, and the three others, earth, air, and water, on the other.” What would be most interesting is the determination of their relationship.
(_δ_) In what deals with the relationship of the two ideal moments, friendship and strife, and of the four real elements, there is thus nothing rational, for Empedocles, according to Aristotle (Met. XII. 10), did not properly separate, but co-ordinated them, so that we often see them in proximity and counted as having equal value; but it is self-evident that Empedocles also separated these two sides, the real and the ideal, and expressed thought as their relation.
(_ε_) Aristotle says with justice (De gen. et corr. I. 1) that “Empedocles contradicts both himself and appearances. For at one time he maintains that none of the elements springs out of the other, but all else comes from them; and, at another time, he makes them into a whole through friendship, and again destroys this unity through strife. Thus through particular differences and qualities, one becomes water, the other fire, &c. Now if the particular differences are taken away (and they can be taken away since they have arisen), it is evident that water arises from earth, and the reverse. The All was not yet fire, earth, water, and air, when these were still one, so that it is not clear whether he made the one or the many to be, properly speaking, real existence.” Because the elements become one, their special character, that through which water is water, is nothing in itself, that is, they are passing into something different; but this contradicts the statement that they are the absolute elements, or that they are implicit. He considers actual things as an intermingling of elements, but in regard to their first origin, he thinks that everything springs from one through friendship and strife. This customary absence of thought is in the nature of synthetic conceptions; it now upholds unity, then multiplicity, and does not bring both thoughts together; as sublated, one is also not one.[78] F. ANAXAGORAS.
F. ANAXAGORAS.
With Anaxagoras[79] a light, if still a weak one, begins to dawn, because the understanding is now recognized as the principle. Aristotle says of Anaxagoras (Met. I. 3): “But he who said that reason (_νοῦς_), in what lives as also in nature, is the origin of the world and of all order, is like a sober man as compared with those who came before and spoke at random (_εἰκῆ_).” As Aristotle says, hitherto philosophers may “be compared to the fencers who fence in an unscientific way. Just as the latter often make good thrusts in their struggle, though not by any skill, these philosophers seem to speak without any knowledge of what they say.” Now if Anaxagoras, as a sober man amongst drunkards, was the first to reach this consciousness—for he says that pure thought is the actually existent universal and true—he yet, to a considerable extent, still thrusts into space.
The connection of his philosophy with what precedes is as follows: In Heraclitus’ Idea as motion, all moments are absolutely vanishing. Empedocles represents the gathering together of this motion into a unity, but into a synthetic unity; and with Leucippus and Democritus it is the same. With Empedocles, however, the moments of this unity are the existent elements of fire, water, &c., and with the others, pure abstractions, implicit being, thoughts. But in this way universality is directly asserted, for the opposing elements have no longer any sensuous support. We have had Being, Becoming, the One, as principles; they are universal thoughts and not sensuous, nor are they figures of the imagination; the content and its parts are, however, taken from what is sensuous, and they are thoughts in some sort of a determination. Anaxagoras now says that it is not gods, sensuous principles, elements, or thoughts—which really are determinations of reflection—but that it is the Universal, Thought itself, in and for itself, without opposition, all embracing, which is the substance or the principle. The unity as universal, returns from the opposition into itself, while in the synthesis of Empedocles, what is opposed is still apart from it and independent, and Thought is not Being. Here, however, Thought as pure, free process in itself, is the self-determining universal, and is not distinguished from conscious thought. In Anaxagoras quite new ground is thus opened up.
Anaxagoras concludes this period, and after him a fresh one begins. In accordance with the favourite idea of there being a genealogical descent of principles from the teacher to the taught, because he was an Ionian, he is often represented as perpetuating the Ionic school, and as an Ionic philosopher: Hermotimus of Clazomenæ, too, was his teacher. To support this theory Diogenes Laertius (II. 6) makes him a disciple of Anaximenes, whose birth is, however, placed in Ol. 55-58, or about sixty years earlier than that of Anaxagoras.
Aristotle says (Met. I. 3) that Anaxagoras first began by these determinations to express absolute reality as understanding. Aristotle and others after him, such as Sextus (adv. Math. IX. 7), mention the bare fact that Hermotimus gave rise to this conception, but it was clearly due to Anaxagoras. Little is gained if such a fact were true, since we learn no more about the philosophy of Hermotimus; it cannot have been much. Others have made numerous historical researches respecting this Hermotimus. The name we have already mentioned amongst those of whom it is said that Pythagoras existed in them before he lived as Pythagoras. We also have a story of Hermotimus to the effect that he possessed the peculiar gift of being able to make his soul quit his body. But this did him bad service in the end, since his wife, with whom he had a dispute, and who besides knew very well how matters stood, showed to their acquaintances this soul-deserted body as dead, and it was burnt before the soul reinstated itself—which soul must have been astonished.[80] It is not worth while to investigate what lies at the ground of these ancient stories, i.e. into how we should regard the matter: we may think of it as implying a state of ecstasy.
We must consider the life of Anaxagoras before his philosophy. Anaxagoras, according to Diogenes (II. 7), born in Ol. 70 (500 B.C.), comes earlier than Democritus, and in age also precedes Empedocles, yet, on the whole, he was contemporaneous with these, as also with Parmenides; he was as old as Zeno, and lived somewhat earlier than Socrates, but still they were acquainted with one another. His native town was Clazomenæ, in Lydia, not very far from Colophon and Ephesus, and situated on an isthmus by which a great peninsula is connected with the mainland. His life is shortly summed up in the statement that he devoted himself to the study of the sciences, withdrew from public affairs; according to Valerius Maximus (VIII. 7, extr. 6) he made numerous journeys, and finally, according to Tennemann (Vol. I. pp. 300, 415), in the forty-fifth year of his age, in the 81st Olympiad (456 B.C.), and at a propitious time, he came to Athens.
With him we thus find Philosophy in Greece proper, where so far there had been none, and coming, indeed, as far as Athens; hitherto either Asia Minor or Italy had been the seat of Philosophy, though, when the inhabitants of Asia Minor fell under Persian rule, with their loss of freedom, it expired amongst them. Anaxagoras, himself a native of Asia Minor, lived in the important period between the war of the Medes and the age of Pericles, principally in Athens, which had now reached the zenith of its greatness, for it was both the head of Grecian power, and the seat and centre of the arts and sciences. Athens, after the Persian wars, brought the greater part of the Greek islands into subjection, as also a number of maritime towns in Thrace, and even further into the Black Sea. As the greatest artists collected in Athens, so also did the most noted philosophers and sophists live there—a circle of luminaries in the arts and sciences such as we have in Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Diogenes of Apollonia, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and others from Asia Minor. Pericles then ruled the State, and raised it to that height of splendour which may be called the golden age in Athenian life; Anaxagoras, although living in the most flourishing time of Athenian life, touches on its decay, or rather reaches the first threatening of that decay, which ended in a total extermination of this beautiful life.
What is of special interest at this time is the opposition between Athens and Lacedæmon, the two Greek nations which contended with one another for the foremost place in Greece; here we must therefore allude to the principles of these celebrated States. While the Lacedæmonians had no arts or sciences, Athens had to thank the character of its constitution, and of its whole spirit, for the fact that it was the seat of the sciences and fine arts. But the constitution of Lacedæmon is also worthy of high esteem, for it regulated and restrained the high Doric spirit, and its principal feature was that all personal peculiarity was subordinated, or rather sacrificed, to the general aim of the life of the State, and the individual had the consciousness of his honour and sufficiency only in the consciousness of working for the State. A people of such genuine unity, in whom the will of the individual had, properly speaking, quite disappeared, were united by an indestructible bond, and Lacedæmon was hence placed at the head of Greece, and obtained the leadership, which, we find, it held among the Argives in the days of Troy. This is a great principle which must exist in every true State, but which with the Lacedæmonians retained its one-sided character; this one-sidedness was avoided by the Athenians, and by that means they became the greater. In Lacedæmon personality proper was so much disregarded that the individual could not have free development or expression; individuality was not recognized, and hence not brought into harmony with the common end of the State. This abrogation of the rights of subjectivity, which, expressed in his own way, is also found in Plato’s Republic, was carried very far with the Lacedæmonians. But the universal is living spirit only in so far as the individual consciousness finds itself as such within it; the universal is not constituted of the immediate life and being of the individual, the mere substance, but formed of conscious life. As individuality which separates itself from the universal is powerless and falls to the ground, the one-sided universal, the morality of individuality cannot stand firm. The Lacedæmonian spirit, which had not taken into account the freedom of consciousness, and whose universal had isolated itself therefrom, had hence to see it break forth in opposition to the universal; and though the first to come forward as the liberators of Greece from its tyranny were the Spartans, whom even Athens thanks for the expulsion of the descendants of Pisistratus, their relationship to their confederates soon passes into that of common, mean, tyranny.
Within the State it likewise ends in a harsh aristocracy, just as the fixed equilibrium of property (each family retaining its inheritance, and through forbidding the possession of money, or trade and commerce, preventing the possibility of inequality in riches) passes into an avarice which, as opposed to this universal, is brutal and mean. This essential moment of particularity, not being taken into the State, and hence not made legal and moral (moral first of all), comes forth as vice. In a rational organization all the elements of the Idea are present; if the liver were isolated as bile it would become not more, and not less active, but becoming antagonistic, it would isolate itself from the corporate economy of the body. Solon, on the contrary, gave to the Athenians not only equality of laws and unity of spirit in their constitution (which was a purer democracy than in Sparta), but although each citizen had his substantial consciousness in unity with the laws of the State, he also gave free play to the individual mind, so that each might do as he would, and might find expression for himself. Solon entrusted the executive to the people, not to the Ephors, and this became self-government after the displacement of the tyrants, and thus in truth a free people arose; the individual had the whole within himself, as he had his consciousness and action in the whole. Thus we see in this principle the formation of free consciousness and the freedom of individuality in its greatness. The principle of subjective freedom appears at first, however, still in unison with the universal principle of Greek morality as established by law, and even with mythology; and thus in its promulgation, because the genius of its conceptions could develop freely, it brought about these masterpieces in the beautiful plastic arts, and the immortal works of poetry and history. The principle of subjectivity had, thus far, not taken the form that particularity, as such, should be set free, and that its content should be a subjectively particular, at least distinguished from the universal principle, universal morality, universal religion, universal laws. Thus we do not see the carrying out of isolated ideas, but the great, moral, solid, divine content made in these works object for consciousness, and generally brought before consciousness. Later we shall find the form of subjectivity becoming free for itself, and appearing in opposition to the substantial, to morality, religion, and law.
The basis of this principle of subjectivity, though it is still a merely general one, we now see in Anaxagoras. But amongst this noble, free, and cultured people of Athens, he who had the happiness to be first, was Pericles, and this circumstance raised him in the estimation of the individual to a place so high that few could reach it. Of all that is great amongst men, the power of ruling over the will of men who have but one will, is the greatest, for this controlling individuality must be both the most universal and the most living—a lot for a mortal being than which hardly any better can be found. His individuality was, according to Plutarch, (in Pericle 5) as deep as it was perfect; as serious (he never laughed), as full of energy and restfulness: Athens had him the whole day long. Thucydides has preserved some of Pericles’ speeches to the people which allow of few works being compared to them. Under Pericles the highest culture of the moral commonwealth is to be found, the juncture where individuality is still under and also in the universal. Presently individuality prevails, because its activity falls into extremes, since the state as state, is not yet independently organized within itself. Because the essence of the Athenian State was the common spirit, and the religious faith of individuals in this constituted their essence, there disappears with the disappearance of this faith, the inner Being of the people, since the spirit is not in the form of the Notion as it is in our states. The speedy transition to this last is the _νοῦς_, subjectivity, as Being, self-reflection. When Anaxagoras at this time, the principle of which has just been given, came to Athens, he was sought out by Pericles, and, as his friend, lived in very intimate relations with him, before the latter occupied himself with public affairs. But Plutarch (in Pericle 4, 16) also relates that Anaxagoras came to want because Pericles neglected him—did not supply the illuminating lamp with oil.
A more important matter is that Anaxagoras (as happened later with Socrates and many other philosophers) was accused of despising those whom the people accepted as gods. The prose of the understanding came into contact with the poetic, religious point of view. It is distinctly said by Diogenes Laertius (II. 12) that Anaxagoras believed the sun and stars to be burning stones; and he is, according to Plutarch, (in Pericle, 6) blamed for having explained something that the prophets stated to be a marvellous omen, in a natural way; it quite tallies with this that he is said to have foretold that on the day of Ægos-Potamos, where the Athenians lost their last fleet against Lysander, a stone should fall from heaven.[81] The general remark might be made of Thales, Anaximander, &c., that the sun, moon, earth and stars were counted as mere things, i.e. as objects external to mind, and that they no longer held them to be living gods, but represented them in different ways—which ideas, for the rest, deserve no further consideration, since these matters belong properly to ordinary learning. Things may be derived from thought; thought really brings about the result that certain objects which may be called divine, and certain conceptions of these which may be called poetic, together with the whole range of superstitious beliefs, are demolished—they are brought down to being what are called natural things. For in thought, as the identity of itself and of Being, mind knows itself as the truly actual, so that for mind in thought, the unspiritual and material is brought down to being mere things, to the negative of mind. All the ideas of those philosophers have this in common, that nature is through them undeified; they brought the poetic view of nature down to the prosaic, and destroyed the poetic point of view which ascribes to all that is now considered to be lifeless, a life proper to itself, perhaps also sensation, and, it may be, a being after the usual order of consciousness. The loss of this point of view is not to be lamented as if unity with nature, pure faith, innocent purity and childlike spirit went with it. Innocent and childlike it may certainly have been, but reason is just the going forth from such innocence and unity with nature. So soon as mind grasps itself, is for itself, it must for that very reason confront the ‘other’ of itself as a negation of consciousness, i.e. look on it as something devoid of mind, an unconscious and lifeless thing, and it must first come to itself through this opposition. There is in this a fixing of self-moving things such as are met with in the myths of the ancients,