Ch 3 The Origin and Development of Dualism-First Period of Greek Speculation, before Socrates.

Classics in the History of Psychology AsyenatoGy An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario History of Psychology: A Sketch and an Interpretation Volume I James Mark Baldwin (1913) CHAPTER III. The Origin and Development of Dualism-First Period of Greek Speculation, before Socrates. PROJECTIVISM. -- It is commonly recognised that the first recorded attempts to explain the world are those of the Greek schools before Socrates.[1] There were before this, of course, the mystic and Spiritistic points of view of the religious cults and mysteries whose characteristics have been mentioned in the preceding chapter. Such views were, however, bound up with a social tradition and sanction of extraordinary force; they did not allow -- much less did they stimulate -- any sort of independent speculation on the part of individuals. The rise of speculation represented, accordingly, an enormous transition in culture, and an unheard-of dislocation of interest. Its roots are to be found, no doubt, in political and geographical conditions. In certain cases, geographical conditions favoured freedom of commerce and the rise of industrial individualism; and in some cases, political conditions favoured the rivalry and competition of social and [p. 24] religious institutions. These, together with the embarrassment that such conditions produce for the individual, worked for results of liberty and freedom in which the motives of reflective thought found a certain scope. MeliMQa. LN2aA5s ak vEa N‘ That this did not extend far, even in Greece, is seen in the conditions of persecution under which Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Socrates pursued their careers at Athens. But both politically and socially there was in certain of the Greek colonies a state of things which, in contrast with earlier mystical collectivism, could be called one of relative rationalism. There arose a degree of speculative liberty, and with it came the urgency of new problems for thought. Its factors became more and more explicit, as we are to see, and culminated in the "relativism" of the Sophists and the New Academy. The thinkers of this early period are generally classified in groups as "Ionians" and "Eleatics" (so named from their geographical origin in Ionia and Elea), "Pythagoreans," "Atomists," and "Sophists." Later historians, however, have properly insisted upon a classification which will reflect something more important than location of birth or membership in a group. We should aim at presenting a more essential connection than that of mere locality between this thinker and that, and a more essential bond than that of mere succession between this period and that. In our view the development of the theory of the soul or self furnishes the proper clue; and in this the analogy with the development of

18-02-11 16:51 An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario (Return to index) History of Psychology: A Sketch and an Interpretation Volume I James Mark Baldwin (1913) CHAPTER III. The Origin and Development of Dualism-First Period of Greek Speculation, before Socrates. PROJECTIVISM. -- It is commonly recognised that the first recorded attempts to explain the world are those of the Greek schools before Socrates.[l] There were before this, of course, the mystic and spiritistic points of view of the religious cults and mysteries whose characteristics have been mentioned in the preceding chapter. Such views were, however, bound up with a social tradition and sanction of extraordinary force; they did not allow -- much less did they stimulate -- any sort of independent speculation on the part of individuals. The rise of speculation represented, accordingly, an enormous transition in culture, and an unheard-of dislocation of interest. Its roots are to be found, no doubt, in political and geographical conditions. In certain cases, geographical conditions favoured freedom of commerce and the rise of industrial individualism; and in some cases, political conditions favoured the rivalry and competition of social and [p. 24] religious institutions. These, together with the embarrassment that such conditions produce for the individual, worked for results of liberty and freedom in which the motives of reflective thought found a certain scope. That this did not extend far, even in Greece, is seen in the conditions of persecution under which Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Socrates pursued their careers at Athens. But both politically and socially there was in certain of the Greek colonies a state of things which, in contrast with earlier mystical collectivism, could be called one of relative rationalism. There arose a degree of speculative liberty, and with it came the urgency of new problems for thought. Its factors became more and more explicit, as we are to see, and culminated in the "relativism" of the Sophists and the New Academy. The thinkers of this early period are generally classified in groups as "Ionians" and "Eleatics" (so named from their geographical origin in Ionia and Elea), "Pythagoreans," "Atomists," and "Sophists." Later historians, however, have properly insisted upon a classification which will reflect something more important than location of birth or membership in a group. We should aim at presenting a more essential connection than that of mere locality between this thinker and that, and a more essential bond than that of mere succession between this period and that. In our view the development of the theory of the soul or self furnishes the proper clue; and in this the analogy with the development of the individual's apprehension of the self has direct application. From this point of view, the period may be described as that of the first appearance and early development [p. 25] of " dualism." It opened, indeed, with a sort of speculation which was, properly speaking, a-dualistic. The world is to the race, as it is also to the individual in the earliest stages of his development, a sort of panorama of given and unexplained changes. It is simply "projected" before the eyes, given to the senses. Its explaining principles, matter, mind, God, are not in any way isolated or differentiated from one another. But it is just its principal character that it does not remain meaningless and blank; it passes from this "projective" and a-dualistic stage into one of crude but positive dualism. In tracing this out, we reach the real significance of the movement for psychology. Construed in accordance with this genetic principle, we find the following stages in the development of Pre-Socratic thought -I. The "Hylozoism" of the Ionic thinkers. II. The "Dualism" of the so-called "Early Dualists." III. The "Corpuscular Theory" of the Atomists. IV. The "Formal" Theories of Pythagoras and his School. V. The Theory of the "One " of the Eleatics.

18-02-11 16:51 VI. The "Relativity" of The Sophists, and the transition to the "Subjectivism" of Socrates.[2] [p. 26] I. Ionian Hylozoism.[3] -- The Ionian philosophers sought for some single principle by which to explain the world. By Thales and Anaximenes (in the sixth century B.C.), Diogenes of Apollonia (who wrote about 424 B.C.), and Heracleitus (about 500 B.C.), "water," "air," and "fire" were in turn taken as the principles of explanation. To Diogenes the soul was warm air; to Heracleitus it was fire. Through the breath, it partakes of the. eternal living fire, which is the basis of all things. Heracleitus is called the "flux" philosopher, from his insistence on change and transformation, taking place, as he said, through the identity of being, considered as fire, through all its opposites. In common they recognised movement, change, and development, and sought to account for it by some primal principle. This led to the theory of "hylozoism," according to which all the world of reality is endowed with life, and the living or self-moving thing is the seat of the soul. Accordingly, we find, on the side of their theories with which we have to do, a common emphasis laid upon life. Life is the basis of all movement, change, evolution. Living beings have souls, and all things have life. The mental or conscious principle is not separated from matter: matter or hyle ('ulh) is always life or zoön (zwon); hence the term "hylozoism." [p. 27] This view represents a first step toward an interpretation which makes some note of the group of changes and processes by which living and conscious beings are characterised. It is, therefore, properly described by the term hylozoism. On the other hand, so far as distinctions of living from not-living, and mind from life, are concerned, the result is quite negative. It is consequently possible to say that it represents the "projective " stage in the development of dualism;[4] it is not subjective, nor is it objective. Life is a sort of first thing, a crude general term within which more positive meanings are later on to be differentiated. It is the first step toward a more individual and reflective point of view -- similar to that taken by the child -- leading away from the social or collective zoömorphism of racial interpretation. But it retains the essentially zoömorphic content, for which hylozoism is only another name. II. The Early Dualists. -- Within the same school, a group of men went further and worked out a series of views to which the term dualism has been very properly applied by the historians of the period. The great names to be mentioned are those of Anaximander (cir. 566 B.C.), Empedocles (455 B.C.) and Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.). Each of these thinkers pointed out contrasted or opposing principles in the world. Anaximander postulated the "unlimited " or "infinite " (to apeiron) as a positive something over against the limited elements of things. To Empedocles "love and hate" were the principles of opposition-an anthropomorphic rendering of attraction and repulsion. Finally, [p. 28] Anaxagoras gave the name spirit (nouV) to the vital or formative principle, contrasting it with matter. Not only in these general principles of opposition, which in a sense did what the one principle of life had been called on to do, do these thinkers differ from the hylozoists; but also in their views as to the concrete matter of the world. They recognise in nature certain qualitatively different elements whose composition, under the action of general principles, produces things. The qualitative elements for Anaximander are the "warm" and the "cold," the "dry" and the "wet." Empedocles postulated four different elements: fire, water, air, and earth. But fire and air are the warm and the cold over again, and water and earth are the wet and the dry. These elements are undecomposable although composite. They also fill space; there is no such thing as the "empty." Anaxagoras also explains all the phenomena of nature in terms of the union and separation of qualitative elements. Man according to Anaximander was evolved from aquatic animals. The philosophy of these thinkers, thus briefly described, leads to a new stage of the dualism which the science of psychology presupposes; and this in two ways. In the first place, the postulation of natural qualitative elements serves to solidify the external or objective pole of the growing distinction between the soul and the outer world. It is a step toward naturalism -- toward a causal explanation of change in nature. It is a clarification of the mystic and vitalistic explanations of the hylozoists, tending to express itself in dualism. In the second place, this reacts to produce a similar clarification or definition on the side of the self, the [p. 29] subjective term or pole. If the more objective is in a measure divorced from the less objective, the external From the internal, this will result in a further statement on both sides. Accordingly, we find not only the recognition of the elements as external and distinct from one another, but with this that of the general principle of movement or change by which the combination and dissolution of the elements is accomplished. And it is here -- in Empedocles, and more explicitly in Anaxagoras -- that the further phase of dualism asserts itself. This principle is "spirit," reason, nouV. The origin of this opposition and its further development are of great interest from the point of view of the analogy between the racial and individual processes. The child is led by the stress of life, by the need of adaptation, to the recognition of a certain stability, lawfulness, and uniformity in the external world. This uniformity conditions and controls his thought and action. And it is by this movement toward the definition of the objective that the contrasting phase of experience, the inner quasi-subjective phase, is clarified in turn. The moving principle behind the regularity and uniformity of things, the raison d'etre of ordered change, is something that is to shape itself as the self or soul. This we see reproduced here in the development of reflection. It is the further working out of a motive present in the mystic

18-02-11 16:51 interpretation of primitive peoples. Animism and mystic participation are readings, by a sort of social projection, of a crude soullife into the changes of nature. Here we see its counterpart in early reflection. The world of things is exhausted in the combination and dissolution of elements; how is this combination and dissolution to [p. 30] be accounted for? By the second and less definite principle which the dawning world-dualism implies -- the soul. It has been very commonly said that in this dualism, which gives explicit recognition to the principle of "spirit " or nouV over against matter or 'ulh, Anaxagoras anticipated a full dualism, even that of Descartes. This is, however, a grave mistake. The facts, no less than the interpretation they should bear, dispute this. We cannot here anticipate more than the general significance of the Cartesian dualism, but that will suffice. Descartes reached the thought of the actual separateness of two substances, mind and body, having disparate characters, thought and extension, and incapable of direct interaction between themselves. The contrast to this afforded by the theory of Anaxagoras is instructive. Instead of two substances, having specific characters, this thinker makes mind the basal principle of order and unity in the material no less than in the spiritual world-a conception developed by the Pythagoreans. Instead of separation and non-interaction, he postulates immanence and union. The problem for Anaxagoras is, what is the one principle of all nature? That of Cartesianism is, how can the appearance of interaction between mind and body, in particular cases, be accounted for, despite their absolute separation? The philosophy of the Greeks worked out the separation of mind and body; that of modern times seeks to bring them together again.[5] More positively stated, the dualism reached by [p. 31] [figure][p. 32] Empedocles and Anaxagoras may be described as an important step toward subjectivism. It did not, however, reach the full subjective point of view, seeing that the positive determination reached was on the side of the objective, the external in nature; where the elements were qualitatively determined and the underlying principle was that of space.[6] The inner or mental principle remained largely negative: a sort of speculative resort, or at best a refinement on matter. The subjective as a conscious life was not yet defined. This appears in the fact that the two great problems which exercised the Greek mind subsequently to this were not strictly those of dualism. We find the problem of "the one and the many" growing constantly more exacting and imperative. It was solved by the theories of the Atomists and Pythagoreans. The other problem -- connected with the former -- was that of the unreliability of the senses worked out in turn by the Eleatics and Sophists. The special doctrines of this group of thinkers were varied and interesting; we have space only to mention certain of them. The evolution of the world, including man, is described as a single and continuous process. It is due, according to Empedocles, to the action of love and hate. Man is the latest and highest product of this development; his immediate cause, according to Anaximander, is the action of the sun upon the earth working through lower forms of life, from the fishes upward. According to Empedocles, the plants are still earlier forms of life, produced by the action of love which overcomes the disorganising forces of hate.[7][p. 33] Empedocles also held to a theory of "transmigration" of souls. A series of bodily forms is imposed upon the soul by the action of hate. It is the function of love to free the soul from its bondage to this wandering life, and restore it to its divine place. Perception to Empedocles was due to the action upon the senses of emanations from things. He attributed perception to plants. Truth was secured through sense-perception in accordance with the principle that "like acts only upon like." We can know things because we, like things, are composed of material elements organised by love and hate. In Anaxagoras, the principle of spirit, or nouV already spoken of, takes the place of the love and hate of Empedocles. As opposed to the elements of things (called by Aristotle "seeds," 'omoiomerh) which are material, the soul is simple, identical, unmixed. It brings movement, order, and form into the mixed materials. It is, moreover, the principle of reason, from which the ends found in nature proceed, acting in opposition to accident and blind necessity. It is also active, not merely intelligent; it is the moving, working principle, seen not in the living person only but in all nature. In Anaxagoras, too, the concept of evolution becomes more clear, as a process of real advance, of historical creation, rather than one of mere distribution and redistribution of elements.[8][p. 34] The single soul is the form taken by spirit in a given body of material elements. The plants have "dark" or immature reason, endowed with sensation, desire, etc. Truth is reached by reason working upon opposition and distinction; it is not attainable by

18-02-11 16:51 the senses alone. Summing up the position of dualism among these thinkers, we may quote Mr. A. W. Benn: "Anaximander could regard the heavenly bodies as blessed Gods, Xenophanes could ascribe omnipotence and omniscience to the material world. Empedocles could represent love and strife as elementary bodies" -- all this in explaining how "pure reason could have been identified with pure space" by Parmenides and Anaxagoras (A. W. Benn, Ancient Philos., p. 33).· III. The Greek Atomists and the Corpuscular Theory. -- In Leucippus (cir. 480 B.C.) and Democritus (460-361 B.C.), the leading Atomists, the definition of the objective pole of the mind-matter dualism was carried forward. It reached such a positive statement in the direction of naturalism and mechanism that the theory, especially as presented by Democritus, is usually called "materialism." It advanced the concept of the soul, however, only negatively; and for this reason its psychological interest is small.[9] To these thinkers, the elements of the world were atoms or corpuscles, varying in figure and size, but without differences of quality. These atoms have, for Democritus, a necessary downward movement: they fall in empty space (Leucippus), faster or slower according to their size, the larger being heavier. By these atoms, thus set in movement, nuclei of matter are [p. 35] formed, aggregates assembled, and the world of things produced.[l0] Bodies are aggregates of corpuscles. The soul is such an aggregate. It is composed of round, smooth, warm, fire-like atoms. The physical body is also an aggregate of atoms warmed into life by the soul, which departs at death leaving the. Body inanimate. Perception takes place by means of little images (eidola) which pass to the soul through the senses. But perception is imperfect and often deceptive. The qualitative aspects of the world are due to illusion of the senses, since only quantitative differences exist. Impulse and will, the active life, reveal the reverse process -- the pouring-out of the images taken-in by perception. The air is peopled by demons, as the popular theosophy declared, agreed Democritus; they are human-shaped images, capable of speaking, and having knowledge of human affairs. As intimated above, these thinkers represent a departure of importance in a certain direction. They freed speculation about the external world from the intrusion of occult and vitalistic elements. They banished the moving principles -- love, hate, reason -- of Empedocles and Anaxagoras, substituting a falling movement, which is, of course, so far as falling is concerned, a movement without a cause. But for such a movement :there must be a void, an empty space. This thought is a notable achievement in physical science; but it denies the existence, and obscures the properties; of qualitative phenomena and with them those of the [p. 36] soul. It may be called an advance for psychology, therefore, only in the negative sense that it makes it easier for subsequent thought to characterise subjective phenomena as such, in so much as the external and mechanical is more sharply defined. We cannot, properly speaking, call their view materialism. For this would be to suppose an opposition between their view and some sort of conscious spiritualism: to presuppose, that is, the dualism between mind and matter. On the contrary, the supposition that the soul is made up of smooth round atoms is only another of the attempts to account for it as part of the world, composed of the same stuff as the world in general. In this, it is in agreement with preceding theories, which had also failed to isolate the mental or conscious as such. The conception of Nature (fusiV) is advanced in the direction of an objective and mechanical world-order. The antithesis between nature and man, as it took form in the Sophists, is thus prepared for. IV. Pythagoras (after 600 B.C.) and the Pythagoreans. -- As multiplicity and disorder were emphasised by the Atomists, so in the Pythagorean school we find emphasis placed on the notions of unity and order. The atoms of Democritus are, as we saw, left without any ordering, arranging, or developing principle; they fall, and that is all. In Pythagoras, there is a return to the Ionic thought of a principle -- love, hate, spirit, etc. -- that stands for unity and order, behind or within the multiplicity of nature; this thought was given a very remarkable illustration in the Pythagorean theory. For Pythagoras, nature obeys and reflects the laws of "number." Every phase of phenomenal change may [p. 37][figure][p. 38] be supposed to follow a numerical order. As we should say to-day, every thing allows of "numerical. expression" -- a mathematical conception of the world. The world becomes an ordered cosmos; its unity is seen in its numerical relations. Plurality is disorder; a rebellion against the order and unity of a numerical system. The essence of things consists in the numbers which express them; the numbers, therefore, are themselves essences. The Pythagoreans did not find this inconsistent with the recognition with the "early dualists" of opposites or antitheses in nature of which they made a list -- one and many, rest and motion, etc. The soul is the numerical harmony of the body, as the world-soul

18-02-11 16:51 from which it arises is the harmony of the cosmos. Universal life is governed by number in four stages: (1) it is latent in seeds; (2) it appears in plants; (3) it becomes the "sensitive " soul in animals (located in the heart); and (4) the rational soul in man (located in the head). The soul has three parts: reason (freneV), intelligence (nouV) and desire (qumoV). The first of these, the reason, is peculiar to man; animals have the other two. This is an early attempt at classifying mental powers or faculties; but it goes no further than this. With the point of view of order and harmony we find united a development of the Orphic[11] doctrine of transmigration of souls. Souls go from one body to another, being in this sense separate existences. Demons are disembodied spirits. There is an apparent contradiction between this doctrine and the view that the soul is the numerical harmony of a particular body. It is probable that in [p. 39] the Pythagorean circle -- a secret religious organisation -- the theory of transmigration was the accepted view, answering to ethical and practical demands and maintaining the Orphic tradition. The need of carrying out further the conception of order and harmony in a comprehensive philosophy, and of ridding it of contradictions, appeared later in the theory of "ideas" of Plato, for which the foundation is here in a sense laid. The development of a formal and unifying principle-that of number-suggests the corresponding rôle of thought or the "idea"; but it is only by vague hints that this is intimated. In the general tendency, however, away from the purely objective and pluralistic view of things to one in which the apprehension of unity and order is made prominent, and which is in some way connected with the soul, an advance toward subjectivism is to be recognised. V. The Eleatics. -- In the philosophers of Elea -- Xenophanes[12] (cir. 540 B.C.), Parmenides (cir. 490 B.X.), Zeno[13] and Melissus of Samos (both cir. 450 B.C.) -- a further movement of thought shows itself. In them, two antitheses were clearly presented which had been foreshadowed in earlier speculation: that of "the one and the many," and that of "being and becoming." These, together with the Aristotelian problem of "matter and form," remained the critical questions of Greek interest. So far as the problem of psychology is concerned, the definition of the mental principle, both of these antitheses have significance. Claiming that the absolute principle of things is one and not many, the [p. 40] Eleatics explain the multiplicity of things as "appearance" only, due to the deception of the senses. To Xenophanes, earth is the one original element. It is of infinite extension: and it is at the same time God, all-wise and all-powerful. As this principle was held to be one of fixed being, not one of change and becoming, such an interpretation of sense perception was reinforced. For Parmenides the "one " -- to Melissus, infinite -- was finite but eternal and at rest; it was pure space, which, like the "earth" of Xenophanes, was also reason and God. The Eleatics developed both these positions. The world-principle is one; not many, as the Atomists taught. It is also fixed, perfect, changeless; not in development, as the Ionics believed. The two other schools were alike led astray by the appearance of things -- an appearance due to illusion of the senses. In this the force of the Eleatic philosophy for psychology shows itself. It brings to the fore the problem of perception and makes an explicit criticism of knowledge necessary for further theory. Without such a criticism the three alternatives of thought -- Ionic, Atomistic, and Eleatic -- might be reiterated again and again without end. But the problem of perception or knowledge is one of the inner or subjective life; and in bringing it forward the Eleatic philosophers took a step toward the definition of the subjective point of view as such, represented later on by Socrates. Parmenides, although identifying soul and body in the "one," still attributed to the "one" something like consciousness. Their theory was also in line with the doctrine of unity and order of Pythagoras, which also denied absolute multiplicity. But it sought this unity in the absolute [p. 41]ground of things or in God, as the Ionics had done before them; not, as Pythagoras had done, in a property of the world itself. The potential dualism of spirit and matter disappears in the theory of Xenophanes and Parmenides as to the nature of God. God is both a sphere, supporting the world of material things, and also a spirit: the "perfect" in extension and in thought, the "All in One" (en kai tan). In this speculative "identity philosophy," we are reminded of the pantheism of Spinoza, which followed upon the dualism of Descartes, much as the pantheism of the Eleatics follows upon the similar but less well-defined dualism of the Pythagoreans. They both show the resort of the imagination to a single monistic principle. The world of change and becoming is appearance, illusion, Schein; this Zeno demonstrates by showing the absurdities contained in the conception of motion. His famous proof that Achilles could not overtake the tortoise -- because whatever the fraction of the distance traversed by Achilles, the tortoise would also have gone forward a distance in the same time -- remains

18-02-11 16:51 a classical piece of logic. Specifically the world, and with it man, is a mixture of "light and darkness": a position which shows how undeveloped the dualism of mind and matter still remains. Both together are the outcome of the one fundamental refined physical principle. "Light and dark" was about the only antithesis of a general sort in nature that had not already been invoked! A sharp distinction was made, however, between reason and sense. As perception is illusory, change and becoming are not real but only apparent; but as reason is the organ of truth, unity and being are absolutely [p. 42]disclosed by it. The reason grasps the being of things and establishes, for Parmenides, the identity of thought and its object, that of reason and extension. VI. The Sophists. -- In the group of men called sophists, or "wise men,"[14] the decay of speculation followed from its own general tendencies. The Sophistic period is one of denial and lack of confidence. This showed itself in a temper of mind to which certain of the implications of earlier thought were congenial. First, the doctrine that the senses deceive, stated by the Atomists and Eleatics in a form that made all perception a mirage and motion impossible, was carried out by the Sophists in the theory called in later speculation that of the "relativity of sense qualities." All external reality or truth is relative to the observer, who apprehends the world through the medium of the senses; there is no reliable general knowledge of nature secured by perception. Justice and morals cannot be founded on a supposed objective order of nature. But this is not all. Why, ask the Sophists, is reason any better? What right have the Eleatics to say that the absolute can be reached by reason? This, too, is vain; there is no way to reach any independent truth, either sensible or rational; all rests upon the experience and nature of man. Hence the positive position to which these negations brought certain of the Sophists -- the only resort is that which appears to the man, his fleeting and circumscribed experience. Homo mensura omnium: "man is the measure of all things." This is the motto of Protagoras [p. 43] (480-411 B.C.), and Gorgias (427 B.C.)[15] the latter the dialectician who argued that there is nothing, and, besides, we could not know it if there were, and we could not communicate it if we knew it. The Sophistic period is one of clearing up or stock-taking. It represents the bankruptcy of the old ways of thinking. The mind finds itself embarrassed by the futilities of partial and unsuccessful systems. Its meaning for psychology, however, is not at all negative; it is very positive. The retreat of thought into the man himself, into his circumscribed consciousness, into the empirical life, is in itself a new point of view, and the beginning of a new method. Give up, say the Sophists, the mere "say so" of dogmatic assertion, the mere preference for this system or that, and be content with what you find within you. To be sure, the Sophists did not themselves apply such a method or develop the new point of view. They were in a true sense sceptics; the satirists of the old, not the prophets of the new. But nevertheless they indicated the platform -- cleared of its broken furniture -- from which the prophets of the subjective were to speak, Socrates first of all. The Sophistic stand is, for the development of racial interpretation, what the dawn of the subjective era is for that of the thinking individual. The mind is, in a sense, thrown back upon itself through the ineffectiveness of its first efforts to understand things. It finds in itself a mass of material of first-hand immediate quality, a mass of affective and active data: feelings, efforts, the contents of the practical life. All this [p. 44] remains a direct possession, after the objective illusions and appearances of sense and reason are discounted. The "subjective" becomes a sphere of reference, a resort having its own characters, sanctions, and modes of being; it is a term that stands in opposition to the other term, the external and foreign, of whatever sort. The dualism of "subjective and objective" is preparing itself. In our opinion, this is the significance of the Sophistic reaction: it came up to the verge of the subjective. It shows its value fully in the Socratic schools, subsequent to Socrates, in which various tendencies of thought were held together by this one common intuition of the subjective. We are to see its positive characters in our exposition of the views of Socrates himself. It is the mother-thought of all the idealisms, empirical no less than rational, of the history of philosophy.[16] The Sophistic situation reminds us forcibly of the condition of embarrassment in which the growing individual finds himself, as he confronts the puzzle of [p. 45] his own body. On the one hand, the "self" is the body, its principle of organisation and manner of existence are primarily those of external things. But, on the other hand, the personal "self" has the characters of an inner world-the practical, active, characters by which it dominates the body and works effects through lit. Like that of the Sophists, the thought of the individual at the corresponding stage of reflection, shows the germs at once of practical idealism and of theoretical positivism. The division into parties shows the two motives actually present in the school, the extreme "humanist" and the more "naturalistic." It is clear that the significance of the entire pre-Socratic movement resides in this: it furnished, unconsciously or spontaneously, the dualistic basis upon which the alternatives of later reflection were founded. The "projective" is passing into the "subjective" point of view. The distinction between subjectivism and objectivism, idealism and naturalism, could receive its first and worldfamed presentation in Plato and Aristotle, when once Socrates had shown the meaning of the subjective. Footnotes

18-02-11 16:51 [1] Aristotle's account of these early thinkers, in his De Anima, Book I, constitutes the first history of psychology and philosophy. [2] Although this method, considered as a mode of treating the entire historical movement, is new, the interpretation of the period as one of developing dualism is not new. It will be found in the work of Harms, Die Philosophie in ihrer Geschichte, I. Psychologie, 1878 (see especially p. 112, and in detail, pp. 118 ff.). In the recent Geschichte der Psychologie of O. Klemm, 1911, the antithesis between earlier dualistic and later monistic views is made the characteristic of the "metaphysical" psychology of the period (loc. cit., pp. 12 ff.). Accordingly, it will be plain that the exposition of the movement as one of growing dualism is not due to our special rule of interpretation, although it is clearly in accord with it. [3] It should be distinctly understood that in treating of this and of all the other "isms" of our account, it is not the history of philosophy but that of psychology, with which we are concerned. It is only the psychological bearings of a theory that we are to bring out. For the Greek philosophy as such, authoritative histories should be consulted such as Zeller, History of Greek Philosophy, and Gomperz, The Greek Thinkers (both in English translation). See also the little book of A. W. Benn, History of Ancient Philosophy (1912), in this series. Mr. Benn's larger work is The Greek Philosophers (1882). [4] Cf. Chapter VII of Vol. II on the "projective" stage in the individual. [5] The same difference exists between the substantive form of dualism of later Christian theology and that of the mystic spiritualism of Alexandria. Modern theology is embarrassed by the contradiction involved in the resurrection of the body ; but the Apostle Paul could say without feeling the contradiction, "it will rise a spiritual body." [6] Like the "thought" of Parmenides, the "nous" of Anaxagoras was made one with empty space. [7] The organs were separately formed and were brought together in many combinations by the action of love; from which best adapted survived. Thus he hit upon the idea of natural selection. [8] Anaxagoras is criticised, however, by Socrates (in Plato's report in the Phaedo, 96 ff.) for omitting finality, i.e., the end is the "good," from his account. It is true that the soul-doctrine of Anaxagoras lapses into physics, instead of leading on to ethics. [9] The classical treatment is that of Lange, History of Materialism. [10] This is the usual account. According to Benn (Hist. of Ancient Philosophy, p. 133 ff.) it was only in the later atomism of Epicurus that "weight" and a "downward" direction of motion were attributed to the atoms; Democritus' atoms flew at random. [11] The name of Orpheus, the legendary founder of a mystical sect, became attached to this type of world-theory. [12] Xenophanes was the first Greek philosopher to write in verse. [13] Known as "Zeno the Eleatic," in distinction from the more famous "Zeno the Stoic." [14]They were a class of travelling teachers who took money payment. They prepared wealthy young men for careers requiring skill in disputation and rhetoric. [15] Their contemporaries, Hippias and Prodicus, held a more conservative position as to the value of objective knowledge. [16] Certain recent writers on the history of psychology have seemed singularly blind to this or neglectful of it, although it has been given full recognition by various historians of philosophy. For example, Klemm (Geschichte der Psychologie) is led by his plan of treating only of positive theories, to overlook the Sophists -- no doubt because they represented no positive "ism," but merely a point of view. Similarly, Dessoir (Abriss einer Geschichte der Psychologie) passes from the so-called Seelenbiologie, of the early Greek schools, direct to Plato, omitting Socrates as well as the Sophists altogether, to the extreme disadvantage of his treatment of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. This is incomprehensible, even from the simple point of view of the history of ideas. Harms is much nearer the truth (Geschichte der Psychologie), although still too negative. The analogy with the progress of individual thought reinforces the traditional interpretation, which finds in Socrates the transition-by way of the Sophistic reaction -- to subjectivism and practical idealism: to all that body of doctrine which the subjective point of view underlies.