1
/
of
1
Leila's Books
THE RISE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY
THE RISE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY
Regular price
$1.99 USD
Regular price
Sale price
$1.99 USD
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Quantity
Couldn't load pickup availability
This ebook edition has been proofed and corrected for errors and compiled to be read with without errors!
***
An excerpt from the beginning of the:
INTRODUCTORY
In due course of human thought, the long reign of Mythology is followed by an epoch of Philosophy. Men's earliest efforts to reason out the principles of nature have always resulted in ascribing its phenomena to deific influence. Not only the unseen heavens and the deep Tartarean realms are placed under the kingly rule of the Gods, but the region of the visible as well. The movements of the heavenly bodies, the earth, air and ocean, the flow of streams and the growth of trees, are alike governed by their separate divinities. The imagination is as active in devising deities as nature is in presenting forces; and gradually a complex series of myths arise, whose origin in the operations of nature it becomes very difficult to trace.
But when men begin to reason and doubt, and cease to imagine and accept, all mythologies receive a fatal blow, and their final disappearance is but a question of time. The growth of a mythology, though slow, is an unconscious process; there is no evident exercise of thought; a nation, on emerging from its primitive state, finds itself possessed of an intricate cosmogony, of whose origin it is in utter ignorance, and the existence of which is most easily solved by ascribing it to the teaching of the Gods themselves.
But it is a laborious process to reason out a system of nature in which inanimate springs of action, and material motive forces, shall replace the deus ex machina of the earlier cosmogonies. Such a development can only be worked out by the active exercise of human thought, and the mile-stones of its progress will naturally be marked by the names and systems of the successive thinkers to whom its gradual growth is due. Several of the ancient races present us with some degree of progress in this direction; as in the philosophic speculations of the Chinese and the Indians; but the Greeks alone succeeded in including the phenomena of nature and life in the circle of a philosophic system that replaced all the vagaries of mythology.
Their movement in this direction was marked by their usual mental vigor, rapidly advancing, as it did, from the crude ideas of the Ionic school to the deep idealism of Plato and the broad philosophic grasp of Aristotle.
The earlier steps in this philosophic progress were necessarily crude in character and vague in outline. They consist of the writings of three natives of Ionia, namely, Thales of Miletus, who flourished about 600 B.C., and his successors, Anaximander and Anaximenes. Their doctrines are more curious than intrinsically valuable, except as a first opening into this untrodden field of thought. The scope of their effort was to reduce nature to a single underlying principle, from which all existing things resulted. This principle, in the case of Thales, was water. His theory may be briefly expressed in his own words: " From water everything arises, and into water everything returns." Anaximander imagined an original undefined essence as the basis of nature, and Anaximenes taught that air is the basic principle.
***
Contents:
Introductory
Socrates
Plato
Aristotle
The Later Philosophy
The Grecian School of Oratory
Lysias
Isocrates
Isæus
Demosthenes
Æschines
***
An excerpt from the beginning of the:
INTRODUCTORY
In due course of human thought, the long reign of Mythology is followed by an epoch of Philosophy. Men's earliest efforts to reason out the principles of nature have always resulted in ascribing its phenomena to deific influence. Not only the unseen heavens and the deep Tartarean realms are placed under the kingly rule of the Gods, but the region of the visible as well. The movements of the heavenly bodies, the earth, air and ocean, the flow of streams and the growth of trees, are alike governed by their separate divinities. The imagination is as active in devising deities as nature is in presenting forces; and gradually a complex series of myths arise, whose origin in the operations of nature it becomes very difficult to trace.
But when men begin to reason and doubt, and cease to imagine and accept, all mythologies receive a fatal blow, and their final disappearance is but a question of time. The growth of a mythology, though slow, is an unconscious process; there is no evident exercise of thought; a nation, on emerging from its primitive state, finds itself possessed of an intricate cosmogony, of whose origin it is in utter ignorance, and the existence of which is most easily solved by ascribing it to the teaching of the Gods themselves.
But it is a laborious process to reason out a system of nature in which inanimate springs of action, and material motive forces, shall replace the deus ex machina of the earlier cosmogonies. Such a development can only be worked out by the active exercise of human thought, and the mile-stones of its progress will naturally be marked by the names and systems of the successive thinkers to whom its gradual growth is due. Several of the ancient races present us with some degree of progress in this direction; as in the philosophic speculations of the Chinese and the Indians; but the Greeks alone succeeded in including the phenomena of nature and life in the circle of a philosophic system that replaced all the vagaries of mythology.
Their movement in this direction was marked by their usual mental vigor, rapidly advancing, as it did, from the crude ideas of the Ionic school to the deep idealism of Plato and the broad philosophic grasp of Aristotle.
The earlier steps in this philosophic progress were necessarily crude in character and vague in outline. They consist of the writings of three natives of Ionia, namely, Thales of Miletus, who flourished about 600 B.C., and his successors, Anaximander and Anaximenes. Their doctrines are more curious than intrinsically valuable, except as a first opening into this untrodden field of thought. The scope of their effort was to reduce nature to a single underlying principle, from which all existing things resulted. This principle, in the case of Thales, was water. His theory may be briefly expressed in his own words: " From water everything arises, and into water everything returns." Anaximander imagined an original undefined essence as the basis of nature, and Anaximenes taught that air is the basic principle.
***
Contents:
Introductory
Socrates
Plato
Aristotle
The Later Philosophy
The Grecian School of Oratory
Lysias
Isocrates
Isæus
Demosthenes
Æschines
Share
