by Peter Watson
What these Ionians grasped was that the world was something that could be understood, if one took the trouble to observe it properly. It was not a playground of the gods who acted arbitrarily on the spur of the moment, moved by grand passions of love, wrath or revenge. The Ionians were astonished by this and, as Schrödinger also remarked, ‘this was a complete novelty’.21 The Babylonians and the Egyptians knew a lot about the orbits of the heavenly bodies but regarded them as religious secrets.
The very first scientist, in the sixth century BC, was Thales of Miletus, a city on the Ionian coast. However, science is a modern word first used as we use it in the early nineteenth century, and the ancient Greeks would not have recognised it; they knew no boundaries between science and other fields of knowledge, and in fact they asked the questions out of which both science and philosophy emerged.22 Thales was not the first ancient figure to speculate about the origin and nature of the universe but he was the first ‘who expressed his ideas in logical and not mythological terms’.23 As a merchant who had travelled to Egypt, he had picked up enough mathematics and Babylonian astronomy to be able to predict a total eclipse of the sun in the year 585 BC, which duly occurred, on the day we call 29 May. (For Aristotle, writing two centuries later, this was the moment when Greek philosophy began.)24 But Thales is more often remembered for the basic scientific-philosophical question that he asked: what is the world made of ? The answer he gave–water–was wrong, but the very act of asking so fundamental a question was itself an innovation. His answer was also new because it implied that the world consists not of many things (as it so obviously does) but, underneath it all, of one thing. In other words, the universe is not only rational, and therefore knowable, but also simple.25 Before Thales, the world was made by the gods, whose purpose could only be known indirectly, through myths, or–if the Jews were to be believed–not at all. This was an epochal change in thought (though to begin with it affected only a tiny number of people).
Thales’ immediate successor was another Ionian, Anaximander. He argued that the ultimate physical reality of the universe cannot be a recognisable physical substance (a concept not so far from the truth, as it turned out much later). Instead of water, he substituted an ‘undefined something’ with no chemical properties as we would recognise them, though he did identify what he called ‘oppositions’–hotness and coldness, wetness and dryness, for example. This could be seen as a step towards the general concept of ‘matter’. Anaximander also had a theory of evolution. He rejected the idea that human beings had derived indirectly from the gods and the Titans (the children of Uranus, a family of giants) but thought that all living creatures arose first in the water, ‘covered with spiny shells’. Then, as part of the sea dried up, some of these creatures emerged on land, their shells cracked and released new kinds of animal. In this way, Anaximander thought ‘that man was originally a fish.’26 Here too it is difficult to overstate the epochal change in thinking that was taking place–the rejection of gods and myths as ways to explain everything (or anything) and the beginnings of observation as a basis for reason. That man should be descended from other animals, not gods, was as great a break with past thinking as could be imagined.
For Anaximenes, the third of the Ionians, aer was the primary substance, which varied in interesting ways. It was a form of mist whose density varied. ‘When most uniform,’ he said, ‘it is invisible to the eye…Winds arise when the aer is dense, and moves under pressure. When it becomes denser still, clouds are formed, and so it changes into water. Hail occurs when the water descending from the clouds solidifies, and snow when it solidifies in a wetter condition.’27 There is not much wrong with this reasoning, which was to lead, a hundred years later, to the atomic theory of Democritus.
Before Democritus, however, came Pythagoras, another Ionian. He grew up on Samos, an island to the north of Miletus, off the Turkish coast, but emigrated to Croton, in Greek Italy, because, it is said, the pirate king, Polycrates, despite luring poets and artists to Samos, and building impressive walls, headed a dissolute court that Pythagoras, a deeply religious–not to say mystical–man, hated. All his life, Pythagoras was a paradoxical soul. He taught a wide number of superstitions–for example, that you do not poke a fire with a knife (you might hurt the fire, which would seek revenge). But Pythagoras’ fame rests on the theorem named after him. This particular theorem (about how to obtain a right angle), we should never forget, was not merely an abstraction: obtaining an absolute upright was essential in building. This interest in mathematics led on to a fascination with music and with number. It was Pythagoras who discovered that, by stopping a lyre-string at three-quarters, two-thirds or half its length, the fourth, fifth and octave of a note may be obtained, and that these notes, suitably arranged, ‘may move us to tears’.28 This phenomenon convinced Pythagoras that numbers held the secret of the universe, that number–rather than water or any other substance–was the basic ‘element’. This mystical concern with harmony persuaded Pythagoras and his followers that there was a beauty in numbers, and this led, among other things, to the idea we call ‘square numbers’–those that can be represented as squares:
But this fascination also led Pythagoras to what we now call numerology, a belief in the mystical meaning of numbers. This was an elaborate dead-end.
The Pythagoreans also knew that the earth was a sphere and were possibly the first to draw this conclusion, their reasoning based on the outline of the shadow during eclipses of the moon (which they also knew had no light of its own). They thought that the earth always presented the same face to the ‘Central Fire’ of the universe (not the sun), rather as the moon always presents the same face to the earth. For this reason they imagined that half the earth was uninhabitable. It was the varying brightness of Mercury and Venus which persuaded Heraclitus (who was very close to the later Pythagoreans) that they changed their distance from earth. These orbits added to the complexity of the heavens and confirmed the planets as ‘wanderers’ (the original meaning of the word).29
This quest for what the universe was made of was continued by the two main ‘atomists’, Leucippus of Miletus (fl. 440 BC), and Democritus of Abdera (fl. 410 BC).30 They argued that the world consisted of ‘an infinity’ of tiny atoms moving randomly in ‘an infinite void’. These atoms, solid corpuscles too small to be seen, exist in all manner of shapes and it is their ‘motions, collisions, and transient configurations’ that account for the great variety of substances and the different phenomena that we experience. In other words, reality is a lifeless piece of machinery, in which everything that occurs is the outcome of inert, material atoms moving according to their nature. ‘No mind and no divinity intrude into this world…There is no room for purpose or freedom.’31
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was partially convinced by the atomists. There must be some fundamental particle, he thought: ‘How can hair come from what is not hair, or flesh from what is not flesh?’32 But he also felt that none of the familiar forms of matter–hair or flesh, say–was quite pure, that everything was made up of a mixture, which had arisen from the ‘primordial chaos’. He reserved a special place for mind, which for him was a substance: mind could not have arisen from something that was not mind. Mind alone was pure, in the sense that it was not mixed with anything. In 468–467 BC, a huge meteorite fell to earth in the Gallipoli peninsula and this seems to have given Anaxagoras new ideas about the heavens. He proposed that the sun was ‘another such mass of incandescent stone’, ‘larger than the Peloponnese’, and the same went for the stars, which were so far away that we do not feel their heat. He thought that the moon was made of the same material as the earth ‘with plains and rough ground in it’.33
The arguments of the atomists were strikingly near the mark, as experiments confirmed more than two thousand years later. (As a theory it was, as Schrödinger put it, the most beautiful of all ‘sleeping beauties’.34) But, inevitably perhaps, not everyone at the time accepted their ideas. Empedocles of Acragas (fl. 450), a roug
h contemporary of Leucippus, identified four elements or ‘roots’ (as he called them) of all material things: fire, air, earth and water (introduced in mythological garb as Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis). From these four roots, Empedocles wrote, ‘sprang all things that were and are and shall be, trees and men and women, beasts and birds and water-bred fishes, and the long-lived gods too, most mighty in their prerogatives…For there are these things alone, and running through one another they assume many a shape.’ But he also thought that material ingredients by themselves could not explain motion and change. He therefore introduced two additional, immaterial principles: love and strife, which ‘induce the four roots to congregate and separate’.35
As ever, we do well not to make more of Ionian positivism than is there. Pythagoras had such an immense reputation that he was credited with many things he may not have been responsible for–even his famous theorem, which may have been the work of later followers. And these first ‘scientists’ have been compared to a ‘flotilla’ of small boats headed in all directions and united only by a fascination for uncharted waters.
In the Iliad and the Odyssey, plague is attributed to divine intervention (an idea that was to be resurrected more than a millennium later by Christianity), but in the reports of the battles themselves the treatment of wounds is carefully described and Homer makes it clear that this was already a specialist skill. Asclepius, referred to by him as a great healer, was subsequently deified in the Greek manner and a cult in his honour was established. Archaeologists have identified at least a hundred temples to Asclepius, to which the sick would flock in search of a cure.36
In the fifth and fourth centuries, a new and more secular traditional grew up, associated with the name of Hippocrates of Cos (about 460–377 BC), who was a meticulous observer. (Celsus recognised Hippocrates as the man who detached medicine from philosophy.37) One of his treatises examined the effects of climate and environment on physique and psychology, another–entitled The Sacred Disease–was an investigation of epilepsy. Hippocrates discounted divine intervention and attributed this malady to ‘natural causes…men think it divine because they do not understand it…all diseases alike are divine, and all are human; all have their antecedent causes’. His own theory was that epilepsy was caused by a blockage (by phlegm) of the veins in the brain.
Probably under the influence of Empedocles, Hippocrates’ school adopted the theory of the Four Humours: phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile ‘which reflect in the body the four elements [or “roots”] of the cosmos, fire, air, water and earth, and each of which is associated with the basic qualities of hot, dry, cold and moist. Phlegm, for example, which is cold, increases in quantity in the winter, and therefore during the winter phlegmatic ailments are more common. Their proper balance in the body is the cause of good health, imbalance causes pain, and temperaments differ according to which humour predominates (phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric and melancholic).’ Purging the body, through blood-letting or laxatives, for example, was the right way to restore balance and therefore health.38 As the historian Andrew Burn points out, ‘This theory was to exercise a thoroughly deleterious influence on medicine for 2,000 years; because under it one could account for anything, it blocked the way to further inquiry based on observation.’ (Hippocrates’ method for treating dislocation of the jaw was still being used in France in the nineteenth century.39) Hippocrates also taught that the careful observation of symptoms was an important part of medicine–examination of the body, posture, breathing, sleep, urine and stools, sputum, whether or not the patient is coughing, sneezing, has flatulence or lesions, and so on. Treatment did not only include diet, but might also entail bathing or massage, and many herbal remedies, including emetics, to promote vomiting, and expectorants to produce coughing. But Hippocrates was probably even more famous for his oath, which was taken on adoption into his school. The chief features of the oath were to always put the patient first, never to give poison or procure abortion, or to use one’s position of authority to seduce ‘male or female, slave or free’. The oath covers patient–client confidentiality in such detail that it has secured a high status for doctors for most of history.
It does not take much imagination to see how shocking all this would have been for people to whom the heavenly bodies and winds were gods, or agents of the gods. Moves were made against these ‘advanced’ intellectuals, as holy men sought to impeach them and Aristophanes famously lampooned them in The Clouds. But the new ideas were part of an evolving culture in the Greek poleis. Geoffrey Lloyd has shown, for instance, that a word like ‘witness’, as used in the Athenian courts, was also the root for ‘evidence’ as used by early scientists, and the term ‘cross-examination’ likewise was adapted to describe the testing of a hypothesis.40
The birth of reflection in Ionia, what some modern scholars call Ionian Positivism, or the Ionian Enlightenment, occurred in a dual form: science and philosophy. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes can all be regarded as the earliest philosophers as well as the earliest scientists. Both science and philosophy stemmed from the idea that there was a kosmos that was logical, part of a natural order that could, given time, be understood. Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin say that the Greek philosophers invented the very concept of nature ‘to underline their superiority over poets and religious leaders’.41
Thales and his immediate followers had sought answers to these questions by observation, but it was Parmenides, born c. 515 BC in Elea (Velia) in southern Italy, then part of Magna Graecia, who first invented a recognisably ‘philosophical’ method, as we would understand that term today. His achievement is difficult to gauge because only about 160 lines of a poem, On Nature, have survived. But he was a great sceptic, in particular about the unity of reality and the method of observation as a way to understand it. Instead, he preferred to work things through by means of raw thought, purely mental processes, what he called noema. In believing that this was a viable alternative to scientific observation, he established a division in mental life that exists to this day.42
Parmenides became known as a sophist. To begin with, this essentially meant a wise man (sophos), or lover of wisdom (philo-sophos), but our modern term, philosopher, conceals the very practical nature of the sophists in ancient Greece. As classicist Michael Grant tells it, sophists were the first form of higher education–in the Western world at least–developing into teachers who travelled around giving instruction in return for a fee. Such instruction varied from rhetoric (so that pupils could be articulate in political discussion in the Assembly, a quality much admired in Greece), to mathematics, logic, grammar, politics, and astronomy. Because they travelled around, and had many different pupils, in differing circumstances, the sophists became adept at arguing different points of view, and in time this bred a scepticism about their approach. It wasn’t helped by the sophists’ continued stress on the difference between physis, nature, and nomos, the laws of Greece. (It was in their interests to stress this division because the laws of nature were inflexible, whereas the laws of the land could be modified and improved by educated people–i.e., the very students they taught, and received income from.) Thus sophistry, which began as a love of wisdom and knowledge, came to embody ‘cunning reason, designed to put bad arguments in a good light’.43
The most renowned of the Greek sophists was Protagoras of Abdera in Thrace (c. 490/485–after 421/411 BC). His scepticism extended even to the gods. ‘I know nothing about the gods, either that they are or they are not, or what are their shapes.’44 (Xenophanes had also been sceptical: he asked why the gods should have human form. On that basis, horses would worship horse gods. He thought there might just as easily be one god as many.45) Protagoras is probably best remembered, however, for another statement, that ‘the human being is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are; and things that are not, that they are not.’
This is how philosophy started, but there are three great Greek philosophers whose names everyone knows–Socrates, Plato
and Aristotle. In his book on Protagoras, Plato described Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) making fun of the sophists who he said were more interested in verbal pyrotechnics than genuine learning. But, like Parmenides and Protagoras, Socrates also turned away from scientific observation and concentrated more on what might be achieved by raw thought. However, he never wrote any books and what we know about him is largely due to Plato and to Aristophanes who portrayed Socrates, unflatteringly, in two plays. He is remembered now primarily for three reasons: his conviction that there is an eternal and unchanging ‘absolute standard’ as to what is good and right, the belief that all nature works towards a purpose, which is the apprehension of this ‘standard’; that to discover this standard one must above all know oneself; and his ‘Socratic method’ of questioning everything and everyone he came across (‘the unexamined life is not worth living’). Socrates played more than word games, though; he believed he had a mission from the gods to make people think and so he played mental games to provoke people into questioning all that they took for granted. His aim was to help people lead a good and fulfilling life but his mischievous methods led eventually to his trial on charges of mocking democracy and public morality, and of corrupting the youth, by teaching them to disobey their parents. When he was found guilty, he was allowed by law to suggest the penalty. Had he chosen exile this would surely have been granted. But, contentious as ever, he said that what he really deserved was maintenance for life as a public benefactor but that he would agree to a fine. The jury was insulted and ordered him–by a larger majority than had convicted him–to commit suicide. After a delay when, according to Plato, he spoke eloquently on the soul, he drank hemlock at sundown.46
