FORE:Xenophanes does not seem to have been ever molested on account of his religious opinions. He complains bitterly enough that people preferred fiction to philosophy, that uneducated athletes engrossed far too much popular admiration, that he, Xenophanes, was not sufficiently appreciated;B but of theological intolerance, so far as our information goes, he says not one single word. It will easily be conceived that the rapid progress of Greek speculation was singularly favoured by such unbounded freedom of thought and speech. The views just set forth have often been regarded as a step towards spiritualistic monotheism, and so, considered in the light of subsequent developments, they unquestionably were. Still, looking at the matter from another aspect, we may say16 that Xenophanes, when he shattered the idols of popular religion, was returning to the past rather than anticipating the future; feeling his way back to the deeper, more primordial faith of the old Aryan race, or even of that still older stock whence Aryan and Turanian alike diverged. He turns from the brilliant, passionate, fickle Dyaus, to Zn, or Ten, the ever-present, all-seeing, all-embracing, immovable vault of heaven. Aristotle, with a sympathetic insight unfortunately too rare in his criticisms on earlier systems, observes that Xenophanes did not make it clear whether the absolute unity he taught was material or ideal, but simply looked up at the whole heaven and declared that the One was God.15 Aristotle was himself the real creator of philosophic monotheism, just because the idea of living, self-conscious personality had a greater value, a profounder meaning for him than for any other thinker of antiquity, one may almost say than for any other thinker whatever. It is, therefore, a noteworthy circumstance that, while warmly acknowledging the anticipations of Anaxagoras, he nowhere speaks of Xenophanes as a predecessor in the same line of enquiry. The latter might be called a pantheist were it not that pantheism belongs to a much later stage of speculation, one, in fact, not reached by the Greek mind at any period of its development. His leading conception was obscured by a confusion of mythological with purely physical ideas, and could only bear full fruit when the religious element had been entirely eliminated from its composition. This elimination was accomplished by a far greater thinker, one who combined poetic inspiration with philosophic depth; who was penetrating enough to discern the logical consequences involved in a fundamental principle of thought, and bold enough to push them to their legitimate conclusions without caring for the shock to sense and common opinion that his merciless dialectic might inflict.Pyrrho, who probably no more believed in books than in anything else, never committed his opinions to writing; and what we know of them is derived from the reports of his disciples, which, again, are only preserved in a very incomplete form by the compilers of the empire. According to these, Pyrrho began by declaring that the philosophic problem might be summed up in the three following questions:138 What is the nature of things? What should be our relation to them? What is the practical consequence of this determination? Of its kind, this statement is probably the best ever framed, and might be accepted with equal readiness by every school of thought. But the scepticism of Pyrrho at once reveals itself in his answer to the first question. We know nothing about things in themselves. Every assertion made respecting them is liable to be contradicted, and neither of the two opposing propositions deserves more credence than the other. The considerations by which Pyrrho attempts to establish this proposition were probably suggested by the systems of Plato and Aristotle. The only possible avenues of communication with the external world are, he tells us, sense and reason. Of these the former was so universally discredited that he seems to have regarded any elaborate refutation of its claims as superfluous. What we perceive by our senses is the appearance, not the reality of things. This is exactly what the Cyrenaics had already maintained. The inadequacy of reason is proved by a more original method. Had men any settled principles of judgment, they would agree on questions of conduct, for it is with regard to these that they are best informed, whereas the great variety of laws and customs shows that the exact opposite is true. They are more hopelessly divided on points of morality than on any other.227 It will be remembered that Pyrrhos fellow-townsman, Hippias, had, about a hundred years earlier, founded his theory of Natural Law on the arbitrary and variable character of custom. The result of combining his principles with those professed by Protagoras and Gorgias was to establish complete moral scepticism; but it would be a mistake to suppose that moral distinctions had no value for him personally, or that they were neglected in his public teaching.
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