The Idea Of Progress | Page 7

disaster. These a priori principles account for the admiration of the Spartan state entertained by many Greek philosophers, because it was supposed to have preserved unchanged for an unusually long period a system established by an inspired legislator.
2.
Thus time was regarded as the enemy of humanity. Horace's verse,
Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?
"time depreciates the value of the world," expresses the pessimistic axiom accepted in most systems of ancient thought.
The theory of world-cycles was so widely current that it may almost be described as the orthodox theory of cosmic time among the Greeks, and it passed from them to the Romans.
[Footnote: Plato's world-cycle. I have omitted details not essential; e.g. that in the first period men were born from the earth and only in the second propagated themselves. The period of 36,000 years, known as the Great Platonic Year, was probably a Babylonian astronomical period, and was in any case based on the Babylonian sexagesimal system and connected with the solar year conceived as consisting of 360 days. Heraclitus seems to have accepted it as the duration of the world between his periodic universal conflagrations. Plato derived the number from predecessors, but based it on operations with the numbers 3, 4, 5, the length of the sides of the Pythagorean right-angled triangle. The Great Year of the Pythagorean Philolaus seems to have been different, and that of the Stoics was much longer (6,570,000 years).
I may refer here to Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." See the whole passage, where the Magnus Annus of 12,954 years is referred to.]
According to some of the Pythagoreans [Footnote: See Simplicius, Phys. 732, 26.] each cycle repeated to the minutest particular the course and events of the preceding. If the universe dissolves into the original chaos, there appeared to them to be no reason why the second chaos should produce a world differing in the least respect from its predecessor. The nth cycle would be indeed numerically distinct from the first, but otherwise would be identical with it, and no man could possibly discover the number of the cycle in which he was living. As no end seems to have been assigned to the whole process, the course of the world's history would contain an endless number of Trojan Wars, for instance; an endless number of Platos would write an endless number of Republics. Virgil uses this idea in his Fourth Eclogue, where he meditates a return of the Golden Age:
Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae uehat Argo Delectos heroas; erunt etiam altera bella, Atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles.
The periodic theory might be held in forms in which this uncanny doctrine of absolute identity was avoided; but at the best it meant an endless monotonous iteration, which was singularly unlikely to stimulate speculative interest in the future. It must be remembered that no thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his cycle the present hour might be. The most influential school of the later Greek age, the Stoics, adopted the theory of cycles, and the natural psychological effect of the theory is vividly reflected in Marcus Aurelius, who frequently dwells on it in his Meditations. "The rational soul," he says, "wanders round the whole world and through the encompassing void, and gazes into infinite time, and considers the periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe, and reflects that our posterity will see nothing new, and that our ancestors saw nothing greater than we have seen. A man of forty years, possessing the most moderate intelligence, may be said to have seen all that is past and all that is to come; so uniform is the world." [Footnote: xi. I. The cyclical theory was curiously revived in the nineteenth; century by Nietzsche, and it is interesting to note his avowal that it took him a long time to overcome the feeling of pessimism which the doctrine inspired.]
3.
And yet one Stoic philosopher saw clearly, and declared emphatically, that increases in knowledge must be expected in the future.
"There are many peoples to-day," Seneca wrote, "who are ignorant of the cause of eclipses of the moon, and it has only recently been demonstrated among ourselves. The day will come when time and human diligence will clear up problems which are now obscure. We divide the few years of our lives unequally between study and vice, and it will therefore be the work of many generations to explain such phenomena as comets. One day our posterity will marvel at our ignorance of causes so clear to them.
"How many new animals have we first come to know in the present age?