The Life of Reason | Page 7

expressed, Heraclitus had
opened the door into another region: had he passed through, his
philosophy would have been greatly modified, for permanent forms
would have forced themselves on his attention no less than shifting
materials. Such a Heraclitus would have anticipated Plato; but the time
for such a synthesis had not yet arrived.
[Sidenote: Democritus and the naturally intelligible.]
At the opposite pole from immediacy lies intelligibility. To reduce
phenomena to constant elements, as similar and simple as possible, and
to conceive their union and separation to obey constant laws, is what a
natural philosopher will inevitably do so soon as his interest is not
merely to utter experience but to understand it. Democritus brought this
scientific ideal to its ultimate expression. By including psychic
existence in his atomic system, he indicated a problem which natural
science has since practically abandoned but which it may some day be
compelled to take up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even
for chemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great
transformation if they were to support intelligibly psychic being as well;
but that very grossness and false simplicity had its merits, and science
must be for ever grateful to the man who at its inception could so
clearly formulate its mechanical ideal. That the world is not so
intelligible as we could wish is not to be wondered at. In other respects
also it fails to respond to our ideals; yet our hope must be to find it
more propitious to the intellect as well as to all the arts in proportion as
we learn better how to live in it.
The atoms of what we call hydrogen or oxygen may well turn out to be
worlds, as the stars are which make atoms for astronomy. Their inner
organisation might be negligible on our rude plane of being; did it
disclose itself, however, it would be intelligible in its turn only if

constant parts and constant laws were discernible within each system.
So that while atomism at a given level may not be a final or
metaphysical truth, it will describe, on every level, the practical and
efficacious structure of the world. We owe to Democritus this ideal of
practical intelligibility; and he is accordingly an eternal spokesman of
reason. His system, long buried with other glories of the world, has
been partly revived; and although it cannot be verified in haste, for it
represents an ultimate ideal, every advance in science reconstitutes it in
some particular. Mechanism is not one principle of explanation among
others. In natural philosophy, where to explain means to discover
origins, transmutations, and laws, mechanism is explanation itself.
Heraclitus had the good fortune of having his physics absorbed by
Plato. It is a pity that Democritus' physics was not absorbed by
Aristotle. For with the flux observed, and mechanism conceived to
explain it, the theory of existence is complete; and had a complete
physical theory been incorporated into the Socratic philosophy, wisdom
would have lacked none of its parts. Democritus, however, appeared
too late, when ideal science had overrun the whole field and initiated a
verbal and dialectical physics; so that Aristotle, for all his scientific
temper and studies, built his natural philosophy on a lamentable
misunderstanding, and condemned thought to confusion for two
thousand years.
[Sidenote: Socrates and the autonomy of mind.]
If the happy freedom of the Greeks from religious dogma made them
the first natural philosophers, their happy political freedom made them
the first moralists. It was no accident that Socrates walked the Athenian
agora; it was no petty patriotism that made him shrink from any other
scene. His science had its roots there, in the personal independence,
intellectual vivacity, and clever dialectic of his countrymen. Ideal
science lives in discourse; it consists in the active exercise of reason, in
signification, appreciation, intent, and self-expression. Its sum total is
to know oneself, not as psychology or anthropology might describe a
man, but to know, as the saying is, one's own mind. Nor is he who
knows his own mind forbidden to change it; the dialectician has
nothing to do with future possibilities or with the opinion of anyone but
the man addressed. This kind of truth is but adequate veracity; its only
object is its own intent. Having developed in the spirit the

consciousness of its meanings and purposes, Socrates rescued logic and
ethics for ever from authority. With his friends the Sophists, he made
man the measure of all things, after bidding him measure himself, as
they neglected to do, by his own ideal. That brave humanity which had
first raised its head in Hellas and had endowed so many things in
heaven and earth, where everything was hitherto monstrous, with
proportion and use, so that man's works might justify themselves to