THE MONISTRARY

PLATO'S CONCEPTION OF THE COSMOS.

"PYTHAGORAS

I.

YTHAGORAS was the first," says Plutarch, "who named the compass of the whole a Cosmos, because of the order which is in it."

The notion that all things knowable and all things existent form one orderly and comprehensive system, in which every event is linked with every other by causal necessity while all the elements with mechanical nicety mutually enmesh, is to us of to-day an intellectual commonplace. We make no difficulty in thinking an Everything which is made up of all things, an Entirety or a Totality which is just the commingled sum of the numberless particularities which our lives are always itemizing; and we call this Totality, this All, this Thing of things, the Universe or the World. It rarely occurs to us to question either the unity or the reality of this omnium-gatherum, which, even if it occupies a somewhat concealed position in our thoughts, is yet a well-nigh indispensable convenience; it stands an everready and capacious receptacle for all the perplexities and inconsistencies which the apparent nature of things is constantly presenting, but which, we feel, are in some benign way healed by the alchemical mystery of an all-inclusive World.

Ideas are habits; and when an idea gets so fixed that the habit has become automatic, it is usually good medicine

to revive, now and again the habit-forming period, that we may judge with refreshed intelligence the safety and truth of our continued course. This is our purpose in turning to certain Greek conceptions of the world as a cosmos.

For we must remember that the notion, so familiar to us, of what they variously called tò лav, the All, or tò ὅλον, the Whole, or again ὁ οὐρανός, the Heaven, or ὁ κόσμος, the Order of Things, was to the Greeks a new invention. The idea that all things are somehow one is by no means self-evident, and when it was suggested the wary Hellenic mind approached it with canny suspicion and cautious circumlocution. Is the World limited or unlimited? Is it truly One or is it Many? Does the Whole, or Totality, exhaust the All? Or indeed may not the All indefinitely transcend the Realm of Order, the Cosmos? These were questions which were raised and discussed-questions with a dangerous smack of impiety-by the men who were interested in what Xenophon characterizes as "that which is called by sophists 'the world.'"

Doubtless it was Pythagoras, as Plutarch states, or some Pythagorean, who first daringly pronounced the Whole to be a Cosmos, the realm of reality and the realm of order to be coextensive. For the Pythagoreans were the earliest of men to be entirely enamored of that first principle and foundation of law and order, the idea of number. They devoted themselves to mathematics and music and astronomy, and in the numerical analogies which they discovered in the properties of sound and in the movements of the heavenly bodies there burst upon their minds, with what must have seemed a very blaze of creative intelligence, the great conception of number in nature, which has since been the foundation of all our science. They conceived all nature to be organized according to mathematical proportions, and because they found these proportions to be most emblematically realized in musical strings

and pipes they named the principle of it a harmony, and again because they seemed to see it regnantly imaged in the motions of the heavenly spheres they regarded these too as a harmony and a music. It was indeed primarily to the heavens that the name Cosmos was given, and it was only later, when the seasons of Earth were observed to follow the periods of the Sun while the figures of the stars were regarded as prognostics of human events, that the conception of order was extended from celestial to terrestrial phenomena.

The background of Hellenic thought, like the natural thought of mankind everywhere, was pluralistic. To the normal Greek, even in the days of Plato and Aristotle, the obvious facts of life indicated not a consistent and closelocked universal scheme, but a mêlée of whim and purpose, blind chance and blinder fancy, while the most reasonless of all the powers he recognized was that to which he gave the name Necessity. To him it seemed evident that the affairs of men and nature are innumerable and unorganized, and while certain of the more stable aspects of existence were regarded as the charge of the Olympian gods, not even such mercurial control as emanated from the hoydenish family of Zeus divine obtained in the generality of experience: the vast majority of events were not to be explained at all; they were simply the manifestation of the hostility, indifference, idiosyncracy and anarchy which appear in the elemental facts of life.

This, I say, was the view of the normal Greek even in his classical hey-dey, as it is the view of the naive and natural man everywhere. But the foundations of our own sophisticated philosophy had been set long before, in two first conditions which, as I see it, go far to account for the whole edifice of reason.

One of these is a psychological condition. It is what is known in Kantian philosophy as the "unity of apper

ception" and in scientific method as the "law of parcimony," or economy of thought. Essentially it is just our native simple-mindedness, expressed in the maxim, "Attend to one thing at a time." Intellectually we are unable to cope with complex facts; we have to simplify them, analyze them, in order to see them. Hence we regard simplicity as the supreme virtue, not only in reason but also in nature; and hence also our invincible conviction that reason's simplifications are more genuine than nature's empirical complexities. In spite of its multitudinous and multiplying variety the very limitations of our intellectual powers compel us to see Nature as one, as a unity, and thus out of chaos is created an orderly world.

Such is the inner condition, but it is mightily helped outwardly by the natural allegory of Sky and Earth, Day and Night, Summer and Winter. These antitheticals seem to form a great division of Nature into the Intelligible and the Unintelligible: Sky and Day and Summer not only symbolize but embody motion and light and life, which are in turn the image and essence of reason; while Earth and Night and Winter no less surely body forth the inert and void and deathly realm of anti-reason. Thus we have a realm of order, Cosmos, set over against a realm of disorder, a Chaos; and because the orderly Sky images the rulership of reason, and because Day is the revealer and Summer the life-giver, these powers are regarded as friendly to man and in the great contention of Nature as encroaching upon and subduing the dark forces of Chaos.

Such a sense of duality is omnipresent in human thought. Its metaphors are the very breath of life of poetry, and even in philosophies which deny its reality the problems to which it gives rise-problems of the formal and material, spiritual and physical, good and evil,—are the crucial perplexities. Greek thought is no exception to the rule. Already in the epic theogonies Uranus and Gaea,