some parts of this work; but the subject has become so large, and the number of authorities whose testimony must be weighed is so great, that it is not easy for any one writer to be equally at home in all parts of the field.

I have consulted the student's convenience by giving references to the seventh edition of Ritter and Preller (ed. Schultess) throughout. The references to Zeller are to the fourth German edition, from which the English translation was made. I have been able to make some use also of the recently published fifth edition (1892), and all references to it are distinguished by the symbol Z I can only wish that it had appeared in time for me to incorporate its results more thoroughly.

I have to thank many friends for advice and suggestions, and, above all, Mr. Harold H. Joachim, Fellow of Merton College, who read most of the work before it went to press.

J. B.

ABBREVIATIONS.

ARCH.

Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Berlin, Georg

Reimer.

Dox. Doxographi Græci. Collegit, recensuit, Prolegomenis Indicibusque instruxit Hermannus Diels. Berlin 1879.

R. P.

Historia Philosophia Græcæ. Testimonia Auctorum conlegerunt Notisque instruxerunt. H. Ritter et L. Preller.

Editio septima, quam curaverunt Fr. Schultess et Ed. Wellmann. Gotha 1888.

ZELLER. Die Philosophie der Griechen, dargestellt von Dr. Eduard

Zeller. Erster Theil, Vierte Auflage. Leipzig 1876.

INTRODUCTION.

I. IT was not until the traditional view of the world The cosmological charand the customary rules of life had broken down, that acter of early Greek philothe Greeks began to feel the needs which philosophies of sophy." nature and of conduct seek to satisfy. Nor were those needs felt all at once. The decay of popular morality hardly set in till the traditional view of nature had altogether passed away; and, for this reason, the earliest philosophers busied themselves almost exclusively with speculations about the world around them. In due season, Logic was called into being to meet a fresh want. The pursuit of cosmological inquiry beyond a certain point inevitably brought to light a wide divergence between science and common sense, which was itself a fresh problem demanding some solution, and moreover constrained philosophers to study the means of defending their paradoxes against the prejudices of the unscientific many. Later still, the prevailing interest in logical matters raised the whole question of the origin and validity of knowledge; while, almost at the same time, the breakdown of the traditional morality gave rise to Ethics. The period in the history of Greek thought which precedes the rise of epistemological and ethical speculation has thus a distinctive character of its own, and may fitly be treated apart.1

1 It will be observed that Demokritos falls outside the period thus limited. The common practice of treating this younger contemporary of

The traditional view of the world.

II. Even in the earliest times of which we have any record, the traditional view of the world is fast passing away, and we are left to gather what manner of thing it was from the stray glimpses we get of it here and there in the older literature, to which it forms a sort of sombre background, and from the many strange myths and stranger rites that lived on, as if to bear witness of it to later times, not only in out-of-the-way parts of Hellas, but even in the "mysteries" of the more cultivated states. So far as we can see, it must have been essentially a thing of shreds and patches, ready to fall in pieces as soon as stirred by the fresh breeze of a larger experience and a more fearless curiosity. The only attempt at an explanation of the world which it could. offer was a wild story of the origin of things, only to be matched for puerile cruelty and obscenity among the worst inventions of the lowest races of mankind. short, the earliest Greek view of nature was nothing more. nor less than a form of that world wide superstition which has its roots deep down in the peculiar constitution of the savage mind.

In

This is hardly, perhaps, the picture of the earliest state of the Greek intellect with which most of us have been familiar; but the evidence which anthropologists have brought in support of it is, in its cumulative force, overwhelming. Such a story as that of Ouranos, Gaia, and Kronos is plainly, as Mr. Lang has shown in Custom and Myth, in all essential features, on precisely the same level of thought as the Maori tale of Papa and Rangi;

Sokrates along with the "pre-Socratic philosophers" has obscured the true course of historical development. Demokritos comes after Protagoras, and his theory is everywhere conditioned by the epistemological problem. See Victor Brochard, Protagoras et Démocrite (Arch. ii. 368).