those who were half theologians and half philosophers, and who put what was best in the beginning.[1] It is obvious, however, that this process is the very reverse of scientific, and might be carried on indefinitely; so we have nothing to do with the cosmogonists in our present inquiry, except so far as they can be shown to have influenced the course of more sober investigations.
VI.General characteristics of Greek cosmology. The Ionians, as we can see from their literature, were deeply impressed by the transitoriness of things. There is, in fact, a fundamental pessimism in their outlook on life, such as is natural to an over-civilised age with no very definite religious convictions. We find Mimnermos of Kolophon preoccupied with the sadness of the coming of old age, while at a later date the lament of Simonides, that the generations of men fall like the leaves of the forest, touches a chord that Homer had already struck.[2] Now this sentiment always finds its best illustrations in the changes of the seasons, and the cycle of growth and decay is a far more striking phenomenon in Aegean lands than in the North, and takes still more clearly the form of a war of opposites, hot and cold, wet and dry. It is, accordingly, from that point of view the early cosmologists regard the world. The opposition of day and night, summer and winter, with their suggestive parallelism in sleep and waking, birth and death, are the outstanding features of the world as they saw it.[3]
The changes of the seasons are plainly brought about by the encroachments of one pair of opposites, the cold and the wet, on the other pair, the hot and the dry, which in
- ↑ Arist. Met. N, 4. 1091b 8.
- ↑ See Butcher, "The Melancholy of the Greeks," in Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, pp. 130 sqq.
- ↑ This is well brought out by Prof. J. L. Myres in a paper entitled "The Background of Greek Science" (University of Chicago Chronicle, vol. xvi. No. 4). There is no need to derive the doctrine of the "opposites" from a "religious representation" as Mr. Cornford does in the first chapter of From Religion to Philosophy. In Greece these force themselves upon our attention quite apart from anything of the sort. Of course they are also, important in agrarian magic for practical reasons.
