6. The emancipation of women—a far more difficult advance—was evidently in the mind of Pericles, who himself violated social propriety, not merely by having Aspasia at the head of his house, but apparently by permitting her to receive company and discuss social and moral questions with intellectual men. But this example, and the constant teaching of Socrates in the same direction, were unable to overcome the strong conservative feeling of Attic society, that such a change must be subversive of morals and of home life. Thus it remained an unsettled conflict—one of those problems of the day—in which the theorists are unanswerable in argument, but yet powerless to move the inertness of the public, or retort the ridicule to which their novelties expose them.
7. But these social questions were only the consequence of far deeper and wider problems, which stirred in the minds of men as soon as an assured empire gave them time and ambition for reflection. Moral and social philosophy (apart from the early proverbial or gnomic form) does not strike root until men have somewhat exhausted the rich virgin soil of speculation with larger and vaguer inquiries into the origin of things, the texture of matter and mind, and the nature of their first cause. Theology and metaphysic always precede ethics and sociology as sciences. Early thinkers assume the nature of man as obvious, and desire to probe the secrets of the universe. Thus we have in Greece, beginning earlier than the Periclean epoch, a series of great names in the history of philosophy—Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras—whose speculations on Being and Becoming, on Permanence and Change, on the elements of matter and the laws of their composition, have afforded even to modern German metaphysicians all the best hints for their systems.
These physical and metaphysical philosophers, from Thales onward, all agreed in one important feature—they were thoroughly secular in spirit, and carried on their inquiries without the restraint or justification
