Some Greek Anticipations of Modern Science
BY HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS, LL.D.
IN the world of thought, whatever is is Greek. Such at least has been the popular verdict of many generations of enthusiastic commentators. Before the Greeks, chaos of ideas; with the Greeks, creation; after the Greeks, decay and degeneration, or at best rediscovery along Greek lines. We are told that the Greeks first conceived the idea that the world is round; they first reached the conception that the sun, and not the world, is the centre of our planetary system; they first imagined a non-anthropomorphic deity; they first thought of the world as made up of particles of matter; they first investigated the processes of mind itself; they first conceived of the brotherhood of man and gave that thought expression in an attempt at democratic government. They did many inconsistent things as well, but these do not greatly concern us here; no progressive movement ever starts exactly on the right lines at first. Still, we shall best appreciate the real progress of the Greek if we take account also of some of his false steps. We shall see that upon the whole his progressive march carried him far toward the truth; so far, indeed, that after he was forced to leave the field no successor was able to push much beyond the outposts of Greek thought for a thousand years. That being true, the enthusiasm with which commentators have all along regarded the- Greek is surely justified.
If it be urged that the resuscitated history of the old Orient brings to light curious anticipations of Greek civilization, it may be urged with no less validity that the Greek departure from the Oriental models amounts in many directions to re-creation rather than mere evolution. Plato made a modest estimate when he said, "Whatever we Greeks receive from the barbarians we improve and perfect." He might almost have said, "Whatever we receive we transform, metamorphose, and re-create." Let us witness some phases of these transformations of thought.
First of all, of course, we have to do with, the problems of world-building,—the mechanism of the universe. As to this, the earliest Greek ideas were crude enough,—a mere reflex of Oriental thought. But the Greeks soon began to think for themselves. Thales and Anaximander and Anaximenes and Hecatæus at the eastern borders of the Greek world, and Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles out in Italy, felt the vivifying influence of racial mixings and were stirred with the promptings of creative enthusiasm. The Milesians did not get very far. Theirs was a first effort for the infant mind of Hellas. "The world is a flat disc floating on the great abysm of primordial waters," guessed Thales. That is merely the Oriental idea transplanted; such had been the explanation of the Babylonians. "The primordial element is air, not water," said Anaximenes. "The earth," said Anaximander, "rests not upon water but upon a conic base." "Not so," asserted the Italic Greeks with Pythagoras and Parmenides at their head; "the world is no disc, no truncated cone; it is a sphere; a sphere whirling in a circular orbit about a central fire. All this universe is a sequence of circles."
That was the sure beginning. When Anaxagoras, the teacher and friend of Pericles and Euripides, had explained the phases of the moon and the true nature of eclipses, and Aristotle had given his verdict for the theory, the sphericity of the earth became stock doctrine of Greek thought. Archimedes out in Sicily, when
