Greek natural science was based on the principle that the world of nature is saturated of permeated by mind. Greek thinkers regarded the presence of mind in nature as the source of that regularity or orderliness in the natural world whose presence made a science of nature possible. The world of nature they regarded as a world of bodies in motion. The motions in themselves, according to Greek ideas, were due to vitality or ‘soul’; but motion in itself is one thing, they believed, and orderliness another. They conceived mind, in all its manifestations, whether in human affairs or elsewhere, as a ruler, a dominating or regulating element, imposing order first upon itself and then upon everything belonging to it, primarily its own body and secondarily that body’s environment.
Since the world of nature is a world not only of ceaseless motion and therefore alive, but also a world of orderly or regular motion, they accordingly said that the world of nature is not only alive but intelligent; not only a vast animal with a ‘soul’ or life of its own, but a rational animal with a ‘mind’ of its own. The life and intelligence of creatures inhabiting the earth’s surface and the regions adjacent to it, they argued, represent a specialized local organization of this all-pervading vitality and rationality, so that plant or animal, according to their ideas, participates in its own degree psychically in the life-process of the world’s ‘soul’ and intellectually in the activity of the world’s ‘mind’, no less than it participates materially in the physical organization of the world’s ‘body’.
That vegetables and animals are physically akin to the earth is a belief shared by ourselves with the Greeks; but the notion of a psychical and intellectual kinship is strange to us, and constitutes a difficulty in the way of our understanding the relics of Greek natural science which we find in their literature.
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |