Early Greek Philosophy

in their turn encroach on the other pair. This process was naturally described in terms borrowed from human society; for in early days the regularity and constancy of human life was far more clearly realized than the uniformity of nature. Man lived in a charmed circle of social law and custom, but the world around him at first seemed lawless.

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That is why the encroachment of one opposite on another was spoken of as injustice (adikia) and the due observance of a balance between them as justice (dikē). The later word kosmos is based on this notion too. It meant originally the discipline of an army, and next the ordered constitution of a state.

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That, however, was not enough. The earliest cosmologists could find no satisfaction in the view of the world as a perpetual contest between opposites. They felt that these must somehow have a common ground, from which they had issued and to which they must return once more.

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They were in search of something more primary than the opposites, something which persisted through all change, and ceased to exist in one form only to reappear in another.

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That this was really the spirit in which they entered on their quest is shown by the fact that they spoke of this something as "ageless" and "deathless."¹ Underlined in pencil: If, as is sometimes held, their real interest had been in the process of growth and becoming, they would hardly have applied epithets so charged with poetical emotion and association to what is alone permanent in a world of change and decay. Underlined in pencil: That is the true meaning of Ionian "Monism."²

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¹ Ar. Phys. Γ, 4. 203 b 14 "for it (sc. the apeiron) is deathless and imperishable," as Anaximander and most of the natural philosophers say; Hipp. Ref. i. 6, 1 "a certain nature of the apeiron... and this is eternal and ageless." The epithets come from the Epic, where "deathless and ageless" is a standing phrase to mark the difference between gods and men.

² As it has been suggested that the Monism ascribed by later writers to the early cosmologists is only based on Aristotle’s distinction between those who postulated one archē and those who postulated more than one (Phys. A, 2. 184 b 15 sqq.), and is not therefore strictly historical, it will be well to quote a pre-Aristotelian testimony for it. In the Hippocratic On the Nature of Man (Littré, vi. 32) we read: "for they say that what is, is one certain thing."