FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY.* LCOMMUNICATED.] THIS is—we say it deliberately—a

great book. It expresses and marks an epoch in thinking. It is of twofold import. The book took its rise, as great works often must, in a piece of minute specialism—an inquiry into the exact meaning of some of the dark sayings of the pre-Socratic philosophers. But, and again this is a frequent characteristic of really great and living work, almost immediately the writer spreads his wings to a wider and higher flight. The examination of the riddles of Anaximander and Heracleitos issues inevitably in " a study of the origins of Western speculation." Mr. Cornford stands as pioneer of the new academic spirit that sees and feels its own specialism in wider, indeed, in world-wide, relations ; and it is by the baptism in this new spirit, so as by fire, that academic institutions will find salvation. The writer's book does honour to his college and his university.

Where every chapter teems with suggestion it is well to make clear the main contention.

Religion and philosophy, especially when, as with the Greeks, philosophy included science, are commonly held to be distinct and even alien provinces, and between them there is carried on some sort of " border warfare." Among the Greeks, it is currently said, the new spirit of rational inquiry awoke in the sixth century B.C. in the Ionian School. Here was a fresh start ; here a new impulse of scientific inquiry was born. Science and philosophy, however crude their beginnings, claimed to look facts in the face and to pronounce unfettered judgment on what had before been matter of sacrosanct belief. It banished the gods to make way for the elements.

This canonical view is well formulated by the most recent historian of ancient philosophy, Professor Deussen. The characteristic trait of Hellenism is the freedom of thought with which the Greek confronted nature. He stood unen- cumbered by early implanted delusions, unconstrained by any close and closed dogmatic system ; he could take in the nature of things with untroubled eyes and with senses open to accept its revelations. Exceptionally untrammelled by dogmatic prejudice and priestly persecution the Greeks undoubtedly were; but the Greek mind, like every other mind, was subject from the outset necessarily, inevitably, to another and a subtler sway, that of the unconscious tradition of language, and, above all, of religious representation. That a man should stand face to face with nature, and his sense impres- sions of nature, is the last triumph of rationalism and indi- vidualism—it is Omega, not Alpha. A Greek's philosophy is a compound, not merely, as Professor Deussen would have it, of two factors, of his outer-sensuous experience and his inner- moral sense. To these must be added a third factor, imminent, dominant always, his inherited collective consciousness that issues in religious representations. To explain a philosophy we have always to ask of what religion was it the outcome. Greek philosophy, pre-Socratic, yes, and post-Socratic, was not a clean start : it was a process arduous, intermittent, of the clarifying and rationalizing of certain pre-existing religious conceptions : such conceptions are, God, the Soul, Nature, Fate, Law ; and such conceptions, essentially religious, continue to circumscribe the movements of rational thought down to the time of Aristotle and even to-day.

Diogenes Laertius grouped Greek philosophers in two successions, Ionian and Italiote, headed by Anaximander and Pythagoras. He rightly divined that Greek thought was not to be divided into two successive periods, religions or super- • From Religion to Philosophy : a Study in the Origins of Western Speculation. By Francis Macdonald Cornford, Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College, Cambridge. London : Edward Arnold. [108. 64.]

stitious and scientific or philosophic, but rather was from +beginning to end marked by two tendencies, two traditions, which may be called " mystical " and "scientific," moved by two impulses along lines diverging more and more widely towards opposite conclusions.

" These impulses are still operative in our own speculation ; for the simple reason that they correspond to two permanent needs of human nature and characterize two familiar types of human temperament."

The roots, then, of philosophic mysticism, the mysticism of Heracleitos, of Pythagoras, of in part Empedocles and Plato, lie deep in mystical religion ; the roots of scientific philosophy, the philosophy of Tbales, of Anaximander, of, again in part, Empedocles and Plato, lie also not less deep in a scientific religion, and if we would understand the fruit and flavour it is for these roots we must burrow.

That religion should be mystical and should beget a mystical philosophy this seems likely enough. Religion is in its essence admittedly mystical ; it is the grasping by faith after the unity of things ; it is a sense of the oneness of spiritual life. Recent researches have shown that though about the orthodox religion of Homer's Olympians there was something less than no mysticism, yet beneath their splendid panorama was a deep stratum of primitive half-magical faith that centred round Dionysos, the mystery god, the very kernel or centre of whose cultus and myth was the communal communion of ‘worshipper with god, the mystical unity of the whole of things. Mystical philosophy finds here its natural and proper parent. But when we ask, " What in Greek religion represents the scientific tendency ?" the problem baffles us. The Olympians, we feel, are parents and products of art, but what gods were the begetters of science? Now it is just in the solution of this problem that Mr. Cornford's great claim to originality lies, and it was a problem that could only be solved by a blend of learning at once wide and minute with a bold creative imagination. The answer to the question who was the religious father or rather mother of science and philosophy is in one word—Moira.

The supremacy of Moira over the Olympians, over Zeus lihnself, is a canonical crux in Homeric theology ; volumes have been written, are being written, but we hope will soon cease to be written, on this well-worn theme. Moira at last is understood : she is not primarily Fate ; she is, as her name says, division, partition, allotment. She is not yet, not yet for a long time, the intellect whose motto is, Divide et impera, but she is the tribal, social material, of which that intellect is made. Science classifies, makes moirai, partitions. And in the moral world Moira, partition, gives to each man his due allotted share ; to the divine Moira the prayer goes up, "For- give us our trespasses." The Greeks were a people of intellect, of clear thinking, of sharp dividing ; their cardinal sin was hybris—over-and-aboveness, overstepping, trespass. Naturally, inevitably, they worshipped Moira, who laid down the limits, and Nemesis, who avenged transgression. The theios aner of Hesiod sums up the whole duty of man; be is to be

"Knowing in birds and not overstepping tabus."

'The Olympians, the " scientific " gods,, are but specialized Moirae.

It might seem sufficient to have penetrated behind the figures of the Olympians to the shadowy dominance of Moira, but the relentless method of modern science demands that the analysis be pushed further. Mr. Cornford avows himself

a disciple of the French sociological school of Professor Durkheim, and he has taken to heart the dictum of Dr. Rivers as President of the Anthropological Section of the last British Association. "It is with social structure that we must begin the

attempt to analyse culture." What social structure then is em- bodied in Moira? Why, nothing more or less than social struc- ture, tribal structure itself. Classification is the very essence of Moira, and classification, logical classification, as Professor Durkheim has triumphantly shown, is finally based on tribal structure. The primitive sanctities of all are tribal divisions,

tribal boundaries; the gods themselves—and we suddenly understand why—are bound by Horkos, for Horkos, as Professor Gilbert Murray shows, is not primarily an oath, but

an enclosure, a boundary. Herkeios, He-of-the-Enclosure, was, it may be, before Zeus himself.

We said that Mr. Cornford was wide as well as deep read. He raises the time-honoured question : Why was

Nature, contrary to all experience, always supposed to be

moral, the "good" man prosperous ? And he answers it by taking us to the tribal structure of the Zufiis, a totemistic tribe of North American Indians. To primitive peoples human society is continuous with nature ; human tribal divisions divide the whole known universe. It is society confers sanctity. " Moira came to be supreme in nature over all the subordinate wills of men and gods because she was first supreme in human society, which was continuous with nature. Here, too, we find the ultimate reason why Destiny is moral : she defines the limits of mores, of social custom." This the Greek expressed mythologically : Themis, social custom, was the mother of the Moirae. Mr. Cornford might well have chosen for the title of his book, " From Themis to Moira "—from tribal structure and social collective custom to intellectual logical division.

Moira, then, and the Olympians are the religious and mystical stuff that went to the weaving of the scientific strand in philosophy. This side of the book we have emphasized, because it is his profound and searching analysis of Moira that is Mr. Cornford's main contribution to the history of Greek and of all thinking. We have left no space to consider what is perhaps the most sympathetic and beautiful side of a book of frequent beauty, his analysis of the mystical element seen in Dionysos and in Dike, the mystical counterpart of Moira— Dike, who is at once the " way, the truth, and the life," Dike the perennial cycle of living and dying, that moves and persists through all the man-made Moirae, Dike who has her being in time and eternity rather than in space.

It is strange and, we think, significant that the author, who is punctilious in acknowledgments, should not realize the deep debt he owes to Professor Bergson. The contrast he draws between the temporal Dike and the spatial Moira (p. 160) —his analysis of the function of intellect as "framing a per- fectly clear, conceptional model of reality," as driven by a deep- lying need to master the world by understanding it (p. viii)— all this is pure Bergson. The reason of this unconsciousness in borrowing is not far to seek. The author is a convinced and avowed rationalist ; his book is dedicated to science in the great name of Darwin. Theoretically and consciously he admires and emulates the scientific mind ; he aims at and attains a clear, logical, almost ruthless vision and grasp of facts, a sharp and vivid presentment ; but he is cursed, or, we should say, blessed, by a mystical temperament which, from sheer intellectual honesty, he sharply and constantly controls. The ferment of his faith and his mysticism works and will work and flower, we believe, when the writer and his rationalism are blown dust.