For men begin to doubt in questions of religion first, and then in
matters of more secular interest; and as regards the nature of the
spirit of historical criticism itself in its ultimate development,
it is not confined merely to the empirical method of ascertaining
whether an event happened or not, but is concerned also with the
investigation into the causes of events, the general relations
which phenomena of life hold to one another, and in its ultimate
development passes into the wider question of the philosophy of
history.
Now, while the workings of historical criticism in these two
spheres of sacred and uninspired history are essentially
manifestations of the same spirit, yet their methods are so
different, the canons of evidence so entirely separate, and the
motives in each case so unconnected, that it will be necessary for
a clear estimation of the progress of Greek thought, that we should
consider these two questions entirely apart from one another. I
shall then in both cases take the succession of writers in their
chronological order as representing the rational order - not that
the succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or that
dialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceives
its advance. In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods of
stagnation and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectual
development, not merely in the question of historical criticism,
but in their art, their poetry and their philosophy, seems so
essentially normal, so free from all disturbing external
influences, so peculiarly rational, that in following in the
footsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the order
sanctioned by reason.
CHAPTER II
AT an early period in their intellectual development the Greeks
reached that critical point in the history of every civilised
nation, when speculative invades the domain of revealed truth, when
the spiritual ideas of the people can no longer be satisfied by the
lower, material conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men
find it impossible to pour the new wine of free thought into the
old bottles of a narrow and a trammelling creed.
From their Aryan ancestors they had received the fatal legacy of a
mythology stained with immoral and monstrous stories which strove
to hide the rational order of nature in a chaos of miracles, and to
mar by imputed wickedness the perfection of God's nature - a very
shirt of Nessos in which the Heracles of rationalism barely escaped
annihilation. Now while undoubtedly the speculations of Thales,
and the alluring analogies of law and order afforded by physical
science, were most important forces in encouraging the rise of the
spirit of scepticism, yet it was on its ethical side that the Greek
mythology was chiefly open to attack.
It is difficult to shake the popular belief in miracles, but no man
will admit sin and immorality as attributes of the Ideal he
worships; so the first symptoms of a new order of thought are shown
in the passionate outcries of Xenophanes and Heraclitos against the
evil things said by Homer of the sons of God; and in the story told
of Pythagoras, how that he saw tortured in Hell the 'two founders
of Greek theology,' we can recognise the rise of the Aufklarung as
clearly as we see the Reformation foreshadowed in the INFERNO of
Dante.
Any honest belief, then, in the plain truth of these stories soon
succumbed before the destructive effects of the A PRIORI ethical
criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, as is its custom,
found immediately a convenient shelter under the aegis of the
doctrine of metaphors and concealed meanings.
