Text extracted from opening pages of book: HEAD AND HAND IN ANCIENT
GREECE FOUR STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL RELATIONS OF THOUGHT The
Thinker's Library No. 121. HEAD AND HAND IN ANCIENT GREECE FOUR
STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL RELATIONS OF THOUGHT BY BENJAMIN FARRINGTON
Professor of Classics, University College, Swansea LONDON: WATTS
& CO., 5 & 6 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E. C. 4 PREFACE
HERE are four essays which treat four great move* ments of ancient
thought historically that is, in close relation to their social
setting. If there be anything true in them they should help us to
see beneath the surface of the social phenomena of our own day. The
first discusses the character of the great early period of Greek
science and shows that, while it was not yet experimental, neither
was it purely specu lative. It was, in fact, closely related to
practice. The Ionian philosophers were not simply observers of
nature but active interferers with nature, for the philosopher and
the man of action were yet one. They made a distinction between
necessity and design that is, between the spontaneous processes of
nature and the action of man on nature. They attempted to
understand the spontaneous processes of nature the realm of
necessity in the light of the controlled processes the realm of
design. Thus, though experimental research had not yet been
developed, speculation was controlled by being related to
experience. The second essay traces the effect on the art and
science of medicine of social changes affecting the attitude to
manual work and the manual worker. It claims that the Hippocratic
doctors, rightly famous for their analysis of the patient as a
living organism striving to maintain itself in balancewith its
environ ment, yet overlooked the chief factor in a human being's
environment his job. It is through his job vii Viii PREFACE that
society chiefly acts on the individual. If the individual is
failing to react adequately to his environ ment, very often it is
his working conditions that need alteration. Stoicism forms the
subject of the third essay, Stoicism as a living and developing
movement in a changing environment. Looking through the eyes of the
historian Diodorus Siculus we can see Stoicism as a way of life
largely eastern in origin. It was at first inspired by astrological
beliefs in a just society and was critical of the social injustices
of Greek society. Later it declined into being the social cement of
the Roman State and a school of resignation. The Roman State, aided
by Stoicism, made as much use as it could of religion as a means of
policing society. The fourth and last essay shows how jgjg. mild
religion and boldjicience of Epicurus, the rapid spread of~ wEicK
ffifouighout Italytfireatened to rob superstition of its police
function, alarmed the governing class at Rome and produced an
intellectual battle in which the statesman Cicero and the poet
Lucretius were on opposite sides. B. F. Swansea, September 21,
1946. INTRODUCTION IT is agreed on all hands that the Greeks were
great thinkers. Let nobody suppose I wish to dispute this fact. But
it is widely taught that the Greeks were poor doers as well as
great thinkers. I do wish to dispute this belief. I do wish to
assert that the best Greek thinking was the companion and helper of
vigorous action. Nowadays bookish people have lost the sense for
all the intellect that exists outside books. A farm, a factory,
anengine, a ship, the back-axle of a motor car, a wheel-barrow, a
fishing-rod, is not seen as an intellectual achievement. No. The
philosopher sits in his study and murmurs My days among the dead
are passed. Around me I behold, Where'er these casual eyes are
cast, The mighty minds of old. The mighty minds are all between
covers, and I do not deny that some of the ancient Greeks shared
the same illusion. But not all. Not Aeschylus, whose Prometheus
catalogues in such picturesque detail all the crafts he taught to
men. Not Sophocles, who celebrates the incredible ingenuity
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