THE IDEA OF SPIRIT IN GREEK THOUGHT 357 



THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA OF SPIRIT IN GREEK 



THOUGHT 



By President MARY MILLS PATRICK, Ph.D. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE FOR GIRLS, CONSTANTINOPLE 



THE ideal side of life came into Greek consciousness on the eastern 

 shore of the blue Mediterranean, under the shadow of Mt. Ida, 

 in sunny Ionia with its fertile plains and luxuriant verdure and its 

 rich and brilliant cities. 



The poets were its forerunners, Homer, Alkaeus, Sappho and Anak- 

 reon. First there were the wandering poets, and then a school of 

 poetry arose in the many tinted isle of Mitylene with Sappho at its 

 head at the end of the seventh century, a school which was compared 

 in antiquity to the circle of Sokrates. Schools of philosophy followed 

 in Miletos, that hot-house of intellect, and later on in Ephesos, where 

 Sappho and Herakleitos were born. We do not know whether these 

 schools were organized Thiasai, dedicated to the goddesses like the 

 school of Pythagoras in southern Italy and the Greek schools of philos- 

 ophy of a later age, but it may well have been so, for in Ionia as in 

 Greece there was a ' shrine at every turn of the mountain path, and a 

 religious ceremony for every act of daily life.' 



On the southern shore of the Gulf of Smyrna, opposite the river 

 Hermus, with Mitylene in the distance across the sea, was the city of 

 Klazomenai, the modern Voorla. There Anaxagoras was born, who 

 was the first among the Greeks to evolve the idea of spirit as a philo- 

 sophical principle. Yet like all great ideas, this one, perhaps the 

 greatest, was vague and uncertain in its first appearance. Anaxagoras 

 belonged to the school of Anaximenes of Miletos. Miletos lay only a 

 few miles south of Klazomenai on the shore of another picturesque 

 gulf of the eastern Mediterranean, and from the time of Thales it had 

 been a center of philosophic thought. Theophrastos states that Anaxa- 

 goras was an ' associate of the philosophy of Anaximenes,' but these 

 two great thinkers were not contemporary, as Anaximenes died in 

 520 B.C., two decades before the birth of Anaxagoras. The connection 

 between them lay especially in a love of scientific research, and in 

 similar methods of explanation of astronomical and cosmological facts. 

 Anaxagoras lived in Ionia until he was about forty years of age, and 

 he attained great fame in his own country during the last ten years of 

 his residence there, gaining a reputation for depth of thought and 

 integrity of life, and slowly evolving his theory of the universe. 



The Ionian philosophers were monists and materialists. They 

 sought a fundamental substance, water, air or fire, or some other form 



