ABSTRACT
ALL through ids life Cornford was a dissenter. It is characteristic of him that he should turn in his later years against an assumption which he himself had first accepted along with the great majority of modern scholars: that the natural philosopher of Ionia, from Anaximander to the atomists, was 'scientific', in contrast with the religious philosophy of the Pythagoreans and the rationalistic philosophy of the Eleatics. Cornford had expounded just this notion in his early book, From Religion to 'Philosophy (London, 1912). Heretical in many ways, this work had taken for granted the orthodox view of the 'scientific' motives and nature of Ionian cosmology; it described the atomists, for example, as 'behaving exactly as a modern man of science would do, remodelling the hypothetical substance to "save appearances'" (p. 157). I do not know how long it was before Cornford came to question this view. He had certainly done so by 1931. His Inaugural Lecture in that year, The Laws of Motion in Ancient Thought (Cambridge), argues that this topic, the proper theme of physical science, was completely misconceived by the Presocratics, who tried to explain it by the supposed tendency of motion of 'like to like', a notion derived from the common sense of their own day and ultimately from the 'unacknowledged principles of magic' (p. 44) and mimetic rites. A few years later ('Greek natural philosophy and modern science', in Background to Modern Science, J. Needham and W. Pagel (eds.), Cambridge, 1938), he argued that the method, objective, and motivation of Greek natural philosophy were all different from those of modern science: its method was marked by the neglect of experiment and indulgence in speculative dogmas unverifiable by observation; its objective was to understand 'what things really and ultimately are' (p. 10), instead of how they behave; and its motivation lacked the essential concern of the modern scientist, to understand nature for the purpose of furthering practical control. Cornford devoted the closing years of his life to the effort to round out and document this argument, and we can read the all but finished result in the present book. Its scholarship, unfortunately, is neither dispassionate nor precise. The book abounds in remarks which are opinionated tangents on the available evidence rather than sober conclusions from it. It nevertheless commands attention as the work of an imaginative man who has a rare power to challenge the mind of his reader. An exhaustive commentary on the mass of ideas it contains is quite impossible in this review, and I am anyhow not competent to discuss one of its important topics, the affinities between Greek cosmogonies and the creation myths of Babylonians, Canaanites, and others. All I can do here is to reckon, quite selectively, with those of its theses which bear directly on the nature, temper, and immediate origins of Presocratic cosmology.
