Euclides, a native of Megara on the Corinthian isthmus, was a devoted hearer
of Socrates, making his
way to hear him, sometimes even at the ‘risk of his life, in defiance of a
decree of his native city forbidding intercourse with Athens. When Plato and
other Athenian followers of Socrates thought well to quit Athens for a time
after Socrates’ execution, they were kindly entertained by Euclides at
Megara.
The exact character of the development which the Socratic teaching received
from Euclides and his school is a matter of considerable doubt. The
allusions to the tenets of the school in Plato and others are only
fragmentary. We gather, however, from them that Euclides was wholly
antithetical to the personal turn given to philosophy, both by the Cyrenaics
and the Cynics. He revived and developed with much dialectical subtlety the
metaphysical system of
Parmenides and the Eleatics, maintaining that there is but one absolute
existence, and that sense and sense-perceptions as against this are nothing.
This one absolute existence was alone absolutely good, and the good for man
could only be found in such an absorption of himself in this one absolute
good through reason and contemplation, as would bring his spirit into
perfectness of union with it. Such absorption raised a man above the
troubles and pains of life, and thus, in insensibility to these through
reason, man attained his highest good.
The school is perhaps interesting only in so far as it marks the continued
survival of the abstract dialectic method of earlier philosophy. As such it
had a very definite influence, sometimes through agreement, sometimes by
controversy, on the systems of Plato and Aristotle now to be dealt with.
A History of Greek Philosophy /
THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS /
EUCLIDES THE MEGARIC
