The first phenomena of psychical life to arrest attention were the reflex actions of consciousness upon the conduct of peoples. Yet the early historians were in bonds to that cosmological conception which traced psychical facts to an external order of nature that manifested itself in the acts of avenging and rewarding divinities. The stories told by Herodotus are in this vein. Thucydides began to set an example of positive criticism of tradition for the sifting out of fact from fiction.
Side by side with historical investigation, political philosophy (Staatslehre) developed. Though necessarily a branch of psychical science, it long remained, and is still, in close union with general philosophy. In the ethical precepts which tradition ascribes to the earliest sages of Greece, there is a combination of practical wisdom with the stern political consciousness which dictated the law-giving of the time. Neither here nor in the Pythagorean school, in spite of the profound philosophical discernment, is there any profound scientific reflection upon ethical and political tasks. In the fifth century B. C. the Sophists assumed the functions of public political teachers. They brushed aside as useless all speculations about the connections of natural phenomena. They devoted themselves to the service of training individuals for the needs of practical, and especially political, careers. Herewith was aroused an interest in the theoretical problems connected with rhetoric and politics. In the question whether the chief products of associated life, language, morals, state, are derived from nature or from statute, the antithesis for the first time appears which up to the present moment has divided thinkers about society. The foundation of the Platonic academy marks a turning point in the development of psychical science. In it—probably from Pythagorean influence—there was, for the first time, an attempt at scientific organization of research, of which our modern academies are in some sense copies. Even Plato, however, was too much influenced by the Socratic impulse for reform to perform the proposed task with empirical precision and patience. Not how things are, but how they should be, was the thought of his Politics. Hence, with Plato, politics, like physics, had not so much the task of comprehending the real world as of constructing an ideal one.
Aristotle was really the first to demand in all fields of research comprehensive collection of empirical facts as a preparation for general philosophical reflection. His doctrine of the state, in common with that of Plato, was accordingly his abstraction from the circumstances of his time and environment, based, at the same time, on comparatively thorough knowledge of the past. In the Platonic academy the principle of the division and correlation of labor in the sciences seems to have been carried into effect only in mathematics and astronomy. In the Aristotelian school, per contra, the plan of minute investigation was applied to all branches of natural and psychical science. The teacher of Alexander the Great not only had animals from all zones for his zoological study; he was the first scientist who could command a great collection of books, from which he and his pupils could extract deep
