3. Cosmos. The term cosmos (κόσμος) is Homeric,
and classicists are studying it increasingly (even the
numerous bibliographical notices in Miss Jula
Kerschensteiner are not exhaustive). The basic meaning
in Homer is “order,” and throughout the length of
antiquity this original meaning remained active amidst
many figurative ones.
This “order” began to be “universe,” by way of
“world-order,” in the following saying of Heraclitus
of Ephesus (Diels, frag. 30):
This cosmos [κόσμον τόνδξ] did none of the gods or men
make, but it always was and is and shall be; an everliving
fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures
(Kirk
and Raven, p. 199).
The association of this cosmos with “everliving fire,”
whatever that be, need not disqualify it from repre-
senting cosmological space. In Albert Einstein's Gen-
eral Theory of Relativity cosmological space is most
intimately associated with gravitation (Whittaker, Vol.
2, Ch. 5). Yet the nuclear structure of gravitation is
so little known that a Heraclitus of today could not
be silenced, or even gainsaid, if he chose to declare
that gravitation is “everliving” and that “gravitational
waves” are alternately kindling and going out.
In this saying of Heraclitus, order is a principle of
the universe as a whole, but long afterwards, in the
logico-metaphysical outlook of Leibniz it is a schema
of the space around us. We quote.
Space is the order of coexisting things, or the order of exist-
ence for all things which are contemporaneous. In each of
both orders—in that of time as that of space—we can speak
of a propinquity or remoteness of the elements according
to whether fewer or more connecting links are required to
discern their mutual order
(Leibniz Selections, p. 202).
... When it happens that one of these coexistent things
changes its relation to a multitude of others, which do not
change their relation among themselves; and that another
thing, newly come, acquire the same relation to the others,
as the former had; we then say it is come into the place
of the former; and this change we call a motion in that
body, wherein is the immediate cause of the change
(ibid.,
251-52).
In these reflections of Leibniz there is even a conflu-
ence of two properties of space, of ordering and of
relation; and the nearest to all this from classical
antiquity is in the following passage from Aristotle:
This is made plain also by the objects studied in mathe-
matics. Though they have no real place they nevertheless,
in respect of their position relative to us, have a right and
left, as ascribed to them only in consequence of their posi-
tion relative to us, not having by nature these various
characteristics
(Physica 208b 23-24; Oxford translation).
Among forerunners of Leibniz' ideas after Aristotle,
if any, one might perhaps name the late Hellenistic
(or early medieval) Aristotle commentator Joannes
Philoponus (ca. 575). “For Philoponus conceives space
as pure dimensionality, lacking all qualitative differen-
tiation” (M. Jammer, p. 55), and to him “space and
void are identical,” with “void being a logical neces-
sity” (ibid., p. 54); and this creates a foretaste of
Leibniz, perhaps.
