Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY.385lated how it could have arisen. Tims Thales, weare told, imagined its first principle to be water;Anaximander, boundless matter; Anaximenes, air;the Pythagorean said, all is number; the Eleaticschool, all is the one unchangeable being.9 Onthe contrary Heracleitus conceived the one Beingas ever in motion, involved in perpetual change :in accordance with which he nowhere finds true .knowledge, and thinks the mass of men have nounderstanding for eternal truth.10 Empedocles ofAgrigentum sets forth the four elements, * earth V/MIA VJ-JLawater, air, and fire, as the material principles orroots of things, attaching to these two ideal principlesas moving forces, Love as the unitive, andHatred as the severing.11 Anaxagoras, over andabove mechanical causes, W to which he limited himselfin the explanation of everything in particular, recognisesa divine spirit, which as the finest of allthings is simple, unmixed, passionless reason, whichcame upon chaos, forming and ordering the worldout of it.12 Democritus of Abdera takes for hisprinciples the Full and the Empty, identifyingthese with Being and Non-being, or Something andNothing. His Full consists of indivisible atoms.13The remarkable thing about all these systems,if we may so call them, is, that while the existingpopular religion teemed over, so to say, with the9 Zeller, i. p. 141. w Ib. i. pp. 449-452.11 Ueberweg, Grundriss der Gescfdclite der Pliilosovltie, drit. Aufl. i,p. G5.12 2 Ueberweg, i. 68. 13 ib. i. 72.II.CC