ARISTOTLE AND THE EARLIER PERIPATETICS vol.I by Eduard Zeller, B.F.C.Costelloe 1897

METAPHYSICS 295
which proceeds by deducing its essential attributes would
not trouble Aristotle, 1
since the same thing would be true
of the fundamental conceptions of any science whatever.
To the question whether the First Philosophy
would also deal with the general principles of scientific
procedure, Aristotle answers in the affirmative, inasmuch
as these principles themselves relate to Being in
general rather than to any particular class of Being.
In fact, he proceeds immediately to a detailed investigation
of the law of Contradiction and the Excluded
Middle, which by reason of its relation
to Methodology
has been already discussed at p. 251. By Aristotle,
however, these inquiries are in the present connection
treated ontologically, as giving knowledge of the actual,
for which reason he includes them in his First Philosophy.
2
3. Tlie Fundamental Questions of Metaphysics and
their Treatment by eourlier Philosophers.
The forerunners of Aristotle had left him a series of
problems in the way of metaphysical inquiry for which
he found it necessary to obtain a new solution. The
most important of these, to the answering of which the
fundamental ideas of his system are immediately
directed, were the following :
1. First of all, how are we to think of the actual ?
Is there nothing but corporeal existence, as the pre-
Socratic natural philosophy assumed ? Or is there,
beside and above that, something uncorporeal, as
It is nowhere expressly answered in the Metaphysics.
'
'
h. iv. 3.
296 ARISTOTLE
Anaxagoras, the Megarians and Plato said ? Are the
ultimate grounds of things of the nature of matter
only, or is form to be distinguished from matter as a
peculiar and a higher principle ?
2. Connected with this is the question of the relation
of the Individual to the Universal. What is that
which is essential and in the last resort actual ? Is it
the individual things or the universal ideas, or is there
perhaps in truth only one universal Being ? The first
was the common view which had lately come out, bluntly
enough, in the Nominalism of Antisthenes ;
the second
was the theory of Plato ; the third that of Parmenides
and of Eucleides after him.
3. Seeing that unity of being and manifold existence
are both given in experience, how can we hold these
two together in thought ? Can the One be at the same
time a manifold, including in itself a number of parts
and qualities ? Can the Many come together in an
actual unity ? These questions also were variously
answered.
Parmenides and Zeno had denied that the
two ideas could be reconciled, and had therefore
declared the manifold to be a delusion, while the
Sophists used the assumption of the manifold for theii
theory of argument, as Antisthenes for his theory oi
knowledge. 1 The Physicists of the Atomic and
Bmpedoclean schools limited the relation between the
Many and the One to that of an external and mechanical
juxtaposition of parts. The Pythagoreans found in
number* and Plato, with keener philosophic insight, in
his Ideas, a means of combining a multitude of different
1
See Zbllbb, Ph. d. Or. pt. 1, pp. 985 etc.
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