anything is made, a meaning which easily passes into that of its "make-up," its general character or constitution. Those early cosmologists who were seeking for an "undying and ageless" something, would naturally express the idea by saying there was "one φύσις"[1] of all things. When that was given up, under the influence of Eleatic criticism, the old word was still used. Empedokles held there were four such primitive stuffs, each with a φύσις of its own, while the Atomists believed in an infinite number, to which they also applied the term.[2]
The term ἀρχή, which is often used in our authorities, is in this sense[3] purely Aristotelian. It is very natural that it should have been adopted by Theophrastos and later writers; for they all start from the well-known passage of the Physics in which Aristotle classifies his predecessors according as they postulated one or more ἀρχαί.[4] But Plato never uses the term in this connexion, and it does not occur once in the genuine fragments of the early philosophers, which would be very strange on the assumption that they employed it.
Now, if this is so, we can understand at once why the Ionians called science Περὶ φύσεως ἱστορίη. We shall see
- ↑ Arist. Phys. A, 6. οἱ μίαν τινὰ φύσιν εἶναι λέγοντες τὸ πᾶν, οἷον ὕδωρ ἢ πῦρ ἢ τὸ μεταξὺ τούτων, B, I. 193 a 21 οἱ μὲν πῦρ, οἱ δὲ γῆν, οἱ δ' ἀέρα φασίν, οἱ δὲ ὕδωρ, οἱ δ' ἔνια τούτων, (Parmenides), of οἱ δὲ πάντα ταῦτα (Empedokles) τὴν φύσιν εἶναι τὴν τῶν ὄντων.
- ↑ For the history of the term φύσις, see Appendix I.
- ↑ Professor W. A. Heidel has shown that the cosmologists might have used ἀρχή in a sense different from Aristotle's, that, namely, of "source," "store," or "collective mass," from which particular things are derived (Class. Phil. vii. pp. 217 sqq.). I should be quite willing to accept this account of the matter if I could find any evidence that they used the term at all. It is only in the case of Anaximander that there is even a semblance of such evidence, and I believe that to be illusory (p. 54, n. 2). Moreover, Diels has shown that the first book of Theophrastos's great work dealt with the ἀρχή in the Aristotelian sense, and it is very unlikely that the word should have been used in one sense of Anaximander and in another of the rest.
- ↑ Phys. A, 2. 184 b 15 sqq. It is of great importance to remember that Theophrastos and his followers simply adopted the classification of this chapter, which has no claim to be regarded as historical.
