Hippokratês, if he be the author, begins by deprecating the attempt to connect the study of medicine with physical or astronomical hypothesis (c. 2), and he farther protests against the procedure of various medical writers and sophists, or philosophers, such as Empedoklês, who set themselves to make out “what man was from the beginning, how he began first to exist, and in what manner he was constructed,” (c. 20). This does not belong, he says, to medicine, which ought indeed to be studied as a comprehensive whole, but as a whole determined by and bearing reference to its own end: “You ought to study the nature of man; what he is with reference to that which he eats and drinks, and to all his other occupations or habits, and to the consequences resulting from each:” ὅ,τί ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος πρὸς τὰ ἐσθιόμενα καὶ πινόμενα, καὶ ὅ,τι πρὸς τὰ ἄλλα ἐπιτηδεύματα, καὶ ὅ,τι ἀφ᾽ ἑκάστου ἑκάστῳ συμβήσεται.
The spirit, in which Hippokratês here approaches the study of medicine, is exceedingly analogous to that which dictated the innovation of Sokratês in respect to the study of ethics. The same character pervades the treatise, De Aëre, Locis et Aquis, a definite and predetermined field of inquiry, and the Hippokratic treatises generally.
[690] Aristotel. Metaphys. i, 5, p. 985, 986. τὸ μὲν τοιόνδε τῶν ἀριθμῶν πάθος δικαιοσύνη, τὸ δὲ τοιόνδε ψυχή καὶ νοῦς, ἕτερον δὲ καιρὸς, etc. Ethica Magna, i. 1. ἡ δικαιοσύνη ἀριθμὸς ἰσάκις ἴσος: see Brandis, Gesch. der Gr. Röm. Philos. lxxxii, lxxxiii, p. 492.
[691] Aristotel. Metaphys. iii, 3, p. 998, A. Οἷον Ἐμπεδοκλῆς πῦρ καὶ ὕδωρ καὶ τὰ μετὰ τούτων, στοιχεῖά φησιν εἶναι ἐξ ὧν ἐστὶ τὰ ὄντα ἐνυπαρχόντων, ἀλλ᾽ οὐχ ὡς γένη λέγει ταῦτα τῶν ὄντων. That generic division and subdivision was unknown or unpractised by these early men, is noticed by Plato (Sophist. c. 114, p. 267, D).
Aristotle thinks that the Pythagoreans had some faint and obscure notion of the logical genus, περὶ τοῦ τί ἐστιν ἤρξαντο μὲν λέγειν καὶ ὁρίζεσθαι, λίαν δὲ ἁπλῶς ἐπραγματεύθησαν (Metaphys. i, 5, 29, p. 986, B). But we see by comparing two other passages in that treatise (xiii, 4, 6, p. 1078, b, with i, 5, 2, p. 985, b) that the Pythagorean definitions of καιρὸς, τὸ δίκαιον, etc., were nothing more than certain numerical fancies; so that these words cannot fairly be said to have designated, in their view, logical genera. Nor can the ten Pythagorean συστοιχίαι, or parallel series of contraries, be called by that name; arranged in order to gratify a fancy about the perfection of the number ten, which fancy afterwards seems to have passed to Aristotle himself, when drawing up his ten predicaments.
See a valuable Excursus upon the Aristotelian expressions τί ἐστι—τί ἦν εἶναι, etc., appended to Schwegler’s edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysica, vol. ii, p. 369, p. 378.
About the few and imperfect definitions which Aristotle seems also to ascribe to Demokritus, see Trendeleuburg, Comment. ad Aristot. De Animâ, p. 212.
[692] Aristotle remarks about the Pythagoreans, that they referred the virtues to number and numerical relations, not giving to them a theory of their own: τὰς γὰρ ἀρετὰς εἰς τοὺς ἀριθμοὺς ἀνάγων οὐκ οἰκείαν τῶν ἀρετῶν τὴν θεωρίαν ἐποιεῖτο (Ethic. Magn. i, 1).
[693] Plato, Phædon, c. 102, seq., pp. 96, 97.
[694] As one specimen among many, see Plato, Theætet. c. 11, p. 146, D. It is maintained by Brandis, and in part by C. Heyder (see Heyder, Kritische Darstellung und Vergleichung der Aristotelischen und Hegelschen Dialektik, part i, pp. 85, 129), that the logical process, called division, is not to be considered as having been employed by Sokratês along with definition, but begins with Plato: in proof of which they remark that, in the two Platonic dialogues called Sophistês and Politicus, wherein this process is most abundantly employed, Sokratês is not the conductor of the conversation.