In the theories of these Ionic philosophers, the physical ideas of generation, transmutation, local motion, are found in the foreground: generation in the Kosmos to replace generation by the God. Pythagoras and Empedokles blend with their speculations a good deal both of ethics and theology, which we shall find yet more preponderant when we come to the cosmical theories of Plato. He brings us back to the mythical Prometheus, armed with the geometrical and arithmetical combinations of the Pythagoreans: he assumes a chaotic substratum, modified by the intentional and deliberate construction of the Demiurgus and his divine sons, who are described as building up and mixing like a human artisan or chemist. In the theory of Aristotle we find Nature half personified, and assumed to be perpetually at work under the influence of an appetite for good or regularity, which determines her to aim instinctively and without deliberation (like bees or spiders) at constant ends, though these regular tendencies are always accompanied, and often thwarted, by accessories, irregular, undefinable, unpredictable. Both Plato and Aristotle, in their dialectical age, carried abstraction farther than it had been carried by the Ionic philosophers.[3] Aristotle imputes to the Ionic philosophers that they neglected three out of his four causes (the efficient, formal, and final), and that they attended only to the material. This was a height of abstraction first attained by Plato and himself; in a way sometimes useful, sometimes misleading. The earlier philosophers had not learnt to divide substance from its powers or properties; nor to conceive substance without power as one thing, and power without substance as another. Their primordial substance, with its powers and properties, implicated together as one concrete and without any abstraction, was at once an efficient, a formal, and a material cause: a final cause they did not suppose themselves to want, inasmuch as they always conceived a fixed terminus towards which the agency was directed, though they did not conceive such fixed tendency under the symbol of an appetite and its end. Water, Air, Fire, were in their view not simply inert and receptive patients, impotent until they were stimulated by the active force residing in the ever revolving celestial spheres — but positive agents themselves, productive of important effects. So also a geologist of the present day, when he speculates upon the early condition[4] of the Kosmos, reasons upon gaseous, fluid, solid, varieties of matter, as manifesting those same laws and properties which experience attests, but manifesting them under different combinations and circumstances. The defect of the Ionic philosophers, unavoidable at the time, was, that possessing nothing beyond a superficial experience, they either ascribed to these physical agents powers and properties not real, or exaggerated prodigiously such as were real; so that the primordial substance chosen, though bearing a familiar name, became little better than a fiction. The Pythagoreans did the same in regard to numbers, ascribing to them properties altogether fanciful and imaginary.
[3] Plato (Sophistes, 242-243) observes respecting these early theorists — what Aristotle says about Hesiod and the Theogonies — that they followed out their own subjective veins of thought without asking whether we, the many listeners, were able to follow them or were left behind in the dark. I dare say that this was true (as indeed it is true respecting most writers on speculative matters), but I am sure that all of them would have made the same complaint if they had heard Plato read his Timæus.
[4] Bacon has some striking remarks on the contrast in this respect between the earlier philosophers and Aristotle.
Bacon, after commending the early Greek philosophers for having adopted as their first principle some known and positive matter, not a mere abstraction, goes on to say:—
“Videntur antiqui illi, in inquisitione principiorum, rationem non admodum acutam instituisse, sed hoc solummodo egisse, ut ex corporibus apparentibus et manifestis, quod maximé excelleret, quærerent, et quod tale videbatur, principium rerum ponerent: tanquam per excellentiam, non veré aut realiter.… Quod si principium illud suum teneant non per excellentiam, sed simpliciter, videntur utique in duriorem tropum incidere: cum res plané deducatur ad æquivocum, neque de igne naturali, aut naturali ære, aut aquâ, quod asserunt, prædicari videatur, sed de igne aliquo phantastico et notionali (et sic de cæteris) qui nomen ignis retineat, definitionem abneget.… Principium statuerunt secundum sensum, aliquod ens verum: modum autem ejus dispensandi (liberius se gerentes) phantasticum.” (Bacon, Parmenidis, Telesii, et Democriti Philosophia, vol. xi., p. 115-116, ed. Montagu.)
“Materia illa spoliata et passiva prorsus humanæ mentis commentum quoddam videtur. Materia prima ponenda est conjuncta cum principio motûs primo, ut invenitur. Hæc tria (materia, forma, motus) nullo modo discerpenda, sed tantummodo distinguenda, atque asserenda materia (qualiscunque ea sit), ita ornata et apparata et formata, ut omnis virtus, essentia, actio, atque motus naturalis, ejus consecutio et emanatio esse possit. Omnes ferè antiqui, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Anaximenes. Heraclitus, Democritus, de materiâ primâ in cæteris dissidentes, in hoc convenerunt, quod materiam activam formâ nonnullâ, et formam suam dispensantem, atque intra se principium motûs habentem, posuerunt.” (Bacon, De Parmenidis, Telesii, et Campanellæ, Philosoph., p. 653-654, t. v.)
Compare Aphorism I. 50 of the Novum Organum.
Bacon, Parmenidis, Telesii, et Democriti Philosophia, vol. xi. ed. Montagu, p. 106-107. “Sed omnes ferè antiqui (anterior to Plato), Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Democritus, de materiâ primâ in cæteris dissidentes, in hoc convenerunt, quod materiam activam, formâ nonnullâ, et formam suam dispensantem, atque intra se principium motûs habentem, posuerunt. Neque aliter cuiquam opinari licebit, qui non experientiæ plané desertor esse velit. Itaque hi omnes mentem rebus submiserunt. At Plato mundum cogitationibus, Aristoteles verò etiam cogitationes verbis, adjudicarunt.” … “Omnino materia prima ponenda est conjuncta cum formâ primâ, ac etiam cum principio motûs primo, ut invenitur. Nam et motûs quoque abstractio infinitas phantasias peperit, de animis, vitis, et similibus — ac si iis per materiam et formam non satisfieret, sed ex suis propriis penderent illa principiis. Sed hæc tria nullo modo discerpenda, sed tantummodo distinguenda: atque asserenda materia (qualiscunque ea sit) ita ornata et apparata et formata, ut omnis virtus, essentia, actio, atque motus naturalis, ejus consecutio et emanatio esse possit. Neque propterea metuendum, ne res torpeant, aut varietas ista, quam cernimus, explicari non possit — ut postea docebimus.”
Playfair also observes, in his Dissertation on the Progress of Natural Philosophy, prefixed to the Encyclopædia Britannica, p. 31:—
“Science was not merely stationary, but often retrograde; and the reasonings of Democritus and Anaxagoras were in many respects more solid than those of Plato and Aristotle.”