[317] Scotsman, August, 1827.
Discoveries
OF THE
ANCIENTS AND MODERNS.
No. V.
Having examined what knowledge the ancients had in logic and metaphysics, we are now to consider with the same impartiality, what general or particular discoveries they made in physics, astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, and the other sciences.
Of Bodies—the Incorporeality of their Elements.—Leibnitz.
Although the distance may appear considerable between metaphysics and physics, yet an idea of their connection runs through the whole system of Leibnitz. He founds this on the principle, employed long ago by Archimedes, “that there must be a sufficient reason for every thing.” Leibnitz inquires, why bodies are extended in length, breadth, and thickness. He holds, that to discover the origin of extension, we must come at something unextended, and without parts; in short, at existences entirely simple; and he contends, that “things extended” could have had no existence, but for “things entirely simple.”
The foundations of this system were, in effect, long since laid by Pythagoras and his disciples. Traces of it are in Strato of Lampsacus, who succeeded Theophrastus in the Lyceum; in Democritus; in Plato, and those of his school; and in Sextus Empiricus, who has even furnished entire arguments to Leibnitz for establishing “the necessity of seeking for the reason of compound things, in those which never had external existence.” Moderatus Gaditanus, in relation to the numbers of Pythagoras, says, “Numbers are, so to speak, an assemblage of units, a progressive multitude which arises from unity, and finds there its ultimate cause.” And Hermias, expounding the doctrine of the Pythagoreans, says, that, according to them, “the unit, or simple essence, was the origin and principle of all things.”
Sextus Empiricus deems it unworthy of a philosopher to advance, that what falls under the notice of our senses, could be the principle of all things; for things sensible ought to be derived from what is not so. Things compounded of other things cannot possibly be themselves a principle; but what constitutes those things may. Those who affirm that atoms, similar parts, particles, or those bodies which only are to be apprehended by the intellect itself, are the primary elements of all things, in one respect say true, in another not. In so far as they acknowledge for principles, only such things as fall not under our senses, they are right; but they are wrong in apprehending those to be corporeal principles: for as those bodies which fall not under our senses, precede those which do, they themselves are preceded also by what is of another nature: and as the letters are not a discourse, though they go into the composition of it, neither are the elements of body, body: but since they must be either corporeal or incorporeal, it follows, that they are incorporeal. To this end he argues, that “bodies are composed of incorporeal principles, not to be comprehended but by the mind itself.”
To the same effect, Scipio Aquilianus, treating of the opinion of Alcmæon, the Pythagorean, concerning the principles of things, reduces it to a syllogism. “What precedes body in the order of nature, is the principle of body; number is such a thing; therefore number is the principle of body. The second of these propositions is proved thus:—Of two things, that is the first, which may be conceived independent of the other, whilst that other cannot of it. Now number may be conceived independently of body, but not body of number; wherefore number is antecedent to body in the order of nature.”
Marcilius Ficinus imputes to Plato the same notion, and gives us the substance of that philosopher’s thoughts. “The different species of all sorts of compounds may be traced out to something which in itself is uncompounded; as the boundaries of body to a point, which has no boundary; numbers to a unit, which consists not of numbers; and elements to what has nothing in it mixt or elementary.” Marcilius Ficinus expresses the system in a few words. “Compounds are reducible into things uncompounded, and these again into what is still more simple.” One sees here those compounds of Leibnitz, which, when reduced to their simple parts, terminate in the Deity for their cause and source.