Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/25

Rh 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" 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.

The term ἀρχή, which is often used in our authorities, is in this sense 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. 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