Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/30

Rh of living things: pondering upon the first inchoate material of them, and the moving influences of warmth and moisture; then considering the reasons and manner of their growth and sustenance, noting the features of their structure. In the Homeric Epics, the fortunes and fatalities of men and beasts were frequently determined by the arbitrary will and action of the gods. Such a pantheon could have no place in the minds of men searching for a plastic source and for operative causes which should be constant and regular, dependable and even predictable, in their action. With these men "the conception of Nature replaced that of the gods as a basis of explanation, was conceived as the source of the manifold activities of the world."3

These early philosophers, Pre-Socratics, as they are called, had not analyzed causation or distinguished one manner of cause from another. That was left for Aristotle. They had no distinct conception of final causes or the purposeful adaptation of means to ends. "Lucky for them!" many of us moderns might remark. Nevertheless, to them. Nature, the source of things if one will, seemed to contain the moving principles which issued in the