Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/31

Rh world of plants and animals, and ruled within or over them. These initial and controlling forces might be conceived as utterly mechanical, as in the later Atomic theory of Democritus. Yet some of the early Greeks, observing the obvious conformity of means to ends, at least in animals, could not rest in the thought of Nature as merely mechanical and without purpose in its operation. Besides, plants and animals were alive, and life could not really be explained in terms of weight and impetus. Since Nature was the source and fashioner of living beings, Nature itself, or herself, might in the end be thought of as alive. The concrete, vital, form-and-life-giving character of Greek thinking could hardly keep from vitalizing its concept of the great source and mother of living things. Heraclitus had already said that "Nature loves to hide," or "play at hide-and-seek." When has she not been found the cleverest of players at this game?

So the early and the later Greeks touched delicately on the living vitality and possibly vague personality of Nature. If divine, Nature was pantheistically so, and never to be moulded to the sharp personality of an Homeric Zeus or Apollo or Athena.