Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/449

 ETIUCS STUDIED APATIT. 427 blended together; and the Pythagoreans, who explained all nature by numbers and numerical relations, applied the same explana- tion to moral attributes, considering justice to be symbolized by a perfect equation, or by four, the first of all square numbers. 1 These eaily philosophers endeavored to find out the beginnings, the component elements, the moving cause or causes, of things in the mass ; 2 but the logical distribution into genus, species, and individuals, does not seem to have suggested itself to them, or to have been made a subject of distinct attention by any one before Sokrates. To study ethics, or human dispositions and ends, apart from the physical world, and according to a theory of their own, referring to human good and happiness as the sovereign and and considers to be the production of Hippokrates himself, in which case it would he contemporary with Sokrates. On this subject of authorship, how- ever, other critics do not agree with him : see the question examined in his vol. i, ch. xii, p. 295, seq. Hippokrates, if he be the author, begins by deprecating the attempt to connect the study of medicine with physical or astronomical hypothesis (c. 2), and he farther protests against the procedure of various medical writers nnd sophists, or philosophers, such as Empedokles, who set themselves to make out " what man was from the beginning, how he began first to exist, and in what manner he was constructed," (c. 20.) This does not belong, he says, to medicine, which ought indeed to be studied as a comprchensivo whole, but as a whole determined by and bearing reference to its own end : " You ought to study the nature of man ; what he is with reference to that which he cats and drinks, and to all his other occupations or habits, and to tfie consequences resulting from each :" o, TI tanv uv&puKos irpb? rd t(r8io- ieva KOI Tuvofieva, nai 6, TI wpdf TO. uka tTTLTijScvfiaTa, KOI 5, TI u/z/?J7(Tera{. The spirit, in which Hippokrates here approaches the study of medicine, is exceedingly analogous to that which dictated the innovation of Sokrates in respect to the study of ethics. The same character pervades the treatise, De Acre, Locis ct Aquis, a definite and predetermined field of inquiry, and the Hippokratic treatises generally. 1 Aristotel. Metaphys. i, 5, p. 985, 986. rd plv Toiovde TUV upidpuv 7rui9of diKaioavvTj, T(i de TOtovde "fiv^r) ical vovf, frepov 6e Katpdg, etc. Ethica Mag- na, i, 1. i] diKaioavvrj upidpbf lauKi<; tcrof : sec Brandis, Gcsch. der Gr. Rom. Philos. Ixxxii, Ixxxiii, p. 492. nal Tit fiETil TOVTUV, a T o i % e I a Qtjaiv elvai ti; uv earl rd dvra lvvirapxov~ TCJV, ei^A' ov K u? y evrj 3,eye< raiira ruv OVTUV. That generic division and subdivision was unknown or unpractised by these early men, is noticed by Plato (Sophist, c;. 114, p. 2(57, D.)
 * Aristotel. Metaphys. iii, 3, p. 998, A. Olov 'EuTreiloid.?/? nvp xal Mwp