Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/36

20 sophical motive ; that the distinction between the corporeal and the spiritual as such has not yet arisen. In Anaxagoras we have the beginning of the end of early Greek cosmology, but the essential characteristic of this phil- osophy still clings to his system ; for though he introduces vow to explain the beginning of the world-movement, yet the world-forming spirit (?) " operates merely as a force of Nature, and is represented in a half -sensible form as a more subtle kind of matter." 1 Consistently, therefore, with their naivete", the Greek cosmologists " presuppose the conception of movement as one that is intelligible in itself and in need of no further explanation."* While it is true that it was the spectacle of the persistent, unceasing change of phenomena which led the Greeks to seek for the abiding ground of Becoming, it is also true that their very nai've hylozoism prevented any critical enquiry into the cause or possibility of Change or Becoming itself. Such an enquiry could not, as a matter of the history of thought, be natural to the philosophers of the cosmological period, who were accustomed, not to the notion of dead things obedient to mechanical law, but of things animated with inner impulses. 3 We note then, in passing, a second characteristic of Greek cosmology, namely, the conception of movement, or change as being intelligible in itself, the naive acceptance of the causelessness of the cosmic processes. The fundamental belief which underlies early Greek cos- mology is, on no less authority than that of Aristotle,* a belief in the conservation, so to put it, of matter and energy, at bottom, however, a sentiment or intuition, and certainly with- out our conscious scientific sense of its value and meaning ; a belief explicitly announced for the first time, so Mr. Burnet submits, 5 by Parmenides: "Being cannot begin or cease to be. It was not, it will not be, but it is in a full undivided present." 6 Now, in the first place, since the old mythological 1 Zeller, Die Phil. d. Griechen, Eng. tr., vol. I, p. 200. 2 Windelband, op. cit. sup., p. 55. 8 See Burnet, op. cit. sup., Introd., p. 10. 6 Op. cit. sup., Introd., p. 9. But see Heraclitus, Frag. 20 (Bywater). 8 Uepl 0J<rewj, vs. 6r, Zeller, op. cit. sup., i, p. 585.
 * Met. A, 3, 983 b, 5-10.