484 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



" Cause " conveys the meaning of " effective operation upon," originally derived 

 from the sense of our own efforts and actions on our surroundings. It is difficult 

 to decide whether, in attenuating the material body to atomic dimensions, a little 

 bit of psychism did or did not remain up to the days of Dalton with the little bit 

 of matter; it is not so difficult to perceive that animistic conceptions were included 

 in the first Greek speculations about matter, as about all else. 



The backward glance of history along the track of thought notes psychisms 

 disappearing from the concept of matter. The familiar " abhorrence of a vacuum " 

 was a psychism — an endeavour at explanation, through a concept obviously 

 couched in psychical terms, that evoked the caustic comment from Torricelli, 

 when he supplied the mechanical explanation of the mercury column in the 

 barometer, that nature evidently only abhorred a vacuum to the height of twenty- 

 nine inches. Descartes, Prof. Ward remarks, finally cleared matter of animism. 

 The psychisms he expelled were perhaps a considerable residuum, but only a 

 residuum, of the pervasive animism organised into the first Greek conceptions of 

 the material world. 



When Prof. Burnett, in his Greek Philosophers, says that " the Milesians had 

 reached the conception of what we call ' matter,' " he substitutes the final product, 

 a conception of matter in terms of non-psychical particles controlled solely by 

 mechanical laws, for the animistic original in the minds of the first Greek philoso- 

 phers. The saying of Thales, fortunately preserved in his sparse tradition, that 

 " All things are full of gods " does not sound like the voice of the modern 

 physicist, who would hardly regard his atoms as containing gods, or, to use 

 a more satisfactory equivalent for the "gods" of Thales, as animated. Prof. 

 Burnett explains this outburst of mystic enthusiasm as " polite atheism." If all 

 things are full of gods they are all on the same level : it is as though there were no 

 gods at all — Thales is a materialist through and through. Burnett definitely com- 

 pares Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander to modern materialists who derive 

 everything from lifeless matter mechanically conceived. Thales did place all 

 things on the same level, but it was a psychical level : all things were alive. The 

 primary " water " of Thales, or the " air " of Anaximenes, or the " infinite " of 

 Anaximander are, however;, inadequately rendered either by comparing them to 

 our modern " matter ; ' or to our modern " protoplasm." To think of protoplasm 

 as animated matter, a clear, definite distinction must first be drawn between the 

 purely material and the vital or the psychical. Science has prospered by abstract- 

 ing the material from the vital and the mental to be studied as a separate domain 

 in mechanical terms ; but this abstraction was not struck out at a blow. The 

 thought of Thales was more homogeneous and undifferentiated than our con- 

 ceptual system, with its sharp analytical distinction between the psychical and the 

 material : Thales simply thought of all things in one great round of transformation 

 from the primal " mother-stuff" and back to it again. 



It is generally admitted that our sharp discrimination between mind and body, 

 between the physical and the psychical, dates from Descartes. Aristotle did not 

 sever them so completely, even in thought, though he realised their distinction 

 and was familiar with the conception of the soul's incorporeality. Anthropology 

 informs us, as Prof. Ward remarks, that for primitive thought the duality of mind 

 and living body is obscured by their close connection. Philosophy starts with 

 the mental outfit provided by the past, and it would be indeed startling to discover 

 that Thales and his immediate successors had leaped straight from animistic con- 

 cepts, in which the physical and the psychical are organised together, into such 

 purely physical conceptions as the production of "earth" by the condensation of 



