THE GREEK ATTITUDE 



even from him, as his ideas show that the basis of 

 science was laid by deductive reasoning and intuition. 



In this brief review of early Greek scientific thought 

 I have endeavoured to show that the two principal 

 modes of viewing the objective world had been dis- 

 played with a certain amount of definiteness. On the 

 one hand, the doctrine of monism had been advanced, 

 according to which there exists but one substance and 

 but one active principle in the world; this idea took 

 the form either that inorganic matter possessed life, 

 or at least sensation — the doctrine of hylozoism; or 

 that organic matter was but a more complicated 

 structure of material substance — the atomistic doc- 

 trine. On the other hand, we find the doctrine of dual- 

 ism which distinguished two substances, the organic 

 and inorganic, and two principles, the physical and 

 the vital. In its most complete development, dualism 

 postulated a ruling and guiding principle, the nous 

 which planned the universe. These early thinkers had 

 also discovered deductively the fundamental laws of 

 science, those laws without which the human mind 

 can find no certainty or order in the complexity of 

 phenomena. 



At this point the stage was set for the two master 

 minds of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle, who by their 

 genius absorbed all previous thought and erected up- 

 on it such an imposing system that philosophy, to the 

 present day, is mostly a commentary for or against 

 one or the other. While their differences are well 



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