MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IITH AND 12TH CENTURIES 81 



versions in which the history influenced early Christian thought. 

 The Stoics held that the universe, like other wholes, had two 

 principles, an active and a passive principle, or an efficient and 

 a material principle, and that the universe is ordered by reason 

 and providence/^ Plato distinguished and related the operation 

 of reason and of necessity in the formation of the universe by 

 placing reason in the composition of the world soul and neces- 

 sity in the operation of elements. The pattern of later dis- 

 cussions of elements as the material parts of a universe brought 

 into existence by the efficient or rational causality of God is 

 established in pagan and Christian accounts of the history of 

 philosophy during the early centuries of the Christian era. 

 Almost the same doctrines are given in three related accounts — 

 one by Sextus Empiricus, a physician and skeptical philosopher, 

 the other two ascribed respectively to the physician Galen and 

 to the Christian Clement the Roman — and they are adaptable 

 to the Mosaic account of creation.^" The Recognitions of the 

 pseudo-Clement were translated into Latin, with modifications, 

 by Rufinus and are well-known in various versions during the 

 early Middle Ages; the Historia Philosopha of the pseudo-Galen 

 is in accord with the treatment of elements in Galen's medical 

 works which were translated in the eleventh century. 



Sextus and the pseudo-Galen follow the Stoic division of 

 philosophy into three parts, logic, physics, and ethics; and they 

 organize their treatment of physics by distinguishing an efficient 

 and a material principle .^^ The pseudo-Clement distinguishes 

 simples from composites and argues that corporeal wholes 

 cannot be accounted for by the elements of which they are 

 composed without recourse to a simple cause, rational and 

 providential, of the invisible universe which contains the visible 



" Diogenes Laertius, VII, 134 and 138-139. 



^^ Herman Diels (Doxographi Graeci, Berlin, 1889, pp. 251-2) argues that the 

 three are so closely related that they must have been derived from a common Stoic 

 source composed between the times of Seneca and the Antonines. 



^' Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoneiai Hypotyposeis, III, 1, Adversus Mathematicos, 

 IX, 4; Galen, Historia Philosopha, 16 (Diels, pp. 608-9) . 



