96 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



but every careful student will be conscious of a fundamental difference. 

 Socrates, by introducing the logical method of definition, based upon 

 induction and employed in the interest of deduction, discovered a 

 new order of existence, which was subject not to mechanical, but to 

 teleological laws. Teleological facts were known from the beginning of 

 time, and, as we have seen, Nature herself became, in the latter part 

 of the pre-Socratic period, charged with personality in a measure 

 which made a new interpretation of her operations a foregone conclu-. 

 sion; but teleology, considered as a method of explanation, was a dis- 

 covery of the Socratics. 



The significance of this fact can hardly be measured ; certainly it 

 has not been appreciated hitherto by historians of philosophy. Among 

 the pre-Socratics conceptions have been found which were certainly 

 alien to their range of thought ; and the fundamental significance of 

 the revolution wrought by Socrates still awaits the appreciation which 

 is its due. Henceforth the world is definitively divided into two spheres, 

 one subject to mechanical, the other subject to final, causes. The 

 latter alone is really " intelligible " ; of the other we may say on, not 

 Sion. The later Greek systems owe their basic physical concepts ulti- 

 mately, and almost exclusively, to the pre-Socratics: where these con- 

 ceptions were in any way modified, the reasons for the change are 

 commonly to be sought in obviously logical or metaphysical considera- 

 tions traceable to the Socratics. Hence the two discrete streams of 

 philosophical thought, though externally united, flow in the main 

 peacefully side by side, clear and transparent everywhere save at the 

 line of contact, where they become a trifle turbid. Plato and Aristotle 

 constantly betray their dependence upon the predecessors of Socrates 

 for their physical concepts ; and where the post- Aristotelians departed 

 from the specifically Platonic-Aristotelian doctrines, they harked back 

 frankly to one or another of the pre-Socratics for their physical theories. 



In the following synopsis the attempt has been made to classify the 

 uses of the word <pu'o-is in such sort as to suggest their relations one to 

 another and to the root-meaning, which is assumed to be "growth." 

 The scheme makes no claim to finality or completeness, being intended 

 primarily as a means of displaying in a more or less logical wder the 

 chief connotations of the term. The inner history of the semasiology 

 may be left to others whose interests incline them to such studies. 69 



69 J r egret to say that I have not been able to obtain Der Beyriff der Physis in der 

 griechischen Philosophic, I Theil, von E. Hardy, Berlin, 1884. I know it only at second 

 hand, chiefly through the reviews of Natorp (in Philosophische Monntshefte, 21 (1885), 

 pp. 572-593) and of Lortzing (in Bursian's Jahresbericht, 96 (1899), pp. 223-225). 

 There is a brief study of <pvtns in Ch. Huit, La Philosopkie de la Nature chez les 



