HEIDEL. — Uepl fyvvtus. 121 



there to begin with. "In the beginning," says the materialist, "was 

 matter." " No," replies the theist, " in the beginning God created 

 matter ; " and thus a preface is placed before the beginning. The tele- 

 ologist and the pragmatic explain all with reference to the end, which 

 justifies the means. All alike endeavor to define the fact in the hope 

 of explaining it ; but it remained for a Socratic to detect the teleologi- 

 cal import of logical definition and hence practically to identify it with 

 the final cause. We have referred to the principal classes of philoso- 

 phers with the exception of the positivist. If the materialist defines 

 things with reference, so to speak, to the past, and the teleologist, with 

 reference to the future, the positivist asks neither whence nor whither, 

 but how. Definition for him becomes description, and description in 

 universal, timeless terms. Such at least is the logic of his position. 

 The reason why Aristotle did not find it possible to reconcile his ulti- 

 mately two-fold causation in his ' formal ' cause is that historically he 

 was the heir of the pre-Socratic and the Socratic methods, of which 

 the former deified the material, the latter the final, cause. 162 The 

 degree of advancement in the formulation of the positivist attitude 

 was not such as to compel a recognition in logic and metaphysics, 

 although it would not be unfair to say that there was much of the pos- 

 itivist spirit in the scientific thought of the fifth century. Apparently 

 it was the concreteness of Greek thinking, more than anything else, 

 that obscured the significance of the scientific impulse as such. Every 

 process, as we have seen, no matter how abstract, assumed in the 

 thought of the Greeks the form of a series in time, or of a history with 

 a proper beginning. How much of this was conscious device, how 

 much instinctive procedure, we shall never know. Even the ideal con- 

 struction of the world in Plato's Timaeus was, however, taken as an 

 intended vera Mstoria by the literal-minded Aristotle. 



Accordingly we are not surprised to find that Aristotle sets down the 

 pre-Socratics as mentioning only the material causes of things. This 

 means, however, as we may now see, that they did not bring forward 

 efficient causes — that is, chiefly, God — nor formal causes — that is, 

 definitions or descriptions — nor final causes, as sufficient principles of 

 explanation. It does not mean that they were not interested in the 

 processes of nature as such or in their precise methods and laws. 

 This no one would deny ; but it is a point of prime importance, whose 

 significance is frequently overlooked. What Hippocrates says of the 

 monists is true of them all. " They agree in point of view, but not in 

 statement." Why the difference in language 1 Because one kind of 



162 The logical aspect of this situation I sought to set forth in my essay on The 

 Hecessary and the Contingent in tJie Aristotelian System. 



