130 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



the natural laws involved in the attempt to navigate the air, of which 

 the inventor must take advantage in the deft adjustment of his me- 

 chanical contrivance to the attainment of his cherished object. Many 

 an experimenter even will be found to be lacking in a knowledge of 

 these principles which absorb the attention of the theorist. The natural 

 philosopher, however, will devote himself to the determination and for- 

 mulation of the laws involved ; from his point of view the inventor is 

 of no consequence, and in his calculations the materials used in the 

 contrivance will figure as a plus or minus quantity. 



It remains for us to speak briefly of Professor Burnet's dictum 189 

 concerning the scope of the early Greek researches Ilepl (pvcrew;. Since 

 he himself holds that the title is not original and finds it first men- 

 tioned in Euripides, 190 it is fair to judge it by the conceptions of the 

 fifth century. But we may reasonably go farther and assert that the 

 usage of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. merely reflects the ideals of 

 Greek science as they were gradually developed from the beginning. 

 In the Metaphysics 191 Aristotle says : ' It is owing to their wonder 

 that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize ; they won- 

 dered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little 

 and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e. g. about the phe- 

 nomena of the moon and those of the sun, and about the stars and 

 about the genesis of the universe." It is clear that the "obvious diffi- 

 culties," which are said to have originally excited the wonder of men, 

 belong rather to the stages of preparation for technical philosophy, and 

 that philosophy proper begins for Aristotle with the investigation of the 

 phenomena of the heavens and of the origin of the universe. Accord- 

 ing to Plato 192 also it was the observed regularities of heavenly phe- 

 nomena that begot the research into the nature of the universe. They 

 were the 6&a par excellence, 193 and wonder born of the observation of 

 them was supposed to have produced the belief in the existence of 

 gods. 194 It'can hardly be doubted that in the early stages of philoso- 

 phy the researches of investigators might have been almost indifferently 

 characterized as irf.pl fxeruoptov or -n-epl c^vo-ews la-jopirj. Speaking of the 

 distinction and elevation in oratory conferred upon Pericles by his fa- 

 miliarity with the lofty speculations of Anaxagoras, Plato says 196 iraa-ai 



ocrcu pLeydXat. tuiv T€^vwv 7rpo<xSeovTui a.8o\ea)(t.as kcli /ncTCwpoAoyias (^vcrtcos 



189 Quoted above, p. 80. 



190 See above, n. 7. 



191 Met. 982 b 12-17, transl. Ross. 



192 Tim. 47 A. Cp. Epin. 990 A and Eepub. 530 A-531 A. 



193 Cp. n. 182 above. 



194 By Democritus, cp. Diels, Vorsokr. 365, 22 foil, 

 i" Phaedr. 269 E. 



