46 Baron Cuvier's Lectures on the Natural Sciences. 



tensive. It became extinct, but was taken up again by Plato, 

 who adopted a part of it. 



Ekatic School. — Besides the Pythagorean school, another was 

 established, that of Eea, founded by Xenophon, who, about 500 

 years before Christ, came from Colophon, his native country, 

 and settled in Sicily. This philosopher is the first who com- 

 bated the anthropcMnorphism of the Greeks. The divinity 

 was, according to him, ^mity^ every thing ; but his pantheism, in- 

 stead of being of a material sort, like that of the lonians, was 

 purely spiritual. Parmenides, his scholar, went much farther, 

 and maintained that the whole of nature was a sensible illusion. 



This is precisely the system which, in the present day, we 

 find among the Indians. 



Parmenides and Zeno came to Ath^is about 460 years before . 

 Christ. Anaxagoras came thither about the same time. So- 

 crates was then ten years old, and thus had the opportunity of 

 receiving instructions from all the three. 



Atomistic School — Leucippus, founder of the atomistic sect, 

 was cotemporary with the two eleatics we have just mentioned, 

 and a declared antagonist of their doctrine. Disgusted with 

 idealism, by the abuse he saw made of it, he ran precipitately 

 into the opposite excess, and was a complete materialist. He 

 rejected alike the intelligent unity of the eleatic school, the whole 

 neither material nor immaterial, and the numbers with the har- 

 rtionic proportions of the school of Pythagoras. He allowed no- 

 thing beyond a vacuum and atoms; these very atoms he deprived 

 of the properties which other philosophers admitted they posses- 

 sed, and assigned to them only figure aixl motion. The different 

 properties of bodies, their colour, consistence, heat, and cold, 

 depended at once on the figure aixl arrangement of these mole- 

 cules ; the external alternation of the destruction and reproduc- 

 tion of beings resulted from their motion ; the soul itself was 

 only an aggregatio.i of atoms in a particular mode of combina- 

 tion. 



Alcmeon had studied the anatomy of many animals, but De- 

 mocritus of Abdera was certainly the first who practised com- 

 parative anatomy. He observed differences of organization in 



3 



