370 ANTIENT METAPHYSICS. Book III. 



feparates a Surface from a Solid, Length from Breadth, and both from 

 what he calls apoiut^ which he fays is without parts. But a Point 

 has pofition, and occupies fpace ; whereas an immaterial fubftance 

 occupies no fpace : So that we muft make one abftradion more than 

 Euclid has made. And at the fame time that we conceive it fo dif- 

 ferent from body, we muft alfo conceive it to be of much greater 

 excellence, not only operating in a way quite different trom body, 

 but doing things which it is impoffible that body can do. 



That men muft have been far advanced in arts and fciences be- 

 fore they could have made fuch abftraclions, and formed an idea of 

 a fubftance fo remote from body, and of fuch fuperior excellence, 

 is evident. Even the Greeks, when they were fo far advanced not 

 only in arts and civility, but in fcience and philofophy, as to 

 have formed a fchool of philofophy, called the loiiick fchool, of 

 which Thales was the founder, had not, in that fchool, got the 

 Idea of fuch an immaterial fubftance as I have defcribed, who 

 formed and governed this univcrfe : For the firft philofophers in 

 Greece, were all materialifts, as Ariftotle informs us, till Anaxagoras 

 arofe among them, who firft employed mind and intelligence to fet 

 every thing in order, and therefore, fays Ariftotle, talked like a 

 fober man among babbling drunkards *. He v^as a fucccftbr of Tha- 

 les; but at that time the fchool was above ico years old. He, how- 

 ever, ftill retained fo much of the prejudices of the more antient phi- 

 lofophy, that after things were once arranged and difpofcd, he fup- 

 pofed that they went on by matter and mechanifm, and accounted, 

 as Plato informs us f, for all the phaenomena of nature, from va- 

 pours, aethers, and fubtile fluids. 



In this refpecl he very much rcfcmblcd fome of our modern phi- 

 lofophers, particularly Sir Ifaac Newton, who accounts in that way 



for 



* See preface to Vol. III. of this work, p. i J. 

 \ See Vol. I. of this work, p. 276. 



