24 ANTIENT METAPHYSICS. Book I. 



(lance is incorporated with the body which it moves. Now, we 

 can have no conception of one body being (o incorporated with 

 another body, as to aft upon it and move it, and yet to make but 

 one fubftance with that other body, and to occupy the fame place. 

 We underftand very well, that one body, by external impulfe upon 

 another, fhould move it ; but we never can conceive how one 

 body (hould enter into another, and from within produce its mo- 

 tion in the way that mind moves body. What, therefore, thus incor- 

 porates with body, moves it, and, according to the dodtrine of Timae- 

 us, gives it its form, and makes it a body of a particular fpecies, can- 

 not be body, but muft be a fubftance of a quite different kind, that 

 is an immaterial fubftance. Further, we cannot conceive that body 

 can move body otherwife than by impelling or drawing it. Now, 

 it is impoffible to conceive that the internal principle, which moves 

 body, can do it in either of thefe ways. 



But though, in this way, the diftindion betwixt body and mind 

 be clearly apprehended by the philofopher, yet it is not to be won- 

 dered that the vulgar, who are converfant with body only, and per- 

 ceive things only by their fenfes, fhould not form the idea of an im- 

 material fubftance. Even the firft philofophers of Greece appear 

 not to have formed that idea; and it was Pythagoras, as we are in- 

 formed by the authors of his life. Porphyry and his fcholar Jambli- 

 chus, who firft taught the Greeks to know the to ovtoj? ov, that is 

 what has a real exiftence, and is not like material things, of which 

 they faid, ovx t(rli aX7^Bt. ymTctt, that is, ivhat cannot be /aid truly to 

 exiji^ but is always becoming fometh'ing that it was not before: This is 

 the cafe of body, which is not a moment the fame thing, but is al- 

 ways changing; by which I mean not changing its place but its fub- 

 Jiance, We are, therefore, not to wonder if the firft philofophers of 

 Greece were, as Ariftotle tells us, materialifts; and that, though Py- 

 thagoras brought into Magna Graecia the dodrine of immaterial 



fubftances, 



