64 THE GREEK SCHOOL PHILOSOPHY. 



lie adds, that if water be in a vessel, tlie vessel being at rest, the parts 

 of the water may still move, for they are included by each other ; so 

 that while the whole does not change its place, the parts may change 

 their places in a circular order. Proceeding then to the question of a 

 void, he, as usual, examines the different senses in which the term is 

 used, and adopts, as the most proper, place without matter ; with no 

 useful result, as we shall soon see. 



Again, 3 in a question concerning mechanical action, he says, "When 

 a man moves a stone by pushing it with a st ; .ck, we say both that the 

 man moves the stone, and that the stick moves the stone, but the lat- 

 ter more properly? 



Again, we find the Greek philosophers applying themselves to ex- 

 tract their dogmas from the most general and abstract notions which 

 they could detect ; for example, from the conception of the Universe 

 as One or as Many things. They tried to determine how far we may, 

 or must, combine with these conceptions that of a whole, of parts, of 

 number, of limits, of place, of beginning or end, of full or void, of rest 

 or motion, of cause and effect, and the like. The analysis of such con- 

 ceptions with such a view, occupies, for instance, almost the whole of 

 Aristotle's Treatise on the Heavens. 



The Dialogue of Plato, which is entitled Parmenides, appears at 

 first as if its object were to show the futility of this method of philos- 

 ophizing ; for the philosopher whose name it bears, is represented as 

 arguing with an Athenian named Aristotle, 4 and, by a process of 

 metaphysical analysis, reducing him at least to this conclusion, "that 

 whether One exist, or do not exist, it follows that both it and other 

 things, with reference to themselves and to each other, all and in all 

 respects, both are and are not, both appear and appear not." Yet the 

 method of Plato, so far as concerns truths of that kind with which we 

 are here concerned, was little more efficacious than that of his rival. 

 It consists mainly, as may be seen in several of the dialogues, and 

 especially in the Timceus, in the application of notions as loose as 

 those of the Peripatetics ; for example, the conceptions of the Good, 

 the Beautiful, the Perfect ; and these are rendered still more arbitrary, 

 by assuming an acquaintance with the views of the Creator of the uni- 

 verse. The philosopher is thus led to maxims which agree with those 



3 Physic. Ausc. viii. 5. 



4 This Aristotle is not the Stagirite, who was forty-five years younger Uian Pluto, 

 out one of the " thirty tyrants," as they were called. 



