XXX PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
The fundamental principle of the ancient physical philosophy— 
its point of departure and its ever re-entering point of return—is 
found in the famous well-worn maxim of metaphysics, that out of 
nothing nothing comes, and that what 7s can never be annihilated. 
It was in the name of this maxim and under the shadow of its 
authority that the Greek physical philosophers sought to shelter 
their whole right of free enquiry from the charge of impiety, and 
if to us the dictum seems the merest truism, it was not so regarded 
at the dawn of natural philosophy. Sometimes used as a logical 
club with which to brain a stolid and incurious indifferentism, and 
sometimes waved as a red flag in the face of polytheistic supersti- 
tion, it meets us perpetually in all the oldest records of ancient 
philosophical speculation—in the formal elaborations of Aristotle,* 
in the lucubrations of Boéthius,} and in the verse of poets as remote 
from each other in style and creed as Lucretius, the lively Epicu- 
rean,{ and Persius, the sternest of Stoic moralists.§ This maxim 
stirred the philosophical mind of antiquity to its lowest depth, 
because it was then the type and symbol of a whole method of phi- 
losophizing—a method regarded by many as not a little presump- 
tuous, much as the Copernican theory of the Universe was regarded 
in the sixteenth century, or much as the Formula of Evolution is 
regarded to-day outside of scientific circles. 
It was because the maxim seemed to so many the challenge of a 
vain wisdom and of a false philosophy that the early champions of 
physical philosophy sometimes felt themselves called to vindicate 
the truth of this truism by an appeal to formal argument. The 
necessity for such an appeal measures the scientific ineptitude of 
the average mind at that early age. ‘“ If what emerges into sensible 
perception,” argues Epicurus with the utmost gravity, “can be con- 
ceived as coming from nothing, then everything might come of any- 
thing, and that, too, without any need of germs; and if what dis- 
appears from sensible perception was really destroyed into nothing, 
then all things might perish without anything being left into which 
* Aristotle: De Generatione et Corruptione, I, iii, 5, (Didot’s ed., vol. 2, 
p: 437.) 
+ Boéthius: De Consolatione Philosophie, Lib. V, Prosa 1. 
} Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, I, 161-227. 
2 Persius: Sativa, iii, 84. 
