ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXXI 
sk 
they were resolved.” * Such was the rude flint-flake with which, 
as their only weapon of logic, the early Nimrods of philosophy in 
Greece defended their right to philosophize in the paleolithic stage 
of natural enquiry. 
As the next step in this metaphysical logic we find a distinction 
drawn by the ancient Greek philosophers between things as they 
are in substrate and things as they appear, disappear, and reappear 
in time—between the noumenal and the phenomenal world, as we 
would say to-day in the Kantian phraseology. It was the favorite 
doctrine of the Eleatic school of philosophers that we get a true 
conception of things only when, abstracting from their individ- 
uality, their partitiveness and their changing forms, we find the 
ultimate root and unity of all being in a simple, indivisible, and 
unchangeable substrate, which is the true object of knowledge, be- 
cause it is the true basis of all reality. This concept increased in 
clearness as it passed through the minds of Xenophanes, Parmeni- 
des, and Empedocles, until, in the generalizations of the last-named 
philosopher, the ultimate substrate of things was resolved into four 
elementary substances—earth, air, fire, and water; each uncreated 
and imperishable, each equal in quantity, each composed, within 
itself, of parts that are qualitatively the same, and each forever in- 
commutable with the others; yet each and all capable of every 
variety and degree of mixture in the manifold combinations of 
things as they appear in the sensible world. 
On the other hand, it was held by Heraclitus that this funda- 
mental substrate or unity of things is a mere figment of the phil- 
osophical imagination, and that it is only as things are conceived 
to be in perpetual flux that the forms of our knowledge can be 
brought into correspondence with the forms of actual being. That 
is, to the doctrine of the unchanging substrate of things Heraclitus 
opposed the doctrine of the perpetual flux of things. 
It remained to effect a synthesis and reconciliation between these 
opposing views of the Eleatic and Heraclitic philosophies of nature, 
while at the same time saving the fundamental dogma of all natural 
philosophizing, that out of nothing nothing comes. Such a basis of 
pacification was found in the terms of the Atomic Philosophy, in the 
doctrine that the changing forms, positions, motions, and phases of 
* Diog. Laért.: Lives of the Philosophers, swb voce ‘‘ Epicurus.”’ 
