XXXVI PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
carry with it any clear conception of personal identity, and hence 
Lucretius justly argued that the doctrine of a future life, as held 
by many in his day, was stripped of all significance if the chain of 
personal consciousness is broken at death.* 
And to this fundamental antithesis of ideas lying at the bottom 
of these two forms of the Greek Atomic Philosophy another anti- 
thesis must be added in the Stratonical Hylozoism, which, assuming 
in matter an atomic structure partly material and partly vital, pro- 
ceeded to account for the genesis of animated bodies on the super- 
added assumption of a plastic energy working in nature to the pro- 
duction of every living thing. In a word, Strato’s matter, instinct 
with life, and waiting only for the first chance to be stuck together 
in the composition of plants and animals, seems to have been the 
metaphysical anticipation of our modern protoplasm.f ? 
It was in opposition alike to the physics of Anaxagoras, Democ- 
ritus, and Strato, that Plato reared his splendid fabric of idealism, 
while Aristotle, for his part, rejected the philosophy of atoms alto- 
gether, and installed in its place for centuries the doctrine of Form 
and Quality, and Substance and Entelechy, whatever that may mean. 
“Tf,” he says, “there be no other substance beyond the substances 
existing in nature, then Physics is the first science; but if there be 
a certain substance which is immoyable, then this is before body, 
and Philosophy is the first science.” | That single sentence re- 
capitulates the whole verbal philosophy of the Middle Ages. Plato 
was so hostile to the hypothesis of Democritus that he never once 
names that philosopher in all his writings, though it is the Abderite 
physicist to whom he intends a disparaging allusion when in the 
Timeus he impales on the shafts of his irony “a certain philosopher 
of an indefinite and ignorant mind.” Aristotle names him often 
enough, either separately or in conjunction with Leucippus, and 
treats the Atomic Philosophy with respect as an ‘invention framed 
to explain the transformation and birth of things—explaining birth 
and dissolution by the decomposition and recomposition of atoms, 
* Lucret.: De Rerum Natura, Lib. iii, 851. 
+ Cicero aptly defines the antithesis of ideas between Democritus and 
Strato. Sce Academ. Prior., Lib. II, xxxviii, 121. Also, De Nat. Deor., 
Lib. I, xiii, 35. 
{ Arist.: Bet, Lipe'V 1; 0% ef. Dib.) X, ‘vil, 9: 
