138 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 
the western races of Greece. A diminished interest in external 
nature, consequent upon a diminution in her gifts, necessarily resulted 
in a new phase of philosophy, in which the mind began first to turn 
from nature in upon herself. 
The Eleatics, advancing a step further, broke away entirely from 
sensuous experience, and saw in the many forms of matter only a 
delusion of the senses. What is zs and must always be. ‘The really 
existing is eternal and unchanging. Multiplicity and change are 
but appearances and mere opinion. 
Heraclitus, following these, goes to the other extreme, and 
affirms everything to be in a continual flow. The becoming not the 
being is the only reality. 
Empedocles attempts to explain the nature of things by a union 
of these two theories. He asserts four primitive elements incapable 
of change. These represent the pure being of the Eleatics. To 
account for the world of change, he sets over these two moving 
powers, love and hate, the uniting and the separating forces, and 
thus introduces into his system the becoming of Heraclitus. 
From this latter there was an easy transition to the theory of the 
Atomic school.. These affirmed nature to be composed of indivisible 
atoms, between which is empty space preventing their contact and 
allowing motion, thus giving rise to multiplicity and change. This 
motion is represented as eternal and the result of necessity. 
Whatever advance these latter philosophers may have made, 
and however they may differ among themselves, one element is yet 
common to all. This element consists in the objective and mater- 
ialistic nature of their theories. From the earliest philosophers, who 
attempted to reduce all matter to a single element, down to the 
Atomists, we find nothing but matter and properties of matter. Two 
influences were now at work tending to a radical change in Greek 
philosophy. 
One of these lay in the condition of philosophy itself. If, as 
claimed by the Atomists, the motion of atoms is regulated by some 
law of necessity, this motion must transcend the material. How 
then is it to be explained? How may we account for the regularity 
and continuity ofthis law? Here we find a new question which 
philosophy must attempt to explain. 
The other influence was a result of the contact of the early 
philosophy with Athenian life and thought. Philosophy was in- 
