1. Before Philosophy. Primitive cultures often pos-
sess techniques for transforming matter that are sur-
prising anticipations of scientific methods. By 3,000 B.C.
specially designed heating pots were being used in
Mesopotamia for distillation of liquids and sublimation
of ores, and not much later arts of alloy-making, glass-
manufacture, and perfumery were widespread around
the Eastern Mediterranean. Primitive cultures also
develop elaborate accounts of the processes of material
nature, principally in myths where the processes are
translated into personal relations of natural deities and
semi-deities. Technique and myth are heterogeneously
mixed in ritual and magical practices. Such ritual con-
cerns were surely reflected in a relatively sophisticated
Babylonian theory of seven chief heavenly bodies,
seven metals, seven principal parts of the human body,
seven colors, seven days of the week, and seven stages
of the soul's enlightenment—a theory which can, inci-
dentally, remind us that progress towards a scientific
theory of matter has consisted almost as much in the
discovery of disillusioning disorder as of unanticipated
order. In spite of the facts that beliefs and attitudes
of enormous subsequent influence were formed at this
mythological stage of intellectual development, it is
difficult to speak of concepts of matter: matter had
not yet been distinguished from other elements or
aspects of experience.
The two ancient cultures that have had the most
direct influence on the development of the Western
world are the Hebraic and Greek, and even in the case
of a concept so philosophical and scientific as that of
matter it might be difficult to say which had had the
greater. Both cultures moved away from cosmogonies
where, as Thales is reported to have said, “All things
are full of gods” and, where as might equally be said,
all gods are full of natural forces. By the time of the
eighth-century prophets, the Jews were sharply distin-
guishing Yahweh, the personal, ethical, and absolute
lord of history, from the material world. The world
correspondingly lost its divine immanence, a develop-
ment illustrated by prophetic attacks on magic and
soothsaying employed to cajole divine compliance, in
favor of miracle and revelation, the uncoerced grace
of Yahweh to those who served his moral and historical
ends (cf. Numbers 22-24, esp. 23:23; Deuteronomy
18:14-16). It is illustrated above all by the doctrine
of creation: in Genesis 1 all the natural order (and no
other order so much as entered into the account) was
manipulable stuff from and in the hands of the creator.
While there was no developed theory of God's imma-
teriality, and in earlier Old Testament accounts God
had appeared in bodily form and acted creatively
through his breath, he was clearly now conceived in
such a manner that the material world could not react
reciprocally upon him. If the account was anthro-
pocentric, it was not because man was not part of
material creation but because he shared a moral per-
sonality with Yahweh.
