2. The Pre-Socratics 600-400 B.C. It was with the
Greeks that “matter” first emerged as a cosmological
concept systematically distinguished from such con-
trasting notions as those of change, form, void, or mind.
The fact that some of these distinctions are currently
more vague than they have often previously appeared
should not blind us to the enormous intellectual ad-
vance such distinctions represented. Of course, the
conceptual clarifications came gradually: with the
physiologoi of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., the
so-called Pre-Socratics, the interpreter is often unsure
whether suggestive insights arise from profundities, or
merely from the fragmentary character and ambiguities
of the texts. The archai or “principles” which were
the common quest of Ionian inquiry might be historical
“origins,” “units” composing the material world, or
“axioms” of scientific theory.
Nevertheless these Ionian ventures beyond mythos
and towards sophia exhibit progressions. (1) The se-
quence of material constituents, from Thales' water
through Anaximenes' air to Heraclitus' fire, seems to
reflect a growing concern that the basic stuff of nature
be sufficiently active and refined to account for all its
phenomena, including especially those of life, conscious-
ness, and thought. (2) It has also been suggested by
C. Lejewski (McMullin, pp. 25-36) that while Thales'
water was that from which all things first came, Anaxi-
mander's apeiron (“the unlimited” or “unqualified”)
was also that to which they would eventually return,
while the air of Anaximenes (and then the fire of
Heraclitus) was in addition that of which all things
presently consisted. If the fragmentary textual hints are
reliable, they would represent an expansion from
merely historical to properly metaphysical cosmology.
(3) As to the forces effecting these transformations, in
Anaximander there was an alternate separating out of
variously qualified things from neutral stuff creating
inequalities within it, and then the compensatory re-
turn. Anaximenes was concerned to account for the
world's unity: its varieties were only products of con
densation and rarefaction of the all-embracing
pneuma.
Finally in Empedocles, and then in his successors,
it was the mixture of separate and different elements
(for Empedocles, earth, water, air, and fire) under
varying influences (for Empedocles, love and hate) that
explained change. This combination of material plu-
ralism and structural monism has been called (Toulmin
and Goodfield) “the first appearance in our scientific
tradition of an important intellectual model.” The
general character of that model was preserved in the
theory of “homeomerous seeds” statistically distributed
under the action of Nous (“Mind,” “Reason”) in the
theory of Anaxagoras.
The challenge which came to these Ionian “river
gods” from the “patrons of Being,” the Pythagoreans
and the Eleatics—Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno—
could be described as an attack on “material” explana-
tions of the world. Of course, just as Ionian hylozoism
(animated matter) had introduced vitality as an imma-
nent property of the material stuff, so Pythagorean and
Eleatic “formalisms” were not entirely abstracted from
a material base. Still the judgment of Parmenides that
“only that can really exist which can also be thought”
(Diels, 3, 8, 34) meant that shapes, patterns, and pro-
portions could be assigned a metaphysical status equal
to that of stuff. Indeed Pythagorean acoustic theory
played a seminal role in the mathematization of matter
and the origin of mathematical physics. Parmenides
and Heraclitus provide at their sharpest the contrasts
which had developed between the two traditions: per-
manent Being as against fluent becoming, unity as
against plurality, and the requirements of conceptual
thought as against the reports of sensory experience.
Probably the sharpness of contrasts on questions of such
ultimacy stimulated the remarkable outburst of in-
genuity on the problem of matter that followed.
The “systematic period” of Greek philosophy, the
century from 400 to 300 B.C., embracing the active
careers of Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,
produced a set of rival theories the contrasts among
which foreshadowed many of the broad outlines that
subsequent debate has followed. Francis Bacon sug-
gested that these works survived in less fragmentary
form than those of the Pre-Socratics only because they
were less solid and so did not sink in the flood of
barbarism terminating classical civilization (Novum
Organum, lxvii). The earlier theories no doubt had the
advantage of a more intimate connection with the craft
tradition, but craftsmen are not always boldly experi-
mental, and Bacon's regret perhaps underestimates the
importance to inquiry of clear and coherently orga-
nized concepts. At any rate Democritean atomism,
Platonic organicism, and Aristotelian hylomorphism
have been recurrent ideas and pervasive influences in
the development of the sciences of matter.
