INTRODUCTION.

how far have they amalgamated these into a systematic theory of existence?

In the endeavour to answer these questions I think we can hardly fail to discern amid the goodly company of those early pioneers certain men rising by head and shoulders above their fellows: Herakleitos, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, these three. Each one of these bequeathed to his successors a great principle peculiarly his own; a principle of permanent importance, with which Plato was bound to deal and has dealt. And save in so far as the Pythagorean theory of numbers The Pythagoreans believed that numbers were the ultimate reality and the cause of all things. may have influenced the outward form of his exposition, there is hardly anything in the early philosophy before Sokrates, outside the teaching of these three men, which has seriously contributed to Plato’s store of raw material. The synthesis of their one-sided truths required nothing less than the whole machinery of Plato’s metaphysical system: it is from their success and their failure that he takes his start—the success of each in enunciating his own truth, the failure of each to recognise its relations.

Since these three men, as I conceive, furnished Plato with his base of operations—or, more correctly perhaps, raised the problems which he must address himself to solve, it is incumbent on us to determine as precisely as we can the nature of the contributions they severally supplied.

The Ionians and Herakleitos.

§ 3. The old Ionian physicists Early Greek philosophers from Ionia (modern-day Turkey) who sought the primary substance of the universe. were all unknowingly working their way to the conception of Becoming The philosophical concept of change, flux, or the process of coming into being, as opposed to static "Being.". They did not know this, because they knew not that matter, with which alone they were concerned¹, belonged altogether to the realm of Becoming. Nor yet did they reach this conception, for they had not been able to conceive continuity in change—that is to say, they had not conceived Becoming. They imagined the indefinite diversity of material nature to be the complex manifestations of some uniform underlying element, which, whether by condensation and expansion or by some more fundamental modification of its substance, transmuted itself into this astonishing multiplicity of dissimilar qualities. But according to their notion this underlying element, be it water or air or some indefinable substrate, existed at any given place now in one form, now in another; that is, it abode for a while in one of its manifestations, then changed and abode for a while in another. Air is air for a time; then it is

¹ Of course the antithesis of matter and spirit had not yet presented itself to Greek thought.