Hesiod Parmenides
Table of Contents
One might suspect that Hesiod was the first to look for such a thing-or some one else who put love or desire among existing things as a principle. Parmenides also does this. In constructing the genesis of the universe, he says:
Love, first of all, the Gods she planned.
Hesiod says:
First of all things was chaos made, and then Broad-breasted earth… And love, ‘mid all the gods pre-eminent
These imply that there is a cause which will move existing things and bring them together.
The contraries of the various forms of good and bad were also perceived to be present in nature.
- The bad things were in greater number than good
Empedocles introduced friendship to cause the good, and strife to cause the bad.
He is the first to mention the bad and the good as principles.
These thinkers vaguely grasped two of the causes which we distinguished in our work on nature.
- The matter
- The source of the movement
These thinkers go round their opponents and often strike fine blows. But they do not fight on scientific principles.
And so these thinkers do not seem to know what they say because they make no use of their causes except to a small extent.
Anaxagoras uses reason as a deus ex machina for the making of the world.
- When he is at a loss to tell from what cause something necessarily is, he drags reason in.
- But in all other cases, he ascribes events to anything rather than to reason.
Empedocles uses the causes to a greater extent than this.
But he neither does so sufficiently nor attains consistency in their use.
At least, in many cases he makes love segregate things, and strife aggregate them.
For whenever the universe is dissolved into its elements by strife, fire is aggregated into one, and so is each of the other elements; but whenever again under the influence of love they come together into one, the parts must again be segregated out of each element.
Empedocles, in contrast with his precessors, was the first to introduce the dividing of this cause, not positing one source of movement, but different and contrary sources.
He was the first to speak of 4 material elements. Yet he does not use four, but treats them as 2 only.
He treats fire by itself, and its opposite-earth, air, and water-as one kind of thing.
Leucippus and his associate Democritus say that the full and the empty are the elements, calling the one being and the other non-being-the full and solid being being, the empty non-being (whence they say being no more is than non-being, because the solid no more is than the empty).
They make these the material causes of things. And as those who make the underlying substance one generate all other things by its modifications, supposing the rare and the dense to be the sources of the modifications, in the same way these philosophers say the differences in the elements are the causes of all other qualities.
These differences, they say, are three-shape and order and position. For they say the real is differentiated only by ‘rhythm and ‘inter-contact’ and ’turning’; and of these rhythm is shape, inter-contact is order, and turning is position; for A differs from N in shape, AN from NA in order, M from W in position. The question of movement-whence or how it is to belong to things-these thinkers, like the others, lazily neglected.
“Regarding the two causes, then, as we say, the inquiry seems to have been pushed thus far by the early philosophers.