Three Ancient Meanings of Matter: Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle Author(s): Harold J.

Johnson Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1967), pp. 3-16 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708477 . Accessed: 16/04/2014 11:18
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THREE ANCIENT MEANINGS OF MATTER: DEMOCRITUS, PLATO, AND ARISTOTLE

BY HAROLD J. JOHNSON

"L'unedes taches essentielles du philosopheme semble d'etre de definir ce que j'appelleraisvolontiersdes positionspures.... Notre tendancenaturelle est de vivre confortablementdans la region impure du compromis."(E. Gilson, Christianismeet Philosophie.)

The more facts we learn, the greater our need of perspectivesin which they can be exhibited as coherent and manageable.A proper perspective in the case of our knowledge of historical philosophies should not only avoid ignoring or distorting the facts accumulated in piecemeal discovery; it should highlight the general patterns of thought and motivation that generated the special theories. Just because there is such a vast literatureon the philosophiesof Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle-probably the three most influential conceptual schemes of classical antiquity-it is always worth renewing the question of the extent to which we can discover system in their interrelations.This paper concentrateson the meanings assigned to the concept of matter in the cosmologiesof these three philosophies and on some peculiaritiesof method that seem connectedwith them. Also I shouldnot be sorryif the perspectiveadvancedby this paper helped to counteractwhat seems to me the frequently excessive emphasis in philosophical historiographyon the interests peculiar to particular times and cultures, to the detriment of more permanent problems and persisting proposalsfor their resolution. The dialogue of systems we shall considerdemonstrateshow misleading it can be to speak of "the Greekview" of matter, or time, or space, or method, for purposesof contrastingit with "the Hebraic,"or "the medieval," or "the modern view." Democritus does indeed share with Aristotle a languageand a heritage,but his way of thinking about nature is in significantways more similar to that of Hugh Eliot or J. J. C. Smart than to that of his contemporaryand compatriot. The question is not entirely a theoretical one. It raises the whole issue of the limits of interculturalcommunication.If we are unable to learn from the Greeks just because they were Greeks,or perhaps or because they had not yet learned to ask "the right "prescientific," questions,"then I fear we shall also be impatient in having to listen to the voices of contemporarycultures whose ways of speaking are not those we preferor with which we are most familiar.My assumption has rather been that in coming to understandthe oppositionsin the Greek cosmologicaldebates we shall also shed light on the alternatives open to us.
3

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HAROLD J. JOHNSON

1. Let us begin with the divergentattitudes of Democritus,Plato, and Aristotle on a question that may at first seem remote from the meanings they attached to the concept of matter-the question of the applicability of the logical principle of non-contradictionto the phenomena of nature. The curious fact is that two of the philosophers, Democritus and Plato, raise serious objection to such application. Both affirm,in defianceof the famous dictum of Parmenides, that in some sense non-beingis.' Aristotle, on the other hand, finding this principle of non-contradiction"the most certain of all," makes a strenuouseffort to show that no operationsof nature are exceptions to it.2 The distinctionbetween actuality and potentiality, the elaboration of which occupiesso much space in Aristotle'streatisesin natural account of all species science, is intended to give a non-contradictory of change. Repeatedly when he seems faced with the necessity of ascribing contradictory predicates to the same subject, Aristotle points out that this will be "in no way paradoxical"if we simply understand,for example, that "the second predicate will attach to it potentially, but the first actually."3 It is, then, by means of the concept of potentiality that Aristotle purportsto avoid the reservations regarding the principle of non-contradictionhe finds in his predecessors.And by potentiality Aristotle means matter, the substratum that prior to change was in privation of the characteristic it now possesses. The actual existent thing is a certain potential "matter,"in-formed by certain characteristics. 2. Is there then something in the views of Democritusand Plato that disinclines them from exploiting the concept of matter to the same end? In the case of Democritus the answer is surely that his conceptionof matter is of particles possessedwholly and exclusively of the primaryqualities.The atoms and their quantitative determinations are in all respects eternal and undergo no generation, corruption, alteration, increase, or diminution. The sole change to which they are subject is that of local motion. Though Democritus and Aristotle are in agreementin treating matter as the continuing substratum in change, Democritean matter cannot function as potentiality for the plain reasonthat it is permanentlyand uninterruptedly actual in all the respects in which anything for Democritus ever is actual.4 In the case of Plato the answer is radically different. "What is that," he asks, "which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is appre1 Ref. 44 (Diels 654), Nahm, Selectionsfrom Early GreekPhilosophy (New York, 2 Meta. iv. 3. 1005b 15-24. 1947), 172; Sophist, 241e-2a. 3 Gen. and Corr.i. 2. 316b 20-22; cf. also Phys. i. 2. 186a 2; Nic. Ethics ii. 1. 4 Cf. e.g., Ref. 37-48, Nahm, 169-73.

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hended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in the process of becoming and perishing and never really is." 5 For Plato, fully actual Being belongs only to the intelligible and that which is necessaryby reason of its intelligibility, that is to the immaterial essences discovered by dialectic. The highest praise that can be given to an existent, on the other hand, even to an eternal one like God or the soul, is just that its true home is with the essences, and that it participatesin them to a particularlyintimate degree. But material existences are known by the senses and have no permanenceor stability. If in atomism the only sort of material change possible is locomotion, in Platonism material change is a radical generation and destructionof the existent.6 And if Democritus would have to reject the Aristotelian conception of matter as potential because Democritean matter is perpetually actual, Plato would have to reject it for the opposite reason that nothing material can ever be actual; it fleetingly imitates the to our first systematic actual, but never attains it. Thus corresponding contrast involving divergent attitudes towards the physical appliwe have now discovered cability of the principleof non-contradiction, a second: Democritean matter is always actual; Platonic matter is never actual; and Aristotelian matter is potential in so far as it is in privation of a property, but actual in so far as it possesses it. It is, then, actual underdeterminateforms. 3. The foregoing explains why Aristotle's two predecessorsdid not choose his particularphilosophicalresourcefor maintaining the applicability of the principle of non-contradictionto nature. It does not explain what led them to their original reservationsabout such application. But in the case of Democritus the motive is clear and well-known: the non-being the existence of which he must assert is empty space or the void; and he must assertit to providean extended and non-resistant something in which the atoms may move. There are, then, two equally necessaryrealities in his universe,matter and space. Space shares with matter all its geometrical properties, and in fact is distinguishedfrom it in only one primaryrespect, the distinction of the empty from the full. However,this is also the only distinction that enjoys ontological status in the system of Democritus. All other differences,indeed all qualitative determinationswhatever, are reducibleto this one.7 If we now turn to the conceptionof space in Plato we again encounter the sharpest contrast to Democritus. Whereas Democritus
5 Timaeus 27e-28a. 7 Cf. e.g., Ref. 49 (D. 125), Nahm, 173-74.
6 Laws x. 894a.

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HAROLD J. JOHNSON

had made matter and space ontologicalopposites, they are identified by Plato. Space for him is the Receptacle,necessaryas in Democritus to account for motion; but it is now also analogizedwith a Mother and nurse who, being impregnatedby the immaterial essences, provides the very stuff out of which the sensible world of becoming is generated.The Receptacle is at once "hardlyreal," a postulate that is requiredby the fact that we say "all existence ... must of necessity be in some place and occupy a space," and at the same time "in some mysterious way partakesof the intelligible" 9 so that although it is devoid of determinateand exclusive form it neverthelessis "duly prepared"to "receivethe impress"of any form10and to be the substratum of the created world. Finally, Aristotle'streatment of space is in terms of the "places," proper and actual, of his different kinds of substances. He defines place as "the innermostmotionless boundaryof what contains,"1 a definition at which he arrives after having consideredand rejected the solutions of his predecessors. Place can be "neitherthe form, nor the matter [Plato], nor an extension which is always there, different from, and over and above, the extension of the thing which is displaced [Democritus]."
12

Avoiding technicalities we can say that for

Aristotle space is nothing more than the sum total of places, no separately existing principle, either material or immaterial,but just the relationsof containingand being containedof substancesin their activities.'3 We are thus led to a third systematic contrast involved in these conceptionsof matter: Democriteanspace is the ontologicalreverseof matter; Platonic space is identical with matter; and Aristotelian space, while not material, has no existence apart from the relations of material bodies among themselves.l4 4. It seems possible to extend this contrast, roughly in parallel fashion, to time, like space a correlateof material change. In Democritus the relation of moving atoms to time is not isomorphicwith
10Timaeus50c-e. 9 Timaeus51b. 1 Phys. iv. 4. 212a 20. 12 Phys. iv. 4. 212a 2-4. IsPhys. iv. 1-5. Cf. also Categ. 4. lb25-2a3; 14. 141 am puzzled by Max Jammer'scharacterization of atomistic, Platonic, and Aristotelian space as "physical,""mathematical,"and "ontological"respectively (Conceptsof Space: A History of Theoriesof Space in Physics [Cambridge, Mass.; in all three theories, but only in atomism is 1954] 67). Space is "mathematical" its character exclusivelymathematical.Again space is a locus of "physical"being in all three theories, but only in Platonism is space constitutive of the physical. that space has no "ontological" status separate Finally it is just in Aristotelianism from the relations of physical objects.
8 Timaeus52b.

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their relation to the void. The void is an ontologicalprinciple,equal and opposite to the atom, but given its existence, no similar status is requiredfor time. It is simply an accident consequentupon the successive redistributionsof the full and empty, "an appearanceunder the forms of day and night."' In production of phenomena the temporal dimension may seem quite as indispensableas the spatial ones, but since the atoms are eternally actual, since they are identically the same in any infinitesimal fraction of a second as they are in a month or a millennium,time clearly is no essential ingredientof what things are. In Plato, however,temporalityis an essential propertyof material things and it is a property that is motheredby the same Receptacle that producedthe spatial dimensions. That the Father, or Essence, is never able to transmit its full actuality to its Offspringin space is indicated by calling the offspringa "copy"or "image";but it is the same impossibility of full communicationthat renders the "image of eternity" a "moving"one. If it would not be quite accurateto say that time, space, and matter are synonymous concepts for Plato, it is nonetheless true that in any concrete instance of becoming they represent inseparableaspects and dimensions and that all these aspects take their origin from the Receptacle.16 The treatment of time which leads Aristotle to his definition of it as the "numberof movement in respect of the before and after"17 is remarkablyparallel to his treatment of space, with the "now"in this instance playing a role analogousto that of "place."Like space, time is not a pre-existent medium, but is constituted by a mutual relation of substances. Aristotle's view of the relation of time to matter differsfrom that of Democritusin that changes of substance, quality, and quantity, as well as those of place, can give rise to relations of "beforeand after" and in that there are substancesthat are It differs from that of Plato in essentially temporal or "perishable." the separability of spatial and temporal dimensions of material things: there might be, and Aristotle thinks that there are, material substanceswhich are eternal and hence are not perpetuallybecoming; and, on the other hand, there might be changes, such as alteration of quality, which involve no spatial rearrangements.18 Ourfourth contrast may then be summedup as follows: time has a purely accidental relation to Democritean matter; it is quite as essential and constitutive as spatial dimension to Platonic matter; and while for Aristotle it is always matter or potentiality that gives
15 Ref. 72, Nahm, 179.

16Timaeus37d-e; cf. also 52d-53c. 17Phys. iv. 11. 220a 24. 8 Phys. v. 2. 226a 23-36: Meta. xii. 1: Phys. iv. 7. 214a 26-28.

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HAROLD J. JOHNSON

rise to temporal relations, nevertheless these relations are not defining characteristics of material things qua material. 5. Another concept frequently involved in the philosophy of nature yields a significant contrast in the three theories of matter-the concept of necessity. In this case there seems to be at least verbal agreement that in natural causation matter and necessity coincide. Democritus' predecessor, Leucippus, had already said that "nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity." 19 There is, in fact, the closest identification of reasons and necessities in ancient atomism, at least prior to Epicurus. The clearer our concepts of matter become the more we are driven to acknowledge its operations as inevitable, for they follow from the formal mathematical properties-shape, size, position-inherent in the atoms and void themselves. Aristotle, while agreeing that in physics necessity lies in the material cause, is at some pains to dissociate his view from this mathematical determinism. It is not, he argues, invoking an analogy with the arts, that given iron and its properties it must of necessity become a saw, but rather that on the hypothesis that one wishes a saw, he will first need something like iron and its properties. Physical necessity, then, is properly spoken of in the context of the tendencies of material entities to certain acts and ends, and it refers to the potentialities without which those tendencies could not possibly be brought to realization.20 The most interesting of the three concepts of physical necessityperhaps because it is least current-is that of Plato. Typical of his constant coupling of necessity with its dialectical opposites, "freedom" or "mind," is a passage from the Timaeus: Thus far in what we have been saying with small exception the works of intelligencehave been set forth, and now we must place by the side of them in our discoursethe things which come into being through necessity-for the creation is mixed, being made of necessity and mind. Mind, the ruling power, persuadednecessity to bring the greater part of created things to perfection, and thus and after this manner in the beginning,when the in19Fr. 2, Nahm, 160.

ii. 9. The contrast between Democritusand Aristotle on necessity might be expressed by stating that Democritus would not allow Aristotle's distinction between "physical"and "mathematical" necessity (200a 15-29). We can construct no universalgeometryof existencewhen form may or may not encountera matter with the potential to receiveit. Hence in such a theory it is only when quantitative form is abstractedfrom matter that its formal causality is wholly determinantand the result completely demonstrable.But mathematical necessity in nature is a of a fully actual matter with its quantitativeformsinherentin it. logical consequence

20 Phys.

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fluence of reason got the better of necessity, the universe was created.21 Here, matter, although an actively causal principle, seems to show its character as "necessity" neither in the inevitability of its operations (Democritus)-since it is open to "persuasion"-nor in the indispensability of its contribution to the natural product (Aristotle)since it is rather a question of "getting the better" of it; but rather in its recalcitrance to the activity of Mind. This is necessity in the sense of what intelligence, in its quest for values, must acknowledge and make the best of, although this is just the "necessity" it would prefer to avoid. We now seem in a position to make a fifth contrast. Democritean matter is necessary by virtue of its inherent, and inherently intelligible, mathematical forms; Platonic matter, on the contrary, is necessary in the sense of its resistance to intelligible form; and Aristotelian matter is necessary as the potentialities, often unknown at that particular level of abstraction, without which certain formal properties could not be brought to actuality. 6. If we now superimpose upon one another the distinctions we have been able to draw thus far, do we get a pattern which enables us to say what each philosopher meant when he invoked "matter" as an explanatory principle? In the cases of Democritus and Aristotle, it seems to me, our discussion has already obliged us to state how matter basically figures in their systems, and we shall be able to restate with relative brevity its defining functions. But in the case of Plato more needs to be said. In the Timaeus, having carried on his account for some time using only the "pattern, intelligible and always the same," and "the imitation of the pattern, generated and visible," he begins to feel that "the argument seems to require" that we should invoke "a third kind" of thing. This turns out to be the Receptacle, "the nurse of all generation." 22 Now, why does the argument "require" it? Not, I think, because we need spatio-temporal dimensions or tangible stuff for the existence of material things, though these are in fact products of the Receptacle. Rather again and again in the Platonic writings the theme occurs that God, if he be good, is not the authorof all things.... For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributedto God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere .. .23 The problem is that "evils, Theodorus," do not "pass away" but
22

21 Timaeus 47e-48a. Timaeus 48e-49a. 23 Republic ii. 379d.

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"hover around the mortal nature, and this earthly sphere";24 God, impressing the forms on matter, no doubt made things "as far as possible the fairest and best," but he evidently had to make them from things "not fair and good";26 the essential reason for the Receptacle or matter, then, seems to be that we cannot suppose the causes of things "less than two-one the author of good and the other of evil." 26 If we examine what the Receptacle in fact does to the essence impressedupon it, it appears that its uniform tendency is to drag it towards its contrary: the realm of Forms is universal, absolute,eternal, omnipresent,intelligible, harmonious,perfect; matter makes its offspringto be particular,relative, temporal, localized, confused, discordant,and defective. The very function of matter is to act as a principleof privation. It is the non-being whose existence must be affirmedto explain how the Being we discover by intellect gets diffused,fragmented,or diluted into the becomingwe encounter through the senses. But is it not true that in Aristotle also matter is a principle of imperfectionhostile to form? It is not true, except accidentally. If the marble has flaws or if the foetus fails to receive a propersupply of nutrients we shall indeed have a defective statue or a monstrous birth, and by reason of the matter; but it is equally true that unless we have marble and nutrients and the potentialities they represent we shall not have any statues or men at all.27In Platonism no empirical instance ever fully exemplifiesthe form-the finest statue and the truest man are in the realm of Essence ratherthan in this worldand that is why dialectic must transcendthe sensible. If Aristotle, on the contrary,believes that we can abstractforms within the sensible, it is because material instances are the only instances of the natural forms there are. Matter is not the principleof privation in Aristotle, but the potentiality that can be now deprived, now in-formed. Its essential characteras the substratumthat underlieschangeis perhaps best evidenced by Aristotle's doctrine of the radical transmutability not of the elements only but of motions.28 In summary, then, for Democritus matter as the full, the ontologicalreverseof the empty, is the bearerof those formalquantitative propertieswhich determineevents and phenomena;in Plato we have the sharply opposed doctrine that matter is what resists and debilitates form; and in Aristotle we have a matter that is passive to the action of efficient causes in imposing or destroying forms within it. While Aristotle in this comparison,as in most of the rest, may seem
24 27

Theaetetus176b. 25 Timaeus53b. Cf. e.g., On the Soul ii. 1-2; Phys. ii. 2. 194b 8. 28 Gen. and Corr. ii. 4. 10.

26Laws x. 896e.

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to occupy some intermediategroundbetween the sharply contrasted positions of Democritusand Plato, there is also a sense in which their views of matter stand together in opposition to his; for Aristotle matter is the substratumof all natural contraries; for both Democritus and Plato it is one of the contraries.29 7. Are there features in the theories of knowledge of the three philosophersparticularlyconnected, either as antecedents or consequents, with the development of these variant concepts of matter? For both Democritus and Plato matter is in principle unobservable,
I am tempted to essay another systematic contrast, at this point, on the general question of "creation." It takes us beyond the figures considered here, but is a consequence, I think, of their principles. (1) In a thoroughgoing and exclusive atomism, there can, of course, be no question of creation: the completely actual neither needs to be, nor could be, "created"; it is itself necessary existence. (2) Those theories inspiring themselves from Platonism have, it seems to me, tended toward "emanationism," the nature and extent of the "creation" depending on a "principle of plenitude." Leibniz's explicit contention that a perfectly benevolent God would create no less than "the best of all possible worlds" is only an echo of the assertion of Plato himself that "God made them ['creatures'] as far as possible the fairest and best. . ." (Timaeus 53b); and this is akin to emanationism in that nature is necessarily determined to be "the finest of creations" (ibid., 28e-29a). (3) Aquinas, on what I think Aristotelian grounds, dissents from this Platonic interpretation. "Others, like Plato and his followers, erred regarding the necessity imposed by the final cause. For he said that the universe as to its actual conformation was the necessary outcome of the divine goodness as understood and loved by God. . . . This indeed may be true if we look only at what is and not what might be. This universe consisting of the things which actually exist is very good, and it is due to the sovereign goodness of God that it is very good. Nevertheless God's goodness is not so tied to this universe that it could not have produced a better or one that is less good" (De potentia dei, I, q. 3, a. 16c). Now, why this difference? The answer seems to me to lie in different conceptions of "non-being." In Platonism it must be said to exist in some sense as something that is hostile to Being, which impedes it, and which finally forces it into a compromise. It is only when non-being is so conceived that a "plenitude" of the "best possible" is a meaningful concept. When, on the contrary, non-being is simply absence of being, it imposes no limitations on the creative power of the First Being, and in the context of a plural creation "best possible" ceases to be meaningful. Says St. Thomas: "As a thing can be created, not by reason of a passive potentiality, but only by reason of the active potentiality of the Creator, Who can produce something out of nothing, so when we say that a thing can be reduced to nothing, we do not imply in the creature a potentiality to non-being, but in the Creator the power of ceasing to sustain being" (Summa theologica, I, q. 75, a. 6, ad 2). Again, it is a measure of the absence of any general force contrary to the Creator that "things that have no contrary, though they have a finite power, continue to exist forever" (ibid., q. 104, a. 4, ad. 2). I owe my introduction to St. Thomas' views on this question to Anton Pegis' exciting study, St. Thomas and the Greeks (Milwaukee, 1939). I think Pegis makes good his case that St. Thomas is not involved in the particular dilemma analyzed in Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, but fails to make his case that this escape involved an essential break with Aristotelian principles (cf. Meta., v. 12).
29

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and for both, the realm of experienceis a realm of phenomenaor appearances.The atoms are in principle unobservablebecause, exception made of fullness or solidity, they are devoid of perceptiblequalities. Further, no atom could ever be seen since vision itself is an atomic process.And Plato hardly ever refers to his matter, the Receptacle,without touchingupon the difficultywith which it is known, not by sense, but by "a kind of spurious reason," beheld "as in a dream,"30 and so "dimly seen" that it almost requires "words of anotherkind."31It is in some sense even more obscurethan the realm of the sensible,which nonethelessit contributesto make phenomenal. If we ask why the empiricalrealm is a realm of appearances for these two philosophers,however, the answers are diametrically opposed. For Plato it is because the empiricalalways falls short of that which fully and actually is, that is the Essences. But for Democritus, empirical qualities must exist, as he says, only "by convention"32 because they are in addition to what is already fully and unalterably actual. All of experience,except that of the spatial order and variations of full and empty, is in excess of what is really there. Sensory appearanceis the surplus by which epistemologicalsupply goes beyond the ontological demand. The doctrine of matter of Aristotle, on the other hand, serves to explain both why Aristotelianmatter is not in principleunobservable and why the entire empiricalworld,though not exhaustive of reality, nonethelessenjoys full title as a real object of real knowledge.In the first place, the matter of the statue is the marble and the matter of the developingfoetus is the nutriments ingested by the mother, and neither of these lie beyond empiricalobservation.Aristotelianspace, too, though it was later found to embracea budget of astronomical errors,took its origin in observedrelations of containing,rather than in mathematicalpostulates. More generally, if it is true that "Aristotle, once you have learnt his technique,is ... the thinker who gives us dazzling glimpses of the obvious,"33 if the Aristotelian tradition, in contrast to its more inventive and variable atomistic and Platonic rivals, has shown itself literal, relatively uniform,and even repetitive, is it not precisely because it believes that in the sensible world it stands confrontedwith a portion of the actual, and with that portion of the actual whose potentialities for producingform are most akin to our own cognitive potentialities for reproducingit? In summary,
30 Timaeus52a-b. 81 Timaeus48e-49a; cf. 29b. 32Ref. 49 (D. 125, 156), Nahm, 173. 3 Knowles,AquinasPapers, no. 30 (London: BlackfriarsPublications,1956), 8. In Aristotle,cf., Gen. and Corr.i. 2. 316a 6-11, Phys. ii. 2. 194b ff.

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then, the empiricalworldis a properobject of knowledgefor Aristotle because it is actual; it is appearancefor Plato because it fails to reach the actual; and it is appearancefor Democritusbecause it goes beyond what actuality contains.34 8. Finally, I should like to relate the foregoingconsiderationsto a few aspects of the scientific methods of our three philosophers.We shall then in some sense have completeda circle,since it was with the applicability of logical principles to natural phenomena that we began. One contrastin method is closely associatedwith the divergent judgments on the veridical characterof sense experience.Since both Democritus and Plato regard the sensible world as in considerable degree illusory, both tend to look to philosophy as an emancipation or salvation from that initial illusion. That is probably the reason why theory and practice,fact and value, are so intimately connected in their systems. Plato, we know, judges knowledgeby the extent to which it leads us to a better condition of the soul and Democritus too, at least if we may judge from the use that was made of his doctrines by his disciples, the Epicureans, seems to have felt that "thereis no profit in philosophy either if it does not expel the suffering of the mind."35 If Aristotle, on the contrary, makes a radical distinction between those theoreticaldisciplineswhich are directedto knowledgefor its own sake and those practicalones which are sought to improve action,36 this surely conformswith his judgment that the empiricalworld is not primarilyan illusion to be escaped. Of course, the emancipationssought by the atomists and Plato are differentenough. Epicurussays that "we should have no need of natural science" if we "were not troubled by our suspicions of the phenomena of the sky and about death, fearing that it concernsus ...." 37 The illusion he wishes to escape from is superstitionand this illusion is, characteristically,an overestimation of the resourcesof the world, in this case its resources for producing pain. Plato is haunted by the opposite and "very melancholy" possibility that, wasting our lives like prisonersin a cave, we shall needlesslymiss out on "truth and knowledgeof realities."38
34 This doctrineof the phenomenal characterof the given tends to make empirical causation "epiphenomenal" in the one case and "occasionalistic" in the other: the empirical is just not the area where real decisions are made. The prominenceof the four causes in Aristotelianism, on the other hand, corresponds with its epistemologicalrealism. 85Epicurus, "Fragmentsfrom Unknown Sources,"in Oates, ed., The Stoic and EpicureanPhilosophers(New York, 1940), 50. Cf. Fr. 31, Nahm, 212. 36 Meta. i. 1; Nic. Ethics vi, esp. 2. 1139a 21-32. 37PrincipalDoctrines xi, cf. Oates, 36. 38Phaedo 90d.

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When a philosopherbecomes convinced that primary experience has failed to acquaint him with the genuine or the "real,"he has probably already framed some conceptual representation of what anything that is to qualify as genuine must be. But why does the to the genuine?To providean explanation not correspond experienced the philosophermay have to invoke a third principlein addition to his "appearance" and "reality,"a principlethat operatesin opposition to reality in the productionof phenomena.This, it seems to me, is how Democritus and Plato have proceeded.For both of them the method is to accountfor the empiricalas a middle groundor amalgam of conceptualextremes-atoms and void, least part and infinite space, in the case of Democritus; Being and non-being, One and manyness in Plato.39For both philosophersthese extremes,though beyond senmore distinctly than empiricalobjects.40 sation, can be conceptualized For both of them one of the extremes-in the case of Democritusthe atoms, in the case of Plato the Essences-is the bearerof the homogeneity, not so apparentat the level of experience,on which the universality of science must rest. For both of them there is, as a consequence, one all-embracingscience: for Democritus the science of the independentlyexisting least part; for Plato the science of the organic whole possessingits unity throughthe hierarchyof Formsor Essences. And for both of them, to return to the question which initiated our is not fully applicable investigation,the principleof non-contradiction to nature because the other, and equally necessary, extreme is precisely the privation of what full being must be. But for Aristotle the method of science is to start with the experienced and to workout towardssuch extremesas explanationrequires. In a judgment that runs counter to both the doctrinesand practices of his philosophicalcolleagueshe holds that "a science expandsnot by the interpositionof fresh middle terms, but by the appositionof fresh extreme terms."41And though these extremes are perhaps "better known to nature,"they are not "better known to us": 42 our knowledge of the substancesthat are compositesof matter and form is far more firm and complete than our inferential gropings toward prime matter and the Prime Mover as ideal limits of these principles. Further, the homogeneity necessary to the existence of universal science is not concentratedat one extreme-e.g., the least part, or the hierarchyof Essences-as in atomism or Platonism; universal principles of organizationare operative at all levels of the world. Hence
89Gen. and Corr.ii. 3. 330b 17-18. Cf. Republicv. 478e. 40 Ref. 59, Nahm, 175. 41 Post. Anal. i. 12. 78a 13. 42 Post. Anal. i. 2. 71b 32-72a6. Cf. ii. 19; Meta. i. 1. 980a 23-b12.

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THREE ANCIENT

MEANINGS

OF MATTER

15

there will be a plurality of sciences treating of different aspects of nature and at differentlevels of abstraction.Finally, as we saw at the outset, Aristotle's concept of matter as the potentiality which can successively exhibit contrary attributes is his means of maintaining that no contradictionis really involved in natural change. "Other thinkers," he says, "are confronted by the necessity that there is something contrary to" their first principles, "but we are not. For there is nothing contraryto that which is primary,for all contraries have matter. ...." 43 A word further on how this touches us. There is not one of these theoriesof matter that in its strugglefor continued life has not to undergo drastic excision of its bad guesses at the hands of those with new expert information.Nevertheless, Sir James Jeans, who finds the "disaster"for physics represented by Plato's attitude only exceededby the "worse[that was] to come from his pupil Aristotle," is, by contrast, surprisedat "how many of the basic ideas of modern physics were foreshadowedin the speculations of" Democritus (and Empedocles).44 Richard P. McKeon, however, thinks that "presentday conceptionsof time, space, matter, motion, and cause are nearerto those of Aristotle than they have been in 400 years";45 and Max Jammer ventures to "suggest a comparisonbetween the notion of physical space in Aristotle's cosmology and the notion of Einstein's 'spherical space'as expoundedin earlierrelativistic cosmology."46Finally, Whitehead's magnanimous tribute to the seminal value of "sevennotions"in Plato's cosmologyis well-known: he thinks that "all philosophy is in fact an endeavour to obtain a coherent system out of some modificationof these notions" and that they must be given significantcredit for "driving. . . [the peoples of Western Europe] towards their civilization."4 The point is not merely that one is able to quote competent historiansof thought who find the ancient answersrelevant to modern inquiries. That relevance is more impressively demonstratedby the divisibility of the comments themselves according to their obvious
Meta. xii. 10. 1075b 20-24. Cf. Gen. and Corr. ii. 5. 332a 23-26. 44Jeans, The Growth of Physical Science (New York, 1958), 52-54. 45RichardP. McKeon,"The Philosophyof Aristotle,"introduction to a projected but unpublishedtwo-volumeanthologyof Aristotle'sworks,made available to students at the University of Chicagoin mimeograph,1949. Cf. McKeon, "Aristotle's Conception of the Development and the Nature of Scientific Method," J.H.I. VIII (1947), 3-44, for contrast of Aristotle'smethod to the methods of Plato and Democritus. 46 Jammer, Concepts of Space, 20. 47 Whitehead,Adventuresof Ideas (New York, 1933), 354, 366.
43

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16

HAROLD J. JOHNSON

preferencesfor one or another of the schools.Although the details of argumentchangedrasticallyas scientificknowledgeaccumulates,there are fundamentalissues that persist. The particularoptions that have been exploredby this paper, for example-whether spatial and temporal dimensionsare separable,whether we should think of particles conjoinedor of fields with local peculiarities,whether the laws of all other natural sciences are reducibleto those of physics, how far our physics may be formal-deductiveand how far it must be empiricalinductive-these remainto a surprisingdegreeliving options. I would venture the claim that for everyone of the specific ancient options described, a competent contemporaryproponent of a philosophical choice significantly correspondingwith it could be found. Another day would have to document that claim. Meanwhile it should be no occasionfor hand-wringing over the indecisivenessand futility of philosophy. As long as science continues to be stimulated by the debate of rival hypotheses, philosophical pluralism is no bad background from which to operate. The University of Western Ontario.

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