Three Ancient Meanings of Matter: Democritus, Plato, and AristotleAuthor(s): Harold J. JohnsonSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1967), pp. 3-16Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708477 .

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THREE ANCIENT MEANINGS OF MATTER: DEMOCRITUS, PLATO, AND ARISTOTLE

BY HAROLD J. JOHNSON

"L'une des taches essentielles du philosophe me semble d'etre de definir ce que j'appellerais volontiers des positions pures.... Notre tendance naturelle est de vivre confortablement dans la region impure du compromis." (E. Gilson, Christianisme et Philosophie.)

The more facts we learn, the greater our need of perspectives in 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 literature on the philosophies of Democ- ritus, Plato, and Aristotle-probably the three most influential con- ceptual 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 concentrates on the meanings assigned to the concept of matter in the cosmologies of these three philosophies and on some peculiarities of method that seem connected with them.

Also I should not be sorry if the perspective advanced by this paper helped to counteract what seems to me the frequently excessive em- phasis in philosophical historiography on the interests peculiar to particular times and cultures, to the detriment of more permanent problems and persisting proposals for their resolution. The dialogue of systems we shall consider demonstrates how misleading it can be to speak of "the Greek view" of matter, or time, or space, or method, for purposes of contrasting it with "the Hebraic," or "the medieval," or "the modern view." Democritus does indeed share with Aristotle a language and a heritage, but his way of thinking about nature is in significant ways more similar to that of Hugh Eliot or J. J. C. Smart than to that of his contemporary and compatriot.

The question is not entirely a theoretical one. It raises the whole issue of the limits of intercultural communication. If we are unable to learn from the Greeks just because they were Greeks, or perhaps "prescientific," or because they had not yet learned to ask "the right questions," then I fear we shall also be impatient in having to listen to the voices of contemporary cultures whose ways of speaking are not those we prefer or with which we are most familiar. My assump- tion has rather been that in coming to understand the oppositions in the Greek cosmological debates we shall also shed light on the al- ternatives open to us.

3

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4 HAROLD J. JOHNSON

1. Let us begin with the divergent attitudes 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-contradiction to the phenomena of nature. The curious fact is that two of the philoso- phers, Democritus and Plato, raise serious objection to such appli- cation. Both affirm, in defiance of the famous dictum of Parmenides, that in some sense non-being is.' Aristotle, on the other hand, finding this principle of non-contradiction "the most certain of all," makes a strenuous effort to show that no operations of nature are exceptions to it.2 The distinction between actuality and potentiality, the elabora- tion of which occupies so much space in Aristotle's treatises in natural science, is intended to give a non-contradictory account of all species 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 purports to avoid the reserva- tions regarding the principle of non-contradiction he finds in his predecessors. And by potentiality Aristotle means matter, the sub- stratum 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 Democritus and 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 conception of matter is of particles possessed wholly and exclusively of the primary qualities. The atoms and their quantitative determina- tions are in all respects eternal and undergo no generation, corrup- tion, alteration, increase, or diminution. The sole change to which they are subject is that of local motion. Though Democritus and Aristotle are in agreement in treating matter as the continuing sub- stratum in change, Democritean matter cannot function as poten- tiality for the plain reason that it is permanently and 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 appre-

1 Ref. 44 (Diels 654), Nahm, Selections from Early Greek Philosophy (New York, 1947), 172; Sophist, 241e-2a. 2 Meta. iv. 3. 1005b 15-24.

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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THREE ANCIENT MEANINGS OF MATTER 5

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 necessary by reason of its intelli- gibility, 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 participates in them to a particularly intimate degree. But material existences are known by the senses and have no permanence or stability. If in atomism the only sort of material change possible is locomotion, in Platonism material change is a radical generation and destruction of the exist- ent.6 And if Democritus would have to reject the Aristotelian con- ception of matter as potential because Democritean matter is per- petually actual, Plato would have to reject it for the opposite reason that nothing material can ever be actual; it fleetingly imitates the actual, but never attains it. Thus corresponding to our first systematic contrast involving divergent attitudes towards the physical appli- cability of the principle of non-contradiction, we have now discovered 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 under determinate forms.

3. The foregoing explains why Aristotle's two predecessors did not choose his particular philosophical resource for maintaining the applicability of the principle of non-contradiction to nature. It does not explain what led them to their original reservations about 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 assert it to provide an extended and non-resistant something in which the atoms may move. There are, then, two equally necessary realities in his universe, matter and space. Space shares with matter all its geometrical properties, and in fact is distinguished from it in only one primary respect, the dis- tinction of the empty from the full. However, this is also the only dis- tinction that enjoys ontological status in the system of Democritus. All other differences, indeed all qualitative determinations whatever, are reducible to this one.7

If we now turn to the conception of space in Plato we again en- counter the sharpest contrast to Democritus. Whereas Democritus

5 Timaeus 27e-28a. 6 Laws x. 894a. 7 Cf. e.g., Ref. 49 (D. 125), Nahm, 173-74.

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6 HAROLD J. JOHNSON

had made matter and space ontological opposites, they are identified by Plato. Space for him is the Receptacle, necessary as in Democritus to account for motion; but it is now also analogized with a Mother and nurse who, being impregnated by the immaterial essences, pro- vides the very stuff out of which the sensible world of becoming is generated. The Receptacle is at once "hardly real," a postulate that is required by 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 partakes of the intelligible" 9 so that although it is devoid of determinate and exclusive form it nevertheless is "duly prepared" to "receive the impress" of any form10 and to be the sub- stratum of the created world.

Finally, Aristotle's treatment of space is in terms of the "places," proper and actual, of his different kinds of substances. He defines place as "the innermost motionless boundary of what contains," 1 a definition at which he arrives after having considered and rejected the solutions of his predecessors. Place can be "neither the 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 dis- placed [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 relations of containing and being contained of substances in their activities.'3

We are thus led to a third systematic contrast involved in these conceptions of matter: Democritean space is the ontological reverse of 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 correlate of material change. In Democ- ritus the relation of moving atoms to time is not isomorphic with

8 Timaeus 52b. 9 Timaeus 51b. 10 Timaeus 50c-e. 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's characterization of atomistic, Platonic, and

Aristotelian space as "physical," "mathematical," and "ontological" respectively (Concepts of Space: A History of Theories of Space in Physics [Cambridge, Mass.; 1954] 67). Space is "mathematical" in all three theories, but only in atomism is its character exclusively mathematical. Again space is a locus of "physical" being in all three theories, but only in Platonism is space constitutive of the physical. Finally it is just in Aristotelianism that space has no "ontological" status separate from the relations of physical objects.

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THREE ANCIENT MEANINGS OF MATTER 7

their relation to the void. The void is an ontological principle, equal and opposite to the atom, but given its existence, no similar status is required for time. It is simply an accident consequent upon the suc- cessive redistributions of the full and empty, "an appearance under the forms of day and night." ' In production of phenomena the temporal dimension may seem quite as indispensable as the spatial ones, but since the atoms are eternally actual, since they are identi- cally the same in any infinitesimal fraction of a second as they are in a month or a millennium, time clearly is no essential ingredient of what things are.

In Plato, however, temporality is an essential property of material things and it is a property that is mothered by the same Receptacle that produced the spatial dimensions. That the Father, or Essence, is never able to transmit its full actuality to its Offspring in space is indicated by calling the offspring a "copy" or "image"; but it is the same impossibility of full communication that renders the "image of eternity" a "moving" one. If it would not be quite accurate to say that time, space, and matter are synonymous concepts for Plato, it is nonetheless true that in any concrete instance of becoming they represent inseparable aspects and dimensions and that all these as- pects take their origin from the Receptacle.16

The treatment of time which leads Aristotle to his definition of it as the "number of movement in respect of the before and after" 17

is remarkably parallel to his treatment of space, with the "now" in this instance playing a role analogous to 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 differs from that of Democritus in that changes of substance, quality, and quantity, as well as those of place, can give rise to rela- tions of "before and after" and in that there are substances that are essentially temporal or "perishable." It differs from that of Plato in the separability of spatial and temporal dimensions of material things: there might be, and Aristotle thinks that there are, material substances which are eternal and hence are not perpetually becoming; and, on the other hand, there might be changes, such as alteration of quality, which involve no spatial rearrangements.18

Our fourth contrast may then be summed up 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. 16 Timaeus 37d-e; cf. also 52d-53c. 17 Phys. iv. 11. 220a 24. 8 Phys. v. 2. 226a 23-36: Meta. xii. 1: Phys. iv. 7. 214a 26-28.

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8 HAROLD J. JOHNSON

rise to temporal relations, nevertheless these relations are not defin- ing characteristics of material things qua material.

5. Another concept frequently involved in the philosophy of na- ture 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 con- cepts of matter become the more we are driven to acknowledge its operations as inevitable, for they follow from the formal mathemati- cal 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 po- tentialities without which those tendencies could not possibly be brought to realization.20

The most interesting of the three concepts of physical necessity- perhaps because it is least current-is that of Plato. Typical of his constant coupling of necessity with its dialectical opposites, "free- dom" or "mind," is a passage from the Timaeus:

Thus far in what we have been saying with small exception the works of intelligence have been set forth, and now we must place by the side of them in our discourse the things which come into being through necessity-for the creation is mixed, being made of necessity and mind. Mind, the ruling power, persuaded necessity to bring the greater part of created things to perfection, and thus and after this manner in the beginning, when the in-

19 Fr. 2, Nahm, 160. 20 Phys. ii. 9. The contrast between Democritus and 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 universal geometry of existence when form may or may not encounter a matter with the potential to receive it. Hence in such a theory it is only when quantitative form is abstracted from matter that its formal causality is wholly determinant and the result completely demonstrable. But mathematical necessity in nature is a logical consequence of a fully actual matter with its quantitative forms inherent in it.

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TIREE ANCIENT MEANINGS OF MATTER 9

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 opera- tions (Democritus)-since it is open to "persuasion"-nor in the in- dispensability 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 intelli- gible, mathematical forms; Platonic matter, on the contrary, is neces- sary in the sense of its resistance to intelligible form; and Aristotelian matter is necessary as the potentialities, often unknown at that par- ticular 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 re- state 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 "re- quire" 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 author of all things.... For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere .. .23

The problem is that "evils, Theodorus," do not "pass away" but 21 Timaeus 47e-48a. 22 Timaeus 48e-49a. 23 Republic ii. 379d.

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10 HAROLD J. JOHNSON

"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 Re- ceptacle 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 impressed upon 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; mat- ter makes its offspring to be particular, relative, temporal, localized, confused, discordant, and defective. The very function of matter is to act as a principle of privation. It is the non-being whose existence must be affirmed to explain how the Being we discover by intellect gets diffused, fragmented, or diluted into the becoming we encounter through the senses.

But is it not true that in Aristotle also matter is a principle of imperfection hostile to form? It is not true, except accidentally. If the marble has flaws or if the foetus fails to receive a proper supply 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.27 In Platonism no em- pirical instance ever fully exemplifies the form-the finest statue and the truest man are in the realm of Essence rather than in this world- and that is why dialectic must transcend the sensible. If Aristotle, on the contrary, believes that we can abstract forms within the sensible, it is because material instances are the only instances of the natural forms there are. Matter is not the principle of privation in Aristotle, but the potentiality that can be now deprived, now in-formed. Its essential character as the substratum that underlies change is 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 onto- logical reverse of the empty, is the bearer of those formal quantitative properties which determine events and phenomena; in Plato we have the sharply opposed doctrine that matter is what resists and debili- tates 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 Theaetetus 176b. 25 Timaeus 53b. 26 Laws x. 896e. 27 Cf. e.g., On the Soul ii. 1-2; Phys. ii. 2. 194b 8. 28 Gen. and Corr. ii. 4. 10.

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THREE ANCIENT MEANINGS OF MATTER 11

to occupy some intermediate ground between the sharply contrasted positions of Democritus and Plato, there is also a sense in which their views of matter stand together in opposition to his; for Aristotle matter is the substratum of all natural contraries; for both Democ- ritus and Plato it is one of the contraries.29

7. Are there features in the theories of knowledge of the three philosophers particularly connected, either as antecedents or conse- quents, with the development of these variant concepts of matter? For both Democritus and Plato matter is in principle unobservable,

29 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 confor- mation 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).

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12 HAROLD J. JOHNSON

and for both, the realm of experience is a realm of phenomena or ap- pearances. The atoms are in principle unobservable because, excep- tion made of fullness or solidity, they are devoid of perceptible quali- ties. Further, no atom could ever be seen since vision itself is an atomic process. And Plato hardly ever refers to his matter, the Re- ceptacle, without touching upon the difficulty with 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 another kind." 31 It is in some sense even more obscure than the realm of the sensible, which nonetheless it contributes to make phenomenal. If we ask why the empirical realm is a realm of appearances for these two philosophers, however, the answers are diametrically opposed. For Plato it is because the empirical always falls short of that which fully and actually is, that is the Essences. But for Democritus, em- pirical qualities must exist, as he says, only "by convention" 32 be- cause they are in addition to what is already fully and unalterably actual. All of experience, except that of the spatial order and varia- tions of full and empty, is in excess of what is really there. Sensory appearance is the surplus by which epistemological supply goes be- yond the ontological demand.

The doctrine of matter of Aristotle, on the other hand, serves to explain both why Aristotelian matter is not in principle unobservable and why the entire empirical world, though not exhaustive of reality, nonetheless enjoys 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 developing foetus is the nutriments ingested by the mother, and neither of these lie beyond empirical observation. Aristotelian space, too, though it was later found to embrace a budget of astronomical errors, took its origin in observed relations of containing, rather than in mathematical postulates. More generally, if it is true that "Aris- totle, 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 confronted with a portion of the actual, and with that portion of the actual whose potentialities for producing form are most akin to our own cognitive potentialities for reproducing it? In summary,

30 Timaeus 52a-b. 81 Timaeus 48e-49a; cf. 29b. 32 Ref. 49 (D. 125, 156), Nahm, 173. 3 Knowles, Aquinas Papers, no. 30 (London: Blackfriars Publications, 1956), 8.

In Aristotle, cf., Gen. and Corr. i. 2. 316a 6-11, Phys. ii. 2. 194b ff.

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THREE ANCIENT MEANINGS OF MATTER 13

then, the empirical world is a proper object of knowledge for Aristotle because it is actual; it is appearance for Plato because it fails to reach the actual; and it is appearance for Democritus because it goes beyond what actuality contains.34

8. Finally, I should like to relate the foregoing considerations to a few aspects of the scientific methods of our three philosophers. We shall then in some sense have completed a circle, since it was with the applicability of logical principles to natural phenomena that we began. One contrast in method is closely associated with the divergent judgments on the veridical character of 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 knowledge by 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 "there is no profit in philosophy either if it does not expel the suffer- ing of the mind." 35 If Aristotle, on the contrary, makes a radical distinction between those theoretical disciplines which are directed to knowledge for its own sake and those practical ones which are sought to improve action,36 this surely conforms with his judgment that the empirical world is not primarily an illusion to be escaped.

Of course, the emancipations sought by the atomists and Plato are different enough. Epicurus says 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 concerns us ...." 37 The illusion he wishes to escape from is superstition and this illusion is, characteristically, an overestimation of the resources of 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 prisoners in a cave, we shall needlessly miss out on "truth and knowledge of realities." 38

34 This doctrine of the phenomenal character of 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 prominence of the four causes in Aristotelianism, on the other hand, corresponds with its epistemological realism.

85 Epicurus, "Fragments from Unknown Sources," in Oates, ed., The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers (New York, 1940), 50. Cf. Fr. 31, Nahm, 212.

36 Meta. i. 1; Nic. Ethics vi, esp. 2. 1139a 21-32. 37 Principal Doctrines xi, cf. Oates, 36. 38 Phaedo 90d.

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14 HAROLD J. JOHNSON

When a philosopher becomes 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 experienced not correspond to the genuine? To provide an explanation the philosopher may have to invoke a third principle in addition to his "appearance" and "reality," a principle that operates in opposition to reality in the production of phenomena. This, it seems to me, is how Democritus and Plato have proceeded. For both of them the method is to account for the empirical as a middle ground or amalgam of conceptual extremes-atoms and void, least part and infinite space, in the case of Democritus; Being and non-being, One and manyness in Plato.39 For both philosophers these extremes, though beyond sen- sation, can be conceptualized more distinctly than empirical objects.40 For both of them one of the extremes-in the case of Democritus the atoms, in the case of Plato the Essences-is the bearer of the homo- geneity, not so apparent at the level of experience, on which the uni- versality of science must rest. For both of them there is, as a conse- quence, one all-embracing science: for Democritus the science of the independently existing least part; for Plato the science of the organic whole possessing its unity through the hierarchy of Forms or Essences. And for both of them, to return to the question which initiated our investigation, the principle of non-contradiction is not fully applicable to nature because the other, and equally necessary, extreme is pre- cisely the privation of what full being must be.

But for Aristotle the method of science is to start with the experi- enced and to work out towards such extremes as explanation requires. In a judgment that runs counter to both the doctrines and practices of his philosophical colleagues he holds that "a science expands not by the interposition of fresh middle terms, but by the apposition of fresh extreme terms."41 And though these extremes are perhaps "better known to nature," they are not "better known to us": 42 our knowl- edge of the substances that are composites of 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 concentrated at one extreme-e.g., the least part, or the hierarchy of Essences-as in atomism or Platonism; universal princi- ples of organization are operative at all levels of the world. Hence

89 Gen. and Corr. ii. 3. 330b 17-18. Cf. Republic v. 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 different levels 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 contradiction is 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 contrary to that which is primary, for all contraries have matter. ...." 43

A word further on how this touches us. There is not one of these theories of matter that in its struggle for

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 exceeded by the "worse [that was] to come from his pupil Aristotle," is, by contrast, surprised at "how many of the basic ideas of modern physics were foreshadowed in the speculations of" Democritus (and Empedocles).44 Richard P. McKeon, however, thinks that "present day conceptions of time, space, matter, motion, and cause are nearer to those of Aristotle than they have been in 400 years";45 and Max Jammer ventures to "suggest a comparison be- tween the notion of physical space in Aristotle's cosmology and the notion of Einstein's 'spherical space' as expounded in earlier relativistic cosmology."46 Finally, Whitehead's magnanimous tribute to the seminal value of "seven notions" in Plato's cosmology is well-known: he thinks that "all philosophy is in fact an endeavour to obtain a coherent system out of some modification of these notions" and that they must be given significant credit for "driving . . . [the peoples of Western Europe] towards their civilization." 4

The point is not merely that one is able to quote competent historians of thought who find the ancient answers relevant to modern inquiries. That relevance is more impressively demonstrated by the divisibility of the comments themselves according to their obvious

43 Meta. xii. 10. 1075b 20-24. Cf. Gen. and Corr. ii. 5. 332a 23-26. 44 Jeans, The Growth of Physical Science (New York, 1958), 52-54. 45 Richard P. McKeon, "The Philosophy of Aristotle," introduction to a projected

but unpublished two-volume anthology of Aristotle's works, made available to stu- dents at the University of Chicago in 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's method to the methods of Plato and Democritus.

46 Jammer, Concepts of Space, 20. 47 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York, 1933), 354, 366.

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16 HAROLD J. JOHNSON

preferences for one or another of the schools. Although the details of argument change drastically as scientific knowledge accumulates, there are fundamental issues that persist. The particular options that have been explored by this paper, for example-whether spatial and tem- poral dimensions are separable, whether we should think of particles conjoined or of fields with local peculiarities, whether the laws of all other natural sciences are reducible to those of physics, how far our physics may be formal-deductive and how far it must be empirical- inductive-these remain to a surprising degree living options. I would venture the claim that for everyone of the specific ancient options described, a competent contemporary proponent of a philosophical choice significantly corresponding with it could be found. Another day would have to document that claim. Meanwhile it should be no occasion for hand-wringing over the indecisiveness and futility of phi- losophy. 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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