Note (return) — Chapter VIII

Those writers 398 are, therefore, clearly in error who assert that the earliest question of Greek philosophy was, What is God? and that various and discordant answers were given, Thales saying, water is God, Anaximenes, air; Heraclitus, fire; Pythagoras, numbers; and so on. The idea of God is a native intuition of the mind. It springs up spontaneously from the depths of the human soul. The human mind naturally recognizes God as an uncreated Mind, and recognizes itself as "the offspring of God." And, therefore, it is simply impossible for it to acknowledge water, or air, or fire, or any material thing to be its God. Now they who reject this fundamental principle evidently misapprehend the real problem of early Grecian philosophic thought. The external world, the material universe, was the first object of their inquiry, and the method of their inquiry was, at the first stage, purely physical. Every object of sense had a beginning and an end; it rose out of something, and it fell back into something. Beneath this ceaseless flow and change there must be some permanent principle. What is that στοιχεῖον--that first element? The changes in the universe seem to obey some principle of law--they have an orderly succession. What is that µορφή--that form, or ideal, or archetype, proper to each thing, and according to which all things are produced? These changes must be produced by some efficient cause, some power or being which is itself immobile, and permanent, and eternal, and adequate to their production. What is that ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως--that first principle of movement Then, lastly, there must be an end for which all things exist--a good reason why things are as they are, and not otherwise. What is that τὸ οὗ ἕνεκεν καῖ τὸ ἀγαθόν--that reason and good of all things? Now these are all ἀρχαί or first principles of the universe. "Common to all first principles," says Aristotle, "is the being, the original, from which a thing is, or is produced, or is known." 399 First principles, therefore, include both elements and causes, and, under certain aspects, elements are also causes, in so far as they are that without which a thing can not be produced. Hence that highest generalization by Aristotle of all first principles; as--1. The Material Cause; 2. The Formal Cause; 3. The Efficient Cause; 4. The Final Cause. The grand subject of inquiry in ancient philosophy was not alone what is the final element from which all things have been produced? nor yet what is the efficient cause of the movement and the order of the universe? but what are those First Principles which, being assumed, shall furnish a rational explanation of all phenomena, of all becoming?