Handbook of the history of philosophy / by Albert Schwegler; translated and annotated by James Hutchison Stirling.

  • Schwegler, Albert, 1819-1857.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Handbook of the history of philosophy / by Albert Schwegler; translated and annotated by James Hutchison Stirling. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    35/520 (page 7)
    Tonics, or of the quantitative principle of the Pytha- goreans, they proposed, consequently, an intelligible prin- ciple. 4. And thus there was completed the first or analytic period of Greek philosophical development, in order to give place to the second or synthetic period. The Eleatics had sacrificed to their principle of pure being this mundane existence with all its separate existences. But denial of nature and the world could not possibly be carried out. The reality of both pressed, against their wills, in on them, and they had themselves, though only hypothetically and under protest, been necessitated to speak of them. But from their abstract being they had no bridge, no longer any return to the concrete being of sense. Their principle was to have been an explanatory ground of existence, of the vicissitude of existence, and it was none. The problem, to find a principle that should explain the becoming, the vicissitude of existence, was left but the more urgent. Heraclitus, then, ap- peared now with his solution, and asserted for absolute principle the unity of being and non-being,—becoming. According to him, it belonged to the very nature of things that they should be in incessant change, in infi- nite flux. 'All fleets.' We have here, at the same time, in place of a primitive matter, as with the Ionics, the idea of a primitive living force, the first attempt to explain existence and the movement of existence by a principle that had been analytically acquired. After Heraclitus the question of the cause of becoming re- mained the chief interest and the motive of philosophical progress. 5. Becoming is unity of being and non-being. Into these two moments the Heraclitic principle was by the Atomists consciously sundered. Heraclitus, namely, had without doubt enunciated the principle of becoming, but only as fact of experience ; he had only named, but not explained, the law of becoming : the point now was to demonstrate the necessity of that universal law. Why is the all in constant flux, in eternal movement ? It was evidently necessary to advance from the indefinite unity of matter and motive force to a conscious and de- finite distinction, to the mechanical separation of both. Thus it was that to JEmpedocles matter became the principle of being, fixed and permanent being, while force became the principle of movement. We have here a