memorable fact consisted in their looking for one. [Footnote 2: Aristot. Metaphys. B. 4, p. 1000, a. 10. [Greek: Oi( me\n ou)=n peri\ Ê(si/odon, kai\ pa/ntes o(/soi theo/logoi, mo/non e)phro/ntisan tou= pithanou= tou= pro\s au)tou/s, ê(mô=n d' ô)ligô/rêsan; Theou\s ga\r poiou=ntes ta\s a)rcha\s kai\ e)k theô=n gegone/nai], &c. Aristotle mentions them a few lines afterwards as not worth serious notice, [Greek: peri\ tô=n muthikô=s sophizome/nôn ou)k a)/xion meta\ spoudê=s skopei=n.]] [Side-note: Views of the Ionic philosophers--compared with the more recent abstractions of Plato and Aristotle.] In the theories of these Ionic philosophers, the physical ideas of generation, transmutation, local motion, are found in the foreground: generation in the Kosmos to replace generation by the God. Pythagoras and Empedokles blend with their speculations a good deal both of ethics and theology, which we shall find yet more preponderant when we come to the cosmical theories of Plato. He brings us back to the mythical Prometheus, armed with the geometrical and arithmetical combinations of the Pythagoreans: he assumes a chaotic substratum, modified by the intentional and deliberate construction of the Demiurgus and his divine sons, who are described as building up and mixing like a human artisan or chemist. In the theory of Aristotle we find Nature half personified, and assumed to be perpetually at work under the influence of an appetite for good or regularity, which determines her to aim instinctively and without deliberation (like bees or spiders) at constant ends, though these regular tendencies are always accompanied, and often thwarted, by accessories, irregular, undefinable, unpredictable. Both Plato and Aristotle, in their dialectical age, carried abstraction farther than it had been carried by the Ionic philosophers.[3] Aristotle imputes to the Ionic philosophers that they neglected three out of his four causes (the efficient, formal, and final), and that they attended only to the material. This was a height of abstraction first attained by Plato and himself; in a way sometimes useful, sometimes misleading. The earlier philosophers had not learnt to divide substance from its powers or properties; nor to conceive substance without power as one thing, and power without substance as another. Their primordial substance, with its powers and properties, implicated together as one concrete and without any abstraction, was at once an efficient, a formal, and a material cause: a final cause they did not suppose themselves to want, inasmuch as they always conceived a fixed terminus towards which the agency was directed, though they did not conceive such fixed tendency under the symbol of an appetite and its end. Water, Air, Fire, were in their view not simply inert and receptive patients, impotent until they were stimulated by the active force residing in the ever revolving celestial spheres--but positive agents themselves, productive of important effects.