The Ionian science of nature
Author:
R.G. Collingwood
Source:
Collingwood, R.G., 1945, The Idea of Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
pp. 29-30.
The
Ionian philosophers of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. devoted so much
attention to cosmological problems that Aristotle, who is by far our most
important authority for the history of early Greek thought, refers to them in a
body as ______ [Greek word], theorists of nature. According to Aristotle, the
characteristic of this Ionian cosmology is the fact that whenever its devotees
ask the question: ‘What is nature?’ they at once convert it into the question:
‘What are things made of?’ or ‘What is the original, unchanging substance which
underlies all the changes of the natural world with which we are acquainted?’
People who could ask this question
must have already settled in their mind a large number of preliminary points;
and if a whole school of thinkers; whose work extends over the best part of a
century, could agree in asking the same question the preliminary points must
have been very settled. I will mention three of them.
1.
That there are natural things: in other words, that among the
things with which we are acquainted some, no doubt, are ‘artificial’, that is,
the products of ‘skill’ on the part of human or other animals, but others are
‘natural’, the contradictory of ‘artificial’, things that happen or exist of
themselves and not because someone has made or produced them.
2.
That ‘natural’ things constitute a ‘single world of nature’:
in other words, that the things which happen or exist of themselves have in
common not only the negative characteristic of not having been produced by
‘skill’ but certain positive characteristics as well, so that it is possible to
make statements about them which apply not merely to certain selected groups of
them but to all of them together.
These two points are indispensable
presuppositions of any ‘science of nature’. The Greeks had worked them out,
through what processes of inquiry or reflection we do not know at all, and with
what amount of help from Mesopotamians and Egyptians and other non-Greek
peoples we know only very slightly, by the seventh century B.C.
3.
That what is common to all natural things is being made of a single
‘substance’ or material. This was the special or peculiar
presupposition of Ionian physics; and the school of Miletus may be regarded as
a group of thinkers who made it their special business to take this as their
‘working hypothesis’ and see what could be made of it: asking in particular the
question: ‘That being so, what can we say about this single substance?’ They
did not consciously treat it as a ‘working hypothesis’: it cannot be doubted
that they accepted it as an absolute and unquestioned presupposition of all
their thinking; but the historian of thought, looking back on their
achievement, cannot fail to see that what they really did was to test this idea
of a single universal substance and to find it wanting.