ABSTRACT
After the Eleatics, the endeavour of philosophers had been to modify the terms of the problem which the Ionians had attacked. Instead of inquiring what is the one thing which becomes all other things, they asked what essential plurality can be reconciled with the true unity of Being and, by unions and separations, account for the appearance of becoming. On the other hand, the physicists whom we shall now discuss behaved as if the Eleatic criticism had never existed. For them, the problem of becoming took the form which it had had for the philosophers whom the Eleatics had combated; their monism was that of the old Milesians. Herein they were reactionaries. But, in order to invest their erudite resuscitations of a vanished past with a semblance of youth, they gave them a colouring borrowed from later doctrines. So they were, at the same time, “eclectics.”
