ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the eager and relentless search for the Origins and for the One behind and before the phenomena. A great deal of speculation went always into the location and description of the One, but the postulate that there is something ultimate was never questioned. The search for the substratum is, in its main aspects, ever the same, yet it is also fascinatingly plural. The Plotinian pattern is repeated by various thinkers, while others argue that Plotinus locked himself up in a self-contained system, without an exit. The state of the question of the substratum is supposed to have drastically changed with Immanuel Kant's denial of the problem's validity. The Empedoclean substratum is mobile, but this does not mean that it is mobility. Today's physicist too denies the substratum on which all of classical physics, whether of Aristotle or Lord Kelvin, was built.
