he meaning conveyed by any philosophical term consists
largely of the distinctions which it suggests. Its peculiar quality,
like the physiognomy of the battle-scarred veteran, is a composite of
the controversies which it has survived. There is, therefore, an almost
unavoidable confusion attendant upon the denomination of any early phase
of philosophy as _materialism_. But in the historical beginnings of
thought, as also in the common-sense of all ages, there is at any rate
present a very essential strand of this theory. The naive habit of mind
which, in the sixth century before Christ, prompted successive Greek
thinkers to define reality in terms of water, air, and fire, is in this
respect one with that exhibited in Dr. Samuel Johnson's smiting the
ground with his stick in curt refutation of Bishop Berkeley's
idea-philosophy. There is a theoretical instinct, not accidental or
perverse, but springing from the very life-preserving equipment of the
organism, which attributes reality to _tangible space-filling things
encountered by the body_. For obvious reasons of self-interest the
organism is first of all endowed with a sense of contact, and the more
delicate senses enter into its practical economy as means of
anticipating or avoiding contact. From such practical expectations
concerning the proximity of that which may press upon, injure, or
displace the body, arise the first crude judgments of reality. And these
are at the same time the nucleus of naive philosophy and the germinal
phase of materialism.

[Sidenote: Corporeal Being.]

Sect. 103. The first philosophical movement among the Greeks was a
series of attempts to reduce the tangible world to unity, and of these
the conception offered by Anaximander is of marked interest in its
bearing upon the development of materialism. This philosopher is
remarkable for having _defined_ his first principle, instead of having
chosen it from among the different elements already distinguished by
common-sense. He thought the unity of nature to consist in its periodic
evolution from and return into one infinite sum of material (+to
apeiron+), which, much in the manner of the "nebula" of modern science,
is conceived as both indeterminate in its actual state and infinitely
rich in its potentiality. The conception of matter, the most familiar
commonplace of science, begins to be recognizable. It has here reached
the point of signifying a common substance for all tangible things, a
subs