^ f. UBBARV - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

GREEK THEORIES OF
ELEMENTARY COGNITION
FROM ALCMAEON TO ARISTOTLE
INTRODUCTION
§ I. The aim of the following pages is to give a close General
historical account of the various theories, partly physio- ^^^""
logical and partly psychological, by which the Greek
philosophers from Alcmaeon to Aristotle endeavoured to
explain the elementary phenomena of Cognition. The
pre-Aristotelean writers who applied themselves to this
subject, and of whose writings we possess any considerable
Information, are Alcmaeon of Crotona, Empedocles,
Democritus, Anaxagoras, Diogenes of Apolronia, and
Plato. We propose to set forth here their speculations,
together with those of Aristotle, as to the so-called Five
Senses, Sensation in general, and the psychical processes,
such as Imagination and Memory, which involve the synthetic
function referred by Aristotle to Sense, and named
by his Latin commentators the Sensus Communis. We shall
concern ourselves as little as possible with metaphysical or
epistemological questions, attending rather to what the
writers above mentioned, together with Aristotle, did, or
tried to do, for empirical psychology, to the extent which
we have defined. Aristotle in his psychological teaching
sums up for us the results of the work of his predecessors,
whose doctrines he sifted and compared. Accepting, rejecting,
or modifying these, he developed a scheme of psychology
which in minuteness and comprehensiveness transcends
anything of the same kind achieved before. But if this is
to be thoroughly understood, it must be considered in due
connexion with preceding schemes ; and to place it in this