§ 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 substance that in its own general and omnipresent nature is without the special marks that distinguish these tangible things from one another. And in so far the philosophy of Anaximander is materialistic.
[Sidenote: Corporeal Processes. Hylozoism and Mechanism.]
§ 104. But the earliest thinkers are said to be _hylozoists_, rather than strict materialists, because of their failure to make certain distinctions in connection with the _processes_ of matter. The term hylozoism unites with the conception of the formless material of the world (+hylê+), that of an animating power to which its formations and transformations are due. Hylozoism itself was not a deliberate synthesis of these two conceptions, but a primitive practical tendency to universalize the conception, of life. Such "animism" instinctively associates with an object's bulk and hardness a capacity for locomotion and general initiative. And the material principles defined by the philosophers retain this vague and comprehensive attribute as a matter of course, until it is distinguished and separated through attempts to understand it.
That aspect of natural process which was most impressive to Greek minds of the reflective type was the alternation of "generation and decay." In full accord with his more ancient master, Epicurus, the Latin poet Lucretius writes: