One of the immediate followers of Aristotle was Theophrastus, born Ol 102, 2 (371 B.C.); though a man of distinction, he can still only be esteemed a commentator on Aristotle. For Aristotle is so rich a treasure-house of philosophic conceptions, that much material is found in him which is ready for further working upon, which may be put forward more abstractly, and in which individual propositions may be brought into prominence. However Aristotle’s manner of procedure, which is to take an empirical starting point of ratiocination [Raisonnement], and to comprehend this in the focus of the speculative Notion, is characteristic of his mind, without being one which, on its own account, can be freely elevated into a method and a principle. Thus of Theophrastus as of many others (Dicæarchus of Messina, for instance), amongst whom Strato of Lampsacus, the successor of Theophrastus, is best known, there is not much to tell. As regards Dicæarchus, Cicero says, (Tusc. Quæst. I. 31, 10) that he controverted the immortality of the soul, for he asserted that “the soul is no more than an empty name, and the whole of the capacities and powers with which we act and feel are equally extended over all living bodies, and inseparable from the body; for it is nothing but the body so constituted as to live and feel through a certain symmetry and proportion in its body.” Cicero gives in an historical manner a result as he made it comprehensible to himself, without any speculative conception. Stobæus (Eclog. phys. p. 796), on the other hand, quotes from Dicæarchus that he held the soul to be “a harmony of the four elements.” We have only a little general information to give of Strato, that he acquired great fame as a physicist, and that his conception of nature went upon mechanical lines, and yet not on those of Leucippus and Democritus, and later, of Epicurus; for, according to Stobæus (Eclog. phys. p. 298), he made warmth and cold into elements. Hence, if what is said of him is accurate, he was most unfaithful to the beliefs of Aristotle, because he led everything back to mechanism and chance and did away with the immanent end, without accepting the false teleology of modern times. At least, Cicero (De nat. Deor. I. 13) relates of him that he maintained that “divine strength lies altogether in nature, which has in itself the causes of origination, of growth, and of decay, but lacks all sensation and conformation.” The other Peripatetics occupied themselves more with working up individual doctrines of Aristotle, with bringing out his works in a commentated form, which is more or less rhetorical in character, though similar in content. But in practical life the Peripatetic school maintained as the principle of happiness, the unity of reason and inclination. We thus may set aside any further expansion of the Peripatetic philosophy, because it has no longer the same interest, and later on tended to become a popular philosophy (Vol. I. p. 479, Vol. II. p. 130); in this mode it no longer remained an Aristotelian philosophy, although this, too, as what is really speculative, must coincide most closely with actuality. This decay of the Aristotelian philosophy is, indeed, closely connected with the circumstance already mentioned (pp. 126-128), that the Aristotelian writings soon disappeared, and that the Aristotelian philosophy did not retain its place so much through these documents as through the traditions in the school, whereby they soon underwent material changes; and amplifications of Aristotle’s doctrines were brought about, as to which it is not known whether some may not have slipped into what pass for his works.