phuetai], nascitur, grows, by an organic life, and therefore decays
again; which has a beginning, and therefore, I presume, an end. And
Metaphysical means that which we learn to think of after we think of
nature; that which is supernatural, in fact, having neither beginning
nor end, imperishable, immovable, and eternal, which does not become,
but always is. These, at least, are the wisest definitions of these two
terms for us just now; for they are those which were received by the
whole Alexandrian school, even by those commentators who say that
Aristotle, the inventor of the term Metaphysics, named his treatise so
only on account of its following in philosophic sequence his book on
Physics.

But, according to these definitions, the whole history of Alexandria
might be to us, from one point of view, a physical school; for
Alexandria, its society and its philosophy, were born, and grew, and
fed, and reached their vigour, and had their old age, their death, even
as a plant or an animal has; and after they were dead and dissolved, the
atoms of them formed food for new creations, entered into new
organisations, just as the atoms of a dead plant or animal might do.
Was Alexandria then, from beginning to end, merely a natural and
physical phenomenon?

It may have been. And yet we cannot deny that Alexandria was also a
metaphysical phenomenon, vast and deep enough; seeing that it held for
some eighteen hundred years a population of several hundred thousand
souls; each of whom, at least according to the Alexandrian philosophy,
stood in a very intimate relation to those metaphysic things which are
imperishable and immovable and eternal, and indeed, contained them more
or less, each man, woman, and child of them in themselves; having wills,
reasons, consciences, affections, relations to each other; being