Strato

, of Lampsacus, the successor of Theophrastus in the charge of the Peripatetic school, flourished in the third century B. C. and presided eighteen years over that school with a hi;;h degree of reputation for learning and eloquence. Ptolemy Philadelphus made him his preceptor, and repaid his services with a royal present of eighty | talents. He died about the end of the 127th Olympiad. His opinions have been suspected of atheism. Brucker collects from them that “there is inherent in nature a principle of motion, or force, without intelligence, which is the only cause of the production and dissolution of bodies: that the world has neither been formed by the agency of a deity, distinct from matter, nor by an intelligent animating principle, but has arisen from a force innate to matter, originally excited by accident, and since continuing to act, according to the peculiar qualities of natural bodies.” It does not appear, adds Brucker, that Strato expressly either denied or asserted the existence of a divine nature; but, in excluding all idea of deity from the formation of the world, it cannot be doubted, that he indirectly excluded from his system the doctrine of the existence of the Supreme Being. Strato also taught, that the seat of the soul is in the middle of the brain; and that it only acts by means of the senses. Brucker has a more laboured defence of Strato in a dissertation inserted in Schelhorn’s “Amputates Litterarije.” ¹