The Summary of Physics Restored

13Philosophers believed in a certain first matter older than the elements, but because they knew little of it, they explained little, and that as though through a cloud. It is without qualities and accidents, yet their first subject; empty of quantity, yet that through which all things have quantity; simple, yet the seat of contraries; unknown to the senses, yet the basis of sensible things; extended everywhere, yet perceived nowhere; always desiring forms, holding none; the root of all bodies, yet something that can be conceived only by an operation of the mind and cannot be sensed. In short, it is actually nothing, potentially everything. Thus they posited a fictitious and shadowy foundation of nature.