formed of νύξ, matter, and ζωή, life, the name of a sect of atheists among the ancient Greek philosophers, who held matter to be animated; maintaining that matter had some natural perception, without animal sensation, or reflection in itself considered; but that this imperfect life occasioned that organization whence sensation and reflection afterwards arose. Of these, some held only one life, which they called a PLASTIC nature, presiding regularly and invariably over the whole corporeal universe, which they represented as a kind of large plant or vegetable; these were called the cosmoplastic and stical atheists, because the Stoics held such a nature, though many of them supposed it to be the instrument of the Deity. Others thought that every particle of matter was ended with life, and made the mundane system to depend upon a certain mixture of chance and plastic or orderly nature united together. These were called the Stratonici, from Strato Lampascenus, a disciple of Theophrastus, called also Physicus (Cicero de Nat. Deor. lib. i. cap. 13.), who was first a celebrated Peripatetic, and afterwards formed this new system of atheism for himself. Besides these two forms of atheism, some of the ancient philosophers were Hylopathians, or ANAXIMANDRIANS, deriving all things from dead and stupid matter, in the way of qualities and forms, generable and corruptible; and others again adopted the ATOMICAL or Democratic system, who ascribe the production of the universe to atoms and figures. See on this subject Culworth's Intellectual System, book i. chap. 3.