formed from ὕλη, matter, and ζωή, life, the name of a sect of atheists amongst the ancient Greek philosophers, who maintained that matter had some natural perception, strictly so called, without animal sensation or reflection; but that this imperfect life occasioned that organization whence sensation and reflection afterwards arose. Of these, some held that there was only one life, which they called a plastic nature, presiding regularly and invariably over the whole corporeal universe, represented by them as a kind of large plant or vegetable. These were called the cosmoplasmic and stoical atheists, because the Stoics believed such a nature, though many of them supposed it to be the instrument of the Deity. But others thought that every particle of matter was endowed with life, and represented the mundane system as depending upon a certain mixture of chance and plastic or orderly nature united together. These were called the Stratoni, from Strato Lampsacus, 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, generative and corruptible; and others again adopted the atomical or Democritical system, by which the production of the universe is ascribed to atoms and figures.