The Book of the Knowledge of Truth or the Cause of All Causes translated from the Syriac original into German by Karl Kayser. Kayser (1843-1910) was a Lutheran minister and church historian. Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy inquired about the "fundamental principle" of all being. However, this should not only be understood as searching for a "cause" in the contemporary sense of the word. Rather, they sought a kind of primordial substance or an all-encompassing principle, the Arché, or principles such as the Warm, the Cold, Fire, or Air. The concept of cause initially had a moral-legal significance and referred to a responsible party or culprit. By the end of the 5th century BC, it was used by Hippocratic physicians to denote the causes of diseases, thus for the first time clearly in a causal sense.