fable, invisible, incorporeal God, flashing through the whole world with rapid thoughts.1

The leading thought in the teaching of Empedocles, freed from its theological shell, meets us again in the system of the Ionian Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras is the founder of corpuscular physics, and, by his hypothesis of the ordering vous, anticipates the teleology of Plato and Aristotle.

ANAXAGORAS 2 was born at Clazomen in Ionia, of an illustrious family. He seems to have emigrated to Athens about 460, and to have been, for thirty years, the central figure in this new intellectual centre of Greece. His friendship for Pericles, Euripides, and Protagoras, and his profound contempt for the official religion made it necessary for him to retire to Lampsacus towards the close of his life. Here he died about 429 B. C. Like the majority of the great physicists of antiquity, he left a book Tepi púoews, a few fragments of which are still extant.

Anaxagoras opposes Heraclitus in two essential points: 1. He opposes his dynamism with a mechanical cos mogony.

2. He substitutes dualism for hylozoistic monism, as suming the existence of an unintelligent, inert substance and of an intelligent principle, the cause of motion.

1 Mullach, p. 12, v 395:

Φρὴν ἱερὴ καὶ ἀθέσφατος ἔπλετο μοῦνον

φροντίσι κόσμον ἅπαντα καταΐσσουσα θοῇσιν.

2 Aristotle, Met., I., 3; passim ; Simplicius, In Phys., f. 33, 34, 35, 38; Diog. Laertius; Fragments collected by Schaubach (Leipsic, 1827), Schorn (Bonn, 1829), Mullach (I., pp. 243 ff.), Ritter and Preller (pp. 112 ff.); [Burnet (pp. 282 ff.); Breier, Die Philosophie des Anaxagoras, Berlin, 1810]; Zévort, Dissertation sur la vie et la doctrine d'Anaxagore, Paris, 1848.

1. THE MATERIALS OF THE COSMOGONY.- Matter cannot be reduced to a single element, to a homogeneous substance, like water, air, or fire, that may be transformed into other substances. It is inconceivable how a substance can become another substance. Hence there are several primitive elements, and not only four, as Empedocles teaches; nay, there is an infinite number of them. These -germs of things (σπéρμата) are infinite in number and infinitely small (χρήματα ἄπειρα καὶ πλῆθος καὶ σμικρόTηTа), uncreated, indestructible, and absolutely unchangeable in essence. The quantity of these first principles is always the same; nothing can be destroyed or added (πάντα ἴσα ἀεί . . . ἀεὶ πάντα οὐδὲν ἐλάσσω ἐστὶν οὐδὲ New); they change neither in quality nor in quantity. Nothing comes into being or passes away. Our usual notions of birth (coming-into-being) and death (passingaway) are absolutely wrong. Nothing is produced ex nihilo, and nothing is lost; things are formed by the combination of pre-existing germs, and disappear by the disin tegration of these germs, which still continue to exist. Hence it would be better to call coming into being, mixture, and passing away or death, separation. There is no other change except change of place and grouping, external metamorphosis, movement; the notion of change of essence or transubstantiation is a contradiction.

2. EFFICIENT AND FINAL CAUSES OF THE COSMOGONY. Anaxagoras no longer regards the motion. which produces and destroys things as an original and eternal reality, inherent in the very nature of the elements. The latter are inert and incapable of moving by themselves. Hence they cannot account for the move

1 Simplicius, In Phys., 34: Τὸ δὲ γίνεσθαι καὶ ἀπόλλυσθαι οὐκ ὀρθῶς νομίζουσιν οἱ Ἕλληνες· οὐδὲν γὰρ χρῆμα οὐδὲ γίνεται οὐδὲ ἀπόλλυται ἀλλ ̓ ἀπὸ ἐόντων χρημάτων συμμίσγεταί τε καὶ διακρίνεται. καὶ οὕτως ἂν ὀρθῶς καλοῖεν τό τε γίνεσθαι συμμίσγεσθαι, καὶ τὸ ἀπόλλυσθαι διακρίνεσθαι.

ment in the world and the order which rules it. In order to explain the cosmos, we must assume, in addition to the material, inert, and unintelligent elements, an element that possesses a force and intelligence of its own (vous). This element of elements is absolutely simple and homogeneous; it is not mixed with the other elements, but is absolutely distinct from them. The latter are wholly passive; the voûs, however, is endowed with spontaneous activity; it is perfectly free (aРтокρаτýs), and the source of all movement and life in the world. The inferior elements have no consciousness of their own; the mind knows all things past, present, and future; it has arranged and organized everything with design and according to its teleological fitness; it is the eternal governor of the universe, more powerful than all the other elements put together.

3. COSMOGONY. In the beginning, the inert and unintelligent elements were all jumbled together (óμoû Távτа). In this original chaos (μîyμa), everything was in everything: gold, silver, air, ether, all things which are now separated, formed an indeterminate and inert mass. The intelligent substance alone lived a distinct life of its own. Then it entered the chaos and disentangled it, making the cosmos out of it (εἶτα νοῦς ἐλθὼν πάντα διεκόσunoe). The germs, being set in motion by the Nous, were separated and mingled together again according to their inner affinities. From the point where movement is imparted to the chaos, the whirling motion (divos) gradually extends over a wider and wider space to all parts of the world; it continues, as is proved by the rotation of the heavens, and will continue without interruption until the μiyua is completely separated. Our earth is a cylindrical body and is composed of the heaviest germs, which were carried towards the centre of the world by the orig inal motion. The lighter corpuscles, which form water

were deposited upon this solid mass; higher up, the atmo sphere is formed by the germs of air; at last, in the heavenly regions, the most subtle elements, the fiery ether, are mixed together again. A second separation of elements takes place, and the original motion parts off from the earth the different solid, mineral, and other bodies which compose it; from the water it parts off the different liquids, and so on, until our central world receives. the shape which it now has. The stars are solid masses, which were torn from the earth by the rotatory motion originally possessed by it in common with the rest of the universe, and which were ignited by coming in contact with the celestial ether. The sun is a fiery mass, μúdpos diáπuρos. The moon has mountains and valleys in it, and borrows its light from the sun.

The views which we have just expounded forecast the cosmogonic theories of Buffon, Kant, and Laplace. Anaxagoras also anticipates comparative physiology by advancing the principle of the continuity of beings, by pointing out the unity of purpose in the diverse vegetable and animal types. In spite of all that has been said, however, he is so far from being a spiritualist in the Cartesian sense of the term, that he conceives animals, and even plants, as sharing in the vous. If man is more intelligent than animals, it is, he believes, because his mind employs more developed organs. All living things, without exception, are endowed with mind.

How do living beings partake of mind? Does the intelligent principle of Anaxagoras exist outside of these beings, or is it but the sum of all the intelligences, all the purposes, and all the motive forces, whence movement in general results? On the one hand, it is certain that, inasmuch as the voûs knows all things past, present, and future, and knows them before the organization of matter, it in no wise resembles either the Substance of

Spinoza or the active Idea of Hegel; for the Substance of Spinoza and the Idea of Hegel know things only through the mediation of the human brain; that is to say, by means of previously-organized matter. Anaxagoras is so decided in his assumption that the vous is free and conscious of its action, that he regards the word Fate (eiμapμévn) as devoid of meaning. Besides, the very term which he uses to designate the motive principle signifies reason, purpose. He seems to make a transcendent being of it, one that exists independently of other beings, and acts upon them in a purely mechanical way. He even seems to consider these beings, not as intelligent in the true sense of the word, but as automata which appear to be intelligent without really being so. On the other hand, he speaks of the presence of the vous in living creatures as though he were a pantheist. The long and short of it is, the thinkers of this remote age never broached the questions of transcendency and immanency, personality and impersonality, conscious intelligence and unconscious intelligence. Heraclitus found nothing objectionable in assuming a primitive substance and a perpetual state of change. Similarly, we may suppose, Anaxagoras maintained both the transcendency and the immanency of the vous, without even suspecting that he was contradicting himself.

The same may be said in answer to the question whether the vous of Anaxagoras is simply less material than other substances, or whether it is an absolutely immaterial entity. It is undoubtedly true, on the one hand, that the attributes of the vous are altogether like those of the spirit of spiritualism, and that the vous seems to have nothing in. common with matter except existence. Yet, on the other hand, there seems to be but a difference of degree between the vous and material substances: the vous, in fact, is the finest, the most mobile thing of all (XETTÓтATOV TÁVTOV χρημάτων); it is identical with the ἀὴρ ψυχή of Anax