[62] Sextus Empiricus embodies this argument of Plato among the difficulties which he starts against the Dogmatists, adv. Mathematicos, x. s. 302-308.
Problems and difficulties of which Sokrates first sought solution.
That which is interesting here to note, is the sort of Cause which first gave satisfaction to the speculative mind of Sokrates. In the instance of the growing youth, he notes two distinct facts, the earliest of which is (assuming certain other facts as accompanying conditions) the cause of the latest. But in most of the other instances, the fact is one which does not admit of explanation. Comparisons of eight men with ten men, of a yard with half a yard, of a tall man with a short man, are mental appreciations, beliefs, affirmations, not capable of being farther explained or accounted for: if any one disputes your affirmation, you prove it to him, by placing him in a situation to make the comparison for himself, or to go through the computation which establishes the truth of what you affirm. It is not the juxtaposition of eight men which makes them to be eight (they were so just as much when separated by ever so wide an interval): though it may dispose or enable the spectator to count them as eight. We may count the yard measure (whether actually bisected or not), either as one yard, or as two half yards, or as three feet, or thirty-six inches. Whether it be one, or two, or three, depends upon the substantive which we choose to attach to the numeral, or upon the comparison which we make (the unit which we select) on the particular occasion.
Expectations entertained by Sokrates from the treatise of Anaxagoras. His disappointment. His distinction between causes and co-efficients.
With this description of Cause Sokrates grew dissatisfied when he extended his enquiries into physical and physiological problems. Is it the blood, or air, or fire, whereby we think? and such like questions. Such enquiries — into the physical conditions of mental phenomena — did really admit of some answer, affirmative, or negative. But Sokrates does not tell us how he proceeded in seeking for an answer: he only says that he failed so completely, as even to be disabused of his supposed antecedent knowledge. He was in this perplexity when he first heard of the doctrine of Anaxagoras. “Nous or Reason is the regulator and the cause of all things.” Sokrates interpreted this to mean (what it does not appear that Anaxagoras intended to assert)[63] that the Kosmos was an animal or person[64] having mind or Reason analogous to his own: that this Reason was an agent invested with full power and perpetually operative, so as to regulate in the best manner all the phenomena of the Kosmos; and that the general cause to be assigned for every thing was one and the same — “It is best thus”; requiring that in each particular case you should show how it was for the best. Sokrates took the type of Reason from his own volition and movements; supposing that all the agencies in the Kosmos were stimulated or checked by cosmical Reason for her purposes, as he himself put in motion his own bodily members. This conception of Cause, borrowed from the analogy of his own rational volition, appeared to Sokrates very captivating, though it had not been his own first conception. But he found that Anaxagoras, though proclaiming the doctrine as a principium or initiatory influence, did not make applications of it in detail; but assigned as causes, in most of the particular cases, those agencies which Sokrates considered to be subordinate and instrumental, as his own muscles were to his own volition. Sokrates will not allow such agencies to be called Causes: he says that they are only co-efficients indispensable to the efficacy of the single and exclusive Cause — Reason. But he tells us himself that most enquirers considered them as Causes; and that Anaxagoras himself produced them as such. Moreover we shall see Plato himself in the Timæus, while he repeats this same distinction between Causes Efficient and Causes Co-efficient — yet treats these latter as Causes also, though inferior in regularity and precision to the Demiurgic Nous.[65]
[63] I have given (in chap. i. p. 48 seq.) an abridgment and explanation of what seems to have been the doctrine of Anaxagoras.
[64] Plato, Timæus, p. 30 D. τόνδε τὸν κόσμον, ζῶον ἔμψυχον ἔννουν τε, &c.
[65] Plato, Timæus, p. 46 C-D. αἴτια — ξυναίτια — ξυμμεταίτια. He says that most persons considered the ξυναίτια as αἴτια. And he himself registers them as such (Timæus, p. 68 E). He there distinguishes the αἴτια and ξυναίτια as two different sorts of αἴτια, the divine and the necessary, in a remarkable passage: where he tells us that we ought to study the divine causes, with a view to the happiness of life, as far as our nature permits — and the necessary causes for the sake of the divine: for that we cannot in any way apprehend, or understand, or get sight of the divine causes alone, without the necessary causes along with them (69 A).
In Timæus, pp. 47-48, we find again νοῦς and ἀνάγκη noted as two distinct sorts of causes co-operating to produce the four elements. It is farther remarkable that Necessity is described as “the wandering or irregular description of Cause” — τὸ τῆς πλανωμένης εἶδος αἰτίας. Eros and Ἀνάγκη are joined as co-operating — in Symposion, pp. 195 C, 197 B.
Sokrates imputes to Anaxagoras the mistake of substituting physical agencies in place of mental. This is the same which Aristophanes and others imputed to Sokrates.