Early Greek philosophy

by John Burnet

This mass is infinite, like the air of Anaximenes, and it supports itself, since there is nothing surrounding it.[^[700]] Further, the “seeds” of all things which it contains are infinite in number (fr. [1]). But, as the innumerable seeds may be divided into those in which the portions of cold, moist, dense, and dark prevail, and those which have most of the warm, dry, rare, and light in them, we may say that the original mass was a mixture of infinite Air and of infinite Fire. The seeds of Air, of course, contain “portions” of the “things” that predominate in Fire, and vice versa; but we regard everything as being that of which it has most in it. Lastly, there is no void in this mixture, an addition to the theory made necessary by the arguments of Parmenides. It is, however, worthy of note that Anaxagoras added an experimental proof of this to the purely dialectical one of the Eleatics. He used the klepsydra experiment as Empedokles had done (fr. [100]), and also showed the corporeal nature of air by means of inflated skins.[^[701]]

Nous.

132. Like Empedokles, Anaxagoras required some external cause to produce motion in the mixture. Body, Parmenides had shown, would never move itself, as the Milesians had supposed. Anaxagoras called the cause of motion by the name of Nous. It was this which made Aristotle say that he “stood out like a sober man from the random talkers that had preceded him,”[^[702]] and he has often been credited with the introduction of the spiritual into philosophy. The disappointment expressed both by Plato and Aristotle as to the way in which Anaxagoras worked out the theory should, however, make us pause to reflect before accepting too exalted a view of it. Plato[^[703]] makes Sokrates say: “I once heard a man reading a book, as he said, of Anaxagoras, and saying it was Mind that ordered the world and was the cause of all things. I was delighted to hear of this cause, and I thought he really was right.... But my extravagant expectations were all dashed to the ground when I went on and found that the man made no use of Mind at all. He ascribed no causal power whatever to it in the ordering of things, but to airs, and aethers, and waters, and a host of other strange things.” Aristotle, probably with this passage in mind, says:[^[704]] “Anaxagoras uses Mind as a deus ex machina to account for the formation of the world; and whenever he is at a loss to explain why anything necessarily is, he drags it in. But in other cases he makes anything rather than Mind the cause.” These utterances may well suggest that the Nous of Anaxagoras did not really stand on a higher level than the Love and Strife of Empedokles, and this will only be confirmed when we look at what he himself has to say about it.

In the first place, Nous is unmixed (fr. [12]), and does not, like other things, contain a portion of everything. This would hardly be worth saying of an immaterial mind; no one would suppose that to be hot or cold. The result of its being unmixed is that it “has power over” everything, that is to say, in the language of Anaxagoras, it causes things to move.[^[705]] Herakleitos had said as much of Fire, and Empedokles of Strife. Further, it is the “thinnest” of all things, so that it can penetrate everywhere, and it would be meaningless to say that the immaterial is “thinner” than the material. It is true that Nous also “knows all things”; but so, perhaps, did the Fire of Herakleitos,[^[706]] and certainly the Air of Diogenes.[^[707]] Zeller holds, indeed, that Anaxagoras meant to speak of something incorporeal; but he admits that he did not succeed in doing so,[^[708]] and that is historically the important point. Nous is certainly imagined as occupying space; for we hear of greater and smaller parts of it (fr. [12]).

The truth probably is that Anaxagoras substituted Nous for the Love and Strife of Empedokles, because he wished to retain the old Ionic doctrine of a substance that “knows” all things, and to identify this with the new theory of a substance that “moves” all things. Perhaps, too, it was his increased interest in physiological as distinguished from purely cosmological matters that led him to speak of Mind rather than Soul. The former word certainly suggests design more clearly than the latter. But, in any case, the originality of Anaxagoras lies far more in the theory of matter than in that of Nous.

Formation of the worlds.

133. The formation of a world starts with a rotatory motion which Nous imparts to a portion of the mixed mass in which “all things are together” (fr. [13]), and this rotatory motion gradually extends over a wider and wider space. Its rapidity (fr. [9]) produced a separation of the rare and the dense, the cold and the hot, the dark and the light, the moist and the dry (fr. [15]). This separation produces two great masses, the one consisting of the rare, hot, light, and dry, called the “Aether”; the other, in which the opposite qualities predominate, called “Air” (fr. [1]). Of these the Aether or Fire[^[709]] took the outside while the Air occupied the centre (fr. [15]).

The next stage is the separation of the air into clouds, water, earth, and stones (fr. [16]). In this Anaxagoras follows Anaximenes closely. In his account of the origin of the heavenly bodies, however, he showed himself more original. We read at the end of fr. [16] that stones “rush outwards more than water,” and we learn from the doxographers that the heavenly bodies were explained as stones torn from the earth by the rapidity of its revolution and made red-hot by the speed of their own motion.[^[710]] Perhaps the fall of the meteoric stone at Aigospotamoi had something to do with the origin of this theory. It may also be observed that, while in the earlier stages of the world-formation we are guided chiefly by the analogy of water rotating with light and heavy bodies floating in it, we are here reminded rather of a sling.

Innumerable worlds.

134. That Anaxagoras adopted the ordinary Ionian theory of innumerable worlds is perfectly clear from fr. [4], which we have no right to regard as other than continuous.[^[711]] The words “that it was not only with us that things were separated off, but elsewhere too” can only mean that Nous has caused a rotatory movement in more parts of the boundless mixture than one. Aetios certainly includes Anaxagoras among those who held there was only one world; but this testimony cannot be considered of the same weight as that of the fragments.[^[712]] Zeller’s reference of the words “elsewhere, as with us” to the moon is very improbable. Is it likely that any one would say that the inhabitants of the moon “have a sun and moon as with us”?[^[713]]