urged Anaxagoras to a memorable hypothesis. Obviously the conceptions
themselves moved themselves, were not pushed and had no cause of
motion outside themselves. Therefore he said to himself, there exists
a something which bears in itself the origin and the commencement
of motion; secondly, however, he notices that this conception was
moving not only itself but also something quite different, the body.
He discovers therefore, in the most immediate experience an effect
of conceptions upon expansive matter, which makes itself known as
motion in the latter. That was to him a fact; and only incidentally
it stimulated him to explain this fact. Let it suffice that he had a
regulative schema for the motion in the world,--this motion he now
understood either as a motion of the true isolated essences through
the Conceptual Principle, the Nous, or as a motion through a something
already moved. That with his fundamental assumption the latter kind,
the mechanical transmission of motions and impacts likewise contained
in itself a problem, probably escaped him; the commonness and every-day
occurrence of the effect through impact most probably dulled his eye to
the mysteriousness of impact. On the other hand he certainly felt the
problematic, even contradictory nature of an effect of conceptions upon
substances existing in themselves and he also tried therefore to trace
this effect back to a mechanical push and impact which were considered
by him as quite comprehensible. For the Nous too was without doubt such
a substance existing in itself and was characterised by him as a very
delicate and subtle matter, with the specific quality of thinking.
With a character assumed in this way, the effect of this matter upon
other matter had of course to be of exactly the same kind as that
which another substance exercises upon a third, _i.e.,_ a mechanical
effect, moving by pressure and impact. Still the philosopher had now a
substance which moves itself and other things, a substance of which the
motion did not come from outside and depended on no one else: whereas
it seemed almost a matter of indifference how this automobilism was
to be conceived of, perhaps similar to that pushing themselves hither
and thither of very fragile and small globules of quicksilver. Among
all questions which concern motion there is none more troublesome than
the question as to the beginning of motion. For if one may be allowed
to conceive of all remaining motions as effect and consequences, then
nevertheless the first primal motion is still to be explained; for the
mechanical motions, the first link of the chain certainly cannot lie in
a mechanical motion, since that would be as good as recurring to the
nonsensical idea of the _causa sui._ But likewise it is not feasible
to attribute to the eternal, unconditional things a motion of their
own, as it were from the beginning, as dowry of their existence. For
motion cannot be conceived without a direction whither and whereupon,
therefore only as relation and condition; but a thing is no longer
"entitative-in-itself" and "unconditional," if according to its nature
it refers necessarily to something existing outside of it. In this
embarrassment Anaxagoras thought he had found an extraordinary help
and salvation in that Nous, automobile and otherwise independent; the
nature of that Nous being just obscure and veiled enough to produce the
deception about it, that its assumption also involves that forbidden
_causa sui._ To empiric observation it is even an established fact that
Conception is not a _causa sui_ but the effect of the brain, yea, it
must appear to that observation as an odd eccentricity to separate the
"mind," the product of the brain, from its _causa_ and still to deem it
existing after this severing. This Anaxagoras did; he forgot the brain,
its marvellous design, the delicacy and intricacy of its convolutions
and passages and he decreed the "Mind-In-Itself." This "Mind-In-Itself"
alone among all substances had Free-will,--a grand discernment! This
Mind was able at any odd time to begin with the motion of the things
outside it; on the other hand for ages and ages it could occupy itself
with itself--in short Anaxagoras was allowed to assume a _first_ moment
of motion in some primeval age, as the _Chalaza_ of all so-called
Becoming; _i.e.,_ of all Change, namely of all shifting and rearranging
of the eternal substances and their particles, Although the Mind itself
is eternal, it is in no way compelled to torment itself for eternities
with the shifting about of grains of matter; and certainly there was a
time and a state of those matters--it is quite indifferent whether that
time was of long or short duration--during which the Nous had not acted
upon them, during which they were still unmoved. That is the period of
the Anaxagorean chaos.
16
The Anaxagorean chaos is not an immediately evident conception; in
order to grasp it one must have understood the conception which our
philosopher had with respect to the so-called "Becoming." For in
itself the state of all heterogeneous "Elementary-existences" before
all motion would by no means necessarily result in an absolute mixture
of all "seeds of things," as the expression of Anaxagoras runs, an
intermixture, which he imagined as a complete pell-mell, disordered
in its smallest parts, after all these "Elementary-existences" had
been, as in a mortar, pounded and resolved into atoms of dust, so that
now in that chaos, as in an amphora, they could be whirled into a
medley. One might say that this conception of the chaos did not contain
anything inevitable, that one merely needed rather to assume any chance
position of all those "existences," but not an infinite decomposition
of them; an irregular side-by-side arrangement was already sufficient;
there was no need of a pell-mell, let alone such a total pell-mell.
What therefore put into Anaxagoras' head that difficult and complex
conception? As already said: his conception of the empirically given
Becoming. From his experience he drew first a most extraordinary
proposition on the Becoming, and this proposition necessarily resulted
in that doctrine of the chaos, as its consequence.
The observation of the processes of evolution in nature, not a
consideration of an earlier philosophical system, suggested to
Anaxagoras the doctrine, that _All originated from All;_ this was the
conviction of the natural philosopher based upon a manifold, and at the
bottom, of course, excessively inadequate induction. He proved it thus:
if even the contrary could originate out of the contrary, _e.g.,_ the
Black out of the White, everything is possible; that however did happen
with the dissolution of white snow into black water. The nourishment of
the body he explained to himself in this way: that in the articles of
food there must be invisibly small constituents of flesh or blood or
bone which during alimentation became disengaged and united with the
homogeneous in the body. But if All can become out of All, the Firm out
of the Liquid, the Hard out of the Soft, the Black out of the White,
the Fleshy out of Bread, then also All must be contained in All. The
names of things in that case express only the preponderance of the one
substance over the other substances to be met with in smaller, often
imperceptible quantities. In gold, that is to say, in that which one
designates _a potiore_ by the name "gold," there must be also contained
silver, snow, bread, and flesh, but in very small quantities; the
whole is called after the preponderating item, the gold-substance.
But how is it possible, that one substance preponderates and fills a
thing in greater mass than the others present? Experience shows, that
this preponderance is gradually produced only through Motion, that
the preponderance is the result of a process, which we commonly call
Becoming. On the other hand, that "All is in All" is not the result
of a process, but, on the contrary, the preliminary condition of all
Becoming and all Motion, and is consequently previous to all Becoming.
In other words: experience teaches, that continually the like is
added to the like, _e.g.,_ through nourishment, therefore originally
those homogeneous substances were not together and agglomerated, but
they were separate. Rather, in all empiric processes coming before
our eyes, the homogeneous is always segregated from the heterogeneous
and transmitted (_e.g.,_ during nourishment, the particles of flesh
out of the bread, &c), consequently the pell-mell of the different
substances is the older form of the constitution of things and in point
of time previous to all Becoming and Moving. If all so-called Becoming
is a segregating and presupposes a mixture, the question arises,
what degree of intermixture this pell-mell must have had originally.
Although the process of a moving on the part of the homogeneous to
the homogeneous--_i.e.,_ Becoming--has already lasted an immense
time, one recognises in spite of that, that even yet in all things
remainders and seed-grains of all other things are enclosed, waiting
for their segregation, and one recognises further that only here and
there a preponderance has been brought about; the primal mixture
must have been a complete one, _i.e.,_ going down to the infinitely
small, since the separation and unmixing takes up an infinite length of
time. Thereby strict adherence is paid to the thought: that everything
which possesses an essential "Being" is infinitely divisible, without
forfeiting its specificum.
According to these hypotheses Anaxagoras conceives of the world's
primal existence: perhaps as similar to a dust-like mass of infinitely
small, concrete particles of which every one is specifically simple
and possesses one quality only, yet so arranged that every specific
quality is represented in an infinite number of individual particles.
Such particles Aristotle has called _Homoiomere_ in consideration of
the fact that they are the Parts, all equal one to another, of a Whole
which is homogeneous with its Parts. One would however commit a serious
mistake to equate this primal pell-mell of all such particles, such
"seed-grains of things" to the one primal matter of Anaximander; for
the latter's primal matter called the "Indefinite" is a thoroughly
coherent and peculiar mass, the former's primal pell-mell is an
aggregate of substances. It is true one can assert about this Aggregate
of Substances exactly the same as about the Indefinite of Anaximander,
as Aristotle does: it could be neither white nor grey, nor black, nor
of any other colour; it was tasteless, scentless, and altogether as a
Whole defined neither quantitatively nor qualitatively: so far goes the
similarity of the Anaximandrian Indefinite and the Anaxagorean Primal
Mixture. But disregarding this negative equality they distinguish
themselves one from another positively by the latter being a compound,
the former a unity. Anaxagoras had by the assumption of his Chaos at
least so much to his advantage, that he was not compelled to deduce the
Many from the One, the Becoming out of the "Existent."
Of course with his complete intermixture of the "seeds" he had to
admit one exception: the Nous was not then, nor is It now admixed with
any thing. For if It were admixed with only one "Existent," It would
have, in infinite divisions, to dwell in all things. This exception
is logically very dubious, especially considering the previously
described material nature of the Nous, it has something mythological in
itself and seems arbitrary, but was however, according to Anaxagorean
_prœmissa,_ a strict necessity. The Mind, which is moreover infinitely
divisible like any other matter, only not through other matters but
through Itself, has, if It divides Itself, in dividing and conglobating
sometimes in large, sometimes in small masses, Its equal mass and
quality from all eternity; and that which at this minute exists as Mind
in animals, plants, men, was also Mind without a more or less, although
distributed in another way a thousand years ago. But wherever It had a
relation to another substance, there It never was admixed with it, but
voluntarily seized it, moved and pushed it arbitrarily--in short, ruled
it. Mind, which alone has motion in Itself, alone possesses ruling
power in this world and shows it through moving the grains of matter.
But whither does It move them? Or is a motion conceivable, without
direction, without path? Is Mind in Its impacts just as arbitrary
as it is, with regard to the time when It pushes, and when It does
not push? In short, does Chance, _i.e.,_ the blindest option, rule
within Motion? At this boundary we step into the Most Holy within the
conceptual realm of Anaxagoras.
17
What had to be done with that chaotic pell-mell of the primal state
previous to all motion, so that out of it, without any increase of
new substances and forces, the existing world might originate, with
its regular stellar orbits, with its regulated forms of seasons and
days, with its manifold beauty and order,--in short, so that out of
the Chaos might come a Cosmos? This can be only the effect of Motion,
and of a definite and well-organised motion. This Motion itself is
the means of the Nous, Its goal would be the perfect segregation of
the homogeneous, a goal up to the present not yet attained, because
the disorder and the mixture in the beginning was infinite. This
goal is to be striven after only by an enormous process, not to be
realized suddenly by a mythological stroke of the wand. If ever, at
an infinitely distant point of time, it is achieved that everything
homogeneous is brought together and the "primal-existences" undivided
are encamped side by side in beautiful order, and every particle has
found its comrades and its home, and the great peace comes about after
the great division and splitting up of the substances, and there will
be no longer anything that is divided ind split up, then the Nous will
again return into Its automobilism and, no longer Itself divided,
roam through the world, sometimes in larger, sometimes in smaller
masses, as plant-mind or animal-mind, and no longer will It take up Its
new dwelling-place in other matter. Meanwhile the task has not been
completed; but the kind of motion which the Nous has thought out, in
order to solve the task, shows a marvellous suitableness, for by this
motion the task is further solved in each new moment. For this motion
has the character of concentrically progressive circular motion; it
began at some one point of the chaotic mixture, in the form of a little
gyration, and in ever larger paths this circular movement traverses
all existing "Being," jerking forth everywhere the homogeneous to
the homogeneous. At first this revolution brings everything Dense
to the Dense, everything Rare to the Rare, and likewise all that is
Dark, Bright, Moist, Dry to their kind; above these general groups or
classifications there are again two still more comprehensive, namely
_Ether,_ that is to say everything that is Warm, Bright, Rare, and
_Aër,_ that is to say everything that is Dark, Cold, Heavy, Firm.
Through the segregation of the ethereal masses from the aërial,
there is formed, as the most immediate effect of that epicycle whose
centre moves along in the circumference of ever greater circles, a
something as in an eddy made in standing water; heavy compounds are
led towards the middle and compressed. Just in the same way that
travelling waterspout in chaos forms itself on the outer side out of
the Ethereal, Rare, Bright Constituents, on the inner side out of the
Cloudy, Heavy, Moist Constituents. Then in the course of this process
out of that Aërial mass, conglomerating in its interior, water is
separated, and again out of the water the earthy element, and then
out of the earthy element, under the effect of the awful cold are
separated the stones. Again at some juncture masses of stone, through
the momentum of the rotation, are torn away sideways from the earth and
thrown into the realm of the hot light Ether; there in the latter's
fiery element they are made to glow and, carried along in the ethereal
rotation, they irradiate light, and as sun and stars illuminate and
warm the earth, in herself dark and cold. The whole conception is of
a wonderful daring and simplicity and has nothing of that clumsy and
anthropomorphical teleology, which has been frequently connected with
the name of Anaxagoras. That conception has its greatness just in this,
that it derives the whole Cosmos of Becoming out of the moved circle,
whereas Parmenides contemplated the true "Existent" as a resting, dead
ball. Once that circle is put into motion and caused to roll by the
Nous, then all the order, law and beauty of the world is the natural
consequence of that first impetus. How very much one wrongs Anaxagoras
if one reproaches him for the wise abstention from teleology which
shows itself in this conception and talks scornfully of his Nous as
of a _deus ex machina._ Rather, on account of the elimination of
mythological and theistic miracle-working and anthropomorphic ends and
utilities, Anaxagoras might have made use of proud words similar to
those which Kant used in his Natural History of the Heavens. For it is
indeed a sublime thought, to retrace that grandeur of the cosmos and
the marvellous arrangement of the orbits of the stars, to retrace all
that, in all forms to a simple, purely mechanical motion and, as it
were, to a moved mathematical figure, and therefore not to reduce all
that to purposes and intervening hands of a machine-god, but only to
a kind of oscillation, which, having once begun, is in its progress
necessary and definite, and effects result which resemble the wisest
computation of sagacity and extremely well thought-out fitness without
being anything of the sort. "I enjoy the pleasure," says Kant, of
seeing how a well-ordered whole produces itself without the assistance
of arbitrary fabrications, under the impulse of fixed laws of motion--a
well-ordered whole which looks so similar to that world-system which
is ours, that I cannot abstain from considering it to be the same.
It seems to me that one might say here, in a certain sense without
presumption: 'Give me matter and I will build a world out of it.'"
18
Suppose now, that for once we allow that primal mixture as rightly
concluded, some considerations especially from Mechanics seem to oppose
the grand plan of the world edifice. For even though the Mind at a
point causes a circular movement its continuation is only conceivable
with great difficulty, especially since it is to be infinite and
gradually to make all existing masses rotate. As a matter of course one
would assume that the pressure of all the remaining matter would have
crushed out this small circular movement when it had scarcely begun;
that this does not happen presupposes on the part of the stimulating
Nous, that the latter began to work suddenly with awful force, or at
any rate so quickly, that we must call the motion a whirl: such a
whirl as Democritus himself imagined. And since this whirl must be
infinitely strong in order not to be checked through the whole world of
the Infinite weighing heavily upon it, it will be infinitely quick, for
strength can manifest itself originally only in speed. On the contrary
the broader the concentric rings are, the slower will be this motion;
if once the motion could reach the end of the infinitely extended
world, then this motion would have already infinitely little speed of
rotation. _Vice versa,_ if we conceive of the motion as infinitely
great, _i.e.,_ infinitely quick, at the moment of the very first
beginning of motion, then the original circle must have been infinitely
small; we get therefore as the beginning a particle rotated round
itself, a particle with an infinitely small material content. This
however would not at all explain the further motion; one might imagine
even all particles of the primal mass to rotate round themselves and
yet the whole mass would remain unmoved and unseparated. If, however,
that material particle of infinite smallness, caught and swung by the
Nous, was not turned round itself but described a circle somewhat
larger than a point, this would cause it to knock against other
material particles, to move them on, to hurl them, to make them rebound
and thus gradually to stir up a great and spreading tumult within
which, as the next result, that separation of the aërial masses from
the ethereal had to take place. Just as the commencement of the motion
itself is an arbitrary act of the Nous, arbitrary also is the manner of
this commencement in so far as the first motion circumscribes a circle
of which the radius is chosen somewhat larger than a point.
19
Here of course one might ask, what fancy had at that time so suddenly
occurred to the Nous, to knock against some chance material particle
out of that number of particles and to turn it around in whirling dance
and why that did not occur to It earlier. Whereupon Anaxagoras would
answer: "The Nous has the privilege of arbitrary action; It may begin
at any chance time, It depends on Itself, whereas everything else is
determined from outside. It has no duty, and no end which It might
be compelled to pursue; if It did once begin with that motion and
set Itself an end, this after all was only--the answer is difficult,
Heraclitus would say--_play!_"
That seems always to have been the last solution or answer hovering on
the lips of the Greek. The Anaxagorean Mind is an artist and in truth
the most powerful genius of mechanics and architecture, creating with
the simplest means the most magnificent forms and tracks and as it were
a mobile architecture, but always out of that irrational arbitrariness
which lies in the soul of the artist. It is as though Anaxagoras was
pointing at Phidias and in face of the immense work of art, the Cosmos,
was calling out to us as he would do in front of the Parthenon: "The
Becoming is no moral, but only an artistic phenomenon." Aristotle
relates that, to the question what made life worth living, Anaxagoras
had answered: "Contemplating the heavens and the total order of the
Cosmos." He treated physical things so devotionally, and with that
same mysterious awe, which we feel when standing in front of an antique
temple; his doctrine became a species of free-thinking religious
exercise, protecting itself through the _odi profanum vulgus et arceo_
and choosing its adherents with precaution out of the highest and
noblest society of Athens. In the exclusive community of the Athenian
Anaxagoreans the mythology of the people was allowed only as a symbolic
language; all myths, all gods, all heroes were considered here only as
hieroglyphics of the interpretation of nature, and even the Homeric
epic was said to be the canonic song of the sway of the Nous and the
struggles and laws of Nature. Here and there a note from this society
of sublime free-thinkers penetrated to the people; and especially
Euripides, the great and at all times daring Euripides, ever thinking
of something new, dared to let many things become known by means of the
tragic mask, many things which pierced like an arrow through the senses
of the masses and from which the latter freed themselves only by means
of ludicrous caricatures and ridiculous re-interpretations.
The greatest of all Anaxagoreans however is Pericles, the mightiest and
worthiest man of the world; and Plato bears witness that the philosophy
of Anaxagoras alone had given that sublime flight to the genius of
Pericles. When as a public orator he stood before his people, in the
beautiful rigidity and immobility of a marble Olympian and now, calm,
wrapped in his mantle, with unruffled drapery, without any change of
facial expression, without smile, with a voice the strong tone of
which remained ever the same, and when he now spoke in an absolutely
un-Demosthenic but merely Periclean fashion, when he thundered, struck
with lightnings, annihilated and redeemed--then he was the epitome
of the Anaxagorean Cosmos, the image of the Nous, who has built for
Itself the most beautiful and dignified receptacle, then Pericles was
as it were the visible human incarnation of the building, moving,
eliminating, ordering, reviewing, artistically-undetermined force of
the Mind. Anaxagoras himself said man was the most rational being or
he must necessarily shelter the Nous within himself in greater fulness
than all other beings, because he had such admirable organs as his
hands; Anaxagoras concluded therefore, that that Nous, according to
the extent to which It made Itself master of a material body, was
always forming for Itself out of this material the tools corresponding
to Its degree of power, consequently the Nous made the most beautiful
and appropriate tools, when It was appearing in his greatest fulness.
And as the most wondrous and appropriate action of the Nous was that
circular primal-motion, since at that time the Mind was still together,
undivided, in Itself, thus to the listening Anaxagoras the effect
of the Periclean speech often appeared perhaps as a simile of that
circular primal-motion; for here too he perceived a whirl of thoughts
moving itself at first with awful force but in an orderly manner, which
in concentric circles gradually caught and carried away the nearest and
farthest and which, when it reached its end, had reshaped--organising
and segregating--the whole nation.