ANAXAGORAS.
1. HIS PERSONAL HISTORY.—Anaxagoras is said to have been born at
Clazamena, about the year 500 B. C.; to have gone to Athens immediately,
or soon after the Persian war, to have lived and taught there for a long
time, and, finally, accused of irreverence to the gods, to have fled,
and died at Lampsacus, at the age of 72. He it was who first planted
philosophy at Athens, which from this time on became the centre of
intellectual life in Greece. Through his personal relations to Pericles,
Euripides, and other important men,—among whom Themistocles and
Thucydides should be named—he exerted a decisive influence upon the
culture of the age. It was on account of this that the charge of
defaming the gods was brought against him, doubtless by the political
opponents of Pericles. Anaxagoras wrote a work “_Concerning Nature_”
which in the time of Socrates was widely circulated.
2. HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS.—The system of Anaxagoras starts
from the same point with his predecessors, and is simply another attempt
at the solution of the same problem. Like Empedocles and the Atomists so
did Anaxagoras most vehemently deny the becoming. “The becoming and
departing,”—so runs one of his sayings—“the Greeks hold without
foundation, for nothing can ever be said to become or depart; but, since
existing things may be compounded together and again divided, we should
name the becoming more correctly a combination, and the departing a
separation.” From this view, that every thing arose by the mingling of
different elements, and departed by the withdrawing of these elements,
Anaxagoras, like his predecessors, was obliged to separate matter from
the moving power. But though his point of starting was the same, yet was
his direction essentially different from that of any previous
philosopher. It was clear that neither Empedocles nor Democritus had
satisfactorily apprehended the moving power. The mythical energies of
love and hate of the one, or the unconscious necessity of the other,
explained nothing, and least of all, the design of the becoming in
nature. The conception of an activity which could thus work designedly,
must, therefore, be brought into the conception of the moving power, and
this Anaxagoras accomplished by setting up the idea of a world-forming
intelligence (νοῦς), absolutely separated from all matter and working
with design.
3. THE PRINCIPLE OF THE νοῦς.—Anaxagoras described this intelligence as
free to dispose, unmingled with any thing, the ground of movement, but
itself unmoved, every where active, and the most refined and pure of all
things. Although these predicates rest partly upon a physical analogy,
and do not exhibit purely the conception of immateriality, yet on the
other hand does the attribute of thought and of a conscious acting with
design admit no doubt to remain of the decided idealistic character of
the Anaxagorean principle. Nevertheless, Anaxagoras went no farther than
to enunciate his fundamental thought without attempting its complete
application. The explanation of this is obvious from the reasons which
first led him to adopt his principle. It was only the need of an
original cause of motion, to which also might be attributed the capacity
to work designedly, which had led him to the idea of an immaterial
principle. His νοῦς, therefore, is almost nothing but a mover of matter,
and in this function nearly all its activity is expended. Hence the
universal complaint of the ancients, especially of Plato and Aristotle,
respecting the mechanical character of his doctrine. In Plato’s Phædon
Socrates relates that, in the hope of being directed beyond a simple
occasioning, or mediate cause, he had turned to the book of Anaxagoras,
but had found there only a mechanical instead of a truly teleological
explanation of being. And as Plato so also does Aristotle find fault
with Anaxagoras in that, while he admits mind as the ultimate ground of
things, he yet resorts to it only as to a _Deus ex machina_ for the
explanation of phenomena, whose necessity he could not derive from the
causality in nature. Anaxagoras, therefore, has rather postulated than
proved mind as an energy above nature, and as the truth and actuality of
natural being.
The further extension of his system, his doctrine concerning the
homoiomeria (constituent elements of things), which according to him
existed together originally in a chaotic condition until with their
separation and parting the formation of the world began—can here only be
mentioned.
4. ANAXAGORAS AS THE CLOSE OF THE PRE-SOCRATIC REALISM.—With the
Anaxagorean principle of the νοῦς, _i. e._ with the acquisition of an
absolutely immaterial principle, closes the realistic period of the old
Grecian Philosophy. Anaxagoras combined together the principles of all
his predecessors. The infinite matter of the Hylics is represented in
his chaotic original mingling of things; the Eleatic pure being appears
in the idea of the νοῦς; the Heraclitic power of becoming and the
Empedoclean moving energies are both seen in the creating and arranging
power of the eternal mind, while the Democritic atoms come to view in
the homoiomeria. Anaxagoras is the closing point of an old and the
beginning point of a new course of development,—the latter through the
setting up of his ideal principle, and the former through the defective
and completely physical manner in which this principle was yet again
applied.