Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/182

158 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE From the side of Being there arose three important systems. Empedocles of Acragas, whom we have treated above (p. 75), assumes the existence not of one, but of four original ' Roots of Things'— Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, with empty space about them. The roots are unchang- ing matter in themselves, but moved and mixed — this is perhaps his most important contribution to philosophy — by non-material forces, which he describes as Love and Hate, or Attraction and Repulsion. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, the first philosopher to settle permanently in Athens, assumed a very much larger number of original and eternal ' things ' or * seeds ' {^prjfxara, aTripfiara), whose combination and separation make the substances of the world. He means some- thing like the 'Elements' of modern Chemistry. Among them there is Mind, ' Noos,' which is a 'thing' like the rest, but subtler and finer, and able to move of itself. It acts in the various component parts of the world just as we feel it act in our own bodies. It has 'come and arranged' all the 'things.' Anaxagoras treated the Sun and Moon as spheres of stone and earth, the Sun white-hot from the speed of its movement ; both were enormous in size, the Sun perhaps as big as the Pelo- ponnese ! He gave the right explanation of eclipses. The other solution offered by this period is the Atomic Theory. It seems to have originated not from any scientific observation, but from abstract reasoning on Parmenidean principles. The ov is a irXkov, a Thing is a Sohd, and anything not solid is nothing. But instead of the One Eternal Solid we have an immense number of Eternal Solids, too small to be divided any more — ' Atomoi' (' Un-cuttables '). Parmenides's argument against