ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA.
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ANAXAGORAS
ANAXAGORAS, according to the most probable calculations, was born about the year 500 B.C. At his native town of Clazomenæ, in Asia Minor, he had, it appears, some amount of property and prospects of political influence, both of which he surrendered, from a fear that they would interfere with his search after the knowledge of nature. In early manhood he went to Athens, which was rapidly becoming the headquarters of Greek culture; and in that city he is said to have continued for thirty years. Here Pericles learnt to love and admire him; and the poet Euripides derived from him an enthusiasm for science and humanity. His influence was due partly to his astronomical and mathematical eminence, but still more to the ascetic dignity of his nature, and his superiority to ordinary weaknesses—traits which legend has embalmed. His observations of the celestial bodies led him to form new theories of the universal order, and brought him into collision with the popular faith which found the objects of its worship in the heavens. Anaxagoras had tried to reduce eclipses to the operation of known causes: he had removed the halo of deity from the sun, and profanely turned Apollo into a mass of blazing metal, larger than the Peloponnesus; and he was even reported to have brought the phenomena of meteoric stones within the limits of predictable events. The dominant polytheism, and the ignorance of the multitude, could not tolerate such explanation; and the enemies of Pericles used the superstitions of their countrymen as a means of attacking the ideas of that statesman in the person of his friend. Anaxagoras was arrested on a charge of contravening the established dogmas of religion; and it required all the eloquence of Pericles to rescue him from the persecutors. Even then Athens could no longer be the sphere of his activity. He was forced to retire to Lampsacus, where he died about 428 B.C.
It is difficult to present the cosmical theory of Anaxagoras in an intelligible scheme. All things have existed in a sort of way from the beginning. But originally they existed in infinitesimally small fragments of themselves, endless in their number, inextricably mixed throughout the spaces of the world. All things were in that mass, but in the obscurity of indistinguishableness. There were the seeds or miniatures of corn, and flesh, and gold, in the primitive mixture; but these parts, of like nature with their wholes (the [ Greek ] of Aristotle), had to he eliminated from the complex mass before they could receive a definite name and character. The existing species of things having thus been transferred, with all their specialities, to the prehistoric stage, they were multiplied endlessly in number, by reducing their size through continued subdivision, at the same time that each one thing is so indissolubly connected with every other that the keenest analysis can never completely sever them. The work of arrangement, the segregation of like from unlike, and the summation of the [ Greek ] into totals of the same name, was the work of Mind or Reason. This peculiar thing, called Mind ([ Greek ]), was no less illimitable than the chaotic mass, but it stood pure and independent, a thing of finer texture, alike in all its manifestations, and everywhere the same. This subtle agent, possessed of all knowledge and power, is especially seen ruling in all the forms of life. Its first appearance, and the only manifestation of it which Anaxagoras describes, is Motion. Reason originated a rotatory movement in the mass (a movement far exceeding the most rapid in this present scene), which, arising in one corner or point, gradually extended till it gave distinctness and reality to the aggregates of like parts. But even after it has done its best, the original intermixing of things is not wholly overcome. No one thing in the world is ever absolutely separated, as by the blow of an axe, from the rest of things. The name given to it merely signifies that in that congeries of fragments the particular seed is preponderant. Every a of this present universe is only a by a majority, and is also in lesser number b, c, d.
