experiment as Empedokles had done (fr. 100), and also showed the corporeal nature of air by means of inflated skins.[1]
132.Nous. 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 assumed. 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,"[2] and he has often been credited with the introduction of the spiritual into philosophy. The disappointment expressed by Sokrates in the Phaedo 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[3] 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, of course with this passage in mind, says:[4] "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 was something on the same level as the Love and Strife of Empedokles,
- ↑ Phys. Z, 6. 213 a 22 (R. P. 159): We have a full discussion of the experiments with the klepsydya in Probl. 914 b 9 sqq., a passage which we have already used to illustrate Empedokles, fr. 100. See above, p. 219, n. 2.
- ↑ Arist. Met. A, 3. 984 b 15 (R. P. 152).
- ↑ Plato, Phaed. 97 b 8 (R. P. 155 d).
- ↑ Arist. Met. A, 4. 985 a 18 (R. P. 155 d).
