from the slime; they did not live long, and later on generation from one another began. And men were distinguished from the rest, and set up leaders, and laws, and arts, and cities, and so forth. And he says that Nous is implanted in all animals alike; for each of the animals, as well as man, makes use of Nous, but some quicker and some slower.
It is clear from this that, just as Diogenes had tried to introduce certain Anaxagorean ideas into the philosophy of Anaximenes, so Archelaos sought to bring Anaxagoreanism nearer to the old Ionic views by supplementing it with the opposition of warm and cold, rare and dense, and by stripping Nous of that simplicity which had marked it off from the other "things" in his master's system. It was probably for this reason, too, that Nous was no longer regarded as the maker of the world.[1] Leukippos had made such a force unnecessary. It may be added that this twofold relation of Archelaos to his predecessors makes it very credible that, as Aetios tells us,[2] he believed in innumerable worlds; both Anaxagoras and the older Ionians upheld that doctrine.
193.Conclusion. The cosmology of Archelaos, like that of Diogenes, has all the characteristics of the age to which it belonged—an age of reaction, eclecticism, and investigation of detail.[3] Hippon of Samos and Idaios of Himera represent nothing more than the feeling that philosophy had run into a blind alley, from which it could only escape by trying back. The Herakleiteans at Ephesos, impenetrably wrapped up as they were in their own system, did little but exaggerate its paradoxes and develop its more fanciful side.[4] It was not enough for Kratylos to say with Herakleitos (fr. 84.) that you cannot step twice into the same river; you could not do so even
- ↑ Aet. i. 7, 14=Stob. i. 56 (R. P. 217 a).
- ↑ Aet. ii. i, 3.
- ↑ Windelband, § 25. The period is well described by Fredrich, Hippokratische Untersuchungen, pp. 130 sqq. It can only be treated fully in connexion with the Sophists.
- ↑ For an amusing picture of the Herakleiteans see Plato, Theaet. 179 e. The new interest in language, which the study of rhetoric had called into life, took with them the form of fantastic and arbitrary etymologising, such as is satirised in Plato's Cratylus.
