were somewhat under the influence of Oriental ideas, and the thought here expressed is not perhaps far afield from the Babylonian conception that everything came forth from a chaos of waters. Yet the fact that the thought of Anaximander has come down to posterity through such various channels suggests that the Greek thinker had got far enough away from the Oriental conception to make his view seem to his contemporaries a novel and individual one. Indeed, nothing we know of the Oriental line of thought conveys any suggestion of the idea of transformation of species, whereas that idea is distinctly formulated in the traditional views of Anaximander.
Just what opinion Anaxagoras held concerning this novel view of man's development we are not informed. Yet there is one phrase of that philosopher's which suggests—without perhaps quite proving—that he too was an evolutionist. This phrase asserts, with insight that is fairly startling, that "man is the most intelligent of animals because he has hands." The man who could make that assertion must, it would seem, have had in mind the idea of the development of intelligence through the use of hands,—an idea the full force of which was not evident to subsequent generations of thinkers until the time of Darwin.
It was Anaxagoras also who is cited by Aristotle as believing that "plants are animals and feel pleasure and pain, inferring this because they shed their leaves and let them grow again." The idea is fanciful, yet it suggests a truly philosophical conception of the unity of nature. The man who could conceive that idea was but little hampered by traditional conceptions. He was exercising a rare combination of the rigidly scientific spirit with the poetical imagination. He who possesses these gifts is sure not to stop in his questionings of nature until he has found some thinkable explanation of the character of matter itself. Anaxagoras found such an explanation, and, as good luck would have it, that explanation has been preserved.
As Anaxagoras conceived it, matter is composed of ultimate particles of many different kinds—one kind, indeed, for each specific kind of substance. These minute particles he conceived as being uncreated and indestructible, as well as unchangeable. The particles were supposed to be indivisibly small, and hence may fairly be likened to the molecules of the modern physicist. The chief distinction is that the molecule, as we now conceive it, is susceptible of being broken up into smaller particles which we call atoms; but there were no data available in the time of Anaxagoras which could lead to this idea. The analysis of Anaxagoras told him of particles of flesh, particles of wood, particles of metal, and so on, and, considering the knowledge at his disposal, it would have been rather an unwarranted flight of the imagination to suppose that many of these different substances are made up of the same elements in different combinations. The modern chemist knows that such is the fact, but it required the analyses of a long line of experimenters to give him this knowledge. These analyses have reduced the elementary substances from the almost infinite number predicated by Anaxagoras to a relatively limited number,—seventy odd being known at the present time. To the philosophical mind there is something very disquieting about this citation of seventy odd elementary substances, and from the earliest day of the modern atomic theory there have been speculators who conceived that these so-called elementary bodies are not really elementary, but are susceptible, under proper conditions, of disassociation; that they themselves are, in short, compound bodies, and that the ultimate particles of which all material substances are composed are identical. Spectroscopic examination of the sun has seemed to demonstrate that an actual disassociation of elements may occur under the conditions of extreme temperature existing in that body, and numerous laboratory experiments with high temperatures and electricity tend to corroborate the same idea without as yet perhaps actually demonstrating it. In a word, speculative opinion of to-day trends toward the idea of so-called monism,—the idea that there is but a single
elementary substance out of which the universe is built. This is an idea which, if demonstrated, would satisfy the philosophical thinker. As we have said, Anaxagoras did not reach, or at least did
