INTRODUCTION.

With these theories we are not now concerned, since it is the development of Greek metaphysics alone which we are engaged in tracing. Anaxagoras distinguished himself by the postulation of Mind as an efficient cause An "efficient cause" is the agent or force that actually brings something into being or initiates movement.: therefore it is that Aristotle says he came speaking the words of soberness after men that idly babbled. All was chaos, says Anaxagoras, till Mind came and ordered it. Now what is the meaning of this saying, as he understood it?

First we must observe that the teaching of Anaxagoras is not antithetical to that of either Heraclitus or Parmenides, as these two are to each other: he takes up new ground altogether. His doctrine of Mind original: "νοῦς" (nous). In Greek philosophy, this refers to the faculty of intellectual perception and the soul's ability to understand truth. is antagonistic to the opinions of Empedocles and of the atomists. Empedocles assumes Love and Hate as the causes of union and disunion. But herein he really introduces nothing new; he merely gives a poetical half-personification to the forces which are at work in nature. The atomists, conceiving their elemental bodies darting endlessly through infinite space, assigned as the cause of their collision Chance original: "τύχη" (tyche) or Necessity original: "ἀνάγκη" (ananke), by which they meant an inevitable law operating without design, a blind force inherent in nature. This is what Anaxagoras gainsaid: to him effect required a cause, motion a mover. Now he observed that within his experience individual minds are the cause of action: what more likely then, he argued, than that the motions of nature as a whole are caused by a universal mind? It did not seem probable to him that a universe ordered as this is could be the chance product of blindly moving particles; he thought he saw in it evidence of intelligent design. He knew of but one form of intelligence—the mind of living creatures, and chiefly of man. Mind then, he thought, must be the originator of order in the universe—a mind transcending the human intelligence by so much as the operations of nature are mightier than the works of man. Thus then he postulated an efficient cause distinct from the visible nature which it governed.

Anaxagoras and causation.

This leads us briefly to compare his attitude towards causation with that of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Heraclitus sought for no efficient cause. The impulse of transmutation is inherent in his elemental fire, and he looks no further. Why things are in perpetual mutation is a question which he does not profess to answer; it is enough, he would say, to have affirmed a principle that will account for the phenomena of the universe: it is neither necessary nor possible to supply a reason why the universe exists on this principle. And in fact every philosophy