but that, thanks to the influence of Pericles, this sentence was
commuted to banishment. In any event, the aged philosopher was
sent away from the city of his adoption. He retired to Lampsacus.
"It is not I that have lost the Athenians," he said; "it is the
Athenians that have lost me."

The exact position which Anaxagoras had among his contemporaries,
and his exact place in the development of philosophy, have always
been somewhat in dispute. It is not known, of a certainty, that
he even held an open school at Athens. Ritter thinks it doubtful
that he did. It was his fate to be misunderstood, or
underestimated, by Aristotle; that in itself would have sufficed
greatly to dim his fame--might, indeed, have led to his almost
entire neglect had he not been a truly remarkable thinker. With
most of the questions that have exercised the commentators we
have but scant concern. Following Aristotle, most historians of
philosophy have been metaphysicians; they have concerned
themselves far less with what the ancient thinkers really knew
than with what they thought. A chance using of a verbal quibble,
an esoteric phrase, the expression of a vague mysticism--these
would suffice to call forth reams of exposition. It has been the
favorite pastime of historians to weave their own anachronistic
theories upon the scanty woof of the half- remembered thoughts of
the ancient philosophers. To make such cloth of the imagination
as this is an alluring pastime, but one that must not divert us
here. Our point of view reverses that of the philosophers. We are
chiefly concerned, not with some vague saying of Anaxagoras, but
with what he really knew regarding the phenomena of nature; with
what he observed, and with the comprehensible deductions that he
derived from his observations. In attempting to answer these
inquiries, we are obliged, in part, to take our evidence at
second-hand; but, fortunately, some fragments of writings of
Anaxagoras have come down to us. We are told that he wrote only a
single book. It was said even (by Diogenes) that he was the first
man that ever wrote a work in prose. The latter statement would
not bear too close an examination, yet it is true that no
extensive prose compositions of an earlier day than this have
been preserved, though numerous others are known by their
fragments. Herodotus, "the father of prose," was a slightly
younger contemporary of the Clazomenaean philosopher; not
unlikely the two men may have met at Athens.

Notwithstanding the loss of the greater part of the writings of
Anaxagoras, however, a tolerably precise account of his
scientific doctrines is accessible. Diogenes Laertius expresses
some of them in very clear and precise terms. We have already
pointed out the uncertainty that attaches to such evidence as
this, but it is as valid for Anaxagoras as for another. If we
reject such evidence, we shall often have almost nothing left; in
accepting it we may at least feel certain that we are viewing the
thinker as his contemporaries and immediate successors viewed
him. Following Diogenes, then, we shall find some remarkable
scientific opinions ascribed to Anaxagoras. "He asserted," we are
told, "that the sun was a mass of burning iron, greater than
Peloponnesus, and that the moon contained houses and also hills
and ravines." In corroboration of this, Plato represents him as
having conjectured the right explanation of the moon's light, and
of the solar and lunar eclipses. He had other astronomical
theories that were more fanciful; thus "he said that the stars
originally moved about in irregular confusion, so that at first
the pole-star, which is continually visible, always appeared in
the zenith, but that afterwards it acquired a certain
declination, and that the Milky Way was a reflection of the light
of the sun when the stars did not appear. The comets he
considered to be a concourse of planets emitting rays, and the
shooting- stars he thought were sparks, as it were, leaping from
the firmament."

Much of this is far enough from the truth, as we now know it, yet
all of it shows an earnest endeavor to explain the observed
phenomena of the heavens on rational principles. To have
predicated the sun as a great molten mass of iron was indeed a
wonderful anticipation of the results of the modern spectroscope.
Nor can it be said that this hypothesis of Anaxagoras was a
purely visionary guess. It was in all probability a scientific
deduction from the observed character of meteoric stones.
Reference has already been made to the alleged prediction of the
fall of the famous meteor at aegespotomi by Anaxagoras. The
assertion that he actually predicted this fall in any proper
sense of the word would be obviously absurd. Yet the fact that
his name is associated with it suggests that he had studied
similar meteorites, or else that he studied this particular one,
since it is not quite clear whether it was before or after this
fall that he made the famous assertion that space is full of
falling stones. We should stretch the probabilities were we to
assert that Anaxagoras knew that shooting-stars and meteors were
the same, yet there is an interesting suggestiveness in his
likening the shooting-stars to sparks leaping from the firmament,
taken in connection with his observation on meteorites. Be this
as it may, the fact that something which falls from heaven as a
blazing light turns out to be an iron-like mass may very well
have suggested to the most rational of thinkers that the great
blazing light called the sun has the same composition. This idea
grasped, it was a not unnatural extension to conceive the other
heavenly bodies as having the same composition.

This led to a truly startling thought. Since the heavenly bodies
are of the same composition as the earth, and since they are
observed to be whirling about the earth in space, may we not
suppose that they were once a part of the earth itself, and that


<< previous page | next page >>

Jump to page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87 | 88 | 89 |