and it arranged that rotation, according to which now rotate
stars and sun and moon and air and aether, now that they are
separated. Rotation itself caused the separation, and the dense
is separated from the rare, the warm from the cold, the bright
from the dark, the dry from the moist. And when nous began to set
things in motion, there was separation from everything that was
in motion, all this was made distinct. The rotation of the things
that were moved and made distinct caused them to be yet more
distinct."[3]
Nous, then, as Anaxagoras conceives it, is "the most rarefied of
all things, and the purest, and it has knowledge in regard to
everything and the greatest power; over all that has life, both
greater and less, it rules." But these are postulants of
omnipresence and omniscience. In other words, nous is nothing
less than the omnipotent artificer of the material universe. It
lacks nothing of the power of deity, save only that we are not
assured that it created the primordial particles. The creation of
these particles was a conception that for Anaxagoras, as for the
modern Spencer, lay beyond the range of imagination. Nous is the
artificer, working with "uncreated" particles. Back of nous and
the particles lies, for an Anaxagoras as for a Spencer, the
Unknowable. But nous itself is the equivalent of that universal
energy of motion which science recognizes as operating between
the particles of matter, and which the theologist personifies as
Deity. It is Pantheistic deity as Anaxagoras conceives it; his
may be called the first scientific conception of a non-
anthropomorphic god. In elaborating this conception Anaxagoras
proved himself one of the most remarkable scientific dreamers of
antiquity. To have substituted for the Greek Pantheon of
anthropomorphic deities the conception of a non-anthropomorphic
immaterial and ethereal entity, of all things in the world "the
most rarefied and the purest," is to have performed a feat which,
considering the age and the environment in which it was
accomplished, staggers the imagination. As a strictly scientific
accomplishment the great thinker's conception of primordial
elements contained a germ of the truth which was to lie dormant
for 2200 years, but which then, as modified and vitalized by the
genius of Dalton, was to dominate the new chemical science of the
nineteenth century. If there are intimations that the primordial
element of Anaxagoras and of Dalton may turn out in the near
future to be itself a compound, there will still remain the yet
finer particles of the nous of Anaxagoras to baffle the most
subtle analysis of which to-day's science gives us any
pre-vision. All in all, then, the work of Anaxagoras must stand
as that of perhaps the most far-seeing scientific imagination of
pre-Socratic antiquity.
LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS
But we must not leave this alluring field of speculation as to
the nature of matter without referring to another scientific
guess, which soon followed that of Anaxagoras and was destined to
gain even wider fame, and which in modern times has been somewhat
unjustly held to eclipse the glory of the other achievement. We
mean, of course, the atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus.
This theory reduced all matter to primordial elements, called
atoms
further division. These atoms, making up the entire material
universe, are in this theory conceived as qualitatively
identical, differing from one another only in size and perhaps in
shape. The union of different-sized atoms in endless combinations
produces the diverse substances with which our senses make us
familiar.
Before we pass to a consideration of this alluring theory, and
particularly to a comparison of it with the theory of Anaxagoras,
we must catch a glimpse of the personality of the men to whom the
theory owes its origin. One of these, Leucippus, presents so
uncertain a figure as to be almost mythical. Indeed, it was long
questioned whether such a man had actually lived, or whether be
were not really an invention of his alleged disciple, Democritus.
Latterday scholarship, however, accepts him as a real personage,
though knowing scarcely more of him than that he was the author
of the famous theory with which his name was associated. It is
suggested that he was a wanderer, like most philosophers of his
time, and that later in life he came to Abdera, in Thrace, and
through this circumstance became the teacher of Democritus. This
fable answers as well as another. What we really know is that
Democritus himself, through whose writings and teachings the
atomic theory gained vogue, was born in Abdera, about the year
460 B.C.--that is to say, just about the time when his great
precursor, Anaxagoras, was migrating to Athens. Democritus, like
most others of the early Greek thinkers, lives in tradition as a
picturesque figure. It is vaguely reported that he travelled for
a time, perhaps in the East and in Egypt, and that then he
settled down to spend the remainder of his life in Abdera.
Whether or not he visited Athens in the course of his wanderings
we do not know. At Abdera he was revered as a sage, but his
influence upon the practical civilization of the time was not
marked. He was pre-eminently a dreamer and a writer. Like his
confreres of the epoch, he entered all fields of thought. He
wrote voluminously, but, unfortunately, his writings have, for
the most part, perished. The fables and traditions of a later day
asserted that Democritus had voluntarily put out his own eyes
that he might turn his thoughts inward with more concentration.
Doubtless this is fiction, yet, as usual with such fictions, it
contains a germ of truth; for we may well suppose that the
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