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CH.I.] upon first causes, Anaxagoras and his predecessor Hermoticus had maintained that, as in animals there is a motor principle, so in nature there is mind, and that it is the cause as well of the universe as of universal order; and thus "they assumed at once that mind is the cause of the beautiful, the origin of being, and the source whence motion is derived for every thing living." Anaxagoras, in fact, regarded mind as the first cause of things (which Empedocles was rather disposed to assign to the principle of attraction, which he designated φιλία, and held to be an universal element), and maintained that, while all else is but a combination of particles, it is homogeneous, impassive, isolated, and pure. We are incapable, Aristotle observes, in his comment upon these opinions, of continuous thought and reflexion, because these are recreations too lofty to be continuously maintained; but, on this account, watching (not being asleep, that is), feeling and thinking are our most genial conditions, because from and through them, we derive our hopes and recollections. Notwithstanding, however, this acknowledgement, so to say, of mind, as a sovereign principle, and its attributes, there is no attempt to define its nature and its relations, or to shew in what it was identified with or different from the vital principle; and this want of critical distinction between them is the more apparent as several epithets (προγϵνϵστατός – θϵωρητικός – πρακτικός – παθητικός) are introduced in the course of these physiological treatises, which cannot but have modified the parent term.