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CH. II] Xenocrates, whom they praise as the ablest expositor of the doctrine of ideal numbers. He maintained that Vital Principle has in it an abiding source of ideas congenial with a mobile, ever-changing nature, such as pertains to the external world, and that hence it is a number which, while unable to free itself from the nature of things, approximates to ideas; and in order to prevent faculties so ungenial from being severed, he derived from Vital Principle the faculty and origin of motion, by which, as by a link, they are to be retained together. Thus, he thought to reconcile the apparent discrepance of the co-existence of ideas and things in the same being. Plato has well criticised, in one of his writings, the varying theories of philosophers upon the number, nature and relations of elementary principles.

Note 10, p. 23. Anaxagoras seems, as we have, &c.] The writing of Anaxagoras, the Clazomenian, here alluded to, appeared, according to Aristotle, after those of Empedocles, although, in age he was his senior; and Anaxagoras maintained, he says, that first causes are infinite in number. Thus, that almost all homogeneous bodies, such as water or air, can be produced or destroyed only by combination and separation; and that, admitting of no other origin or destruction than these, they must endure for ever. From all which it might be inferred, that he admitted of but one cause, and that in the form of matter. He made mind, to which he attributed