Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/365

Rh stone between the earlier study of nature and the later study of man. Indeed, his rationalism affected Greece through his followers, who were Perikles, Euripides and Thukydides. It is probable, also, that Themistokles studied with him at some period, perhaps when Anaxagoras was still in Asia Minor during the time of Themistokles's ostracism.

The introduction of the Nous into Greek thought changed the basis upon which rested the accepted opinions of the multitude. We see this first of all in the necessary metamorphosis of religious beliefs which began in the age of Perikles.

The first strong point of influence on the part of Anaxagoras in revolutionizing thought was in his astronomy, which was sufficiently developed to enable him to give a comparatively correct explanation of eclipses and other astronomical phenomena. It was a part of the creed of the age that the heavenly bodies were gods, and even in the time of Plato it was considered a crime not to believe in the godhead of the sun and moon. Anaxagoras asserted that the sun was not Helios, the god, but a mass of ignited stone as large as, or larger than, the Peloponnesus. He even tried to explain how it became ignited. He attempted to reduce all meteorological and elemental phenomena to law, and although some of the laws were wrong, yet the idea of law as a force in nature controlling phenomena was a rationalizing power that we can hardly compute, for according to the belief of the multitude, the gods interfered to produce these phenomena. Anaxagoras has left no writings, to our knowledge, directly on religion. The Nous even does not seem to have been a god, but rather a force; yet by introducing laws to control the outward phenomena of the universe, by one fell stroke he destroyed the deepest-seated religious ideas of those around him. The lightning blast that Zeus produced from Mt. Olympus by shaking his aegis, was accounted for sacrilegiously by Anaxagoras. The rain, the storm and the seasons the people regarded as the work of Zeus; and Anaxagoras in explaining them according to natural laws seemed to threaten the foundation of their religion. The world had been the plaything of the gods. It was now the work of a rational principle. Anaxagoras separated the gods from the procession of natural phenomena; but that he did not wish to destroy the reverence with which they were regarded is shown by the spirit in which the restoration and the enlargement of the Akropolis was undertaken, while his influence was still strong over Perikles.

Science, too, was changed by Anaxagoras, not only because he did much toward reducing to order and formulating the astronomical and cosmological theories of the time, but because he made law the basis of scientific research, and sought to find the uniformity of law in the phenomena of nature. He received a strong incentive to rational study of science in his young manhood when he had the opportunity of