Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/10

Rh was born, or when he died; but he must have lived to a very great age, for he was in high repute as early as 544, and he was the tutor of Anaxagoras,  480. His theory was, that air was the first cause of all things, and that the other elements of the universe were resolvable into it. From this infinite air, he imagined that all finite things were formed by compression and rarefaction, produced by motion, which had existed from all eternity; so that the earth was generated out of condensed air, and the sun and other heavenly bodies from the earth. He thought also that heat and cold were produced by different degrees of density of this primal element, air; that the clouds were formed by the condensing of the air; and that it was the air which supported the earth, and kept it in its place. Even the human soul he believed to be, like the body, formed of air. He believed in the eternity of matter, and denied the existence of anything immaterial.

Anaxagoras, who, as has been already stated, was a pupil of Anaximenes, was born at Clazomenæ, in Ionia, about 499. He removed to Athens at the time of the Persian war, where he became intimate with Pericles, who defended him, though unsuccessfully, when he was prosecuted for impiety: he was fined five talents, and banished from the city; on which he retired to Lampsacus, where he died at the age of 72. He differed from his predecessors of the Ionic School, and sought for a higher cause of all things than matter: this cause he considered to be νοῦς, intelligence, or mind. Not that he thought this νοῦς to be the creator of the world, but only that principle which arranged it, and gave it motion; for his idea was, that matter had existed from all eternity, but that, before the νοῦς arranged it, it was all in a state of chaotic confusion, and full of an infinite number of homogeneous and heterogeneous parts; then the νοῦς separated the homogeneous parts from the heterogeneous, and in this manner the world was produced. This separation, however, he taught, was made in such a manner that everything contains in itself parts of other things, or heterogeneous elements; and is what it is only on account of certain homogeneous parts which constitute its predominant and real character.