Anaxagoras

but this theory, which was first stated by Anaxagoras and later by Eudoxus and others, is very readily refutable, for it is easy to adduce plenty of impossibilities against such a view.

To say that originally everything was a mixture is absurd for various reasons, but especially since (a) it follows that things must have existed previously in an unmixed state;

but this is impossible on the assumption that everything was mixed together, for then the form would have been already differentiated, whereas he says that everything was mixed together except Mind, which alone was pure and unmixed.

" Excellently Anaxagoras, who, when he was dying at Lampsacus, and his friends asked whether he wished to be carried, if anything should happen, to his homeland Clazomenae, said:

For he had been a hearer of Anaxagoras, who, they say, when the death of his son was announced, said:

and Anaxagoras:

and this idea was borrowed by Anaxagoras when he declared that all things were originally together until Mind came and set them in order.

The succession passes from Thales through Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, to Socrates, who introduced ethics or moral philosophy;

Others wrote no more than one treatise each, as Melissus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras.

This man transferred the school from Ionia to Athens.

And some relate that Anaxagoras, son of Hegesibulus, of Clazomenae, was the first to publish a book in writing.

since even if Anaxagoras first set mind over things, yet not even he preserved the efficient cause, depicting certain senseless whirls together with the inactivity and senselessness of mind.

And yet those natural philosophers, very rarely, when they are stuck at some point, cry out, as if driven by inspiration — Empedocles indeed so that he sometimes seems to me to rave — that all things are hidden, that we perceive nothing, discern nothing, can find out at all nothing of what kind a thing is;

Anaxagoras said snow was black.

Anaxagoras said matter was infinite, but that from it there were minute particles like one another, these at first confused, afterward brought into order by a divine mind.

This is why people say that men like Anaxagoras and Thales may be wise but are not prudent, when they see them display ignorance of their own interests;

Anaxagoras again does not seem to have conceived the happy man as rich or powerful, since he says that he would not be surprised if he were to appear a strange sort of person in the eyes of the many;

But on behalf of myself and the likeness I will now say a word which Anaxagoras spoke, having lost a son:

the Athenians from Solon and Aristides and Pericles the disciple of Anaxagoras;

Well, and do you not believe the doctrine of Anaxagoras, that it is mind or soul which orders and holds the nature of all things?

Why, it seems to have anticipated by many years the recent doctrine of Anaxagoras, that the moon receives its light from the sun.

Another man says he laughs at all these notions, and that justice is what Anaxagoras says it is, mind;

Or if all thing were mixed together and never separated, the saying of Anaxagoras, all things are chaos, would soon come true.

Then one day I heard a man reading from a book, as he said, by Anaxagoras, that it is the mind that arranges and causes all things.

As I went on with my reading I saw that the man made no use of intelligence, and did not assign any real causes for the ordering of things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other absurdities.

Moreover, by way of providing himself with a style of discourse which was adapted, like a musical instrument, to his mode of life and the grandeur of his sentiments, he often made an auxiliary string of Anaxagoras, subtly mingling, as it were, with his rhetoric the dye of natural science.

But the man who most consorted with Pericles, and did most to clothe him with a majestic demeanor that had more weight than any demagogue’s appeals, yes, and who lifted on high and exalted the dignity of his character, was Anaxagoras the Clazomenian, whom men of that day used to call Nous, either because they admired that comprehension of his, which proved of such surpassing greatness in the investigation of nature;

These were not the only advantages Pericles had of his association with Anaxagoras.

For, having reasoned that the mind is the beginning of all things, and having hung the swinging-pole of the universe upon its axis, and affirmed it to be pure and simple and unmixable, he by this very title above all segregates it from any commingling with the soul, and yet elsewhere assigns it to the soul.

Anaxagoras, with Xenophanes, a weariness;

Now it is said that when somebody persisted in putting various difficulties of this sort to Anaxagoras and went on asking for what object one should choose to come into existence rather than not, he replied by saying, For the sake of contemplating the heavens and the whole order of the universe.

But Anaxagoras answered in that way because he saw that the man who put the question supposed it to be impossible to receive the appellation happy without being great and beautiful or rich, whereas he himself perhaps thought that the person who humanly speaking enjoys bliss is he that lives by the standard of justice without pain and in purity, or participates in some form of divine contemplation.

the Italiotes honored Pythagoras, and the Lampsacenes buried Anaxagoras, although he was a foreigner, and still hold him in honor.

"It was with Zeno, as we have received it, that Arcesilas set up his whole contest—not from obstinacy or zeal for victory, as it seems to me at least, but because of the obscurity of those matters which had brought Socrates, and, even before Socrates, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and almost all the ancients, to the confession of ignorance.

when the sun was darkened and sudden shadows fell, and the greatest fear had seized the minds of the Athenians, that famous Pericles, foremost of his state in authority and eloquence and counsel, is said to have taught his fellow citizens what he himself had received from Anaxagoras, whose pupil he had been:

Then Anaxagoras, who received his teaching from Anaximenes, was the first who held that the ordering and measure of all things was designed and brought about by the force and reason of an infinite mind.

but since that is not to his liking, mind bare and simple, with nothing joined to it whereby it might perceive, seems to escape the grasp and conception of our understanding.

And of the other philosophers, all who, passing beyond the elements, busied themselves with something loftier and more extraordinary, some of them hymned the Infinite, as Anaximander (he was a Milesian) and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and the Athenian Archelaus.

Nor is it anything new to renounce wealth and bestow it on the poor or on one's country, which many did before the Saviour's coming, some for the sake of leisure for letters and a dead wisdom, others for the sake of empty fame and vainglory—men like Anaxagoras and Democritus and Crates.

You will hear first that Pericles, who is thought to have far surpassed all men of his age in intellectual grasp, addressed himself to Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and only after being his pupil acquired this power of judgement.

and Pericles studied under two of the sophists, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and Damon, the latter in his day reputed to be the wisest among the Athenians.

And from minute and littlest flesh all flesh,

Bones to be sprung from littlest bones minute,

The homeomeria of Anaxagoras,

Yes, you know, Socrates, they say he did not get his wisdom independently, but consorted with many wise men, such as Pythocleides and Anaxagoras;

Do you think you are accusing Anaxagoras, my dear Meletus, and do you so despise these gentlemen and think they are so unversed in letters as not to know, that the books of Anaxagoras the Clazomenian are full of such utterances?

For indeed, if the soul were not in command of the body, but the latter had charge of itself, and so cookery and medicine were not surveyed and distinguished by the soul, but the body itself were the judge, forming its own estimate of them by the gratifications they gave it, we should have a fine instance of what Anaxagoras described, my dear Polus,—for you are versed in these matters: