Anaxagoras

" 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:

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?

That name appears to put Anaxagoras in an uncomfortable position.

Now the light is always new and old about the moon, if the Anaxagoreans are right;

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.

For I never imagined that, when he said they were ordered by intelligence, he would introduce any other cause for these things than that it it is best for them to be as they are.

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;

"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:

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.

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.

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.

First, then, when he speaks

The homeomeria of Anaxagoras,

Which Anaxagoras takes unto himself,

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?

it appeared, however, that they were disputing either about Anaxagoras or about Oenopides;

for it was, I think, his falling in with Anaxagoras, who was just such a man, that filled him with high thoughts and taught him the nature of mind and of lack of mind, subjects about which Anaxagoras used chiefly to discourse, and from these speculations he drew and applied to the art of speaking what is of use to it.

If I make comparison on the score of good faith — Anaxagoras denied to his hosts a deposit entrusted to him:

For that sage, in declaring the sun to be fire, ignored the facts than men can look at fire without inconvenience, but cannot gaze steadily at the sun;

He said that he who meddles with these matters runs the risk of losing his sanity as completely as Anaxagoras, who took an insane pride in his explanation of the divine machinery.