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ANAXAGORAS was born of a family of high position in Clazomenæ, in Ionia. Early in life he reparied to Athens, the most splendid period in whose history was then beginning. Through the nobility and gravity of his character, and his growing fame as a teacher, he gathered round him a band of friends and pupils; among them, Pericles, whose friendship he retained throughout his life, and over whom he exercised the strongest influence. He taught Pericles, says Plutarch, to apply reason to Nature; and, freeing him from a terrifying and arid superstition, gave him a religion of peace and good hope. But Anaxagoras had the common fate of teachers of new truths. His science was falsely represented as an attack upon religion. He was accused of blasphemy, and was saved from death only by the exertions of Pericles; but he was banished from Athens. He retired to Lampsacus, where he died, honoured by its citizens. "Let the day of my death be a holiday for your children," was his answer to the request of how they might pay him honour. And so late as the second century B.C., Plutarch tells us, was the annual holiday still kept.
Anaxagoras, like Anaximander, understanding creation to be merely arrangement, held that the differences of things cannot be explained except by the existence of different elements. From all time these elements have existed, but uncombined and in chaos, the like mingled with the unlike. Then Mind appeared, he said, and reduced them to order. Like elements were joined to like, and thus the world was formed. What, then, is this forming Mind? To Anaxagoras it was not a supreme Being outside the universe; it was itself an element and material; but, as Aristotle described it, unmixed with other elements, and more subtle, more pure than they. If Mind regulates the universe, then is there a principle of order which science may strive to comprehend. We may regard Anaxagoras as having been the first to feel the importance of this truth, and to see that it led to the rejection of Fate and Chance; for these, he taught, are only the names we give to undiscovered Cause.
To him also belongs the signal merit of recognizing, as Aristotle did more explicitly, that knowledge comes to us through sensation. And he established the distinction, developed in modern philosophy, between Objective and Subjective Reality, between things in themselves and things as they appear to us. To the latter, he held, is our knowledge limited.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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