ty of a great name the most
visionary chimeras and the most mischievous wanderings of perverted
speculation. But, looking to the man himself--his discoveries--his
designs--his genius--his marvellous accomplishments--we cannot but
consider him as one of the most astonishing persons the world ever
produced; and, if in part a mountebank and an impostor, no one,
perhaps, ever deluded others with motives more pure--from an ambition
more disinterested and benevolent.

XXI. Upon the Athenians the effect of these various philosophers was
already marked and influential. From the time of Solon there had
existed in Athens a kind of school of political philosophy [246]. But
it was not a school of refining dogmas or systematic ethics; it was
too much connected with daily and practical life to foster to any
great extent the abstract contemplations and recondite theories of
metaphysical discoveries. Mnesiphilus, the most eminent of these
immediate successors of Solon, was the instructor of Themistocles, the
very antipodes of rhetoricians and refiners. But now a new age of
philosophy was at hand. Already the Eleatic sages, Zeno and
Parmenides, had travelled to Athens, and there proclaimed their
doctrines, and Zeno numbered among his listeners and disciples the
youthful Pericles. But a far more sensible influence was exercised by
Anaxagoras of the Ionian school. For thirty years, viz., from B. C.
480 to B. C. 450, during that eventful and stirring period intervening
between the battle of Thermopylae and the commencement of the five
years' truce with Sparta, followed by the death of Cimon (B. C. 449),
this eminent and most accomplished reasoner resided in Athens [247].
His doctrines were those most cherished by Pericles, who ranked the
philosopher among his intimate friends. After an absence of some
years, he again returned to Athens; and we shall then find him
subjected to a prosecution in which religious prejudice was stimulated
by party feud. More addicted to physics than to metaphysical
research, he alarmed the national superstition by explaining on
physical principles the formation even of the celestial bodies.
According to him, the sun itself--that centre of divine perfection
with the Pythagoreans--was ejected from the earth and heated into fire
by rapid motion. He maintained that the proper study of man was the
contemplation of nature and the heavens [248]: and he refined the
Author of the universe into an intellectua