influence on
subsequent philosophies, but in his own hands it was little more than a
dead letter. His immediate interest was rather in the variety of
phenomena than in their conceived principle of unity; he is
theoretically, perhaps, 'on the side of the angels,' in practice he is
a materialist.

[12]

Mind he conceived as something apart, sitting throned like Zeus upon
the heights, giving doubtless the first impulse to the movement of
things, but leaving them for the rest to their own inherent tendencies.
As distinguished from them it was, he conceived, the one thing which
was absolutely pure and unmixed. All things else had intermixture with
every other, the mixtures increasing in complexity towards the centre
of things. On the outmost verge were distributed the finest and least
complex forms of things--the sun, the moon, the stars; the more dense
gathering together, to form as it were in the centre of the vortex, the
earth and its manifold existences. By the intermixture of air and
earth and water, containing in themselves the infinitely varied seeds
of things, plants and animals were {56} developed. The seeds
themselves are too minute to be apprehended by the senses, but we can
divine their character by the various characters of the visible things
themselves, each of these having a necessary correspondence with the
nature of the seeds from which they respectively were formed.

[128]

Thus for a true apprehension of things sensation and reason are both
necessary--sensation to certify to the apparent characters of objects,
reason to pass from these to the nature of the invisible seeds or atoms
which cause those characters. Taken by themselves our sensations are
false, inasmuch as they give us only combined impressions, yet they are
a necessary stage towards the truth, as providing the materials which
reason must separate into their real elements.

From this brief summary we may gather that Mind was conceived, so to
speak, as placed at the _beginning_ of existence, inasmuch as it is the
first originator of the vortex motions of the atoms or seeds of things;
it was conceived also at the _end_ of existence as the power which by
analysis of the data of sensation goes back through the complexity of
actual being to the original unmingled or undeveloped nature of things.
But the whole process of nature itself between these limits Anaxagoras
conceived as a purely mechanical or at least physical development, the
un