nsiderable authority) are chargeable with the very procedure of which
they accuse the philosopher--introducing _a priori_ inventions of their
own into the records of the past. It is, for example, a widely current
fiction that there was an original primeval people, taught directly by
God, endowed with perfect insight and wisdom, possessing a thorough
knowledge of all natural laws and spiritual truth; that there have been
such or such sacerdotal peoples; or, to mention a more specific claim,
that there was a Roman Epos, from which the Roman historians derived the
early annals of their city, etc....

I will mention only two phases and points of view that concern the
generally diffused conviction that Reason has ruled, and is still ruling
in the world, and consequently in the world's history; because they give
us, at the same time, an opportunity for more closely investigating the
question that presents the greatest difficulty, and for indicating a
branch of the subject which will have to be enlarged on in the sequel.

1. One of these points is that passage in history which informs us that
the Greek Anaxagoras was the first to enunciate the doctrine that
[GREEK: nous],--Understanding in general, or Reason, governs the world.
It is not intelligence as self-conscious Reason--not a spirit as such
that is meant; and we must clearly distinguish these from each other.
The movement of the solar system takes place according to unchangeable
laws. These laws are Reason, implicit in the phenomena in question; but
neither the sun nor the planets which revolve around it according to
these laws can be said to have any consciousness of them.

A thought of this kind--that nature is an embodiment of Reason, that is,
unchangeably subordinate to universal laws--appears nowise striking or
strange to us. We are accustomed to such conceptions and find nothing
extraordinary in them; and I have mentioned this extraordinary
occurrence partly to show how history teaches that ideas of this kind,
which may seem trivial to us, have not always been in the world; that,
on the contrary, such a thought makes an epoch in the annals of human
intelligence. Aristotle says of Anaxagoras, as the originator of the
thought in question, that he appeared as a sober man among the drunken.
Socrates adopted the doctrine from Anaxagoras, and it forthwith became
the ruling idea in philosophy--except in the school of Epicurus, who
ascribed all events to chance. "I was de