ANAXAG'ORAS, one of the most eminent philosophers of the Ionic school, was b. at Clazomenw, in Ionia, 500 u.c. He belonged to a wealthy and distinguished family, which circumstance may have enabled him to devote himself exclusively to intellectual pursuits. Yet he does not seem to have entered into the possession of his property, but left it to his relations. When only 20 years of age, he went to Athens, where, in the course of time, he acquired a high reputation, and had several illustrious pupils, among whom were Pericles, Euripides, Socrates, and Archelaus. But at last, being accused of impiety towards the gods, he was condemned to death. His sentence, how ever, was commuted into banishment for life, through the eloquence of Pericles. He withdrew to Lampsacus on the Hellespont, where he died in the 73d year of his age. The old man was accustomed to say proudly, in his exile: " It is not I who have lost the Athenians, but the Athenians who have lost me." When on his death-bed, the magistrates of the town asked what funeral honors he desired; "Give the boys a holi day," was the quaint reply of the sage; and for several centuries the day of his death was commemorated in all the schools of Lampsacus.
It is not easy to ascertain what were the opinions of A. in philosophy. Fragments merely of his works have been preserved, and even these are sometimes contradictory. Of one thing we are certain, that lie had a deeper knowledge of physical laws than any of his predecessors or contemporaries. The absurdities of opinion which are attributed to him are no proof of the contrary, for, in his time, any attempt to explain even a moderate number of the phenomena of nature was sure to be attended with what every body now sees to be extravagant fictions. He believed the heavens to be a solid vault;
the stars to be stones thrown up from the earth by some violent convulsion, and set on fire by the ether which ever burns in the upper regions of the universe; the milky-way to be the shadow of the earth; that the soul had an aerial body; that the sun was a burning mass of stone, larger than the Peloponnesus. But he also arrived at some tolerably accurate conclusions regarding the cause of the moon's light, of the rainbow, of wind, and of sound. His great contribution to ancient philosophy, however, was his doctrine as to the origin of all things. He held that all matter existed originally in the condition of atoms; that these atoms, infinitely numerous, and infinitely divisible, had existed from all eternity, and that order was first produced out of this infinite chaos of minntite through the influence and operation of an eternal intelligence (Gr. noes), lie also maintained that all 1.1odies were simply aggregations of these atoms, and that a bar of gold, or iron, or copper, was composed of inconceivably minute particles of the same material; but he did not allow that objects had 'taken their shape through accident or blind fate, but through the agency of this " shaping spirit" or Nous, which he described as infinite, self-potent, and unmixed with anything else. "Nous," he again says, " is the most pure and subtle of all things, and has all knowledge about all things, and infinite power." A.'s theory is thus only one step from pure theism. He makes the work of the Eternal commence with providence, not with creation.
The fragments of A. have been collected by Sehauhach (Leipsic, 1827), and by Schorn (Bonn, 1829).