ccount for the phenomena of _physical_ nature
that they sought, and they had not attained to a realization of even a
rude form of the theistic problem. All they sought for was a primary
substance which should satisfy the needs of a rudimentary physical
science, which would enable them to co-ordinate the scanty data which
they had accumulated from their contact with the world in which they
lived, and to whose secrets they seem at times, in spite of their
limited knowledge, to have come very close. And even granting that the
problem involved in their search for the {Arche} was at bottom identical
with that of theism, they attempt to give no proof or argument for their
conclusions with regard to it. They are as yet merely _seers_, who
report the vision that comes to them as they gaze upon the stress and
strain and ever-changing spectacle of earth's phenomena. Even the
teleology of Anaxagoras (often mentioned as the germ of the theistic
argument) gives us nothing more than a poet's dream, expressed, as
Diogenes Laertius informs us, in a "lofty and agreeable style."[2]
"Nous," Anaxagoras tells us, "is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed
with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself.... It has all knowledge
about everything, and the greatest strength; and Nous has power over all
things, both greater and smaller, that have life. And Nous had power
over the whole revolution, so that it began to revolve in the
beginning.... And Nous set in order all things that were to be and that
were, and all things that are not now, and that are, and this revolution
in which now revolve the stars and the sun and the moon and the air and
the aether that are separated off."[3] This, however, amounts to no
argument, and it is extremely doubtful whether Anaxagoras ever meant
anything more by his Nous than Empedocles did by his Love and Strife, of
which it was the historical successor, and we may safely, I think,
endorse the judgment of Aristotle when he says that "Anaxagoras, also,
employs mind as a machine" (_i.e._, as the Laurentian MS. indicates, as
a theatrical _deus ex machina_) "for the production of the cosmos; and
when he finds himself in a perplexity as to the cause of its being
necessarily so, he then drags it in by force to his assistance; but, in
the other instances, he assigns as a cause of the things that are being
produced, everything else in preference to mind (Nous)."[4] This
criticism will, I am confident, apply fully as well to