ed that
rotation, according to which now rotate stars and sun and moon and air
and aether, now that they are separated. Rotation itself caused the
separation, and the dense is separated from the rare, the warm from the
cold, the bright from the dark, the dry from the moist. And when nous
began to set things in motion, there was separation from everything that
was in motion, all this was made distinct. The rotation of the
things that were moved and made distinct caused them to be yet more
distinct."(3)

Nous, then, as Anaxagoras conceives it, is "the most rarefied of all
things, and the purest, and it has knowledge in regard to everything and
the greatest power; over all that has life, both greater and less, it
rules." But these are postulants of omnipresence and omniscience. In
other words, nous is nothing less than the omnipotent artificer of the
material universe. It lacks nothing of the power of deity, save only
that we are not assured that it created the primordial particles. The
creation of these particles was a conception that for Anaxagoras, as
for the modern Spencer, lay beyond the range of imagination. Nous is
the artificer, working with "uncreated" particles. Back of nous and the
particles lies, for an Anaxagoras as for a Spencer, the Unknowable. But
nous itself is the equivalent of that universal energy of motion which
science recognizes as operating between the particles of matter, and
which the theologist personifies as Deity. It is Pantheistic deity
as Anaxagoras conceives it; his may be called the first scientific
conception of a non-anthropomorphic god. In elaborating this conception
Anaxagoras proved himself one of the most remarkable scientific
dreamers of antiquity. To have substituted for the Greek Pantheon
of anthropomorphic deities the conception of a non-anthropomorphic
immaterial and ethereal entity, of all things in the world "the most
rarefied and the purest," is to have performed a feat which, considering
the age and the environment in which it was accomplished, staggers the
imagination. As a strictly scientific accomplishment the great thinker's
conception of primordial elements contained a germ of the truth which
was to lie dormant for 2200 years, but which then, as modified and
vitalized by the genius of Dalton, was to dominate the new chemical
science of the nineteenth century. If there are intimations that the
primordial element of Anaxagoras and of Dalton may turn out in the near
future