ANAXAGORAS

, one of the most celebrated philosophers among the ancients. He was born at Clazomene in Ionia, about the 70th Olympiad. He was a disciple of Anaximenes; and he gave up his patrimony, to be more at leisure for the study of philosophy, giving lectures in that science at Athens. Being persecuted in this place, and at last banished from it, he opened a school at Lampsacum, where he was greatly honoured during his life, and still more after his death, statues having been erected to his memory. It is said he made some predictions relative to the phenomena of nature, as earthquakes &c, upon which he wrote some treatises. His principal tenets may be reduced to the following:— All things were in the beginning confusedly mixed together, without order and without motion. The principle of things is at the same time one and multiplex, which had the name of homæmeries, or similar particles, deprived of life. But there is beside this, from all eternity, another principle, an infinite and incorporeal spirit, who gave motion to these particles; in virtue of which, such as are homogeneal united, and such as were heterogeneal separated according to their different kinds. All things being thus put into motion by the spirit, and every thing being united to such as are similar, those that had a circular motion produced heavenly bodies, the lighter particles ascending, while those that were heavier descended. The rocks of the earth, being drawn up by the whirling force of the air, took fire, and became stars, beneath which the sun and moon took their stations. —It was said he also wrote upon the Quadrature of the Circle; the treatise upon which, Plutarch says, he composed during his imprisonment at Athens. |