THE IDEA OF SPIRIT IN GREEK THOUGHT 361 



stone between the earlier study of nature and the later study of man. 

 Indeed, his rationalism affected Greece through his followers, who 

 were Perikles, Euripides and Thukydides. It is probable, also, that 

 Themistokles studied with him at some period, perhaps when Anax- 

 agoras was still in Asia Minor during the time of Themistokles's 

 ostracism. 



The introduction of the Nous into Greek thought changed the basis 

 upon which rested the accepted opinions of the multitude. We see this 

 first of all in the necessary metamorphosis of religious beliefs which 

 began in the age of Perikles. 



The first strong point of influence on the part of Anaxagoras in 

 revolutionizing thought was in his astronomy, which was sufficiently 

 developed to enable him to give a comparatively correct explanation 

 of eclipses and other astronomical phenomena. It was a part of the 

 creed of the age that the heavenly bodies were gods, and even in the 

 time of Plato it was considered a crime not to believe in the godhead 

 of the sun and moon. Anaxagoras asserted that the sun was not 

 Helios, the god, but a mass of ignited stone as large as, or larger than, 

 the Peloponnesus. He even tried to explain how it became ignited. 

 He attempted to reduce all meteorological and elemental phenomena 

 to law, and although some of the laws were wrong, yet the idea of law 

 as a force in nature controlling phenomena was a rationalizing power 

 that we can hardly compute, for according to the belief of the multi- 

 tude, the gods interfered to produce these phenomena. Anaxagoras 

 has left no writings, to our knowledge, directly on religion. The ISTous 

 even does not seem to have been a god, but rather a force ; yet by intro- 

 ducing laws to control the outward phenomena of the universe, by one 

 fell stroke he destroyed the deepest-seated religious ideas of those 

 around him. The lightning blast that Zeus produced from Mt. 

 Olympus by shaking his aegis, was accounted for sacrilegiously by 

 Anaxagoras. The rain, the storm and the seasons the people regarded 

 as the work of Zeus; and Anaxagoras in explaining them according to 

 natural laws seemed to threaten the foundation of their religion. The 

 world had been the plaything of the gods. It was now the work of a 

 rational principle. Anaxagoras separated the gods from the procession 

 of natural phenomena; but that he did not wish to destroy the rever- 

 ence with which they were regarded is shown by the spirit in which the 

 restoration and the enlargement of the Akropolis was undertaken, while 

 his influence was still strong over Perikles. 



Science, too, was changed by Anaxagoras, not only because he did 

 much toward reducing to order and formulating the astronomical and 

 cosmological theories of the time, but because he made law the basis 

 of scientific research, and sought to find the uniformity of law in the 

 phenomena of nature. He received a strong incentive to rational study 

 of science in his young manhood when he had the opportunity of visit- 



