400 



INDUCTION. 



NOTE SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PRECEDING CHAPTER. 



The author of the Second Burnett Prize Essay (Dr. Tulloch), who has em- 

 ployed a considerable number of pages in controverting the doctrines of the pre- 

 ceding chapter, has somewhat surprised me by denying a fact, which I imagined 

 too well known to require proof that there have been philosophers who found 

 in physical explanations of phenomena the same complete mental satisfaction 

 which we are told is only given by volitional explanation, and others who de- 

 nied the Volitional Theory on the same ground of inconceivability on which it 

 is defended. The assertion of the Essayist is countersigned still more positively 

 by an able reviewer of the Essay :* "Two illustrations," says the reviewer, 

 " are advanced by Mr. Mill : the case of Thales and Anaximenes, stated by him 

 to have maintained, the one Moisture and the other Air to be the origin of all 

 things ; and that of Descartes and Leibnitz, whom he asserts to have found the 

 action of Mind upon Matter the grand inconceivability. In counterstatement 

 as to the first of these cases the author shows what we believe now hardly 

 admits of doubt that the Greek philosophers distinctly recognised as beyond 

 and above their primal material source, the VOVQ, or Divine Intelligence, as 

 the efficient and originating Source of all : and as to the second, by proof that 

 it was the mode, not the fact, of that action on matter, which was represented 

 as inconceivable." 



A greater quantity of historical error has seldom been comprised in a single 

 sentence. With regard to Thales, the assertion that he considered water as a 

 mere material in the hands of VOVQ rests on a passage of Cicero de Naturd 

 Deorum : and whoever will refer to any of the accurate historians of philo- 

 sophy, will find that they treat this as a mere fancy of Cicero, resting on no 

 authority, opposed to all the evidence ; and make surmises as to the manner 

 in which Cicero may have been led into the error. (See Ritter, vol. i. p. 211, 

 2nd ed. ; Brandis, vol. i. pp. 118-9, 1st ed. ; Preller, Historia Philosophic? 

 Grceco-Romana, p. 10. " Schiefe Ansicht, durchaus zu verwerfen ;" "augen- 

 scheinlich folgernd statt zu berichten ;" " quibus vera sententia Thaletis plane 

 detorquetur ;" are the expressions of these writers.) As for Anaxiraenes, he, 

 even according _to Cicero, maintained, not that air was the material out of 

 which God made the world, but that the air was a god : " Anaximenes aera 

 deum statuit :" or according to St. Augustine, that it was the material out of 

 which the gods were made; "non tamen ab ipsis [Diis] aerem factum, sed 

 ipsos ex acre ortos credidit." Those who are not familiar with the metaphy- 

 sical terminology of antiquity, must not be misled by finding it stated that 

 Anaximenes attributed ^v^n (translated soul, or life) to his universal element, 

 the air. The Greek philosophers acknowledged several kinds of ^u%>), the 

 nutritive, the sensitive, and the intellective.f Even the moderns with ad- 

 mitted correctness attribute life to plants. As far as we can make out the 

 meaning of Anaximenes, he made choice of Air as the universal agent, on the 

 ground that it is perpetually in motion, without any apparent cause external 

 to itself: so that he conceived it as exercising spontaneous force, and as the 



* Westminster Review for October 1855. 

 -f See the whole doctrine in Aristotle de Animd : where the 

 is treated as exactly equivalent to O^TTTLKT] 



