SOCRATES. 21 



intend to exclude a supreme intelligence from their theories of the 

 formation of the universe. " It plainly appears," says Dr. S. Clarke, 

 "how little reason modern atheists have to boast either of the autho- 

 rity or reasons of those ancient philosophers who held the eternity of 

 the world. For since these men neither proved, nor attempted to 

 prove, that the material world was original to itself, independent, or 

 self-existent ; but only that it was an eternal effect of an eternal cause, 

 which is God ; it is evident that this their opinion, even supposing it 

 could by no means be refuted, could afford no manner of advantage to 

 the cause of atheists in our days ; who, excluding supreme mind and 

 intelligence out of the universe, would make mere matter and necessity 

 the original and eternal cause of all things." 



The great difference between the theists and atheists before the Ancient 

 time of Aristotle was, that the former affirmed the world to have been 

 made by God; the latter, by the fortuitous motion of eternally- 

 existent matter ; and this theory was not the doctrine of the Ionic school. 



The atomic theory is attributed by Plato to Protagoras; but its Atomic 

 real authors (as applied to the purposes of atheism) were Leucippus J^ eory ' 

 and Democritus, who lived about 460 B.C. They made the two great and^Denio- 

 principles of nature to be the Plenum and the Vacuum, the one ov, the critus - 

 other p,fi ov. They taught that everything was made by the fortuitous 

 concourse of atoms, or individual corpuscles, some of which were 

 round, some angular, some curved and hooked. These were called 

 by Xenocrates peyidr) acWpcTra, " indivisible magnitudes ;" by 

 Pythagoras, jjiovadeQ, '" units." Fire and the soul, according to these 

 philosophers, consist of spherical corpuscles, which Democritus com- 

 pared to the motes in the sunbeam. According to this hypothesis, 

 all things are materially and mechanically necessary; but the older 

 atomists (t. e. those who believed in the formation of the* world from 

 atoms, but did not exclude spiritual essence, or rather incorporeal 

 substance) were generally theists; as, for instance, Pythagoras and 

 Parmenides. 



A determined opponent of Democritus was ANAXAGORAS, the Anaxagoras, 

 successor of Anaximines, and the most remarkable of the Ionic school, born500B - c - 

 whose philosophy is a subject of more immediate interest to us, inas- 

 much as he took up his abode in Athens, and became the instructor 

 of Pericles and Euripides, and the source from which Socrates derived 

 his knowledge of natural philosophy. Anaxagoras discovered that 

 there were inequalities in the moon's surface ; and asserted that the sun 

 was a mass of burning matter. He maintained that snow was black ; 

 and that the eyes were not capable of discovering the true colours of 

 objects. Of the reasons which induced him to maintain these 

 opinions, the ancient writers give but an indifferent account. It 

 would appear that Anaxagoras had adopted a leading notion of the 

 old materialists, which has been revived by modern philosophers, that 

 the qualities of bodies which strike our senses have no real existence 

 without us, but are images and appearances within us. With regard 



