GREEK SCIENCE IN EARLY ATTIC PERIOD 



vaguest terms. Still his cosmogonic speculation re- 

 mains as perhaps the most remarkable one of an- 

 tiquity. How widely his speculation found currency 

 among his immediate successors is instanced in a 

 passage from Plato, where Socrates is represented as 

 scornfully answering a calumniator in these terms: 

 " He asserts that I say the sun is a stone and the 

 moon an earth. Do you think of accusing Anaxag- 

 oras, Miletas, and have you so low an opinion of these 

 men, and think them so unskilled in laws, as not to 

 know that the books of Anaxagoras the Clazomenaean 

 are full of these doctrines. And forsooth the young 

 men are learning these matters from me which some- 

 times they can buy from the orchestra for a drachma, 

 at the most, and laugh at Socrates if he pretends they 

 are his particularly seeing they are so strange." 



The element of error contained in these cosmogonic 

 speculations of Anaxagoras has led critics to do them 

 something less than justice. But there is one other 

 astronomical speculation for which the Clazomenasan 

 philosopher has received full credit. It is generally 

 admitted that it was he who first found out the ex- 

 planation of the phases of the moon ; a knowledge that 

 that body shines only by reflected light, and that its 

 visible forms, waxing and waning month by month 

 from crescent to disk and from disk to crescent, merely 

 represent our shifting view of its sun-illumined face. 

 It is difficult to put ourselves in the place of the an- 

 cient observer and realize how little the appearances 

 suggest the actual fact. That a body of the same 

 structure as the earth should shine with the radiance 

 of the moon merely because sunlight is reflected from 



