A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



lacks nothing of the power of deity, save only that we 

 are not assured that it created the primordial particles. 

 The creation of these particles was a conception that 

 for Anaxagoras, as for the modern Spencer, lay beyond 

 the range of imagination. Nous is the artificer, work- 

 ing with "uncreated" particles. Back of nous and 

 the particles lies, for an Anaxagoras as for a Spencer, 

 the Unknowable. But nous itself is the equivalent of 

 that universal energy of motion which science recog- 

 nizes as operating between the particles of matter, and 

 which the theologist personifies as Deity. It is Pan- 

 theistic deity as Anaxagoras conceives it; his may be 

 called the first scientific conception of a non-anthropo- 

 morphic god. In elaborating this conception Anaxag- 

 oras proved himself one of the most remarkable scien- 

 tific dreamers of antiquity. To have substituted for 

 the Greek Pantheon of anthropomorphic deities the 

 conception of a non-anthropomorphic immaterial and 

 ethereal entity, of all things in the world "the most 

 rarefied and the purest," is to have performed a feat 

 which, considering the age and the environment in 

 which it was accomplished, staggers the imagination. 

 As a strictly scientific accomplishment the great think- 

 er's conception of primordial elements contained a 

 germ of the truth which was to lie dormant for 2200 

 years, but which then, as modified and vitalized by 

 the genius of Dal ton, was to dominate the new chemical 

 science of the nineteenth century. If there are inti- 

 mations that the primordial element of Anaxagoras 

 and of Dalton may turn out in the near future to be 

 itself a compound, there will still remain the yet finer 

 particles of the nous of Anaxagoras to baffle the most 



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