NOTES ON EARLY GREEK COSMOGONICAL SPECULATIONS 53 



So,also, Anaximines called Air, the first principle or fundamental 

 substance with which he starts, a god.' 



Other illustrations might be given, but these will perhaps 

 suflSce. 



In Empedocles, we have the first attempt to conceive of force out- 

 side of matter. His two forces. Love and Hate, (f)c\6rT)<i kuX veiKOf, 

 work on the four elements. Earth, Air, Fire and Water; but these 

 forces, as Burnet shows, are themselves more or less material. A 

 more successful attempt at conceiving immaterial force is the yow, or 

 intelligence, of Anaxagoras; but here again there is confusion of 

 force with matter. 



The atoms of Democritus are explicitly stated to be devoid of 

 sensation, volition or intelligence, and yet they possess the inher- 

 ent tendency to fall — a tendency he does not explain, though he is 

 vaguely groping for the idea of gravitation. 



5. The poetic and philosophic cosmogonies are both character- 

 ized by the conception of a dual agency at the beginning of the cos- 

 mic process. The first parents are for the poet Darkness and Light, 

 variously named, sometimes called Night and Day ; sometimes Chaos 

 and ^ther; and again Night and Phanes. These agents are always 

 personified: Darkness, the passive agent; Light, the active. They 

 are, at the same time, vaguely conceived as material things, Darkness 

 being usually conceived as a 7nu7'ky, indistiiig^dshaMe mist in which 

 the vivifying ethereal Light is latent. This dualism is found in a 

 less fantastic form in the philosophic conception also, as I shall try to 

 show, after giving illustrations of it from the poet's version of the 

 world story. 



Milton, in "Paradise Lost," expresses the Greek mythical con- 

 ception when he starts with a dark 



' Cicero Deor. Nat. I 26. Anaximines aera deum statuit eumque 

 gigni esseque immeusum et infinitum et semper in motu. 

 cf. Augustine Civ. D. VIII 2. Omnes rerum causas aeri infinito 

 dedit nee deos negavit aut tacuit, non tamen ab ipsis aerem 

 factum sed ipsos ex aere ortos credidit. 



