1950.
Defense of an Essay, &c.
579
If this honor is denied to Anaxagoras, and it be maintained that Thales and Pythagoras are also theists, it will not alter the force of our argument that sog was not used by Homer, Hesiod, and the earliest Greeks, as the name of a self-existent, spiritual Being; for if this had been the general belief in the age of Homer, how can we account før the existence of any controversy with respect to the theism of Thales and others of the Ionic sect, and for the direct assertions above quot- ed that Anaxagoras was the first among the Greeks, who conceived of mind as detached from matter?
If the belief in a monadic so was the ancient traditionary faith of Greece, handed down to them by their ancestors from the patriarchal age, and not either the fruit of philosophic speculation, or a tenet of foreign importation, how can we account for the treatment of this very Anaxagoras and the Greek philosophers generally by the common pev- ple, who are sure to adhere most firmly to the tradition of their fa- thers? Cudworth says, "It is certain the vulgar in all ages have been very ill judges of theists and atheists; as for example, Anatagoras the Clazomenikn, though he was the first of all the Ionit philosophers (unless Thales ought to be excepted,) who made an infinite mind to be a principle, that is, asserted a Deity according to the true notion of it; yet he was, notwithstanding, cried down for an atheist, merely because he affirmed the sun to be a mass of fire,' or 'a fiery globe,' and 'the moon to be an earth;' that is, because he denied them to be animated, and endued with understanding souls, and consequently to be gods. So likewise, Socrates was both accused and condemned for atheistical impiety, as denying all gods, though nothing was pretended to be proved against him but only this, that he did teach that those were not true gods which the city worshiped, and in the room thereof introduced other new gods.”* What is this, but saying in other words, that he was condemned for rejecting the old traditionary gods for the new philosophic ones; among whom the monadic eros is to be in- cluded?
If 60s when standing absolutely in Homer and Hesiod designates God (propriè), and not some particular god, either Zɩus or some other, to be inferred from the context, how can we account for the facts men- tioned above, and fʊr a thousand others that might readily be brought forward?
The truth is, we are prone to read old writers with our modern eyer. Polytheisin scems infinitely foolish to us; and it is inconceivable, in
Cudworth's Intellectual System, Vol. I. page 190