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Defense of an Essay, &c.

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subjects of attack from the same source; so that it has been absolutely necessary to recount in their naked simplicity the Hesiodic stories, in order to know what it was that Plato deprecated and Xenophanos denounced."

It was philosophical inquiry, a better acquaintance with nature, more correct views of geography, &c., &c., which led the philoso- phers of the 5th and 6th centuries before the Christian era, to doubt the story of the gods which was so firmly believed by all in the days of Homer and Hesiod "The honor of having first represented God as the intelligent cause of the universe is ascribed to Anaxagoras by the ancients.....That he maintained an infinite mind to be the au- thor of all motion and life, is attested by many ancient authorities. Plato expressly asserts that Anaxagoras taught the existence of a Dis- posing Mind, the cause of all things.' Noũg & diaxospŵv ls xai wavía aifios. Aristotle gives it as his doctrine that mind is the first princi- ple of all things, pure, simple and unmixed; that it possesses within itself the united powers of thought and motion; and that it gives mo- tion to the universe, and is the cause of whatever is fair and good. Plutarch confirms this account of the doctrine of Anaxagoras, and shows wherein it differed from that of his predecessors. The Ionic philosophers,' says he,' who appeared before Anaxagoras, made for- tune or blind necessity, that is, the fortuitous or necessary motion of the particles of matter, the first principle in nature; but Anaxagoras affirmed that a pure mind, perfectly free from all material concretions, governs the universe.' The infinite Mind, or Deity, which his pre- decessors had confounded with matter, making them one universe, Anaxagoras conceived to have a separate and independent existence, and to be simple, pure, intelligence, capable of forming the eternal mass of matter according to his pleasure. Thus he assigned an adequate cause for the existence of the visible world.” Enfield, Vol. I. p. 161.

Here we have, if this account may be relied on, this great truth of the existence of an intelligent mind or God, separate from matter, first asserted in Greece in the 5th century B.C. The word ɛog was much older than this. Homer, and Hesiod, and Orpheus had used it. If, as used by them, this word designated, when standing absolutely, an understanding, spiritual being, who is self-existent and the former of the universe, how could any respectable ancient authority

"ascribe to Anaxagoras the honor of having first represented God (805) as the intelligent cause of the universe?"

* Grote's History of Greece, Vol. I.