Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/12
the preference to the conclusions of reflection. People even said that he maintained snow to be really black; for was it not produced from the dark water?
Anaxagoras marks a turning-point in the history of philosophy. With him speculation passed from the colonies of Greece to settle at Athens. By the theory of minute constituents of things, and his emphasis on mechanical processes in the formation of order, he paved the way for the Atomic theory. By his enunciation of the order the comes from Reason, on the other hand, he suggested the theory that nature is the work of Design. But the features of this Reason he described in a vague and analogical way. Aristotle and Plato have blamed him for basing his explanations on natural, not on final causes. These charges are scarcely fair. Anaxagoras seems to have held that the order was the work of Mind; but he needed not on that account to assume what the order was, and then employ the conception to explain why things were so and so. The order is rather the general postulate which the details have to prove, instead of themselves resting upon it. The conception of Reason in the world passed from him to Aristotle, to whom it seemed the dawn of sober thought after a night of distempered dreams. From Aristotle it descended to his commentators, and under the influence of Averroes became the engrossing topic of speculation. The fragments of Anaxagoras have been collected by Schaubach (Leipsic, 1827), and Schorn (Bonn, 1829). See also Mullach, Fragmenta Philos. Græc. i. 243–252.(W. W.)
Anaxarchus, a Grecian philosopher of the Eleatic school, was born in Abdera, and flourished about 340 B.C. He was the companion of Alexander in his expedition into Asia, and seems, from anecdotes that have been preserved, to have enjoyed his intimate friendship. He checked the vainglory of Alexander, when, elated with pride, he aspired to the honours of divinity, by pointing to his wounded finger, saying, "See the blood of a mortal, not of a god." When Alexander was tortured with remorse at having slain his friend Clitus, Anaxarchus endeavoured to soothe him by saying, that "kings, like the gods, could do no wrong." It is said that Nicocreon, tyrant of Cyprus, commanded him to be pounded in a mortar, and that he endured this torture with the greatest patience; but the story is doubtful, having no earlier authority than Cicero. Regarding his philosophical doctrines we have no information. Some have inferred from the epithet εὐδαιμονικός ("The Fortunate"), usually applied to him, that he held the end of life to be Εὐδαιμονία.
Anaxilaus of Larissa, a physician and Pythagorean philosopher, was banished from Rome by Augustus, B.C. 28, on the charge of practising the magic art. This accusation appears to have originated in his superior skill in natural philosophy, by which he produced effects that the ignorant attributed to magic. (Euseb., Chron. ad Olymp. clxxxviii.; St Iren. i. 13; Plin. xix. 4, xxv. 95, xxviii. 49, xxxii. 52, xxxv. 50.)
Anaximander, the second of the physical philosophers of Ionia, belonged, like his predecessor Thales, to the city of Miletus. His biography is a blank. The computations of Apollodorous have fixed the year of his birth at 611, and of his death a short while after 547 B.C. Tradition, probably correct in its general estimate, represents him as a successful student of astronomy and geography, and as one of the pioneers of exact science among the Greeks. But it is not to his delineations of the divisions of the globe, or to his dialling, or to his enlarged acquaintance with the celestial phenomena, especially of the obliquity of the ecliptic, that we can attribute the preservation of his name to the present day. That honour he owes to the broad views of the origin of things which his glimpses of natural knowledge suggested, and which he propounded in a treatise on nature or growth (φύσις). Of that work only a few words are left. The beginning or first principle (ἀρχή, a word which, it is said, he was the first to use) was an endless, unlimited mass (ἄπειρον), subject neither to old age nor decay, and perpetually yielding fresh materials for the series of beings which issued from it. It embraced everything, and directed the movement of things, by which there grew up a host of shapes and differences. Out of the vague and limitless body there sprung a central mass,—this earth of ours, cylindrical in shape, poised equidistant from surrounding orbs of fire, which had originally clung to it like the bark round a tree, until their continuity was severed, and they parted into several wheel-shaped and fire-filled bubbles of air. Man himself and the animals had come into being by like transmutations. Mankind was supposed by Anaximander to have sprung from some other species of animals, probably aquatic. But as the measureless and endless had been the prime cause of the motion into separate existences and individual forms, so also, according to the just award of destiny, these forms would at an appointed season suffer the vengeance due to their earlier act of separation, and return into the vague immensity whence they had issued. Thus the world, and all definite existences contained in it, would lose their independence and disappear. The "indeterminate" alone is perennial and godlike, all-embracing and all-guiding. The blazing orbs, which have drawn off from the cold earth and water, are the temporary gods of the world, clustering round the earth, which, to the ancient thinker, is the central figure. (See Ritter et Preller, Historia Phil. §§ 17–22; Mullach, Fragmenta Phil. Græc. i. 237–240.)W. W.
Anaximenes of Miletus may have been a younger contemporary of Anaximander, whose pupil or friend the ordinary tradition represents him to have been. To him it seemed that the air, with all its variety of contents, its universal presence, and all the vagueness which it has for the popular fancy as the apparent source of life and growth, was what maintained the universe, even as breath, which is our life and soul, sustains us. This vital air, boundless in its kind, is the source of the world's life. Everything is air at a different degree of density. Eternal movement pervades it; and under the influence of heat, which expands, and of cold, which contracts its volume, it gives rise to the several phases of existence. The process is a gradual one, and takes place in two directions, as heat or cold predominates. In this way was formed a broad disk of earth, which floats like a leaf on the circumambient air. Similar condensations produced the sun and stars; and the flaming state of these bodies is due solely to the extreme velocity of their motions. (See Ritter et Preller, Historia Phil. §§ 23–27; Mullach, Fragmenta Phil. Græc. i. 241–243.)W. W.
Anaximenes, a Greek historian and rhetorician, was born at Lampsacus, in Asia Minor, in the 4th century B.C. He accompanied Alexander, whom he is said to have instructed in rhetoric, on his expedition against Persia. He wrote a history of Philip and of Alexander, and likewise twelve books on the early history of Greece, but only a very few fragments of these exist. The treatise Ρητορικὴ πρὸς Ἀλέξανδρον, usually included among the works of Aristotle, has been ascribed by many critics to Anaximenes, on grounds that are generally admitted to be conclusive.
Ancelot, Jacques Arsène François Polycarpe, a French dramatist and littérateur, was born at Havre, 9th Feb. 1794, and died 7th Sept. 1854. He completed his studies at Paris, where he made his literary début in 1819, with Louis IX., a five-act tragedy, of which three editions were speedily exhausted. It had a run of fifty representations, and brought him a pension of 2000 francs from the king, Louis XVIII. His next work The Mayor of the