caught sight of the two sides, abstract, idle, dead, apart, but concrete, energetic, busy, living and life-giving in unity. Of course, I need not remark that his efficient is the usual material: he says efficient here, because what he speaks of is the matter or material operant. With these anticipatory explanations, I may now proceed. In regard to the history of the proofs for the Being of a God, we are now arrived, as has been said, within sight of Greece. As I am not intending at present to expatiate on these proofs themselves; so I shall not take up your time with any rehearsal of the various classifications and designations proposed in their regard by the various authorities. It shall be enough for us that all of these, with whatever peculiarity of dressing, come, in the end, to the three arguments in and with which Kant assumes to comprehend and exhaust the subject. That is, there is, first, the Cosmological; second, the Teleological; and, third, the Ontological argument. There is no dispute as to the position of this last. That argument, the ontological one, does not appear in history until in the time of Anselm Christianity has been for centuries the dominant religion in Europe. About the order of the two others there has been some little difference; Kant characterizing the teleological argument as the oldest, and Hegel postponing it to the cosmological. It has been usual, however, to speak of the latter in connection with Aristotle, and at all events it seems, on the whole, more convenient to begin with the teleological argument. Begin with which we may, however, and let them be separated from each other as they may be in time, the three, after all, do constitute together but the three undulations of a single wave, which wave is but a natural rise and ascent to God, on the part of man's own thought, with man's own experience and consciousness as the object before him. The word Teleology (due as a word probably to Wolff) has, in its meaning at all events, always been associated with the name of Anaxagoras. He, so far as history teaches, is the acknowledged originator of the idea. That is to be admitted. There can be no doubt that, whatever others may seem to have said in the same direction, it was Anaxagoras who, for the first time in Greece, perhaps in the world, spoke of the beauty and order in the universe being due to a designing mind. We have but to look to the single fragment of his lost work, περὶ φύσεως, which (the fragment) has been preserved to us by Simplicius, to become aware of such clearness and fulness on the part of Anaxagoras in his conception of the νοῦς, nous, as could not fail to impress on his successors the necessary problem, generally, of what is meant by teleology, and must perfectly justify, as well, the position which has been assigned to him at their head. "Nous (Intelligence)," he says there, "is infinite and absolute, free from admixture with anything else, alone by itself; it is omniscient and omnipotent, and has disposed all things, in order and in beauty, within the encompassing whole, where the stars are, and the sun, and the moon, and æther, and the air." This, beyond doubt, is fairly to characterize Mind as the ultimate causality of the universe, and of the order and design we see in it; and, very certainly, most amply, does the general voice of antiquity confirm the gloss. For one, Socrates, in the Phædo, gives very full testimony to this effect. He had heard a book of Anaxagoras' read, he says, in which it was mainiained that νοῦς, which may be translated mind, understanding, reason, was the disposing and arranging principle in the universe, and he had been mightily pleased therewith. For it seemed to him right and excellently well that an intelligence should be SOCRATES IN THE PHÆDO. 47 recognised as the cause of all things, inasmuch as, in that case, everything would find itself precisely where it was best that it should be; so that, accordingly, such consideration would directly lead us to a perfect explanation of anything in the world around us which we might be curious to understand. In a personal reference, for example, it became a man to ask, whether for himself or others, only what was best. To know that was the same thing as to know what was worst; for in a single cognition both lay (the proposition which is more familiar to us now-a-days, perhaps, as the dictum de vero; that the truth, namely, is the index sui et falsi). But it is this that has specially struck the mind of Socrates. What an inestimable good it will be to come to understand everything by being made to see that an intelligence has placed it precisely where it is best for it! Nothing could better have suited him than such a doctrine. What was as it should be, justice, right, reason, moral and intellectual truth - that was the special quest of Socrates at all times. Socrates is understood to have had no favour for Meteorologia, speculation into things celestial. Nay, Xenophon introduces him as calling this very Anaxagoras mad in the special reference (Mem. iv. 7. 6). Not but that Socrates, as we may see further, has his own interest in cosmologia, if not in meteorologia. It is only as characteristic of him, indeed, that he should be made to say here: "It appeared to me εὖ ἔχειν it appeared to me to be excellently well that the Nous should be the cause of all things;" for it certainly belonged to his very inmost and dearest thought that all things should be found to be framed and arranged by intelligence, and disposed according to what is best. There are other expressions in Plato, not always in the mouth of Socrates, quite to the same effect as regards the Nous of Anaxagoras holding and disposing all things at its own sovereign hest. Such expressions are to be found in the Laws (967 B), for example, and in the Cratylus (400 A, 413 C) more than once. But it is this great passage in the Phædo that must be considered the locus proprius on the point. Socrates, in it, dwells at very considerable length on the whole matter. It may almost be referred to, actually has been referred to, as an example and proof of Socrates' polylogia, his Redseligkeit, his loquacity, and, as Smollett says, clack. In point of fact, there is no fuller reference to the consideration in debate to be found anywhere, and Socrates does seem to have taken occasion from it to deliver himself in full freedom, unrestrictedly at large. He expatiates, positively, on the expectations which Anaxagoras had conjured up in him, expectations quite contradictorily meteorological, after all, seeing that, in great measure, they concern the shape of the earth, the sun, and the moon, and the comparative courses of the stars, he expatiates at great length on these expectations, positively, and he would not have given them up, he says, πολλοῦ, for a great deal. Then he expatiates at equal length on his disappointments, negatively, when, most eagerly possessing himself of the books and most keenly reading them, he found the man making no use whatever of the Nous, but, on the contrary, in all actual explanations of things, calling in only mechanical causes, airs, and æthers, and waters, and other ἄτοπα the like, quite as before!-just as though, says Socrates, it should be first affirmed of Socrates that he did all that he did by his own understanding, and then sapiently subjoined as if by way of example, that it was because of such and such bones and tendons, so and so constructed, that he sat there, the real reason being that it seemed to the Athenians best to condemn Socrates, and to himself best to abide the result. "Else, by the dog," he exclaims, "methinks these bones and tendons THE CAUSES TOGETHER CONCRETE-" ABSTRACT." 49 would, long ere this, have been somewhere about Megara or the Bœotian confines, transported thither on the thought of what seemed best." We see here that Socrates not only understood the principle of Anaxagoras with Anaxagoras' own further stultification of it, but also, perfectly, the distinction between final and mechanical causes. Proximately, it was certainly because of certain bodily antecedents that Socrates remained, as he did, sitting in prison; but, as certainly, for all that, it was the resolution of his own mind that was the final cause. Here, too, this also is to be seen, that the two sorts of causes do not remain abstract, that is, as Bacon (compare the De Augmentis in its correspondent part with The Advancement of Learning, ii. 8. 2) explains the word abstract, "severed," or "dissevered," from all else; but that they are, in rerum natura, concretely associated. The centrifugal force, in the revolution of the planets, is not the same as the centripetal: rather, the one is directly the reverse or the opposite of the other. Nevertheless, in the words of Mr. Clerk Maxwell, they are "merely partial and different aspects of the same stress." In point of fact, as already seen in regard to form and matter, this synthesis in antithesis, this one of two, this breadth of a duality in the unity of strain, seems to be the cosmical truth, and alone valid. There cannot be action without reaction; and the one abiding reality is the single nisus between, that conjoins no less than it disjoins. It is the τὸ ἀντίξουν συμφέρον, the coherent disherent, attributed to Heraclitus by Aristotle, who adds "that the fairest harmony results from differents, and that all things are produced from strife" (Eth. Nic. viii. 1). The two sides, it would seem, though they stand over against each other, and are absolutely opposed the one to the other, do not, for all that, subvert or destroy each other, D |