III. Archelaos of Athens

191. The last of the early cosmologists was Archelaos of Athens, who was a disciple of Anaxagoras.[1018] He is also said to have been the teacher of Sokrates, a statement by no means so improbable as is sometimes supposed.[1019] There is no reason to doubt the tradition that Archelaos succeeded Anaxagoras in the school at Lampsakos.[1020] We certainly hear of Anaxagoreans,[1021] though their fame was soon obscured by the rise of the Sophists, as we call them.

192. On the cosmology of Archelaos, Hippolytos[1022] writes as follows:—

Archelaos was by birth an Athenian, and the son of Apollodoros. He spoke of the mixture of matter in a similar way to Anaxagoras, and of the first principles likewise. He held, however, that there was a certain mixture immanent even in Nous. And he held that there were two efficient causes which were separated off from one another, namely, the warm and the cold. The former was in motion, the latter at rest. When the water was liquefied it flowed to the centre, and there being burnt up it turned to earth and air, the latter of which was borne upwards, while the former took up its position below. These, then, are the reasons why the earth is at rest, and why it came into being. It lies in the 416centre, being practically no appreciable part of the universe. (But the air rules over all things),[1023] being produced by the burning of the fire, and from its original combustion comes the substance of the heavenly bodies. Of these the sun is the largest, and the moon second; the rest are of various sizes. He says that the heavens were inclined, and that then the sun made light upon the earth, made the air transparent, and the earth dry; for it was originally a pond, being high at the circumference and hollow in the centre. He adduces as a proof of this hollowness that the sun does not rise and set at the same time for all peoples, as it ought to do if the earth were level. As to animals, he says that when the earth was first being warmed in the lower part where the warm and the cold were mingled together, many living creatures appeared, and especially men, all having the same manner of life, and deriving their sustenance from the slime; they did not live long, and later on generation from one another began. And men were distinguished from the rest, and set up leaders, and laws, and arts, and cities, and so forth. And he says that Nous is implanted in all animals alike; for each of the animals, as well as man, makes use of Nous, but some quicker and some slower.

It is not necessary to say much with regard to this theory, which in many respects contrasts unfavourably with its predecessors. It is clear that, just as Diogenes had tried to introduce certain Anaxagorean ideas into the philosophy of Anaximenes, so Archelaos sought to bring Anaxagoreanism nearer to the old Ionic views by supplementing it with the opposition of warm and cold, rare and dense, and by stripping Nous of that simplicity which had marked it off from the other “things” in his master’s system. It was probably for this reason, too, that Nous was no longer regarded as the maker of the world.[1024] Leukippos had made such a 417force unnecessary. It may be added that this twofold relation of Archelaos to his predecessors makes it very credible that, as Aetios tells us,[1025] he believed in innumerable worlds; both Anaxagoras and the older Ionians upheld that doctrine.

193. The cosmology of Archelaos, like that of Diogenes, has all the characteristics of the age to which it belonged—an age of reaction, eclecticism, and investigation of detail.[1026] Hippon of Samos and Idaios of Himera represent nothing more than the feeling that philosophy had run into a blind alley, from which it could only escape by trying back. The Herakleiteans at Ephesos, impenetrably wrapped up as they were in their own system, did little but exaggerate its paradoxes and develop its more fanciful side.[1027] It was not enough for Kratylos to say with Herakleitos (fr. 84) that you cannot step twice into the same river; you could not do so even once.[1028] But in nothing was the total bankruptcy of the early cosmology so clearly shown as in the work of Gorgias, entitled Substance or the Non-existent, in which an absolute nihilism was set forth and based upon the Eleatic dialectic.[1029] The fact is that philosophy, so long as it clung to its old presuppositions, had nothing more to say; for the answer of Leukippos to the question of 418Thales was really final. Fresh life must be given to the speculative impulse by the raising of new problems, those of knowledge and conduct, before any further progress was possible; and this was done by the “Sophists” and Sokrates. Then, in the hands of Demokritos and Plato, philosophy took a new form, and started on a fresh course.