Book 12
967
Ath. The position at present is, as I said, exactly the opposite of what it was when those who considered these objects considered them to be soulless. Yet even then they were objects of admiration, and the conviction which is now actually held was suspected by all who studied them accurately—namely, that if they were soulless, and consequently devoid of reason, they could never have employed with such precision calculations so marvellous; and even in those days there were some who dared to hazard the statementAn allusion to the saying of Anaxagoras, All things were together; then Reason (νοῦς) came and set them in order. But A. ascribed to Reason only the initiation of a world-order; in all other respects his doctrine was materialistic, and he used purely physical causes and processes in explaining the world, regarding the stars as fiery masses of matter (full of earth, stones, etc.). Cp.Phaedo 91 B ff. that reason is the orderer of all that is in the heavens. But the same thinkers, through mistaking the nature of the soul and conceiving her to be posterior, instead of prior, to body, upset again (so to say) the whole universe, and most of all themselves; for as regards the visible objects of sight, all that moves in the heavens appeared to them to be full of stones, earth and many other soulless bodies which dispense the causes of the whole cosmos. These were the views which, at that time, caused these thinkers to incur many charges of atheism and much odium, and which also incited the poets to abuse themCp. Plat. Rep. 607b, c. by likening philosophers to dogs howling at the moon, with other such senseless slanders. But today, as we have said, the position is quite the reverse.
967
Clin. How so?
