Kitap 1
16
Hence when someoneAnaxagoras. said that there is Mind in nature, just as in animals, and that this is the cause of all order and arrangement, he seemed like a sane man in contrast with the haphazard statements of his predecessors.Cf. Plat. Phaedo 97b-98b.
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We know definitely that Anaxagoras adopted this view; but HermotimusA semi-mythical person supposed to have been a preincarnation of Pythagoras. of Clazomenae is credited with having stated it earlier. Those thinkers, then, who held this view assumed a principle in things which is the cause of beauty, and the sort of cause by which motion is communicated to things.
1
It might be inferred that the first person to consider this question was Hesiod, or indeed anyone else who assumed Love or Desire as a first principle in things; e.g. Parmenides. For he says, where he is describing the creation of the universe, Love sheProbably Aphrodite (so Simplicius, Plutarch). created first of all the gods . . . Parmenides Fr. 13 (Diels)And Hesiod says,Hes. Th. 116-20. The quotation is slightly inaccurate. First of all things was Chaos made, and then/Broad-bosomed Earth . . ./And Love, the foremost of immortal beings, thus implying that there must be in the world some cause to move things and combine them.
2
The question of arranging these thinkers in order of priority may be decided later. Now since it was apparent that nature also contains the opposite of what is good, i.e. not only order and beauty, but disorder and ugliness; and that there are more bad and common things than there are good and beautiful: in view of this another thinker introduced Love and StrifeEmpedocles Fr. 17, 26 (Diels); R.P. 166. Cf. Burnet, E.G.P. 108 ff. as the respective causes of these things—
