It thus appears that philosophical Idealism harbours a more valid explanation of reality than does materialism and its corollary, mechanism.
In the Western world, philosophical Idealism found its most lucid and comprehensive expression in Neoplatonism. Its hierarchical view of reality rests on two interrelated principles: the simple precedes the complex, and the intelligible precedes the sensible. Accordingly, the complex is explained by the simple and the sensible is explained by the intelligible.87 In terms of the ‘top-down’ metaphysics of Neoplatonism, the material is explained by the psychical, just as the latter is explained by the intellectual. In other words, the physical world is explained in the light of the metaphysical world. In this world-view, which is the precise opposite of a materialist one, “the material world can only be accounted for in terms of the non-material, the visible in terms of the invisible, the measurable in terms of the non-measurable.” Thus, Lord Northbourne concludes, “the ultimate truth is enshrined in the latter and not in the former [of each pair].”88
The cosmology of Anaxagoras is also relevant to other aspects of modern physics. In contrast to the commonly held view of his time on the separate realms of the gods and the cosmos, Anaxagoras postulates a bringing-together of the various levels of reality. In terms thereof, Mind indwells the physical cosmos while remaining unmixed with it, due to Mind being the finest and purest of all things. It has been remarked by a recent commentator that this world-view is reflected in modern physical theories such as the equivalence of energy and matter, and the substantial nature of the ‘vacuum’ of space.89
The teaching of Anaxagoras on Mind furthermore evokes a correlation between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Through his observations of the motions of the celestial bodies as well as his own mind/body interaction, Anaxagoras became convinced that the cosmos likewise consists of body and mind. Just as in the human being the mind activates the body and controls its motions, so does the universal Mind control the motions of the cosmos. Thus, “the role of mind in the control and function of the body and the principles of birth, growth, decay and death extend outward into the creation.”90 This concept of a correlation between the macrocosm and the microcosm would become axiomatic in both Hellenic and Christian thought in the centuries following Anaxagoras.
As was the case with other Pre-Socratic thinkers, Anaxagoras viewed the cosmos as alive. The source of the living cosmos is the Logos of Heraclitus, the realm of Being of Parmenides, and the Mind of Anaxagoras.91 The notion of a living cosmos fashioned by the Demiurge (i.e., the personification of Intellect) would be elaborated by Plato in his dialogue Timaeus: “This, then, in keeping with our likely account, is how we must say divine providence brought our world into being as a truly living thing (zoion), endowed with soul and intelligence” (29e–30c), and “Since the god wanted nothing more than to make the world like the best of the intelligible things, complete in every way, he made it a single visible living thing, which contains within itself all the living things whose nature it is to share its kind” (30c–31a). The cosmos is therefore alive due to the activity of the universal Mind.
It is highly significant to an authentic philosophy of life that Anaxagoras disagreed with the prevailing Hellenic view (not to mention the modern humanistic view) that among mortal beings, Mind is limited to humans. In contrast, Anaxagoras recognized that each living thing has a share of Mind, including the lower animals and plants. As we read in Fragment 12, “And Mind rules all things that possess life—both the larger and the smaller.” It is precisely due to the presence of Mind that plants and animals possess sensation, thought, and feelings in varying degrees. And since all living things are sources of change and motion, for Anaxagoras these are due to the activity of Mind, which is the universal cosmic principle of change.92 This admirable stance towards our fellow Earth-dwellers provides a further link between Anaxagoras and Indian philosophy, with its teaching that the individual self is identical with the World-Soul, or Atman. The latter is the life-principle which animates all organisms, just as the universal Mind does.93
For the sake of conceptual clarity, we must emphasize that Mind, or Intellect, should not be confused with reason, as any number of translators and commentators have done. In the Hellenic understanding, reason (dianoia) is an individual faculty limited to humans, whereas Intellect (nous) is universal and divine. This was understood by Meister Eckhart, who wrote that there is something in the human soul which is uncreated, and this is the Intellect. The two are yet related, Thomas Taylor noted, since reason is the power of the soul which derives the principles of its reasoning (logismos) from the Intellect.94 However, in most of modern Western philosophy the concepts of Intellect and reason have become conflated.
Moreover, since Mind is the first cause of the cosmos arising from the relative non-being of formless matter, it implies that Mind provides the ultimate standard whereby things are measured and judged. Idealism is by its very nature opposed to the world-view of humanism, which holds mankind as such to be the final arbiter in all things—in other words, reality is viewed as man-centred instead of Mind-centred. In Western philosophy, the notion of humanism was first enunciated by Protagoras, an Athenian contemporary of Anaxagoras, who famously held that man (ho anthrōpos, which in Greek comprises male and female) is the measure (metron) of everything. As reported by Socrates, Protagoras said that “Man is the measure of all things: of the things which are, that they are, and of the things which are not, that they are not” (Theaet, 152a). This implies that truth is relative, and that different individuals will view it differently—the opposite of the stance taken in Idealism.
With his doctrine that Mind/Intellect is the ultimate cause of motion, Anaxagoras also became the first Western philosopher to clearly distinguish between the mover and the moved. In other words, all the motions of material things can be traced to the action of Mind. The basis of Mind’s rule over all things is its power of causing them to move, not in a random fashion but in a way that sets them in order; the verb diakosmein (to set in order) is related to the noun kosmos, which means order.95 That is to say, Intellect is the first cause of the orderly motion of the cosmos.
Given the wide-ranging relevance of Anaxagoras’ thought, it is fitting that the American scholars Daniel Gersenshon and Daniel Greenberg declared Anaxagoras to be the first scientist, in the sense in which the latter term is used today (in their 1964 book Anaxagoras and the Birth of Physics). A few years earlier the celebrated physicist Erwin Schrödinger had already opposed the modernist dismissal of the Pre-Socratic natural philosophers in his treatise Nature and the Greeks. As recently commented, “This convergence of science and philosophy in Anaxagoras is significant and brings us to a consideration of Universal Mind as a property of physics as well as a subject of philosophy.”96
According to Diogenes of Apollonia, a younger contemporary of Socrates, the entire world of physical phenomena arises from the intelligence (noēsis) underlying it. The term noēsis is cognate to nous, which (as we saw) is used by Anaxagoras for Mind. The following fragments from Diogenes’ writing are relevant here: “In my opinion, to sum it all up, all things that are, are differentiated from the same thing and are the same thing. But all these things (earth, water, air, fire, and all the rest of the things in the cosmos), being differentiated out of the same thing, come to be different things at different times and return into the same thing” (Fragment 2); “For without intelligence (noēsis) it [i.e., the same thing] could not be distributed in such a way as to have the measures of all things—winter and summer, night and day, rains and winds and good weather” (Fragment 3); “Humans and animals live by means of air through breathing.
