Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

xxviii INTRODUCTION SECT.
conscious and even supra-sensual, rather than amalga-
mated and infused.
'
All things were jumbled together,'
was the summary of his teaching, '
till Nous gave order
to the whole.' His doctrine marks a stage of untenable
transition, but is feeling its way to a new and higher
metaphysic, and was potent in fixing and determining
the place of Nous in philosophic terminology. There
is no proof that Anaxagoras invented or approached the
thought of incorporeal existence ; on the contrary, the
terms he uses are explicitly material ; Nous is '
thinnest
'
of all it things is ;
'
unmixed '
; its action on matter is
still conceived and expressed materially ; for the time
had not yet come to broach the question of immaterial
being. Neither was his Nous the mind of a divine
creator or upholder of the world, an idea quite foreign
of Nous was invoked
to his point of view ; the agency
only to initiate, not to maintain or to direct motion.
Nor yet again was it a world-soul pantheistically con-
ceived as immanent in all things. Nevertheless, in
isolating Nous from all other forms of matter, in making
its activity the originative motor of the Cosmos, in
associating with its essential properties the terrestrial
and, still more impressively, the celestial order, in choos-
ing and emphasising the name that suggested personal
intelligence, he helped to give currency to a term, and
even to conceptions, which from different sides Plato,
Aristotle, and the Stoics adopted and filled with a
new content.
There is one more debt to record, a debt rather of
temper and aim than of direct intellectual obligation.
the order of the
Pythagoras, it was said, surveying
I