Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

386 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH ANDidea of a number of personal agents directinghuman things, these philosophers nearly all concurredin the attempt to find some one agent, andthat material, from which all should spring. As yeteven the radical distinction of matter and spiritwas not clear to their minds:14 the soul of theindividual man was to them merely a particleof the vital power which disclosed itself throughthe universe, the purest portion, but a portion still,of primal matter. In their conception of theconstituent cause while they advanced towardsunity they receded from personality. Even theworld - forming Intelligence of Anaxagoras, whofirst distinctly declares that spirit is not mixedwith matter, works only as a power of nature, andis portrayed to us in a semi-sensuous form, as afiner matter.15"After Greek philosophy had run out duringabout a hundred and fifty years in this sort ofvague and imaginative speculation upon the physicalworld, it underwent a great change, whichmarks the transition to its second period. Thesesuccessive opinions of philosophers led a class ofmen who arose at Athens about the middle age O ofSocrates to the conclusion, that it would be more14 Dollinger, HeidentTwm und Judentliiim, p. 272, and Zeller, i. p. 139,who states this of the Eleatics, Heracleitus, Democritus, and even thePythagoreans, who, though they put Number instead of Matter, yet conceivedincorporeal principles as material, and so considered from thesame point of view the soul and the body, the ethical and the physical,in man.15 Zeller, ibid.