Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/111

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GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

mind, soul, or spirit, than had yet been made. We must remember that, although we are nowadays familiar with these words, and attach to them some sort of idea, it was very different in these early times. Then no such words as mind, soul, spirit, and consequently no such conceptions, existed; and when such conceptions first began to dawn, they were clothed in words which originally signified breath or air (animus, ψυχή, spiritus, πνεῦμα—the original sense of these words is breath or wind): so important did air appear to the ancient framers of speech that they supposed it to be the sustaining and moving principle not only of our physical life, but of our intelligent and spiritual functions.

28. This opinion, which Anaximenes either adopted or originated, was carried out still further by his pupil, Diogenes of Apollonia, a city in Crete. This philosopher held that the air was itself sensible and intelligent; and that it was through his participation in this ethereal principle that man both felt and understood—a doctrine which was revived at a late period by Campanella, a philosopher of the sixteenth century, whose works have fallen into more complete oblivion than they deserve. Campanella published a work, entitled 'De Sensu Rerum,' in which he contends that all nature possesses some sort of intelligence and sensibility, although it is only in man that this intelligence and sensibility attain to self-consciousness. His reason for this opinion is given in these words: