position of the primitive ὁμοιομερῆ. Thus bread, although it apparently excludes bone, and flesh, and blood from its composition, does not really exclude them, because a man can be nourished upon bread; that is to say, in the human system bread is converted into bone, flesh, and blood, and therefore these existed in the bread before it was taken into the human system. I give you this illustration, not as physiologically or chemically correct, but for the purpose of illustrating Anaxagoras's doctrine, which is, that the properties, and indeed we may say the contents, of the various articles in nature are very different from what they appear to us to be. The doctrine proceeds on the principle that no kind of matter can be changed into any other kind, that no quality of matter can be changed into any other quality. Hence, when we find that bread gives rise to bone and flesh, we must either suppose that the bone and flesh are still bread, or else we must suppose that the bread was, or at any rate contained, bone and flesh. To argue otherwise would, in the estimation of Anaxagoras, be equivalent to maintaining that something could spring out of nothing.
18. There are two interesting questions connected with the philosophy of Anaxagoras, which I shall merely broach at present, without discussing them. These are, first, the consideration of the extent to which Anaxagoras may have been influenced in the construction of his system by the study of his own consciousness, and by the reflection that he himself,
