IV. Those who hold views of the end of life similar to that of Clemens himself, who regarded obedience to the law of God and consequent eternal life as the τέλος. (1) Antisthenes: ἀτυφία. (2) Followers of Annikeris. (3) Plato. III. The passage in Theodoret, Book XI, of the Ἑλλινικῶν παθημάτων θεραπευτική, is entitled περί τέλους καὶ κρίσεως, and is probably dependent on Clemens. IV. Diogenes Laertes. Diogenes seems to know nothing of the work of Karneades. Philo and Antiochos are not mentioned, nor is Cicero. In his information on the τέλος he never goes beyond that given by Clemens, excepting in the case of the Cyrenaics where his account is completer.
Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and Plato are necessary to the understanding of Aristotle's theory of reason. Parmenides's assertion of the identity of thought with its object is repeated by Aristotle. A. is more inclined to explain the soul through the world than the world through the soul. Idealist interpreters of A. fail to do him justice in two ways: 1st. We invert the Aristotelian procedure, if we deduce reality a priori from the categories of consciousness. 2d. This operation is of less dignity and importance in the eyes of A. than the inductive method. "If the reason," a thought of Anaxagoras, "is to think all things, it must be free from admixture of foreign elements. For that which is foreign blocks out and eclipses the objects of our mental vision." So the constitution of the reason must lie in its pure potentiality, in its being able to take upon itself every intellectual form. As Plato starts from the Idea, so A. assumes the objects of the intellect τὰ νοητά, and from them explains the faculty (ὁ νοῡς) which apprehends them. The supremacy which Plato assigned to the Idea of Good passes with A. to purely intellectual objects, and on A.'s theory we need not recall them from any pre-natal life. "In material things," says A., "each intelligible is potentially present"; and he accounts for the intermissions in the reason's activity by this dependence on outward conditions, i.e., the activity of reason is the joint product of a potency within and a potency without,—reason waiting for its objects, intelligible objects waiting for a reason to think them. What does A. mean when he says that reason is identical with the object of reason? For Parmenides and A. alike, the presence of
