phenomena and mine conform to the same laws, and it is for this reason that I believe both to arise from a similar cause. Accordingly I do not extend the conclusion beyond the grounds for it. Earth, fire, mountains, trees, are remarkable agencies, but their phenomena do not conform to the same laws as my actions do, and I therefore do not believe earth or fire, mountains or trees, to possess animal life. But the supporters of the Volition Theory ask us to infer that volition causes every thing, for no reason except that it causes one particular thing; although that one phenomenon, far from being a type of all natural phenomena, is eminently peculiar; its laws bearing scarcely any resemblance to those of any other phenomenon, whether of inorganic or of organic nature.
NOTE SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PRECEDING CHAPTER.
The author of the Second Burnett Prize Essay (Dr. Tulloch), who has employed a considerable number of pages in controverting the doctrines of the preceding chapter, has somewhat surprised me by denying a fact, which I imagined too well known to require proof—that there have been philosophers who found in physical explanations of phenomena the same complete mental satisfaction which we are told is only given by volitional explanation, and others who denied the Volitional Theory on the same ground of inconceivability on which it is defended. The assertion of the Essayist is countersigned still more positively by an able reviewer of the Essay:[1] "Two illustrations," says the reviewer, "are advanced by Mr. Mill: the case of Thales and Anaximenes, stated by him to have maintained, the one Moisture and the other Air to be the origin of all things; and that of Descartes and Leibnitz, whom he asserts to have found the action of Mind upon Matter the grand inconceivability. In counter-statement as to the first of these cases the author shows—what we believe now hardly admits of doubt—that the Greek philosophers distinctly recognized as beyond and above their primal material source, the νοῦς, or Divine Intelligence, as the efficient and originating Source of all; and as to the second, by proof that it was the mode, not the fact, of that action on matter, which was represented as inconceivable."
A greater quantity of historical error has seldom been comprised in a single sentence. With regard to Thales, the assertion that he considered water as a mere material in the hands of νοῦς rests on a passage of Cicero de Naturâ Deorum; and whoever will refer to any of the accurate historians of philosophy, will find that they treat this as a mere fancy of Cicero, resting on no authority, opposed to all the evidence; and make surmises as to the manner in which Cicero may have been led into the error. (See Rutter, vol. i., p. 211, 2d ed.; Brandis, vol. i., pp. 118-9, 1st ed.; Preller, Historia Philosophiæ Græco-Romanæ, p. 10. "Schiefe Ansicht, durchaus zu verwerfen;" "augenscheinlich folgernd statt zu berichten;" "quibus vera sententia Thaletis plane detorquetur," are the expressions of these writers.) As for Anaximenes, he even according to Cicero, maintained, not that air was the material out of which God made the world, but that the air was a god: "Anaximenes aëra deum statuit;" or, according to St. Augustine, that it was the material out of which the gods were made; "non tamen ab ipsis [Diis] aërem factum, sed ipsos ex aëre ortos credidit." Those who are not familiar with the metaphysical terminology of antiquity, must not be misled by finding it stated that Anaximenes attributed ψυχὴ (translated soul, or life) to his universal element, the air. The Greek philosophers acknowledged several kinds of ψυχὴ, the nutritive, the sensitive, and the intellective.[2] Even the moderns, with admitted correctness, attribute life to plants. As far as we can make out the meaning of Anaximenes, he made choice of Air as the universal agent, on the ground that it is perpetually in motion, without any apparent cause external to itself: so that he conceived it as exercising spontaneous force, and as the principle of life and activity in all things, men and gods inclusive. If this be not representing it as the Efficient Cause the dispute altogether has no meaning.
If either Anaximenes, or Thales, or any of their contemporaries, had held the doctrine that νοῦς was the Efficient Cause, that doctrine could not have been reputed, as it was throughout antiquity, to have originated with Anaxagoras. The testimony of Aristotle, in the first book of his Metaphysics, is perfectly decisive with respect to these early speculations. After enumerating four kinds of causes, or rather four different meanings of the word Cause, viz., the Essence of a thing, the Matter of it, the Origin of Motion (Efficient Cause), and the End or