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Updated: June 1, 2025
Towards the close of his days, for example, he overthrew with a stroke of the pen, by the aid of certain observations of the moon, the cosmogonic theories of Buffon and Bailly, which were so long in favour. According to these theories, the earth was inevitably advancing to a state of congelation which was close at hand.
Anaxagoras could not prove; his argument was at best suggestive, not demonstrative. He did not even know the laws which govern falling bodies; much less could he apply such laws, even had he known them, to sidereal bodies at whose size and distance he could only guess in the vaguest terms. Still his cosmogonic speculation remains as perhaps the most remarkable one of antiquity.
Every thing which is said, every thing which is printed, induces us to suppose that the world is the creation of yesterday. This opinion, which allows to each a part more or less brilliant in the cosmogonic drama, is under the safeguard of too many vanities to have any thing to fear from the efforts of logic.
And forsooth the young men are learning these matters from me which sometimes they can buy from the orchestra for a drachma, at the most, and laugh at Socrates if he pretends they are his-particularly seeing they are so strange." The element of error contained in these cosmogonic speculations of Anaxagoras has led critics to do them something less than justice.
He held me upright, and spoke calmly, unpretentiously. "You must not get overdrunk with ecstasy. Much work yet remains for you in the world. Come; let us sweep the balcony floor; then we shall walk by the Ganges." I fetched a broom; Master, I knew, was teaching me the secret of balanced living. The soul must stretch over the cosmogonic abysses, while the body performs its daily duties.
There were cosmogonic songs, as among the Maoris and Zunis songs of the beginnings of things; there were magical songs, songs of weddings, a song based on the same popular tale that underlies the legend of the Argonauts. There were songs of the Culture Hero, songs of burial and feast, and of labour.
Naturally enough, this thought, embalmed in every cosmogonic speculation of whatever origin, was appealed to in explanation of the destruction of these hitherto unimagined hosts, which now, thanks to science, rose from their abysmal slumber as incontestable, but also as silent and as thought-provocative, as Sphinx or pyramid.
Even his famous cosmogonic guess, according to which water is the essence of all things and the primordial element out of which the earth was developed, is but an elaboration of the Babylonian conception. When we turn to the other field of thought with which the name of Thales is associated namely, geometry we again find evidence of the Oriental influence.
Myths, like gods, may be composite: of this nature, probably, are some cosmogonic histories, and the stories of Gilgamesh, Heracles, Perseus, and many others. The lines of origin mentioned above have, naturally, in some cases, coalesced, and their combination into single coherent narratives has been spread over long periods of time.
Loki in some stories is a genuine villain, and the death of Balder is a real tragedy. The great cosmogonic and eschatological myths are conceived in grandiose style. The struggle between gods and giants is in its basis the widespread nature myth of the conflict of seasons.
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