such enquiries. Nor was he less perplexed with notions of comparison and
number. At first he had imagined himself to understand differences of
greater and less, and to know that ten is two more than eight, and the
like. But now those very notions appeared to him to contain a
contradiction. For how can one be divided into two? Or two be compounded
into one? These are difficulties which Socrates cannot answer. Of
generation and destruction he knows nothing. But he has a confused notion
of another method in which matters of this sort are to be investigated.
(Compare Republic; Charm.)

Then he heard some one reading out of a book of Anaxagoras, that mind is
the cause of all things. And he said to himself: If mind is the cause of
all things, surely mind must dispose them all for the best. The new
teacher will show me this 'order of the best' in man and nature. How great
had been his hopes and how great his disappointment! For he found that his
new friend was anything but consistent in his use of mind as a cause, and
that he soon introduced winds, waters, and other eccentric notions.
(Compare Arist. Metaph.) It was as if a person had said that Socrates is
sitting here because he is made up of bones and muscles, instead of telling
the true reason--that he is here because the Athenians have thought good to
sentence him to death, and he has thought good to await his sentence. Had
his bones and muscles been left by him to their own ideas of right, they
would long ago have taken themselves off. But surely there is a great
confusion of the cause and condition in all this. And this confusion also
leads people into all sorts of erroneous theories about the position and
motions of the earth. None of them know how much stronger than any Atlas
is the power of the best. But this 'best' is still undiscovered; and in
enquiring after the cause, we can only hope to attain the second best.

Now there is a danger in the contemplation of the nature of things, as