Burnet and Blavatsky on Anaxagoras' Ideas and Impact

John Burnet and H.P. Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 26 pages

Twenty-six pages pairing two treatments of the same philosopher, which is the method this section uses repeatedly. The first is John Burnet's account from Early Greek Philosophy — a standard piece of classical scholarship, given here in full and section by section: the date, the early life, the relation to the Ionic school, Anaxagoras at Athens, the trial, the writings, and the surviving fragments.

Burnet's exposition then proceeds through the doctrines themselves — everything in everything, the portions, the seeds, all things together, and Nous — before turning to the formation of the worlds. The second half of the document sets the occult teaching alongside that reconstruction, so that the reader has the scholarly account and the theosophical one on the same subject without either being paraphrased through the other. Anaxagoras matters to this section because of Nous: a doctrine of mind as the ordering principle, arrived at in the fifth century BC, which the tradition here treats as one of the clearest survivals of the older teaching in Greek dress.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.1 MB, 26 pages)