5. Becoming is the unity of being and not-being, and into these two elements is the Heraclitic principle consciously analyzed by the _Atomists_. Heraclitus had uttered the principle of the becoming, but only as a fact of experience. He had simply expressed it as a law, but had not explained it. The necessity for this universal law yet remained to be proved. WHY is every thing in a perpetual flow—in an eternal movement? From the dynamical combination of matter and the moving force, the next step was to a consciously determined distinction, to a mechanical division of the two. Thus Empedocles combining the doctrines of Heraclitus and Parmenides, considered matter as the abiding being, while force was the ground of the movement. But the Atomists still considered the moving mythic energies as forces; Empedocles regarded them as love and hate; and Democritus as unconscious necessity. The result was, therefore, that the becoming was rather limited as a means for the mechanical explanation of nature, than itself explained. 6. Despairing of any merely materialistic explanation of the becoming, _Anaxagoras_ next appears, and places a world-forming Intelligence by the side of matter. He recognized mind as the primal causality, to which the existence of the world, together with its determined arrangement and design (_zweckmässigkeit_) must be referred. In this, philosophy gained a great principle, viz.—an ideal one. But Anaxagoras did not know how to fully carry out his principles. Instead of a theoretical comprehension of the universe—instead of deriving being from the idea, he grasped again after some mechanical explanation. His “world-forming reason” serves him only as a first impulse, only as a moving power. It is to him a _Deus ex machina_. Notwithstanding, therefore, his glimpse of something higher than matter, yet was Anaxagoras only a physical philosopher, like his predecessors. Mind had not yet appeared to him as a true force above nature, as an organizing soul of the universe.