These bright hopes faded when I saw that he did not require thought at all nor any reason for the formation of things, but had recourse to air, fire, water and many other eccentricities.” We here see how to what is best, according to the understanding (the relation of final end), that which we call natural causes is opposed, just as in Leibnitz the operating and the final causes are different. Socrates explains this in the following way: “It appears to me to be as if some one were to say that Socrates performs all his actions with understanding, and then in going on to give the reasons for each of my actions, were to say that I sit here because my body consists of bones and muscles; the bones are fixed and have joints that divide them (_διαφυὰς_), but the muscles have the power of extending and bending, and they cover the bones with flesh and skin; it is as though he were further to bring forward as the cause of my talking with you, other similar causes, sounds, and air, hearing, and a thousand other things, but omitted to give the true cause” (free independent determination), “which is that the Athenians judged it fit to condemn me, and therefore I judged it better and more just to sit here and to suffer the punishment which they accorded” (we must recollect that one of his friends had arranged everything for the flight of Socrates, but that he refused to go) “for else, by the dog of Egypt, how long ago would these bones and muscles have gone to Megara or to Boeotia, had they been moved only by their opinion of what was best, and had I not considered it juster and better to bear the punishment which the State laid upon me, instead of escaping and fleeing from it.” Plato here correctly places the two kinds of reason and cause in opposition to one another—the cause proceeding from ends, and the inferior, subject, and merely external causes of chemistry, mechanism, &c.—in order to show the discrepancy between them, as here exemplified in the case of a man with consciousness. Anaxagoras seems to define an end and to wish to proceed from it; but he immediately lets this go again and proceeds to quite external causes. “But to call these” (these bones and muscles) “causes is quite improper. If, however, anyone were to say that without having bones and muscles and whatever else I have, I could not do that which I consider best, he would be quite right. But to say that from such causes, I do that which I do, and do with understanding; to say that I do not do it from the choice of what is best—to make such an assertion shows a great want of consideration; it signifies an incapacity to distinguish that the one is the true cause and the other is only that without which the cause could not operate,” _i.e._ the conditions.