Note 78 — E. Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus.

Hegel certainly used in his lectures, to follow the usual order, and treat Empedocles before the Atomists. But since, in the course of his treatment of them, he always connected the Atomists with the Eleatics and Heraclitus, and took Empedocles, in so far as he anticipated design, as the forerunner of Anaxagoras, the present transposition is sufficiently justified. If we further consider that Empedocles swayed to and fro between the One of Heraclitus and the Many of Leucippus, without, like them, adhering to either of these one-sided determinations, it is clear that both moments are assumptions through whose variations he opened a way for the Anaxagorean conception of end, which, by comprehending them, is the essential unity from which proceeds the manifold of phenomena, as from their immanent source.—[Note by Editor.]