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Anaximander.

Teichmüller, Studies, p. 1.

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Introduction.

Among the philosophers of the Greeks, Empedocles of Agrigentum was the first to reduce things to several elements and to refuse to explain one element as having been transformed out of another. The Ionian natural philosophers, by contrast, all assumed a single primordial substance from which all the various so-called elements and all things arose through modifications. This idea is therefore the oldest philosophical theory of the world. Since it is still shared today by a large portion of natural scientists and philosophers, Anaximander deserves an eminent place in the history of philosophy: he was the first to give this theory a scientific form and, with grand daring, to attempt to construct an account of the formation of the world on its basis.

Of those who have dealt especially with Anaximander's doctrine, Schleiermacher must be named above all, and with distinction. The lecture On Anaximander, which he delivered before the Academy of Sciences in 1811, displays the profound insight of the dialectical mind. He ridicules those who are inclined to accept the crude contradictions of the ancient philosophers without question and reminds us that precisely in the rich and

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complicated modern science such things might be found more readily than in “those childish attempts of the earliest schools”—if indeed one may call them schools—whose philosophizing rested essentially upon an exceptional clarity belonging to a more deeply perceptive intellect, and in which the little that anyone placed before ordinary experience as a philosophical proposition had all the more necessarily to cohere with itself because everything proceeded from a single point.”

However stimulating and significant Schleiermacher's investigation may be, it deals throughout only with those concepts of Anaximander concerning which we possess no sufficient reports, namely, principally with the concept of the Boundless (Greek text) and with the countless worlds and the opposites. The investigation must evidently prove much more fruitful if it takes as its subject those particular doctrines which have been better transmitted to us and, if these cohere with one another, works backward from them to discover the “one point” from which everything in his thought proceeded.

After Schleiermacher, Röth dealt extensively with Anaximander in his Western Philosophy. Röth calls him the “Humboldt of his age,” eloquently emphasizes the man's natural-scientific orientation, and praises his newly invented astronomical instruments. At the same time, however, he proceeded from an unfounded prejudice and wanted to immerse Anaximander in the ideas of the Egyptian priests. His argument moves only within shadowy generalities and lacks exact philological analysis. The more closely we study Anaximander, the more clearly we shall recognize that he cast mythology aside and, as a decided European and Greek, relied only upon his own observations and rational arguments. In more re-

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cent times, Zeller has produced, with thorough scholarship, a many-sided, corrected, and excellent portrait of our philosopher. Since, however, he did not consider all of Anaximander's doctrines with equal attentiveness, renewed study must yield new interpretations—interpretations that may raise Anaximander's achievements to an even higher level, while also touching upon the most important questions of natural philosophy.

Thales regarded water as the seed of all things and derived both air and fire and solid earth from it. A sober intellect, however, had immediately to subject this view to the criticism that led directly to Anaximander's standpoint. For water that becomes stone, air, and fire is evidently not pure water. Whatever is to arise from water must already have been contained within it. Thales's water, in order to generate everything, must be a mixture of everything—and in such a way that each thing does not yet emerge in its own determinateness and limitation, but exists together with everything else in an indeterminate or boundless condition. The first critical examination of Thales's water therefore leads to Anaximander's Boundless (Greek text).

A second thought is equally necessary. If water is supposed to be the first of all things, it is impossible to see why it should not remain what it was at the beginning, or why the fiery and earthy elements should separate themselves from the mixture. In short, the ground of change and motion is the question. Just as Anaximander, as a philosophical thinker, had to transform water into the Boundless, so too he had to add the cause of motion

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to it.

Through these two fruitful ideas he arrived at the boldest conclusions, which raised him to a significant philosophical standpoint despite the immaturity of his knowledge of nature. The following considerations will prove this.

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§ 1.

Hypothesis Concerning the Formation of the World.

Almost the most remarkable feature of Anaximander's thought is his conception of the origin of the world. He imagined—and this is the first step—that the universe originally existed as a great sphere in which all substances were chaotically mixed together, so that nothing bodily,[Note: If Anaximander called this unity Greek text, the point is not so much its boundlessness in space as the fact that, for example, earth and water and so forth had not yet formed boundaries and distinctions within it. Compare below, § 9.] bounded, or opposed could yet exist, but everything formed one boundless unity. From this mass—and here we take the second step—a spherical shell of fire separated itself and surrounded the remaining mass, within which an envelope of air formed around the sphere of the earth.

He compares the fiery spherical shell to the bark that forms naturally around a tree as it grows. Now comes the third step. This fiery rind of the world tears apart and closes itself together again into several circles, and these then constitute the sun, the moon, and the stars.[Note: The passage is found in Eusebius, Praep. evang. I.8: Greek text [note cuts off, cont'd]]

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In fact, once one takes into account that Anaximander naturally could not yet have recognized the true relation of our planetary system to the fixed stars, we nevertheless find here, in other respects, a conception that seems to belong entirely to modern natural science. For the boldness of the thought with which he extends the once-undivided masses of earth, water, air, and fire, like an immeasurable ball of gas, as far as the region where the stars would later be located, and

[Note cont'd: Greek text.

“...to be separated from this world, and from it a certain sphere of fire to grow around the air surrounding the earth, like bark around a tree; when this broke away and enclosed itself in certain circles, the sun, the moon, and the stars came into being.”

Röth imagins the matter as though an opaque, solid shell—a firmament—were situated around the world, beyond which the fire would be located, and as though this fire broke through holes at certain points, producing the appearance of the stars and the sun. Compare Western Philosophy 2, p. 154 and following. But these claims rest upon an inadequate translation, for a solid vault of heaven is not found in Anaximander. The passage that Röth cites—compare note 139a, Galen, History of Philosophy, chapter 13, section D—

Greek text

“Anaximander says that the stars are carried by the circles and spheres upon which each of them stands”—contains in fact nothing about the stars being fixed to a solid vault, as though nailed to it. This would also be the most senseless assumption of all, since it has no point of contact whatsoever with Anaximander's entire explanation of the world.

It merely says that the stars are carried by the circles and spheres upon which each of them stands. Whether these spheres are made of solid material, and whether the stars are nailed to them, is not said. How the Anaximandrian passages can be interpreted otherwise than Röth interprets them, I have developed above in greater detail.

Nor does the first passage say that a solid shell was torn apart and that fire shone through its holes. Rather, the spherical shell itself is the fire, and the fire itself tears apart—that is, it loses its continuous coherence—and closes itself together again into several (Greek text) circles.

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explains the various concentric spherical layers of the elements through gradual condensation and separation. This recalls Laplace; it recalls theories concerning Saturn's ring and the breaking apart of such rings into planets. For an Ionian natural philosopher, the conception is therefore as admirable as it is proof that he sought mechanical causes for the formation of the world and excluded the gods as its makers.

Nor need we entirely lack the moving cause. Although the tradition does not expressly mention axial rotation, it does report that he taught an eternal motion which was older than Thales's water. Naturally older, because only through motion did water separate out as something distinct from the indeterminate mixture of the universe.[Note: Röth, Western Philosophy 2.2, note 123, p. 11, comments on the passage in Hermias, Irrisio gentilium philosophorum 4, Migne, Patrologia, volume 6, p. 1173: Greek text. “That eternal motion should be older than the primordial substance, Greek text, water, must probably be attributed only to Hermias.” Röth does not read carefully enough; otherwise he would not have overlooked the fact that Anaximander is distinguished precisely by regarding water as something that separates out through motion from the indeterminate primordial matter. Those modern interpreters who agree with Röth and likewise attribute Thales's water to Anaximander must explain why they refuse to praise Anaximander's higher insight, since his entire explanation of nature is carried out with the aid of eternal motion.

Through motion he explains fire and the course of the heavenly bodies; through motion, the separation of the elements; through motion, all coming-to-be and passing-away. Since the cause of motion must have made itself readily apparent, we may not]

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doubt that precisely Anaximander—who, according to Aristotle's testimony, so perceptively examined the reason why the earth does not move—was also the first to bring the principle of motion to prominence.

But that motion, for Anaximander, had to be axial rotation is clear in itself, since no other universal motion had been observed in connection with the fiery phenomena of the heavens; and since, as we shall see below, he was a sharp dialectician concerning the relations of motion, only circular motion could have occurred to him.

§ 2.

the Heavenly Bodies.

One must now ask why the heavenly bodies are located in particular places, why they stand at a particular height, and why they sometimes disappear, as the moon does. Anaximander answers all these questions with his hypothesis.

First, one must consider the relation of fire to the other phenomena. Anaximander's opinion is especially clearly recognizable from his explanation of lightning in Hippolytus. For he says that lightning arises when the wind tears the clouds apart.

Fire therefore arises from wind. Wind itself, however, is the finest evaporation of air and comes into being when these fine particles, pressed closely together, are set in motion.[Note: Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies I.6, p. 18, ed. Duncker: Greek text. “Winds arise when the finest vapors of the air separate out and, when they have gathered together, move; lightning arises when a wind, rushing in, divides the clouds.”]

A precise description of this process is found in Galen and Plutarch.

[Note cont'd: Since the cause of motion must have made itself readily apparent, we may not doubt that precisely Anaximander—who, according to Aristotle's testimony, so perceptively examined the reason why the earth does not move—was also the first to bring the principle of motion to prominence.]

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According to this account, the wind must first enter into a dense cloud, where it becomes completely wrapped up and enclosed. But since it consists entirely of fine and light particles, it breaks out violently. The tearing apart of the clouds produces the thunder; the contrast between the fine substance of the wind and the black color of the clouds produces the flash of light.[Note: Galen, History of Philosophy 19, p. 287, ed. Kühn: Greek text (Plutarch: Greek text.

Compare Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 3.7. I owe to a personal communication the observation that Greek text must mean the rupture in the clouds through which the brighter sky becomes visible. I cannot, however, accept this interpretation, since the rupture or opening must itself be filled with the fine substance of the wind, which is either already fiery or at least appears subjectively as fire and light by contrast with the thick cloud.]

From this one could already say, a priori, how Anaximander must explain the heavenly bodies: namely, as certain winds in the uppermost layer of air. And in fact there are passages in which Anaximander expresses himself in precisely this way. He assumes that, at a certain distance from the earth, there are certain airy regions in which the upper, fine, fiery excretion of the world enters into a whirlwind, so that the fiery mass is entirely enclosed by air and can emerge as light only at one place. That place is where we see the sun or the star each time.[Note: Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 2.20, “On the Substance of the Sun”: Greek text. “Anaximander says that the sun is a circle twenty-eight times as large as the earth, resembling the rim of a chariot wheel, hollow and full of fire, at one point of which the fire shines out through an opening, as through the tube of a bellows; and this is the sun.”]

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Let us analyze this conception into its elements. 1) First, we recognize the heavenly body as a flame shooting outward (Greek text). 2) This luminous, lightning-like ray

[Note cont'd: The passage from Plutarch continues: Greek text. “...resembling the rim of a chariot wheel, hollow and full of fire, at one point of which the fire shines out through an opening, as through the tube of a bellows; and this is the sun.”

Wyttenbach constructs the passage, unconcerned by the contradictio in adjecto, in such a way that he first makes the sun the entire Greek text and then makes it the fire that shines through the opening of a tube at one point of the Greek text. According to the view I developed above, we must always distinguish two elements in this and the following reports concerning Anaximander. The first gives the genetic explanation of the phenomenon; the second indicates that the final result of the entire complicated process—the flame blown outward—is what we perceive as the sun, moon, or stars.

The parallel passages are: Hippolytus, Philosophumena I.6: Greek text. “The stars come into being as circles of fire, separated from the fire belonging to the world and enclosed by air; their outflows form certain airy places through which the stars become visible.”

Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 2.25, “On the Substance of the Moon”: Greek text. “Anaximander says that the moon is a circle nineteen times as large as the earth, like the sun, full of fire; it undergoes eclipse during the rotations of the wheel, for it resembles a chariot wheel with a hollow rim full of fire and with one opening.”

Stobaeus, Eclogae I.510, “On the Substance of the Stars, and so forth”: Greek text. “Anaximander says that they are wheel-shaped masses of air, full of fire, which breathe out flames through openings at certain points.”

And in the same work, I.524, “On the Substance of the Sun”: Greek text (Augustanus and Vaticanus: Greek text. Instead of the word Greek text, Stobaeus transmits Greek text, “circumference,” immediately passing from the image to the geometrical meaning. In the final words we miss Greek text.

If this word could genuinely have been absent, it becomes still clearer that Greek text cannot be a parallel illustration of Greek text, since neither lightning nor a storm wind can serve metaphorically as the designation of a hole. If, as I suspect, the effective cause is meant, the difficulty disappears. Let us now]

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shoots out from a tube made of matted air (Greek text) and resembling a wagon wheel. 3) The opening is located in the

[Note cont'd: To this comparison let us also add the words transmitted by Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 2.20: Greek text. “At one point the fire shines out through an opening, as through the tube of a bellows, and this is the sun.”

Philologists have attempted many conjectures in order to remove the word Greek text, since a piece of a flute can hardly be designated by Greek text. It has been proposed that one should write Greek text, “through the opening of a flute,” or Greek text, “bellows through a flute,” or, as Roeper suggests, Greek text, “perforated.” In the translation given above, I have therefore tried, as well as possible, to arrive at a usable meaning by understanding the word not as indicating a place but as indicating the effective cause. The genitive Greek text is permissible in poetic diction.

Whether Anaximander explained the whirlwind through the rotation of the wheel—which would in itself be very probable, considering the eternal motion mentioned below in § 3—I leave undecided here. In any case, Greek text, “tube” or “flute,” is an appropriate image for the hollow rim of the wheel. The whole conception—that a storm wind arises from west to east through the rotation of the great world-potter's wheel, whirls the fine air together, and drives it out through the openings in a fiery form—possesses both vividness and the grand character peculiar to Anaximander.

I will mention one further explanation, which I owe to a personal communication. The word Greek text might be understood as the tube within the whirlwind and taken locally, so that the meaning would be very simple and consistent with the whole conception: “as through the hollow space within the whirlwind.” This would also preserve the comparison introduced by Greek text, “as.” For although every whirlwind, whirlpool, waterspout, or tornado contains a space not carried along by the motion—a space that could appropriately be called an Greek text and could provide the location of the outflow—the reduction of the heavenly phenomenon to the lesser conditions found here below would still have to be understood as a comparison.

The whole conception would, however, lose something, since in the comparison with the flute (Greek text, for which Achilles Tatius has Greek text) not merely the required hollow space is provided, but]

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rims (Greek text) of the wheel, that is, in the circumference of the wheel; and this solid portion of an ordinary wheel must therefore be imagined as hollow and filled with fire (Greek text). 4) Such openings are located at several definite, densely packed places in the air, where the heavenly bodies are consequently seen (Greek text).[Note: Roeper, Philologus 7, p. 608, wants to place Greek text after Greek text and to read Greek text instead of Greek text. But no sufficient reason is given for these emendations, since the transmitted text is intelligible.] 5) The flame is driven outward as though by a whirlwind emerging from a wind instrument (Greek text).

Zeller assumes that “the fire flows out from the hubs of the wheel-shaped shells.”[Note: Philosophy of the Greeks I, third edition, p. 195.] But however acceptable this conception may be in itself, Greek text always means the structure—the interlocking rims of the wheel—and not the hub made from a single piece. Moreover, the hub is always provided with a hollow space in which the axle of the wagon moves. Anaximander therefore would not have needed to insist that one imagine the hub as provided with such a hollow. When he says, “with a rim imagined as hollow” (Greek text), he evidently requires, in addition to the image of the wheel, a supplementary feature of the conception, one that was indeed necessary if the rims were to be imagined as hollow.

This small alteration in the translation of the passages transmitted to us has fairly far-reaching

[Note cont'd: ...but also the idea of blowing outward (Greek text), which contains the principle of motion and explains the Greek text more effectively.

[Note: Roeper, Philologus 7, p. 608, wants to place Greek text after Greek text and to read Greek text instead of Greek text. No sufficient reason is given for these emendations, since the transmitted text is intelligible.]

[Note: Philosophy of the Greeks I, third edition, p. 195.]

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consequences for the whole conception. For if, according to the interpretation that has hitherto prevailed, the shells enclosing the fire are supposed to resemble an entire wheel, then the fire would naturally have to flow out from the center—that is, from the hub.

This was probably the compelling logic that led Zeller to his translation. For if the fire flowed out from a place on the rim, that is, from the circumference, then the stars would have to appear to us—like the sun and moon—as rotating in small circles, like the wheels of a fireworks display, while to ordinary sight they show neither any movement nor any change in their positions relative to one another.

We are therefore driven to alter the whole conception. If the heavenly bodies are located at the circumference of the wheel, then the hub of the wheel must be the center of the world. The rotating wheel is thus the entire sphere of air revolving around the earth; at the outermost circumference of this sphere of air, the air is whirled together, so that it can there be compared with the hollow rims of the wheel.

At particular points on these circular wheels, the densely matted air-whirls allow the finest warm excretion of the world contained within them to shoot out as flames, and these are seen as the heavenly bodies circulating around the earth.

The conception is certainly greatly changed by this interpretation. But it does not force the transmitted words into an unnatural meaning. On the contrary, Anaximander once again appears as the bold investigator who, with the knowledge available to him, succeeded in producing a quite plausible explanation of the phenomena of the heavens.

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When one makes this conception clear to oneself, it becomes incomprehensible how Anaximander could have been so misunderstood by Röth that he was taken to teach a solid firmament through whose holes the fire beyond it shone.

The solid shell of the heavens is entirely unknown to him. The fire was once a single, great, shell-shaped, continuous mass, but it was torn apart by some cause that is not directly specified for us and has since existed only in many individual wheels of fire, like Saturn's rings. These, enclosed within a mantle of densely matted air, shine forth as heavenly bodies through an opening, just as lightning shines out from a cloud.

Examination of Zellers Arguments.

Before we may declare the problem settled, we must examine Zeller's important objections, which led him to such a different interpretation. I distinguish two principal arguments. The first is drawn from the calculation concerning the sun's Greek text; the second rests upon a passage in Achilles Tatius.

As for the first difficulty, Zeller rightly points out, in the work cited above, p. 196, that according to Plutarch the circle on which the sun stands is supposed to be twenty-eight times as large as the diameter of the solar disk. This conflicts so conspicuously with visual experience that we can scarcely attribute such a conception to Anaximander. Consequently, Zeller wants to understand the air-whirl enclosing the solar disk as the wheel that is twenty-eight times as large as the solar disk itself.

Against this, however, it must first be remembered that Anaximander does not speak of the diameter of the sun, but simply says: “twenty-eight times greater than the earth.” It is therefore more appropriate to take only the circumference into account, since the measurement presumably proceeded by rolling out the circumference, and one then obtains

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a measure three times greater. 2) Furthermore, the parallel passage in Hippolytus says: “twenty-seven times as large as the moon,” or “as the circle of the moon.” The statement has therefore been transmitted in such an uncertain form that it is scarcely possible to build any secure conclusions upon it.

For that reason, one could just as well, without contradicting visual experience too conspicuously, calculate the circles of the apparent orbits of the sun and moon. Since the daily circle of the moon's orbit is supposed to be nineteen times as large as the earth, one could take 19 times 27—that is, 513—as the ratio determined by Anaximander between the daily circle of the sun's orbit and the circumference of the earth, or, respectively, the circumference of the sun. Anaximander would accordingly have set the solar disk at approximately half its actual size, since we calculate its diameter as approximately half a degree on average—32 minutes and 3 one half seconds—and would therefore express the ratio of its circumference to the entire circle as 1 to 260. Because of the uncertainty of the transmission, I have therefore paid no attention to these numerical statements, since the conception can acquire sufficient security even without such conjectures.

The passages read as follows. Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 2.20, “On the Size of the Sun” (Greek text):

Greek text.

“Anaximander says that the sun itself is equal to the earth, but that the circle from which it has its outflow and upon which it is carried is twenty-seven times as large as the earth.”

If one considers the individual expressions, Greek text, understood in Zeller's sense as the whirlwind enclosing the sun, would be an unusual designation. Likewise, instead of Greek text, one would expect the expressions that occur elsewhere in all the fragments—Greek text—and finally, instead of Greek text, one would surely expect Greek text, since the sun does not stand upon the whirlwind but is enclosed within it. If, however, one understands Greek text as the circle of the sun's course through the heavens, all these expressions fit in the most exact sense.

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These expressions fit in the most exact sense. Stobaeus has, in the parallel passage, Eclogae I.24.524, Greek text instead of Greek text, but he also has Greek text instead of Greek text. The revolution of the sun around the axis of the world cannot well be attributed to the air-felt that encloses the sun; this variant therefore does not alter the interpretation.

The passage in Hippolytus I.6 reads:

Greek text.

“The circle of the sun is twenty-seven times as large as that of the moon; the sun is highest, while the circles of the fixed stars are lowest.”

Roeper was right to want to read Greek text instead of the transmitted reading. One can see that the passage concerns the measurement of distances, whereby, presumably, attention can be paid only to phenomena that actually fall within the range of sight. For this reason alone, I consider it very unlikely that Anaximander intended his entire calculation to concern the entirely imperceptible, purely hypothetical air-mantle of the sun.

Third, I would also draw attention to the fact that Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 2.29, “On the Eclipse of the Moon” (Greek text), says:

Greek text.

“When the opening around the wheel is blocked.”

The designation of the place where the opening is supposed to be located by the expression Greek text would be exceedingly strange if the exact center of the wheel were intended. The designation would, by contrast, be entirely natural if an indefinite location on the wheel-rim were meant, since Greek text signifies not only the entire wheel but also the circle or rim. Indeed, the rim that children roll in their games, and which has neither hub nor spokes, is also called Greek text.

As for the second passage, the one upon which Zeller relies, I would be inclined to deny it all value, although it appears to offer the greatest clarification. The passage reads in full:

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“Concerning the sun” (Greek text) (Achilles Tatius, Introduction to Aratus' Phenomena 19, ed. Petavius, De doctrina temporum, volume 3):

Greek text.

“But some people, among whom is Anaximander, say that it sends forth its light in the shape of a wheel. For just as, in a wheel, the hub is hollow, while spokes extend from it toward the outer circumference of the rim, so the sun also sends forth its light from a hollow space, extending its rays and illuminating the outside in a circle. Others say that it sends forth its light from a hollow and narrow place, as from a trumpet, like a thunderbolt.”

The author here divides the opinions into two groups, and he counts Anaximander among the first. Unfortunately, he neglected to report who else held this doctrine. It is his convenient habit almost everywhere merely to say, Greek text, and so forth, thereby avoiding the necessity of giving an exact account. Since it is unlikely that all of these people expressed themselves in the same way, the report about each of the Greek text may contain something that, taken as a whole, fits no individual.

That is evidently what has happened here with regard to Anaximander. Since he groups Anaximander together with an entire class of thinkers (Greek text), we have lost the right to attribute the following report either exclusively or entirely to Anaximander, and consequently nothing certain can be deduced from it.

If we nevertheless examine the report, we must distinguish between indirect and direct speech. The direct speech (Greek text) is evidently an explanatory addition by Achilles Tatius and has the purpose of overcoming the difficulty that the fire is supposed to emerge from the Greek text.

In the indirect speech, however, there is no mention whatsoever of the hub or the spokes, but only that the fire comes from a hollow space and shines outward in a circular form. Even if one wanted to attach greater importance to this report of Achilles Tatius, it could not accomplish what is demanded of it. Self-

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if one wanted to attach greater importance to this report of Achilles Tatius, it could nevertheless not accomplish what is demanded of it.

One must also take into account the helpless imagination of the man whose greatest achievement consisted in extracting the subsidiary ideas of hub, spoke, and rim merely from the word “wheel,” without giving the slightest indication of what these parts are supposed to mean in relation to the sun. For if the light must follow these peculiar paths, it must surely be forced to do so by a solid body.

While the historical Anaximander explains the entire phenomenon vividly through mechanical processes, Achilles Tatius knows nothing of the air-whirls and merely plays with the impoverished image of the wagon wheel. Clearly, his imagination was set in motion by the hollow rim of the wheel and by the hollow space from which the fire was supposed to come while nevertheless appearing in a circular form.

The completion of the image was easy enough: one had only to insert the spokes as connecting structures.

In the rest of his account, however, Achilles Tatius—compelled by more definite traditions—presents the correct conception of the heavenly wheel, for example when he describes Atreus's doctrine concerning the contrary motion of the planets and the sun.

There the heavens are for him the wheel (Greek text), and naturally only the rim of the wheel. The sun is the ant which crawls in the opposite direction—from west to east—upon the wheel that turns from east to west.

Let us now turn to the second group (Greek text). Although one would expect to hear here of a different doctrine with which Anaximander had nothing to do, we notice immediately that Achilles Tatius has simply placed beside the first doctrine the other half of Anaximander's conception, which he could not easily reconcile with the first, as though it were an independent doctrine.

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Anaximander's conception, which he could not easily reconcile with the first, as though it were an independent doctrine. For who fails to recognize the Anaximandrian whirlwind (Greek text), which emerges from the hollow, narrow space, as from a blowpipe (Greek text, here Greek text)?

But since Achilles Tatius had already added hub and spokes to Anaximander's conception, he could not naturally reconcile that image with the image of a wind instrument, and it was therefore most convenient to make two groups of doctrines out of them.

After this examination, I am convinced that Achilles Tatius must either be discarded entirely as useless or analyzed in the manner explained above, so that, although he does not transmit the exact wording of Anaximander's passages, he can nevertheless confirm the conception we have reached from other sources.

For the theory introduced by the words Greek text is evidently only an elaboration of the perhaps genuinely transmitted words, “as through the tube of a bellows” (Greek text).

Achilles probably had flashes of lightning in mind when he used the word Greek text, and in this respect—although he supposedly is not presenting anything specifically Anaximandrian—he saw correctly that Anaximander explained the production of the flames of the heavenly bodies by analogy with lightning. Compare p. 10.

Nevertheless, in the passage from Plutarch I would prefer, for the reasons given above, to understand the image as referring to the whirlwind, which consists of the finest fiery excretions of the air and therefore adequately explains the flame of fire.

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§ 3.

the Eternal Motion.

The repeatedly transmitted report that Anaximander taught an eternal motion is highly interesting. Although this doctrine escaped none of the ancient commentators, nor any of the more recent historians—with the exception of Ueberweg—not one of them has, strangely enough, drawn any advantage from it for the interpretation of Anaximander.

Yet a determination of the principle must itself have a fundamental significance, so that everything that follows cannot be properly understood without this principle. When I now examine Anaximander's eternal motion more closely, I am in fact taking up a problem that has hitherto been neglected; and it is only this previous neglect that explains why Ueberweg, in his diligent compilation, passed over the point in complete silence.

Where Schleiermacher mentions this doctrine, it must have seemed so unimportant to him that he does not even raise the question whether it means a spatial or a qualitative motion. He seems to understand it merely as a general designation for all changes in the world. While he considers every possible interpretation of the apeiron with the greatest care, he contents himself, in interpreting eternal motion, with the first idea that occurs to him, without treating it as a problem.

I shall quote the passage in which he most clearly and fully reveals his interpretation. Compare Schleiermacher's Works on Philosophy 2, p. 192:

“Since the principle itself can never appear, it must be in eternal motion, in order to separate out the opposites, and

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thus to allow the world and, within it, the subordinate cycle of coming-to-be and passing-away to emerge.”

It is remarkable that Schleiermacher could be satisfied with such a completely indeterminate conception of eternal motion. Indeed, his conception is actually worse than merely indeterminate, for the separation of the opposites is a process that cannot properly be understood as motion in space, but must, in Schleiermacher's sense, be only a qualitative process by which what was initially undifferentiated becomes differentiated.

Thus Anaximander's eternal motion is translated figuratively rather than understood according to its proper meaning, and must present itself either as an Aristotelian path toward entelechy or as a modern dialectical unrest. But with such a hysteron proteron (Greek text) we certainly miss the simple cast of mind of the oldest Ionian philosopher, who liked to explain things through winds and whirlwinds, through the pressure of bodies, and through the ruptures that resulted from such forces.

When Anaximander speaks of motion, we must surely think of spatial motion. We must not focus upon arbitrary individual motions, but upon the one motion which was regarded throughout antiquity as eternal and fundamental, and which presents itself as unchanging to the simple understanding of every observing human being.

Let us now compare what Zeller offers in his History of Greek Philosophy. We should expect Zeller not merely to mention the principle of eternal motion but also to interpret it correctly. He says, on p. 193:

“Anaximander further conceived the moving force as joined to the substance from the beginning, or—as Aristotle expressed it—he said of the Infinite not merely that

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it encompassed everything, but also that it directed everything. He therefore conceived the primordial substance, in the manner of ancient hylozoism, as moving itself, as alive, and as a result of this motion he allowed things to arise from it.”

Zeller supports these apt remarks with a further explanation—compare the note at the same place—of the word “direct”:

“When we hear the word Greek text, which originally signifies the direction of a ship's movement by means of the rudder, we must initially think of the motion of the heavenly structure.”

One would expect Zeller to have used these clear and accurate concepts to explain Anaximander's cosmogony. Strangely, however, he leaves this insight standing apart like an island and pays so little attention to it that entirely contrary points of view appear in the rest of his exposition.

For example, when he wishes to present Anaximander as a dynamist, he says on p. 186:

“On the other hand, the assumption of unchanging primordial substances is connected not only in Anaxagoras with the assumption of a world-forming intellect, but the analogous conceptions of Empedocles and the Atomists were likewise determined by their specifications concerning the efficient causes. None of these philosophers could have conceived the primordial substances as qualitatively unchanging if they had not possessed an independent moving principle: Anaxagoras, the Nous; Empedocles, Strife and Love; and the Atomists, the Void. But in Anaximander no one knows of any similar determination, nor can one derive from the familiar small fragment of his writing the conception that he placed the moving force in individual things and made them emerge from the original mixture through their own impulse, but rather that the

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Infinite itself is what moves everything. The conditions of a mechanical physics are therefore entirely lacking here.”

If Zeller had retained his earlier explanation—that the directing of all things (Greek text) initially means the motion of the heavenly structure—he would scarcely have found the conditions of a mechanical physics lacking, since modern physicists demand no other conditions.

But just as he here immediately understands eternal motion in Schleiermacher's manner as a qualitative process, so too, when dealing with the individual physical phenomena, he forgets the fundamental explanation to such a degree that he even says, on p. 196:

“Anaximander derived the motion of the heavenly bodies from the air-currents that bring about the rotation of the celestial spheres.”

I cite these contradictions merely to show that even this distinguished scholar has not yet turned his attention to Anaximander's eternal motion, and so that my hypothesis may be received with indulgence when I now first formulate the problem and venture an attempt to work out this most important principle of natural philosophy.

What sort of motion could Anaximander call eternal, and of which he said that it was older than water, that through it everything comes into being, and that through it everything perishes in an infinite cycle?

It is impossible to think of a motion that, like the winds, is younger than water. It would be equally inadmissible to understand the expression as referring to the many other conditioned motions that always presuppose an earlier motion and therefore can never claim the rank of a principle.

Nor may we simply invent some arbitrary motion through our imagination. It seems to me, therefore, most natural to regard the eternal rotation of the heavens—which presents itself to simple observation—as the motion intended by Anaximander.

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From this assumption, Anaximander's theory can be understood in a comprehensive and harmonious way. I will first attempt to reconstruct the whole conception without analyzing the individual pieces of evidence, and only afterward point to those reports that indirectly support this hypothesis.

Originally there was the Boundless, the world-substance before the separation of its elements. This great sphere was in motion around its own axis, like a wheel.[Note: That the world was a sphere according to Anaximander's doctrine follows simply from his theory concerning the earth's being at rest because of its equal distance from every point on the circumference of the heavens. Compare below, § 6.]

Through this rotation, the various elements of the world separated out: the thinnest fiery particles accumulated at the outermost circumference, like a shell, and air formed beneath them. Water also rose partly upward and partly formed the circular boundary around the earth, leaving the earth behind as a sediment.

Through the same rotation, great storms formed at the periphery of the air. These storms tore the fiery shell of the world into individual rings and enclosed the fiery mass within them like a hollow wheel-rim, from which the same powerful whirlwinds caused flames as large as the earth to shoot out through certain openings.

Through the influence of the heat rising from above, the water of the earth gradually dried up more and more. One may further imagine that the sea too gradually disappeared, and that in this way life on earth was disturbed, as perhaps also

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the earth itself could eventually evaporate under these influences. Thus the original Boundless (Greek text) would be restored, since the separated elements would once again be united in an indeterminate mixture. Through eternal motion, a second formation of the world could then occur, and this second world would have to undergo the same fate. In this way the process would continue cyclically into infinity.

The role of eternal motion in Anaximander's drama of the world—in which all things are finally brought to punishment and destruction for their transgression—has thereby been indicated. I therefore consider it inadequate to explain the rotation of the celestial spheres through air-currents, since these winds belong to a later generation.

In Anaximander, the winds, together with all the processes of evaporation that occupied the attention of ancient philosophy, serve merely to explain the modifications within the general motion: the waxing and waning of the moon, eclipses in general, and the seasons. I see no passage that could compel us to begin the formation of the world with the winds.

The harmony thereby established among Anaximander's various statements, and the grand style in which all his thoughts are conceived, seem to me to testify to the correctness of this explanation of eternal motion.

I shall now cite several reports by the ancient compilers that are at least indirectly useful for supporting the hypothesis just presented.

As for the general and total destruction of the world, one might indeed infer from the passage cited above on p. 9:

Greek text.

“Anaximander says that eternal motion is an origin older than the moist element, and that through it some things come into being while others perish.”

One might therefore suppose that coming-to-be and passing-away referred only to the parts (Greek text) of the world.

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...and passing-away referred only to the parts (Greek text) of the world. Zeller, however, has already rightly developed the opposing doctrine: that the entire world is affected by this periodic coming-to-be. Compare The Philosophy of the Greeks I, third edition, p. 201.

I entirely agree with him and would add the passage in Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica I.8.2, where he identifies the apeiron as the cause of the coming-to-be and destruction of the universe (Greek text), while the words concerning the infinitely many worlds—Greek text—already signify a world-process that returns into itself.

The report in Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, Duncker, p. 16, is completely unambiguous. It says that Boundless Nature—that is, the apeiron—is eternal and ageless and encompasses all worlds:

Greek text.

“This is eternal and ageless, and it encompasses all the worlds.”

The worlds that appear one after another, and that have an allotted time of coming-to-be, existence, and passing-away—Greek text—are therefore all encompassed by the imperishable primordial substance, of which they constitute temporary forms of existence.

Finally, I would remind the reader that Anaximander must teach a general destruction of the world simply because he clearly posited a beginning for the world that now exists.

According to him, there was once a time when no sun, moon, or stars yet existed, but only a great, continuous mass of fire lay like a shell around our world. According to him, there was also a time when the earth did not yet exist and the sea was not yet salty, for the earth appeared only through the partial evaporation of the original sphere of water at the center

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of the world, through which the sea, as the remnant of the great body of water, also acquired its altered character. Compare below, § 7, the passages concerning the form of the earth.

If Anaximander clearly indicated a beginning for the present world, it follows that the advance of motion must also bring about its destruction, just as the present form of the world is already the destruction of the previous form.

For all these forms, however, the sufficient material cause is the Boundless (Greek text). But the moving cause—and therefore the most important element of the entire conception—would be missing if Anaximander merely asserted all this arbitrarily, without giving any tangible reason.

Why should the fiery shell tear apart? Why should such densely matted air-whirls form and enclose the upper fire? What drives the fire out of its hiding place? What rounds the world into a sphere?

One could continue asking such questions, always relying on individual Anaximandrian doctrines, without receiving an answer. All these questions, however, are answered at once if we understand Anaximander's eternal motion as the rotation of the world around its axis.

For in this way we gain a principle sufficient to drive the various opposites, out of the internally and qualitatively formative nature of the Boundless substance, toward different regions of space. Once the fire has accumulated above, the air revolving beneath it tears it apart and encloses it. The same principle explains the rotation of the heavenly bodies and the circular form of the earth.

The probability of such an assumption is already apparent from the fact that it is common to ancient cosmology as a whole. It was presumably for this reason that the Pythagoreans set the earth, together with the counter-earth, into circular motion, for whatever is not located at the center must participate in the general rotation. And in the same way Democritus could teach that the earth originally oscillated about within the whirlwind and only gradually came to rest at the center of the world.

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Antichthon into circular motion, for whatever is not located at the center must participate in the general rotation. In the same way Democritus could teach that the earth originally oscillated about within the whirlwind and only gradually came to rest at the center of the world.

These general considerations may suffice to defend my assigning such a significant role in Anaximander's entire drama of the world to this second principle, which has hitherto been neglected.

I shall add only the words of Simplicius, with which he describes Anaximander's principle:

“Of those who assume a single principle that is in motion, Anaximander, son of Praxiades, a Milesian, posited as the principle a certain boundless nature, different from the four elements, and said that its eternal motion was the cause of the coming-to-be of things.”[Note: Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics, fol. 6: Greek text.]

Since Simplicius here has in mind, as the opposing doctrine, the teaching of Parmenides, who posited a single and unmoving principle,[Note: Simplicius, same passage: “He contrasted the natural philosophers with Parmenides, who posited one unmoving principle, and says that the natural philosophers were opposed to him.”] it is perfectly clear that it must have been a generally accepted view in antiquity that Anaximander's Boundless Nature was to be conceived as engaged in eternal spatial motion.

That this motion must be imagined as circular is shown, among other things, by a passage in Hippolytus, who speaks of eternal motion as a second cause in the explanation of the worlds.

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Hippolytus, who speaks of eternal motion as a second cause in the explanation of the worlds:

Greek text.

“In addition to this, there is an eternal motion in which the heavens come into being.”

Since he primarily traces the origin of the heaven—or rather, of the heavens, each of which encloses the world contained within it—Greek text—to eternal motion, it is natural to explain the circular motion of the heavens through an eternal motion that itself turns in a circle.

Zeller has already demonstrated, against Schleiermacher and with the most convincing arguments, that Anaximander's infinitely many worlds cannot be understood as existing simultaneously beside one another.

When Zeller says, “The infinitely many worlds existing alongside one another are surely only the heavenly bodies,”[Note: The Philosophy of the Greeks I, p. 200, third edition.] I believe this assumption is ruled out simply because, according to Anaximander, the heavenly bodies are no larger than our earth. They therefore could no more be designated by the word “world” (Greek text) than the earth itself could.

I agree instead with Zeller's second interpretation, which he adds as the more probable one: namely, that the worlds must appear one after another. For the formation of the world corresponds to the destruction of the world, and if the principle remains undamaged and does not grow old, but endures immortally in eternal motion, then a new formation of the world is necessary. After the destruction of the new world, the same process must be repeated infinitely.

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§ 4.

Eclipses.

If one assumes a solid crystalline shell of heaven through whose holes the fire beyond it shines, then eclipses must be explained, as Röth explains them, by the blocking of the holes.[Note: Among others, Röth, Western Philosophy 2.1, p. 155.] But what could block them? It is hardly possible to suppose that one could fetch coverings from the earth and insert them into the holes in the heavens.

Anaximander's conception, by contrast, becomes perfectly clear if we take his earlier hypothesis into account. The whirlwinds made of air can move and rotate. As soon as they turn in a certain direction, the flame issuing from them must become invisible, since it has only one outlet.[Note: Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 2.29: Greek text. “The moon undergoes eclipse during the rotations of the wheel.”] Alternatively, the thick mantle of air may, through its motion, completely or partially block the outlet of the flame and then open it again through another movement, so that complete or partial eclipses, followed by the return of the light, necessarily occur.[Note: Hippolytus, Refutation, Duncker, p. 16, chapter 6, line 51: Greek text]

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[Note cont'd: Greek text. “The moon is sometimes seen as full and sometimes diminished according as the pores are blocked or opened.” The pores or outlets are the same things that he elsewhere calls Greek text, “outflows.”]

§ 5.

the Spheres.

The spheres are the source from which many misunderstandings concerning Anaximander's theory proceed.

Röth believed that Anaximander assumed not merely a solid, opaque shell of heaven, but also several other crystalline, transparent shells closer to the earth, to which the stars were supposedly attached, so that they would be carried along together with the rotation of these spheres.

A similar, but still more adventurous, conception was constructed by Gruppe of Anaximander.[Note: The Cosmological Systems of the Greeks, 1851, pages 37 to 45.] He assumes that, “since the heavens are of a solid nature,” they could enclose the earth and prevent “the ocean, whose mass is no longer so great, from flowing away sideways.”

He likewise believes that, according to Anaximander, the round, broad earth was the ultimate foundation of everything, in the form of a section of a cylinder, with only a narrow strip of ocean between it and the heavens—almost merely enough to facilitate the motion of the heavens.

“The heaven of the fixed stars is a solid crystalline bell,” and it “can have no other shape than that of a hemisphere.”

Gruppe has not thought it necessary to tell us where all these confident assumptions come from. It is therefore all the more necessary that we reject them as entirely unfounded.

Zeller does not seem to share Gruppe's and Röth's views—in the third edition of The Philosophy of the Greeks, 1869—although in general, through his comprehensive scholarship and philological precision, he usually arrives at the correct conclusion. Since, however, he does not expressly emphasize and refute Röth's fundamental error as he does his other errors, the whole doctrine must remain unclear until one has become clear about this point.

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For when Zeller says, for example, on page 196, “Anaximander derived the motion of the heavenly bodies from the air-currents that bring about the rotation of the celestial sphere,” this could be understood as though the air-currents were essentially different from the celestial spheres, so that one might perhaps imagine the celestial spheres as a solid shell. The same is true when he says, in note 2 at the same place, that “the heavens are moved by the currents.”

I therefore assume that Zeller has not yet directed his attention to this problem. This also seems evident from the fact that he entirely passes over the great difference between Anaximenes and Anaximander in this doctrine, since he even seems inclined to assume a complete agreement between them concerning the explanation of the formation of the world, and especially of the heavenly bodies, on page 213.

Zeller's and Schleiermacher's attention was directed chiefly toward the metaphysical questions, which I shall leave more to one side here, partly because I know myself to agree with Zeller's careful considerations and therefore could add nothing new, and partly because, in deciding these questions, we can rely only upon reports transmitted to us at second or third hand, whereas Anaximander's physical doctrines, made vivid through many metaphors, have evidently been transmitted in the words of the ancient natural philosopher himself and exercise a distinctive attraction through their vividness and grandeur.

No tradition proves that the conception of solid heavenly shells belonged to Anaximander. What materials, moreover, could these solid structures

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also have been made of?! According to Anaximander, like moved toward like during the formation of the world, when the individual elements separated themselves from the indeterminate mixture of the primordial substance.[Note: Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics, fol. 6b: Greek text. “He says that, in the separation of the Boundless, things of the same kind move toward one another.”]

The solid, therefore, would have had to move toward the solid: the supposed solid spherical shells would have had to move toward the earth at the center of the world. Röth's conception therefore has nothing in common with Anaximander's hypothesis concerning the formation of the world.

The conception becomes immediately intelligible if we understand the spheres merely in geometrical terms. The world-sphere can be divided into any number of concentric spheres. The one nearest the center is the solid sphere of the earth,[Note: Diogenes Laertius I.1: Greek text. “The earth lies in the middle, occupying the position of the center, and is spherical in form.” That the shape of the earth, according to Anaximander's conception, was not purely spherical but strongly flattened on both sides, I shall show below in § 7.] surrounded by various layers of air.

Let us imagine a sphere at a particular radius within this air, and, within that sphere, a circle. At particular points on the circle,[Note: Greek text, “certain airy places”; compare above, p. 14, note on p. 12. And Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 2.20: Greek text, “the circle from which it has its outflow and upon which it is carried.”] imagine the peculiar pores from which the flames of the stars shoot forth. These flames, carried along by the sphere of air, must naturally revolve with it without being nailed to a solid vault.[Note: Galen, History of Philosophy, chapter 13, p. 273, ed. Kühn: Greek text. “Anaximander says that the stars are carried by the circles and spheres upon which each of them stands.”] Their position is determined by the outflow occurring at that location, and they revolve together with the revolving ring of air.

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Anaximander must therefore be acquitted of the terrible absurdities attributed to him, and we cannot help admiring him for the grandeur of his conception, according to which he thought that the phenomena of the heavens had arisen by mechanical means and therefore regarded the heavenly bodies as burning gas.

In this way, both the positions of the heavenly bodies and their motion and form are adequately explained. One cannot expect a more refined mathematical calculation from him; rather, one should be astonished at the bold natural philosopher who dared to apply to the formation of the entire world the processes of fire-production that he had observed here below in the realm of meteorology.

§ 6.

why the Earth Remains at Rest.

Anaximander's free scientific speculation is also displayed in the great thought that he seems to have been the first among the Greeks to conceive: that the earth floats freely, unsupported and surrounded on all sides by air.[Note: Pseudo-Origen, Philosophumena I.6: Greek text. “The earth is suspended, held up by nothing, and remains in place because it is equally distant from everything.” Aristotle, On the Heavens 2.13: Greek text. “Some of the ancients, among them Anaximander, say that it remains in place because of its equal relation in all directions.”]

One must properly imagine the intellectual energy required for such a conception. Even Anaximander's teacher, Thales—although he is said to have predicted a solar eclipse—still attempted to show how the earth could float upon the water because of its flat shape.

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That the earth remains in its place was taught by visual experience and immediate impression. Anaximander therefore began, still undisturbed by the phenomena of the heavens, from this conviction as an acknowledged fact.

The task was merely to discover the reason why it remains at rest, for it was natural to suppose that, since it is heavier than the air surrounding it, it ought to fall downward.

He met this objection—which must certainly have been raised against his hypothesis—with the following ingenious argument. It falls because it is surrounded by air. But in which direction? Since it is surrounded by air equally on every side, it would have to fall in any direction just as well as in any other, he said. Since no direction can be named toward which it ought to fall rather than toward another, it cannot fall at all, for it cannot move simultaneously in opposite directions.

The earth therefore remains in its place, at the center of the world, from which it is equally distant from every point on the circumference of the universe.[Note: Aristotle, On the Heavens 2.13: Greek text. “Nothing ought to move upward, downward, or sideways rather than in another direction when it is established at the center and is similarly related to the extremities; for it is impossible for it to move simultaneously in opposite directions. Therefore it must remain.”]

Only Aristotle seems to have been capable of blunting the point of this ingenious argument. Although he too assumed that the earth rests at the center of the world, he nevertheless wanted to give it a deeper justification.

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“Let us suppose,” says Aristotle, “that the earth is located in the center of the world, equally distant on all sides from the circumference of the heavens. Should it then behave like a hungry and thirsty man who, although he greatly desires food and drink, cannot move because all food and drink are located at an equal distance from him?”[Note: Aristotle, On the Heavens 2.13: Greek text. “And it is like a man who is extremely hungry and thirsty, but is equally distant from food and drink, for he too must remain at rest.”]

Aristotle praises the witty idea of Anaximander but does not regard its basis as true.[Note: Aristotle, same passage: Greek text. “Ingeniously, but not truly.”] For although the earth as a whole could not move, it would split apart, and its individual pieces, once separated, would satisfy the requirement.[Note: Aristotle, same passage: Greek text. “For because of this argument it will not remain but will move—not as a whole, however, but in pieces.”]

Aristotle also removes the objection that, in this case, there would not be a corresponding point in the heavens for every point of the earth toward which the separated pieces could move, since the circumference of the heavens is so much larger than the circumference of the earth.

He replies that, just as a larger body can contract through condensation into a smaller space, so a denser body can expand into a larger space when it becomes thinner. Physical bodies must not be measured merely by points but according to proportions, so that, for example, one quarter of the earth could move toward one quarter of the circumference of the heavens.[Note: Aristotle, same passage: Greek text—for this alone necessarily follows from the argument concerning equal relation—Greek text. “Not the whole toward a single point—for that alone necessarily follows from the argument concerning equal relation—but the corresponding part toward the corresponding part of the outer boundary; I mean, for example, one quarter toward one quarter. For a point is nothing in the case of bodies. Just as a body can contract from a large space into a smaller one through condensation, so it can expand from a smaller space into a larger one by becoming thinner.”]

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If the argument already given by Anaximander were correct, Aristotle continues, fire would also remain at rest if it were located at the center. Yet fire visibly moves upward. Nor would the argument explain why fire remains in the upper region, since it is not located there at the center.[Note: Aristotle, same passage: Greek text. “The same argument would apply to fire as to the earth: if placed at the center, it would necessarily remain like the earth; but nevertheless it will be carried away from the center, as it visibly moves, when nothing prevents it, toward the extremity.”]

Furthermore, the earth does not really remain at rest, as can be seen from bodies thrown into the air. They fall downward when they are not held back, just as fire moves upward when it is not impeded.

Aristotle therefore regards this inductive proof from experience as decisive for establishing the general proposition that the whole has the same motion as each of its parts.[Note: Aristotle, same passage: Greek text (naturgesetzlich), Greek text. “For it not only appears to remain at the center, but also moves toward the center. For wherever any part of it moves, the whole must move there too; and where it moves by nature, it also remains there by nature.”]

He consequently attributes to the entire earth a natural motion toward the center and assumes that it is located at the center and remains there because that place has a necessary, law-governed relation to its physical nature. Without this reason, the earth would move away from the center despite its equal distance from the circumference of the world, just as, for example, fire

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would move away from that place if it were not held there.[Note: Aristotle, same passage: Greek text. “Thus, if the earth moved away from the center in this manner merely because of the argument from equal relation, this would happen unless this place were naturally the place of the earth.”]

The mathematical fact of equal distance therefore contains, according to Aristotle, only an accidental consequence and not the peculiar cause of the phenomenon.[Note: Aristotle, same passage: Greek text. “This is true accidentally, and so forth.”]

I have thought it appropriate to communicate this brilliant Aristotelian criticism at such length because it makes all the clearer the free philosophical vision with which both thinkers observed nature.

No one will reproach them for not yet having discovered what is regarded today as the correct astronomical conception. Rather, one will marvel at the ease with which their minds freed themselves from the impressions of the senses and tradition in order to allow the world to arise in thought according to general laws and to comprehend what exists as something that has come into being necessarily.

In this respect, Anaximander displays just as few prejudices as Aristotle.

§ 7.

the Form of the Earth.

Anaximander now had to determine the shape of the earth.

Originally, according to his assumption, the earth was still mixed with an enormous quantity of water. Since the fire dried out most of it, the sea remained as the smaller residue.[Note: Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica I.8: “The sea is the remnant of the original moisture, most of which the fire dried up.”] He must therefore have imagined the earliest condition of the earth-sphere as moist or muddy. Clearly, he must have imagined the earliest condition of the earth-sphere as moist or muddy, and therefore—

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as moist or muddy, and it is therefore understandable that he could arrive at the great thought of assigning the earth a spherical form.[Note: Compare above, p. 35, note: Diogenes Laertius I.1, Greek text, “spherical.”]

The words of the bold natural philosopher that have been transmitted to us, however, have been compressed so severely by the commentators that they have now been subjected to almost every critical procedure, since they were regarded as unintelligible.

I therefore believe that I too may contribute something to their explanation by describing how I myself moved from one interpretation to another.

At first, it seemed correct to me to follow the report of Diogenes and accordingly to accept the spherical shape as Anaximander's doctrine.

I therefore attempted to understand the remaining words just as they had been transmitted—not through difficult intermediaries and hypotheses, but simply on the basis of Anaximander's perfectly familiar theory of the formation of the world.

Since Anaximander originally assumed that water and earth were mixed together, this whole mass must naturally have been moist and muddy, and it is very logical that he should have explained its form accordingly.

His words, as transmitted by Hippolytus, read: “The earth is moist and round in shape.”[Note: Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, Duncker, p. 16: Greek text, “moist and round, resembling a snow-stone.”]

The characteristic “moist” seemed meaningless to the commentators, and consequently they thought that the transmitted text was corrupt.[Note: Roeper, Philologus 7, p. 607, wants to read Greek text instead of the supposedly meaningless reading.]

Yet it seems clear that natural rounding can belong only to a moist body with movable parts and not to a solid one. Anaximander evidently wanted to

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determine the shape according to his theory and therefore chose a very apt designation, since it presents us with the image of a drop.

The following words then provide the closer determination that makes the whole comparison vivid. He adds: “like snow that has become stone,” or, as we might say briefly in English, “like a hailstone.”[Note: Plutarch transmits the words in the reverse order, so that the first passage reads “like a stone,” with Greek text—or Greek text—added as a closer specification: “like a stone made of snow.”]

This comparison follows almost necessarily from his theory, according to which earth mixed with water floats freely in the air. The four poetic expressions of the old natural philosopher, whose poetic language particularly struck the ancient commentators—I mean the words “moist,” “round,” “snow,” and “stone”—seemed to me somewhat intelligible in this sense, especially when one remembers that Anaximander expressly intends to offer a comparison with a familiar natural phenomenon. He could hardly have found a more similar process in nature than the formation of hail, which arises when a moist drop freezes, since the earth, in contrast with the upper fiery region, must likewise be understood as having become cold.

This first explanation did not entirely satisfy me, however, despite its harmony with Anaximander's theory of the formation of the world, and for two reasons. First, the poetic freedom involved in the expression “snow-stone” (Greek text) seemed too great, since grammar does not readily permit us to transform a noun into a participle or adjective; and second, by comparing the various compilers, I recognized that a pair of further words must have followed immediately after these words in Anaximander, which point directly toward a cylindrical form.

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One must therefore transform a noun into a participle or adjective; and, second, by comparing the various compilers, I recognized that a pair of further words must have followed immediately after these words in Anaximander, which point directly toward a cylindrical form.

Plutarch transmits the following strange statement concerning the shape of the earth: “Anaximander judges the earth to be like a stone, a column, with respect to its surfaces.”[Note: Plutarch, same passage: Greek text.]

As one can see, this makes no sense.

Wyttenbach, feeling the need to introduce some meaning, therefore translates: “like a flat stone column.”[Note: Anaximander planae columnae lapideae. Roeper, at the same place, p. 634, had already observed that something was plainly missing at the end and conjectured: Greek text, “lying above and below.”]

But this merely compounds the absurdity. A flat or level column is like wooden iron. Moreover, the specification that the column is made of stone is comical, since it is plainly irrelevant to the description of its shape whether the column is made of stone, wood, or anything else.

In fact, the sentence cannot be translated as it stands.

Fortunately, Hippolytus rescues us from the difficulty in his refutation of heresies, for he too transmits the sentence, and does so with both its beginning and its end.

“The shape of the earth is moist and round”: this is the beginning. Then come Plutarch's words, with Origen reading “snow” where Plutarch has “column” (Greek text): “like snow, resembling a stone.” And then comes the conclusion: “On one of the two surfaces we stand

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and the other is on the opposite side.”[Note: Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, Duncker I, p. 16: Greek text.]

Plutarch has therefore either excerpted the passage nonsensically or has transmitted an incomplete excerpt, since the “surfaces” (Greek text) plainly do not belong grammatically to “column” (Greek text), but to the words that have dropped out of Plutarch's text.

Once we understand the two surfaces of the column—the bottom surface on the antipodal side and the upper surface upon which we live—we still have the difficulty of the stone.

Taking the beginning of the sentence, “moist and round,” as a guide, we might change Greek text, “stone,” to Greek text or Greek text, “smooth.” The smoothness of the column's circumference, uninterrupted by irregularities, would correspond to the rounded form that must be attributed to the moist, sea-encircled earth.[Note: That the surface of water must necessarily be spherical is demonstrated at length by Aristotle, On the Heavens 2.4, since water flows until all lines from the center are equal in length. Perhaps for this reason Diogenes Laertius's report, which Zeller calls a “mistake,” that the earth is spherical should be understood as referring to the part of the earth lying between the two surfaces.]

But even if this reading were tolerable, the image of the column would still be troublesome. How ridiculous it would be to imagine the earth according to the proportions of length and thickness that characterize the columns used in architecture!

One would therefore have to borrow from the image of the polished column only the geometrical concept that serves as the point of comparison. The comparison would then become very weak.

If one adds the passage that Eusebius excerpted from Plutarch, in which the earth's shape is described in purely stereometric terms as—

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metrically, without any metaphors, cylindrical, and indeed with such proportions that its thickness is one-third of its breadth,[Note: Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica I.8.2: Greek text. “In shape, the earth is cylindrical, and its depth is one-third of its breadth.”]

we obtain almost the image of a drum—that is, of one stone in a composite column. One might therefore be tempted to read Greek text, since the stated dimensions of a cylinder fit the individual drum much better than they fit an entire column.[Note: I subsequently compared Roeper's “Attempts at Emendation in the Philosophumena of Hippolytus” (Philologus 7, p. 608), and I find that he arrived at the same idea and therefore wanted to read a word meaning “column-stone.”]

But if we take the dimensions more precisely, the resemblance still cannot be maintained.

The conception becomes especially difficult when we think of the sea surrounding the earth. It is impossible for the water encircling the earth to extend along the upper surface as far as the horizon, then descend at a right angle, and finally turn again at a right angle beneath the earth.

Water will always attempt to round itself into a sphere, like a drop of dew upon a leaf. We are therefore irresistibly led back to the words “moist and round” (Greek text).

Among animals, such a shape is found in the hedgehog; in architecture, it is found in the part of the capital of a Doric column that is called the echinus, after the hedgehog.

One might therefore be inclined to read Greek text, “like a stone resembling an echinus,” instead of Greek text. In fact, Anaximander's conception of the earth comes closest to the image of an echinus.

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This comparison, however, is not entirely free from objection, for it is already defective because the rounding is carried out only from bottom to top.

Since I am in general no friend of uncertain conjectures, I abandon all these ideas at will. I regard their only gain as this: they illuminate Anaximander's conception from different sides and thereby make it more vivid.

If, therefore, we cannot confidently attribute to Anaximander the conception that the earth was formed by a process analogous to the formation of hail, we must assume that he explained its shape through a deposition from the turbid central sphere in which water and earth were still undifferentiated, just as he regarded the sea as the residue of the original water, whose properties had been altered through the process of evaporation and which had thereby become salty.[Note: Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 2.1: Greek text. “Anaximander says that the sea is the remnant of the original moisture; the greater part was dried up by the fire, while what remained was changed through being burned.”]

The two sides of the earth would thereby also become intelligible. Although Anaximander follows Thales in explaining the formation of the earth from water—just as Metrodorus later explained the earth as the sediment of water[Note: Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 3: Greek text, “the sediment of water.”]—he had to advance far beyond Thales by assuming the same deposition on the antipodal side, since he conceived the earth as freely suspended.

For Thales, the earth floats upon water, and the water extends without limit into infinity, so that, to put it in a particularly crude and vivid way, according to his doctrine one could have sailed by ship all the way to the heavens.

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According to Thales, the earth therefore had only a single surface. Anaximander's doctrine, by contrast, approaches our conception of the earth as a flattened sphere and arrives at the significant idea of an antipodal earth because he dared to think of it as freely suspended in the air, without support or foundation.

The greatness of this thought cannot be sufficiently admired when one compares it with the weak beginnings of Thales and the still weaker relapses of later thinkers.

For just as Xenophanes believed that the roots of the earth extended downward into infinity—that is, negatively, that the earth was not finite or bounded below[Note: Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers 3: Greek text, and likewise III.11: Greek text.]—so, although we possess little certainty concerning Thales, we must presumably assume that he conceived the water as the primordial ground of things, extending without limit downward and sideways, so that the world that had arisen existed in a sense only above the surface of the water from which earth, air, and the heavenly bodies had emerged.

As I shall attempt to demonstrate more precisely below in connection with Heraclitus, this seems to have been the ancient Egyptian conception, as it is also the most natural and intelligible conception from the standpoint of childhood.

All the more magnificent, then, is Anaximander's advance: he tears away the roots of the earth and places it freely suspended in the air, bounded on every side.

Schleiermacher too carefully considered Diogenes' report concerning the spherical shape of the earth. His final decision, however, is somewhat strange,

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since he presupposes “a kind of floating” for the earth.

He believes that the statement of a definite relation between depth and height points to the ancient conception of a “shield-shaped form of the earth,” and that “a calculation seems to lie at its basis concerning whether, and how deeply, the floating body must be submerged in its medium.”[Note: Schleiermacher, Lecture on Anaximander, Works 2, p. 204.]

One can see how hazy the image is that Schleiermacher constructed of Anaximander's natural philosophy.

If he had treated the physical problems first, with the same dialectical skill with which he illuminated the metaphysical problems, Anaximander's vivid clarity would have spread from the physical to the metaphysical questions, and many difficulties would have been solved more easily.

§ 8.

the Principle.

In his critical history of philosophy, J. Brucker said that Anaximander had been the first to use the word Greek text in the sense that it indicates the cause of things, and for this he refers to Pseudo-Origen.[Note: Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae II.1, p. 481: Hoc infinitum primum esse principium dixit vocemque primus in hoc sensu accepisse ut causam rerum indicaret, refert Pseudo-Origenes. “He said that this Infinite was first the principle, and that he was the first to use the word in this sense, to indicate the cause of things, as Pseudo-Origen reports.”]

Schleiermacher, always cautious, writes in the history of philosophy edited by Ritter that Anaximander probably first used the expressions Greek text and Greek text.[Note: Schleiermacher, Collected Works on Philosophy 4.1.]

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Eduard Zeller expresses himself with similar caution in his Philosophy of the Greeks, 1844, p. 84:

“Anaximander is also said to have first used the expression Greek text.”[Note: Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics, fol. 6.32b.]

Ueberweg, however, turns this into an established fact, which he reports in § 13 of his History of Philosophy, 1865, and again in 1871, among his summary notices concerning Anaximander:

“Anaximander was the first to expressly call the material primordial substances the principle (Greek text).”

Since terminology is so important to the history of science, it would indeed be very interesting for the history of the concept of Greek text if we learned that Anaximander had already transformed this word into a technical term. A more exact interpretation, however, will deprive us of this alleged report.

The passage reads:

“Among those who posit a single, moving, and boundless principle, Anaximander, son of Praxiades, a Milesian, successor and student of Thales, declared the Boundless to be the principle and element of beings, being the first to introduce this name for the principle. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a certain other boundless nature, from which all the heavens and the worlds contained within them arise.”[Note: Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics, fol. 6a: Greek text.]

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from which all the heavens and the worlds contained within them arise.”

In my translation I have already removed the misunderstanding. Ueberweg evidently translated the passage as: “being the first to introduce this name, 'principle.'” One could certainly translate it in that way and remain entirely correct,[Note: The accusative would nevertheless be more usual for this meaning. Compare Kühner § 356.2.] but not at this point, where the context clearly shows that the name in question is the name of the Boundless or Indeterminate (Greek text).

This was an entirely new idea introduced into philosophy by Anaximander, and it brought about a profound transformation of the doctrine.

When Simplicius says further, Greek text, this too must not be translated as: “he first called the substrate 'principle,'” but rather: “he first named the substrate as a principle.”

For while Thales had previously declared water to be the principle, Anaximander was the first to understand that one had to take a step beyond this, since water itself had first separated out from the primordial mass and was therefore younger than it.

He consequently arrived at the idea of an indeterminate nature (Greek text) or of matter (Greek text).

His distinctive achievement was to discover this indeterminate nature. In this respect he was the first, and he named it the Boundless (Greek text).

It would be a strange achievement if he had merely given a name to the idea of a substrate. That idea did not yet exist before him.

Through him it arose and received from him the name Greek text, which passed into the history of philosophy and whose concept led Plato and Aristotle into the most difficult investigations. And—

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The Principle

That this is the only possible interpretation of the words becomes perfectly clear if we add the lines immediately preceding them:

Greek text.

“For Anaximander says that, since the opposites are present in the underlying Boundless, which is incorporeal, they are separated out from it. He himself was the first to designate the underlying substance as a principle. The opposites are hot and cold, dry and moist, and the others.”

The issue here is not the name Greek text. This word, like the expressions Greek text and Greek text, is a later technical term belonging to the commentator. Simplicius merely wishes to say that Anaximander was the first to designate as a principle the concept of an underlying substance containing immanent opposites that are separated out from it.

The same point appears in the report of Pseudo-Origenes I.6:

Greek text.

“This man said that the principle of beings is a certain nature of the Boundless, from which the heavens and so forth come into being.”

And further:

Greek text.

“This man called the Boundless the principle and element of beings, being the first to give this name to the principle.”[Note: In Simplicius, Greek text is clearer than Greek text, and Greek text is clearer than Greek text.]

For this reason, none of the later writers speaks of Anaximander's Greek text, whereas all speak of Anaximander's Greek text. This is probably also why Schleiermacher, as noted above, at least allows the expression Greek text to share in the honor of having been first used by Anaximander—although he would have had no right to do so if Ueberweg's translation were authoritative.

We must therefore set aside this alleged report concerning Anaximander's philosophical achievements. That he used the expression Greek text is almost self-evident, since not only was Thales supposedly already calling water the principle (Greek text),[Note: Compare, among others, Diogenes Laertius I.6.27: Greek text, “he established water as the principle of all things.”] but Homer had already used the same word to mean “beginning” and “cause.”

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This word could not acquire a special meaning until the oppositions between temporal beginning, material cause, moving cause, and so forth had emerged for thought—that is, until the word had been defined as a technical term and divided into its various kinds. That was not Anaximander's achievement.

§ 9.

the Concept of the Greek text.

When scholars debate whether Anaximander's Greek text is the Aristotelian substrate, Greek text, or chaos, I cannot accept the idea that Anaximander merely “did not express himself with complete determinateness.”[Note: Ueberweg, Outline of the History of Philosophy, 1871, p. 38.]

I believe that there would be no history of philosophy at all if earlier thinkers already possessed all the thoughts of later philosophers and merely failed to state clearly which of the later theories they preferred.

Rather, all progress in thought must consist in the fact that earlier thinkers arrive at ideas for explaining things which later thinkers subject to clarification, elaboration, and division because they are still indeterminate.

Anaximander therefore posited the Boundless (Greek text) as the principle. Since the opposites could not be explained in terms of one another—the moist could not arise from the dry, nor the warm from the cold—Anaximander did not want to make one element, such as water, the principle. He demanded instead a substance that contained all the opposites within itself, from which they could then be separated.

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This thought represented an enormous advance over the earlier standpoint, and yet philosophy could not stop there. Naturally, the coexistence of the opposites could initially be conceived only as a kind of mixture, as a chaotic mixture.

We saw above that Anaximander conceived both the fiery shell of the world and the separation of the earth from the water roughly as though water, oil, and earth, mixed together, gradually separated through settling, each taking its appropriate place—above, below, and in the middle.

The spirit and order of the world, of course, could not be placed alongside or outside the world. The ideal was therefore immanent in the whole as a kind of helmsman, since no one could yet see the spiritual as something existing independently.

The inadequacies of this conception gradually become apparent. One naturally asks whether the apparently simplest elements in the mixture—water and air—are genuinely its constituents, or whether these too are merely coarser compounds of much finer elements, such as bone-substance, flesh-substance, and hair-substance, so that these finer elements would themselves first have to be separated when an organism was formed from the coarse masses of water, earth, and air.

Anaxagoras therefore had not yet been anticipated by Anaximander.

One must also ask whether this One from which the world is formed is a continuous, interconnected mass or whether it consists of innumerable indivisible particles heaped together.

Democritus therefore had not been rendered superfluous by Anaximander either. One must ask whether the unity of the opposites in the mass is related to its kinds as the universal is related to its species, or whether this universal is merely a name, while all the opposites have always existed in the mass in a ready-made but imperceptible form.

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The idea of the substrate, Greek text, or matter, was therefore not yet determined by Anaximander, although Simplicius believed he already recognized it in the passage mentioned above on p. 51.

One must also ask how spirit could exist within the mass, and whether it ought instead to stand opposite the mass as something pure, unmixed, and independent. Anaximander therefore had not yet even touched upon Anaxagoras's and the later philosophers' doctrine of spirit.

We must not therefore assume that Anaximander merely failed to express his doctrine clearly enough. Rather, we see that these problems had not even remotely occurred to him.

I regard it as established, then, that Anaximander conceived the original unity from which he explained the opposing forms of things as a chaotic mixture, but that the philosophical necessity which led him to this thought was the same necessity that later led Aristotle to his concept of the substrate (Greek text).

This also makes it intelligible why Aristotle, in his survey of earlier opinions, sometimes places Anaximander alongside Hesiod and Anaxagoras, while at other times he recognizes the idea of the substrate (Greek text) in Anaximander's Boundless (Greek text).

If we attend to the historical expression of the thought, Anaximander belongs together with Hesiod and Empedocles. If we attend instead to the tendency of thought contained within it, that tendency should be designated by the concept of matter (Greek text).

If we now examine Anaximander's concept of the Greek text more closely, several determinations must be distinguished.

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The Concept of the Greek text

Several determinations must be distinguished in it. Although Anaximander himself gave no explanation of his principle,[Note: Stobaeus I.10.294: Greek text. “He errs in failing to say what the Boundless is.”] it will not be difficult to interpret the meaning of this new philosophical term from the passages transmitted to us.

The first determination that emerges very clearly from several passages is timelessness, or boundlessness in time—in other words, the eternity of the principle.

The individual worlds arise and perish in time and therefore have a limited existence. The principle, the Boundless (Greek text), is supposed to exist without age and without destruction and therefore to encompass all worlds.[Note: Hippolytus I.6: Greek text. “He says that the principle of beings is a certain nature of the Boundless, from which the heavens and the world within them arise.” Ritter wants to read Greek text. If one always assumes only a single world enclosed by the heaven, however, the singular can be retained. Greek text. “This is eternal and ageless, and it encompasses all the worlds. He says that the worlds have a definite time of coming-to-be, existence, and destruction.”]

If we begin with the simplest—and therefore also with the most widespread—explanation among ancient philosophers of what is bounded, namely, that something is bounded if it has a beginning, middle, and end, then Anaximander's first speculative step had necessarily to be the derivation of all bounded and therefore perishable being from an unbounded and therefore timeless and imperishable being.

The second determination would concern space. A correct line of reasoning ought also to attribute to the principle being without space. But we find no trace of this in Anaximander. It is easy to see why. Before the concepts

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Anaximander

of space and matter had been separated, and before the opposition between speculative and sensory knowledge had become familiar, statements of this kind could not yet be expected.

Since this separation did not occur before the time of the Eleatics, we must naturally find—and a priori expect—that in Anaximander space and matter were conceived together in an indeterminate mixture.

We are therefore not compelled to imagine his Boundless (Greek text) as extending spatially into infinity. Before infinite spatial extension had been discovered, the Boundless could not be conceived so sharply.

For this reason, I consider it mistaken to attribute to Anaximander the doctrine that, outside the world enclosed by the heavens, there is an indefinite world-substance spreading ever farther into infinity—or, as Schleiermacher would have it, still other worlds.

We must instead calmly accept the contradiction involved in the conception of an infinite world-sphere. The fiery substance that has separated itself from the infinite world-substance gathers above and encompasses the world (Greek text) as a fiery shell, and no Anaximandrian thought ventures beyond this boundary into regions outside what encompasses everything.

I therefore have no doubt that Anaximander believed in his Boundless with the childlike simplicity of thought that had not yet been troubled by any Eleatic scruples, and that it was only Röth's uncritical manner of thinking that could attribute to him space as an “independent being” and a “divine primordial being.”[Note: Röth, Western Philosophy 2.1, p. 139: “It is therefore clear that, in the concept of the Boundless, the Infinite, the apeiron, Anaximander included both spatial and temporal infinity, and that he attributed to the deity both infinite extension in boundless space and infinite duration in boundless time, without beginning or end. According to the state of thought at that time, in which the later objections to the essence of space and time could not even remotely have been anticipated, Anaximander had to conceive space and time as equally real—or, as we would say, as substantial beings. In accordance with appearances, they had to be different, independent, infinite beings for him; both equally ungenerated and equally imperishable. They had to be for him precisely what they were for Thales and the Egyptians: two infinite divine primordial beings.” Röth then adds, as a third primordial being, the divine infinite spirit, and, as a fourth primordial being, water as primordial matter.

To complete the absurdity, he understands by Greek text, with which Aristotle explains Anaximander's Greek text, the mixture of this fourfold unity, since one primordial being must at the same time be regarded as a plurality. It is unnecessary to refute this in detail, for some misunderstandings are caused, in a sense, by the subject itself and by the general nature of the human mind, while others arise only from the faulty way in which the person who misunderstands thinks. The present case is an example of the latter kind.]

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The Concept of the Greek text

A different perspective opens up when we proceed from the category of quality. I believe I can read from all the transmitted passages that Anaximander understood the individual qualitatively determined elements as the Bounded, in opposition to his Boundless.

This consideration leads directly to a dynamic concept of matter. In this respect, Zeller is evidently right when he contrasts Anaximander as a dynamist with the teachers of a mechanical explanation of the world.

For Aristotle's assertion that Anaximander first separated the opposites from his unity demands this interpretation.[Note: Aristotle, Physics I.4: Greek text. “Those who derive the opposites from the One, as Anaximander says.”]

The same is true of the fact that Aristotle and his commentators recognized the substrate (Greek text) or matter (Greek text) in Anaximander's Greek text.[Note: Stobaeus I.10.294: Greek text. “The Boundless is nothing other than matter; and matter can be actuality only if the agent underlies it.”]

The tradition also says that the principle is Boundless (Greek text), so that the existing process of coming-to-be would not be lacking in material.[Note: The parallel passage in Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers I.3, says: Greek text. “He errs in failing to say what the Boundless is—whether it is air, water, earth, or some other body. He errs, therefore, in declaring it to be matter, since he removes the productive cause; for the Boundless is nothing other than matter, and matter cannot be actuality unless the agent underlies it.” Plutarch says further: Greek text. “Why, then, does he say that it is Boundless? So that the process of coming-to-be may not lack material.”]

This inexhaustibility of the substance, which must provide from its boundless reserve enough for the formation of all limited individual things, leads from superficial appearance into the dynamic depth of the theory.

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Anaximander

This inexhaustibility of the substance, which must provide from its boundless reserve enough for the formation of all limited individual things, leads from superficial appearance into the dynamic depth of the theory.

Against this interpretation, however, we have equally compelling reasons to understand Anaximander's explanation mechanically. First, Anaximander explains all the individual natural phenomena—the thunder, lightning, wind, rain, phases of the moon, sun, and stars, and the entire formation of the world—in mechanical terms.

Second, Aristotle and the compilers group him with those who assumed chaos or a mixture (Greek text) as the principle, including Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and even Democritus.[Note: Aristotle, Metaphysics I.2: Greek text. “This is better than Anaxagoras' 'all things together,' Empedocles' mixture, Anaximander's, and Democritus's claim that all things were together potentially but not actually, so that they would be attached to matter.”]

The separation from the Boundless Nature therefore need not have taken place dynamically. It can also be understood as a mechanical separation of homogeneous components, just as Simplicius says that, during the separation of the Boundless, like moved toward like.

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The Concept of the Greek text

The separation from this Boundless Nature therefore need not have taken place dynamically, but can also be understood as a mechanical separation of homogeneous components, just as Simplicius says that, during the separation of the Boundless, like moved toward like.[Note: Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics, fol. 6b: Greek text. “In the separation of the Boundless, things of the same kind moved toward one another: whatever was gold in the whole moved toward gold, whatever was earth toward earth, and likewise with each of the others, as though they did not come into being but had existed previously.”]

The same issue is involved in the dispute over whether Anaximander conceived his Greek text as something intermediate between air and water.[Note: Philoponus, Royal Manuscript 1947: Greek text. “Some assumed that it is denser than fire but thinner than air, or, as others say, denser than air but thinner than water, and they believe this to be Anaximander.”]

I therefore believe it is safer not to classify Anaximander simply as a dynamist, but to distinguish the tendency of his thought from its execution.

He evidently recognized that, in order to explain the visible, one must assume invisible elements. But he did not say whether these elements dynamically transform themselves into visible forms through a qualitative process, or whether they already possess the properties of the forms that have become visible and are hidden from the eyes merely because they are mixed together and exist in very small quantities, becoming visible only when they have accumulated in larger masses.

Anaximander probably said nothing about this because he had not thought about it. The problem had not yet been formulated.

His entire cast of mind, however, was probably closer to the mechanical explanation. Even the tradition that Anaximander taught atoms—a tradition Schleiermacher considered absurd—can be explained by the mechanical character of his account of the world.

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Anaximander

The tradition that Anaximander taught atoms can be explained by the mechanical character of his account of the world, which could lead just as easily to Democritean and Anaxagorean atoms as to the Platonic and Aristotelian explanation of matter as non-being or potentiality.

I shall therefore conclude by quoting Aristotle's judgment: the earlier philosophers had, in a certain sense, already sought and discovered all the principles of the explanation of nature, but in another sense had understood nothing, since they spoke only in dark and stammering language because philosophy was still young.[Note: Aristotle, Metaphysics I.10: Greek text (sc. Greek text. “In one sense all the causes have previously been stated; in another, none at all. For the earliest philosophy seems to stammer about everything, since it is young and at its beginning.”]

That this distinction between an apparently mixed mass and a genuinely mixed substance is not something I have imposed upon the evidence can easily be shown from Aristotle.

Aristotle regards it as one of his distinctive achievements that he was the first to understand the nature of mixture correctly, and in such a way that two bodies which had previously been independent and possessed different properties come together into a new body that acquires new properties, whose parts are everywhere homogeneous with one another and with the whole.

He distinguishes this mixture—which we today would call a chemical process—from the mere juxtaposition (Greek text) of the finest parts (Greek text) of different bodies, in which the bodies retain their individual character.

When the division is sufficiently fine that the individual heterogeneous constituents can no longer be perceived, there is a mixture in relation to the senses (Greek text),

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...present, but actually only, as he puts it, for someone who does not see sharply; for someone, however, with Lynceus-eyes, merely a juxtaposition, as if barley grains lay beside wheat grains, entering into no mixture. This synthesis is therefore what we ordinarily call mixture, and in its finest form, a solution, although no chemical process takes place *).

This chemical mixture Aristotle explains with the help of the opposition between actuality and potentiality, just as he explains the process of growth (aunas), which no one before him had recognized more precisely. For in growth, spatial enlargement first arises when differently constituted bodies are compelled to bring into actual appearance forms of existence that were previously present only potentially in something actually determined; for example, fire grows when wood is added, which is potentially fire, and is then brought by the actual fire to actual burning. And in the same way our flesh grows, and so forth **). In the same manner, mixture presupposes that both mixed bodies have become actually something different, while they still have potentially what was formerly, before the mixture, their property, without losing it ***). One therefore sees clearly that mixture cannot be understood without familiarity with the concepts of actuality and potentiality.

When we now recall that Aristotle, looking down from above, praises all the earlier thinkers who

Note: Compare the detailed exposition in De generatione et corruptione I.10:

“Greek text.”

“But if the mixture is a composition in small parts, the mixture is only mixed in relation to perception; for Lynceus, however, nothing is mixed.”

And earlier:

“Greek text.”

“For it will be a composition, and neither a blending nor a mixture; nor will the part have the same ratio as the whole.”

Note: Compare Aristotle, De generatione et corruptione I.5

*Note: Ibid. I.10

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from a unity or an original mixture produce everything, or who teach that everything existed all together (Greek text), because they had sensed the concept of matter *): we cannot conclude from this recognition that Aristotle wished to grant Anaximander the dynamic explanation that he gives, for example, in the case of mixture (Greek text). For among those whom he praises in this way he also counts Democritus, who nevertheless decisively denies chemical mixture and recognizes only mixture in appearance. One could therefore demonstrate from these passages in Aristotle, with equal force, that he attributed to Anaximander the doctrine of atoms as the doctrine of the dynamic. In fact, however, one is as inadmissible as the other; for Aristotle wishes, quite justly, only to recognize the intellectual impulse in those earlier philosophers who were quietly compelled by the concept of matter toward their “Unbounded” or their “All-together,” although, with this unclear conception, they imagined the wholly external mixture of elements or atoms, since the concepts of actuality and potentiality had not yet dawned upon them.

I therefore believe that it would not be easy to produce a passage that would compel us to go beyond this just judgment of Aristotle. Anaximander is a dynamist only in accordance with the tendency of his thought, but his mode of conception moves within the mechanical.

Note: Aristotle, Metaphysics I.2:

“Greek text.”

“And this is better than the doctrine of Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and Anaximander: the mixture and the 'all together' were all together potentially, but not actually; consequently they would have grasped matter.”

Note: Compare above, p. 60, note **): Greek text and Greek text.

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If we now look back at the investigation above, it follows that Anaximander called his principle the Unbounded in four respects: first, because, in contrast with the determinate properties of the elements and individual bodies, it has an unbounded and therefore altogether incorporeal nature; secondly, because, in contrast with the limited quantity and power of individual things, it has an unlimited reserve of power and is sufficient for the emergence of all things; thirdly, because, in contrast with the bounded space of individual things, it fills everything in an unbounded manner, while the conception of an infinite extension in infinite space must nevertheless be kept at a distance; and fourthly, because, accordingly, in contrast with the bounded time of the existence of individual things, it has an unlimited duration without age and death.

From the first determination there later arose the nonexistent or the dynamic; from the second, the self-sufficiency of the world; from the third, the unity and non-spatiality of what truly exists; from the fourth, its timeless eternity.

§ 10.

The Emergence of Animals and Human Beings

Darwinism

The boldness of the natural philosopher, which I already emphasized above in connection with Anaximander's hypothesis of the formation of the world, is also evident when he attempts to explain the emergence of animals. Since the earth was merely a separation from the originally much larger watery central sphere of the world, of whose mass of water the sea is only a small remnant, it was natural to regard all animals originally as aquatic animals. In fact,

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it is reported that, according to Anaximander, the land animals originally lived in the water, covered with a thorny bark; but as they grew older they rose onto dry land, where their bark burst open, and they adapted their way of life to the altered conditions within a short time *). Such a hypothesis could not have been formed without analogies. Anaximander had evidently observed the emergence of dragonflies from larvae living in the water, which also crawl onto dry land and, after bursting their bark, adapt themselves to the new conditions.

Through the conception of the adaptation of the way of life (Greek text), Anaximander could be regarded as a predecessor of Darwin, just as through the other conception that the oldest organisms are to be sought in the sea, from which the land animals are regarded merely as transformations. This comparison becomes still more complete when we add Anaximander's account of the origin of human beings; for our philosopher asserts that human beings originated in animals of another kind. He proves this proposition simply from the improbability that a being such as the human being, who, unlike the other animals, cannot quickly find nourishment for himself but requires such a long period of suckling, could have survived under such beginnings.

Note: Plutarch, De placitis philosophorum V.19:

“Greek text.”

“Anaximander says that the first animals were generated in the moist element, enclosed in thorny bark; as their age advanced, they came forth onto the drier element; and when their bark had burst open, they changed their mode of life for a short time.”

Brucker evidently did not understand this passage; for he translates it (Hist. crit. II.2.1 §15) as ruptoque cortice non multum temporis supervixisse, “and when the bark had burst, they survived for not much time,” as though Greek text expressed the time that followed, rather than the transformation.

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could have survived *). This is sufficiently self-evident, and it is a sign of Anaximander's acumen that he immediately emphasizes nourishment as the most important condition of survival. It follows, then, that the first human being born without a mother, in order to survive, had to be born already fully grown—a conception that also lies immediately behind the views of those who teach a creation of human beings. Now, naturally, a fully grown human being could not emerge from another mammal, and so it was a very comprehensible and at the same time very bold and magnificent thought to place the origin of human beings in the water, where the human being, in another form, first grows like a fish, in order, once he had gradually become capable of withstanding the struggle for existence (Greek text), only then to come onto land. Hippolytus also relates that, according to Anaximander, human beings were initially similar to a fish “.” This word “initially” (Greek text) must surely be understood as referring to the beginnings of human beings, that is, to their youth in the water. Evidently he explained the metamorphosis necessary in this change of way of life in a manner similar to the emergence of the other land animals.

It is a pity that an analogy drawn by Anaximander himself has been lost to us; for although it is transmitted by Plutarch, it remains unintelligible according to its wording and could first through

Note: Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica I.8, from Plutarch:

“... Greek text.”

“...that at the beginning human beings were generated from animals of another kind, because whereas the other animals quickly feed themselves, the human being alone requires prolonged nursing; therefore, at the beginning, being such, he could never have survived.”

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a conjecture acquire a doubtful value *). We must take from it only this much: Anaximander did not put forward these assertions out of thin air, but pointed to observations that could make such a metamorphosis from aquatic animals into land animals probable. I have already referred to dragonflies, and one should add mosquitoes, since the emergence of these conspicuous animals could not have escaped the observation of the ancient natural philosophers. For this reason Aristotle, in his History of Animals, where he speaks of such a metamorphosis, gives mosquitoes as a familiar example:

“Greek text.”

“Some animals live first in the moist element, then change into another form and live outside, as, for example, the mosquitoes in the rivers.” **)

And in another passage of the same book he describes the process quite exactly:

“Greek text.”

“Then, after breaking away, they are carried along through the water—the creatures called roundworms. After the shell has burst, the mosquito sits above until the sun or the wind moves it; only then does it fly away.” ***)

Note: Plutarch, Symposium Questions 8.8.4:

“... Greek text.”

“...he declares that human beings first came from the moist element, and, having been nourished like the ancients (?) and become capable of helping themselves, were then cast forth and took hold of the earth.”

Perhaps: “Greek text”—“as frogs.”

Note: History of Animals I.1:

“Greek text.”

“Some animals live first in the moist element, then change into another form and live outside, as, for example, the mosquitoes in the rivers.”

*Note: Ibid. V.20

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To be sure, it is also possible that the words Greek text are not intended to indicate an analogy; at least, it seems that no one has previously thought of this possibility. Wyttenbach remarks concerning the words mentioned above:

“non aptum huic loco: aptius Greek text quod verti nempe velut educati et ...”

“Not suitable to this passage: more suitable is Greek text, which I translate, namely, 'as though brought up ...'”

Hutten likewise finds the words inappropriate, even if one translates them with Xylander as “ut veteres putant”—“as the ancients think.” The latter is already impermissible for the reason that Plutarch is precisely reporting Anaximander's departure from the more refined opinion of the ancients. Hutten also adduces another reading: “Referenda huc videtur lectio ... notata Greek text.” But he immediately rejects it:

“Sed quid inde lucri?”

“But what advantage would that bring?”

Thus he leaves the matter standing in doubt:

“Quid haec sibi velint, dubium est.”

“What these words mean is doubtful.”

If, therefore, the matter cannot be helped in this way, it might fit better if an analogy were given for nourishment and then also for the metamorphosis that followed. Since the matter cannot be decided, it is sufficient to recall those analogies that would have been known to the natural philosopher *).

Note: One possible explanation would be the following. Plutarch relates that the ancients taught that human beings grew forth from the moist element:

“Greek text”

“that the human being grew forth from the moist substance,”

and therefore regarded the fish as our relative and as nourished together with us, “Greek text.” Anaximander, on the other hand, departs from this in the direction of a poorer doctrine by allowing human beings to originate from the fish, while otherwise agreeing with this conception of the ancients, “Greek text.” What is unsatisfactory here is that Plutarch has not previously said how the ancients conceived this generation of human beings from water.

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But if Anaximander prohibited the eating of fish because the fish is at once our father and mother *), then in the prohibition we undoubtedly recognize a connection with the teachings of the Egyptian priests; but no less in the justification do we recognize the independence of Anaximander's research, since the derivation of human beings from the fish—criticized by Plutarch and in contradiction to mythology—reveals precisely a sober scientific consideration, whose value can only be brought still more into the light by modern hypotheses.

It is interesting how, approximately a hundred years ago, the distinguished scholar Brucker judged this Anaximandrian theory. “This generation of human beings from beings of another kind does indeed show Anaximander's limited education in natural science, but he is all the more to be forgiven for it, because most pagan philosophers philosophized so foolishly about the origin of the human race. For since they once admitted the hypothesis that a generatio aequivoca was possible, it was also easy to ascribe such an origin to the human race, since they did not know the true origin of human beings, knowledge of which presupposes a revelation” **).

Note: Plutarch, Symposium, Book 8.8:

“Greek text.”

“Anaximander, declaring the fish the common father and mother of human beings, condemned it as food.”

Note: Historical Criticism, Part 2, Book 2, Chapter 1, §15:

“cum enim semel hypothesin illam, generationem aequivocorum esse possibilem, admitterent, facile inde erat, humano generi ejusmodi adscribere ortum, cum veram hominis originem, cujus notitia revelationem supponit, ignoraverint.”

“For once they had admitted that hypothesis—that the generation of things from unlike things was possible—it was easy from this to ascribe such an origin to the human race, since they were ignorant of the true origin of human beings, knowledge of which presupposes revelation.”

“Anaximander's limited erudition in natural matters must therefore be explained by his unfamiliarity with revelation. Thus the learned Brucker thought in the year 1767.”

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If we admired the grand meaning and bold movement of thought in this doctrine of Anaximander's, just as in his hypothesis concerning the formation of the world, it remains for us to call attention to an interesting analogy. In the formation of the world, a bark of fire first forms around the world, and after this has burst open, the phenomena of the world now known develop. In the same way, in the formation of the land animals, a bark first forms around the earlier life-form in the water, and after this has burst open, the transformed life of the animals on land develops.

In both cases Anaximander uses the same expressions, and we may therefore say that he allows the world to develop like a great animal, or that he allows the animals to develop like a small world. To be sure, the analogy is not at all remote; yet in both cases at least a development from within outward is presented, and I do not know whether, on account of the word “bark” (Greek text), one may not also bring in the analogy with the development of plants.

These analogies would once again indicate a dynamic conception of nature, in that an inner process of transformation takes place under the protection of a bark; but since a mechanical explanation is decisively required for the cosmic phenomena, and since tradition has preserved only those few passages concerning the origin of animals, it seems to me that in this case too Aristotle's judgment is confirmed: the tendency of thought was indeed working toward a dynamic-organic conception, but the expression of the concepts remained in stammering obscurity.

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Conclusion

I have discussed Anaximander's hypotheses at such length partly because they are especially interesting as the first work of natural science among the Greeks and had not yet been properly interpreted, and partly because this makes the contrast with Heraclitus emerge all the more sharply. For although Anaximander does not in the least forget the divine nature of his All and even speaks, with poetic images *), of an accounting which things must render for their transgression (Greek text) and in which they must pay penance and punishment (Greek text), it is nevertheless sufficiently clear that the mechanical explanation of things decisively prevails in him, and that his sober, clear, and penetrating gaze was not governed by any mythological tradition.

While Heraclitus denyed all judgment to the blind understanding of the multitude and enveloped himself in priestly dignity and oracular language, borrowing his thoughts from mythology, Anaximander, despite the boldest hypotheses, sought the simplest analogies and the evidence of the senses accessible to all. The following studies on Heraclitus will demonstrate this contrast sufficiently.

Note: Simplicius, Physics, fol. 6a:

“Greek text.”

“Expressing these things in more poetic names.”