Chapter 10

Anaximander

The next philosopher of the Ionic school is Anaximander.
He was an exceedingly original and audacious thinker. He
was probably born about 611 B.C. and died about 547.
He was an inhabitant of Miletus, and is said to have been
a disciple of Thales. It will be seen, thus, that he was a
younger contemporary of Thales. He was born at the time
that Thales was flourishing, and was about a generation
younger. He was the first Greek to write a philosophic
treatise, which however has been unfortunately lost. He
was eminent for his astronomical and geographical knowl-
edge, and in this connection was the first to construct a
map. Details of his life are not known.

Now Thales had made the ultimate principle of the uni-
verse, water. Anaximander agrees with Thales that the
ultimate principle of things is material, but he does not
name it water, does not in fact believe that it is any par-
ticular kind of matter. It is rather a formless, indefinite,
and absolutely featureless matter in general. {25} Matter,

as we know it, is always some particular kind of matter. It

must be iron, brass, water, air, or other such. The differ-

ence between the different kinds of matter is qualitative,

that is to say, we know that air is air because it has the

qualities of air and differs from iron because iron has the

qualities of iron, and so on. The primeval matter of Anax-

imander is just matter not yet sundered into the different

kinds of matter. It is therefore formless and characterless.

And as it is thus indeterminate in quality, so it is illim-

itable in quantity. Anaximander believed that this matter

stretches out to infinity through space. The reason he gave

for this opinion was, that if there were a limited amount

of matter it would long ago have been used up in the cre-

ation and destruction of the “innumerable worlds.” Hence

he called it “the boundless.” In regard to these “innumer-

able worlds,” the traditional opinion about Anaximander

was that he believed these worlds to succeed each other in

time, and that first a world was created, developed, and was