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Updated: May 22, 2025
The Buddhists, and the unbelievers who figure so boastingly upon the rostrum in modern times, speak alike. They say: "As many facts and second causes as you please, but ask no questions about first causes; that is unscientific." There never was a more absurd and wild speculation. It is an old speculation. Anaximander, who lived six centuries before Christ, advocated the assumption.
When Oropastes attempted to explain to him the celebrated Babylonian sun-dial, introduced by Anaximander of Miletus into Greece, he turned from the Magian with a scornful laugh, saying: "We knew all this, before you knew the meaning of an hour."
Anaximander also noted the importance of rotary or vortex motion in the cosmical scheme, and he inferred that there might be an indefinite number of rotating systems in addition to that with which we are immediately acquainted. He also made some very important observations of a biological character, and he announced that man must be descended from an animal of a different species.
Hence that the sun, moon, and stars, and even the air, are constantly moving in a circle. In the mean time another sect of philosophers had arisen, who, like the Ionians, sought to explain Nature, but by a different method. Anaximander, born 610 B.C., was one of the original mathematicians of Greece, yet, like Pythagoras and Thales, speculated on the beginning of things.
The formal advance has been in printing, railroads, and such like, in which direction we may easily suppose progression will yet further continue. But there has been no essential advance whatever. We know as little now of our own being, of the being of God, or even of that of the smallest infusoria, as in the days of Thales and Anaximander.
Air the beginning of things All things pass The eternal and the temporary The weeping philosopher III. ANAXIMENES. This philosopher was also a native of Miletus, and is said to have been a hearer or pupil of Anaximander.
Anaximander invented the sphere, the gnomon, and geographical charts, which required considerable geometrical knowledge. Anaxagoras employed himself in prison in attempting to square the circle. Pythagoras discovered the important theorem that in a right-angled triangle the squares on the sides containing the right angle are together equal to the square on the opposite side of it.
Anacreon of Teos was courted by the rulers of Athens. Thales of Miletus flourished in the middle of the seventh century, and Anaximander, born B.C. 610—one of the great original mathematicians of the world, speculated like Thales, on the origin of things. Pythagoras, born in Samos, B.C. 580—a still greater name, grave and majestic, taught the harmony of the spheres long before the Ionian revolt.
As a mathematician Anaximander must have been familiar in various aspects with the functions of the Infinite or Indefinable in the organisation of thought. To the student of Euclid, for example, the impossibility of adequately defining any of the fundamental elements of the science of geometry the point, the line, the surface is a familiar fact.
We have given prominence, in the first instance, to the doctrine of "spontaneous" or "aboriginal" production, because it constitutes an indispensable part of the Theory of Development, and because we believe that, were this clearly understood, that theory would soon sink into general discredit or total oblivion, like the kindred speculations of Anaximander and Anaxagoras, of the old Ionic School.
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