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ANAXIMANDER; HERACLITUS. Anaximander of Miletus, an astronomer also, and a geographer, believed that the principle of all things is indeterminate a kind of chaos wherein nothing has form or shape; that from chaos come things and beings, and that they return thither in order to emerge again.
In this theory he united the Zeus, or ether, of Pherecydes, and the Infinite of Anaximander, for he held the air to be God in itself, and infinite in its nature.
It is to be noted, however, that while modern science assumes necessarily two correlative data or originative principles, Force, namely, as well as Matter, Anaximander seems to have been content with the formulation of but one; and perhaps it is just here that a kinship still remains between him and Thales and other philosophers of the school.
Doctor Cudworth, in his Intellectual System, reckons four species of atheists among the ancients. First. The disciples of Anaximander, called Hylopathians, who attributed every thing to matter destitute of feeling.
Thales, born 640 B.C., taught the rotundity of the earth, and that the moon shines with reflected light. He also predicted eclipses. Anaximander, born 610 B.C., invented the gnomon, and constructed geographical charts. But the Greeks, after all, were the only people of antiquity who elevated astronomy to the dignity of a science.
A Milesian named Hekataeus, who spends his life in travelling, drew it, and gave it me in exchange for a free-pass." He improved the map made by Anaximander, and his great work, "the journey round the world," was much prized by the ancients; but unfortunately, with the exception of some very small fragments, has now perished. Vol.
Anaximander, born B.C. 610, was one of the original mathematicians of Greece, yet, like Pythagoras and Thales, speculated on the beginning of things. His principle was that the Infinite is the origin of all things.
Nay, more, Anaximander explained the origin of living creatures on like principles, for the sun's heat, acting upon the primal miry earth, produced filmy bladders or bubbles, and these, becoming surrounded with a prickly rind, at length burst open, and, as from an egg, animals came forth. At first they were ill-formed and imperfect, but subsequently elaborated and developed.
Anaximander held at least one theory which, as vouched for by various copyists and commentators, entitles him to be considered perhaps the first teacher of the idea of organic evolution. According to this idea, man developed from a fishlike ancestor, "growing up as sharks do until able to help himself and then coming forth on dry land."
Anaximander made geographical charts, which required considerable geometrical knowledge. Anaxagoras employed himself in prison in attempting to square the circle. Thales, as has been said, 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.
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