United States or French Southern Territories ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Six hundred years before Christ, Anaximander, the Greek, taught that animal life was engendered from the earth through the influence of moisture and heat, and that life thus generated gradually evolved into higher and different forms: all animals once lived in the water, but some of them becoming stranded on land put forth organs of locomotion and defense, through their supreme resolve to live.
The main doctrine of his philosophical system was, that water, or fluid substance was the single original element from which everything came and into which everything returned. ANAXIMANDER, the successor of Thales in the Ionic school, lived from B.C. 610 to 547.
The speculations of Thales had tended toward discovering the material constitution of the universe upon an induction from observed facts, and thus made water to be the origin of all things. Anaximander, accustomed to view things in the abstract, could not accept so concrete a thing as water; his speculations tended toward mathematics, to the science of pure deduction.
What is it that shall explain the difference between our map of the world and that of Sesostris or Anaximander? Geological deposits, the washing away of mountains, and the change of river-courses are certainly but trifling in such an account.
Alcmaeon and the mathematicians, that the planets have a contrary motion to the fixed stars, and in opposition to them are carried from the west to the east. Anaximander, that they are carried by those circles and spheres on which they are placed. Anaximenes, that they are turned under and about the earth.
II. ANAXIMANDER. Our information with respect to thinkers so remote as these men is too scanty and too fragmentary, to enable us to say in what manner or degree they influenced each other. We cannot say for certain that any one of them was pupil or antagonist of another.
And therefore they worship a fish as of the same production and breeding with themselves, in this matter being more happy in their philosophy than Anaximander; for he says that fish and men were not produced in the same substances, but that men were first produced in fishes, and, when they were grown up and able to help themselves, were thrown out, and so lived upon the land.
The same philosopher is said to have made the first sketch of a geographical map, but this again is a statement which modern researches have shown to be fallacious, since a Babylonian attempt at depicting the geography of the world is still preserved to us on a clay tablet. Anaximander may, however, have been the first Greek to make an attempt of this kind.
The early Greek philosophers were the first to attempt answers to these problems. Many of them held that all things natural sprang from what they called the original elements fire, air, earth, water. Anaximander held that animals were begotten from the earth by means of heat and moisture; and that man was developed from other beings different in form.
And, moreover, that as the mind in man is so ordered as to naturally proceed from the more known to the less known, from the ascertained fact of the moral law, we ascend to the source of the moral law, which, like all things, takes its rise in the apeiron, the Boundless of Anaximander, the Infinite of Mr. Spencer.
Word Of The Day