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Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes of Miletus, Bias of Priene, Solon of Athens, Pittakus of Lesbos, the most celebrated Hellenic philosophers, had in former and happier days been guests at the court of Croesus in Sardis. His full clear voice sounded like pure song when compared with the shrill tones of Amasis.
A glance at the Greek philosophy, to which we owe so much that is of value in our intellectual life, is sufficient to disclose how difficult it was for thinking men to attain to a higher conception. Thus, Anaximenes of Miletus, who lived in the sixth century before Christ, says that "our soul, which is air, rules us."
Thus did this philosopher reason, comparing the world with our own living existence, which he took to be air, an imperishable principle of life. Laert., ii. 3; Bayle, Dict. Diogenes thus refers the origin of the world to an intelligent being to a soul which knows and vivifies. Anaximenes regarded air as having Life. Diogenes saw in it also Intelligence.
This is pretty nearly all that we know of Anaximenes. So far as the few known facts reveal him, we can hardly say that except as supplying a step towards the completer development of the motive idea in being, he greatly adds to the chain of progressive thought.
He had a great and inquiring mind, but it gave him no knowledge of a spiritual, controlling, and personal deity. Anaximenes, the disciple of Thales, pursued his master's inquiries and adopted his method. He also was born in Miletus, but at what time is unknown, probably 500 B.C. Like Thales, he held to the eternity of matter.
Sometimes it struck her how this dance with ideas was like awakening to the fact that one was all alone dancing in an empty room of a lunatic asylum. A dilemma was the air of Thales, the water of Anaximenes, and the fire of Heraclitus. These forces of withdrawing and shunning but needing people were like the peculiar components of atoms. They bounced off each other and made her.
This is it which I love when I love my God. And what is this? I asked the earth, and it answered me, "I am not He"; and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, "We are not thy God, seek above us." I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, "Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God.
"If Anaximenes," says Maurice, not very clearly, "discovered that he had within him a power and principle which ruled over all the acts and functions of his bodily frame, Heraclitus found that there was life within him which he could not call his own, and yet it was, in the very highest sense, himself, so that without it he would have been a poor, helpless, isolated creature, a universal life which connected him with his fellow-men, with the absolute source and original fountain of life.... He proclaimed the absolute vitality of Nature, the endless change of matter, the mutability and perishability of all individual things in contrast with the eternal Being, the supreme harmony which rules over all."
Two of the Milesians, disciples of Anaximander and Anaximenes, were staying then in Egypt, to study astronomy and the peculiar wisdom of the Egyptians at Heliopolis, and the third was a wealthy merchant and ship-owner, named Theopompus, who had settled at Naukratis.
The sun appears to us more refulgent, by reason it is moved in a clearer and purer air; the moon appears more duskish, it being carried in an air more troubled and gross. Anaximenes believes that the mouth of the wheel, about which the moon is turned, being stopped is the cause of an eclipse. Berasus, that it proceeds from the turning of the dark side of the lunar orb towards us.
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