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Updated: May 24, 2025
Anaximenes writing to Pythagoras, "To what purpose," said he, "should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?" for the kings of Persia were at that time preparing to invade his country.
We find that Anaximander, the next in the list, assumed as the source out of which all things proceed and that to which they all return "the infinite and indeterminate"; and that Anaximenes, who was perhaps his pupil, took as his principle the all-embracing air.
Thales has said that water is the source of everything. Anaximander would not agree to this, for he thought that all had come from space. Anaximenes had affirmed that it was air. Anaxagoras had remarked that matter was infinite. Xenophanes had declared that everything was one whole, and that it was a god, everlasting, eternal, never born and never dying, but round in his shape!
He treats of the form and magnitude of the earth, and devotes eight books to Europe, six to Asia, and one to Africa. His great authorities are Eratosthenes, Polybius, Aristotle, Antiochus of Syracuse, Posidonius, Theopompus, Artemidorus Ephorus, Herodotus, Anaximenes, Thucydides, and Aristo, chiefly historians and philosophers.
He attempted to delineate the celestial sphere, and to measure time by a sun-dial. Anaximenes of Miletus taught, like his predecessors, crude notions of the sun and stars, and speculated on the nature of the moon, but did nothing to advance his science on true grounds, except the construction of sun-dials. The same may be said of Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Anaxagoras.
Diogenes was the wit of Greece, but when, after holding up an old dried fish to draw away the eyes of Anaximenes' audience, he exclaimed "See how an old fish is more interesting than Anaximenes," he said a funny thing, but he stabbed a friend.
As we have said, the tendency of the later members of the school was towards emphasising the motive side of the supposed underlying principle of nature, and accordingly Anaximenes chose Air as the element which best represented or symbolised that principle.
Let any one, with Polemo, take the world; or with the Stoics, the aether, or the sun; or with Anaximenes, the air, to be God; and what a divinity, religion, and worship must we needs have! Nothing can be so dangerous as PRINCIPLES thus TAKEN UP WITHOUT QUESTIONING OR EXAMINATION; especially if they be such as concern morality, which influence men's lives, and give a bias to all their actions.
We must not be misled by the fact that Anaximander called his innumerable worlds 'gods' and that his successor Anaximenes spoke of Air as a 'god'. These were never the gods of any city and were never worshipped by any one, and they did not therefore answer at all to what the ordinary Greek meant by a god.
Anaximenes and his school held that the soul was what they called Air, but that was just because they regarded Air as the primary substance of which all things are made. As Diogenes of Apollonia expresses it, it is 'a small portion of the god', that is, of the primary substance, enclosed in a human body for a time, and returning at death to the larger mass of the same substance outside.
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