rmed, and from them rain-drops, and springs, and
fountains, and rivers, and even the sea. He also attributes infinity to
it, a dogma scarcely requiring any exercise of the imagination, but
being rather the expression of an ostensible fact; for who, when he
looks upward, can discern the boundary of the atmosphere. Anaximenes
also held that even the human soul itself is nothing but air, since life
consists in inhaling and exhaling it, and ceases as soon as that
process stops. He taught also that warmth and cold arise from mere
rarefaction and condensation, and gave as a proof the fact that when we
breathe with the lips drawn together the air is cold, but it becomes
warm when we breathe through the widely-opened mouth. Hence he concluded
that, with a sufficient rarefaction, air might turn into fire, and that
this probably was the origin of the sun and stars, blazing comets, and
other meteors; but if by chance it should undergo condensation, it would
turn into wind and clouds, or, if that operation should be still more
increased, into water, snow, hail, and, at last, even into earth itself.
And since it is seen from the results of breathing that the air is a
life-giving principle to man, nay, even is actually his soul, it would
appear to be a just inference that the infinite air is God and that the
gods and goddesses have sprung from it.

Such was the philosophy of Anaximenes. It was the beginning of that
stimulation of activity by rival schools which played so distinguished a
part in the Greek intellectual movement. Its superiority over the
doctrine of Thales evidently consists in this, that it not only assigns
a primitive substance, but even undertakes to show by observation and
experiment how others arise from it, and transformations occur. As to
the discovery of the obliquity of the ecliptic by the aid of a gnomon
attributed to Anaximenes, it was merely a boast of his vainglorious
countrymen, and altogether beyond the scientific grasp of one who had no
more exact idea of the nature of the earth than that it was "like a
broad leaf floating in the air."

[Sidenote: Diogenes asserts that air is the soul of the world.]

The doctrines of Anaximenes received a very important development in the
hands of Diogenes of Apollonia, who asserted that all things originate
from one essence, which, undergoing continual changes, becoming
different at different times, turns back again to the same state. He
regarded the entire world as a