for
certain that any one of them was pupil or antagonist of another. They
appear each of them, one might say for a moment only, from amidst the
darkness of antiquity; a few sayings of theirs we catch vaguely across
the void, and then they disappear. There is not, consequently, any
very distinct progression or continuity observable among them, and so
far therefore one has to confess that the title 'School of Miletus' is
a misnomer. We have already quoted the words of Aristotle in which he
classes the Ionic philosophers together, as all of them giving a
_material_ aspect of some kind to the originative principle of the
universe (see above, P. 4). But while this is a characteristic
observable in some of them, it is not so obviously discoverable in the
second of their number, Anaximander.

This philosopher is said to have been younger by [11] one generation
than Thales, but to have been intimate with him. He, like Thales, was
a native of Miletus, and while we do not hear of him as a person, like
Thales, of political eminence and activity, he was certainly the equal,
if not the superior, of Thales in {8} mathematical and scientific
ability. He is said to have either invented or at least made known to
Greece the construction of the sun-dial. He was associated with
Hecataeus in the construction of the earliest geographical charts or
maps; he devoted himself with some success to the science of astronomy.
His familiarity with the abstractions of mathematics perhaps accounts
for the more abstract form, in which he expressed his idea of the
principle of all things.

[21]

To Anaximander this principle was, as he expressed it, the _infinite_;
not water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a different
thing from any of them, something hardly namable, out of whose
formlessness the heavens and all the worlds in them came to be. And by
necessity into that same infinite or indefinite existence, out of which
they originally emerged, did every created thing return. Thus, as he
poetically expressed it, "Time brought its revenges, and for the
wrong-doing of existence all things paid the penalty of death."

The momentary resting-place of Thales on the confines of the familiar
world of things, in his formulation of Water as the principle of
existence, is thus immediately removed. We get, as it were, to the
earliest conception of things as we find it in Genesis; before the
heavens were, or earth, or the waters under the