From Anaximander to Socrates

Anaximander studied under Thales. He was the son of Praxiadas and a native of Miletus. He said that the first principle of the things that exist is a certain nature of the Boundless, out of which the heavens are generated and the worlds within them; and that this principle is eternal and does not decay, and takes in all the worlds. He speaks of time as something whose coming to be, existence and destruction are all limited. He declared the Boundless to be a first principle and an element of the things that exist, and he was the first to use that name for a first principle. [a]

He further asserted that there is an eternal motion, and that by its working the heavens come to be. The earth hangs suspended, held up by nothing, staying where it is because it is equally distant from everything else; and its shape is curved and round, like a stone column. One of its two surfaces is the one we walk on, and the other is on the opposite side. The stars are a ring of fire, cut off from the fire near the world and shut in by air. There are airy vents at the places where the stars shine, and when these vents are blocked, eclipses happen. The moon looks now full and now waning, according as its paths are blocked or opened. The circle of the sun is twenty-seven times larger than the moon; the sun sits in the highest part of the sky, and the spheres of the fixed stars in the lowest.

Animals are produced in moisture, by evaporation under the sun. Man was originally like a different animal, that is, a fish. Winds are caused when the very thin vapors of the air separate off, and then move once they have been packed together. Rain comes from the earth giving back the moisture it takes in from the clouds under the sun. There are flashes of lightning when a wind comes down and splits the clouds. He was born in the third year of the forty-second Olympiad.

Anaximenes was also a native of Miletus, the son of Eurystratus. He held that the first principle is boundless air, out of which come the things that exist, the things that have existed and the things that will exist, gods and divine beings included, and that everything else arises from what this air produces. Air of this sort, when it is perfectly even, cannot be seen, but it shows itself through cold and heat and moisture and movement, and it is always moving; for whatever undergoes alteration does not change unless there is motion. It presents a different appearance depending on whether it is packed together or thinned out. When it is dissolved into something thinner, fire is produced; when it is moderately packed back into air, a cloud is formed from the air by that contracting; when it is packed tighter still, water; when the packing goes further, earth; and when it is packed to the very highest degree, stones. So the ruling principles of coming to be are opposites — heat and cold. [g]

The earth is spread out flat and rides along on the air, and so do the sun and the moon and the rest of the stars; for all of them are fiery in nature, and because they are broad and flat they ride on the air. The stars are produced out of the earth, by reason of the mist that rises from it; when this mist is thinned, fire is produced, and the stars consist of that fire as it is carried upward. There are earthy bodies as well in the region of the stars, traveling along with them. He says that the stars do not move under the earth, as some have supposed, but around it, the way a cap is turned around our head; and that the sun is hidden not by going under the earth but by being covered by the higher parts of the earth, and because of its greater distance from us. The stars send out no heat to us, because of the length of the distance.

Winds are produced when the packed air becomes thin and is carried along; and when it is gathered and thickened further, clouds are generated, and so a change is made into water. Hail is produced when the water carried down from the clouds freezes; snow is generated when these same clouds, being wetter, freeze. Lightning is caused when the clouds are parted by the force of the winds, for when they are torn apart a bright, fiery flash is produced. A rainbow is produced when the sun’s rays fall on the gathered air. An earthquake takes place when the earth is altered into a larger bulk by heat and cold. These, then, were the opinions of Anaximenes. He flourished about the first year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad.

After him comes Anaxagoras, the son of Hegesibulus, a native of Clazomenae. He said that the first principle of the universe is mind and matter: mind is the cause that does the work, and matter is what was being formed. For all things came into existence at once, and then mind came in and brought order. The material principles, he says, are unlimited in number, and even the smaller of them are unlimited. All things share in motion by being moved by mind, and like bodies come together. The heavenly bodies were arranged by circular motion. So what was thick and moist and dark and cold, and everything heavy, came together at the center, and out of its hardening the earth got its support; but the opposites of these — heat and brightness, dryness and lightness — rushed out to the far part of the sky. [i]

The earth is flat in shape, and it stays suspended where it is because of its size, because there is no empty space, and because the air, which is the most powerful thing there is, carries the earth along upon itself. Among the moist things on earth was the sea and the waters in it; and when these evaporated under the sun, or settled beneath, the ocean was formed in this way, and from the rivers that flow into it from time to time. The rivers too are kept up from the rains and from the actual waters in the earth, for the earth is hollow and holds water in its caverns. The Nile floods in summer because of the waters carried down into it from the snows in the north.

The sun and moon and all the stars are fiery stones, rolled around by the turning of the ether. Beneath the stars are the sun and the moon and certain invisible bodies that travel along with us. We have no perception of the heat of the stars, both because they are so far off and because of their distance from the earth; and besides, they are not hot to the same degree as the sun, because they occupy a colder place. The moon, being lower than the sun, is nearer to us. The sun is larger than the Peloponnese. The moon has no light of its own, but gets it from the sun. The circuit of the stars takes place under the earth. The moon is eclipsed when the earth comes between, and sometimes when the bodies beneath the moon come between; the sun is eclipsed when the moon comes between at the beginning of the month. The solstices are caused by the sun and the moon both being pushed back by the air, and the moon turns often because it cannot make headway against the cold. He was the first to set out definitions about eclipses and about the lighting of the heavenly bodies.

He affirmed that the moon is earthy, and has plains and ravines on it. The Milky Way is a reflection of the light of the stars that do not get their brightness from the sun; and shooting stars, running across the sky like sparks thrown off, arise out of the motion of the pole. Winds are caused when the air is thinned by the sun, and by those burning bodies that pass under the pole and are carried away from it. Thunder and lightning are caused by heat falling on the clouds. Earthquakes are produced when the air above falls on the air under the earth; for when that is set moving, the earth riding upon it is shaken too. Animals first came into existence in moisture, and after that from one another; and males are conceived when the seed given off from the right parts sticks to the right parts of the womb, and females are born when the opposite happens. This philosopher flourished in the first year of the eighty-eighth Olympiad, at which time, they say, Plato was also born. They maintain, too, that Anaxagoras could foresee what was coming.

Archelaus was an Athenian by birth, the son of Apollodorus. Like Anaxagoras, he asserted the mixture of matter, and he set out his first principles in the same way. But this philosopher held that a certain mixture is present in mind itself from the start; and that the first principle of motion is the separating of heat and cold from each other, and that the heat moves while the cold stays at rest. The water, being dissolved, flows toward the center, where the scorched air and the earth are produced, of which the one is carried upward and the other stays below. [m]

The earth is at rest, and this is why it came into existence: it lies at the center, being, so to speak, no part of the universe, since it was left out when everything burned. From the earth, first of all in a state of burning, comes the nature of the stars, the largest of which is the sun and the next the moon, while of the rest some are smaller and some larger. He says the heaven was tilted at an angle, and so the sun spread light over the earth, made the air clear and dried the ground; for at first the earth was a sea, since it is high at the rim and hollow in the middle. As an indication of the hollowness he offers this: the sun does not rise and set for everyone at the same time, which it ought to do if the earth were level.

As for animals, he says that when the earth was at first being heated in its lower part, where the heat and the cold were mixed together, there the rest of the animals made their appearance, many of them and unlike one another, all with the same food, nourished from mud. Their life lasted only a short time, but afterwards they came to be generated from one another. Men were separated off from the rest of the animals, and they appointed rulers and laws and crafts and cities and the rest. And he asserts that mind is inborn in all animals alike; for each of them made use of mind — one slower, another faster — according to the difference in its bodily make-up.

Natural philosophy, then, ran on from Thales to Archelaus. Socrates studied under Archelaus. There are, however, a great many others besides, who bring in all sorts of opinions about the divine and about the nature of the universe; and if we were minded to set out every one of their opinions, we would have to write an enormous number of books. But we will remind the reader of the men we especially ought to name — those who deserve mention for their fame, and because they were, so to speak, the leaders of the men who afterwards framed systems of philosophy, and gave them their starting point — and then hurry on to what is left for us to examine.

Parmenides likewise supposes the universe to be one, both eternal and never brought into being, and spherical in shape. Even he did not escape the opinion of the great body of thinkers: he affirmed that fire and earth are the first principles of the universe, the earth as matter and the fire as cause — indeed as the cause that does the work. He asserted that the world would be destroyed, but he does not say in what way. The same man, however, affirmed the universe to be eternal and not generated, spherical in form and the same throughout, though it has no place within itself, and motionless and limited. [o]

Leucippus, a companion of Zeno, did not hold the same opinion. He affirms that things are unlimited and always in motion, and that coming to be and change go on continuously. He says that the elements are the full and the void. Worlds are produced, he asserts, when many bodies gather and flow together from the surrounding space into a great void, and, striking against one another, those of the same shape and similar in form become entangled; and when they are interwoven in this way, there are changes into other bodies, and the things that come to be grow and shrink by necessity. But he did not define what the nature of necessity is. [p]

Democritus was an acquaintance of Leucippus. He was the son of Damasippus and a native of Abdera, and he put forward his system after conferring with many gymnosophists among the Indians, with priests in Egypt, and with astrologers and magi in Babylon. He makes the same statements as Leucippus about the elements, the full and the void, calling the full “what is” and the void “what is not”; and this he asserted because existing things are continually moving in the void.

He maintained that worlds are unlimited in number and vary in size; that in some there is neither sun nor moon, while in others they are larger than ours, and in others more numerous. The distances between worlds are unequal; in one quarter of space there are more of them and in another fewer; some are growing, others have reached their full size, and others are dwindling away; in one quarter they are coming into existence and in another they are failing; and they are destroyed by crashing into one another. Some worlds have no animals or plants and no moisture of any kind. The earth of our world was made before the stars were, and the moon is lowest, then the sun above it, then the fixed stars. The planets themselves do not all stand at the same height either. A world flourishes until it can no longer take in anything from outside. This man turned everything into ridicule, as though all of human life deserved to be laughed at.

Xenophanes, a native of Colophon, was the son of Orthomenes. This man lived on into the time of Cyrus. He was the first to assert that there is no possibility of understanding anything, putting it this way: [r]

He affirms that nothing is generated or perishes or is moved, and that the universe, being one, is beyond change. But he says that the divine is eternal, and one, and altogether the same throughout, and limited, and spherical in shape, and able to perceive in all its parts. The sun comes into existence each day out of a gathering of small sparks; the earth is unlimited, and is surrounded neither by air nor by the heaven. There are unlimited suns and moons, and all things spring from earth. This man affirmed that the sea is salt because of the many mixtures that flow into it; Metrodorus, however, says it is salt because it is filtered through earth.

Xenophanes is of the opinion that there was once a mixing of the earth with the sea, and that in the course of time the earth was freed from the moisture. He claimed he could produce proofs of the following kind: that shells are found inland and in the mountains; that in the quarries at Syracuse, he says, the print of a fish and of seals was found; at Paros the print of an anchovy deep inside a stone; and on Malta pieces of every sort of sea creature. He says these were formed when everything was originally sunk in mud, and an impression of them was dried in the mud. But all human beings perished when the earth was carried down into the sea and turned to mud; then it began generation over again, and this collapse has happened to all worlds.

A certain Ecphantus, a native of Syracuse, affirmed that it is not possible to arrive at true knowledge of things. He does, however, define — as he thinks — the primary bodies as indivisible, and says that there are three variations of them: size, shape and capacity, from which the objects of the senses are generated. There is a determinable multitude of these bodies, and this is unlimited. Bodies are moved neither by weight nor by impact, but by a divine power, which he calls mind and soul; and the world is a representation of this, which is also why it has been made in the form of a sphere by divine power. And the earth, at the center of the ordered universe, turns around its own center toward the east. [u]

Hippo, a native of Rhegium, put forward as first principles the cold — water, for example — and the hot, for example fire. He said that fire, once produced by water, overpowered the power of the thing that produced it and formed the world. The soul, he said, is sometimes the brain and sometimes water; for the seed too is something that appears to us to arise out of moisture, and out of that, he says, the soul is produced.

So far, then, we think we have brought forward enough of these men’s opinions. Since we have gone through the teachings of the natural philosophers adequately, it seems to remain that we now turn to Socrates and Plato, who gave the first place to moral philosophy.

Socrates, then, studied under Archelaus the natural philosopher. He held in reverence the rule “Know yourself,” and he gathered a large school, in which he had Plato, who was far superior to all his other pupils. Socrates himself left no writings behind him. Plato, however, took impressions of the whole of his wisdom and established a school of his own, combining natural, ethical and logical philosophy together. But the points Plato settled on are these that follow. [v]