[In this excerpt, Fuller suggests that Anaximander complicated ancient cosmology by describing the world-substance as the indeterminate ground of determinate physical types, thus presaging modern evolutionary theory.]

Anaximander, a pupil of Thales, was born about 610 B.C. He lived to see the fall of Sardis and the destruction of the Lydian Empire. Indeed, the publication of his book on philosophy, perhaps the first Greek work in prose, is said to have taken place in the same memorable year—546 B.C. Only fragments of this book have come down to us, but it was extant in the time of Aristotle. The exact date of his death is unknown.

Anaximander seems to have shared the universality of his age and of his master. He evinced a profound and scientific interest in astronomy, geography, and biology, and drew the maps—the first in existence in the Western world—to illustrate the descriptions of his fellow-townsman, the geographer Hecatæsus.

With the philosophical conclusions of his teacher the pupil was unable to agree. He asked the same simple and comprehensive question, and answered it also in a single word. But the word was different. Apparently he found water too specific, too wedded to its own nature and ways, in a word, too essentially watery, to be transformed without protest in fact and imagination into all the myriad things which water to all intents and purposes, save those of theory, so palpably is not. The Stuff of which all things are made must be something more versatile, more adaptable, more capable of throwing itself wholeheartedly and with utter self-effacement into its innumerable and absolutely different rôles and parts. Indeed, that one specific kind of thing should be the substance of which all other sorts of things are composed might well seem unreasonable. Only something which was no one thing in particular could turn itself with equal facility into anything and everything. And perhaps, too, he was struck with the way in which the confusion of things may be sorted out into pairs of opposites, and thought that Thales gave undue prominence to the wet and unduly disparaged the importance of the dry.¹

However that may be, Anaximander refused to specify the nature of the World-Substance. It was simply something to which no particular character or limitations of any sort could be assigned. It was the Boundless, the Indeterminate. Being undefined and unbounded, it could be imagined without difficulty as assuming any shape whatsoever. Out of it all things arose and into it all things were resolved again without any alteration of its essential character.

In addition to the question, "What is the world made of?" Anaximander asks and attempts to answer a second question, "What is the process like by which the world is formed?" This problem he tries to solve somewhat as follows: There is an eternal motion in the Boundless, in the course of which pairs of opposites like hot and cold, wet and dry, light and darkness, become separated out from the indefinite substance. These opposites conflict with and suppress one another and are thus continually resolved again into the undifferentiated World-Substance. This happens, we are told, in a somewhat perplexing phrase, "as is ordained, for they give satisfaction and reparation to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time."²

What does this passage mean? Is it, as the compiler who quotes it suggests, simply a poetic way of speak ing? It may well be that Anaximander is merely remarking rather figuratively that as any one thing by monopolizing a certain amount of space and material keeps some other thing from existing, it only seems turn about and fair play for it eventually to step out and make room for something else in the crowded world. Or he may have the balance of opposites in mind, and the disturbance to the order and equilibrium of the Universe which would result if one member of a pair permanently triumphed over and suppressed its adversary. Again, he is not perhaps from his own point of view speaking figuratively and poetically at all. It may be that we are simply dealing with a philosophical example of that tendency, noted in the last chapter, to leave physical and moral law indistinguishable from one another, and to regard the behavior of things as controlled by the same considerations of propriety and equity as regulate the conduct of men.

Anaximander seems to have continued his description of the way in which the world arose, with considerable astronomical, geological, and biological detail. He be lieved apparently in the existence of other worlds besides our own. But whether he conceived the process of separation into opposites as occurring throughout the Indeterminate and Boundless Substance and thus giving rise simultaneously to an indefinite number of cosmic systems, or believed rather in an infinite succession of such systems, one after another, is a debatable point.³ These worlds he also spoke of as Gods.

The manner in which a world-system was evolved he conceived as follows: The original opposition of the hot and the dry to the cold and the moist became, when once they were separated out, a ring of fire surrounding a core of cold and wet. In the course of the interaction between these two, earth, water, and air or vapor were differentiated within the core, while the enclosing fire became broken into three revolving hoops or rings, solar, lunar, and stellar. These rings were veneered with air or mist except at holes through which the fire shone out. The hole in the first is the sun, in the second the moon. The many perforations of the third are the stars. The earth itself is a cylinder on the top of which we live.

Anaximander's account of the origin of man is even more interesting. "Living creatures," he tells us, "arose from the moist element as it was evaporated by the sun⁴ … each enclosed in a prickly bark. As they advanced in age, they came out upon the drier part. When the bark broke off, they survived for a short time."⁵ Man himself "was born from animals of another species,"⁶ and was "like a fish, in the beginning."⁷ For had he been subject in the old days to his present disadvantages of a prolonged infancy and of inability immediately to forage for himself, he could never have survived primeval conditions.

It seems astonishing to find at the very outset of Greek thought a theory anticipating some of the most important conclusions and arguments of the modern doctrine of evolution, but it should be remembered that the idea of the development of all things out of less highly organized beginnings was, as we have pointed out, natural to the Greek mind, and that the notion of the fixity of species was a later development in ancient philosophy. And as for the doctrine of the special creation by fiat of the different kinds of animals, we remarked in the last chapter that it was quite foreign to Hellenic ways of thinking.

Notes

¹ Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 54.

² Diels, Vorsokratiker, I. p. 15 (trans. Burnet).

³ The latter view is Zeller's, the former Mr. Burnet's.

⁴ Hipp. Ref. 1, 7 (trans. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., p. 73).

⁵ Aet. v. 19, 4 (trans. Burnet, loc. cit.).

⁶ Ps.-Plut. Strom. fr. 2 (trans. Burnet, loc. cit.).

⁷ Hipp. Ref. 1, 6 (trans. Burnet, loc. cit.)