Anaximenes (560–500 B. C.?) was the disciple of Anaximander.One sentence is preserved of his writings.[9]
The Milesian Philosophy. The Milesians lived upon the seacoast, and the changes of the sea and air must have deeply impressed them. They had an intellectual curiosity to find the cosmic matter which remained identical with itself and at the same time moved. (See [p. 22.]) They were not, therefore, interested to discover the chemical composition of matter, but to find what matter was most moving and therefore most alive. Thales said that it was water; Anaximenes, air; and Anaximander, the Apeiron, or the Unlimited. Their respective choices were determined by what seemed to possess the most mobility and the greatest inner vitality. Thales thought water possessed this quality. Water is always moving. Thales saw it moving. It therefore has life in itself. Anaximander felt that no object in our perceptual experience would fully explain the ceaseless mobility of nature, and he called it the Unlimited or the Indeterminate—the Apeiron. It is a mixture in which all qualities are lost. The changes in nature are endless, and therefore the single cosmic substance, from which they come, must be endless as well, for “from whatever source things come, in that they have their end.” We learn that this is just the reason for Anaximenes choosing the air for the single underlying cosmic substance. The air is the most changeable thing and is Unlimited.[9]
Both Thales and Anaximenes still held to the traditional polytheism of the Greek Epic. Anaximanderrises above them in this respect. This conception of the Unlimited, to which his scientific search led him, is regarded by him as Deity. He calls it “the divine” (τὸ θεῖον); although he speaks of it in the neuter gender it is, nevertheless, the first European philosophical conception of God. It is the first attempt to conceive of God as purely physical and yet without any mythical dress. In Anaximander the Milesian monism has a religious aspect.
2. Xenophanes, the Religious Philosopher (570 B. C.). The scientific monism of Anaximander was after all only expressive of that religious dissatisfaction, first voiced by the Wise Men, against the Hesiod cosmogony and the immorality of the Homeric myths. Now for the first time a positive conflict between religion and philosophy arose through Xenophanes, the rhapsodist of Colophon. Colophon, an Ionian city near Miletus, was noted for its obscene and cruel religious practices, and when his native city capitulated to the Persians, Xenophanes charged its feebleness to its immoral religion. He went to Magna Græcia, and, disguised as a musician, he wandered about for sixty-seven years through its length and breadth declaiming in song against the anthropomorphism, the mystic ecstasies, and the general social practices of the Greeks. He finally settled in Elea, southern Italy (see [map]), and on this account he is sometimes called the founder of the Eleatic school.
Xenophanes’ influence upon the thought of Greece was threefold: (1) He preached the Milesian philosophical monism to the people of Greece in the form of a religious monism; (2) He carried this doctrine from eastern Greece (Asia Minor) to Western Greece (MagnaGræcia); (3) He was the connecting link between the Milesian and the following Eleatic school.
The Philosophy of Xenophanes. Based on one of the Milesian assumptions, viz., a single cosmic substance remains identical with itself in nature, Xenophanes felt that he had a right to set down two principles about nature.
1. The single primordial substance below the changes of nature is God. The reality below nature which Thales conceived to be water, Anaximander to be unlimited substance without a name, Anaximenes to be air, was said by Xenophanes to be God. The important point here is that Xenophanes has not given the Greeks a spiritualistic conception of God; but that he has positively stated that the substance of the universe is an object of religious devotion. He calls the cosmic substance God instead of calling it water, Apeiron, or air. It is a material thing, and yet it is an object of reverence. He ascribes to this God a spherical form, and yet also mental power of omniscience. God is “one and all” ἓν καὶ πᾶν, and yet he is “one god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form and thought like unto mortals.” The positive conception of God hangs confused in the mind of Xenophanes. He is scarcely a monotheist, nor yet a pantheist. He is a hylozoist, who conceives the underlying cosmic substance to be an object of religious reverence.
2. The single cosmic substance below the changes of nature is unchangeable. To the Milesians the more moving is matter, the more alive is it. Life and activity are the same thing. To Xenophanes this is not the case, but, on the contrary, the opposite is true. He conceives God to be a definite sphere that is unchangeableand homogeneous. The material substance, God, always remains the same. “He has no need of going about, now hither, now thither, in order to carry out his wishes; but he governs all men without toil.” Xenophanes thus becomes the forerunner of the Eleatic school.
3. Heracleitus, “the Misanthropist” and “the Obscure” (about 563–470 B. C.). Heracleitus was a native of Ephesus, belonged to the aristocracy, and suffered at the hands of the democracy. He wrote a treatise that was difficult to understand even by the ancients, some fragments of which are preserved. He was called the “weeping philosopher” because of his misanthropy, and also the “dark philosopher” because of the obscurity of his writings. He was a theorist rather than a physicist, and his doctrines foreshadow our modern physical theories. His name is coupled with that of Parmenides in the deep impression he made upon Greek thought. From his complacent and gloomy retirement he looked forth upon the world around him with profound contempt, as did the Stoics after him.
a. Heracleitus’ Doctrine of Absolute and Universal Change. The wonder which the Ionians felt, that nature phenomena change into one another, found its liveliest expression in Heracleitus. He not only found that mutability was the primal aspect of nature phenomena, but he also pointed out that human experiences also had their rapid and complete transitions. Especially was he fond of citing the changes of opposites into each other. But what shows his development over the early Milesian doctrine was his isolation of the aspect of change from the Milesian conception of the cosmic matter, thereby affirming that abiding permanence isan illusion. It is one thing to affirm that reality is essentially change; it is another to universalize change by affirming that the permanent has no existence. The Milesian doctrine was too naïve to go as far as that. Heracleitus piles up figures of speech to show that there is no permanence whatever. All existing things are only “becoming”-things, passing-away things. Being is always becoming, about-to-be. The only unchanging thing is change. “You cannot step into the same rivers, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger.” “All things flow” (πάντα ῥεῖ). What abides and deserves the name of Deity is not thing, but motion—Becoming.