The moist, cold interior of the world is not, it will be noticed, pure water. It is always called “the moist” or “the moist state.” That is because it has to be still further differentiated under the influence of heat into earth, water, and vapour. The gradual drying up of the water by the fire is a good example of what Anaximander meant by “injustice.” And we see how this injustice brings about the destruction of the world. The fire will in time dry up and burn up the whole of the cold, moist element. But then it will not be fire any longer; it will simply be the “mixture,” if we choose to call it so, of the hot and cold—that is, it will be the same as the Boundless which surrounds it, and will pass away into it.
The view which Anaximander takes of the earth is a great advance upon anything we can reasonably attribute to Thales, and Aristotle has preserved the arguments by which he supported it. It is equally distant from the extremes in every direction, and there is no reason for it to move up or down or sideways.[[138]] Still, he does not attain to the idea that it is spherical. He believes that we live on a convex disc, and from this the cylindrical form follows as a matter of course. The really remarkable thing is that he should have seen, however dimly, that there is no absolute up and down in the world.
Animals.
21. We have seen enough to show us that the speculations of Anaximander about the world were of an extremely daring character; we come now to the crowning audacity of all, his theory of the origin of living creatures. The Theophrastean account of this has been well preserved by the doxographers:—
Living creatures arose from the moist element as it was evaporated by the sun. Man was like another animal, namely, a fish, in the beginning.—Hipp. Ref. i. 6 (R. P. 22 a).
The first animals were produced in the moisture, each enclosed in a prickly bark. As they advanced in age, they came out upon the drier part. When the bark broke off,[[139]] they survived for a short time.—Aet. v. 19, 1 (R. P. 22).
Further, he says that originally man was born from animals of another species. His reason is that while other animals quickly find food by themselves, man alone requires a lengthy period of suckling. Hence, had he been originally as he is now, he would never have survived.—Ps.-Plut. Strom. fr. 2 (R. P. ib.).
He declares that at first human beings arose in the inside of fishes, and after having been reared like sharks,[[140]] and become capable of protecting themselves, they were finally cast ashore and took to land.—Plut. Symp. Quaest. 730 f (R. P. ib.).
The importance of these statements has sometimes been overrated and still more often underestimated. Anaximander has been called a precursor of Darwin by some, while others have treated the whole thing as a mythological survival. It is therefore important to notice that this is one of the rare cases where we have not merely a placitum, but an indication, meagre though it be, of the observations on which it was based, and the line of argument by which it was supported. It is clear from this that Anaximander had an idea of what is meant by adaptation to environment and survival of the fittest, and that he saw the higher mammals could not represent the original type of animal. For this he looked to the sea, and he naturally fixed upon those fishes which present the closest analogy to the mammalia. The statements of Aristotle about the galeus levis were shown long ago by Johannes Müller to be more accurate than those of later naturalists, and we now know that these observations were already made by Anaximander. The manner in which the shark nourishes its young furnished him with the very thing he required to explain the survival of the earliest animals.[[141]]
Theology.