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
earth, or light, or sun, or moon, or grass, or the beast of the field, when
the “earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the
deep.”
Only, be it observed, that
while in the primitive Biblical idea this formless void precedes in time
an ordered universe, in Anaximander’s conception this formless infinitude is
always here, is in fact the only reality which ever is here, something
without beginning or ending, underlying all, enwrapping all, governing all.
A History of Greek Philosophy /
THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS /
ANAXIMANDER
