anaximander's book. 281 



cal implications. We have no intention of debating here the question 

 whether in any or all of these matters he was right or wrong: for our 

 purposes it is sufficient to say that in no instance is he certainly right, 

 since the opinions in c^uestion are quite susceptible of interpretation 

 with reference to purely physical facts or processes. 



The influences which we have so cursorily reviewed gave rise to a 

 body of statements of supposed fact and critical judgments, consti- 

 tuting and perpetuating a literary tradition. Properly it is only from 

 Theophrastus onwards that one may call it doxographic; but for our 

 present purposes we may apply this name to the earlier stages also, 

 in which were framed the conceptions which dominate it to the end. 

 Thanks to the intensive study of Greek philosophy and especially 

 to the illuminating analysis of Professor Diels this particular literary 

 tradition can be traced in the main with great precision. The phe- 

 nomenon is, however, not at all isolated; for every literary kind has 

 its traditions more or less clearly defined. This becomes at once 

 apparent to the student who surveys any series of books on a given 

 subject: the innovations appear trivial in comparison with the mass 

 of purely traditionary matter and opinion. Mathematics, for obvious 

 reasons, presents perhaps the best examples; as Sir Thomas Heath 

 has recently said,^^ "elementary geometry is Euclid, however much 

 editors of text-books may try to obscure the fact." These special 

 literary traditions deserve far more attention and critical study than 

 scholars have accorded them. 



Now, as we have seen, a considerable field of early scientific thought 

 and interest lies partly or wholly without the scope of the doxographic 

 tradition. Considering the development which can be discerned in 

 Greece from the fifth century onwards we are justified in speaking of 

 it as that of laistory and geography together, . because they were not 

 really separate. To our view this fact is apt to be obscured by the 

 solitary eminence of Thucydides, who breaks the line of continuity 

 and with those whom he immediately inspired forms a group^ apart. 

 Dealing with a circumscribed area well knoM^n to his readers he had no 

 need to digress into geographical descriptions or considerable ethno- 

 graphic details.^^ But if we disregard Thucydides and his kind, the 

 continuity of the historico-geographical tradition in Greece is palpable. 

 So evident is the wholesale appropriation of matter from predecessors 



■ • — 



^6 Euclid in Greek, Bk. I., Preface, p. v. 



89 The same is of course true of chronology; for, as Thucydides was con- 

 cerned solely with the Peloponnesian War, which lasted a few years only, he 

 had no need to discourse on chronology in general. 



