276 HEIDEL. 



ical and other phenomena which Theophrastus and his successors 

 found in Anaximander's book were scattered through it and were 

 offered in connection with various lands or places. Not only the 

 second book of Aristotle's Meteorologica, but the various historical and 

 geographical treatises also which survive from antiquity in whole or 

 in part, afford sufficient examples to justify such a theory. It is not 

 necessary to assert that this was true of Anaximander's book; it 

 suffices for our purposes that it may be true. For a consideration of 

 the character of the doxographic record of his opinions will readily 

 show that it affords no presumption whatever regarding the form of 

 his treatise. Through the genius of Professor Diels ^* we are enabled 

 to gather from the welter of late extracts a view of the Opinions of the 

 Physical Philosophers of Theophrastus, the disciple and successor of 

 Aristotle, from which ultimately derive most of the statements re- 

 garding the doctrines of the early thinkers.^ That work, as we see, 

 was a systematic account of Greek philosophy arranged under heads 

 following closely the order which Aristotle himself had used in his 

 treatises. Thus the arrangement is that of the Peripatetic historian 

 and bears no necessary relation to the order in which the early ' phi- 

 losophers ' set forth their opinions. What we know, moreover, of the 

 method of Theophrastus, who was wholly under the influence of his 

 master, suggests caution in respect to the 'philosophical,' that is to 

 say especially the metaphysical or ontological, doctrines which he 

 repoi'ts; for both Aristotle and Theophrastus were prone to discover 

 in statements intended as descriptions of physical processes a deeper 

 meaning which would bear a metaphysical interpretation. 



Now it happens that Theophrastus, following Aristotle, allowed no 

 place in his scheme for matters pertaining directly to history and 

 geography. We cannot, therefore, be surprised that the doxo- 

 graphic tradition contains no hint of Anaximander's services in these 

 directions: they were not germane to the 'physical philosopher' with 

 whom alone Theophrastus was concerned. Strictly speaking, to be 

 sure, this statement is at best a half-truth. Theophrastus, like 

 Aristotle, speaks not of physical philosophers, but of physikoi or physi- 



84 In his Doxographi Graeci, Berlin, 1879. A serviceable summary is given 

 by Professor Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy,^ pp. 31 sq. On p. 181 sq. 

 Diels gives a table of the contents of the ' Vetusta Placita ' or the ' Posidonian 

 Areskonta,' wliich most fully represents the original ^vo-lkcov dS^ai of Theo- 

 phrastus. One sees that it includes, besides the topics treated in Aristotle's 

 Metaphysica, De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, and Meteorologica, the 

 subjects wluch belong to his De anima and the lesser psychological treatises 

 and also a large group of questions discussed by medical writers who wrote 



