the late Professor James l could divide philosophy into two schools, 

 the one he called, in figurative language, the "tender-minded", 

 these are the mystics, the other he called the "tough-minded". 

 It is upon the early members of this latter class that attention 

 must now be centred. 



Anaximander, born 610 B.C., the second head of the Milesian 

 school, is its most important member. Gomperz even says of him 

 that "we may fairly look on Anaximander as the author of the 

 natural philosophy of Greece and consequently of the Occident. 

 He was the first to introduce the scientific method in answering 

 the vast questions as to the origin of the universe, the earth and 

 its inhabitants. . . . Childish as some of his endeavours were, to 

 grope out the way of nature, yet his merits as a pioneer and a 

 path-finder command our awe and respect". 2 Anaximander was 

 the first to give to the Greeks a map of the earth and a chart of 

 the sky. He endeavoured to arrive at the magnitude of the sun 

 and of the moon relatively to that of the earth, and, though his 

 accounts are hardly intelligible to us to-day, yet he must be accorded 

 a certain degree of mathematical training. His attempts to explain 

 the origin of the heavenly bodies, based on the opposites hot and 

 cold, are no less ingenious than his speculations on the evolution 

 of an mals. It is no doubt going too far to call him a precursor of 

 Darwin, but the records which we have unmistakably point to 

 him as one who avoided mere speculation. He must have been 

 a careful observant of facts of nature. In his cosmological inquiries 

 Anaximander is far ahead of his predecessor, Thales. The latter 

 had said that water is the original element of all things, Anaxi- 

 mander claimed that it was neither water nor air nor fire. The 

 pr mary substance was TO awdpov, the Boundless, as it has been 

 translated. He seems to have realized the futility of attempting 

 to explain the variety of nature by any one part of nature, and so 

 postulated the Boundless which was other than the four elements. 

 From this Boundless, as Aristotle says in his Physics, the "ele- 

 ments" 3 were believed by Anaximander to have arisen, separated 

 out by the "eternal motion". These "elements" are limited, are 

 grouped in pairs of opposites and are the "secondary stuffs", to 



1 Pragmatism, P. 12. 



2 Op. Cit. Vol. I, P. 49. 



3 As Burnet points out, this is certainly an anachronism, as the conception of 

 "elements" dates only from the time of Empedocles. Cf. Burnet Op. Cit. P. 56. 



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