Philosophical Works of the Late James Frederick Ferrier/Lectures on Greek Philosophy (1888)/Anaximenes
ANAXIMENES.
25. Of the life of Anaximenes, the third philosopher of the Ionic sect, we have little or no record. He was probably twenty or thirty years younger than Anaximander, and may have been born about 590 B.C. He also was a Milesian.
26. As Thales had fixed upon water, and as Anaximander had fixed on the infinite or unbounded, as the universal principle, the ultimately real in all things, so Anaximenes fixed upon air as the common principle of the universe. Anaximenes thus fell back on the ground occupied by Thales, that is to say, he chose as his principle a natural determinate element. At the same time, by selecting an element less palpable, less visible, less formed than water (air, namely), he seemed to aim at combining into one the principle of Thales and the principle of Anaximander. The principle of Thales was too sensible, too material, too definite, to be the universal in all things. The principle of Anaximander again was too indefinite to be comprehended. But air combines the two. It is sufficiently indefinite to be universal: it is sufficiently definite to be perceived and understood it is, in short, a determinate infinite. Such appears to be the position occupied by Anaximenes in the philosophical genealogy which we are sketching. He attempted to effect a sort of compromise between the philosophy of Thales and the philosophy of Anaximander.
27. In representing air as the essential and animating principle of all things, Anaximenes appears to have made a nearer approach to the conception of mind, soul, or spirit, than had yet been made. We must remember that, although we are nowadays familiar with these words, and attach to them some sort of idea, it was very different in these early times. Then no such words as mind, soul, spirit, and consequently no such conceptions, existed; and when such conceptions first began to dawn, they were clothed in words which originally signified breath or air (animus, ψυχή, spiritus, πνεῦμα—the original sense of these words is breath or wind): so important did air appear to the ancient framers of speech that they supposed it to be the sustaining and moving principle not only of our physical life, but of our intelligent and spiritual functions.
28. This opinion, which Anaximenes either adopted or originated, was carried out still further by his pupil, Diogenes of Apollonia, a city in Crete. This philosopher held that the air was itself sensible and intelligent; and that it was through his participation in this ethereal principle that man both felt and understood—a doctrine which was revived at a late period by Campanella, a philosopher of the sixteenth century, whose works have fallen into more complete oblivion than they deserve. Campanella published a work, entitled 'De Sensu Rerum,' in which he contends that all nature possesses some sort of intelligence and sensibility, although it is only in man that this intelligence and sensibility attain to self-consciousness. His reason for this opinion is given in these words: "Quicquid est in effectibus, esse et in causis; ideoque elementa et mundum sentire" ('De Sensu Rerum'); which, with a little expansion, may be translated—"Whatever is in the effects, that is also in the causes. Man's sensations are the effects of the actions of the elements and the world, therefore the elements and the world are endowed with sensations." But I shall say no more at present either about Campanella or Diogenes of Appollonia. I mention the latter merely in connection with Anaximenes, whose disciple he was, and as the fourth and last name in the older Ionic school which it is at all necessary to particularise. Heraclitus was also an Ionian, but he comes later, and is therefore not to be classed with the four of whose names and opinions I have endeavoured to give you some account.
29. Without carrying further our exposition of these systems, and without entering on any detailed criticism of their merits or demerits, I shall just make this concluding remark: that these systems are truly philosophical, in so far as they aim at the attainment of a unity, a universal in all things, and in so far as they are animated and carried forward by the conviction, obscure and inexplicit though that conviction may have been, that the universal in all things is the ultimately real—is the truth for all intelligence; and that they aim at such a unity, and that they are, to a large extent, actuated and inspired by such a conviction, this, I think, is undoubted. So far they proceed under the direction of reason, of necessary thinking, and so far they are truly philosophical. But, on the other hand, they are truly unphilosophical in their details, or in their attempts to show what the universal in all things is. The true universal is certainly not water; it is certainly not formless or unlimited matter; it is certainly not air: for though we are under the necessity of thinking some universal in all things, we are not under the necessity of thinking this as water, or as formless matter, or as air; therefore these elements are not forced on our acceptance by any necessity of thought; therefore they are only relatively, and not absolutely, true, they are only truths for some and not truths for all intelligence: they are at the utmost merely truths for the senses and the understanding, not for the reason; they are merely disguised sensibles, and, as such, we cannot accept them as the veritable universal of which philosophy is in quest.