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p Under this heading come three thinkers from Miletus: Thales, his pupil Anaximander and Anaximander’s pupil Anaximenes. The term “school” is traditionally applied to them not only because schools or corporations uniting physicians (the Asclepiades, then the rival schools at Cos and Cnides), singers, painters, philosophers (the Milesians, the Pythagoreans, the Eleates), etc. on the basis of kinship, or fellow-citizenship were common in Ancient Greece. Far more important was an affinity of views which in the case of the Milesian philosophers manifested itself in their interest in “physicos” and natural studies.

p (1) Thales. Thales of Miletus, son of Examyas and Cleobulina was evidently of Phoenician descent. According to most evidence, he lived between the 35th and 58th Olympiads, i.e. between 640 and 545 B.C. -Tradition assumes 625-547 B.C. as the most likely dates for his life. Thales was known to have travelled in Egypt, probably on business, and become acquainted there with mathematics. He was also credited with expert knowledge of Babylonian astronomy which he may have learnt through Phoenicia, the native land of his ancestors, as well as through Lydia. According to credible testimony of Herodotus (I, 74) and a number of other authors, 39 Thales made an exact prediction of a full solar eclipse of 585 g C. To -Thales was also ascribed the calculation of the time of solstices and equinoxes, the discovery of the annual movement of the Sun against the background of the stars, the establishment of the year length at 365 days, etc. Thales shares with Pythagoras the fame of the founder of scientific mathematics: he was believed to be the first to inscribe a triangle into a circle, to establish the equality of the opposite angles and the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle, to define the parts of a circle divided by its diameter, etc. Thales the geographer explained the floods of the Nile by the trade-winds opposing in summer the river flow. He enjoyed a reputation for practical statesmanship and sources give him the credit for wise advice that he gave the Milesians on two occasions: to set up a common centre of government in Teos in order to coordinate the efforts of the Ionian cities in the face of the Persian threat and to refrain from antiPersian alliance with Croesus. His advice was accepted and, according to Diogenes Laertius (I, 35), "saved the city.”

p It is not surprising that all these exploits brought Thales the fame of a "sage," even the foremost of the glorious "seven." Tradition credits him with many dicta that went down in history. Some of them do not differ from those ascribed to other sages, yet there are several aphorisms among them that have a truly unique character. Here they are, in Plutarch’s rendition: "Which is the oldest?—God, because he was not born. Which is the largest?—Space, because it encompasses the whole world with all things. Which is the finest?—The world, because all that is fine is part of it. Which is the wisest?—Time: it has already produced one and will produce another. Which is common to all?—Hope: it is available even to those who have nothing else. Which isthe most useful?—Virtue, because everything else can find an application and become useful through it. Which is the most harmful?—Vice, because almost everything rots in its presence. Which is the strongest?—- Necessity, because it is irresistible. Which is the’easiest?—That which corresponds to nature, because even enjoyment often wearies" (Plut. Sept. sapient, conv. 9, 153 cd).

p These utterances show a clear transition from ordinary practical wisdom to fundamental and profound world views with a marked vein of rationalist approach to problems—no wonder they are ascribed to Thales. Tradition also holds him 40 to be the author of some doctrines which can already be rated as philosophical in the proper sense of the word. Regrettably, we do not possess any writings from the pen of Thales himself. Though he is credited with several treatises, including the philosophical one entitled "On First Principles" (and referred to by Seneca, Plutarch and Galen), the evidence is far from being reliable. As regards the style of the excerpts quoted by different authors, it betrays a much later origin of the treatise which cannot have been composed before the beginning of the Christian era. Nevertheless, we possess sufficiently credible testimony from Aristotle and, perhaps, Hippias, regarding Thales’s philosophical views. According to this testimony, Thales was the author of two fundamental ideas: one regarding water as the first principle of all things, and the other regarding the "soul complex”.

p Having characterised the views of the earliest philosophers on the principles of all things, Aristotle adds: "Yet they do not all agree as to the number and the nature of these principles. Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, says the principle is water (for which reason he declared that the earth rests on water).”  [40•1  Striving to reproduce the reasoning of Thales, Aristotle continues: "His supposition may have arisen from the observation that the nourishment of all creatures is moist, and that warmth itself is generated from moisture and lives by it; and that from which all things come to be is their principle. Besides this, another reason for his supposition would be that the semina of all things have a moist nature, and water is for moist things the origin of their nature.”  [40•2 

p The brevity of this excerpt, quoted also in other sources, opens the possibility for a broad spectrum of interpretations. Indisputable, however, is the naturalistic tendency of the philosopher seeking to trace all things to natural causes and draw clear analogies between the world of nature and the life of animals. If the semina and the nourishment of all things have a moist nature, if they cannot live without water and .dry up after death, if warmth itself is the "animal heat" of the Warm-blooded, and the fire of heavenly bodies and of the Sun feeds on water vapour (see Ae’tius, DD, 276), it is only too natural to suppose that moisture (water) is the “principle” of all being and the “element” of all things.

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p The idea that the earth rests on water noted by Aristotle as characteristic of Thales’s views is evidently traceable to the Egyptian mythology in which the Earth was likened to a flat dish floating on water, whereas the Sun was described as floating across the sky in a boat. In all probability, it was not only and not so much a myth as a common, everyday notion of the Egyptians. It must have been also quite accessible to an alien familiarising himself with the country’s customs, particularly if that alien came from such a seafaring people as the lonians. At this point, however, another problem arises. As we saw, Aristotle ascribes to all “physiologers” the idea that all things and, consequently, all elements (elemental forces) came from one primary substance. Are we to infer from this that Thales derived air, fire and earth from water? Aristotle does not assert that Thales held this particular view, but in later doxographer Hippolytus we find: "He [Thales] said that water is the beginning and the end of everything, as through thickening and evaporation it makes up and maintains everything with resultant vacillation of earth, vortices and movement of luminaries, so that everything is carried along and flows in accordance with the nature of the ultimate substance of all things" (DD, 555).

p This testimony deriving from Theophrastus deserves credibility. In any case, we have sufficient grounds to presume that Thales was the first to develop a doctrine, by way of conjecture not yet raised to the level of a general principle, of the emergence of all things and elemental forces from a primary substance and of their subsequent dissolution into jt. These passages, however, may also be construed as representing a different, more primitive view: the earth emerges from water in the sense that it was originally covered by it and then comes out as the primordial moisture (sea) evaporates. This latter view was not infrequently expressed by later philosophers (Anaximander, Diogenes of Apollonia).

p The second idea associated with the name of Thales is the "soul complex". Here again we have two different opinions. On the one hand, "Aristotle ^ind Hippias affirm that, arguing from the magnet andj from amber, he [Thales] attributed a soul or life evpn to inanimate objects..." (Diog. L. I, 24).

p Indeed, in Aristotle we read: "...Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded about him, seems to have held soul to be 42 a motive force, since he said that the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron.”  [42•1 

p On the other hand, none other than Aristotle writes: "Certain thinkers say that soul is intermingled in the whole universe, and it is perhaps for that reason that Thales came to the opinion, that all things are full of gods.”  [42•2 

p Hence, the world appeared to -Thales as animated, full of life. It was typical hylozoism (hyle—matter, zoe—life’) rooted in mythology. In Thale,s, however, it acquired a new meaning, essentially different from mythological. Nature as a single and living whole possesses, according to Thales, an inner principle of motion, a "motive element" which he denoted by the habitual terms “soul” and "gods." This concept represented a step towards naturalistic pantheism which dissolves god in nature and makes him but a principle of its spontaneous motion.

p Thales’s teaching viewed as a whole clearly reveals two sources, two different trends merging in a single world outlook—myth and science. Their synthesis, i.e. the radical restructuring of mythological stories on the basis of initial scientific knowledge and rational thinking produced the first philosophical doctrine in the history of ancient philosophy. The next step on this path was made by Thales’s followers.

p (2) Anaximander. Anaximander (c. 610—546 B.C.), the son of Praxiades of Miletus, was a pupil, a follower and, according to some evidence, a relative of Thales. He wrote in prose a philosophical treatise On Nature one of the excerpts of which has’come down to us in the rendition of – Theophrastus. The account of Anaximander’s views given by Simplicius, in large part from Theophrastus (Phys. 24. 13, DK, A 9 and B 1), runs as follows: "Anaximander named the arche and element of existing things ’the boundless’, being the first to introduce this name for the arche. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a different substance which is boundless, from which there come into being all the heavens and the worlds within them. Things perish into those things out of which they have their being, as is due; for they make just recompense to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time—so he puts it in somewhat poetical terms. It is clear that when he observed how the four elements change into each other, 43 he did not .hink it reasonable to conceive of one of these as underlying the rest, but posited something else. Moreover he does not account for genesis by a qualitative alteration of the element, but by a separation of the opposites caused by the eternal motion." (DK 12 A 9, B 1).

p -This passage from Theophrastus quoted by Simplicius in his commentary to Aristotle’s Physics and containing an authentic sentence from Anaximander’s work has given rise to much controversy among philologists and philosophers regarding the true meaning of the author’s words. However, even if we proceed from what is generally recognised as Theophrastus’s representation of Anaximander’s actual clause—"for they make just recompense to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time," and regard the first sentence of the above extract as Aristotle’s standard description of physiologers’ philosophical views, we are bound to admit that Theophrastus gave us very valuable information, namely:

p (1) Anaximander recognises "the primary substance (arche) and element" as something single and boundless (infinite, indefinite), i.e. as "apeiron." He may have introduced the word himself, though a possibility cannot be excluded that it was coined later by Anaximander’s doxographers.  [43•1 

p (2) The clause "things perish into those things out of which they have their being, as is due" is undoubtedly authentic, representing Anaximander’s genuine idea, if not his wording. Theophrastus, rating Anaximander among the monists would have written "that thing" instead of "those things" (ex hon ... eis tayta). The subsequent explanation shows that the plural refers to the "opposites.”

p (3) Anaximander’s reference to "the boundless" is interesting in that to apeiron can be understood both as indefinite in a qualitative sense and as infinite in a quantitative sense. We have conflicting evidence regarding Thales. Thus in one of the extracts Simplicius says that Thales considered his primary substance, water, as finite ( peperasmenon), whereas in another fragment he writes that those who made one element the primary substance regarded 44 it as the one infinite body like Thales regarded water (see DK 11 A 13). Aristotle, for his part, contended that "none of the physicists made fire or earth the one infinite body, but either water or air or what is intermedite between them..." (Phys. III. 5, 205a). Hence, in his first testimony Simplicius speaks about the definiteness of Thales’s “ principle” in the qualitative sense, and in the second testimony, about its quantitative infiniteness, which is just what the doxographer says. As regards Anaximander, his apeiron is both qualitatively indefinite and quantitatively infinite. The emergence of things from it is their qualitative determination and quantitative limitation.

p (4) The “boundless” is sometimes identified with mythological Chaos. Such an understanding, however, does not consort with Anaximander’s recognition of the temporal orderliness of both genesis and destruction, this orderliness being" essentially necessary.

p According to another opinion, Anaximander’s “boundless” is boundless in general, resulting from the abstraction of everything that is concrete. However, Aristotle specially indicated that it was not so. The notion of the limitless or infinite as such was characteristic of the Pythagoreans and Plato, whereas "the physicists, ... all of them, always regard the infinite as an attribute to a substance which is different from it and belongs to the class of the so-called elements—water or air or what is intermediate between them" (Phys. III. 4, 203a). This evidently applies to Anaximander too and the “substance” that has the infinite as its attribute must be somehow specified. Regarding the meaning of apeiron, the most common opinions are as follows; first, apeiron is indeterminate nature which does not lend itself to any qualitative determination in principle; second, it is what Plato and Aristotle later called “matter” (hyle) encompassing all things in a potential state; third, it is a mechanical mixture of all things or elements from which things separate; fourth, it is something intermediate between them (metaxy).

p Each of these notions resting on certain testimony has its weak points. The notion of indeterminacy provides no solution at all as it is purely negative. It does not accord, as we shall see later, with Anaximander’s specific determinations of the substance of the boundless. The same applies to “matter” as understood by Plato and Aristotle who characterised it as non-being or pure possibility. By contrast, Anaximander’s 45 boundless is an active, creative force, the closest to which is Plato’s idea or Aristotle’s form. The notion of “mixture” with regard to the ultimate substance is traceable to the fifth-century physiologers, in particular, to Anaxagoras. However, even if primary mixture is understood as a homogeneous indistinguishable mass, it cannot by any means be conceived as a living organic whole, as the “nature” of the early Greek philosophers. The fourth notion is perhaps the closest approximation to what Anaximander meant by his apeiron, but even here evidence is by no means conclusive. Aristotle, for one, characterising the views of various thinkers and not infrequently referring to the apeiron as something intermediate between fire and air or air and water, never mentions the author (authors) by name. Though in all such cases the context is suggestive of Anaximander, it seems to be rather a shaky ground for a definite conclusion and the question remains open.

p Nevertheless, there are certain “properties” of Anaximander’s primary substance which can be considered well authenticated. As Aristotle writes in his Physics, the “boundless” does not come into existence, nor can it be destroyed; "there is no principle of this, but it is this which is held to be the principle of other things, and to encompass all and to steer all, as those assert, who do not recognise, alongside the infinite, other causes, such as Mind and Friendship. Further they identify it with the Divine, for it is ’ deathless and imperishable’ as Anaximander says, with the majority of the physicists.”  [45•1  According to Hippolytus who gives a slightly different wording, the non-limited "is everlasting and ageless.”  [45•2  Plutarch, for his part, wrote that Anaximander, the friend of Thales’s, regarded the boundless as the cause of universal genesis and destruction. The passage from Plutarch reads as follows: "He says that at the birth of this cosmos a germ of hot and cold was separated off from the eternal substance, and out of this a sphere of flame grew out, the vapour surrounding the earth like the bark around the tree. When this was torn away and shut off in certain rings, the sun, moon and stars came into existence" (DK 12 A 10).

p Proceeding from this evidence we can conceive of the following process by which the “boundless” produces all things: the everlasting, ageless and indestructible nature, 46

p the apeiron, separates out a “germ” (genimon) of the opposites—the hot and the cold, the dry and the wet which, in turn, produce all things. Regrettably, we can only make guesses at the relationship between the opposites described by Anaximander in terms of “injustice” and "recompense,”  [46•1  though it clearly points to the conflict of the opposites, the dialectics of their struggle which was to be later unfolded by Heraclitus.

p Analysis of Anaximander’s philosophical teaching shows that he defined the most important features of the primary substance or arche (the term may have been introduced by Anaximander himself, though the validity of Theophrastus’s testimony is now called in question): its universal, creative and generative character; its immortality and indestructibility as opposed to finite, emerging and perishing things and “worlds”; its boundlessness in time and space, as well as its eternal motion; its inherent necessity and self-sufficiency; consequently, its divinity as the highest axiological characteristic. Finally, though the apeiron in Anaximander can hardly be conceived as constituting the substance of all things, it is indisputable that "all come into being from it and into it all perish." Hence, Anaximander departs from myth even farther than Thales and makes yet another step towards a scientific cosmology. His world view was largely a result Of his concrete natural studies.

p Anaximander is said to have invented a sun dial with upright rod, drawn up the first geographical map in the Greek world and given a systematic account of geometrical knowledge. Far more important, however, were his cosmology and cosmogony as they emerge from the evidence of ancient doxographers.

p Anaximander’s picture of the world can roughly be presented as follows. The earth is cylindrical in shape like the drum of a column with a depth three times its breadth. It hangs freely in the centre of the world "owing to its equal distance from everything" (A 11). It is not clear whether the earth evolved from the boundless or existed 47 at all times. During the formation of heaven there appeared water and air shells, and then a shell of fire enclosing the space round the earth like bark round a tree. The sphere of fire breaks into several rings or circles encased in tubes of mist or dense air. The apertures in the surrounding envelopes of the ring of fire appear to us as heavenly bodies. The sun eclipses and the phases of the moon are due to alternate contracting and opening of the apertures in the tubes of mist. The circle of the sun is situated highest of all, next comes the circle of the moon, and beneath them the rings of the stars. This unusual order of heavenly bodies coincides with what we find in the Persian mythology of the Avesta, the sacred books of the ancient Zoroastrian religion. The worlds are innumerable, yet it is not clear from the extant evidence if they replace one another in their eternal rotation or exist simultaneously.

p According to Anaximander, the earth was originally covered with water. It gradually evaporated and that which remained in low places on the earth surface formed a sea. Drying up from excess heat or getting soaked as a result of heavy rains the earth cracks up and air penetrating into the crevices causes it to displace—hence the earthquakes. The first living creatures arose from the moist element (the sea) and were covered with thorny scale. When they grew older, they began to come out ashore and finally gave rise to land animals and men.

p Like in all early philosophical teachings, Anaximander’s cosmology is a curious combination of fantastic notions borrowed from mythology with a rationalist approach to the world, representing an attempt to account for the universe in naturalistic, even mathematical, terms. The worldview resulting from this synthesis is a unique intellectual product which cannot be reduced to any of its original components.

p (3). Anaximenes. Anaximenes, known as Anaximander’s friend and pupil, lived in the most critical period of Miletus’s history. It is evidently for this reason that our knowledge of him is very meagre. The dates of his life are assumed 588-525 B.C., but he may have lived long enough to witness the fall of Miletus in 494. His book written, according to Diogenes Laertius, in a "simple and economical style" was treated by time no better than that of his teacher, but Anaximenes’s views have come down to us in far 48 more detail. Here is an evidence of Simplicius which goes back to Theophrastus: "Anaximenes of Miletus, son of Eurustratus, the companion of Anaximander, also posits a single infinite underlying substance of things, not, however, indefinite in character like Anaxhnander’s but determinate, for he calls it air and says that it differs in rarity and density according to the different substances. Rarefied, it becomes fire; condensed, it becomes first wind, then cloud, and when condensed still further water, then earth and stones. Everything else is made of these. He too .postulated eternal motion, which is indeed the cause of the change" (DK13 A 5).

p Why did Anaximenes go back from his teacher’s conception of apeiron, the boundless, to an apparently cruder idea of air as primary substance, one of the familiar forms of matter? -This retrogression was evidently a result of the Milesian philosophical tradition seeking to explain the world order in terms of natural causes known from experience. Anaximander’s notion of the boundless as that from which all things come into being and into which all perish must have appeared too abstract for the Milesian thought as it could not account for the subsequent generation of things except by a purely imaginary process of the separation of opposites. Anaximenes’s choice of air as the ultimate substance brought his doctrine in line with the traditional conceptions of his time and enabled him to invoke the empirically verifiable process of condensation and rarefaction for explanation of change in the world.

p Identifying the transformation of matter with the change of air from one state to another, Anaximenes emphasises the universal mutability of his primary substance. Indeed, isn’t wind but condensed air and the cloud that follows in its wake but condensed wind? And aren’t the opposites of the warm and the cold the result of a change in the state of air? In his account of Anaximenes’s teaching Plutarch wrote: "What is compacted and condensed, he says, is cold, but what is rare and loose ... is hot. Hence, he said, there is something in the saying that a man blows bath hot and cold with his mouth, for the breath is cooled when the lips press and condense it, but when it issues from an open mouth it is rarefied and becomes warm" (DK 13 A 1). It would not be correct to think that Anaximenes conceived air as the physical substance we breathe. Though the available evidence is not completely unanimous, we have 49 good reason to believe that he identified it with soul and considered a creative’vital principle that animates all things.

p It is not to be wondered that Anaximenes equated air we breathe with life itself since his general nai’ve materialistic conception of the universe was, rooted in the ancient mythological idea of breath-soul as a specific principle of living and thinking bodies. "As our soul," he says, "being air, holds’ us together, so do breath and air surround the whole universe" (DK 13 B 2). Anaximenes clearly derives the “soul” from “air” regarding it, together with Anaximander, Anaxagoras and Archelaus, as being " airlike." Moreover, on the evidence of St. Augustine Anaximenes contended that the gods too had their origin from air (A 10). According to Cicero and Aetius who evidently expressed this idea in a more adequate form, Anaximenes held that the air is god and that divine forces are present in elements or in bodies. -The latter statement attested to by Aetius seems to suggest that the Milesian thinker formulated the central ide^la of pantheism—the identity of god with nature or, in that particular case, with “air” which is the nature of all that exists. However another of his statements, vouched for by Cicero, namely, that gods and divine things came from air, warrants a more cautious appraisal of Anaximenes’s views. Evidently, he showed but a tendency towards the pantheistic identification of god with being and applied the descriptive attribute “divine” to air, like Anaximander to the boundless, merely by way of qualifying the primary substance as immortal and indestructible. Anaximenes’s cosmology was relatively simple and in some ways even primitive as compared with Anaximander’s broad vision of the universe marked by great power of reasoning and bold imagination. Considering the earth to be flat, Anaximenes held that it is riding upon the air like the sun, the moon and the planets. As distinct from the immovable earth, heavenly bodies are actuated by the cosmic wind, whereas the stars are attached to a crystalline heavenly dome which turns around the earth. The sun’s and moon’s eclipses, as well^jas the moon’s phases were accounted for by the fact that the heavenly bodies turn to the earth alternately with their light and dark sides. Following Thales, he believed the heavenly bodies to have originated from the earth. Some of them came from evaporating moisture which 50 rarefied into fire, others (by which he may have meant the planets) "enclose certain earthy bodies also which revolve together with them and are not seen" (A 14). Anaximenes somewhat improved on Anaximander by abandoning the latter’s views traceable to the Persian sources that the stars are nearer to the earth than are the moon and the sun.

p Anaximenes’s choice of air as the primary substance accounts for his special interest in meteorological phenomena, such as rain, hail, snow, etc. Hail for him is frozen water falling from clouds, adnjixture of air in water results in the formation of lighter snow, rain falls from condensed air, lightning and thunder are the effect of wind splitting a cloud, the rainbow is the effect of the sun’s (sometimes moon’s) rays falling on a compacted cloud so that one part of it becomes heated and the other remains dark, etc. Like Anaximander, he accounts for earthquakes by earth cracking in droughts or falling apart in heavy rains.

p The philosophical teaching of Anaximenes represents a consistent embodiment of the central idea of the “ physiologers”: that out of which all existing things come to be is what they all perish into after completing their cycle. It was the culmination of the Milesians’ spontaneous sensual materialism and the highest -expression of their conception of eternal motion of living and breathing air that permeates the entire universe.

p (4) Later "physiologers." The Milesian school had exhausted its possibilities for explaining the world by the end of the fifth century B.C. Its closing period is associated with several names of no great fame and indeed far less original than their predecessors. Nevertheless, it would hardly be correct to pass over in silence the last Milesian thinkers if only for the fact that the theories they professed reflected the philosophical thought of their period. Hippon of Samos is known from a play by Cratinus, his contemporary, who died in 422 B.C. The dates of the philosopher’s life cannot be fixed exactly. Sources say that he posited water (also called "the cold") and fire ("the hot") as two primary elements. Water produced fire which then overmastered its parent to form the cosmos. Hippon identified the soul with the brain which was also called water or moisture. The brain comes from the semen or marrow (DK 38 A 3). Hence, the natural moisture or water is, according to Hippon, the primary substance and the source of 51 life and sensations: "When this moisture is in its proper condition, the living creatur^ is healthy, but when the moisture dries up, it loses sense and dies. -This is the reason why old men are dry and enfeebled in their senses, namely that they are without moisture" (A 11).

p Hippon is said to have been labelled an “atheist” as he did not consider his primary substance to be of divine character. -The single fragment of Hippon’s writing ihat we possess is related to natural science and says that sweet water comes from the sea. The ancient evidence for Hippon’s teaching is largely confined to his physiological views (the nature of semen, fecundation, the formation and development of the foetus, etc.) and seems to show that he mainly concerned himself with concrete scientific problems and did not specify their relationship to the concept of primary substance.

p Among Anaximenes’s followers who shared his views concerning a single determinate element were Idaeus of Himera and Diogenes of Apollonia, Anaxagoras’s younger contemporary. Here is a fragment from the latter’s book On Nature: "And it seems to me that that which has Intelligence is that which is called Air by mankind; and further, that by this all creatures are guided, and that it rules everything; for this in itself seems to me to be God and to reach everywhere and to arrange everything and to be in everything. And there is nothing which has no share of it; but the share of each thing is not the same as that of any other, but on the contrary there are many forms both of the Air itself and of Intelligence; for it is manifold in form: hotter and colder and dryer and wetter and more stationary or having a swifter motion... Also in all animals the Soul is the same thing (namely) Air, warmer than that outside in which we are, but much colder than that nearer the sun. This degree of warmth is not the same in any of the animals (and indeed, it is not the same among different human beings), but it differs not greatly, but so as to be similar... Since therefore change is manifold, animals also are manifold and many, and not like one another either in form or in way of life or in intelligence, because of the large number of (the results of) changes. Nevertheless, all things live, see and hear by the same thing (Air), and all have the rest of Intelligence also from the same" (DK64B5).

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This passage, as well as many others show that Diogenes took a different course from Hippon: having posited air as the ultimate substance, he then set out to demonstrate that the universe owes its orderliness to Intelligence inherent in this substance: "Such a distribution would not have been possible without Intelligence, (namely) that all things should have their measure: winter and summer and night and day and rains .and winds and periods of fine weather; other things also, if one will study them closely, will be found to have the best possible arrangement" (B 3). Diogenes, therefore, should be regarded as a philosopher whose views marked a turn from spontaneous materialist “physiology” to the idealistic conception of universal Intelligence. In his teaching the naive materialism of the Milesian school gives way to a rising idealist tendency.