ll those
material atoms which in the beginning of the world lay in disorder the
impulse by which they took the forms of individual things, and that this
impulse was given in a circular direction. Hence that the sun, moon, and
stars, and even the air, are constantly moving in a circle.

In the mean time another sect of philosophers had arisen, who, like the
Ionians, sought to explain Nature, but by a different method.
Anaximander, born 610 B.C., was one of the original mathematicians of
Greece, yet, like Pythagoras and Thales, speculated on the beginning of
things. His principle was that _The Infinite_ is the origin of all
things. He used the word _[Greek: archae] (beginning)_ to denote the
material out of which all things were formed, as the Everlasting, the
Divine. The idea of elevating an abstraction into a great first cause
was certainly a long stride in philosophic generalization to be taken at
that age of the world, following as it did so immediately upon such
partial and childish ideas as that any single one of the familiar
"elements" could be the primal cause of all things. It seems almost like
the speculations of our own time, when philosophers seek to find the
first cause in impersonal Force, or infinite Energy. Yet it is not
really easy to understand Anaximander's meaning, other than that the
abstract has a higher significance than the concrete. The speculations
of Thales had tended toward discovering the material constitution of the
universe upon an _induction_ from observed facts, and thus made water to
be the origin of all things. Anaximander, accustomed to view things in
the abstract, could not accept so concrete a thing as water; his
speculations tended toward mathematics, to the science of pure
_deduction_. The primary Being is a unity, one in all, comprising within
itself the multiplicity of elements from which all mundane things are
composed. It is only in infinity that the perpetual changes of things
can take place. Thus Anaximander, an original but vague thinker,
prepared the way for Pythagoras.

This later philosopher and mathematician, born about the year 600 B.C.,
stands as one of the great names of antiquity; but his life is shrouded
in dim magnificence. The old historians paint him as "clothed in robes
of white, his head covered with gold, his aspect grave and majestic,
rapt in the contemplation of the mysteries of existence, listening to
the music of Homer and Hesiod, or to the harmony of the