, the lightning, and the winds. His
conjectures are usually shrewd and keen; and sometimes, as in his
assertion, "that the moon shone in light borrowed from the sun," may
deserve a higher praise. Both Anaximander and Pherecydes concurred in
the principles of their doctrines, but the latter seems to have more
distinctly asserted the immortality of the soul. [237]

Anaximenes, also of Miletus, was the friend and follower of
Anaximander (B. C. 548). He seems, however, to have deserted the
abstract philosophical dogmas of his tutor, and to have resumed the
analogical system commenced by Thales--like that philosopher, he
founded axioms upon observations, bold and acute, but partial and
contracted. He maintained that air was the primitive element. In
this theory he united the Zeus, or ether, of Pherecydes, and the
Infinite of Anaximander, for he held the air to be God in itself, and
infinite in its nature.

XV. While these wild but ingenious speculators conducted the career
of that philosophy called the Ionian, to the later time of the serene
and lofty spiritualism of Anaxagoras, two new schools arose, both
founded by Ionians, but distinguished by separate names--the Eleatic
and the Italic. The first was founded by Xenophanes of Colophon, in
Elea, a town in western Italy. Migrating to an alien shore,
colonization seems to have produced in philosophy the same results
which it produced in politics: it emancipated the reason from all
previous prejudice and prescriptive shackles. Xenophanes was the
first thinker who openly assailed the popular faith (B. C. 538). He
divested the Great Deity of the human attributes which human vanity,
assimilating God to man, had bestowed upon him. The divinity of
Xenophanes is that of modern philosophy--eternal, unalterable, and
alone: graven images cannot represent his form. His attributes are--
ALL HEARING, ALL SIGHT, and ALL THOUGHT.

To the Eleatic school, founded by Xenophanes, belong Parmenides,
Melissus the Samian, Zeno, and Heraclitus of Ephesus. All these were
thinkers remarkable for courage and subtlety. The main metaphysical
doctrines of this school approach, in many respects, to those that
have been familiar to modern speculators. Their predecessors argued,
as the basis of their system, from experience of the outward world,
and the evidence of the senses; the Eleatic school, on the contrary,
commenced their system from the reality of ideas, and thence argued on
the r