Thales himself left no written works, and this Ionic _Historia_ first emerges into the full light of day with Anaximander of Miletus, who founded the Ionic school about a generation later. In him the three forces are strongly marked and defined--first the scientific spirit, which impelled him to give visible expression to the geographical ideas of his countrymen by means of a map of the earth’s surface, and to make a systematic description of the heavens with the stationary and revolving celestial bodies. With him originated the conception of the constellations as a system of spheres rotating through and within one another, and it was his mathematical imagination that led him to assume the existence of certain fixed intervals between the revolving spheres, arbitrarily determined as to number, but expressing in their proportion the idea of harmony. Here we have the germ of the speculations of Pythagoras, on which, as is well known, the laws of Copernicus and Kepler are founded. The vein of poetry in the Ionian character is manifest not only in this intuitive perception but in the aptness of his imagery, when he calls these spheres “chariot-wheels,” from the rim of which the fiery flames of the sun, moon, etc., start out like felloes. The scientific element in his system is evident in the manner in which he follows out biologically the idea of Thales concerning water. If all things have at one time been water, then organisms cannot originally have been created as land animals. Hence man, who now comes into the world utterly helpless, has been gradually evolved from pisciform creatures--the first germ of Darwinism. Lastly the pessimistic mysticism which had lately arisen is clearly manifest in him. When he regards the origin of all individual existences as a wrong committed by them in separating themselves from the All-One, we can only understand him by referring to Orphic religious ideas, in which birth is looked upon as a decline and fall from the blissful seats of the gods and earthly life is represented as a vale of misery. Death is consequently the penalty which the individual pays for his presumption, whether the individual be a man or a celestial body. For the earth and all other Cosmoi are doomed to extinction in an “Infinite” which corresponds to the ancient idea of Chaos, and, like that, is not conceived of as a vacuum but as matter in an undefined form. This alternation of creation and annihilation, this perpetual motion, anticipates the eternal flux of Heraclitus of Ephesus, who at the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth, transformed the teaching of Anaximander into keener dialectics.