Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3)
Georg Hegel · en
He has said further (and in this, according to Theophrastus, he agrees
with Anaxagoras), “In the infinite the like separates itself from the
unlike and allies itself to the like; thus what in the whole was gold
becomes gold, what was earth, earth, &c., so that properly nothing
originates, seeing that it was already there.”[27] These, however, are
poor determinations, which only show the necessity of the transition
from the undetermined to the determined; for this still takes place
here in an unsatisfying way. As to the further question of how the
infinite determines the opposite in its separation, it seems that the
theory of the quantitative distinction of condensation and rarefaction
was held by Anaximander as well as by Thales. Those who come later
designate the process of separation from the Infinite as development.
Anaximander supposes man to develop from a fish, which abandoned water
for the land.[28] Development comes also into prominence in recent
times, but as a mere succession in time—a formula in the use of which
men often imagine that they are saying something brilliant; but there
is no real necessity, no thought, and above all, no Notion contained in
it.
But in later records the idea of warmth, as being the disintegration of
form, and that of cold, is ascribed to Anaximander by Stobæus (Eclog.
Phys. c. 24, p. 500); this Aristotle (Metaphys. I. 5) first ascribed
to Parmenides. Eusebius (De præp. Evang. I. 8), out of a lost work of
Plutarch, gives us something from Anaximander’s Cosmogony which is
dark, and which, indeed, Eusebius himself did not rightly understand.
Its sense is approximately this: “Out of the Infinite, infinite
heavenly spheres and infinite worlds have been set apart; but they
carry within them their own destruction, because they only are through
constant dividing off.” That is, since the Infinite is the principle,
separation is the positing of a difference, i.e. of a determination or
something finite. “The earth has the form of a cylinder, the height
of which is the third part of the breadth. Both of the eternally
productive principles of warmth and cold separate themselves in the
creation of this earth, and a fiery sphere is formed round the air
encircling the earth, like the bark around a tree. As this broke up,
and the pieces were compressed into circles, sun, moon, and stars
were formed.” Hence Anaximander, according to Stobæus (Ecl. Phys. 25,
p. 510), likewise called the stars “wheel-shaped with fire-filled
wrappings of air.” This Cosmogony is as good as the geological
hypothesis of the earth-crust which burst open, or as Buffon’s
explosion of the sun, which beginning, on the other hand, with the sun,
makes the planets to be stones projected from it. While the ancients
confined the stars to our atmosphere, and made the sun first proceed
from the earth, we make the sun to be the substance and birthplace of
the earth, and separate the stars entirely from any further connection