form was difference. The ἄπειρον of Anaximander was a πρώτη ὕλη, a first matter, from which all form or difference had been stripped, or rather to which no form or appearance was as yet appended, although Anaximander seems to have accorded to this matter a power of developing or secreting differences.
20. As an illustration of this conception, you may take the case of flour baked into bread. The bread, we shall say, exists as loaves and cakes in every variety of form. You explain these loaves and cakes as determinate flour, as flour determined or fashioned in a multiplicity of different ways. But then flour is itself something determinate, and therefore you will next be asked, What is flour the determination of? What is its principle? You must assign as its origin either something determinate or something indeterminate. If you assign something determinate (wheat, for example) as its origin, you are again asked, But what is the origin of the wheat? Again your answer must yield something determinate or something indeterminate. If determinate, then the same question recurs, and your explanation goes for nothing. It has reached no ultimate, so that you are driven in the last resort to assign an indeterminate matter as the ultimate origin of the bread. This indeterminate matter is this matter without form, the ἄπειρον of Anaximander.
21. So far, then, the position of Anaximander is an
