the boundless and chaotic mass in which everything at first lay blended and enveloped.
23. The only two points, then, in the system of Anaximander seem to be these: first, the principle of all things, the universal in nature, the groundwork of the universe, the ultimately real and true, is, according to him, an unbounded, indeterminate, formless matter; this he calls ἀρχή, the beginning, and ἄπειρον, the unlimited; and secondly, to this ἄπειρον he seems to have assigned some power of self-limitation, through which a shape was given to the different objects of the senses.
24. When we look to the mere letter of Anaximander's system, we find in it as little to satisfy the demands of reason as we found in the system of Thales, when embraced according to the letter. Even from the scope and spirit of the system we cannot gather much which is of philosophical or speculative value. Perhaps the chief merit of the system lies in its tendency to bring to light the opposition between the finite and the infinite. All true philosophy, I conceive, is based on a conception which conciliates, or reduces to one, these two, the finite and the infinite. But that this conciliation may take place, the opposition between them requires first of all to be signalised. And Anaximander seems to have been the first in the history of philosophy who marked the distinction. Finite things, the various objects of the universe, these cannot be explained out of the finite. Such an
