From the Beginning to Plato

THE IONIANS 55
all subject to destruction as well as creation. This is probably anachronistic, but—
contrary to what some interpreters have argued—right in general thrust. 33 We
should suppose that the hypothesis of eternal motion generates in its turn a
further bold conjecture, exploiting indifference reasoning of just the kind the
atomists were to make their own speciality:
1 Eternal motion in the apeiron is necessary to generate a universe.
2 But its activity provides no more reason for a universe to be generated here
and now than for one to be generated there and then.
3 So if it generates a universe here and now, it also generates a universe there
and then.
4 Therefore it generates a plurality of universes.
One strain in the doxography suggests that Anaximander did not merely say that
the first principle is the infinite, but that it must be the infinite—otherwise
coming into being would give out. This carries conviction: Aetius introduces the
report as his evidence for the more far-reaching and dubious claim that
Anaximander posited (like the atomists) the birth and death of an infinite number
of worlds. Without mentioning Anaximander, Aristotle too cites the need for an
infinite supply as one of the reasons people give for introducing the infinite as a
principle. He objects:
Nor, in order that coming into being may not give out, is it necessary for
perceptible body to be actually infinite. It is possible for the destruction of
one thing to be the generation of another, the sum of things being limited.
(Aristotle Physics 208a8ff. [KRS 107])
This excellent point ought to tell against the idea, parroted by the doxographers,
that Anaximander envisaged the destruction of worlds as well as their generation,
at any rate if he did endorse the infinite supply argument. Only if worlds are not
recycled is there a requirement for the apeiron to meet an infinite need.
It looks in fact as if Theophrastus, in assimilating Anaximander to the
atomists, specifically searched for evidence that he like them believed in the
ultimate destruction of all worlds, and found it hard to discover any. His citation
of the famous surviving fragment of Anaximander’s book is best interpreted as a
misguided attempt to produce such evidence. The relevant passage of
Simplicius, reproducing his account, runs as follows:
He says that the principle is neither water nor any other of the so-called
elements, but some different boundless nature, from which all the worlds
come to be and the orderings within them. And out of those things from
which the generation is for existing things, into these again their
destruction comes about ‘according to what is right and due, for they pay