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Anaximenes shows very clearly the nature of his
essence in the soul, and he thus points out what may be called the transition of natural philosophy into the philosophy of consciousness, or the surrender of the objective form of principle.

In place of the undetermined matter of Anaximander, he brings forward a definite natural element; hence the absolute is in a real form, but instead of the water of Thales, that form is air. He found that for matter a sensuous being was indeed essential, and air has the additional advantage of being more devoid of form; it is less corporeal than water, for we do not see it, but feel it first in movement.

The advance made by the determination of the principle as infinite in comprehensiveness rests in the fact that absolute essence no longer is a simple universal, but one which negates the finite. At the same time, viewed from the material side, Anaximander removes the individuality of the element of water; his objective principle does not appear to be material, and it may be understood as Thought.

Wwith the ancient philosophers, the principle has a definite and, at first, a physical form. To us this does not appear to be philosophic but only physical; in this case, however, matter has philosophic significance. Thales' theory is thus a natural philosophy, because this universal essence is determined as real; consequently the Absolute is determined as the unity of thought and Being.

The simple proposition of Thales therefore, is Philosophy, because in it water, though sensuous, is not looked at in its particularity as opposed to other natural things, but as Thought in which everything is resolved and comprehended.

This wild varied imagination of Homer is set at rest by the proposition that existence is water; this conflict of an endless quantity of principles, all these ideas that a particular object is an independent truth, a self­sufficient power over others existing in its own right, are taken away, and it is shown that there is only one universal, the simple unimaginative perception, the thought that is one and one alone

It must undoubtedly be said that in this unconsciousness of an intellectual world, one must acknowledge that there is a great robustness of mind evinced in not granting this plenitude of existence to the natural world, but in reducing it to a simple substance, which, as the ever enduring principle, neither originates nor disappears, while the gods have a Theogony and are manifold and changing.

Man has nature before him as water, air, stars, the arch of the heavens; and the horizon of his ideas is limited to this. The imagination has, indeed, its gods, but its content still is natural;

These two places, Ionia and Greater Greece, are thus the two localities where this first period in the history of Philosophy plays its part until the time when, that period being ended, Philosophy plants itself in Greece proper, and there makes its home.