SOURCE: Charles H. Kahn, "Anaximander's Fragment: The Universe Governed by Law," in The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Anchor Books, 1974, pp. 99-117.

In the following excerpt, Kahn contends that Anaximander 's most significant achievement was the conception of nature governed by regular and determinate laws. According to Kahn, Anaximander's Boundless was not a mystical but a scientific and philosophical idea.

Anaximander … declared the Boundless to be principle and element of existing things, having been the first to introduce this very term of "principle"; he says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some different, boundless nature, from which all the heavens arise and the kosmoi within them; "out of those things whence is the generation for existing things, into these again does their destruction take place, according to what must needs be; for they make...