Anaximenes looks out from a stone writing ledge towards the clouds and coast.

The long passage from air to stone

Anaximenes of Miletus, a Greek thinker of the sixth century BCE, sought a common origin for things that look quite unlike one another. His own account has been lost. An important report survives in the late antique commentator Simplicius, who in turn draws on Theophrastus. When air, cloud, water and stone appear together in this tradition, we are hearing an early teaching arranged and transmitted by readers who came considerably later.

One material in different conditions

When rarefied it becomes fire, when condensed it becomes wind, then cloud, and when condensed still further, water, then earth, then stones. Everything else comes from these.

– Anaximenes, Testimony in Simplicius, 1906, p. 18.[1]

At one end of the sequence stands something almost impossible to grasp. At the other is a body that resists the hand. In between come experiences familiar to anyone who spends time out of doors. Wind moves across the landscape, cloud thickens the sky, water falls and collects on the ground. The account arranges transitions of this kind by degree of condensation. Stone occupies a definite place in it. Its solidity appears as the extreme point of a sequence that began with moving air.

How an early account has reached us

The power of the proposal lies partly in its economy. One direction of change connects many different bodies. At the same time the account asks the reader to make a considerable imaginative leap. Nobody watching a cloud gather can follow the entire passage all the way to a mass of rock. The transmitted series extends familiar experiences beyond what can directly be seen. An everyday contrast between air and stone becomes a question about what the two could have in common despite the difference felt by the hand.