Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/400

368 HISTORY OF GREECE. visible and invisible, spread over the universe. 1 The whole vie * of nature was purely religious and subjective, the spontaneous suggestion of the early mind. It proceeded from the instinctive tendencies of the feelings and imagination to transport, to the world without, the familiar type of free-will and conscious per- sonal action : above all, it took deep hold of the emotions, from the widely extended sympathy which it so perpetually called forth between man and nature. 2 The first attempt to disenthral the philosophic intellect from this all-personifying religious faith, and to constitute a method of interpreting nature distinct from the spontaneous inspirations of untaught minds, is to be found in Thales, Xenophanes and Pytha- goras, in the sixth century before the Christian aera. It is in them that we first find the idea of Person tacitly set aside or limited, and an impersonal Nature conceived as the object of study. The divine husband and wife, Oceanus and Tethys, parents of many gods and of the Oceanic nymphs, together with the avenging goddess Styx, are translated into the material sub- stance water, or, as we ought rather to say, the Fluid: and Thales set himself to prove that water was the primitive element, out of which all the different natural substances had been formed. 3 He, as well as Xenophanes and Pythagoras, started the problem of physical philosophy, with its objective character and invariable laws, to be discoverable by a proper and methodical application of the human intellect. The Greek word f&vatg, denoting nature, and its derivatives physics and physiology, unknown in that large sense to Homer or Hesiod, as well as the word Kosmos, to denote the mundane system, first appears with these philosophers. 4 The 1 Hesiod, Opp. Di. 122; Homer, Hymn, ad Vener. 260. 2 A defence of the primitive faith, on this ground, is found in Plutarch, Question. Sympos. vii. 4, 4, p. 703. 3 Aristotel. Metaphys. i. 3. 4 Plutarch, Placit. Philos. ii. 1 ; also Stobseus, Eclog. Physic, i. 22, where the difference between the Homeric expressions and those of the subsequent philosophers is seen. Damm, Lexic. Homeric, v. <H>oY ; Alexander von Ilumboldt, Kosmos, p. 76, the note 9 on page 62 of that admirable work. The title of the treatises of the early philosophers (Melissus, Dercokritus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Alkmaeon, etc.) was frequently Hepi Qvasuf (Galen. Opp. torn. i. p. 56, ed. Basil).