884 HISTORY OF GREECE. philosophers, spoke of him with similar esteem. To him wore traced, by the Grecian inquirers of the fourth century B.C., the first beginnings of geometry, astronomy, and physiology in its large and really appropriate sense, the scientific study of nature : for the Greek word denoting nature ((fvaig,) first comes into compre- hensive use about this time (as I have remarked in an earlier chapter), 1 with its derivatives physics and physiology, as distin- guished from the theology of the old poets. Little stress can be laid on those elementary propositions in geometry which are epecified as discovered, or as first demonstrated, by Thales, etill less upon the solar eclipse respecting which, according to Herodotus, he determined beforehand the year of occurrence. 2 ]iut the main doctrine of his physiology, using that word in its larger Greek sense, is distinctly attested. He stripped Oceanus and Tethys, primeval parents of the gods in the Homeric theogony, of their personality, and laid down water, or fluid substance, as the single original element from which everything came, and into which everything returned. 3 The doctrine of one eternal element, remaining always the Eame in its essence, but indefinitely variable in its manifestations to sense, was thus first introduced to the discussion of the Gre- cian public. We have no means of knowing the reasons by which Thales supported this opinion, nor could even Aristotle do more than conjecture what they might have been ; but one of the statements urged on behalf of it, that the earth itself rested on water, 4 we may safely refer to the Milesian himself, for it would hardly have been advanced at a later age. More- over, Thales is reported to have held, that everything was living und full of gods ; and that the magnet, especially, was a living thing. Thus the gods, as far as we can pretend to follow opin- ions so very faintly transmitted, are conceived as active powers,
- Vol. i, ch. xvi.
- Diogen. Laert. i, 23 ; Herodot. i, 75 ; Apuleius, Florid, iv. p. 144, Dip.
Proclus, in his Commentary on Euclid, specifies several propositions said JO have been discovered by Thales (Brandis, Handbuch der Gr. Philoa ib. xxviii, p. 110).
- Aristotel. Metaphys. i, 3 ; Plutarch, Placit. Philos. i, 3, p. 875. bf U
Warof tyriai TTUVTCL eivai, nai elf iidup vuvra
- Aristotel. ut supra, and De Coelo, ii. 13.
