THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



ception of nature was suddenly replaced by a far more 

 rationalistic idea which is stated to have been due to 

 Thales of Miletus. 



We know little about Thales, and will probably 

 never know whether his ideas were his own, or 

 whether he merely enlarged on those of others. Even 

 two centuries after his birth, he had become a legen- 

 dary figure. Tradition tells us merely that he was 

 born in the year 640 b.c. ; that he studied in Egypt 

 and attained note as a scientific thinker; and that he 

 established a school of natural philosophy. The 

 Greeks regarded him as the founder of Greek philoso- 

 phy because he replaced the ordinary mythical ex- 

 planation of phenomena by teaching that all things 

 are due to a single principle which he held to be 

 water. ^ If this opinion of the Greeks be correct, that 

 Thales, of his own initiative, arrived at such an 

 astounding conception of the world, then this fact 

 marks one of the greatest revolutions in thought. At 

 a single step, man passed from a crude animism to a 

 conception of objective law. At any rate, we can date 

 the beginning of scientific or rational thought with 

 Thales, and since his time we have records of a con- 

 tinuous search to determine the nature of substance 

 and the cause of phenomena. 



It matters little to us that Thales held that water 

 is the first principle of all things; that his successor, 

 Anaximander, changed the first principle, or arche, 



1 Fairbanks, The First Philosophers of Greece, Scribner's, p. i. 



C383 



