32 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



and the initiated were invited to contemplate in the first, 

 a divine nature essentially unitary, pure spirit, perfect, all- 

 wise, almighty, supremely good; the ignorant masses in 

 the second, a variety of gods ranging from heroes to bulls, 

 cats, and apes, and a worship teeming with rites unspeak- 

 able. 



Of science properly so called the Egyptian had none. 1 

 He claimed to have made records of natural facts for ages, 

 such, for example, as astronomical observations, which, as 

 he boasted, had been kept up for six thousand centuries. 

 But out of this vast storehouse of accumulated data not a 

 single theory explanatory of the motions of the heavenly 

 bodies ever emerged. He heaped up facts as he did the 

 stones of the great pyramid, with infinite labor, and over 

 a great interval of time, but the mountain of facts was as 

 lifeless as the mountain of stone. It was dead, it held the 

 dead, and there was no health in it. 



There lived at this time, a keen young Milesian, 2 of an 

 intelligence far above tke ordinary mental level of his 

 countrymen ; in character uniting the astuteness of the 

 Phoenician, whence he sprang, with the impressionable 

 temperament of the Hellene ; one of those "souls born out 

 of time extraordinary prophetic, who are rather related to 

 the system of the world than to their particular age and 

 locality." 3 Upon this phenomenal mind reacted an intel- 

 lectual environment wherein the most diverse elements 

 were commingled ; conceptions of the spirit gods of Egypt, 

 jarring with those of the anthropomorphic deities of 

 Greece ; dawning notions of physical astronomy jumbled 

 together with the sports of the shining gods and goddesses 

 in the blue vault, and no straight thought anywhere. The 

 result was the beginning of philosophy ; for when Thales 

 of Miletus saw how the machinery given to man to under- 

 stand facts could neither make the facts nor control them, 



1 Buckle : History of Civilization, i., 36. 



2 Plutarch : De Placet. Phil, j, 3. Clem. Alex. : Strom i, 15, \ 66. 

 8 Emerson : Wealth. 



