PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY. 37 



substances are forced round and round and are changed 

 and pass severally into their own place by composition and 

 divination." 1 



It must be admitted, however, that even if Thales had 

 been cognizant of the amber phenomenon, it was not 

 logically necessary, from his point of view, to include it 

 specifically under his theory based upon the attraction of 

 the lodestone : and hence lack of mention does not, on his 

 part, imply lack of knowledge. All physical philosophy 

 as it stood before the age of Socrates was an obscure, semi- 

 poetical speculation as to first principles. It neither 

 sought to explain nor to clear up phenomenal experiences, 

 but often added new difficulties of its own, frequently con- 

 tradicting or discrediting experience. In the words of 

 Grote, "Thales and his immediate successors (like their 

 predecessors, the poets), accommodated their hypotheses to 

 intellectual impulses and aspirations of their own, with 

 little anxiety about giving satisfaction to others, still less 

 about avoiding inconsistencies or meeting objections. Each 

 of them fastened upon some one grand or imposing general- 

 ization (set forth often in verse), which he stretched as far 

 as it would go by various comparisons and illustrations, but 

 without any attention or deference to adverse facts or rea- 

 sonings. Provided that his general point of view w r as im- 

 pressive to the imagination, as the old religious scheme of 

 personal agencies was to the vulgar, he did not concern 

 himself abouj: the condition of proof or disproof." 2 



Plato while denying the attraction of the amber never- 

 theless links its effect with that of the magnet; but 

 as to what it acts upon or wherein its action differs, if 

 at all, from that of the Heraclean stone, he is silent. 



1 Plato : Timaeus, 80. Cicero refers to this in the De Natura Deorum, 

 and so does Timaeus of Locri, reputed to have been Plato's teacher, but 

 whose sole extant work is probably an abridgment of the Platonic Dia- 

 logues. (Timaeus Locrensis, ed. Serrani, p. 102. See, also, Smith: 

 Dict'y of Greek and Roman Antiquities, art. Timaeus.) 



2 Grote : Aristotle. London, 1872; Vol. II., chap. XL, p. 154. 



