FROM THALES TO LUCRETIUS. 



5 



Greek eagerly sought for the law governing the facts 

 around him. And in Ionia was born the idea foreign 

 to the East, but which has become the starting-point 

 of all subsequent scientific inquiry the idea that 

 Nature works by fixed laws. Sir Henry Maine said 

 that " except the blind forces of Nature, nothing 

 moves which is not Greek in its origin," and we feel 

 how hard it is to avoid exaggeration when speaking 

 of the heritage bequeathed by Greece as the giver 

 of every fruitful, quickening idea which has devel- 

 oped human faculty on all sides, and enriched every 

 province of life. Amid serious defects of character, 

 as craftiness, avariciousness, and unscrupulousness, 

 the Greeks had the redeeming grace of pursuit after 

 knowledge which naught could baffle (Plato, Repub- 

 lic, vol. iv, p. 435), and that healthy outlook on things 

 which saved them from morbid introspection. There 

 arose among them no Simeon Stylites to mount his 

 profitless pillar; no filth-ingrained fakir to waste life 

 in contemplating the tip of his nose; no schoolman 

 to idly speculate how many angels could dance upon 

 a needle's point ; or to debate such fatuous questions 

 as the language which the saints in heaven will speak 

 after the Last Judgment. 



In his excellent and cautious survey of Early 

 Greek Philosophy, which we mainly follow in this 

 section, Professor Burnet says that the real advance 

 made by the lonians was through their " leaving off 

 telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of 

 describing what was when as yet there was nothing, 



