FROM THALES TO LUCRETIUS. 



3 



tual freedom is born. Such a stage was markedly 

 reached whenever, for example, an individual here 

 and there challenged the current belief about the 

 beginnings and nature of things, beliefs held because 

 they were taught, not because their correspondence 

 with fact had been examined. 



A pioneer (French, pionnicr; Italian, pedone; 

 from Latin pedcs) is, literally, a foot-soldier; one 

 who goes before an army to clear the road of ob- 

 structions. Hence the application of the term to 

 men who are in the van of any new movement; 

 hence its special fitness in the present connection, as 

 designating men whose speculations cut a pathway 

 through jungles of myth and legend to the realities 

 of things. The Pioneers of Evolution the first on 

 record to doubt the truth of the theory of special 

 creation, whether as the work of departmental gods 

 or of one Supreme Deity, matters not lived in 

 Greece about the time already mentioned; six cen- 

 turies before Christ. Not in the early stages of the 

 Evolution idea, in the Greece limited, as now, to a 

 rugged peninsula in the southeastern corner of Eu- 

 rope and to the surrounding islands, but in the Greece 

 which then included Ionia, on the opposite sea- 

 board of Asia Minor. 



From times beyond memory or record, the isl- 

 ands of the ^gean had been the nurseries of culture 

 and adventure. Thence the maritime inhabitants 

 had spread themselves both east and west, feeding 

 the spirit of inquiry, and imbibing influences from 



