THALES AND ANAXIMANDER. 33 



tend to read into these speculations opinions which 

 Zeller, with his more critical and exact analysis, 

 throws into their actual relative value. 



THE IONIANS AND ELEATICS. 



THALES and ANAXIMANDER, the earliest lonians, 

 were students of Astronomy and of the origin of 

 the Universe. So far as we know, they were the 

 first who endeavoured to substitute a natural expla- 

 nation of things for the old myths. Thales was 

 also the first of the long line of natural philosophers 

 who looked upon the great expanse of mother ocean 

 and declared water to be the matter from which all 

 things arose, and out of which they exist. This 

 idea of the aquatic or marine origin of life, which 

 is now a very widely accepted theory, is therefore 

 an extremely ancient one. As has been said, it 

 could only have arisen in a country surrounded 

 by warm marine currents prodigal with shore and 

 deep sea life. 



ANAXIMANDER (611-547), the Milesian, is termed 

 by Haeckel the prophet of Kant and Laplace in 

 Cosmogony, and of Lamarck and Darwin in Biol- 

 ogy ! His theories were still largely imbued with 

 mythology, and the more closely we examine them, 

 the less they seem to resemble modern ideas. If 

 we reduce this superlative prophetic mantle, we 

 still find Anaximander imbued with a wealth of 

 suggestion, and a literal prophet of some of the 



