THALES TO LUCRETIUS 



intellectual freedom is born. Such a stage was, 

 markedly, reached whenever, for example, an indi- 

 vidual 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, pionnier ; Italian, pedone ; 

 from Latin pedes) 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 

 centuries before Christ. Not, in the early stages of 

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

 to a rugged peninsula in the south-eastern corner 

 of Europe 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 islands 

 of the ^Egean had been the nurseries of culture and 

 adventure. Thence the maritime inhabitants had 

 spread themselves both east and west, feeding the 

 spirit of enquiry, and imbibing influences from older 

 civilisations, notably of Egypt and Chaldaea. But, 

 mix as they might with other peoples, the Greeks 

 never lost their own strongly-marked individuality, 



