THALES TO LUCRETIUS 



emotions excited at a time when multiplication and 

 division, squaring and cubing, the rule of three, the 

 construction and equivalence of figures, with all their 

 manifold applications to industry, commerce, fine 

 art, and tactics, were just as strange and wonderful 

 as electrical phenomena are to us ... and we shall 

 cease to wonder that a mere form of thought, a life- 

 less abstraction, should once have been regarded as 

 the solution of every problem ; the cause of all 

 existence ; or that these speculations were more 

 than once revived in after ages ' (Benn, Greek 

 Philosophers^ i. 12). Xenophanes of Colophon, one 

 of the twelve Ionian cities of Asia Minor, deserves 

 a passing reference. He, with Parmenides and 

 Zeno, are the chief representatives of the Eleatic 

 school, so named from the city in south-western 

 Italy where a Greek colony had settled. The 

 tendency of that school was towards metaphysical 

 theories. He was the first known observer to detect 

 the value of fossils as evidences of the action of water, 

 but his chief claim to notice rests on the fact that, 

 passing beyond the purely physical speculations of 

 the Ionian school, he denied the idea of a primary 

 substance, and theorised about the nature and actions 

 of superhuman beings. Living at a time when there 

 was a revival of old and gross superstitions to which 

 the vulgar had recourse when fears of invasions arose, 

 he dared to attack the old and persistent ideas about 

 the gods, as in the following sentences from the 

 fragments of his writings. 



' Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all 

 things that are a shame and a disgrace among men, 

 theft and adulteries and deception of one another/ 



