CHAPTER I. 

 THE RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND. 



In the first book of that part of his work which is known 

 as his Metaphysics, Aristotle gives a critical review of certain 

 Greek thinkers, among whom he names Thales as the founder of 

 the first school of philosophy. For this reason, mainly, succeeding 

 historians have generally commenced their outlines of Western 

 philosophy with an account of this early thinker. 



It is unlikely that Thales committed any of his teaching to 

 writing. If he did, not even a fragment appears to have survived 

 the tooth of time. The traditions, however, which centre around 

 his name are many, and some of these are fairly authentic. Those 

 which most interested Aristotle are mainly cosmological in their 

 nature, and, if one follows Burnet, they may be reduced to the 

 following three: 



(1) The earth floats on the water. 



(2) Water is the material cause of all things. 



(3) All things are full of gods. The magnet is alive; for it has 



the power of moving iron. 1 



Whether these statements represent the teaching of Thales at all 

 accurately it is difficult to determine. The terminology of the 

 second statement is, of course, Aristotelian, and it is very probable 

 that the Stagirite has interpreted the tradition in the light of his 

 own special philosophical system. However, it is doubtless safe 

 to conjecture that Thales was seeking the nature of the primary 

 stuff of all things. The word, which he most likely used to desig- 

 nate this primary substance, was not the Aristotelian dpxr? but 

 probably the word </>uo-is. His work, and that of all the philo- 

 sophical writers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., might have 

 been entitled Trept </>vo-cos. What is <j>vcris ? This constituted their 

 problem. The answer which Thales gave was, <t>vcns is water. 

 The nature of things, or the primary and fundamental something, 



1 J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, Pp. 47-8. 



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