SOCRATES. ] 9 



means of knowing the fact than we have), that Lycurgus and Solon, 

 as well as the poets Orpheus, Musaeus, Melampus, and Homer, and 

 the philosophers, Pythagoras and others, had drawn most of their 

 knowledge from Egypt. And Diogenes, asserts, upon the authority, 

 as he says, of Hecata?us and Aristagoras, that the Egyptians had 

 taught, from the remotest antiquity, that the world had a beginning ; 

 that the earth was spherical, and the stars of the nature of fire ; and 

 that the soul was immortal. 



Whoever will take the trouble of considering the passages which 

 Bp. Stillingfleet has collected in his ' Origines Sacra?,' b. iii. c. 3, will 

 readily recognise, in the physics of Thales, some traces of the Mosaic 

 cosmogony. The water, which according to Thales was the primitive 

 form of matter, corresponds to the chaotic mass which " was without 

 form and void." 



To return to the theology of Thales : amidst the conflicting ac- 

 counts which later writers have given of his opinions as to the forma- 

 tion of the world, it seems not unreasonable to conclude that he 

 delivered no express dogma on the subject, but tacitly supposed the 

 existence of a God: 



With regard to his notions on the subject of natural history, we 

 may remark, that he held the moon to be a solid body, like the earth, 

 and to receive its light from the sun ; that the earth is spherical, in 

 the centre of the universe ; that eclipses of the sun are caused by the 

 intervention of the moon between the sun and the earth. His know- 

 ledge of astronomy was sufficient to enable him to predict eclipses of 

 the sun ; this we know, upon the testimony of Herodotus ; but with 

 what degree of precision, whether to the assigning of the exact hour, 

 we cannot determine. 1 Proclus tells us, and most probably his asser- 

 tion is true, that Thales derived his mathematical knowledge from 

 Egypt ; and that amongst other geometrical problems he discovered 

 the following, which were afterwards inserted in the * Elements of 

 Euclid:' 1. That a circle is bisected by its diameter. 2. That the 

 angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal to each other. 

 3. That two straight lines intersecting one another make the vertical 

 angles, at the point of intersection, equal. Thales also introduced 

 into Greece an improved distribution of the year, which he divided 

 into 365 days. 



ANAXIMANDER, who taught publicly the opinions which Thales Anaximan- 

 had broached in private, was born about the 42nd Olympiad. He Jio B.C? 

 has been frequently confounded with Anaximenes, and sometimes 

 with Anaxagoras. He was the first person that constructed a geogra- 



1 It is impossible to reconcile this fact with the account which is given of the 

 notions of Anaximander, that eclipses were caused by the stopping up of the orifices 

 through which the fire of the sun and moon exhaled. If Thales did really predict 

 an eclipse, he must either have known the obliquity of the ecliptic, and possessed a 

 far more accurate knowledge of astronomy than his scholar, or he must have 

 obtained some information of an expected eclipse from the Egyptian or Babylonian 

 astronomers, which perhaps is not an improbable conjecture. 



c2 



