38 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



westwards, beginning in the Ionian islands of the 

 J^gean Sea, where the Hellenes first met the men of 

 Asiatic descent. It then reached the zenith of its 

 philosophical and artistic development at Athens 

 and in the cities of the mainland, and spread gradually 

 to the colonies of greater Greece in Sicily and South 

 Italy, where the practical geniu: of Archimedes marks 

 its highest achievement in natural knowledge. 



The first known European school of thought to 



break away definitely from the mythological tradition 



Early Greek was that of the Ionian philosophers. 



Philosophy, x^ position of the cities of Ionia and 

 the adjacent isles as the starting-point of Hellenic 

 philosophy is of great interest. Either their situation 

 at an extremity of the region overrun by the northern 

 invaders enabled them at an early period to recover 

 the settled course of steady development, free for a 

 while from further intrusion, or else the character of 

 the existing population was already extraordinarily 

 favourable to the development of philosophic thought. 

 Possibly we may here encounter the effects of some 

 earlier unrecorded migration of a similar racial stock 

 which had already prepared the soil and leavened the 

 inhabitants. Thales of Miletus (580 B.C.) is the 

 earliest of the Ionian teachers whose fame has reached 

 us. He taught that water, or moisture, was the essence 

 of all things, that everything possesses a principle of 

 activity has " soul in it " and that this " soul " is 

 divine in origin, or, at any rate, is superhuman. The 

 importance of the Milesian school of philosophy lies 

 in the fact that it possessed a unity of purpose and 

 definite aim, setting out, by means of such research 



