Note 76 — Chapter V · FREETHOUGHT IN GREECE

Thales, like Homer, starts from the Babylonian conception of a beginning of all things in water; but in Thales the immediate motive and the sequel are strictly cosmological and neither theological nor poetical, though we cannot tell whether the worship of a God of the Waters may not have been the origin of a water-theory of the cosmos. The phrase attributed to him, “that all things are full of Gods,”76 clearly meant that in his opinion the forces of things inhered in the cosmos, and not in personal powers who spasmodically interfered with it.77 It is probable that, as was surmised by Plutarch, a pantheistic conception of Zeus existed for the Ionian Greeks before Thales.78 To the later doxographists he “seems to have lost belief in the Gods.”79 From the mere second-hand and often unintelligent statements which are all we have in his case, it is hard to make sure of his system; but that it was pantheistic80 and physicist seems clear. He conceived that matter not only came from but was resolvable into water; that all phenomena were ruled by law or “necessity”; and that the sun and planets (commonly regarded as deities) were bodies analogous to the earth, which he held to be spherical but “resting on water.”81 For the rest, he speculated in meteorology and in astronomy, and is credited with having predicted a solar eclipse 82—a fairly good proof of his knowledge of Chaldean science83—and with having introduced geometry into Greece from Egypt.84 To him, too, is ascribed a wise counsel to the Ionians in the matter of political federation,85 which, had it been followed, might have saved them from the Persian conquest; and he is one of the many early moralists who laid down the Golden Rule as the essence of the moral law.86 With his maxim, “Know thyself,” he seems to mark a broadly new departure in ancient thought: the balance of energy is shifted from myth and theosophy, prophecy and poesy, to analysis of consciousness and the cosmic process.