cedure of the mind is ever constant; thought establishes its base-lines and triangulates its more or less accurate advances; and these projections reach toward a universal principle, a single fact by which all other facts may be explained.

Thales naturally sought out a cause, or chief antecedent, of all that he saw around him, and his induction was more elaborate than would at first appear. It was during his time that a spirit of contemplation and investigation first made its appearance among the Greeks. Hitherto men had contented themselves with accepting what they saw without explanation, remanding all obscure phenomena to the realm of superstitious adoration. Thales being the first in Greece who sought to establish a primal cause, is regarded as the originator of philosophic inquiry. It is not easy to return from our more advanced point of scientific observation to that of Thales. Yet there can be little doubt that his choice of water as the ultimate or formative principle of nature was based upon extended observation supplemented by thought. He was impressed with the universal presence of moisture in animals and plants, in the earth and in the skies. Seeds were apparently nourished by moisture; all life seemed due to the presence of water. His cosmological theory too was no doubt biased by the ancient superstition that the earth floated upon water; for it is natural to suppose, when we consider the matter in connection with more modern thought, that this early step taken to establish a first principle was not entirely free from the then ruling influence of myths. Thales also endeavored to explain that every thing was evolved from seed-germs; the whole world, as well as individual beings.

This, however, leads us to the doctrines of Anaximenes, who is said to have been born in the same Greek colony as Thales, in the 63d Olympiad (B.C. 529). His views were fundamentally the same as those of Thales, though his explanation of the primary essence was different. Anaximenes could not accept water as the cause of all, for to him air seemed to be life. He taught that air was the origin of all

things; that it was infinite, and in its pure state invisible. Only through its qualities—heat, cold, moisture, and motion -could it be known to us. To its eternal motion he attributed all change, for he reasoned that motion alone is the power manifested in all the transformations of nature. He also believed that the condensation of air had produced the earth, which he supposed perfectly flat, and supported by air. He also thought that the heavenly bodies were flat; and he is said to have been the first to discover that the moon shone by the sun's light. Anaximenes goes a step further than Thales, for from individual life he endeavored to deduce universal life. It is true that this effort took the form of a theory, that the universe was a living organism, palpitating with the same kind of life observed in terrestrial organisms. So ancient is this belief, however, that it is hard to say in what degree Anaximenes surpassed Thales in his conception of the truth which underlies it.

Another famous theory of the universe was offered in this epoch, by Diogenes of Apollonia,' born about the 80th Olympiad (B.C. 460). He argued, with Anaximenes, that air was the origin of all things, but, giving it a deeper signification, he compared it to the soul; though the word soul, for him, meant life in a general sense, rather than mind distinctively. As the primary substance of Thales was more than the element itself-was water endowed with vital energy,so the air of Diogenes was more than the atmosphere; it was air full of vital qualities of warmth and life which ensouled the universe. Life was to him Intelligence: "For without reason," he says, "it would be impossible for all to be arranged so duly and proportionately as that all should maintain its fitting measure; winter and summer, day and night, the rain, the wind, and fair weather, and whatever object we consider, will be found to have been ordered in the best and most beautiful manner possible."

There is something very interesting in these intensely

'Diogenes of Apollonia is not to be confounded with Diogenes the cynic, the contemporary of Plato.

human if crude speculations. The accuracy with which they have been repeated by the thoughtful of subsequent ages speaks volumes for the constancy of mental procedures, if not for the progress of knowledge. It would not be difficult to find, even in our day, men of high standing in the intellectual world who reason precisely as did Diogenes of Apollonia, with regard to universal intelligence. In other words, they apply to matter and to general phenomena a word which expresses conditions of human sentiency that have been built up into what we term intelligence or mind. They imagine that the order of nature can only be explained by the sequences of thought; whereas all mental activity is but an expression of this order of nature, a consequence of conditions that are far wider and deeper than human life. It would thus be hardly fair, to charge Diogenes, who lived about twenty-three centuries ago, with anthropomorphism, for at that time the circumscriptions of human life, now so familiar, had scarcely been thought of, much less delineated; but to interpret, in our times, the order of nature as a manifestation of intelligence, is to lose sight of the limits of language and the nature of perception.

Diogenes believed that air was intelligence, or order itself. "That which has knowledge is what men call air; it is it that regulates and governs all; and hence is the use of air to pervade all, and to dispose all, and to be in all; for there is nothing that has not part in it.""

It is seen from the above that Thales, Anaximenes, and Diogenes tried to explain the universe from a physical basis, citing water, air, and air-life as the origin of all things. There was a man, however, who lived about the same time as Thales, who seems to have divined the great truth that the physicial, substantial, or statical aspect of nature is not an ultimate fact, but rather a phase or aspect only of the ultimate fact. The learned disquisitions on the nature of matter, which form so prominent a feature of the philosophic literature of our century, were probably an unknown.

See Ritter, vol. I., p. 214.

luxury to the early Greek thinkers; so that we have no choice but to admire the independence and astuteness of Anaximander in taking a position so much in advance of that occupied by the teachers of modern physics. No one who studies the science of Physics, as it is taught in the universities of the world to-day, would suspect that matter was not an ultimate fact. Those who speak of the absolute weight and extension of atoms, postulating a material cause of all phenomena, reason precisely as did Thales, Anaximenes and Diogenes. To regard matter as an ultimate fact is to reverse the order of preception, for matter can never mean more than an aspect of motion.'

Anaximander is said to have been born in the 42d Olympiad (B.C. 610). He excelled in the political and scientific knowledge of his time. "He was passionately addicted to mathematics, and framed a series of geometrical problems," and is credited with the invention of the sun-dial and the origination of the system of geographical maps.

Anaximander is stated to have been the first to use the term principle for the beginning of things. He defined this word as the infinite. One of his tenets was: "The Infinite is the origin of all things." In thus seizing upon a principle, not a substance, as the ultimate generalization,

To show how vain it is to consider any special property of matter as ultimate, we quote the pertinent objections which Judge Stallo brings against the habit of regarding weight or density as absolute.

"The weight of a body is a function, not of its own mass alone, but also of that of the body or bodies by which it is attracted, and of the distance between them. A body whose weight, as ascertained by the spring-balance or pendulum, is a pound on the surface of the earth, would weigh but two ounces on the moon, less than one-fourth of an ounce on several of the smaller planets, about six ounces on Mars, two and one-half pounds on Jupiter, and more than twentyseven pounds on the sun. And while the fall of bodies, in vacuo, near the surface of the earth amounts to about sixteen feet (more or less, according to latitude) during the first second, their corresponding fall near the surface of the sun is more than four hundred and thirty-five feet.

"The thoughtlessness with which it is assumed by some of the most eminent physicists that matter is composed of particles which have an absolute primordial weight persisting in all positions and under all circumstances, is one of the most remarkable facts in the history of science."-" Modern Physics," p. 205.

Anaximander at once rose above materialism, and perceived that divine unity which alone can harmonize life and mind. Speaking of this principle, Ritter says: "The reason why Anaximander regarded the primary substance as infinite finds a natural explanation in the infinite variety of the evolutions of the world, which have their ground in it. He is represented as arguing that the primary substance must have been infinite to be all-sufficient for the limitless variety of produced things with which we are encompassed. Now, although Aristotle expressly characterizes this infinite as a mixture, we must not think of it as a mere multiplicity of primary material elements; for to the mind of Anaximander it was a unity, immortal and imperishable, an ever-producing ENERGY. This production of individual things was derived by Anaximander from an eternal motion of the infinite; from which it would appear that he ascribed to it an inherent vital energy, without, however, employing the terms life and production in any other acceptation than the only one allowable by the character of his philosophy, in the sense, i. e., of motion, by which the primary elements of the infinite separate themselves one from another."'

Anaximander acquired a great reputation for learning; and as the Greeks spoke little but their own language his wisdom was, for the most part, the result of a direct study of nature. "His calculations of the size and distance of the heavenly bodies were committed to writing in a small work, which is said to be the earliest of all philosophical writings." His inventions of the sun-dial and of geographical maps, and his passionate love of mathematics, above mentioned, declare him to have been a man of definiteness and thoroughness in his researches; and this is the more interesting when we consider that he struck the key-note of philosophy, that he framed an hypothesis which all subsequent research has proved unable to destroy.

1 Ritter, vol. I., p. 269.

'Lewes : " Biographical History of Philosophy,” p. 11.