Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/399

 THALES. 381 like that of the Pythagoreans, to be noticed presently, can b made out. There is, indeed, a certain general analogy in the philosophical vein of Thales, Hippo, Anaximenes, and Diogenes of Apollonia, whereby they all stand distinguished from Xeno- phane? of Elea, and his successors, the Eleatic dialecticians, Parmenides and Zeno; but there are also material differences between their respective doctrines, no two of them holding the tame. And if we look to Anaximander, the person next in order of time to Thales, as well as to Herakleitus, we find them departing, in a great degree, even from that character which all the rest have in common, though both the one and the other are usually enrolled in the list of Ionic philosophers. Of the old legendary and polytheistic conception of navure, which Thales partially discarded, we may remark that it is a state of the human mind in which the problems suggesting themselves to be solved, and the machinery for solving them, bear a fair proportion one to the other. If the problems be vast, indeterminate, confused, and derived rather from the hopes, fears, love, hatred, astonishment, etc., of men, than from any genuine desire of knowledge, so also does the received belief supply invisible agents in unlimited number, and with every variety of power and inclination. The means of explanation are thus multiplied and diversified as readily as the phenomena to be explained. And though no future events or states can be pre- dicted on trustworthy grounds, in such manner as to stand the scrutiny of subsequent verification, yet there is little difficulty in rendering a specious and plausible account of matters past, of any and all things alike ; especially as, at such a period, matters of fact requiring explanation are neither collated nor preserved with care. And though no event or state, which has not yet oc- curred, can be predicted, there is little difficulty in rendering a plausible account of everything which has occurred in the past. Cosmogony, and the prior ages of the world, were conceived as a sort of personal history, with intermarriages, filiation, quarrels, and other adventures, of these invisible agents ; among whom some one or more were assumed as unbegotten and self-existent, the latter assumption being a difficulty common to all systems vf cosmogony, and from which even this flexible and expansive hypothesis is not exempt.