Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/400

 382 HISTORY OF GREECE. Now when Thales disengaged Grecian philosophy from the old mode of explanation, he did not at the same time disengage it from the old problems and matters propounded for inquiry. These he retained, and transmitted to his successors, as vague md vast as they were at first conceived ; and so they remained, ihough with some transformations and modifications, together writh many new questions equally insoluble, substantially present to the Greeks throughout their whole history, as the legitimate problems for philosophical investigation. But these problems, adapted only to the old elastic system of polytheistic explanation and omnipresent personal agency, became utterly disproportioned to any impersonal hypotheses such as those of Thales and the philosophers after him, whether assumed physical laws, or plausible moral and metaphysical dogmas, open to argumentative attack, and of course requiring the like defence. To treat the visible world as a whole, and inquire when and how it began, as well as into all its past changes, to discuss the first origin of men, animals, plants, the sun, the stars, etc., to assign some com- prehensive reason why motion or change in general took place in the universe, to investigate the destinies of the human race, and to lay down some systematic relation between them and the gods, all these were topics admitting of being conceived in many different ways, and set forth with eloquent plausibility, but not reducible to any solution either resting on scientific evidence, or commanding steady adherence under a free scrutiny. 1 At the time when the power of scientific investigation was scanty and helpless, the problems proposed were thus such as to 1 The less these problems are adapted for rational solution, the moro nobly do they present themselves in the language of a great pw*. *e< as ipecimen, Euripides, Fragment. 101, ed. Dindorf. n? rfjq icf-opiac v, [IT/TE -KokiTuii 'Errt Trrjfioffvvy, JJ.TIT' elf adiKOVf Hpa^etf opfiuv 'A A3.' ii&avuTov aadopuv Qiiaeuc Kocr/iov uyrjpu, irrj TE avvsarij Kal CTTT] KOl OTTUr. Tolf 6e TotovToif ovdeiror'