An Introduction to Philosophy | Page 4

to call philosophers, we are
struck by the fact that those who head the list chronologically appear to
have been occupied with crude physical speculations, with attempts to

guess what the world is made out of, rather than with that somewhat
vague something that we call philosophy to-day.
Students of the history of philosophy usually begin their studies with
the speculations of the Greek philosopher Thales (b. 624 B.C.). We are
told that he assumed water to be the universal principle out of which all
things are made, and that he maintained that "all things are full of
gods." We find that Anaximander, the next in the list, assumed as the
source out of which all things proceed and that to which they all return
"the infinite and indeterminate"; and that Anaximenes, who was
perhaps his pupil, took as his principle the all-embracing air.
This trio constitutes the Ionian school of philosophy, the earliest of the
Greek schools; and one who reads for the first time the few vague
statements which seem to constitute the sum of their contributions to
human knowledge is impelled to wonder that so much has been made
of the men.
This wonder disappears, however, when one realizes that the
appearance of these thinkers was really a momentous thing. For these
men turned their faces away from the poetical and mythologic way of
accounting for things, which had obtained up to their time, and set their
faces toward Science. Aristotle shows us how Thales may have been
led to the formulation of his main thesis by an observation of the
phenomena of nature. Anaximander saw in the world in which he lived
the result of a process of evolution. Anaximenes explains the coming
into being of fire, wind, clouds, water, and earth, as due to a
condensation and expansion of the universal principle, air. The
boldness of their speculations we may explain as due to a courage born
of ignorance, but the explanations they offer are scientific in spirit, at
least.
Moreover, these men do not stand alone. They are the advance guard of
an army whose latest representatives are the men who are enlightening
the world at the present day. The evolution of science--taking that word
in the broad sense to mean organized and systematized
knowledge--must be traced in the works of the Greek philosophers
from Thales down. Here we have the source and the rivulet to which

we can trace back the mighty stream which is flowing past our own
doors. Apparently insignificant in its beginnings, it must still for a
while seem insignificant to the man who follows with an unreflective
eye the course of the current.
It would take me too far afield to give an account of the Greek schools
which immediately succeeded the Ionic: to tell of the Pythagoreans,
who held that all things were constituted by numbers; of the Eleatics,
who held that "only Being is," and denied the possibility of change,
thereby reducing the shifting panorama of the things about us to a mere
delusive world of appearances; of Heraclitus, who was so impressed by
the constant flux of things that he summed up his view of nature in the
words: "Everything flows"; of Empedocles, who found his explanation
of the world in the combination of the four elements, since become
traditional, earth, water, fire, and air; of Democritus, who developed a
materialistic atomism which reminds one strongly of the doctrine of
atoms as it has appeared in modern science; of Anaxagoras, who traced
the system of things to the setting in order of an infinite multiplicity of
different elements,--"seeds of things,"--which setting in order was due
to the activity of the finest of things, Mind.
It is a delight to discover the illuminating thoughts which came to the
minds of these men; and, on the other hand, it is amusing to see how
recklessly they launched themselves on boundless seas when they were
unprovided with chart and compass. They were like brilliant children,
who know little of the dangers of the great world, but are ready to
undertake anything. These philosophers regarded all knowledge as their
province, and did not despair of governing so great a realm. They were
ready to explain the whole world and everything in it. Of course, this
can only mean that they had little conception of how much there is to
explain, and of what is meant by scientific explanation.
It is characteristic of this series of philosophers that their attention was
directed very largely upon the external world. It was natural that this
should be so. Both in the history of the race and in that of the individual,
we find that the attention is seized first by material things, and that it is
long before a clear conception of the mind and