THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

ARISTOTLE 5 i
IV. THE ORGANIZATION OF SCIENCE
i. GREEK SCIENCE BEFORE ARISTOTLE
"Socrates/' says Renan, 16
"gave philosophy to mankind, and Aristotle
gave it science. There was philosophy before Socrates, and science before
Aristotle; and since Socrates and since Aristotle, philosophy and science
have made immense advances. But all has been built upon the foundation
which they laid." Before Aristotle, science was in embryo; with him
it was born.
Earlier civilizations than the Greek had made attempts at science; but
so far as we can catch their thought through their still obscure cuneiform
and hieroglyphic script, their science was indistinguishable from theology.
That is to say, these pre-Hellenic peoples explained every obscure opera-
tion in nature by some supernatural agency; everywhere there were gods.
Apparently it was the Ionian Greeks who first dared to give natural explanations
of cosmic complexities and mysterious events: they sought in
physics the natural causes of particular incidents, and in philosophy a
natural theory of the whole. Thales (640-550 B. c.), the "Father of
Philosophy," was primarily an astronomer, who astonished the natives of
Miletus by informing them that the sun and stars (which they were wont
to worship as gods) were merely balls of fire. His pupil Anaximander
(610-540 B. c.), the first Greek to make astronomical and geographical
charts, believed that the universe had begun as an undifTerentiated mass,
from which all things had arisen by the separation of opposites; that
astronomic history periodically repeated itself in the evolution and dis-
solution of an infinite number of worlds; that the earth was at rest in
space by a balance of internal impulsions (like Buridan's ass) ;
that all
our planets had once been fluid, but had been evaporated by the sun;
that life had first been formed in the sea, but had been driven upon the
land by the subsidence of the water; that of these stranded animals some
had developed the capacity to breathe air, and had so become the pro-
genitors of all later land life; that man could not from the beginning
have been what he now was, for if man, on his first appearance, had been
so helpless at birth, and had required so long an adolescence, as in these
later days, he could not possibly have survived. Anaximenes, another
Milesian (fl. 450 B. c.), described the primeval condition of things as a
very rarefied mass, gradually condensing into wind, cloud, water, earth,
and stone; the three forms of matter gas, liquid and solid were
progressive stages of condensation; heat and cold were merely rarefaction
and condensation; earthquakes were due to the solidification of an
originally fluid earth; life and soul were one, an animating and expansive
force present in everything everywhere. Anaxagoras (500-428 B. c.) 9
Life of Jesus, ch. 28.