tual development. The exercise of faith
and the imagination even in unproductive ways prepared the way for
broader service of investigation. But these standing alone could
permit nothing more than a childish conception of the universe. They
could not discover the reign of law. They could not advance the
observing and reflecting powers of man; they could not develop the
stronger qualities of his intellect. Individual action would be
continually stultified by the process of accepting through credulity
the trite sayings of the ancients. The attempt to find out how things
were made was an acknowledgment of the powers of the individual mind.
It was a recognition that man has a mind to use, and that there is
truth around him to be discovered. This was no small beginning in
intellectual development.

_The Ionian Philosophy Turned the Mind Toward Nature_.--Greek
philosophy began in the seventh century before Christ. The first
philosopher of note was Thales, born at Miletus, in Asia Minor, about
640 B.C. Thales sought to establish the idea that water is the first
principle and cause of the universe. He held that water is filled with
life and soul, the essential element in the foundation of all nature.
Thales had great learning for his time, being well versed in geometry,
arithmetic, and astronomy. He travelled in Egypt and the Orient, and
became acquainted with ancient lore. It is said that being impressed
with the importance of water in Egypt, where the Nile is the source of
all life, he was led to assert the importance of water in animate
nature. In his attempts to break away from the {217} old cosmogony, he
still exhibits traces of the old superstitions, for he regarded the sun
and stars as living beings, who received their warmth and life from the
ocean, in which they bathed at the time of setting. He held that the
whole world was full of soul, manifested in individual daemons, or
spirits. Puerile as his philosophy appears in comparison with the
later development of Greek philosophy, it created violent antagonism
with mythical theology and led the way to further investigation and
speculation.

Anaximander, born at Miletus 611 B.C., an astronomer and geographer,
following Thales chronologically, wrote a book on "Nature," the first
written on the subject in the philosophy of Greece. He held that all
things arose from the "infinite," a primordial chaos in which was an
internal energy. From a universal mixture