In his excellent and cautious survey of Early Greek Philosophy, which we mainly follow in this section, Professor Burnet says that the real advance made by the Ionians was through their "leaving off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what all things really are now." For the early notions of the Greeks about nature, being an inheritance from their barbaric ancestors, were embodied in myths and legends bearing strong resemblance to those found among the uncivilized tribes of Polynesia and elsewhere in our day. For example, the old nature-myth of Cronus separating heaven and earth by the mutilation of Uranus occurs among Chinese, Japanese, and Maoris, and among the ancient Hindus and Egyptians.
The earliest school of scientific speculation was at Miletus, the most flourishing city of Ionia. Thales, whose name heads the list of the "Seven Sages," was its founder. As with other noted philosophers of this and later periods, neither the exact date of his birth nor of his death are known, but the sixth century before Christ may be held to cover the period when he "flourished."
That "nothing comes into being out of nothing, and that nothing passes away into nothing," was the conviction with which he and those who followed him started on their quest. All around was change; everything always becoming something else; "all in motion like streams." There must be that which is the vehicle of all the changes, and of all the motions which produce them. _What_, therefore, was this permanent and primary substance? in other words, of what is the world made? And Thales, perhaps through observing that it could become vaporous, liquid, and solid in turn; perhaps--if, as tradition records, he visited Egypt--through watching the wonder-working, life-giving Nile; perhaps as doubtless sharing the current belief in an ocean-washed earth, said that the primary substance was WATER. Anaximander, his friend and pupil, disagreeing with what seemed to him a too concrete answer, argued, in more abstract fashion, that "the material cause and first element of things was the Infinite." This material cause, which he was the first thus to name, "is neither water nor any other of what are now called the _elements_" (we quote from Theophrastus, the famous pupil of Aristotle, born at Eresus in Lesbos, 371 B. C.). Perhaps, following Professor Burnet's able guidance through the complexities of definitions, the term BOUNDLESS best expresses the "one eternal, indestructible substance out of which everything arises, and into which everything once more returns"; in other words, the exhaustless stock of matter from which the waste of existence is being continually made good.