parent of all their materialistic tendencies. This led
them continually to seek an arche, or first principle of the universe,
which should, under some form, be appreciable to _sense_; and
consequently the course of thought tended naturally towards materialism.

Thales was unquestionably a dualist. Instructed by traditional
intimations, or more probably guided by the spontaneous apperceptions of
reason, he recognized, with more or less distinctness, an incorporeal
Deity as the moving, animating, and organizing cause of the universe.
The idea of God is a truth so self-evident as to need no demonstration.
The human mind does not attain to the idea of a God as the last
consequence of a series of antecedent principles. It comes at once, by
an inherent and necessary movement of thought, to the recognition of God
as the First Principle of all principles. But when, instead of
hearkening to the simple and spontaneous intuitions of the mind, man
turns to the world of sense, and loses himself in discursive thought,
the conviction of a personal God becomes obscured. Then, amid the
endlessly diversified phenomena of the universe, he seeks for a cause or
origin which in some form shall be appreciable to sense. The mere study
of material phenomena, scientifically or unscientifically conducted,
will never yield the sense of the living God. Nature must be
interpreted, can only be interpreted in the light of certain _a priori_
principles of reason, or we can never "ascend from nature up to nature's
God." Within the circle of mere sense-perception, the dim and
undeveloped consciousness of God will be confounded with the universe.
Thus, in Anaximenes, God is partially confounded with "air," which
becomes a symbol; then a vehicle of the informing mind; and the result
is a semi-pantheism. In Heraclitus, the "ether" is, at first, a
semi-symbol of the Deity; at length, God is utterly confounded with this
ether, or "rational fire," and the result is a definite _materialistic
pantheism_. And, finally, when this feeling or dim consciousness of God,
which dwells in all human souls, is not only disregarded, but pronounced
to be an illusion--a phantasy; when all the analogies which intelligence
suggests are disregarded, and a purely mechanical theory of the universe
is adopted, the result is the utter negation of an Intelligent Cause,
that is, _absolute Atheism_, as in Leucippus and Democritus.

CHAPTER IX.

THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS _(con