o be conditioned by moisture, that the life-producing seed in all
creatures is moist, and so on."

Other characteristics of water, it is elsewhere suggested, may have
been in Thales' mind, such as its readiness to take various shapes, its
convertibility from water into vapour or ice, its ready mixture with
other substances, and so forth. What we have chiefly to note is, that
the more unscientific this theory about the universe may strike us as
being, the more completely out of accord with facts now familiar to
everybody, the more striking is it as marking a new mood of mind, in
which _unity_, though only very partially suggested or discoverable by
the senses, is {6} preferred to that infinite and indefinite _variety_
and _difference_ which the senses give us at every moment. There is
here the germ of a new aspiration, of a determination not to rest in
the merely momentary and different, but at least to try, even against
the apparent evidence of the senses, for something more permanently
intelligible. As a first suggestion of what this permanent underlying
reality may be, _Water_ might very well pass. It is probable that even
to Thales himself it was only a symbol, like the figure in a
mathematical proposition, representing by the first passable physical
phenomenon which came to hand, that ideal reality underlying all
change, which is at once the beginning, the middle, and the end of all.
That he did not mean Water, in the ordinary prosaic sense, to be
identical with this, is suggested by some [10] other sayings of his.
"Thales," says Aristotle elsewhere, "thought the whole universe was
full of gods." "All things," he is recorded as saying, "have a _soul_
in them, in virtue of which they move other things, and are themselves
moved, even as the magnet, by virtue of its life or soul, moves the
iron." Without pushing these fragmentary utterances too far, we may
well conclude that whether Thales spoke of the soul of the universe and
its divine indwelling powers, or gods, or of water as the origin of
things, he was only vaguely symbolising in different ways an idea as
yet formless and void, like the primeval chaos, but nevertheless, {7}
like it, containing within it a promise and a potency of greater life
hereafter.

II. ANAXIMANDER.--Our information with respect to thinkers so remote as
these men is too scanty and too fragmentary, to enable us to say in
what manner or degree they influenced each other. We cannot say