presented, and to fix it in concepts and theories
which share in nature's universal and unending life.

Water, air, and fire--what an enormous number and variety of
natural phenomena range themselves under these heads! If we
try to understand why they were singled out in turn, in the
search for the _Welt-stoff_, we shall have penetrated far into the
Nature Mysticism of these famous "elements."

Starting, then, with Thales, we ask why he fixed upon water in
his attempt (the earliest recorded) to determine the constitution
of the universe? What were the properties, qualities, and
functions of that "element" which arrested his attention, and
governed his crude, but acute and original, speculations? As
already remarked, existing cosmological conceptions played an
important role, more especially that of the great primeval ocean
on which the world was supposed to float. This cosmographical
ocean and its accompanying myths will be considered in a
subsequent chapter. But restricting our view at present to the
physical aspects of water, it is not wholly impossible to recover,
and sympathise with, his train of reasoning.

Water is wonderfully mobile, incessantly changing, impelled
apparently by some inherent principle of movement. Its
volatility, also, is very marked; it passes from solid to liquid,
and liquid to vapour, and easily reverses the series. More
especially would the old-world thinker be struck by the
phenomena of the circulation of water. He would see the vapour
drawn up by the sun from lake and ocean, seeming to feed the
heavenly fires, and returning to earth in the form of rain. He
concluded that this must represent the flow of the cosmic
process as a whole. Again, in the falling of dew, in the
gatherings of mists, and in the welling-up of fountains, the solid
materials of the world are apparently passing into a liquid state.

Thales was not the first to note these things. They had been
subtly modifying the thoughts of men for untold generations.
But he was the first whom we know to have gathered together
into a definite theory the vague intuitions which had been so
long unconsciously operative. He singled out this mobile
element and saw in it the substance of the flux of the world as a
whole.

His theory of movement took a wide range. He did not separate
the thing moved from the moving force; nor did he draw any
distinction between the organic and inorganic--the mechanical
and the vital. He regarded all mo