represented each divine element in human nature. They were prophets of the
future development of humanity. They showed how man is a partaker of the
divine nature. If they humanized Deity, they divinized humanity.

Sec. 6. The Gods of the Philosophers.

The problem which the Greek philosophers set themselves to solve was the
origin of things. As we have found a double element of race and religion
running through the history of Greece, so we find a similar dualism in its
philosophy. An element of realism and another of idealism are in
opposition until the time of Plato, and are first reconciled by that great
master of thought. Realism appears in the Ionic nature-philosophy;
idealism in Orphism, the schools of Pythagoras, and the Eleatic school of
Southern Italy.

Both these classes of thinkers sought for some central unity beneath the
outward phenomena. Thales the Milesian (B.C. 600) said it was water. His
disciple, Anaximander, called it a chaotic matter, containing in itself a
motive-power which would take the universe through successive creations
and destructions. His successor, Anaximenes, concluded the infinite
substance to be air. Heraclitus of Ephesus (B.C. 500) declared it to be
fire; by which he meant, not physical fire, but the principle of
antagonism. So, by _water_, Thales must have intended the fluid element in
things. For that Thales was not a mere materialist appears from the
sayings which have been reported as coming from him, such as this: "Of all
things, the oldest is God; the most beautiful is the world; the swiftest
is thought; the wisest is time." Or that other, that, "Death does not
differ at all from life." Thales also taught that a Divine power was in
all things. The successor of Heraclitus, Anaxagoras (B.C. 494), first
distinguished God from the world, mind from matter, leaving to each an
independent existence.

While the Greek colonies in Asia Minor developed thus the Asiatic form of
philosophy, the colonies in Magna Graecia unfolded the Italian or ideal
side. Of these, Pythagoras was the earliest and most conspicuous. Born at
Samos (B.C. 584), he was a contemporary of Thales of Miletus. He taught
that God was one; yet not outside of the world, but in it, wholly in every
part, overseeing the beginnings of all things and their combinations.[242]

The head of the Italian school, known as Eleatics, was Xenophanes (born
B.C. 600), who, says Zeller,[243] both a philosopher and a poet, taugh