them to be the original meaning. Musing in themselves on the
phenomena of nature, they were relieved at being able to utter the
thoughts of their hearts in figures of speech which to them were not
figures, and were already consecrated by tradition. Hesiod and the
Orphic poets moved in a region of half-personification in which the
meaning or principle appeared through the person. In their vaster
conceptions of Chaos, Erebus, Aether, Night, and the like, the first
rude attempts at generalization are dimly seen. The Gods themselves,
especially the greater Gods, such as Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Athene, are
universals as well as individuals. They were gradually becoming lost
in a common conception of mind or God. They continued to exist for the
purposes of ritual or of art; but from the sixth century onwards or even
earlier there arose and gained strength in the minds of men the notion
of 'one God, greatest among Gods and men, who was all sight, all
hearing, all knowing' (Xenophanes).

Under the influence of such ideas, perhaps also deriving from the
traditions of their own or of other nations scraps of medicine and
astronomy, men came to the observation of nature. The Greek philosopher
looked at the blue circle of the heavens and it flashed upon him that
all things were one; the tumult of sense abated, and the mind found
repose in the thought which former generations had been striving to
realize. The first expression of this was some element, rarefied by
degrees into a pure abstraction, and purged from any tincture of sense.
Soon an inner world of ideas began to be unfolded, more absorbing, more
overpowering, more abiding than the brightest of visible objects, which
to the eye of the philosopher looking inward, seemed to pale before
them, retaining only a faint and precarious existence. At the same time,
the minds of men parted into the two great divisions of those who saw
only a principle of motion, and of those who saw only a principle of
rest, in nature and in themselves; there were born Heracliteans or
Eleatics, as there have been in later ages born Aristotelians or
Platonists. Like some philosophers in modern times, who are accused of
making a theory first and finding their facts afterwards, the advocates
of either opinion never thought of applying either to themselves or to
their adversaries the criterion of fact. They were mastered by their
ideas and not masters of them. Like the Heraclitean fanatics whom Plato
has ri