and back again
from the universe to man. While he was arranging the world, he was
arranging the forms of thought in his own mind; and the light from
within and the light from without often crossed and helped to confuse
one another. He might be compared to a builder engaged in some great
design, who could only dig with his hands because he was unprovided with
common tools; or to some poet or musician, like Tynnichus (Ion), obliged
to accommodate his lyric raptures to the limits of the tetrachord or of
the flute.

The Hesiodic and Orphic cosmogonies were a phase of thought intermediate
between mythology and philosophy and had a great influence on the
beginnings of knowledge. There was nothing behind them; they were to
physical science what the poems of Homer were to early Greek history.
They made men think of the world as a whole; they carried the mind back
into the infinity of past time; they suggested the first observation
of the effects of fire and water on the earth's surface. To the ancient
physics they stood much in the same relation which geology does to
modern science. But the Greek was not, like the enquirer of the last
generation, confined to a period of six thousand years; he was able to
speculate freely on the effects of infinite ages in the production of
physical phenomena. He could imagine cities which had existed time
out of mind (States.; Laws), laws or forms of art and music which had
lasted, 'not in word only, but in very truth, for ten thousand years'
(Laws); he was aware that natural phenomena like the Delta of the Nile
might have slowly accumulated in long periods of time (Hdt.). But he
seems to have supposed that the course of events was recurring rather
than progressive. To this he was probably led by the fixedness of
Egyptian customs and the general observation that there were other
civilisations in the world more ancient than that of Hellas.

The ancient philosophers found in mythology many ideas which, if not
originally derived from nature, were easily transferred to her--such,
for example, as love or hate, corresponding to attraction or repulsion;
or the conception of necessity allied both to the regularity and
irregularity of nature; or of chance, the nameless or unknown cause; or
of justice, symbolizing the law of compensation; are of the Fates and
Furies, typifying the fixed order or the extraordinary convulsions of
nature. Their own interpretations of Homer and the poets were supposed
by