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From, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, The early Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 1-25.
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Page 5
The history of Greek philosophy can be conveniently divided into periods which show a real difference of outlook and interest, corresponding in part to changes of outward circumstances and habits of life. They also differ in the locality of the centres from which the main intellectual influences were exerted upon the Greek world. At the same time, if this division is adopted, it is important not to lose sight of the equally real continuity that runs through the whole development of thought from the Milesians to the Neoplatonists. To bring out this continuity, it will be worth while attempting a brief sketch of the development of Greek philosophy before we proceed to consider it in detail. The next few pages may be regarded as a map of the country which we have to traverse, and it is always as well to run the eye over the map before setting out on the journey itself.
Our attention is first directed to the eastern fringe of Greek settlement. Here in Ionia, on the western border of Asia Minor under Lydian and Persian rule, something happened in the sixth century before Christ which we call the beginning of European philosophy. Here opened the first, or Presocratic period of our subject, with the Milesian school. These men, inhabitants of one of the largest and most prosperous of Greek cities, with numerous colonies of her own and widespread foreign contacts, were endowed with an indefatigable curiosity about the nature of the external world, the process by which it reached its present state, and its physical composition. In their attempts to satisfy this intellectual craving for knowledge, they by no means excluded the possibility of divine agency, but they reached a conception of it very different from the polytheism current in contemporary Greek society. They believed that the world arose out of a primal unity, and that this one substance was still the permanent base of all its being, though now appearing in different forms and manifestations. The changes were rendered possible by an everlasting motion of the primary stuff due, not to any external agent, but to its own essential animation. The distinction between a material and an efficient principle had not yet been felt, and the primary entity, since it lived for ever and was the author of its own movement and change, and of all the ordered world of earth, sky and sea, was naturally thought to merit the epithet 'divine'.
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=5
