There is here the germ of a
new aspiration, of a determination not to rest in the merely momentary and
different, but at least to try, even against the apparent evidence of the
senses, for something more permanently intelligible. As a first suggestion
of what this permanent underlying reality may be, Water might very
well pass. It is probable that even to Thales himself it was only a symbol,
like the figure in a mathematical proposition, representing by the first
passable physical phenomenon which came to hand, that ideal reality
underlying all change, which is at once the beginning, the middle, and the
end of all.
That he did not mean Water,
in the ordinary prosaic sense, to be identical with this, is suggested by
some other sayings of his. “Thales,” says Aristotle elsewhere, “thought the
whole universe was full of gods.” “All things,” he is recorded as saying,
“have a soul in them, in virtue of which they move other things, and
are themselves moved, even as the magnet, by virtue of its life or soul,
moves the iron.”
WWithout pushing these
fragmentary utterances too far, we may well conclude that whether Thales
spoke of the soul of the universe and its divine indwelling powers, or gods,
or of water as the origin of things, he was only vaguely symbolising in
different ways an idea as yet formless and void, like the primeval chaos,
but nevertheless, like it, containing within it a promise and a potency of
greater life hereafter.
A History of Greek Philosophy /
THE SCHOOL OF MILETUS /
THALES
