Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/62

(3) All things are full of gods. The magnet is alive; for it has the power of moving iron.^[1]

The first of these statements must be understood in the light of the second, which is expressed in Aristotelian terminology, but would undoubtedly mean that Thales had said water was the stuff of which all other things were transient forms. We have seen that this was the great question of the day.

10.Water. Aristotle and Theophrastos, followed by Simplicius and the doxographers, suggest several explanations of this doctrine. Aristotle gives them as conjectures; it is only later writers that repeat them as if they were quite certain.^[2] The most probable view seems to be that Aristotle ascribed to Thales the arguments used at a later date by Hippon of Samos in support of a similar thesis.^[3] That would account for their physiological character. The rise of scientific medicine had made biological arguments popular in the fifth century; but, in the days of Thales, the prevailing interest was not physiological, but meteorological, and it is from this point of view we must try to understand the theory.

Now it is not hard to see how meteorological considera-

1. Arist. De an. A, 5. 411 a 7 (R. P. 13); ib. 2. 405 a 19 (R. P. 13 a). Diog. i. 24 (R. P. ib.) adds amber.
2. Met. A, 3. 983 b 22 ; Aet. i. 3, 1 ; Simpl. Phys. p. 36, 10 (R. P. 10, 12, 12 a). The last of Aristotle's explanations, that Thales was influenced by cosmogonical theories about Okeanos and Tethys, has strangely been supposed to be more historical than the rest, whereas it is merely a fancy of Plato's taken literally. Plato says (Theaet. 180 d 2; Crat. 402 b 4) that Herakleitos and his predecessors (οἱ ῥέοντες) derived their philosophy from Homer (Il. xiv. 201), and even earlier sources (Orph. frag. 2, Diels, Vors. 66 B 2). In quoting this suggestion, Aristotle refers it to "some"—a word which often means Plato—and he calls the originators of the theory παμπαλαίους, as Plato had done (Met. A, 3. 983 b 28; cf. Theaet. 181 b 3). This is how Aristotle gets history out of Plato. See Note on Sources, § 2.
3. Compare Arist. De an. A, 2. 405 b 2 (R. P. 220) with the passages referred to in the last note. We now know that, though Aristotle declines to consider Hippon as a philosopher (Met. A, 3. 984 a 3; R. P. 219 a), he was discussed in the Peripatetic history of medicine known as Menon's Iatrika. See §185.