The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the world of impersonal causes.
    Socrates brought the search for meaning down from heaven to earth. While their myths still live, we also owe the Greeks our descent from Olympus. They marked our first steps on the earthly paths of science and philosophy. They led us from the affairs of Apollo and Venus to the chaste realm of elements and ideas. While Job was wrestling with the intentions of his one all-powerful God, a Greek poet, Hesiod (c. 750-675 B.C.), tending sheep on Mount Helicon heard the Muses call him to sing of the gods. His
Theogony
(Birth of the Gods) told tales of their birth, their sexual frolics and gory battles. He told how Uranus and Gaea had emerged from the primordial Chaos, how the Titans had risen. Kronos had castrated his father, Uranus, and out of his blood came the Furies, the Giants, and the Nymphs of the Ash Trees. From his genitals arose the beautiful Aphrodite. Zeus, born of Uranus and Gaea, enlisted the hundred-handed, fifty-headed monsters to defeat the rebellious Titans, and so he ruled Olympus.
    The versatile ancient Ionians, on the islands and shores of western Asia Minor around the Aegean Sea and the eastern coasts of Greece, exercise—and tax—our imagination. To their two Ionian revolutions we owe the origins both of Western science and of Western philosophy. Astonishingly, too, these successive achievements of classical Greece not only were opposite to earlier ways of Greek thought but were quite contrary to each other.
    The first Ionian revolution, pioneered by Thales of Miletus (born c. 624 B.C.), boldly dethroned the gods and replaced them with impersonal elements. Instead of the erotic adventures of Kronos and Uranus, Thales sought permanent substances and general causes. “What is the world made of?” For his new question and his answer Aristotle called him “founder” of a new type of philosophy. Celebrated as the first of the “physicists” seeking the basic elements of nature (in Greek,
physis
), Thales offered a simple sensible answer—“that the principle is water . . . getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist and kept alive by it . . . and from the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water is the origin of the nature of moist things.” Among other “physicists,” Anaximander imagined a primal mass in everlasting motion, while Anaximenes conceived the principle to be air.
    All of them imagined that the different kinds of matter were produced by heat, motion, and other natural processes. This was an epochal axiom of emerging science. Another potent and durable concept was supplied by Pythagoras, an emigrant from the Greek island of Samos to southern Italy (c. 530 B.C.). He saw a Kosmos made of number. The Pythagoreans charmed by their mystic notion of a living breathing universe, by the transmigration of souls, and their cosmology of musical harmony. They took a great leap from the mythic whimsical world of Hesiod to an orderly universe of causes. So they provided a rudimentary vocabulary for science. But only the rudiments.
    In contrast to their other spectacular achievements, the ancient Greeks made remarkably little progress in the physical sciences. Though adept at the application of their knowledge to architecture, metallurgy, pottery, navigation, and astronomy, they left a legacy of obsolete theoretical sciences. Since they never divorced science from philosophy, their science remained, somehow, a search for meaning. And it never outlived its birth in philosophy—in the search for wisdom. They never recovered from their proud divorce of theory from practice. And in fact they created a grand enduring monument to that divorce. Plato’s theory of ideas treated the whole world of experience as somehow unreal, by contrast to the pure and changeless ideas, according to him the only real source of knowledge. This first Ionian revolution—from mythology to “physics”—proved a dead end. The