IT BEGAN HERE

             Philosophy and science arose in the sixth century B.C. in the ancient Greek city of Miletus in Asia Minor. It was the wonder and curiosity of the Greeks about this world, rather than concern about the next, that led to the rise of philosophy and science. Discovering the world for the first time not only led these first thinkers to raise new questions about it but also led them to pursue these new questions in a new way. They sought natural rather than supernatural knowledge about the world, and their goal was the achievement of a system of unified knowledge rather than a collection of facts.

             The first philosophers and scientists did not succeed in seeing the world entirely anew. There were a number of beliefs (concerning the genesis, government, and composition of the world) that they inherited from the past, which continued to influence their thinking on the new questions they raised.

            The first philosopher and scientist was Thales, who flourished around 585 B.C. The first question raised by Thales and his successors concerned the nature of "Being." The great variety and profusion of things surrounding us must all have arisen, Thales and his successors speculated, from some one fundamental substance. Picking one of the four elements mentioned by tradition, Thales said that it must all have come from water. Anaximander, believing that it would have been unjust (and a threat to the harmony of the cosmos) for one of the elements to be elevated above the others, speculated that it could not have been any one of the four but something more primitive and prior to them. He identified it as the Boundless-some neutral,

indeterminate, and infinite stuff. Anaximenes, the last member of this school, trying to preserve and synthesize what seemed best in the thought of his two predecessors, suggested that the fundamental stuff was air-a substance not quite so definite as water and not so indefinite and empty as Anaximander's Boundless. The other three elements, he further suggested, arose from it by way of the principle of condensation and rarefaction. 

             Thinkers soon realized that the first question raised and discussed: "What is the nature of that stuff which seems constantly to be changing or becoming something else? " entailed another, even more fundamental question: "What is change itself?" and they turned their attention to it.

             The First to do so was Parmenides, who argued that change or becoming, if we use reason as our guide and are not deceived by what our senses tell us, must be an illusion. Since space, logically, is nothing, and since nothing is not, it does not exist. If there is no space, there cannot be motion in which it can take place, and without motion there cannot be change. Furthermore, since for many things to exist there must be space between them, and since there is no space, all there can be is just one thing. Parmenides called that unitary, unchanging being the It.

             Parmenides's subtle and abstract arguments were strongly reinforced by one of his followers, Zeno the Eleatic, in the form of certain paradoxes that continue to baffle thinkers to this day.

             Heraclitus, a thinker living at about the same time as Parmenides, adopted a diametrically opposite view. Far from change being unreal, it is the most real thing there is. "Everything flows-nothing abides," he said. Concerning the nature of that which is in constant flux, he said it was fire.

             The effort on the part of subsequent thinkers to preserve what was correct in each extreme finally resulted in the theory of atomism, a theory that proved to be an ingenious solution not only to the problem of Becoming but also to the problem of Being. The atomists suggested that the basic stuff out of which everything arises is atoms-tiny, indestructible particles, infinite in number. Bodies, large and small, are collections of atoms and arise and disappear as a result of the generation or dissolution of atoms. Parmenides was correct in maintaining that the real is unchanging, for the real consists of atoms and they do not change; and Heraclitus was correct in insisting on change, for change, too, is real but only happens to complexes of atoms. And the Milesians were correct in seeking a unitary source of Being. Atoms are that source.

             Although it is remarkable that thinkers living in the fifth century B.C. should succeed in arriving at a physical theory that in its essentials is still accepted by science today, what is even more noteworthy about both them and their predecessors was the new spirit that guided their investigations. In them, for the first time, supernaturalism gave way to naturalism, making possible the birth of science and philosophy.