We do not read of any remarkable philosophical inquirer until Thales arose, the first of the Ionian school.  He was born at Miletus, a Greek colony in Asia Minor, about the year 636 B.C., when Ancus Martius was king of Rome, and Josiah reigned at Jerusalem.  He has left no writings behind him, but was numbered as one of the seven wise men of Greece on account of his political sagacity and wisdom in public affairs.  I do not here speak of his astronomical and geometrical labors, which were great, and which have left their mark even upon our own daily life,—­as, for instance, in the fact that he was the first to have divided the year into three hundred and sixty-five days.

     “And he, ’tis said, did first compute the stars
     Which beam in Charles’s wain, and guide the bark
     Of the Phoenecian sailor o’er the sea.”

He is celebrated also for practical wisdom.  “Know thyself,” is one of his remarkable sayings.  The chief claim of Thales to a lofty rank among sages, however, is that he was the first who attempted a logical solution of material phenomena, without resorting to mythical representations.  Thales felt that there was a grand question to be answered relative to the beginning of things. “Philosophy,” it has been well said, “maybe a history of errors^ but not of follies”.  It was not a folly, in a rude age, to speculate on the first or fundamental principle of things.  Thales looked around him upon Nature, upon the sea and earth and sky, and concluded that water or moisture was the vital principle.  He felt it in the air, he saw it in the clouds above and in the ground beneath his feet.  He saw that plants were sustained by rain and by the dew, that neither animal nor man could live without water, and that to fishes it was the native element.  What more important or vital than water?  It was the prima materia, the [Greek:  archae] the beginning of all things,—­the origin of the world.  How so crude a speculation could have been maintained by so wise a man it is difficult to conjecture.  It is not, however, the cause which he assigns for the beginning of things which is noteworthy, so much as the fact that his mind was directed to any solution of questions pertaining to the origin of the universe.  It was these questions, and the solution of them, which marked the Ionian philosophers, and which showed the inquiring nature of their minds.  What is the great first cause of all things?  Thales saw it in one of the four elements of Nature as the ancients divided them; and this is the earliest recorded theory among the Greeks of the origin of the world.  It is an induction from one of the phenomena of animated Nature,—­the nutrition and production of a seed.  He regarded the entire world in the light of a living being gradually maturing and forming itself from an imperfect seed-state, which was of a moist nature.  This moisture endues the universe with vitality.  The world, he thought, was full of gods, but they had their origin in water.  He had no conception of God as intelligence, or as a creative power.  He had a great and inquiring mind, but it gave him no knowledge of a spiritual, controlling, and personal deity.