That this strange person who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle has got hold of a little spark of truth which eventually may upset (or at least greatly modify) the scientific conclusions of the last sixty centuries, is a matter of profound indifference to the millions of easy-going citizens whose interest in mathematics does not reach beyond the conflict which arises when their favorite batsman tries to upset the law of gravity.
The text-books of ancient history usually get rid of the difficulty by printing “Thales of Miletus (640-546 B.C.), the founder of modern science.” And we can almost see the headlines in the “Miletus Gazette” saying, “Local graduate discovers secret of true science.”
But just how and where and when Thales left the beaten track and struck out for himself, I could not possibly tell you. This much is certain, that he did not live in an intellectual vacuum, nor did he develop his wisdom out of his inner consciousness. In the seventh century before Christ, a great deal of the pioneer work in the realm of science had already been done and there was quite a large body of mathematical and physical and astronomical information at the disposal of those intelligent enough to make use of it.
Babylonian star-gazers had searched the heavens.
Egyptian architects had done considerable figuring before they dared to dump a couple of million tons of granite on top of a little burial chamber in the heart of a pyramid.
The mathematicians of the Nile Valley had seriously studied the behavior of the sun that they might predict the wet and dry seasons and give the peasants a calendar by which they could regulate their work on the farms.
All these problems, however, had been solved by people who still regarded the forces of nature as the direct and personal expression of the will of certain invisible Gods who administered the seasons and the course of the planets and the tides of the ocean as the members of the President’s cabinet manage the department of agriculture or the post-office or the treasury.
Thales rejected this point of view. But like most well educated people of his day, he did not bother to discuss it in public. If the fruit vendors along the water front wanted to fall upon their faces whenever there was an eclipse of the sun and invoke the name of Zeus in fear of this unusual sight, that was their business and Thales would have been the last man to try to convince them that any schoolboy with an elementary knowledge of the behavior of heavenly bodies would have foretold that on the 25th of May of the year 585 B.C., at such and such an hour, the moon would find herself between the earth and the sun and that therefore the town of Miletus would experience a few minutes of comparative darkness.
Even when it appeared (as it did appear) that the Persians and the Lydians had been engaged in battle on the afternoon of this famous eclipse and had been obliged to cease killing each other for lack of sufficient light, he refused to believe that the Lydian deities (following a famous precedent established a few years previously during a certain battle in the valley of Ajalon) had performed a miracle, and had suddenly turned off the light of Heaven that the victory might go to those whom they favored.
For Thales had reached the point (and that was his great merit) where he dared to regard all nature as the manifestation of one Eternal Will, subject to one Eternal Law and entirely beyond the personal influence of those divine spirits which man was forever creating after his own image. And the eclipse, so he felt, would have taken place just the same if there had been no more important engagement that particular afternoon than a dog fight in the streets of Ephesus or a wedding feast in Halicarnassus.