Drawing the logical conclusions from his own scientific observations, he laid down one general and inevitable law for all creation and guessed (and to a certain extent guessed correctly) that the beginning of all things was to be found in the water which apparently surrounded the world on all sides and which had probably existed from the very beginning of time.
Unfortunately we do not possess anything that Thales himself wrote. It is possible that he may have put his ideas into concrete form (for the Greeks had already learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians) but not a page which can be directly attributed to him survives today. For our knowledge of himself and his ideas we depend upon the scanty bits of information found in the books of some of his contemporaries. From these, however, we have learned that Thales in private life was a merchant with wide connections in all parts of the Mediterranean. That, by the way, was typical of most of the early philosophers. They were “lovers of wisdom.” But they never closed their eyes to the fact that the secret of life is found among the living and that “wisdom for the sake of wisdom” is quite as dangerous as “art for art’s sake” or a dinner for the sake of the food.
To them, man with all his human qualities, good and bad and indifferent, was the supreme measure of all things. Wherefore they spent their leisure time patiently studying this strange creature as he was and not as they thought that he ought to be.
This made it possible for them to remain on the most amicable terms with their fellow citizens and allowed them to wield a much greater power than if they had undertaken to show their neighbors a short cut to the Millennium.
They rarely laid down a hard and fast rule of conduct.
But by their own example they managed to show how a true understanding of the forces of nature must inevitably lead to that inner peace of the soul upon which all true happiness depends and having in this way gained the good-will of their community they were given full liberty to study and explore and investigate and were even permitted to venture within those domains which were popularly believed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. And as one of the pioneers of this new gospel did Thales spend the long years of his useful career.
Although he had pulled the entire world of the Greeks apart, although he had examined each little piece separately, and had openly questioned all sorts of things which the majority of the people since the beginning of time had held to be established facts, he was allowed to die peacefully in his own bed, and if any one ever called him to account for his heresies, we fail to have a record of the fact.
And once he had shown the way, there were many others eager to follow.
There was, for example, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who left Asia Minor for Athens at the age of thirty-six and spent the following years as a “sophist” or private tutor in different Greek cities. He specialized in astronomy and among other things he taught that the sun was not a heavenly chariot, driven by a God, as was generally believed, but a red-hot ball of fire, thousands and thousands of times larger than the whole of Greece.
When nothing happened to him, when no bolt from Heaven killed him for his audacity, he went a little further in his theories and stated boldly that the moon was covered with mountains and valleys and finally he even hinted at a certain “original matter” which was the beginning and the end of all things and which had existed from the very beginning of time.