only dig with his hands because he was unprovided with common tools; or to
some poet or musician, like Tynnichus (Ion), obliged to accommodate his
lyric raptures to the limits of the tetrachord or of the flute.

The Hesiodic and Orphic cosmogonies were a phase of thought intermediate
between mythology and philosophy and had a great influence on the
beginnings of knowledge. There was nothing behind them; they were to
physical science what the poems of Homer were to early Greek history. They
made men think of the world as a whole; they carried the mind back into the
infinity of past time; they suggested the first observation of the effects
of fire and water on the earth's surface. To the ancient physics they
stood much in the same relation which geology does to modern science. But
the Greek was not, like the enquirer of the last generation, confined to a
period of six thousand years; he was able to speculate freely on the
effects of infinite ages in the production of physical phenomena. He could
imagine cities which had existed time out of mind (States.; Laws), laws or
forms of art and music which had lasted, 'not in word only, but in very
truth, for ten thousand years' (Laws); he was aware that natural phenomena
like the Delta of the Nile might have slowly accumulated in long periods of
time (Hdt.). But he seems to have supposed that the course of events was
recurring rather than progressive. To this he was probably led by the
fixedness of Egyptian customs and the general observation that there were
other civilisations in the world more ancient than that of Hellas.

The ancient philosophers found in mythology many ideas which, if not
originally derived from nature, were easily transferred to her--such, for
example, as love or hate, corresponding to attraction or repulsion; or the
conception of necessity allied both to the regularity and irregularity of
nature; or of chance, the nameless or unknown cause; or of justice,
symbolizing the law of compensation; are of the Fates and Furies, typifying