the fixed order or the extraordinary convulsions of nature. Their own
interpretations of Homer and the poets were supposed by them to be the
original meaning. Musing in themselves on the phenomena of nature, they
were relieved at being able to utter the thoughts of their hearts in
figures of speech which to them were not figures, and were already
consecrated by tradition. Hesiod and the Orphic poets moved in a region of
half-personification in which the meaning or principle appeared through the
person. In their vaster conceptions of Chaos, Erebus, Aether, Night, and
the like, the first rude attempts at generalization are dimly seen. The
Gods themselves, especially the greater Gods, such as Zeus, Poseidon,
Apollo, Athene, are universals as well as individuals. They were gradually
becoming lost in a common conception of mind or God. They continued to
exist for the purposes of ritual or of art; but from the sixth century
onwards or even earlier there arose and gained strength in the minds of men
the notion of 'one God, greatest among Gods and men, who was all sight, all
hearing, all knowing' (Xenophanes).

Under the influence of such ideas, perhaps also deriving from the
traditions of their own or of other nations scraps of medicine and
astronomy, men came to the observation of nature. The Greek philosopher
looked at the blue circle of the heavens and it flashed upon him that all
things were one; the tumult of sense abated, and the mind found repose in
the thought which former generations had been striving to realize. The
first expression of this was some element, rarefied by degrees into a pure
abstraction, and purged from any tincture of sense. Soon an inner world of
ideas began to be unfolded, more absorbing, more overpowering, more abiding
than the brightest of visible objects, which to the eye of the philosopher
looking inward, seemed to pale before them, retaining only a faint and
precarious existence. At the same time, the minds of men parted into the
two great divisions of those who saw only a principle of motion, and of