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She was not sad, even to think of him crowned with green seaweed, and sitting under the sea-floor with fish-tailed Tritons at their tables of pearl, while the finny shoals like birds flitted above their heads. Thales the Sage made all life proceed out of the sea. Perchance all life should return to it. Then she would find her husband again, not beyond, but within the realms of great Oceanus.
Cleobulus, praising "moderation in all things," would glorify a moral warning of universal application, as to pleasures, riches, and rank; or especially perhaps as preferring true temperance before its modern tee-total false pretences; or lauding some Richard Cromwell's choice of a quiet country life, before the turbulent honours of a proffered Protectorate; while Thales, with his all but old English proverb of "more haste, less speed," would apply admirably to Sultan Mahmoud's ruinous reforms; or to the actual injury gulled Britain has done to the condition of negroes in general by a vastly too precipitate abolition of the slave-trade: a vile evil, indeed, but a cancer of too long creeping to be cured in a day, a rottenness too deeply seated in the frame-work of the world to be extirpated by such caustic surgery as fire and sword; or to be quacked into health by patent gold-salve.
Thales replied, after his wonted smiling way, If it contains any hard question, away with it to Priene. Bias will resolve it with the same readiness he did your former problem. What problem was that? quoth he.
Hitherto the Europeans had been only known to the Egyptians as pirates and cannibals. From the doctrine of Thales, it may be inferred that, though he had visited Egypt, he had never been in communication with its sources of learning, but had merely mingled among the vulgar, from whom he had gathered the popular notion that the first principle is water.
Thales suggested that the Ionians should form themselves into a confederation, to be governed by a congress which should meet at Teos, the several cities retaining their own laws and internal independence, but being united for military purposes into a single community.
The main doctrine of his philosophical system was, that water, or fluid substance was the single original element from which everything came and into which everything returned. ANAXIMANDER, the successor of Thales in the Ionic school, lived from B.C. 610 to 547.
So that it may truly be said that Thales prepared the way for the discipline introduced by Lycurgus.
A certain type of man accepts a certain theory. The Christian view of creation was practically the conception of the Greeks before Thales. This wise man, in the Sixth Century before Christ, taught that the earth was round, and that certain stars were also worlds. He showed that the earth was round and proved it by the disappearance of the ship as it sailed away.
Waife then, once more resorting to the recesses of scholastic memory, plucked therefrom, somewhat by the head and shoulders, sundry names reverenced in a by-gone age. He thought of the seven wise men of Greece, but could only recall the nomenclature of two out of the even, a sad proof of the distinction between collegiate fame and popular renown. He called Thales; he called Bion.
Thales is said to have predicted the solar eclipse which terminated a battle between the Medes and Lydians, but it has been suggestively remarked that it is not stated that he predicted the day on which it should occur.
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