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We shall find that, in spite of the plausibility with which the talent of Marx invested it, this basic doctrine of so-called scientific socialism is the greatest intellectual mare's-nest of the century which has just ended; and when once we have realised with precision on what, in the modern world, the actual efficiency of the productive process depends, we shall see that the analysis of Marx bears about the same relation to the economic facts of to-day that the child's analysis of matter into the four traditional elements, or the doctrine of Thales that everything is made of water, bears to the facts of chemistry as modern science has revealed them to us.
As to the profound meaning which some have been disposed to extract from the dogma of Thales, we shall, perhaps, be warranted in rejecting it altogether.
As Thales was talking after this fashion, in comes a servant and tells us it was Periander's pleasure we would come in and inform him what we thought of a certain creature brought into his presence that instant, whether it were so born by chance or were a monster and omen; himself seeming mightily affected and concerned, for he judged his sacrifice polluted by it.
First of all Thales thought that water was the primordial substance of all things. Democritus and his follower Epicurus thought that it was the atoms, termed by our writers "bodies that cannot be cut up," or, by some, "indivisibles." The school of the Pythagoreans added air and the earthy to the water and fire.
It was in this active, prosperous, enterprising state, and at the period of its highest activity, that Thales, statesman, practical engineer, mathematician, philosopher, flourished. Without attempting to fix his date too closely, we may take it that he was a leading man in Miletus for the greater part of the first half of the sixth century before Christ.
"Certainly," I said to my genius, "the barbarians who immolated all these victims had never read these beautiful words." We then saw the Zaleucus, the Thales, the Aniximanders, and all the sages who had sought truth and practised virtue. When we came to Socrates, I recognized him very quickly by his flat nose. "Well," I said to him, "here you are then among the number of the Almighty's confidants!
"I belong to the school of Thales, who held that the ocean is the mother of all life; and feel no more repugnance at returning to her bosom again than Humphrey Gilbert did." "But, Frank, my mother?" "My mother knows all; and would not have us unworthy of her." "Impossible! She will never give you up!" "All things are possible to them that believe in God, my brother; and she believes.
The speculations of Thales had tended toward discovering the material constitution of the universe upon an induction from observed facts, and thus made water to be the origin of all things. Anaximander, accustomed to view things in the abstract, could not accept so concrete a thing as water; his speculations tended toward mathematics, to the science of pure deduction.
Thales of Miletus, a natural philosopher and astronomer, as we should describe him, believed matter namely, that of which all things and all beings are made to be in perpetual transformation, and that these transformations are produced by powerful beings attached to every portion of matter. These powerful beings were gods. Everything, therefore, was full of gods. His philosophy was a mythology.
Thales, Solon, Eudoxus, Pythagoras, and Plato, all studied there, perhaps Moses too. In front of one of the principal temples of the sun, in this magnificent city, stood along with a companion, long since destroyed, the solitary obelisk which we now behold on the spot.
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