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Hatch held the fort, however, translating and serving as guide for travelers, and occasionally having to threaten with his pistol redskins who menaced him with their bows and arrows. After a fortnight, Jacob Hamblin sent him a companion, Thales Haskell, another noted pioneer, and together the two spent the balance of the winter in the lonely outpost.
Thales, the Milesian, thanks in part at least to this accomplishment, had been known in life as first on the list of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, and had passed into history as the father of Greek philosophy.
No doubt Thales, when he was in Egypt, would see diagrams drawn to illustrate the rules for the measurement of circles and other plane figures, and these diagrams would suggest to him certain similarities and congruences which would set him thinking whether there were not some elementary general principles underlying the construction and relations of different figures and parts of figures.
I have introduced it here, because this belief of Aristotle, or rather of the Greek philosophers generally, is as fatal as the doctrines of Thales and the Ionic school to the theory that the human mind is compelled by its constitution to conceive volition as the origin of all force, and the efficient cause of all phenomena.
The speculations of Thales 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.
He does not, like Thales, strive to find out the beginning of all things, but the highest good, by which his immortal soul may be refreshed and prepared for the future life he cannot solve, yet in which he believes.
It is next to be remarked that all generalizations which profess, like the theories of Thales, Democritus, and others of the early Greek speculators, to resolve all things into some one element, or like many modern theories, to resolve phenomena radically different into the same, are necessarily false.
Moreover, he taught that the whole world is an insouled thing, and that it is full of dæmons. Thales had, therefore, not completely passed out of the stage of sorcery. His system obtained importance not only from its own plausibility, but because it was introduced under favourable auspices and at a favourable time.
That he did not mean Water, in the ordinary prosaic sense, to be identical with this, is suggested by some other sayings of his. "Thales," says Aristotle elsewhere, "thought the whole universe was full of gods."
Homer among the poets, Thales among philosophers, Herodotus, the father of history, Hippocrates, the oracle of physicians, Apelles, the prince of painters, were among their citizens; and Pythius, who presented one of the Persian Kings with a plane-tree and a vine of massive gold, was in his day, after those kings, the richest man in the known world.
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