The ancient Greeks from the sixth century BCE rather quickly began to lose faith in the ancient legends about the origin of the world, told by Homer, Hesiod, and other early poets; about how Uranus had fathered the Titans with Mother Earth and how the Titans fought and lost to Zeus and the other gods for dominance of the world.
They no longer seemed believable; they even seemed deliberately misleading. Instead, the question that every Greek sage before Socrates wanted to answer was: “What is real about reality?” More specically, what is the stuff from which everything else in the world is made?Thales and his fellow pre-Socratics, as they are called, came up with a variety of answers, some more speculative than others. Only fragments of their words have survived. Reconstructing their thought process involves a certain amount of guesswork.
But almost all agreed that water, air, fire, and earth were the key constituents of material reality—although which came first, or which held sway over the others,* was a matter of long and intense debate. Thales himself opted for water as the first element from which all things, even the sun and stars, were made (a notion he may have picked up from Egyptian cosmology). Anaximenes proposed air instead. Democritus and Leucippus were willing to take another tack. They insisted that all four elements, and everything else, were actually made up from tiny indivisible particles they called atoms—an astonishing anticipation of the modern atomic theory to come twenty-four centuries later.
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