Thales, the parent of the Western Philosophy

Thales of Miletus , ca. 624 BC–ca. 546 BC), was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition. According to Bertrand Russell, "Western philosophy begins with Thales."

Thales was surely an exceptional man, but he was not the only thinker in ancient Greece whose thoughts were ahead of his time. For instance, the idea that all forms of substances can be reduced to a few elements and that every form of matter are made of these elements, is essentially Greek, and was conceived around the time of Thales.
Thales stated that the origin of all matter is water. Although this sounds a bit odd, there may be some truth in it. As we know today, the largest constituent of the universe is hydrogen, which makes two of the three atoms in water (H2O). The missing oxygen atom was added later when our planet formed. Scientists believe that liquid water is prerequisite to life, and we know with certainty that the first life forms flourished in the oceans, so water is indeed a primordial substance.

Water as a first principle

Thales' most famous belief was his cosmological thesis, which held that the world started from water. Aristotle considered this belief roughly equivalent to the later ideas of Anaximenes, who held that everything in the world was composed of air. The best explanation of Thales' view is the following passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics. The passage contains words from the theory of matter and form that were adopted by science with quite different meanings.

"That from which is everything that exists and from which it first becomes and into which it is rendered at last, its substance remaining under it, but transforming in qualities, that they say is the element and principle of things that are." And again:

"For it is necessary that there be some nature, either one or more than one, from which become the other things of the object being saved... Thales the founder of this type of philosophy says that it is water."
Aristotle's depiction of the change problem and the definition of substance is clear. If an object changes, is it the same or different? In either case how can there be a change from one to the other? The answer is that the substance "is saved", but acquires or loses different qualities.

A deeper dip into the waters of the theory of matter and form is properly reserved to other articles. The question for this article is, how far does Aristotle reflect Thales? He was probably not far off, and Thales was probably an incipient matter-and-formist. The essentially non-philosophic Diogenes Laertius states that Thales taught as follows: "Water constituted the principle of all things."
Heraclitus Homericus states that Thales drew his conclusion from seeing moist substance turn into air, slime and earth. It seems clear that Thales viewed the Earth as solidifying from the water on which it floated and which surrounded Ocean.

Beliefs in divinity

Thales applied his method to objects that changed to become other objects, such as water into earth (he thought). But what about the changing itself? Thales did address the topic, approaching it through lodestone and amber, which, when electrified by rubbing, attracts also. A concern for magnetism and electrification never left science, being a major part of it today.

How was the power to move other things without the mover’s changing to be explained? Thales saw a commonality with the powers of living things to act. The lodestone and the amber must be alive, and if that were so, there could be no difference between the living and the dead. When asked why he didn’t die if there was no difference, he replied “because there is no difference.”

Aristotle defined the soul as the principle of life, that which imbues the matter and makes it live, giving it the animation, or power to act. The idea did not originate with him, as the Greeks in general believed in the distinction between mind and matter, which was ultimately to lead to a distinction not only between body and soul but also between matter and energy.

If things were alive, they must have souls. This belief was no innovation, as the ordinary ancient populations of the Mediterranean did believe that natural actions were caused by divinities. Accordingly, the sources say that Thales believed all things possessed divinities. In their zeal to make him the first in everything they said he was the first to hold the belief, which even they must have known was not true.

However, Thales was looking for something more general, a universal substance of mind. That also was in the polytheism of the times. Zeus was the very personification of supreme mind, dominating all the subordinate manifestations. From Thales on, however, philosophers had a tendency to depersonify or objectify mind, as though it were the substance of animation per se and not actually a god like the other gods. The end result was a total removal of mind from substance, opening the door to a non-divine principle of action. This tradition persisted until Einstein, whose cosmology is quite a different one and does not distinguish between matter and energy.

Classical thought, however, had proceeded only a little way along that path. Instead of referring to the person, Zeus, they talked about the great mind:

"Thales", says Cicero, "assures that water is the principle of all things; and that God is that Mind which shaped and created all things from water."

Nazim Ahmed, ELL, SUB