Thales was well versed in the scientific learning of the East – and probably traveled to Egypt to study the mathematics, geometry and astronomy of the Egyptians.  He put his learning to work as a military engineer – and was fabled for his scientific genius.  He predicted a solar eclipse, measured the shadows of objects (from pyramids to ships) to estimate their distances or locations.  It is reported of him that he even diverted a river in order to better position the Milesian army against an enemy city.

But it is in the area of philosophical thought that Thales is best remembered.  Thales was interested in discovering, through the process of rational enquiry, the essence or substance of all matter.  He looked out on the world as a by-product of  some material substance – a single substance which by its own makeup or inner mechanics could bring into being all other things.  For him that single substance was water.  Perhaps such a conclusion was inevitable for one who grew up near the sea and who undoubtedly often watched the power of the clouds above and the waves below during a tempest.  But remember also that the ancient world widely shared the view that creation emerged from a watery void.

Thus in ascribing the dynamics of the universe to water as the formative substance, rather than to the gods as the formative powers, he became our first known "materialist" or "secularist.

Thales' rational inquiry was taken up by Anaximander (ann-AKS-imander), reported by some to have been a student of Thales.'  In many ways he continued the intellectual tradition of Thales, becoming enlightened in a number of the sciences of the day.  He is reported to have written down his vast learning on a wide range of subjects – though we have today only a small portion of his work, Concerning Nature.

We know also however that Anaximander objected to Thales' theory – on the basis that water could not be the formative substance of life and yet at the same time one of its end products.  Anaximander speculated that the original substance of the universe was some kind of primal, formless material which is found infinitely throughout creation – the material source of all created things (including water) and the material into which the universe will eventually return. 

He also speculated that the world was the result of a process of moving forces, a process that holds the universe steadily on its course – and leads it into the future.  He saw this process as one ultimately of moving all things to maintain or restore a primal balance, one in which the multitude of forces in the cosmos work in the long run to counterbalance each in order to produce a basic harmony.  Hot balances cold, dry balances wet, etc. to provide a cosmic harmony.  But the actual dynamic of life involves a separation of these opposites – a falling into their particulars (an act of cosmic ‘injustice’), from which then a basic urge toward harmony (a return toward ‘justice’) moves them forward.  This is the cause of motion or action in the universe:  the urge to reharmonize.

He speculated that the earth was a solid object hanging in a fixed position in the emptiness of space because it was equidistant from everything else, the very center of balance of all the forces in the universe.  He might have viewed the world therefore as a ball or globe at the very center of  the universe, but the flatness of the earth seemed so self evident that he supposed instead that the earth might be a huge cylinder, like a drum.  We move around on one of the flat sides of the drum, held in place by balancing forces arising from the other flat side of the drum.

Anaximander really was raising the ‘teleological’ issue in philosophy.  He looked at creation, at life, from the point of view of where did things (material things) come from, why were they here, and what was their destiny.  He too rejected the notion that this was all a matter of the doings of the gods on Olympus. And he too, like Thales, surmised that the vital forces of life are somehow contained within the ‘stuff’ of life itself.  He, like Thales, was a materialist – and also an evolutionist!