by the Orphics to mean "sacrament," and was intended to purify the believer's soul and enable it
to escape from the wheel of birth. The Orphics, unlike the priests of Olympian cults, founded
what we may call "churches," i.e. religious communities to which anybody, without distinction
of race or sex, could be admitted by initiation, and from their influence arose the conception of
philosophy as a way of life.
CHAPTER II The Milesian SchoolIN every history of philosophy for students, the first thing mentioned is that philosophy began
with Thales, who said that everything is made of water. This is discouraging to the beginner,
who is struggling--perhaps not very hard--to feel that respect for philosophy which the
curriculum seems to expect. There is, however, ample reason to feel respect for Thales, though
perhaps rather as a man of science than as a philosopher in the modern sense of the word.
Thales was a native of Miletus, in Asia Minor, a flourishing commercial city, in which there
was a large slave population, and a bitter class struggle between the rich and poor among the
free population. "At Miletus the people were at first victorious and murdered the wives and
children of the aristocrats; then the aristocrats prevailed and burned their opponents alive,
lighting up the open spaces of the city with live torches." * Similar conditions prevailed in most
of the Greek cities of Asia Minor at the time of Thales.
Miletus, like other commercial cities of Ionia, underwent important economic and political
developments during the seventh and sixth centuries. At first, political power belonged to a
land-owning aristocracy, but this was gradually replaced by a plutocracy of merchants. They, in
turn, were replaced by a tyrant, who (as was usual) achieved power by the support of the
democratic party. The kingdom of Lydia