XIII. It is necessary to say something as to the scientific worth of the philosophy we are about to study. We have just seen that the Eastern peoples were, at the time of which we write, considerably richer than the Greeks in accumulated facts, though these facts had certainly not been observed for any scientific purpose, and their possession never suggested a revision of the primitive view of the world. The Greeks, however, saw in them something that could be turned to account, and they were never as a people slow to act on the maxim, _Chacun prend son bien partout où il le trouve_. The most striking monument of this spirit which has come down to us is the work of Herodotos; and the visit of Solon to Croesus which he describes, however unhistorical it may be, gives a very lively and faithful picture of it. Croesus tells Solon that he has heard much of “his wisdom and his wanderings,” and how, from love of knowledge (φιλοσοφέων), he has travelled over much land for the purpose of seeing what was to be seen (θεωρίης εἵνεκεν). The words θεωρίη, φιλοσοφίη, and ἱστορίη are, in fact, the catchwords of the time, though they had, we must remember, a somewhat different meaning from that which they were afterwards made to bear at Athens.[42] The idea that underlies them all may, perhaps, be best rendered in English by the word _Curiosity_; and it was just this great gift of curiosity, and the desire to see all the wonderful things—pyramids, inundations, and so forth—that were to be seen, which enabled the Greeks to pick up and turn to their own use such scraps of knowledge as they could come by among the barbarians. No sooner did a Greek philosopher learn half a dozen geometrical propositions, and hear that the phenomena of the heavens recur in cycles, than he set to work to look for law everywhere in nature, and, with a splendid audacity, almost amounting to ὕβρις, to construct a system of the universe. We may smile, if we please, at the strange medley of childish fancy and true scientific insight which these Titanic efforts display, and sometimes we feel disposed to sympathise with the sages of the day who warned their more daring contemporaries “to think the thoughts befitting man’s estate” (ἀνθρώπινα φρονεῖν). But we shall do well to remember at the same time that even now it is just such hardy anticipations of experience that make scientific progress possible, and that nearly every one of the early inquirers whom we are about to study made some permanent addition to the store of positive knowledge, besides opening up new views of the world in every direction. Footnote 42: Still, the word θεωρία never wholly lost its early associations, and the Greeks always felt that the θεωρητικὸς βίος meant literally “the life of the spectator.” Its special use, and the whole theory of the “three lives,” seem to be of Pythagorean origin. See my edition of Aristotle’s _Ethics_, p. 19 n.