The freedom from great centralized government, the development of the individual life, the influences of the early ideas of art and life, and the religious conceptions, were of great importance in shaping the Greek philosophy and the Greek {214} national character. They had a tendency to develop men who could think and act. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first real historical period was characterized by struggles of citizens within the town for supremacy. Fierce quarrels between the upper and the lower classes prevailed everywhere, and resulted in developing an intense hatred of the former for the latter. This hatred and selfishness became the uppermost causes of action in the development of Greek social polity. Strife led to compromise, and this in turn to the recognition of the rights and privileges of different classes. SUBJECTS FOR FURTHER STUDY 1. The Aegean culture. 2. The relation of Greek to Egyptian culture. 3. What were the great Greek masterpieces of (_a_) Literature, (_b_) Sculpture, (_c_) Architecture, (_d_) Art, (_e_) Philosophy? 4. Compare Greek democracy with American democracy. 5. What historical significance have Thermopylae, Marathon, Alexandria, Crete, and Delphi? [1] Sergi, in his _Mediterranean Race_, says that they came from N. E. Africa. Beginning about 5000 years B.C., they gradually infiltrated the whole Mediterranean region. This is becoming the general belief among ethnologists, archaeologists, and historians. [2] Recent studies indicate that some of the Cretan inscriptions are prototypes of the Greece-Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenicians evidently derived the original characters of their alphabet from a number of sources. The Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet about 800-1000 B.C. {215} CHAPTER XIII GREEK PHILOSOPHY _The Transition from Theology to Inquiry_.--The Greek theology prepared the way for the Ionian philosophy. The religious opinions led directly up to the philosophy of the early inquirers. The Greeks passed slowly from accepting everything with a blind faith to the rational inquiry into the development of nature. The beginnings of knowing the scientific causes were very small, and sometimes ridiculous, yet they were of immense importance. To take a single step from the "age of credulity" toward the "age of reason" was of great importance to Greek progress. To cease to accept on faith the statements that the world was created by the gods, and ordered by the gods, and that all mysteries were in their hands, and to endeavor to find out by observation of natural phenomena something of the elements of nature, was to gradually break from the mythology of the past as explanatory of the creation. The first feeble attempt at this was to seek in a crude way the material structure and source of the universe.