Contrasted with the psychical condition of India, we cannot but be struck with the feebleness of these first European efforts. They correspond to that period in which the mind has shaken off its ideas of sorcery, but has not advanced beyond geocentral and anthropocentral conceptions. As is uniformly observed, as soon as man has collected what he considers to be trustworthy data, he forthwith applies them to a cosmogony, and develops pseudo-scientific systems. It is not until a later period that he awakens to the suspicion that we have no absolute knowledge of truth. The reader, who might, perhaps, be repelled by the apparent worthlessness of the succession of Greek opinions now to be described, will find them assume an interest, if considered in the aggregate, or viewed as a series of steps or stages of European approach to conclusions long before arrived at in Egypt and India. Far in advance of anything that Greece can offer, the intellectual history of India furnishes systems at once consistent and imposing--systems not remaining useless speculations, but becoming inwoven in social life. [Sidenote: Commences in Asia Minor.] Greek philosophy is considered as having originated with Thales, who, though of Phoenician descent, was born at Miletus, a Greek colony in Asia Minor, about B.C. 640. At that time, as related in the last chapter, the Egyptian ports had been opened to foreigners by Psammetichus. In the civil war which that monarch had been waging with his colleagues, he owed his success to Ionian and other Greek mercenaries whom he had employed; but, though proving victor in the contest, his political position was such as to compel him to depart from the maxims followed in his country for so many thousand years, and to permit foreigners to have access to it. Hitherto the Europeans had been only known to the Egyptians as pirates and cannibals. [Sidenote: Doctrine of Thales] [Sidenote: is derived from Egypt.] [Sidenote: Importance of water in Egypt.]