THALES OF MILETUS (about 609 B.C.), the Ionian philosopher, introduced Egyptian and Asiatic science into Greece. He had probably in his travels in the land of the Pharaohs devoted himself to mathematical pursuits, and if not a scientific inquirer was a deep speculator on the origin of things. He held that everything arises from water, and everything ultimately again resolves itself into water. Everything, he said, is full of gods; the soul originates motion (the magnet has a soul, according to him), and so the indwelling power or soul of water produces the phenomena of the natural world. He must not, however, be understood as teaching the doctrine of the Soul of the Universe, or of a Creating Deity. Thales was the first writer on physics and the founder of the philosophy of Greece. Le Clerc connects him with medicine by his converse with the priest-physicians of Egypt, and that he had performed certain expiatory or purifying ceremonies for the Lacedæmonians which could only be done by such as were divines and physicians.[347] PHERECYDES, the Syrian, a philosopher who lived about the same time as Thales, is said by Galen to have written upon diet. EPIMENEDES was a sort of Greek Rip Van Winkle, who purified Athens in the time of a plague by means of mysterious rites and sacrifices. He excelled as a fasting man, so that he was said to have been exempt from the ordinary necessities of nature, and could send out his soul from his body and recall it like the Mahatmas. He was of the class of priestly bards, a seer and prophet who was well acquainted with the virtues of plants for medicinal purposes, and as he was believed to have gone to sleep in a cave for fifty-seven years, he was credited with the possession of supernatural medicinal powers.[348] ANAXIMANDER, born B.C. 610, is said to have been a pupil of Thales. He taught that a single determinate substance having a middle nature between water and air was the infinite, everlasting, and divine, though not intelligent material from which all things had their origin. This he called the ἄπειρον, the chaos. All substances were derived thence by the conflict of heat and cold and the electric affinities of the particles. The atomic theory is foreshadowed here. ANAXIMENES was the friend of Thales and Anaximander, and all three were born at Miletus. He considered that air was the first cause of all things, or primary condition of matter; all finite things were formed from the infinite air by compression or rarefaction produced by eternal motion. Heat and cold are produced by the varying density of the primal element. He held the eternity of matter like his brother philosophers, and believed that the soul itself is merely a form of air. He held no Divine Author of the Universe, motion being a necessary law of the universe, and with motion and air he required nothing else for the constitution of all things.