It will be interesting and useful briefly to trace the growth of the ethical tendency in Greek Philosophy, not only as a preparation for the study of Plutarch’s position as an ethical and religious teacher, but also because the prominence of this tendency in the pre-Socratic systems appears to have been greatly underestimated.[54] It has been found so easy, for purposes of historical narrative, to describe a certain philosophical tendency as “physical,” and a certain other as “metaphysical,” that the purely general character of these descriptions has been overlooked. Thales was a natural philosopher, an astronomer, and, if we may trust the “general belief of the Greeks” to which Herodotus alludes in his account of the crossing of the river Halys by Crœsus, a great mechanical engineer as well.[55] But he was something more than this. He was distinguished for great political insight, and was acknowledged to be the greatest of the group of practical philosophers who were known as the Seven Sages.[56] To this group are assigned those famous dicta which, whether inscribed by priests on the walls of temples, or embodied by philosophers in their ethical systems, conveyed a profound moral significance to every member of a Hellenic community. Although no special one of these sayings is ascribed to Thales by name, it would surely be absurd to suppose him deficient in those very qualities which brought fame to the men at whose head he was universally placed. A man who was confessedly a trusted counsellor in Politics would assuredly, in those days, have had something to say on that branch of Politics which was destined eventually to be separated from its parent stem, and to become a distinct branch of philosophical investigation. Anaximander cannot, at this distance of time, be directly associated with the practical problems of human life, but must ever remain wrapped up in his “infinity,” which is neither Air nor Water, nor any other element, but “something that is different from all of them.”[57] It is not, however, without significance in this connexion, that the most striking fragment of his Philosophy that has reached our times is couched in ethical phraseology: “That out of which existing things have their birth must also, _of right_, be their grave when they are destroyed. For they must, by the dispensation of time, _give a just compensation for their injustice_.”[58] We are in equal ignorance of any special ethical teaching of Anaximenes. Heraclitus, however, has a distinctly ethical aspect, in spite of the physical nature of most of his philosophical speculations. Self-knowledge, which is alien to the multitude, who are under the sway of the poets,[59] is already, in Heraclitus, the basis of self-control, as it is in Socrates the basis of all moral excellence.[60] An ordered self-control is the highest of all virtues; even the Sun must not transgress the limits of his sphere, or the Erinnyes, the Ministers