Thales rejected this point of view. But like most well educated people of his day, he did not bother to discuss it in public. If the fruit vendors along the water front wanted to fall upon their faces whenever there was an eclipse of the sun and invoke the name of Zeus in fear of this unusual sight, that was their business and Thales would have been the last man to try to convince them that any schoolboy with an elementary knowledge of the behavior of heavenly bodies would have foretold that on the 25th of May of the year 585 B.C., at such and such an hour, the moon would find herself between the earth and the sun and that therefore the town of Miletus would experience a few minutes of comparative darkness. Even when it appeared (as it did appear) that the Persians and the Lydians had been engaged in battle on the afternoon of this famous eclipse and had been obliged to cease killing each other for lack of sufficient light, he refused to believe that the Lydian deities (following a famous precedent established a few years previously during a certain battle in the valley of Ajalon) had performed a miracle, and had suddenly turned off the light of Heaven that the victory might go to those whom they favored. For Thales had reached the point (and that was his great merit) where he dared to regard all nature as the manifestation of one Eternal Will, subject to one Eternal Law and entirely beyond the personal influence of those divine spirits which man was forever creating after his own image. And the eclipse, so he felt, would have taken place just the same if there had been no more important engagement that particular afternoon than a dog fight in the streets of Ephesus or a wedding feast in Halicarnassus. Drawing the logical conclusions from his own scientific observations, he laid down one general and inevitable law for all creation and guessed (and to a certain extent guessed correctly) that the beginning of all things was to be found in the water which apparently surrounded the world on all sides and which had probably existed from the very beginning of time. Unfortunately we do not possess anything that Thales himself wrote. It is possible that he may have put his ideas into concrete form (for the Greeks had already learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians) but not a page which can be directly attributed to him survives today. For our knowledge of himself and his ideas we depend upon the scanty bits of information found in the books of some of his contemporaries. From these, however, we have learned that Thales in private life was a merchant with wide connections in all parts of the Mediterranean. That, by the way, was typical of most of the early philosophers. They were “lovers of wisdom.” But they never closed their eyes to the fact that the secret of life is found among the living and that “wisdom for the sake of wisdom” is quite as dangerous as “art for art’s sake” or a dinner for the sake of the food.