In the first beginnings of culture, however, we are more often met by this admixture of Philosophy and general knowledge. There comes a time to a nation when mind applies itself to universal objects, when, for example, in seeking to bring natural things under general modes of understanding, it tries to learn their causes. Then it is said that a people begins to philosophize, for this content has thought in common with Philosophy. At such a time we find deliverances about all the common events of Nature, as we also find intellectual maxims, moral sentences, general principles respecting morality, the will, duty, and the like, and those who expressed them have been called wise men or philosophers. Thus in the beginnings of Greek Philosophy we find the seven sages and the Ionic Philosophers. From them a number of ideas and discoveries are conveyed to us which seem like philosophic propositions. Thus Thales, amongst others, has explained that the eclipse of sun and moon is due to the intervention of the moon or earth. This is called a theorem. Pythagoras found out the principle of the harmony of sounds. Others have had ideas about the stars: the heavens were supposed to be composed of perforated metal, by which we see throughout the empyrean region, the eternal fire which surrounds the world. Such propositions as products of the understanding, do not belong to the history of Philosophy, although they imply that the merely sensuous gaze has been left behind, as also the representation of those objects by the imagination only. Earth and heaven thus become unpeopled with gods, because the understanding distinguishes things in their outward and natural qualities from Mind.