Christendom. We know little of them beyond those aphorisms ascribed to each of them, and said to have been engraven in gold on the gates of Delphi, which became as household words in Greece, and some of which have found their way into modern proverbs—"The golden mean," "Know thyself," "Virtue is difficult," "Call no man happy till he dies." Another of the seven was Thales—half star-gazer, half man of business—honoured by Aristotle with the title of "the first philosopher." He and those who followed him tried to discover some one element or first principle underlying the incessant change and motion which they saw in the world around them. Thales believed this principle to be Water—improving on the old myth of Oceanus, the eternal river that girds the universe. Anaximander thought the universe originally was a bath of flames, or a ring of fire broken up into sun, moon, and stars, while the earth remained balanced like a column in the centre. Anaximenes, again, said that "Air ruled over all things; and the Soul, being Air, ruled in man." Thus these three Ionian philosophers took each some one element as the symbol of an abstract idea.
Then came Heraclitus of Ephesus, surnamed the Obscure,—"shooting," says Plato, "as from a quiver, sayings brief and dark." He is oppressed with the sense of the perpetual change in nature. Nothing is at rest, all is in continual movement and progression. Life and time are like a stream flowing on for ever, in which thoughts and actions appear for a moment and then vanish. Pythagoras, again, maintained that
