in the philosophy of Thales, when we look away from the letter of the system, and regard rather its general scope, is that it stands opposed to the authoritative deliverances of the senses. That the mind of man should throw back and away from it the rich fulness and the diversified forms of sensible existence, and should strive to reduce them all to one primitive element, this was a bold and a novel procedure. It showed that the mind, in its pursuit of the ultimately real, was beginning to emancipate itself from the ascendancy which the senses had hitherto exercised in determining its decisions. It showed that the senses were beginning to lose their authority as the criterion of ultimate truth, and that a tendency to appeal to a different tribunal, the tribunal, not of sense, but of thought or reason, was beginning to declare itself. It was not truth for some, truth acquired through the particular faculty, that was now aimed at, it was rather truth for all; truth to which every mind could and must respond, whether it had senses such as ours or not; truth, in short, for the universal faculty in our nature. This emancipation of the philosophic mind was carried, indeed, to no great length in the school of Thales and the other Ionic speculators. Sense, in fact, still remained the criterion of truth; all that can be affirmed is, that there was a tendency to rise to a different standard, the standard of thought and reason, in the settlement of philosophical questions—the tendency to find something which should
