How far this unstable religious position was subject to the influence of the oriental mysticism at which we have glanced already, is, at any rate, so far as concerns the classical age of Greek philosophy, a matter of conjecture.  But the resurrection of a prehistoric and almost forgotten civilization from the buried cities of Crete has brought to light many evidences of frequent intercourse, two or three thousand years before the Christian era, between European and Egyptian, or Asiatic, centres of life.  Therefore, we may well believe that during the earliest stages of the evolution of thought in East and West, it was as impossible as at the present time for any local school of thinkers to be absolutely original or independent.  Thus, later Greek philosophers, whether themselves within sound of the echoes of Hindoo teaching or not, may very well have grown up in an atmosphere impregnated with mythic germs, whose origin they did not know.  But however that may be, Greek Pantheism, while it had many points of contact with Eastern speculation, was more purely intellectual and less essentially religious than the Pantheism of the Vedas, or the solemn dream that haunted Egyptian temples.  For while the aspiration of Hindoo Pantheists was to find and assume the right attitude toward “the glory of the sum of things,” the Greeks, as St. Paul long afterward said, “sought after wisdom,” and were fascinated by the idea of tracing all the bewildering variety of Nature up to some one “principle” ([Greek:  arche]), beginning, origin.

[Sidenote:  Thales, about 640 B.C.]

Thus Thales of Miletus, during the late seventh and early sixth century B.C., is said to have been satisfied when he found in water—­or moisture—­the ultimate principle out of which all things and all life, including gods and men, were evolved.  With such a speculation of infant philosophy we are here not concerned, except to say that it was not Pantheism as understood in modern times.  For while his ablest exponents admit that no sufficient evidence is left to show very clearly what he meant, there seems no reason for supposing that to him the Universe was a Living God.

[Sidenote:  Successors of Thales.]

It would be fruitless to relate how successors of Thales varied his theory of an ultimate “principle,” by substituting air or fire for water.  But it is worth while to note that another citizen of Miletus, Anaximander, after an interval of some forty years, pronounced that the beginning, the first principle, the origin of all things, was neither water, nor air, nor fire, but the Infinite ([Greek:  to apeae on]).  And though the best authorities confess that they cannot be sure of his meaning, this may very well be because he anticipated Herbert Spencer by two and a half millenniums, in acknowledging that all things merge in one and the same Unknowable.  But, so far as our evidence goes, he made no such attempt as the modern philosopher did, to persuade the religious instinct that this Unknowable could supply the place of all the gods.