Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 30. So far we have not met with any trace of conscious Migrations to opposition between science and popular beliefs, though the views of the Milesian cosmologists were really as inconsistent with the religions of the people as with the mythology of the anthropomorphic poets.1 Two circumstances combined to hasten on the inevitable conflict, the ' shifting of the scene to the West, and the religious revival which swept over Hellas in the sixth century B.C. The chief figures in the philosophical history of this period were Pythagoras of Samoa and Xenophanes of Kolophon. Both were Ionians, and yet both spent the greater part of their lives in the West. The advance of the Persian power in Asia Minor had occasioned an - extensive migration to Sicily and Southern Italy, of which Herodotos has given us a vivid idea by sketching a few of its most characteristic episodes;2 and this must, no doubt, have had a great influence on the development of philosophy. The new views had probably grown up so gradually in Ionia that the shock of conflict and reaction was avoided; but this could no longer be the case when they were suddenly transplanted to a region where men were wholly unprepared to receive them. 1 For the theological views of Anaximander and Anaximenes, sec 21 and 29. - Cf. Herod, i. 170 (advice of Bias), vi. 22 sqq. (Kale Akte). Another, though a somewhat later, effect of the migration was to bring Science into contact with Rhetoric, perhaps the most characteristic product of Western Hellas. Even in 1'armenides we may note the presence of that dialectical and controversial spirit which was destined to have so great an influence upon Greek thought, and it was this fusion of the art of arguing for victory with the search for truth th...