Thales of Miletus · Philosophy
Thales held that the magnet has a soul because it moves iron, and that ‘all things are full of gods.’ His doctrine of a living, self-moving cosmos - hylozoism - shows that the first naturalism was not a dead mechanism but an enchanted, animate world.
We have seen Thales as the first naturalist - the man who explained nature by nature rather than by the gods. But it would be a deep mistake to picture his cosmos as the cold, dead, mechanical universe of later physics, a heap of inert matter pushed around by external forces. Thales’ underlying stuff - water - was itself alive: self-moving, generative, the source of all growth and change. His most famous metaphysical sayings point the same way: that the magnet has a soul because it moves iron, and that ‘all things are full of gods.’ For Thales, to be is, in some measure, to be alive.
This doctrine is called hylozoism, from the Greek hyle (matter) and zoe (life): the view that matter as such is animate, that life and motion are not added to dead stuff from outside but belong to the nature of stuff itself. It is the natural first answer to a question Thales’ naturalism could not avoid: if the gods are no longer the cause of motion and change, then what is? Where does motion come from, in a world explained by nature? Thales’ answer is that nature is self-moving, because the fundamental stuff is alive. The cosmos does not need an outside pusher because it is, through and through, a living thing. This is naturalism - but an enchanted naturalism, a world humming with soul and divinity, not a clockwork run down.
Behind the charming magnet example lies one of the deepest problems in all of philosophy and physics: the problem of the source of motion. The world is full of movement and change - but what gets it going? What is the original cause that makes things move? For the early Greeks, the answer was tied to the concept of soul (psyche), which they understood not first as a mind or a ghost but as the principle of life and self-movement - that which makes a living thing move itself, in contrast to a corpse, which cannot. To have soul was to be a self-mover; to lack it was to be inert.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Thales held the magnet to have a soul because it moves iron, and that ‘all things are full of gods’ - the doctrine of hylozoism, that matter is itself alive and self-moving. Explain why this means the first naturalism conceived a living cosmos, not a dead mechanism.
Leads to Aristotle.
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