The Birth of Science

RELATED QUOTES:

[^1]: It is through wonder that men begin to philosophize. Aristotle

[^2]: The world of primitive peoples was a dynamic, animated, living reality in which natural phenomena are considered to be manifestations or embodiments of a kind of spiritual power. An I‑thou attitude toward the world as opposed to an I‑it attitude. Schlagel p. 49

[^3]: Primitive humans seek to influence the threatening demons and spirits and demigods by imitating or propitiating them. This repeated attempt at magic gives birth to ritual, to which myth is closely related. Freund p. 23

[^4]: Frazer shares Lang's belief that myth began as a form of primitive science, but goes beyond that ‑‑ some myths are belated rather than initial explanations, not of natural objects or processes, but of long honored magical rites. Freund p. 30

[^5]: The kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science. The difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied. C. Levi‑Strauss, Schlagel p. 37

[^6]: Myths are not the work of imagination, but the result of interpreted observation. In them a great store of ancient and direct experience is laid up. They are fossil history: actual happenings which lie far beyond the reach of history proper. Hans Bellamy, Freund p. 25

[^7]: Even myths, therefore, are not just imaginative stories of the origin of the world created out of the visions and legends of shamans, seer‑poets, or prophets. Instead, they represent a feat of intellectual abstraction in which certain prominent empirical occurrences are rendered stable and intelligible by being fitted into the only available theoretical frameworks of the time ‑‑ a story as to "how things came to pass." Schlagel p. 64

[^8]: The striking originality of Thales consists in discarding the personifications of natural phenomena, in rejecting the anthropomorphic explanations as found in the Theogony, and in abstracting from the content of experience a natural observable element as the basic constituent or principle of things. Schlagel p. 69

[^9]: Egyptian and Mesopotamian technical knowledge contained no hint of an attempt to explain all the phenomena of the universe on the basis of an intelligible system of natural law. Technical achievement in itself is not proof of the power of conscious abstraction. Farrington p. 5

[^10]: Today, still, it may seem strange to many that Anaximander's thought, starting from a wrong idea, such as the rotation of the sky, and leading to a wrong conclusion, such as the central position of the earth, should be considered justified and important because of the reasoning that joins the two. de Santillana p. 36

[^11]: In much of his account Anaximander has to preserve the language and images of his predecessors in order to make himself understood. But we see that he is using all these images and is not controlled by them. de Santillana p. 38

[^12]: What made the Ionian way physical is that the cause of things is no longer imagined in a dramatic or mythical way, but as some kind of primordial ‑‑ and stable ‑‑ substance. de Santillana p. 22

[^13]: The Greek thinker who advanced the opinion stood behind the opinion himself. He claimed objective validity for his statements; but they were his own personal contribution to knowledge and he was prepared to defend them as such. Earlier world‑views were based on sacred books; an orthodoxy to be maintained by authority. Farrington p. 18

[^14]: The great originality of the Iliad is that the events of which the story consists are represented as springing out of the character of the actors. Man the author of his own destiny not a puppet in the hands of fate. Nothing could be more opposed to the fatalism of Chaldean astrology. The Iliad provided Ionian science with the background of secularism which was prerequisite. Farmington p. 17

[^15]: If the modern thinker discards the notion that he knows nature as it is, and realizes that he knows it only relative to his intellectual or symbolic framework, then he is in a position to recognize that his thinking is similar to that of the primitive. Levi‑Strauss, Schlagel p. 37

Giorgio de Santillana, Origins of Scientific Thought, The University of Chicago Press, [^1970]:

Benjamin Farrington, Science in Antiquity, Oxford University Press, [^1969]:

Philip Freund, Myths of Creation, Washington Square Press, NY, [^1965]:

Richard Schlagel, From Myth to the Modern Mind, Vol I, Peter Lang, NY, [^1985]: