CHAPTER ONE

1.1       INTRODUCTION

Science is the concerted human effort to understand better, the history of the natural world and how the natural world works withobservable physical evidence as the basis of that understanding. It is done through observation of natural phenomena, and/or through experimental processes under controlled conditions.

            The foundation of Modern Western Science is traceable to Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Aristotle especially in their conception of the universe. That is the crux of this essay. The aforementioned philosophers conceived the foundations of the universe in different ways. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes all tried to answer the central question: what was the underlying “stuff” of the universe. All three believed it was a material substance rather than mental or spiritual.

            Thales thought that everything was full of gods. He said that the magnet has a soul because it moves iron. Arguing from the magnet and amber he attributed soul or life even to inanimate objects.

            He supposed that water was the primary substance of all things, and that the universe is ensouled and full of divinities.

            Anaximander was a contemporary of Thales, from the same city, Miletus. He too was a scientist and inventor. He is said to have invented the Sundial, and to have made other clocks to tell the time, to have drawn the first map and made the first globe.

            Anaximander believed that the origin of all things was what he called the “apeiron” – an unlimited or indefinite indestructible substance, out of which individual things were created and destroyed.

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