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Nevertheless 'picture-thoughts' (it has been well said),ssss1 and nothing more, were represented by these prefatory genealogies. Night and darkness loomed into personal shape, and from the obscurity of their union the creatures of light radiantly sprang, and proceeded, according to a predetermined law of order, to sort out the elements of chaos and dispose them into cosmical harmony.

This mythical phase of thought terminated in Greece with the rise of the Ionian School of Philosophy. Immemorial legends, discredited by the advent of a new wisdom, took out a fresh lease of life under the guise of folk-lore; Orphic fables were left to the poets and the people; and the sage of Miletus set on foot a speculative tradition, maintained by a long succession of metaphysicians down to the very threshold of the recent scientific epoch. All were what we should call evolutionists—Thales of Miletus no less than Descartes and Swedenborg; their main object, in other words, was to find a practicable mode of evoking a systematic arrangement of related parts from the monotony of undifferentiated confusion. Now, in essaying this enterprise they encountered two distinct problems. One was concerned with the nature of the primeval world-stuff; the other with the operations to which it had been submitted. Modern theorists have made it their primary object to expound the mechanism of cosmic growth—the play of forces involved in it, the transformations and progressive redistribution of energy attending it. But questions of this kind could only in the scantiest measure be formulated by early thinkers, who accordingly devoted their chief attention to selecting an appropriate material for the exercise of their constructive ingenuity.