IONIAN SCHOOL, at times called also the Ionian Sect, was the oldest among the an cient schools of Greek philosophy. It originated in Asia Minor under Thales of Miletos, about 600 years before the beginning of the Christian era. Diogenes Laertius places the birth of Thales during the 35th Olympiad, that is, be tween 640 B.C. and 636 B.c.; and the philosopher died, according to Apollodorus, in his 78th year, but according to Sosicrates, in his 90th year. The other most famous exponents of Ionian thought after the advent of Thales of Miletos were Anaximander of Miletos, Phere cydes of Syra, Anaximenes of Miletos, Herac litus of Ephesus, Diogenes of Apollonla and Anaxagoras and Hermotinius of Clazomenie. It is a most interesting fact in the history of Greek thought that its birth took place not in Greece but in its colonies on the eastern shores of the iEgean Sea. The first name in the list, not alone of Ionian, but indeed of European, thought, is Thales. From Asia Minor the spirit of Ionian philosophy passed into Greece, at first under Anaxagoras, then afterward under Archelaus, the master of Socrates. The interval between Thales and Archelaus amounted to a period of not less than 150 years. Thus Athens, taught from Ionia, became in turn the headquarters of philosophy and the parent of the most celebrated Greek schools. The labors of the Ionian School cleared the way for all those schools which at a later period undertook to explain the physical world and served at once as a model and as a starting point for Leucippus, Democritus, Empedocles, Aristotle • and Epicurus. In truth most of the schools which arose in Greece from the time of Thales to the time of the great thinker Socrates- roughly speaking during the period between 600 ac. and 400 ac.— and constituted the first philosophic period, were in some sort so many offshoots of the Ionian School. Pythagoras, born at Samos, became the pupil of Pherecydes; Xenophenes,•the founder of the Eleatic School, was a native of the Ionian city of Colophon; Abdera, the birthplace of Leucippus and De mocritus and the seat of the school which they founded, was a colony from Phoctea; and be sides, Democritus was the pupil of Anaxagoras. In the course of its development, the Ionian School was contemporary with other Greek schools, among which the Abderitan and Eleatic schools and the systems of Empedocles and Pythagoras were the most important. , The Ionian Philosophy (q.v.), notwithstand ing the celebrity of its first professors, most of whom are named above, soon failed in classical Grecian schools and in Greece never afterward recovered its ancient reputation and authority. This was owing to the suspicion of impiety under which it lay in Athens; to the early growth of new branches from the Socratic stock; and to the rise and spread and vigor of the Eleatic and the Epicurean mode of thought. Ionian philosophy thus dis appeared in antiquity for the first time owing to the dual opposition of sullen, unlearned bigotry and the incissive critique it received at the hands of its more profound rivals, like, for example, the Socratic Philosophy.
History has preserved the record of numer ous.attempts . that' have been made to form a rational conception of the whole world df phenomena and to recognize in the universe the action of one sole active force by which mat ter is penetrated, transformed and animated. These attempts are traced in classical antiquity in those treatises on the principles of things which emanated from the Ionian School and in which all the phenomena of nature were sub jected to hazardous speculations based upon a small number of observations. By degrees, as the influence of great historical events has favored the development of every branch of science supported by observation, that arder has cooled which formerly led men to seek the essential nature and connection of things in purely rational principles. In recent times the mathematical portion of natural philosophy has been remarkably and admirably enlarged. The method and the instrument (analysis) have been simultaneously perfected. That which has been acquired by means so differ ent by the ingenious application of atomic suppositions, by the more general and intricate study of phenomena and by the improved con struction of new apparatus — is now the com mon property of mankind.
Thales and the earlier members of the school stand in closer relation to the previous mythic and religious cosmologists than the later members. And they seek to substitute intelli gible hypothesis, based on real things or events, for the myths of the poets. The first attempt to disc/Alvan the philosophic intellect from the all-personifying religious faith and to con stitute a method .of interpreting nature dis tinct from the untaught inspiration of An Eerier minds is to be found in in. the 6th century before the Christian era. It is to Thales and to a small number of other inde pendent Greek thinkers that philosophy owes the substitution of an impersonal nature for the personified cosmos, conceived as the proper object of study, The Greek word, denoting nature and its derivatives physics and physiology, unknown in the sense which Thales understood it to Homer and Hesiod, as well as the word kosmos to denote the mundane system, first appears in these philosophers' spec ulations. But it must be allowed that the dis tinction between personal and impersonal was not strongly felt in antiquity and it is a mis take to lay overmuch stress upon it. It seems rather that the real advance made by the scien tific men of Miletos was that they left off tell ing mere tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was where as yet there was nothing and asked instead what all things really are now. The great epistemological prin ciple which underlies all their thinking, though it is first put into words by Parmenides, is that nothing comes into being out of nothing and nothing passes away into nothing. See GREEK PHILOSOPHY; IONIAN PHILOSOPHY.