Justified True Belief

(●) The first man in the West to explain the world by the world, and the first name in almost every history of philosophy written since. + Every history of Western philosophy opens with the same man, and it is not because he was right. Thales of Miletus said that everything is made of water. That is false, and it has been known to be false for a very long time. What put him first was the shape of the answer rather than its content. Asked what the world is, he named something a person could point at, weigh, boil, and argue about, instead of telling a story about which god had married which goddess and what came of it. Aristotle, writing two and a half centuries later, called him "the founder of this type of philosophy," and the label has never come off. The type of philosophy Aristotle meant is the one that looks for the nature of things in the things themselves. Everyone who has ever asked what the universe is ultimately made of, from the Milesian coast to a physics department, is working in a line that starts here. A Christian has two reasons to care about a pagan who got the answer wrong. The first is the question he asked. What is everything, finally, from? That is the question the cosmological arguments run at, the family of arguments that reason from the existence of the world back to a cause of the world, and the Christian answer is a Person rather than a substance, which is exactly the disagreement worth having. The second is that the church kept him. When Christian writers set out to explain where Greek thought had come from, they began at Miletus, copied out the doctrines, and passed them on. A good deal of what anyone knows about the first philosopher survives because Christians thought a pagan’s wrong answer was worth writing down. One fact governs everything anybody says about him: not one sentence of his own survives, and the ancients could not agree whether he wrote anything at all. Every word about him is a report by someone who never met him. The earliest of those reporters, Herodotus, was born about sixty years after Thales died and wrote a century after it.

(●) c. 624 BC: Born at Miletus, a harbour city where Greek, Egyptian and Babylonian learning came ashore together. + Miletus sat on the coast of Ionia, the strip of Greek cities on the western edge of what is now Turkey, at the mouth of a river with four harbours and a fleet that had planted colonies all around the Black Sea. Grain came in from the north, linen and papyrus and Egyptian arithmetic from the south, and with the cargo came the astronomical records the Babylonians had been keeping for centuries. A curious man in Miletus in the seventh century BC had more of the world’s information within walking distance than almost anyone alive. His parentage is reported two ways and the sources do not settle it. Herodotus calls him a Milesian of Phoenician descent. Diogenes Laertius, who assembled his lives of the philosophers in the first half of the third century AD out of everything he could find, passes on the same claim and then the rival one, that Thales was a native Milesian of a distinguished family. Clement of Alexandria repeats the Phoenician version. Nobody was in a position to check. The dates need a word of warning, and the warning applies to every date on his life. They are a reconstruction rather than a record. Greece had no common calendar, no year one that every city agreed on, so the ancient chronographers, the scholars whose whole trade was working out what had happened when, counted in Olympiads: the four-year gaps from one celebration of the games at Olympia to the next, numbered forward from the first of them in 776 BC. Those same scholars liked to fix a man not by his birth, which nobody outside the family notices at the time, but by his akme, his peak, which convention put at about forty. For Thales the peak was obvious, because the eclipse carried a date of its own, and the rest of the life could then be measured out from that one fixed point. Diogenes hands the results on in a tangle. He reports that Apollodorus, in his Chronology, placed the birth in the first year of the thirty-fifth Olympiad, which is 640 BC, and that Thales died in the fifty-eighth Olympiad, 548 to 545 BC, at the age of seventy-eight, or of ninety if you follow Sosicrates. Those figures cannot all be right. A man born in 640 BC who dies at seventy-eight is gone by 562 BC, a good while before the fifty-eighth Olympiad comes round at all. Hermann Diels proposed reading the numeral as the thirty-ninth Olympiad instead, which is 624 BC and fits the rest exactly, and most editors have followed him, though the correction has its critics. That one adjusted numeral is where the conventional birth year comes from, and it is why the "c." in front of each of these years is doing real work.

(●) c. 590 BC: He is said to have gone to Egypt, to have found the height of a pyramid by measuring its shadow, and to have left geometry with its first proofs. + The Egypt journey is tradition rather than record, and the tradition is old and wide. Diogenes Laertius reports it, and so does Clement of Alexandria, who says of Thales that "he alone seems to have met the prophets of the Egyptians," meaning the priests who kept the temple learning. Whether he went is not certain. That Greek geometry arrived from Egypt in roughly his lifetime is not seriously doubted. The trick in the pyramid story is plain enough that anyone can do it in a driveway on a sunny afternoon. You cannot climb the Great Pyramid with a tape measure. You can, however, stand beside it in the morning and wait. There comes an hour of the day when a man’s shadow is exactly as long as the man is tall, and at that hour the pyramid’s shadow is exactly as long as the pyramid is tall, so you pace out the shadow and you have the height. Hieronymus of Rhodes reports this version, and Plutarch tells a slightly different one in which Thales works from the ratio of the two shadows and needs no special hour at all. Either way the move is the same, and it is the move geometry is made of: the thing you cannot reach behaves like the thing you can. Later Greeks credited him with the first proofs as well as the first measurements. Proclus, a philosopher of the fifth century AD who drew on a lost history of geometry by Aristotle’s pupil Eudemus, says Thales was the first to demonstrate that a circle is cut in half by its diameter, that the two base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that when two straight lines cross, the opposite angles are equal. He is also said to have worked out how to find the distance of a ship at sea, which needs that last result. It is fair to say the sources are a thousand years downstream and generous with their credit. It is also fair to say that the difference they are reaching for is a real one, and it is the difference between measuring and knowing. Fold a circle in half along its diameter, on a scrap of paper, and the two halves match; fold forty circles and they match forty times. A proof is the other kind of thing altogether. It says the halves must match, for every circle there will ever be, including the ones nobody will ever draw. Somewhere in the sixth century BC somebody began asking for that second kind of answer.

(●) 28 May 585 BC: He told the Ionians that the sun would fail within the year, and a battle stopped when it did. + The Lydians and the Medes had been fighting for five years along the river Halys with neither side gaining anything. In the sixth year, Herodotus writes, they met again, and in the middle of the fighting the day turned into night. Both armies stopped, and both were so shaken that they agreed peace terms and sealed them with a marriage. Herodotus adds a sentence that is the reason this battle is remembered: "This change of the day Thales the Milesian had foretold to the Ionians laying down as a limit this very year in which the change took place." Astronomers running the sky backwards put that eclipse on 28 May 585 BC, which is why one obscure skirmish has a calendar date when most ancient battles do not. Notice how carefully Herodotus puts it. Thales named the year. He did not name the hour, and he did not name the place. That matters, because the obvious question, the one anybody asks the moment they hear the story, is how a man in the sixth century BC could have done such a thing at all. Part of the answer is that eclipses of the moon are not especially hard. The moon simply dims, and it dims for everybody on the night side of the earth at once, so the pattern shows up in any long enough record, and the Babylonians had been keeping one. Eclipses of the sun are a different problem. The moon’s shadow falls on the earth as a narrow track, usually about a hundred miles wide, drawn across a planet that is turning underneath it, so the same eclipse is total in one town, partial in the next province, and invisible a day’s ride away. No cycle available in the sixth century BC could say where that track would land. Historians of astronomy have doubted the story for that reason, and the honest answer is that nobody knows what he did. He may have had a Babylonian list of dangerous years, named one, and been lucky. Being lucky in front of an army is still a career. It made his name across the Greek world, and it fixed the one date in his life that everybody afterwards counted from.

(●) 582 BC: Seven men were named the wise men of Greece, and his was the first name on the list. + Diogenes Laertius, citing a fourth-century BC list of Athenian officials compiled by Demetrius of Phalerum, says Thales was "the first to receive the name of Sage, in the archonship of Damasias at Athens," and that the title was given to all seven together. Athens labelled its years by its chief magistrate, the archon, much as an older Englishman might date something to the third year of the reign, and the year of Damasias works out to 582 BC. That is why a date this old can be this exact. It does not rest on anybody’s memory of Thales; it rests on a list of officeholders that a city kept because cities keep such things. The Seven Sages were the Greek world’s short list of men who had said something worth repeating, and Plato names his own version of the list in the Protagoras: Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias of Priene, Solon of Athens, Cleobulus of Lindus, Myson of Chenae, and Chilon of Sparta. Membership shifted from author to author. Thales is on every list there is. Two stories about him come down as a pair, and the pair is more interesting than either half. In the first, told by Plato and repeated by the Christian writer Hippolytus, who even gives the woman a name, Thratta, the philosopher is walking along studying the sky and falls into a well, and the maidservant standing over him laughs: he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven that he could not see what was in front of his feet. In the second, told by Aristotle, Thales is taunted for being poor, as though philosophy were good for nothing. So he reads the weather signs, concludes the olive harvest will be enormous, quietly puts deposits on every olive press in Miletus and Chios in the dead of winter when nobody wants them, and when the harvest comes in and everybody needs a press at once, he rents them out at his own price. Aristotle’s summary is dry: "Thus he showed the world that philosophers can easily be rich if they like, but that their ambition is of another sort." The Greeks kept both stories because they could not decide what to make of the new kind of man. He is either useless or he is dangerous, and the well and the olive presses are the two verdicts, told about the same person, sometimes on the same page.

(●) c. 547 BC: Persia came west, and the advice he gave his own city saved it. + Croesus of Lydia, the richest king the Greeks knew, marched east against Cyrus of Persia and lost everything, and the Greek cities that had tied themselves to him went down with him. Diogenes Laertius reports that Thales had talked the Milesians out of an alliance with Croesus, and that when Cyrus won, the refusal was the saving of the city. That is the one piece of practical politics the sources put squarely to his credit, and it is the sort of counsel nobody thanks you for at the time. On the same campaign the Greeks told a more colourful story, and Herodotus refuses to believe it. Croesus, they said, could not get his army across the river Halys, so Thales had a crescent-shaped channel dug behind the camp and split the river into two shallow streams that could be waded. Herodotus reports the tale and then says flatly that he does not accept it, since Croesus had bridges and used them. It is a small moment worth noticing: the first Greek historian applying a plain test of common sense to a famous story about the first Greek philosopher. After Lydia fell, Persia took the Ionian cities one at a time. Herodotus is careful about the order in which the two pieces of advice were given, and the order is the whole difference between them. Bias of Priene spoke at the Panionion, the common sanctuary, after the ruin was already done, and told the Ionians to sail away and found one city for all of them in Sardinia. Thales had given his own counsel earlier, before Ionia was destroyed, and it came to this: stop being twelve cities. Set up one council chamber for the whole of Ionia at Teos, which is in the middle, and let the other cities carry on as they were but count as neighbourhoods of the one state. Herodotus, writing a century later with the whole outcome in front of him, calls it good counsel. It was not taken, and the cities were picked off separately.

(●) c. 546 BC: He died an old man at a games, and though not a sentence of his own survives, the questions outlived every answer he gave. + Diogenes Laertius gives the end in one sentence: "Thales the Sage died as he was watching an athletic contest from heat, thirst, and the weakness incident to advanced age." He was somewhere between seventy-eight and ninety, depending on which chronographer you follow. It is a fittingly ordinary death for a man who spent his life saying that ordinary things explain other ordinary things. What he left behind was not a doctrine but a habit, and the habit took in Miletus immediately. Anaximander, the next Milesian, agreed that there must be one source of everything and then told his teacher he had picked the wrong one: it cannot be water, because water is one of the opposites and the source has to be neutral between them, so call it the boundless, the stuff with no qualities of its own. Anaximenes, the third, disagreed with both of them and said air. Three men, three answers, one question, and each of them free to say in public that his own teacher had got it wrong. Contradicting your master was not how learning normally passed from one generation to the next in the ancient world, where a pupil received a teaching and handed it on intact. In Miletus a pupil received a question instead, and the question came with permission to answer it differently. That is a school of a kind the world had not had before, and every seminar room since is a descendant of it. Aristotle put Thales at the head of the whole line, and Aristotle’s judgement is why the line has a head at all. Take the founder away and the pre-Socratics, the Greek thinkers who came before Socrates and asked what the world is made of rather than how a man should live, are a scatter of clever men with theories. Leave him there and they are a conversation.

What He Taught

(T1) Everything comes from one thing, and that one thing is water. + Point at a wooden chair and ask what it is. One true answer is "a chair." Another true answer, underneath that one, is "wood." Thales asked the second kind of question about the whole world at once, and the Greek word for what he was after is archē: the beginning of a thing, and also the stuff it is made of and never stops being made of. His answer was water. Aristotle, who is guessing at the reasoning because Thales left him nothing to read, suggests it came from looking at living things. Everything that feeds on something feeds on something moist. Seeds are wet. Heat itself seems to come out of the moist and to be kept going by it. And water is the one substance a Greek could watch turn solid, run liquid, and rise off a hot stone as vapour, which makes it a plausible candidate for the thing that becomes everything else. The answer is wrong. The question is not, and neither is the assumption underneath it, which is the part that changed the world: that the many different things in front of us are variations of some smaller number of things, and finally of one, and that a person can work out which. Homer explained the sea with Poseidon. Thales explained Poseidon’s sea with water and left Poseidon out. Christian thinkers have always been able to say two things about that at once. The world really is one, really is ordered, and really can be understood, which is what Scripture means when it calls the whole of it a single work with a single Maker. But the one thing behind everything is not a thing at all.

(Q) "Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, says the principle is water (for which reason he declared that the earth rests on water), getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist, and that heat itself is generated from the moist and kept alive by it." + Source: Aristotle, Metaphysics I.3, 983b (Ross translation). Aristotle is surveying his predecessors before laying out his own account of causes, and Thales gets the first entry. The parenthesis is important: Aristotle is not sure of the reasoning and says so, twice, with "perhaps." This single paragraph is the main reason anyone knows what Thales taught.

(T2) The earth is not held up by anybody. It floats. + Every ancient people that thought about it at all had to answer the same childlike and entirely reasonable question: what stops the earth falling? The usual answers were persons. A god holds it, a giant carries it, a turtle bears it. Thales answered with a log in a millpond. Push the log under and it comes back up; leave it and it sits there, going nowhere, held by nothing but the water it displaces. The earth, he said, is like that, resting on water. Two things are true of that answer at once, and holding them together is the only way to see what happened at Miletus. It is wrong, plainly, because the earth is not floating on anything, and because it invites the follow-up question a child would ask, which is what holds the water, and which Aristotle raises and Thales apparently never answered. It is also new, because the explanation is impersonal. No one is holding it. It stays put for the same reason your bathtub toy stays put, and that reason can be examined by anybody. Seneca reports that Thales carried the picture through to earthquakes: the earth is riding on water, and when the water heaves the earth shudders, which is why the ground shakes. There is a god missing from that sentence, and the missing god is the point. Scripture is not on Thales’ side of the physics and it is not on the side of the giants either. When Job’s answer comes, it takes away the support altogether: "He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing" (Job 26:7). What holds the world up, in the Hebrew answer, is not a substance underneath it but a word over it.

(Q) "Others say the earth rests upon water. This, indeed, is the oldest theory that has been preserved, and is attributed to Thales of Miletus." + Source: Aristotle, On the Heavens II.13, 294a (Stocks translation). Aristotle is running through the theories of why the earth stays where it is, and he takes Thales first because he judges it the oldest one still on record. He goes on to say the earth was supposed to stay still because it floated like wood, and then objects that whatever holds up the earth must itself be held up by something (T2).

(T3) The world is alive, and all things are full of gods. + Put a lump of lodestone on a table and slide a nail towards it, and at some point the nail moves on its own. That is magnetite, an iron ore that occurs naturally in Greek soil, and to a sixth-century Greek watching it there was one obvious conclusion. What makes things move themselves is soul. This rock moves iron. So the rock has soul in it. Aristotle reports both halves of the thought: that Thales said the magnet has a soul because it moves the iron, and that he held all things to be full of gods. The technical name later given to this is hylozoism, from the Greek for matter and life: the view that matter is not inert stuff waiting to be pushed, but is itself in some measure alive. On that view you do not need a separate force to get the world going, because the world was never dead. Something in that does not sit still, and the discomfort is not a modern invention: the ancients felt it too. Thales is famous as the man who took the gods out of nature, and then here he is, putting gods back into everything. Scholars have gone both ways. Augustine read him as leaving no divine mind in the picture at all. Others read the phrase as genuine piety of a kind, the divine soaked into the world rather than banished from it. What neither reading gives is the thing Genesis opens with: a God who is not part of the world, who stands outside the water and speaks to it. Divinity spread evenly through everything is another way of having it nowhere in particular, and Scripture’s verdict on the move is blunt: they "exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25).

(Q) "Certain thinkers say that soul is intermingled in the whole universe, and it is perhaps for that reason that Thales came to the opinion that all things are full of gods." + Source: Aristotle, On the Soul I.5, 411a (J. A. Smith translation). Aristotle is testing the idea that soul is spread through the whole of things, and cites Thales as the earliest case of it. In the same book, at I.2, 405a, he gives the other half: "Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded about him, seems to have held soul to be a motive force, since he said that the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron." Aristotle’s hedges, "to judge from what is recorded" and "perhaps," are worth keeping in view. He is working from hearsay as much as anyone.

(T4) The divine is whatever has no beginning and no end. + Everybody knows a line that some famous person is supposed to have said, and half of those lines turn out to belong to two or three famous people at once, depending on who is repeating them. The Greeks had the habit badly, and sayings drifted between the Seven Sages the way jokes drift between comedians. Among the ones that circulated under Thales’ name is a short run of set questions with set answers, the shape a catechism has, and one of the exchanges is a definition of God in seven words. What is the divine? That which has neither beginning nor end. The caution comes first, then. Diogenes Laertius introduces the whole batch as sayings "assigned to him," which is his standard way of saying that this is what people repeated, not what he can vouch for. So the definition is the tradition’s Thales rather than certainly the man himself, and that warning belongs beside the words rather than in small print underneath them. Even so, the line is worth stopping over, because of where it sits. Every other thing in his account of the world has a beginning. Rain begins, seeds begin, cities begin, men begin. Run the question back far enough and either the chain of beginnings goes on forever or it stops at something that never began, and the definition puts the word "divine" on whatever it stops at. That is the bare skeleton of an argument Christians have been making ever since, and it is the reason a Milesian water theorist keeps turning up in books about the existence of God. The skeleton is not the body. Knowing that something had no beginning tells you nothing about whether it knows your name. Paul made exactly this point standing on a hill in Athens, in front of an altar the Athenians had built to a god they could not identify: "What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you" (Acts 17:23). The reach was real. The reaching stopped short.

(Q) "What is the divine? That which has neither beginning nor end." + Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers I.36 (Hicks translation). One line from a run of questions and answers that Diogenes preserves without vouching for any of it. The others in the set are lighter: what is difficult, to know oneself; what is easy, to give advice to another (T4).

(Q) "Of all things that are, the most ancient is God, for he is uncreated. The most beautiful is the universe, for it is God’s workmanship. The greatest is space, for it holds all things. The swiftest is mind, for it speeds everywhere. The strongest, necessity, for it masters all. The wisest, time, for it brings everything to light." + Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers I.35 (Hicks translation). Diogenes calls these "current apophthegms assigned to him," an apophthegm being a saying short enough to be remembered and passed on, and the label is a warning that the attribution is loose. Christian writers of the first centuries quoted lines like these gladly, and this one shows why: an uncreated God and a universe that is his workmanship, out of the mouth of a pagan five hundred years before Christ, was a gift to anyone arguing that the truth about God had never been wholly hidden from the nations.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) When Christian writers told the story of Greek thought, they began at Miletus, and that is largely why the story survives. + Hippolytus, a Roman churchman of the early third century, wrote a long book called the Refutation of All Heresies, and his argument was that the heresies troubling the church were pagan philosophy in Christian clothes. To make the case he had to lay out the philosophy, so Book One is a doxography: a catalogue of who held what, school by school. It opens with Thales. Water is the source and the end of all things, Hippolytus writes, and then he tells the story of the well and the maid Thratta, which is how a Christian bishop came to preserve a joke about a philosopher who died seven centuries before he was born. Clement of Alexandria used him differently. Clement was arguing that Hebrew wisdom was older than Greek wisdom, and dating was the whole game, so he needed the earliest Greek philosopher and his date. He puts Thales at the head of the Ionic school, lists him among the Seven Sages, repeats the Phoenician descent, notes that he alone of the Greeks seems to have met the priests of Egypt, and concludes that the Hebrew philosophy was older by many generations. Eusebius of Caesarea carried the same material forward in the Preparation for the Gospel. Augustine gave him the opening chapter of the philosophical survey in Book VIII of the City of God. The effect was not what any of them intended. Between them they wanted to refute, to date, and to place. What they actually did was to copy out and keep. Several things anyone knows about Thales are known because a Christian writer thought a pagan’s wrong answer was worth writing down carefully enough to argue with.

(†) He asked the question that Christian theology answers with a name. + Strip the water out and what is left of Thales is a question with a particular shape: not "who is in charge of the sea" but "what is everything, at bottom, from." Once a culture starts asking that, an answer is owed, and every serious answer since has been a rival to his. Aristotle answered with an unmoved mover, meaning something that sets everything else going without being set going by anything: the hand behind the stick that moves the stone, when nothing is moving the hand. Aquinas took that machinery over and pushed the question one step further back, past what keeps the world running to why there is anything running at all, and his answer was God, whose existence is not one more item in the world alongside the water and the stars. Christians have a name for the fact that a pagan with no Scripture could get this far. General revelation is the knowledge of God available to anyone through the world and the conscience, as distinct from special revelation, which is what God says in Scripture and in Christ. Paul states it directly: "For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20). On that account Thales is doing exactly what a mind is built to do, looking at what has been made and reasoning back toward what made it, and getting some of the way. There is a second inheritance, quieter and easier to overclaim. Thales assumed that the world has a regular order a person can find out, which is not obvious and which a world of quarrelling gods does not give you. Christian theology could underwrite that assumption with a doctrine: the sea is not a god, the sun is not a god, the whole of it is a work, and the maker does not change his mind about how it runs. That is not a claim that Christianity invented natural science, which would be too much. It is the more modest claim that Milesian curiosity and Genesis 1 agree on something a great many other religions did not, and that the monks who copied the books had a reason to think the copying was worth the candles.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the world is a work, not a womb. + The disagreement is not about chemistry. Nobody needs Scripture to correct him about water. It is about what kind of thing is ultimate, and there the distance is the whole distance. - The ultimate is not a substance. For Thales water is the thing that was always there and became everything else, the world’s womb. In Genesis the water is on the wrong side of the line: it is already created, dark and shapeless, and something else is moving over it. "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). Peter puts the same point the other way round, and it reads almost as a direct reply to Miletus: "the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God" (2 Peter 3:5). Water may well be involved. The word is what is doing the work. - There is no mind in the account. This is Augustine’s complaint in the City of God, and it is fair. Thales gives a first principle and an order and no one to have intended either. Order without a mind is the position, and Scripture’s alternative is not a better substance but a speaker: "By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" (Hebrews 11:3). - Gods spread everywhere are gods nowhere. All things full of gods sounds generous and costs nothing. It gives you divinity in the lodestone and the river and the harvest, and no one at all to be answerable to. The God of Israel is emphatically not the world: he made it, he is other than it, and the difference is the ground of every command he gives. Jeremiah says it to a nation surrounded by local gods in things: "The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens" (Jeremiah 10:11). - Having no beginning is not the same as having a face. The definition attributed to him, that the divine has neither beginning nor end, is true as far as it goes and could be carved over a church door. What it cannot do is talk back. Scripture’s claim is that the one without beginning has spoken, and to particular people, at datable times: "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1-2). John says the same thing in the language Thales set going, that the source of everything is not a stuff but a Word, and that the Word became a man. Six centuries after Thales, a Jew from Tarsus stood on a hill in Athens and told a crowd of Greek philosophers about "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth" (Acts 17:24), and then quoted their own poets back to them, because he took it for granted that they had been reaching for something real. The man from Miletus had asked the right question first, in the right way, and had come up short of an answer that could ask anything of him in return. That is roughly what the reach of an honest mind looks like, and roughly where it stops.