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. just so they say nothing else comes to be or ceases
to be; for there must be some entity-either one or more than
one-from which all other things come to be, it being conserved.
Yet they do not all agree as to the number and the nature of these
principles. 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 (and that from which they come
to be is a principle of all things). He got his notion from this fact,
and from the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature,
and that water is the origin of the nature of moist things.
Some think that even the ancients who lived long before the
present generation, and first framed accounts of the gods, had a
similar view of nature; for they made Ocean and Tethys the parents
of creation, and described the oath of the gods as being by water,
to which they give the name of Styx; for what is oldest is most
honourable, and the most honourable thing is that by which one swears.
It may perhaps be uncertain whether this opinion about nature is
primitive and ancient, but Thales at any rate is said to have declared
himself thus about the first cause. Hippo no one would think fit to
include among these thinkers, because of the paltriness of his
thought
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