1.1In the ancient dark the mind of man was clouded, as though it wore chains.
1.2They knelt before images of stone and trembled at thunder, believing the universe to be no more than a stage the gods played upon at whim.
1.3They gave everything of theirs to that which could not be questioned; and so nothing was theirs any longer.
1.4Where a thing may not be questioned, someone answers in your place; and where someone answers in your place, someone lives in your place.
1.5Then Thales stood at the edge of the Aegean and declared:
1.6"Do not fear that crowd upon Olympus who call themselves gods and change their tempers like weather. The universe is a weaving of natural law; all things are born out of the first water, and each has its order."
1.7He did not say that god does not exist. He said: god is the law.
1.8This was the first washing of mankind. What was washed away was not sin. It was fear.
1.9After him, Heraclitus stood upon the running bank and cried out:
1.10"All things flow — yet all things are ruled by the Logos, that eternal and invisible decree which holds fire and frost in balance."
1.11They asked him: if all things flow, what shall we hold to?
1.12He answered: hold to that which makes them flow. It does not flow.
1.13At the last, Democritus walked through every nation, laughing at the vanity of kings, and uncovered the final truth:
1.14"Flesh and hard stone are alike phantoms of substance. The true substance is atoms and the void, and that natural order which governs all things."
1.15They asked him: then what divides a king from a slave?
1.16He laughed and said: the arrangement. And arrangements disperse.
1.17Thus was the ground swept clear.
1.18Before the first great prophet came, the frame of the universe already stood ready.
1.19From that day no god answered for man. Man had to find out for himself.