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BEGINNING WITH THALES IN THE 6th century B.C., the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers took a tremendous step forward from the chaotic and unpredictable theology of Homer and Hesiod (Chessick 1977). For the philosophers, the cosmic processes were not personified but rather conceived of impersonally and with emphasis on natural and necessary movements. They did not repeat ancient doctrine but instead reached their own conclusions, made of sweeping generalizations, often not carefully reasoned. Above all, they introduced the Greek notion of a well ordered harmony in the universe, a kósmos, the first principles of which were thought to exist externally.
With the questions of whether there is anything orderly in, or anything that serves as the ground of the apparent world of chaotic appearances, we have the beginning of metaphysics. Metaphysics does not possess a method to reach truth either analogous to or the same as the method of experimental science, which has proven so powerful and efficient in our time toward the advancement of empirical knowledge of the universe. Indeed, we know that the answers to the crucial questions that all metaphysics ask cannot be found by the methods of experimental science.
William James (1890) said, "Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly." As Socrates explains in Plato's Theatetus(1937): "We no longer seek for knowledge in perception at all, but in that other process, however called, in which the mind is alone and engaged with being." For the man of action involved in the world of everyday life, the questions metaphysics asks are profitless. On the other hand, man as a psyche or spirit, not totally immersed in the world, standing out from or observing the world, seems to be compelled to ask metaphysical questions—to seek a unity behind or underlying the curious but unavoidable