Here the wind is seen as a great creating agency. An impersonal actor is the aspect in which each of the four elements is regarded by the Hindoo philosophy of nature. This accords well with the superficial view of natural phenomena taken by the Eastern Asiatic mind. The Semite and the believer in the Bible view the events of creation and of universal nature as caused by God. Science comes into the field of nature, and finds out what are the second causes operating to produce observed phenomena. The Christian believer, when convinced of their truth, accepts the results of science as safe and genuine additions to our knowledge, and as harmonising with the teachings of religion. With the Eastern Asiatics it is different. The elemental philosophy of the ancient Hindoos could not be scientific, nor could it base its system of nature on a series of patient observations. It was not in the capacity of the Hindoo to undertake such inquiries. He was content, then, to imagine where he could not discover. He therefore willingly adopted that view of nature--probably in its origin Greek, and ultimately Babylonian--which made of the four elements as many active powers controlled in their working, not by a conscious will, but by a blind yet retributive necessity.

It is interesting to note the resemblances between the Hindoo physical system of the world and that of the Ionian philosophers. Thales of Miletus, who lived B.C. 600, held that water is the origin of things. Out of water everything is derived, and to it everything ultimately returns. Heraclitus of Ephesus believed the one principle which underlies all phenomena to be fire. The world is formed, he taught, by evolution from fire; not made by God or by man. This fire is a rational intelligence controlling the universe. It also is the human soul. Anaximenes said that the physical principle which originates nature is air, and all the elements may be resolved into

this. Air made dense gave birth to the earth, and from the earth were formed the heavenly bodies. The air acts by motion impressed on it from eternity, causing in it alternate rarefaction and compression. This air he thought to be eternal. Anaximander of Miletus was a friend of Thales. He held the elements of the world to be simple and unchangeable, and taught that they formed all things by concurrence with homogeneous particles already existing.

Let it be observed that all these philosophers regarded matter as the cause of all things. They lived two centuries before Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who extended their inquiries into the world of mind, and taught a system in which either mind in the abstract, or God, was regarded as the source of the world.

No more do they resemble Pythagoras, who, living early enough to be the contemporary of some of them, formed a system of his own based on numbers. The secret soul of the world which causes its various phenomena is a principle of harmony.