The first philsophers were the natural philosophers, the Greeks. They started the whole game of thought off, and the process has rolled from there. But, what did they think and why did they think it?

Well, the natural philosphers came as a reaction to the old world order. Until this point, the beliefs that ruled the world were those of mythology. Every culture had their own, from Norse Gods like Thor, to Greek Gods like Hades. The natural philosophers rebelled against these ideas with their own. So, what was the project of the natural philosphers? Well, the natural philosphers wanted to look at, surpirsingly enough, the natural world and its processes. Essentially, they asked the question: Where did things come from? This was the project they sought to find out. You may not agree with what they found, but what they surmised and the processes they used helped lay the foundation of thought today.

One of the key elements for the natural philosphers was the idea that something had to come from something. In this, there was the acknowledgement that things changed and transformations took place in nature, but all things, however transformed, had to come from something. For the natural philosophers, questions such as how live fish came from water, or huge trees could come from apparently dead ground, were questions of marvel. As they watched these things, they saw that nature was in a continual transformaton. But, how could these transformations occur?

Although we don't know where the consensus came from, there was one among the natural philsophers. They all accepted that there had to be a basic substance to the root of all this change; that there was an element that produced the transformations in the world and nature. There had to be something that all things came from and returned to.

For our purposes here it is not the conclusions that the natural philsophers came to which are important, but the questions they asked in the process of finding their conclusions. How they thought, not what they thought, is what is important because each grouping of philosphers shaped our world view, whether we acknowledge it or not.

The natural philosphers wanted to understand how the world worked without having to resort to the mythological ideas that preceeded them. They sought an understanding of how things are through reason and nothing more. For the natural philosphers, reason was the key to understanding what the world really is. The natural philsophers were, for all intents and purposes, the first of a long line of what became known as "rationalists".

Two of the natural philsophers were Parmenides and Heraculitus and both had very different ideas about how things were. For Parmenides (540-480BC), the idea that something came from nothing was wrong. He said that nothing can come from nothing and nothing that exists can become nothing. He took this even farther and said there is no such thing as actual change. Nothing could become anything other than what it already was. Parmenides could see with his senses that things changed, but he could not reconcile this with what his reason told him. He concluded that the our senses gave an illussory perception of the world that was not in accordance with reason. He chose reason over his senses. His project as a philospher was to expose all these forms of perceptual illussion with the use of reason.

In comparison, Parmenides' contemporary Heraculitus said the world was in a constant state of flux. We could say that he trusted his senses much more than Pamenides. He saw that the world was made up of opposites that were interdependent. If we never became ill, then we would not know what being well was. If there was never a war, then we would never appreciate what it was to be at peace. Without a winter, we would never see the spring. Although limited, it is very straight-forward and sensical, don't you think? "Logos (reason) is day and night, spring and summer, war and peace," said Heraculitus.

Both Paramenides and Heraculitus believed in a "one element" theory to the world. The only difference was that one said that, although things appear to change, they cannot because nothing can come from nothing, while the other said things are always in flux and the sensory perceptions can be relied upon. It took the next natural philosophers to solve this obvious contradiction in their predecessors' ideas. Empedocles (490-430BC) said that both were right in one of their assertions, but wrong in the other. The problem he addressed was the "one element". Empedocles said that this premise was wrong; that there were four elements to everything, namely, earth, air, fire and water.

Everything is made up of these things. Nothing did not come from nothing, but things did change because it was the coming together of the four elements that did it. The elements are eternal, but the things they make are not. One could liken this to the idea of a painter who only has one colour, such as red. If he only has red, then he cannot paint a green field. But, if he has yellow, red, blue and black, he can paint hundreds of different colours by mixing them together.

The four elements were the key to bringing a resolution of the earlier natural philosphers' ideas. How did Empedocles realise this, though? We can only guess what might have caused this realisation for Empedocles. Perhaps, he was one day sitting watching a piece of wood burning. As a piece of the wood disintegrated, he heard the crackling and splutter. That was the water. Then, something went up in smoke. The air. The fire he could, of course, see, and then the ashes that remained when the fire was extinguished was earth.

And there we will end it for now. We can see that the natural philosphers were the ones that sparked the method of scientific inquiry. They wanted to see the world as it was in nature and began the journey down the road of reason. They believed that everything in the world came from the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. These elements came together and came apart to form things and that was how natural change took place. It may not have been right, but it was deduced by reason and observation together and that is the important thing. Remember, we are not interested really in what they said, but more in the process by which they came to say the things they said.

So where do we go next? The next step is to look at the what the big guns of Greece said about nature and philosophy. The journey will move forward in time to the days of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and the marvel of their ideas that have also shaped the way we think.