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Thales forever split this world, creating two separate conceptual realms, the natural and the supernatural—or in the common synecdoche, the seen and the unseen—that didn’t exist before. Rather, they existed, but the hard-and-fast conceptual boundary between them didn’t. Putting up that boundary was the most significant act in the history of human thought.In an influential essay called “The Fixation of Belief,” the nineteenth-century pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce describes the scientific method as resting on the following premises:There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and . . . by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really are . . . .The new conception here involved is that of reality.2Thales’ new and self-evidently powerful way of thinking spread rapidly throughout Greece. It soon gave rise to many branches of learning that are still with us, including literary theory, rhetoric, political science, history, ethnology, medicine, botany, biology, and not least logic itself—the rules of naturalistic thinking. Where physical sciences attempt to explain raw material reality in naturalistic terms, these disciplines sought to explain various other aspects of reality (human social realities, for example, or realities of the plant or animal kingdoms) in the same way. Together, they established free rational inquiry as the entire realm of human endeavor aimed at explaining the revolutionary “new conception” of reality.

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But Thales’ significance doesn’t end there. For in peeling the sensible from the insensible, the seen from the unseen, Thales didn’t just invent reason. He also made it psychologically necessary for someone to invent faith as well. We can draw a direct line from Thales through Plato, whose Demiurge shapes the seen in the image of the unseen, to St. Paul, who denounced Greek philosophy and pointedly defined faith as “the conviction of things not seen,” and to Muhammad, who dedicated the Qu’ran to “those who believe in the unseen.” In what became programmatic messages for subsequent believers—and they became so, we must realize, because they resonated psychologically—Paul and Muhammad thus accepted and embraced the split between seen and unseen. Where Plato and Aristotle had tried to close the gap, the new faiths would own it. If Thales sensed God’s presence in the seen, and Plato and Aristotle used God to try to mediate between the seen and unseen, the Christians and the Muslims triumphantly proclaimed God as the definitive victory of the unseen over the seen.