Modern science has its source in the great philosophical ideas of .antiquity, in the earliest answers to the questions: What is the physical world? . . . How did it begin? This brilliant volume re-creates the very spirit of the first epoch of science as it began to run the course from myth to method. It covers the eleven centuries between An-aximander and Proclus, and shows how and in what intellectual climate were born the scientific ideas that future generations developed. Included are selections from the writings of ancient Greece and of the Roman Empire, which are placed in a completely new perspective by Professor Giorgio de Santillana of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.