Perhaps, then, what marks the physiologoi as early scientists is not so much the use of naturalistic explanations for the mysteries that the world presents, as rational ones. They believed that wisdom did not merely have to be received, but that ideas were worth debating and, if need be, discarding. They argued with each other and those who came before them; they were ambitious for their ideas. Here is Heraclitus (fl. 500 BC) evaluating some of his predecessors: ‘great learning does not teach sense: for otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus’.
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