Once while Thales was gazing upwards while doing astronomy, he fell into a well. A clever and delightful Thracian serving-girl is said to have made fun of him, since he was eager to know the things in the heavens but failed to notice what was in front of him and right next to his feet.

The story goes that when they found fault with him for his poverty, supposing that philosophy is useless, he learned from his astronomy that there would be a large crop of olives. Then, while it was still winter, he obtained a little money and made deposits on all the olive presses both in Miletus and in Chios. Since no one bid against him, he rented them cheaply. When the right time came, suddenly many tried to get the presses all at once, and he rented them out on whatever terms he wished, and so made a great deal of money. In this way he proved that philosophers can easily be wealthy if they desire, but this is not what they are interested in.

It is quite possible that Thales wrote nothing down about his philosophy. At least it is extremely unlikely that any writings attributed to Thales still existed during Aristotle's lifetime some 250 years later. Otherwise Aritotle would not have been as circumspect as he is in introducing Thales' opinions , which he carefully embeds (Metaphysics, I.3 983a26ff) in structures of his own devising. (McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates, 27ff is very good on this subject.) In passages such as this Aristotle's invention of the historiography of philosophy is at its clearest. He is working with accounts that in his day are already incomplete and fragmented, and we can watch him work as he tries to make his predecessors speak sense. For Aristotle, at the end of a long chain of philosophical reflection, it was clear that the earliest thinkers were working their way toward a concept of original matter or stuff. Aristotle himeslef was reduced to metaphor when it came to referring to the original, utlimate matter of things. He called it hyle, which in the Greek of his day meant "timber," the stuff out of which useable lumber could be milled.

There is certain a substantial tradition that holds that Thales identified water as the source of all things and that to which things return., and there can also be little doubt that, in the view of his successors, he had, implicitly if not explicitly, set himself the task of answering the question, "What is the origin and primary stuff of all things? Thales' choice of water from among the obvious candidates (the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water) confirms his Near Eastern sources. Some have suggested that he might have gotten his idea from the annual flooding of the Nile, fertilizing the flood plain and leaving a rich deposit of nutrients and life-forms behind. Certainly water (oceans, deeps, floods) fiugured prominently in many Near Eastern myths. Some have even posited amniotic fluid as the key to Thales' choice, a point to which Aristotle alluded in his more general interpretation in which he speculates (Metaphysics, I.3. 983b20ff, W. D. Ross translation) that Thales

says the principle is water (for which reason he declared that the earth rests on water), getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist, and that heat itself is generated from the moist and kept alive by it (and that from which they come to be is a principle of all things.) He got this notion from this fact, and from the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water is the origin of the nature of moist things.