Editing First principle (section)

==== Mythical cosmogonies ====
The heritage of Greek [[mythology]] already embodied the desire to articulate reality as a whole and this universalizing impulse was fundamental for the first projects of speculative theorizing. It appears that the order of "being" was first imaginatively visualized before it was abstractly thought.<ref>{{cite book|title=Presocratic Philosophy vol.3|author=Barry Sandywell|year=1996|publisher=Routledge New York|isbn=9780415101707 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=k561uXI-uPgC }} p.28,42</ref>

In the mythological cosmogonies of the Near East, the universe is formless and empty and the only existing thing prior to creation was the water abyss. In the [[Babylonia]]n creation story, [[Enuma Elish]], the primordial world is described as a "watery chaos" from which everything else appeared.<ref>{{cite book|title=A History of Greek Philosophy|author=William Keith Chambers Guthrie|year=2000|publisher=Cambridge University Press|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ogUR3V9wbbIC|pages=58, 59|isbn=9780521294201 }}</ref> This watery chaos has similarities in the cosmogony of the Greek mythographer [[Pherecydes of Syros]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=West |first1=Martin Litchfield |title=The Orphic Poems |date=1984 |publisher=Clarendon Press |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BxHTzAEACAAJ |pages=104–107 |language=en}}</ref> In the mythical [[Greece|Greek]] [[cosmogony]] of [[Hesiod]] (8th to 7th century BC), the origin of the world is [[Chaos (cosmogony)|Chaos]], considered as a divine primordial condition, from which everything else appeared. In the creation "chaos" is a gaping-void, but later the word is used to describe the space between the Earth and the sky, after their separation. "Chaos" may mean infinite space, or a formless matter which can be differentiated.<ref>This is described as a large windy-gap, almost unlimited ([[Abyss (religion)|abyss]]) where are the roots and the ends of the Earth, sky, sea and [[Tartarus]]: [http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/theogony.htm online ''The Theogony of Hesiod'']. Translation H.G.Evelyn White (1914): 116, 736-744</ref> The notion of temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the religious conception of immortality.<ref>{{cite book|title=A History of Greek Philosophy|author=William Keith Chambers Guthrie|year=2000|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=9780521294201 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ogUR3V9wbbIC}} p 83</ref> The conception of the "divine" as an origin influenced the first Greek philosophers.<ref>The phrase: "Divine is that which had no beginning, neither end" is attributed to [[Thales]]</ref> In the [[Orphic]] cosmogony, the unaging [[Chronos]] produced [[Aether (mythology)|Aether]] and Chaos and made in divine Aether a silvery egg, from which everything else appeared.<ref>{{cite book|title=The Presocratic Philosophers|author=G.S.Kirk, J.E.Raven and M.Schofield|year=2003|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=9780521274555 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kFpd86J8PLsC}} p.24</ref>