stylistic:tone, structural:reformatting
Rationalism, observation and the beginning of scientific thought

The pre-Socratic intellectual revolution is widely considered to have been the first step towards liberation of the human mind from the mythical world and initiated a march towards reason and scientific thought that yielded modern western philosophy and science. The pre-Socratics sought to understand the various aspects of nature by means of rationalism, observations, and offering explanations that could be deemed as scientific, giving birth to what became Western rationalism. Thales was the first to seek for a unitary arche of the world. Whether arche meant the beginning, the origin, the main principle or the basic element is unclear, but was the first attempt to reduce the explanations of the universe to a single cause, based on reason and not guided by any sort of divinity. Anaximander offered the principle of sufficient reason, a revolutionary argument that would also yield the principle that nothing comes out of nothing. Most of pre-Socratics seemed indifferent to the concept of teleology, especially the Atomists who fiercely rejected the idea. According to them, the various phenomena were the consequence of the motion of atoms without any purpose. Xenophanes also advanced a critique of anthropomorphic religion by highlighting in a rational way the inconsistency of depictions of the gods in Greek popular religion.