At the Start of the chapter, it was

At the Start of the chapter, it was pointed out that the Greeks, because of the secular nature of their thought, relied more than other peoples on Observation, and that since, further, this Observation was long dissociated from purely scientific inquiry, it expressed itself in delineations of human types, in myths that portrayed basic relationships, and in gnomic statements of social and moral truths. On the other hand, the Ionian physicists and, even more, the medical writers of the fifth Century were very largely moved by the spirit of detailed, specific inquiry familiar in modern times. And since Thucydides, as we have seen, was evidently much concerned with the generic and the typical but at the same time was at equal pains to trace specific events with utmost accuracy, it is of interest to see how these two opposite tendencies—the one towards the typical, the other towards the specific—revealed themselves in the thought of his time. For this larger aspect of his inheritance is clearly of final importance for his work.