ABSTRACT
Events in the course of the intellectual history of the fifth century BC followed swiftly upon each other. Yet, as always in a transitional period, breaks and connective lines crisscross each other. Concepts such as necessity, chance, or fate could still be applied to alien and unknown powers even after the secular breakthrough. And rational insight was not necessarily an insight bridging man’s little world and nature’s macrocosm. It is possible to observe a relatively uniform rationality in the science of the age-Democritus, Hippocrates, Thucydides-but the concept of insight had already for some time been acquiring a new content. No longer was the object mere speculative insight into the nature of the world, but far more man’s insight into his own nature, his own powerlessness, or his own possibilities.
