Friedrich Nietzsche, 1890

 What gave these men the right to be considered philosophers, unlike the other astronomers, geographers and doctors who were active especially in the latter half of the period, was their common assumption that the world possessed some kind of integral unity and determinability which could be understood and explained in rational terms. A more important debt to myth appears in the central presupposition that the world is coherent and intelligible, is somehow a unity in spite of the diversity of its appearance.