FORE:Charlton said nothing, but from the sound of his laboured breathing it was evident that the spirit of adventure was upon him. They sat there for some time with the two doors open, so that they might see through the grimy windows into the courtyard beyond. It was weary work, and the minutes passed slowly.
8.00 - 10.00 | JUN 09,2014
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FORE:Those who will may see in all this an anticipation of chemical substitution and double decomposition. We can assure them that it will be by no means the most absurd parallel discovered between ancient and modern ideas. It is possible, however, to trace a more real connexion between the Aristotelian physics and mediaeval thought. We do not of361 course mean the scholastic philosophy, for there never was the slightest doubt as to its derivation; we allude to the alchemy and astrology which did duty for positive science during so many centuries, and even overlapped it down to the time of Newton, himself an ardent alchemist. The superstitions of astrology originated independently of the peripatetic system, and probably long before it, but they were likely to be encouraged by it instead of being repressed, as they would have been by a less anthropomorphic philosophy. Aristotle himself, as we have seen, limited the action of the heavens on the sublunary sphere to their heating power; but, by crediting them with an immortal reason and the pursuit of ends unknown to us, he opened a wide field for conjecture as to what those ends were, and how they could be ascertained. That the stars and planets were always thinking and acting, but never about our affairs, was not a notion likely to be permanently accepted. Neither was it easy to believe that their various configurations, movements, and names (the last probably revealed by themselves) were entirely without significance. From such considerations to the casting of horoscopes is not a far remove. The Aristotelian chemistry would still more readily lend itself to the purposes of alchemy. If Nature is one vast process of transmutation, then particular bodies, such as the metals, not only may, but must be convertible into one another. And even those who rejected Aristotles logic with scorn still clung to his natural philosophy when it flattered their hopes of gain. Bacon kept the theory of substantial forms. His originality consisted in looking for a method by which any form, or assemblage of forms might be superinduced at pleasure on the underlying matter. The real development of knowledge pursued a far different course. The great discoverers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries achieved their success by absolutely reversing the method of Aristotle, by bringing into fruitful contact principles which he had condemned to barren isolation.362 They carried terrestrial physics into the heavens; they brought down the absoluteness and eternity of celestial law to earth; they showed that Aristotles antithetical qualities were merely quantitative distinctions. These they resolved into modes of motion; and they also resolved all motions into one, which was both rectilinear and perpetual. But they and their successors put an end to all dreams of transmutation, when they showed by another synthesis that all matter, at least within the limits of our experience, has the changeless consistency once attributed exclusively to the stellar spheres.The De Rerum Natura is the greatest of Roman poems, because it is just the one work where the abstract genius of Rome met with a subject combining an abstract form with the interest and inspiration of concrete reality; where negation works with a greater power than assertion; where the satire is directed against follies more wide-spread and enduring than any others; where the teaching in some most essential points can never be superseded; and where dependence on a Greek model left the poet free to contribute from his own imagination those elements to which the poetic value of his work is entirely due. By a curious coincidence, the great poet of mediaeval Italy attained success by the employment of a somewhat similar method. Dante represented, it is true, in their victorious combination, three influences against which Lucretius waged an unrelenting warfarereligion, the idealising love of woman, and the spiritualistic philosophy of Greece. Nevertheless, they resemble each other in this important particular, that both have taken an114 abstract theory of the world as the mould into which the burning metal of their imaginative conceptions is poured. Dante, however, had a power of individual presentation which Lucretius either lacked or had no opportunity of exercising; and therefore he approaches nearer to that supreme creativeness which only two races, the Greek and the English, have hitherto displayed on a very extended scale.
11.00 - 10.00 | JUN 10,2014
Pellentesque ut urna eu mauris scele risque auctor volutpat et massa pers piciis iste natus scele risque auctor volutpat et massa.
