FORE:I have explained already in the chapter "Round about Lige" that I myself was duped occasionally, for example, by the story of the three hundred civilians who had been shot. To my mind these violent acts at the beginning of the war were part and parcel of the system of frightfulness, by which the Germans tried to scare the population and indirectly the hostile armies, at the same time rousing their own soldiers to anger and fury.Even as regards physical phenomena, Socrates, so far from professing complete ignorance, held a very positive theory which he was quite ready to share with his friends. He taught what is called the doctrine of final causes; and, so far as our knowledge goes, he was either the first to teach it, or, at any rate, the first to prove the existence of divine agencies by its means. The old poets had occasionally attributed the origin of man and other animals to supernatural intelligence, but, apparently, without being led to their conviction by any evidence of design displayed in the structure of organised creatures. Socrates, on the other hand, went through the various external organs of the human body with great minuteness, and showed, to his own satisfaction, that they evinced the workings of a wise and beneficent Artist. We shall have more to say further on about this whole argument; here we only wish to observe that, intrinsically, it does not differ very much from the speculations which its author derided as the fruit of an impertinent curiosity; and that no one who now employed it would, for a single moment, be called an agnostic or a sceptic.