ONE:"Certainly!"The analogy may be carried even farther. If Plato regarded the things of sense as not merely a veil, but an imperfect imitation of the only true realities; so also did Aristotle represent the sublunary elements as copying the disposition and activities of the ethereal spheres. They too have their concentric arrangementsfirst fire, then air, then water, and lastly earth in the centre; while their perpetual transformation into one another presents an image in time of the spatial rotation which those sublime beings perform. And although we think that Sir A. Grant is quite mistaken in identifying Aristotles Supreme Mind with the Idea of Good, there can be no doubt of its having been suggested by that Idea. It is, in fact, the translation of Platos abstraction into concrete reality, and the completion of a process which Plato356 had himself begun. From another point of view we may say that both master and disciple were working, each in his own way, at the solution of a problem which entirely dominates Greek philosophy from Empedocles onthe reconciliation of Parmenides and Heracleitus, Being and Becoming, the eternal and the changeful, the one and the many. Aristotle adopts the superficial, external method of placing the two principles side by side in space; and for a long time the world accepted his solution for the same reason that had commended it to his own acceptance, its apparent agreement with popular tradition and with the facts of experience. It must be confessed, however, that here also he was following the lines laid down by Plato. The Timaeus and the Laws are marked by a similar tendency to substitute astronomy for dialectics, to study the celestial movements with religious veneration, to rebuild on a scientific basis that ancient star-worship which, even among the Greeks, enjoyed a much higher authority and prestige than the humanised mythology of the poets. But for Christianity this star-worship would probably have become the official faith of the Roman world. As it is, Dantes great poem presents us with a singular compromise between the two creeds. The crystalline spheres are retained, only they have become the abode of glorified spirits instead of being the embodiment of eternal gods. We often hear it said that the Copernican system was rejected as offensive to human pride, because it removed the earth from the centre of the universe. This is a profound mistake. Its offence was to degrade the heavenly bodies by assimilating them to the earth.254 Among several planets, all revolving round the sun, there could not be any marked qualitative difference. In the theological sense there was no longer any heaven; and with the disappearance of the solid357 sidereal sphere there was no longer any necessity for a Prime Mover.
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ONE:Happily the burgomaster intervened, and, as I heard later, got him released.
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ONE:146
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ONE:Hetty was waiting for him now in Lawrence's study. She looked bright and cheerful so that Bruce kissed her passionately. It would be hard if he could not live up to her courage and devotion.112
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ONE:To get rid of superstitious beliefs was, no doubt, a highly meritorious achievement, but it had been far more effectually57 performed by the great pre-Socratic thinkers, Heracleitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. These men or their followers had, besides, got hold of a most important principlethe vital principle of all sciencewhich was the reign of law, the universality and indefeasibility of physical causation. Now, Epicurus expressly refused to accept such a doctrine, declaring that it was even worse than believing in the gods, since they could be propitiated, whereas fate could not.119 Again, Greek physical philosophy, under the guidance of Plato, had been tending more and more to seek for its foundation in mathematics. Mathematical reasoning was seen to be the type of all demonstration; and the best hopes of progress were staked on the extension of mathematical methods to every field of enquiry in turn. How much might be done by following up this clue was quickly seen not only in the triumphs of geometry, but in the brilliant astronomical discoveries by which the shape of the earth, the phases of the moon, and the cause of eclipses were finally cleared up and placed altogether outside the sphere of conjecture. Nor was a knowledge of these truths confined to specialists: they were familiar alike to the older Academy, to the Peripatetic, and to the Stoic schools; so that, with the exception of those who doubted every proposition, we may assume them to have been then, as now, the common property of all educated men. Epicurus, on the other hand, seems to have known nothing of mathematics, or only enough to dispute their validity, for we are told that his disciple Polyaenus, who had previously been eminent in that department, was persuaded, on joining the school, to reject the whole of geometry as untrue;120 while, in astronomy, he pronounced the heavenly bodies to be no larger than they appear to our senses, denied the existence of Antipodes, and put the crudest guesses of early philosophy on the same footing with the best-authenticated results of later observation. It is no wonder, then, that during the whole58 continuance of his school no man of science ever accepted its teaching, with the single exception of Asclepiades, who was perhaps a Democritean rather than a disciple of the Garden, and who, at any rate, as a physiologist, would not be brought into contact with its more flagrant absurdities.
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