THREE:"Our editor has moreover interviewed young Miss Antoinette de Bruijn here, whom our correspondent brought from Louvain to Maastricht. In the presence of her mother she told how she had been in a train full of wounded, that there were armed soldiers on the platform, and that some wounded soldiers had been teased by offering them steaming soup which was not given to them. The father of this girl, Mr. de Bruijn, also assured us that when he met his daughter at Maastricht, our correspondent, Mr. Mokveld, was still very much under the impression of what he had witnessed."
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THREE:It will be seen from the foregoing passage how strong a hold the old Greek notion of an encircling limit had on the mind of Aristotle, and how he transformed it back from the high intellectual significance given to it by Plato into its original sense of a mere space-enclosing figure. And it will also be seen how he credits his spheres with a full measure of that moving power which, according to his rather unfair criticism, the Platonic Ideas did not possess. His astronomy also supplied him with that series of graduated transitions between two extremes in which Greek thought so much delighted. The heavenly bodies mediate between God and the earth; partly active and partly passive, they both receive and communicate the moving creative impulse. The four terrestrial elements are moved in the various categories of substance, quantity, quality, and place; the aether moves in place only. God remains without variableness or shadow of a change. Finally, by its absolute simplicity and purity, the aether mediates between the coarse matter perceived by our senses and the absolutely immaterial Nous, and is itself supposed to be pervaded by a similar gradation of fineness from top to bottom. Furthermore, the upper fire, which must not be confounded with flame, furnishes a connecting link between the aether and the other elements, being related to them as Form to Matter, or as agent to patient; and, when the elements are decomposed into their constituent qualities, hot and cold occupy a similar position with regard to wet and dry.
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THREE:"Not in the way you mean," she said. "Balmayne has fooled you to save his own skin. He knew I should make my story good and prove my innocence, or he would never have sent you to meet me tonight."Nor was this all. Thought, after having, as it would seem, wandered away from reality in search of empty abstractions, by the help of those very abstractions regained possession of concrete existence, and acquired a far fuller intelligence of its complex manifestations. For, each individual character is an assemblage of qualities, and can only be understood when those qualities, after having been separately studied, are finally recombined. Thus, biography is a very late production of literature, and although biographies are the favourite reading of those who most despise philosophy, they could never have been written without its help. Moreover, before characters can be described they must exist. Now, it is partly philosophy which calls character into existence by sedulous inculcation of self-knowledge and self-culture, by consolidating a mans individuality into something independent of circumstances, so that it comes to form, not a figure in bas-relief, but what sculptors call a figure in the round. Such was Socrates himself, and such were the figures which he taught Xenophon and Plato to recognise and portray. Character-drawing begins with them, and the Memorabilia in particular is the earliest attempt at a biographical analysis that we possess. From this to Plutarchs Lives there was still a long journey to be accomplished, but the interval between them is less considerable than that which divides Xenophon from his immediate predecessor, Thucydides. And when we remember how intimately the substance of Christian teaching is connected with the literary form of its first record, we shall still better appreciate the all-penetrating influence of Hellenic thought,158 vying, as it does, with the forces of nature in subtlety and universal diffusion.
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THREE:The Epicurean philosophy of life and mind is completed by a sketch of human progress from its earliest beginnings to the complete establishment of civilisation. Here our principal authority is Lucretius; and no part of his great poem has attracted so much attention and admiration in recent times as that in which he so vividly places before us the condition of primitive men with all its miseries, and the slow steps whereby family life, civil society, religion, industry, and science arose out of the original chaos and war of all against each. But it seems likely that here, as elsewhere, Lucretius did no more than copy and colour the outlines already traced by his masters hand.189 How far Epicurus himself is to be credited with this brilliant forecast of modern researches into the history of civilisation, is a more difficult question. When we99 consider that the most important parts of his philosophy were compiled from older systems, and that the additions made by himself do not indicate any great capacity for original research, we are forced to conclude that, here also, he is indebted to some authority whose name has not been preserved. The development of civilisation out of barbarism seems, indeed, to have been a standing doctrine of Greek Humanism, just as the opposite doctrine of degeneracy was characteristic of the naturalistic school. It is implied in the discourse of Protagoras reported by Plato, and also, although less fully, in the introduction to the History of Thucydides. Plato and Aristotle trace back the intellectual and social progress of mankind to very rude beginnings; while both writers assume that it was effected without any supernatural aida point marked to the exclusive credit of Epicurus by M. Guyau.190 The old notion of a golden age, accepted as it was by so powerful a school as Stoicism, must have been the chief obstacle to a belief in progress; but the Prometheus of Aeschylus, with its vivid picture of the miseries suffered by primitive men through their ignorance of the useful arts, shows that a truer conception had already gained ground quite independently of philosophic theories. That the primitive state was one of lawless violence was declared by another dramatic poet, Critias, who has also much to say about the civilising function of religion;191 and shortly before the time of Epicurus the same view was put forward by Euphorion, in a passage of which, as it will probably be new to many of our readers, we subjoin a translation:135
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