ONE:What seems to us the reactionary attitude of the spiritu357alist school was dictated by the circumstances of its origin. A product of the great classical revival, its cause was necessarily linked with the civilisation of ancient Greece, and of that civilisation the worship of the old gods seemed to form an integral element. One need only think of the Italian Renaissance, with its predilection for the old mythology, to understand how much stronger and more passionate this feeling must have been among those to whom Greek literature still spoke in a living language, whose eyes, wherever they turned, still rested on the monuments, unrivalled, undesecrated, unfallen, unfaded, of Greek religious art. Nor was polytheism what some have imagined it to have been at this period, merely a tradition, an association, a dream, drawing shadowy sustenance from the human works and human thoughts which it had once inspired. To Plotinus and Proclus, as formerly to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, the luminaries of day and night blazed down from heaven as animated and immortal witnesses of its truth. It was not simply that the heavens declared the glory of God; to the pious beholder, they were visibly inhabited by glorious gods, and their constellated fires were, as Plotinus said, a scripture in which the secrets of destiny might be read. The same philosopher scornfully asks the Gnostics, who, in this respect, were indistinguishable from the Christians, whether they were so infatuated as to call the worst men their brothers, while refusing that title to the sun; and at a much later period, notwithstanding the heavy penalties attached to it, the worship of the heavenly bodies continued to be practised by the profoundest thinkers and scholars of the Neo-Platonic school.529 Moreover, polytheism, by the very weakness and unfixity of its dogmas, gave a much wider scope to independent speculation than could be permitted within the limits of the358 Catholic Church, just because Catholicism itself constituted a philosophical system in which all the great problems of existence were provided with definite and authoritative solutions.
TWO:This assumed, the scheme is complete, so far as the relative movement of the hammer-drop and the valve, but there must be some plan of giving motion to this added mechanism. In many examples there may be seen parts of machinery which continue in motion after the force which propels them has ceased to act; cannon balls are thrown for miles, the impelling force acting for a few feet only; a weaver's shuttle performs nearly its whole flight after the driver has stopped. In the present case, it is therefore evident that an independent or subsequent movement of the valves may be obtained by the momentum of some part set in motion during the descent of the hammer-head. His [Aristotles] theory of syllogism is simply an explicit statement of the fact that all knowledge, all thought, rests on universal truths or general propositionsthat all knowledge, whether deductive or inductive, is arrived at by the aid, the indispensable aid, of general propositions. We in England have been almost charmed into the belief that reasoning is perpetually from particular to particular, and a village matron and her Lucy have been used to express the truth for us in the concrete form adapted to our weaker comprehension (Mills Logic, bk. ii. ch. 3). We shall next be told, forsooth, that oxygen and hydrogen do not enter into the composition of water, because our village matron perpetually drinks it without passing through either element, and the analysis of the chemist will be proved as great a fiction as the analysis of the logician. Aristotle has supplied the links which at once upset all such superficial389 analysis. He has shown that even in analogy or example, which apparently proceeds in this way from one particular instance to another particular instance, we are only justified in so proceeding in so far as we have transformed the particular instance into a general proposition.284
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