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.Something has happened! decided Larry.
FORE:In person Aristotle resembled the delicate student of modern times rather than the athletic figures of his predecessors. He was not a soldier like Socrates, nor a gymnast like Plato. To judge from several allusions in his works, he put great faith in walking as a preservative of healtheven when lecturing he liked to pace up and down a shady avenue. And, probably, a constitutional was the severest exercise that290 he ever took. He spoke with a sort of lisp, and the expression of his mouth is said to have been sarcastic; but the traits preserved to us in marble tell only of meditation, and perhaps of pain. A free-spoken and fearless critic, he was not over-sensitive on his own account. When told that somebody had been abusing him in his absence, the philosopher replied, He may beat me, too, if he likesin my absence. He might be abused, even in his own presence, without departing from the same attitude of calm disdain, much to the disappointment of his petulant assailants. His equanimity was but slightly disturbed by more public and substantial affronts. When certain honorary distinctions, conferred on him by a popular vote at Delphi, were withdrawn, probably on the occasion of his flight from Athens, he remarked with his usual studied moderation, that, while not entirely indifferent, he did not feel very deeply concerned; a trait which illustrates the character of the magnanimous man far better than anything related of Alexander. Two other sayings have an almost Christian tone; when asked how we should treat our friends, he replied, As we should wish them to treat us; and on being reproached with wasting his bounty on an unworthy object, he observed, it was not the person, but the human being that I pitied.181
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