THREE:"Well ...! The Nieuwe Zijds Voorburgwal."Machinery of transmission being generally a part of the fixed plant of an establishment, experiments cannot be made to institute comparisons, as in the case of machines; besides, there are special or local considerationssuch as noise, danger, freezing, and distanceto be taken into account, which prevent any rules of general application. Yet in every case it may be assumed that some particular plan of transmitting power is better than any other, and that plan can best be determined by studying, first, the principles of different kinds of mechanism and its adaptation to the special conditions that exist; and secondly, precedents or examples.
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THREE:The Epicurean philosophy was, in fact, the first to gain a footing in Rome; and it thereby acquired a position of comparative equality with the other schools, to which it was not really entitled, but which it has ever since succeeded in maintaining. The new doctrine fell like a spark on a mass of combustible material. The Romans were full of curiosity about Nature and her workings; full of contempt for the degrading Etruscan superstitions which hampered them at every turn, and the falsity of which was proving too much even for the official gravity of their state-appointed interpreters; full of impatience at the Greek mythology which was beginning to substitute itself for the severe abstractions of their own more spiritual faith;265 full of loathing for the Asiatic orgies which were being introduced into the highest society of their own city. Epicureanism offered them a complete and easily intelligible theory of the world, which at the same time came as a deliverance from supernatural terrors. The consequence was that its different parts were thrown out of perspective, and their relative importance almost reversed. Originally framed as an ethical system with certain physical and theological implications, it was interpreted by Lucretius, and apparently also by his Roman predecessors,266 as a scientific and anti-religious system, with certain references to conduct neither very prominently brought forward nor very distinctly conceived.168 And we know from the contents of the papyrus rolls discovered at Herculaneum, that those who studied the system in its original sources paid particular attention to the voluminous physical treatises of Epicurus, as well as to the theological works of his successors. Nor was this change of front limited to Epicureanism, if, as we may suspect, the rationalistic direction taken by Panaetius was due, at least in part, to a similar demand on the side of his Roman admirers.However, the effect of these Austrian mortars was terrible enough. I could not form a correct opinion about them by the sound of the shot; and only those who were in the fort that was hit were able to realise the terrific results. Hence the interest of the report by an officer, who escaped after having been made a prisoner at Loncin. He told my colleague of De Tijd at Antwerp about it. After having related how, during nearly ten days, the fort had been defended heroically and reso64lutely, he gave the following description of the final struggle:
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THREE:According to Sir A. Grant, it is by the mystical and poetical side of his nature that Plato differs from Aristotle. The one aspired to a truth above the truth of scientific knowledge; the other to methodised experience and the definite.182 Now, setting aside the question whether there is any truth above the truth of scientific knowledge, we doubt very much whether Plato believed in its existence. He held that the most valuable truth was that which could be imparted to others by a process even more rigorous than mathematical reasoning; and there was no reality, however transcendent, that he did not hope to bring within the grasp of a dialectic without which even the meanest could not be understood. He did, indeed, believe that, so far, the best and wisest of mankind had owed much more to a divinely implanted instinct than to any conscious chain of reflection; but he distinctly293 asserted the inferiority of such guidance to the light of scientific knowledge, if this could be obtained, as he hoped that it could. On the other hand, Aristotle was probably superior to Plato as a poet; and in speaking about the highest realities he uses language which, though less rich and ornate than his masters, is not inferior to it in force and fervour; while his metaphysical theories contain a large element of what would now be considered mysticism, that is, he often sees evidence of purpose and animation where they do not really exist. His advantage in definiteness is, of course, indisputable, but this was, perhaps, because he came after Plato and profited by his lessons.It is a familiar fact, first brought to light by Lessing, and generalised by him into a law of all good literary composition, that Homer always throws his descriptions into a narrative form. We are not told what a hero wore, but how he put on his armour; when attention is drawn to a particular object we are made acquainted with its origin and past history; even the reliefs on a shield are invested with life and movement. Homer was not impelled to adopt this method either by conscious reflection or by a profound poetic instinct. At a certain stage of intellectual development, every Greek would find it far easier to arrange the data of experience in successive than in contemporaneous order; the one is fixed, the other admits of indefinite variation. Pictorial and plastic art also begin with serial presentations, and only arrive at the construction of large centralised groups much later on. We have next to observe that, while Greek reflection at first followed the order of time, it turned by preference not to present or future, but to past time. Nothing in Hellenic literature reminds us of Hebrew prophecy. To a Greek all distinct prevision was merged in the gloom of coming death or the glory of anticipated fame. Of course, at every great crisis of the national fortunes much curiosity prevailed among the vulgar as to what course events would take; but it was sedulously discouraged by the noblest minds. Herodotus and46 Sophocles look on even divine predictions as purposely ambiguous and misleading. Pindar often dwells on the hopeless uncertainty of life.35 Thucydides treats all vaticination as utterly delusive. So, when a belief in the souls separate existence first obtained acceptance among the Greeks, it interested them far less as a pledge of never-ending life and progress hereafter, than as involving a possible revelation of past history, of the wondrous adventures which each individual had passed through before assuming his present form. Hence the peculiar force of Pindars congratulation to the partaker in the Eleusinian mysteries; after death he knows not only the end of life, but also its god-given beginning.36 Even the present was not intelligible until it had been projected back into the past, or interpreted by the light of some ancient tale. Sappho, in her famous ode to Aphrodit, recalls the incidents of a former passion precisely similar to the unrequited love which now agitates her heart, and describes at length how the goddess then came to her relief as she is now implored to come again. Modern critics have spoken of this curious literary artifice as a sign of delicacy and reserve. We may be sure that Sappho was an utter stranger to such feelings; she ran her thoughts into a predetermined mould just as a bee builds its wax into hexagonal cells. Curtius, the German historian, has surmised with much plausibility that the entire legend of Troy owes its origin to this habit of throwing back contemporary events into a distant past. According to his view, the characters and scenes recorded by Homer, although unhistorical as they now stand, had really a place in the Achaean colonisation of Asia Minor.37 But, apart from any disguised allusions, old stories had an inexhaustible charm for the Greek imagination. Even during the stirring events of the Peloponnesian war, elderly Athenian47 citizens in their hours of relaxation talked of nothing but mythology.38 When a knowledge of reading became universally diffused, and books could be had at a moderate price, ancient legends seem to have been the favourite literature of the lower classes, just as among ourselves in Caxtons time. Still more must the same taste have prevailed a century earlier. A student who opens Pindars epinician odes for the first time is surprised to find so little about the victorious combatants and the struggles in which they took part, so much about mythical adventures seemingly unconnected with the ostensible subject of the poem. Furthermore, we find that genealogies were the framework by which these distant recollections were held together. Most noble families traced their descent back to a god or to a god-like hero. The entire interval separating the historical period from the heroic age was filled up with more or less fictitious pedigrees. A mans ancestry was much the most important part of his biography. It is likely that Herodotus had just as enthusiastic an admiration as we can have for Leonidas. Yet one fancies that a historian of later date would have shown his appreciation of the Spartan king in a rather different fashion. We should have been told something about the heros personal appearance, and perhaps some characteristic incidents from his earlier career would have been related. Not so with Herodotus. He pauses in the story of Thermopylae to give us the genealogy of Leonidas up to Heracls; no more and no less. That was the highest compliment he could pay, and it is repeated for Pausanias, the victor of Plataea.39 The genealogical method was capable of wide extension, and could be applied to other than human or animal relationships. Hesiods Theogony is a genealogy of heaven and earth, and all that in them is. According to Aeschylus, gain is bred from gain, slaughter from slaughter, woe from woe. Insolence bears a child like unto herself, and this in turn gives birth to48 a still more fatal progeny.40 The same poet terminates his enumeration of the flaming signals that sped the message of victory from Troy to Argos, by describing the last beacon as not ungrandsired by the Idaean fire.41 Now, when the Greek genius had begun to move in any direction, it rushed forward without pausing until arrested by an impassable limit, and then turned back to retraverse at leisure the whole interval separating that limit from its point of departure. Thus, the ascending lines of ancestry were followed up until they led to a common father of all; every series of outrages was traced through successive reprisals back to an initial crime; and more generally every event was affiliated to a preceding event, until the whole chain had been attached to an ultimate self-existing cause. Hence the records of origination, invention, spontaneity were long sought after with an eagerness which threw almost every other interest into the shade. Glory be to the inventor, sings Pindar, in his address to victorious Corinth; whence came the graces of the dithyrambic hymn, who first set the double eagle on the temples of the gods?42 The Prometheus of Aeschylus tells how civilisation began, and the trilogy to which it belongs was probably intended to show how the supremacy of Zeus was first established and secured. A great part of the Agamemnon deals with events long anterior to the opening of the drama, but connected as ultimate causes with the terrible catastrophe which it represents. In the Eumenides we see how the family, as it now exists, was first constituted by the substitution of paternal for maternal headship, and also how the worship of the Avenging Goddesses was first introduced into Athens, as well as how the Areopagite tribunal was founded. It is very probable that Sophocless earliest work, the Triptolemus, represented the origin of agriculture under a dramatic form; and if the same poets later pieces, as well as all those of Euripides,49 stand on quite different ground, occupied as they are with subjects of contemporaneous, or rather of eternal interest, we must regard this as a proof that the whole current of Greek thought had taken a new direction, corresponding to that simultaneously impressed on philosophy by Socrates and the Sophists. We may note further that the Aeginetan sculptures, executed soon after Salamis, though evidently intended to commemorate that victory, represent a conflict waged long before by the tutelary heroes of Aegina against an Asiatic foe. We may also see in our own British Museum how the birth of Athn was recorded in a marble group on one pediment of the Parthenon, and the foundation of her chosen city on the other. The very temple which these majestic sculptures once adorned was a petrified memorial of antiquity, and, by the mere form of its architecture, must have carried back mens thoughts to the earliest Hellenic habitation, the simple structure in which a gabled roof was supported by cross-beams on a row of upright wooden posts.
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ONE:A considerable portion of the present work, comprising the whole of the first volume and the first two chapters of the second, is reprinted with corrections and additions from the Westminster Review. The last chapter of the second volume has already appeared under a slightly different title in Mind for January and April 1882. The chapters entitled, The Sceptics and Eclectics, The Religious Revival, and The Spiritualism of Plotinus, are now published for the first time.IV.
ONE:"I'll come quietly," he said between his teeth. "Have you got the woman?"
ONE:"Till next time," he said. "It's all over with me. The pitcher has gone too often to the well, and it has got broken at last. And I deserved all I got--there is no question whatever about that.""Is that so? Well, it is not very clear! And that little girl?"
