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When we pass from Plutarch to Maximus Tyrius and Apuleius, the darkness grows perceptibly thicker, and is no longer broken by the lucida tela diei with which the Theban thinker had combated at least one class of mistaken beliefs. These writers are so occupied with developing the positive aspects of supernaturalism��daemonology, divination, and thaumaturgy��that they can find no place for a protest against its extravagances and perversions; nor is their mysticism balanced by those extensive applications of philosophy to255 real life, whether under the form of biography or of discourses on practical morality, which enabled Plutarch��s mind to preserve an attitude of comparative sobriety and calmness. Hence while Maximus is absolutely forgotten, and Apuleius remembered only as an amusing story-teller, Plutarch has been perhaps the most successful interpreter between Greek humanity and modern thought. His popularity is now rapidly declining, but the influence exercised by his writings on characters differing so much from one another and from his own as those of Montaigne, Rousseau, and Wordsworth, suffices to prove, if any proof be needed, how deep and wide were the sympathies which they once evoked.The explanation of this anomaly is, we believe, to be found in the fact that Catholicism did, to a great extent, actually spring from a continuation of those widely different tendencies which Epicurus confounded in a common assault. It had an intellectual basis in the Platonic and Stoic philosophies, and a popular basis in the revival of those manifold superstitions which, underlying the brilliant civilisations of Greece and Rome, were always ready to break out with renewed violence when their restraining pressure was removed. The revival of which we speak was powerfully aided from without. The same movement that was carrying Hellenic culture into Asia was bringing Oriental delusions by a sort of back current into the Western world. Nor was this all. The relaxation of all political bonds, together with the indifference of the educated classes, besides allowing a rank undergrowth of popular beliefs to spring up unchecked, surrendered the regulation of those beliefs into the hands of a78 profession which it had hitherto been the policy of every ancient republic to keep under rigid restraint��the accredited or informal ministers of religion.154 Now, the chief characteristic of a priestly order has always and everywhere been insatiable avarice. When forbidden to acquire wealth in their individual capacity, they grasp at it all the more eagerly in their corporate capacity. And, as the Epicureans probably perceived, there is no engine which they can use so effectually for the gratification of this passion as the belief in a future life. What they have to tell about this is often described by themselves and their supporters as a message of joy to the weary and afflicted. But under their treatment it is very far from being a consolatory belief. Dark shades and lurid lights predominate considerably in their pictures of the world beyond the grave; and here, as we shall presently show, they are aided by an irresistible instinct of human nature. On this subject, also, they can speak with unlimited confidence; for, while their other statements about the supernatural are liable to be contradicted by experience, the abode of souls is a bourne from which no traveller returns to disprove the accuracy of their statements.The two elements of error and achievement are so intimately blended and mutually conditioned in the philosophy which we have been reviewing, that to decide on their respective importance is impossible without first deciding on a still larger question��the value of systematic thought as such, and apart from its actual content. For Aristotle was perhaps the greatest master of systematisation that ever lived. The401 framework and language of science are still, to a great extent, what he made them; and it remains to be seen whether they will ever be completely remodelled. Yet even this gift has not been an unmixed benefit, for it was long used in the service of false doctrines, and it still induces critics to read into the Aristotelian forms truths which they do not really contain. Let us conclude by observing that of all the ancients, or even of all thinkers before the eighteenth century, there is none to whom the methods and results of modern science could so easily be explained. While finding that they reversed his own most cherished convictions on every point, he would still be prepared by his logical studies to appreciate the evidence on which they rest, and by his ardent love of truth to accept them without reserve. Most of all would he welcome our astronomy and our biology with wonder and delight, while viewing the development of modern machinery with much more qualified admiration, and the progress of democracy perhaps with suspicious fear. He who thought that the mind and body of an artisan were alike debased by the exercise of some simple handicraft under the pure bright sky of Greece, what would he have said to the effect wrought on human beings by the noisome, grinding, sunless, soulless drudgery of our factories and mines! How profoundly unfitted would he have deemed its victims to influence those political issues with which the interests of science are every day becoming more vitally connected! Yet slowly, perhaps, and unwillingly, he might be brought to perceive that our industry has been the indispensable basis of our knowledge, as supplying both the material means and the moral ends of its cultivation. He might also learn that there is an even closer relationship between the two: that while the supporters of privilege are leagued for the maintenance of superstition, the workers, and those who advocate their claims to political equality, are leagued for its restraint and overthrow. And if402 he still shrank back from the heat and smoke and turmoil amid which the genius of our age stands, like another Heracleitus, in feverish excitement, by the steam-furnace whence its powers of revolutionary transmutation are derived, we too might reapply the words of the old Ephesian prophet, bidding him enter boldly, for here also there are gods.The victim was no ordinary man either. People flocked to view the body as morbid folks will do on such occasions. The victim of the crime was no more attractive in death than he had been in life. There were the crooked limbs, the hideous hooked nose, the claws with the orange splashes on them.His analysis of individuality was the first step in this direction. We have seen that he treats definition as a process of gradual specification, beginning with the most general notions, and working down by successive differentiations to the most particular. Now, the completed conception is itself the integration of all these differences, the bond of union holding them together. Turning to an antithetical order of ideas, to the material substance of which bodies are composed, and its various transformations, we find him working out the same vein of thought. According to the Aristotelian chemistry, an ultimate indeterminate unknowable something clothes itself with one or other of the opposing attributes, dry and moist, hot and cold; and when two of these are combined, manifests itself to our senses as one of the four elements. The elements combine in a particular manner to form homogeneous animal tissues, and these again are united into heterogeneous organs, which together constitute the living body. Here, then, we have two analogous series of specifications��one conceptual and leading down from the abstract to the concrete, the other physical, and leading up from the vague, the simple, and the homogeneous, to the definite, the complex, and the heterogeneous. Aristotle embraces both processes under a single comprehensive generalisation. He describes each of them as the continuous conversion of a346 possibility into an actuality. For the sake of greater clearness, let us take the liberty of substituting modern scientific terms for his cumbrous and obsolete classifications. We shall then say that the general notion, living thing, contains under it the two less general notions��plant and animal. If we only know of any given object that it has life, there is implied the possibility of its being either the one or the other, but not both together. On determining it to be (say) an animal, we actualise one of the possibilities. But the actualisation is only relative, and immediately becomes the possibility of being either a vertebrate or an invertebrate animal. The actuality vertebrate becomes the possibility of viviparous or oviparous, and so on through successive differentiations until we come (say) to a man. Now let us begin at the material end. Here are a mass of molecules, which, in their actual state are only carbon, nitrogen, and so forth. But they are potential starch, gluten, water, or any other article of food that might be named; for under favourable conditions they will combine to form it. Once actualised as such, they are possible blood-cells; these are possible tissues; these, again, possible organs, and lastly we come to the consensus of vital functions, which is a man. What the raw material is to the finished product, that are the parts to the entire organism, the elements to the compound, the genus to the species, and such in its very widest sense is potency to realisation, δ?ναμι? to ?ντελ?χεια, throughout the universe of growth and decay.24671<000005>