THREE:Turning away, back to his view, in a dark dress, a woman who had been at the extreme after rail was racing out of sight behind the cabin.We have now to study an analogous, though far less complicated, antagonism in ancient Greece, and to show how her most brilliant period of physical philosophy arose from the combination of two seemingly irreconcilable systems. Parmenides, in an address supposed to be delivered by Wisdom to her disciple, warns us against the method pursued by ignorant mortals, the blind, deaf, stupid, confused tribes, who hold that to be and not to be are the same, and that all things move round by an inverted path.19 What Parmenides denounced as arrant nonsense was deliberately proclaimed to be the highest truth by his illustrious contemporary, Heracleitus, of Ephesus. This wonderful thinker is popularly known as the weeping philosopher, because, according to a very silly tradition, he never went abroad without shedding tears over the follies of mankind. No such mawkish sentimentality, but bitter scorn and indignation, marked the attitude of23 Heracleitus towards his fellows. A self-taught sage, he had no respect for the accredited instructors of Hellas. Much learning, he says, does not teach reason, else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.20 Homer, he declares, ought to be flogged out of the public assemblages, and Archilochus likewise. When the highest reputations met with so little mercy, it will readily be imagined what contempt he poured on the vulgar herd. The feelings of a high-born aristocrat combine with those of a lofty genius to point and wing his words. The many are bad and few are the good. The best choose one thing instead of all, a perpetual well-spring of fame, while the many glut their appetites like beasts. One man is equal to ten thousand if he is the best. This contempt was still further intensified by the very excusable incapacity of the public to understand profound thought conveyed in a style proverbial for its obscurity. Men cannot comprehend the eternal law; when I have explained the order of Nature they are no wiser than before. What, then, was this eternal law, a knowledge of which Heracleitus found so difficult to popularise? Let us look back for a moment at the earlier Ionian systems. They had taught that the universe arose either by differentiation or by condensation and expansion from a single primordial substance, into which, as Anaximander, at least, held, everything, at last returned. Now, Heracleitus taught that this transformation is a universal, never-ending, never-resting process; that all things are moving; that Nature is like a stream in which no man can bathe twice; that rest and stability are the law, not of life, but of death. Again, the Pythagorean school, as we have seen, divided all things into a series of sharply distinguished antithetical pairs. Heracleitus either directly identified the terms of every opposition, or regarded them as necessarily combined, or as continually24 passing into one another. Perhaps we shall express his meaning most thoroughly by saying that he would have looked on all three propositions as equivalent statements of a single fact. In accordance with this principle he calls war the father and king and lord of all, and denounces Homers prayer for the abolition of strife as an unconscious blasphemy against the universe itself. Yet, even his powerful intellect could not grasp the conception of a shifting relativity as the law and life of things without embodying it in a particular material substratum. Following the Ionian tradition, he sought for a world-element, and found it in that cosmic fire which enveloped the terrestrial atmosphere, and of which the heavenly luminaries were supposed to be formed. Fire, says the Ephesian philosopher, no doubt adapting his language to the comprehension of a great commercial community, is the general medium of exchange, as gold is given for everything, and everything for gold. The world was not created by any god or any man, but always was, and is, and shall be, an ever-living fire, periodically kindled and quenched25. By cooling and condensation, water is formed from fire, and earth from water; then, by a converse process called the way up as the other was the way down, earth again passes into water and water into fire. At the end of certain stated periods the whole world is to be reconverted into fire, but only to enter on a new cycle in the series of its endless revolutionsa conception, so far, remarkably confirmed by modern science. The whole theory, including a future world conflagration, was afterwards adopted by the Stoics, and probably exercised a considerable influence on the eschatology of the early Christian Church. Imagination is obliged to work under forms which thought has already superseded; and Heracleitus as a philosopher had forestalled the dazzling consummation to which as a prophet he might look forward in wonder and hope. For, his elemental fire was only a picturesque presentation indispensable to him, but not to us, of the sovereign law wherein all things live and move and have their being. To have introduced such an idea into speculation was his distinctive and inestimable achievement, although it may have been suggested by the ε?μαρμ?νη or destiny of the theological poets, a term occasionally employed in his writings. It had a moral as well as a physical meaning, or rather it hovers ambiguously between the two. The sun shall not transgress his bounds, or the Erinyes who help justice will find him out. It is the source of human laws, the common reason which binds men together, therefore they should hold by it even more firmly than by the laws of the State. It is not only all-wise but all-good, even where it seems to be the reverse; for our distinctions between good and evil, just and unjust, vanish in the divine harmony of Nature, the concurrent energies and identifying transformations of her universal life.
THREE:Theyre getting aheadgetting away from us! cried Sandy.Meanwhile a new and powerful agency was about to interpose with decisive effect in the doubtful struggle. This was the study of mathematics. Revived by the Arabians and never wholly neglected during the Middle Ages, it had profited by the general movement of the Renaissance, and was finally applied to the cosmical problem by Galileo. In this connexion, two points of profound philosophical interest must be noted. The first is that, even in its fall, the Aristotelian influence survived, to some extent, both for good and for evil. To Aristotle belongs the merit of having been the first to base astronomy on physics. He maintains the earths immobility on experimental no less than on speculative grounds. A stone thrown straight up in the air returns to its starting-point instead of falling to the west of it; and the absence of stellar385 parallax seems to show that there is no change in our position relatively to the heavenly bodies. After satisfying himself, on empirical considerations, that the popular astronomy is true, he proceeds to show that it must be true, by considerations on the nature of matter and motion, which, although mistaken, are conceived in a genuinely scientific spirit. Now Galileo saw that, to establish the Copernican system, he must first grapple with the Peripatetic physics, and replace it by a new dynamical theory. This, which he could hardly have effected by the ordinary mathematical methods, he did by borrowing the analytical method of Atomism and applying it to the measurement of motion. The law of falling bodies was ascertained by resolving their descent into a series of moments, and determining its rate of velocity at successive intervals; and curvilinear motions were similarly resolved into the combination of an impulsive with an accelerating force, a method diametrically opposed to that of Bacon, who would not even accept the rough analysis of the apparent celestial motions proposed by Greek astronomers.
THREE:
TWO:Lucretius has been called Romes only great speculative genius. This is, of course, absurd. A talent for lucid ex101position does not constitute speculative genius, especially when it is unaccompanied by any ability to criticise the opinions expounded. The author of the De Rerum Natura probably had a lawyers education. He certainly exhibits great forensic skill in speaking from his brief. But Cicero and Seneca showed the same skill on a much more extensive scale; and the former in particular was immensely superior to Lucretius in knowledge and argumentative power. Besides, the poet, who was certainly not disposed to hide his light under a bushel, and who exalts his own artistic excellences in no measured terms, never professes to be anything but a humble interpreter of truths first revealed to his Greek instructors vivid intellect. It has, indeed, been claimed for Lucretius that he teaches a higher wisdom than his acknowledged guide.195 This assertion is, however, not borne out by a careful comparison between the two.196 In both there is the same theory of the universe, of man, and of the relations connecting them with one another. The idea of Nature in Lucretius shows no advance over the same idea in Epicurus. To each it expresses, not, as with the Stoics, a unifying power, a design by which all things work together for the best, but simply the conditions of a permanent mechanical aggregation. When Lucretius speaks of foedera Naturai, he means, not what we understand by laws of nature, that is, uniformities of causation underlying all phenomenal differences, to understand which is an exaltation of human dignity through the added power of prevision and control which it bestows, but rather the limiting possibilities of existence, the barriers against which human hopes and aspirations dash themselves in vainan objective logic which guards us against fallacies instead of enabling us to arrive at positive conclusions. We have here the pervadingly negative character of Epicureanism,102 though probably presented with something of Roman solemnity and sternness. The idea of individuality, with which Lucretius has also been credited, occupies but a small place in his exposition, and seems to have interested him only as a particular aspect of the atomic theory. The ultimate particles of matter must be divided into unlike groups of units, for otherwise we could not explain the unlikenesses exhibited by sensible objects. This is neither the original Greek idea, that every man has his own life to lead, irrespective of public opinion or arbitrary convention; nor is it the modern delight in Natures inexhaustible variety as opposed to the poverty of human invention, or to the restrictions of fashionable taste. Nor can we admit that Lucretius developed Epicurean philosophy in the direction of increased attention to the external world. The poet was, no doubt, a consummate observer, and he used his observations with wonderful felicity for the elucidation and enforcement of his philosophical reasoning; but in this respect he has been equalled or surpassed by other poets who either knew nothing of systematic philosophy, or, like Dante, were educated in a system as unlike as possible to that of Epicurus. There is, therefore, every reason for assuming that he saw and described phenomena not by virtue of his scientific training, but by virtue of his artistic endowment. And the same may be said of the other points in which he is credited with improvements on his masters doctrine. There is, no doubt, a strong consciousness of unity, of individuality, and of law running through his poem. But it is under the form of intuitions or contemplations, not under the form of speculative ideas that they are to be found. And, as will be presently shown, it is not as attributes of Nature but as attributes of life that they present themselves to his imagination.
TWO:"And yet it is so. Are you perhaps a Netherlander?"