浜烘�т氦姣涚墖涓�绾�A鐗囬粍鑹瞋浼︽�х編涓�绾�A鐗嘷淇勭綏鏂疉鐗囦笌缇庡浗A鐗嘷淇勭綏鏂�涓�绾ф瘺鐗嘇鐗囧厤璐�

THREE:CHAPTER V. THE OBJECT OF MECHANICAL INDUSTRY.

THREE:During the two centuries that ended with the close of the Peloponnesian war, a single race, weak numerically, and weakened still further by political disunion, simultaneously developed all the highest human faculties to an extent possibly rivalled but certainly not surpassed by the collective efforts of that vastly greater population which now wields the accumulated resources of modern Europe. This race, while maintaining a precarious foothold on the shores of the Mediterranean by repeated prodigies of courage and genius, contributed a new element to civilisation which has been the mainspring of all subsequent progress, but which, as it expanded into wider circles and encountered an increasing resistance from without, unavoidably lost some of the enormous elasticity that characterised its earliest and most concentrated reaction. It was the just boast of the Greek that to Asiatic refinement and Thracian valour he joined a disinterested thirst for knowledge unshared by his neighbours on either side.5 And if a contemporary of Pericles could have foreseen all that would be thought, and said, and done during2 the next twenty-three centuries of this world’s existence, at no period during that long lapse of ages, not even among the kindred Italian race, could he have found a competitor to contest with Hellas the olive crown of a nobler Olympia, the guerdon due to a unique combination of supreme excellence in every variety of intellectual exercise, in strategy, diplomacy, statesmanship; in mathematical science, architecture, plastic art, and poetry; in the severe fidelity of the historian whose paramount object is to relate facts as they have occurred, and the dexterous windings of the advocate whose interest leads him to evade or to disguise them; in the far-reaching meditations of the lonely thinker grappling with the enigmas of his own soul, and the fervid eloquence by which a multitude on whose decision hang great issues is inspired, directed, or controlled. He would not, it is true, have found any single Greek to pit against the athletes of the Renaissance; there were none who displayed that universal genius so characteristic of the greatest Tuscan artists such as Lionardo and Michael Angelo; nor, to take a much narrower range, did a single Greek writer whose compositions have come down to us excel, or even attempt to excel, in poetry and prose alike. But our imaginary prophet might have observed that such versatility better befitted a sophist like Hippias or an adventurer like Critias than an earnest master of the Pheidian type. He might have quoted Pindar’s sarcasm about highly educated persons who have an infinity of tastes and bring none of them to perfection;6 holding, as Plato did in the next generation, that one man can only do one thing well, he might have added that the heroes of modern art would have done much nobler work had they concentrated their powers on a single task instead of attempting half a dozen and leaving most of them incomplete.

THREE:A quarter of an hour passed, and then a trim maid with dark short hair, and in the smart starched style peculiar to good servants, appeared. She gave one glance of indifference at Prout, and then passed down the stairs. From his window he could see the very neat figure crossing the square.We met only a few Germans on the road from Brussels to Charleroi, and found no garrison except in the townlet Hal. Very little burning had taken place on this road, but so much the more plundering and looting. A woman took us all over her house in the neighbourhood of Brussels, to show us the total wrecking. Small pieces of furniture were generally taken away, but stoves, kitcheners, and cupboards were smashed. She herself had had her face badly wounded, because she had hidden herself in the cellar when the Germans came near, and they had beaten her out of that with their rifle-butts. Many other women were treated in the same manner.

THREE:They girt with towers and sheltering houses raised,"A very singular circumstance, is it not?" he asked, quietly.

THREE:The Epicurean cosmology need not delay us long. It is completely independent of the atomic theory, which had only been introduced to explain the indestructibility of matter, and, later on, the mechanism of sensation. In describing how the world was first formed, Epicurus falls back on the old Ionian meteorology. He assumes the existence of matter in different states of diffusion, and segregates fluid from solid, light from heavy, hot from cold, by the familiar device of a rapid vortical movement.168 For the rest, as we have already noticed, Epicurus gives an impartial welcome to the most conflicting theories of his predecessors, provided only that they dispense with the aid of supernatural intervention; as will87 be seen by the following summary, which we quote from Zeller:—