ONE:Smoke! He turned the focusing adjustment a trifle. Too soon to signalit may be an oil-burning steamer and not the yachtor a rum-runner of a revenue patrolits thick, black oil smoke, the sort the yacht would giveit is a small boatyesIt was natural that the best methods of interpreting so useful a source of information should be greatly sought after, and that they should be systematised in treatises expressly devoted to the subject. One such work, the Oneirocritica of Artemid?rus, is still extant. It was composed towards the end of the second century, as its author tells us, at the direct and repeated command of Apollo. According to Artemid?rus, the general belief in prophecy and in the existence of providence must stand or fall with the belief in prophetic dreams. He looked on the compilation of his work as the fulfilment of a religious mission, and his whole life was devoted to collecting the materials for it. His good faith is, we are told, beyond question, his industry is enormous, and he even exercises considerable discrimination in selecting and elucidating the phenomena which are represented to us as229 manifestations of a supernatural interest in human affairs. Thus his beliefs may be taken as a fair gauge of the extent to which educated opinion had at that time become infected with vulgar superstition.351
THREE:"All right; you may go!"
THREE:The next great forward step in speculation was taken by Anaximander, another Milesian, also of distinguished attainments in mathematics and astronomy. We have seen that to Thales water, the all-embracing element, became, as such, the first cause of all things, the absolute principle of existence. His successor adopted the same general point of view, but looked out from it with a more penetrating gaze. Beyond water lay something else which he called the Infinite. He did not mean the empty abstraction which has stalked about in modern times under that ill-omened name, nor yet did he mean infinite space, but something richer and more concrete than either; a storehouse of materials whence the waste of existence could be perpetually made good. The growth and decay of individual forms involve a ceaseless drain on Nature, and the deficiency must be supplied by a corresponding influx from without.A For, be it observed that, although the Greek thinkers were at this period well aware that nothing can come from nothing, they had not yet grasped the complementary truth inalienably wedded to it by Lucretius in one immortal couplet, that nothing can return to nothing; and Kant is quite mistaken when he treats the two as historically inseparable. Common experience forces the one on our attention much sooner than the other. Our incomings are very strictly measured out and accounted for without difficulty, while it is hard to tell what becomes of all our expenditure, physical and economical. Yet, although the indestructibility of matter was a conception which had not yet dawned on Anaximander, he seems to have been feeling his way towards the recognition of a circulatory movement pervading all Nature. Everything, he says, must at last be reabsorbed in the Infinite as a punishment for the sin of its separate existence.10 Some may find in this sentiment a note of Oriental10 mysticism. Rather does its very sadness illustrate the healthy vitality of Greek feeling, to which absorption seemed like the punishment of a crime against the absolute, and not, as to so many Asiatics, the crown and consummation of spiritual perfection. Be this as it may, a doctrine which identified the death of the whole world with its reabsorption into a higher reality would soon suggest the idea that its component parts vanish only to reappear in new combinations.
THREE:
