ONE:A world where ordering reason was not only raised to supreme power, but also jealously secluded from all communion with lower forms of existence, meant to popular imagination a world from which divinity had been withdrawn. The astronomical teaching of Anaxagoras was well calculated to increase a not unfounded alarm. Underlying the local tribal mythology of Athens and of Greece generally, was an older, deeper Nature-worship, chiefly directed towards those heavenly luminaries which shone so graciously on all men, and to which all men yielded, or were supposed to yield,41 grateful homage in return. Securus judicat orbis terrarum. Every Athenian citizen from Nicias to Strepsiades would feel his own belief strengthened by such a universal concurrence of authority. Two generations later, Plato held fast to the same conviction, severely denouncing its impugners, whom he would, if possible, have silenced with the heaviest penalties. To Aristotle, also, the heavenly bodies were something far more precious and perfect than anything in our sublunary sphere, something to be spoken of only in language of enthusiastic and passionate love. At a far later period Marcus Aurelius could refer to them as visible gods;32 and just before the final extinction of Paganism highly-educated men still offered up their orisons in silence and secresy to the moon.33 Judge, then, with what horror an orthodox public received Anaxagorass announcement that the moon shone only by reflected light, that she was an earthy body, and that her surface was intersected with mountains and ravines, besides being partially built over. The bright Seln, the Queen of Heaven, the most interesting and sympathetic of goddesses, whose phases so vividly recalled the course of human life, who was firmly believed to bring fine weather at her return and to take it away at her departure, was degraded into a cold, dark, senseless clod.34 Democritus observed that all this had been known a long time in the Eastern countries where he had travelled.C Possibly; but fathers of families could not have been more disturbed if it had been a brand-new discovery. The sun, too, they were told, was a red-hot stone larger than Peloponnesusa somewhat unwieldy size even for a Homeric god. Socrates, little as he cared about physical investigations generally, took this theory very seriously to heart, and42 attempted to show by a series of distinctions that sun-heat and fire-heat were essentially different from each other. A duller people than the Athenians would probably have shown far less suspicion of scientific innovations. Men who were accustomed to anticipate the arguments of an orator before they were half out of his mouth, with whom the extraction of reluctant admissions by cross-examination was habitually used as a weapon of attack and defence in the public law courts and practised as a game in private circleswho were perpetually on their guard against insidious attacks from foreign and domestic foeshad minds ready trained to the work of an inquisitorial priesthood. An Athenian, moreover, had mythology at his fingers ends; he was accustomed to see its leading incidents placed before him on the stage not only with intense realism, but with a systematic adaptation to the demands of common experience and a careful concatenation of cause and effect, which gave his belief in them all the force of a rational conviction while retaining all the charm of a supernatural creed. Then, again, the constitution of Athens, less than that of any other Greek State, could be worked without the devoted, self-denying co-operation of her citizens, and in their minds sense of duty was inseparably associated with religious belief, based in its turn on mythological traditions. A great poet has said, and said truly, that Athens was on the will of man as on a mount of diamond set, but the crystallising force which gave that collective human will such clearness and keenness and tenacity was faith in the protecting presence of a diviner Will at whose withdrawal it would have crumbled into dust. Lastly, the Athenians had no genius for natural science; none of them were ever distinguished as savants. They looked on the new knowledge much as Swift looked on it two thousand years afterwards. It was, they thought, a miserable trifling waste of time, not productive of any practical good, breeding conceit in young men, and quite unworthy of receiving any attention from orators, soldiers, and43 statesmen. Pericles, indeed, thought differently, but Pericles was as much beyond his age when he talked about Nature with Anaxagoras as when he charged Aspasia with the government of his household and the entertainment of his guests."He knew more than he would tell," said Prout.
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TWO:53Forging as a process in machine-making includes the forming and shaping of the malleable parts of machinery, welding or joining pieces together, the preparation of implements for forging and finishing, tempering of steel tools, and usually case-hardening.
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Art-Director
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TWO:Her nimble wit pointed to conspiracy.Fourth. Pressure wheels, acting in every respect upon the principle of a rotary steam-engine, except in the differences that arise from operating with an elastic and a non-elastic fluid; the pressure of the water resting continually against the vanes and "abutment," without means of escape except by the rotation of the wheel.
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Art-Director
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TWO:We have already seen how this fundamental division is applied to the universe as a whole. But our philosopher is not content with classifying the phenomena as he finds360 them; he attempts to demonstrate the necessity of their dual existence; and in so doing is guilty of something very like a vicious circle. For, after proving from the terrestrial movements that there must be an eternal movement to keep them going, he now assumes the revolving aether, and argues that there must be a motionless solid centre for it to revolve round, although a geometrical axis would have served the purpose equally well. By a still more palpable fallacy, he proceeds to show that a body whose tendency is towards the centre, must, in the nature of things, be opposed by another body whose tendency is towards the circumference. In order to fill up the interval created by this opposition, two intermediate bodies are required, and thus we get the four elementsearth, water, air, and fire. These, again, are resolved into the antithetical couples, dry and wet, hot and cold, the possible combinations of which, by twos, give us the four elements once more. Earth is dry and cold, water cold and wet, air wet and hot, fire hot and dry; each adjacent pair having a quality in common, and each element being characterized by the excess of a particular quality; earth is especially dry, water cold, air wet, and fire hot. The common centre of each antithesis is what Aristotle calls the First Matter, the mere abstract unformed possibility of existence. This matter always combines two qualities, and has the power of oscillating from one quality to another, but it cannot, as a rule, simultaneously exchange both for their opposites. Earth may pass into water, exchanging dry for wet, but not so readily into air, which would necessitate a double exchange at the same moment.
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Art-Director
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