FORE:It was from mathematical science that the light of certainty first broke. Socrates had not encouraged the study of mathematics, either pure or applied; nor, if we may judge from some disparaging allusions to Hippias and his lectures in the Protagoras, did Plato at first regard it with any particular favour. He may have acquired some notions of arithmetic and geometry at school; but the intimate acquaintance with, and deep interest in them, manifested throughout his later works, probably dates from his visits to Italy, Sicily, Cyrn, and Egypt. In each of these places the exact sciences were cultivated with more assiduity than at Athens; in southern Italy they had been brought into close connexion with philosophy by a system of mystical interpretation. The glory of discovering their true speculative significance was reserved for Plato. Just as he had detected a profound analogy between the Socratic scepticism and the Heracleitean flux, so also, by another vivid intuition, he saw in the definitions and demonstrations of geometry a type of true reasoning, a particular application of the Socratic logic. Thus the two studies were brought into fruitful reaction, the one gaining a wider applicability, and the other an exacter method of proof. The mathematical spirit ultimately proved211 too strong for Plato, and petrified his philosophy into a lifeless formalism; but no extraneous influence helped so much to bring about the complete maturity of his constructive powers, in no direction has he more profoundly influenced the thought of later ages.Here, then, we find, chiefly among the rustic population, a religion intimately associated with morality, and including the doctrine of retribution after death. But this simple faith, though well adapted to the few wants of its original votaries, could not be raised to the utmost expansion and purity of which it was susceptible without being brought into vivifying contact with that other Olympian religion which, as we have seen, belonged more peculiarly to the ruling aristocracy. The poor may be more moral than the rich, and the country than the town; nevertheless it is from dwellers in cities, and from the higher classes, including as they do a large percentage of educated, open-minded individuals, that the impulses to moral progress always proceed. If the narrowness and hardness of primitive social arrangements were overcome; if justice was disengaged from the ties of blood-relationship, and tempered with consideration for inevitable error; if deadly feuds were terminated by a habitual appeal to arbitration; if the worship of one supreme ideal was substituted for a blind sympathy with the ebb and flow of life on earth; if the numerical strength of states was increased by giving shelter to fugitives; if a Hellenic nation was created and held together by a common literature and a common civilisation, by oracles accessible to all, and by periodical games in which every free-born Greek could take part; and, lastly, if a brighter abode than the slumberous garden of Persephon was assigned after death to the godlike heroes who had come forth from a thrice repeated ordeal with souls unstained by sin;55all this was due to the military rather than to the industrial classes, to the spirit that breathes through Homer69 rather than to the tamer inspiration of Hesiods muse. But if justice was raised to an Olympian throne; if righteous providence, no less than creative power, became an inalienable attribute of Zeus; if lyric poetry, from Archilochus to Simonides and Pindar, is one long hymn of prayer and praise ever turned upward in adoring love to the Divine; we must remember that Themis was a synonyme for Earth, and that Prometheus, the original friend of humanity, for whose benefit he invented every useful art, augury included, was her son. The seeds of immortal hope were first planted in the fructifying bosom of Dmtr, and life, a forsaken Ariadn, took refuge in the mystical embraces of Dionysus from the memory of a promise that had allured her to betray. Thus, we may conjecture that between hall and farm-house, between the Olympian and the Chthonian religions, there was a constant reaction going on, during which ethical ideas were continually expanding, and extricating themselves from the superstitious elements associated with their earliest theological expression.
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