TWO:There is a story that Plato used to thank the gods, in what some might consider a rather Pharisaic spirit, for having made him a human being instead of a brute, a man instead of a woman, and a Greek instead of a barbarian; but more than179 anything else for having permitted him to be born in the time of Socrates. It will be observed that all these blessings tended in one direction, the complete supremacy in his character of reason over impulse and sense. To assert, extend, and organise that supremacy was the object of his whole life. Such, indeed, had been the object of all his predecessors, and such, stated generally, has been always and everywhere the object of philosophy; but none had pursued it so consciously before, and none has proclaimed it so enthusiastically since then. Now, although Plato could not have done this without a far wider range of knowledge and experience than Socrates had possessed, it was only by virtue of the Socratic method that his other gifts and acquisitions could be turned to complete account; while, conversely, it was only when brought to bear upon these new materials that the full power of the method itself could be revealed. To be continually asking and answering questions; to elicit information from everybody on every subject worth knowing; and to elaborate the resulting mass of intellectual material into the most convenient form for practical application or for further transmission, was the secret of true wisdom with the sage of the market-place and the workshop. But the process of dialectic investigation as an end in itself, the intense personal interest of conversation with living men and women of all classes, the impatience for immediate and visible results, had gradually induced Socrates to restrict within far too narrow limits the sources whence his ideas were derived and the purposes to which they were applied. And the dialectic method itself could not but be checked in its internal development by this want of breadth and variety in the topics submitted to its grasp. Therefore the death of Socrates, however lamentable in its occasion, was an unmixed benefit to the cause for which he laboured, by arresting (as we must suppose it to have arrested) the popular and indiscriminate employment of his cross-examining method,180 liberating his ablest disciple from the ascendency of a revered master, and inducing him to reconsider the whole question of human knowledge and action from a remoter point of view. For, be it observed that Plato did not begin where Socrates had left off; he went back to the germinal point of the whole system, and proceeded to reconstruct it on new lines of his own. The loss of those whom we love habitually leads our thoughts back to the time of our first acquaintance with them, or, if these are ascertainable, to the circumstances of their early life. In this manner Plato seems to have been at first occupied exclusively with the starting-point of his friend��s philosophy, and we know, from the narrative given in the Apologia, under what form he came to conceive it. We have attempted to show that the account alluded to cannot be entirely historical. Nevertheless it seems sufficiently clear that Socrates began with a conviction of his own ignorance, and that his efforts to improve others were prefaced by the extraction of a similar confession of ignorance on their part. It is also certain that through life he regarded the causes of physical phenomena as placed beyond the reach of human reason and reserved by the gods for their own exclusive cognisance, pointing, by way of proof, to the notorious differences of opinion prevalent among those who had meddled with such matters. Thus, his scepticism worked in two directions, but on the one side it was only provisional and on the other it was only partial. Plato began by combining the two. He maintained that human nescience is universal and necessary; that the gods had reserved all knowledge for themselves; and that the only wisdom left for men is a consciousness of their absolute ignorance. The Socratic starting-point gave the centre of his agnostic circle; the Socratic theology gave the distance at which it was described. Here we have to note two things��first, the breadth of generalisation which distinguishes the disciple from the master; and, secondly, the symptoms of a strong181 religious reaction against Greek humanism. Even before the end of the Peloponnesian War, evidence of this reaction had appeared, and the Bacchae of Euripides bears striking testimony to its gloomy and fanatical character. The last agony of Athens, the collapse of her power, and the subsequent period of oligarchic terrorism, must have given a stimulus to superstition like that which quite recently afflicted France with an epidemic of apparitions and pilgrimages almost too childish for belief. Plato followed the general movement, although on a much higher plane. While looking down with undisguised contempt on the immoral idolatry of his countrymen, he was equally opposed to the irreligion of the New Learning, and, had an opportunity been given him, he would, like the Reformers of the sixteenth century, have put down both with impartial severity. Nor was this the only analogy between his position and that of a Luther or a Calvin. Like them, and indeed like all great religious teachers, he exalted the Creator by enlarging on the nothingness of the creature; just as Christianity exhibits the holiness of God in contrast and correlation with the sinfulness of unregenerate hearts; just as to Pindar man��s life seemed but the fleeting shadow in a dream when compared with the beauty and strength and immortality of the Olympian divinities; so also did Plato deepen the gloom of human ignorance that he might bring out in dazzling relief the fulness of that knowledge which he had been taught to prize as a supreme ideal, but which, for that very reason, seemed proper to the highest existences alone. And we shall presently see how Plato also discovered a principle in man by virtue of which he could claim kindred with the supernatural, and elaborated a scheme of intellectual mediation by which the fallen spirit could be regenerated and made a partaker in the kingdom of speculative truth.A somewhat similar observation applies to the art of reasoning, which it would be possible to compile by bringing together all the rules on the subject, scattered through the Organon. Aristotle has discovered and formulated every canon of theoretical consistency, and every artifice of dialectical debate, with an industry and acuteness which cannot be too highly extolled; and his labours in this direction have perhaps contributed more than those of any other single writer to the intellectual stimulation of after ages; but the kind of genius requisite for such a task was speculative rather than practical; there was no experience of human nature in its concrete manifestations, no prevision of real consequences involved. Such a code might be, and probably was to a great extent, abstracted from the Platonic dialogues; but to work up the processes of thought into a series of dramatic contests, carried on between living individuals, as Plato has done, required a vivid perception and grasp of realities which, and not any poetical mysticism, is what positively distinguishes a Platonist from an Aristotelian.190

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TWO:My "foreign" passport was, of course, in French, of which language the man evidently knew not a word. Although I explained that this passport was the best one could get in The Netherlands, that I had paid six guilders and seventy-five cents for it, that I was a war-correspondent of De Tijd, it was all useless. I had to go with him to the guard-house, and the man kept the queer passport��the damning piece of evidence��firmly in his hand. All the inquisitive loafers, of which the frontier was full during those days, followed me, and so we went in procession to the guard-house, at some distance from the frontier. I heard all sorts of discussions behind me, and constantly caught words like: German, boche, deserter, franc-tireur, spy, and other complimentary niceties.The majority of the refugees returning to Louvain belonged to the lower classes, and they began to loot and plunder the town, encouraged thereto by the German soldiers, who threw the things into the streets, and said: "Take it, if you like!" In extenuation of the looting and plundering I might say that the poor wretches tried before all to get hold of half-burned eatables.

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TWO:In their theory of cognition the Stoics chiefly followed Aristotle; only with them the doctrine of empiricism is enunciated so distinctly as to be placed beyond the reach of misinterpretation. The mind is at first a tabula rasa, and all our ideas are derived exclusively from the senses.37 But while knowledge as a whole rests on sense, the validity of each particular sense-perception must be determined by an appeal to reason, in other words, to the totality of our acquired experience.38 So also the first principles of reasoning are not to be postulated, with Aristotle, as immediately and unconditionally certain; they are to be assumed as hypothetically true and gradually tested by the consequences deducible from them.39 Both principles well illustrate the synthetic method of the Stoics��their habit of bringing into close16 connexion whatever Aristotle had studiously held apart. And we must maintain, in opposition to the German critics, that their method marks a real advance on his. It ought at any rate to find more favour with the experiential school of modern science, with those who hold that the highest mathematical and physical laws are proved, not by the impossibility of conceiving their contradictories, but by their close agreement with all the facts accessible to our observation."Found out a lot," said the first policeman. "This motor's as bright as your lantern really, It's all covered over with blacklead."

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