Were it not that moral influences in learning mechanics, as in all other kinds of education, lie at the bottom of the whole matter, the subject of this chapter would not have been introduced. But it is the purpose, so far as possible, to notice everything that concerns an apprentice and learner, and especially what he has to deal with at the outset; hence some remarks upon the nature of apprentice engagements will not be out of place. To acquire information or knowledge of any kind successfully and permanently, it must be a work of free volition, as well as from a sense of duty or expediency; and whatever tends to create love and respect for a pursuit or calling, becomes one of the strongest incentives for its acquirement, and the interest taken by an [19] apprentice in his business is for this reason greatly influenced by the opinions that he may hold concerning the nature of his engagement.
FORE:"That is just what I should like to do," Lawrence said coolly."Freedom and revenge," she murmured. "What good words they are. Tomorrow! Well, tomorrow shall be my destruction or my Waterloo!"
FORE:"I promise nothing. You are in no position to dictate terms. Sit down and tell me the history of the forgery."The German officers, of course, held a different opinion; they alleged that the shooting by the civilians was even very general and purported to be a decided attack on the army. I asked them whether they had found any rifles or other arms at the "searches" of the housesI expressed myself somewhat cautiously on purposefor that ought to have been the case if such a great number of citizens had joined in the shooting. "No," they answered, "they were sly enough to see to it that we did not find these. They had been buried in time, of course."
Yet there was a difference between them, marking off each as the head of a whole School much wider than the Academy or the Lyceum; a difference which we can best express by saying that Plato was pre-eminently a practical, Aristotle pre-eminently a speculative genius. The object of the one was to reorganise all human life, that of the other to reorganise all human knowledge. Had the one lived earlier, he would more probably have been a great statesman or a great general than a great writer; the other would at no time have been anything but a philosopher, a mathematician, or a historian. Even from birth they seemed to be respectively marked out for an active and for a contemplative life: the one, a citizen of the foremost State in Hellas, sprung from a family in which political ambition was hereditary, himself strong, beautiful, fascinating, eloquent, and gifted with the keenest insight into mens capacities and motives; the other a Stagirite and an Asclepiad, that is to say, without opportunities for a public career, and possessing a hereditary aptitude for anatomy and natural history, fitted by his insignificant person and delicate constitution for sedentary pursuits, and better able to acquire a knowledge even of human nature from books than from a living converse with men and affairs. Of course, we are not for a moment denying to Plato a fore294most place among the masters of those who know; he embraced all the science of his age, and to a great extent marked out the course which the science of future ages was to pursue; nevertheless, for him, knowledge was not so much an end in itself as a means for the attainment of other ends, among which the preservation of the State seems to have been, in his eyes, the most important.M Aristotle, on the other hand, after declaring happiness to be the supreme end, defines it as an energising of mans highest nature, which again he identifies with the reasoning process or cognition in its purest form.His face slowly changed, gradually became red.So far our investigation has been analytical. We have seen Plotinus acquire, one after another, the elements out of which his system has still to be constructed. The first step was to separate spirit from matter. They are respectively distinguished as principles of union and of division. The bodies given to us in experience are a combination of the two, a dispersion of form over an infinitely extended, infinitely divisible, infinitely changeful substratum. Our own souls, which at first seemed so absolutely self-identical, present, on examination, a similarly composite character. A fresh analysis results in the separation of Nous or Reason from the lower functions of conscious life. And we infer by analogy that the soul in Nature bears the same relation to a transcendent objective Nous. Nous is essentially pure self-consciousness, and from this self-consciousness the world of Ideas is developed. Properly speaking, Ideas are the sole reality: sensible forms are an image of them impressed on matter through the agency of the world-soul. But Nous, or the totality of Ideas, though high, is not the highest. All that has hitherto occupied us, Nature, Soul, and Reason, is316 pervaded by a fundamental unity, without which nothing could exist. But Soul is not herself this unity, nor is Reason. Self-consciousness, even in its purest expression, involves a duality of object and subject. The notion of Being is distinct from the notion of oneness. The principle represented by the latter, as the cause of all things, must itself transcend existence. At the same time, it is revealed to us by the fact of our own personal identity. To be united with oneself is to be united with the One.CHAPTER V
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