THREE:It is best, when an apprentice thinks of entering an engineering establishment, to inquire of its character from disinterested persons who are qualified to judge of the facilities it affords. As a rule, every machine-shop proprietor imagines his own establishment to combine all the elements of an engineering businessand the fewer the facilities for learners, usually the more extravagant this estimate; so that opinions in the matter, [24] to be relied upon, should come from disinterested sources.Of Aristotle and his philosophie.
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FORE:To understand Descartes aright, we must provisionally disregard the account given in his work on Method of the process by which he arrived at a new theory of the world; for, in truth, there was nothing new about it except the pro388portion in which fragments taken from older systems were selected and recombined. As we have already noticed, there is no such thing as spinning philosophies out of ones own head; and, in the case of Descartes, even the belief that he was so doing came to him from Plato; for, along with Aristotles dogmatic errors, his sound teaching with regard to the derivation of knowledge had fallen into oblivion. The initial doubt of the Discourse on Method and the Meditations is also Platonic; only it is manifested under an individual and subjective, instead of a universal and objective form. But to find the real starting-point of Descartes enquiries we must look for it in his mathematical studies. A geometrician naturally conceives the visible world under the aspect of figured extension; and if he thinks the figures away, nothing will remain but extension as the ultimate material out of which all determinate bodies are shaped. Such was the result reached by Plato in his Timaeus. He identified matter with space, viewing this as the receptacle for his eternal and self-existent Ideas, or rather the plastic medium on which their images are impressed. The simplest spatial elements are triangles; accordingly it is with these that he constructs his solid bodies. The theory of triangular elements was probably suggested by Atomism; it is, in fact, a compromise between the purely mathematical and the materialistic methods. Like all Platos fancies, this theory of matter was attacked with such convincing arguments by Aristotle that, so long as his physics remained in the ascendent, it did not find a single supporter; although, as we saw in the last chapter, Plotinus very nearly worked his way back to it from the Peripatetic definition. Even now, at the moment of Aristotles fall, it might have failed to attract attention, had not the conditions under which it first arose been almost exactly repeated. Geometrical demonstration had again become the type of all reasoning; there was again a sceptical spirit abroad, forcing men to fall back on the most elementary and universal con389ceptions; an atomistic materialism again threatened to claim at least the whole field of physical enquiry for its own. That Descartes followed the Timaeus in identifying matter with extension cannot be doubted; especially when we see that he adopts Platos analysis of body into elementary triangles; but the theory agreed so well with his intellectual predispositions that he may easily have imagined it to be a necessary deduction from his own priori ideas. Moreover, after the first two steps, he parts company with Plato, and gives himself up, so far as his rejection of a vacuum will permit, to the mechanical physics of Democritus. Much praise has recently been bestowed on his attempt to interpret all physical phenomena in terms of matter and motion, and to deduce them from the unaided operation of natural causes; but this is no more than had been done by the early Greek thinkers, from whom, we may observe, his hypothesis of an initial vortex was also derived. His cosmogony is better than theirs, only in so far as it is adapted to scientific discoveries in astronomy and physiology not made by Descartes himself; for where his conjectures go beyond these they are entirely at fault.The analogy may be carried even farther. If Plato regarded the things of sense as not merely a veil, but an imperfect imitation of the only true realities; so also did Aristotle represent the sublunary elements as copying the disposition and activities of the ethereal spheres. They too have their concentric arrangementsfirst fire, then air, then water, and lastly earth in the centre; while their perpetual transformation into one another presents an image in time of the spatial rotation which those sublime beings perform. And although we think that Sir A. Grant is quite mistaken in identifying Aristotles Supreme Mind with the Idea of Good, there can be no doubt of its having been suggested by that Idea. It is, in fact, the translation of Platos abstraction into concrete reality, and the completion of a process which Plato356 had himself begun. From another point of view we may say that both master and disciple were working, each in his own way, at the solution of a problem which entirely dominates Greek philosophy from Empedocles onthe reconciliation of Parmenides and Heracleitus, Being and Becoming, the eternal and the changeful, the one and the many. Aristotle adopts the superficial, external method of placing the two principles side by side in space; and for a long time the world accepted his solution for the same reason that had commended it to his own acceptance, its apparent agreement with popular tradition and with the facts of experience. It must be confessed, however, that here also he was following the lines laid down by Plato. The Timaeus and the Laws are marked by a similar tendency to substitute astronomy for dialectics, to study the celestial movements with religious veneration, to rebuild on a scientific basis that ancient star-worship which, even among the Greeks, enjoyed a much higher authority and prestige than the humanised mythology of the poets. But for Christianity this star-worship would probably have become the official faith of the Roman world. As it is, Dantes great poem presents us with a singular compromise between the two creeds. The crystalline spheres are retained, only they have become the abode of glorified spirits instead of being the embodiment of eternal gods. We often hear it said that the Copernican system was rejected as offensive to human pride, because it removed the earth from the centre of the universe. This is a profound mistake. Its offence was to degrade the heavenly bodies by assimilating them to the earth.254 Among several planets, all revolving round the sun, there could not be any marked qualitative difference. In the theological sense there was no longer any heaven; and with the disappearance of the solid357 sidereal sphere there was no longer any necessity for a Prime Mover.
FORE:I stood near the spot where the ferry-boat used to take people across; but to cross was now out of the question, for any one alighting on the opposite side would be landed in the scorching glare. Therefore, I returned to Lixhe, where I might try to cross the river by the pontoon-bridge, and get to Vis along the other bank of the Meuse.
FORE:But there was a woman on the bridge with the white uniformed captain and a navigating officer. She was in dark clothes! But she had been there all the time. He suddenly recalled the French maid Jeff had mentioned in the hotel. That answered his puzzled wonder. He knew who had thrown that life preserver, at any rate. It could not be the mistress. It left only the maid to suspect.When we came to Jumet, a suburb of Charleroi, and a prosperous place with flourishing factories, we found the whole town wrecked.... Nearly all the houses were burned immediately after the occupation by the Germans, and many inhabitants were killed, of course under the pretext that they had been shooting.
