ONE:I then tried to find the nunnery of the S?urs de la Misricorde, where one of my cousins had taken the veil. At last, in the Rue des Clarisses I found the huge door of the monastery, and rang the bell. After a few moments a small trellised shutter in the stout door was opened ajar, and a tremulous voice asked in French what I wanted. I assumed that42 it was one of the nuns, but I could see nothing through that narrow jar."Oh, then you knew that I was in England?" Ren replied. "I have been in prison for some time, otherwise you would have done less mischief. Woman, what has become of my brother--your husband?"
ONE:CHAPTER XXXIII. SHAPING MACHINES.
ONE:The doctor now became more communicative on other matters. According to him the Germans contended that the inhabitants had been shooting from windows and cellars, in order to prevent the120 garrison from assisting their comrades, who were fighting a battle against the Belgians at a distance of about four miles and a half from the town. Such an organised action of the inhabitants, under the tyrannical rule of the Germans during the eight days before the destruction, he called impossible, and therefore the whole accusation absurd. At any rate they had felt that the destruction was coming, and had been planned systematically, for during those eight days the Germans had plundered the population, and taken from them all bread, even what they required to feed themselves.Not that the vitality of Hellenic reason gave way simultaneously at every point. The same independent spirit, the same imaginative vigour which had carried physical speculation to such splendid conquests during the first two centuries of its existence were manifested with equal effect when the energies previously devoted to Nature as a whole concentratedxv themselves on the study of conduct and belief. It was thus that Socrates could claim the whole field of human life for scientific treatment, and create the method by which it has ever since been most successfully studied. It was thus that Plato could analyse and ideally reconstruct all practices, institutions, and beliefs. It was thus that Aristotle, while definitely arresting the progress of research, could still complete the method and create the language through which the results of new research have been established, recognised, and communicated ever since. It was thus that the Stoics advanced from paradox to paradox until they succeeded in co-ordinating morality for all time by reference to the three fundamental ideas of personal conscience, individual obligation, and universal humanity. And not only were dialectics and ethics at first animated by the same enterprising spirit as speculative physics, but their very existence as recognised studies must be ascribed to its decay, to the revolution through which philosophy, from being purely theoretical, became social and didactic. While in some directions thought was made stationary and even retrogressive by the very process of its diffusion, in other directions this diffusion was the cause of its more complete development. Finally, ethics and logic were reduced to a scholastic routine, and progress continued to be made only in the positive sciences, until, here also, it was brought to an end by the triumph of superstition and barbarism combined.
