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TWO:ROUND ABOUT LI¨¨GE"Surely not," Lawrence murmured quietly. "I have made no accusations. In taking up the matter on behalf of Gordon Bruce, I have to make searching inquiries. I naturally ask myself where are the rest of those notes. By a strange fate they turn up here. Isidore identifies the numbers and I identify the scent. I am more or less able to prove that it was you who produced those notes the night of the card party. You went to your room to get some cash which you changed into gold. Therefore the notes were in your possession."

TWO:Perhaps no subject has gained so much from the application of the new historical method as that which we have now to study in its connexion with the progress of Greek philosophy. This is the religion of the Roman empire. On199 former occasions, we have had to observe how fruitful was the interaction between faith and reason in the early stages of Greek thought. We have now to show how the same process was continued on a greater scale during its later development and diffusion. The conditions and results of this conflict have sometimes been gravely misconceived. We have said that in more than one direction important advances were made under the empire. In the direction of pure rationalism, however, there was no advance at all, but, on the contrary, a continual loss of the ground formerly won. The polytheism which Christianity displaced turns out to have been far more vigorous and fertile than was once supposed, and in particular to have been supported by a much stronger body not only of popular sentiment, but, what at first seems very surprising, of educated conviction. We were formerly taught to believe that the faith of Homer and Aeschylus, of Pythagoras and Pheidias, was in the last stage of decrepitude when its destined successor appeared, that it had long been abandoned by the philosophers, and was giving place in the minds of the vulgar to more exciting forms of superstition newly imported from the East. The undue preponderance given to purely literary sources of information is largely responsible for an opinion which now appears to have been mistaken. Among the great Roman writers, Lucretius proclaims himself a mortal enemy to religion; Ennius and Horace are disbelievers in providence; the attitude of Juvenal towards the gods and towards a future life is at least ambiguous, and that of Tacitus undecided; Cicero attacks the current superstitions with a vigour which has diverted attention from the essentially religious character of his convictions; Lucian, by far the most popular Greek writer of the empire, is notorious for his hostility to every form of theology. Among less known authors, the elder Pliny passionately denounces the belief in a divine guidance of life and in the immortality of the soul.306200 Taken alone, these instances would tend to prove that sceptical ideas were very widely diffused through Roman society, both before and after the establishment of the empire. Side by side, however, with the authorities just cited there are others breathing a very different spirit; and what we have especially to notice is that with the progress of time the latter party are continually gaining in weight and numbers. And this, as we shall now proceed to show, is precisely what might have been expected from the altered circumstances which ensued when the civilised world was subjected to a single city, and that city herself to a single chief.An approving chorus followed from the others.

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TWO:Such a view was essentially unfavourable to the progress of science, assigning, as it did, a higher dignity to meagre and very questionable abstractions than to the far-reaching combinations by which alone we are enabled to unravel the inmost texture of visible phenomena. Instead of using reason to supplement sense, Aristotle turned it into a more subtle and universal kind of sense; and if this disastrous assimilation was to a certain extent imposed upon him by the traditions of Athenian thought, it harmonised admirably with the descriptive and superficial character of his own intelligence. Much was also due to the method of geometry, which in his time had already assumed the form made familiar to us by Euclid¡¯s Elements. The employment of axioms side by side with definitions, might, indeed, have drawn his attention to the existence and importance of judgments which, in Kantian terminology, are not analytic but synthetic¡ªthat is, which add to the content of a notion instead of simply analysing it. But although he mentions axioms, and states that mathematical theorems are deduced from them, no suspicion of their essential difference from definitions, or of the typical significance which they were destined to assume in the theory of reasoning, seems ever to have crossed his mind; otherwise he could hardly have failed to ask how we come by our knowledge of them, and to what they correspond in Nature. On the whole,385 it seems likely that he looked on them as an analysis of our ideas, differing only from definition proper by the generality of its application; for he names the law of contradiction as the most important of all axioms, and that from which the others proceed;277 next to it he places the law of excluded middle, which is also analytical; and his only other example is, that if equals be taken from equals the remainders are equal, a judgment the synthetic character of which is by no means clear, and has occasionally been disputed.278

TWO:Not that it mattered much, seeing that the letter was addressed to Bruce. The note inside was evidently dashed off in a violent hurry. It was an agitated request to the recipient to come in the motor at once; there was no address, nothing more than this agitated plea. Under the circumstances there was nothing startling in the presence of the automobile.

TWO:Lawrence chuckled to himself with the air of a man who has a joke which is too good for the world in general. Isidore was puzzled and interested.With regard to the Nicomachean Ethics, I think Teichmüller has proved this much, that it was written before Aristotle had read the Laws or knew of its existence. But this does not prove that he wrote it during Plato¡¯s lifetime, since the Laws was not published until after Plato¡¯s death, possibly not until several years after. And, published or not, Aristotle may very well have remained ignorant of its existence until his return to Athens, which, according to the tradition, took place about 336 B.C. Teichmüller does, indeed, suppose that Aristotle spent some time in Athens between his flight from Mityl¨ºn¨º and his engagement as tutor to Alexander (Literarische Fehden, p. 261). But this theory, besides its purely conjectural character, would still allow the possibility of Aristotle¡¯s having remained unacquainted with the Laws up to the age of forty. And it is obvious that the passages which Teichmüller interprets as replies to Aristotle¡¯s criticisms admit of more than one alternative explanation. They may have originated in doubts and difficulties which spontaneously suggested themselves to Plato in the course of his independent reflections; or, granting that there is a polemic reference, it may have been provoked by some other critic, or by the spoken criticisms of Aristotle himself. For the supposition that Aristotle wrote his Ethics at the early age of thirty-two or thirty-three seems to me so improbable that we should not accept it except under pressure of the strongest evidence. That a work of such matured thought and observation should have been produced by so young a man is, so far as I know, a phenomenon unparalleled in thexxii history of literature. And to this we must add the further circumstance that the Greek mind was not particularly remarkable for precocity in any field except war and statesmanship. We do, indeed, find instances of comparatively juvenile authorship, but none, I believe, of a Greek writer, whether poet, historian, or philosopher, who reached the full maturity of his powers before a considerably advanced period of middle age. That the Ethics is very imperfect I fully admit, and have expressly maintained against its numerous admirers in the course of this work. But, although imperfect, it is not crude. It contains as good a discussion of the subject undertaken as Aristotle was ever capable of giving, and its limitations are not those of an unripe intellect, but of an intellect at all times comparatively unsuited for the treatment of practical problems, and narrowed still further by the requirements of an elaborate speculative system. Now to work out this system must have demanded considerably more labour and independent thought than one can suppose even an Aristotle to have found time for before thirty-three; while the experience of life shown in the Ethics is such as study, so far from supplying, would, on the contrary, have delayed. Moreover, the Rhetoric, which was confessedly written before the Ethics, exhibits the same qualities in about an equal degree, and therefore, on Teichmüller¡¯s theory, testifies to a still more extraordinary precocity. And there is the further circumstance that while Aristotle is known to have begun his public career as a teacher of rhetoric, his earliest productions seem to have been of a rather diffuse and declamatory character, quite opposed to the severe concision which marks the style both of the Rhetoric and of the Ethics. In addition to these general considerations, one may mention that in axxiii well-known passage of the Ethics, referring to a question of logical method (I., iv.), Plato is spoken of in the imperfect tense, which would seem to imply that he was no longer living when it was written. Speaking from memory, I should even be inclined to doubt whether the mention of a living writer by name at all is consistent with Aristotle¡¯s standard of literary etiquette.

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