FORE:Again, while attacking the belief in human immortality, Epicurus seems to direct his blows against the metaphysical reasonings of Plato,153 as well as against the indistinct forebod77ings of primitive imagination. The consequences of this two-edged polemic are very remarkable. In reading Lucretius, we are surprised at the total absence of criticisms like those brought to bear on Greek mythology with such formidable effect, first by Plato and, long afterwards, by Lucian. There is a much more modern tone about his invectives, and they seem aimed at an enemy familiar to ourselves. One would suppose that the advent of Catholicism had been revealed in a prophetic vision to the poet, and that this, rather than the religion of his own times, was the object of his wrath and dread; or else that some child of the Renaissance was seeking for a freer utterance of his own revolt against all theology, under the disguise of a dead language and of a warfare with long-discredited gods. For this reason, Christians have always regarded him, with perfect justice, as a dangerous enemy; while rationalists of the fiercer type have accepted his splendid denunciations as the appropriate expression of their own most cherished feelings.

FORE:Nevertheless, in each case, subjective idealism had the effect of concentrating speculation, properly so called, on ethical and practical interests. Locke struck the keynote of eighteenth century philosophy when he pronounced morality to be ��the proper science and business of mankind in general.��574 And no sooner had morality come to the front than the significance of ancient thought again made itself apparent. Whether through conscious imitation, or because the same causes brought about the same effects, ethical enquiries moved along the lines originally laid down in the schools of Athens. When rules of conduct were not directly referred to a divine revelation, they were based either on a supposed law of Nature, or on the necessities of human happiness, or on some combination of the two. Nothing is more characteristic of422 the eighteenth century than its worship of Nature. Even the theology of the age is deeply coloured by it; and with the majority of those who rejected theology it became a new religion. But this sentiment is demonstrably of Greek origin, and found its most elaborate, though not its most absolute, expression in Stoicism. The Stoics had inherited it from the Cynics, who held the faith in greater purity; and these, again, so far as we can judge, from a certain Sophistic school, some fragments of whose teaching have been preserved by Xenophon and Plato; while the first who gave wide currency to this famous abstraction was, in all probability, Heracleitus. To the Stoics, however, is due that intimate association of naturalism with teleology which meets us again in the philosophy of the last century, and even now wherever the doctrine of evolution has not been thoroughly accepted. It was assumed, in the teeth of all evidence, that Nature bears the marks of a uniformly beneficent design, that evil is exclusively of human origin, and that even human nature is essentially good when unspoiled by artificial restrictions.

FORE:

FORE:This absolute separation of Form and Matter, under their new names of Thought and Extension, once grasped, various principles of Cartesianism will follow from it by logical necessity. First comes the exclusion of final causes from philosophy, or rather from Nature. There was not, as with Epicurus, any anti-theological feeling concerned in their rejection. With Aristotle, against whom Descartes is always protesting, the final cause was not a mark of designing intelligence imposed on Matter from without; it was only a particular aspect of Form, the realisation of what Matter was always striving after by virtue of its inherent potentiality. When Form was conceived only as pure thought, there could be no question of such a process; the most highly organised bodies being only modes of figured extension. The revival of Atomism had, no doubt, a great deal to do with the preference for a mechanical interpretation of life. Aristotle had himself shown with masterly clearness the difference between his view of Nature and that taken by Democritus; thus indicating beforehand the direction in which an alternative to his own teaching might be sought; and Bacon had, in fact, already referred with approval to the example set by Democritus in dealing with teleological enquiries.To attain a double effect, and avoid the loss pointed out, Mr Ramsbottom designed what may be called compound hammers, consisting of two independent heads or rams moving in opposite directions, and acting simultaneously upon pieces held between them.

FORE:CHAPTER XX. GENERALISATION OF SHOP PROCESSES.