ONE:Nor was this all. Thought, after having, as it would seem, wandered away from reality in search of empty abstractions, by the help of those very abstractions regained possession of concrete existence, and acquired a far fuller intelligence of its complex manifestations. For, each individual character is an assemblage of qualities, and can only be understood when those qualities, after having been separately studied, are finally recombined. Thus, biography is a very late production of literature, and although biographies are the favourite reading of those who most despise philosophy, they could never have been written without its help. Moreover, before characters can be described they must exist. Now, it is partly philosophy which calls character into existence by sedulous inculcation of self-knowledge and self-culture, by consolidating a mans individuality into something independent of circumstances, so that it comes to form, not a figure in bas-relief, but what sculptors call a figure in the round. Such was Socrates himself, and such were the figures which he taught Xenophon and Plato to recognise and portray. Character-drawing begins with them, and the Memorabilia in particular is the earliest attempt at a biographical analysis that we possess. From this to Plutarchs Lives there was still a long journey to be accomplished, but the interval between them is less considerable than that which divides Xenophon from his immediate predecessor, Thucydides. And when we remember how intimately the substance of Christian teaching is connected with the literary form of its first record, we shall still better appreciate the all-penetrating influence of Hellenic thought,158 vying, as it does, with the forces of nature in subtlety and universal diffusion.
TWO:Planing machines of the most improved construction are driven by two belts instead of one, and many mechanical expedients have been adopted to move the belts differentially, so that both should not be on the driving pulley at the same time, but move one before the other in alternate order. This is easily attained by simply arranging the two belts with the distance between them equal to one and one-half or one and three-fourth times the width of the driving pulley. The effect is the same as that accomplished by differential shifting gearing, with the advantage of permitting an adjustment of the relative movement of the belts.
ONE:
TWO:"Not too much water," said Bruce. "A little now, and some fresh cold water later on. I shall give her a few of those drops I prescribed for her last week. Four now, and four in an hour's time. But be very careful as to the dose."
ONE:Even in his much-admired criticisms on the actually existing types of government our philosopher shows practical weakness and vacillation of character. There is a good word for them allfor monarchy, for aristocracy, for middle-class rule, and even for pure democracy.183 The fifth book, treating of297 political revolutions, is unquestionably the ablest and most interesting in the whole work; but when Aristotle quits the domain of natural history for that of practical suggestions, with a view to obviate the dangers pointed out, he can think of nothing better than the old adviceto be moderate, even where the constitutions which moderation is to preserve are by their very nature so excessive that their readjustment and equilibration would be equivalent to their destruction. And in fact, Aristotles proposals amount to thisthat government by the middle class should be established wherever the ideal aristocracy of education is impracticable; or else a government in which the class interests of rich and poor should be so nicely balanced as to obviate the danger of oligarchic or democratic injustice. His error lay in not perceiving that the only possible means of securing such a happy mean was to break through the narrow circle of Greek city life; to continue the process which had united families into villages, and villages into towns; to confederate groups of cities into larger298 states; and so, by striking an average of different inequalities, to minimise the risk of those incessant revolutions which had hitherto secured the temporary triumph of alternate factions at the expense of their common interest. And, in fact, the spontaneous process of aggregation, which Aristotle did not foresee, has alone sufficed to remedy the evils which he saw, but could not devise any effectual means of curing, and at the same time has bred new evils of which his diagnosis naturally took no account.
TWO:After the formal and material elements of life have been separately discussed, there comes an account of the process by which they are first brought into connexion, for this is how Aristotle views generation. With him it is the information of matter by psychic force; and his notions about the part which each parent plays in the production of a new being are vitiated throughout by this mistaken assumption. Nevertheless his treatise on the subject is, for its time, one of the most wonderful works ever written, and, as we are told on good authority,257 is now less antiquated than the corresponding researches of Harvey. The philosophers peculiar genius for observation, analysis, and comparison will partly account for his success; but, if we mistake not, there is another and less obvious reason. Here the fatal separation of form and matter was, except at first starting, precluded by the very idea of generation; and the teleological principle of spontaneous efforts to realise a predetermined end was, as it happened, perfectly in accordance with the facts themselves.
