"On the previous day many workmen of the silk factory Kimmer and their wives and children had found a shelter in the cellars of the building, with some neighbours and relatives of their employer. At six o'clock in the evening the unfortunate people made up their mind to leave their hiding-place and went into the street, headed by a white flag. They were immediately seized by the soldiers and roughly ill-treated. All the men were shot, among them Mr. Kimmer, Consul of Argentina.
ONE:Along the coast the German line did not reach far beyond Mariakerke, where a big German flag on a high dune indicated their most advanced front. Thanks to the consent of a couple of officers I was allowed to push on to the front lines, and did this in spite of the danger from bursting shrapnel. The wounded had to walk back from there to Ostend, very often suffering the most trying pains, because, according to what they told me, the Red Cross Service was not able to help them all. They were very dissatisfied on account of the waste of human life by which the attacks were accompanied, and some made bitter remarks about the staff which seemed to be mad, constantly sending new troops into the murderous fire with such evident callousness.
ONE:45 All the forts thundered away again, and the guns of the Germans were also busy on the citadel and the various surrounding heights. Already early in the morning a terrible and suffocating smoke of fire and gunpowder hovered over Lige. The smoke came down also from the burning villages, like Bressoux, on the slopes of the hills near Lige. The flames flared up from the houses and offered a melancholy sight.Very many other cases of martyrdom among priests remained unknown to me, but the various Belgian bishops examined all these events with praiseworthy zeal and scrupulousness, and by taking extensive evidence established the fact that in no case the victims could be reproached with any act that justified the sentence against them. After the war the world will surely be made acquainted with the horrible truth.
THREE:The systems of Plato and Aristotle were splendid digressions from the main line of ancient speculation rather than stages in its regular development. The philosophers who came after them went back to an earlier tradition, and the influence of the two greatest Hellenic masters, when it was felt at all, was felt almost entirely as a disturbing or deflecting force. The extraordinary reach of their principles could not, in truth, be appreciated until the organised experience of mankind had accumulated to an extent requiring the application of new rules for its comprehension and utilisation; and to make such an accumulation possible, nothing less was needed than the combined efforts of the whole western world. Such religious, educational, social, and political reforms as those contemplated in Platos Republic, though originally designed for a single city-community, could not be realised, even approximately, within a narrower field than that offered by the mediaeval church and the feudal state. The ideal theory first gained practical significance in connexion with the metaphysics of Christian theology. The place given by Plato to mathematics has only been fully justified by the develop2ment of modern science. So also, Aristotles criticism became of practical importance only when the dreams against which it was directed had embodied themselves in a fabric of oppressive superstition. Only the vast extension of reasoned knowledge has enabled us to disentangle the vitally important elements of Aristotles logic from the mass of useless refinements in which they are imbedded; his fourfold division of causes could not be estimated rightly even by Bacon, Descartes, or Spinoza; while his arrangement of the sciences, his remarks on classification, and his contributions to comparative biology bring us up to the very verge of theories whose first promulgation is still fresh in the memories of men.
THREE:From a little way off came the sound of rapid footsteps. The step grew swifter, and there was the sound of another behind. As if by magic a half score of people seemed to spring from under the trees against the square yonder.
With Aristotle propositions assumed a new importance. He looked on them as mediating, not only between concepts, but also between conception and reasoning. Still, neither as a psychologist nor as a logician did he appreciate them at their real value. A very brief consideration is given to judgment in his work on the soul, and we are left in doubt whether it is a function of Nous alone or of Nous combined with some other faculty. Setting aside the treatise on Interpretation, which is probably spurious, and, at any rate, throws no new light on the subject, we may gather from his logical writings half a dozen different suggestions towards a classification of propositions, based partly on their form and partly on their import. In all we find an evident tendency to apply, here also, his grand fundamental distinction between the sphere of uniformity and the sphere of change and opposition. All propositions are either universal or particular; either positive or negative; either necessary or actual or contingent; either reciprocating or not reciprocating; either essential or accidental; either answering to the first question in the categories, or to one of the other nine.273 But nowhere is any attempt made to combine and systematise these various points of view.I did not feel very comfortable after what had happened to those soldiers who lost their lives so cruelly sudden, or in any case had been seriously wounded, while the officers took little notice of them. But it was desirable to behave as discreetly as possible, and so to get a permit to Maastricht.Of these views, the first is taken by Ritter, and adopted with some modifications by M. Vacherot in his Histoire de lcole dAlexandrie. It is also unreservedly accepted by Donaldson in his continuation of Müllers History of Greek Literature, and is probably held at this moment by most Englishmen who take any interest in the subject at all. The second viewaccording to which Neo-Platonism is, at least in342 its main features, a characteristic although degenerate product of Greek thoughtis that maintained by Zeller. As against the Orientalising theory, it seems to us that Zeller has thoroughly proved his case.506 It may be doubted whether there is a single idea in Plotinus which can be shown to have its exact counterpart in any of the Hindoo or other Asiatic systems whence he is supposed to have drawn; and, as our own analysis has abundantly shown, he says nothing that cannot be derived, either directly or by a simple and easy process of evolution, from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. On the other hand, has not Zeller gone much too far in treating Neo-Platonism as a product of the great religious reaction which unquestionably preceded and accompanied its appearance? Has he not altogether underrated its importance as a purely speculative system, an effort towards the attainment of absolute truth by the simple exercise of human reason? It seems to us that he has, and we shall offer some grounds for venturing to differ from his opinion.
