THREE:The latter seems a plausible theory, and perhaps a correct one; but there are two facts in connection with the operation of reaction water-wheels which seem to controvert the latter and favour the first theory, namely, that reaction wheels in actual practice seldom utilise more than forty per cent. of useful effect from the water, and that their speed may exceed the initial velocity of the water. With this the subject is left as one for argument or investigation on the part of the reader.
THREE:Under such unfavourable auspices did philosophy find a home in Athens. The great maritime capital had drawn to itself every other species of intellectual eminence, and this could not fail to follow with the rest. But philosophy, although hitherto identified with mathematical and physical science, held unexhausted possibilities of development in reserve. According to a well-known legend, Thales once fell into a tank while absorbed in gazing at the stars. An old woman advised him to look at the tank in future, for there he would see the water and the stars as well. Others after him had got into similar difficulties, and might seek to evade them by a similar artifice. While busied with the study of44 cosmic evolution, they had stumbled unawares on some perplexing mental problems. Why do the senses suggest beliefs so much at variance with those arrived at by abstract reasoning? Why should reason be more trustworthy than sense? Why are the foremost Hellenic thinkers so hopelessly disagreed? What is the criterion of truth? Of what use are conclusions which cannot command universal assent? Or, granting that truth is discoverable, how can it be communicated to others? Such were some of the questions now beginning urgently to press for a solution. I sought for myself, said Heracleitus in his oracular style. His successors had to do even moreto seek not only for themselves but for others; to study the beliefs, habits, and aptitudes of their hearers with profound sagacity, in order to win admission for the lessons they were striving to impart. And when a systematic investigation of human nature had once begun, it could not stop short with a mere analysis of the intellectual faculties; what a man did was after all so very much more important than what he knew, was, in truth, that which alone gave his knowledge any practical value whatever. Moral distinctions, too, were beginning to grow uncertain. When every other traditional belief had been shaken to its foundations, when men were taught to doubt the evidence of their own senses, it was not to be expected that the conventional laws of conduct, at no time very exact or consistent, would continue to be accepted on the authority of ancient usage. Thus, every kind of determining influences, internal and external, conspired to divert philosophy from the path which it had hitherto pursued, and to change it from an objective, theoretical study into an introspective, dialectic, practical discipline.
THREE:"Our editor has moreover interviewed young Miss Antoinette de Bruijn here, whom our correspondent brought from Louvain to Maastricht. In the presence of her mother she told how she had been in a train full of wounded, that there were armed soldiers on the platform, and that some wounded soldiers had been teased by offering them steaming soup which was not given to them. The father of this girl, Mr. de Bruijn, also assured us that when he met his daughter at Maastricht, our correspondent, Mr. Mokveld, was still very much under the impression of what he had witnessed.""Here's a piece of rare good luck," he exclaimed. "Why, the well is dry."
