TWO:The keynote of the whole poem is struck in its opening lines. When Venus is addressed as Natures sole guide and ruler, this, from the poets own point of view, is not true of Nature as a whole, but it is eminently true of life, whether we identify Venus with the passion through which living things are continually regenerated, or with the pleasure which is their perpetual motive and their only good. And it is equally appropriate, equally characteristic of a consummate artist, that the interest of the work should culminate in a description of107 this same passion, no longer as the source of life, but as its last outcome and full flower, yet also, when pushed to excess, the illusion by which it is most utterly disappointed and undone; and that the whole should conclude with a description of death, not as exemplified in any individual tragedy, but in such havoc as was wrought by the famous plague at Athens on man and beast alike. Again, it is by the orderly sequence of vital phenomena that Lucretius proves his first great principle, the everlasting duration and changelessness of matter. If something can come out of nothing, he asks us, why is the production of all living things attached to certain conditions of place and season and parentage, according to their several kinds? Or if a decrease in the total sum of existence be possible, whence comes the inexhaustible supply of materials needed for the continual regeneration, growth, and nourishment of animal life? It is because our senses cannot detect the particles of matter by whose withdrawal visible objects gradually waste away that the existence of extremely minute atoms is assumed; and, so far, there is also a reference to inorganic bodies; but the porosity of matter is proved by the interstitial absorption of food and the searching penetration of cold; while the necessity of a vacuum is established by the ability of fish to move through the opposing stream. The generic differences supposed to exist among the atoms are inferred from the distinctions separating not only one animal species from another, but each individual from all others of the same species. The deflection of the atoms from the line of perpendicular descent is established by the existence of human free-will. So also, the analysis which distinguishes three determinate elements in the composition of the soul finds its justification in the diverse characters of animalsthe fierceness of the lion, the placidity of the ox, and the timorousness of the deerqualities arising from the preponderance of a fiery, an a?rial, and a windy ingredient in the animating principle of each respectively. Finally, by another organic108 illustration, the atoms in general are spoken of as semina rerumseeds of things.
FORE:CHAPTER II GHOSTS, GUMAND GEMS
FORE:The truth is that critics seem to have been misled by a superficial analogy between the spiritualistic revival accomplished by Plotinus, and the Romantic revival which marked the beginning of the present century. The two movements have, no doubt, several traits in common; but there is this great difference between them, that the latter was, what the former was not, a reaction against individualism, agnosticism, and religious unbelief. The right analogy will be found not by looking forward but by looking back. It will then be seen that the Neo-Platonists were what their traditional name implies, disciples of Plato, and not only of Plato but of194 Aristotle as well. They stood in the same relation to the systems which they opposed as that in which the two great founders of spiritualism had stood to the naturalistic and humanist schools of their timeof course with whatever modifications of a common standpoint were necessitated by the substitution of a declining for a progressive civilisation. Like Plato also, they were profoundly influenced by the Pythagorean philosophy, with its curious combination of mystical asceticism and mathematics. And, to complete the analogy, they too found themselves in presence of a powerful religious reaction, against the excesses of which, like him, they at first protested, although with less than his authority, and only, like him, to be at last carried away by its resistless torrent. It is to the study of this religious movement that we must now address ourselves, before entering on an examination of the latest form assumed by Greek philosophy among the Greeks themselves.
FORE:Such arguments manifestly tell not only against Platonism, but against every kind of transcendental realism, from the natural theology of Paley to the dogmatic agnosticism of Mr. Herbert Spencer. A modern Aristotle might say that the hypothesis of a creative first cause, personal or otherwise, logically involves the assumption of as many original specific energies as there are qualities to be accounted for, and thus gives us the unnecessary trouble of counting everything twice over; that every difficulty and contradiction from which the transcendental assumption is intended to free us, must, on analysis, reappear in the assumption itselffor example, the God who is to deliver us from evil must be himself conceived as the creator of evil; that the infinite and absolute can neither cause, nor be apprehended by, the finite and relative; that to separate from Nature all the forces required for its perpetuation, and relegate them to a sphere apart, is a false antithesis and a sterile abstraction; lastly, that causation, whether efficient or final, once begun, cannot stop; that if this world is not self-existing, nothing is; that the mutual adaptation of thoughts in a designing intelligence requires to be accounted for just like any other adaptation; that if the relative involves the absolute, so also does the relation between the two involve another absolute, and so on to infinity.
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THREE:I knew about Bressoux. I had seen the flames burst out from many houses, and I had reliable information also from other villages about the slaughter that took place there, although this lady of course exaggerated when she said that "not even the tiniest babies escaped."
THREE:Namur was shelled on August 21st and the 23rd. Many houses were then already wrecked, many civilians killed. On the 23rd the Belgian army withdrew and only some of the forts were defended. This withdrawal of the Belgian army may have been a strategical necessity, but it is certain that the forts had not been defended unto the last. Five forts fell into the hands of the Germans without having suffered any damage."Why not, sir?" I asked.
THREE:It is remarkable that Aristotle, after repeatedly speaking of induction as an ascent from particulars to generals, when he comes to trace the process by which we arrive at the most general notions of any, does not admit the possibility of such a movement in one direction only. The universal and the individual are, according to him, combined in our most elementary sense-impressions, and the business of scientific393 experience is to separate them. Starting from a middle point, we work up to indivisible predicates on the one hand and down to indivisible subjects on the other, the final apprehension of both extremes being the office, not of science, but of Nous. This theory is equally true and acute. The perception of individual facts is just as difficult and just as slowly acquired as the conception of ultimate abstractions. Moreover, the two processes are carried on pari passu, each being only made possible by and through the other. No true notion can be framed without a firm grasp of the particulars from which it is abstracted; no individual object can be studied without analysing it into a group of common predicates, the idiosyncrasy of whichthat is, their special combinationdifferentiates it from every other object. What, however, we wish to remark is the illustration incidentally afforded by this striking aper?u of Aristotles analytical method, which is also the essentially Greek method of thought. We saw that, for our philosopher, syllogism was not the subsumption of a particular case under a general law, but the interpolation of a mean between two extremes; we now see that his induction is not the finding of a law for the particular phenomenon, but its analysis into two elementsone universal and the other individuala solution of the mean into the extremes. And the distinctive originality of his whole system was to fix two such extremes for the universea self-thinking thought in absolute self-identity at one end of the scale, and an absolutely indeterminate matter at the other; by combining which in various proportions he then re-constructed the whole intermediate phenomenal reality. In studying each particular class of facts, he follows the same method. The genus is marked by some characteristic attribute which one speciesthe prerogative species, so to speakexhibits in its greatest purity, while the others form a graduated scale by variously combining this attribute with its opposite or privation. Hence his theory, since revived by Goethe, that394 the colours are so many different mixtures of light and darkness.But because the German libels go on accusing the Belgian people of horrible francs-tireurs acts, I have thought that I ought not to wait any longer before giving my evidence to the public.
