ONE:Turning away, back to his view, in a dark dress, a woman who had been at the extreme after rail was racing out of sight behind the cabin.What seems to us the reactionary attitude of the spiritu357alist school was dictated by the circumstances of its origin. A product of the great classical revival, its cause was necessarily linked with the civilisation of ancient Greece, and of that civilisation the worship of the old gods seemed to form an integral element. One need only think of the Italian Renaissance, with its predilection for the old mythology, to understand how much stronger and more passionate this feeling must have been among those to whom Greek literature still spoke in a living language, whose eyes, wherever they turned, still rested on the monuments, unrivalled, undesecrated, unfallen, unfaded, of Greek religious art. Nor was polytheism what some have imagined it to have been at this period, merely a tradition, an association, a dream, drawing shadowy sustenance from the human works and human thoughts which it had once inspired. To Plotinus and Proclus, as formerly to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, the luminaries of day and night blazed down from heaven as animated and immortal witnesses of its truth. It was not simply that the heavens declared the glory of God; to the pious beholder, they were visibly inhabited by glorious gods, and their constellated fires were, as Plotinus said, a scripture in which the secrets of destiny might be read. The same philosopher scornfully asks the Gnostics, who, in this respect, were indistinguishable from the Christians, whether they were so infatuated as to call the worst men their brothers, while refusing that title to the sun; and at a much later period, notwithstanding the heavy penalties attached to it, the worship of the heavenly bodies continued to be practised by the profoundest thinkers and scholars of the Neo-Platonic school.529 Moreover, polytheism, by the very weakness and unfixity of its dogmas, gave a much wider scope to independent speculation than could be permitted within the limits of the358 Catholic Church, just because Catholicism itself constituted a philosophical system in which all the great problems of existence were provided with definite and authoritative solutions.
ONE:We have seen how the idea of Nature, first evolved by physical philosophy, was taken by some, at least, among the Sophists as a basis for their ethical teaching; then how an interpretation utterly opposed to theirs was put on it by practical men, and how this second interpretation was so generalised by the younger rhetoricians as to involve the denial of all morality whatever. Meanwhile, another equally important conception, destined to come into speedy and prolonged antagonism with the idea of Nature, and like it to exercise a powerful influence on ethical reflection, had almost contemporaneously been elaborated out of the materials which earlier speculation supplied. From Parmenides and Heracleitus down, every philosopher who had propounded a theory of the world, had also more or less peremptorily insisted on the fact that his theory differed widely from common belief. Those who held that change is86 impossible, and those who taught that everything is incessantly changing; those who asserted the indestructibility of matter, and those who denied its continuity; those who took away objective reality from every quality except extension and resistance, and those who affirmed that the smallest molecules partook more or less of every attribute that is revealed to senseall these, however much they might disagree among themselves, agreed in declaring that the received opinions of mankind were an utter delusion. Thus, a sharp distinction came to be drawn between the misleading sense-impressions and the objective reality to which thought alone could penetrate. It was by combining these two elements, sensation and thought, that the idea of mind was originally constituted. And mind when so understood could not well be accounted for by any of the materialistic hypotheses at first proposed. The senses must differ profoundly from that of which they give such an unfaithful report; while reason, which Anaxagoras had so carefully differentiated from every other form of existence, carried back its distinction to the subjective sphere, and became clothed with a new spirituality when reintegrated in the consciousness of man.This, then, was the revolution effected by Aristotle, that he found Greek thought in the form of a solid, and unrolled into a surface of the utmost possible tenuity, transparency, and extension. In so doing, he completed what Socrates and Plato had begun, he paralleled the course already described by Greek poetry, and he offered the first example of what since then has more than once recurred in the history of philosophy. It was thus that the residual substance of Locke and Berkeley was resolved into phenomenal succession by Hume. It was thus that the unexplained reality of Kant and Fichte was drawn out into a play of logical relations by Hegel. And, if we may venture on a forecast of the future towards which speculation is now advancing, it is thus that the limits imposed on human knowledge by positivists and agnostics in our own day, are yielding to the criticism of those who wish to establish either a perfect identity or a perfect equation between consciousness and being. This is the position represented in France by M. Taine, a thinker offering many points of resemblance to Aristotle, which it would be interesting to work out had we space at our command for the purpose. The forces which are now guiding English philosophy in an analogous direction have hitherto escaped observation on account of their disunion among themselves, and their intermixture with others of a different character. But on the whole we may say that the philosophy of Mill and his school corresponds very nearly in its practical idealism to Platos teaching; that Mr. Herbert Spencer approaches326 Aristotle on the side of theorising systematisation, while sharing to a more limited extent the metaphysical and political realism which accompanied it: that Lewes was carrying the same transformation a step further in his unfinished Problems of Life and Mind; that the philosophy of Mr. Shadworth Hodgson is marked by the same spirit of actuality, though not without a vista of multitudinous possibilities in the background; that the Neo-Hegelian school are trying to do over again for us what their master did in Germany; and that the lamented Professor Clifford had already given promise of one more great attempt to widen the area of our possible experience into co-extension with the whole domain of Nature.209
TWO:XI."What do you think of that?" Prout asked.
THREE:
FORE:Now we can catch them and ride them down! exulted Dick.They strained their ears.
FORE:"Now where does this come in?" he asked himself. "There isn't a grate in the house that has been touched for years. And this cake is not quite dry yet. And a bit of yellow soap in the tray over the sink that would be as hard as a chip if it had been here since the people left. But it hasn't. Murderer may have washed his hands, which is exceedingly likely, but what did he want blacklead for?"22
