THREE:A people so endowed were the natural creators of philo4sophy. There came a time when the harmonious universality of the Hellenic genius sought for its counterpart and completion in a theory of the external world. And there came a time, also, when the decay of political interests left a large fund of intellectual energy, accustomed to work under certain conditions, with the desire to realise those conditions in an ideal sphere. Such is the most general significance we can attach to that memorable series of speculations on the nature of things which, beginning in Ionia, was carried by the Greek colonists to Italy and Sicily, whence, after receiving important additions and modifications, the stream of thought flowed back into the old country, where it was directed into an entirely new channel by the practical genius of Athens. Thales and his successors down to Democritus were not exactly what we should call philosophers, in any sense of the word that would include a Locke or a Hume, and exclude a Boyle or a Black; for their speculations never went beyond the confines of the material universe; they did not even suspect the existence of those ethical and dialectical problems which long constituted the sole object of philosophical discussion, and have continued since the time when they were first mooted to be regarded as its most peculiar province. Nor yet can we look on them altogether or chiefly as men of science, for their paramount purpose was to gather up the whole of knowledge under a single principle; and they sought to realise this purpose, not by observation and experiment, but by the power of thought alone. It would, perhaps, be truest to say that from their point of view philosophy and science were still undifferentiated, and that knowledge as a universal synthesis was not yet divorced from special investigations into particular orders of phenomena. Here, as elsewhere, advancing reason tends to reunite studies which have been provisionally separated, and we must look to our own contemporariesto our Tyndalls and Thomsons, our Helmholtzes and Z?llnersas furnishing the fittest parallel to5 Anaximander and Empedocles, Leucippus and Diogenes of Apollonia.We trust that the steps of a difficult argument have been made clear by the foregoing analysis; and that the whole process has been shown to hinge on the ambiguous use of such notions as the individual and the community, of which the one is paradoxically construed as a plurality and the other as a unity; justice, which is alternately taken in the sense of control exercised by the worthiest, control of passion in the general interest, control of our passions in the interest of others, and control of the same passions in our own interest; and wisdom or reason, which sometimes means any kind of excellence, sometimes the excellence of a harmonious society, and sometimes the excellence of a well-balanced mind. Thus, out of self-regarding virtue social virtue is elicited, the whole process being ultimately conditioned by that identifying power which was at once the strength and the weakness of Platos genius.
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams
