ONE:Driven by Christian intolerance from every other centre of civilisation, Greek philosophy found a last refuge in Athens, where it continued to be taught through the whole of the fifth century and the first quarter of the sixth. During that period, all the tendencies already indicated as characteristic of Neo-Platonism exhibited themselves once more, and contributed in about equal degrees to the versatile activity of its last original representative, Proclus (410-485). This remarkable man offers one of the most melancholy examples of wasted power to be found in the history of thought. Endowed with an enormous faculty for acquiring knowledge, a rare subtlety in the analysis of ideas, and an unsurpassed genius for their systematic arrangement, he might, under more favourable359 auspices, have been the Laplace or Cuvier of his age. As it was, his immense energies were devoted to the task of bringing a series of lifeless abstractions into harmony with a series of equally lifeless superstitions. A commentator both on Euclid and on Plato, he aspired to present transcendental dialectic under the form of mathematical demonstration. In his Institutes of Theology, he offers proofs equally elaborate and futile of much that had been taken for granted in the philosophy of Plotinus. Again, where there seems to be a gap in the system of his master, he fills it up by inserting new figments of his own. Thus, between the super-essential One and the absolute Nous, he interposes a series of henads or unities, answering to the multiplicity of intelligences or self-conscious Ideas which Plotinus had placed within the supreme Reason, or to the partial souls which he had placed after the world-soul. In this manner, Proclus, following the usual method of Greek thought, supplies a transition from the creative One to the Being which had hitherto been regarded as its immediate product; while, at the same time, providing a counterpart to the many lesser gods with which polytheism had surrounded its supreme divinity. Finally, as Plotinus had arranged all things on the threefold scheme of a first principle, a departure from that principle, and a subsequent reunion with it, Proclus divides the whole series of created substances into a succession of triads, each reproducing, on a small scale, the fundamental system of an origin, a departure, and a return. And he even multiplies the triads still further by decomposing each separate moment into a secondary process of the same description. For example, Intelligence as a whole is divided into Being, Life, and Thought, and the first of these, again, into the Limit, the Unlimited, and the absolute Existence (ο?σ?α), which is the synthesis of both. The Hegelian system is, as is well known, constructed on a similar plan; but while with Hegel the logical evolution is a progress from lower to higher and360 richer life, with Proclus, as with the whole Neo-Platonic school, and, indeed, with almost every school of Greek thought, each step forward is also a step downward, involving a proportionate loss of reality and power.In no other branch of machinery has so much research and experiment been made during eighty years past as in steam machinery, and, strange to say, the greater part of this research has been directed to the details of engines; yet there has been no improvement made during the time which has effected any considerable saving of heat or expense. The steam-engines of fifty years ago, considered as steam-using machines, utilised nearly the same proportion of the energy or power developed by the boiler as the most improved engines of modern constructiona fact that in itself indicates that an engine is not the vital part of steam machinery. There is not the least doubt that if the efforts to improve steam-engines had been mainly directed to economising heat and increasing the evaporative power of boilers, much more would have been accomplished with the same amount of research. This remark, however, does not apply to the present day, when the principles of steam-power are so well understood, and when heat is recognised as the proper element to deal with in attempts to diminish the expense of power. There is, of course, various degrees of economy in steam-using as well as in steam-generating machinery; but so long as the best steam machinery does not utilise but one-tenth or one-fifteenth part of the heat represented in the fuel burned, there need be no question as to the point where improvements in such machinery should be mainly directed.
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