FORE: Among natural objects, some exist unchanged through all eternity, while others are generated and decay. The former are divinely glorious, but being comparatively inaccessible to our means of observation, far less is known of them than we could wish; while perishable plants and animals offer abundant opportunities of study to us who live under the same conditions with them. Each science has a charm of its own. For knowledge of the heavenly bodies is so sublime a thing that even a little of it is more delightful than all earthly science put together; just as the smallest glimpse of a beloved beauty is more delightful than the fullest and nearest revelation of ordinary objects; while, on the other hand, where there are greater facilities for observation, science can be carried much further; and our closer kinship with the creatures of earth is some compensation for the interest felt in that philosophy which deals with the divine. Wherefore, in our discussions on living beings we shall, so far as possible, pass over nothing, whether it rank high or low in the scale of estimation. For even such of them as displease the senses, when viewed with the eye of reason as wonderful works of Nature afford an inexpressible pleasure to those who can enter philosophically into the causes of things. For, surely, it would be absurd and irrational to look with delight at the images of such objects on account of our interest in the pictorial or plastic skill which they exhibit, and not to take still greater pleasure in a scien311tific explanation of the realities themselves. We ought not then to shrink with childish disgust from an examination of the lower animals, for there is something wonderful in all the works of Nature; and we may repeat what Heracleitus is reported to have said to certain strangers who had come to visit him, but hung back at the door when they saw him warming himself before a fire, bidding them come in boldly, for that there also there were gods; not allowing ourselves to call any creature common or unclean, because there is a kind of natural beauty about them all. For, if anywhere, there is a pervading purpose in the works of Nature, and the realisation of this purpose is the beauty of the thing. But if anyone should look with contempt on the scientific examination of the lower animals, he must have the same opinion about himself; for the greatest repugnance is felt in looking at the parts of which the human body is composed, such as blood, muscles, bones, veins, and the like.193 Similarly, in discussing any part or organ we should consider that it is not for the matter of which it consists that we care, but for the whole form; just as in talking about a house it is not bricks and mortar and wood that we mean; and so the theory of Nature deals with the essential structure of objects, not with the elements which, apart from that structure, would have no existence at all.194
THREE:May all the nations of the world after the war collaborate to compensate Louvain for her martyrdom, see that this city shall be restored to her former, happy prosperity, and get a library which approaches as much as possible the one she lost. The Germans can probably do their part by investigating where the motor-cars went which left the Halls on that wretched Tuesday night, heavily laden with books.As these shop processes or operations are more or less connected, and run one into the other, it will be necessary at the beginning to give a short summary of them, stating the general object of each, that may serve to render the detailed remarks more intelligible to the reader as he comes to them in their consecutive order.
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THREE:But, towards the close of the sixteenth century, the time for amassing observations was past, no further progress being possible until the observations already recorded were interpreted aright. The just instinct of science perceived this; and for nearly a century after Cesalpino no addition of any magnitude was made to what Bacon called History, while mens conceptions of natural law were undergoing a radical transformation.544 To choose such a time for developing the Aristotelian philosophy was peculiarly unfortunate; for that philosophy had become, both on its good and on its bad side, an obstacle to progress, by encouraging studies which were not wanted, and by fostering a spirit of opposition to the Copernican astronomy.
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THREE:Prout was surprised. Not that he ought to have been surprised after the strange things that had come in his way professionally. The way he conveyed the impression that all this was news to him was artistic. He asked a score of questions, he made voluminous notes solemnly in a large book.
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THREE:Ill bet there is! Sandy said to himself.Stated briefly, Zellers theory of ancient thought is that the Greeks originally lived in harmony with Nature; that the bond was broken by philosophy and particularly by the philosophy of Socrates; that the discord imperfectly overcome by Plato and Aristotle revealed itself once more in the unreconciled, self-concentrated subjectivity of the later schools; that this hopeless estrangement, after reaching its climax in the mysticism of the Neo-Platonists, led to the complete collapse of independent speculation; and that the creation of a new consciousness by the advent of Christianity and of the Germanic races was necessary in order to the successful resumption of scientific enquiry. Zeller was formerly a Hegelian, and it seems to me that he still retains far too much of the Hegelian formalism in his historical constructions. The well-worked antithesis between object and subject, even after being revised in a positivist sense, is totally inadequate to the burden laid on it by this theory; and if we want really to understand the causes which first hampered, then arrested, and finally paralysed Greek philosophy, we must seek for them in a more concrete order of considerations. Zeller, with perfect justice, attributes the failure of Plato and Aristotle to their defective observation of Nature and their habit of regarding the logical combinations of ideas derived from the common use of words as an adequate representative of the relations obtaining among things in themselves. But it seems an extremely strained and artificial explanation to say that their shortcomings in this respect were due to a confusion of the objective and the subjective, consequent on the imperfect separation of the Greek mind from Naturea confusion, it isx added, which only the advent of a new religion and a new race could overcome.1 It is unfair to make Hellenism as a whole responsible for fallacies which might easily be paralleled in the works of modern metaphysicians; and the unfairness will become still more evident when we remember that, after enjoying the benefit of Christianity and Germanism for a thousand years, the modern world had still to take its first lessons in patience of observation, in accuracy of reasoning, and in sobriety of expression from such men as Thucydides and Hippocrates, Polybius, Archimdes and Hipparchus. Even had the Greeks as a nation been less keen to distinguish between illusion and reality than their successors up to the sixteenth centurya supposition notoriously the reverse of trueit would still have to be explained why Plato and Aristotle, with their prodigious intellects, went much further astray than their predecessors in the study of Nature. And this Zellers method does not explain at all.
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