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if I say anything which is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute: for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain. is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing some one else." And again: “I pray God to grant that my words may endure, in so far as they have been spoken rightly; if unintentionally I have said anything wrong, I pray that he will impose on me the just punishment of him who errs; and the just punishment is that he should be set right." If Socrates was not a man of science himself, he knew the spirit by which science lives. They knew the conditions of science and philosophy; they must σώζειν τὰ φαινόμενα, keep the phenomena safe,' as they picturesquely said—a hypothesis must explain the facts without doing violence to them. Concisely and quaintly they defined the method of science. Plato explains that mere right opinion without knowledge is helpless; the man who has it is "like a blind man, who manages to keep in the right road"; and "true opinions while they abide with us are beautiful and fruitful, but they run away out of the human soul and therefore are not of much value until they 2 Id. Critias, 1c6.

1 Plato, Gorgias, 458.

3 Id. Republic, 506.

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are tied up by the tie of the cause," "1 The tie of the cause, that is the piece of string with which Science still walks the world and turns opinions into knowledge, connecting isolated phenomena by discovering their cause. And they were equally interested in themselves. ἐδιζησάμην ἐμαυτόν, said Heraclitus, ‘I inquired into myself,' and the phrase opens up the endless branching avenues of philosophy. They had indeed a nobler and wider conception of philosophy than we, with whom philosophy-'the love of wisdom,' and science knowledge,' disown their names and are each consigned to a single province of their true kingdom and made jealous members of a loose federation. When they spoke of philosophy they had in their mind the whole range of knowledge from the knowledge of God to that of nature, for they saw the universe as a whole, and regarding it all as the kingdom of man, rejected the narrow specialism of our philosophers and scientists, each shut, like an anchorite, in his small, private cell. Listen to Aristotle on physical science; men of science might take the words as a motto, for never has the study of nature been more nobly praised or more widely conceived. 1 Id. Meno, 98.

"Doubtless," he says, "the glory of the heavenly bodies fills us with more delight than we get from the contemplation of these lowly things (i.e. the facts of zoology); for the sun and stars are born not, neither do they decay, but are eternal and divine. But the heavens are high and afar off, and of celestial things the knowledge that our senses give us is scanty and dim. On the other hand, the living creatures are nigh at hand, and of each and all of them we may gain ample and certain knowledge if we so desire. If a statue please us, shall not the living fill us with delight, all the more if in the spirit of philosophy we search for causes and recognise the evidences of design. Then will Nature's purpose and her deep-seated laws be everywhere revealed, all tending in her multitudinous work to one form or another of the Beautiful." 1

The spirit revealed by these quotations is not common even with us. It looks at life unblinded by pre-conceptions, by sentiment, by regard for what other people think, have thought, or will think. Now turn from its isolated utterances to

1 De Part. Animalium, i. 5. The translation is taken from Prof. D'A. Thompson's delightful Herbert Spencer lecture on "Aristotle as a Biologist."

its action on life. It was applied to theology, and within less than a hundred years of the time when poets believed that the Father of Heaven tried to eat his own children, that one of them, after deposing him, reigned in his place, bullying his fellow-gods and taking the form of various animals in order to seduce the daughters of men, Plato was writing: "Evil cannot reside in heaven, so it is compelled to haunt mortal nature and our earthly home. Therefore we must try and escape from earth to heaven as quickly as we can and this escape is to become like God, as far as lies in our power; and to become like him is to become good and holy and at the same time wise (notice this characteristically Greek addition). God is nowhere and in no way unrighteous, he is supremely righteous; and there is nothing more like him than those of us who become truly righteous." Those who know the Republic will remember how Plato, by patient argument and laborious logic, proves the absurdity of the old stories and arrives at this conclusion; thus reaching in the Greek way, by following his reason, what Hebrew prophets reached by a leap of the mind in a moment of revealing vision. Think, by 1 Theaet. 176.

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contrast, how many centuries it took Europe to put the dark stories of the Old Testament in their proper place. The same spirit was applied to politics, and democracy came into being, and her charter was written in words which no subsequent age need ever rewrite; in the speech which contains it Pericles claims as a peculiar quality of the Athenians, that they were never afraid of thought, but made it the basis of all they did.

The same spirit of creative intelligence was applied to the art of writing, and, though they had no specimens of prose, Greek or foreign, to guide them, within a hundred years of their first attempts, they not only wrote far better than we do (in the mere art of writing, Greece has never been surpassed), but they had discovered the essential principles of prose style, and had begun to discuss what rhythms were suitable to it. (Till Professor Saintsbury wrote his History of English Prose Rhythm, we had not conceived that there was such a problem at all.) The same spirit was applied to history, and Thucydides wrote that account of the Peloponnesian War which caused Macaulay to say: "I finished Thucydides after reading him with inexpressible interest and ad