Part 10

... "Then," continues Socrates, "whoever amongst us prepares, with the greatest caution and accuracy, to reflect upon that particular thing by itself upon which he is inquiring" and ... "using reflection alone, endeavors to investigate every reality by itself, ... abstaining as much as possible from the use of the eyes ... is not such an one, if any, likely to arrive at what really exists?"

"You speak, Socrates," answered Simmias, "with amazing truth."

It is curious to note in how many particulars this process of acquiring knowledge is opposed to that of the modern scientific man. Observe specially that Socrates wishes to investigate every reality by itself, while we, on the contrary, fly from nothing with so much vehemence as from an isolated fact; it maddens us until we can put it into relation with other facts, and delights us in proportion to the number of facts with which we can relate it. In that book of multitudinous suggestions which Novalis (Friedrich Von Hardenberg) calls _The Pupil at Sais_, one of the most modern sentences is that where, after describing many studies of his wondrous pupil, Novalis adds that "erelong he saw nothing alone."

Surely, one of the earliest and most delightful sensations one has in spiritual growth, after one has acquired the true synthetic habit which converts knowledge into wisdom, is that delicious, universal impulse which accompanies every new acquisition as it runs along like a warp across the woof of our existing acquisition, making a pleasant tang of contact, as it were, with each related fibre.

But Plato speaks even more directly upon our present point, in advocating a similar attitude towards physical science. In Book VII. of the _Republic_, he puts these words into the mouth of Socrates: "And whether a man gapes at the heavens, or blinks on the ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he can learn, for nothing of that sort is matter of science."

Of course these, as the opinions of professed idealists, would not be representative of the Greek attitude towards physical science.

Yet when we turn to those who are pre-eminently physical philosophers, we find that the mental disposition, though the reverse of hostile, is nearly always such as to render the work of these philosophers unfruitful. When we find, for example, that Thales in the very beginning of Greek philosophy holds the principle, or beginning, [Greek: he arche] of all things to be moisture, or water; that Anaximenes a little while after holds the beginning of things to be air; that Heraclitus holds the _arche_ to be fire: this _sounds_ physical, and we look for a great extension of men's knowledge in regard to water, air and fire, upon the idea that if these are really the organic principles of things, thousands of keen inquiring eyes would be at once leveled upon them, thousands of experiments would be at once set on foot, all going to reveal properties of water, air and fire.

But perhaps no more expressive summary of the real relation between man and nature, not only during the Greek period but for many centuries after it, could be given than the fact that these three so-called elements which begin the Greek physical philosophy remained themselves unknown for more than two thousand years after Thales and Anaximenes and Heraclitus, until the very last century when, with the discovery of oxygen, men are able to prove that they are not elements at all; but that what we call fire is merely an effect of the rapid union of oxygen with bodies, while water and air are compounds of it with other gases. It is perfectly true that in the years between Thales and the death of Aristotle, a considerable body of physical facts had been accumulated; that Pythagoras had observed a number of acoustic phenomena and mathematically formulated their relations; it is true that--without detaining you to specify intermediate inquirers--we have that wonderful summary of Aristotle--wonderful for one man--which is contained in his _Physics_, from which the name "meta-physics" originated, though the circumstance that he placed the other books _after_ those on physics, calling them [Greek: Ta meta ta physicha biblia], the meta-physical, or over and above physical, books.

When we read the titles of these productions--here are "Eight Books of Physical Lectures," "Four Books of the Heavens," "Two Books of Production and Destruction," Treatises "On Animals," "On Plants," "On Colors," "On Sound"--we feel that we must be in a veritable realm of physical science. But if we examine these lectures and treatises, which probably contain the entire body of Greek physical learning, we find them hampered by a certain disability which seems to me characteristic not only of Greek thought, but of all man's early speculation, and which excludes the possibility of a fruitful and progressive physical science. I do not know how to characterize this disability otherwise than by calling it a lack of that sense of personal relation to fact which makes the thinker passionately and supremely solicitous about the truth, that is, the existence of his facts and the soundness of his logic; solicitous of these, not so much with reference to the value of his conclusions as because of an inward tender inexorable yearning for the truth and nothing but the truth.

In short, I find that early thought everywhere, whether dealing with physical facts or meta-physical problems, is lacking in what I may call the intellectual conscience--the conscience, for example, which makes Mr. Darwin spend long and patient years in investigating small facts before daring to reason upon them; and which makes him state the facts adverse to his theory with as much care as the facts which make for it.

Part of the philosophy of this personal relation between a man and a fact is very simple. For instance what do you know at present of the inner life of the Patagonians? Probably no more than your Mitchell's or Cornell's Geography told you at school. But if a government expedition is soon to carry you to the interior of that country, a personal relation arises which will probably set you to searching all the libraries at your command for such travels or treatises as may enlarge your knowledge of Patagonia.

It is easy to give a thousand illustrations of this lack of intellectual conscience in Greek thought, which continued indeed up to the time of the Renaissance. For example: it would seem that nothing less than a sort of amateur mental attitude towards nature, an attitude which does not bind the thinker to his facts with such iron conscientiousness that if one fact were out of due order, it would rack him, could account for Aristotle's grave exposition of the four elements. "We seek," he says "the principles of sensible things, that is of tangible bodies. We must take therefore not all the contrarieties of quality but those only which have reference to the touch.... Now the contrarieties of quality which refer to the touch are these: hot, cold; dry, wet; heavy, light; hard, soft; unctuous, meagre; rough, smooth; dense, rare." Aristotle then rejects the last three couplets on several grounds and proceeds: "Now in four things there are six combinations of two; but the combinations of two opposites, as hot and cold, must be rejected; we have therefore four elementary combinations which agree with the four apparently elementary bodies. Fire is hot and dry; air is hot and wet; water is cold and wet: earth is cold and dry." And thus we comfortably fare forward with fire, air, earth and water for the four elements of all things.

But Aristotle argues that there must be a fifth element: and our modern word quintessence is, by the way, a relic of this argument, this fifth element having been called by later writers _quinta essentia_ or quintessence. The argument is as follows: "the simple elements must have simple motions, and thus fire and air have their natural motions upwards and water and earth have their natural motions downwards; but besides these motions there is motion in a circle which is unnatural to these elements, but which is a more perfect motion than the other, because a circle is a perfect line and a straight line is not; and there must be something to which this motion is natural. From this it is evident that there is some essence or body different from those of the four elements, ... and superior to them. If things which move in a circle move contrary to nature it is marvelous, or rather absurd that this, the unnatural motion should alone be continuous and eternal; for unnatural motions decay speedily. And so from all this we must collect that besides the four elements which we have here and about us, there is another removed far off and the more excellent in proportion as it is more distant from us."

Or take Aristotle's dealing with the heaviness and lightness of bodies.

After censuring former writers for considering these as merely relative, he declares that lightness is a positive or absolute property of bodies just as weight is; that earth is absolutely heavy, and therefore tends to take its place below the other three elements; that fire has the positive property of lightness, and hence tends to take its place above the other three elements; (the modern word _empyrean_ is a relic of this idea from the _pyr_ or fire, thus collected in the upper regions), and so on; and concludes that bodies which have the heavy property tend to the centre, while those with the light property tend to the exterior, of the earth, because "Exterior is opposite to Centre, as heavy is to light."

This conception, or rather misconception, of opposites appears most curiously in two of the proofs which Socrates offers for the immortality of the soul, and I do not know how I can better illustrate the infirmity of antique thought which I have just been describing than by citing the arguments of Socrates in that connection according to the _Phaedo_. Socrates introduced it with special solemnity. "I do not imagine," he says, "that any one, not even if he were a comic poet, would now say that I am trifling.... Let us examine it in this point of view, whether the souls of the dead survive or not.

"Let us consider this, whether it is absolutely necessary in the case of as many things as have a contrary, that this contrary should arise from no other source than from a contrary to itself. For instance, where anything becomes greater, must it not follow that from being previously less it subsequently became greater?

"Yes."

"So, too, if anything becomes less, shall it become so subsequently to its being previously greater?"

"Such is the case," said Cebes.

"And weaker from stronger, swifter from slower, ... worse from better, juster from more unjust?"

"Surely."

"We are then sufficiently assured of this, that all things are so produced, contraries from contraries?"

"Sufficiently so."

... "Do you now tell me likewise in regard to life and death. Do you not say that death is the contrary of life?"

"I say so."

"And that they are produced from each other?"

"Yes."

"What then is that which is produced from life?"

"Death," said Cebes.

"And that which is produced from death?"

"I must allow," said Cebes, "to be life."

"Therefore, our souls exist after death."

This is one formal argument of Socrates.

He now goes on speaking to his friends during that fatal day at great length, setting forth other arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul. Finally he comes to the argument which he applies to the soul, that magnitude cannot admit its contrary, but that one retires when the other approaches. At this point he is interrupted by one who remembers his former position. Plato relates:

Then some one of those present (but who he was I do not clearly recollect) when he heard this, said, "In the name of the gods, was not the very contrary of what is now asserted laid down in the previous part of the discussion, that the greater is produced from the less and the less from the greater, and this positively was the mode of generating contraries from contraries?" Upon which Socrates said ... "... 'Then it was argued that a contrary thing was produced from a contrary; but now, that contrary itself can never become its own contrary'.... But observe further if you will agree with me in this. Is there anything you call heat and cold?"

"Certainly."

"The same as snow and fire?"

"Assuredly not."

"Is heat, then, something different from fire, and cold something different from snow?"

"Yes."

"But this I think is evident to you, that snow while it is snow can never, having admitted heat, continue to be what it was, snow and hot; but on the approach of heat will either give way to it or be destroyed."

"Certainly so."

"And fire, on the other hand, on the approach of cold, must either give way to it or be destroyed; nor can it ever endure, having admitted cold, to continue to be what it was, fire and cold.... Such I assert to be the case with the number 3 and many other numbers. Shall we not insist that the number 3 shall perish first ... before it would endure while it was yet 3 to become even?... What then? what do we now call that which does not admit the idea of the even?"

"Odd," replied he.

"And that which does not admit the just, nor the graceful?"

"The one, ungraceful, and the other, unjust."

"Be it so. But by what name do we call that which does not admit death?"

"Immortal."

"Does the soul, then, not admit death?" (Socrates has already suggested that whatever the soul occupies it brings life to.)

"No."

"Is the soul, therefore, immortal?"

"Immortal."

Socrates' argument drawn from the number 3 brings before us a great host of these older absurdities of scientific thought, embracing many grave conclusions drawn from fanciful considerations of number, everywhere occurring. For briefest example: Aristotle in his book "On the Heavens" proves that the world is perfect by the following complete argument: "The bodies of which the world is composed ... have three dimensions; now 3 is the most perfect number ... for of 1 we do not speak as a number; of 2 we say _both_; but 3 is the first number of which we say _all_; moreover, it has a beginning, a middle and an end." You may instructively compare with this the marvelous matters which the school of Pythagoras educed out of _their_ perfect number which was 4, or the _tetractys_; and Plato's number of the _Republic_ which commentators to this day have not settled.

These illustrations seem sufficient to show a mental attitude towards facts which is certainly like that one has towards a far-off country which one does not expect to visit. The illustration I have used is curiously borne out by a passage in Lactantius, writing so far down as the fourth century, in which we have a picture of mediaeval relations towards nature and of customary discussions.

"To search," says he, "for the causes of natural things; to inquire whether the sun be as large as he seems, whether the moon is convex or concave, whether the stars are fixed in the sky or float freely in the air; of what size and what material are the heavens; whether they be at rest or in motion; what is the magnitude of the earth; on what foundations it is suspended and balanced;--to dispute and conjecture on such matters is just as if we chose to discuss what we think of a city in a remote country of which we never heard but the name."

Perhaps this defect of thought, this lack of personality towards facts, is most strikingly perceived in the slowness with which most primary ideas of the form and motion of the earth made their way among men. Although astronomy is the oldest of sciences, and the only one progressive science of antiquity; and although the idea that the earth was a sphere, was one of the earliest in Greek philosophy; yet this same Lactantius in the 4th century is vehemently arguing as follows: "Is it possible that men can be so absurd as to believe that the crops and trees on the other side of the earth hang downwards, and that men there have their feet higher than their heads? If you ask of them how they defend these monstrosities--how things do not fall away from the earth on that side? they reply that the nature of things is such that heavy bodies tend towards the centre, like the spokes of a wheel, while light bodies, as clouds, smoke, fire, tend from the earth towards the heavens on all sides. Now I am really at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once gone wrong, steadily persevere in their folly and defend one absurd opinion by another."

And coming on down to the eighth century, the anecdote is well known of honest Bishop Virgil of Salisbury, who shocked some of his contemporaries by his belief in the real existence of the antipodes, to such an extent that many thought he should be censured by the Pope for an opinion which involved the existence of a whole "world of human beings out of reach of the conditions of salvation."

And finally we all know the tribulations of Columbus on this point far down in the fifteenth century, at the very beginning of the Renaissance.

Now this infirmity of mind is as I said, not distinctive of the Greek. To me it seems simply a natural incident of the youth of reason, of the childhood of personality. At any rate, for a dozen centuries and more after Aristotle's death, to study science, means to study Aristotle; in vain do we hear Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century--that prophet philosopher who first announces the two rallying cries of modern science, mathematics and experiment--in vain do we hear Roger Bacon crying: "If I had power over the works of Aristotle I would have them all burnt; for it is only a loss of time, a course of error, and a multiplication of ignorance beyond expression, to study them."

Various attempts have been made to account for the complete failure of Greek physical science by assigning this and that specific tendency to the Greek mind: but it seems a perfect confirmation of the view I have here presented--to wit that the organic error was not Greek but simply a part of the general human lack of personality--to reflect that 1,500 years after Aristotle, things are little better, and that when we do come to a time when physical science begins to be pursued upon progressive principles, we find it to be also a time when all other departments of activity begin to be similarly pursued, so that we are obliged to recognize not the correction of any specific error in Greek ratiocination, but a general advance of the spirit of man along the whole line.

And perhaps we have now sufficiently prepared ourselves, as was proposed at the outset of this sketch of Greek science, to measure precisely the height of the new plane which begins with Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo in the 16th century, over the old plane which ended with Aristotle and his commentators. Perhaps the true point up to which we should lay our line in making this measurement is not to be found until we pass nearly through the 17th century and arrive fairly at Sir Isaac Newton. For while each one of the great men who preceded him had made his contribution weighty enough, as such, yet each brings with him some old darkness out of the antique period.

When we come to examine Copernicus, we find that though the root of the matter is there, a palpable environment of the old cycle and epicycle still hampers it; Galileo disappoints us at various emergencies. Kepler puts forth his sublime laws amid a cluster of startling absurdities; Francis Bacon is on the whole unfaithful; Descartes will have his vortices or eddies as the true principles of motion of the heavenly bodies; and so it is not until we reach Sir Isaac Newton at the end of the 17th century that we find a large, quiet, wholesome thinker, de-Aristotleized, de-Ptolemized, de-Cartesianized, pacing forth upon the domain of reason as if it were his own orchard, and seating himself in the centre of the universe as if it were his own easy chair, observing the fact and inferring the law as if with a personal passion for truth and a personal religion towards order. In short, and in terms of our present theory, with Sir Isaac Newton the growth of man's personality has reached a point when it has developed a true personal relation between man and nature.

I should have been glad if the scope of this part of my inquiry had allowed me to give some sketch at least of the special workers in science who immediately preceded Newton, and some of whose lives were most pathetic and beautiful illustrations of this personal love for nature which I have tried to show as now coming into being for the first time in the history of man. Besides such spectacles as the lonesome researches of Jeremiah Horrox, for example, I scarcely know anything in history which yields such odd and instructive contrasts as those glimpses of the scientific work which went on about the court of Charles II, and of what seems to have been the genuine interest of the monarch himself. In _Pepys' Diary_, for instance, under date of May 11th, 1663, I find the entry: "Went home after a little discourse with Mr. Pierce the surgeon who tells me that ... the other day Dr. Clarke and he did dissect two bodies, a man and a woman, before the king, with which the king was highly pleased." Again, February 1st, of the next year: "Thence to Whitehall, where in the Duke's chamber the King came and stayed an hour or two, laughing at Sir W. Petty ... and at Gresham College in general: Gresham College he mightily laughed at for spending time only in weighing of air and doing nothing else since they sat." On the 4th, he was at St. Paul's school and "Dr. Wilkins" is one of the "posers," Dr. Wilkins being John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, whose name was well-known in mathematics and in physics. Under date of March 1st, same year, the entry is: "To Gresham College where Mr. Hooke read a second very curious lecture about the late comet; among other things proving very probably that this is the very same comet that appeared before in the year 1618, and that in such a time probably it will appear again, which is a very new opinion; but all will be in print." And again on the 8th of August, 1666, I find an entry which is of considerable interest: "Discoursed with Mr. Hooke about the nature of sounds, and he did make me understand the nature of musical sounds made by strings mighty prettily; and told me that having come to a certain number of vibrations proper to make any tone, he is able to tell how many strokes a fly makes with her wings (those flies that hum in their flying) by the note that it answers to in music during their flying. That I suppose is a little too much refined; but his discourse in general of sound was mighty fine."

On the other hand, I scarcely know how I could show the newness of this science thus entering the world, more vividly than by recording two other entries which I find in the midst of these scientific notes. One of these records a charm for a burn, which Pepys thought so useful as to preserve. This is, in case one should be burned, to say immediately the following verse:

"There came three angels out of the East; One brought fire, the other brought frost-- Out fire, in frost, In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost."

And the other is, under Sept. 29th, 1662, "To the King's Theatre, where we saw 'Midsummer's Night's Dream,' which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life."