Before Aristotle 17 



Later Hippocratic treatises which deal with physiological topics 

 are on a lower plane, and we must seek some external cause 

 for the failure. Nor have we far to seek. This period saw 

 the rise of a movement that had the most profound influence 

 on every department of thought. We see the_advent into the 

 Greek world of a great intellectual movement as a result of 

 which the department of philosophy that dealt with nature 

 receded before Ethics. Of that intellectual revolution 

 perhaps the greatest the world has seen Athens was the site 

 and Socrates (470-399) the protagonist. With the movement 

 itself and its characteristic fruit we are not concerned. But 

 the great successor and pupil of its founder gives us in the 

 Tlmaeus a picture of the depth to wdiich natural science can 

 be degraded in the effort to give a specific teleological meaning 

 to all parts of the visible Universe. The book and the picture 

 which it draws, dark and repulsive to the mind trained in modern 

 scientific method, enthralled the imagination of a large part of 

 mankind for wellnigh two thousand years. Organic nature 

 appears in this work of Plato (427-347) as the degeneration 

 of man whom the Creator has made most perfect. The school 

 that held this view ultimately decayed as a result of its failure 

 to advance positive knowledge. As the centuries went by its 

 views became further and further divorced from phenomena, 

 and the bizarre developments of later Neoplatonism stand to 

 this day as a warning against any system which shall neglect 

 the investigation of nature. But in its decay Platonism dragged 

 science down and destroyed by neglect nearly all earlier bio- 

 logical material. Mathematics, not being a phenomenal study, 

 suited better the Neoplatonic mood and continued to advance, 

 carrying astronomy with it for a while astronomy that affected 

 the life of man and that soon became the handmaid of astrology ; 

 medicine, too, that determined the conditions of man's life, was 

 also cherished, though often mistakenly, but pure science was 

 doomed. 



2540-1 B 



