262 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



III. The Period of Speculative and ^Esthetic Contemplation 



of Nature. 



In the next place, from the nature of the country inhabited by the 

 Hellenes, Buckle infers the symmetry of the Hellenic mind. Here, 

 says he, for the first time the imagination was in some degree tempered 

 and confined by the understanding, though without impairing its 

 strength or diminishing its vitality ; and, though originally the Greeks 

 may have borrowed a good deal from the Egyptian priests, they were 

 nevertheless the first people in history to look on Nature from anything 

 like a scientific point of view, as distinguished from the point of view 

 of anthropomorphism. Though still strongly tinged with anthropomor- 

 phism, this scientific contemplation of Nature had its origin in the 

 teaching of the Ionian physical philosophers ; and then, in the course 

 of 250 years, it had attained such a height in Epicurus that in his doc- 

 trines we already find foreshadowed the law of the conservation of 

 energy, on which the proud edifice of mathematical physics to-day 

 rests. And though Epicurus could neither strictly formulate this law, 

 nor illustrate it by an example, he nevertheless makes in favor of it an 

 argument that is almost exactly the same as one made 2,000 years later 

 by Leibnitz. Thus, then, with respect to the ultimate questions of 

 philosophy, those ancient thinkers were, in fact, as well advanced, or 

 rather as little advanced, as ourselves a fact of no small importance 

 for our theory of understanding. 



When we contemplate the advances made in mathematics, astron- 

 omy, and acoustics, even by Thales and Pythagoras, it looks as though 

 the instinct of causality had already reached maturity among the 

 Mediterranean nations, and as though it was destined to lead men in- 

 fallibly on to the latest results of scientific inquiry, as reached in our 

 own times, and so on to domination of Nature resulting therefrom. 

 Every one knows how different from all this the event really was. 



Under the term Natural Science, we here mean not only the sum of 

 our knowledge of Nature, organic and inorganic, its phenomena, its 

 effects, and its laws, but also the conscious insight into the one method 

 which aids in enlarging that sum of knowledge, and also the conscious 

 application of this knowledge to the useful arts, to navigation, medi- 

 cine, etc. in short, the mastery and exploitation of Nature by man 

 with a view to increasing his own power, comfort, and enjoyment. 



Natural science in this sense was all unknown, we may say, to the 

 Greeks and Romans. Those apparently so promising beginnings lacked 

 persistent force. It is true that, during the 1,000 years which inter- 

 vened between Thales and Pythagoras and the fall of the Roman Em- 

 pire of the West, individual minds attained extraordinary heights. 

 Aristotle and Archimedes must unquestionably be reckoned among the 

 greatest teachers that have ever appeared. So, too, for som'e time a 

 steady advance of science appeared to be insured by the labors of the 



