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NATURAL-HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS. 



Barok Cuviee's Lectures on the History of the Natural Sciences. 



Lecture VI Socrates and his times.— State op Science up 



TO the time of Aristotle We have seen the rise and progress of the 



philosophical spirit among the Greeks, and its division into several sects. In the 

 oldest of these sects or schools, rude ideas of matter formed the basis of all the 

 spec'ilations. In the second, something beyond mere matter was already looked 

 for ; some of its laws were discovered, and the powers of number and of harmony 

 were invoked. In the third, metaphysical ideas assume the ascendancy : matter 

 is held in contempt, its existence is even denied ; bodies are merely illusions, and 

 the entire universe is in the intellect. The fourth, from extreme dislike to these 

 abstractions, falls into the opposite extreme, and admits nothing beyond matter 

 and motion. Lastly, Anaxagoras raises himself to the idea of an intellgence 

 by which matter has been arranged. 



The most celebrated of the disciples of Anaxagoras was Socrates. The history 

 of this philosopher is so well known that we need not be particular with respect 

 to it. Selecting from among the doctrines of his master all that was elevated 

 and useful, he attempted to establish a more complete reform, and laboured to 

 direct philosophy into a path from which it should never have strayed. Reject- 

 ing all the suppositions that had been made, he wished to bring metaphysics 

 within the controul of sound judgment, and to reduce physics to the empire of 

 common sense and observation. 



Socrates, after exhibiting during his whole life a model of virtue, furnished by 

 his death an example of the respect which is due to the laws, by refusing to with- 

 draw himself from the unjust sentence by which he Was condemned. He had 

 been accused of impiety, and although no person had ever formed a more sublime 

 idea of the divine providence, he fell beneath the weight of the accusation. Per- 

 haps his death was less the work of religious fanaticism than of political animo- 

 sity. After the expulsion of the thirty tyrants, it was remembered that he had 

 been the friend of one of them, of Critias, But this connection, which the love 

 of science alone had formed, could never have made the philosoper deviate from 

 the rule of conduct which he had traced to himself, and at all times he had been 

 as firm under the suggestions of friendship as under threats and violence. 



Socrates did not cultivate the physical sciences, and yet he contributed more 

 than any one to give them the direction which they presently assumed, and he 

 may be said to have paved the way to Aristotle. The Elean school, introduced 

 at Athens, had there, by its being perverted, produced sophists, who, by dint of 

 subleties, had contrived to throw uncertainty on the clearest ideas. It was to 

 combat them that Socrates chiefly directed his mind. To force them to renounce 

 the subterfuges to which they habitually had recourse, one of his principal means 

 was to define with precision the value of terms. In this manner he created a 

 Strict language, and thus rendered important service to the positive sciences, by 

 furnishing them with the instrument which was indispensable to them. 



It is to Socrates that we owe the introduction of a very productive principle, 

 by which the natural sciences have greatly benefited, namely, t\ifi principle of 

 final causes, or, as it is now commonly called, of conditions of existence. He 

 himself informs us, that this idea was suggested to him by reading a work of 

 Anaxagoras on the intelligence which has arranged the universe. If the universe, 

 said he, is the work of an intelligent being, all its parts must be in mutual accor- 

 dance, and so disposed as to concur towards a common end. There results from 

 this that each organized being must be connected with all the rest by necessary 

 relations, and moreover that it must contain in itself all the conditions which may 

 render it fit for performing the part assigned to it. 



The principle of final causes has sometipies misled speculative minds, who have 



