time: the refreshing river 



and Chloe: "My young friends," says Philetas, "Love is a god, 

 young, beautiful, and ever on the wing. He therefore rejoices in 

 the company of youth, he is ever in search of beauty, and gives 

 wings to the souls of his favourites. His power far exceeds that of 

 Zeus. He commands the elements; he rules the stars; he governs 

 the world, and even the gods themselves are more obedient to him 

 than these your flocks are to you. All these flowers are the works of 

 Love, these plants and shrubs are his offspring; through him these 

 rivers flow and these zephyrs breathe."^ But all this is of course 

 poetry. We cannot in sober truth be such hylozoists. One must 

 remember that historically the attribution of animistic emotions, etc., 

 to inorganic things was the primitive method of explanation of natural 

 processes, from which science freed itself in the 17th and i8th cen- 

 turies only with great difficulty.^ Still, we can say with Drummond 

 that there may be something analogous between the bonds appropriate 

 to each of the different levels of organisation in the world. And we 

 remember that greak book in which Sigmund Freud described what 

 he called "the task of Eros" in the process of human social evolution.^ 

 And hence the true profundity in the repeated invocations (so beauti- 

 ful, but sometimes in the past to me so puzzling) of Lucretius to the 

 Epicurean Venus, alma Venus: — 



"quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernas 

 nee sine te quicquam dias in luminis oras 

 exoritur neque fit laetum neque amabile quicquam"* 



(. . . For thou alone 

 Governest all things, and without thee naught 

 Is risen to reach the shining shores of light, 

 Nor aught of joyful or of lovely bom.) 



She who is the Delight of Gods and Men embodies the principle of 

 Union and Aggregation. 



Thus it will be seen that as social evolution is continuous with 

 biological evolution, so (Drummond was convinced) much of the 

 content of traditional christian theology — "the laws of the spiritual 

 world" — arose directly from what had preceded it in the highly 

 organised realm of the psychological. In this he complemented in 

 an important way the thought of his contemporaries, though his 



^ Geo. Thornely's translation, 1657. 



^ Cf. J. G. Gregory "Tlie Animate and Mechanical Models of Reality," Journ. Philos. 

 Stud., 1927, 2, 301. 



^ Civilisation and its Discontents (London, 1930). * De Rer. Nat. I, 21. 



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