246 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
It is not a cheering creed, but is it scientific? Can it be said to 
be unscientific just because it is not cheering: just because it offends a 
certain deep and sanguine instinct ? That is a question for the theolo- 
gians. Thucydides had no such theology as could make it seem un- 
scientific to his mind. His mind was academic: the mind of an acade- 
mic liberal: who is next door to a conservative: who lives in a semi- 
detached house with conservatism occupying the other half. Like 
Jowett, for example, Thucydides was liberal in theology and conserva- 
tive in politics: liberal in education but conservative in broader 
and deeper things. He was of two minds about education and 
religion. He distrusted religion in details and in given cases— 
in the case of Nicias’ superstitions about the moon, for example 
—but he welcomed it as a conservative force, as a force modifying 
the wheels of change, putting a break upon them. Conversely, he 
trusted education in details, wanted it for himself and men of his 
class, an upper class: but he distrusted it broadly and on larger grounds 
and in the field of politics as a solvent of the existing order of things, as 
a harbinger and herald of universal doubt and of that ever widening 
horizon of open questions, which is the mark of democracy and uni- 
versal education, and the plague of books and lectures, and which 
ends in anarchy. Culture—universal culture at any rate—is anarchy. 
It is “sensibility without bread’? as Goldwin, Smith used to say. 
To know everything is to do nothing. Thucydides coined the epigram, 
resented it, but perforce illustrated it in himself. He was the scientific 
officer who lost a campaign because he had more science than energy: 
the type of officer with whom we have all been familiar of recent years, 
since the day when one scientific general failed to swear his boats 
up the Nile in time to relieve Gordon, and a second failed to hold 
the crest of Majuba against the escalading Boers. Science can do 
much in warfare—especially in modern warfare—but it cannot supply 
energy. It may easily diminish the energy of native will and natural 
force of character: ‘‘the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er by the 
pale cast of thought.” Thucydides could do nothing in the Athens of 
his days, or in the war in which, unfortunately for his reputation, 
he took an academic and a very ineffectual hand, except record its 
history. 
