WHAT IS PHYSICAL LIFE 



man, an inquirer after facts or reasons, 

 from the verb to look carefully around and 

 to consider. Socrates claimed to be a 

 skeptic, because he held his judgment in 

 suspense until he could decide according to 

 reasons. But in the course of barely three 

 centuries this fine stock of men died out, 

 and were succeeded by what our Western 

 cattle-growers would call a breed of runts. 

 Instead of the like of Socrates, Plato, and 

 Aristotle, there arose a set called Pyr- 

 rhonists w r ho made skepticism synony- 

 mous with its wretched counterfeit, In- 

 credulity, and it has retained this ignoble 

 meaning ever since, leaving the word in its 

 original sense as dead and gone as the 

 great-minded race of men who first made 

 it. It was reserved for a man of another 

 people, who when writing to Greeks thus 

 defined the duty of a true skeptic, Prove 

 all things and then hold fast to that 

 which is good. 



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