94 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



of the temple are hung with myrtle, and, amid festoons 

 of purple and garlands of roses, there are celebrated the 

 nuptials of Mars and Venus, while in the love of the mag- 

 net and the iron a new metaphor is given to the world 

 which even the greatest of its poets has not disdained to use. 



With the decadence of the Roman Empire the com- 

 mentator waxed more and more in strength, and original 

 thought became correspondingly enfeebled. Men forgot 

 or feared to consult nature, to seek for new truths, to do 

 what the great discoverers of other times had done; they 

 were content to consult libraries, to study and defend old 

 opinions, to talk of what great geniuses had said. 1 Thus 

 no new gold was mined, but the supply on hand was 

 beaten to the last degree of tenuity or twisted into a 

 myriad of forms. The three things which blocked progress 

 were the overshadowing claims of religion to the sole 

 domination of the reflecting mind, the prevalence of the 

 Platonic doctrine that all science may be evolved by the 

 use of the reason, and the disposition to dispute about 

 terms, or to seek new facts by new and subtle collocations 

 of words in the endeavor to read nature through books. 



From these there became evolved first, a blind faith in 

 the supernatural, and in its constant intervention in the 

 physical world; second, an imagination capable of conceiv- 

 ing such interference as occurring under any and all cir- 

 cumstances, and as being the one and the sole explanation 

 for everything that was in the least respect phenomenal; 

 and, third, a habit of dealing with all learning at second 

 hand, which quickly obliterated the distinction in value 

 between evidence of the senses and mere hearsay reports of 

 speculations, especially after the latter had permeated down 

 through two or three generations of commentators. The 

 result was mysticism, injected into the Greek philosophy 

 by the Alexandrian school, and then spreading through 

 the whole body of human thought and poisoning it to its 

 very centres. If the ancient Greek was so familiar with 



1 Whewell : Hist, of the Inductive Sciences, i., 312. 



