CHAPTER XII 



THE LEGACY OF THE GREEKS: THE 

 REBIRTH OF TIME 



THE appraisal of the Greek achievement has varied widely. 

 To the scholars of the Renaissance it seemed wondrous. In our 

 later day it has suffered somewhat from neglect. " It may be 

 doubted," says Huxley, " if even-handed justice, as free from 

 fulsome panegyric as from captious depreciation, has ever yet 

 been dealt out to the sages of antiquity, who for eight centuries, 

 from the time of Thales to that of Galen, toiled at the founda- 

 tions of physical science. " 



The observation is just ; the explanation perhaps is not 

 distant. The quality of mind which finds adequate mental 

 pabulum in the mere records of another people or another time 

 is not high. It will as a rule be ignorant of the achievements 

 of its own age. It will then reckon large the deeds of antiquity. 



On the other hand, the modern man of science, dipping 

 into the ancient day, is impatient with what to him seem in- 

 excusable absurdities. He is accustomed to exact methods of 

 research, and the Greeks were not exact. Accuracy and pre- 

 cision are to him the elementary principles of investigation, 

 and the ancients often failed even of that degree of accuracy 

 which was readily attainable from the instruments and methods 

 they employed. The modern mind is trained to rigorous 

 demands for proof ; the ancient mind was not. Plato and 

 Aristotle are credulous to a degree which in the most ordinary 

 man of enlightenment to-day would render him absurd. 



And again, the greatest measuring geniuses of antiquity, 

 men like Eratosthenes and Poseidonius, seemed to have been 

 quite content if the limits of error were within ten, twenty, or, 

 in extreme cases, fifty per cent. It was not that they were 

 uninstructed ; it was not that they lacked ingenuity. In the 

 latter regard they have been surpassed by no modern mind. It 

 was simply that the temper of the age was careless. So it is 



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