THE AIM AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD. 51 



rigid system of beliefs and customary acts " heavy as frost and 

 deep almost as life." 



16. 



It was such a system of interpretations of the Objective 

 which was losing its authority at the momentous epoch which 

 we mark as that of the birth of Greek Philosophy. Philosophy, 

 the child of Wonder, began when advancing knowledge was 

 banishing the nymph and dryad from the world of practical 

 activity to the fantasy world of the poet, when no longer the 

 Ionian could 



" Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 

 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 



With the realisation of the inadequacy of the once sufficing 

 explanations of the world's happenings, there arose the need for 

 more satisfactory ones, while the widening and deepening of 

 intellectual interests that came with an age of comparative 

 personal and social security, brought men face to face with the 

 old problems of change and decay in a much more general 

 form. The motive of the movement, which we commonly date 

 from the speculations of Thales, was to seek escape from the 

 intellectual oppression of the world's ceaseless flux in some 

 abiding reality. The animistic " moment " was passed, but 

 men had not yet come to that realisation of the great gulf 

 fixed between their real selves and physical nature which is 

 the distinguishing mark of the modern consciousness.*:. We 

 find accordingly that the new effort to render the Objective 

 intelligible takes the form of an attempt "to give back to 

 Nature the life of which it had been robbed by advancing 

 knowledge .... simply by making it possible for that life 

 which had hitherto been supposed to reside in each thing, to be 

 transferred to the one thing of which all others were passing 

 forms." f Animism was replaced by Hylozoism. 



* Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, i, pp. 123, 124. 

 t Burnet, Early Greek Philosophers, p. 13. 



E 2 



