MODERN SCIENCE n 



Pt is this sense of the reign of law together with the 

 personal character of scientific investigation that the 

 Greeks have handed down to us. It is these things 

 that unite us with them and separate our Science from 

 that of the ancient East. 



So far we have considered the resemblance of our 

 Science to that of the Greeks. We may now turn to 

 the elements which separate us from them. In con- 

 sidering these elements we must, for the moment, 

 expressly exclude mathematical Science which, as we 

 shall see, needs to be considered apart. 



When the philosophers of Ionian Greece had at last 

 entered on the heritage of antiquity, they began at once 

 to engage on that continuous and active process of 

 cosmic speculation that became the ancestor of the 

 characteristic Greek Philosophy and through it of Greek 

 Science. vNo people were ever more free from theo- 

 logical and social prejudices, and Greek thought de- 

 veloped without any of those trammels from which the 

 modern system has but very slowly disengaged itself. 



As time went on knowledge accumulated, and separate 

 sciences were gradually differentiated from the philo- 

 sophy from which they had sprung. The earliest 

 departments to be thus separated were naturally those 

 in which the idea of number could be invoked. Mathe- 

 matics thus_ became the first science in point of time, 

 and by the extent to which mathematical principles can 

 be applied we must still often test the stage that any 

 science has reached. In the course of centuries the 

 sciences became separated more and more from the 

 parent stock of philosophy, but it is peculiar to Greek 

 scientific thought that it never loses its relationship 

 dependence on its parent. Whether we look to the 

 earliest traces of the scientific spirit in the seventh 



