54 



warned us against our deceptive terminology. " Us 

 pre*tendent expliquer, (he says), la nature par 

 leurs idees gene*rales et abstraites, comme si la 

 nature e*tait abstraite." The methods of the 

 English grammar schools are even now medieval 

 in so far as their teaching begins, as it mostly 

 does still, with abstract propositions. 



Mysticism gathered over Germany ; in Paris to 

 this day nature is constrained in the artifices of 

 logic and rhetoric ; and to this day platonism, 

 chiefly by the influence of the Florentine humanists 

 and perhaps of the Cambridge school of Henry 

 More, has moulded both thought and language 

 in England. John Hunter conceived a "materia 

 vitse diflusa " : and but yesterday Huxley had to 

 say of Owen's theory of " spermatic force" that 

 an artillerist might as well attribute the pro- 

 pulsion of a bullet to " trigger force." We profess 

 Aristotle, and we talk Plato. Even by men of 

 science it is daily forgotten that the only being is 

 the particular. After the Faith then, realism 

 the belief in principles and kinds having external 

 existence, and in formative essences to be reached 

 by abstract thinking stood another adversary 

 against natural knowledge. 



