SCIENCE AND CULTURE 5 



numbers, or of atoms, or of particles infinitely 

 tiny but qualitatively different; whether the 

 action of an entirely mechanical necessity is 

 enough to account for the order and the mar- 

 vellous diversity of the phenomena of the uni- 

 verse. In magnificent systems, they displayed, 

 as in a vast panorama, the history of the world, 

 its orgin, its course, its destiny. 



But what became of man in the midst of this 

 universe? His virtues, his thoughts, his arts, 

 his institutions, his life — had they any reality, 

 any value? Socrates, crowning by a positive 

 doctrine the critical work of the Sophists, was 

 not content with protesting against a science 

 which ignored or absorbed man; he put in the 

 foreground human duties and the knowledge 

 and culture of self. Then Plato and Aristotle 

 found a way to make human virtue itself the 

 point of departure for all wisdom, and the 

 crisis precipitated by the Sophists was resolved 

 into a harmony arising from the subordination 

 of the science of nature to ideal culture. 



A second crisis arose, at the end of the 

 Middle Ages, when scholasticism seemed to 

 have established to all eternity a science ade- 



