THE FABRIC OF MATTER 5 



moon and stars ; they saw behind them Birth, and 

 before them Death ; and reahsing the mystery 

 of existence, they propounded new creeds and 

 philosophies, and lo ! there appeared a Plato, or 

 a Socrates, or a Democritus, or a Heraclitus. 



It was simply a case of harp and hand. For 

 150,000 years the brain had been there ; for 

 150,000 years the stars and the seas had been 

 waiting to play upon it, but only now was the 

 instrument ready for the musician. Palaeolithic 

 Man had no doubt his art, for bisons and reindeer, 

 and mammoths, carved on antlers and tusks, have 

 often been found ; but yet Palaeolithic Man did 

 not, could not, produce a Plato or a Phidias. The 

 Greek brain of 600 b.c. was something quite new 

 in the world. 



The modern man goes to his business day after 

 day, and in many respects his brain is very much 

 alert and alive ; but he is usually quite incurious 

 of the stars ; he knows enough about them to 

 satisfy his feeble curiosity, and he feels that the 

 mechanism of the world is no concern of his. 

 Not so the Greek philosopher. To him the world 

 was new, and strange, and full of problems, and 

 he was afire with divine curiosity. 



One of the earliest problems that engaged the 

 awakened Greek mind was the nature of the 

 objective — of that changing something we call matter^ 



