ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXXIX 
hardly be possible to frame an explanation more pointless. If there 
has ever been a hypothesis framed with more “distinct ideas” than 
that of the Greek atomists, I am not acquainted with it, and it is 
precisely because it was so “appropriate” to the surface facts of the 
Greek observation that it was so illusory. It was fitted to these 
facts with a concinnitas that is most admirable from a psychological 
point of view. It was invented to fit them, and its whole raison 
d’étre was that it did fit them, so far as ideas and words could make 
it fit. For this purpose it was revised, modified, contracted, en- 
larged, supplemented, until it seemed to fit every sinuosity of the 
facts of nature, as far as the facts of nature were open to the appre- 
hension of the Greeks in the 5th century before Christ. The hy- 
pothesis was strong just where it seems weak to Dr. Whewell, and 
it is precisely because it was so ideally strong that it was so physic- 
ally weak, and it is precisely because it fitted the facts so well that it 
was a delusion andasnare. Men rested in it with a sense of satisfac- 
tion which simulated the rest of a mind turning on the poles of truth. 
It satisfied the highest cravings of Greek physical enquiry in the 
then contemporaneous stage of mental evolution in Greece. The 
Greek mind of that age had not reached a stage of development 
which required anything more than metaphysical hypotheses for the 
explanation of physical facts, because it had not reached a stage 
of evolution which capacitated it to frame hypotheses in physics capa- 
ble of anything more than metaphysical verification. And hence 
it was in the ingenuity of a plausible hypothesis, and in the nicety 
with which it fitted the superficial facts that the subtle and artistic 
mind of the Greeks found the sole interest and zest which a physi- 
cal hypothesis had for them or could have. “Ancient logic,” says 
Prof. Jowett, “was always mistaking the truth of the form for the 
truth of the matter.”* The conscious incapacity of the Greeks 
for physical science was so great that we find the best class of minds 
among them absolutely revolting at the very idea of such a science. 
Socrates, for instance, had no patience with it. Plato represents 
him in the Phedo as at the same time deploring misology—the 
hatred of formal ideas—and yet, in almost the same breath, confess- 
ing himself a misologist in the presence of mechanical conceptions 
of nature. He liked the doctrines of Anaxagoras well enough, so 
* Jowett’s Plato, vol. I, p. 376. 
