August 8, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



171 



and plants, the significance of life, death, 

 generation, sleep and dreams. These were 

 all perennial problems and all insoluble. 

 The men of Greece moved as in a maze, not 

 only ignorant, as we are, of man's origin 

 and fate, but, unlike us, dreading the 

 things around them, since most of these, 

 like the lightning and the hurricane, were 

 not only not interpreted but seemingly 

 might come at any moment to kill or to 

 crush. 



At first man stands before the roaring loom of 

 Time, gazing in iielpless perplexity at the move- 

 ments of the infinite shuttles, ignorant of the 

 movements which may be beneficent and of those 

 which may be destructive to him. . . . He has to 

 find his friends and his foes amid the multitude of 

 forces which surround him. . . . The spontaneous 

 activity of his growing intellect urges him to 

 make out some scheme by which the various phe- 

 nomena may be bound together. He begins to 

 link the known and accessible on to the unknown 

 and inaccessible; he animates the universe; inter- 

 prets all he sees by all he feels. — G. H. Lewes. 



This childlike anthropomorphism, how- 

 ever, failed to satisfy the minds of the 

 more cultivated Greeks, who, having noth- 

 ing else to fall back upon, retreated from 

 it into a kind of agnosticism or into crude 

 forms of atomism such as that of Demoe- 

 ritus. Even the great Hippocrates, while 

 pleading for observation and virtually be- 

 ginning clinical observation as well as 

 holding to the healing power of nature, was 

 so ignorant of anatomy and physiology and 

 pathology as to be able to offer nothing 

 better as a theory of disease than his well- 

 known suggestion of the four humors, of 

 which the sole merit — though at that time 

 a very great merit — ^was that it focused 

 attention upon the patient rather than on 

 priest or temple or bloody sacrifice ; that is 

 to say, on the disease itself rather than on 

 ^some ancient dogma. Bmpedocles, it is 

 true, is believed to have used natural 

 means to forestall disease when he cut 



down the hill behind Girgenti and drained 

 the malarial marshes of Selenunti, the 

 parsley city. Aristotle, too, for the most 

 part seems far away from anthropomor- 

 phism in most of his thought and work, but 

 while all the middle age regarded him 

 with Dante as "the master of those who 

 know," Lewes has truly said: 



It is difficult to speak of Aristotle without exag- 

 geration; he is felt to be so mighty and is known 

 to be so wrong. . . . His influence has only been 

 exceeded by the great founders of religions; never- 

 theless, if we now estimate the product of his 

 labors in the discovery of positive truths, it ap- 

 pears insignificant when not erroneous. None of 

 the great germinal discoveries in science was due 

 to him or his disciples. 



The Roman period was practically sterile 

 as to any helpful interpretations of nature, 

 the great work of Lucretius being for the 

 most part an amplification of that of Epi- 

 curus; while the triumph of Christianity 

 and, later, of Mohammedanism over the 

 Roman world, or parts of it, merely im- 

 posed upon it oriental interpretations 

 which by substituting few gods or one for 

 the multitudes of Greek mythology, simpli- 

 fied without wholly depersonifying nature. 

 It may well be, however, that the introduc- 

 tion of the Hebrew Scriptures into the 

 western world afforded a real relief from 

 the overhumanized and top-heavy interpre- 

 tation of the Greeks and Romans. "What a 

 cool refreshment follows, for example, a 

 verse like this taken from those Scriptures : 

 "The wind bloweth where it listeth; thou 

 hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell 

 whence it cometh or whither it goeth." 

 Here is no excessive anthropomorphism. 

 The wind and its blowing do not strike us 

 as interpreted differently from our expla- 

 nations of to-day. Sound is personified, but 

 at the same time we have a frank admis- 

 sion of ignorance as to its origin and fate. 

 As opposed to the theory of- ^olian origin 

 and the assumption of personality we have 



