THE WONDERS OP LIFE 



t^iese remarkable efforts to found a pariimtive monismi, 

 which found so finished a,n expression in the De return 

 natma of the great poet-philosopher, Lucretius Cairus 

 (918-54 B.C.), were shortly tJurust out by the sprejad' — 

 through Plato's curious dualism — of the belief in the 

 immortality of tbe soul and the transcendental world of 

 ideas, 



The EJieatics, Parmenides a,nd Zeoo, ]p,ad foreshadowed 

 io the fifth century the division of philosophy into two 

 branches; but Platoi and his pupil Aristotle; (in the 

 fourth century b.c). succeeded in gaining general accept- 

 ance for this, duailism and antithesis of physics and meta- 

 physics. Physics devoted itgelf on the ground of experi- 

 ence toi tbe study of the phenomena of things, leaving 

 their real essences (or noumena) that, lay behind the 

 phenomena, to. metaphysics. These inner essences are 

 transcendiental and ina,cce.ssible to, empiricaJi research; 

 they form the naeit^physical world of eternal ideas, which 

 is independent of the real world, and has its. highest 

 unity in God, as the. Absolute. The soul, an eternal idea 

 that dweEs for a time in the passing human body, is 

 imitnortal. This consistent dualism of Plato's system, 

 with its sharp antithesis of this world and the next, of 

 body and sotdi, of world and God, is its chief character- 

 istic. It became all the more influential when Plato's 

 pupil Aristotle blended it with his empirical metaphysics, 

 based on ample scientific experience, and pointed out the 

 idea in the entelechy, or purposively acting principle, of 

 every being; and especially when Christianity (three 

 hundred years afterwards) found in this duaUsm a 

 welcome philosophic support of its own transcendlental 

 tendency. 



In the course of the thousand years which historians 

 call the Middle Ages, and which are usually dated from 

 the fall of the Romgji Enjpire (476), to the discovery of 

 America (1492), the superstition of civilised races 



66 



