358 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



prove to no purpose, for such a people are horn so tJiat tliey do not feel tlie 

 needs of science. They will never be convinced that the aim of the latter, 

 when it looks for the distances of planets, is nothing else than to bring us 

 to comprehend both our position and lot in space ; tliey will never he con- 

 vinced that a veritable scholar may study such things merely, therefore, he- 

 cause he desires to hnoio them ; on the contrary, their belief was, is, and 

 will remain for ever, that the student who proceeds this way must either 

 pant for some personal renown, or must be a madman, or else will end by 

 putting his brains upon the rack about a method of connecting the celestial 

 bodies with the earth by a telegraph; in short, their belief will always be 

 that the student who deals with these subjects, if not ambitious and not 

 crazed, must have a mind to make merchandise of them, and so to treat 

 them that they may yield to him a profit. They will naturally give a par- 

 tial and defective definition of the ' profit' every earnest student of science 

 is working to obtain, a profit which differs in every essential part from the 

 one which is to their minds the only road to human greatness. To this 

 class belonged Socrates, and him from whom we learn his historical en- 

 gagement better than from Plato, Xenophon himself. 



" The ancient Greek natural philosophers were reproached by Socrates 

 with being unable to produce, if occasionally required, wind or rain, etc., 

 however they strain their wit in refinements about the origin of all these 

 phenomena. According to the judgment of this ' wisest of all mortals,' it 

 would be sufficient to cultivate astronomy only as far as it may serve to 

 the recognition of the parts of a year, month, or day ; and this knowledge 

 might be obtained through a conversation with town-criers and steersmen. 

 To go further than this, to extend the ken of our intellectual powers to 

 tiie planetary and cometary orbits, he deemed not only superfluous, but 

 even dangerous. From geometry, likewise, he permitted only so much to 

 be acquired as might be necessary for the affairs of purchase, bargain, ven- 

 dition, and for the surveying of fields. To stray into problems of a m.ore 

 complicated nature would consume human life in vain. 



" We may thus regard him as a mere advocate of practical life, who 

 spent his own in analysing the errors of almost all classes of human society, 

 and incessantly pursuing the phantom of what he thought might be termed 

 ' virtue,' without ever being able to feel, in spite of his ' spiritual mid- 

 wifery,' any nearer approach to the perception of wherein, after all, this 

 'virtue' consists. 



" "We may regard him as a mere political agitator, who never attained 

 to the dignity of a true moral philosopher ; for the latter will, when con- 

 tinuing the direction pointed out by his own frame of mind, never assail 

 those who cultivate the other great branches of intellectual life, the meta- 

 physical or physical. On the contrary, he will esteem such a distribution 

 of force necessary. His dull objections against cosmical philosophy, ut- 

 tered in the shops of carpenters, shoemakers, saddlers, and helmetmakers, 

 added the stamp of quackery to his unquestionable rudeness ; his econo- 

 mical receipts, as in the case of Ceribus or of the steward, added to his 

 repute nothing common to that of men like Anaxagoras. Honest enthu- 

 siast, in other respects, as he was, he would have expressed the memory of 

 the most distinguished adversaries of Greek cosmosophy without cankering 

 the coming civilization of whole nations. Yet his scholars, Plato and 

 XonopluMi (I he former being incoinparably'greater than his master), stirred 

 up his manes, ;ind rendered him hateful and despicable to the noblest class 

 of men, \o nnlural philosophers." 



The ]u-ogress of positive biological knowledge was thus impaired by tlie 

 inlliience of moral poetry amongst the Greeks". "It was the pressure exer- 



