358 
TUE GEOLOGIST, 
prove to no purpose, for such a people are horn so that they do not feel the 
needs of science. They will never be convinced tbat 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 ; they will never he con- 
vinced that a veritable scholar may study such things merely, therefore, he- 
cause he desires to know them ; on the contrary, their belief w as, 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 ill 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 difi'ers 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, moiith, or day ; and this knowledge 
might be obtained through a conversation witli town-criers and steersmen. 
To go further than this, to extend the ken of our intellectual powers to 
tlie 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 more 
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,' anj" 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 
Xenophon (the former being incomparably 'greater than his master), stirred 
up his manes, and rendered him hateful and despicable to the noblest class 
of men, to natural philosophers." 
The progress of positive biological knowledge was thus impaired by the 
influence of moral poetry amongst the Greeks. "It was the pressure exer- 
