i88a.] Charles Darwin : a Farewell Offering 329 
man of talk ! Had the latter lived among us he would have 
received not a draught of hemlock, but a peerage — perhaps 
the Premiership. 
In the subjects of their respective studies, and in the 
results arrived at, the difference is even more striking. It 
cannot be denied that Socrates drew off attention from 
Physical Science. He was a despiser of Nature — of every- 
thing visible save man, and it may even be said of the human 
body. He formally initiated that great aberration which 
rendered the Greek philosophy of the latter ages so utterly 
unworthy of its hopeful dawn in the days of Thales, Demo- 
critus, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, which culminated in 
the first centuries of the Christian era, and which even yet 
is far from having come to an end. Men were not merely 
ignorant of Nature (pardon the personification) ; they des- 
pised and refused all physical knowledge. The words which 
Goethe, in the second part of “ Faust,” puts in the mouth 
of the Archbishop-Archchancellor— 
“ Natur und Geist ! so spricht man nicht zu Christen ; 
Deshalb verbrennt man Atheisten !” 
are a faithful expression of the manner in which the natural 
sciences and their subjects were regarded in the dark ages. 
We find in Socrates the germs at least of that separation of 
man from Nature as a something altogether heterogeneous, 
independent of law, of the sequence of cause and effedt, and 
not to be introduced into any classification of the organic 
world. We even yet meet with such expressions as “ the 
kingdoms of Nature and of freedom.” 
Among the consequences of the Socratic movement may 
rank all the persecutions of Science from adfcual executions 
and imprisonments, in the good old times, down to the con- 
temptuous ill-will of so many poets, historians, novelists, 
journalists, metaphysicians (? anti-physicians), and fast lite- 
rary men of this nineteenth century. 
In the life labour of Darwin we find all this reversed. 
He not only showed that Nature was better worthy of study 
than the words, the quibbles, and the dreams of men, — in 
so doing he, like all followers of Science of whatever grade, 
simply carried out in adlion what Bacon had taught in pre- 
cept : but he did more ; he showed that man is an integral 
part of the organic world, capable of being understood, phy- 
sically or psychically, only when regarded in that light. It 
has been well said that Galileo, rejecting one of the foolish 
antitheses of ignorant ages, “ restored earth to her place in 
the heavens 1 ” With equal truth it may be said that Darwin, 
VOL. iv. (third series). z 
