He

extended itself, side by side, with that founded by Zeno. Epicurus was born at Samos, about the year 340 B.C. He studied industriously the writings of Democritus, which supplied him with the corner-stone of his cosmology, the doctrine of atoms. He was at Athens at the time of the downfall of liberty. Thebes had perished, and Demosthenes lived in exile. When Alexander died suddenly at Babylon, Epicurus left Athens, to return only in the maturity of his years. There he bought the Garden, in which he taught and dwelt with his disciples. He believed in the Gods in some uncertain manner, but denied their interference with the course of nature. taught that everything in nature is governed by an eternal order, which regulates the interchange of origination and destruction. As soon as death comes, then we exist no more. Peace of soul and freedom from pain are the only proper pleasures, and these are, therefore, the true aim of existence. "Is it prudence or folly in thee, O man! when thou hast not tomorrow in thy power, to procrastinate thy making thyself happy till the Future, and, in the meantime, lose the opportunity of the present, of which only thou art certain?.......It is not perpetual feastings and drinkings; it is not the love of and familiarity with beautiful boys and women; it is not the delicacies of rare fishes, sweet meats, rich wines, nor any other dainties of the table that can make a happy life: but it is Reason, with Sobriety, and, consequently, a serene mind."*

In other respects Epicurus's theory of nature is almost entirely that of Democritus. Like the earlier philosopher, he denies the existence of intrinsic qualities in the atom. With Epicurus the soul is a genuine constituent of the body, an organ.

When Epicurus died, the new theatre of Greek intellectual life was opened at Alexandria. Grammar found at this period an Aristarchus of Thrace; history, a Polybius and a Manetho; geometry, a Euclid and an Archimedes; and astronomy, Hipparchus.

The second corner-stone of modern science is Experiment. This too, had its birth in Alexandria, and in its schools of medicine. A school of great influence grew up which made Experience its grand principle, and great progress was the reward of its efforts. It was not the want of internal vitality, but the course of history, which speedily put an end to this activity; and we may say that the renascence of the sciences

* Epicurus's Morals, London, 1670, pp. 4, 24.

was chiefly a revival of Alexandrian principles. Nor must we undervalue the results of positive research in antiquity. We here leave out of sight grammar and logic, history and philology, whose great and permanent achievements none will controvert. We will rather point out that in those very sciences, in which the last few centuries have attained such an unequalled development, the preparatory achievements of Greek inquiry were of high importance.

Whoever contemplates the Homeric world with its ceaseless miracles, the narrow space of its earth surface, and its naive conceptions of the heavens and the stars, must confess that the capable among the Greeks had entirely to remodel their notions of the universe. Of the wisdom of the Indians and the Egyptians only fragments reached them, which, without answering efforts of their own, could never have attained to any serious development. With the Romans, apart from the fact that they received their first scientific impulse from the Greeks, it was, if possible, still worse. The nascent GræcoRoman culture found scarcely the barest rudiments of astronomy and meteorology, no trace of physics and physiology, not a suspicion of chemistry. In a word, there was still wanting the very beginning of natural science-Hypothesis.

At the termination of the short and brilliant career of ancient civilisation, we find a complete change. Positive natural science, directed by the precise investigation of particular facts, has already completely separated itself from the speculative philosophy of nature, which seeks to reach beyond the bounds of experience, and rise to the ultimate causes of things. The exact sciences, by a brilliant elaboration and perfecting of mathematics, had secured that instrument, which, in the hands of the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Teutono-Romanic people of modern times, step by step, brought about the most magnificent practical and theoretical results. The books of Euclid constitute still, in the country of Newton, after more than 2,000 years, the foundation of mathematical instruction. Astronomy, under the guidance of subtle and complicated hypotheses as to the motion of the heavenly bodies, accomplished incomparably more than those primitive diviners of the stars, the peoples of India, Babylon, and Egypt, had ever succeeded in attaining. A very nearly exact calculation of the positions of the planets, of eclipses of the sun and moon, an accurate representation and grouping of the fixed stars, does not exhaust the list of what was achieved; and even the root idea

of the Copernican system, the placing the sun in the centre of the universe, is to be found in Aristarchus of Samos, with whose views Copernicus was very probably acquainted. Long before Ptolemy the spherical shape of the earth had been generally recognised. The researches of Aristotle and his predecessors had diffused a mass of information on the fauna and flora of more or less distant countries. Accurate description, anatomical examination of the internal structure of organic bodies, paved the way for a comprehensive survey of the forms which, from the lowest upward to the highest, were conceived as a progressive realisation of formative forces, which end by producing in man the most perfect of earthly beings. When the elder Pliny attempted in his encyclopedic work to represent the whole field of nature and art, a nearer insight into the relations between human life and the universe was already possible.

The physics of the ancients embrace a notion, built upon experiment, of the main principles of acoustics, of optics, of statics, and the theory of gases and vapours. The mighty buildings, war engines, and earth-works of the Romans were based upon scientific theory. Scientific medicine, culminating in Galen of Pergamos (A.D. 131), had already explained the bodily life in its most difficult element, nervous activity. Sömmering, in the last century, found the theory of the brain. almost where Galen had left it. The ancients were acquainted with the importance of the spinal marrow, and thousands of years before Sir Charles Bell they had distinguished the nerves of sensibility and movement; and Galen cured paralysis of the fingers, to the astonishment of his contemporaries, by acting upon those parts of the spine from which the implicated nerves took their rise. No wonder, then, that Galen partly regarded ideas as results of bodily conditions.

When we behold knowledge thus accumulating from all sides knowledge which strikes deep into the heart of nature, and already pre-supposes the axiom of the uniformity of events

we must ask the question: How far did ancient Materialism contribute to the attainment of this knowledge and these views? And the answer to this question will, at first sight, appear very curious. For not only does scarcely a single one of the great discoverers-with the chief exception of Democritus-distinctly belong to the Materialistic school, but we find amongst the most honourable names a long series of men belonging to an utterly opposite, idealistic, and even enthusiastic tendency.

And special attention must here be paid to mathematics. Plato is the intellectual progenitor of a line of inquirers who carried the clearest and most consequent of all sciences, mathematics, to the highest point it was to reach in antiquity. The Alexandrian mathematicians, including the Neo-Platonists, belonged almost wholly to the Platonic school. A similar tendency proceeded from Pythagoras, whose school produced in Archytas a mathematician of the first order. Even Aristarchus of Samos, the forerunner of Copernicus, clung to Pythagorean traditions. The great Hipparchus, the discoverer of the precession of the equinoxes, believed in the divine origin of the human soul. Pliny, Ptolemy, and Galen, without any exact system, leaned to pantheistic views. Galen, who was more of a philosopher than any of them, is an eclectic, and is acquainted with the most various systems, yet he shows himself least inclined to the Epicurean, by assuming immediate truths of the reason which are previous to all experience. We see, easily enough, that the ideal element with the conquerors of the sciences stands in the closest connection with their inventions and discoveries. It is a result of the complex organisation of man, that, in many cases, the roundabout course, through the play of the imagination, leads more quickly to the apprehension of higher truth than the sober effort to penetrate the closest and most various disguises.

There is no room to doubt that the Atomism of the ancients comes incomparably nearer to the essential reality of things, so far as science can understand it, than the Numerical theory of the Pythagoreans, or the Ideal theory of Plato; at least it is a much straighter and directer step to the existing phenomena of nature than those vague and hesitating philosophemes which spring almost wholly out of the speculative poesy of individual souls. But the immeasurable love for the pure forms in which all that is fortuitous falls away, that tendency of the spirit to the supersensuous, helped to open the laws of the sense-world of phenomena on the path of abstraction. Although we may assign great importance to the subjective impulse, yet we must not for a moment lose from view how it is just this fantastic stand-point which has so long hampered the progress of knowledge, and still continues to do so. The beginning of clear methodical observation of things is, in a sense, this first true beginning of contact with things themselves. The value of this tendency is objective. The starting point of Greek scientific activity is to be sought in

Democritus, and the rationalising influence of his system—in the resolution of the varying and changeful universe into unalterable but mobile particles. Although this principle, most closely connected as it was with Epicurean Materialism, has only attained its full significance in modern ages, yet it obviously exercised a very deep influence upon the ancients also. It is indeed true that the Atomism of to-day, since chemistry has been worked out, stands in very much more direct connection with the positive sciences. But the connecting of all these otherwise inexplicable events in nature, of becoming and perishing, of apparent disappearance, and of the unexplained origin of matter with a single pervading principle, was, for the science of antiquity, the veritable Columbus's egg. The constant interference of gods and demons was set aside by one mighty blow, and whatever speculative natures might choose to fancy of the things that lay behind the phenomenal world, the World itself was exposed to view, and even the genuine disciples of a Plato and a Pythagoras experimented or theorised over natural occurrences without confusing the world of Ideas and of Mystic Numbers with what was immediately given to the senses.

This confusion, so strongly manifested in some of the modern philosophers of Germany, first appeared in classical antiquity at the era of the Neo-Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean extravagances. But the whole thought of Greek antiquity, from its beginning to the period of its complete destruction, was under the influence of a Materialistic element. The phenomena of the sensible world were, for the most part, explained out of what was perceived by the senses, or represented as so perceived. The school of the Epicureans remained amongst all the ancient schools the most fixed and unalterable. Revived in the 17th century by Gassendi, and variously modified by Descartes, Newton, and Boyle, the doctrine of elementary corpuscles, and the origin of all phenomena from their movements, became the corner-stone of modern science.

The work which secured for the Epicurean system, ever since the revival of learning, a powerful influence on modern thought was the poem of the Roman, Lucretius Carus. Among all the peoples of antiquity, none, perhaps, was by nature further removed than were the Romans from Materialistic views. Their religion had its roots deep in superstition; their whole political life was circumscribed by superstitious forms. Art and science had little charm for them, and they were still