aclitus in particular-are in so fragmentary a state as they are. Read without context, indeed, the fragments of the great Ionians are not very entertaining, and they are certainly not commended by the attempts of later antiquaries and historians of philosophy who clearly did not understand them, and seem to have chosen their extracts in a rather arbitrary and irrelevant way. Compared, moreover, in this unlucky guise with the mathematical writers of Alexandria, of whom we have remains long enough and coherent enough to be typical, the early physicists make but a poor show. If we are to do them justice, we must read what we have of their work in the light of the layman whose thinking they modeled; of the knowledge and belief of the contemporary East, which they failed to touch as completely as the East (by a happy accident) failed to influence them; above all, in the light of what we can learn from geographers and our own observation about the Greek world as they knew and observed it; and from the modern peasant life of Greek lands, which so often preserves unawares something more than superficial likeness to its great past. And by its great past I do not mean only the thoughts and the talk of Herodotus and Anaxagoras, but the farmyard weatherwisdom of Strepsiades. Recent work in the history of Greek astronomy, and in the applications of it to chronology and history, is probably familiar to us all. It is the branch of natural science which has always illustrated with most elementary lucidity the processes whereby the attempt is made to reach scientific conclusions about facts of nature which are beyond the reach of experiment, even for us, and were beyond the reach even of precise measurement before the invention of instruments like the telescope, the chronograph, and the micrometer. But the details of this enquiry are special, and its results accessible, so I shall venture to leave them to one side, and so gain time for the methods and achievements of Greek biology. In the same way, recent lectures of my colleague, Professor Vinogradoff, in Oxford, on the early history of Greek Law, and of the theories of the nature of right on which Greek systems of law were based, have done much to suggest how closely Greek views of the nature of law in society were linked, in quality as in origin, with Greek notions of the law in the realm of nature. To this new and rather intricate topic I hope to have time to return later on, so I only note here its obvious interest and importance. 2 Thirdly, the analysis of the content of Greek religion, which has been attempted by Mr. Cornford,1 and more recently still by Professor Gilbert Murray, has indicated very clearly the mental processes which bring primitive peoples everywhere-and can be shown to have brought the earliest peoples of the Aegean-to certain conclusions about the nature of the world in which they lived, and to certain practices designed in the main to prevent this world from getting the upper hand in their struggle for life in it. Out of these conclusions, as experience and reflection corrected them, arose on the one hand, as Professor Murray was concerned to show, a scheme of religious belief, with appropriate religious practices; and on the other-what mainly interests Mr. Cornford a scheme of scientific belief, with the practical applications to the daily life of man which result sooner or later from all scientific discovery. On the other edge of the history of thought, furthest removed both from religious emotion and from the brute necessities of the daily war with undomesticated nature. Mr. Lindsay has foreshadowed the close affinity between the thought of Socrates and some of his most distinguished successors and the practice of the great school of scientific medicine, of which our knowledge comes through the literature ascribed to Hippocrates. What I shall try to do now is to follow these clues in the direction to which they all converge, and to recover 1 From Religion to Philosophy, Cambridge, 1912. 2 Four Stages of Greek Religion, New York, 1913. first some of the limiting conditions under which any scheme of scientific knowledge and scientific method necessarily came into being in Greek lands, and among a people with the historical antecedents of the Greeks; and, then, some of the chief features of the scheme of knowledge and method which actually came into existence there. One remark, at the outset, about Greek lands, as a theatre, in the strict sense of the word: a Oéaтpov or place of onlooking, in which man is the onlooker-Oearns, if not "of all time" like the historian and the astronomer, yet of all existing things, as physicist, and chemist, and biologist. For this theatre-this "show-place," as its German equivalent reminds us-is also itself in the Latin sense the spectaculum, the pageant which passes before the eye; and offers also, in the English sense, the spectacles through which alone man's eye can see it truly; for man, in his corporeal mechanism, is no less part of the show than the sea and the trees. Now considered as a theatre, a place for observing nature, Greek lands offer in some respects unequaled facilities. They are a region of abrupt contrasts, and frank revelations of what nature is, in its infinitely various detail. Its clear air decimates distanceswitness Lucretius' remark that far-off lights do not grow smaller; but its strong contrasts of hot and cold, due to intensity of sunlight and rapidity of radiation, continually present the atmosphere as a perceptible fluid, with shimmering ripples over each roasted rock, and with an upper surface, emphatic as a sea-level, on which the wool-pack clouds sit like snowflakes on a window pane; and where the mirage is painted, like Parnassos on the mirror of the Corinthian Gulf. In such a climate, too, wet and dry are as clearly defined in their antagonism as hot and cold. Evaporation, of diagrammatic intensity, is the daily comfort of the traveler and the hunter; and the daily worry of the housewife. Wet "liquid" was always either "rising" 3 Compare Aristotle's description of the philosopher: learns TаVTÒS μὲν χρόνου πάσης δὲ οὐσίας. into gas, or "sinking" into dry and solid matter; all the more noticeable in a land where almost all the water is "hard" with lime and gypsum, and almost all the tabledrink is not water, but raw red wine, which leaves copious sediment on the cup and on the wineshop benches. Where the Scottish fireside, with its tea-kettle, stands in the physics of James Watt, and "phlogiston" in the chemistry of stoveheated Germany and France, there stands "evaporation" in the scheme of things as they appeared to Heraclitus and Anaxagoras. Wet and dry, too, are not only natural opposites, but are engaged in perpetual struggle here: in alternating seasons of rain and rainlessness; in the still more striking contrast, from day to day, of abrupt cyclonic rain-spates and the splendid interludes of Aegean winter, so like the best winter of California. With the other great antithesis of the physical philosophy, it is the same. Think of light and darkness, in these southern latitudes and clear skies; where night is a solid velvety thing like a camera cloth; a darkness that can be felt, like that of Egypt; where almost all the year, in all the haunts of men, the air is so dust-laden that light, pouring through crevices, cuts the dark like a shaft of opal glass-witness Herodotus' tale of the Younger Son's Portion—and where the broad daylight is such that by contrast the whole Atlantic seaboard was Cimmerian, more or less. Think of hard and soft in a land where almost all soil is alluvial, thinly spread over massive limestones, crowded with boulders and pebbles, yet most clearly resulting from nothing but their decomposition. Think of sweet and bitter, where the only sugar is honey; where no meal is complete without its vinegar," and where the country wine, as every tourist knows, is ever in unstable alcoholic equilibrium "between being and not being": "honey *ȧva@vμíaois, literally the going up of incense. 5 No less abrupt is our contrast here between the Sierras and the Sacramento Valley. "Greek salads challenge comparison with Californian, but åσrakós is a poor equivalent for crab. sweet' one day, and "the sharp-tasted" par excellence the next. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the extraordinary rapidity both of decomposition and of organic growth. The burial of Alcestis in the play seemed to Dr. Verrall' indecently rapid: to a pupil of Hippocrates, a phthisis which could carry off a healthy young woman between breakfast and dinner, would demand a galloping funeral. In modern Greek churchyards, grave-spaces are let on a three years' lease; and when the lease is up there is seldom anything but dry bones to be removed. The "cemetery, moreover, is not the place where the graves are, but the charnel-house under the church, or in a corner of the yard. Over each Greek grave it might be written, "This is not your rest"; and this custom of secondary burial goes back locally to the Early Minoan Age. Among the living it is the same: nothing but Apollo's own scavenger, Greek sunlight, averts Apollo's pestilence from people so reckless of their sanitary surroundings. The dog Argus lies dying on a dunghill in the palace fore-court; but the suitors, too, are sitting on piles of hides of oxen that have been killed for their last meal. In the same way, growth is rapid. The seasonal cycle of vegetable life is brief. Autumn rains hardly begin till November, and the winter frosts are not over till early March; but the annual poppies are in their prime in April, and by the middle of May the dead stalks of them are literally "dust before the wind." Most of the gayest perennials, too, asphodel, iris, and anemone, spring from bulbs and woody corms, which go to sleep as soon as the flowers fall -as their kinsmen oversleep the California summer— and lie lifeless and soil-colored all summer, some deep below the surface, others almost loose upon it. The vine, too, in its winter phase, is dry and scabrous as a dead gooseberry bush-this, too, we know on the Coast-its 7 Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist, Cambridge. 8 KоLμηTÝρov, literally the place of going to sleep. |