of Nature. They sank into planet-worship.
They invented, it would seem, that fantastic pseudo-science
of astrology, which lay for ages after as an incubus
on the human intellect and conscience. They became
the magicians and quacks of the old world; and mankind
owed them thenceforth nothing but evil. Among
the Greeks and Romans, again, those sages who dared
face Nature like reasonable men, were accused by the
superstitious mob as irreverent, impious, atheists.
The wisest of them all, Socrates, was actually put
to death on that charge; and finally, they failed.
School after school, in Greece and Rome, struggled
to discover, and to get a hearing for, some theory
of the universe which was founded on something like
experience, reason, common sense. They were not
allowed to prosecute their attempt. The mud-ocean
of ignorance and fear in which they struggled so manfully
was too strong for them; the mud-waves closed over
their heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired;
and the last effort of Graeco-Roman thought to explain
the universe was Neoplatonism—the muddiest
of the muddy—an attempt to apologise for,
and organise into a system, all the nature-dreading
superstitions of the Roman world. Porphyry,
Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia herself, and all her
school—they may have had themselves no bodily
fear of Nature; for they were noble souls. Yet
they spent their time in justifying those who had;
in apologising for the superstitions of the very mob
which they despised: just as—it sometimes
seems to me—some folk in these days are
like to end in doing; begging that the masses might
be allowed to believe in anything, however false,
lest they should believe in nothing at all: as
if believing in lies could do anything but harm to
any human being. And so died the science of the
old world, in a true second childhood, just where
it began.
The Jewish sages, I hold, taught that science was
probable; the Greeks and Romans proved that it was
possible. It remained for our race, under the
teaching of both, to bring science into act and fact.
Many causes contributed to give them this power.
They were a personally courageous race. This
earth has yet seen no braver men than the forefathers
of Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or Teuton,
Angle or Frank. They were a practical hard-headed
race, with a strong appreciation of facts, and a strong
determination to act on them. Their laws, their
society, their commerce, their colonisation, their
migrations by land and sea, proved that they were
such. They were favoured, moreover, by circumstances,
or—as I should rather put it—by
that divine Providence which determined their times,
and the bounds of their habitation. They came
in as the heritors of the decaying civilisation of
Greece and Rome; they colonised territories which gave
to man special fair play, but no more, in the struggle
for existence, the battle with the powers of Nature;
tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; with boundless