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TWO:"So you've got back," he said. "Rather a sensational bit of copy for the papers over the inquest, eh? That pompous juryman's face was a study when Hetty and that reporter chap knocked him out of time."

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THREE:Yet, however much may be accounted for by these considerations, they still leave something unexplained. Why should one thinker after another so unhesitatingly assume that the order of Nature as we know it has issued not merely from a different but from an exactly opposite condition, from universal confusion and chaos? Their experience was far too limited to tell them anything about those vast cosmic changes which we know by incontrovertible evidence to have already occurred, and to be again in course of preparation. We can only answer this question by bringing into view what may be called the negative moment of Greek thought. The science of contraries is one, says Aristotle, and it certainly was so to his countrymen. Not only did they delight51 to bring together the extremes of weal and woe, of pride and abasement, of security and disaster, but whatever they most loved and clung to in reality seemed to interest their imagination most powerfully by its removal, its reversal, or its overthrow. The Athenians were peculiarly intolerant of regal government and of feminine interference in politics. In Athenian tragedy the principal actors are kings and royal ladies. The Athenian matrons occupied a position of exceptional dignity and seclusion. They are brought upon the comic stage to be covered with the coarsest ridicule, and also to interfere decisively in the conduct of public affairs. Aristophanes was profoundly religious himself, and wrote for a people whose religion, as we have seen, was pushed to the extreme of bigotry. Yet he shows as little respect for the gods as for the wives and sisters of his audience. To take a more general example still, the whole Greek tragic drama is based on the idea of family kinship, and that institution was made most interesting to Greek spectators by the violation of its eternal sanctities, by unnatural hatred, and still more unnatural love; or by a fatal misconception which causes the hands of innocent persons, more especially of tender women, to be armed against their nearest and dearest relatives in utter unconsciousness of the awful guilt about to be incurred. By an extension of the same psychological law to abstract speculation we are enabled to understand how an early Greek philosopher who had come to look on Nature as a cosmos, an orderly whole, consisting of diverse but connected and interdependent parts, could not properly grasp such a conception until he had substituted for it one of a precisely opposite character, out of which he reconstructed it by a process of gradual evolution. And if it is asked how in the first place did he come by the idea of a cosmos, our answer must be that he found it in Greek life, in societies distinguished by a many-sided but harmonious development of concurrent functions, and by52 voluntary obedience to an impersonal law. Thus, then, the circle is complete; we have returned to our point of departure, and again recognise in Greek philosophy a systematised expression of the Greek national genius. THREE:"You saw those people go off with the diamonds," he said. "You saw those gems flash and dazzle in the light of the lamp. I am going to give you a surprise now, and the surprise of our predatory friends will come later on. Your wife's gems were three rows of diamonds and a collar of the same set plain in silver."He came at length, a little dapper man, with a slight hump between the shoulders, a nose slightly crooked on one side. He appeared to take his warm welcome quite as a matter of course, he discarded a pair of grey su��de gloves, and called for a bottle of champagne. THREE:We have said that the founder of Neo-Platonism contrived to blend the systems of his two great authorities in such a manner as to eliminate much of the relative truth which is contained in each of them taken by itself. It has been reserved for modern thought to accomplish the profounder synthesis which has eliminated their errors in combining their truths. Yet, perhaps, no other system would have satisfied the want of the time so well as that constructed by Plotinus out of the materials at his disposal. Such as it was, that system held its ground as the reigning philosophy until all independent thinking was suppressed by Justinian, somewhat more than two and a half centuries after its author��s death. Even then it did not become extinct, but reappeared in Christian literature, in the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, and again in the daring speculations of Erigena, the father of mediaeval philosophy, to pass under more diluted forms into the teaching of the later Schoolmen, until the time arrived for its renewed study in the original sources as an element of the Platonic revival in the fifteenth century. All this popularity proves, as we say, that Plotinus suited his own age and other ages which reproduced the same general intellectual tendencies. But the important thing was that he made Plato and Aristotle more interesting, and thus led men to study their writings more eagerly than before. The true reign of those philosophers does not begin until we reach the Middle Ages, and the commanding position which they then enjoyed was due, in great measure, to the revolution effected by Plotinus.