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ONE:��No excitement��now, I wonder������Those who will may see in all this an anticipation of chemical substitution and double decomposition. We can assure them that it will be by no means the most absurd parallel discovered between ancient and modern ideas. It is possible, however, to trace a more real connexion between the Aristotelian physics and mediaeval thought. We do not of361 course mean the scholastic philosophy, for there never was the slightest doubt as to its derivation; we allude to the alchemy and astrology which did duty for positive science during so many centuries, and even overlapped it down to the time of Newton, himself an ardent alchemist. The superstitions of astrology originated independently of the peripatetic system, and probably long before it, but they were likely to be encouraged by it instead of being repressed, as they would have been by a less anthropomorphic philosophy. Aristotle himself, as we have seen, limited the action of the heavens on the sublunary sphere to their heating power; but, by crediting them with an immortal reason and the pursuit of ends unknown to us, he opened a wide field for conjecture as to what those ends were, and how they could be ascertained. That the stars and planets were always thinking and acting, but never about our affairs, was not a notion likely to be permanently accepted. Neither was it easy to believe that their various configurations, movements, and names (the last probably revealed by themselves) were entirely without significance. From such considerations to the casting of horoscopes is not a far remove. The Aristotelian chemistry would still more readily lend itself to the purposes of alchemy. If Nature is one vast process of transmutation, then particular bodies, such as the metals, not only may, but must be convertible into one another. And even those who rejected Aristotle��s logic with scorn still clung to his natural philosophy when it flattered their hopes of gain. Bacon kept the theory of substantial forms. His originality consisted in looking for a method by which any form, or assemblage of forms might be superinduced at pleasure on the underlying matter. The real development of knowledge pursued a far different course. The great discoverers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries achieved their success by absolutely reversing the method of Aristotle, by bringing into fruitful contact principles which he had condemned to barren isolation.362 They carried terrestrial physics into the heavens; they brought down the absoluteness and eternity of celestial law to earth; they showed that Aristotle��s antithetical qualities were merely quantitative distinctions. These they resolved into modes of motion; and they also resolved all motions into one, which was both rectilinear and perpetual. But they and their successors put an end to all dreams of transmutation, when they showed by another synthesis that all matter, at least within the limits of our experience, has the changeless consistency once attributed exclusively to the stellar spheres. THREE:We have now to study an analogous, though far less complicated, antagonism in ancient Greece, and to show how her most brilliant period of physical philosophy arose from the combination of two seemingly irreconcilable systems. Parmenides, in an address supposed to be delivered by Wisdom to her disciple, warns us against the method pursued by ��ignorant mortals, the blind, deaf, stupid, confused tribes, who hold that to be and not to be are the same, and that all things move round by an inverted path.��19 What Parmenides denounced as arrant nonsense was deliberately proclaimed to be the highest truth by his illustrious contemporary, Heracleitus, of Ephesus. This wonderful thinker is popularly known as the weeping philosopher, because, according to a very silly tradition, he never went abroad without shedding tears over the follies of mankind. No such mawkish sentimentality, but bitter scorn and indignation, marked the attitude of23 Heracleitus towards his fellows. A self-taught sage, he had no respect for the accredited instructors of Hellas. ��Much learning,�� he says, ��does not teach reason, else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.��20 Homer, he declares, ought to be flogged out of the public assemblages, and Archilochus likewise. When the highest reputations met with so little mercy, it will readily be imagined what contempt he poured on the vulgar herd. The feelings of a high-born aristocrat combine with those of a lofty genius to point and wing his words. ��The many are bad and few are the good. The best choose one thing instead of all, a perpetual well-spring of fame, while the many glut their appetites like beasts. One man is equal to ten thousand if he is the best.�� This contempt was still further intensified by the very excusable incapacity of the public to understand profound thought conveyed in a style proverbial for its obscurity. ��Men cannot comprehend the eternal law; when I have explained the order of Nature they are no wiser than before.�� What, then, was this eternal law, a knowledge of which Heracleitus found so difficult to popularise? Let us look back for a moment at the earlier Ionian systems. They had taught that the universe arose either by differentiation or by condensation and expansion from a single primordial substance, into which, as Anaximander, at least, held, everything, at last returned. Now, Heracleitus taught that this transformation is a universal, never-ending, never-resting process; that all things are moving; that Nature is like a stream in which no man can bathe twice; that rest and stability are the law, not of life, but of death. Again, the Pythagorean school, as we have seen, divided all things into a series of sharply distinguished antithetical pairs. Heracleitus either directly identified the terms of every opposition, or regarded them as necessarily combined, or as continually24 passing into one another. Perhaps we shall express his meaning most thoroughly by saying that he would have looked on all three propositions as equivalent statements of a single fact. In accordance with this principle he calls war the father and king and lord of all, and denounces Homer��s prayer for the abolition of strife as an unconscious blasphemy against the universe itself. Yet, even his powerful intellect could not grasp the conception of a shifting relativity as the law and life of things without embodying it in a particular material substratum. Following the Ionian tradition, he sought for a world-element, and found it in that cosmic fire which enveloped the terrestrial atmosphere, and of which the heavenly luminaries were supposed to be formed. ��Fire,�� says the Ephesian philosopher, no doubt adapting his language to the comprehension of a great commercial community, ��is the general medium of exchange, as gold is given for everything, and everything for gold.�� ��The world was not created by any god or any man, but always was, and is, and shall be, an ever-living fire, periodically kindled and quenched25.�� By cooling and condensation, water is formed from fire, and earth from water; then, by a converse process called the way up as the other was the way down, earth again passes into water and water into fire. At the end of certain stated periods the whole world is to be reconverted into fire, but only to enter on a new cycle in the series of its endless revolutions��a conception, so far, remarkably confirmed by modern science. The whole theory, including a future world conflagration, was afterwards adopted by the Stoics, and probably exercised a considerable influence on the eschatology of the early Christian Church. Imagination is obliged to work under forms which thought has already superseded; and Heracleitus as a philosopher had forestalled the dazzling consummation to which as a prophet he might look forward in wonder and hope. For, his elemental fire was only a picturesque presentation indispensable to him, but not to us, of the sovereign law wherein all things live and move and have their being. To have introduced such an idea into speculation was his distinctive and inestimable achievement, although it may have been suggested by the ε?μαρμ?νη or destiny of the theological poets, a term occasionally employed in his writings. It had a moral as well as a physical meaning, or rather it hovers ambiguously between the two. ��The sun shall not transgress his bounds, or the Erinyes who help justice will find him out.�� It is the source of human laws, the common reason which binds men together, therefore they should hold by it even more firmly than by the laws of the State. It is not only all-wise but all-good, even where it seems to be the reverse; for our distinctions between good and evil, just and unjust, vanish in the divine harmony of Nature, the concurrent energies and identifying transformations of her universal life.
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