ONE:"Oh no! That is impossible, and, after all, we are not afraid of Japan either. You had better write in your paper that we are not afraid of anything excepting Montenegro. And you may also inform your readers that it is better for Netherlanders not to cross the frontier, as we are going to apply much stricter measures. For we have evidence that those people from Vis and other106 villages who fled to The Netherlands are returning with forged papers, in order to shoot at us. And now you may go, but back to Maastricht at once."Ever since the age of Parmenides and Heracleitus, Greek thought had been haunted by a pervading dualism which each system had in turn attempted to reconcile, with no better result than its reproduction under altered names. And speculation had latterly become still further perplexed by the question whether the antithetical couples supposed to divide all Nature between them could or could not be reduced to so many aspects of a single opposition. In the last chapter but one we showed that there were four such competing pairsBeing and Not-Being, the One and the Many, the Same and the Other, Rest and Motion. Plato employed his very subtlest dialectic in tracing out their connexions, readjusting their relationships, and diminishing the total number of terms which they involved. In what was probably his last great speculative effort, the Timaeus, he seems to have selected Sameness and Difference as the couple best adapted to bear the heaviest strain of thought. There is some reason for believing that in his spoken lectures he followed the Pythagorean system more closely, giving the preference to the One and the Many; or he may have employed the two expressions indifferently. The former would sooner commend itself to a dialectician, the latter to a mathematician. Aristotle was both, but he was before all things a naturalist. As such, the antithesis of Being and Not-Being, to which Plato attached little or no value, suited him best. Accordingly, he proceeds to work it out with a clearness before unknown in Greek philosophy. The first and surest of all principles, he declares, is, that a thing cannot both be and not be, in the same sense of the words, and furthermore that it must either be or not be. Subsequent340 logicians prefixed to these axioms another, declaring that whatever is is. The three together are known as the laws of Identity, Contradiction, and Excluded Middle. By all, except Hegelians, they are recognised as the highest laws of thought; and even Hegel was indebted to them, through Fichte, for the ground-plan of his entire system.235
FORE:"My name, sir," said the other coolly and clearly, "is Mr. Garrett Charlton, the owner of this house. And who are you?"The engineering apprentice, as a rule, has a desire to make drawings as soon as he begins his studies or his work, and there is not the least objection to his doing so; in fact, there is a great deal gained by illustrating movements and the details of machinery at the same time of studying the principles. Drawings if made should always be finished, carefully inked in, and memoranda made on the margin of the sheets, with the date and the conditions under which the drawings were made. The sheets should be of uniform size, not too large for a portfolio, and carefully preserved, no matter how imperfect they may be. An apprentice who will preserve his first drawings in this manner will some day find himself in possession of a souvenir that no consideration would cause him to part with.
FORE:Socrates represents the popular Athenian character much as Richardson, in a different sphere, represents the English middle-class characterrepresents it, that is to say, elevated into transcendent genius. Except this elevation, there was nothing anomalous about him. If he was exclusively critical, rationalising, unadventurous, prosaic; in a word, as the German historians say, something of a Philistine; so, we may suspect, were the mass of his countrymen. His illustrations were taken from such plebeian employments as cattle-breeding, cobbling, weaving, and sailoring. These were his touches of things common which at last rose to touch the spheres. He both practised and inculcated virtues, the value of which is especially evident in humble lifefrugality and endurance. But he also represents the Dmos in its sovereign capacity as legislator and judge. Without aspiring to be an orator or statesman, he reserves the ultimate power of arbitration and election. He submits candidates for office to a severe scrutiny, and demands from all men an even stricter account of their lives than retiring magistrates had to give of their conduct, when in power, to the people. He applies the judicial method of cross-examination to the detection of error, and the parliamentary method of joint deliberation to the discovery of truth. He follows out the democratic principles of free speech and self-government, by submitting every question that arises to public discussion, and insisting on no conclusion that does not command the willing assent of his audience. Finally, his conversation, popular in form, was popular also in this respect, that everybody who chose to listen might have the130 benefit of it gratuitously. Here we have a great change from the scornful dogmatism of Heracleitus, and the virtually oligarchic exclusiveness of the teachers who demanded high fees for their instruction.
