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THREE:"A glass of beer, madame."

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FORE:184Thales, of Miletus, an Ionian geometrician and astronomer, about whose age considerable uncertainty prevails, but who seems to have flourished towards the close of the seventh century before our era, is by general consent regarded as the father of Greek physical philosophy. Others before him had attempted to account for the world��s origin, but none like him had traced it back to a purely natural beginning. According to Thales all things have come from water. That8 the earth is entirely enclosed by water above and below as well as all round was perhaps a common notion among the Western Asiatics. It was certainly believed by the Hebrews, as we learn from the accounts of the creation and the flood contained in Genesis. The Milesian thinker showed his originality by generalising still further and declaring that not only did water surround all things, but that all things were derived from it as their first cause and substance, that water was, so to speak, the material absolute. Never have more pregnant words been spoken; they acted like a ferment on the Greek mind; they were the grain whence grew a tree that has overshadowed the whole earth. At one stroke they substituted a comparatively scientific, because a verifiable principle for the confused fancies of mythologising poets. Not that Thales was an atheist, or an agnostic, or anything of that sort. On the contrary, he is reported to have said that all things were full of gods; and the report sounds credible enough. Most probably the saying was a protest against the popular limitation of divine agencies to certain special occasions and favoured localities. A true thinker seeks above all for consistency and continuity. He will more readily accept a perpetual stream of creative energy than a series of arbitrary and isolated interferences with the course of Nature. For the rest, Thales made no attempt to explain how water came to be transformed into other substances, nor is it likely that the necessity of such an explanation had ever occurred to him. We may suspect that he and others after him were not capable of distinguishing very clearly between such notions as space, time, cause, substance, and limit. It is almost as difficult for us to enter into the thoughts of these primitive philosophers as it would have been for them to comprehend processes of reasoning already familiar to Plato and Aristotle. Possibly the forms under which we arrange our conceptions may become equally obsolete at a more advanced stage of intellectual evolution, and our sharp distinctions may prove to be not9 less artificial than the confused identifications which they have superseded.

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THREE:Under the guidance of a somewhat similar principle the Stoic logicians attempted a reform of Aristotle��s categories. These they reduced to four: Substance, Quality, Disposition, and Relation (τ? ?ποκε?μενον, τ? ποι?ν, τ? π?? ?χον, and τ? πρ?? τι π?? ?χον41); and the change was an improvement in so far as it introduced a certain method and subordination where none existed before; for each category implies, and is contained in, its predecessor; whereas the only order traceable in Aristotle��s categories refers to the comparative frequency of the questions to which they correspond.During the month��s respite accidentally allowed him, Socrates had one more opportunity of displaying that stedfast obedience to the law which had been one of his great guiding principles through life. The means of escaping from prison were offered to him, but he refused to avail himself of them, according to Plato, that the implicit contract of loyalty to which his citizenship had bound him might be preserved unbroken. Nor was death unwelcome to him although it is not true that he courted it, any desire to figure as a martyr being quite alien from the noble simplicity of his character. But he had reached an age when the daily growth in wisdom which for him alone made life worth living, seemed likely to be exchanged for a gradual and melancholy decline. That this past progress was a good in itself he never doubted, whether it was to be continued in other worlds, or succeeded by the happiness of an eternal sleep. And we may be sure that he169 would have held his own highest good to be equally desirable for the whole human race, even with the clear prevision that its collective aspirations and efforts cannot be prolonged for ever.

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FORE:Good fitting is often not so much a question of skill as of the standard which a workman has fixed in his mind, and to which all that he does will more or less conform. If this standard is one of exactness and precision, all that is performed, whether it be filing, turning, planing, or drawing, will come to this standard. This faculty of mind can be defined no further than to say that it is an aversion to whatever is imperfect, and a love for what [171] is exact and precise. There is no faculty which has so much to do with success in mechanical pursuits, nor is there any trait more susceptible of cultivation. Methodical exactness, reasoning, and persistence are the powers which lead to proficiency in engineering pursuits.

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