initial commit of ebook 1275HEADmain

1 files changed, 3806 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/1275-0.txt b/1275-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..55faf52
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1275-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3806 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Alexandria and her Schools, by Charles
+Kingsley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Alexandria and her Schools
+
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+
+
+Release Date: April 5, 2015  [eBook #1275]
+[This file was first posted on March 23, 1998]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1902 Macmillan and Co. “Historical Lectures and
+Essays” edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+                          [Picture: Book cover]
+
+
+
+
+
+                     ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. {3}
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+I SHOULD not have presumed to choose for any lectures of mine such a
+subject as that which I have tried to treat in this book.  The subject
+was chosen by the Institution where the lectures were delivered.  Still
+less should I have presumed to print them of my own accord, knowing how
+fragmentary and crude they are.  They were printed at the special request
+of my audience.  Least of all, perhaps, ought I to have presumed to
+publish them, as I have done, at Cambridge, where any inaccuracy or
+sciolism (and that such defects exist in these pages, I cannot but fear)
+would be instantly detected, and severely censured: but nevertheless, it
+seemed to me that Cambridge was the fittest place in which they could see
+the light, because to Cambridge I mainly owe what little right method or
+sound thought may be found in them, or indeed, in anything which I have
+ever written.  In the heyday of youthful greediness and ambition, when
+the mind, dazzled by the vastness and variety of the universe, must needs
+know everything, or rather know about everything, at once and on the
+spot, too many are apt, as I have been in past years, to complain of
+Cambridge studies as too dry and narrow: but as time teaches the student,
+year by year, what is really required for an understanding of the objects
+with which he meets, he begins to find that his University, in as far as
+he has really received her teaching into himself, has given him, in her
+criticism, her mathematics, above all, in Plato, something which all the
+popular knowledge, the lectures and institutions of the day, and even
+good books themselves, cannot give, a boon more precious than learning;
+namely, the art of learning.  That instead of casting into his lazy lap
+treasures which he would not have known how to use, she has taught him to
+mine for them himself; and has by her wise refusal to gratify his
+intellectual greediness, excited his hunger, only that he may be the
+stronger to hunt and till for his own subsistence; and thus, the deeper
+he drinks, in after years, at fountains wisely forbidden to him while he
+was a Cambridge student, and sees his old companions growing up into
+sound-headed and sound-hearted practical men, liberal and expansive, and
+yet with a firm standing-ground for thought and action, he learns to
+complain less and less of Cambridge studies, and more and more of that
+conceit and haste of his own, which kept him from reaping the full
+advantage of her training.
+
+These Lectures, as I have said, are altogether crude and fragmentary—how,
+indeed, could they be otherwise, dealing with so vast a subject, and so
+long a period of time?  They are meant neither as Essays nor as Orations,
+but simply as a collection of hints to those who may wish to work out the
+subject for themselves; and, I trust, as giving some glimpses of a
+central idea, in the light of which the spiritual history of Alexandria,
+and perhaps of other countries also, may be seen to have in itself a
+coherence and organic method.
+
+I was of course compelled, by the circumstances under which these
+Lectures were delivered, to keep clear of all points which are commonly
+called “controversial.”  I cannot but feel that this was a gain, rather
+than a loss; because it forced me, if I wished to give any interpretation
+at all of Alexandrian thought, any Theodicy at all of her fate, to refer
+to laws which I cannot but believe to be deeper, wider, more truly
+eternal than the points which cause most of our modern controversies,
+either theological or political; laws which will, I cannot but believe
+also, reassert themselves, and have to be reasserted by all wise
+teachers, very soon indeed, and it may be under most novel embodiments,
+but without any change in their eternal spirit.
+
+For I may say, I hope, now (what if said ten years ago would have only
+excited laughter), that I cannot but subscribe to the opinion of the many
+wise men who believe that Europe, and England as an integral part
+thereof, is on the eve of a revolution, spiritual and political, as vast
+and awful as that which took place at the Reformation; and that,
+beneficial as that revolution will doubtless be to the destinies of
+mankind in general, it depends upon the wisdom and courage of each nation
+individually, whether that great deluge shall issue, as the Reformation
+did, in a fresh outgrowth of European nobleness and strength or usher in,
+after pitiable confusions and sorrows, a second Byzantine age of
+stereotyped effeminacy and imbecility.  For I have as little sympathy
+with those who prate so loudly of the progress of the species, and the
+advent of I know-not-what Cockaigne of universal peace and plenty, as I
+have with those who believe on the strength of “unfulfilled prophecy,”
+the downfall of Christianity, and the end of the human race to be at
+hand.  Nevertheless, one may well believe that prophecy will be fulfilled
+in this great crisis, as it is in every great crisis, although one be
+unable to conceive by what method of symbolism the drying up of the
+Euphrates can be twisted to signify the fall of Constantinople: and one
+can well believe that a day of judgment is at hand, in which for every
+nation and institution, the wheat will be sifted out and gathered into
+God’s garner, for the use of future generations, and the chaff burnt up
+with that fire unquenchable which will try every man’s work, without
+being of opinion that after a few more years are over, the great majority
+of the human race will be consigned hopelessly to never-ending torments.
+
+If prophecy be indeed a divine message to man; if it be anything but a
+cabbala, useless either to the simple-minded or to the logical, intended
+only for the plaything of a few devout fancies, it must declare the
+unchangeable laws by which the unchangeable God is governing, and has
+always governed, the human race; and therefore only by understanding what
+has happened, can we understand what will happen; only by understanding
+history, can we understand prophecy; and that not merely by picking
+out—too often arbitrarily and unfairly—a few names and dates from the
+records of all the ages, but by trying to discover its organic laws, and
+the causes which produce in nations, creeds, and systems, health and
+disease, growth, change, decay and death.  If, in one small corner of
+this vast field, I shall have thrown a single ray of light upon these
+subjects—if I shall have done anything in these pages towards
+illustrating the pathology of a single people, I shall believe that I
+have done better service to the Catholic Faith and the Scriptures, than
+if I did really “know the times and the seasons, which the Father has
+kept in His own hand.”  For by the former act I may have helped to make
+some one man more prudent and brave to see and to do what God requires of
+him; by the latter I could only add to that paralysis of superstitious
+fear, which is already but too common among us, and but too likely to
+hinder us from doing our duty manfully against our real foes, whether it
+be pestilence at home or tyranny abroad.
+
+These last words lead me to another subject, on which I am bound to say a
+few words.  I have, at the end of these Lectures, made some allusion to
+the present war.  To have entered further into political questions would
+have been improper in the place where those Lectures were delivered: but
+I cannot refrain from saying here something more on this matter; and
+that, first, because all political questions have their real root in
+moral and spiritual ones, and not (as too many fancy) in questions merely
+relating to the balance of power or commercial economy, and are (the
+world being under the guidance of a spiritual, and not a physical Being)
+finally decided on those spiritual grounds, and according to the just
+laws of the kingdom of God; and, therefore, the future political
+horoscope of the East depends entirely on the present spiritual state of
+its inhabitants, and of us who have (and rightly) taken up their cause;
+in short, on many of those questions on which I have touched in these
+Lectures: and next, because I feel bound, in justice to myself, to guard
+against any mistake about my meaning or supposition that I consider the
+Turkish empire a righteous thing, or one likely to stand much longer on
+the face of God’s earth.
+
+The Turkish empire, as it now exists, seems to me an altogether
+unrighteous and worthless thing.  It stands no longer upon the assertion
+of the great truth of Islam, but on the merest brute force and
+oppression.  It has long since lost the only excuse which one race can
+have for holding another in subjection; that which we have for taking on
+ourselves the tutelage of the Hindoos, and which Rome had for its
+tutelage of the Syrians and Egyptians; namely, the governing with
+tolerable justice those who cannot govern themselves, and making them
+better and more prosperous people, by compelling them to submit to law.
+I do not know when this excuse is a sufficient one.  God showed that it
+was so for several centuries in the case of the Romans; God will show
+whether it is in the case of our Indian empire: but this I say, that the
+Turkish empire has not even that excuse to plead; as is proved by the
+patent fact that the whole East, the very garden of the old world, has
+become a desert and a ruin under the upas-blight of their government.
+
+As for the regeneration of Turkey, it is a question whether the
+regeneration of any nation which has sunk, not into mere valiant
+savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible.  Still more
+is it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, not by the rise
+of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of the Koreish), but simply by
+more perfect material appliances, and commercial prudence.  History gives
+no instance, it seems to me, of either case; and if our attempt to
+regenerate Greece by freeing it has been an utter failure, much more, it
+seems to me, would any such attempt fail in the case of the Turkish race.
+For what can be done with a people which has lost the one great quality
+which was the tenure of its existence, its military skill?  Let any one
+read the accounts of the Turkish armies in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
+seventeenth centuries, when they were the tutors and models of all Europe
+in the art of war, and then consider the fact that those very armies
+require now to be officered by foreign adventurers, in order to make them
+capable of even keeping together, and let him ask himself seriously,
+whether such a fall can ever be recovered.  When, in the age of
+Theodosius, and again in that of Justinian, the Roman armies had fallen
+into the same state; when the Italian legions required to be led by
+Stilicho the Vandal, and the Byzantine by Belisar the Sclav and Narses
+the Persian, the end of all things was at hand, and came; as it will come
+soon to Turkey.
+
+But if Turkey deserves to fall, and must fall, it must not fall by our
+treachery.  Its sins will surely be avenged upon it: but wrong must not
+avenge wrong, or the penalty is only passed on from one sinner to
+another.  Whatsoever element of good is left in the Turk, to that we must
+appeal as our only means, if not of saving him, still of helping him to a
+quiet euthanasia, and absorption into a worthier race of successors.  He
+is said (I know not how truly) to have one virtue left; that of
+faithfulness to his word.  Only by showing him that we too abhor
+treachery and bad faith, can we either do him good, or take a safe
+standing-ground in our own peril.  And this we have done; and for this we
+shall be rewarded.  But this is surely not all our duty.  Even if we
+should be able to make the civil and religious freedom of the Eastern
+Christians the price of our assistance to the Mussulman, the struggle
+will not be over; for Russia will still be what she has always been, and
+the northern Anarch will be checked, only to return to the contest with
+fiercer lust of aggrandisement, to enact the part of a new Macedon,
+against a new Greece, divided, not united, by the treacherous bond of
+that balance of power, which is but war under the guise of peace.  Europe
+needs a holier and more spiritual, and therefore a stronger union, than
+can be given by armed neutralities, and the so-called cause of order.
+She needs such a bond as in the Elizabethan age united the free states of
+Europe against the Anarch of Spain, and delivered the Western nations
+from a rising world-tyranny, which promised to be even more hideous than
+the elder one of Rome.  If, as then, England shall proclaim herself the
+champion of freedom by acts, and not by words and paper, she may, as she
+did then, defy the rulers of the darkness of this world, for the God of
+Light will be with her.  But, as yet, it is impossible to look without
+sad forebodings upon the destiny of a war, begun upon the express
+understanding that evil shall be left triumphant throughout Europe,
+wheresoever that evil does not seem, to our own selfish
+short-sightedness, to threaten us with immediate danger; with promises,
+that under the hollow name of the Cause of Order—and that promise made by
+a revolutionary Anarch—the wrongs of Italy, Hungary, Poland, Sweden,
+shall remain unredressed, and that Prussia and Austria, two tyrannies,
+the one far more false and hypocritical, the other even more rotten than
+that of Turkey, shall, if they will but observe a hollow and uncertain
+neutrality (for who can trust the liar and the oppressor?)—be allowed not
+only to keep their ill-gotten spoils, but even now to play into the hands
+of our foe, by guarding his Polish frontier for him, and keeping down the
+victims of his cruelty, under pretence of keeping down those of their
+own.
+
+It is true, the alternative is an awful one; one from which statesmen and
+nations may well shrink: but it is a question, whether that alternative
+may not be forced upon us sooner or later, whether we must not from the
+first look it boldly in the face, as that which must be some day, and for
+which we must prepare, not cowardly, and with cries about God’s wrath and
+judgments against us—which would be abject, were they not expressed in
+such second-hand stock-phrases as to make one altogether doubt their
+sincerity, but chivalrously, and with awful joy, as a noble calling, an
+honour put upon us by the God of Nations, who demands of us, as some
+small return for all His free bounties, that we should be, in this great
+crisis, the champions of Freedom and of Justice, which are the cause of
+God.  At all events, we shall not escape our duty by being afraid of it;
+we shall not escape our duty by inventing to ourselves some other duty,
+and calling it “Order.”  Elizabeth did so at first.  She tried to keep
+the peace with Spain; she shrank from injuring the cause of Order (then a
+nobler one than now, because it was the cause of Loyalty, and not merely
+of Mammon) by assisting the Scotch and the Netherlanders: but her duty
+was forced upon her; and she did it at last, cheerfully, boldly, utterly,
+like a hero; she put herself at the head of the battle for the freedom of
+the world, and she conquered, for God was with her; and so that seemingly
+most fearful of all England’s perils, when the real meaning of it was
+seen, and God’s will in it obeyed manfully, became the foundation of
+England’s naval and colonial empire, and laid the foundation of all her
+future glories.  So it was then, so it is now; so it will be for ever: he
+who seeks to save his life will lose it: he who willingly throws away his
+life for the cause of mankind, which is the cause of God, the Father of
+mankind, he shall save it, and be rewarded a hundred-fold.  That God may
+grant us, the children of the Elizabethan heroes, all wisdom to see our
+duty, and courage to do it, even to the death, should be our earliest
+prayer.  Our statesmen have done wisely and well in refusing, in spite of
+hot-headed clamours, to appeal to the sword as long as there was any
+chance of a peaceful settlement even of a single evil.  They are doing
+wisely and well now in declining to throw away the scabbard as long as
+there is hope that a determined front will awe the offender into
+submission: but the day may come when the scabbard must be thrown away;
+and God grant that they may have the courage to do it.
+
+It is reported that our rulers have said, that English diplomacy can no
+longer recognise “nationalities,” but only existing “governments.”  God
+grant that they may see in time that the assertion of national life, as a
+spiritual and indefeasible existence, was for centuries the central idea
+of English policy; the idea by faith in which she delivered first
+herself, and then the Protestant nations of the Continent, successively
+from the yokes of Rome, of Spain, of France; and that they may reassert
+that most English of all truths again, let the apparent cost be what it
+may.
+
+It is true, that this end will not be attained without what is called
+nowadays “a destruction of human life.”  But we have yet to learn (at
+least if the doctrines which I have tried to illustrate in this little
+book have any truth in them) whether shot or shell has the power of
+taking away human life; and to believe, if we believe our Bibles, that
+human life can only be destroyed by sin, and that all which is lost in
+battle is that animal life of which it is written, “Fear not those who
+can kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do: but I
+will forewarn you whom you shall fear; him who, after he has killed, has
+power to destroy both body and soul in hell.”  Let a man fear him, the
+destroying devil, and fear therefore cowardice, disloyalty, selfishness,
+sluggishness, which are his works, and to be utterly afraid of which is
+to be truly brave.  God grant that we of the clergy may remember this
+during the coming war, and instead of weakening the righteous courage and
+honour of our countrymen by instilling into them selfish and
+superstitious fears, and a theory of the future state which represents
+God, not as a saviour, but a tormentor, may boldly tell them that “He is
+not the God of the dead but of the living; for all live unto Him;” and
+that he who renders up his animal life as a worthless thing, in the cause
+of duty, commits his real and human life, his very soul and self, into
+the hands of a just and merciful Father, who has promised to leave no
+good deed unrewarded, and least of all that most noble deed, the dying
+like a man for the sake not merely of this land of England, but of the
+freedom and national life of half the world.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE I.
+THE PTOLEMAIC ERA.
+
+
+BEFORE I begin to lecture upon the Physical and Metaphysical schools of
+Alexandria, it may be better, perhaps, to define the meaning of these two
+epithets.  Physical, we shall all agree, means that which belongs to
+φύσις; _natura_; nature, that which φύεται, _nascitur_, grows, by an
+organic life, and therefore decays again; which has a beginning, and
+therefore, I presume, an end.  And Metaphysical means that which we learn
+to think of after we think of nature; that which is supernatural, in
+fact, having neither beginning nor end, imperishable, immovable, and
+eternal, which does not become, but always is.  These, at least, are the
+wisest definitions of these two terms for us just now; for they are those
+which were received by the whole Alexandrian school, even by those
+commentators who say that Aristotle, the inventor of the term
+Metaphysics, named his treatise so only on account of its following in
+philosophic sequence his book on Physics.
+
+But, according to these definitions, the whole history of Alexandria
+might be to us, from one point of view, a physical school; for
+Alexandria, its society and its philosophy, were born, and grew, and fed,
+and reached their vigour, and had their old age, their death, even as a
+plant or an animal has; and after they were dead and dissolved, the atoms
+of them formed food for new creations, entered into new organisations,
+just as the atoms of a dead plant or animal might do.  Was Alexandria
+then, from beginning to end, merely a natural and physical phenomenon?
+
+It may have been.  And yet we cannot deny that Alexandria was also a
+metaphysical phenomenon, vast and deep enough; seeing that it held for
+some eighteen hundred years a population of several hundred thousand
+souls; each of whom, at least according to the Alexandrian philosophy,
+stood in a very intimate relation to those metaphysic things which are
+imperishable and immovable and eternal, and indeed, contained them more
+or less, each man, woman, and child of them in themselves; having wills,
+reasons, consciences, affections, relations to each other; being parents,
+children, helpmates, bound together by laws concerning right and wrong,
+and numberless other unseen and spiritual relations.
+
+Surely such a body was not merely natural, any more than any other
+nation, society, or scientific school, made up of men and of the spirits,
+thoughts, affections of men.  It, like them, was surely spiritual; and
+could be only living and healthy, in as far as it was in harmony with
+certain spiritual, unseen, and everlasting laws of God; perhaps, as
+certain Alexandrian philosophers would have held, in as far as it was a
+pattern of that ideal constitution and polity after which man was
+created, the city of God which is eternal in the Heavens.  If so, may we
+not suspect of this Alexandria that it was its own fault if it became a
+merely physical phenomenon; and that it stooped to become a part of
+nature, and took its place among the things which are born to die, only
+by breaking the law which God had appointed for it; so fulfilling, in its
+own case, St. Paul’s great words, that death entered into the world by
+sin, and that sin is the transgression of the law?
+
+Be that as it may, there must have been metaphysic enough to be learnt in
+that, or any city of three hundred thousand inhabitants, even though it
+had never contained lecture-room or philosopher’s chair, and had never
+heard the names of Aristotle and Plato.  Metaphysic enough, indeed, to be
+learnt there, could we but enter into the heart of even the most brutish
+negro slave who ever was brought down the Nile out of the desert by
+Nubian merchants, to build piers and docks in whose commerce he did not
+share, temples whose worship he did not comprehend, libraries and
+theatres whose learning and civilisation were to him as much a sealed
+book as they were to his countryman, and fellow-slave, and only friend,
+the ape.  There was metaphysic enough in him truly, and things eternal
+and immutable, though his dark-skinned descendants were three hundred
+years in discovering the fact, and in proving it satisfactorily to all
+mankind for ever.  You must pardon me if I seem obscure; I cannot help
+looking at the question with a somewhat Alexandrian eye, and talking of
+the poor negro dock-worker as certain Alexandrian philosophers would have
+talked, of whom I shall have to speak hereafter.
+
+I should have been glad, therefore, had time permitted me, instead of
+confining myself strictly to what are now called “the physic and
+metaphysic schools” of Alexandria, to have tried as well as I could to
+make you understand how the whole vast phenomenon grew up, and supported
+a peculiar life of its own, for fifteen hundred years and more, and was
+felt to be the third, perhaps the second city of the known world, and one
+so important to the great world-tyrant, the Cæsar of Rome, that no Roman
+of distinction was ever sent there as prefect, but the Alexandrian
+national vanity and pride of race was allowed to the last to pet itself
+by having its tyrant chosen from its own people.
+
+But, though this cannot be, we may find human elements enough in the
+schools of Alexandria, strictly so called, to interest us for a few
+evenings; for these schools were schools of men; what was discovered and
+taught was discovered and taught by men, and not by thinking-machines;
+and whether they would have been inclined to confess it or not, their own
+personal characters, likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, strength and
+weakness, beliefs and disbeliefs, determined their metaphysics and their
+physics for them, quite enough to enable us to feel for them as men of
+like passions with ourselves; and for that reason only, men whose
+thoughts and speculations are worthy of a moment’s attention from us.
+For what is really interesting to man, save men, and God, the Father of
+men?
+
+In the year 331 B.C. one of the greatest intellects whose influence the
+world has ever felt, saw, with his eagle glance, the unrivalled advantage
+of the spot which is now Alexandria; and conceived the mighty project of
+making it the point of union of two, or rather of three worlds.  In a new
+city, named after himself, Europe, Asia, and Africa were to meet and to
+hold communion.  A glance at the map will show you what an ὀμφαλὸς γῆς, a
+centre of the world, this Alexandria is, and perhaps arouse in your
+minds, as it has often done in mine, the suspicion that it has not yet
+fulfilled its whole destiny, but may become at any time a prize for
+contending nations, or the centre of some world-wide empire to come.
+Communicating with Europe and the Levant by the Mediterranean, with India
+by the Red Sea, certain of boundless supplies of food from the
+desert-guarded valley of the Nile, to which it formed the only key, thus
+keeping all Egypt, as it were, for its own private farm, it was weak only
+on one side, that of Judea.  That small strip of fertile mountain land,
+containing innumerable military positions from which an enemy might annoy
+Egypt, being, in fact, one natural chain of fortresses, was the key to
+Phoenicia and Syria.  It was an eagle’s eyrie by the side of a pen of
+fowls.  It must not be left defenceless for a single year.  Tyre and Gaza
+had been taken; so no danger was to be apprehended from the seaboard: but
+to subdue the Judean mountaineers, a race whose past sufferings had
+hardened them in a dogged fanaticism of courage and endurance, would be a
+long and sanguinary task.  It was better to make terms with them; to
+employ them as friendly warders of their own mountain walls.  Their very
+fanaticism and isolation made them sure allies.  There was no fear of
+their fraternising with the Eastern invaders.  If the country was left in
+their hands, they would hold it against all comers.  Terms were made with
+them; and for several centuries they fulfilled their trust.
+
+This I apprehend to be the explanation of that conciliatory policy of
+Alexander’s toward the Jews, which was pursued steadily by the Ptolemies,
+by Pompey, and by the Romans, as long as these same Jews continued to be
+endurable upon the face of the land.  At least, we shall find the history
+of Alexandria and that of Judea inextricably united for more than three
+hundred years.
+
+So arose, at the command of the great conqueror, a mighty city, around
+those two harbours, of which the western one only is now in use.  The
+Pharos was then an island.  It was connected with the mainland by a great
+mole, furnished with forts and drawbridges.  On the ruins of that mole
+now stands the greater part of the modern city; the vast site of the
+ancient one is a wilderness.
+
+But Alexander was not destined to carry out his own magnificent project.
+That was left for the general whom he most esteemed, and to whose
+personal prowess he had once owed his life; a man than whom history knows
+few greater, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus.  He was an adventurer, the son of
+an adventurer, his mother a cast-off concubine of Philip of Macedon.
+There were those who said that he was in reality a son of Philip himself.
+However, he rose at court, became a private friend of young Alexander,
+and at last his Somatophylax, some sort of Colonel of the Life Guards.
+And from thence he rose rapidly, till after his great master’s death he
+found himself despot of Egypt.
+
+His face, as it appears on his coins, is of the loftiest and most
+Jove-like type of Greek beauty.  There is a possibility about it, as
+about most old Greek faces, of boundless cunning; a lofty irony too, and
+a contemptuousness, especially about the mouth, which puts one in mind of
+Goethe’s expression; the face, altogether, of one who knew men too well
+to respect them.  At least, he was a man of clear enough vision.  He saw
+what was needed in those strange times, and he went straight to the thing
+which he saw.  It was his wisdom which perceived that the huge amorphous
+empire of Alexander could not be kept together, and advised its partition
+among the generals, taking care to obtain himself the lion’s share; not
+in size, indeed, but in capability.  He saw, too (what every man does not
+see), that the only way to keep what he had got was to make it better,
+and not worse, than he found it.  His first Egyptian act was to put to
+death Cleomenes, Alexander’s lieutenant, who had amassed vast treasures
+by extortion; and who was, moreover, (for Ptolemy was a prudent man) a
+dangerous partisan of his great enemy, Perdiccas.  We do not read that he
+refunded the treasures: but the Egyptians surnamed him Soter, the
+Saviour; and on the whole he deserved the title.  Instead of the wretched
+misrule and slavery of the conquering Persian dynasty, they had at least
+law and order, reviving commerce, and a system of administration, we are
+told (I confess to speaking here quite at second-hand), especially
+adapted to the peculiar caste-society, and the religious prejudices of
+Egypt.  But Ptolemy’s political genius went beyond such merely material
+and Warburtonian care for the conservation of body and goods of his
+subjects.  He effected with complete success a feat which has been
+attempted, before and since, by very many princes and potentates, but has
+always, except in Ptolemy’s case, proved somewhat of a failure, namely,
+the making a new deity.  Mythology in general was in a rusty state.  The
+old Egyptian gods had grown in his dominions very unfashionable, under
+the summary iconoclasm to which they had been subjected by the Monotheist
+Persians—the Puritans of the old world, as they have been well called.
+Indeed, all the dolls, and the treasure of the dolls’ temples too, had
+been carried off by Cambyses to Babylon.  And as for the Greek gods,
+philosophers had sublimed them away sadly during the last century: not to
+mention that Alexander’s Macedonians, during their wanderings over the
+world, had probably become rather remiss in their religious exercises,
+and had possibly given up mentioning the Unseen world, except for those
+hortatory purposes for which it used to be employed by Nelson’s veterans.
+But, as Ptolemy felt, people (women especially) must have something
+wherein to believe.  The “Religious Sentiment” in man must be satisfied.
+But, how to do it? How to find a deity who would meet the aspirations of
+conquerors as well as conquered—of his most irreligious Macedonians, as
+well as of his most religious Egyptians?  It was a great problem: but
+Ptolemy solved it.  He seems to have taken the same method which Brindley
+the engineer used in his perplexities, for he went to bed.  And there he
+had a dream: How the foreign god Serapis, of Pontus (somewhere near this
+present hapless Sinope), appeared to him, and expressed his wish to come
+to Alexandria, and there try his influence on the Religious Sentiment.
+So Serapis was sent for, and came—at least the idol of him,
+and—accommodating personage!—he actually fitted.  After he had been there
+awhile, he was found to be quite an old acquaintance—to be, in fact, the
+Greek Jove, and two or three other Greek gods, and also two or three
+Egyptian gods beside—indeed, to be no other than the bull Apis, after his
+death and deification.  I can tell you no more.  I never could find that
+anything more was known.  You may see him among Greek and Roman statues
+as a young man, with a sort of high basket-shaped Persian turban on his
+head.  But, at least, he was found so pleasant and accommodating a
+conscience-keeper, that he spread, with Isis, his newly-found mother, or
+wife, over the whole East, and even to Rome.  The Consuls there—50 years
+B.C.—found the pair not too respectable, and pulled down their temples.
+But, so popular were they, in spite of their bad fame, that seven years
+after, the Triumvirs had to build the temples up again elsewhere; and
+from that time forth, Isis and Serapis, in spite, poor things, of much
+persecution, were the fashionable deities of the Roman world.  Surely
+this Ptolemy was a man of genius!
+
+But Ptolemy had even more important work to do than making gods.  He had
+to make men; for he had few or none ready made among his old veterans
+from Issus and Arbela.  He had no hereditary aristocracy: and he wanted
+none.  No aristocracy of wealth; that might grow of itself, only too fast
+for his despotic power.  But as a despot, he must have a knot of men
+round him who would do his work.  And here came out his deep insight into
+fact.  It had not escaped that man, what was the secret of Greek
+supremacy.  How had he come there?  How had his great master conquered
+half the world?  How had the little semi-barbarous mountain tribe up
+there in Pella, risen under Philip to be the master-race of the globe?
+How, indeed, had Xenophon and his Ten Thousand, how had the handfuls of
+Salamis and Marathon, held out triumphantly century after century,
+against the vast weight of the barbarian?  The simple answer was: Because
+the Greek has mind, the barbarian mere brute force.  Because mind is the
+lord of matter; because the Greek being the cultivated man, is the only
+true man; the rest are βάρβαροι, mere things, clods, tools for the wise
+Greeks’ use, in spite of all their material phantom-strength of
+elephants, and treasures, and tributaries by the million.  Mind was the
+secret of Greek power; and for that Ptolemy would work.  He would have an
+aristocracy of intellect; he would gather round him the wise men of the
+world (glad enough most of them to leave that miserable Greece, where
+every man’s life was in his hand from hour to hour), and he would develop
+to its highest the conception of Philip, when he made Aristotle the tutor
+of his son Alexander.  The consequences of that attempt were written in
+letters of blood, over half the world; Ptolemy would attempt it once
+more, with gentler results.  For though he fought long, and often, and
+well, as Despot of Egypt, no less than as general of Alexander, he was
+not at heart a man of blood, and made peace the end of all his wars.
+
+So he begins.  Aristotle is gone: but in Aristotle’s place Philetas the
+sweet singer of Cos, and Zenodotus the grammarian of Ephesus, shall
+educate his favourite son, and he will have a literary court, and a
+literary age.  Demetrius Phalereus, the Admirable Crichton of his time,
+the last of Attic orators, statesman, philosopher, poet, warrior, and
+each of them in the most graceful, insinuating, courtly way, migrates to
+Alexandria, after having had the three hundred and sixty statues, which
+the Athenians had too hastily erected to his honour, as hastily pulled
+down again.  Here was a prize for Ptolemy!  The charming man became his
+bosom friend and fellow, even revised the laws of his kingdom, and fired
+him, if report says true, with a mighty thought—no less a one than the
+great public Library of Alexandria; the first such institution, it is
+said, which the world had ever seen.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+So a library is begun by Soter, and organised and completed by
+Philadelphus; or rather two libraries, for while one part was kept at the
+Serapeium, that vast temple on the inland rising ground, of which, as far
+as we can discover, Pompey’s Pillar alone remains, one column out of four
+hundred, the rest was in the Brucheion adjoining the Palace and the
+Museum.  Philadelphus buys Aristotle’s collection to add to the stock,
+and Euergetes cheats the Athenians out of the original MSS. of Æschylus,
+Sophocles, and Euripides, and adds largely to it by more honest methods.
+Eumenes, King of Pergamus in Asia Minor, fired with emulation, commences
+a similar collection, and is so successful, that the reigning Ptolemy has
+to cut off his rival’s supplies by prohibiting the exportation of
+papyrus; and the Pergamenian books are henceforth transcribed on
+parchment, parchemin, Pergamene, which thus has its name to this day,
+from Pergamus.  That collection, too, found its way at last to
+Alexandria.  For Antony having become possessor of it by right of the
+stronger, gave it to Cleopatra; and it remained at Alexandria for seven
+hundred years.  But we must not anticipate events.
+
+Then there must be besides a Mouseion, a Temple of the Muses, with all
+due appliances, in a vast building adjoining the palace itself, under the
+very wing of royalty; and it must have porticos, wherein sages may
+converse; lecture-rooms, where they may display themselves at their will
+to their rapt scholars, each like a turkey-cock before his brood; and a
+large dining-hall, where they may enjoy themselves in moderation, as
+befits sages, not without puns and repartees, epigrams, anagrams, and
+Attic salt, to be fatal, alas, to poor Diodorus the dialectician.  For
+Stilpo, prince of sophists, having silenced him by some quibbling puzzle
+of logic, Ptolemy surnamed him Chronos the Slow.  Poor Diodorus went
+home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died
+in despair, leaving five “dialectical daughters” behind him, to be thorns
+in the sides of some five hapless men of Macedonia, as “emancipated
+women;” a class but too common in the later days of Greece, as they will
+always be, perhaps, in civilisations which are decaying and crumbling to
+pieces, leaving their members to seek in bewilderment what they are, and
+what bonds connect them with their fellow-beings.  But to return: funds
+shall be provided for the Museum from the treasury; a priest of rank,
+appointed by royalty, shall be curator; botanical and zoological gardens
+shall be attached; collections of wonders made.  In all things the
+presiding genius of Aristotle shall be worshipped; for these, like
+Alexander, were his pupils.  Had he not mapped out all heaven and earth,
+things seen and unseen, with his entelechies, and energies, and dunameis,
+and put every created and uncreated thing henceforth into its proper
+place, from the ascidians and polypes of the sea to the virtues and the
+vices—yea, to that Great Deity and Prime Cause (which indeed was all
+things), _Noesis Noeseon_, “the Thought of Thoughts,” whom he discovered
+by irrefragable processes of logic, and in whom the philosophers believe
+privately, leaving Serapis to the women and the sailors?  All they had to
+do was to follow in his steps; to take each of them a branch, of science
+or literature, or as many branches as one man conveniently can; and
+working them out on the approved methods, end in a few years, as
+Alexander did, by weeping on the utmost shore of creation that there are
+no more worlds left to conquer.
+
+Alas! the Muses are shy and wild; and though they will haunt, like
+skylarks, on the bleakest northern moor as cheerfully as on the sunny
+hills of Greece, and rise thence singing into the heaven of heavens, yet
+they are hard to tempt into a gilded cage, however amusingly made and
+plentifully stored with comforts.  Royal societies, associations of
+savants, and the like, are good for many things, but not for the breeding
+of art and genius: for they are things which cannot be bred.  Such
+institutions are excellent for physical science, when, as among us now,
+physical science is going on the right method: but where, as in
+Alexandria, it was going on an utterly wrong method, they stereotype the
+errors of the age, and invest them with the prestige of authority, and
+produce mere Sorbonnes, and schools of pedants.  To literature, too, they
+do some good, that is, in a literary age—an age of reflection rather than
+of production, of antiquarian research, criticism, imitation, when
+book-making has become an easy and respectable pursuit for the many who
+cannot dig, and are ashamed to beg.  And yet, by adding that same
+prestige of authority, not to mention of good society and Court favour,
+to the popular mania for literature, they help on the growing evil, and
+increase the multitude of prophets who prophesy out of their own heart
+and have seen nothing.
+
+And this was, it must be said, the outcome of all the Ptolemæan
+appliances.
+
+In Physics they did little.  In Art nothing.  In Metaphysics less than
+nothing.
+
+We will first examine, as the more pleasant spectacle of the two, that
+branch of thought in which some progress was really made, and in which
+the Ptolemaic schools helped forward the development of men who have
+become world-famous, and will remain so, I suppose, until the end of
+time.
+
+Four names at once attract us: Euclid, Aristarchus, Eratosthenes,
+Hipparchus.  Archimedes, also, should be included in the list, for he was
+a pupil of the Alexandrian school, having studied (if Proclus is to be
+trusted) in Egypt, under Conon the Samian, during the reigns of two
+Ptolemies, Philadelphus and Euergetes.
+
+Of Euclid, as the founder (according to Proclus) of the Alexandrian
+Mathematical school, I must of course speak first.  Those who wish to
+attain to a juster conception of the man and his work than they can do
+from any other source, will do well to read Professor De Morgan’s
+admirable article on him in “Smith’s Classical Dictionary;” which
+includes, also, a valuable little sketch of the rise of Geometric
+science, from Pythagoras and Plato, of whose school Euclid was, to the
+great master himself.
+
+I shall confine myself to one observation on Euclid’s genius, and on the
+immense influence which it exerted on after generations.  It seems to me,
+speaking under correction, that it exerted this, because it was so
+complete a type of the general tendency of the Greek mind, deductive,
+rather than inductive; of unrivalled subtlety in obtaining results from
+principles, and results again from them _ad infinitum_: deficient in that
+sturdy moral patience which is required for the examination of facts, and
+which has made Britain at once a land of practical craftsmen, and of
+earnest scientific discoverers.
+
+Volatile, restless, “always children longing for something new,” as the
+Egyptian priest said of them, they were too ready to believe that they
+had attained laws, and then, tired with their toy, throw away those
+hastily assumed laws, and wander off in search of others.  Gifted, beyond
+all the sons of men, with the most exquisite perception of form, both
+physical and metaphysical, they could become geometers and logicians as
+they became sculptors and artists; beyond that they could hardly rise.
+The were conscious of their power to build; and it made them ashamed to
+dig.
+
+Four men only among them seem, as far as I can judge, to have had a great
+inductive power: Socrates and Plato in Metaphysics; Archimedes and
+Hipparchus in Physics.  But these men ran so far counter to the national
+genius, that their examples were not followed.  As you will hear
+presently, the discoveries of Archimedes and Hipparchus were allowed to
+remain where they were for centuries.  The Dialectic of Plato and
+Socrates was degraded into a mere art for making anything appear
+alternately true and false, and among the Megaric school, for undermining
+the ground of all science, and paving the way for scepticism, by denying
+the natural world to be the object of certain knowledge.  The only
+element of Plato’s thought to which they clung was, as we shall find from
+the Neoplatonists, his physical speculations; in which, deserting his
+inductive method, he has fallen below himself into the popular cacoethes,
+and Pythagorean deductive dreams about the mysterious powers of numbers,
+and of the regular solids.
+
+Such a people, when they took to studying physical science, would be, and
+in fact were, incapable of Chemistry, Geognosy, Comparative Anatomy, or
+any of that noble choir of sister sciences, which are now building up the
+material as well as the intellectual glory of Britain.
+
+To Astronomy, on the other hand, the pupils of Euclid turned naturally,
+as to the science which required the greatest amount of their favourite
+geometry: but even that they were content to let pass from its inductive
+to its deductive stage—not as we have done now, after two centuries of
+inductive search for the true laws, and their final discovery by Kepler
+and Newton: but as soon as Hipparchus had propounded any theory which
+would do instead of the true laws, content there to stop their
+experiments, and return to their favourite work of commenting, deducing,
+spinning notion out of notion, _ad infinitum_.
+
+Still, they were not all of this temper.  Had they been, they would have
+discovered, not merely a little, but absolutely nothing.  For after all,
+if we will consider, induction being the right path to knowledge, every
+man, whether he knows it or not, uses induction, more or less, by the
+mere fact of his having a human reason, and knowing anything at all; as
+M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without being aware of it.
+
+Aristarchus is principally famous for his attempt to discover the
+distance of the sun as compared with that of the moon.  His method was
+ingenious enough, but too rough for success, as it depended principally
+on the belief that the line bounding the bright part of the moon was an
+exact straight line.  The result was of course erroneous.  He concluded
+that the sun was 18 times as far as the moon, and not, as we now know,
+400; but his conclusion, like his conception of the vast extent of the
+sphere of the fixed stars, was far enough in advance of the popular
+doctrine to subject him, according to Plutarch, to a charge of impiety.
+
+Eratosthenes, again, contributed his mite to the treasure of human
+science—his one mite; and yet by that he is better known than by all the
+volumes which he seems to have poured out, on Ethics, Chronology,
+Criticism on the Old Attic Comedy, and what not, spun out of his weary
+brain during a long life of research and meditation.  They have all
+perished,—like ninety-nine hundredths of the labours of that great
+literary age; and perhaps the world is no poorer for the loss.  But one
+thing, which he attempted on a sound and practical philosophic method,
+stands, and will stand for ever.  And after all, is not that enough to
+have lived for? to have found out one true thing, and, therefore, one
+imperishable thing, in one’s life?  If each one of us could but say when
+he died: “This one thing I have found out; this one thing I have proved
+to be possible; this one eternal fact I have rescued from Hela, the realm
+of the formless and unknown,” how rich one such generation might make the
+world for ever!
+
+But such is not the appointed method.  The finders are few and far
+between, because the true seekers are few and far between; and a whole
+generation has often nothing to show for its existence but one solitary
+gem which some one man—often unnoticed in his time—has picked up for
+them, and so given them “a local habitation and a name.”
+
+Eratosthenes had heard that in Syene, in Upper Egypt, deep wells were
+enlightened to the bottom on the day of the summer solstice, and that
+vertical objects cast no shadows.
+
+He had before suggested, as is supposed, to Ptolemy Euergetes, to make
+him the two great copper armillæ, or circles for determining the equinox,
+which stood for centuries in “that which is called the Square
+Porch”—probably somewhere in the Museum.  By these he had calculated the
+obliquity of the ecliptic, closely enough to serve for a thousand years
+after.  That was one work done.  But what had the Syene shadows to do
+with that?  Syene must be under that ecliptic.  On the edge of it.  In
+short, just under the tropic.  Now he had ascertained exactly the
+latitude of one place on the earth’s surface.  He had his known point
+from whence to start on a world-journey, and he would use it; he would
+calculate the circumference of the earth—and he did it.  By observations
+made at Alexandria, he ascertained its latitude compared with that of
+Syene; and so ascertained what proportion to the whole circumference was
+borne by the 5000 stadia between Alexandria and Syene.  He fell into an
+error, by supposing Alexandria and Syene to be under the same meridians
+of longitude: but that did not prevent his arriving at a fair rough
+result of 252,000 stadia—31,500 Roman miles; considerably too much; but
+still, before him, I suppose, none knew whether it was 10,000, or
+10,000,000.  The right method having once been found, nothing remained
+but to employ it more accurately.
+
+One other great merit of Eratosthenes is, that he first raised Geography
+to the rank of a science.  His Geographica were an organic collection,
+the first the world had ever seen, of all the travels and books of
+earth-description heaped together in the Great Library, of which he was
+for many years the keeper.  He began with a geognostic book, touched on
+the traces of Cataclysms and Change visible on the earth’s surface;
+followed by two books, one a mathematical book, the other on political
+geography, and completed by a map—which one would like to see: but—not a
+trace of all remains, save a few quoted fragments—
+
+               We are such stuff
+   As dreams are made of.
+
+But if Eratosthenes had hold of eternal fact and law on one point, there
+was a contemporary who had hold of it in more than one.  I mean
+Archimedes; of whom, as I have said, we must speak as of an Alexandrian.
+It was as a mechanician, rather than as an astronomer, that he gained his
+reputation.  The stories of his Hydraulic Screw, the Great Ship which he
+built for Hiero, and launched by means of machinery, his crane, his
+war-engines, above all his somewhat mythical arrangement of mirrors, by
+which he set fire to ships in the harbour—all these, like the story of
+his detecting the alloy in Hiero’s crown, while he himself was in the
+bath, and running home undressed shouting εὕρηκα—all these are
+schoolboys’ tales.  To the thoughtful person it is the method of the man
+which constitutes his real greatness, that power of insight by which he
+solved the two great problems of the nature of the lever and of
+hydrostatic pressure, which form the basis of all static and hydrostatic
+science to this day.  And yet on that very question of the lever the
+great mind of Aristotle babbles—neither sees the thing itself, nor the
+way towards seeing it.  But since Archimedes spoke, the thing seems
+self-evident to every schoolboy.  There is something to me very solemn in
+such a fact as this.  It brings us down to some of the very deepest
+questions of metaphysic.  This mental insight of which we boast so much,
+what is it?  Is it altogether a process of our own brain and will?  If it
+be, why have so few the power, even among men of power, and they so
+seldom?  If brain alone were what was wanted, what could not Aristotle
+have discovered?  Or is it that no man can see a thing unless God shows
+it him?  Is it that in each separate act of induction, that mysterious
+and transcendental process which cannot, let logicians try as they will,
+be expressed by any merely logical formula, Aristotelian or other—is it I
+say, that in each separate act of induction we do not find the law, but
+the law is shown to us, by Him who made the law? Bacon thought so.  Of
+that you may find clear proof in his writings.  May not Bacon be right?
+May it not be true that God does in science, as well as in ethics, hide
+things from the wise and prudent, from the proud, complete,
+self-contained systematiser like Aristotle, who must needs explain all
+things in heaven and earth by his own formulæ, and his entelechies and
+energies, and the rest of the notions which he has made for himself out
+of his own brain, and then pack each thing away in its proper niche in
+his great cloud-universe of conceptions?  Is it that God hides things
+from such men many a time, and reveals them to babes, to gentle,
+affectionate, simple-hearted men, such as we know Archimedes to have
+been, who do not try to give an explanation for a fact, but feel how
+awful and divine it is, and wrestle reverently and stedfastly with it, as
+Jacob with the Angel, and will not let it go, until it bless them?  Sure
+I am, from what I have seen of scientific men, that there is an intimate
+connection between the health of the moral faculties and the health of
+the inductive ones; and that the proud, self-conceited, and passionate
+man will see nothing: perhaps because nothing will be shown him.
+
+But we must leave Archimedes for a man not perhaps so well known, but to
+whom we owe as much as to the great Syracusan—Hipparchus the astronomer.
+To his case much which I have just said applies.  In him astronomic
+science seemed to awaken suddenly to a true inductive method, and after
+him to fall into its old slumber for 300 years.  In the meantime
+Timocharis, Aristyllus, and Conon had each added their mites to the
+discoveries of Eratosthenes: but to Hipparchus we owe that theory of the
+heavens, commonly called the Ptolemaic system, which, starting from the
+assumption that the earth was the centre of the universe, attempted to
+explain the motions of the heavenly bodies by a complex system of
+supposed eccentrics and epicycles.  This has of course now vanished
+before modern discoveries.  But its value as a scientific attempt lies in
+this: that the method being a correct one, correct results were obtained,
+though starting from a false assumption; and Hipparchus and his
+successors were enabled by it to calculate and predict the changes of the
+heavens, in spite of their clumsy instruments, with almost as much
+accuracy as we do now.
+
+For the purpose of working out this theory he required a science of
+trigonometry, plane and spherical: and this he accordingly seems to have
+invented.  To him also we owe the discovery of that vast gradual change
+in the position of the fixed stars, in fact, of the whole celestial
+system, now known by the name of the precession of the equinoxes; the
+first great catalogue of fixed stars, to the number of 1080; attempts to
+ascertain whether the length of years and days were constant; with which,
+with his characteristic love of truth, he seems to have been hardly
+satisfied.  He too invented the planisphere, or mode of representing the
+starry heavens upon a plane, and is the father of true geography, having
+formed the happy notion of mapping out the earth, as well as the heavens,
+by degrees of latitude and longitude.
+
+Strange it is, and somewhat sad, that we should know nothing of this
+great man, should be hardly able to distinguish him from others of the
+same name, but through the works of a commentator, who wrote and observed
+in Alexandria 300 years after, during the age of the Antonines.  I mean,
+of course, the famous Ptolemy, whose name so long bore the honour of that
+system which really belonged to Hipparchus.
+
+This single fact speaks volumes for the real weakness of the great
+artificial school of literature and science founded by the kings of
+Egypt.  From the father of Astronomy, as Delambre calls him, to Ptolemy,
+the first man who seems really to have appreciated him, we have not a
+discovery, hardly an observation or a name, to fill the gap.  Physical
+sages there were; but they were geometers and mathematicians, rather than
+astronomic observers and inquirers.  And in spite of all the huge
+appliances and advantages of that great Museum, its inhabitants were
+content, in physical science, as in all other branches of thought, to
+comment, to expound, to do everything but open their eyes and observe
+facts, and learn from them, as the predecessors whom they pretended to
+honour had done.  But so it is always.  A genius, an original man
+appears.  He puts himself boldly in contact with facts, asks them what
+they mean, and writes down their answer for the world’s use.  And then
+his disciples must needs form a school, and a system; and fancy that they
+do honour to their master by refusing to follow in his steps; by making
+his book a fixed dogmatic canon; attaching to it some magical
+infallibility; declaring the very lie which he disproved by his whole
+existence, that discovery is henceforth impossible, and the sum of
+knowledge complete: instead of going on to discover as he discovered
+before them, and in following his method, show that they honour him, not
+in the letter, but in spirit and in truth.
+
+For this, if you will consider, is the true meaning of that great
+command, “Honour thy father and mother, that thy days may be long in the
+land.”  On reverence for the authority of bygone generations depends the
+permanence of every form of thought or belief, as much as of all social,
+national, and family life: but on reverence of the spirit, not merely of
+the letter; of the methods of our ancestors, not merely of their
+conclusions.  Ay, and we shall not be able to preserve their conclusions,
+not even to understand them; they will die away on our lips into skeleton
+notions, and soulless phrases, unless we see that the greatness of the
+mighty dead has always consisted in this, that they were seekers,
+improvers, inventors, endued with that divine power and right of
+discovery which has been bestowed on us, even as on them; unless we
+become such men as they were, and go on to cultivate and develop the
+precious heritage which they have bequeathed to us, instead of hiding
+their talent in a napkin and burying it in the earth; making their
+greatness an excuse for our own littleness, their industry for our
+laziness, their faith for our despair; and prating about the old paths,
+while we forget that paths were made that men might walk in them, and not
+stand still, and try in vain to stop the way.
+
+It may be said, certainly, as an excuse for these Alexandrian Greeks,
+that they were a people in a state of old age and decay; and that they
+only exhibited the common and natural faults of old age.  For as with
+individuals, so with races, nations, societies, schools of thought—youth
+is the time of free fancy and poetry; manhood of calm and strong
+induction; old age of deduction, when men settle down upon their lees,
+and content themselves with reaffirming and verifying the conclusions of
+their earlier years, and too often, alas! with denying and anathematising
+all conclusions which have been arrived at since their own meridian.  It
+is sad: but it is patent and common.  It is sad to think that the day may
+come to each of us, when we shall have ceased to hope for discovery and
+for progress; when a thing will seem _à priori_ false to us, simply
+because it is new; and we shall be saying querulously to the Divine Light
+which lightens every man who comes into the world: “Hitherto shalt thou
+come, and no further.  Thou hast taught men enough; yea rather, thou hast
+exhausted thine own infinitude, and hast no more to teach them.”  Surely
+such a temper is to be fought against, prayed against, both in ourselves,
+and in the generation in which we live.  Surely there is no reason why
+such a temper should overtake old age.  There may be reason enough, “in
+the nature of things.”  For that which is of nature is born only to decay
+and die.  But in man there is more than dying nature; there is spirit,
+and a capability of spiritual and everlasting life, which renews its
+youth like the eagle’s, and goes on from strength to strength, and which,
+if it have its autumns and its winters, has no less its ever-recurring
+springs and summers; if it has its Sabbaths, finds in them only rest and
+refreshment for coming labour.  And why not in nations, societies,
+scientific schools?  These too are not merely natural: they are
+spiritual, and are only living and healthy in as far as they are in
+harmony with spiritual, unseen, and everlasting laws of God.  May not
+they, too, have a capability of everlasting life, as long as they obey
+those laws in faith, and patience, and humility?  We cannot deny the
+analogy between the individual man and these societies of men.  We
+cannot, at least, deny the analogy between them in growth, decay, and
+death.  May we not have hope that it holds good also for that which can
+never die; and that if they do die, as this old Greek society did, it is
+by no brute natural necessity, but by their own unfaithfulness to that
+which they knew, to that which they ought to have known?  It is always
+more hopeful, always, as I think, more philosophic, to throw the blame of
+failure on man, on our own selves, rather than on God, and the perfect
+law of His universe.  At least let us be sure for ourselves, that such an
+old age as befell this Greek society, as befalls many a man nowadays,
+need not be our lot.  Let us be sure that earth shows no fairer sight
+than the old man, whose worn-out brain and nerves make it painful, and
+perhaps impossible, to produce fresh thought himself: but who can yet
+welcome smilingly and joyfully the fresh thoughts of others; who keeps
+unwearied his faith in God’s government of the universe, in God’s
+continual education of the human race; who draws around him the young and
+the sanguine, not merely to check their rashness by his wise cautions,
+but to inspirit their sloth by the memories of his own past victories;
+who hands over, without envy or repining, the lamp of truth to younger
+runners than himself, and sits contented by, bidding the new generation
+God speed along the paths untrodden by him, but seen afar off by faith.
+A few such old persons have I seen, both men and women; in whom the young
+heart beat pure and fresh, beneath the cautious and practised brain of
+age, and gray hairs which were indeed a crown of glory.  A few such have
+I seen; and from them I seemed to learn what was the likeness of our
+Father who is in heaven.  To such an old age may He bring you and me, and
+all for whom we are bound to pray.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE II.
+THE PTOLEMAIC ERA.
+(_Continued_.)
+
+
+I SAID in my first Lecture, that even if royal influence be profitable
+for the prosecution of physical science, it cannot be profitable for art.
+It can only produce a literary age, as it did in the Ptolemaic era; a
+generation of innumerable court-poets, artificial epigrammatists,
+artificial idyllists, artificial dramatists and epicists; above all, a
+generation of critics.  Or rather shall we say, that the dynasty was not
+the cause of a literary age, but only its correlative?  That when the old
+Greeks lost the power of being free, of being anything but the slaves of
+oriental despots, as the Ptolemies in reality were, they lost also the
+power of producing true works of art; because they had lost that youthful
+vigour of mind from which both art and freedom sprang? Let the case be as
+it will, Alexandrian literature need not detain us long—though, alas! it
+has detained every boy who ever trembled over his Greek grammar, for many
+a weary year; and, I cannot help suspecting, has been the main cause that
+so many young men who have spent seven years in learning Greek, know
+nothing about it at the end of the seven.  For I must say, that as far as
+we can see, these Alexandrian pedants were thorough pedants; very
+polished and learned gentlemen, no doubt, and, like Callimachus, the pets
+of princes: but after all, men who thought that they could make up for
+not writing great works themselves, by showing, with careful analysis and
+commentation, how men used to write them of old, or rather how they
+fancied men used to write them; for, consider, if they had really known
+how the thing was done, they must needs have been able to do it
+themselves.  Thus Callimachus, the favourite of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and
+librarian of his Museum, is the most distinguished grammarian, critic,
+and poet of his day, and has for pupils Eratosthenes, Apollonius Rhodius,
+Aristophanes of Byzantium, and a goodly list more.  He is an encyclopædia
+in himself.  There is nothing the man does not know, or probably, if we
+spoke more correctly, nothing he does not know about.  He writes on
+history, on the Museum, on barbarous names, on the wonders of the world,
+on public games, on colonisation, on winds, on birds, on the rivers of
+the world, and—ominous subject—a sort of comprehensive history of Greek
+literature, with a careful classification of all authors, each under his
+own heading.  Greek literature was rather in the sere and yellow leaf, be
+sure, when men thought of writing that sort of thing about it.  But
+still, he is an encyclopædic man, and, moreover, a poet.  He writes an
+epic, “Aitia,” in four books, on the causes of the myths, religious
+ceremonies, and so forth—an ominous sign for the myths also, and the
+belief in them; also a Hecate, Galatæa, Glaucus—four epics, besides
+comedies, tragedies, iambics, choriambics, elegies, hymns, epigrams
+seventy-three—and of these last alone can we say that they are in any
+degree readable; and they are courtly, far-fetched, neat, and that is
+all.  Six hymns remain, and a few fragments of the elegies: but the most
+famous elegy, on Berenice’s hair, is preserved to us only in a Latin
+paraphrase of Catullus.  It is curious, as the earliest instance we have
+of genuinely ungenuine Court poetry, and of the complimentary lie which
+does not even pretend to be true; the flattery which will not take the
+trouble to prevent your seeing that it is laughing in your face.
+
+Berenice the queen, on Ptolemy’s departure to the wars, vows her
+beautiful tresses to her favourite goddess, as the price of her husband’s
+safe return; and duly pays her vow.  The hair is hung up in the temple:
+in a day or two after it has vanished.  Dire is the wrath of Ptolemy, the
+consternation of the priests, the scandal to religion; when Conon, the
+court-astronomer, luckily searching the heavens, finds the missing
+tresses in an utterly unexpected place—as a new constellation of stars,
+which to this day bears the title of Coma Berenices.  It is so convenient
+to believe the fact, that everybody believes it accordingly; and
+Callimachus writes an elegy thereon, in which the constellified, or
+indeed deified tresses, address in most melodious and highly-finished
+Greek, bedizened with concetto on concetto, that fair and sacred head
+whereon they grew, to be shorn from which is so dire a sorrow, that
+apotheosis itself can hardly reconcile them to the parting.
+
+Worthy, was not all this, of the descendants of the men who fought at
+Marathon and Thermopylæ?  The old Greek civilisation was rotting swiftly
+down; while a fire of God was preparing, slowly and dimly, in that
+unnoticed Italian town of Rome, which was destined to burn up that dead
+world, and all its works.
+
+Callimachus’s hymns, those may read who list.  They are highly finished
+enough; the work of a man who knew thoroughly what sort of article he
+intended to make, and what were the most approved methods of making it.
+Curious and cumbrous mythological lore comes out in every other line.
+The smartness, the fine epithets, the recondite conceits, the bits of
+effect, are beyond all praise; but as for one spark of life, of poetry,
+of real belief, you will find none; not even in that famous Lavacrum
+Palladis which Angelo Poliziano thought worth translating into Latin
+elegiacs, about the same time that the learned Florentine, Antonio Maria
+Salviano, found Berenice’s Hair worthy to be paraphrased back from
+Catullus’ Latin into Greek, to give the world some faint notion of the
+inestimable and incomparable original.  They must have had much time on
+their hands.  But at the Revival of Letters, as was to be expected, all
+works of the ancients, good and bad, were devoured alike with youthful
+eagerness by the Medicis and the Popes; and it was not, we shall see, for
+more than one century after, that men’s taste got sufficiently matured to
+distinguish between Callimachus and the Homeric hymns, or between Plato
+and Proclus.  Yet Callimachus and his fellows had an effect on the world.
+His writings, as well as those of Philetas, were the model on which Ovid,
+Propertius, Tibullus, formed themselves.
+
+And so I leave him, with two hints.  If any one wishes to see the justice
+of my censure, let him read one of the Alexandrian hymns, and immediately
+after it, one of those glorious old Homeric hymns to the very same
+deities; let him contrast the insincere and fulsome idolatry of
+Callimachus with the reverent, simple and manful anthropomorphism of the
+Homerist—and let him form his own judgment.
+
+The other hint is this.  If Callimachus, the founder of Alexandrian
+literature, be such as he is, what are his pupils likely to become, at
+least without some infusion of healthier blood, such as in the case of
+his Roman imitators produced a new and not altogether ignoble school?
+
+Of Lycophron, the fellow-grammarian and poet of Callimachus, we have
+nothing left but the Cassandra, a long iambic poem, stuffed with
+traditionary learning, and so obscure, that it obtained for him the
+surname of σκοτεινός, the dark one.  I have tried in vain to read it:
+you, if you will, may do the same.
+
+Philetas, the remaining member of the Alexandrian Triad, seems to have
+been a more simple, genial, and graceful spirit than the other two, to
+whom he was accordingly esteemed inferior.  Only a few fragments are
+left; but he was not altogether without his influence, for he was, as I
+have just said, one of the models on which Propertius and Ovid formed
+themselves; and some, indeed, call him the Father of the Latin elegy,
+with its terseness, grace, and clear epigrammatic form of thought, and,
+therefore, in a great degree, of our modern eighteenth century poets; not
+a useless excellence, seeing that it is, on the whole, good for him who
+writes to see clearly what he wants to say, and to be able to make his
+readers see it clearly also.  And yet one natural strain is heard amid
+all this artificial jingle—that of Theocritus.  It is not altogether
+Alexandrian.  Its sweetest notes were learnt amid the chestnut groves and
+orchards, the volcanic glens and sunny pastures of Sicily; but the
+intercourse, between the courts of Hiero and the Ptolemies seems to have
+been continual.  Poets and philosophers moved freely from one to the
+other, and found a like atmosphere in both; and in one of Theocritus’
+idyls, two Sicilian gentlemen, crossed in love, agree to sail for
+Alexandria, and volunteer into the army of the great and good king
+Ptolemy, of whom a sketch is given worth reading; as a man noble,
+generous, and stately, “knowing well who loves him, and still better who
+loves him not.”  He has another encomium on Ptolemy, more laboured,
+though not less interesting: but the real value of Theocritus lies in his
+power of landscape-painting.
+
+One can well conceive the delight which his idyls must have given to
+those dusty Alexandrians, pent up forever between sea and sand-hills,
+drinking the tank-water, and never hearing the sound of a running
+stream—whirling, too, forever, in all the bustle and intrigue of a great
+commercial and literary city.  Refreshing indeed it must have been to
+them to hear of those simple joys and simple sorrows of the Sicilian
+shepherd, in a land where toil was but exercise, and mere existence was
+enjoyment.  To them, and to us also.  I believe Theocritus is one of the
+poets who will never die.  He sees men and things, in his own light way,
+truly; and he describes them simply, honestly, with little careless
+touches of pathos and humour, while he floods his whole scene with that
+gorgeous Sicilian air, like one of Titian’s pictures; with still
+sunshine, whispering pines, the lizard sleeping on the wall, and the
+sunburnt cicala shrieking on the spray, the pears and apples dropping
+from the orchard bough, the goats clambering from crag to crag after the
+cistus and the thyme, the brown youths and wanton lasses singing under
+the dark chestnut boughs, or by the leafy arch of some
+
+               Grot nymph-haunted,
+   Garlanded over with vine, and acanthus, and clambering roses,
+   Cool in the fierce still noon, where the streams glance clear in the
+   moss-beds;
+
+and here and there, beyond the braes and meads, blue glimpses of the
+far-off summer sea; and all this told in a language and a metre which
+shapes itself almost unconsciously, wave after wave, into the most
+luscious song.  Doubt not that many a soul then, was the simpler, and
+purer, and better, for reading the sweet singer of Syracuse.  He has his
+immoralities; but they are the immoralities of his age: his naturalness,
+his sunny calm and cheerfulness, are all his own.
+
+And now, to leave the poets, and speak of those grammarians to whose
+corrections we owe, I suppose, the texts of the Greek poets as they now
+stand.  They seem to have set to work at their task methodically enough,
+under the direction of their most literary monarch, Ptolemy Philadelphus.
+Alexander the Ætolian collected and revised the tragedies, Lycophron the
+comedies, Zenodotus the poems of Homer, and the other poets of the Epic
+cycle, now lost to us.  Whether Homer prospered under all his expungings,
+alterations, and transpositions—whether, in fact, he did not treat Homer
+very much as Bentley wanted to treat Milton, is a suspicion which one has
+a right to entertain, though it is long past the possibility of proof.
+Let that be as it may, the critical business grew and prospered.
+Aristophanes of Byzantium wrote glossaries and grammars, collected
+editions of Plato and Aristotle, æsthetic disquisitions on Homer—one
+wishes they were preserved, for the sake of the jest, that one might have
+seen an Alexandrian cockney’s views of Achilles and Ulysses!  Moreover,
+in a hapless moment, at least for us moderns, he invented Greek accents;
+thereby, I fear, so complicating and confusing our notions of Greek
+rhythm, that we shall never, to the end of time, be able to guess what
+any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric Hexameter, sounded like.  After a
+while, too, the pedants, according to their wont, began quarrelling about
+their accents and their recessions.  Moreover, there was a rival school
+at Pergamus where the fame of Crates all but equalled the Egyptian fame
+of Aristarchus.  Insolent!  What right had an Asiatic to know anything?
+So Aristarchus flew furiously on Crates, being a man of plain common
+sense, who felt a correct reading a far more important thing than any of
+Crates’s illustrations, æsthetic, historical, or mythological; a
+preference not yet quite extinct, in one, at least, of our Universities.
+“Sir,” said a clever Cambridge Tutor to a philosophically inclined
+freshman, “remember, that our business is to translate Plato correctly,
+not to discover his meaning.”  And, paradoxical as it may seem, he was
+right.  Let us first have accuracy, the merest mechanical accuracy, in
+every branch of knowledge.  Let us know what the thing is which we are
+looking at.  Let us know the exact words an author uses.  Let us get at
+the exact value of each word by that severe induction of which Buttmann
+and the great Germans have set such noble examples; and then, and not
+till then, we may begin to talk about philosophy, and æsthetics, and the
+rest.  Very Probably Aristarchus was right in his dislike of Crates’s
+preference of what he called criticism, to grammar.  Very probably he
+connected it with the other object of his especial hatred, that fashion
+of interpreting Homer allegorically, which was springing up in his time,
+and which afterwards under the Neoplatonists rose to a frantic height,
+and helped to destroy in them, not only their power of sound judgment,
+and of asking each thing patiently what it was, but also any real
+reverence for, or understanding of, the very authors over whom they
+declaimed and sentimentalised.
+
+Yes—the Cambridge Tutor was right.  Before you can tell what a man means,
+you must have patience to find out what he says.  So far from wishing our
+grammatical and philological education to be less severe than it is, I
+think it is not severe enough.  In an age like this—an age of lectures,
+and of popular literature, and of self-culture, too often random and
+capricious, however earnest, we cannot be too careful in asking
+ourselves, in compelling others to ask themselves, the meaning of every
+word which they use, of every word which they read; in assuring them,
+whether they will believe us or not, that the moral, as well as the
+intellectual culture, acquired by translating accurately one dialogue of
+Plato, by making out thoroughly the sense of one chapter of a standard
+author, is greater than they will get from skimming whole folios of
+Schlegelian æsthetics, resumes, histories of philosophy, and the like
+second-hand information, or attending seven lectures a-week till their
+lives’ end.   _It is better to know one thing_, _than to know about ten
+thousand things_.  I cannot help feeling painfully, after reading those
+most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that the especial
+danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness, sentimental
+eclecticism—and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed, that
+intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand, and
+eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness and
+shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks, without
+an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to escape from
+its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists did, by plunging
+desperately into any fetish-worshipping superstition which holds out to
+its wearied and yet impatient intellect, the bait of decisions already
+made for it, of objects of admiration already formed and systematised.
+
+Therefore let us honour the grammarian in his place; and, among others,
+these old grammarians of Alexandria; only being sure that as soon as any
+man begins, as they did, displaying himself peacock-fashion, boasting of
+his science as the great pursuit of humanity, and insulting his
+fellow-craftsmen, he becomes, ipso facto, unable to discover any more
+truth for us, having put on a habit of mind to which induction is
+impossible; and is thenceforth to be passed by with a kindly but a
+pitying smile.  And so, indeed, it happened with these quarrelsome
+Alexandrian grammarians, as it did with the Casaubons and Scaligers and
+Daciers of the last two centuries.  As soon as they began quarrelling
+they lost the power of discovering.  The want of the inductive faculty in
+their attempts at philology is utterly ludicrous.  Most of their
+derivations of words are about on a par with Jacob Böhmen’s etymology of
+sulphur, wherein he makes _sul_, if I recollect right, signify some
+active principle of combustion, and _phur_ the passive one.  It was left
+for more patient and less noisy men, like Grimm, Bopp, and Buttmann, to
+found a science of philology, to discover for us those great laws which
+connect modern philology with history, ethnology, physiology, and with
+the very deepest questions of theology itself.  And in the meanwhile,
+these Alexandrians’ worthless criticism has been utterly swept away;
+while their real work, their accurate editions of the classics, remain to
+us as a precious heritage.  So it is throughout history: nothing dies
+which is worthy to live.  The wheat is surely gathered into the garner,
+the chaff is burnt up by that eternal fire which, happily for this
+universe, cannot be quenched by any art of man, but goes on forever,
+devouring without indulgence all the folly and the falsehood of the
+world.
+
+As yet you have heard nothing of the metaphysical schools of Alexandria;
+for as yet none have existed, in the modern acceptation of that word.
+Indeed, I am not sure that I must not tell you frankly, that none ever
+existed at all in Alexandria, in that same modern acceptation.  Ritter, I
+think, it is who complains naïvely enough, that the Alexandrian
+Neoplatonists had a bad habit, which grew on them more and more as the
+years rolled on, of mixing up philosophy with theology, and so defiling,
+or at all events colouring, its pure transparency.  There is no denying
+the imputation, as I shall show at greater length in my next Lecture.
+But one would have thought, looking back through history, that the
+Alexandrians were not the only philosophers guilty of this shameful act
+of syncretism.  Plato, one would have thought, was as great a sinner as
+they.  So were the Hindoos.  In spite of all their logical and
+metaphysical acuteness, they were, you will find, unable to get rid of
+the notion that theological inquiries concerning Brahma, Atma, Creeshna,
+were indissolubly mixed up with that same logic and metaphysic.  The
+Parsees could not separate questions about Ahriman and Ormuzd from Kant’s
+three great philosophic problems: What is Man?—What may be known?—What
+should be done?  Neither, indeed, could the earlier Greek sages.  Not one
+of them, of any school whatsoever—from the semi-mythic Seven Sages to
+Plato and Aristotle—but finds it necessary to consider not in passing,
+but as the great object of research, questions concerning the
+gods:—whether they are real or not; one or many; personal or impersonal;
+cosmic, and parts of the universe, or organisers and rulers of it; in
+relation to man, or without relation to him.  Even in those who flatly
+deny the existence of the gods, even in Lucretius himself, these
+questions have to be considered, before the question, What is man? can
+get any solution at all.  On the answer given to them is found to depend
+intimately the answer to the question, What is the immaterial part of
+man?  Is it a part of nature, or of something above nature?  Has he an
+immaterial part at all?—in one word, Is a human metaphysic possible at
+all?  So it was with the Greek philosophers of old, even, as Asclepius
+and Ammonius say, with Aristotle himself.  “The object of Aristotle’s
+metaphysic,” one of them says, “is theological.  Herein Aristotle
+theologises.”  And there is no denying the assertion.  We must not then
+be hard on the Neoplatonists, as if they were the first to mix things
+separate from the foundation of the world.  I do not say that theology
+and metaphysic are separate studies.  That is to be ascertained only by
+seeing some one separate them.  And when I see them separated, I shall
+believe them separable.  Only the separation must not be produced by the
+simple expedient of denying the existence of either one of them, or at
+least of ignoring the existence of one steadily during the study of the
+other.  If they can be parted without injury to each other, let them be
+parted; and till then let us suspend hard judgments on the Alexandrian
+school of metaphysic, and also on the schools of that curious people the
+Jews, who had at this period a steadily increasing influence on the
+thought, as well as on the commercial prosperity, of Alexandria.
+
+You must not suppose, in the meanwhile, that the philosophers whom the
+Ptolemies collected (as they would have any other marketable article) by
+liberal offers of pay and patronage, were such men as the old Seven Sages
+of Greece, or as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  In these three last
+indeed, Greek thought reached not merely its greatest height, but the
+edge of a precipice, down which it rolled headlong after their decease.
+The intellectual defects of the Greek mind, of which I have already
+spoken, were doubtless one great cause of this decay: but, to my mind,
+moral causes had still more to do with it.  The more cultivated Greek
+states, to judge from the writings of Plato, had not been an
+over-righteous people during the generation in which he lived.  And in
+the generations which followed, they became an altogether wicked people;
+immoral, unbelieving, hating good, and delighting in all which was evil.
+And it was in consequence of these very sins of theirs, as I think, that
+the old Hellenic race began to die out physically, and population
+throughout Greece to decrease with frightful rapidity, after the time of
+the Achæan league.  The facts are well known; and foul enough they are.
+When the Romans destroyed Greece, God was just and merciful.  The eagles
+were gathered together only because the carrion needed to be removed from
+the face of God’s earth.  And at the time of which I now speak, the signs
+of approaching death were fearfully apparent.  Hapless and hopeless
+enough were the clique of men out of whom the first two Ptolemies hoped
+to form a school of philosophy; men certainly clever enough, and amusing
+withal, who might give the kings of Egypt many a shrewd lesson in
+king-craft, and the ways of this world, and the art of profiting by the
+folly of fools, and the selfishness of the selfish; or who might amuse
+them, in default of fighting-cocks, by puns and repartees, and battles of
+logic; “how one thing cannot be predicated of another,” or “how the wise
+man is not only to overcome every misfortune, but not even to feel it,”
+and other such mighty questions, which in those days hid that deep
+unbelief in any truth whatsoever which was spreading fast over the minds
+of men.  Such word-splitters were Stilpo and Diodorus, the slayer and the
+slain.  They were of the Megaran school, and were named Dialectics; and
+also, with more truth, Eristics, or quarrellers.  Their clique had
+professed to follow Zeno and Socrates in declaring the instability of
+sensible presumptions and conclusions, in preaching an absolute and
+eternal Being.  But there was this deep gulf between them and Socrates;
+that while Socrates professed to be seeking for the Absolute and Eternal,
+for that which is, they were content with affirming that it exists.  With
+him, as with the older sages, philosophy was a search for truth.  With
+them it was a scheme of doctrines to be defended.  And the dialectic on
+which they prided themselves so much, differed from his accordingly.  He
+used it inductively, to seek out, under the notions and conceptions of
+the mind, certain absolute truths and laws of which they were only the
+embodiment.  Words and thought were to him a field for careful and
+reverent induction, as the phenomena of nature are to us the disciples of
+Bacon.  But with these hapless Megarans, who thought that they had found
+that for which Socrates professed only to seek dimly and afar off, and
+had got it safe in a dogma, preserved as it were in spirits, and put by
+in a museum, the great use of dialectic was to confute opponents.
+Delight in their own subtlety grew on them, the worship not of objective
+truth, but of the forms of the intellect whereby it may be demonstrated;
+till they became the veriest word-splitters, rivals of the old sophists
+whom their master had attacked, and justified too often Aristophanes’
+calumny, which confounded Socrates with his opponents, as a man whose aim
+was to make the worse appear the better reason.
+
+We have here, in both parties, all the marks of an age of exhaustion, of
+scepticism, of despair about finding any real truth.  No wonder that they
+were superseded by the Pyrrhonists, who doubted all things, and by the
+Academy, which prided itself on setting up each thing to knock it down
+again; and so by prudent and well-bred and tolerant qualifying of every
+assertion, neither affirming too much, nor denying too much, keep their
+minds in a wholesome—or unwholesome—state of equilibrium, as stagnant
+pools are kept, that everything may have free toleration to rot
+undisturbed.
+
+These hapless caricaturists of the dialectic of Plato, and the logic of
+Aristotle, careless of any vital principles or real results, ready enough
+to use fallacies each for their own party, and openly proud of their
+success in doing so, were assisted by worthy compeers of an outwardly
+opposite tone of thought, the Cyrenaics, Theodorus and Hegesias.  With
+their clique, as with their master Aristippus, the senses were the only
+avenues to knowledge; man was the measure of all things; and “happiness
+our being’s end and aim.”  Theodorus was surnamed the Atheist; and, it
+seems, not without good reason; for he taught that there was no absolute
+or eternal difference between good and evil; nothing really disgraceful
+in crimes; no divine ground for laws, which according to him had been
+invented by men to prevent fools from making themselves disagreeable; on
+which theory, laws must be confessed to have been in all ages somewhat of
+a failure.  He seems to have been, like his master, an impudent
+light-hearted fellow, who took life easily enough, laughed at patriotism,
+and all other high-flown notions, boasted that the world was his country,
+and was no doubt excellent after-dinner company for the great king.
+Hegesias, his fellow Cyrenaic, was a man of a darker and more melancholic
+temperament; and while Theodorus contented himself with preaching a
+comfortable selfishness, and obtaining pleasure, made it rather his study
+to avoid pain.  Doubtless both their theories were popular enough at
+Alexandria, as they were in France during the analogous period, the
+Siècle Louis Quinze.  The “Contrat Social,” and the rest of their
+doctrines, moral and metaphysical, will always have their admirers on
+earth, as long as that variety of the human species exists for whose
+especial behoof Theodorus held that laws were made; and the whole form of
+thought met with great approbation in after years at Rome, where Epicurus
+carried it to its highest perfection.  After that, under the pressure of
+a train of rather severe lessons, which Gibbon has detailed in his
+“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” little or nothing was heard of
+it, save _sotto voce_, perhaps, at the Papal courts of the sixteenth
+century.  To revive it publicly, or at least as much of it as could be
+borne by a world now for seventeen centuries Christian, was the glory of
+the eighteenth century.  The moral scheme of Theodorus has now nearly
+vanished among us, at least as a confessed creed; and, in spite of the
+authority of Mr. Locke’s great and good name, his metaphysical scheme is
+showing signs of a like approaching disappearance.  Let us hope that it
+may be a speedy one; for if the senses be the only avenues to knowledge;
+if man be the measure of all things; and if law have not, as Hooker says,
+her fount and home in the very bosom of God himself, then was Homer’s
+Zeus right in declaring man to be “the most wretched of all the beasts of
+the field.”
+
+And yet one cannot help looking with a sort of awe (I dare not call it
+respect) at that melancholic faithless Hegesias.  Doubtless he, like his
+compeers, and indeed all Alexandria for three hundred years, cultivated
+philosophy with no more real purpose than it was cultivated by the
+graceless _beaux-esprits_ of Louis XV.’s court, and with as little
+practical effect on morality; but of this Hegesias alone it stands
+written, that his teaching actually made men do something; and moreover,
+do the most solemn and important thing which any man can do, excepting
+always doing right.  I must confess, however, that the result of his
+teaching took so unexpected a form, that the reigning Ptolemy, apparently
+Philadelphus, had to interfere with the sacred right of every man to talk
+as much nonsense as he likes, and forbade Hegesias to teach at
+Alexandria.  For Hegesias, a Cyrenaic like Theodorus, but a rather more
+morose pedant than that saucy and happy scoffer, having discovered that
+the great end of man was to avoid pain, also discovered (his digestion
+being probably in a disordered state) that there was so much more pain
+than pleasure in the world, as to make it a thoroughly disagreeable
+place, of which man was well rid at any price.  Whereon he wrote a book
+called, Ἀποκαρτερῶν, in which a man who had determined to starve himself,
+preached the miseries of human life, and the blessings of death, with
+such overpowering force, that the book actually drove many persons to
+commit suicide, and escape from a world which was not fit to dwell in.  A
+fearful proof of how rotten the state of society was becoming, how
+desperate the minds of men, during those frightful centuries which
+immediately preceded the Christian era, and how fast was approaching that
+dark chaos of unbelief and unrighteousness, which Paul of Tarsus so
+analyses and describes in the first chapter of his Epistle to the
+Romans—when the old light was lost, the old faiths extinct, the old
+reverence for the laws of family and national life, destroyed, yea even
+the natural instincts themselves perverted; that chaos whose darkness
+Juvenal, and Petronius, and Tacitus have proved, in their fearful pages,
+not to have been exaggerated by the more compassionate though more
+righteous Jew.
+
+And now observe, that this selfishness—this wholesome state of
+equilibrium—this philosophic calm, which is really only a lazy pride,
+was, as far as we can tell, the main object of all the schools from the
+time of Alexander to the Christian era.  We know very little of those
+Sceptics, Cynics, Epicureans, Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, of whom
+there has been so much talk, except at second-hand, through the Romans,
+from whom Stoicism in after ages received a new and not ignoble life.
+But this we do know of the later sets, that they gradually gave up the
+search for truth, and propounded to themselves as the great type for a
+philosopher, How shall a man save his own soul from this evil world? They
+may have been right; it may have been the best thing to think about in
+those exhausted and decaying times: but it was a question of ethics, not
+of philosophy, in the sense which the old Greek sages put on that latter
+word.  Their object was, not to get at the laws of all things, but to
+fortify themselves against all things, each according to his scheme, and
+so to be self-sufficient and alone.  Even in the Stoics, who boldly and
+righteously asserted an immutable morality, this was the leading
+conception.  As has been well said of them:
+
+“If we reflect how deeply the feeling of an intercourse between men and a
+divine race superior to themselves had worked itself into the Greek
+character—what a number of fables, some beautiful, some impure, it had
+impregnated and procured credence for—how it sustained every form of
+polity and every system of laws, we may imagine what the effects must
+have been of its disappearance.  If it is possible for any man, it was
+not, certainly, possible for a Greek, to feel himself connected by any
+real bonds with his fellow-creatures around him, while he felt himself
+utterly separated from any being above his fellow-creatures.  But the
+sense of that isolation would affect different minds very differently.
+It drove the Epicurean to consider how he might make a world in which he
+should live comfortably, without distracting visions of the past and
+future, and the dread of those upper powers who no longer awakened in him
+any feelings of sympathy.  It drove Zeno the Stoic to consider whether a
+man may not find enough in himself to satisfy him, though what is beyond
+him be ever so unfriendly. . . . We may trace in the productions which
+are attributed to Zone a very clear indication of the feeling which was
+at work in his mind.  He undertook, for instance, among other tasks, to
+answer Plato’s ‘Republic.’  The truth that a man is a political being,
+which informs and pervades that book, was one which must have been
+particularly harassing to his mind, and which he felt must be got rid of,
+before he could hope to assert his doctrine of a man’s solitary dignity.”
+
+Woe to the nation or the society in which this individualising and
+separating process is going on in the human mind!  Whether it take the
+form of a religion or of a philosophy, it is at once the sign and the
+cause of senility, decay, and death.  If man begins to forget that he is
+a social being, a member of a body, and that the only truths which can
+avail him anything, the only truths which are worthy objects of his
+philosophical search, are those which are equally true for every man,
+which will equally avail every man, which he must proclaim, as far as he
+can, to every man, from the proudest sage to the meanest outcast, he
+enters, I believe, into a lie, and helps forward the dissolution of that
+society of which he is a member.  I care little whether what he holds be
+true or not.  If it be true, he has made it a lie by appropriating it
+proudly and selfishly to himself, and by excluding others from it.  He
+has darkened his own power of vision by that act of self-appropriation,
+so that even if he sees a truth, he can only see it refractedly,
+discoloured by the medium of his own private likes and dislikes, and
+fulfils that great and truly philosophic law, that he who loveth not his
+brother is in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth.  And so it
+befell those old Greek schools.  It is out of our path to follow them to
+Italy, where sturdy old Roman patriots cursed them, and with good reason,
+as corrupting the morals of the young.  Our business is with Alexandria;
+and there, certainly, they did nothing for the elevation of humanity.
+What culture they may have given, probably helped to make the
+Alexandrians, what Cæsar calls them, the most ingenious of all nations:
+but righteous or valiant men it did not make them.  When, after the three
+great reigns of Soter, Philadelphus, and Euergetes, the race of the
+Ptolemies began to wear itself out, Alexandria fell morally, as its
+sovereigns fell; and during a miserable and shameful decline of a hundred
+and eighty years, sophists wrangled, pedants fought over accents and
+readings with the true _odium gammaticum_, and kings plunged deeper and
+deeper into the abysses of luxury and incest, laziness and cruelty, till
+the flood came, and swept them all away.  Cleopatra, the Helen of Egypt,
+betrayed her country to the Roman; and thenceforth the Alexandrians
+became slaves in all but name.
+
+And now that Alexandria has become a tributary province, is it to share
+the usual lot of enslaved countries and lose all originality and vigour
+of thought?  Not so.  From this point, strangely enough, it begins to
+have a philosophy of its own.  Hitherto it has been importing Greek
+thought into Egypt and Syria, even to the furthest boundaries of Persia;
+and the whole East has become Greek: but it has received little in
+return.  The Indian Gymnosophists, or Brahmins, had little or no effect
+on Greek philosophy, except in the case of Pyrrho: the Persian Dualism
+still less.  The Egyptian symbolic nature-worship had been too gross to
+be regarded by the cultivated Alexandrian as anything but a barbaric
+superstition.  One eastern nation had intermingled closely with the
+Macedonian race, and from it Alexandrian thought received a new impulse.
+
+I mentioned in my first lecture the conciliatory policy which the
+Ptolemies had pursued toward the Jews.  Soter had not only allowed but
+encouraged them to settle in Alexandria and Egypt, granting them the same
+political privileges with the Macedonians and other Greeks.  Soon they
+built themselves a temple there, in obedience to some supposed prophecy
+in their sacred writings, which seems most probably to have been a wilful
+interpolation.  Whatsoever value we may attach to the various myths
+concerning the translation of their Scriptures into Greek, there can be
+no doubt that they were translated in the reign of Soter, and that the
+exceedingly valuable Septuagint version is the work of that period.
+Moreover, their numbers in Alexandria were very great.  When Amrou took
+Constantinople in A.D. 640, there were 40,000 Jews in it; and their
+numbers during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, before their temporary
+expulsion by Cyril about 412, were probably greater; and Egypt altogether
+is said to have contained 200,000 Jews.  They had schools there, which
+were so esteemed by their whole nation throughout the East, that the
+Alexandrian Rabbis, the Light of Israel, as they were called, may be
+fairly considered as the centre of Jewish thought and learning for
+several centuries.
+
+We are accustomed, and not without reason, to think with some contempt of
+these old Rabbis.  Rabbinism, Cabbalism, are become by-words in the
+mouths of men.  It may be instructive for us—it is certainly necessary
+for us, if we wish to understand Alexandria—to examine a little how they
+became so fallen.
+
+Their philosophy took its stand, as you all know, on certain ancient
+books of their people; histories, laws, poems, philosophical treatises,
+which all have one element peculiar to themselves, namely, the assertion
+of a living personal Ruler and Teacher, not merely of the Jewish race,
+but of all the nations of the earth.  After the return of their race from
+Babylon, their own records give abundant evidence that this strange
+people became the most exclusive and sectarian which the world ever saw.
+Into the causes of that exclusiveness I will not now enter; suffice it to
+say, that it was pardonable enough in a people asserting Monotheism in
+the midst of idolatrous nations, and who knew, from experience even more
+bitter than that which taught Plato and Socrates, how directly all those
+popular idolatries led to every form of baseness and immorality.  But we
+may trace in them, from the date of their return from Babylon, especially
+from their settlement in Alexandria, a singular change of opinion.  In
+proportion as they began to deny that their unseen personal Ruler had
+anything to do with the Gentiles—the nations of the earth, as they called
+them—in proportion as they considered themselves as His only subjects—or
+rather, Him and His guidance as their own private property—exactly in
+that proportion they began to lose all living or practical belief that He
+did guide them.  He became a being of the past; one who had taught and
+governed their forefathers in old times: not one who was teaching and
+governing them now.  I beg you to pay attention to this curious result;
+because you will see, I think, the very same thing occurring in two other
+Alexandrian schools, of which I shall speak hereafter.
+
+The result to these Rabbis was, that the inspired books which spoke of
+this Divine guidance and government became objects of superstitious
+reverence, just in proportion as they lost all understanding of their
+real value and meaning.  Nevertheless, this too produced good results;
+for the greatest possible care was taken to fix the Canon of these books;
+to settle, as far as possible, the exact time at which the Divine
+guidance was supposed to have ceased; after which it was impious to claim
+a Divine teaching; when their sages were left to themselves, as they
+fancied, with a complete body of knowledge, on which they were henceforth
+only to comment.  Thus, whether or not they were right in supposing that
+the Divine Teacher had ceased to teach and inspire them, they did
+infinite service by marking out for us certain writers whom He had
+certainly taught and inspired.  No doubt they were right in their sense
+of the awful change which had passed over their nation.  There was an
+infinite difference between them and the old Hebrew writers.  They had
+lost something which those old prophets possessed.  I invite you to
+ponder, each for himself, on the causes of this strange loss; bearing in
+mind that they lost their forefathers’ heirloom, exactly in proportion as
+they began to believe it to be their exclusive possession, and to deny
+other human beings any right to or share in it.  It may have been that
+the light given to their forefathers had, as they thought, really
+departed.  It may have been, also, that the light was there all around
+them still, as bright as ever, but that they would not open their eyes
+and behold it; or rather, could not open them, because selfishness and
+pride had sealed them.  It may have been, that inspiration was still very
+near _them_ too, if their spirits had been willing to receive it.  But of
+the fact of the change there was no doubt.  For the old Hebrew seers were
+men dealing with the loftiest and deepest laws: the Rabbis were shallow
+pedants.  The old Hebrew seers were righteous and virtuous men: the
+Rabbis became, in due time, some of the worst and wickedest men who ever
+trod this earth.
+
+Thus they too had their share in that downward career of pedantry which
+we have seen characterise the whole past Alexandrine age.  They, like
+Zenodotus and Aristarchus, were commentators, grammarians, sectarian
+disputers: they were not thinkers or actors.  Their inspired books were
+to them no more the words of living human beings who had sought for the
+Absolute Wisdom, and found it after many sins and doubts and sorrows.
+The human writers became in their eyes the puppets and mouthpieces of
+some magical influence, not the disciples of a living and loving person.
+The book itself was, in their belief, not in any true sense inspired, but
+magically dictated—by what power they cared not to define.  His character
+was unimportant to them, provided He had inspired no nation but their
+own.  But, thought they, if the words were dictated, each of them must
+have some mysterious value.  And if each word had a mysterious value, why
+not each letter?  And how could they set limits to that mysterious value?
+Might not these words, even rearrangements of the letters of them, be
+useful in protecting them against the sorceries of the heathen, in
+driving away those evil spirits, or evoking those good spirits, who,
+though seldom mentioned in their early records, had after their return
+from Babylon begun to form an important part of their unseen world?  For
+as they had lost faith in the One Preserver of their race, they had
+filled up the void by a ponderous demonology of innumerable preservers.
+This process of thought was not confined to Alexandria.  Dr. Layard, in
+his last book on Nineveh, gives some curious instances of its prevalence
+among them at an earlier period, well worth your careful study.  But it
+was at Alexandria that the Jewish Cabbalism formed itself into a system.
+It was there that the Jews learnt to become the jugglers and
+magic-mongers of the whole Roman world, till Claudius had to expel them
+from Rome, as pests to rational and moral society.
+
+And yet, among these hapless pedants there lingered nobler thoughts and
+hopes.  They could not read the glorious heirlooms of their race without
+finding in them records of antique greatness and virtue, of old
+deliverances worked for their forefathers; and what seemed promises, too,
+that that greatness should return.  The notion that those promises were
+conditional; that they expressed eternal moral laws, and declared the
+consequences of obeying those laws, they had lost long ago.  By looking
+on themselves as exclusively and arbitrarily favoured by Heaven, they
+were ruining their own moral sense.  Things were not right or wrong to
+them because Right was eternal and divine, and Wrong the transgression of
+that eternal right.  How could that be?  For then the right things the
+Gentiles seemed to do would be right and divine;—and that supposition in
+their eyes was all but impious.  None could do right but themselves, for
+they only knew the law of God.  So, right with them had no absolute or
+universal ground, but was reduced in their minds to the performance of
+certain acts commanded exclusively to them—a form of ethics which rapidly
+sank into the most petty and frivolous casuistry as to the outward
+performance of those acts.  The sequel of those ethics is known to all
+the world, in the spectacle of the most unrivalled religiosity, and
+scrupulous respectability, combined with a more utter absence of moral
+sense, in their most cultivated and learned men, than the world has ever
+beheld before or since.
+
+In such a state of mind it was impossible for them to look on their old
+prophets as true seers, beholding and applying eternal moral laws, and,
+therefore, seeing the future in the present and in the past.  They must
+be the mere utterers of an irreversible arbitrary fate; and that fate
+must, of course, be favourable to their nation.  So now arose a school
+who picked out from their old prophets every passage which could be made
+to predict their future glory, and a science which settled when that
+glory was to return.  By the arbitrary rules of criticism a prophetic day
+was defined to mean a year; a week, seven years.  The most simple and
+human utterances were found to have recondite meanings relative to their
+future triumph over the heathens whom they cursed and hated.  If any of
+you ever come across the popular Jewish interpretations of The Song of
+Solomon, you will there see the folly in which acute and learned men can
+indulge themselves when they have lost hold of the belief in anything
+really absolute and eternal and moral, and have made Fate, and Time, and
+Self, their real deities.  But this dream of a future restoration was in
+no wise ennobled, as far as we can see, with any desire for a moral
+restoration.  They believed that a person would appear some day or other
+to deliver them.  Even they were happily preserved by their sacred books
+from the notion that deliverance was to be found for them, or for any
+man, in an abstraction or notion ending in -ation or -ality.  In justice
+to them it must be said, that they were too wise to believe that personal
+qualities, such as power, will, love, righteousness, could reside in any
+but in a person, or be manifested except by a person.  And among the
+earlier of them the belief may have been, that the ancient unseen Teacher
+of their race would be their deliverer: but as they lost the thought of
+Him, the expected Deliverer became a mere human being: or rather not a
+human being; for as they lost their moral sense, they lost in the very
+deepest meaning their humanity, and forgot what man was like till they
+learned to look only for a conqueror; a manifestation of power, and not
+of goodness; a destroyer of the hated heathen, who was to establish them
+as the tyrant race of the whole earth.  On that fearful day on which, for
+a moment, they cast away even that last dream, and cried, “We have no
+king but Cæsar,” they spoke the secret of their hearts.  It was a Cæsar,
+a Jewish Cæsar, for whom they had been longing for centuries.  And if
+they could not have such a deliverer, they would have none: they would
+take up with the best embodiment of brute Titanic power which they could
+find, and crucify the embodiment of Righteousness and Love.  Amid all the
+metaphysical schools of Alexandria, I know none so deeply instructive as
+that school of the Rabbis, “the glory of Israel.”
+
+But you will say: “This does not look like a school likely to regenerate
+Alexandrian thought.”  True: and yet it did regenerate it, both for good
+and for evil; for these men had among them and preserved faithfully
+enough for all practical purposes, the old literature of their race; a
+literature which I firmly believe, if I am to trust the experience of
+1900 years, is destined to explain all other literatures; because it has
+firm hold of the one eternal root-idea which gives life, meaning, Divine
+sanction, to every germ or fragment of human truth which is in any of
+them.  It did so, at least, in Alexandria for the Greek literature.
+About the Christian era, a cultivated Alexandrian Jew, a disciple of
+Plato and of Aristotle, did seem to himself to find in the sacred books
+of his nation that which agreed with the deepest discoveries of Greek
+philosophy; which explained and corroborated them.  And his announcement
+of this fact, weak and defective as it was, had the most enormous and
+unexpected results.  The father of New Platonism was Philo the Jew.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE III.
+NEOPLATONISM.
+
+
+WE now approach the period in which Alexandria began to have a philosophy
+of its own—to be, indeed, the leader of human thought for several
+centuries.
+
+I shall enter on this branch of my subject with some fear and trembling;
+not only on account of my own ignorance, but on account of the great
+difficulty of handling it without trenching on certain controversial
+subjects which are rightly and wisely forbidden here.  For there was not
+one school of Metaphysic at Alexandria: there were two; which, during the
+whole period of their existence, were in internecine struggle with each
+other, and yet mutually borrowing from each other; the Heathen, namely,
+and the Christian.  And you cannot contemplate, still less can you
+understand, the one without the other.  Some of late years have become
+all but unaware of the existence of that Christian school; and the word
+Philosophy, on the authority of Gibbon, who, however excellent an
+authority for facts, knew nothing about Philosophy, and cared less, has
+been used exclusively to express heathen thought; a misnomer which in
+Alexandria would have astonished Plotinus or Hypatia as much as it would
+Clement or Origen.  I do not say that there is, or ought to be, a
+Christian Metaphysic.  I am speaking, as you know, merely as a historian,
+dealing with facts; and I say that there was one; as profound, as
+scientific, as severe, as that of the Pagan Neoplatonists; starting
+indeed, as I shall show hereafter, on many points from common ground with
+theirs.  One can hardly doubt, I should fancy, that many parts of St.
+John’s Gospel and Epistles, whatever view we may take of them, if they
+are to be called anything, are to be called metaphysic and philosophic.
+And one can no more doubt that before writing them he had studied Philo,
+and was expanding Philo’s thought in the direction which seemed fit to
+him, than we can doubt it of the earlier Neoplatonists.  The technical
+language is often identical; so are the primary ideas from which he
+starts, howsoever widely the conclusions may differ.  If Plotinus
+considered himself an intellectual disciple of Plato, so did Origen and
+Clemens.  And I must, as I said before, speak of both, or of neither.  My
+only hope of escaping delicate ground lies in the curious fact, that
+rightly or wrongly, the form in which Christianity presented itself to
+the old Alexandrian thinkers was so utterly different from the popular
+conception of it in modern England, that one may very likely be able to
+tell what little one knows about it, almost without mentioning a single
+doctrine which now influences the religious world.
+
+But far greater is my fear, that to a modern British auditory, trained in
+the school of Locke, much of ancient thought, heathen as well as
+Christian, may seem so utterly the product of the imagination, so utterly
+without any corresponding reality in the universe, as to look like mere
+unintelligible madness.  Still, I must try; only entreating my hearers to
+consider, that how much soever we may honour Locke and his great Scotch
+followers, we are not bound to believe them either infallible, or
+altogether world-embracing; that there have been other methods than
+theirs of conceiving the Unseen; that the common ground from which both
+Christian and heathen Alexandrians start, is not merely a private vagary
+of their own, but one which has been accepted undoubtingly, under so many
+various forms, by so many different races, as to give something of an
+inductive probability that it is not a mere dream, but may be a right and
+true instinct of the human mind.  I mean the belief that the things which
+we see—nature and all her phenomena—are temporal, and born only to die;
+mere shadows of some unseen realities, from whom their laws and life are
+derived; while the eternal things which subsist without growth, decay, or
+change, the only real, only truly existing things, in short, are certain
+things which are not seen; inappreciable by sense, or understanding, or
+imagination, perceived only by the conscience and the reason.  And that,
+again, the problem of philosophy, the highest good for man, that for the
+sake of which death were a gain, without which life is worthless, a
+drudgery, a degradation, a failure, and a ruin, is to discover what those
+unseen eternal things are, to know them, possess them, be in harmony with
+them, and thereby alone to rise to any real and solid power, or safety,
+or nobleness.  It is a strange dream.  But you will see that it is one
+which does not bear much upon “points of controversy,” any more than on
+“Locke’s philosophy;” nevertheless, when we find this same strange dream
+arising, apparently without intercommunion of thought, among the old
+Hindoos, among the Greeks, among the Jews; and lastly, when we see it
+springing again in the Middle Age, in the mind of the almost forgotten
+author of the “Deutsche Theologie,” and so becoming the parent, not
+merely of Luther’s deepest belief, or of the German mystic schools of the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but of the great German Philosophy
+itself as developed by Kant, and Fichte, and Schelling, and Hegel, we
+must at least confess it to be a popular delusion, if nothing better,
+vast enough and common enough to be worth a little patient investigation,
+wheresoever we may find it stirring the human mind.
+
+But I have hope, still, that I may find sympathy and comprehension among
+some, at least, of my audience, as I proceed to examine the ancient
+realist schools of Alexandria, on account of their knowledge of the
+modern realist schools of Germany.  For I cannot but see, that a
+revulsion is taking place in the thoughts of our nation upon metaphysic
+subjects, and that Scotland, as usual, is taking the lead therein.  That
+most illustrious Scotchman, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, first vindicated the
+great German Realists from the vulgar misconceptions about them which
+were so common at the beginning of this century, and brought the minds of
+studious men to a more just appreciation of the philosophic severity, the
+moral grandeur, of such thinkers as Emmanuel Kant, and Gottlieb Fichte.
+To another Scotch gentleman, who, I believe, has honoured me by his
+presence here to-night, we owe most valuable translations of some of
+Fichte’s works; to be followed, I trust, by more.  And though, as a
+humble disciple of Bacon, I cannot but think that the method both of Kant
+and Fichte possesses somewhat of the same inherent defect as the method
+of the Neoplatonist school, yet I should be most unfair did I not express
+my deep obligations to them, and advise all those to study them
+carefully, who wish to gain a clear conception either of the old
+Alexandrian schools, or of those intellectual movements which are
+agitating the modern mind, and which will, I doubt not, issue in a
+clearer light, and in a nobler life, if not for us, yet still for our
+children’s children for ever.
+
+The name of Philo the Jew is now all but forgotten among us.  He was
+laughed out of sight during the last century, as a dreamer and an
+allegorist, who tried eclectically to patch together Plato and Moses.
+The present age, however, is rapidly beginning to suspect that all who
+thought before the eighteenth century were not altogether either fools or
+impostors; old wisdom is obtaining a fairer hearing day by day, and is
+found not to be so contradictory to new wisdom as was supposed.  We are
+beginning, too, to be more inclined to justify Providence, by believing
+that lies are by their very nature impotent and doomed to die; that
+everything which has had any great or permanent influence on the human
+mind, must have in it some germ of eternal truth; and setting ourselves
+to separate that germ of truth from the mistakes which may have distorted
+and overlaid it.  Let us believe, or at least hope, the same for a few
+minutes, of Philo, and try to find out what was the secret of his power,
+what the secret of his weakness.
+
+First: I cannot think that he had to treat his own sacred books unfairly,
+to make them agree with the root-idea of Socrates and Plato.  Socrates
+and Plato acknowledged a Divine teacher of the human spirit; that was the
+ground of their philosophy.  So did the literature of the Jews.  Socrates
+and Plato, with all the Greek sages till the Sophistic era, held that the
+object of philosophy was the search after that which truly exists: that
+he who found that, found wisdom: Philo’s books taught him the same truth:
+but they taught him also, that the search for wisdom was not merely the
+search for that which is, but for Him who is; not for a thing, but for a
+person.  I do not mean that Plato and the elder Greeks had not that
+object also in view; for I have said already that Theology was with them
+the ultimate object of all metaphysic science: but I do think that they
+saw it infinitely less clearly than the old Jewish sages.  Those sages
+were utterly unable to conceive of an absolute truth, except as residing
+in an absolutely true person; of absolute wisdom, except in an absolutely
+wise person; of an absolute order and law, except in a lawgiver; of an
+absolute good, except in an absolutely good person: any more than either
+they or we can conceive of an absolute love, except in an absolutely
+loving person.  I say boldly, that I think them right, on all grounds of
+Baconian induction.  For all these qualities are only known to us as
+exhibited in persons; and if we believe them to have any absolute and
+eternal existence at all, to be objective, and independent of us, and the
+momentary moods and sentiments of our own mind, they must exist in some
+absolute and eternal person, or they are mere notions, abstractions,
+words, which have no counterparts.
+
+But here arose a puzzle in the mind of Philo, as it in reality had, we
+may see, in the minds of Socrates and Plato.  How could he reconcile the
+idea of that absolute and eternal one Being, that Zeus, Father of Gods
+and men, self-perfect, self-contained, without change or motion, in whom,
+as a Jew, he believed even more firmly than the Platonists, with the
+Dæmon of Socrates, the Divine Teacher whom both Plato and Solomon
+confessed?  Or how, again, could he reconcile the idea of Him with the
+creative and providential energy, working in space and time, working on
+matter, and apparently affected and limited, if not baffled, by the
+imperfection of the minds which he taught, by the imperfection of the
+matter which he moulded?  This, as all students of philosophy must know,
+was one of the great puzzles of old Greek philosophy, as long as it was
+earnest and cared to have any puzzles at all: it has been, since the days
+of Spinoza, the great puzzle of all earnest modern philosophers.  Philo
+offered a solution in that idea of a Logos, or Word of God, Divinity
+articulate, speaking and acting in time and space, and therefore by
+successive acts; and so doing, in time and space, the will of the
+timeless and spaceless Father, the Abysmal and Eternal Being, of whom he
+was the perfect likeness.  In calling this person the Logos, and making
+him the source of all human reason, and knowledge of eternal laws, he
+only translated from Hebrew into Greek the name which he found in his
+sacred books, “The Word of God.”  As yet we have found no unfair
+allegorising of Moses, or twisting of Plato.  How then has he incurred
+this accusation?
+
+I cannot think, again, that he was unfair in supposing that he might hold
+at the same time the Jewish belief concerning Creation, and the Platonic
+doctrine of the real existence of Archetypal ideas, both of moral and of
+physical phenomena.  I do not mean that such a conception was present
+consciously to the mind of the old Jews, as it was most certainly to the
+mind of St. Paul, a practised Platonic dialectician; but it seems to me,
+as to Philo, to be a fair, perhaps a necessary, corollary from the
+Genetic Philosophy, both of Moses and of Solomon.
+
+But in one thing he was unfair; namely, in his allegorising.  But unfair
+to whom?  To Socrates and Plato, I believe, as much as to Moses and to
+Samuel.  For what is the part of the old Jewish books which he evaporates
+away into mere mystic symbols of the private experiences of the devout
+philosopher?  Its practical everyday histories, which deal with the
+common human facts of family and national life, of man’s outward and
+physical labour and craft.  These to him have no meaning, except an
+allegoric one.  But has he thrown them away for the sake of getting a
+step nearer to Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle?  Surely not.  To them,
+as to the old Jewish sages, man is most important when regarded not
+merely as a soul, but as a man, a social being of flesh and blood.
+Aristotle declares politics to be the architectonical science, the family
+and social relations to be the eternal master-facts of humanity.  Plato,
+in his Republic, sets before himself the Constitution of a State, as the
+crowning problem of his philosophy.  Every work of his, like every saying
+of his master Socrates, deals with the common, outward, vulgar facts of
+human life, and asserts that there is a divine meaning in them, and that
+reverent induction from them is the way to obtain the deepest truths.
+Socrates and Plato were as little inclined to separate the man and the
+philosopher as Moses, Solomon, or Isaiah were.  When Philo, by
+allegorising away the simple human parts of his books, is untrue to
+Moses’s teaching, he becomes untrue to Plato’s.  He becomes untrue, I
+believe, to a higher teaching than Plato’s.  He loses sight of an eternal
+truth, which even old Homer might have taught him, when he treats Moses
+as one section of his disciples in after years treated Homer.
+
+For what is the secret of the eternal freshness, the eternal beauty, ay,
+I may say boldly, in spite of all their absurdities and immoralities, the
+eternal righteousness of those old Greek myths?  What is it which made
+Socrates and Plato cling lovingly and reverently to them, they scarce
+knew why, while they deplored the immoralities to which they had given
+rise?  What is it which made those myths, alone of all old mythologies,
+the parents of truly beautiful sculpture, painting, poetry? What is it
+which makes us love them still; find, even at times against our
+consciences, new meaning, new beauty in them; and brings home the story
+of Perseas or of Hercules, alike to the practised reason of Niebuhr, and
+the untutored instincts of Niebuhr’s little child, for whom he threw them
+into simplest forms?  Why is it that in spite of our disagreeing with
+their creed and their morality, we still persist—and long may we persist,
+or rather be compelled—as it were by blind instinct, to train our boys
+upon those old Greek dreams; and confess, whenever we try to find a
+substitute for them in our educational schemes, that we have as yet none?
+Because those old Greek stories do represent the Deities as the
+archetypes, the kinsmen, the teachers, the friends, the inspirers of men.
+Because while the schoolboy reads how the Gods were like to men, only
+better, wiser, greater; how the Heroes are the children of the Gods, and
+the slayers of the monsters which devour the earth; how Athene taught men
+weaving, and Phœbus music, and Vulcan the cunning of the stithy; how the
+Gods took pity on the noble-hearted son of Danae, and lent him celestial
+arms and guided him over desert and ocean to fulfil his vow—that boy is
+learning deep lessons of metaphysic, more in accordance with the _reine
+vernunft_, the pure reason whereby man perceives that which is moral, and
+spiritual, and eternal, than he would from all disquisitions about being
+and becoming, about actualities and potentialities, which ever tormented
+the weary brain of man.
+
+Let us not despise the gem because it has been broken to fragments,
+obscured by silt and mud.  Still less let us fancy that one least
+fragment of it is not more precious than the most brilliant paste jewel
+of our own compounding, though it be polished and faceted never so
+completely.  For what are all these myths but fragments of that great
+metaphysic idea, which, I boldly say, I believe to be at once the
+justifier and the harmoniser of all philosophic truth which man has ever
+discovered, or will discover; which Philo saw partially, and yet clearly;
+which the Hebrew sages perceived far more deeply, because more humanly
+and practically; which Saint Paul the Platonist, and yet the Apostle,
+raised to its highest power, when he declared that the immutable and
+self-existent Being, for whom the Greek sages sought, and did not
+altogether seek in vain, has gathered together all things both in heaven
+and in earth in one inspiring and creating Logos, who is both God and
+Man?
+
+Be this as it may, we find that from the time of Philo, the deepest
+thought of the heathen world began to flow in a theologic channel.  All
+the great heathen thinkers henceforth are theologians.  In the times of
+Nero, for instance, Epictetus the slave, the regenerator of Stoicism, is
+no mere speculator concerning entities and quiddities, correct or
+incorrect.  He is a slave searching for the secret of freedom, and
+finding that it consists in escaping not from a master, but from self:
+not to wealth and power, but to Jove.  He discovers that Jove is, in some
+most mysterious, but most real sense, the Father of men; he learns to
+look up to that Father as his guide and friend.
+
+Numenius, again, in the second century, was a man who had evidently
+studied Philo.  He perceived so deeply, I may say so exaggeratedly, the
+analogy between the Jewish and the Platonic assertions of an Absolute and
+Eternal Being, side by side with the assertion of a Divine Teacher of
+man, that he is said to have uttered the startling saying: “What is Plato
+but Moses talking Attic?”  Doubtless Plato is not that: but the
+expression is remarkable, as showing the tendency of the age.  He too
+looks up to God with prayers for the guidance of his reason.  He too
+enters into speculation concerning God in His absoluteness, and in His
+connection with the universe.  “The Primary God,” he says, “must be free
+from works and a King; but the Demiurgus must exercise government, going
+through the heavens.  Through Him comes this our condition; through Him
+Reason being sent down in efflux, holds communion with all who are
+prepared for it: God then looking down, and turning Himself to each of
+us, it comes to pass that our bodies live and are nourished, receiving
+strength from the outer rays which come from Him.  But when God turns us
+to the contemplation of Himself, it comes to pass that these things are
+worn out and consumed, but that the reason lives, being partaker of a
+blessed life.”
+
+This passage is exceedingly interesting, as containing both the marrow of
+old Hebrew metaphysic, and also certain notional elements, of which we
+find no trace in the Scripture, and which may lead—as we shall find they
+afterwards did lead—to confusing the moral with the notional, and finally
+the notional with the material; in plain words, to Pantheism.
+
+You find this tendency, in short, in all the philosophers who flourished
+between the age of Augustus and the rise of Alexandrian Neoplatonism.
+Gibbon, while he gives an approving pat on the back to his pet
+“Philosophic Emperor,” Marcus Aurelius, blinks the fact that Marcus’s
+philosophy, like that of Plutarch, contains as an integral element, a
+belief which to him would have been, I fear, simply ludicrous, from its
+strange analogy with the belief of John, the Christian Apostle.  What is
+Marcus Aurelius’s cardinal doctrine?  That there is a God within him, a
+Word, a Logos, which “has hold of him,” and who is his teacher and
+guardian; that over and above his body and his soul, he has a Reason
+which is capable of “hearing that Divine Word, and obeying the monitions
+of that God.”  What is Plutarch’s cardinal doctrine?  That the same Word,
+the Dæmon who spoke to the heart of Socrates, is speaking to him and to
+every philosopher; “coming into contact,” he says, “with him in some
+wonderful manner;” addressing the reason of those who, like Socrates,
+keep their reason pure, not under the dominion of passion, nor mixing
+itself greatly with the body, and therefore quick and sensitive in
+responding to that which encountered it.
+
+You see from these two extracts what questions were arising in the minds
+of men, and how they touched on ethical and theological questions.  I say
+arising in their minds: I believe that I ought to say rather, stirred up
+in their minds by One greater than they.  At all events, there they
+appeared, utterly independent of any Christian teaching.  The belief in
+this Logos or Dæmon speaking to the Reason of man, was one which neither
+Plutarch nor Marcus, neither Numenius nor Ammonius, as far as we can see,
+learnt from the Christians; it was the common ground which they held with
+them; the common battlefield which they disputed with them.
+
+Neither have we any reason to suppose that they learnt it from the
+Hindoos.  That much Hindoo thought mixed with Neoplatonist speculation we
+cannot doubt; but there is not a jot more evidence to prove that
+Alexandrians borrowed this conception from the Mahabharavata, than that
+George Fox the Quaker, or the author of the “Deutsche Theologie,” did so.
+They may have gone to Hindoo philosophy, or rather, to second and third
+hand traditions thereof, for corroborations of the belief; but be sure,
+it must have existed in their own hearts first, or they would never have
+gone thither.  Believe it; be sure of it.  No earnest thinker is a
+plagiarist pure and simple.  He will never borrow from others that which
+he has not already, more or less, thought out for himself.  When once a
+great idea, instinctive, inductive (for the two expressions are nearer
+akin than most fancy), has dawned on his soul, he will welcome lovingly,
+awfully, any corroboration from foreign schools, and cry with joy:
+“Behold, this is not altogether a dream: for others have found it also.
+Surely it must be real, universal, eternal.”  No; be sure there is far
+more originality (in the common sense of the word), and far less (in the
+true sense of the word), than we fancy; and that it is a paltry and
+shallow doctrine which represents each succeeding school as merely the
+puppets and dupes of the preceding.  More originality, because each
+earnest man seems to think out for himself the deepest grounds of his
+creed.  Less originality, because, as I believe, one common Logos, Word,
+Reason, reveals and unveils the same eternal truth to all who seek and
+hunger for it.
+
+Therefore we can, as the Christian philosophers of Alexandria did,
+rejoice over every truth which their heathen adversaries beheld, and
+attribute them, as Clement does, to the highest source, to the
+inspiration of the one and universal Logos.  With Clement, philosophy is
+only hurtful when it is untrue to itself, and philosophy falsely so
+called; true philosophy is an image of the truth, a divine gift bestowed
+on the Greeks.  The Bible, in his eyes, asserts that all forms of art and
+wisdom are from God.  The wise in mind have no doubt some peculiar
+endowment of nature, but when they have offered themselves for their
+work, they receive a spirit of perception from the Highest Wisdom, giving
+them a new fitness for it.  All severe study, all cultivation of
+sympathy, are exercises of this spiritual endowment.  The whole
+intellectual discipline of the Greeks, with their philosophy, came down
+from God to men.  Philosophy, he concludes in one place, carries on “an
+inquiry concerning Truth and the nature of Being; and this Truth is that
+concerning which the Lord Himself said: ‘I am the Truth.’  And when the
+initiated find, or rather receive, the true philosophy, they have it from
+the Truth itself; that is from Him who is true.”
+
+While, then, these two schools had so many grounds in common, where was
+their point of divergence?  We shall find it, I believe, fairly expressed
+in the dying words of Plotinus, the great father of Neoplatonism.  “I am
+striving to bring the God which is in us into harmony with the God which
+is in the universe.”  Whether or not Plotinus actually so spoke, that was
+what his disciples not only said that he spoke, but what they would have
+wished him to speak.  That one sentence expresses the whole object of
+their philosophy.
+
+But to that Pantænus, Origen, Clement, and Augustine would have answered:
+“And we, on the other hand, assert that the God which is in the universe,
+is the same as the God which is in you, and is striving to bring you into
+harmony with Himself.”  There is the _experimentum crucis_.  There is the
+vast gulf between the Christian and the Heathen schools, which when any
+man had overleaped, the whole problem of the universe was from that
+moment inverted.  With Plotinus and his school man is seeking for God:
+with Clement and his, God is seeking for man.  With the former, God is
+passive, and man active: with the latter, God is active, man is
+passive—passive, that is, in so far as his business is to listen when he
+is spoken to, to look at the light which is unveiled to him, to submit
+himself to the inward laws which he feels reproving and checking him at
+every turn, as Socrates was reproved and checked by his inward Dæmon.
+
+Whether of these two theorems gives the higher conception either of the
+Divine Being, or of man, I leave it for you to judge.  To those old
+Alexandrian Christians, a being who was not seeking after every single
+creature, and trying to raise him, could not be a Being of absolute
+Righteousness, Power, Love; could not be a Being worthy of respect or
+admiration, even of philosophic speculation.  Human righteousness and
+love flows forth disinterestedly to all around it, however unconscious,
+however unworthy they may be; human power associated with goodness, seeks
+for objects which it may raise and benefit by that power.  We must
+confess this, with the Christian schools, or, with the Heathen schools,
+we must allow another theory, which brought them into awful depths; which
+may bring any generation which holds it into the same depths.
+
+If Clement had asked the Neoplatonists: “You believe, Plotinus, in an
+absolutely Good Being.  Do you believe that it desires to shed forth its
+goodness on all?”  “Of course,” they would have answered, “on those who
+seek for it, on the philosopher.”
+
+“But not, it seems, Plotinus, on the herd, the brutal, ignorant mass,
+wallowing in those foul crimes above which you have risen?”  And at that
+question there would have been not a little hesitation.  These brutes in
+human form, these souls wallowing in earthly mire, could hardly, in the
+Neoplatonists’ eyes, be objects of the Divine desire.
+
+“Then this Absolute Good, you say, Plotinus, has no relation with them,
+no care to raise them.  In fact, it cannot raise them, because they have
+nothing in common with it.  Is that your notion?”  And the Neoplatonists
+would have, on the whole, allowed that argument.  And if Clement had
+answered, that such was not his notion of Goodness, or of a Good Being,
+and that therefore the goodness of their Absolute Good, careless of the
+degradation and misery around it, must be something very different from
+his notions of human goodness; the Neoplatonists would have
+answered—indeed they did answer—“After all, why not?  Why should the
+Absolute Goodness be like our human goodness?”  This is Plotinus’s own
+belief.  It is a question with him, it was still more a question with
+those who came after him, whether virtues could be predicated of the
+Divine nature; courage, for instance, of one who had nothing to fear;
+self-restraint, of one who had nothing to desire.  And thus, by setting
+up a different standard of morality for the divine and for the human,
+Plotinus gradually arrives at the conclusion, that virtue is not the end,
+but the means; not the Divine nature itself, as the Christian schools
+held, but only the purgative process by which man was to ascend into
+heaven, and which was necessary to arrive at that nature—that nature
+itself being—what?
+
+And how to answer that last question was the abysmal problem of the whole
+of Neoplatonic philosophy, in searching for which it wearied itself out,
+generation after generation, till tired equally of seeking and of
+speaking, it fairly lay down and died.  In proportion as it refused to
+acknowledge a common divine nature with the degraded mass, it deserted
+its first healthy instinct, which told it that the spiritual world is
+identical with the moral world, with right, love, justice; it tried to
+find new definitions for the spiritual; it conceived it to be identical
+with the intellectual.  That did not satisfy its heart.  It had to
+repeople the spiritual world, which it had emptied of its proper
+denizens, with ghosts; to reinvent the old dæmonologies and
+polytheisms—from thence to descend into lower depths, of which we will
+speak hereafter.
+
+But in the meanwhile we must look at another quarrel which arose between
+the two twin schools of Alexandria.  The Neoplatonists said that there is
+a divine element in man.  The Christian philosophers assented fervently,
+and raised the old disagreeable question: “Is it in every man?  In the
+publicans and harlots as well as in the philosophers?  We say that it
+is.”  And there again the Neoplatonist finds it over hard to assent to a
+doctrine, equally contrary to outward appearance, and galling to
+Pharisaic pride; and enters into a hundred honest self-puzzles and
+self-contradictions, which seem to justify him at last in saying, No.  It
+is in the philosopher, who is ready by nature, as Plotinus has it, and as
+it were furnished with wings, and not needing to sever himself from
+matter like the rest, but disposed already to ascend to that which is
+above.  And in a degree too, it is in the “lover,” who, according to
+Plotinus, has a certain innate recollection of beauty, and hovers round
+it, and desires it, wherever he sees it.  Him you may raise to the
+apprehension of the one incorporeal Beauty, by teaching him to separate
+beauty from the various objects in which it appears scattered and
+divided.  And it is even in the third class, the lowest of whom there is
+hope, namely, the musical man, capable of being passively affected by
+beauty, without having any active appetite for it; the sentimentalist, in
+short, as we should call him nowadays.
+
+But for the herd, Plotinus cannot say that there is anything divine in
+them.  And thus it gradually comes out in all Neoplatonist writings which
+I have yet examined, that the Divine only exists in a man, in proportion
+as he is conscious of its existence in him.  From which spring two
+conceptions of the Divine in man.  First, is it a part of him, if it is
+dependent for its existence on his consciousness of it? Or is it, as
+Philo, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius would have held, as the Christians held,
+something independent of him, without him, a Logos or Word speaking to
+his reason and conscience?  With this question Plotinus grapples,
+earnestly, shrewdly, fairly.  If you wish to see how he does it, you
+should read the fourth and fifth books of the sixth Ennead, especially if
+you be lucky enough to light on a copy of that rare book, Taylor’s
+faithful though crabbed translation.
+
+Not that the result of his search is altogether satisfactory.  He enters
+into subtle and severe disquisitions concerning soul.  Whether it is one
+or many.  How it can be both one and many.  He has the strongest
+perception that, to use the noble saying of the Germans, “Time and Space
+are no gods.”  He sees clearly that the soul, and the whole unseen world
+of truly existing being, is independent of time and space: and yet, after
+he has wrestled with the two Titans, through page after page, and
+apparently conquered them, they slip in again unawares into the
+battle-field, the moment his back is turned.  He denies that the one
+Reason has parts—it must exist as a whole wheresoever it exists: and yet
+he cannot express the relation of the individual soul to it, but by
+saying that we are parts of it; or that each thing, down to the lowest,
+receives as much soul as it is capable of possessing.  Ritter has worked
+out at length, though in a somewhat dry and lifeless way, the hundred
+contradictions of this kind which you meet in Plotinus; contradictions
+which I suspect to be inseparable from any philosophy starting from his
+grounds.  Is he not looking for the spiritual in a region where it does
+not exist; in the region of logical conceptions and abstractions, which
+are not realities, but only, after all, symbols of our own, whereby we
+express to ourselves the processes of our own brain?  May not his
+Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well as
+nearer the common sense and practical belief of mankind, in holding that
+that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be seen or conceived of
+as residing in persons; and that that which is personal is moral, and has
+to do, not with abstractions of the intellect, but with right and wrong,
+love and hate, and all which, in the common instincts of men, involves a
+free will, a free judgment, a free responsibility and desert? And that,
+therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Dæmonic Element, an universal
+Reason, a Logos, a Divine Element, closely connected with man, that one
+Reason, that one Divine Element, must be a person also?  At least, so
+strong was the instinct of even the Heathen schools in this direction,
+that the followers of Plotinus had to fill up the void which yawned
+between man and the invisible things after which he yearned, by reviving
+the whole old Pagan Polytheism, and adding to it a Dæmonology borrowed
+partly from the Chaldees, and partly from the Jewish rabbis, which formed
+a descending chain of persons, downward from the highest Deities to
+heroes, and to the guardian angel of each man; the meed of the
+philosopher being, that by self-culture and self-restraint he could rise
+above the tutelage of some lower and more earthly dæmon, and become the
+pupil of a God, and finally a God himself.
+
+These contradictions need not lower the great Father of Neoplatonism in
+our eyes, as a moral being.  All accounts of him seem to prove him to
+have been what Apollo, in a lengthy oracle, declared him to have been,
+“good and gentle, and benignant exceedingly, and pleasant in all his
+conversation.”  He gave good advice about earthly matters, was a faithful
+steward of moneys deposited with him, a guardian of widows and orphans, a
+righteous and loving man.  In his practical life, the ascetic and gnostic
+element comes out strongly enough.  The body, with him, was not evil,
+neither was it good; it was simply nothing—why care about it? He would
+have no portrait taken of his person: “It was humiliating enough to be
+obliged to carry a shadow about with him, without having a shadow made of
+that shadow.”  He refused animal food, abstained from baths, declined
+medicine in his last illness, and so died about 200 A.D.
+
+It is in his followers, as one generally sees in such cases, that the
+weakness of his conceptions comes out.  Plotinus was an earnest thinker,
+slavishly enough reverencing the opinion of Plato, whom he quotes as an
+infallible oracle, with a “He says,” as if there were but one he in the
+universe: but he tried honestly to develop Plato, or what he conceived to
+be Plato, on the method which Plato had laid down.  His dialectic is far
+superior, both in quantity and in quality, to that of those who come
+after him.  He is a seeker.  His followers are not.  The great work which
+marks the second stage of his school is not an inquiry, but a
+justification, not only of the Egyptian, but of all possible theurgies
+and superstitions; perhaps the best attempt of the kind which the world
+has ever seen; that which marks the third is a mere cloud-castle, an
+inverted pyramid, not of speculation, but of dogmatic assertion, patched
+together from all accessible rags and bones of the dead world.  Some here
+will, perhaps, guess from my rough descriptions, that I speak of
+Iamblichus and Proclus.
+
+Whether or not Iamblichus wrote the famous work usually attributed to
+him, which describes itself as the letter of Abamnon the Teacher to
+Porphyry, he became the head of that school of Neoplatonists who fell
+back on theurgy and magic, and utterly swallowed up the more rational,
+though more hopeless, school of Porphyry.  Not that Porphyry, too, with
+all his dislike of magic and the vulgar superstitions—a dislike
+intimately connected with his loudly expressed dislike of the common
+herd, and therefore of Christianity, as a religion for the common
+herd—did not believe a fact or two, which looks to us, nowadays, somewhat
+unphilosophical.  From him we learn that one Ammonius, trying to crush
+Plotinus by magic arts, had his weapons so completely turned against
+himself, that all his limbs were contracted.  From him we learn that
+Plotinus, having summoned in the temple of Isis his familiar spirit, a
+god, and not a mere dæmon, appeared.  He writes sensibly enough however
+to one Anebos, an Egyptian priest, stating his doubts as to the popular
+notions of the Gods, as beings subject to human passions and vices, and
+of theurgy and magic, as material means of compelling them to appear, or
+alluring them to favour man.  The answer of Abamnon, Anebos, Iamblichus,
+or whoever the real author may have been, is worthy of perusal by every
+metaphysical student, as a curious phase of thought, not confined to that
+time, but rife, under some shape or other, in every age of the world’s
+history, and in this as much as in any.  There are many passages full of
+eloquence, many more full of true and noble thought: but on the whole, it
+is the sewing of new cloth into an old garment; the attempt to suit the
+old superstition to the new one, by eclectically picking and choosing,
+and special pleading, on both sides; but the rent is only made worse.
+There is no base superstition which Abamnon does not unconsciously
+justify.  And yet he is rapidly losing sight of the real eternal human
+germs of truth round which those superstitions clustered, and is really
+further from truth and reason than old Homer or Hesiod, because further
+from the simple, universal, everyday facts, and relations, and duties of
+man, which are, after all, among the most mysterious, and also among the
+most sacred objects which man can contemplate.
+
+It was not wonderful, however, that Neoplatonism took the course it did.
+Spirit, they felt rightly, was meant to rule matter; it was to be freed
+from matter only for that very purpose.  No one could well deny that.
+The philosopher, as he rose and became, according to Plotinus, a god, or
+at least approached toward the gods, must partake of some mysterious and
+transcendental power.  No one could well deny that conclusion, granting
+the premiss.  But of what power?  What had he to show as the result of
+his intimate communion with an unseen Being?  The Christian Schools, who
+held that the spiritual is the moral, answered accordingly.  He must show
+righteousness, and love, and peace in a Holy Spirit.  That is the
+likeness of God.  In proportion as a man has them, he is partaker of a
+Divine nature.  He can rise no higher, and he needs no more.  Platonists
+had said—No, that is only virtue; and virtue is the means, not the end.
+We want proof of having something above that; something more than any man
+of the herd, any Christian slave, can perform; something above nature;
+portents and wonders.  So they set to work to perform wonders; and
+succeeded, I suppose, more or less.  For now one enters into a whole
+fairyland of those very phenomena which are puzzling us so
+nowadays—ecstasy, clairvoyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by
+the effect of what we now call mesmerism.  They are all there, these
+modern puzzles, in those old books of the long bygone seekers for wisdom.
+It makes us love them, while it saddens us to see that their difficulties
+were the same as ours, and that there is nothing new under the sun.  Of
+course, a great deal of it all was “imagination.”  But the question then,
+as now is, what is this wonder-working imagination?—unless the word be
+used as a mere euphemism for lying, which really, in many cases, is
+hardly fair.  We cannot wonder at the old Neoplatonists for attributing
+these strange phenomena to spiritual influence, when we see some who
+ought to know better doing the same thing now; and others, who more
+wisely believe them to be strictly physical and nervous, so utterly
+unable to give reasons for them, that they feel it expedient to ignore
+them for awhile, till they know more about those physical phenomena which
+can be put under some sort of classification, and attributed to some sort
+of inductive law.
+
+But again.  These ecstasies, cures, and so forth, brought them rapidly
+back to the old priestcrafts.  The Egyptian priests, the Babylonian and
+Jewish sorcerers, had practised all this as a trade for ages, and reduced
+it to an art.  It was by sleeping in the temples of the deities, after
+due mesmeric manipulations, that cures were even then effected.  Surely
+the old priests were the people to whom to go for information.  The old
+philosophers of Greece were venerable.  How much more those of the East,
+in comparison with whom the Greeks were children?  Besides, if these
+dæmons and deities were so near them, might it not be possible to behold
+them?  They seemed to have given up caring much for the world and its
+course—
+
+             Effugerant adytis templisque relictis
+    Dî quibus imperium steterat.
+
+The old priests used to make them appear—perhaps they might do it again.
+And if spirit could act directly and preternaturally on matter, in spite
+of the laws of matter, perhaps matter might act on spirit.  After all,
+were matter and spirit so absolutely different?  Was not spirit some sort
+of pervading essence, some subtle ethereal fluid, differing from matter
+principally in being less gross and dense?  This was the point to which
+they went down rapidly enough; the point to which all philosophies, I
+firmly believe, will descend, which do not keep in sight that the
+spiritual means the moral.  In trying to make it mean exclusively the
+intellectual, they will degrade it to mean the merely logical and
+abstract; and when that is found to be a barren and lifeless phantom, a
+mere projection of the human brain, attributing reality to mere
+conceptions and names, and confusing the subject with the object, as
+logicians say truly the Neoplatonists did, then in despair, the school
+will try to make the spiritual something real, or, at least, something
+conceivable, by reinvesting it with the properties of matter, and talking
+of it as if it were some manner of gas, or heat, or electricity, or
+force, pervading time and space, conditioned by the accidents of brute
+matter, and a part of that nature which is born to die.
+
+The culmination of all this confusion we see in Proclus.  The unfortunate
+Hypatia, who is the most important personage between him and Iamblichus,
+has left no writings to our times; we can only judge of her doctrine by
+that of her instructors and her pupils.  Proclus was taught by the men
+who had heard her lecture; and the golden chain of the Platonic
+succession descended from her to him.  His throne, however, was at
+Athens, not at Alexandria.  After the murder of the maiden philosopher,
+Neoplatonism prudently retired to Greece.  But Proclus is so essentially
+the child of the Alexandrian school that we cannot pass him over.
+Indeed, according to M. Cousin, as I am credibly informed, he is _the_
+Greek philosopher; the flower and crown of all its schools; in whom, says
+the learned Frenchman, “are combined, and from whom shine forth, in no
+irregular or uncertain rays, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno,
+Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus;” and who “had so comprehended all
+religions in his mind, and paid them such equal reverence, that he was,
+as it were, the priest of the whole universe!”
+
+I have not the honour of knowing much of M. Cousin’s works.  I never came
+across them but on one small matter of fact, and on that I found him
+copying at second hand an anachronism which one would have conceived
+palpable to any reader of the original authorities.  This is all I know
+of him, saving these his raptures over Proclus, of which I have quoted
+only a small portion, and of which I can only say, in Mr. Thomas
+Carlyle’s words, “What things men will worship, in their extreme need!”
+Other moderns, however, have expressed their admiration of Proclus; and,
+no doubt, many neat sayings may be found in him (for after all he was a
+Greek), which will be both pleasing and useful to those who consider
+philosophic method to consist in putting forth strings of brilliant
+apophthegms, careless about either their consistency or coherence: but of
+the method of Plato or Aristotle, any more than of that of Kant or Mill,
+you will find nothing in him.  He seems to my simplicity to be at once
+the most timid and servile of commentators, and the most cloudy of
+declaimers.  He can rave symbolism like Jacob Böhmen, but without an atom
+of his originality and earnestness.  He can develop an inverted pyramid
+of dæmonology, like Father Newman himself, but without an atom of his
+art, his knowledge of human cravings.  He combines all schools, truly,
+Chaldee and Egyptian as well as Greek; but only scraps from their
+mummies, drops from their quintessences, which satisfy the heart and
+conscience as little as they do the logical faculties.  His Greek gods
+and heroes, even his Alcibiades and Socrates, are “ideas;” that is,
+symbols of certain notions or qualities: their flesh and bones, their
+heart and brain, have been distilled away, till nothing is left but a
+word, a notion, which may patch a hole in his huge
+heaven-and-earth-embracing system.  He, too, is a commentator and a
+deducer; all has been discovered; and he tries to discover nothing more.
+Those who followed him seem to have commented on his comments.  With him
+Neoplatonism properly ends.  Is its last utterance a culmination or a
+fall?  Have the Titans sealed heaven, or died of old age, “exhibiting,”
+as Gibbon says of them, “a deplorable instance of the senility of the
+human mind?” Read Proclus, and judge for yourselves: but first contrive
+to finish everything else you have to do which can possibly be useful to
+any human being.  Life is short, and Art—at least the art of obtaining
+practical guidance from the last of the Alexandrians—very long.
+
+And yet—if Proclus and his school became gradually unfaithful to the
+great root-idea of their philosophy, we must not imitate them.  We must
+not believe that the last of the Alexandrians was under no divine
+teaching, because he had be-systemed himself into confused notions of
+what that teaching was like.  Yes, there was good in poor old Proclus;
+and it too came from the only source whence all good comes.  Were there
+no good in him I could not laugh at him as I have done; I could only hate
+him.  There are moments when he rises above his theories; moments when he
+recurs in spirit, if not in the letter, to the faith of Homer, almost to
+the faith of Philo.  Whether these are the passages of his which his
+modern admirers prize most, I cannot tell.  I should fancy not:
+nevertheless I will read you one of them.
+
+He is about to commence his discourses on the Parmenides, that book in
+which we generally now consider that Plato has been most untrue to
+himself, and fallen from his usual inductive method to the ground of a
+mere _à priori_ theoriser—and yet of which Proclus is reported to have
+said, and, I should conceive, said honestly, that if it, the Timæus, and
+the Orphic fragments were preserved, he did not care whether every other
+book on earth were destroyed.  But how does he commence?
+
+“I pray to all the gods and goddesses to guide my reason in the
+speculation which lies before me, and having kindled in me the pure light
+of truth, to direct my mind upward to the very knowledge of the things
+which are, and to open the doors of my soul to receive the divine
+guidance of Plato, and, having directed my knowledge into the very
+brightness of being, to withdraw me from the various forms of opinion,
+from the apparent wisdom, from the wandering about things which do not
+exist, by that purest intellectual exercise about the things which do
+exist, whereby alone the eye of the soul is nourished and brightened, as
+Socrates says in the Phædrus; and that the Noetic Gods will give to me
+the perfect reason, and the Noeric Gods the power which leads up to this,
+and that the rulers of the Universe above the heaven will impart to me an
+energy unshaken by material notions and emancipated from them, and those
+to whom the world is given as their dominion a winged life, and the
+angelic choirs a true manifestation of divine things, and the good dæmons
+the fulness of the inspiration which comes from the Gods, and the heroes
+a grand, and venerable, and lofty fixedness of mind, and the whole divine
+race together a perfect preparation for sharing in Plato’s most mystical
+and far-seeing speculations, which he declares to us himself in the
+Parmenides, with the profundity befitting such topics, but which _he_
+(_i.e._ his master Syrianus) completed by his most pure and luminous
+apprehensions, who did most truly share the Platonic feast, and was the
+medium for transmitting the divine truth, the guide in our speculations,
+and the hierophant of these divine words; who, as I think, came down as a
+type of philosophy, to do good to the souls that are here, in place of
+idols, sacrifices, and the whole mystery of purification, a leader of
+salvation to the men who are now and who shall be hereafter.  And may the
+whole band of those who are above us be propitious; and may the whole
+force which they supply be at hand, kindling before us that light which,
+proceeding from them, may guide us to them.”
+
+Surely this is an interesting document.  The last Pagan Greek prayer, I
+believe, which we have on record; the death-wail of the old world—not
+without a touch of melody.  One cannot altogether admire the style; it is
+inflated, pedantic, written, I fear, with a considerable consciousness
+that he was saying the right thing and in the very finest way: but still
+it is a prayer.  A cry for light—by no means, certainly, like that noble
+one in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam:”
+
+    So runs my dream.  But what am I?
+       An infant crying in the night;
+       An infant crying for the light;
+    And with no language but a cry.
+
+Yet he asks for light: perhaps he had settled already for himself—like
+too many more of us—what sort of light he chose to have: but still the
+eye is turned upward to the sun, not inward in conceited fancy that self
+is its own illumination.  He asks—surely not in vain.  There was light to
+be had for asking.  That prayer certainly was not answered in the letter:
+it may have been ere now in the spirit.  And yet it is a sad prayer
+enough.  Poor old man, and poor old philosophy!
+
+This he and his teachers had gained by despising the simpler and yet far
+profounder doctrine of the Christian schools, that the Logos, the Divine
+Teacher in whom both Christians and Heathens believed, was the very
+archetype of men, and that He had proved that fact by being made flesh,
+and dwelling bodily among them, that they might behold His glory, full of
+grace and truth, and see that it was at once the perfection of man and
+the perfection of God: that that which was most divine was most human,
+and that which was most human, most divine.  That was the outcome of
+_their_ metaphysic, that they had found the Absolute One; because One
+existed in whom the apparent antagonism between that which is eternally
+and that which becomes in time, between the ideal and the actual, between
+the spiritual and the material, in a word, between God and man, was
+explained and reconciled for ever.
+
+And Proclus’s prayer, on the other hand, was the outcome of the
+Neoplatonists’ metaphysic, the end of all _their_ search after the One,
+the Indivisible, the Absolute, this cry to all manner of innumerable
+phantoms, ghosts of ideas, ghosts of traditions, neither things nor
+persons, but thoughts, to give the philosopher each something or other,
+according to the nature of each.  Not that he very clearly defines what
+each is to give him; but still he feels himself in want of all manner of
+things, and it is as well to have as many friends at court as
+possible—Noetic Gods, Noeric Gods, rulers, angels, dæmons, heroes—to
+enable him to do what?  To understand Plato’s most mystical and
+far-seeing speculations.  The Eternal Nous, the Intellectual Teacher has
+vanished further and further off; further off still some dim vision of a
+supreme Goodness.  Infinite spaces above that looms through the mist of
+the abyss a Primæval One.  But even that has a predicate, for it is one;
+it is not pure essence.  Must there not be something beyond that again,
+which is not even one, but is nameless, inconceivable, absolute?  What an
+abyss!  How shall the human mind find anything whereon to rest, in the
+vast nowhere between it and the object of its search?  The search after
+the One issues in a wail to the innumerable; and kind gods, angels, and
+heroes, not human indeed, but still conceivable enough to satisfy at
+least the imagination, step in to fill the void, as they have done since,
+and may do again; and so, as Mr. Carlyle has it, “the bottomless pit got
+roofed over,” as it may be again ere long.
+
+Are we then to say, that Neoplatonism was a failure?  That Alexandria,
+during four centuries of profound and earnest thought, added nothing?
+Heaven forbid that we should say so of a philosophy which has exercised
+on European thought, at the crisis of its noblest life and action, an
+influence as great as did the Aristotelian system during the Middle Ages.
+We must never forget, that during the two centuries which commence with
+the fall of Constantinople, and end with our civil wars, not merely
+almost all great thinkers, but courtiers, statesmen, warriors, poets,
+were more or less Neoplatonists.  The Greek grammarians, who migrated
+into Italy, brought with them the works of Plotinus, Iamblichus, and
+Proclus; and their gorgeous reveries were welcomed eagerly by the
+European mind, just revelling in the free thought of youthful manhood.
+And yet the Alexandrian impotence for any practical and social purposes
+was to be manifested, as utterly as it was in Alexandria or in Athens of
+old.  Ficinus and Picus of Mirandola worked no deliverance, either for
+Italian morals or polity, at a time when such deliverance was needed
+bitterly enough.  Neoplatonism was petted by luxurious and heathen popes,
+as an elegant play of the cultivated fancy, which could do their real
+power, their practical system, neither good nor harm.  And one cannot
+help feeling, while reading the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual
+Love, which Castiglione, in his admirable book “The Courtier,” puts into
+the mouth of the profligate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely
+to dilettantism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself.  But in
+England, during Elizabeth’s reign, the practical weakness of Neoplatonism
+was compensated by the noble practical life which men were compelled to
+live in those great times; by the strong hold which they had of the ideas
+of family and national life, of law and personal faith.  And I cannot but
+believe it to have been a mighty gain to such men as Sidney, Raleigh, and
+Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of the wells of Proclus
+and Plotinus.  One cannot read Spenser’s “Fairy Queen,” above all his
+Garden of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability, without feeling that his
+Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from many a dark eschatological
+superstition, many a narrow and bitter dogmatism, which was even then
+tormenting the English mind, and must have helped to give him altogether
+a freer and more loving conception, if not a consistent or accurate one,
+of the wondrous harmony of that mysterious analogy between the physical
+and the spiritual, which alone makes poetry (and I had almost said
+philosophy also) possible, and have taught him to behold alike in suns
+and planets, in flowers and insects, in man and in beings higher than
+man, one glorious order of love and wisdom, linking them all to Him from
+whom they all proceed, rays from His cloudless sunlight, mirrors of His
+eternal glory.
+
+But as the Elizabethan age, exhausted by its own fertility, gave place to
+the Caroline, Neoplatonism ran through much the same changes.  It was
+good for us, after all, that the plain strength of the Puritans,
+unphilosophical as they were, swept it away.  One feels in reading the
+later Neoplatonists, Henry More, Smith, even Cudworth (valuable as he
+is), that the old accursed distinction between the philosopher, the
+scholar, the illuminate, and the plain righteous man, was growing up
+again very fast.  The school from which the “Religio Medici” issued was
+not likely to make any bad men good, or any foolish men wise.
+
+Besides, as long as men were continuing to quote poor old Proclus as an
+irrefragable authority, and believing that he, forsooth, represented the
+sense of Plato, the new-born Baconian philosophy had but little chance in
+the world.  Bacon had been right in his dislike of Platonism years
+before, though he was unjust to Plato himself.  It was Proclus whom he
+was really reviling; Proclus as Plato’s commentator and representative.
+The lion had for once got into the ass’s skin, and was treated
+accordingly.  The true Platonic method, that dialectic which the
+Alexandrians gradually abandoned, remains yet to be tried, both in
+England and in Germany; and I am much mistaken, if, when fairly used, it
+be not found the ally, not the enemy, of the Baconian philosophy; in
+fact, the inductive method applied to words, as the expressions of
+Metaphysic Laws, instead of to natural phenomena, as the expressions of
+Physical ones.  If you wish to see the highest instances of this method,
+read Plato himself, not Proclus.  If you wish to see how the same method
+can be applied to Christian truth, read the dialectic passages in
+Augustine’s “Confessions.”  Whether or not you shall agree with their
+conclusions, you will not be likely, if you have a truly scientific habit
+of mind, to complain that they want either profundity, severity, or
+simplicity.
+
+So concludes the history of one of the Alexandrian schools of Metaphysic.
+What was the fate of the other is a subject which I must postpone to my
+next Lecture.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE IV.
+THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT.
+
+
+I TRIED to point out, in my last Lecture, the causes which led to the
+decay of the Pagan metaphysic of Alexandria.  We have now to consider the
+fate of the Christian school.
+
+You may have remarked that I have said little or nothing about the
+positive dogmas of Clement, Origen, and their disciples; but have only
+brought out the especial points of departure between them and the
+Heathens.  My reason for so doing was twofold: first, I could not have
+examined them without entering on controversial ground; next, I am very
+desirous to excite some of my hearers, at least, to examine these
+questions for themselves.
+
+I entreat them not to listen to the hasty sneer to which many of late
+have given way, that the Alexandrian divines were mere mystics, who
+corrupted Christianity by an admixture of Oriental and Greek thought.  My
+own belief is that they expanded and corroborated Christianity, in spite
+of great errors and defects on certain points, far more than they
+corrupted it; that they presented it to the minds of cultivated and
+scientific men in the only form in which it would have satisfied their
+philosophic aspirations, and yet contrived, with wonderful wisdom, to
+ground their philosophy on the very same truths which they taught to the
+meanest slaves, and to appeal in the philosophers to the same inward
+faculty to which they appealed in the slave; namely, to that inward eye,
+that moral sense and reason, whereby each and every man can, if he will,
+“judge of himself that which is right.”  I boldly say that I believe the
+Alexandrian Christians to have made the best, perhaps the only, attempt
+yet made by men, to proclaim a true world-philosophy; whereby I mean a
+philosophy common to all races, ranks, and intellects, embracing the
+whole phenomena of humanity, and not an arbitrarily small portion of
+them, and capable of being understood and appreciated by every human
+being from the highest to the lowest.  And when you hear of a system of
+reserve in teaching, a _disciplina arcani_, of an esoteric and exoteric,
+an inner and outer school, among these men, you must not be frightened at
+the words, as if they spoke of priestcraft, or an intellectual
+aristocracy, who kept the kernel of the nut for themselves, and gave the
+husks to the mob.  It was not so with the Christian schools; it was so
+with the Heathen ones.  The Heathens were content that the mob, the herd,
+should have the husks.  Their avowed intention and wish was to leave the
+herd, as they called them, in the mere outward observance of the old
+idolatries, while they themselves, the cultivated philosophers, had the
+monopoly of those deeper spiritual truths which were contained under the
+old superstitions, and were too sacred to be profaned by the vulgar eyes.
+The Christian method was the exact opposite.  They boldly called those
+vulgar eyes to enter into the very holy of holies, and there gaze on the
+very deepest root-ideas of their philosophy.  They owned no ground for
+their own speculations which was not common to the harlots and the slaves
+around.  And this was what enabled them to do this; this was what brought
+on them the charge of demagogism, the hatred of philosophers, the
+persecution of princes—that their ground was a moral ground, and not a
+merely intellectual one; that they started, not from any notions of the
+understanding, but from the inward conscience, that truly pure Reason in
+which the intellectual and the moral spheres are united, which they
+believed to exist, however dimmed or crushed, in every human being,
+capable of being awakened, purified, and raised up to a noble and heroic
+life.  They concealed nothing moral from their disciples: only they
+forbade them to meddle with intellectual matters, before they had had a
+regular intellectual training.  The witnesses of reason and conscience
+were sufficient guides for all men, and at them the many might well stop
+short.  The teacher only needed to proceed further, not into a higher
+region, but into a lower one, namely, into the region of the logical
+understanding, and there make deductions from, and illustrations of,
+those higher truths which he held in common with every slave, and held on
+the same ground as they.
+
+And the consequence of this method of philosophising was patent.  They
+were enabled to produce, in the lives of millions, generation after
+generation, a more immense moral improvement than the world had ever seen
+before.  Their disciples did actually become righteous and good men, just
+in proportion as they were true to the lessons they learnt.  They did,
+for centuries, work a distinct and palpable deliverance on the earth;
+while all the solemn and earnest meditation of the Neoplatonists, however
+good or true, worked no deliverance whatsoever.  Plotinus longed at one
+time to make a practical attempt.  He asked the Emperor Gallienus, his
+patron, to rebuild for him a city in Campania; to allow him to call it
+Platonopolis, and put it into the hands of him and his disciples, that
+they might there realise Plato’s ideal republic.  Luckily for the
+reputation of Neoplatonism, the scheme was swamped by the courtiers of
+Gallienus, and the earth was saved the sad and ludicrous sight of a
+realised Laputa; probably a very quarrelsome one.  That was his highest
+practical conception: the foundation of a new society: not the
+regeneration of society as it existed.
+
+That work was left for the Christian schools; and up to a certain point
+they performed it.  They made men good.  _This_ was the test, which of
+the schools was in the right: this was the test, which of the two had
+hold of the eternal roots of metaphysic.  Cicero says, that he had learnt
+more philosophy from the Laws of the Twelve Tables than from all the
+Greeks.  Clement and his school might have said the same of the Hebrew
+Ten Commandments and Jewish Law, which are so marvellously analogous to
+the old Roman laws, founded, as they are, on the belief in a Supreme
+Being, a Jupiter—literally a Heavenly Father—who is the source and the
+sanction of law; of whose justice man’s justice is the pattern; who is
+the avenger of crimes against marriage, property, life; on whom depends
+the sanctity of an oath.  And so, to compare great things with small,
+there was a truly practical human element here in the Christian teaching;
+purely ethical and metaphysical, and yet palpable to the simplest and
+lowest, which gave to it a regenerating force which the highest efforts
+of Neoplatonism could never attain.
+
+And yet Alexandrian Christianity, notoriously enough, rotted away, and
+perished hideously.  Most true.  But what if the causes of its decay and
+death were owing to its being untrue to itself?
+
+I do not say that they had no excuses for being untrue to their own
+faith.  We are not here to judge them.  That peculiar subtlety of mind,
+which rendered the Alexandrians the great thinkers of the then world, had
+with Christians, as well as Heathens, the effect of alluring them away
+from practice to speculation.  The Christian school, as was to be
+expected from the moral ground of their philosophy, yielded to it far
+more slowly than the Heathen, but they did yield, and especially after
+they had conquered and expelled the Heathen school.  Moreover, the long
+battle with the Heathen school had stirred up in them habits of
+exclusiveness, of denunciation; the spirit which cannot assert a fact,
+without dogmatising rashly and harshly on the consequences of denying
+that fact.  Their minds assumed a permanent habit of combativeness.
+Having no more Heathens to fight, they began fighting each other,
+excommunicating each other; denying to all who differed from them any
+share of that light, to claim which for all men had been the very ground
+of their philosophy.  Not that they would have refused the Logos to all
+men in words.  They would have cursed a man for denying the existence of
+the Logos in every man; but they would have equally cursed him for acting
+on his existence in practice, and treating the heretic as one who had
+that within him to which a preacher might appeal.  Thus they became
+Dogmatists; that is, men who assert a truth so fiercely, as to forget
+that a truth is meant to be used, and not merely asserted—if, indeed, the
+fierce assertion of a truth in frail man is not generally a sign of some
+secret doubt of it, and in inverse proportion to his practical living
+faith in it: just as he who is always telling you that he is a man, is
+not the most likely to behave like a man.  And why did this befall them?
+Because they forgot practically that the light proceeded from a Person.
+They could argue over notions and dogmas deduced from the notion of His
+personality: but they were shut up in those notions; they had forgotten
+that if He was a Person, His eye was on them, His rule and kingdom within
+them; and that if He was a Person, He had a character, and that that
+character was a righteous and a loving character: and therefore they were
+not ashamed, in defending these notions and dogmas about Him, to commit
+acts abhorrent to His character, to lie, to slander, to intrigue, to
+hate, even to murder, for the sake of what they madly called His glory:
+but which was really only their own glory—the glory of their own dogmas;
+of propositions and conclusions in their own brain, which, true or false,
+were equally heretical in their mouths, because they used them only as
+watchwords of division.  Orthodox or unorthodox, they lost the knowledge
+of God, for they lost the knowledge of righteousness, and love, and
+peace.  That Divine Logos, and theology as a whole, receded further and
+further aloft into abysmal heights, as it became a mere dreary system of
+dead scientific terms, having no practical bearing on their hearts and
+lives; and then they, as the Neoplatonists had done before them, filled
+up the void by those dæmonologies, images, base Fetish worships, which
+made the Mohammedan invaders regard them, and I believe justly, as
+polytheists and idolaters, base as the pagan Arabs of the desert.
+
+I cannot but believe them, moreover, to have been untrue to the teaching
+of Clement and his school, in that coarse and materialist admiration of
+celibacy which ruined Alexandrian society, as their dogmatic ferocity
+ruined Alexandrian thought.  The Creed which taught them that in the
+person of the Incarnate Logos, that which was most divine had been proved
+to be most human, that which was most human had been proved to be most
+divine, ought surely to have given to them, as it has given to modern
+Europe, nobler, clearer, simpler views of the true relation of the sexes.
+However, on this matter they did not see their way.  Perhaps, in so
+debased an age, so profligate a world, as that out of which Christianity
+had risen, it was impossible to see the true beauty and sanctity of those
+primary bonds of humanity.  And while the relation of the sexes was
+looked on in a wrong light, all other social relations were necessarily
+also misconceived.  “The very ideas of family and national life,” as it
+has been said, “those two divine roots of the Church, severed from which
+she is certain to wither away into that most cruel and most godless of
+spectres, a religious world, had perished in the East, from the evil
+influence of the universal practice of slave-holding, as well as from the
+degradation of that Jewish nation which had been for ages the great
+witness for these ideas; and all classes, like their forefather
+Adam—like, indeed, the Old Adam—the selfish, cowardly, brute nature in
+every man and in every age—were shifting the blame of sin from their own
+consciences to human relationships and duties, and therein, to the God
+who had appointed them; and saying, as of old, ‘The woman whom Thou
+gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’”
+
+Much as Christianity did, even in Egypt, for woman, by asserting her
+moral and spiritual equality with the man, there seems to have been no
+suspicion that she was the true complement of the man, not merely by
+softening him, but by strengthening him; that true manhood can be no more
+developed without the influence of the woman, than true womanhood without
+the influence of the man.  There is no trace among the Egyptian celibates
+of that chivalrous woman-worship which our Gothic forefathers brought
+with them into the West, which shed a softening and ennobling light round
+the mediæval convent life, and warded off for centuries the worst effects
+of monasticism.  Among the religious of Egypt, the monk regarded the nun,
+the nun the monk, with dread and aversion; while both looked on the
+married population of the opposite sex with a coarse contempt and disgust
+which is hardly credible, did not the foul records of it stand written to
+this day, in Rosweyde’s extraordinary “Vitæ Patrum Eremiticorum;” no
+barren school of metaphysic, truly, for those who are philosophic enough
+to believe that all phenomena whatsoever of the human mind are worthy
+matter for scientific induction.
+
+And thus grew up in Egypt a monastic world, of such vastness that it was
+said to equal in number the laity.  This produced, no doubt, an enormous
+increase in the actual amount of moral evil.  But it produced three other
+effects, which were the ruin of Alexandria.  First, a continually growing
+enervation and numerical decrease of the population; next, a carelessness
+of, and contempt for social and political life; and lastly, a most
+brutalising effect on the lay population; who, told that they were, and
+believing themselves to be, beings of a lower order, and living by a
+lower standard, sank down more and more generation after generation.
+They were of the world, and the ways of the world they must follow.
+Political life had no inherent sanctity or nobleness; why act holily and
+nobly in it?  Family life had no inherent sanctity or nobleness; why act
+holily and nobly in it either, if there were no holy, noble, and divine
+principle or ground for it?  And thus grew up, both in Egypt, Syria, and
+Byzantium, a chaos of profligacy and chicanery, in rulers and people, in
+the home and the market, in the theatre and the senate, such as the world
+has rarely seen before or since; a chaos which reached its culmination in
+the seventh century, the age of Justinian and Theodora, perhaps the two
+most hideous sovereigns, worshipped by the most hideous empire of
+parasites and hypocrites, cowards and wantons, that ever insulted the
+long-suffering of a righteous God.
+
+But, for Alexandria at least, the cup was now full.  In the year 640 the
+Alexandrians were tearing each other in pieces about some Jacobite and
+Melchite controversy, to me incomprehensible, to you unimportant, because
+the fighters on both sides seem to have lost (as all parties do in their
+old age) the knowledge of what they were fighting for, and to have so
+bewildered the question with personal intrigues, spites, and quarrels, as
+to make it nearly as enigmatic as that famous contemporary war between
+the blue and green factions at Constantinople, which began by backing in
+the theatre, the charioteers who drove in blue dresses, against those
+wild drove in green; then went on to identify themselves each with one of
+the prevailing theological factions; gradually developed, the one into an
+aristocratic, the other into a democratic, religious party; and ended by
+a civil war in the streets of Constantinople, accompanied by the most
+horrible excesses, which had nearly, at one time, given up the city to
+the flames, and driven Justinian from his throne.
+
+In the midst of these Jacobite and Melchite controversies and riots,
+appeared before the city the armies of certain wild and unlettered Arab
+tribes.  A short and fruitless struggle followed; and, strange to say, a
+few months swept away from the face of the earth, not only the wealth,
+the commerce, the castles, and the liberty, but the philosophy and the
+Christianity of Alexandria; crushed to powder by one fearful blow, all
+that had been built up by Alexander and the Ptolemies, by Clement and the
+philosophers, and made void, to all appearance, nine hundred years of
+human toil.  The people, having no real hold on their hereditary Creed,
+accepted, by tens of thousands, that of the Mussulman invaders.  The
+Christian remnant became tributaries; and Alexandria dwindled, from that
+time forth, into a petty seaport town.
+
+And now—can we pass over this new metaphysical school of Alexandria? Can
+we help inquiring in what the strength of Islamism lay?  I, at least,
+cannot.  I cannot help feeling that I am bound to examine in what
+relation the creed of Omar and Amrou stands to the Alexandrian
+speculations of five hundred years, and how it had power to sweep those
+speculations utterly from the Eastern mind.  It is a difficult problem;
+to me, as a Christian priest, a very awful problem.  What more awful
+historic problem, than to see the lower creed destroying the higher? to
+see God, as it were, undoing his own work, and repenting Him that He had
+made man?  Awful indeed: but I can honestly say, that it is one from the
+investigation of which I have learnt—I cannot yet tell how much: and of
+this I am sure, that without that old Alexandrian philosophy, I should
+not have been able to do justice to Islam; without Islam I should not
+have been able to find in that Alexandrian philosophy, an ever-living and
+practical element.
+
+I must, however, first entreat you to dismiss from your minds the vulgar
+notion that Mohammed was in anywise a bad man, or a conscious deceiver,
+pretending to work miracles, or to do things which he did not do.  He
+sinned in one instance: but, as far as I can see, only in that one—I mean
+against what he must have known to be right.  I allude to his relaxing in
+his own case those wise restrictions on polygamy which he had proclaimed.
+And yet, even in this case, the desire for a child may have been the true
+cause of his weakness.  He did not see the whole truth, of course: but he
+was an infinitely better man than the men around: perhaps, all in all,
+one of the best men of his day.  Many here may have read Mr. Carlyle’s
+vindication of Mohammed in his Lectures on Hero Worship; to those who
+have not, I shall only say, that I entreat them to do so; and that I
+assure them, that though I differ in many things utterly from Mr.
+Carlyle’s inferences and deductions in that lecture, yet that I am
+convinced, from my own acquaintance with the original facts and
+documents, that the picture there drawn of Mohammed is a true and a just
+description of a much-calumniated man.
+
+Now, what was the strength of Islam?  The common answer is, fanaticism
+and enthusiasm.  To such answers I can only rejoin: Such terms must be
+defined before they are used, and we must be told what fanaticism and
+enthusiasm are.  Till then I have no more _à priori_ respect for a long
+word ending in -ism or -asm than I have for one ending in -ation or
+-ality.  But while fanaticism and enthusiasm are being defined—a work
+more difficult than is commonly fancied—we will go on to consider another
+answer.  We are told that the strength of Islam lay in the hope of their
+sensuous Paradise and fear of their sensuous Gehenna.  If so, this is the
+first and last time in the world’s history that the strength of any large
+body of people—perhaps of any single man—lay in such a hope.  History
+gives us innumerable proofs that such merely selfish motives are the
+parents of slavish impotence, of pedantry and conceit, of pious frauds,
+often of the most devilish cruelty: but, as far as my reading extends, of
+nothing better.  Moreover, the Christian Greeks had much the same hopes
+on those points as the Mussulmans; and similar causes should produce
+similar effects: but those hopes gave them no strength.  Besides,
+according to the Mussulmans’ own account, this was _not_ their great
+inspiring idea; and it is absurd to consider the wild battle-cries of a
+few imaginative youths, about black-eyed and green-kerchiefed Houris
+calling to them from the skies, as representing the average feelings of a
+generation of sober and self-restraining men, who showed themselves
+actuated by far higher motives.
+
+Another answer, and one very popular now, is that the Mussulmans were
+strong, because they believed what they said; and the Greeks weak,
+because they did not believe what they said.  From this notion I shall
+appeal to another doctrine of the very same men who put it forth, and ask
+them, Can any man be strong by believing a lie?  Have you not told us,
+nobly enough, that every lie is by its nature rotten, doomed to death,
+certain to prove its own impotence, and be shattered to atoms the moment
+you try to use it, to bring it into rude actual contact with fact, and
+Nature, and the eternal laws?  Faith to be strong must be faith in
+something which is not one’s self; faith in something eternal, something
+objective, something true, which would exist just as much though we and
+all the world disbelieved it.  The strength of belief comes from that
+which is believed in; if you separate it from that, it becomes a mere
+self-opinion, a sensation of positiveness; and what sort of strength that
+will give, history will tell us in the tragedies of the Jews who opposed
+Titus, of the rabble who followed Walter the Penniless to the Crusades,
+of the Munster Anabaptists, and many another sad page of human folly.  It
+may give the fury of idiots; not the deliberate might of valiant men.
+Let us pass this by, then; believing that faith can only give strength
+where it is faith in something true and right: and go on to another
+answer almost as popular as the last.
+
+We are told that the might of Islam lay in a certain innate force and
+savage virtue of the Arab character.  If we have discovered this in the
+followers of Mohammed, they certainly had not discovered it in
+themselves.  They spoke of themselves, rightly or wrongly, as men who had
+received a divine light, and that light a moral light, to teach them to
+love that which was good, and refuse that which was evil; and to that
+divine light they stedfastly and honestly attributed every right action
+of their lives.  Most noble and affecting, in my eyes, is that answer of
+Saad’s aged envoy to Yezdegird, king of Persia, when he reproached him
+with the past savagery and poverty of the Arabs.  “Whatsoever thou hast
+said,” answered the old man, “regarding the former condition of the Arabs
+is true.  Their food _was_ green lizards; they buried their infant
+daughters alive; nay, some of them feasted on dead carcases, and drank
+blood; while others slew their kinsfolk, and thought themselves great and
+valiant, when by so doing they became possessed of more property.  They
+_were_ clothed with hair garments, they knew not good from evil, and made
+no distinction between that which was lawful and unlawful.  Such was our
+state; but God in his mercy has sent us, by a holy prophet, a sacred
+volume, which teaches us the true faith.”
+
+These words, I think, show us the secret of Islam.  They are a just
+comment on that short and rugged chapter of the Koran which is said to
+have been Mohammed’s first attempt either at prophecy or writing; when,
+after long fasting and meditation among the desert hills, under the
+glorious eastern stars, he came down and told his good Kadijah that he
+had found a great thing, and that she must help him to write it down.
+And what was this which seemed to the unlettered camel-driver so
+priceless a treasure?  Not merely that God was one God—vast as that
+discovery was—but that he was a God “who showeth to man the thing which
+he knew not;” a “most merciful God;” a God, in a word, who could be
+trusted; a God who would teach and strengthen; a God, as he said, who
+would give him courage to set his face like a flint, and would put an
+answer in his mouth when his idolatrous countrymen cavilled and sneered
+at his message to them, to turn from their idols of wood and stone, and
+become righteous men, as Abraham their forefather was righteous.
+
+“A God who showeth to man the thing which he knew not.”  That idea gave
+might to Islam, because it was a real idea, an eternal fact; the result
+of a true insight into the character of God.  And that idea alone,
+believe me, will give conquering might either to creed, philosophy, or
+heart of man.  Each will be strong, each will endure, in proportion as it
+believes that God is one who shows to man the thing which he knew not: as
+it believes, in short, in that Logos of which Saint John wrote, that He
+was the light who lightens every man who comes into the world.
+
+In a word, the wild Koreish had discovered, more or less clearly, that
+end and object of all metaphysic whereof I have already spoken so often;
+that external and imperishable beauty for which Plato sought of old; and
+had seen that its name was righteousness, and that it dwelt absolutely in
+an absolutely righteous person; and moreover, that this person was no
+careless self-contented epicurean deity; but that He was, as they loved
+to call Him, the most merciful God; that He cared for men; that He
+desired to make men righteous.  Of that they could not doubt.  The fact
+was palpable, historic, present.  To them the degraded Koreish of the
+desert, who as they believed, and I think believed rightly, had fallen
+from the old Monotheism of their forefathers Abraham and Ismael, into the
+lowest fetishism, and with that into the lowest brutality and
+wretchedness—to them, while they were making idols of wood and stone;
+eating dead carcases; and burying their daughters alive; careless of
+chastity, of justice, of property; sunk in unnatural crimes, dead in
+trespasses and sins; hateful and hating one another—a man, one of their
+own people had come, saying: “I have a message from the one righteous
+God.  His curse is on all this, for it is unlike Himself.  He will have
+you righteous men, after the pattern of your forefather Abraham.  Be
+that, and arise, body, soul, and spirit, out of your savagery and
+brutishness.  Then you shall be able to trample under font the profligate
+idolaters, to sweep the Greek tyrants from the land which they have been
+oppressing for centuries, and to recover the East for its rightful heirs,
+the children of Abraham.”  Was this not, in every sense, a message from
+God?  I must deny the philosophy of Clement and Augustine, I must deny my
+own conscience, my own reason, I must outrage my own moral sense, and
+confess that I have no immutable standard of right, that I know no
+eternal source of right, if I deny it to have been one; if I deny what
+seems to me the palpable historic fact, that those wild Koreish had in
+them a reason and a conscience, which could awaken to that message, and
+perceive its boundless beauty, its boundless importance, and that they
+did accept that message, and lived by it in proportion as they received
+it fully, such lives as no men in those times, and few in after times,
+have been able to live.  If I feel, as I do feel, that Abubekr, Omar, Abu
+Obeidah, and Amrou, were better men than I am, I must throw away all that
+Philo—all that a Higher authority—has taught me: or I must attribute
+their lofty virtues to the one source of all in man which is not
+selfishness, and fancy, and fury, and blindness as of the beasts which
+perish.
+
+Why, then, has Islamism become one of the most patent and complete
+failures upon earth, if the true test of a system’s success be the
+gradual progress and amelioration of the human beings who are under its
+influence?  First, I believe, from its allowing polygamy.  I do not judge
+Mohammed for having allowed it.  He found it one of the ancestral and
+immemorial customs of his nation.  He found it throughout the Hebrew
+Scriptures.  He found it in the case of Abraham, his ideal man; and, as
+he believed, the divinely-inspired ancestor of his race.  It seemed to
+him that what was right for Abraham, could not be wrong for an Arab.  God
+shall judge him, not I.  Moreover, the Christians of the East, divided
+into either monks or profligates; and with far lower and more brutal
+notions of the married state than were to be found in Arab poetry and
+legend, were the very last men on earth to make him feel the eternal and
+divine beauty of that pure wedded love which Christianity has not only
+proclaimed, but commanded, and thereby emancipated woman from her old
+slavery to the stronger sex.  And I believe, from his chivalrous
+faithfulness to his good wife Kadijah, as long as she lived, that
+Mohammed was a man who could have accepted that great truth in all its
+fulness, had he but been taught it.  He certainly felt the evil of
+polyamy so strongly as to restrict it in every possible way, except the
+only right way—namely, the proclamation of the true ideal of marriage.
+But his ignorance, mistake, sin, if you will, was a deflection from the
+right law, from the true constitution of man, and therefore it avenged
+itself.  That chivalrous respect for woman, which was so strong in the
+early Mohammedans, died out.  The women themselves—who, in the first few
+years of Islamism, rose as the men rose, and became their helpmates,
+counsellors, and fellow-warriors—degenerated rapidly into mere
+playthings.  I need not enter into the painful subject of woman’s present
+position in the East, and the social consequences thereof.  But I firmly
+believe, not merely as a theory, but as a fact which may be proved by
+abundant evidence, that to polygamy alone is owing nine-tenths of the
+present decay and old age of every Mussulman nation; and that till it be
+utterly abolished, all Western civilisation and capital, and all the
+civil and religious liberty on earth, will not avail one jot toward their
+revival.  You must regenerate the family before you can regenerate the
+nation, and the relation of husband and wife before the family; because,
+as long as the root is corrupt, the fruit will be corrupt also.
+
+But there is another cause of the failure of Islamism, more intimately
+connected with those metaphysical questions which we have been hitherto
+principally considering.
+
+Among the first Mussulmans, as I have said, there was generally the most
+intense belief in each man that he was personally under a divine guide
+and teacher.  But their creed contained nothing which could keep up that
+belief in the minds of succeeding generations.  They had destroyed the
+good with the evil, and they paid the penalty of their undistinguishing
+wrath.  In sweeping away the idolatries and fetish worships of the Syrian
+Catholics, the Mussulmans had swept away also that doctrine which alone
+can deliver men from idolatry and fetish worships—if not outward and
+material ones, yet the still more subtle, and therefore more dangerous
+idolatries of the intellect.  For they had swept away the belief in the
+Logos; in a divine teacher of every human soul, who was, in some
+mysterious way, the pattern and antitype of human virtue and wisdom.  And
+more, they had swept away that belief in the incarnation of the Logos,
+which alone can make man feel that his divine teacher is one who can
+enter into the human duties, sorrows, doubts, of each human spirit.  And,
+therefore, when Mohammed and his personal friends were dead, the belief
+in a present divine teacher, on the whole, died with them; and the
+Mussulmans began to put the Koran in the place of Him of whom the Koran
+spoke.  They began to worship the book—which after all is not a book, but
+only an irregular collection of Mohammed’s meditations, and notes for
+sermons—with the most slavish and ridiculous idolatry.  They fell into a
+cabbalism, and a superstitious reverence for the mere letters and words
+of the Koran, to which the cabbalism of the old Rabbis was moderate and
+rational.  They surrounded it, and the history of Mohammed, with all
+ridiculous myths, and prodigies, and lying wonders, whereof the book
+itself contained not a word; and which Mohammed, during his existence,
+had denied and repudiated, saying that he worked no miracles, and that
+none were needed; because only reason was required to show a man the hand
+of a good God in all human affairs.  Nevertheless, these later Mussulmans
+found the miracles necessary to confirm their faith: and why?  Because
+they had lost the sense of a present God, a God of order; and therefore
+hankered, as men in such a mood always will, after prodigious and
+unnatural proofs of His having been once present with their founder
+Mohammed.
+
+And in the meanwhile that absolute and omnipotent Being whom Mohammed,
+arising out of his great darkness, had so nobly preached to the Koreish,
+receded in the minds of their descendants to an unapproachable and
+abysmal distance.  For they had lost the sense of His present guidance,
+His personal care.  They had lost all which could connect Him with the
+working of their own souls, with their human duties and struggles, with
+the belief that His mercy and love were counterparts of human mercy and
+human love; in plain English, that He was loving and merciful at all.
+The change came very gradually, thank God; you may read of noble sayings
+and deeds here and there, for many centuries after Mohammed: but it came;
+and then their belief in God’s omnipotence and absoluteness dwindled into
+the most dark, and slavish, and benumbing fatalism.  His unchangeableness
+became in their minds not an unchangeable purpose to teach, forgive, and
+deliver men—as it seemed to Mohammed to have been—but a mere brute
+necessity, an unchangeable purpose to have His own way, whatsoever that
+way might be.  That dark fatalism, also, has helped toward the decay of
+the Mohammedan nations.  It has made them careless of self-improvement;
+faithless of the possibility of progress; and has kept, and will keep,
+the Mohammedan nations, in all intellectual matters, whole ages behind
+the Christian nations of the West.
+
+How far the story of Omar’s commanding the baths of Alexandria to be
+heated with the books from the great library is true, we shall never
+know.  Some have doubted the story altogether: but so many fresh
+corroborations of it are said to have been lately discovered, in Arabic
+writers, that I can hardly doubt that it had some foundation in fact.
+One cannot but believe that John Philoponus, the last of the Alexandrian
+grammarians, when he asked his patron Amrou the gift of the library, took
+care to save some, at least, of its treasures; and howsoever strongly
+Omar may have felt or said that all books which agreed with the Koran
+were useless, and all which disagreed with it only fit to be destroyed,
+the general feeling of the Mohammedan leaders was very different.  As
+they settled in the various countries which they conquered, education
+seems to have been considered by them an important object.  We even find
+some of them, in the same generation as Mohammed, obeying strictly the
+Prophet’s command to send all captive children to school—a fact which
+speaks as well for the Mussulmans’ good sense, as it speaks ill for the
+state of education among the degraded descendants of the Greek conquerors
+of the East.  Gradually philosophic Schools arose, first at Bagdad, and
+then at Cordova; and the Arabs carried on the task of commenting on
+Aristotle’s Logic, and Ptolemy’s Megiste Syntaxis—which last acquired
+from them the name of Almagest, by which it was so long known during the
+Middle Ages.
+
+But they did little but comment, though there was no Neoplatonic or
+mystic element in their commentaries.  It seems as if Alexandria was
+preordained, by its very central position, to be the city of
+commentators, not of originators.  It is worthy of remark, that
+Philoponus, who may be considered as the man who first introduced the
+simple warriors of the Koreish to the treasures of Greek thought, seems
+to have been the first rebel against the Neoplatonist eclecticism.  He
+maintained, and truly, that Porphyry, Proclus, and the rest, had entirely
+misunderstood Aristotle, when they attempted to reconcile him with Plato,
+or incorporate his philosophy into Platonism.  Aristotle was henceforth
+the text-book of Arab savants.  It was natural enough.  The Mussulman
+mind was trained in habits of absolute obedience to the authority of
+fixed dogmas.  All those attempts to follow out metaphysic to its highest
+object, theology, would be useless if not wrong in the eyes of a
+Mussulman, who had already his simple and sharply-defined creed on all
+matters relating to the unseen world.  With him metaphysic was a study
+altogether divorced from man’s higher life and aspirations.  So also were
+physics.  What need had he of Cosmogonies? what need to trace the
+relations between man and the universe, or the universe and its Maker?
+He had his definite material Elysium and Tartarus, as the only ultimate
+relation between man and the universe; his dogma of an absolute fiat,
+creating arbitrary and once for all, as the only relation between the
+universe and its Maker: and further it was not lawful to speculate.  The
+idea which I believe unites both physic and metaphysic with man’s highest
+inspirations and widest speculations—the Alexandria idea of the Logos, of
+the Deity working in time and space by successive thoughts—he had not
+heard of; for it was dead, as I have said, in Alexandria itself; and if
+he had heard of it, he would have spurned it as detracting from the
+absoluteness of that abysmal one Being, of whom he so nobly yet so
+partially bore witness.  So it was to be; doubtless it was right that it
+should be so.  Man’s eye is too narrow to see a whole truth, his brain
+too weak to carry a whole truth.  Better for him, and better for the
+world, is perhaps the method on which man has been educated in every age,
+by which to each school, or party, or nation, is given some one great
+truth, which they are to work out to its highest development, to
+exemplify in actual life, leaving some happier age—perhaps, alas! only
+some future state—to reconcile that too favoured dogma with other truths
+which lie beside it, and without which it is always incomplete, and
+sometimes altogether barren.
+
+But such schools of science, founded on such a ground as this, on the
+mere instinct of curiosity, had little chance of originality or vitality.
+All the great schools of the world, the elder Greek philosophy, the
+Alexandrian, the present Baconian school of physics, have had a deeper
+motive for their search, a far higher object which they hope to discover.
+But indeed, the Mussulmans did not so much wish to discover truth, as to
+cultivate their own intellects.  For that purpose a sharp and subtle
+systematist, like Aristotle, was the very man whom they required; and
+from the destruction of Alexandria may date the rise of the Aristotelian
+philosophy.  Translations of his works were made into Arabic, first, it
+is said, from Persian and Syriac translations; the former of which had
+been made during the sixth and seventh centuries, by the wreck of the
+Neoplatonist party, during their visit to the philosophic Chozroos.  A
+century after, they filled Alexandria.  After them Almansoor, Hairoun
+Alraschid, and their successors, who patronised the Nestorian Christians,
+obtained from them translations of the philosophic, medical, and
+astronomical Greek works; while the last of the Omniades, Abdalrahman,
+had introduced the same literary taste into Spain, where, in the
+thirteenth century, Averroës and Maimonides rivalled the fame of
+Avicenna, who had flourished at Bagdad a century before.
+
+But, as I have said already, these Arabs seem to have invented nothing;
+they only commented.  And yet not only commented; for they preserved for
+us those works of whose real value they were so little aware.  Averroës,
+in quality of commentator on Aristotle, became his rival in the minds of
+the mediæval schoolmen; Avicenna, in quality of commentator on
+Hippocrates and Galen, was for centuries the text-book of all European
+physicians; while Albatani and Aboul Wefa, as astronomers, commented on
+Ptolemy, not however without making a few important additions to his
+knowledge; for Aboul Wefa discovered a third inequality of the moon’s
+motion, in addition to the two mentioned by Ptolemy, which he did,
+according to Professor Whewell, in a truly philosophic manner—an
+apparently solitary instance, and one which, in its own day, had no
+effect; for the fact was forgotten, and rediscovered centuries after by
+Tycho Brahe.  To Albatani, however, we owe two really valuable heirlooms.
+The one is the use of the sine, or half-chord of the double arc, instead
+of the chord of the arc itself, which had been employed by the Greek
+astronomers; the other, of even more practical benefit, was the
+introduction of the present decimal arithmetic, instead of the
+troublesome sexagesimal arithmetic of the Greeks.  These ten digits,
+however, seem, says Professor Whewell, by the confession of the Arabians
+themselves, to be of Indian origin, and thus form no exception to the
+sterility of the Arabian genius in scientific inventions.  Nevertheless
+we are bound, in all fairness, to set against his condemnation of the
+Arabs Professor De Morgan’s opinion of the Moslem, in his article on
+Euclid: “Some writers speak slightingly of this progress, the results of
+which they are too apt to compare with those of our own time.  They ought
+rather to place the Saracens by the side of their own Gothic ancestors;
+and making some allowance for the more advantageous circumstances under
+which the first started, they should view the second systematically
+dispersing the remains of Greek civilisation, while the first were
+concentrating the geometry of Alexandria, the arithmetic and algebra of
+India, and the astronomy of both, to form a nucleus for the present state
+of science.”
+
+To this article of Professor De Morgan’s on Euclid, {127} and to
+Professor Whewell’s excellent “History of the Inductive Sciences,” from
+which I, being neither Arabic scholar nor astronomer, have drawn most of
+my facts about physical science, I must refer those who wish to know more
+of the early rise of physics, and of their preservation by the Arabs,
+till a great and unexpected event brought them back again to the quarter
+of the globe where they had their birth, and where alone they could be
+regenerated into a new and practical life.
+
+That great event was the Crusades.  We have heard little of Alexandria
+lately.  Its intellectual glory had departed westward and eastward, to
+Cordova and to Bagdad; its commercial greatness had left it for Cairo and
+Damietta.  But Egypt was still the centre of communication between the
+two great stations of the Moslem power, and indeed, as Mr. Lane has shown
+in his most valuable translation of the “Arabian Nights,” possessed a
+peculiar life and character of its own.
+
+It was the rash object of the Crusaders to extinguish that life.
+Palestine was their first point of attack: but the later Crusaders seem
+to have found, like the rest of the world, that the destinies of
+Palestine could not be separated from those of Egypt; and to Damietta,
+accordingly, was directed that last disastrous attempt of St. Louis,
+which all may read so graphically described in the pages of Joinville.
+
+The Crusaders failed utterly of the object at which they aimed.  They
+succeeded in an object of which they never dreamed; for in those Crusades
+the Moslem and the Christian had met face to face, and found that both
+were men, that they had a common humanity, a common eternal standard of
+nobleness and virtue.  So the Christian knights went home humbler and
+wiser men, when they found in the Saracen emirs the same generosity,
+truth, mercy, chivalrous self-sacrifice, which they had fancied their own
+peculiar possession, and added to that, a civilisation and a learning
+which they could only admire and imitate.  And thus, from the era of the
+Crusades, a kindlier feeling sprang up between the Crescent and the
+Cross, till it was again broken by the fearful invasions of the Turks
+throughout Eastern Europe.  The learning of the Moslem, as well as their
+commerce, began to pour rapidly into Christendom, both from Spain, Egypt,
+and Syria; and thus the Crusaders were, indeed, rewarded according to
+their deeds.  They had fancied that they were bound to vindicate the
+possession of the earth for Him to whom they believed the earth belonged.
+He showed them—or rather He has shown us, their children—that He can
+vindicate His own dominion better far than man can do it for Him; and
+their cruel and unjust aim was utterly foiled.  That was not the way to
+make men know or obey Him.  They took the sword, and perished by the
+sword.  But the truly noble element in them—the element which our hearts
+and reasons recognise and love, in spite of all the loud words about the
+folly and fanaticism of the Crusades, whensoever we read “The Talisman”
+or “Ivanhoe”—the element of loyal faith and self-sacrifice—did not go
+unrequited.  They learnt wider, juster views of man and virtue, which I
+cannot help believing must have had great effect in weakening in their
+minds their old, exclusive, and bigoted notions, and in paving the way
+for the great outburst of free thought, and the great assertion of the
+dignity of humanity, which the fifteenth century beheld.  They opened a
+path for that influx of scientific knowledge which has produced, in after
+centuries, the most enormous effects on the welfare of Europe, and made
+life possible for millions who would otherwise have been pent within the
+narrow bounds of Europe, to devour each other in the struggle for room
+and bread.
+
+But those Arabic translations of Greek authors were a fatal gift for
+Egypt, and scarcely less fatal gift for Bagdad.  In that Almagest of
+Ptolemy, in that Organon of Aristotle, which the Crusaders are said to
+have brought home, lay, rude and embryotic, the germs of that physical
+science, that geographical knowledge which has opened to the European the
+commerce and the colonisation of the globe.  Within three hundred years
+after his works reached Europe, Ptolemy had taught the Portuguese to sail
+round Africa; and from that day the stream of eastern wealth flowed no
+longer through the Red Sea, or the Persian Gulf, on its way to the new
+countries of the West; and not only Alexandria, but Damietta and Bagdad,
+dwindled down to their present insignificance.  And yet the whirligig of
+time brings about its revenges.  The stream of commerce is now rapidly
+turning back to its old channel; and British science bids fair to make
+Alexandria once more the inn of all the nations.
+
+It is with a feeling of awe that one looks upon the huge possibilities of
+her future.  Her own physical capacities, as the great mind of Napoleon
+saw, are what they always have been, inexhaustible; and science has
+learnt to set at naught the only defect of situation which has ever
+injured her prosperity, namely, the short land passage from the Nile to
+the Red Sea.  The fate of Palestine is now more than ever bound up with
+her fate; and a British or French colony might, holding the two
+countries, develop itself into a nation as vast as sprang from
+Alexander’s handful of Macedonians, and become the meeting point for the
+nations of the West and those great Anglo-Saxon peoples who seem destined
+to spring up in the Australian ocean.  Wide as the dream may appear,
+steam has made it a far narrower one than the old actual fact, that for
+centuries the Phoenician and the Arabian interchanged at Alexandria the
+produce of Britain for that of Ceylon and Hindostan.  And as for
+intellectual development, though Alexandria wants, as she has always
+wanted, that insular and exclusive position which seems almost necessary
+to develop original thought and original national life, yet she may still
+act as the point of fusion for distinct schools and polities, and the
+young and buoyant vigour of the new-born nations may at once teach, and
+learn from, the prudence, the experience, the traditional wisdom of the
+ancient Europeans.
+
+This vision, however possible, may be a far-off one: but the first step
+towards it, at least, is being laid before our eyes—and that is, a fresh
+reconciliation between the Crescent and the Cross.  Apart from all
+political considerations, which would be out of place here, I hail, as a
+student of philosophy, the school which is now, both in Alexandria and in
+Constantinople, teaching to Moslem and to Christians the same lesson
+which the Crusaders learnt in Egypt five hundred years ago.  A few years’
+more perseverance in the valiant and righteous course which Britain has
+now chosen, will reward itself by opening a vast field for capital and
+enterprise, for the introduction of civil and religious liberty among the
+down-trodden peasantry of Egypt; as the Giaour becomes an object of
+respect, and trust, and gratitude to the Moslem; and as the feeling that
+Moslem and Giaour own a common humanity, a common eternal standard of
+justice and mercy, a common sacred obligation to perform our promises,
+and to succour the oppressed, shall have taken place of the old brute
+wonder at our careless audacity, and awkward assertion of power, which
+now expresses itself in the somewhat left-handed Alexandrian
+compliment—“There is one Satan, and there are many Satans: but there is
+no Satan like a Frank in a round hat.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+It would be both uncourteous and unfair of me to close these my hasty
+Lectures, without expressing my hearty thanks for the great courtesy and
+kindness which I have received in this my first visit to your most noble
+and beautiful city; and often, I am proud to say, from those who differ
+from me deeply on many important points; and also for the attention with
+which I have been listened to while trying, clumsily enough, to explain
+dry and repulsive subjects, and to express opinions which may be new, and
+perhaps startling, to many of my hearers.  If my imperfect hints shall
+have stirred up but one hearer to investigate this obscure and yet most
+important subject, and to examine for himself the original documents, I
+shall feel that my words in this place have not been spoken in vain; for
+even if such a seeker should arrive at conclusions different from my own
+(and I pretend to no infallibility), he will at least have learnt new
+facts, the parents of new thought, perhaps of new action; he will have
+come face to face with new human beings, in whom he will have been
+compelled to take a human interest; and will surely rise from his
+researches, let them lead him where they will, at least somewhat of a
+wider-minded and a wider-hearted man.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES.
+
+
+{3}  These Lectures were delivered at the Philosophical Institution,
+Edinburgh, in February, 1854, at the commencement of the Crimean War.
+
+{127}  Smith’s “Classical Dictionary.”
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 1275-0.txt or 1275-0.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/2/7/1275
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
+specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
+eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
+for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
+performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
+away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
+not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
+trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country outside the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
+  are located before using this ebook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
+Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org 
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary 
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
+mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
+volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
+locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
+Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
+date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
+official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+
+    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+    Chief Executive and Director
+    gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+