instances of local celebrations which, having passed through the stage of tribal popularity, had become centres of attraction to the whole Hellenic world. That the full force of all these influences on minds so sensitive and impressible as those of the Greeks can scarcely be realised under our changed conditions of society, we have already admitted: but powerful as they may have been, they could not even tend to produce the convictions which seem to us the very basis of our political beliefs. However vivid might be the glow of Pan-Hellenic sentiment at Eleusis or Olympia, it left untouched the veneration paid to the city as the first and the final unit of human society, and in no way interfered with the local jealousies and the strifes of towns which challenged for their quarrels the high-sounding title of wars. Even the sacred truce proclaimed before these games might be used to further the interests of one belligerent city against those of another. So far therefore as there was a common national feeling and any national action among Greeks, it was created and kept alive by influences with which their political tendencies were in complete antagonism. Happily the ambition of the Persian kings awakened in some of the Hellenic tribes feelings more generous than the selfish and brutal instincts which arrested the growth of Thrakians, Aitolians and Epeirots; but it is obvious that the ill-organised resistance made in fact by Athens and Sparta would have been no resistance at all, if they had not been so far educated as to value their national life above the mere independence or wealth of their own cities. This education even before the days of Peisistratos was of a very complex kind. Imperfect in all its parts, it exhibited the germs of the mighty growth of after ages; and the great festivals with their tribal or Pan-Hellenic gatherings were without doubt the most powerful instruments in promoting it. These supplied a constant incentive to genius, and the activity awakened in one direction led by a necessary consequence to greater energy in another. The old heroic lays, which told the tales of Ilion and Thebes, of the Argonauts and the Herakleidai, were followed by a school of poetry which unveiled the mind of the poet himself, and lit the torch which has been handed down from Hellas to Italy and from Italy to Germany and England. Along with the poet, the sculptor, and the painter the orator was daily attaining to wider power; but the eloquence even of Themistokles was necessarily directed first and chiefly to promoting the individual interests of Athens. Art cannot be thus selfish: and the sense of beauty, springing as it did from a thoroughly patient and truthful observation of fact, was combined with the possession of a common trea The influence of art on the growth of a PanHellenic sentiment. sure of poetry, linking together by a national bond tribes which could never be schooled into our notions of political union. Growth of physical science. But beyond the province of the poet, the rhetorician, and the statesman, there lay a boundless field in which the Greek first dared to drive his plough; and the very fact that this attempt was made, at the cost of whatever failures or delusions, marked the great chasm between the thought of the Eastern and the Western Aryans, and insured the growth of the science of modern Europe. The Greek found himself the member of a human society with definite duties and a law which both challenged, and commended itself to, his obedience. But if the thought of this law and these duties might set him pondering on the nature and source of his obligations, he was surrounded by objects which carried his mind on to inquiries of a wider compass. He found himself in a world of everlasting change. The day gave place to night; the buds and germs put forth in the spring ripened through summer into fruits which were gathered in autumn tide, and then the earth fell back into the sleep from which it was again roused at the end of winter. By day the sun accomplished his journey in calm or storm across the wide heaven: and by night were seen myriads of lights, some like motionless thrones, others moving in intricate courses. Sometimes living fires might leap from the sky with a deafening roar, or the earth might tremble beneath their feet and swallow man and his works in its yawning jaws. Whence came all these wonderful or terrible things? What was the wind which crashed among the trees, or spoke to the heart with its happy and heavenly music? These and a thousand other questions were all asked again and again, and all in one stage of thought received an adequate answer. The subject was one which admitted of no doubt, and the system thus gradually raised had the solemn sanction of religion. This system was the mythological, and it was marked by this special feature that it never was, and never could be, at a loss for the solution of any difficulty. All things were alive, most things were conscious beings; and all the phenomena of the universe were but the actions of these personal agents. For the Greek the moon' wandering among the stars of lesser birth' was Asterodia surrounded by the fifty daughters of Endymion, the attendant virgins of Ursula in the Christianised myth. All the movements of the planets were for him fully explained by this unquestioned fact; and with the same unhesitating assurance he would account for all sights or sounds on the earth or in the heavens. The snow-storm was Niobe weeping for her murdered children; 1 the earthquake was the heaving caused 1 Myth. Ar. Nat. ii. 279. by the struggles of imprisoned giants who were paying the penalty for rebellion against the lord of heaven. Such a belief as this might seem to give a dangerous scope to utterly capricious agents; but even here the theological explanation was forthcoming. There was a fixed and orderly movement of the sun through the sky, a stately march of the stars across the nightly heavens; but this was because the great Zeus ruled over all, and all were his obedient or unwilling servants. The movements of some were penal; with others they were the expression of gladness and joy. The stars and the clouds were the exulting dancers who clashed their cymbals round the cradle of Zeus;1 the sun was the hero compelled to go his weary round for the children of men,2 or crucified daily on his blazing wheel,3 or condemned to heave to the summit of the heaven the stone which thence rolled down to the abyss. This system might be developed to any extent; but it amounts to nothing more than the assertion that all phenomena were the voluntary or involuntary acts of individual agents. Its weak point lay in the forming of cosmogonies. It might be easy to say that the great mountains and the mighty sea, that Erebos and Night were all the children of Chaos; 5 but whence came Chaos? In other words, whence came all things? The weakest attempt to answer this question marked a revolution innght; and the man who first nerved himself to the effort achieved a task beyond the powers of Babylonian and Egyptian priests with all their wealth of astronomical observations. He began a new work and he set about its accomplishment by the application of a new method. Henceforth the object to be aimed at was a knowledge of things in themselves, and the test of the truth or the falsity of the theory must be the measure in which it explained or disagreed with ascertained facts." His first steps, and the steps of many who should come after him might be like the painful and uncertain totterings of infants; but the human mind had now begun the search for truth, and the torch thus lit should be handed down from Thales to Aristarchos,7 and from Aristarchos to Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton. 1 Ib. i. 364; ii. 314. 2 Ib. ii. 42 et seq. 3 Ib. ii. 36. 4 Ib. ii. 27. 5 Hes. Theog. 123. 6 It is scarcely necessary to say that Macaulay, when writing his essay on Lord Bacon, never thought of this aspect of early Greek philosophy; but it is unfortunate that for many the true facts should be kept out of sight by the fallacies of a popular writer. The protest of Aristarchos against the intricate system of Eudoxos of Knidos is perhaps the most noteworthy fact in the whole history of ancient philosophy. Archimedes rejected his theory, and is therefore a witness beyond suspicion, when he tells us that that most illustrious man believed the earth to revolve in a circle of which the sun was the immovable centre, the fixed stars being also motionless, and that he explained the apparent annual motion of the sun in the ecliptic by supposing the orbit of the earth to Source of Greek philosophy. Such was the mighty change wrought by the old Hellenic philosophers. But was the Greek himself reaping on a field where others had sown the seed? Was his work confined to the introduction of a philosophy which had grown up elsewhere? Greek traditions of a later day pointed to foreign lands as the sources of their science: and the admission was eagerly welcomed by Egyptian priests who boasted of observations extended over more than 600,000 years, and professed to have unlocked the secrets of heaven to the stargazers of Chaldæa. Thus the Egyptian claimed to be the teacher of the Greek, and the later Greeks made no resistance to the claim. It remains to be seen whether it had any foundation in fact. At the outset we may note that the Egyptians are said to have been taught how to measure the height of the pyramids by Thales' who is stated to have gained his knowledge in Egypt. The assertion is not more likely than the statement that he discovered the seasons, while his speculations on the risings of the Nile would not prove that he had even seen it. Herodotos speaks of these risings as caused by the Etesian winds without mentioning Thales; and the phenomenon was one which attracted the attention of Greek observers in general. If the Egyptians had accumulated a stock of astronomical observations indefinitely larger than that of the Greeks, Aristotle makes no mention of Egyptian astronomical treatises, or indeed of anything received from them in writing. It is not pretended that Aristotle or later writers derived their knowledge from Egypt; and the plea that they revealed to Hipparchos the precession of the equinoxes discovered by that illustrious astronomer is a purely gratuitous assumption. If on the other hand the relative precedence of Egyptian and Asiatic astronomers were to be determined by their own assertions, we should have simply to reject a mass of claims and counter claims, all equally incredible and absurd. The debt due from Greece to Egypt was expressly repudiated by Hipparchos; but if taken in their widest meaning, the statements of Greek writers come to no more than this,-that in their time the Egyptians had amassed a store of observations, that they had a calendar scarcely so accurate as the Greek, and that they used sundials for the notation of time. If there is nothing to contradict Herodotos when he says that the Egyptians were careful in recording unusual phenomena, there are yet the more significant facts that no single Egyptian astronomer is known to us by name and that even Ptolemy never mentions any observations made by a native Egyptian. The most that can be said for Egypt is that if its science was meagre and its influence weak, it seems to have been at least harmless. It was otherwise with the Babylonians. The great gift of Syrian science was the boon of genethliac astrology. It was the special work of Chaldean astronomers to link the fortunes of man with the position of the planets at his birth, and to draw out into elaborate system a superstition which almost more than any other dwarfs and cripples the human intellect. In Egypt that system was an exotic, not less than at Athens or Rome; but Egyptian vanity, or the weakness of Egyptian intellect, was dazzled by the mysterious art; and forged treatises sprung up in abundance to prove that it was of ancient and indigenous growth.1 Greek These characteristics of the so-called science whether of Egypt or of Assyria dispose effectually of the assertion that it was the parent of the really historical and always progressive astronomy. science of Greece. While the names of Chaldæan, Babylonian, and Egyptian astronomers remain wholly unknown, with Thales begins a long line of philosophers who contributed to the advance of practical astronomy as much as they failed to improve it in theory. Thales and the Ionic school. Most of these philosophers here mentioned are to us little more than shadows. They belong to that happy band who, in the words of Euripides, have given their lives to the task of scrutinising the everlasting order of immortal nature, and by their task have been raised far above the murky regions of meanness and vice. But they lived before the age of a written history; they left behind them no writings of their own, and the outlines of the picture have in each case become faint and blurred. The lifetime of Thales is said to belong in part to the age of Solon, who with him was numbered among the Seven Wise Men; but Solon as a philosopher recedes far into the mists of popular tradition. We shall come across Thales hereafter in the stories of the two last Lydian kings and again in the disastrous revolt of the Ionians against Dareios. But what is there said of him proves nomore than that his name was associated with ideas of great knowledge and power; and Aristotle who speaks of him as the founder of philosophy cites his opinions from hearsay. Nor are we justified in saying that he established a definite school, for the series of the so-called Ionic philosophers were independent thinkers, not 1 See at length Sir G. C. Lewis, Astron. Anc. chs. i. and v. 2 Fragm. (965) 136. Clem. Alex. Strom. iv. 25, § 157. 3 As according to the reputed chronology some sixty years inter vened between the death of Solon |