school, in Greece and Rome, struggled to discover, and to get a
hearing for, some theory of the universe which was founded on something
like experience, reason, common sense. They were not allowed to
prosecute their attempt. The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear in which
they struggled so manfully was too strong for them; the mud-waves closed
over their heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired; and the
last effort of Graeco-Roman thought to explain the universe was
Neoplatonism--the muddiest of the muddy--an attempt to apologise for, and
organise into a system, all the nature-dreading superstitions of the
Roman world. Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia herself, and all
her school--they may have had themselves no bodily fear of Nature; for
they were noble souls. Yet they spent their time in justifying those who
had; in apologising for the superstitions of the very mob which they
despised: just as--it sometimes seems to me--some folk in these days are
like to end in doing; begging that the masses might be allowed to believe
in anything, however false, lest they should believe in nothing at all:
as if believing in lies could do anything but harm to any human being.
And so died the science of the old world, in a true second childhood,
just where it began.

The Jewish sages, I hold, taught that science was probable; the Greeks
and Romans proved that it was possible. It remained for our race, under
the teaching of both, to bring science into act and fact.

Many causes contributed to give them this power. They were a personally
courageous race. This earth has yet seen no braver men than the
forefathers of Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or Teuton, Angle or
Frank. They were a practical hard-headed race, with a strong
appreciation of facts, and a strong determination to act on them. Their
laws, their society, their commerce, their colonisation, their migrations
by land and sea, proved that they were such. They were favoured,
moreover, by circumstances, or--as I should rather put it--by that divine
Providence which determined their times, and the bounds of their
habitation. They came in as the heritors of the decaying civilisation of
Greece and Rome; they colonised territories which gave to man special
fair play, but no more, in the struggle for existence, the battle with
the powers of Nature; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; with
boundless means of water communication; freer than most par