God.

[Sidenote: Legends of Democritus.]

I need scarcely refer to the legendary stories related of Democritus, as
that he put out his eyes with a burning-glass that he might no longer be
deluded with their false indications, and more tranquilly exercise his
reason--a fiction bearing upon its face the contemptuous accusation of
his antagonists, but, by the stolidity of subsequent ages, received as
an actual fact instead of a sarcasm. As to his habit of so constantly
deriding the knowledge and follies of men that he universally acquired
the epithet of the laughing philosopher, we may receive the opinion of
the great physician Hippocrates, who being requested by the people of
Abdera to cure him of his madness, after long discoursing with him,
expressed himself penetrated with admiration, and even with the most
profound veneration for him, and rebuked those who had sent him with the
remark that they themselves were the more distempered of the two.

[Sidenote: Rise of philosophy in European Greece.]

[Sidenote: Commercial communities favourable to new ideas.]

Thus far European Greece had done but little in the cause of philosophy.
The chief schools were in Asia Minor, or among the Greek colonies of
Italy. But the time had now arrived when the mother country was to
enter upon a distinguished career, though, it must be confessed, from a
most unfavourable beginning. This was by no means the only occasion on
which the intellectual activity of the Greek colonies made itself felt
in the destinies of Europe. The mercantile character in a community has
ever been found conducive to mental activity and physical adventure; it
holds in light esteem prescriptive opinion, and puts things at the
actual value they at the time possess. If the Greek colonies thus
discharged the important function of introducing and disseminating
speculative philosophy, we shall find them again, five hundred years
later, occupied with a similar task on the advent of that period in
which philosophical speculation was about to be supplanted by religious
faith. For there can be no doubt that, humanly speaking, the cause of
the rapid propagation of Christianity, in its first ages, lay in the
extraordinary facilities existing among the commercial communities
scattered all around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, from the ports
of the Levant to those of France and Spain. An incessant intercourse was
kept up among them during the five centuries before Chris