necessarily be nations in
anarchy. For a time their tendency to explosion may be kept down by the
firm application of the hand of power; but this is simply an antagonism,
it is no cure. The social putrefaction proceeds, working its way
downward into classes that are lower and lower, until at length it
involves the institutions that are relied on for its arrest. Armies, the
machinery of compression, once infected, the end is at hand, but no
human foresight can predict what the event shall be, especially if the
contemporaneous ruling powers have either ignorantly or wilfully
neglected to prepare society for the inevitable trial it is about to
undergo. It is the most solemn of all the duties of governments, when
once they have become aware of such a momentous condition, to prepare
the nations for its fearful consequences. For this it may, perhaps, be
lawful for them to dissemble in a temporary manner, as it is sometimes
proper for a physician to dissemble with his patient; it may be lawful
for them even to resort to the use of force, but never should such
measures of doubtful correctness be adopted without others directed to a
preparation of the mass of society for the trials through which it is
about to pass. Such, doubtless, were the profound views of the great
Italian statesmen of the Middle Ages; such, doubtless, were the
arguments by which they justified to themselves resistance against the
beginning of the evil--a course for which Europe has too often and
unfairly condemned them.

[Sidenote: Summary of the preceding theories.]

It remains for us now to review the details presented in the foregoing
pages for the purpose of determining the successive phases of
development through which the Greek mind passed. It is not with the
truth or fallacy of these details that we have to do, but with their
order of occurrence. They are points enabling us to describe graphically
the curve of Grecian intellectual advance.

The starting point of Greek philosophy is physical and geocentral. The
earth is the grand object of the universe, and, as the necessary result,
erroneous ideas are entertained as to the relations and dimensions of
the sea and air. This philosophy was hardly a century old before it
began to cosmogonize, using the principles it considered itself sure of.
Long before it was able to get rid of local ideas, such as upward and
downward in space, it undertook to explain the origin of the world.

But, as advances were