ome one subject of successful handling, whether art or science or
practical craft. This idea, this effort, distinguishes these two men.
The Greeks--predecessors, contemporaries, successors of Aristotle--were
speculators, full of clever and ingenious guesses, in which the amount
of clear and certain fact was in lamentable disproportion to the schemes
blown up from it; or they devoted themselves more profitably to some one
or two subjects of inquiry, moral or purely intellectual, with absolute
indifference to what might be asked, or what might be known, of the real
conditions under which they were passing their existence. Some of the
Romans, Cicero and Pliny, had encyclopaedic minds; but the Roman mind
was the slave of precedent, and was more than satisfied with partially
understanding and neatly arranging what the Greeks had left. The
Arabians looked more widely about them; but the Arabians were
essentially sceptics, and resigned subjects to the inevitable and the
inexplicable; there was an irony, open or covert, in their philosophy,
their terminology, their transcendental mysticism, which showed how
little they believed that they really knew. The vast and mighty
intellects of the schoolmen never came into a real grapple with the
immensity of the facts of the natural or even of the moral world; within
the world of abstract thought, the world of language, with its infinite
growths and consequences, they have never had their match for keenness,
for patience, for courage, for inexhaustible toil; but they were as much
disconnected from the natural world, which was their stage of life, as
if they had been disembodied spirits. The Renaissance brought with it
not only the desire to know, but to know comprehensively and in all
possible directions; it brought with it temptations to the awakened
Italian genius, renewed, enlarged, refined, if not strengthened by its
passage through the Middle Ages, to make thought deal with the real, and
to understand the scene in which men were doing such strange and
wonderful things; but Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, and their
fellows, were not men capable of more than short flights, though they
might be daring and eager ones. It required more thoroughness, more
humble-minded industry, to match the magnitude of the task. And there
have been men of universal minds and comprehensive knowledge since
Bacon, Leibnitz, Goethe, Humboldt, men whose thoughts were at home
everywhere, where there was s