the
first beginnings of Greek speculation. There are two ways of
envisaging those aspects of nature which seem to bear the impress of
reason or intelligence. There is the deist's way, which regards them
merely as marks of design, which separates the informing mind from its
result in nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the
pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which [76] regards nature
itself as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as
though vaster in scope than the human. Partly through the influence of
mythology, the Greek mind became early possessed with the conception of
nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man. This
unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified
into an idea, is the force which gives unity of aim to Greek
philosophy. Little by little, it works out the substance of the
Hegelian formula: "Whatever is, is according to reason: whatever is
according to reason, that is." Experience, which has gradually
saddened the earth's colours for us, stiffened its motions, withdrawn
from it some blithe and debonair presence, has quite changed the
character of the science of nature, as we understand it. The
"positive" method, in truth, makes very little account of marks of
intelligence in nature: in its wider view of phenomena, it sees that
those instances are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences: it
absorbs them in the larger conception of universal mechanical law. But
the suspicion of a mind latent in nature, struggling for release, and
intercourse with the intellect of man through true ideas, has never
ceased to haunt a certain class of minds. Started again and again in
successive periods by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case
the thought may have seemed paler and more fantastic amid the growing
[77] consistency and sharpness of outline of other and more positive
forms of knowledge. Still, wherever the speculative instinct has been
united with a certain poetic inwardness of temperament, as in Bruno, in
Schelling, there that old Greek conception, like some seed floating in
the air, has taken root and sprung up anew. Coleridge, thrust inward
upon himself, driven from "life in thought and sensation" to life in
thought only, feels already, in his dark London school, a thread of the
Greek mind on this matter vibrating strongly in him. At fifteen he is
discoursing on Plotinus, as in later years he re