eoplatonism--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 parts of the world from
those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and the
hurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child
beneath the foot of a giant. Nature was to them not so inhospitable
as to starve their brains and limbs, as it has done for the
Esquimaux or Fuegian; and not so bountiful as to crush them by its
very luxuriance, as it has crushed the savages of the tropics. They
saw enough of its strength to respect it; not enough to cower be