it comes as an all-pervading and mystic
enthusiasm, 'like the desire of strong wine, the craving of ambition, the
passionate love of what is beautiful.'

Still, though we miss in the historian those higher and more spiritual
qualities which the philosopher of the Academe alone of all men
possessed, we must not blind ourselves to the merits of that great
rationalist who seems to have anticipated the very latest words of modern
science. Nor yet is he to be regarded merely in the narrow light in
which he is estimated by most modern critics, as the explicit champion of
rationalism and nothing more. For he is connected with another idea, the
course of which is as the course of that great river of his native
Arcadia which, springing from some arid and sun-bleached rock, gathers
strength and beauty as it flows till it reaches the asphodel meadows of
Olympia and the light and laughter of Ionian waters.

For in him we can discern the first notes of that great cult of the seven-
hilled city which made Virgil write his epic and Livy his history, which
found in Dante its highest exponent, which dreamed of an Empire where the
Emperor would care for the bodies and the Pope for the souls of men, and
so has passed into the conception of God's spiritual empire and the
universal brotherhood of man and widened into the huge ocean of universal
thought as the Peneus loses itself in the sea.

Polybius is the last scientific historian of Greece. The writer who
seems fittingly to complete the progress of thought is a writer of
biographies only. I will not here touch on Plutarch's employment of the
inductive method as shown in his constant use of inscription and statue,
of public document and building and the like, because they involve no new
method. It is his attitude towards miracles of which I desire to treat.

Plutarch is philosophic enough to see that in the sense of a violation of
the laws of nature a miracle is impossible. It is absurd, he says, to
imagine that the statue of a saint can speak, and that an inanimate
object not possessing the vocal organs should be able to utter an
articulate sound. Upon the other hand, he protests against science
imagining that, by explaining the natural causes of things, it has
explained away their transcendental meaning. 'When the tears on the
cheek of some holy statue have been analysed into the moisture which
certain temperatures produce on wood and marble, it yet by no means
follows that t