sently gave it another twist to
out-Aristotle Aristotle (as someone said) to stagger the
Stagirite--and passed it on as the scientific method of today.
According to Coleridge, every man is by nature either a Platonist
or an Aristotelian; and there is some truth in it.

And meanwhile, though the huge Greek illumination could die but
slowly, Greece was growing uninteresting. For Pheidias of the
earlier century, we have in Plato's time Praxiteles, whose carved
gods are lounging and pretty nincom--- well, mortals; "they
sink," says the Encyclopedia, "to the human level, or indeed,
sometimes almost below it. They have grace and charm in a supreme
degree, but the element of awe and reverence is wanting."--We
have an Aphrodite at the bath, a 'sweet young thing' enough, no
doubt; an Apollo Sauroctonos, "a youth leaning against a tree,
and idly striking with an arrow at a lizard." A certain natural
magic has been claimed for Praxiteles and his school and
contemporaries; but if they had it, they mixed unholy elements
with it.--And then came Alexander, and carried the dying impetus
eastward with him, to touch India with it before it quite
expired; and after that Hellenism became Hellenisticism, and what
remained of the Crest-Wave in Greece was nothing to lose one
little wink of sleep over.

VII. THE MAURYAS OF INDIA

"Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much.
He was Aristotle's pupil; and apart from or beyond his terrific
military genius, had ideas. Genius is sometimes, perhaps more
often than we suspect, an ability to concentrate the mind into a
kind of impersonality; almost non-existence, so that you have in
it a channel for the great forces of nature to play through. We
shall find that Mr. Judge's phrase 'the Crest-Wave of Evolution'
is no empty one: words were things, with him and in fact, as he
says; and it is so here. For this Crest-Wave is a force that
actually rolls over the world as a wave over the face of the sea,
raising up splendors in one nation after another in order
_geographically,_ and with no haphazard about it. Its first and
largest movement is from East to West; producing (as far as I
can see) the great manvantaric periods (fifteen hundred years
apiece) in East Asia, West Asia, and Europe; each of these being
governed by its own cycles. But it has a secondary movement as
well; a smaller motion within the larger one; and this produces
the brilliant days (thirteen decades lon