ts fruits have scarcely begun to
appear; the lands it is discovering have not yet been circumnavigated,
and there is no telling what its ultimate influence will be on human
practice and feeling.

[Sidenote: Its miscarriage in Greece.]

The first period in the life of science was brilliant but ineffectual.
The Greeks' energy and liberty were too soon spent, and the very
exuberance of their genius made its expression chaotic. Where every mind
was so fresh and every tongue so clever no scientific tradition could
arise, and no laborious applications could be made to test the value of
rival notions and decide between them. Men of science were mere
philosophers. Each began, not where his predecessor had ended, but at
the very beginning. Another circumstance that impeded the growth of
science was the forensic and rhetorical turn proper to Greek
intelligence. This mental habit gave a tremendous advantage in
philosophy to the moralist and poet over the naturalist or
mathematician. Hence what survived in Greece after the heyday of
theoretic achievement was chiefly philosophies of life, and these--at
the death of liberty--grew daily more personal and ascetic. Authority in
scientific matters clung chiefly to Plato and Aristotle, and this not
for the sake of their incomparable moral philosophy--for in ethics that
decadent age preferred the Stoics and Epicureans--but just for those
rhetorical expedients which in the Socratic school took the place of
natural science. Worse influences in this field could hardly be
imagined, since Plato's physics ends in myth and apologue, while
Aristotle's ends in nomenclature and teleology.

All that remained of Greek physics, therefore, was the conception of
what physics should be--a great achievement due to the earlier
thinkers--and certain hints and guesses in that field. The elements of
geometry had also been formulated, while the Socratic school bequeathed
to posterity a well-developed group of moral sciences, rational in
principle, but destined to be soon overlaid with metaphysical and
religious accretions, so that the dialectical nerve and reasonableness
of them were obliterated, and there survived only miscellaneous
conclusions, fragments of wisdom built topsy-turvy into the new mythical
edifice. It is the sad task reserved for historical criticism to detach
those sculptured stones from the rough mass in which they have been
embedded and to rearrange them in their pristine order, thus
redi