scovering the inner Socratic principle of moral philosophy, which is
nothing but self-knowledge--a circumspect, systematic utterance of the
speaker's mind, disclosing his implicit meaning and his ultimate
preferences.

[Sidenote: Its timid reappearance in modern times.]

At its second birth science took a very different form. It left cosmic
theories to pantheistic enthusiasts like Giordano Bruno, while in sober
laborious circles it confined itself to specific discoveries--the
earth's roundness and motion about the sun, the laws of mechanics, the
development and application of algebra, the invention of the calculus,
and a hundred other steps forward in various disciplines. It was a
patient siege laid to the truth, which was approached blindly and
without a general, as by an army of ants; it was not stormed
imaginatively as by the ancient Ionians, who had reached at once the
notion of nature's dynamic unity, but had neglected to take possession
in detail of the intervening tracts, whence resources might be drawn in
order to maintain the main position.

Nevertheless, as discoveries accumulated, they fell insensibly into a
system, and philosophers like Descartes and Newton arrived at a general
physics. This physics, however, was not yet meant to cover the whole
existent world, or to be the genetic account of all things in their
system. Descartes excluded from his physics the whole mental and moral
world, which became, so far as his science went, an inexplicable
addendum. Similarly Newton's mechanical principles, broad as they were,
were conceived by him merely as a parenthesis in theology. Not until the
nineteenth century were the observations that had been accumulated given
their full value or in fact understood; for Spinoza's system, though
naturalistic in spirit, was still dialectical in form, and had no
influence on science and for a long time little even on speculation.

Indeed the conception of a natural order, like the Greek cosmos, which
shall include all existences--gods no less than men, if gods actually
exist--is one not yet current, although it is implied in every
scientific explanation and is favoured by two powerful contemporary
movements which, coming from different quarters, are leading men's minds
back to the same ancient and obvious naturalism. One of these movements
is the philosophy of evolution, to which Darwin gave such an
irresistible impetus. The other is theology itself, where it has been
emanci